CULTURAL STUDIES: Connemara: The Last Pool of DarknessBy Tim RobinsonPenguin Ireland, 373pp. €25
IN THE FINAL paragraph of the final chapter of his 200l essay collection My Time in Space, in which he moves from the smallest of observable phenomena - the "less than a speck" of Planck's Constant - to the infinite number of possible universes hypothesised by some cosmologists, Tim Robinson remarks that: "This heartshaking vision of the grounds of our possibility in a perhaps eternal and infinite profusion of universes is strangely like that of the foam of being we glimpse at the other end of the length-scale. We are not desolate creatures helplessly adrift between two deathly abysses. The perspectives I have sketched span the perilous sea of our universe from shore to shore. They are two wings of not-quite-inconceivable breadth and power, that bear us up for a time. Not for long enough, but for a time."
The essay from which these words are taken is entitled "The Fineness of Things", and for some 20-odd years now we have trusted this writer to alert us to, and to celebrate, the fineness - in every sense of the word - of the things that surround us, and of our own imaginings. Now, in the second volume of a trilogy that began with the widely and deservedly praised Listening to the Wind, Robinson continues his exploration both of Connemara and of the wider questions of our place in space and time, moving out from his home ground of Roundstone to the wilder and sometimes sinister terrain to the north, around the bays of Killary and Mannin and the islands beyond. This was where Wittgenstein came, towards the end of his life, in search of a place where he could work unhindered by the noise and flummery of the world - and it is this troubled, unusually restless philosopher whom Robinson invokes at the beginning of his own quest: "'I can only think clearly in the dark,' he said, 'and in Connemara I have found one of the last pools of darkness in Europe'. His thought, a mental ascesis that matched his frugal and solitary existence there, was directed to an end, or rather to its own end. As he had written 'The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question'."
There is an undeniably mystical component to this train of thought - a philosophical via negativaas thoroughgoing as that of the desert ascetics, or of those wild monks who perched 180m above the Atlantic winds, on Skellig Michael, and emptied their minds of everything but God - and it is one that runs throughout Wittgenstein's work. Yet when Robinson follows him into that "last pool of darkness", he comes armed with a different sensibility, an awareness that there is no end to philosophy, because there is no end to mystery - "a mystery" he has said, "is a question mark in search of a question; it is unappeasable". So, while there are affinities with Wittgenstein's concerns in Robinson's work, he is open to a wider range of mysteries, and a far wider range of possible questions.
FROM THE GEOLOGY OF THE MOUNTAINS and bays, to local accounts of famine and migration, to the fishing wars around Inishbofin in the early to mid 1800s, Robinson travels from "suspect terrane", through faults and unfinished histories to the islands beyond Slyne Head that form the outmost border of the west, in search of "some hoped-for conclusive identification of the quintessence of Connemara".
What he arrives at, however, is an ugly intrusion from the world beyond the last pool of darkness, in the form of two blocks of holiday apartments "in the gibbering-gables style that now infests the Irish countryside" where "some perceptive fly-by-night critic had scrawled 'EYESORE' in huge letters on one of the unplastered gable ends". Faced with this, he is forced to consider whether or not he has found, not Connemara, but "some Anticonnemara that threatens to neutralize the place, to drag it down into globalized nullity".
It is a question he might have encountered almost anywhere else on the face of the Earth which he has mapped and written about so beautifully but, coming at the close of a book that has drawn such wonders from one narrow corner of a small country on the edge of an infinitely diverse continent, it is no less poignant, and no less urgent, for being universal. Nor is it simply an expression of dismay, akin to the concluding remarks in some nature documentary about our threatened natural heritage, for Robinson moves on, convincingly, from this vision of banal failure to a reminder of the "real Connemara . . . in all its plenitude", where we live, not only as "physical entities, subject to the law of gravity", but also as ideas and narratives and, even if it is "not for long enough", those narratives unfold in what we make of space and time.
Thus, Connemara is "both a certain tract of the Earth's surface and an accumulation of connotations: wild shores and tiny fields, famine and folksong, mountains, lakes, heathers and lichens, the O'Flahertys and the O'Malleys, deserted cottages and russet-sailed turf boats, Patrick Pearse's vision of Connemara as 'a little Gaelic kingdom', the Sublime and lots more", as well as "the qualities of Wittgenstein's 'pool of darkness', or of what dregs remain to us from it: tremendous silences, shadowy retreats from the competitive lights of the city, untimeable hours and non-calendrical days".
Connemara: The Last Pool of Darknessis a wonderful book, easily the equal of its predecessor in the trilogy, and one that demands to be read closely and with a growing sense, not only that we are travelling in a land that offers a multitude of mysteries and spaces for thought, but also that our guide is one of the finest of contemporary prose stylists, as well as an important thinker who raises questions that are both intriguing and urgent, in response to the mysteries of a world which we all both inhabit and imagine into being. That community of imagination is one that Robinson never forgets, for its power to reassert - periodically and provisionally, and always as part of a dialectic in which making good and dragging down are eternal opponents and complements - the "real Connemara in all its plenitude" to which he refers. Indeed, it is to this community that he appeals, in a moving, and in many ways heartening conclusion as, struck by a coincidence that should not be revealed here, he sees the need to abandon his book - as Prospero does, at the end of The Tempest- and, in so doing, set it adrift, like a paper boat, "on the unknown waters of other people's minds, unballasted with summation or conclusion". This notion makes for an astonishing and provocative end to an astonishing and almost infinitely provocative work, and as such, it is a rare pleasure to be among those engaged in the salvage of so rich a treasure.
John Burnside is a novelist and poet. His most recent novel is Glister(Jonathan Cape, 2008). He lives in Fife, Scotland, where he is a reader in English at the University of St Andrews