Turning on and tuning in in Ireland

We are in gracious, pretty DubIin after a smooth crossing from Cornwall. I’ve come to love these great car ferries that trundle us across the seas, even more, I think, now that I’ve been in a helicopter that transformed a three hour voyage into a fifteen minute trip.  On the ferry it is like being back in the womb, gently rocked and with a choice of sleeping or reading or snacking from the café with the sea all around.  By the time you arrive you are properly gestated.

Speaking of reading, I have downloaded on to my kindle a book highly recommended by son Mungo.  It is about psilocybin and LSD research – how it was once respectable – indeed  Bill Wilson, founder of AA wanted to explore LSD use for helping alcoholics in the 1950s. Timothy O’Leary, however, scotched all that when he urged young people to “turn on, tune in and drop out” just when the US government wanted them to head off to Vietnam. The medical benefits of psychedelics were outweighed by its challenges. The book is a fascinating read  and suggests at one point that the mind and the ego as they mature stop having naive encounters with life but use a sort of shorthand developed through experience.  I am reminded of a folk rhyme

“There were three jovial huntsmen

As I have heard men say

And they would go ahunting

Upon St Davids Day

 [……..]

And all the night they hunted

And nothing could they find

But the moon agliding

Agliding in the wind

The first he said it was the moon

The second he said nay

The third he said it was a cheese

With half o’t cut away

The first huntsman is a proper adult with narrow adjusted vision and gets it right, the second is probably drunk but the third is open to myriad possibilities like a child.

When you travel, I think, you are inevitably like the third huntsman with the laces of the mind all unloosed.  The old saw that “travel broadens the mind” is actually spot on.  I experienced this in an uncomfortable way when we stopped at the Wexford Irish Agricultural Museum, partly because we couldn’t get into our air bnb until after two o’clock.  Before continuing I must state that the only pharmaceuticals that had passed my lips that day were my old lady’s cocktail of medicaments. No gin, no magic mushrooms.  But perhaps because of reading the Pollen book’s personal accounts of tripping my mind was open to anything.

The first place we went to was a barn full of old carts of all sorts – some with low sides for tossing potatoes in, some adapted to carrying churns or hay and one with elegant metalwork and benches for people.  But what caught my attention was the great wooden curved shafts that all of them had for attaching the horse.  I stroked one shaft  and tried to lift it. I couldn’t and suddenly I was overcome with pity for all the horses that had been enslaved by these carts, heavy when empty and how much heavier when loaded with people with whips  and potatoes in the back.  I remembered the Aesop’s fable that I read so often to Ethan from the pop up book. How the horse was tricked by man into servitude. It seemed so sad.

But the next room was worse.  It was full of farming implements - blades and prongs and things like corkscrews for grubbing survival out of the grim earth.  There was a huge stone bead with a chain through it for “crushing clods” I couldn’t even lift its handle.  The pity of life before petrol.

I think if there had been even one effigy of a jolly ploughman with his pitchfork it might have seemed different but I pressed on feeling great sorrow for the past.

The next gallery contained the story of the 1845 Potato Blight which starved a million and sent a million more in ”coffin ships” to Canada and the States.  There were three bowls of potatoes which Grant later said he thought were fake. ‘I didn’t touch them” he said.  I didn’t either but to me they looked real.  For a start they were sprouting a bit, which added a melancholy touch.  The first bowl was stacked as high as my down jacket in its pouch. It represented the pile of potatoes a child would eat every day The second and third piles were as big as compacted sleeping bags and represented the adult rations.  The consumption seemed enormous until one realised there was probably

next to nothing else.  And when the potatoes rotted the bowls would’ve been empty.

It was an excellent museum and my trip through it taught me pity and humility but it was troubling too.

When we went to the archeological museum next day I double knotted the laces in my brain.  There were paths there down which I had no intention of travelling - namely the bronze age bog man who lay in his glass case – only his squashed top half with a little ear all crinkled like mine and real hair.  He’d been murdered three times – strangled, stabbed and bashed on the head. I chose not to care about him. It all happened so long ago and god knows why.  I also got slight gold fatigue from beholding artefacts from umpteen hoards.

But Dublin city is as fair as the song says and I’ll save her for tomorrow.