Stones of Aran Read online

  Stones of Aran

  LABYRINTH

  TIM ROBINSON

  Introduction by

  JOHN ELDER

  The Lilliput Press

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction

  I. EAST

  Sworn to the Tower

  Maidenhair

  Sermons in Stones

  Discrepancies

  Dwelling

  The Fitzpatricks

  Tales from the Hill

  The Invisible Tower

  Origin and Vanishing-Point

  Dark Angel

  Mementos of Mortality

  Sometime Places

  Gold and Water

  Development

  Statistic and Sentimental Tourists

  An Ear to the Coffin

  Backwaters

  Climbing the Hill

  Breathing Space

  Mainistir

  Among the Thorns

  Lights in the Darkness

  Evelyn’s Shop

  Locus Terribilis

  A Fool and His Gold

  In Search of Wasted Time

  The Four Beauties

  The Bed of Diarmaid and Gráinne

  Modalities of Roughness

  The Blood of the Heart

  Spuds

  Black Harvest

  A Mouthful of Echoes

  II. RESIDENCE

  III. WEST

  On the Boundary

  The Village of Contented Women

  Storm-Driven Male

  The Shining Ways

  Moongrazing

  The Clock

  Going to Cill Mhuirbhigh

  Ancient Histories

  The Ferocious O’Flahertys

  The Big House

  Dún Aonghasa Revisited

  Malediction

  An Unfathomable Puddle

  Clochán

  A Poet and His Village

  Eoghanacht

  Seven Churches and a Factory

  Looking Out of Aran

  Running Out of Time

  IV. POSTSCRIPT

  The Lesser Aran

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  MAPS

  The Aran Islands, Galway, and Clare

  Árainn

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Stones of Aran, Tim Robinson’s two-volume masterpiece, consists of Pilgrimage, published in 1986, and Labyrinth, which came out in 1995. It’s hard to think of another author in the literature of place who has managed to combine such intricacy and precision in the mapping of his home terrain with such a passionate, questing voice. Robinson’s adopted landscape in these books is that of the Aran Islands, rugged limestone outcroppings that arise to the west of Galway and Connemara. He organized Pilgrimage as a series of walks that took him around the entire perimeter of Árainn, the biggest of the islands, to which he and his wife, Mairead, had moved in 1972. In concluding that first account, however, he also recognized the need for a complementary set of excursions: “for a book to stand like an island out of the sea of the unwritten it must acknowledge its own bounds, and turn inward from them, and look into the labyrinth.” The labyrinth is Robinson’s image for the geological and historical tangle of Árainn’s interior—its crevices and bogs; its ruins, relics, and perennially resalvaged building materials; all its tales with their endless variations on the lives of saints.

  From the start Robinson knows the exact spot where this second book will plunge into the interior—Túr Mháirtín at the island’s eastern tip, where the circle of his meditative stations began and ended in Pilgrimage. But the complexity of his new undertaking is compounded by the fact that his excursions must often rely on memory rather than direct observation, since his wife and he moved to the Connemara mainland more than a decade earlier, just before Robinson had finished the first volume. Further, he is determined now to confront more directly both his own mind and his motivation as an author. Specifically, he must grapple with a certain quality of obsessiveness that makes the achievement of any resolution difficult for him. In this regard, he will be both Theseus seeking the minotaur and the hidden inhabitant of the labyrinth.

  Robinson is fascinated by every aspect of these flinty, windswept, but long-inhabited islands. Even when compared with a writer like John McPhee, who shares his fascination with the lore of plate tectonics, mineralogy, and weathering, Robinson’s geological investigations are extraordinarily tenacious and sustained. In his collection of myths about St. Enda and the founders of Aran’s monastic tradition, his genealogy of the O’Flaherty family and other prominent residents, and his accounting of archaeological discoveries at the various prehistoric dúns, or forts, his writing is similarly precise. This is one of the first things a reader notes about Labyrinth: facts and stories are not subordinated to a larger plot or used to reinforce an argument. Their accumulation is itself the central project: a determination to see and hear what this stony island-world has to say for itself. Such richness of details and connections helps a reader, too, feel the heightened alertness of an expedition into uncharted territory.

  Robinson, who was already a cartographer before he turned writer, also manages to shape his books with a special force-fulness. As in the maps of the Aran Islands and Connemara produced by his company, Folding Landscapes, the literary terrain of Stones of Aran strives for a reliable correspondence with the outer world of shoreline, headlands, and roads. His Aran books and maps are similar, in fact, for their remarkably fine-grained interior detail. The key that accompanies Robinson’s map Oileáin Árann, with its scale of 2.25 inches to the mile, equally reflects his ambitions as a writer—with its symbols not only for Neolithic tombs, ancient ringforts, and mysterious grassy mounds, but also for buildings still in use, tumbled-down walls, and the boreens or paths along which farmers, hikers, writers, and readers may all thread this intricate realm.

