Chester Beatty Library

Today Eleanor and her mother Janet invited me on an excursion to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The museum is a special love of Janet's, who was introduced to it through a friend who works there. Although I had heard very good things about the museum I had no idea what to expect, especially as the museums here can be a bit disappointing, more promise than delivery.

         The first stop when we got there was the usual film (the Irish accent makes the word film into two syllables--fi-lim) about the founder. I usually dread these introductions, filing them away with headphone commentaries than has everyone moving like lemmings through the galleries and tours on the hop on and off buses, but this time I was glad I watched. Beatty was born in New York in 1875, one year after my Irish grandfather. Like my grandfather, he graduated with a degree in mining engineering, which they both received in 1898. And, like my grandfather, Beatty went off on a great adventure, Beatty to the Colorado mines, my grandfather to the much more adventurous territory of the Yukon. The similarity ends there. Although the film shied away from his background, Beatty clearly was raised in privilege in New York. How many kids were collecting Chinese snuff bottles as a hobby back in 1880? There is no record of what my grandfather might have collected as a child, and certainly his degree from Trinity was no less at least partially the product of privilege (and maleness) than was Beatty's from Columbia, but my grandfather had only a modest family income to help support him. He was also probably not as smart and was certainly not as connected or ambitious as Beatty, who managed to work his way very quickly from a mine hand to being called the King of Copper.

         While my grandfather was dutifully returning to Ireland to take over the family farm in the early 1900s, Beatty was amassing a fortune. He began buying European and Persian manuscripts for reasons that are not fully articulated, then branched out into editions of the Qur'an around 1914. Supposedly he began buying these Qur'ans at Egyptian bazaars; there is a quote in the film that suggests he found that people would happily part with any number of these sacred books for the price of a Chevrolet.

         Beatty amassed what has to be one of the most fabulously varied book collections in the world. Whether he did it by magnanimous purchasing to save fundamental artifacts from certain dereliction or by exploitive actions toward impoverished populations that robbed them of their heritage is a question that will probably remain open. 

         In the first exhibition room, The Arts of the Book, the European collection showed that Beatty went for the splashy over the substantive. The lovely paperback-sized Aldines were dwarfed by the bloated magnificence of huge, elaborately illustrated or flashily bound texts. Upstairs it was a different story. The room, again divided into three sections, this time by religion--Christianity, Islam, and Asian religions (chiefly Buddhism and Hinduism)--held a breathtaking array of artifacts. Beatty managed to collect nearly every important papyrus fragment of the Gospels and the Letters of Paul. Parts of the papyri codices were displayed here under carefully controlled light on purpose-built plexiglass stands. The mounting of the work in the museum overall was some of the best I have ever seen. There were gorgeous binding fragments that showed how the layers of papyrus were piled up to make thick bindings, there were examples of early books of the separate gospels, there were Bibles in Coptic. Despite the low light the artifacts were alive; from time to time there was nearly a trompe l'oeil effect, when the glass partition didn't even appear to be there and it felt like you could touch the work so temptingly close on the other side.

         The other two main areas were equally vibrant. Beatty had, for instance, collected the dharani in its turned wooden container that was commissioned by the Empress Shotoku in the eighth century, a work often referred to as the first instance of printing (from wood and copper blocks) and the first example of mass production. Modest Qur’ans sat alongside thickly gilded folios. At the entrance to the gallery two video monitors showed looped footage of baptism and marriage rituals from the religions represented in the collection, helping to breathe life into the books and artifacts.

         The portrait of Beatty used to advertise the library shows a jovial, well-fed man in the robes of some honorary doctorate. The rare television interview included in the introductory video gives us a smallish man, hatted in the outdoor location, perhaps to give him more height against his very tall female interviewer. His fabulous wealth in the often ruthless enterprises of mining says something as well about the facts of his life. Beatty, a naturalized British citizen, moved to Ireland later in his life because he was fed up with British tax laws. The Irish embraced him, and he was good to the country in return. He became their first honorary citizen, and in thanks he left them this marvelous collection of works, and the money to support it in the style to which he was quite obviously accustomed

A country festival

Dawn comes very early this far north; the sun is up well before 5am. Yesterday it shone through my bedroom curtains with the promise of a heavenly day, and for once the promise was actually delivered. With no walk on tap and no desire to spend a big part of the day driving, I decided to have a lazy Sunday morning with the papers and the laundry, which I could finally hang out to dry with no concern for the rain, then head out to a local festival. The first challenge was finding it. This is not a festival with a website and driving directions. The one road sign I had seen advertised it as being in Carbury, which around here could mean anything. So I started by driving to Nodlaig's, source of all local information; she suggested I head in the direction of Derrinturn, about about 5 miles from her house, and declined to accompany me.

Of course she was right. As soon as I got near Derrinturn there were arrows pointing the way to the All-Ireland Turf Competition and Festival. As I drove deeper into the country I began to wonder about the All-Ireland aspect of the festival. For one thing, if much of Ireland descended on these narrow, pockmarked lanes there would be a serious traffic problem. Finally I got to the the steepest canal bridge I have yet encountered, a terrifying up-and-over ride that, although quite short, meant that it was not possible to see if there was a car coming in the opposite direction. Once safely on the other side, I turned down another thin strip of lane and finally across someone's driveway and straight onto the edge of the peat bog, where I paid a worker the €5 entry cost and parked the car.

In front of me I could see a giant bouncy castle, a midway trailer selling popcorn, and, far in front of where I stood on the edge of the bog, people moving across the brown turf with wooden barrows. This was clearly the most local of festivals, with everyone greeting each other by name, asking after the kids as if they hadn't seen each other at mass in the morning, and yelling over the din of the loudspeaker, which was in the hands of the usual glib and very chatty older man who is always given the job of emcee. When I arrived he was asking people to ante up for mouse bingo, a game which I discovered to my horror is played by releasing a live mouse on a table with numbers on it and paying off the bettor who holds the number where the mouse lands. I'm not sure where the bingo part comes in.

But the main attraction was the bog itself. Nearly 20 teams of turf cutters worked in the heat, cutting turf by hand with a variety of shovels and specialized two-sided rectangular-shaped spades. Each team had three people on it: the cutter, the thrower, and the barrow runner. The goal was principally to cut as much turf as time permitted, but the teams also had to wheel the cut turf bricks to a spot opposite where they were cutting, then spread them carefully so that they could begin to dry. Judging would be based on how much turf was cut, how clean the bricks were, how well spread-out the piles were, and how neat both the piles and the cutaway were left. The best teams would cut all the way down to the water, about 10 or 12 feet from the bog's surface before their time was up.

Cutting turf is hard work. The peat is dense and heavy with moisture, as if you had a plot of highly compacted earth that had to be cleared of any plants, then made into neat bricks that you had only one chance to shape. The cutter was therefore the skilled position on the team, and while the other two positions might trade off, the cutter worked all the way through the competition. The barrow runners seemed like they had the easiest job, since they got to sit while they waited for the thrower to fill the small wooden barrows, with their wooden wheels and no sides. But the barrow runner needed the rest: a full cart, with maybe 15 or 20 of these turf blocks on it, would be incredibly heavy, and the wooden wheels do not glide easily over the muddy surface of the bog.

Despite the grueling work, the teams were for the most part not made up of burly young men. In fact, it was men in their fifties, sixties and even seventies who formed most of the teams. There were a couple of all-women teams, there was a woman well into her seventies who was a cutter for another team, and there were two or three teams of kids learning the ropes from their parents or scout instructors. The cutter on one of the women's teams had on shorts and a tee shirt; when she leaned over to dig, the tattoo on her waist was visible. It was the word fiach, meaning a duty to someone or something.

