The Annotated Stone of Loneliness

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So Janis Ian is up for an Audio for the audiobook of Stars, the anthology edited by her and Mike Resnick.  You could search forever in the paper book for my story and never find it.  But they included "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again," which was inspired by Janis' song "Mary's Eyes," as an extra, a special treat for those who buy the audiobook.

Wednesday, I talked a little about the story and told where you can find the song that Janis wrote for it.  Today it occurred to me that it might be helpful is I provided a light annotation of it.

In general, everything I say about Ireland is true, unless it's something that has yet to happen, in which case it's fiction.  There can't be many readers who will have trouble telling one from the other.  But a few entries are personal and there's no way you could possible know that.  So, presented below are those elements that make this as close to an autobiographical story as I've ever written.

Enjoy!


... my great-great-grandfather saw Gerry Adams strolling down O’Connell Street on Easter morning of ’96, the eightieth anniversary of that event, returning from a political rally with a single bodyguard to one side of him and a local politico to the other. 
 

All true.  That is exactly where and when and what happened to me.  Making me the protagonist's ancestor.  The bodyguard, incidentally, was huge.  His shoulders were so wide they made his head look small.

...I can see his face, liquid and wavy as if glimpsed through candle flames, as he lay dying under a great feather comforter in his New York City railroad flat, his smile weak and his hair forming a halo around him as white as a dandelion waiting for the wind to purse its lips and blow.

That was my grandfather, Michael O'Brien.  He died when I was -- what? -- three years old, I think.  I can see him clearly even now, smiling lovingly at me as I played on my little plastic guitar for him.

The holy well is one such antiquity, though it is only a round hole, perhaps a foot across, filled with water and bright green algae.  The altar over it is of recent construction, built by unknown hands from the long slender stones formed by the natural weathering of the limestone between the grykes, which makes the local stone walls so distinctive and the walking so treacherous. 

It wasn't easy to find, but Marianne and I had a geodetic survey map, and we tromped over the rocks until we all but stumbled across it it. Later that day, we struck up a conversation with a friendly waiter.  The man was a talker.  But when we mentioned the holy well, he clammed right up.

We met in the Fiddler’s Elbow, a pub in that part of the West which the Bord Failte calls Yeats Country. 

A lovely place.  We shared a pint with a dairy farmer there.  When I said that Ireland was a very beautiful country, he said, "But it can be a very dirrty country, too."  With a trill in the r.  The peat fire, however, comes from a pub in Dublin, as does the back room where the concert was held.

“This one’s for the American,” she’d said.

But how had she known?

This happened to a friend of mine.  She was in the audience and the singer said, "This one's for the American in the front row."  So she stayed after to ask how he knew.  "You have American teeth," he said.

“Looking for your roots, then, are ye?”

This is a question all visitors to Ireland must endure.  Apparently the Irish can't imagine any other reason for coming to see their country.

...and the ladies of Noraid goose-stepping down the street on Saint Patrick’s Day in short black skirts

True.  Terrifying.

“It’s not the wee folk you have to worry about.  It’s the boys.”

In Ireland, "the boys" is or was a euphemism for the IRA.  Which is why a friend who was putting up the members of an Irish folk group in her house for a few weeks was always careful to refer to them as "the lads."

The Stone of Loneliness was a fallen menhir or standing stone, something not at all uncommon throughout the British Isles.  They’d been reared by unknown people for reasons still not understood in Megalithic times, sometimes arranged in circles, and other times as solitary monuments.  There were faded cup-and-ring lines carved into what had been the stone’s upper end.  And it was broad enough that a grown man could lie  down on it. 

 On a beautiful, bright day on our first visit to Ireland in 1982, Marianne and I found the Stone of Loneliness, so called because it was supposed to be a cure for heartbreak.  People about the leave Ireland forever would sleep on it the night before departure.  I lay down on it and I felt all the loneliness in the world flood into my body.

a nondescript cinder-block building

I swiped this bar from my mother.  She took a tour of Ireland, before which she asked if there was anything I wanted her to bring back.  "If you run across a bottle of Knappogue Castle," (at that time a rare whiskey) I said, "I'd like that."

