I consider myself lucky to have a least two places to think of as home. One is where I grew up, as remote and quiet a place as you could imagine; the other is the biggest and most densely populated city on Earth: Tokyo.
When I get a chance to go home (I now reside in Suzhou, China), I go to visit places as much as I go to visit people. By places I mean rivers, groves, forests, alleys, specific trees, hills, streets, coffee shops, restaurants, train lines. Unable to leave, bound there by laws which do not follow the principles of physics, it’s in these places that memories lurk.
When back in Tokyo, I will spend hours, days even, walking along the banks of the Tama and Odagawa river. Close your eyes and it can in places be almost as quiet as the Slieve Felim mountains of north Tipperary. When I return to Tipperary, I will also spend hours walking. The longer a person is away, the more they truly appreciate the remarkable beauty and solitude of those sloping hills and valleys. There is an undeniable otherworldliness about this countryside, and I am often struck with the feeling, as I was when I was a child, that even though I am totally alone, with nobody around for miles, that there’s something watching me as I watch the nothingness around. Listen to the land, go there if you doubt me, on a cold November’s morning, stop and listen, tell me the land is not alive, tell me you cannot unburden yourself to it, tell me it cannot swallow your suffering like it might swallow a single midge on a warm summer’s evening.
Do not the dead live on? In the land? Reducing things to fundamentals, then yes, they do live on, they live on under our feet as atoms and molecules, which become grass and trees and weeds and flowers. When I began to write my novel, it was to this land I returned. A land of both the living and the dead. Bear with me.
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The question, “What’s your novel about?”, is almost as welcome and unanswerable as how many copies have you sold, though in the case of the latter it may not be pure ignorance which renders you speechless for seconds before you formulate your response in the form of an incomprehensible mumble, a deflective joke, or a nice polite F-you too. All depends on who’s asking, as does the meaning question depend on who’s reading.
Strangely, the writer may not be the best person to ask as to the meaning of the novel. In my case, as I wrote Spit, the meaning of what I was writing was not foremost in my mind. I was riding a wild horse without saddle through a dark night on some treacherous landscape. At least that’s what’s it felt like at times. I just wrote and let it take me where it took me.
The townland I grew up in is called Shevry, which in Irish is Seithe Bhreighe, which translates to King of the Faeries. Two hundred yards from our house there was a structure referred to locally as a fairy fort. Less than a hundred yards away, on the opposite side of the road, stood an ancient ring circle. A few miles away there was a dolmen. Though we were a generation which did not grow up as superstitious (TVs and progress had replaced the tradition of people visiting each other’s houses to play cards, or music, or to simply chat and recall stories) as did our parents’ generation, many of those superstitions and stories trickled down to us, and others we learned in school.
[ Upperdown review: Murder, mayhem and maths in TipperaryOpens in new window ]
However, it wasn’t until I started to research this area that I discovered the depth and richness of Ireland’s catalogue of folk stories and mythology. You may be familiar with some of the following, some maybe not: Púca, Spook, Jack O Lantern, Will O’ Wisps, Changelings, Dullahan, Aos Si, Bean-sidhe, fairy, fairy darts, spells and piseogs, the wee folk, the good people, the little people, and so on. Yeat’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry contains a vast collection of stories, songs and poetry which I read in the process of writing this novel. Edited by Thomas Kinsella, An Duanaire (Poems of the Dispossessed) 1600-1900, an anthology that showcases the Irish poetic tradition from the collapse of the Gaelic order to the emergence of English as the new vernacular, was also influential.
Poetry, music and song reside in the land; the generations that went before are not gone, rather we are, in the widest sense, what remains of them. In my case, to truly understand my “home”, I had to leave it, to renounce it, to be free of it.
But the burden of your culture is not something you can take off like a coat. Nietzsche uses the analogy of the camel, the lion and the child. We are all born camels, in that we are forced to carry the weight of our culture’s past and its collective ideas. Some become lions, angry and rebellious, they shake off the burden and become rebels and free thinkers. Very few become what he calls the child – a person with the state of understanding that everything is the way it is and there’s little you can do about it, except laugh or play some games with it. Perhaps thinking of it as a circle may be more useful: most of the time, most of us are camels; sometimes we can escape the camel and kick off our loads, and then there are moments, those rare moments, when we gain true insight into the nature of the world and who we are.
Two hundred years from now, none of us will exist, and it’s likely all memory of us will not exist either. Fingers crossed, the land will exist, and might it contain something of us? If anything is holy, then it might be this. It’s little wonder then what people are willing to endure to be able to stay in their land and call it home.
Spit by David Brennan is published by Époque Press
