In search of EUROPA - CEATHARLACH Invisible Barriers

To every place there belongs a story . . .

CEATHARLACH

Ceatharlach is the old Irish name for the town of Carlow that sits in the LODE-Line zone between the Atlantic and the Irish Sea.

The LODE cargo for the Ceatharlach crate was made by the River Liffey, the same river Liffey that flows down to the sea through the heart of Dublin, in a place called Harristown.

The Pale








Harristown was chosen as a place to make one of the LODE compasses because it was, according to the Statute of 1488, on the boundary that was later called the Pale, a term that is used today to identify a territory associated with and surrounding the Irish capital city Dublin.

The histories of migration in Ireland are those of arrivals, settlers gaining land and property, and departures, those who have been dispossessed of land, property and livelihood.

Arrivals 

Departures

There are stories and monuments

Remain 55.8%

Leave 44.2%

Curry my yogurt!

First there is a border, then there is no border, then . . .

Let Europe's border be the Irish Sea!

For many, politicians included, for big business, for xenophobes, borders are something to use for leverage, for advantages of one kind or another, but the contemporary electric information environment has for a long time now been creating a new political geography that is both global and local, and sometimes with a "universal" edge, even when this, what we might call a psycho-geography is local and "regional".

Look at the dial! Europe? Transformed by airwaves?

Belfast - Luxemburg 

"In The Days Before Rock 'N' Roll" Van Morrison sings of being down on his knees at those wireless knobs, Telefunken, Telefunken. And I'm searching for Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Athlone, Budapest, AFN, Hilversum, Helvetia. . . .  In the days before rock 'n' roll . . . . 

Justin, gentler than a man

I am down on my knees

At the wireless knobs

I am down on my knees

At those wireless knobs

Telefunken, Telefunken

And I'm searching for

Luxembourg, Luxembourg,

Athlone, Budapest, AFN,

Hilversum, Helvetia

In the days before rock 'n' roll

In the days before rock 'n' roll

In the days before rock 'n' roll

When we let, then we bet

On Lester Piggott when we met

We let the goldfish go

In the days before rock 'n' roll

Fats did not come in

Without those wireless knobs

Fats did not come in

Without those wireless knobs

Elvis did not come in

Without those wireless knobs

Nor Fats, nor Elvis

Nor Sonny, nor Lightning

Nor Muddy, nor John Lee

In the days before rock 'n' roll

In the days before rock 'n' roll

When we let and we bet

On Lester Piggott 10/1

And we let the goldfish go

Down the stream

Before rock 'n' roll

We went over the wavebands

We'd get Luxembourg,

Luxembourg and Athlone

AFM stars of Jazz

Come in, come in, come in, Ray Charles

Come in, the high priest

In the days before rock 'n' roll

In the days before rock 'n' roll

When we let and we bet

On Lester Piggott 10 to 1

And we let the goldfish go

And then the killer came along

The killer, Jerry Lee Lewis

A whole lotta shakin' goin' on,

Great balls of fire

Little Richard

Justin, gentler than a man

Justin, Justin, where is Justin now?

What's Justin doing now?

Just, where is Justin now?

Come aboard

The River that runs by . . . 

The river that runs by the LODE compass made at Harristown, and now contained in the LODE cargo, is the same river that runs through James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the River Liffey. Joyce gives the river the character and name of Anna Livia Plurabelle.

The book involves the Earwicker family, with a father HCE, a mother ALP, and their three children, Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. 

Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the WAKE, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. 

The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. Many Joycean fellow travellers, such as Samuel Beckett, link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico's seminal text La Scienza Nuova ("The New Science"), upon which they argue Finnegans Wake is structured.

The "WAKE" begins thus;

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

though, actually, it is the end of the last sentence of the book: 

A lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

So the beginning is the end in "a commodius vicus of recirculation". 

Anna Livia Plurabelle, or ALP, is HCE's wife ALP as "the river-woman whose presence is implied in the "riverrun" with which Finnegans Wake opens and whose monologue closes the book. For over six hundred pages, Joyce presents Anna Livia to us almost exclusively through other characters, much as in Ulysses we hear what Molly Bloom has to say about herself only in the last chapter." 

The most extensive discussion of ALP comes in chapter I.8, in which hundreds of names of rivers are woven into the tale of ALP's life, as told by two gossiping washerwomen.

Similarly hundreds of city names are woven into "Haveth Childers Everywhere", the corresponding passage at the end of III.3 which focuses on HCE. 

As a result, it is generally contended that HCE personifies the Viking-founded city of Dublin, and his wife ALP personifies the river Liffey, on whose banks the city was built.

Edna O'Brien: how James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle shook the literary world
When it was first published, Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle was derided as the musings of a shipwrecked mind. Ninety years on, this section of Finnegans Wake offers a late example of his great, radical vision


This blog-post is a matrix that originates first in the context of an artistic activity that relates to this place, Ceatharlach, and then connections multiply through processes of association, suggesting links, articulations and juxtapositions that the contemporary information wrap affords us, in a particular and contemporary type of consciousness, where the "loop" or "ricorso" helps the zig zagging necessary to see what is going on.


That's just the way it is . . . but don't you believe them . . .