Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara

by Tim Robinson

  Such knots of significant place can hardly be conveyed in a map alone; that is why I have combined my Connemara map with a book, which itself is a complicated text dense with cross-references. Even that cannot accommodate such condensed labyrinths as the one I have spelled out here, so there will have to be another book some day, a recursive, self-enfolding coverage of the terrain, for which this paper is a brief trial run. (I have proposed to my publisher this infinitely long book, to appear as an occasional series of volumes or an ‘almost periodical’, ending only with the end of the author, publisher or reading public; he looked queasy, but did not baulk.) The map itself has taken me about seven years, but it is only a preliminary orientation in the field; as I said, the most revealing features of a map are its blank areas. I think that is one reason I prefer to build up my maps of little dots and strokes of the pen standing separately on blank paper, rather than layers of colour that cover whole areas and implicitly claim to say something about every point within them. In the nature of fractals, the closest and most detailed exploration or mapping imaginable cannot do more than scratch the surface. My mode of drawing is a scratching of the surface of the paper, and makes no claims to comprehensiveness. Because of the psychological carry-over mentioned earlier, from my repetitious footsteps to this repetitious handwork, it is also a caressing of the Earth, a soothing and taming of the fractious fractal itself.

  Discourse, too, is fractal; every remark suggests amplifications and amendments, every thesis, critiques and refutations; this fractal nature of intertextuality is the clue to the way the text itself sits into the fractals of non-textual reality. To be true to the nature of fractals, I should go on indefinitely, but in this world of practicalities, I must at this point abandon the tangled tale.

  NOTES

  1. This step is immediate for anyone who remembers any school algebra; otherwise the quickest way of seeing it is first to square each side of the equation, thus

  64 = 4D x 4D

  and note that 64 = 4 x 4 x 4 = 43, and 4D x 4D = 42D. Hence 43 = 42D, and so 3 = 2D.

  2. Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York, 1983).

  3. H.-O. Peitgen and P.H. Richter, The Beauty of Fractals (Berlin, 1986).

  8

  On the Cultivation of the Compass Rose

  PROUSTIAN TRIANGULATION

  Is it by chance that Proust twice uses a trio of uprights and their apparent motions as examples of the type of impression that seems to him the most significant? Let me briefly summon up remembrance of the two passages.

  Certain sensations seem to the narrator to impose an obligation on him to discover the reason for the intense but obscure pleasure they give him, but usually the distractions of the succeeding moments provide him with an excuse for evading this ‘duty of consciousness’. However, on the drive back from Martinville circumstances leave him facing the memory of such an experience and he begins to consider it deeply. Phrases form in his mind which wonderfully augment the initial pleasure, and he writes a description of the changing appearances of three bell-towers he had observed from various distances and angles during the drive. On finishing this, his inaugural work of literature, he is filled with happiness in having acquitted himself of his obligations to the impressions and what they hid.

  But we do not learn what they hid. Instead we have two descriptions, one almost objectively topographical and the other full of metaphors and similes in which the towers are shamelessly anthropomorphized.

  Later, near Balbec, the narrator recognizes this unique pleasure again in the sight of three trees near the road he is being driven along. But this time he lets the moment slip away without the necessary effort of analyzed consciousness, and as the trees fall into the distance he feels as sad as if he had lost a friend, died to himself, denied a ghost, or failed to recognize a god.

  The back-reference from the pattern of three trees to the pattern of three towers, the possibility that it is a submerged memory of the latter that is stirred by the former, is latent in the passage; indeed the narrator wonders if it is because they remind him of something that the trees are so potent, but he soon drops this line of enquiry. And it would merely bring one back to the question of what was so significant in the earlier experience itself. I suggest that since the narrator himself never knew what it was that the trees wanted to bring him, we are at liberty here to look around from this clearing in the great work, and turn away from the infinite regression of Time Past, to a rarer realization, that of Space Present. The towers are described as close neighbours, three birds alighted in the plain, arms waving farewell, three golden pivots, three maidens in a legend; the trees become a round-dance of sorcerers, lost friends waving their arms in despair. But if all these charming clusters of images are blown off them, what terrain may be triangulated, starting from three bare poles?

