jacktellslies

Newgrange is brilliant. It's a single mound, similar to those at Knowth, only much larger. It had been lost to history, thought only a natural hill and used as farmlands. Occasionally a lump of quartz would turn up there, and when the Scottish landlord who owned the place decided to begin mining for the stuff, Newgrange itself must have cried out and revealed itself. The first men to touch shovel to earth there dug directly to that famous entrance stone, to those carvings, and stopped immediately. They knew that what they had found was very old, and very important.

The place has since been restored to what a pile of important academics assure us is very near its original state. It's ringed in skull sized lumps of quartz, shining and white, interspersed occasionally with slightly smaller dark stones in a set pattern. Like at Dowth, the base is haloed with boulders, some of them marked.

The door is guarded by that stone, by spirals and hatches. It's huge and perfect. It could be a map of the Boyne Valley, the fertile river-ringed island contained within Ireland, the spirals marking out Newgrange and Knowth and Dowth, the other shapes representing the surrounding farmland. It could be a map for the souls of the dead entombed there to follow. I'd been to Newgrange once before with my mother and my grandmother. I'm glad to have been allowed to touch it twice. There is a door for humans there, wide like a cave's mouth, and there is a door for the sun, smaller and located above your head. If you don't kneel a bit when entering you'll whack your head on the bottom of its stone frame. I did, in fact, after expressly being warned not to do so. My hat suffered the worst of the blow, but I took the hint and assumed the correct ritual posture.

The ceiling as you enter the long corridor is low, and the walls press close, more narrow near your head. Busy stooping, forced to keep bowing to the place, you do not notice the strong slant in the floor, that in fact you are climbing up. By the time the interior opens into what seems after your crawl an expansive cavern, your feet are precisely level with the sun's door. Both are also level with the horizon as viewed in the distance from the entrance. You're standing underground; you're standing where the earth meets the sky.

Newgrange is five-thousand years old, older by five-hundred years than the Egyptian pyramids. The ceiling of the central chambers is shaped a bit like a beehive rising high above your head, and corbelled, which is to say pieced together with flat stones piled atop one another and fitted together. No mortar was used. The construction was precise: in all that time, cradled by a river and sleeping under weeping Irish skies, it's not leaked once. Lost to us for who knows how long, the interior did not require reconstruction.

Newgrange is cruciform in shape: the stone hall leads to chambers, one before you, one to your left, and one to your right. The carvings inside those spaces are varied. The rooms to your left and right as you enter are covered in them; the one directly before you bares only that triple spiral, beloved but almost a secret placed where it is, to the right of the entrance and facing inward.

Newgrange was there well before the people who first sang the mythologies of Ireland arrived, and ages before the monks eventually stumbled in to record them. So the mythology cannot tell us what Newgrange meant to the builders, but it can tell us something of what it meant to their successors.

Boann had a husband, Nechtan. But she was beautiful, and the Dagda wanted her. So the Dagda gathered his trickery, and sent Nechtan on a journey. And he called up his magic, and he hid himself and Boann in space, within Newgrange, and in time: he built a year in which they could lie together, and he hid it within a single day. They had time enough for one another then, and time enough even to birth a child. The Dagda left at the end of the year, and Nechtan came back at the end of the day, and he was none the wiser.

The son was named Aengus. Through some accident, he was left with no inheritance, so he asked his father for use of Newgrange for a day and a night. Through certain grammatical coincidences in the Irish language, however, "a day and a night" and "day and night" are both described by the same phrase. Therefore, in asking for a short lease, he was also making the place his for all of eternity.

It's about light and dark. It's about sex. It's a time machine that runs on trickery and clever words.

On the winter solstice, at sunrise, a beam of light penetrates the door built for it. It makes its way slowly up the corridor, finally illuminating all three chambers in a way that doesn't quite make sense.

I have two tattoos: a labyrinth on my left shoulder, and a church window on my right arm, shoulder to elbow. My body was built to imitate these structures: spirals carved in the earth; light shining through stone; the sacred reaching into something we mortals made. It's a man's ritual built in the shape of a woman.

Both sites were far too heavily beset with tourists for me to either lose or find myself much there. And the tours were invasive. They preached at us about the science of the place in a way that might have been interesting if I hadn't already known much of it, and allowed us an hour only at each site, including their speeches.

