Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (12 page)

‘The Peano Curve and Its Representation by a Lacunary Power Series’ was the title of the paper Besicovitch handed to us
afterwards
. It looked formidable, but such was my ignorance I did not realize how far beyond me it was. My colleague and I met that evening and struggled through a page or two of it, and later called on the professor to have it elucidated. Besicovitch silently admitted us to his small rooms, and enquired our names: Davis and
Robinson; he pondered them for a time and then remarked ‘D and R!’, with a kindly smile to indicate that he was proffering a joke. (Brezhnev and Khrushchev, visiting the United Nations at that time, had been abbreviated to ‘B and K’ in newspaper headlines.) Our private sessions with him became a weekly ritual. As our incomprehension drove him deeper and deeper into the problem, I believe he invented new lines of argument that skirted around
difficulties
too deep for us to ford. We looked over his soft, bulky, Slavic shoulders as his pen hovered and agonized in the air for minutes before inscribing each symbol. We learned a little about him; that he was born a member of the Karaites, a tribe of Jewish faith and Central Asian ethnicity that wandered between the Caspian and Lapland; that he had studied at the University of Perm, where it was so cold that he used to get into a sack to read. What convulsions of history had brought him to Cambridge we did not think to ask.

Eventually we deluded ourselves that we understood the
simplified
proof that emerged from these tutorials, and the day came on which ‘R’ had undertaken to expound the first half of it and ‘D’ the second, to our assembled peers. All were silent and
attentive
as I blundered on into the valley of death. Besicovitch soon showed signs of concern, though, and at one point where I announced my intention of deducing a certain proposition from another one he interrupted to ask how I intended to do that. ‘By the Mean Value Theorem!’ I replied, which probably revealed to him for the first time how far out of my depth I was. He put me on the track again and let me limp to my conclusion. I returned to my bench, and ‘D’ took up the chalk. But he fared even worse than I, and the professor dismissed him from the blackboard and continued the lecture himself. I was overcome by what I self-
protectively
identified as the absurdity of it all, and sat there snorting hysterically; once or twice Besicovitch’s eye rested on me,
forebearing
, puzzled by this human predicament, before gazing off into the world of forms again.

I do not remember that anyone ever mentioned this dreadful episode to me afterwards, or that I thought much of it myself; it must have vanished into the froth of my rather belated adolescence. But the Peano Curve remained branded on my mentality; it was the original of ‘the conception filling my mind of a strange map
consisting of one line, and that so convoluted it visited every point of the territory’, which I wrote of in ‘Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara’. For a personally researched map that aspires to
comprehensiveness
must be, as I have said, the record of a walk that covers the ground; therefore the Peano Curve, this topological monster, is its perfect emblem. But it is also a reminder of how far any such map must fall short of success. This fractal nature of the ideal one-person map is both my excuse for the map of Connemara having taken me about five times as long as I thought it would when I set out, and my condemnation for having undertaken an absurdity, an adequate map; for any such thing would have taken not five times but an infinite number of times longer than my naive estimates. And now, when I see the name of Besicovitch in the roll of those of whom Mandelbrot writes, ‘These names are not
ordinarily
encountered in the empirical study of Nature, but I claim that the impact of the work of these giants far transcends its intended scope,’ also that ‘while Hausdorff is the father of nonstandard dimension, Besicovitch made himself its mother,’ I realize that I have wasted some hours of the lifetime of a genius, which is an intellectual crime, and that my penitential would-be fractal journey enacts a double apology – to Besicovitch for my inability to
appreciate
his self-infolded gigantism, and to the surface of the Earth for the paucity of all our attentions to it.

Let me now turn to more concrete matters, a tiny selection of the places, experiences, discoveries and surprises that my convoluted walk about Connemara led me through. These are some of the moments that made the endless trudging along muddy shores and stony tracks worthwhile; perhaps my fractal theme will secure them from being mere mementos brought home by polymorphic dilettantism.

