Chapter 14 of Chasing the Dead: Amateur Adventures in Genealogy

"Tell me about a complicated man, 
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost 
When he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, 
And where he went, and who he met, the pain 
He suffered in the storms at sea, and how 
He worked to save his life and bring his men 
Back home. He failed: they died, they ate the sun 
God's cattle, and the god kept them from home. 
Goddess, child of Zeus, tell us the old
Story for our modern times."
Opening of Homer’s Odyssey, Translated by Emily Wilson

Aren’t we all on odysseys? ‘A long series of wanderings; a long adventurous journey. Also figurative?’ Our wanderings — internal or external, imaginative or vividly real — can seem ‘long’ even when their actual duration is too short. And figurative? M. H. Abrams in my college textbook, A Glossary Of Literary Terms, proposed that figurative language, words deviating from their usual implication, helps us to “achieve special meaning or effect.” Isn’t that what many of us ― especially amateur genealogists ― are trying to do with the stories of our lives and lines of descent? Give them ‘special meaning’?

Highfalutin? Self-indulgent? Not at all. Conjuring a metaphor for our lives or even one segment of those days is advisable; the ‘special effect’ can be to make them more understandable, even more bearable. Doesn’t have to be an odyssey. Life is a circle, race, garden, voyage, a vapour. (Avoid Shakespeare as your metaphor supplier unless you prefer your life to be “a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; …a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”)

James Fitzjames Stephens had life as a watercourse, “guided this way or that by a system of dams, sluices, weirs, and embankments.” I like that: our existence flowing like a river, sometimes in ways as Stephens would have it that other forces — ‘customs, traditions, and institutions‘ — control, sometimes in torrents that arising from us overrun all those gates and barriers. Go ahead and find your own metaphor. There’s nothing to stop us doing so. If Robbie Burns can say, “O my Luve is like a red, red rose. That’s newly sprung in June;. O my Luve is like the melody. That’s sweetly played in tune”  then I can say our trip to Ireland was an odyssey. Lowercase.

Regarding that Elliott brothers’ odyssey, here’s some spoiler alerts:

• Unlike Joyce’s novel, there was no Molly Bloom moment at the end (‘Yes, I said Yes!’), no visits to brothels, no eating like Leo Bloom “the inner organs of beasts and fowls, thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes” or those urine-scented grilled mutton kidneys.
• Unlike Homer’s tale, nobody died on the trip, wrecked a hotel room (let alone ‘the holy town of Troy‘), got seduced by the daughter of a sun god, or blinded a cyclops. I am positive about the last one even though the statute of limitation on felonious cyclop assault probably ran out. We definitely did eat the equivalent of the Sun God’s cattle along with fish and chips and lots of other food. And we all got home eventually.

And like Emily Wilson’s translation, our fraternal quartet descending upon our relatives in Dublin before heading out to the Monaghan graveyards were all like Ulysses ‘complicated‘ men. (My dear friend Jim Hartnett points out that in Greek the line describing Odysseus that Wilson translates as complicated is ‘Polytropos‘. Jim wrote: this is “translatable as ‘many’ (poly) ‘turning/flexible/ADAPTABLE’ (tropos). I love this translation – as it adheres to my classical studies guide/counselor (in the late 1970s) Helga Doblin, who, at some 80 yrs. old, insisted that ‘flexibility/adaptability’ was the most crucial talent for survival.” The Elliotts were complicated AND adaptable to the max. Compounding the comedy unfolding in Dublin was that our cousins and friends who we were going to meet were also pretty complicated. We were a complex of complicated codgers in this first chapter of our odyssey. (Yes, even though it was 15 years ago we were already in the early stages of codgerness.) My challenge was being adaptable enough to stay out of political tussles with these guys that I loved.

Like James Joyce’s Odyssey we began at the Martello Tower in Sandycove where “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan…” oh, you know the rest. No one would pretend to have read Ulysses around old English majors.

The first night we were all together was at a dinner that our cousin Gerry with typical Irish hospitality insisted on hosting at his house in Sandycove, a village south of Dublin tightly drawn up against the Irish Sea. If we climbed to his top floor, we could peer just down the street and see the Martello Tower.

