Thoughts on Father's Day

My father G.A. Hayes-McCoy and his parents, Galway, 1930s

When I was a child in the 1950s my father worked in the Art and Industrial Division at the National Museum of Ireland. He subsequently became a noted military historian but until I was five or six  he was an assistant keeper at the museum, with responsibility for the Military History and the War of Independence collections.

When I visit the museum today I can still feel his presence. He was fascinated by archaeology as well as history and so passionate about Ireland's past that even at that age I learned to share his enthusiasm. It was a passion rooted in a philosopher's sense of the universality of human experience as well as delight in his own cultural inheritance. And, above all, it was founded on a pursuit of truth. Looking back now, I'm aware that his uncompromising insistence on the importance of facts over nationalist sentiment must have made him unpopular in some quarters in the Ireland of his time. But as a child I just loved his stories. Not that I grasped many facts at the age of five of six. Instead I received a kaleidoscope of impressions, a sense of excitement and drama, colour and texture, discovery and delight. It's lived with me ever since.

I remember him lifting me up to admire Iron Age ring-beads of translucent black glass with spiral yellow inlay, and twisted gold collars with gorgeous fluted ends. There were amber beads and inlaid boxes too, enamelled horse-bits, jet ornaments, and ceremonial trumpets. Unlike their later, medieval counterparts who laboured over complicated strap-work and heavy decoration, Iron Age craftsmen produced works that are almost modernist in their simple clarity.

That early experience in the museum sparked a lifetime's ambition to achieve the same simple clarity in my writing. It also produced a misunderstanding that, in hindsight, has clarified my understanding of my father as an historian.

The Broighter Boat (photo courtesy of the National Museum of Ireland)

Among the artefacts in the museum is a little boat which was probably a votive offering to Mannanán Mac Lír, the ancient Celtic sea god. It’s a perfect model of a sea-going version of a naomhóg, the slender, curved coracle still used round the west coast of Ireland, where I live today. About seven inches long and fashioned in beaten gold, it was ploughed out of a field in 1896, by a farmer whose name was Tom Nicholl. 

Several little objects were found with the boat, one of which I saw in my childhood as a slender, golden spear. To me that made sense. I knew from stories about ancient Irish voyagers that saints and explorers hunted whales for food. And I’d been told that the Celtic sun god, Lugh, wore a golden collar and carried a spear of light. So I imagined Lugh and Mannanán sailing the golden boat to towards the western horizon and finding the Isles of The Blessed.

 

I know now that the object I saw as a spear was actually a model of the steering oar that guided sea-going naomhóga.

I know too that no offering’s ever been found that links the Celtic sea and sun gods as neatly as I linked them then in my imagination.

But I also know that imagination itself, balanced by discipline and meticulous research, has a vital place in our understanding of the past.

It's a lesson I learned from a father whose own rigorous, uncompromising scholarship was informed by an imaginative awareness of the universality of human experience. 

My mother, father and me, O'Connell St. Dublin, 1960s

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A Time For Listening.

A cold, wet spring after a cold wet winter. And now a cold, late summer after the slow coming of spring.

Snow on Mount Brandon at Easter. No growth in the grass. Furze and fuchsia bushes slow to flower and primroses still starring the ditches in the last week of May.

For the last three years the rhythm of the seasons has faltered and the certain swing of one thing to the next thing has changed. Now, with livestock crying out for fodder, farmers are shaking their heads and talking of bankruptcy. Here in Corca Dhuibhne, the price of bought-in fodder is high and all over the country the effects of this year's weather are being factored into predictions for next year's profits and losses.

In pubs and shops, and on the roads when people stop to chat with their neighbours, there's talk of selling up and shipping out. Emigration's always been a quick-fix here in Ireland: but now shoulders are being shrugged. The weather's wrong everywhere, they say. There are floods in England and Europe, tornadoes in America, earthquakes, drought and famine all over the world. Food prices are high and, in the current global recession, jobs are scarce wherever you go.

The other morning Radio Kerry ran a story about a priest who's urged people to come together and pray for a change in the weather. I've heard people talk about that since, and not many have laughed. Beneath the talk of prices and recession lies a visceral dread, rooted in shared race-memory, existing at an unconscious level, and all the more powerful for that. What if the sun never shines again? What if all the animals die and the earth ceases to yield?

