You gotta love any country that burns dirt to stay warm.
Peat. Compressed dirt.
Takes a thousand years to make ten inches of the stuff. It's freaking magic. The bog, the gorse, the moor, the taiga, whatever you want to call the Irish countryside, gets buried under itself and becomes this dark, umber-black, amateur charcoal.
Travel around Ireland and you can see it cut into strips looking like long rails of chocolate waiting for the rain to pause so it can dry.
Burns slower than wood, but faster than coal.
Has a unique... smell…..I'm told.
Bog. What an awesome anglo viking saxon word. Dent. Bent. Ax. Bog. All good.
I just got to Belfast and have realized what the whole trip was for.
So I could get to Belfast.
Love this place. Love the people. Hilarious piss takers, shit talking slangy Pict Irish ruffians in a proud armed city, Proddys and Taigs side by side.
Feels like Pittsburgh. With bombs.
With the occasional bomb I mean, and what that would do to the people's parlance.
Dad said we were Ulster Scots and now I firmly believe it. I belong here. I'm of them. Some things you just realize smack as you walk thru the door. Family at first sight.
Abhor the politics and the "Ulsterism" but this is the Ireland I'm a son of.
Ah well. Maybe a great great great great grandson of once removed but...
The Giro D'Italia runs thru Belfast tomorrow to add a tang of the absurd. Im going to wake up and watch thousands of Euro types hooting for their favorite diarrhetic burn victim athlete in a town that doesn't normally wake up till 9.
I might start drinking early.
Drove the whole northern curve of Ireland today. From Sligo to Belfast. Stood on Europe's highest cliffs- for a moment my Cabela's hat was the highest seaside object in the EU. (Full disclosure I've never worked for them or any other crypto-fascist supply outlet).
Screw the Cliffs of Moher - named strangely enough for my friend Malhar ( good work on the bog to table restaurant you've started over here my man) and go to these Slieve League cliffs which are higher and far more majestical. And God bless the Irish for continually not giving a damn if there's any kind of formal stairs to be found along a trail. Makes the journey seem routed in one's fantastical childhood imagination. You step from a stream bed to a set of rocks to heaps of turf that may or may not be related to the human foot, to a path that drops 1000 feet in either direction (God Bless the fog too, best not to know how you're gonna die) and it's a lot like being ten again, searching the neighborhood for "trails" and secret hideaways and the bushy doorway to some enchanted clearing.
Every point of the progress of a trip across the Irish countryside every nook and cranny is uneven, off true, bent. There's not a straight line or plumb surface to be found. The landscape continually alters. The fingers and the feet of whatever God built the place must have been constantly active. You feel you could lay any story into any corner of it. Or that someone, eons of someones already have. It's remarkable. It's a place lousy with narrative. They harvest narrative here.
And it's lush. My God it is. Fecund, seething with life, creeping growing piled up life. There's more water here than Seattle and Pittsburgh combined. It's a green and dark green Irish jungle. The Connemara, Sligo, Donegal, wow they are packed with streams and lakes and heaps of moss and turf dripping over whatever pathway or wall we've put between them and wherever it is they want to go.
Drove drove drove it all. Which when you realize the place is the size of Maine doesn't mean much. Roads the width of the average driveway in Bloomfield. As if they took the Big Sur coast road, squeezed it a touch and laid it over Ireland. Over and over again. Donegal, Ballybofey, Derry (yes DERRY!), Portrush, Ballymoney, Kells, and here, where the 3-d Titanic Experience auditorium is bigger than the ship itself.
The last 20 miles -and when you get to the NI it becomes miles again and things take longer to get to damn it!- the last 20 were on a major highway that could have (dis) graced any American city. You descend on it into Eastern Belfast thru some light hills, the road cuts below the neighborhoods and at the last overpass before I hit the city proper I saw on one side the Irish tricolor high on a pole and on the other the Union Jack.
Oh, the politics. Am I this am I that….what American could have any idea without living here?
Hmmnn….
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Connemara
I looked up from my seat at the bar and saw it was May 5th.
Cinco de Mayo in Ireland.
Ah. Like St Patrick's day in Oaxaca.
Except May 5th is the day Bobby Sands died. His IRA hunger strike come to an end. The career of Michael Fassbender one day to be launched. The man who's proved almost single handedly the edict of Ice Berg Slim, "Ain't no woman can't be turned."
Ah well…casting, casting….
St Patrick has a mountain.
It's where he had a hunger strike for 44 days and then called on all the venomous creatures of Ireland to arise and said to them "Out demons!"
The English stayed.
His mountain looks like a perfect cone. It's not of course but from afar it makes you want to drive at it to see, "Is that for real?" It's a pilgrimage magnet.
At the end of July 30,000 people climb it in a week. In their bare feet.
St Patrick's mountain is not made of mud.
On the contrary, the faithful have over the years placed stone after stone along the route of the pilgrimage thus making the "pathway" a kind of scree strewn Hell. The last two hundred yards alone make you wonder what kind of penance needed to pay for this.
And on the summit is a chapel built by the same folks who thought they should toss sharp stones all over the trail and this chapel is locked.
Instructions are posted as to how many Hail Marys and Our Fathers one should say near the Pope's picture (jammed in a pile of rocks) and how many times one should have circled the entire mountain before attempting the summit in order that the plenary indulgence could be awarded.
Now I don't know how many of you go on regular religious pilgrimages or how many of you have sat on a Holy Mountain but I was looking for some ….fireworks.
A little lithic levitation, a voice in the fog, a fellow pilgrim to have a long chat with who I'd later see in some ten year old obit page.
Nope.
Russians wearing plastic bags to stay dry.
German kids kicking rocks and slowing down their father as they debated whether or not Pep Guardiola was gay.
Intense looking men on their own.
Why is every interesting corner of the world ruined by awkward young men in close fitting clothes who can't stop staring?
Anyhow.
It was freezing. It rained. I was soaked. The wind was blowing about 40 miles an hour.
I'd made it my mission to pick up any garbage I saw and you can say what you will about christian fanatics but on the whole they don't litter much.
I stumbled to the top. More rocks at my feet, grey everywhere else. Said Chapel padlocked. And for some reason I was scared.
It makes no sense. I'm 2200 feet from a car park and a Guinness on a path you could drive ( well you could roll) a truck down - there's 4 more hours of daylight left and I had water in a bottle in my hand.
But I was afraid.
Maybe not scared but….at a loss….at sea……bereft……
I suddenly thought, well you're here, why not pray for your brother. So I knelt in the bloody cold wind and said a weak little prayer, a straight request it was, that my brother could be somewhere as beautiful as this country, this place, wind swept and bone chilling as it sometimes may be.
I wanted him to be somewhere he could be thrilled. "Happy" feels a little weak for what we should gain or face in the afterlife so I chose Thrilled.
And then I got up and walked, tripped, and slid back down.
At the shoulder of the top section the clouds blew off and the green and brown peat valley below lit up. It looked uneven somehow- not true- tilted against the slope of the rocky hill.
I looked to my left and there was a guy.
I'd been on my own for the last 45 minutes of the climb. Not a soul on the cliff and here I had company.
He walked right up to me and asked where I was from. To my Pittsburgh he replied, "I'm from Boston. My family was from around here and I've never been. Is the chapel open, man?"
I told him it wasn't and that he had the place to himself. "It's just you and the mt, brother. And the fog. And the ghosts."
And he looked at me.
"I lost my brother this year. I never do this shit. Thought I'd go up and say something."
I just looked back at him and we smiled, I suppose like people do when they're both somewhere absurd or dangerous or alone and he headed up.
About 400 yards later I looked back and he was standing in the rocks, a black shape against the clay colored stone. He looked calm. The fog swept in and he was gone.
When I got near the bottom and threw out all the trash I'd accumulated, the sun hit me and there were suddenly two rainbows over the hill below St Patricks. I started laughing and talking like the guy in the Lucky Charms commercial and I thought if I was Irish and heard a guy doing that I'd beat his ass. And then I thought about Ali and Frazier fighting for the third time and how Ali said One of us was going to die in there and how much respect the two men had for each other in the end. Even if they didn't show it.
I looked back and the summit was clear, its cone revealed, the peak of the locked up chapel clearly visible and I thought, "At least he got to pray in the sun."
Cinco de Mayo in Ireland.
Ah. Like St Patrick's day in Oaxaca.
Except May 5th is the day Bobby Sands died. His IRA hunger strike come to an end. The career of Michael Fassbender one day to be launched. The man who's proved almost single handedly the edict of Ice Berg Slim, "Ain't no woman can't be turned."
Ah well…casting, casting….
St Patrick has a mountain.
It's where he had a hunger strike for 44 days and then called on all the venomous creatures of Ireland to arise and said to them "Out demons!"
The English stayed.
His mountain looks like a perfect cone. It's not of course but from afar it makes you want to drive at it to see, "Is that for real?" It's a pilgrimage magnet.
At the end of July 30,000 people climb it in a week. In their bare feet.
St Patrick's mountain is not made of mud.
