cloud-cuckoo-island
After a busy year leaping from one project to another I am looking forward to editing a short film in spring, cloud-cuckoo-island, made in response to the Isle of Eigg. The project currently comprises a cycle of poetic texts and solo performance-to-camera improvisation, exploring madness and mythology, trauma and psychology, in relation to ‘wildness’ and ‘wilderness’. Before shaping the material I have spent some time reflecting; this blog begins in Summer 2013, when I first visited Eigg.
Making cloud-cuckoo-island, reflections on process:
The island was in hyper-green mode, its vitality palpable in blazing wildflowers – lady’s smock, bluebell, ragged robin, red campion, orchid, and yellow flag – lining the ditches and burns with colourful bunting; the air intense with a broad band of birdsong – blackbird, warbler, thrush, wren, a percussive corncrake, and insistent soloist, the cuckoo, ringing out its disyllabic “cuc-ooo cuc-ooo”, hour after hour, over the long midsummer days, like a pendulum marking time. Though his voice was amplified by the basalt ridge, we scarcely saw him.
Being a dabbler at vocal bird mimicry I couldn’t help joining in, calling out a clear, punchy “ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo”. It sounded quite convincing, if a little loud. There was a pause, then, from afar “cuc-ooo, cuc-ooo”. Excited by his reciprocation, I called back, keeping it going for longer “ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo…” The bird catapulted out of nowhere onto a nearby branch “cuc-ooo, cuc-ooo, cuc-ooo”. Was he talking to me? More to the point, was I talking to him? Not sure of the phrase’s meaning, I responded “ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo” – silence – he’d gone. What did he perceive? A super-cuckoo on his patch? Had I scared him off? Without intending, had I claimed his territory, like a clumsy bird-human giant?
I was reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of the story of Sweeney, the Irish King who became deranged in battle. Fleeing his familiar surroundings, the poet lived on watercress and was comforted by belling stags. According to Heaney’s version, Sweeney carried his trauma off to the wilds, stopping off on the isle of Eigg for a few weeks, staying in a cave loaned to him by St Donan.
What I’d been hearing morphed: the manic invisible cuckoo became a wandering bird-man ‘gone cuckoo’, leaping awkwardly from tree to tree.
On my walks a couple of place-names caught my eye. Down by Laig farm, Na Sìdhean, The Faerie Mounds, and Sìdhean na Cailleach, The Faerie Mounds of Cailleach, combined two ‘otherworld’ figures in Scottish folklore: Cailleach and the faeries.
As a child, I learnt that although fairies don’t exist, if they did they would be small, pretty, winged creatures, darting around hedgerows, bathed in an aura of light that now seems sickly and cloying. The ‘faerie people’ of Scottish folklore, the sìdhichean, are sinister compared to these Victorian figures. They lurk in shadows and dwell underground, in conical-shaped green hillocks known as sìdhean. It was believed that the ancestral dead lived among them; archeology proves some sìdhean were burial mounds, giving rise to the theory that the sìdhichean were a memory of a pre-Celtic culture. In the Nineteenth century, two cists containing bones and a stone axe were found inside the Sìdhean na Cailleach on Eigg.
The sìdhichean are rarely seen, but their malevolent presence is felt. There are stories describing how a human infant, or an adult, was ‘swept away’ to the land of the sìdh, and replaced by a changeling. Sadly, these abduction tales were sometimes used to explain physical and mental disabilities and illnesses. I thought of the cuckoo, that parasitic bird, which invades nests to lay eggs that hatch into a bird-changeling, a gigantic freak compared to the other chicks in the nest, raised by unsuspecting parents. In Gaelic, one of the folk-names for the cuckoo is eun-sìdhe, ‘the faerie bird’. During winter he dwells underground, within the faerie mounds, until the old woman of the hill, the Cailleach, sets him free to usher in spring. In some bird lore traditions the cuckoo shape-shifted into a sparrowhawk for the winter months – no doubt due to their similar appearance. Scientific studies suggest that cuckoos evolved their plumage patterns to assume a hawk-like appearance, to scare the birds whose nests they invade.
In the Scottish tradition, the Cailleach, Gaelic for ‘hag’, is the ancient crone goddess, a giantess who shaped the land. She gives her name to mountains, knolls, rivers, and caves. As the Winter Queen, ruler of the dark months, she personifies the wild and elemental forces of nature and has the ability to metamorphose into birds and animals, most notably raven, crow, and deer. As a protector-ess of deer – her ‘fairy cattle’ – she can shape-shift into a beautiful young woman to lure the hunter.
Perhaps a female creatrix was too much for Christianity? Her matriarchal lore was shattered into fragments – dramatized in stories of witches and wise-women, outcasts who were fossilized in Gaelic place-names. At Laig, she is associated with two low breast-shaped mounds: Sìdhean na Cailleach, The Fairy Mounds of Cailleach – pap-shaped landmarks are often named after her.
Walking along the beach, these correspondences between the human body and the landscape became suddenly all the more striking, for, looking up, the profile of a face formed itself in the skyline at the head of the island – complete with basalt eyebrows and nose. Could this be Cailleach looking out to the spear-shaped Askival on Rum? I could never have discerned the form from the map and there are no surviving place-names for ‘brow’, or ‘head’, but nearby, Guala Mhòr, The Great Shoulder, and Guala Thoinisteir, The Twisted Shoulder, have survived. A spine-like basalt ridge extends south from here, and perhaps it isn’t going too far to say that the thin wisps of cloud, which often shroud the rock, is like the long white hair of an old woman. In my looking, the island had become it’s own original name Eilean nam Ban Mòra – The Isle of the Big Women.
Eigg didn’t feel like a hag: it was a fertile mother, oozing with peaty abundance, brimming with amorous birds. But romance is fleeting: after the passions of summer come the dark months of winter and the departure of the cuckoo; then his return heralds spring, harbinger of cuckoldry, false love and true love.
On the other side of the farm I stumbled upon the entrance to a hidden lochan, known as ‘The Giant’s Footstep’ – but to me the watery footfall belonged to a giantess – Cailleach! Enclosed by basalt and green slopes, the pool felt like a natural amphitheatre, and the wee rushy islets in the water, a stage. On impulse, I decided to sing, throwing my voice at the cliff in short, loud, and high pitch sounds. The effect was amazing: the echo bounced back, not once but twice. The cliff was singing back at me.
I’d experienced something similar up on Skye singing cuckoo-like calls at a small hill in Kilbride. There I shifted into more complex melodies in a long drawn-out improvisation, and the site became another performance Women of the Hill. Here at the lochan footstep I drew on the cuckoo’s repetitions of two intervals, repeating ‘ooo-ooo’ again and again, calling and responding to the echo, mapping the acoustic characteristics of the site with my voice. I knew that the following year I would have to come back and develop a new piece.
And so I did, returning in May 2014 – cuckoo-season – for a week’s residency at Sweeney’s Bothy, snug under the Cleadale cliffs. I was full of good intentions, with seven days to focus entirely on the new vocal composition, but something else happened. A Sweeney-style madness came bubbling to the surface. I spent much of my time helpless, in the throws of dark and sometimes manic depression, plunged into a brain-fog. I couldn’t do any work, no matter how hard I tried, and the more frustrated I got, the more my knotted-up I became. Nothing would flow. I felt trapped and it seemed as if the sky was heavy and looming. My body temperature was all wrong, my head ached or I spaced out, and I lost my sense of joy in the land. I hid away, even though I have friends on the island. Every time I began a new approach, a simple thought, or the seed of an idea, a malevolent voice boomed out in my head: “you can’t do that”, “it’s a stupid, worthless idea”, and “you aren’t good enough to be here”. The guilt spiraled into self-accusation.
What made things even harder was that the Away with the Birds performances were in the final stages of preparation. They would take place on the Isle of Canna, which lay nestled just out of sight, behind Rum. It was my most ambitious project and the accumulation of many years’ work; a ‘coming of age’ that I was prepared for in terms of the production, but now the thought of it actually coming to life felt emotionally charged. Without expecting it I was terrified, not so much by the performances, but out of the blackness, I realised I was confronting permission. The world seemed to be saying ‘yes’ in a way it never had before and my inner critic was echoing back, ‘no’, insistently, ‘NO’, again and again.
Just like Sweeney, I came face to face with trauma. It was not as extreme as his mythic crisis but I recognized the anxiety and dissociation and, for that week, I embodied madness, sinking low, sleepless, and utterly exhausted.
Unlike Sweeney, after the crisis drew to a close, when I left the island, I would find my way out of the spiraling fears.
I felt compelled to honour the experience, terrifying though it had been. And so I began to write.
The cuckoo became my guide – calling out of the fog, calling onto the page – and I hopped, from branch to branch, from the real to the mythic, from myself to Sweeney, and back again.
From a failed work, a new work was born. The cycle of poems that resulted, describes cloud-cuckoo-island, a world that resembles the real bioregion of Cleadale. The landscape is ‘peopled’ by symbolic archetypes: the otherworld is ever-present; lunacy is one step – or fall – away from the euphoria of spring; plants spell out the passage of time in a manic green clock; topography assumes the form of a gigantic woman’s body.
