Dublin, that old whore, with her piss -stained pavements
Abruptly transforms into a woman of a certain station.
Such are the, at once, brutal and subtle shifts where
In an instant, Hell aligns in an altogether strict
Congruence… Like when you climb aboard
The final commuter train of the week on a Friday
Evening on Platform One at Pearse Station.
And, as the train finally pulls out, leaving
Behind her the contents of a working week,
Passing images are reflected back to you
Through the compartment windows, revealing
Dune and marram at Portmarnock, to a passing
Lagoon at Malahide, and then the panoply of imagery
Miraculously washes away all of the whoredom from your mind.
The Great Burnishment
Your Pirelli calendar moment must last, at least, twenty score years;
Nobody makes this very important point entirely clear.
So, try to remember, while cavorting in the Sun,
That the memories must endure, and for everyone!
Call it, if you will, the great Burnishment.
When like two figures from a fabled myth or play,
You roam the most remote shores and the very
Earth appears made for you both alone.
It is the cliché – you look on her then and on those mythic shores –
With the aroma of wild rosemary, myrtle and Goat;
Desire bears you both ever onward with its emblazoned sail.
Fast forward two decades now and she stands before you in your kitchen,
And the initial violence of the sun from that first day,
Tell me, do you still feel its impact burning your skin?
The Flies
The two house- flies, Beckett and Joyce, buzz about you
And the TV screen. There they land, buzz again
Before flying off to Memphis copulating
And multiplying on the wing. As a sign of virility,
The Egyptians displayed them on their amulets.
That great race, unlike our own, had a great respect for insects!
Even the Greeks showed a similar respect,
When having a BBQ they offered a sacrifice to Shoo Fly Zeus.
The crabby meat men, in this way, could eat their own
Undisturbed by patrolling swarms and Oxen that had fallen
Were replaced by Lotus Eater, and burning eucalyptus in the Sun.
Now, you look at the books of both these modern sages
That you have been reading for an eternity,
And still you hear the flies buzzing across the pages!
The Vico Road
From the vantage point of Strawberry Hill,
A Victorian Villa recently selling for a cool 5 million,
A place more evocative of Raymond Chandler
Than anything remotely Irish. I am reminded,
Again, of the Neapolitan philosopher who
Peopled his New Science with giants. In fact,
While lunching there on one of the picnic tables,
I had a slightly hallucinatory vision of Gulliver
Striding in 18th century breeches, and croppy hair
Over the Sugar- Loaf Mountain, while
The Lilliputians below discussed the ongoing
Business in the property sector: vulture funds
And NAMA; hedge funds in Texas,
Where the multi-headed Cereberus roars.
The prize painting in the National Gallery of Ireland is, without a doubt, Caravaggio’s depiction of The Taking of Christ. The painter presents us with an iconic image of Judas in the act of betraying Christ with the sign of a kiss, as previously arranged with Roman legionaries, who are depicted in costumes from Caravaggio’s own time.
In fact, Caravaggio even depicts himself in this great work, bearing a lantern so that he might better see the image of Christ.
I am always reminded of the Rolling Stones song on Exile of Main Street in which Jagger sings ‘don’t talk to me about Jesus, I just want to see his face!’ And of course, Oscar Wilde’s unforgettable lines taken from The Ballad of Reading Goal:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
So, betrayal in art, and particularly embodied in the Biblical figure of Judas, is nothing new. In fact, when I first saw some of Michael Corrigan’s Judas poems, which was around this time two years ago, while co- editing the April edition of Live Encounters Poetry and Writing with Mark Ulyseas, I was immediately reminded of Brendan Kennelly’s Book of Judas (Bloodaxe Books, 1991) .
So, I was intrigued. It was high time – twenty year separates the publication of these books – that a poet from this most treacherous of isles penned a few poems treating of the monumental and time-honoured theme of betrayal.
Indeed, James Joyce never stopped harping on about how Irish history was full of tales of treachery. A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist (1916) begins with the parents of the young artist in question arguing over the betrayal of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Continuing on the political scene – as a Cork man – how could I miss an opportunity to bring up the assassination of Michael Collins…!
But enough, if I keep enumerating all the treacherous, low down dirty deeds that have been committed down through Irish history and immortalised by writers, and artists I’ll never get started on this review!
But one final word: isn’t it interesting that both Michael Corrigan’s book and Brendan Kennelly’s were published in the UK?
Achtung, “The best way to serve the age is to betray it”…. The Book of Judas. Brendan Kennelly. 17/4/36-17/10/21. RIP. – Bono pic.twitter.com/S7rWFC6kHG
The title poem of the book greets the reader on the first page, here is the final verse.
On the night I sold you to the wolves of respectability,
in Gethsemane where sleeping olives dreamed of rain,
I pressed my face to the loamy earth and beneath a moon too cold
to touch, I believe I heard her mournful sigh;
“nothing is new, nothing is new,
I have seen it all before.”
The poet, imagining himself as Judas makes the figure contemporaneous, which he also does quite successfully with other Biblical figures in the collection, such as Maryfrom Magdala. This last poem offers a really poignant insight into the Bible’s most notorious harlot who washes the feet of Jesus with her hair; indeed it is said by some to be that she was the sexual partner of the man from Nazareth – he the son God, the lover of a prostitute! Say what you like, but by God that book (the Bible) is a cracker. No wonder it’s a bestseller!
In Ephesus her end of days,
nights shallow with shortening breath,
a mill beneath the small bare room,
millstones grinding, dark sea lapping at her door.
I also love how in the first verse the poet informs the reader of Mary’s wealthy origins. As an Irishman, Corrigan understands people’s innate prejudices; as we are far more likely to forgive someone coming from a ‘good’ home, in other words a wealthy family, than a person from a poor background.
This goes back to Max Weber, who recognised a correlation between wealth and respectability, perversely conflated in the West with spirituality. This idea of respectability, signalled very early on in the very first poem – see again above – underscores the whole collection The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot; especially how such a notion, being respectable, makes traitors or ‘Judases’ of us all. It is into this constantly recurring idea that the poet mines, to wonderful effect.
She sang sea music, fluent in the rise and fall,
knew deep, dark places that calved the biggest waves.
From the flat roof of a prosperous house in Magdala, Galillee,
watched the purple gather of every winter storm
chase small boats to harbour before an angry swell.
I don’t know how historically accurate any of the above is, nor do I particularly care. Poets were never well known, or appreciated, for their attention to facts, at least in days of yore; metaphor being their quarry to a far greater extent.
It is only recently, I believe, that poets actually have had to literally embody their work in both life and deed, literally breathing words of blessed scripture. Good lord, good luck to them!
Vineyards in the Champagne region of France.
Terroir
Another particular feature of what, I believe, is Mister Corrigan’s second superlative collection is the irreverent and humorous nature of some of the poems.
At times, I was reminded of another stalwart in the recent Irish literary canon, and that is Paul Durcan. Michael Corrigan, being but a few years older than myself, is of that generation that grew up during the Depression in 1980s Ireland, and his humour is deeply informed by the experience of busts and booms, in that particular order.
This is something that you simply cannot imitate. The French have the term terroir which is particular to their culture. They use it principally to describe the distinctive flavour and taste of a certain cheese or wine that can be traced to the particularities of weather and soil of the place it comes from in France.
Champagne is an obvious example of this cultural phenomenon. No other sparkling white wine can use the term unless it comes from this specific region. The French feel other sparkling drinks, such as Prosecco, come from very different terroirs with different soil and climates and so cannot possibly be described using the term.
The particular terroir that Michael Corrigan comes from is a feature informing the aesthetic of his work; like the shells in the soil that inform that old white wine that comes from Bordeaux and whose name escapes me now…
When the dark waters of sleep
close across my resting butch face
and I become a fat Ophelia
floating down the weedy slope
of memory, hope and duck billed platitudes,
back to childhood, back to faith,
where a diarrhoea fountain
of bare-knuckled nationalism
provides us with its dullard troops
each one trained to shit on sight,
the brightest and best promoted to teach
in the places that smelled of failure and feet.
There are many so-called poets who are praised for their satirical nature. Many is the time that I have read their work and wondered what all the fuss was about.
Poetic trends, like any, come and go . But verse such as the above would certainly qualify as satire of the very highest order. God knows every particular cuntry has its own exasperating strains, and dear old Ireland is no exception.
Embracing Mediocrity
I remember being at an exhibition in one of the older more established art galleries in Dublin and a very famous photographer, who had made his career abroad, commented on how in the Republic we make a point of embracing mediocrity
It is this particular phenomenon, again, that I think Mr Corrigan is particularly good at eking out. Begrudgery being another!
when masters came to class tooled up
and the biggest looters wore the best suits,
Every society has its particular issues. I’ve lived long enough in France to spot some there, and having lived with an Italian for over twenty years, I am qualified to identify that country’s or rather its peoples, foibles.
What Corrigan is particularly good at putting his finger on here (both of the above quotes are taken from Unlearning my Place) is the atrocious competitiveness produced by living on a small island, where everybody is fighting for their portion of the land.
