Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The City That Does Not Leave: August in Ballinascarthy

2011; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2011.0036

1534-5815

Joe Horgan,

Irish and British Studies

The City That Does Not Leave:August in Ballinascarthy Joe Horgan August used to be summer. In childhood it was not only summer; it was the height of summer. It was the fields and lanes of Ireland. Even years later, as an adult working in the industrial brick hills of the city, it was still the summer: warm streets, late drinks, the sound of the city. Sleep with the windows open and streetlights shine in and Auden's "beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall"—but your sleep is not broken by alarms or sirens or footsteps, because this was city sleep and this was the summer. My neighbor the farmer says that August isn't summer at all, meaning that it never was. I laughed when I first heard that. Perhaps, I thought, the rhythms of the farming industry are such that August is no longer the summer but that doesn't mean that nature, the material, physical world, has also had its seasons altered. When the breathless harvest moon hung low over the fields and I looked at the machine-baled hay, I felt sure that nothing could change natural time; only scheduled time, constructed time, factory time could be tinkered with. Those bales are a picture spread out across the fields, like acres and acres of an art installation. But no work of art dictates the seasons. Which is still true. But back then August used to be summer and now I know it isn't. In Spring Forest, the Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann writes of living in rural New South Wales: "It was dark when we drove up / and lit our pressure lamps and unpacked. / Our children found potatoes sprouting / on the wire mattress of a large iron bed. . . . That day five cars passed on the road, / and the children ran out every time." The part of Ireland from where I write this essay has, since the 1970s at least, seen a stream of "blow-ins" arriving to its grassed-over byways and abandoned farmhouses—tired escapees from urban European life, searching for roads where only five cars might pass. They have sought here in Ireland a different way to live, and by and large have found it in a country that only now, only in the last few years, has given itself over to the development that other states experienced decades ago. The irony, of course, is that [End Page 9] we are only arriving at modern as others are departing it; but it is worth noting all the same that we are only just arriving, only now. Those "blow-ins" had a long escape. I'd like to have been one of those "blow-ins." Dave Lordan, in my opinion one of the best of the new Irish poets, writes of growing up in this corner of Ireland and these "spiritual immigrants." It is, he says, "impossible to overestimate the immensely enriching influence immigrants like these had on our cultural life. Without them things would have been all mud and monotony, broken by the occasional outbreak of savagery. It would have been all priests and porter." The artists, writers, and poets dotted around these hills brought something as much as they sought something; left to their own devices, landing amidst a strangely live-and-let-live locality of rural, conservative, judgmental Ireland, they prospered. I often wish I was simply one of them. I envy them the absence of an "Irish" complexity to their lives here, the absence of identity. But, in truth, I'm not like them. Not fully, anyhow. I was having Irish summers before I could walk and—though born and reared across the Irish Sea—my immigrant Irish parents kept those summers, that ritual, that leaving of England to "go home," throughout the summers of my childhood, throughout all of those bittersweet, vanished, remembered Augusts. When I came here to live as an adult, as another jaded city dweller, I came seeking not the great escape nor the ghost of Yeats's Romantic Ireland; I came "home." I lived in Birmingham. I used to see kestrels in the city too. One freezing morning at the bus stop I...