Hanging with the Elephant

by Harding, Michael

  Saucepans, pots and two frying pans sat on the small cooker. And on the chair beneath the window, I noticed a red plastic basin, with a face towel draped on the side. There was a toothbrush, a tube of paste, a bar of soap sitting on a plastic dish in the basin. The Rayburn had once been fuelled by coal, and rarely went out and it was there that she used to cook chicken soup when I was a child, but in her seventies she had no one to cook for anymore, and the coal buckets were heavy, and what she ate herself she could heat in the microwave or boil on a small electric cooker in the back kitchen. But no smoke had risen in the Rayburn chimney for thirty years to disturb the crows that nested there. On top of the Rayburn, there was only a black kettle from my grandmother’s world, a large packet of toilet rolls and half a dozen plastic bags with Dunnes Stores printed on them.

  She saved bags each week when we went shopping because she hated paying the extra twenty-two cents for a new one. But we always forgot to bring a bag, and were obliged to buy one more each week. So the bags piled high on the Rayburn beside a blue plastic folder that contained the care workers’ notes and log book. Every event that had happened in the house was written in there – what work had been done, what conversations or arguments had taken place, and what physical and emotional condition my mother had been in. It was a backup to contradict any false accusations that Mother might make about having been mistreated, robbed or neglected by the care worker.

  I sat down on a hard chair at the table and took the black rosary beads in my hand and pressed them to my lips with a reverence that was more nostalgic than true. Like many other people in Ireland, I had outgrown the devotions of my childhood, the fervour that gathered us together in the shelter of a church. I suppose if I could have cried even then, it might have helped.

  I’D BEEN DELIGHTED to find the sugar bowl in my studio. But it was also a warning. OK, she might be in Poland and it’s only day one, but if I neglected the basic domestic chores now, what kind of condition would the place be in after six weeks? So I decided to make a better effort. I returned to the kitchen and made myself a breakfast from whatever scraps I could find. A kind of emptiness filled the little cottage. Shafts of light broke into the small room. I turned on a blow heater. To my surprise I found three eggs at the back of the empty fridge which I boiled in a white enamel pot and I ate them all from the one cup, along with two slices of blue moulded bread I found in a press and which were edible enough once I cut out the mouldy bits and toasted them.

  I wiped down the worktop mechanically, as I would do if the beloved were standing there beside me. It was the first moment that she surfaced in my mind. I could sense her hand on the dishes. I went into the bathroom and sensed her feet in the shower, and in the sun room I imagined I heard her talking about the loveliness of geraniums that she had taken in for the winter and the pot of aquilegia that she intended to plant out later in the spring. There were small buds coming now, but no one to notice them only me.

  I had an urge to text.

  Buds coming on that plant in the front room. Must water the aquilegia—

  But halfway through the text, I desisted. She’s wise and she had turned off her phone, and I ought to do the same. This was a time of separation, a time for each of us to withdraw, to forget the familiarity of each other’s bodies, to stand untouched for a short while and listen to what was coming from inside. Then later we could embrace with love and joy, instead of just falling into each other’s arms unconsciously because we wanted to find escape from interior weather.

  So I made a list and I made a plan. The list was as extensive a catalogue as I could manage of what was needed in the house. Things like rashers, sausages, boxty, firelighters and so forth. I made the plan on a separate sheet, drawing a timetable, and then pencilling in what I might do from hour to hour.

  I would get up at seven every morning and go for a walk in the mountains. Then I’d return and meditate. In the afternoons, I would read or write. And in the evenings, I would turn on the television, boil an egg and relax. It seemed to me like a perfectly swift path to enlightenment. When she returned home, I’d have half a book written, the place would be spotless, I’d be totally chilled out and the cat would have no hairballs. Everything was going to be perfect. And it was time to begin because already the sun was moving higher and the mountain beckoned.

  I put on leggings and a big yellow raincoat and my sunglasses and a woollen hat, got into the jeep and drove farther up the mountain, beyond all the neighbours’ houses until I passed a derelict council cottage by the bridge, where a couple had once raised six children. The house is now abandoned. The sight of derelict houses was never uncommon in Leitrim. The weather strips the plaster and the thatch and what remains in the forestry or at the end of a weedy lane is usually just the bare stones, the gable wall and the little holes where windows were long ago torn out by winter storms. But since the boom and subsequent collapse, there are many modern houses – semi-detached, urban dwellings – and many dainty little pebble-dashed cottages that the county council erected in the 1970s which are now empty. Some were never occupied. Some were shelter for poor rural families. And all will soon be rubble, tossed by diggers. The cottage by the bridge still had a slate roof intact. But the windows were boarded up. And the front door had been taken off its hinges so that the interior lay open to the elements. Sheep and sometimes horses take shelter there from the storms. I suppose houses don’t look much different from any other stable to an animal.

  I drove across streams and through forestry, until I came to a turn for the wind farm, a summit where once stood the entrances to mine shafts, and where local men went with lamps to dig out coal. They lay on their sides, stretched on the horizontal to scrape narrow seams, as the floor of the shaft filled with water. A community so oppressed that one miner was forced to dig a small shaft of his own from inside his bedroom down into the layers of clay and shale and coal beneath the house in order to keep his family warm. He brought up the fuel all winter without anyone knowing how he did it. The smoke rose from his chimney but he was never seen buying a single bag.

  I drove as far as I could on the tarred road and then a mile farther on stones and rocks that fell away loose beneath the tyres of the jeep’s huge wheels. And when I could make no more ground in the jeep, I stopped and walked on, clad in wet gear with a walking stick that a musician in Mullingar had given me years ago.

  It’s never easy to know what to wear on the mountain. When I wear leggings, an anorak, gloves and a woollen hat I think I look like Shackleton or Tom Crean, and then the sun comes out and I meet other hikers on the hills in their shirts and their jumpers slung around their waists and I feel like a pure eejit. But on the other hand, when the sky is blue, I sometimes leave the wet gear in the jeep and head up with just a walking stick and before I’m at the summit, a big nasty cloud of rain bursts out of nowhere and I’m drenched to the bone.

  I always take the blackthorn stick. Not that I need it. It’s just that men feel more secure when they’re wielding a weapon. I think that’s why bishops always have an elegant gold-plated shepherd’s crook when they’re processing down the aisle. And someone once told me that the word ‘imbecile’ denotes a man without a walking stick, which makes perfect sense to me. I remember a time when all the farmers in the pubs in Dowra would have a stick in one hand and a pint of Guinness in the other on a fair day. And there were men who would kill if someone took their personal stick. Mine is a blackthorn with the shinbone of a goat cut into the top as a handle. When I grasp it, I feel confident. It gives me courage. It enables me to feel like the musician, though the musician is more of a man than I am. He is certain in his masculinity. He is confident in his compassion. Maybe because, as a lover, he has a history of wildness. And there is nothing that becomes a man more than a good history. It makes his face pleasant and his heart satisfied, when he gets over forty. Sowing wild oats develops in a man some kind of tranquillity. His countenance exudes an ease that draws people to him.

  As I walk
ed up the steep incline, watching that my feet didn’t slip on the scree and loose rock, the sun behind me rose into the fog, illuminating it from behind, so that it looked like a brilliant sheet covering the sky. And sometimes the fog blew away, leaving the hills clear and the windmills gleaming white in the sunlight. Irish weather is the core of our melancholy, I thought. The unpredictability of it. If it’s raining, it’s raining; if the sun is shining, the only question to ask is how long will it last. Not long. The fog comes again. Envelops us. No wonder half the country is depressed.

  Below me I could see the rivers of Leitrim and Longford, the small lakes and the glorious Shannon, like thin steel threads, meandering around the drumlins. Closer to me on either side were hills. What we in Ireland defiantly refer to as mountains; highlands of bog, all brown and soggy for miles and miles around me and stretching as far as Sligo and the sea.

