Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  This original nucleus of the village straggling down from the main road is very decayed. I remember one family who called me in to witness their squalor; the old woman by the fireside had to put up with the braon anuas, the drip from the ceiling, because they did not want to mend the thatch lest the improvement spoil their chances of a council house. In another cottage I drank milk with goat-hairs in it, from a sticky cup, and queasily declined a slice from a fly-infested side of bacon (but then some of the best stories in this book came from that household). I once peered in at the window of a cottage left untouched since the occupant, an old bachelor, had been carried out dead. A huge thistle rooted in the rotten board of the sill inside filled the little window like a specimen in a display-case; behind it the shelves of the dresser faintly gleamed with dozens of the tall straight-sided cream-coloured jugs, often bearing nostalgic scenes of cottage life, that Araners used to buy from travelling salesmen, more for decoration than for use.

  The village has stretched westwards along the road from this moribund cluster, as a few bungalows and council-built houses have been sited in the fields between the older cottages. The former teacher’s residence is recognizable, being of the standard design with central gable. Here lived Máirtín Ó Direáin’s old schoolmaster Joe Flanagan, who as Seosamh Ó Flannagain used to collect Aran folklore (including the tale of Aristotle and his wife) for the journal Béaloideas, and was drowned with two others when returning by currach from Roundstone after a pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick. Ó Direáin’s sister’s cottage, a quarter of a mile along, is a little below the level of the road; one looks down into its tiny front garden bordered with the big round stones her brother Tom had brought up from the shore and which she used to whitewash every year. Her kitchen, all lime-bright walls and brown-painted woodwork, was of the traditional design, with a tall ceiling space and an open staircase going up to a loft over the two small rooms to the east. The seomra to the west was high too, with no loft over it; it was comfortable and easy-going, unlike the “best room” apparently kept polished in gloomy anticipation of the next wake in so many cottages; it relaxed by a hearth, and kept its things on shelves made out of orange-boxes painted brown, with another box to hide the gas-cylinder because Máire did not like the look of it when gas first came to the island. Here, the traditional meant the full of life. I used to call in during my mapping of the village; she was fascinated by the progress of the work, and wished Tom could see it—though if he had a couple of drinks in him, she told me, he would be sure to say “Ara, you have it all wrong!” She was an ample, soft, welcoming person; remembering her, I think of well-risen bread. In between stuffing a chicken and boiling potatoes and making tea for me and eating biscuits, she would bring me out to the little area at the back of the house, half flagged, half grassy, with hens and kittens and the interesting weeds she wanted me to see, the pair of us bobbing over them like hens: calamint, which her mother used to put in a bowl, though they never used it as mint; petty spurge, which a doctor had told her is the thing for curing warts (it does have a caustic sap); mugwort, one of those old-fashioned herbs for rough-and-ready medicine or magic, rather rare nowadays outside Aran, and groundsel, which she called chickenweed because they used to feed it to young chicks, who she said “craved for it.”

  Máirtín, it seemed, used to return much less frequently to the island than Tom; in fact his poems and essays make it clear that the Aran he found on his visits did not match up to the one he had carried with him in his head from childhood. The original family home was a tiny cottage a hundred yards down a twisty path that links the western end of Sruthán (Sruthán Beag, little Sruthán, as it used to be called) to the foreshore at An Gleannachán. It had been empty for a long time, and Máire had the idea that M and I might move into it, but the thatch had caved in and the low walls looked as if they were digging themselves deeper into the earth and would shortly withdraw entirely from this world. This would have been Ó Direáin’s “teach caoch ar shúil bhóthair,” hollow house at road’s opening, in “Dán an Tí,” the poem of the house. (The word-play is simple but untranslatable: the literal meaning of the phrase is “blind house by road’s eye”—the house he left to begin his life’s journey.) Each element of the house demands a hearing; for instance, the hearth:

  Ba mise croí an tí

  I was the heart of the house

  Atá fuar is follamh

  That am cold and empty

  Éistear liom feasta:

  I am to be heard now:

  Ar m’uchtsa tharla

  At my breast there was

  Leis na cianta fada

  Through many long years

  Feistiú na bhfód

  Setting of turf-sods

  Adnadh is lasadh

  Kindling and sparking

  Spóirseach thine

  Blazing fire

  Laom is deatach,

  Flame and smoke,

  Thart orm coitianta

  Around me habitually

  Cuideachta is caidreamh

  Company and closeness

  Ó ghlúin go glúin

  From generation to generation

  Scéalaíocht is nathaíocht,

  Story-telling and joking,

  Spíonadh is cardáil

  Wool-combing and carding

  Sníomh is cniotáil

  Spinning and knitting

  An tae beag

  Afternoon tea

  Tráthnóna an lae bheannaithe

  On the Blessed Day

  An biadán, an chúlchaint,

  Gossiping, backbiting,

  An sciolladh, an feannadh,

  Scolding, flaying,

  An paidrín páirteach

  The family rosary

  Thar dhoras á leathadh,

  With the door wide open,

  Go domhain san oíche

  Until late in the evening

  An t-airneán á leanacht,

  Visitors still talking,

  Is mar dhíon ar shuan

  And to ward off sleep

  An tae ar tarraingt.