My getting there became a heroes journey of its own. Joseph Campbell summarized the heroes journey like this:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

For me, the immediate quest after alighting in Dublin was heading straight to a laundry and then crashing at our first lodgings, a B&B called Sunbrae House. Household chores and naps rarely feature in a classical heroes journey, but Jim Joyce would approve.

Thus, the first fabulous opposing force encountered was a taxi driver who told me of my bad luck landing on the Saturday of not one but two big sporting events: The first-ever rugby match at the newly opened Aviva Stadium and Dublin in a All-Ireland Football Championship quarter-final at Croke Park. That day, July 31st was also smack dab in the middle of a bank holiday weekend. Laundries, drug stores, and other shops would be already shuttered. Pubs would be open. Clean underwear like the golden fleece would not be so easy to obtain.

Brendan calling me in Paris to say our innkeeper in Glasthule was a young German woman presaged my second challenge. Since, well over two-thirds of communication among the Elliott brothers was in hyper-kidding mode and getting a straight answer proved rarer than the appearance of a black swan under a blue moon, his account seemed bogus. In the Ireland I knew, B&Bs were run by dainty old Irish women named Bridie, not some Helga or Hans.

That our hostess really was German became clear in my frantic phone conversation with her. After knocking fruitlessly on every entrance of the B&B and risking being arrested for peering in every window, I noticed a scrap of paper pinned by the front door that contained the koan like message, “Call if there is no answer”.  The heavily accented person answering at the number instantly wielded a variation of the Nuremburg defense — she was just following orders and none were given by any of my brothers concerning my arrival time. “I cannot be there 24 hours a day”, she protested as innkeepers often do when you only needed them to be there for the minute when you arrives during typical Irish weather of general rain and occasional sun. She felt guilty. Did she fear a ranting internet review? “Dear TripAdvisor, I was soaked by the rain while I waited for my irresponsible Teutonic landlady to appear.” (I know… TripAdvisor; it was 2010.)

This was an opportunity to show my new attitude of letting thigs go. Yes, waiting in the rain outside the Sunbrae’s front door put another pothole in my hero’s journey, but I assured her that my time there was blessed by mild wind, frequent sunshine, and only a few spits of rain. And then huddled in a nearby bus shelter, I wrote the first notes for what has become these pages. So, like many adventures in a hero’s journey or odyssey what seemed to be a setback turned out to be advantageous. Would it have been even better if I wrote the start of this account while sitting inside a pub in Glasthule? Perhaps but then I wouldn’t have a story with a German landlady.

Spy versus Spy

Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason and invective for documentation than in politics. That is a realm, peopled only by villains or heroes, in which everything is black or white and gray is a forbidden color.
John Mason Brown

Eventually everything was sorted (except my dirty laundry) and I ventured to that dinner that night in Ireland cloaked in that new attitude of letting things go, of releasing all of my fears about my relations with the brothers on this trip. That’s another kind of ‘long adventurous journey’: finding your better self. Progress on that seemed slippery and spiny as I stood amidst the very first group conversation of the trip with my siblings. Still milling around the kitchen getting in the way of our hosts’ dinner preparations, I could sense my brothers’ proclivity to turn every exchange into a political lecture. Like an Irish setter that starts pacing and circling skittishly sensing an imminent thunderstorm, I calculated how much time might be spent in the bathroom that evening without exciting suspicions of a suicide attempt or jungle fever. This is how it is and was in wanting to avoid being immured in a conversation of some sociopolitical obsession of my Elliotts, the insistent pressing of some topic to the dismay of most present. The speaker might suck all the life out of the gathering. Or at least out of me.

There was Brendan, the tallest and maybe the handsomest of our brood, arching downward that magnificent head topped by soft, white, swept back hair so as to more intently drive home a line of reasoning to one of the locals attending. When he gets going, Brendan is like an Irish Billy Graham jawboning Satan into submission.

On another front, Jimmy looking like a monk on vacation with his round head and cloth cap mildly raised his eyebrows almost to the top of his round face before carpet-bombing some factoids gleaned from the damper corners of the internet into innocent empty spaces in the discussion. His amiable presence amplified by his girth belied his subversive intentions. (Of course, one man’s subversion is another man’s evangelism.)

John, his breaking wave of white hair perfectly styled and those dark eyes darting, posed like the conductor of this symphony, now attending to the orchestrated debate and then plunging forward with a fortissimo gesture.

