If
the Holy Land exists now it only exists in the imagination. I caught a
glimpse of it, though, at five. In the Children’s Bible. The three
wise men in bright raiment on camels travelled under an aubergine-bluedark
sky proliferate with stars like pommegranite seed. Later the Holy Land
became language: the Garden of Eden, the Land of Canaan, Tigris and Euphrates,
Tower of Ivory, House of Gold. Tabernacle. Cherubim. Matins and vespers.
Supplication and prayer. These days the Holy Land is a fugitive scent.
The kind of warm odour you catch when an aeroplane touches down at night
near the Mediterranean: a sweet, musty odour of figs and the desert, cinnamon
and dust. The Holy Land in Belfast exists only as a blasphemous prayer.
It is maze of little Belfast streets behind Queen’s University and
beside the River Lagan. Jerusalem Street. Palestine Street. Damascus Street.
Some family homes here still have their own little holy of holies: china
cabinets behind net curtains with best china, souvenirs from seaside towns.
Student dives predominate though between Laundromats, waste allotments
charred by ‘bonefires’ and Brethern Halls where they sing of
a Holy Land but emerge on Sundays and blink into a grey light or hard
rain and look nothing like the three wise men. Down the road some men
are raising the flags of Israel and Palestine but it is the smell of boiled
bacon and cabbage that permeates the air. Behind the red brick houses
of the Holy Land there’s a warren of backyards surrounded by high
red brick walls topped by broken bottles. These alleys are full of ‘wheely’
bins, spilled refuse, mesh ventilation grills, dogs, the smell of urine
from late night drinkers. Walking those warrens you’ll be forgiven
for claiming that the Holy Land does not exist. In the little Sunday Schools
they still sing of it but as the chorus goes it ‘far, far away’.
If the Holy Land exists it only exists in the imagination. It is a ‘bright
nowhere'.
