Danny Boy in the Ditch
A Journey through song from Ireland to the Himalayas
“Something has crept, or has been driven out of dark waters under the mountains. There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.” J.R.R. Tolkien
Welcome to the launch of ‘Out of Dark Waters, Over Mountains’, a blog that explores myth, folklore and peculiar things through tales of travel and dream
–Dedicated to Michael Morris
Once, my friend Michael Morris told me that many Irish airs came from the Sídhe (the Faeries). He told me that a man fell off his bike drunk, into the ditch, and heard the air of Danny Boy drifting across the land from their land. He got out of the ditch, cycled to the pub, and sang it there and then. Not, of course, what Malachy McCourt told the world– that the musical story of "Danny Boy" has its roots way back in the 1690 siege of Derry in Northern Ireland, and its colourful cast of characters includes Charles Dickens' son and a Jack the Ripper suspect. However, I still believe that nobody truly knows the origins of the air.
It’s these reckless, wildly speculative theories, informed by the Dreamtime, entirely disinterested in science and logic, that fascinate me.
It’s what I love most about Eriú. That kind of native logic is far from the gaudy, over-stated and over-marketed Irish-ness that we’ve exported, and imported ad infinitum. Danny Boy is of course one of the most overplayed songs on planet earth, and has become part of our export Irish-ness, along with nylon Kelly-green hatted leprechauns, and renditions of Patrick’s Day parades with its tractors, trumpets and young girls banging drums in perfect knee length white socks and starched dresses, gritting their teeth against the bitter winds on the Seventeenth of March. When I was nine, I marched down the Boghall Road with a sign that said: “St. Patrick wasn’t Irish.” I was marching in the opposite direction. Nobody noticed the nine year old killjoy in a pink anorak and a thick fringe, carrying that sign. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t abide the day even then.
When I grew up (if I ever did), I found my way to the Himalayas. I was not in search of anything other than a path that would lead me straight off this little island as far away from my family as I could get. I was in my mid twenties, had graduated and had little interest in following friends’ footsteps to New York or London. Although my parents gave me no direction (a blessing), my father always told me to just keep writing. So I did, and I’ve never stopped. But this trip to the Himalayas had a different purpose, handed to my by my teacher, Lama O, (a Tibetan lama living in a Buddhist centre by a lake in Cavan) who sent me to Dharmsala (in Northern India) where I was to study Tibetan language until I was good enough to be a translator. It gave me the perfect excuse to run away from everyone and everything. The reality was a bit different to what I’d expected (I’d dreamed of sitting at the Dalai Lama’s feet taking notes, yak baying in the distant plains). I grew quickly bored of my drill-obsessed monk-teacher Ten-la in the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, who had us repeat everything like baa-ing sheep, all the prepositions and the tenses and the cases back to front and upside down and inside out. One humid afternoon, an old scholar and retired Indian diplomat (and spy, it was rumoured) called Raj, turned to me on the bench outside the Library with his mischievous grin and said to me:
“Why don’t you go to the hills? The rain is coming. The whole of Dharmsala will be covered in mould. I will flee to Lucknow. There is this hidden valley called Spiti…”
I left Dharmsala like a shot, being horrified by the prospect of mould, being from an island morbidly associated with such things. Raj promised me that Spiti Valley was as dry as a bone.
His Sea as she serves him or kills?
So and no otherwise – so and no otherwise –
Hillmen desire their Hills.
From The Sea and the Hills
by Rudyard Kipling
I fled on a rattling bus to Manali, twelve hours north east of Dharmsala. From there, I took the bus to Kaza, which crawled treacherously around hairpin bends, thousands of metres into the air above sea level. Locals on the bus quietly swigged bottles of (illegal) home brewed Arak to distract themselves from the graveyard of buses and jeeps that lay far, far below us in the valley. We did not see people on those roads for a very long time, until we reached the Kunzum la, a pass where, they said, the holy Goddess Kunzum danced on the mountains while passersby hoisted prayer flags to flutter in her honour.