For thousands of years, the pre-Christian peoples of this peninsula responded to the changing seasons with ritual gatherings and prayers. Their purpose was to channel the energy of the universe and promote the turning cycle of the year. In the Ancient Celtic worldview, each element of the universe is animated by the same pulse of energy and everything in the universe shares a living soul. And in the Celts' circular image of eternity, each thing follows the next in its allotted sequence, like the notes of a tune or the steps in a dance. So for our ancestors, the steady rhythm of seed time followed by harvest time was a sign that the universe was in balance and good health.

And that, I think, is the key. Somewhere deep in our shared consciousness is an instinct that tells us we live in a joined up universe. Increasingly it's becoming evident that the continuing health of the planet depends on our husbandry of it, and it's equally clear that the models we currently live by just don't work.

I've nothing against praying for a change in the weather. But I think it might help if we looked first at our Celtic ancestors' worldview, and considered the nature of the gods that they imagined. 

 That's not something that's hard to do.  Indigenous peoples all over the world still hold versions of that worldview.

I think we'd be wise to listen to what they have to say.

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St. George's Day at Borough Market - more Circles Links and Layers.

The legend of St. George belongs to England. I remember standing under a statue of him when I first came to London as a child, admiring the dashing knight in armour on his rearing horse, poised to slay the fierce, curly-tailed dragon that was snarling at his feet.

It was years later that I discovered that St. George belongs to many other countries as well, including Catalonia, a region proud of its Celtic cultural roots, where his feast day's known as La Diada de Sant Jordi. But it's only since moving to Bermondsey that I've discovered the Catalan tradition of giving a rose and a book to a loved one on Sant Jordi's Day. 

And then today, wandering round Borough Market, I discovered the link between St. George's Day, which is April 23rd, and UNESCO's International Day of the Book, which falls on the same date because of that Catalan tradition, and because it was the date of the death - and possibly the anniversary of birth - of both the English playwright William Shakespeare and the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes.

Borough Market is London's oldest market specialising in food and drink. There was Catalan produce for sale there today and visitors from Catalonia handed out red roses to the shoppers.

 

It's a glorious mix of local and international specialities reflecting London's cosmopolitan tastes and traditions. There were knights in chain mail selling artisan British Charcuterie. 
The stalls were decked with flags and bunting, and everywhere there were red St. George crosses. 

 

 

 It was a wonderful demonstration of how new traditions can be sparked by older ones, and of how the same legend can be common to more than one culture. And for me there were even echoes of this year's Scoil Cheoil an Earraigh in Ballyferriter, when Galician piper Anxo Lorenzo marched through the village celebrating the links between Corca Dhuibhne and Galicia's shared Celtic inheritance.

But some things remained quintessentially English.

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Easter on The Dingle Peninsula.

Jack says he doesn't know if anyone had chocolate eggs at Easter when he was a child. Round here they used to boil a big pot of newlaid eggs on Easter morning and compete to see who could eat the most of them. One man was said to have eaten twenty. There was a boy who claimed he'd had six hen's eggs, two duck eggs and a goose egg for his breakfast. 

I sat at Jack's table and we agreed that they wouldn't do it now. They'd have chocolate bunnies.

Here in Corca Dhuibhne, the peak of Mount Brandon's still crowned with ice but below in the valleys the earth's waking to springtime.

 

New traditions replace old ones and across continents and millennia the symbols shift and change. But this is the time of year when they all speak of death and resurrection, seedtime and harvest time, life in the earth, fire in the sun, and the power of the moon over water.

Once, before Easter was ever thought of, the egg was a potent symbol of fertility, strong enough to invoke a blessing or call down a curse. 

Once, before he became a chocolate bunny in foil wrapper, the hare was a servant of the Goddess.

He carried her messages to us from the moon.

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Spring Equinox on the Dingle Peninsula

The earth is waking

 

 Primroses and celandines gleam under briars on the ditches.

Furze smells like coconut when the sun warms its yellow flowers.

Snow lies thick on Mount Brandon, but the hills and valleys below are green with new grass. 

This year Easter falls only two weeks after St. Patrick's Day and between the two is the Spring Equinox,  when day and night are in balance and the wheel of the year turns again towards light, life and fertility.

