Sands of Eternity

When the tide is out, strolling Dubliners take to James Joyce’s favourite beach.

Ferries and sailing boats glide through mirages way out on the sand. Couples walk through pools of reflected dimming golden light. It is the end of the day and the evening promenade is in progress.

Sandymount Strand merges with the sky’s horizon when the tide is out and seems to stretch to infinity and back. I am not the only one with a special affection for this place and its mudflats, as Dubliners flock here even during winter squalls to stroll along the eastern edge of Ireland.

Sandymount Strand, jus a few miles from the city centre, is the most famous beach in Irish fiction. Our greatest writer, James Joyce, based two episodes of his epic novel Ulysses here.

At 11am on Bloomsday, upon which the novel is set, Stephen Dedalus wanders “into eternity” on the strand (“crush, crack, crick, crick”) and muses on being an artist, death, and the meaning of life. Dedalus is Joyce’s alter ego and his meanderings mirror those of an author who walked these self-same sands in his youth.

In Joyce’s day, the vista was much different from that we see today. There was a wooden latticed pier and the baths were in their heyday.  The graffiti-adorned square of stone was once a Victorian swimming pool into which salt water was pumped from beyond the tide line for well-to-do bathers. At tuppence a swim, this was a gathering place for Dublin’s aristocracy. Now it sits in ruins, submerged in silting sand.

The  pier, filled with brass from the bandstands and peddlers selling cockles and mussels, didn’t survive the lashing of the elements for long. It was removed within three decades.

Recently a plan was mooted to restore the baths and build another pier, but this idea has apparently been shelved. An international design competition was announced and then quietly quashed.

In the Proteus episode of Ulysses, Stephen closes his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. The mudflats are still filled with intertidal bivalves. Razor clams, cockles and mussels are all exposed when the tide is out and were eaten in former times. Perhaps the demise of the whole O’Connor family through mussel poisoning, as detailed in the novel, was the reason Irish found smaller shellfish unpalatable for much of the 20th century. The bay has been cleaned up since then, however. Irish dining tastes have changed.

Kitesurfers catch the wind here all year long. In summer, young children frolic in the tidal pools. Dogwalkers unleash canine companions who spray themselves with cooling splashes as they dash about. Venturing far out on the sands is not without peril, particularly when the moon is on this side of the earth. The tide floods rapidly and unfortunate strollers have been trapped and isolated by swirling saltwater lakes. The sea has claimed its victims at Sandymount the past, so be wary of a waxing moon.

Read more On Protean Sands..

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Brent geese overwinter here and feed on the eelgrass that colonises the mudflats. It is a birdwatchers’ paradise with all kinds of exotica on view, especially during the colder months of the year. Early morning is best for birding – if you’re lucky you might spot a red breasted merganser, turnstone, knot, snow bunting or bar-tailed godwit. They feed on the tiny razorshell clams and cockles exposed by the tide.

Early in the morning as commuters Dart by, there is often a silhouetted fisherman out looking for telltale sand casts just before the turning tideline. He will dig up a trench and hopefully get his treasure in the form of lugworms to stick on the end of a line as bait. Lugs are allegedly great for baiting flounders and bottom feeder fish such as cod, pollock and haddock.

The Martello tower on the edge of the promenade is one of nine fortifications built on the Dublin coastline stretching from Howth to Bray. Erected to thwart an alleged impending invasion by Napoleon, the all conquering little emperor never made it to Irish shores and the towers were used to temporarily imprison smugglers. Some were rented out and Joyce spent an infamous night in the one at Sandycove.

In the distance, tiny sailing boats race from Howth and Dun Laoghaire on summer evenings. They fill the sweeping panorama of sea and sky with multicoloured spinnakers, jostling in the wind with each other. Sailors distracted from racing look towards the setting sun or the southwest, the Sugar Loaf mountain and the distant Wicklow Hills. They cannot but be affected by the majesty of the surrounds – even if it distracts from a competitive edge. The views from Dublin Bay are one of the undiscovered treasures of the region.

