Isolation, deprivation and unending darkness. The classic unhingers of the mind. Add to this, a cell in which you can reach out and touch all four walls of your confinement without moving, then you will have found yourself tottering on the very brink of your known world and peering into chaos.
In this angel-fearful place, all manner of things percolate through the dark. The screams of someone being tortured, a man weeping inconsolably or the loud snores of someone who has found some refuge in a sleep so deep that even nightmares cannot enter in. But in such a place all manner of things do enter. They people the darkness and you can feel yourself suffocate with their imaginary breath upon your skin.
The circus of the mind might shrivel you, or it might save you, depending on how you receive and deal with this onslaught. And if you possess nothing else, you alone possess what is in your head. And so you repeat over and over again, like a mantra, "There is nothing here, only what is in my head and that is mine to do with what I will"
There are no books, no radio, no letters, nothing on which to focus your thoughts. You have only yourself and your fevered imagination to pass the time. You seize on to it because you must. You make friends with the ghosts because they are your only companions. In time they become more real than the concrete walls of your cell. Soon you welcome them in. They push back the walls. They illuminate the mind, even if the cell remains in its black shroud.
During my long period of isolation I had many imaginary visitors, some fleeting, some remaining for days or perhaps only hours, you couldn't be sure. There was no way to measure time in the constant dark.
I wanted each of them to stay, but their time was their own. They came and went at their own whim. But one visitor I was determined would not go was a certain character named Turlough Carolan. Why he should come and why I should seize on him, I still, to this day, choose not to question. My only knowledge of the man was that he was blind; he played the harp and lived in Ireland several centuries ago. But I latched on to him like a flea on a dog's ear. Though I never saw any physical presence, the man intrigued me in a profound way. At first it seemed as if I was making all the effort, doing all the imagining. But as time progressed, it seemed more like this was a shared experience, almost as if a conversation was developing between us.
His story was not a simple narrative, with a beginning, middle and an end. Incidents and moments in his life would be suddenly pulsating in my head. It was as if an old battered jigsaw was flung in front of me and I was compelled to put it together.
The sense of compulsion was incredibly strong. It was as if my life and his depended on it. Sometimes I would hear him whisper excitedly "You see now, do you still not understand?" And curiously, even if I didn't rationally understand, I felt as if I did. Then he was gone and I was left with all these bits and pieces of him to somehow fit together. The jigsaw often looked like a very poorly executed Picasso, full of irreconcilable images. But instead of being driven insane by Turlough and his crazy story, it gave me focus and purpose. I became fascinated by the complexity of the man, who in a sense I had kidnapped from out of the ether and had chained beside me.
Here was a man full of impossible contradictions and paradoxes. A ghostly hologram, which, as the months went by, became more fleshy and real for me. I never wearied of him and if the man became much larger than life for me, then so what? I was living in a very heightened reality anyway. Some of my imaginings were too bizarre for words and I am convinced that if a psychiatrist had been able to look in on me or knew of my many conversations with the concrete wall he/she would have instantly declared me insane.
But sanity is only a condition defined by a balanced response to the world. My cell was its own world. There was nothing balanced or normal about it and I was only another element in its strangeness. So I suppose insanity was perfectly normal in such a place.
It wasn't until I was incarcerated with other human beings that I was able to question my relationship with my ghostly companion. But it was already too late. I had already drunk too deep from Turlough's cup. I had shared too intimately in his suffering, his hedonism, his conceit and his frailty to simply dismiss our conversations as the product of a deeply confused mind. On the contrary, I was devoted and indebted to my mysterious musician.
It was after some months of being held with John McCarthy that I began to talk about Turlough. I never once admitted to having had imaginary conversations with the man. I simply explained my fascination with him, his blindness and the world he inhabited. "So much of our world is visually experienced," I would explain to John, then expand on Leonardo's belief that sight is our primary sense and that all others are second to it.
"If it was so," I would continue, "then what was Turlough's source of inspiration? Think of all the great poets, musicians; what would they have created without the influence of the world around them, without having the trigger of sight to fire all their other responses?"
And so my intellectual juggling went for many months. McCarthy enjoyed the rigours of my intellectual, but sometimes slightly deranged, questions. For Turlough's story had thrown up so many. The clash of religion and politics in 18th-century Ireland had moved itself in the 20th century to our prison cell, with its Islamic zealots and revolutionary gunmen? Questions about alcohol and creativity opened up greater discussions about our different preferences in writers and artists. And so the debate went on, with old Turlough gently nudging us along, unseen but ever-present.
But my elaborations on the life of Turlough were becoming more fabulous by the day. Even I was becoming intoxicated by the lunacy of my own invention. I remember waking McCarthy in the early hours one morning with the words "You know John, you remember I was saying about Carolan that . . . " Before I could finish, McCarthy abruptly butted in: "Just a minute, just a minute. Did this mad musician of yours ever explain anything about music to you?" The question threw me totally. "No," I answered. "Perhaps I should ask him," I concluded, trying to joke and side-step the awkward question. But John was not finished. "Yeah, why don't you do that then. And tell him while you're at it to make it nice and simple, to put us both out of our misery for a few months at least."
