Stones of Aran (47 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
In the midst of this almost hysterical collecting and classifying of shapes and colours, I was sometimes aware that I was playing off the wild-flowers against the schoolchildren, whose shrill cries at playtime flew through the air to me—
at
me, it felt, though I knew it was not so—like thrown knives. Their tiny silhouettes appearing and disappearing on the horizon as they scrambled about on the walls of the playground threatened my eyes like thorns. The sky-parallel crags became arenas of phobia as well as entrancement, the cupped fields flowing with buttercups and
daisies
were poisoned by anxiety, the fraught intricacies of the ivied scarps netted me in compulsions.
Even after the children had became individualized persons and lost this edge of menace, I found that my botanical
browsings
never quite ensured peace of mind. Under any leaf there could be a splinter off a ragged edge of my fragmented past. Some uneasy thought, such as a doubt about the value of my writings, could be working its way towards me along the fissures of the crag, like the cockerel that the wicked old wise women used to set wandering at random to carry off disease. Imagine it: the corner of the eye catches an incomprehensible knot of colours appearing and disappearing, scratching its way along the other side of a wall; it finds a gap and comes out into the open, a beribboned cockerel, its eye a dew-drop of malice tilted towards you. There is a paper tied to it which might be—well, no matter what, you have to read it, caught out in the open here. For me, it might be, for instance:
Ancient Celtic tradition associates the northern province of Ireland with battle, the east with prosperity, the south with music, the centre with
kingship
, and the west with knowledge. Tim Robinson’s book on Aran
conforms
to this schema in asserting the knowability of that western island. His method is the patient accumulation of detailed fact, with the occasional excursus into the wider conceptual structures within which alone those facts have significance. The difficulty in this approach is, on the one hand, that an adequate provision of background information would overweight the book or bring its progress to an awkward halt, and on the other that without such background the facts are mere curiosities or momentary
distractions
. Thus even the rather rudimentary potted history of the Land League is too long for its position in the book, on the brink of an exciting cliff-top adventure story as it were, whereas the brief mention of
Saccamen-opsis
is a stumbling-block to readers not familiar with the general principles and findings of stratigraphy and the fossil record. Worse still, even the
suitably
informed reader cannot take the facts adduced here at face value.
Minor
mistakes abound (E.P. Wright was Professor of Botany in UCD, not of Zoology in TCD, for instance) and there are some lamentable
misinterpretations
. The rendering of the headland west of Port Mhuirbhigh as Cora Scaití Ciúin, the sometimes calm point, is DIY etymology at its most inept; as the late Éamonn Ó Tuathail has pointed out, the name is Cora Scath Tí Chuinn, from a house of the Quinn family which provided a mark for
boatmen
skirting the reef. As for the cross on the sill of Arkin Castle, which Robinson takes as the very seal of truth of the Cill Éinne legend, it probably dates from 1818 like similar ones carved here and there around Galway by a man called Healy. In other fields professional research has already made Robinson’s account obsolete (
cf.
C. Cotter, 1993, 1994, on Dún Aonghasa, for example). Such failings are only to be expected; a multidisciplinary study demands the modesty of teamwork, and the best that can be said of Robinson’s attempts is that he manages to fall between more professorial chairs than most amateurs.
A more fundamental flaw is the work’s uncertainty and equivocation about its own purpose. Striding roughshod over the bounds of specialisms and genres, it seems to imply that some overarching meaning of it all is
going to be revealed through the juxtaposition or pile-up of viewpoints, but alas this higher truth never quite emerges, and in trying to be “not just” a historian or geologist or botanist or even a poet, Robinson ends up being nothing in particular. If some philosophical question had been formulated in the volume under review, one might look forward to an attempt to
answer
it in the forthcoming volume, but since no such level of generality is attained in
Pilgrimage,
one fears that
Labyrinth
will be no more than a
further
tangle of observations and anecdotes united only by a high-flown style—for Robinson would clearly have us know he is no mere polymath of the natural sciences but a literary adept too; hence the prevalence of
unsignalled
quotations and half-buried references, particularly to such
touchstones
of the English littérateur as Proust, Ruskin, and
The
Wind
in
the
Willows.
Although Robinson disclaims aspirations to transcendency he seems drawn to the brink of it, perhaps by some dim afterglow of belief as is
betrayed
by the title
Pilgrimage
itself. But what is the point of a pilgrimage to an empty shrine? He sets off bravely enough with the concept of the “
adequate
step” which is mysteriously to totalize all modes of comprehension, but by the time he gets back to his starting-point it has been tested to
destruction
and he discards it like a worn-out boot. Having completed this null circuit, which leaves him and us no more than “marginally
better-informed
” about some of the stones of Aran, our hero rurns inward, to the labyrinth. Clearly his temperament is not one to go bull-headed for
minotaurs
, but seeing him wander off clueless one does fear that he will blunder into factual booby-traps or be ambushed by the irrational.
Perhaps all that is so. However, my hard hour on the crags has lasted too long now for reconsiderations. Whatever wrong
turnings
have brought me to this point, there is only one way out, and it lies westward. Only by reporting these cliff-edge experiences (which I am as likely to find on a petal’s rim as on the lip of the ocean) can I get in step with the world again, and I find that to approach them and then crawl back to safety I must cling onto as much factuality as I can grasp at a time. Perhaps such dizzy
penultimates
are, strictly speaking, indescribable. But dreams are
notoriously untellable (if in reality not more so than reality itself), and yet we succeed in telling our dreams; this is because we all dream, we each fail to describe our dream and therefore
recognize
the ways in which others fail, and so their failures to describe their dreams direct us unerringly to those dreams in our own experience. And if there is no community of experience to appeal to, it has to be created. The drug addict addicts others to the drug out of a craving to communicate the drug-state; the writer instils into the reader the words induced in the writer by experience. Mad faith that the same words will induce the same experience in others!—so that one can say, “
That
is what I would say, if it were possible to say it!,” and trust that the other will recognize that unsayable.
As a poem of Máirtin Ó Direáin’s whisperingly reminds us, at Christmastime Aran puts candles in its windows to welcome the Holy Family.
| | | An eol duit, a Mhuire, | Oh Mary do you know |
| | | Cá rachair i mbliana | Where to go this year |
| | | Ag iarraidh foscaidh | Begging shelter |
| | | Do do Leanbh Naofa, | For your Holy Child |
| | | Tráth a bhfuil gach doras | When every door |
| | | Dúnta Ina éadán | Is slammed in His face |
| | | Ag fuath is uabhar | By the hate and pride |
| | | An chine dhaonna? | Of humankind? |
| | | | |
| | | Deonaigh glacadh | Graciously accept |
| | | Le cuireadh uaimse | My invitation |
| | | Go hoileán mara | To an isle of the sea |
| | | San Iarthar cianda; | In the antique West; |
| | | Beidh coinnle geala | Bright candles will shine |
| | | I ngach fuineog lasta | In every window |
| | | Is tine mhóna | And a fire of turf |
| | | Ar theallach adhainte | Will glow on the hearth. |
A candle is added for each day of Christmas, and so on a windy Twelfth Night if we stoop to peer past the candle flame gasping in the drafts of our scullery window, Gort na gCapall, a mile away, looks like the dots of a row of dominoes, a child’s game the vast turbulent blackness takes care to step over as it races towards us across the crags.
Liam O’Flaherty was born in Gort na gCapall, and in the
after-swell
of his stormy prose many wild words have been written about the situation of this tiny hamlet, giving one to understand that it is menaced by waves that mount two-hundred-foot-high cliffs. In fact it is a quarter of a mile from the sea, and is wrapped around to the south by a low scarp that gives some shelter from the wind and must have protected it much more effectively when the dwellings were all single-storied and had the blunted
ridgelines
of thatch. Of the eleven houses all but two comparatively recent ones stand close together on a cliffed terrace above a green hollow of marshy fields, where in winter there is standing water and in summer a three-layered haze of red, lilac and pink formed by ragged robin, lady’s smock and bogbean, flowering at
different
heights above the damp greensward. All the houses face north. Six are of the two-storied slate-roofed design introduced by the Land Commission in the ’fifties, with plain flat façades, a window on either side of the front door, the straight line of the eaves drawn close above the three upstairs windows, and a
chimney
topping each of the high end-gable walls. The rest are
cottages
; we saw the last of their thatched roofs replaced by concrete tiles in the ’seventies. Then there are the huddled old stores and barns and odd empty-windowed wall-corners and bereft
gable-ends
tucked in here and there, relics of ancestral cabins. A rough continuation of the side-road and a branching boreen link all this
present and past habitation into a relaxed neighbourliness. The form of the village is, as it were, the story of the village; only the very newest houses, spilt out onto the crag below it to the north, betray a modern disinterest in old tales.
Perhaps the mutually unintrusive but companionable spatial relationships of Gort na gCapall gave me fond preconceptions of the community, but my years of visiting there have not proved them delusive. On the other hand, the layout itself of Aran’s more linear “street-villages” suggests the sidelong glance of envy and malicious supposition, and in one of two of them I sense a rural claustrophobia compounded by the anomie of suburbia. The dull stress bears hardest on the women, who either escape early to the mainland, or live out lives even more straitened in spatial terms than do the males. I remember one or two girls who looked as if they had been born to dance, but folded away their silken youth with their wedding-dresses and set themselves like jugs on the shelf of their marriages, becoming matronly overnight in
expectation
of expectation. Later on, bored by their monosyllabic
husbands
, they might find consolation in fantasy. Making a sequence of visits in one of these villages after a winter’s absence from the island, M found one young wife in a state of exhilaration. “I
suppose
you’ve been hearing all about me!” she cried. “No!” said M, and instantly regretted her honesty. “You haven’t?” The woman was disappointed; the thought of the scarlet doings the
neighbours
might be crediting her with had been warming her through the dull months. Or, if their own lives were irremediably prosaic, they thought that perhaps ours were not. For several years we wintered in London, and I used to return in March to air the house and set the vegetable garden. My preparations and M’s
reappearance
a month or two later were always noticed, in this
island
so grateful for assurance that the winter was over, and in fact she often coincided with the first bright weather, or came flushed with triumph over the last of the storms or fogs that might have delayed her. Adding to her bridal glow in my eyes were the stylish garments she came in, Courrège, Laura Ashley, Kenso, each in
their turn and only a season or two past their peak of fashion, rescued from the dowdy piles in Kilburn charity shops. It had not occurred to me that anyone saw all this as anything but a tribute to myself, to the respringing of our love. But after a few years one of M’s street-village Bovarys took her aside and said, “Can I ask you something? Every time you come back from London, we
notice
that you look great. Tell me—do you have lovers in
London
?”
Some women, though, were gone beyond the mild stimulant of vicarious romance. Worn down by a coercive biology, their skirts hemmed by ever-more clutching hands and mouths and eyes, they had fallen into embittered exhaustion. In our earlier years in Aran, the District Nurse, a nun, was instructing wives in the Billings Method, a way of charting their ovulatory cycles by inspection of vaginal secretions. Approved by the Church as a means of determining the right time to conceive, the method also could not help but indicate the right time not to conceive, and, it being better to fudge than to burn, use of this knowledge was acceptable too. However as a method of birth control it was not the best; among the factors it took no account of were the ache of moonlight, and a husband’s indifference to “safety” after a few pints in the pub. As the first crop of “Billings Babies” ripened, one victim of these delusive haruspications said to me, “The Nun is the only one it seems to work for!” A few years later, two children later, that same woman’s despair had taken on an edge of
viciousness
. It was at the time of the vet’s annual visit to castrate the bull-calfs; “That’s all there is for it,” she said, “the men will have to go to the vet.” Eventually the Nun retired gratefully to her cloisters, weary of the conflict between her own good sense and the eternal verities.
Could all those children get their sufficiency of love, I
wondered
? Some of them had the dark petals of sadness under their eyes. And even if love is as shareable as loaves and fishes, time is not, speech is not. The imaginations of some of these children were word-starved. I once took a six-year-old for a stroll from his
house, down a boreen, across a field, up another boreen. As we reached home I said “Let’s tell them we’ve been to Dublin!” but he struck me down with “That’s all lies!” It was also part of the “natural” way of things that the woman of the house would have sole care of the elderly and infirm. The string of children might therefore be competing for attention with a bed-ridden ancient, such as the grandfather-in-law I heard one exasperated mother complaining of: “If he was younger he’d have died long ago, but
him
!”—laughing in bitter recognition of the old fellow’s
staying-power.
While many women seemed to win through to serene grandmotherhood after all those years in which their own
identities
could only appeal for consideration through their varicose veins, angina or depression, others did not, and I saw them
carrying
their lives like heavy sacks.
But it was not like that in Gort na gCapall (though of course my knowledge is limited, and perhaps my memory is selective, tending to group similars together, to organize my book). In that magic round of nests, children however numerous were bright with love, aged grandmothers smiled by the hearth, husbands were welcomed home from the pub even when they were, as one wife expressed it, “a little hilarious.” Once, walking home from a funeral, I fell in with a cosy widow from this contented village, and we chatted about the departed. “It must be hard, going,” she said; “Why can’t we just live in Aran for ever!” For herself, I knew, she would have specified Gort na gCapall, as being neither west nor east nor south nor north of somewhere better, and well
located
even in regard to Paradise.
My approach to Gort na gCapall from the Residence was most often goatwise: I would lever myself over the back garden wall, hop across a corner of the great crag to the ragged edge of cliffs marking the saints’ boundary, clamber along it stepping around the ends of walls that stopped on the brink, squeeze down a little crevasse where the cliffs loop around the marshy pocket below the village, browse there on its beautifully indiscriminable
subspecies
of Irish marsh orchids, and pop up the scarp again by
steps trodden into it by long-ago water-fetchers, directly into the heart of the village. If M was with me we would take a less
acrobatic
but equally picturesque route (it was linguistically
picturesque
too), down the main road a little and then south by a narrow
róidín
between the houses of Creig na Córach that leads to a favourite spring at the foot of the cliff-line, Tobar an Bhuaile Bhródúil, the well of the proud milking pasture (proud, pleased, or something in between, as in the phrase
chomh
bródúil
le
cat
a
bhfuil
póca
air,
as proud as a cat with a pocket); thence by stiles and grassy zigzag ways through a child’s paradise (in spring) of buttercups and lambs and rabbits, called An Chrangaire,
cran
gaire
being old-Aran for
cnagaire,
a sixteen-acre holding; finally joining the Gort na gCapall road where it begins its gentle climb by Aill an Tine Chnáimh, the cliff of the bone-fire (the Irish
preserves
the etymology lost in English), site of the village bonfire on midsummer’s eve. Or if M was dressed for (a favourite word of hers)
bothántaíocht,
going from
bothán
(cottage) to
bothán
for gossip and amusement, we would avoid the prickly vegetation one had to push through in the
róidín
by taking our bicycles, purring down the mainroad to the T-junction and pedalling along the quiet side-road between green pastures, riding tall between the low walls, regally regarding the ruminants.
On weekday afternoons Gort na gCapall gave the impression of being discreetly at home to itself. With the children at school and the menfolk on the sea, in the fields or pony-trapping tourists to and from Dún Aonghasa, the women would have the place to themselves. Dogs drowsed on the garden walls, hens scratched under the veronica bushes. Turning left, the road passes Bridgie Fitzpatrick’s and Maggie Conneely’s, and then, increasingly stony and grassy, becomes Bóthar na gCrag. Bridgie, her capacious motherly face, her alert, amused, eyes, became my reference-point when I was first mapping that quarter; she stayed me with
sandwiches
, and, readier with the pen than her menfolk, noted down place-names for me from their talk:
Near Port Bhéal an Dúin there is Poll Uí Aodáin can’t say if this spelling is correct, its a great cliff for fishing & young fellows go down there to the shore by rope, not a very safe way but they do it. I hope this little helps you in your good work, it is something well worth doing for the Island.
Maggie I used to meet when collecting fishing-history from her husband Gregory, who having lost a leg and a trawler in his early days had come back from that disaster to become the father of the contemporary fleet. I remember how her two daughters throughout their early teens seemed to reflect between them a single handsome and cryptic look intercepted from their mother, as if their faces were hand-glasses held up to each other.
Turning the other way at the entrance to the village, Maeve’s was on the right. A sensible Dublin woman with a good job in Guinness’s, she had fallen in love with the island, married a lively young farmer, had her family quite quickly, inherited a sweet-natured fireside granny for them, and now combined capable
domesticity
with part-time secretarial work for the little factory in Eoghanacht. Beyond her house was Winnie’s cottage; it was
Winnie
who would have chosen to live on in Aran for ever. Her
husband
had been drowned long ago, but then she shared in the winning of the sweepstake with a lady in Cill Mhuirbhigh; she remembers the money being brought in and piled on the table, and the village children calling to lay their hands on the pile for luck. A quietly smiling figure in Winnie’s background when I called (to map her potato-plot for a planning application for a septic tank, and to drink a glass of whiskey in return) was her sister, who apart from going to Mass lived a retired and sheltered life. Finally the boreen, bordered with mauve-blossomed
common
mallows and tall yellow mulleins, turns up west between Winnie’s cottage and another I didn’t know so well, and ambles off towards the storm-beach and the rock-torn maelstrom behind it, as if the sea were just a crotchety old neighbour who should be called in on now and again.