The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit
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The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781577318026 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New World Library |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog
The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit
By Patricia Monaghan
New World Library
Copyright © 2003 Patricia MonaghanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57731-802-6
CHAPTER 1
The Sacred Center
I remember the exact moment I knew I would go to Ireland. It was a cold Alaskan night, and I was talking with Sikvoan Weyahok. That was his birth name; in English he was called Howard Rock. Every Wednesday Howard held court at Tommy's Elbow Room, where I unfailingly joined him. Almost forty years my senior, he was Eskimo; although that Algonkian word for "raw fish eater" is disdained by many now, it was Howard's word for himself and for his people, the Tigaramiut of Point Hope. He had been an artist in Seattle until threats of nuclear testing near his coastal village brought him home to become a crusading newspaper editor. As one of the most politically significant thinkers of the state, he was treated with respect by Native and non-Native alike.
Howard had no children, but he sentimentally called me his granddaughter. Perhaps that was because, at our first meeting, I fell into treating him like I treated my own grandfather, offering him attention that was both undivided and untinged by flattery. Just as I had with my grandfather, I challenged Howard when he became pompous, plied him with questions when he grew withdrawn, teased him when he turned maudlin. We were close for a dozen years. When Howard died in his mid-sixties — still so young, I now think — I was on the cusp of my first trip to Ireland.
I have only to close my eyes to see it now, the way it was then: The old mill below Thoor Ballylee, its whitewash long since dissolved away, its stones gray and rough. Nettles palisaded around its perimeter like sharp warnings. The broken millstone near the little sing-song river. The damp chill that hung about even on the brightest day.
I went to Ireland because Howard told me to. Not directly: he was far too traditional to give me explicit commands. Nevertheless, he told me to go. It happened one Wednesday night in 1970. We were sitting at his usual table halfway down the dim room at Tommy's, talking politics, as always. The Native land claims had not yet been settled, so we were probably discussing congressional strategies when Howard suddenly turned to me and asked, "You, now: Where are you from?"
There is this wonderfully oblique yet direct quality — something like what the Irish call "codding," a kind of blunt pointedness — about old-fashioned Eskimo speech. Perhaps that is why I fell into a special relationship with such a distinguished Native elder, because I recognized that kind of talk from my own grandfather, whose sidewise testing comments had been part of my childhood. Pop once commented to my roundest sister, when she complained of her weight, "Ah, but you'll be glad of it when the next Famine comes." Another time, when he was nearing ninety and his son's mother-in-law insinuated that he drank to excess, Pop inquired mildly of her teetotaling spouse, "What was he when he died? — seventy, wasn't it?"
I was reminded of Pop one evening when I showed off my new bearskin mukluks to Howard. I had stretched and tanned a hide for the traditional footwear, razored it into careful pieces, sewn the seams tightly with dental floss — that modern sinew substitute — and tied on bright multicolored yarn pom-poms. I thought my mukluks marvelous, but Howard was less impressed. Squinting down, he shook his head. "I think you forgot the claws," he said. I followed his eyes to where, yes, my feet resembled misshapen bear paws in the floppy oversized booties.
So I was used to listening beneath the surface of conversation. What was Howard asking? He knew I had grown up in Anchorage, that my parents still lived in Turnagain near the ruined clay cliffs of Earthquake Park. Clearly he wanted something other than the family address. Underlying our discussion of land claims was an unvoiced agreement about the importance of Howard's Eskimo heritage, so my own must be of interest. "Well," I offered, "I'm Irish."
Even when it wasn't March, I was proud of being Irish. I was proud of my ancestral home, that colonized land of splendid myth and bitter history whose yearning sentimental songs my family sang and whose poets I yearningly imitated. But I didn't know Kinvara from Kinsale, Kildare from Killaloe. The Ireland I imagined that I loved — so green, so beautiful — was vague, indistinct, unreal, not a place at all but a haunted haunting dream.
Howard waited, his face still, both hands around his glass. I tried again. "From Mayo. County Mayo," I said, retrieving what I could remember of my grandfather's stories. "From ... a town ..." Bohola, I would answer instantly now, but then I could not name where Pop John Gordon and Grandma Margaret Dunleavy had been born. Bohola: three syllables in a language I could not speak, meaningless because they were connected with neither memories nor stories, faces nor dreams.
The road beyond Bohola on a cloudy day. A sudden looming shape, blue-gray in the mist. A perfect pyramid that retreats, advances, retreats as the road dips and swoons. Around the mountain twists a pilgrims' path. Atop its height of eagles stands an ancient circle of stone.
Howard repeated my words. "From ... a town." I could hear how ignorant it sounded.
