by Mark Boyle
Saturday night and The Hill is packed. There are ten local musicians playing, all from around the village of Kylebrack, complemented and supplemented by those in the crowd who, throughout the night, like to offer up a song to a silent, attentive audience, as is the tradition in these parts. The quality of the music, and the singing from the audience, is good, though nothing like that of the greats. I sometimes wonder, however, if our constant exposure to the world’s best has degraded our relationship to our ordinary, local musicians in the same way that exposure to porn stars with fake 34DD breasts and 10 inch penises has degraded and damaged our sexual relationships with those ordinary men and women we call our lovers, our husbands and wives, our girlfriends and boyfriends.
Michael, from down the road, is on the accordion. Last week Kirsty and I spent the morning catching two horses that had broken out of a field which was clean out of grass, and the rest of the day trying to figure out who owned them. It turned out they were his. He offers us a few pints for the bother, but we tell him that it was none, and that most of Knockmoyle would be drunk if we bought drinks for every kind act that had been done for us since we moved here.
The owner of the pub, and a few of the locals, ask Kirsty if she’ll do some hula-hooping for the next couple of songs. She’d love to, she says, and before the night is out most people are up dancing too. One of the old boys has a short-lived go with the hula-hoop, for which he gets the cheer of the night.
~
They say that if you feel you don’t have fifteen minutes to meditate each day, then you need to do an hour. I’m sure it would do me no harm at all, but I’ve never been much of a man for sitting cross-legged, focusing on my breath. Instead, I prefer to whittle.
Whittling is a form of practical meditation, which pre-dates the Buddhist and Hindu civilisations. It’s as simple as it gets. To make a tablespoon you take a branch – I prefer green birch, but holly, beech, maple and cherry can work well. Avoid softwoods. Saw it to length, axe it in half, draw out the shape of the spoon you’re aiming for, and start whittling it away with a small carving knife.
Your knife, along with your sense of awareness, needs to be sharp. Drift away in your thoughts, worries or daydreams for one moment and, if you’re lucky, you’ll shave off a sliver of wood that may take you twenty minutes to correct; in the final stages you may not be able to correct it at all. If you’re unlucky, you may shave off a sliver of flesh from your finger that may take a week or two to correct itself. Nothing focuses the mind better than blood, or the thought of showing the woman you love an ugly, impractical spoon.
Sitting by the rocket stove in the fire-hut, tending to a brew, I put the finishing touches to a soup spoon. It’s not perfect, yet every imperfection tells a story of my afternoon, which makes it perfect to me, and me only. When I eat soup from this day forth, that small dent in the bottom will be my Buddha, but I’m content with it. There’s no point being otherwise.
~
When you consider that, in the mid-1900s, the Great Blasket Island became its own literary sub-genre – albeit a now largely forgotten one – it is surprising how little we know about the island’s history. Even its name is a bit of a mystery. The receptionist at the Blasket visitor centre felt the island was long overdue an archaeological dig, to find out more about its ancient past. I’m not convinced that the wildlife that continue to call the island home would agree with such civilised opinions. Personally, I’d prefer to understand the life that lives there now than that which may have lived there thousands of years ago. It’s all too easy to destroy the present while exploring the past or the future. I left the island hoping that a dig would be one of those big expensive jobs that the government, or its private partners, would never get around to doing. In a world of disappearing wildness and wilderness, some things are better left mysterious.
One of my immediate impressions of the place was that, despite being 5 kilometres off the south-west coast of Kerry, the island was once connected physically to the mainland parish of Dunquin, and not just socially connected as it was between the early 1800s and 1953, when the last remaining Islanders were eventually evacuated. I would later learn that geologists had confirmed what their own eyes would have suspected. This compulsion ‘to know’ places which we show no interest in actually getting to know reminds me of E.O. Wilson’s words:
If there is a danger in the human trajectory it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfilment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.
Whoever the first inhabitants were, they left behind stone beehive-shaped huts called clocháns, which would later be used by monks. It was probably these monks, or the Vikings who followed, who built the promontory fort at An Dún, one of the island’s peaks.
I’ve since wondered whether life would have been harder, or easier, for these earlier inhabitants than it was for those who moved there at the start of the Industrial Revolution. On the one hand, they wouldn’t have had the advantage of the seine boats which transformed fishing around 1800; on the other hand, these ancient frontier people wouldn’t have had to compete with the titanic British, French and Spanish trawlers that would quickly and efficiently empty the Blasket Sound of its mackerel, and other fish, to feed their own distant, growing populations. As later generations would come to learn more acutely, in a globalising world, technology offers an advantage only for as long as you are the people with the best technology.
These monks and Vikings would have had the added advantage of not having to give a portion of their lives to paying rents to landlords who, by the eighteenth century, had mostly inherited the land from plundering conquerors. It was because of such land rents, which were hiked up all over Ireland around 1800, that the Islanders fled mainland Ireland to take refuge on this remote island in the first place.
