Remarks

People tell you where they've gone

They'll tell you where to go

But till you get there yourself

You'll never really know.

—Joni Mitchell, "Amelia," from Hejira

A man came slowly from the setting sun ...

— Yeats, "Cuchulain's Fight With the Sea"

Oh, goodie – vacation photos!

In putting this edition together, I feel as if I've invited you all over to my apartment to look at my summer vacation slides. I should be wearing a screaming Hawaiian print shirt. At least this way you can look or skip it at your leisure and not have to come up with another death in the family in order to avoid the bore. I only wish I could offer you a cocktail for the experience.

I hope this account of my 10-day trip to Ireland will be at least mildly interesting to some of you. At least a few have expressed sincere interest in the journey; for the rest of you, I suppose I'm violating Jim Millaway's most important piece of advice: just because it happened to you doesn't make it interesting. When we get right down to it, though, I threw this account together more for myself than anyone else. (This is the truth of all writers, is it not?) These were 10 strange days – not strange as in bizarre or wacky, but as in nebulous, surprising and open-ended – and I was actually eager to get home and try to make some sense of it.

I have, at least, kept this account primarily to the surface experiences of the tour. It's a big, sloppy travel article. The inner experiences of the trip will take some more time to simmer down. I might have made some monumental personal decisions while adrift in Dublin and skipping along Ireland's west coast. This is only my third time to leave the island of Manhattan since August. The resulting shock – particularly in a place that, believe it or not, reminded me a great deal of Oklahoma – set my dials spinning madly out of control. That plus the jet lag, and a few times on this trip I was one emotional, angst-ridden freak. In a productive sense. Uh-huh.

The jet lag really kicked my ass – and, in fact, is still kicking it as I write. I keep waking up at 7 a.m. (Those who know me best are really laughing at that.) I still get hungry for dinner about noon. It's not as bad coming back, but getting there was a bitch. The flight leaves here at 6 p.m. and arrives six hours later at 6 a.m. The body clock whirls about like a fast-forward movie transition. Even though friend Alicia's magic pills kept me healthy – she distributed little packets of her homemade antioxidants and ecchinacea to everyone as we boarded the big, green Aer Lingus plane – I was off-kilter for the first half of the Dublin days. I would go back to my hotel room at midnight and not fall asleep until about 5 a.m., all the while stressing over not being able to fall asleep. A vicious cycle. The reality of this was brought home on my return in a conversation with my mother.

"I don't remember having this much trouble with jet lag when I went to Europe 10 years ago," I said.

There was a pause. "But – you were 20 then," she said.

Sigh.

The anxiety I experienced over my sleep cycles was also fed by the anxiety pervading Dublin. The city of Dublin is a tense place. Dubliners suddenly have something to prove – something utterly new. Riding atop a sweeping economic boom and a resulting swell in native culture, this very young city (half of its million are under 30) may be the first generation of Dubliners in a thousand years that doesn't feel beholden to or weighed down by the Importance of Tradition. The new economy is based almost solely on computers. The Temple Bar district is stuffed with swank lounges and Prada shoes. The growth of tourism allows the kids to store the traditional music, the traditional crafts and most of the Gaelic speakers in its padded (but confining) trunks, clearing the cultural centers and recording studios for new artists and new voices.

At least, this is what most Dubliners will have you believe – and they try very hard to convince you of it, which is the source of the anxiety. Dublin is waking up from centuries of turbulent and self-conscious sleep, and it's stumbling into a brave new European Union as a worldly capital city with a social cachet it hasn't had in centuries, if ever. Dublin is me in high school – the socially awkward skinny kid craning his neck to see what the cool kids are doing, determined to be involved.

This anxiety, this contrast, is manifested physically everywhere you turn. Not only in the determined faces of Dublin's Gen-Y entrepreneurs but in the architecture clashes along every street. The rapid growth of new modern buildings and techno storehouses is beginning to chafe against the magnificent Gothic and Georgian buildings and cathedrals clotting most every lane in Dublin. The skyline of Dublin right now features more construction cranes than Las Vegas. And they ain't building 'em like they used to. An old, whining argument, I know. Sometimes the juxtapositions are intriguing, sometimes they're unsettling.

These clashes were catharsis for some of my own personal crises involving the old and new. I was not alone. My primary travelling companion, Cynthia Joyce, was on the same page. We both found that we'd come to Ireland with certain storybook expectations of the place our ancestors called home. None of these expectations were met. This is not a bad thing, believe me, nor did it really dampen the trip. It just kept us unsettled, shaken, untethered – feelings we'd had in New York for several months now, anyway. The foreign laboratory allowed us to work through some of them, cast away others. The endless pints of Guinness helped forget a few, too.

We also expected some instinctual magnetic pull to the great ancestral homeland, which we didn't feel even when standing atop the majestical Cliffs of Moher – a soul-sweeping spot that should inspire the dullest of men or women to artistic genius. We forget, though, that we're not Irish. We have some Irish roots, but I've also got German, English and French. I'm an American mutt, and the only homeland that tugs at my bones – really, down to the marrow – was the one I left behind for this voyage. When a singer in a Lahinch coastal pub sang "The City of New Orleans," there was suddenly a tear in my beer.

Make no mistake, we had a blast – as I hope these pages will convey. These ruminations are simply the overworkings of an oversensitive mind at a very precarious point in its life. Ireland is a tiny, vast headspace, if that makes any sense. It seeps in like basement dampness, and its moldy green won't be easily scrubbed away from my experience. I encountered people, ideas and art that reframed portions of my perception, and already I miss the dank little island. Hope some of this seeps into you a bit, too, if you brave many of these pages. I'm sure this isn't the last you'll hear about Ireland from me.

Cheers...thc

The journey:

Recurrent themes: