To Set the Darkness Echoing
Today is April 13. It is Wednesday night. I wrote last April 10 from Killarney. Here’s a photo of a rare moment of sunlight in the entryway of our arbnb building here in Dublin.
We got on the bus Thursday April 11 at the Killarney Hotel - though through a series of mishaps and misunderstandings left more than an hour behind schedule. It was interesting - the gathering had been beautifully organized but no one seemed in charge of departure buses. No lists were checked, no announcements made. Everything was haphazard. We were concerned about the protest by truckers that was happening in Dublin (a protest against gas prices which threaten truckers livelihood, as well as quality of life for all people with limited income) but the protest did not end up affecting us much - except emotionally. I was very affected by a trucker interviewed for Irish Times who said something like this: “We don’t know if this protest is the right thing to do, we don’t know if it will help, but somebody’s got to do something. The prices are crazy. We will lose our jobs. People won’t be able to afford to live - it isn’t just gas for cars, it’s kerosene and propane too. It’s everything that we need to live.” I found it heartbreaking to contemplate the complexity of an oil embargo against Russia. Nothing is simple, is it? So here is a photo of a sculpture I liked at Trinity College. Chrissy calls it Winken, Blinken, and Nod. But there’s a fourth passenger: shall we call her Gigglen?
Finding and getting into our new space went smoothly - and what a change! From a five star posh hotel to a tiny tiny apartment with a bed and a small kitchen-dining-living room area. Here are views our the windows.
The decor is minimalist-ikea, very very simple, and so different from the ornate and complex decor at Killarney. The amazing thing is how deeply we slept - whatever had troubled our allergies at Killarney was gone and we began to recover and catch up on a week of lost sleep. We have slept a lot here but also enjoyed walking around and exploring the city seeing sprong unfold: lots of tulips and blossoming friut trees and our first tulips, most of it against a gray sky, rain frequent but mostly light, and a few glimmers of precious sunshine.
Our favorite exhibit - as is often true for us - was the one we came across by chance, an exhibit honoring the life and work of Nobel laureate and poet Seamus Heaney. We were walking down the street and just stumbled upon it at the Bank of Ireland and went in. A very special delight was that ever since my friend Joan had referred to her experience of the Jung gathering as a well from which she draw up water and drink, I had been thinking of Seamus Heaney and his poem Personal Helicon. Well, I had been trying to think of it, except for the small problem that I couldn’t remember the name of either poet or poem! So we walk into the exhibit and there are the final lines of the poem I immediately recognize (I can’t resist giving the whole poem here. It is one i have deeply loved and carries so much of what I have experienced as characteristically Irish)
Personal Helicon
By Seamus Heaney
for Michael Longley
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
It felt as if the world itself were helping me with my lost memory, the way a kind stranger helps a lady who can no longer easily walk by helping her across the street. It was a random act of kindness from the universe and moved me. Chris and I both loved the exhibit and Chris bought Seaney’s last book, published posthumously, his translation of Book 6 of the Aeniad (Aeneas’ journey to the underworld where he meets his father) which she has been reading these last two days slowly and with great relish. It is fun to hear her pause and say “I just LOVE this book.”
I had a very moving experience on Tuesday when Judy and I met by zoom for our contemplative drawing. I decided to sketch and then paint in a scene inspired by a sculpture in St. Stephen’s Green that I had taken a photo of. It depicted desperate people - their suffering and despair poignantly expressed in their stretched out arms and hands. It was about the suffering of the Irish people before they gained their freedom, but for me those outstretched arms and hands could have been about anything - enslavement, war, plague, famine, drought - anywhere in the world. The sculpture could have been about refugees from political chaos or climate change, from Ukraine. (Or ordinary people facing poverty as prices skyrocket?) There had been a quote from a poem beside the sculpture which had not really “sung” for me but as I drew my picture I found a few words that “sang” what (for me) the poem intended: “Even in our troubles, we had dreams.” There was another part of the sculpture - not only these desperate outstretched arms and hands, eloquent with suffering and need, but also rising up from them were birds, with fully extended wings, flying upward. I found myself wanting to color the suffering bodies in the dark bright red and purple colors I recalled from the stained glass windows at the Dublin airport church of Our Mother Queen of the Sky. And wanting to color the birds rising (herons? Cranes?) the same colors as the upper level of stained glass windows in that church - a light turquoise blue and a grey green. I was struck as I painted by how rare it is for me to “think” via color rather than language. Color allowed me to integrate my experience of the suffering of the world [and that of the Irish people, that I had become keenly attuned to, with my pre-travel reading of so much Joyce and then Banville - all his Benjamin Black mysteries] with the ritual and mythology of Catholic worship and architecture, and with the sculpture. I’m not finding words for this experience that do it justice. I think I felt “held” by those colors, the part of me that feels pain and desperation and that feels helpless to respond sufficiently to others who who do, and the part of me still able to dream, to open wings, stretch my neck up, to fly. Yes. Painting those colors onto my drawing (inspired by the plain gray sculpture) moved me and made me feel held together, not so fragmented within myself, or estranged from other human beings.
