Authoring Software a resource for teachers and students of New Media. April 7, 2011
On a shelf beneath the painting composed
of 14 lakes, I decided to put
an artists book with sketches of
wildflowers on the trail in spring.
It was perhaps an excuse to
begin painting and sketching on the trail
when the rains stopped and the sun came out.
Using a notebook of arches paper,
I began to draw a rectangle or square on
each page. This week, I took the book
on the trail.
When one makes a book in this way,
the sketches must relate to each other.
So, as is much of my work,
it is an exercise in creating
art with small building blocks
of visual information that work together.
Because screen based literature is inherently visual, such exercises are not only a welcome diversion from research, writing, and editing but are also helpful in the creation of lexias that work together and in the designing of interfaces that must balance text with design. January 14, 2011 A friendly challenge to paint the waters of the lake as beautifully as they actually were. I did not know whether or not I could do this. If it was hard to do this while I was actually there, sitting in the sunshine on the rocks with paints beside me and a lunch of bread and cheese at a place where the views were so beautiful that there was no way I could descibe them or tell you how I felt when I saw glimpses of the blue and green water between the trees as I walked along the path, than it is harder now in the rainy California winter with nothing but the memory of the view. Around the lake, there were places where the water was so blue green that it looked like a series of jewels set into the darker blue A photograher can convey this A painter does not see in the same way. Beside the shore, the water rippled so clear you could see the rocks and the multigrained sand through the surface of the water. This is very difficult to paint because one has to convey the browns and grays and yellows througth clear water that is not in these places actually blue. Yet sometimes it is surprising what one can convey with only paper and paints and words Perhaps by the time I go to the mountains again I will know how to begin. 
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Judy Malloy:
The story began in
From Ireland with Letters: Prologue.
Returning to
Frederick Douglass and the "under language" of The Greek Slave, I record that Douglass'
words on the treatment of slaves and slave families are so potent that they have remained with me
throughout the week. I also read Olaudah Equiano's distressing account of "The Middle Passage" (the
transport of African American slaves across the Atlantic) in his
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa the African (1789)
According to O'Callaghan's To Hell or Barbados,
"As there is no record of how the Irish on the slave ships were
treated (none ever returned), we have to assume that they were treated exactly
as African slaves were treated, for which there are many records." (P. 87)
I do not know for sure if this is true, but Olaudah Equiano's account of
"The Middle Passage" for African American slaves has stayed with me,
and I turned to other pursuits to relieve the "melancholy" for which slaves were actually
punished on The Middle Passage.
On
CCSWG12 Reading Code in Context -- which was organized by Jeremy Douglass and Mark C. Marino
and coordinated by Jason Lipshin -- I have followed the discussions with interest, sometimes
also participating as a working new media writer or answering questions about my own code
critique, which was about creating a collaborative work in which the program (late BASIC era)
mediated both the input and the resultant array.
The whole of Reading Code in Context has seemed to me like a programmers' studio where you can
wander around virtually and look at what people are doing, and it has been a very creative
and useful experience.
Over and over, the events of Cromwell's retreat from Waterford appeared on my screen in a
history sung/told many years later, as I worked and reworked the timing and words of Part IV of
Begin with the Arrival that I had thought in December was finished.
At the same time, I approached continuing work on From Ireland with Letters
in three different but related ways.
1. With a continuing interest in how slave memories are passed from generation and are intertwined
with culture, I began to read Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
An American Slave. (first published in 1845)
In Chapter II, (Boston, MA: Anti Slavery Office, 1847 pp. 13-14) I read:
....While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for
miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing
at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.
They would compose and sing as they went along,
consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that
came up, came out if not in the word, in the sound ;
and as frequently in the one as in the other. They
would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in
the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment
in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs
they would manage to weave something of the Great
House Farm. Especially would they do this, when
leaving home. They would then sing most exultingly
the following words:
" 1 am going away to the Great House Farm !
This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to
many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless,
were full of meaning to themselves. I have
sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those
songs would do more to impress some minds with the
horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole
volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.
I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning
of those rude and apparently incoherent songs.
I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw
nor heard as those without might see and hear. They
told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond
my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long,
and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of
souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every
tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to
God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of
those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled
me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found
myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence
to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and
while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling
has already found its way down my cheek. To those
songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the
dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get
rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to
deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies
for my brethren in bonds...
"All gone. All fallen. At the siege of Ross his father, at Gorey all his brothers fell.
To Wexford, we are the boys of Wexford, he would. Last of his name and race."
You would have to know that "The Boys of Wexford" was a song about the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798
to completely understand the allusion and Joyce's repeated references to the "Croppy Boy" from the same 1798
rising.
Like the symbolism and codes underlying African American quilts, the defeat and devastation of
Ireland occurs and reoccurs in the work of writers and poets of Irish heritage. Yet although lines of song
cryptically allude to sorrow and suffering, a reader might only see the beautiful quilt.
3. On a day after rain when the woods were wet, I hiked in the Berkeley Hills at a place
where the trail offers views across hillsides as it winds in and out of small groves of redwood and laurel.
I enjoyed a simple picnic of bread and cheese and began a pen and ink drawing.
At home, after reflecting on the impact of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
An American Slave (which first published in 1845 sold 30,000 copies) on the perception of
The Greek Slave and rereading The National Era's 1851 coverage of The Greek Slave --
I returned (in reading) to the place where Hiram Powers created The Greek Slave and followed
Francesco Bocchi through the Boboli gardens, near where I think Powers lived at the time.
"...Grand Duke Cosimo had the commendable notion of having a garden laid out, worthy of the
magnificence of the palace. It is very ample, covering much of the ground, partly flat,
and partly up the hill, and extending to the walls of the city. On this terrain, cultivated and
wild trees are growing, and all through the year there are shady groves, designed by a skilled
hand in correspondence with the layout of the palace. They not only provide nesting places
for different song birds, but also form espaliers stretching along both sides of an ample
lawn extending up the hill..." (pp. 80-81)
At a time when Florence is central to the narrative, or at any time, last Saturday night in Berkeley
was an evening to remember. In the acclaimed Cal Performances series, a magnificent celebration of
The Polychoral Splendors of Renaissance Florence was produced and conducted by
musician, musicologist and conductor Davitt Moroney.
A fine group of musicians -- including Magnificat, American Bach Soloists, Schola Cantorum San Francisco,
Chalice Consort, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts and musicians from the University of California at
Berkeley's Department of Music -- gathered for this performance of 40-60 part 16th century choral music.
Recreating the environment of the Duomo in Renaissance Florence on occasions of celebration, such
as Medici weddings, the music was complex, dense, highly structured, yet composed in such a way that
it was the whole not the individual parts that dominated the environment. It was a
sumptuous experience that concluded with two standing ovations.
The evening opened with an organ intonation by composer Girolamo Cavazzoni, played by the conductor,
and leading perfectly to Stefano Rossetto's Christmas motet in 50 parts, Consolamini,
consolamini popule meus, which begins in Davitt Moroney's words with "a massive wall of sound
in F major, over slow and simple harmonies, with melodic fragments swirling around, intertwining
and tumbling over each other, in brilliantly shimmering textures". Building to a climax of a
repeated 50 voice "Alleleua", the work enveloped the audience in achingly beautiful textured sound,
so compelling that one immediately wanted to hear it again.
The only score for this motet -- it was the first modern performance -- is in Munich.
But 3 of the 8 part books (18 voices) were missing. In 2010, they were seamlessly/brilliantly
recomposed by Dr. Moroney. The process, of interest to a writer of new media literature,
was difficult. The music was extraordinary.
It was not the only feat of restoration which Davitt performed for this program. Working
from unusual notation ("Spanish number tablature") and only one line of text he went through 36 poetry
versions of the Ten Commandments to recreate the lyrics of the circa 1545 anonymous Spanish canon
Unum Cole Deum in which the versified Commandments were set in music. "The canonic setting
is symbolic," he observes in the program notes. "Each of the four notated vocal parts (soprano, alto tenor and bass)
is sung as a tenfold canon: the other nine sopranos, nine altos, nine tenors and nine basses follow
systematically, coming in one by one after an interval of four breves...."
From a new media writer's point of view, the canonic structure in the resulting
work created an experience like the opening interface of Concerto for Narrative Data.
(if the phrases were all set to music and produced in an overlapping manner) But in Unum Cole Deum,
the audience already knows the words, so the way the sound traveled back and forth separate/together
was an exceptional experience in which known text -- the Ten Commandments -- was represented
in a continually undulating wall of sound.
And then the desire to hear Stefano Rossetto's motet again was anticipated because after an instrumental
in 8 parts by Giovanni Gabrieli, the Spanish Canon, and an instrumental in 9 parts
by Tiburtio Massaino, Rossetto's Consolamini, consolamini popule meus, came again to end the first
half of the program.
It is important to understand that the performance of this work is not the equivalent of
a contemporary 60 member choir that sings in 4 part SATB. What 40-60 voices means in polychoral works
is that at times there are actually 40-60 simultaneous lines of music, sometimes as in the Agnus Dei,
with the voices coming in one by one in what can be described as a "wave" of music: "dona nobis pacem"
Striggio's Missa sopra "Ecco si beato giorno" -- that Moroney himself discovered in the
Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2005 after a twenty year search and first conducted
on July 17, 2007 for the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall --
received its American Premiere in 2008 at the Ninth Berkeley Festival of early music.
(with Davitt Moroney conducting)
I remember that it was at about the time that an (oddly contingent)
work of mine was included in the Visionary Landscapes Electronic Literature Organization
conference in Vancouver, Washington,
(coincidently, the ELO Conference and the Berkeley Festival of early music usually play at
about the same time) and that because I could not get a ticket for the performance of
"Ecco si beato giorno", I went instead to hear Davitt give a lecture on this work.
So, I had been waiting for three and 1/2 years to hear a live performance
of Alessandro Striggio's
"Ecco si beato giorno". And yes, it was worth the wait.
The histories of Striggio's Mass and of all the works on the program are extensively documented in
the program notes on the Cal Performances website at
Liam O'Brien's previous work was on the 19th century Hudson River School. As the Prelude begins,
he has already researched the time spent in Italy by Frederic Church and George Inness. (in articles by
Gerald Carr and J.R. Cikovsky in Italian Presence in American Art, 1860-1920, Irma B. Jaffe ed.,
NY: Fordham University Press, 1992, among other sources)
Exploration of how an a 19th century Irish
American artist's environment was changed when he moved to Florence, now colors his research into
the work of Hiram Powers. At the moment, he is reading Bocchi's The Beauties of the City of Florence,
a Guidebook of 1591. It is not as abrupt a transition from the pub-based Irish lay in
Begin with the Arrival as would be be expected.
Indeed, Bocchi's rich adjectives achieve an unexpected transference. Surprisingly, the effect of
his writing reminds me of Dorothy Richardson. The styles or words are not comparable, but at her best
Richardson manages to transform words into text-based impressionist art while conversely
with a flow of repeated sumptuous words, Bocchi manages to convey Florentine art with writing.
The work now closes
with the same lines it opens. Rewritten from The 17th Century "Flight of the Earls", they are:
"In great halls at close of days
Junction of Several Trails will begin with a prelude to the first conversation between Liam and
Máire. This prelude will probably be an interior monologue, written in the
third person and housed in an interface of successive
central lexias -- somewhat based on Narrabase IV, which I began using in 2000 for Dorothy Abrona McCrae.
Like a medieval manuscript or a glossed academic document, these lexias will be surrounded
by a thicket of links to the research trails that Liam is following. As noted before,
From Ireland with Letters is constructed somewhat like a piece
of music in that a series of separate but complete parts all work together as a whole.
As this prelude begins, we are in Liam O'Brien's office.
On the desk in front of him is a classic art historian's source document for 16th century
Florentine art and architecture: The Beauties of the City of Florence,
a Guidebook of 1591. (Introduced, Translated, and Annotated by Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Williams.
London, Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2006)
This is not a contemporary guidebook. It was written in the 16th Century by Florentine arts writer
Francesco Bocchi. (1548-1616)
Liam might be following Bocchi along the Via de' Benci to the Piazza Santa Croce,
near where Hiram Powers and his family first lived:
"Walking northwards, one comes to the Piazza Santa Croce, so-called for the magnificent church
that one sees at the eastern end. This square is very beautiful because the homes surround it
gracefully, in the manner of a theatre, but the church, magnificently set somewhat above
[the level of the square], gives it dignity in addition to beauty. Now so the view may be even
more noble, and correspond to the happy effect of the houses, and the church, the square is divided
into areas of a certain size surrounded by a fence of stakes, [with the added result that] the
young men of the city may exert themselves more becomingly in the soccer tournament that takes place
every year..."
Or perhaps he is reading Bocchi's chapter about the Roman Gate (pp 77-103) because later the Powers family
moved to the Via delle Fornaci between the Ponte alla Carraia and the Porta Romana.
Powers makes cameo appearances in Set in Stone. In the 19th century, many American
travelers to Florence visited his studio, (p.6) and, for instance, in the section on Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Salenius describes how Powers finds an apartment for Hawthorne and his wife and children.
The apartment was just across the street from Powers' own home and studio on the Via delle Fornaci,
(now via de' Serragli) from whence Hawthorne "enjoyed taking long pleasurable walks 'for the mere
pleasure of walking', along the streets of the city, the banks of the river Arno,
the paths of the Boboli gardens, and in the Cascine Park." (p.38)
"...As we returned home over the Arno, crossing the Ponte di Santa Trinita, we were struck by
the beautiful scene of the broad, calm river, with the palaces along its banks, repeated in it,
on either side, and the neighboring bridges, too, just as perfect in the tide beneath as in the air above --
a city of dream and shadow so close to the actual one. God has a meaning no doubt, in putting this
spiritual symbol continually beside us. Along the shore of the river, on both sides, as far
as we could see, there was a row of brilliant lamps, which, in the far distance, looked like a cornice
of golden light; and this also shone as brightly out of the river's depth..."
"The essay on Michelangelo was followed three years later, in 1567, with another in praise of Andrea del
Sarto. Strikingly more original and complex, it is essentially a theory of painting based on Aristotle's
Poetics. Bocchi enumerates five elements of painting which he says correspond to five of the six parts
of tragedy defined by Aristotle. Design (disegno) corresponds to plot, character depiction
(costume) in painting to character depiction in drama, relief (rilievo)
-- the drawing and modelling of forms in such a way as to suggest three-dimensionality --
to what Aristotle called 'thought', paint handling or
colouring (colorito) to the expression of thought in words (Aritotle's diction), and a certain
'sweetness and facility' (dolcezza et facilita) productive of naturalism,
to what Aristotle called 'song'..."(p. 12-13)
Titles have always been a problem for me although generally once the title has finally been selected,
I am not unhappy with it. In the course of the work, a working title is sometimes changed, but
I do not like to do much writing on a new work without a title; it feels like working on something
that does not exist.
During the past week, many hours were spent reading Irish poetry and looking at the words of
Hiram Powers in search of a title for File 3 of From Ireland with Letters. Finally,
I went back to my own Prologue because a repeated use of prologue words was intended.
From the Prologue, I chose "junction of several trails" --
the words a harbinger of the exchange of information between
Liam and Máire. This is a working title, by which I mean it will probably be changed.
But now I can begin to work seriously on File 3.
Next -- in addition to continuing research and some preliminary writing --
it is time to create a draft interface.
With sustained original vision, Sonya Rapoport has created a wonderful, innovative,
intellectual yet evocative body of work, and with this exhibition, last year's exhibition at
Kala. and the forthcoming book from Heyday (edited by Terri Cohn)
the artist and curators Terri Cohn and Anuradha Vikram have effectively conveyed the importance
of Rapoport's work and vision.
Around the museum,
continuous feed computer paper -- made into art with dense, intricate hand-created images, text, and code --
was displayed on the walls,
divulging details of an artist's life and of cross cultural explorations.
On the floor was
the prescient NetWeb from her installation Objects on my Dresser
that I had seen at 80 Langton St in San Francisco in 1981. Introduced by the bureau from
Objects on my Dresser, there were small objects, artists books, and new media.
including the recent large-screen displayed Nuclear Family.
And the concept of interactive installation was conveyed in an invitation to the audience
to participate in the reenactment of early interactive works, such as Brutal Myths.
(in 1996 created in collaboration with Marie Sat)
Also included -- on a computer; on the wall -- was Objective Connections,
the collaborative webpece that Sonya and I created together for the Generations exhibition
at the Richmond Art Center in 1996. I thought it held up well as a surprisingly seamless
exploration of how Sonya's images and my words converged and diverged in the many
years in which we worked/conversed in separate but sometimes parallel artmaking.
The making of artists books during the Christmas season has clarified my thinking or perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that the activity of putting things together by hand is
satisfying and clears one's mind for the intense concentration sometimes needed to create
electronic literature. Although, there are traditional ways of making artists books,
there are -- as often happens in the creation of interface --
difficult questions when putting togther one of a kind books, and relatedly, there are
display/audience questions. How does the viewer approach the work?
In the context of the pleasures of studio work, the difference between writing/interface design and
painting/making of artists books was a subject of discussion at Sonya's opening.
But there is no reason that I cannot begin the creation of the interface for Junction of Several Trails
with paper, paint, and pen, the way I used to, and I am thinking about this.
Two books that I received for Christmas are helping to shape both the identity of Liam O'Brien, whose
family emigrated in the times of the potato famine, and a deeper understanding of role and
continuity of Irish roots in contemporary American poetry. They are:
Jay P. Dolan, The Irish Americans, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008
and
Daniel Tobin, Awake in America; on Irish American Poetry. Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2011.
University of Notre Dame Professor
emeritus of history Dolan's chapter
on "The Great Hunger" (pp. 67-83) is a harrowing read, setting forth the terrible times of the
potato famine and the arduous trip to America in such a way that I could not sleep the night
I read this chapter. Somehow the two hundred years between Cromwell's fatal
devastation of Ireland and the potato famine were conflated, and my own viewpoint from the
earlier vantage was more deeply colored with the knowledge of continuing/parallel hardship.
Poet and Emerson College professor Tobin's dense, information-intense exploration of Irish
American Poetry is a book to be read slowly, revealing unexplored works of poetry,
skillfully contrasting very different approaches and opinions and looking at the poetry of Diaspora
as a whole. The work was always there, but we need to see it as a whole, not only as a vibrant tradition
of Irish American writing, but also as an integral part of American literature.
Tobin has woven a rich tapestry of fellow Irish American poets -- to which I will continue to return.
As the children of the Irish slaves in Massachusetts became
a part of the community, they may not -- in this Puritan culture and later at times of extreme
discrimination against the Irish -- have spoken too openly of their roots. And in some branches of the
family, they may not have known. In the 17th century, the British falsified the official records of
many of the Irish children they stole; they were listed as shipped from Bristol or some other
place in England; some of these children were given false names; and Catholicism, the center of their
former worship, culture, and family life was forbidden.
How the records of roots -- particularly in cases of slavery -- are passed from generation
to generation are of interest, and I would like to know more about how the millions of enslaved
African Americans passed their African roots and culture from generation to generation.
In my family, it was my mother, who was of Scottish descent, who kept the underground Irish origin
of my father's family in our hearts. It was she who told me that my father's family had Irish roots,
and she made sure that we celebrated Saint Patrick's day, that there were shamrocks in the windows on
that day and that we listened to and sang the Irish songs. The songs that we sang in
those days were the Irish American songs of exile culture or of returning home: "Dear Old Donegal",
the song that Máire Powers plays impromptu in
Begin with the Arrival,
"When Irish Eyes are Smiling", "MacNamara's Band". We also sang "The Wearing of the Green" and
"Finnegan's Wake".
It had been logical to assume that the first Walter Power in America was an orphan when he was taken
from Ireland, because that was the official story as regards the children and young people who were
enslaved. However, from the document quoted in last week's entry in this writer's notebook,
it appears that the British set aside 12 year old girls and 14 year old boys from The Transplantation.
Given the ages of the young people aboard The Goodfellow, some may not have been orphans but rather
were forcefully taken from their living families.
