Let me tell you a story....
There are places in Ireland that the tourist rarely sees, and County Roscommon is one of them. There are no cliffs of coast in it, nor is it on the road to Clifden or to Killarney. The landscape is raw and skinned-looking, no green and pleasant land. There are those who'd point out that a working agricultural county like Roscommon has no business with 'niceness.' Fair enough, but a landscape can tell quite about the society that has created that landscape.
Every culture is founded on particular and often distinctive ways of interpreting reality. This world-view is, in turn, reflected in the various patterns out of which the society is constructed. These patterns run through a society in all its aspects, from religion to games, from high to low. In a society's landscape, the patterns are laid out before us for inspection. A working landscape that is shabby, incoherent and unhappy with itself means more than just 'men at work.' What is happening in the culture as a whole that it paints such a portrait of itself?
There are many such landscapes in Ireland today, and there's a lot could be said about their implications. But leave that aside. Look instead at two boys growing up in County Roscommon; two rooms in which lights burnt late into the night; two men who made a difference to Ireland--Cathal O Conchobhair and Douglas Hyde.
So far from us now in the 21st century that the March wind itself can bring us no rumour of that time, north Roscommon was Ui Bruin Ai. The O Conchubhair family, kings of Connacht province, was of this people, including Tadhg O Conchubhair (died 1374), of whom it was said, "Owing to our king, every bright-branched hazel tree has become red, and the fruits of the pleasant-bending sloe-bushes have grown jet-black with fruit. In his time, the cattle are like part of the Boramha; nuts are coppery-gold for the descendant of gentle Mugh." (These lines from a bardic poem refer to the fact the a king's inauguration was considered a marriage to the land, and the king's maintenance of truth and justice were answered by abundance in the wild and in the cultivated fields.) At every inauguration were present the twelve coarbs and the twelve kings of Siol Muireadhaigh. It was O Maolchonaire, the hereditary historian, who presented the king with the rod of kingship, and O Connachtain who warded the gate of the hill on which the king was ceremonially wedded to his country.
But "D'imgh sin and thainig seo." (That departed and this arrived.) By 1700, the O Conchobhair family was hemmed into 700 acres in Balnagare by the English adventurers who'd carved out estates for themselves from the woods and fields of Ui Bruin Ai after it was conquered by Queen Elizabeth's armies.
Into islands like this one there gathered the last representatives of the old learned families, they who had maintained schools of poetry, history, law and the like. They were men of an old world, in which memory spoke from every hill and standing stone--every square mile of Ireland a living landscape, its individual song blending into a great music that grew more vast and profound with story and with meaning as the centuries unrolled. These scholars were gardeners, cultivating, keeping the wells clear, ensuring that memory endured and that the voices could be heard.
There remains of that music today only odd bits and pieces noted down in manuscripts and books. Sometimes, turning those worn pages, half-heard harmonies we do not know drift just beyond hearing. But that is all. That music died.
An 18th century scholar was tutor to a young boy in Belnagare, a boy who gathered the lore of Eire, of old Ireland, like a 'bee of knowledge.' Cornan O Cuirnin, of the poets to the old kings of Breifne, said of the boy when he was fifteen years old; "There is a young man of the old stock who will make a stand for Connacht...No wonder is it that intelligence and nobility, exploits and bravery, are in him, considering every royal line that comes together in his blood. O Cearbhulllain (Carolan) taught him the harp. To him came the original copy of the Book of the Four Masters, and the Book of O'Connor Donn.
Cathal O Conchubhair made his stand, though not on the field of battle. Steeped in the lore of north Connacht, the eighteen year-old went to Dublin for two years. There he completed his education, a young gentleman of the eighteenth-century English world. But even in the capital, the old voices were not yet entirely stilled. Coming and going on the well-mannered streets, unknown and ignored for the most part, were the writers of the group centered on the O Neachtain family of Roscommon; poets, grammarians and tale-tellers. A surviving manuscript lists the boy as one of their number, and his handwriting is still to be seen in their manuscripts.
The young man returned to Roscommon to marry and to farm. As the years went by, he was approached by increasing numbers of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy who were intrigued by the rumour of another world all around them, and seeking information on what had begun to call to them too. Unnoticed, they began to absorb the Irish language and its lore. Didn't Carolan write his Irish Gaelic songs for this aristocracy, for the most part? Wakefield, the agricultural writer, notes in 1821 that "In Connacht, the gentlemn understand Irish, which facilitates their intercourse with the peasantry."