You also find it in the novels of Andrea Camilleri describing Sicily. The cold, brutal violence of the mafia in his case. In the Republic of Ireland, things are a lot less dramatic. Dead is the word. Everybody is caught in a kind of entropy that James Joyce identified on page one of Dubliners – PARALYSIS.
The disease has not gone away. Irish society, in general, is still plagued by it. The absolute awfulness of social convention. The tiresome scene that informs everything. Even poetry!
Choose friends wisely,
enemies will self-select,
smiling like tigers or growling like bears,
an arm around your shoulder
while pissing down your leg,
the welcome will be warm
before you’re taken out and shot.
The indirect nature which seems to govern everybody’s speech, the coded chatter, the back stabbing nature that it all creates. All the atrocious hallmarks of the ‘Irish’ when at home; behind the smiling eyes: the daggers in their bones.
The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot – Poems by Mick Corrigan is a wonderful collection of both poetry and verse. The first is infused with Biblical insight and learning, while the latter is concocted with sharp and bitter knowledge won, no doubt, first-hand by the author who thinks so little of the slights by now that he has made it the stuff of polished rhymes and memorable phrases.
The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot: Poems by Mick Corrigan Dionysia Press Ltd, 2021
59 pages – £15.50
Poems in the Manner of the Devil After Alexandar Ristović (1933-1994)
If you can’t chew on oxtail, eat knuckles instead.
The bounty of bedlam,
Let these crumbs be your Thanksgiving,
Or Last Suppers.
Imitation is always the greatest form of flattery.
See the world now through the light of wine.
Do you have confidence in the morning?
Do you have faith in toast?
Each morning, do you spread marmalade
Under the clouds in the sky?
Here, drink this little cup of coffee.
Taste the bitterness brewed in countless suns
And raise your little finger, subconsciously,
To honour the martyrdom of little buns.
These trees that surround you,
Why do there branches rise like accusatory fingers
Holding peaches up to the clouds?
Where have all the flamingos flown?
Into the jaws of baboons in hell.
Columns, arches… shit!
Commerce herself is dizzied by the sun.
But know also this,
That within all of this madness
There is one alone who sleeps quietly
Nestled in dreams like a bird
And she dreams of housing owls
While presiding over countless committees.
Break Fast
The table- cloth was a souvenir from Turkey.
It had a very simple olive pattern,
The kind you might find in a good café
Or restaurant where the meals were affordable.
The kind you might find your hands floating over
Stirring spoons of sugar or lifting glasses
And bottles of water and wine, picking up bread
And paper napkins or surely raising to take out
Bank cards, in order to settle the bill.
In order to settle the bill.
Hardly is this last phrase out and everything,
The whole panoply of artifacts,
Suddenly is in freefall before you,
Like that last joke you heard before leaving.
The Familiar
Don’t talk to me about storms in teacups,
Speak rather about the dervish in your espresso.
For your idioms and metaphor are tired,
As tired as my crocs worn out from pacing
Over the same old living space. Here, then,
Is where I dwell in both the word and the poem.
And, in memory! The ontological shifts
Which we must surely feel as much as the pedal
Pressing down on the pianoforte, sustaining the SOUND
The words vibrating, each particular element,
Each particular word, key, shape or movement
Given the proper attention it deserves.
Such is modality. Yes, I would speak to you of modality,
And the ontological shifts in taking a coffee!
Janus
I will Putinize you, you know what I mean!
As I think it say it my reptilian eyes roll over
Blocking out momentarily the carrion tinted sun.
For, each encounter is a potential existential threat.
So, I repeat it again as I move closer to you
Physically and you will have the opportunity
Of understanding what it is I am now telling you again.
If you do Not do as I ask, I will Putinize you!
Putinize – a verb designated to describe
The systematic annihilation of either a person,
A place, an animal or a thing so that the object
Is no longer physically recognisable anymore.
Just as the city will be left in rubble, the person
Will no longer be recognisable instead left lifeless; like himself.
Kyiv
After the heroic age there are only two options remaining,
for hatred can only burn for so long before eventually capitulating
to either madness or so- called reason.
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster… when you look into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you. Friedrich Nietzsche
Day 1.
On the question of the one against the many, as opposed to the many against the one, White was decidedly with the former after having proven, to himself at least, that his poor father was a lost one without any direction having given himself to the latter and now, after spending his life among his own, was fundamentally on his own more than ever, isolated more so than White himself was, for whereas White had taken the conscious decision to oppose the many by choice, thus accepting to lead a life of solitude, whereas his poor father by accepting to choose a life among the many, sharing their so called ‘core values’, White’s father, all his life, would go on and on about shared values; now, at the end of the day, nearing his end, ironically he was perhaps more alone now than he ever was! This was something that White, to a certain degree, could take satisfaction in. The fact that no matter what way you decided to lead your life, in the end, you always ended up on your own. Solitude was, in this sense, always the end result. Of course, this is something that White had always taken into consideration. It is, you could say, the reason why he chose to accept a life of solitude in the first place. If the truth were known, White was always intensely anti-political, which is why he hated groups. He always had. So, the idea of any kind of group consensus was anathema to him. Family being the first! The first group. He had always hated being apart of it, at least since he started to see through it. That is to say when he first started to question it when he was a very young man.
Even White’s friends, some of whom were considered to be quite wild, were shocked by White’s initial coldness. White would refer to certain animals who would leave the family to fend for themselves. Why did humans insist on remaining in contact with their parents? Out of all the animals on the earth, only humans, as far as he could see, remained in such close proximity to their parents, and at what cost?
Of course, White’s whole vision of the world had been profoundly altered or shaped by the tragic death of his brother. His brother had committed suicide when White was still a very young man, and this act had such an incredible knock-on effect on everything that White would do. This act had fundamentally altered White. Utterly, you could say. It wasn’t the only act to have had such a powerful effect on him, there was another, but it was the first event rather which was to have such a radical impact on his whole worldview, if one could say that White did have such a thing, a view of the world, as it were. I should probably say what the second event was now after having already alluded to it and in this way setting out the trajectory of the present tale. Building up the horizon, as it were.
The second great event to influence White, after his brother’s suicide, was when he eventually was to separate from his wife, whom he was to eventually divorce. This was the second great event in his life. The second of the great Ds. So, first Death and secondly Divorce. Life was made up of a series of Ds, White had noticed. The 3 Ds, he called them. White being Irish, alcohol, or Drink, was the 3rd. It was a so- called coping mechanism. The results, of course, were disastrous as a man who has already been struck by two of Life’s greatest events, Death and Divorce, to then resort to Drink to get over them is simply asking for even more trouble, and of course this is what this story is all about. Stories all involve trouble, the interesting ones at least.
I’d like to get back to White’s father now, after having presented you, the Reader, with an overview of the overall substance of the narrative of the following tale, having thus fulfilled, to a certain degree, the duties of the Author – ha, dead me arse!
If there was one person in the world who was to have such a singular effect on White, apart from his late brother and former wife that is, it was the old pater familias. God, what an absolute cunt! A curse on his kind, indeed, as that is in fact what he was, White had surmised. The Patriarch! The cunt! The superlative arsehole of the Universe! The sum total of all his woes! As when it came to the Patriarch, the many were truly the One. They all conformed to the same depths of depravity. Hitler being the superlative. You had to nail your colours to the mast.
Because of the dire nature of White’s relationship with his father, to a large degree White’s relations with men in general were pretty shitty. Indeed, it was rare that he actually liked one. Though not an impossibility too, having said that. He had had great friendships with some men, over the years. But, in general, White was more a Woman’s man than he was a Man’s man and this was primarily to do with the whole very complex relationship that he had had with his parents. White’s poor mother, for example, had been a martyr to all women as she had come from that very particular generation of women in Ireland who simply stood by their men, come hell or any amount of assorted high water! High water indeed, the expression was literally true now, now that they were all expecting a biblical like deluge to submerge them all due to global warming. Patriarchy and Fossil Fuels, now how many academic papers were headed in such a way in Humanity Departments in progressive universities all around the world?
One could dream of Noah and his drunkenness. White saw again Uccello’s depiction, all cascading in glorious Rouge, or Reds….
The fact of the matter was, no matter how you wished to look at it the situation was truly awful. The man had been the worst possible fucking cunt of his kind. There were no redeemable qualities, the more he looked the more shit was uncovered. How many could say the same? These shits, shits of their kind, this kind, this kind of shit kind, the shitty fucking shit kind, the kind of shitty fucking shit that you wouldn’t want to shit next to nor sit beside mind, that kind, mind your backside! The fucking shitty shitters and their fucking shitty shitting shits! Those kind of shitty fucking shitters… That Kind!
End of Day One!
Day 2
Now White hadn’t always been an aggressive son of a gun. He had become one. His nature then was historic, you could say. Informed as it had been by the unending deluge of experience that had gone on over his time in the world. Planet Earth. What they had done to it! It was nothing short of disastrous. The so-called strong men. What a bunch of dipshits. Strong men my ass. Show me a man and I’ll show you an ass, that is what White would say. As he had lived with one. Oh yeah, he had survived him too. Mister Universe spinning around in his tight leopard skin briefs. Bikini briefs! God forbid. It was infectious. The briefs that is. “Be brief!” Puts a whole new context on it…
When he thought about his childhood, which was rare, White remembered particularly the long torturous dinners which went on in the depths of winter. The family, all six of them, surrounded the table upon which the food had been placed. Every Patriarch worthy of the name has his place at the table and mealtimes are a particular pleasure for control freaks of this nature as these events allow for a certain element of theatricality and ceremony. Placing people at the table involves a whole network of categorisation. Hierarchy within families, for example. Directors on Boards. They all involve systems of power, and so invoke a little ceremony.
