1
Perhaps it began with the trip to Kinsale in January of this year. I had been promising my friend Ulick I would visit him for several months. He was doing a course in permaculture at Kinsale College of Further Education. Permaculture is about practical sustainability, the idea of living a self-sufficient life. Every time I hear this word, self-sufficiency, I am drawn to the image of a dacha in the Russian taiga with the soil as black as crude oil and the crackling of a freshly shovelled wood-chip fire; images drawn from Tarkovsky’s films or perhaps, not so strangely, the paintings of Finnish mythology by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. A Finnish man once asked me about Irish nationalism and art; why, in the nineteenth century, architecture never played the same role here as in other emerging European nations. I suppose my answer was something about colonialism or religion, but I do not remember.

I did not decide to go to Kinsale until just before my journey. It was a week before university was to start. The weather was cold and grey but it was not raining. I got the train to Cork and slept. On arriving at Ceannt Station, I struggled onto the platform and from there to the bus depot. I was weighed down with my top-heavy rucksack. It was mostly full of new books I had received over Christmas.

It would be an hour before the bus to Kinsale was to leave and so, even with my cumbersome luggage, I went to Eason’s in search of poetry, my obsession at the time. I had spent the previous two months reading and writing poetry, rooting it out, looking for “nourishment” as I called it. In one working week in December, I had written four poems I was happy with – a record! Never before had I written with such vigour and, on this creative high, all the things I saw, heard and tasted, were printed in my memory as ideograms, waiting to be placed into poems.

My uncle Barney described great poems as being like sweets you could suck on forever. On Christmas Eve, we sat in O’Flaherty’s pub in Buncrana discussing poetry. The photo of the night, posted on the internet several weeks later, shows him and me sitting close together. My hair is greasy and plantlike: clumps of hair whisp in every direction. My right hand is holding a half-empty pint glass while I gesticulate with my left. Barney’s hands are on his lap, out of sight, and his dark-reddish hair is silvering over the ears.

“I can’t write poetry, Michael,” he said. “But I can appreciate it.” His Donegal accent has an American twang. He has lived in San Francisco since 1979. His favourite poet is Thomas Hardy, but he told me to read Gary Snyder.

2
It is May. I recently finished an MA in Writing at NUI Galway and have since moved back to Dublin to live in my parents’ house because my loan ran out. Things have changed in Dublin though. Most of my friends have moved away and, being unemployed, I spend my days reading or chain-watching TV series. I have written very little now that there are no deadlines left.

I am a nostalgist, idealising everything about the past, therefore I have a strong desire to return to Galway.

A few weeks before the end of the autumn term, I moved into a thatched cottage on the Headford Road with two other men in the programme, Ryan and Jonathan. The unofficial fourth occupant was Niamh, another classmate and Jonathan’s girlfriend. We had gotten into the habit of reading poems aloud in front of the fireplace, which, like a qiblah niche, invited ritual. It was so huge you could walk into it. We used a mixture of wood and peat to fuel the fire, setting it alight around seven, and by nine it was intense. There were two nooks on either side of the fireplace with embedded seats.

We sat in the nooks or on the armchairs pulled close, taking turns reading, each of us polishing our voices, trying to make the poetry live, or rather, trying to impress each other. We all had our own style of reading. As the night drew on, we puffed away at cheap cigars, drinking whiskey or sherry, budget wine and beer, searching for great poems in the dozen anthologies and collections we shared. Each poem was spoken slowly, clearly. Every word was treated as an equal and all punctuation was observed. By midnight, light perspiration covered our foreheads. The house was cold outside the semi-circle of the fireplace. We rarely turned the lights on, as a coin-operated meter ran the electricity. The only light was the violent orange of the peat sods. The fire sunk inside the sods.

The others were usually in bed by three in the morning, but I would stay up, pacing the room. That hour between three and four has always been the most creative time for me. I stood over the last bit of fire, stoking it with the poker, searching, scratching the grate.

When I moved back from Galway and unpacked, my mother commented that all my clothes, even the freshly washed pieces, stank of peat smoke.

3
In Eason’s in Cork, I picked up a volume of Derek Mahon’s Collected Poetry. He was my hero when I was seventeen. For about two years after I first read him in English class, I would recite “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” at least twice a week. He lives in Kinsale, and I thought perhaps, by chance, I might bump into him in a pub and he would sign it for me. I prefer Mahon’s older poetry; his newer pieces, since the nineties, seem more obtuse and overwrought, although his recent book, Life on Earth, is very good.

I went back to the bus depot and got the coach to Kinsale. It was a forty-minute journey. The coach pulled into a large car park just outside of the town and left us there. I called Ulick. No response. I wandered down the hill from the bus stop in search of a pub where I could wait for him.

Kinsale is a good-looking town. The streets are narrow with brightly painted buildings, boutique shops, a marina full of yachts, and even a brewery specialising in Kinsale Lager (Beer and Cider in Ireland: The Complete Guide was tucked into the breast pocket of my jacket on that day). There are hills on either side of the town. In places, there is exposed rock. Some of the streets have flights of steps leading up the hills giving the town a barracks-like quality.

I felt comfortable wandering around, but my mind continually rested upon the strangeness of the experience. I am doing research on Lough Swilly in Donegal with the intention of writing a book, and I had been to Rathmullan in November. Rathmullan is the site of The Flight of the Earls in 1607. It is an important event in Irish history, when Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell left Ireland forever. Their final military defeat had occurred at Kinsale during the siege of 1601. When the two earls and their entourages left Ireland, it marked the end of the old Gaelic order and the completion of the English conquest of the island. From that point onwards, native Irish literature, robbed of its sponsoring patrons, became one long and grieving jeremiad.

After walking around the town for half an hour, my bag was becoming too burdensome; I could feel a huge sweat patch growing between my shoulder blades. Like most respectable Irish towns and villages, Kinsale has various beautifully fronted pubs. I chose Blue Haven because they had Wi-Fi. I sat for an hour, calling Ulick constantly, but there was still no answer. I ordered dinner: steak and chips and a pint of Guinness. My laptop ran out of power, so I tore up some beer mats. Forty minutes later, at four o’clock, Ulick called me and we met. He’d been in class all afternoon. We left the pub and climbed the hill up to his house. He lives on a road called Blind Gate. I thought there would be a good view of the town from up here but the slate roofs of the houses obscured it.

Ulick was living with two women and two tabby cats. They all led an alternative lifestyle with a fridge full of milk substitutes and a press of herbal teas, lentils, and chickpeas. We had dinner and talked for a while about the things that had happened since we last met. I tormented the cats while he spoke, dangling keys in front of them and making them jump. The elder cat opened her eyes, looked at the keys, batted them once, yawned and fell asleep on the couch. The kitten, more sanguine, pounced at the keys with each new jingle I gave them. Finally, he jumped so far, with his claws showing, that he hit the elder cat in the face. She snapped at the kitten who then ran into the next room. He came back fifteen minutes later as if nothing had happened. The elder left.

“You’re easily amused, Michael,” remarked Ulick.

It got late so we went outside into darkness. Ulick’s friends, Simon and Chelsea, were going to have an “information evening.” Information evening might be a term I invented – I have gone over that trip so often in my head. Periodically, they watched videos about particular topics and invited people along. They had a discussion following the video.

Simon and Chelsea are from Canada and in their mid-twenties. They were both dreadlocked and very nice. They hugged Ulick at the door and made me feel welcome. Chelsea had been baking snacks: rectangular wafers with encrusted pumpkin seeds. There was houmous and tzatziki to dip them in.

The house itself was spectacular. It was built with beautiful granite blocks reminding me of an old photograph I had once seen of Aberdeen. Inside, there was an open fire with a sheepskin rug in front. The wall was lined with chopped wood for the fire. There were baskets hanging from the ceiling, over the kitchen counter. One had fruit in it; another had herbal teabags. A cast-iron spiral staircase wound upwards.

Ulick and I were early arrivals. We had brought beer, but it seemed like no one else would be drinking. Justine offered us tea and presented us with at least a dozen different flavoured teabags. I went for the rooibos.

There were seven of us in the end. The show was an information film on 2012, the year in which the Mayans prophesied the end of the world. Ulick had hinted at this earlier on in the day saying vaguely that it might be “a little new-agey.”

