by Tim Robinson
ISBN: 9781590172773
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This bare, soluble limestone is a uniquely tender and memorious ground. Every shower sends rivulets wandering across its surface, deepening the ways of their predecessors and gradually engraving their initial caprices as law into the stone. This recording of the weather of the ages also revivifies much more ancient fossils, which are precisely etched by the rain’s delicate acids, so that now when a rising or setting sun shadows them forth, prehistory is as urgent underfoot as last night’s graffiti in city streets. And every hairline fracture the rock has sustained throughout its geological troubles is eventually found out by the rain and dissolved into a noticeable cleft, so that the surface is divided up in a fashion that has been decisive for the development of field boundaries and paths, which have been obliged to follow and so reinscribe like visible scars the old invisible wounds. Further, this land has provided its inhabitants the Neolithic tomb-builders, the Celtic cashelor, the monastic architect, the fence-making grazier of all ages—with one material only, stone, which may fall, but still endures. To this retentive nature of the terrain itself must be added the conservative effect of its situation just beyond the farthest reach of Europe, wrapped in a turn or two of ocean. The material destructiveness of modern life is only now beginning to impinge on Aran, and until very recently the sole custodian of this land of total recall has been a folk-mind of matching tenacity, focused by the limitations of island life and with the powers of memory of an ancient oral culture.
p. 9
These rugged boulders are quite dif. ferent from the smooth slabs of limestone lying everywhere; they were carried here by ice, which ground them into rough ovoids before dropping them as the glaciers melted back at the end of the last Ice Age thousands of years ago. These glaciers had radiated out from an ice-cap on the mountains of the Joyce Country thirty miles to the north, and most of the “erratics” they brought with them are of Galway’s granite, but the chunks of limestone that are so profusely scattered across the eastern end of the island must have been torn out of the ground somewhere not so far to the north, either on Aran itself or from the floor of what is now the Sound between it and the granite country. They are all individual and characterful objects, which lead one on into strolling from field to field as through the rooms of some weirdly metamorphosed sculpture gallery. Rain has worked into the tilted flanks of the boulders, carving terraces for miniature rock-gardens of wallrue ferns and little herbs with starry blossoms in white or purple: scurvy grass, herb Robert, etcetera. Some boulders have been so deeply eaten by rainwater that they have come apart along their parallel fracture-planes and now lie in three or four thick slices stacked aslant. One or two have small lean-to pens for goat-kids built against them out of the curious shards of stone the ground crops in this part of the island. The biggest of them all, ten feet tall, is called Mulán Sheáin Bhig, Little Seán’s boulder, after some long-dead toiler in the unpromising plot it overshadows.
The boulder-streak (as the geologists term such an assemblage of glacial erratics, because when plotted on a map it appears as a streak marking the course of the ice that brought the boulders) leads one away from the coast towards the ridge-line, and beyond that down again to near the starting-point of this book. Once engaged in hunting out a way through these tiny, bare, deserted fields, with the curious paths and gaps and stiles that link them into sequences, it is difficult to turn back. Field follows field with the unending incalculable oddity of the prime numbers in their sequence, that ultimate mystery of arithmetic. But the quest for Aran’s interior mysteries is reserved for the sequel to this book, and I must return from this incursion, to the cliffs of the south.
p. 38
And the setting of this rough gem? Correspondingly vast, almost immeasurable, leaving the walker of the clifftops a microscopical figure assailed by immensities that pry at cracks in the self: the sea’s temper, whatever it may be, unchecked to the horizon, where in the south Mount Brandon in Kerry is a mere shadow seen when rain has cleared the air, and there is nothing at all to the west but the sky of the hour; and this sky colossal in all its moods, sometimes raising shield upon shield of tenuous greys against the blinding voids behind it, sometimes opening out into unsoundable rooms opulently furnished with cumulus in white and cream, delicately stratified in various perfections of blue, flawed only by the course of transatlantic flights from Shannon, along which slow silver darts rise one by one far in the south-east, arc silently across the dazzling heights and sink to the western horizon while their murmurous voices are still lagging past the // zenith; I have seen their departures follow on so closely that three or four are glinting in the sky at once and their vapour-trails entwine and merge and are scored into the blue as if the sky itself were weakened, fissured and veined, along an invisible line of predestined fall.
