Éirigh a Naomh Manchán!

Arise St Manchán! For reasons, which may become clear, I've been fossicking among the bones of Irish saints since my annual devoirs upon St Fursey's Day. There are A Lot of Irish Saints: incl 25 of them canonized in a single swooosh by Pope Leo in 1902. There are more RC saints than there are days of the year, so there is a mort o' doubling up for Feast-days. Perhaps the most notable being the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul celebrated with panache on 29 June each year. Peter Paul Rubens [R] was so named b/c born on the Eve of that day in 1577. If there was a Pope of Woo, they would have already elevated Manchán Magan, who died cruel young last October to their list of Alternative Saints.

There are [at least] two St Mancháns stalking the calendar of Irish saints, the more famous is Manchán of Mohill who doubles up with St Valentine on 14th February. But Saint Manchán mac Silláin (died 664) is venerated locally [Lemanaghan, between Ballycumber and Ferbane in King's County] on 24th of January. [sharing the day with many other saints and martyrs incl St Francis of Sales]

Last year, you may remember, Storm Éowyn blasted through Ireland for a shortcut on the morning of 24th Jan 2025 felling out a few trees for us [Darragh in December 2024 was more damaging] but generally felling more across the country and recording record wind-speeds. Some people were still without electric power two full weeks after the storm and insurable damage reached €300 million.

When the wind abated in the evening, as every year, Offaly woman Aoife Phelan took herself and the kids to the Holy Well at Lemanaghan. The childer were delirah because Éowyn had uprooted 4 substantial trees in the compound and they had a whoopin' and hollerin' climbing frame to play on instead of just a splash of holy water. As you do "We took some pictures of them climbing them and it was only looking back on the photographs later, that they saw that there could be something there," Ms Phelan said. Closer inspection revealed a skull and so Heritage were called and they've spent some time excavating the site previously unregistered as a graveyard.

Among other protocols, the archaeologists sent some of the human bones off to QUBelfast for radiocarbon C₁₄ dating. That test is known for giving quite large error bars - it's better at 000s of years than 00s. But the dating range for at least one skeleton just includes the best guess for the death of Naomh Manchán.  Phelan and other devotees are making much of the good saint lurching himself from the earth on his own feast day. Resurrection? 'tis the end of days, my friends, shrive yourselves as soon as convenient . . . and No More Sinning.

40 focal don sneachta

When the barn went on fire in the night a few days after Dau.I was born, we had a chance to save a few things before our home was engulfed in the roaring consuming conflagration. In the moment, I made a foolish call and bundled my new computer into a binbag and carried it out to the garden. I should have saved the photos - which weren't digital in 1993. [spoiler: the fire brigade came in time and I got a second chance with the photos] It's a decision we could all prepare for as we sort our parents' papers, and our own, because our burden-of-stuff is not all equally valuable. But beware of saving big ticket items and dumping the quotidian. You might think that those who come after would like another copy of the Life magazine celebration of Neil Armstrong's small step for a man . . . but you'd be wrong. Twenty consecutive years of bank statements, because ephemeral, will provide 22ndC historians with a unique insight into daily life in the late 20thC.

Remember that 94% of the plays of Sophocles were consigned to the flames by the ignorant. There is no evidence therefore that the saved 7 is the cream or the froth or just a random selection of his insights into the human condition.

Manchán Magan, performer and recorder, has become gate-keeper for the Kerry dialect of Irish and made The Selection for what to save from the words he learned from his grandmother Sighle Humphries, who was a storm petrel for Pearse and Connolly 100+ years ago. Largely, it seems, through the force of her personality, Manchán was raised first language Irish in a leafy Dublin suburb besieged by Bearla, and distracted by Lego, Star Wars and Bazooka bubblegum. But every Summer, he'd be hangin' with Sighle's neighbours - hauling water, seaweed, milk and hay as a small helping hand on the micro farms of the West and consuming Miwadi & biscuits agus an teanga for/after his labours. He's written it down, in big print, because most of his informants are old, with sight and memory failing; if not already passed on to Tír na Neamhní - and published it as Thirty-two Words for Field.

