The Troubles

I spent a number of hours today at the Ulster Museum, and learned a tremendous amount about The Troubles.

I was saddened to find this article in today's copy of the Belfast Telegraph: Bomb Plot to kill police revealed.

The Giant's Causeway

Take your mind back to the third century A.D. It’s probably a little difficult to remember, but try. You live near the coast of northeast Ireland, in what is now known as County Antrim. It is a land of verdant hills and bogs. The weather is rainy and grey more times than not, and wind blows feverishly in the winter. The trees are sturdy and strong. The cattle are large, strong, and stubborn. The terrain, weather, and livestock often require some battling. You must also possess some of these traits to survive here.

Consider what you think if you stumbled upon steep embankment and found a river of rocks separating the land from the sea? What’s more, what would you think if you ventured down to that river of rocks only to find that its waves were frozen in time in the shape of tall solid columns – both long and narrow… columns that each had five or six sides… columns that locked together into what looks like a huge stone honeycomb sprawling into and out of the sea?

Today, we know that this wonder, known as the Giant’s Causeway, is made up of basalt (solidified lava) that cooled and cracked over a period of two million years, forming columns of interlocking stone. But what might you think if you were here over 1,000 years ago? You might come up with the creation myth below. This version of the folktale of Finn MacCool comes from the National Trust of Northern Ireland.

Legend tells of Finn MacCool (Finn mac Cumaill) wanting to do battle with a rival giant in Scotland, known as Benandonner. The two giants had never met, so Finn built enormous stepping stones across the sea so that the Scottish giant could cross to Ireland to face the challenge. However, when Finn saw the great bulk Benandonner approaching, he fled home in fear and asked his wife, Oonagh, to hide him.

Oonagh disguised Finn as a baby, and put him in a gigantic cradle. When Benandoner saw the size of the infant in the cradle, he assumed that the father must be even more gigantic than he. Benandoner fled home in terror, ripping up the Causeway in case he should follow.

This is the reason that the Giant’s Causeway exists in north Antrim, along with similarly shaped columns of stone at Fingal’s Cave on the Scottish island of Staffa to the north. These are the two surviving ends of the Causeway built by Finn MacCool.

This legend entertains us today and provides insight into ancient Irish beliefs and imagination. The name Finn is etched into place-names throughout Ireland and Scotland, and in the surnames of people around the world.

Belfast

Despite the fact that the “always-reliable travel guides” described Belfast as a charming city, I predicted that I would see a worn down city clouded with the weight of heaviness in the air. I was proven wrong. Instead I've found a city that is welcoming and bustling… with just a faint taste of subterranean political unrest.

I spent my first full day in Belfast wandering the streets without any particular destination in mind. My hotel is very close to the beautiful Queen’s University, and I’m actually a block away from the Department of Education. This part of the city seems to be a college town bursting at the seams. There are at least three coffee shops on every block (great café au lait!), thrift stores, restaurants, and pubs. I love the colors. Buildings tend to be shaded a drastically different pastel from the one next to it.

On my way to the City Hall, I passed an old, rectangular fountain. I found an inscription for the visitor to read as while walking around the structure. It states: WHOSEVER DRINKETH OF THIS WATER SHALL NEVER THIRST. WHOSEVER DRINKETH OF THIS WATER SHALL THIRST AGAIN. Interesting. When I had a look inside the pools where one might have cupped their hands to drink some water, I found discarded plastic bottles and other garbage.

Across the street from the prophetic fountain are the North Ireland offices of the BBC. There was a group of people on strike. I asked one of the strikers what they were boycotting. She kindly explained that a number of people on staff had been let go and directed outdoors by security without warning.

I asked if I could take a picture. She said I was more than welcomed to, and the entire group of strikers posed for the camera and smiled. Interesting, again.

The Belfast City Hall is an impressive building with a great green lawn and beautiful fountain. Inside are many artifacts and statues that, along with label copy, tell the story of the British foundation of this city. Most fascinating to me was a golden trowel used to lay a foundation in 1898. (I found no mention of political strife in the exhibitry.)

There is a particularly striking statue of Queen Victoria outside of the front gates. Tall and imposing, she stares down at passer-byes with an imperious gaze. I wondered what she would say if she could speak.

After visiting the City Hall, I found myself in a bustling portion of the City Centre. Stores, stores, stores, coffee shops, coffee shops, coffee shops. The Disney Store. Starbucks. HMV.