p. 62
From Binn na nIasc one has a view inland for the first time, as the coast descends from here onwards to the low-lying neck of the island; Dún Aonghasa, on the cliff’s edge at the shoulder of the next upland, is seen in profile against the sky, a mile and a half ahead. Three little villages appear, lying apart in this intervening lowland: Gort na gCapall near the southern coast and not far away; Cill Mhuirbhigh far to the north-west near the other coast, and on the horizon directly inland a few of the rooftops of Fearann an Choirce (Oarquarter)-among them that of our own house, which signals to us across grey-green latitudes of crag with the little flag of its darkly vivid cypress, the instant we reach this spot in returning from a walk along the cliffs. We often rest here, on sunny afternoons. At Aill na mBairneach one is about a hundred feet above the sea and on a level with the gannets sailing by just offshore, which seem also to be idling along in enjoyment of the summer skies bright-skinned beauties in long black gloves, out of a Sargent portrait-until one of them suddenly checks in mid-air, half-folds its elegant slim wings, and plunges vertically, avidly, disappears in a plume of spray, and surfaces a few moments later to lumber into the air with a mackerel in its beak.
Not far along the cliff from Binn na nlasc is an extraordinary detached pillar of rock that appears to be frozen in the act of staggering into the sea bearing a little green field on its head. I have the impression that it has leaned farther out from the cliff during the years we have known it, and the Gort na Capall people whose bit of land is being alienated in this way tell me that goats used to jump out onto it, and that the village lads used to put a plank across the gap to fetch birds’ eggs off it. It is called simply An Aill Bhriste, the broken cliff, and its top is a little square garden of sea-pinks, scurvy grass, samphire and sea beet, beyond the reach now of any goat.
p. 74
If as an artist I wanted to find a sculptural form for my intuition of the Aran landscape, I would not think in terms of circles. Aran’s circles of stone, the great inland cashels and lesser ring-forts, the ancient hunchback huts, Long’s evanescent inscriptions, can be read as fearful withdrawals from these bare spaces or as egocentric stances within them, habits of thought born elsewhere and merely sojourning here, not deeply rooted in the specificity of Aran. In other landscapes the rounded might be equated with the natural and the right angle with the human contribution. Here, though, it is as if the ground itself brings forth right angles. Because of the limestone’s natural partings along its vertical fissures and horizontal stratifications, the oblong and the cuboid are the first-fruits of the rock. These are the forms that coerce one’s footsteps in this terrain, and hence have directed the evolution of the chief human stratum of the landscape, the mosaic of fields and the paths that side-step between them. These too are the forms that come to hand in picking up a loose stone to build a wall and so the fieldpatterns rhyme with the patterns of the stones in their walls. On the largest scale the rectilinear skylines and stepped flanks of Aran remember their origins in the nature of the rock.
A block, then, would best embody the essence of Aran’s landforms — or, since I am dealing in abstractions and have undergone the metamorphoses of contemporary art, the absence of a block, a rectangular void to stand for all blocks. And since the sea is the most decisive sculptor among the various erosive agents that disengage Aran’s form from its substance, let this void be filled by water, reversing the relationship of sea and island. Site it on one of the great stages of rock below the cliffs; do it on a prodigious scale, a spectacle rather than a gallery-piece; let the ocean dance in it, and the cliffs above step back in wide balconies to accommodate the thousands who will come to marvel at this kinetic-conceptualist, megalominimalist, unrepeatable and ever-repeated, sublime and absurd show of the Atlantic’s extraction of Aran’s square root!
What I have imagined, exists. An exactly rectangular block over a hundred feet long has somehow been excerpted from the floor of a bay in the cliffs, a few hundred yards west of Port Bhéal an Dúin, and the sea fills the void from below. This is Poll na bPéist, the hole of the worms, or The Worm-Hole as it is called for English-speaking visitors; the word péist, like the English “worm” in its older acceptances, covers everything from sea-monsters to the grubs that pullulate in rotten seaweed, and nobody knows what sort of creeping thing was originally in question here.
