Hanging with the Elephant: A Story of Love, Loss and Meditation

by Michael Harding

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, looking at me for the first time, with a certain curiosity.

  ‘What I mean is,’ I said, ‘it would be lovely if it wasn’t raining.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, nodding emphatically and then turning to her little ones at the other table playing games on mobile phones.

  What I had meant to say was that it’s a wonderful morning when I can get up in the fullness of my health, walk the city streets among the sauntering women, the jogging women, with their earphones plugged in, and the ones who dream and gaze and pass me by without the slightest glance. It’s still wonderful. That’s what I meant. But I didn’t say it.

  ‘You have your hands full,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said. ‘And I’m desperate for Garth Brooks tickets. And they’re queuing halfway down Grafton Street.’

  Christ, I thought, this is the great thing about cities. People talk to each other. They sit down with strangers and share intimacies. Now I knew quite a lot about her. I knew she liked Garth Brooks. I knew she was even thinking of going to his concert. Maybe she’s trying to tell me something, I thought. Maybe it wasn’t an accident that she sat down here. After all, why did she not sit down with the other three at the other table? There was plenty of space. Maybe she unconsciously wanted distance between herself and the children for a moment. She needed to breathe as an individual and not as a mammy. And maybe she was drawn to me unconsciously. Maybe this is the moment wherein my life changes.

  I felt like saying, ‘Do you want me to go and queue for you? You can just sort out the kids and I’ll meet you at lunchtime in Bewley’s. I’ll get you all the tickets you want.’

  But I didn’t. I knew that on the bipolar wheel, my emotions were on the crest. So I restored myself to reality.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Garth Brooks. Yeah. He’s a great singer.’

  She smiled at me. Looked into my eyes. She was soft and emotional and because of the baby on her lap, she seemed full of maternal love. Maybe this was Mia Farrow and I was Woody; although I reminded myself how that turned out, which grounded me slightly.

  But yet, I was looking into her eyes. Somewhere inside me little happy juices were squirting out excessive doses of bliss, and I was contemplating how wonderfully open city people can be in the morning. I was convinced that I could tell if the dreams of any customer sitting at one of the tables near me were good or bad or if their sex was wild or mediocre by just looking into their eyes. And I was looking at everyone, and staring at the woman across the table from me.

  I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t go home at all. Maybe I should stay here in Dublin, this city throbbing with life. That’s the thing I cling to as I get older – life. And there was life here. Maybe I should go to Garth Brooks. I was thinking maybe this woman at my table with her three baby bags full of wipes, bottles and Pampers is just waiting for me to say something. Maybe I should just say, ‘Tell me what you dreamed of last night.’

  But I didn’t have time because all of a sudden he arrived – her husband or partner or whatever, presumably the father of her four children. And by the black woollen coat on him and the two pigskin gloves in one hand and the smell of his aftershave, I could see he wasn’t stuck for a penny.

  He sat at the table with the children. They all clambered around him with stories. And she, the Scandinavian television presenter, swooned and said, ‘Ohhhhh, great! You’re here!’ And she moved over to the space her children were making for her at the other table and midway between the two tables his lips touched her cheek.

  ‘I’ve got the car,’ he said, like he was Colin Firth. ‘And Susan is fine for Thursday with the kids. So we’re free.’

  And I wasn’t even jealous of him because he did look a bit like Colin. He too was part of me. In the great oneness of the cosmos, and the oneness of the morning, he was only another part of the great oneness inside me. We were all one. That was the point I kept telling myself. In fact, maybe he was indeed Colin Firth. Maybe he actually was himself, and she was some old friend and he was bringing her to Italy for a break. Maybe she had cancer and he had flown in that morning out of compassion. ‘And Susan is fine for Thursday with the kids.’ So that was great! They were fine. They were free. How wonderful. I could share their joy. I wasn’t one of those people who phone into radio talk shows to complain about the world; someone who would object to Susan and Colin and herself with her lovely babies driving around in a fancy car. Maybe they have a house in Leitrim, I thought. Maybe they’re going up there for the weekend, to their modest little cottage in the hills. And who knows, they might like to meet other people like themselves; blow-ins as we’re called in rural Ireland. Should I lean across and say, ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry for interrupting, but you’re not by any chance going to Leitrim?’

  And he would turn to me, and then I’d know it was Colin Firth and he’d say, ‘By jove, yes we are. We have a little cottage up there that we got for a song, but we don’t know where to go for the fishing.’

  ‘Ahh-ha,’ I would reply, ‘I’m so glad you asked. You see, I too live in Leitrim and my wife is away and of course you must come for dinner.’

  ‘How spiffingly wonderful,’ Colin might say. And we’d all be friends and have a great old weekend.

  These fantasies almost unbalanced me. I spilled half my coffee on the table and so I decided to get back out onto the street and start walking before I did more damage than a bull in a china shop.

  Thirty minutes later, I was almost at my hotel. The jeep was under the trees at the corner of the car park. I could see from a distance that it had been drenched with bird shit.

  I paid the bill, went out to the jeep, brushed the bird shit off the windscreen, threw my luggage in the back, turned on the ignition and asked the sat-nav to show me the way home.

  HEADING BACK to Leitrim, I was thinking of the fifty-inch television set sitting in the front room of our cottage. It’s so big that we couldn’t find a table to accommodate it. In fact, we didn’t even buy it. It was a gift from a relation. And when a big television set comes out of the back of a van, you can’t really say no. We just succumbed to the irresistible condition of being Irish.

  Everyone in Ireland watches television. We’re addicted to the sense of reality that it provides. Television seems real and more clear than ordinary life. People go to football matches, but they come home early from the pub to see what the game was like on television. During the boom, people used to spend Sunday mornings in Harvey Norman and Currys where there were electrical sections dominated by walls of large television sets. Televisions mounted on sleek black stands, with separate speakers on either side. Men would edge up to them and touch the screens like devout monks touching the tabernacle, knowing that within were all the digital paraphernalia to manifest the ultimate truth, to screen the world in all its deep reality, to show things not just as they are to human eyes but in their essence, in high definition.

  And all because we lost faith in God, and in the foggy world of metaphysical reality.

  The material realm became our truth. In rural Ireland people built houses that would have sufficed as palaces for Arabian princes, majestic castles on the sad little drumlins, and began driving around the pot-holed roads of the nation in BMWs and top-of-the-range 4x4s. The ground of human existence was established in tangible things. It was imperative that everything was real. Even the clarity of Tony Soprano’s wife’s lips when she was putting on her gloss required high definition. Sometimes I suspect that it was faith in high definition that encouraged the fashion among some women to eradicate pubic hair with fancy little pink razors, as a sort of assurance that the vagina itself was also a material certainty.

  Myself and the beloved missed the excesses of the Celtic Tiger. We lived in a cottage and we couldn’t find a place where the enormous television would fit without one end of it blocking a door or masking a window. So we positioned it at an angle, between the fireplace and the glass door into the sunroom. I say ‘we’, but it was me tha
t wanted it.

  And I am wondering as I drive, why am I addicted to television? Why do I have a television the size of a small cinema screen? Something that is so out of proportion to the size of the house that it is impossible to be in the room for a single moment without being aware of it. I can’t answer this except to say that sitting down with the beloved to watch soap operas was always a way of entering deeply into her presence. The fact that the programme was vacuous and devoid of any meaning made it an even deeper experience for us. It was like entering the great bliss void together, like watching flames flickering in the fire hundreds of years ago.

  I suppose there’s very little to do in rural Ireland, at the top of a mountain on a winter night.

  This is something that urban people can never understand. They ask me at dinner tables if I watch television, and I go on for longer than is necessary, exalting the pleasures of Home Box Office dramas, and they sniff and say, ‘How interesting,’ as if I was talking about a zoo in China. When I’m finished, someone flips a comment in front of me like a dagger. ‘Of course, we never watch television.’ And that ends that. But they don’t know what it’s like to live up a mountain.

