At the Edge of Ireland Page 24

  On the church:

  The concept of sin and sinning was daily thrust into my face; everlasting hell and limbo, purgatory, a mere end of the world away. But none of these poor sisters, brothers or fathers ever showed us the Love of God—all they drummed into us was fear and loathing and burning and suffering…When my vision of the Church crumbled into dust, I was left godless, and for many years I walked the dark, cold path of disbelief.

  On political protest:

  In 1977 I became involved with Revolutionary Struggle and a small group of very active and political people…I campaigned and did benefit gigs in many towns…It was my first time to become directly involved in a political campaign…It opened my eyes to the potential of people power and what can be done when we come together to effect change.

  And finally comes a tribute to his younger brother—Barry Moore, aka Luka Bloom:

  We worked together on a number of recordings both his and mine. Occasionally we still play together on stage and when it happens it’s always spontaneous and I always feel really good doing it.

  “Well—I guess it’s a case of define ‘very successfully,’” said Luka Bloom with a deep chuckle. Unlike his brother’s burly bulldoglike appearance, Luka has a long, sensitive face, large open eyes, and just the hint of a perpetual grin around his mouth.

  We’d met by pure happenstance in the kitchen of the center. I’d left it a bit late to sneak out to the bathroom before the opening act, and when I came back, a young female folksinger with a Judy Collins–style voice and maybe just a touch of Sheryl Crow had begun, and I was asked to slip in the back way through the kitchen when her song was complete and the applause started.

  I nodded and smiled, remembering the days when Lynne and I sang together and there was nothing more off-putting in the middle of a song than when people started talking or moving around for drinks or bathroom trips. We liked our audiences serious and sensitive. And of course, here at the center, seriousness and sensitivity were the orders of the day. In everything.

  So I crept quietly into the kitchen and went to stand by the door to the concert room, which was actually the meditation room with its spectacular cliff and ocean vistas we’d enjoyed so many times before. The applause seemed a long time coming. And then I heard this most discordant sound echoing out from the shadows of the kitchen back by the huge stove. I turned and saw someone apparently trying to tune a guitar.

  “Oh, hi,” I said. “You playing tonight?”

  A faint chuckle was followed by: “Well—I hope so. Otherwise I’ve come an awful long way for nothing…”

  “Ah—so you’re with Luka Bloom?” Sometimes I can be a little slow on the uptake.

  Another soft chuckle. “Well—not exactly.” More strange tuning sounds that made me wonder if this guy could even play a guitar. “I am Luka Bloom.”

  “Oh…I, ah…er…Sorry. I didn’t recognize you. Probably because I don’t even know what you look like!”

  “Oh, I’m nothing much special really in the looks department…”

  “Well…,” I said, wondering if I was about to make another faux pas, “good to meet you. Big fan of your brother.”

  “Yeah—so are most people over here…”

  “Not that…I mean…actually, I’ve only heard a few…But by the look of the crowd in there, you’ve got a heck of a following too…”

  Luka Bloom

  Finally he stepped out of the shadows and I was able to see him, stop rambling on, and shake his hand. And after that, our conversation flowed a little less erratically. It was all about Christy at first, of course, and the soft-spoken Luka was remarkably open and honest.

  “M’brother’s hard to quantify because well—he’s not…when you meet him he doesn’t really appear to be very…what you might call, charismatic. He’s very ordinary, y’see—very quiet and he really likes to present himself to people in that way…One-on-one he can be quite shy…But once he gets on the stage, he carries the show like a real trouper…although there are many shows he carried that he doesn’t ever remember at all. In fact, he often had to be hoisted onstage full of God knows what—booze, drugs—and then it was magic. He’d transform in a flash, becoming a different person—the real Christy—and hold his audience—galvanize them—for two, sometimes three hours solid, and then when he came off, he’d be just the way he was when he was carried on! He’s an amazing man. Truly amazing. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow himself to be confined. I remember once an interviewer said to him: ‘You seem to have so many different personas.’ And Christy was right back at him: ‘Well—I’d feel imprisoned, locked up, if I had to live with only one of them!’”