Intermingling with the consumerism were older churches. My favorite was St. Malachy’s, a Catholic church founded in 1840s. As I made my way through the church taking in different images from the New Testament and votives, an elderly woman with brightly dyed red hair and caked on makeup approached me and asked where I was from. (Was it that obvious that I was a tourist? Apparently so.) I told her I was. She was excited as, she told me, she was too!

“I’m from Dublin,” she told me. “I’ve come all this way to find an adoration.”

I asked her what that was.

“You don’t know what an adoration is? Are you Catholic?” she gasped.

“No,” I replied. “I’m Jewish.”

“You’re Jewish, and you’re visiting a church?” she asked with surprise.

“Yes, I love learning about different religions.”

She blessed me and then explained what an adoration was.

* * * * *

I’ve been in Belfast for several days now. And the more time I observe and read, the more hushed whispers of the Troubles I hear. It seems that the city is making an effort to move on, to mention the conflicts between the Protestant and Catholic, North and South, British and native Irish under its breath.

In my opinion, The Troubles are not evident on the surface. But it doesn’t take much scratching to find their evidence underneath that surface.

The Gulf of Araby

I wrote this narrative approximately eight years ago। Believe it or not, it is edited down from the original. Somehow it seemed appropriate for this blog. The pictures are from this visit.

I admit that I developed a slight crush on Natalie Merchant when I was in college. It began one day in a Borders bookstore when I first heard Merchant’s Carnival over the speakers and immediately connected the lyrics to my first experience walking the streets of a large city, in this case San Francisco.

An interesting feature of the recording was that of a smoky, raw voice that echoed Merchant’s in the chorus. The liner notes read that it belonged to a woman named Katell Keineg. I took note of the name and let it sink in somewhere into the folds at the back of my mind.

A year later, I was perusing through a used record store in St. Louis. As I made my way through the aisles, looking for bootlegs of Annie Lennox and Fiona Apple concerts, I came across a lonesome copy of a Katell Keineg CD. The cover of the album, O Seasons O Castles, was eye-catching to say the least।

Hues of reds, browns and golds shot forth from the blurred image of a lanky woman wearing what appeared to be an old dress that didn’t fit her well, smiling madly. This was Katell Keineg? How odd, I remember thinking. The CD insert was imprinted with a golden seal indicating that the it had been distributed for promotional purposes only, and that it was illegal for it to be sold. I thought that I had stumbled upon lost treasure. A rare, illegal, promo CD from the mysterious singer Katell Keineg.

I bought the CD for a couple of dollars.

Shortly, I found myself listening over and over to the album. I thought I had discovered a magical songstress. Keineg had the ability to belt out notes so high that they whistled. She had the ability to hold notes so long that they splintered into , what sounded like, the moans of a cow giving birth. Her voice was raw, powerful and, well, different from anything I had ever heard. I had discovered a new instrument.

The last song on the album The Gulf of Araby haunted me upon first listen। (As some of my friends will attest to, this is the one song I play on the piano that will bring me to tears.)

The words drew me in:

If you could fill a veil with shells from Killiney Shore,

And sweet-talk in a tongue that is no more,

If wishful thoughts could bridge,

The Gulf of Araby between,

What is and what can never be

(I've included the complete lyrics at the end of this post.)

Keineg’s knack for throwing in allusions to literature throughout the album impressed me. Surely Killiney and Araby must be references to some obscure text from the Middle East or Ireland. How could they not? I tried in vein to track these evocative places down. Unfortunately, searches on the pre-Google internet came up empty except for mention of the short story Araby by James Joyce.

Years later, I discovered that Killiney Shore was located south of Dublin along the Irish Sea.

* * * * *

This was the day that Pia and I designated to explore Killiney, in hopes of finding Killiney Shore.

We took the train south from Dublin for 45-minutes to the small town. On the way we sat opposite a red-eyed, older woman with thin, ghostly white skin and frayed grey hair. By this point in the trip, I had decided to affectionately give monikers to all of the individuals that Pia and I came across so that I might remember them in the future. I named this woman Mrs. Paddingcheek. She was quite friendly, and helped give us a sense of where we were going. Like the others we had met thus far, she was curious to learn about us as we were Americans.