  Sometimes, changes in the relative position or apparent size of objects, caused by our own motion, reveal that motion to us at an unaccustomed level of consciousness, and bring the bare fact of motion, of position itself, into the light of attention. We rush to humanize the perception: the trees are watching us go; the towers are withdrawing resignedly into the night. But we are left with an uneasy notion that something else is hidden in the experience, and hidden the more deeply by our added layer of interpretation. It may be forced upon us that such kinetic geometries are not merely an endlessly reinterpretable stuff for the expression of the cloud-work of the soul, that the world is not just a Rorschach blotter to soak up the projections of our hopes and fears, not just a bottomless well of metaphor; that behind whatever social or personal significances we read into them such impressions carry a reminder of something so obvious that to state it seems absurd, so basic that it rarely intrudes into consciousness, so overwhelming that its realization might be profoundly therapeutic or psychically crushing. We are spatial entities – which is even more basic than being material entities, subject to the laws of gravity. The barest of bones of the relationship between an individual and the world are geometrical; on the landscape scale, topographical. Our physical existence is at all times wrapped in the web of directions and distances that constitutes our space. Space, inescapable and all-sustaining Space, is our unrecognized god.

  I once wrote about a man who consciously obeyed the laws of perspective, an absurdity that points to its opposite banality: like Carroll’s sundial we stand in the middle of a ‘wabe’. The totality of geometric relations between the individual and the world is more than infinitely dense, and even the mere set of directions from me to other things or places forms an uncountable continuum. Consciousness at its richest can only hold an infinitesimal proportion of them, and so the image of a web is acceptable not as referring to the totality but to the miserable selection from it that our minds can handle. The relationships are always there, constituting our geometrical existence, which is a component of our physical existence and hence of every other level of individual and social existence. The most rudimentary element of geometry, the relationship of topological inclusion, is the kernel of all the complexities of social and ecological belonging. At such higher levels the geometrical is usually generalized out of mind, though there is always the possibility of unusual ‘circumstances’ imposing its primacy, as in the ballistic space of the battlefield. Perhaps the duty of consciousness in this regard is to be open to a maximal realization, a delicate and precise awareness of one’s spatial relationships to the world. (Try it when watching branches swaying in the breeze, one behind another.) But this awareness, if it becomes strained and muddled, soon subsides into the indiscriminate welter of ‘being at one with Nature’. Like love, it flourishes best on the very edge of loss of identity, of merging with the object; it is a dangerous leaning-over the brink of the blissfully all-dissolving Oceanic, or of the seasick existential shudders. A cliff-edge experience.

  FIGURE IN A MAP

  The ‘topographical sensations’ arising, for instance, from crossing a pass, completing the circuit of an isla
nd, or walking out to an island accessible at low water, are privileged moments of spatial awareness, able to bear the heavy vestments of symbolism. The exhilaration of crossing from one valley to another through a pass comes partly from such a journey’s being a metaphor for threshold moments in which successive life-stages are simultaneously graspable, and past and present support the moment like two giant stilts. But the ground of this feeling is the geometrical configuration of the saddle-point, combining the highest and the lowest into a highly defined point of unstable equilibrium, so that you, here, are highly defined as a figure in a landscape. The landscape itself focuses on you, pinpointing a precise ‘sense of place’. Such eruptions of the meaningful into the plains of geometrical existence are themselves distractions from the quotidian inevitability of emplacement, the humble submission to the laws of perspective. It is fitting that, on a map, such singularities and discontinuities of topography as mountain summits, coastlines and passes occupy an area tending to zero with increasing fineness of drawing.

