“Is Éireannach me!”

“Is Éireannach me!”

Silently imputing crimes of an unspecified nature to my accent, a man in spectacles spoke to me at the bar. -So ye are not of these parts? There was a dark and hooded manner on him. He stood stiff at his drink, balaclava black, shielding his eyes behind his glass. Although he spoke, it was clear he was closed to me and as uninviting in his welcome as a pub window seen from the street of a strange town. I hesitate to use my hippy word negativity, but in his case the ayes did not have it. His eyes had something quite else. Although vitreous, they were still able to convey an icy cold bundled in smouldering aggression. Not a gunman, I could see that at once. Not a professional. Just a loose provincial cannon. A sráid bhaile dreamer. He seemed to be a man who had stepped out of darkness and found only darkness. He had tasted history at tenth hand and it left a bitter and unsatisfied taste in his mouth. I knew him. He had been loitering here with intent for generations. Much has been said of the passage of time, but there are people in Ireland for whom time does not pass. It stagnates only and when it stagnates it breeds strange monsters. There is no passage for them. They lurk in the back passage, waiting, for what, they do not know. Until they think this might be it. I think he thought I might be it.

I looked him up and down. He was not one of them. This place was too far from the border. And anyway, the discipline was lacking. When you are an amadán yourself it is not hard to recognise another eejit, as long as you are not a total amadán. Perhaps he was not a total eejit. Perhaps his need for satisfaction was too great to be ignored. Perhaps in his family the anti-Christs de Valera and McQuaid had been worshipped as a matter of course.

I myself have always considered myself to be a gentleman, but certainly not a seoinín. But I was raised over the water. Over a lot of water. You would not be able to put a finger on my accent by now. And I do not warm to finger pointers, particularly if we have not been formally introduced.

My appearance and perhaps my Anglo-elocution belie me. I may seem on the surface to be a gentleman but I have recently come to the conclusion that in spite of an earlier squeaky-clean self-image, I am actually not at heart a gentleman and certainly not a gentle man.
At the age of twelve I always carried a brass knuckleduster in the top pocket of my beautifully tailored hand-me-down tweed hunting jacket and had considered sewing razor blades into the lining of my lapels had not my teenage years been full of forced and enjoyable violence in the OTC where I found brens and stens and two-inch mortars both delightfully destructive, satisfying, and legal to boot.

-Is Éireannach me! I said, and broke his glasses.

So this was Agincourt.
Or Gettysburg.
Or Arnhem.
Or, who knows?
Some long remembered battlefield,
Scarred and somewhat canonized,
With a brazen plaque.

There was a stone wall, I recall,
And approaching it,
Unarmed,
A meadow.

It was a garden in June,
Boughed with the weight of Summer,
Bound down with honeysuckle
and purple ropes of blackberry,
Breathing slowly out its perfumed breath,
Watching the swallows.

And then,
Like a stray bullet,
A hummingbird ricochet’d behind my ears,
And I threw myself down
And felt the warm earth sigh.

As I Walked Out in Galway City

It is a hangover. I thought it was the weather until I tried to rise. Cramps in my calf muscles as if a butcher were trying to strip them slowly from the bone. Homemade Strawberry Wine from a shop in Shop Street in Galway City. Köstliche Träume alone late at night on a sofa with a good film, Australian (the film) and delightful. It bulged with unrequited love like an Elizabethan codpiece and with what the euphemist these days calls scenes of a graphic nature. I suppose it is because the action goes off the graph in matters of body ripping and bottom slapping. Should they not be called scenes of an ungraphic or transgraphic or hypographic nature? Good old rumpety-pumpety anyway, and much kitchen vulgarity in the style of New South Wales suburban, the whole ending with a murder (brutal of course) and kisses and hugs all round back at the Outback. That’s my cup of Fosters! Though originating from down-under in that far-off austral landmass which appears to those who have only seen it on maps to be a capsized continent and possibly sinking to boot (or is that New Zealand?) this was nevertheless a happy film devoid of kangaroos. Thus it confounded my I’m-on-top-of-the-world prejudice. I like a dénouement where the women are gráphicly satisfied (we all like a bit of the grá and what am I but a gráfic artist anyway) and afterwards all the men get pushed off a cliff. When they fall for a long time unrepentative and then go splat at the bottom, well, could one ask for more? Not my own nemesis, though. That is more vice-versa. This after all is not a pipe! It is only a pipe dream.

And as for pipe dreams, let us begin one:

The Bog Crocodile
The Bog Crocodile opened an eye and surveyed for a moment the lazy surface of the pool that stretched away from him in two placid directions between yellow orchids and purple willow herb. No change in the familiar surroundings was apparent and this was enough to ensure the unrelenting somnolence of the other eye. Yet something must have prompted this tiny shift in his awareness. The Bog Crocodile was not given to idle speculation. Indeed he was not given to speculation of any kind whatsoever. The Bog Crocodile was certain. He was, one might say, sufficient in himself. Like the Universe.
It was clear to him that the orange waters flowing imperceptively today over his loggy bulk still slid past with the same immeasurable sloth as ever. The air hung motionless from a pig skin yellow sky, as though too tired to breathe. Even when an infantile puff of breeze, scarcely awake at this early hour, accidentally set the cotton heads nodding, it seemed nothing more than an affirmation of the never ending changelessness of things.
However at this moment deep beneath his unsuspecting certainty, from turfy depths where the black mash of sunlight and centuries lay fermenting into fire, a silver bubble as large and wobbly as a juggler’s dinner plate rose slowly towards the light.

