What's in a Name?

The name of this blog comes from a poem entitled 'Carrickfergus' by the Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice.  The Belfast-born MacNeice declares he was 'born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries/To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams'.  It is a fairly typical description of the largest city in the North of Ireland: in addition to a sense of tension and conflict, it is the industrial qualities of the city that seem to dominate the environment.  

The Gantries of Harland & Wolff

I should explain Belfast's environs, in order for this cityscape to make sense.  Mountains surround Belfast to its immediate north and west; the River Lagan and Belfast Lough dominate the city's east, both physically and culturally.  The mountains in the west suggest connections to other places: the rural soils of Ulster that yield flax for Belfast's once-thriving linen industry or indeed Swift's Lilliput.  Some say Belfast's Cave Hill, which looms to the north, looks like the profile of a man lying down.  Legend has it, this image inspired Swift's tales of Gulliver.  This explains the mountains, but what of the gantries?  As Gerald Dawe, another Belfast-born poet, says, 'the massive gantries of the Harland & Wolff shipbuilders--once the greatest of their kind in the world--straddle the city's horizon like monumental arches' (Dawe 18).  It is difficult to overstate the dominance these arches symbolise: shipbuilding, the historic leading industry of East Belfast, inevitably recalls the divisions, cultural, political, and sectarian, that continue to shape our view of Belfast today.      

None of this, of course, seems to inspire one to write a blog about studying and living in that tense industrial city.  But, I suppose, the raison d'etre of this blog is to convince you otherwise.  As Dawe writes in 'My Mother City', 'MacNeice was to change his mind and discover beneath the seemingly unchangeable "outer ugliness and dourness" a deeper reality' (Dawe 25).  Throughout these next three years, I want to find for myself and hopefully to share that deeper reality.  It seems an appropriate task for someone studying literature.  Is that not the very purpose of all of academia?  Are we not trying constantly to find the next truth and to re-examine all others in the light of this the newest?  

I suppose I've accomplished the task I set myself at the beginning of this inaugural entry.  I promise you not all of these posts will be based in poetry, but some will.  Some will be history, some politics, some literature, some life, some just craic, but all will, as MacNeice wrote, try to 'feel/the drunkenness of things being various'.