Major Landscapes, Minor Paths

We had frost this past Sunday morning, none yesterday, and this morning brought heavy frost and ground fogs inland, clear skies out over Lake Michigan.

From Peterson Park, where Sarah and I went for our inaugural adventure of the day, I could see all the way to North Fox Island, while South Fox was so distinct that the morning light made its dunes visible to me from the mainland.



The blue horizon line called, but so did small landscapes near at hand: moss--its green so startling!--and lichen and fossils. As always, there was so much for me to see and for Sarah to smell that we could have stayed outdoors all day, had not duty called us back to town.



Returning also to the urban landscape of Dublin in the wee years of the twentieth century and preparing for our small Ulysses study group, I read again Chapters 9 and 10. The richness of Joyce’s writing is such that every reading brings forth something new, but for some reason today my mind is fixed on a very minor character, Dilly Daedalus, one of Stephen’s sisters, a character who does not seem to represent any larger mythic or political element. Dilly in her “shabby dress” accosts her father on the street to see if he has gotten any money. Their mother recently dead, the family still in morning, they are practically starving at home, but her father only berates her for not standing up straight and tries to deny that he has any money. “Where would I get money?” he protests. But Dilly is persistent, and finally he gives her a shilling. Then for a penny the girl buys a coverless French primer. Luxury! She wants to learn French, probably wants to emulate her brother, Stephen, by fleeing from Dublin to Paris. When Stephen sees his sister’s purchase and, through it, sees her dreams, he thinks, “She will drown me with her.” Then, “Misery! Misery!” He feels he cannot save himself and his sister, too.

I’ve been paying plenty of attention to the symbolic parallels between Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey, but these Dublin characters are so much more than mere symbols, and this young woman trapped in poverty has quite captured my attention today. What is her fate? To die young, worn out from childbearing or sick with consumption? She is real, and I feel for her.

Literature, like life, presents an infinite number of paths to explore. It pleases me sometimes to take a path few others have bothered to explore, having some small piece of a writer’s greatness for my own treasure.

Seahorses, Etcetera

Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan.
- James Joyce, Ulysses

In his analysis of the works of James Joyce, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words,* Joseph Campbell wrote of this passage:

I am now living by the beach, and I frequently think of this image when I look out and see the waves rolling in, the foam flying like the manes of the four seahorses pulling the chariot of Mananaan MacLir, the Irish Lord of the sea. He is a hospitable host, with a great palace under the sea where he entertains the dead who drown in his waters.

Our Ulysses study group will be meeting soon for only the second time, but already the four of us are gaining confidence as we begin to work together through this difficult but magnificent book. Ineluctably, Joyce draws us into the visible, the audible, the personally interpreted and imagined Dublin of one June day in 1904. We may be confused at times about what is going on, but we are definitely there. My reading of this book in the past has only been reading, unguided, not study, and I've loved it but only skimmed the delightful surface, so this time through, paying attention to the symbolism and history, the experience is richer by far. What a gift to the world, this book! The Irish in me can't help feeling proud.

*Actually, Campbell did not sit down and write Mythic Worlds, Modern Words; it is a collection of his articles, lectures, and answers he gave in Q/A sessions on Joyce's work, gathered together and edited by Edmund L. Epstein. The thoughts and language are, however, recognizably Campbell's.

The Irish in Me

Thanks to my sister Bettie, I now have copies of a few documents relating to the maternal grandfather we never met, Patrick Daley of County Cork. All we knew of him for decades was just that: Patrick Daley from County Cork. Now we know more.

It’s strange to have specific information for the first time—his date of birth, December 13, 1886, and place of birth, Fermoy; to know that at the age of 30 (having immigrated to America in 1913) he registered for the draft in Dayton, Ohio, identifying himself as a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, employed as a furniture finisher for Burkhardt Furniture Company on Monument Avenue in Dayton; to have evidence on paper that he and Grace Braudendistel [the spelling on the document, though we were never given that name with an ‘r’] were married in Dayton in February of 1918 at the Church of St. Joseph, “according to the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.” There is even a physical description: “medium build, slender, blue eyes, dark brown hair.” My mother, at the time of her own marriage following World War II, could have been described in the same words.

For me, these details deepen the mystery of my mother’s father rather than diminishing it. For the first time I have sketched for me a living person rather than simply a name from an Irish county. A man peers out from behind the myth (of which, over the years, we had conflicting versions), but he is still in the shadows.

The man, though, gives me a different perspective on Irish history. It’s all more personal. I read of the Mitchelstown Massacre in 1887 and think, “My grandfather was less than a year old then.” Reading Nuala O’Faolain’s wonderful MY DREAM OF YOU (so richly layered and full of surprises), I realize that my grandfather’s parents were among the thin ranks of “survivors,” those who neither died nor emigrated during the Famine.

Another Patrick, Patrick Gallagher, whose grandfather of the same name was born in 1842, writes in his introduction to Laurence O’Connor’s LOST IRELAND:
“Old photographs are spooks left by their subjects, emanations of their presence, tracings of their bodies. They are not at all one man’s image of another, as is the painted portrait. They are tangible after-images of existence: they diminish imagination, offering in its place an embarrassing closeness to the waxy dead.”
We still have no photograph of Patrick Daley, but this documentation offers traces of his existence, and I find myself with new markers in time.