On the contrary, the faithful have over the years placed stone after stone along the route of the pilgrimage thus making the "pathway" a kind of scree strewn Hell. The last two hundred yards alone make you wonder what kind of penance needed to pay for this.
And on the summit is a chapel built by the same folks who thought they should toss sharp stones all over the trail and this chapel is locked.
Instructions are posted as to how many Hail Marys and Our Fathers one should say near the Pope's picture (jammed in a pile of rocks) and how many times one should have circled the entire mountain before attempting the summit in order that the plenary indulgence could be awarded.
Now I don't know how many of you go on regular religious pilgrimages or how many of you have sat on a Holy Mountain but I was looking for some ….fireworks.
A little lithic levitation, a voice in the fog, a fellow pilgrim to have a long chat with who I'd later see in some ten year old obit page.
Nope.
Russians wearing plastic bags to stay dry.
German kids kicking rocks and slowing down their father as they debated whether or not Pep Guardiola was gay.
Intense looking men on their own.
Why is every interesting corner of the world ruined by awkward young men in close fitting clothes who can't stop staring?
Anyhow.
It was freezing. It rained. I was soaked. The wind was blowing about 40 miles an hour.
I'd made it my mission to pick up any garbage I saw and you can say what you will about christian fanatics but on the whole they don't litter much.
I stumbled to the top. More rocks at my feet, grey everywhere else. Said Chapel padlocked. And for some reason I was scared.
It makes no sense. I'm 2200 feet from a car park and a Guinness on a path you could drive ( well you could roll) a truck down - there's 4 more hours of daylight left and I had water in a bottle in my hand.
But I was afraid.
Maybe not scared but….at a loss….at sea……bereft……
I suddenly thought, well you're here, why not pray for your brother. So I knelt in the bloody cold wind and said a weak little prayer, a straight request it was, that my brother could be somewhere as beautiful as this country, this place, wind swept and bone chilling as it sometimes may be.
I wanted him to be somewhere he could be thrilled. "Happy" feels a little weak for what we should gain or face in the afterlife so I chose Thrilled.
And then I got up and walked, tripped, and slid back down.
At the shoulder of the top section the clouds blew off and the green and brown peat valley below lit up. It looked uneven somehow- not true- tilted against the slope of the rocky hill.
I looked to my left and there was a guy.
I'd been on my own for the last 45 minutes of the climb. Not a soul on the cliff and here I had company.
He walked right up to me and asked where I was from. To my Pittsburgh he replied, "I'm from Boston. My family was from around here and I've never been. Is the chapel open, man?"
I told him it wasn't and that he had the place to himself. "It's just you and the mt, brother. And the fog. And the ghosts."
And he looked at me.
"I lost my brother this year. I never do this shit. Thought I'd go up and say something."
I just looked back at him and we smiled, I suppose like people do when they're both somewhere absurd or dangerous or alone and he headed up.
About 400 yards later I looked back and he was standing in the rocks, a black shape against the clay colored stone. He looked calm. The fog swept in and he was gone.
When I got near the bottom and threw out all the trash I'd accumulated, the sun hit me and there were suddenly two rainbows over the hill below St Patricks. I started laughing and talking like the guy in the Lucky Charms commercial and I thought if I was Irish and heard a guy doing that I'd beat his ass. And then I thought about Ali and Frazier fighting for the third time and how Ali said One of us was going to die in there and how much respect the two men had for each other in the end. Even if they didn't show it.
I looked back and the summit was clear, its cone revealed, the peak of the locked up chapel clearly visible and I thought, "At least he got to pray in the sun."
Monday, May 5, 2014
Inishmore
The Aran islands are famous for their stone walls dividing and subdividing their fields. Three islands, Inishmore, Inishman, and Inisheer, or big Inis, middle Inis and little Inis to the locals, who call themselves Ishies, running northwest to southeast along Ireland's Western shore.
The mainland's barely a boat ride away, you can see houses there clearly on a good day.
There's even an airport here which must be the aeronautical equivalent of tossing a stone across a pond if you're only flying back to Galway. Up to speed, up, apex and down again. At least when the weather's good. If not it must be the equivalent of tossing your heart up into your throat.
Everybody here lives on the inland or leeward side of their island. If you lived on the windward side you'd probably go mad. On the two smaller islands the land slides down toward the sea like the back of a wave. The people hide their towns under the face on the eastern side.
On Inishmore most of the land doesn't slide down to a Western beach. It rides straight out, dropping slightly and then snaps off into the ocean. Cliffs 200 feet high get hit by rollers that have travelled 3000 miles. When you look down the line of the coast it's hard to read the scale of the landscape. Waves hit the stone and ride up almost to the crest of the lower grazing lands- it takes awhile to add up that those lands are 90 feet off the water. You can perch on the edge or 100 yards from the edge and the concussion of the waves is like some mammoth drum being struck. It comes up into your feet. You can feel it tap on your breastbone. Oddly enough it's calming. I find it calming. I almost fell asleep lying in the thick grass of a clearing of a bronze age fort. Anyone who knows me knows I don't nap much nor do I do it in public in a field but for some reason….
well there's basically no one here. And there's almost none of that commercial culture which springs up around vacation spots or ex-art colonies. You'd imagine these islands would be lousy with writers and painters and "craftsmen" but they're not. Nobody's out painting in the fields. There's no main drag with galleries selling faux indigenous drawings. There's no yoga retreat. Only the big island has an espresso machine.
There's just a pack of locals and their bars where they like to stay up late and drink, and make music and money off the tourists who ride around in buses and drink. Otherwise, it's you and the livestock and the walls.
It's the only place I've ever been where I feel like you move too quickly when you ride a bike. I rented one and pretty often I just propped it up against one of the walls and headed out on foot. The place was made for feet and the way your eyes read a landscape when you walk. It reads stone by stone. Inlet by magical inlet.
Almost everyone's seen a photo of the Aran walls- think back to the academic parents of your most thinky friend in high school, his dad's study maybe had one framed in metal above a desk. A coffee shop in the 90s, the office of a dentist who liked to travel but got his prints done at Rite-Aid. You'd know them.
They look good photographed, they're easy to photograph, hell I've taken 50 so far of the same damn arrangement but they don't work that way. You don't see the Aran walls. You experience them, you move through them, you -like the islanders and the cattle and the horses- you use them. They're things and they're art and like a Christo you have to be in them, go to them, to "get it". And really they're more "things" than they are art but in some way the act of moving through them gets your mind rolling and you say to yourself ….sure it's the simplest way to build a wall but …is that it?
I just don't buy it that the guys laying and tilting and tapping these stones 600 years ago didn't step back once every 40 or 50 feet and say, "Damn Seamus, that's a good one."
Wandering the fields is endlessly compelling and at the same time maddening - you're staring at a piece of "modern art" every step you take and then you find yourself being passed by a farmer in his tractor and you're just staring at his wall. Sean Scully, a painter I like, was obsessed with this place - he said the entire landscape was drawn. The earth was picked up and used to mark the air. Not sculpture but vertical drawing that people try to decode, to read.
"Should art be useless and only ever that?" he writes, "So that its intensity is unfettered?"
Stone, the elemental representative of form. Each stone a letter or a digit or a figure….what we've all done since childhood, "This stone is special, this must have been made this way on purpose, this meant something."
So two things happen here: there's practically nothing but stone which shoves one's thinking toward the declaration, it's just a series of piles, it's meaningless, and then comes the realization that no matter how much stone is piled, how much evidence there is of the commonality of the stuff the arranging never ceases to fascinate or trigger meaning.
We never stop ordering, making patterns, arranging. And before writing and color theory and meter and rhyme there was all this stuff lying around us. So we moved it with our hands. And we still do. Sure there's a very practical reason for tearing all the stones out of what little arable land you have to survive on and stacking them so the mad winds of the North Atlantic don't knock them down each day and scour the entire island, but it's more than that. Or it's become more than that. The walls aren't art. They don't lean toward modern painting or aesthetic formulae any more than the sea does. But Art, any art, works to be something like these walls. The way Mamet describes theater trying to be like a wedding ceremony or a funeral. In our dreams, the wooden puppet or the stuffed rabbit trying to be alive.
Aran's walls are, oddly enough for hard mute stone….alive….they're animated every time someone walks by them and thinks, and knows, each of those stones was placed in its place by a human hand. A person stood there and made that hunk of rock rise up and defy gravity. Choices were made, time passed, sweat stained them, from right to left or left to right, point by point of the compass, they were cobbled together into that simplest of human constructions. A line. 4000 years and practicality became virtuosity.
- Okay. Pause. News flash. I've been writing and rewriting (re. erasing) these walls notes for days so today I had to go somewhere where there were no walls to clear my head and that place is called The Sea so I hopped on a boat, nominally traveling to the other islands, where there are more walls - (and each Island has its own subtle wall style but I won't get into that)- but really I just wanted to stare at a liquid moving surface that if you tried to mark it would only laugh and then probably kill you.
