Bloody Brilliant

Another month winds down, neither furious lion nor lovable lamb, just one long, intermittent drizzle under an ever-brightening sky, the scent of lilacs on the office walk, the greasy slide of intrepid earthworms underfoot. Spring is a process. We have a goodly ways to go, but at least there is no turning back now. The sensible laws of physics are subverted: as the daylight reaches further into the evening, each day seems shorter than the previous, simply because the things that delight always seem to end sooner than the things that oppress. By my calculations, the month of March will have lasted a little longer than three-and-a-half days, depending on how you spent St. Pat’s Day, and/or how your NCAA tournament bracket fared through the usual upsets and heroics. I am reminded by one of my faithful readers, who number well into the teen, that I’ve written little here this month. I have my excuses to be sure, but none of them withstand even my own charitable scrutiny. Chagrined, I blog. Think of me as an earthworm, and tread carefully. 

This morning’s theme is credulity. It’s on my mind, and likely yours, plunged as we’ve been so far this past cussed decade and then some into a state of perpetual political campaigning, and thus a condition of constant, too often jaw-dropping, disbelief. From Weapons of Mass Distraction to bloated grand jury outfielders; from screeching she-devil Tweets to the sorry, sordid specter of Wall Street; from the once-stunning horrors of Gitmo to the ho-hum slaughters of the Stryker Brigade, we are plunged into what seems to be a Century of Deceit—perhaps an inevitable stage in a culture with a long, uneasy relationship with the truth. Whereas some of we gray hairs can recall a time when bald-faced fabrications from military and political leaders raised an indignant outcry, I’ve resigned myself to the reality that, at least in the realm of public officials, high-paid entertainers and all forms of media, from the networks to the networked, we nowadays expect, indeed even demand, to be lied to. Imagine for a moment that you have turned on some sort of local or (especially) national news—the radio, the TV, your favorite website. Imagine believing, with a willing absence of serious reservations, what you read, see or hear there. It is as easy to imagine a stroll across the surface of Neptune. And as likely to happen to you, or to me, our lifetimes. 

This week may mark the turn of a calendar page, but let’s face up to it: every day is April Fool’s Day, anymore. The notion of the day itself seems anachronistic, as though we still need to set aside a date for prank playing and truth-twisting. It’s like celebrating Take a Bath Day, or Drive to Work Day: it might have made cultural sense at one time, but Foolery of all sorts has become our daily meat and drink, and the joke is always on us. 

In 1980 and ’81 I had occasion, as elsewhere mentioned in these entries, to spend some quiet months near and frequently in a small fishing village on the west coast of Ireland. The place was a short walk from the Atlantic shore, which on the West coast of Clare is generally a rough and rocky place, suited much more to mussel beds than to sun bathers. Squalls occur hourly, the waves tend to the house-tall and growly persuasion, and the salt spray on even a relatively calm day can strip a three-day beard down to baby soft and tender if the wind is blowing stiff enough. Irish weather being as predictable as, well, Irish weather, the year of my residence enjoyed a stretch of strange, summer-like conditions toward the end of March and then some. Temperatures soared into the 60s, reportedly topping seventy on the few brief strands of actual sand, just south of the Cliffs of Moher, famous in tourist literature as a spot for pictures and picnics, and among Irish musicians for a double jig of the same name. 

Have you ever been in a famously dark and gray place when the sun makes a rare but strong appearance? It’s not unlike a lion’s cage when the keeper tosses in a few live rabbits. Discipline takes a backseat. Primal urges nudge polite conventions aside. In the lion’s cage, it’s a brief, furry blood bath followed by burps and a few tawny naps. In the west of Ireland the reaction is a sight uglier: Schools let out at noontime. Shops and offices close. Taverns open early and risk fines by staying open late. Thin, short and revealing clothes make their way out of deep mothballs, in most cases to no advantage whatever on the part of their wearers. Pork-fed flesh blooms in the little towns like pale, pink fungus, here waddling into a grocer’s, there idly pillowed on a bus stop bench. Disturbingly tiny men and woman of uncertain age, though surely older even than the dank, black stones, appear at the tumbledown doorways of thatched stone hovels one had heretofore taken as abandoned livestock sheds. They wear filthy gray tatters and tall navvy boots, men and women both. All that tells them apart are the dark, frayed shawls of the one versus the flat caps and high-cheekbone whiskers of the other, like weird, bottom sets of eyebrows, wisps of simian flair on faces as knotty as the bark of the single, wind-battered tree in the sorry yard, its leaves spare and shivery, dropping like waning years onto the barren dirt. The poor souls stare at the bright, foreign orb in the unfamiliar blue, cross themselves and shuffle back indoors, slamming thick wooden doors behind them. Sometimes God himself plays tricks.

