Places and Connections

Between the Facebook sites, the blogs, and the emails I’ve been getting, I’m feeling pretty connected to the students and faculty in Dungarvan, (even though I’m still in Erie). For St. Patrick’s Day I made grilled corned beef sandwiches on a really nice rye bread and my lovely wife made cooked cabbage and carrots while we listened to The Pogues. We all ate Irish at least. Good enough, but nothing in comparison the events I’ve been seeing online in Dungarvan. To begin with, in Erie we had classes…….

On another note, I’ve been reading in preparation for Irish classes (and making adjustments to the syllabi) so that when I get there I’ll be ready to rock. The reading is awesome. (What clever fellow designed the reading list?) In particular, Seamus Heaney has been hard for me to put down. He is a poet of place that makes me want to go back to places I’ve been with poem in hand. This one really gets me:

In Gallarus Oratory

You can still feel the community pack
This place: it’s like going into a turfstack,
A core of old dark walled up with stone
A yard thick. When you’re in it alone,
You might have dropped, a reduced creature,
To the heart of the globe. No worshipper
Would leap up to his God off this floor.

Founded there like heroes in a barrow,
They sought themselves in the eye of their King
Under the black weight of their own breathing.
And how he smiled on them as out they came,
The sea a censer and the grass a flame.
　
---(c) Seamus Heaney. All rights reserved.

I’ll make a stab at going back to Dingle to look at Gallarus Oratory again, just to walk out of the “walled up stone / A yard thick” and feel the sublime rush of movement from dark to lightness. Maybe it was built for just this type of moment.