Cultural amnesia allows us to survive sodden summers
Tuesday September 02 2008
That was it. That was the summer we see behind us, that dismal plain of rain and floods, bookended by a few sunny days to start with, the last day of August, to finish.
The springtime hopes for hot days and warm nights, and barbecues in the evening, are at one with Uganda's space programme. The summerless summer, once again, is gone, and now we must prepare for the dire whimsies of an Irish autumn, and the precipitate depths of that long dark tunnel that is our winter.
How do we fool ourselves that we have any reason to expect a fine summer? On the westernmost island of the world's greatest landmass, we are almost guaranteed not to have good weather. The globe moves on its axis, from right to left, from east to west: we are hurled into the weather systems that are created by the vast Atlantic. This is a realm of kelp and cod, spindrift and spume. It is as unreasonable to suppose that heatwaves could be conjured from the 3,000 miles of moving seawater as it is to expect the Sahara to conjure silver shoals of shining mackerel from its dunes of dust and waterless wadis, or the Congo rainforests to produce gambolling armies of polar bears.
So, though summer almost never happens in Ireland, the fecund imagination of the Irish historical memory permits us each May to reach for the Ambre Solaire and the charcoal, with slightly fretful conversations about sunblock and skin cancer. In part, this is a cultural transfer of the American experience into our language: just as Irish people blithely use baseball terms such as "stepping up to the plate" and "left-field" without realising they are unrelated to our own experiences, so we also have imported enchanting but unreal concepts of what our summer should consist of.
But the colonisation of our language by the linguistic and cultural grey squirrels from the US only partly explains why each spring we brace ourselves for a real summer, and each autumn, retrospectively contemplate the sodden season lying dead behind us. For an ancient cultural conditioning enables us to get through the torment and the disappointments of an Irish summer, and the key to this conditioning is a profound amnesia. We need to forget, just in order to get us through the year: if we remembered that our summers usually consisted of staring through rain-lashed windows, to be followed by three successive seasons of doing exactly the same thing, how long would we remain sane?
So, a false memory is forged on the thousand fathoms of heaving seas that send us downpours and mists and grey skies: for upon that cruel anvil, we have beaten the basic skill of forgetting into a fine art, in which the filigree of amnesia is combined with the fine ornamentation of historical creation.
And with this extraordinary capacity to ignore reality goes another talent, that of embellishing and inventing: and the mind which each May can happily foresee yet another summer of sultry noons, and sunlit lunches, can easily direct its talents to the past.
Is this how violence can become such a cleansed and virtuous thing within the official Irish political imagination? Thus the squealing youngster, Thomas Playfair (14), who is hunted down and killed by Volunteer Holohan in the opening moments of the 1916 Rising, is forgotten: but the fate of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, who was murdered by Crown forces towards its end, has become an enduring totem of British cruelty.
And those who campaigned so vigorously for the retrospective pardon of the 28 Irish soldiers of the crown executed by firing squad during the Great War apparently regard their silence over the fate of the 77 anti-Treaty men summarily executed by the Free State, without even the pretence of a trial, as neither anomalous nor hypocritical. Moreover, it is only with the grimmest of mirth that one can contemplate the latest Shinner allegations about collusion between the British and paramilitaries: for who knows more about collusion than the organisation which produced Eamon Collins, Freddy Scappaticci, Frank Hegarty, Christopher Black, Denis Donaldson, agus Uncail Tomas O Coblaigh and all? I used to think that the fantastic capacity of Irish republicans to bluster and to weep about the demented war that they began and they sustained down the decades was actually a conscious act of humbug: but of course, I was -- as usual -- wrong. No, no, no: their toxic mixture of self-pity and sanctimonious self-justification (aided, of course, by their industrial levels of forgetfulness) is merely an acute and pathological form of a common condition in Ireland.
This was shaped on our ability, annually, to dispose of an inescapable truth: that we live on an island on the edge of the Eurasian continental shelf, alongside the largest and foulest weather-factory in the world, namely the Atlantic Ocean. And in place of this fact, we indulge the fiction that we live beside some genial and salubrious sea, which will seasonally send us summers of sunlit days and sultry nights. So, if we can, repeatedly, believe that, then we can truly believe anything. Which perhaps explains why we so often do.
kmyers@independent.ie
If we remembered our summers consisted of staring through rain-lashed windows, to be followed by three successive seasons of the same thing, how long would we remain sane?