Cathal O Conchubhair, "the chief repository of the learning of Ireland in the eighteenth century," thus carried the standard for his people in a way the poets may never have foreseen. He became a bridge between Eire and Ireland; writing histories, training scribes, guiding researchers, sitting n committees, assisting at the foundation of the Royal Irish Academy. For forty years, he labored, a man, as he said of himself, "whose soul is on fire when he sees that the heroes of his native country are in no respect inferior to those of Greece or Rome, except in want of a historian...without which they will be...no more known than if they never had existed." Cathal O Conchubhair did a man's share to ensure that they did not die a second death.
Thought it as a tireless worker under the light of the Anglo-Irish sun that we glimpse him, in the end, there was the pupil of O Duibhgheannain, O Cuirnin, O Cearbhullain; lone scholar himself and seeker on the roads of the past for the heart of Ui Bruin Ai.. "Ro fhagbus Ath Cliath and thanguas go Belatha na gCarr...ar mo studer an mo ruma anois dhamh." (I left Dublin and I came to Beal Atha na gCaor....studying in my room now.)
One hundred years later, another boy growing up near Belnagare found his own teachers.
The passing years, despite the work of the few, saw Eire fading. The interests of the new landlords demanded that they rearrange their properties in certain ways in order to 'improve' them and to make them profitable. Yet these were not simply properties; they were age-old communities as well. When the landlord broke up the 'baile', the hamlets from which kin-groups cooperatively farmed the surrounding open fields; when he turned it into a few large farms rented to whoever could squeeze the largest profit from the land; when he left the rest of the people to make their way however they could, usually as half-starved agricultural labourers; when the landlord did these things, he cut the feet from under Eire. The refugees from these thousands of broken communities were forced to find places for themselves in the new English-speaking system and landscape based on the agricultural estates. The old disappeared from around them. They found themselves strangers in their own land.
Irish was now a language without a foundation, language of a culture that had lost its native ground; a broken culture. So the teachers that Douglas Hyde found, though learned and cultivated in a way that no 'improver' could know, were men of a smaller world.
The young Hyde writes in his diary (translated); As regards Irish, I began to learn it orally from Seumas O hAirt, the bog-keeper...the finest countryman I ever met, a man for whom I have more love and respect than any other...." He speaks of O hAirt in his 1890 collection of folktales as having "the greatest repertoire of any shanachie (storyteller) I ever met." In his 1893 collection of love-songs (Abhrain Ghradh Chuige Connacht), he notes, "I obtained this piece from an old woman named Brighid ni Chosruaidh who lived in a hut in a bog...and she almost a hundred years old." The voices of Ui Bruin Ai were still audible, for those who knew how to listen.
At age eighteen, Hyde was attending auctions, buying what he could afford of the books and manuscripts of a passing generation. Into his room at Frenchpark, he gathered the written lore that had survived into his own day. At age twenty, the last scholars of the Irish language were inviting his own contribution to their work.'
Douglas Hyde too went to Dublin. There he dined in clubs and lived the life of a Protestant minister's son. There he kept company with Yeats and the others of the young Anglo-Irish literary set. But there too, he located the scholars of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, working under great contempt in the years of prosperity and British Empire to make a future for this despised patois of western peasants.
In 1886, in response to an article that applauded the approaching death of Irish, Hyde took up the banner. Irish, he stated, is the language of civilization in rural Ireland. Where it had been lost, that which had taken its place was not high English culture, but rather a stinginess, an emptiness. The people knew nothing but "the latest scandal or the price Tim Rooney got for his calf." Once they lost the Irish language, "with its immense vocabulary and subtle distinctions of meaning (which) developed in them a wide range of thought, and a precision and delicacy of expression that is wonderful, " they also lost all knowledge of place and of the past that had sustained them as a community. They were cut off from all that had been, and dependent on the schools and newspapers to teach them how to be.
This recession of the landscape all over Ireland into darkness, ignorance and silence was a death blow to the old culture. Ireland had never been an abstract entity, a state or a political nation. Its culture had lived, not in any capital, nor in the halls of universities, but rather in a hundred little worlds like Ui Bruin Ai. Its dominant note had always been its particular sensuous concreteness. It is in love with the world, with the world's colours, textures, sounds and creatures; with reality. Embracing, open-eyes, these compounds of nature that are always doomed to fade and finally go out, its poignant sensibility is similar to that of old Japan.
Twilight
The Autumn wind on the moor
penetrates my flesh.
The quail cry out
in the deep grass
at Fukakusa village.
Fujiwara No Toshinari (1114 - 1204)
I hear melodious music
of the Garbh River in its winter splendor;
I sleep to the sound of great revelry
on a very cold icy night.
