In the essential Boomer text, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance one of the chief ideas was the difficulty of defining what we mean by “quality”. Almost everyone knows what quality is and can easily spot the presence or lack of it in something. But the word itself, the concept, the thing of it, is difficult to describe. So, in the absence of a clear definition, the presence of quality can become a claim by a person selling a thing which, their patter maintains, possesses the elusive attribute.
So even though everyone knows what quality is, it is possible, with a good enough story, to convince someone that something which may not actually possess quality, does possess quality. The key is the story. With a good enough story, anything is anything. You can even sow doubt in a person’s mind, making them believe that they actually lack the ability to discern quality, but that luckily, you are there to help them; for a small fee.
The old story of the emperor’s new clothes is an illustration of what happens when a lie reaches critical mass to leave an entire herd deluded. If everyone claims to be able to discern the quality of the invisible garment, it takes balls to go against the herd, and, herds being what they are, the balls to differ is rare. So, an attribute which is difficult to define, leaves wriggle room for the unscrupulous and the potential danger of delusion for the naïve. You can almost hear Arthur Daly or Dell Boy spin it, “Look at that! That’s quali’y that is.”
Value
This is where Mariana Mazzucato starts out from in her book on economics, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. In Mazzucato’s thesis the word “value” is in many ways a synonym for “quality”, and she shows how some clever-clever salespeople have sold a pup to the entire world with a fancy story that somehow has the effect of equating value with price: if a thing is expensive it must be good, right? “Look at that! Now that’s quali’y.”
Mazzucato shows how this simple con has allowed the Arthur Dalys of big finance to enrich themselves and their friends by extracting value from goods created by the wider working community. They do this primarily by blurring the distinction between value creation and value extraction. This is the Making and Taking aspect of the book.
We see it all the time in the arts. Irish musicians and actors will be more than familiar with the publican who asks them to work for nothing because, unlike him, they “enjoy” their work. Therefore, so his thinking goes, that is reward enough and the publican can extract the economic value from the skills of the artistes. The story the publican spins in this transaction is the implicit suggestion that the arts are actually worthless.
Mariana Mazzucato 2016.
The Con
Everyone can see the con when it’s that glaring, but in the wider world of high finance it’s all a bit faster and meaner: worker’s wages stagnate while shareholders extract fat bonuses. Energy company shareholders holiday in the sun while families decide between food and heat. Mazzucato’s book is a reveal of the stories and patter and understandings used and exploited by corporations and swallowed by the public and by governments, that results in wealth being sucked to the top while wages stagnate and inequality increases.
Mazzucato’s goal is to unmask the tawdry yarns of modern capitalism’s snake-oil salesmen who profess to be the high priests of identifying value: the bankers and corporations essentially claiming welfare in the form of tax breaks while creaming from the top of community-created wealth to transfer to their shareholders, all with the connivance of a bought-out political class, many of whom are corporate shareholders themselves. She writes:
“If the assumption that value is in the eye of the beholder is not questioned, some activities will be deemed to be value creating and others will not, simply because someone – usually someone with a vested interest – says so, perhaps more eloquently than others… If bankers, estate agents and bookmakers claim to create value rather than extract it, mainstream economics offers no basis on which to challenge them, even though the public might view their claims with scepticism.”
Side Street in Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon.
Fake Stories
Derelict American cities are a living example of wealth extraction, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake while the top 1% live the high life. It is in untangling these stories, these modern myths of economics, that Mazzucato hopes to bring clarity in the necessary project to somehow reimagine capitalism, so that it works once more for the benefit of all, creating a thriving world rather than a dying one.
At the centre of this entanglement of fake stories, spun by the elite like so many spider-webs, she shows that what is afoot is nothing more than a cheap con being perpetrated by groups of people with stories so shoddy that as soon as you see the move and the angle you can’t unsee it. Theirs is a strategy that depends essentially on the manipulation of one human weakness: convincing people that they are solely to blame for their own condition. Not the system. But their own character defects.
And people buy it, every time. It’s not unlike the original sin the church used to so successfully sell. In the end, they claim, it’s all your own fault. So, while the poor sit self-tortured in self-flagellation for their own condition, which is almost always an outcome of social and economic inequality, the sales shaman steals away with the pensions and anything else he can manage to capture.
Quality
Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance spent a book trying to get a grasp on the meaning of the term “quality”, an attribute whose presence or absence is clear to everyone. That was the mystery he was trying to pin down. How is it everyone knows when something has quality but can’t quite describe it?
In the same way, you don’t need a PhD in economics to see that the attribute of quality is severely lacking in today’s capitalism. You have only to look at the manner in which business is being conducted that it is delivering neither quality nor value, just endless bonuses to a select few and endless grinding poverty to the many, no matter how hard they might work.