In ancient Ireland at the turn of the year, fires were lit on the mountains and offerings were made to 

the Good Goddess and her consort the Sun God, 

to bless the earth and bring luck to seed time and harvest time.

Beneath last weekend's rituals in honour of St. Patrick were echoes of those older rites.

And this evening, high on Mount Brandon, the sunset glowed like a ritual fire .

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Memory and Potential on St. Patrick's Day

Ok, so this is the story...

'Patrick approached the High King's fort at Tara where the Druids stood by the chair of the High King. And every fire in Ireland was quenched that night. The druids had called up darkness and shrouded the hills in mist. Because there was a law that no fire should burn on the eve of the festival of Bealtine, when the druids themselves lit a fire to their pagan gods.'

'But Patrick came to the Hill of Slane and lit a fire there and prayed for the people of Ireland. The druids saw the flames of his fire from the height of the Hill of Tara, and they spoke to the High King and told him that Patrick should be killed. But Patrick came to the Hill of Tara from the Hill of Slane and he praised God there and told the High King of God's goodness. And the High King fell to his knees.'

'Then Patrick took a shamrock that was growing on the hill. The shamrock had three leaves on a single stem. And Patrick showed it to the druids and taught them the wonder of the Holy Trinity, that three persons existed in one God, truly distinct and equal in all things, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And the druids were amazed and fell to their knees and worshipped God.'

Generations of Irish children grew up with that story, passed on from generation to generation, in churches, by firesides and in schools. I remember it from my first picture book in which Patrick towered above the dark-faced druids with firelight behind him and the shamrock held aloft. Behind the druids the high king knelt by his carved throne. And behind the throne a man with a gold harp, with his head bowed, was holding the palms of his hands on the harpstrings to silence its pagan music.

But, as always, the truth's more complex than the legend. Though the legend contains echoes of the truth.

Last night, in Dublin, hi-tech green 'doodles' were projected on the buildings and the flickering, dancing images went viral on the internet. On Sunday there'll be parades in cities from Cork to Chicago and from Boston to Beijing. Green flags, gold harps and three-leaved shamrocks, dancing, drinking and celebration - the whole world's going green this weekend for St. Patrick, the bearded bishop in the green robes with his fistful of shamrock and his gleaming golden crozier.

But meanwhile, on the hills and in the valleys of Ireland, the earth itself is going green. And this was the wonder celebrated by the druids. For the ancient Celts, the ritual fire kindled in darkness at the feast of Bealtaine symbolised the triumph of light over darkness in the return of seedtime and the sun.

They too gathered to celebrate with dancing and music, parades, religious rites and wild parties. But they needed no explanation of the concept of a triple-aspect deity. Their own vision of springtime was contained in the image of a triple-aspect goddess, the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone. She was memory and potential, childhood, maturity and old age. Here in Corca Dhuibhne her name was Danú. Elsewhere she has other names. But everywhere it's her marriage to the Sun God that brings balance to the universe and fertility back to the earth.

This week a new pope was elected in Rome, the centre of the faith which Christian missionaries like Patrick brought to Ireland. This St. Patrick's Day I'll be thinking about memory and potential.

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The Next Big Thing

Last week I was surprised and delighted to be tagged by the poet Aine Macaodha in a Blog Hop called 'THE NEXT BIG THING'  in which writers answer ten questions on their work in progress and tag other writers to do the same.

(Image © National Museum of Ireland)

When I'm sailing uncharted waters my mind's mostly on feeling the current, so I tend to be fairly useless when it comes to talking about work that's unfinished. But Aine's invitation arrived when the draft of my next book was already off my desk and with my agent. That means that although it's still a work in progress I do have some degree of separation from it. So here are my responses to the ten questions.

 1) What is the title of your next book?

