Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

he just couldn’t fucking do it so that

twenty minutes out from land, on a heading straight for Clare Island, he calculated that we would soon be over ‘The Maids’, a sudden rock shelf visible only at very low tide, a feeding ground on which crabs and lobsters thrived, and he stood at the stern of the boat looking back towards land because the old way of finding this particular marker was to head straight out from the bottom of Kerrigan’s land and bring the spire of the Protestant church in the north out with you till Matthew Ryan’s hayshed in the south came into view around the end of the headland and with these three markers drawn into alignment you should be over ‘The Maids’ as I knew them myself and still know them, having heard of them since childhood but not till now, when they were being put to the test, had I ever wondered how much faith should be put in this old way of finding them because while part of me had a real appreciation of such inherited wisdom another part of me was never sure just how wise it was to invest so much in it but now

my anxiety in all this was only a small wager — this old technique was not something I ever had to live by, unlike my father who now, at a time in his life when he could have passed up the challenge with honour, still found it necessary to test what he knew and had lived his own life by so that now, with him standing at the back of the boat and scanning the coast, my heart was in my mouth because there was no knowing how he’d react if his old system was at variance with the sonar and my sense of what was at issue was so clear to me it reached down into my very soul because, what really hung in the balance was the possibility that a good man, through no fault of his own, but by way of received wisdom and immemorial faith, may have lived an important part of

his life warped in error and foolishness, misguided over the seas and if that was now shown to be the case then might not that same foolishness have been handed down to me some way or other — what’s bred in the dog coming out in the pup — and been responsible for some of the misdirections of my own life so

now

he shouted from the stern

we should be over them now

and sure enough, standing in the wheel house, I saw the graph rising across the screen, the ocean floor coming up to meet the keel in a crest of shallow peaks, my soul rising with it, a gladness which must have been contagious because Joe Needham was chuckling and slapping me on the back as if I were responsible for the happy outcome, both of us relieved — thank fuck for that — and I went out to the old man and confirmed that yes, we had hit the marker and he contented himself with a nod, pointing out to me the relative positions of the church and the hayshed, markers which were ten miles apart in a straight line which traversed the parish west to east, a meridian known only to a handful of fishermen along this coastline and

that summer Sunday, with its blue sky arched down to the horizon beyond Clare Island my father showed me how he had so precisely fixed and located himself within the world’s widest shores, an incident I would recall often not because of what he had shown me but because I, with all my schooling and instruments, could never lay claim to such an accurate sense of myself in anything whatsoever, not even as

an engineer, whose life and works

concerned itself with scale and accuracy, mapping and surveying so that the grid of reason and progress could be laid across the earth, gathering its wildness into towns and villages by way of bridges and roads and water schemes and power lines — all the horizontal utilities that drew the world into settlements and community — this was my life, an engineer’s life, which, even if governed by calculations, was never one in which I was so accurately placed as my father, not then and not now either as I had thought that by now I would be carrying myself with more certainty — some part of me believing that with wife, work and family a wisdom of sorts would surely have come also and brought certain assurances or clarities but instead it seemed that all my circumstances had gathered to a point where they were unwilling to present themselves as a clear account, but settled instead into a giddy series of doubts, an unstable lattice of questions so far withholding any promise I might inherit

my father’s ability to comprehend the whole picture across all those contours and cycles in which our lives were grounded — family, farming and fishing and most memorable of all, politics, as he would show me in the run-up to the 1977 general election, that counter historical upheaval which was not only a watershed in the nation’s fortunes but which marked also my own political blooding as well over

thirty years ago now, hard to believe, and certainly not anything so predictable that morning I went out to start milking shortly after seven o’clock, a beautiful May morning with a cold mist rising off the land to meet a low sun as I came around the side of the barn with a galvanised bucket in my hand to see all the telegraph poles along the roadside hung with election posters that had gone up overnight, the face of a new candidate staring down at me from within a green and gold border, high up on every pole, this face echoing away into the mist back as far as the crossroads and

I, standing there in the door of the cowshed with the bucket in my hand, was not to know that the way this candidate’s face paled off into the dawn was this moment’s way of telling me that at some time in the future I could look back and mark this morning as the moment in my life when I came to political consciousness, having turned eighteen earlier that year and my father having made sure he’d contacted the local Peace Commissioner to enter my name on the electoral register putting me among that large swathe of young people who would be voting for the first time in this election and who were judged by commentators to be an unpredictable element in its outcome so that

I, with a keen sense of my involvement in this historic moment and an anxious interest to measure my political wit in these charged circumstances persuaded my father to sit down with a constituency map of the country and, holding as many variables in mind as possible — all the likely swings and divisions of the electoral system — we would separately try to prophesy the result, going through the constituencies one by one and marking them as we thought they would fall when the votes were counted, all the gains and losses of an electoral campaign, and when the forty-two constituencies were complete I found that my prediction differed little from the current political wisdom, which foresaw the coalition government being returned with a loss of two or three seats at most across the whole country, a solid outcome that would see the nation returned to the sullen rule of the law and order party, an outcome which gratified me in one sense as I was happy to find my own result chiming with the majority of the media’s political analysis but which also had a disappointing lack of drama about it as well, a quality squarely in keeping with the personality of the outgoing government — steady and dogged and fixated on questions of security — but an outcome totally at odds with my father’s analysis which

when he pushed his paper across the table towards me, showed that he had weighed the opposition with a tidal majority of twenty-two seats, such an outlandish result and margin that, for a moment, I thought he had not taken the exercise seriously but had merely struck through the constituencies carelessly to have done with it and come up with this result which I was careful to recheck no fewer than three times but which, how ever way I did it, still refused to yield little of its ridiculous margin except one or two seats either way, no serious adjustment no matter how it was looked at it, twenty seats or thereabouts, an epic margin which, in the unlikely event of its fulfilment, would reconfigure the whole political horizon into the long-term future, but so utterly fantastical and beyond all likelihood that it was not made any more probable by my father getting up from the table without a word of explanation except to tap his finger in the centre of the map and say