  The teapot brewing.

  In this nest Máirtín’s mother brought up four children by herself. Her first husband was Labhras Phatch Sheáin, one of the currachmen whose drowning so perturbed the sea-caverns, as I recounted in “Tides of the Other World” in my first volume. They had only been married a few months at the time. Then she spent three years in America, and returned to marry Seán Ó Direáin, who was a sick man for years and died when Máirtín, their eldest child, was only six or seven. A certain memory of this pitiful father was evidently for Máirtín one of those wounds that weep life long:

  I remember a peaceful, drowsy, afternoon. The sort of afternoon that is reluctant to give way to evening. My father was walking down the “street” [the space between the cottage and the boreen] on his way to the garden down by the shore. Not that he was able to do much at that time, but his peevishness would not let him stay indoors. I called him a couple of names and threw a couple of little pebbles at him. I think he burst into tears. “Now do you see what you’ve done to your father?” said my mother. She would have been right to give me a thrashing, however severe it was. I took myself off behind the gable, choked with shame, heartbreak and disgust.

  Since the sixteen-acre farm could not support them all, and Máirtín had no hand for farmwork anyway, he left the island for a job in the Galway post office before his eighteenth birthday. In the city he joined the Gaelic League and acted in the Taibhd-hearc, the newly founded Irish-language theatre. In 1937 he moved to Dublin, and worked in the Civil Service until his retirement. Many of his poems express the loneliness and frustration of exile from his people and their language, and his disgust with the Ireland that had succeeded to the vision of its founders. Thus, the poem “Mothú Feirge” (feeling of anger) from his 1962 collection, Ár Ré Dhearóil (our wretched era):

  Feic a mhic mar a chreimid na lucha

  See, my lad, how the mice have gnawed

&nbs
p; An abhlann a thit as lámha na dtréan

  The Host that fell from the hands of the great

  Is feic fós gach coileán go dranntach

  And see too each snarling whelp

  I bhfeighil a chnáimh ina chró bhréan

  Hoarding its bone in its filthy kennel

  Is coinnigh a mhic do sheile agat féin.

  And, my lad, keep your spittle to yourself.

  While his ancestors, he felt, had pitted themselves against the reality of bare rock and won from it lasting testimony to their existence—“Thóg an fear seo teach / Is an fear úd / Claí nó fál…” (This man built a house / And that man / A wall or a fence …)—our rootless generation would have a mean and unreal memorial:

  Beidh carnán trodán

  A dusty heap of files

  Faoi ualach deannaigh

  Is what will last of us

  Inár ndiaidh in Oifig Stáit.

  In a governmental office.

  But Ó Direáin’s was not just the reproachful and embittered spokesman of a discarded past, or the elegist of the elemental simplicities and ancient pieties of Aran; he also represented a new growth, and one which has flourished since. As an Irish-language poet of the generation he inspired has written, “In place of the metres and rhythms of folksong, he set the free verse of today dancing by the hearth of Irish—and it is a testimony to his importance as pioneer and his poetical genius that he was the first major poet to do so.” This was publicly recognized; in 1977 he received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland, and President Ó Dálaigh presented him with the Ossian Prize, an international award funded by the Freiherr von Stein Foundation of Hamburg for work in a traditional or minority culture. Several other honours followed before his death in 1988. Even his own people had begun to be persuaded of his stature by then, though some of them still look on it with the same contemptuous incomprehension as their parents showed towards his earliest magical appropriations of their village. I translate literally:

  I began making “fearachaí cloch” (tiny stone men). If the word fearachaí is strange to you, I heard it as many times as I have fingers from grown-ups talking to us children; yes, and beannachaí (tiny women) too. A sort of baby-talk, I suppose. I made a likeness of each man and each woman of the village. I had a likeness of each house too. A hole in the wall or a little hollow made in a cliff served for a house. Thin flat stones made young men for me; flat stones a bit wider for the fathers, ones a bit wider again for the women because of the shawls they wore. I never felt time passing in the company of these fearachaí and beannachaí. I had total power over them. I could put them to sleep and wake them as I wanted. I could set them drinking and revelling, scolding and tongue-lashing each other, fighting and quarrelling. With these creatures of stone in the palm of my hand I was a little god. I had a little world of my own in the field down below the house, a world I had shaped, creatures I had shaped….

  People saw me from the road down there by myself, and soon they were wondering at me. They started to talk. I wasn’t all right. My mother heard about it. She went soft and hard on me asking me to give up the stone habit and be the same as the rest, but I didn’t like to. I became more guarded, more cunning. I moved my “tiny families” to another little pasture where I thought no one would ever see me, but I was found out. “Throw them away from now on,” my mother said; “It’s no wonder you’re ashamed of yourself, and half the island laughing at you!”

  No one forced me to give up the company of the stones. I grew out of it myself slowly and by degrees, as we all grow out of the ways of our childhood. In the city when I told the story they said it had been the “creative urge” at work in me. But even if I had known that name for it at the time it would not have protected me. No notice would have been taken of me.

  In one of his later poems Ó Direáin puzzles over the ontological status of his Aran. He recalls Bishop Berkeley’s theory that “to be” is nothing more than “to be perceived” and that outside the contents of our minds nothing exists. Dean Swift once reproved the Bishop for his fantastic speculation by refusing to open the door to him—for why should he open an idea to an idea? Dr. Johnson’s plain-man’s contempt for the theory was reported by Boswell: “I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, until he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus!’” Ó Direáin, born and bred on a rock, was predisposed to the common-sense view too:

  Ní shéanaim go raibh mo pháirt

  I don’t deny I took the side

  Leis na móir úd tamall,

  Of those eminent men for a while,

  Ach ó thosaigh na clocha glasa

  But since the grey stones started

  Ag dul i gcruth brionglóide i m’aigne

  To take the form of dream in my mind

  Níl a fhios agam a Easpaig chóir

  I do not know, my dear Bishop,

  Nach tú féin a chuaigh ar an domhain

  If you were not the one who

  Is nach iad na móir a d’fhan le cladach.

  And the eminent ones who hugged the shore.

  This doubt, according to Mac Síomáin and Sealy, the editors of his Selected Poems, amounted to a weakening of Ó Direáin’s governing myth (which, I take it, is the abiding integrity of the old Aran, as opposed to “our wretched era”), and his subsequent work rarely matched the resonance of the earlier “island poems.” These commentators interpret Ó Direáin’s rather cryptic late poem, “Neamhionraic Gach Beo” (faithless is every living thing), which I looked into in Kilmurvey House, as an expression of “deep and growing dissatisfaction with his creative work.” If I understand it, the poem says that life is perpetually seduced by the present moment and is therefore a betrayal of the past, and that only lifeless objects, “cloch, carraig is trá / I lár na hoíche fuaire” (stone, rock and strand / in the cold midnight), stay true:

  Sleamhnaíonn nithe neamhbheo

  Inanimate things slip back

  Siar ón mbeo go bhfdágann é:

  From the living until they leave him:

  An amhlaidh sin a d’fhág

  Was that how the island

  An t-oileán mo dhán,

  Left my poetry,

  Nó ar thugais faoi deara é?

  Or did you notice it?

  How would I comfort his shade, if I met him haunting this changed island? All the old fellows he celebrated in his early poems, in their neat bawneens and trousers of homespun tweed, all the old ladies in their red petticoats and Galway shawls, are gone; so, even, are his sister Máire and the other dwellers under thatch of Sruthán I have mentioned. Stone and the cold of midnight will indeed outlast those and all other generations. But his own death has freed his poetry from the perspective in which he, and perhaps we, could see it as in decline. There are new generations of children in Sruthán, and they learn it at school. Even admitting the terrible possibility of the death of his language, Ó Direáin’s version of Aran will be re-worded again and again throughout whatever future we have, which even if it lasts as long as stone is unlikely ever to forgo the solace of the western myth he so perfectly expressed….

  And if he rejects all this as mere whistling in the dark, I would take him down the twisty lane to the little field below the old house, and set him to search through the grass and the holes in the walls until he had reassembled those once-impassioned pebbles of his childhood games, which, it occurred to me once in passing the spot, must still be lying there; and together we would contemplate the mysterious essence of stones, which is not their constancy—they were his, they are mine, and will be another’s—but their ability to absorb all the words we write on them into the darkness of their cores.

  EOGHANACHT

  The fourth and last of Aran’s townlands is Eoghanacht; the anglicized form Onaght gives a good approximation to the pronunciation. Its boundary runs from Port Chonnla on the north coast, following the Aran-north line of the glen that h
olds the stream of Sruthán village and nicks each successive step of the scarp-slope of the island; then it continues the same line across the plateau to the cliff-coast not far west of Dún Aonghasa. The boreen that follows the boundary up from Sruthán, with zigzagging divergencies to help in mounting the scarps, must have been widened and improved around the end of the last century when Henry Robinson of Roundstone was the land-agent, for the steepest part of it is known as Carcair Robinson. Dún Eoghanachta, the last of Aran’s great cashels, sits on the terrace of the hillside half a mile above the main road, and to visit it one climbs the carcair and then takes a smaller path scrambling through the fields along the slope to the west for a few hundred yards. John O’Donovan laid it down that the ancient name of this dún has been lost, and that it is now merely named from the townland; but of course the opposite is likely to be the case, if this was the original hub of settlement in the western lobe of the island. In any case a wealth of time-lore is invested in the dún by the name of the Eoghanacht, as will appear, which compensates for its present bare and unengaging look of being some purely functional thing that has lost its function.