My Time in Space (9 page)

Just before I achieved invisibility I created the three works that were to be seen publicly only after a lapse of quarter of a century, in ‘The Event Horizon’ at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. The first of these was a collection of wooden rods of lengths from about three to eight feet and of thicknesses from an eighth of an inch to eighteen inches or so, painted in black and white bands in various combinations of width. They used to lie stacked in a loose bundle in a corner or all crisscrossed on the floor in a way that reminded me of my grandmother’s little set of ivory spillikins. In a letter to my parents I wrote:

I produced one or two of these sticks each day until there were about thirty. The same sort of visual tick-tock ran through them all, but each had its own rate and rhythm, weight and balance, and I used to hand them one by one to whomever called to see them. An art-critical friend wondered if they were ‘measure become organic’, and indeed one might imagine them to be growth-stages in the life of a measuring-rod; perhaps I had unknowingly
followed
up the thought of measuring-rods that had arisen in
connection
with the wave-floor project. There used to be two or three very big sticks too, twenty or thirty feet long and several inches thick, which I suppose rightly formed part of the
assemblage
but were left outside leaning up into trees and have not accompanied me down to the present.

As to the second of these works, I have no memory of
making
it and was surprised after all those years when I found it wrapped up with the others. It consists of thirty-five thin white wooden rods each thirty-five inches long. On each one a
different
inch-long segment is picked out in grey, so that if they are laid side by side in a certain order the grey inch appears to progress regularly from one end to the other, but of course this symmetry is broken when they are dropped and scattered. Nowadays it is impossible for me not to read both these collections of rods as breakings-out from restrictive spaces – of the canvas, of the
studio
, of the art world, of the city.

The third piece was the slender, yard-long, vertically-
suspended
, white rod, which I used to think of it as measuring a pace taken towards the middle of the earth. It hung from dozens of coloured threads which converged to the centre of its upper end from drawing-pins set here and there in the ceiling and higher parts of the walls and furnishings of whatever space it was mounted in. When it inhabited the middle air of my studio it was mysterious and almost hypnotic in its stillness; I remember a
visitor
who slept on the floor under it one night saying how much she had learned from it. The simplicity of the white rod seemed to disengage itself from the prismatic mist of threads like a
decision
from a multitude of indefinite considerations.
Retrospectively
I know it was obscurely at work in our decision to leave London for the Aran Islands.

None of these three works had names so far as I can
remember
, but now I call them, respectively, ‘Autobiography’, ‘
Inchworm
’, and ‘To the Centre’. When I resurrected them in 1997 I was disturbed to realize that in their abstraction they prefigured a whole network of imagery – of gravity and rainbows, of compass roses and cardinal directions, of the birth of the universe and the
moment of vision – I had thought originated in the intervening period of map-making and topographical writing, my geophanic years. In the ‘Event Horizon’ show at IMMA I confronted the latent intentions of these three constructions with passages from the subsequent writings, exhibited on wall-mounted cards. The title of the installation as a whole, ‘The View from the Horizon’, hinted at my unease as to whether any of this work would do at all. The move from city to island, from the visual arts to literature, from minimalist abstraction to the most scrupulous cartography of the grain of the actual – had even that drastic step not been enough to shake up my little store of conceptions? Have I only painted the one problematic onto my interior darkness during all the career reviewed here? To the artist it is intolerable that one cannot climb to one’s own horizon and look beyond.

I suspect that all my memories of the house in Braiche Close, Redbourne, which we left when I was four, are reconstructions from old snapshots, except for an image of crisscrossed diagonals, the leading of its diamond-pane windows, which feels as if it has been impressed permanently on my vision by the intensity of my staring through it. My parents used to recall that I would stand with my nose against one of these windows looking out at evening shadows gathering in the garden; ‘There’s a tiny dark,’ I would say, and ‘There’s another tiny dark.’ Darkness reveals space; would I have noticed these little tents of space under bedding plants or tufts of grass if the sun had not declined to illuminate them?

My father was able to see into the depths of leafage that
presented
opaque surfaces to most eyes; therefore he was able to show us children the scribble on a yellowhammer’s egg even if he could not decipher it. On caravanning holidays after the war he used to conduct us on tiptoe walks along sun-warmed field margins, where it seemed nothing in the hedgerow bottoms escaped him; he could dip the handle of his walkingstick into the mesh of twigs
and hook out a shiny green grass-snake for us to fall upon and try to grab as it writhed in figures of eight and disappeared as cleverly as if it had swallowed itself. Padding softly along the byways of the leafy heartlands of England in the pantheistic hush of twilight, I learned wordlessly from him to look. I brought glow-worms back to the caravan in a jamjar, and stared at them, or into them, for hours after bedtime, fixated by the living light emanating not from their surface but from their cloudy interiors, and then, a night or two later, experienced the joy of discovering that they had laid eggs, each with its own minute yolk of luminescence.

I inhabit darkness confidently, moving cautiously, absorbing wide-eyed the vaguest of glimmers and pallors, actively
interpreting
them as presences and emptinesses. Once, coming home from school on a full-moon night when the ground was covered in snow, I challenged my opponent in snowballing to a duel in a neglected little woodland park. As soon as we were among the spindly trees I stood as still as one of them, and let him go on before. Soon he had no idea where I might be, whereas I could trace him clearly by the suddenly jutting angles his nervous
movements
produced in the motionless columnar silhouettes of the treetrunks between us. I waited until he was quite bewildered by perspectiveless black and white, and cautiously lobbed a snowball over his head into the stiff rattling leaves of a laurel bush; he leaped around in a panic, and I had to call out to calm him. A few years later, in Malaya, I found myself on the other side of the shadows, when the rota of guard duties had me prowling a
bomb-dump
from two till four one night. The bombs lay, profoundly asleep, in long lines between high embankments that divided a few acres of rough ground into pools of blackness. Palmtrees rose out of the undergrowth, their fronds creaking high overhead.
Beyond the barbed wire, swamp and jungle croaked and groaned and shrieked. There was a frisson of danger, slight enough to be enjoyable, for although we had been told that the ‘terrorists’ had been driven from that locality they still haunted the night like the ghosts and goblins of only recently abandoned folk-belief. I
wandered
with my loaded rifle through this cemetery of
moon-shocked
iron, daring myself to penetrate its remotest alleys, and had my moment of panic when a firefly drifted in at head-height from the perimeter fence like the glow of an intruder’s cigarette.

For many years after my National Service I lived in cities – Cambridge, Istanbul, Vienna, London – and could have denied my love of tangled obscurities had not briar-patches of doodling invaded the margins of every page I wrote, and had not many of my paintings been tussles with darkness ramified. Then I became a cartographer of the half-deserted and overgrown landscapes of the western seaboard of Ireland. The Burren, in particular, was to re-entrap me with the lure of thickets.

On a gloomy day, which was to prove the lowest point of some months of work in the Burren, I arrived at the ruined church of Kilmoon. I had heard that there was, or used to be, a stone
carving
of the head of a bishop in it, which had been employed for casting spells. Cursing-stones used to be known from many old religious sites in Ireland, and there is much folklore about the
misfortunes
– a sudden wind upsetting a boat, a neighbour’s face struck crooked – caused by malicious persons turning such stones ‘against the sun’, that is, anticlockwise, while saying certain prayers. As late as the end of the nineteenth century a man,
prosecuted
for laming an old woman who had threatened to ‘turn the stones of Kilmoon agin him’, had pleaded self-defence and was acquitted. I found the little building roofless and full of nettles; I could not see the carved head, and a local man who came into the graveyard to help me search said that he hadn’t set eyes on it for some years. So I noted the other features of the church and
continued
my mapwork up the road.

Later that day I happened to meet an elderly countryman who told me he looked after the church and could show me the bishop’s head. It was beginning to rain heavily but he was not to be put off, so I walked back down with him, rather reluctantly. He went into a cottage for a coat, and we both climbed the stile into the long grass of the churchyard. He thoroughly believed in the power of the head; a priest once came out from the nearby village of Lisdoonvarna to put a stop to the pagan practice, he told me, but ‘he hammered and hammered it and he couldn’t mark it – and after, he didn’t live a week!’ It was difficult to follow his account, but I gathered that the bishop had got into trouble – ‘too fond of the women’ – and had been excommunicated; the phrase ‘and Rome divides!’ came into the story several times. When the Board of Works had tidied up the church the head had been thrown out with rubbish into the road, and this man’s father had told him to put it back and look after it. I asked him if I should mention on my map that anyone who wanted to see it should apply to him? The idea alarmed him. If the Parish Priest (that old tyrant from the mountains) ever heard that he was showing the head to people, he’d get hammered as much as the old bishop was hammered, he said.

The door of the church was half walled up with blocks of stone, and he squeezed through under the little arch with great
difficulty while I stood outside in the wet grass. He fished the stone out from nettles in a corner and humped it over and whacked it down in front of me on the wall across the doorway in a way that made me jump. He clearly believed that it was
indestructible
, contrary to the evidence of his own eyes that the face was featureless on one side. I felt a reluctance to touch the thing, but because he seemed to expect it, I ‘took its likeness’ (as he put it), sketching rapidly in the rain while he stood inside the church propping up the stone for me and saying encouragingly ‘A fine hand! A fine hand!’ It was a weird session, and helped to
precipitate
a mood of disgust with the sheer unreason of the Burren. Why, I wondered, was I standing in the rain listening to this
garbled
superstitious nonsense, when I could be at home listening to Monteverdi, or in Venice studying the architecture of San Marco, when the whole world of high culture was waiting for me?

In fact this wet stony landscape I was struggling with, day after day, week after week, was beginning to get the better of me. Some days were simply dispiritingly cold, solitary, wasted ‘
standing
under a dripping bush halfway up Cowshit Lane’ as my diary puts it, or in failing to find the Neolithic tomb I was groping through the thickets for, because the map-references given in the magisterial
Survey
of
Megalithic
Tombs
of
Ireland
were incorrect, as I discovered in several cases. As it happened, I had other reasons for unhappiness at that time, but my isolation in the self-imposed task left me vulnerable; my diary records ‘a crisis of loneliness’ one evening in a rather chillingly proper guesthouse, after which I jumped onto my bike and pedalled furiously, almost blindly, for miles, met a woman who showed me a stone in the roadside wall with six fingerholes poked into it by a saint, one cannot imagine why, and then cycled back again from the site of the futile
miracle
– ‘despair, almost, and an unsuccessful and exhausting fugue’. How, in the middle of my life, had I got into this dark wood?

Of course it was natural that having mapped the three Aran Islands I should raise my eyes to the mainlands visible from them: the purple shadowy peaks of Connemara to the north, the
silver-mounded
Burren to the east. In Robert Lloyd Praeger’s book
The
Botanist
in
Ireland
I found this bald mention, illustrated with a fuzzy photo of acres of
Potentilla
fruticosa
scrub:

It was enough to decide me. As soon as I had distributed the newly printed Aran map to the shops I took the plane to Galway, hitchhiked round Galway Bay to Ballyvaughan, had a Guinness in what was then the charming old-fashioned grocery-cum-bar opposite the quay, and walked back a mile to Lough Rask, where Dorie and Bernie’s B&B looks down slanting fields to the trees of a heronry by a little lake. The weather was superb, sunny and breezy. I soon found myself at grips with, or in the grip of, this landscape’s tight interlock of barrenness and exuberant fertility. My diary allows me to reconstruct my rambles and fervent
amateur
botanizing in some detail:

All the elements of the perfect West-of-Ireland day are in that – the old ruins with rustic life harmonious around them; the
fascinating
wildflowers (Praeger was the first to write in detail about the way different species of plant grow in contoured zones around the turloughs, depending on what degree and frequency of immersion they thrive on); the getting lost and coming out in a place where nobody goes, and the encounter with an animal that had never met humankind before and therefore was perfectly confiding; the discovery of a plant unknown in the region (and I was very proud of it, because the Burren has been so energetically searched by generations of botanists but this handsome tall poppy had never been recorded there); the magnificent walk over a
hilltop
into the sight of the ocean …