Understory: Writing and Building

Exploiting the traditional association of rhetoric and architecture, this chapter argues that a different kind of writing (the silva) might express a different kind of dwelling place. A literary term for miscellany, silva also means wood, and the concrete context of the essay is the colonial fate of the Irish whose territorial and cultural subjugation was linked to the destruction of the woods said to define their cultural identity. A recent residency in Galway weighed these mythopoetic identifications against overwhelming evidence of environmental alienation, and asked what discourse or under story, could begin the process of ‘psychic reforestation.’ A first step might involve re-reading key episodes in the emergence of Irish national consciousness: the ambiguous heritage of Lady Gregory, Coole House and W.B. Yeats is discussed. The essay also revisits a past ‘sculpture in woodland’ program and documents a contemporary social artwork made by C.J. Conway. Community interest generated by her act of tree repair created a place where psychic homelessness, the colonial legacy of dispossession, could be addressed therapeutically.