Characters shape-shift: the sparrowhawk is King Sweeney before his spiral into madness; the goddess Cailleach has the power to transform king into fool, hawk into gowk, predator into changeling, taking revenge for humanity’s ego-driven violence.
The final poem sees the mad king and wild woman meet at the lochan shaped like a Giant – or Giantess – footstep. Cailleach, in trickster guise, probes Sweeney’s wounds and brings his psychic torment to the surface. In a contest that is both lamentation and flyting, Sweeney keens for the loss of his family back in Ireland, and Cailleach mourns for the severance of humanity from the wild earth. She ups and takes flight in the form of a crow and disappears. Sweeney, mad as a cuckoo, is left under the cliff calling after her, as the island echoes back. In that mirror of loneliness there is an invitation: Sweeney could listen and, in hearing the island calling, be present, bearing witness to the buried wounds which sustain his madness.
What of my own spiraling? Writing helped me to understand that if I was to fully realise this work, I had to become Sweeney. I may have identified my ‘inner critic’ long ago, as ‘male’, or, in Jungian terms, a ‘negative animus’, but knowing is not understanding, and now it dawned on me that if I could embody Sweeney’s distress, perhaps I could then, finally, attend to my own trauma, and grow beyond my old hurt self to be, like Sweeney, present in the landscape. And so I made my plan to return to Eigg the following Spring and sing Sweeney’s cuckoo-call to the cliffs.
In May 2015 I landed on cloud-cuckoo-island, in the good company of two men, my regular collaborators film-maker Daniel Warren and sound-recordist Pete Smith. With my breasts strapped down to disguise my female form, I wore men’s white thermals and a wig-beard made from hair-moss and a bird’s nest. For sure, I looked absurd and I felt ridiculous, but there was healing to be had sitting on a boulder, singing a wordless ‘ooo-ooo’ at the cliffs, playing with my own echo.
The grass-covered rocks echoed my voice, bouncing back my sound and everything I was feeling. Sonic repetitions punched through the air, peeling back layers of emotion. What started out as preposterous comedy, slowly morphed into vulnerability, to the point where I felt a lump in my throat and tears form in my eyes. There it was, a feeling that could be named: grief, that familiar often repressed emotion. I stayed with it and as my voice went higher and grew louder, I found there was space for a new feeling: acceptance. Here I was, singing my heart out. And it was OK. It was allowed. I’d given myself permission, who else? My voice: an echo of the land.
Coda
After shooting the film on Eigg, I was delighted to hear from Alastair McIntosh that an Eighth century sacred Tibetan text, The Cuckoo of Awareness, teaches that happiness is hidden deep within us all through the total presence of mind.
Photos by Hanna Tuulikki and Alec Finlay Film stills by Daniel Warren Drawings by Hanna Tuulikki
Bibliography:
Aristophanes, The Birds Edward A. Armstrong, The Folklore of Birds Angela Bourke, ‘More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry’; essay in Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture John Chester, The Birds of Eigg Mark Cocker, Birds Britannica Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, The Book of The Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer John Gregorson Campbell, The Gaelic Otherworld I.F.Grant, Highland Folk Ways Camille Dressler, Eigg: The Story Of An Island Alec Finlay, Sweeney on Eigg Marja Gimbutas, The Living Goddess Francesca Greenoak, British Birds, their Folklore, Names and Literature Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora Seamus Heany, Sweeney Astray C.G.Jung, The Red Book Breandán Ó Madagáin, Keening and Other Old Irish Musics Michael Newton, Warriors of the Word Anne Ross, Scottish Folklore
Sweeney's Bothy is tucked under the magnificent cliffs of Cleadale on the Isle of Eigg, hosting a range of residencies and public rentals. Created by The Bothy Project in collaboration with artist Alec Finlay as part of Creative Scotland’s Year of Natural Scotland 2013. Visit The Bothy Project website here.
Laig Beach Bothy is a family sized bothy on the edge of Eigg's Laig Beach, Laig Beach with views out to Rum, available for public rentals here.
cloud-cuckoo-island is part of Mnemonic Topographies, a new series of works investigating the land encoded in the song, the lore embedded in the land, supported by a Creative Scotland Artist Bursary. A residency at Sweeney’s Bothy on Eigg was supported by the Bothy Project. Thanks to Daniel Warren, Pete Smith, Lucy Conway, Bobby Niven, Saira Renny, George Carr, Michael Newton, Alastair McIntosh, Amy Porteous, Frances Davis, and Alec Finlay.