Stones Of Aran: Pilgrimage (1991) - Plot & Excerpts
If you have been to Aran, or plan to go, or long to go, this book can serve as an aid to memory, an introduction, or a way there. But be warned: the reading demands care and a kind of faith—namely, that walking in circles is not for nothing.I carted this (very elegant—bless the NYRB) little volume around everywhere last winter—friends eventually started asking “Haven’t you been reading that for like, months?” At which point I would explain this pilgrim’s lack of progress by reading them the following sentence: “Whereupon, rebelliously struggling through this clogged precipitate of scourings worn off its housing by the gyrating sea, this lumpish outwash of the wasting-away of the Earth, this dandruff of a seedy cosmos, one begins to feel that even if the whole did have a meaning narrow enough to be discovered by or revealed to such infinitesimals as Man, it would be one which we, honouring ourselves as dust, should decline to read or make our own.” Which is, to be fair, the most outrageous example I could find, but nevertheless epitomizes everything both grand and amiss in Robinson’s style. And it did perk me up during a particularly difficult mile, as I couldn't help but laugh at what can only be described as self-parody nonpareil.Fond chuckles at the author’s expense aside, I can’t say I particularly enjoyed the reading experience—just as I can’t say I enjoyed walking the south shore of Aran. Joy is not the overarching mood of the island. Like Robinson, “however fascinating the life and lore of the clifftops, I can never walk those heights without bringing home like burrs on my clothes the seeds of nightmare.” (Now there's an image that beats cosmic dandruff any day!)So here are my two caveats to the curious: 1) Even an erstwhile classicist, no stranger to Ciceronian periods propping up an overwrought metaphor or four (and therefore perhaps the most sympathetic reader Robinson could hope for), thought the prose a bit much at times. (But it has to be, you see—it has to wear away at you like the relentless Atlantic, until it’s polished and gutted you; or, better yet—it has to be as uneven, muddy, and pitted as the terrain it describes, so that you strain and stagger and take misstep after misstep, always turning back to see where you left the last clause, and who, exactly, the subject of this circuitous journey of a sentence turned out to be. Robinson’s a mathematician, and consequently attentive to form.)And 2) Aran is bleak. It is grey and rocky and rainy, and when there is sunshine it’s only just enough so as you remember what you’re missing when the clouds inevitably come rolling on in. Oh, and every once and a while, someone gets blown off a cliff. What I’m trying to get at: if you’re the kind of person who would move to LA for the weather, this place (this book? I can hardly tell them apart anymore) may not be for you.At any rate, even if you like hiking and read Burton for fun, the going is arduous. What with the bleakness of the landscape and the Baroqueness of the frame, a slow and measured approach is advisable. Mousse-rich language might make the medicine of existential dread go down easier, but even so—I know I could only stomach so much Robinson at one go. (I’m also inordinately anal about looking up every word I can’t conjure an image to and, speaking as a city kid, if the bird isn’t a pigeon, I got nothing—Chat? shag? plover? I hardly know ’er!) That being said, those who persevere will, like all palmers past, find there’s grace at journey’s end (which is, of course, where they began); and if you’re like me, learn more than you know what to do with about North Atlantic flora, fauna, and rock formation along the way—not all the book's doing—often a cursory Google would result in an hour’s Wiki-binge—now, was this a distraction from the quest, or am I supposed to embrace sidetracks as just another step of the journey? If there’s any grand ‘take-away’ from Robinson, it’s that the divine is in the details, and perhaps nowhere else. He treats life’s minutiae with the same reverential attention as its cataclysms, and by the end one isn’t sure what’s sublime and what mundane. There is no mystery in such profundity, at least none that isn’t in the doing of it—the walking, the reading, the attending to. Robinson’s Pilgrimage at full circle is a heroic feat—having roamed through haunted lands in search of some secret knowledge which he failed to find, he none the less returned to tell the tale; and, great mythographer that he is, he has inscribed his ritual in words without loss or profanation. You cannot read the words without enacting the ritual—you can’t read the book with its relentless accumulation of specificity and not be trudging wearily along the grey margins of Aran. So be prepared, when you at last look up from the page, to come out of the experience bone-tired, but sharper-eyed and satisfied, and bringing home both the seeds of nightmare and of dreams.I’m going to have to wait a long while before setting foot in the Labyrinth. I don't have the strength of will for the requisite sustained attention yet; besides which, it really is a winter’s read.—KRecommended for fans of the The Stones of Aran: From the Mouth of the Whale—more impressionistic in style, but provokes a very similar feeling. And of course Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone,” which is mentioned in the introduction, is also tremendous.
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