Omphalos

I would begin with the Greek word, omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the center of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, 
omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door.
— Seamus Heaney, “Mossbawn”

Omphalos, omphalos, omphalos    ...    The rhythm of the word that conjured up for Heaney the pump in his childhood yard — the Greek term for the center of things — calls to mind the helicopters hovering over the cityscape of my childhood, a constant part of the soundtrack of growing up. The army would use the racket of propellers to drown out speeches at Free Derry Corner. So in my mind, the blades are related to words, in opposition to our words, slicing up sentences in the wind.

An emigrant’s view might also hover, surveying the misty valley of a city, grids of streets punctuated by churches, before focusing in on a house. It’s near the upper end of a terrace, the house where we lived. Looking back, I can rarely locate the “I,” a common experience in large families. Memories have a collective quality. Mine are often from the point of view of “the wee ones,” the four youngest siblings — two sisters, my brother, and myself. Something happened and “we” were excited; something else, and “we” were scared. The “big ones,” the five eldest girls, were a slightly separate tribe.

So the house was part of a terrace, and “I” was part of a sequence of children. Perhaps we can think of ourselves, siblings from large families, as terraced children, as opposed to detached or semi-detached. Do we share interior walls, psychologically? My sisters and I appear in a recent poem, “hand in hand like paper dolls,” walking to the infant school. Most of the neighboring houses had children and the street was one of open doors, as we darted in and out of each other’s homes.

Our street overlooked the Moor, a series of terraces that runs from the cathedral on the left to the city cemetery on the right. Below the Moor lay the valley of the Bogside, with its neat rows of roofs adorned with TV aerials and smoke. My mother had grown up in our house and the upstairs drawing room from her less chaotic 
childhood was now a dormitory of single beds. My grandmother lived with us until she died in 1967. That year, the electronics factory that loomed behind our houses closed, leaving hundreds of men unemployed. The area, as it might have looked in my mother’s heyday, was beautifully drawn by Seamus Deane in his novel Reading in the Dark. His characters inhabit a maze of rained-on terraces, rife with political intrigue. Where Deane’s novel ends, my life begins, with the advent of the seventies.

In 1972, one week after Bloody Sunday, our windows are blown in by an explosion down in the Moor. There are house raids by paratroopers and later, after a shoot-out at the gable end, they fire rounds of tear gas. Because the window panes are gone, the rooms fill quickly and my mother ushers everyone out, forgetting in her panic the toddler asleep in her cot. A courageous neighbor, Pat Breslin, covers his face and dashes up the stairs.

We would lean over the fence as funerals slow-footed along the Moor to the cemetery, led by the priest in his black suit. Or peep from the vantage point of the top windows when rioting erupted below. One night we watched, fascinated, as Metal Mickey — the bomb disposal robot — advanced towards an abandoned Cortina. To my mother’s generation, going “over the Moor” was the euphemism for dying. Years later, when I read Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death,” I pictured Death’s carriage paused by the terraced houses in the Moor, an image hard to dislodge.

When I was ten, we moved down the street from number 17 to number 4. I remember a stand-up piano being wheeled along the pavement like a barrel organ. The new house was a mirror image of the old, only slightly larger. Like vital clues in a mystery, the departing family had left behind a globe of the earth in dusty halves, and a pair of antiquated binoculars. These objects provided my first and lasting impressions of our new world, as our furnishings filled the freshly painted rooms.

In Jungian dream analysis, a house can symbolize one’s psyche or self, the various levels of consciousness. The contents of an attic may signify hidden aspects of our personalities, brought to our attention by the dreaming mind. Some poems, like dreams, seem to come from another level, slightly beyond what we know or remember. Often, we capture only fragments. And when a poem is written, like a fully remembered dream, its meaning can remain withheld for a long time.

My recent poems seem to want to examine that place, and time, more closely. The results are only glimpses, seen through doorways, sometimes held in mirrors. The mirror in our hallway was consulted by everyone leaving or entering by the front door — checking faces, fixing hair. Now, in the hall mirror, I can see nine children looking out. I’m stealing this image from a Mary Poppins story, where a small boy asks her to tell him what he looks like. “Look in the mirror,” she says, surprised. “But there are so many faces,” he replies, “I don’t know which is mine!” When the British soldiers raided our house in the early hours of the morning, my mother would request that they stack their rifles under the hall table, so as not to scare the children. I imagine each man’s face suspended for a brief moment in that hall mirror, as he bends to set down his gun.

So the house is central to my poetic world, in its mirrors and in both of its mirrored incarnations, number 17 and number 4. And the terraced street is a concertinaed expansion of the house, a sort of cliff of rooms in and out of which many children flit like swifts. The street overlooks the valley of the town, which rises again beyond the Rossville flats to meet the crown of medieval walls. The writing is on the walls, of course, the slogans of the day in white emulsion. The house stands in its historical moment, in a particular war, where trouble is the norm, and children are not afraid of tanks, or bombs, or balaclavaed men. A chopper hovers over the walls, dips, turns, and veers away. Weirdly, it feels like the safest place in the world.