Marianna Mazzucato has unmasked the shoddy yarn driving this fountain-pen theft of communal wealth, in a book so timely and revealing that it simultaneously exudes the twin attributes of quality and value while providing much-needed insights into the vexing question: why is capitalism only really working for a select few? The answer is simple: the herd has been deluded by clever economic patter: “That’s quali’y, tha’ is.”
The colourful humourist and English poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) is the subject of Dominic Moseley’s Betjeman in Ireland (Somerville Press, 2023), which is lavishly illustrated with photographs.
Betjeman, who took his teddy bear, Alfie with him to Oxford in 1925 was the inspiration for the character of Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Posted to Dublin as press attaché in the British Embassy during World War II from early 1941 to autumn 1943, his love affair with Ireland had begun two decades earlier in Oxford. There he met, and had a unique affinity with, the remnants of the Irish Ascendancy in all their fading glory. Chief among them was Edward Pakenham, 6th Earl of Longford who lived in what is now, Tullynally Castle in Co. Westmeath. It was Pakenham who first brought Betjeman to Ireland in 1925.
An unapologetic social climber, Betjeman was the son of a furniture manufacturer from North London. Yet he was often ridiculed for his remorseless snobbery and his upwardly mobile pursuits. He finally enrolled in Magdalen College, Oxford after some difficulty in 1925, and it was in Oxford he met influential people such as C.S. Lewis and Maurice Bowra and Evelyn Waugh but also members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy who held a unique charm for him and with whom he formed a special bond. Indeed, his road to social success seems to have been through the back door of the Irish Ascendancy.
Betjeman nourished an abiding fascination with Ireland from his Oxford days, especially the Irish Aristocracy – the more eccentric the better. He declared his ‘particular’ fondness for ‘people who had gone to seed’.
Others in the roll call of Betjeman’s Irish friends were Lord Rosse of Birr Castle, Basil Ava of Clandeboy House, Co Down Northern Ireland. His life-long love affair with Ireland was cemented in 1951 when, aged forty-six, he met the twenty-year-old Elizabeth Cavendish of Lismore Castle, who became his lifelong mistress and muse, causing occasional, great misery to his aristocratic wife Penelope.
It was through such aristocrats that Betjeman got his first taste of Ireland and when he arrived in Dublin as press attaché in 1941, whereupon he immersed himself further into that circle. Described affectionately by Moseley as ‘an ambitious social alpinist’ who ‘dearly loved a lord and lady’ he shamelessly cultivated them. Indeed, his enthusiasm for the Irish upper crust bordered on sycophantic.
Moseley chronicles an awesome litany of love affairs, flirtations and dalliances indulged in by Betjeman. But this larger than life, affable, and energetic figure could still say, incredibly, in later life that the one regret he had was not ‘having had more sex.’
It was possibly because of Betjeman’s popularity among Ireland’s Ascendancy he was chosen as press attaché. He soon became an instant hit among the literati of the Palace Bar, on Fleet Street in Dublin. This helped fulfil his mission ‘to ameliorate the anti-Irish tone of British press and to dilute the anti-English sentiments of the Irish press.’
In the Palace Bar the influential editor of the Irish Times, RM Smyllie ‘held court’ among a wide audience. Betjeman charmed a formidable array of artists and writers such as Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Brinsley MacNamara, Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke, Terence de Vere White, Maurice Craig, Cyril Cusack and numerous others from the world of literature who also wielded a lot of influence.
He was no less popular among the artists he befriended such as, Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats, Harry Kernoff, Sean O’Sullivan and numerous others. This group was ‘the locus of soft power’ in Ireland and once Betjeman was accepted and esteemed in this circle his success in Ireland was assured.
Portrait of Seán Ó Faoláin by Howard Coster, 1930’s
Ireland could easily have become a strong ally for Germany against Britain. Betjeman had ‘stepped into a historical minefield with little resources except his natural affability’. He certainly seems to have had a major diplomatic impact, and his friendship with the writer, Elizabeth Bowen – herself working for the British Ministry of Information and an on-off lover of Sean O’Faolain – was sure to have helped Betjeman.
It was Betjeman’s easy charm, wit and affability that made him a huge success in Ireland and his encounters with the Irish politicians of the day, including Éamon de Valera were very successful too: he had a sympathy with the problems posed by partition in the North, but this did not prevent the IRA classifying him, for a time, as a person of ‘menace’, although the plot to assassinated him was later dropped.
In 1942, he used his influence to get the English Horizon literary and artistic magazine to do an Irish number, featuring among others, Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Patrick Kavanagh and Jack B Yeats.
