A Webcrawl Down Memory Lane

Happy Easter to all my readers! I'm just back from the Easter Vigil, so my Lent is officially over!

And so, back to blogging...

Recently, I rediscovered the text of my first blog. I wrote it in 2006. It made for some interesting reading.

At this stage, I was still several years from accepting Christianity. I was, however, increasingly conservative. I had been working in UCD library for about five years. I was also lodging with a family in Stillorgan, a suburb in the south of Dublin. The only reason for this was my shame about "living at home". (Despite the fact that everybody, by definition, lives at home.) I felt so awkward living in somebody else's home that I spent less and less time there, and more and more time-- living "at home".

My time in Stillorgan was the loneliest time of my life. I've never experienced such horrible loneliness. I actually deleted every contact number from my phone, to stop myself from sending texts to everybody in the long evenings-- and getting upset when people didn't respond. A friend compared me, at this time, to the protagonist of Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell-- a touchy, highly-strung poet. It was a fair comparison. I spent much of my evenings sitting on my bed writing poetry, still hoping that people might actually read poetry. I was also suffering from an unrequited attachment which lasted several years.

My bedroom in Stillorgan, surprisingly, had two pictures featuring Dante and Beatrice on the wall. (The family were not in the least bit literary, so this still perplexes me.) Halfway up the stairs, on the landing I only passed on my way to the bath, there was a picture of ducks flying over marshy ground that I liked very much.

My rented room was a few minutes walk from a cinema, the Ormonde. (Now it's yet another Odeon cinema.) I went there several times a week, and saw some very bad films, as well as a few good ones. Sometimes there would be a raucous audience of teenagers, which was a lot fun. I always remember seeing Red Eye there. It was a thriller film set on an airplane, and I've never heard so much hooting and screaming in a cinema.

Anyway, that's enough scene-setting.

Here's a blog post I wrote about W.B. Yeats, and more particularly about a Yeats exhibition in the National Library (which has now become a permanent exhibition) and a visit to his grave in Sligo. I'm very taken aback, now, to read my hostile references to political nationalists and Irish language speakers. I've certainly changed my views on those topics! But I still feel the same about Yeats.

I'll probably post more blog posts from this old blog.

He Wrote the Lake Isle of Inishfree, That’s What He Did

I can remember the exact moment W.B. Yeats entered my life. I was about fourteen and I was walking home from school. I would always walk home from school, it took about half an hour but half-way I would stop for some barbecue flavoured Hula Hoops. I had a strange ritual, I would pop one in my mouth and keep it there all the way from the shops to the traffic lights. Then I would swallow it and polish off the rest. But that’s not important now.

One particular afternoon I realised that I had the entire text of "A Prayer for My Daughter" by W.B. Yeats– a longish poem– off by heart. I didn’t try to learn it off by heart, it was just there. I’d come across it in my English text-book. I ended up reciting it to myself all the way home for a few days. Then I moved on to the other stuff in the book, "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death", "Easter 1916", "The Song of Wandering Aengus". Soon I found an old textbook an older brother or sister had discarded– Soundings, that stopgap English poetry textbook that generations of Irish people have furtively admitted to actually liking– and even found myself piecing together fragments of an intermediate-level poetry book whose wreck I discovered in some bookcase. I felt like the Renaissance Italians rediscovering ancient temples and sculptures, hitherto neglected treasures.

I’d always presumed poetry was for the toffs, been rather intimidated by the reputations and mystique of big names like Yeats. It felt like trespassing on private property. But soon bashfulness gave way to arrogance; after a while, I thought of Yeats as my poet and resented anybody else presuming to comment upon him. He spoke to me and I couldn’t believe anyone else heard as much as I did. This snobbery was especially baseless in that I had some Yeats poems off by heart– the virility of my teenage memory for poetry was pretty astonishing– without understanding in the least what they meant. “Amongst School Children” was one. I don’t think I even felt curious; the language was enough for me.So perfectly proportioned and formed and polished, like an ancient marble statue.

What excited me more, the sandy-haired girl sitting at three tables away or a verse like:

Both nuns and mother worship images
But those the candle lights are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries
But keep a marble or a bronze repose
And yet they too break hearts..?

Well, probably the sandy-coloured hair girl sitting three tables away. But just about. Even though I’d never spoken two sentences to her, and I hadn’t a clue what Yeats was on about.

I used to actually go to read Yeats in the school library when we had free classes. I mean, study classes. I remember one of the nuns congratulating me that I spent a study class actually studying. Little did she suspect I was enjoying it.

My Yeats mania contributed to a brief period of intense romantic nationalism, when I was about sixteen. I actually slept with the tricolour over my bedroom window. (This included an even briefer religious conversion, during a trip to my aunt’s farm and brought on by a particularly good sermon, possibly even better than that preached by Fr. Ted Crilly before his aborted trip to America; “I feel so good, I could convert gays!”.) I carried rosary beads around with me for a while, and used them. What a true-born son of Kathleen Ni Houlihan.

I can remember lying awake in bed through all of one night, unable to sleep, and I ended up reciting poetry to myself through all the hours until dawn. It was Yeats’s "The Fisherman" and Patrick Pearse’s "The Fool"– both still poems I adore– that were foremost on the mental jukebox. It’s funny how some of the most vivid experiences of one’s life are ones where nothing actually happens. But the thrill that ran through my soul when I thought of lines like:

About a twelve-month since
Suddenly I began
In scorn of this audience
Imagining a man
And his sun-freckled face
And grey Connemara cloth
Going up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth
And the downturn of his wrist
As the flies drop in the stream
A man who does not exist
A man who is but a dream;

Or:

I have squandered the splendid year
Lord, if I had the years I would squander them over again,
Aye, fling them from me!
For this I have heard in my heart, that a man shall scatter, not hoard,
Shall do the deed of to-day, nor take thought of to-morrow’s teen
Shall not bargain or huxter with God ; or was it a jest of Christ
And is this my sin before men, to have taken Him at His word?

It was every bit as intense as a religious experience. I remember going into school the next day and seeing the world transfigured, radiant with beauty.

And I can remember the moment my patriotism died: when a class-mate, a macho lout who was loudly republican, ridiculed Yeats during an English class. I just couldn’t understand being patriotic and disliking Yeats; it didn’t make sense. It was like being a communist and having a pop at Marx. Over the years I developed a hatred of republicanism, of the vulgarity and empty-headedness of Irish political nationalists, Irish language enthusiasts and Sinn Feiners, that unfortunately spilled over into a distaste for all things Irish for many years. Only in recent years have I started to see the stupidity of this; why concede Irishness to Shane MacGowan and Gerry Adams and Celtic-jerseyed thugs and similar morons? But my love of Yeats never wavered. He was Anglo-Irish, anyway, I thought to myself.

So I was pretty excited when I heard that the National Library of Ireland were holding a Yeats exhibition. I found it anti-climactic at first. The prospect of seeing Yeats’s actual manuscript pages was somehow more pleasing than the reality; just pieces of paper, with an almost indecipherable scribble. They didn’t even glow. I somehow couldn’t bring myself to appreciate that these were the actual words written by Yeats’s actual hand.

And the very piece of carved lapus lazuli that inspired the poem, "Lapus Lazuli". And Sato’s sword, the samurai sword that an admiring Japanese student presented to him, and that pleased him so much he refers to it in several of his poems. The entire exhibition was very much in the Yeatsian spirit; he was a fervent believer in the actual and tangible, and despised abstractions and mere ideas. His own poetry is full of references to things that have been handled and handed down by those he admires.

I think I was too primed. I went again a second time, on my own this time– much better to look at things on your own, not distracted by conversation– and it slowly began to sink in. There’s even a lock of his hair, which I wanted to nick, and a pair of his glasses.

In Yeats mode, I headed off to Sligo a couple of days ago, to see Yeats country. Spent the first day looking around the town, and drizzling rain confined me to the B&B that night, where I was only slightly perturbed to see Yeats’s most annoyingly famous poem, "The Lake Isle of Inishfree", on my bedroom wall. (Its popularity annoyed him, too; he used to recite it first at his readings, “to get it out of the way”. It’s not even an especially good poem.)

But first thing in the morning I walked from Sligo town to Drumcliffe churchyard, where Yeats is laid, as he put it himself in “Under Ben Bulben”. And there Ben Bulben was against the sky, capped with clouds, looking as Olympian and lofty as anyone could ask for. I spent ages looking for the right headstone before I realised it was right outside the church. It was very early and I was the only person in sight, apart from the lady opening the Drumcliffe Tea-Shop (where I had some tea and found to be really not that kitsch.) It felt so funny to be standing there, alone. I recited his poems to myself, mentally, for ten minutes or so, and wondered if there was any truth to the rumour that some French bloke is buried there by mistake. (Yeats was originally buried in France but that would have ruined the poem.) I didn’t even think the tombstone was all that classy– the lettering was a bit too flashy– but it didn’t matter. I felt this was the centre of Ireland.

I was amused to see that there’s a Yeats United F.C. in the vicinity. I don’t know which code of football they play, but thought it was an appropriate name since Yeats always tried to “hammer his thoughts into a unity”.

After looking at a Celtic cross from the 9th century, I walked to Lissadell House, where he used to stay as a guest of some aristocratic women friends (and, as the very eyesome tour guide told me and the three others on the guided tour), the master of the house threw him into the stables for wandering around the house at four in the morning. He said he was looking for a ghost but his host apparently suspected him of designs on his daughters. We were shown Yeats’s room– it was strange, again, looking out the window Yeats must have looked out of many times– and also his study. The rest of the house was impressive, too, especially the room Yeats had in mind when he wrote the lines:

The light of evening, Lissadell
Great windows open to the south
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

It wasn’t even ruined by them having a facsimile manuscript version of "The Lake Isle of Inishfree" on his study desk, a poem he actually wrote in London.

I walked back to the town centre, thinking how nice it is that Sligo doesn’t make too much fuss of Yeats– for all the Yeats United FCs and Inishfree B&Bs– that there are ordinary people living just outside his final resting place. All the same I’m thinking of making it an annual pilgrimage. Of going on the same day every year, very early in the morning, so I can spend some quality alone time with the greatest Irishman ever.