Guinness Signs and Sidewalk Truth

Subscribers' Lynchline 28: January 16, 2023

It’s Monday! I sort of detest Mondays, as all creatures of neutral good alignment do. And yet here I am, getting all up in your Monday, adding my pixelated song-and-dance to your cares and travails. What’s that you say? “Lynch, why not give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice in it while you’re at it, eh? Maybe put more of your long-haired goofball noise in my inbox to drive my blood pressure up as I settle in to recommence pushing my boulder up its hill!” Well, sure thing. Henceforth and possibly forever, the regular issues of this newsletter will be a Monday affair!

I have been vacillating for weeks now on whether to aim for Thursdays or Fridays, but then I realized that everyone with a good newsletter already covers the end of the week, leaving a wide opening on Mondays for a bargain-basement operation like this one. Lucky you! We’ll start our weeks together for a while and see how it goes.

In other housekeeping news, I have decided that for the immediate future (specifically, until I hand the next draft of The Thorn of Emberlain in to the kindly editors who want to adopt it) more of my newsletters than usual will be public. Subscribers will still get access to a bunch of cool little side projects and doodads, starting with an audio discussion of word origin/pronunciation in the Gentleman Bastard stories, and some of my thoughts on folding and spindling real languages to give Locke’s world its particular feel. That will be up next Monday.

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Now let me tell you a story or two about Ireland.

It was not particularly difficult, in a relative sense, for me and my wife to stay at home as the long weary months of the initial pandemic rolled on. We work here to begin with, and we have what you might call rich inner lives— we don’t go stir-crazy if we can get out to a bowling alley or the Rotary Club. We’re also fortunate enough to be able to shelter here for long periods of time, not an option that everyone’s circumstances allow. Still, once the vaccines and boosters were rolled out, we were happy to see people and take little jaunts hither and thither. In fact, we finally decided to do something we’d been planning and discussing for years— take a trip to Ireland.

Part delayed honeymoon component, part delayed 50th birthday celebration for my wife, and part sheer escapism, our sojourn in September of 2022 was the first time either of us had been on a plane for nearly three years. We flew with care, masked the whole time, with no dining or drinking at the airports on either end. Our plan was to be calculated and cautious, avoiding the most egregious opportunities for exposure without hiding from civilization completely. If you’re going to do that anyway, why leave home? We ate out among people, on rooftops and in the open air, and we dined indoors precisely once, on a quiet evening when we mostly had the room to ourselves. We tested ourselves frequently, stayed masked in shops, and in the end escaped infection by anything except a powerful urge to go back and do it all again.

This was a purely personal trip involving no publishing business, no signings, no appointments. Our primary residence was a rental cottage, tucked away in the hills near Cahersiveen in Kerry, selected for relative remoteness so that we might have a solitude in which to write, read, and be extremely lazy. In all three areas we triumphed; we stood atop the podium, shook our champagne bottle, and received our medals. I also spent much of the time knocking my brains from side to side trying to figure out what I was going to call Untitled Lynch Novella #1. If you had told me I wouldn’t come up with an answer until just after the new year, I would have groaned and mumbled “fucking figures.”

The afternoon following our arrival, I took a long walk. As I was returning to our cottage, a car rolled toward me on the narrow rustic road, gravel popping under its tires as it slowed. Down went the window as it stopped beside me, and then came… first contact. I cannot reproduce the noise involved, because if I broke what I heard down to discrete phonetic blocks it would not be incomprehensible enough, and if I rendered it in amusing gibberish I would fail to hint at the patterns lurking tantalizingly somewhere beneath the surface.

The driver of the car was a white-haired man, rugged, pleasant-looking. I think of myself as an experienced decoder of Irish and UK accents, but his was a pure encrypted transmission, as if, forgive me, a leprechaun had been squeezed through the rotors of an Enigma machine. I couldn’t I connect an instant of it to any meaning in my head. I hemmed and hawed, and he issued another stream of… issuance. This, then, was my first encounter with a deep old-time countryside Kerry accent, a wall of sound so thick it could absorb a laser beam. It makes Dylan Moran sound like he’s from Ohio.

I reacted awkwardly. I am, at the best of times, inept at making small talk with complete strangers and in Ireland this pattern kept repeating itself with older people in particular— I was as nervous as a shoeless teenager on an electrified floor. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know if I can help you with that, I’m a complete stranger around here,” guessing that he was asking for directions. Of course he was not— he was trying to tell me that he was the neighbor from the next farm over, and the appointed caretaker for our rental cottage, and he already knew our names and was pleased to see us. All these concepts he eventually got across by slowing himself down another notch, repeatedly, until the jumpy misappropriator of shared language from across the sea could finally get the point. I don’t believe he took genuine offense, but I still felt like a complete asshole. He waved cheerily as he finally drove off; I was busy looking for a rock to hide behind for a few hours.

