Stones of Aran (67 page)

What Roderic O’Flaherty writes as O’Brasil is more
correctly
Hy Brazil or Hy Breasail,
hy
being from the old Norse
ey,
island, and
breasail
an
Irish word for reddish substances such as raddle, rouge and even blood, sharing an obscure etymology with “brazil wood,” the red dye-wood from which Brazil was named. “Beg-Ara” is now Ára Beag or Árainn Bheag, Little Aran, in local tradition. From fourteenth-century Catalan maps down to a chart of 1865, Hy Breasail drifts about off the west coast of Ireland like flotsam from the wreck of Atlantis. According to a Dutch map of O’Flaherty’s time it was at the Porcupine Bank, some hundred miles west of Aran, but locally it was thought to be nearer than that, as his account shows:

This story still exists in the oral realm, and surfaces in print now and again. In 1839 O’Donovan recorded a version with an additional detail that rounds out its sense. Lee, as he calls its hero, was among the crew of a fishing boat; they landed on an island they did not know, and were turned off it by a man who told them it was enchanted. As they were going away the islander gave Lee a book, with directions not to look into it for seven years. He complied, and having read the book seven years later, was able to practise surgery and medicine. The book, O’Donovan was told, had been passed down through Lee’s descendents but had very recently been sold to a Dublin bookseller.

In fact this “Book of O’Brasil” is a reality, and soon found its way into the library of the Royal Irish Academy. It is a
fifteenth-century
medical manuscript in Irish and Latin, with lists of diseases, symptoms, cures, etc., arranged in columns under such headings as
Prognostics,
Causa,
Signum
and
Evacuatio.
The Lees were hereditary physicians to the O’Flahertys in olden times, and Roderic O’Flaherty’s editor, Hardiman, conjectures that the truth of the matter is that Lee, having lost his patrimony in the Cromwellian confiscations, dusted off his ancestors’ old book, invented his O’Brasil adventure to advertise himself, and set up as a quack.

No such cynicism has been allowed to impede the
development
of the tale in its birthplace. In 1938 a collector for the Irish Folklore Commission took down an elaborate version of it from a well-known story-teller living near Carna. It begins with a
customary
rigmarole:

Then we are told exactly where Lee lived, in Letterdeskert just west of Carna, and where he tied up his boat in nearby
Cornarone
. One day when he was sailing to Galway, the boat touched bottom in a place where he had never heard talk of there being a rock; he looked over the side and saw heather growing, but when he touched this land with the croisín he had for gathering seaweed, it vanished. Soon afterwards he was menaced by three huge waves, each of which he quelled by throwing a sod of turf at it. Then came an even bigger wave. He pulled out his pocketknife, opened it, and flung it at the wave; the sea fell calm again, and he completed his voyage.

A good while later, Lee was cutting heather for cattle-bedding on the hillside above his home, when he felt sleepy and faint, and was carried off through the air. He found himself in the house of an old man, the king of Little Aran. The old man took him upstairs and showed him the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, lying in bed, moaning and complaining about the knife plunged into her right breast. Lee was filled with remorse when he saw that it was his own knife; he pulled it out, and she rose up as well as she had ever been. “Now,” said the old man, “you had better marry this woman and stay here with us.” But Lee
explained
that, being an only son, he had to stay at home until his sisters were settled. So they rewarded him with a book instead, which if he did not open it for seven years would make him the best doctor under the sun. Then he was magically returned to the
hillside, walked down home, threw the basket of heather into the cowhouse, and put the book away.

For three years he resisted all suggestions that he open the book, but then a dear cousin of his fell ill, and he was persuaded to look out a cure for him. He found the remedy, but only three years’ share of the knowledge in the book was readable; the rest of the pages had melted and turned as black as soot. However, that was enough to make him the best doctor in Ireland. Doctor Lee finally left Letterdeskert and travelled before him, curing both lowly and noble. He never returned, and it is supposed that he must have gone off to live with the beautiful woman of Little Aran.

According to Aran islanders I have talked to, tradition holds that Árainn Bheag appears (or “dries,” like a shoal when the tide is very low) every seven years. Some Inis Meáin people, I am told, have seen the clothes laid out in the sun on its bleaching-green. If you could row out to it without taking your eyes
off it, not even to blink, or if you could throw a spark of fire onto it, it would be yours. Alternatively, as the tales of it imply, it comes to the one who accepts its invitation graciously—and if Little Aran has fallen into the hands of a Connemara man, the Araners have only their own diffidence to blame. A currach crew from Iaráirne landed on it once, and were approached three times by a red-haired beauty who said each time, “Am I not a fine woman?” The third time, one of the men, Tadhg Ó Neachtáin, was bold enough to reply, “Arragh, how would we know that—fine or not fine?,” whereupon she flung a handful of mud between his eyes, and he came home blind. A similar story was told to Lady Gregory in 1898 by a man from Inis Meáin:

While I have not met any islander who claims to have seen Árainn Bheag, never mind landed on it, I have talked to one who has dreamed of seeing it, Dara Ó Conaola (but Dara is a writer, and so an unreliable dreamer). In his dream he was on the shore when it appeared, and he was glad that his brother came up
behind
him and saw it too, for otherwise nobody would have
believed
him. It was an island of two hills, with a tower at either end, and, he told me, it filled up that awful space out to the
south-west
, giving him a feeling of security.

But that was only a dream, and the dream of a mirage at that. In reality Pangaea is broken, and all the mystic bits and pieces circulating in the slow vortices of Panthallassa—Atlantis, the Land of Youth, Maol Dúin’s islands—have foundered, dragging down their rainbows. Now and again, perhaps once in seven years, some “illusion of airy clouds” tricks us back into that sense of security. The deep truths of myth act on me less than their deep falsities; recognitions of the latter are the cruel blades that facet the world like living crystal. That one’s dwelling-place in the world can be possessed as by patriarchal marriage, that there is somewhere a book containing what one needs to know, that the wound can be cured by plucking out the knife—these are some of the illusions proposed by the Lesser Aran.

Supposing, though, that such comforting generalities were
acceptable,
what more particularly would I require from an
otherwordly
Aran? Cliffs against which the waves forever lift their
white hands, not in despair, not in joy. Paths lined with flowers that sing their identifications like birds, leading through an
infinity
of fields, in each of which is an old man remembering its name. A hermit’s history nourished on the lashings and lavings of the sea. A Residence in a sunny corner between east and west … But it seems I have already been expelled, ferried out hoodwink’d and left back on the shores of the actual, for I am merely
redescribing
the Aran I have written up. And of that, the Greater Aran, all I demand now is some certification of its existence.

More accurately, I need to persuade myself that I am part of the same continuum of reality as Aran. My doubts do not arise in relation to its people, with whom I have the normal range of
co-existences
and whose loves and quarrels, committee-meetings and savage solitarinesses are as bone-familiar to me as those of any of my (human) race. It is true, on the other hand, that the
transcendent
perspectives of Aran sometimes give casual gestures the
distancing
charisma of blessing or prophecy. Once I was sitting on one of the western cliff-tops, half my sphere of vision dazzled by the sun-battered waves, when I saw a lobster-boat, that looked the size of a tea-chest, working in towards the base of the cliff three hundred feet below. One of the argonauts looked up, saw me, and waved; it was Mikey from Cill Mhuirbhigh. This Mikey was later to be drowned, and a communication from him after that event would not have been more appalling than that cheerful greeting from the unworld gaping at my feet. But if Mikey, an
acquaintance
of every day, is part of this sea-contested land, then so am I. The real difficulty arises when it is untenanted except by myself. I walk along the cliffs, the sequence of lofty headlands behind me when I glance back at them already looking as remote as
archaeological
eras—Iron Age, Bronze Age, Stone Age—and fading into haze. If the promontory under my feet is the present, then those ahead are the nameless and unimaginable divisions of future time, the to-become-historical and the post-historical. I can walk around the bay from this peninsula to the next, bringing my sense of reality with me like the circle of visibility that accompanies one
through a mist, but I cannot catch them all together into my presence. The foam that flashes and leaps in the sunlight below makes me think of Keatsean perilous seas; but the word that tolls me back to my sole self here is not “forlorn,” but “casements.” Since I am not here just in fancy but in reality, why is it so
difficult
to abolish this window, to be outside, present, in this land which is not a fairyland, forlorn or otherwise, but a segment of my home-planet, a walkable extension of the ground I stand on at this moment? I suspect that my obsessive interest in the minutest particulars of Aran is a displacement-activity, a postponement of the unbuilding, or at least the de-charming, of those casements.

The either/or is this: to be simply present and not to know and remember it, or to be reflectively aware, which implies the
mediation
of imagery, of mirroring—and reflection multiplies mirrors as fast as mirrors multiply reflections. Writing is my way out of this labyrinth. But I am no abstract, deep-sea, philosopher; if I raise up a metaphor as a sail to catch the winds of thought, I am soon overturned by shoals, or fly to the horizon and lie becalmed there. Therefore I choose this Aran-building method, the slow deposition of facts and observations, coalescing and fusing under their own weight into tablets of stone; if these bear writing, it is thanks to certain alchemical fixatives concocted during those
furiously
sleeping afternoons in my little room in the Residence.

A writing (an utterance which has almost nothing in common with a true act of speech, as opposed to the glib self-quotation writers are prone to), may incorporate spontaneities, but it is not the work of a moment and does not issue from a single mental state; like the step, writing down a sentence holds open the
possibility
of returning, changed, to that point, to approaching it from the west rather than the east. Since rewriting is the essence of the sort of writing I am writing about, it might seem that the only exit from the endless walk is to leap over the cliff and leave it unfinished. In fact only the careful dispersal of its end
throughout
the whole book will render unnecessary a miracle of closure in the final sentence.