- On the last day here, in the sauna of Dublin’s Boddington Hotel, to
be exact, I saw, or perhaps the sensory word I’m looking for is heard, the
origin of Joyce’s Dubliners. Not denying the mythic pattern, the Irish and
indeed world history, the immense theological knowledge, the intertextuality
that Joyce could pull out of his ass by the yardful – to all of that I tip my
hat, of course. But the birth is from Irish small talk, of which I was a privileged
witness sitting there absorbing the heat on a bench above two types – a good
looking gent in his fifties and a pretty woman who in the course of conversation
revealed her age to be 58. It was hard to say whether these two knew each other
extensively or had met for some convention at the hotel, but the man was
sharing his tale of stomach upset and ulcer that had put him off his feed for
who knows how long and the woman was full of commiseration, for hadn’t she too
had a sickness in her 51st to 54th years? And he was on
about how the pi
lls worked but he didn’t want to get addicted, and she was on
about how you can’t let things go to fast, for they will go fast, and the man
said he couldn’t even fucking take a walk and his dad had said the same thing
about time, said it to him when his dad was sixty, and the woman instanced a
recent news item, even from yesterday, the whole family in that terrible car
crash, out for a vacation they were, and the man had heard of it, and the woman
said they’ll never get back their life.
And I had to think of the two Dubliners who bought tickets
to go to the top of the Nelson pillar of accursed memory. Or of Stephen
Daedalus’s extensive and crumbled jottings. Notes to self.
- In William Butler Yeats’s poem In Memory of Major Robert
Gregory there is a verse that goes:
“And then I think of old George Pollexfen,
In muscular youth well known to Mayo men
For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses,
That could have shown how pure-bred horses
And solid men, for all their passion, live
But as the outrageous stars incline…”
I quote this quite dispassionately, but I have memories
mixed with it – walking down the slope of Church Street in Clarkston Georgia as
a high school student whose sense of poetry and the larger life I thought I
could never live on roads like that of Church Street in a suburban Atlanta was
stirred by Yeats so that these verses were more than verses, once, but files by
which I’d saw the bars of the prison – a heated adolescent idea.
In Yeats’s biography, he mentions, briefly, that George Pollexfen was a mystic,
an uncle, and that he lived in Ballina. I have now been to Ballina and it is
Church Street in Clarkston with uglier buildings and a Papa Johns that serves fries
with its Pizza. It is true that “Many ingenious lovely things are gone/ That
seemed sheer miracle to the multitude”, but lets not get carried away with
Greek ivories- there’s always Church Street in Clarkston Georgia, in a point of
view that has entirely dwindled, in a man that has waxed and waned and seen
Ballina on a gloomy drizzly day.
Of course, very likely the Anglo-Irish relatives of Yeats’s
were acquainted more with the Knox-Gore family, who lived rather eccentrically
in a modest castle and a fairy wood, the Belleek forest, outside Ballina. The Knox-Gores were great ones for
horseflesh, and so was Pollexfen.
- The impressive mountain peak above us, which in the
morning was wreathed with clouds, is called Croag Patrick, a name that our
tongues play with a bit: Croag, Craig. It comes up from the Clewe bay, which
made Westport a considerable export import competitor of Galway and Sligo at
one point, until the bay’s comparative shallowness made for problems with the
modern deeper freightors. All that is knowledge from the cruise, which we took
three days after this ascent I’m talking about.
The Rough Guide says of the peak’s trail: “… taking an
average of 3 and ½ hours return, is easy to follow, though steep in places –
you will need good walking shoes and a stick.” True enough, although it would
have been nice to add that it isn’t the steepness as much as the way the path
up to the top is firstly dirt, scree, and some medium boulders, and secondly
something like oyster shell, easy to tread, and for the last third is a winding
nightmare of jagged broken boulders and small ones that seem deliberately
designed to impede the walker and to send signals to the knees and legs that
are received even days afterwards.
Hazel sticks are definitely a necessity, even as we are
summing these things up from the parking lot and having no idea of what the
path is like. So we get them, two euros a piece at the kiosk, and start off in
high spirits. The clouds lift, the views spread out below us, and we talk of
what the guide book says – that pilgrims make the trek on Reek Sunday, the last
Sunday in July. Barefoot! That sounds like with a little tricky footing and sneaks
we ought to do nicely.
Up we tread. Up we plod. We make our way up the path of
dirt, scree, small boulders, and we see the hills on either side of us in
panoramascope all the way to the Ocean and the islands in the bay, and we think
that this is what we came for. We picnic on some boulders a third of the way
up. Tuna sandwiches. Apples. Blueberries. Water.
At this point, unbeknownst to us, we were merely a ticklish
distance along – a fourth of the way, maybe. The mile and a half to come would
not be so easily covered. Oh, we were walking over the mountain, but, as we saw
in retrospect, the mountain was also walking over us. I myself began to doubt
of everything when, in the end, I was going up the craggy, helixy curves that
were in steep ascent, in a sheer grade of crazy rockiness, to the grassy couple
acres of the summit. I was being passed by young hikers chatting and picking
their way without much effort, and by more middle aged and elder types who
encouraged each other – we were strangers all but bound by the journey, I
suppose. It was nice to see bare chested rather athletic looking men getting
all deflated as the climb went on, and sitting down, finally, tacitly admitting
that no, they were not going to bull their way up. And myself, I thought, what
the fuck am I doing here? I knew the top would not be worth this much strain on
the old body.
The mountain was definitely walking over me. Later, we made
our way back to Enniscrone and had a quiet spaghetti dinner and exhaustion ran
around the table.
- So many ruined fortresses, abbies, houses. So many cows
and sheep and their odor in the wind. Particularly recommend Easky for its cliffs,
and the cliffs near Ceid Fields, although the latter are not for wandering
around on a windy day. Every day there is, of course, windy, so there is that.
Other notes will come as I think of them, my comrádaí!
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