At the Ceide Fields . . .

On the north Mayo coast I met the knowledge
that there are lives that must be hard held
against despair
as a fractious horse;
lives without hope,
or even the prospect of hope,
corkscrewed into a barren landscape like stumps of bog oak;
with none of the consoling, hidden vistas
of a gentler country,
where people can fool themselves
as to what lies around
the next bend.

And I realised that, in this situation, man both reaches God
and pushes him out
to the utmost valenced limit
of his understanding.

We have become too crowded by God,
been made too familiar,
like the press of burnoosed Arabs in a souk,
so that he has become a Novocain that doesn’t work,
a watered penicillin,
the bleat of priests repeating formulae at a funeral.
We can no longer see the forest for the trees,
due to too close a magnification on the gewgaws,
the statues,
the rosary beads . . .

Out here, in the hard life,
if you want to see God, it’s not in the chapel,
it’s away there on the horizon where the sky meets sea.
For this is the only God that could make sense in the situation,
implacable, harsh, refusing to bend the knee
to the prayers of men,
dropping them in it to see how well they swim,
and, whatever about the soul, judging the body accordingly,
granting survival to the sole extent
that they have tried themselves to the exhausted limit
and can do no more.

That is not to say that you cannot find God in the chapel,
the softer side of him,
the downy, sparse-bearded visage of the Son.
But the God of fear, the God of anger, the God
who is the beginning of wisdom,
he is below here at this moment,
white-headed as a Friesian bull,
rooting at the pilings of the cliff-face. (2004)

* * *

[I reprint also a section of a document written contemporaneously with the above poem and to an extent explanatory of it:]

‘ . . . Famine apart, any effort to eke out life on this Mayo coast must have at the best of times been a precarious thing. What was the religious or philosophical outlook likely to have been of a people forced to live over generations in such conditions of elemental hardship?

Life has a tendency sometimes of testing a people almost down to destruction, until all there is left is a nub of those who will not permit themselves be easily destroyed. And more often than not the sole thing found unmelted in the ashes of that process is the keen, clean hardness of a people’s faith in God and resignation to his will. Not the volitionless resignation of fatalism, but instead a recognition of the presumption of any attempt to second-guess God in the matter, and the need to always deliver of one’s best efforts in the struggle for survival.

In such a world, in which no kindness or mitigation is to be expected, it would seem natural that God would in a certain sense be pushed back a remove - not out of disrespect or unbelief, but rather as an electron might be displaced outwards in the shells of an atom. This is not a place where conventional piety is liable to prosper; the only prayers possible of answer here are those of sweat and hard work, with no guarantee at all of success as the final outcome. In such a situation people tend to cut their idea of God to suit their circumstance. The God of the remote places tends to be Himself remote, harsh, inflexibly just. He is a God in His way as forbidding as the bare horizons and grey seas. He is a God Whose ways are mysterious and into Whose hands is resigned the fate of all human endeavours. He is a God liable to be seen as helping those who help themselves, and, if intervening at all, only doing so in circumstances where the individual has exhausted all possible effort.

As to the practical matter of a philosophy conducive to survival in the Mayo of the 1840’s, where, according to one contemporary commentator, the great famine took on “its most appalling form”, there are recorded “instances in which Cottiers had buried potatoes, with the View of preserving them for Seed - and . . . had actually allowed members of their Families to perish of want and had suffered the sorest extremities of hunger themselves, sooner than betray their cherished hoard.” (quoted in Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, OUP, 1985). Once you get over the immediate visceral reaction to this report, you may begin to see here a universal lesson in the logic of survival in hard times.

If the cottiers mentioned seem cruel, they were cruel from the most understandable of motives: the need to try and secure the survival of at least a portion of their families, even at the expense of their own lives and health, and the lives and health of other members of their families. Yet saving the potatoes for seed offered no guarantee of success: if the next season’s harvest failed – and the potato crop had failed in successive years in 1845 and 1846 - then all the effort and suffering would have been in vain. It is a problem worthy of the philosophical subtlety of Pascal. Yet the answer is simple: only those prepared to make the terrible sacrifice of keeping back part of the potato crop for seed had any realistic hope of survival. In taking the steps that they did, the cottiers were not guaranteeing the remaining members of their families survival, but rather the possibility - the chance - of survival, all other things being equal.

Nor was it simply a matter of consuming or not consuming the potatoes: also involved was the physical effort by a starving people to get the saved seed into the ground, and tend it, and watch over it on tenterhooks, anxious all the time that it would not betray their hopes.

Should the following season’s harvest fail, then those who ate the seed potatoes were no worse off than those who saved them: both were likely to perish. However if the harvest was healthy, those who gave into hunger and ate the seed were, at best, likely to be reduced to begging of the charity of their more strong-minded neighbours. At worst they were reduced to a death of slow starvation. In either event, they had lost the possibility of control of their own destinies: unwilling or unable to take the hard decisions necessary to help themselves survive, they were reduced to a futile reliance on God or fate or luck.

The principle involved here has applications in all fields. For example, you have the student who hasn’t studied for his exams and hopes to get through on pure luck. He may well succeed; there are known instances of it. On the other hand, you have the student who has prepared diligently. He should succeed, but it is also quite possible that he will fail. There are many instances of this as well. Yet the overriding fact is that the odds are stacked heavily in favour of the student who has through his own efforts tried to achieve the customary preconditions for success. The feckless may well on occasions succeed and the diligent fail – but the fact that such instances are generally found to be worthy of comment is evidence of how clearly contrary to the normal state of things they tend to run . . .’