It is, indeed, a beautiful image, and there is something hieratic and priest-like about this trinity of readers – one, indeed, seems to be wearing a dog-collar – each involved in his private realm of contemplation, as if interceding with another universe, their backs turned to the ladders in the ruins. Reading their different postures, we are reminded of ourselves: that backwards craning of the neck to scan the spines of an upper shelf; that exploratory stoop, the index finger hooked into the headband; that poised, absent-minded stance, where the reader’s eyes are absorbed in the light which falls on an open page.
I see myself maintaining these postures in Smithfield, reaching up on tip-toes, for example, for this calf-bound book I next take up, Vol. VI of The Works of Henry Fielding, comprising Joseph Andrews, ‘The Preface to David Simple’, and ‘The Preface to the Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple, and some others’, these latter pieces taking up only thirteen pages. As I weigh it in my hand, it has the feel of a pocket icon, and I appreciate again its rock-solid binding, the five thistle motifs gold-blocked between the raised bands of its spine (it was printed in Edinburgh ‘by and for Martin & Wotherspoon’ in MDCCLXX); opening it, I see again the Phoenix colophon of Hon. John Browne, Newport, hand-stamped in embrowned ink on the frescoesque, damp-stained, foxed inside front cover, and the scrawled, still-black signature of Wm. Gibbon, something illegible, 1872. Skimming the book, letting the leaves flick by my left thumb in a rewind animation sequence, I remember how movies or films used to be known as ‘flicks’; as I arrest it at two open pages, my eye is carried to the bottom of a page, where I notice that the first word of the next page is reproduced, or anticipated, indented in the right-hand margin. I like this 1771 device, which simultaneously stops you and carries you forward, in a knit-purl fashion, and you could make a mini-narrative or arbitrary précis of the matter by conjugating these dropped stitches, a yarn made all the more mysterious because it contains hyphenated bits, broken by whatever way the typesetter thought fit to justify them, for example, ‘pray, deed, they, too, upon, martyr, -sently, -ship, O love, -gar, -ness, more, your, passion, returned, but, fellows, you, Mr, that, was, they, -tainty, or, all, unless, mistake, time, -wouse, Joseph, poor, The, thief, CHAP.’, which gives a tolerably fair, if etiolated, encryption of Chapters V–XIII.
It strikes me that this hook-and-eye principle is applicable to my own method of writing, where I have to make a link or bridge from the end of a chapter to the head, or body, of the next, sometimes in quite an arbitrary fashion; it is also part of the ever-recurring problem of getting sentences to follow each other, like a troupe of circus elephants, trunks hooked into tails, or the tall-tale filing system cited by Manguel, where, ‘in the tenth century … the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, in order not to part with his collection of 117,000 books when travelling, had them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.’
Taking the last words on the pages of a random chapter of this book, ‘From Abbey Road to Zetland Street’, as printed out in my fair copy, I get the following: ‘have, old, top, it, makes, reflection, numbers, thimbles, directory, aeroplanes’, which is a pretty good mnemonic; but of course a quite different, and much shorter, series will appear on the finally published pages of this book, this caravanserai. The pattern will be different, but nonetheless as valid. Pattern, the second word of that last sentence, recalls knitting, and my niece Róisín’s saying, in response to some idle remark about pine-needles fallen on the road, ‘Are those the needles that you woolly with?’ She was about five at the time, I think; not that I heard her speak it, but it was one of those implanted-memory syndromes of family folklore, which are so strong that they can cross branches of a family tree, and I can visualize an absent Róisín sitting beside me in my sister Caitlín’s car, as we drove along a shiny black tar road strewn with pine-needles, and the circumstances nudged her memory of Róisín’s bon mot. My sister, indeed, has a great memory, and remembers me doing things I cannot recall; but I can observe myself doing them through her comedy of words. She also has a great mind for the words of songs,1 and must have a couple of hundred off by heart: I sometimes think of her brain as a knitting-machine, as she word-processes the pattern of the songs into wearable garments, and racks them up in camphor-scented wardrobes for future retrieval; naturally some, in difficult-toget-at recesses, get forgotten about, but not lost, and sometimes make themselves available for selection when she’s looking for another item; here, maybe, we’re talking fifties juke-boxes, which, like typewriters, have their knitting-machine aspects, not to speak of dishwashers, and there is something humanoid about the armature which flips over the black disc in the manner of a blackjack dealer. Also, juke-boxes look like the bonnets of American cars with their sunburst chromium grins and curved windshields; I’m trying to remember if they sported anything like tail-fins, which would have made them look like science-fiction rockets, whereupon the windshield would become the transparent visor of a Dan Dare space-helmet. Coincidentally, ‘juke’ if spelled ‘jook’ is what I used to believe was Ulster dialect for ‘look’; but one rhyming-slang etymology traces it to the fifties motor-bike rider Geoff Duke, whom you only got to see when he took off his helmet; Chambers gives ‘jook’ as Scots ‘to duck, to dodge’, which is possibly a related issue, as I never fail to see a sly boy jooking round a corner when I hear this word.
