A Book of Migrations

by Rebecca Solnit

  I could smell a faint aroma of pizza in the woods around Barney O’Reilly’s house. Barney O’Reilly had taken early retirement from his job as a state forester, in part because he disliked the new forestry policies being carried out, and he showed me around Portumna Woods and Lough Derg. The woods, which he had once taken care of as the head of a crew of about a dozen, were neglected now, he said, and they were being managed more for profit than for the public good. Happy to have a witness to what he thought was going wrong, he went into a long digressive monologue studded with Latin botanical names while showing me stately trees on which trainees had been permitted to practice tree surgery, harvested conifer stands that left eyesores, stone walls from the old estate being left to crumble and other signs of neglect.

  He insisted that such things would never happen in America, where the forests were protected, and I spluttered and thought of the hundreds of thousands of acres of primeval forest being chainsawed every year, but he was hard to interrupt. His America may have been safe and simple, but his picture of the changing west was gloomy. There was a mass exodus from rural areas, he said, and the small towns and shops would close down as the farmers went, and the locals would go to the cities or emigrate. The large farmers would buy up the small farms, and more and more of the west would be planted to subsidized forests, which create far fewer jobs than even livestock do. So the west would be reforested at last, but not as a triumph of nationalism, traditionalism, ruralism. The region would belong entirely to agribusiness, the state, and the tourist industry. It would exist entirely for outsiders.

  I had thought from the passion she exhibited that Sister Kathleen was protecting a magnificent wilderness from destruction, but it was only the small forest park of a minor aristocrat’s estate that had been transferred from private hands to state ownership. The forest had taken me aback, not because of what it was becoming but because of what it had always been: a mixed, managed, muddled wood. It had been the parklands of the estate, and one could have walked its perimeter in a couple of hours. It had some very pretty groves of beeches (which are not a native tree) and oaks (which are) and Monterey Cypress (which are Californian), but while wandering in what I thought was a forest I would suddenly find myself among trees that grew in rows or abutted the adjoining golf course. I realized that this was a place where Europeans were indigenous and my own criteria about nature and culture were meaningless, since nature or wilderness in America means the state of things before white people showed up or a condition in which human beings are a minority population. In such places, one can at least daydream of a primordial world, however inaccurately, but this was a historical world. The stone walls had the same authority of antiquity as the oldest trees and were not an imposition on them, and the place, whether tended or neglected, was nothing but a garden. The most natural-looking bits were what had been arranged to suit the estate owners’ aesthetic of nature, and so even the trees were monuments to aristocratic tastes and land use patterns. The animals, the wildlife—fallow deer, badgers, shrews—were, like the decorative beasts in the borders of medieval manuscripts, well-loved, but hardly central to the story. And the story I had barged in on wasn’t about the preservation of the wild but of the local.

  The island Barney took us to was more dramatic. We set off in a little boat with an outboard motor across the smooth blue waters for the place where the cormorants nested. It was a tiny island, tearshaped, perhaps the size of a city block. Covered from shore to shore with leafless trees, its ground was thick not with leaves but with white feathers and guano. The stench was terrific. Every tree had a nest in it, and the cormorants kept up a constant screaming as they flew back and forth from lake to young. The trees were mostly Irish whitebeam, which are endangered, Barney explained, and the cormorants are endangered too, though they’re flourishing here. They used to nest on the seacoast but their habitat there was being destroyed, and so they had flown all this way up the Shannon to find nesting sites. The seventy pairs here ten years ago had become four hundred. Weighing the merits of endangered birds against endangered trees had me stumped, but Barney was all for the trees. The birds would survive because they were mobile, but the trees were helpless.

  George Santayana once wrote, “Has anyone ever considered the philosophy of travel? It might be worthwhile. What is life but a form of motion and a journey through a foreign world? Moreover locomotion—the privilege of animals—is perhaps the key to intelligence. The roots of vegetables (which Aristotle says are their mouths) attach them fatally to the ground, and they are condemned like leeches to suck up whatever sustenance may flow to them at the particular spot where they happen to be stuck.” But there is more to be said for being local than Santayana allows. To be local is to merge into your world and become vulnerable as it is vulnerable; to be a traveler is to become the pared-back person I was beginning to recognize, free to invent and learn, but not to live in that local correspondence between memory and landscape. It may be that memory requires a locale and a community, the continuity of reminders in the landscape and people with a shared frame of reference.

