The gulls of sisyphus
“Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.”
– Werner Herzog.
The same can be said of the gull.
Each morning I sit at Bullock Harbour and admire the activities of gulls. Every morning I return and they are always there. Where do they go at night? How do they sleep? Where do they think all the humans have gone? What is their diet like? Do they yearn for processed meats?
Bullock Harbour is on the south tip of the horseshoe that is Dublin bay. The harbour was built with the granite of the nearby hilltop quarry in the 19th century after providing refuge to ships for centuries in a natural inlet protected by cliffs. Bullock Castle still stands from 1150, a warrior’s face protrudes in stone and his eyes, like mine, watch over the action below. The sea usually carries an oily glare, where rainbows appear in the murk. Poet John Cooper Clarke wrote ‘where the action isn’t / that’s where it is’ and I am reminded of these lines, these words to live by, each day. Every morning repeatedly for the last month I sit and watch tense maritime standoffs in all their grotesque beauty.
This morning the tide was going out and it was feeding time at the pier.
Submerged under the sea hugging the walls of granite conger eels bore their teeth. Plump seals hauled out of the water flapping fin-footed tails, licking fish gunk off their whiskers. The saltwater rippled from swift mackerel and a silver pair of pollocks. The idiotic face of a porpoise swam under a scrapping otter. The clownish grins of monkfish smiled up towards the orb of Snell’s window.
The crustaceans mucked about on the precipice of the departing tide. Lobsters squirmed in rotting pots and velvet crabs and common shrimp nipped at the sea weeds and paddled in the brine, sinking sharp claws into the sunken bed, curious to feel what lay below the surface.
Above the water the warfare was ornithological. The rock pipits peaked into crevices and wrangled down in the crustacean trenches. I listened to the tuck-tuck-tucking of a turnstone as it waded through the shallows.
Out in the deeper waters on the calm sea the hooked bills of shags and cormorants peered menacingly down into the depths, waiting to jump and dive to dine on eels or fish. Full-bellied cormorants dried their wings on a rock tattooed in seaweed. A gust blew at their outstretched feathers; the bird resembled Christ crucified on the mount. After profitable foraging, the razorbill returned to his young ready to spew sprat into their open beaks. In a roseate flash a tern dove from the heavens into the calm of the sea returning shortly after with a cocksure chew. The black guillemot picked with his beak at an exposed mollusc and a brent goose ripped into sea lettuce with the stub of its snout.
A grey heron remained distant and calculated waiting to pierce the eye balls of a crab well-camouflaged in the brown of a rockpool.
On the granite pier edge, in the shallow pools, floating above was the pervasive presence of the gull. Gulls of all kinds: great black-backed, the herring, the black-headed, the kittiwake. I saw a gull pick a feather off the wing of another that flew away with a shriek of agony. They noticed my stare and their wide eyes stared back into mine. The longer I stayed the closer they came to me. The necks moved rapidly, twitching. The gulls fly up into the air and on windy days they go nowhere, the span of their wings leave them floating as they fly beak-first into the gale. Some find a tranquil slipstream and fly out into the bay towards the horizon.
As gulls to chunks of fish are we to the gods,
They watch us watch gulls for their sport.
If you follow the flight of a gull out into the bay your eye meets the Kish lighthouse shining with persistence on a barren knuckle of a rock. I think of the shining light of the Kish perched on a sandbank that sank ships for centuries. The light blinks and winks a welcome to incoming ships as they enter the bay. I think of Robert Eggers’ film of last year The Lighthouse that I recommended to a friend. They believed it to be horrid, vulgar and too long. I thought it was horrid, vulgar and too short – for me, a masterpiece. That friend clearly doesn’t spend their mornings admiring the grotesque beauty of gulls in a brown harbour.
The film takes place on a desolate salt-soaked island off the New England coast towards the end of the 19th century and is drenched in references to mythology. Prometheus giving fire to humans, his liver pecked at by a bird each day only to grow back again over night, solely to be pecked again. Tantalus in the shallow pool reaching above his head for some fruit and when he brushes the low-hanging grapes the shallow suddenly sinks to a bottomless depth. The sirens on the rocks singing and tempting you into peril and the trial of Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the peak only for it to roll back down.
The young Ephraim Winslow gets given Sisyphean tasks by his superior Thomas Wake, a man obsessed with the beam of the lighthouse. Winslow scrubs the floors, carries barrels of kerosene up to the light and carries them back down again. He shovels lumps of coal that burn to ash in the furnace. In his dreams he is sucked towards something in the distance out to sea and drowns before he can get there. The songs of a siren on the rocks entice him until their beauty becomes hideous. Wake is like a tyrant denying light to his subject and Winslow will stop at nothing to fixate on it, hypnotised by the light.
During all these trials and task, Winslow is harassed by a one-eyed gull, an avian cyclops. Wake warns ‘I seen ye sparrin’ with a gull…best y’leave ‘em be. Bad luck to kill a seabird’ as ‘in ‘em’s the souls o’ sailors what met their maker’.
In all the times I have watched the warfare of feeding time at Bullock Harbour, I have never been tempted to bash the brains in of a barking gull. I promise that. Killing a seabird would be cruel, anti-social and possibly an arrestable offence. Why would I risk being terrorised by the sharp prongs of Triton and his pitchfork?
Rather like Prometheus giving fire to humans, Dubliners have given beef burgers to gulls and they are mutating into savage beasts the size of dogs. Like Werner Herzog said of the chicken, one must look deep into the eyes of a gull and see their bottomless, fiendish stupidity, their horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish stare of which I cannot seem to get enough. I have an insatiable thirst for their stupidity.
The gulls must wonder where we have gone. There are less people and therefore less opportunity to swoop down and steal processed meats for which they have developed a keen taste.
I was the sole spectator of this ornithological and maritime parade of grotesque beauty.
While we are isolated within 2km, this is what is going on and on outside and like the great boulder of Sisyphus rolling down the barren peak, it will happen again tomorrow and the day after that.
I, like Sisyphus, will wipe the sweat from my brow and breathe in the air and watch again tomorrow and the day after that in abject awe.