Midlife Irish
Page 13
I almost called out, “Hello, is anyone there?” but I stopped myself. How big a moron could I be? People might be walking by and hear me. Then they would come see if I was hurt. I’d be standing here in all my stupid big American glory. I did not need that scene.
But what was it? Whose presence was I feeling? I said to myself that if there was an animal, it could not be a dangerous animal. Maybe a rabbit. Or a deer. Was I afraid of Bambi, now?
I made my way along. As I walked along carefully, a thought came into my mind and stayed there. It stayed there until I finally saw my bed and breakfast.
I believe in fairies. Leave me alone.
As I nodded off to sleep, I held that thought.
I took several moonlit walks after that. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Paulette. There was always something out there. Waiting.
If you go into the woods at night in Ireland, don’t go alone. Because you won’t be. In Ireland no one knows what “Augh!” means.
There are fairy stories that explain and comment on everything that there is in life in Ireland. The symbols of Ireland—the harp and the shamrock—are spiritual symbols, and it is impossible to think of a nonspiritual Ireland, a place entirely bound by the laws of physics. The Irish are “the ancient dreaming race.” When I think about Ireland, I think of it as a place where there are fairies all over and they aren’t going anywhere. They’re in the woods.
I’ve never had anything like a religious experience. Whenever anyone says that he had one, I think of Ray Robinson and George Foreman.
Sugar Ray Robinson had one after he collapsed in the 102-degree heat at Yankee Stadium against Joey Maxim. He said he saw God in his locker room after the fight. George Foreman after losing to Jimmy Young saw something similar. Indians who want to see God don’t drink any liquid for four days. A dehydrated brain is close to God. For me, it’s also close to Dumbo.
God has never come up to me and pinched me. He’s never come to me in a dream like the Old Testament guys. When I was in college I read William James and I put the God experience in the box labeled “discharging lesions of the occipital cortex.” I don’t know what that means, but when I say it people look at me as if I know what I’m talking about. Boy, are they deluded.
Everything that happened in my life happened because somebody caused it to happen and I could, in many instances, name the person who did it. My unfaith has been around a long time. It started when I was twelve or so.
I used to do magic tricks when I was a kid. I did one that was great. Not David Blaine great, but better than you would expect from a kid doing tricks for his parents and friends in his dining room. This was the great trick. When I was twelve.
I first got a dollar bill from a subject in the audience. I had my assistant write the serial number on a handy blackboard. Then I took the dollar, rolled it in my hands, and made it vanish. (I’m not finished. I told you it was great.)
My assistant brought in a tray (a “TV dinner table,” as it was called). I selected someone from the vast audience (ten if I was lucky). There were five oranges on the tray. I asked the chosen party to select one. She did. I asked her to slice it open (supplying the knife). There was a dollar bill tightly rolled in the orange. I asked her to unroll it. I asked her to read the serial number. Yes, indeed, a match! The same number that was on the dollar the guy gave me! Thank you very much. No, I can’t tell you how I did it. A magician never tells.
One day, I did tell. There are two dollars. The number is subtly changed. I “force” the girl to pick the right orange. The dollar goes up my sleeve. It’s all a trick.
After I revealed the secret, nobody liked it. It got around.
In Ireland nobody tells. Because nobody knows. There is no place like Ireland. It is a place where the Stone Age is literally still there, but they have cable TV and cell phones. You drive past little towns with churches too big for the towns. You pass weird stone structures erected long ago to weird old Druid gods. Everywhere there is the other world rubbing right up against this world.
There is a world with weird old gods who steal children and leave their doubles. (The Irish had the mystical equivalent of cloning a long time before Crick and Watson.) This is a world where screaming spirit women take you to the land of the dead. This is a land where the most important building in town is the Catholic church, but it’s built within sight of a pile of giant stones erected in honor of some huge ancient deity.
In this land, the spiritual realm is very real, and you can’t even ignore it if you want to.
In the magazine of America “Religion” is a very small section. You flip through it quickly. There’s not much to it. It reduces itself down to a box you check when you apply for some things. Catholic. Jewish. Protestant. Other.
