Cradle Catholic

"I was educated in public + parochial schools in L.A. and was raised very Catholic. I was taught by and still know many devoted people, lay and clerical. I am no longer practicing, and the family I have married into and raised two sons in is not Catholic. I weigh the good the Church has done with the bad; I stand apart. BTW, 1/10th of Americans are ex-Catholic. If not for immigrants, the parishes would be empty indeed in many places. As w/ Ireland now." 

I posted this on a Facebook feed after a friend there, a native of Dublin now living about 30 miles east of me, reflected on raising his children non-Catholic. He and his wife were cradle Catholics.

Another friend, whom I admire for his principles hard-won and doggedly expressed against threats of violence to him and his family, assists his local St. Vincent de Paul charity in his Irish small city. He reasoned that in the absence of state assistance, the poor and the neglected earn their keep and their minding from volunteers such as himself. I accompanied him on his rounds, as two men are assigned to go together to avoid any disrepute. Although an articulate and vehement non-believer, his background, like nearly all the Irish friends I have, remains embedded in our tribe, our "romish" clan.

A week ago, I received an Ancestry DNA test to take. Lacking knowledge of my genetic history in the absence of contacts, my wife suggested I spring the $100 for this. It will match my autosomal DNA with any others in the pool at that site. Unfortunately, there's no one database. FamilyTreeDNA is a rival, with its own tests and participants. And then there's Google's 23+Me (although limited now on what it can share about health findings), and in Europe, MyHeritage. This can all add up to a few hundred dollars, and not counting the pricier Y-DNA paternal and mitochondrial offerings for deeper knowledge. Still, for those of us cut off or ignorant of the strains good or bad within us, it's progress.

When I got to the religious affiliation, I hesitated. Unlike Ireland and many nations, one's denomination is not asked by our census, and rarely have I ever had to tick any box for it on any document, I realize. I put "prefer not to answer," but after reading the reactions to the sad revelations revived about "the Tuam babies" scandal at the ironically christened Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, I am reconsidering. I leave certain details discreet, but suffice to say that this home rose in the vicinity of where my grandparents would have grown up, and that "by the grace of..." in my own family tree...So, that makes me wonder. Despite my own disaffiliation, by tribal ties, for probably 1600 years, my ancestral allegiance among my nameless forebears has been to this Church.

Therefore, for genealogists, my data may align better with narrowed parameters if I claim this identity. It may no longer be mine in action, but in my origins, however free of genetic influence, the patterns imprinted in my psyche, my quirks, and my outlook may gain some traces of trauma passed down, as has now been confirmed, by a harrowing series of unfortunate events, so to say, endured.

In conclusion, I leave this generalized for protection of my own story, and what I know or do not know of it remains mostly occluded by law, reticence, and time. But my search for origins, to dispel my own conception when I was brought up of my own "origin myth," persists as a strong factor in my own makeup, both of nature and nurture. And reflecting on the terminated stories of so many near my "home turf" I realize I will have to go back and change my affiliation, in testimony to this inheritance.

Fate of my fathers

Last year, I remarked to a FB thread that the Irish might have suffered trauma in surviving An Gorta Mór. A recent study verified this epigenetic transfer to children born to parents who had endured the Holocaust, after all. I was mocked immediately as if I was trying to support white privilege, and as if I was discounting somehow the experience of the Middle Passage and black slavery and abuse.

Not sure how all this equates in the victimhood sweepstakes, but it wasn't my intent to enter that contest. I merely wondered, as Séan de Fréine did half a century ago in his little book The Great Silence, how the impact of the sudden and dramatic loss of one's identity rooted in language, culture, and family might be shattered so its effects were transferred by mores and habits from those effected.

In de Fréine's account, he focused on the nationalist legacy, but I recall hearing Garrett O'Connor speak of this in nature as well as nurture terms twenty-odd years ago. His chapter on this topic in Tom Hayden's The Great Famine collection of essays suggested from O'Connor's treatment of we Irish how this might have come down 150 years later, and left imprints on dynamics and complexes.

My ancestral region has lost 80% of its population since that mass death and emigration crippled its economy, its coping mechanisms, and its people's prospects. How might that have emanated in my forebears? How, huddled in a farmhouse rebuilt around 1851, might they have dealt with this--or not?

Psychoanalyst Michael O'Loughlin explores this, and he lists some of the research advanced. It's no longer apparently a fringe idea, despite my FB deniers. As genetics progresses, so do explanations.

Now, I write this short entry far from my expertise, but I raise it anew as I happened to see one pundit fear how this upsetting behavior undergone by millions now might echo down the DNA so to speak. The shakeup among half the nation in terms of their expectations for the election leaves many around me self-medicating with more pot, more booze, and more indulgences. I lack this reaction, but it may be indeed my inherited detachment from emotion from my own clan, who knows? An useful article in Discover Magazine in March 2013 elaborates discoveries of Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf.

Apparently I am vindicated. While my own family history is left for discretion off this day's reflections, I can see evidence for supporting patterns I have inherited from stress and separation very early on. While this does not ease my challenges directly, it does offer me explanations for why I am at least in part--is it nature and nurture?-- the way I perplexingly am, facing a topsy-turvy New Year.

Rule book or blank pages?

The Hedge School 

Five hoot-calls of an owl awoke me this dawn. Regarding this long in my life as my "totem" despite my recent Apache student's warning that this in her culture reads as a death message, I took this as a pre-Election Day harbinger. Sure, the entrails drawn and stars scryed read victory for Her, but our motley He-men loom, "useful idiots" manipulated for those, the shadow government who pulls our nation down.

Such rhetoric may be hyperbole, but the prophecies emitted over this "long national nightmare," to lift a phrase from the recent past which formed my coming-of-age, meant for me, as I've written before here, a skeptical bent towards the claims of power. Originally I looked to "put not my trust in princes, in man in whom there's no salvation/On the day he departs, his spirit returns to dust/On that day his plans die," to summon up a song from my youth taken from the Psalms. I suppose I toss that world-negating cast within my own prognostications, as I've always been drawn to those abnegating Mr. Dryasdust's norm or the stultifying Laputan, from my Confirmation patron St. Francis to the Irish republicans whose "blood" flows in me from a great-grandfather I discovered less than a decade ago was "drowned in mysterious circumstances" on a Land League 1898 delegation from Co. Roscommon to the city on the Thames.

The past few years, since Occupy, have found me delving into left-libertarian and anarchist thought. I did not know the typological niche in poli-sci where my non-state-socialist-sympathizing (but very suspicious of any political machine's machinations) leanings led me, for while some I respect chose Marx, I wanted a simpler, more egalitarian, transformating energy with room for misfits, seekers, and introverts. Even the milennarian schemes of the democratic left, for me, left not enough space for ambiguity, for a quest into the earthy, the numinous, the intellectual, the intuitive all. I suspect authority and recall the first grade meeting with my mom and my teacher, when she castigated me for the look on my face when criticized or disagreeing, a quirk I'm unable to shake. Even when I think I have a poker face, I don't, according to chagrined colleagues who chuckle, chiding me too late.

But I also mistrust the common herd. They're misled, and voting and democracy while ingrained in me betray the machinations of Her against Bernie, the evasion of ethics, the will to power consuming our people and our planet. Too many capitulate. I'm from the once-lauded, now despised "working class," oddly, the "scholarship boy" defined by Richard Hoggart and then popularized by Richard Rodriguez when I was in college on Pell and Cal Grants. But mortás cine, the pride I felt in Montana among those committed to passing on the ways of the heritage in a climate shunted aside for its lack of shade, is lacking in the city where I was born, far from the centers of the community the diaspora tries to grasp. No less than the bien-pensant elites with whom my more modest wife and my college-educated sons associate with, I suppose my own humble liberal arts pursuit churns me out into a chilly milieu, where nothing the DNC ever does can be equated with Him and His, and where flyover countryfolk are mocked and memed, in ways that these elites would never dare due to those of any other category or identification. Where surnames are summed up and approved lineages calculated and promoted. We're charted, boxes to check for Uncle Sam, and inevitably "identity politics" is used to generate gains for some and losses for others, in a society where nobody's the majority anymore.

Getting students to think about this tires them out. I've tried to integrate subversion, different points of view from an ideological range against the norms, but my students and colleagues are career-driven. As my institution symbolizes, one attends not to ask Big Questions, but to get tidy answers. Few then, want to undermine the paradigms by which they secure careers. The humanities attracts the discontents, but even there, most of those studying them today choose their own conformity of non-conformity, where every standard must be overturn. Instead of reading Shakespeare or Milton to appreciate or attack them, it's expedient to abandon them, and analyze Lady Gaga or the Simpsons. I show the five-minute tale of terror that's Hamlet for Bart, but I also include the play itself, first...

We're all able to enter the liberal arts. But now we're told it frees none; it's for the dead, tainted by a certain complexion or class, that it reeks of privilege. Yet out of it, sullied as it is, emerged those all around the world who wrestled with its tensions, and out of them, responded with their own informed creations. On my native island, some in my family tree might have learned Virgil in a hedge school.

As Daniel Mendelsohn asked in Harper's of his own realization of his same-sex attractions as a teen, a man almost exactly my own age: "Do you identify with what separates you from others, rather than what links you to them?" I paraphrase, but this ranking is one by melanin and genitalia on us, that delegates to the front of the line or relegates to the back, the first last, the last first, on Judgment Day.

