I was gazing out the window at the ocean, and thinking how tiny Ireland is, compared to the vast Atlantic
I WENT to the Abbey Theatre recently to see a play about a bank director who died in the snow, and the amount of mobile phones that were buzzing during the first half of the drama was amazing. As Frank McNamara pointed out, in an Irishman's Diarylast week, the management actually had to make a special plea to the audience at the interval, so that the actors could get through their lines without interruption. In the second half the phones were quiet, but the audience coughed so much that I was reminded of the old days, when people used to engage in collective coughing at Mass, to demonstrate their devotion.
I think coughing at Mass was an unconscious attempt by the disempowered poor, to participate in the extraordinary acts of God that were happening on the altar, and from which they were effectively excluded.
In those days the priest turned his back to the congregation as he mumbled his way through the ritual, but he was invariably accompanied by a chorus of chesty sighs.
Coughing was infectious; one person would begin, and another would reply, and before long the entire congregation found a steady rhythm.
This continued until the consecration bell abruptly woke the dozing boys, and silenced every congested lung, and as the bread was raised above the priest’s head, an intense silence prevailed for about a minute; and thereafter, as if to indicate that the terror and awe of God’s moment in history was over, the coughing erupted once again, with even more vehemence than before.
I felt something similar happening in the Abbey Theatre when John Gabriel Borkman died in the snow on the stage. Alan Rickman was playing the part, and as he lay stretched on the boards the coughing stopped completely and the audience was gathered into a single moment of attention.
Someone offered to buy me a wine at the bar afterwards, but I would accept only a glass of lemon juice, because I was driving back to Mullingar, and I didn’t want to take any risks. Besides, I love lemons. I eat a lot of them. There’s nothing better than two squeezed lemons in a glass of water, for refreshing the palate and cleansing the urinary tract.
Even when I stay in hotels, I always go to the nearest shop to buy a few, and then get a knife and fork from the hotel kitchen and do the rest in my room.
I suppose I ought to bring a juice squeezer with me, because a knife and fork are not the most effective weapons for draining the juice out of a lemon that has been sitting on the display counter of a corner shop for a few weeks.
Last weekend I was in a hotel in Donegal, sucking more lemons, and gazing out the window at the ocean, and thinking how tiny Ireland is, compared to the vast Atlantic.
For many the ocean is full of ghosts; those of dead fishermen, and loved ones lost at sea. For others the ocean is full of life; seals and dolphins and things that swim in the dark.
But the ocean frightens me, when I stand on the shoreline, because I always feel that some magnificently indifferent being is watching me, in that moment.
The shoreline is also a place people go, when they want to mark significant moments in their lives. It’s a place they go to say things like, “I love you,” or to say, “It’s over,” or to say, “I am not well.”
And I’ve always noticed that people who live beside the ocean make a lot of music, but talk less than those who live in the midlands. I suppose the ocean’s hum makes human discourse superfluous.
At the shoreline there is a vast “elsewhere”, which creeps up to our bare feet, and touches us with a presence so powerful that people fall naturally into a state of silent attention.
But last weekend, at the shoreline in Donegal I kept thinking about the elegant performance of Alan Rickman in the Abbey, as he portrayed John Gabriel Borkman; and how, as he fell down dead in the snow, the coughing stopped, and stillness enveloped the audience.
Not that the terror of God had moved the curtains or anything! Such implausible scenarios don’t bother us in Ireland anymore; rather, it is the terror of an empty universe that we are beginning to hear, along the shoreline, and in the theatres, as we finally awake from our slumber and from childish devotions.