The Irish have a duty to the turf. It has, along with the potato, provided livelihood for many generations of Irish laborers and farmers. A bog on your property meant an income source as the turf was cut, dried and sold. Many people still heat with turf. In the chilly evenings of April and even May the pungent smell of burning turf lays across the air, like the smell of coal so familiar to me from my childhood but with an earthiness that coal is missing. As someone said yesterday, if the turf were allowed to stay another million years or so it would become coal. 

Nodlaig heats exclusively with turf, which her neighbor delivers to her doorstep now that Charlie is dead. Until he got too fragile to do it, Charlie used to love to foot the turf, or take the partially dried bricks and stack them so that air could circulate. These days the turf is cut by small tractors and shaped into neat logs that are baked dry. Many of the bogs have been decimated by automated techniques. The Bog of Allen, at the extreme edge of which the festival took place, was once an enormous mountain of a bog that extended for close to 400 square miles but is now a shadow of its former noble self. The festival was begun as one very small way to save and pass on the traditional way of harvesting the turf, a touch of the old craft in a pause from mechanical production.

The bogs are also treacherous. People and things disappear in the bog, sinking down fast without leaving a trace of their existence. This has meant that the bogs have preserved historical evidence remarkably well in their completely unoxygenated depths, but they also can hide all manner of nefarious deeds. Falling into a bog is a serious event.

When the teams took their tea break (tea being a euphemism for beer, since bog cutting was as beer-soaked as all activity is in Ireland) I wandered around the festival grounds, which ran to about an acre all told.  I watched the dog shows, four separate categories of dogs--small, medium, large, and mutt--as Sparky, Gypsy, Elizabeth and Rover were walked around the sitting-room-sized ring by their owners. I bought a half-portion of colcannon (potato, onion and cabbage), the only food other than the popcorn and some soft ice cream and candy for sale at the festival. The women prepared the colcannon in huge pots and served it in deep blue plastic bins like the ones the supermarkets pack produce in. I looked at the local jams, but since I had just been given a jar of homemade raspberry preserves I didn't buy any. As I left I noticed, just beyond the edge of the car park, a small area of natural bog. The bog cotton was in full bloom and the field held both the promise of summer and the guarantee of warmth next fall, with none of the bog's treachery visible in the peaceful scene.

kittens

At a quarter to ten this peaceful Sunday evening there was a knock on my door. When I opened it, expecting to have to tell the neighborhood girls--again--that it was not okay to call so late, Claudia, my 6-year-old upstairs neighbor, and her friend showed me their big find; newborn kittens. What, they asked, should they do with them? I had noticed earlier in the evening that Claudia's mother Liz had left on foot, dressed up and heading for what must be an important occasion. I know she doesn't get to go out much, so I was glad to be here for Claudia even though I had no idea what to tell her.

They had two kittens, and said there were two more that they had left behind. The kittens looked like they had just been born. Their eyes were closed and one of them was gently mewing. Claudia told me they might carry them to the pet store in the morning, and asked me if the pet store would take them. Since this is a bank holiday weekend, the chance that the pet store would be open was very slim. I told them I would look online to see what newborn kittens need, and asked them to come back. Claudia and her friend asked me if a cat could have four such differently colored babies. With no personal history of cats (my family's cat allergy has been lifelong) I told them that cats could definitely have several babies that were different colors, hoping that I wasn't misleading them.

A half hour later they were back, this time with all four kittens. One was calico, with lots of buttery yellow in it fur, one was black and white, and two were twins, all grey. In the meantime I had read that what the kittens needed was to be kept warm, that underfeeding was better than overfeeding, and that dehydration was the biggest danger (outside of predators, of course). Mostly I told them what I had said earlier, that the best thing they could do was to put the kittens back where they found them, in hopes that their by now no doubt desperate mother would be looking for them. I got a small box from the boot of my car, and Claudia's friend brought a big towel to line it with. They put the kittens in the box, and the girls and one of Claudia's brothers carefully carried the box back to where they found the kittens in the first place. I told them I would help them in the morning if the kittens were still there, but I have very little hope that they will be. This is a challenging neighborhood for anyone who lives in it, kittens included.