Solar Bones

the bell   the bell as   hearing the bell as     hearing the bell as standing here     the bell being heard standing here     hearing it ring out through the grey light of this     morning, noon or night     god knows     this grey day standing here and     listening to this bell in the middle of the day, the middle of the day bell, the Angelus bell in the middle of the day, ringing out through the grey light to     here     standing in the kitchen     hearing this bell     snag my heart and     draw the whole world into     being here     pale and breathless after coming a long way to stand in this kitchen     confused     no doubt about that     but hearing the bell from the village church a mile away as the crow flies, across the street from the garda station, beneath the giant sycamore trees which tower over it and in which a colony of rooks have made their nests, so many and so noisy that sometimes in spring when they are nesting their clamour fills the church and     exhausted now, so quickly     that sprint to the church and the bell     yes, they are the real thing     the real bells     not a transmission or a broadcast because     there’s no mistaking the fuller depth and resonance of the sound carried towards me across the length and breadth of this day and which, even at this distance reverberates in my chest     a systolic thump from the other side of this parish, which lies on the edge of this known world with Sheeffry and Mweelrea to the south and the open expanse of Clew Bay to the north     the Angelus bell     ringing out over its villages and townlands, over the fields and hills and bogs in between, six chimes of three across a minute and a half, a summons struck on the lip of the void which gathers this parish together through all its primary and secondary roads with     all its schools and football pitches     all its bridges and graveyards     all its shops and pubs     the builder’s yard and health clinic     the community centre     the water treatment plant and     the handball alley     the made world with     all the focal points around which a parish like this gathers itself as surely as     the world itself did at the beginning of time, through     mountains, rivers and lakes     when it gathered in these parts around the Bunowen river which rises in the Lachta hills and flows north towards the sea, carving out that floodplain to which all roads, primary and secondary, following the contours of the landscape, make their way and in the middle of which stands     the village of Louisburgh     from which the Angelus bell is ringing, drawing up the world again     mountains, rivers and lakes     acres, roods and perches     animal, mineral, vegetable     covenant, cross and crown     the given world with     all its history to brace myself while     standing here in the kitchen     of this house     I’ve lived in for nearly twenty-five years and raised a family, this house outside the village of Louisburgh in the county of Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, the village in which I can trace my seed and breed back to a time when it was nothing more than a ramshackle river crossing of a few smoky homesteads clustered around a forge and a log bridge, a sod-and-stone hamlet not yet gathered to a proper plan nor licensed to hold a fair, my line traceable to the gloomy prehistory in which a tenacious clan of farmers and fishermen kept their grip on a small patch of land     through hail and gale     hell and high water     men with bellies and short tempers, half of whom went to their graves with pains in their chests before they were sixty, good singers many of them, all     adding to the home place down the generations till it swelled to twenty acres, grazing and tillage, with access to open commonage on Carramore hill which overlooks the bay and     this pain, this fucking pain tells me that     to the best of my knowledge     knowledge being the best of me, that     that     there is something strange about all this, some twitchy energy in the ether which has affected me from the moment     those bells began to toll, something flitting through me, a giddiness     drawing me     through the house     door by door     room by room     up and down the hall     like a mad thing     bedrooms, bathroom, sitting room and     back again to the kitchen where     Christ     such a frantic burst     Christ     not so much a frantic burst as a rolling crease in the light, flowing from room to room only to find     this house is empty     not a soul anywhere     because this is a weekday and my family are gone     all gone     the kids all away now and of course Mairead is at work and won’t be back till after four so the house is mine till then, something that should gladden me as normally I would only be too happy to potter around on my own here, doing nothing, listening to the radio or reading the paper, but now the idea makes me uneasy, with four hours stretching ahead of me till she returns,     alone here for four hours     four hours till she returns so     there must be some way of filling the span of time that now spreads out ahead of me, something to cut through this gnawing unease because     the paper     yes     that’s what I’ll do     the daily paper     get the keys of the car and drive into the village to get the paper, park on the square in front of the chemist and then stand on the street and     this is what I will do     stand there for as long as it takes for someone to come along and speak to me, someone to say     hello     hello     or until someone salutes me in one way or another, waves to me or calls my name, because even though this street is a street like any other it is different in one crucial aspect – this particular street is mine, mine in the sense of having walked it thousands of times     man and boy     winter and summer     hail, rain and shine so that     