My Time in Space (13 page)

To all these points I unreservedly subscribe. However, they do not exactly address the grounds for disquiet this essay is picking its way across. It may be that the imagery I have been discussing derives its power, pathos and persuasiveness from an illicit appeal to a supernaturalist mode of thought I reject. Liberating the saints and their miraculous wells from their rags of historicity, I use them as poetic expressions of the powers of nature – but does their relict
sanctity infect my poetry with untruth? Is the idea of a sacred landscape still viable? The ascetically naked and tonsured hills of the Burren have been extolled for their spirituality. This resonant claim arose recently in the context of defending the Burren against the Irish State and its minions, who wanted to build an ‘interpretative centre’ in a particularly open and unspoiled part of it and bring in coachloads of tourists, which would have
necessitated
straightening the winding lanes and so on – a misconceived scheme which was heroically opposed by a local group for nine years and finally defeated in 2000. I supported the defenders of the Burren, but I feel they were ill-advised in conjuring up ad-hoc spiritual values. The Burren claims attention in its own right through its many singularities, not as a pointer to something
transcending
it. (Chartres is a spiritual building in that sense; it points metaphorically, as well as architecturally, to heaven.) If the
Burren
appears sometimes to be unearthly, that is because of the narrowness of our perspectives on the Earth. And if the Earth appears to revenge itself for our violations, as it may be doing already through global warming, it is as a self-adjusting system of feedback loops, not as a conscious being acting with intent. In trying to capture my feelings about the territories I have explored, I once described myself as ‘a discriminating earth-worshiper’. But earth-worship itself is a sacrifice to an even deeper central fire, a
universally
immanent Deity, or that more subtle, distilled essence of it, the Divine, and these concepts are of no use to me either as explanations for whatever physics’ latest Superstring Theory
hasn’t
got tied up, or as lifebelts in the maelstrom of inexorable
personal
extinction, or as tokens of my many attitudes to this intriguing, stupendous and appalling world that for the time being includes me.

So, what I would like to find is a language for these questions, not dependent on personalizing the land, neither sexualizing nor spiritualizing my relationship with it. To date, all I have towards that is what I have written about in
Stones
of Aran
and elsewhere, the act of walking. To me, walking is a way of expressing, acting out, a relationship to the physical world; there are of course many others, notably in art. This sort of walking is an intense cognitive and physical involvement with the terrain, close to but not lapsing into identification with it, not a mysticism; and not a matter of getting from A to B but of lingering, revisiting, cross-hatching an area with one’s most alert and best-informed attention. And my maps are the lasting traces of such mobile reveries; they are drawn in footprints. Sometimes, looking back on the times they represent for me, I feel they have been dreamed in footprints.

There, for the time being, I stand. However, one more walk remains to be described …

One winter evening, cycling home from fieldwork in Inis Ní, as I passed under the great beechtrees that shadow the road just north of Roundstone, I heard a sound – axe, mallet, spade; I
forget
which, but one of the forthright notes of countryside handwork – from within the wood. The little demesne and the Victorian mansion hidden in it, once the home of the landlord’s agent, now belongs to a consortium of nature-loving Dutch who at that time employed as their gardener a learned hermit, a philosopher, perhaps a mystic, or so I had heard. I left my bike at the gate and went in to find this curiosity.

John Moriarty looked much as he appears on the cover of one
of the strange treatises that he was to publish subsequently: large-framed, at one with the spade or axe or mallet he was
shouldering
, in an ancient workjacket of many pockets and a wide leather belt that gave him the figure of a Tolstoy. His big visage also had enough pockets for a lifetime’s tremendous experiences, and was topped by a joyful explosion of grey curly hair. We talked, and as on many later occasions it took only a couple of introductory
sentences
to bring us to the One and the Many. Through a gap in the trees, Inis Ní appeared across the bay crystallized by the level rays of sunset; full of my findings, I named all its inlets and headlands and hillocks. John was admiringly receptive to this excursion into the Many, but his quest is interior. Some years earlier he had abandoned a university career in Canada (having looked up from the Keats ode he was expounding and realized how inadequate its assumptions were to the howling desert of snow filling the
classroom
window), and had returned to Ireland, supporting himself with odd jobs, searching for a place in which to purge his mind of its European culture and open it to the vastitude of the Divine. The intervening years had been of solitude, ascesis and near breakdown. But as I was to discover, his unremitting application to the working out of his vision is in no conflict with a fine sense of humour and a generous and inventive humanity.