Othala

(O: Ancestral property.) Inherited property or possessions, a house, a home. What is truly important to one. Group order, group prosperity. Land of birth, spiritual heritage, experience and fundamental values. Aid in spiritual and physical journeys. Source of safety, increase and abundance. Othala Reversed or Merkstave: Lack of customary order, totalitarianism, slavery, poverty, homelessness. Bad karma, prejudice, clannishness, provincialism. What a man is bound to.


This précis brings me round to the past few months. This blog's found me in hiatus. I've continued to archive new entries as book reviews, but I had to beg off after the end of February, vowing to rearrange my stored-up posts in my spare moments. These proved elusive due to heavier teaching loads, tendonitis, longer commutes, and audio books putting me to sleep after drives, rather than in print. I had also piled up as is my wont a lot of titles to review, and these turned into book reports of sorts, one always waiting due to remind me of my academic production line, and my need to please.

One project, which will be a chapter on the evolution of Irish folk-metal for a forthcoming anthology edited by my friend, Dr. Jenny Butler (now lecturing in Folklore at Univ. College Cork, to the delight of many), kept reminding me of procrastination's Sword of Damocles dangling over my greying head. It also kept in the back of my mind her chapter on neo-Druidry. And my drift to the North, videlicet. 

Finishing that task Mid-Summer's Day, I faced then increased teaching online in two courses of about three-dozen students each the past two terms to consume me, along with onsite courses. These online assignments are heavy, and take up a considerable amount of attention. The failure of my work PC (twice now) led to further tsurris, compounded by slow routers at home and the evasion of storing up much on an older laptop resurrected in a pinch (twice now). And I confess, for pleasure and profit in teaching, that FB has taken me onto its engineered conveyor line (no two times the same, thanks to its design, as we pursue likes, seeing our name over and over, and beckoned to share more "moments").

With my talk on anarchist reactions to the Rising timed for the ACIS-West conference in Missoula, I rushed to finish grading as the rush of finals grew during the gathering. Meanwhile the failure of my PC taken with me to Sea-Tac Airport found me reduced to pecking my Kindle for all things electronic. But I was not as despairing as before, for I'd backed up nothing again on the perfidious, aging PC replacement work issued me, all our laptops, it seems, going down around me in the other cubicles from my fellow toilers. Again, a portent of readiness: a call to hunker in, to stay alert now.

For a few friends I trust, from FB and some crossing over from there or to there from "real life" the past decade of change (what else?) in my quest, have all counseled me separately and lately. Prepare for what is to come. Remember my "warrior" side, shown not in battle (for I who was in the first cohort to sign up for Selective Service, who at 17 wrote to put myself on the record as a C.O. opposed to any state-induced induction, who remains committed to rejecting the order to kill even as I teach those who will never hear of my late-teen choice, my classes of 30-70% veterans, who in turn often must go to the nearby VA, to treat their wounds of body or mind.) but in commitment to justice, to a search for meaning, to a suspicion of cant and an intolerance for imposition of algorithms.

Why I am so comprised, due to nature or nurture, the fates or some genealogical resurgence, I'm stumped by my luck or lack in the DNA lottery. I woke up a few summer months ago with a firm resolve in my mind to pull down the copy of Halldór Laxness' Independent People from my shelf. Maybe as an inbred reaction to counter a hundred-degree heatwave here, but I rapidly decided, after enjoying the first few pages, to halt it to find out more about the Icelandic context. That led me to his biography, and his novel The Atom Station, and then Wayward Heroes, newly translated and reviewed. I like that take-down a lot, of the medieval Christian ethos and of group-think, penned as an adaptation of two sagas during the height of the Cold War, written in the last years of Stalin by a committed Communist who had begun to waver in his own faith substituted for his early Catholic conversion, but who remained, cranky, driven to yearn for rebellion in his fiction, and in his career.

A suitable figure to accompany me, Laxness' other fiction will continue to beckon me. I've also been listening to Saga Thing, a nicely punned podcast devoted to great length of the Icelandic corpus. Think of NPR's "Car Talk" but with discussions of the mechanics of kennings and the breakdowns of order rather than transmissions a thousand-plus years ago, related by skalds of their doughty forebears. I also followed along with Njál and Egil in their titular adventures, getting a sense of the guiding forces propelling their compatriots along. While Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders proved a let-down, at least I finally ended that, as I'd hoped to get insight into the failure of that Norse lot. She also stumbled when updating the Decameron into Ten Days In the Hills, so I guess despite her useful summation of the Middle Ages as great for the creative spark as they combine imagination with rigor, Smiley lacks the knack of vivid depiction of this era. Laxness similarly contended four years against depression in the creation of Wayward Heroes, and its appearance in 1952 was during dark Red hues.

Swinging into the long stretch, I've been musing how Norse ideals and a Northern mythos can or cannot align with a cantankerous mindset of mine unwilling to submit to divine creeds or to entertain the notion of deities revealed to us anymore than they are published by DC Comics or churned out as Marvel blockbusters. My students flock to manga and FPS and cosplay more and more, and I tell them that the gods do live on around us, even as churches dwindle and "nones" increase among them.

My exposure to the North gets me curious. My mother's surname although an Co. Mayo-originating clan--able if in legend to track itself back to not only the brother of Niall of the Nine Hostages but the root of their allies as the Northern Uí Neill, Conchobor Mac Nessa from the Táin itself-- I learned a few days ago may betray a Scandinavian tinge, confusingly. For "fionn" connotes a fair or bright one, conjectured by one antiquarian to derive from the lighter appearance of the "Viking" blow-ins. Not sure how this aligns with the definitely indigenous strain that's 93% of my DNA test, but that 6% Central Asian tinge lingers with a distant confirmation of the shamans and the steppes before the Ice Age receded and Doggerland became drained enough to separate the isles from the Continent. And that 1% East Asian may playfully explain my scholarly and personal curiosity about Buddhism, too.

All this circles round to the past few weeks. I'd naturally gravitated in my reading to see, before this surname find, if the revival of Ásatrú I knew of from Michael Strimska's chapter in Modern Paganism (where Jenny B has her valuable observer-participant account of Irish neo-paganism) might be worth a revisit. I reviewed the book a few years ago, and it struck me that only stregheria, the sorcery line in Italy, had arguably survived the Christian crackdown, despite the earnest claims of many that their so-and-so had sustained the Craft in the so-called Burning Times with the romantic or rhetorical excesses that accompany that epoch in New Age tellings. My medievalist training may mean I'm inoculated against rose-tints. I found Strimska's subsequent disavowal of the American folkish contingents of "the native European spirituality" advocated as Ásatrú instructive. As my next document, Stephen McNallen's eponymous primer and survey, confessed if between the carefully phrased lines, the end of the last century found those seeking this controversial path divided between those encouraging all, the universalists, and those folk restricting entry to those descended from the Germanic, Scandinavian, or a bit strangely to me, the Celtic peoples. As the Celts have never been a "racial" (sic) but a linguistically related congeries, the argument of "bloodline" gives me pause. My review elaborates on this and related issues. McNallen's Ásatru Folk Assembly stands for this stance.

I've been mulling this over, as is common for me, the intellectual and the personal quest entangling. The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens reminds us of the power of "invisible fictions," the concepts sparking links beyond the forager that make our modern realm possible. His subsequent Homo Deus warns of a post-modernism too eager to make us into immortal gods, a reification of the aura that entices heathens towards a hallowed promotion into a deathless realm. Harari suggests the appeal of polytheism for the ancients lay in its corporate loyalties and branding opportunities for the Assyrians, say, or Egyptians, a clever concept. I suppose pantheism, for their own ancestors, felt too diffuse, too localized. The imperial implications of the warrior cult, the Indo-European migrations, appear to complicate the ur-path of the pagans. An anarcho-primitivist critique ends with a boost for the animists. The short-lived Circle Ansuz attempted to take down McNallen from an Antifa angle.

Where I stand on this is under construction, as the sign says. I oppose open borders and approve population reduction for ecological and moral reasons. This puts me at odds with the left. I recognize multicultural realities and encourage exploration of knowledge by whomever wishes to learn. This may distinguish me from the right. But as Harari gently admits, the discredited "evolutionary humanism" of the past century, no less than the "socialist" version attacked, merits consideration, alongside the dominant paradigm of the Whole Foods crowd, liberal humanism. While I took a quiz to find I'm "93%" humanist, as my friend, a fervent atheist if of the Irish Catholic strain also got the same score. So even he mused what might lurk within him, as with me, to tug me towards the mystic.

I understand the consequences of assimilation into our current tossed salad (and this non-meat eater hates lettuce), where even if a European flavor's evident, it's swallowed up in spice and rice, so to say! Monocultures loom, as we're schooled to embrace the Other and we're getting used to portrayals of blends of families and couples never seen aired a few years ago. My students and my neighbors reflect this process. If I teach a story by Joyce or the myth of Plato's Cave, I'm not expecting those only who share my genome or continental origins to be enlightened by their revelations. In fact, I'm increasingly the only one "not of color" in my working environment. Still, I feel the legacy weaken.

That is, for whomever wants to find it, I sense an abandonment of this storehouse of folly and wisdom. Listening to David Hyde Pierce's masterful reading of Gulliver's Travels, the raw disgust and sly satire cutting back any pastel tints of its "children's book" set-up, I reflected I'd read it in high school. I couldn't imagine my current college crowd handling this, even with generous footnotes.