What this entertaining page turner underscores is that John Betjeman was first and foremost a gifted poet who ‘celebrated every aspect of the idea of love’ and was especially ‘a poet of place whether it be the home counties, Oxford, Ireland or his beloved Cornwall.’
Unsurprisingly, he had a particular affinity with, and admiration for, Patrick Kavanagh where a sense of place is always foremost in the latter’s poems.
A major early influence was Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village.’ Betjeman’s passion for place, for architecture, for locations, for churches and old ruins saturates his poems and this is very much the case regarding his most celebrated Irish poem ‘Ireland With Emily’ where place fuses with his unrequited passion for Emily Hemphill of Tulira Castle in Galway (later to become Emily Villiers-Stuart of Dromana House, Waterford). It is one of his finest and most evocative poems about Ireland.
Betjeman’s passion for architecture flourished in Ireland too and his love of stately houses often outstripped his passion for their occupants, albeit he later wondered ‘how many linen sheets in the houses of Ireland received his lustful limbs.’ The combination of place with the erotic in his poems is described as a ‘potent brew’.
He waxed erotically about Furness House, Kildare, Shelton Abbey, Wicklow, Woodbrook House, Portarlington, Pakenham Hall, Westmeath and numerous others. Betjeman even learned the Irish language and frequently signed himself Sean O’Betjemán. His heart-rending Irish poem ‘A Lament for Moira McCavendish’ is another fine example of how place and love conflates in a way unique to Betjeman.
He might, as the author suggest, ‘have by his association with Elizabeth Cavendish, ascended to the highest rung’ socially but the portrait that emerges in this book is of a complex, flawed but likeable, warm human being with a large-hearted humanity and a unique generosity of spirit. It was that quality that made him the perfect diplomat in Ireland at the time.
A devout Anglican who feared the afterlife he emerges as the most loveable of ‘sinners’ in this book. His ‘Ballad of the Small Town in Ireland’ is likened to a Thomas Moore melody in which he celebrates the ordinary life of fair days, burned barracks, elegant squares, neglected graves, ruined churches and court houses.
Above all, Betjeman’s pre-eminence as a poet of merit is vigorously reclaimed in this study. The author notes how the ‘Modernism’ in poetry championed by T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings paved the way for an, often ‘graceless poetry devoid of scansion, rhyme, metre and original thought’.
As a traditionalist Betjeman is often dismissed as a ‘trite poet’ and, lamentably, does not feature today on school and college syllabi. None of this takes from the fact that his Collected Poems sold over two million copies and that when he died in 1984, he had been England’s poet laureate for twelve years, from 1972.
This book is not just an inspirational, charming and entertaining account of Beckett’s time in, and life-long love affair with, Ireland but it is a passionate command to restore him as a major poet of the English language.
Betjeman In Ireland by Dominic Moseley is published in paperback by Somerville Press and costs €15.
Earlier this month I released The Blue Light, a selection of solo piano and chamber pieces spanning the last decade, performed by pianist Michael McHale and musicians from Crash Ensemble. The album offers a range of sound-worlds, and I like to think that I am open to the possibility of my music changing, but I realise that there seem to be some constants in what I am doing: I want to create highly concentrated, meditative – even ritualistic – experiences. Maybe I always will.
In 2006, I co-founded a record label and music production company called Ergodos with composer Benedict Schlepper-Connolly. We have co-curated dozens of projects together, and my work as a composer has often involved composing for specific contexts (such as, e.g., the Ergodos Musicians project I Call to You). For The Blue Light, my first solo album, I wanted to try to keep a sense of curated “coherence” across the record, even though the album is essentially a compilation.
The album opens with a solo piano piece composed last year: Und weinen, und lächeln. This short toccata takes its inspiration from “Des Fischers Liebesglück”, a song by Franz Schubert with words by Karl Gottfried von Leitner. The final stanza reads: “Und weinen / Und lächeln, / Und meinen, / Enthoben / Der Erde, / Schon oben, / Schon drüben zu sein.” An English translation: “Weeping, / smiling, / we think / we are relieved of the earth, / and are already up above, / in another place.”
Audio embed: use code below to embed “Des Fischers Liebesglück” by Franz Schubert from Spotify
Audio embed: use code below to embed Und weinen, und lächeln by Garrett Sholdice from Bandcamp
St Dunstan-in-the-East for piano, two violins, viola & cello was also composed last year, although the idea for the piece was sparked several years ago, whilst visiting London. St Dunstan-in-the-East was a church on St Dunstan’s hill in the City of London. It was mostly destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. After the war, the decision was taken to turn the ruins into a public garden. The space is unassuming and beautiful.
St Dunstan in the East, City of London.