At any rate, my mother was a great woollier, and I used to be baffled by the practised ease with which she translated a pattern from its multiplicity of tightly printed symbols into a visibly expanding, multicoloured Fair Isle cardigan – which strikes me as being a bit of an oxymoron, given that Cardigan is in Wales, though the garment is named after Lord Cardigan, who probably rarely set foot there. For a moment I indulge a fantasy of the Shetlands (official name until 1974, Zetland), where Fair Isle is situated, as a Welsh-speaking archipelagic colony, and envisage the great Shetland-pony-wool-spinning, wind-powered factories, the extensive, unwalled orchards of windmills perched on the sides of mountains; or perhaps the people speak a Celtic–Norse– Scots–English creole which is an important field of study for Swiss linguists, who arrive in flocks in the summer like migratory birds, and rarely winter there, so that many of the multiple choice words for fog and sleet are not found in their thesauruses. In the winter the folk pass the long Northern nights about the fire in composing a saga about the Swiss, who have been coming to Zetland for generations, and whose cast-off watches and obsolete tape-recording machines have become objects of devotion. Then the Swiss return in summer to record the next cycle, thus ensuring that it will not be lost to future generations; mostly, the saga deals with the unrequited episodic love of foreigners.
Of course, if one follows the grammatical logic of the construction ‘Fair Isle cardigan’, the shoe would be on the other foot, and the Zetlanders would have invaded Wales, whereupon a cinematic image of a fleet of dragon-boats skims across the inward eye like a squadron of swans, evoking the Early Irish monkish marginal quatrain:
Bitter the wind tonight,
combing the sea’s hair white:
from the North, no need to fear
the proud sea-coursing warrior.
I like this version by John Montague for its nice internal assonantal rhymes based around the ee of the sea sound, its enjambement of fear, giving it all a shivery impression; and I think the phrase ‘negative capability’ could be bandied about here, since we can see these Vikings even though they don’t exist for now, just as the invisible traveller in the Basho haiku walks unbidden into our brain, as Harold G. Henderson’s literal translation2 has it: This/road/:/going-person/be-none/(with)/autumn-nightfall. We imagine him carrying a staff or a sickle, flitting in and out of digital being. Returning to the Norsemen, you can see the target-practice shields slung from the gunwales like the roundels on the wings of Second World War Royal Air Force fighter-planes, and the guy standing at the front, or is it the back, with his long hair f
lying round him from under his earphones-horned helmet, pointing his sword in the general direction of Ireland, encouraged by the general spy knowledge that the round towers laboriously constructed by the Irish are strategically silly, given that all you have to do is light a fire around the structure once the monks, withdrawing their ladders, have climbed into its top storey.
Checking my old Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable for a possible entry for round towers, I can only come up with Roué and Rouen, both of which deserve to be quoted in full:
Roué. The profligate Duke of Orleans, Regent of France, first used this word in its modern sense (about 1720). It was his ambition to collect round him companions as worthless as himself, and he used facetiously to boast that there was not one of them that did not deserve to be broken on the wheel – that being the most ordinary punishment for malefactors at the time; hence these profligates went by the name of Orleans’ roués or wheels. The most notorious roués were the Dukes of Richelieu, Broglie, Biron, and Brancase, together with Canillac and Nocé; in England, the Dukes of Rochester and Buckingham.
