Anam Cara

We hear here behind us the tattered screeching of a crow and we see the birds soaring in and sweeping out of the place. It is lovely to watch animals and see how at home they are in a landscape. Sheep are, I think, the undercover mystics of the Connemara landscape: I often think they are totally in a Zen mode of stillness! You would often see them, when driving the roads here, lying out in the middle of the road paying no attention to you as you slow down and pass on. They are chewing and ruminating on something totally different altogether. And there are huge populations of birds here that know these places better than the human foot or the human eye can ever know. They fit together, the landscape and the animals. The animals of course are our older brothers and sisters—they were here before we were. I often think that one of the next breakthroughs in the evolution of human consciousness will be the recognition of the subtle complexity and the hidden inner world that animals carry around with them. The innocence and silence of the animal world has a huge subtlety to it that is anything but dumb, but rather notices everything and is present in everything. Animals carry a huge ministry of witness to the silence of time and to the depth of nature. They are like the landscape in a sense: they live too in the mode of silence. It must be strange for a mountain to look at humans and the way they go around, their limbs and their eyes blurred by their desire and movement. And their inability to stay still in the one place. Pascal said that most of our troubles occur from our inability to sit still in a room, and stone manages that. Look at the stones here. They have been here for tens of thousands of years, but they don’t move, they just stay still all the time. When you look out at the Twelve Bens, there is little enough distance between them, but they have never once, in hundreds of thousands of years, managed to move or to relate to one another. I often feel that there is a world, maybe an infinite world of dream, hidden at the heart of a mountain, and that maybe part of the duty of the artist is in a certain sense to excavate the secret dream world of the mountain in an imaginary way. If you do agree that landscape is alive and that it is a presence, maybe then it is in the shape of landscape, the form of mountains, that you actually get an expression of the state of the place. If you go from that perspective, then the mountains of Connemara have risen very high, almost as noble guardians of the memory of the place and as lookouts in some sense for the infinite and the eternal.

INTRUSION

This is of course a place of pilgrimage. Professor Míchéal McGréil of Maynooth has done great work here in getting a little church built, and there is a beautiful statue here by Cliodhna Cussen of St. Patrick, Aoire Mháiméan, with the sheep just round his legs in the stone, beautifully carved by her. On Good Friday, Míchéal McGréil leads Stáisiúin na Croise here and Joe John Mac an Iomaire sings that sean-nós song Caoineadh na dTrí Mhuire, which would break your heart with the pathos of it. I often think that our liturgies have become very bony and very spindly and have none of the sensuous textures of landscape in them. Maybe that would be one way of reviving liturgy, bringing it out into the landscape and allowing the elemental force of the landscape to clothe the liturgy again with sensuous texture and enable us to come in.

As humans, do we intrude too much on the landscape? One of the most wonderful photographers in Ireland, a person who specializes in Connemara, is Fergus Bourke. He has taken some amazing black-and-white pictures of this place. I remember one day we had exactly that conversation: what gives the person the right to intrude on this place? I suppose the only thing you can say is that the quality of your presence here in this way, in order not to be voyeuristic or consumerist, has to slow down to the level of attention where you begin to come into the rhythm of the landscape. I think Fergus Bourke’s work is a witness to that, to incredible moments where he almost catches the landscape out in conversation with itself.

SILENCE