Hollow Earth

by John Kinsella

  34.

  The internet and its attendant devices were of unending if ironic amusement and bemusement to them. Most fascinating was the Wikipedia entry ‘Hollow Earth’. Is this where you got your name for us, Manfred? No, no, he laughed. Look at this map, Ari, it’s hilarious! And look at these concentric circles! They roared with laughter, with Roaring Water Bay behind them. Problem is, said Ari, combined, they sort of approach a frightening truth, seen from up here, don’t you think? No, surely not. Then he showed them the phantom island and they paled to green. They were always slightly green, which had brought quips from the woman in the supermarket, who said, Been eating the nettles, dearies? You’re surely a shade of green. The woman didn’t laugh and they realised she wasn’t being humorous, as she had been when they first entered the shop and she was joking about flatulence. I do my fair share and keep the anemometer circling! she’d said. And Manfred said as they went out, You are a tinge green enough for them to notice, but don’t worry, the sun will burn it off. And then he felt guilty and said, Sorry … and then he told them of the famine pits and the depression went deeper. There is nothing to laugh about on the surface, they thought. It is a world written with disturbance. Their affect was out; they couldn’t know how to behave. They wanted to know how intimations of Hollow Earth had reached the surface – why it had to exist in the imaginations of surface dwellers [Ah, those missionaries who went ‘up’ and never returned.] Why surface dwellers had starved each other to death. They continue to do so across the surface of the globe, Manfred admitted. It’s lousy with cruelty.

  You have been selective in telling your stories, Manfred. You have lured us here with promises of insights that would help other Hollow Earthers on our return. But you can belong here, said Manfred – through you, humanity can realise it does not hold exclusive rights over existence. So you’re using us? No, sorry … people can never know where you come from. The learning has to start in Hollow Earth and gradually emanate out. It makes little sense to us, Manfred, but I think I also speak for Ari in saying we feel compelled to follow you in this expedition. We want to take nothing back but our learning, nothing back home from this realm of lies and the sun.

  35.

  Utopian fantasies made our mission more achievable – the notion that we are bad and they good engendered a lust for intrusion against the grain. Like the ecologists who in the time of the catastrophic climate change flew around the world studying the evil, and flew around the world speaking of the evil, plus went to conferences and allowed themselves family holidays in remaining beauty spots, who fed our purpose as effectively as any mining redneck they belittled for denying what was happening around them. Those who believed it was happening, as it was, appeased their consciences by trying to bring light to the unconverted. THUS SPAKE THE UNDERWORLDERS, relishing the slippage between Robber Baron and activists, the confusion of roles when in the end the Robber Baron and his crews would reap the profits. The irony fed the boom – the more the collapse was obvious, the more the mining technologists were able to exploit the remaining resources to bring the promise of a secure future against the odds. The world was signed off on, for good. And for the idealists remaining, intimations of Hollow Earth’s purity compelled them to search it out, to plunge where they once had flown, to act as a vanguard in opening the underworld for their missionary zeal, their purpose of saving, as opposed to the Underworlders mission of destruction. Could they see a difference in consequences of their intrusions? Were the Hollow Earthers real beyond being mirrors to their own salvation? Concentric circles, the echoes of Narcissus’s reflection breaking up. You’ve got to love that prefix ‘eco’! The house that God knows who built!

  36.

  We will walk to Mizen Head. Watch out for the machines on the road. Cars. Trucks. Tractors. There is little space when walls are close, have to be wary. Cows. Old red sandstone. Bog. Fields. Cow shit. Plethora of experience. A colonial template aches across the hedgerows. Time to move on. Look, said Ari, that cow is out of the field and trying to get off the road, trying to climb a wall it can’t climb. We must help it. It serves the plates, it serves the language, it serves the gossip, it serves the tourists, it serves the economy, it serves the bull, it tries to serve itself. We must help it go where it needs to go. It returns to the zone of death, Ari.

  37.

