I was getting drunk. And so I grabbed Antoin at one point, and quietly I sang to him a very silly song I know about Ulster, “The Old Orange Flute.” He let out big gulps of laughter and an almost maniacal smile. And this new mood descended on the room. Now, for everyone there, I was made to sing the things I sing to my daughter. I tried “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” I don’t have a voice for real work on the stage, but for a bar or night like that one, it’s pretty good. And then Megan, in a crushingly tender soprano, sang “She Moved Through the Fair.” Here it was: We revealed to everyone left, and maybe even to ourselves, that we, yes, the young ones, were romantics too.
Antoin got up and recited the Bobby Sands poem “The Rhythm of Time.” By the time in that poem when “the undauntable thought,” “screamed aloud by Kerry lakes, / As it was knelt upon the ground,” Antoin was sobbing openly and unashamed before us. When was the last time you saw a man in his midtwenties reciting a poem in front of people he just met and croaking out the words through tears?
Yes, all these things were in English. But I believe we were there because something about the Irish language, for us, sets it apart. By the 1960s and ’70s, hopes for the complete revival of Irish had been diverted into something more humble, but with radical implications. Preserving Irish took on the character of a voluntary and local resistance to globalization and the reordering of all culture by commerce. Its preservation requires the courage to embrace an identity that could not be bought and sold. I think that is why the experience of coming together to learn this language subtly encouraged us to shed this cumbersome emotional armor, this generational pose of ironic distance from everything, even ourselves.
And to shed it means to recognize the deeper truth about my little foray into this quixotic “useless” language. The die-hard clerical Gaelic Leaguer Rev. O’Hickey complained of the failure to preserve the language: “Are the Irish people going to endure this? If so they deserve the worst that has ever been said of them. They are a people without spirit, without national self-respect, without racial pride, a poor, fibreless, degenerate emasculated, effete race—eminently deserving of the contempt of mankind.” I know how the culture around me wants me to respond to a statement like this: with a knowing, dismissive snort. If I’m to respond to it intellectually at all, it is as an academic. “Well, O’Hickey is echoing common tropes about masculinity and nationalism and such and such.” If I am to respond the way my education would prompt me, I would say that O’Hickey is being intolerably absolutist.
What the culture insists I am not supposed to do is read those words and feel an honest conviction flooding my heart and stealing my breath. What I am not supposed to do is make vows to wake up your grandchildren each morning with “Tà an maidan ann. Múclaígí anois, a thaiscí!”
Many language learners say that they find a new personality in their second language. Already I can see the Irish language gives me access to another part of myself, one that doesn’t feel so needful of admiration, that doesn’t couch itself in layers of irony and hide behind hand-waving verbal acts of self-creation. I’m determined to learn Irish, because it forces me to be a child and to grow up again. It allows me to become the kind of person who can utter simple convictions and mean them: I bought those Irish language books for my daughter because my mother bought the same books for me. I struggle to learn the Irish language because she struggled to learn it. Because she wanted me to learn it. Because our little routine at night was for her to tell me to “dún un doras,” and we would exchange an “oíche mhaith!” before I went to bed. Because the history of being Irish is setting yourself an impossible task, then failing to do it over and over again, until one day it is accomplished. My mother tried. I will try again. This isn’t mere sentiment. The speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish.
It might cost a little money for me to learn a dying language, to graft it onto the tongue of the man of this house. But then the transaction stops being commercial. My children learn it freely, something Irish that is not a product or a brand that fades, but that becomes its own treasure, letting us live off the wealth it generates over a lifetime.
And I can already see the returns coming in. None of your household fits into the category of “competent speakers.” You have told me about the image of Irish speakers that you had in childhood, of women that smelled like turf fires, and men that smelled like their fishing nets. You’re no good with it, you say. But that is what everyone says. When I have tried my few words of Irish at Dublin Airport, I get the distinct sense that the people working there would rather that an American try to sneak a gun past them than a few words of Irish. They look genuinely pained or even threatened. I know that Irish people can have a genuinely complex relationship with this language that they almost understand. They want it to continue to exist, but they never use even the few words they have.
But when you and your daughters visit, and see these little children’s books lying around, you pick up these books and read them to her. All of you dare yourself to do it. My intention was that my daughter learn Irish, but through her, I’m beginning to think all of you have a chance.
Slán,
your son
VII
Reconciliation
O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true?
What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell
In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?
—Patrick Pearse
Dear Father,
The sun is rising here as I write to you. And a blade of soft orange light is expanding across my dining-room table toward this letter. The kettle is on. Everyone in our kip is still asleep. My little girl is on the couch, her safety guarded by the tangle of blankets and pillows I put on the floor, in case, when I’m not looking, she rolls off. I am happy.