We got off the train in Killiney and found ourselves in a small, seemingly abandoned train station resting on a lonely stretch of land along the Irish Sea. It appeared as if we were in the middle of nowhere save for some houses and a large castle-like structure in the distance. There were signs pointing to the nearby villages of Dalkey and Killiney. The stationmaster told us that we should walk down the road from the station for about 20-minutes and that we would then find some spectacular scenery.

As we walked, the road began to curve uphill. It was quite pretty. Misty grey clouds hovered and swirled above the sea. Grey waves pounded against a dark, sandy shore dusted with colored stones. In the distance we could see a steep hill containing a dark green forest that seemed to lead up to some kind of cliff overlooking the sea. Rising out of the trees was a brown, conic shape which we believed to be the top of a small, castle.

As we walked, we found luxurious homes and villas built along the seaside surrounded by walls of stone and iron fences. We first happened upon a man walking an overweight weimaraner. I named the pooch Killiney.

The road grew increasingly steep as we headed closer to the woods - the trees on our left, and a stone wall on our right.

Soon we crossed paths with Mr. and Mrs. Helpfulhands, an older couple entering Vico Road from a path leading down to the shore. They told us that we could go down the path to the shore there.However, if we continued to walk for another 20-minutes, we would find even more spectacular scenery.

Just as Pia and I were ready to continue our walk, Mrs. Helpfulhands asked if we had come to see Bono’s house. (Yes, Bono of U2 fame.) We said that we hadn’t, puzzled. She was surprised as she had expected us initially to ask her where his home was. We asked her why, and she told us that were standing front of it. Yup, right there at Killiney Shore, we found Bono’s estate. I had noticed that there was a good deal of graffiti on the stone wall, however I hadn’t realized that it surreptitiously protected a home. I looked closely at the wall. The graffiti spelled out notes to Bono – love letters and praise.

We continued uphill, and soon met another elderly couple. I named them Mr. and Mrs. Evergreen.

Mr. and Mrs. Evergreen encouraged us to hike up into the forest and continue uphill until we came across a concrete path. Apparently the view would be well worth it.

We entered what seemed to be a temperate rainforest – lush, green, moist ferns and moss grew wildly alongside a muddy, narrow trail. We followed a path of dead leaves uphill, winding around and about. Eventually we found a smaller trail of dead leaves and mud leading away from our path and up to the incline towards the cliffs. Pia and I decided to take the road less traveled and ventured up a steep, slippery path. We hiked up and up and up; tremendous exercise, great cardio!

Eventually we found the concrete path at what seemed to be the top of the incline. We knew we were at a high altitude, but we didn’t know just how high.

We walked south, continuing uphill, and passed a number of people walking their dogs. Then we came across an opening the top of the cliffs along the sea! We had made it. The view was unbelievable. There was the long dark coast of Killiney running along the swelling seas. Green, green, green long grasses and short gymnosperms revealed large, elephantine rocks. The wind was fierce, and blew our hair madly. It was fairly cold but not freezing. There, I felt the splendor of being alive – free in the roaring wind surrounded by the sprawling earth and sea. Could this portion of the Irish Sea be the Gulf of Araby?

There were a few interesting structures atop the mountain. One was a pyramid-like monument with stairs leading to the top. A man wearing an Irish cap stood atop the pyramid looking out at the sea. Behind us was the cone we had seen from below. The structure was small, a castle-like monument built in the late 19^th-century. As we approached it, we passed the man with the Irish cap. I noticed that he had tears running down his cheeks. (I didn’t give him a name. He didn’t need one.)

Pia and I walked down from the summit renewed. The hike down was a welcomed change to our hike uphill. We wandered into the small town of Killiney and continued downhill until we found ourselves at the crossroads where we had met Mr. and Mrs. Helpfulhands. We followed their path down to the shore, walking along Bono’s stone wall. The narrow trail turned into a kind of corridor. Along the way I stopped and took a loose stone from the wall for my friends David and Irene, huge fans of U2.

The shore was magnificent. Huge, blackish, smooth stones filled with sands sprinkled heavily with smooth pebbles of different colors and sizes. There were a good number of folks and dogs on the beach. I knelt down and began collecting rocks and symbolically placed them in the hood of my raincoat. For me, I was filling a veil with shells from Killiney Shore.

We walked back to the train station and headed back to Dublin. On the train, we sat opposite a handsome, young man with dark, curly hair from sporting all black. He told us that he was from County Mayo. I named him Darkcurls. He, like many others, wondered where we were from. His accent seemed richer, somehow deeper than the Dubliners we had met, and his face turned a bright shade of crimson when he spoke.