My trio of sibs were quite an act. Their bending to an ideological plane every point uttered by someone else — no matter how harmless, topical, or even inane — made consorting with the three of them for me like being trapped with Amway salespeople just before bonus time, or Jehovah’s Witnesses on meth. Of course, they were not at their peak yet; after they warmed up in those days an innocent observer might think she had wandered into an infomercial for the Tea Party.

That they were displaying a relative reserve around our Irish cousins and friends at this moment didn’t reduce my anxieties about the trip. I knew what was lurking once they had me alone: they would turn the volume up to ‘11’ on free markets and Fannie Mae, Socialist plots and Nancy Pelosi. Relentlessly they would decry taxes, assail regulation of any kind, and conjure Obama (2010!) as a sort of Ming the Merciless puppeteer. They would pull at every thread of discussion to reveal some perceived rip in the fabric of the world. And then they would work to generally ascribe each and all of these ills to big government. To me, my very smart brothers sounded like a script of a 1950s ‘red scare’ movie in which the bit players (everyone else) are educated about the menaces of the Soviet slave masters. But what did I sound like to them?

That was when a terrible truth hit me: I was the ‘enemy agent‘ in such a melodrama. In 2010 whether in silence or in full throated argument, I had already over the last dozen years become the Bizarro world version of my brothers. Undoubtedly in the routines that would emerge during our 10 days together, I was just as likely as them if freed from my vows of restraint to treat a conversation as a set piece to unfold my ‘sophisticated’ views. I had five years before his candidacy what today would be called Trump derangement syndrome. The original phrase suggests that an apter title for this outrage and paranoia that occurs on both sides of our political divide would be ‘[Opposite party leader] derangement syndrome’.

I was so caught up in wanting to be right that like them I had cultivated a reflexive disdain for what the other side was saying even before they had finished talking.  We had reached the place where neither side considered the merit of the ideas the other espoused; we simply maneuvered so that we could claim we were right. Who was I kidding? Just like in the better spy movies and novels, this was the moment of the realization that both sides cared about the same things: at a minimum, survival; ultimately, world domination. The truth or justice? Not so much.

What else could I expect of Elliotts? Around the dinner table in the 1960s, we took apart every political idea and current event with the goal of being right, not persuading others to join us in some social mission. None of us left these discussions and then took our political energy deeply into a real arena. Making phone calls for Bill Clinton or canvassing neighborhoods in Philadelphia that were already dedicated to voting for Barack Obama was the extent of my political activity. As far as I can tell, it was true for my adversaries on the other side. Jimmy claimed to be a poll watcher, but he would get bored fast watching other right-wing retirees shuffle to the machines in Boynton Beach. All of this churning was about winning an argument, not making a difference. I didn’t seem to be able to find a way to come in from the cold.

Were they stuck like me? We seemed to be locked in the same sort of dilemma as those Cold War spies. In the end, something was going to have to intervene — the equivalent of some Berlin Wall falling down on all our heads — because we seemed to be incapable of stopping ourselves from having the same argument over and over again. Another spoiler alert: that change didn’t happen in 2010, 16, 20, or 24. The craziness outlived Jimmy and John, not to mention Mike who was the craziest of all of them politically.

But in that present moment, Ireland or at least a few of its citizens punctured my depression at this hellish vision of fraternal relations. Just when I was about to abandon my tactic of silence and shred Brendan’s implications that Sharia law and enforced clitorectomies were about to pop up in the Dublin 4 postal district, Cousin Gerry started pouring some very good claret, and he kept pouring throughout the night until we slid out the door onto Ballygihan Avenue. I had discovered yet another tactic to at least avoid the merry-go-round of debate. Keep the glass pressed to my mouth and dream of my bed at the inn where darkness and silence awaited me. Not exactly detente and certainly not an advance in the odyssey to be a better person, but it made me a noncombatant for one night. And the Irish ancestor odyssey was well launched. It would be okay; Ulysses and his crew didn’t always get along

And that personal odyssey where I could more easily hold both my love for these mugs and my own sense of self without fretting and arguing, straining and stressing? Ongoing. Allowing myself to focus on the flow of my own life rather than twitching at every perceived absurdity in the attitudes of others? Not then. Better, but not yet. Perhaps my chasing the dead this time in this book will propel me in that quest.