The capacity for comprehension of this, of Huck Finn, of 1984, of Mary Wollstonecraft and Zora Neale Hurston for that matter, seemed distant. If I was teaching where my sons earned their degrees, it'd be different, but even there, reading dwindles. The haunting scene of Marcel Theroux's Far North comes to mind. The heroine, representing the last of our progeny in this era, begins to forget the few constellations she can dimly discern. Civilization collapsed, she faces her fate in the ignorant dark.

So, who gets first dibs on admission to the word-hoard, the barrow-treasure, the sea-chest? For my choice, anyone who wants it, for we all pay homage to that enrichment. So, is that any different for following a way attributed, or more realistically to me, reconstructed from the shattered remnants of what's known to "our extended kin," as a welcome companion--on the bus ride through Irish traces evident still in Montana, to my inbred surprise and inner spark--phrased our common vision-quest?

As a long-suffering adult learner of Irish, one who tries from a great distance to recover my own meaning in part from my island's lore, I recognize the isolation of the seeker. Nobody around me shares my longing, nor communes with my invocations. A few out there advise and commiserate, mostly from the homeland, and two of them have in fact emigrated there from here, for that decision.

My family around me's from another upbringing, and one I accept and value as do my wife and sons. But mine's a different variegation. Its tendrils wind around me alone. I've been called silly for my search, as if for some 'red-haired colleen,' and chided for my inattention to my Los Angeles reality. But I'd never have been here if not born here. As dodgy "metagenetics" as McNallen phrases it, if in fealty more to Jung than science, does resonate despite reason. That Montana encounter endures as what the Swiss magus might label a "meaningful coincidence," of what calls within the lost soul beneath the pessimistic, analytical, and scrutinizing mind. Within, I also shelter an "anima," after all.

My internal jury's out debating this. (I can hear the strident tones of the likely ruler of a nation I increasingly feel disenchanted from, coming down from the t.v. above me. The promise of a midnight rally with Lady Gaga emanates. After sixteen months, there's eight years to go. Twitter tweets and fat-shaming, blaming and railing, comedy appearances and SNL gigs constitute what Lincoln and Douglas debated in their high-falutin' tones, albeit schooled in the classics.) I sit here and type away, in thought. I also recognize the othala, the inheritance rune I've seen in net searches popping up for a reconstituted clan, the "vikelt." While my post-Catholic affinities cause me not to adapt its Scandinavian design as a cross-flag, I recognize the green-and-gold colors that remind me of a land only once-removed from me. It's a construct I've not been able to trace, but it signals some echoes.

John Moriarty, whose voluminous and verbose texts ranged across the stories of cultures all over the world, nevertheless attempted in his Ireland in his last years to establish 'a Christian monastic hedge school' in his native Kerry. I imagine given his formidable eclectic mysticism it'd have defied that classification. His final attempt at convincing his countrymen and women, Invoking Ireland, sought to recover that fragile, thin voice as one like mystic him must have heard, not only at Samhain. My one generation is all that's here and the rest, for hundreds of such spans, rested and roamed in other lands and over another island, even before maybe it was an island. Drawn backwards to that dreamtime, one the scholar turned gardener Moriarty penetrated diligently if densely, I think of what's deemed The Hidden Lives of Trees and I imagine them as "fossils of time" even if a sensible FB pal sneers at my Robert Graves-like position. When lemon orchards fell in my childhood landscape, and tract homes and a freeway replaced where I'd played, I felt a loss as if a parent died. That gap in my youth may gash me in dreams tonight. Overcoming divisions of geography, class, and "race," do I gravitate back for grounding in the nature-nourished? What can an egg-head like me recover there?

As the definition demonstrates above, that Othala rune carries in it both affirmations and inversions. Germanic peoples know the cost of the latter towards the twisting of concepts for evil. Our ancestors likely labored as thralls, or slaves, some sent from Ireland to Iceland. Kings and heroes fill the chronicles, but as Laxness characterizes, stupidity and superstition accompanied voyages and accumulated plunder snatched from the suffering, our probable true bloodline, those defiant against power and then made, as the Odin Brotherhood purportedly commemorates, a persecuted and murdered line of "pagans" refusing the crozier's domination or the crown's domain. This may be a clever conceit for those too elevated to open Dan Brown (myself included).  Given how I resent order not chosen: can one be happy in a pre-modern regimen one undertakes to carry on? Can I--who reckon deities as emanations of our common yearnings, and our inbred projections for making sense out of the confusing, the depressing, and the perplexing-- find fulfillment in alliance with kinfolk?

Last night, before beginning my return, this time on audio, to a attenuated and sinister evocation of secret societies in David Mitchell's ambitious tale The Bone Clocks (I anticipate from the start it'll improve in the hearing as I found the reading of it engaging but enervating), I listened to Méti investigator Mark Wolf's interview about his 2013 follow-up to Mark Mirabello (see above link) on the Brotherhood. It rambled, but Wolf's acknowledgement of the blank pages opened for an adept in heathen paths as opposed to the monotheistic "rule book" conjured a useful metaphor. Increasingly, as with left-libertarian or Buddhist, anarchist or conventional ideologies, I seek the dim light between their cracks, the marginalia, the empty spaces. That may hearken a more solitary quest for me ahead.

Peter Somerville-Large's "Irish Voices": Book Review

This prolific chronicler's Anglo-Irish background offers a welcome vantage point from which to look back on the half-century (and more!) from the 1916 Rising. Although its subtitle makes this seem as if it ends in 1966, it looks at the cultural changes weakening the Catholic church and the social mores that for long kept many Irish men and women within the sectarian and political divisions that the Free State, Republic of Ireland, and the Northern Ireland province as bywords and manifestations for division, strife, and bitter memories lived out for millions who remained, or left, the fraught island.

Peter Somerville-Large integrates engagingly many first-person accounts into his own prose. As a veteran journalist and historian, he can blend the varied and contending testimonies of hundreds of his fellow countrymen and women (as well as visitors with their romantic or barbed reflections) into a thematic sequence of chapters. These are loosely chronological, taking you from the failure of De Valera and his rebels to their qualified, partial, and ambiguous "success" in leading the 26 Counties.

Somerville-Large, however, looks to Loyalists, dissenters, and Republicans alike, and he mixes his own aloof (by his own estimation) approach towards this small place whose allegiances loom large. He sympathizes with those who have suffered under clerical and political and economic power; while from a place of privilege himself, as somewhat of an outsider despite that advantage, in at least the post-1922 state, he offers a comprehensive panorama by a social history for the general public that is far more readable and enjoyable than a casual reader may expect. Inevitably, one may differ with some of his tone or leanings, but that too may be predictable when investigating this locale, so full of contention, controversy, and best of all despite all the ups and downs, conversation, as constant craic.
(Amazon US 11-4-15)

Mark Cunningham: "Horslips: Tall Tales": Book Review

At last, musicians played traditional tunes in a lively, innovative way that made an Irish boy feel "proud" rather than "pathetic". So Maurice Linnane recalls when he heard Horslips as a boy on the radio, in this large-format biography of this pioneering 1970s Celtic rock band. Mark Cunningham, himself a musician and producer, integrates reminiscences from each of the five members, along with archival material from photos and media. This handsome design intersperses thoughtful analyses and entertaining stories into editorial commentary on gigs, albums, critical reception, and career moves. 

Having grown up with Beatlemania, as well as an eclectic exposure to Irish music and culture, four of the five musicians first met in 1970 to mime a "suitably hairy" band for a Harp commercial. Three of them worked in advertising and promotion; the real band they then formed was determined to remain in Ireland and to retain control of not only its music but marketing and presentation. Bassist Barry Devlin defines this "funky ceilidhe" approach to "deconstruct tunes and use them as the basis for new material"; Violinist, guitarist, and concertina player Charles O'Connor agrees that the band would "transfer melodies" from traditional sources. By the end of 1971, they electrified dancehalls in more ways than one. Appealing to the emerging glam rock movement, they dressed in leather, snakeskin, and even curtains from Clery's. Suitably, they also blended a bold visual look with fresh sounds.

Horslips may have confessed no "cultural responsibility to incorporate the traditional context; it just evolved" as keyboardist, piper, and flautist Jim Lockhart avers. But it captured attention soon, as the band knew not only how to work the media but to work themselves in an intelligent, disciplined fashion. By 1972, their self-released debut, Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part made them Ireland's first home-grown rock success. Follow-up The Táin mingled Yeats' treatment of Cú Chulainn with Old Irish sources, bypassing Thomas Kinsella's translation as "too recent" for lyricist and percussionist Éamon Carr. These "indigenous" inspirations mingled with superheroes and Marvel Comics for Carr, a poet who also began to sprinkle into songs his verse patterns filtering both the Beats and Basho.

Turlough O'Carolan's life story flowed into their third album, Dancehall Sweethearts, but that and its overproduced, more mainstream if lackluster follow-up loosened the intricate fit of rock with folk which had made their first pair of LPs critically and popularly successful. An acoustic Christmas-themed album mid-decade revived their spirit, enthusiastic reception on tours at home and overseas increased, and by 1976, their arguably most consistent and most powerful record emerged. A teenaged guitarist, soon to be known as The Edge, attended his first rock concert at Skerries. He was so impressed by Horslips that he resolved to join classmates who became U2. A triple-movement "Celtic symphony", the Book of Invasions managed to slip a stanza stolen from Swinburne and what Carr calls a "Bowie-esque whiff of alienation" into a confident examination of origin myths.