  The kitchen door was suddenly flung back and someone (very serious and respectful) leaned in: “Ah…Mr. Bloom…the er, stage is yours whenever you’re ready…sir…”

  Luka seemed particularly amused by the “sir” bit, nodded, and kept on fiddling with his guitar tuning. It all sounded very discordant to me.

  “You doing some special kind of open tuning or what?” I asked.

  “Well—I guess you could call it that. It’s something I’ve worked up over the years…”

  He continued twiddling and then, having pronounced himself happy with what still sounded to me like some kind of Arabic quarter-tone disharmonic, shook my hand again, said, “Let’s talk some more after the show,” and walked out of the kitchen and down the aisle to the stage.

  The applause was sudden, deafening, and long. This was obviously a well-informed audience packed into every corner and crevice of the meditation room. They were obviously proud to have such a highly respected celebrity-singer in their midst. He acknowledged his reception with a broad, happy smile and then, with little in the way of introduction, launched himself into a spectacular two-hour performance that encompassed just about every mood and subject one could imagine in contemporary folk songs, most of which he’d written himself.

  The audience relished every moment and demanded encore after encore. And as if to celebrate the power of his performance, the sun slowly began to sink behind the huge floor-to-ceiling windows of the room and gave us one of the most spectacularly colorful eventides Anne and I had witnessed so far on Beara. The audience was bathed in a soft scarlet glow, and Luka sang his final song silhouetted against a golden sheen of light that seemed to make his whole body vibrate with the intensity of a mystical aura. And even after he’d finally left the stage and vanished back into the kitchen, his presence and the resonating intensity of his songs remained with us. And there was none of that mad scampering for the exits that usually characterizes the end of a concert. Instead, people seemed to be reluctant to leave. Some were looking around dreamily, as if waking from an enticing half sleep; others reached out to talk to friends quietly in nearby seats. Everywhere were smiles and hugs and expressions of deep satisfaction. It was as if we’d all experienced a mass meditation together and we didn’t really want it to end.

  I intended to join Luka back in the kitchen and congratulate him, but I too was having problems leaving my seat. Anne reached out and squeezed my hand and whispered—as she had done before and would do many times again on this amazing peninsula—“Magic! Absolute magic…”

  19

  At Anam Cara

  AND HERE COMES MAGIC AGAIN—A place of magic cocooned in one of the most beautiful spots on the Kerry side of Beara.

  Alongside the road to Eyeries from Allihies, atop a rise above pastures and bosky hedgerows overlooking Coulagh Bay, sits what looks at first like a small neat bungalow. The grounds, sprawling languorously behind high bushes, are meticulously manicured. Velvety lawns are edged with profusions of flowers. There’s a fountain and a duck pond, and it all seems a little decadently suburban. But then if you wander as I did on my first visit to the rear of the house, you’ll find the land suddenly tumbling away down steep rocky clefts crammed with Tolkienesque tangles of hawthorn and stunted, twisted trees. Cascades and waterfalls have cut deep into the strata. Narrow paths weave their
way through a permanent twilight of shadowy niches pierced by sudden laser-thin sun rays. The water chitters and chuckles, invisible birds chirp and twitter, and there are odd rustlings in the undergrowth. If you follow the path far enough you’ll end up on one of the bay beaches.

  The abrupt contrast between the neat roadside garden at the front of the house, and the primeval spirit of the tumbled land behind, is of course absolutely intentional.

