As we passed along a tree-lined avenue, she told me about her Irish grandmother on a farm in the Midwest, who used to tell her granddaughter about talking to trees, when the middle generation was not there to intervene. Their sense of time is different, said the grandmother, so that if you spoke to them or did something for them it might be a year or more before they’d say something, and maybe they wouldn’t anyway. Over the blandest Chinese food I ever tasted, she told me about her mother, who was not so distant and romantic a figure, but a hovering source of anxiety: her mother wanted to live through her and never heard anything that contradicted her dreams of a daughter as a mirror of purity, self, and maternity. She kept making the giantess presents of things she wanted herself. And so we talked about mothers and the difficulties of daughter-hood. Families up close, particularly the parent-child debacle, are often something one defines oneself against rather than with. But families at a distance, relatives with whom the ties of obligation and experience are not so tight, are another matter, a half-imagined community, and ancestry often seemed to me a wholly imagined one, a mythology of origins and member-ship—for it’s not the dead ancestors but the surviving stories that provide sustenance. A myth strong enough to make the Irish government give me citizenship, strong enough to make the giantess and me come over to see how the place fit, but as often based in recitations and lists and names as in experience.
In the morning we both hopped aboard the same bus for the coast of Clare and the Cliffs of Moher, which the surfer who sold me my maps had told me to visit. On an impulse, I got off in the town of Lahinch, to be alone and walking again, and to let the giantess pursue her own plans of solitary adventure which she seemed in danger of giving up for the far easier approach of trailing along with me. The cliffs were a few miles away, but things seen to rise gradually out of their surroundings are infinitely more real than things which suddenly bump up in front of one, as though the theater set has been changed behind curtains. So I set off walking, along a sandy shore, and then through a network of streets that became roads and roads that became dirt lanes, still with in sight of shore. There was a tower marked on the map, and when a few miles later I met a woman on a back road not far from the sea, I asked her how to get there.
She was old, she looked like my mother’s mother with her straight back and blue eyes, and she was wearing a green sweater under a vivid green cardigan and watering the geraniums with a dirty milk jug in her walled front yard. A border collie and an unusually calm kitten stood by attentively. She told me to continue down the road and go through the gate and along the trail, even though it said bull in field—the bull never showed up, she said. That way I’d get to the first tower along the cliffs, even though—and I could never be sure she said this, but between the difference in our accents and the tenacious direction of her conversation I couldn’t worm it out of her again—even though she’d never been there herself since she’d been here. I was flattened by the idea that she’d never bothered to walk all the way to the cliff’s edge and wonder about it still. Could a life be so profoundly local, could daily life so overwhelm idle curiosity? And in a life so settled, what filled the place occupied by eternal adjustment for the rest of us? Was it more tranquility or more unconsciousness—deeper roots, shorter branches?
Did you move to this area, I asked, because she’d said since she’d been here, though her house looked too unpolished to be a holiday home. She said she’d been here her whole life. The house she grew up in was just over the rise, she indicated, in a tiny hamlet, and she’d married a boy she grew up with, had been married fifty years. Half a century seemed to merit congratulations, and so I offered them, and she replied that though it had been fifty years since she married, he’d been in his grave for the last seven of them. And they’d buried her brother a week ago. And if I saw two men quarrying slate by the cliffs, they’d be her son and nephew. She pointed at the wall across the road with her arm and said, It was here when I came fifty years ago and it’ll be here fifty years from now. Then she asked me how I liked Ireland. Irish people were always asking this question, with the expectant confidence of a beauty queen inquiring if her hair was all right, and I said that I liked the unhurried cordiality of the people, though I can’t have put it quite that way. Well we’ve not joined the rat race yet, she replied briskly, We’re easygoing, like.
It’s true that Ireland hasn’t joined something that most often seems to be the industrial revolution, with its stern ideas about schedules and production. Time is not necessarily money here, where there aren’t enough jobs to go around and there isn’t a whole lot to rush toward or compete for (Joyce once remarked in a letter that the Irish are the most civilized people in Europe because they are the least bureaucratic). Or perhaps it’s that with five thousand years of visible history breathing down your neck, any urgency is swallowed up in the vastness of time. Or it may be the metaphysics of Catholic countries—in which all time lies in the shadow of eternity, death is a more real and less terrible fact than in many places, and one’s purpose on earth is not necessarily materially profitable—that makes Ireland so patient a place. It was certainly part of what made it a good place to travel through at the minimum speed of my legs, and an easy place to find people who would stop to talk. I wandered down to the pasture without the bull and found the tower immediately, a ruined square thing of huge stones a few yards away from the cliffs.
