Finding Ireland: A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture

From Venice to Tipperary

From Venice to Tipperary 1. It is November now, the wind roars across this hillside acre as if it wanted to wrench the garden shed where I write off its foundations and scatter its pine boards across the face of Sliabh na mBan. I live on the side of the mountain at the end of an unmarked lane in a remote corner of Tipperary, three miles from the nearest stop sign. Even when the wind is still, there is no traffic noise—no sirens, no horns. If we hear a motor, it probably means our neighbor is driving his tractor up the lane, bringing hay to the cattle. When a solitary airplane flies over, its silent passing is a singular enough event to make one look up and follow its progress across the sky. The wind is relentless. It whispers, whistles, swoops and swerves, rattles the gutters and windowpanes. The rainsaturated meadows I see out the window glow emerald green, and there is a velvety denseness in the foliage of pines that grow along the demarcations between fields. Here and there the ghostly grey trunk of a beech tree shows through, and the black and white of Friesian cattle decorate a field. The only color other than natural tones is our red car parked in front of the house. 255 Tillinghast pt 4-5 8/20/08 3:27 PM Page 255 Part of me is in Tipperary, part of me is still in Venice. We have just returned. While we were gone a gale blew the hinges off the henhouse door, then blew the door off, and the fox killed one of our chickens. This morning when I got up I saw him out there, looking for another opening. He pranced away when he saw me, looking for all the world like a Renaissance dandy in a russet-colored tunic, his gorgeous tail pluming behind him. He was light on his feet and carried himself with the style of a young courtier in a painting by Vittore Carpaccio in the Accademia Gallery. We go to Venice for the intoxication of spending a few days in a place that is utterly beautiful. By comparison with many parts of the world, we already live in such a place, even though Ireland is changing every day, and not necessarily for the better. Despite our remoteness, we ourselves are impatient for broadband Internet service to arrive where we live. No one escapes the modern world, and most of us don’t care to completely. Even antimodernists like ourselves are selective in our refusals. Both Venice and the Irish hinterland still carry some flavor of life in Europe during the Middle Ages. Both are ancient cultures the contemplation of which allows one to travel back in human history and entertain ways of thinking that can raise us for a few moments above the day’s trivia. In the eighth century, when Venice was first establishing herself as a city-state with a more or less secure foundation in its lagoon, trading for salt and grain between the mainland of Lombardy and the Byzantine Empire to the east (much of my information about Venetian history comes from Jan Morris’s Venice), Ireland had already achieved a rich monastic culture, which produced illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells and sent missionaries to nearby Scotland and England, and to Germany and Switzerland on the continent. The first Viking incursions lay a century or so in the future, when predators would sail their fast ships down from the northern fjords to ravage their more settled neighbors. FromVenice to Tipperary Tillinghast pt 4-5 8/20/08 3:27 PM Page 256 (A good source for the broad outlines of this story is Maire and Conor Cruise O’Brien, A Concise History of Ireland.) After the breakup of the Roman Empire the problem for cultures all over Europe was how to sustain commerce, trade, prayer, the making of art and artefacts, as all this had been carried on under the Romans, and at the same time to keep themselves safe from marauders like the Vikings in northern Europe, the Goths, Visigoths, and Huns in Central Europe and Italy, and the Turks and Arabs at the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Ireland, protected from outside interference by its remoteness, had never had the Romans either as conquerors, or as overlords who could provide a garrison of centurions...