  In a section of Labyrinth called “The Clock,” Robinson reflects upon his book’s goal of arriving at a “coherence of mind” that is “in a connection that can be symbolized as spatial with that universal origin.” He strives to achieve a mode of thought and a quality of language that are precisely aligned with the origins, forms, and processes of these islands. As he walks along the faultlines of Árainn on their westward course he experiences something akin to the “songlines” by which Australia’s aboriginal people guide their own pilgrimages. Bruce Chatwin has discussed the way in which landmarks of the outback define hallowed paths across that island-continent, avenues that are inseparable from ancient creation myths and that also stimulate an immediate, spiritually charged awareness of the land. For Robinson, similarly, each stage in his exploration of Aran’s fissured surface tells its own story—one that implicitly encompasses the universe for an attentive listener. “Spatial,” as Robinson uses the word above, thus describes a mode of deep relationship to topography that comes from abandoning oneself to a certain moment in a particular place.

  The recurrent references to Proust in Labyrinth—one section of which is entitled “In Search of Wasted Time”—express Robinson’s desire for a wholeness in which no moment is wasted, no object expendable. Proust insists upon the potential for such unity in his own search, as Ruskin does in another book which Labyrinth invokes—Stones of Venice. These are not merely literary references for Robinson. They are maps he has consulted in preparing for his own cartography of inwardness. Near the end of this book he sums up his enterprise in this way:

  Pilgrimage, the ritual of attending to things one by one as we come to them, enacts a necessity forced on us by our limitations, our evolutionary stage of mind. In reality everything is co-present (or at least, and so as not once
again to oversimplify, an uncountable number of stories struggle competitively through every event of space-time). Even a pilgrimage narrow-mindedly devoted to one end is endlessly ambushed and seduced by the labyrinth it winds through, while the most comprehensive course we can chart through the incomprehensible is an evasive shortcut.

  But Robinson’s wry awareness of his inadequacy to the task he has set himself also allows for another of the most valuable aspects of Labyrinth. Again and again, playful moments spring author and readers at least temporarily from the rigor of his larger design. Like an Aran farmer dismantling and rebuilding a stone wall when he wants to move his cattle over to another field, Robinson knocks over his concepts and designs from time to time, in scenes that inject a certain silly quality into his quest. His embedded biographies, in both third person and first person, like the highly unsympathetic review of his own book he imagines at one point, cast a humorous glance at the ambitions of Stones of Aran.

  Equally striking are a cluster of scenes in which the writer is shown in a more childlike light. Whether Robinson is evoking the gleeful muteness into which he and other patrons of Evelyn’s store enter when an unsuspecting tourist enters that modest establishment, his misadventures questing after sheep with Mikey, his attempt to be of assistance to a farmer taking his bull out to service a cow, or his giddy skipping down the scarps under a glorious sunset, he introduces an exuberant quality to Labyrinth. The seriousness of the whole endeavor is not lessened by such moments. Rather, it is illuminated by them, as the stony islands themselves are transfigured when bathed in light from the west. Long before page 540, where his exclamation “Off with you, nothing but a pack of marked cards!” recalls Alice in Wonderland, a reader of this book has had occasion to remember several of the classic English books for children. The Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh remain potent for so many adults because of the ways they evoke long days spent poking about out of doors. Robinson’s own secession from institutional life when settling in Aran is a resolute and earnest business, but at the same time feels like a kind of spree. Perhaps Joyce’s word “jocoserious” captures this doubleness of intent.

  Proust famously recovered his own childhood in the taste of a tea-soaked cake. In Labyrinth Robinson’s discovery of a nautiloid fossil reminds him of “a pearly nautilus wonderfully striped in carmine on rosy white” in “a book of my childhood days, The Story of Living Things and their Evolution by Eileen Mayo.” He recalls how “[t]his magically named creature used to conduct my imagination through phosphorescent seas across which jungle-archipelagoes breathed cinnamon and a diffuse longing for some incomprehensible adventure.” Such entrancing associations with a fossil preserved in the chiseled rock of Aran reinforce Robinson’s sense that this gray northern realm is itself a touchstone for all the largest geological and evolutionary transformations of our earth. They account for his decision to devote so many years to circling and then bisecting this island less than eight and a half miles in length and less than two and a half miles across at its widest. And they always remind him, amid his most painstaking investigations, that “the most comprehensive course we can chart through the incomprehensible is an evasive shortcut.”

  —JOHN ELDER

  Stones of Aran

  LABYRINTH

  However, it will already be clear that Aran, of the world’s countless facets one of the most finely carved by nature, closely structured by labour and minutely commented by tradition, is the exemplary terrain upon which to dream of that work, the guidebook to the adequate step. Stones of Aran is all made up of steps, which lead in many directions but perpetually return to, loiter near, take shortcuts by, stumble over or impatiently kick aside that ideal. (Otherwise, it explores and takes its form from a single island, Árainn itself; the present work makes a circuit of the coast, whose features present themselves as stations of a Pilgrimage, while the sequel will work its way through the interior, tracing out the Labyrinth.)