The early 1980s. I try to rate, or even to recall them, in terms of credulity. It’s hard to remember much about the geopolitical situation, being as I was a young man intent on little besides fiddle music, Guinness and Irish lasses, none of whom (the lasses I mean) had the remotest interest in me. So I was intent on music and Guinness, then, but certainly not foreign affairs—at least not until poor Jimmy Carter tried to send a Special Forces team into Iran to rescue the hostages taken after the end of the Shah. I recall sitting at a bar somewhere in Clare in January 1981 and glancing at a grizzled farmer three stools away reading the Irish Times half-page photo with caption: “Carter Defeated in Iran,” showing a tearful President, his head half-buried in his hand, fresh with the news of the rescue debacle. (Can you believe that we once had a president who was strong enough to weep publicly? After Jimmy we had chuckling Ronnie, then twitchy George the First, and don’t forget squeaky Bill; then oh if only we could forget smirking Boy George, and now we seem to have blinking Barack. It’s difficult to imagine any of them reacting to anything out of unbridled emotion, at least not without checking first with their PR staffs.) The developments in the mid-East got my attention principally because I was still draftable, having missed the Vietnam call-up by a matter of months but still vulnerable, contemplating a shift in my ex-pat status to that of illegal alien. News, however, was hard to come by on the west coast of Ireland. This was long before the Internet—shoot, Bill Gates was still programming DOS in a basement someplace—and international newspapers weren’t available short of a half-day hitchhike to Galway or Cork. The Times would have to suffice, and to say of this venerable publication that it tended (and for all I know tends still) to rate the selling power of a bold-faced headline over the prosaic necessity of fact-checked reporting is like saying that Rush Limbaugh sort of likes to hear his own voice. (The eruption of Mt. St. Helen’s, some four months later, was announced by a headline proclaiming that the Northwest U.S. had been destroyed, with an accompanying graphic showing the impact from BC to Northern California to practically the Mississippi. I milked the opportunity for sympathy pints for a couple of hours before I felt compelled to suggest that some exaggeration might be at play, thereby ruining a perfect Irish evening of alcoholic commiseration and Total Tragedy Immersion. Youth can be so cruel.) 


It’s perversely gratifying to recognize, thirty years down the road from Clare, that I have my fingers pressed as firmly now as I did them to the pulse of popular culture and opinion. In Loughrea, County Galway, searching for a reclusive fiddle legend (whose wife greeted me, when I finally found his cottage, as though I was a leprous tax collector with the plague), I learned in a pub for the first time that Ronald Reagan was running for the Presidency. The Galway drinkers were understandably alarmed, but I was quick to assure them that in America we often have non-serious candidates announce a run for public office solely on the basis of their popularity and name recognition, and the mere fact that they are wealthy enough to toss their hat into the ring, but that these forays—including Reagan’s—were not serious candidacies, but merely the whims of the bored and wealthy. Ronald, I assured them, was a “B” movie actor who’d been a celebrity governor, but not even the crackpot far right would suggest that he be seriously considered for national public office. As we struggle still, three decades later, to dig ourselves out of the economic and cultural sink hole into which middle-finger Reaganomics cast us with its signature swagger, I might spend another rainy morning noting the success of my myriad other prophecies on the political front. But I doubt I could stomach the exercise. All I can say in my Galway defense is hey, I was young. Optimistic. Memories of Watergate were fresh. I still thought things could change.