My piece St Dunstan-in-the-East represents an attempt to create meaning out of fragmentary materials, perhaps in a way that is resonant with the idea of transforming a ruined building into a public urban space. Looking back over the notebook I used whilst sketching the piece, I noticed the following entry: “where is it going / what is it made from / why is it here / thick / thin / husks / the beauty of damaged, fragmentary things…”
Sketches for St Dunstan-in-the-East, from the composer’s notebook, 2022.
The next work on the album, Das blaue Licht for two violins, viola & cello dates from 2013, when I was based in Berlin. The title (which means “the blue light” in German) refers to the luminous blue of the sky above Danziger Strasse in northeast Berlin, during the hot July weeks in which I wrote the piece. The first part of Das blaue Licht features intricate pizzicato “hocketing”: a brief (ec)static dance. In the second part a series of chordal “breaths” eventually lead to a gentle song inspired by Javanese gamelan.
Berlin, Danziger Straße.
Often, at the ends of my pieces, melodies emerge as if finally remembered or unearthed. (This can be heard in the second part of Das blaue Licht.) I think this comes from my earliest musical experiences as a boy chorister in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, where sung melody was a daily experience. It was here that I first got to know choral music of the late Renaissance, such as William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. The weaving of melodic lines in this music always seems somehow miraculous to me.
At the beginning of the Tallis excerpt above, the soprano part (“S. P.” = “sexta pars”) and alto part (“Sup.” = “superius”) are both “divided” into two, a technique known as “gymel” in Medieval and Renaissance vocal music. This technique was the inspiration for my viola and cello duet, Gymel, composed in 2018. In my piece, the cello and viola begin in unison, singing as one. This unison line then bifurcates, and the individual personalities of the two instruments emerge.
The album closes, as it opens, with a solo piano piece: Prelude No. 12, composed in 2017. This is a soliloquy: just me, spinning out a single unbroken melodic line. The American poet Frank O’Hara talked about writing “personal poems”; this is maybe a “personal piece”. When I wrote it, I prefaced the score with these lines from his poem, “To Gottfried Benn”: “Poetry is not instruments / that work at times / then walk out on you / laugh at you old / get drunk on you young / poetry’s part of yourself”.
For me, as a composer working with notation in the classical tradition, the score is not the music – only the performers can create this. It has been my good fortune to work with such extraordinary performers for this record: pianist Michael McHale, and musicians from Crash Ensemble – violinists Diamanda La Berge Dramm and Larissa O’Grady, violist Ed Creedon and cellist Kate Ellis. The sensitivity with which they interpreted these scores was more than I could hope for.
Similarly, I am in indebted to the most diligent and incisive audio team: assistant producer Caterina Schembri, recording and post-production engineer Eduardo Prado, and mastering engineer Christoph Stickel. Often, for my music, the challenge is to somehow translate the atmosphere of a live acoustic performance experience into a digital recording. Thanks to this team, the intimacy and ritual of live performance comes across on this record.
Album cover for The Blue Light by Garrett Sholdice, featuring a watercolour by Neil Sholdice. (Cábán i n-aice na coille, Loch Coirib, 2019)
I always considered myself a late bloomer when it came to music. Growing up, I didn’t have many opportunities to play instruments, and I chose to focus on art rather than music during my secondary school years. Becoming a better musician seemed like a mysterious journey with no obvious roadmap.
I credit my Dad for introducing me to some incredible artists like Led Zeppelin, Queen, Pink Floyd & Jethro Tull. In return, I introduced him to the captivating sounds of Radiohead, a band which played a pivotal role in developing my appreciation of interesting chord progressions and ambiguous harmony.
We listened to a lot of music together and aged fourteen my Dad surprised me with my very first guitar – an SX acoustic steel string. I remember eagerly trying to bend those strings in the style of Jimmy Page, with no great success. It would be some years before I would get round to purchasing my first electric guitar.
I struggled as a teenager to envisage my future career. I was less concerned with money, status, or even moral virtue. Instead, I found myself preoccupied with what the day-to-day experience would be like. I would ponder different paths, like the idea of becoming a doctor – helping people, earning a good income, a respectable profession. But then I would wonder, ‘What would the minute-to-minute reality be like?’ Would it involve blood, guts, and smelly feet? High stakes with people’s lives on the line?
That’s why I find myself where I am today – as a musician and a teacher. I derive immense joy from the everyday moments in my career. It’s not about the grand aspirations; it’s the day-to-day experience that fulfils me. Whether I’m playing music or sharing my knowledge as a teacher, I find deep satisfaction in the present moment.
Revelation!
Not long after finishing school, I stumbled upon a YouTube video of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ arranged for solo classical guitar. It instantly captivated me, and I dedicated that entire summer to learning the piece from start to finish. The experience brought me an unparalleled joy – the intricate polyphony, the interplay between the upper and lower voices, and the sublime harmonic movements, all projected from my own instrument! It was a revelation – I had finally found something I could pour hours into.