Nowhere, it turned out, was safe from these extortionate rents. The first generation of Islanders in the early nineteenth century were charged a rent of five pounds a cow, the severity of which is emphasised by the fact that their grandchildren would only be asked to pay a fifth of that, and even at that they could barely afford it. Regardless of the amount, what each generation seemed to have in common was a determination to resist paying the rent to the Earl of Cork. Their efforts were notorious.
On one occasion a ship of bailiffs, armed with guns, anchored in the bay and attempted to land on the island and take whatever they could – fish, cattle, whatever money or belongings the Islanders had. According to Tomás Ó Criomhthain in The Islandman, many of the Islanders feared that there wouldn’t be ‘many houses left in this island by evening’. That was until the island’s women gathered their own ammunition – rocks – on the cliff above the landing spot, and waited for the first bailiff to set foot on their shores. ‘Won’t you be better off dead than lying in a ditch, thrown out of your own cabin?’ one woman asked. As the bailiffs attempted to come ashore, wearing dark uniforms and high caps, the women – each of whom had a gun fixed on her – showered them with rocks. One woman was so incensed and convinced they were done for, that she had to be restrained from throwing her baby at them as soon as they were out of rocks. The bailiffs, stunned, retreated back to their ship before making two more attempts to land. But the women – rearmed with stones gathered by the men – held their ranks, and not one stirred. Ó Criomhthain later said that ‘they felt less fear than they inspired’, and so ‘the ship cleared off with all of its crew that day without taking a copper penny with them’.
On another occasion the Dingle police confiscated the Islanders’ fishing boats while they were in town selling their wool, sheep and pigs. Acting on behalf of the Earl of Cork, they demanded the rent for the whole island before they would return their boats, which the fishermen depended upon for their livelihoods. Friends from Dunquin and the surrounding area offered to contribute money towards this demand, but the Islanders refused with
thanks. Instead they decided to leave the boats with the rent collectors and go back to fishing with their naomhóga. The bailiffs later tried to sell the boats, but as not one person would buy them they eventually rotted in a field. ‘The upshot of the whole affair,’ Ó Criomhthain said, ‘was that you wouldn’t find it hard to reckon up all the rent we’ve paid from that day.’
It was out of this tough, uncompromising crop of Islanders that the Blasket literature emerged. To call it an unlikely genre would be understated. Peig Sayers – whose autobiography Peig was required reading on the Irish school curriculum until recently – could neither read nor write; she dictated it to her son, the poet Micheál Ó Guithín. Hers, after all, was an oral culture, while she was one of its most gifted storytellers.
If it hadn’t been for two Englishmen, Robin Flower and George Thomson, who regularly visited the island around the time of the Irish uprising against British rule, two classics of Irish literature – Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s The Islandman and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin’s Twenty Years A-Growing – would probably never have been written. From these spawned a plethora of memoirs by Islanders and their descendants, ‘all drawing the last drop with melancholic longing for the past’ as the Irish lexicographer (and grandson of Ó Criomhthain) Pádraig Ua Maoileoin would go on to say. It is from this collection of accounts that we get to glimpse the daily practicalities and culture of a people whose ways my generation can now scarcely believe.
~
I’m a recovering Manchester United fan. Thankfully not many people round here know that. I grew up playing Gaelic football, and what we called soccer. Like many young boys I dreamt of becoming a professional footballer, and like many young boys I was nowhere near good enough to make it.
Due to my dad’s allegiances, I began supporting Manchester United in 1983, when I was four, a few years before Norman Whiteside would win us the FA Cup and Sir Alex Ferguson’s reign would begin. At the time, the club prided itself on bringing through its young players, often local Manchester lads, and had something mildly resembling a soul.
Long after the club had been bought out by American billionaires and transformed into a team of multi-million-pound prima donnas, I was still supporting them, and still addicted to football. Such was the scale of the addiction that one of the hardest thoughts I had when I was contemplating living without complex technology was the fact that I would no longer be able to watch Match of the Day or, considering I don’t live anywhere near Manchester, ever see my team play again. To anyone who has never supported a football team, that must seem like a First World problem, and of course it is. But to anyone who has passionately followed a club from childhood, it can feel like the loss of a close friend. Now I suspect that supporting a corporate football team is a sort of toxic substitute for our basic primal need to belong to a tribe who are all bound by the same common purpose. But when one player you roared on one season signs for a rival club the next, for €90 million, the joke starts to wear thin.
Even after five months away from football, I know it’s May, and that means crunch time. Excitement. Tension. Passion. Roaring. Shouting. Swearing. Cycling home from the lake one day, I notice a game on a big screen television glaring out of a pub window. I stop, stare in for a moment, and am surprised to feel absolutely nothing.
~
While I’m out in the woods climbing over an obstacle course of rotting logs and deep ditches, avoiding widow-makers, cross-cutting logs and sweating hard, Kirsty is in the cabin making dinner: a wild salad mix along with the pike and rudd I caught the night before. Are we performing traditional roles – man on wood, woman on food? It would seem so, but not consciously. We’re both free to do whatever work we want, but it’s just that most of the time I prefer wooding and she prefers cooking.
