Ireland 2009 blog UPDATE #9!

Good Craic. Welcome to Eire. "Madra". After you click on this link, you may click on HOME at the bottom of that post to return to the main page fo that blog and see the previous posts. OR, go to the top of the right panel on this page and click on the link below the pub picture.

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Glendalough, Ireland. And..."The Dead".

Glendoalough, Ireland, May 2006. Founded in the 6th century by the hermit

priest, St Kevin, and destroyed in 1398 by English troops.

Met with my playwright friend Jerry Small today to discuss a play of his that I'm reading in. We got to talking and he read me these last two paragraphs from James Joyce's "The Dead", the final story in Joyce's collection of short stories called, Dubliners, from 1914. Got to thinking about the musical version of "The Dead" I saw in Hollywood with my friend Donovan - and of my trip in 2006 to Ireland with my friend, Justyna, for the reading of my play, "Stan's Addiction".

"Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

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Ireland.

'Tis Saint Patrick's Day, so I thought it fitting for a stroll down memory lane when I was in Ireland, April 2006. Not a day goes by when I don't think of this country - or the trip. I want to go back now, yesterday - whenever. I think I left a piece of me over there. Anyway, that's what it feels like somedays.

God, the land's beautiful. Takes my breath away. Redross - in Co. Wicklow. A view from our porch.

My friend Justyna (we've known each other since we were 14) accompanied me as one of my plays, Stan's Addiction, was being read at a festival in Belfast. You know how when you go on trips and certain songs remind you of the trip 'cause you heard them...on the trip? Take a listen to our song - though we picked it out before we got to Ireland. Is that cheating?

The Irish Sea at Brittas Bay.

It's not difficult to find one of those famous Irish doors to lean against.

Justyna and I in Avoca.

Lynhams of Laragh - in the Village of Laragh, near Glendalough. Founded in 1777, it was the coziest of all the pubs we'd been in.

Me and my Guinness in Waterford, Co. Waterford. Happy St. Patrick's Day and "Caed Mile Failte", or "A thousand welcomes".

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