Learning Gaelic

It is 1977, and I am 18 and climbing dingy back steps to a room above the Gaelic Club in inner-city Surry Hills. Downstairs in the bar, it's already humming and busy, the tall fat glasses of Guinness are dribbling on the towelling mats, some nights, people have already started singing. When I went past, I often saw one man, with heavy black hair flopping over his face, swaying on his stool though it was barely seven o'clock. In that place of laughter and loud voices, he never seemed to speak to anyone, and never looked up when I went past. For which I was thankful, for I was wary of the numb aggression of his kind of drunk. My way lay past him, past the jollities of the bar, up stairs to a dusty room where the beginners' class in Irish Gaelic was gathered. Every Monday, it was the same:the gentle buzz of conversation, of greetings as one by one we, the class, came in, then our teacher. At 18, I was by far the youngest, though there were quite a few twenty-and thirty-somethings. But I was also the only woman there and every time was greeted with a warm, flattering courtesy that energised my steps. There were people there who had only recently come from Ireland; others who had Irish ancestry but spoke in broad Australian; and me. The ring-in, not only because of my age and my sex, but also my mostly non-Celtic ancestry(although we all agreed that after all, France was once Gaul, and in any case, the distant Mc Kenzie ancestor must also count!)

At the head of the table sat our teacher, a tall, rather stooped man with faded-flower eyes who always called me Saidbh, the Gaelic version of my name, with a kind of gentle ceremony that made me feel as if he had bestowed on me an ancient honour. The others explained to nme, on an unusual occasion when he was late, that our teacher was a Northerner, an Ulsterman, a rare bird indeed in that very Southern place. They did not say any more; politics was always tactfully, watchfully left out of the equation there. And no-one advanced any personal stories of their own; there was no gratuitous garrulity in Gaelic society, as I soon came to realise, despite the facility with words so many of my classmates undoubtedly had. We met as the Beginners' class and that was all. All!Wasn't that enough?

My journey up those steps had begun long before, when as a magic-and-myth-enthralled child, I had ridden with King Arthur and Cuchulain and Vercingetorix along the twisting paths and tangled forests of Celtic legend and history. The Celts were already well entrenched in me by the time I reached puberty, their distant fire still raising embers within me when at the age of thirteen, I came across two things which set those embers to blazing:a book by an author whose name I cannot recall, called The Hill of the Red Fox, and the music of Alan Stivell, a Breton harpist who dreamt of a Golden Age of pan-Celtic unity. The book was a fairly exciting adventure, but what set it apart for me was the revelation of Gaelic(Scottish Gaelic, in this case). The author used several Gaelic words and phrases to pepper and spice his narrative, and I was instantly arrested by them. Sgurr na Mhodaidh Ruaidh, I would murmur dreamily and thrillingly to myself, despite the fact that this was simply the Gaelic form of the book's title. The strange juxtapositions of letters in this extraordinary language filled me with an excitement which is hard to convey. Something wild and ancient and full of deepset power, something which accorded instinctively with my own developing apprehension of the world beyond the world and at the heart of the world. It seemed to name things I had been dimly aware of from infancy, to give tongue to the silent singing at the heart of the universe. And Stivell's rolling, haunting music confirmed me in these feelings. Together, they saw me off on a marvellous journey of discovery which also had its disconcerting and ridiculous moments. For years, I filled notebooks with the cadences of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh and Breton. I read every book I could lay my hands on, I joined an organisation called The Celtic League with its headquarters in Baile Atha Cliath, otherwise known as Dublin, and wrote enthusiastic letters to its wary and careful president, another Breton called Alan, but Heusaff, not Stivell. I studied Celtic poetry and attempted my own song cycle, where I tried to fuse Celtic symbols and poetic forms with Australian imagery and Tolkien portentousness, a not altogether felicitous mix. But occasionally a poem might break free of its crippling constraints and soar, or a line might sing for me, such as 'the son of the sea shall ride with me/ with his hair in the hair of the wave'. All alone, I thrilled to the depths of my adolescent soul: for such a passion was not easily shared by my schoolmates or indeed anyone I knew. My mother was first intrigued then in turn amused and resigned as I made breakfast-table revelations of some arcane point of Celtic history, or a serendipitous connection in my reading and my thinking. My father was alarmed for a while, even annoyed, perhaps, that I was usurping his own talent for extremities, for the margins, and conducted fierce Roman-Empire-apologist shouting matches with me about the people he called 'barbarians' despite his own passionate and paradoxical championing of the underdog. My friends became used to those things, too, and would nod indulgently, especially as it did not stop me discussing--with only half a mind--really important things like the latest alternative music, or what so-and-so would wear to this or that party. I could speak knowledgeably of such things; yet they ruffled me little, and I was certainly not alone in this. My generation is a sandwich one; neither of the baby boomers nor of so-called Generation X, we were children of the 70's, when social and political activism had been superseded by private fantasy. It is in this period that began the huge post-Tolkien boom in fantasy based on ancient myths, a boom that took up the slack where traditional religion lost its appeal. Yet beneath the lace-and-velvet, Lord of the Rings-carrying, truth-is-beauty, boundaries-pushing seventies push I half-inhabited, was a core of something else that would catapult me beyond what we are now accustomed to seeing as the New Age appropriations of Celtica. 

