There’s a word, craic in Irish, crack in English, to describe this lively conversation, in which jokes and insults and compliments and stories are fired back and forth in playful volleys. It impressed me that such talk was so highly valued it had a name, and impressed me more to meet people who made their own entertainment, rather than consuming someone else’s. I bantered a little with them and fell into talking about rock and roll with the guitar-wielding Dubliner sitting next to me. Music was beginning to be as useful for socializing with the younger strangers I ran across as weather was with their elders. This man had a particular devotion to U2 and told me about the U2 concert he’d flown to New York to see.
U2 is itself obsessed with America, and its songs are as likely to be about Martin Luther King and the Fourth of July as about Ireland’s Bloody Sunday; for them rock and roll is itself about America. Later on my travels I found a little one-night-a-week rockabilly club in Dublin where a collection of young people had formed a sort of cult of American pop culture. Europeans approach many genres of American popular music with a peculiar reverence; it’s as mysteriously, exotically perfect for them as though it were Ming dynasty porcelain. The French worship of jazz is well known, and much obscure country and rockabilly music of the 1950s is reissued on German and English labels with scholarly liner notes. The music invokes a fantasy America, pared down to twangs and heartaches and rhyme schemes, the perfect world of a perfected art form, and artists like the Australian Nick Cave and Ireland’s U2 conjure up an iconic America over and over again, full of wild horses and wanted men unburdened by the banality of the familiar. Country music, which after all originated among poor rural white southerners in the process of being displaced, is the most popular genre in Ireland now, edging out rock and roll. When I was there even the prepaid telephone cards featured Garth Brooks, the corporate cowboy himself, Ireland’s number one pop star.
But in the dimly lit bar on a Dublin back street, this pack of rockabilly aficionados felt like an obscure religious cult, druidic, secretive; the songs they knew and steps they’d mastered seemed like initiation rites or incantations summoning up another time and place. They were perfectly friendly to me, though I wasn’t dressed for the occasion and can’t jitterbug. I fell to talking about favorite fifties country songs with one of them, and when I said, Johnny Horton, “Honky-Tonk Hardwood Floor,” he pumped my hand with the fervor with which Stanley must have greeted Livingstone, and I was one of the anointed anyway. A DJ walked me back through the dark streets after midnight, remarking in passing, The Irish are eighty percent drunk and twenty percent depressed. He was clearly among the 80 percent and slipped a little from his hipness as we parted on O’Connell Street, saying, God bless you.
Having seen U2 on their first American tour stood me in good stead in Lisdoonvarna, and having been to the place in the southern California desert their album The Joshua Tree was named after didn’t hurt any either. Late that evening, when the singing had turned back into talking, a shaggy, grimy, spry old man, a leprechaun of sorts, wandered in out of the rain with a fiddle case clutched in one dirty hand. He showed off on the fiddle, playing jazzy, experimental introductions to his traditional ballads and jigs and mumbling through his long beard in a brogue so heavy it took me a while to notice the German accent around the edges. Finally, after the last call for drinks—no liquor can be poured in Irish pubs after 11:30 p.m. in the summer months and 11 p.m. the rest of the year—an old local quavered some American country ballads sublimely, with accompaniment by the Welsh drummer and the German fiddler. When he was done and my last whiskey was downed, I wandered off to bed while the guitarists serenaded me from the foot of the stairs with an ironic rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”
The following night, in Galway, it was a young woman who had the guitar and handwritten notebook of songs—and a loaf of soda bread baked by her mother. She was from a small town not far away and had come down for a weekend holiday after breaking up with her fiancé, and she sang in a tiny, good voice “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and “Walkin’ After Midnight.” I’d caught a ride into Galway with a man who was trying to start a business supplementing the region’s scanty bus service with a van shuttle. In practice, this meant that he picked me up in Lisdoonvarna, dropped by the youth hostel a dozen miles up the coast of Galway Bay, loitered there for midmorning tea and cookies with a couple of other young women, dropped them off somewhere, picked up his kids from school while still driving me about, and discoursed marvelously on local matters all the while. Efficiency is an unfriendly virtue, and no one I met in Ireland seemed afflicted with it.
Stone walls occupied us for the first stretch. They were first of all, said my driver, the easiest way to unstone a field, and the more stony the field the thicker the wall. There are supposed to be places where the walls are ten feet thick for this reason, and there was a field I saw where boulders too big to build with filled almost a quarter of the cleared field. I was becoming a connoisseur of stone walls: the low Cork walls in which verdure had almost overtaken the stone; the neat solid walls of places where the rock came in flattish shapes; the particularly charming walls in which the stacks of horizontal stones were crowned with a row of uprights that always recalled rows of books on a bookshelf; and the ungainly walls in places where the stone came in irregular shapes, walls as loose as lace, full of holes the light and wind came through. My driver told me that a lot of the walls had been built in Famine times, because the English didn’t believe in giving something for nothing, and a lot of them were intentionally useless. He pointed out the lines of walls running straight up the rocky ridges of the Burren, walls in places too rough for large animals and too low to keep goats and sheep in, pointless walls built by starving people. He called the tracery of stonework evidence of torture.
Galway was full of evidence of history and music clubs, and I wandered through both. There were a lot of histories to choose from. There was a modern cathedral on an island, through which communicants wandered from the end of a mass, and tall priests in lace vestments strolled. There was a plaque to commemorate Christopher Columbus’s stay in Galway:
On these shores
in 1477
Christopher Columbus
found sure sign
of lands beyond the atlantic
said the sign on the stone pillar on one of the many waterfronts of this coastal town on a river. It had been defaced with a little anticolonialist rhetoric by someone who wasn’t so enthusiastic about the old world’s early enterprises in the new world. Nora Barnacle Joyce’s childhood home was open to the public on a little side street, and when I wandered in I was happy to find that her husband had played tourist too, long before he became a tourist industry himself. He apparently subscribed to the idea that one can understand history and personality through the tangible space in which events unfolded. There was a letter of his framed on the wall,
26.VIII.09
My dear little runaway Nora
I am writing this to you sitting at the kitchen table in your mother’s house!!! She sang for me “The Lass of Augrim” [the song the dying lover sings in “The Dead’] but she does not like to sing the last verses in which the lovers exchange their tokens. I shall stay in Galway overnight.
How strange life is, my own dear love! To think of my being here! I went round the house on Augustine Street where you lived with your grandmother and in the morning I am going to visit it pretending I want to buy it in order to see the room you slept in.
Nora Barnacle’s family’s house was a tiny box wedged between larger buildings, with one small room downstairs and another upstairs, no running water, no gas, and an open fireplace to cook on. In it she had lived with her parents, five sisters, and a brother until many of them were adult—though she had been farmed out sometimes to her grandmother and to a convent—and her mother, Mrs. Annie Barnacle, had lived there until she died at the age of eighty-four in 1940. The Barnacle house was so small no one could have even sighed private
ly, and psychic as well as physical life must have been communal. (Ireland never did give me a very specific sense of ancestral identity, save for the reminder that those names on the genealogy were most often the names of poor people, the heirs to centuries of poverty, and the poverty in early Irish photographs, of furnitureless cabins and ragged, barefooted people, suggested what that poverty might mean. I remembered my own mother’s admonition that people who fantasized about the past always thought they’d be aristocrats, but the great majority of us were descended from peasants and were we to be magically transported back would be peasants at best.)
The woman who took admission gave her set piece about the history of the house and, when I asked if you could feel a person’s presence by being in the space they’d occupied, added that it was a very good place to write letters and that Stephen Joyce, the Joyce’s grandson, had come by a few times and approved of what they were doing. A sweet-voiced ordinary-looking woman in her fifties, she gathered steam from there and went into the most marvelous soliloquy, circular and lyrical, chaotic and enthusiastic, one that would undoubtedly have made Joyce himself happy. All I could recall from it were the phrases: When we get to the end of time, we will see everything is connected. We will see the thread that runs through everything. Because if you go back very very very far—if you look far back enough at a family tree and such—it’s all connected.