all its doors and shop-fronts are familiar to me, every pole and kerbstone along its length recognisable to me     this street a given     this street is something to rely on     fount and ground     one of those places where someone will pass who can say of me     yes, I know this man     or more specifically     yes, I know this man and I know his sister Eithne and I knew his mother and father before him and all belonging to him     or more intimately     of course I know him – Marcus Conway – he lives across the fields from me, I can see his house from the back door     or more adamantly     why wouldn’t I know him, Marcus Conway the engineer, I went to school with him and played football with him – we wore the black and gold together     or more impatiently     I should know him, his son and daughter went to school with my own – we were on the school council together     or more irritably     of course I know him – I lent him a chainsaw to cut back that hawthorn hedge at the end of his road and     so on and so on     to infinity     amen     the basic creed in all its moods and declensions, the articles of faith which verify me and upon which I have built a life in this parish with all its work and rituals for the best part of five decades and     this short history of the world to brace myself with     standing here in this kitchen, in this grey light and wondering     why this sudden need to rehearse these self-evident truths should press so heavily upon me today, why this feeling that there are     thresholds to cross     things to be settled     checks to be run     as if I had stepped into a narrow circumstance bordered around by oblivion while     looking for my keys now     frisking my pockets and glancing around, only to see that     Mairead has beaten me to the job, she has been out early and bought the papers – not one but two of them, local and national, both lying in the middle of the table neatly folded into each other, the light glossing unbroken across their surface, making it clear she has not read them herself that I might have the small pleasure of opening up a fresh newspaper, hearing it rattle and creak as it discloses itself, one of those experiences which properly begin the day or the afternoon as is the case now, turning it over and leafing through it     starting at the back, the sports pages, to read the headline     Hard Lessons in Latest Defeat     as if this were the time and the place for a sermon     which prompts me to close it again quickly, not wanting any homily at this hour of the day with the paper showing the date as     November 2nd, the month of the Holy Souls already upon us, the year nearly gone so     what happened to October     come and gone in a flash, the clocks gone back for winter time only last week and     the front-page stories telling that the world is going about its relentless business of rising up in splendour and falling down in ruins with wars still ongoing in foreign parts – Afghanistan and Iraq among others – as peace settlements are being attempted elsewhere – Israel and Palestine – while closer to home, the drama is in a lower key but real nonetheless – bed shortages in hospitals and public sector wage agreements under pressure – all good human stories no matter how they will pan out, you can feel that, the flesh and blood element twitching in them, while at the same time     in the over-realm of international finance other, more abstract indices are rising and falling to their own havoc – share prices, interest rates, profit margins, solvency ratios – money upholding the necessary imbalances so that everything continues to move ever forward while on one of the inside pages there is     one year on     a long article with an illustrative graph and quotes outlining the causes and consequences of our recent economic collapse, a brief résumé of events that culminated on the night of September 29th, feast of the archangel Michael – the night the whole banking system almost collapsed and the country came within a hair’s breadth of waking the following morning to empty bank accounts and     for clarity’s sake     this article is illustrated by a sidebar which gives some indication of just how outsized the nation’s financial folly was in the years leading up to the collapse, debt piling up till it ran to tens of billions, incredible figures for a small island economy, awe-inspiring magnitudes which shifted forever the horizons of what we thought ourselves liable for and which now, stacked on top of each other like this – all those zeroes, glossy and hard, so given to viral increase – appear like     the indices and magnitudes of a new cosmology, the forces and velocities of some barren, inverse world – a negative realm that, over time, will suck the life out of us, that collapse which happened without offering any forewarning of itself, none that any of our prophets picked up on anyway as they were     all apparently struck dumb and blind, robbed of all foresight when surely this was the kind of catastrophe prophets should have an eye for or some foreknowledge of but didn’t since it is now evident in hindsight that our seers’ gifts were of a lesser order, their warnings lowered to a tremulous bleating, the voices of men hedging their bets and without the proper pitch of hysterical accusation as they settled instead for fault-finding and analysis, that cautionary note which in the end proved wholly inadequate to the coming disaster because pointing out flaws was never going to be enough and figures and projections, no matter how dire, were never likely to map out the real contours of the calamity or prove to be an adequate spell against it when, without that shrill tone of indictment, theirs was never a song to hold our attention and no point whatsoever meeting catastrophe with reason when what was needed was     our prophets deranged     and coming towards us wild-eyed