Hanging with the Elephant (15 page)

‘Oh, look,’ she said, ‘isn’t that a beautiful teapot.’

When she went to Irish Countrywomen’s Association meetings on winter nights I used to walk with her into town. There she joined other housewives with permed hair behind a closed door and drank tea from an exquisite china teapot on the second floor of Tower Hamlet, a creaking, eighteenth-century building in the middle of town, while I played on the stairs and buried myself in the ladies’ overcoats that hung on the wall hooks.

While we were out, my father would get a notion to reposition the furniture or rearrange the paintings on the walls. But she never quite understood what he was doing because he always made a mess of it. There was a lack of refinement in him which disabled any intelligent
engagement with the sensate world, and that appalled her. He was a talking man, a wordy man. Her own arrangement of furniture was unconscious and always artistic. Even with her eyes closed, she could make things lovely, whether it was a tray of meringues in the oven or the arrangement of flowers in a vase. There was a natural aesthetic at play when she gathered little ornaments and objects around her. Her emotions were never verbalised. Her story was never told. But the interior of her house held it all. The museum of useless stuff she left in her wake was as eloquent as a novel.

As I looked into the back bedroom, the final room I examined, I felt exhausted. And for no particular reason, I lay down on the bed, allowing myself to be swallowed up in waking dreams for half an hour, intending then to rise and leave and drive home. But sleep overtook me like a tide, and I drifted into that unconscious state which was the only place where I could still speak with her.

At first, I dreamed about Brahma, the Hindu god who creates everything that exists from sound, each universe from the vibration of his breath. He simply breathes out. And breathes in. And then closes his eyes. And falls asleep. And then he wakes up. And opens his eyes. And breathes out again. And then he breathes in. And he closes his eyes. And thus the universe pulses for eternity. And that was my mother’s rhythm too, before she died. Every few minutes, she woke up and opened her eyes. Then she closed her eyes. And fell asleep again. And then she woke again. I think it
was the house that made me dream like that. It too had a pulse. It had lungs, and I could feel it breathing all around me. I was conscious of the fact that sixty years earlier I had been born in that same room, in that same little house of my mother’s broken dreams.

So there I was on Farnham Road in Cavan, dreaming of everything mad, from Hindu gods and thrushes to Russian snow and the Queen of England. All night, I talked with her in dreams as soft as a bog that enfolds itself around the ashes of old fires, and the hearthstones of ancient houses, and the butter that was churned a thousand years ago and the wizened leather faces of the dead. And I slept until dawn when I heard the birds again in the attic and under the eaves of the house.

T
HE MORNING AFTER I shared my curry with the cat, the wind was gusting and the ground was dry. I stood at the gable of my studio listening to my five stones; they were smooth and round and as big as ostrich eggs and sat one on top of the other on the step of the studio. I believe that if I make offerings to my own demons regularly, I can keep them under control. Anger, rage, jealousy and all the other disturbing emotions a human being experiences between one sup of tea and the next can be personified, and assigned a particular corner
of the garden, and kept at bay with generous offerings of breadcrumbs, bowls of water, jelly beans or wild flowers. My therapist thought I was nuts, but what can you say to the unbelieving? When you respect your darkest energy, like anger, and when you are mindful of it, and when you hold and embrace it, then you’re less likely to be possessed by it unconsciously. That’s what I believe. So the stones became a kind of shrine to my demons. I would leave peanuts beside them, which the birds enjoyed through the winter, and sometimes I even imagined that the wind faintly whistling through the stones was the sound of those demons in pain and I felt pity for them.

A few days after I threw the stone at the magpie and hit the postman, he came again, this time to the studio, and caught me reverently placing a jelly baby sweet on top of the stones.

‘What’s all this about?’ the postman wondered.

‘I like to feed the birds,’ I said, not wanting to share with him the real intent of my ritual in case he’d be frightened away and I’d never get any more letters.

‘Didn’t know they liked sweets,’ he said suspiciously.

‘Oh, yes,’ I assured him, ‘some of them are mad for the jelly babies.’

But these rituals, like everything else in the ornate world of Buddhist practice, were, as far as I was concerned, merely a method of becoming more conscious of the disturbing emotions that drew me into depression. By doing this yoga
of conscious activity, I tried to protect myself from ever becoming completely possessed by them.

Not that the person who gave me the stones shared any of these fanciful notions. She just presented them for my birthday a month after my mother died because she found them on the beach and thought them to be pretty and eloquent and I was delighted with her generous gift. That was back in August 2012. They were oval and they held fossils on their surface, and they could be arranged in stacks. The smaller stones sat on top of the larger ones and they made two small monuments. But to assemble them outside the door of my new studio like a shrine was my own idea.

I used to sit by the fire and stare at them through the window, and I remember one day in September falling asleep so that when my beloved arrived, she laughed.

‘Well, just look at the old man dozing by the fire,’ she said.

I said, ‘I’m lucky to have a fire, considering the price of coal and the carbon tax, and the number of windmills all around me now, whose owners are granted enormous sums of taxpayers’ money just to lodge those monstrous cement creatures on what used to be the bare and beautiful slopes of lovely Leitrim.’

‘There he goes again,’ she said, ‘the old man is growing bitter.’

I confided in her how I was hoping to hear the wind
whistle through the stones. She said she didn’t think that the wind would make any noise. I said it did at the gable wall. ‘But those stones are too small,’ she said, ‘to deflect the wind in a manner that might create music.’

I said, ‘A boiling kettle makes music too.’

To which she said, ‘OK, I get the message. I’ll make some tea.’ And she turned to go back into the house.

‘I’ll follow you in a few moments,’ I said, but I didn’t. I forgot. Or perhaps I fell asleep again.

It was like that during the autumn. We lived placidly in the hills. I mourned quietly in my newly built room at the back of the house, looking out over Lough Allen. Across the wide water I could see Sliabh an Iarainn and the mountains of west Cavan, the lakes and small fields, and the forests and bogs.

L
IKE MANY OTHER artists, I arrived in Leitrim in the 1980s, not just because of a black economy and cheap housing, but because we were all seeking some spiritual holy ground. Germans came. Painters. Writers. Sculptors. They bought up little cottages very cheaply. Many were refugees from broken homes, dysfunctional families or unresolved relationships; like one-winged birds seeking shelter in a ditch.

I settled on the Leitrim–Roscommon border after years
of wandering around west Donegal, south Fermanagh and east Galway, renting bungalows or chalets in remote corners of the countryside.

I once passed a winter on a wild headland near Annagry in Donegal, just to watch the ocean beat off the rocks in the moonlight. To listen in the morning to the waves of the sea break on the beach at Carrickfinn.

And there were hills around Lough Allen where I once walked a dog; hills as barren as the moon. The road curling up into the high ground beyond the village, where the wind screeched through empty mineshafts and over bare slag heaps; mounds of rock and shale and shifted earth, a graveyard of dead diggers and mining machinery. Bleak highways cut into the mountain, to make a path for wind turbines that arrived with the new century on lorries as big as any Yankee convoy in Kabul.

The first time I heard the sound of a curlew, I thought it so forlorn that it sucked all my neurosis out, and left me as clean as an empty bowl. Wilderness, I believed, was the mother of all poetry.

There was a nineteenth-century notion that if you got away to the wilds, you could find your wildness. If you got to a space with no fences, then your mind would be without boundaries. Romantic poets could let loose their creativity, if they but owned a little cottage in a bee-loud glade or went fishing at midnight in a boat on Lough Erne, seeking pike by the light of a moon. In England,
Wordsworth wallowed in a rustic romance of daffodils, pretty girls sweating in the fields, and brooding mountains. But it was Yeats who forged the template for Romantic Ireland, in misty bogs where ancient heroes wandered and the wind whistled through stones where fairies sang. And we know where all that led; Europeans in dungarees with albums by Clannad and dilated eyeballs, trying to lure the Shee off Bohey Mountain with tin whistles.

I found it possible to be human in rural Ireland, far away from the suburban lawns of Farnham Road. I had fled from a middle-class childhood, a world of manners and decorum, and found a kind of serenity in the wilderness of boggy mountain, lake and river. This is where I could brood in solitude and safety, lick my wounds and absorb the healing energy of the earth and sky.

Living on the side of a mountain seemed like a healthier option for the spirit, when compared to what cities offered. I got a wide view up in the mountains. I got close to the stars at night. I got close to goats in the daylight. I lived in the wind and was wrapped in leaves. There was something ancient about the routine of daily life in the country. People sat in the kitchen listening to the clock. They could hear footsteps on the laneway when someone was half a mile away. They could tell the emotions of animals. They told stories and gossiped about things that happened a hundred years ago. It all implied that no mountain was as wonderful as their mountain. No place was as special as their place.
They knew what was going to happen next, though usually nothing happened.

And, of course, they were never alone. They sat deeply in the world. They walked deeply on the surface of Mother Earth. When they uttered the names of townlands, it was as if they were invoking some real presence: Gubaveeny, Éadan Mór or Coratavvy.

If the doctor asked an old man in the waiting room for his name, he might say, ‘Jack So-and-so from Altacorran [or wherever]’ because to speak his surname in isolation was not quite adequate a description. Only when a person was placed within the matrix of all the love and sorrow of his people – their deaths and poverty and heroic deeds that a single townland name could conjure up – was he properly defined as human.

In dancehalls sometimes in those old days, a girl might ask a boy where he was from and he would utter his townland name and she would look through him as if she were seeing all the strings that held him to his people and made him the ‘Who’ that she wanted to hold.

That September, when I walked up the hilly road along the wild ravines of Arigna and across the shoulders of the mountain, I could hear a sound deep in the rocks, like clear bells, and more real than my own voice. I could hear a kind of music vibrating in the trees, the wind playing sonatas in the forestry, mimicking the sound of a Japanese flute. And when my mother had been buried on a small hill in
Cavan, I returned to Arigna and spent weeks walking the hills and sitting in my studio nursing grief and listening to the stones singing in the wind. I lit the fire. I stared out at the lake. I began reading Chinese poetry and hoped that autumn would be a time of recovery from the grief and emptiness I felt since her death.

After lunch each day, I would say to my beloved in the kitchen that I was going to work. I would leave the house, go to the end of the yard and enter my room, where I would stretch out on an armchair and doze.

Like the Chinese poet Po Chu-I, who lived over a thousand years ago, I abandoned myself to dreams for some of the afternoon and then drank bowls of tea and, just like him, I took heed of the lengthening shadows of evening. I could almost hear him whispering to me.

‘Winter is coming. Winter is coming. Joyful people regret the fleeting years, and sad people must endure the slow hours, but only those without joy or sorrow can accept what life brings. Winter is coming.’

I
N THE DAYS after I had thrown the stone at the postman I began to realise that I’m one of those men who doesn’t improve on their own. I get locked into solitude in a lazy sort of way. Like the way a moth circles a flame. Maybe it’s the sterility of the male psyche, or the lack of a womb, that gives us the propensity to sit idle for hours, barely conscious of the fact that we are alive and yet transfixed by the certainty of being extinguished in death. Over the years, men have conjured up an endless number of metaphysical concepts that ease the pain of this
existential anxiety, from God and Buddha to a wide variety of New-Age substitutes. Men, as someone once said, have all the answers but very few of the questions.

On Midsummer’s Eve, the mountains in the west of Ireland hum with the sounds of the New Age; the pulse and beat of drums, and the cry of shamans connecting with their animal souls, and a wide variety of alternative political and social activists seeking converts on the streets of various arts festivals. Catholicism may have crumbled, but the fervour of men who passionately believe in odd forms of metaphysical truth still continues. Just leave a man alone for long enough west of the Shannon river and he will discover the meaning of life. And then he’ll try to convince everyone else that he is the one with the right answer.

But it was conventional religion that was my weakness. I grew up in the house of Catholic iconography and I could never quite let go of it. And even now I remain religious. I can’t let go of the sense that my Self belongs in the deep otherness of an infinite cosmos. I can’t let go of the consolation that fading into the universe at death might be natural and that death may hold the greatest possibility of all. And what draws me into that? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a man thing. Or maybe it’s a fear-of-death thing. Or maybe it’s just the utter poetry of it.