The Frayed Atlantic Edge, page 26
The last few years have seen powerful films transform public awareness of these issues. First there was A Turning Tide in the Life of Man (2014), which recounts the efforts of an islander to reason with bureaucracies. Then there was Atlantic (2016), which compared the threatened communities of Ireland with the lost industries of Atlantic Newfoundland and the thriving ocean industries of Norway. And major research projects now aim to breach the divide between these communities’ understanding of the sea and the very different vision of distant institutions. These include the Irish Fishers’ Knowledge Project at the National University of Ireland, Galway. But it remains to be seen if anything can be done that will prevent the need for a future writer in Robinson’s mould to recover a sense of the lost Aran life of today.
The most revealing set piece in all Robinson’s work demonstrates the need for any understanding of community, of place, or of the relations of production, to be rooted in time. It evokes inspiration from the Aran strand-line rather than cliff edge. Wading into ocean to watch dolphins as they wove through sea, Robinson mused on relations of human movement to time and space. The present and thousands of past processes exist in every step, he realised, and the task of decoding a single metre is beyond the wherewithal of humans:
I waded out until I was within a few yards of them. Their beautifully easy plunging motion entranced me – the way they moved through the waves was itself wave-like; it seemed to express the perfection of their adaptation to their habitat. I began to wonder what the human equivalent would be. Could one imagine taking a step, just one step, even on the world we inhabit, that would be as adequate to the ground it covered as is the dolphin’s wave-like plunge to the wave it traverses?
Pursuing this logic of attentive being, which recalls no other attitude so much as that of a medieval monk, Robinson’s work offers an orientation of extraordinary precision but also inspires an experience of extreme disorientation as the moment swings into deep time and back.
I’d thought most of the temporal contrasts Robinson draws on the day that summed up my wet and windy time in Connemara. This was days before I passed beneath the Aran cliffs, and I still wasn’t sure what implications Robinson’s writing might have for my journey. I was rounding a unique headland that is neither cliff nor shore but as complex as either. This was one of very few places that Robinson, by necessity rather than inclination, surveyed by boat instead of on foot. Slyne Head is the westernmost extremity of County Galway. Its squat dark rock is broken by rampaging seas into scores of scattered, salt-sprayed islands. The sky as I paddled hung low and intense. Black clouds were heavy with vapour, ridged like rough water, and goaded by the same sou’westerly that whipped the sea. Exposure like that here is rare except beneath tall cliffs. In swell of any size this low land is lost: it drops beneath the paddler’s view as if sunk in sea. Ragged sheets of wave loomed, coiled, and fell across the kayak, solid, forceful and relentless. The effect was claustrophobic: like contracting walls of nightmare cells. The horizon was near enough to touch and could never go unwatched for a moment.
Sometimes, however, there’d be a fleeting glimpse above the scarps of sea. In those moments close perspective transformed to cinematic sweep. Horizons bright with golden light spilled between pewter sky and iron ocean. There were sea-strafed reefs where towers of white foam grasped like stalagmites towards cloud as solid as the ceiling of a cave. The dark sea bore ranks of marching furrows, flecked with white, a thousand strong. I tried in vain to blink sea spray from tired eyes whenever my tiny world was transformed into this vision of stupendous forces. I felt smaller than I’ve ever felt before and my little paddles spun like the wings of a moth fluttering moonward. I thought of Robinson and the words with which he evokes each step in a Connemara field as a point of access to vast inhuman scales of space and time. His phrase – ‘the immensities in which each little place is wrapped’ – captured the paradoxes of close focus in the second biggest ocean on earth. Robinson’s eyes and limbs are always straining towards dimensions inconceivably larger and unimaginably smaller than the human: it was here, as my senses dealt with droplets and the ocean dealt with me, that it struck me how awe-inspiring Robinson’s philosophy of place could be.
