My Time in Space (26 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
Neither my emollient remarks about the Co-op nor my appeal to the ghosts of the national ancestors caused a change of heart in the proponents of the scheme, but the neighbouring island of Inis Oírr responded to my open letters by inviting me to address a seminar on forward planning. I accepted with deep misgivings, fearing the occasion might become acrimonious, for the speakers were to include my Connemara politician and the head of the Gal way Alternative Energy Centre, a forceful young man who sniffs breezes appreciatively, saying ‘Ah! Kilowatt-hours!’ But the debate was well chaired, and it gave me an opportunity to amplify my direct appeal to the islanders:
WHAT’S SO SPECIAL ABOUT ARAN
?
In making decisions about our own little patches of the Earth’s surface and how we are to live on it, we have to bear in mind a wider background. The Earth’s population has doubled in the lifetime of most of us here today. Every one of us wants more in the way of material goods and such immaterial ones as mobility and choice. Humanity is exerting an
immense, unparalleled, pressure on the resources of the earth, including
Lebensraum,
living-space. But these resources are limited; what we take, other forms of life lose. Hundreds and thousands of plant and animal species are going out of existence because there is no space, no peace, no nature for them to flourish in; we are presiding over and responsible for one of the most rapid mass extinctions in the whole geological history of the planet.
Coming a little closer to home, in Ireland the landscape is changing more rapidly than ever before. Roads, housing estates, forestry, turf
extraction
, quarrying, are eating up the natural biological surface of the land day by day. And what is left is losing its naturalness. The hilltops have masts on them, the wide spaces of the bogs are rimmed by lines of pylons, the bays are dotted with fish cages. All these things are there to fulfil our demands; we are all implicated. But we should be aware of the cost. In a word, the world is getting smaller and smaller. Each place is becoming more and more like every other place. History is being bulldozed out of the way. Even the most familiar birds – thrushes, skylarks – and the
common
butterflies, are being poisoned out of existence. Our youngsters
probably
think that wildlife is a TV show. Technology flourishes and exerts its fascination; the rest of life is becoming less and less interesting and
beautiful
.
I feel we are reaching the crisis of this stage of humanity’s life cycle, and that perhaps in another generation a more intelligent technology and more caring attitudes to the rest of creation will assert themselves. So what we have to do at this juncture is to hold on to what we still have, and fight to protect it from destruction. The key to rural development is to preserve the best aspects of the rural environment, the features that make it
attractive
and lovely to live in as compared to the urban environment. If the countryside becomes just a poor imitation of suburbia, people will leave it for the real thing. But I also believe it is a duty, a moral obligation, for
people who have the privilege of living in, say, a beautiful old city or a lovely countryside, to conserve and enhance it for the good of the whole of humanity.
Focusing in on the Aran Islands, what we have here is one of the strangest and most interesting places in the world. Humanity and nature working on each other for centuries have brought forth a landscape which is not paralleled anywhere else in the world. Its combination of grandeur of scale in the natural and fineness of detail in the human contribution, is literally unique. So, if Aran is indeed special, it demands special
consideration
and sensitivity in planning. For instance, the scale and the details of the network of boreens are important. I hesitate to revisit a lot of little corners of the islands that I know so well, in case they are gone, like the lovely Róidín Ard leading out towards Synge’s Chair in Inis Meáin, a loss which I know many islanders deeply regret. Recently I’ve been
campaigning
against the proposal to site three wind turbines on the south shore of Inis Meáín. The argument for wind power is of course that it is
non-polluting
, doesn’t contribute to global warming etc. I’m as concerned as anyone about the long-term threats to our environment from fossil fuels. But there is no use saying wind turbines are non-polluting; they are grossly visually polluting, at least in some landscapes. The three relevant features of wind turbines are:
1) the obvious one, that they are very tall and can be seen for miles, especially in an open landscape that is composed of long level horizons like this.
2) that they are always in motion, so they draw the eye and you can’t get away from them.
3) that they are all more or less the same – they are industrial
products
, and so they tend to reduce all the different landscapes they occur in to the same sort of homogenized uniformity.
Now in the West we have a series of very delicate, very special and
very fragile landscapes, which we are likely to lose rather quickly if the
present
rush to install windfarms persists. Some hard decisions are needed about where they should be put and where not. I’m glad to say that since the Inis Meáin project came up, a national debate on that question has begun. But it doesn’t need a debate to see that Aran is the last place they should be permitted. That would be a rank exploitation of Aran’s
environment
.
I ended by quoting the ‘Afterwords’ of a little book I’d published to accompany my map of the islands:
Step into one of Aran’s fourteen thousand little fields, and you are back in the nineteenth century. Walk the Atlantic cliffs, and the ramparts of Dún Aonghasa startle by their modernity. Stroll down the boreens, and you go arm in arm with the Atlantic, for their pattern is that of the
fissures
caused by the forces that separated Europe from America sixty or
seventy
million years ago. The Aran Islanders are inescapably face-to-face with the elemental and the timelessly recurrent, from the spray of winter storms to the foam of daisies in springtime pastures.
Thus, Aran is one of civilization’s loftiest windows onto its own
origins
in the past and the natural world. In addition to the economic and social penalties of being marginal to material Europe, the Aran
community
bears the responsibility of keeping that window crystal clear for ever. Since throughout Europe we have let such windows become blurred and dingy, Aran has the right to call on the wider community, national and international, for whatever support it needs in its priestlike task.
Nowadays
, with so much of its surface in wreckage and filth, it is the Earth that faces us with moral demands. The spiritual merges once again with the natural, from which, disastrously, it has been separated for some centuries.
However, nobody lives on this glorious, elemental, level all the time;
in Aran one is also simply exposed to the elements, that is, rained-on, fogbound, windblown, cut off. Life is tough, opportunities limited. Improvement of the economic basis is the natural and rightful expectation of the people. At the same time, like it or not, a special trust is invested in them. If islands lose their singularity, the world becomes smaller. If Aran, in offering us more and more of the comforts and facilities of the
outskirts
of Galway, reduces the possibility of escaping from the banalities of suburban life, we are all impoverished, in our relationship to the past, to nature, to the influence of solitude and space. There may be specific
developments
that in other places would be welcome and proper, and that Aran should forgo. To live on Aran is a rare and demanding privilege; it is to be the inheritor of something both awkward and valuable, like a
Stradivarius
, or intangible, like a talent that only rewards long commitment.
In concluding this work, the last and best I can do for Aran, I thank the islanders for seconding my efforts over the years, and commend these precious islands to their good sense.
In the old days the islanders had to put up with priests coming out to conduct missions featuring bloodcurdling sermons against
making
poitín and reading the books of Liam O’Flaherty. I think they forgave the mildly preacherly tone of
this appeal addressed not to their faithful souls but to their ‘good sense’; at any rate there was applause and a cry of ‘Hear, hear!’
Since that occasion, the Planning Board has rejected the appeal against the granting of planning permission, dismissing all our patient documentation of the splendours of the island landscape with a phrase to the effect that the development would not
interfere
with the visual attractions of the place. Their Inspector’s Report included this fatuity on the aesthetics of the question:
On a calm sunny day this area has a wonderful environmental quality with beautiful colours but the reality is that it experiences very frequent rainfall, showers, grey skies and heavy seas. In that context I consider that a small windfarm development might well be considered as being
complementary
to the character of this landscape in that it would be
perceived
as utilizing the obviously available wind resource.
So, since the Inis Meáin turbines are regarded as a test case, we can now expect an infestation of these demented clockwork giants throughout the windy West.
*
But what antiques, revenants, freakshows they will be, the little patches such as Aran and Roundstone Bog, if we succeed in
saving
them while the avalanche of metal and concrete covers all the rest! Everybody will come to admire them, which will wear them to ribbons, or they will be off-limits to all but their custodians. There will certainly be no room for Atlantic hermits like myself; we would be elbow to elbow from the North Cape of Norway to Gibraltar.
Weighing the boxes of documentation generated by these two skirmishes – parochial but exemplary – against the daily headlines on the worldwide advance of destruction, I am not so confident as my words in Inis Oírr suggest, about the survivability of
the coming crisis and the caring regime that is to follow. Seen from space our globe shows scars, circular geological features resulting from asteroid impacts; they are called ‘astroblemes’. Most of these are millions of years old; all the more recent blemishes of Earth are due to human trampling. The imagery of the step that has
sustained
me through so much writing on the Echosphere is
becoming
uncomfortable; it transmits pain. What might be called anthropoblemes (horrible word for horrible things) can be felt through the soles of one’s feet. But, outside of Gaian fantasies, the Earth itself does not suffer; we are its nerve-cells, its pain is ours. The other creatures of the Earth bear it individually to their
varying
capacities for suffering, and we humans alone can feel it in its generality, as is only fitting. For our footprint is, in ecological terms, ‘loss of biodiversity’, wearing-thin of the weave of life as one species after another declines into rarity, singularity, and final extinction (which means, for the sentient and sociable among them, some last impoverished life and solitary death). We
accomplish
this unprecedented massacre of the innocents by
interrupting
nature’s cycles, denying it space for its patterns, time for its adjustments. And now, if nature has to be subsumed into technics to ensure our own survival, if conservation of the wild is to become mere landscape gardening, then my echopoetry is only nostalgia and I have invested my heart in dandelion fluff.
These are dreadful considerations. They embitter the waters of the West for me; they are in themselves a pollution. I am tempted to retreat from them into the domestic, or take flight into
Pascalian
infinities.
The four creatures, as disparate as the corners of a square, who live in this house spend most winter evenings symmetrically disposed about the small wood-burning stove that stands for our hearth. M and I occupy wing-chairs (I was intolerant of their bourgeois solidity when my parents bought them in the fifties, but I
appreciate
their comfort now), hers facing a glass door into the
conservatory
that also functions as a front porch, and mine the window, its green-velvet curtains drawn against the north wind tonight, that looks out onto the quayside. The cat and the dog (a fluffy short-legged terrier about the size of the cat) curl up in baskets to right and left of the stove, showing no preferences between them; sometimes there is a little wrangling for the space between the legs of the stove, where the cat in particular relishes very high
temperatures
but the dog soon begins to pant and has to be ordered out to cool off.
This is our winter-room and library. It is about twelve feet square and disproportionately high, having a coved ceiling with a skylight in the north-east corner. Above the stove is a mantelpiece
with a cloisonné vase, midnight blue and peach blossom, which I think must have come from my grandmother’s antique shop, and a fake carriage clock that came free with a purchase from a
mailorder
catalogue. Between these hangs an oval rosewood mirror which from my chair shows a reflection of the skylight, empty black by night, or star-dotted or streaked with silvery rivulets of rain; as I begin to write this, on midwinter eve, the full moon appears in the mirror, stealing my warmth, instilling a
Mallarméean
chill. I have never seen the moon in this way before; it must be exceptionally high in the north-eastern sky. The papers say it is nearer the earth tonight than it has been for a century.
The library holds some few thousand books, none of much individual market value but collectively irreplaceable, the product of browsing in bookstalls and jumble-sales. Those shelved on either side of the fireplace have been placed there for appearance; they have a bit of gilt or a pattern on the back, or pleasing titles like
She
Cometh
Up
As
a
Flower
and
She
Might
Have
Been
a
Duchess,
both from M’s collection of nineteenth-century women’s novels. In a recess to the left are ‘recent acquisitions’, mostly bought from catalogues of remaindered books and astonishingly
heterogeneous
. Among them at the moment are
The
Distribution
of
Prime
Numbers
,
which will join a shelf of mathematics texts and popular science books once I have resigned myself to the fact that it is too advanced for me; a paperback of Cormac McCarthy’s
blood-boltered
novel about the wolf, abandoned at the point where M could not bear to read on; and all the volumes except the last of Carmichael’s
Carmina
Gadelica,
a trophy of my recent visit to the Hebrides. Over the window is a five-foot-long shelf with a slight sag in the middle; most of it is taken up by books of an
environmentalist
persuasion, and the rest by a collection of various
editions
of my own writings; I tend to glance up at this and worry
that the row is not longer. The next wall, opposite the fireplace, is largely literature, and roughly in alphabetical order. A browser would soon notice that no women writers are represented, because they have all been commandeered by M for her feminist collection shelved on the fourth wall of the room; we sometimes discuss reintegration, but that would be a major ideological shift and a day’s dusty work.
Leaving the warmth of the library to go to bed, we pass through a corner of the livingroom next to it, which is enormous, impossible to heat for winter use, with wide windows along the north side and another in the eastern gable end, all giving onto the waters and farther shores of Roundstone Bay. We glance down its chilly perspective as we hurry through, or if the night is fine go to the gable window to admire the patterns of moon-ridden wavelets and listen to an oyster-catcher’s lonesome whistle flitting to and fro in the blackness. By day this room is entranced by its views; entertaining guests here on summer evenings we
sometimes
find that a companionable silence falls, all of us lapsing into reverie over the mountains’ slow rebuilding of themselves out of dusk after having spent their substance in sparkles all day long. There are trays of seedlings on the wide windowledges, and M’s several fancy sorts of fuchsia in pots on the floor. The furniture is heterogeneous and undistinguished, the ornaments are all
accidental
acquisitions given to us by visiting children or bought to fill an empty minute in a Clifden junkshop, but the general effect is spacious and pleasing, our
forté
as home-makers, we sometimes think, being the nice arrangement of the nasty. The room has three skylights and the same high board-lined ceiling as the library, which was evidently divided off from it by a thin partition wall at some stage.
A hundred years ago the whole chamber was one of the Lace
Schools set up by the Congested Districts Board here and there throughout its poverty-stricken fiefdom under the charitable patronage of the Viceroy’s wife, Lady Aberdeen. A young lady from Fermanagh, Margaret Cosgrove, came to teach the craft here, and married Richard O’Dowd, clerk to the landlord’s agent, who had his office next door on the quayside; their descendants still own O’Dowd’s, the summer visitors’ favourite bar and
restaurant
, overlooking the harbour, and when we took over this
building
and began to rescue it from years of dereliction, one of them gave us a photograph of Margaret and her two sisters, also
lace-teachers
, one employed in Ros Muc and other villages of
Connemara
and the other in Cliffony, County Sligo, all three wearing wondrous evening gowns of their own creation.
That photograph hangs by the gable window of the big room, together with others relating to an earlier stage in its history when, according to the oldest resident of Roundstone, it was the
ballroom
of someone called ‘Sainty’ Robinson, of
whom she knew no more than his intriguing name. I was anxious to find out more of him, foreseeing that I will be conflated with him in folk-
memory
if there still is such a thing in another century’s time. It seemed likely that he was a connection of George Robinson and his son, who were successively land agents for most of Connemara from the 1850s to the 1930s and lived in Letterdyfe House just north of Roundstone. But I could establish nothing about him, until one evening there was a knock on our door, and an elderly gentleman of Edwardian mien greeted me with ‘Mr Robinson? –
I’m
Robinson!’ This Dr Philip Robinson of Dublin, who turned out to be descended from George Robinson, had heard tell that his forebear had been a harsh, evicting agent, and was calling on me as a local historian to find out if this was so. I took him down
to the studio, opened my files and showed him the evidence that it was indeed so. Nevertheless we became fast friends, to the point that we found ourselves almost adopted into the posterity of the Letterdyfe Robinsons, and inheritors, after Dr Philip’s death, of several memorabilia of the family. So it comes about that I can identify ‘Sainty’ in a copy of the family tree as a St-John
Robinson
, one of George’s younger sons, and that a pair of framed
Victorian
silhouettes of George and his wife Rebecca hang in Sainty’s former ballroom. And once a year, on the day of Roundstone Regatta, we remind the room of its past, hold open house and drink to the dancers of old. While the traditional work-boats, the Galway hookers, gather below our windows to race in the bay, an extraordinary mix of guests drop in for a lunch of courgette eggah and apple crumble, watch the events from our windows, go off to crew a boat or join the crowd of spectators on the quayside, and return for tea. Sometimes a visiting poet recites, musicians bring out their fiddles and flutes, ladies from the village dance a
Connemara
set; sometimes when we sit down with a few lingering guests, the evening is mellow with wine and the last of the
red-brown
sails are ghosting home to the harbour through a pearly mist, there are moments in this room when time itself is perfectly content.
The rest of this level of our house is an extension to the back, probably added when the building became a knitting factory under the regime of a State development body, Gaeltarra Éireann, in the 1950s. First comes a space we have turned into a kitchen, originally an office separated from the big room by a glazed screen through which the supervisor used to keep an eye on her
workforce
, as several elderly ladies of the village well remember. From there a corridor leads back, with cookery and gardening books
shelved on the left, and on the right, two windows onto a small rockery under a misshapen cypress that leans close to the house, called Crann na gCat, the cats’ tree, because cats, our cat and her visitors, love to lie along its broad, comfortable branches. There are circular jumble-sale mirrors looking each way along this
corridor
; in fact the house has so many mirrors, glazed doors and windows that a diagram of how scraps of sky and garden are
multiplied
within it would look like that of an optical instrument. And since the sea surrounds us on the north and east, whatever light falls into the house from those quarters is accompanied – shadowed – by a thin restless inverse of itself flung upwards onto ceilings.
At the end the corridor turns left into the bedroom, from which a portion has been glassed off as M’s room: her Italian books, the ironing-board, her desk, and in a drawer the backup copies of my writings, to be snatched to safety in the garden in case of fire. Our bed is very wide, on a low platform homemade out of planks and two-by-one timber; there is room for
entwining
and room for being untouched, surface area for books and breakfast tray, and for Squig the dog who sleeps nested against the curve of M’s back; Nimma the cat sleeps in the library but
sometimes
joins us in the morning and curls up under my caressing hand while I read the paper. Lying in bed we are facing two
windows
and a glass-panelled door onto the garden; we watch the seasonal transformations of an ancient hawthorn tree against the minute-by-minute transformations of the sky. Morning sunlight beams in, glowing in the leaves and blossoms of geraniums on the window ledges as in stained glass. One or two friends who know our late-morning ways sometimes follow the path round the house to the garden door, and if they find it as is usual wide open,
come in to sit in chairs opposite us, as at a
Petit
Lever.
All is
luxe,
calme
et
volupté
,
with a good deal of the often forgotten ingredient,
ordre.
Finally there is the bathroom, narrow, with two little square windows at the far end like picture frames holding trial-pieces of the hour and its weather.
We are house-proud, and garden-proud. First-time visitors would not know we had a garden other than the shady rockery under the cypress by the front door; in fact the topography would not seem to provide room for more. So if we want to amaze them we bring them through the house to the garden door, where it is as if space had suddenly sprouted a new dimension. A rather undulating and irregular lawn leads away down a long perspective between, on the left, a high, ragged, thunder-dark fuchsia hedge, and on the right a sequence of incidentals – paths curving out of sight between raised flowerbeds, a garden hut overwhelmed by honeysuckle, a little sunset mountain-range of hydrangeas, a grove of a dozen birchtrees – that demand to be explored. We respond to that demand every day except when the rain is heavy; we carry our mugs of coffee around in a ritual that includes the animals, Squig bounding ahead and looking back with a ball in her mouth, Nimma sauntering after as if it were only by chance she had decided to look round the garden at the same time as us. We
commend
every blossom in its burgeoning and fall; we allow ourselves to be amazed again and again, like a child with a favourite
storybook
, by the sequence of the seasons.
The paths are odd, being made of rectangular concrete blocks, which soon lose their harsh blue-grey tone and sharp edges as moss takes them in hand, and are easily dug up and reset when I decide to realign a path, as I frequently do. These narrow ways fork and loop and duck under trees around a dozen little
subsections
of the garden in a romantic, even sentimental, way, and then unexpectedly – even to us, who made all this – straighten
themselves
up into the perimeter of a slightly sunken, square, parterre, the centre of which is marked very formally by the slim vertical of a cordyline palm. This forum, as we call it, is surrounded by aspens and birches and larches, which screen it from the new
holiday
apartments overlooking us from inland but are slender enough to leave it sunny, and one can sit in still air here even when the rest of Connemara is hysterical with gales. Its area is divided up by a symmetrical pattern of 144 concrete blocks into 145 square plots of earth, 81 of them defined by the long edges of four blocks and 64 by short edges, the larger plots being regularly interspersed with the smaller ones. In the 32 plots nearest the edge, all the way round, we grow extravagant amounts of parsley from which once a year we make jamjarfuls of a sweet jelly called parsley honey, and in the others are chives, mint, blue corydalis, pink oxalis and so on, in an irrational and planless mixture. This numerological garden was a work I undertook at a time when I was spending long nerve-stretching hours every day dotting details onto my Connemara map with a magnifying glass; in the evenings I would restore a sense of scale to my muscles and bones by digging out barrowloads of earth and levering the heavy blocks into position with the back of a spade. It has settled itself
comfortably
into the ground, weather has gentled it and fernspores have discovered its crevices, so that it already looks as if it has been there for a hundred years. Walking across it, feeling the regularity it imposes on the step, reminds me of Aran’s fissured limestone flags, and of the ‘wavy concrete floor’, the unrealized project of my London days.