The Keeper, Blog#4: The Easter Uprising

Not too long after my in-car Happy Meal with Raskolnikov and the gang, and about the same week in which I came upon the woman feeding the ducks, I happened to read a really good book about the Easter Uprising in Dublin, which took place, by the way, in 1916. The book had been lent to me by none other than my friend the legendary history teacher. He was himself of Scottish descent but he knew I was Irish and I liked Sinn Fein and Yeats’s famous poem, so he’d lent me this rather brilliant little book, not to disabuse me of my cynicism vis-a-vis history but because he had found the Irish Uprising inspiring, I suppose, and a kind of confirmation of his own belief in heroes and glory and all that.

There was a lot to support his inspiration, too. I’ll admit that right off the bat. From farms and towns all around Ireland, I read, men, and even some women, with the most primitive sorts of flintlock rifles traveled to Dublin to huddle in a kind of military deployment in a bakery, some, or in the Post Office or other buildings around Dublin, but only after first driving the Brits out of Dublin Palace and then deciding for some reason not to occupy it. Whatever their reason for not occupying The Palace, these otherwise highly focused men, plus some women, expected the rest of Ireland to rise up with them, or at least not long after. The people, they reasoned, would be inspired by their martyrdom (if it came to that) and would rise up in their turn to drive the British from every corner of their beautiful and mysterious island. There were politicians, of course, who were committed to a peaceful and parliamentarian route to the mitigation, maybe even the elimination, of British sovereignty, but politicians, as we all know, are snakes and among the uprisers the spirit of St. Patrick was such that reliance on them seemed repulsive to anyone who considered him or herself a true son or daughter of Erin. So they’d become quite exercised by the prospect of bypassing the politicians and just having directly at the Brits, killing them if necessary but, in any case, getting them out of Ireland—and, perhaps, avenging along the way the many storied and unimaginably brutal things done to their forebears down through the ages.

I knew a little about those nasty things from family lore, but in spite of how much I love Ireland and my Irish roots, and Irish music, especially the great contemporary Irish fiddler Martin Hayes, and also W.B. Yeats, I am quite an anglophile. My wife’s a hundred percent English so I must be. Nevertheless, there’s good reason to decry the excesses, as they call them, to which the British adverted during their eight-hundred-year occupation of Ireland. Oliver Cromwell, as it turns out, was a case in point, especially where my own family was concerned. I discovered this some years ago in a passionate burst of interest in my family’s farings in the mitherland, in the course of which I read somewhere that Cromwell had slaughtered a considerable number of men and boys of the town and County of Wexford. This was where many of my forebears dwelt at the time, so chances are good some of them were among the victims. He had done so with unthinking dispatch and because he could, and he’d done it right in the middle of town in the market square—killing three hundred women, too, for good measure, who’d come to huddle at the town cross as if that would somehow protect them and their men.

So much for faith, you might say.

Many commentators, by the way, contest this story. They say it’s pure hooey, concocted by the Royalists and the Papists to discredit the Protestants and the Parliamentarians, and they may be right, but even if they are I prefer the hooey.

It makes me feel more connected with my family, for one thing.

Also, it gets the blood circulating.

Anyway, the Easter Uprisers, hoping, as I said, that Ireland would rise in concert with them and expel the British pollution from their land, were direly disappointed when Ireland in fact stayed exactly where it was, tending its sheep and its cows, poking at its peat fires, cooking its corned beef and cabbage, and baking its delicious soda bread. Furthermore, the people of Dublin didn’t particularly appreciate the inconvenience and danger of having a horde of roughnecks from the outlying districts inciting the British to send extra troops to the city by way of perpetrating an occupation. Roughnecks or not, though, and in spite of not asking the people of Dublin for permission before sneaking in and turning the town into a shooting range, the Irish uprisers were pretty heroic. They were quickly outnumbered and surrounded—as they sort of suspected they would be without the aforementioned hoped-for help from the rest of the nation—and eventually their non-standard-issue rifles ran out of non-standard-issue bullets and, their firearms being of different makes and models, there was no uniform supply of ammunition with which to re them up. If I remember correctly, they resorted to throwing stones and hunks of metal at the British, although they knew that wouldn’t help their cause. Finally, they were pretty much massacred or taken prisoner and the leaders were summarily executed.

It was this last act in the whole drama that made the rebellion a tragedy instead of an absurdist farce. The Brits were so bloody callous, so bloody vindictive, and so bloody, well, British, that they humiliated the leaders of the Uprising with rheumy-eyed sanguinity before killing them like so many sewer rats. When word of their savagery circulated throughout Erin, all those bloodies I just heaped on the Brits’ heads kept getting multiplied and expanded upon down through the generations until by the time the I.R.A. got going the Uprising had become an eternal symbol of the martyrdom of Irish innocents at the hands of British tyranny, which in certain quarters it remains to this day. That is, although in and of itself the Uprising was a botch-job and a blithering blathering failure, as an historical “event” it rose phoenix-like from its own ashes to become a monument to the Irish spirit, a harbinger and symbol of Irish independence in light of which the Irish came to believe that the casting off of their cuffs and chains had not only been prompted by divine example on Calvary Hill, but had been, given their natural nobility as a people, as inevitable as the high truth and even the justice of The Banshee’s Wail Over the Mangle Pit, which, by the way, you should hear Martin Hayes play that one.

As an aside, I have to admit that as I read that book on the Easter Uprising I kind of found all the shooting and speech-making and dying and praying and dying again and shooting some more and then making more speeches, and then getting shot again, only this time through the top of the skull—well, interesting. The river-of-blood stuff, that is. Interesting. Even entertaining. I don’t go in for those kinds of things in my own life—except maybe for the praying part if it’s not under pressure. In a book, though, those things can be a lot of fun. Maybe it’s especially fun to read about those things because I know I’m not getting shot. The bullets and everything are only words. Being made of syllables, not steel, they can’t just fly out of the book and kill me. Even the men falling out of the windows of the buildings across the street from the Dublin Post Office are only words, the men twitching in the dust in all their agony, the men puling like children as the last drams of blood leak out of their prostrate Irish or English bodies—in a book they’re only words, little bundles of syllables, and they’re in the past tense, you see, and the past is, well, over.

Done with.

You can’t help the past, really, so you might as well enjoy it.

*

This attitude of mine, this tendency to prefer history as narrative rather than as factual account, might be related by the way to the sad story of why I never became a history major in college. I considered it quite seriously for a while, not having reached the point yet of being inclined simply to dismiss it—history, that is—as a river of blood. The tipping point may have been when in my freshman year I had an assignment in my Western Civilization seminar to evaluate three primary-text accounts of a fourteenth-century event and rank order them according to their reliability, explaining my assessments thereof in essay form. The C- I received on that assignment was generous, I’d say, since—as the professor patiently explained later in his office while handing me tissues and saying “There, there!”—I had, in fact, chosen the least reliable of the three accounts and supported my selection with exactly the wrong arguments: that it was well-written and exciting; chock-full of convincing details; and morally uplifting, inasmuch as the guy you really wanted to come out looking good—the blind guy who sold daffodils in the market place and happened to have been given a magic ring for safekeeping—well, he was the one who came out, you know, looking good. The most reliable document, Professor Dorfman explained to me, was in fact the one that was about seventy-five words long, had no adjectives, and stuck to facts as mundane and uninspiring as my diary was at that time. Facts like how many chickens had been slaughtered that morning, or that the tanner happened at the moment to be using stones to secure the things he was tanning instead of horseshoe nails from the blacksmith’s shop.

Gradually, and especially after this traumatic episode, I think I realized that I was more interested in the sorts of people who didn’t make history. Like the blind daffodil salesman, or even the tanner. I didn’t much care, really, about dopes like the earl’s bastard son, who’d cut off the blacksmith’s head the day before and had his men take away all the stuff in his shop, including the horseshoe nails, and throw it in the river. History is pretty heavily populated with bastard sons of earls who do things like that. It’s the little guys that interest me. And that seems to be what literature is about, mostly. Even historical novels are most interesting when their main characters are little guys or women. If the main characters in literature do happen to be history makers, lots of times it’s only by accident and in a sort of a cockamamie way.

That’s really what it is.  I like cockamamies, and literature, as opposed to history, is full of them. Raskolnikov, for instance. Hamlet, if you think about it. Oedipus even, in his own post-Oedipal way. And all the various poets—they’ll be the first to step forward when the cockamamie roll call is taken. They won’t even wait for their names to be called. They’ll step proudly out of the line and into the lists.

By way of clarification, I don’t know exactly what I mean by a cockamamie. After all, I only just thought up the idea. I should at least try, though, to get at some sort of a working idea. A cockamamie, I’d say, is the sort of person who believes God will save him if he jumps off a bridge into a frozen river—if God wants to, that is—so in order to find out whether God wants to he jumps off the bridge. After first dropping a large rock off it, of course, in order to see if the ice breaks when it’s hit with the rock or the rock breaks when it hits the ice. The latter would not be as good, of course, as the former—although in either case, the cockamamie thinks, it would be nice if God caught him or something before he hit the ice.

As for that, well, who knows if He did—catch him, that is—God, that is—but I’d put my money on some kind of a happy outcome.

And this is because the cockamamie isn’t just conducting a sort of detached experiment in order to prove some random pie-in-the-sky point. He jumps off that bridge solely to convince his friend—whose name is Jerry—that his (Jerry’s) being poor and hungry and always having to rely on the cockamamie to bring him a sandwich or a random bag of beef jerky strips, or even to do a shop for him whenever he (Jerry) has found a fairly stable location under a highway overpass where he can store some food for a while in that thermal lock-bag the cockamamie got him—that all these misfortunes aren’t due to the fact that there’s no God, as poor starving Jerry has concluded. The cockamamie tells poor Jerry his suffering is due primarily to the fact that we live in an age of progress and therefore in a system rather than a civilization and in this system people are merely inputs, not people, so those who don’t input in the right way don’t eat and the system cares neither one iota nor even a jot.

The cockamamie cares, though, so in order to keep Jerry’s belief in something alive, and to prove to Jerry that God, unlike the system, does indeed care about us all, the cockamamie decides to do the jumping off the bridge thing after, of course, asking Jerry himself to pray to God to catch him. Also after hedging the whole deal a bit—for Jerry’s sake—by averring that we can’t force God to do anything and if He doesn’t catch him it will be because it’s not part of His plan, and Jerry will have to respect that and not just go around saying he’d told him so, there was no God, and everything was even worse now that his only friend the cockamamie was gone.

Anyway, I’m sure God catches him.

Not all cockamamies are so lucky, though. Sometimes things turn out badly for them. For instance, another sort of cockamamie might be this guy who knows how to bundle together a lot of really junky junk bonds with a few apparently “okay” bonds and sell them to people and make a lot of money. But then he realizes that the people he intends to sell them to are going to sell them to other people who eventually are going to sell them to thousands of hard-working, family-rearing, kid-feeding, scrimping and saving Americans who trust the system, God bless them, because it’s the right thing to do. Remember that optimism thing I was talking about?

Our friend the cockamamie realizes those junky junk bond bundles are ultimately going to destroy all those optimistic people’s lives. They’re going to ruin their kids’ lives, too, and make some of them even go hungry, causing ripples of misery to radiate all throughout the good ole U.S. of A. The cockamamie being in spite of his job sort of an optimist himself, this is the first time he ever thought of the fact that his job is about screwing people, directly or indirectly. So he decides not to make all that money by selling all those junk bonds. Instead, he decides to blow the whistle on the whole system and, of course, ends up getting fired, harassed, sued, threatened, spat on, and generally ruined practically to death, all by guys in very nicely tailored Armani suits.

Now his life is a cruel mess. Even his kids distance themselves from him. His kids, you see, never really knew him because he was such a money-driven money grubber and then he became a justice-driven cockamamie, which really confused them. He wants somehow to make it all up to them. He’s in his car. It’s his only possession left in the world ever since mom, who is a good person but not a cockamamie, divorced him and took everything including the kids for herself. Now he actually lives in his car—which by the way is out of gas.

He’s the loneliest man in the world, our cockamamie. He can’t even take solace in the fact that by exposing all that financial corruption he’s struck a blow for the children of working families, saved them from disaster, from starvation, or at least from malnutrition. In fact, he hates himself. What a cockamamie thing to do with his life, he says to himself.

Might as well have just jumped off a bridge.

*

The greatest cockamamies, as noted, are the poets, whose tendency—contraindicated by such social-systemic requirements as efficiency and the outcome-dedicated functionality of inputs and component parts—is to address themselves, most of them, not so much to belly-hunger as to soul-hunger. They aim to fulfill the craving for beauty and truth, not the pie-in-the-sky kind but the kind that manifests the world’s goodness as well as the goodness of human life, urging us to know that we can feel both if we just stop trying to progress all the time and open ourselves up to what’s in front of and all around us. The poets seem to think we’re hungry for that feeling, that it’s a kind of food in and of itself, and, well, somebody has to cook it up. Metaphors go into the pot, along with the occasional symbol or two, and the way it bubbles when the boil rolls is in its way, well, tuneful.

This brings me back to that book about the Easter Uprising, the name of which by the way is The Easter Uprising, by Fearghal McGarry, who is a historian of great discipline and intellectual breadth and almost as good a writer as he is an historian, having, that is, a steady eye for the cockamamie.  It turns out, for instance, that the great and heroic men who planned and executed the uprising—and then were executed themselves—were the most huggable sorts of cockamamies you could ever hope to meet. For one thing, two of them were poets. So right there it’s more than evident that in spite of their making history this band of perfectly rational and heroic men, all of them hard-nosed killers and fighters grimly committed to staking their very lives on an action as grave as this, had a very high cockamamie IQ. It’s little wonder, then, that, as noted, they declined to occupy Dublin Palace after taking it by surprise that lovely spring day. McGarry tells us, in fact, that they declined to occupy any militarily significant positions, including the Dublin Train Station. Why, after all, make it too difficult, after news of their action had reached official military ears, for the British to send thousands of fresh troops straight into the heart of the city by train?