White, for example, used to sit at the head of the table directly opposite his older brother who eventually committed suicide. White was the second in command, following the patriarchal hierarchy. His sister sat beside his mother on the left side, important detail, as you came in the door and then on the right- hand side sat the Father and on his right side his youngest son whom neither White’s older brother nor sister could stand. He was the porte parole while the eldest brother was the weakest link. White could see it all, how he had been set up to fail. As he was not a natural leader, White’s eldest brother. This had been his great tragedy and which was to kill him, literally, in the end. It would have been better, in many respects, if White had been the eldest as he had leadership qualities but then they had been acquired by White from a sustained practice of observation. This is how White seemed to have learned everything, from the point of observation. Seeing how Not to do something, typically then in everything in later life also the very point of departure.
White could remember the hours spent at the kitchen table listening to the voice of God drone on endlessly about some subject matter. Omnipotence. This was a key idea in the pater familias. The all seeing all knowing One, like the Sun. The King without a throne. The King looking down at his subjects, all knowing, all condescending! And oh God how he would go on and on and on and on and on and on and on…in a monotone.
Of course, the atmosphere around the table would be unbearable. I have read accounts of Hitler at the dinner table, apparently he gave these endless monologues talking for hours and hours and hours and hours. Omnipotent. All knowing, addressing all kinds of subjects. Not really knowing all of the subjects at all, and so talking absolute horse shite half of the time. Can you imagine it? One of the World’s Most Important Figures Talking Absolute Horse Shit. And for hours!
Yes. In retrospect, White had been well prepared. All his life. For his Life. LIFE. In screaming capitals. He could take great pleasure in that fact. That it had all, all the horror, all the boredom, all the manic pain and apparently pointless suffering. It all had some kind of purpose, in the end! It was preposterous, really. And for what? By what grand design had it all been arranged for?
Were there reasons for it all, after all? Some universal truth? There in the great black firmament, shot through with countless stars for millennia, in the great abstraction of the night of the cosmos was there, after all, some kind cosmic arrangement where the infinitely, infinitely small and inconsequential, most insignificant of beings finds a place after all in the great scheme of things?…
No answer. Silence. The kind of silence that could sink whole nations. A Black Hole. You are on the event horizon. Don’t fall in. Or perhaps we are already in and have come out the wrong end? That would make sense.
Platitudes
The people who live here will never get bored with the beautiful views…
The truth is they do, and this kind of explains the whole god-awful mess.
Whether it is the young man who, having finally won over his ‘beautiful
Princess’, starts focusing now on her bad breath and tiresome habit of
Complaining already after only two years in and who will,
After breaking up with her one year later, dreams only about bottling that
Same horrendous breath and keeping it as a heady perfume
To remind him of his most cherished memories.
Loss, that great Optician, Loss, and absence its partner,
Are the great rose-coloured lenses that truly help us to SEE
The many-splendored colours of the world.
Seeing through the cracked lens offers alone true vision.
(There’s one for SpecSavers!)
Day 3.
White never actually liked his parents, if the truth were known. How could he? His mother, after all, was not very intelligent. She was smart, and quite pretty. Actually, very beautiful when she was young, but she was also extremely subservient, not very curious, she could be a real bitch and was not at all tactile, so not prone to showing any kind of affection to White nor his siblings. This was hardly surprising considering the fact that her mother before her was a horrible woman who was hysterical, fanatically religious, cunning, cruel, malicious and spiteful. In fact, whenever White did think about her, which was rare, ugly was the word he would use to describe her. Such were his memories.
As for his father… It was even less pretty, the picture. He was a profoundly vain and ignorant man and it was this twin display of vanity and ignorance that were particularly horrendous to behold; the latter of course cancelling any reason for the former to exist, you would think! But no, the ignorance was such that it apparently clouded all judgement in the so-called thinking subject, as it had no awareness of its own faults, and what was even worse, if it did, and sometimes it seemed to show some inkling of awareness (For example, when it was eating at the dinner table, it had the habit of chewing its food with its mouth open, a truly odious habit, and then, seeing that White was actually observing it, instead of closing its mouth like any normal person would, it instead continued to masticate its food in an even more exaggerated manner like some ghoulish creature, which is why I am speaking about it as opposed to him.) but even so continued its ghoulish behaviour nonetheless. That is when White started to think of his father in terms of the mythic creature fabricated by Homer.
The Cyclops was, at least for White, the most truly amazing poetic metaphor in all of western creation. White never ceased to be amazed by Homer’s creative genius when he did think about it, which was a lot due to his particularly horrendous relationship with his father. White wondered was he alone, in this, and, by the fact that Homer’s metaphoric beast was being re-invented time and time again for generations and generations of people down through the millennia so that they too could understand the truly epic horror show that they were dealing with which was, in a word, PATRIARCHY
There it was. The bullet stopped here. This ten- letter word fell off of the pen or the tongue with all of the monumental obstinacy of the one-eyed monster himself. The cave dweller of old, horribly blinded by the clever and equally intelligent Odysseus himself. It is this twin pillar of cleverness And intelligence that had made Odysseus the truly remarkable hero that he is and again this is a further testament to Homer, or the Greeks, their incredibly astute insight into man’s nature. In other words, what it meant to be a Man. A Real Man, that is, as opposed to some One-Eyed King of some barren cave dwelling along the coast. You could of course say, perhaps must, here we have the two kinds of man, in the end. The Cyclopean Monster, or what we would call in modern parlance – The Narcissistic Toxic Male. TNT M. Nietzschean dynamite. All metaphors being carved specifically from the finite, as good old Friedrich knew.
Back at the kitchen table, White could only look upon the creature before him as the Cyclops personified. There before him, that grotesque vision of the creature masticating on the meat before him. Contemptuous, almost, of him. The beastly couldn’t give a FUCK look of him. I AM THE KING. The Cock-eyed face of power on him. Tunnel vision. Hence the voice. HMV. His Master’s Voice. Lacanian. Tripping on the Real. The lexical field filled with metaphors is far more really lasting then the mere sports field with all its associated bruises and weather stains, for they will all be memories. Whereas, the symbolism will reign eternal. Such then is the very potent power of poetry. This is why the intelligent princes feared it. Not only the Greeks but in every culture.
White saw again his Irish Master incontinent with piss- stained grey pants, his face a travesty of a man. More a Terminator in decline, his rusting member leaking out like some old oil well. Grotesquerie. For teenage boys a male mockery.
White would go home alone and strip and slip into his mother’s room would steal, like countless boys before him, tights and underclothes. Fetishes that he would take away to his cave where he would sit alone unmanned and Freudian.
Enter the imagery of Salvador Dali. The Great Masturbator. Eros and Thanatos. Sex and Death. Such were the twin pillars guarding the Exit, from the mad man’s lair. Such was the wonder of her hair. The other worldly feminine. That offered some kind of safe-haven. From IT. From Him.
Enter then the Muse.
Feature Image: The blinded Polyphemus seeks vengeance on Odysseus: Guido Reni‘s painting in the Capitoline Museums.
The gentle discord of rainfall,
its alternating static dance are
Reeds of air in suspension
before the corona of sensation.
A droplet splashes and trickles
along your neck,
its joyous grief
is welcomed by you with a shudder.
The courage of the leaf
passes beneath the banks of cloud,
the burnishing lustre blossoming
upon your limbs,
the flowering sounds
of the sun’s brassy trumpets
illuminate the oracle of the hills.
II
The space between the words
Is akin to the space between the rain;
This is syntax –
The syntax of the rain.
Each word, each drop,
With its cohesion of letters
Is an alphabet written in water
Pooling in language. The liquidity of words. Your waters fall like rain,
Their quiet sudden declensions thunder
With an astonishment of showers
Light and gentle as thought’s forgotten tributaries
Brining relief from the tropics,
The tropics of the spring.
III
The distillation of the night
ferments the dawn,
minute revolutions of uninterrupted
sleep; night being a dark day
for things that silently creep.
Out of such stuff things bloom!
The leaf of thought could fill a room
With the bestiaries of the night.`
IV
Upon the crest you cycle
With the Black Hills as register.
Sheepless and quiet.
The dissemination of clouds
Pass, yet you are the only witness
To such wonder.
Accompanying all with aural springs
Cadence and rhythm pick up
With the invigoration of muscle.
Thought’s labour on the passing of the evening
Still clinging to the web of sleep
Like the silken trail of a woman’s stocking,
While banking on your side
Sheer locomotion shunts
Fabulously across the morning.
A thousand hermaphrodites
Lie slain and severed upon the heath,
Yet not a sole is being recorded.
While placed religiously upon the library shelves,
A hundred almanacs of the tides!
V
Along the footpaths, trees stand erect
As arrows, Virgilian sentinels
To patrol the fingerless dawn.
