Thursday, March 19, 2020

...and then everything changed.

How are you? We are perfectly fine and healthy. Checking the news like maniacs. Going for walks. Writing. Getting ready to move to another house. 

I hope you are able to work from home and are cocooned up somewhere. 

That's what our Taoiseach told us to do, and wow, everyone is doing it, even the outlaws of Donegal. Of course, half of Belfast was here, buying a month's worth of toilet paper for a St. Patrick's weekend that never arrived. 

A neighbor mentioned that it was the oddest St. Patrick's day
he'd ever seen. (He's old.) I said there hasn't been a St. Patrick's Day like that since 432, but I don't think he got the joke because few people know that is the year St. Patrick arrived in Ireland. 


Leaving Artemis clean clothes to change into after visiting the market. The market started delivering three times a week, so she won't need to do this again. 


The waiting room at the Oncology Day Ward March 12, 2020. The schools closure announcement was made that day, and my nurse said no one wants to take care of the children of a nurse or doctor. 




When Ireland's pubs closed, all the musicians lost their jobs.



This is how unemployment works in Ireland. 

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

St. Sheelah's Day, in honor of St. Patrick's Wife



The day after St. Patrick's day isn't observed as a holiday anymore, but in pre-famine Ireland, people celebrated March 18th in honor of St. Sheela.

Shane Lehane of the Folklore and Ethnology/Béaloideas department at University College Cork discovered this lost folklore: 
Pre Famine, pre-1845, if you go back to the newspapers in Ireland they talk not just about Patrick's Day but also Sheelah's Day. So I wondered where this came from? You have Paddy's day on the 17th and it continues on to Sheelah's day. I came across numerous references that Sheelah was thought to be Patrick's wife. She was his other half. The folk tradition has no problem with such detail. The fact that we have Patrick and Sheelah together should be no surprise. Because that duality, that union of the male and female together, is one of the strongest images that we have in our mythology. ...

Sheelah represented, for women in particular, a go-to person because she represented the female. The Sheela-na-Gig is a really important part of medieval folk tradition. She is an important folk deity. The figure of Sheelah was perhaps much bigger than suggested by the scant mentions we find in the old newspaper accounts. She would have been massively important. She represents a folk personification, allied to, what can be termed, the female cosmic agency, and being such, would have played a major role in people’s everyday lives. It is a pity that the day has died out. But maybe we will revive it. I am sure Fáilte Ireland would be delighted with it. I think it would be a great idea! (source: UCC)

Lehane uncovered St. Sheela in old newspapers and a book by John Carr, A Stranger in Ireland.

Carr said that on the anniversary of St Patrick, the country people assembled in their nearest towns and villages and got very tipsy. "From a spirit of gallantry, these merry devotees continue drunk the greater part of the next day, viz., the 18th of March, all in honour of Sheelagh, St. Patrick’s wife."

Sheelagh, St. Patrick's wife, is old, like himself, and could be a version of the Cailleach, the winter witch. This goddess would be leaving the world around the time of her feast day and the Spring Equinox. When there is a light snowfall the day after St. Patrick's day, as often happens, it's called Sheela's brush.


Two years ago on March 18th we went to a Sheela-na-gig festival in Killanaboy, Co. Clare.





That day remains one of my favorite excursions in Ireland. The festival organizers' creativity shone in every aspect of the day. We learned the history and archeology of sheela-na-gig, but they also provided clay so we could make our own sculptures, cookie frosting at lunch, and a photographic scavenger hunt. 


\


Killanaboy's sheela-na-gig still presides above the church entryway. 

Like many sheelas it is hard to see, even when you're right there and under it. 






Several years ago, a team began capturing Ireland's sheela-na-gig in 3D digital glory. 

The collection is online. 























My favorite part of the festival is this poem. 