13
The War between the Birds and Trees
I didn’t realize I was headed for a convent until I was on my way there. I had met Kathleen at the Killarney conference when she had tried to interest a speaker in what was happening to her local forest. The man whose talk had been about the importance of forests wasn’t interested, but I was, and so she took me off to tell me more, and when she found out I was a writer—a professional witness—she invited me to come and see for myself and stay in her community, which seemed to be the hub of the environmental activism she was talking about. She had a sense of great urgency about her local environmental crises, she was fluent in the jargon of environmental activism, and she was wearing white running shoes, jeans, and a pastel sweatshirt. In her late thirties, she had chestnut hair and an appealing face and an air of delicate yet vigorous youth.
Where I’m from, communities that care about environmental issues usually mean collective households of young radicals. But when I called up Kathleen, she told me that Sister Phyllis and Sister Agnes were in Galway City and would take me back to Portumna, and I realized how far away I was and that I was headed farther away: to a convent. Portumna is a town on the west bank of Lough Derg, the big lake the Shannon swells into as it divides County Galway from County Offaly. Anywhere else, it could be called sleepy and small, but by Irish standards Portumna seemed average, with a main street of shops, with schools, churches, and with a ruined priory and castle being restored as national heritage-cum-tourist attractions. The Portumna Sisters of Mercy had once run a residential school to teach young women the domestic arts of farmwives, but the days when domesticity required such art were largely over, and the four sisters lived in corners of the handsome stone school building that must have once held a hundred. All except Sister Noreen had lived in San Francisco—practically everyone in Ireland seems to have passed through the Bay Area—and two of them still taught school as they had there. To welcome me, they opened a bottle of elderberry wine a local had brought by and slipped hot water bottles into my bed in one of the abandoned student cubicles. The enormous differences between their beliefs and mine never came up; it’s easy not to talk about sexual morality.
Kathleen, a former teacher of eight-year-olds, was being funded by the diocese to work as an environmental activist, and she had a fine tradition behind her. Early medieval Irish monks had once written nature poetry that took such pleasure in the birds, berries, trees, and wolves around them that they seemed more like the Zen-monk painters and poets of Japan than like the more familiar world-denying ascetics elsewhere in Europe. St. Columba, says an old book of the Irish saints, lived in a forest in Doire—modern-day Derry or Londonderry—and wrote a hymn “that shows there was nothing worse to him than the cutting of that oakwood: ‘Though there is fear in me of death and of hell, I will not hide it that I have more fear of the sound of an ax over in Doire.’ ” St. Coemgen was praying with arms outstretched one day when a blackbird laid an egg in his hand; with saintly strength he held out his hand until the egg hatched. This minority tradition whose most famous continental exponent is Saint Francis may always have existed, though the church is often spoken of as though it had been a monolith of nature-hating throughout its history (in such works as Lynn White’s famous essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” the first of a cascade of writings blaming Western dualism for environmental disaster). My own blanket dislike for the church had been slowly undermined by such phenomena as the US bishops’ condemnation of nuclear war, liberation theology, and heroic Franciscan antinuclear activists. Kathleen told me many speak now of the “Greening of the Church,” of a reconciliation between Christian and environmental dogma. A case can be made that ecological sensibility has a long Christian tradition here, and another that it’s a new sensibility rewriting the past to establish itself as traditional. But whether or not an environmental activist nun in jeans was an anomaly, I was her guest.
