Stones of Aran

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Stones of Aran Page 21

by Tim Robinson


  Height—The men are mostly of a slight but athletic build … Aran average is 1645 mm or about 5 feet 4 ¾ inches, that of 277 Irishmen is 1740 m. or 5 feet 8 ½ inches.

  Head—The head is well shapen, rather long and narrow; but viewed from above the sides are not parallel, there being a slight parietal bulging. The mean Cephalic Index, when reduced to the cranial standard, is 75.1, consequently the average head is to a slight extent, mesaticephalic; although, as a matter of fact, the number measured is nearly evenly divided between mesaticephalic and dolichocephalic. The top of the head is well vaulted, so that the height above the ears is considerable.

  Face—The face is long and oval, with well-marked features … In many men, the length between the nose and the chin has the appearance of being decidedly great.

  The battery of instruments with which these results were obtained—The Traveller’s Anthropometer, Flowers’ Craniometer, a sliding rule as used in Galton’s Anthropometrical Laboratory, and Chesterman’s steel tape for taking the horizontal circumference of the head—must have impressed the islanders, for measuring skulls was powerful magic in the hands of their native healers. As to what was going on inside those skulls, Haddon and Browne admit that the question of psychology is very difficult and delicate, but nevertheless advance the usual intrusive generalizations Aran has to put up with:

  Naturally to the casual visitor the inhabitants show to their best advantage, and to such they appear as a kindly, courteous, and decidedly pleasing people. Though begging is becoming more prevalent than formerly, owing to the opening up of the island to tourists, a pleasant independence is often exhibited. We believe them to be “good Catholics.” They have had the character of being exceptionally honest, straightforward, and upright. On the other hand, we have been told that the men have no unity or organisation, that they are cunning, untrustworthy, and they certainly are very boastful when in liquor. They rarely fight, but will throw stones at one another. Occasionally the old people are badly treated; and when an old man has made over his farm to his married son, the young people have been known to half starve him, and give him the small potatoes reserved for the pigs. The men do not appear to have strong sexual passions, and any irregularity of conduct is excessively rare; only five cases of illegitimacy having been registered within the past ten years. There is no courtship or love-making, marriages being suddenly arranged for, mainly for unsentimental reasons. The marriages appear to be as happy as elsewhere; and the women can quite hold their own with the men.

  Among innumerable journalistic accounts of the islands from the early years of this century, one curiosity stands out, an article James Joyce placed with Il Piccolo della Sera, a newspaper of Trieste, where he was living at the time. Its bemusing title is (in translation), “The mirage of the fisherman of Aran—England’s safety valve in case of war,” and it describes a day-trip he made to “Aranmore, the holy island that sleeps like a great shark on the grey waters of the Atlantic Ocean.” The mirage, one obscurely learns, is a project he happened to read about during the voyage, for making Galway into a transatlantic port which would reinvigorate Ireland and assure England’s contact with the New World in time of war; Joyce associates this vision with one seen by an Aran fisherman said to have accompanied St. Brendan on his voyages. Everything else in Joyce’s brief evocation is equally adrift.

  We stop in one of the steep little streets, uncertain. An islander, who speaks an English all his own, says good morning, adding that it has been a horrible summer, praise be to God. The phrase, which at first seems one of the usual Irish blunders, rather comes from the innermost depths of human resignation…. Around the stunted shrubs which grow on the hills of the island his imagination has woven legends and tales which reveal the depth of his psyche. And under his apparent simplicity he retains a slight trace of scepticism, and of humour. He looks away when he has spoken and lets the eager enthusiast jot down in his notebook the astounding fact that yonder hawthorn tree was the little tree from which Joseph of Arimathea cut his walking stick.

  Joyce did not share Synge’s empathy with the west; in fact he seems to have feared it as an atavistic and deathly trait in the mentality of his times. The old man of the west is a spectre Stephen Dedalus has to face, almost on the eve of his going-forth to encounter life and to forge the conscience of his race:

  I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till day come, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till … Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean no harm.

  And the badinage in Ulysses, when Stephen is told, “The tramper Synge is looking for you. He’s out in pampooties to murder you,” is not to be taken too lightly. To incorporate this peasant world of legends that could be jokes into his own psychic record, Joyce himself would have to invent “an English all of his own,” full of what seem at first to be “the usual Irish blunders.” His throwaway scrap of newspaper column-filling perhaps records the moment of conception of Finnegans Wake. If so, I claim that moment for Aran.

  After the First World War, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War, after scores of those jolly excursionists to Aran had died in the trenches, and the graduates of the “University of Irish” had been shot as rebels or achieved high office in the Free State, after the dislocation and depression of tourism by the “economic war” with Britain, the filming of Man of Aran in 1932 set the Aran mirage industry on its feet again. Robert Flaherty, his family and film-crew and visiting admirers, spent money freely, and laughed away the inhibitions of the islanders about the miraculous new medium that would present them in their ragged nobility on the silver screen of the world. When the film appeared, the “man of Aran” himself was hailed as a star, and Flaherty as a benefactor to the cause of popular entertainment:

  Tiger, Tiger burning bright

  In the cinema at night

  Two and six and one and three

  Good old Robert Flaherty.

  Thus Aran was launched on a career of mass appeal.

  The film itself, despite its innocency, is deep enough to sustain numerous reinterpretations of its own reinterpretation of Aran. It is interesting that in the Venice Film Festival of 1934 it won the Grand Prix or Mussolini Cup, and was well received in Hitler’s Germany, where its theme of man striving against the forces of nature aligned it with the cultish mountaineering films of the time. Even its title is subject to all the inflexions “man” is heir to. As a portrait of a community rooted through the family in the land, or in labour, it needs only the slightest of changes in emphasis, a few words added to its subtitles, to swing this epic of struggle to the left or to the right. And if, as he has been pronounced, Man is dead, the nihilistic magnificence of Aran’s storm-beaten cliffs would add grandeur to his drowning.

  It may well have been Man of Aran that brought Aran its strangest visitor. A middle-aged Frenchman who stayed for a few days in August 1937 and left without settling his bill, he is still dimly remembered as “Franncach Sheáinín Bhile,” from the name of the man he lodged with in Eoghanacht village. It is also remembered that the children used to tease him by pretending to steal his walking-stick. The bright, cruel, eyes of children are drawn by signs of psychic trouble, and perhaps they sensed that a wind from hell was blowing this man through Aran, that his stick was a lightning-conductor for the storms of war soon to overwhelm the world. He was Antonin Artaud, the dramatist and theoretician of “the theatre of cruelty.” He had recently left the clinic in which he had undergone courses of “detoxification” for his opium addiction, and had been living rough and begging in Montparnasse. As he wrote to a friend just before leaving for Ireland:

  I do not know what I am but I know that for 22 years I have never ceased to burn, and they have made a pyre of me…. I greatly fear that from October and November the fire will be everywhere in Paris. Those whom I love will be sheltered and warned.

  For he had lost the power to keep symbols in their own domain, and a
ll the monstrous inventions of his literary genius had become for him painful realities about to break out of his mind into the world: “My life fulfils Prophecy,” he wrote to a friend from Galway. A few months earlier he had received certain illuminations, and deduced others by “cabbalistic reduction”—arithmetical hocus-pocus—of the digits of certain dates, which he expressed in a work called New Revelations of Being:

  The absolute male of nature has begun to move in the sky…. Because a Cycle of the World is finished which was under the supremacy of the Woman: Left, Republic and Democracy…. That means that the Masses will go under the yoke, and it is just that they should be under the yoke. Because the Masses are by nature Women and it is Man who rules Woman, and not the contrary.

  This event was due to take place in five months from June 1937, because:

  … on the 3 June 1937 the five serpents appeared which were already in the sword of which the power of decision is represented by a cane!—What does that mean?—That means that I who speak have a Sword and a Cane. A cane with 13 knots and that this cane carries on the ninth knot the magic sign of thunder; that 9 is the numeral of destruction by fire and—THAT I FORSEE A DESTRUCTION BY FIRE… I see this Cane in the middle of the Fire and provoking the destruction by Fire.

