19 October, 1998

Extremities

I made a mistake.

I went home this weekend.

Of course that's not really wherein the mistake lies. The mistake is that I left home at all this weekend.

I should have stayed here in Virgina, safely ensconced in the empty condo, just me and the cats and read my books and written my paper, studiously, responsibly and with plenty of time to spare. Instead I did my reading in snatched moments on the couch at Sabs' Mom's house and then after an excellent lunch of poached salmon, boiled potatoes and peas with my family on Sunday.

I managed to get the bulk of the reading done over the weekend, though nowhere near to the schedule which I'd planned for myself. This left a few meager hours today to write the associated book review paper and make some sort of informed critique of the book I'd chosen.

Biographies are very hard to critique. Usually because people's lives do speak for themselves and it's hard to make any kind of controversial argument about them. Especially when you pick someone like John Devoy who is practically a saint in terms of Irish revolutionary tradition. That is of course if you find the revolutionary tradition itself to be worthy of sainthood, which is, a controversial statement itself since the movement has since the mid-19th century, been associated with escalating terrorist tactics.

Devoy, according to all biographies I read and his personal memoir, doesn't fall into the terrorist category, though he was, by all accounts a dedicated revolutionary, and a proponent of the need for a violent insurrection to "free Ireland from the yoke of British tyranny."

This book was fascinating reading, actually, especially since it covers the time period during which my own great-grandfather was supposedly actively involved with the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland and then the Fenians in America. Supposedly he was running guns sometime around 1890 in Ireland and got informed on and fled to New York, as many of the IRB did from the 1850's through the turn of the century. He met and married my great-grandmother in New York in 1892 and his first child was born in 1896. As far as I know he never returned to Ireland, but according to my grandfather he was always donating money, which was always in short supply int he Kelleher household, to "the Cause". My grandfather was much embittered by this behavior, and never set foot in Ireland during his whole life. He stated quite firmly that he was an American and wanted no part of the country whose struggle for independence had sapped the financial resources of his own family.

So. My personal family history is very bound up in the history of American Fenianism and all of its associated controversies. My great-grandfather died in 1920, a year before Ireland resolved the conflicts wich led to the Irish Free State which exists today as the Irish Republic. I wonder what he thought about the treaty which freed 26 out of the 32 counties from British rule ...

The long and short of this divagation into my family history is simply this: I am tired.

It's been another one of those long hauls where I've had to tap all of my resources just to get by. I am not proud of the work I did on this paper. I am not proud of the work I will be doing for class tomorrow. I am just, generally, not proud right now.

And my mind is blasted, feels scoured clean from the effort of creating this paper, so quickly and so on the fly. This really isn't my standard modus operandi. Really. It just isn't.

I'm not happy about that.