 (I don't have the author's name to hand at the moment, but when I do I will update. )

We don't know what sheela-na-gigs "meant" to the people who carved them, nor to the generations who preserved them for a thousand years. But could the significance of these mysterious carvings be anything other than what is invoked with this meditation on everything female and old and powerful? 

I wish you a happy St. Sheelah's Day, and a lifetime of her blessings. 





My other posts on Sheela-na-gig:

Tipperary Sheela-na-gigs, found and lost
Everything I May Write About St. Gobnait and Hints at What I Can't.

Monday, March 9, 2020

Rich People and Our Houses


The other day I posted a photo of Dublin's Hungry Tree. It grows in the park of the King's Inns, a legal institution founded in 1541. (The present building dates from 1800.)


This is the rear of the building in the first photo, showing how it forms a cul-de-sac on Henrietta street.


Here's a longer view of Henrietta street. 



Georgian housing developments are everywhere in Dublin but this is the first and oldest, established in 1720. 


A single aristocratic family and their servants lived in at each address. The gardens of these houses stretched behind them for several acres, and the residents decorated the interiors with plaster moldings, grand staircases, silk furniture, and gold-framed windows. 

But being the 18th century, no house had running water, and everyone pooped in a pot. 

For decades the richest and powerful families in Dublin lived on Henrietta street. After the 1798 rebellion, the governance of Ireland changed forever with the 1801 Act of Union. Irish Parliament dissolved itself and the aristocrats moved to London. They sold their opulent city houses to the middle- and professional-class people they left behind, like the lawyers associated with the King's Inns at the top of the street. 

Being the 19th century, no house had running water, and everyone pooped in a pot.

The Act of Union was an economic disaster for Dublin, and the absence of leadership lead to human disaster when the potato crop failed in the late 1840s. Millions of people who had lost everything moved to Dublin where they could find work and food. And they needed housing. 

Beginning in the 1850s, property developers bought dilapidated Georgian houses and converted them to apartment houses, one apartment per room. They installed modern sanitary facilities: A common tap in the yard, outdoor toilets, and a single toilet per building.

(A similar devolution happened in every city, and it happens to this day.)

The conversion of Dublin's Georgian houses to tenement apartments provided housing to Dublin's hard-working poor, though the toilets were fearsome and plumbing non-existent. Large families lived in crowded apartments with little heat and no privacy. And yet those conditions were far better than what millions of families have tonight, living in a car or a tent under a freeway.



At one time over 800 people lived on this single block of Henrietta street. None of the houses had running water, and... well, I don't need to say it again.  

Beginning in the 1930s the new Irish government began building new apartment buildings for the people who lived in the tenements. Here's an example of a mid-century apartments just a few blocks away from Henrietta street.



Today, some of these houses are occupied by single wealthy families again.


Some are empty, some are offices. 14 Henrietta street is a museum. 












The Irish government of the 1950s and 60s began building public housing in the suburbs and the tenements emptied. Some people chose to remain in their apartments until the 1970s, within fond living memory.


A video of people remembering the wonderful food their mothers and grandmothers made for them in their apartments in Henrietta street. 










This video explains how the museum could recreate a 1970s apartment in such detail. 


Many women worked at home. 







If you couldn't afford a blanket, you slept under your coat. 


A nice kitchen, but no taps or sink. 


There is an RTE documentary about Henrietta street and Dublin tenement living. This is the first episode of four. It's worth the time as a history of a city and its poorest residents. As they say: "relatable."



The documentary follows a family who lived at 7 Henrietta street. For the program, younger members of the family live in the house for a weekend and re-enact the life of their parents and grandparents. 

A few days after visiting the museum, I read an article in New York Magazine, A $60 Billion Housing Grab By Wallstreet. Truly nothing changes. When the price of houses dropped in 2008, instead of the deflation of the bubble leading to greater affordability, the wealthy used their capital and access to taxpayer-backed loans to purchase hundreds of thousands of single-family homes and turn everyone into tenants. Forever. 