p. 82
Now, if the original sense of a placename cannot be retrieved, how does one prevent a placenames-study degenerating into the sterile exercise of preferring old mistakes to new ones? And even if a degree of probability is attainable, is a name’s origin always its most vital factor? A placename (of the questionable sort I am discussing) is perpetually gathering and shedding meanings; it comes down to us a loose bundle which may or may not still contain that kernel, the intitial grain of sense that set it rolling through time. Taken as a cluster of more or less untutored guesses at its origin, the placename (in this wider interpretation) may appear ridiculous-witness the present agglomeration of raven, bream, pilgrim and roast potato. But if read as a mnemonic for a history of the mind’s responses to a mysterious marriage of sound and place, the placename can be a word of power—a password, perhaps, to that “step” foreshadowed in the introduction to this book.
p. 153
Many foam-born amoeba-goddesses of wave-worn polystyrene bring archetypal touches in art colours to the grey of the storm beach. From all over our plastic Babel come greetings in bottles labelled Drink-Me/Drink-Me-Not in effaced print and unknown languages. These and innumerable other fragmentary and ambiguous emblems, washed up here to be pounded to bits or imbricated whole among the stones, fatten the rock-bank, and shorten the way.
p. 169
The pale shinglebanks of An Gleannachán frame a dark half-oval of shallow and seaweed when the tide is low. Sometimes one sees a man moving slowly to and fro out there, stalking and stooping just like the shore-birds that come in clouds to pick over the seas leavings. Perhaps he is collecting periwinkles for bait before going to some taller shore to fish, but if the season is late spring or summer he may be gathering the edible seaweed called carraigin or “Trish Moss,” which he will spread to dry on the short grass of some field by the shore, and sell to a mainland wholesaler through an agent in Cill Rónáin. Some of it goes abroad; in London, for instance, little cellophane packets of it can be bought in the more expensive stores, in health-food shops and in corner groceries catering to nostalgic Irish exiles. A few packets even come back to the Aran shops and are sold at amazing prices (65p. for two-and-ahalf ounces in 1982, when the pickers were getting £4 a stone for it), and not only to tourists. Next to whiskey it is the Aran peoples most trusted cure for coughs and colds; they simmer a few sprigs of it in milk or water and after straining out the insoluble bits drink the resulting bland and soothing essence of rock-pool. We have occasionally used a thicker brew of it as the basis of a sort of blancmange, which is nutritious and soothing but soon palls, and no doubt it has other unexplored potentials, but so far the picking and drying of it has afforded us more health and pleasure than the eating.
p. 171
The waning and extinction of the old shore-life was sufficiently prolonged into this century to be briefly illuminated-old moon in the arms of the new—by the first brilliant generation of island writers. Máirtín O Direáin has jotted down a note of one of its good moments in a poem called An tEarrach Thiar. (“The Western Spring” will have to do as English for this title, but it could also be the late spring, or even, stretching a grammatical point, a spring of the old days, of the Dublin literary figure’s Aran origins, for the word thiar and its derivatives have two sets of meanings as intimately related as warp and woof: one is connected with “west” and the other with “back,” as relative position in space or time. Further, the frictions of Irish history and geography have given the concept of “the West” such a charge that thiar is almost as potent a word as sean, old, is in Irish. Indeed this whole book, like all possible books on Aran, could be read as a footnote to the full explication of these two simple Irish words. But the following line-by-line translation of O Direáin’s poem does not presume to look into such mysteries.)
p. 176
If squalls break across the island one after another as they often do at that time of year, forcing us to spend time crouched under a wall by the roadside looking at the mare hanging her dripping head, the three journeys take all day, and I learn not only the Irish terms for countless details of horsecraft and seaweed lore, but also a slower mental pulse, which dreams away the distinction between minutes and hours and threatens to stretch my city-cut days into the baggy lunar months and earth-heavy seasons of Aran’s old fields and shores.
p. 186
**All the roads and tracks of this area run to or loiter by the beach. The stony coastline itself seems to holiday here and unwind from its severities. Sunbathers and sandcastle-builders dispel the old equation of the shore with labour and its new one with loneliness, at least for those short and radiant times in which the angle of a gull’s white wing against the unstable Atlantic blue defines high summer in Aran. At such hours even the pulse of the breaking waves, the universal constant of all shores, never quite stilled, becomes a whisper, a merely subliminal reminiscence of storm, of winter.