It was enough. I had been going on about Turlough Carolan for months and months. The humour and excited discussion he had brought into our cell was being overwrought. He was losing his credibility. I was creating him too much, instead of letting him speak for himself. It was time to allow him to return to the shadows for a while.
And it was inevitable that he would return when McCarthy and myself found ourselves confined in a large underground room with three Americans. Turlough came bubbling back as fantastical as Don Quixote. Right up until its publication, Terry Anderson, the last American to be released in Lebanon, rang every few months asking if I had finished the book about the musician. He was as fascinated by the man as I was and wanted answers from the book that I could not provide in our hole in the ground in the Balbac Valley.
I had always promised Terry I would write the story of Turlough some day, never really believing I would. I had other promises I intended to keep first. But I suppose I hadn't reckoned with the omniscience of Turlough. Little did I know that he would pursue me even in freedom.
Just as Turlough had randomly entered my head and my cell, many other random incidents bore the mark of Carolan on them. Like the time during my first few years of freedom that I took the wrong turn en route to a friend's house and ended up in the little town of Mohill in Co Leitrim. I decided to stop, find a cafe and ask for directions. I turned a corner and saw Turlough Carolan, "last of the bards", seated on a rough-hewn, stone stool across the street. I crossed to take in the large bronze sculpture. He was not as I had envisaged him. His features looked too placid and unanimated. One thing struck me: there were no strings in his harp! Nor was I sure whether the sculpture had been designed for them. I drove off wondering about the harp strings and why Turlough had never explained music to me. I also decided I had been "directed" to the town on purpose.
Several years ago, I went to give some guest lectures in the University of Firbanks in Alaska. After a lecture on writing, I was talking about the intuitive element and the writer's relationship with it. To illustrate these points, I very briefly mentioned my interest in Carolan and the difficulties I envisaged in writing my story: my severe lack of musical scholarship, my sightedness and the fact that I did not speak a word of Irish, while Turlough spoke little else. I therefore had to create for myself and for my subject a wholly imaginative trajectory which would allow me to encompass the whole of his life, being as true to historical fact as I could while imaginatively recreating the emotional and psychological persona of Turlough.
But the task was more fraught than I had imagined. The historical record was replete with gaps and cul-de-sacs. The history of the period was as complex as the man I was trying to unearth from it, and my own highly visual style of writing did not lend itself to telling the story of a blind man. I was rapidly becoming disillusioned and overwhelmed by my task, and for several months I shelved the idea with notions of abandoning it altogether. Then when the whole project seemed hopelessly impossible, I received a strange letter from an Innuit woman who had attended my lectures in Alaska. Among other things in her short letter, she informed me how Carolan was a Dreamwalker. At first I dismissed the letter and, as there was no return address, that should have been the end of the matter. Or so I thought.
For another four months, I evaded the demands of Turlough. But it was a hopeless evasion by now. My spirit companion had become a monkey on my shoulders, beating furiously on my head and pulling at my hair in frustration. "I told you my story for a reason, now you tell it for me!" the monkey seemed to be incessantly saying. But monkey or no monkey, I still could not find a way to hang the whole story together without losing the spirit and the voice of Turlough. I was foundering once more when another letter arrived from the strange Innuit woman again insisting that Carolan was a Dreamwalker and that I had been visited by him for a reason. Her words stared at me from the paper, exactly echoing the increasingly rabid monkey on my shoulders!
I was beginning to question all these odd incidents: the stringless harp, the letters from the woman in Alaska and many others which would be much too complex to explain.
In all my troubled thinking, one thing was becoming clear: whatever had happened in Beirut was still happening, only in a more veiled form. I owed Turlough Carolan a debt and I could not refuse to pay it. It was a debt of honour. My own dignity, if it was to be worth anything, demanded that I pay up, and the price was simply Carolan's story.
The way to do this was staring me in the face in the Alaskan letter. Carolan was a Dreamwalker. He walked into my dreams and enriched them. He threw his own special light into my dark place. So if I was to do justice to his story, if I was to put flesh, on the myth of the musician, if I was to reveal the living man in all his faulted complexity, then I needed only to reveal his dreams. At last, everything seemed do-able and even the monkey was now gently patting me on the head.
History, as we all know, is full of great and villainous men and women. But great wars and the petty imperialisms that make them do not impress me. History is a human construct, and often the best of our human species are passed over, or perhaps choose to remain in the shadows. If I have disinterred one human being who seems to me a perfect metaphor for the age in which he lived, then perhaps I have achieved something.
But if I have, Lazarus-like, put back the flesh upon his bones, if I have made him real, however flawed or confused, and if I have made him live again for a brief spell with some degree of sympathy and understanding, then I have repaid my debt to a man who kept me sane as I insanely perused his story. Even better still, I have unlocked the chains and let the monkey go!
Turlough by Brian Keenan is published by Jonathan Cape at £16.99 (hardback)