Wedding the Water: Writing With "Hands"
how wide an ocean is, how long a century
In 2019, I was in the middle of an MFA program at San Francisco State — a period I had set aside to close the gap between “my Life” and “my writing.” The goal was to finish something, to get an idea out of my head, put it on paper, and make it actual in the world. I had been reading the oral histories of the Blasket Island people, a community of Irish speakers who had lived on a small series of steep and rocky island crumbs fallen from the loaf of Ireland’s southwest. Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s The Islandman and Peig Sayers An Old Woman’s Reflections recounted their small life as it came to a close — a life of shoaling fish, gannets, Atlantic storms, hens nesting in the thatched roofs, sheep shearing, monthly priests, and midnight rows across the sound to the mainland. The short three miles to the rest of Ireland was far enough, and this community on the far western edge of Europe dragged behind the rest in terms of modernization until it was completely abandoned just after the Second World War. Reading these stories on California’s coast, one got the sense how wide an ocean actually is, how long a century.
That distance intrigued me. I wrote a series of poems built from the words taken from those Blasket Islanders’ mouths. My graduate thesis started to take shape as a novel about a family physically displaced from their island community and emotionally displaced from themselves after a sudden death. All representative of the struggle of building a bridge to another person with language. Those paperback books at arm’s length, the pen pinched at the end of my fingers, the notebook or computer open on my lap, such a great distance even from my own hands.
Doing research for my thesis, I found a video on YouTube about curragh building (also known as a currach, or naomhóg depending on locale), a shallow-hulled vessel specifically designed to navigate the rough waters and cramped rocky coves of Ireland’s west coast. The boat is reputed to date back to ancient Ireland, the Neolithic age, and its design essentially unchanged all the way through the mythic sea-voyages of St. Brendan to the present day. On the Blaskets, the naomhógs were essential for their maneuverability and durability. Easy to launch and beach, easy for one man to carry. Keel-less, they sat high in the water allowing for the transport of great loads across to the mainland: a flock of sheep stuffed to the prow and jostling between thwarts; a cow being taken out to a bull, a sizeable mackerel catch during the autumn run to be sold at the market.
The video, produced in the late 70s, depicts the construction of a naomhóg by a group of red-faced wrights enrobed in sweaters and flared collars. They bend over the frame propped up in the gravel driveway and mutter to each other in Irish.
A narrator details the process, but sparingly. The camera lingers on the deft movements of their hands, often refusing to cut away, relishing the second and third chisel slice, cutting through a bit of softwood as a knife does butter, or how stubborn oak ribs can be when bending. The quality of the film feels warm, wooly, like one of their sweaters. Children in rubber boots picking at blades of meadow grass as boards are bent around a frame. The dialogue between the people is indiscernible, an Irish whose words often sound like wet lumped clay. The sing-song accent mingles with the wail of a child off-screen, the quick rush of a circular saw, the cluck of a bothered hen.
It’s a slow twenty minutes of television, but what pulled me in and kept me was the deliberateness of their movements. Practiced, yes, and understood. The process written in the materials itself.
From my writerly stoop, that quality was covetous. Granted, I had no understanding of the skills and practice needed to master this kind of work, but the appeal came in its physical manifestation, in seeing the thing go up: gunwale then slats then canvas and tar. I tried to imagine some correlation between the manipulation of the bog oak and the manipulation of language. To imagine calling over a neighbor to help finagle a word into the mold of a sentence, or hold one end of a paragraph so I could stretch it taut over the wood slats and pin it to the upper gunwale. O’Crohan in The Islandman writes that it was cause for celebration when a new naomhóg was finished. A boisterous parade would follow the beetle-black hull down to the slipway to see it wed to the water. A splash, a great cheer as the boat builder spins it across the shallows for all to admire, for the old timers and rivals to critique the line of the prow, the starboard list.
Words built with the aid of many hands into some sturdy frame, into some specific practicality, then an audience! A book that floats. I wanted Seamus Heaney’s sense of work and purpose when he took up the pen: I’ll dig with it. But in going back to his famous “Digging”, the resolve he ends the poem with is bogged down with sadness. Heaney, the writer at the beginning of his lauded career, has broken a chain established by previous generations. He has “no spade to follow men like them.” The pen might open ground — but is it the right tool?
There are thirty-six more episodes in the Hands series, released and broadcasted over a decade from 1978 to 1989 on RTÉ, Ireland’s PBS. Each episode places its subject firmly in a specific county, a specific homestead or town, within a specific tradition. There might be notes of saccharine nostalgia or undertones condemning the isolated state of modern society, but really each episode becomes a meditation on process. The harp, the hurl, the bee skep, the chair or the barrel are all gorgeous and fine and immediately put to use, but the images that linger are the supple flicks of a woman’s wrist as she cards wool, the finger that gently spins the wheel.
Early on, in “Fermanagh County,” the narrator tells us that four of the ten Mulholland siblings have left the secluded family farm to go “out into the big world.” Their absence hangs over the days of the six that remain, starting out cramped around the table before they get on with their work.
The brothers cut sandstone in the quarry, scouring and sculpting the blocks into whetstones to sharpen their scythes while their sister stands over the churn and molds fresh pats of butter with her palm. The day ends with all of them again cramped in the front room. A record is put on and from their own corner, each of the Mulholland siblings considers the day that was, the day to come, and the days that could’ve been.
Innate human drama that lifts to the surface if you hold fast on a person long enough, and the camera in “Hands” isn’t one to waver. Nor does it miss the comedy. In “Of Bees and Bee Skeps”, eighty-year-old Jack Carey of Clonakilty, County Cork, tends to his garden from a wooden chair, and winds dried wheat and harvested bramble at his kitchen table into a conch-like basket hive called a skep.
As someone who knows nothing of beekeeping, the skep’s exact purpose is unclear to me as Jack limps around his garden, directing his slightly-less geriatric apprentice Tommy Donovan (who was “introduced to bees only recently”) to place the skep, then move the skep, then bring over the skep, then put the skep away for now. The skep serves as a sort of middleman, which might explain why they aren’t really used anymore (light Googling has told me they are actually illegal in many U.S. states due to their difficulty to inspect). The swarming honey bees are shaken from a hedge that they apparently like very much into Jack’s skep, another spot they grow accustomed to before being knocked from the basket and swept towards the hive boxes where they make honey. Honey that Jack spins from the comb and sells from his garden gate.
As always the work is punctuated by long smoke breaks and ends with tea and some of Jack’s homemade soda bread.
I often wish I produced practical things, objects with shape and heft that I can hold in the hands at the end of my arms. Watching “Hands” can make me feel an inconsolable longing, but more often than not it brings me back to the joy of the act. So it’s a silly question that I posed before: the one about whether writing can be work. It’s one I often find myself shooing off, or just ignoring while I continue to write, as a bee ignores the intelligible bickerings of Jack Carey and Tommy Donovan. Heaney’s poem isn’t about the tool, but the decision to keep digging. Writing can be that.
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Digging is a deceptively complex poem. I agree with the malaise