Stones of Aran (4 page)

A suggestion from the post mistress in the western village of Cill Mhuirbhigh gave me the form of this contribution: since I seemed to have a hand for the drawing, an ear for the placenames and legs for the boreens, why should I not make a map of the
islands
, for which endless summersful of visitors would thank and pay me? The idea appealed to me so deeply that I began work that same day. My conceptions of what could be expressed through a map were at that time sweeping but indefinite; maps of a very generalized and metaphorical sort had been latent in the abstract paintings and environmental constructions I had shown in London, in that previous existence that already seemed so long ago, but I had not engaged myself to such a detailed relationship with an actual place before. The outcome, published in 1975, was a better image of my ignorance than of my knowledge of Aran, but it was generously received by the islanders, prospered
moderately
with the tourists, and brought me into contact with the
specialists
in various fields who visited Aran. During the subsequent years of accumulation towards the second version of the map, published in 1980, I have walked the islands in companionship with such visiting experts as well as with the custodians of local lore whom I sought out in every village, and have tried to see Aran through variously informed eyes—and then, alone again, I have gone hunting for those rare places and times, the nodes at which the layers of experience touch and may be fused together. But I find that in a map such points and the energy that accomplishes such fusions (which is that of poetry, not some vague “
interdisciplinary
” fervour) can, at the most, be invisible guides, benevolent
ghosts, through the tangles of the explicit; they cannot themselves be shown or named. So, chastened in my expectations of them, I now regard the Aran maps as preliminary storings and sortings of material for another art, the world-hungry art of words.

However, although the maps underlie this book, the
conception
of the latter dates from a moment in the preparation for the former. I was on a summer’s beach one blinding day watching the waves unmaking each other, when I became aware of a wave, or a recurrent sequence of waves, with a denser identity and more
purposeful
momentum than the rest. This appearance, which passed by from east to west and then from west to east and so on,
resolved
itself under my stare into the fins and backs of two
dolphins
(or were there three?), the follower with its head close by the flank of the leader. I waded out until they were passing and
repassing
within a few yards of me; it was still difficult to see the smoothly arching succession of dark presences as a definite
number
of individuals. Yet their unity with their background was no jellyfish-like dalliance with dissolution; their mode of being was an intensification of their medium into alert, reactive self-
awareness
; they were wave made flesh, with minds solely to ensure the moment-by-moment reintegration of body and world.

This instance of a wholeness beyond happiness made me a
little
despondent, standing there thigh deep in Panthalassa (for if Pangaea is shattered and will not be mended by our presence on it, the old ocean holds together throughout all its twisting
history
): a dolphin may be its own poem, but we have to find our rhymes elsewhere, between words in literature, between things in science, and our way back to the world involves us in an endless proliferation of detours. Let the problem be symbolized by that of taking a single step as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin’s arc to its wave. Is it possible to think towards a
human
conception of this “good step”? (For the dolphin’s ravenous
cybernetics
and lean hydrodynamics induce in me no nostalgia for
imaginary
states of past instinctive or future theological grace. Nor is the ecological imperative, that we learn to tread more lightly on
the earth, what I have in mind—though that commandment, which is always subject to challenge on pragmatic grounds if
presented
as a mere facilitation of survival, might indeed acquire some authority from the attitude to the earth I would like to hint at with my step.) But our world has nurtured in us such a
multiplicity
of modes of awareness that it must be impossible to bring them to a common focus even for the notional duration of a step. The dolphin’s world, for all that its inhabitants can sense Gulf Streams of diffuse beneficences, freshening influences of rivers and perhaps a hundred other transparent gradations, is endlessly more continuous and therefore productive of unity than ours, our craggy, boggy, overgrown and overbuilt terrain, on which every step carries us across geologies, biologies, myths, histories, politics, etcetera, and trips us with the trailing
Rosa
spinosissima
of personal associations. To forget these dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings, but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under foot at any given moment would be a crushing backload to have to carry. Can such contradictions be forged into a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground? At least one can speculate that the structure of
condensation
and ordering necessary to pass from such various types of knowledge to such an instant of insight would have the
characteristics
of a work of art, partaking of the individuality of the mind that bears it, yet with a density of content and richness of
connectivity
surpassing any state of that mind. So the step lies beyond a certain work of art; it would be like a reading of that work. And the writing of such a work? Impossible, for many reasons, of which the brevity of life is one.

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
guide-book
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 short-cuts 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
.) And although I am aware that that moment on the beach, like all moments one remembers as creative, owes as much to the cone of futurity opening out from it as to the focusing of the past it accomplished, I will take it as the site of my book, so that when at last it is done I will have told the heedless dolphins how it is, to walk this paradigm of broken, blessed, Pangaea.

The circuit that blesses is clockwise, or, since the belief is
thousands
of years older than the clock, sunwise. It is the way the
fire-worshipper’s
swastika turns, and its Christianized descendant St. Bridget’s cross. Visitors to holy wells make their “rounds” so, seven times, with prayers. This book makes just one round of Árainn, though seven could not do justice to the place, and with eyes raised to this world rather than lowered in prayer. On Easter Fridays in past centuries the Aran folk used to walk around the
island
keeping as close to the coast as possible, and although
nothing
has been recorded on the question it is inconceivable that they should have made the circuit other than in the right-handed sense. This writing will lead in their footsteps, not at their
penitential
trudge but at an inquiring, digressive and wondering pace.