  Barleycove – where bales of cocaine washed up on the beach formed by a great quake off the coast of Portugal. Reshaped. And not far from here Marconi signalling a ship. And not far the last sight of Ireland before heading across the depths where lost atomic weapons nestled close to the roof of Hollow Earth. Eager to facilitate the opening, the pouring of the Atlantic into the world below. I have a friend, a boy I briefly went to school with in Schull, said Manfred, who had made a documentary about that cocaine bust. I would like to see the pods being harvested, said Ari. That’s on another continent, Ari. We will go there if our search suggests a need. One day. Soon, said Ari, who loved the high.

  38.

  We are bereft of devices, said Manfred. I must acquire a phone so you can connect with this world. We need to get to Bantry. I will ask the bookshop owner, another old schoolfriend, if he will drive us there. I am sure it will happen. I will catch the bus to Cork City and hire the car again. The order of things. We need to plan more – we are stumbling from day to day, walking in the soft rain, the mists. We are never warm, we are always damp. I speak like this because I am recalling William R. Bradshaw’s The Goddess of Atvatabar, which as soon as we have a phone you can enjoy, speaking and reading English and all other surface languages as you do! I know you’re sick of hearing me recite from that and Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and I know I transcribed large tracts from memory for you to entertain yourselves with down in Hollow Earth, but soon you will encounter the texts extant! We will wear witch hats and dress up in Halloween costumes and toy with the veneer between worlds. The new imperialism? Manfred explained nothing and mocked everything. The coincidences of existence were wonderful to him. He did not feel compelled to explain the leaps in the narrative of their encounter with the surface, any more than Zest and Ari had explained the disjunctions of his encounters in Hollow Earth. Then he said, But we will need wheels – I’m sick of cadging lifts and catching buses. Then I can drive you around to see the sights. I have to get to the bank as well. My credit card still works, but my other accounts have seized up – so long inactive. Mind you, we could get that done in Bantry or Skibbereen. I’ve still got some of my mother’s inheritance money left. We’ll manage for a few months without working. You see, without such explanations we can’t progress forward, and ultimately without them we can’t get back to Hollow Earth. Up here, there is no story without moolah, dosh, cash, money. The leader of the expedition remains ever mindful of mountains of gold to be discovered and plundered. Disgusting, ain’t it? Zest and Ari rolled on the bed and pleasured themselves. We feel so lightweight here, they said. Gravity is such a drag. Well, said Manfred, according to Bradshaw, Hollow Earth being attracting gravity-wise from both sides of the shell makes you ‘light as a feather’ and you can bounce around to your heart’s content. And there’s a red sun that never gives night that hovers some three and a half thousand miles or so overhead. Life in the round. Life between gravities. So what do you think of that?! Zest and Ari were disturbed by his odd way of speaking. Is he a machine? their eyes asked each other. He is filling in the gaps as he goes, he is making the progress of our souls function in his reality. And as if on cue, Manfred recited a favourite bit from Bradshaw: ‘‘The whole thing,’ said Flathootly, ‘is as clear as mud. I’m glad to know, sorr, I haven’t lost me entire constitution at all evints, an’ if I can only carry home what weight I’ve got lift I’ll make a fortune in a dime museum.’’ And then Manfred’s eyes began rolling and he frothed, All hail to Plutusia! Glorious interior world where such exploitations await the surfacedwelling capitalists, where they can forget about land rights and refugees, where all inhabitants are the other. U
s and them!

  39.

  We thought what a cry of joy would electrify both planets when through our instrumentality they first knew of each other’s existence. We alone possessed the tremendous secret! Then, what possibilities of commerce! What keen and glorious revelations of art! What unfolding of the secrets of nature each world would find in the other! What inventions rival nations would discover in either world, and here for the outer world what possible mountains of gold, what quarries of jewels! What means of empire and joy and love! But such thoughts were too vast for wearied souls. We were stunned by such conceptions, and, yielding to nature, sank into a dreamless sleep.2

  38.

