Today is St. Patrick’s Day. We celebrated Ireland, and the Irish people as a family yesterday. Ireland and its inhabitants have always been hard scrabble. Rural, village life is not easy-city-living. And then there’s England. The British have been Ireland’s overlords until recently, Dec. 6, 1921. Even then the British held onto Northern Island. Curious about the British evisceration of Ireland, and Bloody Sunday? CLICK HERE

The Irish have a wry, uncanny attitude about what it means “to be.” Irish music, dance, beer is a typical response to “being fucked.” Knowing that life owes you nothing, and joy, such as is possible, is what you will make for yourself.

We enjoyed corned beef sandwiches and Green River-vanilla ice cream floats to affirm our kinship with Ireland, and the Irish story.

…true being-in-the-world
is “uncanny”
(unheimlich);
the fundamental mood of our way of being
is anxiety.

Human being is in anxiety
regarding the self’s
being-in-the-world
and shudders from the anxiety
of death

–that is, in the face of the possibility
that Existence may become impossible.

In anxiety, human being
“finds itself before the Nothing of the possible impossibility
of its Existence”

Basically we are never truly
at home in the world;
the true being of the self
is fundamentally
unheimlich.

And in this anxiety,
Nothing
is revealed.

The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Nishitani Keiji, trans. by Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara, page 166

This tune is apt for our memory of Irish history, and of “the given” of the struggle to be human. Sunday, Bloody Sunday by U2.