with the divine. The plumbline is vertical
as the resulting verse, so that neither agony
nor ecstasy travel horizontally but curl and rise,
sweet smoke from the swung thurible. Perhaps
these are the only prophets left to us, still able
to loop the loose thread of heaven through earth’s
needle-eye, a tremendous feat because her heavy lid
cannot stay open, closes now even on a clear day.
I imagine a bird and the bird is language, the bird
encircles the head of the most high and does not
flinch or burn, does not hide itself in a cleft of rock
that the holy might pass by. It cannot land. The point
is that the bird approaches—the point is flight. We need
only send our winged words through the needle’s eye,
the poets tell me, as though it’s easy, as though handfuls
of heaven are there for anyone to pattern, Dante or
the old woman at the end of the street who drives out
alone to check her spring calves. And yet to see her
returning at dusk, you’d swear she has covenantal
rainbows on her face, in her white hair.
Lucky gull chicks on a city roof
take food from their parents and snuggle for warmth;
for them, life has begun as well as it could.
The flightless chick who fell from its nest above
and is abandoned by its parents
on a hostile gull family’s roof
is shut in a large, bright, open room
and soon learns that fear is a nail
that fixes the whole being to a hard board.
The lost chick can hear its family above
and calls to them, looking up to a place
it cannot reach and from which no helps comes;
flight is weeks away. The enemy adults attack
and the refugee huddles in a corner
watching the privileged chicks eat well,
all because the spots on its head
are not in the correct pattern.
Sometimes it cannot resist any longer
and rushes forward to try and share the food,
but is driven back by sharp, flashing beaks.
The fallen one must somehow hang on,
surviving on forgotten scraps
until its feathers are ready
and a new phase of life begins.
The prisoner walks around and around,
the will to live fighting the hunger,
but it cannot escape for now, no matter what.
Living in terror in this rooftop hell,
every day is the longest day of the year.
Then the fairy spread her wings and flew off. People came from far and wide to hear the tale of their adventures, and when it was told, they grew up loving and loved, with the fairies for their friends and protectors, ever ready to help them if they were in trouble; in time they were married and lived happily together – that is the end of the story. (H.H.H. Nine Little Fairy Stories: A&C Black, London 1923)
London April 1919
Mr Mancini, the stout and mutton-chopped proprietor of the private hotel, had made an exception and allowed Henry Herbert possession of a front-door key, a privilege that was extended to no other of his residents. The outside doors of the slightly dingy establishment, with their stained glass panels and flanked by cream-painted Etruscan columns, were locked at 11pm every night and after that hour it was only Henry Herbert who was permitted the luxury of drawing up in a hansom and letting himself in, or, having walked home carefully in opera cloak and top hat and maybe a little woozy from the champagne consumed in the Crush Bar, of fumbling just a little with the key as he effected his independent entrance.
Somewhat willowy and slim of waist, with daintily barbered moustache (although he may have been getting a little thin on the top), Henry Herbert was a dapper fellow and while he might not have inspired an overriding impression of manliness, most onlookers found it gratifying to observe this tall gentleman with his neat cravat and swinging his cane as he bravely and confidently occupied the London pavements on his determined way to wherever he was heading.
Henry Herbert occupied the first-floor front, the finest rooms of the narrow five-storey building, overlooking the communal gardens with their protecting iron railings, their locked iron gates and their sooty plane trees. But this was in truth not to claim much, for the Frazer Private Hotel was, at best, a modest establishment in an unfashionable area and had few pretensions beyond its respectability and convenience. However, for Mr Mancini, Henry Herbert, with his fabled money and supposed connections was indeed a catch and an embellishment to the house, somewhat belied by his private ways and apparently modest way of life.
For Henry Herbert it was a two-way transaction. True, money was no object to him, but in exchange for what must at best be considered a somewhat frowsty dwelling he was given freedom from what could be called the attentions of the greater world and the demands of society as well as the quiet and peace he needed to finish his collection of Nine Little Fairy Tales and get them ready for publication. Although South Kensington was near to everything that the great world revered, and not half a mile from his place of birth and his childhood residence, it was, in 1919, a place in free fall from its glory days, the great houses being broken up into flats and rooming-houses, and its great cream stucco façades looking increasingly tired and begrimed as leases expired, families fled and ownership splintered.
On this day, in April 1919, at half past seven in the evening, Henry Herbert walked back to the Frazer Hotel after not having attended a concert of Mendelssohn and Schubert at the Aeolian Hall. The reason for his non-attendance was that the concert had been cancelled because of the “influenza epidemic” and, as he walked back to Queen’s Gate, past the groups of delivery boys waiting with their bicycles, the cabbies at the rank, the loiterers around the Gentlemen’s subterranean convenience and those few intent upon some business, he was for the first time hit with the realization that although the terrible war was over, something equally terrifying had taken its place, something that was evident in the subtly changed activity and atmosphere of the London streets. He had also taken note of a story that had been buried in the middle pages of most newspapers and variously reported as “General Dyer defends the Empire as illegal meeting broken up at Amritsar” to “Two hundred natives killed in the Punjab.”
Henry Herbert knew he was different from other men but after over 40 years of life still hadn’t quite worked out what it was that made him a constant outsider. Although he maintained decorous relations he was certainly at odds with his commercially-minded family to whom turning a decent profit took precedence over matters of the heart or art. As the only son of seven children, the preponderance of females put a terrible weight of expectation upon Henry Herbert’s narrow shoulders, far, far greater than the modest expectations placed upon his six sisters – that they should marry, and marry well enough not to bring disgrace upon the family. Four of them had accomplished what had been asked of them, not spectacularly but respectably, two were unmarried and certain to remain so, a disappointment to their parents but a minor one compared to Henry Herbert’s earth-shattering failure to do even the most miniscule part of what was expected of him, the only boy.
He loved his nephews and nieces, he adored his mother, he doted on his sisters, especially the unmarried youngest, Olive. He liked music and books, he loved pictures, he wrote fairy tales, he did illustrations, he collected engravings, he disliked sport, he was uninterested in politics, he was largely indifferent to the business that kept the great Empire turning. And now, for the first time, as he made his way through the streets of Kensington back to the Frazer Private Hotel on this day in April 1919, he had a flash of consciousness that not only had a major change come upon the world, wrought first by the terrible war that had just ended and now being consolidated with the palpable but hushed-up horrors of the influenza epidemic, but also that he himself, Henry Herbert, embodied this change in two ways. First in an awareness of how singular he was and the infinite vistas that opened because of this and how unlikely it was that the new world would be able to accommodate him, and second, that at the same time he was a part of this mass of human beings he encountered every day. This filled him with equal measures of fear and hope, putting him into a kind of stasis, and for a moment he was almost unable to breathe.
He stopped for a few moments by the church on the corner of Queen’s Gate to catch his breath and regain his equilibrium.
Having to some extent recovered, despite having soiled his lavender gloves on the sooty railing, he continued on the last stretch back to the Frazer Hotel.
This crisis of the imagination was to be replicated by real events a few moments later. Hardly had he put his key in the door than it was opened from within by Mr. Mancini. Behind the bewhiskered and sweating landlord centre-stage was a supporting chorus of residents and servants in what seemed like a tableau of outrage.
So what was this all about? After a lot of fevered explanation on the part of Mr. Mancini, it turned out that Miss Stratford-Tuke, the horsy girl from an impoverished county family who occupied the fourth floor back, had put in a complaint about a supposed visitor of Henry Herbert’s who had been encountered the previous day in the exceptionally dingy and dreary drawing room on the ground floor. This dark-skinned and hirsute young man, having been taken for a servant by Miss Stratford-Tuke and challenged for lolling in the chintz-covered armchair in front of the sulky heatless fire whilst perusing a year-old Illustrated London News provided by the establishment, had apparently proceeded to “insult” her.