The Famine and immigration continued as themes in Exiles (1977) and The Man Who Built America (1978). The latter used Mici Mac Gabhann's memoir Rotha Mór an tSaoil to ground its narrative. Reflecting this novel mix of Irish heritage and American reinvention, Devlin and O'Connor appear to have sought a polished, slick  musical delivery, in an era when arena rock and punk competed for loyalty among fans split over the merits of progressive rock's concept albums and mythic lore. The other three musicians preferred to ground a "stadium rock sheen," as guitarist Johnny Fean puts it, within a firm foundation balancing an accessible radio-friendly sound with their obvious strength, as shown best in Táin and Book, of a carefully constructed interplay of Irish narrative and trad tunes.

Devlin reminds readers of the band's lucky inheritance. They grew up exposed to both rock and Irish music, and they learned as they grew older from traditional players. Unlike their English peers, Horslips had no need to create a song-cycle about elves: "We're pinching from a culture that's alive."

Cunningham's book understandably relies on storytellers who regale us with life on the road as well as in the studio. While cultural examination is unsurprisingly understated compared to tall tales (with their Irish license plates and accents, they get mistaken for subversives in a jittery Troubles-era London and Wales, as well as for the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany), a reader nonetheless gains some sense of how Irish identity infused their music and lyrics, and their concerted effort to retain an image that would appeal to all in their divided homeland as well as far afield, during a tumultuous era. One senses that, as Devlin produced some of U2's early demos, those four Dubliners learned some crucial lessons about a similar ambition to stand for an island which united disparate factions.

This underlying legacy endures. Despite the band's weariness by their last studio album 1979 to reconcile its image as "conceptual rockers" into a "post-punk landscape" U2 would capitalise upon, their live act ensured their enthusiastic reception past their breakup in 1980. Cunningham documents the subsequent careers of the five men in a variety of the fine arts, their legal battle over reclaiming rights to their songs, the remasters and reissues of their twelve albums, museum exhibitions on their Irish impact, and their eventual reunions from 2009 on.

A couple of slips show: a transcription has Devlin remarking on an "alter" boy and elsewhere crediting the short story "The Trusting and the Maimed" to "Flannery O'Brien" rather than O'Connor, which nonetheless might have made Myles na gCopaleen chortle. But overall, research results in a welcome survey of the band's Irish impact. A thorough discography is appended; supplemental sources are listed (including my Estudios Irlandeses 3 [2008]: 132-142 article). The band's genial discussion, enriched by those who join them here, creates an enduring appeal. This recommends Tall Tales: The Official Biography to those who will be quite happy to meet them, and surely sorry to part.
[Estudios Irlandeses 10 (2015): 160-161] (Also on Amazon US 3-15-15)

Maeve Binchy's "Maeve's Times": Book Review

Maeve Binchy's many novels have gained her a wide readership in and beyond Ireland. A teacher turned writer, she wrote more prolifically than many Irish storytellers; she produced bestsellers. The U.S. book jacket for this anthology of her Irish Times columns over five decades sketches her perspective as imagined by at least some of her readers abroad: pastel colors, a cat, a cup of tea, a neatly stacked newspaper, pen and notebook, all in an orderly room overlooking an idealized (no logos, no litter, no graffiti, no rain, no cars at all) market town's high street. But the reality, as this journalism (collected by Róisín Ingle, introduced by her husband, Gordon Snell) documents, reveals Binchy's sharp ear. She conveyed clearly the inner troubles hidden and then confessed or betrayed by everyday people living behind those sunny town facades. Her eye, in turn, focuses upon the contradictions between outward propriety and intimate shame, as many of those, mostly women like herself, whom she interviews or dramatizes betray their increasingly tense frustrations with their homeland's pious submission to Church, State, and Da. 

As she explains, she writes as she speaks. In her steady prose, without fuss or fancy, I hear her peer, my own Irish mother, on the page, for both express themselves candidly. Women born as they were seventy-odd years ago in Ireland faced barriers against advancement; Binchy speaks for those who broke free of the Irish stranglehold. She began as feminism roused many, starting her stint after she returned from a kibbutz (where she lapsed from her faith), as Women's Editor for the Times in 1968.

Her entries begin with pleasant but often lightweight wit. But a few years in, she creates three vignettes titled "Women Are Fools". Each tells, as her fiction might, the tale of someone who sins. But to the women themselves, each may feel, as filtered through Binchy's sympathetic portrayal, that perhaps they are not sinners but merely flawed, not to be cast aside by the Church or abandoned in a State where divorce and contraception continued to be outlawed. An unwanted child, promiscuity, infidelity, and marital breakdown are treated without sentiment, but with insight and understanding.

She continued to analyze her homeland with the same concern for the telling detail to make her point. Although she spent much of the 1970s as the London editor for the newspaper, she returned frequently. This slight distance combined with familiarity enlivened her observations, such as of a seaside resort. "Out in Killiney I saw people walking Afghan hounds which, I feel, must be a sign of prosperity, but I am assured that's it's just the same person with the same hound that I keep seeing."

In Britain, she found contrasts. "Here the parks are filled with children, in London they are filled with the old. In Dublin you hold a supermarket door open for a mother with a pram, in London for an elderly couple with a basket on wheels." She balances her sentences neatly, and she narrates briskly. 

Her range may surprise those expecting only domestic drama or casual comments. In 1980, she meets Samuel Beckett, who by 74 still looks 54, if by then more like a Frenchman than an Irishman to her. "He has spikey hair which looks as if he had just washed it or had made an unsuccessful attempt to do a Brylcreem job on it and given up halfway through. He has long narrow fingers, and the lines around his eyes go out in a fan, from years of smiling rather than years of intense brooding." So begins her encounter, and she shares her respect and camaraderie for the playwright, examining him carefully. 

She does the same for Margaret Thatcher, fifteen years her senior, under whose administration she lived in Britain for many years. In 1986, Binchy ponders Thatcher's bid for a third term as Prime Minister. "When people praise Thatcher, and many, many do every day, they praise her not at all for anything to do with being a woman. And perhaps that is her greatest achievement. She has almost single-handedly banished the notion that it is somehow unusual or special for a woman to be able to do anything. For that, if nothing else, women in the future may thank her." This statement deploys Binchy's command of tone and control over her style masterfully, and proves her journalistic skill. 

Yet not all is somber. Being Irish, she can spin a lively tale. In an "provincial town", a man sets up his office for the day in a hotel, in the ladies' cloakroom. He has no idea where he has settled down. When Binchy tells him, we see his reaction. "He stood up like a man who had been shot in the back in a film and was about to stagger all about the set before collapsing. 'I don't believe you,' he said." 

Many who mourned her death in 2012 praised Binchy's generosity towards other writers as well as ordinary folks. Her good-natured voice, as revealed in Maeve's Times: In Her Own Words, does not shirk criticism, but manages--as the Thatcher profile demonstrates--to challenge prejudice or piety on behalf of those who have been shut out or held down. She does this without scolding or posturing, although a 1992 entry welcoming the return of dullness after Thatcher's delayed exit is more bitter. 

Some of this goes on too long. Sitting next to a garrulous teller, no matter how fluent, a listener needs a break. So with a reader. These essays may be better sampled as they originally appeared, one at a time. I would find them in The Irish Times, where I wondered how she managed to produce so many novels, stories, and articles with seeming ease. She does not tell us here the pace or the cost, but she seems to have lived happily and delighted in her career. Certain Irish authors relegated to a small press backlist or a poetry seminar's syllabus may envy her promotion through Oprah's Book Club. 

Trained as an historian, from a well-educated suburban Dublin family, Binchy found success apart from academia, and she spoke to those who saw in her writing a concern for dignity and decency. She calls out her countrymen and women for stereotyped fecklessness, and she holds them accountable. 

Avoiding euphemism while remaining polite, she encourages her readers to confront death without cant, and to support those whose weakness or failures have led them to be too harshly condemned. Abortion, heartbreak, aging, and even a tacit case of murder "before I knew that people called things by different names" occur. By the 1990s, Binchy witnesses a much-changed Ireland, one which her generation had waited for. Traffic clogs Dublin, while coffee brews everywhere. But Binchy, who has "taken charge of her life" ever since she quit teaching and began writing, enjoys holidays and counsels readers who share her "senior moments". Her energy subsides, naturally, by the 2000s. Her novels are made into films, her portrait is made for the National Gallery of Ireland, and she lists ten things never to say to someone with arthritis as one of her final submissions. One of her last entries borrows a phrase from another creative spirit in his autumnal years, Woody Allen: "I'm so mellow I'm almost rotten." While the range of her earlier entries narrows by the conclusion of this anthology, no one can chide Maeve Binchy for showing her readers how to cherish all one can from a peaceful life. (Pop Matters 11-7-14)

"Worse than the pagans"

Cardinal Raymond Burke may not have used the exact phrase "worse than the pagans," yet that is how the media have headlined their reporting on his disappointment with most Irish voters. As a child, my sympathies lay with the pagans, for I felt the zeal of Patrick and his followers destroyed much that was good in ancient Ireland. I may be accused of romanticizing the serfs and slaves who more likely than kings and lords are my ancestors, but I hated to see Druidry damned.

The Tablet reports on May 28, in the week after Ireland's 62% yes vote. Katherine Backler and Liz Dodd explain, in an article I reproduce here to capture Burke's address and anguish best:

Ireland has gone further than paganism and “defied God” by legalising gay marriage, one of the Church’s most senior cardinals has said.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was recently moved from a senior role in the Vatican to be patron of the Order of Malta, told the Newman Society, Oxford University’s Catholic Society, last night that he struggled to understand “any nation redefining marriage”.

Visibly moved, he went on: “I mean, this is a defiance of God. It’s just incredible. Pagans may have tolerated homosexual behaviours, they never dared to say this was marriage.”
 
A total of 1.2 million people voted in favour of amending the constitution to allow same-sex couples to marry, with 734,300 against the proposal, making Ireland the first country to introduce gay marriage by popular vote.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, told RTE afterwards that “the Church needs a reality check right across the board [and to ask] have we drifted away completely from young people?”
Cardinal Burke, who speaking on the intellectual heritage of Pope Benedict XVI, went on to say “liturgical abuses” had taken place after the Second Vatican Council, after which he said there had been “a radical, even violent approach to liturgical reform”. Quoting Pope Benedict, he said that the desire among some of the faithful for the old form of the liturgy arose because the new missal was “actually understood as authorising, or even requiring, creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear.”

On Tuesday Cardinal Burke presided over Mass at the Oxford Oratory, and on Wednesday he led Vespers and Benediction for the intentions of the Order of Malta.

Speaking at the lecture afterwards Cardinal Burke stressed the continuity between liturgical forms before and after the council. “The life of the Church is organic; it is a living tradition handed down in an unbroken line from the apostles,” he said. “It does not admit of discontinuity, of revolutions.”

Paraphrasing Pope Benedict, Cardinal Burke said that after the council, there had been a battle between a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture, and the hermeneutic of reform. This was because the nature and authority of the council had been “basically misunderstood.” Apparently departing from his script, the Cardinal voiced his own concern about similar misunderstandings around the upcoming Synod. “There seems to be a certain element who think that the Synod has the capacity to create some totally new teaching in the Church, which is simply false.” He went on to speak of the damage caused by “an antinomianism which is inherent in the hermeneutic of discontinuity.”

Though the talk consisted primarily in an overview of Pope Benedict XVI's chiefest intellectual contributions, Cardinal Burke adopted a more personal note in his answers to questions at the end. Responding to a question about the marginalisation of faith in the public sphere, he stressed the primary importance of fortifying the family in its understanding of how faith “illumines daily living”. ‘The culture is thoroughly corrupted, if I may say so, and the children are being exposed to this, especially through the internet.’
 
He told the audience that he was “constantly” telling his nieces and nephews to keep their family computers in public areas of the house so that their children would not “imbibe this poison that’s out there.”

Irish Central expands the way such influences affect Catholics. I cite this verbatim for its catechetical language and chastising tone. Dara Kelly on May 30 reports in her lead that: "a prominent American canon lawyer has branded all Yes voters in the recent marriage referendum potential 'heretics.'

Dr. Edward Peters, who was appointed a Referendary of the Apostolic Signatura by Pope Benedict in 2010, has described the outcome of the constitutional referendum on marriage in Ireland as 'a disaster.'

'Any Catholic who directly helped to bring about Ireland’s decision to treat as marriage unions of two persons of the same sex has, at a minimum, arrayed himself against the infallible doctrine of the Church and, quite possibly, has committed an act of heresy,' Dr Peters wrote on his Canon Law Blog this week.

The technical term for voting to allow same sex marriage is 'sin', wrote Dr. Peters, 'and the consequences of sin are always spiritual and sometimes canonical; and the solution for sin is repentance and Confession.'

Dr. Peter's [sic] counsels his readers not to pursue potential excommunications for the political leaders who led the nation toward the referendum, instead he suggests they focus their efforts on 'righting' the result 'as soon as possible.'"

The image I chose for me captures the Church's predicament, Looking at the tired faces of the feeble nuns, you can see that the traditions of Irish fidelity to the Magisterium may remain, but among fewer, and likely many elderly, congregants and clergy. My relationship to how I was raised is nuanced, as I lack the feral hatred a lot of my peers have for Catholicism. I teach comparative religion and meditate over two comments I have from online students about my critical approach. "They should hire a Christian so the course is not biased." "He compared consulting the Bible to a Ouija board." The truth might be more subtle, after all. Many resist any challenge to long-held belief.

I hold respect for certain elements of the Church, for I do counter that it did lead many people to care more about the needs of the less fortunate more than their own wants and desires. It reminded people of their limits within a short and difficult life. It encouraged a degree of intellectual exploration, and it curbed the excesses some of us had, in many directions, which led to the harm of ourselves and others. Many clergy as well as laity gave up careers and success in the secular world to give us a solid schooling, and in dark times, priests and those under their guidance assisted me. I doubt if a working-class kid could have received for so little money such a preparation for the life of the mind. 

My parents and family were devoted, and made sacrifices for me to attend such institutions. But I don't miss the shame, repression, and guilt that still haunt me in middle age, after such a traditional upbringing, even in the decade after Vatican II, a confused time for many Catholics. The future, as I blogged last week, seems to be with those who, rejecting the "reality check" called for by Archbishop Martin, find its dogma and doctrine wanting. This recalls Dan Savage, sex columnist, ex-Catholic, and gay rights advocate, back in 2013 as he reviewed Jeff Chu's "Does Jesus Really Love Me?":

"Chu worries that gay people like Mr. Byers have been ;pushed out of the church.' That’s not true for all of us. My father was a Catholic deacon, my mother was a lay minister and I thought about becoming a priest. I was in church every Sunday for the first 15 years of my life. Now I spend my Sundays on my bike, on my snowboard or on my husband. I haven’t spent my post-Catholic decades in a sulk, wishing the church would come around on the issue of homosexuality so that I could start attending Mass again. I didn’t abandon my faith. I saw through it. The conflict between my faith and my sexuality set that process in motion, but the conclusions I reached at the end of that process — there are no gods, religion is man-made, faith can be a force for good or evil — improved my life. I’m grateful that my sexuality prompted me to think critically about faith. Pushed out? No. I walked out." My own nation has now 13% ex-Catholics. For every convert, six others leave. The U.S. since 2007 has 8% fewer Christians. Change may be rapid for other nations too, like a thief in the night. 

Photo caption: Carmelite sisters leave a polling station in Malahide, County Dublin, Ireland, Friday, May 22, 2015

Clan Committment: Armenia + Ireland, 100 years on

 

This photo, "Remnants of an Armenian Family," reminds me of photos taken from An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, known popularly if not exactly correctly, according to many, as the Irish Famine. Change the costumes or headgear, and these five could be an evicted family from a stone cottage far northwest.

Nothing to Celebrate in ANZAC in Solidarity Net criticizes those who from colonies and dominions were encouraged to fight in useless battles for capitalism, imperialism, warlords, and false ideals. It questions the tributes to troops at Gallipoli. About 88,000 for the Ottoman and 44,000 for the British Empire died there. This slaughter and that in Armenia echo, as death returns in a region today. Small nations hunted and hated by armed fanatics, hunted for their allegiance, their clan, their religion.

James Connolly, when asked "What Should Irish People Do During the War?", after denouncing cooperation with the Crown to defend its Empire and admitting if Germany could free Ireland from Britain, that would not be rejected, finally rallied against Kaiser or King. "Should the working class of Europe rather than slaughter each other for the benefit of kings and financiers, proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the transport service that war might be abolished, we should be perfectly justified in following such a glorious example and contributing our aid to the final dethronement of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world."

Reflecting this May Day on an Irish history full of invective against its nearest and oldest enemy, I wonder about the psychic cost of raising generations a century later on what riled and inspired our families' desperation: to rage against rulers, to take up arms, to revenge eras culminating in ravaged decades filled with famine, rape, emigration, rack-rent, landlords, conscription, death fast or slow. 

While for years much of my reading and writing focused on The Cause, I find the past few years, and after all nearing two decades since truces were called and arms decommissioned and dumped in Ireland, I'm a bit weary of a sustained diet of study of these events. How, I mulled over as I studied Judaism, can people craft careers in analyzing the records of the Shoah, or literature of the Armenian genocide? It reminds me off hand somehow of the professor of Hitler Studies in White Noise, but no parody is intended by me. Primo Levi's books are being retranslated this autumn and reissued, and the publisher has to remind the press and audience he's not only a survivor-testifier from the deathcamps. 

Watching the shows that John Walsh produces as his son was killed years ago and led him to produce America's Most Wanted as the first of many successful get-tough programs on t.v., my wife and I muse over what that career must do to one's spirit. How far do you capitalize, however well-intended, on death or harm caused to you or your family? Does that market or brand you always? Levi wrote fables like his fellow storyteller Italo Calvino; he dramatized the life of workers, he crafted stories, and he told some of his best tales set before the war, in The Periodic Table, as when he hiked with his little dog. Those moments tend to get subsumed into the great drama. Some veterans never get over the most vivid and harrowing moments of their service, and I suppose for prisoners, hostages, those freed from slavery or torment, kidnapping or disaster, the life after can never create the same energy. 