Spoiler: Achadh; Áirleann; Bánóg; Biorach; Branar; Buadán; Buaile; Cabhán; Cathairín; Cluain; Cuibhreann; Cúilín; Domasach; Faicthe; Fásach; Garraí; Geamhar; Gort; Ingealtas; Lóiste; Losaid; Loscán; Mach; Machaire; Magh; Mainnear; Mín; Mothar; Páirc; Plás; Plásóg; Póicín; Raon; Réalóg; Réidh; Réidhleán; Tamhnach; Tuar. And, yes, there are more than 32 words in the list because who wants to spill all their biscuits out on the table with the first cup of tea of our acquaintance? There are, after all, not 40 Eskimo words for snow. 

So this is a book like Jorge Luis Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius: describing the language and culture of a land that is probably mythical and certainly ungraspable and only available to us in the partial, selective writings of a single surviving witness. "By extracting the wisdom and memories contained within a place name, through a mixture of analysis and intuition, we can cast light on the profound truths about people, gods, and nature". And why not? I'd prefer analysis and evidence but acknowledge that evidence is only what a group of people agree to be the truth . . . for the time being. So our scientific certainty is not always demonstrably better than the intuitions of someone who is deeply immersed in the data story.

I was so excited when our alphabetical top pals A & B gave us a copy of 32 Words, because I thought it might be 32 chapters long with maps charting out the geographic and cultural spread of each of the words like Zimmermann and O'Hara's agri-townland analysis or Eugene Costello's deep landscape; indeed The Blob's own Holistic Landscape. It is not that; it is both richer and more discursive, with lists of names pertaining to fairies and stones as well as fields. Like Simone Kotva's extensive ruminations on Faeroese bird-names.

One interesting assertion is that the Irish [people and language, both] tend to use cardinal points N E W S in their directions [like the Guugu Ymithirr] as opposed to the speaker-centric Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning used by most other European languages. But that's just not true, everyone knows that Irish people give directions by pubs "Turn left at Cahill's, along the road a-piece, then right at Mulligan's".

End Jun Mixum

The Feast of St Martial of Aquitaine: just so y'know.

• What's not to love about chaps singing about the quiet wonders of the Alentejo. 
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• wannabee witches need to know how to construct a pentacle
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• Michael Rosen podspeaks Manchán Magan [prevs] about how Irish and landscape collide
• related Ordnance Survey bicentennial and Brian Friel's [prev] Translations
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• MapMen ask how many countries? Wales?  Нохчийн? Sealand?
• Matt Parker - how to read (your own) audiobooks
• George Orwell life and times discussed on The Rest is History
  

Holy holy holy

There is a Holy Well Project afoot. I was part of this venture one recent Saturday. It didn't seem to have much lasting effect on my mental state (or immortal soul); but I applaud the idea that such shrines have a place in community. Even if that place is secularized to fit the needs of 21stC Ireland.

One element of the project is to go visit some of the 42 Holy Wells in the county, make a little video & say a little prayer poem. 

• Overview, introduction 
• St Andrew, Dunleckney 
• St Bridget, Myshall 
• Our Lady, Clonagoose, Borris  
• St Fortune / Fortchern, Killoughternan
• St Lazerian, Lorum (not to be confused with St Lazerian Old Leighlin) 
• These are hosted by the County Library YT Service, where more such clips may appear. 

The key reference article is The Holy Wells of County Carlow (1933) by Edward O'Toole.

As we're talking about heritage, it is with some sadness we report the death of Manchán Magan, gaeilgeoir, broadcaster, prolific writer and Master of Woo. I am a bit of a fan. His republican antecedents are dynastically impeccable - Grannie. As a spoiler, I wrote down all (and more) of his Thirty-two Words for Field when that book came out in 2021. He was interviewed on RTE, essentially from a hospital bed, just a couple of weeks ago when it became known that his prostate cancer had metastasized all over. Still and all, three weeks notice is a bit tight for setting the affairs in order. His latest book Ninety-Nine Words for Rain (and One for Sun) is available at Kennys and in the library but there are 2x reservations as there are copies in the system.

Tír gan gaeilgeoirí, tír gan anam

 

 

Ewe woo

John Connell [prev] is getting traction as spokesman for the Irish countryside, although the competition Manchán Magan [prev] has landed his own TV series. And don't dismiss Kerri ní Dochartaigh [prev] just because of the missing Y-chromosome. It is certainly possible to speak {to | of | for | from} The Land as a wordsmith [Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud; Yeats having nine bean rows]. And shite happens in the countryside that is nothing to do with farm yard manure. But of the three living spokesppl cited above, only Connell has had his hand regularly up a sheep's vagina and we should therefore listen to him on that facet of rural life.

We were up in Dublin recently and Dau.I the Librarian pushed John Connell's 2024 Twelve Sheep life lessons from a lambing season at me because a) I'd read a couple of his earlier books b) I count a similar number of sheep every day c) we'd both trudged to Santiago at some time in the past. The conceit here is that young(ish) John buys 12 hoggets [equivalent to a heifer; a female sheep up until her first lamb delivery] from his farmer father, and tracks them through twelve chapters sort of based on the agricultural year. Or at least on the 5 months of sheep gestation. 

Early on, Connell floats the idea that the has-to-be-twelve chapters could be based on, or informed by: the zodiac [one of which is ♈︎Aries?] or the Labors of Hercules [mucking out the Augean stables?] or the Lives of the Apostles [good shepherds all?]. But (correct me if I've missed a trick) he lacks the discipline to chunk his anecdotes by these constraints. Joyce's Ulysses is a classic because he did follow through: holding the Odyssey up to mirror one inconsequential day in the life of Dublin.  

Whatever the initial aspiration of structure, the book gets flubby soon enough with too many rambling thoughts unrelated to caring for sheep and delivering lambs. The Sheep Game it is not. In current public discourse, there is a lot of Nobel Hubris about and not only among winners of The Prize. N.H. occurs when, because you've got the gong, people will listen to what you have to say about any damn bee you might have a-buzzzing in your bonnet. Connell has an ingrained expertise in scratching a living from The Land - and nobody claims farming is either lucrative or easy. But when it comes to philosophy (how we can live our best lives) he is no wiser or more competent than you or me. Been to Santiago [✓] doesn't count: I know . . . that I don't know.

There could be another story in there: a bildungsroman about the growth and development of the lambs Connell Jnr as he battles mental health and the patriarch[y] to discover his true self but that theme is very much noises off. And may have been resolved in Connell's earlier books.

A lot of the usual suspects get a mention because something they've said has been written in Connell's writer's notebook . . . and that'll do to pad out this book. Because despite 176 dead-tree pages and £12.99 rrp the generous margins, nice colophons [as above L] and 1.5pt spacing, makes Twelve Sheep only 36,000 words long. 

Influencers in Connell's journey include: John Clare; Rachel Carson; Henry Thoreau; Henri Nouwen; John O'Donohue; Hermann Hesse; Heinrich Harrer; Martin Heidegger; Erich Hartmann; the Dahlia Lama; the Buddha; Narcisse Blood; John McGahern; Thomas Merton; Father Sean, Bruce Chatwin; Erling Kagge; Thích Nhất Hạnh; Fran Contreras; Paolo Coelho; Saint Francis;  Fergus Kelly; E.M. Forster; David Malouf; Carlo Rovelli; Michael Kelly; Rover Thomas; Raven; Maria Gonzales; Wendell Berry; Nicholas Shakespeare; John Bergman; Karen Emslie; Robert Hughes; Don Watson; Adrian Stimson; Bruce Pascoe; Chief Joseph; Alex Haley; August Schenck; Padriag Colum; Pauline Matarasso; Yukio Mishima; Sam Shepard. They are all given parity of esteem word-count with an unnamed Longford neighbour who claims to cure strawberry orf [contagious pustular dermatitis; a bit like a viral impetigo] by muttering prayers down the phone. Life lessons for the reader? I don't think so.

Darwin Dad

Charles Darwin b. 12 Feb 1809

• Listiclecity: Tim Berra Darwin had 10 children
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• Totally History: Darwin had 10 children 
• Darwin had his own view of the sprogs
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• A short biography about Dad's Army
• Cammy attempts half-heartedly to sell his son
• Dad acquires daughter 
  
• otter motter:
  
• A wonderful trove of 400 science-book reviews. via MeFi
  
• Manchán Magan [R] wording nature as gaeilge
• Tonka Toys on & off Dawlish Beach
• Katsudon Chiyomatsu - by all means eat something bigger than your head 
• How come GPS is free ?
• Navstar 7 fail deets
• Never enough bakery porn: Levain le Vin, Bordeaux
• M. de Valmont at work
  

Moths on the pillow

Two years ago, we walked a troubled league near Thin Places with  Kerri ní Dochartaigh picking up feathers and stones because they were there so fucking perfect: exemplars of their kind. You canna keep a poet in a box, they have to walk about  this dark world and wide  looking sideways at feathers and stones and the beating heart. The rest of us don't even notice the feathers, let alone reflect on how form and function collide. The rest of us shear away from Thin Places where real life steps through those rents in the fabric of the universe to confront the other. 