Kaza, the main market town in Spiti Valley, was a segment of the moon. A town of flat roofed mud houses, painted white with black, square windows like giant eyes. With one post office and a scattering of guesthouses. And a Bank of India that would not take traveller’s cheques. It’s the strangers we meet on journeys that make you wonder was it all planned. She told me, at the corner of the Bank of India, with a big friendly toothy grin, that I should go to see the Rani, the Queen mother of Spiti. She liked foreigners. So I did, after the stranger walked me there. There was the Rani with her Lhasa Apso, knitting by the fire. Her unmarried eldest daughter grinned at me from under her scarf, and quickly resumed gossiping with a group of Spiti girls who shared the knitting of the same pair of socks (Spiti socks are patterns of luminous pink, greens, yellows and blues and are sold from Delhi to Goa). One knitter picks up where the other left off, in a shared creation. They looked after me in the Queen Mother’s hovel, helping me to sort out my useless Thomas Cook traveller’s cheques. Somebody arrived and stuffed the cheques into their overcoat, and handed me a wad of hundred rupee notes. It wasn’t much, but enough for my board and lodging in this hidden valley. It was not long until I got the royal command from the Queen mother: “Go to Kinnaur and find my son in Puh village. He’s working on a government job with O.P. Negi. Please tell him to order six pressure cookers from the army canteen.’
The Rani, the Queen Mother of Spiti Valley, with her Lhasa Apso
Before I could fulfil the Queen’s request, they sent me to a place that was half way to Puh, where her son the Nono lived. Funny name for a King. There was a Tibetan teacher in Dankhar, the old seat of the Spiti Kings, who could teach me for a while, since I’d abandoned my studies in Dharmsala. In the old days they used to fling boiling oil at intruders from the towering heighth of the Dankhar fort that’s built on a high, craggy rock. Luckily, it was a quiet enough place these days. A monastery, where I was to study Tibetan with a teacher called Sherab. My room had no glass in the window frames. The windows rattling at night in the fierce Spiti winds, reminded me of Wuthering Heights. I thought Cathy Earnshaw would drag herself through one of the open windows. I ate dal and rice and chapati every day around a low stove, while the monks cracked jokes and played ‘mo’, a Tibetan dice game. About as holy as… one of them told me his tales of Paris, where he’d been given a Swatch with a ‘canard’ and had apparently fallen in love with a French girl, who sent him back to Spiti. He seemed a bit disgruntled, but he was fiercely proud of his Swatch with duck’s wings as arms.
In the dark evenings after the sun had gone down (most of the time there is no electricity in this valley, so the nights are black and the village windows glow with gas and candlelight), I went to the village to sit on the mud floors of people’s homes, drank arak and listened to tales of the bang-mo, the witch who visited the village in winter, who sent fire balls in the windows of houses, searching for young girls to possess, who’d be promptly dragged off to the lama to be exorcised. The bang-mo guarded the bridges and sometimes stole people away. It was like Ireland before electrification. When I looked into the eyes of the women with their cream yak shawls, their baskets full of dung, their weathered faces full of the lines of the rivers and the valleys of this pure land, I thought they were just like the women of Aran in Ireland before they became like the mainlanders. Those women, at the mercy of the harsh Atlantic, and these women in the Heart of a valley on the Tibetan border, at the mercy of the elements, and, of course, the Chinese who were just over the border. These women were of the hills, as those Aran women were of the sea.
And they sang. They sang as they dug, as they threshed, as they cooked. One evening, a group of young girls said they were going to sing a song about me. They huddled together with a couple of rusty old petrol cans to drum and out came a song in the dusty air, a song that wove itself like the Queen’s socks, gently, collectively and almost magically sung through the girls, because they sang the lyrics in synchronicity, despite that they were making it up on the spot. They howled and cackled afterwards and I was truly honoured, even though I hadn’t understood it. They could have been laughing at the silly white girl who listened to the silly stories their parents told….
I began to see Irish faces in Tibetan faces. Their stories of exile and dispossession were, rhythmically though not temporally, woven in with the Irish stories in my mind. Not only were the Tibetans like the Irish in political experience, but in how they understood land itself, in how it was full of stories. I grew to love the soft, earthy tones of Tibetan, and how it made me feel to speak in that tongue.
After months at Dankhar I took take a tractor ride down the tracks to the main road, to pick up a bus to Puh village, where the Rani had sent me to get her son the Nono. He was living with the renowned Om Prakash Negi. It was time to organise the Queen’s much needed pressure cookers- an important mission, the most important of my time in the valley.
