Cassandra Voices

Author: casswp

  • LONG READ: The Sleep of Reason II

    Editor’s Note: This is the second part of an extended essay by Irish artist Terence O’Connell but can be read as a stand alone piece.

    Rationalism is a psychosis; a dissociation of intellect and feeling; the suppression of our intuitive, emotional, and sensual being (the heart’s domain). Enlightenment thinkers wished to replace the credulity of religious compliance with reason. They put their faith in human progress and an expansive intellect – and some, it should be said, in a deeper and more natural spirituality.

    They thought they could reform society, but radical social reform has rarely, if ever, been generated by external pressure. It arises when an established worldview reaches the limit of its credibility and its possibilities.

    For all the fine words and egalitarian instincts, what emerged was a restricted and abstracted rationality, blinkered by the narrow focus of scientific empiricism: a civilization devoid of core significance that was to become a kind of megalomania. Mathematical abstraction, reductionist precision and the crushing urgency of capital  accumulation could never have generated a benign culture.

    Without consent to meaning and an imaginative response to the innate feelings that evoke a deeper sense of being, Western civilization will continue its fragmentation and decline until it succumbs to incompetence, overreach, and inner contradiction.

    At this point, Goya’s Capricho 43 comes to mind once more. There he sits, Goya himself, slumped over a table, looking like he has the whole world on his shoulders and wishing it would all go away.

    However, the words on the panel are stark: “The sleep of reason produces  monsters”. And the owls, bats and lynx are generally presumed to symbolize a resurgent irrationality always watching for reason to lower its guard – a clear expression of Enlightenment values. It is balanced somewhat by the caption for the print: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders”.

    This is fine so far as it goes, but it ultimately amounts to the same thing. It implies that you can’t trust imagination without reason to almost police it. But in art – so in life generally – the imaginative impulse is primary. It is not going to lead you down the road to ruin as in some Victorian morality tale.

    Imagination is the indispensable quality, a benign compulsion in an unfolding life. A creative leap, the capacity to conceive the new, is essential if life is to evolve rather than merely repeat.

    Even mathematics, the very rock on which the rational world is built, is itself a brilliant act of imagination; an original, symbolic system, independent of life as lived, and that may in turn be applied to our practical engagement with its process.

    Reason elaborates the idea in a kind of inner dialectic that bridges the gap between inspiration and cultural expression, between the imaginative realm and the everyday. In practice, this is an indivisible, spontaneous process – not linear and mechanical – and its accomplishment is a sensitive art.

    However, we can’t really be sure what Goya meant. He was unhealthy, overworked and disillusioned. But the sleep of reason is not loss of control; the sleep of reason is rationalism, reason without heart.

    Looking at Capricho 43 with the Covid pandemic at its height, the bats were insistent. Their association with the new disease was a topic of speculation. A global panic was underway; the threat index was rising, and we were at war with a virus. The response to this “existential” threat (yet another) was employing the standard rhetoric of the war machine. Civil liberties were suspended; a crusade was launched; “trust the science” was on the banners; and facts and figures were deployed like heavy artillery.

    If your attitude to the world is purely rational, your actions – both the action itself and the manner of its effect – will reflect the sense of separability and isolation that characterizes it.

    Notwithstanding the fact that we humans have co-evolved with viruses, that their presence is vital, even if some are potentially harmful, a program of total suppression was begun. At least until a vaccine (a “magic bullet” that would stop Covid dead in its tracks) could be developed, we were told.

    Since the time of Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century it has been known that a small piece of a virus or bacterium can stimulate an immune response. The technique has been used to prevent many common diseases ever since.

    A corona virus tends to generate variants liberally and is not so susceptible to a traditional vaccine. For the biotech industry, which had struggled after the financial expectations of The Human Genome Project were not realized, and the difficulty of meeting regulatory requirements, its moment had come. They were now cast as world saviours and the whole force of a global pandemic was behind them.

    To put it very simply, gene-based vaccines cause your own cells to produce a spike protein – essentially a piece of the virus – which, like a traditional vaccine should then provoke an immune response. All very well if you “trust the science”.

    In this case it meant trusting a pharmaceutical industry with a long record of disregard, deception and harm and allowing them to manipulate, or ‘program,’ your own cells.

    But no scientist can assure the outcome of speculative interference in the elusive and dynamic process at the heart of, and common to, every living system. A cell is a cell: nucleus, cytoplasm, membrane, and the tiny world within continuously generating growth. All cells share the same structure; all life is cellular; and all life is interconnected. What could possibly go wrong?

    Just to add that claims for efficacy went all the way from “magic bullet” to balm and Covid is still with us, vaccinated or not. And, I almost forgot, a few more billionaires now grace the earth.

    The publication of Los Caprichos marks the opening of the nineteenth century. In Spain, the war with France and years of political upheaval would follow. Goya reflects the disorder in his strikingly expressive work of those years until his death in exile in 1828.

    By this time Europe and North America were on the verge of a world that would seem very familiar to us now. Both electrification and the internal combustion engine arrived in the 1880’s, and the subsequent years are known as La Belle Epoque in Europe and The Gilded Age in America.

    The conspicuous affluence these terms betray rested on a period of intense industrialization and exploitation, during which the British Empire was the great world power. By the year of Goya’s death economic liberalism was about to reveal its most brutal aspect.

    In Britain the new poor laws were enacted to starve masses of the underclass into wage slavery. Without support millions more were plunged into sea of destitution. Included in this purgatory of despair were tens of thousands of women and girls forced into prostitution and an early grave. This was the social catastrophe confronted by Charles Dickens and Karl Marx.

    Across the seas, India and China (and countries in between), two ancient and distinct civilizations – their history, social structures and trading patterns rent – were forcibly conscripted into a global trading and financial system to their utter detriment, and to the enrichment of an elite group of financiers, industrialists and Western powers who controlled it.

    Further south, the scramble for Africa would soon open the gates to yet another prolonged exhibition of colonial barbarity.

    One appalling outcome: the instability and structural disintegration wrought by this interference in traditional systems of land use, production and trade left them unable to deal with the consequences of a prolonged drought in the 1880’s. (A phenomenon not unknown and provided for by tradition). As in Ireland a few decades earlier, famine ensued. It is estimated that between Asia and Africa perhaps as many as fifty million may have died.

    The unspeakable horror of all this is chronicled in detail in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis, in so far as words or even pictures can convey the terrible suffering of fellow human beings on such an immense scale. Its full effect requires an imaginative capacity typically repressed in the cultivated mind by the assumption of superiority.

    In the words of Mike Davis, ‘What seemed from a metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century’s final blaze of imperial glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant funeral pyre.’[i]

    For all the achievements of Western civilization in science and the arts the dark side of our history is actual. Moreover, it still resonates around the world in conflict, poverty, migration, and debt.

    It is critical that we should acknowledge our defects now that, so we are told, we are once again standing at the edge of fundamental change. The transition to a post-carbon future will not forestall dire predictions without a radical shift in perspective and it remains ‘business as usual’.

    Unrestrained capital accumulation, open-ended economic growth, finance capitalism and the rigged marketplace are entrenched. Bacon’s slogan “knowledge is power” still drives and validates the scientific ideology that underlies it all. Together they perpetuate a toxic system to which the question of how it is fuelled is almost incidental.

    In addition, the corporate sector now has the ‘sustainable’ technology supposed to save us firmly in its grip; ‘saving the planet’ is a heaven-sent marketing strategy; and the promise of a ‘just transition’ has become a sickly green joke.

    A cursory analysis of the crisis we are facing would reveal the dynamic driving it. That it has done so for almost half a millennium is why the crisis is so acute and why its cause should be so obvious.

    That there are limits to growth is axiomatic. And it should also be apparent that renewable technologies could never equal the energy potential of fossil fuels. The dispersed energy of wind and solar and the second-hand energy of biofuels, even without the problem of intermittence, could only possibly match the concentrated energy of fossil fuels – discounting the growth imperative – by an expansion of its technologies on such a scale that this factor alone would be problematic.

    In any case, highly complex renewable systems present their own difficulties. Every method of energy production requires energy to support it: for mining coal, pumping oil, or the massive resource extraction demand by renewables and the ‘smart’ technology that enables it. This requirement has initiated yet another round of colonial exploitation and despoilation.

    Also, known reserves of many essential minerals are deficient. And resource scarcity is insurmountable; what doesn’t occur cannot be conjured into existence. A finite world has bio-physical limits: as its resources are subject to exhaustion, so our ambitions are subject to restraint. Our centuries long escapade is being constricted and the problems of over-development and over-complexity cannot be solved by more of the same – more regulations, more laws, plans, targets, goals, reproof, and penalties.

    Image: Aleksandar Pasaric

    What use is a carbon-free future if our rapacious civilization continues as is? Biodiversity loss, degradation of soils, deforestation, plunder of the oceans, toxic  pollution of every kind: all these are just as malignant, if not more so. Degradation and degeneracy cannot be ameliorated by new technologies. And it is delusional to hope that ‘sustainability’ can somehow allow us to defy some of the most fundamental realities of being.

    All this prowess we’ve engineered over time seems to have convinced too many of us that men are gods. And challenging the Gods never ends well. Hubris is followed by nemesis – inexorably if we can’t break through the bounds of scientific rationalism. And the stimulus for such a profound shift in consciousness cannot be prescribed; it can only arise organically. Whether from disillusionment, decline, crisis, chaos, or common sense remains to be seen.

    The ground of this dilemma was prepared during that long period of transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world: when the dominance of capital was extended, scientific inquiry established the mechanical worldview, and the hegemony of humanity over nature began its destructive course in earnest. If only Galileo could have seen the future through his telescope.

    It was at that time of change, about the year 1605 – just five years after Giordano Bruno was tied to the stake and the breadth of his perception went up in flames with him – that Don Quixote first set forth. Caught between these worlds, his adventure in a sense exemplifies dilemma. The changing conditions were presenting a choice: between faith and belief – and the new belief; between metaphor and fact; between self-realization and passivity; between the individual subject and the social object; and for Don Quixote himself perhaps – depending how you read it – between the way of a (wise?) fool and the way of conviction.

    Adventure is a disorder, a disruption of the everyday. The quest is, in part, a dissatisfaction in the everyday, a compulsion to discover its deeper reality. In the mediaeval epic the hero and the epic plane are coincident, so to speak. “The men of Homer belong to the same world as their desires”, to quote Jose Ortega y Gasset.[ii]

    But Don Quixote is at odds with his world. In this he is probably the first hero of the modern age – an anti-hero, if you will – not borne by the established manner of a chivalric tale, but impelled by his own will, along “the trackless way”, in Joseph Campbell’s words,[iii] of his unfolding life; and creating in his wake his own ‘mythology’, by his own heroic self-realization in a world at variance with his inner being and feeling – as individual integrity will be in an abstract world of facts and figures.

    Capital and the new science were breaking the world apart. The organism was torn from its environment, but the soul craves reconciliation and unity. The pathology of progress – distraction, addiction, obsession, emotional disorder, and mental distress to the point of psychosis – all those cries of pain and anguish resound because the world is no longer whole.

    And when the prevailing culture is a secular, socio-economic state and no more, to which art and philosophy are peripheral (and largely commodified), it cannot set the terms for a necessary transformation.

    To be convinced – whether by religious or scientific dogma makes no difference – is to set yourself at naught and passive in a world always active and renewed. Self-realization, the search for meaning within a prison of abstraction and global assent is, in consequence, only possible in the individual psyche and through the daily heroism of each one of us.