In To Hell or Barbados, (Dingle, Co. Kerry, Ireland: Brandon Books, 2000) Sean O'Callaghan
(the journalist, not the informant of the same name) describes the capture of Irish people
in this way:
"The work of rounding up people for transportation was carried out very thoroughly by government
agents throughout the country. These 'man-catchers', as they were called, were mounted and armed,
with long whips to herd the unfortunate people into the holding-pens outside the cities and towns
....Here they were branded with the initials of the ship that would take them to Barbados or Virginia.
They were attached together with ropes around their necks and the long march to the seaports in
the south of Ireland began." (p. 78)
According to O'Callaghan, many of the British slave ships docked in Bristol, England
before embarking for the Americas. Sometimes they were the same ships that were used
to transport black slaves from the West Coast of Africa to the West Indies. (p. 80)
O'Callaghan writes that "As there is no record of how the Irish on the slave ships were
treated (none ever returned), we have to assume that they were treated exactly
as African slaves were treated, for which there are many records." (P. 87)
I am not yet ready to revisit who exactly Walter Power was when he was probably thus captured
and transported to Massachusetts. But this being a birthday week in my family,
it seems a good time to revisit Powers family Irish American family genealogy back to Walter Power and
Trial Shepherd.
In Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor, 1805-1873, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991.
Volume I, p 28) Smithsonian art historian Richard P. Wunder documents that Walter Power was
born in Waterford Ireland, probably in 1639, and that his name appears in Massachusetts records in 1654.
In Pioneer Irish in New England, (NY: P.J. Kennedy & Sons, 1937. pp 239-241) Michael J.
O'Brien writes that it is logical to conclude that Power came on the slave ship, The Goodfellow.
Much work needs to be done in details and verification, but roughly, the begats for my family go as follows:
Walter Power married Trial Shepherd in 1661. Their first son,
William Power, was born in 1661 in what is now Littleton Massachusetts.
(but at that time may have been a part of Concord) He married Mary, daughter of John and
Hannah Jenkins Bank (or Banks, Banke, or Bunk) of Chelmsford. William and Mary's second child
was William Powers, born in 1691 in Littleton. I do not as yet know when the family added
the "s" to the name, but it looks as if it could be at about this time.
William Powers II married Lydia Perham of Chelmsford. Their children
included Lemuel Powers, born on December 11, 1714 in Grafton, Massachusetts.
Lemuel married Thankful Leland. Their children included Ezekiel Powers, born March 27, 1745.
Ezekiel fought in the American Revolution and married Hannah Hall. This is probably when
the family moved from Massachusetts to Croydon, New Hampshire. Their children included
Major Abijah Powers, born May 7, 1781. Abijah Powers married Olive Melendef or Melendy
Their children (or possibly his children by Charlotte Rogers) included Elias Powers
born May 1, 1808 in Croydon, NH.
Elias Powers married Emeline White. Their children included
Wilbur Howard Powers, born January 22, 1849 in Croydon. Wilbur Howard Powers, went to Dartmouth,
which was probably not usual for this branch of the family, many of whom were rural farmers,
and then to Boston University, where he got a law degree. He married
Emily Owen from Lebanon, NH, and they moved to Boston. Wilbur and Emily had two children: Myra and
my Grandfather, Walter Powers, born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts on August 3, 1885.
Walter Powers married Ethel Carver. And now we come to my father, Wilbur Langdon Powers,
who was born in 1911 and married Barbara Lillard. [1]
In
From Ireland with Letters, Máire Powers is fictional, but it seems fitting
to put her in the same line as my own family, which is clearly traced from Walter and Trial Power's
first born child William.
Both sets of my grandparents were named Walter and Ethel.
The artist Hiram Powers. whose life and work Liam O'Brien is researching in From Ireland with Letters,
was descended
from Walter and Trial's fourth child, Thomas Powers, born in 1667.
There are passages in Hiram's writing about The Greek Slave (chained with the manacles used on
African American slaves) and other works (America trampling on those same chains) that make the
possibility that he did know the family origins cogent. But no documentation has of yet been found
that proves this.
When The Greek Slave toured America, during the 447 days it was on view,
(1947-1948) it was seen by more than one hundred thousand people, according to Wunder (p. 242)
becoming one of the
most famous sculptures in 19th century America.
The abolitionist newspaper
The National Era ran several articles about this work, including
"Powers's Greek Slave in St. Louis", (The National Era, January 16, 1851)
which is reproduced on the Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture
website
at
The National Era writes:
"I was fashioned by a hand whose every motion was the offspring of love
for man in all his relations, with a sublime conception of the beautiful and the true,
and it is therefore that he has sent me around the world to preach by this loveliness and
nakedness, and by this cruel chain, joy to the forsaken, comfort to the destitute,
and liberty to the captive. I was carved from Parian, rather than from Ebony,
that I might more effectually appeal to perverted justice and partial sympathy;
but I am the representation of the captive and the forsaken everywhere,
and whatever sympathy I may secure for my enslaved sisters in Turkey, are due to my sisters
of another hue in the land throughout which I am making my pilgrimage.
Whatever claim of justice I may secure for me, and those like me, are due to those equally
oppressed in your very midst. Think you that it was cruel to rob me of liberty,
purity, and happiness? Though my skin were black as night, my soul would have the same aspirations,
and need the same sympathies, my intellect would have the same laws and need the same development.
Cease your sympathy for a slave in Constantinople, and go show kindness
and justice to those over whom you have power."
In preparation for a series of conversations between Máire and Liam, while Liam continues to trace
the role of Italian art and culture on Hiram Powers' work, Máire is now on a darker research path,
reading the classic work about The Transplantation: John Prendergast, The Cromwellian
Settlement of Ireland, London: Longman, 1865.
In Prendergast, a fold out map which looks as if it is a facsimile of the original
and is titled "The Settlement of Ireland by the Act of 26th September, 1653" makes clear the
very small amount of territory allotted to the Irish in their own country. The conditions of The
Transplantation
were so extreme that Parliament found it necessary to declare in italics that it was "not their intention
to extirpate the whole nation." (p.26)
Prendergast's words set the stage:
"The Earl of Ormand, Primate Bramhall, and all the Catholic nobility, and many of the gentry, were
declared incapable of pardon of life or estate, and were banished. The rest of the nation were
to lose their lands, and take up their residence wherever the Parliament of England should order.
On 26th September, 1653, all the ancient estates and farms of the people of Ireland were declared
to belong to the adventurers and army of England; and it was announced that the Parliament had
assigned Connaught (America was not then accessible) for the habitation of the Irish nation, whither
they must transplant with their wives, daughters, and children, before the 1st of May following (1654)
under penalty of death, if found on this side of the Shannon after that day." (p. 27)
Connaught was selected because it was surrounded by the sea and the Shannon,
and the boundaries could be easily fortified. It was also "at this time the most wasted Province
in the kingdom". (p.30) However, The Transplantation was difficult to enforce, was resisted by the
Irish people, and was not completely accomplished.
A chilling series of quotes -- from letters from Dublin to England and from reports and proclamations
-- which Prendergast prints in Part II of his book, ("The Transplantation", pp. 26-77) document
British reactions to Irish resistance to the Transplantation, including hanging those who refused
to leave their homes and placing placards that said "for not transplanting" on their hanging bodies;
entering their homes at night, taking them from their beds and jailing them in overcrowded prisons;
and selling them as slaves in America.
Given the ages of the children shipped to America as slaves, there is an ominous statement
in a petition which Prendergast documents:
"The humble petition of the Officers within the
precincts of Dublin, Catherlough, Wexford, and Kilkenny, in behalf of themselves, their
Souldiers, and other faithful English Protestants, to the Lord Deputy and Council of Ireland"
Prendergast's summary of this petition begins: "They pray that the original order of
the Council of State in England, confirmed by the Parliament September 27th, 1653, requiring the removal
of all the Irish nation into Connaught, except boys of 14 and girls of 12, might be enforced..."
(p. 61)
One hundred eighty-three years later, carrying with him a recurring childhood dream of a woman on a
pedestal whom he could not reach across the river, Walter Power's descendent Hiram Powers and his family
sailed to Florence.
It is fitting that the first architect for the Uffizi was f. He wrote the lives of the artists of
the Italian Renaissance, and he began the building that houses so many of their works.
Thus, returning to Florence, I/Liam O'Brien have been indulging in
the art researcher's holiday pastime of perusing The Uffizi, Catalogue of all the works in the
Gallery, (Florence, Bonechi, 1989-90) imagining what works Hiram Powers might have stopped to look at
the first time he entered the Uffizi in 1837. The Uffizi, Catalogue is a guidebook, but
Liam happens to have a copy which he purchased at a used book store in Cambridge, and its very nature
as a guidebook -- with incomplete information presenting trails to follow --
is an appropriate beginning of a research journey that will encompass 19th century travel histories,
the blogs of the era, such as Camillia Crosland's
Landmarks of a Literary Life, 1820-1892.
What works were in the Uffizi in 1837 will of course have to be verified when information
is included in the narrative itself.
When Liam and Máire meet in a series of conversation that will comprise the next file of
From Ireland with Letters, each conversation will probably be framed with some of their lives and
research, beginning with Liam's research into the life and work of Hiram Powers in his studio in
Florence Italy.
Liam/I are walking in the shoes of a 19th century sculptor who grew
up on a Vermont Farm but spent most of his life as a working artist in Italy. For the purposes of
this narrative, although I have been to Florence and to the Ufizzi,
Liam will approach the Uffizi as an art historian who has never been there. If, on his own journey through
this catalog, he stops to look at paintings that would not interest Hiram Powers, no one will blame him.
The collection is extraordinary.
Powers, it should be noted, as artists will do from time to time, sometimes
approached the works of other artists in a framework of preferring his own work,
but that does mean that he was not influenced by the culture of the country in
which he lived and worked.
For instance, there is bas-relief of a Seated Wayfarer. The work is identified in
the catalog as Roman from the second century AD. The Wayfarer sits with an outstretched arm,
holding his staff. As if -- like Odysseus -- he is an heroic warrior returning home as a beggar,
he has dignity. His pose is seated yet dynamic; draperies frame his legs in finely carved detail. No Powers
sculpture that I know of repeats The Wayfarer's pose, but there is a quality of potential
action in this work that Powers at his finest achieves.
Then there are two figures of women that have resonance with Powers' work:
the third century BC Girl Preparing for the Dance and the 3rd century BC Crouching Venus.
The later may have been at the Villa Medici in the 19th century, but Hiram could have seen it there.
Most important in this respect is the marble copy of a bronze Greek sculpture of
Venus -- the Venus de' Medici -- which Hiram used for one of the models of The Greek Slave.
There are quite a few stories associated with how Powers used the Medici Venus in the creation of
The Greek Slave, and more research needs to be done on this subject. So, I will
return to this work later, noting only that there is a story that Hiram Powers
was one of very few artists given permission at that time to make a cast of the Venus de' Medici,
and that this happened because after Powers made a bust of the Duchess of Tuscany, (probably in 1846,
a few years after he created The Greek Slave)
her husband, Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany, was so impressed with the work that he asked Powers if
there was any service he could do for him. Powers replied that he would like to make a cast of the Medici
Venus, and his request was granted.
A Romanian translation of
Memories of Arts Wire was created by Alexander Ovsov
and -- reminding me of the importance of International
cultural exchange -- is available at
Amintiri din sârmă Arte.
And rereading the introduction to Jaishree Odin's Hypertext and the Female
Imaginary (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) refocuses my attention on
contemporary electronic narrative. "The electronic media easily lend themselves to creating
complex narratives of multiple worlds or worlds within worlds that have potential for diverse
trajectories of meaning," Odin notes the introduction.
Rather than plunge into research on Irish slavery and The Transplantation, this Christmas week I recollected Christmas in Ireland in the
troubled 17th century.
Many Christmas traditions in Ireland originated in times when culture and religion were persecuted and suppressed, and
the spirit of light in times of darkness has survived in contemporary Irish Christmas traditions that
are simple yet resonant
-- such as the placing of a lighted candle in the window on Christmas Eve as a symbol of welcome
to Mary and Joseph on their
difficult search for shelter.
In the Boston area where I grew up, candles in the front windows were always a part our family tradition, symbolizing a welcoming home.
As children, we joined our friends in caroling from door to door. When snow fell on dark Christmas Eves
-- with snowflakes visible in the air and on our winter coats and sweaters -- it was magical to be walking and singing.
"Night-time was an invitation
Among many other works from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, were Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla's
(Mexico, 1590-1664) Kyrie/Gloria, Sanctus/Benedictus and Agnes Dei from Missa
Ego Flos Campi and Tomás Luis de Vittoria's (Spain, 1548-1611) "Christe Redemptor Omnium".
As is traditional, there were also Villancicos, (Spanish language Christmas Carols) including
songs of devotion for Mary and lullabies for Jesus.
I have added a loaf of Irish bread for "The Laden Table" to my Christmas baking list.
After a Christmas hike in Marin -- where there is a place I particularly like
to go at this time of year, and where I sat beside a stream under redwoods and had a late
breakfast of coffee and pastry -- I returned to the finishing work on
Part IV of Begin with the Arrival.
As Part IV begins, it is intermission and Máire Powers is sitting with musician friends.
Like the crowded pub at intermission, the interface is dense, as in separate parallel tracks,
she and Liam O'Brien recall what happened to Walter Power at age 14 and what happened to his descendent,
the sculptor Hiram Powers, at the same age.
After Máire returns to the stage to the accompaniment of bodhrán drums,
there is a single central focus, and -- until the quote from Saint Patrick appears as protection
in a time of slavery and exile -- it is mainly her voice that is heard.
Then ritornello quotes from the Prologue introduce "The Transplantation",
and as Máire Powers begins to play the finale, Liam's voice returns.
Making changes in the "continuo" as part of the finishing work,
I moved the lines from Andreas Mac Marcuis' "The Flight of the Earls":
"Foemen camp in Neimid's plains
to a more appropriate place in the work -- about the time of the Transplantation.
Then I began the continuo with rewritten lines from the same work of poetry.
From century to century, it is within the Irish tradition to make such changes,
although I do not do it very often.
"The Flight of the Earls" was written before the Cromwellian conquest, probably in 1607,
but because of its deep sorrow at a time exile of and because it was written at a time when
Irish harpers were condemned -- the 1603 British proclamation against the Irish read "to exterminate by
marshal law all manner of Bards, Harpers," and then more explicitly "to hang the harpers wherever
found, and destroy their instruments" -- it is an appropriate beginning. The poet was probably a
bard of the exiled Hugh O'Neill.
The original lines as translated by George Sigerson in his Bards of the Gail and Gall
are:
"In great halls at close of days
Foemen camp in Neimid's plains
To begin Part IV of Begin with the Arrival, I/Maire changed the first part of these lines to
In great halls at close of days
A week of the pleasures of words and music began on December 2 when the musicians of the University
Baroque Ensemble danced onto the stage, playing a familiar Bach March in festival tempo.
At the center of the program were arias and the Prologue from Monteverdi's Orfeo.
Framed with entrancing music, the plot of Orfeo is iconic, and the lyrics --
written by Alessandro Striggio, son of the composer of the same name -- are luminous:
"To this lovely meadow
"Penelope pulls home
Somewhere near the beginning, almost every anthology of Irish poetry includes Patrick's Breastplate,
the words attributed to Saint Patrick and used as his protection on journeys of faith
in the wilds of Ireland.
The threads of slavery and rescue that pervaded Patrick's life are also potent in
Begin with the Arrival, and Patrick's words may be the
text to quote, when in 1654 about 500 Irish slaves arrive in America in chains and emerge from the hold
of the slaveship that carried them far from Ireland. Here: (from Hoagland) are the lines I am considering
quoting at the end of Part IV of Begin with the Arrival:
"..I arise today
In medieval poetry -- in Kinsella's anthology, in most collections of Irish poetry -- anonymous monks
celebrate the countryside, describing the songs of the birds, the woods and meadows, the streams and
ponds, and the animals with whom they share the wilderness -- painting a romantic picture of the
life of the Irish scholar in the middle ages. Here are a few lines from Kinsella's translations,
the first anonymous, the last attributed to Colum Cille (Saint Columba) in which he remembers
the Ireland that he has left and wishes to see again:
"Above my book, with its lines laid out "To this lovely meadow Every wild spirit Often comes in search Of happy rest" At the U.C. Berkeley Department of Music on Friday, December 2, 2011, the Prologue and arias from Monteverde's Orfeo were sung (beautifully/expressively) by soprano Alana Mailes and baritone Nicholas Losorelli. The other musicians who created this fine program -- that also included the music of Bach, Lully, Rameau, Telemann and Corelli, among others -- were Daeun Jeong, (recorder) David Zhu, (flute) Noboru Emori, Hannah Glass, David Lin, Daniel Pasternak, (violin) Hannah Glass, Mark Lee, (viola) Anna Clifford, Seth Estrin, (cello) Andy Su, (violone) Marco Paliza-Carre, (guitar) Thomas Yearsley, (organ) and Kay Yoon. (harpsichord) The coaches who work with UBE student musicians are Carla Moore, (violin) Elisabeth Reed, (cello) John Dornenburg, (violone) and Louise Carslake. (flute/recorder) The University Baroque Ensemble is directed by Davitt Moroney. I have always preferred Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, but in listening to the selections in this program, (some first heard this year in October at the UBE's first concert of the semester) it was as if -- somewhat like the observing of the 19th century uncovering of Giotto's frescoes in the Bardi Chapel, not far from where Hiram Powers lived in Florence -- an unknown treasure was revealed. I should not, I suppose, complain of ambiguity in the ending of Orfeo at a time when the iPad version of its name was Penelope (a work, which celebrated for its offering of multiple readings, ends with an ambiguous song) is almost ready to be released, and when the classic CD version of its name was Penelope will be featured in the Electronic Literature exhibition at the January 2012 MLA Convention in Seattle. Curated by Dene Grigar, Lori Emerson, and Kathi Inman Berens, Electronic Literature will include, among others, the work of Mark Amerika, Shelley Jackson, Michael Joyce, Deena Larsen, Marjorie Luesebrink, Judy Malloy, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, and Stephanie Strickland, plus "future Writers -- Electronic Literature by Undergraduates from U.S." November 29, 2011
In From Ireland with Letters, Part IV of Begin with the Arrival
has been finished and posted. As usual, there is editing and continuo work to do,
and there are interface questions about how to tie Part IV into the whole. For now -
because I would like the reader to be somewhat familiar with the story before reading Part IV --
an opportunity to choose Part IV does not occur until it is encountered on the menu
that accompanies Part III. There is always the question of making all parts equally accessible
to the returning reader, so I will probably revisit this issue in a month or two.
A print work generally begins with a table of contents, so all parts are accessible to the readers of print
literature who is generally more inclined to proceed sequentially. Web readers sometimes click almost at random. Thus, how
the reader is pathed is an interface issue that must be continually addressed.
The research for From Ireland now focuses on The Transplantation and Irish slavery --
beginning with John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, London: Longman, 1865.
which is the classic work in the field.
At the same time, I will be reviewing the extensive notes I took a year ago when
I read Hiram Powers' letters on microfilm from the Archives of American Art. The letters as a whole
present a picture of studio business and family life. They were read in conjunction with research
into the City of Florence and 19th century Florentine artists. And I concentrated
on the time period from when Powers and his family arrived in
Florence to his work on The Greek Slave.
To begin this review, Powers and his family arrived in Florence on
November 24, 1837. They traveled from New York via boat to Le Havre; from Paris to Marseille
by French stagecoach; and then to Italy via boat. He first lived near the Piazza San Croce
where he had an upper apartment and a studio in a shed in the building's courtyard.
The Powers family soon moved to a place more conducive to work in the Parish of St Barnabas
not far from the Piazza Maria Antonia. (now the Piazza dell'Indipendenza) Here, he had
an indoor studio and a place to receive visitors. Then they moved across the Arno
to the Via delle Fornaci between the Ponte alla Carraia and the Porta Romana, where
he had a studio on the ground floor and apartments on the third and top floor with a
rooftop deck that overlooked the Goldoni Theatre. Next to the studio, there was a shared garden,
where the Powers family grew their own vegetables, including American corn.
A gate from the garden opened into the Via Romana, and the entrance to the Boboli Gardens was
opposite this gate.
As currently planned, Book III of From Ireland with Letters -- to be researched and written
in the Spring of 2012 -- will be created with a series of conversations between Liam O'Brien and
Máire Powers as they meet and compare their lives and research. Liam will share what he
knows of the life of Hiram Powers; Máire will share what she knows of The Transplantation,
Irish slavery, and the arrival of Walter Power in America.
As is apparent from his level of knowledge of the Cromwelliam
conquest of Ireland, although his primary field is 19th century American art, Liam did some
graduate work in Irish history and culture. Fittingly, since his family arrived in America in the
19th century during the potato famine, his scholarship interests have merged in the study of the
life and work of Hiram Powers. Máire is not a historian, but she grew up in a family where
the legacy of her great grandfather, who came to America after the Easter Rising, still lives
in an inherited library of his Gaelic Revival books. She has based much of her Lay on these books.
If Liam represents legendary Irish Scholars, from the Medieval period to the Gaelic Revival,
Máire represents legendary Irish harpers. From this point on, their lives will be intertwined.
Also, in the beginning of this coming year -- first returning to my own conversation-based new media works.
such as Wasting Time, Afterwards, and Part II of Paths of Memory and Painting,
then studying the conversations in Ossianic lays and how conversation and dialogue are used
in music -- an interface will be created for Book III.
As the Christmas season begins, life intertwines with art in the making of small artists gifts, the baking of Christmas cookies and breads, the bringing into the home of Christmas greens and Advent candles, and the listening to Christmas music. Christmas shopping includes Arches watercolor paper to make gifts and Christmas treats for family.
November 23, 2011
In this Thanksgiving week, I worked on the writing of Part IV of Begin With The Arrival
which fittingly closes with a brief vignette of Walter Power's arrival in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. The vignette is magical realism and is so identified by the narrator,
but following the terrible scenes of Cromwell's destruction of the Power family homes on his
march to Dungarvan, it is a way of letting the reader
know that there is some hope in the story.
Máire Powers tells the audience
that she does not know if Walter Power, the founder of her family in America, was chained
when he was sold in Marblehead, but that (according to some of the literature) on
British slave ships, the captives were chained in the hold. Then, describing the music
that she will play to conclude the performance, she asks the audience to hear
in the music that ends the performance/to imagine that when in chains -- either real or symbolic--
Walter Power walked through the streets of Marblehead with his new master,
"on this cold day in January 1694, he saw a young Puritan
woman walking with her family in the streets of Marblehead,
and she turned and looked at him with empathy.
Her name was Trial Shepherd, and
she was the woman he would marry."
In addition to an interesting, provocative, insightful look at the role of art in contemporary society,
or perhaps because of this core aspect of the exhibition, many of the works included were iconic, representing
-- through interactive or performative or surveillant approaches -- contemporary eras of
artmaking and visual culture.
For instance, I had never seen anything but a reproduction of Judy Dater's Imogen and Twinka, 1974, At
Yosemite), but there it was -- compelling, holding its place the wall. For that alone,
it is worth the trip to this exhibition.
Also included -- in addition to works by Robert Arneson, Leon Borensztein, Bruce Cannon, Carter,
Van Deren Coke, Marque Cornblatt, Viola Frey, Jack Fulton, Michael Garlington, Larry Jordan,
leonardogillesfleur, Rigo 23, and Michael Stevens -- are Lynn Hershman Leeson's ektacolor print
Constructing Roberta Breitmore, part of the documentation for her Roberta Breitmore
series of performative fictive identity; Anthony Aziz' riveting/revealing look at corporate
identity; (Corporate Edge #4 (Public Image/Private Sector) and Alan Rath's iconic in new media
practice Wall Eye #6.
And beside my own self portrait photograph from the street performance
Free Values, (performed on the streets of San Francisco on Nov. 8 - election eve, 1988)
my complete documentation for this performance is reproduced on the gallery wall.
Re-reading my own words was of particular interest because earlier this year (at
Reading the Middle Ages,
an International Graduate Student Conference hosted by the UC Berkeley Program in Medieval Studies)
this performance, in which I looked at contemporary values,
came to mind during Matthew Sergei's presentation on interactive readership in the medieval
poetry game, The Chance of the Dice.
The "values" I handed out in the course of the Free Values performance
were
rolled up and tied; the audience/readers did not know what they were getting.
As if playing an encore November 16, 2011 "All six French Suites contain a similar sequence of movements based on the rhythms of traditional French courtly dances. The sequence (which is all the word "suite" means) always contains the four essential ones, Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue, but others can be interpolated before the Gigue. On paper, this unity of construction makes the suites look similar to each other (especially when laid out in a concert program), and the thought of hearing six such sequences of the same dances might seem daunting. Yet paradoxically, it is by hearing all the suites together that attentive listeners can more easily notice the characteristics that that identify each movement's essential form, its 'substance'." Davitt Moroney, Program Notes for J.S. Bach: The Complete French Suites, Cal Performances, November 13, 2011 Imagine a brilliant musician recreating a series of works by a brilliant composer; Bach's six French Suites all experienced in one afternoon; all splendidly played on three different reproductions of antique harpsichords arrayed side by side on the stage; all built by Berkeley master craftsman John Phillips. Explaining each instrument before the playing of each Suite, the performer walked between them as if choosing partners at a minuet. The music flowed like champagne on a beautiful day in early summer. The issue of how to play the ornaments -- Bach first notated the Suites unornamented in the 1722 Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, but it was the custom for performers to create their own ornaments for such music -- is of interest to a writer of electronic literature who never knows precisely how a work will be read. When I read Begin with the Arrival my self, I watch the text move by in the way I created it -- as if viewing a film or listening to a piece of music. But I am also very aware that web readers are impatient, and it is likely that (when it becomes apparent that this is possible) they will read the work by clicking on text segments. When a reader does this, the time spent making the work flow like a piece of music will be lost. Nevertheless, each reader expects to control the work, to click at will, and that sense of control can be an important part of the reading experience in a work of new media literature. At times, there is a temptation to deny the reader clicking control of the work, but sometimes the computer fails to produce the next lexias, so it important to provide alternative ways of reading, and additionally, I do not wish to frustrate an impatient reader. At the same time, the text must of necessity move slowly enough so that the opposite does not occur. When creating works in BASIC years ago, I sometimes gave the reader the choice of the speed in which the text occurs. This was an easy and expected process when composing with BASIC. Perhaps it should be revisited. As Baroque music reminds us, from era to era, successive waves music of should not be viewed as improvements but rather as different ways of cultural expression. These issues emerged more clearly in the aftermath of Sunday's concert. If this performance was extraordinary, and indeed it was, it was the combination of the music, the opportunity to hear all of these suites at once, the fine instruments, the performative movement between the instruments, and the flawless, creative, authentic way in which Davitt Moroney played these works. In the program notes, he writes that: "Each suite does have its own inner character, and here the richness of Bach's imagination can be appreciated. Bringing out these distinctive characters within the overall concept of unity is, I feel, one of the principal responsibilities of the performer."
When -- in my recent interview with Stuart Moulthrop on Authoring Software --
the question of how a writer of new media literature can anticipate how a reader will explore
a work came up, Stuart suggested the creation of a testing program for electronic literature.
That indeed would be useful. For instance, it could tell us where the "loops" were frustrating,
or where the reader couldn't figure out how to reach the next section. But could such a program disclose
what I saw whan my work was available in local exhibitions, and I sat and watched how
it was "played"?
Contingently, in the throes of beta testing the forthcoming iPad edition of its name was Penelope,
it was necessary to take into consideration how the reading conventions on the iPad are different
from those on the web. How will a reader who grew up, so to speak, on iPad conventions, experience a
work of new media literature created at an earlier time when interface conventions were somewhat different?
Although this and the issue of how a musician chooses to ornament Bach's French Suites
are not precisely the same, in Bach's time, the audience may have been more likely to also
play themselves, and in a sense the reader of each work of electronic literature does perform the work.
And so, returning in memory to the six French Suites that Davitt played on Sunday,
I recall how, after Suite No. 1 was played, I listened so expectantly to the following Suites;
how there were certain movements I particularly wanted to hear: the Sarabandes, the Minuets; how each
time they ocurred there was a moment of heightened satisfaction.
November 11, 2011
As the second intermission begins in Begin With the Arrival and before I start writing
the last section, I am concentrating on planning an architectural model to correlate
lexia placement and timing changes. The need to correlate timing changes in a work with 200-300
lexias has engendered a visual system of
documenting the relationship of the lexias and the timing that will eventually translate into
an authoring tool. Given that Begin with the Arrival is almost finished, this is a future
project. However, now, while in the throes of the process, is a good time to envision it.
Basically I'm thinking of a large wall space using stationary pegs and small moveable
squares of lexia text. The design and size of the framework and the scale will be determined
by variables such as the amount of time each lexia stays on the screen, the number of lexias,
and the placement of lexias in relationship to each other. The use of modular information in wall-based
arrays is a conceptual art device with a distinguished history. But here it will be used to
model a process that will eventually become a computer program. This is desirable because there are
more lexias in Begin wtih the Arrival than there were in,
for instance, the "trio sonata" that concludes Paths of Memory and Paintng, and also
the writing must correlate more closely, by which I mean that in Paths, I could write
anything I wanted to, in any order, but From Ireland is more exactly based on sequential
history, so the order of the texts needs to be more precise.
The occasion -- an International Conference on the Italian Madrigal and Birthday Celebration
for Anthony Newcomb -- began with introductions from Conference Chair, Department of Music
Professor Kate van Orden. Then, in the first presentation, "Musical and Poetic Gravitas in the
late Renaissance Madrigal", Giuseppe Gerbino (Columbia University) effectively explored poetic
sound in an era where the pursuit of gravitas was a core aesthetic.
If the difficulty of setting implicitly sonorous poetry to music was apparent
in Gerbino's poetic lecture/reading, later in the afternoon, with sound clips and
through the lens of epic historical romance,
in a presentation on "Wert's Settings of Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and his Ottavo Libro a Cinque Voci
(1586))", Massimo Ossi (Indiana University, Bloomington) illustrated how music
seductively dominates words in Giaches de Wert's brilliant, composerly settings.
In between, in "What Literary Manuscripts Can Tell Us About Music: The Case of Giovambattista Strozzi
the Younger (1551-1634)," James Chater (Burgundy, France) looked at how the works and life of an artist
can be pieced together using manuscript sources, and Emiliano Ricciardi (Stanford University) explored
a series of arrays of settings of "Canzonettas and Canzonetta-Madrigals on Torquato Tasso's Rime".
The first session (Gerbino, Chater) was chaired by Kate van Orden;
the second session (Ricciardi, Ossi) was chaired by
Louise George Clubb. (U.C. Berkeley Department of Comparative Literature,
Department of Italian Studies) Chater's paper was read by the celebrated Berkeley madrigal scholar
Anthony Newcomb. What I heard was only a short part of a scholarly yet evocative occasion that
also included Madrigal scholars James Haar, Franco Piperno, Marco Bizzarini and Massimo Privitera,
among many others.
At home, I returned to Calvino, seeking in Invisible Cities,
echoes of the fine flow of Italian Renaissance poetry.
November 5, 2011
Having divided
Begin with the Arrival into what will eventually be four parts,
the making of each part perfect (in accordance with my vision) has become feasible.
To create
Part III, I used the "continuo" in a somewhat more dissonant way than in Part I
(where the whole flows like a fine song) or in Part II, where the whole is a lament.
In the margins of Part III, there are transient glosses that are brief moments of poetry but
there are also isolated lines from traditional Irish songs. Their relationship to the central lexias
is fragmented, yet Máire's audience will be very familiar with these songs.
The related ideas --
The distilled struggle with displacement and broken traditions -- that Crosson documents
in the work of the contemporary Irish poets Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella,
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal ÓSearcaigh, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson,
and Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, -- is at times
also apparent in Irish American approaches to hereditary displacement.
Along the way in the difficult process of making all the parts of Begin with the Arrival work,
there has been help from unexpected places, and I am grateful.
On Wednesday, in a working narrative poet's mood, I went to Berkeley
to hear the University Baroque Orchestra, which musician and musicologist Davitt Moroney directs,
and experienced the program through the lens of how story is revealed/played
in music -- through composers' choices of lyrics, through the relationship of words to sound,
(how Bach orchestrated two very different sets of lyrics in "Jesu meine Freude" and in "Mache dich,
mein Geist, bereit", for instance) and through the choice of what was performed for the audience.
Along the way in this enchanting program, woodland streams
returned in the flute music of Telemann and in the flute and recorder music of Loeiller de Gand;
there were the memorable words of love that Orpheus and Euridice speak to each other in Monteverdi's
Orfeo; there was Proserpine's intimate lament for her lost freedom
from Lully's 17th century opera of the same name; and the performance concluded with Rameau's
wonderful air for sailors of all genders. The soloists who performed this program
so well included Alana Mailes, (soprano) Nicholas Losorelli, (baritone) Daeun Jeong, (recorder)
and David Zhu. (flute)
For me, listening to music is very important in the process of creating polyphonic literature.
Sometimes, the influence is direct; but more often a musician's work somehow indirectly informs the
process. Or to put it another way, there
is an inexplicable transfer of understanding. For instance, at times (last week, today)
when in need of clarity, I play Davitt Moroney's beautiful recording of Bach's The Art of Fugue.
October 30, 2011
This week in
Part III of Begin with the Arrival, Cromwell is defeated at Duncannon and Waterford.
I almost have the writing of this section working, but creating the continuo text is very difficult.
The continuo is words -- not music played on the viola da gamba or harpsichord -- and these words occur only
intermittently, not continuously. But sometimes the continuo texts do set the pace of the work --
ie on either side, the briefly occurring words I inaccurately call continuo are what makes the whole work.
The process is like working on a painting that needs something, but you don't know what it is until
you put what seems like a small detail in one corner, and all of a sudden the whole painting comes alive,
so to speak.
I suppose I need to write an authoring tool or create a chart for testing the placement and timing of
the continuo text, because otherwise making it work is very time consuming, and I am weary of the process.
Nevertheless, this week there was a continuo high point, the discovery of
Frances Browne's "Songs of Our Land", which I found in a venerable 1892 edition of Henry Montgomery's
Specimens of the Early Native Poetry of Ireland. She was a 19th century Irish writer, who, like
the harper Turlough Carolan, was blind. So in Begin with the Arrival, I used a few words from "Songs of our Land"
as continuo text to introduce Carolan's "Lament for Owen Roe O'Neill".
In unlikely counterpoint to Frances Browne's:
"...ye are still left when all else has been taken
I am reading Brendan Kennelly's Cromwell.
(The message from Amazon,
"Your Amazon.com order of "Cromwell: A Poem" has shipped!" seemed repeated on my email menu
-- like the commands needed to set things in motion in some works of Interactive fiction.
"Your Amazon.com order of "Cromwell: A Poem" has shipped!" )
Kennelly's Cromwell is a disturbing read but good, very good. I'm writing something else,
a lament is one way to look at it, and am interested in the contrast. The ridding of demons
-- an appropriate topic for the beginning of All Souls Week -- is accomplished
in different ways by different artists. But sometimes Kennelly also steps into
the rhythms of ancient Irish poetry. In "A Host of Ghosts", Cromwell p.78, he writes:
"...I here suggest the bobbing sea's debris
Yet Austen's witty, satirical words of life and love in the English countryside -- so separate from the events
of the larger world stage -- are why one returns so often to her work. Works of art and literature are
sometimes enduring because they deftly convey ordinary and/or extraordinary details of the times in which
they were written or recollected, but every artist sees their era or recollected eras differently, I thought
while looking forward to seeing the exhibition
Looking at You Looking at Me
at di Rosa that includes my work of another decade along with the work of,
among other artists, Robert Arneson, Anthony Aziz, Judy Dater, Viola Frey, Jack Fulton,
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Larry Jordan, and Alan Rath.
Contingently last Sunday at the Berkeley Art Museum, I heard the University Chamber Chorus,
guest directed by Matthew Oltman, Music Director Emeritus of Chanticleer,
in an afternoon of The Art of the Masque: Dramatic Music by Henry Purcell.
The staging, the singing, and the music of violins, violas, cello, lute, trumpet, harpsichord
The libretto for Dioclesian was written by Thomas Betterton. (based on Beaumont and Fletcher)
John Dryden's challenging Prologue
was surpressed after the first performance for various reasons, one of which was that
it was thought to be critical of William of Orange's war in Ireland.
"'Oliver,' sweated William, 'I'm back from the Boyne
Brendan Kennelly writes in "Cromwell". October 20, 2011  The new drawing on the opening page of From Ireland with Letters is of Kinsale Harbor, after a drawing by Cork artist William Willes that is inserted into a map of Cork in Samuel C. Hall and Anna Maria Hall, Ireland: its scenery, character &. (London: How and Parsons, 1841) In the aftermath of Cromwell's conquest of Ireland, Kinsale was the port of departure for the slaveship that carried Walter Power and over 500 other captive Irish and Scottish children and young people to America. In part two of Begin with the Arrival, Máire's telling of this difficult story continues to be shared by Liam. He recalls the details of the negotiations, as, in parallel lexias, she tells how. while the negotiations were still in progress, a traitor allowed Cromwell and his soldiers to enter Wexford and slaughter the townspeople without mercy, I now return to the death of Owen Roe on November 6, 1649. Here -- as she catalogs the somber stories of the heroism of the Irish defense against Cromwell -- Máire will center the narrative with the music, in the way she used the Irish fiddle in the opening story of Saint Patrick. And the story in this section of Begin with the Arrival will be predominantly carried by the words and music as they are experienced by the audience. If sometimes it seems that there is more writing in this notebook then there is in the work itself, it should be remembered that From Ireland with Letters is basically a poetic narative. This notebook has been helpful in distilling the facts to the point that they can be written as poetic narrative. The epic poets knew the stories they told; they were oral history. From Ireland with Letters is to a certain extent a family history, but this history was lost in the many generations since Walter Power arrived in America in 1654. All I knew to begin with was what my grandfather Walter Powers told me about Hiram Powers. I have learned the stories through reading, then have better understood them through writing in this notebook. To review before I start writing the lexias for this section: Owen Roe O'Neill, the "wild goose" returned home from fighting for Spain, had defeated a large force at the Battle of Benburb in 1646. But in October 1649, just as an alliance with Ormande prepared the way for his Army to March against Cromwell, Owen Roe became unaccountably ill. Many historians believe that if he had lived, he would have saved Ireland. He was the brilliant and inspirational general, who was needed to unify the defense against Cromwell. Until the very end, Owen Roe was carried on a litter at the head of his troops.
"We thought you would not die we were sure you would not go,
"Lament for the Death of Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill" But it should be remembered that in the months after Waterford and Wexford, there were victories for Ireland, and there were heroes, including at Duncannon, Colonel Edward Wogan, who led an aggressive defense; at Waterford, Lieutenant-General Richard Ferrall, whom Owen Roe had sent South with 2000 experienced soldiers; and at Clonmel in 1650, Owen Roe O'Neill's nephew, Major-General Hugh Dubh O'Neill, who outwitted a traitor Under the command of Colonel Edward Wogan and strategically located for the defense of Waterford, Duncannon was the first fort in Ireland to hold out against the New Model Army. Attacked by Cromwell's son-in-law, Henry Ireton, who was reinforced by Michael Jones, Duncannon was successfully defended by a combination of ingenuity, courage and collaboration. By boat, Lord Castlehaven sent 80 horses that when mounted by the defenders of Duncannon, the New Model Army misinterpreted to be a larger army from abroad. This action, as well as the town's heroic and proactive defense of the fort, forced the withdrawal of Cromwell's Army. In late November, 1649, Cromwell and the New Model Army put Waterford to siege. But Lieutenant-General Richard Ferrall in command of a division of Owen Roe's experienced Army, forced Cromwell's retreat from Waterford. In Cromwell in Ireland, Denis Murphy writes: "On arriving before the city, Cromwell had sent a trumpeter to summon the garrison to yield upon quarter. Ferrall would give way to none to answer other than himself; he requested the trumpeter to return to his master with this result, that he was Lieutenant-General Ferrall, governor of that place, at present having 2000 of his Ulster force there; that as long as any of them did survive, he would not yield the town. The sudden appearance of the reinforcements made Cromwell change his plans." At Clonmel, Owen Roe O'Neill's nephew, Major-General Hugh Dubh O'Neill, in command of 1,500 soldiers from Counties Cavan and Tyrone, turned the tables on Cromwell's use of traitors. O'Neill was suspicious when a guard at one of the gates of Clonmel replaced Ulster Army men with his own men. The discovery of the traitor allowed O'Neill's small Army to ambush a division of The New Model Army as they rushed into the entry the traitor had provided. Hugh Dubh then built fortifications inside Clonmel and was victorious in a second battle. He did not have the forces or supplies to hold out much longer. but Hugh Dubh O'Neill and his Army escaped to fight again, and the inhabitants were given a quarter that was honored. This section will be followed by another intermission. Two more sections will comprise the rest of Begin with the Arrival. The destruction of the Powers family castles outside of Waterford, which will be related in the epic manner and the transplantation and sending into slavery of the Irish people -- ending with Walter Power's arrival in America -- for which she will return to a fiddle-centered narrative. This last part will not include all the material on Irish slavery that will eventually comprise From Ireland with Letters. The transplantation, Irish slavery and who Walter Power was will be continuing themes when Liam and Máire meet in Book III. As interludes in this week of difficult writing, continuing job searches and related worries, I took a pleasant hike along a stream where the leaves were beginning to turn gentle California autumn colors and, as is customary at this time of year, began making small paintings for Christmas presents. October 14, 2011
The search for a few phrases of Irish poetry that are exactly right for the work
has taken many not-begrudged hours this week. Surely laments for Drogheda and Wexford
were written in 1649, but we have no record of them. The reasons are obvious.
