Sweeney and Sisyphus

Sweeney was a pagan king in Ireland who offended a saint and was cursed to wander the country in the form of a bird. Shy of people, he seeks out the remote places and finds comfort in his discomfort in things such as the belling of a stag or a good supply of watercress, which has become his favourite food. In all the places he visits, he recites poetry about the landscape and its animals and plants. After many years of wandering and various encounters with other characters and reciting a lot of verses, he dies at the house of St. Moling, but not without first receiving the sacrament. He is a fugitive from society and between eras. The world being brought into being by the christian saints is not the one he grew up in. Though, since the saints also pursue an austere sort of comfort in their monastic settlements, maybe there is a kind of understanding. Are they colonizers imposing an alien order without compromise, or are they assimilating their mission to a wild, wet sanctity that they, too, find in this landscape? Is Sweeney really reconciled to the new age? We don’t know, and of course history is written by the victors. All we know of the old Irish legends comes to us through the hands of the medieval monastic scribes. Though in Sweeney, and in other works such as the Acallam na Senórach, they go to considerable lengths to show the early saints as natural successors who allow the old heroes to have their say one last time before departing in peace. Quite a different approach, on the face of it – since poor Salman Rushdie is in the news – to the offence taken by some at the slightest hint of an accommodation between the prophet and the old religions in the “satanic verses” story.

Sweeney has lost his kingdom of Dál nAraidi but gained the whole land. Its wild places have become his home. The middle of a bush in a hidden glen is his hearthside. Does he own the landscape, or does it own him? His closeness to the topography, to the woods and streams and wild animals, is reminiscent of the Fianna, the outdoor survivalists of the legends (in contrast, as Yeats observes in his preface to Lady Gregory’s ’Gods and Fighting Men’, to the characters of the Ulster Cycle, who are much more at home in forts and towns).

The first place I came across the Madness of Sweeney/Buile Shuibhne was in Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds and I think, although it is a comical book and the Sweeney material partly serves as a send-up, that many turns of phrase in it are hard to beat. O‘Brien, a first-language Irish speaker, knew what he was up to and it’s not the only case in which he seems to get inside an Irish original all the better by parodying it (see also: An Béal Bocht). The other version I’ve read so far is Sweeney Astray by Seamus Heaney. There are more that I hope to get around to some day. In any case: At-Swim-Two-Birds is the name of one of Sweeney‘s places of refuge, a spot on the bank of the River Shannon. And now you can understand where the title of this blog comes from, if you haven’t guessed already.

The books in the picture are:

• At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O‘Brien, in the Penguin printing of 1988, cover illustration by David Parfitt
• Sweeney Astray, by Seamus Heaney, faber and faber, paperback edition of 2001
• In Schwimmen-Zwei-Vögel, Flann O’Brien, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag (German translation of At-Swim-Two-Birds, by Harry Rowohlt, with acknowledgement of the previous translator Dr. Lore Fiedler), printing of 1993, cover illustration by Almut Gernhardt.

Where is at-eat-two-biscuits? It’s not an important place, not what you’d call a tourist destination. It’s just a spot along the road where I fish out a little something to eat, or to put on or take off some item of clothing, or just stop for a minute. Sweeney reddened his spear in the side of an acolyte, lobbed a psalter into a lake and split a holy bell in two; we all have our little conflicts. Some tensions that we’re seeking to relieve when we go a-wandering. Somewhere along the way they dissipate, at some point we’ve worked off the backlog of suppressed fight-or-flight responses; somewhere, an overt or inarticulate resolution of whatever was bothering us is reached. Or an explicit understanding is achieved and promptly forgotten. Almost everyone says that they ride a bike for the sake of their mental and emotional equilibrium. Our troubles may not have the dimensions of Sweeney’s, but our soul like his may find its comfort zone in a wild and lonely, and on the face of it somewhat incommodious place.

