Perspectives on Ireland II

Self Evaluation

13MAR1998

In this evaluation, given the immensity of our work over the past two quarters, I have a task as difficult as all the warriors of Ireland trying to dislodge CúChulainn from the ford. The amount of information we have covered is overwhelming, especially in regard to the desire to integrate and connect the disparate source materials and biases. The length and breadth of which included over twenty texts, nine plays, nigh fifty poems, between twenty and thirty songs sung and played, an equal number of films and student performances - not to mention the lectures by our faculty team, and the poetry, proverbs, and folktales recited by students. My creative output has been extensive; eighty-seven pages of writing, a good deal of which is integrative in focus and content. I took part in the reading and performance of five plays, two of which were part of our collaborative group work at quarters' end. I memorized and recited six poems, one of which was in Gaelic. In addition I recited a story from Irish folklore, and produced two illuminated manuscripts. I learned conversational Gaelic phrases for the evaluation process. The incredible amount of work at times felt like a tsunami from which I could not escape. Never the less, it is with an incredible sense of accomplishment that I can look back on this, the end of my Freshmen year at Evergreen, and take in the vast expanse of terrain we have traversed.

I took on the Perspectives on Ireland program primarily due to my interest in the ancient Gaelic culture. I felt it would be better to dive into a subject I had already developed an affinity for; not to limit the amount of intellectual work, but to reorient myself with the educational process, so as to not get in over my head my first time back in these waters. In seminar my work in the Interpretation: Comparative Religion program last year helped me to sift through extraneous information I had uncovered in my own searching, and to bring in informative connections as opposed to non sequitors. In this program I was able to address and correct many a faltering from that first quarter. I completed all the readings and took notes on the texts in order to inform my seminar discussions, I took a more active role in the seminar process, and in my attendance I missed only two days and one seminar throughout both quarters. This program has allowed me to embrace the scholar in my personality, which so many others have recognized, but to my mind is still unactualized.

My intellectual accomplishments in this program are also informed by what I struggled to do in that first program; focusing on the texts at hand and listening to what they were saying. Both of my final exams in this program were praised for their integration and used as examples of what the faculty was looking for. I feel that my work in this program exhibits a desire to delve deeper into, and 'get dirty' working with, the material; to not be taken in by generalities and superficialities, but to look to a more connective and substantial understanding. One of the major intellectual 'salmon leaps' I took was in using the Möbius strip to explicate the continual motif of ironic juxtapositions or 'boundary crossings'. The image arose in a discussion of the Yeats poem The Second Coming. In particular I used this image to show how in Condren's The Serpent and The Goddess, the matrifocal cultures of the early Indo-Europeans, specifically the Gaelic Celts, were turned away from the family kinship of 'milk-ties' and into the national kingship of 'blood-ties'. In essence turning life and love into death and war. This informs our interpretation of the Táin, showing it to be as Kinsella points our, an 'ironic anti-feminist poem'. This idea has given me an effective means to explain this paradigm shift, which is as readily apparent in the Irish Táin, as it is in the Greek Orestia. In the end, the freedom and power which women held in ancient Ireland, as seen in the Brehon laws, is sharply contrasted with the constitution of DeValera's Ireland of 1922, which posits she draws her importance in the state from her ability to produce children. As James Joyce might say, more nettles for the 'sow who eats her sorrow'.

The crossing of boundaries was a major theme in our work throughout this program. In Condren we see the use of sacral loci of Pagan Ireland being utilized in the new religion. Ard Macha and Brugh na Bóinne become Armagh, Patrick's seat and Kildare, Bridget's sacred site. As we saw in Patrick's Biography, he utilized Druidic techniques to aid in the spreading of his faith among the heathen Irish; showing how the pre-Christian beliefs of Ireland influenced the form Christianity took there. Cahill suggests in How the Irish Saved Civilization that the red or blood martyrdom, in the Irish, became the green or hermetic (Druidic) and the white or monastic (exile); turning death back to life and perserving Classical knowledge in the process.

The Gaelic language functions to make the invaders' beliefs and languages adapt to their new environment, as seen in the way Gaelic syntax is superimposed over the English of the Cromwellian Planters, even though as we saw in Translations the British were intent on the eradication of its use. With Cromwell, we have a shifting of a political and temporal based struggle turned into a cultural and religious was, which still has a grip on the Irish throat today. Another ironic twist on parallel with the kin and king mentioned above is seen in the openness and community as expressed by Dark Eileen's Iron Age moral triad, 'Generous, Handsome, and Brave', being turned into the fear and dislocation of post-Hunger Ireland.

This quarter the juxtapositions weren't as apparent, but are none the less there to be uncovered. Principally they are seen in Erin's Daughters in America, where Hasia Diner comments on the powerlessness of women in the Catholic Church in Ireland. It is contrasted with their overwhelming importance in establishing the American Catholic Church, and the network of services attached to it, hospitals, orphanages, and schools; the cornerstone of the Irish American communities. Another powerless to power shift takes place in the establishment of the Irish electorate in the Democratic Party, offering a political agency completely absent in Ireland. The idea of the 'fifth province' in Kearney's Postnationalist Ireland, suggests that we have to look to the neither/nor, the pivotal point at which the Möbius strip twists like a Celtic knot, for a solution; a door out of this querulous house we are ensconced in.

My fifth week essay last quarter discussed a point I keep returning to in regard to the information I have been immersed in these last two quarters. I have a desire to establish an educational curriculum, a non-profit foundation whose purpose is to reawaken many of the Irish cultural themes we have worked with. One of the major themes is the collision of traditional oral and a modern literate culture, which we warned isn't to be viewed as so many do, as an either/or dichotomy but a functional synthesis of the dualism. In addition to the song work we have done all year, we worked within the oral mode of folktales and poetry the last three weeks of the program. These were the techniques which the filidh or Bards utilized to encapsulate their history, genealogy, poetics, and musical styles. In the same way the Druids worked with natural sciences, medicine, metaphysics, and philosophy; they were the information technologies of their culture. Elizabeth's "kill all harpers", flushed them out of the felled forests and destroyed them, effectively silencing these culture bearers and insuring Britain's cultural hegemony.

As Collins suggests in Cultural Conquest of Ireland, the Gaelic language is a powerful example of how a 'being' culture operates. The connection to temporal existence, the subjective view as opposed to objectification, the animism or agency invested in the 'other', whether it be a plant, an animal, or abstract concept, all of these are represented in the 'psychodynamics' of the Gaelic preposition ag or 'at'. This connection to place and things, which in our 'filthy modern tide' is twisted into commodity and psychological dysfunction, is something we have reason to want to reawaken. The indigenous form of Christianity and the Paganism of ancient Ireland have a place within the framework of the postmodern 21st century, if only to reassert our connection to ourselves, our community, our planet, and to reaffirm our responsibility as stewards of the entire global community.

By far though, the most important aspect of the Irish culture, which needs to be incorporated into our educational framework, is hospitality. Joyce in 'The Dead' has Gabriel saying, "our country has no tradition which does it so much honor and which it should guard so jealousy as that of hospitality". It is reflected in the words of Dark Eileen on her husband's gravestone, "Generous, Handsome, and Brave". Another example is the John Hewlitt poem 'The Scar'. The grandmother accepts the diseased into her home, knowing it precedes her own demise. She offers food to the less fortunate, even in the depth of despair, which was the Great Hunger. Most importantly, she offers up her own life to keep the 'mantle of Irishry' alive in the country's darkest hour. The emotive connection which existed in our program community shows how the Evergreen experience is working towards making this a functional aspect of our educational work here, and our future experiences outside the classroom as well.