“Hey, they’re getting pretty personal here.” But you go ahead and check the box next to “Catholic” or “Jew” or “Lutheran” or “Episcopal” or “Presbyterian” or “Evangelical” or “None.” You don’t like to check “None.” What are you, a troubled loner? Get with the program. Which place did your parents take you? Put that. Don’t cause trouble.
It’s the magic conversation ender. If you say, “Barb and I are Lutherans,” the guy who asked you will say, “Do you go to First Lutheran?” and you say, “No. We hit the Second Lutheran.” Then the guy says, “Ah,” and it’s time to change subjects.
Religion is like “I have a bad case of halitosis” as a conversation ender. There is nothing you can say about your religion or your halitosis that anyone really wants to hear about. They’d rather listen to Conelrad on the radio. They’d rather read cereal boxes.
But go to Ireland; spend some time and, voila! everything is different. “Religion” there really isn’t a subject. They never talk about it. But it’s not a subject for discussion because it’s not separate from life. While I was in Ireland I tried to think of what that state of mind was like and I came up with this: It’s the same state of mind you had when you were ten years old. When you are ten you don’t know anything. When you are forty, you know a whole bunch of things but you don’t know why you’re here or where you’re going. If you’re going anywhere.
There are worse things. I found that I was an Irish Catholic the way I had two arms. That was the way it was. Period.
There are worse things.
Because Ireland is the land where the next world seems so close, the place where the ghosts in the machine take a coffee break, it seems a huge contrast to America, where the Disney Corporation produces all spirituality. The one thing that underlines this more than anything else is an Irish saint’s feast day, Saint Patrick’s. The American Saint Patrick’s Day and the Irish Saint Patrick’s Day are, well, oceans apart.
Every year on March 17, America becomes conscious of the Irishness in its midst. That is the one day every year that allows people to wear garish green clothing and say things like “Sure and begorrah.” People wear pins that say things like “Kiss me, I’m Irish.” Restaurants serve corned beef and cabbage. A lot of bagpipes are heard. Some people dress as leprechauns. They are usually drunk when they do this. There are big parades in New York, Boston, Chicago, and, surprisingly, Savannah, Georgia. Food coloring is added to malt beverages. It is, for those who are Irish in America, all pretty repulsive. Someone writes an op-ed piece about how repulsive it is. The op-ed piece is repulsive.
Saint Patrick’s Day in America has an odd history. The earliest Irish immigrants were from Northern Ireland, Protestants from Ulster. Their early marches and celebrations in America were a celebration of the Battle of the Boyne, the 1690 battle in Ireland where William III, a Protestant, defeated King James II, a Catholic. Saint Patrick’s Day, first celebrated in the middle 1800s in America, was a counter-demonstration by later Irish Catholic immigrants, a sort of in-your-face to the Protestants. Saint Patrick’s Day today has virtually nothing to do with any of this, but that’s how the celebration started in America.
On Saint Patrick’s Day in northern Georgia, where I now
live, hardly anything unusual happens at all. Some of the bars have green beer specials, a particularly nauseating practice. On TV, they show the episode from Bonanza where Hoss sees little men dressed in green and assumes they are “what they call them there, leper-cons, Paw! I seen ’em, Paw! You gotta believe me!” Nobody believes old Hoss and his face gets mighty red. The rest of the show consists of the increasingly excited Hoss seeing the “leper-cons” and rushing to get Paw or Little Joe (Adam had, I believe, already said “adios” by the time this epic episode was made). Of course the leper-cons always disappear right before Hoss gets back with a witness. As a result, Paw and Little Joe begin to assume that Hoss has been involved in substance abuse.
The background music for this episode is truly remarkable. David Rose and his orchestra (who had an actual chart record, “The Stripper”) play the most grotesquely “Irish” music I have ever heard, music that perfectly evokes the “pseudo-Irish” experience.
The Saint Patrick’s Day Bonanza episode. See it!
On the last few Saint Patrick’s Days, I have established a little ritual. I have a little dinner with a few friends. I play Chieftains records. I try, yet again, to make soda bread that doesn’t taste like papier-mâché.