But on this All Soul’s Night there is
no respite from the keening of the wind.
I would not be amazed if every corpse came risen
from the graveyard to join in exaltation with the gale,
a cacophony of bone imploring sky for judgement
and release from being the conscience of the town. src

More? Canongate have brought out a continuation of This Observer's life Cacophony of Bone which starts between Solstice and Christmas 2019 when Kerri and her feller M, bunk off from Derry to hunker down in a micro-cottage on a now barely visible defunct railway in Co Westmeath. Their rough haven in a sea of troubles is about halfway between Lough Derravarragh and Granard Co Longford. The book is dedicated to Ann Lovett of Granard [and see Paula Meehan stanza above] and Kerri often swims in wild Derravarragh with the Children of Lír and in-real-life wild things: feathered and finned. With hindsight it was an awkward time to start a year of living together up a laneway surrounded by bogs. Even as their van pulled into the yard, SARS-CoV2 was scything through Wuhan and was about to change what everybody could and couldn't do. In another life (same planet) my mother died, in the fullness of her 99 years, three weeks after Kerri and M had their first breakfast in their new home. At her memorial service in February 2020, rumours of Covid were drubbing louder and that was the last time I was in England until the end of August this year.

 The title Cacophony of Bone is an acknowledgment of the litter of skeletal remains that are scattered about the fields and ditches . . . if you pay attention and care to look. Kerri has a collection of these skulls and pelvises which rub scapulae with the feathers and perfick stones that can be found on beaches - when we're permitted to travel from bogland to shoreline. As well as wild-swimming and bogland walks, Kerri records the process of final revisions and proofing her first book aka, in the book's Victorian convention of reference by initials, "TP". In one sense this choice is legitimate - it's a journal! -  in another it's exclusionary to the reader. JH is John "Derry's Own" Hume who died, and is here fondly memorialized, in August of the year of marking time - that's okay. M is Kerri's life-partner, unless it's referring to M's business partner M. Other writers, incl Manchán Magan [prev] are mostly credited in full, while personal pals and supporters are reduced to a letter grade. I guess they know who they are, and it's none of my biz.

I had a swipe at the word unimaginable in my review of TP. CoB's over-used word is surreal. It can almost always be replaced with surprising, unusual, peculiar and is rarely used in its dictionary sense of the intersection of dreams and the unconscious with reality. Now, authors and especially poets can adopt a Humpty-Dumpty (When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less) attitude to language but loose massaging of meaning make the writing flabby.

Two particular and personal celebrations twine through this journey-in-place: i) getting on the waggon after years of crabby hung-over mornings and ii) getting with child, which brings its own crabby mornings. I used the f-word in the first sentence of this Blob, which is not something I do a lot. But in this piece it's not out of place? That's how babies are made and, after surreal, it's the most over-used adjective in Cacophony of Bones. 

But leave aside the carp! Read this book for its lyrical ruminations on nature and our place there. Kerri ní D is mind-open to whatever the world throws at her; she pays attention and is grateful for small-small things. Growing lettuce in her own garden becomes a source of wonder and accomplishment; waking to find a moth on her pillow is a message from the old gods; just by being there, by bearing witness, she soothes the troubled breast. Hers, but ours too by proxy. 

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm. src
sing it

And the child? Reader, she delivered him!

Sounday round-up

Bits 

• Manchán "32 Words" Magan talking about Ireland
• Giving Dara O'Briain back his fada.
• Rohin Francis gives the dope on Statins
• Celui qui tombe; theatre in the round
• RedBull Hardline downhill mountain biking
• planning
• actual
• Well fit? 83 y.o. climbs a 30m pole
• Julia Galef remembers her father
• you may choose to remember BeanDad
• The enigma of Elgar's Enigma Vars
• Seafarer abandonment; it's a thing.
• Shipbuilder inclusion it's a Tally Ho: The Whiskey Plank: