Spaces

In 7th century Ireland the monks start writing in the Irish language, and they use what they call a minuscule script – it’s more compressed, it uses less vellum ... and around the same time they start using spaces between words. ... We were inventing the mechanics of modern writing ... you take our indigenous oral mythology and translate that into the written word, and you invent spaces, commas, punctuation –you introduce musicality to writing. There’s beats now, there’s spaces, there’s pauses – you’re making the page sing. The Land of Slaves and Scholars

 

The day after the operation I had a number of visions. ... I saw a man made of rain. ... He led me to different places (I call them ‘places’) such as my father’s grave, inside my father’s bones, the land of no-language, the place where scars are roads through difficult territories ... Brendan Kennelly

First days of summer, hawthorn foams in the hedges, shocks of roses fling open. The grasses are knee-high, thigh-high, waist-high, flowering. Pardalotes have fledged and the chicks buzz around at head height like giant bumblebees in the sheltered space outside the back door. Grey robins are raising a second brood under the eaves inside the abandoned nest of a shrike thrush – a much bigger bird – in a risky but possibly genius move, as the shrike thrushes, who would love to feed robin eggs and chicks to their own young, have considered the space and rejected it. Every now and then I catch a glimpse of the hen robin’s head above the parapet of the big nest, like a child at bathtime looking over the edge of the tub.

High pressure systems drift across the Bight, bringing easterly weather to the island with soft rain, almost mist, so fine it’s nearly soundless as it runs from roof to gutter. The sound is like breath, a breathing hush that settles over the birds too, noticeable in these usually noisy weeks of nesting and feeding young and marking foraging grounds with song. And quiet runs through me also, in the drifting damp. With rain, the huge rounded canopies of mature bluegums star themselves with flowers, and in and around them a world of insects and birds revolves like the atmosphere of a planet.

And then ... sick again – laid low for the third time this year, sweating, aching, chilled, woken again and again by a cough that comes from deep in my chest. Gales return as the slowing of the polar vortex continues, and fires break out along the east coast of the island, where there’s been less than usual rainfall. Fires nearby too, and fires in the collective heartmind. A father and his 25-year-old son, radicalised, shoot dozens of people at a beachside Hanukkah festival. Politicians seize the opportunity to capitalise blame, and so extreme positions become further entrenched. My mind lunges like a leashed dog, frantic, straining ahead into smoke haze.

On the hill flanks, a thick pelt of grass ripples in the wind and a snow of hawthorn petals falls under the hedges. We eat asparagus and first zucchinis and peas. Hay making begins and nesting goes on. Outside my window a pair of blackbirds chase off a tiger snake – it rears and feints but they’re undeterred, pecking its sides, flying and landing close, in what looks like a combination of fight and feigned injury. Raven pairs climb the air with rapid beats and frantic calls, gaining enough height to divebomb eagles as they pass over the ravens’ nesting territories.

Christmas comes with sleet and rain, and snow on the mountains – all the fires on the island are out, it seems, and we breathe relief. The grey robin brings out a chick – or rather the chick brings itself out – too early? It sits on the lawn like a small, round, grey-and-black speckled stone, bright eyed, not quite able to get itself airborne, while we listen to ravens and currawongs and shrike thrushes call nearby. T puts it back in the nest but ten minutes later it’s on the ground again, with the parents flying back and forth, their alarm calls like pebbles tapped together, trying to coax it upwards into a tree. Next day I hear the baby calling from the bushes, so it made it through the night, at least.

As I approach the end of another five years of making these posts, I’m thinking about what it is I’m doing when I write: I’m trying to find language for what passes through this place and through me, yes; I’m allowing experience that stays with me to find its way onto the page. I’m letting the words arrange themselves through draft after draft into a rhythm that pleases me, although at times I’ve been mistrustful of this impulse, aware as I am of the power of language to glamorise and ensorcel, to bind us to understandings that harm and delude.

As a child and adolescent, I felt silenced by the accounts of reality that were on offer, where magisterial language – of the church, of literature – presented itself as a transparent window onto truth. I knew there was more but could not speak it. Then I encountered the work of Aotearoa New Zealand writer Janet Frame, whose voices and landscapes I recognised. Her characters bear dogged witness, at first to their own dismissal and destruction by forces enacted through received language, and later to the possibility of finding agency through ‘language that satisfies the ear and the heart’ (Envoy 183). I trusted Frame’s fictional accounts, knowing that their motivation came from her lived experience in the 1940s and 50s when she was in her twenties, of surviving nearly a decade of incarceration in psychiatric hospitals where in many ways, conditions had not changed since the 19th century.

A key question for me too as a writer is how to satisfy not just the ear but also the heart’s desire for healing and transformation; how to create breathing space. I follow the musical impulse of my mother’s Irish forbears (and of most of my father’s people too for that matter) – not as a way of avoiding difficulty but as a way of ‘staying with the trouble’ as Donna Haraway puts it. Janet Frame began with a desire and need to point to the dangers of language and ‘to make the words show up for what they really are the cruel deceivers’ (Intensive Care 243). Gradually, though, she became less and less confined to resistance and more and more able to access a place, as Brendan Kennelly describes it so marvellously, ‘where scars are roads through difficult territories.’ Halting or fluent, sounding out the beats, the spaces, the pauses, we go on.

 

References

Janet Frame. The Envoy from Mirror City: Autobiography 3. Paladin, 1987.

———. Intensive Care. Reed, 1971, p 243.

Donna J. Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Brendan Kennelly. The Man Made of Rain. Bloodaxe, 1998, pp 7–9.

The Land of Slaves and Scholars. Directed by Blindboy Boatclub. RTÉ 2024. Documentary. 40–48 mins.