  In fact everything is intentional here at Anam Cara, a place recognized as one of the finest retreats for artists, writers, and poets in the whole of Ireland. And it has been a focal point of Beara’s creative energies since 1998, when it was founded by one of the most altruistic and energetic “catalysts of change” on the peninsula. Her name is Susan Booth-Forbes and, following an extensive career as writer, editor, and communication director in Boston and “a significant change in marital status” (a divorce), she decided to follow her longtime dream to move to Ireland and create an environment where artists and writers could come together and “celebrate their muses.” And Sue is one of those lucky individuals who not only listens and responds to dream-directed urges but also knows how to turn them into inspiring realities.

  Anam Cara translates from Gaelic as “Soul Friend,” and she dedicated her new “base” to John O’Donoghue, whose book on Celtic wisdom of the same name had long offered nurturing visions to Sue.

  In her invitational Web site, she offers “an intimate residential retreat providing time, space, and creature comforts to support your focusing on your own projects and doing your best creative work.” Susan goes on to describe herself as “part friend, part editor, part travel guide, and part mid-wife in stimulating creative rebirths and helping participants to slow down enough inside to maximize their individual capabilities.” From what we’d heard locally, she’d helped many writers rediscover their muses and cease their languishing in unpublished purgatory.

  When I first visited she greeted me with such mercurial warmth that I wondered if we’d known each other as friends in some past incarnation. And, as if to immediately confirm that odd sensation, she said, “You look familiar. I feel I’ve met you somewhere before.” I mumbled some inane reply about “wishing we had” as I was being led on a guided interior tour of the retreat.

  What seemed a modest bungalow-styled structure from the road morphed into an intriguing array of spaces. Some were small and intimate niches ideal for sharing the challenges and joys of the creative process. Others included a delightful sunroom complete with grape arbor, a charming dining area and kitchen for her ten or so “guests,” a series of large central spaces that, on her popular “community evenings,” can host up to a hundred or more visitors for lectures, poetry readings (Leanne O’Sullivan, one of our favorite “creators” on Beara, had a star billing here in 2006), artist shows, and workshops—and even the occasional hullabaloo of a music, singing, and dancing hooley.

  In addition to ensuring “lots of quiet creative time” for her guests, Sue also organizes an array of writing workshops and art sessions, field trips to nearby Eyeries and other key places around Beara, Celtic-flavored events, and yoga periods. “And to cap it all—I do fabulous breakfasts of omelets and homemade soda bread as top attractions!”

  As she gave examples of literary and artistic “breakthrough moments” for which Anam Cara is apparently renowned, she projected a fascinating dual persona of enthusiasm wrapped in a cooler, gimlet-eyed, guru-tinged organizer-self. One of her recent “creative coups” was a workshop conducted by the Irish-American poet Billy Collins, once the poet laureate of the USA. Admirers of his power-packed works have described them as “full of quirky bends and heart-stopping imagery” and “like a plate of fat pancakes—lots of good stuff that will stick to your ribs for a long time.”

  Eyeries Village

  Apparently the workshop was a roaring success, with Billy in fine fettle offering “no mollycoddling,” criticizing the overuse of the thesaurus in certain works in progress, and “treating us like real poets,” according to one participant, who also described him as “a Peter Pan high on Ireland—and a fantastic dancer, inside the house, outside and, on one occasion, in the duck pond!”

  “Listen,” said Sue as we sat sipping afternoon tea in the sunroom. “Maybe you’d like to join us next week. We’re having a couple of Beara artists bring their works in and give us a talk. They’re both well known here and on show at local galleries on the peninsula. It should be fun.”

  “Most of the artists I know seem to hate describing their work habits and paintings,” I suggested, “except in the most esoteric of terms, which is usually not much fun at all!”

  “Trust me. You’ll love these two…”

  And so I came and I did.

