In From The Wilderness

Abbey Ruins, Abbey Island, Derrynane – Trevor Harris – CC BY-SA 2.0

So I’ve been gone but now I’m back. Nearly two weeks in Ireland (mostly) and London (a long weekend). It’s the 100th anniversary of the “failed” 1916 Easter rebellion in Dublin. I saw a play about the “failed” 1798 rebellion, also in Dublin. And there was a feeling permeating the country (I don’t think I was imagining it) that was explicitly anti-colonial. Pro-Palestine leaflets were plastered alongside advertisements for “1916 tours” and the parallels couldn’t have been more obvious or unavoidable.

The play I saw in Dublin at the Project Arts Centre, “The Northern Star”, “is based on Henry Joy McCracken struggling to compose his final speech to the people of Belfast after the failure of the rebellion/rising. Henry Joy incorporates the seven ages of man into his speech and uses the words from great Irish playwrights including Beckett, O’Casey, Wilde and Synge to emphasise and make accessible the missed opportunities, horrors and failures of Irish history.”

The horrors and failures of history seem to happen whenever nascent revolutionaries lose sight of the “moral force” as their only weapon in the struggle. In another time and another country, in a much less nationalistic context, Bob Dylan echoes that vision of moral force: “There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door / You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars / After losin’ every battle.”

I spent some time in County Kerry, in the extreme Southwest of the country. It was like a cold jade rainforest, completely denuded of trees. I saw a stone fortress built 2,000 years ago. With my finger I traced circles that had been carved into stones 5,000 years ago. And I walked the ruins of the Derrynane Abbey, technically on an island, and only accessible by a bridge of beach.

In these places the horrors of history felt pierced by an elusive and transcendent permanence. The wind and water were slowly melting the rock away, but it was all held within a cohesive eternity that gave the grinding gears of nature an order and coherence that I felt (temporarily) attuned to. And I’m grateful.

“Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything.”
― Gregory of Nyssa