I landed at Slyne Head as the clouds collapsed into downpour and cleansed three days’ salt-rime from my skin and clothes. The views slammed shut. Although low light warmed the rain for a little longer, grey melted into grey and ground receded into shadow. The island was cryptic with granite that slowly quit glittering. Two lighthouses, less than half a mile apart, mark this out as a site of danger. One is a grim black light at the island’s west that feels like something from Tolkien, the other a stunted grey tower at the east. An even clearer symbol of exposure is a strange long corridor like a fragment of labyrinth: a walled pathway that bisects the islet so that walks across it can be made in storm-force winds (though it might be fifty years since the trudge was last made in earnest). There are unexpected steps and platforms amid the rabbit-dug land and brackish pools. Bright creatures perch beside rain-pelted puddles; gradually, they reveal themselves through the drifting grey veil to be buoys blown ashore by gales.
The night felt like winter. I was wrapped in wet darkness until the huge black light whipped by. Its beams were unwelcome three times over: they intensified the dark between each sweep, they lit constellations of falling water that I hoped in vain to forget, and they marked time through a deluge that felt interminable. The surprise was that there was something comforting about this spot, precisely because it was humanised by Robinson’s record of shoreline life. It couldn’t be wild when populated with his warm cast of fishers and farmers for whom each skerry was familiar. Their mocking, laconic responses to fearsome weather made it impossible for me to feel sorry for myself. His is a vision of these islands that’s close to us in time yet radically different from the ways of life in Dublin or Belfast or Cork. Never idealised but always enchanted, never mystical but full of mystery, the ordinary and domestic are revealed to be astonishing and wild, and the wild and astonishing, domestic.
I cruised a few days later straight into the heart of Galway, having rounded the great promontory of Ireland’s mid-west and dealt with the most challenging seas of the whole journey. Galway was like a fireside in winter or a lighthouse in a storm: an oasis of arts and sociability on the edge of the Atlantic. A mercantile town of great antiquity, Galway long provided Norman invaders with protection from both the ocean and the Irish but is today a haven of Irish-language culture. Maybe my feelings were shaped by the wild context of the preceding days and by the introductions Moya Cannon had granted me, but I’ve never been so instantly enamoured of a city on first visit. The presence of urban centres such as Galway and Limerick in deep clefts of the land mass distinguishes the Irish Atlantic from the Scottish and explains, in part, why Irish culture once faced the ocean more resolutely than any other part of the British and Irish Isles. It may also help explain the greater resilience of the Irish than the Scottish language after 1800. My next few days were more intensively social than any others on the journey: breakfasts, lunches, coffees, dinners and drinks ran one into the other, each with artists, writers or scholars from the National University of Ireland. The wrench of moving on was palatable only because an approaching spell of calm promised to ease my passage through the finest skerry-scapes in Europe.
MUNSTER
(May)
I ARRIVED IN Munster at the perfect time of year. As spring waxed, shearwaters arrived. These large, piebald birds, with long cylindrical bills of gun-metal grey, transformed the experience of the sea. By day they glided noiselessly a foot or two above the waves, drawing uplift from the sea’s contours, appearing silently at my shoulder. At dusk they sat together in vast rafts, conjoined into ocean obstacles, and quiet unless spooked into clamour. After dark they began to vocalise: island nights were haunted both by ghostly wails from their burrows and the zip of their long wings cutting the air beside my head. Sometimes I’d round a headland to find myself in choirs of cooing razorbills. I’d drift, silent and ignored, through the rituals with which they remake pair bonds every spring: tapping bills, nuzzling, gurgling and swimming to and fro with feathered faces pressed together (figure 10.1). I’d never before witnessed these extraordinary displays of affection.
Days lengthened and seas warmed till the high shadows of gannets were matched below the boat by dark forms of pelagic fish and mammals. I soon heard rumours: gangs of basking sharks, fifteen or twenty strong, were lumbering north along the Kerry coast. Among the Blasket Islands (Na Blascaodaí) I watched an alien creature, its waggling nose golden-bright in the last light, flap towards the coast. Only days later did I discover it was an infant basking shark. The Munster names of this species relate to its habit of lounging in fine weather with its fin above the water close to shore: ainmihide na seolta (‘monster with the sails’), liop an dá (‘unwieldy beast with two fins’) and liabán gréine (‘great fish of the sun’). Oil from this shark’s liver burns exceptionally clean and smokeless, so that the city streets of eighteenth-century Galway glowed with shark: ‘sun fish’ is a name twice deserved. The creature’s plenitude was such that thousands were killed to light the roads: in 1774 a whaler named Thomas Nesbitt harpooned forty-two from a single small boat.
