As we all know beginnings are multi-dimensional and as impossible to locate definitively as it is to map a coastline down to its last micro-nano fractal, as Zeno and Tim Robinson both knew. But scaling up the map from there is how we live most of our days. On which scale, I’ll take you back to 3 November 1968. That was when at twenty-two and with all my worldly goods I made landfall on Inis Mór. I am aware how often I refer to that time, how thoroughly it haunts me still, and what that might say about my pathology and all the other years of my life. Here is a poem on the subject, a belated SOS. Is there anyone out there with a life-line?
The Scene of my Undoing, All Over Again
I drew a line Latitude 53° 07´ with my ruler
from November to October.
A clean line I thought
like a break with the past.
Then I stood back.
A line under what?
Too much to keep out.
Here I go, I said to myself,
all over again, in-between
W. Longitude 9° 50´ and 37´ –
minutes like me that don’t move on
with 45 bisecting the bay
where I’d like my ashes strewn
at highwater one day.
Where wintering waders
pipe and scatter
and in spring the lark continuously singing
climbs from haven to heaven –
to stoop and loop in silence down again
as I revisit the scene
of my undoing.
And in the month of June
do I need to say
the corncrake’s asymmetry
and the one-eyed cimetière marin
blowing forever
to the echo of hooves and waves
in that eavesdropping time.
Time from November to October
that so possesses me still,
surely there must be
something wrong with me?
O come to my rescue if you will.
You have the coordinates.
And may you find me soon,
there or here, I don’t mind.
You can also find someone purporting to be me in Andrew McNeillie’s book An Aran Keening, first published by the Lilliput Press, Dublin, in 2001, now reissued and available again in handsome new livery, as here:
Also a new, previously unpublished prequel to it: News of the World (2025), allowing you to look further into the pathology of ‘the playboy’ and the hold Inis Mór exerted over him in his youth and young-manhood.
Do please go to the Lilliput website and order copies to support their valiant cause. Also available via the London Review Bookshop. If you have a copy already, make someone else happy, or sad. Now, keep it to yourself, as we say when we want the cat out of the bag, but, according to people informed on the matter (as the Financial Times is given to saying, on topics of far less weight), the Skipper is out fishing, nightfishing currently, very much in the dark, for a new issue of Archipelago. We expect he’ll make landfall here in November, for auld lang syne.
We doubt there’ll be more to report until the end of the year when all will be revealed, as the old man holds course for the inglorious twelfth and his eightieth birthday (DV). The last we heard he was shooting his net at the western approaches to the Menai Strait. He plans then to head north in the direction of the Isle of Staffa. From there it’s anyone’s guess where he’ll surface next. All we can say is that the ‘catch’ this time will revert to the proportions of the earlier issues. Postal charges on ‘bumper’ issues are crippling to bear.