After many fevered accusations from the angry chorus. Henry Herbert got to the bottom of it. The visitor was a acquaintance of his, a certain Tommy Stephanides, a young cockney Greek whom he had met amongst the etched glass and chandeliers of the Salisbury Tavern on St. Martins Lane. Tommy had been sitting at a nearby table with a glass of beer and a small volume of poetry which Henry Herbert eventually recognized as identical to his own copy of Towards Democracy, a revolutionary collection in the style of Whitman by Edward Carpenter. The sight of this familiar green book had the unusual impetus of emboldening Henry Herbert to initiate a hesitant conversation with the young man sitting at the next table.
From this interchange he learned to his amazement that the fellow had actually visited Edward Carpenter’s Uranian commune at Millthorpe in Yorkshire and the flyleaf had been signed by the man himself.
Tommy Stephanides with his crisp black hair and sharply defined moustache had something of the extremist about him, uncompromising and fundamentalist almost, no apparent softness and yet, somehow, the softest, most revolutionary person Henry Herbert had ever met. Clever and sketchily-educated though he was, Tommy negotiated the world in a way that Henry Herbert could only dream of. He lived with his mother in a tiny flat near the market in Spitalfields and he worked as a typesetter at a nearby press that turned out pamphlets and manifestos for revolutionary causes. He had been born in London along with the 20th century. He’d always felt constrained by his circumstances and had always felt that there must be something better for him and his mother. He had a Portuguese pal who had gone out to British East Africa and had made a better life for himself. But he lived his life as it was with a certainty and a commitment that seemed to spring from some source unavailable to Henry Herbert. He had a hunger for art and music and was doing his best to educate himself by attending evening classes at the Worker’s Educational Association, but his enormous energy still allowed him to find time to be outside the factory gates with pamphlets at least three evenings a week. It was, in fact, Tommy’s very certainties that made him able to be so soft. His negotiation with the world around him was without nuance, an absolute rejection of the rules by which the world was governed. This gave him an incredible freedom, including the freedom to be soft.
Henry Herbert found Tommy physically alluring and was also cautiously attracted by his brave radicalism and his uncompromising vision.
As the explanations unfolded against the background of anaglypta wallpaper, oleographs of Osborne House and gas mantles in the dreary vestibule of the Frazer Hotel, it soon became clear that the ‘insult’ to Miss Stratford-Tuke was entirely in the young lady’s mind and that while Tommy may indeed not have behaved like a gentleman, his comportment had been largely reactive, a modest response to the pent-up fury in the young lady when she perceived that her accusations were empty.
Henry Herbert had indeed invited Tommy to call on him at the Frazer Private Hotel. He loved the boy with the love of a true innocent. It was significant that it was Edward Carpenter that had brought them together. He knew well that he himself was not made for family life, the pursuit of money or the service of Empire but had never seen himself as any kind of revolutionary, while recognizing and accepting the fact that he was different. Picking up boys from the rich and hazardous street-life of post-war London, however tempting, was not Henry Herbert’s way. The terrible lessons of Oscar Wilde just over twenty years earlier had made him cautious. He sublimated his libido into his collecting, his daily routines and his fairy stories.
* * *
Glasgow docks, Berth 5, April 1923
Olympia Stephanides in her widow’s black waited at the foot of the gangway of the RMS Doric bound for Mombasa with her case and bundle while her son negotiated with a couple of officials. A motor taxi drew up and a dapper figure in a dark overcoat and with a cane emerged. The taxi-driver extracted a suitcase from the back. The man tipped the cabbie and took charge of the suitcase. He looked around and, fixing his eyes on Mrs. Stephanides approached her, took her hand briefly and inclined his head to hers. Tommy finished his dealing with the officials and joined his mother and the gentleman.
The ship’s horn sounded three times and suddenly the somewhat static scene of the wharf burst into frenetic life. The visually monochrome but socially divided crowd fast sorted itself into separate queues for the two gangways. To the observer it became evident that one was for steerage passengers, the other for first and second class. The man with the cane was seen to have a moment of hesitation, but after a brief consultation with Tommy, he joined the mother and son on the steerage gangway.
The rain which had been threatening to fall started as the ship’s horn sounded again. The comings and goings ceased, the crowds on the wharf dispersed and the Doric drew away from the wharf and heaved slowly off into the grey Clyde and the world beyond.
Whether the dapper gentleman had left the ship before it sailed or whether he had remained on board was not observed.
Feature Image: John Atkinson Grimshaw, Glasgow Docks 1881.
To comprehend, regard the brutal wilderness to hand.
More than most, the burrow-broken vagabonds
recall the living tune. In remoter reaches
of the Wicklow hills, they live where a sodden soul
could barely pass, and look out all the year on unimpeded
barriers of heath. In every season, heavy sleets of freezing water
descend interminably, so the roof-thatch drips a colour
peaty-blue, and the cottage-floors are sinking,
boggy in the wet. The wide skies rock in hellish
storminess: by dawn the ragged larches that endure
are bent and twisted, bowing bleakly to the rim
where sunlight somehow rises in the summer.
Down the beggar-glens the churning wind, as well,
comes whirling with a river-roar that time
to time will lessen, of a sudden, giving way
to hush – enough, that is, to sow a tension
in the listening body, neck and limbs, of anyone
who waits, crouching with an ear ajar
for the mournful cries of country-dogs
that prowl among the crags. The elder-folk
who keep and carry on the memory, the quenchable
tradition, of risen insurrection, raising fire in the guts,
are dwindling today, a disappearing army, blown afar –
though here and there, disguised among the lonely
and the low, I’ve met them as I passed along,
and gathered up their words. To see these Irish men
and Irish women sunken, unrepenting, their leather-
skin and ageing eyes ablaze again, condemned for good
not to the viscerating gibbet, but to the slow obscurity
of dying-out, forgotten but by dreamers and the fey –
it’s been enough to wring me with the pang of isolation,
an echo of that dumb, determining distemper, impossible
to heal, of unredeemed deracination… a share, perhaps,
of the desolation mixed in every region of the land
with the waterfalling beauty of experience itself, the luminous
cascade we all have known, elusive, controvertible, but actual
and active to the penetrating mind. I raise my hungry fist
in health – to the ferocity and wonder of the world.
Some viewers have noticed the numberplate on the Ford Cortina in That They May Face the Rising Sun, the recent film based on John McGahern’s 2002 novel of the same name. The plate reads ‘OZU 155’. Surely this is a reference to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu? In interview, the director, Pat Collins, has said that the coincidence of the number plate was unplanned, but deliberately retained.
Ozu is not well known in the West now, but he is certainly a canonical name among people, like Collins, who know their cinema history. Ozu is celebrated for an observational, restrained style of storytelling, with minimal music or camera movement and, indeed, minimal plot. Collins’s admirable adaptation of McGahern’s final novel bears more than passing resemblances to key Ozu films, such as Late Spring from 1949, Early Summer from 1951, Tokyo Story from 1953 and An Autumn Afternoon from 1962. Like Collins, these all share a concern with the gentle unfolding of inter-generational time, with subtle domestic interactions, and with the challenge (sometimes welcome, sometimes not) posed by the visitor from outside.
What is most pertinent about this playful reference, however, is the common take on Ozu that he addressed ‘universal’ themes, and that his appeal is ‘universal’. Similar observations litter the reception of That They May Face the Rising Sun, and of another recent Irish breakthrough hit that I consider a companion piece to this, 2022’s An Cailín Ciúin, directed by Colm Bairéad. Both of these films are set in isolated, unnamed rural locales, with ordinary folk as lead characters, and have plots that are not besmirched by the concerns of urban existence (crime and punishment, politics, violence, money, addiction, social isolation, class conflict), which tend to dominate the stories we watch on screen. As with Ozu, paring away as many specific plot details as possible makes these films feel, to reach for vocabulary favoured by reviewers, ‘timeless’, ‘classic’, ‘profound’, ‘dreamlike’, ‘beautiful’, ‘delicate’.