  And up I went, still stumbling through the scree, until I reached a harder landscape where the bog lessened and heaps of grey shale stood twenty feet high on either side of the roadway, with boulders idle in the soft shale. This is a desert landscape. An Afghanistan of the mind where I could have imagined British troops coming around the bend, in armour-plated personnel carriers as they prepared to take out an enemy. This is not the quiet landscape of Yeats or Kavanagh. This is another Ireland. The hills up here were man-made with diggers or hand shovels centuries ago, by miners with the sweat of their brows. This is a landscape where men have made their mark. Even the townland names up here are personal, like Spion Kop, taken from a hill in South Africa where the British stood against the Boers and where men of the Connaught Rangers died in defence of an empire. And when that war was over, the men came home to Roscommon and Leitrim, and played in flute bands on Sunday afternoons, and worked the mines the rest of the week, and the name of the hill followed them like a shadow.

  I walked through it all at a marching pace, with the musician’s stick. Going uphill, trying to find in myself the kind of masculinity I see in the leisure centre, when the boys are lifting weights in the gym and their grunts carry all the way to the jacuzzi.

  I was sweating and I was almost at the summit where various roads meander through small quarries of sand, resembling a desert landscape. There were markers posted to indicate the path to each turbine. The clouds at that point dispersed and I could see in the distance the grave of Queen Maeve on the top of Knocknarea and the head of Ben Bulben beneath which Yeats lies buried, and between the two mountains I could see Sligo bay. Closer to me was a broken turbine, its third blade lying down, limp, like the broken limb of a soldier.

  I kept pushing at a brisk pace up the hills as my heart pumped furiously and my limbs ached but I felt joyful and happy. You can’t beat a good walk for calming the mind. It might be lonely, but not even a room full of beautiful women in leotards doing yoga can induce the tranquillity that the sight of a wild hare on the crest of a hill has on my psyche.

  The mountain walk was a great beginning to my retreat.

  Of course I did try to reach enlightenment by stretching my yogic limbs in a room full of ladies in leotards with foam mats on a wooden floor and a glass wall and soft Zen music in the background. I was attending a privately run health centre on the outskirts of Mullingar. There was a series of large rooms with walls of glass looking out onto flower gardens, privately owned and rented to various holistic practitioners: yoga teachers, reiki masters, reflexologists and various adepts at massage in the Thai, Chinese and Brazilian styles who rented by the hour and charged their clients modest recession prices.

  For the yoga class, we gathered on a Wednesday morning at eleven. The sun was pouring in through the window behind the teacher, who seemed like she was radiating light. I happened to be the only male present, apart from a sandalled, boyish journalist who had persuaded me to attend. After a short while, I found myself in contorted positions with my face always sideways or upside down or squashed on the floor and nearest to me was invariably a young woman in similar contortions, such that I found myself getting slightly aroused. At the coffee break, I explained that I feared I might have pulled a muscle and I retreated for ever from the intensity of group yoga classes. Although, on my way out, I passed another room where the door was open and a beautiful woman with dark skin and brown eyes wearing a white coat smiled at me.

  ‘You’re not from Mullingar,’ I said.

  ‘Brazil,’ she replied, laughing.

  She was standing at a bench that looked like an enormous ironing board except that there was a hole at one end.

  I said, ‘What’s the hole for?’

  She said, ‘That is for your head.’ And she described how a client would lie on the board with his or her face in the hole while Miss Brazil kneaded the muscles of the shoulders and lower back.

  ‘What were you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘I was in the yoga class,’ I confessed.

  She roared laughing, and I knew immediately that in another life we could have been great friends.

  But walking is a powerful yoga. And I love the mountain and the solitude of it and the freedom to talk aloud to myself since no one is listening except the sheep.

  When I returned to the foothills and jeeped my way back to the house, my chakras were open. At least they felt open. I mean if a policeman asked me where my chakras actually were, I wouldn’t be able to tell him. But they felt open. And it was time now to meditate in earnest. I was ready for enlightenment.

  MEDITATION IS NO joke. It’s serious. It’s a word that can be used to impress people. It implies that you’re taking life seriously. You are grasping the essence of being. Sometimes on television chat shows, when celebrities are talking about their personal suffering or addiction or how they came to be the best guitarist or singer in the world, the interviewer will ask them what they do when they’re not touring.

  And sometimes they say, ‘I meditate.’

  Although I’m a bit uneasy with people who say they meditate and retain a completely straight face. Because in a way meditation is not something to do. It’s not something you achieve. If you think you’re meditating, then maybe you’re not. If you think you’re not, then maybe you are. As they say in Japan, if you name the bird then you cease to experience the song. So in naming the act of meditation you cease to meditate. Personally I just doze. I think dozing might be described as the Irish tradition of meditation. It’s a space in your mind that opens out when you stay still. When you stop thinking. And your mind widens to take in everything at the same time and you’re half aware of everything, as they say in Cavan. So that’s what I would call meditation in the Cavan style.

  Dozing.

  Now and again, as the beloved and I are slurping our midday soup, she asks me a question.

  ‘What are you going to do for the afternoon?’

  I suppose it’s a way of testing whether or not I’d like to join her in Lidl or Aldi, to follow her trolley around the aisles and share the fun of selecting which cheese we might eat next week. But I have only one reply.

  ‘I’m going to meditate.’

  Which means I’m going out to my studio, to light the stove and do nothing. Or rather, I’m going to resist doing anything. I’m going to take a break from everything. Because doing nothing is still doing something. So the wisdom is in the not doing. The complete non involvement in anything. Stillness. And if that’s not a sure way to induce a beautiful doze then nothing is.

  Irish people don’t spend enough time dozing at the fire, gazing at the flickering flames in the stove or staring out the window at the birds on the peanut feeder. But I find that stillness grows in my body when I do these things and my mind becomes gentle. When nothing happens for the entire afternoon, it’s lovely to just feel you are there. To be aware that you are there. It’s what I used to be accused of doing in school. Back then it was called daydreaming. But today, as I pay attention to the flame in the stove, the flickering shadow, or the movement of a bird on a tree outside or the tiny shifting of the curtains
with the wind I am not dreaming. I am awake in my lovely dozing. I feel like a baby in a cot with open eyes. I know I’m there. And I feel like an old man by the fire who knows that he has only a short while to live, and that the clock is ticking and each moment is precious.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ the postman asked, one day he was obliged to come around to the studio behind the house with a parcel because he got no answer at the kitchen door.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I was just dozing.’

  ‘There’s no one in the house,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  ‘Is she away?’

  ‘She’s in Poland,’ I said.

  ‘And is she coming back?’ he wondered.

  ‘Hard to tell,’ I said. ‘The future is a mystery.’

  ‘That’s true,’ he agreed, as he stared out at the lake. ‘We can never tell what’s out there.’

  I REMEMBER WHEN I lived in west Cavan in the 1970s, I used to finish work as a teacher at about four or sometimes three in the afternoon. I would drive up the hills from Blacklion and turn onto a small laneway that led to a remote farmhouse, where lived three young women in their late teens and their mother and father. I figured out that the best way to find girlfriends in those years was to befriend their mothers. I’d pop in unexpectedly and offer to fetch messages because I had a car, and I’d chat with the mother about anything from the weather to the price of lambs. When the girls arrived from work in the evening, I was already part of the family. In those days, courtship was a complex ritual in rural Ireland.

  I would spend long afternoons sitting on the chair near to the range while the woman of the house mooched about preparing the evening meal. And then sometimes she’d sit down opposite me. We’d both be there on either side of the range, which would wheeze with heat. There was no Joe Duffy or talk shows or political debates on the radio to entertain us. Just the sound of rain. And when we had exhausted the possibilities of whether it might rain imminently or later in the evening or tomorrow morning or if, in fact, it was already raining, there wasn’t much else to say. So the sitting continued. And both of us drifted into a different space, a timeless and beautiful womb of silence and presence. Each of us warmed the other and when I was going later she’d say, ‘Thanks for calling,’ as if I had done her a great service. And I too felt refreshed but at twenty-two years of age, I had no way of expressing how I felt to a middle-aged woman who had reared five children. The only thing we knew about Buddhism or Asian philosophy in those days was that a German woman who lived in a small cottage farther up the hill would pass the door sometimes with a great sack of groceries on her back. She had no car and locals would whisper to each other that she was one of those Hare Krishnas who came from Fermanagh, though nobody quite knew what exactly that meant.