Kinnaur was another realm. I was now out of the arid moonscape and into the land of lusty Kinnauris whose beautiful faces and almond eyes and had been hard for the proselytising Buddhist monks to resist, centuries ago. The whole valley was a sweep of apricot and almond trees, gently swaying in the breeze. And it was warm. The bus coughed me out in Puh Village at the post office. Down there, they said, you’ll find Om Prakash Negi, through the red gate, where the golden temple of his residence sat like a jewel.
Kinnauri women, Puh
Keep in mind that I hadn’t washed in three months. The monks at Dankhar had never shown me where nor how I could wash. Several women with long, thin plaits and green felt hats with dried flowers in their pouches, came out to greet me. One was a dwarf called Kelsang, one of O.P. Negi’s three dwarf sisters. We understood each other as the Kinnauri dialect has its origins in Tibetan. Then, the King came out. The Nono. In brass rimmed spectacles, he looked like a Tibetan Woody Allen. He warmly welcomed me. Where had I been? Would I like a rum? A wash? I grasped at the latter. The very jolly and rosy-cheeked O.P. Negi had just announced that there was to be a farewell party that night for the Commander of the Army, who was being posted to Benares.
Cleaned, but in my ugly western clothes- combat slacks, a hoody and a miserable scarf in my uncut hair, I felt like an eyesore among the exquisitely varied army wives who discussed delicately the nuances of their husband’s diets ‘my husband is taking roti, he’s never taking rice’ . They spoke in lilting Indian English, interspersed with Hindi. The commander got going on Triple XXX Rum, straight from the Army Canteen, and crooned Karaoke into the mike, but when O.P. Negi sang Urdu Ghazal songs, later in the night, his voice filled the conservatory with the warm, velvet tones of an Indian night, and put us all, as Octavio Paz put it, into ‘A delicious swoon’.
Songs. Local, Hindi, Urdu. Would I sing? All I had in my repertoire was a ghastly, broken version of the ballad of Kevin Barry. Back then I didn’t give a hoot about Kevin Barry, but it was the only thing I could pull out of my impoverished repertoire. The local ADC Officer (Administrative District Officer? I can’t remember, but he’s a bigwig bureaucrat of some sort…) praised it, and then told me all about the bits of Ulysses he’d adored. All the way over here, in a little valley of almonds and apricots on the Tibetan border. I thought of the songs that came out of Ireland, and thought that if I could damn well sing Danny Boy or the like, these people would appreciate it. I had never thought that I’d be asked to sing. Those songs that came out of ditches in Ireland, made people weep all over the world. Here I was, almost mute.
Om Prakash Negi of Puh Village and the local ADC Officer, H.P.
Although I felt at home in this valley it was comforting that I wasn’t related to anyone. I was safely anonymous, as I didn’t often go by my own name, only the name Lama O had given me: Dekyi, which means ‘happiness’ in Tibetan. I might find that elusive elixir, under my pen name. They were not like most of the Irish people I knew, but they might have been what they had been. They sure had no resonance with the Celtic Tiger’s materialistic, spiritually void breed. But they were similar in a deeper, broader sense. Perhaps, if we live closer to the land and allow it to offer us its melodies and its stories, we are, in a pre-colonial sense, the same or at least fairly similar. Like how Danny Boy came out of the ditch, according to Michael Morris. Or at least, through the land and into the ears of a drunken man who fell into the ditch. It travelled all over the world. Played by Elvis, sung at Diana’s funeral, a song of longing and separation had come out of the ditch. A fluidity of movement between the realms.
I wondered though, what, apart from many etymological resonances between Sanskrit and Irish, the two most ancient languages in the Indo-European language family group, could be the threads that tie India to Ireland? I was among people who were ethnically Tibetan, but it was in India I had this sense that, as two (post) colonised countries (not to dismiss the fact that Tibet is being brutally colonised as we speak) we seemed to meet on the same psychic plane. Our languages are deeply intertwined. Our mutual tendency towards chaos and mismanagement (boringly replaced by the nannying of the State in Ireland) our hospitality (not that it exists in Ireland as engagingly as it still does in India, where the guest is a blessing to the home).
