There is an old Irish myth I’ve been carrying around for a while. I think I found it in a book by John and Caitlyn Matthews, and I probably misremembered it. The misremembered version is the one I tell you now.
As the bards of Ireland were doing their rounds — telling the stories, incanting the poems, singing the songs whilst wandering around the Emerald Isle — something strange began happening.
Verses of poems they knew well slipped away from them. Lyrics they’d sung a-plenty could not be remembered. Crucial details of the stories hid themselves from memory.
What started as small cracks in the recollection of the canon grew into great canyons, and soon, all they had left were fragments. As you can imagine, beyond the professional embarrassment this caused the bards, this was a source of great distress.
The bards laid plans to gather and gather they did. There was a great council: each bard from all the four comers of Ireland, near and far, were there, each resolved to find a way to solve their common problem.
They tried everything they could. They tried to piece together the verses each had left, to try and weave it into a tapestry, yet the more they did, the more fragmented it seemed to become. Instead of a beautiful cloth, they were left with rags.
They got more and more desperate, more and more at a loss. Finally, they were left to confront the facts: their oral tradition, mysteriously, was lost to them. They were adrift, and the people of Ireland with them.
Now, I don’t know whether he turned up late or just kept his mouth shut until now, but finally, one bard piped up. His name was Fintan, and he was known as one of the wisest and greatest bards of all of Ireland and all the lands beyond.
“Why don’t we do when this happened last time?”
“Last time?” the other bards replied, “What do you mean, last time?”
“You know, last time. Or did that story disappear from your repertoire, too? Last time and the time before that and the time before that too.”
The bards were puzzled. They had indeed, no idea what Fintan was on about. But seeing as nobody else had a clue what to do, they listened.
This rupture, this loss, this disappearance, had, according to the old stories, happened not once but many times before. Each time, one bard went up a hill, a specific hill—the hill of Tara—an ancestral power place, and fasted, alone, for four days and four nights. At the end of that time, the stories, songs and poems were restored, in full, to their memory.
If you were there that day, when Fintan finished explaining, you would have felt the council of bards breathe a great sigh of relief. Fantastic idea, Fintan. What a good craic you are to help us figure that one out. Now, all that is left is for someone to volunteer for the task.
The gathered bards cast their eyes about, looking for a young buck among them who would put themselves forward. Many mumbled something about not being able to take four days off because, although business was slow, they still needed to file this year’s tax return.
Between a solitary fast and a hot shower, the easy option beckoned.
“Oh, alright then, I’ll do it.” Fintan volunteered.
The rest of the bards of Ireland breathed another great sigh of relief.
With warm words and well wishes, they helped him ready himself, and a less cowardly soul helped Fintan lug some extra skins of water up the hill with him.
Just like the stories before, Fintan sat and fasted and slept alone under the stars on the hill of Tara. On the fourth and final night, the stories and the verses and the music of his ancestors came flooding back to him in their completeness, with not a rhyme on a stanza missing.
As dawn was breaking, Fintan came back down the hill and was greeted by his fellows, all of whom were too wrought with anticipation to go home to file their tax returns.
He told them the stories. He sang them the songs. And as he did, their memories, too, were restored, in full, with not a verse or a melody missing.
They resolved to ne’er again to forget the story that had been before and had just been again, and with that, they disbanded and set off again back across the land of Ireland.
Singing our way through the wilderness
Around the same time I heard this tale, I kept on bumping into various poets and writers and tellers of tales talk about “the Songlines”. Bizarrely, whilst in a children’s library in the middle of Indonesia (where I had a regular gig as a storyteller), I found a copy of “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin, borrowed it and devoured it.
Chatwin’s book is arguably two books. One is his journey in Australia, spending time amongst the Aboriginals and their allies, trying to understand the tradition the book is named after. The second part is a loose collection of notes, quotes, and anecdotes in which he speculates and ruminates about the existence of such a tradition beyond the continent of Australia.
The Songlines, or Dreaming Tracks, are pathways of song to be sung whilst walking across the Australian continent.
When the world was young and creation was not yet created, the ancestral animals wandered, ate, copulated, played and shat their way across the land, singing the world into being as they did. Members of the Aboriginal tribes, as they walk these tracks, sing these songs once again — creation is not linear; it must be renewed.
Knowing these songs, beyond maintaining cosmic order, grants very practical knowledge — plants which are edible, plants which are poisonous, the location of waterholes, and the movements of bugs and spiders.
The way your Songline would be determined is that when your mother felt your first kick, that’s where your spirit crawled up out of the earth, up her leg and into her uterus. That spot is located along your songline, and ideally, somewhere close to that spot is where you will go, when your time comes, to die.
In the second part of the book, Chatwin points out that while many aspects of the Aboriginal tradition are local and culturally specific, many have remarkable parallels with other traditions and phenomena. In addition, if you draw the Songlines on a map, they appear to be spread out from the part of Northern Australia where there used to be a land bridge to East Timor.
“The human brain”, he speculates “, is evolved for singing our way through the wilderness.”
Once, I shared my perception with Angus Balbernie that Indian and Celtic folk music feels very similar.
He replied, “If you follow the modes of Celtic music, you can find a track going from India, out to the west, across Northern Africa, up through the west of Spain and France and up into the British Isles. You can get musicians from across this path together, and they can just jam because their”, or did he say our, “music all fits together.”
Homesick
“A creative person has little power over their own life. They are not free. They are captive and driven by their daimon.” Carl Jung
This is all to say that I’m getting homesick. But I want to be clear: this only applies to a broad definition of home. If, as so-called ‘civilisation’ wants us to believe, home is a singular place, a dot on the map, then I am not sure I am homesick.
Perhaps, however, being home means being on, or at least connected to, one’s dreaming track, one’s Songline in the broad sense.
Something I’ve observed is that for some cultures, the sense of being of the place or belonging to those people is a matter of breeding. “My great, great, great grandfathers and mothers were all from here.” You can travel far but still come back because it runs in your blood, even generations later.
For others, being born in that place matters. My mother felt me kick somewhere in the vicinity of Caer Idris in North Wales. I was born in Bangor Hospital, a town overlooking a stretch of sea that separates mainland Britain from Bardsey, the site of one of the greatest Druidic and Bardic Universities of the old Celts.
Not having any Welsh ancestors I know of, when I visit Wales, I make no claims of Welshness. Yet when I mention I was born in Bangor, the response is always the same:
“You’re a Welsh boy. You’re one of us.”
More fascinating is a conversation I recently had with a Nigerian taxi driver. My grandfather, a doctor in the British Army, was posted in Nigeria, and my father, whose middle name is Bandele—a child born far from his homeland—was born there. I told the driver that my dad was born in Ibadan, not leaving out the (awkward colonial) context.
“Your father is Nigerian?!”
“Well, born there.”
“Have you ever been?”
“No, not yet.”
“You have to come home.”
So home is not, in my reckoning anyway, a dot on a map, but it could, perhaps, be a squiggle of lines.
Which brings me back to the question?
What should we do with this drunken sailor er-lie in the morn’en?