Going Irish by Christopher Mahon copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved

I am thinking about my Irish past.

I have to. I’m at that point in my memoir where I want to explore my Irish past.

Yet I know little about it. Almost nothing.

My grandparents on both sides were Irish — the Mahons and the Cuffs, and the Heffernans and the Buckleys — and so I know the blood in my veins is all Irish blood — whatever that means: all Irish blood.

My Irish blood is a combination of ingredients. It runs from the deep past to the present. It goes beyond or, even, before, the Celtic and the Gaelic, all the way back to even before the Neolithic. People began to settle in Ireland nine or ten thousand years ago. My Irish blood is part of the same bloodstream that ran or runs through the poetic veins of Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and Sean O’Casey, John McGahern and, even, Frank McCourt. But I don’t know who carried that blood across the ocean for me. I don’t know who it was among my Irish ancestors who came over here first. I don’t know those particular details of what is, ultimately, for me, my own story.

So I was particularly interested in staying up late some weeks back to watch Jim Sheridan, the Irish film maker, be interviewed on The Charlie Rose Show.

Sheridan was talking about his new film, "In America," which imaginatively portrays the immigrant story of one Irish family — his, during a time in the 1980s when he arrived, with his wife and two children, in America. Their journey brought them to New York City where Sheridan looked for work as an actor. They lived in Hell’s Kitchen and their days — and nights, apparently — were animated by the bright spirits of the two little Sheridan girls. They’re called Sullivan in the movie and the whole family, in a way, is arriving in America to flee the death of another of the Sullivan children, the little boy Frankie, who died from accident or tragedy. The family carries the ghost of the little boy Frankie across the border and another Irish-American story begins.

There is a scene in In America. The artist father has arrived in New York in the summer, and it’s getting hot and humid, so he goes out and buys a second-hand air conditioner unit — the kind he can put in a window — and rolls and carries it home.

This particular Irish man, Johnny Sullivan, is rolling the air conditioner down sidewalks, and across streets and the brute tedium of pulling the roller up and down curbs gets to be too much for him, so, in the middle of Manhattan, he rolls the air conditioner down the middle of a busy street, an avenue, oblivious, or in spite of, any traffic that might be coming his way. And traffic is coming his way, and is honking at the Irishman in the middle of the street. Oh my, but he is a stubborn, insistent man with a vision of the future set firmly in his mind and there is nothing but nothing that will prevent him from walking toward it.

The true Irishman may sometimes, frequently or eternally think the world is against him. And he’s got enough reason in the history of the world to justify his belief. He’s stubborn and bullheaded and when frustrations grows high enough, nothing will stop him from going his own way. I don’t know where this fierce spirit of independence comes from. You can always recount the sad history of oppression and the desire to burst forth from it. But maybe this character of independence — if not solitude — comes from the fact that Ireland, geographically, is at the end of the world, or, at least, at the end of a continent. The Irish were flung out there on their own, cast off from the rest of Europe. Out there they created their own stories, "covered with embroideries out of old mythologies," as Yeats said.

I've lost many of those stories. I've lost so much of my Irish past that I don't even know the names of my grandparents' parents. I don’t know even where I came from, exactly, in Ireland. The family I grew up in is now scattered. The few things I own that are Irish are precious: a gold shamrock, a treasured Christmas ornament, and a blanket once possessed by my mother.

Most of the Irish I’ve got, or got left, is inside of me. And apparently, it’s plenty. In writing my memoir I’m returning to my past. I’m returning to the people and the places that existed long before I was born. I may learn more about the factual history of them. But in many ways I’ll be going back home through the good services of another vehicle: my imagination.

Something has been passed down to me in the blood that runs through the heart that pumps my imagination.

I’ll make my own story of my Irish past. It will include an oak tree and a Celtic cross. Maybe I’ll even learn where, exactly, my own ancestral immigrants came from. But I’ll be looking at that past and at this world through Irish eyes.

I can’t help but look at it that way.

And that movie, In America? I understood it inside out.

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