Chasing the Hare

This excerpt is from my MA studies on contemporary Irish Storytellers and their cultivation of practice within place.

This is the first part of my first interview, which was with Paddy Doyle, poet, mystic and storyteller.

On the way to Paddy’s home in Dunderrow, I stop at the ‘Stone of Destiny’, a sculpture created by Ken Thompson to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Battle of Kinsale. The large empty stone chair -symbolizing the defeat of the Irish chieftains and their Spanish allies by the English- has a backdrop of sodden fields, eerily quiet machine-slashed hedgerows, and clouds slate-grey and sullen.

Paddy welcomes me with a hug on arrival, his elderly greyhound rouses herself and a black cat on the sofa carefully watches a spider. It’s a creative house, instruments everywhere, well-used sofas, kale growing in the garden. He makes us a pot of tea,

I gift him with a candle, bread and cheese. We will not be walking as the rain returns.

We settle in with a pot of tea in his workspace/bedroom. A big window reveals the remarkable vista below, the broad, winding Bandon river, stretching away from us.

Tidal mud gleaming, treed banks, mist rising.

We rove far and wide from that small room but are mostly are transported to his family place in North Kilkenny, Maigh Aribh, the valley of his ancestors. 900 years, he says, of presence, of community. Of strong men and tribal tapestries. He evokes the specific field where the young men of his father’s and grandfather’s generation gathered to test their mettle and practice their hurling. Long before that, seasonal fairs had been held there and before that, the high kings encamped on their annual circuit around Ireland. The layers of history still present to Paddy.

I can still feel it, the clattering of hooves, women wearing and trading silk, the carts coming down on market day, you can be in all these realms together. The job of word, music, sound really, poetry, spoken word is to unlock these doorways to the other world, the imaginative realm, the collective unconscious of humanity, of the earth itself. We are not separate from the land, not separate from our ancestors. We are all in the one pool and once we soften into it and allow these things, these memories to open in our body, our histories, our herstories, these things might come again.

Then we move on to the subject of hare coursing, and the catching of the hares. In 1924 his grandfather set up coursing to ameliorate the residual tensions of divisive local politics. The family has a long tradition of being top greyhound men and women with deep wisdom around hares, land and interaction. Hares being watched, caught, minded, released, timed so that the dogs wouldn’t catch them, forty years of not losing a hare, an understanding of the land and the species, balancing biodiversity and livelihood. Paddy talks of coming from a tradition of big strong men, work was always farming. Hard labouring in the busy seasons, but plenty of time in between to rest, banter, chat, socialise, play, and fish.

I grew up with men who told stories all the time and most of them were bare-faced lies. They were countrymen, very straight, very honourable and they’d never deceive you but they had a fluidity with their reality. It was a thing. They knew they were fabrications but the stories were pure entertainment, a creative impulse and there was allowance in that culture for people to have that fluid relationship with reality. That’s something that has been really pushed out of the culture now.

We talk of the contrast between Logos (pragmatic, rational logic) and Muthos (complex, mythic interpretation) Paddy shares the delight of his youthful telling of a loose variation of a tale at home and receiving appreciation. Like improvisation, or good cooking, the adding spices brings flair to each telling. There is an element of play within this.

Paddy, as the eldest son, was born to be a ‘King’ of this land. He is the first to break away, heading off to be a poet, to explore outside his ancestral land. The psychic tearing of his deep-rootedness. There he is, in New York, with Beat Poet dreams, working steel on the skyscrapers. Finding himself homesick he looks upon the Manhattan skyline, and he sees his home valley unfurl below him, each morning reciting the names of the fields overlaid upon this other landscape.

I’d get up there early just when the sun was coming up, all those rectangles. I’d go up there and match up my fields with the rooftops, then my two worlds came together and I was happy. I am not ever away from it. I am of that place. I still sometimes see that famous shot, you know that one of the Manhattan skyline, and I still see some of my fucking fields there!

Later there are years of extreme illness, unable to rise from his bed, freezing, in pain, working through ancestral trauma, going into the abyss and returning. There is a tangible sense of shamanic rebirth from the darkest places.

I had to let go of lots of stuff, make peace with that. I am in deep communion with the land, the ancestral community. It’s a two-way thing.

Poetry is the essence of his practice, the thread, the umbilical cord, Paddy begins articulating his words with graceful, gesticulating movements. He is lit up.

I am a page poet. I sit down and write poetry on a page. That’s always been my supreme joy. Putting words on a page. The stillness of that. I am a poet by nature, first and foremost.

You can just reach into the heart of something. That is where I am made whole. For me poetry stitches the world together. A poem is a rose that grows in a prose garden. The story is the fabric, and the poems are the thread.