I used to know a great deal about Mayan prophesies when I was twelve. My hobby at that age was to research the paranormal. My friend Kevin and I used to make a newsletter every fortnight called The Paranormal Page. We sold it in school for 20p. It had information on a wide variety of topics: ghosts, UFOs, Nostradamus, cryptozoology, etc. We made fifteen issues throughout sixth class.

The Mayan 2012 prophecy was never featured in our newsletter, but it often came up while we did research on overlapping subjects. This interest in all things paranormal soon changed when I became an atheist at the age of fourteen. I made a fetish of being a sceptic, taking a sadistic pleasure in trying to disprove the religious beliefs of peers. I particularly loved religion class, when I would engage in debates with the teacher. Questioning people’s faith can infuriate them. I went to Jesuit school, and I was often told to shut up and mind my own business. I am ashamed of my behaviour now, especially at my attempts at arguing with an ex-nun once, who must have been coming up on her seventies, when I was fifteen.

The film was one of those typical new-age-straight-to-video pieces. It had men with long hair and beards and earth-goddess women. I felt myself getting angry at this film, especially when the word “energy” was used. I sat silently though, with my arms crossed. I opened one of my beers. Half an hour into the film, I fell asleep. I was awoken near the end as the narrator spoke over some mystical background music that turned out to be Enya.

The conclusion of the film was actually unexpected. It was said that something might happen in 2012, but probably nobody will notice; life will go on the same. The others had a quick discussion after the film but I remained silent. I did not want to get embroiled in a long argument, especially as one of the men there kept staring at me. He sensed my scepticism. They began to talk about the film that they had watched the previous night about the New World Order and various Western governments’ attempts, including Ireland’s, to prevent revolution by pacifying the population through “spiking” water supplies with fluoride. Fifteen minutes later, we left the house and I began to rant. Ulick patiently listened.

We decided to go past Ulick’s house and up Compass Hill. It was after midnight. The moon was full and the fields were blue but the trees were black. It was enticingly cold and crisp. We walked along the quiet road and looked down into the valley next to Kinsale. There was a lifeless housing estate; the streetlamps bathed it in amber light.

“I’m bored of this road; Irish roads are all the same,” I said.

“Well, let’s go in here then,” said Ulick and we walked into a gateless field. It had been ploughed not long ago; the furrows were deep, meshed by frost. The moon was white. We gazed at the stars for a few minutes, picking out the Plough and Orion’s Belt. I tried to get Ulick to see the Pleiades by not looking at them directly. They only appear when you see them in the corner of your vision.

Ulick had to go to class the next day so I stayed in bed. I was sleeping on the couch in the sitting room where the kitten joined me in the late morning. Ulick got home at noon, and I informed him of my intention to meet Derek Mahon. The subject amused him. Ulick had been living in Kinsale for six months, but he had yet to see Mahon. Ulick offered several possible pubs he might frequent and, after I had showered and eaten, we walked down the hill to the town centre, and Ulick pointed out a house or two where he could possibly live.

That night, we walked to a party in Scilly, a neighbourhood just east of Kinsale. There was an English girl there who stood out. She was dreadlocked, with the sides of her head shaven. She had just arrived from Madrid, having squatted there. She had come by boat to Ireland. She refused to take airplanes.

Her description of the squat in Madrid reminded me of being in Christiania, a commune in central Copenhagen, when I was twenty. It was originally an old army barracks but hippies, in 1971, began squatting in it and created a new town. For a long time, drugs were freely traded and consumed there. Hard drugs became a major problem, though, in the ‘eighties, which led to a clearing of the major addicts. In recent years, the police have taken a much more active role in patrolling the commune, but when I was there in 2005, cannabis, while not in your face, was widely available.

In 2007, a squat called Ungdomshuset in another part of Copenhagen was shut down and demolished. It had been a left-wing cultural centre for over a hundred years. Apparently Lenin stayed in it for a time. I can see Christiania being shut down eventually as sympathy towards such institutions continues to erode.