It has been a long-running complaint that Irish cinema was dominated too long by questions of national and/or sectarian identity, that its narratives were tediously populated by priests and hysterical IRA men running around in ill-fitting leather jackets. Why couldn’t we just have a ‘normal’ cinema that would tell non-political stories that would have a universal appeal? The embarrassment of a liberal commentariat, and academy, at our political backwardness means that any Irish film that is not about the British question in some form or other is greeted with praise for having achieved some kind of postnationalist maturity. The two recent Irish films that we are concerned with here are therefore feted, as evidence that we have grown up.
It is true of any film set in the past that it is as much about the time it is made as the time it depicts. That They May Face the Rising Sun is set in the early 1980s, but the couple at the heart of the story, self-exiled from the city, are recognisably from our times. The period details are minimal, and the sense of being in the past is achieved mostly by the omission of digital devices, screens and disposable homeware. The fashion and hairstyles, so often an important guide to period, are neutral enough to belong either to the 1980s or to the present, especially if we regard Joe and Kate as ageing hipsters. (All the other characters are timelessly old-fashioned in their appearance.) As for what they do, they are engaged in what we now call remote working and the back-to-basics simplicity of their existence, with its mix of intellectual life, light agricultural activity and overpopulation-conscious childlessness, has a whiff of prepperism.
A very memorable sequence dwells on the wake, hours after the unexpected death of the lonely Johnny, who has been marooned in a life of drudgery in London for decades. In the crowded kitchen of Johnny’s brother’s family, a woman leads the group of country people in reciting a decade of the rosary, keeping track with a set of beads on her lap. Everybody participates in the ritual, responding to her as she cycles through the prayers. We linger on the faces and voices for longer than a more distractable film would allow. In the midst of all this, our protagonists Joe and Kate remain silent. For all of their integration into the community and the vital welcome that they offer to all comers, they are nevertheless not fully part of it.
The tone of this separateness is carefully judged; the silence of Joe and Kate is not hostile, nor is it received badly, as the story is one of tolerance. But, whereas in the novel, it is the community that kindly tolerates the blow-ins who have landed in their midst, in the film the flow of tolerance has switched, and now it is the liberal couple who tolerate the traditional, conservative values of the community. The contemporary characteristics of Joe and Kate align them with our 2024 values. The vast changes that have taken place between the early 1980s and now are palpable in this difference.
Nobody knew better than McGahern the tightness of the stranglehold that the Catholic Church held over the life of the country, especially in rural areas and in the schools. (He lost his job as a teacher because of the content of earlier novels). It is apparent to us now that the church was in fact at an unsustainable peak of dominance, triumphant in the abortion referendum of 1983 and in the defeated divorce referendum of 1986. But events such as the outcries at the death of Ann Lovett and the persecution of Joanne Hayes would set in motion the church’s reputational freefall in the intervening decades (rapist priests, slave laundries, death camps for children of the unmarried, the list goes on) and the blanket implementation in recent times of what was in the past quaintly known as ‘the liberal agenda’.
That They May Face the Rising Sun is a document of the final years of the previous dispensation, before the enormous transformation that has brought us to the liberal consensus that now prevails. When did this change take place, and how? Certainly the election of Mary Robinson in 1990 is a milestone, and in and around that date we could also include the Maastricht Treaty, Sinead O’Connor ripping up a photo of the pope (both 1992), the rise of globalisation and neoliberalism (Clinton, Blair, the World Trade Organisation), the 1995 referendum that introduced divorce (by a margin of 0.28%), and the world wide web.
One other, admittedly cosmetic, landmark event was the switch in 1987 to the standard European style of car numberplates, where the numbers and letters actually mean something. ‘OZU 155’ stands for the Japanese filmmaker, whose work is celebrated for the vacuous virtue of being about everything and therefore about nothing — in other words, for being politically inoffensive. Any edge of critique present in Ozu is blunted on contact with a commentariat in search of liberal universalisms, hungry to understand ‘story’ as a virtue and ‘context’ as an embarrassment.
McGahern similarly needs to be pruned of embarrassing excrescences. The problem is that in all his books he is a border writer, constantly conscious of the Troubles, the aftermath of the Civil War, the problem of political-institutional legitimacy and the family dysfunctions that flow as a result. He presents the awkward vista of rural communities that to this day persist in voting for political gombeens, seemingly unable to adapt to the fact that people in Dublin and Brussels know what is best. The film adaptation of his final novel forgives these errors by the device of celebrating the tolerant humanism of the educated outsider, stand-ins for viewers who crave forgiveness for despising the backwardness of pre-liberal Ireland and its uncomfortable, unresolved politics and its quaintly non-rational numberplates.
I was en route to Leitrim for a second time in a month when ‘Zooropa,’ the U2 song from the album of the same name, came on the stereo (a consequence of Spotify’s predictive algorithm). I hadn’t heard the song in thirty years, the year the album came out and I was a student working in Bavaria for a long hot summer. Suddenly, I was back in the apartment room in Straubing, listening and thinking about the Europeanisation of U2 that had come on the back of Achtung Baby and now Zooropa. The previous summer I worked on an old Soviet style pig farm about a hundred kilometres from Berlin. As U2 hung old Trabants from the stage, I considered driving home to start university in one of these relics of the old world: the former Soviet Bloc that bewitched my younger self. The two U2 albums shouldered my journey into Old Europe, experiencing the stark contrast between the former DDR and the richer region of the Bavarian West.
It was only as I set out for Leitrim the second time and the song played that I thought of its significance as a harbinger of the future: the lurch into Capitalist Realism and the End of History. Zooropa is steeped in contradiction as a song, marking the creative energy that pulsated across Europe at the time and the strange perpetual present that would define the new age. ‘No particular place names, no particular song,’ Bono sings, an incendiary criticism of the new Europe’s neoliberal squashing of tradition and place.
Before this Bono implores us to ‘skip the underground…go to the overground’ in a raucous anthemic lament predictive of the exploitation and extortion of the underground music scene in the decades to come. Perhaps it is this very exploitation that led Mark Fisher to coin the term Capitalist Realism in his book of the same name in the first place (ironically, Bono has been at the forefront in legitimising neoliberalism as a social and economic force).
Fisher defines capitalist realism as the ‘widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ This contractual entrenchment in a singular ideology brings with a fatigue culture. In response to a lengthy quotation from The Communist Manifesto, Fisher would offer the retort ‘capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.’
For Fisher, who took his life in 2017, neoliberal consumerism is defined by an orgy of the recycled without the commitment that defines the properly political. We watch The Truman Show, all the while laughing at the naivety and innocence, unaware that the media is owned by similarly large corporations, and much of the news curated for the masses.
It is not that, therefore, that we skip the underground, as Zooropa suggests. We move up to an overground feeding on an ever-dwindling underground that becomes a proxy for it. Most of today’s ‘alt’ music would not sound out of place in the 1990s. Ruins, relics are everywhere, fodder for commodity production, without ritual and symbolic currency.
Image: Darn Thorn
Monumental Failure
It is perhaps for this reason the Sligo-born artist Darn Thorn’s solo exhibition Monumental Failure at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, my second reason for travelling to Leitrim in the space of a month, leaves such a mark, the photographic document resistance to the consumer-spectator fix. Thorn’s show consists of old and new work, the main body of which is a video projected slide show containing haunting photographs of the destroyed bunkers along Europe’s northern coastline.
