Roundstone, Co. Galway, Ireland, where Tim Robinson lived for 40 years. It would be the base from which he mapped out Connemara, the Aran Islands and the Burren. Photo by Nick Kane on Unsplash
Originally published on Substack 8th November 2020
This week’s book isn’t an historical favourite, but in line with a more traditional book club discussion, it’s the book I’ve just finished reading. The fact that I’m immediately committing this to writing on the internet makes it feel like it’ll be an historical favourite. Experiments on Reality is a memoir of sorts by the late Tim Robinson, who was born in Yorkshire but became an honorary citizen of Connemara, if such a legal status exists. Shortly after I began reading it, I also happened last week upon an online talk celebrating Robinson’s life and work chaired by Fintan O’Toole for Dublin Literary Festival, and so felt inspired to share some of what I’ve learned here.
The meaning of the small synchronicity of these occurrences was crystallised in the reading of the book – it is wonderful, to the point that coming across the book at the time I did felt like no coincidence. Robinson dedicated his life to drawing intricate maps, both illustrated and in words, of the environment and landscape of the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara, where he lived with his wife in Roundstone from the 70’s until recent years. This book is a collection of memoirs, short stories, travelogues, essays and thought experiments which spans the breadth of Robinson’s life through space (having lived for periods marked by different professional roles in Malaysia, Istanbul and Vienna), one which expertly balanced a distinguished career, creative fulfilment and beautiful humanity.
But none of that matters to me, really, because regardless of the intelligence or depth of knowledge displayed, beautiful writing is beautiful writing – and this book is a masterclass in it. Though this isn’t to trivialise the expertise contained within, as it is quite apparent on first reading of any of the selection of ‘chapters’ – which range from four page short stories told out of chronological order, often about seemingly utterly unrelated things, to a thirty-something page transcription of speech on the subtle effects that places have on our psychology – that there is far more to them that meets the unfamiliar or untrained eye.
The effect of Robinson’s writing is to remove much of the narrative links between things – which is sometimes himself, sometimes details like the passing, or even the existence, of time – and in doing so highlights how much of these details, rather than adding key information to stories, as we all assume they do (myself included), do not serve the story as it naturally exists in our memories, or in our hearts. He masterfully pulls away unseen details, so that the reader’s attention is fully honed in on what counts. The effect of his sleight of hand is to breathe even greater life into the broader stories, but the attention given to the slightest of detail revealing entire stories within each one. A series of mental snapshots and portraits are placed in the mind, like pacing a gallery from painting to painting, rather than the attempt at movie-making which usually constitutes story-telling, It seems Robinson has a deeper understanding of the realities of story-telling in our minds than what is commonly understood.
A mathematician, physicist, teacher, cartographer, writer and artist, Robinson is also a master at drawing lines between the many different fields of his expertise. His heart appears to be most deeply embedded in the field of geometry – the drawing of lines, and it is with these disparate eyes, all connected by real or imagined lines, that he views the world.
The effect of his story-telling and line-drawing abilities was most apparent to me in two stories in the middle of the book: The Gods of the Neale and The Tower of Silence. I enthusiastically started on the former being somewhat familiar with the village of the title that resides amongst the beautiful green stone walls of south Mayo; further delighted when the story is introduced by the author as beginning – for reasons he didn’t bother remembering – “in the humdrum town of Claremorris”. Though the story that follows is anything but humdrum, however, and Robinson brings a seemingly simple – or humdrum I suppose – travelogue and micro-history and lesson that dabbles in place-name etymology on rural Ireland stretching from landlord times far back to mythological times to roaring life through an evocative and deliberately unreliable narrative. The introduction, whilst accurate, is a subtle beginning of a series of narratives that breathe fantastic life into a seemingly ‘humdrum’ day and tourist experience.
The author’s writing is so carefully detailed that it’s difficult to keep track as you read, details are dripped into your attention to cause you to awaken and return again to the beginning to check you’re on the same page, and it feels like the author is always one step ahead of you in the details he sees in the world, yet always with the care of a parent rather than some deceptive force, My first reading of the Tower of Silence left me with a sense of witnessing something profound, though I couldn’t quite articulate why, and I immediately reread the paragraphs of its four pages, but in random order, my brain searching for the clues it needed to fill in various details in the order it needed to process it all. And then I read it a third time.
It feels like one could return to any of these stories again and again in such a fashion. The beauty is in the small standalone details, each word and sentence able to be enjoyed on its own, but the whole being not just more than the sum of its parts, but also different.
To Robinson, rather than seeing the world through a binary of internal (psychological) and external (physical), it seems his intimate understanding of it and its laws, and his deep love that stems from this knowledge, is such that he considers the entire universe to be his inner world. The lines he draws through time and space map closely to ones he draws between those same things in his mind. And although in reading his word-based illustrations there is frequently the sense that the reader is missing something, often these gaps are filled in by the story’s conclusion, if not consciously, then on a level that resonates deeply.
It is interesting then to return to the introduction, which on first reading almost seems smug in its concluding sentence’s definitive assertion: “No, there is only one world, and that is all we need to know.” This seed is planted in the reader’s mind, and the assertion seems to falter as the writer takes us on journeys that exalt the world in language normally reserved for the religious or spiritual worlds. Robinson’s depictions span the breadth of the physical, of tiny rocks and sea shells, to space stations and into what seem like the supernatural – the sense of yearning or sadness that feels inherent to a place, or mythological battles that appear to him to be embedded into the very air that hangs over the fields around the Neale. Yet without leaning too hard on details, he is quite happy to step back and omit or highlight the details that he cannot explain. He shows the sacred respect normally reserved for gods or the inexplicable mysteries of the spirit to even the tiniest of objects, everything an example of the miracle of evolutionary creation and the wonders of the universe. There is no need for him to look at mysteries beyond the physical world, because there are already so many in the one we inhabit.
A good writer can recreate the most vivid and faithful illustrations of the places he writes about in the reader’s mind, with the sparsest of details, if they are the right ones; doing so puts the utmost faith in the reader. Less is more, and when and by drawing attention to the simplest of elements, the truth of the whole is captured. There are an infinite number of ways to tell the infinite number of stories of the world, and it possible with the right perspective for all of them to reveal some aspect of the truth. Yet it is up to the reader to take the evidence they understand from these stories and to then continue to conduct their own Experiments on Reality.
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