Last week, I sat on the floor of the Library, deciding which books to take home with me to
supplement Kathleen Hoagland's, 1000 Years of Irish Poetry and George Sigerson's
Bards of the Gail and Gall. Seduced by its antiquity, I took home
Specimens of the Early Native Poetry of Ireland with an introduction and running commentary
by Henry R. Montgomery. (Dublin, Hodges, Figgis, and Co., Second Edition, 1892)
In contrast, I also checked out The Penguin Book of Irish Verse,
introduced and edited by the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly. It is a bound paperback that may be
piled beside my bed other with the evidence of other quests.
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, second edition, 1981, first published in 1970)
Having once worked for the Union Catalog at the Library of Congress, the reading of bibliographic
information is as natural as a walk in the woods or the baking of bread learned in long Colorado
winters.
Kennelly -- it seems that with a lament in the voice of an immigrant
whose family have been exiled from Ireland since the seventeenth century, I trespass on the path of his
"Cromwell" -- makes the point "that Ireland was singularly untouched by the Renaissance in Europe;
her poets never drank from that particular well of inspiration". I am not sure if this is completely true;
we do not know what was lost in the hanging of the harpers and the Cromwellian destruction of
culture and churches.
"Through the woods let us roam,
(from "The Downfall of the Gael", written in 1562 by Fearflatha O'Grive who was a bard of
the O'Neills)
But sometimes it does seem -- from the flowering of medieval culture in Irish monasteries throughout Europe --
that Ireland's Renaissance was earlier and wilder.
"A Hedge of trees surrounds me;
(part of a poem found on the margin of the St. Gall manuscript in the Medieval Irish-founded monastery
in Switzerland)
During intermission conversation in the pub,
Liam also recollects the Caffe Michelangiolo in Florence where Powers' fellow artists, the Maccchiaioli, met to talk
about art and politics.
"...there is nostalgia," I respond, "for a world
where the Society of Six went painting together in the hills of California and returned to Selden Gile's
cabin, spreading their work around the room and drinking red wine while Selden cooked dinner..."
October 8, 2011
What I am trying to do in
Begin with the Arrival is to put the reader in a place of
filmic and musical reading of literature. It is something I have been doing for many years.
(Jaishree Odin compares its name was Penelope to the films of Trinh T. Minh-ha;
Sue-Ellen Case compares
name is scibe to The English Patient) In Begin with the Arrival,
a series of filmic episodes are set like light and dark jewels into the larger narrative of
From Ireland with Letters.
"He was not a man who usually cried, but he was close to tears as the music continued."
The rewarding of Nordic vision was a good omen on Thursday, the day that Swedish poet
Tomas Transtromer won the Nobel Prize. At noonhour, on that same day,
poet Robert Haas read the work of fellow poet Czeslaw Milosz. We were in the Morrison Library
against the backdrop of book-filled shelves. Admittedly at first (I am not very familiar with his work)
I did not hear what I should have heard. Original vision sometimes takes reflection and
a realization that poetry is not always what one expects. Milosz' poetry stayed with me on the way home.
October 4, 2011
A narrative poet who creates characters is likely to be immersed in the character he or she is writing.
From 2008 to 2010, it was Dorothy Abrona McCrae's return to her past as a painter of landscape
in
Paths of Memory and Painting in which I was immersed.
The years of creating this story were particularly
pleasant because I returned to painting in the hills in order to write the narrative.
In this time period, I often visited the Hearst Gallery at St Mary's College to look at the work of
William Keith and other painters of California landscape. Thus -- now immersed in Irish poetry,
history, and music -- it was a reminiscent pleasure to go this Sunday to the opening of
The Comprehensive Keith: A
Centennial Tribute at the expanded Hearst Gallery, now the St. Mary's Museum of Art;
to hear Kevin Starr's fine lecture "Thinking about William Keith - Some Centennial Considerations";
and to remember Brother Fidelis Cornelius (1877-1962) of Saint Mary's. Himself
a landscape painter, Brother Cornelius was responsible for beginning the collection of Keith's
work that resulted in this extraordinary retrospective.
I was reminded also of the need to read about the Swedenborgian religion that was a bond
between William Keith -- who for the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church painted a series of murals
of the changing seasons of California -- and many other
19th century artists, including Hiram Powers. Powers' wife, whose mother was born in Ireland,
was brought up Catholic. Elizabeth sometimes attended Mass at Santa Croce in Florence, but Powers
was a Swedenborgian, and his home was a central meeting place for other Swedenborgian artists.
Of interest, in the creation of a narrative pervaded by slavery and resistance to slavery,
are the contingent themes of the role that the Swedenborian Church played in inspiring anti-slavery
artists and writers and the core role that Irish men and women connected with the
Belfast Harp Festival, and with the United Irishmen played in opposing slavery.
United Irishmen founder Thomas Russell was an anti-slavery advocate, and Henry Joy McCracken's sister,
Mary Ann, a founding member of the Belfast Harp Society, was also a leading force in the
Belfast antislavery movement.
Hiram Powers' studio in Florence will be central in the third "book" of
From Ireland with Letters.
October 1-3, 2011
The work on part two of
Begin with the Arrival is going slowly. I have written and rewritten
both the opening words and the interface many times in the past week. There
is somewhat of a compromise between wanting to isolate the story of Cromwell's invasion of Ireland
and at the same time wanting to continue with the interface of part one because the locale and time
are the same. What I want to do is to maintain the feeling of being in the pub that worked quite
well in part one, but in some parts of the narrative focus, as the audience might do,
focus on the compelling story of Cromwell in Ireland. In the past few days, there has been some back
and forth on how to do this, but at the moment I think it is working.
At the Belfast Harp Festival, there were ten musicians from all
around Ireland, and a Welch musician. They included Arthur O'Neill, Denis Hempson, and
Charles Fanning. One of
the Irish musicians was a woman, Rose Mooney, a third prize winner at the Granard Harp Festivals.
The advertisement in the Belfast Newsletter read as follows:
"National Music of Ireland
A respectable body of the inhabitants of Belfast having published a plan for reviving the ancient music of this country,
and the project having met with such support and approbation as must ensure success to the undertaking; performers of the Irish Harp
are requested to assemble in this town on the 10th day of July next, when a considerable sum will be distributed in premiums i
n proportion to their merits.
It being the intention of the Committee that every performer shall receive some premium, it is hoped that
no harper will decline attending on account of his having been unsuccessful on any former occasion."
Whether through custom, charity, or the law at that time, Irish harpers were blind or lame and all of
the Irish harpers at the renowned Belfast Harp Festival had disabilities.
The songs that they played were collected and transcribed by Edward Bunting, who had studied music
in Drogheda, was an organist at St Anne's Church in Belfast, and lodged with Henry Joy McCracken,
a founding member of the Society of United Irishmen.
The online writer's notebook I created for
From Ireland With Letters: Prologue
was useful not only in crystallizing my thoughts about the narrative but
also in notating the research in such a way that I could return to it
at a later time.
Yet much time was spent on this notebook
that could have been spent writing the actual work.
This was partially because I was also writing about painting, making artists books, listening to music,
seeing art, and drinking beer with family,
among other things.
The documentation of these pleasant activities
may return later this year,
but for now -- listening to Cosi fan tutte on the BBC as I write this --
I plan to write only about the research for the writing and structure of
the continuation of From Ireland With Letters.
While I write this, my eyes stray to a large sheet of watercolor paper tacked to my wall
on which there are (so far) the beginnings of five attempts
at replicating the exact color of bluegreen of a lake where I hiked and painted last fall.
Below the painting, is printed a text of which only a small part reads:
If it was hard to do this while I was actually there,
I am tempted to set aside my laptop and return to this lovely activity.
Luckily F. Alberto Gallo's Music of the Middle Ages II is surprisingly compelling,
leading me to think about structuring part one of From Ireland with Letters
with the array of four lexia-spaces which
(sitting beside a trail with a lunch of bread and cheese)
I plotted in a sketch book a few days ago.
It will be somewhat more difficult than the trio sonata
that I attempted in
paths of memory and painting, but I think
that in this way the four narratives of the story can progress
like a piece of a music.
Dear reader, I will tell you next week.
The research trails this week were like a series of circular paths that start in one place, proceed eventfully,
and then return to the beginning. For instance, in my work, when structuring new media poetry,
I have looked at works of early music -- such as the concertato form used as structural inspiration
in Concerto for Narrative Data and the trio sonata form that was the structural
inspiration for part three of Paths of Memory and Painting.
But although I had been looking at the connections
between Giotto and the theory composer Marchetto da Padova, I was not aware that
early music theory composers had looked as closely at literary forms as they did.
Thus it was a fine surprise to (following a reference in Eleonora Beck's studies of artist's connections
in Padua) pick up Gallo's
Music of the Middle Ages II
and read about the influence of literary forms on early music.
Gallo makes the point that
the intellectualization of composition using established literary forms was important in changing
attitudes about the seriousness of secular music. "The polyphonic and 'poly-textual' motet
is the genre most symbolic
of medieval music and its analogies with language" he writes," and it is the first form in which music
is not only a pleasant sound but a way of seeing reality." (p.22)
His descriptions are among the most useful I have read in visualizing the
polyphonic composer's process. "The liturgical melody acts as the road laid down in advance
along which the piece must develop...," he explains, and how to do this becomes so much clearer.
Or, and here he is quoting Franco of Cologne: "Whoever wishes to compose a conductus
must first make up a song, the most beautiful possible, and then use it as the tenor on which
to build his polyphony." (p. 18)
Also of interest given that new media poetry may at times use elements of architecture
are the relationships to architecture which Gallo describes. "The hoquetus was a piece
for two of more voices, which systematically alternated between singing and pausing,
so that the voices partly overlapped with each other and partly created intervals
of silence, a style liked to 'tiles on the roof of a building.'" (p. 12)
Gallo explains the relationship of polyphonic techniques to literary devices of the time,
using as an example a poetical acrostic prayer to the Virgin Mary and noting that
polyphonic composers used notes of the existing melody
in the same way that this poet used the letters of Maria's name.
That then was the first circular path -- from literature to music; from music to literature.
Using a structure somewhat akin to the trio sonata used in paths
but with four lexias spaces, I would like this composition to work somewhat like a piece of music
-- not exactly of course; they are different art forms and works created by school of
Notre Dame and Ars Nova composers were probably not exactly comparable to the forms of classic poetry
that they studied.
British persecution against Irish musicians began under Henry VIII (if not earlier)
and continued with Queen Elizabeth I's 1603 proclamation
against the Irish: "to exterminate by marshal law all manner of Bards, Harpers,"
and then more explicitly "to hang the harpers wherever found, and destroy their instruments".
It was continued under Cromwell with the destruction of the organs in Irish Catholic Churches.
As is not unusual, the content and the search for interface structure for
From Ireland with Letters have converged.
On an unmarked trail in search of a four part interface for a narrative,
I began this week with (a diversion?) Bach's four part chorales;
continued with -- heard this week on Lucie Skeaping's Early Music show on the BBS --
how different Bach's concerto for four harpsichords sounded from the Vivaldi concerto
for 4 violins on which it was based; (personally I am not sure that Vivaldi would have
been happy about this - no need to explain why) continued with the music and notes in
Davitt Moroney's fine recording of Music
from the Borel Manuscript; (the compositions are circa 1650-1670!) and returned to the melody
I laid down in the Prologue of From Ireland with two (as yet unread) books checked out from the Library on Friday.
They are:
Susan Gedutis, See You at the Hall, Boston's Golden Era of Irish Music and Dance,
Working on the different colors of lakes in the watercolor I am creating that now has nine rectangular
small paintings of lakes on the same large sheet of arches watercolor paper.
Returning to the
Prologue to From Ireland. Much of the work this week has been in the colors of the
background of the lines that key the separate narratives and move slowly side by side
beside the main lexia. I had not been able to quite make the musical quality of the movement of
these lines apparent, and thought the problem was in the timing. But when I tried varying the colors
of the backgrounds, I realized that part of the problem was that what I was doing was not really apparent to the reader.
How color is used with text, can be somewhat equivalent to how the basso continuo works/might be written in a piece of music;
often the continuo is not really apparent to the casual listener, (whether intentional or not) but, among other variables, how it is instrumented
could make a difference in how apparent it is, if one was composing or directing a piece of music.
So far, the Prologue isn't exactly what I want. One cannot simply change the colors -- as in a
painting they must work together. And the "music"
of the lines in From Ireland is a dance between the two characters, so that also must be taken
into account.
While working on this poetic textual dance music, I am reading See You at the Hall, Boston's Golden Era of Music and Dance
by Susan Gedutis (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004.) Gedutis brings alive the eras
when couples met and danced in the Boston dance halls where Irish American and Irish musicians played.
Liam's family came to America during the potato famine and lived in Boston, and (working on his narrative)
I want to know more about the lives of his family and the music they
listened to.
Many of the Boston Irish dance halls started in the 1920's, were closed during the World War II.
The music started again in 1946. A few years later, Liam's grandparents met at one of the dance halls in Dudley Square:
the Intercolonial, the Hibernian, Winslow Hall, the Dudley Street Opera House, the Rose Croix, where single men and women,
from Irish American families or newly arrived from Ireland were sure to find a neighbor from the old country, or even a job or a romance.
In the old world, marriages were still sometimes arranged, but one could go to the dance halls and begin a courtship.
You could meet someone whose family came from County Cork at the time of the potato famine
and so did your family, but you never knew this until you were dancing and talking at the Hall. That is how Liam's grandparents
met in the early 1950's.
Probably there was one Hall where people
whose families were from Country Cork gathered, but I don't know as yet which one.
The dance halls were also a nurturing place for Irish music. Perhaps Liam's Grandparents heard Tom Senier's Emerald Isle Orchestra
at Winslow Hall or Matty Toohy's band. Senier was born in Galway; Toohy was from Country Kerry. Toohy worked at Harvard University by day;
Saturday nights he played at the Dudley Square Opera House. Then there was Johnny Bresnahan's band, which played Winslow Hall, Johnny Powell's band,
which played at the Intercolonial, and the famous accordian players Joe Derrane and Billy Caples.
Irish American songs and the songs that musicians born in Ireland brought with them when they
came to America were sometimes quite different. But both traditional Irish songs and Irish American Songs were played at the dance halls.
As described by Eugene O'Curry in his 1873 book, While Liam -- having seen a poster advertising Máire Powers' next performance -- is remembering how his Grandparents met in Boston at "The Hall", Máire Powers is working on the narrative song she will soon perform for the first time. Hugh Shields observes in Narrative Singing in Ireland, (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993) that not all Irish lays were about the early Irish Fianna. Some were concerned with themes that might also appear in romantic ballads, or with laments, or with genealogy; some took a magical view of Irish history, creating, for instance, a dialogue between Oisin and St Patrick. Spoken word was also a part of Irish lays. Shields notes that there was a tradition of ending a lay with speech -- "in this way the speaker announces a return to 'real' or 'non-ritual' time at the song's end". And "expressive descent into speech" was sometimes an integral part of the song. (p. 121) And there is a blurring of the distinction between narrator and subject in Irish lays that is particularly interesting to a new media poet. "With little difficulty", Shields notes, "Oisin also came early to be credited with the authorship of the songs he thus narrates. Yet in what he narrates, the objectivity of third-person heroic discourse is little disturbed by this author-participant." (p. 14) Máire will call the work she is composing a lay because that is the form of Irish narrative song which it will most resemble. She/I are working out the details of its composition and performance. Tradition is followed when possible, but it is a contemporary lay that takes into account the performer's skills and the narrative itself.
"The hand-held Irish harp she also played Heroic song is traditionally accompanied by plucked or bowed instruments, Shields observes; "...it is the common supposition that a harp would have accompanied the medieval Irish singer." (p. 17) The time of introduction of the fiddle to Ireland is not clear. Flood says it is documented as early as the 7th century; other sources put it later. But Máire is most comfortable with the fiddle, which she has played since childhood. Thus she will use both the harp and the fiddle in her performance. And so this week I listened with pleasure to John Hartford playing "Big Rock Candy Mountain" and observed the different ways he used his fiddle to accompany his voice. It was May 24, 2000 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, when legendary country musicians gathered for Down from the Mountain. " Once finding himself very tired ", Saint Francis " desired a little music to waken the happiness of the spirit; and for religious modesty he did not ask for it. But God that night gave him heavenly music so beautiful that Saint Francis thought he was in the other world. I believe that an angel descended playing a violin, because this is what painters believe, as I remember singing in many famous oil paintings." I was in the music library when I read these words on page 8 of Eleonora Beck's paper "Revisiting Dufay's Saint Anthony Mass and Its Connection to Donatello's Altar of Saint Anthony of Padua". (Music in Art 26:102, Spring-Fall 2001, pp. 5-19) It was one of those days when my copier card did not contain enough funds to copy the article, so I wrote the quote in my notebook. Now, confronted by my admittedly not always legible handwriting, I realize that I will have to return to verify the quote and to make sure that it is Vincenzo Rota's footnote to his poem L'incendio del tempio di S. Antonio di Padova. The connection between Eleonora Beck's paper and the interface for the next part of From Ireland is an intuitive trail of structure in Medieval and Renaissance music and art, which I began with Concerto for Narrative Data, continued in Parts II and III of Paths of Memory and Painting, and still follow. As usual, one research trail leads to another and another. (David Fallows' publications; how many St Anthony masses for how many St Anthonys, for instance and perhaps not as far afield as it may sound, how many Catholic Irish lords were in France in the 17th century) But research for the creation of a narrative is somewhat different from scholarly research. And I, the poet who will soon set the meeting of Máire Powers and Liam O'Brian in motion, follow a poet's research trails, as I simultaneously work on the interface for the central part of the story and consider the intuitive connection between minuets and the Irish set dances -- both alluded to in the lines interface that takes place to the right of the main lexia in the Prologue for From Ireland with Letters. Writing about the structure of Irish Dance music, in Traditional Music in Ireland, (Cork, Ireland: Ossian Publications, 1978, p. 27) Irish musician Tomás O'Canainn observes that there is a tendency to concentrate on a few notes of the available scale "and return to these again and again throughout the tune". But when played by an expert player, the result is "a tune which attains a unity of purpose and a build-up of tension eminently satisfying.." On the evening of my return from the library, I listened to Guillaume Dufay's beautiful Mass for St. Anthony of Padua. (Pomerium) Sometimes, there is a gift at the end of a long research trail. February 18, 2011
Today was a fine rainy day to begin reading Muirchú Moccu Machthéni's Life of Saint Patrick.
And so on a stormy morning in Northern California, I went to the library in search of Saints.
First, in the Music Library I verified the words about the music that came one evening to Saint Francis and
pondered the difference between "dreamy" and "heavenly", between "seeing" and "singing" -- the mistakes I had made in
transcribing my handwriting that are now corrected in the previous post.