High in the hills of Leitrim, a reservoir of natural colour and landscape, is the Centre itself. As one drives into New Line, Manorhamilton, in my case on a sunny summer evening, the blue and white colours of the centre are a dalliance with sun-soaked hills that lie all around. Thorn seems aware of this, given the curation of the show and the placement of work within the labyrinth spaces of the gallery.
On entering the space, itself, a series of older framed photographic works, two of which are in colour – all directly or indirectly concerned with the process of ruination as it transforms natural and manmade habitats – are hung. The two works in colour, titled Unknown Zone #8 and Unknown Zone #10 respectively, are images that seem to hang some way between the ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’ as landscape erupts in a sea of colour, and the ‘index’ is less a known quantity in comparison to the black and white images. These are sumptuous, and often mystifying photographs that seduce the senses in a far different capacity to drier, more contemplative and ‘index’ directed black and white photos.
Produced over a decade, and part of prior exhibitions in Thorn’s catalogue of work, the prints in the first space are primers for the meat of the exhibition projected by video in the main gallery space. In the first area black and white photographs produced between 2010 and 2016 are hung, one of which is ‘Oakhampton Castle in Ruins (after Turner).’ This is a giclee print, aligning photographic process with present day content, both of which the viewer is invited to connect in one. Thorn’s use of technical equipment is important, part of a broader aim to make time palatable as a process that exists as a continuum. Working against the desire to simply appropriate and recycle the past in objects of rebuilt ‘time’, a mainstay of capitalist realism, one finds here a measured engagement with the history of art via a ruined building that carries through Turner’s career as artist, used to define a graduating romantic sensibility.
Thorn is obviously familiar with the romantic preoccupation with ruins. His stark black and white rendering of the great castle (in its (post-)modern iteration) is that of an object to be approached cautiously. It is a kind of wry commentary on the genius of Turner in rendering landscape both ‘beautiful and ‘sublime.’ It is also, in this regard, something of an austere commentary on the site of exhibition: deep in the West of Ireland, the Leitrim hills. How do we make sense of this landscape? In the post-Covid, climate change era, is it even possible to look at landscape as anything other than commodity? Because, in my estimation, Thorn can do beautiful and sublime if that is what is needed. But his concern with landscape as a genre of art is to help connect with the past in a way that is primal and other to that of commodity culture.
Image: Darn Thorn
Perfect Location
Perhaps this is why Leitrim, with its traces of an older, less atomised Ireland, is the perfect location for this exhibition. Ruins lie everywhere, in the built environment or the landscape, as the Old and New Ireland face off against one another. It is difficult not to think of the coastline near Manorhamilton on entering the exhibition space and confronting the mainstay of Monumental Failure: austere analogue and monochrome images of the destroyed bunkers that litter Europe’s beaches like ghosts in the machine.
As mentioned in the short text accompanying the exhibition, French architect and theorist Paul Virilio began a career documenting these bunkers in the 70s, traces of an historical war machine that had become spatial and unmoored from time: bombs could fall at any moment, in night or day. Virilio, like Thorn, approaches the bunkers as monuments to a regime of power, whether the Atlantic Wall Hitler dreamed of becoming a ruination to rival Greek Civilisation, or a nation’s resistance to the Soviet March towards a future that is dialectically driven by Progress itself.
The destroyed bunkers that Thorn fixates on in three separate series, whether in Denmark or Lativa, are upended, torn apart, existing as traces of totalitarianism to which Europe’s past is intrinsically bound. Unlike the real landscape around the Sculpture Centre, these often-melancholic images present regimes of power best understood as evil.
They can be read in an implicit socio-historical or moral context, an art historical context as periodic movements, or as primers for an imagination that has no context other than a subject reckoning with time. It is the latter position that implored me to respond to the austere force of the imagery. Maybe Ireland’s recent Covid past was a trigger, but the ruins seemed more than mere historical indexes of a long-lost history, depictions of time that preceded the critic and artist. The idea of retreating to a bunker and hiding away in hope that the war would pass spoke to me of the pandemic lockdowns, the society-wide shutdowns ordered in lockstep across Europe during the Covid 19 pandemic. By looking at Europe’s past Ireland’s past began to stare back at me.
Image: Daniele Idini.
The War on Covid
‘The War on Covid,’ as Michael Casey referenced it in a timely article, (as really a ‘war on people’) is not a glitch in the smooth functioning of the West, but the continuation of social atomisation that accelerated in the previous decade. As capitalist realism bears its ugly teeth, the masses emerge as the ultimate consumers in every facet of life. Stay in, shut up, consume. The lockdown is the bunker mentality of global capitalism, delivering ‘goods’ while ‘keeping you safe’ becomes the key mantra spluttering from the mouths of bureaucrats high on the capital involved in controlling movement of people in space.
Is it mere coincidence that Thorn completed the series titled Monumental Failure, presented in four parts (there is an architectural drawing for an Atlantic Wall bunker by the Lodt organisation projected onto the floor in addition to the photographs of ruins projected on screen) as lockdown ended and the war in the Ukraine usurped it as a media focus? The ruins depicted in these haunting, exquisite, ‘failures’ are symptoms of totalitarianism that persists in our wake. They are signifiers of a bunker mentality that atomises and reduces human beings to bodies in hiding.
A certain symmetry therefore exists in knowing that these images document the beaches of Europe as of today, comment on Europe’s historical war machine, and pay homage to the medium of photography as practiced at the time the bunkers were constructed. Thorn spent considerable time in Lativa, a country that was invaded by the Soviets and Nazis in quick succession, the ruins acting as monuments to liberation and signs of an imminent fascist return.
The complex history of the region, as one regime of power succumbs to another, becomes manifest as haunting blots on landscape, the ruins left uncared for like remains of alien life. Recently, I stumbled upon an online debate concerning the Memorial Museum at Auschwitz, that morally debated the transformation of the death camps into a visiting centre (we see the museum at the end of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest) to remind us of genocidal horror. The thrust of the debate concerned the morality of memorialising something as horrific as the camps that killed so many. Why, the argument went, build a monument to genocide? As I drove home from Leitrim thinking of the ruined bunkers whose various parts lay scattered on the beaches of Europe, meticulously rendered in Thorn’s monochrome images, I thought of a bunker mentality born less of a credo to murder than to ‘keep us safe.’
If the Memorial Museum is intended to engender memory of an event, what, we might ask, is the purpose of the ruined bunkers? Once intended to hide away from terror, the bunkers soon became the object of terror. Would destroying the bunkers trigger a mass forgetting, or do the ruins simply invoke the credo that one person’s idea of safety is another’s idea of terror? If there’s an ethical purpose to Thorn’s Monumental Failure it is to help see both positions as one.
Rationalism is a psychosis; a dissociation of intellect and feeling; the suppression of our intuitive, emotional, and sensual being (the heart’s domain). Enlightenment thinkers wished to replace the credulity of religious compliance with reason. They put their faith in human progress and an expansive intellect – and some, it should be said, in a deeper and more natural spirituality.
They thought they could reform society, but radical social reform has rarely, if ever, been generated by external pressure. It arises when an established worldview reaches the limit of its credibility and its possibilities.
For all the fine words and egalitarian instincts, what emerged was a restricted and abstracted rationality, blinkered by the narrow focus of scientific empiricism: a civilization devoid of core significance that was to become a kind of megalomania. Mathematical abstraction, reductionist precision and the crushing urgency of capital accumulation could never have generated a benign culture.
Without consent to meaning and an imaginative response to the innate feelings that evoke a deeper sense of being, Western civilization will continue its fragmentation and decline until it succumbs to incompetence, overreach, and inner contradiction.