Kathleen cared about all the subtle disasters going on around her, and she bewailed the southern Europeans who came to bag songbirds by the score, the Germans who were buying up vacation homes so voraciously that there were German-dominated villages on the Shannon, the decline of the local farmers, the local forests, and the local lough. She bewailed it from inside the house, over tea in the morning and tea in the evening, from inside the forest and from a scenic vantage point over the lowlands of east Galway, on our way to the school where her old students sang a song to me in Gaelic and asked me who I’d root for in the World Cup, and as we drove past a dump draining into a local stream, near which Travellers’ piebald carthorses grazed. She modified it with her earnest enthusiasm for ecological visions and positive solutions. But as far as she was concerned, the whole world she’d grown up in was being destroyed, and she was apparently right. She brought me together with various locals who were likewise watching their world disappear from under them.
Fintan Muldoon, a handsome old farmer in a tweed cap and coat who helped organize the rural farmers of the West, dropped by on a cool afternoon. Sister Kathleen shut us up in an upstairs parlor with a turf fire and a tray of tea things until I was better educated about Irish agriculture—though not as well as I might have been, because we often failed to understand each other’s accents. We managed, though, and he told me that the average farm in the West was less than forty acres, and some of those acres were usually boggy or stony or steep, so the farms were too small to be run on the scale of agribusinesses. The artificial agricultural economy of subsidies and quotas created by the European Economic Community was skewed in favor of larger farmers, and the Irish Farmer’s Association wasn’t doing anything much for the small farmer either. Back in the thirties, he said, a lot of farmers remained bachelors for economic reasons, and a lot of girls emigrated if they could. In the last twenty or thirty years, he added, a niece or nephew would generally take over the farm, but the standard of living wouldn’t be high, and it has come to the point where the niece or nephew won’t take a farm today. So the small farms and small farmers are dying out, and young women are still scarce in rural Ireland.
Muldoon and his fellow activist farmers had gone to the bishop in Clonfert and then to the archbishop of Tuam, and the archbishop had told them, I am the archbishop of a green desert, meaning that however nice western Ireland looked it was becoming alarmingly depopulated. The farmers didn’t want to see their farms become vacation homes or join the ruined cottages of the Famine times, and the clergy had a stake in keeping the devout rural culture alive. They recognize that rampant emigration is sapping their congregations; posted prominently in the Sisters of M
ercy Convent was a sign that read, “Emigration is not an act of God. It is not the will of God that the Irish should be emigrants, the migrant labor of the English-speaking world, and now the migrant labor of the developed European countries . . .” So the bishops of Connaught came together to work with the farmers on the Rural Alliance to Develop the West. They may succeed in modifying change, but not in stopping it: the government estimates that forty thousand small farmers will give up by the end of the century. The government has less to say about what this means for a country whose culture has always been rural, even if the farm is what much of Ireland has been fleeing for a century and a half.
Kathleen was reviving the old convent school gardens to teach organic farming, mostly to women and the unemployed, on the chance that organic produce could provide an income for some of them. She herself remembered growing up on her family’s farm, where they grew a variety of vegetables, kept cows and chickens, and were largely self-sufficient. But most contemporary farms in Ireland specialize in cows and sheep for the meat, wool, and milk markets, and even potatoes are often imported from other European countries. The subsidized and rigged economies appalled her: she told me stories of ships loaded with surplus butter anchored offshore and doing nothing, of farmers paid not to produce. Her father still farmed, and she took me out to meet her mother, who fed me ham sandwiches and tea in the room where the old turf-burning range still sat, though they cooked on an electric stove around the corner. Her mother was charming—practically everyone in Ireland is charming, at least to casual acquaintances—and joked that they ought to marry me off to Kathleen’s bachelor brother, who still lived at home but wasn’t going to take over the farm. And I realized all the farm people I’d met had been old, from Cork to Clare.
The primary local food product, aside from milk, beef and lamb, was frozen pizza. While I was visiting Sister Kathleen’s community, the public meeting to discuss the Green Isle Pizza factory’s solvents and other effluents being dumped into Lough Derg was held in a convent classroom. Some of the locals were in favor of expanding the pizza factory for the sake of jobs, and others pointed out that tourism was also a source of employment, and a dead lough wasn’t going to be very attractive.
A Book of Migrations Page 19