"More like a village, I think." The word village has resonance in Alaska. Native people come from villages. Villages are where people know you and your family, where you know the land and its seasons and the food it provides. I had never been to Point Hope, yet when Howard's eyes grew distant at its name, I could almost see a cluster of brown houses, the sea churning gray near it in summer, thin skeins of geese overhead in spring and fall, the sun's red ball on short winter days. I thought perhaps my grandparents were from somewhere like that, a small place far from the centers of power, easy to overlook, significant because of how deeply rather than how widely it was known.
"More like a village." Howard continued to repeat my words. I had exhausted what I knew. I stared into my drink. Finally he said again, gently, "A village. In Ireland." And I could only nod.
In his subtle Tigaramiut way, Howard had asked me a profound question. How could I ever know myself if I did not know where I was from — not just the scenes of my personal memories, but the places where my ancestors had walked, where my body understood the way time unfolded its seasons on the land, where people still spoke a language whose rhythms echoed in my own? Where history had been made by people with my family names? Where the unrecorded history of ordinary loves and losses had been lived by people with features like mine? Howard knew what Carson McCullers meant when she wrote, "To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from." Not knowing where I came from, I did not know who I was or who I might ultimately become.
At that moment, sitting silent beside Howard, I knew I would go to Ireland. Howard died before I came back with my first insights into a proper response. Where am I from? Even now, I cannot fully answer that question, but it was Howard who set my feet upon the path toward understanding.
The Sky Road across from Errislannan. The full moon sheets the calm ocean with silver light. A vanilla fragrance — gorse — drifts past on a slight summer breeze. Beneath my feet, the boreen is pebbly and uneven. Somewhere on the hill, someone whistles to a dog.
"Is this your first trip home, then?" people asked me. That odd, common question. Home? Wasn't I already at home in Alaska? Yes, but no. My uprearing was there, but my heritage was not. I had only to look around me in Ireland to realize the difference; for the first time, I belonged. For more generations than I can count, people like me have worked the Irish land and fished the Irish seas. Short square bodies and strong faces are common there. I have the Dunleavy nose ("I've never really seen it on a girl," said my great- aunt Sarah, that first time over, codding me the way Pop had always done). My forehead is the same as my cousin Bridey's. I have the Gordon build. It was strange to me, that first time over, hearing my features — which I had grown up thinking of as unique — dissected and reassigned. And just as my face was familiar to my Irish relations, I found Ireland strangely familiar. Having grown up deeply loving a land to which I nonetheless was a newcomer, even an invader, I found myself learning to love another land just as deeply and specifically, even knowing that I was and would probably remain an exile from it.
An exile. That is the old word for people forced, by economics or politics, to leave Ireland. America called them immigrants; Ireland calls them exiles. Coming from a family of exiles, I was welcomed back as though it were the most natural thing to be drawn to the island where my blood ran in the veins of others. The fact that I was so strongly pulled to Gort, where I had no known family connections, instead of to Bohola, the center of the clan, was a mystery to my friends for many years. "Whyever did ye come to Gort?" fretted antiquarian Tom Hannon until he learned that my grandmother was a Daley. That relieved him greatly, since the Daleys — the Ó Daillaighs — were historically the poets of New Quay, just a few miles away. "Ah, there, Patricia," Tom exulted. "There. Now we have it. Now we have it, Patricia."
The holy well at Liscannor on a dank winter day. The slanting path slippery, the sound of the holy spring masked by pelting rain. Saint Brigit in her protective glass box. The litter of mementoes — handwritten pleas for help, rosaries, bits of damp yarn, bedraggled feathers. Ivy clutching its way up black, wet stones.
When I picture Ireland, I never see a postcard of some generic greenness. I see the Burren, Connemara, Mayo in a wet spring, the mountains of the hag. More specific yet: I see a familiar greening field, a particular thunder-stricken yew, a granite-strewn patch of bog that looks a great deal like other granite-strewn patches of bog but with a certain ineffable difference. For I know Ireland not as a single place but as a mosaic of places, each one steeped in history and myth, song and poetry.
When I meet someone Irish, whether in Ireland or in America, the conversation invariably turns to place. "Where are you from?" it begins. You name the county first, then the town; the parish, then the farm. "Oh, where?" the listener encourages, nodding as familiar names are voiced. My mother's family is from Mayo. Near Castlebar. Bohola. Carrowcastle. When someone can follow all that, you move onto family names. Gordons. Dunleavys. McHales. Deaseys. "Oh, I have a Deasey married to my cousin who lives now down the country in Wicklow." Oh, where? And so it begins again.
