MÁMÉAN
On this beautiful foggy morning—the ideal landscape to see these mountains in—we are at the foot of Máméan in the middle of the Connemara mountains. There is a deep layer of cloud halfway down the mountain. The light is very mute. In certain places the morning sun is coming through the clouds, making the fog very white, and there is a stream flowing to our right, coming down the mountain. There is a great stillness. The sheep are all in their first stage of morning activity, grazing away, in their lovely Zen kind of nonchalance. We are about to ascend…
I wasn’t born here in Connemara but I have lived here a long time and I really find the landscape an incredible presence, a companion in my life. People often think of the Connemara landscape as very lonesome. I live in a little cottage down here, and in some strange way you are never lonesome here, because if you look out the window, there is the constant drama of the landscape unfolding before you in the different light that is always at play here. I have never known a landscape that is as dependent on light as the Connemara landscape. When the light is here the whole place is luminous and really alive with such subtlety of color. When the light goes, the landscape is so eerie and in the grip of gravity. I’ve always been very moved by this, and several years ago I tried to express it in a poem called “Connemara in Our Mind.”
Connemara in Our Mind
It gave us
the hungry landscapes
resting upon
the unalleviated
bog-dream,
put us out
there, where
tenderness never settled,
except for the odd nest
of grouse mutterings
in the grieving rushes,
washed our eyes
in the glories of light.
In an instant
the whole place flares
in a glaze of pools,
as if a kind sun
let a red net
sink through the bog,
reach down to a forgotten
infancy of granite,
and dredge up
a haul of colors
that play and sparkle
through the smother of bog,
pinks, yellows,
amber and orange.
Your saffron scarf,
filled with wind,
rises over your head
like a halo,
then swings to catch
the back of your neck
like a sickle.
The next instant
the dark returns
this sweep of rotting land,
shrunken and vacant.
Listen,
you can almost hear
the hunger falling
back into itself.
This is no place
to be.
With the sun
withdrawn,
the bog wants to sink,
break
the anchor of rock
that holds it up.
We are left.
There is no one
who knows us.
In our monotone
we beg the bound stone
for our first echo.
From Echoes of Memory
In a certain way, this landscape belongs to no one, but primarily to itself. Landscape is the firstborn of creation. It was here for hundreds of millions of years before ever a plant or an animal arrived here. It was also here, obviously, before the human face ever emerged on earth. It must have seemed very strange to the ancient eye of landscape when we arrived here. Landscape has a huge, pre-human memory. It precedes everything that we know. I often think that you could talk almost of a “clay-ography”: the whole biography of the earth. Everything depends of course on whether you think landscape is dead matter or whether you think it is a living presence.
I think there is life in these rocks and in these great mountains around about us, and because there is life, there is memory. The more you live among mountains like this, the more aware you become of the cadences of the place and the subtlety of the place, its presence and personality. When you look out from here this morning, you see at the front of Máméan the beginning of the Twelve Bens. The fog is halfway down the mountain, and there is another half of the mountain concealed inside that fog that the eye cannot see. With the mind you cannot penetrate that blanket of cover but with the imagination you can sense the presence that is actually there that you cannot see with the eye. And all the time, with the light and the cloud and the rain and the mist, a whole kind of narrative of presence is unfolding, hiding itself, emerging. Not alone that, one of the frightening things about Connemara for a lot of people is how lunar and how bare it actually seems. One must not forget of course that it is mainly bog, and bog is the afterlife of a forest, of all the trees that were here. So even though we are looking down now on major emptiness and bare granite mountains, there was a time when this place was completely clustered and covered with forests and trees. There is a poem that I wrote a while ago trying to reimagine that, called “The Angel of the Bog”:
The Angel of the Bog
The angel of the bog mourns in the wind
That loiters all over these black meadows.
Remembers how it chose branches to strum
From the orchestra of trees that stood here;
How at twilight a chorus of birds came
To silence in nests of darkening air.
Raindrops filter through leaves, silver the air,
Wash off the film of dust to release nets
Of fragrance on which the wind can sweeten
Before expiring among the debris
That brightens each year with fallen color
Before the weight of winter seals the ground.
The dark eyes of the angel of the bog
Never open now when dawn comes to dress
The famished grass with splendid veils of red,
Amber, white, as if its soul were urgent
And young with possibility and dreams
That a vanished life might become visible.
From Conamara Blues
MEMORY
If the human eye had been able to look out over this landscape maybe ten thousand years ago or more, all it would have seen would have been gray, dead black ice everywhere and everything covered completely. It must have been an incredibly frightening and suffocating experience for the land that all its color was overtaken gradually with the surge of the gray breath of the cold, and then the snow, and then the ice freezing down on top of it. To be suffocated under hundreds of feet of this pack ice and to have lived that way for thousands of years must have been an incredible experience for the landscape. You can imagine when the first trickles of water began to loosen and the glaciers began to move, and the landscape became freed of this whole darkness on top of it, the first time that the sun touched it, and seeds maybe hidden for thousands of years began to awaken in the earth—that must have been an incredible emergence for the landscape. So the landscape has the memory of the time of ice that the human knows nothing about; except, I believe that we are made out of clay, that in some sense that memory is within our clay as well. Maybe that is the reason that fear can get to us so quickly, that maybe what fear does is awaken this relic cold in the bone again.
We hear here behind us the tattered screeching of a crow and we see the birds soaring in and sweeping out of the place. It is lovely to watch animals and see how at home they are in a landscape. Sheep are, I think, the undercover mystics of the Connemara landscape: I often think they are totally in a Zen mode of stillness! You would often see them, when driving the roads here, lying out in the middle of the road paying no attention to you as you slow down and pass on. They are chewing and ruminating on something totally different altogether. And there are huge populations of birds here that know these places better than the human foot or the human eye can ever know. They fit together, the landscape and the animals. The animals of course are our older brothers and sisters—they were here before we were. I often think that one of the next breakthroughs in the evolution of human consciousness will be the recognition of the subtle complexity and the hidden inner world that animals carry around with them. The innocence and silence of the animal world has a huge subtlety to it that is anything but dumb, but rather notices everything and is present in everything. Animals carry a huge ministry of witness to the silence of time and to the depth of nature. They are like the landscape in a sense: they live too in the mode of silence. It must be strange for a mountain to look at humans and the way they go around, their limbs and their eyes blurred by their desire and movement. And their inability to stay still in the one place. Pascal said that most of our troubles occur from our inability to sit still in a room, and stone manages that. Look at the stones here. They have been here for tens of thousands of years, but they don’t move, they just stay still all the time. When you look out at the Twelve Bens, there is little enough distance between them, but they have never once, in hundreds of thousands of years, managed to move or to relate to one another. I often feel that there is a world, maybe an infinite world of dream, hidden at the heart of a mountain, and that maybe part of the duty of the artist is in a certain sense to excavate the secret dream world of the mountain in an imaginary way. If you do agree that landscape is alive and that it is a presence, maybe then it is in the shape of landscape, the form of mountains, that you actually get an expression of the state of the place. If you go from that perspective, then the mountains of Connemara have risen very high, almost as noble guardians of the memory of the place and as lookouts in some sense for the infinite and the eternal.