Thursday, September 02, 2004
All things Aerish
Quite casually, I have been exposed to many things Irish these past few weeks: From Irish literature to Irish cinema�all of them significantly, in English.
If one wanted, he or she could find a lot of similarities between the Irish and Indian colonial situation. Just look at me, I write very comfortably in a tongue bequeathed to me by my colonised ancestors. And I don�t consider English to be a foreign language at all. It is part of the way I think, the way I learn and study, and the way I do things. It definitely comprises a significant part of my daily communication. I think, much like the Irish, for me, my linguistic preference is quite beyond political debate. A debate made irrelevantly remote by generations of usage? Of course, I differ notably in one way: I still speak Tamil, read and write as well. But of course, this linguistic colonial inheritance is but one of the many things that helps me relate to Irish works.
I have made it a habit to start almost every post now-a-days with such a preamble. Now getting to the point, James Joyce�s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the latest of my Irish influences. After the disaster that was the reading of Finnegan�s Wake, I have now taken the saner route to the complete enjoyment of Joyce. Apart from a glorious reminder of my own �imagined past�, the book gave me pointers for the future as well.
On the eve of my own departure to study art in England, I can take something out of Stephen Dedalus� philosophy towards the end of the book. It seems that for me too, �the shortest way to Tara (is) via Holyhead�.
This expression is explained so by Seamus Deane:
Tara � Holyhead: that is, the shortest way to Tara, the ancient site of the High Kings of Ireland, was via Holyhead, the port in Wales for the steam packets from Dublin. This would seem to mean either that exile is the quickest way to gain recognition (as a king) in your own country; or that leaving Ireland is the only way to get to know it truly; or that leaving Ireland is the only way left to restore to it some of the glory formerly associated with Tara.
In other news entirely non-Irish, I now have a G-mail ID and the Firefox browser.
Comments to All things Aerish
hehe....
so where in England? - maybe we can meet (u see a pattern in our meets - rougly once every 7 years;) )
posted by 
Nilu
Better than Haley's comet! I'm going to Bristol dude.
posted by Anand
Wow.
So u r going to Ireland?
posted by 
that was Sathish BTW
posted by
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