Meline Toumani, an Armenian-American writer originally from Iran, warns in the New York Times: "Armenians Shouldn't Let Genocide Define Us." She speaks of how Jews are accused of self-hatred if they take issue with the prevailing notion that one must conform to the narrative of what I borrow from the saga of the Irish as "Most Oppressed People Ever." (MOPE: I don't agree with much of that last link's writer, but it's for ease of cyber-reference for this acronym.) Historian Alvin Jackson, a more reliable source, cites colleague Paul Bew who reminds us of the dubious claim "that the most oppressed people in Europe in the 1940s were to be found in Ireland." (671; Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History.) It's almost, but not quite given the fatal lack some carry now, superfluous to say that this was a decade which few countrymen and fellow sufferers who were interned with Primo Levi survived. So, that takes us back to Toumani. Noting Kim Kardashian's support of the centennial, Toumani submits her thesis: "Watching the dubious intersection of celebrity worship and genocide commemoration, I couldn’t help but reflect on some of the less obvious things Armenians have lost since 1915: not just people and property, but a kind of existential confidence. The genocide recognition campaign itself, in the name of restoring Armenia’s losses, has been so all-consuming as to stand in the way of other kinds of development--in Armenia and in the diaspora." It should not be all Armenians, admittedly a long time away from this event, should focus on for their identity.

She argues that it's too limiting to expect members of small ethnicities and their diasporas should or must conform to a narrow range of banal exhortations to carry on or insistent dehumanization of the enemy nation or empire which committed the violence. She went to Turkey to try to learn from the other side's intransigence and denial. Therefore, in her estimation, she has been accused of "self-hatred." She defines this: "The idea is that you are embarrassed by your true nature — your ethnic nature — and so you mock it or speak out against it. The label is used not to engage in meaningful criticism, but to dismiss such criticism by chalking it up to shame. And yet the behavior labeled self-hating often reflects the opposite of shame; it reflects confidence." Comparing the plight of Armenians to that of the Jews, she continues: "The common phrase, 'Is it good for the Jews?' is implicitly present, too, for Armenians: but what does it mean to be 'good' for the Armenians, if survival means blocking out uncomfortable ideas and clinging to simplistic symbols?"

No, neither she nor I are denying horrors perpetuated. Turkey's refusal to take responsibility, Britain's collusion to worsen the potato blight's devastating impacts by pushing millions off the land and on the emigration boats if not the sides of the road to starve, or the black whirlwind of the Shoah all stand as blots on the record of what we do to each other. But how long do we stand in as "survivors"? 

Back to Ireland, similar questions can be raised. I am no great fan of the revisionists who try, as one wag put it, to tidy it all over, as if the English had a small misunderstanding with their subjects. Yet,  as the commemoration of the Easter Rising's centennial looms and politicians and pundits bicker over whether to invite the British, this drawn-out fracas, to some apart from the scrum, appears very petty.

Toumani concludes, for her small ancestral nation (one that like Ireland has clung long to an ideal of an embattled faith, a bastion of learning amid idiocy, an outpost of beauty and tradition and language apart from its brutish neighbors far greater in power, greed, and cunning): "But the question of what healing looks like beyond the use of a single word; of how children can be taught about their histories in a way that does not leave them hating the descendants of their ancestors’ killers. Of how a country can grow in meaningful ways so that there won’t be a Kardashian-size gap in its national confidence. Taking positions that don’t track with your ethnic group’s orthodoxies, or indeed living your life in a way that is not defined by clan commitment, are not signs of self-hatred but rather an indication of learning to value oneself. And this is at the heart of what it means to be not erased but fully alive."

My friends in Ireland are learning slowly how to learn a more inclusive history, as that nation itself becomes more diverse than any other time, rapidly, ever before. Some like me one generation apart from the homeland grapple with that old language, not easy to learn at home, but far more difficult pverseas, at least from my struggle. Many at home and abroad begin to drift from from clerical orthodoxies, and those who do not feel emboldened to speak out against ecclesiastical abuse. Those of us in the diaspora, passing on our heritage to our children, grapple with how much to pass on about past wrongs, and whether so much of our identity consists of commemorating ancestral pain. Clan commitment remains. But our pride does not overshadow an awareness of nuance or honesty.

Laurence Cox's "Buddhism and Ireland": Book Review

Marxist sociologist of social movements Laurence Cox’s Buddhism and Ireland expands into nearly four-hundred lively pages what to him first appeared to take but a chapter. In fact, this topic elicited his first dissemination in 2009 in JGB 10. His astute interpretations and groundbreaking research stretch into a sustained grappling to pin down a phenomenon that presents a case study beyond any insularity. One end of Eurasia connects with the other/ Other, for far longer and with more traffic than arguably any previous scholars or practitioners have surmised.

Professor Cox contrasts the academic focus on who controlled the means of intellectual production with “grey literature” in Asia (tracts and agitprop as produced by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish bhikkus who deployed anti-Christian polemic to rouse natives against missionaries). He elaborates how “experience breaks up the smooth flow of discourse” as authors and activists wander East to West and back again unpredictably.

He highlights his investigation as “a history of people in relationships, rather than a history of ideas; it is a history of empire not so much as ideology but as lived practice, and it is a history of social change as anti-colonial struggle and as counter-cultural transformation.” (pp. 39-40) He arrays his findings, drawn from testimony and texts, for a stress akin to what E. P. Thompson asked about Marx: “the question is not whether we are on Marx’s side but whether he is on ours.” (p. 14) That is, Cox confronts the academic bias for textual domination. However reliant upon the written record for his quest, he prefers whenever possible to interpret decisions as carried out or mooted by those Irish who, having found out about Buddhism, acted on it.

Similarly, Cox asks “whether particular choices and actions mark a step forward in relation to people’s previous situation and in the direction of greater personal clarity, interpersonal solidarity and capacity for transformation” regarding globalizing systems and ideologies, from the two tips of Eurasia -- and everywhere beyond and between as the dharma spread, up to nine centuries delayed in transmission. (pp. 14-15) He distinguishes ancient and medieval glimmers of Buddhist content as consumed by Westerners from more recent contributors (as Orientalists, as missionaries, but also a few introduced here as converts turned propagandists). Since the middle of the last century, he locates a shift back to Westerners consuming Buddhism. He cautions against overly reliant textual emphases for interpretation; trinkets, retreats, or travel may as they do nowadays convey for many far more product labeled “Buddhist” rather than books. If agency rather than doctrine, as with many New Religious Movements tends to dominate over dogma or “official” devotees regarding the prevalence of Western Buddhists who primarily identify through meditation, this too needs reiteration, for the fluid nature of identification with Buddhism leads many to a revolving door, challenging census data. In the Irish case, where some interviewed here still fear “outing,” the pressure of conformity and the impositions or allegiances of a dominant culture must be included, and the ability of Buddhist identification and practice to elude facile equivalences. Cox never assumes a devotee of a certain sangha can be summed up by the precepts of that sangha, as if affiliation sums up one's outlook.

Cox cautions that two millennia of Buddhism accumulates vast knowledge and claims, but that these “make it harder for researchers to hear the ‘needs’ which bring people to Buddhism, the problems they are grappling with in their own lives or the hegemonies they are attempting to dismantle.” Rather, organizations step in to “impose their own interpretation and articulation of these needs.” This occludes what people on the everyday level mean by Buddhism, and “we cannot take accounts formulated within this language at face value-- contra both the guardians of Buddhist orthodoxy and the left-feminist critique of ‘religion’ per se.” (p. 33) Cox explains how Westerners often drift into Buddhism as converts or fellow travelers and insert or fixate their own naive or filtered predilections.

These may often not be what sanctioned ministers desire. Teachers, schooled and approved as the establishment no matter their often promoted counter-cultural claims, may crack down on the earlier experimenters. This imported hierarchy may arrive years or decades later as a witting or unwitting force to push heterodox practice towards uniformity, and this in turn clouds subsequent understanding of how ordinary people as well as those in charge of imposing order or recording dogma reacted to Buddhism. Cox suggests instead examining practice “as a pointer to needs,” as a corrective to too much text. While this proves difficult given the paucity of material for many Irish encounters, the reminder that Buddhism appeals or repels many based on their own pressing conditions grounds this invigorating approach while it justifies the humanist and Marxist theoretical framework Cox applies.

Curious readers, to take one persistently purported Irish Buddhist encounter, that of pre-Roman influence on Celtic monasticism from (quasi-)Buddhism, will find that here, the material basis is thin and the testimony muddled.  Cox documents well in his survey how some scraps of “what-ifs” enticed those in the distant and recent past. The gap in transmission is itself a sobering corrective; as much as nine centuries between the East and the farthest island of the West attenuated even a glimmer of the dharma. However, as Cox finds, the core of the "misrecognised biography" within Barlaam and Josaphat medieval legend does prove (at least for once) semi-cohesion of that popular, transmitted ur-tale. Contrasting what W. B. Yeats invoked in “Under Ben Bulben” as “Swear by what the sages spoke/Round the Mareotic Lake” near Alexandria, the Therapeutae rumored (wrongly) by Eusebius as the original monks, Cox finds attempts at claiming Buddhist forebears for Christian monasticism (or Celtic nature poetry by implicit concatenation) inconclusive. He gently shelves fervent attempts at “origin relations” alongside Graves’ The White Goddess as “poetic myths." (p. 63)

The second chapter collects many examples of how the West consumed Buddhist accounts. Testimony from clerics, soldiers, diplomats, pilgrims, and tale-spinners as expressed by learned texts, romances, and chapbooks dominated. The Irish learned more than scholars have claimed. Networks (as Cox examines the Anglican holdings at Trinity College, Dublin and the Catholic equivalents at his home campus, now the National University of Ireland, Maynooth) joined the small farmer or laborer, who might have heard a newspaper account of the East recited by a local priest or merchant, in turn informed reliably or otherwise by Jesuits, Dissenters, traders, or journalists, via communication from China or India. French-language reports enriched Enlightenment discourse in Ireland which began to attempt to make more than mythical sense out of the East. Yet, constrained by conformity to Irish denominational and ethnic allegiances, "being Buddhist" did not appear for pre-modern readers back home or for curious travelers in those Asian realms as a viable or comprehensible personal option.