Towards the end of the day another episode of Ulysses takes place on Sandymount Strand. The book’s hero Bloom, the greatest of ordinary Dubliners, watches fireworks and pleasuredshimself in a blue dusk on Sandymount Strand. He was permitted an intentional glimpse of Gerty McDowell’s underwear in the light of a pyrotechnic Roman candle explosion.

Joyce was the most European of Irish writers and Bloom, the Magyar-Celt, was a European Dubliner. It seems fitting that the welcome of his fictional ancestors, the Hungarians, into the fold of the European Union during the Irish Presidency was marked here on Sandymount Strand.

The “Stars of the Sea” pyrotechnic explosions on May 1 2004 however, were probably located there more by accident than design. This would have appealed to Joyce as he was rather fond of a spontaneous party, not to mention serendipitous coincidences.

Bloomsday Centenary

This year is the centenary of Bloomsday, which is undoubtedly the most important day in the literary history of Dublin. On 16^th of June in 1904, a day later than was originally intended as she stood him up on the prearranged date of the day before, James Joyce had his first date with his future wife Nora Barnacle. This first date was of such significance to the young writer that he later marked it by basing his monumental masterpiece Ulysses on that auspicious date and immortalising it forever in fiction.

Ulysses is the great “unread” work of world literature and a huge percentage of the Irish population has probably not even glanced at the first sentence in the book. It has an unfair reputation of being unreadable and it is this preconception that is the greatest deterrent to potential readers.

There is no doubt that reading Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the ultimate challenges in fiction and it has taken me the better part of seven months to plough through it. It is undoubtedly the great experimental work of modern language and Joyce set out to challenge the reader in every way he could by varying the style and filling the book with many confusing literary and historical allusions. In some passages the reader can feel like they are struggling through deep sludgy mud. In others, they are propelled through the text rapidly even though they may not fully comprehend what they are reading.

The basic story of Ulysses is a day in the life of the main character Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew, and it is written in parallel to Odysseus journey in Homer’s Odyssey. Bloom’s journey is both physical in that which he does during the day and spiritual in his ultimate encounter with the second main character of the book Stephen Dedalus. Stephen acts as the spirit of the son that Bloom never had and the quest of his spiritual journey through the day.

Joyce had a photographic memory and was pedantic to the point of extremism.

He was fastidious that every word in the book had to be correct in meaning and accuracy. Even though he wrote Ulysses when he was living abroad he aimed to create a novel that would contain all of Dublin. A famous quote is that you could reconstruct Dublin just from Ulysses if the city was ever destroyed. He would badger people who lived in the city to check every single detail before he committed pen to paper for even the most simple of phrases. Every tiny punctuation mark was painstakingly researched to ensure it was correct by the author, just as scholars scrutinize the text today to try and elucidate its intended meaning.

It was Joyce’s fortieth birthday when he received the first edition of his book after much struggling to get it published. It was banned in many places and considered obscene. His book was vilified before it even saw a printing press, especially in his native city. Dublin has a history of denigrating its literary talent.

It was last March when I myself reached that great same age that I decided that I really needed to try again to read the greatest literary work about my home city. When I was much younger I had failed in an attempt before I even started. Within a chapter, I was captivated.

I was immediately struck by the strength of the imagery in the book and I knew that I was going to have to do something visually with this inspiration. This project was too big for one photographer and the work too complex. One of the themes of the book is the inadequacy of a single viewpoint or single interpretation, so this had to be a group project. So I started asking some photographer friends if they wanted to be involved and the momentum built.

Through his book, Joyce wanted to present Dubliners with “one good look through a nicely polished looking glass.” As looking in a mirror distorts the image that others see of you, the photographic lens is the ideal medium to provide a contemporary look at Dublin in similar way to what Joyce achieved.

The imminent centenary celebrations seemed the ideal opportunity to celebrate Joyce in a way that was different to everything else that will be going on for the centenary. The ideal time to take a contemporary snapshot of Dublin, while also using Ulysses as an inspiration for the work.