but we made it to Dublin before
summer’s longest day, shortest night.
I didn’t bring my bowler hat
anyway and I don’t have
a waistcoat. But we walked
through St Stephen’s Green where
Irish Citizens Army volunteers
were pinned down during the
Easter Rising by a British Army
machine gun on the 4th floor
of the Shelbourne Hotel
and paired with another one
at the United Services Club
and snipers in many windows.
We sat on a bench behind
the Park Superintendent’s
cottage. A sign said that there
was a ceasefire for an hour
each morning of the siege
so that he could feed the ducks.
Today young couples reclined on the
warm afternoon grass, and today’s
children fed bread to the ducks.
A young man walked by where
we sat. He balanced two shallow
white boxes with the word Doom
printed in heavy black letters
along on the side. Slices of Doom
Detroit style rectangular pizza,
claimed as the best in Dublin,
a far cry from cockles and mussels
alive, alive-o sold from a cart
by the legendary Molly Malone
affectionately known by the locals
as “the tart with the cart”.
William Faulkner wrote in
Requiem for a Nun, “The past
is never dead, it’s not even past”.
The past in Dublin is aswirl
and awash in a flood of bronze
figures and monuments to its dead.
The emaciated figures of the Famine
victims and a starving dog stand and
sprawl before rough granite pillars.
A bust of Countess Markievicz, who
led volunteers in the Easter Rising
depicts her in a military uniform.
Probably the one she designed
for the Irish Citizens Army. She was
sentenced to death but was spared
for her tender gender, and two years
later she became the first woman
to be elected to the Parliament,
a position she refused to accept.
Nearby, just off the Grafton Street
shopping area, a shining figure
holding an electric bass guitar
stands between Boodles and
Bruxelles, Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy.
Oscar Wilde lounges languorously
on a boulder across the street from
his childhood home in Merrion Square.
The Book of Kells, the 800-year-old
manuscript of the four gospels dwells
at a special Book of Kells Experience
at Trinity College. Hundreds of visitors
meander through kiosk-sized enlargements
of the exquisitely detailed postage stamp-sized
finials of the book. It resides in a glass cube
in a darkened room, where the crowds
are thin. The book is so small, so modest
in dimension and protected from harsh light.
Signs prohibit photographs, the light from
cameras and phones would be harmful.
And yet, a guard has to warn over and over
as someone ignores the prohibition,
Sir, no photos!, no photos! It’s the best
thing in the whole exhibition, the actual
real Experience, unmediated by
technology or academic exposition.
What I want to see, at the Museum
of Irish Literature, besides the multitude
of covers of Joyce’s Ulysses, or
peans to Yeats or Wilde, or Seamus Heany,
God love them all, is Samuel Beckett’s
telephone from his Paris apartment.
If I’d had that number back in 1972,
when I was a conscientious objector
separating edible from inedible garbage
at a nuclear missile base in southern Germany,
I would have called him to thank him for his
novels, they carried me through a difficult time.
Because often it is only the absurd,
irreducible moment stripped to its core
that makes sense in an insane world.
Keenan bought me a gray tweed wool flat cap,
I know that I’ve been blessed; by God's grace,
Keenan's love, and Sam Beckett's books.