I shook away from the crowd and whispered my name to the place. I breathed and I did not. I followed the stones that held the edge of it. When they too subsided leaving only grass and hill I collapsed on the mound as if I were exhausted and resting my head on a lover's thigh when they were through with me. I bid a hasty adieu and returned to the bus. It wasn't enough. I want to break into these places with you in the dark. I want to find them when they are free.

The cathedral itself is something of a museum now. The original had been built, supposedly, by Saint Brighid, whom the museum and church readily admitted had once been a goddess. "That other Brighid," they called her, which is very similar to what my grandmother (not the one who is praying for me, although this one might be too) usually called a certain gentleman caller who happened to have the same name as my father. The goddess Brighid was a triumvirate, a patron of blacksmithing, healing, and poetry. The myths speak again of the split between the culture gods and the nature gods. War threatened, and Brighid volunteered to marry the wild king. If there was a line between two ideas, Brighid could be found there, blurring the edges of things, joining them. She was a goddess of fire and of water, of eternal flames and holy wells.

Christianity came to Ireland, and Brighid, in a move similar to the one she made with her marriage, apparently decided to become a nun. She was successful that time: the new faith came peacefully. This Brighid was the daughter of a nobleman and his bondwoman, thus making her a creature of neither class and both. At her ordination the archbishop of Ireland accidentally read the wrong vows, making her not a nun, but, impossibly, a bishop. He claimed that the mistake had been the work of the Holy Spirit and defended it fiercely, refusing any challenge that was raised. Brighid was a defender of the poor, as exceptionally generous with her father's money as saints tend to be, and the founder of a notable monastery. Bridging perceived divisions again, she made a monastic centre for women and men both. In the story of her founding of it, she went to the noble who owned the land at what would become Kildare, which means church of the oak, asking for a space for her religious order. He offered her as much ground as her mantle could cover, and she accepted. The cloth, thrown down below the tree, expanded to cover enough ground to build the entire large town. I believe this is traditionally depicted as a miracle, but I've always imagined that she was a clever creature and unravelled her cloak, making one great, single ring of the thread.

The church was interesting to me for how little of Christianity was in it. There were saints in the stained glass. There were alters and a lectern and ornate confessionals and the things that one needs for the ritual, but there was no crucifix. I only found two images of Christ in the building, in fact. There were animals depicted in the tiles in the floor. There was a nautilus shell raised on a small dais in the back. The baptismal font was carved of a single rough piece of stone.

Outside of the church I found an old crypt that locals apparently once called Brighid's kitchen. I climbed into it, blinded by the dark. The few pictures I took were more to see the cavern through the light of my camera than to keep the pictures themselves. I took the stairs down, under the earth. The bricks at the back wall of the place curved, their shape suggesting an oven.

I spoke to the woman at the tourism centre and was given a map that should have directed me to a holy well dedicated to the saint. In Ireland the wells are often flanked by a tree covered in torn bits of cloth. The cloth is a prayer, tied onto a branch. It is when the attentions of time and weather eventually cause the fabric to disintegrate that the prayer is thought to be granted. However, either the map was a particularly Irish one or any skills I may posses at finding my way were failing me. I gave up, not much disappointed by not having found the well, and returned to Dublin and my fabulously international hosts.

From Cahersiveen I made my way to Cork. My delight upon entering a city again was as complete as it was unexpected. My utter surprise at finding more than a few buildings located within close proximity of one another may have seemed reasonable had I been away from cities for a few months or years as opposed to maybe a week. But I love the urban, and Cork, from what I saw of it, was wonderful. I had every intention of exploring, finding a queer bar and going dancing, but found instead that my hostel came with a wireless connection, that I had a good deal of writing I wanted to do, and that I was still exhausted. I took a few pictures of the local graffiti, bought a few new pairs of underthings, and moved on to Limerick.