  The mobile and local are not necessarily oppositional. The migrants and nomads who follow circuits that tie them intimately to multiple locales are polylocal and must not be confused with drifters whose passage is linear, not circular. And change is not always akin to motion; motion is simply one way to keep pace with or outrun change—or stagnation. I like to claim to be on the side of the birds, but being a bird was a vacation for me. I haven’t changed regions since I was five. Watching places over extended periods, I could see how radically they were being transformed, while most of the transient residents who passed through thought they were seeing stable neighborhoods, towns, cities, ecologies, economies, and climates. The mobile person sees the landscape she passes through as static, because she changes faster than it does, but the stationary person sees that everything around is changing. Had I not spoken to anyone in Portumna, I would have thought it was a sleepy town in which nothing was happening, rather than a place in which the past was being unraveled faster than people could bear.

  The rocklike foundation for identity an ancestral land is supposed to be was dissolving before my eyes into a river of transformations. The longer I passed through the Ireland that both the Irish and the Irish-Americans seem to imagine as a solid foundation, the more it seemed instead to be made up of a continuous flow of discontinuities and accelerating movements, of colonizations and decolonizations, liberations, exiles, emigrations, invasions, economic pendulums, developments, abandonments, acculturations, simulations. Another generation would sweep away rural culture, modify its Catholicism, assimilate to the European Community and the global markets and continue to emigrate, and through the hole they widened, the world would come pouring in. I stared out the window of the bus that took me away from Portumna, on an afternoon when the very air was still, and saw all the animals were lying down in the green fields like beasts at a nativity, waiting.

  14

  Wild Goose Chase

  In books, however, the Irish were always turning into birds. The old legends and romances are full of them, blessed, cursed, and chatty. There were the Children of Lir, whose stepmother turned them into swans but let the four of them keep their voices and sing enchantingly for the nine hundred years until St. Patrick came and their enchantment broke. There was my favorite impacted myth, “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel,” in which birds and people are so akin they breed and speak together. Birds with instructive messages show up in various saints’ lives and miraculous voyage narratives. At the Paradise of Birds St. Brendan sailed to, the birds were devout spirits with instructive messages, and birds, of course, often serve as messengers, from Noah’s dove to the raven who delivered bread to the desert fathers St. Anthony and St. Paul the Hermit. But they are peculiarly abundant in Irish culture.

  The ethnologist Artelia Court writes, “The Irish tradition that it is unlucky to kill or molest swans is rooted in the belief that swans
are the incarnations of human souls, frequently those of nobility, a belief reflected in present-day swan protection laws,” and in the twentieth century folklorists encountered Irish Travellers who believed that cranes and swans might be one’s grandparents. It may be a linguistic coincidence that the 1607 departure of the Ulster rulers Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell is in English called the Flight of the Earls, but the Wild Geese, another set of military leaders and soldiers who went into exile in France at the latter end of that century, were unmistakably avian (and may have had their revenge in the IRA’s flying columns of 1919). In this century, birds came to crowd Yeats’s poetry, some of them Greek, some Gaelic, like the watchers in “Cuchulain Comforted” who “sang, but had nor human tunes nor words” and “had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.” Some are all his own: aristocratic swans, various hawks, cocks, and peacocks, and the artificial bird singing in Byzantium. Joyce was as bird-mad, and his books have birds all over them.