On that occasion we each stood our ground, which according to me was on a certain planet, in such-and-such a country, county, barony, townland, and so definably on indefinitely, whereas for him this pyramidology of place was a pointless horror unless it ultimately rested on Divine Ground. Summing up, John felt that deep down we agreed; but I thought that this was typical of his metaphysical thirst for the One, and that in fact we
disagreed
, in accordance with my basic tenet that difference is the
sine
qua
non
of existence. As we parted, I remember, a huge full moon like a ripe peach floated up into a silk-green sky from the snow-dusted peaks of the Twelve Bens, and Connemara
momentarily
became a province of mystic Tibet.

After that John used to call in whenever he was in Roundstone for his frugal shopping, and we had many resounding arguments; one day M had to banish us from the kitchen because we were thumping each other over the head with the dreadful word ‘
epistemology
’ with such violence that the sauce she was preparing
separated
. On Sundays John would find M and me having breakfast in bed, sybaritically pillowed, and would take a seat opposite us, sip a cup of lukewarm water and hold forth about the Abyss until we began to feel it opening immediately at the foot of our bed. In those years he was compounding what seemed to me a bizarre synthesis of shamanism and Christology out of an exorbitant array of excerpts from all the world’s myths; I was anxious to get a sense of the whole of this mighty work, and persuaded him to send his bulky typescripts, which he was convinced were unpublishable, to Antony Farrell at Lilliput Press, who had venturesomely undertaken my
Stones
of
Aran.
The result to date has been five tomes,
Dreamtime
,
the trilogy
Turtle
Was
Gone
a
Long
Time,
and the
autobiographical
Nostos
–
slow sellers, largely ignored by the literary sceneshifters, but defiantly existent, asserting their rights to
shelf-space
in futurity; in all, a noble act of publication against the grain. I have been called upon to review them two or three times (‘Not more than 350 words
–
and please make it lively!’) and have done my best to square my admiration for John’s dedicated life and radiant spirit with doubts as to whether these writings adequately carry his genius, and my rejection of his points of departure and arrival (they are the same) with wonder at his gigantic
circumambulation
.
Hence the well-hedged tribute I see has been quoted on the jacket of his latest volume: ‘Even dissenters like myself can be grateful to John Moriarty, for he has gone farther up the front steps to heaven and down the back stairs to hell than most of us will ever dare.’

Then John left Connemara for distant Kerry, to our great loss. A year or so later I went to visit him there. He lives rather
isolatedly
within a panorama of mountains which includes a glimpse of just one of the Paps of Danu, Dhá Chích nAnann, a special object of veneration for him. Danu or Anu, the ‘mother of the Gods of Ireland’, is to be traced back through the Indo-European realm, appearing as Dôn the Welsh mother of wizards, reflected in the rivers Don, Danube and others, originating perhaps as the stream-goddess Danu of Sanskrit texts. On my journey down to
Killarney
, keeping a lookout to the left from the train window on John’s instructions, I had already seen the pair of smooth and shapely hills, each with a prehistoric summit cairn as nipple, lovely as only breasts can be. The next day John took me for a walk to their vicinity, to rejoice in the return of his strength after long debilitation, and, as it transpired, to invoke the blessing of the Goddess on my topographical labours.

