Happy St. Patrick's Day to those of you who celebrate this sentimental business of Éirinn go Brách ("Ireland forever"). It reminds me of the time in 1993 that I delighted my female Irish housemates in Dublin with a pun involving the Gaelic language. There's an Irish-Gaelic toast that goes bás in Éirinn ("Death in Ireland"), meaning that if you're lucky you'll get to die in the Old Sod. I had traveled by bus that summer from Limerick to the capital with sojourns in Killarney, County Galway & Cork city. Alas, despite generous European Union infrastructure subsidies, Ireland still has few train lines.
Mine was a low-budget, yet gloriously romantic trip around the west & south of the Emerald Isle. It included a few harrowing moments on the narrow roads that wind across the perpetually moist countryside. The Gaelic name of Ireland's national bus line is Bus Éireann. After safely arriving in Dublin, I told my affable new housemates that I - an American with a half-Irish matrilineal ancestry (the Crawfords of County Kerry) - sometimes felt that I would surely bás in Éirinn thanks to the fearless drivers of Bus Éireann. Eileen, Siobhan & Mary laughed and congratulated me on my clever use of their ancient official tongue.
The Irish love to laugh as much as they enjoy a good pint of stout or a glass of whiskey - a word derived from the Scottish-Gaelic phrase uisge beatha ("water of life"). Laughter was a survival strategy throughout the centuries of British oppression in conquered Ireland. Like diaspora Jews, the Irish both soothed their worried minds & mocked their oppressors by honing their wit into a deadly weapon.
No wonder James Joyce made the main protagonist of his masterpiece, the Dublin-set novel Ulysses (1922), a Jew. By giving the fictional Leopold Bloom this quasi-outsider status, the ex-Catholic expatriate Joyce could distance his character from the society that he was, in part at least, lampooning.
No wonder James Joyce made the main protagonist of his masterpiece, the Dublin-set novel Ulysses (1922), a Jew. By giving the fictional Leopold Bloom this quasi-outsider status, the ex-Catholic expatriate Joyce could distance his character from the society that he was, in part at least, lampooning.
Joyce, of course, had plenty of company in his complaints about the strictures of Irish society. Only recently have the Irish people circumvented the repressive dominance of the Roman Catholic Church & its political allies. Condoms first became legally available to most adults in Ireland around 1992, while abortion remains practically unavailable in the Republic of Eire.
Most good Irish writers rejected the provincial, patriarchal attitudes of their native culture. While reading the semi-autobiographical 1970 novel Down All the Days by Christy Brown (1932-81) yesterday, for example, I spotted this irreverent paragraph of a sentence:
"Hell was a place they often discussed, much more than they talked about heaven, for while one was supposedly full of the same sort of crowd and dense with holy monotony, the other place was a sort of melting-pot in every sense of the word, where kings and emperors and high priestesses rubbed burning shoulders with dissipated butchers, debauched politicians and gold-hearted little street girls who had relentlessly pursued a lifelong policy of no surrender; so of the two hell offered the more fruitful ground for fierce argufying back and forth; it was somehow more of a thrill to talk about being damned than being eternally saved, which sounded boring, like being locked up inside a chapel forever with a bag of liquorice all-sorts [p. 54]."
If you've seen the film My Left Foot (1989), based on Christy Brown's memoir of the same title, then you've witnessed one of Daniel Day-Lewis's most impressive performances. Portraying Brown from adolescence into middle age, Day-Lewis inhabits the difficult role of this nearly unintelligible "cripple" who became a widely admired artist & writer.
Afflicted with cerebral palsy & an alcoholic father, Brown was raised in poverty in a Dublin slum along with the dozen siblings who survived childbirth & infancy. He overcame his severe physical limitations by tapping into a vast reservoir of grit & determination, aided by a loving mother, a devoted lady therapist & a literary doctor. Famously, Brown could only draw, paint, write & type with the toes of his left foot.
