This is my story. If there is a lie in it let it be so. It was not I who
composed it. I got no reward but butter boots and paper stockings. The
White-Legged Hound came, and ate the boots from my feet and tore my paper
stockings.

Cill Rialaig
I am a storyteller and a painter in Ireland in 2006. I think of the word
story. I think of it all the time for I have given my life to stories. I
found a dictionary explanation:
Story (stor’e), n. 1. A narrative, either true or fictitious. 2. A way of
knowing and remembering information; a shape or pattern into which
information can be arranged and experiences preserved. 3. An ancient,
natural order of the mind. 4. Isolated and disconnected scraps of human
experience, bound into a meaningful whole.

“I am finished now with the stories. I am old, and it is not long that I
shall be here. All the tales I have are in this book and I am glad that
they are there. There is no knowing but they will shorten the night for
those who will hear them, and I hope that those who read them or hear them
will say a prayer for me and for those from whom I learned them.” Sean
O’Conaill, story teller of Cill Rialaig, 1853-1931

This man Sean O’Conaill inspired all these paintings. If it weren’t for the
urgings of Noelle Campbell Sharpe, and my stay down in Cill Rialaig in the
cottage beside his little cottage, this whole body of work would not exist.
He was the keeper of the sacred stories of the people. If we lose our
stories we lose our soul. We become gentrified. We take on the stories of
others, far off stories that have no connection to our lives. Hollywood
stories and BBC stories are not our stories. Many of them are merely
products; stories manufactured with economics as their sole purpose. Sean
O’Connail’s stories are the stories of our people – the Irish. They are
unique. Even if we can no longer speak our own native language we can still
hear the stories. They are our last link to the first of our people. They
make us unique.
“The people of the place thought Sean was sometimes rather odd. He had
never been in the least irrational, but he had a certain strange way that
some of his neighbours found incomprehensible. Sean had always the greatest
respect for his tales and anecdotes, and he would have preferred to lose his
worldly goods than to forget them. When times changed and stories and
storytellers were no longer sought after, when he was no longer being asked
to tell tales and people had lost all interest in them he hit upon a device
to preserve them in his memory.
He used to tell the tales to himself when he thought no one was within
listening distance. When he was alone herding cattle on the hillside or
returning to Cillrialaig from the town walking slowly behind the cart, or
working in the garden by himself, he would tell a tale to himself “with the
speech, the action and the fatal pursuit - “Diarmuid of the Red Beard” or
“Ceatach”, or “Iolann” – and as he got well into the story he would spread
out his hands to emphasize a passage for the missing audience.”

Staying in Cill Rialaig in February, I walked the same roads he walked, and
climbed through the boggy fields to the standing stones from where I could
see the cold blue sea on either side of the ragged stony mountain. I
imagined Sean walking the roads, talking the stories to himself, protecting
them from oblivion. The missing audience turned away, wrapped up in their
own lives, looking outward.
We are a culture obsessively looking outward, while inside us grows empty
with neglect. I felt it was important to listen now more than ever.
Seventy-five years after his death I stood on the hill and listened to his
stories. One night the electricity was out and I huddled by the turf fire
reading his stories by flashlight. I felt the huge darkness envelope me.
It wrapped around me, layer after black layer, until I was swaddled and
bound by the night. Immediately beyond the intricacy of the fire flames and
the beam of my torchlight the dark was endless and impenetrable. Just as
loneliness and fear of dying makes God this was the kind of darkness that
makes fairies and pookas. As one old woman put it “when the electricity
came in the fairies went out.” That night I even woke up sure there was
someone walking around the cottage. Another of the painters told me the
next morning that it was Sean’s curious ghost coming to see what I was
doing. I laughed at the absurdity, but each night alone in the cottage my
mind strayed from its rational core and spirits inhabited the periphery as I
immersed myself in Sean’s stories.
Sometimes the stories are sad. They bespeak of a hard life. One in which
poverty, death and uncertainty were as constant as the great slate of
Atlantic sea that batters the impassive mountains. Children chasing fairies
to the edge of the town with their concerns, “oh rider of the white horse,
what cures whooping cough?” Those are worried children with adult anxieties.
Wives disappearing for seven years and returning to throw new wives out of
the house, “And I do not blame either of ye, but this is my place now,” I
could not help but feel for the servant girl who had become the new wife who
would now be homeless. Just as I admired the first wife giving no
explanation of her seven year absence. The hag reaching down the chimney
and groping around the room until she plucks a newborn off her mother’s
chest and snatches her away to drown her in the river. The amazing princess
in the Bull of Bhalbhae transgresses all boundaries, goes against her
family’s wishes and marries a beast, goes against the beast’s wishes and
returns home each pregnancy, and then pursues her husband the bull across
the countryside and down into the underworld. He urges her to leave him
alone and go home but “she told him she would not go, and that she would
never return home until she died for him.” This nameless princess gets
everything in the end. She gets her husband the bull, all her children back
and lives as royalty once more.
We use stories to filter our multitude of experiences, to express the pain
in a structured way. They heal by their acknowledgement of the mystery of
our sorrow. By their nature they are implicit in the understanding that
often there is no understanding. They never reveal the mystery; rather the
story preserves and nurtures it. Stories give us the dignity to go on in an
unfathomable place. There is sorrow in these stories but there is also
ferocity and a wit and a delight in the complexity of our existence that
resonates through the pages of the book.
All religions are really stories we have held to be sacred. The bible, the
Koran, the Ramayana, are tales from long ago that have been passed down
until they are considered so precious that we organize whole civilizations
around them. History is an amalgamation of stories in a supposed
progression. Stories are our core defiance in the face of our inevitable
universal fate. They give us shape.
Sean’s stories are local; they are Irish stories. That is why we should
cherish them particularly as Irish people. Some were familiar to me, and
some, like the magnificent centerpiece The Bull of Bhalbhae, were
revelations. We live in a country that is currently suffering an identity
crisis, where old Irish things are dismissed as embarrassing and painful
reminders of a not too distant oppressive past of hunger, colonialism, and
suffocating religion. There is a danger that in rejecting the gloom of the
past we will throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. We have to
be careful at this juncture in our history. We have to cup our hands around
the tiny flames of an old Irish culture that is in danger of being
extinguished forever. We cannot allow what is sacred in our culture reduced
to a cute Disney version of Irishness that no one can relate to. There is
evidence that we are living in the sixth great extinction on our planet.
This is a human made extinction that will see 50% of current species
disappear before the century’s end. This natural devastation is also
reflected in our cultural life, we are seeing native customs, tribes,
languages and stories disappear too. Do we want our great grandchildren
born into this generic bland global future?
Sean understood that these weren’t his stories alone. Indeed many of them
end with the disclaimer This is my story. If there is a lie in it let it be
so. It was not I who composed it. I got no reward but butter boots and
paper stockings. The White-Legged Hound came, and ate the boots from my
feet and tore my paper stockings. He never changed a word of what he heard.
He was not an artist in the romantic modern version of the word. In his
head he held a whole library of stories and folklore. He was fully aware of
what it was worth and was very eager to have Seamus O Duilearga transcribe
word for word and preserve them. He was a priest of folklore, an active
vessel for the vivid and complex spiritual life of his people. I went on the last day to the lovely graveyard in Balie’nSgeilg where he
and his family are buried. I walked around searching for the grave to say
that prayer that he asked for. A stark winter sun shone on the old lichen
covered stones. I clambered over graves old and new. All stories beneath
me. The air smelt of the salty sea. Birds swooped and sliced among the
medieval ruins of the abbey. I don’t have a particular God so I hesitated at
his grave, marked as it was by a high Celtic cross. I said good-bye and I
said thank-you. Then I put on my butter boots and paper stockings and headed
back East to Co. Meath to paint some more. I would miss him and this place
at the edge of the world.
The last words go to Seamus O Duilearga who dedicated his life to saving all
these stories for generations to come. May we not forget to remember.
Sean is dead but his stories are as alive as the day he first was told them.
“I thank God that it came about that I met him and other people like him of
the old stock in the remote places throughout Ireland. It is a sorrow and
heartbreak that these fine people are going. They take much with them to
the grave, and the land is the poorer without them. While they were here,
they were ignored. Thousands upon thousands of Irish speakers who had an
incalculable inexhaustible wealth of all kinds of oral literature and of
pure eloquent vigorous Irish have departed, and in life they were unsought
and neglected. The well of tradition was overflowing with no one to tend
it…. When these old people die there will be an end to the Middle Ages in
Western Europe, and the chain which still links the present generation to
the earliest settlers of Ireland will be broken…. Farewell to that pleasant
life, and my five hundred farewells to the lovable Gaelic people who poured
out for me what they had with big generous hearts! Wherever the remnant of
them may be now, at home or in foreign parts, may this book bring them my
greetings and my thanks! With the passing of time the mist of forgetfulness
will come over the life I once knew, and a generation will arise with no
understanding of it or interest in it. I have truly done my best in this
book to show the richness of story and tradition stored in the memory of one
man of Cillrialaig.”

martin_emer@hotmail.com