Stones of Aran Read Online Free PDF Page A

the western village of Cill Mhuirbhigh gave me the form of this contribution: since I seemed to have a hand for the drawing, an ear for the placenames and legs for the boreens, why should I not make a map of the islands , for which endless summersful of visitors would thank and pay me? The idea appealed to me so deeply that I began work that same day. My conceptions of what could be expressed through a map were at that time sweeping but indefinite; maps of a very generalized and metaphorical sort had been latent in the abstract paintings and environmental constructions I had shown in London, in that previous existence that already seemed so long ago, but I had not engaged myself to such a detailed relationship with an actual place before. The outcome, published in 1975, was a better image of my ignorance than of my knowledge of Aran, but it was generously received by the islanders, prospered moderately with the tourists, and brought me into contact with the specialists in various fields who visited Aran. During the subsequent years of accumulation towards the second version of the map, published in 1980, I have walked the islands in companionship with such visiting experts as well as with the custodians of local lore whom I sought out in every village, and have tried to see Aran through variously informed eyes—and then, alone again, I have gone hunting for those rare places and times, the nodes at which the layers of experience touch and may be fused together. But I find that in a map such points and the energy that accomplishes such fusions (which is that of poetry, not some vague “ interdisciplinary ” fervour) can, at the most, be invisible guides, benevolentghosts, through the tangles of the explicit; they cannot themselves be shown or named. So, chastened in my expectations of them, I now regard the Aran maps as preliminary storings and sortings of material for another art, the world-hungry art of words.
    However, although the maps underlie this book, the conception of the latter dates from a moment in the preparation for the former. I was on a summer’s beach one blinding day watching the waves unmaking each other, when I became aware of a wave, or a recurrent sequence of waves, with a denser identity and more purposeful momentum than the rest. This appearance, which passed by from east to west and then from west to east and so on, resolved itself under my stare into the fins and backs of two dolphins (or were there three?), the follower with its head close by the flank of the leader. I waded out until they were passing and repassing within a few yards of me; it was still difficult to see the smoothly arching succession of dark presences as a definite number of individuals. Yet their unity with their background was no jellyfish-like dalliance with dissolution; their mode of being was an intensification of their medium into alert, reactive self- awareness ; they were wave made flesh, with minds solely to ensure the moment-by-moment reintegration of body and world.
    This instance of a wholeness beyond happiness made me a little despondent, standing there thigh deep in Panthalassa (for if Pangaea is shattered and will not be mended by our presence on it, the old ocean holds together throughout all its twisting history ): a dolphin may be its own poem, but we have to find our rhymes elsewhere, between words in literature, between things in science, and our way back to the world involves us in an endless proliferation of detours. Let the problem be symbolized by that of taking a single step as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin’s arc to its wave. Is it possible to think towards a human conception of this “good step”? (For the dolphin’s ravenous cybernetics and lean hydrodynamics induce in me no nostalgia for imaginary states of past instinctive or future theological grace. Nor is the ecological imperative, that we learn to tread more lightly onthe earth, what I have in mind—though that