I.
When I first went to see Ireland in the summer of 1963, I wasn’t certain about what might await me. To be sure, I wasn’t completely ignorant of Ireland. My parents were immigrants from Belfast who had met in New York and they remained Irish is many ways. The tales of Finn McCool and Cuchullain were part of my childhood, along with a potted version of Irish history, and what I thought was Irish music. I was educated in the schools of a Brooklyn neighborhood where the word Irish was a synonym for Catholic. I’d marched in St. Patrick’s Day Parades. I was delighted by the vision of Ireland presented in such films as John Ford’s “The Quiet Man.” If that vision was a lie, it was a charming lie. Later, while learning the writing trade, I’d read Yeats and Joyce, Wilde and Shaw and Swift, O’Casey and Frank O’Connor. All gave me an abiding curiosity about the land from which so many of the Irish had fled, including my mother and father and their friends..

But when I flew to Ireland that first time, I was no longer a boy and certainly not in search of my Irish “roots.” I was a newspaperman, trained by vigorous masters to a permanent secular skepticism. My newspaper teachers distrusted the abstract, the ideological, and the mystical. Every day of the week, they subjected the events of the world to empirical proof. “Trust your mother,” such men insisted, “but count the cards.”

As a result, I was determined to try to see Ireland clearly, not through the hazy lenses of Irish American sentimentality. That detachment was underlined by the character of my parents. As Belfast people, the Ireland of leprechauns and blarney stones was remote from their lives; they were city people, whose myths were about British soldiers, murder gangs and pogroms. Ulster puts marks on them that would last all of their lives. As a son of the Irish diaspora, I had my own uneasy feelings about Irishness. I was repelled by the figure of the shure-and-begorrah Stage Irishman; it was another version of the shuffling Stepin Fetchit stereotype that so enraged many of my black friends. I quickly wearied of the green beer and shamrocks rituals of St. Patrick’s Day. And I could not imagine Yeats or Shaw breaking into some beery version of “Danny Boy.”

In 1963, religion and the spiritual barely existed for me. I wasn’t against religion, which at that time embodied the more glib notions of the spiritual; I just didn’t get it. Even as an altar boy, when I enjoyed the secret codes of Latin and the dramatic structures of the rituals, I felt detached from the core of the mass itself. The whole notion of a jealous, vindictive and narcissistic God, sitting in a place called Heaven, judging the flaws, failures and sins of his own creations: that notion seemed even less plausible to me than “Flash Gordon”. As I grew older, I came to cherish the music and art of Catholicism, its grand sacred architecture, the kindness and compassion of individual priests and nuns, the demand of its schools for human excellence. I just didn’t believe in the central premise. I wasn’t like the Dostoiefsky character who passionately believed in atheism. I was more like E.M Forster, who said: “I do not believe in belief.”

And so I was unprepared for what happened that morning when I first glimpsed Ireland from a window seat in an airliner. After the long night’s journey, I finally saw through shreds of cloud the green rain-softened land. And I was astonished. My scalp tingled. My skin pebbled. I felt a sensation of something invisible rising towards me. Like atomic particles. A kind of fine dust made up of a billion scrambled messages, directed at me from the green silent land. Transcending centuries. Or millennia. Rising from beyond the knowable world and its wretched histories, to speak to me.

Come, they seemed to whisper.

Come home. We’ve been waiting for you.

II.

I recognize now what I didn’t understand all those years ago: I had been touched by an obscure feeling that most properly could be described as spiritual. I don’t know if it’s simply a proof of the power of the human imagination. It might be, in the broader sense that all gods are the inventions of men. But in my own case, I did not first imagine my reaction and then find a way to have it verified. The pebbling of skin and tingling of scalp hadn’t truly happened to me before that day. Neither had the sense of being bombarded by primordial messages.

They did happen to me again in Ireland, in the years that followed. Once when looking at Newgrange. Another time when walking around the Hill of Tara. In each case, I was older, and knew that the verifiable facts don’t always lead to the truth. I knew more about Irish history and Irish myth but remained hopelessly secular. But at Newgrange and at Tara, my skin pebbled, my skin tingled, and I felt again that I was receiving messages from the congested earth.