Growing up without a father has meant that I am late to life. Every year, as I enter middle age, some little event that would have happened for just about anyone else in their boyhood finds me. A few years ago it was standing on the hurling pitch with you. Last week, my brother-in-law got me a baseball glove for my birthday. We did a long toss for around half an hour and shot the shit. He had no idea it was my first catch. Another sports milestone a quarter century too late. Life’s spectator is finally translated to the field of play.
You predicted that having a child would “send me to the roots.” You were right. It’s not just the pile of history books and the Irish lessons. My daughter has sent me back to you. And in just the past year I’ve made my two best memories with you.
Just a few months ago, I visited you on my own. I walked the sites of the Rising during Paddy’s week. I walked Northumberland Street. I walked to the General Post Office, and imagined the incredible racket a gunship in the Liffey would make firing on it. I ignored the official tours for my own reading. Another day I got off at Connolly station, then crossed the river and walked to the Abbey Theatre. As an institution, I knew it as the nursery for my heroes.
You knew that we could get standby tickets if we waited for the right time. And there in the theater we watched The Plough and the Stars, a play about the lives interrupted, distorted, and lost in the Rising. In the final moments, a dramatic recreation of “the awesome Wagnerian inferno of smoke and fire” that closed the Rising and destroyed Dublin closed in on you and me.
In the middle of the play, from offstage we hear the voice of Patrick Pearse in hysterical pitch. It was the same quote I heard over and over during this year of commemoration, cited to shame the people who wanted to celebrate his memory and his achievements:
We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horri
ble than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them.
The play is almost perfectly calibrated to play to your politics and general view, the view of a man who thinks in terms of labor, that high ideals of national glory count for nothing against hunger or illness. In the play all the men are enthralled by talk of national greatness, while their working-class wives suffer the destruction it ultimately wrought.
I have three things to say about it. The first is that the play uses the old Unionist trick of hiding the English from view until the second before Irish violence strikes them. The second is that this level of romanticism about violence was everywhere during World War I. It was common to nationalist movements all over Europe, and you would find much of it in the Parliament too. You’ll find it in Theodore Roosevelt, who lost a child in the war. The third is to understand that Pearse is talking to himself. At this time, he is urging himself to do something quite unusual for someone like him, a melancholic dandy and educationist. Okay, I have a fourth thing to say about it: Pearse is right.
Ireland’s modern leaders have come on the radio, interrupting, the happy local commemorations of the Rising, and tut-tut that “sacrifice breeds intransigence.” I wonder what it is they can mean. Do they love nothing in life so much as to be intransigent in its defense?
I’ve been contemplating it on nights like last night, when my little girl started to cry in the middle of the night. I picked her up. I settled her down. And before I fell asleep, I read Patrick Pearse. And in his words, I think I have found the answer. This baby girl in my arms overthrows all uncertainty about it. Manhood is found in sacrifices, offered joyfully. The only liberation worth having is one accomplished in sacrifice.
Sometimes the sacrifices are almost unbearably slight and the rewards returned to them unconscionably large. And that is fine. It is giving me a chance to practice this formula. A slow pitch. Overnight, like most nights, my daughter could not sleep. I gave up my bed and brought her into the dark of the living room. I sang to her quietly, and bounced lightly until she gave up the fight and fell back to sleep. Yes, it is annoying to be up when I need sleep. But subtract the slight feeling of panic about waking up her mother, and what is left is a gentle dance. She falls asleep lying on my chest, and I watch her breathe. She snores contentedly on daddy’s chest. Nature asks me for this tiny sacrifice of sleep, through this little imperfection of her youth, and then the joy returned to me I can treasure and hold on to for the rest of my life.
Sometimes, for posterity’s sake, the sacrifices demanded are larger. Pearse, above all else a teacher, trained boys for it at St. Enda’s, the school he formed to be an example of what Irish education should be. He wanted to use the most progressive educational methods of his day, but in service to fostering the most durable values. He occasionally referred to his methods as discipleship. Pearse considered the school system the English had forced on Ireland—one imposed on them before it was forced on English students—“the most grotesque and horrible of the English inventions for the debasement of Ireland.” It was a disaster worse than even the Famine. He indicted it as a “murder machine” that deliberately created human debris. In his mind, the English education system had the same mission Sir Edmund Spenser drew up for Ireland: civilizing the Irish by destroying Irish civilization, absenting the Irish from their national heroes and saints, and robbing them of their language. Borrowing from Eoin MacNeill, he compared this system to the separate system set up by Romans and Greeks for educating slaves:
To the children of the free were taught all noble and goodly things which would tend to make them strong and proud and valiant; from the children of the slaves all such dangerous knowledge was hidden. They were taught not to be strong and proud and valiant, but to be sleek, to be obsequious, to be dexterous: the object was not to make them good men, but to make them good slaves. And so in Ireland.
