Canal Reflections

The beauty of Amsterdam is that there are two cities, not one. For every stretch of Golden Age merchant's houses there is another reflected in the placid waters of the canals. The elms that raise watery green leaves against the skyline reflect again waving slowly in the silent depths.

Canals are elemental, a mixture of water and sky, made all the more profound by being angularly framed by man. A perfect picture of what lies above.

Ireland has a mere handful of canals to compare with those of the Netherlands. They stretch like a belt across the central plain and form a necklace around Dublin's girth. Those of Amsterdam ripple outwards from the Palace forming a maze of refracted and reflected worlds. The grachten are present in all the Western cities from Utrecht, to Leiden and the Hague. Each metropolis marked by a thumbprint of waterways. There seem too many to name.

Dublin has the Grand and Royal canals. The Grand ambles along the south of the city viewing Ballsbridge, Ranelagh and Rathmines on the way. Near Baggot Street a seat is set, allowing the observant to sit and watch. Here a statue of the country poet, Patrick Kavanagh, looks on. The bench was a response to his fantastic request, O commemorate me where there is water, Canal water, preferably, so stilly. The poet imagines the canal as a passageway and journey to Arcadia. In quite summer evenings his words come back to life: A swan goes by head low with many apologies... He ends the elegiac text with... ...O commemorate me with no hero-courageous Tomb - just a canal bank seat for the passer-by.

The Northside of the city boasts the Royal Canal. Sitting with his back to Drumcondra Bridge the statue of Brendan Behan sits vigilant eyeing passing ducks and the distant bulk of Mountjoy Gaol. A very different writer to Kavanagh, Behan circled the political, mocked the heroic and settled uncomfortably into his vision of Every (Dublin) Man. His poetry is all about Republicanism, prisons and politics. The anger of the little man in the larger scheme of things.

Both writers, although very different, share a genius for contemplation and it is this quality that inspired them to seek beauty and Arcadia and solace in these man made waterways. My canal pictures, I hope, do the same.

The Liffey

...riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay... These are the words of James Joyce from his novel Ulysses. The book is considered the centrepiece of Anglo-Irish literature and a cornerstone of world culture. Joyce exiled himself from Ireland in order to see her clearer. He loved the city on the banks of the river Liffey so much that his book is a detailed description of Dublin - the more you walk the streets, read place name signs, pass old institutions and hear muttered conversations the more you begin to realise that you are not sure whether you are inside his book and will, happenstance, run into one of his characters. Or maybe that his characters are reading a book in which you may well be a minor, and lethargically written, figure.


One of the secrets to reading the book, and there may be many, is not to read it. Do what every other purchaser does and leave it, casually - ever so casually, on your shelf for passers by to read. Affect it in some literary position somewhere between Saints and Sinners and The Amen Corner.


Occasionally dip into it. Choose somewhere near the back, pick a sentence at random... God save Ireland from that bloody mouseabout. Up near the front yank this from the text Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. And from the middle Then he starts hauling and mauling and talking to him in Irish and the old towser growling, letting on to answer, like a duet in the opera. That's quite enough and now close the book.


Maybe start with Dubliners. Read a story or two. And then perhaps dip into Patrick Kavanagh's Collected Poems. You will find it in there, his poem, about the US grad students who killed Joyce. Then read one of the critical books. Maybe one about the language of Joyce. Choose one by a visiting professor from the University of West Somewhere. (They probably hold an archive of James' butcher's invoices and a reference collection of early Yeatsian boiled sweet wrappers). You will then engulf a couple of hundred closely argued pages on words that Joyce 'invented' and nod sagely feeling you are really getting into the writing. Unfortunately you then realise that half the words mentioned are current slang from Ballybough to Stoneybatter and even then the place names sound, well, Joycean anyway. And you realise it's happening again, is Joyce Dublin or is Dublin Joyce?


And the mystery of the thing leads you to believe you can plough into it and you get as far as the scene where Leopold Bloom savours the taste of some offal. Too much. Replace the book in position as sentinel of your Learning (note the capital L). Until one afternoon you begin again... This was it what all that company that sat there at commons in Manse of Mothers the most lusted after and if they met with this whore Bird-in-the-Hand (which was within all foul plagues, monsters and a wicked devil) they would strain the last but they would make at her and know her.


And if that is not a description of at least a dozen bank boards then what is? Again Dublin, then and now. Fresh image of a Hungarian below and below again:


I, Rudolph Virag, now resident at no 52 Clanbrassil street, Dublin, formerly of Szombathely in the kingdom of Hungary, hereby give notice that I have assumed and intend henceforth upon all occasions and at all times to be known by the name of Rudolph Bloom.

Green Door

The photograph is of the door of an old music shop on one of my favourite Dublin thoroughfares, Capel Street. This is a street dating from the late seventeenth century even though the buildings, for the most part, have eighteenth century facades. These are punctuated, here and there, by Victorian pubs and modern offices. Nothing is particularly out of place and nothing has particularly changed over the past two hundred and fifty years - with the exception that the street has taken a decidedly downmarket air.

In the eighteenth century it was a fashionable parade with dukes and dandys strolling along and purchasing lottery tickets - wealth was a given and the people inhabiting the street led unimaginable lives to the 'mere' Irish as they were known. Along the way gentlemen in frockcoats pranced, ladies sauntered and servants dashed invisible.

Meanwhile five miles in any direction from this spot people lived in abject poverty and suffered a series of famines in the lead up to the Great Hunger of the mid-nineteenth century. This was when over a million people died in five years.

Over the passing centuries this brilliant avenue began to drift from the raffishness of the lotteries to gambling clubs and side street inns. Gradually a middling crowd took over and the great public houses such as Slattery's appeared and provided a convivial pleasure for real working class Dubliners. In between grocers, tailors and merchants plied their wears only beginning to lose ground as the late Victorian suburbs spread outwards dragging the better class of customer with them.

The Rising against Britain, the subsequent destruction of the city centre by the Empire and the catastrophe of the Civil War played out within an ass's roar of the street and pushed the wealth of the area further downwards.

In the 1930s the route was famous for haberdasheries and builder's providers as well as furniture. The Emergency, as the Second World War is known in Ireland, killed off another layer of businesses and the street saw the erection of some new out of character buildings as planning and design were luxuries that the country could ill afford. Emmigration sapped the lifeblood of the island. By the 70s, when I first remember Capel Street, it was reduced to a steady stream of furniture shops, a well-known garden shop and an equally famous tailor. There were some less than salubrious pubs as well. All was snarled up in the beginnings of the angry love affair between Hibernia and the car. Come the 1980s, stripped pine showrooms with bunkbeds lined up on the footpaths became a common sight - readily parked to scoop up the baby boom. Then crazy happened.

Sex came to Ireland! Sexshops appeared, protests began, the church ranted, little old men railed, rosaries were proffered and yet these purveyors of sin survived - albeit dyslexically - Uthopia (and perhaps they are).

But through it all from the 1920s onwards this little shop sold musical instruments. Fiddles to be loved and played and the soul of the street resided in that brass handle as musicians, decade by decade, came to view and buy lutes, guitars and all manner of melody makers.

Now the shop, too, has passed.