Afflicted with cerebral palsy & an alcoholic father, Brown was raised in poverty in a Dublin slum along with the dozen siblings who survived childbirth & infancy. He overcame his severe physical limitations by tapping into a vast reservoir of grit & determination, aided by a loving mother, a devoted lady therapist & a literary doctor. Famously, Brown could only draw, paint, write & type with the toes of his left foot.
Brown was also granted a musical honor by the London-based Celtic folk-punk band the Pogues. Renowned for their raucous celebration of all things Irish - including aspects of the nearly global Irish Diaspora, the Pogues bore a shortened name due to BBC censorship. Their original moniker, Pogue Mahone ("kiss my arse" in anglicized Gaelic), was unacceptably scatological to some Scottish listeners.
The Pogues tipped their woolen caps to Christy Brown by recording the song "Down All the Days" (on Peace and Love, 1989). Opening with the clatter of typewriter keys, the record features the compelling voice of the Pogues' ingenious songwriter Shane MacGowan posing as Brown: "I can type with me toes / Suck stout through me nose / And where it's gonna end / God only knows."
Sadly, for Christy Brown it ended rather ignominiously. According to the Wikipedia entry about him, Brown died in Somerset (England) at age 49 after "choking during a lamb chop dinner." The autopsy revealed significant bruising, allegedly caused by his abusive alcoholic English wife, Mary Carr. Brown might have appreciated the dark irony of his own demise.
Perhaps the most literate group in pop-music history, the Pogues recorded MacGowan's irresistible tribute to the controversial Irish republican writer Brendan Behan ("Streams of Whiskey") on their 1984 debut album Red Roses for Me. In 1987 the Pogues released the brilliant If I Should Fall from Grace with God, featuring a photo of the fedora-sporting bespectacled James Joyce on the cover. One of its best tracks, the emigrant ballad "Thousands Are Sailing," was the first Pogues song I ever heard - thanks to a DJ on WWOZ, the non-profit radio station & community treasure in New Orleans, in early 1989.
The Pogues also recorded MacGowan's homage to the gay Spanish poet/playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. "Lorca's Novena" is a religious-themed protest against the outspoken liberal writer's murder by a fascist death squad in 1936. It appears on the Pogues' last great album Hell's Ditch (1990), produced by Joe Strummer - who replaced MacGowan as frontman for one tour after Shane got sacked for alcoholic unreliability in 1991. Another Pogues' song ("Hell's Ditch") was based on the prison novels of Jean Genet. Early on, the band covered the classic Irish prison lament "The Auld Triangle" by Dominic & Brendan Behan.
The intersection of music & literature is a fertile place for artistic expression. The Irish have occupied it with aplomb, producing songs & stories that have inspired their proud nation & entertained millions of foreign admirers like me. Curious about Irish history, I wrote a research paper on early Christian Ireland (circa 400-900 A.D./C.E.) for a medieval history course at UW-Madison in the spring semester of 1981.
I learned that, while most of Europe had fallen into barbarism following the collapse of the Roman Empire, lonely Irish monks & missionaries kept the fires of Western civilization burning. These mostly anonymous scribes & sages produced sublime illuminated manuscripts (e.g. the Book of Kells) & spread their nominally forgiving faith among the often hostile "pagan" tribes then roaming the continent.
That seems like reason enough to hoist a glass of Guinness - "It's so healthy that doctors prescribe it to pregnant women," a Spiddal barman claimed, apparently without blarney, during my 1980 visit to the partially Gaelic-speaking region of Connacht.
Please join me in toasting the Irish: May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back & may you arrive in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead! If you don't drink, don't believe in an afterlife, or if you'd simply prefer to dwell in hell instead, well - as Pope Francis recently said about gay people: Who am I to judge?
Please join me in toasting the Irish: May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back & may you arrive in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead! If you don't drink, don't believe in an afterlife, or if you'd simply prefer to dwell in hell instead, well - as Pope Francis recently said about gay people: Who am I to judge?
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