This recalls to me lectures at the Jung in Ireland gathering, both Sylvia Brinton Perrera using spontaneous drawing in ways that helped people find ways of holding fragmented experiences of selves in a larger more peaceful sense of wholeness and Mary Dougherty talking about using Active Imagination. Jung’s technique of active imagination differs from Freud’s of free association in that Jung followed images and Freud language. Both allowed the image (or word) to emerge without conscious shaping or editing from the unconscious. So both techniques involve waiting at the edge of the unknown and listening for or waiting to see the unknown self. And both I know from my own experience can be very very powerful and even frightening in their power. That is clear from the numinous quality of Jung’s Red Book and from the fact that it grows out of a process in which his personality broke apart into fragments and had to be rewoven into a functioning whole.
I had meant to talk a bit about the last night at Killarney - that would have been Sunday night April 10. Just after I last posted. We shared the last celebratory dinner with Joanie and Sylvia and Mary Dougherty and her daughter Colleen. It was moving to have Mary say that Chris and Sylvia were her “fairy godmothers” and to take a photo of the three of them together.
Equally moving was to hear how Colleen who had come mainly to be with her mother had been unexpectedly touched in ways that felt transformative during the week. She spoke of new awareness of imbalances in her life where work and love were her overriding focus and play and creativity were neglected, and her desire particularly now that her youngest child was entering middle school and becoming more independent to recalibrate her life to include those neglected aspects. We talked about our love of hiking and she became very enthysiastic about my stories about how much it meant to me to walk the PCT alone and to realize that I could walk alone - and that I wanted to experience the world that way. As we say goodbye to Killarney, here’s a photo of one of these plain grey stone churches i lije so much. I especially like the full on the right steeple, as well as the one in the air.
. . . Now as I take up this unfinished post, it is April 15, Friday. I am on the plane from Dublin to Helsinki. I feel strangely incomplete leaving Chris behind in the airport (later today she will fly to Cologne where I will join her next Thursday. )
We didn’t have a lot of energy to go to museums or other cultural destinations in Dublin. We mostly napped and meandered around Trinity College and St. Stephens’ Green. One fun mini adventure was finding a good fish and chips restaurant. We figured we shouldn’t leave Ireland without eating fish and chips. I found one very well reviewed con TripAdvisor and an unexpected bonus was that the route there took as for a walk along the river Livvey, which I really enjoyed.
As we approached we were a bit daunted by the bleakness of the neighborhood and then by the finding it to be a tiny wine, fish and chips bar with no tables and just six stools at the bar. But the fish was very good (if a bit too much for us to eat) and it did feel like an adventure. Here’s the photo of the bar and the bartender with her great Irish smile.
Alright. I’ve said the Seamus Heaney exhibit was a high point of our visit. Our friend Joanie sent us another Heaney poem and I love it because I was so aware of the very strong wind (sometimes I thought it might knock us down. So it feels like a great way to approach the end of our Ireland visit.
. . . I leave Ireland now recalling lots and lots of green, wind, and grey skies and occasional moments of sun. But it is the humor I think will remember most gratefully. As I walk through security, having taken off shoes and jacket and everything imaginable, I still manage to set off the alarm. “Do you think it could be the credit card in my back pocket?” I ask the security guard. “We don’t take credit cards,” he says, a great Irish twinkle in his eye. “She wants to give us a credit card,” he calls to the woman who is starting to check my body with her gadget.
See you in Helsinki!
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