The UnDeceiving: Pilgrimage

Inis Oirr, (Part One)

Photo from plane, approaching perilous landing.

Friends - I spent ten days of January on a remote Irish island. These next few UnDeceiving posts are an account of quite what happened.

These are LONG pieces and you may prefer to listen to me reading, which can be found at the bottom of the essay.

There is also news that from next week – leading into the Easter period – I will be reading the entire story of Parzival as a series of Sunday Stories (as requested). This Grail epic can be found in my book Snowy Tower. Early spring is the perfect time for this story.

Finally, many of you will by now have received news of The Skin-Boat & The Star, my new teaching programme beginning this September – I’m delighted to say that Iain McGilchrist will also be joining the ranks of distinguished guest speakers setting out on this endeavour.

Onwards.

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And it fears me sair, my good maister,

There’s a tempest out at sea.

Childe Ballad

I am dancing goose-wild on January limestone, I dance clean out of my civic drabness, my strained theatre, my expedient manoeuvring. Let those skins fall like feathers around me. I dance into the essential, the vital and the archaic. Stuff ye if ye don’t understand.

A rock grows in a certain way; it has the sun and the rain endorsing and belittling it. It takes its form by staring hard into centuries, weather, cattle piss. But there’s another side to the rock. Its underside. That has other information in its curvature.

The rocks inside me have been turned, all at once. What was off stage, hidden, unknown even to me, is now on stage. This is an adjustment. There’s only so much darkness you can eat in one sitting.

I am on the Aran Islands. Next stop is Hy-Brazil that mystical isle, and far beyond that the Eastern Abenacki, Pequawket, Mohawk, Pawtucket, Shawnee, Meskwaki. Today all I see is an unimaginably vast stretch of water ahead, with a great sheaf of limestone under my pale bare feet. I am singing in bad-Irish, with lots of stops and starts. I am trying to become a real human being.

On the island I was. Ten days in regular-type time.
But these were strayed-days; a flinty, yellowed type of time – stretched out for a year or three. On the island I am a blow-in, what we call a grockle where I am from.

One night I dreamt I reached into my left ear and pulled out a long strand of something like honeycomb. It would be damaging to the dream to say quite what that means in daylight time. But I would know that I am listening to things in a fresh way. And I’m prepared to sacrifice some sweetness to do so.

See where it leads you, they said. That was the only plan. Just over the waters are the mountains of Connemara, ancestral ground. I love the drama of a big old slope, but the fog’s put paid to any eyeballing. The island of Inis Oirr sounds like Inis Sheer and locals pronounce it Inner-Seer. I’m saying nothing.

Men a long time ago leave the big island to sail to the small island. They are heavy with drink. In the morning there is the boat delivered tidy on the other shore, but the syruped lads are vanished. When the people cut into their potatoes that evening, they will find them filled with blood.

I am a Dumnonian man, a Devon man. I come from someplace else. This is a westerly migration what is happening here.

On the flight over from Spidall I was with a man called Micheál and his dog. He gave me some island lore. He said to negotiate spiritual darkness you are to pick up a huge rock. A rock that makes you sweat-queasy and your knees totter to even grapple it. You then get-walked-by-the-rock in circles till your whole body is on fire. At that point you place the boulder on a tree stump or a dry-stone wall. You will feel different.

So I pick my story up to get-walked-by-it, to leave it somewhere it’s never been.