The "circuits of distribution" for Buddhist material into Ireland as mapped by Cox overlap. A Protestant, "English," and imperial system intersects with the Catholic, "Irish" and diasporic one. By the eighteenth century, a middle-class or plebeian readership itself blends with an orally dispersed set of listeners in cities and towns. Steadily if slowly, the sphere of Buddhist transmission widened. A "more restricted distribution of medieval and classical knowledge before that" period gave way to hedge-schools for Catholics under Penal Law, mass education under Protestant reformers, and then empire-building in which the Irish themselves, once colonized, took part via the military and trading.

All the same, active interest in Buddhism had to wait for opportunity. This came when "the rising power of Catholic nationalism created a new kind of crisis for old affiliations." (p. 97) The nineteenth-century agitations for Home Rule, loyalty to, or freedom from the British Crown eventually forced what exposure alone to texts or hearsay about Buddhism could not invite or suggest. Conversions began only when Buddhism "became an attractive 'Other' for some Irish people," and a choice became feasible, "possible and meaningful." (p. 96) Cox estimates that this choice to legally register as a Buddhist did not occur until a decriminalization of "blasphemy" which occurred after the (partial) independence of the Irish nation, and nearly none took advantage of it, .
at least as far as the historical records, always only part of the Irish Buddhist chronicle, document.

Part two of this study offers a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Ireland as a case study for European reception to, and propagation by a few of, Buddhism. Contrasted with the (unmentioned by Cox) 1994 attempt by Stephen Batchelor in The Awakening of the West, Cox's work remains on firmer terrain as he constructs his case with care. He cites often another popularization of Buddhism's globalization, Lawrence Sutin's All is Change (2006), but he applies J. Jeffrey Franklin's "cultural counter-invasion" thesis from The Lion and the Lotus (2008) best to posit Buddhist hermeneutic challenges to Christian mindsets, as Cox unveils this "minor moral panic." Avoiding when possible any sole reliance on textual evidence for earlier centuries, Cox places knowledge of Buddhism within wider networks. These expand exponentially as Asian anti-imperialism plays off of concurrent Irish colonial tensions. By the end of the nineteenth century, the choice to convert or sympathize loomed.

As formal sanctions declined even while "informal social costs" accrued, a few Irish people contemplated taking refuge in, or encouraging the promotion of, Buddhism. Cox emphasizes the impacts of this decision. Most of those so inclined early on were from the Anglo-Irish establishment, and if they served overseas in Asian locales, their careers would have to shift, languages had to be mastered, and new networks had to be found to replace those freethinkers cut off from ecclesiastical or imperial enterprises. Outmarriage usually met with disinheritance, and within what Cox labels Dissident Orientalism, the decision to separate from a matrix where "religion, ethnicity, career and social identity were intimately connected had enormous implications for one's whole life." (p. 110)

His third chapter pursues Irish participation in the British Empire and missionary efforts. The Irish "used religion to critique empire and their own culture," and as with other colonies caught up in the running of the royal realms, ambivalence about what was carried out overseas in relation to what was perpetuated back home continued among a few, driven to chastise what most did without complaint. Soldiers and missionaries brought into Ireland many stories and images from Buddhist culture, and among intellectual Catholics at the turn of the last century, these messages met with interest and dread. Cox charts a "minor moral panic" by papal pundits recoiling from Buddhism's nihilistic aura, even as plain Catholics were kept from knowledge of its energies, a process Cox finds akin to Gramsci's "firewalling" by an Italian clerisy of ideas labeled as too volatile for parishioners to handle.

Meanwhile, the Catholics charged with converting the Asian pagans quailed. Overestimating Buddhists to be forty percent of the world's faithful, they blundered into mission territory severely unprepared. The Columban Fathers entered China not knowing its language. They failed to sway many to the Church, and Cox compiles their incomprehension of the religion they met as their foe. Buddhism tended by the intelligentsia to be handled with care for its prestige and lineage, but consigned by Christian evangelists to the bin of racial stereotypes and character flaws of its adepts.

However, Irish awareness in a less stigmatized form of Buddhism filtered down, if obliquely, into popular culture. Sir Edwin Arnold's successful poem on the Buddha, The Light of Asia (1879), found itself publicized in the Dublin press in bowdlerized or blinkered fashion as a story of a prince's reformation. Cox locates in its coverage no mention of the Buddha. Conversely, most Irish instances then to Arnold's title "are to racehorses or greyhounds, indirectly attesting to its popularity." (p. 169)

Another encounter with the East, the best-known instance for Western readers, has been analyzed far more widely over the past century and more. Theosophy earns a chapter devoted to three concerns. First, it beckoned some Anglo-Irish away from the "service class" (in Marxian terms), to pursue esoteric concerns. Next, it forced followers to choose between Blavatsky and Olcott's Eastern variety or the Western occult tradition in what became the Order of the Golden Dawn. The careers of respectively Æ (George Russell) and Yeats epitomize this bifurcation among this Irish class. Finally, as Indian contact deepened Western awareness of key distinctions between Hindu and Buddhist concepts as actually practiced rather than as textual claims, theosophical divisions widened.

Cox situates his subjects, marginalized yet inextricably tied to identity, within their era, 1850-1960: "For most Irish people, politics was spoken of as religion, as it was in India or Ceylon." (p. 195)  His fifth chapter features the stories of many less heralded than Yeats or Blavatsky, "those who resisted sectarian closure at its height" as "solidarity activists" and agents outside Irish or British confines.

Cox and his colleagues Brian Bocking and Alicia Turner continue to investigate an enigmatic working-class hobo-turned-bhikkhu, born in Booterstown, Dublin to an Irish Catholic family. He covered his perhaps subversive tracks as he wandered across America and took the name, after he wound up in Rangoon to go sober and get religion, of U Dhammaloka. Well into middle-age when in 1900 he burst into notoriety as a preacher against Christian missionaries, his career, until it just as suddenly vanishes after 1914, enlivens a memorable case study. He promoted by his Buddhist Tract Society what Cox superimposes as importing Daniel O'Connell's Irish model of cultural nationalism, defending the popular religion (this time, Burma) against the colonial elite (again, Protestant Britain).

While more from Dhammaloka himself would have jolted what remains a jaunty chapter, a snippet from a sample polemic, The Teachings of Jesus Not Adapted for Modern Civilization (1910), conveys his flair. Denouncing "the necessity of a vast host of able-bodied, well-fed Sky-Pilots" as "managers of matters between men and the big Papa in the Clouds," the BTS "holds that if a man's soul is to [be] saved by man's work, the man that has the soul has got to do the work." (p. 251) As Cox's "classic Irish Buddhist" by his defiance of the norm and his sustained reinvention in a different guise and a different realm, to this reviewer, Dhammaloka furthermore appears to fit Gramsci's model of an "organic intellectual": this formation of such a wry, self-confident figure suggests further application.

These Irish Buddhists at home and abroad comprise a memorable faction. Their numbers may have been larger than what can be surmised up to a century later, given that reliance on the "means of intellectual production" limits research to those who have published, as had Dhammaloka and his ilk. Many of those who can be verified emerge, moreover, from the educated elite. Even a shortlist of those who can be verified finds Cox resorting to the modifier "eccentric" more than once. Their common roles found them on the fringes, relegated there for counter-cultural (in the 1890s sense as well as the more recent usage) claims that featured republicanism, the avant-garde, mandarin poses, a spurious if bestselling claimant (Lobsang Tuesday Rampa for a while had fled to Ireland to evade British demands for his purportedly Tibetan passport) of transmigration, and, in Michael (born Laura) Dillon's case, the first female-to-male transsexual through plastic surgery. A doctor, he shifted from Theosophy as he traveled East. Remaking himself into Lobzang Jivaka, his life commemorates total devotion to breaking barriers first of gender, and then, as Cox narrates movingly, those of class and race as he sought to become a humble Gelugpa novice in Ladakh, before his untimely death in 1962.

Bedeviling identification now as then, the pressure for Irish Buddhists to "pass" as Catholics leaves Cox's study necessarily reticent regarding who can be singled out. Allegiances being fluid, those officially Buddhist tally as its smallest cohort, most likely. "Hinduism, paganism and ritual magic" appealed to mavericks who could creolize these practices more accessibly, given purported Christian or Celtic affinities as imagined or invented by Irish adepts. Cox avers that the "sub-Theosophical version" of Buddhism edged too close to Victorian beliefs for its adoption by seekers, while its "orthodox Asian versions" remained too risky for public identification until a few Buddhists stepped forward in 1971. Historically, "most survived by their pen and died poor" even among the smattering, usually those who had left an intolerant Ireland, who admitted their devotion to the dharma. (p. 281) 

Such intolerance, as Catholic hegemony over the southern part of the island crumbled between the 1960s and the 1990s, ebbed. The patrician Protestant service class, after the British Empire faded, retreated or emigrated. Educational opportunities and economic expansion drew working-class Catholics into the (sub-)urbanized, and somewhat secularized (if far less than the rest of Western Europe until very recently) middle class. While midcentury Victorians knew more about Buddhism, gleaned from imperial information, than almost any Irish people did between the 1920s and 1950s, the counter-cultural turn beckoned a handful towards a hesitant, perhaps furtive, move towards practice. Wearied by sectarian verities and stagnant piety, Dissident Orientalists from among disaffected Catholics revived within Irish culture, as communities formed in remote retreats as well as Dublin and Belfast. Blow-ins from Britain and Western Europe conveyed "imported Buddhism" during the 1970s-1980s. Then Irish inquirers, often self-taught solitaries who had tended to lay low, invited missionaries with their "export" version of Buddhism in the 1990s. By the millennium, "baggage Buddhism" increased as Asian immigrants contributed to Ireland's globalizing economy.

