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.