  The centerpiece in this literary aviary, however, is The Frenzy of Sweeney, an early medieval masterpiece about a man become bird that has been intensively revived and reworked in this century. Buile Suibhne, as it’s titled in Irish, was written down sometime between the thirteenth and sixteenth century but is thought to have been composed by the ninth century. A sort of fairytale Hamlet, its alienation, suffering, and ambiguity have a peculiarly modern cast, though it seems to mix Christian and pre-Christian elements. Like the two creations of Eve in Genesis, there are two explanations given for the birdbrained madness and literal flight of King Sweeney. One cause is a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome from the horrors of the Battle of Magh Rath, the other, a curse by a holy man whom Sweeney had offended, so that the tale portrays the tension between the early church and those it had not converted. The battle took place in 637 between the High King of Ireland and the northeastern kingdom of Dal Riada, a sort of Scottish outpost in what is now Northern Ireland’s County Antrim; a Suibhne who apparently evolved into the literary Sweeney seems to have taken part in it. The Frenzy of Sweeney tells in verse and prose the wanderings of Sweeney after the battle and the clerical showdown, on through to his death in another churchyard.

  Birds are a pleasant image for the poet, who after all is a singer of sorts; Sweeney is a darker version of the artist as bird. Seamus Heaney speaks of him as “a figure of the artist, displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance.” Though the narrative of The Frenzy takes place in prose, the speeches are in verse, and most of them are Sweeney’s, and most of Sweeney’s are marvelous. His madness is ambiguous. Contemporary interpreters have tended to suggest that he merely thinks he can fly, but the tale itself suggests that there is a morphological component to his condition. Certainly he takes up perching in trees, leaps and flutters great distances, and switches over to a birdy diet of watercress and other wild greens. The 1913 translation by J. G. O’Keeffe includes the fine digressive footnote that old Norse literature describes a battlefield condition recalling that of the Vietnam vets said to have taken to the deep woods: “Cowardly men run wild and lose their wits from the dread and fear which seize them. And then they run into a wood away from other men, and there live like wild beasts . . . And it is said of these men that when they have lived in the woods in that condition for twenty years, then feathers grow on their bodies as on birds . . . but the feathers are not so large that they may fly like birds. Yet their swiftness is said to be so great that other men cannot approach them . . .” O’Keeffe suggests that the Norse account may be based on the Sweeney poem. Levitation, he points out, is also a common characteristic of medieval saints, and he adds, “Until quite recent times it was the general belief in Ireland that madmen were as light as feathers and could climb steeps and precipices.” Anguish, exile, distrust, and bird behavior make up the madness of Sweeney, and only the turbulence of the narrative seems to suggest the mental confusion that makes up modern madness.

  This is how the story goes. Sweeney at the height of his kingly powers is beautiful, belligerent, and anti-ecclesiastical. After his many assaults on Ronan—a follower murdered, a psalter tossed into a lake, a spear cast at Ronan himself—the holy man cursed him: “thou shalt be one with the birds” and added nakedness, “madness without respite,” and an eye-for-an-eye doom of death by spear. “Turbulence and unsteadiness, restlessness, and unquiet filled him, likewise disgust with every place in which he used to be and desire for every place which he had not reached . . . He went, like any bird of the air, in madness and imbecility.” His flight is an odd business. Sometimes he skims along the earth, sometimes he makes prodigious leaps, sometimes he can rise up out of the trees, often he falls. It has the uneasy, unsteady quality of flying in dreams, of movement sustained by concentration and will rather than innate ability.

  I have spent twenty or more years flying in my sleep with varying degrees of ease and anxiety, and of all the things that tempted me to claim a mystical blood relation to Ireland, nothing tempted me like its recurrent flying literature. Dreams of flight seem allegorical, perhaps about the dreamer’s sense of isolation, the unreliable ability to soar in language and imagination, and the desire to escape (and perhaps the weightless horizontality of the sleeping body). But even the usually prescriptive Freud admits, “Dreams of flying or floating in the air (as a rule, pleasurably) require the most various interpretations.” In French the word voleur means both flyer and thief; in Irish it seems as though flying and madness have a cultural if not an etymological association. But Sweeney flies another way, in the metaphorical modes of soaring poetry and flights of fancy: in his marvelous passages of nature poetry. For he has become a lover of green places, trees, and solitude, and a lyrical praiser of them, so that Buile Suibhne joins the Irish medieval tradition of nature panegyrics, as well as topographical obsession. Magic and tragic, it also recalls the more enchanting side stories of Arthurian romance: Lancelot going mad and becoming a wild man in the woods; Sir Gawain accepting the challenge of the Green Knight and lopping off his head, only to have the conversational severed head set up another rendezvous in the deep woods; all the lonely wandering among hermits and wild places of the Quest of the Holy Grail.

  Sweeney goes to Glen Bolcain, “ever a place of delight to madmen,” with its windgaps, beautiful wood, clean wells and springs, clear streams, sorrels, berries, wild garlic, and acorns. He endures much bodily suffering—cold, injury, hunger—and bemoans that and the regal identity he has lost. He wanders over Ireland and then England and adds exile to his litanies of complaints. His wife takes up with another man. A kinsman lures him out of the trees with the lie that all his family is dead and then shackles him and brings him back to his kingdom. In his old home, a hag comes and drives him back into madness and longing for his forest home. With a great praise poem of the trees and plants, he departs:

  Longing for my little home

  has come upon my senses—

  the flocks in the plain,

  the deer on the mountain.

  Thou oak, bushy, leafy,

  thou art high beyond trees;

  O hazlet, little branching one,

  O fragrance of hazel-nuts.

  Exile has become his home, home an exile. Sweeney has become an incurable malcontent on top of everything else, a hybrid birdman who belongs in neither place, and the only companionship he finds is with another birdy madman, an Englishman named Alan who goes off to die in a waterfall after they have been together a year. So it goes, episode after episode of Sweeney’s misery. He ends up hanging around another church, living on milk he drinks out of a milkmaid’s footprint in dung. The milkmaid’s husband in a jealous rage stabs Sweeney with the prophesied spear. Pierced through the left nipple and mortally wounded, Sweeney dies in the doorway of the church, promised that he will go to heaven.

  What about all these birds and the Irish tendency to turn into them? They suggest an identification with the ethereal, almost disembodied singing sweetness of birds, creatures of air rather than land,
a kind of angel complex for people who have an easier time being spiritual than physical (the holy ghost is often represented as a bird, not least in the blasphemous songs of Buck Mulligan). And they suggest of course the dichotomy of nesting and flying, of the stationary and the mobile, though it is the mobile that dominates. They suggest freedom and the desire to be so rootless one doesn’t even touch the mud and mire of earth, a counterimage to all the nationalist soil of Yeatsian poetry, and maybe to nationalism, to community, even to humanity and all the other ties that bind (though Sweeney ends up a tamed bird drinking from a footprint in the pastoral dung). The ongoing imaginative engagement with flight can also be read as a reflex of lack of freedom. Observations and fantasies of birds and flying things proliferate in the jail letters and drawings of Countess Markievicz, who participated in the Easter Rising, and, half a century earlier, the Fenian leader Michael Davitt documented his imprisonment in the book Letters to a Blackbird. Portrait of the Artist’s protagonist declares, “When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.” Heaney, Sweeney’s best interpreter, writes that “it is possible to read the work as a quarrel between free creative imagination and the constraints of religious, political, and domestic obligation.”

  Sweeney is the bird as emblem of exile, and much of his anguish is that of no longer belonging where he came from and not being able to become part of where he has ended up, the hybrid’s, immigrant’s, halfbreed’s, exile’s double identity in which each half cancels out the other: “disgust with every place in which he used to be and desire for every place which he had not reached.” Exile, from the Flight of the Earls to that of revolutionaries, peasant immigrants on post-Famine coffin ships, and writers looking for a more tolerant, diverse society, will become a major Irish theme, and so will Sweeney. In the twentieth centuryhe makes a stupendous and sustained reappearance, in many guises. The writer Fintan O’Toole declares, “If traditional myths had to be used, then they would not be the heroic, collective myths of Cuchulain or Fionn MacCumhail, or of Joyce’s Homer but the myths of Sweeney, the maddened existential outsider who was returned to again and again in the eighties in the visual arts, in theater, in poetry. Myth could be used, not to counteract the sense of fracture and isolation but to reinforce it.” But Sweeney’s shadow stretches not just over the last decade, but over the entire century: in T. S. Eliot’s recurrent Sweeney figure, in Seamus Heaney’s free translation of Buile Suibhne and in the Sweeney poems of his Station Island, in translations and references by many other Irish poets, and in the motifs of Joyce, to name some of his more prominent scribes.