James Joyce and Rugby

Yesterday, I pinned up pictures of people I love. My great cloud of witnesses gazes at me from my walls and inspire me.

I've been reading James Joyce and today as I was reading and looking out on first the tree tops, then the city, then the snow capped Munros, listening to the Avett Broths and Denison Whitmer, and then reading harrowing lyical prose, all appealing to my senes at once, overwhelmed my cold heart, and I couldn't help cry in the library. For missing home. For finally being here, that's like a consummation of a marraige.

After such a cathartic experience, I left the library to go to the pub to watch Rugby matches. Game 1: England vs. Italy. Game 2: Ireland vs. France. At first I wanted England to win. Then the match ended and Ireland began to come up. The stadium they happened to be using was the site of a massacre in the early 1900s by the English on the Irish, and for a while no British games have been allowed to play there. However, for this tournament of 6 Nations, the Irish Rugby team has been allowed to use it.

In my James Joyce class I've been learning about this time in Irish history. About identity, nationalism, fighting against the English and against each other. So much fighting and contention. I begin to understand what I didn't before hand. That history stays in this land and people remember it. All the Scottsmen in the bar did not want England to win, but pulled for Italy. In the second match, they all sang along for Ireland's national anthem. And not softly, but loudly and proudly.

Its funny how these tensions still play out. Its funnier still how I'm not quite a part of it, a third party looking on and noting this. I find myself pulling against England, but I'm not Scottish or Irish or English. I'm American. I'm Southern. I'm a Carolina girl, deep down. So on my way home, I found myself singing "The Weight of Lies" by the Avett Brothers along cobbled streets in Medieval Edinburgh.