Admiring Ancestors and Atavism

          We were a small group of Caseys together in Northern Ireland in Cullyhanna, the cemetery of our paternal ancestors.  Stephen was relating how graves had been dug on a site where a previous family member had been interred.   As a young man he joined in that labor.  Few recognizable remains were unearthed because of decomposition and the passing of time.  When some bones were found they were placed in a bag to keep them separate from the newly deceased.  Stephen recalled having his stomach turn when he found a foot, some teeth and clumps of hair.  On the other hand, the pre-eminent poet of the North discerns the dignity in ancient practice: “Our pioneers keep striking/ Inwards and downwards, / Every layer they strip/ Seems camped on before.” (Seamus Heaney, “Bogside”)

 There’s a lot in Irish culture about death and digging. One of Heaney’s signature poems is “Digging.” He reflects on his father’s and grandfather’s skill with a spade.  “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”  You can find excavation and exhumation metaphors in the poets of the North and in the playwrights of the Republic. Christy Mahon’s father dies and resurrects more than once in The Playboy of the Western World.  

           And in the grim memorials of the Troubles that stand as headstones and wall murals in and around the Falls (Catholic) and Shankill (Protestant) roads in Belfast, one can hear an unceasing keen for the fallen.

John Montague wrote about the “the old people” who “trespassed on my dreams” in childhood, “[u]ntil once, in a standing circle of stones, / I felt their shadows pass/ Into that dark permanence of ancient forms.”  The circle of stones referred to are “dolmens” which is the famous comparison in the title/first line of his poem, “Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.”

 

The dolmens are portal tombs, dramatic in appearance. A capstone is supported by columnar pillars.  The burial chamber is within and below.  So also is the storehouse of the past, within our elders and below the surface of our present living.

          It may be that all humans are haunted by the past in one form or another.  For the Irish, the force of the past is often historical or genealogical.  In the North religious rage and political difference fed division.  While overt violence ended with the Good Friday agreement in 1998, memories of mutual atrocities endure.

          The pull of the past and the lure of ancestral lore both partake of atavism. But to state that is not to contemn or condemn.  The word itself is unjustly pejorative (especially in its adjectival form, “atavistic.”)  The core denotation of atavism actually cites genetics rather than the domain of the troglodytic in explaining the recurrence of form in an organism further back than one’s parents.  There is a conviction that sages will instruct and edify us so that we can increase knowledge of self.  To rewrite   Santayana: “Those who do remember and understand the past are privileged to learn from it and use it wisely.”

          Retrieving what is remote from us is not an easy endeavor. You “got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.”   And for Johnny and I that required journeying to the ancestral homeland (again).  But in our dotage, steadied by our female custodial companions, we made our way to the farm our father grew up on over 100 years ago; visited the gravesite of our grandfather, our aunt and uncles; received very helpful information from Crossmaglen native Michael McArdle; and unmatched hospitality from our cousin, Stephen Casey.  My brother, the first son of John Casey and the namesake, recalled how Dad had provided the headstone in the cemetery.  He bantered about having a claim on the space for himself.  At our leaving the deal was sealed.  Johnny left beaming.  That’s an Irishman for you.  Got to scope out the plot before you plop into it.  At least someone else will do the digging.