There was a young lad at the session in Cruise's on Saturday. First time, I think — he had that look, the one where you're holding your pint a small bit too carefully, like it might be a test. Eighteen, maybe nineteen. Came in with an older fella who I'd guess was an uncle or a neighbour, the sort who drags a young one along to "show him what it's about" and then mostly leaves him to it. He sat near the back. Said nothing for the first hour. Tapped his foot, which is the right thing to do, and I liked him for it.
And then we did the Bog.
Now you know how it goes, or if you don't, go look at the lyrics and come back to me. You start small. The bog. The bog down in the valley-o. Then the tree, then the limb, the branch, the twig, the nest, the egg, the bird, the feather, and then — finally, the whole room leaning in, everyone breathing in the same place — the FLEA. The flea on the feather and the feather on the bird and the bird in the egg and the egg in the nest and the nest on the twig and you're climbing back DOWN the whole thing, the entire room hauling it up out of the floor, fifteen people who half of them have never met, and it lands.
He cried.
Not sobbing. Not a scene. His eyes just went, and he wiped them with the back of his hand quick, the way you do when you don't want anyone to clock it. But I clocked it. I was sat across.
And a couple of the lads laughed. Not cruel — I want to be clear, these are SOUND people, they weren't slagging him to wound — just that surprised bark of a laugh you do when something unexpected happens and you don't have a word for it. One of them said "ah here, it's only a flea" and there was a bit of a chuckle.
I didn't laugh.
Because here's the thing I've never quite been able to explain to people, and I'm going to try now, badly, because that's the only way I have. The flea verse is not about a flea. The flea is the smallest thing in the song. It's the LEAST. It's the daftest little detail at the far end of a chain of bigger daft details, and that's exactly why it breaks you. You've spent four or five minutes building this enormous fragile tower of words, the whole pub holding it up together, faster and faster, and the song's entire architecture exists to deliver you to the tiniest possible point. The flea. A nothing. A speck.
And the speck holds.
That's the trick of a cumulative song, and I've gone on about this before in the Bog's strange shape, so I won't bore the lifelong regulars. But quickly: most songs are a line you walk down. The cumulative song is a thing you BUILD, and then a thing you all carry, and the weight of it is real even though it's only words about a bog. By the time you hit the flea you are not really singing about nature anymore. You're singing about the fact that this enormous unlikely structure — the room, the night, the strangers, the whole improbable business of fifteen people deciding to make something together in a pub on a wet Saturday — held. It didn't collapse. The flea is on the feather and the feather is on the bird and nobody dropped a word and you all did it, together, and you're still here.
That's what got the young lad. I'd put money on it. He didn't know it would do that. Nobody ever knows it'll do that, that's WHY it does it.
I'll tell you a thing I've never told anyone here. The first time I cried at it I was thirty-one. THIRTY-ONE. A grown man with a job and a mortgage application. It was a session in Doolin and I'd had a desperate year — won't go into it, it's long done — and we got to the flea and I had to put my pint down on the floor and look very hard at a beermat. So when a young lad does it at eighteen, before life has even properly started landing on him, I think that's not weakness. I think that's a person whose insides are still wide open, who hasn't yet learned to slam the shutters when something true walks in. That's a gift. They lose it soon enough, most of them. The world sees to that.
So no, I didn't laugh, and afterwards I went over and didn't make a fuss either — the worst thing you can do is make a fuss, then you've turned his private thing into a public one. I just said the singing was savage tonight, wasn't it, and he said yeah, deadly, and we left it there. That's all that needed saying. He'll be back. Lads who cry at the flea verse always come back.
The older fella, the uncle, caught my eye on the way out and gave me a small nod. He'd seen it too. Sound man.
Anyway. If you're new and you well up at the flea, you're not soft. You're paying attention. The song is doing exactly what it was built over a few hundred years to do, and it found you, and that's a kind of luck. Most people go their whole lives and nothing ever climbs all the way up the twig to reach them.
Don't be embarrassed. Be glad it still works on you.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' was on the windowsill the whole session as usual, dead to the world, and woke up at the exact second the flea verse landed and stretched. I'm not saying the cat knows. I'm saying he picked a gas moment to wake up. Don't @ me.