A few days after I threw the stone at the magpie and hit the postman, he came again, this time to the studio, and caught me reverently placing a jelly baby sweet on top of the stones.
‘What’s all this about?’ the postman wondered.
‘I like to feed the birds,’ I said, not wanting to share with him the real intent of my ritual in case he’d be frightened away and I’d never get any more letters.
‘Didn’t know they liked sweets,’ he said suspiciously.
‘Oh, yes,’ I assured him, ‘some of them are mad for the jelly babies.’
But these rituals, like everything else in the ornate world of Buddhist practice, were, as far as I was concerned, merely a method of becoming more conscious of the disturbing emotions that drew me into depression. By doing this yoga of conscious activity, I tried to protect myself from ever becoming completely possessed by them.
Not that the person who gave me the stones shared any of these fanciful notions. She just presented them for my birthday a month after my mother died because she found them on the beach and thought them to be pretty and eloquent and I was delighted with her generous gift. That was back in August 2012. They were oval and they held fossils on their surface, and they could be arranged in stacks. The smaller stones sat on top of the larger ones and they made two small monuments. But to assemble them outside the door of my new studio like a shrine was my own idea.
I used to sit by the fire and stare at them through the window, and I remember one day in September falling asleep so that when my beloved arrived, she laughed.
‘Well, just look at the old man dozing by the fire,’ she said.
I said, ‘I’m lucky to have a fire, considering the price of coal and the carbon tax, and the number of windmills all around me now, whose owners are granted enormous sums of taxpayers’ money just to lodge those monstrous cement creatures on what used to be the bare and beautiful slopes of lovely Leitrim.’
‘There he goes again,’ she said, ‘the old man is growing bitter.’
I confided in her how I was hoping to hear the wind whistle through the stones. She said she didn’t think that the wind would make any noise. I said it did at the gable wall. ‘But those stones are too small,’ she said, ‘to deflect the wind in a manner that might create music.’
I said, ‘A boiling kettle makes music too.’
To which she said, ‘OK, I get the message. I’ll make some tea.’ And she turned to go back into the house.
‘I’ll follow you in a few moments,’ I said, but I didn’t. I forgot. Or perhaps I fell asleep again.
It was like that during the autumn. We lived placidly in the hills. I mourned quietly in my newly built room at the back of the house, looking out over Lough Allen. Across the wide water I could see Sliabh an Iarainn and the mountains of west Cavan, the lakes and small fields, and the forests and bogs.
LIKE MANY OTHER artists, I arrived in Leitrim in the 1980s, not just because of a black economy and cheap housing, but because we were all seeking some spiritual holy ground. Germans came. Painters. Writers. Sculptors. They bought up little cottages very cheaply. Many were refugees from broken homes, dysfunctional families or unresolved relationships; like one-winged birds seeking shelter in a ditch.
I settled on the Leitrim–Roscommon border after years of wandering around west Donegal, south Fermanagh and east Galway, renting bungalows or chalets in remote corners of the countryside.
I once passed a winter on a wild headland near Annagry in Donegal, just to watch the ocean beat off the rocks in the moonlight. To listen in the morning to the waves of the sea break on the beach at Carrickfinn.
And there were hills around Lough Allen where I once walked a dog; hills as barren as the moon. The road curling up into the high ground beyond the village, where the wind screeched through empty mineshafts and over bare slag heaps; mounds of rock and shale and shifted earth, a graveyard of dead diggers and mining machinery. Bleak highways cut into the mountain, to make a path for wind turbines that arrived with the new century on lorries as big as any Yankee convoy in Kabul.
The first time I heard the sound of a curlew, I thought it so forlorn that it sucked all my neurosis out, and left me as clean as an empty bowl. Wilderness, I believed, was the mother of all poetry.