I suppose it was my sunny disposition that took me to the beach near the Cliffs one of those rare warm spring mornings. I had a book with me, as I always did back then and generally do now. I suspect it was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which I’d checked out of the Lisdoonvarna Library shortly after Christmas but not yet returned, determined as I was to read it, as Mann himself suggested (presumably in jest), at least a couple of times back-to-back in order to glean its essence completely, and also because the Lisdoonvarna Library was approximately the size of the health food section of your average American Mini-Mart. There just weren’t an awful lot of choices. I can’t remember if I made it all the way through the book twice, but at the least the one reading stuck with me more than a lot of other things I spent time on that year—countless reels and jigs, for instance, or even my own sporadic Irish journals, which I lit on fire, one page at a time, in my small coal stove the night before I returned to America, determined to let my Clare memories age with me, and not be fixed artificially in the thin, mottled amber of a young man’s myopic perspective. (Yes of course I have regretted this, a thousand times at least.) I remember dear Hans Castorp, and his seven years at theBerghof , engaged almost accidentally in his peculiar, insular coming-of-age at a tuberculosis sanatorium, the patients of which conveniently represented the various passions, peeves and persuasions of pre-WWI Europe. I recall being slowed down, though not completely stymied, by its long passages in French, which I had not studied since high school, but which oddly came back to me in bursts just sufficient to comprehend the gist of endless conversations between Hans and the long-suffering Madame Chauchat. And I have a pretty clear memory of reflecting on how my year among the bogs might serve as the basis of a sort of down-market, late 20th century kunstlerroman, an artist’s coming-of-age novel, set on my own odd Magic Mountain high above the gray-green Atlantic, isolated as I was from familiar society and cast not among a privileged parlor room of ailing savants but in the company of fishermen, barkeeps, turf-diggers, dairy farmers, greyhound racers and itinerant fiddler players. (Thankfully this reflection never matured into an actual writing project.) I enjoyed such musings sprawled on the coarse sands of a Doolin beach, my back propped against a rock, book in hand, a couple of apples and a block of yellow cheese in my knapsack alongside a half-loaf of brown soda bread, which I had learned as a survival skill to make, along with a decent pot of tea, within days of my arrival in the country months before. I had food, I had Hans, I had the sun and salt spray. There were two pubs within a mile’s walk where I was no stranger. I was twenty-four, with a lifetime ahead of me. I was a happy guy.

Except that I was troubled. I had a radio back in my “caravan,” an elegant word for my singularly inelegant dwelling, a single-wide trailer parked in a driveway next to my landlady’s house about five miles from the beach. I’d brought the radio from the States, unsure whether I would find any use for it, and was pleased to find that I got at least the national station, Radio Eirann, loud and clear, along with fleeting, polyglot snatches from near and far, dependent on the time of day, the direction of the prevailing winds and ye gods knows what else. There was at the time a great deal of traditional Irish music available on the station, much of whose broadcasting was in Irish, a language that was all but dead at the time, living then (and now, I expect) mostly among revivalists and romantic die-hards in mostly remote rural areas deemed by the Irish government to constitute the “Gaeltacht.” I had come to the country determined to learn its native tongue, a quest I abandoned after perhaps three days of intensive study, when I recognized the utter pointlessness of the endeavor—even more pointless, it seemed to me then and does still, than stuffing my young head full of reels and jigs, which in my rough, palsied renditions over the years have offered at least fat targets of derision, if not actual entertainment, among fellow aficionados. I was pleased to learn that many of Radio Eirann’s broadcasts were in English—the ones, I expect, that they actually expected people might listen to. Among them were the usual hodge-podge of talk, call-in and panel shows, not appreciably different in substance or staging than those I might have heard at the time back in Ohio, my last U.S. residence before moving abroad. Experts debated experts, smarmy hosts asked loaded questions, regular folk called to commend, condemn and contradict whoever was sitting in the hot seat du jour. Devoid as this sparring was of any taint of the predictable Ds v. Rs dynamics I’d left behind me in Buckeye land, it was novel enough to me to serve as acceptable background entertainment while I munched my standard breakfast of rashers and boiled eggs.