But. Upon landing at Inisheer I looked down into the harbor and there was a woman swimming with a dolphin.
Yep. Woman. Wild dolphin. 55 degree water. All three together.
Very quickly my interest in bronze age ruins and early christian burial sites and the hermeneutics of wall making went right out the window.
I'm simple that way. If you want to get me out of my head, or knock me off my autistic art appreciation track, show me a kitten. Or a horse. Or a woman in water that would kill most people after 20 minutes swimming next to a wild 12 foot dolphin.
Mind blowing.
She's from Dusseldorf. She lives part of the year there. But she and her husband come to Ireland 7 months out of the year where she ….well…swims in a couple harbors with this dolphin she met 12 years ago.
IT COMES TO FIND HER EVERY TIME.
IN THREE DIFFERENT HARBOR SITES 7 MILES APART.
SHE STAYS IN THE WATER FOR HOURS.
THIS SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE.
I went into the local bar where a pack of Boston firemen and their wives were communing with their ancestors while watching the Red Sox and checking their Facebook accounts and I said to the bartender, "You know there's a woman swimming with a dolphin in your harbor? This isn't possible." Nice girl, finally with some dark hair, "Oh yes with the dolphin, she's been doin it forever, every day she is."
I downed a bad bloody mary and some crisps and went back down to the shore and there they were husband and wife sitting on the jetty, she wrapped in towels leaning over and I thought damn she must be freezing poor thing. I got a little closer and I realized they weren't freezing they were praying. Kind of nodding, kind of davening to the water in a Dusseldorfy sort of way, and the dolphin no where to be seen.
Walls in the Arans. Slag heaps in Pittsburgh.
Hmm.
The major physical by-product of steel making, well the major one you can see, is this grey gravel called slag. It's what gets scraped off the top of a ladle of molten steel as it cooks, like pond scum or the meringue on a pie. The landscape of Pittsburgh is literally walled in by heaps of the stuff that became grassy mounds and cliffs and hillsides people think were always there. Dig into them and the slag reveals itself, comes crumbling out in handfuls of little digits. Looking like pieces of bone or clay that was squeezed in a hand and then fired.
It's not the most romantic material.
And yet…
We don't give the workers of the industrial age much authority. And in that word lays a clue. The author. Authorship. Somehow when a thing doesn't have somebody's name written on it it's not worth as much. The walls of Aran have no names inscribed but their very shape calls to mind the movement of individuals. But is that simply a prejudice of how well or what languages we can read? How subtle are the movements of the plasterer or the wall painter or the steel worker? How circumscribed?
I know that when a good "cook" was made as the furnace boys called it, when they'd made an especially difficult alloyed soup out of molten metals and then rolled it into steel, afterwards they'd go up and sign the cooled ingots. Not just to mark them and tell the loaders what batch was what but just to say, we did this.
When I'm scrambling over the slag heaps in my hometown trying to get to a bike path or down to some hidden patch on the rivers I look at the miserable crap and sometimes it looks to me like typeface, or some kind of language that got broken off a wall and ground into gravel.
And the sea around Aran today looks like metal. Adios.
The mainland's barely a boat ride away, you can see houses there clearly on a good day.
There's even an airport here which must be the aeronautical equivalent of tossing a stone across a pond if you're only flying back to Galway. Up to speed, up, apex and down again. At least when the weather's good. If not it must be the equivalent of tossing your heart up into your throat.
Everybody here lives on the inland or leeward side of their island. If you lived on the windward side you'd probably go mad. On the two smaller islands the land slides down toward the sea like the back of a wave. The people hide their towns under the face on the eastern side.
On Inishmore most of the land doesn't slide down to a Western beach. It rides straight out, dropping slightly and then snaps off into the ocean. Cliffs 200 feet high get hit by rollers that have travelled 3000 miles. When you look down the line of the coast it's hard to read the scale of the landscape. Waves hit the stone and ride up almost to the crest of the lower grazing lands- it takes awhile to add up that those lands are 90 feet off the water. You can perch on the edge or 100 yards from the edge and the concussion of the waves is like some mammoth drum being struck. It comes up into your feet. You can feel it tap on your breastbone. Oddly enough it's calming. I find it calming. I almost fell asleep lying in the thick grass of a clearing of a bronze age fort. Anyone who knows me knows I don't nap much nor do I do it in public in a field but for some reason….
well there's basically no one here. And there's almost none of that commercial culture which springs up around vacation spots or ex-art colonies. You'd imagine these islands would be lousy with writers and painters and "craftsmen" but they're not. Nobody's out painting in the fields. There's no main drag with galleries selling faux indigenous drawings. There's no yoga retreat. Only the big island has an espresso machine.
There's just a pack of locals and their bars where they like to stay up late and drink, and make music and money off the tourists who ride around in buses and drink. Otherwise, it's you and the livestock and the walls.
It's the only place I've ever been where I feel like you move too quickly when you ride a bike. I rented one and pretty often I just propped it up against one of the walls and headed out on foot. The place was made for feet and the way your eyes read a landscape when you walk. It reads stone by stone. Inlet by magical inlet.
Almost everyone's seen a photo of the Aran walls- think back to the academic parents of your most thinky friend in high school, his dad's study maybe had one framed in metal above a desk. A coffee shop in the 90s, the office of a dentist who liked to travel but got his prints done at Rite-Aid. You'd know them.
They look good photographed, they're easy to photograph, hell I've taken 50 so far of the same damn arrangement but they don't work that way. You don't see the Aran walls. You experience them, you move through them, you -like the islanders and the cattle and the horses- you use them. They're things and they're art and like a Christo you have to be in them, go to them, to "get it". And really they're more "things" than they are art but in some way the act of moving through them gets your mind rolling and you say to yourself ….sure it's the simplest way to build a wall but …is that it?
I just don't buy it that the guys laying and tilting and tapping these stones 600 years ago didn't step back once every 40 or 50 feet and say, "Damn Seamus, that's a good one."
Wandering the fields is endlessly compelling and at the same time maddening - you're staring at a piece of "modern art" every step you take and then you find yourself being passed by a farmer in his tractor and you're just staring at his wall. Sean Scully, a painter I like, was obsessed with this place - he said the entire landscape was drawn. The earth was picked up and used to mark the air. Not sculpture but vertical drawing that people try to decode, to read.
"Should art be useless and only ever that?" he writes, "So that its intensity is unfettered?"
Stone, the elemental representative of form. Each stone a letter or a digit or a figure….what we've all done since childhood, "This stone is special, this must have been made this way on purpose, this meant something."
So two things happen here: there's practically nothing but stone which shoves one's thinking toward the declaration, it's just a series of piles, it's meaningless, and then comes the realization that no matter how much stone is piled, how much evidence there is of the commonality of the stuff the arranging never ceases to fascinate or trigger meaning.
We never stop ordering, making patterns, arranging. And before writing and color theory and meter and rhyme there was all this stuff lying around us. So we moved it with our hands. And we still do. Sure there's a very practical reason for tearing all the stones out of what little arable land you have to survive on and stacking them so the mad winds of the North Atlantic don't knock them down each day and scour the entire island, but it's more than that. Or it's become more than that. The walls aren't art. They don't lean toward modern painting or aesthetic formulae any more than the sea does. But Art, any art, works to be something like these walls. The way Mamet describes theater trying to be like a wedding ceremony or a funeral. In our dreams, the wooden puppet or the stuffed rabbit trying to be alive.
Aran's walls are, oddly enough for hard mute stone….alive….they're animated every time someone walks by them and thinks, and knows, each of those stones was placed in its place by a human hand. A person stood there and made that hunk of rock rise up and defy gravity. Choices were made, time passed, sweat stained them, from right to left or left to right, point by point of the compass, they were cobbled together into that simplest of human constructions. A line. 4000 years and practicality became virtuosity.
- Okay. Pause. News flash. I've been writing and rewriting (re. erasing) these walls notes for days so today I had to go somewhere where there were no walls to clear my head and that place is called The Sea so I hopped on a boat, nominally traveling to the other islands, where there are more walls - (and each Island has its own subtle wall style but I won't get into that)- but really I just wanted to stare at a liquid moving surface that if you tried to mark it would only laugh and then probably kill you.
But. Upon landing at Inisheer I looked down into the harbor and there was a woman swimming with a dolphin.
Yep. Woman. Wild dolphin. 55 degree water. All three together.
Very quickly my interest in bronze age ruins and early christian burial sites and the hermeneutics of wall making went right out the window.
I'm simple that way. If you want to get me out of my head, or knock me off my autistic art appreciation track, show me a kitten. Or a horse. Or a woman in water that would kill most people after 20 minutes swimming next to a wild 12 foot dolphin.
Mind blowing.
She's from Dusseldorf. She lives part of the year there. But she and her husband come to Ireland 7 months out of the year where she ….well…swims in a couple harbors with this dolphin she met 12 years ago.
IT COMES TO FIND HER EVERY TIME.
IN THREE DIFFERENT HARBOR SITES 7 MILES APART.