Doing so was not easy. And when I finally got to the house where I was meant to be couch surfing, really wanting only to get something to eat, take a shower, and sleep forever, I instead discovered two things: that my host was not home, and that his parents did not know I was coming. His poor mother was very hospitable despite being a bit high pitched, seeming the entire time we waited for her son to arrive as if she were about to explode. I felt completely awful. And apparently I wasn't the only couch surfer he'd invited without telling her, either: there were two other Americans I hadn't known about already there. Brian, my errant host, arrived before long with two recently graduated boys from Seattle named Morgan and Eric. He announced that we'd be going out drinking, and not staying at his house but crashing on the floor at a friend's flat. I nearly fled, taking the next available bus to Dublin and getting a hostel there. But I'm very glad that I didn't.

A few drinks and some good conversation did me more good than retreating, defeated, into sleep would have. His friend Denis was adorable and desperately enthusiastic about alternative music and his friends' local bands. At the pub we danced to a funny little band from South Wales that made good use of an electric ukulele which my new Irish friends erroneously described as punk. I met Lindsey, a sweet red haired girl. I chatted about our dreadlocks with a stunning barmaid named Katie. I met a young man named Ray who was named for his uncle, one of the men to starve and die in the hunger strikes of the eighties. He was genuinely grateful and impressed that I'd even heard of the event, which I thought ridiculous, and sad. I lived here. Isn't knowing something about the place before coming over the least I could do? He actually shook my hand for having bothered to read a book. Then again, I did spend that day and the next gently reminding the other Americans that their word choices frequently made them seem to be presumptuous swine. Ray's mother was an American, and he asked me if I'd ever been to Philadelphia. He then asked if I'd ever heard of South Street, which is where she lived. How delightfully unlikely! I've been working on South Street for years, and flâneuring there for as long as I've been sentient enough to take a bus.

The next day we slept late, had a good breakfast, and then Brian drove Morgan and Eric and I to Lough Gur. I'd read that it was a pretty lake with a few small sites nearby. What I found instead was a positively astounding stone circle. The Grange was aligned to sunrise on midsummer, composed of more than a hundred large rocks, some of them homes to truly massive, ancient trees, practically infants compared to the age of the circle itself. The first tree I met was a truly gorgeous old thing, still thriving but completely hollow inside, the gash that opened her beautifully shaped. I whispered into her. I reached my hand in, feeling the bark curve, rough, far into the wound. The wood was smooth on the other side. Her roots curled around ancient stone, it guiding her shape, her cracking it slowly, lovingly, over the course of long centuries. The next was next to the entrance, a short hallway of stones. He seemed to guard the place, moss clinging to him like a beard. I liked him immensely.

Listen. I've sought out and fought hard for a charmed life. I've seen some amazing things. Never in my life have I felt a place so good, so perfect. Photography failed me. I couldn't make art of it. I touched the bones of the earth. I returned to the first tree, my fingers finding the bark on the other side of her bole. Sometimes, usually only if I'm quite close to someone, I'll come hard and the chemicals will shift in my head too fast. I'll feel the rush of it, the sharp change, and I'll cry. It happened there: I touched a tree and something changed in my head, something I wasn't prepared for, and I was weeping, half laughing.

There was a small pile of rounded stones on the other side of the circle. It looked much like a child, and people had taken to leaving coins there, one and two cent pieces, pennies and a few pence. The other boys were standing around it, waiting for me to finish making love to the shrubbery so we could move on to the lake itself, wanting to leave a coin but apparently not having anything between the three of them. I hadn't anything so small at the time, but I left a bit of gold, a twenty cent piece, excusing it to them: "I like this place. It can have a bit more." I thought of you there. I wished you could have found it with me. The place sang.

They dragged me away and we explored an abandoned farmhouse, round holes built into the walls of one of the barns, meant for firing rifles through during the revolution.

We found the lake. We climbed the biggest hill by the water, got caught on nettles and climbed under and over live electric fences and barbed wire. I did so safely; two of the boys were a bit too daring and were punished for it. And, in my opinion at least, it was worth it. Atop the hill we could see not only the lake and the surrounding farmland, two castles and all the way to Limerick, but to the mountains curving around us on all sides. I stood on a hill and saw to the end of the world. We played up there, throwing rocks, frolicking and jumping and taking ridiculous pictures. When we got back down to the lake the weather had changed from occasionally pouring, usually dry but grey, to perfect blue skies, white clouds, and a shimmering lake. There is a crannog in the middle of it, a small island built in the Iron Age as a fortification on which the creators could safely keep cattle and their homes without much fear of a raid. The legend of Lough Gur is that once a year the water, which is only a glamour, disappears, and the city beneath the lake is made clear. I gazed into the shining place, the grasping green things growing under the surface.