Winter is defined by a bird here too, a solitary great northern diver that comes with falling temperatures from the far north to haunt the bay, and lives for months out there on the heaving waters, rising and falling in time to the crash of waves on the beach, a dark, secretive thing that keeps its distances and refuses one a view, slipping silently under the surface if one approaches the water’s edge and reappearing after a long interval farther off, half lost in the poor light. One gives up peering, identifying, and wanders along the heavy ever-repeated landfall of the sea. At this season the resistant depths of colour on land, sea and sky slow down the pace of perception to that of contemplation. If a gleam from the loy sun comes across to catch the countless overlapping marks on the sand, then idleness and the absence of humankind can tempt one into the error of thinking; “Signatures of all things I am here to read.” Each fallen wave, for instance, rushes up the strand with a million urgently typing fingers, and then at the moment berween writing and erasing subscribes itself in a negligent cursive across the whole breadch of the page. Signatures and counter-signatures accumulate, confuse, obliterate. Seabirds put down their names in cuneiform, lugworms excrete their humble marks. And then come my boots to add the stamp of authenticity, not of the endless process of the beach which needs no authentification from anybody, but of my witnessing of it.
Is this an image of the work I have dreamed of, that book— wich which the present book has a certain flirtatious but respectful relationship-preliminary to the taking of an all-encompassing stride? A muddled draft of it perhaps, or more usefully a demonstration of its impossibility; for the multitudinous, encyclopaedic inscription of all passing reality upon a yard of ground is ultimately self-effacing. But no; for if the book like the beach lies open to all that befalls it, welcomes whatever heterogeneous material is washed up or blown in, then must begin the magic transubstantiation of all this intractable stuff into the person fit to make the step. A work of many generations, I wonder? Let a few almost frivolous examples of the countless marks that have been impressed temporarily on this particular beach and more lastingly upon myself demonstrate how nearly overwhelming is even my limited and ill-defined project.**
p. 231
The notion of a momentary congruence between the culture one bears and the ground that bears one has shattered against reality into uncountable fragments, the endless variety of steps that are more or less good enough for one or two aspects of the here and now. These splinters might be put together into some more serviceable whole by paying more heed to their cumulative nature, to the step’s repeatability, variability, reversability and expendability. The step, so mobile, so labile, so nimbly coupling place and person, mood and matter, occasion and purpose, begins to emerge as a metaphor of a certain way of living on this earth. It is a momentary proposition put by the individual to the non-individual, an instant of trust which may not be well-founded, a not-quite-infallible catching of oneself in the act of falling. Stateless, the step claims a foot-long nationality every second. Having endlessly variable grounds, it needs no faith. The idea of freedom is associated in dozens of turns of speech with that of the step. To the footloose all boundaries, whether academic or national, are mere administrative impertinences. With this freebooter’s licence there goes every likelihood of superficiality, restlessness, fickleness and transgression— and so, by contraries, goes the possibility of recurrency, of frequentation, of a deep, an ever-deeper, dwelling in and on a place, a sum of whims and fancies totalling a constancy as of stone.
p. 364
Somewhere I have read of a temple built around a footprint of the Buddha, and, looking back, I see that it was a god’s all-comprehending step I had in mind when I set out. But that footprint (is it in Ceylon?) is, I believe, the last, the takeoff point for transcendence, and the next one, which would complete a step, does not exist; whereas in fact the earth and its powers of healing and wounding, of affirming and contradicting, of supporting and tripping you up, can never be finished with. And the idea of brotherhood, even leavened with sisterhood, has only a limited application to the dense thorny thickets of interrelatedness I have been skirting around. When I review the cast I have gathered in this round of Aran of the Saints and Stones—myself the walker, you the reader, they the farmers and fishermen, landlords and bailiffs, rabbits and stoats, gulls, cormorants, dolphins, plants, fossils; the gamut from saint to stone—I realize that the idea of a temple of brotherhood is born out of loneliness, that it soon recoils before the bitterness of sibling politics, and that it subsides at last into cosy tautology. Better to let the obscuring name evaporate. There remains the bare stone, upon which, having completed this circuit of the island, we can now pace to and fro, marginally better informed as to its provenances and properties, its relationships to those other horizons of stone to the north and east, its usefulness as a sea-mark to Mikey going by there in his boat piled high with lobsterpots; this ordinary stone of Aran, of which we can scarcely dream now that its virtues could all be caught together into a moment of vision, having peered a little farther down the bottomless cliff of its reality.
p. 369