It was when I left home and went to Sydney University that I decided not only to dream of the Celts, but to do. I scoured the curriculum for anything approaching Celtic studies, but at the time, these were not popular--the only one I could only find was Middle Welsh, with Professor Stephen Knight--the closest after that were Anglo-Saxon studies, and Norse sagas, both of which I took as being vaguely contemporary, but both of which confirmed me in my impatient prejudice about the other warrior cultures of the time. And then there was the Monday-night Gaelic class. I had never, even in my wildest fantasy, wanted to reinvent myself as Celtic; even when my Gaelic class offered me the chance to do so, when they would have welcomed me as a card-carrying Celt with open arms, I hung back, feeling inappropriateness. One man told me all Europeans were Celtic, way back, anyway, but my Basque ancestors told me something different. All Celts we might be, but there were other things too, other bloods, other ways of being, which were precious to me. Besides, I was in Australia; it was difficult not to feel a sense of the ridiculous and even insolence, trying to recreate a lost ancient culture here in a country that had itself lost ancient cultures so recently. But still, I wanted to explore further, I wanted to know this Celtic soul more, and to do that, as a people's soul is in their language, I had to enter that language whose first impact had been such a shock of delight. 

It's a strange thing, it strikes me. Why was it Gaelic and not the Brythonic Celtic languages, Welsh and Breton,probably closer to Gaulish,which thrilled me so? Our teacher said laughingly that it was probably that distant Mc Kenzie coming out in me, but there was something different to me, something more brusque and pointed and passionate about Gaelic compared to its softer, rounder, more sophisticated Welsh cousin. The great tales of the Welsh Mabinogion, the undertones of Arthur carried within them a subtlety, a duplicity, a wordly magic more familiar to me as an inheritor of Gaul, perhaps, than the brutal ironies and exalted insular visions of the Tain Bo Cuailgne or the Ulster Cycle. They all shared, though, that Celtic sense of tragedy, of time passing,of a fearful asymmetry which characterise both, for instance, The Hag of Beara and the story of Blodeuwedd, the Flower-Faced. Be that as it may, it was to the Irish Gaelic tongue I cleaved to, the Irish tongue I cultured most closely, despite that flirtation with Middle Welsh in Stephen Knight's classes. And so, every Monday, up those stairs I went, past the drinkers and the singers and the black-haired man on his stool, to the dusty room where a dozen men and I gathered to dutifully intone simple phrases which, despite their simplicity, their banality in English translation,I persisted as somehow seeing as a key. Others in the class were simply after reconfirming their heritage, or trying to recapture something they had once taken for granted; and our teacher gently encouraged us all, his stooped frame gathered around each person's needs. He had never lost what we were all seeking; occasionally, he would speak in Irish without interruption and explanation, an experience which always induced in me a thrill close to panic--for instantly I was aware not only of the language's beauty, but of how little I knew of it, how long it would take to know. Deep inside, I also knew that he was mistaken in his assessment of me as a symbol of the young renaissance of his language. I was a pillager, as well as a pilgrim; I would not have the stamina for a close, plodding, careful, loving examination and exploration of his language beyond the fantasy I carried within me. 

On one Monday evening in 1978, I climbed those steps to discover that the room was empty. There were no books, no buzz of conversation. I waited five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. No-one. Twenty minutes. Our teacher had never been as late as this. And where was the class? I could hear the noise from the bar downstairs and thought that I would have to go there and find out. I had never gone in on my own, though occasionally, after class, with the others, had sipped at and pretended to love a small dribbling glass of what our teacher had once called black velvet. 

I could see, in the corner, a couple of people from the Gaelic class. They called me over. They did not seem surprised to see me there or sorry that I had had to wait upstairs for so long. "Didn't you hear?" they said. "He's dead. Died last night. Heart attack. "

"But he didn't seem that old, "I said stupidly. They looked at each other; smiled. I felt all of eighteen. 

"He was a good man,Saidbh," one man said, at last, kindly, and we all nodded solemnly, suddenly united in the banal words that somehow contained, at that moment, a longing and a truth that made me want to cry. 

On the way out, I had to pass the black-haired drunk on his stool. But this time, as I went past, he looked up. Under that flopping black hair was a pair of the most beautiful eyes that ever graced any Naoisi, any Lancelot;eyes so large and green and black-lashed that they were almost unbelievable. I stared; for a moment I thought he was going to speak. I'm not sure what I was half-expecting: words of wisdom, of saga or fantasy, perhaps, or even the numb aggression of the habitual drunk. But he said nothing; nothing at all. He simply turned back to the bar, and the row of empty glasses dribbling their rags of black velvet onto the towelling mats. None of them were his--he had been drinking whisky after whisky. I remember our teacher telling me, how 'whisky' was a corruption of uisge beatha, water of life, and me excitedly telling him how eau de vie, also water of life, was the preferred, illegally distilled drink of French peasants. We had smiled at each other, well-pleased, for out of such small things we tried to stitch together the enigmatic fragments of something once made of whole cloth. Now he was dead; and the drunk sipped dumbly at his water of life. 

Coda

1996, and the plunging, exhilerating hills of Mid Wales. We are in Machynlleth, the place where Owain Glyndwr once raised his short-lived pan-Welsh parliament-(alas! Celtic unity would seem to be an oxymoron: a fact well known to the patient Roman and Saxon and Frank). We are going to visit the permanent, famous Celtica exhibition in Owain's town. For things have changed. What was once arcane has now become more and more mainstream. There are big-budget books on Celtic magic and wisdom, solemn-faced 'druidic' rituals conducted(the Druids themselves, despite a thorough grasp of literacy, left no written records of their ceremonies, considering such encoding to be sacrilegous--so I suppose 'channelling' or 'reincranation', then, must be the obvious explanation for the remarkable rediscovery of these things). There are innumerable records of Celtic-inspired, often very beautiful music--Loreena Mc Kennitt, Enya, Clannad, are just three of the most popular, found in every mainstreet record store. Stivell is not on his own anymore, even in Brittany, in Breizh itself where he's been overtaken by such bands as Tri Yann and Ti Jaz and his own ex-guitarist, Dan ar Bras, with his massive pan-Celtic band. There are Celtic festivals all over the place, including Australia, there is a definite cachet in proclaiming Celtic ancestry rather than the seemingly more mundane 'Anglo' one(I remember an Aboriginal writer of my acquaintance telling me that he could feel quite close, too, to that branch of his ancestry which hailed from Ireland, as he could understand the Celtic spirit but never the English). In our fin-de-siecle days, we are experiencing not a second Celtic twilight, as in the last fin-de-siecle when there were still Irish and Scottish and Welsh and Breton peasants who were not even aware consciously that they were practising this thing called Celtic culture; but rather the dawning of a neo-Celtic identity. 

And so to the exhibition, which aims at presenting not a rosy, but a warts-and-all picture of this culture we now call Celtic and which appears to be vestigially preserved in Wales, Ireland, Brittany, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and--even more vestigially--in Cornwall and Galicia, in Northern Spain. The exhibition, which is beautifully put together and appeals very strongly to the modern sense of fantasy, works best if you don't know much about Celtic culture--at times the generalisations, the simplistic enthusiasm for a people whose warts appear here as simply another aspect of their obvious ancestral power made me wince. I saw that power which had called to me long ago here forced into postmodern visual 'explorations' that tried to hold the Otherworld and keep it fast. But as everyone knows, the Otherworld escapes all those attempts, and so the result was patchy at times, even a trifle desperate. 