  The general utility of a map resides in its being a conceptual model of the terrain projected onto paper, a representation of spatial relationships in a symbolism that facilitates calculations; i.e. the map is a visual calculus for topography. In my own maps this aspect only arises incidentally and inescapably, the web of self-centred spatial relationships, which one might symbolize by the compass rose, being inextricable from the totality of directions from point to point. We could not use or even bear to look at a map that was not mostly blank. This emptiness is to be filled in with our own imagined presence, for a map is the representation, simultaneously, of a range of possible spatial relations between the map-user and a part of the world. The compass rose represents the self in these potential relationships; it is usually discreetly located in some unoccupied corner, but is conceptually transplantable to any point of the map sheet. Its meagre petals are a conventional selection of the transfinity of directions radiating from the self to the terrain. It is a skeletal flower, befitting our starved spatial consciousness.

  This irreducible nub of topographicity is my emblem as map-maker. I present the exiguous mystic bloom of the compass rose to the one who unfolds my map and finds herself a point upon it. It comes from a god unrecognized, a ghost denied, a lost friend, a self to whom you had died. Alternatively it comes from something as crashingly obvious as an Ox, and I, imitating the Rosenkavalier, have cheekily appropriated it for my own wooing of the world’s wide spaces.

  For I do not know that I understand what I have written. No; I am writing blind, as a pilot has to fly blind in fog or cloud, sustained by faith in a compass course rather than by vision of a destination. But this much is clear: the recommended situation for cultivation of the compass rose is on the very edge of the cliff.

  9

  Place/ Person/ Book

  SYNGE’S THE ARAN ISLANDS

  It begins: ‘I am in Aranmor, sitting over a turf fire, listening to a murmur of Gaelic that is rising from a little public-house under my room’, and it ends: ‘The next day I left with the steamer.’ It does not mention why he came, nor what bearing the island of time represented between these two sentences was to have on his further life. Its exclusion of matters relating to the past and the future of the Aran Islands, except as they arose in thought and conversation during his visits, is equally absolute. This self-sufficiency of the book commands respect, and to present some additional information on its subject and on its author, before discussing it in detail, is not to buttress it, but to erect a base on which to display its singularity.

  THE PLACE

  The word ára, literally the kidneys or loins and, by extension, the back, is a common element of Irish placenames, in which it connotes a back or ridge of land, and so Oileáin Arann, anglicized as the Aran Islands, could be translated as ‘the ridge islands’.1 The three islands, when they come into view against the Atlantic horizon as the ferry leaves the shelter of Galway Bay, are clearly the remains of a long escarpment broken through by the ocean. They once formed part of the Burren uplands to the south-east in County Clare, from which they are divided now by five miles of water. The sounds between the islands are each about a mile and a half wide, and ten or twelve miles separate Arainn (Synge’s ‘Aranmor’) from Connemara to the north. Aran (the island group as a whole can be so named, for brevity) is of limestone, like its parent the Burren, and the formations to which limestone gives rise determine much of the character of the Aran landscape and even many features of daily life there. Stone is what meets the eye everywhere. Along its north-east-facing flank the escarpment rises in a few broad terraces separated by low cliffs or scarps, and the treads of these giant steps are level expanses mainly of bare rock, riven by long parallel fissures and littered with broken fragments and boulders in some areas, as smooth as a dance-floor in others. Inis Meáin (Synge uses the anglicized form, Inishmaan) has the most spectacular examples of this extraordinary limestone ‘pavement’, as it is called, spreading like grey aprons below the villages. In each of the islands, settlement is largely in the lee of the upper scarps, while from the sheltering ridge above the string of villages, uninhabited expanses of rough stony pasturage decline very slightly south-westwards, and in Árainn terminate with dramatic suddenness in vertical or deeply undercut cliffs fifty to three hundred feet high opposing the Atlantic. All the lower shores of the islands, except for a few sheltered stretches facing north-east, carry a stormbeach of shingle or boulders above the high-water mark, which even continues along the tops of the lower stretches of cliff. Again Inis Meáin has the most breathtaking example of this formation. Around its exposed south-western tip countless blocks of up to a few hundred tons weight have been broken by the sea out of the low rock-terrace forming the shoreline, shifted hundreds of yards inland and piled up like a vast rampart; and where the coastline rises into cliffs along the west of the island the stormbeach follows it, diminishing as it gradually climbs out of range of all except the most exceptional waves and fading out at a height of about a hundred feet (at which point the last few stones of it have been at some unknown period formed into a little clifftop look-out shelter, now called Synge’s Seat).