We are an earthy people, I thought, contemplating my mistakes and remembering Judge Woolsey's words about Ulysses
("it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring")
as I headed for the main library in search of what happened when Saint Patrick returned to Ireland.
Primary threads -- that link the stories of Walter Power, who arrived in Massachusetts in 1654
as an Irish slave, and his descendent the artist Hiram Powers --
are slavery and opposition to slavery.
Liam will begin this part of the narrative when Hiram Powers begins to create The Greek Slave in 19th century Florence. Tracing
the creation and travels of this sculpture, he is reading Hiram Powers' letters.
Máire will begin with Saint Patrick's story: his slavery in Ireland, his return to Ireland, and
how his teaching and actions brought a tradition of respect for freedom to Ireland.
This is the story that Liam will hear her perform.
February 23, 2011
Without an understanding of sean-nós singing, Tomás O'Canainn
tells us, in Traditional Music in Ireland,
a performer will not understand Irish music, and he bids us listen as in his chapter
"Sean-nós Singing", he, an Irish Uilleann piper, takes us on a journey of songs of tragedy
and songs of love, dwelling particularly on the songs of Irish male singers' encounters with beautiful women in so many places
along the roads they traveled and on the different meanings of love lyrics in Ireland.
" In the small rural communities in which it developed, the sean-nós was very much more than entertainment,"
O'Canainn writes.
" It contained among its large repertoire the religious songs of a people
who were not allowed the luxury of public devotion, their work songs and songs of love, their
humorous songs and the stories of local tragedies whose horror had imprinted
itself on the minds of the small community. Here too were the thinly disguised songs of rebellion,
the glorification of past heroes coupled with a message of hope for a new awakening, when the Prince would come from across the sea
to free the people. The singer would tell, too, of the simple local happenings, perhaps adding a new dimension of fantasy to the event
to provide the heroic element so necessary for an oppressed people.
In this situation the sean-nós singer was not performing, but giving expression to the shared experiences
and hopes of the audience..." (pp. 79-80)
Sometimes during the performance, the sean-nós singer's audience responds with good wishes, compliments, or good-natured banter,
and sometimes during the performance, the singer might sit among the audience. Máire, however, will not sit in the audience
on the evening Liam first hears her. In singing a lay without the melismatic ornamentation
characteristic of sean-nós and in using an instrumental accompaniment, she is not a sean-nós singer.
But perhaps she will sit in the audience when, in a later performance, she sings the story of how Walter Power meets Trial Shepherd.
But, as Thomas O'Loughlin explains and asks us to consider in Discovering Saint Patrick, (NY/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005)
our spiritual lives and the role of science in our civilization -- and thus how we experience miracles -- are very different from
the experience and understanding of miracles in the world of the Middle Ages.
So I am not yet sure how Máire Powers' will tell Patrick's story.
Perhaps she will read Muirchú's Vita, yet choose to base her lay on St Patrick's own writings
and on the legends about Saint Patrick that have been handed down for generations, the stories which her own Mother told her.
Yet these stories will have some relationship to Muirchú's account of Patrick's life.
This is within the tradition of Irish narrative singing.
It should be remembered that the narrative I compose will not set
forth Máire's lay as a whole but rather will be experienced by the reader through selected quotes from Máire's work, through her research
into Irish slavery and her research and
thoughts about the life of Saint Patrick. It will be experienced in another way through Liam's account of what he heard:
his experience of the performance as a whole, what he remembers of the words and music of her lay, and how it relates to his own research on Hiram Powers'
sculpture, The Greek Slave.
March 1, 2011
For this interface, it will probably not be possible to recreate the structure of the lost early music
as composed in Medieval Ireland. But the idea of such a musical structure is looked to as inspiration,
I thought as I considered the problems and possibilities of an interface for
the part of From Ireland with Letters that will be composed of
four side by side lexias which progress separately yet together, as does a piece of music.
Before I beginn writing I need to think about both the interface and the writing, so that they work
together.
In
Part III of
Paths of Memory and Painting , there is primarily one voice and the tone of each of the three
lexias is somewhat similar. This is not the case in From Ireland, yet it will need to cohere as a whole --
a starting point to remember before I begin writing.
Recollected in this respect, was the fine range of percussive sounds that issued from a stage during
the Eco Ensemble's performance of Beat Furrer's work that I heard at Cal last month.
I particularly remember the visual way the instruments were arranged on the stage, how each performer worked to
create each moment of sound, how the work cohered.
And I remembered how a few weeks ago, Davitt Moroney sandwiched three works by William Byrd and Purcell's organ works
between dances by two different composers, so that in his program, there were four distinct yet related composer "voices"
played by one musician. It is not the usual way to look at such a beautifully conceived and played program of organ works.
Nevertheless, there are similarities between the way a writer
becomes a character and the way an experienced musician -- who at the time of playing seems almost to become the composer --
presents the audience with a carefully selected array of different works of music.
March 10, 2011
Máire's lay will begin in the mountains and forests of Ireland, where a slave, who will escape
and then return to Ireland, is herding and pasturing his master's sheep.
There was rain,
"icy coldness", snow, and no shelter where Patrick was sent to work. But he would wake up before daylight and begin to pray.
In the words of Saint Patrick: "And it was there of course that one night
in my sleep I heard a voice saying to me: 'You do well to fast: soon you will
depart for your home country.' And again, a very short time later, there was a voice prophesying: 'Behold, your ship is ready.'"
Ship as slave ship. Ship as vehicle of rescue.
The words are from Saint Patrick's story in his own words, his Confessio.
The scene -- Patrick, like the shepherds of old in the Christmas story,
herding sheep in winter in the Irish countryside -- is how Máire will begin her lay.
Was thinking about the conjunction of words and interface in hypertextually disclosing this story when I went to the opening of Sonya Rapoport's exhibition at Kala last week. It was a wonderful gathering, with many old friends and the exhibition itself museum quality. A visual arts Céilí featuring Sonya's informative-intense work which was and is both intellectual and beautiful. Remembered the room she and I and Abbe Don shared -- each of us with a separate installation -- at the Richmond art Center exhibition in 1989, first thinking about the visual aspect of each our works and then about the different ways we created computer-mediated narratives. For its name was Penelope, the work I showed in that exhibition, I used a photographer's vision to create a narrative about a conceptual photographer and the alternative art world in which she worked. The interface was a series of "files" based on books of The Odyssey. ("Dawn", "A Gathering of Shades", "That Far Off Island", "Fine Work and Wide Across", "Rock and Hard Place", and "Song") The reader selected which file to read, but within each file the lexias were produced at the will of the computer. Not exactly what I want to do in From Ireland, but I began to think more clearly about organizing the story around each part of Máire's lay -- evoking the tradition of epic poetry told in the public community space of the Internet -- which I used in 1986 when I began telling Uncle Roger online on Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL and which in turn inspired its name was Penelope. March 17, 2011
Today - St Patrick's Day -- is the anniversary of the day I formally began the
research for From Ireland with Letters. In family tradition, I met my son at a local brewery
for celebratory St Patrick's Day green
Beer and remembered the words I wrote a year ago:
"A fine day to be honoring family!
Most of Máire's
making of music has been with a group of Celtic musicians who are well known
in the community. They regularly play the local clubs and Festivals and have a good community
following. Their work incorporates more contemporary influences than the lay which she
is creating on her own, and they have just released an album. They perform and dress informally.
The group leader, with whom Máire was once involved, favors black pants, black jacket, and teeshirt.
Máire usually wears the traditional white or green Aran sweater and pants.
But either she will perform her lay in the grey garb that the harpers wore in the Harp Festival of 1792:
"'It may be interesting for the reader to know something of the personal appearance of these last
representatives of a class so famous in song and history,'" Charlotte Milligan Fox
(Annals of the Irish Harpers, NY: Dutton, 1912 p. 106 ) quotes Edward Bunting as writing.
"'They were in general clad in a comfortable homely manner in drab-coloured or
grey cloth of coarse manufacture. A few of them made an attempt at splendour by wearing silver
buttons on their coats...'"
or she will perform in a emerald green silk dress.
March 21, 2011
Thinking of the Prologue in terms of a "Ritornello" that introduces theme(s) in
more of an early music sense, I have gone even further back in time, reading (in Giulio Cattin, Music of
The Middle Ages I, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984, translated by
Stephen Botterill) about the Medieval music practice of tropes and troping --the adding of words
or music to existing works -- and wondering how this might work in using some of the
text of the Prologue to From Ireland with Letters as a kind of pre-existing
tapestry to embroider on.
Presumably the early Irish lays because they were oral, also introduced variations, but
what might be a little different here is that I will be working
with my own text in the Prologue, rather than adding words or music to an
existing text by another artist. So, as I have in the past in works such as
its name was Penelope, I'm also creating new media literature using the idea of memory,
how we remember repeated phrases and incidents in ways that are not necessarily
sequential and can be repetitive.
Thus I could take a passage from the Prologue such as
It was early autumn, a time that for him
His Father's family was from County Cork.
or
The intangible similarity, Liam thought,
and use such passages in Begin with as incidents and ideas that will
be remembered and embroidered on in Liam's thoughts as he listens to Máire begin her lay
in a local club not far from his University office.
March 28, 2011
Last week, the week when I began actually creating the Interface for Behold,
I went to a few sessions of
Reading the Middle Ages, an International
Graduate Student Conference
hosted by the UC Berkeley Program in Medieval Studies. It was a gathering where the conjunction of oral
literature and
reading in the Middle Ages was set forth
in a pageant of stories, literary devices and scholarly interpretations that transcended its
campus lecture hall setting, (gray day, rain outside the window)
as now taken for granted ideas of reading -- different ways of reading, oral reading,
reading to oneself -- were explored by panelists, moderators, and respondents.
On Friday, in a panel moderated by UC Berkeley Professor of Rhetoric and Celtic Studies, Daniel Melia,
later editions of Chaucer's 14th century The Canterbury Tales --
approaches to the poet and his work in a different era -- set the stage for reoccurring themes
of Chaucer's work as a key to
the imagining/understanding of the experience of literature in the Middle Ages.
(presenter: Devani Singh, Trinity College, Oxford)
Using textual analysis to reveal what the writers themselves said about their work,
Hélène Haug, (Université
catholique de Louvain, Belgium) presented cogent evidence that in the Middle Ages many
written texts were meant to be read aloud. An oral use of manuscripts was also illustrated
in Amelia Garcia's
(Simon Fraser University, Department of English) presentation on a Medieval Bestiary:
how the lives of animals were used as a central focus in teaching
the living of human lives; how written bestiaries were carried into communities and read aloud.
Sean Curran, UC Berkeley, Department of Music, gave a dense
lecture which -- interspersed with lyrical phrases and
informal performances of motets by the presenter and his friends in the Department of Music
-- evoked issues of motet words, notation, and performance in
a sort of Medieval Céilí. And the panel closed with a summary by
Erik Born, UC Berkeley, Department of German, as well as audience questions.
In a panel moderated by Emily Thornbury, Assistant Professor of English, UC Berkeley,
on Saturday morning Chaucer returned in a discussion of the "Summoner's Tale",
his earthy response to his own "Friar's Tale".
(presenter: Blair Citron, UC Davis, Department of English)
And a paper on "Crashing the Text in Medieval Baghdad" looked at satire and unexpected
bawdy comedy in Arab Medieval texts.(Emily Selove, UCLA, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures)
I had lately been reviewing the text of my own Uncle Roger. First told in an online community
situation, Uncle Roger is an early work
interspersed with bawdy occurrences, where in Part One, during the course of a dream-laced night
after, the narrator replays
a party in dream and memory fragments, and in Part Three the story is disclosed with
randomly generated screens of text. (I programmed this by numbering each lexia
and then using a pseudo-random number generator to produce the texts in varying orders.)
Thus, Matthew Sergei's (UC Berkeley, Department of English)
talk on interactive readership in The Chance of the Dice was of particular interest.
In this work created by a medieval poet, fictional/semi-fictional texts were written and numbered.
Each text was produced by a throw of the dice, so that as each player received a text,
their character was defined, and in the whole process, a kind of story was generated.
Respondent Kenneth Fockele, UC Berkeley, Department of German
I was only able to attend a few sessions but look forward to following up on the work of
some of the other presenters. Would particularly like to follow up on Bridget Wheartys
(Stanford University, Department of English)
work on Lydgate's Fall of Princes and on Deirdre Jackson's
(British Library, Department of Manuscripts) work on the Cantigas de Santa Maria.
And it was a fine surprise to learn that Dan Melia is writing a book on Saint Patrick!
A draft interface page for Begin with the Arrival has been created, It works somewhat
like file III of paths of memory and painting but there are four instead three lexia spaces
side by side. Have decided what
the basic narrative of each lexia space is and now need to write a few lexias for each space to see how
this will work. The four tracks
as they are currently conceived are:
1. What actually happened to Walter Power from the time of his birth
through the first year or two of servitude in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
This part of the narrative needs to create something of the feel of Walter's voice.
It will have to be clear that it is Máire's conjecture.
However, at this point, I want to give the story more life by presenting both Walter Power and
Hiram Powers as real characters, as opposed to showing their lives only as seen through the eyes of
Liam and Máire.
2. Máire's composition of her lay. This narrative track will involve the histories and sources she
looks at, how she decides to present the material, and details about her own life.
3. Liam's experience of the lay he hears Máire sing in a local club.
This narrative track will also include how he intertwines what he hears
with his own research and life.
4. Hiram Powers life in the first years in Italy up through 1842, including the beginning of the
creation of The Greek Slave. There is much more documented material, so this will be
easier to do in Hiram's voice than it will be to do Walter Power's voice.
Relatedly, it is of interest to look at
how Medieval manuscripts, which are often very visual, dealt with complex information
Thanks to a url on a bookmark provided by Deirdre Jackson at Reading the Middle Ages, I was able to
do this using the searchable
Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts created by the British Library.
Searching for "glossing" produces some interesting results!
April 12, 2011
I now begin to research more thoroughly the Power family in Ireland in the 17th century in order to
look at who Walter Power might have been. Am beginning with the most riveting
story: Lord John Power, his wife Giles Fitzgerald, and the destruction of their castles, which they
defended against Cromwell in 1649.
Here is the information about John Power's family from
Gabriel O'C Redmond, An historical memoir of Poher, Poer, or Power
With an Account of The Barony of Le Power and Coroghmore, County Waterford,
Dublin: Office of "The Irish Builder", 1891
"John Power was the eldest son of Nicholas Power, the eldest son, Baron of Dunisle,
Lord of Kilmedan, obiit 1st April, 1635. By his wife Elenor, dau. of Thomas Purcel,
Baron of Loughmoe, he had issue three sons - John (of whom presently); Nicholas; and
Walter Power, who married a dau. of ----- Grant, Esq., of Curlody - and a dau. Elenor,
who married Nicholas Power, of Kilballykiltie.
I have already looked at John ("of whom presently") and thus will look at his parents and siblings.
Haven't done this for a while but have always liked the
juxtaposition of new media literature with hand-crafted objects.
Sometimes everything all comes together, and it is good without much work;
other times it is months before
the piece works. How long it will take isn't predictable,
but the time must be spent. So, finally I like
the title page for
The Prologue
and the work unfolds in a satisfactory way. It took four months!
I had to hear the beautiful flute and recorder pieces that the University Baroque Ensemble played on
Saturday to realize that on the title page, I was not showing the reader the sound of words.
dark green color of the ocean And the work unfolds in a satisfactory way... There was a problem that some of the lexias were too long, but I didn't want to increase the number of "lines" in the interface, which I thought would need to be done if I broke some of the lexias into two parts. On Friday, I went to hear Stanford Professor of Musicology and Director of the ensemble Cut Circle, Jesse Rodin, lecture at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Music on "Pacing as Form in Fifteenth-Century Music". I was interested (for obvious reasons) in his approach to the role of pacing in the Renaissance music he has performed and recorded. Unexpectedly, there was something that I heard briefly in the music he played from Cut Circle's fine recordings of Joaquin De Pres and his contemporaries that provided a solution to the problem. If I broke up the lexias that were too long in such a way that one part was short and moved quickly to a longer part, I could use one "line" to interface two lexias. The result was both melismatic and more dramatic. Sometimes the harp and voice together and other times the fiddle alternating with her voice. as if everything in her life was linked to the moment the words with which he dedicated the book the intangible similarity valleys and mountains that the artists of the Hudson River school had painted outside, the church bells had begun to ring On Saturday, under the direction of Davitt Moroney, there was the pure pleasure of early music well played by the University Baroque Ensemble. Evocative of woodland streams, wildflowers picnic baskets, and champagne, in the UBE's program this spring there was the sound of flutes and recorders in the music of Telemann, Bach, Vivaldi and Blavet -- reminding me that ultimately it is the beauty of the music that is important, in whatever way it is created. In counterpoint, the program concluded with a challenging interpretation of Bach's seductively instrumented, puritanical Cantata about sinful experience: 'Widerstehe doch der Sunde'. It was Cal Day, and among many other things there was also an Electronic Sound Garden, coordinated by composer Sivan Eldar. (where audio and brook ran in polyphonic score) Later in the day I listened to a fine program of Gospel music by the University Gospel Chorus under the direction of D. Mark Wilson, who reminded us of the role of Gospel music in our history and beliefs -- while sitting outside, we in the audience enjoyed and participated in the music.
The Prologue, then, is a hybrid of an electronic manuscript and a polyphonic
work of music. There is no reason that it cannot be this. But I would
like Behold, the part of the work which follows the Prologue, to work in somewhat the
same way that the third file of Paths of Memory and Painting works.
It is not a problem that there are four lexia spaces in Behold because there could be four
instruments playing in a trio sonata. Essentially, rather than one lexia space representing
the basso continuo, as was the case in paths, in Behold, there will be two basso
continuo lexia spaces. Already, having designed a draft first page,
I can see that it will be easier to write this part than it was to write and code the troublesome
Prologue.
The largest area of research that remains for this part of the work is the reading of Prendergast's
The Cromwellian settlement of Ireland
and other things about Cromwell that some potent ancestral memory urges me to avoid.
As if joining the "Wild Geese" Irish at the French court, I would rather listen to music
and secretly continue the notebook of small drawings and paintings of wildflowers.
Late this morning I was on a trail
doing some sketching and in the shame of wildflower painting, closed the book
everytime someone passed the place where I was sketching.
I need to listen to music, but don't know yet know what music to listen to.
The work needs to be serious enough to convey the themes of the time Saint Patrick spent as a slave
and
Cromwell's devastation of Ireland, yet at the same time
Liam is sometimes thinking the things one would think in a local pub.
May 2, 2011
Began the writing for Begin with the Arrival. Very happy to actually begin writing again after months of editing and
interface tweaking. The idea is good: Máire's lay conveyed through how Liam experiences
it; through selected lines of song; through her recollection of the composition process;
and with a background of the lives of Walter Power and Hiram Powers --
all these things running in parallel lexia spaces, so that like a piece of music, the reader
experiences them together.
As is often the case, I needed some things to help me begin: the fine spring weather, the
enjoyable unstructured task of painting by hand, the listening to music. On Friday it was the
University Baroque Ensemble's more complete reprise of their Cal Day performance -- their
conveyed understanding of the music, their rapport with their instruments, and the program itself.
It was perfectly set out, with seamless contrasts between the clear simplicity of woodwind melody,
the echoing unusual phrases of Rosenmuller's Sonata Settima and -- as if we were in a
Hudson River landscape, "storm approaching") the beautifully played Telemann concerto in E minor for flute,
recorder, and strings.
UBE Director Davitt Moroney looks at painting in connection with music, and although the music is of course
primary, this communicated visual/narrative aspect suffuses the program. And so, as if I were in a Bay
Area Florence having ventured briefly from my studio, there is music, and then I return to writing.
On Saturday, the respite from writing was a drawing hike where I sat in
a most beautiful place, drank coffee from a thermos, ate homemade apple cake, and drew...
And on Sunday, I returned to Patrick. Máire's lay is not primarily about Saint Patrick,
but she sets the stage with his experience of his life as a slave and with an exploration of the
ancient Forest of Foclut.
