Jagged C Press – The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone

The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone

Cornelius Conlon has been forever growing old. Born at the turn of the 20th century, he has lived through a lifetime of madness, and now must witness his towns demise. He preaches, writes, loves and obsesses – of the darkness of the tunnels, of the dangers of the Folly, of the weather – but few pay heed. Deeply frustrated, his daughter, Lily, worries for him, but to many in Poulnabrone, he is simply, Con 'The Loon,' the man who stands on his soap box by the church, his face a cloud of beard and prognostication, his cane pointing as he delivers a sermon.

Poulnabrone is decaying, its walls riven with cracks and mould, its streets punctured and torn. Young Malachy understands, but his mind is as fractured as the streets of the town, and greater forces are at play. The bonds of history are the walls of a river; fraying and broken, loose beneath the earth. An absurd demise beckons.

At once both melancholic and magical, The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone is the debut novel of author Liam Howley. Part comedy, part elegy, and often hallucinatory, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the predicaments of our times.

An Excerpt

The rain fell light as Cornelius walked. He walked where the slow slopes of the moorlands dipped and the streams began. He shuffled east towards the sun, that hidden by clouds, rose steady and cast a diffuse light over the blanket of purple- and rust-coloured heather. Bog cotton resisted the gentle mist and stood leaning and laden. Beneath the heather and cotton, walls of peat: rigid lines carved in the land where turf had once been harvested for fuel and then stacked to dry, an activity that brought back memories. Dark pools of water in the cut terrain. A low wall of stone and some scattered rocks, the remaining traces of human settlement. Empty now. Sadness. Beside him the stream gurgled, callow, carrying sand and silt and pebbles, polishing grey and white stones smooth as it carved from the hill its path that in time would alter, as all paths must.

The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone Typeface

He cast his eyes about as he walked. To the north the land dropped away and rose again in a majestic sweep. Scree marked the foot of spruce plantations that stood dark and geometric and at odds. At a point marked by nothing in particular, he left the path and picked his way amongst the heather. The valley slope turned sheer as it came into view. At its steepest point stood two boulders, against which water smashed and plunged in kinetic fervour. He stared for a moment, as he always did, letting his thoughts drown in the torrent of sound from the fall. Keeping his eyes on the landscape, he took a plastic bag from his pocket and removed a biscuit. He nibbled on it for a moment. When he began again the rain had ceased and clouds parted and a mist rose from the damp sheen of his oilskin coat. The day was hot.

°

Slow steps amongst the footprints of ghosts, where when the clouds hung low and dense, a movement of peoples could be discerned. He’d walked here since the earliest days when his father had brought him searching for wayward sheep. This land of apparitions where mountains ran from coast and back to coast, a landscape strewn with messages and meanings, where podzols and poverty were synonyms even the soils could understand. Not ghosts once, but men and women, carving their lives out from the shallow soils, from the raised beds of the thin organic layer where only potatoes could be grown, where the worn remnants of birch and oak had long ago been subsumed and the land then rinsed of sustenance but for sheep and heather and furze. Over where he looked, a tale etched in falling walls, of sheep eaten and dogs scavenging amongst the bones, the pauper’s house of stone on stone abandoned and crumbling, an anonymous cenotaph for future witness. Everywhere the land starving. Shuffling steps, ravenous, ragged, fathers and mothers carrying the dead and dying, their blood riven by hunger and the diseases of hunger. Rivers tainted and poisoned. Pools of clumped corpse and coliform in slow waters where sedges and reeds pushed from the shallow and sodden earth. Human and yet not human, vomited as a poison is purged with ruthless force, through convulsion and spasm, like how some great articulation in hyperextension is rendered sunder.

He thought ahead, the route a close companion. Always the same destination, always ending by the reservoir beneath which lay that mythical place of his birth. He’d grown up nearby, lived and farmed in an adjacent valley and having returned from war, married his childhood sweetheart and made his home in the village. He’d fished in the river, cut peat from the uplands, returned to where his heart had resided, to where his mind had held steady. His first three children had been born by the river’s banks and he’d buried those children in the field by the back of his house. Life and death a cycle as certain as the water’s fall.