  But it’s not just televisions that we need. Country people listen to the radio all day with a collective intensity that marks them out from city dwellers. They listen morning, noon and night. They stop what they’re doing, they stand still with a dishtowel in the hand or they put down the razor or they become transfixed at the fire grate holding a coal scuttle just to hear the next sentence that the person on the wireless might utter.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ some man says, coming into the kitchen to address his wife, because there’s always more than one radio in any house.

  In the kitchen, there is often a big old-fashioned wireless, the one that got thrown out of the sitting room when the first television arrived. A big bulky box of art deco panels with a glowing glass window and a dial that spins across the medium waves. And in the living room, there might be something more contemporary; twin speakers on either side of a wifi adapter perhaps, with a cradle and socket to connect an iPod or iPad, and which might transmit all the radio stations in the world. But there are usually radios upstairs too, in the bedrooms. €30 worth of vulgarity from discount stores, made in China, silver-coloured lumps of plastic shining like the dashboard of a Korean jeep with a transistor inside that can only pick up RTÉ or Shannonside or Galway Bay FM or whatever the local radio station in the district is. Which is what everyone wants. If something was said and you missed it then you would be the only one in the supermarket queue who couldn’t comment on it. And maybe you’d feel like you had missed something. The details of their funerals read out in solemn tones with soft music in the background to soothe the listeners; the women toiling at the sink in tears, and the men at the dinner table with broken hearts.

  Radio provides a focus, an object for unconscious anger and other emotions that may arise. Like the child who is bullied in school and then goes to his bedroom and pulls off his teddy bear’s ears, there is nothing more dangerous than a man pent up with a rage that has festered from some abuse or humiliation that was never acknowledged. And it’s easy for a wife to become the negative ‘other’ who carries the can for such a man’s wounds. In Ireland, hurt is the default condition of the psyche. We are marked by a sense of victimhood, and a foggy wound that is linked backwards to the Famine, to oppression by the British, to the tyranny of nuns and priests, and forwards into all possible situations in the future wherein we may be hurt. That’s what we listen for. We are not really listening to the radio. We are monitoring our own unconscious. We are waiting to be annoyed.

  And the minute we are annoyed, we take up the telephone. ‘Did you hear that bastard on the radio? Wasn’t he outrageous? I’m so upset. I think I’ll phone Liveline this afternoon.’ And on it goes for hours or days.

  The indignation of the people becomes sulphuric. We suck up the hurt, nurture the wound and relish the pain. We rise for a moment out of our unconscious soup of jigs and reels because we have been offended. We have been wronged again. And so we remain hopelessly addicted to our little receivers.

  I suppose we say so little of any meaning to each other face to face that we need someone else to expose emotions. We talk at each other in a manner that Freud once described as the ability to say nothing by saying everything, and then we switch on the radio to hear pain expressed, depression revealed, anxiety and orgasms gushing over the airwaves at us. And we love it. And if a woman is weeping at the sink while chopping the carrots or if a man is swallowing rage with every bite of his rasher while he sits to his tea with the evening news, it is a private affair.

  ‘Your eyes are red, my darling. Were you crying?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she protests, ‘I was only chopping onions.’

  We talk about nothing by talking about everything. And in the countryside people who are isolated cannot bear to look at the blowing rain, or hear the keening wind across all the bleak bogs and flooded fields. So they listen to the radio. Single men with cupboards full of tablets listen. Unmarried brothers who once courted the same woman listen. Spinsters who live on sliced ham and wrinkled lettuce leaves from their own gardens listen.

  My mother used to put the radio on at night when she was going to bed. Her favourite station was the BBC World Service. She would put it on at full volume and it remained so until morning. Whenever I stayed with her, during her later years, I would try to sleep in the room next to hers, awake until maybe 4 a.m., listening to correspondents from the Sudan and Nigeria discussing crop failures, threats of drought and the ongoing casualties of war.