SHE STAYS IN THE WATER FOR HOURS.
THIS SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE.
I went into the local bar where a pack of Boston firemen and their wives were communing with their ancestors while watching the Red Sox and checking their Facebook accounts and I said to the bartender, "You know there's a woman swimming with a dolphin in your harbor? This isn't possible." Nice girl, finally with some dark hair, "Oh yes with the dolphin, she's been doin it forever, every day she is."
I downed a bad bloody mary and some crisps and went back down to the shore and there they were husband and wife sitting on the jetty, she wrapped in towels leaning over and I thought damn she must be freezing poor thing. I got a little closer and I realized they weren't freezing they were praying. Kind of nodding, kind of davening to the water in a Dusseldorfy sort of way, and the dolphin no where to be seen.
Walls in the Arans. Slag heaps in Pittsburgh.
Hmm.
The major physical by-product of steel making, well the major one you can see, is this grey gravel called slag. It's what gets scraped off the top of a ladle of molten steel as it cooks, like pond scum or the meringue on a pie. The landscape of Pittsburgh is literally walled in by heaps of the stuff that became grassy mounds and cliffs and hillsides people think were always there. Dig into them and the slag reveals itself, comes crumbling out in handfuls of little digits. Looking like pieces of bone or clay that was squeezed in a hand and then fired.
It's not the most romantic material.
And yet…
We don't give the workers of the industrial age much authority. And in that word lays a clue. The author. Authorship. Somehow when a thing doesn't have somebody's name written on it it's not worth as much. The walls of Aran have no names inscribed but their very shape calls to mind the movement of individuals. But is that simply a prejudice of how well or what languages we can read? How subtle are the movements of the plasterer or the wall painter or the steel worker? How circumscribed?
I know that when a good "cook" was made as the furnace boys called it, when they'd made an especially difficult alloyed soup out of molten metals and then rolled it into steel, afterwards they'd go up and sign the cooled ingots. Not just to mark them and tell the loaders what batch was what but just to say, we did this.
When I'm scrambling over the slag heaps in my hometown trying to get to a bike path or down to some hidden patch on the rivers I look at the miserable crap and sometimes it looks to me like typeface, or some kind of language that got broken off a wall and ground into gravel.
And the sea around Aran today looks like metal. Adios.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Galway away
What flipping sunlight. What LA light wants to be when it grows up. Like the Guinness…this is light without pasteurization. Catholic light. It comes without protection.
And the walls everywhere. Light bouncing off stone after broken stone refracting into the heavy grass.
Fields dragged for stone over the centuries. It must have been hell - like eating bony fish with a spoon. Eating centuries worth of bony fish with a spoon - there's more loose rock in this country than the rest of the world. Every freaking 8th of an acre clipped in by wall after wall after wall. Amazing. And in every other back yard is a white horse and a couple cows, or a handful of the big fatties meandering around in the rocks and the mud. And the damn things never come say hi. You can't pet them for the life of you.
BIG SEGUE
(Word about the building trades in Ireland -or really Europe- there must be about 5 wholesale suppliers. Period. Once you roll into Irish suburbia all the damn houses look half done, naked, clipped together out of the same cheap dry wall propped around standard windows poked through in utter disregard for some kind of aesthetic balance- same vinyl siding, same dropped on rooves, same pale plasters, I mean they look like shit. Graceless, almost completely utilitarian without even a Spartan modernist charm I just don't get it.
(Word about the building trades in Ireland -or really Europe- there must be about 5 wholesale suppliers. Period. Once you roll into Irish suburbia all the damn houses look half done, naked, clipped together out of the same cheap dry wall propped around standard windows poked through in utter disregard for some kind of aesthetic balance- same vinyl siding, same dropped on rooves, same pale plasters, I mean they look like shit. Graceless, almost completely utilitarian without even a Spartan modernist charm I just don't get it.
It's not just me missing the ridiculous wealth of some American burbs where even among every 15 McMansions you'll find one castle well appointed by a wife with taste - no there's just no .... Design... To the euro burbs. They didn't build from their own vernacular for some reason. It's odd.
Maybe it's me.
Or us.
The American fetishization of "THE HOME". Our obsession with the estate, each man's house being his castle so why not figure out 500,000 ways to standardize and miniaturize the details and signs of estatedom? Tack Chatsworth onto a 1/4 acre in Connecticut. Spend a year and a years salary "remodeling". The finished home answers all problems, supplies all needs, and shuts the door to the world. It's the outer armor of the married couple whose eggs have literally become the basket. Or vice versa….
Europeans I think don't fall for it. They've been in apartments for so long even the the idea of a house, what we'd see and call a shed or a fishing shack they'd call home and be happy with it. Their houses like their spouses aren't expected to be able to shut the world out, or carry its weight.)
Annnnnnd, back to Galway. A last night doing as Romans do roaming from bar to bar looking for a decent band and finding several. For a one street town given over shamelessly to the State University model of bars! stores! and …more BARS!! they do have a pack of seriously devoted fiddlers.
I sat on a stool in a corner of a place called Tis Coulis (?) which I think is gaelic for old house and I'm guessing because there used to be a crepe joint in San Fran called Ti Couz which in Breton means old house and we in the drunken Nineties hoped meant old something else, but the Galwegian bartender had watched a lot of tv so he was generous to me and to this kid I'd met on a hike thru the Burren Hills earlier that day.
Went on a bus tour (yep) with a pack of germans driven by a man whose voice in both Irish and English was the aural equivalent of being basted in cat urine while Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music plays in the background. In long reasonable history of the Celts this guy was sui generic. Half Office cast member half Hannibal Lecter and half way thru the loop o' the sights after he turned the volume down on the Greg Kihn's greatest hits, the option was given. "Those who would like at the given time to make the hike over Brown Mt thru the Connolly farm and its many goats will be welcome and we will move on to the famous Alliwee caves and retrieve you up on the opposite side."
I got the hell off and so did one other guy. And of course he's an actor from Montreal taking some time off after his auditions at the Bristol Vic and running from a lost love named Tasha in French Canadia.
We walked over a scrabbled, rock-screed mini mountain mis-quoting Hamlet and Henry V and Pinter in the middle of nowhere a place dotted by cairns and tombs that Shakespeare and his well dressed London friends would have found ancient and quaint if they'd been here 400 year ago- we met some goats, three beautiful hunting dogs and a pair of Connolly brothers who'd just come back from University and looked a little dazed but happy that they'd decided to make a go of it with grandmother's farm. They made great hot chocolate and knew every wall, flower, and brackened gorse patch in the valley and when we told them finally how barking mad the bus driver was the older brother said the best thing Ive heard in an Irish accent thus far, "Yeah, guy's a dick."
Return with me to the bar in Galway after "time" which means the bartenders just up and leave and people sit in the bar like nothing happened and continue to talk and listen to music. Me and Mark, Mr Canada, sat tapping our feet to the circling rhythms - the shit is like a hindu prayer wheel become music- its mesmerizing, when it's done you feel like you've been sent thru the wash cycle of your soul.
I don't know if Im Irish or half Irish or an 8th but somehow it taps on the shin of my heart and involuntarily happily without the least thought or decision I move, I am moved to happiness.
Well all the folksters went home to bed or to somewhere they only tell each other and I ended up in another bar this time more suited to Ann Arbor or Columbus Ohio or Happy Valley than the West Coast of Ireland. Two guys stood in the corner and played all the shit all the shit heads ask for and chant with and can't dance to and I wanted to teleport five angry guys from Mckees Rocks into the place so they could kick some gap year collegiate ass.
I decided I'll drink one more beer and try and help Canada and Ireland mix genetic strains - when I got up to the bar one of the two guitar men yelled "Anything!! Come on people, we can play anything, try us."
"Richard Thompson", I yelled over my shoulder as the Guinness sat thru its first draw.
Woman yelled to them, " No don't play that…wait who IS that?"
One of the Munson twins said "He's an Irish folk musician." To which I replied now beer in hand, "Right and Guinness is an Irish beer. Come on - something, something guys that sounds like you learned it here."
And the bigger fellow stared at me and said, " You want something local? We'll give ya something local. "
And they proceeded to sing Aerosmith's Walk This Way set to the tune of Galway Girl with the latter getting the second and last chorus.
Utter bloody genius.
I bought them both ridiculously expensive Whiskeys. Which they made fun of.
Galway!! Good night!! We love you.
Maybe it's me.
Or us.
The American fetishization of "THE HOME". Our obsession with the estate, each man's house being his castle so why not figure out 500,000 ways to standardize and miniaturize the details and signs of estatedom? Tack Chatsworth onto a 1/4 acre in Connecticut. Spend a year and a years salary "remodeling". The finished home answers all problems, supplies all needs, and shuts the door to the world. It's the outer armor of the married couple whose eggs have literally become the basket. Or vice versa….
Europeans I think don't fall for it. They've been in apartments for so long even the the idea of a house, what we'd see and call a shed or a fishing shack they'd call home and be happy with it. Their houses like their spouses aren't expected to be able to shut the world out, or carry its weight.)
Annnnnnd, back to Galway. A last night doing as Romans do roaming from bar to bar looking for a decent band and finding several. For a one street town given over shamelessly to the State University model of bars! stores! and …more BARS!! they do have a pack of seriously devoted fiddlers.
I sat on a stool in a corner of a place called Tis Coulis (?) which I think is gaelic for old house and I'm guessing because there used to be a crepe joint in San Fran called Ti Couz which in Breton means old house and we in the drunken Nineties hoped meant old something else, but the Galwegian bartender had watched a lot of tv so he was generous to me and to this kid I'd met on a hike thru the Burren Hills earlier that day.
Went on a bus tour (yep) with a pack of germans driven by a man whose voice in both Irish and English was the aural equivalent of being basted in cat urine while Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music plays in the background. In long reasonable history of the Celts this guy was sui generic. Half Office cast member half Hannibal Lecter and half way thru the loop o' the sights after he turned the volume down on the Greg Kihn's greatest hits, the option was given. "Those who would like at the given time to make the hike over Brown Mt thru the Connolly farm and its many goats will be welcome and we will move on to the famous Alliwee caves and retrieve you up on the opposite side."
I got the hell off and so did one other guy. And of course he's an actor from Montreal taking some time off after his auditions at the Bristol Vic and running from a lost love named Tasha in French Canadia.
We walked over a scrabbled, rock-screed mini mountain mis-quoting Hamlet and Henry V and Pinter in the middle of nowhere a place dotted by cairns and tombs that Shakespeare and his well dressed London friends would have found ancient and quaint if they'd been here 400 year ago- we met some goats, three beautiful hunting dogs and a pair of Connolly brothers who'd just come back from University and looked a little dazed but happy that they'd decided to make a go of it with grandmother's farm. They made great hot chocolate and knew every wall, flower, and brackened gorse patch in the valley and when we told them finally how barking mad the bus driver was the older brother said the best thing Ive heard in an Irish accent thus far, "Yeah, guy's a dick."
Return with me to the bar in Galway after "time" which means the bartenders just up and leave and people sit in the bar like nothing happened and continue to talk and listen to music. Me and Mark, Mr Canada, sat tapping our feet to the circling rhythms - the shit is like a hindu prayer wheel become music- its mesmerizing, when it's done you feel like you've been sent thru the wash cycle of your soul.
I don't know if Im Irish or half Irish or an 8th but somehow it taps on the shin of my heart and involuntarily happily without the least thought or decision I move, I am moved to happiness.
Well all the folksters went home to bed or to somewhere they only tell each other and I ended up in another bar this time more suited to Ann Arbor or Columbus Ohio or Happy Valley than the West Coast of Ireland. Two guys stood in the corner and played all the shit all the shit heads ask for and chant with and can't dance to and I wanted to teleport five angry guys from Mckees Rocks into the place so they could kick some gap year collegiate ass.
I decided I'll drink one more beer and try and help Canada and Ireland mix genetic strains - when I got up to the bar one of the two guitar men yelled "Anything!! Come on people, we can play anything, try us."
"Richard Thompson", I yelled over my shoulder as the Guinness sat thru its first draw.
Woman yelled to them, " No don't play that…wait who IS that?"
One of the Munson twins said "He's an Irish folk musician." To which I replied now beer in hand, "Right and Guinness is an Irish beer. Come on - something, something guys that sounds like you learned it here."
And the bigger fellow stared at me and said, " You want something local? We'll give ya something local. "
And they proceeded to sing Aerosmith's Walk This Way set to the tune of Galway Girl with the latter getting the second and last chorus.
Utter bloody genius.
I bought them both ridiculously expensive Whiskeys. Which they made fun of.
Galway!! Good night!! We love you.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
2nd day in Galway
The Irish walk like they're being chased.
It's ridiculous. You think you've come to the land of the meander, the tangent, the long way round. Far bloody from it.
It might be a long way to Tipperary but these bastards are taking the shortest distance between two points.
Watch the shoulders, the lowered heads, the outright scamper. Where the Hell are they all going?
Tetchy. It's the only way I can put it. There's the velocity and then there's also the general disregard for lane safety. Tokyo feels less aggressive. Any moment you feel like someone's going to lend you a Gaelic hip check. A ten year old swung his book bag into me on a bridge in Galway. I'd of smacked him but there were seven more. Seven ten year olds could maybe do some damage.
Frightened Celtic tigers? Is it that? Is it……the Irish are warlike? That they wanna scrap?
Or is it maybe…. I do…..
Cab to the station in Dublin I almost told the cabbie to shut the fuck up I'd gotten too many gifts from his gab. It was like being in a cafe in Westwood surrounded by 5 jilted UCLA students. All wrapped into one man.
And then the 8 church ladies packed together on their way to Galway. Reassuring each other they were all there, tucking away their coats and bags and their tupperwared snacks which they thought they needed to hide. Gambling. Swearing. Chatting up the Serbian coffee kart kid until he started laughing, "ladies, ladies, my loves". You've never heard an Irish accent until it's been welded onto a Slavic one.
It is a beautiful accent wherever it comes from. It's 20 beautiful accents. There's so many you can't keep up.
But down West here in Galway you hardly hear it - what with the Spanish and the Yanks and the Italians and the Brits and the Germans all come to this picturesque sea side town -with a bay worthy of Steve Perry's voice- to gather in tawdry groups and listen to i phones together.
Galway's like the center of Barcelona. Crammed with the subsidized detritus of the Global Village. Co-eds with their off center baseball caps and hip once again lycra'd legs. Dreaded jugglers and drummers smack in the middle of the historic harbor jetties like so many bobble headed Bozos the clown. Squads of young men from any one of the Euro union's staggering states. 4 Italian guys, 4 Spanish guys, 4 French guys -who the fuck knows- with their matching treated jeans, their matching labeled T-shirts, premier league tops, and the curious almost Capezio like footware only 19 year olds from Rouen think is cool, all strolling in formation looking for that universal staple, wanted by all- the American college chick.
And boy have the ladies come here in droves. In schools. Like Herring.
I guess if I wanted to study abroad and hadn't really gotten around to studying one of those languages abroad people speak, I guess I'd have got to Ireland too .
And they have.
So who can blame these embarrassing boys. If I'd been born in a bankrupt suburb near Valencia and heard that every year more than a thousand corn fed, porn bred, relativistic American girls were coming to Galway, I might have camped out here too.
And then strangely, when you leave downtown Hibernia-Barca, the built landscape quickly becomes Northern California. Walk north along the "bike path" and you too can be a landed member of the New Irish Upper Middle Class. Which seems bound and determined to act like it grew up in Palo Alto or any of the mindless beach burbs between Irvine and La Jolla. (yes I know those are in So Cal.)
I guess I was just impressed by the sameness. The samenitude. That money looks the same as money all over the world. And people who've gotten a little money all start buying, wanting, and walking like other newly moneyed folks from Greenwich to the Galway Bay.
And I guess I wanted the Irish to be immune. To be all cottagey, and dour and mismatched and pluralistic even when it comes to their golden, breathtaking Western shore.
Which is neither golden nor a shore, but you get what I mean.
I didn't want to be in Ireland and be passed by latte laden moms driving Maclarens ( the pram not the car) in yoga gear and ball caps, 4000 miles from the closest ball park.
At least I haven't heard any Brad Paisley.
That said.
It's a gorgeous little town. A series of lanes curving down wide and well preserved canals full of dark emerald water down to the sea which made this place. There are still a few working boats in the various inlets (only one of them a Hooker, i.e. a Galway Hooker which if you didn't know and I didn't is a sturdy fishing boat built like it could take the wave in the Perfect Storm and come up laughing. Or drinking). At 6 in the afternoon the various whites and the blues and the greens of the plastered houses glow. Church domes and spires jazz up the curve of the coast. Clouds bunched behind give the place a Wild West feel, which I suppose it kind of is.
From a mile away out on a causeway which beckons but ultimately leads you to the town sewage facility, the narrow face of the city, its line across the horizon looks like an early Klimt landscape, or an early Mondrian. You could be in Holland or Northern Germany…..but then again, why would you want to be? Given the choice I'd rather be in Ireland. Listening to the guys try and teach their girlfriends how to hit a hurling stick in a green field the size of the rest of the city. Right by the water, cold as Maine with mothers and kids swimming in it and the curve of the Cliffs of Moher miles off in the distance.
I swat away some more sea flies, fed literally by the crap of Galway, and swear at myself for following a bunch of retirees doing their evening work out, out and back. There's a plaque at the end of the pier. I read it as some young lassie in her short short dress ( that is the default Irish look these days, praise Jaysus) runs from the flies and her lad chases past me…. "At the end of this causeway is the Mutton Point Lighthouse, the last light in Galway harbor proper and many times the last sight thousands and thousands of refugees fleeing the Great Famine ever had of their homeland."
It's ridiculous. You think you've come to the land of the meander, the tangent, the long way round. Far bloody from it.
