History Redux [1] 'An Gorta Mor*'

 

[Google Images]



  Patrick Grugan looked around the squalid little workhouse. There was a fiendish grey light from Dingle Bay that signaled the approach of day, darting in and out of the wall cracks and window-less holes. The rain-sodden village of Clynacartan was still asleep. Following the light—there was no window,  just a hole in the wall draped with a piece of sackcloth that didn’t quite cover the hole--the embers of a turf fire were still glowing in one corner, and the feet of the children  seemed to be reaching for the waning warmth.

The woman next to him had stopped breathing. 

Grugan crawled closer to the fire and threw a couple of sods on top.  The young man lying closest to the fire opened one eye and then resumed sleeping.  The unmistakable smell of peat burning inside warded off the rising damp outside the workhouse; the flimsy hut looked like a gale would blow it any minute into Dingle Bay. A second room had collapsed on itself. Smoke columns started from the new sods and with it the children’s coughing. That is, from those who still could cough. All of these sounds acquired their own logic but Grugan was suddenly aware of something different. Feet were marching outside.  Then they stopped. Pikestaffs clinked and a horse whinnied in impatience.

Then the dawn silence was broken by a peremptory voice. It was a landlord’s agent. No mistaking the tone.

“How many take shelter here?”

A soldierly voice replied: “About seven or eight….we tried to round them up last night and escort them to the market place to put them on the cart but they gave us the slip…”

“Right.” The landlord’s agent spoke in monosyllabic disdain. “They should have complied…the cart would have taken them out of this squalor and filth….” His voice only served to underline his disgust.

Then he continued: “Burn it. Both of youse. Make sure no one gets out alive.  There are no rents to collect here. The rest of you come with me.”  Landlord’s agent, horse and soldiers formed a new marching rhythm, one that quickly distanced itself between them and the workhouse.

  Grugan’s mind was racing with fear. He shook the young lad.

“Get up…now!” he half whispered. “And check under the rug…see who is still alive…”

They didn’t have long. Outside in the damp morning air the soldiers would be smearing torches with pitch then using flints to set them alight. Every second counted.

Under the rug there were five children.

Four of them were dead. Dead from starvation.

Their twitching limbs rearranged the sodden straw in new formations, and the stench of human filth mingled with that of the peat within and the pitch-covered torches without.

Grugan looked out of the rag-covered hole that passed for a window and saw both soldiers kneeling, attending to the soon-to-be-lit torches. He reached into his threadbare jacket—he had already pawned his overcoat for food rations—and found his hurling stick. Drawing it out, he motioned to the young lad and child to crouch next to the back entrance, that which looked out at a shrouded and emerging McGillacuddy's Reeks.

“When I give the signal….” But his words faded into silence as a piercing shot penetrated the seagull-laced, morning silence. One of the soldiers stumbled into the front entrance, lit torch in hand, then careened backwards, blood spurting from his chest. Immediately Grugan sprang forward and  out, grabbed the torch and thrust it into the comrade’s face. Part fire, part pitch, his face started to sizzle at which point Grugan brought the hurling stick down hard on his skull.

“No one makes a funeral pyre of Patrick Grugan,” he snarled. Then he ran around the back where he was joined by his young companion. Out of the mist appeared a scruffy, red-haired man, all beard and whiskers with slightly blackened face. It was Micheal Sullivan.

“Jesus Mick, I might have known it was you,” Grugan smiled in obvious appreciation.

“Sons of Kerry...... the Flying Column…. I was following the landlord patrol….got here just in time, by the looks of it…”

He picked up the abandoned musket from his victim.

“Here….you take this….down the bracken and over that wee hill and ye should have a good view of that patrol. I’ll take care of the lad…..looks like he hasn’t eaten in days.”

“Good man,” replied the Grugan, “Ye read me mind entirely”. And off he set at a pace to head off the patrol. A steady rain was replacing the early mist as he raced up the wee hill and flattened himself upon the summit. The retreating  mist was patchy but rising. Grugan raised the musket to his shoulder and waited.

Looking closer at the massive rock he noticed the familiar signs. A Mass rock.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph…I’m lying on holy ground,” he chuckled to himself.

                   ********************************************

Grugan had never killed another person in his life. Once he had contemplated killing the village priest, just at the onset of the famine*. Looking for a bit of work, he had arrived at the priest’s cottage in the early evening and had stopped in his tracks outside the kitchen window. Inside he could see the father entertaining two of his fellow priests with steaming platters of crubeens, boiled potatoes, roasted vegetables, large onions. A large bumper of Rhenish stood in the center of the table. The feasting was accompanied by laughter and abject merriment. Grugan felt a dull ache in the pit of his stomach which was quickly replaced with burning resentment.

