It's a magical world

I was immensely gladdened yesterday afternoon to hear that at long last the official British inquiry into the matter has found every single one of the victims of the Bloody Sunday massacre perpetuated in 1972 by the British Army in Derry, Northern Ireland, to be innocent; Prime Minister Cameron called the murders "unjustified" and "unjustifiable" on the floor of the House of Commons, and apologized.

While in Ireland in 2006 I met a man who was present at the massacre; Jan. 30, 1972, was actually Tony's 18th birthday, and many of those killed were his classmates. Among many other things about growing up in the North and living in the Republic, he told us that of his entire high school class only three guys including him aren't in prison or dead. I actually looked for him in the photos of the people gathered in Derry to hear Cameron's speech; I'm sure that wherever he was, it did him some good at least to hear the British government acknowledge its soldiers' actions. Justice may be cold comfort, but it is real, and it is a real component of reconciliation, just as real and important as apologies.

Elsewhere in the Dept. of Long Delayed Recognition, the Shinnecock Indians of Long Island, N.Y., have finally been recognized as a tribe by the federal government. It only took 32 years for Uncle Sam to acknowledge that, yes, they've been living in the Hamptons since at least the 1600s.

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Via everyone, to make a segue, ephemere's post Itys, about anger and speaking out (with bonus Aeschylus quotation!) needs to be read by everyone.

And via oliviacirce, these posts focus specifically on writing: impertinence on policing our own racism before it leaves our heads, newredshoes on how to write with consideration, and petra recs a story that does it right.

Since, via jonquil, I learned that today is Lady Gregory's birthday, and since via toft, eumelia, and several others I have encountered the following meme, here is a poem which was (as the title indicates) partially written at her estate in County Galway. (And because I was there and at Yeats' tower in January 2006, have some photos of what remains.)


Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931

Under my window-ledge the waters race,
Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven's face
Then darkening through "dark" Raftery's "cellar" drop,
Run underground, rise in a rocky place
In Coole demesne, and there to finish up
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.
What's water but the generated soul?

Under the border of that lake's a wood
Now all dry sticks under a wintry sun,
And in a copse of beeches there I stood,
For Nature's pulled her tragic buskin on
And all the rant's a mirror of my mood:
At sudden thunder of the mounting swan
I turned about and looked where branches break
The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.

Another emblem there! That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning's gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.

Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound
From somebody that toils from chair to chair;
Beloved books that famous hands have bound,
Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere;
Great rooms where travelled men and children found
Content or joy; a last inheritor
Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame
Or out of folly into folly came.

A spot whereon the founders lived and died
Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,
Or gardens rich in memory glorified
Marriages, alliances and families,
And every bride's ambition satisfied.
Where fashion or mere fantasy decreees
We shift about--all that great glory spent--
Like some poor Arab tribesman and his tent.

We were the last romantics--chose for theme
Traditional sanctity and loveliness;
Whatever's written in what poets name
The book of the people; whatever most can bless
The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;
But all is changed, that high horse riderless,
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.

--W. B. Yeats



Like many stories of the C20th in Ireland, Lady Gregory's is bittersweet. She was a great patron and friend of Yeats and many others in the so-called Irish Renaissance of the early part of the century (which many people note was actually an Anglo-Irish renaissance), but her son was killed fighting for Britain in World War I, leaving only her young grandson, and her estate house was eventually destroyed by Republican partisans.

Seeing the old-fashioned cars in the FMA movie made me remember the morning in Dublin after the group left and something that happened. It was a brilliantly sunny day and I was wandering around the St. Stephen's Green area aimlessly. Well, I was walking down Dawson Street toward the Green and I passed a church on my right across the street (on the Waterstone's side) and there was a crowd of people waiting in front of the doors. A man in a very black tuxedo was standing at the top of the steps to the church. When I turned onto St. Stephen's Green North I realized it was a wedding because I saw the bride and her father riding in one of those old-fashioned cars (not open-topped). She looked very happy and her dress seemed very pretty--I couldn't see much besides the sheer lace covering her shoulders and her bouquet in her hands. So that man was the groom. I don't think I've ever seen a blacker tuxedo. It was really just nice, in the most un-cloying sense of the word possible. They had a beautiful day to get married on and I wish them all the best. But then, I wish everyone the best.