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BTW when I read Voice the image of the fisherman camouflaged in leaves as he stalks the fens on stilts really rang a bell. Has anyone any idea where Moore got the idea? Could a man really use stilts to walk through water & mud?
No idea, but that's the image that's always stuck with me from the book. I found that story utterly heartbreaking, and somehow the pathos of the guy dressed as a heron kind of fixed it in my head. I may have actually cried, to be honest, but I'm a wuss.
I haven't read the book yet, but will prob get around to it some day, especially after reading this thread just now.
Anyway regarding the chap who goes mad and comes over like a bird, I would imagine that he is inspired by a character from Irish Literature/folklore called 'Mad Sweeney'. He was a King who was cursed by a holy man after Sweeney lost his temper with him and threw his bell into a marsh. "The saint bell of the sainty saints" - which Moore nods to from your description.
His curse took the form of his believing that he was a bird and taking to sitting up in the trees eating only mosses and lichens.
He has appeared in one form or another (sometimes as a pathetic wretch who believes he is a bird and sometimes as an equally pathetic half-bird half-human creature) in a lot of texts.
I first came across him in Flann O'Brien's 'At Swim-two-birds' - a work with a lot of parrellels in GMs writing especially Animal Man. I highly reccomend "At Swim-Two-Birds" to any of you that enjoy a bit of 'play' in your (meta)texts. Also a seriously funny book.
He's also appeared in whole sequences of poems in the works of T.S Eliot and Seamus Heaney and also in Neil Gaiman's American Gods.
At first he doesn't seem a likely character to have drawn the attention of so many top-flight writers (including Alan it would seem), but then you realise that Sweeney's only consolation in the wet branches is composing 'melodious verses' as Flann O'Brien put it.
He's a poet who has had everything taken away from him. His only solace is in the rhymes and sounds of his craft, and in recreating in Art his past comforts and friendships. Sweeney is THE embodiment of a writers lot in many ways!
Sweeney has a lot in common with the Children of Lir, who also were turned into birds (albeit beautiful swans at least!) and condemned to a lifetime of exile, isolation and self-pity. It was only recently that I realized that their actual storylines were secondary to the fact that these stories could be used by a writer to 'hang' many poems and songs on, about exile, the beauty of nature and the tragedy of loss.
The original text was called in Irish - 'Buile Shuibhne' and there is a little about him here
A long ramble, but I thought I'd throw it in as poor Sweeney seems to be very little known despite being such an "Artists' Artist" |
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Not to stalk Mr. Moore, I don't have to meet him at all, just to soak up the feel of the town now that I've read about it and its history to a large extent.