  JOHN BRENNAN WAS A bald, bright-eyed, young-looking man who seemed to relish the uncertainty of the “creative process.” A half-hour PowerPoint presentation of his artworks seemed to enthrall the hundred or so locals in the audience. He stirred up chuckles and giggles with his references to “hours spent just looking at a painting and wondering where to go next” and “I always try to keep a number of canvases going simultaneously so I don’t get bored.” He emphasized that he was talking about paintings, not people, although he admitted he had a “low threshold for tolerance of sameness.” And yet—superficially at least—there seemed to be a great deal of “sameness” about his colored boxes paintings. He suggested his variations were subtle and “not always immediately apparent” and the audience seemed to agree. However, the notes he used to describe his explorations of his abstract genre helped clarify the process:

  What and how to paint? Imagery. Inventing a vocabulary for a wordless world. The process of designing and then selecting the most appropriate image to convey a given word, an adjective…There are no words, no representational imagery to guide us toward a possible meaning…Do these shapes have a certain resonance for us and does this affect how we react…Would an irregular shape be more potent and also open to wider interpretation…Is it really possible to communicate “a specific feeling” or “an experience” by such simple or abstract means…Unlike a writer, I do not have a plot or outline to begin, only a starting point…Thus begins a journey of discovery, elimination, and of decision-making…My shapes are my characters…I cajole and mold them and the shapes evolve in color and form…I’m always altering the direction the painting could take and maybe taking the road less traveled…until I am left in no doubt that the shapes I select work collectively within the confines of the canvas…I’m always working towards the unknown.

  What could have been a load of effetist mumbo jumbo and aesthetic gobbledygook became instead a courageous revelation of one artist’s tenuous search for meaning and significance in totally abstract terms using nothing but color, simple random shapes, and the critical spaces in between. Most artists prefer not to (or maybe just can’t) explain their own creative mazes. Maybe, in many instances, there’s not that much to explain anyway. In a lot of contemporary art, one senses an arrogant dismissive “you either get it or you don’t” or “whatever it means to you is what it means” attitude on the part of so-called artists. But John, who had a permanent exhibition of his work at the Mill Cove Gallery just east of Castletownbere, was open, honest, and obviously beguiled by the vagaries and vastness of the abstract “creative process.”

  Admittedly, his audience seemed more beguiled as he showed how sometimes his abstracts morphed almost unintentionally into semirepresentational works, most notably dramatic seascapes of churning, writhing waves with maybe just a hint of land at the far edges of the canvas.

  “You can tell how living here on Beara can create this kind of response,” he said, smiling. “You’re surrounded by the ocean. Its sound, its fury, its ever-changing moods and its dominant power…They all get inside and eventually emerge in my paintings, sometimes when I least expect it…In my sea paintings I’m trying to combine a certain balance of realism and abstraction. I’m also looking for a sense of
timelessness in the colors and forms. I don’t want it to be a particular time of day. I want it to be…eternal…transcendent beyond just sea paintings into something else…something more enduring…intriguing…fascinating.”

  And it was indeed fascinating to share John’s fascination. He seemed, like many fine artists, to be blending the dual capacities of standing deeply within his own mind and artistry and yet far outside the source of the stimulation—seeing it objectively almost as the Creator Him/Herself might see it. And trying to express, in James Joyce’s words, “the particular in the universal” (and vice versa).

  The second artist of the evening, Jeannie Richardson, was an intriguing study in contrasts. She was frail, shy, and soft-spoken and seemed to have great difficulty with the PowerPoint system. For a moment she looked so flummoxed and uncomfortable that I thought she’d hastily apologize and flee from the stage. But she didn’t. And the audience applauded her spontaneously just for staying put. And I for one was delighted that she had, because her life and art were so beguilingly different from John Brennan’s. She made no references to “juxtaposed abstracts,” “nonrepresentational imagery,” “spatial illusions,” and “unresolved states.” Instead she merely showed a sequence of her highly realistic work of animals, plants, and vegetables, and Vermeer-like still-life watercolors. And while it looked as if she might be tantalizingly close at times to producing Hallmark-type illustrations, she always seemed to manipulate composition, color, and moods of great calm in such a subtle way that you sensed layerings of perceptions and meanings in even the simplest of her subjects.