This morning, though, my little radio had commanded my full attention. A panel of perhaps a half-dozen people was being interviewed by an excitable host regarding a recent beach find, reported at no great distance from where I was planning to spend my lazy day, of a dead, adult mermaid. Yeah, you read it write: a mythical girl with a tail. I sat at my little table on one of those trailer-type booth seats, letting my tea steep, nibbling a bread crust, watching the quiet street and the patchy fields beyond, boxed by fences built of heavy stones, slick with the winter’s rotted moss. The sky, unusually, was a deep, cobalt infinity, rather than the usual low ceiling of tomorrow’s filthy puddles. An old man in tweed pedaled by on a bicycle that probably had rusted long before Winston Churchill smoked his first stogie. He was followed uncertainly by a three-legged mutt who lived in the town, whose name, if he had one, I never heard anyone say. I looked at my radio. They were still talking about the discovery. There weren’t a lot of the sort of details one would expect: where it (she?) was found and by whom, how the locals were reacting, what the international scientific community had to say. I found myself assuming that these subjects must have been covered earlier, before I’d flipped the station on. The speakers were both sensationalistic and oddly matter-of-fact. They mentioned famous mermaid sightings in literature both classical and modern. They spoke of the number of species yet undiscovered in the ocean’s black depths. They mused that this might be a specimen washed by errant tides from some distant, warmer clime, then contradicted this hypothesis by remarking on how fresh and intact was the creature’s skin, according to first-hand observation, apparently by one of the panelists themselves. This remark led, as both my tea and I grew cold, to a light-hearted, speculative discussion about the potential health and beauty products that might be derived from the scaly, oily flesh of a mammalian/piscatorial creature. One of the speakers, has it happened, was a dermatologist. The others were zoologists, biologists and a British anthropologist with the slightest of stutters, who shared a few funny anecdotes about mermaid encounters in the folktales of coastal peoples from the Arctic to Cape Horn. Someone mentioned the Yeti. The word “remarkable” was overused. An intermission was announced. The next broadcaster, a newsman, spoke Irish. I downed a cup of cold tea, put the rest of my breakfast in my bag and set off for the beach.

And now I sat, nothing between me and the coast of Newfoundland except an ocean filled with—well, what? I knew there were weird damned things down there. A merchant sailor friend had described the sighting of a dead whale shark in the Pacific, a thing the size of a couple of barges end-to-end that could be smelled across five nautical miles. I’d read about the colorless, sightless creatures of the deepest volcanic rifts, and of their bug-eyed, phosphorescent cousins, looking like something drawn by a Disney animator on an opium bender. I knew that there were stingrays and giant squid and octopuses with arms twice the length of a living room. I knew that there were critters with sharp teeth, with poisonous barbs, with ink-shooting jets that blackened the water and stung the eyes of predators. I knew that legends abounded of sea dragons and serpents, even in lakes far from Loch Ness. I hurt my head in the sun, straining to remember every snippet of detail I’d gathered from the radio, particularly before the reality of their topic had sunk in fully. They had not mentioned, after all, exactly what the thing looked like. Did it have a humanoid, if not an actual human, torso? Luxuriant hair as well as scales? Smooth, naked flesh above the waist? Had any more been sighted nearby?

That’s when I did it. I’m haunted still by my actions. I was quite alone, you understand, on this stretch of strand. A couple of day-fishing boats were barely visible on the horizon. To my right I could just make out the distant Aran Islands, a bit blurred in a mid-day haze rising off the still waters. No one was there to see me as I furtively brought a flat hand to my brow, shielding my eyes as I slowly, almost reluctantly, scanned the horizon. I was just looking, I told myself, at the ocean; not for anything. Just, you know, looking. TheMountain lay splayed on the sand by my pack. My apple and cheese were forgotten. There was no sense trying to fool myself. Young though that former self may seem to me now, I was, plainly and simply at the time a grown man looking for mermaids. No I’m not no I’m not no I’m not I’m just looking at the water. No, I was looking for mermaids. Or perhaps a mermaid. I didn’t know what the hell the radio mermaid looked like, so I couldn’t have described to anyone exactly what I was seeking. Reason and logic tied themselves into a tight knot, deep in my skull, kind of toward the back, and smugly went on strike as I tortured what few snippets I’d gleaned from the broadcast to come up with an explanation I could tolerate without ripping off my clothes and running naked and screaming into the waves, never to return. 