Silent and treacherous, it broke surreptitiously upon the surface of the pool with the false politeness of an embarrassed guest struggling to divert attention from a smelly indiscretion at the dinner table.
An old spider knitting quietly in a clump of marsh marigolds sensed a twang of change register on his web. Peering to the right and to the left he strengthened his grasp on his silver ladder and a moment later felt the reeds twitch as a strange ripple passed them by. It brought with it an old, old smell, and made him think of dead flies, and long forgotten banquets in buzzing bluebottle halls, and the cobwebby paradise of ruined cottages and abandoned barns mouldering into the earth. It was the smell of arum lily and graves. It had a toadstool quality, even more pungent at first than that of the flowers in which he kept his deadly traps.
From a vantage point high above the wetland a sharp eyed bird of prey noticed the waters ripple and break. She wheeled for a moment treading the high breeze expectantly.
Below her the Bog Crocodile closed both eyes in defiance and took a deep and considered breath. “I smell,” he thought with the assurance of age if not of wisdom, “I smell something very rotten.” In pontifical solemnity he slowly licked his lips.

(From "An Leabhar Dubh agus Geal - Stories from my Linocuts". The Bog Crocodile Chapter One. Unfinished. But all suggestions for the continuation of this tale welcomed. I know what is going to happen. But perhaps you know better?)

Blow-in in the Wind

I say I am alone on this bog, but that is not strictly true. From out of the changing populations of farm animals people often emerge. Horses and cows, ponies and donkeys: of course there would have to be ownership upon them as there is upon every scrap of this bog. Even the commonage is tugged at in covetous directions by a whole handful of wary families. But the people here are not obvious. They appear suddenly as figures from a mist in the morning. They rise silently from the reeds. They move slowly along bog tracks, emerging unobtrusively out of rocks and scraw. They are sleight of hand beings. First you do not see them and then you do. They invest the loneliness of the bog with a loneliness of another kind.

These people are not casually in place on the land. They are rooted. When they show they occupy themselves intently with this task or that one as if the survival of the very earth gods depended upon it. Perhaps it does. To fill a gap in a ditch with an iron bedstead could be considered either an act of vandalism or a piece of planned recycling. But then again, their ancestor cast iron blades into sacred pools and propitiated gods who in all probability still lurk today in the blackthorn thicket among the bitter sloes. To me this smacks if not of worship then at least of divine appeasement.

In this corner it is hard to discover what lies behind any action. Life goes on, and I suppose it must seem to have a purpose. I am told there is no profit in cattle. I am also told, in a rhetorical kind of way, for I do not know the answer and am certainly not expected to know it: -but if there is no profit in cattle where does the money come from for a hundred and fifty thousand euros worth of truck and trailer? Don’t ask me. I use a spade and grow beans and potatoes.

To me they are mysterious characters, these emergents from the mist. I know nothing of the social structure in which they are embedded and I am ignorant of their personal histories. Scraps of gossip reach me blown in on the bog wind and shredded and distorted by the journey. But it is I who am the blow-in here and probably I could not even imagine their true stories.
Until only recently they lived far far back in time while I was gallivanting the world and witnessing what has become history.

They lived without electricity, water, telephone. They had an earth floor to walk on, an open fire to warm by, an iron pot to cook in and they shat in the barn. Perhaps. Why should they tell me the truth? Why should they? I myself travelled from far away 35 years ago to kiss the Blarney Stone. Ever since it has stood me in very good stead. You might or might not call me a liar but Truth like any saleable commodity needs to be pampered and arranged to the best advantage if someone is to buy it at all at all. Oh I know! Truth is not for sale! But do you buy that? Do you really buy that? Everything has a price, and so does everyone. It is the Market Economy. So what has a price must be for sale. Market my words. On this island blarney is in the water supply and as endemic as coliform bacteria. Words are alive inside.Children, working their fingers raw and their muscles sore. I see them grown to adulthood and standing before me and sometimes they may speak. About the weather. About their cattle. About their tastes or lack of in vegetables, in shopping, in.....who knows? I am limited in my way and they are limited in theirs. The world is narrow if you want it to be. Narrow is a safe place. Straight and narrow, well that is something else about me and my life. Veiled of course, as everybody veils their life here.

Among these wraiths is Attracta McCabe. Her land is scattered all around the bog like a torn up document. In the same way she scatters her ten cows, moving them daily the way a farmer might scatter his seeds at planting time, from one inherited bog field to another, as if the Land Registry had never bothered to clump them together into usable sizes. She is a strong and handsome woman, beautiful one might say, with a sad faraway look as if she suspects there is a world out there away from the bog, snippets of news of which reach her from time to time, and which she knows she will never experience. She does not drive. She has a large almost grown family who are becoming of the outside world, of college and job and the internet. She cares for them and her husband and her ten coweens.

I see her at evening bringing the cows home, walking along the bóithrín, she and they silhouetted against the evening sky, light stick in her hand, walking with them gently but with the majesty of Queen Maedbh. Sometimes, later, in my headlights, returning from a gathering I come across her lit up in her reflective jacket by my beam like a sudden lighthouse, cowering blinded back into the drain as we meet, she returning from putting them away for the night or checking a broken ditch. Beautiful and sad.

Schwantz has encountered her too. His eyes glitter when they meet.
–How is my sweet honeysuckle of the lane, he whispers, listening to be sure his voice does not carry over the bog amphitheatre to her family house or the conch-eared neighbours tuned to every variation in a frequency that scarcely changes from one moment to another.
– The Queen of the Bogland with her prize bulls! The divil is in him then. I hear him. He is on his way here and a whisper is louder than the wind down my slope.
I do not know her thoughts. She moves with the cows year in year out like the swaying of the ash branches, in tune with the place, but not unmoved by the wind. She balances on a fine edge. It would be cruel to tip her. To set her wobbling.