Rouen. Aller à Rouen. To go to ruin. The French are full of these puns, and our merry forefathers indulged in them also, as, ‘You are on the highway to Needham’ (a market town in Suffolk), i.e. your courses will lead you to poverty.
The Bloody Feast of Rouen (1356). Charles the Dauphin gave a banquet to his private friends at Rouen, to which his brother-in-law Charles the Bad was invited. While the guests were at table King Jean entered the room with a numerous escort, exclaiming, ‘Traitor, thou art not worthy to sit at table with my son!’ Then, turning to his guards he added, ‘Take him thence! By holy Paul, I will neither eat nor drink till his head be brought me!’ Then, seizing an iron mace from one of the men at arms, he struck another of the guests between the shoulders, exclaiming, ‘Out, proud traitor! by the soul of my father, thou shalt not live!’ Four of the guests were beheaded on the spot.
However, ‘tower’ yields an interesting concept: ‘Towers of Silence. See SILENCE.’ Under Silence, ‘the Towers of Silence. The small towers on which the Parsees and Zoroastrians place their dead to be consumed by birds of prey. The bones are picked clean in the course of a day, and are then thrown into a receptacle and covered with charcoal.’
Before reading this definition, I had reckoned that the Towers of Silence might appertain to the Stylites, or Pillar Saints, described thus by Brewer’s:
A class of early and mediaeval ascetics, chiefly of Syria, who took up their abode on top of a pillar, from which they never descended. The most celebrated are Simeon Stylites of Syria, and Daniel the Stylite of Constantinople. Simeon (d. 596) spent sixty-eight years on different pillars, each loftier and narrower than the preceding, the 1st being 66 feet high. Daniel (d. 494) lived thirty-three years on a pillar, and was not infrequently blown from it by the storms from Thrace.
One cannot help but wonder about the logistics of such operations, as we imagine baskets of food or faeces being raised or lowered on ropes by a supporting cast of aficionados, and the buzz of having such a drop-out character to provide for and look up to must have been immense, if we are to believe the Revd John-Bernard Dalgairns, whose treatise, The Holy Communion, deals with such issues in passing:
With this tendency to error in the race from which he sprung, one would have expected to find marks of fanaticism about St. Simeon Stylites. Yet no one has less about him of the arrogance or obstinacy of delusion. He comes down from his pillar at a word of advice from the neighbouring monks. He casts away the chain that bound him at the suggestion of a visitor. Above all, the good which he effected marks him out as an apostle. There is something wonderful in the apparition of this man, with beautiful face and bright hair, raised up on high, night and day, adoring God. He stands in the same relation to the saints of the solitary desert, that the Dominicans do to the cloistered Benedictines or Camaldolese. Not in the desert, but in the vicinity of vast wicked Antioch,3 he stands on his pillar and he preaches. Once he grew weary of the streams of people who were continually flocking from all parts of the world, even from distant Britain, to hear him; he bade the monks shut up the enclosure round his column, because he wished to be alone with God. At night a troop of angels came and threatened him for quitting the post assigned to him by God. He began again at once his weary work. For thirty-seven years his sleepless eyes looked down with pity and compassion on the crowds who came to consult him. Cheerfully, and with temper unruffled by the burning heat, or the pitiless pelting of the mountain storms, he listened to all and consoled them. From three o’clock in the afternoon till set of sun he preached from that strange pulpit to the most motley congregation ever assembled to hear the Word of God. Wild Bedouin Arabs, mountaineers from the highlands of Armenia, and from the cedars of Lebanon, banditti from the Isaurian hills, blacks from Ethiopia, were mingled there with perfumed counts of the East, and prefects of Antioch with Romanised Gauls and Spaniards. The Emperor Marcian was once among his audience. Even the objects of St. Chrysostom’s indignant eloquence, the ladies of Antioch, who never deigned to set their embroidered slippers on the pavement of the city, quitted the bazaar and their gilded palanquins to toil up the mountains, to catch a glimpse of the saint outside the enclosure, within which no woman entered. Wicked women looked from a distance on that strange figure, high in air, with hands lifted up to heaven and body bowing down with fear of God; and they burst into an agony of tears, and then and there renounced their sins for ever.
