My Time in Space (12 page)

Indeed I have had to omit words from the crux of this account, where I babbled of beatific love, atonement and other matters I knew nothing of.

The ardencies and exaltations of Hindu festivals, the vast
quietudes
of the Buddhist temples, were at least as convincing as the pale mystic rays I had once persuaded myself I saw emanating from the aumbry, when serving as altar-boy at an early-morning Mass that had drawn no worshippers but myself and the good Canon Wellington of St Margaret’s, Ilkley. A dingy secondhand book I picked up in Penang (I still have it: B.K Sarkar,
Chinese
Religion
Through
Indian
Eyes
,
Shanghai, 1916) also shook my unconsidered attachment to my parental faith, by its title as much as by its content: here was a survey of wide and ancient realms of belief, in which Christianity was only briefly considered, as ‘the Christ-cult of Judaism’, one of the numerous incarnation-myths of its time. By the time my stint in the RAF was done and I had
reached Cambridge, my Christianity was a dead letter, and I had even abandoned an ingenious project of reconcocting God out of the immediacy of mystical experience, on the lines of Russell’s construction of physical and mental realities out of sense data. Part of my induction as a freshman was an interview with the college chaplain. I took the opportunity of assailing this mild don with my observations on the weaknesses of the traditional proofs of the existence of God. He admitted he had only a hazy memory of them, but thought that even if each of them was faulty,
collectively
they were persuasive, to which I retorted that seven
fallacies
were no better than one fallacy. I remember his bowed head before me, with one lank lock forming a questionmark on its bare dome. But the exchange had convinced him that I was an advanced case, and, meaning well, he lent me a book on
Christian
spirituality. Ironically, its account of the nauseating self-
mortifications
of some medieval mystics finalized my departure from the fold.

I was not much concerned with either God or goddesses for many years thereafter, and my passionate unbelief was seldom
discernible
from the unthinking secularity of my various milieus, until in my late thirties I came to the west of Ireland, where the Angelus is still a rallying cry and the wayside grotto lurks to pick a fight with any passer-by. Even in the Aran Islands it was
possible
to manoeuvre my atheism down the twisty boreens of social practice without upsetting people too gravely. But when I got out into the field, as it were, my work – the mapping and writing-up of countrysides that are, or were, sacralized at various depths –
forced my attention on questions that still remain unresolved for me.

Our new postal address, for instance, brought the matter home: Kilronan, The Aran Islands. ‘Kilronan’ is from the Gaelic ‘Cill Rónáin’, the church or churchyard of Rónán (Gaelic
cill
being from a borrowing of the Latin
cella,
a cell). In undertaking my map of Aran, one of the tasks I set myself, blithely unaware of its difficulties, was to restore the musical and memorious Gaelic
placenames
that had been traduced by the phonologically dim and semantically null anglicized forms given on the official Ordnance Survey maps. This project I thought of as political, in that it aimed to undo some of the damage of colonialism and to uphold the local and vernacular against the levelling metropolitan culture of our times. But inevitably it was also a rescue-archaeology of a shallowly buried sacred landscape. Rónán was only one of the more obscure amongst the many hermits and monks who
contributed
to Aran’s medieval fame as Ára na Naomh, Aran of the Saints. His holy well has long vanished, while his
cill
,
from which the islands’ chief village derives its name, is reduced to a knee-high rectangular enclosure a few yards square, featureless apart from a nineteenth-century cross-inscribed stone, and regarded (or disregarded, rather) as the saint’s bed. Nothing is recorded of Rónán himself, but from the memories of one or two old folk of the village and the writings of a former parish priest I revived a story of how a Presbyterian bigot was smitten by a stroke when he tried to uproot an elderberry bush growing in the ‘bed’, which he said was a limb of St Rónán. The site is typical of hundreds I have sought out, formerly defended by popular reverence – indeed, superstitiously regarded as well able to defend themselves – and now neglected or forgotten.

Before Kilronan was developed as a fishing port in the late nineteenth century, Killeany, now a quiet and rather run-down village just over a mile to the south, was the centre of gravity of the islands. The name masks the foundation of St Éanna or Enda: Cill Éinne, and two assertions from the late medieval
Life
of
St
Enda
will illustrate the interpretative situation facing the placelorist. First, that Enda was the brother-in-law of King Oengus Mac
Nad-froích
of Cashel in Munster, and received a grant of the islands from him in order to build a monastery. Secondly, that on
reaching
the mainland coast opposite Aran and finding no boat available, he and eight of his followers pushed a big stone into the water and sailed across on it. There is nothing implausible about the former proposition; Oengus is a well-attested historical figure (he died in 489 according to the
Annals
of
the
Four
Masters
),
Aran was within the reach of his powers, and many Early Christian monasteries owe their inception to the patronage of a regional or local secular ruler. And as to the latter proposition, the very stone on which the saints came sailing in is still to be seen on the
Killeany
shore, close to the end of the airstrip. Now, one may accept the part of the story that sounds like history, or reject it as
hopelessly
unverifiable given that the earliest surviving written record of it dates from the fourteenth century, which is nearer to our own time than to Enda’s – but the stone boat is headed for deeper harbours in the mind.

This canoe-shaped rock lying on the foreshore was not, for me, merely a picturesque relic of bygone, fanciful, naïve, folkloric times; in fact it became the cornerstone of an image of reality I was constructing through my maps and writings. St Enda’s boat is the coming of history to Aran, symbolically its foundation stone. But this floating foundation stone itself is founded on nothing
except the possibility of foundering like a stone. Just so, the cosmos has produced itself out of nothing and is maintained in
existence
by nothing, a perpetual, precarious wonder to itself, a miracle – perhaps the only miracle that ever happened, but that one all-inclusive. Although any given detail of it is in principle open to comprehension (that is, within the world there are no miracles), the whole overwhelms our intelligence by its richness; it is a plenum, a density of interrelationships, endlessly nourished by its own complexity.

In such a world every point is connected to every other point; every event is a starburst of futurity. To express this aspect of
reality
too, I have turned to the stories of the saints for imagery. In Connemara and the Burren as well as in Aran, generations of the pious and credulous have interpreted hundreds of little oddities of geology as traces of the saints, and my maps of these territories are discreetly asterisked with such miraculous sites, which I have gone to immense pains to locate and record. In one of the Aran Islands there is a spring well with curious indentations on its rim – prints of the hands of a voyaging saint who came ashore to drink at it. Near Cleggan in Connemara a head-shaped stone with red streaks of jasper in it marks the spot where a saint was beheaded, so
giving
the place its name (
cloigeann
,
a head). At the top of a pass in the Burren are a holy thorntree and the marks of the knees of St Brigid, who paused there in her travels to look back prayerfully to her far-off homeland in Kildare. My literal incredulity liberates these spots of holiness from their footnote-like dependency on hagiography. As I said, within the world there are no miracles; in fact I believe that the only true believer in miracles is one who believes they do not happen. We should reserve the idea of such events, infinitely rare, impossibly free from the chains of cause and
effect, to play the part of dazzling emblems of the potentialities hidden in any event whatsoever.

My maps are constellated in particular by holy wells, most of which would otherwise be known only to a few of the older inhabitants of their immediate localities. Many would read my devotion to these traces of popular, or formerly popular, faith as a symptom of religious cravings suppressed. Am I so blinded by the smoke of the factual I do not realize I am walking over the embers of my buried spirituality? If I have a religion (but I think the term does not fit my attitudes) it is one that burns through the ground I tread, from deeper in the Earth. Just as many of the so-called saints are artefacts of the Christianization of Celtic legends,
ancestral
heroes hastily kitted out with halos, so their holy wells are sites of pre-Christian earth-worship. This stratum of the sacred outcrops unusually frequently in the landscape of Ireland, even today; for instance, in the names of the country itself – in our address, once again.

It was on the eve of May, a Thursday, the 17th day of the moon, in the Year of the World 3500, that the ancestors of the Irish first set foot on the shores of Ireland. At that time the island was in the possession of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the ‘people of the Goddess Danu’, and the invaders soon met one of them, a lady accompanied by hosts of druids and magicians. She told them the country was named from her, Banba, and asked that it should always bear that name, which was agreed. Later they met a
second
lady, Fódla, and had the same conversation with her. Finally they met a third, Ériu. ‘Warriors,’ she said, ‘Welcome. Your
coming
has been long prophesied. The land will be yours, and there is no finer island in the world. But grant that my name be on it for ever.’ And they agreed. The only untoward note in the
discussion
came from one of the warriors, Donn, who said, ‘Not to her do we give thanks for it, but to our gods and to our strength.’ And the Goddess – for of course that’s what she was – reproved him and foretold that neither he nor his children would profit from the land. All this we may read in the ancient
Book
of
Inva
sions
of
Erin.

Nominally, each of these avatars of the Celts’ triple Earth
Goddess
(as modern folklorists would identify them) has received her due, for Banba and Fódla were celebrated by the bards and figure as representations of the oppressed Gael in the vision-poems of the seventeenth century, and Ériu is of course Éire. But the implication of the curse on Donn is that if the land is taken by force the outcome will be sterility. I am acutely aware of the fact that cartography has historically been associated with conquest,
colonization
, control. The Ordnance Survey was a function of the army. Therefore I have taken care that the mapping I have been essaying for the last quarter-century or so in the west of Ireland be one that returns the territory mapped to itself, to its inhabitants, and that I hope is not subject to the reproach of Ériu.

This myth of the naming of Ireland accords with the fact that in Celtic society kingship was conceived of as marriage with the tutelary Goddess of the territory. Kings come and go, mere
history
; the land pursues its eternal and mysterious cycles. Under a just and integral king the realm prospers and is bountiful; under an unjust or maimed king it withers into a wasteland. With the triumph of Christianity the role of the Goddess necessarily became unofficial. In the Burren I came across her as the
legendary
Brónach Boirne, the sorrowful one of Burren, the Hag who haunts Lough Rask near Ballyvaughan. To Dermot O’Brien in the early fourteenth century, establishing his rule over what is
now County Clare, she was a fairy lover; to his rival Donough O’Brien she appeared as a frightful banshee washing piles of heads and limbs in the lake and foretelling his death in battle.

Even today, the Otherworld having foundered into oblivion, these archaic patterns of thought, established perhaps before the role of the male in generation was realized, obtrude in our metaphors. We no longer believe in goddesses, but the stoutest atheists among us (among us men, perhaps I should say) cannot resist the identification of land with woman. J.M. Synge on his first visit to the Aran Islands in 1898, wrote ‘With this limestone Inishmaan I am in love … and hear with galling jealousy of the various priests and scholars who have lived here before me,’ and flirted with the idea of marrying a woman who would personify the island. Following him some knowing generations later, I (or at least my subconscious) energetically feminized the island I was trying to capture in the cartographical net: ‘Round and round the island form, round and round the furry tomb’ went a ditty in a dream of that time, and my night-self was delighted with its
subtlety
in substituting tomb for womb. Recently an otherwise approving review of my essays on landscape and mapping, by Catherine Nash, a feminist cultural geographer, has pointed out the exclusiveness of my ‘openly sexualised description of the
resistances
, climactic pleasures and exhaustion of fieldwork’. This is a matter I take seriously.

What is the role, nowadays, of this rumpled bed of a metaphor? Most trivially, it is a slightly disguised, displaced or
sublimated
sexual fantasy – but then mapping, especially in the west of Ireland, involves a lot of lonely hours crouched under
inadequate
bushes waiting for the rain to stop, and perhaps one may be forgiven such vaguely warming ruminations. More important is its
gender-asymmetry. It seems only natural to associate by metaphor the land, or the earth as a whole, that brings forth and sustains its biota in accordance with rhythms as old as life itself, with the female of our own species. A metaphor is a bridge intended to carry meaning across from one topic to another – but as soon as the bridge is established, meaning will sneak across it in the other direction, unobserved. To think of the land as a woman is to strengthen an unthinking identification of woman with the
autonomic
side of her being, and her reproductive biology in particular. Also, if the territory is female, the explorer, the researcher, even the cartographer, that most circumspect of conquistadors, by the banal law of opposites, must be male – implying that the female is short of
the necessary qualities of intellectual and physical adventurousness. But nowadays something approaching a fair proportion of the fieldworkers I depend upon for their specialist knowledge in researching my maps are women, which makes the underlying trope sound terminally oldfashioned. Further,
mapping
, in particular, has been historically the imposition of
interpretations
on the previously meaningless, the appropriation for covert and often exploitative purposes of the passive, empty,
terrain
; the consolidation of the mapper in this masculinist, colonial, role, can only thicken the mystique of objectivity in which the process is usually obscured.