My Lawn on the Bog

(Notes of a Professional Hypochondriac. Tagebuch eines professionellen Hypochonders)

Decked out in deck chair and straw hat I lounge on my homemade lawn today completely in tune with the Zeitgeist of the wider Bog, musing on the approach of fatal and incurable diseases. The sun galloped out of the East this morning riding fast on the back of a black windstorm as if running away from something nasty nasty nasty. It has hung around cancerously overhead ever since clearly contemplating a counter-atrocity. I have tied my hat to my head and tethered my chair to a passing erratic well lodged in the earth and am now covered for sun, wind, rain, storm or an attack by flying turtles, rare, but not impossible I have been told.

My lawn was torn out of some sad abandoned tract of bogland whose turf bearing days are not even a distant memory, so barren had its rooty furrows become. It was a forlorn ground, earthless, turfless, stonyfaced as an unwilling bachelor long past his useful reclamation date. Out of kindness I turned the ground out to grass. And with constant feeding, gleaned garden weeds and recycled scutch grass, and with the benediction of the interminable rains-without-end that protect all bog dwellers from the abomination of the sun it has turned into a well watered and lush pasture that now needs two donkeys to cut it and when they are beyont, grows overnight rattling exponentially upwards like a beanstalk until it looks in the morning as if it could feed five cows until they burst like fireworks in the sky. And there would still be enough grass left over for twenty-five good bales of silage to swap for potatoes.
(Next week I shall tell you more.)

Zephyrs and the Black Bog Midgets

“Underneath the Spreading Cemetery
All the little Worms are full of glee.
They wait for you and they wait for me!
Underneath the Spreading Cemetery.

Always keep on good terms with Worms!
Always keep on good terms with Worms!
Always smile, be good mannered and be best behaviour-ed,
Or one night in a grave in some dark lonesome graveyard
You may meet them again and you won't feel so brave you'd
Best keep on good terms with Worms! Worms!
Dying to meet you!
Worms! worms! Waiting to eat you!

Worms!”

A visit to the alchemist and the tide of fever recedes with a slurp leaving me wrinkled and happy as an untrodden beach. Muchibus Thankibus a dhochtúir! What a pick-me-up is belief! It picks me up yes yes yes and then blows me about the garden like a peppercorn with wings. The old changeable bogweather transmutes; skies of lead to skies of gold. I am carried into happiness by unclad gusts and placed gently among the lilies. Lilies! Graveyard flowers! I mock them! I own the pathetic fallacy. I own the weather. Like a lover blinded the wind breathes for me only. For who else? I alone. Even the donkeys have gone beyont.

With the delicious heat come delicious breezes, gentle as mist, stroking and carding and cleaning the garden. Kindness to me and a sweet flicking brutality to the midges that forces them back into the undergrowth. They begrudge us from there, waiting, always, impatient, like heirs at a deathbed. In the black undergrowth poison midgets are brewing bootleg among the nettles, testing needles, gnashing teeth, snorting hemlock and nightshade. When the soupy blight evenings return so will they, resurrected as crowns of thorn, in stinging hordes. Men have been known to go mad, screaming from the black bog turbary, blinded, groping for salvation in smoke-filled taverns, which they will not find again. Ni fheicfadh tú feasta iad!

Fever Fever

To catch the moment of disconnection fever brings, to linger in that space between rational consciousness and raving blackness is a wonderful opportunity. With real and dangerous fever the difficulty would be the possibility of simply dying at the end of it and not being able to return with the fruits of discovery.

Is this a real and dangerous fever? I cannot see it so. But in the land of euphemism I pass as fully sighted. In point of fact I am a One-eyed Jack. The strangest thing is that since diabetes removed one of my eyes I see more than ever I did before.

Fever becomes as a kaleidoscope, a binocular, a viewfinder, a mirror, a microscope. It is a tool box full of optical miracles.

Fever and again fever. Through my shirt the smell of boiled cabbage seeps out. When I am sick I smell like a 1950s school dinner. The smell hardens and cakes on me, a thin coating of vanilla wax that flakes off when I turn and fills the bed with crumbs that smell of almonds. I remember the 1957 pandemic, the lines of iron beds, the coughing school boys, the smell of camphor and Dettol, the starched Matron in her razor sharp vestments stalking the early hours with her clipboard like a valkyrie.