I reread the pages in Thomas O'Loughlin's Discovering Saint Patrick that describe
biographical sources and noted a few texts that might actually be included in the lay,
such as the words written by Abbot Cellanus of Péronne, who probably lived in the
late seventh century:
Brightening our darkness with the light of faith,
It is, O'Loughlin writes, "the first case of Irishmen taking the memory of Patrick abroad
as part of their own memory and identity."
May 7, 2011
Today I went to Marin and hiked along a beautiful stream, where amidst tall grass and
blue flowers, I continued to draw. The project is a new media poet's exercise in creating lexias with
small drawings of wildflowers.
Began charting the lexias for Behold. Each lexia is a separate file and thus
must have a name, so that it can be called by the code. So the top file is "behold.html" and it calls
4 different lexias:
"power1.html", "maire_lay1.html", "liam_lay1.html", and "hiram1.html". These files will continue as
"power2.html", "maire_lay2.html", "liam_lay2.html", "hiram2.html", and so on....
There were other things I should have been working on on Thursday, but in the morning I took my wildflower
sketch book on a green-with-new-grass trail, where I sketched white flowers and dark blue-green leaves.
And then -- whether escape or research or because entranced by the creative rhyming,
the rapidly flowing lines,
the alliteration, the painterly words, the love of the land -- I reread a book
I have had for quite a few years: Kathleen Hoagland, 1000 Years of Irish Poetry
(Old Greenwich, CT: Devon-Adair, 1981) and looked also at George Sigerson's
Bards of the Gail and Gall.
(New York: Scribner's, 1907)
Irish poetry begins with the words of Amergin, the legendary Milesian druid poet,
who, to stop a magic wind, wrote The Incantation. The opening lines are:
"Fain we ask Errin
In the appendix, Sigerson explains that it is composed in
"Conaclon", a form in which the end word of one line rhymes to the first line of the following line.
The poem is ancient, although the exact date is not known. Hoagland also includes The Incantation
but starts her book with two other poems attributed to Amergin: The Mystery
and Invocation to Ireland.
beginning words from Invocation to Ireland
"I invoke the land of Ireland. closing words from The Mystery
"Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?" The most difficult poems were written during the 17th century. Not much art and music remains from that time of the devastation of Ireland, not much, but there are these poems. When I read them, I heard the voices of seventeenth century Ireland: wistful, mornful, questioning, harrowing. Thus I will quote from them in From Ireland. They are The Flight of the Earls written by Andreas Mac Marcuis in 1607; ("Who shall break our heavy chains?") and Geoffrey Keating's Farewell to Ireland. ("Best wishes to her truest, Her blue of bluest mountains, My love to those within her, Her lakes and linns and fountains.") Keating was a Priest who had to hide in a cave, later traveled in disguise, and wrote a history of Ireland. The most harrowing poem, the poem that might also have been written by Walter Power or his fellow enslaved passengers on The Goodfellow before they were taken from Ireland, is Shaun O'Dwyer of the Glen written in 1651. Shaun O'Dwyer was Colonel John O'Dwyer, who soon afterwards left Waterford for Spain with 500 followers. But, it is spring in California, and today it is these lines of Irish poetry that are on my mind:
"Mellow tunes ever flowing
(from The Isle of Delight)
and: (from the Fionn era) "Where is sweetest music found?" May 20-22, 2011
It has been a week of fine "woodland surprises". One came from
a Healy, an evocative reminder of studying watercolor painting and art history
with Arthur Kelly David Healy at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Living in New Hampshire, Máire Powers and Liam O'Brien
are very aware of the beautiful environment in which they live, as also are Vermonters.
Thus desciption of place will be a part of both of their narratives in From Ireland with Letters.
And I will return to (or remember) the words in this notebook
when Máire Powers sings of Patrick's captivity.
Ancient Irish Forests probably began with juniper, dwarf willow, and birch. And then came oak and elm, hazel, Scots pine, alder, ash, and yew. They were protected by law in Medieval times, according to A History of Irish Woods, by Back on the Map, which is a project of the Woodland Trust "to create a record of ancient and long-established woodland in Northern Ireland for the first time." This week I went in search of the Forest of Foclut which Patrick mentions in his Confessio: "And after a few years I was again in Britain with my parents [kinsfolk], and they welcomed me as a son, and asked me, in faith, that after the great tribulations I had endured I should not go an where else away from them. And, of course, there, in a vision of the night,I saw a man whose name was Victoricus coming as it from Ireland with innumerable letters, and he gave me one of them, and I read the beginning of the letter: 'The Voice of the Irish', and as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at that moment to hear the voice of those who were beside the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea, and they were crying as if with one voice: 'We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us." According to The Voices from the Forest of Fochluth" on Library Ireland, (From The Wonders of Ireland by P. W. Joyce, 1911) early sources for the location being the vicinity of the village of Foghill in County Mayo include: John O'Donovan, ed, The Genealogies, Tribes, and Customs of Hy-Fiachrach, Irish Archeological Society, 1844 and John , The life and writings of St. Patrick, Dublin: Gill & Son, 1905.
John Healy writes that
"Focluth Wood, by the western sea, is one of the most
interesting places referred to in the Lives of St. Patrick.
The name still survives in a form only slightly changed
from the original. In the Irish Tripartite the name is
Fochlad -- Caille Fochlad -- of which the present form is
beyond doubt a corruption, or rather a modification, in
accordance with well-known phonetic laws. The modern
townland of Foghill is a little to the south of Lackan Bay,
and is marked in the County map of Mayo; but in ancient
times the Woods of Fochlad extended all along the low
ground from the head of Lackan Bay to Killala, and even
some distance to the south-east of that ancient church.
There is a little to the west of the present railway line,
just before it enters Killala, an extensive marsh, which
was once a lake surrounded by rather steep hills on the
west, where in places the natural wood still survives. We
can easily gather from the Tripartite, as will be seen here-
after, that all this marshy ground was in the time of St.
Patrick a portion of the great Focluth Wood; and it was
probably that part of it to which he expressly refers, when
he describes the voices of those who dwelt near it as calling
him back to Erin in language so pathetic and endearing. If Foclut is Foicheall/Foghill, and the Forest extended to now Killala, this description at the beginning of an eyewitness account to the 1798 landing of the French in support of the United Irishmen Rebellion is of interest. It is from Landing of the French at Killala, by an Eye Witness, The Dublin Penny Journal 1:49, June 1, 1833, available on Library Ireland.
"Killala, an ancient Bishop's See, deriving its name from a cell, built by Amhley, the Amalgadeus [1]
of St. Patrick, was, at the period of my recollection, a neat and picturesque little town.
Never shall I forget the impression made on my youthful mind, on first beholding this interesting
place. Its lofty round steeple, (the still existing remains of its ancient church,)
insulated on an eminence in the centre of the town; its capacious harbour and
contiguous arm of the mighty Atlantic, present objects of unceasing interest; whilst fertile corn fields,
luxuriant meadows, and groves of venerable trees, descending to the water's edge, invested the entire
scene with an air of tranquillity and repose."
In The life and writings of St. Patrick, John Healy suggests the possibility that this is where Patrick's ship of rescue was docked. However, even if the distance Patrick describes in his Confessio ("And it was not close by, but, as it happened, two hundred miles away") is, as has been suggested, exagerated, it does not seem likely that this is the case if Foclut was also the site of his captivity. But it should be noted that Patrick does not specifically say that Foclut was the place of his captivity. (There is also a legend that it was in the vicinity of Mount Slemish in Country Antrim) Foclut Woods could have been have been near the place of his rescue and thus a part of his sense of duty to return. We do not know whom he met when he was first turned away from the ship of rescue, but he does say that he was staying in a hut in the area. Also of interest -- remembering John Muir's long routes through the Sierras when he grazed his flocks, (see Following Muir's First Summer Route by John Fiske on the Sierra Club's website) -- is that the area of Patrick's captivity may have been larger than usually imagined. The place of rescue was probably not one of many places on a sheepherder slave's route to graze his master's flocks because he says he has never been there. I say "probably not" because it is possible that he did not want to reveal the details of the place of his rescue and thus gently misled the reader. Where lived the voices who asked him to return would be important, as it is core to to his story, but a place of rescue for a runaway slave might be justifiably somewhat concealed. From a poet's point of view, the descriptions of place do not have to be tied to specitic events and despite the questions, I came away from the week's reading with an idea of what the countryside was like in the general vicinity of Patrick's captivity and rescue. John Healy's description of the Killala area is:
"Killala was at the time, as it is still, a much better
harbour for boats and light craft than for large ships. It
has many quiet coves sheltered from every wind and sea,
where the lighter craft of the olden time could easily glide
in and out with the full tide, and lie not only secure, but
completely hidden from inquisitive eyes at low water. Just
before reaching the station of Killala the railway crosses
over such a cove at the present day. In old times the trees
of Focluth Wood surrounded these quiet coves, for there
was no Killala then, that is before St Patrick had founded
its church for his disciple Muiredach, whom he placed over
his converts, that were newly baptized in the spring still
flowing by the edge of the sea. It was there, in our opinion,
or in some cove near at hand, that the 'ship,' all unknown
to its crew, was awaiting, by Divine providence,
the runaway slave -- the ship destined to be laden with the most
precious freight that ever left the shores of holy Ireland.
About two miles more northward and seaward, near
the point where the Rathfran river enters the bay, there is
a low-lying ridge of rocks, still called *St. Patrick's Rocks,'
and just under the ancient
church of Kilcummin, is a small bay sheltered by the rising
ground to the west, and protected from the ocean swell by
a low rocky ledge running out at right angles to the shore.
It affords secure anchorage against all winds and sea,
except the north-east gales, which sometimes break into
this estuary with great fury. It was here the French ships,
under Humbert, landed in 1798; and it may have been
here, as some think, that Patrick's ship was drawn up on
the sandy beach just under the rocks where the coast-guard
station now stands."
Two articles I still seek on the Wood or Forest of Foclut which St. Patrick mentions in his Confessio are:
Patrick MacNeill, "The Identification of Foclut",
Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society,
22:3/4, 1947 pp. 164-173
and
Niall OCarroll, "Forest Perspectives Saint Patrick's Forest", Irish Forestry,
Journal of the Society of Irish Foresters, 63:1&2, 2006 May 14, 20113
Began thinking about an encyclopedia entry I am writing about "authoring
software", a welcome responsibility that brings with it
the reviewing of what it was, what it is, what it may be,
while the week progressed in reading, research, archives, and remembering:
my grandfather and grandmother and the house with a driveway fenced with wisteria,
the fish pond and the ocean beach only a mile or so away. Roses.
Restless with words not spoken, scenes not painted,
the many places I have been but never to Ireland,
the need to hear music before I write anymore because there is a certain way
that the words should flow and relate to each other and I want to be sure of
what that is.
"Speak, ye champion chiefs, rejoicing
The story of the books Máire's mother's grandfather brought to America
when he left Ireland after the Easter Rising is a part of her family history and is
why Máire has in her home a collection of family books of Irish history, music, and poetry.
She is very familiar with Irish traditional music played in her family, played with her band.
And in her great-grandfather's books, she has read and reread the stories of the 17th and 18th
century harpers. She has played their works, particularly the works of the 17th century harper-composers,
including Rory Dall, Carolan, and Thomas Connellan. Their works, as she reconstructs them,
will be at the core of the sound of her lay.
Immersing herself in the life of a harper, she has read and reread the rambles of Arthur O'Neill
as set forth in his memoirs in the Annals of the Irish Harpers.
And there is something else she wants to emerge in a few places in the work: the sound of the lost
Irish sonata. The search for this sound is why she is taking baroque violin lessons from a neighbor,
who plays in an ensemble in Boston.
June 4, 2011
Surprisingly, it is Liam and not Máire who has heard Amy Beach's Gaelic Symphony.
Premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on October 30, 1896, the Gaelic Symphony was begun in 1894,
later than the flowering of the Hudson River School. But
as an historian of the work of the Hudson River School,
Liam thinks the work expresses some of the same aesthetic, and in it he hears the experience of larger
than life native landscape, the coloring, even the importance of the weather. Also, because his family
came to America
a half a century earlier during the potato famine, he is interested in the composer's explanation that
the Gaelic Symphony was about the sufferings and struggles of the Irish people, 'their laments...their romance,
and their dreams.'" (quoted in
an article by Beach's biographer Adrienne Fried Block on the American Composers Orchestra website.)
The Gaelic Symphony was the first major Symphony by an American woman composer.
She was born in New Hampshire.
The work is too symphonic for Máire, but perhaps Liam will play it for her
after they meet.
Amy Beach used an 1841 book of Irish folk songs published in Dublin, as one of her sources,
according to the American Composers Orchestra article.
June 7-9, 2011
The opening narrative of From Ireland with Letters -- that follows the Prologue --
has been renamed
Begin with the Arrival. The writing is now in progress online in a draft version,
and an idea of how the themes will move back and forth in this work can be seen at
http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/begin_with/begin_with.html.
It will take a while to make this work, but the process is rewarding.
A lot of work goes into an online writer's notebook,
but that work is eventually repaid when the time comes to create the work
because much of the thinking has been done, and the research has been documented.
June 14, 2011
In Begin with the Arrival, when working with four themes that move back and forth
across the screen, it is my job as the writer to make the whole coherent. There are
ways that this can be done, but at this time in the history of new media writing, I do not have the work
of centuries
of composers of computer-mediated word structures to study.
There are elements of early polyphony in the interface for Begin with the Arrival.
But when it came time to actually create the interface and the cadence of the work, I looked in particular
at the extraordinary rhythms of ancient Irish poetry.
After I had finished the draft writing and created the draft interface. It took more than four months to
make the Prologue "work". As a jeweler would set gems into a complex work of Celtic jewelry,
there was much work to be done on the structure, cadence, colors, and words before it was what I wanted.
Now, I begin the process again, as the draft writing of Begin with the Arrival is in progress.
Some would wait until the whole was done before making it available on the public Internet. But perhaps
the spirit of great-great Uncle Hiram Powers is with me in my choice of working with stories
in progress online. There were many visitors in and out of his studio in Florence who saw each
unfinished work as he continued to perfect it. It was a community process.
This online studio way of working also comes from the beginning of my life as a new media poet,
when stories were told live on The WELL, and then polished with each telling
in different places. It is a way of creating epic poetry that evolves with the
telling and retelling to an audience. Within my story, Máire has based her performance
on the ancient Irish lay, using a combination of singing, speech and passages of music.
The reading of words from books would not be traditional, but it is her way of honoring
those writers.
And some will ask "why?" Why write this way? I am not one to want to replace the book.
Like Máire, I have beside me a shelf of beautiful books, many fifty to a hundred years old.
I do not write polyphonic text to replace these books or any book. Rather, I want to convey human
experience in different ways.
One of the reasons print narrative is so enduring is that it is human nature to want a sequential story.
Yet the experiences of life can be conveyed in other ways. There is a value in that, and we now have
the capabilities of doing it. For instance, Liam will not listen to Máire sing without thinking
his own thoughts. The audience will drink their ale or beer and notice what there neighbors are
doing. while at the same time they hear the music and the words. The performer will have her own concerns,
particularly if this is the first time she has performed the work. These things will happen at the
same time. Conveying this simultaneous pub performance experience coherently
is not easy, but that is how it happens in life. Such struggles of vision and ways of conveying
experience are a part of the making of art. And sometimes there will be moments when everything
comes together, and one thinks "yes this is what I want to convey, and finally I have done it".
Because I seek a wider audience for the story itself,
I will eventually write a print narrative of From Ireland with Letters. I hope that it will be good,
but a print narrative will be a different experience than the computer-screen exploration of
parallel narratives in the Prologue or the idea of being in the pub when Máire first
performs the lay of Walter Power.
On
January 21, not long after I began this notebook, I was reading Gallo's
Music of the Middle Ages II. Lately I have returned to his thoughts as it is helpful to be
reminded of a
similar era of creating a different kind of art. Our ears are now accustomed to the complex ways in
which they created their music. But "why write this way?"
was also a question asked of the early polyphonic composers.
June 21, 2011
The draft writing for the first part of
Begin with the Arrival is finished,
except, perhaps, for a few more lexias in the Hiram Powers lexia space.
It is time for an intermission.
The audience in the pub is ordering beer or ale.
I am taking a break from this writing to work on other things and
to polish what I have done so far. (the writing, the timing)
The next part will be more difficult, for it begins in the 17th century and
will concern Oliver Cromwell's invasion of Ireland and what happened to Walter Power.
In 2007, when I was writing The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen
I used a detail from a drawing of my old violin in the opening pages. The drawing was done many years ago,
but I noticed when I found it that it was unfinished. I had not drawn the strings.
Part of the story is that I carried that violin
all around Europe, on the back of a motorbike until something happened
to it. In Germany, I bought a lute which I learned to play, but it was never quite the same.
Thus, since I used that drawing in 2007, I had been thinking that somehow I needed to
restring the violin. Máire Powers plays the Irish fiddle
extraordinary well, and somehow I feel as if she has restrung that violin for me.
Once in a while in the lives of poets, such things happen.
June 30, 2011
In
Begin with the Arrival, the "Lament for Owen Roe O'Neill", that
Máire Powers plays
on the harp to close the first part, is the 17th century music written by Ireland's celebrated
harper and composer Turlough Carolan. (Or rescored by Carolan, Flood thinks this "glorious lament"
was first written at the time of Owen Roe's death in 1649. A History of Irish Music, p.194)
There is also a work of poetry composed for the death of Owen Roe O'Neill,
the Irish General who won the Battle of Benburb and died (possibly of poisoning)
before confronting Oliver Cromwell. It is "Lament for the Death of Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill",
written by the 19th century Irish writer and revolutionary Thomas Davis
and much read and quoted at the time of the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy:
"We thought you would not die we were sure you would not go,
Its an interesting book and a good read!
July 6, 2011
The stories of what happened to the Irish prisoners who were sent into slavery in Barbados
are so terrible that they are difficult to read. Yet during Cromwell's reign more than 50,000
Irish people, mainly women and children, were sent into slavery in British colonies, according to
HistoryJournal.ie (
The Irish Slave Trade) and other sources.
No slavery can be called fortunate. But it was much better to be sent to
the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where Walter Power arrived in 1654 on the slaveship
The Goodfellow.
That it was Cromwell's policy to send the Irish into slavery, he himself confirms in a letter
to an English official where he also boasts about the fact that he massacred all the inhabitants of Drogheda.
The letter was written to John Bradshaw, Esquire, President of the Council of State on September 16,
5 days after the massacre.
"Being thus entered, we refused them quarter; having, the day before summoned the Town. I believe
we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants. I do not think Thirty
of the whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did, are in safe
custody for the Barbadoes."
The complete letter is available on Oliver Cromwell Website at
http://www.olivercromwell.org/Letters_and_speeches/letters/Letter_105.pdf
To begin with, so that what they were doing could not be easily traced, the British forced
many of the young people they abducted as slaves to change their names. So we may never know for sure
if the name of the young man who arrived in Marblehead in 1654 and eventually
started a family in America was actually Walter Power. However, From Ireland with Letters
and many other sources make the assumption that it was.
The primary source for information about Walter Power is Michael J. O'Brien's
Pioneer Irish in New England, originally published in 1937.
O'Brien spent 60 years of his life researching early Irish Americans.
In addition to being the historiographer of the American Irish Historical Society
and a major contributor to the Society's journal, he wrote
A Hidden Phase of American History: Ireland's Part in America's Struggle for Liberty,
(New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1920) an influential book about the role of Irish Americans
in the American Revolution.
In Pioneer Irish in New England, O'Brien documents not only Walter Power but also
the Power family, noting that they were of Norman origin but by the 17th century, they had
been in Ireland for nearly 500 years and were Irish and their interests were identified
solely with Ireland. (p. 240)
The name, according to many sources, was originally French: Le Poer --
confirmed by tracing O'Brien's reference to Irish Pedigrees, written by
John O'Hart in 1892. However, Irish Pedigrees also notes that Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh
-- an Irish historian, who in the 17th century created an extensive,
multi-volume work: Leabhar na nGenealach,
published hundreds of years later as The Great Book of Irish Genealogies --
sets forth an Irish origin for the Power family. I haven't yet read Mac Fhirbhisigh's account,
but according to unverified sources, the story is that the Power family and several other
Hiberno-Norman families were originally descended from Donnchad mac Briain, a deposed
High King of Ireland, who fathered some children when he was on a pilgrimage to Rome in the 11th century.
