Given all the awful, horrifying things happening in the world, and the apparently never-ending challenges of life, who cares about Irish (and Scots Gaelic, Breton etc.)?
An obscure
language, barely-spoken anymore, with no apparent relevance to anything
important or even half-important? Sure, maybe as a hobby and a way to pass the
time that would otherwise be spent wandering the Web… Yeah, Irish: other people
do Indonesian cooking or chess or the history of punk rock or knitting and it’s
all cool, if you’re into it. You know: hobbies.
Nothing
against knitting or the rest, but I think Irish does matter, and not as a
hobby. I think that an involvement in and attention to the language and culture
put us right there in the middle of important stuff happening in the world.
It can
easily be just a hobby, of course, and a fascinating one, but look a little
deeper and you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of somebody who
knows a lot about butterflies or the Greenland glaciers or family farms in the
U.S.
I don’t mean that Irish is threatened with extinction and we’ve got to fight for it. That is a fact, and I respect Kneecap, An Dream Dearg, etc, but I’m not sure about the “fighting” part. Maybe cultivating it instead? Deeply in our own lives?
Alright,
but doesn’t that just bring us back to hobbies, personal growth and so on? Add
some nice Irish to your day and you’ll be a finer person?
Knitting
can be very satisfying and maybe it’s a path to understanding, but Irish traditionally
offered a whole different way of seeing: a way of seeing that’s almost totally
at odds with the way our society has been going.
That’s not because of Is and Tá or anything intrinsic to the language. I think it’s because Ireland and Highland Scotland were off on the margins, away in the West there, and didn’t matter much to anybody until, say, the 16th century. Society on a local level was archaic in the same way that, say, Sami culture was archaic, People kept thinking in old ways and doing things in old ways. It was only when manic, explosive and very determined Tudor English society discovered new ways of making the world better and more controlled and more profitable, that things seriously changed.
*I tried to bring the Youtube video (Lux Prize 2017 "Sami Blod") here but failed._
Irish and
Highland (and Breton and Welsh etc. etc.)
life was intensively local. The culture connected people to place in many ways:
through awareness of the Otherworld (“Fairy Queens” and so on): through awareness of ongoing human/place
interaction evidenced everyday by the dense net of ancient and modern place
name stories; through the need to respect the land that nourished, and the need
to respect the people around you. (What do I mean by that? You couldn’t just
dump chemical fertilizer on the fields if you wrecked the soil, or just go
shopping. You couldn’t be an asshole and alienate your neighbours, then go get
a job in Dublin.)
People
lived in place. You could even say they were a place, and part of the
weave of life there. Many old stories bear witness to the fact that these
people’s greatest terror was exile, even exile after death if they were buried
somewhere else. Sure, ambitious kings rode around sometimes doing stuff with
swords, but most of the time, you could just look the other way. Life went on.
(Why does place matter? I think it matters because we live in a place, and not just “Ireland” or “America” or “Earth”, and definitely not on the internet. There is a pleasure in being somewhere that’s not just a node in the international distribution system. There is a pleasure in getting to know a place through the seasons and through the years. There is a deep pleasure in getting your hands in the dirt: a pleasure unknown otherwise.)
The old ways became very difficult after the Tudor conquest and ongoing reorganization of Ireland (and the Highlands in the 18th century) into a system whose purpose was to produce wealth for the wealthy, and massive food exports to England, the armed forces and Caribbean colonies. It was a meat grinder and ongoing social trauma for everybody but the people who staffed and owned the new system which, yes, did include some Irish people. A somewhat stable new English-speaking society of big farmers was in place by, say, 1880, but the effects of trauma lurked beneath the surface.
Change
happened slower where profits came harder, and Irish and Highland people often recreated
versions of local traditional societies there whenever nobody was looking…until
they couldn’t or didn’t want to, because, face it, respect and money and ongoing access to food can be very pleasant.
Today it looks like we are at the very end of the story.
There are
people who’ll disagree. “Look at all the people who can speak some Irish!” they
say, ad yes, there’s a lot more people who can, compared to the Eighties or
whatever.