Well, my mother asked the tour but driver and he hadn't heard of it either.  But "I think I know what he meant," he said, and drove to a very seedy bar and after warning his charges not to leave the bus, went in.  He came back with a Fresca bottle filled with illegal poteen.

When she got home, my mother told me this story, showed me the Fresca bottle, and put it back in her own liquor cabinet.

...only Ireland and my family could make me cry.  

It's God's own truth.

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Seeing (and Hearing) Stars

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I just recently heard that Stars, the audio version of Janis Ian's anthology of stories based on her songs (released by Audible and Brilliance) has received an Audio nomination for Best Multi-Voice Performance.

This is of significance to me because while the story I wrote for that anthology, "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll not be Back Again," though it was finished at least a year too late for the print anthology, was included in the audiobook as a sort of amuse-bouche, an extra for those buying  it.

I haven't heard what Janis did with my story yet, though I am wild to do so.  But I know it's great because she did something extraordinary with it.  In the story, a musician sings a song called "Deirdre's Lament," snatches of which, not being a songwriter myself, I cribbed from a nineteenth-century poem of that name by Sir Samuel Ferguson.  So while she was prepping for the story, Janis wrote to ask if I'd mind if she made up a tune for it.

Would I mind?  Christ!  "Society's Child" was a very important song for me, back when I was sixteen (and she was fifteen).  Rather casually, I told her that I guessed I had no objections.

Then she wrote to tell me that she was giving me a co-writing credit.

"Nonono," I wrote back, "those weren't my words!  I can't take credit for them."

But it turns out that by the arcane rules of ASCAP, I can take credit for them.  So I now have a co-writing credit with Janis Ian.

The talentless singer-songwriter of my coffeehouse days would have been every bit as thrilled and appalled as I am now.

And the song itself?  I think it's a heartbreaker.  But then, as I said in the story, only Ireland and my family can make me cry.

In order to register the song, Janis had to make a recording of it.  Which she has very generously put  up to be heard for free on her website.  You can download it here.  It's a beautiful song, beautifully sung.  You be the judge.


Janis Ian is making something of a second career (or third or eighth) as an audiobook narrator.  She's also up for Audies for her narration of Miriam Therese Winter's The Singer and the Song, and as one of the readers of George R. R. Martin's and Gardner Dozois' Dangerous Women.  While still holding down her day job.  As a singer-songwriter.  I feel like such a slacker.

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The Alien Worms of Truth

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I am, as always, on the road -- and by the time I get home, 300+ miles from now, I will be exhausted.  So no pictures, no bells, and no whistles today.

But I want to answer a question I was asked on a panel Saturday.  Somebody asked about what I intended with my story "Passage of Earth," and I replied thatI had wanted to create an alien extemely unlike human beings and see what could be deduced about its thought processes simply by disecting it.

This was true as far as it goes.  But I'd been on four program items in a row by then and was feeling a little wasted.  So I only spoke about what I'd intended to do, and not what the story became during the  years-long process of writing it.

Now I must spoil some of the story for those who have not read it yet.  So serious readers will first go to Clarkesworld, where the story first appeared, and read it.  Here.

Eliding a great deal of plot, the protagonist comes to realize he has been eaten by an alien worm and has been on continual replay for hundreds or thousands of years as the alien tries to understand him.  This section gave me a great deal of trouble before I could find a resolution for it.  But afterward it was clear to me that the protagonist's dilemma was a metaphor or perhaps thought experiment was an apter term for the his realization of himself as an alien and his resultant failure to comprehend himself.

I could, with a great deal of work, make that clearer, or with a little less work go into much greater detail about it.  But I set out to answer a question I had not done justice to and now my task is done and I may go to bed.

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