Imagining the multilingual babble of these congregations, I think of how my sister’s children were reared bilingually, in Irish and English, as my siblings and I were. I used to lull myself to sleep with language, mentally repeating, for example, the word capall, the Irish for horse, which seemed to be more onomatopoeically equine than its English counterpart; gradually, its trochaic foot would summon up a ghostly echo of ‘cobble’, till, wavering between languages, I would allow my disembodied self to drift out the window and glide through the silent dark gas-lit streets above the mussel-coloured cobblestones. I was bound for the Star Factory, where words were melted down and like tallow cast into new moulds.
Thinking about pre-language, I come up with the earliest dream I remember, where I am adrift in a universe devoid of words; here, ‘cloud’ and ‘star’ are meaningless vocables; but I am sitting on what resembles a cloud, and the uncountable stars blaze all around me. This does not seem an entirely unusual position to be in, although the cloud has a curious non-terrestial texture, feeling both hard and soft at the same time; and I am ensconced in aeons, minutes, seconds, centuries of time, huge other clouds of it slowly toppling and thrashing like waterspouts collapsing themselves in the distant regions of the future, occluding whole galaxies; sometimes, they bump into one another, and flicker and boom with rapid desultory sultry lightning. Whatever I am, I sit on my private cloud for a small eternity, before a bolt zaps me across the universe with immeasurable angelic force, to land me on another identical cloud; and the sequence repeats itself again and again, till it seems it must go on forever.
Luckily, there is an out. When I realize the recurrent nature of this dream, I can harness a cloud to take me to the moon, from whence I can take the moonbeam causeway back to earth, gliding in through the window-pane into my bed, where I snuggle within my skin and close my eyelids, hoping to dream of a bridge to the next chapter.
1 Caitlin is also moderately ambidextrous and, in the manner of Leonardo, used to practise mirror-writing. When she was a young girl she used to make up mini-sagas about Princess Nosrac Niltiac and her brother, Prince Nosrac Naraic, our reversed alter egos. The Nosracs inhabited a Through-the-Looking-Glass realm not unlike Hollywood Transylvania, and were famous for travelling the country in disguise, performing various feats of charity and advocacy for the peasantry, who were oppressed by absentee or anti-Royal overlords. A secret passage led from a palace attic down through a zig-zag stair within the cavity wall to a larder in the cellar, from whence it took you under
the moat, and you emerged from a far-off wishing-well into an April-dappled glade. There was, indeed, a serial princess of this ilk who featured in a weekly girls’ comic of the fifties and sixties, School Friend (not Schoolfriend, which has entirely different connotations). I’ve just asked my wife Deirdre if she remembers it, and en route she tells me a possibly apocryphal story of how the present Queen of England, Elizabeth, when a princess, used to go on disguised walkabouts with her younger sister Margaret, the one who smokes and drinks. As it happens, I have a copy of the 1956 School Friend annual before me, having dragged it out from under a pile of books in the back room in the course of writing this footnote, and I am most disappointed to find that the said princess does not feature here, though there is a jolly good illustrated yarn about The Silent Three, who have a habit of donning monks’ cowled robes and black eye-masks in order to advance the plot (‘ …at school, the three chums formed a secret society known as The Silent Three. While out for a stroll on the cliffs, Betty had wandered ahead of her chums. And suddenly …). Other stories include ‘It All Began with a Carnival Costume’, ‘Dilly’s Dizziest Day-dream’, ‘Solak – a Dog Under Suspicion’, ‘The Disguise which Bluffed the Boys’, and ‘Trix’s Amazing First Flight’. But no Transylvania, which might have belonged to another similar comic (do I vaguely recall School Chum?). All the same, I can picture its mad King Ludwig of Bavaria Eurodisney castle, and the pretty princess with her hair done up in plaits, flitting about her business in a milk-maid’s yoked tight-bodiced dirndl dress over a drawstring-necked blouse with elbow-length puffed sleeves.
2 In his An Introduction to Haiku.
3 His mountain was forty-five miles from Antioch, but easily accessible.
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