“The past is a foreign country; they do things
differently there.”
(L.P.
Hartley, The Go-Between)
I had
occasion recently to visit a part of my past, a period immensely important and
formative for me, a place which was, for seven years, both focus and circumference
of my whole world, the centrality of which was so self-evident to me that I
could not then imagine that it would ever be otherwise in my life.
I was
seventeen years old when I left Sligo . The
leaving was a wrench, soul-tearing, ambiguous; on the one hand I was taking a
self-chosen step into a different world, a new life, for I had decided to join
the Dominican Order, on the other hand I was leaving nearly everything and
everyone I knew behind me. The parting was all the more radical, for at the same
time, my father was transferred and our whole family moved to the other end of
the country. Although I was to return there frequently in the years that
followed, the basic bond was broken; the continuous connection formed by the
unity of family and place was gone. It meant that the inevitable decay of most
youthful friendships was greatly accelerated in my case, for home had been sundered and the most
basic part of it had moved elsewhere.
It hurt,
that sundering. I remember feeling very aggrieved, with the unthinking, naïve
selfishness of youth, that my parents had moved away from Sligo
while at the same time being perfectly self-righteous about my own move into a
new life, which also took me to other places. But I recovered. After all, in
the following years, I still went back there, even if not as frequently or for
as long as I might have wished, and I still retained my basic feeling of
identity with and love for the place. Given my peripatetic history, the simple
question “Where are you from?” has always been a little problematic for me, but
Sligo still remains one of the default
answers.
After I was
ordained a Catholic priest, therefore, in 1985, it was completely clear to me
that Sligo would be one of the places where I would celebrate a formal “First
Mass.” And if someone had told me that day that it would be twenty eight years
before I would return, I would have laughed in disbelief.
But that is
what happened. In the following year, primed by the potent fuse of love, my
life exploded into scintillating chunks and shards of new directions,
possibilities, preoccupations and priorities. I found myself in a different
country, living a very different life, with a wife and baby daughter, and practical
decisions concerning job and career to be made and carried through. While I
continued to visit Ireland
Another in
my family had made a very different choice; my sister, Máire, had found her way
back to Sligo and has lived in the coastal village of Strandhill
The traces
of all this were clear to be seen on my journey, from the new motorway leading
out of Dublin to the empty property developments in towns like
Carrick-on-Shannon along the way. Even the approach to Sligo was completely
different to that of my memories; the towns of Collooney and Ballysadare bypassed,
a new road to the town itself, leading to a new bridge across the Garavogue river.
The
following morning, Saturday, I spent a couple of hours walking around town. It
was very strange. The basic geographical skeleton remained as I remembered it
but much of the flesh on the bones had changed; new buildings, new shops and
businesses in old buildings. Deeper, stranger changes too; children of African
and Asian backgrounds speaking with the distinctive Sligo accent, a Polish
butcher’s shop – signs of the internationalisation of Ireland through
immigrants, drawn by the boom of the Tiger years, something unimaginable in the
mono-cultural world of my youth in the seventies when Ireland was a country
which exported rather than imported people. In the past five years the export
has begun once more.
I knew, of
course, that things would not be as I remembered them; I had no expectations
that the place would spontaneously open its arms to me, recognising and
welcoming the long lost son. It was curiosity which led my steps, a desire to
see just what had changed. But as my feet led me along the streets I had walked
so often as a teenager, I found myself becoming more detached. The time elapsed
was just too great, the changes – perhaps, most of all, the changes in myself –
too profound. Though I had already intellectually known that there is no such
thing as time travel, that the past is irrevocably gone, it was something more
to really practically experience it in this fashion. “Something’s lost and
something’s gained,” Joni Mitchell sings, “in living every day.” Over ten thousand
days had past since I last set foot in Sligo, so much lost and so much gained
in all that time that it had, I thought, become impossible to regain any sort
of deep contemporary contact.
And so my
urge to walk further waned. There was a Sligo which was real for me, that town
which had been the stage for my life during those oh so intense years of the
ending of childhood and the unbearably exciting and frightening growth into
increasing adulthood, but it had little to do with the town in which I now
found myself. Looking at my watch, I realised that I still had an hour before
the next bus would leave for Strandhill where I was saying. Finding myself at
the junction of Wine Street Quay Street Lyons
Climbing
the stairs to the hundred and fifty year old café, I discovered that here at
least much remained as I remembered it. Oh, the menu is more extensive,
sophisticated and cosmopolitan but someone has been careful to preserve the
basic character of the place and the small tables and wooden chairs are still
the same as they were in the seventies when this was one of the favourite
haunts of the teenagers of the town. There weren’t all that many places where
the boys from Summerhill
College Lyons
As I drank
a second cappuccino, I tried to understand what I was doing; what I had
expected of my perambulation and what exactly I had experienced. Perhaps some
part of me had been hoping for the kind of epiphany described by Proust in his
famous madeleine episode in À la recherche du temps perdu, where a particular
taste throws his protagonist completely into a memory of the past. If so, it didn’t happen
for me; sitting there in the café, many recollections of my youthful years did
come to mind, but still far away and detached from me, the teenagers of the
mid-seventies populating the room around me like barely perceived, transparent
ghosts. Reality, I thought, was more like L.P. Hartley described it, the past is
a foreign country.
And then, that evening at my sister’s party, I had an encounter which
changed everything. One of the guests was someone I had known back in the time,
the memories of which I had been attempting to recall with my walkabout through
town. She was another member of that clique to which I had belonged as a
teenager – to be honest, I’d had quite a crush on her when I was sixteen, but
had been too uncertain and insecure to ever mention it to her then, or to
attempt to move it beyond the confused desires of my youthful wishes into the
realm of practical action. Now we were meeting again after more than thirty
five years of life and all that it had done with us during that time. I had
gone away and never returned; she had left for a number of years but had come
back, and married another of my friends from that time. Our children are now
older than we were back then.
And as we talked, I suddenly I realised that I had somehow come to the
place I had been looking for that morning. Having exchanged the broad outlines
of our stories of the long interim, we started reminiscing together about that
faraway world of our youth. I discovered myself (and so, in a real sense, rediscovered
my earlier self) asking about people I hadn’t thought of for decades and she
(who had remained in – or, rather, returned to – Sligo) knew a lot of the
answers. We found ourselves sharing memories of things that we had done
together, of events commonly experienced. The past, which had seemed so
irretrievably far away to me just a few hours earlier, was suddenly just around
the last corner we had turned, the years between not negated but somehow
bridged. It occurred to me later that I’d had this kind of experience on a
number of occasions over the past decade or so, a period where I have had the
great good fortune to reconnect with quite a few friends with whom I had lost
contact. It’s what happens when you meet old friends and discover that you can,
amazingly, just pick up where you left off.
And I realised a truth – at least something that is true for me. While
place is important (and one would suffer from some kind of serious deficiency
not to cherish the beauty of Sligo, magnificently set as it is on an Atlantic
bay to the west, framed by the mountains of Benbulben to the north and
Knocknarea to the south), in the end it is people and not place which are more
central to a feeling of belonging, of home. And though in memory
we organise things by assigning them a location, this is only background, the
setting of the stage of life on which we perform the stories of our lives in
interaction with others. In my case, I would wager (and I suspect that my
mistake is not uncommon) that I had tended to confuse the importance of people
in my life, and the stories we created together, with the place in which these
stories took place. Setting is of course important – context is everything, as
Derrida once remarked – but people, not place, are the most significant
component of context.
It is a realisation
with which I, for one, am quite content.
"Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that
time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow
of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him fly
with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the
childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his
means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea."
Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill
Pictures retrieved from:
http://www.blogspot.com/_paRKpxGMuCE/Sttfal6-u6I/AAAAAAAABpw/2MOzvtaXyz8/s400/0909_HSligoTown.jpg
http://www.askaboutireland.ie/_internal/gxml!0/2ocqn930ubywvi8z0wl9dhefnm6z926$eb12sbh0qz22rny8m0x0tay0mjelewi
http://www.menupages.ie/images/550x344/6585_lyons_cafe.jpg
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS4YZ-2TRtqmongpHxTWThgHFp9c3xj2-ezJRsBiT7Agi0aITmvudIS-JCqh56juTDpOJ1Y2G9799QhwQOzRT-LNpAcSZf7Mfsz3Ft48xaJaIMJk8WS2t7DxBGYKHZbSRzeMTwBtZrgmM/s1600-h/0909_FBenbulben.jpg