Pia was exhausted so we taxied back to our inn to rest.

Once Pia woke up from her nap, we got spiffied up and took a bus to one of the quays at the Liffey. On the bus, I told Pia of my wish to go to as many exotic places around the world as possible. Places like Iceland, Suriname, Madagascar, Namibia, Thailand and on and on. We both agreed that we would love to travel to South Korea and Japan.

All this time, an older man with golden hair fading fast to silver, and big, swollen red eyes sat across from us. As the bus driver announced the next stop, he turned to us and said suddenly, “Make sure you go!”

“To South Korea?” I asked.

“To all the… places… travel… I could have… traveled but I… made a mistake… you only go through… life once!”

Pia was silent. I stared directly into his red eyes and asked, “Where did you want to travel to?”

“40 years ago… to England.”

That was all he said for it was his stop. He got up and hobbled off the bus, limping.

It was as if we had been visited by a prophet or a ghost. Pia thought he was drunk. “No,” I stated firmly. “He was not drunk. He might have some sort of palsy, but

he was not drunk.”

Pia nodded and said, “You know, you are living your dream.”

And the bus drove on into the night’s carnival।

The Gulf of Araby by Katell Keineg

If you could fill a veil with shells from Killiney's shore
And sweet talk in a tongue that is no more
If wishful thought could bridge
The Gulf of Araby
Between what is
What is
What is
And what can never be

If you could hold the frozen flow of New Hope Creek
And hide out from the one they said you might meet
If you could unlearn all the words
That you never wanted heard
If you could stall the southern wind
That's whistling in your ears
You could take what is
What is
What is
What is
To what can never be

One man of seventy whispers free at last
Two neighbors who are proud of their massacres
Three tyrants torn away in a winter's month
Four prisoners framed by a dirty judge
Five burned with tyres
Six men still inside
And seven more days to shake at the great divide


The Gulf, the Gulf of Araby
The Gulf, the Gulf of Araby

Well, we would plough and part the earth to bring you home
And harvest every miracle ever known
If they laid out all the things
That these ten years want to bring
We would gladly give them up
To bring you back to us
O, there is nothing we would not give
To kiss you and believe you can take what is
What is
What is
To what can never be

One man of seventy whispers not free yet
Two neighbors who make up knee-deep in their dead
Three tyrants torn away in the summer's heat
Four prisoners lost in the fallacy
Five, on my life
And six, I'm dead inside
And seven more days to shake at the great divide

The Gulf, the Gulf of Araby
The Gulf, the Gulf of Araby

National Folklore Collection

When I started conducting research for this trip, I immediately began looking for repositories of Irish folklore. Libraries would be helpful certainly, but archives or special collections, even better. I stumbled across the National Folklore Collection at the University College Dublin (UCD) while conducting a google search. Its website stated that the National Folklore Collection was, “home to one of the largest collections of [Irish] oral and ethnological material in the world." It supposedly contained books, manuscripts, musical recordings, and fine art all related to Irish folk history. It sounded like I had hit the jackpot.

It was necessary for me to apply for permission to use the Archives, so back in the early months of 2010 I filled out an application and faxed it overseas. I was thrilled when I found out that my application had been accepted. I had an appointment with Archivist Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh. Me... an official pseudo-researcher at the National Folklore Collection at the University College Dublin! If I had been asked as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, this would never had crossed my mind.

It was surprising to me that few people in the Dublin's City Centre could tell me how to get to UCD. It wasn't on any maps of the city, so I had to search maps of the region. I finally figured out how to get there via bus with the help of a friendly fellow at the Tourism Bureau. The trip only took about a half-hour via bus. The campus was quiet and small. Very green grass, a small lake, and cubic grey buildings. It didn't take too long to find the Archives in a building largely dedicated to theatre and language studies. The Archives were located in a small corner.

Upon entering the Collection, I introduced myself to a young man named Johnny, and he told me that Críostóir (pronounced Cris-to-er) would be 'round to help me in a few minutes. Eventually, a friendly man sporting a blue button-down shirt, about 50-years old, appeared. He introduced himself as Críostóir, shook my hand, asked a few questions about the kinds of material I wanted to look at, and took me behind a locked door. We then walked down another hallway. Beautiful paintings depicting different aspects of Irish life and lore adorned the walls.