  I asked her once why she kept it on. She said it helped her sleep. I think what she meant was that when the radio was on, she could hear nothing else. She wasn’t vulnerable to disturbing sounds in the night that might frighten her. If someone broke into the house, she wouldn’t know about it unless the robbers came upstairs and asked her to turn down the volume.

  Myself and the beloved were not strictly speaking addicted to television. For there were many nights when we never turned it on at all. Hundreds of nights when she sat by the fire sketching or fingering her iPad or knitting, and I sat there at the opposite side of the fire, both of us cramped on dainty little armchairs and huddled towards the flames, because the house is so small, with our backs to the monstrous television set and I would just gaze at her in awe, and be amazed at how she could knit.

  I was driving past the turn for Maynooth, thinking how wonderful it was that an academy once as intellectually stimulating as a wardrobe of dead flies had finally been transformed into a real university, bristling with young students. I imagined what it might be like to saunter through the gates again towards the library, now probably full of beautiful young women and not the sad, pale-faced clerics who had sat there with me on creaking chairs reading books about Thomas Aquinas. And then suddenly the jeep drifted across two lanes as I daydreamed, and a car behind me blew his horn to get me out of the way.

  THE ROAD TO Leitrim is straight and bypasses most towns, but I left the N4 at the Roosky exit because I wanted to visit an old friend, a long-black-haired poet whose wife was expecting a baby in the coming days. Both of them were at home and I went in and joined them for a pot of tea, and I said, ‘The beloved has gone to Poland.’

  He was watching television. She was in the bedroom.

  He said, ‘You will miss her.’

  I agreed.

  His long black hair was tied with an elastic band at the nape of his neck and he wore silver rings on his thumb and forefinger as he rolled a joint.

  ‘I feel fragile,’ I said. ‘I hope to do a bit of meditation when I’m alone in the house. I had this notion that I’d set up a nice secure nirvana, a solitude of calm abiding, and just sit watching the grass grow for a month. But now that she’s gone, I’m wondering if that is just a fantasy.’

  ‘Sure, she’ll be back in a couple of weeks, man. Relax. You’re fretting too much.’
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  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’ll have a great time on your own,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a chance to check out things inside yourself. And don’t be afraid to go in there.’

  ‘In where?’ I asked.

  He pointed to his head.

  ‘Get in there, man. Take the opportunity to go inside.’

  I’m always alarmed when people begin talking like they were in an episode of Star Trek.

  ‘I’ll probably just sit on my arse for six weeks,’ I muttered.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you’re looking good. You’ve lost weight.’

  ‘But there’s another issue,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I get frustrated with myself. I think I have become domesticated.’

  ‘How do you know you’re domesticated?’

  ‘I got slippers for Christmas,’ I replied. ‘With a tartan pattern.’

  ‘Man,’ he said, ‘that’s not good.’

  His wife emerged from the bedroom, a woman with long sandy hair, wearing a sleeveless dress of rainbow colours down to her ankles. I couldn’t resist staring at her long, elegant toes as they peeped out from under the dress and flapped about in brown leather sandals. He asked me if I wanted another cup of tea.

  She had been doing yoga in the bedroom, she said, and now she was going out for air. She looked at his smoking cigarette with sadness. I kissed her on the cheek, as a sort of hello and goodbye, and wished her well. He got up and hugged her too. ‘Love ya, baby,’ he muttered, and held the door for her as she went out into the world like a goddess to bless the cosmos or water the plants. When she was gone, we both sat in silence staring at the door. The room felt completely empty. He asked me again if I wanted another cup of tea, but I refused.

  I continued on towards Carrick-on-Shannon and then to Drumshanbo where I stopped at the Gala shop to get some shopping, and finally out the Drumkeerin road, and up the narrow lane we call the mountain road, beyond the dirty sheep, the hungry horses and the abandoned thatched studio that two Hungarian artists once lived in before they fled to lower ground on the other side of the lake where they set up a ceramic studio. I could see the wind turbines up ahead near Spion Kop. Each year, there are more blades. More pillars of white reaching into the sky, confusing the hen harriers. They sneak them up on great transporter vehicles at night when people are asleep.