  Aboriginal soil is rare in Aran; the glaciers of the last Ice Age scoured the rock bare, and most of what soil developed after that has long been lost to erosion. It is likely that the islands were wooded, perhaps until settlement and grazing increased in early mediaeval times, but for centuries there have been virtually no trees apart from low thickets of hazel on sheltered slopes. The little green fields on the northern sheltered flank of the islands are the work of generations of men, women and children who cleared the crag of loose stone and spread it with sand and seaweed carried up in baskets from the shore. The field boundaries are drystone walls, of which there are about fifteen hundred miles in the three islands, so that most of the terrain is a mosaic of fractions of acres. This apparently manic subdivision has its purposes, in shielding stock and crops from the high winds of the oceanic coast, in facilitating the close control of grazing – so that the cow has to eat up all the grass, not just the juicier sorts, before it is allowed into fresh pasture – and in freeing the ground from the litter of stone. Again, Inis Meáin, the stoniest of the three stony islands, has the tallest walls – well over head-height in places, making an oppressive and bewildering maze of the rough tracks that ramify and dwindle like veins throughout the tissue of little rectangular fields.

  Nowadays farming on the tiny scale permitted by Aran’s vexatious topography is not a paying proposition, and hazel scrub is invading abandoned fields. Because of the small usage of pesticides and fertilizers, Aran’s drifts of common buttercups and daisies are such as cannot be seen now in the rundown countrysides of Europe, while her kindly, crannied limestone and mild climate provide habitats for unusual floristic neighbourings, so that most of the wildflowers which surprise with their variety and opulence in the Burren are present here too. It is the Atlantic that dispenses this climate, shipping in constant
weather changes from the south-west: interleaved squalls and shafts of sunshine that dress the islands in rainbow after rainbow, halcyon calms that curdle into sea-mist, storms that blow themselves out like candles.

  The islands’ spider webs of field walls entangle many archaeologies tumbled one upon another: communal tombs from the late Stone Age like big boxes made of limestone slabs, stone-lined cist graves from the Bronze Age, huge drystone cashels of the Celtic Iron Age, primitive oratories and hermits’ cells, foundations of once-famous monasteries, roofless mediaeval chapels. The cliff-edge cashel of Dún Aonghasa, with its three semi-circular ramparts, opening onto empty space nearly three hundred feet above the surge of the Atlantic, occupies the most dramatic site of Celtic Europe. This, together with six other great cashels, of which Dún Chonchúir on the central height of Inis Meáin is the most impressive, shows that Aran was for some centuries around the beginning of our era the seat of a settled and prosperous community, for there is no evidence to justify the traditional designation of these mysterious structures as ‘forts’. It has been suggested that the cashels were primarily ritual centres;2 if so, the religious significance of Aran had been long established when St Enda came here some time before AD 489 (according to the much later mediaeval account of his life and miraculous works) and founded a monastery which was to become known throughout Europe. Columcille of Iona, Ciarán of Clonmacnois and Colman of Kilmacduach were among the saints to whom hagiography ascribes the almost obligatory early years of prayer and study in the illustrious and uniquely blessed isles called ‘Aran of the Saints’. According to a poem by the ninth-century king-bishop of Cashel, Cormac mac Cuillenáin, it is impossible to count the saints of Aran, the four holiest places in the world are the Garden of Paradise, Rome, Aran and Jerusalem, no angel ever came to Ireland without visiting Aran, and if people understood how greatly the Lord loves Aran they would all come to partake of its blessings. It was not until the decade of Synge’s first visits that Aran briefly recovered something of this extraordinary mystic status.