I discovered I had a knack for memorizing lengthy pieces, so I embarked on expanding my repertoire. Attending classical guitar recitals at the National Concert Hall became a regular thing, as I aimed to immerse myself in the rich tapestry of the classical guitar world. By the time I enrolled for lessons with Leslie Cassidy at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama in 2013, I had already delved into the works of various composers, including Villa Lobos, Tarrega, Barrios, Koshkin, and Albeniz. This played a pivotal role in shaping my technique and opened my ears to a more contemporary range of harmonies as I explored the guitar repertoire from the romantic period onwards.
My time with Leslie was absolutely crucial to my growth as a musician. I eagerly looked forward to our weekly Saturday morning lessons, where he meticulously reviewed every piece I had learned, correcting my mistakes and helping me break free from bad habits – especially my woeful right hand technique. Though my time with Les lasted only two years, he was an incredibly supportive and motivating mentor and teacher. I miss him dearly, and I often wonder what it would be like to have a conversation with him today, at this stage of my musical journey.
Everything in Its Right Place…
Regardless of my skill level as a musician, I’ve always been drawn to composing. It just felt right and has always been a natural part of how I absorb new musical ideas. I aim to combine elements that I find appealing in a way that feels satisfying—a blend of the familiar and the unpredictable. There’s a certain joy that comes with seeing a well-developed idea come to life, as if putting something in its rightful place.
I knew I lacked many of the skills and understanding necessary to compose music at the level I desired. Even though I was already composing for my band BiG Fridge, I wanted a deeper understanding of my own music to better develop and convey my ideas. That’s why I decided to enroll in the Bachelor’s program in Jazz Performance at the Newpark Academy of Music. Despite knowing little to nothing about jazz, I discovered that this foreign musical idiom shared many of the same values that resonated with me.
Attending Newpark was a humbling experience. I had never before been surrounded by so many individuals who loved and took music as seriously, if not more so, than I did. I met amazing people who possessed qualities I aspired to, and learned a great deal from them, both as individuals and musicians. Tommy Halferty, my teacher, was truly remarkable. He encouraged me to embrace my own strengths and musical voice, always pushing me to work harder and give my best.
Although I often felt out of my depth, the further I progressed at Newpark, the more I realized that I had ended up exactly where I needed to be. I was exposed to new and exciting forms of music, and I acquired not only the skills and knowledge I sought in harmony, arranging, improvisation, and composition, but also a common language to effectively communicate my ideas with my peers.
Moreover, the experience gave me a glimpse into the vast realms of what I didn’t yet know. It provided me with the terminology and techniques that empowered me to delve deeper into these subjects even after completing my degree. While at the time, the degree felt all-encompassing, I later realized it was merely scratching the surface of music theory.
Harmony Takes Centre Stage
If there’s one quality that takes center stage in my own music, it would be the harmonic content. Reflecting on my own compositions, I’ve discovered that I can learn a great deal about myself and my personal taste through retrospective analysis. This understanding of harmony is crucial for me to achieve that. It’s simply the aspect of music that I find most fascinating and exhilarating.
Much of the music I create is either modal or strives to fully explore the relationship between two loosely related chords. I aim to employ parsimonious voice leading as a means of generating new movements that sound fresh and captivating to my ears.
After completing college, I set about forming the instrumental ensemble known as Rynx Laneran, with the goal of developing and performing my latest compositions. I joined forces with Andy O’Farrell and Alex Delogu, both of whom I had the good fortune of meeting at Newpark. The music we create is deeply influenced by my admiration for artists like Portishead, as well as renowned film composers such as Bernard Hermann and Lalo Shiffrin. Our sound also takes inspiration from the captivating style of Mulatu Astatke’s music.
I’m incredibly proud of the music we have crafted together thus far, and I eagerly look forward to returning to live performances this summer. Additionally, we have plans to release more music later in the year, and I couldn’t be more excited about sharing it with our audience.
Irish Music
My fascination with traditional Irish music began with a chance encounter at a party where I met guitarist Chris Cole. Chris took me under his wing and introduced me to the fundamentals of his rhythmic approach when playing traditional music on the guitar. He generously shared his insights into arranging tunes for the instrument, and as my repertoire grew, I started creating my own solo guitar arrangements of Irish tunes, drawing on my knowledge of classical technique.
Last year, I received a tremendous validation for my efforts when the Arts Council awarded me the Music Agility Award, enabling me to develop twelve original arrangements of traditional Irish tunes for contemporary Irish classical guitar.
Currently, I’m exploring how to merge different genres from around the world by applying scales from folkloric music such as Ethiopian music to the Irish tunes I’ve arranged. I’ve recently completed three “Ethiopian Jigs,” as I’m currently referring to them, and they possess a unique quality that is both familiar and exotic. I’m excited to see where this compositional approach will take me next.
These days, my schedule is busier than ever, and I’m constantly learning and expanding my musical horizons. I consider myself fortunate to have encountered a diverse range of musicians who have allowed me to pursue my various musical interests, no matter how niche they may be. I’ve never wanted to limit myself strictly to classical or jazz music; my love for different genres is vast, and I aspire to play them all.
In the past year, I’ve arranged numerous classical pieces by some of my favorite composers, which I perform as a duo with bassist Alex Delogu. Additionally, I formed a gypsy jazz quartet called The Tenters with fellow guitarist John Mahon, bassist Dave Mooney, and violist Brendan Lawless, and we regularly perform around Dublin.
I thoroughly enjoy my role as a session guitarist, collaborating with various artists such as Christian Wethered, Adam Nolan, and Yankari Afrobeat Collective. Each experience adds to my musical journey and presents unique challenges that I embrace as a contributing member.
As I reflect upon my career as a musician, I feel incredibly lucky to have dedicated myself to the study of the guitar. It may sound unbelievable, but it often feels like every positive thing in my life has either directly or indirectly stemmed from my commitment to this instrument. It serves as my meditation, my hobby, and my livelihood. It’s what motivates me to get out of bed each day. The impact it has had on my life is immeasurable. I’ve discovered an endless game, a never-ending journey that reflects my approach to life, one of constant learning and growth, an outlook that I intend to maintain throughout my life and journey as a musician.
I never knew myself to have a Persian beard, now,
This is odd, this will need some explanation
So too the crown and concubines and all these
Half-drunk vessels from the house of God
Isn’t it 2023 or 2022—was I not, just now,
Pulling up in a Subaru or whatever it is I
Get myself around in? In fact I’m quite certain
My father was born in 1959 and hardly Nebuchadnezzar,
Though it is his second term as village president
(He ran unopposed this time) for the Most High God
Set him over it. TEKEL
Says the writing on the wall of my lordly mind, haunting,
TEKEL—you have been weighed in the balance
And found wanting
God I am always wanting
Wanting wanting wanting I am
Always wanting in or out of the balance,
And there is no wisdom in these Chaldeans
I have summoned to advise me, these useless
Fuckwitted Chaldeans with parlor tricks who break
My words with sticks and hurt me thus. How many more,
(I wonder!!) how many more misdeeds before my kingdom
Is divided, and given to the Medes?
Inspired by Michel Houllebecq’s novel Atomised (1998), Ben Pantrey considers the endurance of the Christian idea of the apocalypse in contemporary debates. Note: This article contains plot spoilers for Atomised!
Atomic Particles
Last week, I was in the magazine office, where I picked up a copy of Michel Houllebecq’s book Interventions 2020, which is a collection of short essays. I was instantly struck by the humour, the choice of topics, and the easy-to-read-but-thoughtful analysis of contemporary society. I was shocked.
“I thought Houllebecq’s books were all about whining about women and immigrants.” I said to the magazine editor.
“No, of course not. He’s a great writer.” he replied.
A few days later, I started reading Atomised.
That book is also extremely readable. In fact it’s the most engaging book I’ve read by a living author. His description of modern life, and the meaningless existence elevated to an ideal in our society, is right on point. The situations he depicts are funny, grotesque, or just plain depressing, but he never wallows. There is a good balance between ideas and plot.
Miniatur Wunderland.
Miniatur Wunderland
More than anything, I was struck by how Houellebeca’s vision matched an idea that had been pressing upon me for some time. In January 2020, I visited Hamburg, and went to an exhibition called the ‘Miniatur Wunderland’.
It was a building with floor upon floor of model railways in different settings: famous cities, woodlands, desserts, mountains and so on. A miniature model of Hamburg itself was there, with its red light street, the Reeperbahn, where model women posed in red-lit windows, and model men with beer bellies gathered.
Although constructed from wood, acrylic, steel and plaster, this world was a moving world. Trains and trams shuttled to and fro, aeroplanes took off, and ambulances raced through intersections with their blue lights flashing. I was amazed by the amount of detail that went into this work. They were like Brueghel paintings, with little stories and humorous incidents everywhere you looked: a man falling off a ladder; a love affair; a protest.
It didn’t happen immediately, but as the years passed, the vision of life suggested by the Miniatur Wunderland wormed its way into my thinking. Standing in the street, I would start wondering how it would look if I was staring down from the sky. How would I perceive the world if I had nothing at stake? If all I was bringing to bear on it was my own curiosity?
The downside of comparing the world to a model is that it makes everything seem flat and mechanistic. It denies the one real truth of life – subjectivity – and puts in its place a deterministic universe, full of cause-and-effect situations and atoms endlessly shuttling to and fro. There is no space for inner truth, no space for change. Only matter in a void. A big round ball of Being.
But, since the age of Lucretius this has been exactly the view underpinning the development of scientific thought, and worked out in capitalist economics. Atomistic, materialistic, deterministic. One apple is equivalent to another. Through the medium of money, the variety and uniqueness of physical reality is squashed into a flat virtuality.
One day Banzan was walking through a market. He overheard a customer say to the butcher, “Give me the best piece of meat you have.” “Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You cannot find any piece of meat that is not the best.” At these words, Banzan was enlightened. (Zen Koan)
The notion of a commodity with a fixed price (your used copy of a book is worth the same as another person’s used copy of a book in the same condition) ignores the sentimental value of an object.
‘Sentimental value’, by which we deem everything that belongs to the domain of actual lived and meaningful experience, is excluded from the reckonings of the marketplace. All the worse, then, that our entire society has become a marketplace, where individuals compete for status: monetary, cultural and sexual. It is this last arena that most fascinates Houellebecq.
Miniatur Wunderland.
Love is an anomaly…
In Atomised, Houellebecq satirises the dominant ideological model of society, exposing it as spiritually barren, dominated by selfishness, exploitation and ruthless competition in every sphere of life. Love is an anomaly, and quickly snuffed out in a cold world.
The novel loosely follows the story of two brothers: Michel and Bruno. Their parents are divorced, and they grew up with very different childhoods.
Michel was fascinated by the natural world, and in his adolescence met by chance with a beautiful girl who loved him in an almost spiritual way, but was met by coldness on his side.
Bruno, meanwhile, was bullied mercilessly, had no success with girls, and cared more for literature.
In their adult life, their paths diverge widely. Michel has no desire for life, he drifts onwards, pulled only by his own curiosity to understand the world scientifically. He ignores romantic opportunities, and eventually commits suicide after putting his scientific insights down on paper.
Bruno, meanwhile, is a sex addict. He pursues sex relentlessly, seeking a validation that no experience can ever provide. No matter the sexual pleasure, or how many orgies he participates in or taboos he breaks, he cannot develop a sense of wholeness. He is always frustrated. This frustration is expressed in his misogynistic and racist articles that nobody wants to publish.
There isn’t a plot, per se. The main interest lies in the various hijinks Bruno gets up to, and in the bits of social commentary Houellebecq the narrator includes along the way. When describing the protagonists’ father attending school, for examples, the narrator says:
“Martin’s teacher was keenly aware that there was more to his job than spoon-feeding elementary facts and figures to every untrained citizen. His task was to seek out the qualities that allowed a child to join the elite…” (p. 18)
Here, Houellebecq is able to bring social critique into his narrative quite effectively, posing provocative interpretations of the role of schooling to the reader. In general, novels act as great mediums for this. The all-knowing tone typical of a novel’s narration, and the fact that they are consumed in private, allows for a direct, and didactic engagement with the minds of readers. The length allows the author to present a totalising view of life all in one go, unlike an article that can only sketch at a perspective.
Miniatur Wunderland.
New Age Society
The most damning portrayal of contemporary society arrives in a part of the novel where Bruno attends a festival-cum-self-help-weekend. Houellebecq’s description of the activities at this event could be seen as a a damning assessment of New Age Society as a whole:
“All around him human beings were living, breathing, striving for pleasure or trying to develop their personal potential. On every floor, human beings were improving, or trying to improve, their social, sexual or professional skills or find their place within the cosmos.” (p. 100)
Obviously, Houellebecq is not impressed.
The prime example of Houllebecq’s critique of this self-help 60s-influenced culture is in Michel and Bruno’s mother, who abandons her children in favour of an endless quest of self-discovery and spiritual development.
Atomised is a bitter and satirical portrait of the modern world where only isolated instances of illogical love redeem a landscape that is otherwise cold, selfish, brutal and crude. Death haunts every moment, with the decaying of our bodies, the shocking cruelties of fate, and our obsession with sex: the one means of delaying the extinction of the species.
It’s definitely a cynical point of view that Houellebecq promotes, but it’s hard to argue against, and really isn’t so different to that expressed in such popular fiction as The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins, 2008). Here, too, society is depicted as a ruthless arena of competition. A zero-sum game where those in the lower rungs of society desperately vie to join the elite in a viciously enforced hierarchy.
Miniatur Wunderland.
Sci-fi Twist
The final pages of Atomised turns the book on its head, adding an unexpected sci-fi twist. Michel, who has spent his life devoid of romance, devises a way to allow humans to propagate without the need for sex.