It might be a long way to Tipperary but these bastards are taking the shortest distance between two points.
Watch the shoulders, the lowered heads, the outright scamper. Where the Hell are they all going?
Tetchy. It's the only way I can put it. There's the velocity and then there's also the general disregard for lane safety. Tokyo feels less aggressive. Any moment you feel like someone's going to lend you a Gaelic hip check. A ten year old swung his book bag into me on a bridge in Galway. I'd of smacked him but there were seven more. Seven ten year olds could maybe do some damage.
Frightened Celtic tigers? Is it that? Is it……the Irish are warlike? That they wanna scrap?
Or is it maybe…. I do…..
Cab to the station in Dublin I almost told the cabbie to shut the fuck up I'd gotten too many gifts from his gab. It was like being in a cafe in Westwood surrounded by 5 jilted UCLA students. All wrapped into one man.
And then the 8 church ladies packed together on their way to Galway. Reassuring each other they were all there, tucking away their coats and bags and their tupperwared snacks which they thought they needed to hide. Gambling. Swearing. Chatting up the Serbian coffee kart kid until he started laughing, "ladies, ladies, my loves". You've never heard an Irish accent until it's been welded onto a Slavic one.
It is a beautiful accent wherever it comes from. It's 20 beautiful accents. There's so many you can't keep up.
But down West here in Galway you hardly hear it - what with the Spanish and the Yanks and the Italians and the Brits and the Germans all come to this picturesque sea side town -with a bay worthy of Steve Perry's voice- to gather in tawdry groups and listen to i phones together.
Galway's like the center of Barcelona. Crammed with the subsidized detritus of the Global Village. Co-eds with their off center baseball caps and hip once again lycra'd legs. Dreaded jugglers and drummers smack in the middle of the historic harbor jetties like so many bobble headed Bozos the clown. Squads of young men from any one of the Euro union's staggering states. 4 Italian guys, 4 Spanish guys, 4 French guys -who the fuck knows- with their matching treated jeans, their matching labeled T-shirts, premier league tops, and the curious almost Capezio like footware only 19 year olds from Rouen think is cool, all strolling in formation looking for that universal staple, wanted by all- the American college chick.
And boy have the ladies come here in droves. In schools. Like Herring.
I guess if I wanted to study abroad and hadn't really gotten around to studying one of those languages abroad people speak, I guess I'd have got to Ireland too .
And they have.
So who can blame these embarrassing boys. If I'd been born in a bankrupt suburb near Valencia and heard that every year more than a thousand corn fed, porn bred, relativistic American girls were coming to Galway, I might have camped out here too.
And then strangely, when you leave downtown Hibernia-Barca, the built landscape quickly becomes Northern California. Walk north along the "bike path" and you too can be a landed member of the New Irish Upper Middle Class. Which seems bound and determined to act like it grew up in Palo Alto or any of the mindless beach burbs between Irvine and La Jolla. (yes I know those are in So Cal.)
I guess I was just impressed by the sameness. The samenitude. That money looks the same as money all over the world. And people who've gotten a little money all start buying, wanting, and walking like other newly moneyed folks from Greenwich to the Galway Bay.
And I guess I wanted the Irish to be immune. To be all cottagey, and dour and mismatched and pluralistic even when it comes to their golden, breathtaking Western shore.
Which is neither golden nor a shore, but you get what I mean.
I didn't want to be in Ireland and be passed by latte laden moms driving Maclarens ( the pram not the car) in yoga gear and ball caps, 4000 miles from the closest ball park.
At least I haven't heard any Brad Paisley.
That said.
It's a gorgeous little town. A series of lanes curving down wide and well preserved canals full of dark emerald water down to the sea which made this place. There are still a few working boats in the various inlets (only one of them a Hooker, i.e. a Galway Hooker which if you didn't know and I didn't is a sturdy fishing boat built like it could take the wave in the Perfect Storm and come up laughing. Or drinking). At 6 in the afternoon the various whites and the blues and the greens of the plastered houses glow. Church domes and spires jazz up the curve of the coast. Clouds bunched behind give the place a Wild West feel, which I suppose it kind of is.
From a mile away out on a causeway which beckons but ultimately leads you to the town sewage facility, the narrow face of the city, its line across the horizon looks like an early Klimt landscape, or an early Mondrian. You could be in Holland or Northern Germany…..but then again, why would you want to be? Given the choice I'd rather be in Ireland. Listening to the guys try and teach their girlfriends how to hit a hurling stick in a green field the size of the rest of the city. Right by the water, cold as Maine with mothers and kids swimming in it and the curve of the Cliffs of Moher miles off in the distance.
I swat away some more sea flies, fed literally by the crap of Galway, and swear at myself for following a bunch of retirees doing their evening work out, out and back. There's a plaque at the end of the pier. I read it as some young lassie in her short short dress ( that is the default Irish look these days, praise Jaysus) runs from the flies and her lad chases past me…. "At the end of this causeway is the Mutton Point Lighthouse, the last light in Galway harbor proper and many times the last sight thousands and thousands of refugees fleeing the Great Famine ever had of their homeland."
Ireland. First Sunday.
Backpacks.
What the Hell does a tourist keep in a back pack? What possible reason lies within?
Why not wear a sign on your back that says, "Sucker. Please demean. And then rob me."
Students wear backpacks. Hikers 40 miles from the nearest hostel wear them.
Why in the middle of one of the world's great cities would you be wearing a backpack?
To carry your lunch? That you may have stored in your ….hotel fridge?
Blankets for said lunch?
Water in case EVERY MINI MART FOUND EVERY TWO BLOCKS AND EVERY PUBLIC FOUNTAIN IN A VERY WATERED CITY is closed?
A camera the size of a panaflex? A child you're ashamed of????
What is it that makes urban dwellers who wouldn't be caught dead in their own urban setting wearing a backpack and fleece need to don the wardrobe of "traveler" in city after city?? Hiking boots that could get you over the Annapurna pass. A shell which force 5 rain couldn't rend.
Shirts that "wick".
WTF?
Wick the fuck.
I don't mean to vent.
When you go to a foreign city you want to be the only foreigner. You want everyone to be that nationality speaking that language.
Dublin makes this tough in two ways. There are reams of people like you/me. You hear more Polish than Irish and because the common language of Ireland is English the "foreign" meter sits pretty low. And then you pass group after group of neither Irish nor Yankee. Who knew the Italians loved Dublin? Or the Slovaks? They have their own section of town. Little Bratislava I suppose.
But here they come, wave after wave, tired well dressed Italians always dressed for snow and looking put upon that lunch and dinner don't start exactly the same time that mommy makes back at the apt in Florence.
The French with their abysmally behaved children laughing at everything in site, the parents either too preoccupied trading dissertations about what they've just seen in the museum to notice or wishing to avoid the student representative conference any disciplinary action would require.
The Spanish just having a better time than anyone. Some Rafa-looking guy asked me for directions and I thought we were gonna hug at the end.
The Russians pretending to take in the sights but then simply setting up shop at a bar to google local real estate prices.
Lots of Poles, lots of Germans….but fewer Americans and even fewer Brits than one would think.
And all around them, in their odd sense of grey on off-grey matching greens, are the Irish.
Who knew the Irish and the Catalonians had the same (lack of) fashion sense?
I don't mean to generalize.
It was a miraculous sunday. Pope John Paul was canonized. The soccer fan from Krakow who ended up in the Vatican. I'm glad I was in a Catholic country.
There's a Polish parish up by the oldest part of Dublin and in the bright sun I watched them stream in. The 6th century bells of St Audeon's next door started peeling which meant there was a person up there in the tower actually kicking and tugging at the damn things.
The Russians think that bells have souls and they intentionally make them untrue, slightly off pitch, so each one has its own particular voice and together scores of them ringing in a Russian village make tones and microtones you'll never hear anywhere else on earth.
These three ancient bells ringing for John Paul gave a little hint of that.
I walked the length of the Liffey to go see Lutyen's War Memorial. A pretty park next to a short line of falls that turned out to be the site of the oldest Viking village in Dublin (which pretty much began as a Viking Village until it became an English one). Kids playing soccer trying to hit the goal posts. Littler kids throwing each other around like models in Homer's Whip. Lovers coiled in the grass. Dogs off leash. Fathers trying to triage it all.
Across the river was a green hill. On the map it was a massive green square. It had a "castle" in it. So I had to go.
The Irish do this wonderful thing. (Beside letting their dogs run around.) They don't cut the grass. All my life I've had a deep and abiding hatred of lawn mowers and lawns cut like bitten nails. Men determined to always be amputating something. The lawn, the branches of an oak on their property, their wives affections, their children's hopes.
But in Phoenix Park Dublin the grass is high. You could lay down in it and disappear. Small dogs run through it like dolphins leaping. Where people tend to walk it tamps down into pathways but elsewhere it grows rich and catches the sun like a painting.
I was in fucking heaven.
And there were girls running reps up a short hill breathing hard, and a man teaching his son how to Hurl (the Gaelic game not the..) and the dogs came up to me and the sun was setting in the West …..but it being Ireland, there had to be... that twist….I thought to myself this place, this verdant plateau overlooking the City's western reaches was as magic as the camp I went to as a kid. The field here and the field there in far off Ohio in my memory seem to recognize each other. I was walking, hovering in a space outside my experience yet familiar and deeply inside my heart, yet totally new.
And then I got to the castle.
And I realized it was the prison, the holding zone, the hilltop dungeon really that the Brits had used in the last years of their rule. Here their best boys had been tortured and died and damn if you couldn't feel it.
When I walk thru a mill town in the Mon Valley in Pgh and I pass what used to be the factory site, or the once thriving main street or the town library padlocked from use, I feel a similar sting. Some violence happened here. Some people were seriously screwed. Ireland for better and worse doesn't forget. We might pretend to. But a place does not. The Irish I think, know that.
The other jail or gaol where most of the heros of their Civil War were housed, tortured, and sometimes killed they rebuilt in the 60s, stone by stone, tile by tile until it was sparkling. And then they all walked back into it and had a party. There's a photograph of 12 guys who had once been shackled in the joint and there they are these rebels become politicians and civil servants to the Irish State… laughing.
It was 4 miles back to my hotel and the sun was setting. I left the "castle, walked up and down some dips in the park, came through a small wood and when I broke the tree line a hundred yards in front of me a woman with red gold hair standing by a tree pulled a shimmering dress over her head and stood in that thick grass and long light naked.
Pow.
I stopped dead.
When I'd first moved to New York a friend of mine dragged me straight to the Russian Baths in the East Village and down into one of its lower rooms heated by a black stone chimney that would boil the skin off your bones if you touched it.
When we walked into the steam filled space a woman against the far wall sat up. Covered in sweat, hair skin face soaking with eucalyptus and oak leaves slapped against her suds flying she pulled up her swimsuit and it was like watching a selkie being born, or one of Michaelangelo's skinless souls having its being stuffed back in, the woman of her ….all stomach, and ribs, and breasts, sucked back into that sodden suit in one breath and I just about came and died right there.
Some memories brand your ass.
Well here I was wondering had she been reborn in a Dublin field? An alabaster sheath flew away to reveal even more alabaster skin with that hair falling to the middle of her back and then a black dress appeared out of nowhere, up and through went her arms and down to become that body.
Somebody laughed. Giggled really.
It was a photo shoot. She was finishing up and in the long tradition of models and actors decided Hell they've seen everything anyway who cares so she just dropped trou and switched back to her street clothes.
The camera crew emerged from behind the tree applauding. A little Bohemia in Phoenix park, cigarettes soon lit and something in a bottle gave them reason to sit back down and watch the sunset.
I walked on, acting like I hadn't seen her or them, or anything and for some reason as I passed the soccer field I remembered trying to flirt with a team of 12 year old girls when I was ten on some vacation to Philadelphia where my parents had left me in the hands of the hosts older son and trying to be cool or smart, I pretended to know some acronym they were using, some hip little prep school phrase about having a boner which I thought it was just about "seeing U later" and they laughed, let their cigarettes and ignored me.
There's a Yeats' poem called The Song Of Wandering Aengus.
Old. Wandering. Fires in my head.
It was kinda cool to see her again. A glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair.
If only for a second to two.
What the Hell does a tourist keep in a back pack? What possible reason lies within?
Why not wear a sign on your back that says, "Sucker. Please demean. And then rob me."
Students wear backpacks. Hikers 40 miles from the nearest hostel wear them.
Why in the middle of one of the world's great cities would you be wearing a backpack?
To carry your lunch? That you may have stored in your ….hotel fridge?
Blankets for said lunch?
Water in case EVERY MINI MART FOUND EVERY TWO BLOCKS AND EVERY PUBLIC FOUNTAIN IN A VERY WATERED CITY is closed?
A camera the size of a panaflex? A child you're ashamed of????
What is it that makes urban dwellers who wouldn't be caught dead in their own urban setting wearing a backpack and fleece need to don the wardrobe of "traveler" in city after city?? Hiking boots that could get you over the Annapurna pass. A shell which force 5 rain couldn't rend.
Shirts that "wick".
WTF?
Wick the fuck.
I don't mean to vent.
When you go to a foreign city you want to be the only foreigner. You want everyone to be that nationality speaking that language.
Dublin makes this tough in two ways. There are reams of people like you/me. You hear more Polish than Irish and because the common language of Ireland is English the "foreign" meter sits pretty low. And then you pass group after group of neither Irish nor Yankee. Who knew the Italians loved Dublin? Or the Slovaks? They have their own section of town. Little Bratislava I suppose.
But here they come, wave after wave, tired well dressed Italians always dressed for snow and looking put upon that lunch and dinner don't start exactly the same time that mommy makes back at the apt in Florence.
The French with their abysmally behaved children laughing at everything in site, the parents either too preoccupied trading dissertations about what they've just seen in the museum to notice or wishing to avoid the student representative conference any disciplinary action would require.
The Spanish just having a better time than anyone. Some Rafa-looking guy asked me for directions and I thought we were gonna hug at the end.
The Russians pretending to take in the sights but then simply setting up shop at a bar to google local real estate prices.
Lots of Poles, lots of Germans….but fewer Americans and even fewer Brits than one would think.
And all around them, in their odd sense of grey on off-grey matching greens, are the Irish.
Who knew the Irish and the Catalonians had the same (lack of) fashion sense?
I don't mean to generalize.
It was a miraculous sunday. Pope John Paul was canonized. The soccer fan from Krakow who ended up in the Vatican. I'm glad I was in a Catholic country.
There's a Polish parish up by the oldest part of Dublin and in the bright sun I watched them stream in. The 6th century bells of St Audeon's next door started peeling which meant there was a person up there in the tower actually kicking and tugging at the damn things.
The Russians think that bells have souls and they intentionally make them untrue, slightly off pitch, so each one has its own particular voice and together scores of them ringing in a Russian village make tones and microtones you'll never hear anywhere else on earth.
These three ancient bells ringing for John Paul gave a little hint of that.
I walked the length of the Liffey to go see Lutyen's War Memorial. A pretty park next to a short line of falls that turned out to be the site of the oldest Viking village in Dublin (which pretty much began as a Viking Village until it became an English one). Kids playing soccer trying to hit the goal posts. Littler kids throwing each other around like models in Homer's Whip. Lovers coiled in the grass. Dogs off leash. Fathers trying to triage it all.
Across the river was a green hill. On the map it was a massive green square. It had a "castle" in it. So I had to go.
The Irish do this wonderful thing. (Beside letting their dogs run around.) They don't cut the grass. All my life I've had a deep and abiding hatred of lawn mowers and lawns cut like bitten nails. Men determined to always be amputating something. The lawn, the branches of an oak on their property, their wives affections, their children's hopes.
But in Phoenix Park Dublin the grass is high. You could lay down in it and disappear. Small dogs run through it like dolphins leaping. Where people tend to walk it tamps down into pathways but elsewhere it grows rich and catches the sun like a painting.
I was in fucking heaven.
And there were girls running reps up a short hill breathing hard, and a man teaching his son how to Hurl (the Gaelic game not the..) and the dogs came up to me and the sun was setting in the West …..but it being Ireland, there had to be... that twist….I thought to myself this place, this verdant plateau overlooking the City's western reaches was as magic as the camp I went to as a kid. The field here and the field there in far off Ohio in my memory seem to recognize each other. I was walking, hovering in a space outside my experience yet familiar and deeply inside my heart, yet totally new.
And then I got to the castle.
And I realized it was the prison, the holding zone, the hilltop dungeon really that the Brits had used in the last years of their rule. Here their best boys had been tortured and died and damn if you couldn't feel it.
When I walk thru a mill town in the Mon Valley in Pgh and I pass what used to be the factory site, or the once thriving main street or the town library padlocked from use, I feel a similar sting. Some violence happened here. Some people were seriously screwed. Ireland for better and worse doesn't forget. We might pretend to. But a place does not. The Irish I think, know that.
The other jail or gaol where most of the heros of their Civil War were housed, tortured, and sometimes killed they rebuilt in the 60s, stone by stone, tile by tile until it was sparkling. And then they all walked back into it and had a party. There's a photograph of 12 guys who had once been shackled in the joint and there they are these rebels become politicians and civil servants to the Irish State… laughing.
It was 4 miles back to my hotel and the sun was setting. I left the "castle, walked up and down some dips in the park, came through a small wood and when I broke the tree line a hundred yards in front of me a woman with red gold hair standing by a tree pulled a shimmering dress over her head and stood in that thick grass and long light naked.
Pow.
I stopped dead.
When I'd first moved to New York a friend of mine dragged me straight to the Russian Baths in the East Village and down into one of its lower rooms heated by a black stone chimney that would boil the skin off your bones if you touched it.
When we walked into the steam filled space a woman against the far wall sat up. Covered in sweat, hair skin face soaking with eucalyptus and oak leaves slapped against her suds flying she pulled up her swimsuit and it was like watching a selkie being born, or one of Michaelangelo's skinless souls having its being stuffed back in, the woman of her ….all stomach, and ribs, and breasts, sucked back into that sodden suit in one breath and I just about came and died right there.
Some memories brand your ass.
Well here I was wondering had she been reborn in a Dublin field? An alabaster sheath flew away to reveal even more alabaster skin with that hair falling to the middle of her back and then a black dress appeared out of nowhere, up and through went her arms and down to become that body.
Somebody laughed. Giggled really.
It was a photo shoot. She was finishing up and in the long tradition of models and actors decided Hell they've seen everything anyway who cares so she just dropped trou and switched back to her street clothes.
The camera crew emerged from behind the tree applauding. A little Bohemia in Phoenix park, cigarettes soon lit and something in a bottle gave them reason to sit back down and watch the sunset.
I walked on, acting like I hadn't seen her or them, or anything and for some reason as I passed the soccer field I remembered trying to flirt with a team of 12 year old girls when I was ten on some vacation to Philadelphia where my parents had left me in the hands of the hosts older son and trying to be cool or smart, I pretended to know some acronym they were using, some hip little prep school phrase about having a boner which I thought it was just about "seeing U later" and they laughed, let their cigarettes and ignored me.
There's a Yeats' poem called The Song Of Wandering Aengus.
| I WENT out to the hazel wood, | |
| Because a fire was in my head, | |
| And cut and peeled a hazel wand, | |
| And hooked a berry to a thread; | |
| And when white moths were on the wing, | 5 |
| And moth-like stars were flickering out, | |
| I dropped the berry in a stream | |
| And caught a little silver trout. | |
| When I had laid it on the floor | |
| I went to blow the fire a-flame, | 10 |
| But something rustled on the floor, | |
| And someone called me by my name: | |
| It had become a glimmering girl | |
| With apple blossom in her hair | |
| Who called me by my name and ran | 15 |
| And faded through the brightening air. | |
| Though I am old with wandering | |
| Through hollow lands and hilly lands, | |
| I will find out where she has gone, | |
| And kiss her lips and take her hands; | 20 |
| And walk among long dappled grass, | |
| And pluck till time and times are done, | |
| The silver apples of the moon, | |
| The golden apples of the sun. |
It was kinda cool to see her again. A glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair.
If only for a second to two.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Ireland Day 3
The men shave every day.
Almost nobody wears shades.
The tea's great, the coffee's tired, and the Guinness does taste different but I suppose so does a Coke in the States.
But the first thing you notice coming down from the clouds is that it really is green.
I mean the greens are green. Must be the northern light, the high white sea air. Blowing in and blowing everything else out but for some reason jacking up the affect of …the emerald.
I'm in Ireland. Land of my fore bearers. For the first time.
And the other thing you notice right away is how much they like pool. Or snooker. Or whatever the Hell it's called. It's on national tv. Gets more coverage than tennis or the NFL even their own soccer teams. It's all over the papers. Intense fellows in tight vests (waistcoats) and ridiculous checkered pants, being spoken of as "hard men", magicians, wizards.
The announcers telling the audience to keep it down.
Keep it down.
I went to see a play about Northern Ireland this afternoon. You could have cut the silence with a knife. You could have set a tea cup on it.
I've rarely been in a theater that was so focused on a common point.
It's a common complaint that the Irish like to talk, that they're good at it but I think what they're good at is listening. They weigh nuance, tone, lilt like nobody else….and in this particular play those things added up to whether someone lived or died.
It was something to sit in a room with people of an age that any one of them could have been one of the killers- or soldiers- on stage. Or known one. Or cared.
And then the lights came up, we applauded - that contained steady applause, like a stream's sound between narrow banks- when an audience truly likes a thing, it's not loud nobody hoots but it keeps going and you see it on the actors' faces, "Ah yes, I hear you.."- and out we went into the drizzle.
It does rain all the time. God bloody bless it. What heaven to be in a place where water wind and clouds are constant. When the sun comes out it's like live music coming out a city door.
If I didn't come from here someone seven generations ago must have paid at least a long visit.
I woke this morning to a church bell. Real iron being hit down the street somewhere calling the faithful. I get the feeling that everyone here is one of the faithful but they don't always come.
Sat in a bar the first night and beyond the fact I was proud I'd powered thru the jet lag I was plain happy to be in drinking establishment …no... a place where people gather and other people are good enough to serve beer…... and there was no tv. Not a game, not a network show, not that dull hum in the background, with a row of faces facing away from each other as they spoke- but a room full of people talking, in circles, in a steady murmur, a little like the applause after the play, but softly.
I sat with two people I'd never met, one from Dublin the other married to him and from Pittsburgh. She was a medievalist, he was a pharmacist. Both were generous to this stranger, him buying more rounds than I did and she from my city telling me about this ancient city she'd been adopted by and adopted.
We were about two blocks from the ring road, what had been the ring of the wall of the old city against its river and she said it's strange to be in a place that unlike the rest of europe wasn't destroyed by a recent war but by an ancient struggle that's been pulling down churches and houses and schools for centuries. You'll find older buildings in London than you will here because until the 1920s London made sure what was left of history here was theirs. Or what they wanted in Ireland.
If my mother had been born here she would have been 7 years younger than the Free State. My grandfather might have fought in the streets.
It's funny. When you get to place you get it.
I might know it intellectually and I might still laugh off including Ireland as I talk about the British Isles, "Sorry, but you know what I mean!" But here I am and I feel it as plain as day. This was an occupied country.
And then we say good night and make jokes about the Irish penchant for public urination and the American penchant for guns and walking back along the canal it all feels like….what might have been home to someone I knew.
Almost nobody wears shades.
The tea's great, the coffee's tired, and the Guinness does taste different but I suppose so does a Coke in the States.
But the first thing you notice coming down from the clouds is that it really is green.
I mean the greens are green. Must be the northern light, the high white sea air. Blowing in and blowing everything else out but for some reason jacking up the affect of …the emerald.
I'm in Ireland. Land of my fore bearers. For the first time.
And the other thing you notice right away is how much they like pool. Or snooker. Or whatever the Hell it's called. It's on national tv. Gets more coverage than tennis or the NFL even their own soccer teams. It's all over the papers. Intense fellows in tight vests (waistcoats) and ridiculous checkered pants, being spoken of as "hard men", magicians, wizards.
The announcers telling the audience to keep it down.
Keep it down.
I went to see a play about Northern Ireland this afternoon. You could have cut the silence with a knife. You could have set a tea cup on it.
I've rarely been in a theater that was so focused on a common point.
It's a common complaint that the Irish like to talk, that they're good at it but I think what they're good at is listening. They weigh nuance, tone, lilt like nobody else….and in this particular play those things added up to whether someone lived or died.
It was something to sit in a room with people of an age that any one of them could have been one of the killers- or soldiers- on stage. Or known one. Or cared.
And then the lights came up, we applauded - that contained steady applause, like a stream's sound between narrow banks- when an audience truly likes a thing, it's not loud nobody hoots but it keeps going and you see it on the actors' faces, "Ah yes, I hear you.."- and out we went into the drizzle.
It does rain all the time. God bloody bless it. What heaven to be in a place where water wind and clouds are constant. When the sun comes out it's like live music coming out a city door.
If I didn't come from here someone seven generations ago must have paid at least a long visit.
I woke this morning to a church bell. Real iron being hit down the street somewhere calling the faithful. I get the feeling that everyone here is one of the faithful but they don't always come.
Sat in a bar the first night and beyond the fact I was proud I'd powered thru the jet lag I was plain happy to be in drinking establishment …no... a place where people gather and other people are good enough to serve beer…... and there was no tv. Not a game, not a network show, not that dull hum in the background, with a row of faces facing away from each other as they spoke- but a room full of people talking, in circles, in a steady murmur, a little like the applause after the play, but softly.
I sat with two people I'd never met, one from Dublin the other married to him and from Pittsburgh. She was a medievalist, he was a pharmacist. Both were generous to this stranger, him buying more rounds than I did and she from my city telling me about this ancient city she'd been adopted by and adopted.
We were about two blocks from the ring road, what had been the ring of the wall of the old city against its river and she said it's strange to be in a place that unlike the rest of europe wasn't destroyed by a recent war but by an ancient struggle that's been pulling down churches and houses and schools for centuries. You'll find older buildings in London than you will here because until the 1920s London made sure what was left of history here was theirs. Or what they wanted in Ireland.
If my mother had been born here she would have been 7 years younger than the Free State. My grandfather might have fought in the streets.
It's funny. When you get to place you get it.
I might know it intellectually and I might still laugh off including Ireland as I talk about the British Isles, "Sorry, but you know what I mean!" But here I am and I feel it as plain as day. This was an occupied country.
And then we say good night and make jokes about the Irish penchant for public urination and the American penchant for guns and walking back along the canal it all feels like….what might have been home to someone I knew.
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