The uprisers, however, did take great care to occupy symbolic places, none of which, by the way, had even the slightest military value. One of them was St. Stephen’s Green. That was and still is a beautiful square and park in the middle of Dublin. The Dubliners loved it, and it had been a big part of Dublin life since the Middle Ages, having been a commons before it became a square. It is incomparably beautiful, with a nice pond fed by the Portobello Canal and even a little garden dedicated to Yeats in it, with a statue of Yeats by Henry Moore. I think there’s one of Wolfe Tone, too. The Yeats statue wasn’t there when they occupied it, of course, but the green was still beautiful and deeply symbolic. One might argue, in fact, that it was a measure of its symbolic value in Irish life that it had exactly no strategic value. Be that as may be, why not dig up huge swaths of it—the uprisers thought, at perhaps the poets’ suggestion—crisscross it with trenches as per the prevalent battle formational style of the day, and wait for the British to go to the upper floors of the Shelbourne Hotel, which was on the square’s northeast corner, and pick them off from above as in the proverbial shooting of fish in a barrel?

It doesn’t seem right or moral, but here’s where the brilliance of McGarry’s writing comes in to assist with the brilliance of his history-ing in suggesting and establishing a very important point: namely, that there was not just a little but in fact a lot of the genuine cockamamie in all these killers and thugs (the British) and all these murderous martyrs (the Irish). It’s just that the cockamamie-ish-ness was fatally mixed up with the other thing, the Death Wish thing, which manifested as a desire to make history. Here’s where the cockamamie-ish-ness comes in, though.  Twice a day—twice a day—by mutual comart and article of war—both contingents of the St. Stephen’s Green Grand Gunnery and Donnybrook Bloodshed Extravaganza recognized an hour of cease-fire during which a little door opened in the wall of the keeper’s hut and out waddled a splay-footed man with an overbite and spiky eyebrows carrying a bucket filled with mashed up bits of lettuce and beans and cabbage and other things, who headed directly and unassumingly to wherever the ducks happened to be—the pond, most likely—and commenced feeding them. As it happened, that is, in addition to a lot of smoke and a lot of dead bodies and a lot of distended moans and savage, bloodthirsty cries and hurrahs, there were also on that famous and symbolic green a lot of ducks. Battle or no, somebody had to feed them.

Both sides had recognized this exigency, and both had agreed the only civilized thing to do was to leave off murdering each other twice a day, for just a spell, of course, and allow the keeper to come out with a bucket of feed-mix. One might safely conjecture that as far as the ducks were concerned each day was just another lovely day for a swim. They didn’t know from Adam about Irish nationalism or the British Empire or glory or martyrdom or war or peace. They didn’t even know who St. Patrick was and why they had never had the pleasure of encountering a snake. Everything they knew could be summed up in one magnificent and unhistoric syllable:

Quack!

So while scarves of smoke wavered and wobbled in the air, and dying Irishmen cried for their mithers to come with perhaps a wee wedge of soda bread, smeared, please, with good Irish butter, and tea-brained hooliganish snipers in standard-issue uniforms, sitting in their posh hotel, sniffing and inspecting the hotel’s collection of aromatic soaps, puffed at their briars and said things like, “I say! Tough lot these Irish monkeys, what?”—while all this was going on a lonely little splay-footed, buck-toothed man with a lonely little bucket heaped with exactly the kind of kitchen scraps he knew his noble and uncognizant feathered friends would like waddled deferentially down the path beneath the insulted trees, right along the most direct route to the pond where, by way of greeting, all the ducks in St. Stephen’s Green flapped and quacked their way over to him in expectation of a fine tuck-in.

During this scene, by the way, McGarry, though writer enough to tell us about the keeper—in a subordinate clause that’s part of a much longer and more consequential sentence—is too busy history-ing, really, to give us much of a description of him. This omission inspires me, therefore, to provide one myself, since, having long ago after receiving that C- decided I was less interested in real history, whatever that is, than in the visionary kind, I have also come to devote much of my life to the search for cockamamies and having found one am disinclined to pass him over simply because he lives in a subordinate clause.

The keeper, you see, is the crux, the crucible, the gist and main point—the thesis—the take-away, if necessary—of this whole series of blogs.