I talked to the English girl for a while and told her about being in Christiania. She said she had always wanted to go there. We sat around, drinking and smoking. There was a cast iron stove in the corner of the room. It looked ridiculously rustic in this modern building. I slowly got drunk. I tend to drink too much in social situations as I’m a shy person and alcohol becomes a way of overcompensating. I told a few people I was doing a master’s degree in creative writing. They didn’t really understand it. They couldn’t see what I was going to do with it.

I sat down and stared at the guy sitting in the opposite couch. He was smoking a cigarette, flicking the ash onto a length of orange peel. The image of the orange peel ashtray stayed in my mind until I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning in the same position. It was bitterly cold and I was breathing steam. Ulick woke soon after. He and a few others decided to go for a walk to a local fort. I wasn’t really interested, but in the end we went.

After we visited the fort, we went to the chip shop and got some potato pies, a Cork speciality. A potato pie is a lump of deep-fried mashed potato. Ulick told me I was the most selfish person he knew after I began to criticise people again. But it didn’t matter at that stage; it was almost time for me to go.

At the bus stop back to Cork, an old man spoke to us. He said that he used to be a drug addict but not anymore, not for a few years. He said he often felt alone because most of his friends were dead from drugs. Ulick and I listened in silence.

I called Ulick up last night to see how is. He’s still living in the same house, but his course is over now. He’s from Wicklow originally, but he said he’ll probably never leave Cork. I apologized for my behaviour down in Kinsale, for my judgements and for being purposefully awkward. I have been told that I can sometimes overtly judgemental and tetchy at times. This of course comes through in my writing. But it’s not something I’m proud of; I’m not proud of my ugly side. I do want to be a decent human being.

I informed him that I would be writing about Kinsale. He told me he saw my ears pick up when the old man at the bus stop began to talk.

I never did get to meet Derek Mahon.

4
One of the main aspects of the MA in Writing course is to engage with other writers. Therefore, every Thursday a writer was invited to the university to discuss their work with us. For the first semester this was organised by the English Department but in the second semester, inviting writers became the responsibility of the class. Tristan, another Dubliner, had first put the question of inviting Tim Robinson to Adrian, the course co-ordinator, back in September. Adrian said that if we were to invite Tim Robinson, we would more than likely go to visit him in Connemara rather that him coming to us.

I was in Dublin soon afterwards, and I found out that Tim Robinson was doing a reading and book signing in Waterstone’s on Nassau Street as part of the launch of the second book in the Connemara trilogy. I approached him as he sat signing books on the top floor of the store.

“Hello, my name is Michael,” I said, handing him a copy of his book.

He smiled and began to sign the book.

“I’m doing the MA in Writing programme at NUI Galway and I would like to invite you to come and talk to us.”

He stopped writing and looked at me, still smiling. “Ah yes. But, let me tell you, you shouldn’t be approaching me directly, these things are done through the University Foundation…”

I didn’t take anything else in, as I was a little intimidated. I just said “Yes, yes… thank you,” then turned and took a seat. He read from his book briefly.

I sent him a letter in January to remind him about my invitation, and I also made contact with the University Foundation. It’s a rather convoluted story, full of bureaucratic meetings, emails, and phone calls. So I will skip ahead to the day we went to Tim’s house in March.

There is Ireland, and then there is Connemara. West of Lough Corrib, it steps away from the green fields and stonewalls of East Galway and becomes a new land. It’s red-brown, heather strewn, and boggy, with a regular interruption of lakes. We went on a beautiful cloudless day. It was particularly hot for March. Eighteen of us got on the private coach headed for the village of Roundstone, the place where Tim Robinson lives.

While Galway city is often known as the gateway to Connemara, the dynamics of landscape only seem to change at the town of Oughterard, northwest of Galway city but close to Lough Corrib’s shore. The coach trundled up the thin roads. There did not seem to be many towns.

There was no wind so the lakes along the way were mirrorlike; the air was hazy-grey and so every mountain emerged slowly from the sky. I feel guilty, in a way, trying to describe this place, since I am writing about Tim Robinson. I am twenty-three, and he has a spent more time there than I have been alive.

For most of the bus journey, everyone was silent, staring out at the world. The sun was shining in a way that made things seem overexposed. Several people were quickly trying to read one or two of Tim Robinson’s essays from My Time in Space before we got there.