Currently it's called The Songs Within Birdsong - titles often change before publication, though.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

I've been exploring its themes all my life. The immediate impulse came from the social and physical dynamics of the area of inner London where I live when I'm not in Corca Dhuibhne. One central part of the plot arose from a conversation with my literary agent, Gaia Banks, who, as well as being an agent, is a born editor and creative facilitator.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

 It's a novel.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

When it comes to movies everyone wants a name attached, to secure funding. Yet at the same time you long for a producer and director with the courage and imagination to think actor first and funding second. Since one of my protagonists is an adolescent there'd probably be a decent chance of that with this book. And since the other principle character is Central European and in her eighties there are wonderful choices to be made. (Many of whom are names, actually - look at the casting for Hoffman's Quartet.) (Looks. Drools. Pulls herself together.) Casting's a funny thing, anyway. Sometimes you set your heart on an actor, get someone else and find yourself unable to conceive of a better performance than the one you end up with. 

5) What is a one sentence synopsis of your book?

Can't really answer that. I don't write to say something so much as to find out what it is I have to say. One sentence synopses can't be produced till a work's completely finished. Besides, I'm never sure the author's the right person to come up with them. 

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

My initial job's done once I deliver a draft that I'm happy with to Gaia and she's happy too. Then I drink tea, walk beaches and get on with the next thing till we get an offer from a publisher.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

My first drafts usually take a few months. Sometimes, as with this one, there are long breaks in the process. While writing my last book, which is a memoir, I realised that the oral, Irish language, tradition of storytelling has had as much influence on my work as the literary, English language tradition. That, combined with the fact that I've been a scriptwriter and playwright for most of my career, means I tend to see, hear and work on things in my head before I write them down. 

(There's a story about someone asking the Regency playwright Richard Sheridan if he'd completed a play he was working on. 'Yes,' he said, 'all that remains now is to write it.')

8) What other books would you compare yours to?

That's another thing I'm not sure authors should do.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?.

The starting point was Kindertotenlieder, a song-cycle by Gustav Mahler. The first title for the book was Dead Children Songs, which is a direct translation of Mahler's title.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Can't speak for my readers but the songs within birdsong concept delights and fascinates me because it exposes how much happens beyond human awareness. The heart of the book is the relationship between an adolescent and her grandmother.
This is how it opens:- 

'Birds speak in myriad fragments and complex patterns beyond our awareness. The stories of their lives reach us in disconnected snatches. In an egg a bundle of cells is suspended in liquid. Time brings a bird with the message of its cells imprinted in its voice. It speaks of danger, fear, hunger, aggression and desire. We hear songs.

The detail is lost. Digitally recorded birdsong, slowed down but played at pitch, reveals sounds within sounds, like painted Easter eggs one inside another. We now know that birds sing too fast for human ears.

Analysts have linked the speed of birds’ communication to the relative shortness of their lifespan. Humans, who live longer, have more time. But what we have to tell can also be lost.  Sometimes because it’s too hard to bear.' 


So that's it. Thanks for thinking of me, Aine. And, by the way, as I've been typing this I've had an email from Gaia saying she loves the draft. 

So .....

.... onwards and upwards.

Next week on THE NEXT BIG THING are two writers whose work I admire, one of whom I met recently, having read her blog, and one I've known and worked with in broadcast for many years. Many thanks to them both for accepting my invitation to blog hop.

Emily Benet

Emily Benet is a writer based in London. Her debut book, Shop Girl Diaries, began as a weekly blog about working in her mum’s unusual chandelier shop. Her blog was the winner of the CompletelyNovel Author Blog Awards at the London Book Fair 2010. She has written about the benefits of Social Media for writers in Publishing Talk, Mslexia and The New Writer and runs Blogging for Beginners and Improvers workshops. She is currently editing a romantic comedy called Spray Painted Bananas which she serialised on Wattpad. She blogs at www.emilybenet.blogspot.com

Michael Bartlett

As well as being a professional writer and a producer with a long and distinguished career in broadcasting, Michael Bartlett is a partner in Crimson Cats, a UK based audio book publishing company specialising in producing and publishing unusual and quirky audio books, mostly material which does not exist elsewhere in audio. From 1975 to the end of 1982 he worked for BBC Radio Drama, initially as a producer, then as Editor of Afternoon Theatre on Radio 4. Before that he worked as a Director in Children's Television, a reader in the Television Script Unit and a producer in Schools Radio. He blogs at  http://crimsoncats.co.uk/blog/

And do check out Aine's work too.

http://aine-macaodha.blogspot.co.uk/

http://ainemacaodha.webs.com/index.htm