I've always thought of walking as a form of liberation, if not a matter of autobiography, writes Colm McCann
Cars, trains and planes are mercenary vehicles: they get us to a fixed point, but walking is perhaps the most elemental way to go about things. Henry David Thoreau said that a man would have to be a genius to know his way from the front door to the path: he was saying, in part, that the essential mysteries are in the small moments.
One of my favourite walks is across the Brooklyn Bridge, which I suppose means - given the fact that more than a third of my life has been spent away from Ireland - that some fine day I might have to accept that I'm gone from "home". This is the hard song of the emigrant: the land you stand for is not always the land you stand on.
Walking Brooklyn Bridge is, in some ways, a form of ancestral memory. The bridge was completed 110 years ago and most of the 40 men who died in its creation were Irish - some were locked in caissons, some had their heads whipped off by snapped cables, others were caught by surprise gusts of wind. They were hard men, these bridge-builders. They knew the value, if not the price, of being gone. One of them was a McCann, who fell from the 250-foot tower, and I sometimes wonder if my short journey is a form of prayer card to unknown family.
The bridge, like all good bridges, is formally sufficient to the subject at hand. The low sprawl of Brooklyn spreads behind you and the high arrogant beauty of Manhattan faces you. It is impossible to walk across without feeling that you are witness to the best and worst of what Fitzgerald called "the green breast of the world".
One feels at the bridge's centre point, looking through the harp of steel cables, that one is on the rim of a musical instrument. There is a sort of awe in looking down through the bare wooden boards (only 1½ inches thick) to the water below, and the subways running beneath the water. This strange conjunction of a walking man above the ordinary traffic of his life is a testament to mystery in the stark reality of the everyday - the fact that this sort of beauty is all around us doesn't always make it more noticeable. It strikes you that the duty of the architect is as the future shaper of dreams: the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler, the Empire State, the gone Twin Towers.
The bridge is also a dream of what "home" might mean. Of course Irish emigration - whether to London, Sydney or New York itself - doesn't exist in the same way it did when the bridge was being built over a century ago. Nor does it exist in the same way it did 20 years ago. In fact, the question might well now be: can emigration continue to exist as a social or political notion at all?
The age-old dream is that of going to a better place, but has this dream become null and void in an Ireland that, on one hand, flourishes and, on the other, tries so desperately to replicate other landscapes?
Increasingly my own perception is that I am not gone from Ireland at all, that I have not left my native land, maybe never did. Along with the obvious reasons - cheap flights, the Internet, global shrinking - there is the sense that when I go back to Ireland, and Dublin in particular, that the landscape has become that of every other place.
So what? There's nothing new in this. I'm not exactly sounding alarm bells. But it seems to me that the lack of a dream of leaving is now as powerful to the national consciousness as the dream itself once was.
A failure of the Irish imagination - and indeed a failure of the emigrant imagination - is the lack of recognition of the notion that emigration is dead. Within Ireland we still try to duplicate the places to which we sent our children. And outside of Ireland we still attempt to keep intact the place that we left long ago - how quickly the beloved emigrant becomes the sad old bastard in the corner of the snug in Woodlawn, New York.
What we are left with is a country held in a peculiar form of aspic-like bridge-dwellers, we go back and forth without ever truly stepping off one end or the other.
So much of the worst in contemporary Irish thought - where mortgages and traffic seem to be the primary radars of a self-conscious culture - has been shaped by a lack of an escape hatch. Our need to be acknowledged by other countries, the British and the Yanks, in particular, would be better replaced by a need to look at ourselves, wherever we happen to be, so that we don't end up competing in a constant cultural Eurovision contest. A country without a theory - or a country whose only theory is borrowed - ends up rimrocked.
This is not a new debate, of course - but it might be shifted slightly if we could acknowledge that emigration as a notion is dead; that one of the most defining social, political and economic factors of the past two centuries no longer affects our landscape as it used to; that our consciousness does not need to be shaped by how other countries perceive us. The desire to be internationally dynamic, which is in itself a lack of self-confidence, makes us (New York Irish, Dublin Irish, Bangkok Irish) like three-year-olds who have just soiled our nappies, shouting: "Look at me, look at me, look at me."
What this might mean is a metaphorical extension of what the Brooklyn Bridge can be, stepping out the front door to reach the path. In any case, I am reminded of Brian Moore, the great Irish novelist, who said he knew where he came from when he knew where he wanted to be buried.
As for me, while I'm not yet ready to figure out where I'll end up, I'm quite sure that I'd like to get there via the Brooklyn Bridge.