St. Enda’s foreshadowed or invented the idea of education as a tool of decolonialization. It was also a national spectacle. The leaders of Dublin’s cultural renaissance and the Gaelic revival would attend the plays put on by St. Enda’s boys. People bought pictures of the students. St. Enda’s was an innovator in bilingual education. And although Pearse tried to develop a distinctly Irish model of education out of the medieval concept of “fosterage,” St. Enda’s also very clearly looks like a rival to England’s Eton College. Instead of rugby, hurling. In King Arthur’s place, Cuchulain. St. George eclipsed by Colmcille. Gaeilge, not English. He wanted freedom for the boys of St. Enda’s, freedom from shallow educational methods, freedom to shape a character in the crucible of a school. And this formation of character meant sacrifice. I grant that there is something utterly mad about Patrick Pearse. Imagine receiving this as the headmaster’s note in your son’s school magazine:
I dreamt I saw a pupil of mine, one of our boys at St. Enda’s, standing alone upon a platform above a mighty sea of people, and I understood that he was about to die there for some august cause, Ireland’s or another. He looked extraordinarily proud and joyous, lifting his head with a smile almost of amusement. I remember noticing his bare white throat and the hair on his forehead stirred by the wind, just as I had often noticed them on the hurling field. I felt an inexplicable exhilaration as I looked on him, and this exhilaration was heightened rather than diminished by my consciousness that the great silent crowd regarded the boy with pity and wonder rather than with approval—as a fool who was throwing away his life rather than a martyr that was doing his duty. It would have been so easy to die before a hostile crowd: but to die before that silent, unsympathetic crowd . . . No one can finely live who hoards life too jealously: that one must be generous in service, and withal joyous, accounting even supreme sacrifices slight.
One can dismiss this as insanity or shrink before it. Compared to Pearse’s dream, I fear that I belong to a class of people who have been formed to be sleek, obsequious, and dexterous. Everything about the world I work in, the class of people who are my intended peers, about the education I received in school, and the mass-media formation given in childhood instructs me to fear more than anything being the man Pearse would prize as a “fool.” I am taught to be quick, and clever. Not deliberate or wise. To be marketable, not indigestible. I’m taught to get along, not to be intransigent.
And not just this little social circle, but my whole life has worked toward this end. All my formation was dedicated to my being free and consciously choosing how to go about my life. I was a fatherless boy. And in my fatherlessness I turned my timidity into slyness. I learned to please people and get from the world what I want, without giving back. In my cynicism I would have rolled my eyes at the idea of becoming hard, proud, and valiant. A matured cynicism would come up with a way of dismissing those words as empty ideology. All this talk of nobility of purpose, a mask for the pursuit of power. This was my way of reassuring myself I never had to be responsible. I never had to be up to it.
Pearse has changed my view of political life. Or, more accurately, reading Pearse with your sleeping granddaughter stretched across me has transformed my views of nearly everything earthly, politics included.
You see, as I entered my adulthood I allowed myself to believe as much as Edmund Burke would give me, that “society is indeed a contract . . . not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” He expands it to say that “each particular state is but a clause in the great primæval contract of eternal society.” But in Pearse’s essay “Ghosts” I see the lineaments of the next code, or at least my next code. And a better one than I had before.
Some critics have accused Pearse of masking how modern he was, by talking so much about tradition, and that his true message was discernible only by sensitive souls. But in Pearse there is no contradiction between past and future. He was oriented to both at the same time. He acutely felt the intervention of the past on himself. He said that the ghosts of dead men had bequeathe
d a trust to the living. And he continued, “There is only one way to appease a ghost. You must do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation sometimes ask very big things; and they must be appeased, whatever the cost.”
I am not a sensitive soul, but perhaps a kindred one. I have said many sweet things in this letter. But now is the time to be blunt. Pearse feared the death of the Irish nation. I sometimes fear the death of both Ireland and America. He despised the generation previous to his own. And, you know, I have felt that same disgust at yours.
“Is mairg do ghní go holc agus bhíos bocht ina dhiaidh,” says the Irish proverb: “Woe to him that doeth evil and is poor after it.” The men who have led Ireland for twenty-five years have done evil, and they are bankrupt. They are bankrupt in policy, bankrupt in credit, bankrupt now even in words. They have nothing to propose to Ireland, no way of wisdom, no counsel of courage. When they speak they speak only untruth and blasphemy. Their utterances are no longer the utterances of men. They are the mumblings and the gibberings of lost souls. . . .
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