  Some years later he explained the significance of his cane, in a note written on a copy of The New Revelations of Being:

  The cane discussed here and which was that of St. Patrick in Ireland is in reality essentially and before all that of Jesus Christ himself…. From June to September 1937 it was in the hands of the signatory of these lines, and did its work. I have not had it for now for six years and it is now in a safe place. And CHRIST alone will reappear with it or one of the persons of the most holy Trinity.

  This copy of his book was dedicated by him (in December 1943, and from the asylum of Rodez) to Adolf Hitler. He had come to Ireland with the idea of returning the cane to its rightful home; but what was it that brought him to Aran in particular, while in the grip of an apocalyptic and Fascistic fantasy, in which it is clear that he himself was to play the role of Führer? In a letter to his family he said that he was looking for the last true descendents of the druids, who would understand that humanity must disappear by water and fire. While J.T. O’Flaherty’s Druidical fire-temples and sacrificial altars would have appealed to the author of Heliogabalus, it is unlikely he would have heard more than the faint echoes of this theme in later writers on Aran. Synge’s vision of Aran as the last stronghold in Europe of the primitive could have been the magnet, or, as I have hinted, the politically ambiguous storms of Man of Aran.

  The impending catastrophe did not relieve Artaud of mundane troubles while in Aran. As he wrote to André Breton:

  Life in Ireland seems to me horribly expensive. I doubt if you could get by in the towns on less than a pound a day. Here where I am it’s a pound a week, there are 9 houses, 3 bushes in the graveyard, and it takes over 2 hours walking to get to the village of Kilronan, where there is a post office, four hotels, 2 bars and about sixty houses. The boat from Ireland calls twice a week. So much for practical details.

  But practical details became so pressing after a few days that he left his lodgings, leaving a reassuring note in English for his hosts: “I go to Galway with the priest to take money in Post Office.” Since the money he had implored his publisher Jean Paul-han to send him had not arrived, he fled from Galway too, leaving his bill at the Imperial Hotel unpaid. In Dublin he got into street-fights, lost the cane, was arrested and deported as an “undesirable.” On arrival at Le Havre, after some trouble with the crew of the ferry, he was taken in a straight-jacket to hospital. There followed over eight years of incarceration, and the fifty-one electro-shock treatments, administered without anaesthetic, that failed to torture him back into normality. There also followed the destruction of much of Europe by fire.

  In the decades since Artaud’s fire-storms, tourists have become more a matter of statistical interest to the islanders than vice versa; each season is “up” or “down” on the last by so many per cent. Correspondingly, new treatments of Aran in old and new media have to be reckoned in batches. Of the many books now available a favourite is Aran, Islands of Legend, by P.A.Ó Síocháin (published in 1962 and doing well in the New Age), according to which the islands are but the tiny fragments of a great Atlantis, of which the Aran forts were the defence-line until it subsided into the ocean without geological fuss “about 2,200 years ago,” halving Dún Aonghasa in the process and leaving behind the ancestors of today’s Araners. In contrast, Oileáin Árann, stair na n oileáin anuas go dti 1922, a well researched history, particularly good on nineteenth-century politics (it has saved me weeks in old newspaper files), by an island-born teacher, Antoine Powell, has been unjustly neglected; one elderly shopkeeper of Cill Rónáin said to me “I suppose because he’s one of our own we think it can’t be any good.” Almost too late for me to mention it here, appears a competent multidisciplinary study with the comic title, The Book of Aran. Seamus Heaney has written on these “three stepping-stones out of Europe,” as have his contemporaries, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon; there are dozens of television films in various languages, an opera (Opera d’Aran, by Gilbert Bécaud, first performed in Paris in 1962), pamphlets, pop-songs, pocket-guides, maps…. The islands are perpetually stormbound in interpretations.

  Finally, Aran has evinced a sentimental interest in tourists too. For some time it has been offering its own temperate version of the sun-sand-&-sex culture of more torrid shores. A few of “the lads” took to hanging around on the beaches hoping to pick up “women”; one of them, I remember, was so assiduous his mates used to say, “Pity he can’t swim, he’d make a great lifeguard.” And then, one summer in the ’seventies, a scattering of girls of a new breed arrived, like rare butterflies from some exceptional hatching far away. They knew enough about sex to intimidate the local experts, but they wanted something more—total mystical identification with the island through love. One of these girls, a Californian, somehow drifted into our home and settled there for a bit, sustaining herself on a little jar of tofu she had with her and an occasional lettuce leaf from the garden. Her project was simple: to have an affair with a man called George or the local equivalent, on as many famous islands as possible. We heard a good deal about her adventures in this parodic quest. She soon picked out and got to know one Seoirse, a handsome young fisherman devoted to the quiet pint. She suggested a stroll through the fragrant, twilight boreens; he was agreeable, and they met by appointment. When he went stumping off ahead of her, shoulders bowed as if he were carrying a sack of feed-beet to the cattle, she scampered after him crying “Seoirse! You might at least hold my hand!”; and then, running ahead to ambush him, “Seoirse! I’m the best thing that ever happened to you—why don’t you recognize that?” But Seoirse was slow to recognize that, and she became impatient. The affair reached its climax when her island love was due back from a few days away with his trawler. She put on a floaty cotton dress and highlighted her hair, and waited for him in the American Bar, in company with the wife of another of the boat’s crew. When at last the trawler appeared in the mouth of the harbour, the Californian suggested that they should both run down onto the quay to welcome their menfolk home from the sea; but the Aran woman was amazed at the idea and hastily said that she had to go home and put on the spuds. So California teased up her hair into a storm of sparks and went skipping down the harbour road alone. Seoirse, peering out of the little window of the deck-house, saw this maenad approaching, and dived into the hold, where he busied himself gutting fish for an hour or so, until she had given up and gone away disconsolate. Later that evening she sat under a wall in a field, wondering if she should leave the island, and waiting for Nature to send her a sign. As dusk gathered about her, a strange rippling mystic music drifted to her on the breeze; she looked over the wall and found it was a cow copiously urinating. And so she decided to leave Aran. We used to get postcards from her now and again
; she was screeching around Capri on the pillion of Giorgio’s Vespa, or sweeping up broken glass in Georgieu’s taverna on Mykonos. As an expert in ironies she will forgive me for having merged her story with that of one of her sister visionaries.

  And so Aran, and especially Cill Rónáin, continues through the years to disappoint, to be a little discrepant to the visitors’ dreams. Nowadays something like 150,000 people visit the islands each summer. Long after midnight the roar of the pubs spewing out their clientele can be heard as far as where St. Enda’s bones rest on the farther side of the bay, and at the end of the season it takes a fortnight of autumn gales to hose the town into sobriety again. A line of Yeats suggests we should tread softly upon dreams, but in truth dreams themselves are heavy-footed, whether they wear pampooties or jackboots. Sometimes I tremble for the stone that has to bear all their trampling.

  AN EAR TO THE COFFIN

  The closely built-up Cill Rónáin that measures itself by the bed-nights and coffee-spoons of tourism, Íochtar an Bhaile, fades out only a couple of hundred yards north of the harbour, and beyond it Lár an Bhaile, the “middle of town,” is made spacious by the disused grounds and empty shells of the Protestant church and rectory. That faith, in its complicity with economic and social power, is extinct in Aran, and its practice restricted to private observation. Only a few elderly islanders still feel resentful of the stony contempt with which the select little community stared down its neighbours, and what they remember of its history is reduced to a few grotesque motifs that could furnish the beginnings of a ghost story. Some years ago, before the bright clean waves of electricity and tourism had swept out the old pub of the area, a descendant of a member of that Cill Rónáin ascendancy—a rather aberrant member in the eyes of his co-religionists—came back to Aran looking for his roots:

 

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