by Tim Robinson
What alarmed me in this situation was that I was unable to wrench my mind away from the problem. I am familiar enough with my tendency to obsessions and panics to be able to distinguish subjective from objective threats. Nothing about the kids themselves troubled me; they were not aggressive or even unmannerly, and the worst I could have said about them was that they showed directly what the adults were too polite to hint at, that we were strangers, oddities, curiosities. (At that period there were no other non-island households in Árainn, and no visitors stayed through the winters.) I found myself roving the crags behind the house or the fields below the scarp to the west with a constant directional consciousness of the school, like a numb and wary side to my face, a film over one eye. The search for plants—this was my first season of botanizing and the beauty of each species struck me as with lightning when it made its entrance into the year—became a counter-obsession, deliberately cultivated to offset the other. But I would come home from an afternoon’s apparently idle and carefree strolling with rings of anxiety deposited round my eyes. What was this about? My mind went spiralling back through my own childhood, my schooldays, my three years of teaching, the stresses of our own decision not to have children: nothing there that recognizably prefigured my present experience. There were other possible sources of unease too. Vietnam was approaching its crisis; Nixon announced “the biggest bombing raid in history.” In our previous life we had participated in the great anti-war demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, raged at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, donated artworks to “Medical Aid for Vietnam”; now here I was on the bomb-crazed pavements of Aran, picking flowers. Art is a guilty business, a desperate search for self-justification outside the sphere of justice, and I was not even producing art. I had a nightmare about a radio announcer saying, “Tonight we bring you the worst news ever. Over to our special reporter…”—but the special reporter was so horror-struck by whatever it was that he could only babble incoherently.
When, eventually admitting to myself that I could not solve this problem, I told M about it, she took thought, and began to cultivate our relations with the children. We soon became the most interesting features of their daily lives; those whose homeward way passed our gate started calling in on us, to marvel at such unfamiliar items as our ranks of books, the typewriter, my binoculars and magnifying glass. The girls would arrive in a rush and fling themselves into the house crying, “Don’t let the boys in!,” and the boys would hang around the gate disconsolately until we promised to see them on the next day. They brought their schoolbooks and taught us Irish; I drew pictures of the birds of Aran for them. Mícheál disapproved strongly; they would only take advantage of us, he said. One day when he was working on the potato-ridges in the garden, a lad larking about on the crag outside threw a stone at a sheet of corrugated iron that filled in a disused doorway in Moloney’s walls, and Mícheál leapt out through one of the empty window-frames with a bull-like bellow and chased a scattering of them off in the direction of Gort na gCapall. Every bit of devilment in the island starts in Gort na gCaPall, he told us. All this frequentation was at first alarming, then became a routine, sometimes troublesome, often vitalizing. The children revealed their individualities, and some became friends; “Ye were the only people who ever took any notice of us,” they told us when they and we were some years older. Even today, having long left the island, we are occasionally hailed in the streets of Galway by a strapping seaman or punk-clad art-student, and I am puzzled to identify him or her with one or other of the small darting creatures that once caused me such distress.
What this episode might mean I do not know, but, clearly, in coming to this place I had stepped into some unfamiliar westernness of the psyche. Other newcomers have had a conviction of their alienage in Aran forced upon them by the barren rocks, the aggressive weather or the incomprehensible language, and have fled. For me, such a recognition would crack the foundation-stone of this book. If Aran is to become a microcosm of the island-universe to which, I believe, I belong without residue, how can I bear even a trace of immanent xenophobia in it? But perhaps “belonging” is something to be earned, or learned. If so, the only escape from the unease of the threshold is, paradoxically, to go on farther, to explore to the end. By coincidence, our house turned out to be perched on the edge of a boundary, instituted by the saints of old, that I can turn to advantage in my westward progress. But I did not know that, at the time; the boundary I knew I had reached was drawn by interior demons.