Perhaps some new, strange, mermaid-looking creature indeed had washed ashore. Perhaps the ravages of wind and waves had transformed something common—or even mutant—into such a startling facsimile of a mythical fin-gal that it had been dubbed accordingly and the term already had stuck; a little etymological hand-stand that had occurred while I was up on the Mountain with Hans, seeing his generation symbolically through the fictional eyes of dead strangers speaking foreign tongues, instead of down in the town where I might have caught some gossip, something on the street or in a smoky public house.. Perhaps a couple of millennia of folklore had its basis on something a man could find stuck in the wet rocks on an Irish coastline. Perhaps its scales really could be used for—finally, I stopped myself. The sun can punish a man darn quick if he’s not used to its rays. I had been reading books since I was four years old. I’d excelled at schools and filled a shoebox with good report cards and achievement badges. I’d graduated from a hoity-toity college and won a prestigious fellowship. And I was sitting on the ground looking out at a calm gray ocean in hopes of seeing a mermaid. I couldn’t conjure an appropriate reaction in the local vernacular, but an old Ohio expression came all too readily to mind: Fuckin’ A. Literally this means nothing other than an expression of recognition, generally of the completely befuddled or at least severely uncomprehending variety, so it seemed perfect for the moment. Unbidden, I then imagined that an Irish neighbor might say, of a man on the beach keeping out a weather eye for mermaids, that he was balmy. A Clare man of a certain class—the one I spent most of my time in—would add a modifier: Fuckin’ balmy. An inner voice then addressed me clearly: Fuckin’ A, you’re fuckin’ balmy. All right, then. Balmy I must be. I gathered my things and checked my pocket watch. The village pubs were open. I visited them each, at length, in turn.

Of course I didn’t forget the incident. Nor did I mention it aloud. That night I spun the radio dial back and forth by the light of a ten-pence candle, seeking some other word, some reference or story or allusion to the discovery the panel had addressed. Nothing. I slept uneasily, troubled in my dreams that I did not know how to say “mermaid” to Madame Chauchat in French. (C’est la sirene. Silly moi.) The next morning I was up early with the kettle on the boil and the radio leaching the life from a fresh set of batteries. All the programming was in Irish, men’s and women’s voices, even an interview with a young, lilting lass. She could have been a mermaid herself, for all I could tell. I kicked myself for abandoning my studies of the language. I was confused and alone.

Some weeks passed. The sun returned to the Mediterranean, or wherever it lives. (We’ve never been close.) Our Irish rains returned. My confusion abated some, or more likely was crowded out by some competing confusion; some disturbing letter from home, or more bad news about Iran, or the “B” part of some devilish jig I’d heard from Tommy Peoples on his last trip through town. On Easter Sunday night, a couple of weeks later, I went to my local pub, less for the music that night than simply for a pint and some company, whatever language it was speaking. With the rigors of Holy Week behind them the crowd was loud and feisty. The dull, foundational roar of normal pub chatter was interrupted here by the bark of mean laughter, there by a heart-felt oath. There were a couple of scuffles, in which young lads were separated by older mates. I sat along the wall at a long table, chatting idly to Noel, a local fellow I knew, the man who drove the daily bus to Shannon airport and back. He was a fiend for crossword puzzles, and likely was working one that evening, digging an elbow into me companionably from time to time, muttering a clue through his thick red beard; something academic he thought I might know, having pegged me early on as one of the town’s few constant readers besides himself, Yank though I was. Between nudges I found myself eavesdropping on two young women on the other side of the table, a few places away. They were exactly the sort of young Irish lasses who moved my imagination but seldom my lips, as I was desperately shy and painfully aware that my status as an American was, even back then, an invisible but daunting hurdle to overcome before most folks would consent to take me or my other countrymen seriously in a social situation. I’d lived in my caravan long enough to have cleared the barrier with most of the town people, but these were city girls—Ennis, or even Galway—and to them, without a bunch of explanation, I was just another early spring tourist who butchered their language like the guys they watched on M*A*S*H. But they were pleasing to look at, and their accents were lovely, and so I snuck both looks and listens while Noel muttered along. I heard something like this:

You heard the show on Radio Eirann? The one the first of April?

I did surely. I laughed ‘til I nearly had to go.

I heard they got calls. People who took it for real.

No! They can’t! Oh Jesus!

Hundreds of them. From all over.

Not just jokers themselves then? People actually thought?

I heard it last week. They played some of the calls. That was rather mean I thought.

I think its brilliant. Can you imagine it? People phoning in?