The celebrated Cliffs of Moher, which run for several miles along the southern side of Galway Bay, are a place where one can feel what it must have been like when Ireland was the westernmost part of the known earth. They still seem remote and lonely as they face into the vast beyond, an abrupt edge on the idea of Europe, maybe even lonelier now as the superseded end of the world. It was the kind of day when the sea rolls toward the sky and the sky to the sea and the exact point where they meet cannot be determined amid the bright blur of distance. A cloud like a puff of smoke floated over the slate blue of the three Aran Islands to the northwest, and their swelling profiles looked like whales, like the whales on whose back St. Brendan the Navigator once celebrated mass. But the main thing was the sea, the inexhaustible sea whose waves rolled as regularly as breathing and which had been lapping the coasts since time and the pull of the moon began. The sea was a deeper blue than my own churning gray Pacific, blue as though different dreams had been dumped into it, blue as ink. I imagined filling a fountain pen with it and wondered what one would write with that ocean. As I walked along the cliffs I saw the rocky shoals at its feet where the water washed up a bright green. Two waves of green washed round a rock over and over, reaching for each other like a pair of foamy arms, and sometimes they joined on the far side and became a ring, and more green waves washed up on spiny reefs and ridges, then turned blue again as they returned to the depths.
Seagulls far below near the sea cried out in voices which rose up faint and eerie, and where the cliff curved in they seemed to fly out of the stone itself. The turf was so soft and pillowy it seemed to soothe one, as though all the world were so welcoming, and the primroses on their own beds of turf on the way down made it easy to forget what lay in store if one slipped from the path. The path itself proceeded often only a foot or less from the cliff’s edge five hundred feet above the stony sea, bound on the other side by sunken pastures. Thin sheets of the local stone set up in tombstonelike vertical sections walled in the pastures, so that every field was funereal, the path a narrow ribbon between the slabs and the deep blue sea. A few miles away from the old woman in the green sweater I came across the quarry she mentioned, and when I looked down into it, a pair of men, presumably her son and nephew, were slowly gathering further slabs and sheets of this stone as gray as stormclouds. The slate loaded onto wooden dollies was cracking into squares and rectangles, as though already architecture. Rather as the sky shades into the sea here, so the made shades into the found, and the millennia of stone architecture seem as much an outgrowth of the stone all around it as an intentional erection.
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The second tower along the cliffs, O’Brien’s Tower, was far more crowded than the first, and a whole visitor-center complex with educational displays, snacks, and souvenirs had been built next to it. Linking all the structures were walkways paved in the local slabs. These slabs, however, had fossil tracks like worm trails winding across them, signs of a time that made the tower recent. Walking along them I saw the giantess in the distance, talking to a middle-aged couple by the snack bar. It was too soon after we’d parted to have a reunion, and the bustle was disconcerting after all the quiet of the day, so I slipped away as the trail wound upward and the cliffs grew higher. The American poet Wallace Stevens wrote about the cliffs, and about ancestry, though he wrote after seeing a photograph rather than visiting the original:
. . . go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,
Above the real
Rising out of present time and place, above
The wet, green grass
This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations
Of poetry
And the sea. This is my father, or, maybe,
It is as he was . . .
Even for Stevens, “The Irish Cliffs of Moher” is an ambiguous poem, suggesting that landscape itself is an ancestor, the point of origin in place of ancestors, or that the generations die away but the cliffs remain: “My father’s father, his father’s father, his—/ Shadows like winds.” Or that when one goes looking for ancestors and antecedents, for time, one finds only enigmatic places.
After walking nearly fifteen miles that day my feet were beginning to murmur ominously again, so when I saw a bed and breakfast in a nondescript one-story house on the road into Doolin, I went in, handed over some cash to the sturdy middleaged woman whose place it was, and took a bath and a nap. Later, as it was getting dark, I walked into Doolin itself, along the main road, and then down to the one street that made the scattered buildings coalesce into a village, the street that runs down to the sea and the port for the Aran Islands. Doolin was once, not long ago, supposed to be a place where folk musicians came in the winter to teach each other tunes, particularly in a pub called O’Connor’s. In pursuit of this authentic culture came tourists, and now though the two or three pubs have musicians in them, they’re hired people playing for an audience rather than each other. The tourist brochures still insist it is a place where musicians come, though the next day a young German woman who had settled locally told me with scorn that everyone in the pub I was in probably spoke German and there was nothing special about the place anymore. But I did speak to a local in O’Connor’s, a blackhaired young man with a nose like a snail shell who was back from Dublin, having a pint with a friend and enjoying the fiddler. He told me there’s a special quality about west Clare and its music, and people from there have a special regard for each other when they meet elsewhere. We talked about music from various places, and he told me they were all for shutting down the pubs of Clare when a Seattle rock star—a genius! he exclaimed fervently—had killed himself a few months earlier. Then he turned back to his friend and picked up where he’d left off, checking in on a long list of local women who’d all married or emigrated and explaining his own plan to emigrate to Australia.
When I got up in the morning, I found that my fellow guests in the farmhouse were a midwestern American businessman and his late-adolescent son who’d gone to the next town over the night before, to Lisdoonvarna, because there were too many Americans in Doolin. Tourism, foreignness, is a virus many tourists suspect everyone but themselves of carrying, and just as a certain kind of traveler wants to be the first person ever to climb a mountain so another wants to be the only outsider in a pristine culture. This one, who left nothing out in his evocation of the ugly American, made me wish I was the only tourist at breakfast as he offered me unsolicited advice about what to do, told me stories whose climax came when he explained things to other people, shared the details of how much the trip was costing him, and confided his aspiration to buy back the family home of a few generations ago and retire out here.
The loud father and the silent son had spent the day before on the Aran Islands, a last outpost of authenticity, a place where, as he reminded me, they still speak Irish. He strengthened my resolve to avoid the place, whose population had been a kind of captive indigenous spectacle since the turn of the century, when J. M. Synge and various other folklorists and linguists would go there to learn the Irish language and marvel at the unspoiled primitiveness of the people. I’d forgotten how much I hate bed and breakfasts, because of the forced intimacy and because, as you try to slip past the family watching its television in the evening and inspect their decoration schemes as they serve you in the morning, staying in someone’s private home seems like colonization wrought on the smallest, most genteel scale. The landlady of this place sat down with us and told us about how the Germans were buying up land in the vicinity for summer homes and complained of their unneighborly ways, while the American son looked down into his third bowl of cornflakes. I put on my pack and walked to Lisdoonvarna.
On my way there I wondered about the giantess who’d come because her grandmother had learned to talk to trees here, and wondered further what the midwesterner thought he would have when he bought his ancestral cottage, and what was the special quality of Clare the young man on his way to Sydney felt, thought of all of us circulating around the fixed point of an old woman who hadn’t relocated any distance in more than seventy years. There are senses of ties that go back past the immediate family and home, to vaguer, more mythic things, to that ancestor in the people and the landscape Stevens spoke of. It’s an odd business: the son of the midwesterner didn’t even look like his father, though I look like the immigrant ancestor who died giving birth to my mother’s mother. I saw her face in a tinted photograph for the first time a few years ago and have wondered since what else she may have transmitted down the generations besides the eyes I was looking at cliffs and tourists with. But that’s a question leading into the unknown, a question about the extent to which identity is racial, the kind of identity my new passport endorsed.
The word race itself is thought to have come into English, French and German from an Arabic word meaning origins, beginning, and head, and the endeavor to identify oneself with race is in some sense a quest for origins, for a personal origin myth. There is a peculiar authority granted to origins in this culture, perhaps itself originating in the story of the Garden of Eden. The authority of origins asserts that in the beginning things were as they should be, and therefore everything afterwards is an unraveling, a decline, a sullying of original purity. Thus the true Irishman for my midwesterner would be not the young rock and roll aficionado in the pub briefly paying his respects to home before setting off for Sydney but some crusty old Gaelic-speaking fisherman on the Aran Islands (“it is worth adding, too, that the timeless Aran Islands of a J. M. Synge had a fishing industry directly linked by large trawlers to the London markets,” writes Terry Eagleton). One could tell an anti-Eden myth in which it is destination rather than origin in which true identity lay: thus to be Irish is to be destined to emigrate, to love African-American music, to outmarry and mingle, and the true, ideal Doolin is only realized when one can hear several other languages in the pubs besides picturesque brogues and when the musicians there get paid. In such a myth, impurity and hybridity would be the ideal form all things aspired to, borders would exist only to be crossed, the urge to go backwards towards the origins before things moved around and mingled would vanish.
Both origin and arrival are unapproachable places, but race is an idea of belonging to something larger than the individual, with its origin and destination more remote, and vaguer. Behind every apparent origin lies another one, and origins nest with in one another, each obliterating the one it succeeds. Race itself, this identification with an ethnicity also imagined as an origin, has for the last century tended to generate a kind of ethnic nationalism whose insistence on the inseparability of race and place is its
elf mystical. It imagines the nation as a single body, a body whose mystical unity is articulated in the image of a common blood, the blood that ties its members together as one race: “the dead generations from which she [Ireland embodied as a woman] receives her old tradition of nationhood,” says the opening sentence of the proclamation that accompanied the 1916 Easter Rising. Before the emergence of ethnic nationalism, the unifying body was not an abstraction but that of the king, the divinely ordained body at the head of the feudal order. The two bodies of the king, the literal royal body and his ageless body politic, were replaced in the national imagination by the image in which the ethnicity or country constituted a single body in which all the chosen had membership, the nationalist body.
This is the image behind blood, the enigmatic fluid so often invoked in the ferocity of identity-making, and blood insists on an unconscious, inherent identity rather than the conscious identity transmitted in stories and values (in other words, the nature/nurture muddle at its most political). “It is one thing to sing the beloved. Another alas,” writes the German poet Rilke, “to invoke that hidden, guilty river-god of the blood.” Blood signifies many things: the feminine blood of defloration and menstruation and childbirth, the sacral blood of Christ’s sacrifice reiterated as communion wine. But the masculine blood of identity intensifies conflicts and alliances: blood feuds, blood pacts, blood brothers, blood guilt, baths, money, oaths (twenty zealots who took blood seriously signed the Ulster Covenant of 1912, against Irish home rule, in their own blood). This metaphorical or allegorical invocation of blood proposes that identity itself is inherent and transmissible.
A Book of Migrations Page 17