I’d spoken to him on the phone a few days before. He was concerned about the level of interest that people would have in his talk. He asked me to lead the question-and-answer session. In my mind, I was going over the questions I would ask again and again.

Somewhere along the route, the fields evened out and became flat. We saw Roundstone at the water’s edge, huddled tightly on two small hills. As part of the trip, we were to have lunch at a pub first. They supplied soup and sandwiches, tea and coffee. We went to Tim’s house and he was very kind to us. His wife, Mairead, greeted everyone in Irish. He spoke for an hour about his writing, about how he saw himself as being part of the Flaubertian school of literature. He spoke about what he was trying to achieve with the Connemara trilogy and the format in which he was doing it. He said he was having particular trouble with the third book in the trilogy, about the Gaeltacht region of Connemara, as it was the hardest to structure. He said any help would be welcome.

I remembered a book I had read for undergraduate anthropology, Wisdom Sits in Places, by Keith Basso. Basso is an anthropologist who worked with the Apaches in Arizona. The book describes, in part, his attempts to help the Apaches create a map of their reservation, with every place name being rewritten in the Apache language. The book is structured so that every chapter deals with a conversation that Basso has overheard or taken part in, and his attempts to analyse the ways in which Apaches use place names to communicate with each other. Every Apache place name has a corresponding story or stories, and therefore place names become mnemonic devices in conversations. A speaker need only say one name and his interlocutor will understand much more.

This is the way I put the book structure to Tim. He had already read the book and said Basso was a much better researcher than he. Tim said his preference for structuring the final book in the trilogy was applying fractal theory. This made me happy as I often use the word fractal in my own writing.

After the talk, Mairead served tea and biscuits. Tim asked us about the work we were doing. I told him about my plans to walk around Lough Swilly. Adrian told Tim that I was heavily influenced by him. This embarrassed the both of us. Tim showed us his paintings, which were geometric, full of straight lines and blocks of colour.

After tea, Mairead showed us their garden. It was almost as geometric as Tim’s paintings. We wandered around, taking photographs and enjoying the sun.

We had to leave at 6:30. I think Tim and Mairead were sorry to see us go. They had expected us to stay later. Our conversations had only just begun. As we left on the bus, Tim had to run after it. Tristan had forgotten his notebook. Even in his seventies, Tim Robinson sure could run. We promised to return soon.

5
I don’t care about stories anymore. It is no longer about plot. I only want to write sentences. I want every sentence to be perfect in image and cadence. The story will follow.

I want every sentence to be as self-contained as this phrase: an orange peel ashtray. To me it’s a perfect symmetrical grouping of words. What’s more, it’s orange. Every time I hear that word, I remember an image from the film, The Magdelene Sisters, where single oranges lay on the blue beds. Everything is blue in the room besides the oranges, reposing on the pillows. From there, my mind wanders back to art history class, staring down at the textbook, looking at a poor reproduction of Manet’s Un bar aux Folies Bergère. My eyes always focus on the bowl of oranges, each fruit painted to look like it had a unique, waxy sheen.

I hate that painting now. I don’t think I ever liked it, but it was easy to talk about. I could write an essay about it with all its socio-historical detail, its almost Dickensian aesthetic, packed as it is with the trivialities of working class life; the drinking habits of nineteenth century British tourists. Men are always predatory in Impressionist art.

I went to the Louvre recently, and I was completely disappointed. European art, more than a thousand years of Italian paintings, all packed into such a tight space, completely decontextualised. A visit to the Louvre is an empty ritual. One enters the glass pyramid and goes underground into a catacombal atrium. It’s like entering a futuristic Masonic lodge or Solomon’s Temple. There are hundreds of people queuing for tickets, or being led by guides or eating in the cafés or browsing the underground shops. It made me think of those thousands of people who visited Nelson’s body lying in state. I went up the escalator and entered the Denon Wing. The first room had dozens of marble statues. Then I went up a flight of stairs to the main gallery space. The rooms are long and the walls are high and green. People sit all along the benches with some of them sketching certain paintings. The walls are covered in paintings as though they are random stamps. They blend into each other, one artist, one period, one year or movement, leading into another without any warning unless you were to be fully acquainted with the all major artists from the Early Modern Period.

