July 26, 2001
On the map Ireland looks like a little, hairy, old-man-foetus in profile stretching its toes and fingers into the Atlantic. It’s coastline, particularly that of the Western coast, is a place consumed with getting from A to B by the most circuitous route. My self-donated annual lottery prize is a visit to this part of the world. It is required to rescue soul and sanity, shore up the body for the coming year and refurbish the imagination. It hasn’t failed yet.
There the birds sing with a persistent generosity all morning, like those jazz greats simultaneously accepting and defying their basic pessimism. There is a machine buzz of flies and their kamakaze ticking against windows; huge moths; large black slugs; cows; endless bewildered sheep roaming the hills and the roads; less humans. Nature here is benign, no mosquitoes, no snakes, no Lyme ridden ticks, no man-eating sharks; the most threatening animal I encountered was a sheep dog with mythological ambitions, whenever one walked onto a beach with him he turned into a hormone driven minotaur monopolizing a leg of the nearest female, usually me.
The first days of the holiday are often the most difficult. Going away is like placing the shopping bag of your life on the floor; the contents escape and become fiercely animate objects and the bag loses all its form. It passes. You can spend a whole day reading, cooking, eating and walking. I became convinced while sitting in the wild garden of our rented cottage one morning, a warm sunny morning, that this is where time is manufactured. It emerges from this navel of the world in a wide ribbon, more plentiful at the point where it issues forth than when it reaches other parts. It is immensely comforting to experience this expanse of time. It stays light until 10.30 pm during the summer, which may have something to do with this illusion.
Wild salmon; smoked salmon; local lamb, pork and beef; floury potatoes; giant cooking apples; regal vegetables; milk, cream and cheese: all striving to taste of their very essence. A famine would seem impossible.
Beware the fellow tourist encountered at the start of the trip, he is the ineluctable character destined to haunt your stay. Ours took the form of a Dutch painter living in the vicinity. We’ll call him Ludwig. The previous tenants of the cottage, friends who we overlapped with for a night, had purchased two paintings of the area from him. The exchange of the paintings for the agreed upon price was the last thing to be done before our friends' departure. As I am sleeping in the sun filled loft bed on our first morning, and one sleeps long and hard in these parts, Ludwig’s verbal diarrhea crashes into the cottage. Can I outsleep his incessant ramblings, will my bladder outlast his tale? No. I have to rise, descend the stairs and join him for a breakfast of pig parts and psychobabble. He has met an American woman from Santa Barbara in the nearest town, in its gourmet shop. He is buying his daily cappucino (yes cappucino has come to Connemara) and betrays some hint of irritation that this blow in, the American, is monopolizing the attention of the shopkeepers. She turns to him and says, “you have been rolling a big boulder uphill all your life.” This comment completely disarms the ornery Dutch man and to make an incredibly long story, as he tells it, short it is decided that Ludwig should leave his Dutch wife of 25 years, move to Santa Barbara with the clairvoyant blow in and start painting redwood trees instead of rocky shorelines. We met Ludwig in every pub, on every turn of the road, and in every shop we frequented until he left for California a week after our initial encounter. He lasted six days in Santa Barbara. The gourmet shopkeeper kept us in cheese and gossip, cappucino and local lore.
What I kept reminding myself as I wanted to tear out Ludwig’s tongue, as my mind became saturated by his New Age tide of trivia, and by his egomaniacal stories of conquest and colonization, was that one shouldn’t run off with strangers you meet in the Connemara Hamper and that the devil you are holidaying with is wildly superior to the man ahead of you in the cappucino queue. Perhaps, as Ludwig kept telling me, there are no coincidences.
I loved finding your ruminations while during a search for Turbot Island. I lived on the island in the late 1970s, wrote a novella about that experience, and still have occasional deep longing for that place, that landscape. Last spring I visited with my son and we had a wonderful few days in Clifden (buying cheeses at the Hamper!), revisiting my old haunts and gathering information for something I was writing.
theresa kishkan ? I remember you being there sometime in the 70s
what is the title of your book re your time there?
I think you stayed in a bungalow rented off my dad, i would not have been on the island too frequently as i worked elsewhere but would remember you as you were a stranger in the locality
rgds pat
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On the map Ireland looks like a little, hairy, old-man-foetus in profile stretching its toes and fingers into the Atlantic. It’s coastline, particularly that of the Western coast, is a place consumed with getting from A to B by the most circuitous route. My self-donated annual lottery prize is a visit to this part of the world. It is required to rescue soul and sanity, shore up the body for the coming year and refurbish the imagination. It hasn’t failed yet.
There the birds sing with a persistent generosity all morning, like those jazz greats simultaneously accepting and defying their basic pessimism. There is a machine buzz of flies and their kamakaze ticking against windows; huge moths; large black slugs; cows; endless bewildered sheep roaming the hills and the roads; less humans. Nature here is benign, no mosquitoes, no snakes, no Lyme ridden ticks, no man-eating sharks; the most threatening animal I encountered was a sheep dog with mythological ambitions, whenever one walked onto a beach with him he turned into a hormone driven minotaur monopolizing a leg of the nearest female, usually me.
The first days of the holiday are often the most difficult. Going away is like placing the shopping bag of your life on the floor; the contents escape and become fiercely animate objects and the bag loses all its form. It passes. You can spend a whole day reading, cooking, eating and walking. I became convinced while sitting in the wild garden of our rented cottage one morning, a warm sunny morning, that this is where time is manufactured. It emerges from this navel of the world in a wide ribbon, more plentiful at the point where it issues forth than when it reaches other parts. It is immensely comforting to experience this expanse of time. It stays light until 10.30 pm during the summer, which may have something to do with this illusion.
Wild salmon; smoked salmon; local lamb, pork and beef; floury potatoes; giant cooking apples; regal vegetables; milk, cream and cheese: all striving to taste of their very essence. A famine would seem impossible.
Beware the fellow tourist encountered at the start of the trip, he is the ineluctable character destined to haunt your stay. Ours took the form of a Dutch painter living in the vicinity. We’ll call him Ludwig. The previous tenants of the cottage, friends who we overlapped with for a night, had purchased two paintings of the area from him. The exchange of the paintings for the agreed upon price was the last thing to be done before our friends' departure. As I am sleeping in the sun filled loft bed on our first morning, and one sleeps long and hard in these parts, Ludwig’s verbal diarrhea crashes into the cottage. Can I outsleep his incessant ramblings, will my bladder outlast his tale? No. I have to rise, descend the stairs and join him for a breakfast of pig parts and psychobabble. He has met an American woman from Santa Barbara in the nearest town, in its gourmet shop. He is buying his daily cappucino (yes cappucino has come to Connemara) and betrays some hint of irritation that this blow in, the American, is monopolizing the attention of the shopkeepers. She turns to him and says, “you have been rolling a big boulder uphill all your life.” This comment completely disarms the ornery Dutch man and to make an incredibly long story, as he tells it, short it is decided that Ludwig should leave his Dutch wife of 25 years, move to Santa Barbara with the clairvoyant blow in and start painting redwood trees instead of rocky shorelines. We met Ludwig in every pub, on every turn of the road, and in every shop we frequented until he left for California a week after our initial encounter. He lasted six days in Santa Barbara. The gourmet shopkeeper kept us in cheese and gossip, cappucino and local lore.
What I kept reminding myself as I wanted to tear out Ludwig’s tongue, as my mind became saturated by his New Age tide of trivia, and by his egomaniacal stories of conquest and colonization, was that one shouldn’t run off with strangers you meet in the Connemara Hamper and that the devil you are holidaying with is wildly superior to the man ahead of you in the cappucino queue. Perhaps, as Ludwig kept telling me, there are no coincidences.
- rachael 7-26-2001 5:26 pm
I loved finding your ruminations while during a search for Turbot Island. I lived on the island in the late 1970s, wrote a novella about that experience, and still have occasional deep longing for that place, that landscape. Last spring I visited with my son and we had a wonderful few days in Clifden (buying cheeses at the Hamper!), revisiting my old haunts and gathering information for something I was writing.
- Theresa (guest) 9-09-2002 5:35 am [add a comment]
theresa kishkan ? I remember you being there sometime in the 70s
what is the title of your book re your time there?
I think you stayed in a bungalow rented off my dad, i would not have been on the island too frequently as i worked elsewhere but would remember you as you were a stranger in the locality
rgds pat
- pat (guest) 1-11-2004 7:11 pm [add a comment] [edit]