This pattern repeated itself across the week on our supply runs to town. I never spoke to anyone else so initially incomprehensible (though I heard many chatting nearby), but many Kerry folk of a certain age seemed to talk in a pattern that was entirely new to me— a sort of casual segue from standard pleasantries to soul-deep interrogation on harrowing subjects. The phenomenon would have seemed like a game or an attack had it not come across (in my limited experience) as so natural, so sincere. Here’s a quick only-slightly-exaggerated hypothetical to show you what I mean.

ME: Good morning.

IRISH HUMAN: Mernin ter yer. American?

ME: Yep.

IRISH HUMAN: Flew over on a plane then did yer?

ME: Yes, from Boston.

IRISH HUMAN: Lotsa people died in them plane crashes over the years.

ME: Oh. Uh… yeah?

IRISH HUMAN: Not ser good fer them then. Slán!

Near the end of our trip I was prowling around one of the near-ish villages for knickknacks and postcards. In the genteel ruins of a shop that had turned into more of a hobby than a business, I found a charming little Guinness sign. The sole proprietor and human cash register, a man of seventy-ish with a satisfied and settled look, was eating lunch in a chair on the sidewalk. Here he greeted literally every other person on the street by name as they passed, and then struck up a bit of conversation with me after I’d paid.

He’d been to America, as it turned out, visiting a daughter who lived there with her husband. San Diego, in fact, had I seen it? I had, and loved the place. What about New York City? I’d been many times, I told him. And what about Atlanta? He’d been there for two days on an extended layover en route to California. Now there I’d never been, I had to admit, though I hoped for a reason to visit eventually.

“Burned it to the ground then, didn’t they? Atlanta.”

I was not exactly caught off guard, thanks to experience. It was more that I had to stifle a giggle at experiencing this flavor of sudden conversational swerve yet again. I have tried to the limits of my ability, in what follows, to recreate our words nearly verbatim.

“Yeah, during the Civil War,” I said.

“That was Sherman, was it?” Though it was phrased as a question I can only say that he was not at all unclear. By asking, he was emphasizing that he was not asking.

“Sherman’s march to the sea,” I said. “Burned a big swath of the south. Tore up railroads. That was… 1864.” I admit that I pretended to have to think about the year. I sometimes do this, consciously or unconsciously, when discussing the Civil War or the Second World War with strangers. It’s a little bit of verbal mummery to ease them into whatever facts I’m rattling off. This guy did not give a shit.

“D’you reckon they deserved it?”

Now here I was caught off guard. Another swerve. Nothing about the guy seemed noncommittal. He was watching me, really watching me, as he waited for my answer.

“Now that’s… difficult,” I said. “Obviously I’m not delighted there was a war, but there was a war and it happened for a reason, and I think Sherman’s campaign was necessary.”

“It was about slavery then, was it? The whole thing. About slavery from the start?”

Well, of course it was. I know that, any honest person knows that, anyone who has ever studied the actual constitution of the Confederate States of America couldn’t miss it except through willful disobedience to reality. I was on guard, though— what was this guy’s angle?

“It was,” I said, carefully. “I believe that’s just plain fact.”

“So it was about them keepin’ slaves, then. And you reckon they did deserve it, then? The march and the burning and all?”

For a moment I felt that suffocating fucking bougie urge to be frictionless. It’s a drilled response, colorless emptiness masquerading as civility. On rare occasion it might save you from something tedious, like a solicitor at the door, but when real human conversation is a possibility I hate it and try to knock it back where it came from. I stared at the guy for a couple seconds, and a little voice in my head said: For fuck’s sake, Scott, you believe what you believe and you’re proud of it and if there was ever a subject to tell the truth about, it’s this one.

“I think that holding an entire people in bondage is an affront to God,” I said, “and if you do it, at some point you should expect blood in return.”

Jesus Christ, did I really just say that out loud in broad daylight to a complete stranger? This is surreal.

A moment passed, and then—

“An affront to God… and to man,” he said, and then he smiled broadly, leaning back in his chair. “We feel much the same way about things here in Ireland.”

The rest of our conversation was cordial indeed.

Boy, I’d go back to Kerry in a heartbeat. I hope the world actually lets us do so.

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Next week will be the first of a four-part series called My Pandemic of Preference, in which I’ll briefly mention how important Stephen King’s The Stand has been to me since I first read it at 11, and then go on at excruciating length dissecting the 1994 TV miniseries adaptation, which is in some ways wildly awesome and in other ways quite goofy and, for various reasons, remains one of my favorite things of all time. I also hope that, if my schedule holds true, I’ll be able to tell you that I’ve passed an acceptable final draft of More Than Fools Fill Graves on to its publisher and will have moved full-time to the last dance with The Thorn of Emberlain. Will I have a good week? Find out next Monday…