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TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy 7 – Core Language
Hi, it’s Megan. Welcome to today’s Notes from Dunfanaghy.
So just a quick one today. I have been thinking a little bit about the Irish language.
Obviously, the retreat is held in Dunfanaghy, which is in Donegal. I grew up in Derry, but Dunfanaghy is an hour down the road across the border, so it’s in the Republic of Ireland. But it is just outside the limits of the Donegal Gaeltacht.
So the Gaeltacht is the area where the Irish language lives on as the primary language, the first language, but Dunfanaghy is just outside of that. And so my family who lived there — it was my great-great-granny who was the last one who spoke Irish. One of her daughters spoke Irish as well as English, but she was the last one to be raised through Irish. And she was raised on an island just off the coast called Inishboffin. And then she came to Dunfanaghy in the 1870s and started the family home there on the mainland.
But so my granny, who grew up in Dunfanaghy, her father, my great-grandfather, who grew up in Dunfanaghy, didn’t speak Irish. Maybe — I don’t know how much my great-grandfather had. My granny might have had a little bit of Irish, but not very much. And I grew up without the language. I don’t speak Irish. I have more French or Spanish than I have Irish.
And I’ve been thinking about Irish more and more when I go to Dunfanaghy in the last few years. On the last retreat — which I’m now trying to think when that was, last year, it was last year — I incorporated a little bit of the Irish language into what we were doing, just a little bit of Irish language poetry here and there. And one of the reasons that I did that is I wanted to kind of temporarily recreate the oral landscape of the past, the oral landscape of my ancestors.
I think a lot when I go to Dunfanaghy, and I’m out in the landscape, I think about the fact that some of these places are so remote and so rural that it really hasn’t changed since, you know, the late 1800s, whenever my great-great-granny was knocking around. And I find that to be very helpful, and, you know, kind of like expanding my time horizon and thinking about the lineage that I’m a part of.
And so I think about the fact that the landscape hasn’t changed, but then I think about the sounds of the landscape — they’re not just the wind and the sea and the birds and all of that, it’s also the voices. And that landscape has changed, because I’m there, and whoever I’m with, we’re speaking English. And so I wanted to introduce just a little bit of the Irish language to recreate that aspect of the oral landscape that would have been the case before the famine.
And there’s something about the way that I think about the Irish language and the relationship I have to it that has really helped me in thinking about the language that is important for me to understand in my work. And, you know, so I’m always thinking about moving out of the traditional business paradigm and more and more into the art paradigm. And the art paradigm has a completely different language to the traditional business paradigm, and one of the things that I’ve been trying to do in the last few years is flesh out that language, so that we are able to talk about taking an artistic approach to our work with the rich language that we need, to be able to articulate where we’re at in the process, and what it feels like, and where we come from, and where we’re going.
And I think that each of us has a core language at the heart of our work. I think, you know, as you begin to build up your body of work — and by the way, you’ve been building your body of work for your whole life, whether you’ve been doing it consciously or not — I think that if you watch small children at play, I think that we begin our real work at a very young age. We have this connection to our curiosity that is uninhibited at a very young age. And so children are engaging in all of these little informal projects all of the time, and it’s very much like they’re following the spark of aliveness and whatever is drawing them.
So, consciously or not, you probably have amassed a significant body of work — it just might not be the work that you’ve been paid for. But I think we have this core language that exists in our work.
And sometimes the way in to really understand exactly what is my real work, and what direction am I going in, and what comes next — sometimes the way to do that is by getting clear on the core language. It can be very difficult to sum up your entire work in a few sentences. That’s very traditional business paradigm — you know, the idea of snappy taglines and elevator pitches and all of that stuff. The art paradigm is much more messy. Most people’s real work is much more messy and layered and nuanced, and between the lines rather than on the lines.
And so it’s hard to capture what your work is in a few words or even a few sentences, but I think that if we can draw out the core language that is at the heart of our work — like the words, the phrases, the language that has particular meaning to us in our work, and that holds a story and holds a lot of energy in it — that is a way to outline your work for yourself.
And it doesn’t really matter whether the world understands that language or not. Your core language is for you. The thing that I’m most interested in is: do you understand your work for yourself? We can think about how do I communicate this with the rest of the world at another point in time. That becomes a simpler proposition whenever you deeply understand and inhabit the work.
And so one of the things that we will be talking about at the Dunfanaghy retreat at the end of September is finding ways into what is the core language of your work, and making some of that more conscious. And just finding these — there are lots of different angles and different ways into understanding what your work is and inhabiting it. And so core language is one of the things that we will look at.
And I think that, you know, being in Ireland, thinking about the Irish language, and what that holds, and what is lost if you disregard that and switch to English — I think that is very stimulating for then translating that to your own work and the language that you use around that. And the business paradigm so often encourages us to abandon the language that is meaningful to us. We are encouraged to communicate things in a way that makes sense to everybody else, we’re encouraged to choose language that’s immediately understandable to the market.
And as I say, there’s a time and place for a conversation about, okay, well, how can I best communicate this, but when we are just immediately thinking, like, well, are people going to understand this, we abandon so much in our work. I think whenever we abandon that language that is meaningful and has weight for us —
Thank you for listening. I will be back tomorrow with more thoughts. If you are thinking about joining me in Dunfanaghy for the retreat, you’re very welcome to shoot me an email and ask me any questions you have, chat about logistics, anything like that. I’m also happy to hop on a quick Zoom call if it’s easier to have a chat about the retreat that way. So just shoot me an email and we’ll take it from there. Thank you.