THE GLASS CHANDELIER: REMEMBRANCES IN TWO VOICES!

Text re-constructed from two novels; - Austin Clarkes Twice Round the Black Church: Early
Memories of England and Ireland, 1962 (A.C) and Mary Margaret Mitchells Gone With The
Wind, 1936 (S.OH.)!

A.C: We came towards Capel Street.!

Memories were jumping over counters and bounding out of shops !
that had changed their owners, long since !
or had gone down in the world. !

Only recently had I found that Capel Street meant much to me when I still went bare-kneed. !
Now, all the way from Drumcondra, through Upper and Lower Dorset and Bolton Street, !
that thoroughfare kept changing its name as we walked;!
(Grattan BridgeParliamentLord Edward).!

Soon we could see the Dublin Mountains from some of the higher streets; !
and beyond them, far away in Wicklow, was the reservoir at Roundwood. !
I longed to go there !
because my father had told me of a mysterious blue clay !
which kept the waters from disappearing.!

S.OH: Scarlett left the village behind and turned into the road to Tara.

A faint pink still lingered about the edges of the sky,

and fat feathery clouds were tinged with gold and palest green.

The red-earth smelled so good

Scarlet wanted to scoop some up in her hands.

The honeysuckle - which draped the gullied red sides of the road in tangled greenery

was piercingly sweet after the rain.

Atlanta had always interested Scarlet more than any other town

because of the story Gerald told her when she was a child;

the fact that she and Atlanta were christened the same year.

In the nine years before Scarlett was born,

the town had been called, rst, Terminus and then Marthasville,

and not until the year of Scarletts birth had it become Atlanta.

!
A.C: Along the left-hand side of Capel Street which had several sweet shops, !
my sister Eileen and I walked slowly during a few weeks.!
I had hired her as my storyteller before I could read very well. !
We always found it exciting to leave the crowded pavements, !
turn the corner, and find ourselves in the narrow alley beside St. Michans Church. !

On this occasion the path was full of people who were making their seven visits. !
Crossing them as we continued on up Bolton Street !
we were suddenly made aware of their transient communion; !
those passing by the lamp-posts; the furniture stores and ironmongery shops; !
and the millions hidden in purgatory.!

!
S.OH: A shadow disengaged itself from the mass and came to the gate.

Are you going? Are you leaving us?

Yes, Mam. You see, the Yankees are coming.

De Yankees is comin! bawled Prissy,

Oh, Miss Scarlett, deyll kill us all! Deyll run dey baynits in our stummicks! Deyll

Scarlett could hear a humming of noise from down the street, but what it signalled she did not know.
All she could distinguish was a volume of sound that rose and fell.

As she sat straining her ears toward town, a faint glow appeared above the trees.

She watched it and saw it grow brighter.

The dark sky became pink and then dull red, and suddenly above the trees,

she saw a huge tongue of ame leap high to the heavens.

!
A.C: They say Meath is no longer a province !
and so it was, in the rustling corner of a lost province !
that I first heard of Tara and knew that the name contained mysteries. !
In ancient times Manor Street was part of a highway from Tara of the Kings to Cuala in Leinster.
It was there that I had an unforgettable experience.!
Stepping for the first time of my life into a lift, to my complete astonishment, !
I found myself alone with three Red Indians. !
One upward glance at those huge earthly figures !
with long black hair, head feathers, knife in belt, !
hurled instantly through my mind all the stories I had read about Buffalo Bill; !
arrow-stricken wagons, shrieking captives. !
At any moment I felt that the Indians might be tempted to revert to their primitive habits and
scalp me! !
Then the lift stopped !
and I got out.!

S.OH: Down the road lumbered the train

past hillsides scarred with serpentine breastworks,

acres of chimneys standing above ashes and tumbled heaps of brick lining the old streets.

While they had been unconscious, their world had changed.

The Yankees had come, the darkies had gone and Mother had died.

Here were three unbelievable happenings and their minds could not take them in.

Certainly Scarlett was so changed she couldnt be real.

Her inner world was gone,

invaded by people whose thoughts were not her thoughts.

!
A.C: Children can enact in their own way the primary myths, !
find for themselves the ancient ritual of fear. !
We quickly forget those first years when the mind seemed to part so readily from the body. !
I cannot remember my discovery of the spring !
or when my secret visits to it became a daily habit !
nevertheless, the fact that I did not tell anyone seems to suggest an obscure imaginative
impulse which I did not understand. !
The waters appearance in the concrete had always been a surprise and a mystery. !
A bit of sky had fallen there, for, a few minutes before, !
the rain-drops which formed it had been miles up in the air. !
When I sat on a box just inside the coal-shed and looked down,!
there, in that half-inch of water, !
was a brighter hemisphere than the one on which I lived. !

S.OH: Scarlett stood in the doorway watching,

the cold draught blowing her skirts about her damp ankles.

The front door was slightly ajar and she trotted, breathless, into the hall

and paused for a moment under the rainbow-prisms of the chandelier.

All of those shadowy folks whose blood owed in her veins seemed to move quietly in the moonlit room.

For all its brightness the house was very still.

!
It was later on between the quarters and the smoked stone foundations, that they found the well,

the roof of it still standing with the bucket far down.

Between them, they wound up the rope,

and when the bucket of cool water appeared from the dark depths, Scarlett tilted it to her lips and drank.

How cool the water was,

how good to lie here like a child.

She sighed and relaxed, and after a time she was alone and the room was brighter,

as the rays of the moon streamed in across the bed.

!
A.C: Certainly as a child, I knew a great deal more about the next world than this one. !
Chief among physical contacts was one which may have been unorthodox !
but was strangely moving. !
A tiny ringing in the ear meant that a poor soul in Purgatory was crying to us for aid. !
Coming from a vast distance, that minute sound would lose all its terrifying agony, !
and yet keep its agency. !
Once, on hearing it, I closed my eyes, !
but I could not escape from the strange moonlight. !
I seemed to be both in the room and at the same time outside under the sky. !
The moon was shining on the streams all around making them as bright as herself, !
and my mind wandered to the warm hearth in the parlour. !
Here too was a glass chandelier, from which I was once given a few broken prisms. !
On Sunday evenings, when the fire was glowing and the incandescent mantles were lit, !
the chandelier was a-dazzle. !
I owe to it my first moment of identity, !
for when I was held up to it as an infant I twinkled into self consciousness.!

END!
Helen Horgan (2014)!

Text commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition; !

IT IS NOT ON ANY MAP; TRUE PLACES NEVER ARE, Youghal, Cork, 2014 curated by Maria Tanner.!
www.itisnotonanymaptrueplacesneverare.eu