I remember one particularly filthy day on the coast south of Ros a’ Mhíl. That area is bleak at the best of times, a bare flatland of granite, walled up into the little fields that spell poverty and labour; it used to be part of the estates of the Blakes of Tully, the worst of the rackrenting landlords. It is said that eventually the Blakes were cursed by the priest for their tyrannical ways; he wrote out Salm na Mallacht, the Anathema, against them, and put it in
an envelope, which he put in another envelope, and that one in another, seven in all; and gave it to a lad to deliver to the Big House, Teach a’ Bhláca, instructing him to leave immediately he had handed it over and put as much distance between himself and the house as possible while Mr Blake was opening those seven envelopes. It seems this moral letter-bomb was expected to
devastate
all in its vicinity. Indeed the Blakes were soon after embroiled in misfortune, and left the house, which is now roofless and ruined, though for a long time after that the tenants continued to pay their rent to a Blake, who was in the mental asylum at Ballinasloe. It still looks as if the curse had its evil effect on the neighbourhood, which is heartbreakingly dreary, especially in winter. But on this wet, blustery day I met two elderly men there, walking up a boreen past a deserted village, puffing their pipes, having driven their cattle down to some distant field. They were delighted to stop and chat with me even though the rain was teeming down; they hitched their coats up over one ear and started telling me stories. At the time I had just about enough Irish to follow them, but because of the rain I couldn’t note anything. They told me about the wicked Blakes, and the strange prophecies of St Colm Cille whose holy well is on the seashore nearby, and then about the giant Conán, the buffoon and glutton of the old legends about Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his warrior band. They said that Conán had emptied out his pocket of winkle shells on the shore at the foot of the boreen we were on, and that it would be worth my while going to see the heap; they called it Toit Chonáin,
toit
being a dialect word for a helping of shellfish. So I walked down to the shore, not very hopeful of being able to find this heap of winkle-shells. And there at the end of the boreen was a hillock of smooth green sward, very conspicuous among the ragged, blackish, seaweedy rocks. Where rabbits had tunnelled into it, thousands of winkle-shells were pouring out. It was evidently a kitchen-midden, marking a place where some prehistoric people had gathered, presumably seasonally over a long period, to live off shore-food. There are many such shell-middens in the west of Connemara, exposed wherever dunes are being eroded; two of them have recently been dated to
AD
400 and 700, and it is likely that some contain very much earlier deposits. But none of them is as striking as Toit Chonáin, which is twelve or fifteen feet high, and forty feet long. ‘
Vaut le détour
,’ as
the
Michelin
Guide
says; the drab shores of Ros a’ Mhíl have their gifts, even if they do seem to be hidden within envelope within envelope within envelope, like the priest’s curse.

The next day I returned to the same stretch of coast to search for the holy well the old men told me had been made by Colm Cille, who had sailed across from the Aran Islands on a stone boat. The boat is still there, a big boulder like the prow of a hooker, with the saint’s huge handprint and marks left by his anchor chain on its deck, and grooves worn into its rim by his oars. The holy well is a rockpool down near the low-water mark, only accessible when the tide is out. There was no one on the shore to direct me, and I spent a long time floundering about among rocks covered in seaweed before I found it. Once seen, it was unmistakable, a big smooth basin, almost circular and with a bowl-shaped bottom, like a baptismal font; in fact (in the sort of fact I was exploring that day, at any rate) St Colm Cille had made this and other similar wells for baptism of the local heathens. However, I was unsure that I was looking at the right rockpool until I put my arm down into it as far as I could reach, and felt something wedged in a crack in the rock – an old penny coin.

This identification by the sense of touch was important to me; it suggested making a mental connection between this particular sort of holy well and the lifestyle of the people who used to
frequent
them, and still do so to a declining extent. For these are not wells in the sense of being sources of fresh water. They are
actually
small potholes in the rock, and their formation is so odd that it is no wonder people think they are of miraculous origin. I have been shown about thirty of them on the shores of Connemara, almost without exception on the granite of the south coast. Most of them are about eighteen inches across and two or three feet deep, cylindrical, with a rounded bottom, and remarkably smooth. If you describe one to the geologists they will explain that it is has been formed by a stone getting caught in a crevice and being driven round and round by waves, especially during storms, and gradually, perhaps over centuries, grinding out a hole. However I have found that if you actually take the geologists and show them an example, even their belief in scientific explanation wavers, for the finish and symmetry of such holes are almost incredibly perfect. This type of holy well seems not to have been described
in anthropological or folklore studies. Only a very few of them are marked on the old
OS
maps, and some of these are in the wrong position, perhaps because the draughtsman could not believe the surveyor’s report that a so-called ‘well’ was down at low water level, and moved it onto the dry land. Most of them are only known to a few people, usually the older ones, of the immediate locality, and many are very hard even for them to find, because of the heaps of seaweed covering them. But it is because of this seaweed that they are known at all, for past generations of Connemara people used to gather seaweed to fertilize their
potato-crops
, and to burn for kelp, which was a principal source of income for almost two-and-a-half centuries from the 1700s on. Each household of the coastal villages had seaweed rights on a certain stretch of shore, and harvested several tons of weed off it every year; in fact it is the sheer complexity, the high fractal dimensionality, of the shoreline that provides habitat for the huge tonnages of seaweed on which the inordinate nineteenth-century population of this otherwise unproductive coastal strip could sustain itself in life, if not in comfort. So every little cranny of the shore was intimately known, by touch, to the families who worked it, and as a result such remarkable features as these potholes were found and named, and acquired their legend.

A woman I met on the road near An Cheathrú Rua told me of one of the holy wells in that area, in which there was a fish that could answer questions about your friends and relatives who had gone to America or England. If you had had no news for a long time, you could go down to this well, and throw in some crumbs, and if the fish appeared swimming the right way up, your absent friend was alive and well; if the fish swam upside down, the absent one was dead. That stark alternative tells us something about the pain of a community forsaken by so many of its sons and
daughters
, in those preliterate times. Strangely enough, I have actually touched this fish. I asked someone who said he used to know the well in question to guide me to it, and then as he couldn’t find it, we went up to the nearest village and collected a couple of local people; they hadn’t visited it in years, for seaweed, like religion, isn’t so important nowadays, but after a lot of splashing and groping they identified it. The pothole was full of mud, and as we were cleaning it out one of my guides just picked up the fish and
showed it to me, a little
donnánach
or rockling, on his palm; I stroked its head, and he put it aside quite casually; there was no question but that it would find its way back into its holy well when the tide came in again, whether by magic or the scientifically well-known territorial instincts of small shore-fish. One of the applications of fractal theory, I am reminded, is to estimating the number of habitable niches available to creatures of different sizes, on a given surface. Here a small area of shore, say an acre, when examined in detail discloses a huge variety of holes and crevices, of a total surface area hundreds of times greater than that of the acre, and within those holes and clefts are smaller ones sheltering smaller creatures, who enjoy areas hugely greater still (not just in inverse proportion to the lesser size of the creatures, but absolutely greater) – and so on, to the well-nigh infinitesimal, the
single-celled
. If one mentally adds to this natural world endlessly
enfolded
within itself, the names of places, coins stuck in the cracks of holy wells, saints’ handprints on stone boats, and prophetic fish, one begins to feel the ground tremble; plenitude of being dissolves into a mist of fictions. The tidal holy wells in particular have been founts of significance for me, on these waste shores.

Indeed the otherworld is copiously enfolded into this one, throughout Connemara. Because of the oral genius of the folk
culture
, which is far from dead in these parts, at any moment one can be beguiled into belief systems quite foreign to one’s normal mental guidelines or trammels. While I was mapping the boglands and trying to find out the names of hundreds of little lakes from the turf cutters, I heard some wonderful stories. One was about a ‘mass rock’, a little table-like outcrop on the hill called Cnoc Mordáin, where the mass is said to have been celebrated by an outlaw priest, at the time when the Catholic religion was proscribed. Its story was told me by a youngish man, in Irish, as he leaned on his
sleán
and rested from turf cutting, on a beautiful summer afternoon far out in the bog. I think I remember his words fairly accurately. There was once a man living in An Aird, near Carna, he said, who dreamed that mass was being celebrated in the mountain, at a place he
recognized
. When he woke up he remembered the dream, and he dressed quickly and hurried over the mountain to the place he’d seen in his dream. A lot of people were gathered there, and he was just in time to see the priest come and celebrate the mass. But he
noticed that the priest kept glancing at him as if he was uneasy. Afterwards when the people were dispersing the priest came over to him, and said, ‘How did you know there was going to be a mass read here today?’ So the man told him about his dream. The priest said, ‘Well, no harm to you this time. But in future, take no notice of such dreams. And next time you go to mass, make sure you go to the right one – for we are not people of this world, and this mass was not for the likes of you.’