We have sanitation laws now, but laws will change to serve the powerful. How much longer till they are renting us our pots? 



Sunday, March 8, 2020

Landscape of the Body



We live near the largest of the Irish speaking areas called An Gaeltacht. You might hear people speaking ceremonial Irish at events where people are welcomed in both Irish and English, but living in an gaeltacht I hear it at the post office and the market. 

You will see Irish on any official notification from the government or utility bills because Irish is the official language of the country. And everywhere the Irish name for a place occurs first on any roadside. As Irish pronunciation rules are fairly regular, I'm learning to pronounce this roadside Irish. But then I need to check with locals on how to actually say it, because of regional accents.



Fifty Irish place names by Foil, Arms, and Hog
Irish words often have many meanings in English, giving it a poetical depth, and my introduction to those meanings have been place names. A book from the 1980s, Irish Place Names, by Deirdre Flanagan and Laurence Flanagan recently came available again, and I devoured it.
Most place names refer to the natural features: bogs, mountains, pools, wells; ancient human things like forts, fields; Christian features like burial grounds, churches. Some are named after people, but many after trees and plants. 

Lots of places are named after human anatomy. So many places in Ireland have reminded people of our bodies. 

The photo at the top of this post was taken in 2012 when I visited that mountain behind me. You can't see its most interesting feature behind my head. 



This one is a bit better, but no photo captures Keshcorran as it is in life: a woman, pregnant, her breasts full, her mouth open in labor. The mountain looks different in every light, every season. On the other side of that mountain are the Caves of Kesh. 
There is a story concerning a small cave in Co. Roscommon that is supposed to have a other-worldly connection with the Caves of Kesh. The Cave of the Cat, also known as “the Hell-Mouth Door of Ireland,” is part of the Rathcroghan Royal Site. In a 1779 diary entry, an antiquarian reported that the local people believed a woman was dragged by a roped calf into the cave. She ran after him there, but the calf kept dragging her further until the next morning she found herself emerging back into the light of day at the Caves of Kesh, 38 kilometers (24 miles) from where she began. In the virtual-reality environment (top left) you can click on a hotspot inside the cave to be transported into the Cave of the Cats. (Voices from the Dawn)


When driving the highway from Cork to Kerry, you can't miss the Paps of Anu.







“Whoever they were, whatever they called her, she is beautiful. Photographs do not do justice to her loveliness: the way the Paps rise from the Derrynasaggarts, slightly separated from the ridge that curves up to them like a belly; those breasts pointing skyward, the breasts of a woman in her prime, not the tender buds of youth or the soft breasts of age, but full and firm, sensual and motherly at once. The breasts separate slightly, so you know the woman is languidly stretched out. There is no head, nor arms nor legs, only breasts and a belly, but it is enough. Enough to suggest that somewhere there is a head we might cradle, somewhere arms that might embrace us, somewhere a womb from which we might emerge, children of earth.Monaghan, Patricia. The Red-haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003. 209. Voices of the Dawn

There's a place in Donegal called Maas (Más) and two places called Mace in Galway and Mayo which means thigh, buttock and a long low hill. Mausrevagh (Más Riabhach) in Galway means "striped thigh" like a tabby cat. Mausrower (Más Rawher) in Kerry means fat thigh. 

The word for "shin" and "slope" is used in Largybrack (Leargaigh Breac), "speckled slope" which is the name of the beautiful grassy dunes near our village.

Leacca or Leacan "means any flat slopping surface, like a cheek, and is generally construed as "hillside."

Ladhar "is another word meaning "fork" and as well as its anatomical expression and refers especially to the land between two converging rivers or hill-ridges. ... [I]n Co. Cork is Lyrenageeha, Ladhar na Gaoithe, "Fork of the Wind." As if in compensation there is, in Co. Limerick a place called Lyrenagrena, Ladhar na Gréine, "Fork of the Sun." 

