DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I HAVE MOVED again. This time to the suburbs beyond the housing estates; to old Mullingar, where the lawns are green, the avenues long, and the sloping fields are lined with beech trees; where the middle classes live, with all the pretty horses. I am staying in an old house with lots of rooms; and in one particular room I found an abandoned turtle, all alone, sleeping in a water tank.
I thought he was dead at first, but when I poked him he stretched his neck, and his eyes looked up at me. I carried the tank downstairs to the study. It was warmer there. I need a lot of heat to prevent my back from seizing up when I’m at the computer. The heat pleased him. I fancied he smiled at me.
Carrying his plastic tank downstairs wasn’t easy; I was afraid he would spill out on to the carpet. When he was settled in the study he stared at me and I began to think about John Moriarty, the Kerry philosopher who wrote a book called Turtle Was Gone A Long Time. I can still recall Moriarty’s soft voice on Joe Duffy’s radio show, intoning the names of forgotten gods and the names of 20 different sea birds.
Moriarty had a big head of shaggy hair, and the eyes of a wise woman. A huge woolly man, his mind was a cardigan people wanted to hug, and his smile always survived every room he entered. He saw the entire earth and all living things as a multiple metaphor for some deeper invisible knowing.
John Moriarty was a big onion of ideas; when he peeled off one idea, there was another layer of thought inside waiting to emerge, so he often talked himself into a state of exhaustion.
He spoke of living, not dying, and when he developed cancer he said that waiting at the door of death didn’t feel like the end, but more like a departure lounge for a flight to elsewhere.
If there was one thing that made him rage it was corporate bankers and stockbrokers playing poker with other people’s money. He described them as “muggers in suits”. It’s ironic that he died just before the financial world collapsed.
And he was a whisperer; not just to horses, but to hares, dogs, dolphins and, of course, turtles.
I don’t think I’d like to live with a turtle. A turtle might turn my world upside down.
In Leitrim we had a dog, who lived outside and was given a bowl of cereal every day. One morning I was woken by the sound of battling magpies gorging on the leavings of his dinner.
Before the magpies came, there were goldfinches, coal tits, thrushes and blackbirds – but the dogs’ dinner changed the ecological balance.
It’s difficult to love magpies. Some people see them as unlucky. Their black and white feathers become a metaphor for tragedy.
Even a small fracture in the best marriage, like failing to agree about how to empty the dishwasher, can grow into a monstrous resentment, and an unfortunate magpie might just sit on the clothesline at the wrong moment and be forever seen as a harbinger of sorrow; as a signal of how much unquiet is hidden underneath the surface of things. Superstition didn’t die with Catholicism.
Not that Catholicism is dead in Mullingar. I was in town last week and noticed that across from the Joe Dolan statue there was a shop window full of enormous religious figures; St Anthony and St Clare, the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Virgin, all on sale, for just €99 each.
One would be forgiven for thinking that a religious revival was at hand, except that Laurel and Hardy were sitting among the communion of saints, and grinning garishly at the world.
To most people, these icons are just statues; and a turtle is just a turtle, a pet bought for a child and then abandoned when childhood is over. But, to me, the turtle is also an abandoned metaphor; a thing still living deep inside the world, as if he were holding it together. He has returned from some elsewhere, and who can tell whether I am holding him up or he is holding me up, as I carry him around the old house, in his tank of water, with it’s plastic staircase, and it’s little plastic palm trees.
