MAGAN'S WORLD: MANCHÁN MAGAN' stales of a travel addict
SOCIAL geographers, poets, etchers and literature professors gathered in Druid theatre, Galway, recently to celebrate the work of travel writer, map-maker and myth collector, Tim Robinson.
For some unfathomable reason, I was invited. Listening to the various scholars eagerly tweezing out the breadth, depth and scale of Robinson's historical, sociological, geological and philosophical exploration of Connemara, the Burren and the Aran islands, was so captivating that I managed to forget the fact that I was expected to contribute. I should have confessed earlier to the organisers that I wasn't an expert on anything, and certainly didn't belong in such august company, but having idolised Robinson since reading Stones of Aranin my late teens, I wasn't going to miss an opportunity to meet him.
He is the nearest thing we have to a living legend, this side of Famous Seamus – one of the few people from our world whose name will still be known a century on. The Praeger, Seathrún Céitinn or Pope O’Mahony of our generation.
So, there I was, lurking amidst the eminences from Notre Dame and Boston College, desperately trying to keep up as they chicaned between topographical channelling, empathic macaronics, linguistic withering and the collective potency of re-storying our past, when suddenly I was called to the lectern.
I wanted to laud Robinson as a medieval master-mason whose work would be admired for centuries like a Clonmacnoise carving. I wanted to quote some vertiginous swoops of his prose in which he distils an entire philosophy into a perfectly-wrought sentence: “Irish placenames dry out when anglicised like twigs snapped off from the tree.” His sentences are like hawk’s pellets which can be dissected to reveal the rodent bones, fox fur, feathers, beetle shells and cereal grains contained within.
What came to my lips instead was a memory of having my ears cleaned in Delhi a decade ago. Somehow it seemed reminiscent of the experience of reading Robinson’s books and of the method he uses to gather his information. The ear-cleaner worked in the underground bazaar beneath Connaught Place where smuggled goods are sold in a seedy strip-lit warren. There was so little menace in his dancing eyes when he produced his length of wire hanger and gestured that he wanted to stick it into my head that I felt it would be rude not to acquiesce.
I allowed him stroke my head a few times, touching a point on my neck which made it flop prone to one side. Then, with one hand firmly on my crown, he began to wind the length of wire into my ear. It was at least a foot long and as he pushed it ever so gently, deeper and deeper into my head I slipped into a state of suspended animation. I was conscious; but neither capable of, nor wishing to, struggle. It was bizarre; my consciousness seemed to follow the tip of the wire as it plunged ever deeper into me and though it couldn’t in truth have gone any more than an inch or two it felt like it was already in my belly.
The experience lasted only a few minutes, until he retracted the wire again, which was now coated in the darkest brown wax. This seemed to delight him, and he waved the wire excitedly for my appreciation, wiping the wax onto his finger and bringing it to my nose for me to smell, before pushing the wire back into my head again to dig further.
The connection between that and Robinson’s work is evident, isn’t it? Tell me it is! Tell me I didn’t just humiliate myself in front of Ireland’s greatest map-maker and a theatre full of the brightest academics NUI Galway and Exeter University could muster?
For more on Robinson, see foldinglandscapes.com