So, an Irishman in his late 70's, makes a pilgrimage to Rome, (where he died in 1064)
and in Italy, he fathers a new family with an Italian woman. This family makes its way
(this did happen with soldiers in these times) through France,, then to England sometime
after the Norman invasion, and then arrives back in Ireland with Strongbow
in the 12th century. Given the clan feuds of the time, this is not completely unlikely
since Donnchad mac Briain had been deposed.
Whether or not this incredible story is true, (or exactly what Mac Fhirbhisigh wrote)
Donnchad mac Briain was a descendent of Brian Boru, ie an O'Brien, and the seemingly
improbable legend -- discovered on the 4th of July -- is a fine source of wonder for a
poet born Powers who verified the story of Walter Power in a book by an historian
named O'Brien.
In the photograph, Hiram and his wife are looking out the window of their villa in Florence Italy.
It is the place where Hiram Powers, a descendant of Irish slave Walter Power, created
The Greek Slave, a work that would be influential in the fight against slavery in America.
In the writing of From Ireland with Letters, as has sometimes happened at other times,
books appear at timely moments, providing information that I did not know
at interesting times. This past week it was Irish Life in the Seventeenth Century by
Edward MacLysaght, (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1979; first published in 1939)
which I had ordered because it was not available in the UC Berkeley Library.
The time period this book covers -- 1660-1700 -- did not at first seem what
I was looking for. Irish life was not the same after the Cromwell invasion.
Yet the book provided some likely constant details that were very helpful in
visualizing the country in the first half of the 17th century:
the not very good roads; (Ireland had not been a part of the Roman Empire)
the unfenced countryside; dancing in the fields; oat cakes, boxty bread, honey, milk,
mead, the many brewers in the country; orchards; the women spinning and weaving;
the playing of the harp not only by the harpers by also as a part of family life;
the hospitality of the Irish people;
how persecution actually strengthened the meaning of Catholicism for the Irish;
what the cottages and the "big houses" were like; living by lantern and candlelight,
with music and storytelling in the dark nights
The book has many references, so there were leads to follow:
the writing of David O'Bruadair, for instance.
And I read about how under very difficult conditions Oliver Plunkett started schools in Ireland
in the years after Cromwell and how he was executed in England in 1681.
Today is the feast day of Saint Oliver Plunkett.
Finally I am beginning to plant flowers
-- yellow and blue in containers on the deck --
usually done earlier in the year, but it was a spring of wild rain storms.
And it has been a month of short hikes, local excursions, and the creation of drawings to work on at home:
a drawing made in Marin where I walked along a stream and sat on a hillside of blue flowers and
green grass; a drawing made on an East Bay trail that reminds me of
New Hampshire back roads in the early summer; an evening walk across the hills,
a picnic on a Contra Costa trail; and meeting family in a pub for beer and bar snacks.
But due to the two parallel yet intersecting tracks
in the Prologue, it is difficult to decide how best to clearly but unobtrusively send the reader
from the Prologue (which functions as a "Ritornello" that introduces themes and
should be well-explored) to the opening narrative in Begin with the Arrival.
In a print work, the reader who reads the book sequentially can expect that after he or she has read
the first chapter, he or she has read everything the author would like read before moving to
the next chapter. And it is clear where the next chapter is.
New media interface choices are more complex.
The other research track is to look at what the country was like
before the arrival of Cromwell. So having finished
MacLysaght's Irish Life in the Seventeenth Century,
I am rereading my copy of H.V. Morton's
In Search of Ireland
(London: Methuen, 1949. First edition: 1930)
Morton, an English journalist, sets off for Ireland only 8 years after the Treaty of 1922.
It is a different era, but still little changed in some areas. On the deck of a boat on his way to Ireland,
he writes:
"I was going not to the land of clowns and 'bulls', which amused the ruling class of two centuries,
but to a small country that has stood to its guns through a consistent War of Independence that dragged
its weary, blood-stained way through nine centuries -- the longest struggle in the history of the world.
Reading In search of Ireland, I have traveled with H.V. Morton from Dublin
and a house where Michael Collins took refuge, to the port of Cobh,
on the Cork coast, from whence sailed millions of Irish people to America in the
time of the potato famine. Morton quotes accounts of the departure
and tells of the postcards he sees in shops, postcards of Irish cottages and shamrocks
for families to send to their loved ones in America.
continue to Hiram's Prologue
and
continue to Walter's Prologue
But there still should be a way to get to Begin with the Arrival
from the Prologue, (and vice versa) and that way should always be available.
Usually I do this in my multi-part works by making the opening page for the entire work always accessible on
some part of each screen. In this way, the reader can at any time chose to return to an opening page --
which functions as both a book cover and a table of contents -- and then move to another part
of the work.
But I don't yet have a title page for From Ireland with Letters.
It is not always customary in works of web-based new media literature to have a titlepage that functions as the
cover of a book would function in print book. Some writers plunge the reader immediately into the work.
That is what I finally decided to do with the Prologue. (after many opening pages did not work)
But a titlepage is usually needed for the whole of a multi-part work
I particularly like the opening page for
Paths of Memory and Painting for which as an image I used a photograph of an
artists book I was working on while writing this narrative. The
artists book I'm currently working might work as an image for the opening page of
From Ireland with Letters, but I think, I would like the opening page image to be a boat or ship, such as the
Irish currach or curragh -- symbolic of the ship that Saint Patrick escaped on when he was a slave.
Possibly it was somewhat like the legendary boat that Saint Brendan built in the 6th century.
(of which there are medieval manuscript depictions)
Or, I could use a 17th century ship. Haven't been able to find a picture of
The Goodfellow, but it might not have looked too different from the Mayflower for
which there are many images. Was thinking about using a watercolor I did in Ipswich of
the sea off of the Massachusetts Coast, but this painting is only ocean,
and I would like a boat or ship.
How Hiram Powers sailed to Italy is also of interest. It was on the Brig Charlemagne,
according to Wunder. (p. 104) If she was the Charlemagne built
by Christian Bergh & Co, in 1828, there are pictures of her in the
Palmer List of Merchant Vessels. However, Wunder describes the ship Powers
sailed on as old and creaking. Powers sailed to Florence in 1837, only 9 years after the
Charlemagne was built. And, I don't think the Bergh & Co. vessal is a brig. A
brig only has two large masts. Will do some more research on
the ship that took Hiram Powers and his family to Le Havre, from whence they traveled to Florence,
where Powers spent the rest of his life.
In Book of the Artists, Henry Theodore Tuckerman tells this story:
"I remember standing with Powers at an angle of one of the principal streets of Florence,
when the Grand Duke's carriages and outriders passed in grand array to the Cathedral
to celebrate some fete: an old resident knowing the spectacle must be a novelty to the artist,
who had arrived but a few days before, and doubtless expecting to see him greatly impressed
by the brilliant show, inquired if it did not strike him as wonderful.
"It might have done so," he quietly replied, "but on the voyage hither I saw a whale."
(Book of the Artists, American Artist Life, NY: Putnam, 1867. p 276)
As in In search of Ireland, H. V. Morton, drinks the Irish moonshine known as poteen; tells
the heroic story of
Patrick Sarfield's defense of Limerick; and heads for Connemara, I have been
creating the first iteration of an opening page for From Ireland with Letters.
It was early autumn,a time that for him that had always seemed like spring.
His Father's family was from County Cork. leaving the green hills of Ireland.
the packet ships that transported hundreds of thousands from Ireland.
the photo he was looking for. instead, as if he was on a journey.
the image of a woman in white, who appeared in a dream
to the artist.
the manacles worn by African American slaves.
the path on a grassy hill to the front door.
when it arrived from Florence.
the intangible similarity.
"coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters"
the junction of several trails
that would eventually converge.
If the ship that carried Hiram Powers to Europe is confirmed to be the packet ship
The Charlemagne,
she will be replicated on the cover with more detail -- perhaps after a 19th
century marine painter. But for now I like the homespun remembrance on the initial opening page. It is
accessible from
Begin with the Arrival (by clicking on "From Ireland with Letters" on the
bottom tags) and is also accessible from the Prologue. In my work, the opening
page is used for navigation and is a part of the interface, so it is important
to have it in place. Three different entry points to the story are emphasized by the three different
places where text links above and below the painting lead the reader. From inside the narrative,
the reader who wishes to move to a different section of the story is returned not to a slave ship
but to a packet boat. The image could also be of the ship that rescued St. Patrick. The text
that surrounds the image could be different "lines". What I created is
probably not the final opening page. The narrative is not yet finished.
Flood's Sketch of Irish Musical History begins with a drawing of the
1621 Fitzgerald Harp and is dedicated to:
"the musical sons and daughters of Ireland
In In Search of Ireland, H.V. Morton visits Armagh, where St Patrick's Confessio
was found, bound in a 807 copy of the New Testament in Latin.
Morton tells the story of how in 432 Patrick rescued the deer when he was consecrating the site
of the Cathedral. Then he concludes his journey at the Hill of Tara in County Meath.
For
From Ireland with Letters,
I have changed the image on the opening page.
The packet ship remains in this notebook in the August 3-6 entry,
but the graphic of Hiram's Birthplace in Woodstock,
Vermont that I found in the July 1999 issue of The New England Magazine
works better with the text because there is some confusion about
which ship is depicted, and I did not want to be too didactic in the poetic words
that surround the image. The opening page is still in flux, so it may change again.
This is a part of the process of an online studio on the World Wide Web.
As I wrote earlier in this notebook
""Some would wait until the whole was done before making it available on the public Internet.
But perhaps
the spirit of great-great Uncle Hiram Powers is with me in my choice of working with stories
in progress online. There were many visitors in and out of his studio in Florence who saw each
unfinished work as he continued to perfect it. It was a community process."
This notebook will be attached to the work in some way.
It is actually meant to be a part of the work, so the image of the packet ship
that is on the wall of Liam's office -- an icon above his desk to remind
him of the story of how his family came to America -- stays with the story in this notebook.
On August 15, 1649, Oliver Cromwell landed in Dublin. It was the day of the Feast of the Assumption
of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Ireland called "The Feast Day of Our Lady
in the Harvest Time", "Lá Fhéile Naomh Muire san Fhómhar". The day had probably
been celebrated in Ireland since the sixth century.
Setting aside some time before I began today's research, I worked on the wildflower book, started in the
early spring -- a small treasure created for no purpose except for the interface creation excuse of
exploring the visual relationships of lexias (an exercise in creating art with small building blocks
of visual information that work together) and the pleasure of making pen and ink and watercolor sketches
in the Northern California countryside.
I have read parts of these books on the Internet, but the trek to the library, the carrying of historic books
home, holding these books in my hands seem a clearer way of following the
path of Irish history. I also carried home a contemporary history. However, because Máire Powers bases
her lay on the books her Great Grandfather brought from Ireland, many written at the time of the
Gaelic Revival or a little earlier, the books I am reading are:
John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, London:Longman,1865.
(Dublin, printed at the University Press by M.H. Gill)
and the book I am starting with:
Rev. Denis Murphy, S.J., Cromwell in Ireland, a History of Cromwell's Irish Campaign. Dublin,
M.H. Gill & Son, New Edition, 1897.
Father Denis Murphys' Cromwell in Ireland is meticulously
researched, tells the story in the words of the people involved, carefully documents statements,
and is an admirable work of history. In his preface, written in Limerick on the feast of St. Patrick,
1883, he writes: "I have allowed each of the chief actors to tell the part which he took, and in his own
words, too, when it was possible to do so."
Murphy sets the stage in Ireland and in England, and then he writes of Cromwell's departure
from Milford Haven:
It was a formidable invasion, probably even larger than Murphy knew because in his
1999 book of the same name, Cromwell in Ireland, (Dublin, Gill @ Macmillan)
James Scott Wheeler (retired US Army) writes that Cromwell had 35 ships; Ireton had 70 ships;
and they were followed by Colonel Horton with a flotilla of 18 ships. (p. 73)
Wheeler says that when Cromwell arrived in Dublin on August 15, he had 35 ships,
and he was followed by Ireton on August 23, with 70 or 80 ships. (p. 81)
Dublin was already in English hands, commanded by Michael Jones. After his arrival,
Cromwell made a disingenuous speech promising leniency to the Irish people. The wording of this
speech compared with
his merciless behavior is
surprising.
But, it was a "shrewd piece of policy" as Father Murphy notes, for the country people
believed him, and his Army was supplied with provisions.
A hike in the countryside; a visit to a chapel, and then I rode to the site of the Siege of Drogheda
with Father Murphy's Cromwell in Ireland. I knew it would be a difficult
journey.
Oliver Cromwell mustered his forces of 15,000 men and moved quickly, probably taking the high road through
Swords and Ballybriggan in Fingal. On the way, his ships battered Baldungan castle, built by the Knights Templar
in the 13th century. The heir, a young child was saved by the Parish Priest who took him to France.
There are accounts of earlier destruction and slaughter by English troops at
Baldungan/Baldongan castle in 1642, (Weston St. John Joyce,
The Neighbourhood of Dublin, 3rd ed., 1920 Chapter 30)
About 23 miles north of Dublin, the seaport town of Drogheda was held by about 6,000 Irish troops
under the command of Sir Arthur Aston. It was fortified by "a wall more than a mile and a half in length,
enclosing an area of about sixty-four acres Irish measure. Its height was about twenty-foot, its thickness
from four to six, diminishing towards the summit so as to allow a space of about two feet behind
the embrasures for the soldiers to stand on." (Murphy p.88)
Cromwell sent a message to Aston asking for surrender but received no response. He then broke the walls
at the place of the Church of Saint Mary's of Mount Carmel. The Irish beat his forces back on the first
attack and then again. "'The third time, as the light was waning, Cromwell led them in person,
forced Aston back upon his inner lines, stormed these lines in turn, and before night was master of the town.'"
Murphy p. 97. quoting Froude's The English in Ireland vol 1, p. 124) Cromwell's New Model Army
destroyed the steeple of St Mary's. It was September 11, 1649.
Quarter was offered and accepted. As soon as the Irish laid down their arms, the word "no quarter was
given," and Cromwell's soldiers began to massacre the defendants of Drogheda. Arthur Aston was
one of the first to fall. They took off his wooden leg, used it to beat out his brains, and hacked
his body to pieces. "In all, 44 captains. all their lieutenants and ensigns, 220 reformadoes and troopers,
and 2,500 foot soldiers" were put to the sword. In Father Murphy's words:
"Such was the fate of those who had surrendered because quarter had been promised them." p. 101
Some of the remaining soldiers took refuge in St Peter's church. They refused to yield.
Cromwell set the steeple on fire and slaughtered the soldiers as they rushed out. The remaining defenders
who were not killed were sent into slavery in the Barbadoes. Father Murphy writes that
"The street leading to the St. Peter's Church retained even within the memory of the present
generation the name of "Bloody Street"; it is the tradition of the place that the blood of those
slain in the church formed a regular torrent in this street". p. 102
Women and children were murdered in cold blood. "'to none was mercy shown: not to the women, nor the aged, nor to the
young..." (Murphy. 107, quoting an eyewitness account) Priests were publicly tortured and slain in the market
place. "The massacre continued for five whole days in succession. (Murphy p. 109)
"'During all that time,' says Clarendon, 'the whole army executed all manner of cruelty and put every man
that belonged to the garrison, and all of the citizens who were Irish, man, woman, and child to the sword."
(Murphy p. 109; Clarendon's The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars, v.3 p.41)
It was a week of completed writing for other works and projects, a hike on favorite trail,
the pleasure of redwoods and hill views. On Thursday, the Buddhas in the Berkeley Art Museum
exhibition Himalayan Pilgrimage, Journey to the Land of Snows reminded me of imagining
(long ago as the slides flashed by in a course on Asian Art History) what it would be like to cross
the Himalayas on Mountain roads, round a bend and see an immense stone statue of the Buddha.
In Berkeley, when you enter the room, the first sight is the golden Shakyamuni Buddha making the
"touching the earth gesture" of enlightenment.
"he might have saved his country. But it was not to be.
He lived for Erin's weal, but died for Erin's woe"
In a footnote Murphy notes that "All writers, even the skeptical Dr. O'Conor of Stowe, admit
that had Owen Roe lived, he would have saved Ireland." (p. 137)
Cromwell unloaded his artillery and continued to deploy his forces around the town.
In his letter to Sinnot on October 4, 1649, Cromwell refused Wexford a formal treaty but said that
"If therefore, yourself or the town have any desires to offer, upon which you will surrender the
place to me. I shall judge of the reasonableness of them when they are made to me." (Murphy p. 148)
On October 10, Cromwell's forces began to batter the strategic Castle on the outside of the walls of the
town.
On October 11, Sinnot sent four men to Cromwell with terms of surrender.
They were:
In response Cromwell promised only life quarter for the soldiers and non-commissioned officers if they left
and promised not to take up arms against England again, the commissioned officers were to be prisoners but
thier lives would be spared, the possessions of the citizens would not be plundered.
"I expect your positive answer instantly: and if you will upon these terms surrender
and quit, and in one hour send to me four officers of the quality of field-officers and two aldermen,
for the performance thereof, I shall thereupon forbear all acts of histility" (Murphy p. 154)
Wexford was prepared for resistance. The town was well-fortified; there was a rampart of earth 15 feet thick
within the walls. Wexford was garrisoned by at least 2,000 men and had a brave commanding officer.
However, the general opinion of the citizens was that it was better to surrender, and thus
four men were sent to negotiate the surrender. Whether this was on the terms that Cromwell
offered or there was further negotiation is unclear. What is clear is that while the negotiations
were still in effect, (Murphy notes that Cromwell's entering the town while the terms of
surrender were still under discussion was "fraudulent and treacherous")
a traitor, Captain James Stafford, who was in command of the Castle, gave Cromwell
the castle and opened the gates to the New Model Army.
"They entered so suddenly, that the townsmen were first made aware of Stafford's treachery
by seeing the enemy's colours floating from the summit of the castle and the guns turned
against the walls." (Murphy p. 159)
"For an hour the fight continued in the market-place but on unequal terms, for the sword of Cromwell
cut down nearly all the townspeople without regard for condition, age, or sex." Bruodin's Propug
p. 680 (cited by Murphy p. 159)
There follows in Murphy's Cromwell in Ireland, a series of accounts of what Cromwell and
his soldiers did to the citizens of Wexford that are so terrible I do not wish to detail them.
The number of accounts by many different people, some of them contemporaries, makes the massacre undeniable.
(Murphy pp 159-171) Civilians, without regard to age or sex or whether or not they were
combatants were cruelly tortured and murdered, including 300 woman who sought sanctuary at the Cross that
stood in the center of town. They were slaughtered where they stood.
According to Wheeler, "Cromwell lost control of the solders once his troops scaled Wexford's walls.
Worse, he made no efforts to regain control and enforce discipline until after the slaughter of
at least 1,500 soldiers and townsmen in the town square....Unquestionably, , and with no moral
or military justification, hundreds of non-combatants were killed by the rampaging troops."
And he notes that in his report to Parliament, Cromwell "recorded no remorse for the slaughter
of the unarmed civilians at Wexford." (Wheeler p. 98)
In the ensuing days, outside the town 4,000 citizens were butchered by order of Colonel Cooke,
the man Cromwell put in charge of Wexford. Priests and Franciscan Fathers were murdered.
The churches of Selskir, St. Patrick's, St. Mary's, St. Brides, St. Johns, St. Peters,
St. Maud's were destroyed. (Murphy p. 170)
"During all that time the whole army executed all manner of cruelty and put every man that belonged
to the garrison, and all of the citizens who were Irish, man, woman, and child to the sword."
(Murphy p. 109; Clarendon's The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars, v.3 p.41)
I recalled the historical book that my grandfather, Walter Powers, had in his possession.
I did not see it until long after his death, but I have held this book in my hands.
Last week, I looked at my mother's papers and in correspondence to and from the Bodleian Library
in Oxford regarding this book confirmed that it was the 1704 edition of v. 3 of
The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars, the exact volume in which the quote
I included last week appeared.
