Stones of Aran (46 page)

The stairs begin in the back right-hand corner of the kitchen, where a fan of three wedge-shaped, hollow-trodden, steps leads up to what looks like a cupboard door; inside, they turn left and climb the narrow stairwell unsteadily, creaking like an old man going off to bed. At the top is a small landing with three low doors of flimsy tongue-and-groove, an old wooden chest full of bedclothes and the smell of mothballs, and a knee-high window looking out to the rear of the house. With the door of my writing-room open I can look across the landing and out of this window at the great crag beyond the back wall of the yard; in fact An Chreig Mhór is for me an adjunct to that cramped little study and in some ways the most familiar room of the house. I have
botanized
so intensively on it that most of Aran’s extremest rarities have turned up there, and I watch over their welfare as if they were part of the family circle: for example,
Calamagrostis
(
Praeger
: “…that very rare Irish grass, the Wood Rush”), waving a fine foxy whisk out of a deep crevice; the unobtrusive
Neotinea
or dense-flowered orchid, rare in the Burren and practically
unknown
elsewhere (Praeger: “It is strange that it does not occur on the Aran Islands”); the common butterwort that catches flies on its sticky leaves and is so well adapted to life on the unnourishing bogs of Connemara that it is an ecological scandal here, where it
clings to the bare sides of two or three tussocks of black bog rush in a watery little gully. Plant-hunting is a relief and distraction from writing, but that too happens on the crag. If I cannot lay my hand on the phrase I am searching for in my room, I stroll out, scramble over the back wall and go rooting for words among the crevices of the rock. The crag is my testing-ground for the
aerodynamics
of sentences, a rebounding-place to prance upon when a chapter comes to its own conclusions and sets me free. Since we look down into it every time we go up or down stairs, the crag, even in its most unhomely aspects—by moonlight for example, astir with rabbits like splatters of ink on a silver tray—is not impossibly remote from domesticity. I have even gone down there for reassurance when time seemed to have got lost in the darkness of the night. I remember one starless three-o’clock vigil, crouched in the lee of a granite boulder under steadily drifting drizzle, unable to make out anything of the world but a wavering layer of dim ellipses floating a foot above the ground, the flowers of
hundreds
of moon-daisies, forming a false bottom to all appearances.

Of the landing’s three doors the first, on the left, with a dented brass knob like an unripe fig, is the bedroom door. The room is small, an attic with sloping ceiling. The high ends of the black wrought-iron bedsteads we found there on our arrival seemed almost to bar entry; later we tackled the rusty bolts and dismantled the bedframes, and replaced them with floor-hugging bed-ends made out of planks from an old crate. M dispelled the morosity of the damp-stained walls and impending ceiling with
avocado-green
, flower-sprigged, wallpaper and billowing lace curtains that trawled the skies from the tiny dormer window and came back full of light and fragrance; there seemed no reason why we should not enjoy a Laura Ashley fantasy of nineteenth-century country living just because we were living in the country and indeed in the nineteenth century. The small tortoiseshell butterflies that besiege the house on hot days, looking for a dark corner that will become their winter quarters, come in at this window and congregate on
the opposite corner of the ceiling, where they hang like the faded standards of their glorious summer campaigns. The bedroom has become our secret retreat too, from both nature and society. With the wooden shutters on the inside of the window closed and a blanket stuffed into the crack between them, our Tilly-lamp can tell no one we are at home, and even when the wind gets one fist down the chimney and the other somehow into the wall-cupboard, it cannot buffet us here, while the oil-heater toasts the dampness into a cosy fug and we lie on the floor examining with voluptuous lingerings a newly arrived parcel of books. Concerned friends now and then post us a few cassettes of music, which fall into our hands like messages whirled up by storms raging very far away, and which become through repeated hearings as spent as old pennies or else so overcharged with meaning as to be unbearable. Monteverdi’s Tancred and Clorinda mutually unrecognized in their armour, hacking at each other in the dark with the intimacy of lovers quarreling in bed—but I close the door on this. So much has happened in that room, of which I shall never write.

The next room, straight ahead at the top of the stairs, about eight feet square, with a hard chair by a postage-stamp of a window dedicated to bare rock, was at first a common boxroom and sulking-room. Then one day the ceiling collapsed because of the unstaunchable leaks in the roof, and some plaster fell off its
interior
walls, revealing that they were built of ancient sods of turf, grey and twisted like senile bricks, which came tumbling round our ankles when we tried to patch the holes. We had to get a local workman to help me wrestle bulging sheets of hardboard into position and nail them to the joists, and then, having the hammer in my hand, I went on to build a desk-like construction under the window out of plastic-coated chipboard delivered from Galway by the cargo boat, and proudly presented the room to M as her study or boudoir. Occasionally My Lady of Silent Reservations withdraws herself into it, leaving me nervously dislocated. What is she doing in there, hour after hour?—weeping herself to death?—writing that feminist thesis we used to joke about,
entitled
“Derrida, I married him”?—or is she savouring her solitude like a cat grooming its fur?

My own room, apart from its little window looking onto the front garden, was initially a void, the interior of some lopsidedly truncated Platonic polyhedron. I installed a peculiarly tall table made by Mícheál’s father, and a chair that to match it had to be supplemented by several cushions. The room is so small that from my perch I can reach almost all the shelves I have contrived around the walls. Over the years these have filled up with
specimens
of rocks and fossils, files of correspondence with the
botanists
, geologists and archaeologists from whom I extort knowledge, drafts of stories, volumes of diary, record-cards of place-names, and parcels of copies of my first map of Aran. One of the
functions
of a publisher is to protect the author from the physical
reality
of the book, its weight and volume multiplied by the print-run. Only the self-published know the sudden condensation of the ideal into inert mass, upon the printers’ delivering. By the time I had lugged the boxes of the Burren map upstairs, the joists of the ceiling below were sagging under the product of that
initially
empty room.

Stones
of
Aran
was begun here too; the lumpy stuff of fact and feeling was excogitated through a machinery of emptiness and silence into something that would lie on a page. The pain of that process! How can it be, that a contrivance of “negative capability” is sometimes blocked for days or weeks at a time, jammed, seized up? Research is easy; however severely it taxes the eyes in libraries or the body in the field, it is a distraction and a relief.
Remembering
, noting, filing, identifying, querying, confirming—one has resources that can be squandered on such preliminaries. But for the finding of a form of words, there are no resources. Education, vocabulary, information, even wit, imagination, sensibility—these are teeth tensed to snap together, pressing out too-ready formulations; the mind aches with the stress of holding them apart, preserving the space in which words can think themselves into shape. Somehow this is not so bad on winter days, with the
rain splattering on the window and the oil-heater singeing my shins, but on a still, hot afternoon it is sometimes unbearable. The intensely alert silence of the garden, the white emptiness of the road going by the gate, the wide amnesia of the world towards me—and then the sudden fidget of a blackbird in the shadow under a bush, exactly “the sound of the clapping of one hand.” Turns of words cunningly composed to disorientate the mind
reveal
their banality. A linguistic philosopher, I forget who, put together as a specimen of a meaningless sentence, “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.” Seeing the invisible flickering of the air above the hot stone of the garden path, I know exactly what he did not mean to mean. Hopelessly sensible nonsense! I give up. I go downstairs.

The house is empty; M must be sunbathing. I make two mugs of coffee, carry them through the silent inferno of Mrs. Callaghan in the hall and round to the back of the house. “Did you write a sentence?” asks M. who really believes that I can write sentences. “Bits of one,” I reply, eyes and voice uncertain, dazzled, after the deep shift in the word-mine. I strip off and lie beside her. The light is enprismed between the whitewashed south-facing wall of the house, the grey limestone so hot we have to lie on rugs, and the black shadow-side of Moloney’s back wall. Butterflies are dithering between the stone-hard sky and the chinks in the
masonry
of the outhouse, entering crouched like pot-holers, backing out, unfurling themselves again. The hour ripens for another heat of the undecidable beauty competition between left breast and right breast. There is no more than a grain of salt between them, but it soon becomes the centre of gravity of the cosmos. The
garden
sleeps furiously, the road passes by, the world is unmindful, as we mould each other’s bodies into their brief perfections.

Afterwards, lapsing back into ourselves, we drift into
half-imagined
conversations. “Did you notice how at that moment the Milky Way swung into alignment with my spine?” “In broad daylight? It was merely that we happened to be lying north-south, as recommended by Marie Stopes.” “Well, did you hear the sun
pounding the stone on either side of us with the flats of its hands?” “I did not. And you didn’t notice that the postman called, and left a parcel of books on your rump.”

Remembering such times, I am moved to a declaration: that making love with Máiréad has been the sustaining joy of my life. There’s a certainty! And where else but in the secret heart of my book could I dare such simplicity? From where, proclaim it to so wide a world?

But writing has no rights of residence; it is driven onwards from any achieved moment of symmetry. Unbalancing forces
energize
the westward progress of this book, for instance. I cannot name them, but for a few months of my first year in Aran they took on a form that, looking back on it, seems like a literary contrivance, and at the time was distressingly immediate,
literally
next door.

The school, as I have mentioned, is just east of the
Residence
. The first time I passed it when the children were out in the schoolyard, they all flocked to the roadside wall to look at me, with the sudden dense whirring rush of starlings; I found their faces unreadable, gnarled, dark, fist-like. They were too shy to say much, and when they did muster a few words “Where ye from?”—they could not understand my answer, and
repeated
unnervingly, “Where ye from?” Finding it increasingly difficult to pass the school, I began to know the times at which they would be playing in the yard or inside at their lessons or spilling out onto the road and scattering homewards. Time, in such places as London, is a disease of the wristbone; one sees sufferers glance anxiously at the glittering lump. I had come to Aran to escape the infection, and bitterly resented its outbreak here. The school became an obstacle dividing the island in two, a constant nagging presence like an aching tooth.

What alarmed me in this situation was that I was unable to
wrench my mind away from the problem. I am familiar enough with my tendency to obsessions and panics to be able to
distinguish
subjective from objective threats. Nothing about the kids themselves troubled me; they were not aggressive or even
unmannerly
, and the worst I could have said about them was that they showed directly what the adults were too polite to hint at, that we were strangers, oddities, curiosities. (At that period there were no other non-island households in Árainn, and no visitors stayed through the winters.) I found myself roving the crags behind the house or the fields below the scarp to the west with a constant directional consciousness of the school, like a numb and wary side to my face, a film over one eye. The search for plants—this was my first season of botanizing and the beauty of each species struck me as with lightning when it made its entrance into the year—became a counter-obsession, deliberately cultivated to
offset
the other. But I would come home from an afternoon’s
apparently
idle and carefree strolling with rings of anxiety deposited round my eyes. What was this about? My mind went spiralling back through my own childhood, my schooldays, my three years of teaching, the stresses of our own decision not to have children: nothing there that recognizably prefigured my present
experience
. There were other possible sources of unease too. Vietnam was approaching its crisis; Nixon announced “the biggest
bombing
raid in history.” In our previous life we had participated in the great anti-war demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, raged at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, donated artworks to “Medical Aid for Vietnam”; now here I was on the bomb-crazed pavements of Aran, picking flowers. Art is a guilty business, a desperate search for self-justification outside the sphere of justice, and I was not even producing art. I had a nightmare about a radio announcer saying, “Tonight we bring you the worst news ever. Over to our special reporter…”—but the special reporter was so horror-struck by whatever it was that he could only babble
incoherently
.

When, eventually admitting to myself that I could not solve
this problem, I told M about it, she took thought, and began to cultivate our relations with the children. We soon became the most interesting features of their daily lives; those whose
homeward
way passed our gate started calling in on us, to marvel at such unfamiliar items as our ranks of books, the typewriter, my binoculars and magnifying glass. The girls would arrive in a rush and fling themselves into the house crying, “Don’t let the boys in!,” and the boys would hang around the gate disconsolately
until
we promised to see them on the next day. They brought their schoolbooks and taught us Irish; I drew pictures of the birds of Aran for them. Mícheál disapproved strongly; they would only take advantage of us, he said. One day when he was working on the potato-ridges in the garden, a lad larking about on the crag outside threw a stone at a sheet of corrugated iron that filled in a disused doorway in Moloney’s walls, and Mícheál leapt out through one of the empty window-frames with a bull-like bellow and chased a scattering of them off in the direction of Gort na gCapall. Every bit of devilment in the island starts in Gort na gCaPall, he told us. All this frequentation was at first alarming, then became a routine, sometimes troublesome, often vitalizing. The children revealed their individualities, and some became friends; “Ye were the only people who ever took any notice of us,” they told us when they and we were some years older. Even today, having long left the island, we are occasionally hailed in the streets of Galway by a strapping seaman or punk-clad art-student, and I am puzzled to identify him or her with one or other of the small darting creatures that once caused me such distress.

What this episode might mean I do not know, but, clearly, in coming to this place I had stepped into some unfamiliar
westernness
of the psyche. Other newcomers have had a conviction of their alienage in Aran forced upon them by the barren rocks, the aggressive weather or the incomprehensible language, and have fled. For me, such a recognition would crack the foundation-stone of this book. If Aran is to become a microcosm of the
island-universe
to which, I believe, I belong without residue, how can I
bear even a trace of immanent xenophobia in it? But perhaps “
belonging
” is something to be earned, or learned. If so, the only escape from the unease of the threshold is, paradoxically, to go on farther, to explore to the end. By coincidence, our house turned out to be perched on the edge of a boundary, instituted by the saints of old, that I can turn to advantage in my westward
progress
. But I did not know that, at the time; the boundary I knew I had reached was drawn by interior demons.

The saints’ boundary arose in this way. St. Enda and St. Breacán proposed to divide the island between them. They agreed that, on an appointed morning and after celebrating the Mass in their respective monasteries in Cill Éinne and Eoghanacht, they would walk towards each other, the boundary to be established where they should meet. But St. Breacán and his followers got up at an unholy hour, gabbled through the Mass, and set off on horseback. As they were climbing the hill towards Fearann an Choirce, one of Enda’s monks saw them, and ran to wake his master, who beseeched God not to let them approach any nearer. Instantly Breacán and his monks found that their horses’ hooves were fixed to the rock, and they had to wait there until Enda came and
released
them. The hoof-marks were visible in the rock at Creig na Córach, the crag of the just division, for many centuries, until the wicked agent Thompson made the people build the road over them, to spite their ancient traditions. Later on the pious Fr. Killeen had a plaque set in the roadside wall to mark the spot, at the foot of the steep slope immediately west of the
Residence
.

While the
Life
of
St.
Enda
tells of the division of the island between him, and the abbots of eight other monasteries, neither it nor any of the old sources on St. Breacán give the above legend; however it is well known in island lore, and there is a version of it in Ó Domhnaill’s
Oileáin
Árann
;
including the postscript about Thompson. (Fr. Mártan Ó Domhnaill was curate here from 1920 to 1934. His book, the first Irish-language one on Aran, is the
most prolix work I have ever come across, but it is the only source for certain pennyworths of information, and is full of charm; a song in it, “Árainn i bhfad i gcéin,” “Aran far away” which appears to be his own composition, is still sung.) A middle-aged Gort na gCapall man told me that the boundary was defined not just on the road, but right across the island from Poll Uí Néadáin on the south coast to Poll na Loinge on the north; he remembered that when he was young there was an old man who knew exactly where it ran through the village. From Gort na gCapall it followed a pronounced scarp, a sharp cliff in fact, to the main road just below the Residence, but nobody can now tell me how it found its way down the northern flank of the island to the shore. It may be that this faded tradition is a memory-trace of an actual boundary
existent
at some distant period, though it fits in neither with the division of the island into four townlands, consolidated by but anterior to the Ordnance Survey of 1839, nor with the tripartite schema recorded in Elizabethan inquisitions. If, as seems likely, Dún Dúchathair and Dún Aonghasa antedate the other big cashels, it is even possible that this was the point of balance
between
those two primitive powers.

Certain other fragments of lore shore up the significance of this point of just division. The steep slant of the road down the scarp used to be called Carcair an Phobaill, the slope of the
congregation
, because there was a little chapel beside it. Mícheál points out a few stones of this building in the bracken of a field tucked under the scarp immediately north of the road, and says he heard it was a ruin even in his great-grandfather’s time; Dara the postman adds that it was so small the priest could scatter holy water on the whole congregation in one go. A couple of hundred yards further west, an area consisting of a few fields on the other side of the road used to be called Muirbheach na Croise, the sandy plain of the cross, and there is a slender pillar-stone about eight feet high, perhaps not ancient, incorporated in a field-wall there, which may or may not have something to do with the name—but when I enquired about it locally the most I could
elicit was the cryptic observation, “There was no harm in the man that put that there.” Island memory of these things has decayed. The “hill of the congregation” has lost its old name; for a
generation
or two it was Carcair Uí Cheallacháin from O’Callaghan the teacher, and nowadays it is just An Charcair Mhór, the big slope. Only Fr. Killeen’s plaque checks the amnesia of the landscape here, the ruination of its meanings. But ruins have their own capacity for housing the imagination; this romantically half-effaced boundary means more to me than the mapped and historically situated ones, and not just because I lived upon it for so long. If there is a privileged site from which to view the quality of westernness, it must be this: a house on the border between east and west in the westernmost of three islands off the west of Ireland. The very western tip of Árainn itself, or for practicality’s sake a cottage in the farthest village, where empty horizons and
undiluted
sunsets could impose too terminal an interpretation, might not be so conducive to this meditation as my liminal perch, with that never quite cured sore point of no return just the other side of it.

The scarp itself, the rough seam along which east and west are cobbled together, was exalted by my feverish botanical
displacement
activity into splendorous Gothic complexity; imagine a cathedral peeled like an apple in one long spiral strip, and the peeling thrown down across the island and passing so close to the house that a few steps could take me from my morning
coffee-mug
to breathless adorations before plants niched like saints in the unwound façade. In that first Aran spring each new flower opened another eye in me, piercing the gloom of winter. I will never see flowers like that again, each one suddenly shining not only out of the wet rock or decayed undergrowth around it but out of the time in which that space had been dark, as if a beam had arrived at last, rejoicing, from a star formed long ago, light-years away. It was not the famous rarities or even the one or two new discoveries I made that most enthralled me, bur the underfoot beneath-notice nearly-nothings; the field madder, for
instance
,
its mauve four-petalled blossoms each only a tenth of an inch across, in clusters of a dozen or so arranged as if it were
crucial
to show off each one to best advantage. Some plants I took home and examined with a magnifying glass, awed by the scale and finish of their architecture. Two great milky-white trunks curving up and smoothly swelling into egg-shaped terminals each with a faint blue stripe across it—the stamens of the bird’s eye speedwell, which is merely so many dots of prettiness to the
rambler
, and sheds its little yellow-centred rings of blue petals like enamelled earrings on the mantlepiece if you bring it home. The hairy bittercress is a negligible weedy thing on the scale of a
passing
pace, but its four white petals under the glass are volupruously curved flanks of satin-smooth angel-flesh, making the paper they lie on look unwholesomely yellowish and pitted. In the earliest days of the year these revelations were sparse; in January just one or two left-over blossoms of herb robert, asterisks footnoting the previous season; in February the lime rice-grains of whitlow-grass scattered in the grazed-down margins of the paths, and then the common scurvy-grass on the coastal rocks (these lovely things named like so many diseases of the earth!); in March the lessons in yellow—
this
is primrose yellow,
this
is buttercup yellow,
this,
subtly different, is celandine yellow. By April spring was pressing ahead faster than I could see or write about it; I could hardly bear to be in the house in case something else was coming into being. The first bloody cranesbill, the first early purple orchid, the first spring gentian, each an explosion of sense-data, each beaming its existence into the world, carrying no message, quite independent of my observation or interpretation. I admired the heraldic
simplicity
of tormentil, a little yellow Tudor rose of four petals set edge to edge; behind the ring of petals is another of eight narrow green sepals, four of them pressed against and backing the petal edges, the alternate four slightly reflexed, one below each petal. The wild strawberry has exactly the same arrangement with five petals and ten sepals, with an extra stylish detail: the petals are slightly
separated
so that the pale green of the sepals shows between them.
Drawing the tormentil plant, following out the logic of its stem and leaves and flowers, and then finding exactly the same
structure
in the much larger and superficially quite dissimilar herb bennet, I entered deeply into the reasons for classifying them both, together with the wild strawberry, in the rose family. These miracles of singularity, I found, had their places in the schemes of reason and the causality of evolution, beyond my comprehension, but in principal comprehensible. That there are miracles, is
explicable
; that there are explanations, is miraculous.