The paintings are gaudy – too much paint, too much movement, too many bodies in awkward contortions. The colours are unsuitably bright or too dark. Everything is driven to extremes. There are signs pointing towards the Mona Lisa. It’s in a large room and people circle the painting like it was the Kaaba.

It was not disappointing to see the Mona Lisa as most people say. It looks exactly the way it should. It’s exactly the right size and colour. The problem is I have seen so many reproductions of it that I wonder if this could be just another copy. Why should I believe this is the real painting?

I think I am like Tim Robinson. I am a landscape painter who is better at writing a landscape than I am at painting one. That’s the way he described himself to us. This is my aesthetic, to get the details, the seemingly insignificant moments and objects and sounds and tastes onto the page. Like Basho did hundreds of years ago. His skill as a haiku poet is unsurpassed but look at his prose, taken here from Narrow Road to the Interior:

There was a temple called Ryushakuji in the province of Yamagata. Founded by the great priest Jikaku, this temple was known for the absolute tranquility of its holy compound. Since everybody advised me to see it, I changed my course at Obanazawa and went there, though it meant walking an extra seven miles or so. When I reached it, the late afternoon sun was still lingering over the scene. After arranging to stay with the priests at the foot of the mountain, I climbed to the temple situated near the summit. The whole mountain was made of massive rocks thrown together and covered with age-old pines and oaks. The stony ground itself bore the colour of eternity, paved with velvety moss. The doors of the shrines built on the rocks were firmly barred and there was no sound to be heard. As I moved on all fours from rock to rock, bowing reverently at each shrine, I felt the purifying power of this holy environment pervading my whole being:

In the utter silence
Of a temple,
A cicada’s voice alone
Penetrates the rocks.

When you read something like this, every sentence becomes an obsession. It’s lucky that I’m lazy, or I might take Virgil’s approach, and only write one sentence a day. I’m searching for some baroque quality that isn’t gaudy. Impossible, I’m sure. But at the same time, everything I love seems be to understated, simple, imagistic. It’s not enough though; it’s not me. I want to write like Herman Melville. I want a sublime ritual to permeate my writing. In order to create a baroque voice, I must tell violent stories about violent men, those individuals who refuse to be tamed and remain hunter-gathers. But that’s not what my voice does. It betrays me. My aesthetic comes down to three artists: Vilhelm Hammershøi, El Greco, and Bill Watterson.

Hammershøi’s art is fantastic in its portrayal of the banal. He paints empty rooms or rooms with women facing walls. Doors are half open and light shines on wood floors. The paintings are so boring, so lacking in action, that they are beautiful. Hammershøi died in 1916.

El Greco, on the other hand was a sixteenth-century Mannerist whose art seems Modern. Just look at his painting View of Toledo. I am no expert, but when I saw this painting I could not believe it was produced in 1597. The turbulent sky in the background is too purposefully psychological, like something by Constable or Turner.

Bill Watterson, the cartoonist, created fantastic seasonal worlds in his strip, Calvin and Hobbes, which fills me with a sense of nostalgia. You may think it is strange to juxtapose a comic strip against gallery art, but in essence, this particular strip has had as much influence over me as any other artistic medium. Bill Watterson’s world transports me back to being four years old in New Jersey. The landscape is the same: a suburban area backing onto forests and creeks. At least that is the memory I have of it.

One of my favourite games back then was “camouflage.” I would tape leaves all over my body – on my t-shirt, on my knees – and I would hide in a bush and call my mother out from the house. There was not much foliage on the bush and I’m sure she could see me but she would pretend not to. She’d call out my name and ask where I was. Then I would jump out from behind the bush. She would act shocked and say she couldn’t believe I was behind it. I’ve never asked her about those games because I still want to pretend that she couldn’t see me. For that’s what it all comes down to in the end: regret, this permanent sense of the loss of innocence and of finding the beauty in that. I think the Japanese call it Wabi-Sabi.

But then again, my father bought me a book of Francis Bacon’s art when I was a teenager. He said he bought it because my room reminded him of Bacon’s studio.

Mick Halloran lives in Dublin