The wind is playing an orchestra of harmonicas.
~Michael Longley, “Harmonica”
39° Fahrenheit, drizzle. Sunrise tomorrow at 7:57am. Sunset 5:19pm. Current time: 7:09pm
Northern Ireland poet Michael Longley passed this week. It was a sad time for The Seamus Heaney Centre and Queen’s, where Michael was known as friend and family. I did not know Michael Longley outside of his poetry, but I heard he gave good bear hugs, and what better way to be remembered?
My classes are going well. The students are incredibly kind and conscientious, and I’m learning from them as much as they may be from me. In the undergrad class we went to the Ulster Museum to see Paul Henry’s paintings of Western Ireland. It was interesting to consider images of Achill, and know that those works were inspired by J.M. Synge. I also learned that the house in Wicklow where Heaney spent his years being a full time poet, was at a cabin a friend had offered him, on the Synge property. The literary community is interconnected. The reason Synge went to the west coast in the first place, was because W.B. Yeats told him to go. He’d tried his hand in music school, and had recently turned to writing when he ran into Yeats in Paris. Yeats told him to tap into the culture of the Aran Islands, to go live there, and capture the life. So that’s what Synge did. He may have been a bit unreliable, dramatic in his portrayal (especially as an outsider), making it out to be more primitive and untouched than it actually was, romanticizing and capitalizing on it, but his work inspired other work and ultimately stood the test of time and criticism. I appreciate his preservation of the Aran stories and characters.
An outsider observation: Belfast is full of readers. You can hear it in their vast vocabulary. At times, I am stunned by the clever precision of language coming out of people’s mouths. If they don’t all write poetry, I don’t believe it, because it is layered into the culture; in idiom, song, everyday speech, and conversation. I mean, I love the Irish accent. I love it. So even a normal greeting is charming. But there is another element—a high level of diction. It makes me a little sad, and I have spent a lot of time with the thesaurus this week. I know I am weak in vocabulary, I’ve never been able to pull the word I want in conversations, always late to the punchline, a little slow to retort, often silent altogether. That is why writing is better for me. It grants me the luxury of time. That is fine, but I love to be in the company of those who can speak widely and accurately, with wit and intelligence, off the cuff.
Heaney’s diction and description are a prime example. His work feels romantic, Wordsworthian, but even more rich in meaning. Go explore this one about his home in Derry and his encounter with fat frogs, or maybe this one, where blackberry juice might drip from the page. Also, he loves to say jam pots.
I began an Irish language class at Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich on Falls Road. It is an old church, now turned cultural center. On the bottom floor they have a cafe and gift shop, then art galleries, studios, and classrooms upstairs. It is the third place I found to take Irish. All the other classes were full, and it is impressive to me that so many people want to learn Irish. A few people will call it Gaelic, and the map will even note The Gaeltacht Quarter section of the city, but most people say “Irish.”
My teacher last week said Irish is quirky and beautiful, since it always describes the physical attributes in place names. The place name might mean the Yew tree at the head of the stand, An tlúr Cinn Trá, (Newry in English), or Glen of Sparrows, Alt na Gealbhán, (Altnagelvin in English). Place names are significant and often descriptive, but when the English came in and colonized Ireland, they Anglicized all the names, relying on phonetic spellings, and leaving the original names devoid of meaning.
It is heartening to see the classes full of people wanting to learn their country’s language. When we went around the room to introduce ourselves, the varied-aged people had many reasons for learning Irish, but most came to rectify the past in some way; a retired teacher resents having her letters to her brother (back in her teen years) blacked out by the post because she’d written in Irish, and she doesn’t want to lose her language, another man is here to learn for all the school children who took lashings for speaking Irish instead of English, a young Englishman’s granddad was born in Belfast and never taught the family Irish, so he’s here to set things straight.
I sat in the middle of a reverent revolution on Falls Road this morning.
Of course the language is charming too; uisce beatha means “water of life.” It’s whiskey. LOL. And when you want to say I’m happy, you’d say “Tá áthas orm,” which literally means, happiness is on me or, “Tá sceitimíní orm,” excitement is on me.
I have to say, I enjoy that emotion is worn on the body rather than embodied, as we say in English, I am happy, or I am sad, since emotions are ephemeral, and often fleeting, in moments of joy. Isn’t it nice to consider that my anxiety and sadness do not have to be embodied—where they have often laid up for a while, and seemed to set up camp—but that they just come by me for a while, understood that they aren’t wrapped up in my identity, but rather like a bit of weather, that’s constantly changing? I hear there are two forms of to be, so maybe this isn’t as happy-go-lucky as I’ve made it out to be, but I like the thought of it so far.
Thought of note; Maybe let the weather of emotion pass through. If you can bask in the sunshine of joy, relish it. If you need to seek shelter from the winds of change and sadness, good on you.
There is so much more that I can’t capture here. There were wee drinks with the set dancers, swans on the river, coffees with students, an Irish studies lecture by Aisling Reid, 'Cahir Healy’s Memoirs from the Argenta Prison Ship ,’ a book launch of The Boy From the Sea by Garrett Carr, an afternoon cabaret singing and dancing to ABBA, an 11-mile long run, homemade soup, submissions, and travel plans.
Y’all.
Tá sceitimíní an domhain orm: The excitement of the world is upon me.
Dia is Muire duit! Taoitneamh a bhaint as gach nóiméad.