Donegal, Ireland Typewriter
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Once upon a time wearing a crash helmet of bamboo leaves before inventing the Internet I created poems, stories and comprehensive travel dreams using paper and pen. Very archaic tools, I admit. Notebooks are layers of strata flattened by geological pressure hearing Fibonacci sing spirals. Using a fountain pen or watercolor brushes is process oriented.
Be the paper. Be the brush, be the ink, be the water. Flow.
It was clean neat and simple creative fun, experimental joy and a beautiful organic mess.
You never hear a kid say I’m going to take the day off and be creative.
In the late 70’s I pounded on a Smith-Corona portable typewriter for two years in the Emerald Isle. A manic-depressed divorced Dublin lover with an angry drunken jealous boyfriend gave me the machine. I was her back door man. He tried to kill me in a snowstorm.
I lived to tell the tale.
Working for An Oige, the Irish Youth Hostel Association as a troubleshooting warden, word janitor, Grave Digger and reliable narrator I carried the red machine from a simple stone mountain habitat in Wicklow to a wild northern conservative Donegal sanctuary in hard rain then south into peat bog Mayo where I created in a desolate hostel haunted by a young girl’s suicide, then to the Killarney hostel and again east south east to Devil’s Glen where J. M. Synge wrote verse.
All the while using inexpensive thin paper, carbon and ribbons.
Carbon paper was the original SAVE feature. Flat sheets in thin box. Valuable and recycled until every space became bone blackened as dream words escaped like free wild geese in Ennisfree.
Ribbons were solid black on stainless steel spools packed in small clear plastic bags purchased from a stationary shop on a Dublin side street off St. Stevens Green. A toothbrush flossed keys. It was a sweet, fast deadly lightweight machine on fully automatic.
I prefer the heart-hand-eye connection holding a fountain pen feeling a nib on paper seeing ink marry papyrus.
Can you find the DELETE key, asked Zeynep. It’s your best friend.
Before leaving Dublin for Donegal I visited a Liberties antique shop. “These are very old,” said the seer woman behind the wooden counter. She wrapped mirrors in newspapers.
"Yes, they are. I will take good care of them.”
“They come from an old estate sale down in the country.”
“Whereabouts?”
“It’s been awhile, and my memory’s not so good anymore you understand my dear. Perhaps the Synge place near Devil’s Glen, a manor house with large stables and shed dating to 1867. It became a dowager house, a house where a woman of means would go to live after the death of her husband. Views extended across valleys filled with old beautiful brown, green and golden trees.”
“That would be J.M Synge, the famous poet and playwright?”
“Yes, my dear. He was born in the nearby village of Rathfarnham and probably only visited to pay his respects to aunts and uncles. I heard a story about a blind Synge family member who visited the place and knew every room, every corner.”
“Yes,” I said. “I imagine Devil’s Glen rivers rocketing from higher ground hurtling past bleak peat bog earth factories below rainbow sunlight skies with quick rising rainstorms inside twisted glens of lush green streams bounding through history’s birth, past slate gray stone thatched houses as wild sheep by the hundreds roam the land.”
“Good on ya. Yes, that’s the place. Another story is how grandfather Synge was in danger of going bankrupt from having established many walking trails around the area and planting trees during a time when the farming life wasn’t paying. The story goes that the butler, when they were living at the Granmore Castle nearby, knew the bailiffs were coming so he gathered up all the silverware and hid it in the forest. They owned the estate for years and sold it to the Irish Land Federation in 1943. It was completely self-sufficient with abundant land for grazing, pastures, vegetables, and livestock. Somebody died.”
“I see.”
“What will you do with the mirrors?” she said.
“I’ll treasure them and protect them. During journeys we will share secrets of truth and beauty. I will receive their visions and gift them to others along the path.” This didn’t scare the woman. She was from the ancient school.
“Hmm. Well then, I shall make a small gift for you. Take this.” She handed me a piece of cloth. It was a coarse, mottled, brown and white checkered wool with faded cosmic symbols running the edge.
“Thank you. It’s beautiful.”
“Carry it with you and only use it to clean the glass,” she said. “It’s older than sand.” She rolled it up.
“One kindness deserves another.” I rummaged in my pack and pulled out Kamben gringsing cloth. “Here, this is for you. It is a magic cloth woven by hand on Bali, an island in Indonesia. They use bark and roots to make the dye. The cloth is essential for every social ritual from birth to death. It will protect you from evil energy and if you ever get sick soak an edge in water and drink the moisture. It will cure you.”
“Wonderful. Many thanks. Travel safe and look after yourself. Before you go I will reveal a small future to you,” she said.
“After Mayo you will ramble across country to the Killarney hostel where, sadly, you will be awake in the predawn morning of December 8th hearing a BBC news announcer tell the world about John Lennon being shot in New York. You will turn your head to the wall and cry. You will ride a bike down wet streets and meet a nun opening black church gates and you will tell her what happened. Together you will push open the heavy wooden doors, genuflect, bless yourselves, walk the length of a cold aisle and light votive candles in silence then you will ride into town and go to news agents and buy every Irish paper with the screaming black tabloid headlines full of desperate black ink and grainy images of death personified before retiring to a pub to sit by a peat fire drinking Guinness reading remembering John’s creativity and his dream Imagine and Give Peace a Chance.”
Source: A Century is Nothing
