Sile

My grandmothers name was Sile.
My father’s mother. She was mad.
She lived like she was on fire.
And then lived madder and more.
Until I last saw her, gibbering over a hot cup of something and sucking a quality street. Breaking my eight year old heart into the marbled blue of her rheumy eyes.
And putting a fear into me of something unseen that stalks me in my blood.

She appears so often when I write poems or stories, coming with the wisdom and the wrath of a wild fire, knowing that sometimes you need to just burn it down.
Or the hollowness of old bones caught the wind to whistle and clack she knows, she knows, how dead things are beautiful.
That ice is stillness.
That broken branches make homes.
She knows that in the flood there is surrender and we drown because our roots cannot hold the water.
She knows because those floods killed her.

I have been scared of her, her skulk and spit.
She walked with me after her death as a shadow, a shade that shook me, slung me from one life to the next, knots on a net in which you eventually feel like a caught fish, gasping.

‘When I first came to town…’

‘Keep going, keep moving, don’t settle, don’t sleep.
If you stay they’ll catch you. They’ll know.
They will find out that you are mad and they’ll put you away
and you will never know love or be anything.’

‘…call me Katie Cruel’

Mediums have met my grandmother Sile.
She wasn’t very polite to them either.
She’s vociferous;
it was never my intention to have them formally introduced.
I feel I’ve been a surrogate life for her sometimes.

Wait though, maybe that is hubris?
A bad invocation.
Indomitable woman that she is, I definitely don’t know the half of it.
She was known to be good with the faeiries, she is one by her namesake.
She ‘abducted’ her own son.
Manned searchlights during ‘The Emergency’.
Beat a gardener with a broken bow for watering gravel in the rain.
Loved a traveller or a banker, or both; she never confirmed.
Held a knife above her sleeping child with emptiness in her eyes.
And sang opera to the horses she saw with red raw scores of gashes across their hides on Westmoreland Street.
She cavorted with soldiers from both sides.
She took flight from isle to isle.
And disappeared for years and years to only she knows where.

Why do women become birds?
Same reason as in the myths and memories I suppose.

Persecution.
Swan or goose or wren.
The exiled shapeshift to survive.

Sile didn’t know how to live and settle herself and become another layer of sediment in the strata of Blarney village.
She was volcanic.
Combustive, combative, her tectonic edges so braised by rigidity and injustice.
She couldn’t help it.
She was a woman coursing with the forces of nature, without a place to change.
She was fucking dangerous too.
For what I know from her stories at least.

I suppose I can only speak of her spectre;
who I feel in me when my whole body yearns for the moon like a tide.
Or when I cannot abide a moments more conversation on inactionable notions notions notions and my blood boils up to my cheeks.
Or when I cannot move for the inertia of the unfinished lives that stand tutting like crooked teeth tombstones all around me.

Sile, sile, speaks to fairies.
Sile sile went dolally.
Severed from the family
Sile lost her head.

I say I feel like a surrogate for her sometimes because I feel I inherited her ‘unfinishedness’ as well as her insanity.
Her madness, her wings, her temper and her talents.
She had a kindness in her, that, like for many worn down people, eventually was not even for children anymore. Only the animals were still innocent.
She’d discarded too many broken parts of her heart in other places to have space for you. You’d have to go back there to the night of dance and get her, bring her here to herself now and maybe she’d remember you and be grateful, that someone, finally, came to get her.

For ‘She Named for the Shining Ones’, shining kindness is the beeswax candle on my altar to her. The one I have to tend, keep lit and remember to check.
If that light goes out all we are left with is the hard lessons that she had to live and those hard lessons weren’t totally written out of the inheritance.

Still, I get to live in a time where most of those lessons aren’t reinforced with the rap of a rapier, or the strap of a straight jacket.
Or shunning.
Or exile.
Or incarceration.
Or worse.

I still live with the paranoia of seeing and feeling more than other people tell me they do. And it’s irony is that it at times makes me closer to the repressed contortions of things clotting up my circulation in the world than if I allowed those veins to flow.
Awareness unexpressed erupts as madness once expressed.
It is in the ignoring that whisper on the wind become screams and ghosts become parasitic entities.
Maybe it is a stagnation in the blood that stalks me?

I suppose that is what Sile teaches me.
To ask; what happens to a woman who silences her soothsaying and burns her witch? Who quenches her volcano, plucks each feather from her arms and keeps her heart wrapped up neatly in some cotton and terrycloth and safely tucked away?
What happens to a woman who calls the wildflowers ‘weeds’ to please the churchyard gardener?
Or who apologises for the pain of bleeding to seem meeker about her earthly alchemy as a lifebringer?
Does she become happy and does the world break out into neat rows and picket fences?
Or does the world wither until she has to tear it all down and start again?

Is She Named for the Shining Ones named so because her dark life was an illumination?
That she could not help but trip every threshold set out before her, breach every boundary?
Call up the deities in her ecstasy and howl down the devil in her misery?
She was those storms and earthquakes the shocks and tumbles that humble us back to basics. Back to the source of things, beneath our feet, beyond the speculative machinations of the predictable seasonal beats we meet with such impatience.
The flash flood, the freak gust, the cold snap.

Sile never made anything sustainable.
The masculine was so oppressive that she had to breakthrough.
That was the cycle of her world.
Maybe that pressure is what makes a shining one.
I hope for her in her afterlife it did.

I often think the gold stolen from the earth and holy places was when man stole the will of mother nature.
And the earth rages that all her will is taken.
We had to take the shiny thing and put it in a cage.
Just to have something to look at.

I love my grandmother Sile.
In life I wish to be the shining that she was too burnt out to emit.
To have the consistency, to fold the wings and plant my feet and dig my roots in to
kindness, kindness, kindness.
To hold a lit torch of creativity and eros and never forget to play along with children and silly songs and breathe along with waves and sunsets.
To be patient enough to see if what withers grows back strong instead of simply burning it all away.
To love with equanimity everyone, everyone, everyone however hurt we are and what suffering we’ve all caused and been caused.

Somehow it often seems we all want to rip it up and start again.
Apocalypse, rapture, endtime.
And who inherits that pain?
That ripped up scarred out charred space? Threads torn from the blanket of spirit, veins torn from the living plane?
The parts of my grandmothers life that I mimic has taught me about that inheritance, and about taking responsibility for that legacy.

I’ve often said madness is an oracle.
And I believe that to be so. Still, we don’t need to consult the oracle as much when we know that the world cannot breathe, when it is right there before your eyes anyway.
I know madness.
Can I listen to what the oracle says?
Take responsbility and change in a sustainable way?

My work is to root my spectral inheritance.
Let Síle shine her light
and the generousity of the healing, nourishing,
breathing wilderness is the kindness she gives in death
as one denied in life.