lost forgotten places – séamas carraher

lost forgotten places

 

“back in mayo a blighted tree bone dry and white on a dry river-bed

– dead…”

the west of ireland, 2006

 

 

 

…there are few lost places left in the ordinary world today.

 

It seems that all that is lost and forgotten now in our shiny new world are only the places within ourselves where little human touch has changed for good or ill that which remains to be discovered…

 

…places inside and – here (in the “undiscovered ireland”) – out, that wait for a presence to appear just for them to exist at all…

 

..in this way on our journey from the uncertainty of yesterday to the fear of tomorrow, certain remote corners we have stumbled upon (as if by magic or the lure of the fairies or an unseen spirit that for the brief moment of belief guides each human journey)…

 

…certain places we arrive at and cannot pass immediately beyond remind us of the world to come? an alternative to the darkness of a future shrouded in despair…

 

…and also strangely enough to what i recall of the past…the world i lived in as a child..

 

like in madness

here is no ordinary world

not even the historical world

nor the world recorded in books or in the imagination

yet an actual world

a real world wakened with the perception and sensitivity and spirit a child experiences

and now years later evoked through the doorway of memory where you step in heartbreak and loss to visit the dead (and we are all truly only “dead men on leave”) in the graveyard of a past remembered in an intensity of present-grief…

 

it seems as if the-world-to-come and the world we have left share a similar loss, the world-to-come: the loss of all we had forgotten and the world-we-have-left: the loss of all we remember…

 

These are desolate wild places

gone even beyond the imagination

for they are not constructs of man or of fiction or romance but of nature and reality and forgotten because that is the price of normality and the economics and the tyranny of the ordinary world…

 

…to be confronted with these places

…to embark on this journey

…is to once again begin to understand in loneliness and terror what is holy in life and how all life is holy and to sense and feel our need is to go there to take a step out of the ordinary a step beyond progress and wealth to sense so much what we are missing…

 

In these remote places

both inside and out

interior and exterior no longer serve as metaphors for each other

indicators of something remote

something needing to be interpreted or translated

but instead are simple potential experiences giving depth and breath to life and leading us beyond the banal and the rigid measurements of the commercial world…

 

…beyond always beyond what can be fixed in the prisonhouse of  language or of value.

 

 

In august of the year pasing we travelled beyond the ordinary world along many of these small roads in north connemara on our way back to cloonchambers bog where we rest…

 

…how extraordinary it seemed to have come to this world from the world of work, of money and power, of poverty and struggle and to arrive here to be transformed for the moment that the question is asked

…and the door to a world that doesn’t sleep endlessly

…that isn’t opaque like a rock or a stone

…but lives and breathes

begins to open…

 

There are few lost forgotten places, inside and out, left in the ordinary world today:

places where no tourist has set foot,

no army has conquered,

no map, law, or logic,

other than the necessity to be! to become…

 

the years come and go so fast now i often wonder is there time for and a time of transformation?

 

…to have been travelling all the days of your life

…to arrive nowhere

 

…never to arrive or rest

only everything changes

 

this is the “law” of what is lost and forgotten

…of what is remote

…made present by human touch and heartbreak, of everything that lives only because it will not live for ever

 

here in the extraordinary world

everything changes

everything falls apart.

 

Each of us must have our own lost forgotten place

 

…inside and out and i have reached mine when the whole world begins to disintegrate

 

…when i walk like a shadow through the days and people and the work within each day

 

…i realise not only that i am becoming a ghost to the ordinary world but i am fixed no-where and i am nothing if not change and nothing abides and all will pass and be forgotten

 

…in this way the ordinary world falls apart

 

… and to be a ‘ghost’ is to remember the lost forgotten places

instead of dying

it is to embrace life while the moment passes

to wake even though in truth it feels instead you are sleeping and the ordinary world is only a dream

…it is to fear being alive because of the strangeness of it all…the loss of the familiar…

 

…“dying” or “going insane” here are words of warning to the living as for the rest of us

we have no point in space to refer to:

instead the immeasurable…

…instead of a lifetime: eternity

to wander lost and forgotten instead of summer days and familiar places

 

…it is as if, like fionn mc cumhail’s son oisín, hundreds of years have passed in a single evening and you have returned to a world that no longer is measured in the hours and faces of your friends

 

…like this the ordinary world falls apart

 