I start at the eastern end of the island. The road from Cill
Rónáin
through Cill Éinne continues past the last village, Iaráirne, and then makes a sharp turn north to a little bay; there is a stile in the wall at that turn from which a faint field-path continues the line of the road eastward, across smooth turf in which hosts of rabbits are digging sandpits, to the exact spot I have in mind. Here one can sit among the wild pansies and Lady’s bedstraw with the low rocky shore at one’s feet, and get one’s bearings. Behind and to the left is level ground of sandy fields, and dunes in the
distance
. To the right the land rises in stony slopes to the ruins of an ancient watch tower on the skyline. A mile and a half ahead across the sound is Inis Meáin; the third island, Inis Oírr, is hidden
behind it, but the hills of the Burren in County Clare appear
beyond
, a dozen miles away. Since the three islands and that
north-western
corner of Clare were once continuous—before the millions of years of weathering, the glaciers of the Ice Ages and the
inexhaustible
waves cut the sea-ways between them—the land-forms visible out there, a little abstracted as they are by distance, can be seen as images of Árainn itself in the context of its geological past, and it is valuable to read them thus before going on to clamber among the details and complexities of the way ahead, so that an otherwise inchoate mass of impressions may find an ordering and a clarification.

Since this opposing, western face of Inis Meáin is cliffed it is in fact like a cross-section of Árainn. The highest land lies across the centre, and from there to the south the skyline declines evenly to sea level, giving the southern half of the island the appearance of a long dark wedge driven in between sky and sea. The cliffs’ ledges and the great platforms of rock along their feet all have the same slant as the skyline, so that the island is visibly made up of a small number of thick parallel layers slightly canted to the south. But if this is an image of Árainn, it is from a time before its southern range of cliffs was formed, for Inis Meáin’s coast is low on the south and stands well out beyond the general line of Árainn’s Atlantic cliffs. Why the ocean has been able to cut back just one of the three islands into south-facing cliffs is a question to which
certain
features of the extreme western tip of Árainn may suggest an answer—but that is as yet a dozen miles of walking and a hundred pages of reading ahead.

While the profile of Inis Meáin’s southern half is simple to the point of monotony, that of the northern half has a wild vigour
recalling
one’s experience of that strange island; it hops and jumps down from the central heights, and then reaches the north in two long strides with a sharp fall between them. The land is enlivened by these little scarps; the houses are in their shelter, the wells at their feet, the boreens wind up and down them. Árainn is the same except that the aprons of bare rock below the terraces that
carry the villages are not so wide; here, as in Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr, the terrain south of the ridge-line is uninhabited, severe,
disconcertingly
open to non-human immensities, while the northern flank of the island is at least raggedly shawled with the human presence. In fact over parts of the north the fabric of history is so closely woven that it can be as oppressive as the more elemental spaciousness of the south, and for all their beauty neither
landscape
is a forgiving one.

This side-view of Inis Meáin shows the formation of the
terraces
with diagrammatic clarity: first the topmost of the great beds of limestone slanting up gently from the south is broken off short by a north-facing scarp; the next layer continues a little farther north before being similarly ended, the next runs still farther north to form another tread of the stair, and so on. There are five such terraces, with three less distinct ones below them, and they can be traced the length of the island chain and indeed matched with similar terraces in the hills of the Burren—at least the
geologist
can match them, by means of slight variations in the
composition
of the limestone and in the fossils to be found in each stratum. In some places the scarp-faces separating them are
considerable
cliffs of up to twenty feet in height, in others they
dwindle
to broken slopes so that the terraces are not immediately distinguishable and it would be hard to count them, while
elsewhere
minor subdivisions become more prominent than these major ones—and in the face of these, the usual and generous ways of reality, any diagram having done its work goes on to
demonstrate
its own inadequacy.

Beyond and above the northern tip of Inis Meáin as viewed from this spot stands the outline of the Burren, which can be seen—through a bewitching gauze of sunshine and cloud-shadow—as a further, more inclusive diagram of Árainn’s geology. The northernmost end of the sequence is the promontory on the south of Galway Bay called Black Head, a great rounded hill rising to about a thousand feet. A well-marked terrace, showing from here as a long streak, silvery below and dark above, crosses the face of
this hill, strikingly parallel to the general slant of Inis Meáin. Above this level the profile of Black Head rises in indistinct steps, which elsewhere in the Burren are very clear but here have been rounded off by glacial action. These are the strata that correspond to and were once continuous with those of the Aran Islands. The unterraced hillsides below them in the Burren represent the roots of Aran below sea level. To see what once lay above these strata one has only to follow the Burren skyline south to a long dark plateau the southern end of which falls away out of sight behind the heights of Inis Meáin; this is Slieve Elva, a high bog-covered tract of shales that dominates the bright limestone slopes below it. These great thicknesses of shale once covered much more of the area, and above them were further depths of flagstone, still extant a little farther to the south where they form the Cliffs of Moher. All these rocks, laid down as sediments under various conditions and heaved up into a gently sloping plain by slow earth-movements, have been worn away piecemeal by the two hundred-odd million years of exposure to climates varying from the tropical to the
arctic
. The process may seem so hugely unimaginable as to be
irrelevant
, but many features of the ground directly underfoot here are only comprehensible in terms of the pressure of the thousands of feet of rock that once bore down on it. And the process of
stripping
, not just to the bone, to the bare rock, but of the rock itself and its fossil bones, continues today. Rainwater swilling across the surface has washed an inch or two off its thickness even in the comparatively brief span of man’s presence here. Unless vaster earth-processes intervene Aran will ultimately dwindle to a little reef and disappear. It seems unlikely that any creatures we would recognize as our descendants will be here to chart that rock in whatever shape of sea succeeds to Galway Bay.