It was the height of summer. Being taken for a walk by John is like being taken for a walk by a mountain, and we strode out mightily, blown along by a gale of talk. Towards the end of a long straight lane through farmland we diverted from the direct approach to the Paps and took a loop around a little valley –
ag
dul
deiseal
,
clockwise, sunwise, everything having to be done with ceremony – in order to visit a holy place known as the City Well, in old times a place of May Eve rituals and revelry. ‘City’ is a
mistranslation
of the Irish
cathair
,
a ringfort, and its ancient name was
Cathair Chrobh Dearg, the ‘fort of Red Claw’. Crobh Dearg is said to have been one of three sister nuns who are associated by folklore with fire in various ways. The chief of them, Latiaran, used to visit a forge every day to collect the ‘seed’ of the fire and carry it back to her cell in her apron. One day the smith
complimented
her on her pretty ankles, and in a moment of pride she looked down at them, whereupon her apron caught fire. Cursing the smith and prophesying that no smithy would ever flourish there in future, she sank into the ground and didn’t come up again until she reached her cell, which she never again left in daylight, to avoid being a cause of sin in others. Crobh Dearg too vanished into the earth where her holy well now is, by the entrance to the Cathair. This strange name, ‘Red Claw’, hints that behind the three saintly nuns looms the triple Goddess in her destructive guise as Badhbh (the carrion crow), Macha and Anu, vengeful spirits who hover over battlefields and glut themselves on carnage.

The Cathair is a grassy space enclosed by a low circular rampart of lichen-covered stonework, within which one visits,
pilgrim
-wise, a number of crosses inscribed on rock outcrops and set slabs, some of them with a little depression like a navel at the
centre
to which rain and dew supply holy water. Opposite the entrance, therefore in the place of honour, is the standard
blue-and
-white statuette of the Virgin Mary, whose cult has been superimposed on that of the Celtic mother-goddess. As John made his ‘rounds’, running his thumb along the grooves of the crosses, widened by centuries of believers’ thumbs, I hung about the entrance gate like a child dragged unwillingly to church, disapproving of John’s reabsorbtion into the ranks of the pious, and sardonically noting the plastic rubbish lying around the holy well.

The day already seemed to have taken a wrong turning, and
was to worsen. When he came out, John told me that a little farm building nearby which had sheltered a Court of Poetry in the old days of poetic Kerry had been bulldozed recently. We walked up through the last of the fields to the commonage. There were no larks; the farmers’ annual springtime burning-off of dead
vegetation
had seen to that. Mounds of stone and rubble had been dumped along the edge of the mountainside, and at the end of the track was the rusty corpse of a car. We took to the slope, and found ourselves treading across bare earth, cracked, greyish, with the texture of scar tissue. The hillside looked as if it had been burned, burned, burned, year in year out; it was the
tiere
gaste
of Arthurian and Celtic legend, the land laid waste and accursed through the King’s incapacity, which John interprets as our repression of Nature within and without us. We trekked across it in deepening depression. At the brow of the slope we left the burned-out area and trod into good deep heather in the little stream-valley coming down from between the Paps. Here John reverently took off his shoes; I did not. One more trial was to confront us: a fox stretched out across a tussock of heather as if basking in the sun, embalmed in the hyperreality of death,
converted
into an exact simulacrum of a fox, lifelike in every detail down to the shotgun pellets in it.

After that horror the journey improved. We climbed to the shallow ripply lake the stream spills out from, and picked our way around it to the beginning of the pass between the two hills. A grey and wind-raked mountain ash where the way begins to steepen marks the point beyond which John feels it would be
presumptuous
to go. Here, speaking out of this deep heart of the island of Ireland, he was to thank me for accomplishing the work it had been given me to do, and I could baulk and resile no
longer. Clambering up to the tree, he reached out and grasped it by one of its many elbows, then stretched back his free hand for me to hang onto, the last link in the chain that would conduct the attenuated and therefore bearable shock of the Divine. I have to omit words here once again. They were, like all John’s speech, generous, deeply considered, magniloquent, and I rejoice that at the last moment I was granted the good grace to receive them; but they are gone and the cliffs above have ceased to repeat them.