…the ordinary world falls apart and your illusions along with it

…and in this lost and forgotten place i have often prayed and pleaded for an arm to hold a hand to reach out and comfort me a god to fill in the emptiness, a presence…

 

…instead a silence reigns…a cold wind that chills your soul

 

…but now and here, travelling the back roads from connemara to mayo i realise the journey within and the exterior journey are the one and the same journey because they are a voyage to the last remaining

of a few lost and forgotten places

in a world becoming completely colonised

divided up in parcels

bought and sold, each passing day…

 

lost and remote. This music of the self…

 

…here a voice asks how long have i slept at what point did i become an object when did i lose myself in the waking dream as if the world went on for ever when did i fall asleep and sleep until it is only a time of darkness and anything else is only a myth and a story…

 

…a voice asks. what has woken me? A visitor calls and waking up you realise there are few visitors left in this world.…until it is too late…

 

…illness, suffering, death, loss, age, pain, love and friendship!

…a  visitor we are grateful so seldom calls…

 

…the risk of living, the danger of living! a voice reaching out through the darkness.

 

…when george norman, (“brother”) reached across his 50 odd years of life headed across the bedroom of his life with such a violent pain heading beyond the place he was furiously reaching for reached beyond the pain i wonder was he struggling to transform 50 years like us all a prisoner in the poverty of a two dimensional world the ordinary world where the colour of love is perpetually missing along with the struggle and the need for transformation for liberation i wonder too does it reach beyond this mortal existence to the energy and the atoms and the force that come together in life and so few can master consciousness of even at the point and price of death…

 

…this voice whispering…without the voice we are only stone…despite the pain and the unfamiliarity…the loss…

 

These thoughts come later…

travelling endless empty roads

travelling a world where the contours are shaped by river and mountain

by bay and water

by wind and sun

 

where we both began and ended our journey at a deserted church and schoolhouse on the north galway coast, at the edge of county mayo

here at the gap between the uncertainty of the past and the fear of the future, a place where there is no present because you realise everything is endless change and the moment we have together is already slipping away…

 

here there is a silence in nature

a silence between us

a silence inside also…

 

these lost parts of ourselves are silent too…parts that could sing and dance only we would have to weep and grieve as well and the sorrow seems to last longer than the joy…

 

…this ordinary world  this world we take for granted is a poor reflection of the world we have lost and forgotten the world we have not created yet…

 

Just as the people we are and have become and take for granted are a poor reflection of what we could be if only …

 

…for all the uncertainty of the past

the fear of the future

no matter how long we sleep…

 

…and all this in the year passing travelling these desolate empty roads realising you can never go back…

 

…you must always live with the poverty this inexpressible poverty despite our wealth despite all our noise we are unable to drown the silence within…to silence the voice within…always two worlds a choice and a time to choose…

 

…and nothing will ever be salvaged of our our bright shiny new world nothing can love without heart and soul nothing will be saved without a heart and a soul…

 

…as if salvation could only come on your journey lost in these forgotten places as you die travelling across the living room of your life and even make it through the terror of death that comes over you the roof of your house collapsing the walls falling down your life crumbling and falling apart and beyond even the fear of madness the futility of everything that has never arrived until it dawns on you

 

i am alone

 

i am alone in a lost forgotten place which is my real self and forgotten so long a time ago when there was the perception and the sensitivity of an angel and i knew that stones danced and that the air sang

 

…until i forgot it all or it was all beaten from me

until i forgot how to dance and sing

and my life was no longer a journey

 

it seems to me,

despite the terror of it all,

these lost forgotten places are our only hope now

 

if we don’t wake up and listen to life

 

listen to what is lost inside and out

we will truly bury everything of value

 

under concrete

 

then there will only be death

only a permanent anaesthesia

medicated by expensive doctors with shiny steel surgical implements

but no heart and no soul..

 

so now…painful and all as it has been, down all the years amid all this immeasureable loss

 

each moment, terrified as i am…

i try and chose to be in these forgotten places

some of them private and personal and individual

and some of them mutual maybe in moments of togetherness

 

in the hope that what comes

whatever

life or death

will be filled with the mystery of meaning the

love of light and the light itself of love

the grace and holiness of our passing always passing

our time together and the harmony and the humanity

each of our souls seek to sing…in need…

 

 

séamas carraher

for teresa and

in memory of george norman

cloonchambers

15 august 2006

ballyogan

31 august 2006