As we drove back, Brian expressed his disappointment that I hadn't made it into town a bit earlier the day before. The boys had gone to a castle that had been boarded up and abandoned ages ago when the owner, a wealthy old woman, had gone mad and left her cattle outside and unfed in the winter. They all starved and died. She was locked up, and the place has had a reputation for being haunted ever since, if it hadn't already before. During the story he said the name of the place a few times, but I'm less accustomed to the Limerick accent than I am to some, and he swallowed his words a bit.

"Wait," I asked, "what was the name of the place again?"

"Castle Connell."

I laughed. I don't usually like to admit such things on the internet, but that's my real surname. I have a castle, a castle haunted by a madwoman and cows.

The boys tried to break into it, climbing trees towards windows, pulling away the boards on the doors, but they failed. Pity I hadn't been there to help.

People, including a good many of the ones from Ireland, apparently love Dingle. A German girl with whom I spoke for a bit at the first hostel in which I'd stayed mentioned that it was the one place an Irish family she'd met told her she absolutely had to see. The locals I've encountered couch surfing seemed genuinely happy for me when I told them that I'd been there. I cannot imagine why. It was Irish Disneyland. It was ugly and cheap and fake. It turned good stories, and worse than that, good people, into plastic clichés.

The scenery I passed on the bus ride over, actually, was really overwhelmingly pretty. Mountains, fields, ocean and shore arranged themselves in combinations more impressive than any I'd yet seen. This only had the affect of making me long even more for the ride back out again.

For Dingle's sake, perhaps I ought to admit a few complicating factors. I arrived there on the first day that the amount of time that I've been spending on buses began really getting to me. I've ridden between four and eight hours nearly every day since I started this trip, and although the view from the bus is often spectacular, it's getting to be a bit much. My sometimes tricky back doesn't seem to be enjoying it much either, honestly. Also, I had no idea of what I was getting myself into. Perhaps my sense of geography is occasionally a bit more American than I might care to admit? This was the first tourist town I'd ever stumbled into in Ireland. Had I known what the place was, I would have braced myself for it, and bemused, a bit dismissive, I would have ignored it.

My goal in going to Dingle had been to see the Gallarus Oratory, a stone monastic structure shaped a bit like an upturned boat. I allowed myself to be too tired to make the trek to find the place the night I got into town, deciding instead to get something to eat, to read a bit, and to sleep a great deal. There's something nice I can say about Dingle: I bought a cheap fish chowder in a restaurant there, and the salmon, cod, mussles, and perch that, in part, comprised it were the freshest fish I've ever tasted in my life. For reasons of professional pride, I wouldn't even admit this if it weren't so overwhelmingly true. Dingle is a fishing town, and the fish I ate were so fresh they were barely recognisable. The salmon was, I think, wild Atlantic, a thing that cannot be legally sold in the States. The mussels had a different texture than what I'm accustomed to selling and cooking. The cod was so fresh it tasted like a different fish entirely. I don't even normally like cod; the stuff in the chowder was spectacular. The dish as a whole was simple and well made, and served with Irish brown bread and butter, two things I'm really going to miss when this trip is over. There: you're not all bad, Dingle. Thanks for the soup.

Most of my thoughts in recent months have been dedicated to attempting to decide upon a reasonable future. Not the entire future, mind, just the next year or more of my own. I know that I'd rather not live in the States. If I did stay, I'd be interested in organic farming on the west coast, although most of my attempts to learn about it have failed. The Peace Corps sound just fine, but I'd rather not be obliged to do anything for any set period of time. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to transfer to a store in Canada. Of course, I miss Ireland terribly. It would seem, however, that in order to get an Irish work visa, one must already have secured work, but that most employers won't hire anyone without a work visa. Fab. Would any of you happen to know anyone who lives anywhere interesting who might be looking for an occasionally unruly houseboy? I'm fairly well read, I like to cook, and my morals are easily compromised.