There’s
“speaking” and there’s “speaking”, though. I can translate my Irish or English
thoughts into French words if I have to, but I don’t have any feel for French,
don’t know much about it or the communities that speak it, and don’t care that
much. Do I “speak French”? Depends what you mean by “speak”. Yes, but mostly
No.
A lot of
the people who “know Irish” today in Ireland are in a similar position.
Maybe
that’s not a big deal, but Irish is/was so rich a language that wooden leg
Irish (Mac Grianna’s term) is sort of a shame, especially since it may replace
real Irish.
Irish-speaking communities had deep deep roots in the earth and in place. They connected speakers to all the generations that came before and to those people’s accumulated humanity, wisdom and humour. The language itself made distinctions in many areas that “Modern” languages do not, thus (I would argue) setting its speakers up to perceive aspects of the sky and weather and ground and emotion and…a lot of things, that Modern language speakers often do not.
Traditional
Irish-speakers made poor bureaucrats, administrators and payment managers. It
was/is a face-to-face language: a concrete yet suggestive language: an old
language.
There is
also the fact that it sings to some of us in wonderful and very moving way that
English or French do not, and speaks uniquely to the heart. I don’t know if
that’s ancestry or what, and I’m entirely willing to agree that Mandan and
North Frisian etc. do the same for other people.
Irish and Gaelic are of particular value and
relevance because our society has been headed in a particular direction for a
long time, and we now seem to be entering into predictably very rough waters.
The world itself is being ripped to shreds at macro and micro levels, and the mania
for control has developed technologies to fulfill its lust for a society that
is completely transparent to the people in charge: a completely regimented
society.
More and more, a lot of us are already just a set of eyes and ears – a mind – wandering at large online and offline in a universe of representations, seeking to enact our desires. Other people are present mostly as representations. Things are representations. Animals are. It’s all representations and nothing really exists except my perception, my desire, call it into existance.
In the
worst days of Chinese domination of Tibet, you could be imprisoned if an
informant saw you moving your lips to say a silent mantra. People were thus driven
to the very heart of their religious practice, free of all externals.
Irish and Scots Gaelic etc. etc. are maybe one secret core of humanity, reminding us that a more human, more benevolent, life was once possible. The traditional literature is vast and offers a kind of path to the very center of life. The languages in themselves tell about other ways, other possibilities. They offer deep nourishment, They are fascinating to explore, and are a storehouse of, I don’t know, wit, wisdom and humanity. They are beautiful. I hesitate to call them works of art, but they are. Speaking them well is a creative act more like singing.
I wrote
years ago that there are ancient sacred groves in these languages where the
corporations will never go. I no longer think that’s true, but exploring and
embodying these languages is probably the truest “resistance” available to us
today, along with growing food, learning the local plants and animals and what
remain of local ways
So, yes,
Irish and Scots Gaelic etc. do matter.
They
matter.
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.
(Note: Why
do I say it’s the end of the road maybe?
In
Ireland, probably only on Tory island and maybe in Machaire Rabhartaigh on the
mainland opposite, is Irish a common everyday language. In Scotland, there’s
only Grimsay island (200 people) and maybe maybe maybe, parts of central South
Uist. In Brittany, there’s only Plounevez-Moedac village, and, at a much lower
level, Ile de Sein. Wales has all the villages west of Bangor and on through Eifionydd
and the Lleyn peninsula in Gwynedd; bits of the mountains in south Denbighshire;
Bala and west; around Dolgellau; the top of the Aman valley on the border of
Carmarthenshire and Glamorgan; and Cwm Gwaun in Pembrokeshire.
Except for
west Gwynedd, the others may not last.
Bleak,
really bleak.
No,
nothing lasts, but it seems to be lately, that it’s mainly good things don’t
last.
Many other
old and local languages all over the world are recently extinct or about to
die, because society has no place for small or local any more, and, let’s face
it, the internet can be very alluring, suggesting there is a magical world of
abundance available to anyone who gives themselves to that world: first step, get your hands out of the dirt, move out of your village and forget all the old
stuff.
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