There was a nineteenth-century notion that if you got away to the wilds, you could find your wildness. If you got to a space with no fences, then your mind would be without boundaries. Romantic poets could let loose their creativity, if they but owned a little cottage in a bee-loud glade or went fishing at midnight in a boat on Lough Erne, seeking pike by the light of a moon. In England, Wordsworth wallowed in a rustic romance of daffodils, pretty girls sweating in the fields, and brooding mountains. But it was Yeats who forged the template for Romantic Ireland, in misty bogs where ancient heroes wandered and the wind whistled through stones where fairies sang. And we know where all that led; Europeans in dungarees with albums by Clannad and dilated eyeballs, trying to lure the Shee off Bohey Mountain with tin whistles.
I found it possible to be human in rural Ireland, far away from the suburban lawns of Farnham Road. I had fled from a middle-class childhood, a world of manners and decorum, and found a kind of serenity in the wilderness of boggy mountain, lake and river. This is where I could brood in solitude and safety, lick my wounds and absorb the healing energy of the earth and sky.
Living on the side of a mountain seemed like a healthier option for the spirit, when compared to what cities offered. I got a wide view up in the mountains. I got close to the stars at night. I got close to goats in the daylight. I lived in the wind and was wrapped in leaves. There was something ancient about the routine of daily life in the country. People sat in the kitchen listening to the clock. They could hear footsteps on the laneway when someone was half a mile away. They could tell the emotions of animals. They told stories and gossiped about things that happened a hundred years ago. It all implied that no mountain was as wonderful as their mountain. No place was as special as their place. They knew what was going to happen next, though usually nothing happened.
And, of course, they were never alone. They sat deeply in the world. They walked deeply on the surface of Mother Earth. When they uttered the names of townlands, it was as if they were invoking some real presence: Gubaveeny, Éadan Mór or Coratavvy.
If the doctor asked an old man in the waiting room for his name, he might say, ‘Jack So-and-so from Altacorran [or wherever]’ because to speak his surname in isolation was not quite adequate a description. Only when a person was placed within the matrix of all the love and sorrow of his people – their deaths and poverty and heroic deeds that a single townland name could conjure up – was he properly defined as human.
In dancehalls sometimes in those old days, a girl might ask a boy where he was from and he would utter his townland name and she would look through him as if she were seeing all the strings that held him to his people and made him the ‘Who’ that she wanted to hold.
That September, when I walked up the hilly road along the wild ravines of Arigna and across the shoulders of the mountain, I could hear a sound deep in the rocks, like clear bells, and more real than my own voice. I could hear a kind of music vibrating in the trees, the wind playing sonatas in the forestry, mimicking the sound of a Japanese flute. And when my mother had been buried on a small hill in Cavan, I returned to Arigna and spent weeks walking the hills and sitting in my studio nursing grief and listening to the stones singing in the wind. I lit the fire. I stared out at the lake. I began reading Chinese poetry and hoped that autumn would be a time of recovery from the grief and emptiness I felt since her death.
After lunch each day, I would say to my beloved in the kitchen that I was going to work. I would leave the house, go to the end of the yard and enter my room, where I would stretch out on an armchair and doze.
Like the Chinese poet Po Chu-I, who lived over a thousand years ago, I abandoned myself to dreams for some of the afternoon and then drank bowl
s of tea and, just like him, I took heed of the lengthening shadows of evening. I could almost hear him whispering to me.
‘Winter is coming. Winter is coming. Joyful people regret the fleeting years, and sad people must endure the slow hours, but only those without joy or sorrow can accept what life brings. Winter is coming.’
IN THE DAYS after I had thrown the stone at the postman I began to realise that I’m one of those men who doesn’t improve on their own. I get locked into solitude in a lazy sort of way. Like the way a moth circles a flame. Maybe it’s the sterility of the male psyche, or the lack of a womb, that gives us the propensity to sit idle for hours, barely conscious of the fact that we are alive and yet transfixed by the certainty of being extinguished in death. Over the years, men have conjured up an endless number of metaphysical concepts that ease the pain of this existential anxiety, from God and Buddha to a wide variety of New-Age substitutes. Men, as someone once said, have all the answers but very few of the questions.
On Midsummer’s Eve, the mountains in the west of Ireland hum with the sounds of the New Age; the pulse and beat of drums, and the cry of shamans connecting with their animal souls, and a wide variety of alternative political and social activists seeking converts on the streets of various arts festivals. Catholicism may have crumbled, but the fervour of men who passionately believe in odd forms of metaphysical truth still continues. Just leave a man alone for long enough west of the Shannon river and he will discover the meaning of life. And then he’ll try to convince everyone else that he is the one with the right answer.
But it was conventional religion that was my weakness. I grew up in the house of Catholic iconography and I could never quite let go of it. And even now I remain religious. I can’t let go of the sense that my Self belongs in the deep otherness of an infinite cosmos. I can’t let go of the consolation that fading into the universe at death might be natural and that death may hold the greatest possibility of all. And what draws me into that? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a man thing. Or maybe it’s a fear-of-death thing. Or maybe it’s just the utter poetry of it.
But when the beloved was in Poland, I had no one to discuss all this with except the cat. Day by day, I nurtured the same fanciful ideas and exotic notions regarding the various reincarnations of myself and my little pussy. From one lifetime to the next she may have been sticking to me just to help me towards the enlightenment she already enjoyed. She may have been incarnating as a cat just to allow me find in myself compassion for cats. After all, she was calmer than me. And I became even more convinced than ever that she may have been an abbess long ago when I was just a humble monk, and when we were both drenched to the bone on Skellig Michael or some other remote refuge, hunting together for fish and enlightenment.
The pattern continued every day. Some mornings I would go with the flow and lie in bed. The next morning I would get up and go walking in the hills like a wise man or a fool, and I would return after perhaps two hours and light a candle and sit in single-pointed concentration in my studio.
And I assured myself that to be enlightened was to go with every flow. So when I wanted to eat buns or cheese sandwiches or drink espresso I went to the kitchen and filled my belly, pleasuring myself in the security that I was not pleasuring myself at all. I ate chocolate at the television at night, assuring myself that I was not attached to it. The chocolate was of no significance to me; in fact it would have been unenlightened to resist it. I suppose once you establish that you’re in tune with the Lord of the entire universe, there is no end to the possibilities of self-delusion.
And I’ll never be able to resist candles – lighting them, gazing at them – sitting there thinking that I am loved by a mother who is hidden behind the veil of the natural world. Other men get up to all sorts of strange things while they are alone. They watch porn or sports channels or find women to whom they can tell lies in the hope of sexual gratification. They probably have far more fun than I do. But at least I had the freedom to do as I pleased, even if I only wanted to sit still and watch the tiny flickering flame.
All that would change when she returned. She would say, ‘Come home to reality, my love. Awaken to this present moment. It is our time. Soon it will be summer and the grass will need to be cut, my love. The smell of mown lawns will envelop us.’
She would gaze at me again, like the sun shining, and I would smile. I dreamed one night of a couple of otters lying on the surface of a river, holding each other’s hands as they slept in case they might slip apart and lose each other in the current. It was a dream that consoled me and made me feel I was not a stranger walking on the earth.
But while she was away, the pond had filled with frogspawn. The hares had begun wandering the fields like they owned the world. The badgers were down in the warrens near the quarry, minding their newly born babies. The magpies were watching for movements in the house in the hope that I might soon throw out some organic material. The crows were getting ready to build.
Each morning, the sun rose a little earlier over Leitrim, over the houses in Drumshanbo, and the new apartments in Carrick-on-Shannon, and the cottages around Manorhamilton where the artists slept, and the polythene benders and tents in the ditches where the New-Age hippies sheltered while they tried to retrieve their souls and find pathways in the undergrowth to some lost paradise. And the sun cast its morning light indifferently on the living and the dead. On the commuters heading to work in factories and hardware stores and the county council offices, and across the graves of musicians and poets and teenagers killed on the roads or in fatal accidents around the farm or on building sites in London. The sun cast its light on John McGahern’s grave, and on the grave of a bishop who once ordered a local library to remove all McGahern’s books from the shelves, and all the other sleeping dead in graveyards of every parish and village in this quiet county.
Sixty years ago, when I had just been born, Leitrim was a land of poor soil where the crack of a spade on stony ground could be heard through the still air from distant fields. But now it had been reinvented by a new generation – sculptors and painters and ceramic artists and film-makers and wood carvers and actors and even old IRA veterans who had built new lives with cross-border grants and retired guards and hippies from London and playwrights and old farmers whose sons were gay and lived in Brooklyn. The power of the clergy had greatly diminished, though there were still a few priests who would rise early in the morning and sleep in the afternoons, and other priests who didn’t get out of bed until noon, and ex-priests who couldn’t sleep at all.
Everything changes. Nothing is permanent. So for the time being, there are fewer priests in Leitrim but more lesbians, fewer bank managers but more musicians. But who can tell what lies in the future?
As I looked out from my hilltop cottage in the hills above Lough Allen, overlooking the mountains that stretch from the peaks of Cuilce to the slopes of Sliabh an Iarainn near Drumshanbo, I could assure myself that, for this time being, Leitrim was undoubtedly an auspicious place to live.
IT WAS NINE o’clock on a Monday morning when he phoned me, the beginning of my third week alone. The rain was beating the roof and the windows on the west side of the cottage. I went to the kitchen and settled a few scoops of coffee in a small espresso pot and placed it on a hot ring. I even resisted putting a bowl of porridge flakes in the microwave now that I was on the verge of becoming an enlightened Buddha, given that Buddhas don’t need porridge, as far as I know. I turned on the radio and then turned it off. I drank the coffee and went outside for a brief investigation of the compound. The trees were bending in the westerly wind but none had fallen. Lough Allen was all tossed up by the storm and the white waves dotted the length of it, and some of the islands seemed to have shrunk in size, as the flood levels in the lake rose higher. A guttering had collapsed on one side of the cottage, and the water tank was overflowing and creating a pool of water beyond the east gable. I came back inside and saw for the first time a stain on the ceiling of the kitchen where water
must have come in under the tiles and saturated the insulation in the attic. This didn’t alarm me because I knew we had a loose tile on that side. But then I saw another larger and darker brown stain on the ceiling around where the chimney takes the smoke and heat from the range up through the roof. And then I saw a stain on the wall, down along the chimney breast. In panic, I went into the next room and there too I noticed brown stains seeping through the white paint of the ceiling. I went to the sun room, where the ceiling was sagging like a hammock in the centre.
This is not good, I thought.
And then the phone rang. I didn’t recognise the number and at first I didn’t recognise the voice.
‘Is that yourself?’ he asked.
‘Who else would it be?’ I said.
He laughed.
‘It’s me,’ he said.
‘Good,’ I replied. ‘I thought it was you.’
‘So how are you?’
‘I’m fine. But who are you?’
‘This is Enda,’ he said.
‘Right.’
‘Enda Maguire.’
‘Ohhhhhh, Enda Maguire. Well, how are you? We studied in Maynooth. Yes, I remember you. Did you ever get ordained afterwards?’
‘I didn’t. I got married.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Much better.’
‘I’m ringing about Tom Lunny.’
Tom Lunny was a parish priest in Laois when we were students in Maynooth and he was our hero. He loved theatre, T.S. Eliot and Verdi operas. He was a liberal, but also irrational and socially dysfunctional. For example, he couldn’t stand nuns and sometimes insulted them at mass by refusing to allow them to give out Communion. On one occasion when an overenthusiastic young woman in a veil walked over to him at the sign of peace with her arms outstretched, he whispered, ‘Feic off, Noddy,’ and then for no apparent reason he turned his back against her gesture of compassion.
Hanging with the Elephant Page 12