The call of the birds on the shore,
their never-ceasing cry is sweet music to me.
Melancholy longing has taken me,
hearing them chant the hours.
Anonymous Irish (circa 1150)
I remember a grass hut
on a rainy night,
dreaming of the past,
my tears starting at the cry
of a mountain cuckoo.
Fujiwara No Toshinari
There is a blue eye
that will look back on Ireland.
Never will it see again
the men of Ireland or its women.
Anonymous Irish (11th century)
In the spring garden
in the colored shadow
of peach blossoms
a girl stands
on a white path.
Otomo No Yakamochi (718 - 785) (Japanese poems are from Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, NY, 1974)
My love is the colour of the blackberries,
the colour of the sloe, and of the sun shining;
the color of the whortleberry dark on the moor,
and it's often there was a dark head on a shining white body.
Irish folk song
Irish nationality arose out of a profound consciousness of the physical reality of place, and of the stories that wove it and human communities together . Ireland was this land and its communities, in all their richness and variety, and nothing else.
One was Irish as one lived out of an awareness of "Eire'; of this tradition that had built up over thousands of years. Ancestry was irrelevant. One could not become Irish by pledging allegiance to some abstract entity, but rather only in a journey to a knowledge of this long humanity.
So the nationalism of traditional Ireland had its feet firmly on the ground. It was, at heart, a love for actual people and actual places. Respect or Seumas O hAirt and for Brighid ni Chosruaidh aet Hyde's feet on the path he took.
It was as spokesman for this world of poets and rainy mornings that he stepped into the gap. It was not his intention to impose any vision of his on some abstract "Irish People,' but, rather, to "assist the Irish-speaking population at the present crisis and to establish for all time a bilingual population in the parts where Irish is now spoken." In other words; to set about correcting those conditions that were destroying the community out of which had come the ferociously authentic and cultured people he had known in his youth. Hyde's hope was that these people's descendants would also have the opportunity to make their own contribution, in their own time, to this ongoing culture.
The nineteenth century saw the progressive dismemberment of Eire. Out of the increasingly dominant world of the 'big farmers' on the agricultural estates came a new abstract Irish nationalism. What it knew of the civilization of the "Eternal Ireland" it claimed to represent was too often only bits and pieces reinterpreted in England, and come back stamped "Made in Erin." That the heroes the new nationalism chose to honor wore green meant little, when what they fought for was a mawkish sentimentalized mirror-image of the English colonizers contemptuous picture of the Irish, with very little real contact with reality.
And while the new nationalists pledged to their vision, their eyes on the heavens, they did not see that in actual Irish communities, the rot of value went on. While they orated, the Irish nation disappeared around them, in place after place, as old people died. But they didn't even notice, much less care. For them, a nation was an idea or a state, and Ui Bruin Ai was absolutely indistinguishable from any other bit of the national territory.
The social processes that have acted to alienate Irish communities from place and past remain unaddressed. Whatever remnant communities in remote western corners still know who and where they are, are now busying themselves at the task of forgetting, as Roscommon did one hundred years ago. There is now no one who could help a child come to know the voice of Ui Bruin Ai. What Irish is to be had in Roscommon is a foreign language re-imported by way of Dublin.
And the place is the worse for it.
It is culture that provides us with the tools with which we make a home for ourselves in the world. Without these tools, we're wanderers in no-man's land, and don't quite know how to live. (Look at the landscape of almost any place.) This lack of a culture is what we see in most contemporary Irish landscapes. It's what allows us to destroy the world and its life-processes.
Humanity will up, given half a chance. Irishmen have begun to build themselves a new culture out of the language of the estates, of the schoolmaster, the newspaper and internet. Given time, they may make something worthwhile of it. As yet, it's a poor relation to Irish.
So for us, the heroes and the stories are forgotten. The hills are silent, mere blank piles of dirt and stone. These vehement men--O Duibhgheannain the historian, O hAirt the bogkeeper--are fled before television and the internet. That shining transient beloved world--Eire, Ui Bruinn Ai--is gone, and no use looking back.
Or is it?
Elena, a Rion, Elena, Queen,
tabhair duinn do laimhin tais give us your soft hand,
abair nach lomchaite leat tell us our frenetic poems
ar vearsai fraoch. aren't worm or moth-eaten.
Abair nach ideal aoldaite Say it's not some clapped-out ideal
do bheal a phogadh, For us to want to kiss your mouth,
lui led thaobh. lie down beside you.
poem by Michael Davitt, translation by Paul Muldoon.