Somewhere in the cottage I have forgotten to turn off the washing machine. It thumps and thumps like a drunken giant copulating doggedly in the kitchen without being able to reach a climax.

Long legged spiders hanging in the ceiling corners are eating midges like chips. They scatter their remains on the skirting board, seaside vandals dropping their garbage. Winkle shells crunch underfoot on the promenade. As I watch I see they are Christmas decorations left behind, long after Twelfth Night, glittering with dust. This is the evening of the Second Night.

I can hear the crass and audible prostitution of a TV talk show left behind in the akashic record. I think I am not well.

The handles on the dresser, art-designed from rods of welding iron, are in the shape of hands and fingers. When you sleep they reach out and gouge you. I do not sleep. There is no sleep in fever. I am running naked in the garden under the red spot of Mars, the night breeze cooling my eyes. In this black of night there are marvellous colours, the fever hues. It would be worth being febrile always to see this richness of reds and blues and woody tints. Fever: the Old Ram is just a little boy. Perhaps some night bug caught me as I wandered around naked among the lilies looking up at Mars blazing red yellow in the South. Perhaps Mars bit me. The fever came, red and yellow and then with a deluge of black scowers and then a descent into one of the Deep Dark Pits I so carefully keep like a secure safe deposit box in a secret distant country.

Painting Flashback

The wind has come up fierce and ferocious today thrashing the bog cotton about like a classroom of wicked boys. It chased out the heat wave long before dawn. Instead of Tuscany I am back to Mayo. And here comes the rain to prove it, hard on the heels of the wind. It’s rattling round the window pane again as it was all winter. It strikes the glass like a shotgun blast. I had to run outside in my slippers and tie up the sunflowers in the flower bed; otherwise they’d have gone cart wheeling off over the turf like windmills.

I like it, this wind. It is July now, but it blows like winter. It blows through the cracks under the door and through the casements and right up my nose and I breath it into my brain. I can go back to the writing now with a head full of oxygen.

So that is a relief.

I thought I might die of guilt, spending all my time painting like that.

If there is a problem at all it is that I am obsessive. I came here to write, alone in this cottage with myself and the bogs and the boharins, swept in by the wind and the memories and the urgent need to get it all off my chest after sixty years of waiting.

But for the past month and two days, instead of writing I have been painting. They are great big unwieldy pictures on sheets of builder’s hardboard I bought water-damaged and at half-price from the hardware store in Kilkelly. Suddenly I wish to be Gauguin and Monet and Edward Hopper and Magritte and all at once and instantly and even so in my own unique spirit. And if I can’t get there within the hour, then it must be at least by the end of the month. After thirty three days there are so many masterpieces they will hardly fit into this neatly ordered universe. The cottage is bulging like a museum basement.

I have been painting night and day. Until today. The weather invited it. There has been a heat wave over Europe and it brought rare and reflected sunshine over Ireland. I have stood outside at the back door and painted everything I can see in all directions. I have captured every visible scene and many visible only to me and splashed so much paint around and about that the very ground begins to resemble something from the Museum of Modern Art and I am wading about in colour.

It has been a strange experience.

Since Miss Maggs beat the art out of me I had not thought about painting at all. I have done other things entirely with my life. And after all of that, I came here to write, for this is a place to stop living and give oneself over to reflection and perhaps death, or at least reflection about death.

It is a great palette itself of wild flowers and weather. Time here is not stopped, but it continues to move endlessly, revolving in the past. I think in Swinford, the 1950’s is the nearest it gets to today. I am at home here as I am at home in museums. They are full of what was once the familiar. That time is more real to me than the one that has come since. After all, I was alive then. Now I seem just to be tidying up after the party.

You see I am not reconciled to age. Sickness forces me to think about it, but only the numbers tell me the bad news, and numbers are only theoretical. Miss Maggs impressed on me their paramount importance and so I decided to delete them at once. I still look at a blackberry vine with the same emotion I looked at it in Polzeath but I do not count the thorns.

Flatpack Dreams

"Bill heard a footfall close behind him. Then a foot fell on his head!
It must have been a Mammoth, or a Rabbit made of lead!
If he'd muttered HOCUS POCUS he would never have heard the swish
And the chuckle of a Mammoth as it hears a man go squish!"


Woke 5am unable to sleep further. Bathed dressed ate grey porridge and walked along the concrete path to my potatoes. They are white in flower this morning, apprehensive and proud. Little girls at their first communion. There is a change in the weather though. Blight is prowling. Across the blank sky clouds loiter like hoodies and the sun is an indifferent yellow presence in the east. On a scrap of washed denim a new moon has been discarded. Fingernail clipping.

The air is so damp and so heavy it hurts my arms. I feel I have an untried prosthesis screwed into me from hand to elbow, both sides. I am drained of energy; a flyhusk in a spider’s web. My safe path maze dusted with dry earth from yesterday’s gardening has been swept by a breeze in the night into a corrugated sand pattern, thin and brown. The breeze has failed by now and the earth crunches like salt under my clogs. I had intended writing but the weight of the sky weighs me down like a guilty thought. I am struggling up Everest with rocks in my backpack instead of oxygen.

Yesterday’s springy energy has left. I can hardly make it back to the cottage. Fully dressed I collapse into bed and pull the comforter up and without comfort become heavy metal. The burden of this air has flattened me. Stamped into a leaden album of dreams, I am licked, kicked, tricked, stuck down, forced to watch image after image as they cross my retina plaintively calling out to be confessed, absolved, forgotten, shouted loud in caves, muttered stealthily under the breath, farted out like thunder in polite company. Anything. Anything. Anything for some attention. And to be done with it.

Cunningly Engraved

These days are unbelievable days for June. The sun rises at five fingering the morning mist as though it were a bride’s veil, and teases it for a while unobserved until the coast is clear. Then slowly at first and warming to the game it proceeds to romp naked into the high morning as if this were a chance for gratification which will never be repeated again. Which is most likely: I have perched on this island of bog and rock and wild grasses for seven years, watching the waters flow by and this is the first June when the earth has crackled under my feet like tortilla chips. It says: approach these Saharan fringes with care. Sand too can drown a man, waterless and bog-sucked under. Dry sand is deeper than you can imagine. It goes on for ever. And we after all are only grains of sand. Cunningly engraved though.

“Who is that black man moving
like an acquired target.
in the heart of Ballyhaunis?
A noonday shadow
standing up
to make itself invisible.

That is a man whose sacred groves are burnt.
He eats sand,
Fleeing a poisoned well.

Mark him passer-by.
Others have marked him before you.

Beyond this place
is the road to Ballaghadereen.
There is no sacrificing now in the oak cathedral.
The trees are cut
and hold up foreign churches.

See that hooded scarecrow
Blown in from treeless deserts?
Recognise the Ethiope
And know him.”

Fever

Through the window beyond my blazing red comfort blanket one of my eyes follows the movement of Mulcahey's artfully arranged towels flying on the line in the sinking sunlight. They are sculpted by the Atlantic wind and wrapped in movement and alive with unbearable streaks of colour. I have never seen so many gradations of hue or such violently dyed texture. It pulses semophorously in my direction. I cannot read the message.

I close my eyes and after the pounding in my head fades away I have reset the clothes line in a meadow of my own lifetime. It seems only moments back but it is half a century and more. There is a gentle slope of grass and flowers not too different from my field here in Páirc Loch but with a green and white trim frame house up there to the right in the background high on a rise. I am lying sprawled and comfortable in the grass, looking up at the house. Michael’s world. It is not exactly the picture you might remember. For that matter it is not precisely the one I know, but the perspective is true and it fits in its deep particulars.

I have added more than the washing. There are two square cows looking on made of planks and painted barn red. I found them in Alberta one afternoon, travelling with the lady harpists across that brilliant and empty desert of grass, on a ranch of wooden animals where the only flesh and blood was the rancher, and he was almost as dried out as his planky animals. And in my picture there are three hardboard sunflowers spilling their shadows jerkily onto the ground like whirligigs as the sun becomes a crescent and slides away down the back end of the afternoon.

I lie in the grass and remember a time of complete loneliness and safety. The place was Compton. It was in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. There was nothing there either, apart from maple sugar and wild strawberries and turtles half as big as barrels and bullfrogs twice as big as truth.
That was before they sent me away to boarding school where I soon learned why turtles have shells and wasps have stings. I learned about self defence long before I learned that you could run away. But once I found out about running I never looked back.

Backflash

Bill was a Mammoth Basher.

It was a beastly shame!
He'd bashed up all the Mammoths
Wot once freely roamed the plain.
Except the Biggest Mammoth,
Who had expressed the wish
To put his foot down hard on Bill
And listen to the squish.

It didn't bother Bill at all. He often beat his chest,
And clothed his insecurity with anti-mammoth jest.
But he kept his eyes on the horizon,
And he never went to bed,
Till all his wives said: “This ain't good enough!
We want that Mammoth dead!”

It is isolated here, up on the bog, in the far corner of Europe. And yet it is amazingly connected with the rest of the world. I am too rooted in an earlier age. I do not think I am yet reconciled to the internet, although it has become my umbilical cord to my islands of the past spread around the world. Twenty years ago the telephone had not reached Curryaun. Now television is horrifying and irresistible. I find it all the more unbalancing to step outside at night to have a pee, and see the sky aswirl with brilliant stars and Mars rising huge and yellow over Tom’s blackthorn hedge and then the moon suddenly splashed out like a broken egg among the torn white clouds. The only sound is the strange vibration of the night jar as it turns in the darkness above the house.

I watched television last night, drinking as much cider as my day’s exercise ration told me was expedient and my diabetes would permit. It was not enough; but then it never is. This illness prohibits excess, and excess has been my place of refuge for as long as I can remember. I am left fighting against myself on all fronts. It makes no difference that I have dropped the old persona. The ghostly form of my amputated nature still hovers around me and I can still feel the pains and aches in it. I am told that if I disobey I shall die sooner than I wish, but that if I do what the doctors tell me there is still a chance that I may stay alive long enough to find out if there is another life after the one I have already trashed.

The film I watched on television was a good one, but bloody. It was chosen to steer my taste away from Schwarzenegger, so far as that is possible. It was an art film and so as well as murder there was lunacy and a substantial opportunity for me to empathise with the protagonists and to recognise their reflection in me. Schwarzenegger is easier. He works on me like an extra gallon of cider without adding to my blood sugar. But I am always half-open to some self-improvement, particularly since my favourite methods of self-destruction are now beyond my reach and I am under a modicum of supervision.

After the film C turned in, and I stepped outside the cottage for my final look at the stars and then followed her to bed and fell past her into a cidery sleep as suddenly as if I had stepped off a cliff. I must have taken the film with me and we hit the ground together harder than I would have wished, for when I awoke this morning it was embedded in my head and I was convinced I had murdered C during the night as she slept.

There was no warmth beside me and no movement in her quarter of the bed.

I hesitate to open my eyes in the morning without an hour or so of pre-emptive consideration and I lay awake for a while feeling the desperate hands of the sheet clutch at my body until it was sure I was still alive. When I had woken enough to find the strength I to called out her name. Her answering grunt relieved me immensely but remnants of my dream still clung to me like a hangover.

Anniversary

"The moon rises above the rocky spine of the island chalking the brittle harbour dusty white,
like an impatient customs officer telling us to go.

There’s no colour under this Aegean moon, only a pallid sky.
It reaches unsympathetically through the window

and marks Passed across your shoulders.
No stars in the sky now, but the floor is still white with moonbeams. They flow over your toes like spilt milk.

No use crying over that."

She was sitting just off to my right at the side of the stage.
It was an important night. It was the night I first knew what it meant to perform.
She smiled. I smiled back. She had full lips and a lot of mascara around her eyes.

That night I sang a song and noticed for the first time the attention of the audience. I had never felt this intensity before. I had sung the words, got through the chords; that was it. This time I felt a tension, an expectation in the darkness after the first few lines. How am I to explain it? I paused, scarcely a pause, but I could feel the hidden crowd lean towards me, waiting for the word. I felt I could delay it for ever. When finally I spoke it it dropped into the blackness like a pebble dropped carefully into an invisible pond. I felt the ripples spread out. I felt them come back to me. I was in control. I knew then what I would do for the rest of my life. This was the triumph of temptation. Did I get lost at that moment, or did I need all this first, before I arrived here?

Afterwards we drank together and walked back to my pension through the cold streets. Her name was Jacqueline. She was half French, half Greek. Mostly French.
She wore a black coat with a big feathery fur collar that evening. And high heeled impractical patent leather shoes that clicked and clacked on the flagstones as we made our way through the shuttered streets. And I was victorious. I had discovered applause. I was Alexander the Great. The moon shone down clapping her chalky hands from high above the Acropolis. White flowers fell into the alleys around us as we walked together.