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... An off-cut

Notes & Notions - or just basic scribbles

It happened in the confusion of time, when time stopped and was rewound, an hour cancelled in the ritual turn of the minute hand, a reversal through sixty revolutions, a chime borrowed, a chink in the order of progress belaying the rise of the morning sun. It happened under a sickle moon, haloed by the drift of racing clouds through which it shone whilst she lay purring, shifting through her dreams like billowing sands, only to shudder against some concrete intrusion, against a gathering storm of wants, of impetuous needs for ever changing lands, a naive flame demanding from her heart a quake, a tremor of excitement to break the stupor, begin afresh and yet remain the same, in love, kindled as the first and all other loves, and let the city be damned. And it happened as her heart stuttered and she heard his glass fall and shatter, and his whiskey spreading out in tongues upon the kitchen floor, rippling, the glass shaken as the table leapt, the table against which he sat, and the chair and countertop blurred, and pots and pans clanging on their hooks, and his eyes seeing waves of things, streaks of light vermiculate in darkness weaving through that compact of sober mind. And as the floor shook she sprang from her covers, her left hand on her swelling womb, her right stretched out in the dark, the wall striking hard on her fingers and palm and against her wrist in spasmodic thrusts as she fought this nocturnal violence and sought the door and the stair and the ragged tumble. And the banister held by trembling hands, against trembling steps, and her feet drunk, and the light dancing eerie in its frosted globe, and the lamp-stand swinging on its twirling base, swinging as some erratic pendulum, rippling, crashing against the phone. And the phone falling, and the frames of pictures falling, catapulted from hook and mounting, and the frames of the glazed glass windows rattling, and the glazed glass cracking, and nothing steady, nothing. On the bottom step she stumbled and staggered forward and meeting him at the door tripped the latch and breathed deep as in its unhinged state it opened. The earth groaned and heaved. And for just an instant she lingered, the plaster cracked casting dry flecks adrift in flurries of surreal meditation. But a beam splintering, perforating knots along its broad grain, swinging precarious in a broad sweep, shuddering, collapsing, crashing into the gable end of this humming motor of bucking concrete, buckling as though under some abnormal warp, some trophic force of immense torque, a spinning zeal gathering all things, crushing all things, accelerating. She lurched forward and raced into the street where a fire licked blue against the frigid night. She grabbed his right hand in her left and raised her right arm to her eyes, and pulled him through the murk, a belched sludge of mud and sewage. The stench of gas. A spark. A flare, quickly extinguished. Another. The hearth of home quivering above the gaping brim of chaos. Panic. Shock. Their neighbour screaming. A violent shudder. A final sag before everything stilled.

THE POULNABRONE DOLMEN

Standing altar-like in the open landscape, the Poulnabrone Dolmen (Poll na mBrón, "The Hole of Sorrows") is a megalithic portal tomb in the Burren region of the west of Ireland. 22 bodies have been found entombed, including six children, and one newborn from the Bronze age period.

THE POULAPHOUCA DAM

"...(The sound of a waterfall is heard in bright cascade.)

THE WATERFALL: Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.

THE YEWS: (Mingling their boughs) Listen. Whisper. She is right, our sister. We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. We gave shade on languorous summer days.

JOHN WYSE NOLAN: (In the background, in Irish National Forester's uniform, doffs his plumed hat) Prosper! Give shade on languorous days, trees of Ireland!

THE YEWS: (Murmuring) Who came to Poulaphouca with the High School excursion? Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade?

BLOOM: (Scared) High School of Poula? Mnemo? Not in full possession of faculties. Concussion. Run over by tram.

THE ECHO: Sham!..."

from Ulysses, by James Joyce

Not to be confused with the Poulnabrone Dolmen, Poulaphouca (Poll a' Phúca, "The Púca's hole or the hole of the fairies"), was a once famous waterfall on the river Liffey. Work began in the late 1930's to both build a hydroelectric dam and create a supply of drinking water for Dublin. The townland of Ballinahown was forever submerged, however, during dry spells many artifacts of life appear: a bog road; granite columns; tree trunks yet to rot.

Notes, Notions & Scribbles

The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone was conceived with the thought, that all things can, and even must, fall apart. The rest is timing and circumstance; the when and the how. Or to put it succinctly, the good old yarn. Born three times, it was each time re-imagined and reinvoked. It came from strolls through Jungle trails, through reading of the rise and fall of Macondo, through a growing sense of the circular nature of our two great modern challenges, and indeed their interwoven ties and similarities. They are, of course, the economic rot and the ecological crisis we now face. Both are imperative. One for the daily survival of billions of people on this planet. The other for, simply put, the survival of everyone. Yet, one thought shone through this realization. That was the absurdity at its heart; that the unfolding tragedy was really a comedy, albeit one of horrendous consequence.

But every narrative needs a place. And with Ireland, the authors homeland, facing economic collapse, the perfect stage was set. Not alone did a financial crisis engulf the country, but a wide-scale failure of almost all dominant institutions was exposed. All authorities, be they financial, political, or religious, were rotting, so that failure soon followed failure. But absurdity is not born from the how or when, but from the why. From the binds that history weaves through people and societies. From the long tale of person and place. It is comedy disguised as tragedy. A hole of sorrows. A town called Poulnabrone.

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