‘For once a history which could do us no harm’

I quoted the other day a passage from Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons in which a character surmises “that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark.”

This is a persistent theme in Irish literature, as perhaps it is in any literature that is the product of a society so long occupied and divided. A professor of mine in college liked to point out the elaborate embellishments in the Book of Kells—so detailed that some of the Irish monks went blind painting them—and wonder what it was about white space, about silence, that the Irish are so afraid of. “Whatever you say, say nothing,” as Seamus Heaney famously put it.

But Tóibín’s prose, as I mentioned, is perfectly unembellished. And I was thinking of this as I read from his 1987 travelogue Walking Along the Border, when Tóibín happens upon an ancient stone circle in Beltany:

I started to think about that moment, that second when the final stone was put in place and the circle formed, what difference it would have made to the people who placed it there: something new, powerful, complete. That there was no artifice involved, that they had merely carried them there and made them into a circle gave the stones a greater spirit. I moved around touching them, looking at the land down below. Beltany must have come from Bealtaine, the Irish word for the month of May; I said that to James Bradley. ‘No, no’ he answered. ‘It’s even older than that, not Bealtaine, but its root, Baal Tine the fire of Baal.’ Baal was a Celtic god. Tine is the Irish for fire.

Indeed, the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland has always been a place of magic and fire, of smuggling, secret identities, and the promise of violence. Tóibín continues:

We walked down the hill, leaving the stones to their magic, away from the reminder that there was once a time in this place when there were no Catholics or Protestants; the dim past standing there on the crown of the hill, for once a history which could do us no harm, could not teach us, inspire us, remind us, beckon us, embitter us: locked up in stone.

It’s the wish for silence. No more embellishment. Whatever you say, say nothing.

IMAGE: A detail of Folio 129v., from the Book of Kells (ca. 800)

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.