Wisps of Rose.
Cotton fields upended.
The fields are aliens reflected
In the lagoons filled with
The mythology of both Roman and Norsemen.
Out by Lambay their ghost’s hover.
Fingal’s cave but a haven for 19th century
Smuggler.
There is ruin and mail under the watery skin
Of every wave. Gut its belly,
Debone and scale the morning.
The electric prophets prophecy nothing.
Mendacity is cultural.
Aural pollution is on the wing.
Emissaries of the void would but spill.
Frustrate them.
Offer other flavours of the evening.
The evenings where shapes still bring
Mythologies as finely wrought
As summer dresses
Garlanding the superb limbs
Of the approaching Amazons.
See there!
Now, they come…
VI.
The elemental walk of the Vitruvians,
Divinely proportioned,
Aqueous folds cocooned in the lithe
Expansive limbs of the morning.
Flesh burnished by a billion suns,
Atomised to the core; Bataille’s erotic
Solar economics beats all Keynesian excess.
Even pedestrian they Kill, for She is slow.
Her cadence and rhythm shift in shapes
Of undulating, mesmerising patterns.
You follow her like a servant, reciting some lost phrase,
Bringing to her the garlands of the morning.
Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’equipage
Prennent des albatross, vates oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissent sur les gouffres amers.
A peien les ont-ils deposes sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroit et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.
Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!
L’un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L’autre mime, en boitant, l’infirme qui volait!
Le poète est semblabe au prince de nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;
Exile sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.
IV – The Albatross
Often, to amuse themselves, ship crews
Brought aboard Albatross, those great birds of the sea,
And who often were their indolent companions,
As their ships glided upon the bitter waves.
And, almost as soon as they let them out on deck,
How these great sky kings suddenly then appeared ungainly and awkward,
Trailing piteously their great white wings
Like proud useless oars behind them.
These winged voyagers, how they appeared so out of place.
Once the superb plungers, now they looked only comical and stupid.
One shakes her beak about in frustration;
Another mimes, as she clumsily walks, the infirm who fly.
The Poet is rather like these Princes of the Clouds,
Those who would fly above the eye of the storm, smiling
As they look down. Yet, exiled upon the earth,
Their great wings impeding even the most local movements.
Consider the L’Albatros, that most ungainly bird alive, used by the poet as an unforgettable metaphor for when s/he is confined on Earth. Reaching the sky, its natural habitat, it glides for hours without flapping its great wings. This is analogous to the invigoration a poet feels when they are in the act of composition.
Verse Junkies, the name of a publication I came across some years ago, vividly conveys the idea, at least in English. Most proper poets – there are so many pretenders these days – see in this creative act a power, or force, that gives them the ultimate or peak sense of personal achievement; so much so that they come to see themselves –their most fundamental sense of self – as intrinsically bound to the role of poet/artist.
The thematic link with the preceding poem Bénédiction is also clearly evident. This is another singular element to Les Fleurs du Mal in that the poems follow a very close chronological order, almost like a novel.
I can think of no other work, barring Dante’s Commedia and Shakespeare’s sonnets, which approach Baudelaire’s ambition. Petrarch, Pushkin, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson come near in terms of scope, I would agree, but there is something all -consuming in Baudelaire’s project which somehow, at least for this reader, leaves those other illustrious poets in his wake.
Perhaps, it is the rather systematic way in which Baudelaire goes through the different topics, or the complexity of the interplay between the poems and the famous correspondences. Thus, after reading L’Albatros, with all its invocation to flight, you turn the page come across Élévation.
IV – ÉLÉVATION
Au-dessous des étangs, au-dessous des vallées,
Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,
Par-delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,
Par-delà les confins des spheres étoilées,
Mon esprit, tut e meus avec agilité,
Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l’onde,
Tu sillonnes gaiement l’immensité profonde
Avec une indiscible et male volupté.
Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;
Va te purifier dans l’air supérieur,
Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur,
Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides.
Derrière les ennuis et les vastes chagrins
Qui chargent de leur poids l’existence brumeuse,
Heureux celui qui peut d’une aile vigoureuse
S’élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins;
Celui don’t les pensers, comme des alouettes,
Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,
– Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort
Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes !
IV – Elevation
High above the ponds, high above the valleys,
The mountains, the woods, the clouds, the seas,
Out there by the sun, out there by the ether,
Out there beyond the confines of the starred planets,
My spirit, bound with great agility,
And, like a superb swimmer it balms in the waves,
Plunging happily into the immense profundity
With an inexpressible and male voluptuousness.
Fly out far beyond the noxious air;
Go and purify yourself in the stratosphere,
And drink, as if from a divine and pure liquor,
The clear fire which replenishes the limpid spaces.
Leave behind the boredom and the vast sorrows
Which super charge our so unclear existence,
Happy is he who with a vigorous wing can
Fly upward to the luminous and serene fields;
Those which certain thinkers, like larks,
Converge to in the morning to partake in the flight to freedom,
– Who glide through life, understanding effortlessly
The language of flowers, and other mute things.
IV – CORRESPONDENCES
La Nature et un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de nite s Qui l’obervent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde nite , Vaste comme la nuit et comme la claret, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, – Et d’autres, corrumpus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin, et l’encens, Qui chantant les transports de l’esprit et des sens.
IV – Correspondences
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Utter at times confused words;
Man passes through the forest of symbols
Which observe him with familiar eyes.
Deep echoes from afar become mixed up
In a dark and profound unity,
Vast like the night and lit through with
Perfumes, colours and sounds respond.
And, they are as sweet as the scent off children,
As soft and as sonorous as the notes emitting from an oboe,
Verdant as prairies, and just as richly corrupted and triumphant.
Having the expanse of infinity,
Like amber, musk, benzoin and incense
Whose songs transport both the body, and the mind.
Correspondances is among the most discussed poems by Baudelaire, and one of the most influential, prefiguring the psychoanalytic schools of Freud, Jung and Lacan, which were to have such a profound effect on twentieth century art and thought.
This one, short poem gives a clear idea of how far ahead Baudelaire was of his time. Rimbaud is the only poet to come anyway close, in terms of mind-expanding conceptualisation. He also embraced the idea, embodied in the poem, of poet as savant and visionary.
The influence of hashish and other hallucinogens, such as opium, which Baudelaire was to graduate to, are in clear evidence in a poem that might explain his popularity in the English speaking world during the 1960s with the advent of the counter culture movement, as hashish and LSD became the drugs of choice among the hippies and beatniks.
Indeed I first came across Baudelaire while smoking hashish on a pretty regular basis just after leaving school. I was listening to the psychedelic music of poets, musicians and bands like Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and Pink Floyd.
Perhaps, with the increasing popularity of cannabis, having been finally legalised in numerous U.S. States and elsewhere, we will also see a revival of interest in the poet. He might provide a wake up call to the sleep-inducing Woke culture!
Baudelaire wrote extensively on his drug usage, consciously following in the line of writers like Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Growing up in 1980s Cork I recall the drug-induced visions, mind-bending in their scope, of William S. Burroughs, foreseeing, like Baudelaire, an apocalyptic future. This, surely, is one of the key signs of a visionary, which Baudelaire certainly was
Now looking around at the horrors of the twentieth century – ecocide, gross inequalities and more – it seems we are not so much inhabiting the world as living out nightmarish, drug-induced prophecies.
Helmut Newton
In the case of Baudelaire I remember very clearly, while living in Paris during the 1990s, the extraordinary images taken by the German photographer Helmut Newton for the Austrian hosiery company Wolford.
They had been lovingly framed and encased in the bus stop shelters used by advertising companies. These latter-day Amazonians, shot in black and white, were illuminated in such a way that at night, when observed from a distance on a passing train or bus, they appeared like ghost emerging out of the smokey haze of one of Baudelaire’s joints; clarifying young eroticised minds.
In these singular images, one could say Baudelaire’s ideal vision of Woman had been realised, and the world had become Baudelaire-ian.
This is another aspect of his genius. Most of us walk around completely unaware of how he shaped the world around us, in particular through the artifacts of the everyday, such as advertisements for women’s tights.
It is through such details that his poetry manifests in the world. Just like when you hear snatches of a song by Léo Ferré emanating from a café, or when a black cat sidles up to you on the street, or when, for example, you hear the ticking of an alarm clock and you imagine the two hands strangling you…
Whenever I think about Literature I think about Love. Both are written with big Ls. The Elles. Like an enjambment of run on legs, going on ad infinitum.
And when I think of Love I think also, inevitably, of betrayal. One cannot be without the other; the two legs upon which humanity stands. Only in their resolution can we find peace. So, Literature – like His story – is very personal. Let me tell you my own.
It is a story about numbers, mainly Thee and Four. Here I am borrowing from Joyce and Beckett, both of whom in their turn drew from Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher, a genius unjustly ignored in his lifetime. Even today, if you ask an educated people about Gimbattista Vico chances are most won’t know anything beyond his Three Ages of Man theory that helped Joyce formulate the structure of Finnegans Wake.
Now let me go back to the women in my life. There were three, you see. I said that this was a story about the numbers Three and Four, but in order to tell this story, I first need to tell you about these three women.
It is a story about Power; all history concerns Power after all.
With the first I was in a situation of Power. I could do anything. Or so it seemed. She clung to me. She lay at my feet and looked up to me like I was a God. And I was too. For when you are so very young, you feel God-like. Such is youth!
Look at them now, the youth of today, walking on the street! Love for them is the eternally INFINITE. That is why with youth there is still hope. As they are believers in the truth. It spreads out before them in space and time. Boundless. They are perpetually in a mindset ready for exploration. Of all kinds. This is why some of them love Art and Literature.
I am in my fifties now. I no longer believe in infinity. For me things are all too FINITE. Where I once saw open space, I now see enclosure.
She used to lie at my feet like I was a God. It’s a great feeling, isn’t it, to have that power! You stand above them like a God or a Goddess, looking down upon them, deciding on their fate.
And of course – as we all know – with such power comes enormous responsibility. The only problem is that when you are young you rarely feel like being responsible. Then one day you decide to do a terrible thing. Everyone does it, at some point. You kill them!
Metaphorically, at least. But this is the first real taste of death, and it is a truly terrible thing. Now, you have the taste of death upon your tongue. The one that you used to kiss. Now, s/he only tastes of poison.
You move on.
It is that simple. It’s called survival. Call this the first age when everything was divine and when you discovered metaphor and the apocalypse of dying.
The Soler Family, Pablo Picasso, 1903.
Nemesis and Trinity
So, time passes. You meet another one. Number Two. S/he is your Nemesis. For she will destroy you. Just like you destroyed number One, now your time too will come. Somehow this enters into our conception of justice. What goes round comes round. Karma.
Just as you had looked down, all those years ago, on your first lover; just as you looked down on the one who crawled around at your feet, now you are in that very same position! Who would have thought it? There now, look at you! That miserable specimen down on both your hands and knees before Her, who is looking down upon you. Like she’s contemplating an insect. And, of course, She eventually squashes you under Her boot heels. She crushes and grinds you into the earth so that there is no longer any trace of you. You are extinguished. Finally. You are dead.
There now. That is the story of numbers One and Two.
What happens next? And what, by the way, does any of this have to do with Messrs Beckett and Joyce? Everything, my dears. Just wait. Be patient, as I will explain. I will take you by the hand and help you to join up all the dots.
But first, let me introduce you to number Thee.
Isn’t she a beauty? Now, remember the score is one-all now. Even Stephens, as we say. You are finally at the age of equality. It happens early on for some; for others later on. And for some poor buggers, it never even comes!
You have to will it. But if s/he does come, you will finally have a chance to redeem yourself. For, like her, you too have been broken. You are no longer the youth you once were. Infinity has been clouded by impossible violence. You need to thread carefully now, and hold onto what you have with more caution.
And you do. Whereas before your relationships – that is with numbers One and Two – may have lasted only five or so years, with number Three it is all-enduring. Before you know it, twenty years have passed and you have children growing up around you; who you now cherish as you once cherished your own life.
This is the story of Three. The Trinity, if you will.
Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy.
How It Is
Moving on to Samuel Beckett and a story from his How It Is(1961) that has obsessed me like no other in Literature. This novel by the Irish Modernist writer has obsessed me throughout most of my adult life. It acts like a portal into human history through Literature, travelling back to the Ancients of Greece, and Rome. But before exploring this, I must first tell you about Giambattista Vico.
When talking about Giambattista Vico and Samuel Beckett, we must also consider James Joyce. The number three is there again! They form a triad. A holy Trinity. It was Joyce, after all, who asked the young Beckett to write an article about Work in Progress – the working title for Finnegans Wake (1939) – when they first met in Paris in 1928.
This was when he wrote his famous essay Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce(1929), in which he singles out Vico – more than the other Italians mentioned in the title – for particular attention, and the important influence of this Neapolitan thinker on James Joyce, in particular on the structural composition of Finnegans Wake.
But it also demonstrated Vico’s influence on Samuel Beckett, a point that has tended to be ignored by Beckett scholars.
Let us consider the essence of Vico’s ideas on the Three Ages of Man, and how Joyce was to incorporate Vico’s theories on history into his epic final novel.
In the La Scienza nouva or A New Science (1725), Vico attempts to break history down into a cyclical process, as natural as the four seasons. In fact, Vico’s Three Ages of Man idea actually contains four parts, and in this Joyce is a stickler. For this reason, though not alone, that Finnegans Wake is made up of four books. One being for each Age.
The Muses Melpomene, Erato, and Polyhymnia, by Eustache Le Sueur, c. 1652–1655.
The Four Ages
What then are these Four Ages? The First is called the Divine Age and language in particular, but also laws, are divinely thought of, or God-given. God in this case is Jupiter, as we are in the Pagan era.
Though, coming from a Christian era, we should recognise the intermediary nature of the Muse Uranus, mother of all the Muses, assigned the role of intermediary between God and man. However, She, in turn, needs a human vessel in order to transfer her God-given knowledge, and this, according to Vico, is where the poets come in.
As it was a theological age, so all poets were theological, unlike today. That is to say, they were only concerned with divine matters.
Language itself was divine. And metaphor played an incredibly important role, as signs and symbols were all-important.
Vico singles out the bolt of lightning, for example, as the first sign of Jupiter. This is simply to show how terrified these primitive people were in the beginning. They lived in caves, like Home’s Cyclops. This was a period of epic wandering. Man was chaotic and unruly. The Muse, through her instruction, tamed him. Such are the divine origins of language.
Joycean scholars have had great fun deciphering the various myths from the Bible and Antiquity that register in Book 1 of Finnegans Wake. It is indeed a really funny book – as Joyceans constantly highlight –full of puns referring back to famous figures, such as the Duke of Wellington and Ishtar, the ancient Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, and the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, and so many more.
It is a great sprawling narrative divided into eight chapters each one given over to one of the major characters who are called the Earwickers. Father and Mother – Humphry and Anna, and their three siblings Shem, Sham and Issy. The first chapter is a kind of prelude given over to history and the origins of the Muse.
Beckett in How It Is begins his novel in similar fashion. Just as Joyce derives his ideas from Vico on the origins on human societies, Beckett too points to the Muse at the very beginning of the novel by starting with an invocation.
Although unconventional, as you would expect from Beckett, that he uses the structural form tells us everything.
The great Russian comparatist Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogical Imagination(1975), is at pains to point out the origins of the novel as a genre and its debt to epic poetry, from which it took many structural features. Most novels are of tri-partite structure in theory, as Aristotle in his Poetics asserts, telling of events before, during and after – which is exactly what Beckett does in How It Is: events before Pim, with Pim and after Pim.
Who is this Pim, you might be asking? To answer this we move on now to Vico’s Second Age, which is given over to violence.
Odysseus and his crew are blinding Polyphemus. Detail of a Proto-Attic amphora, circa 650 BC.
Female Domination
Recall my story with girl Number Two? How She kicked my sorry little ass! Yes, I am talking about Female Domination of the male species, just as I spoke about Male Domination of the female in the First Age. This is karma. Although with Beckett the characters are practically sexless.
Similarly, Joyce parodies Hitler and the Nazis in Book 2 of Finnegans Wake, who were on the rise during Joyce’s lifetime. Book 2 of Finnegans Wake is full of wonderful puns at the expense of the Nazis, referencing particularly their atrocious treatment of Jews.
Beckett in How It Is uses the most crude and forceful comedy. It is truly grotesque. The only comparison that I can think of in literature is a Satyr play – bringing us back to Ancient Greece.
There is only one surviving Satyr play: The Cyclops by Euripides. Anyone who is familiar with this hilarious text will be aware that it is a parody of Homer’s Odyssey. A grotesque parody in the style of Rabelais.
Essentially, Euripides takes the myth of Zeus and Ganymede which sees the king of the gods having his way the beautiful youth.
Ganymede is synonymous with the submissive person in an amorous relationship. The Bottom, in short. As opposed to the Top. We here use the language of S&M, which is what we are talking about. Bottoms and Tops. Dominants and submissives. This is what Beckett is obsessed with in How It Is. This is what I have come to call the maths of rejection.
Set Theory
As the novel progresses, Beckett becomes more and more obsessed with the numbers Three and Four. In fact the quartet, not the trilogy, is the ideal set.
I am using the mathematical term now, taken from set theory. As this is how Beckett chooses to enter into the subject matter. It went on to become a major obsession of his during his later writing career. Consider there were two decades between the publication of How It Is in 1961 and his play Quad, completed in 1981, although tit wasn’t published until three years later.
Beckett spends the greater part of parts 2 and 3 of How It Is going over the innumerable permutations of movements. We are back with girlfriends One and Two, which started this small discourse on Love and Literature. Remember 1 + 2 = 3. Therefore, if we were to progress to 4, that would mean a return to 1 – to my mind anyway. Meaning I would have to become the bastard again.
Beckett uses the terms Victim and Torturer. These are the two modes of so-called human behaviour. In Beckett’s world, or, at least in the universe of How It Is, you are one or the other. I wonder which one are you?
This is a slight simplification, as the movement of the couples in How It Is is in permanent flux.