    The reign of Gods, Goddesses and our own Christian God was over, or coming to an end. If, on the other hand, the cosmic mystery is implicit in every individual existence – plant, animal, or human – then the poetic imagination, art in its broadest sense, out of which the mythic realm was born and which gave form to its cultural expression, could turn its gaze to the metaphysics – indeed the miracle – of being in every one of us.

    And would it be too much to hope that it could then transform everyday life through the reconciliation of the spheres of night and day, of the timeless, or momentous, process of creation and its manifestation in time – and so of reason and authority, the heart, and the head.

    Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Equestrian Statues in Madrid, Spain.

    But now the giants are on the march again; thousands of them ranged across land and sea. Transformed into windmills, not now by the necromancer, Freston, as Don Quixote once suspected, but by vicissitude and the main chance. Aloof, pristine, impertinent, enormous, their alien presence and baleful monotony is an affront to the vibrant landscape – each one a great counter calculating a return. For every turn another dollar.

    The old gods would be in turmoil: the wind harnessed to the strategic avarice of a corporate machine. For what? To ‘save’ a world that the Megamachine (to borrow Fabian Scheidler’s term) has itself constructed and put at risk?

    And so also the sun: once raised variously to the status of God or Goddess, powerful mythological symbol, the vivid nucleus of a living cycle that would every dawn dispel the dark. It, too, is to be committed to the same end. That their potential falls short I have already discussed; that even the most critical demands of our current over-consumption can be met is doubtful. But it must now also power the banal syllabus of cyber mania.

    Socially destructive global monopolies are eager for every megawatt to propel their program of corporate dominance. The digitalization of the world is an imperial project of unprecedented ambition. A counterfeit world is being prepared. Uniformity of thought, action, experience, and expectation is promoted – autonomy would disturb the shallow manner of digital exchange.

    The pioneers of science would be amazed. After all their hard work the earth is becoming flat again. The individual is fading away. Apparently, our lives are to be run by corporate favour and AI. Wow! Our common heritage, from the production of food to our very biology, is to be appropriated by an affected concern and handed over to ‘experts’.

    Thankfully, an authentic humanity will not easily be overcome by technocratic pedantry, and we should all have enough experience of bureaucratic and executive stupidity to expect the project is delusional and self-defeating. After all, if they kill the goose, what then?

    Unfortunately, it has the potential to further the cause of technocratic governance by a coterie of corporate behemoths who have made no secret of their anti-democratic and anti-social resolve, even as they cloak it in the sweet-sounding words of beneficial intent. And there appears to be no limit to their field of operation, or the level of enforcement through sophisticated systems of surveillance and control.

    Image: This is Engineering.

    The intemperate pushing of AI omnipotence has some of the characteristics of mania about it. With any luck it may be destined for the same fate as other notable examples of this recurrent phenomenon. In the meantime, let’s be clear: artificial intelligence is what it says on the tin. It is fake in the same way that artificial flowers are fake. In other words, it is no more than an imitation of intelligence; or rather it purports to be since its proponents have a much- reduced understanding of intelligence in the first place.

    The only way a digital system could seem analogous to intelligence is if human beings have been persuaded that they themselves are analogous to machines.

    For all the accomplishments of computer science, computers still lack resolve. No computer can make an autonomous decision and no idea can arise unbidden in its electronic circuitry. The data it contains has been handed to it and its operative rules are pre-programmed in algorithms and codes. So-called ‘generative’ AI, so far as I understand it, is simply an intensification of the basic on-off electronics and the yes-no, if not this-that, and, or, both, neither, binary mathematics of existing systems.

    To assert that the voluntary and boundless nature of mind and intelligence can be fully represented by a symbolic mathematical system of 1’s and 0’s is absurd – to any thoughtful person. But, of course, if in the first instance you define ‘intelligence’ by what can be contained in its restrictive code then you have AI.

    The computer is an ingenious machine, without doubt, a remarkable tool as it stands, but for some reason its potential has been dressed in vainglorious exaggeration from the outset. The haughty claims for AI are no different today than fifty years ago, although confident prophecies of omnipotence still await fulfilment.

    That more and more aspects of living and our thought processes can be formulated digitally, and that the programs (the preset rules of the game) are run at breakneck speed is what makes it so impressive. But whereas endless variation and repetition are possible, and answers (largely based on past conclusions) can appear as if by magic, without a non-material imagination, new ideas cannot emerge from old data.

    There has been much excitement over the ‘existential’ threat of AI. Indeed, in the hands of the corporate sector, it is busy constructing its own reality with the callous logic of the machine. But there is nothing new here either: apocalyptic alarms have always been associated with the disruption of custom and loss of confidence. If it comes to it, wild forecasts of digital conquest can be countered by simply pulling the plug. The real worry is what on earth has humanity come to that it can so easily imagine subordination to its own technology, to the extent of its own obsolescence – that some would even welcome its approach.

    That it is already secondary, to some extent, has nothing to do with the superiority of AI, but is entirely due to our significant distance from the profound coherence of being.

    But with so much money at play, the industry is oblivious to either temporal limits or harm. And the next step in the construction of an omniscient computer system – always a goal – follows sensibly enough in the reasoning of scientific materialism.

    If the mind has been reduced to the brain, and the brain itself is analogous to a data-processing, memory storage device, then why not build a ‘cognitive’ system that exceeds the intellectual capacity of any human; that would, in turn, design a new improved machine and so on. An “intelligence explosion”, until hey presto! the Singularity is reached – ultra intelligence, omniscience, omnipotence, virtual Godhood!

    As fantastical as all this might seem to anyone with their feet still on the ground, there’s more. The geeks among us don’t rest easy. If you’re interested in fantasy, it’s all gathered under the acronym Tescreal. Just be aware that the principal actors here are over-exalted, self-regarding white males in the main, and a forceful eugenicist agenda (a ‘more enlightened eugenics’ apparently) runs through it.

    Image: Pixabay.

    If partisans of AI infallibility were left to stew in the juice of these absurdities within the techno-utopian compound of Silicon Valley, and certain university departments, they needn’t trouble the lives of ordinary decent people. But unfortunately, they command limitless capital and the insatiable dreams of monopolists. Ah, but their intent is to save the world. It’s more likely that an unholy pairing with messianic pretensions will pave the road to hell.

    And not only do they appear to be living on another planet, they actually think we can. In this respect, it is a point worth making that no man ever set foot on the moon, and no man or woman ever will, unless they want to bring their life to a painful conclusion. Man reached the moon by bringing his earth environment with him in a spacecraft. An ingenious accomplishment, undoubtedly, but a miss is as good as a mile. And because what is contained in the spacesuit, spacecraft, or space colony for that matter, is clearly partial rather than whole, prolonged existence in it is simply impossible, either physically or psychologically – unless, of course, you’re a machine, or a posthuman!

    Given the wonder of existence in the first place, the greatest marvels of being are mind and consciousness, memory and ideas. Any degree of self-awareness should open us to the profound mystery from which they arise. That anyone could make of this ineffable experience nothing more than a mechanical process to be downloaded into a plastic ‘chrysalis’ full of semi-conductors, switches, and silicon chips; and to then emerge as a kind of super-intelligent, posthuman immortal shows just how far from any real sense of our creative presence some of us have drifted.

    Image: Tomas Ryant.

    Every day now, it seems, we are subject to reproof. Signs of crisis are insistent and portents of doom pressure us in a seemingly chaotic world. This essay has attempted to set a wider context; to highlight the critical issues; and to point to the  obvious fact that if the corporate/political/ideological covenant responsible for our present state is being relied upon to provide solutions we are going nowhere.

    For all its achievements to date, it is now becoming clear that scientific materialism and the single-minded logic of its methodology is reaching the limits of its efficacy; even as materialist anticipation is reaching for its apotheosis in the extravagant representations of AI – the ultimate expression of its reductionist worldview.

    And it is possible to see on the wildest shores of this ‘promised land’ a kind of hysteria in the face of diminishing returns, and the desperate resuscitation of a fading ideology.

    But the piling on of the past will not work. With increasing complexity every solution begets more problems. It’s a vicious circle, such that at this point many of us might be beginning to feel Sancho Panza’s reproach – windmills in the head is right! How to step off the treadmill is the crux of the problem, although it is also all too clearly the solution. And in the absence of another world to step on to we are hooked by a kind of compulsion neurosis.

    A more benign world will require a new morality in its broadest sense; it will not arrive ‘off the peg’, so to speak. ‘Smart’, ‘sustainable’, ‘clean’, ‘green’, the defining terms of our post-carbon future, are a cruel deception if their only purpose is to keep the machine in gear.

    Strangely, the very ideology that defines the world will not recognize its material constraint. It still relies on the illusion of superabundance and the invocation of  technological superiority in a world struggling for breath.

    And where – is it ever asked – is our humanity in this brave new world? The whole drama of a single life, a sort of flourish upon the oceanic well of time and creation; and the billions of us marooned in an abstract world of facts and figures. How do we dignify our lives in a world in which fire has been quenched?

    Corbusier’s ‘machine to live in’ is realized in the technological dependence and the spick and span aspect of the all-electric house. But there was a time when the hearth was symbolic of the Navel of the Earth; when fire, the Goddess of the hearth, symbolized the presence of the divine. The hearth and its home were explicit symbols of implicit unity: the invisible or immaterial realm made visible in the material culture.

    Such sensibilities are long gone, of course, and unity and meaning must be sought in the human heart – as they should be at this stage of our cultural evolution. But what if the heart itself is cold?  What if the material culture is destructive or merely bland?

    We now live in a manner without discernment or reserve, informed by opinion and  the ubiquity of the market. Jesus drove the moneylenders from the temple; a second coming would be welcome in the face of an ill-considered, commercial culture of unprecedented shallowness. Its dominance and its demands, and its impression  upon all is turning hearts to stone and our world into a wasteland.

    It is true that most people’s lives are enriched and gain meaning in the ordinary communion of family, friends and community; and perhaps in the practicalities of daily life. But there is a wider world, and in the minds of capitalists the end always justifies the means. In their calculations you don’t count – the phenomenon of your being, that is, not your efficiency in the economy of capital accumulation.

    In the everyday language of economics. the economy appears to be an almost perfect mathematical system independent of human history – an abstraction isolated from reality as a whole. In the extremism of neo-liberalism its jurisdiction has neither moral, social, or cultural bounds and it now regulates the global like a detached and senseless Victorian viceroy. To the extent that our lives are decided by it, the social context will be inhumane, and inadequate to our potential and imaginative capacity.

    Life in the shallows of economic determinism soon exhausts itself. There is an emptiness at the heart of contemporary culture that will not be filled by the ‘green agenda’. The post-carbon future, as currently outlined, exemplifies the metaphor of the machine no less than its antecedent. Technological solutions will only perpetuate our insulation from the vibrant process of creation. And ‘smart’ technology, let us be clear, does not run on fresh air. On the contrary the magnitude of its energy demand may be unprecedented in industrial history.

    The real world arises organically as a self-organizing system, whole and complete at every step of its evolution. That is to say, it is incomparable – it’s what it is and what we are – and may be benign or destructive as we might inhabit it. A bio-physical system is ‘limited’ by the very interdependence of its diverse elements, such that individual behaviour is always governed by a superior context.

    Scientific materialism and the pathology of dissociation have led us astray. “For there is in the universe neither centre nor circumference”, wrote Giordano Bruno, “but if you will, the whole is central, and every point may also be regarded as part of a circumference in respect to some other central point”.

    Each one of us, then, is centre; each one of us manifests the whole, to put it another way. It follows that every identity is ‘I’; and in this sense there is no ‘you’, no other.