Críostóir brought me to a room with a card catalogue stretched alongside a wall, and he taught me "the rules of using it". The card catalogue was divided into subsections such as: Historical Figures, Storytellers, Important Locations, The Otherworld, Fairies, Fairy Abductions, Fairies Trapped in Other Beings, Fairy Hills, Fairy Houses, Water Creatures, etc. The sections were not in any alphabetical order, and were labeled in English on the outside of the drawer, and Irish on the inside on large index cards fading with age.

Next, Críostóir explained that I was not allowed to remove any index cards from the card catalogue. If I saw a card written in English that interested me, I was to copy down the call number, get him, and he would go and find the material in another room. He advised that I ignore the cards written in Irish for, frankly, I wouldn't know how to read them. The archivist also gave me an old copy of a book he referred to as “the Bible of Irish Folklore”. It was a thick book with an old green cover and tattered binding called A Handbook of Irish Folklore by Seán Ó Súilleabháin. It was a thrill to see it as I had read about it in other books.

Flipping through the Handbook, and searching through the card catalogue, could have easily taken me days। The experience of flipping through the old, irreplaceable index cards in English and Irish – covering all kinds of topics and tales - was extraordinary. It felt like dipping my hands into a box and scrolling through hundreds of years of history and stories.


I noticed that many of the cards in the catalogue did not refer to stories with titles. Rather, they contained barely legible, brief synopses of folktales along with reference numbers. These stories were simple and concise. No character development, no description of setting, no real sense of tone. The event and the end. Take the following stories for example:

"Man thinks friends who [are] coming to visit him were delayed too long as he went with his dog. He hunted his dog in under the bridge[.] The whole crowd of wee folk went away [up] the fields laughing [and shouting]. They thought they were the fairies."

"People brought away by the fairies [are] put riding on white horses, brought over the hills and left back again before dawn…"

Now that I have been to the National Folklore Collection, I find myself left with more questions that answers. I am beginning to question what a folktale really is. Or perhaps I am broadening my description of a folktale. A Handbook of Irish Folklore gives incredibly precise directions for students of cultural anthropology on how to record a folktale. Incredibly precise. And I hope to write about those directions in a future post.

I see that my time at this Internet Cafe is winding down, and so I will have to bring this post to a close. Here is the tale of my trip to the National Folklore Collection as one might find in the old card catalogue: Student goes to place with many books. He receives help from a learned man. The student reads. He leaves with new appreciation and questions.

Leprechauns

Did you know that the cereal Lucky Charms is not sold in Ireland? Yup folks, that’s right… that sugar-wielding Lucky the Leprechaun, with his good luck charm marshmallows, somehow never made it to the Emerald Isle. This begs the question: How did Lucky the Leprechaun make it to America in the first place?

I learned this trivial factoid at the Leprechaun Museum yesterday, an institution dedicated to the teaching of Irish folklore located in the heart of Dublin. While the museum is geared in general towards children, one can learn a tremendous amount and, perhaps, life’s most important lessons from children's literature and folktales.

Anyhow, back to Lucky Charms.

You know those charm-shaped, artificially colored, crunchy magical marshmallows sprinkled throughout the cereal? It turns out that they're shaped in the form of objects that leprechauns - or any fairy for that matter - dread. Take the purple horseshoe-shaped marshmallow, for example. Iron was, and possibly still is, used to ward off leprechauns. Thus the Irish took to hanging horseshoes made of iron above entrances to their homes or barns. Why? They served as an unwelcome mat.

The first reference to the leprechaun is found in the story of Fergus Mac Léti, a King from the ancient province of Ulster. Members of the fairy (sídhe) family, leprechauns became known in rural Ireland for their red hair, green clothing, love of the drink, and rebellious temper. Leprechauns are portrayed in folklore as short, clever men with thin legs that carefully guard their gold found at the end of rainbow or in bushes.

Over centuries, the legend of the leprechaun spread to other areas of Europe. Irish and British cousins include brownies, hobs, the drunken clurichaun, and far dirrig.

It was important to keep all sorts of sídhe away from one's home. Of course iron horseshoes couldn't possibly do it alone. Other mechanisms to keep changelings - evil fairies bent on kidnapping mortals and replacing them with shapeshifters - emerged. For example, the Irish took to spitting on their hands before shaking someone else's as a means of greeting. If the other person refused to shake hands, it was a fairy, and immediately told to leave. Another way to ward off fairies? Put a bucket of dirty water outside of one's home. Fairies don't care for muck.

I suppose feisty leprechaun could be seen as having some of the traits of the stereotypical Irishman: red hair, green clothing, love of the drink, and rebellious. One might also see a parallel between the spirit of the leprechaun and that of famous Irish writers.

Earlier in the day, I visited the Dublin Writer’s Museum. There I learned that Irish literature can be classified into one of two general bodies: rural tradition (stories influences by folklore and writing in Irish) and urban writing. The earliest forms of written literature can be found in poems of praise, satire, and lament written by professional poets in the 6th century. They were passed on by oral tradition via the seanachie, traditional storytellers, and eventually collected and written down. Legends such as the Tain Bó Cúlaigne and Fenian Cycle are still being translated into English today, and are studied by people of all ages. They survive today and shed light on early Irish and Scots-Gaelic life.

The following is a quote I copied down from signage at the Dublin Writer's Museum yesterday: "It has been claimed that the greatest weapon the English ever gave to the Irish was their own language."

When the English came to Ireland, literary movements emerged as a means of rebellion. At first, writers took aim at organized religion, particularly that of the Roman Catholic Church. Several hundred years later, the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 was enforced upon the people of Ireland by British authorities. Writers were no longer able to publish work with references to sexuality and "individual consciousness".

How did the rebellious, fiery Irish writers respond? They became disrupters of established literary forms. They questioned rules, invented new genres of writing, and ultimately created new forms of literature found nowhere else in the world.

There is so much more that I could write about in this posting… about the work of writers and collectors such as Lady Gregory, John Synge, and W.B. Yeats, writers that worked to preserve the Irish rural tradition. Perhaps it is best to end this post with one of my favorite piece of Irish literature, an excerpt from Celtic Twilight by W. B. Yeats called The Golden Age:

A while ago I was in the train, and getting near Sligo. The last time I had been there something was troubling me, and I had longed for a message from those beings or bodiless moods, or whatever they be, who inhabit the world of spirits. The message came, for one night I saw with blinding distinctness a black animal, half weasel, half dog, moving along the top of a stone wall, and presently the black animal vanished, and from the other side came a white weasel-like dog, his pink flesh shining through his white hair and all in a blaze of light; and I remembered a pleasant belief about two faery dogs who go about representing day and night, good and evil, and was comforted by the excellent omen. But now I longed for a message of another kind, and chance, if chance there is, brought it, for a man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open.

We were now getting into the big glass-roofed terminus, and the fiddler put away his old blacking-box and held out his hat for a copper, and then opened the door and was gone.

Kaleidscopes and Cracks

My first “day” in Dublin was one of simply wandering the streets. I observed the people, listened to their beautiful accents, and took in the different architecture.

Dublin is kaleidoscopic to me. If you scratch a little beneath the surface, you can see chapters of history playing and mingling with one another, almost like cracks or rifts that are trying to weave together. For example, there are marks of Christianity alongside those of pagan traditions, signs are written both in the native language Irish, and the outsider English, and there is a sense of there being native Irish and those from other parts of the word.

Geographically, one may think of Dublin as being bisected by the River Liffey. This inlet from the Irish Sea was used by the Vikings when they began to settle here during Medieval times.

The last time I was in Dublin, I stayed south of the River Liffey, an area known for its striking Georgian architecture, many museums and libraries, and greenery। This time, I’m staying north of the river. It is much more industrial and worn down. As I walked along the streets, I noticed houses with broken windows, garbage strewn about the pavement, and houses with crusted paint just about to snap off their sides… another crack: north and south of the river.

As I walked down one particular street, I saw a rusted gutter pipe run down into the corner of someone’s porch. It occupied a space between the stairs and a rusty rail. From underneath grew a beautiful blanket of clover-like weeds speckled with lavender and white flowers. It grew like ivy up and around the decayed wooden façade and iron gate… another crack: growth and decay.

Finally, I was struck by a poem I found resting before a statue of St. Patick in the St. Francis Xavier Church. It read: O Patrick…/ In spite of the King of Tara/You kindled the paschal fire on the/Hill of Slane/While smoke and flame have never/yet been enlightened.

In this poem we find the exultation of St. Patrick. He is praised for managing to enlighten a nation of pagan kingdoms with the words of Christianity… another crack: monotheism and polytheism.

What cracks and kaleidoscopes will I find today?