At this point, Goya’s Capricho 43 comes to mind once more. There he sits, Goya himself, slumped over a table, looking like he has the whole world on his shoulders and wishing it would all go away.
However, the words on the panel are stark: “The sleep of reason produces monsters”. And the owls, bats and lynx are generally presumed to symbolize a resurgent irrationality always watching for reason to lower its guard – a clear expression of Enlightenment values. It is balanced somewhat by the caption for the print: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders”.
This is fine so far as it goes, but it ultimately amounts to the same thing. It implies that you can’t trust imagination without reason to almost police it. But in art – so in life generally – the imaginative impulse is primary. It is not going to lead you down the road to ruin as in some Victorian morality tale.
Imagination is the indispensable quality, a benign compulsion in an unfolding life. A creative leap, the capacity to conceive the new, is essential if life is to evolve rather than merely repeat.
Even mathematics, the very rock on which the rational world is built, is itself a brilliant act of imagination; an original, symbolic system, independent of life as lived, and that may in turn be applied to our practical engagement with its process.
Reason elaborates the idea in a kind of inner dialectic that bridges the gap between inspiration and cultural expression, between the imaginative realm and the everyday. In practice, this is an indivisible, spontaneous process – not linear and mechanical – and its accomplishment is a sensitive art.
However, we can’t really be sure what Goya meant. He was unhealthy, overworked and disillusioned. But the sleep of reason is not loss of control; the sleep of reason is rationalism, reason without heart.
"The peremptory watchword "believe in God" has been superseded by “trust the science”. Its dogmatic purpose is no different and it was used to effect during the pandemic as a marketing slogan for social compliance and pharmaceutical profit."https://t.co/QtqRvZn2Co
Looking at Capricho 43 with the Covid pandemic at its height, the bats were insistent. Their association with the new disease was a topic of speculation. A global panic was underway; the threat index was rising, and we were at war with a virus. The response to this “existential” threat (yet another) was employing the standard rhetoric of the war machine. Civil liberties were suspended; a crusade was launched; “trust the science” was on the banners; and facts and figures were deployed like heavy artillery.
If your attitude to the world is purely rational, your actions – both the action itself and the manner of its effect – will reflect the sense of separability and isolation that characterizes it.
Notwithstanding the fact that we humans have co-evolved with viruses, that their presence is vital, even if some are potentially harmful, a program of total suppression was begun. At least until a vaccine (a “magic bullet” that would stop Covid dead in its tracks) could be developed, we were told.
Since the time of Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century it has been known that a small piece of a virus or bacterium can stimulate an immune response. The technique has been used to prevent many common diseases ever since.
A corona virus tends to generate variants liberally and is not so susceptible to a traditional vaccine. For the biotech industry, which had struggled after the financial expectations of The Human Genome Project were not realized, and the difficulty of meeting regulatory requirements, its moment had come. They were now cast as world saviours and the whole force of a global pandemic was behind them.
To put it very simply, gene-based vaccines cause your own cells to produce a spike protein – essentially a piece of the virus – which, like a traditional vaccine should then provoke an immune response. All very well if you “trust the science”.
In this case it meant trusting a pharmaceutical industry with a long record of disregard, deception and harm and allowing them to manipulate, or ‘program,’ your own cells.
But no scientist can assure the outcome of speculative interference in the elusive and dynamic process at the heart of, and common to, every living system. A cell is a cell: nucleus, cytoplasm, membrane, and the tiny world within continuously generating growth. All cells share the same structure; all life is cellular; and all life is interconnected. What could possibly go wrong?
Just to add that claims for efficacy went all the way from “magic bullet” to balm and Covid is still with us, vaccinated or not. And, I almost forgot, a few more billionaires now grace the earth.
In our latest podcast Sunetra Gupta recalls her role as the "anti-lockdown Professor" & explains her work on developing a universal influenza vaccine. She's still awaiting an apology from her opponents such as George Monbiot. Listen to the Full Pod on https://t.co/56pM7rEj94pic.twitter.com/DJp1JuaUaH
The publication of Los Caprichos marks the opening of the nineteenth century. In Spain, the war with France and years of political upheaval would follow. Goya reflects the disorder in his strikingly expressive work of those years until his death in exile in 1828.
By this time Europe and North America were on the verge of a world that would seem very familiar to us now. Both electrification and the internal combustion engine arrived in the 1880’s, and the subsequent years are known as La Belle Epoque in Europe and The Gilded Age in America.
The conspicuous affluence these terms betray rested on a period of intense industrialization and exploitation, during which the British Empire was the great world power. By the year of Goya’s death economic liberalism was about to reveal its most brutal aspect.
In Britain the new poor laws were enacted to starve masses of the underclass into wage slavery. Without support millions more were plunged into sea of destitution. Included in this purgatory of despair were tens of thousands of women and girls forced into prostitution and an early grave. This was the social catastrophe confronted by Charles Dickens and Karl Marx.
Across the seas, India and China (and countries in between), two ancient and distinct civilizations – their history, social structures and trading patterns rent – were forcibly conscripted into a global trading and financial system to their utter detriment, and to the enrichment of an elite group of financiers, industrialists and Western powers who controlled it.
Further south, the scramble for Africa would soon open the gates to yet another prolonged exhibition of colonial barbarity.
One appalling outcome: the instability and structural disintegration wrought by this interference in traditional systems of land use, production and trade left them unable to deal with the consequences of a prolonged drought in the 1880’s. (A phenomenon not unknown and provided for by tradition). As in Ireland a few decades earlier, famine ensued. It is estimated that between Asia and Africa perhaps as many as fifty million may have died.
The unspeakable horror of all this is chronicled in detail in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis, in so far as words or even pictures can convey the terrible suffering of fellow human beings on such an immense scale. Its full effect requires an imaginative capacity typically repressed in the cultivated mind by the assumption of superiority.
In the words of Mike Davis, ‘What seemed from a metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century’s final blaze of imperial glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant funeral pyre.’[i]
Listen to our podcast with Toby Green as he discusses the effect of Covid lockdowns on Africa, which was largely unaffected by the disease, and the intellectual failure of many on the left. https://t.co/EsbBdkq4xr@toby00green@battleforeurope @SunetraGupta @KevinBardosh
For all the achievements of Western civilization in science and the arts the dark side of our history is actual. Moreover, it still resonates around the world in conflict, poverty, migration, and debt.
It is critical that we should acknowledge our defects now that, so we are told, we are once again standing at the edge of fundamental change. The transition to a post-carbon future will not forestall dire predictions without a radical shift in perspective and it remains ‘business as usual’.
Unrestrained capital accumulation, open-ended economic growth, finance capitalism and the rigged marketplace are entrenched. Bacon’s slogan “knowledge is power” still drives and validates the scientific ideology that underlies it all. Together they perpetuate a toxic system to which the question of how it is fuelled is almost incidental.
In addition, the corporate sector now has the ‘sustainable’ technology supposed to save us firmly in its grip; ‘saving the planet’ is a heaven-sent marketing strategy; and the promise of a ‘just transition’ has becomea sickly green joke.
A cursory analysis of the crisis we are facing would reveal the dynamic driving it. That it has done so for almost half a millennium is why the crisis is so acute and why its cause should be so obvious.
That there are limits to growth is axiomatic. And it should also be apparent that renewable technologies could never equal the energy potential of fossil fuels. The dispersed energy of wind and solar and the second-hand energy of biofuels, even without the problem of intermittence, could only possibly match the concentrated energy of fossil fuels – discounting the growth imperative – by an expansion of its technologies on such a scale that this factor alone would be problematic.
In any case, highly complex renewable systems present their own difficulties. Every method of energy production requires energy to support it: for mining coal, pumping oil, or the massive resource extraction demand by renewables and the ‘smart’ technology that enables it. This requirement has initiated yet another round of colonial exploitation and despoilation.
Also, known reserves of many essential minerals are deficient. And resource scarcity is insurmountable; what doesn’t occur cannot be conjured into existence. A finite world has bio-physical limits: as its resources are subject to exhaustion, so our ambitions are subject to restraint. Our centuries long escapade is being constricted and the problems of over-development and over-complexity cannot be solved by more of the same – more regulations, more laws, plans, targets, goals, reproof, and penalties.
Image: Aleksandar Pasaric
What use is a carbon-free future if our rapacious civilization continues as is? Biodiversity loss, degradation of soils, deforestation, plunder of the oceans, toxic pollution of every kind: all these are just as malignant, if not more so. Degradation and degeneracy cannot be ameliorated by new technologies. And it is delusional to hope that ‘sustainability’ can somehow allow us to defy some of the most fundamental realities of being.
All this prowess we’ve engineered over time seems to have convinced too many of us that men are gods. And challenging the Gods never ends well. Hubris is followed by nemesis – inexorably if we can’t break through the bounds of scientific rationalism. And the stimulus for such a profound shift in consciousness cannot be prescribed; it can only arise organically. Whether from disillusionment, decline, crisis, chaos, or common sense remains to be seen.
The ground of this dilemma was prepared during that long period of transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world: when the dominance of capital was extended, scientific inquiry established the mechanical worldview, and the hegemony of humanity over nature began its destructive course in earnest. If only Galileo could have seen the future through his telescope.
It was at that time of change, about the year 1605 – just five years after Giordano Bruno was tied to the stake and the breadth of his perception went up in flames with him – that Don Quixote first set forth. Caught between these worlds, his adventure in a sense exemplifies dilemma. The changing conditions were presenting a choice: between faith and belief – and the new belief; between metaphor and fact; between self-realization and passivity; between the individual subject and the social object; and for Don Quixote himself perhaps – depending how you read it – between the way of a (wise?) fool and the way of conviction.
Adventure is a disorder, a disruption of the everyday. The quest is, in part, a dissatisfaction in the everyday, a compulsion to discover its deeper reality. In the mediaeval epic the hero and the epic plane are coincident, so to speak. “The men of Homer belong to the same world as their desires”, to quote Jose Ortega y Gasset.[ii]
But Don Quixote is at odds with his world. In this he is probably the first hero of the modern age – an anti-hero, if you will – not borne by the established manner of a chivalric tale, but impelled by his own will, along “the trackless way”, in Joseph Campbell’s words,[iii] of his unfolding life; and creating in his wake his own ‘mythology’, by his own heroic self-realization in a world at variance with his inner being and feeling – as individual integrity will be in an abstract world of facts and figures.
Capital and the new science were breaking the world apart. The organism was torn from its environment, but the soul craves reconciliation and unity. The pathology of progress – distraction, addiction, obsession, emotional disorder, and mental distress to the point of psychosis – all those cries of pain and anguish resound because the world is no longer whole.
And when the prevailing culture is a secular, socio-economic state and no more, to which art and philosophy are peripheral (and largely commodified), it cannot set the terms for a necessary transformation.
To be convinced – whether by religious or scientific dogma makes no difference – is to set yourself at naught and passive in a world always active and renewed. Self-realization, the search for meaning within a prison of abstraction and global assent is, in consequence, only possible in the individual psyche and through the daily heroism of each one of us.
The reign of Gods, Goddesses and our own Christian God was over, or coming to an end. If, on the other hand, the cosmic mystery is implicit in every individual existence – plant, animal, or human – then the poetic imagination, art in its broadest sense, out of which the mythic realm was born and which gave form to its cultural expression, could turn its gaze to the metaphysics – indeed the miracle – of being in every one of us.
And would it be too much to hope that it could then transform everyday life through the reconciliation of the spheres of night and day, of the timeless, or momentous, process of creation and its manifestation in time – and so of reason and authority, the heart, and the head.
But now the giants are on the march again; thousands of them ranged across land and sea. Transformed into windmills, not now by the necromancer, Freston, as Don Quixote once suspected, but by vicissitude and the main chance. Aloof, pristine, impertinent, enormous, their alien presence and baleful monotony is an affront to the vibrant landscape – each one a great counter calculating a return. For every turn another dollar.
The old gods would be in turmoil: the wind harnessed to the strategic avarice of a corporate machine. For what? To ‘save’ a world that the Megamachine (to borrow Fabian Scheidler’s term) has itself constructed and put at risk?
And so also the sun: once raised variously to the status of God or Goddess, powerful mythological symbol, the vivid nucleus of a living cycle that would every dawn dispel the dark. It, too, is to be committed to the same end. That their potential falls short I have already discussed; that even the most critical demands of our current over-consumption can be met is doubtful. But it must now also power the banal syllabus of cyber mania.
Socially destructive global monopolies are eager for every megawatt to propel their program of corporate dominance. The digitalization of the world is an imperial project of unprecedented ambition. A counterfeit world is being prepared. Uniformity of thought, action, experience, and expectation is promoted – autonomy would disturb the shallow manner of digital exchange.
The pioneers of science would be amazed. After all their hard work the earth is becoming flat again. The individual is fading away. Apparently, our lives are to be run by corporate favour and AI. Wow! Our common heritage, from the production of food to our very biology, is to be appropriated by an affected concern and handed over to ‘experts’.
Thankfully, an authentic humanity will not easily be overcome by technocratic pedantry, and we should all have enough experience of bureaucratic and executive stupidity to expect the project is delusional and self-defeating. After all, if they kill the goose, what then?
Unfortunately, it has the potential to further the cause of technocratic governance by a coterie of corporate behemoths who have made no secret of their anti-democratic and anti-social resolve, even as they cloak it in the sweet-sounding words of beneficial intent. And there appears to be no limit to their field of operation, or the level of enforcement through sophisticated systems of surveillance and control.
The intemperate pushing of AI omnipotence has some of the characteristics of mania about it. With any luck it may be destined for the same fate as other notable examples of this recurrent phenomenon. In the meantime, let’s be clear: artificial intelligence is what it says on the tin. It is fake in the same way that artificial flowers are fake. In other words, it is no more than an imitation of intelligence; or rather it purports to be since its proponents have a much- reduced understanding of intelligence in the first place.
The only way a digital system could seem analogous to intelligence is if human beings have been persuaded that they themselves are analogous to machines.
For all the accomplishments of computer science, computers still lack resolve. No computer can make an autonomous decision and no idea can arise unbidden in its electronic circuitry. The data it contains has been handed to it and its operative rules are pre-programmed in algorithms and codes. So-called ‘generative’ AI, so far as I understand it, is simply an intensification of the basic on-off electronics and the yes-no, if not this-that, and, or, both, neither, binary mathematics of existing systems.
To assert that the voluntary and boundless nature of mind and intelligence can be fully represented by a symbolic mathematical system of 1’s and 0’s is absurd – to any thoughtful person. But, of course, if in the first instance you define ‘intelligence’ by what can be contained in its restrictive code then you have AI.
The computer is an ingenious machine, without doubt, a remarkable tool as it stands, but for some reason its potential has been dressed in vainglorious exaggeration from the outset. The haughty claims for AI are no different today than fifty years ago, although confident prophecies of omnipotence still await fulfilment.
That more and more aspects of living and our thought processes can be formulated digitally, and that the programs (the preset rules of the game) are run at breakneck speed is what makes it so impressive. But whereas endless variation and repetition are possible, and answers (largely based on past conclusions) can appear as if by magic, without a non-material imagination, new ideas cannot emerge from old data.
There has been much excitement over the ‘existential’ threat of AI. Indeed, in the hands of the corporate sector, it is busy constructing its own reality with the callous logic of the machine. But there is nothing new here either: apocalyptic alarms have always been associated with the disruption of custom and loss of confidence. If it comes to it, wild forecasts of digital conquest can be countered by simply pulling the plug. The real worry is what on earth has humanity come to that it can so easily imagine subordination to its own technology, to the extent of its own obsolescence – that some would even welcome its approach.
That it is already secondary, to some extent, has nothing to do with the superiority of AI, but is entirely due to our significant distance from the profound coherence of being.
But with so much money at play, the industry is oblivious to either temporal limits or harm. And the next step in the construction of an omniscient computer system – always a goal – follows sensibly enough in the reasoning of scientific materialism.
If the mind has been reduced to the brain, and the brain itself is analogous to a data-processing, memory storage device, then why not build a ‘cognitive’ system that exceeds the intellectual capacity of any human; that would, in turn, design a new improved machine and so on. An “intelligence explosion”, until hey presto! the Singularity is reached – ultra intelligence, omniscience, omnipotence, virtual Godhood!
As fantastical as all this might seem to anyone with their feet still on the ground, there’s more. The geeks among us don’t rest easy. If you’re interested in fantasy, it’s all gathered under the acronym Tescreal. Just be aware that the principal actors here are over-exalted, self-regarding white males in the main, and a forceful eugenicist agenda (a ‘more enlightened eugenics’ apparently) runs through it.
If partisans of AI infallibility were left to stew in the juice of these absurdities within the techno-utopian compound of Silicon Valley, and certain university departments, they needn’t trouble the lives of ordinary decent people. But unfortunately, they command limitless capital and the insatiable dreams of monopolists. Ah, but their intent is to save the world. It’s more likely that an unholy pairing with messianic pretensions will pave the road to hell.
And not only do they appear to be living on another planet, they actually think we can. In this respect, it is a point worth making that no man ever set foot on the moon, and no man or woman ever will, unless they want to bring their life to a painful conclusion. Man reached the moon by bringing his earth environment with him in a spacecraft. An ingenious accomplishment, undoubtedly, but a miss is as good as a mile. And because what is contained in the spacesuit, spacecraft, or space colony for that matter, is clearly partial rather than whole, prolonged existence in it is simply impossible, either physically or psychologically – unless, of course, you’re a machine, or a posthuman!
Given the wonder of existence in the first place, the greatest marvels of being are mind and consciousness, memory and ideas. Any degree of self-awareness should open us to the profound mystery from which they arise. That anyone could make of this ineffable experience nothing more than a mechanical process to be downloaded into a plastic ‘chrysalis’ full of semi-conductors, switches, and silicon chips; and to then emerge as a kind of super-intelligent, posthuman immortal shows just how far from any real sense of our creative presence some of us have drifted.
Every day now, it seems, we are subject to reproof. Signs of crisis are insistent and portents of doom pressure us in a seemingly chaotic world. This essay has attempted to set a wider context; to highlight the critical issues; and to point to the obvious fact that if the corporate/political/ideological covenant responsible for our present state is being relied upon to provide solutions we are going nowhere.
For all its achievements to date, it is now becoming clear that scientific materialism and the single-minded logic of its methodology is reaching the limits of its efficacy; even as materialist anticipation is reaching for its apotheosis in the extravagant representations of AI – the ultimate expression of its reductionist worldview.
And it is possible to see on the wildest shores of this ‘promised land’ a kind of hysteria in the face of diminishing returns, and the desperate resuscitation of a fading ideology.
But the piling on of the past will not work. With increasing complexity every solution begets more problems. It’s a vicious circle, such that at this point many of us might be beginning to feel Sancho Panza’s reproach – windmills in the head is right! How to step off the treadmill is the crux of the problem, although it is also all too clearly the solution. And in the absence of another world to step on to we are hooked by a kind of compulsion neurosis.
A more benign world will require a new morality in its broadest sense; it will not arrive ‘off the peg’, so to speak. ‘Smart’, ‘sustainable’, ‘clean’, ‘green’, the defining terms of our post-carbon future, are a cruel deception if their only purpose is to keep the machine in gear.
Strangely, the very ideology that defines the world will not recognize its material constraint. It still relies on the illusion of superabundance and the invocation of technological superiority in a world struggling for breath.
And where – is it ever asked – is our humanity in this brave new world? The whole drama of a single life, a sort of flourish upon the oceanic well of time and creation; and the billions of us marooned in an abstract world of facts and figures. How do we dignify our lives in a world in which fire has been quenched?
Corbusier’s ‘machine to live in’ is realized in the technological dependence and the spick and span aspect of the all-electric house. But there was a time when the hearth was symbolic of the Navel of the Earth; when fire, the Goddess of the hearth, symbolized the presence of the divine. The hearth and its home were explicit symbols of implicit unity: the invisible or immaterial realm made visible in the material culture.
Such sensibilities are long gone, of course, and unity and meaning must be sought in the human heart – as they should be at this stage of our cultural evolution. But what if the heart itself is cold? What if the material culture is destructive or merely bland?
We now live in a manner without discernment or reserve, informed by opinion and the ubiquity of the market. Jesus drove the moneylenders from the temple; a second coming would be welcome in the face of an ill-considered, commercial culture of unprecedented shallowness. Its dominance and its demands, and its impression upon all is turning hearts to stone and our world into a wasteland.
It is true that most people’s lives are enriched and gain meaning in the ordinary communion of family, friends and community; and perhaps in the practicalities of daily life. But there is a wider world, and in the minds of capitalists the end always justifies the means. In their calculations you don’t count – the phenomenon of your being, that is, not your efficiency in the economy of capital accumulation.
In the everyday language of economics. the economy appears to be an almost perfect mathematical system independent of human history – an abstraction isolated from reality as a whole. In the extremism of neo-liberalism its jurisdiction has neither moral, social, or cultural bounds and it now regulates the global like a detached and senseless Victorian viceroy. To the extent that our lives are decided by it, the social context will be inhumane, and inadequate to our potential and imaginative capacity.
Life in the shallows of economic determinism soon exhausts itself. There is an emptiness at the heart of contemporary culture that will not be filled by the ‘green agenda’. The post-carbon future, as currently outlined, exemplifies the metaphor of the machine no less than its antecedent. Technological solutions will only perpetuate our insulation from the vibrant process of creation. And ‘smart’ technology, let us be clear, does not run on fresh air. On the contrary the magnitude of its energy demand may be unprecedented in industrial history.
The real world arises organically as a self-organizing system, whole and complete at every step of its evolution. That is to say, it is incomparable – it’s what it is and what we are – and may be benign or destructive as we might inhabit it. A bio-physical system is ‘limited’ by the very interdependence of its diverse elements, such that individual behaviour is always governed by a superior context.
Scientific materialism and the pathology of dissociation have led us astray. “For there is in the universe neither centre nor circumference”, wrote Giordano Bruno, “but if you will, the whole is central, and every point may also be regarded as part of a circumference in respect to some other central point”.
Each one of us, then, is centre; each one of us manifests the whole, to put it another way. It follows that every identity is ‘I’; and in this sense there is no ‘you’, no other.
In the face of this reality, capitalism rewards one at the expense of another, the few at the expense of the many. In the interest of accumulation, it externalizes costs – to the individual, society, and the environment. It is dehumanizing, anti-social, toxic, ultimately self-destructive, and now global.
We are preoccupied with solutions; but the critical choice is not between fossil fuels and renewables, but between a narrow rationalism and an expanded consciousness, between the sleep of reason and integrity. The crisis we are facing is not, in the first instance, a problem to be solved, but a failure to clearly perceive its cause.
