Some images crystalise a moment around which memories and lives circle. The photo above was taken in 1994, or was it 1995? A time when the complicated world was much simpler. When I stopped for a while and learned to listen to the sound of the wind, and to myself.
Treasa Ní Mhiolláin is on the right in the picture. She is a legend. A beautiful Sean-Nós* singer who gave me lessons during my time living on Inis Mór. She came highly recommended as a teacher, but I couldn't get through to her on the landline. So I wrote her a letter and moved to the island from Glendalough in the hope that she would teach me. No pressure!
When she came up to the house in Baile na Creige she gave me a test. I had to sing a few lines of a song once she had given me the melody. If I could pronounce the words and hold the tune, then she would agree to teach me. I was taken aback, there had been a misunderstanding. I wanted to learn the songs in English. Treasa laughed, in that mischievous way of hers, and said that just wasn't possible. Sean-Nós songs could only be sung in the Irish language. The sheet she handed me with a scrawl of handwritten verses was incomprehensible. I listened in silent panic to her mesmerising voice winding down pathways I had never been. The sounds were strange, the melody bent me into a different shape. I was already on another road.
Every lesson was recorded on a walkman to cheap cassette tapes bought in a pound shop in Galway. We laughed a lot, and gossiped too. Sometimes I pressed pause.
Behind the house a bóithrín made a crooked line to the cliffs at the back of the island. I walked and listened and sang. Play, pause, rewind, play. In quiet moments, the power of the Atlantic ocean pulsing beneath, and that single raven following and watching unnerved me. Once I fell asleep on a neolithic tomb, a bed of Diarmuid and Gráinne. When I awoke a thick fog was rolling in across the water so fast that by the time I rose it had enveloped me. A confluence of the elements and imagination, but everything was charged and tasted of salt and lime.
People didn't seem to mind when I sang slightly strange phonetic versions of Sean-Nós songs in the pub. Others felt I should learn the language first out of respect for their tradition. I understood. Treasa had opened a door, and I had already walked through it. I was on that road. This was a new country: a country within a country, and I had to learn its ways.
The thatched cottage I lived in sat up high in the middle of the island and the view was astonishing. The front door was red and the furniture was painted blue. It was very basic… no bathroom, no landline, too early for the internet. People who visited the island and heard what I was doing told me that I was living their dream. I knew why they didn't live it themselves. When it was romantic it was off the scale. When it wasn't, it was off the scale. I loved it even when the scales had tipped the wrong way. When I asked tourists not to knock on the front door after posing for pictures, they were disappointed that I wasn't the real thing.
The drawing of the naked blue lady above the shelf in the photograph comes with the caption: Blue Madonna Awakes from Dreaming. She needs some explaining because she's a part of this story too, and her genesis was in Glendalough.
Before moving to Inis Mór I shared a house there with my cousin Sinéad. We were both at a juncture in our lives. I wanted to discover Ireland for myself, and she wanted to rediscover it. The house was built into the side of a mountain and was freezing even with the heating on full blast. It even flooded upstairs. Some days we went hitchhiking in any direction just to find a pub with an open fire. When we were there together we had writing marathons. Pick a subject, you've got an hour, write by hand. I devoured Thomas Kinsella's The Táin; was awed and frightened by Mary Condren's The Serpent and the Goddess, and was introduced to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and other Irish poets. It was an exciting time.
On Brigid's day Sinéad read a poem in the ruins of the monastery and her shawl actually caught fire. Later that evening I watched a group of beautiful and formidable women make Brigid's crosses in our sitting room, and heard my first Sean-Nós song from a neighbour who was a folklorist. She recommended Treasa Ní Mhiolláin as a teacher and passed on her phone number. I had by chance already been introduced to Inis Mór by my cousin Helen, an archaeologist working on a dig at Dún Aengus. She had taken me to the prehistoric fort when there was no paved road. I felt like a hitchhiker in a world of poets, singers, diggers and weavers.
During that whimsy time in Glendalough, I became fascinated by the legend of Kevin and Kathleen. There are a few different versions, but in all of them Saint Kevin, the founder of Glendalough was blessed with good looks, and Kathleen was a beautiful maiden who lusted after him. It's pure Hollywood. Kevin was smitten too by all accounts, but he couldn't go there because he was destined to be a saint. So he threw himself into nettles so that "the fire without would extinguish the fire within." Kathleen saw the error of her ways and became a devout follower, possibly even a nun.
In another more sadistic version which inspired a poem by Thomas Moore, Kathleen, a member of 'that wily sex', with 'eyes of the most unholy blue', came to Kevin in his hermit's cave during the night. He reacted quite badly.
And with rude repulsive shock
Hurls her from the beetling rock.
Glendalough, thy gloomy wave
Soon was gentle Kathleen's grave!
Kevin later regrets murdering Kathleen, who was by now a ghost hovering around the lake. However, he was very kind to animals. I learned that in one of the presentations at the heritage centre after watching a film about Saint Patrick converting the pagans.
So I began drawing a naked blue lady as a response to how Kathleen was portrayed. She's a synthesis: a punky christian pagan shiva. I enjoyed doing them for myself. And she evolved. At first she was tortured, naturally upset, but then she settled down. By the time I got to Inis Mór she had become the Blue Madonna, fully awake.
I like to imagine it was the bauld Kathleen who lead me to the island with her wily ways, to Sean-Nós singing classes with Treasa where I met the daughter of the King of Greece. I'm glad I was listening to her, and it's lovely to see them together. Looking at this photograph after such a long time, I realise I was so very lucky to spend time in Ireland on the cusp. Before the tiger. Before culture became more institutionalised and manufactured. I am always searching for that wild place.
To all the mná I've met and communed with on this windy road, I'm thinking of all of you tonight, and the beautiful pattern made by our tangled stories.
Paula
* Sean-Nós: unaccompanied singing in Irish Gaelic
TREASA NÍ MHIOLLÁIN recently recorded a new album, LÁN MARA, released in May 2019!