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This
morning, as I was leaving for work, a man stood at
the foot of my driveway. He asked for directions,
using an address for which no house existed, only,
I told him, a couple of vacant lots for sale. I directed
him as he, and the owner of the lots who waited in
a Mercedes sedan further down my road, went off to
conduct “soil samples.” What I did not tell
him was that I’d been following the example of
1960s environmental activist Edward Abbey, “monkey-wrenching”
or, to alter John Lennon, putting a “spanner
in the works.” Whenever surveyors’ flags
and stakes and signs over the past few months had
been placed on the empty land, I had removed them
under cover of the night. I have also followed the
more law-abiding practice of notifying my local council
about the very dangerous position any houses erected
would threaten on a hair-pin turn of our road, the
loss of hillsides where local children played and
older folks walked dogs, and the risks for fire and
accidents that occupation would exacerbate. My son
asked me why we couldn’t form a human chain stopping
construction, like he had seen on a television episode
where the developers had been defeated by neighbourhood
solidarity. I admitted resignedly to him that we could
not stand there all the time, that the few neighbours
we now have argued that more houses would increase
their property value, and that most people cared little
for what they saw only as weeds and scrub.
I
had finished the other evening the Clare-based seanchai
Eddie Lenihan’s Meeting the Other Side: The
Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland (with Carolyn
Eve Green. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2004. ISBN 1-58542-206-1),
and remembered his prefatory remarks:
Yet I am not so sentimental as to imagine that
people can be other than creatures of their time
and place. And our time and place is a world, a
society that emphasizes the technological rather
than the personal (despite what advertisers might
have us believe), the superficial and fleeting rather
than the profound, the commercial at the expense
of the communal. All these changes have their price,
and the casualties we can see all around us. (12)
Here,
Lenihan speaks for all of us who witness the recent
decades that have transformed the physical and spiritual
Irish landscapes irrevocably. Many republicans and
nationalists have urged us to support these changes,
necessary to economic prosperity, European integration,
secular conquest, and the demolition of the valleys
of squinting windows. We forget that a business park
is an oxymoron. Lenihan’s compilation of oral
testimony, mainly gathered from the region, witnesses
to another kind of business in a less manicured environment.
There, ringforts survive as fairy redoubts, lights
dance and dust puffs as evidence of fairy activity,
and those of us who dare to cross to their side live
shortly or longer afterwards, seemingly at the whim
of beings diminished in size but not in power. Speaking
Irish, hurling, dancing, they represent the survival
of a “hidden Ireland” refusing to capitulate
to the modern age, just as Daniel Corkery wrote, perhaps
romantically I admit, of the 18c bards clinging to
the their remnants of an indigenous Munster mentality.
Lenihan’s collected accounts of rural informants
tell us of an era that may, I hazard, hearken back
to a “race memory” of the Iron Age, as the
indigenous people retreated before the triumph of
the unbending ax and the steely blade, so that their
descendants the Tuatha de Danaan cringe before the
mower’s scythe or the spalpeen’s knife,
while we flee from their nocturnal hegemony across
flowing water to at least temporary refuge.
Many
who read these stories in urban Ireland or abroad,
as Lenihan observes, hide their unease by scoffing
at--or denying these tales as those of--a skittish
and inebriated peasantry. The storyteller takes pains
to gradually let these reactions surrender to, at
least in an older generation, the revelation of their
own rumours, those of a friend of a friend, that often
parallel the encounters he has gathered over the past
quarter-of-a-century, He tells us that his audience
has to be able to remember a time before 1970 or so
to recall any such tales.
This
reminded me of the sign I saw at the Folk Museum outside
Castlebar. It requested visitors to fill out forms
if they wanted to share their own rural memories,
specifying, however, that these needed to be prior
to 1960. Between Lenihan and the National Museum system,
we notice the great division between those (like myself)
who remain cut off from the other side of the water,
living always in a land where television silenced
the seanachai, and the tales of the dark faded when,
as you can see on your evening stroll, the blue light
emitted from the box in every room near at least one
window of nearly every electrified domestic interior.
If
you’re in a hurry to get from Galway to Shannon,
you speed down the N18 through Lenihan’s town,
Crusheen. Six weeks ago, as I temporarily eliminated
the quiet of a Sunday morning, I passed the site of
a new housing estate, with giant signs boasting of
its provenance in scripted paint, going up in the
center of this very town. I wondered which field it
displaced; the Lateen sceach, or whitethorn crucial
to fairy presences, redirected this same road near
Newmarket-on-Fergus even closer to the airport, although
other forts have been demolished, not without loss
of limb or life to those involved in the site’s
destruction or those whooshing down its replacement
along wide and smooth lanes.
The
defence of Latoon, which gained Lenihan headlines
worldwide and which shamed the authorities into rerouting
the road, may seem quixotic at best and stereotypical
to most of the rural Irish mentality that those outside
of tourist shoppes might want to ignore as Ennis expands
and the estates pull residents towards what are no
longer towns but bedroom suburbs of Limerick or Galway
as housing prices edge ever higher. In the depopulated
hinterlands, the old folks tell their stories of the
other side (the “wee folk” or its like never
finding an expression in these respectful pages.)
Lenihan analyses each account in an afterward combining
deftly a folklorist’s skill and a reciter’s
interpretation. He avoids skepticism and enthusiasm
admirably, balancing his sympathy with the vanished
culture these tales capture with a frank admission
that this culture will never revive.
W.Y.
Evans-Wentz, populariser of the esoteric in the early
20c by his version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
earlier wrote a 1912 Oxford dissertation, The Fairy-Faith
in Celtic Countries. Why did the Asian book arouse
so much more enthusiasm, especially when rediscovered
by the Beats and hippies, than the Celtic? Is orientalism
to blame? Do we deny the hidden Ireland as counter-productive,
or even counter-revolutionary? Perhaps we in the West
too easily compartmentalise the realm of the esoteric
and the inexplicable as quaint and irrational. Ireland,
we argue, needs to build its practical foundations
by stealing from its cultural treasure. If the road
speeds us to Shannon and eases goods to Galway, then
Crusheen will suburbanise and fairyforts will be bulldozed.
Only the hippies and their New Age allies will protest.
All I can add is that visiting the ruin of my grandfather’s
house (near the hill of Fairymount) in Roscommon on
the same journey that raced me through Latoon, that
I left the adjacent fairyfort, marked on the OS map
as a rath, safely alone for the cows and birds.
We
see near Tara another debate of highway good, heritage
bad. Bungalow blight, the obsession to put the house
on top of the ridge when our ancestors would have
sought the shelter of the lee, symbolises our contemporary
attitude. Confident in the EC, dismissive of the culchies,
eager for the next franchise to open, Lenihan’s
terrible and occasionally comforting messages of revenge
taken upon our smug selves by those we deny brings
with it a message a Marxist historian like Eric Hobsbaum
(whose autobiography I will next review), in his studies
of “primitive rebels” would have stamped
as politically acceptable for even the reddest of
readers of The Blanket. At our own cost, we forget
the sufferings of those who we reject as less than
human, as relegated to the other side of hell or Connaught,
as we ubermenschen look towards the horizons not out
of respect, as our farming forebears knew to do, but
out of the eyes of developers, exploiters, and expansionists.
The former envisioned what the latter erase, looking
not up but down for soil samples, to dig only to destroy
and build up what long had been left open and apart.
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