Ireland 4

August 1, 2012


Saw Yeats’s Purgatory at the Blue Raincoat last afternoon. It was glorious to witness such a thing, in the most appropriate place to witness it. Sligo, and the Blue Raincoat in particular, have taken Yeats on as a project, with seriously valuable results. I tingle whenever I hear Yeats’s vision for the theater, something lofty and poetic and raised above naturalism. But seeing it in the flesh is perplexing. Perhaps Yeats was not the man to carry out his own vision. The concept is revolutionary, but the plays are static and forbid engagement that is not purely intellectual. I think that is the fault of the poet rather than of the idea, though no one seems to have given the idea a second go. John from the reading the night before was there, and we chatted about the theater. Peter Davey was there too, looking younger and happier than he looked in Tobercurry. We shouted at one another across the crowd, and it seemed he was happy to see me, but he was happy at everything then, so who knows? I told him I’d come to him.

There’s a clear distinction between the Irishman and the Irish artist. The artist–and the Blue Raincoat lobby was full of them–goes about shaggy locked like some ancient Celt. The effect is pleasing.

Hit the bars after an unsuccessful attempt to attend a trad music session. Chatted a time with Paul at Furey’s, who gave me a list of music evenings around town. Hit several on that side of town, where the people were kind, ending up at McGarrigles, which was loud and happy. One big woman said, “I thought you were Irish, sitting there minding your own business like that.” I drank far too much, and am feeling it this early gray morning. Unlike yesterday, I can see Knocknarea under the clouds, so the sky is a little higher.

Seven hundred million without electricity in India.

Evening. Towers of alternating light and cloud over the sea and Knocknarea, The day has been inclement, but with moments of brilliant beauty, which I took in mostly through the windows of a bus. Set out early for Galway, where it was raining so hard I hurried through the tour I was giving myself. One day in Galway is not a good idea. One is never a good tourist in a place which has been one’s home. But I ran past most of the old places. Had the handsome boys serve me coffee in the King’s Head. Ate in the space that will be the Café Journal for me no matter how many times it changes hands and names (it’s now the Quay Kitchens). Walked to the harbor. I took toast with me from breakfast, but there was no gentle feeding of the gulls, for the wind was a gale from the Atlantic and the Corrib was a torrent. Lace curtains covered Pat Jourdan’s windows, but whether that means she’s there or not I don’t know. Galway has suffered far less than Sligo in the hard times, for most of the stores were occupied and the streets were thronged, though it may have something to do with the Galway Races. The trip gave me no reason to revise my assertion that Galway is the happiest, youngest town in the world. I was in odd and extended fury on the bus, worrying the ragged edges of old griefs and present dilemmas, obsessing over things I can’t possibly remedy this minute. Maybe that is hell, or a kind of hell, fully to be submerged in that over which you have no power, imagining the worst, thinking it is a way of being prepared for anything. Even the beauty of the landscape irritated me a little, as though it were a green gold mask over a face of hideous disfigurement. But maybe that was just the misery of a miserable ride with a stop at a thousand boring little towns, a progress of hesitations that I was not, to say the least, in the mood for today. But, on a driveway on Collooney, I saw my first hedgehog. I longed to cry out for the bus to stop.

In the evening it was the readng by Seamus Heaney at the Hawk’s Well. In the lobby I met Jill, an elegant red head from West Virginia who’s taking Irish Studies at Notre Dame and is in Connemara for the summer learning Gaelic. We discussed the intricacies of Academia. We came up on the bus from Galway together. She wants to be a professor of Irish Studies. In the balcony I met a beautiful blond schoolgirl from Sligo, who had been fed Heaney all through school, and now had the chance to see him in person. Heaney is a very old man, gray, a little vague, a sort of monument to himself. He recited “Digging,” and when he forgot a line, fifteen female voices prompted him anxiously from the front rows. One can’t say the reading was very good, but it didn’t have to be. It’s like looking at Ben Bulben and judging its beauty one day to another. He is the most famous poet in the world, and he was humble and funny and direct, his poems in his mouth simpler and more immediately expressive than they seem sometimes on paper, altogether magnificent.

Curled around the long street and ran providentially into Liam unlocking his door. Ten seconds before or after we would not have met. He looks well; he said I look well. He talked several times of my painting which hangs framed now in their house. I’m glad he ended up with it. It is the view from the tiny window of the tiny room he gave me when I first stayed in his house, in 1995, with the moon and crows and Knocknarea and the crooked chimney as it then was.

Bars afterward. In the Troubador I learned that the Irish boxer who won the gold medal is a Traveler, and I was given a tutorial on the deviancies and subtleties of those people.