In my cupboard sized room Jacqueline took off her coat and I hung it in the wardrobe with my guitar. That, apart from the bed, was the only furniture. The door was a mirror. It beamed us back on ourselves and showed us how we thought we were. She was wearing a tight red dress. I lay on her, wrinkling it, and fell asleep immediately, triumphant after my first victory.

"The fist night I made love to an audience
I walked back to my lodgings through the sleeping Athenian streets
and cold stiletto footsteps clapped me
all the way home.

Above the Acropolis
the moon applauded icily,
dropping chill white flowers
where my feet would fall.

Since my victory
I have bought your red silk concupiscence
as easily as a late night souvlaki.

Walk the streets by my side, if you want.
Applause is a whore’s embrace,
It grips me tighter than anything your thin arms could offer.

In the streets of the Plaka
crushed magnolia petals lie like dead snakes on the morning flagstones.
I am envenomed now.
These blossoms have bruised my heel."

Flashback

I wake up.

Morning sunlight has burst into the room and the two paintings on the wall are lit as though they have been placed under the glare of a spotlight. They shimmer and change before my eyes and the colour glazes seemed to hover over the surface and then dart about the canvas like dragonfly wings, making the pictures pulse with energy. They seem almost to be breathing.

I have never looked at my work in this way before. Even while painting I had been aware of them only as if they had been two pieces of writing, carefully put together, grammatically conscious of the rules they must obey, and well behaved. I had thought of them as cerebral creations and little more than descriptions of the scenes they showed.

But now I see that there is something else. They are giving me back something that I had not put into them.

Perhaps it was the sunlight. Perhaps it was because that day I had actually woken up and opened my eyes immediately. I am not as quick as a matter of course, to move from sleeping to waking. It may be the weather here on the bog. Usually I wake to the sound of rain drumming on the tin roof of the red barn or the wind keening in the telephone wires.

I had been deeply asleep, wandering, as I often do now, in those fearful and decrepit places where dreams live uneasily and mutter things to us we would be well advised to remember.

On the stripped pine dresser by the side of the bed my morning mug of tea already waited. She must have put it there quite recently. It was smoking gently in the sunshine like a carefully placed votive offering. I still enjoy thinking like this, in terms of rites and rituals. It helps to nail the day down and keep it in place for a little moment longer. The mug is large and blue with a picture of a fat pink pig on the side. It is ample and it is appropriate.

There are other paintings hanging on the walls all around the room, framed meticulously, as though they needed to be sedated, like wild animals in care. Her paintings and my paintings; but mostly mine, for she is a Virgo, with a justice that touches on self-effacement. Her frames are like painted cages and in themselves are works of art.

These canvases all amaze me, but none so much as mine, for I have never called myself a painter, or thought to call myself one, until this moment.

She had opened the window to air the room, and the breeze gusted suddenly against the curtains and armfuls of light fell all over her furniture overturning the shadows. I try to move, but my body is like a sheet of hammered lead, sunk into the damp of the mattress. I wonder: “Is this old age or sickness?” I would reject them both. It can’t be time yet. But I am wary to throw them summarily out. I feel like a host at a large party confronted with two gatecrashers. Their faces are familiar but I cannot quite place them. I dare not make a scene, for although I cannot remember inviting them, I am not completely sure I did not.

“How strange,” I think, “How strange to start on a journey like this now, at my age.”

"And where are you now?
Striding out along the dykes,
slender amongst the bullrushes and yellow buttercup.
Down by the rusty river,
where brooks run in and rot in the shifty backwaters,
and the frog legions croak their gluttonous victory of flies."

The Vegetarian Cat

I've got a vegetarian cat.
Don't ask me how, Me-ow! Me-ow God made him one. He's just like that.
Don't ask me how, Me-ow!

When he patrols his bailliwick
The mice come out and chat.
They say: “Silly old Puss, you can't catch us!
You're a Vegetarian Cat!”

He smiles.
He looks them up.
He looks them down.
He takes a bow.

Then he beats out their brains with a rhubarb stick!
Me-ow! Me-ow! Me-ow!

Waking

“Sleep, sleep,
sleep beneath my spider-headed crown
in these arms,
silken, crimson, deadly,
till you awake to the harsh screech of an eagle
teaching its young to fly!”

It is that kind of morning and that kind of an awakening. Beaten awake by lilies I emerge into the day, regretfully, leaving something behind that seemed dear once and yet is already forgotten.