He knocked on the door.

There was no answer.

He knocked louder the second time, when, just then, Father Mooney opened the door.

“Grugan. What do ye want at this hour?” he inquired indifferently.

“Ah well, Father….I was ….I was jist wondering if ye needed anything done around yer place like? I’d work for…….” But he never completed the thought as the door was slammed in his face. Someone had once said [rightly in Grugan’s mind] that “the clergy always had too much power over the unfortunate people in this country…” ** He had witnessed it in first person.

                   *********************************************

The clanking of pikestaffs brought him sharply back to his own reality. He looked down the barrel of his musket and waited. One shot. Must make it count. No second chances, that’s for certain. Water dripped from his hat all the way down his fine, aquiline nose.

The landlord’s agent rode into view, followed by three, maybe four foot soldiers. He cocked the musket, inhaled deeply three times and pulled the trigger. The musket ball ripped through the agent’s throat and then exited through the back of his head, causing him to first arch back from the sheer force. He then slumped forward and his confused mount started to make despairing circles around the soldiers.

“From over there…” a voice pointed in Grugan’s  direction.

“No…it was from over there…”

Just then another shot rang out and took down one of the soldiers, from the completely opposite direction.

“God bless you, Mick” Grugan uttered and began retreating from the Mass rock, down the wee hill, keeping to the edge of the peat bog as he made for the Tralee Road.

Predictably the second shot had confirmed the direction of the agent's killer and the remaining soldiers set off in that direction.

*Ireland, An Gorta Mor [the great hunger], 1846

** Cap'n Jacky Boyle, "Juno & The Paycock"

[Places #1] Wounded Knee

 

 

 

[Google Images]


*an excerpt from the film*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irjRMmQ1n-A

*Henry Dawes: This isn't about money, gentlemen,

this is about human beings.

And when you make an agreement,

you have a solemn obligation

- to fulfill-

- In spite of this atrocity...

President Grant: I still believe that setting the Indians

on the course to civilization

best ensures their survival.

Now, do you or do you not agree?

Henry Dawes: Yes, sir. I do.

President Grant: Then you can't deny

that there's no saving the Sioux

unless we compel them

to give up their way of life

and settle

on the reservation.

General Sherman: I'll say it till

my tongue bleeds-

If we're ever going to claim

what we bought from the French

and whooped

the Mexicans for,

it's going to mean

killing Indians.*

Blogger comment: [an excerpt from 'Wachichu', blog post, October, 2014]

     .... I listened intently. 'What a marvelous story, full of promise, and yet also full of sadness......'
'It is a metaphor for our peoples. We have wandered so far from Iktomi's web in pursuit of the white man's dream of occupation, I'm not sure how we get back to our original destiny....'
'Sounds like a spiritual dilemma,' I affirmed.
'Mostly a historical one. As early as 1790, the Indian Intercourse Act stated that the sale of Indian lands was invalid unless sanctioned by a public treaty...which, of course the US government had to approve....'
'As early as that?' I asked.
'This country was still a child, a child with thirteen grandparents. Some people in my tribe say that the Act of 1790 marked the end of the white man's vision for America...'
'And replaced it with?' I continued.
'Greed. Or, if you prefer, lebensraum. A blueprint for owning land....any land. My land. Your land. 'This land is your land.....your land is my land.' A beginning to what was later to become 'eminent domain'. Some thirty years later, we were, in 1823, given what they called tribal rights, but it became clear to our peoples that any such rights were spun around the interminable webs of the federal law.....'

I was quickly becoming Blog-interested.
I ordered another round. He was just getting into his historical stride.
'Subsequent treaties between our peoples and the white man simply became a kind of pretext for nullifying our land titles and opening these same lands for white settlement. Occupation of our 'lands' on the backs of the law. That was the beginning of what is known as reservations**.... We had become trapped in a web of the white man's making.....'

He was silent for a moment.
'We Native Americans....we have never been a nation. We were always a nation of nations....and Iktomi the trickster never found a need to spin lawyers from our web. We had no understanding of owning the land....rather, the land owned us. 
But I digress. In 1870 the white man ended the practice of making treaties with our peoples. This was quickly followed by the Dawes Act, whereby we were encouraged to own small tracts of land so we could follow civilized agrarian practices instead of hunting, fishing and gathering. We had no say, you understand, where those tracts would be, because they kept on changing. We were also allotted some land for grazing purposes. But with the demise of the plains' buffalo, it was as if the white man had killed our vision, for all time.....'

I winced, perceptibly.
'So, let me see if I understand, ' I continued. 'First, the government said that your land [which you didn't think was your land in the first place] was not really your land to think of....and since it really wasn't your land anyway, they then moved you off the good tribal lands as preoccupation after preoccupation came along--gold, railroads, buffalo hunts....'
'That indeed is the gist, my friend. Let me also say that, after the Dawes Act, our peoples lost some 90,000,000 acres of tribal land. You do the math. That is a lot of land. And it wasn't until some fifty years later that the Indian Reorganization Act started to disavow the practice....'
I grew quiet. 
Strangely quiet. Somehow I knew where this was going.

I broke my own silence. 'So, in 1890, when the Battle of Wounded Knee took place...'
He interrupted me in mid sentence.
'Wounded Knee was a massacre. It was no battle. Almost two hundred of our peoples--many defenceless women and children--were slaughtered there. Our refusal to surrender our Indian-ness, to succumb to the bad forces, to change our ways of life, broke both the DreamCatcher and the inner web.'
He paused for a moment, closed his eyes, then intoned: 

'Black Elk, a medicine man, said it best: "I did not then know how much was ended. When I look back from the high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch......And I see that something else died there in the bloody mud. It was buried in the blizzard--a people's dream died there....and it was a beautiful dream......."'


Wounded Knee was where our conversation ended. 
Just as the Lakota dream had ended.
As I said previously......December arrived early in Philadelphia this year.
December, 1890..


*lines from the film, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee  [from the book by Dee Brown] 

People [2]: TF Powys

 

 

[Google Images--TF Powys]

"...lie thee down, somebody..."*

   Progressively, it's getting harder and harder to become a nobody.
No matter how hard I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they 'work' on  losing your self, carefully and methodically applying the RS Peters principle of setting yourself free from your ignorance, prejudice and preconceived ideas, some version of your somebody-ness is always lurking in the background of your paltry little life, always ready to raise its ugly head. And, while the struggle is constant, it is all part of the dance [as foretold by Lord Krishna, lo these many kalpas ago].

  Take the other day for example.
I had just finished talking with a freshman philosophy class about the dangers inherent in a cult of personality, when, during the break, one of the students sidled up to me and said: "Professor Kinch..I just want you to know how much I enjoy your class. I really look forward to it..." Instead of channelling the Suzuki principle [a good teacher knocks down the idol his students would make of him] I allowed myself to bask in the glow of this fleeting  [and empty] praise. Ephemerally earned praise left a bad taste in my mouth.
Lie thee down, somebody...

 Then just the other day I was  visiting a Professor of Eastern Studies, Dr. SeeMore Godbole, and he offered me some tea. I was talking about this and that, and some more about this and  that, so he just kept pouring the tea, slowly. Unable to restrain myself, I finally uttered: 'Professor Godbole, no more tea will go in the cup...it is beginning to overflow..."
He stopped pouring and smiled. 'I was hoping for a conversation but your monolog just made me pour and pour...and pour...'
We both laughed. And then we had a real conversation.
Lie thee down, somebody...

  Much earlier this month, I was volunteering at my local Foodbank, when an elderly woman [who was recovering from a recent surgery] required a bit of help carrying her government supplies--meat, cheese, eggs, and butter--to her old, beat-up car. And since I was between tasks [and follow directions well], I was given the job.

  Initial small talk soon gave way to more serious subjects, and an exchange about generational versus situational poverty. In my rush to empathize, I told her that I had [at least in my mind] flirted with being on the poverty line several times whilst attending the Uni. She listened impatiently to my tale, shot me a seriously look, then said: 'That was misfortune that visited you, once or twice...' and, straightening herself, added:
'Did you ever wonder where your next meal was coming from?
Did you ever freeze on a cold winter night because they had cut off your electricity and the little money you had was spent on food, rather than paraffin?
Did you ever consider putting an end to it all? No one or nothing left to live for?'

  She stopped, waiting for my response.
There was no response other than my face turning various shades of red, and imperfectly forming an I am well rebuked expression.
Lie thee down, somebody...
Lie thee down..
Lie the..
Lie..


*borrowed from a short story by TF Powys

Conjuring Tir-na-nOg [revisited], Act 1, Scene 1

 

[Sullivan images]

"....last night, I dreamed I was on Tir-na-nOg..." [Colm O'Driscoll]

Aibric: A beach.

Somewhere on the shoreline of Tir-na-nOg…

A pale grey-green sky heralding another dawn.

In the distance, the sound of seagulls…

a raucous counterpoint to the rhythmic waves

beating against the shoreline; four largish birds

silhouetted, circling. And circling. Listen.