It’s not a big deal at my house. Paulette isn’t Irish, so my kids are only half Irish. I tell them about my mom and dad a little, but it is all pretty remote. I am sure that my kids will not think of themselves as “Irish.” They will say, I think I’m half Irish on my father’s side.
Things were different when I was a kid. As soon as I say that to my son, I feel as if I am an official old coot.
But things were different.
My parents would mark March 17 on the calendar. They would talk about it as if it were Christmas. “Only three days!” my mom would say. When the big day was finally here, we would get all dressed up and go out to my cousin’s restaurant for the Saint Patrick’s Day Hibernian celebration. We would sit around a big table in a room with many big tables. We had dinner. Then the MC would introduce a priest or, rarely, an actual monsignor, to say a prayer. Then a speaker would be introduced. I saw many speakers, but in my mind’s eye, I always remember the speaker as a fat guy with a red face and a carnation.
I remember not “getting” any of the jokes. I’m sure they weren’t dirty but they were “over my head.” They involved mothers-in-law and mortgages and doctors and priests and rabbis. The Irish people around me laughed at the jokes. As the speech went on, and the amount of consumed alcohol grew, they laughed louder and longer. By the end of the speech the speaker was doing very well, getting big laughs.
After the speaker, the band started playing. They always started with an Irish song or two. “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” played up-tempo, was a popular opening, but they soon went into non-Irish music. Cole Porter, other standards, and “songs you only hear at wedding receptions.”
At first there would be only one or two couples dancing. Then, as the drinking continued, the floor would fill up. There would be old people dancing with young people, women dancing with women. Everything was permissible, except, of course, two men dancing together. Please, this is a saint’s day here.
There would always be one or two little girls there who were about my age. At a certain point my mother would try to induce me to dance. I remember going into the bathroom and staying in there for about an hour to avoid this sort of thing. I would come back from the bathroom and stop at the door to the ballroom. I would peek out and see if my mother was still seated. If she was, I would return to the bathroom and count things. I would count tiles, cracks, anything. Then I would return to my post outside the ballroom. I would peer in again. If my mother was dancing, and therefore unable to press me into dancing, I would return.
I remember these evenings as incredibly long and tedious, but I was internally very happy, so I never complained. I knew that I, unlike my non-Irish friends, didn’t have to go to school tomorrow.
It is easy to forget that Saint Patrick was a real historical figure. For the Irish, he was the man who forever changed the entire country of Ireland. He changed it spiritually and socially. In Ireland, that’s almost everything.
He did this by absorbing the old Irish pagan ideas and making them cohere with Christianity. No man ever succeeded at anything more fully. Ireland has remained overwhelmingly Christian and Catholic despite enormous obstacles, and it may remain that way forever.
Saint Patrick, whatever legends are associated with him, was real, and we know more about him than we know about most people of this era. Even if all of the myths about him are false, Saint Patrick still had an amazingly singular life. He was, in the real sense of the words, the mysterious thing called a holy man.
Patrick first came to Ireland against his will. He was kidnapped from Britain and made a slave at the age of sixteen. He tried to make the best of it in his assigned role, herding cattle. He learned the language, the people’s customs, and, most important, their pagan religion. Patrick, however, remained a steadfast Christian who prayed for hours every day. He wrote that he said over one hundred prayers a day and felt the presence of the Christian God all around him. There was in Ireland an ancient prophecy of a man who was to come and “destroy our gods.” Patrick turned out to be that man.
If Patrick was the man, it means, of course, that the pagan’s scriptures were right. So the pagan scriptures correctly forecast the coming of a man who would prove the falseness of pagan scriptures. The story of Saint Patrick combines the pagan and the Christian traditions in a remarkable way. When Patrick battles the magical forces of paganism he uses the magical powers of Christianity. Patrick wins, but the pagans put up a creditable fight. They go down swinging. Saint Patrick doesn’t say the pagan ways were all bad. They were the old way; I’ll give you the new way.
