I’ll take you home again

Nuala O’Faolain gained wisdom and insight during her often-troubled life.  Her gift for sharing both in her writing was genetic as was her fierce and honest intelligence.  She describes the response of an American audience to a spontaneous TV interview, when she was persuaded to sing, ‘I’ll take you home again Kathleen’.  The audience joined in and afterwards people stood in line to shake her hand.  She concluded that this was because, “Humans seem to need to move towards each other once the dimension of the imagination has been opened up.”
(‘Almost There’,  p.139).

Imagaination is obviously important and I believe that the Irish have always been good at using it.  But I realised that I did not really know what exactly it is, so I consulted a dictionary of psychology.  There I learned that imagination is a capacity to engage with past experience in a creative way, so that the future is thereby improved.  Presumably the earlier experience can be either positive or negative.

As regards early childhood experience O’Faolain has some searing things to say about the shortcomings of parents and of mothers in particular.  Of course none of our mothers had perfect parents either, which might explain why “mothers and motherhood figure are sources of pain” (ibid.)  But in the song Kathleen is promised a place, ‘where your heart will feel no pain’.  This is a myth and unrealistic except at the level of imagination.

Nuala O’Faolain gives a pledge to her readers who, having read her memoir, wrote to her sharing their own sorrows.  In response she offers not sympathy, but only what she asks of them also:  “Don’t do anything for me but know about me, be with me.  You know this song too, don’t you?  Well, won’t you help me to sing it?” 

If you would like to respond please send an e-mail to:  kskeane@eircom.net