Gifts of Imagination

I recently shadowed two friends on their brief visit to Dublin.  In the process I learned about my own capital city.  Punctually one morning they embarked on their tour of the Writers’ Museum from where I was to collect them.  As I arrived at the top of Parnell Square, dozens of other tourists, who had finished the literary tour, were milling on the steps and chatting in a variety of languages.  Their enthusiasm was infectious.  Why have I never yet visited this museum, I asked myself, waiting in bright chilly sunlight.  A friendly doorman reassured me that, “Yes,” I am allowed to drive down through O’Connell Street and drop my friends at the Gresham for coffee, information I subsequently discovered to be inaccurate –I think!

I also chatted to the owner of Chapter One, the discreet basement restaurant under the Museum.  He told me about Queen Elizabeth’s historic visit last year, to the Garden of Remembrance across the road.  Wandering over there, I kept a weather eye out for clampers, as I  gazed  down into the cross-shaped pool, with its wonderful underwater mosaics.  But what a lot of steps.  I marvelled again as I remembered TV pictures of the 85 year-old monarch skimming up and down there unaided.  From above I didn’t see any ramps, but there must be one somewhere.

Of course it is the magnificent Children of Lir sculpture that dominates the Garden, even from street level where I am.  I must read again that mythical story, familiar in my Clare childhood, near a river where swans nested annually.  Gazing now at these mighty metal birds, I could almost hear  “the bell- beat of their wings..”  From the level of the sunken Garden below, the sculpture must be spectacular.  In due course Megan went down all the steps with her IPad; and on returning home, she sent the pictures back to me.  The timeless legend of Lir’s four famous children, condemned to live out their long lives as swans, has travelled away with our many visitors.  Such tales belong the world over.  The artworks, whether digital or hard copies which we now collect, speak to us of the imagination which first gave birth to the stories. Let’s hope it remains in our national psyche, or wherever the imagination resides!

Affirmation of this came when, on leaving, my friends gave me a memento of a Celtic Angel by the Wild Goose studio.  The inscription on the back reads:  “(Angels, being)..of mysterious origin, (are) an essential part of our existence, to be reached by our imagination.”  Only a small leap from Yeats’ Stolen Child to whom he says, “…the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”  WB well knew that it’s also full of mystery, often glimpsed in the appealing Celtic Twilight.  The last three days of friendship and sharing were magical, so obviously this imagination has no national frontiers either.