Shocky's Corner

Of Gods and Fairies and the Power of Storytelling

I typed The End on the last page of my novel and looked at Shocky’s framed letter on my desk. His unique penmanship (some of the handwriting is in cló gaelach – old Irish script) stood to attention to the right of my computer, guarding me as I laboured over my own writing attempts. Shocky wrote the letter in 2001 a few months after my son was born:

A Dhaithí, it read (Daithí is the Irish for David)

Mo bhuachaill bréa, mo ghrá gheaill (my beautiful boy, my promise of love). We have so many stories to tell you.

About Little Setanta, later to become the great Cúchullain, Fionn Mac Cool and the Red Branch Knights, Oisín in Tír na nÓg. About St. Patrick, St. Finnbar, St Brigid, the star-crossed lovers, Diarmuid and Gráinne, Art Ó Laoire and Máire Dubh Ní Chonaill.

Long, long ago, beyond the misty space, 
Of twice ten thousand years,
In Erin Óg there dwelt a mighty race,
Taller than Roman spears

Do sean-athair is do sean-mhaithir dhílis, (from your forever-faithful grandfather and grandmother)

Grandad

What a gift that letter was then and continues to be. I see it, and all the letters he wrote to me when I first moved to Canada, as expressions of his love and as extensions of the poetry of his mind. He never wrote poetry per se, not that I know of anyway, but he lived it. Through the way he spoke, through the way he lived his life, Shocky inspired us Corrigan children to starburst through ceilings imposed on us by the rigidity of academia, by dictators of institutions, by our internal and external saboteurs, by what we saw on the news, or the limitations that can come from friendships and love interests. He never once asked what results we got in school or university exams. Instead, he encouraged us to see books, and language in general, as a way to soar, not only to soar but to believe in the impossible, in magic. He was a mesmerizing storyteller with that baritone of his. He teased and cajoled us into realizing how we used our words would help us evolve, see beyond the usual, beyond the veil. Conversely, he showed us that how we speak, what we read, and how we listen can also cause us to become diminished.

I have read quite a few articles recently that we are now living in a post-literate society. Most of our literary consumption is through a screen or by listening to podcasts. I can’t understand why we deny ourselves the luxury of reading a ripping yarn? Why not escape from glaring reality and bathe our minds in the magic wrought upon us by reading stories and poetry? I look to one of Ireland’s most precious writers, Nobel prize-winner, William Butler Yeats, who was largely responsible for gathering oral tales of Irish myth and thrilling us with how he described the extra ordinary enchantments visible in nature.

Yeats spent many years of his childhood in Sligo. His mother, née Susan Pollexfen, returned to her family home when her husband, John Butler Yeats, struggled to make ends meet as a portrait artist. John B, by all accounts, was a witty conversationalist (à la Oscar Wilde) and had a wide acquaintance in Dublin and London. He had trained to be a barrister in Trinity College, Dublin but eschewed the law in favour of art. Although he was a gifted portraitist, he was exceedingly slow and prone to making endless revisions to his paintings. There was never enough money to pay for his growing family of six children. Any income he received from his mismanaged estate in Tullylish, Co. Down, Northern Ireland, and from art commissions, disappeared without a trace.

The quiet, introverted Susan Yeats, was glad to leave her husband in the big city and take refuge in her family estate in Sligo. She was fascinated by folklore told by the country people and would spend hours listening to tales about fairies, the Red Branch Knights and the mythical pantheon of Celtic gods - the Tuatha De Dannan. She recounted everything she heard to her son and he intertwined all he had heard from her into every trembling fern and flapping heron he encountered as he wandered through the Sligo countryside - which he did for hours every day. It was from his wanderings that the kernel of the opening lines of The Stolen Child came:

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;

Unbeknownst to the anxious and diffident younger Yeats, he was already laying the foundations for when he would be a leading light in bringing about a cultural renaissance in Ireland.

Yeats’ schooling was, at best, patchy. Instead, he napped in caves and daydreamed by rushing waters. His father tested out the fashionable bohemian theory that to educate a child at a young age would stifle him and impede his intellectual development. It wasn’t until he was 11 that W. B. went to school in Hammersmith, England. He was shy and unconfident. He didn’t shine at school. He was bullied and laughed at for being relatively poor and Irish. He was not athletic and loved to dreamily saunter through nature.

I thought a lot about Yeats as I dreamily sauntered through the wilds of Donegal on my most recent visit to Ireland. In Donegal, pink heather stubbles soft lavender hills. Ivy grows over derelict cottages; the vines fall over windows like unkempt eyebrows. It is a magical place. A place where fat sheep have the right of way. Where rain falls through shimmering rays of sunshine, hazifying the fuchsia and ancient oaks, where thick rainbow bands spill out of the sky onto emerald-green fields. Where I feel the hills creep closer to hug me and teeny faces peep, inspecting me from behind tall harebells. There is history in every stone wall and stories to be imagined in every mist.

Nana Eileen awash in the rain-soaked colours of Donegal

I travelled with my mum and two sisters. I have a certain birthday coming up and we decided to travel from the southern-most part of Ireland, where I’m from, to the northern-most tip, Inishowen, and take part in a home-made writing work shop. Next month, I will write a little more on that. But for now, I want to take on the formidable task of talking about Yeats. I find myself almost paralyzed because I care and love his writing so much. It’s almost impossible to rein in what I should focus on with such a huge and brilliant body of work.