Cox parallels these changing Catholic reactions to Buddhism with the "Brezhnev era." That is, "following a brief period of openness and self-criticism, an institution turning back to internal certainties and organisational routine, relying on increasingly greying cadres to sustain itself." (p. 316) Syncretism, meditation mixing Christian and Buddhist approaches, and ecumenical dialogue after Vatican II capitulated as Rome turned away from liberation theology and Eastern-inspired practices, and as conservative Irish clerics denounced "cults," yoga, and the New Age in the 1980s.

The American-Irish Dublin student-turned-Zen monastic in Japan Maura O'Halloran attests in her journals to the power of activism, as socialist, feminist, and anti-capitalist campaigns across the world engaged her while fueling her practice in the late 1970s. Cox aligns such awareness with contexts which, while they kept Irish Buddhists marginalized due to sectarian pressures, allowed networks along alternative politics to flourish, even if their precarious nature meant they often had to start from scratch and may not have lasted for long. Still, they managed better than those in the North during the Troubles. Buddhists in the British-occupied province often have emigrated (before as after the partition of the Irish Free State in 1921), yet the identification of "peace and tolerance" with Buddhism, conversely, has appealed to a few daring to defy deeply divided lines. This topic begged for far more space, but the reserve of many Irish, from the North or South, persisting among certain interviewees demonstrates the difficulty that Buddhists there have had, via the diffidence they show.

The final chapter elaborates Jan Nattier's "baggage, import, and export Buddhism" models. Cox distinguishes the Irish from the American differences. Migrants comprise so tiny and so recent a cohort that nearly no Asians in Ireland have sufficient numbers to build their own Buddhist institutions. Western European teachers exported Buddhism into Ireland from the late 1980s on. Importing Buddhism relied on lay rather than monastic trainers, while "Mind-Body-Spirit" circuits construct "informal Buddhisms in private contexts." (p. 328) Moreover, the domestic or occluded nature of Irish Buddhism by many still in the "closet" or who mix its precepts with other spiritualities evades clearer academic scrutiny of its hybrid, creole, and characteristically dissident manifestations.

Cox estimates a third of such practitioners lack affiliation, and the global dependence of the Irish on British and international "imported knowledge" and contacts means that groups may gather at a home to listen to tapes or meditate rather than, say, flock to Rigpa's Dzogchen Beara on Cork's coast, Samye Dzong or the Zen/Insight group in suburban Dublin, or Black Mountain Zen Centre in Belfast. Less-educated and more female contingents, depending on commercially distributed product for their Buddhist connections, increase among importers in Ireland, Cox confides "anecdotally" if relevantly. Current varieties of Irish exporters, by contrast, gravitate towards hierarchy, rely on tighter doctrine and ritual, appeal to those making a "spiritual career" out of the quest, and may suit male ambitions.

Most seekers aiming at a career train abroad. Most teachers serving the Irish move there from abroad. Immigrant communities also recruit overseas their leaders. Cox analyzes O'Halloran's choice to leave 1970s Dublin for Japan as representative. Rejecting home, family, and a job, the option to travel to an enduring Buddhist enclave in its traditional heartland or at least already solvent Western settlements carried more weight than trying to build a sangha or a monastic manifestation within Irish society.  Very recently, while the strain of pursuing the dharma openly in Ireland may be easing, the daily difficulties of professionally sustaining a Buddhist enterprise limit opportunities all over the island.

The copy for this book claims that since the 1960s, "Buddhism has exploded to become Ireland's third-largest religion." This boom echoes as a whisper. The progression from under a hundred self-identified Buddhists in the Republic's 1991 census to nearly ten thousand (estimating too the North) in 2011 reveals a dramatic, if still infinitesimal leap forward, to 0.19 percent of those reporting a recognized denomination. Converts make up less than half, with fewer than forty percent of these Irish nationals; nearly half of the Buddhist E. U. immigrants hail from Britain, trailed by Germany and France. Cox reckons these total about a third of Irish Buddhists, however loosely defined by their own affiliations. Reacting against their nation's past, more persist in autonomy and/or "reflexivity in all fields of life" as part of their counter-culture. For instance, nobody polled among local Irish adepts appears to want to establish a  Buddhist school. In a country where pedagogy may likely fall under  Catholic or Protestant supervision or intervention, this suggests a fresh start for its nascent Buddhists.

Over ten thousand Chinese immigrants dominate the numbers of ethnic Buddhists. But no temples or organizations exist; the sangha remains within the home or family. Falun Dafa/Falun Gong, contested as to its Buddhist claim, emerges as the most visible Chinese denomination in Ireland, where many students and a turnover population may weaken a more elevated base for Buddhism in public view. Sōka Gakkai International, typically, blurs or breaks down ethnic and convert distinctions, boosting its modest Irish beginnings one-on-one in 1978 by way of a growing Japanese presence during the 1990s. A Dublin Thai center opened in 2011; Cox suggests the recession may spur greater cooperation between immigrants and converts, drawn together by dependence and common ground.

Commonalities with Catholic, Christian, or Celtic and pagan outlooks creolize Buddhist adaptation. Samye Dzong in the 1990s tried to link Tibetan doctrine with Celtic lore, and Sanskrit with Irish-language parallels (however sketchy given evidence). A few Celtic Buddhists invented a lineage, emanating through the aegis of an English-born, American-Canadian émigré butler of Chögyam Trungpa back to Tibetan origins, blending ecological and pagan elements into a hybrid vocation.

In turn, engaged Buddhists agitate alongside Catholic Workers against U.S. military planes at Shannon, raise funds for Tibet, build cross-community outreach in Belfast, or carry out prison visits. Buddhists, as ever enmeshed in their set and setting, have sidled away from Maura O'Halloran's affirmation of socialism as the proper response to injustice and inequality. Reflecting "mindfulness" mantras marketed by seminars to corporations, many Buddhists seem readier to turn inward to transform themselves first, rather than to reduce suffering. "Service-class romanticism," Cox chides, pays less attention to "changing social relationships" while perpetuating the endemic Irish entanglements thwarting equality, given monolithic "ethnic and religious community structures." (p. 369) The "neoliberal boom" harnessing all to relentless workplace productivity finds Irish of all sects or none confronting long privation after pursuit of quick profit, so Buddhism may appeal to restless seekers. Whether this brand of Buddhism becomes a narcotic or a shock to the system remains open, as this far Western island ponders how to integrate, share, peddle, or disguise lore from the Far East.

New Age adherents propel many contemporary innovations branded Buddhist, stirring meditation and mindfulness mantras into an eclectic mission of "self-development" aligned with holistic medicine and psychotherapy. Cox avers that today's status of Buddhism as "tolerated and timid challenger" may not last as Irish Catholicism weakens and the Celtic Tiger slinks. He asserts that Buddhists will fare better not to defend religion as placid allies from "spirituality." Given the mordant Irish experience with organized power controlled by clergy, Buddhists should rally "those who seek an end to suffering in the world." (p. 377) Rather than compromise, they must contend and confront.

If change will occur, Buddhists need to stand among those refusing to step aside when churches or states shove back. Rejecting both the "moral monopoly" assumed by clergy and the "consumption as a way of life" which for many Irish as for most in the rest of the world has become the new creed, Cox pushes Buddhists into the front lines, using their momentum gained by an association with "downshifting" out of the rat race. Like the evanescent presence of many past Irish Buddhists, these activists may flicker and fade from the present or future as well, unless published and recorded, for scholars such as Cox to track down and promote. Small flaws (a welcome index and bibliography, but inconsistent inclusions and indentations; Maura O'Halloran's Asian years ended not in 1992 but 1982 with her sudden death [p. 324]) will not discourage any inquirer opening this to learn so much. Professor and practitioner Laurence Cox's survey of Irish Buddhism shines as the first light projected into a dim space nearly every colleague might have dismissed as all but vacant. Instead, this lively book sparks energies within texts, interviews, tracts, tapes, filled by traces he delineates and connects.

(P.S. Some of my citing from and musing upon Dr. Cox's opening chapter was shared on Speculative Non-Buddhism . See comments #11 and #24 [to #14 {cf. #26}] by Patrick Jennings and #17 by Glenn Wallis in response to his "Non-buddhist blotter, anyone?"  I thank them for suggestions; their fuller consideration awaits my further elaboration on this study, which will appear at The Non-Buddhist. My review appeared in pdf (via JGB homepage), edited from the 4300 words above to less than 3900, in the Journal of Global Buddhism 15 (2014):79-86. At about 1100 words, 3-17-14 to Amazon US)