Far out among offshore rocks I paused in mingled fear and wonder as round-faced Risso’s dolphins burst through waves and overleapt my boat. This was the first time I’d seen this species. Up to four metres in length, their presence was far more imposing than I’d ever imagined. They were ballistic in velocity and purpose: dark torpedoes of pure energy that ripped through still seas. The Risso’s bull that came to investigate at close waters was young and almost black, lacking the pale scars that mark older individuals out as alphas. Whales were more familiar company and were the Risso’s antithesis. Their small fins topped the gentle arcs of their huge bodies in the roaring tides near headlands; they were oases of slow calm amid waters in fast-forward. On my second day off Kerry I was caught in the tiny shining eye of a minke whale that showed its pleats as it slowed almost to stillness and observed the boat; I managed a single photo of a minke fin (figure 10.2). Whenever bubbles rose in the lea of land, tiny, glistening porpoises were sure to rise behind them. It wasn’t now unusual to see three species of cetacean in a day. On the afternoon I met the Risso’s there were five. And there’s no experience I know that compares with being locked in the gaze of creatures that seem to live on planes of existence so remote from ours.
It’s no surprise that Irish culture has for centuries been full of these ocean megafauna. The sea itself was a place of transcendence that looms large in old Irish writing. Poetic inspiration and spiritual insight were thought to occur at the edge of water. Next to heaven in the list of God’s great creations was ‘the white waved sea on earth’. The bright and shining ocean was a mirror of the heavens; a halfway stage between ordinary earth and transcendent air. In words attributed to St Fionan it was ‘in muir múaid mílach’ (‘the noble sea, teeming with life’). In lines attributed to St Columba, the ‘waves above the shining sea’ sing to God ‘in everlasting sequence’ so that anyone aspiring to sanctity must gaze ‘on the manifold face of the waters’. But even this saint, often so focused on his deity, wished to be by the Irish Atlantic for the same experience sought by countless modern visitors: ‘that I might see its mighty whales, the greatest wonder’.
In the older Irish tradition, waves were the blowing manes of the family of Manannàn Mac Lir. These sea gods’ dishevelled tresses were loosed, and turned white, when the gods were wild with joy or anger. But this spiritual sea of Celtic lore was also run through with the imagery of cetaceans. A long seafaring poem attributed to Rumann mac Colmáin, who died in 747, defines the ocean by its beasts with just the surface spume being god-locks: when storms arrive
The pallor of the swan covers
the plain of whales and its inhabitants;
the hair of Manannàn’s wife blows loose.
Even before Heaney translated Beowulf, the medieval kenning of the sea as ‘whale-road’ swam his work, as in the ten exquisite Glanmore Sonnets (1979) which conjure the blown horns of trawlers returning to harbour for shelter from a storm: ‘Sirens of the tundra / Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road raise / their wind-compounded keen’.
Several Irish myths, such as that of St Brendan, recognise that whales are not so much animals as floating ecosystems. They feature cetaceans as land masses on which a party of saints or heroes can dwell for days before discovering their isle is animate. Others feature whales as foes, threatening boats and swallowing heroes whole. In the Irish Cinderella tale, Trembling, the hero, is pushed from a sea cliff by her sister, Fair, who then sets out to seduce the handsome prince while her virtuous sister pines in a whale’s belly. Trembling is swallowed and regurgitated three times before she’s found. Only the Irish telling of this tale, otherwise common to many cultures, turns on a whale’s appetite. Irish Jonahs abound. When Marianne Moore, American daughter of an Ulster mother, wished to assert her identity as a woman of Irish heritage she wrote an essay entitled ‘Sojourn in the Whale’ (1915). The offending whale stands for England, English, empire and patriarchy. However, the poem turns on the phrase ‘water in motion is far from level’. All will not run smoothly, Moore insists, for the Anglo-male whale: a renaissance of cultures like Irish will result in the regurgitation of the things it has consumed. In the surreally understated terms of the critic Fiona Green, Moore’s whale suffers from the ‘digestive difficulties that trouble the colonial project’.1
But Irish culture also features whales as symbols of beneficent strength. Ireland has no official ‘national animal’ like the Welsh dragon or English lion but the whale has often been an unofficial sigil. In the early days of the modern Olympics, when Ireland was politically British, many athletes would not represent the occupying power. The most famous were a group of weight-throwing policemen who, for the USA and Canada, won twenty-three medals between 1896 and 1920. These transatlantic strongmen took the natural name ‘the Irish Whales’ and became a global phenomenon.
