Spring brings Chinese poetry, bowls of tea and a new hope of recovery from my depression. But then Rachmaninov’s The Bells comes on the radio, spurring memories of the last elm tree in Westmeath
I CAN’T UNDERSTAND why people find it so difficult to grasp the fact that Leitrim is the centre of the universe. Since my friend Little Lotus came to visit me last week, I have been reading Chinese poetry and simplifying my daily routine, and it’s clear to me that not only is Ireland a nation equal in greatness to China, but that Leitrim, and in particular the hills above Lough Allen, are the centre of everything that is. And to walk here is to walk deeply in the centre of the cosmos.
I’ve just finished redecorating my office, a single-room outhouse known as the Hut. I built a loft for storage, and made a wall of shelves from pine and stained the wood black, which contrasts with the cream walls and cream curtains, and creates a rustic Tudor effect, further enhanced by a freshly-laid pine floor and the old mountain stove in the corner.
Now I sit. Now I begin. And I hope this spring will be a time of recovery from my depression.
After lunch each day I doze in the Hut, like the Chinese poet Po-Chu-I who lived about 1,200 years ago. I abandon myself to dreams for an hour, and then drink bowls of tea, just like him, and I notice the lengthening shadows of evening, like he did.
“Joyful people regret the fleeting years,” he says, “and sad people must endure the slow hours, but only those without joy or sorrow can accept what life brings.”
I can almost hear him whispering to me. Otherwise no other voice calls. I open the window and look at the trees in the garden, all 100 of them, and for a moment I think, I have lost my faith in the beauty of things. It’s not surprising, after all the scandals, that we in Ireland should lose our faith in anything, but how can poetry be written again if there is no myth, and if human beings are not in conversation with the ghosts in their dreams?
Such thoughts afflict me as I stand at the window, watching the light nudging the cherry and apple into leaf; an impossible miracle of beauty in this sorrowful world where men sit around until mother dies and then weep their way to the grave in bewilderment.
But I am not like other men, who keep their grief a secret and go to the doctor for anti-depressants, and slink around the edges of other people’s worlds, wounded in the hip, their fields in tatters, as they ache for an uncertain home and tell nobody.
When anyone asks me, how are you feeling?, I tell them everything.
I say it as it is. I say it to the ghost of Po-Chi-I who abides in the corner of my hut. I say, “I know where my depression comes from. And I know where hope lies. Depression is a sort of darkness, but darkness is merely a door to some new world I am yet afraid of. And when I walk under the trees I know I am walking deeply in the cosmos.”
Rachmaninov brings out the grief in a man. His choral symphony The Bells swept over me when I turned on BBC Radio 3, and spurred me to remember once again the last elm tree in Westmeath.
Once upon a time, there was a man in Westmeath who had a beautiful elm tree, which had survived every disease and every storm of the previous century. The man had a lot of land and many trees, but he loved his elm most of all; and, being in his late years, he often walked the land, and identified with the tree because they had both survived so long.
But a few weeks ago a storm blew down some beeches on his ditches, and so he went to examine the damage and saw that the elm was still standing. Delighted, he gave a neighbour permission to chop the fallen trees and take them away. And the neighbour did exactly that, and then, being an eejit, he did more.
For some reason beyond the wit of even a Chinese poet to explain, he also tossed the great elm, and chopped it into a thousand logs.
The old man was furious, and eventually broken-hearted, because over the years he had realised that for him the elm was the centre of the universe, and that he stood deeply in the cosmos when he stood beneath it. And now he has nowhere to stand.
