I have a theory, which is mine, about the Irish and maybe Ireland generally, and it behooves me to here share the thing, as it is, in its pulpy mesh, let the juice squeeze down from the sieve and see what part of the idea can live in the sun or more correctly in the rain, for that is where the idea rests, in the weather and the substance of the weather over and above and around Ireland, island astride Britain, the country which the Irish still resent we could say but we shouldn’t say because loathe lands with the proper force and conviction of those feelings the Irish have toward the English (it’s more than a language; it’s a whole empire of thought) their former dominators, colonists, those British and their teabag swagger and indifference to famine, aided and abetted by the church they themselves once abandoned for the Church of England, all so a horny king could jettison a wife to fuck and marry another lady and this is how we make history around here, with an accent on HIStory like a forgotten Michael Jackson record, but the Irish do not forget, oh they don’t forget nothing my lad, under the gray skies that set the stage for their storytelling and drinking drinking drinking in the pub because the weather is everything and that umbrella is a lie between you and heaven so fold it up and let the rain come, because the theory -and you will never hear a truer thing in your life my darling- is the simple truth that the Irish, and Dubliners more specifically, do not know it is raining. Because it is always raining, you see, so how can they know, those green and orange fish in their lovely aquarium.
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The Irishman -and, it must and will be said, the Irishwoman, for she is right there in the Irish Declaration of Independence, one of the only national liberation documents that Next Play knows of that specifically includes women as a category of human beings with the same rights as the other humans and I never saw one like that before- the Irish, I was about to say, are a writer. That is their myth, their picture on the wall, their Dorian Gray, and the land is the writer and the writer is the street name and the book in your hand is Ulysses, that book you didn’t read so many times, like quitting smoking it is just something you do a lot. The book is the tale of Leopold, or Leo if you want to be informal and we’ve had a pint or three so why not, surely we know each other a little now, Shirley, but for the sake of speaking the name at its most grand, let’s say Leopold Bloom, half-Irish half-Jewish and how can you be half of either of those things, so, Irish-Jewish, and it is one day in his life, which my brother-on-law accurately sums up in his review of the first pages: Wait, is he still crossing the street? which is as succinct a summary as you will come across of the most important book ever written in the empire of English, the life of the mind of James Joyce, Irish hero and legend whose portrait hangs next to those of Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde in the back room of The Palace pub in Dublin somewhere near Trinity College, a fabled and fabulous estate of higher learning (they want to take you higher, like Sly Stone did and he is gone and our hearts will never mend of that you can be sure) so pony up to the bar and through the bulky squatters on barstools see the man, or of course the woman, the tender of the bar, and once you have their attention, and no greater gift could be conferred from one human to another than a bartender’s attention to the patron, tired and exhausted after a long morning of casual discourse and just enough work to say that work was done, and with that connection made between two of God’s children even though we gave God the boot after the mistreatment by the dastardly Catholic church who locked up women just for being women, just for fucking breathing, just for having breasts and lips and that nice curve at the hips and the red hair and the green eyes…
Ok computer, where were we, where are we, we are at The Palace, pub in Dublin near Trinity College, an institution underpinned by a promise of accessibility to the Irish student, because this is Ireland, emerald in the Atlantic, where higher learning is made affordable to (just about) everyone and can you imagine that my son, can you imagine a place where learning, sitting with a fucking book under a goddamn tree is about the smartest, most socially acceptable thing, no artificially intelligent facsimile of education as vocation, you can study about thinking about words, and it brings a tear to your eye the beauty of thing, and would you believe, dear friend, that in so doing, this society where they value and pay for a student’s education, would you fucking believe the economy didn’t collapse when they put public resources into making their children thinkers instead of fucking soldiers on the battlefield or the office or the lab, somehow people are not dying in the streets from this rash public investment, somehow people are still gathering in the pubs and guess what my daughter they have something to say that is actually fucking interesting unlike every single utterance of a certain President because there is all the world of difference between a stream of consciousness and a stream of absolute shite.
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So maybe you would just like to sit and read, here at The Palace, under the glower of the dead but alive writers looking down upon the patrons wishing they could share a drink with you.
And from across the barstools you receive your pint of Guinness, better here than anywhere on Earth and in the known universe because it travels less, it stays home where it belongs, right? and another pint of cider, good dry cider and you find two chairs side by side along the three walls of patrons who gab and drink and chortle and read and wheeze and you open your book and this scene is a fascinating thing of observable science: the solitary act of reading become communitarian, maybe in the way it used to be in a church when people would gather around a book and share the crazy idea that your first responsibility is to love your brother, and yes your sister too and none shall be above the least of us.
CODEX
Fortified with good Irish ales, ciders, and whiskeys, I set out -with my attorney, in case of legal wrangling from the Europeans- in a rented car to venture south of Dublin to Wicklow County, and the Wicklow mountains. The furious combinations of drugs -mostly caffeine- on my mind, coupled with the fact of the driver (I think I’m driving, am I driving?) sitting on the right side of the car with the gearshift on my left and the car bolting along the left side of the road makes the drive as exciting as it is terrifying for both of us. I can tell my attorney is enjoying it from the constant one-pitch scream, like a siren through the beautiful countryside. We come upon a lake that looks like the top of a glass of Ireland’s national beer, a creamy top resting upon a dark loch underneath. From there we take off onto a winding road built by the British, long ago, to root out an Irish resistance. The military road, sustained by the Irish, wanders through the marshy land, and a bird’s-eye view would look down on James Bond’s Aston Martin driving along a desolate landscape. I couldn’t be happier, careening along this empty road, vestige of a failed empire and a history this place will never forget.