With one major exception, these feelings never came upon me in Irish cities. Since I was a city man, and the son of city people, I loved those cities. Belfast, Dublin, Cork and Galway demand to be explored. When I’m there, I prowl bookshops and visit museums. I devour the newspapers. I stand in doorways and look at faces and the way people walk. I love listening to the jokes – the “crack” in Belfast is a glorious cousin to the sardonic humor of the Jews. I’ve visited the grave of Jonathan Swift and tried to find the house where Frank O’Connor grew up. I’ve resisted the Bloomsday celebrations, with their platoons of leather-elbowed academics, but I’ve also gazed at the martello tower. I’ve just never had a spiritual experience in an Irish city.

Except when I hear the music.

The Irish music I heard as a child was only technically Irish. Much of it was a commercial concoction, created to exploit the sorrows of the millions who lived in the Irish diaspora that began with the Famine. Those songs – like Yiddish and Italian ballads of the day -- were full of longing and grief and the finality of departure. Tin Pan Alley refined its own “Irish” genre in the 20th century for an audience that was primarily Irish American, becoming essential to St. Patrick’s Day celebrations and to the repertory of such singers as Bing Crosby and Dennis Day. But many 20th century songs also contained elements of English music hall ballads, driven by the ongoing comedy of class, and were then expanded to include rebel songs, full of martyrs and defiance. My father loved to sing many of these songs. So did I.

But when I first heard true Irish music, originally made by men and women whose names were lost to history, I felt another one of those strange internal shifts. The pipes, flutes and drums touched a mysterious place in me, as if echoing through some deep cavern. I didn’t know the tunes, but seemed to have always known the music. Images of bonfires, roasting carcasses, empty landscapes scribbled through me. I wanted at once to fight, sing, shout, make love, and howl at the moon


III.

Since then, I’ve heard more of the music that I suppose must be labeled “pagan” and no matter where I am, it moves me in some extra-rational way. In its presence, I feel utterly Irish. The dark power of those chords performs – at least in the moment of hearing – an extraordinary act of erasure. Gone are “Galway Bay” and “McNamara’s Band”, of course; but gone too are New York and baseball and the American language, along with most recorded history. I feel connected to a world that is virtually empty. In those moments, Christianity seems a mere latter-day parenthesis in Irish life. I’m in a place where wolves move through Irish forests and whales can be seen from Irish shores. I speak a language that I don’t any longer know. I feel the existence of the Otherworld, illuminated by the green glow of emeralds, harboring the honored dead.

Again, I don’t know if such reactions are merely essays in the human imagination. I know I felt them (and feel them), but that old skepticism keeps nagging at me. Each time I’ve encountered New Age zealots, I’ve eased towards an exit, needing fresh air to rid me of the cheap incense of charlatanry. The books published by many of these people are intellectually slippery and mediocre, written in the style of salesmen. Add them all together, and they don’t have the value – as literature or thought – of a single page of the King James Version of the Bible. Like many other people, I have no interest in adopting some pagan creed in reaction to the failures of organized religion or the complexities of the modern world. Cults, in general, appall me, because they entail a surrender of will and choice. We’ve seen in the Nazi cult and the Stalinist cult what can happen when true believers have guns.

And yet there are many cases of people firmly rooted in the world of reason who have had experiences similar to mine. Like me, they’re not mystics, but they have felt emotions that could properly be called spiritual. Human intelligence is, no doubt, in a very early stage of its quest to understand why and how such experiences take place. But I’ve come to accept the intuitions (based on wide cultural and individual research) of Carl Gustav Jung. In 1936, the Swiss psychologist wrote in explanation of his theory of the “collective unconscious”:

“While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity.”1

That seems true to me. If I’m reading him correctly, Jung is insisting that there’s there is a kind of genetic memory in human beings, passed down through all the generations, altered, refined, diffused, displaced, but alive. This seems to be true of cultures all over the world, Jung says, and Ireland is surely no exception. Somewhere in the Irish mists, things happened. Tales were told about those events. Music was made to express them, to defy them or tame them. And both the events and their artful mirrors were so vivid they became part of a generalized, tribal memory. Somehow – and this is the place to which the investigations must go – they were deeply encoded in the people who shared the same portion of the earth. They were passed down, consciously or unconsciously, century after century. In my own case they became part of the consciousness (even if buried) of the Hamills and Devlins who passed them on to me.

Somehow, in Ireland, this enduring consciousness is also connected to the land. The Irish landscape has been denuded, abused, scarred, exploited. But in the land’s empty places an Irish visitor, even from the diaspora, can still feel the abiding presence of those men and women who came before, wearing the skins of animals, and shaping iron into pots and swords. Listen to them whisper. Listen to their music. In that moment, you are home.

1 See The Portable Jung. edited by Joseph Campbell. Penguin 1971. p. 60