Finally, there's a place in Co. Antrim I hope to visit, Ballypitmave (Baile Phite Méabha): Queen Maeve's Vulva. I'll take photos for sure. 

Nothing Cheers Me Up More Than a Ruined Church






I never felt good in my childhood church of Our Lady of Victory, a post-war church built for the Catholics living in post-war subdivision. 

What a contrast to Ireland where you can find an ancient church every other mile. 



The Holy Cross church in Dunfanaghy has never gives me a good feeling, but the village's earlier church does:




The first Irish Christian churches were built between 500-700. Today, they are small and rare. Rare, because many of them were burned by Vikings in the 900s, or because a later church replaced it. 



This is the early medieval church on White Island, in Co. Fermanagh. The walls are reconstructed, but the arch was there when the Vikings arrived. 



Inside the ruined church, carvings of that era have been preserved. Scholars believe they decorated the bases of columns. (More here.)


Some people think this one is a Sheela-na-gig, but I don't. 








The Irish Catholic churches of those early middle ages—before the Norman arrived in the 12th century—is not the same Catholic Church that raised me. Their saints are not Roman Catholic saints. Irish Saints like Columcille and Fintan and Finbar and Gobnait were high-ranking Irish men and women who founded communes—I mean "abbeys"—organized around a religious practice which included creating libraries of books.  





The Roman Catholic Church arrived with the Normans in the early 1200s. The new people built churches on top of earlier Irish chapels. 





The Abby in Sligo. 

One of my favorite ruined churches is Muckross Abbey in Killarney.



Here's a photo of me taken in 2014 in the cloister at Muckross Abbey, where I always feel happy. That day was especially nice because little black mushrooms covered the ground under the yew. 




In the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestants built their new churches on top of, or near, the ruins of Norman churches from the 1200s. Why were the Norman churches ruined? Because Protestants burned them down. 





In many villages there's a Protestant Church in the middle of town that's either empty, or converted to a pizza restaurant or concert venue. That's a Church of Ireland building there in the center of Glencolumcille. (Protestant churches usually have a rectangular bell tower.) The church is encircled by a Catholic pilgrim's path between more than a dozen "stations" around the valley. Sometimes a station is standing stone from the early Christian era, sometimes it's a tomb 3000 years old. 

Modern Catholics visit ancient monuments like those stations, or wells, or mountain tops, but they didn't get their churches back after gaining civil rights in the 19th century.  Their churches today are relatively modern.

The Catholic church in Creeslough is designed to look like Muckish, the mountain behind it. 




After the laws changed, the Catholic Church went on a cathedral-building spree in the early 1900s and lucky for us, the architectural movement at the time was neo-gothic. Here's St. Eunan's, the ancient-looking church in Letterkenny. 




This is how it looked shortly after construction, a hundred years ago. 



I wonder how it will look in 1500 years? 

The ruined church in Dunlewey at the top of this post was built as a memorial to the landlord and Church of Ireland chapel of ease. But 100 years later not enough people remained to keep the church going, so they removed its roof, donated the organ to another church, and left the stones to decay. 

When I am in Dunlewey, looking out over land and sea, I wonder if this hillside might be more beautiful without a pile of old stones on it. On the other hand, given that this is Ireland, there was probably another pile of stones here long before. 



There's a place in Inishowen called The Druid's Altar that gives us a glimpse of how the church at Dunlewey might look in 3000 years. 




The Druid's Altar is a "court tomb," but its ring of stones have long been repurposed into field walls. A better preserved court tomb is Cloghanmore, just south of Glencolumncille. Court tombs are 3000-year-old piles of stone which once enclosed a place for people to gather, like for a funeral. 

This drawing is a top-down view of what Cloghanmore might have once looked like. (From the Voices of the Dawn page about Cloghanmore.) 



Here's a photo which is more like what it feels like than looks like. 





And then there's Uragh Stone circle, the most beautiful church in Ireland, in my opinion. It's my favorite, where I feel the best.