In the words of Jose Ortega y Gasset, “we do not know what is happening to us, and that is precisely the thing that is happening to us – the fact of not knowing what is happening to us”.[iv]
[i] Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, Verso, London, 2001, p 8
[ii] Jose Ortega y Gasset. Meditations on Don Quixote, quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Penguin, London, 1976
In February Anne faced the days with her usual shaky stoicism. She opened the curtains to cold stunted mornings glimmering through the window and at the bottom of the park the pathetic trees. At lunchtime Ryan’s was full of the office crowd so she went at three when she only had a couple of old timers and the occasional dog for company. The barmen knew her and brought a large one to the table when she had settled herself, then she felt OK and had another one. Anne thought about the letter in its pink envelope. She hadn’t opened it immediately but left it on the windowsill pretending not to notice it. When she put her coat on, she picked it up and turned it over to see if there was a return address, nothing. Finally, she slid a butter knife under the gummed flap and tore it open. At first it seemed like the letter was written in a foreign language, she couldn’t understand any of it. She looked again at the name and address on the envelope.
It was getting on for five thirty when Anne left Ryan’s and crossed the road to Dunnes. She wandered through the shelves of fruit and vegetables, the brightly coloured packets of rice and pasta, put a net of oranges in her basket and a sliced pan. Just a sandwich this evening, cheese or a bit of ham maybe biscuits or a fruit cake? Well no. At the checkout a woman was emptying a full trolley, must have a few to feed at home Anne thought. The woman unloaded several packets of mince and a red pepper. This was going to take a while. There were a few people waiting now, the woman was nearly at the bottom only a couple of bottles of Fanta and a bottle of Coke to go. Anne put her items on the conveyor belt. The boy at the checkout looked at her briefly as he put the bottle of Smirnoff through. Tomorrow she’d go to Tesco’s.
The letter was waiting for her when she got home. She smoothed out the page and put on her reading glasses. After she read through it quickly, she sat back. There could be a mistake there must be plenty of Anne Wilsons. How could her mother be alive after all these years with no word It was forty years since that night when Anne was nine years old, the night her mother disappeared. The bottle was within reach, and she poured herself a stiff one. Forty years is a long time still Anne could remember it clearly. It was a Friday night, and her birthday was next day. Ten years old, she would be a big girl and allowed to stay up late. Every detail of that night stood out sharply in her mind, but there was no warning that her mother wouldn’t be there next day. Her father said nothing and said nothing until the day he died. From then on was sad, the brightness was gone. It was worse than if her mother had died then Anne and Dad could have gone to the grave and put flowers on it and cried.
Anne ordered the taxi for six. It was raining and traffic was slow. The taxi driver was listening to the evening news on the radio. Anne sat very still in the back seat waiting for the lights to change as the windscreen wipers swept back and forth making a squeaking noise on the windscreen. The news had given way to ads: insurance, face cream, cold remedies. Anne listened and looked at the lights smudged against the rain spattered glass. The lights turned to green, the taxi inched forward and then sped on unimpeded. It was moving steadily now making its way through gleaming wet streets. She was rarely in this part of town, the buildings seemed darker, the streets emptier. It stopped raining as the taxi drew up to the hospital entrance. She climbed the steep steps and pushed open the gigantic door. Anne’s memories of her mother were all bound up with her disappearance. No child can accept abandonment, there had to be a reason. All through her teens she was haunted by a phantom mother, a mother that didn’t leave. At eighteen she had her first drink. It was in the Palace Bar sitting on high stools with Paul a guy from her class in college. Anne raised her glass of orange and vodka to her mouth and the pain she wasn’t even aware of vanished. A comfortable numbness gathered around her neck and shoulders. In that instant she knew she needed it and that she wanted more.
The hospital was vast and gloomy, there was no sign of her. How would Anne even recognise her? She went to the nurse’s station, but there was no one there. Wandering aimlessly, she eventually noticed some movement from one of the beds, a tiny woman was waving frantically at her.
‘Come here, come here,’ she gasped.
Was this her mother? Maybe she had expected a monster not a little bundle with snowy hair and a soft pink bed jacket.
‘It’s you I knew you as soon as I saw you. Do you hate me? Please don’t hate me I couldn’t bear it’
Anne sat down.
‘What should I call you?’
‘Oh, call me Margaret,’ her face dimpled into a girlish smile.
‘Why are you here? Are you ill?’ Anne asked carefully.
Margaret’s smile faded she plucked distractedly at her bed jacket and blew her nose.
‘Yes’, she said in a small voice. ‘I’ve got cancer’.
Anne caught sight of herself in the window her hair grey and unkempt, her skin greyer still. She didn’t feel able to offer sympathy. It was forty years too late, but still she had the decency to pretend. She was well practised at passing herself off as a decent human being. She turned to her mother.
‘I’m so sorry is there anything you need?’
Her mother’s blue eyes were closing, she tried to say something, but she was overcome with sleep. Anne stood up and bent over the sleeping woman pulling the blankets around her then left the way she had come.
After she graduated Anne and Paul got married and bought a house. They tried to be like everyone else. They had a normal mortgage and a normal car. They got up in the mornings like everyone else and went to work, but that was where it ended. At home with the T.V. turned up loud so the neighbours couldn’t hear they argued heatedly and without inhibition. Alcohol no longer sedated Anne’s anger but seemed to fuel it. There was guilt, shame and above all the need to escape. Still, they went to the pub, on her third double vodka Anne convinced herself this was a good life, the only life she deserved and then the drinks would work their magic once again. One night Paul collapsed and was brought to the cardiac care unit in James’ St Hospital. A year later he didn’t get that far. The house was empty without him. The silent kitchen reminded her of the angry words that had passed between them. She hadn’t told him she loved him for a long time. In work it was harder to hide that things weren’t the way they should be so when she told her boss she was planning early retirement he didn’t discourage her.
She was alarmed to see her mother wasn’t there when she visited again. Then behind her a voice called:
‘Yoo hoo it’s me I’m not dead yet.’
Margaret grinned impishly at her from the confines of a wheelchair.
‘Will you get into the bed for me,’ the nurse cajoled.
When she was settled Margaret turned to Anne and said:
‘Oh, good now we can have a nice chat.’
Anne stiffened.
‘I think you need to tell me where you’ve been all these years.’
‘I met a man who was kind to me,’ Margaret said seriously. And I thought love was the most important thing in the world.’
‘It is,’ Anne surprised herself by saying. ‘But why didn’t you take me with you?’
The older woman started to cry. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.
‘You have no idea how many times I asked myself that and then time passed so quickly, and I thought it was too late.’
‘You don’t think it’s too late now?’, Anne asked bitterly.
‘Was it hard for you?’, Margaret ventured.
‘You could say that.’
Anne leaned back in her chair. Then from somewhere deep in her chest she started to laugh. At first Margaret looked shocked and then soon she was chuckling too. Before long the two women were bent over with laughter. It resounded around the ward, down the corridor and out into the star-studded night.
February gave way to March and at the beginning of April when the light is beginning to brighten in the sky Margaret slipped away in her sleep like a child exhausted by play. It was a small gathering at the funeral just one or two nurses from the hospital and some other people Anne didn’t know including a tall man with curly hair wearing a long grey overcoat. She found herself leaving the crematorium with him.
‘Did you know her well’, he asked.
‘No, I really only got to know her recently, but you could say we go back a long way.’
‘I’m her son David,’ he said smiling a familiar youthful smile.
Next morning when Anne opened the curtains pale lemon sunshine washed the famished lawn. Eggshell blue sky, fresh and limitless roofed the world. Spring had arrived in person and to Anne this time it seemed different. There was nothing special about the daffodils clustered under the trees even the birds’ carefree song had been sung a thousand times before, but there was a detail and Anne had noticed first thing. When she opened her eyes this morning she hadn’t wanted to escape.