    In the face of this reality, capitalism rewards one at the expense of another, the few at the expense of the many. In the interest of accumulation, it externalizes costs – to the individual, society, and the environment. It is dehumanizing, anti-social, toxic,  ultimately self-destructive, and now global.

    We are preoccupied with solutions; but the critical choice is not between fossil fuels and renewables, but between a narrow rationalism and an expanded consciousness, between the sleep of reason and integrity. The crisis we are facing is not, in the first instance, a problem to be solved, but a failure to clearly perceive its cause.

    In the words of Jose Ortega y Gasset, “we do not know what is happening to us, and that is precisely the thing that is happening to us – the fact of not knowing what is happening to us”.[iv]

    [i] Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, Verso, London, 2001, p 8

    [ii] Jose Ortega y Gasset. Meditations on Don Quixote, quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Penguin, London, 1976

    [iii]op. cit.

    [iv] Jose Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis, Norton, New York, 1962, p.119

  • Visiting

    In February Anne faced the days with her usual shaky stoicism. She opened the curtains to cold stunted mornings glimmering through the window and at the bottom of the park the pathetic trees. At lunchtime Ryan’s was full of the office crowd so she went at three when she only had a couple of old timers and the occasional dog for company. The barmen knew her and brought a large one to the table when she had settled herself, then she felt OK and had another one. Anne thought about the letter in its pink envelope. She hadn’t opened it immediately but left it on the windowsill pretending not to notice it. When she put her coat on, she picked it up and turned it over to see if there was a return address, nothing. Finally, she slid a butter knife under the gummed flap and tore it open. At first it seemed like the letter was written in a foreign language, she couldn’t understand any of it. She looked again at the name and address on the envelope.

    It was getting on for five thirty when Anne left Ryan’s and crossed the road to Dunnes. She wandered through the shelves of fruit and vegetables, the brightly coloured packets of rice and pasta, put a net of oranges in her basket and a sliced pan. Just a sandwich this evening, cheese or a bit of ham maybe biscuits or a fruit cake? Well no. At the checkout a woman was emptying a full trolley, must have a few to feed at home Anne thought. The woman unloaded several packets of mince and a red pepper. This was going to take a while. There were a few people waiting now, the woman was nearly at the bottom only a couple of bottles of Fanta and a bottle of Coke to go. Anne put her items on the conveyor belt. The boy at the checkout looked at her briefly as he put the bottle of Smirnoff through. Tomorrow she’d go to Tesco’s.

    The letter was waiting for her when she got home. She smoothed out the page and put on her reading glasses. After she read through it quickly, she sat back. There could be a mistake there must be plenty of Anne Wilsons. How could her mother be alive after all these years with no word It was forty years since that night when Anne was nine years old, the night her mother disappeared. The bottle was within reach, and she poured herself a stiff one. Forty years is a long time still Anne could remember it clearly. It was a Friday night, and her birthday was next day. Ten years old, she would be a big girl and allowed to stay up late. Every detail of that night stood out sharply in her mind, but there was no warning that her mother wouldn’t be there next day. Her father said nothing and said nothing until the day he died. From then on was sad, the brightness was gone. It was worse than if her mother had died then Anne and Dad could have gone to the grave and put flowers on it and cried.

    Anne ordered the taxi for six. It was raining and traffic was slow. The taxi driver was listening to the evening news on the radio. Anne sat very still in the back seat waiting for the lights to change as the windscreen wipers swept back and forth making a squeaking noise on the windscreen. The news had given way to ads: insurance, face cream, cold remedies. Anne listened and looked at the lights smudged against the rain spattered glass. The lights turned to green, the taxi inched forward and then sped on unimpeded. It was moving steadily now making its way through gleaming wet streets. She was rarely in this part of town, the buildings seemed darker, the streets emptier. It stopped raining as the taxi drew up to the hospital entrance. She climbed the steep steps and pushed open the gigantic door. Anne’s memories of her mother were all bound up with her disappearance. No child can accept abandonment, there had to be a reason. All through her teens she was haunted by a phantom mother, a mother that didn’t leave. At eighteen she had her first drink. It was in the Palace Bar sitting on high stools with Paul a guy from her class in college. Anne raised her glass of orange and vodka to her mouth and the pain she wasn’t even aware of vanished. A comfortable numbness gathered around her neck and shoulders. In that instant she knew she needed it and that she wanted more.

    The hospital was vast and gloomy, there was no sign of her. How would Anne even recognise her? She went to the nurse’s station, but there was no one there. Wandering aimlessly, she eventually noticed some movement from one of the beds, a tiny woman was waving frantically at her.

    ‘Come here, come here,’ she gasped.

    Was this her mother? Maybe she had expected a monster not a little bundle with snowy hair and a soft pink bed jacket.

    ‘It’s you I knew you as soon as I saw you. Do you hate me? Please don’t hate                    me I couldn’t bear it’

    Anne sat down.

    ‘What should I call you?’

    ‘Oh, call me Margaret,’ her face dimpled into a girlish smile.

    ‘Why are you here? Are you ill?’ Anne asked carefully.

    Margaret’s smile faded she plucked distractedly at her bed jacket and blew her nose.

    ‘Yes’, she said in a small voice. ‘I’ve got cancer’.

    Anne caught sight of herself in the window her hair grey and unkempt, her skin greyer still. She didn’t feel able to offer sympathy. It was forty years too late, but still she had the decency to pretend. She was well practised at passing herself off as a decent human being. She turned to her mother.

    ‘I’m so sorry is there anything you need?’

    Her mother’s blue eyes were closing, she tried to say something, but she was overcome with sleep. Anne stood up and bent over the sleeping woman pulling the blankets around her then left the way she had come.

    After she graduated Anne and Paul got married and bought a house. They tried to be like everyone else. They had a normal mortgage and a normal car. They got up in the mornings like everyone else and went to work, but that was where it ended. At home with the T.V. turned up loud so the neighbours couldn’t hear they argued heatedly and without inhibition. Alcohol no longer sedated Anne’s anger but seemed to fuel it. There was guilt, shame and above all the need to escape. Still, they went to the pub, on her third double vodka Anne convinced herself this was a good life, the only life she deserved and then the drinks would work their magic once again. One night Paul collapsed and was brought to the cardiac care unit in James’ St Hospital. A year later he didn’t get that far. The house was empty without him. The silent kitchen reminded her of the angry words that had passed between them. She hadn’t told him she loved him for a long time. In work it was harder to hide that things weren’t the way they should be so when she told her boss she was planning early retirement he didn’t discourage her.

    She was alarmed to see her mother wasn’t there when she visited again. Then behind her a voice called:

    ‘Yoo hoo it’s me I’m not dead yet.’

    Margaret grinned impishly at her from the confines of a wheelchair.

    ‘Will you get into the bed for me,’ the nurse cajoled.

    When she was settled Margaret turned to Anne and said:

    ‘Oh, good now we can have a nice chat.’

    Anne stiffened.

    ‘I think you need to tell me where you’ve been all these years.’

    ‘I met a man who was kind to me,’ Margaret said seriously. And I thought love was the most important thing in the world.’

    ‘It is,’ Anne surprised herself by saying. ‘But why didn’t you take me with you?’

    The older woman started to cry. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.

    ‘You have no idea how many times I asked myself that and then time passed so quickly, and I thought it was too late.’

    ‘You don’t think it’s too late now?’, Anne asked bitterly.

    ‘Was it hard for you?’, Margaret ventured.

    ‘You could say that.’

    Anne leaned back in her chair. Then from somewhere deep in her chest she started to laugh. At first Margaret looked shocked and then soon she was chuckling too. Before long the two women were bent over with laughter. It resounded around the ward, down the corridor and out into the star-studded night.

    February gave way to March and at the beginning of April when the light is beginning to brighten in the sky Margaret slipped away in her sleep like a child exhausted by play. It was a small gathering at the funeral just one or two nurses from the hospital and some other people Anne didn’t know including a tall man with curly hair wearing a long grey overcoat. She found herself leaving the crematorium with him.

    ‘Did you know her well’, he asked.

    ‘No, I really only got to know her recently, but you could say we go back a long way.’

    ‘I’m her son David,’ he said smiling a familiar youthful smile.

    Next morning when Anne opened the curtains pale lemon sunshine washed the famished lawn. Eggshell blue sky, fresh and limitless roofed the world. Spring had arrived in person and to Anne this time it seemed different. There was nothing special about the daffodils clustered under the trees even the birds’ carefree song had been sung a thousand times before, but there was a detail and Anne had noticed first thing. When she opened her eyes this morning she hadn’t wanted to escape.

    Feature Image: Irina Iriser

     

     

     

  • Featured Artist: Caleb Butterly

    As a child I was drawn to draw figures. I watched my mother paint and listened to my father tell stories. As my study and practice of art and anatomy have progressed in depth and complexity so too has my choice of models.

    As we all grow, live, love and age we acquire scars, stretchmarks, mum tums, cellulite, lines, fat and much more. All of these surface details for me have come to be the most precious parts of humanity’s patina.

    Grey Morning.

    When nude we show much of our lived story in our skin and form and my art strives to take the time to pause and explore these lives and celebrate their beauty. Paintings for me are a one frame play using light, line, value and colour that can draw out the best parts of not just the model’s unique story but in a way that most of us can relate to and admire.

    In a time where scrolling airbrushed myriad images and rapid videos is the unhealthy and unsatisfying trend, take the time to stop and look at just one image for a while and enjoy the anti-scrolling that is visual art and the cure for many of western humanities current maladies.

    Many of my models are amateur first-timers and model for me upon hearing of a friend or acquaintance of theirs having already enjoyed modelling for me. I’ve spoken to all about their motivations, and none have felt their body or story typically celebrated in mass media.

    Red Thread No. 9.

    Rather than erase the signs of aging to look like the fictional 1% that is sold to us, my art utilises the marks of aging from a genuine love and appreciation of greater complexity in forms that only comes as people age and mature. For me, the human form is the greatest narrative device and I love using it to explore and celebrate the bittersweet lives we all live through our bodies.

    I have always been driven to make things and learn through my broad range of interests, which has seen me live a somewhat fractured life professionally and educationally. I went from studying engineering to completing degrees in both sport science and psychology. My father was a fisherman, and I went from working for him to labourer, bin-man, barman, office worker, assistant psychologist in a prison, fine art metal worker in a bronze foundry and now a welder for over a decade.

    It was working in the bronze foundry with other artists that showed me making art was the one thing that united and made sense of the fractured parts of myself.

    Metal Men No.1.

    Eleven years ago after a divorce I set about researching and teaching myself the methods of realist drawing and painting in the traditional fashion.

    After building my skill set I then set about working with models to make the art I wanted to see made. I’ve exhibited and sold numerous works at art shows and events while working fulltime and been rejected by near every gallery I’ve approached.

    Nudes, even ones as good as I make, are a hard sell in Ireland. Most of the younger, less conservative people who love my work have neither the spare income to buy art, let alone a house with walls to hang.

    Eventually Giovanni from GalleryX saw my work at Artsource and offered me a solo show. This show represents over ten years of study, work, practice, rejection, small wins and unwavering passion for the human form and the importance of visual art in our lives – now more than ever.

    My Red Thread series explores a common but diverse element that to me seemed present in all of my work with female models and expressed through their connection to fabric and objects of a deep red colour.

    Red Thread No.3.

    I don’t have the words for this exploration. Hence I have nine paintings that do what words or music or film cannot. The paintings themselves, like all of my work, are only ever completed when viewed and experienced.

    The possible similarities and diversity in the experiences of these myriad completions in the mind’s eye of the viewer, and the range and overlap with the experiences of the models themselves, are what this series of works explores.

    Making a living as an artist is a challenge, but living as an artist and art lover is something that makes every living day a feast for the eyes.

    Metal Men No. 6.

    I have worked as metalworker for over a decade and two dominant colours I get to enjoy as an artist in great variety of hue and form are that of sand-blasted grey steel and orange- brown oxide rust. I have incorporated these colours into my Metal Men series which seeks to explore themes around modern fragile masculinity, violence and depression and surrender to the grind of life and one’s own demons. This series is additionally personal to me as for many of these first pieces I have used myself as model and actor.

    Both of these series of paintings, along with sixteen other figurative works will be available to view and buy as part of my first solo exhibition in Gallery X, Hume Street in the heart of Dublin from May 3rd to 18th.

    Follow Caleb Butterly on Instagram.

    Featured Image: Red Thread no.7.

  • Podcast: China, COVID-19 and the Viscount

    Listen to Part 2 (Bonus Episode) by subscribing (from just €5 p.m.) on Patreon.

    You can also listen to Part 2 (Bonus Episode) by subscribing (from €15 p.a. for all episodes) on Apple Podcasts.

    Did COVID-19 originate from a pathway connected to China’s trade in wildlife-for-consumption, or did laboratory activity trigger the pandemic? Where do things stand with the so-called Lab Leak Hypothesis? One thing is for sure: in this pressing matter, one of the hardest combined attitudes to take is to be both engaged and polite.

    Many combatants, previously capable of professional comportment, have descended into bare knuckle insults of the kind academe has not seen since the world decided one must be on the Left or the Right, or that one should comport oneself responsibly in the face of a Cold War that may become hot. Are you on the right side of history, or involved at all? You are either ready for flak, in this situation, or keep your head down.

    Many scientists with an opinion worth sharing are choosing not to do so.

    They might be wise. After all, some of this fighting has gotten dirty. Where some engaged in respectable debate before, rivals are now trying to cancel and professionally immolate one another. Direct exchange rather than article or book writing now makes up the majority of this discourse. Peer-reviewed articles on either side of this exchange have been few. Before you say – ‘That’s because there’s no evidence for the lab-leak’, or ‘That’s because there’s no evidence for the wet market/ zoonosis’, consider this: the Chinese government most likely had insight, and most likely destroyed evidence related to one or the other.

    Viscount Matt Ridley, our interviewee here, has been both interested and engaged with the question of the virus origin since the start. He has been so without lapsing into ad hominem jibes. Though he has lapsed into Twitter exchanges of fire, his manner throughout has been civil. He stands with scientists, skilled researchers and a majority of the public in thinking that COVID-19 resulted most probably in a misadventure connected to a Chinese lab.

    This does not mean he is correct.

    Why is it important to point this out? In a context where both sides of a highly contentious argument disagree over all but the smallest of premises, the question of decency – and its cousin attributes honesty and responsibility – does come to the fore. Decency is also a cousin of openness by the way, and as we encircle in our conversation, China’s rulers have been anything but open. Therefore, take a listen to this exchange, and a look at Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book, as a start about posing this question for yourself. For all of us who lived through the pandemic, and in memory of those who didn’t, asking questions about its origins remains a primary part of the aftermath.

    Read Luke Sheehan’s account of his time in China, published by The Lilliput Press.

  • LONG READ: The Sleep of Reason I

    It is a notable feature of the prevailing world order that citizens of Western states, in particular, are significantly ill-informed and mis-informed of the past and present contexts of either their disadvantage or their comfort. For centuries the corporate/political/church covenant (imperialism) has sucked the earth of its bounty, dissipated its coherence, shattered communities and brought it to the edge of ruin. It accomplished this through the exploitation, enslavement, dispossession, degradation, starvation and murder of countless millions of fellow human beings.

    Upon this base history and its persistence rest our affluence and our inequalities, the persuasive delusions of Western civilization (“our values”), its obtrusive superiority and an unrestrained financial sector that through the extension of rentier/monopoly/surveillance capitalism has all but established a global imperium.

    Moreover, this supranational dominance has a forceful ally in its dis-integration of the world in the mis-conceived dogma of scientific materialism that reduces life to matter, minds to brains, whole self-organizing organisms to constituent parts; that effects the enclosure of everything spontaneous, primary, vital, and has generated a bio-tech industry determined to exploit the common process of becoming as if it was just another thing.

    During a period of lockdown, I reopened a book on Goya[i] that I hadn’t read for many years.  Any study of Goya is likely to reproduce his etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. This was intended as the frontispiece of Los Caprichos, a series of 80 etchings published in 1799 that were a cutting satire of Spanish society at the time.

    What gave rise, at fifty-eight years of age to the sudden disillusionment of the successful court painter has long been a matter of speculation. A serious illness in 1792 had left him permanently deaf and he was overworked, trapped by too many commissions. Burdened by demands, constrained by compromise and impelled by a maturing self-realization, creativity and assertiveness, his social position was becoming precarious and the conflict was perhaps too much to bear. Thankfully, he still had thirty years ahead of him and these years freed him enough to become the artist so admired today.

    The usual reading of this striking work (published as Capricho 43 and replaced on the title page by a self-portrait) is that without reason we are susceptible to the naivety, superstitions and ignorance of our irrational impulses. It is a common theme of Enlightenment thinking, central to its comforting tale of intellectual and cultural progression, and it underpins the white-supremacist ideology of Western imperialism, as we shall see.

    And fair enough, the reforms of Charles III notwithstanding, Spain at the time was   the Spain that endured for so long – stuck in its ways, morally enervated and restrained by the barbarity of the Spanish Inquisition. That Goya was eventually appalled at the indolence and hypocrisy of Spanish high society and the regressive influence of a hidebound clergy is not surprising.

    However, it is also a simplistic narrative which I’ll return to later, but to be clear, no one can be sure exactly what Goya was trying to express when he conceived the image. In any case, the purpose of this essay is not to put Goya on the couch, so to speak, but to explain why I found Capricho 43 such an arresting image at the height of the COVID panic and to pursue the train of thought that it provoked.

    It is not the least of the failings of much social and political commentary these days, especially in the mainstream media, that history begins with the latest headline; that, as it has been said, “it is all text and no context”. To this end we need to go back in time.

    Almost exactly two hundred years before Goya published Los Caprichos, Don Quixote de la Mancha rode out like an epic hero of old to confront “at least thirty outrageous giants” that ranged before him and his squire, Sancho Panza, on the plain of Montiel. Impelled only by his own will and disregarding his squire’s assurances that they were windmills, Don Quixote spurred on his horse till he came before his foe. Then, “covering himself with his shield and couching his lance,” he charged, plunged it into the unrelenting sail…..and was tossed aside by the great machine.

    “Mercy on me, cried Sancho…did I not tell you they were windmills, and that nobody could think otherwise, unless he had also windmills in his head”. To no avail.

    Don Quixote by Honoré Daumier (1868).

    Tilting at Windmills

    And so his adventures proceed. This celebrated episode, though it only takes up a couple of pages near the beginning of a book of approximately 750 pages sets the tone for the rest – by part tragic, comic, ironic.

    Deluded clown, romantic idealist, assertive self-hood: all this and more have been read into the character of the famous knight-errant. That Cervantes intended it as, in some sense, a parody of the chivalric tale seems to be so. But, perhaps most importantly, as the diverse interpretations of the work themselves might indicate, it is a compelling portrait of an individual caught between two worlds.

    It was written at a time when the long transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world was reaching a conclusion. The trappings of the centralised state: bureaucracy, social control, militarism and an economy favouring capital accumulation – all so familiar to us now – were being established at this time.

    The sixteenth century opened with death, destruction and unparalleled savagery in Central and South America. It was accompanied at home by large land enclosures and dispossession. And witch trials, actually an occasional occurrence in the Medieval Period, proliferated throughout Europe.

    The seventeenth century continued the pattern with a huge growth of standing armies; the Thirty Years War that decimated Central Europe; genocide in South and Central America repeated in the North; the transatlantic slave trade; and, crucially, the establishment of the world’s first joint-stock company (forerunner of the modern corporation) in Amsterdam.

    As Fabian Scheidler argues in his succinct history of our capitalist civilization,[ii] European economies had developed into what was essentially a circular war economy. European states borrowed enormous amounts of money to finance wars  at home and exploitation abroad. The riches they acquired were largely used to  repay banks, who, in turn, lent more money and so on.

    It was a system that made “entrepreneurs”, war-profiteers, and banks extremely rich, but shattered communities and beggared populations at large. The physical power of the state was indispensable to the project, but the state’s role, it is important to note,  was not in the first instance to extend its power, but to facilitate capital accumulation by a privileged few.

    This, then, was the social environment in which that other pillar of the modern world arose. The development of science is portrayed as the triumph of rationality over irrationality, verifiable knowledge over superstition, and more. But the actual science that developed resulted from an evolving sense of individual autonomy and mathematical clarity and, for reasons to be discussed, it generated an ideology favoured by the forcible socio-economic power structures of the day.

    Furthermore, this type of science did not so much replace religion as the ideological basis of society as extend its dualistic thinking to the relationship between humanity and the natural world – from God versus man to man versus nature.

    To be clear, the problem is not with science per se, but with the reductionist worldview that underlies it and the vested interests that support it. That we should look at the world without pre-conceived ideas or doctrinal certainties and let it speak for itself is fine. And it would be ridiculous to disavow astonishing discoveries in  every field and technological achievements in engineering, medicine and so much more. While the many social advances that would eventually arrive in the wake of modernity can hardly be disregarded – although we in the West are mostly indifferent to the exploitation on which our complacency rests.

    And it might be added that the values of justice, freedom and equality which are the hallmarks of a liberal democracy are routinely circumscribed by class. Laws may be inscribed, but bias is ingrained.

    This is not intended to establish some imagined pre-modern, universal state of nature, but the mutual emergence in this period of a strict rationality in both science and a system of market economics, whereby the intrinsic, or use-value, of material necessity and nourishment is subordinated to its exchange-value in the capitalist marketplace, was problematic from the outset.

    Since the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping in the fourteenth century, income and expenditure could be formulated mathematically and profit or loss calculated accurately. Increasingly, the focus of trade became profit: to repay lenders if finance had been required and to accumulate money.

    Ted Dace has described the outcome of this process clearly: ‘As the basis of economics becomes the trade itself and not the tangible thing exchanged, money is transformed into an all-consuming monster. No longer bound up with the limitations of actual land, people and resources, it springs to life, an abstraction with a will of its own.’[iii]

    By now it is our most pressing need and its acquisition has become an urgent necessity for the many, superfluous wealth for the few; it delineates the structural hierarchy of class and serves as a measure of human worth generally. But, as Ted Dace cautions, ‘sooner or later abstraction runs up against reality.’

    Meanwhile, the real economy of everyday life has been all but consumed by the predation of finance capitalism and corporate monopoly. And the basic needs of a sustainable life for so many people have become subservient to a parasitic imperative of making money out of money, out of you.

    Nicolaus Copernicus.

    Like Clockwork

    When Copernicus turned cosmology on its head in 1543 he began a process, unimaginable then, that would in time overwhelm God himself. The mathematical precision that astronomy seemed to reveal encouraged the idea that all physical interactions on earth could be so understood.

    Thus, Johannes Kepler wrote in 1605: “My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to clockwork ….. Moreover, I show how this physical conception is to be presented through calculation and geometry”.

    A few years later Galileo was unequivocal: “When God produces the world, he produces a thoroughly mathematical structure that obeys the laws of number, geometrical figure and quantitative function, Nature is an embodied mathematical system.” And even more emphatically: “Reality is that which can be described mathematically. Everything else is illusion.”

    In the Medieval period and, as a general rule, most human cultures that ever existed or survived outside the modern age, the world as a whole was organic and alive, to a greater or lesser extent indivisible, and sustained by an animating principle – God, Spirit, Soul, or the many poetic metaphors of world mythology.

    This philosophia perennis, so-called, is an expression of experience rather than ideas. It is a philosophy, or understanding, of our inner nature and the common experience of being. And, perhaps for this reason, the archetypal symbols  generated by it are recognizably similar across many outwardly diverse cultures.

    And considering that the deep reality of being is beyond intellectual grasp, scriptural certainty, and social constraint, it relies on mythopoetic metaphor and the affective power of ritual to express what is essentially ineffable, and to relate it to the cycle of daily life.

    Portrait of Giordano Bruno.

    Giordano Bruno

    The introduction of the heliocentric model by Copernicus, and its determination by others, so stormed the citadel of belief the full weight of The Inquisition bore down on Galileo – who wavered. The recalcitrant Giordano Bruno supported Copernicus, but his philosophy cut much deeper.

    Bruno and others before him had regard for these words from a twelfth century hermetic text, The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere”. But if the very idea of centre has no meaning, as this suggests, then the fixed framework, a sort of cosmic theatre of space and time in which the universal process unfolds – and on which a mechanistic science depends – means nothing either. With it goes anything fundamental and we are left, it would seem, with no ultimate principle or recourse.

    Yet Bruno’s view of the universe was far more profound than anything Galileo could ever have observed through his telescope. All Galileo could see was the inflexible authority of a mathematical system – that must definitively exclude the possibility of an evolving cosmos. And vindication would arrive three hundred years later when Einstein established relativity as a scientific principle.

    Nonetheless, we are all here, alive, and conscious of our continuing existence. Being is absolute; our presence is substantial. For all the relativity of physics – and quantum uncertainty – the daylight world of consciousness is whole, it is now, it endures. Life is immanent, some process is generating it, and experience is real.

    This, of course, is a great mystery that wells like a spring within each of us and the world in which we live. At the same time, it is beyond us, beyond apprehension and the linear logic of language. The mystery is us; for which reason we cannot know it objectively.

    Bruno had much else to say about doctrinal matters, the function of a church and its undesirable interference in philosophical or scientific inquiry. Refusing to recant and pursued around Europe, he was eventually cornered in Venice and spent eight years in the dungeons of the Inquisition in Rome. Still obdurate, condemned and consigned to a foretaste of the flames of hell, he spoke these telling words: “You pronounce sentence upon me perhaps with a greater fear than that with which I receive it.”

    In this tumultuous period, the authority of Catholic dogma was losing its grip as science and philosophy advanced, and no amount of bible thumping could secure it. An existent mythology or set of beliefs cannot prevail when there is no consent to meaning. In fact, no established canon can remain consistent with the evolution of experience and understanding. Although the dead weight of its persistence can overwhelm the embodiment of a new sensibility at the heart of an emergent culture.

    Bruno’s pointed accusation largely explains the deranged reaction to his ideas and the science of Galileo and others. The suppressive resolve of the Inquisition was frantic and irrational, but the leading lights of the Reformation clung even more tightly to the Bible. Martin Luther let go of it occasionally to fling his ink pot at the devil but was otherwise unrestrained in his invective against Copernicus and his followers.

    Bruno, for all his profanities, still had God on his side, so to speak, but it couldn’t save him from the intense conviction of The Holy Office of the Inquisition. Neither science, philosophy, nor the evidence of the senses could be permitted to challenge the insistent truths of Holy Scripture and that was final. The authenticity of individual experience was no match for the infallible authority of “revelation”, and another way is intolerable when conduct is prescribed on tablets of stone. Such is the power of The Word as all good book-thumpers, from St. Paul to Chairman Mao, to neo-liberal economists know well.

    But mere obedience to a precept could never be said to awaken the soul to the redemptive power of a mythic or religious tradition. To interpret its symbolism as literal and historic is to profoundly misunderstand its character as an evocation of our inner nature and the mystery of becoming; and to miss entirely the deeper meaning it holds within its poetic folds for the cosmological, sociological, and psychological orders of existence.

    Biblical literalism and Pauline universalism are the solid ground of our presumptive superiority and missionary impulse. For centuries they have been both pretext and apologia for white-supremacist imperialism. Unparalleled in its destructive violence throughout the long history of humankind; and all the more menacing because the espousing nations have managed to persuade the greater part of their populations that its cruelty and its condescension are the precise opposite of this reality. We are really impelled by the best of intentions.

    The only thing to add to this continuing horror story is that, as Fabian Scheidler has emphasised, the missionary zeal of a church, now in decline, has been assumed by the high- priests of globalist organizations such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. And an amoral cabal of investment banks, hedge-funds, corporate raiders, property speculators and sovereign bondholders (to list only the most obvious) feasting on unearned income from monopoly rights, speculative gains, political favour, and predatory credit.

    Furthermore, since 2008 it has been clearer than ever that those who command capital control the world; that the present system secures the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands; and that its beneficiaries have forgotten, if they ever knew, the theme of countless tales and fables the world over – that to have everything is to have nothing.

    The interior of Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana, California.

    The Metaphor of the Machine

    Science, as we know it today, developed in a world in which capitalism was well established, accustomed to quantification and already defined to some extent, therefore, by mathematics and the ‘laws’ of the capitalist marketplace. In other words, a strictly rational tone was already sounding when Kepler and Galileo began their inquiries.

    Under the sway of mathematics everything becomes a number. The world is what can be measured, and measurement defines reality. The moral power and mechanistic bias of science would confirm the imperialist/capitalist dream. Everything, including all that lives and all that sustains life, could be abstracted, quantified, and assigned an exchange value. Whether a bushel of grain, a slave in the fields, or a cog in an industrial machine, all were just so many commodities to be used, abused, bought, and sold.

    Just as our privileged position at the centre of the universe was being usurped by the Copernican revolution and Bruno’s relativism, the organic worldview of tradition was being steamrolled by the metaphor of the machine.

    But if Kepler and Galileo saw an image of the machine and the unerring mathematics of clockwork in the orbits of celestial bodies and in physical processes on earth, Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, and others later extended the metaphor to include living organisms. And the science that developed from this radical epistemological shift would shape both society and human consciousness and establish a scientific orthodoxy that has survived to the present day.

    That authoritarian states and capitalist elites with imperial interests and ambitions would welcome these reductionist assertions and favour the scientific consensus that advanced them is no surprise. Class warfare at home and genocide abroad are less troubling with convictions like these. A machine, after all, is determinable, controllable, and dispensable.

    It should be said that these early mechanists were still devout. But the world was no longer alive. It was now thought of as inanimate matter, designed by God but governed by fixed mathematical principles. In a sense, then, the scientist was extending God’s work on earth, and in such a way the quasi-religious status of science began to emerge.

    For Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in whom the notion of a scientific priesthood was first conceived, the development of Western civilization would be a scientific and engineering project defined by his slogan, “knowledge is power”.

    God would be a bystander, but we were doing his work. With God on our side and the power of science the world would lay itself open and there would be nothing we couldn’t know or conquer – a presumption of omniscience that still prevails in the scientific community.

    It should also be said that dissenting voices were raised. Not all scientists were prepared to degrade life to this extent. But the church itself had mastered its alarm and ceded worldly matters to the domain of science, while it would continue to look after our souls and prepare us all for Paradise.

    That art, science and philosophy were now free to pursue their own interests without having to look over their shoulder at the stern face of one of God’s representatives on earth, or his legion of scriptural zealots, is one of the boons of modernity, unquestionably. That these three branches would in time diverge and simply feed off themselves would become a significant problem. But, meantime, a modus vivendi had become established; and that such an arrangement would be uncontentious is largely due to a shared dualism.

    Religion and science were agreed: the spiritual and material realms were separate and distinct – God above, humanity and the world below.

    Up to this point, three orders of existence were recognized: body, soul, and spirit. Our bodies were connected to the spiritual realm through our souls – the ‘rational soul’ of man, in Christian theology and the equivalent, to all intents and purposes, of the human mind, which was, as yet, regarded as immaterial.

    Mechanistic science may have removed soul from nature but, since human beings (well, cultivated minds at any rate) considered themselves a cut above brute existence they were still thought to have souls (or minds, or free-will) through which they interacted with God and put themselves in line for eternal life. But all the rest, the whole ecology of living, was mechanical, purposeless, and determined. And our disconnection from nature and more holistic modes of understanding sank into the culture with ruinous consequences.

    As dispiriting as this might seem, we could still rely on our God as ideological support, dispeller of doubt and final consolation. But his days were numbered. The convenient accord with the church was never going to survive the rapid progress of science and the no doubt exhilarating sensation that “knowledge is power”. Every advance would endorse the swelling authority of science and install reliable principles such as Newton’s deterministic laws of motion.

    This burgeoning faith in science, reason and human progress is what we know today as The Enlightenment. Edge God aside and it is the prototype of contemporary secular humanism.

    “The Blue Marble” is a photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17.

    From ‘Believe in God’ to ‘Trust the Science’

    A machine requires a maker and God made the world we were taught. But the more science discovered about the world-machine the more it became clear that, once set in motion, further divine intervention was unnecessary. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, it was also evident that there was no scientific rationale for God either. Fifty years later conspicuous atheism would provoke no censure and materialism was a firmly established tenet of scientific endeavour.

    In the orthodox view the universe is composed entirely of matter. The energy that activates it is also material, or physical. It operates according to fixed laws that can be observed, measured, and formulated – and it is fully determined by them. Like a machine it is a hierarchy of parts right down to the “ultimate building-blocks” of sub-atomic particles and chemical molecules. Even biology is reducible in this way, and in the end, there need be nothing we cannot know.

    Of course, if these are a priori assumptions then complete knowledge is indeed possible – it’s a foregone conclusion. That actual science has long since swept many of these assumptions aside has not radically removed them from the core belief system of scientific dogma and, crucially, from its day-to-day application.

    As a firmly entrenched belief it has replaced religion as the authoritative voice in contemporary society. The peremptory watchword “believe in God” has been superseded by “trust the science”. Its dogmatic purpose is no different and it was used to effect during the pandemic as a marketing slogan for social compliance and pharmaceutical profit.

    In any case, the injunction to “trust the science” simply points up the conventional morass into which scientific orthodoxy has sunk. Science is supposed to be about open inquiry, not a defence of “the science” as if certain matters were resolved beyond question just like old-style religion.

    Science prides itself on its empiricism and its positivism. Fair enough; it has undoubtedly been an effective strategy and the basis of unprecedented technological development, but all experience must now defer to the “scientific method”.

    The objective world of facts: length, height, weight, motion, capacity, etc., from the stars to sub-atomic particles, is the real world. A world objectively apparent, but devoid of meaning, purpose, or self-existence. Moreover, it disallows subjective experience (reality for most of us) and diminishes your creative presence to the point of disappearance.

    Excluded from the terms of the world-machine are those elusive qualities of existence that make us feel alive. Whole organisms are more than the sum of their parts and it is this ‘more’ that is forever beyond the materialist’s scope.

    Science can tell you all about life, but it cannot tell you what life is. It can describe the surface of things, but not their substance. The scientist may well stand to one side (in a confusion of subject and object) and probe every inch of you, but life will not be pinned.

    Scientists can’t seem to start with a whole organism in its environment and develop a methodology to understand it in these terms as a living phenomenon, in a way that does not involve objectification and dissection – even though it is instantaneously apparent to direct experience.

    And one viewpoint need not necessarily delegitimize the other. One could accept both as two sides of a coin, but science insists on its “truth” as superior.

    Thomas Jones, The Bard, 1774.

    Romanticism

    The idea that science alone could define our world was challenged with great energy by the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It left its mark but was no match for the brutal industrialism and economic liberalism of the Victorian era, that explicated Bacon’s rationale.

    That said, it would be some time before some scientists would dare to insist that manifest qualities of human nature are illusory; that even the sense of our own being is delusional; that nihilism would be celebrated in literature and philosophy and disintegration of form become the measure of art. And it will perhaps be a little more time before ‘intelligence’ is boxed and the scientifically emancipated individual of the Enlightenment will be, finally, almost fully dehumanized.

    But hands up how many of you feel like a machine (as opposed to perhaps being treated like one!). The very idea is clearly nonsensical. In short, a machine is lifeless so how on earth did it ever come be identified with life. It’s hard to imagine even the most ardent materialists can really regard themselves as glorified machines and the world as clockwork, but their science is conducted as if universal existence is material, mechanical, mathematically determined and nothing else.

    For Descartes, humanity was uniquely raised above this perfunctory level by the human mind, or soul, which is immaterial and part of our ‘higher’ or spiritual nature. Today’s materialist can invoke no such redemption since the mind has been reduced to the brain – which marvellous (and perplexing) organ has itself been reduced to a personified data processor and control centre.

    And while on the face of it, religious creationists and scientific materialists seem at opposite extremes, they in fact make common cause, both in their determinism and their appeal to either an external deity or some deus ex machina such as genetic programs, or ‘laws’ of nature.

    Set against both the religious duality of God and humanity, spirit and matter, and the reductive objectivity of scientific analysis and its duality of subject and object (a make-believe world constructed from without) is the immediacy of feeling. The world before our eyes, present to the senses; the sublime plenitude of life, its constancy, its astonishing detail, process within process; a universal accord that could only have evolved as an integrated whole.

    There can be moments in life when we forget ourselves, captured by the intensity of experience. Moments of rapture or clarity, free of distraction or intent, that feel complete, and doubt and endeavour dissolve in the pure sensation of being alive. Typically, these moments are fleeting, not a state of permanent bliss. Nor should they be. The everyday is normal; there is a living to be progressed. But they reveal an immediate reality beyond cold hard facts.

    The philosopher Alan Watts once joked that in sober society, it seemed, normality was the world seen on a wet Monday morning. The daylight world of consciousness  is inescapably the plane on which our daily lives unfold. But science has extended its scepticism to the ‘childhood’ of our religious beliefs to anything beyond its scope. God is not a testable hypothesis, but neither is the very real sensation I’ve just described.

    Image Daniel Idini (c)

    A World of Things

    Science is decisive: the limits of its application define our worldview and determine its commonplace expression. But it generates a world of things, a world without context or meaning. As a consequence, we now live in a forest of facts and can’t see the wood for the trees.

    This objective world of facts and things seems real and obvious, which it is, and most of us aren’t bothered by post-modernist allegations that it’s all just interpretation. But at a deeper level there is no such thing as a thing. Which is simply to say that no-thing can exist as an isolated entity apart from other things.

    A tree, for instance, seems unequivocally present and specific, but it can only arise and endure as a system of transpiration, photosynthesis and more, supported by an underground universe of micro-organisms. In other words, a tree is more properly thought of as a process. A process, what’s more, that is inextricably interdependent with our own continuing existence through the interchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen.

    It follows that every other thing (and this includes us) is also a process that can only exist within the greater process of life as a whole. It is this essential truth of being, not sentiment or scientific necessity that commits us to earth, water, fire, and air. We are nature. Consequently, any de-spoilation of the world or nullification of others is an offence against our selves.

    But the language of science is definitive. It supports a methodology that sets the world apart and fails to see that the objective distinction of things is by convention only: that the everyday world of material culture is real at that level, but that a deeper unity underlies it.

    The stupendous diversity, adaptivity and integrity of our world – our being – evolved without direction or external law. That is to say, “laws of nature” are implicit. What makes life consistent is that, as it appears in the moment and evolves over time, it establishes patterns. And what makes a pattern a pattern is that it repeats (becomes a “law”). More than anything else living organisms are habitual. As they reproduce and grow and reproduce and grow, they follow well-worn paths. And old habits die hard. Apples can’t be oranges. The young cuckoo abandoned in its egg flies south in autumn.

    Habitual behaviour is unconscious. A couple of cells grow into ten trillion. That’s ‘easily’ explained. A ‘genetic program’ underlies it biologists assure us; even though they can barely define a gene and the complexity of cellular development is impossible to fully describe. But a living organism has been formed: one that for the duration of its life is present, constant, adaptive, and purposeful. Try explaining that.

    How genes alone could have the determining power of organic development is a modern mystery. How can genes, chemical molecules in the nucleus of a cell, be purposive while the whole organism is mere machine and fully determined?  The soul, Rupert Sheldrake suggests, has been resurrected in the genome.[iv]

    The expectations of The Human Genome Project have not been realized; in fact, many were confounded. Sure enough, DNA keeps yourself to yourself so to speak, but suddenly everything was ‘genetic’. The cause of all disease and even aberrant human behaviour, not to mention your very appearance (good, bad, or indifferent) was hidden in those helical strands.

    We were to finally uncover “the secret of life”. Just as in physics, the atom, and then sub-atomic particles (hundreds now and counting – if they hang around long enough) were thought to constitute the ultimate building blocks of matter, so human biology could be reduced to the molecular level. Our lives are just a matter of physics and chemistry.

    What was actually discovered was incalculable complexity, so intricate it resists scientific analysis. Mechanical explanations fall far short. Whole organisms can never be explained in terms of their parts (if you could even isolate parts in this case). And yet an industry has been capitalized as if, and has stepped, like a bull in a china shop, into a dynamic, balanced process common to all life with who knows what consequences.

    Furthermore, that such prodigious expansion of interconnected and interdependent life since ‘day one’ could be solely due to the random mutation of genes favoured by  natural selection; that integrity in the whole could be produced and sustained by chance in the particular (as is current mechanistic orthodoxy), is a stroke of luck so far beyond calculation as to make the proposition meaningless.

    It is also at odds with Darwin himself, in whose view it is the organism that adapts to environmental pressure, and those adaptions are then inherited by its progeny.

    The inheritance of acquired characteristics is not easily understood, certainly. But there is no evidence it is genetic. Since genes only exist as integral parts of a whole organism, it is only within a machine theory of life they could be said to determine organic formation or carry that ‘information’ from one generation to the next.

    In other words, evolution is a creative process, not a blind mechanism; a sensual interplay of organism and environment, in a world, not determined but open, and committed to its fulfilment – whatever that might be – only as the seed is committed to flower.

    Feature Image: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Francisco Goya, c.1799, Etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin, Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

    [i] Gwyn A. Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution, Penguin Books, England,1976.

    [ii] Fabian Scheidler. The End of the Megamachine, Zero Books, England, 2020.

    [iii] Ted Dace, Escape from Quantopia, Collective Insanity in Science and Society,  Iff Books. UK and USA  2014. p.208.

    [iv] Rupert Sheldrake. The Science Delusion, Coronet, England, 2013.

  • Poem: ‘Faerie Fire’ by Rye Jaffe

    Faerie Fire

    From forests, fields and fens, fair folk are found,
    where witchery winds with the wailing wind,
    dug deep down dreams drooled by departed drowned,
    as painfully professed by powers pinned.
    In iron, imps immersed incur ill eye,
    manacled to mortal machinations,
    while led by living lights, our lost lives lie
    sunk ‘neath stars of shoreless sublimation.
    Hence, happiness haunts high in harrowed hells
    as eldritch escorts eagerly enthrall,
    with conjured chains to clasp close cloistered cells
    run red by romance rebuffing recall.
    And nevermore need namesakes now be known,
    to those tied tight unto this twilight throne.


    Feature Image: The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania by Joseph Noel Paton (1849)

  • Featured Artist: Dorje de Burgh

    My relationship with making art began aged twenty-one as a means to bolster my ego and be cool. I chose photography, mainly because I can’t draw. Also my mum and her brothers were into photography in their twenties, so there were a few nice old cameras around my house when I was growing up. 

    Maybe the ego thing is an obvious thing to say as there’s always so much ego involved in becoming an artist I think, particularly if you’re not rich. Probably if you are rich too.

    Either way, I’m quite suspicious of my reasons for choosing a really hard thing to do that most likely will provide only precarity and emotional insecurity regardless of how good you might be at it. What am I trying to prove?

    BIT ROT BULLY SHOT (2022) 9.08 mins single channel h-8/digital video w/ audio by Frank Lohmeyer & Dorje de Burgh.

    Having said that, sticking with making pictures has been the source of pretty much all the valuable learning I’ve done outside of various mistakes and some major moral failures in my personal life.

    Throughout art school and after my thinking was primarily influenced by the writing of JG Ballard. Mainly his recurring theme of any given personal or social reality existing simply as a stage set that can be swept aside at any moment.

    When that actually happened to me I didn’t handle it well. My mum’s death changed everything. We were very close and her dying was the thing I was always most afraid of, so when she was diagnosed as terminal I completely unravelled.

    But I did keep making pictures, and Dream the End, the work that formed a few years later from a combination of those pictures and her own, would be the first thing I’ve made that I feel actually had a real resonance with people. It taught me that if you try to tell the truth you have a real chance at communication and connection.

    Brain Scan (St Luke’s), archival pigment print, (2017), 820mm x 1000mm – Courtesy of PhotoMuseum Ireland collection.

    And as we move further into a mediatized landscape that seems designed to atomise and alienate us from each other, as the death machine rumbles on, any form of human connection seems vital.

    I know in some ways I’ll never move past this part of my life, I still carry many grudges and various medium to low level addiction issues that I’m only beginning to deal with, but I’m glad the last thing me and my mum did together was make something.

    Soon afterwards I learned that my father had returned from the cult they’d been living with since I was three and now lived as a woman, so inviting her to make a work together seemed like the obvious thing to do, and also a useful way of side-stepping my own fear of meeting after a lifetime apart.

    Sadly she’s pretty unwell, suffering with quite severe psychosis susceptibility syndrome, so collaboration or even direct contact wasn’t possible. But as we figured this out I began to make a film imagining what a work about our relationship might look like without her presence.

    The Sting of Love, from How to Kill Something That Doesn’t Exist, 7.07 mins single channel hi-8/super 16mm projected onto unprocessed Fuji Crystal Archive c-type paper, text adapted from Rollenspiele: Frauen über Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1992, Thomas Honickel) mit Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla und Rosel Zech. Courtesy of The Arts Council of Ireland collection.

    Then the pandemic hit and I decided to move on from trying to understand my two families.

    Following the summer of 2020 I moved to a small town called Carrick-on-Suir in south Tipperary that was both uncannily familiar and totally alien. The work that resulted from living there was in part an attempt to remove myself from the equation, and confront the world in more purely formal photographic terms.

    Untitled, Carrick, silver gelatin hand print, (2021), 250mm x 310mm.

    In addition to being an attempt to somehow subvert the representations of the Irish landscape that I was familiar with, Under the Same Sky is about proximity and distance, and alienation from ourselves and each other. It is also very much concerned with my own conception of home — what home means, what constitutes it and what are the conditions of belonging.

    The best part of making this work was getting to show it in South Tipperary Arts Centre in Clonmel, the town next to Carrick. Often these kinds of loosely documentary style photographic works are made and then disappear to be shown elsewhere, and are never seen by the people local to the place the work is about. The first comment in the visitor’s book described it as ‘an excellent documentation of misery’.

    This line of thought (home not misery) continued as my life became less tethered to a particular place, and during a spell living on a small island off the west coast of Ireland and then mainland Europe I made BIT ROT BULLY SHOT.

    Bit rot is naturally occurring digital decay. A bully shot is old slang for a good shot. The film is about de-materialisation and the natural world as a home that we spend less and less time in, forgoing what can be a beautiful reality for some bullshit virtual escape. How close we are to paradise and how much we’re fucking it up.

    There’s also an element of petty revenge involved, as I was told that I wasn’t allowed to make work featuring the island I was living on by the artist friend I was then living with.

    I’ve always made work in an analogue way. This was a decision born of aesthetic taste but as our world becomes more digital I feel that this mode of working is increasingly the point.

    In terms of who ultimately controls memory, meaning and history we are in a dangerous position, and this would suggest that personal histories and counter narratives are more important and hold more radical potential than ever before.

    BORING PHOTOGRAPHS, made in collaboration with Chris Dreier of the OJAI, is a playful toe in the water as regards subversion of the de-materialised attention economy. It’s a riso publication of forty photographs accompanied by an essay on collaborative vernacular photography written by A.I..

    Convent Wall, silver gelatin hand print, (2023), 127mm x 178mm.

    We launched this work and the publication in two pedestrian tunnels in Berlin. This is very much Chris and her OJAI co-director Gary Farrelly’s longstanding m.o., but for me it was a definite light bulb moment.

    In light of the current levels of hypocrisy and moral compromise apparent across the art world superstructure in regard to the genocide in Palestine, it feels apparent that we have moved past the moment of institutional critique to one of stark institutional irrelevance.

    Steal as much as you can to survive and make the work, but forget career ladders and gatekeeping. Make it DIY.

    Still from TIMEFUCKER multi-channel hi-8 video.

    TIMEFUCKER, my new film and book about the poetics of dystopia should be finished by summer 2024.

    www.forget.rip

    https://www.instagram.com/dum_studio/

    Feature Image: the coombe (i), c-type, (2021), 260x340mm

  • A Rainy Night in Saifi – Luke Sheehan and Nadim Shehadi in conversation

    What is a ‘real country’?

    For the Irish, living as we do on a divided island, the question doesn’t have to be facetious. As a negative example, to try to land on a positive answer, Northern Ireland comes to mind. Wherever that congenitally deformed statelet ends up, its passage through the twentieth century will form a storyline we will never stop arguing about. God bless us.

    Lebanon, where I lived briefly from January 2011, is a mystifying and compelling organism.

    Were it on the seafloor, it would be brightly coloured, shape-shifting and perhaps equipped with a defensive poison. A territory carved out of the Ottoman Empire via the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, it formed with Syria the ‘French mandate’. It has held together against expectations, and enjoyed tangible golden ages through the same century-long lifespan as our post-colonial Ireland.

    At the Beittedine Palace, 2011.

    The local cultures, which still roughly map onto the religious arrangements of the confessional political system, have incredibly deep roots. I say ‘cultures’ and ‘roughly’ because this is a land where people will seriously make the case that they are the direct descendants of the Phoenicians, if not the Canaanites. Some of the ingredients here are antiquated enough to make monotheism look like a recent fad.

    Other claims include references to identifiable cities and mythologized landscapes in ancient history that remain traceable today: the cedar tree that appears on the flag is of the stock used to build the Jewish Temple, and the forests are referred to in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

    In cities like Batroun, Saida and Sur, the phantoms and visible stubs of Phoenician harbours can still be observed. Compressed between the plains and deserts leading to Mesopotamia, and the coastal route to the Nile and Egypt, it has produced merchants and travellers over the millennia. The Lebanese diaspora may number seventy million.

    Beirut’s Green Line after the Civil War.

    To live in Beirut at the time I did, was, I now realize, a taste of a brief golden age all on its own. One of the clichés that had to be learned was the fable of the glorious 1950s and 1960s: the period after the Second World War and before the domestic civil war, when the traditional merchant classes were joined by elite émigres from other parts of the defunct empire to create prosperity. They became ‘bankers to the Middle East,’ a role now occupied by Dubai.

    Wealthy post-Ottoman families that retreated there included the Sursocks, who would form a link to Ireland, and Jewish families from Iraq and beyond. Nadim Shehadi, the guest speaker on our latest podcast, is a product of the cosmopolitan confidence of that time.

    Sursock Palace before the explosion of 2020.

    In 2011, the Arab Spring was triggered by events in Tunisia the week I arrived. Through connections, I had the opportunity to meet the renowned journalist Robert Fisk for coffee, and as we sat in a place on Sadat Street, the TV in the corner was flashing images of Mohamed Bouazizi burning. I had been reading about the story, and Fisk hadn’t, so for a few minutes I was the one explaining events to him.

    My journalistic Larp brought me up and down the country. No-one ever called me out on it. I wrote one story for the Daily Star, the Saad Hariri-sponsored newspaper, about a scheme to write essays and theses for brattish students at the American University of Beirut. My real job was writing multiple choice questions for a rich private school and educational company.

    I had a blast. Young and hopeful journalists were everywhere, and the dismal course of that profession, with Facebook annihilating the business side and ISIS looming into view with plans to cast them in their snuff movies, was not yet obvious.

    One young English writer I knew noted that “the next few years are looking pretty good for work.” She might have been right, but that sort of attitude, shared by the foot soldiers of the international NGOs, was already watering seeds of uncommon bitterness among the Lebanese. Their rivers of trouble were sources of fresh water for well-paid and often decadent hordes of expats. One wonders how high the shoots might have grown by now.

    At the moment of the horrific Port explosion of 2020, I was living in Paris. A Lebanese woman I knew there, a filmmaker[1] and activist, called me briefly, with her voice inflamed from sobbing. “Really Luke, what have we done to deserve all this?”

    Sursock Palace after the explosion of 2020.

    Add to this the financial collapse which wiped out savings and plummeted the domestic currency, the Syrian refugee influx which increased the population by at least 30%, the pandemic pains and now a very possible Hezbollah-Israel war, and you might have a country that even her most ardent lovers will leave. Who will stay, and who will join the seventy million-strong diaspora? What cause for hope might persist?

    One of the characters I met during my time there was Nadim, during a dinner at the palace of the Sursocks in Gemmayzeh. With characteristic Lebanese curiosity and openness, he simply stayed in touch with me, a random person who had breezed through then strayed very far from Beirut, like most of our overconfident cohort running around at the time.

    One also wonders, incidentally, whatever happened to all those little girls and boys?

    Feature Image of Beirut: Jo Kassis

    [1] Of course she was, and is. Her first films were beautiful, artful, personal things shot through with a heatwave of avant garde, mostly concerned with her much-traumatized locality of the Shia south. Some recent work is here.

  • Freebirthing in Ireland

    It’s Mother’s Day morning and I am on the brink. Desperate, determined, exhausted and certain all at once. I have passed an eternal night trying to push out a child, with no apparent progress.

    I don’t have a midwife gently coaching, or calling the ambulance, as the case may be.

    I am freebirthing.

    ‘Is that like a home birth?’, people would ask, when I told them of my birth plans. ‘Yes, only without a midwife,’ I would say. ‘Oh,’ they would respond; an ‘oh’  loaded with ambiguity. Because, in fairness, it doesn’t sound ideal.

    Most Irish women choose to give birth in hospital because they think home birthing with a midwife is a riskier option. This is a view promoted by every medical professional in the country. However, some reading of alternative birth experts soon reveals the best kept secret in the Coombe: a woman’s body is designed to give birth unassisted.

    Known as a physiological birth where each biological process activates the next in a delicately balanced sequence, it is the origin of the hypnobirthing image of the unfolding lotus, petal by petal. The most dangerous thing one can do at a birth is interfere with this process.

    Modern obstetrics which is based on the ‘active management’ of birth, is the petal plucking inverse of this ideal. Drugs to induce and speed labour and pain medications which stall labour, are standard interventions in normal hospital births. These then lead to ‘emergency interventions,’ such as antibiotics, episiotomies, foreceps and Caesarean sections (c-sections).

    In effect, obstetricians are busy ‘saving’ mother and baby from the complications they themselves created.

    From the perspective of physiological birth; modern obstetrics is akin to a sexual violation of women. It is predicated on ‘getting the baby out alive’, an approach which traumatizes and damages the long-term health of both mother and child.

    Most obstetric staff have never even witnessed a physiological birth. Midwifery training in Ireland takes place in a hospital setting only, and most will have never witnessed a home birth, and could be more accurately called obstetric nurses.

    As Irish hospital policy is increasingly determined by insurance liability, where the proof ‘we did all we could,’ is the best defence against malpractice suits, there is a corresponding rise in the national rate of c-sections.

    So, in the medical paradigm, which expectant Irish mothers are forced to occupy, for lack of an alternative, where home-birthing is risky, freebirthing would be considered reckless.

    And we all know what happens to reckless mothers: They get Tusla called on them.

    A HSE homebirth

    I applied to the HSE home birth scheme for my first birth in 2018. But the community midwife serving West Kerry had retired one year previously and had yet to be replaced.

    There are about twenty community midwives serving the entire country – and the HSE insurance requires that at least two midwives attend each birth. As there is no community element in midwifery colleges in Ireland, our national home-birth scheme relies entirely on midwives who have been trained abroad. Little wonder then that just 0.4 per cent (approximately 280) of births in Ireland occur at home.

    So, despite occupying an entirely different health paradigm; the hospital was the only option available to me. And then I discovered freebirthing.

    After reading Laura Shanley’s Unassisted Childbirth, which lists the myriad ways that medical intervention causes birth complications, I decided to birth at home, without a midwife.

    But with the combination of a long labour, doubtful doulas and a fretting family, fear overtook faith. In the early hours of Little Christmas, we drove from our home on the Dingle peninsula to Tralee hospital, naively thinking we could get checked out, allay our fears and be on our merry way.

    We hadn’t accounted for the Hotel California door policy of the Irish maternity ward. Labouring women can check in any time, but security locked doors ensure they cannot leave. ‘For our own good’ presumably.

    And there in the belly of the beast, I fell foul of the highly medicalised birth policy, which allows a woman just 18 hours to deliver her baby from the time of her waters breaking before emergency intervention. In the U.K. birthing mothers are given at least 24 hours before ‘emergency deliveries’ are considered.

    So, despite the fact that first time births can take up to forty hours to deliver, mine was treated as an emergency and my refusal of syntoconin (a drug to speed up labour) infuriated the obstetrican. The umbilical cord was cut immediately after birth, still pulsing full of blood. The child was pulled from my breast, even as he began to grub for colostrum and taken next door to instead be given a shot of glucose for pacification, as the paediatrician syringed a vial of blood from his tiny veins.

    My refusal of ‘precautionary’ antibiotics on the grounds that it would destroy my son’s virgin microbiome precipitated a stand-off in which we were threatened with a court order, the Gardaí and Tusla. The Tusla officer was almost embarrassed, being called to ‘investigate’ and indeed intimidate the only woman on the ward who was breastfeeding.

    There followed three arduous nights in hospital in which my son’s sugar and salt levels were monitored, each day bringing new threats to my hopes for a natural beginning to his life: ‘If you don’t get those levels up, we’re going to have to give him formula.’

    That was my trauma. Minor compared to most, but it radicalised me, made me an advocate for birthing reform and affirmed my position outside the system. But Life will always buck an affirmed position.

    For my second pregnancy I was even more determined to birth at home. But at thirty-six weeks, after a heavy, heart-wrenching bleed, I went for a scan that showed placenta previa, where the placenta is encroaching on the perineum and obstructing the safe exit of the child. Though the child’s head could nudge past, it’s a high risk one, even for a fervent opponent of the system like myself.

    So, again I was bound for the belly of the beast and Eirú, my daughter, was delivered by c-section. And I saw the medical maternity machine from the other end of the spectrum. As a birthing mother not wanting intervention, I was treated as a pariah, but as a birthing mother needing intervention, I was treated as a queen. As in this way, I made my peace with these two faces of the Irish medical industry; a merciless machine staffed by heartfelt humans.

    But, though tempered, my view was unchanged. Previa affects 0.2% of mothers. And the national rate of c-section is 30% and there is a chasm of accountability between the two figures.

    Third time lucky

    So here we are in 2024, pregnancy number three and we are older and wiser and much less furtive than we were as first time parents. Now we are open about our plans to freebirth. The pregnancy is fully ‘off grid’. I don’t even feel the need to visit the G.P.. My dates are sure. My pregnancy is healthy.

    Having gone through the rigorous and ambiguous process of ‘getting signed off’ for a HSE home birth previously, I knew my designation as a geriatric VBAC (meaning a forty-one-year-old vaginal birth after c-section) would eliminate me from the narrow confines of ‘low risk’. So, I spared myself and the child the bother of engaging with a ‘care system’ that would reduce me to such terms.

    A doula with a doppler the week before gave me the reassurance I needed that the placenta and baby were in a good position. I’d read the freebirth manual twice over; I was packing shepherd’s purse tincture for post-partum haemorrhage, clary sage and castor oil to stimulate the uterus, chilli tincture for the child’s respiration and I had the numbers of a few good women that I could call for advice in a pinch. Ready as I would ever be.

    The bull jumping ceremony of the Hamar tribe in Ethiopia.

    The Initiation

    To become a mother, a woman must shed aspects of her youthful self that would create chaos for herself and her new child. So Nature, in her infinite wisdom, made birth a rite of passage. An initiation into motherhood.

    Initiations are characterised by endurance. Birth is not painful per se – a contracting uterus after birth is usually more painful – though birth ‘complications’ can be very painful indeed, but it is intense – earth-shatteringly, butt-rackingly intense.

    The initiate must undertake a journey into the unknown, meet her limits and transcend them. She is shown the insubstantial nature of her persona and must rely on the felt experience of her body and access the instinctual wisdom of her mammalian brain. The two aspects of her self will grapple, the little and the large, the personal and the impersonal taking turns to lead. Her fear will do battle with her trust.

    I cannot say for certain that my faith was stronger than my doubt or that my courage prevailed over my fear. For there were times in those eight hours of the most intense pushing sensations, in which every fibre of my being shuddered and squeezed with the effort of expulsion; pushes so magnificent as to be worthy of the crowning glory of a head; only to succeed in squeezing out yet another tiny piece of shit – which my faithful partner faithfully wiped away; the orgasmic foreplay of pre-labour forgotten in the less pretty reality of active labour – that my weakness and doubt did prevail.

    Between these surges, I sometimes collapse weak on the bed taking the minutes of reprieve to drift into a semi-conscious nap. But it was no power nap. On the contrary, using the intervals in this way left me ill-prepared for the violence of the surges and less than aware riding them.

    In the other times, I breathe and remain alert and rise like a disciple to meet those waves as they roll my body; and those waves I rode. So, on I go through the night like a surfer, catching a few and getting wiped out in others as my strength gives out; my pre-labour thoughts of Macha, the horse goddess, running a marathon in childbirth, gone as I half roll on the bed baying like the cow goddess Boann.

    Transferring to a hospital is as inconceivable as it is impossible in my current state in which all that exists is me riding an ocean of sensation.

    Sometime, about half-way through the storm; Diarmuid drills a hook into the ceiling and hangs an extension cord from it that I could bear down on it.

    Image: Nicky Manosalva

    Alien Cow Goddess

    Eight hours of eternity passed like this. Me and Doubt and Faith and Baby and the rest of the Gang going up and down. Diarmuid keeps vigil on the periphery. The children sleep soundly next door.

    Then there is birdsong and dawn light. Morning arrives but the baby does not. From the frontal cortex of my brain comes the thought (for I now occupy the recesses) occurs: ‘I don’t want the children to witness their mother as an alien cow goddess’.

    The children wake and Diarmuid goes out to them. I stay in the room, baying through the surges and I hear Eiru start to cry at the strangeness of the sound.

    My instinct says there is nothing wrong, but here I am again in a labour that is taking ages.  Patience. Tenacity. Endurance. The words rise from my subconscious as guidance. But my frontal cortex says: ‘Diarmuid, It’s not progressing, we have to call someone.’ Something for him to do. He’s on it.

    I emerge from the bedroom to reassure my daughter, my body a boiling ocean.

    ‘Mammy when I woke I thought there was a cow in the room,’ my son says. Amused, I feel the wave building inside me again. I hug my anxious daughter quickly, ‘Mammy’s good, baby will come soon;’ as the wave towers over and in me, about to break. I step out of her embrace and into the toilet, close the door, sit on the bowl in a sequence of seconds.

    And the wave breaks.

    Only this time, unlike the hundreds or thousands of other times throughout the night, the wave carries a little body in it and pushes it all the way down the birth canal.

    ‘Diarmuid’ I croak, with jubilation and anxiety and blood all mixed. And he is there. ‘Oh thank God, the head.’ And he calls out to our six-year-old: ‘Uisne, take your sister into the neighbours, I’ll come soon’.

    ‘Dig deep, one more push,’ he says, not knowing that I am being dug, I am being pushed. But I follow his instruction anyway, like a robot. And a big slippery child comes out. And we catch him between us.

    There is blood; looks like a lot of blood. How much is too much? We don’t know. But seven drops of shepherd’s purse tincture under the tongue should be sufficient. Is he breathing? I suck mucous from his nose. Yes, he is. Oh, sweet slippery baby. Diarmuid tries to carry me to the couch, but the domesticated mammal bridles at the prospect of getting blood on the couch. So, I sit in a pool of blood on the floor. Looking every inch the warrior. Bruised and weeping, utterly spent and victorious.

    We haven’t been out in public yet. We are resting. I am writing. We are content. I tend to his umbilical cord myself. I treat my hemorrhoids with frankincense and aloe vera and look at my cervix with a hand mirror and great fascination. I am my own healer, calling on fellow warriors for advice.

    He has not been outside yet, felt the spring on his silken skin. But I will not rush him, I wish for his separation to be as gentle as possible.

    Some authority that had been taken from me at Uisne’s birth by coercion, at Eiru’s birth by fate. It has been restored by this home birth; this freebirth.

    Maternity Rights

    I represent a growing number of Irish women who have an ‘alternative’ approach to health. My faith in modern medicine is limited to its functionality in diagnostics, bone setting and some emergency interventions. That’s it. I don’t believe it has any real role in solving chronic illness, which cancer would be, and I most certainly don’t think it has any role to play in 99% of births.

    From this worldview then, giving birth at home is a ‘no-brainer’, except that it’s also a ‘no goer’, for many Irish women, who, either through age or some perceived health issue, (i.e. low iron, vegetarian diet or high blood sugar) or geographical reasons, do not have access to the very limited HSE home birth service.

    In 2008, community (home birth) midwives were compelled to sign very restrictive memorandum of understanding with the health service. Midwives became obliged to transfer birthing women to the hospital in scenarios previously considered normal, such as heightened blood pressure or a delay in labour, or risk losing their licenses to practice.

    The U.K.-based Private Midwives Ireland operate under a slightly less restrictive insurance requirements, but the cost of €6,500 to €10,000 precludes many women.

    So, into the barbarous hospitals we go. Or not. Freebirth is our bright shining alternative.

    The highly medicalised maternity model in Ireland is compelling Irish women to give birth unassisted by midwives at home. And though this may sound like a dangerous scenario to the uneducated; the experience has been both empowering and healing for a growing number of Irish women, many of whom are now sharing their stories on social media.

    Motor and Sensory Regions of the Cerebral Cortex.

    Instinctual Mammalian Brain

    The physiological unfolding of birth requires that a woman relax completely in order to occupy the instinctual mammalian brain that governs the birthing process. Anything that draws her into the frontal cortex is discouraged in this non-intervention, best practice birthing model. Hospitals then, are exactly opposite to the optimal environment for a birthing mother. This reality has been recognized in many European countries such as the Netherlands, which has an extensive national home birth service and birthing centres.

    Ideally, Irish mothers would be attended by experienced midwives who did not have to operate under such punitive criteria and the threat of losing their licences. But in the absence of this, giving birth at home under her own authority is one of the most liberating and empowering things a woman can do. Finally, I can testify to this.

    Life contrives to give us what we need. In the decimation of our home birth service, there is an opportunity for us to step into the gap ourselves alone. The rewards are great and many. And perhaps if enough of us step into that breach, the country’s health care professionals will be compelled to answer the call for maternity reform and give us the support in our own homes that we deserve.

    Follow Siobhán de Paor’s blog: http://insideoutpost.ie/

  • Assange Case: a partial victory or another ominous step towards extradition?

    Anyone watching the agonizing progress of the Julian Assange case proceeding through the U.K. justice system will be aware that it’s highly unlikely that any judge will simply throw open the gates of Belmarsh prison in assent to calls to ‘Free Assange’.

    Sadly for those sympathetic to him, extradition has inched ever closer over the last three years thanks to High Court decisions: first overturning a lower court ruling that blocked extradition on the basis of suicide risk in 2021; next blocking an initial attempt to appeal in 2022; then blocking another appeal attempt in 2023.

    Assange has survived more than a decade of a bizarrely public seclusion and alleged U.S. security targeting that ranged from standard kidnapping and rendition to assassination, details of which were forbidden to be submitted this time round. Yet figures fighting or speaking up for him are not lightweight: more support from Australia where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese backed a parliamentary motion calling for his release in 2023, while his wife Stella has raged for the life of her besieged man like someone out of a Greek drama. Might there be a true reprieve?

    On March 26 the High Court played the ball back to the Americans in a ruling that confirmed three out of nine questions of his imperilled rights: ‘that the applicant [Assange] is permitted to rely on the first amendment, that the applicant is not prejudiced at trial, including sentence, by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same first amendment protections as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty is not imposed.’

    A response is due in three weeks. Had this ruling gone differently, Assange could have been on a plane within days.

    It is worth mentioning here where – even were the death penalty threat to be muzzled – he may end up: the ‘supermax’ prison class where the US boxed up the likes of Ted Kaczynski, Zacarias Moussaoui and Ramzi Yousef.

    An earlier legal concept that was applied to the question of blocking U.S. extradition demands the ‘Death row phenomenon,’ actually starts to look more humane when one itemizes the torture regime of prisons where inmates are slowly aged in isolation under observation without even the chance to kill themselves.

    According to a former warden of the most secure such place, ADX in Colorado, it constitutes a ‘life after death… it’s much worse than death.’

    For Stella Assange, speaking on the steps of the court, this ruling was at least a partial hint of genuinely positive momentum, a support for the notion that Assange might have rights after all. For others responding from around the world, the rejections of the six of the nine grounds formed part of the ominous, serpentine locomotion of the UK justice machine to eventually doom the Australian to that fate.

    For Irish barrister and human rights specialist David Langwallner, who previously spoke to the Cassandra Voices podcast, the ruling gives a hint of a real path to appeal, and can be taken as a serious gesture from the judges. Speaking again informally to CV, he condemns the ongoing absurdity of a persecution that “should have ended long ago,” and lays out precedents like Soering Vs. United Kingdom.

    Check David’s comments here: