Anam Cara

One of the things that humans have done, and especially in Western consciousness, is that we have hijacked all the primary mystical qualities for the human mind, and we have made this claim that only the human self has soul, that everything else is “de-souled” or “unsouled” as a result of that. I think that is an awful travesty, because landscape has a soul and a presence, and landscape—living in the mode of silence—is always wrapped in seamless prayer. In my book Eternal Echoes, I tried to explore that notion of the prayer of landscape. Meister Eckhart said that nothing in the universe resembles God so much as silence, so if you think about silence in that sense, then to come into silence is to come into the presence of the Divine. In a way, you allow yourself to be enfolded by that stillness. In a real sense, the deepest thing in a human heart is not the verbiage but is actually that still silence—not the silence of Buddhism, which often seems to me maybe something anonymous—but is the silence of intimacy where no word is needed and where a word would actually be a fracture.

To the post-modern mind, silence is terror. One of the healing ministries that a landscape performs is as a custodian of a great unclaimed silence that urbanized post-modernity has not raided yet. One of my fears would be, because of the way technology is invading space now, with the invention of virtual space and cyberspace, that we now have the commercialization of space. It is a nightmare scenario that in ten or twenty years’ time, leaving Oughterard and driving that bare stretch of road here to Máméan, which is empty and vacant and has this lovely void quality, that you could be liable to drive it and have at every juncture these beamed images of things to sell or things to do! The invasion of space could actually get to that level.

DARKNESS

On the eve of the New Millennium, I wanted to try and do something special. It seemed to me to be a night that you could be alone with landscape. I went off over Black Head and spent the night on the mountain, and it was really fascinating. When you go out in a place like that on your own where humans never live, but have passed through during the day and have rarely been there in the night, you feel that you have come in to a network of sounds that you don’t normally hear. At the beginning the sounds are frightening because you don’t know what they are, but then you settle down with them and you feel yourself being taken into the landscape. It was lovely to watch the dawn coming out to the landscape. The moon was behind the mountain that night, and then the dawn came in on the limestone that morning. It was almost as if the sea had vacated the place; the lime was rendered so white by the new sun of the first day of the new millennium.

Here in Connemara there is a deeper kind of darkness than in the limestone of Clare, which is a very white, feminine kind of stone, sisterly, friendly in the light. Here there is kind of a light resistance and it gets very, very dark, but when it gets dark on a very cold night the sky is magnificent in terms of stars. Because you have no light pollution, you get this clarity of all these little white apertures in this big wall of darkness twinkling down at you. It is really amazing. You become aware that you are living in a universe. During the day with all the clouds, you move on because you are busy, but at night, when you get a chance to linger and really look, you become aware of the infinite distances that are out there, and the light that is reaching you now is coming to you from stars that have gone out of existence for thousands of years. It is an amazing tenderness of distance that somehow reaches you.

One of the most fascinating aspects of a landscape like this is its interior darkness. We live on the surface of the planet and there is an infinity of darkness that we rarely see. We see it when we open a grave. We create an opening where there is a huge eternal night that is never fractured by light, but lives all the time underneath us. One of the first times I encountered that as a child was when we cut turf on the bog. The first barr or layer of turf was very brown and soggy, but as you cut further down you came to the best turf, the clear black stuff. You were going back through hundreds and thousands of years finding seeds of old plants, bits of bog deal and bog oak. In a sense you were going into the memory of landscape that was totally pre-human. No writer has explored that better than Seamus Heaney in his amazing collection North, where he goes into the secret archive of the bog. It is done with such tight formal beauty, and there is such a sense of edge and danger to it.

WILDNESS