  (from “Timescape with Signpost,” Stones of Aran, Vol. I, Pilgrimage)

  From this point … I see once again the ruined watch tower perched high above the Sound, marking the resting-place of St. Gregory of the Golden Mouth. It suggests the possibility of going round the island once again, looking at everything in more detail, or in others of the infinity of ways of looking. Perhaps a second circuit would be more rewarding now that my pace has been chastened by so many miles, my breath deepened by so many words. But for a book to stand like an island out of the sea of the unwritten it must acknowledge its own bounds, and turn inward from them, and look into the labyrinth.

  (conclusion of Pilgrimage)

  I. EAST

  SWORN TO THE TOWER

  Unquestionable answer to unanswerable question, this volume must close what the first opened, so that I can store them away safely, like two mirrors face to face. Therefore I must begin now at the place where my circuit of the coast of Árainn ended, and from which I am to broach the interior. That place, determined long ago by the structure of the whole book, is at the eastern tip of the island, where a hillside of rock and weather-beaten grass rises from the arc of sand and shingle about a little bay to a small ruined tower. At what era Túr Mháirtín watched over the safety or the subservience of Aran is unknown; but for some years now, in my mind, its function has been to keep my place in the book, marking a promise to return from long wanderings in Connemara and see my way through this island. Old maps call the tower St. Gregory’s Monument. The saint of the golden mouth, even after years of prayer and fasting, felt himself unworthy of a grave in Aran of the Saints, and on the approach of death commanded that his body be consigned to the sea in a barrel. Port Daibhche, the port of the barrel, is where the corpse was brought ashore by a miraculous current, in sign of his worthiness of the holy ground. I have now to write myself back onto that ground, and without benefit of miracle.

  But finding the entrance to the labyrinth is not the simplest of steps, for I find myself separated from it by another labyrinth. I no longer live in Aran; I cannot jump on my bicycle and go and have another look at that harsh grey hillside. My sight-lines and thought-lines to it are interrupted by the thick boggy hills and dazzling waters of Connemara. I am too far for touch, too near for Proustian telescopy. There is also a dense forest of signposts in the way, the huge amount of material I have assembled to help me. Here to my hand are a shelf of books, thirteen piled volumes of diary, boxes bursting with record cards, a filing-cabinet of notes, letters, offprints from specialist journals, maps and newspaper cuttings. Also, three ring-binders of writing accumulated over a dozen years towards this work, some of it outdated, misinformed, unintelligibly sketchy, some so highly polished it will have to be cracked open again in order to fuse with what is still to be written. What tense must I use to comprehend memories, memories of memories of what is forgotten, words that once held memories but are now just words? What period am I to set myself in, acknowledging the changes in the island noted in my brief revisitings over the years, the births and deaths I hear of in telephone calls? In what voice am I to embody the person who wrote that first volume with little thought of publisher or readership during a cryptic, enisled time, I who live nearer the main and have had public definitions attached to me, including some I would like to shake off—environmentalist, cartographer—and whose readers will open this volume looking for more of the same and will be disappointed if they get it? How am I to lose myself once again among the stones of Aran?

  Looking around for inspiration in this quandary I remember that from the saint’s monument one can just make out a mark, a greyish dot, on the brink of the highest cliff of Inis Meáin, a mile away across the sound. This is Cathaoir Synge, Synge’s Seat, a low structure of massive stones like a roofless hut open to the west, of unknown date and purpose. Here the writer used to sit and brood upon the abyss:

  The black edge of the north island is in front of me, Galway Bay, too blue almost to look at, on my right, the Atlantic on my left, a perpendicular cliff under m
y ankles, and over me innumerable gulls that chase each other in a white cirrus of wings … As I lie here hour after hour, I seem to enter into the wild pastimes of the cliff, and to become a companion of the cormorants and crows.

  I would like to use Synge’s vision of it to situate myself on that black edge, the beginning of my work, but at this crucial moment he is alienated from me. In an essay on his book The Aran Islands that grew out of his intense meditations on the cliff-top, I wrote that Synge was mistaken in thinking that the Irish name for the maidenhair fern is dúchosach (black-footed), and that as he knew so little about it he was wise not to treat of the Aran flora. Since then I have heard Aran people call that fern the dúchosach, my earlier source was wrong, and I am caught out in a petty rival-rousness. As if Synge, with his deep, intuitive eyes, cares whether or not I have more facts on Aran than he! The sage turns from me, listening to those clamorous gulls, whose language, he says, “is easier than Gaelic.” I shrink back to my filing-cabinet.

  My efficient record cards remind me, however, that that hillside I would like to refind myself on is called An Teannaire, the pump, from a recess in the cliffs below it where waves rush in and compress themselves into waterspouts, and that it has already been appropriated, if not by literature, then by the oral tradition.

  Thug sé an Teannaire mar spré dhó …

  He gave him the Pump as dowry…

  This is from Amhrán an “Chéipir,” the song of the “Caper,” composed in his head by Taimín Ó Briain, of the poetical O’Brians of Cill Éinne, near the beginning of this century. The “Caper” was a young fisherman from Cape Clear in Cork, who came with a boat called the Lucky Star to work out of Cill Rónáin, and married a girl from Iaráirne, the easternmost village of the island. My translation is a rough piece of work—but so is Taimín’s original: