When a young woman who works as a distiller in Dingle asked me if I felt the magic in reference to being in Ireland for the first time, I was a bit overwhelmed. I hesitated (because the Irish are a skeptical bunch) then I acknowledged her question without going into the explosion of the word “magic” in my mind. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s magic was “love” or at least “laid.” Magic is as good of a word as any trying to capture the mystery of it all. The Irish are a superstitious lot. All those stories, the pagan tales, the Catholic mythology, and the constant stream of interpretations from their keen observations of the intruders as well as those around them every day. So, I wanted to say, I always feel the magic. And as another woman poet in Clare later said to me in reference to my social behavior, “that’s because your Irish.” The Irish are a clannish, tribal people who insist that life is “magic.” I can’t argue with that. Shit happens that I cannot understand. And I’m Irish.
I knew where my grandmother’s house was and went there, had seen photos of it many times over the years visiting relatives had taken, but the owner, Patrick Joyce was not around that day. Down the road a ways I also found the cemetery where all those Cloonacarton folks were buried. This was in the heart of “Joyce Country,” and if you didn’t know the dates of someone’s birth and death, there was no way to know who was who. The Irish name their children after the preceding generation, so there were too many John and Mary Joyces in that cemetery to count. And every date older than the 1940s was weathered away. When I discovered a new headstone erected in the 1980s for Thomas Mannion by his wife, it included the name of “James Gibbons, d. 1946.” That was my grandfather’s, Martin Gibbons’, younger brother, the one who was left with the Gibbons place in Cloonacarton. He was known as “Jimmy.” I’d heard about Jimmy before I came over. My cousin, Bridget Theresa Joyce Stennes, had told me she remembered Jimmy Gibbons coming to the Joyce house (my grandmother’s house that was inherited by her youngest brother, Martin). She told me Jimmy was a very nice man, a likeable guy who was not in good health, and this would have been not long before he died. So I knew I was going there to see my Joyce roots, but I had no idea I’d discover information about the Gibbonses.
My great grandfather, Michael Gibbons, died in his fifties, a child of the famine. Like my grandfather, the other children all left Ireland. Jimmy stayed with his mother, Honor, until she passed. And that’s about all I knew of the Gibbonses in Ireland. Then I was in a bookstore in Clifden and visiting with the young woman clerk when I inquired about the owner because I was a poet from America who came from this part of Ireland and thought they might be interested in some books of mine. She looked at the book I showed her and asked if that was me, if I was a Gibbons. As it turned out, she was a Gibbons and her father was a noted archeologist whom I had hoped to contact but was out of the country at that time. We had a lovely chat and I gave her a book. I hope to reconnect with her and her father at some point, but I felt like that was the cherry on top of my “trip to Ireland family search.” I had met people and discovered things I did not know. So I was satisfied.
On the way back east we had to drive through Recess again, and I still had some copies of my books that I wanted to leave there, so we stopped at the Joyce Craft Shop. It was early and a man was vacuuming the rug before opening. I interrupted him and gave him the brief version of my story. As it turns out, he was a writer, too. He wrote books on the local history, names, geography. He told me that the small lake on the right driving toward Cloonacarton (named Lough Cloonabartan) was known to the locals as Lough-een Jimmy (“lockeen Jimmy” or Jimmy’s small lake) and the property just above it was referred to as Jimmy’s Height. What luck! Now I had to drive back up there and check it out, and since we were going to do that, we’d might as well stop by Patrick Joyce’s place again and see if he might be home, and get a look at the Gibbons place from the perspective of the Joyce place.