The saints’ boundary arose in this way. St. Enda and St. Breacán proposed to divide the island between them. They agreed that, on an appointed morning and after celebrating the Mass in their respective monasteries in Cill Éinne and Eoghanacht, they would walk towards each other, the boundary to be established where they should meet. But St. Breacán and his followers got up at an unholy hour, gabbled through the Mass, and set off on horseback. As they were climbing the hill towards Fearann an Choirce, one of Enda’s monks saw them, and ran to wake his master, who beseeched God not to let them approach any nearer. Instantly Breacán and his monks found that their horses’ hooves were fixed to the rock, and they had to wait there until Enda came and released them. The hoof-marks were visible in the rock at Creig na Córach, the crag of the just division, for many centuries, until the wicked agent Thompson made the people build the road over them, to spite their ancient traditions. Later on the pious Fr. Killeen had a plaque set in the roadside wall to mark the spot, at the foot of the steep slope immediately west of the Residence.
While the Life of St. Enda tells of the division of the island between him, and the abbots of eight other monasteries, neither it nor any of the old sources on St. Breacán give the above legend; however it is well known in island lore, and there is a version of it in Ó Domhnaill’s Oileáin Árann; including the postscript about Thompson. (Fr. Mártan Ó Domhnaill was curate here from 1920 to 1934. His book, the first Irish-language one on Aran, is the most prolix work I have ever come across, but it is the only source for certain pennyworths of information, and is full of charm; a song in it, “Árainn i bhfad i gcéin,” “Aran far away” which appears to be his own composition, is still sung.) A middle-aged Gort na gCapall man told me that the boundary was defined not just on the road, but right across the island from Poll Uí Néadáin on the south coast to Poll na Loinge on the north; he remembered that when he was young there was an old man who knew exactly where it ran through the village. From Gort na gCapall it followed a pronounced scarp, a sharp cliff in fact, to the main road just below the Residence, but nobody can now tell me how it found its way down the northern flank of the island to the shore. It may be that this faded tradition is a memory-trace of an actual boundary existent at some distant period, though it fits in neither with the division of the island into four townlands, consolidated by but anterior to the Ordnance Survey of 1839, nor with the tripartite schema recorded in Elizabethan inquisitions. If, as seems likely, Dún Dúchathair and Dún Aonghasa antedate the other big cashels, it is even possible that this was the point of balance between those two primitive powers.
Certain other fragments of lore shore up the significance of this point of just division. The steep slant of the road down the scarp used to be called Carcair an Phobaill, the slope of the congregation, because there was a little chapel beside it. Mícheál points out a few stones of this building in the bracken of a field tucked under the scarp immediately north of the road, and says he heard it was a ruin even in his great-grandfather’s time; Dara the postman adds that it was so small the priest could scatter holy water on the whole congregation in one go. A couple of hundred yards further west, an area consisting of a few fields on the other side of the road used to be called Muirbheach na Croise, the sandy plain of the cross, and there is a slender pillar-stone about eight feet high, perhaps not ancient, incorporated in a field-wall there, which may or may not have something to do with the name—but when I enquired about it locally the most I could elicit was the cryptic observation
, “There was no harm in the man that put that there.” Island memory of these things has decayed. The “hill of the congregation” has lost its old name; for a generation or two it was Carcair Uí Cheallacháin from O’Callaghan the teacher, and nowadays it is just An Charcair Mhór, the big slope. Only Fr. Killeen’s plaque checks the amnesia of the landscape here, the ruination of its meanings. But ruins have their own capacity for housing the imagination; this romantically half-effaced boundary means more to me than the mapped and historically situated ones, and not just because I lived upon it for so long. If there is a privileged site from which to view the quality of westernness, it must be this: a house on the border between east and west in the westernmost of three islands off the west of Ireland. The very western tip of Árainn itself, or for practicality’s sake a cottage in the farthest village, where empty horizons and undiluted sunsets could impose too terminal an interpretation, might not be so conducive to this meditation as my liminal perch, with that never quite cured sore point of no return just the other side of it.