"Each single, enclosed locality matters and everything that happens within it is of passionate interest to those who live there," the great novelist John McGahern tells us. Ireland is the land of the dindshenchas, the poems of place-lore that tell the mythic meaning of hills and crossroads, dolmens and holy wells. Even today, houses in the West bear names rather than numbers. I was once asked to deliver an article from America to my friend, folklorist and singer Barbara Callan, in Connemara. "We don't have her address," the sender fretted. "We just have the words Cloon, Cleggan, Galway." That is her address, I explained. Cloon is the clutch of houses, Cleggan the village, Galway the county. The local postmistress would envision Cloon's heathery low hill just outside Cleggan town, just as mention of the Gordon farm at Carrowcastle, Bohola, Co. Mayo, conjures for those who know the area wide green pastures and a substantial stucco house. A stranger might find 23 Clifden Road or 125 Highway N5 more helpful, but Irish house names are not meant for strangers but for neighbors who know each twist of the road and every boulder that shadows it.
The coral strand near Ballyconneely, the dark mass of Errisberg rising behind me. The tide is out, the rocks covered with lacy dark seaweed. Somewhere offshore, a seal barks. The endless wind fills me, lifts me, blows through me until I dissolve.
I am lucky, among Americans, in coming from a place. Growing up in Alaska, I learned the land with the kind of voluptuous intimacy the rural Irish know. I learned the summer cycle of edible berries — raspberries first, then blueberries, then low-bush cranberries — and how to recognize, even in other seasons, their favored terrains. I still keep secret the location of the best chanterelles in interior Alaska, in case I ever move back. I know the history of towns and the families connected with them, so that when I pass a certain turnoff near Delta, I see generations of the Kusz family in a flash. When I first came home to Ireland more than twenty years ago, I already possessed a rootedness that helped me recognize the power of place in the Irish spirit.
A shaded path through Páirc-na-lee. Sunlight glancing off the dark waters of Coole Lake. Wild swans, pair by pair, mounting the pale summer sky. The raucous unmelodic calls of hoodie crows in nearby trees.
The lore and love and specificity associated with Irish places grow directly from Ireland's residual paganism. "Scratch a bit at the thin topsoil of Irish Catholicism," the saying goes, "and you soon come to the solid bedrock of Irish paganism." Ireland is still what novelist Edna O'Brien calls a "pagan place." But that paganism does not conflict with a devout Catholicism that embraces and absorbs it, in a way that can seem mysterious, even heretical, elsewhere. In Ireland, Christianity arrived without lions and gladiators, survived without autos-da-fé and Inquisitions. The old ways were seamlessly bonded to the new, so that ancient rituals continued, ancient divinities became saints, ancient holy sites were maintained just as they had been for generations and generations.
Thus the goddess remains alive in Ireland even in the first years of the third millennium of the Christian era. But that sentence is inexact. For the goddess does not merely remain alive in Ireland — she is Ireland. "Ireland has always been a woman," says Edna O'Brien, "a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag." The island still bears her ancient name: Éire, from Ériu, an ancestral goddess whom the invading Celts met and adopted (or did she adopt them?) around 400 B.C.E. Ireland is the goddess. She is every field still fertile a thousand years after its first cultivation. She is every river that still floods with salmon despite millennia of fishing. She is the dancing pattern of the seasons, the fecundity of sheep and cattle, the messages written in the migratory flight of birds. She is the sun's heat stored deep in the dark bogs. She is the refreshment of pure water and of golden ale. She is living nature, and she has never been forgotten in Ireland.
This residual Irish paganism is, perforce, polytheistic, because what monotheism leaves out is the goddess. There has never been a religion that had a goddess but no god, in the way that monotheisms have gods but no goddesses. But the difference between mono- and polytheisms does not end with number and gender of divinities. As Celticist Miranda Green argues, polytheism involves a close relationship between the sacred and the profane, especially in relation to the natural world. Where monotheism imagines god as transcending nature, as separate from this world, polytheism — paganism, if you will — sees nature as holy. Every stream has its special connection with divinity and thus is pictured as a unique and individual god or goddess. As the Greeks expressed it, every tree has its dryad, every rock its oread, every ocean wave its nereid. Paradoxically, such polytheism often sees nature as a whole — called Gaia by the scientist James Lovelock, after the Greek goddess of earth — as divine. In Ireland, that divinity is unquestionably feminine.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog by Patricia Monaghan. Copyright © 2003 Patricia Monaghan. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Chapter One The Sacred Center,Chapter Two Mountains of the Hag,
Chapter Three The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog,
Chapter Four Intoxication,
Chapter Five Becoming Native to This Island,
Chapter Six The Well of Her Memory,
Chapter Seven Wisdom Galore,
Chapter Eight Wildish Things,
Chapter Nine The Stone in the Midst of All,
Pronunciation Guide,
Glossary,
Notes,
Index,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,