The prettier of the two, a dark-haired Daughter of Erin with a constellation of freckles across her nose simply pleading to be counted by a fiddler’s finger tip, caught me looking their direction. In a flash I realized that she was no stranger, but the girl who worked the chip stand in the town square I’d been to several times in the fall before it had closed up, even on weekends, for the spring. I’d heard it would reopen after Easter. She must have returned from wherever she wintered to work there. She smiled at me in half-recognition, which still was a far site better from the look I’d expected.

You heard it, then she said.

I shrugged, feigning incomprehension.

The April Fool show? On the national radio yet? About the mermaids?

The way she said “mermaid” in her west Clare brogue made me wish instantly that she was one, and that I was a fisherman, and that I had a little thatched cottage in a cove where she and I… But I simply shook my head, both to clear it and to boldface lie to her . I had no other plausible option.

No, I wish I had. I just heard about it.

Bloody brilliant, she said.

I gave up a long time ago making excuses for myself. As magical as life was that year on the Emerald Isle, I guess I was always ready for more. Or maybe I was just trying to prolong some childhood faith in the improbable-but-not-absolutely-theoretically-uncategorically-impossible-in-all-of-its-manifestations; the same desperate clinging that had me defending my Santa Claus belief well beyond the age where such devotion makes one an obvious target for slings and arrows, and not just metaphorically. Did I believe? I still can’t say for sure. Maybe for a minute. Did I want to? Hell, yes. Still do.

It’s a genetic trait, I guess. When my second son Peter was quite young, almost three I’ll guess, still in a car seat behind me, we drove once to drop his older brother Colin off at school. As we cruised home on North Seattle’s residential streets, a man jogged by pushing a baby-stroller made for triplets, or at least for three small babies. The stroller was empty, as Dad obviously had just delivered his kids to daycare and was getting his daily run in on the trip. Peter gazed in wonder as we passed.

What’s that? he asked.

It looks like a stroller for triplets.

What are triplets?

Well, you know what twins are, right?

Yeah.

Well, triplets are like twins, only…

He interrupted me, his eyes wide with wonder.

They’re invisible? he asked.

I thought for a moment.

Exactly, I said. 

And we were together for an instant, on that sunny Clare beach, for a moment I’ll cherish forever.

Last Monday I went to the office supply store. I needed a component for our home wireless system. The details not only are not important, but recalling them just might make me weep like Jimmy Carter. [It’s been that sort of week, with respect to Man (me) versus Machine (all things digital)] Suffice it to say that I was and am relatively clueless regarding the technology I was attempting to upgrade, so I swallowed my foolish male old-guy pride and approached one of the gangly, pierced, tire-eyed, socially maladjusted teenagers who staff such places. I explained my dilemma. He nodded with a sagacity that belied his pimply years. He explained that, when I first had “gone wireless” (a phrase he pronounced with the slightest hiccup, the way you or I might say to another adult, “when you finally learned to control your bladder”)—anyway, apparently I had purchased, you know, THIS generation of the appropriate gizmo, though even THAT generation had been available, albeit at quite a price bump, at the time. But now, due to bandwidth and package size (pardon me, fart face?) and countless other restrictions he clearly despaired of explaining to me, it was clear that THE OTHER generation, the newest one of course, was the only system that would meet my needs. It came in five models, from Fairly Cheap to Fuck That Noise. I landed squarely in the middle, and headed for the parking lot with my purchase in a flimsy plastic bag.

In the middle of the lot I stopped. What mealy-mouthed bullshit had he just fed to me? And why had I swallowed it like caviar, and accepted even more? (By which I refer to the optional “buyer’s protection plan,” codified in a six-page brochure to which banana-breath stapled my receipt, and which, thirty-six scant hours later, I could not locate if I knew it contained the Secret to Eternal Life.) 

For a second—a mere long, weary second—I was back on the beach again. But there were no mermaids this time. No three-year old son. No strollers. No triplets. There was not even Hans Castorp to remind me that as gullible as I may be—no, as credulous—a much nicer word—I was not, at least for the moment, tubercular. There was just me and the long, strangely sticky shadow of the salesman. I thought then, more briefly still, of the seemingly awe-struck radio host on that April Fool’s talk show so long ago. And I wondered what if —just what if—he’d believed in mermaids, too?

All together now (regular readers have practice):

Whan that Aprille with its shoures soote…

Happy Real Spring. You can believe in it. Trust me.