Beckett was also obsessed by Heraclitus and Democritus, the crying and laughing philosophers who form the two masks of theatre showing both aspects, extreme poles of human nature: the Tragic and the Comic; the legacy of the Ancient Greeks, which Beckett – without a doubt the greatest playwright of the twentieth century – revitalized.
What other playwright uses farce to such a violent advantage? Think of the Tramps Estragon and Vladimir contemplating hanging themselves from the tree, as a form of entertainment in Waiting for Godot; Nag and Nell consigned to the dustbins in Endgame; or Winnie up to her neck in it in Happy Days.
In all the unforgettable imagery conjured in Beckett’s theatre we find unforgettable visual metaphors encapsulating, in their simplicity, human tropes, which endure eternal.
In this Beckett is the poet of catastrophe and disaster, a role he inherited from the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).
Baudelaire was the first to mine the negative aspect in man to such a profound and relentless degree, in this sense Beckett is really his doppelgänger. It was Beckett’s genius to align himself so much to the dark side, as it were, which Baudelaire had ploughed so successfully in Les Fleurs Du Mal.
Featured Image: Louis Jamnot (1814-1892), Le Vol de l’âme
Before a recent online poetry reading I was invited to meet with other international participants. I assumed the purpose was to gain a little insight into the other writers’ work. In fact, one of the main reasons – I was informed by our overtly gracious American host – was to establish which pronouns we would feel happiest to have ourselves described with.
It was the first time that I had experienced first-hand the increasingly bizarre world of contemporary gender politics. While the subsequent exchange of pronouns went on its way, I couldn’t help thinking of Martin Heidegger’s radical alternative to Descartes cogito.
Shortly after the reading I took down again my English translation, a first edition, of Beiträge zur Philosophie ( Vom Ereignis ), written between 1936 and 1938, though not appearing in print in Germany until 1989 – at Heidegger’s insistence thirteen years after his death – and Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ), which was also published posthumously in 1999.
For the purposes of the present essay, I would like to contrast some of my findings on From Enowning, also known as Of the Event due to a later translation by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (2012), with those of Charles Bambach, who published a book called Heidegger’s Roots; Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Cornell University Press, 2003). I believe this may be useful in the context of identity politics today – as illustrated in the anecdote above.
As I see it, Heidegger’s ideas on Be-ing, along with other useful insights, have been completely railroaded through the excesses of so-called Woke culture. These ideas could have profound implications as we confront contemporary challenges, including climate change.
Peter O’Neill. Image (c) Victor Dragomiretchi.
Nazism and Wider Work
Among the most sinister aspects of contemporary academia is a declining rigor in argument. Thus, for example Heidegger’s undoubted Nazism is being used to undermine all aspects of his work which are simply unparalleled in the context of modern philosophical ideas is. As his former, Jewish, student Hannah Arendt put it:
The gale that blows through Heidegger’s thinking – like that which still, after thousands of years, blows to us from Plato’s work – is not of our century. It comes from the primordial, and what it leaves behind is something perfect which, like everything perfect, falls back to the primordial.
In Heidegger’s Roots[1], however, Charles Bambach attempts to demonstrate that the political ideology of the Nazis infects all of Heidegger’s thought, and so, by implication, this thinker can have very little to contribute to society. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I take the case of Bambach here in this essay, but he is just one of many over the last few years who have jumped on the “Heidegger was a Nazi” bandwagon, which may be located within the context of woke ‘cancel culture.’ Against this I argue that if one reads the books Heidegger wrote during the 1930’s – and indeed also during the war – you find his thought has actually nothing to do with Nazi ideology.
I will be making this case based on two books here, one written in the mid- to late- 1930’s, which I will be referring to as Vom Ereignis/From Enowning[2]; and another from the early 1940’s, at the height of the war as the fate of Stalingrad was being decided, written on the subject of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.[3]
But let us begin with Bambach in Heidegger’s Roots, who discusses Heidegger’s now infamous Rectoral Address at Freiberg University in 1933, after he had been appointed to the position with the support of the Nazi party. Bambach states that unlike other academics he will actually read the text as a serious piece of philosophical writing, wholly consistent with his Heidegger’s overall contribution to philosophy.
This is the substance of Bambach’s book: that Heidegger’s politics is an intimate extension of his entire philosophical outlook and that one cannot distinguish between the Nazis and his thought, as they come from the same source. This is a very interesting idea, and Bambach puts up a meticulous case, at least when it comes to this very questionable period in Heidegger’s life and thought.
Under the Influence
Even as late as 1935, with the publication of Introduction to Metaphysics[4], there are still pro-Nazi passages, deeply shocking to read today, revealing the extent to which Heidegger was under the influence of Nazi ideology, and how he tried to use it to promote his own ideas.
I remember putting this particular book down, despite having been excited by Heidegger’s notions on early Greek thinkers, such as Heraclitus. I simply found the cheap Nazi sentiment really difficult to stomach.
Bambach is very good when explaining the mood of the times, and the extent to which Heidegger was carried along by Hitler being made Chancellor of Germany, thus legitimating the Nazis as the most powerful party in all of Germany, an idea unthinkable in the 1920’s.
If other Germans responded to the National Socialist takeover with “a widely held feeling of redemption and liberation from democracy”and felt relief that an incompetent and petty-minded government would no longer be left to solve the profound crisis of the times, Heidegger concerned himself with greater issues. He interpreted the events of early 1933 not as a political transfer of power, but as an epochal shift within being itself, a radical awakening from the slumbers of Weimar politics as usual.[5]
Two years later, in the summer of 1935, still as Rector of the University of Freiburg, Heidegger, while offering an interpretation of Heraclitus’s fragment number 59 – generally translated as ‘War/conflict is the Father and King of all,’ – claims that ‘along with the German language, Greek (in regard to the possibilities of thinking) is at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages.’
This is just one quote among many peppering a text written in the context of German rearmament that would culminate in World War II, which makes for very unsavoury reading, particularly when considering his standing in German academia.[6]
Heidegger in 1960.
Change of Track
One year later, however, after the Introduction to Metaphysics, in 1936, one meets a radically different text: Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).
It is as if the book is written by a different author altogether. Gone is the hyperbole. The very register and tone are completely different. But, most importantly, there is no mention of German supremacy. There is no mention of Germany at all!
Along with Sein und Zeit (1926) or Being and Time, VomEreignis or FromEnowning (1936) this is the most important of all Heidegger’s texts and the one that he considered the most important of all his books.[7]
Ten years earlier in Being and Time Heidegger claimed that his task was to ‘destroy’ the history of Ontology, or Western metaphysics as we know it; in other words Descartes cogito by replacing it with Dasein or Be-ing, in VomEreignis/ from enowning/ of the Event. Here Heidegger sets out, for the first time, a philosophical structure in six parts, in which he attempts, using the concept of Be-ing/ Dasein, to return to inceptual Greek thinking.
This will become the most important concept for Heidegger to put down in writing. Bambach actually acknowledges this shift , but with nothing like the emphasis it deserves.
The contents of VomEreignis/From Enowning/Of the Event retains real significance for us today, particularly considering our current environmental crisis – a crisis even more severe than the one that Heidegger confronted in the 1930s in Nazi Germany; given today we face actual extinction if we do not radically change the way we live as a species (Dasein) on planet Earth.
Machination
One of Heidegger’s central concerns with the world of men he expresses in VomEreignis is machination. In part two of the book Echo, Heidegger attempts to grasp inceptual historic thinking originating from the Greeks.
This involves an attempt at recuperating Be-ing which has been abandoned as he sees it, as opposed to following cause and effect metaphysics, which are the result of Christian thinking.
There are whole passages in this text which are profoundly at odds with Nazi German policy at the time of the book’s composition, and which, frankly, apart from a mere sentence acknowledging this fact, Bambach largely ignores in this his most fundamental work. It is, after all, referred to as ‘the turn’ or the seminal event in his thinking, in which he decisively takes his own path in philosophical thinking, which remains completely unparalleled today.
One is accustomed to calling the epoch of “civilisation” one of dis-enchantment, and this seems for its part exclusively to be the same as the total lack of questioning. However, it is exactly the opposite. One has only to know from where the enchantment comes. The answer: from the unrestrained domination of machination.[8]
Notably, at the time of writing, in March and in June 1936, the German army had marched into the Rhineland, and were also supplying General Franco with ‘several formations of Junkers 52’s’.[9]
The German military was to become one of the most technologically advanced armies in the world. Heidegger was not only critical of this particular phenomenon, but in the same passage, he continues:
The bewitchment by technicity and its constantly self-surpassing progress are only one sign of this enchantment, by virtue of which everything presses forth into calculation, usage, breeding, manageability, and regulation. Even “taste” now becomes a matter for this regulation, and everything depends on a “good ambiance”.[10]
Joseph Goebbels views the Degenerate Art Exhibition.
Degenerate Art
The Degenerate Art Exhibition (Die Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst ) took place from July to November of 1937, while Heidegger was working on his masterwork VomEreignis – From Enowning – Of the Event.
Heidegger’s use of the term ‘bewitchment’ is interesting considering the mesmeric effect Hitler had on the masses at Nurnberg. During the same year, 1937, the ‘Rally of Labour’ was held (Reichsparteitag der Arbeit) in which masses of people converged on the city.