Many shoreline sites are named for cetaceans, such as Cuasin na Muice Mara (‘Little Inlet of the Sea Pig’) on Clear Island (County Cork), or Ros a Mhíl (‘Promontory of the Whale’) from which ferries depart for the Aran Islands. These evoke the presence of real rather than symbolic whales, often connected to historic strandings. But the practical meaning of these rich masses of meat has changed dramatically since the sites were named. On Inis Mór a whale stranding would once have meant largesse in flesh, bone and blubber, but by the early twentieth century the sight of a vast carcass on the shore inspired disgust not joy. A song, which seems only to be recorded in Tim Robinson’s archive in Galway, recalls the day when:
A big reward was offered for to bury him, for we
nor any other men could haul the monster out to sea.
You’d want stout Coll McMorna, Oscar and Conan Maol,
and even they could hardly stand the stench of rotting whale.
A crowd came o’er from Galway, determined to be rich
‘We’ll cut the body up’, they said, ‘without the slightest hitch’,
but something must have scared them, when once they saw the whale
for home they went as if they had the devil on their tail.
Some came from Connemara, and brave enough to stand.
‘We’ll set alight to him’, said they, ‘and burn him on the strand’,
but they were unsuccessful and one was heard to say,
‘You’d need the Ardmore witch to come and spirit him away.’
In an era that rejects whale commerce these leviathans have become symbolic of environmentalism and blue ecology so that the hulk of a whale speaks on a new scale: not of local windfall but of global tragedy. It is the awe-inspiring antithesis of urban industry and the icon of oceanic otherness.
The fact we think of ‘the whale’ at all is a symptom of this shift. The ethereal song of humpbacks is conflated with the scale of the blue whale, the intelligence of the sperm whale with the friendliness of the grey to create an idealised chimera that is a gentle totem of the ocean. Always, it seems, ‘the whale’ is baleen grazer not toothed hunter. Indeed, I once experimented on my students, asking ‘What do whales eat?’ All answered simply ‘Plankton.’ Not one showed awareness of the range of whales with their many diets; none seemed willing to recall that toothed whales existed. Like the Irish west itself, ‘the whale’ is guardian of old values otherwise lost: survivor of a truly wild ethic and intelligence. It is to nature as Fenimore Cooper’s last Mohican was to culture: the noble savage on a frontier in mid-collapse before forces of homogeneity and profit. In modern cultures the whale is the ocean aboriginal who lived through millennia of prehuman peace. It is a survivor from the age of megafauna whose onshore analogues are not so much elephants as sauropods. Whales are, in this vision, watery Adams and Eves who never left their blue Eden and are unstained by the sin with which myth explains human nature. These fictions of the whale are no less significant and meaningful for being false.
Whales are thus living histories that embody a particular attitude to time. This attitude elevates everything ancient. It casts grand perspective on the fleeting triumphs and disasters of the human present which are made to look like surface froth in contrast to what the whale sees: the slowly moving deep. Though there were once many whale-hunting stations along the Irish shore, these have almost been erased from memory and are mostly beyond identification. In north Donegal I’d found a briar-bound shoreline structure, believed by a few locals to have been a whaling station, but now only ever listed as a ruined salt works. The fact that whaling was a matter of local subsistence in the recent past has been partially erased from consciousness, the hunt presented instead as a pursuit of Greenland, Norway and the high Arctic.
