Ireland 12

Shannon. I’m in the luxurious Park Inn, from which you can walk right into the airport grounds, which I have done, because I could. It was afternoon, and Shannon was calm, after departures and before arrivals. I’d never seen an airport like that before (except when I was stuck in one all night). It was like the set for a an airport movie between shots. I left Sligo with the maximum of regret and headed south. When I got to Tubbercurry, it was Old Farm Fair Day, and I stopped. It was quite early yet, and some of the exhibitors were still setting up, but there was an array of things to eat and things to buy, and chicks and ducklings and young turkeys in cages, and horses and donkeys, and cattle with ribbons over their stalls. All the downtown was filled, and people were smiling and shouting instructions to each other. I would have stayed all day if I could. I wondered if anyone remembered me from the time when I was a visiting celebrity. Continued to Knock. I went with a high heart and an open mind, but the place still creeped me out after a few minutes. Old women with crutches moved around the shrine saying their rosaries, and in the church a mass was being said under the plaster statues of the apparition. More complicated than a simple fake, it is an attempt to domesticate the divine, to dispense it in bits embodied in cheap souvenirs and squirt bottles of holy water. Worse than a simple fake, it says at “here is the healing power of God for the taking,” and provides no answer when one asks, “Why am I not healed?” I was going to buy souvenirs for people who would be pleased by them, but the spirit went out of it when I saw them, the thousand identical rosaries, the grimacing St Pio’s, the Teutonic glower of an infinity of John Pauls. Tried to go to Thoor Ballylee, but as I headed down the narrow road a gigantic tractor came toward me, taking up the whole road, with a line of cars behind it. I backed up and found a side road and turtled into it, and by the time the episode was over my enthusiasm had ebbed. Besides, I was then and am now tired on a level I’m not used to. But I did get to Coole Park without incident. It was–how shall I say this?– special people day, and the retarded and afflicted were everywhere, walking their different walks, being called to by their various caretakers, huddling in their several corners responding to their voices and compulsions. Ordinary people were there too, practicing hurling and running and sitting in the fleeting sun. The tourist center had an exhibit seeking to reproduce the feel for a little girl–Ann Gregory– of living in the house with Lady Gregory. It was moving, charming and melancholy. I found all the seven thimbles one of the screens exhorted us to find. Another screen suggested that Yeats had stroked a pet dog in the woods and thought it was a badger. I walked past the walled garden into the forest, where for a few moments, at the side of an immense ancient cedar, I felt the most profound silence. Nothing moved. Nothing. It put the rest of the day’s experience to one side. I can hardly credit now, at the edge of an airport, with the telly blasting the Olympics, such silence.