The most crucial thing that Christianity brought to Ireland was the written word. During the “Dark Ages” that followed Patrick, when Western civilization was in chaos, Irish monks kept the most profound ideas and values, the things that continue to be the bedrock of all civilization, alive and well. The fall of Rome brought on massive destruction. Irish monks were one of the few sources of classical learning.
The old Celtic civilization was actively hostile to the idea of writing. Things were learned by memory, and they were transmitted, to a select few, orally. There is an ancient Irish written language called Ogham, but it was very limited and could never be used to transmit anything complex. Christianity brought literacy.
Saint Patrick has such a strong hold on the Irish spirit that the Irish tend to forget all the other missionaries who aided in bringing Christianity to Ireland. A reasonable argument can be made that Christianity had a foothold in Ireland before Patrick’s return. And things were not so clean-cut. The conversion was very gradual. A lot of people held to their old pagan ideas and more than a few seem to have put up a lot of resistance. People being the way people are, some people probably died heroically in the cause of the old pagan way. But pagans were illiterate. Unlike their Christian counterparts, the pagans had nobody recording tragic stories of pagans dying for their faith.
One of the most amazing things about Patrick was the way he converted the noblemen of Ireland to Christianity. The peasants were becoming Christians all over Europe at this time. Peasants’ lives were so difficult that they were very receptive to the message of Christianity and its promise of a new, better life after death. But the Irish nobleman’s status, power, and influence were tied to his position as a high priest of paganism. Even the “disinterested lawyers,” the Brehons, were threatened by Christianity because the religion brought its own sense of morality. In practice, Christian morality often undermined the Brehons’ supposedly objective judgment. Once one side has God’s favor, it’s hard to win an argument. Most important, no Christian can ever be totally “disinterested.” For the people of influence in Ireland’s system, Christianity was a huge threat.
Despite this, Patrick was able to convert the very peop
le Christianity threatened. I asked an Irish priest about the mystery of Patrick’s conversions. How did he manage to convert people to Catholicism when Catholicism itself lessened their power, prestige, and money?
“God,” he said. Good answer.
Whatever happened, Ireland was largely Catholic just thirty years after Patrick’s return. Patrick established monasteries and schools, and the faith and a high degree of classical learning now walked hand in hand. During this period, Ireland was truly the intellectual center of the Western world. Thomas Cahill’s wonderful book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, is not misleadingly titled. If you equate civilization with classical learning, Ireland did save civilization in the Western world. Without the work of the Irish monks, the work of Plato and Aristotle (along with many more ancient Greeks and Romans) would have been lost. It would have been a devastating blow to Western civilization.
Although Patrick himself wasn’t a great scholar (his Latin, for instance, was very shaky), he completely changed the way learning took place in Ireland. In changing a pagan oral tradition into a Christian written tradition, Ireland became, as the nuns told us, “The Land of Saints and Scholars.”
Saint Patrick is certainly the main figure in the weaving together of pagan and Christian Ireland, but there was also another huge figure who is rarely mentioned, Saint Columba, the “Dove of the Church.” Saint Columba, like Saint Patrick, was a real historical figure and we know quite a bit about his life. His biographer, Adamnan, depicts him as a man passionately dedicated to both learning and religion. Columba had a privileged background. Unlike Patrick (to the horror of every Hibernian, Patrick was a Briton), Columba was a native of Ireland. He was actually born as someone eligible to become the king at Tara, but amazingly he gave that up and pursued a religious life.
Columba was a quintessential Irish type, a holy man who would, after spiritual musings, punch you in the mouth if he felt you needed it. His prayer book is titled Fighting One. He was a great appreciator of the “old ways.” The Irish, even though they became overwhelmingly Catholic, hung on to a lot of old traditional, “pagan” things. Columba, although a devout Catholic, seems to have been very sympathetic to certain aspects of pagan life. Although Ireland was by then an essentially Christian land, there were a great number of vestiges of the old pagan ways that were still part of the culture. “Fili,” pagan poets whose role was, for the Irish language–loving people, spiritual, coexisted with the new church in Ireland, and Columba, despite Rome’s ever-present authority, didn’t see anything wrong with it. If the Irish want a little paganism with their Christianity, so be it.