We have to look very far back to what most would class as mythology, to find the threads that link the Irish to the Middle East and the Far East. The Book of Invasions told us that the Fir Bolg spent two centuries exiled in the East after being driven out of Ireland by the Formorians. When the Fir Bolg came back to batter the Formorians, they were driven out by the Milesians (Sons of Mil) who were also from the East. E.L. Ranelagh drew our myths together, such as that of Arabian’s Antar and Ireland’s Cú Chulainn who both emerged in cattle economies, who both killed vicious dogs in their childhoods, who were both reared by single women (most heroes are!) both had arms from close male relatives, both terrified the enemy with a glance alone, both died but clung to life by staying upright on horses or spears, or posts…
Our tales are entwined. To me, the Song of Aimhergin (of the White Knees), the warrior poet of the Milesians (the Sons of Mil) who came to conquer Ireland long ago, and sang a Song to the Tuatha De Danaan (the tribe of the Goddess Danú, banished from Heaven because of their knowledge of magic, they’d settled in Ireland, only to be defeated by these Sons of Mil.) Aimhergin’s song lifted the veil of mist cast around the coast by the Tuatha to keep them out..
The Tuatha de Danaan retreated to the underground tumuli of Ériú, and became what is known as the Sídhe. The tall shining ones. Somebody told me once that the etymological root of my name is Sídhe, which comes from Siddha, in Sanskrit.
I am the wind across the sea
I am a dewdrop let fall by the sun.
I am the fire on every hill.
I am the shield over every head.
Who (but I) is both the tree and the lightening that strikes it?
Who (but I) is the dark secret of the dolmen not yet hewn?
Who knows the period of the moon?
Who knows the path of the sun?
I am the shield over every head.
Who (but I) is both the tree and the lightening that strikes it?
Who (but I) is the dark secret of the dolmen not yet hewn?
Who knows the period of the moon?
Who knows the path of the sun?
Not a very European poem now is it, with its fine pantheism? It might be sung in the Bhagavad Gita, to my mind. The dark secret of the dolmen not hewn? The fire on every hill, the shield on every head, the periods of the moon, the path of the sun? How beyond anything a Christian could tolerate. How dare they say they are a dewdrop, the wind across the sea, all at once?
Michael Morris, composer of Eriú's Child, has a beautiful version of the Song of Amhairgin. He saw this verse as one of the most magnificent verses in the Irish tradition, a "hymn to the mystery of existence" from Ireland's Dreamtime, embodying the wisdom of Plotinus that "all is each and each is all". Other songs have come out of the mist, like Port na bPúcaí, first heard by men in a curragh on the waters between the Blasket and Dunquin, near Dingle. It was brought to the mainland by the last fiddle player to leave that Blasket island in the 1960’s and it means 'Song of the Ghosts', or 'Song of the Faeries'.
“The tune is expressive of the spirit of the island and also of the belief, central to fairy lore, that fairies imitate mortal beings and their lives. A great deal of lore exists about fairy music and there are numerous accounts are numerous accounts of fairies playing music and dancing." (R. Flower, The Western Island or The Great Blasket, Oxford 1946). As if we needed to be told that by an academic. People say, even today, they hear whale-song reverberating through the canvas hulls of their boats.
Is bean ón slua sí mé, do tháinig thar toinn
I am a woman from the fairy host who traveled over the seas
Is do goideadh san oíche me tamall thar lear
I was stolen in the night and taken beyond the sea
Is go bhfuilim as ríocht seo fé gheas' mná sídhe
And I am held hostage in the kingdom by the fairy women…
The Derry Air is a very old song taken down 150 years ago from a blind street fiddler in Derry. But again, Michael Morris convinced me that the song rose out of the hedges, like Danny Boy. The Coolin, An Chuilfhionn, is another ancient air that went back to the 13th Century. The original words describe a ‘faery woman’. If you heard Michael Morris version of it on his ‘Eriú’s Child’ album, you would not find it hard to believe its provenance, from the other side…
Whether songs come through the mist, over ditches, whether Elvis sings those songs, or they are sung at the funerals of dead princesses, what strikes me is that we are, in song and manner, very like each other as human beings. If we live well, we can live in balance and in harmony with each other. Our myths mirror each others. Our mountains, too.
“God doesn't need to come down upon a mountain, for the mountain itself is the revelation. We only have to look at it and we will know how we should live.”― John Moriarty
Brilliant!
What an excellent chapter to launch your stack of blogs. Sods of earthy heritage bringing warmth and wonder to your readers.