Something’s about to happen that will unlock the magic and mystery of this tale..

 about Tir-na-nOg- the island of eternal youth,

mentioned in Irish legends, folktales and faerytales…

an oral tradition staring down centuries; an island

where Time seems to stand still, or at least long enough

to help us forget about there ever was a Time…

1^st Drowned Voice: for here no rain falls, nor sleet, nor snow, and the people who live here—for the most part the Sidhe—always seem to be young..

2^nd Drowned Voice: an island that moves, always seeking a new and different compass destiny. Tidal, and alternately non-tidal, magically drifting up and down these Atlantic shorelines, sometimes off the Skerries, sometimes kissing the arch of the Aran Islands, sometimes lingering by Doonbeg…

Aibric: and occasionally, once in a moonless moon,

 directly above the Soul Cages, the home of..Coomara,

  sometimes known as The Lord of these Soul Cages;

along with yours truly, you can also find some winsome Merrows,

keeping the place under the waves all ship-shape and shipwreck-friendly…

Aibric: But to our tale..

1^st Drowned Voice: it seems that a small boat, a corragh, has gone aground on the rocks jist off the Skelligs..

2^nd Drowned Voice: and a young fisherman by the name of Colm O’Driscoll had lashed himself to a wooden plank and was drifting..

Aibric: with the drowned sailors’ magnetic pull closer and closer to Tir-na-nOg, that jist happened to be ‘moored’—if indeed that’s the word of the moment—a hop, skip and a swim from Skellig Micheal..

Colm O’Driscoll: in a salt-water induced haze, occasionally lit be a cloud-begotten moon, I could see a shoreline jist ahead of me. Some force greater than mine pushed me, with a strange but gentle force onto the waiting shoreline. There I grabbed a hold of the welcome sand and pulled myself up from the shoreline..

Coomara: Jist then a tidal surge began pulling on the waves, dragging young O’Driscoll slowly back down the beach towards the murky moonlit blackness

1^st Drowned Voice: where we were waiting, willing the waters to capture another soul and take him..

2^nd Drowned Voice: to a home under the waves in a kaleidoscope wing of the Soul Cages, full of dead sailors’ souls, chirping in unison: Join us…join us…join us..

Colm O’Driscoll: in desperation, I looked around quickly, saw a clump of sea kelp attached to a thick driftwood branch and grabbed a hold of it. I felt me legs being pulled downwards back to the sea shoreline, as I tightened my grip inside the kelp, wrapping as much as I could around my wrist…

Aibric: for Tir-na-nOg was slowly moving, swaying first this way then that as if waiting for a definite tidal direction..

1^st Drowned Voice: the seawater began to tear at him from all sides, slowly back into the jaws of the impatient waves, pulling him ineluctably down, down, down.. But….jist then something magical happened…

Malicho Dan Doonan: there I was out for a constitutional, when I noticed this supine body on the shoreline, moving ever so slightly every time the fading gibbous moon left the clouds behind..

Aibric: and Dan, being a man of action, ran quickly to that shoreline, extending his long left hand to the gasping grasping young man…

1^st Drowned Voice: and that’s when we released young O’Driscoll from our magnetic clutches…the Soul Cages would have to wait..

Colm O’Driscoll:  ..that long arm was a lifeline so I reached out and fastened my hand to its hand. My saviour’s arm seemed longer than a normal man’s arm, but the sand and sea coating my eyes blurred what was right in front of me..

Malicho Dan Doonan: I pulled the young man—for young man he was…a fisherman I’m thinking—across the sandy shoreline and out of the fitful darkness…

Aibric: the young man could make out the shape of an oversized man, his long arms a welcome mystery to a drowning man..

Colm O’Driscoll: ..those longish arms covered in tightfitting tweed, a face that resembled a finely carved turnip, hair every which way, all framing a puckish grin..

Malicho Dan Doonan: the Malicho Dan Doonan at yer service. Call me Dan. Or The Doonan, if ye feel inclined…

Aibric: ..and thus begins our tale of mystery and magic, magic and mystery..

not seen or heard of on Tir-na-nOg since the time Niamh rode over the waves on Embarr, with Oisin the warrior in tow..

 

 

Everyday Poetry [1]: 'Everyday Things We Forget'

 

[Art by Guilia Bernadelli]

“And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.”

          William Butler Yeats, “Byzantium”

 

“It was always burning since the world’s been turning”

          Fall Out Boy, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”

 

Everyday Things We Forget:

 

To leap across the lava, or better yet

build a bridge

with everything that is

within our reach, anything we think

can bear our weight and take the heat.

 

To savor plates of emptiness and drink, slowly,

cups of tea,

overflowing make-believe,

blowing our own steam.

 

That we are nothing

but aware

and every day we walk through flames,

sustained by air.

 

[by Carrie Danaher Hoyt, Poet]