The scarp itself, the rough seam along which east and west are cobbled together, was exalted by my feverish botanical displacement activity into splendorous Gothic complexity; imagine a cathedral peeled like an apple in one long spiral strip, and the peeling thrown down across the island and passing so close to the house that a few steps could take me from my morning coffee-mug to breathless adorations before plants niched like saints in the unwound façade. In that first Aran spring each new flower opened another eye in me, piercing the gloom of winter. I will never see flowers like that again, each one suddenly shining not only out of the wet rock or decayed undergrowth around it but out of the time in which that space had been dark, as if a beam had arrived at last, rejoicing, from a star formed long ago, light-years away. It was not the famous rarities or even the one or two new discoveries I made that most enthralled me, bur the underfoot beneath-notice nearly-nothings; the field madder, for instance, its mauve four-petalled blossoms each only a tenth of an inch across, in clusters of a dozen or so arranged as if it were crucial to show off each one to best advantage. Some plants I took home and examined with a magnifying glass, awed by the scale and finish of their architecture. Two great milky-white trunks curving up and smoothly swelling into egg-shaped terminals each with a faint blue stripe across it—the stamens of the bird’s eye speedwell, which is merely so many dots of prettiness to the rambler, and sheds its little yellow-centred rings of blue petals like enamelled earrings on the mantlepiece if you bring it home. The hairy bittercress is a negligible weedy thing on the scale of a passing pace, but its four white petals under the glass are volupruously curved flanks of satin-smooth angel-flesh, making the paper they lie on look unwholesomely yellowish and pitted. In the earliest days of the year these revelations were sparse; in January just one or two left-over blossoms of herb robert, asterisks footnoting the previous season; in February the lime rice-grains of whitlow-grass scattered in the grazed-down margins of the paths, and then the common scurvy-grass on the coastal rocks (these lovely things named like so many diseases of the earth!); in March the lessons in yellow—this is primrose yellow, this is buttercup yellow, this, subtly different, is celandine yellow. By April spring was pressing ahead faster than I could see or write about it; I could hardly bear to be in the house in case something else was coming into being. The first bloody cranesbill, the first early purple orchid, the first spring gentian, each an explosion of sense-data, each beaming its existence into the world, carrying no message, quite independent of my observation or interpretation. I admired the heraldic simplicity of tormentil, a little yellow Tudor rose of four petals set edge to edge; behind the ring of petals is another of eight narrow green sepals, four of them pressed against and backing the petal edges, the alternate four slightly reflexed, one below each petal. The wild strawberry has exactly the same arrangement with five petals and ten sepals, with an extra stylish detail: the petals are slightly separated so that the pale green of the sepals shows between them. Drawing the tormentil plant, following out the logic of its stem and leaves and flowers, and then finding exactly the same structure in the much larger and superficially quite dissimilar herb bennet, I entered deeply into the reasons for classifying them both, together with the wild strawberry, in the rose family. These miracles of singularity, I found, had their places in the schemes of reason and the causality of evolution, beyond my comprehension, but in principal comprehensible. That there are miracles, is explicable; that there are explanations, is miraculous.
In the midst of this almost hysterical collecting and classifying of shapes and colours, I was sometimes aware that I was playing off the wild-flowers against the schoolchildren, whose shrill cries at playtime flew through the air to me—at me, it felt, though I knew it was not so—like thrown knives. Their tiny silhouettes appearing and disappearing on the horizon as they scrambled about on the walls of the playground threatened my eyes like thorns. The sky-parallel crags became arenas of phobia as well as entrancement, the cupped fields flowing with buttercups and daisies were poisoned by anxiety, the fraught intricacies of the ivied scarps netted me in compulsions.