Of course, this being Wales, it is the Brythonic that is most highlighted here, but somehow, the feeling I'd had before, of the difference between the Brythonic and the Gaelic, seemed to have gone. The dominant feeling in Celtica, the exhibition, is of that brusque, passionate, brutal, mysterious power that was embodied for me in Gaelic itself. Was that because I'd misread, twenty years ago? But I had little time to ponder this; for something else happened at the exhibition which swung my feelings around again and made me remember that dusty room at the top of those stairs with the clarity of exhileration and pain. For we went around the exhibition with a bilingual guide--bilingual in Welsh and English--and everyone else except for our family group understood and preferred to speak the Welsh. There was an elderly couple, a middle aged one, a couple of teenagers and two young children--and all, without exception, spoke Welsh. Fluently. Naturally. Normally, not as a code at all. We could hear the guide saying something, and hear the laughs, and see the sidelong glances, not always translated. The Welsh--the very English word means foreigner--call themselves Cymry, the people, in time-honoured universal self-definition. Always, it seems, there has been that obvious contrast--the invader's arrogance, the indigene's self-confidence, despite the often shifting grounds for both: the fact that the invader eventually became indigene, the fact that the indigene was once invader too, the fact, too, that in the vast majority of cases both are so mixed, so woven together, as to be inextricable. For centuries, the English and Welsh have known those things, have shifted from foot to foot in a skilful dance that could be bloody, or could be playful,but most often was treacherous enough. Somehow, with the Irish, that dance, whilst elements of it were there, never became learnt. It was wonderful, here in Glyndwr's town, to hear the language of the hills and the rivers, the language of Pywll, prince of Dyfed, the language of Merlin, spoken in such a natural way, openly, by people in jeans and sneakers. It was extraordinary, to hear and see how articulate the children of Taliesin still were; more articulate by far in their identity than the descendants of the Saxon and Norman invaders who were now indigenes themselves. That is perhaps a post-postmodern triumph: the return of the tribe, and here, a tribe that never went away, despite all the odds. A tribe that never needed the New Age, but that has incorporated it without flinching overmuch. But then. . . over in Ireland, and in Britain, too, the price is still being paid in these post-postmodern times for the archaic appeal of the tribe. For the realisation that that ancient eloquent power, the power of mystery itself which is perhaps the greatest of all Celtic gifts, is not only manifest in the elliptical swirls of their art, not only expressed through their magnificent legend and myth and poetry and story:not only resonant in the language itself. It is there in the blank stare of a Celtic war mask. There in the exultant cry of Cuchulain as he hacks off a head. There in the tiny triangles of land that men are willing to die--and kill--for. Perhaps that's what I had felt, deep down, so many years ago. The recruits to the IRA were often as young or a little older than I had been, twenty years ago. They begin with a search for meaning in a mean and petty age. And perhaps that's what our teacher had tried to tell me, without saying anything. I had come looking not only for the otherworld, for that world at the heart of and beyond the world, the world I still apprehended intensely now. I had also come looking for that terrible beauty that even Yeats was swayed by, for a time. Perhaps my teacher had not known it himself, consciously. Perhaps he had simply been following the course handbook he had had sent out from Baile Atha Cliath. When he had smiled in pleasure at the conjunction of eau de vie and uisge beatha, perhaps he had not meant at all what I thought he had meant, all those years ago. He had smiled because it was nice, nothing more, to share a small point of language. I had thought of him as tragic, his death as simultaneously expressive of the littleness of our time and the greatness of the cultural core at the centre of his being. Young people can be heartless in their gaucheness. I never thought of finding out about his family, to send a letter of sympathy or comfort, although I regretted that I had not made it more clear to him how much I appreciated his time and dedication. I held his memory within me, his faded-flower eyes fading even more in my head as the sound of his voice, intoning that heraldic language, stayed with me. But now, that's what I think of most clearly. If I had asked him, why do you teach Gaelic, what would he have said? Maybe just that he was a teacher, that he enjoyed it. Or even less, that the Gaelic Club had asked him to, and he needed a bit of money, and it was easy because he was already a native speaker. I remembered, too, that a few years ago, I had looked up that emblematic phrase, Sgurr na Mhodaidh Ruaidh, in a Scottish Gaelic phrasebook I had acquired. None of those words were even in there. 'Hill' was 'cnoc'; 'fox' was 'sionnach' and 'red' was 'dearg'. Half-wryly amused, half-saddened,I had flipped through the book and was arrested by the word for friend: 'caraid', like 'cara', like 'cher'. Later still, though, I realised that my nelancholy amusement was in itself misguided: for the words quoted in The Hill of the Red Fox were in an archaic Gaelic, not made up or mistaken at all. . 

There was a priest I met in Ireland a year or so after our teacher's death, who after I had told him how I'd been to see The Book of Kells in Trinity College, said, quietly but fiercely, "If we lose the language, we may as well throw the Book of Kells into the sea, for all the good it's going to do!" I had written that down in my notebook. Now, as we stood outside the Celtica exhibition, hearing the Welsh fade into the distance as people got into their cars and drove away, I thought of it again. My English husband, whose childhood holidays had all been spent in Wales not far from Machynlleth itself, said softly, "It gives you a shock, doesn't it, to find the different among the familiar, to know that it was always like that, that it was only you who saw it as familiar?" And I thought, Yes. How were all these things connected? Did any of them provide a key at all? What was the question, in the first place? And then our nine-year old son, who had been silent himself for a long time, broke into my thoughts. "Mum," he said, with a quiet, determined passion, "I love the Celts! And I hate the Romans!" And I knew another set of embers had blazed into life, even as I started explaining that things weren't quite as simple as all that, that people were never that simple, that there were always at least two sides to everything. Yet even as I explained, I could also feel the silent singing, all around me, inside me, swelling and rising, and I could taste the incredulous delight of those first Gaelic words. But this time I knew they were much more than simple talismans; they lived within the language I had come to know and love with both long familiarity and new-minted discovery, within English itself, the tongue I loved with, wept with, sang with, yet was still not blood-linked with. 

© Copyright Sophie Masson 1997