Two biscuits is not really like me because my usual unit of biscuit-eating is all the biscuits. But out riding my bike, I tend to eat little and often. I don’t get the kind of bike tourists who ride to a pub and sit down for a full meal and then ride again. That’s not my way. I may navigate by country pubs – the landscape here is punctuated by pubs, some active, some closed down, some memories of places that used to be – , but I rarely stop at one, and then for something small. An Eiskaffee on a hot day, I like one of those. But, if for no better reason than because I can’t digest a meal and ride at the same time, I find my eating habits on the road are a bit more rational (quantitatively) than, say, on a stressful day at home in the office. So it’s possible that I don‘t scarf all the biscuits in one go.

Sisyphus has in common with Sweeney that he was a bit bumptious in his youth and was condemned to a long spell of punishment. I often wonder if in the depths of antiquity there is some connection between the two tales. But I don’t really know much about Sisyphus, nor have I read much by Camus beyond the two sentences: La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux. If there is a better expression of why I like riding my bike up hills, I don’t know it.

At any rate, as a not very fit and somewhat overweight fiftysomething, I’m not going to win any competitions for getting to the top first, so I’d better get something out of the going up. I’m also rather timid and slow about coming down. But I do like the going up, and I always have.

The question doesn’t matter; the answer’s always “aye!”
The best view of all is where the land meets the sky!
— The Proclaimers

I said not very fit, but I’ve been a bit fitter, and recently. The older posts here describe how I took my bike back to Ireland for a few days of touring in 2016, and how I picked it up again after that. In 2018/2019 I was doing things like riding 200 km, or pretty close to it, in a day. Actually further than I’d ever done in one day as a teenager or student. Then SARS CoV2 came along, and the extra demands this time has made on the general logistics of life, nothing dramatic, just the piling up of everyday things that need to be done, has pushed everything off course. Also, after many experiments, about the end of 2021 I concluded that the bike I’ve been riding is the wrong size for current me, and being me (but there may be some method in my madness) I couldn’t just go and buy a new one off the shelf, I had to get another old frame, which was going to need a bit of work to fix up, which required something a bit more like a real workshop to happen in my cellar, which I’ve just got around to doing (frame was bought in March; it’s the end of August now). Life feels like the birthday cake story of Findus and Petterson, and if you don’t know the Findus and Petterson books you should, kids or no kids (caveat: I haven’t checked the English translations; it’s the German one I know).

So fitness-wise, I’m back to the bottom of the mountain to some extent. Except it’s not quite the same as last time. I know a bit more about the cycling than back then. I know a bit more about my body, thanks to the Pilates training I’ve been having. I’m also a bit older, and feeling it in a number of ways.

Will it work? I don’t know.

In general I’m an over-thinker and riding a bike I get to exercise my I don’t know muscles.
— Eleanor Jaskowska

I really like the idea of “I-don’t-know muscles“. To be fair, if I recall correctly, Eleanor got that from someone who was coaching her on long-distance cycling. I can’t remember who they were and Eleanor has had the good sense to depart Twitter and Instagram, so I can’t see.

German has the word Zuversicht which seems to me a much better thing than optimism. It’s a faith that things will work out well, without knowing how. Try a bit more, another bit more, it might work. And riding a bike does that for me, too.

Old hands at riding long distances on a bike say you get there by not thinking about the whole distance in front of you; always just the next bit. Just what you can see. The next kilometre. And then the next. I do know that from my own long rides. After 50 km I can’t imagine doing another 150. After 170, the 50 km point, back in the morning, seems like an age ago, a different era. It’s wonderful. It’s not boring at all. So many things to look after. Am I too warm. Too cold. Hungry yet. Where can I go to the loo. Is my bike making a funny noise. Does it matter. What distance will it be if I turn around there. Where will I be before it gets dark. The bit that comes after recovering from the bonky weak phase in mid-afternoon, when I feel like you could knock me over with a feather, but I could also go on indefinitely. The feeling of achievement when you’re finished, even if you didn’t finish what you set out to do. You’ve found what the day had in it. Hopefully you have become, very gradually, in the way that riding a bike does to you, so completely tired that all your specific worries have for the moment faded away and you can go contentedly to bed and