  What is that language, Manfred? That’s Irish – strange that you can’t understand it when English, French, German, Italian and Chinese present no problems. Nor any problems for my understanding your speech. I’ve just taken it for granted we could speak anywhere with anyone. But clearly not Irish. Hmmm, I recall this passage from Bradshaw – maybe Irish is one step too far: Again the stranger smote his breast, exclaiming: ‘Plothoy, wayleal ar Atvatabar.’

  ‘Well, of all the lingoes I iver heard,’ said Flathootly, ‘this is the worst case yet. It bates Irish, which is the toughest langwidge to larn undher the sun. What langwidge do you call that, sorr?’3

  40.

  Yes, as all Romans must have been white according to the critics of Professor Mary Beard, so too we have English as the core from which, through time and space, meaning emanates. All languages, you say, are transpositions of the colonial language. I will teach you of hybridity, I will teach you of transposition. It all templates into place – no excuse for speaking jibber jabber. This colonial oomph is to be validated by the evidence of Bradshaw again. Note: ‘It seems to me to be a miraculous transposition of the English language …’:

  Professor Goldrock, besides being a naturalist, was an adept in language. He stated that our captive appeared to be either a soldier or courier or coastguard of his country, which was evidently indicated by the last word, Atvatabar. ‘Let us take for granted,’ said he, ‘that “Plothoy” is his name and “Atvatabar” his country. We have left the two words “wayleal ar.” Now the pronunciation and grouping of the letters leads me to think that the words resemble the English language more nearly than any other tongue. The word “wayleal” has the same number of letters as “soldier” and “courier,” and I note that the fourth and last letters are identical in both “courier” and “wayleal.” On the supposition that both words are identical we might compare them thus:

  c is w

  o “ a

  u “ y

  r “ l

  i “ e

  e “ i or a

  r “ 1

  The word “waylei”’ or “wayleal” means to us leal or strong – by the way, a very good name for a soldier.’ At this moment our mysterious friend yelled out: ‘Plothoy, wayleal ar Atvatabar, em Bilbimtesirol!’4

  So, you see, there is no language problem, ever, when the imperialist urge overwhelms us. All is made clear. Except for Irish, which my distant relatives gave up to approximate being English in the colonies, in the colonies … another story, but we’ll get back to it, told already in so many different ways.

  41.

  Collecting hail from buffalo grass at the age of nine, Manfred learned that the moment is eternity if you wish it so. He knew the hail would become water – no being disappointed or bemused by the melting. What mattered was that he collected it and it lasted a moment, congealing into a lump – a crystal ball, an oracle. His superstitions were practical, and he crossed knives to see if a fight would eventuate, though he didn’t want or like fights to happen. He decided he needed just enough science, and no more. He wished, really, to become a mountain climber, all the more because he lived on a coastal plain with a scarp which only rose a few hundred metres and even then at a reasonably gradual rate. A bit of rock climbing around brooks in the hills, but no mountains to speak of. He considered mountain climbing as an extension of walking under a ladder, an extension ladder. Fury was possible beneath, on top, falling. He said to his mother, The proposition of circles in a sun rising over K2. His mother asked him how many suns there were. He said, I cannot tell the time properly on a hand clock, Mum. That doesn’t matter, said his mum. Those clocks lie. The aliens made those clocks – their gift of certainty. Time is anomalous. She drew him a different sort of clock, a clock driven by melting hail, not a spring.

  42.

  By principal of transposition, Zest was a firebug of a ‘minor sort’. The furze fires excited her. She said, As a child I would have lit them without a second thought. Received pronunciation. The textures of burn. And ash. We too have the marks on our foreheads, she told the priest, but under her breath as his robes flapped in the wind … like … like … she was making similes apropos already … gulls. I burnt my fingers touching what I shouldn’t touch, she said. You are an arsonist, said the teacher of the place without religion. I set fire to my own hopes, she said. But Ari was a quencher, and she doused my ardour, though she liked to think of herself as a go-getter. You’ve got to remember, Manfred, we don’t have ‘experiences’, per se … All is what you call a dynamic equivalence. You forgot so easily so easily our ways our ways so easily, now you’re back in your ways, the where you come from, the effort fading. We fit your shape? We transpose to English? The polar swill through the hole. Interior sun. Bloody red waste?

  43.

  A dialectics of family, that’s what, said Manfred to the bookshop proprietor. You have a wife and five children, and your mother’s father lives with you, too, and you have three dogs. You made your family fast – we’re the same age. My wife had triplets, his friend replied. Yes, and wonderful they are. And I have Ari and Zest. They are my family now. I had another family once, but they disowned me after my mother passed. Why? Is that rhetorical, or do you seriously want the goss? The answers are to be found in gleaning the walls of fiction you have here. You’d never censor a novel – a work of art – so why pry into my past? It would only serve the censorship board that is the town. You remember my mother? She was a strange lady, said his friend. My mother never wanted to be understood after her death, she wanted to be heard while she was alive. She was onto something. Are you saying this? asked Manfred, or did I just say it? She always said, There’s more to Ireland than booze, Manfred.

  44.

  A train once ran through Ballydehob, across the estuarial river mouth, over the narrow bridge, over the clusters of mute swans with their secrets they could share but choose not to – good self-protection. To climb away up into the low, boggy mountains, enveloped by clouds. Not the train though, it never went that way, rather taking the coast. Unprofitable, like the waves of English hippies that arrived late sixties early seventies, an imploding recolonising. But heading towards Schull past the rubbish tip hacked into the bog, snippet of protected Derreennatra Bog urging slender cottongrass to speak out against the toxins. Manfred wandered the hills and rocky places. He found standing stones on their sides, he sought out their roots, the reaching down, the transference of sunlight into the depths. Subterranean lives. The passage through when the sun was perfectly positioned.

  45.

  We feel we will be flung outwards, looking at the night sky, said Zest. Those are suns and planets like earth? Mainly stars, Zest, and there’s an infinite number in terms of the kind of numbers we can comprehend. Meaning there’s a finite number, said Ari. Yes, said Manfred, feeling his face flush and his toes wriggle against the constraints of new shoes bought in the village shop, which didn’t have a range of deck shoes extending to his size thirteen – he was squeezing into equivalent twelves. Always equivalents. So many different scales. On Hollow Earth he was, in equivalent terms, a size Z.

  46.

  Why are they – you – so stuck on chronology, Manfred? Because when they destroy a forest, or attack a city or drive a car into a crowd, it affects the future present. Yes, and as you know we don’t deny t
he movement of time, but a belief in the absolute nature of cause and effect impels such destructive acts. Why don’t they, Ari chipped in, believe that consequences pre-exist the crime? Why do they always have to be going somewhere, to be acquiring? Knowledge is always there, and pre-exists and post-exists. It’s just access, and openness – receptivity. Because, said Manfred, surface dwellers see shooting stars and know entire histories have died long before they see them die, and it impels them to force things along. Crisis as epiphany. Well, said Zest, I refuse to participate. Yesterday we saw an island full of birds and flowering hedges, and now we look across the harbour, out to the island, and it is burning all over. Now we hear those fires are out of control. Are we in your ‘summer’ now? You said it wasn’t legal. You make rules you don’t live by?

  47.

  Ari and Zest felt compelled to use the ‘accessible’ toilets when out in public. As an expression of solidarity and resistance. Manfred told them about satire, God, and keeping a journal. He said, Up here, science and existence are at odds.

  48.

  They are pacifists, Manfred told the farmer visiting Schull from Australia as he eyed off Ari and Zest, rubbing his crotch in an aggressive manner. Well, I’m not, mate, he said. I have guns at home, but I keep them in a steel cabinet. Furthermore, I am a knight of faith. I am a patriot, too.