I’ve been studying Ireland in particular and the Celtic world in general–from Paleolithic to Present–for almost as long as I remember.  I’m sure I’ve dedicated more hours to my subject than the average medical or law student has to theirs.  And yet I can’t really explain why.  I’m often asked to.  There aren’t many people immersed in the sort of cultural studies I undertake, particularly when said studies pay less than a penny on the hour, all told, and when they’ve been misrepresented and cheated so often by American pop culture.  To many people, Ireland is no more than green beer and fake accents in bad commercials.  They put it on like a bad Halloween costume, and discard it again as carelessly.

There are the answers I give people at cocktail parties–I fell in love with the mythology, and then the music, and then the literature and language and history and archeology, and haven’t looked back since.  Which is all true, but far from the whole truth.

When I’m being honest–which I think most of us are trying to at least play at with our blogs–I say that studying Ireland, at least at first, felt like some sort of replacement for the side of the family that abandoned us.  I can’t have and really don’t want a relationship with my actual father.  But I want some connection to that missing half of my family, and I guess it feels safer to build a bridge to a long dead ancestor than to an aunt or uncle who just never bothered to try to hold on.  Some strange sense of pride or betrayal made my paternal grandfather try to take our name from my brother and me when my Mom left my father, and I’ve clung tightly to that surname and some birthright I thought it entailed.  Later, that grandfather tried to reconnect with us once he realized how destructive his eldest son was and how right my Mother was to leave him, for us.   But theirs will never be my family reunions.  I see my name attached to some genetic relative now and again–all of the people in the US with my name are direct relatives–and just once had the chance to talk to a distant cousin who had no knowledge of my personal family’s sundering.  It was strange and exciting, and it happened because my name was in a program at a Celtic Festival where I was performing.

And then, studying Celtic cultures is something I can share with my step-father, he who regularly insists that I picked the wrong country to focus on.  He is the child of a Scottish immigrant, and he introduced us to the festival scene that ended up entangling me so fully.  We picked different eras to study, and my obsession with music isn’t something he can truly share, but bridies and bagpipes would be glue enough to connect us as friends even without our shared love for our family.

On some level, I’ve always felt like a traitor for focusing so much of my energy on the culture I wasn’t exposed to by my Mother’s family, whom I have always  known and loved as my own and only.  Why isn’t “I” for Italy in my mind?  Why didn’t German culture appeal?  It don’t think the stain of WWII stopped me from focusing more on either, because my Mom’s family was all here at the beginning of the 20th century and railed against the the modern countries that wrought that horrifying war.   Maybe it’s a Jungian response–a desperate grab at some collective unconscious I’ve been sequestered from.  I do worry sometimes that I’ll outgrow it, and then feel a fool when someone asks me what my MA is in . . . many many people already react to my resume as if it says “BA in artsy-fartsy with a side of teaching, MA in cliches and boredom.”  But no–my obsession carries on.

Because, whyever and however I fell for Eireann, I fell hard, and my love abides.  The tunes and language and literature feel like home as they rattle around in my skull.  The history–even after all these years of study–enthralls me, and appalls me, and sends me from worried insomnia to ecstatic reverie as I study it. I own it.  I need it.  I lived there, and swam in those waters, and ate food from Ireland’s soil, and hope to do so again and again.  I toy with the  idea of seeking dual citizenship, despite the fact that doing so would bar me from a fairly large percentage of the jobs that are available to me here in my current home.

In short, Is leor don dreoilín a nead, agus Níl aon sceal eile orm.

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