The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars was published
between 1702-1704 after his father's death by Clarendon's son.
My Grandfather Powers did not have the other volumes, only volume 3.
I will read it.
In need of a vacation day before continuing to follow the events of 1649 in Ireland,
I took a trip to the Pacific Coast earlier this week. On a secluded beach, sitting by myself
with an informal picnic, I looked out at the ocean and the wide horizon.
At home, reading the reviews of
its name was Penelope for review clips for inclusion in the forthcoming iPad edition,
I was surprised at the interesting
yet very different interpretations of the narrative, although this was an intention of the work.
One can look at someone's life and see certain parts, I thought, and not see other parts and this
is what happens when a story is written in poetry and/or does not proceed sequentially or to put
it in another way, the story is hypertextual generative poetry and the reader participates in but cannot completely control
the way the words are revealed.
In
From Ireland with Letters, a work that explores historical material
for which documentation is not always available, the new media capability of presenting
multiple facets of a story is used somewhat differently than it was in Penelope.
The reasons that historical documents may inspire different interpretations
are somewhat unlike the reasons for varied interpretations of a new media narrative,
but the principle of assembling a collection of materials that look at events in diverse ways
is of interest.
With the build up of narrative through accumulated detail in mind, I journeyed once more
to the Library and other searches remaining unfulfilled,
(that the differently volumed mid-19th century edition of Clarendon may have been somewhat expurgated is
perhaps
not surprising since Cromwell was being rehabilitated in England at this time) I acquired a third version
of Oliver Cromwell's devastation of Ireland.
Originally put off by the title --
it is God's Executioner, Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland --
I had left Micheál Ó Siochrú's book (London, faber and faber, 2008)
on the library shelf a few weeks ago. But this week I changed my mind thinking that
it is of interest to read different interpretations of the material. As it turns out,
Ó Siochrú -- he is a professor of history at Trinity College in Dublin -- is
an interesting addition to the core text of Denis Murphy's 19th century Cromwell in Ireland and
James Scott Wheeler's contemporary military historian's account of the same title.
Then, with Murphy as my primary guide -- the narrative I am writing springs in part
from the books written during the Gaelic Revival that were brought to America by Máire Powers'
great grandfather after the Easter Rising --
I continued to follow Cromwell's attack on Ireland.
In October, 1649, Oliver Cromwell settled his Army in the town of New Ross.
On October 17, he had camped outside of the walls of New Ross, commanded by Sir Lucas Taaffe,
and demanded the town's surrender. Taaffe asked for "liberty of conscience"
for the citizens who desired to remain in New Ross.
On October 19, 1649,
Cromwell's reply included these
words:
New Ross was surrendered without the atrocities the New Model Army had committed in Drogheda and Wexford,
but the Churches were plundered. From New Ross, Oliver Cromwell deployed his Army against Duncannon.
Attacked by Cromwell's son-in-law, Henry Ireton, who was reinforced by Michael Jones,
Duncannon was successfully defended by a combination of ingenuity, courage and collaboration.
By boat, Lord Castlehaven sent 80 horses that when mounted by the defenders of Duncannon, the New Model
Army misinterpreted to be a larger army from abroad. (Murphy p. 175) This action, as well as the town's
heroic and proactive defense of the fort, were instrumental in the withdrawal of Cromwell's Army.
Under the command of Colonel Edward Wogan and strategically located for the defense of Waterford,
Duncannon was the first fort in Ireland to hold out against the New Model Army.
"Situated on the mouth
of the Suir, the fort of Duncannon, one of the most modern in the country, guarded the entrance to
Waterford Harbour," Micheál Ó Siochrú writes to describe the strategic
significance of the victory. (p.103 )
In Wheeler's words:
"Wogan successfully defended Duncannon, even though Cromwell reinforced Ireton's command with 2,000
additional soldiers commanded by Michael Jones. Wogan was one of the few royalist leaders
in Ireland who successfully led a mixed force of Protestant and Catholic soldiers in the tight
confines of a besieged fort. He aggressively attacked English work parties and captured
several field guns from Jones during one of his sorties. Even the presence of Cromwell failed
to break the garrison's resolve. As a result, Duncannon was saved...After loosing two guns to Wogan's
sortie on 5 November, Jones ended the siege, withdrawing his and Ireton's men to rejoin the main
army near New Ross...Wogan's successful defense of Duncannon denied the English navy the ability
to sail into the Barrow to a suitable point at which to land the big siege guns carried by the transports.
This, in turn, made it impossible for Cromwell to blow a breach in Waterford's walls in the same
manner as he had done at Drogheda." (p. 108-109)
Early Autumn hikes have lately relieved the writing and research for From Ireland with Letters.
It is a nice time of year to see fog-blanketed ocean views from the vantage point of the Berkeley hills
to walk along tree-lined trails, or to watch wild birds along an inland waterway.
I had intended to be actually writing the continuation of
Begin with the Arrival by now, but the research
on Cromwell's 1649 invasion of Ireland has been extensive.
Although the numbers and the treatment of the thousands of Irish men,
women and children sent to the sugar plantations may be even worse than the
atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford, Cromwell's attack on Ireland in 1649
is the beginning of the story.
In this story/in my family's story, the key date is 1654 when Walter Power arrived in America on the
slave ship The Goodfellow. He was probably 14 years old in 1654, and would have been 9 years old
when Oliver Cromwell destroyed the Power family castles outside of Waterford after he was unable to take
the City of Waterford. Legend is that Cromwell hung Lord John Power from a tree outside of Kilmeadan,
and Lord John's wife Lady Giles FitzGerald died defending Donoyle.
In late November, 1649, Cromwell and the New Model Army put Waterford to seige.
But the arrival of more than 1,500 Ulstermen from Owen Roe's experienced and courageous Army,
under the leadership of Lieutenant-General Richard Ferrall, forced Cromwell's retreat from Waterford.
In Cromwell in Ireland, Denis Murphy writes:
"On arriving before the city, Cromwell had sent a trumpeter to summon the garrison to yield upon
quarter. Ferrall would give way to none to answer other than himself; he requested the trumpeter
to return to his master with this result, that he was Lieutenant-General Ferrall, governor
of that place, at present having 2000 of his Ulster force there; that as long as any of them did survive,
he would not yield the town. The sudden appearance of the reinforcements made Cromwell change
his plans." (p. 228)
Cromwell lifted the siege on Waterford on December 2.
Thus Ireland had held off Cromwell at Duncannon and at Waterford.
On December 2, 1649, Cromwell began the march from Waterford towards Dungarvan. The Power's
family castles were situated on or near his route.
"Waterford contayneth all the land between the River of the Suer which falleth into the Sea
between Waterford and the River of Younghall called the great Water and includeth
the Mountain country called the Decies the Bishoprick of Lismoore adjoining to the Whit Knights Countrie
called Clongibbon. So hath it the Sea to the East Suer to the North Part of the Counties
of Tipperarie and Limerick to the West, the great Water and part of the Countie of Cork to the South."
Hogan also writes that at the end of the 16th century Waterford was famous for "intellectual wealth".
The people were "Cheerful in their entertainment of strangers, hearty one to another".
The woman were famous for spinning, and "they spin the choicest rug in Ireland".
On December 2, 1649, Cromwell and the New Model Army retreated after their failure to
take Waterford. The weather was bad. Whether for strategic reasons or to
avenge himself on the countryside, Cromwell attacked and destroyed a series of castles in
the area before arriving at Dungarvan on December 4. It was in this campaign
that Lord John Power and his wife Lady Giles FitzGerald lost their homes and their lives.
Cromwell first attacked and destroyed Butlerstown Castle,
just outside of Waterford. Butlerstown Castle was at this time under the control of
Richard Butler, 3rd Viscount Mountgarrett, whose first wife was Margaret O'Neill,
eldest daughter of Hugh O'Neill and cousin of Owen Roe O'Neill.
Mountgarrett had fought as head of an Irish Confederate Catholics force in 1642,
taking strategic places in counties Kilkenny, Tipperary and Waterford. He was later,
outlawed by Cromwell, and exempted from pardon "for life or estate".
(Thomas W. H. Fitzgerald, Ireland and her people; a library of
Irish biography, Chicago, Fitzgerald Book Company, 1909 v. III, pp. 186
About five miles out of Waterford, a little off the road to Dungarvan,
Cromwell's Army attacked Kilmeadan castle, the home of the Power family head, Lord John Power,
the eldest son of Nicholas, Baron of Dunisle/Donoyle,
Lord of Kilmeadan and his wife Elenor, daughter of Thomas Purcel, Baron of Loughmoe.
There were 19 Power men from the Waterford area exiled to Connaught after the Cromwellian conquest,
which would indicate that the family was active in opposing the British.
Kilmeadan was not a match for Cromwell's New Model Army, and the castle was
destroyed. Denis Murphy writes that:
"Kilmeadan, on the Suir, was destroyed, and its owner, one of the le Poer family, seized and hanged on
a tree close by. His property, extending from Kilmeadan to Tramore, was afterwards confiscated." (p. 232)
Cromwell clearly knew where the fortresses outside of Waterford were located because
after destroying Kilmeadan, the New Model Army (or divisions of that Army) marched decisively both North and
South, attacking both a Power family castle at Currigmore about 25 miles North of Kilmeadan near
Portlaw and Lord John's castle at Dunhill, about 25 miles in the other direction.
No ruins of Kilmeadan castle remain. But the overgrown ruins of the 12th century
Donoyle/Dunhill Castle still stand on a rock overlooking the river Anne, the Anne Valley,
and the Copper Coast. Nearby the ruins of the castle, are the ruins of a church.
Donoyle castle was defended by a woman, Lady Giles FitzGerald, the wife of Lord John Power,
and the daughter of John FitzGerald, of Dromana, Lord of the Decies. It is not known whether Lady FitzGerald
rode the 15-20 miles or so to Donoyle after her husband's death and the destruction
of Kilmeadan or, if because it was the stronger fortress, she was already in command of the castle.
Either way, it is an an extraordinary story.
The story is included in Murphy's Cromwell in Ireland on pages 233-234. His source is
Samuel C. Hall and Anna Maria Hall, Ireland: its scenery, character &
London: How and Parsons, 1841. vol 1 p. 302 which states:
"The castle of Don Isle, situated on the sea-coast beyond Tramore, was bravely defended by a
lady. It was built on a rock almost inaccessible, and judging from the ruins still remaining, it
must have been a place of prodigious strength. It is situated on the coast, between Tramore and
Dungarvon. History records that it made a gallant defense, holding out for a long time against the attacks
of a fierce soldiery well provided with artillery; but that it yielded at length and was destroyed.
To this fact tradition has largely added. The brave Countess was the life
and soul of the defenders; day and night she was upon on the ramparts, animating by her presence and
energy the spirits of her dependants. She had, it seems, a skillful engineer, who defeated all the
plans of the besiegers; and at length wearied out, Cromwell was on the point of raising the siege;
he had, indeed, partially drawn off his forces. The Countess has retired to rest,
but had neglected to provide for the wants of her fatigued soldiers. Her engineer sent to demand
refreshment for himself and his comrades, and received in return the unwarlike meed of
'a drink of buttermilk'. Irritated by the insult, he made signals to the retreating foe,
and surrendered to them the castle. It was forthwith blown up with gunpowder,
and the Countess perished among the ruins."
However, the explanation only makes sense if the engineer was a traitor, for if, as reported,
he gave Cromwell's Army a signal, it had to mean that he had already rigged an
opening in the defenses and Cromwell, feigning retreat to disarm the castle's well-fortified
garrison, was waiting for his signal. The traitor may have been angry that the men were
not occupied with strong drink at the planned time of the attack.
Note that part of the success of Cromwell's campaign in Ireland was built on a network of inside traitors.
It was what allowed him to take Wexford so easily. "...Cromwell and Broghill had used similar subterfuges
elsewhere," Wheeler notes in discussing The New Model Army's use of a traitor at Clonmel. (p. 152)
But at Clonmel, Owen Roe O'Neill's nephew, Major-General Hugh Dubh O'Neill, in command of 1,500 soldiers
from Counties Cavan and Tyrone, turned the tables. O'Neill was suspicious when a guard at
one of the gates of Clonmel replaced Ulster Army men with his own men. The discovery of the traitor allowed
O'Neill's small Army to ambush a division of The New Model Army as they rushed into the entry the traitor
had provided. Hugh Dubh then built fortifications inside Clonmel and was victorious in a second battle.
He did not have the forces or supplies to hold out much longer. But that is another story.
In this writer's notebook, Cromwell is still in Waterford Country, taking revenge on the countryside for
his failure to take Waterford.
On December 2 or 3, the New Model Army approached a Power family castle at Currigmore, North
of Kilmeadan near Portlaw. From the story it seems that the castle did not have a defending force,
and much of Currigmore is still standing because because on the approach of Cromwell's Army,
the daughter of this branch of the Power family tricked her father into entering one his
own dungeons and then locked him in his own dungeon to prevent resistance. She then lied to
Cromwell by saying her Father would support him but wasn't at home. Thus Currigmore castle
remained in Ireland's hands.
In support of the story that Cromwell was deceived about where the Curraghmore Power family stood,
according to my notes, later in the 17th century the Curraghmore branch of the
Power family lost their titles when John, Ninth Lord of Curraghmore, was declared an outlaw for his role
in the Jacobite Uprising. And, although I do not yet know of which branch of the family he was from,
on October, 14, 1690, Richard Power, who had also taken part in the Jacobite Uprising,
died a prisoner in the Tower of London.
"During all that time the whole army executed all manner of cruelty and put every man that belonged
to the garrison, and all of the citizens who were Irish, man, woman, and child to the sword."
Clarendon's words are about the massacre at Drogheda. (also known as Tredagh or in Gaelic
Droichead Átha) The quote is important because my grandfather Walter Power had in his possession
a volume of the original 1704 edition of The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars,
which was published by his son after Clarendon's death.
As any storyteller would, I found this of interest. But I do not yet know if this quote is in the
volume Gramp had. Perhaps there is something else of interest in that volume. Stories are passed from generation to generation
in different ways.
That will be a part of the third file of From Ireland with Letters when Liam O'Brien and
Máire Powers begin to work together to put together the stories of the sculptor Hiram Powers and
his forefather, Walter Power, who -- five years after Cromwell's
destruction of the Power castles in 1649 -- arrived in America as an Irish slave.
Before continuing with the research
Begin with the Arrival, it is time to pause to take an overall
look at how this summer's research may have changed the way in which I want to the present the words.
The interface for Begin with the Arrival puts Máire Powers and Liam O'Brien together;
the distinction between their stories and reactions is not always apparent; and
Liam's reaction is as important as Máire's performance. How will this work when Máire
resumes her narrative with the central story of Cromwell in Ireland? There is a temptation
to change the interface design for this part, so that her voice is more prominent, but my vision tends
towards continuing with the same interface. Can I make this work with writing?
I'm not sure, but I think I can. There is also an issue of wanting this part of the narrative
to stand by itself. But that option can probably also be made available, so that -- as if taking home
a recording of a live performance -- the reader could replay this part of the story whenever he or
she desired.
Being able to present words in different ways is one of the strengths of new media literature.
Contingently, in writing about authoring systems for new media literature, I have lately
understood that we are
in a period of history where, as it was in the period beginning in the Middle Ages when theory composers
were exploring and developing methods of how to write and notate polyphonic music,
we don't always have models of what will work.
When the story moves to the "Transplantation" and to slavery in the Americas, the
interface will resume its effective polyphonic presentation of the combined voices of
Máire Powers, Liam O'Brien, Walter Power, and Hiram Powers. In this section,
the sale of Walter Power
as an Irish slave, Hiram Powers' abolitionist sculpture, and Liam's family's immigration at the time
of the potato famine will provide a counterpoint to Máire's story of the Cromwellian
attempt to force most of the inhabitants of Ireland into one corner of their country.
And in the concluding lexias of Begin with the Arrival, the love story between
Walter Power and Trial Shepherd, the daughter of a Massachusetts Puritan family --
a story in which, despite the circumstances, her family gives him land in the New World --
will be introduced, when in Marblehead where he has just been sold, Walter Power
sees her walking with her family.
Remembering words I wrote in the Prologue,
I want to do some writing at this point.
"The fiddle was on the table.
It should perhaps be returned it to its case,
It was a beginning.
The story was continually changing with the research;
The lexia spaces for
Part Two of Begin with the Arrival have been created, and the draft opening
words have been written.
The Irish aisling tradition -- where there is a dream or vision and/or a
woman represents Ireland -- is invoked in the opening quotation from the street
ballad "MacKenna's Dream":
"The harp melodiously shall sound,
With a fiddle under her arm and a harp slung on her back, Máire Powers walks back onto the stage.
She is wearing a skirt of green silk and a traditional harper's gray jacket with silver buttons.
Her attire alludes not only to aisling poetry but also to the garb of the Irish Harper
at the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival, where a woman harper, Rose Mooney, was one of ten harpers who represented the
best of Irish musicians.
Distracted by considerations of issues of context and interpretation that confront both the reader
and the writer of serious writing and art, I nevertheless made a small watercolor. And on the challenging
trek back to the parking lot, saw the blue and green colors of the
lake more clearly.
|
From Ireland with Letters
There were 250 captive Irish and Scottish young
women and girls and 300 captive Irish and Scottish boys
and young men aboard The Goodfellow when she sailed
from Kinsale, Ireland in 1654. From Ireland with Letters
interweaves the stories of Walter Power -- who came to America as an
Irish slave on The Goodfellow in 1654, stolen from his family
by Cromwell's soldiers and sold in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
when he was 14 years old -- and his descendant, 19th century
Irish American sculptor Hiram Powers, who grew up on a Vermont
farm and moved to Florence, Italy, where his work played
a symbolic role in the fight against African American slavery in America.
The role of displacement and disrupted tradition in the work of contemporary Irish authors
is paralleled in From Ireland with Letters,
an Irish American narrative created by a descendant of an Irish slave who was
forcefully taken from his homeland. Composed like a piece of music,
the narrative is a story of slavery
and of the role of art in the fight against slavery.
Index to this Notebook February 15, 2012 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, African America music: "...revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness..."; James Joyce's use of early music structures and Irish music in Ulysses; a hike in the Berkeley Hills: following Francesco Bocchi through the Boboli gardens, "...On this terrain, cultivated and wild trees are growing, and all through the year there are shady groves..."
February 9, 2012
January 18, 2012 January 6, 2012 Prendergast's, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland map of "The Settlement of Ireland by the Act of 26th September, 1653" Connaught, "at this time the most wasted Province in the kingdom" Irish resistance to the Transplantation December 28, 2011 The Uffizi, Catalogue of all the works in the Gallery;, Seated Wayfarer; Girl Preparing for the Dance; Crouching Venus; Venus de' Medici
December 21, 2011
December 16, 2011
November 29, 2011
November 16, 2011
November 5, 2011
October 20, 2011
October 14, 2011
October 8, 2011
October 4, 2011
October 1-3, 2011
September 24-26, 2011
September 16-17, 2011
September 9, 2011
September 7, 2011
September 3-4, 2011
August 27, 2011 >
August 21, 2011
August 15, 2011
August 9, 2011
August 3-6, 2011
July 11, 2011
June 30, 2011
June 21, 2011
June 14, 2011
June 7-9, 2011
June 4, 2011
May 30, 2011
May 20-22, 2011
May 14, 2011
May 7, 2011
April 27, 2011
March 21, 2011
March 17, 2011
February 23, 2011
February 18, 2011
February 4, 2011
January 28, 2011 About Judy Malloy In the twenty-five years since she first wrote Uncle Roger on Art Com Electronic Network, Judy Malloy has created an innovative body of new media narrative poetry that in hypertextual structures explores the lives of artists. Beginning in the 1970's with a series of handmade visual books that sought to create a nonsequential reading experience, her work has been exhibited/published in over one hundred curated exhibitions, invited readings and panels, and editions. She strives for a poetic clarity, so that each lexia -- an idea developed in the handmade books -- transcends the computer screen and can either stand by itself or be combined in the reading or array to create a larger narrative. Notes on for the Creation of the Prologue to From Ireland with Letters
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My grandfather Walter Powers, and my father Wilbur Langdon Powers
