12/31/2023 0 Comments Kaleidoscope song by nano![]() ![]() When an aunt died in the 1990s I made the mistake of sending flowers to put on her coffin. The aesthetics of convent chapels could be demanding. Something they remembered from childhood, that they would not have experienced otherwise, a gift to the world from the sisters who lived both in and out of it. I think now of two quite different men, both poets, how they spoke to me of the place of the convent in their aesthetic experience, the ‘warmth’ of religious services in a small-town chapel in Kerry, the exotic air of processions around convent grounds in a poor part of Cork city. In Irish society some men were resentful of them because of their renunciation of sex, others were comfortable. Although the nuns I knew lived in a female community, their work brought them into contact with men, and they knew how to cultivate connections that were useful to that work, as well of course as relying on, and finding solace in, family relationships. It was in their parlour, in the heavy Roman heat, that I first tasted Coca-Cola.Įxile and religious allegiance were intertwined, and for me the link with women’s history, and with women’s arts of living, has been a long-term source of fascination. Stefano Rotondo, also staffed by Irish nuns (though their order had been founded in England). A couple of days later we were in Rome, and when my father’s mosquito bites flared up alarmingly we found ourselves at the Calvary Hospital in Via S. That first European holiday included a couple of days in a convent near Tournai where another aunt was Mother Superior a few weeks after that, my mother fell getting off a ferry from Ischia to Naples, got concussion and was whisked off to a hospital run by Irish nuns. Life in religion appeared a natural choice to girls of the period – a period that in fact was just about to end. I was well up on the differences between enclosed and open convents, between the contemplatives and the active, though not aware until much later of other historical gaps and connections. Convents were a large part of my youth I had aunts whose sojourns at different periods dotted the map of France and Belgium, and of course I went to a convent school. So, clearly, Europe for me has meant Catholic Europe, later to some extent republican Europe, the tradition linking Machiavelli to Mazzini. We crossed from Dover to Calais where the war damage was much worse, but the food in the convent where we visited my father’s sister was delicious, and it was offered with ceremony that was French but also familiar. The only monument we paused to visit was Gloucester jail my mother wanted to see it because her father had been imprisoned there in 1918-19, as a member of the Executive Council of Sinn Féin. Here was a place where people spoke English with a strange accent, drove on the left but had signposts in only one language, where the food was bad and the pubs were shut. Although my first English experience was very brief, a couple of nights on my way to the Continent with my parents, it offered the outlines of a structure of difference. Like many Irish people of my age, I first encountered the idea of Europe as not-England. At least the assassins, Cotter, Riordan and Crilly, were paid by the government in London. I don’t know which strikes me more forcefully, the three Irish assassins who made the journey to Protestant Switzerland in 1664 to murder Sir John Lisle, a refugee because he had signed the death warrant of Charles I, or the poet Pádraigín Haicéad, probably in Leuven around 1650, enraged by a rule that friars were no longer to write verses or songs. This island plays a part also in a historical and cultural and religious pattern: of developments, divisions, exile, translation and for me these implications constitute the most poignant meaning of the juxtaposition with the Continent. Ireland is part of Europe, and also part of ‘Europe’, a political entity and an emerging legal and financial system. Ireland and Europe: these are categories that overlap and are transparent, like the tracing paper of my schooldays. Faced with these names, my own country and the international complex to which it belongs, I find myself immediately reverting to a question I’ve sometimes been asked, and which may not seem at first to have a connection: why have I written so many poems about nuns and convents? No answer seems entirely adequate, but let me try to answer in terms of my own experience, of an Irish person travelling inside the history that we share. ![]()
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