~
I’ve a thousand and one things going on in my head that I need to attend to, and they are all entirely different. Weed the vegetable garden. Water the horses. Empty the composting toilet. Mound up the spuds. Fix the guttering on the hostel. Plant out more salads. Water the brassicas. Sweep out the tool shed. Manure the pear and plum trees. Write an article about doing things like emptying composting toilets and mounding up spuds. Make a hot tub.
As I walk up the bóithrín to quickly water the horses, I see Tommy trundling along in the opposite direction. He stops to talk while he looks in at his field of cows. I can sense my old city mind making a reappearance. It says I don’t have time to chat, I’m a very busy man. I recognise it, let it run its course, and do my best to be there in both body and mind. He tells me a bit about how a bull, when he’s in a field to impregnate the cows, will take a fancy to a certain cow and, for a day or two, sit beside her. They would almost be staring into one another’s eyes, he says. But as soon as the bull has ‘done the deed’ and spread his seed, all his interest is lost and his roving eye is caught wandering to another cow whom he hasn’t yet impregnated, and he sits down beside her. That reminds me of someone, I tell him.
After he’s given me sound advice on the horses, I continue up the road and bump into my neighbour JP, who is in fine form as usual. JP is in his late sixties, but you wouldn’t know it. He has that kind of bubbly, youthful enthusiasm that’s becoming rare even among young people. His physique, like that of my seventy-three-year-old father, belies the idea that to age is to become unfit, and he is blessed with one of those bright, cheeky faces it would be near impossible to fall out with. Whatever he is taking, I want some of it. He told me one day it was Viagra. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not as he took off down the bóithrín, laughing his head off.
The full composting toilet momentarily pops into my mind. JP tells me that he has just got back from the Aran Islands, where he went out to visit a house he built there forty years ago, to see if the couple he built it for were still there. They were. He didn’t know if they would even remember him, but they recognised him instantly, despite the years, and they spent the whole afternoon together. JP’s off to a job himself, so we say our see-you-laters and I continue up the bóithrín to the horses.
With the horses finally watered, I meet Francie – whose field they are in – on my way back down. He asks me if we can move the horses to another field of his, as he is about to till the one they are currently grazing. No bother, I say. I tell him to give me a shout when he needs a hand with his vegetable garden. His foot has got worse, he says, ‘But sure isn’t it great I’m still alive.’ He’s eighty-four. On that note, he walks off towards his house, where he has his own horses to water.
Back at the cabin I add ‘move horses’ and ‘collect manure’ – which we’ll use in the garden and orchard next year – to the jobs list. I rub out ‘write article’.
~
When I first began to live without all of the distractions of modern life six months ago, I was curious to find out whether or not my overactive mind would get bored or if time would pass slower and, if it did, whether that was something I enjoyed, or something I would struggle with.
My experience has been a strange one. While the days feel more relaxed, unhurried, unstressed, the year itself feels like it is cycling through the seasons as quickly as ever. I suppose we all fill our moments with one thing or another, often forgetting to reflect on the most important question confronting us: what best to do with our precious time here?
Sometimes I feel like I’ll be an old man before I solve that existential puzzle. At thirty-eight, the prospect of old age has slowly started to feel more real, like it’s not just something that happens to other people. Then I look at my own mother and father, and remember that how old you are has very little to do with how many revolutions you have made around the sun, and at least as much to do with what you do with your moments in orbit.
With the exception of the odd cold day, it’s much too warm to use the cabin’s range for cooking and heating water. On busy days like today we have moments where we miss the ease of the gas cooker, turning a dial, hitting a button, making a quick cup of tea. It was som
ething I took for granted for the first twenty-eight years of my life, with my generation being one of the first in the history of this island to have known no different. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I don’t miss the discomfort of having to work jobs I don’t enjoy to pay for gas cookers, dials, buttons and switches. Remembering is the difficult thing.
Because our rocket stove has only one hob, our outdoor meals have got to be simple. That’s fine by us, as we both prefer simple food. Each of my previous ten dinners have consisted of raw salad along with boiled potatoes, cooked in the bottom pot, the steam of which cooks the vegetables on top. Tonight it’s the same, with the addition of a pike caught this morning.
People in these parts eat dinner at different times of the day – Packie at two o’clock, Tommy at three o’clock, while most of my generation has it any time after six-thirty. We try to eat dinner early in the evening, as it improves sleep, but some days don’t always work out like that.
As the red-hot embers in the rocket stove cool down, the still evening air is disrupted by the nasal screams of a chainsaw far off in the distance. We sit on a couple of logs eating peas, Swiss chard, mustard lettuce, runner beans, beetroot, fennel and rocket, along with the spuds and pike. I like eating each on their own, tasting their unique, individual flavours. Eventually the chainsaw stops and peace is restored, and we sit outside until the moon is high in the sky.