We found Lough-een Jimmy and Jimmy’s Height then drove back to the old Joyce house. The gate and door to the house (hay barn) were open. There was a baler parked in the road ahead. Obviously they were busy putting up hay, so I hopped out and walked to the old house. A young kid and an old man came out of the house/barn and I apologized for interrupting their work (the young guy, grinning, said they could use an extra hand). The old man stood in a long work coat and a worn out cap leaning on a cane. He had a wandering eye and reminded me of Peter Ustinov at first take. He was my cousin, Patrick Joyce. He remembered the stories about my grandparents, and he remembered Theresa Joyce and her father Martin. He couldn’t believe I was standing there telling him all this. Ghosts. The people of his childhood. Every response to new information was met with a “Jaysus!” Patrick looked to be a weathered mid-80s to me. His sister Mary who lives in St. Louis is the age of Theresa Joyce in Santa Cruz, both about 90. All these family connections I didn’t have a couple years ago. It was a perfect last day, last hour, in Connemara.
That’s magic. Life is magic. It’s a miracle that we are here experiencing whatever it is we are taking in. So, I’m still unpacking. Aren’t we always? It will continue until it stops when I stop. I know this shit doesn’t mean that much to many folks. I mean, I’m not a guy who needs to identify with some distant history, so I understand why a lot of people don’t get my obsession with this shit. What it amounts to is my proximity to these immigrants, my grandparents. Those brogues. The memory of sitting through the televised Kennedy assassination with my Irish grandmother, keening and praying with here rosary beads, looking through my grandfather’s valise with him for a Crackle bar or checking out his glittering ores under a magnifying glass. I was close to my grandparents, and I was raised by a father who felt the sting of being branded poor Irish-Catholic trash growing up, and someone steeped in the rebel tradition of a people who had struggled against injustice for more generations than anyone could remember. So I feel very connected to “their” Ireland. It’s “my” Ireland, too, because of all that. There is a emotional cord that attaches me to all that. It’s a tactile love I associate with those I love. Anyway, I’ll give this Irish thing a rest for now, leave you to your own stories. Here are a couple of scribbles, one leaving and another one after returning. And here’s wishing you all the magic you can handle, Slainte!
Halloween at 36,000 Feet Somewhere over the Atlantic the distance between yesterday and tomorrow is today. My farewell to Ireland occurs when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. And I knew it going in though I'd never been told. It was my recurring dream, and those faces I already knew: Irish Americans I'd met before. Still, to walk the ground my ancestors' bones are buried in, to feel the stones laid to make a place a home, to speak to the Ones who eked out a life hundreds and thousands of years ago helps me know the stories, myths, and metaphors spinning the magic of being here and surviving it, that blood history of death. So I vow to return if only walking in my dreams, breathing peat smoke and the sea. My Ireland—Slainte!
Irish Dust Late night, jet lag, actually not so late at all, yet you are damn near comatose, hanging on just to snap out of your tailspin, still Dropping after a week zoned and unmotivated to even drink or nap or give-a-fuck enough to focus longer than one or two minutes. Do you wonder why you feel you're dying? Did your quest fall short of expectations? Is this a post-trip depression? Finding out There's nothing here or there to make sense of this shit? No mystery to your past? No chance of enlivening the course of your Decline, the body's inevitable leaning toward the dust, its return to all your fractured forms? Those parts that were once whole Are now a hole with no edges or limitations. Your destiny is somewhere up or down the road, and this is it . . . or not. You have arrived again At what breaks your heart, love and hate, the grateful flux of feelings flexing, the dawn of you fading to the dusk of me, that our hour, Your fucked-up dream that keeps harping you must return to Connemara, fly back to that rock garden of bones and wool and green limestone. Going from here to there felt fine. Coming from there to here you felt like dying. Your body didn't know if it was coming or going home. Know there is no place like home till you discover your yellow-brick road is your own bag of bones. Wherever you stand you know you don't know shit, Other than you're tired and a bit sad that you're still wandering deep in the dark, smiling and whistling past the graveyard, the chattering fool You've always been. And not that they know more or a goddamned thing, these spirits of the ground around you walking the turf, but they've found Their way inside, joined the easy crowd in your head who lived for fun, the daily parade celebrating here—this magical place. Mark Gibbons
Beautiful, Mark. Sounds magical to me
And Ireland came home on a other sod.