Even after the children had became individualized persons and lost this edge of menace, I found that my botanical browsings never quite ensured peace of mind. Under any leaf there could be a splinter off a ragged edge of my fragmented past. Some uneasy thought, such as a doubt about the value of my writings, could be working its way towards me along the fissures of the crag, like the cockerel that the wicked old wise women used to set wandering at random to carry off disease. Imagine it: the corner of the eye catches an incomprehensible knot of colours appearing and disappearing, scratching its way along the other side of a wall; it finds a gap and comes out into the open, a beribboned cockerel, its eye a dew-drop of malice tilted towards you. There is a paper tied to it which might be—well, no matter what, you have to read it, caught out in the open here. For me, it might be, for instance:
STONES OF ARAN: PILGRIMAGE—A BAD REVIEW
Ancient Celtic tradition associates the northern province of Ireland with battle, the east with prosperity, the south with music, the centre with kingship, and the west with knowledge. Tim Robinson’s book on Aran conforms to this schema in asserting the knowability of that western island. His method is the patient accumulation of detailed fact, with the occasional excursus into the wider conceptual structures within which alone those facts have significance. The difficulty in this approach is, on the one hand, that an adequate provision of background information would overweight the book or bring its progress to an awkward halt, and on the other that without such background the facts are mere curiosities or momentary distractions. Thus even the rather rudimentary potted history of the Land League is too long for its position in the book, on the brink of an exciting cliff-top adventure story as it were, whereas the brief mention of Saccamen-opsis is a stumbling-block to readers not familiar with the general principles and findings of stratigraphy and the fossil record. Worse still, even the suitably informed reader cannot take the facts adduced here at face value. Minor mistakes abound (E.P. Wright was Professor of Botany in UCD, not of Zoology in TCD, for instance) and there are some lamentable misinterpretations. The rendering of the headland west of Port Mhuirbhigh as Cora Scaití Ciúin, the sometimes calm point, is DIY etymology at its most inept; as the late Éamonn Ó Tuathail has pointed out, the name is Cora Scath Tí Chuinn, from a house of the Quinn family which provided a mark for boatmen skirting the reef. As for the cross on the sill of Arkin Castle, which Robinson takes as the very seal of truth of the Cill Éinne legend, it probably dates from 1818 like similar ones carved here and there around Galway by a man called Healy. In other fields professional research has already made Robinson’s account obsolete (cf. C. Cotter, 1993, 1994, on Dún Aonghasa, for example). Such failings are only to be expected; a multidisciplinary study demands the modesty of teamwork, and the best that can be said of Robinson’s attempts is that he manages to fall between more pr
ofessorial chairs than most amateurs.
A more fundamental flaw is the work’s uncertainty and equivocation about its own purpose. Striding roughshod over the bounds of specialisms and genres, it seems to imply that some overarching meaning of it all is going to be revealed through the juxtaposition or pile-up of viewpoints, but alas this higher truth never quite emerges, and in trying to be “not just” a historian or geologist or botanist or even a poet, Robinson ends up being nothing in particular. If some philosophical question had been formulated in the volume under review, one might look forward to an attempt to answer it in the forthcoming volume, but since no such level of generality is attained in Pilgrimage, one fears that Labyrinth will be no more than a further tangle of observations and anecdotes united only by a high-flown style—for Robinson would clearly have us know he is no mere polymath of the natural sciences but a literary adept too; hence the prevalence of unsignalled quotations and half-buried references, particularly to such touchstones of the English littérateur as Proust, Ruskin, and The Wind in the Willows.
Although Robinson disclaims aspirations to transcendency he seems drawn to the brink of it, perhaps by some dim afterglow of belief as is betrayed by the title Pilgrimage itself. But what is the point of a pilgrimage to an empty shrine? He sets off bravely enough with the concept of the “adequate step” which is mysteriously to totalize all modes of comprehension, but by the time he gets back to his starting-point it has been tested to destruction and he discards it like a worn-out boot. Having completed this null circuit, which leaves him and us no more than “marginally better-informed” about some of the stones of Aran, our hero rurns inward, to the labyrinth. Clearly his temperament is not one to go bull-headed for minotaurs, but seeing him wander off clueless one does fear that he will blunder into factual booby-traps or be ambushed by the irrational.