In the Pathé newsreels of the time you can see the machination of people converging in the stadium. They are marching just like machines. Heidegger repeats the phrase again, even placing it in italics in the text: ‘theepoch of total lack of questioning of all things and of all machinations.’[11]Heidegger did not allow the book to be published for fifty years after its composition. So far, it has been translated into English twice. It is the most extraordinary testament to Martin Heidegger’s thought, as it is a complete break with Western metaphysical thinking.
Regenerative Ideas
Having begun this essay with a discussion of the use of pronouns today, in terms of gender identity, I now consider Heidegger’s concept of Dasein or Be-ing in English as an alternative designator for the subject.
Heidegger is an Aristotelian in his thinking, who views the multiple in the One, Be-ing as representative of all living creatures, regardless of race, sex etc. It is a wonderfully free and natural idea, totally revolutionary in concept, and here is the thing: the majority of people living in the world today have absolutely no sense of the existence of such a rich philosophical idea
People are far more interested in banging on about an extremely regrettable period in the German thinker’s career. But if we are really serious as a species, in other words if we are really serious about surviving as opposed to going extinct, we had better put such petty notions of self aside, and concentrate instead on regenerative ideas on the way we perceive one another as Dasein.
Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia – Heraclitus (believed to be Democritus) 1652-53 – Luca Giordano
Heraclitus
As stated in the introduction, I want to speak about two of Heidegger’s works. The second book that I turn to is Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos[12] which was originally written at a point when the Wehrmacht met disaster at Stalingrad in 1943.
One of the first things I noticed was, again, the register or tone of the book. Especially considering when it was written, it is a miraculously peaceful work. None of the posturing that appeared in Introduction to Metaphysics is on display in this book.
Bambach does not refer to this work as it was only published in English for the first time in 2018. So a period of fifteen years separates the publication of his 2003 book and this second posthumous work.
My focus here is Heidegger’s beautiful meditation on a god so synonymous with Heraclitus, who is of course Artemis, goddess of the hunt.
Heidegger refers to fragment number 51 which he translates as, ‘The jointure (namely, the self differentiating) unfolds drawing – back, as shows itself in the image of the bow and lyre.’
This meditation is taken from the first section of the book, whose title is The Inception of Occidental Thinking. This point is important to underline as it forms a continuum with Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).
Heidegger sets out in the former work the six ways to inceptual thinking (1. Preview, 2. Echo, 3. Playing Forth, 4. Leap, 5. Grounding and finally 6. The Last God.). He rejects all causality in place of what he defines as inceptual Greek thinking. In other words, pre-Platonic.
Nietzsche had already made this distinction in his lectures from Basel in the 1870s,[13] so Heidegger was following his former master in many respects. For Heidegger, the elegance of this fragment, contrasting the bow and the lyre, is emblematic of all of Heraclitus’s essential doctrine of unity in opposites.
Drawing on the laws of attraction, Heidegger uses the terms ‘submerging’ and ‘emerging’ to remarkable effect. He draws out the subtlety of Heraclitus’s thought in his own very particular way through the idea of unconcealment, which for Heidegger is the essence of authentic Greek thinking before Plato.
At that point truth was emerging from the abiding sway of Be-ing and could only be perceived in the clearing of the mind momentarily, before being obscured again. There is something profoundly sensual about Heidegger’s engagement with the Artemis fragment, and it is a testament to the translators who have managed to capture the wonderful poetry of the meditation throughout the entire work.
Therefore, she roams, as the huntress, the entirety of what we call ‘nature’. We certainly must not think about the essence of ‘tension’ in modern dynamical and quantitative terms, but rather as the lightened apartness of an expanse that is, at the same time, held together. In emerging, emerging receives the self-concealing in itself, because it can emerge as emerging only out of self-concealing: it draws back into this. [14]
Again, as in Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ), in Hercalitus, Heidegger departs from the twentieth century and all of its woes – its abandonment of Dasein Be-ing – in order to return to historic thought.
Image Daniel Idini (c)
The Turn
Such is ‘the Turn’ – at least what has become known as ‘the Turn’ – in his thinking. When Heidegger abandoned not only Nazi ideology, at least in the thinking expressed in these books, but also Western metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche. The results are simply extraordinary.
This is why I feel compelled, living in a world that seems to have abandoned all sense, to critique writers like Charles Bambach, who focus myopically on the very negative elements in Heidegger’s work, but which seems to me much more a part of the man, the lesser part, as distinct from the essential work.
[1] Bambach, Charles: Heidegger’s Roots – Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Cornell University Press, London, 2003.
[2] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions from Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999.
[3] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus – The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, Translated by Julia Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018.
[4] Heidegger, Martin: Introduction to Metaphysics, New Translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press, 2000.
[5] Bambach, Charles: Heidegger’s Roots; Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Cornell University Press, 2003, p.70.
[6] The German TV miniseries Generation War ( Unsere Mütter, unsere Vätter ) has one of the leading characters mention the possibility of attending a lecture by Heidegger when he gets his leave and he can return to Germany from the Eastern Front. Once can only imagine the very powerful feelings generated in the minds of young Germans who were exposed to such very powerful and interesting ideas, yet which were put to the service of National Socialism.
[7] In a marginal note of Letter on Humanism, the Editor F.-W. von Hermann notes, that Heidegger wrote the following; “enowning” has been since 1936 the guiding word of my thinking’.
Heidegger, Martin: Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ) – p.364.
[8] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions From Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p.86.
[10] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions From Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 87.
[12] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus, Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p.115.
[13] Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Translated from the German and Edited, with an Introduction and Commentary, by Greg Whitlock, University of Illinois Press, First Paperback Edition, 2006.
[14] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus, Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p.116.
Awarded one of the Tidiest Towns in the nation, the place was profoundly inept and utterly corrupt. Indeed disturbing, because winning the competition was proof positive that the town represented how things operated in the entire country. In terms of organisation, it was the stuff of nightmare. Everything had to go through countless committees, and the people you’d want absolutely nothing to do with were the kind who joined the committees.
When he did think about them, White merely pictured those broken plastic corrugated sheets which had been haphazardly assembled to form a makeshift roof over the old train station. Effectively it was the first view any observant person would have upon arrival. What did this tell you about the country? Here was the town voted, again by countless committees, as being the Tidiest Town in Ireland, and yet the minute you got off the train, you looked up at the train station itself, at these gaping holes in the shattered corrugated plastic sheeting. It was pathetic, thought White, as it revealed the corrupt nature of an entire island. The whole nation, by voting in this way, or rather the Committees who had voted for the town, by recommending that the town should receive the highest accolade in the land, were actually complicit in praising the most mediocre of towns. Mediocrity was their aim. It was as if, for White, these loose panels of plastic, which during winter would let in buckets of rain, while every year the town’s commuters sheltered under the awful structure, getting wet in the process, had become symbolic of the country’s lack of rigour. Its shambolic state.
He understood why large sections of people in the North wanted nothing to do with the place. Because the level of ineptitude and corruption was shocking. There it was. Visible for all to see, pondered White, who stood under the atrocity. I mean corrugated plastic sheeting! Who in their right mind was going to use such a material to protect the town’s citizens and visitors from the elements? It was the first of many signs that discreetly whispered, These people don’t really care about anyone in the first place. And, if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. That was it, wasn’t it? The “Ah sure, it’ll do!” attitude his neighbour Stan was always banging on about whenever he spoke of the place. Stanley was rarely in country, spending the majority of his time working as a consultant around the world. About what, White didn’t actually know. It was kind of a mystery, but Stan made it very clear to White how much he hated the place and a lot of his fellow Irishmen.
The open hole in the sheeting spread out in a star formation. It was frayed into bits. Where it was not broken, it was black with dirt, moss and other under growth. As if nobody had actually thought about cleaning it up, not to mention fixing it by replacing it with, at the very least, new sheets.
“Ah, sure it will do!”
“If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” Stan would say. “Bunch of fucking morons!”
Every word was spoken with that crisp nearly perfect enunciation that Stan possessed. It would be the closing punch line in these sessions after having looked at and examined the problem from every possible angle. White had never before brought up the lamentable condition of the roof of the town train station with him before. You see, unlike White, Stan wasn’t a commuter. They inhabited very different worlds. Whereas White was grounded firmly in the everyday world that he saw around him, in other words that of the town, and the city beyond, where he worked, and which was only thirty minutes south by commuter train, Stan’s world was one of airports and hotels. Corporate zones. Stan was very corporate. He exuded the spirit and parlance of international corporatism. White was more about the local.
Stan was unaware as to the everyday workings in a town where they both lived, and that never ceased to amaze White. While he looked at Stan with incredulity at times, about his innocence, Stan would throw White some pretty incredulous looks when in turn, his lack of savvy on certain matters at an international level was too obvious to ignore. Merging their knowledge of the micro and the macro, together, the two men were, in a sense, whole.
But they discussed countless other issues together. No, the broken corrugated plastic sheeting hanging over the heads of commuters on the platform outside of the town’s train station was a topic from which he had spared Stanley. Smiling now, White, regarded the drab excuse for a roofing feature. The sheer gombeenism. The degree of decay on a shameless exhibition to all and sundry had to be seen to be believed.
White put it down to Ireland’s post-colonial heritage. Casting a condescending glance at some of the town’s inhabitants as he did. For instance, if you looked at the actual railway station itself, apart from the roofing, it was a fine old building, as many of the old train stations were, having been designed and built by the former occupying power. There you had it then. The very infrastructure had been inherited. Nothing, not the laws of the land, nor the great buildings that housed their government and courts (bar one) had all just been taken over. That was a century and three generations ago. White’s own grandfather had fought in that war. The War of Independence, they called it. What a joke. They were no more independent of their so-called old enemy as the man in the moon.
White looked at his watch. The train would be coming soon. He walked with a quick pace further down the platform. He wanted to get away from the broken corrugated plastic roofing. Another joke. And there were so many of them too. Sick jokes, that is.
Once inside the train, White’s mood improved slightly. At least he had a seat. That was another thing. There were so few trains now that he noticed more and more people would have to stand, and starting with the commuters from the town just after his own. Imagine that, every day, five days a week, getting on the train with your commuter ticket that you had paid for and you would never have, or only rarely, the opportunity to sit down! That was more of it, the chronic sense that nobody really gave a shit about anyone or anything anymore. There was no sense of community. No civic pride. Why would there be? What had they done? In over a hundred years, what had they actually done to the country since their newfound freedom?
While White sat there looking around him, the recorded voice came over on the intercom system. It announced the next town in Irish. Nobody spoke the language, or hardly anybody, and yet that was even more of it. The con. Our government printed every document out twice, first in Irish, which was the official language of the country, and then in English which was a language everyone actually spoke. Why they insisted on imposing the language in this way was all part of it. Keeping up Appearances. A great little nation, the Republic of Ireland, for keeping up appearances. Truth be told, White couldn’t stomach it. This Ireland created by all of its little committees. You couldn’t fart without some fucker complaining to a committee.
He remembered reading somewhere that all revolutions were destined to fail. It was inevitable. Once a revolution had taken place, corruption set in from the word go. This was human nature. There would always be some kind of favouritism. And the types of people who got involved politically, no matter where you were, were always one and the same. Barring, of course, the very rare exception. Chancers who, for the most part, were merely looking out for number one. It was the same the world over. Why should Ireland be any better, or any worse.
While the train slowed, pulling into the next town, White watched the disappointed faces of new commuters who boarded the train. And who had, as usual, missed the opportunity of sitting down. When he was much younger, White would no doubt have given up his seat to one of them. Women in particular, as that’s the way he’d been brought up. But not now. This was the age of equality. White looked hard at some of the women who were now standing up around him. Resigned faces staring out a window at the Irish sea. How did they like this brave new world? Sometimes, very rarely mind you, some guy would grow embarrassed and offer up his seat to one of them, but it was rare now. Pathetic. And all part of it. Everybody hermetically sealed in their own little bubble. Nobody speaking to anyone else. Addicted to their phones. Passive, they listened to radio propoganda or some endless podcast, or perhaps even watched a feature film. Not a sinner reading a real book.
That was another myth, a nation of great readers! Ha! Cunts. Not one of them had read a book by James Joyce. His wife, an Italian who had studied both law and literature at university, worked in a busy solicitor’s office in the city centre. The ignorance of the people there had been appalling. Joyce was revered as essential reading, and yet here, in the cuntry of his birth, (a country from which he notoriously sought exile) hardly anyone at all had ever read him. Anything intellectual was immediately disdained. A myth? No, that was indeed the reality here.
Joyce made White’s mind jump to an idiot who lived in the same town. He had met him under the plastic corrugated roofing on the train station one sunny morning. For some reason Joyce had come up in their brief discussion.
“My opinion is as good as anyone else’s, isn’t it?” He had asked White.
White just laughed, knowing that by the man’s own admission he’d hardly read him at all, and yet he felt compelled to ask such a ridiculous question. Not only that, but he genuinely believed it too. It simply beggared belief how stupid some people could be. But as Stanley’s almost obnoxious North American drawl came crashing in. Every word was perfectly enunciated, to double the effect.
“Bunch of fucking morons.”
Just hearing somebody voice the truth out loud made White feel better. Smiling now from ear to ear, he decided that what made us human was the pleasure of sharing.
If stylistically Francesca Banciu’s latest novel translated into English Fleeing Father (Vatherflucht) is a much simpler construct than her previous incarnation, Mother’s Day – Song of a Sad Mother, it is written in the same inimitable prose, rendered beautifully by Banciu’s publisher, Catharine Nicely with Elena Mancini as translator.
I was immediately reminded, on reading the first few pages, of Ernest Hemingway’s dictum ‘write just one true sentence’ multiplied by every passing line. A rule that is simple in its apparent ruling, but whose practical implications are wrought with sinister complexity.
You’re worthless, nothing will ever come of you. And no one in this world will ever marry you. Father said to motivate me.
The staccato punch of the lines hits the reader as ceaselessly as I imagine Carmen-Francesca Banciu punching the keys of her typewriter-computer. The fact that all quotation marks have been jettisoned is a wonderfully seamless way of incorporating the almost casually brutality of the father’s remarks into his ten-year-old daughter’s worldview.
It is matter of fact, a ‘this is how it is’ Hemingwayesque, simple complexity which renders the text, or rather the reality that is portrayed in the text, into a highly ambivalent and stylistic reading, which personally I find extremely refreshing.
A kind of brutal clarity emerges akin to the visual sumptuousness of Stanley Kubrick’s visual narrative. I suppose the reason for such taut precision is the uncluttered narrative technique of the writer; the absence of sub-clauses.
Banciu is a kind of Anti-Proust in this respect, which is curious as I happen to be a huge fan of the Parisian narrator and veritable King of complex sentence structure. But, surely this is where form fuses equally with content. Banciu is not describing the fin de siècle opulence of decadent Paris, but rather the almost spartan livelihoods of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Socialist Republic of Romania which she grew up in. So, the prose is just as spartan. Brutal.
Ironically, as a reader who happened to grow up during the 1980s, and so can remember quite clearly the revolution and eventual fall of the Dictator, his bloody corpse appearing to me in black and white splashed across the front page of Liberation in miniature while the hawklike head of Samuel Beckett took up the majority of the page (his death having been announced and deemed more important that day in his native Paris), I see parallels with the misery of my own upbringing in the cold and extremely repressive Republic of Ireland during that same period, and so can empathise enormously with Banciu.
The almost reflexive callousness is all too familiar. There is a sexual assault, for example, merely mentioned in passing already five pages into the novel. Domestic violence too, in the form of corporal punishment inflicted upon children, as was standard practice of the time. Spare the rod, and all that.
So, Banciu’s childhood world will be a very familiar one to anyone reading the novel in Ireland who grew up during the eighties, which is a savage indictment in itself of the collective misery which was inflicted on a whole generation here, not to mention people growing up in socialist Romania.
So, the Socialist Republic of Romania and Catholic Republic of Ireland, despite the superficial difference in ideologies, held a lot in common.
One of the central ideas that conjoin both regimes, I couldn’t help noticing while reading Fleeing Father, was the obsession with maintaining appearances on the parts of the protagonist’s parents, and how parents who bought into both regimes were willing to sacrifice the lives of their children in order to maintain the appearance of social order.
This is the most frightening thing about all of Banciu’s fiction, how mothers and fathers will put the happiness and well-being of their own children at the service of the status quo. I saw the very same subservience as a child growing up in the Irish Republic, and while the outward trappings of a police state, constantly surveying on the citizens, may have had a very different modus operandi – the Church filling in for the network of informers which supplied the state police in Romania with information on ‘undesirables’ – what were the mass confessionals which we grew up with as children but a very elaborate way of keeping us in line, even worse, when you think of it as we were programmed, and from a very young age, to inform on ourselves!
All the familiar trappings of patriarchy are here. The subservient mother, at the service of both state and husband. Banciu’s father, as in her novel, was high up in the party and an avid believer in the subservience of the individual for the betterment of the state.
As cognizant as Father wanted to be, he’d never learned Russian. Nor any other foreign language for that matter. It meant he was an anti-talent, unlike my mother.
How I found reading this all too familiar. The fundamental ignorance of the man, the belittling nature of his ways to anything that was foreign to him. Governed by paranoia and fear.
But mother wore high heels that emphasized her gorgeous
Legs. Whether it had been her will or not. Who knows.
Father loved it in any case. And that’s also how she was buried.
Again, the casual way of effacement, Banciu’s staccato sentences dispatch characters with the same casual and disdainful force as the state system and apparatus that kept the Romanian people in check. Like the callous Church that lied to so many here, who suffered all kinds of abuse at the hands of so many priests, and teachers, politicians, and other so- called pillars of society that tried to protect and hide them.
Of course, Carmen- Francesca Banciu rebelled against them all, and ran away to Berlin. Just as I went to Paris. Such a repressive upbringing fuels your creativity for life. Of course, the ideological systems change, just as the means of surveillance do, but the inherent nature to control the populace is still the same, and as long as there are people who rebel books like Fleeing Father will continue to be written. Would that they were all written as well and clearly, and well – thought out though!
Vaterflucht (Flight from Father), 1998 by Francesca Banciu (translated from the German by Elena Mancini) 309 pages.