We drove through Sligo, known as Yeats country, to get to the old thatched cottage in Inishowen. It is in Sligo where many of the legends of Irish folklore that Shocky lists in his letter are said to have roamed. It is not a stretch to imagine those “Taller than Roman spears” Tuatha De Dannan, transversing this land. Ben Bulben, an imposing mountain with its flat top and rugged corners, dominates the horizon. It is in Ben Bulben’s crevices that the vanquished Tuatha disappeared, crossing its portals to the Otherworld. They shrank as they passed through, becoming swarthy and malevolent as they transformed into the Sidhe or fairy folk of Ireland. (I like to think that Yeats would have appreciated Robert Plant’s imaginings that the rustle in the hedgerow was in fact just a spring clean for the May Queen!)

As we drove into Sligo, we had to stop, of course, to pay homage to the great man. Wind howled around the limestone tombstones that day, each one age-spotted with lichen. My mother and I knelt at the foot of Yeats’ grave. I thanked him for providing the soundtrack to my life and for bringing about a rebirth in my nation’s cultural identity.

No doubt, affected by the blustery, noisy wind and the skeletons underfoot, lines from No Second Coming, a poem from Yeats’ political era swirled around my mind as I knelt, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; and the ever current:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

But in that graveyard, next to the church which his great grandfather was once the rector, I didn’t want to think of the outside world. I didn’t want to think of “blood-dimmed” tides being loosed. Instead, I conjured up one of Yeats’ love poems, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven - the first ever love poem that made me weep especially the last three lines:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Even today I cannot say those last three lines out loud without a painful swell in my gorge.

In 1888, Yeats published Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, a compilation of all the folk tales that had been collected in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 19th century had been rough on the Irish. Failure and famine scarred both the landscape and souls of the people. The population was weighed down by failed rebellions, failure to achieve Home Rule, failure of potato crops and an unnecessary famine which killed over a million people from starvation and disease. It’s hard for a people to get out from under the yoke of crippling dereliction. Yeats saw an opportunity to change the dark pall hanging over the island by seeding a flowering of Irish art and literature. He founded the National Literary Society and created The Abbey theatre. The latter, which he created with Lady Gregory and Edward Martin, was a vehicle to deliver the old tales and make them relevant to modern times. (In fact, Lady Gregory, dear friend and collaborator of Yeats, also went around Ireland to collect oral tales from every nook and cranny of the country. She put the stories into Gods and Fighting Men from which I got the idea for my own novel, Etain.)

Yeats saw potential to put life back into the soul of the downtrodden Irish through a powerful retelling of the stories that already existed, and through showcasing an aptitude for poetry that was part of the nod and wink of the people.

It is in Yeats’ own poetry about fairies that I find myself the most fascinated. Especially in his attempts to wrangle the dangerous allure of fairyland’s magical realm with the harsh reality of a world more full of weeping than you can understand, a quote from the poem mentioned above, The Stolen Child.

The opening lines of this poem are full of familiar imagery; rocky highlands, lakes, a leafy island. In an almost comical scene, we see flapping herons startle water rats from their naps. And later, naughty little fairies tell us where they’ve hidden their faery vats full of berries and stolen reddest cherries. There is a delightfully lulling sequence of events - a gentle beckoning to the child.

We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances 

Why would you not want to weave olden dances with these delightful creatures? Mingling hands and mingling glances is my favourite line to say out loud - try it. All those ings and gls rustle up a five-word party for the tongue which has to dance in your mouth in order for you to say it properly. But dear reader, don’t be fooled. Hark, the first hint of darkness appears. All is not leaping and chasing frothy bubbles where, the wave of moonlight glosses, The dim gray sands with light, The world is troubled. Anxiety gnaws at the edges of sleep. The fairies up the ante as they use stronger methods of persuasion to lure the child away from his home.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Before the poem reaches its crescendo, we see a restrained cruelty in the fairies actions. They seek out slumbering trout to whisper nightmarish tales, deliberately planting thoughts that lead to unquiet dreams. The fairies have become more cocky, knowing that the repetition of the hook at the end of each verse has already caught the child, hypnotizing him to follow them into the Otherworld. And then, in the last verse, we hear their triumphant glee:

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed; 

But then in the final verse, there is a switch in perspective as we, for the first time, get a sense of the struggle within the child’s mind as he thinks of all that is beloved and familiar must be left behind:

He’ll hear no more the lowing/ 
Of the calves on the warm hillside/ 
Or the kettle on the hob/ 
Sing peace into his breast,/ 
Or see the brown mice bob/ 
Round and round the oatmeal chest./ 

But despite this knowing, the sadness of the world beyond his home has been sullied for him and he cannot stay in the reality of it. In this poem, I deeply empathize with nine-year old Yeats, fascinated with the supernatural, struggling to find harmony between the overpowering charm of the imagined world and what was, sometimes, harsh reality.

The struggle continued within Yeats and he became committed to the occult in his twenties. He enjoyed life-long membership in the secret society, Golden Dawn. Yeats enjoyed exploring the spirit world with other members of the Golden Dawn and they spent many evenings together exploring astrology and magic. I think it was his belief in the power of magic that allowed Yeats to achieve so much in his lifetime.

I didn’t go as far as joining a secret society when I was younger but I did convince my kid sister for a few years that I was the Queen of Fairyland. We shared a bedroom growing up and I would regale her from the top bunk with tales from visits to my kingdom. And now, I have used that imagination to write a novel with characters from Tír na nÓg and the Tuatha De Danann. Encouraged by Yeats’ efforts and my dad’s words, “We have so many stories to tell you”, I try to pass the spark he lit in me onto David and Molly. May they keep that spark flickering as they tell those stories with a few of their own onto their children. And on it will go like an eternal flame, a long line of believers in the power of magic.

A misty picture of the Tuatha De Danann