It will all be done in a lab from now on, as with Dolly the sheep, and this lab-based reproduction will allow for genetic modification to create healthier humans that won’t develop crippling conditions like cancer, dementia, cystic fibrosis etc.
In hindsight, our age of sexual competition, desperate consumerism, and widespread anxiety and paranoia seem rather laughable and superficial. Everything will be settled in peace by a race of sexless, immortal post-humans.
What do we make of the idea that we are at the cusp of a vast historical shift? The start of a new Millennium, paired with vast strides in technological innovation, certainly put this idea in many people’s minds. This apocalyptic notion manifested first as a fear of the Y2K bug – that computers worldwide would crash at the start of the new Millennium due to dating difficulties, wreaking havoc in the world of finance, medicine and transport.
Next, there was murmuring over the date 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar, after the Western calendar had ceased to be a problem. This, of course, passed without a hitch. Now we project our apocalyptic fears onto the climate, or on advancements in AI.
Terence McKenna introduced the doomsday date of 2012 into mass culture. He was vague about what exactly would happen, but believed it would be something new and unexpected. His listeners, high on the drug of Christianity, took this to mean apocalypse.
Shows like Charlie Brooker’s ‘Black Mirror’ explore the idea of human minds being uploaded into virtual reality when our bodies expire, where we can live in an Eden of our own construction. Is this what Christians meant when they thought of history as a long journey starting and ending in paradise?
Michel Houellebecq in 2008.
Edenic State
The paradisal state of Eden is that of ignorance: paradise was lost once humanity became self-conscious. In our hedonistic pursuits, I wonder, do we strive for that same unselfconsciousness we have lost?
It is clear that we see our faculty of reason as something of a curse, even if it does bring us closer to the state of angels. Gnostics lament that nature didn’t bring us one step closer: let us keep our psyche, but free ourselves from the physical body. Let us be like angels!
With this context, we see how Western science has really been a gnostic dream, with the destruction of physical reality (ecological collapse) and the ascension to pure spirit (cyberspace) its logical goal. We haven’t reached this impasse by accident, but by design.
Only by recognising and consciously rejecting the gnostic message can we take control of our situation. That involves acceptance of the body, and a rebellion against the tyranny of the mind.
Am I calling for a plunge into the irrational? After the horrors of the twentieth century, Western man has an understandable fear of the irrational. But remember it was distorted Reason that led to the horrors propagated under Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.
No ‘primitive’ society could have arranged the Holocaust. No, this horror was the dark face of civilisation and a perverse ‘rationality‘. The ‘greater good’: the cold inhumanity of reason. This is what comes of rejecting emotion and feeling, of being out of touch with the messages of the body, our one tangible link with Nature.
Although we call ourselves a secular society, Christianity still lurks in the shadows of our thinking. Take, for instance, the apocalyptic tone that inevitably attends discussions around climate change or Artificial Intelligence. World leaders packed two by two in Bezos’s Ark. A just reward for our sins. Mr Beast healing the sick. It’s all a bit hellfire and brimstone.
I’m not saying these areas won’t pose issues in the future, but I think it’s concerning that we always think in black and white: either it’s business as usual or it’s the apocalypse. This blindsides us from acting and reacting in the face of more subtle forms of change. This is, after all, the most likely result of our ecological challenge: the Earth will become slowly more inhospitable. Can we train our eyes on this without jumping to hyperbole?
This obsession with apocalypse is of course a remnant of Christianity. For Christians, history is linear and has a clear end point: the Day of Judgement, or the Return of Christ. Everything we do until then is fleeting, and only relevant insofar as it affects the judgement that will be meted out to us (unless you’re a Calvinist, in which case there is no relevance whatsoever to these happenings on Earth).
Christianity has the concept of an End of History built into it, in contrast to cultures that see time as cyclical, just like the seasons of a year or the passing of generations.
The end of history, or civilisation, does not mean the end of life on this planet, nor even human life necessarily. But it does mean the end of “progress” as we have previously considered it. Our buildings will not always grow taller. Our phones will not always become more sophisticated. Our food will not get more processed. Is that so bad? To live closer to the Earth and to one another?
For Houellebecq, the end of history means the end of sex as a means of reproduction. And this he considers a form of liberation. The Buddha would agree. He said all desire is suffering. Yet, there’s such a thing as enjoyable suffering. What kind of music would Houellebecq’s post-humans make?
Another day ends. Throughout the building, lights are flicked off. Conversations slow to a light murmuring, and then drop off completely. At what cost will we keep living in Wunderland?
When, after a long siege, the Greeks breach the defences of Troy, Aeneas must flee. He carries his father Anchises upon his back and leads his son Ascanius by the hand. Thus encumbered – thus empowered – he begins the epic journey whose object is to found the city of Rome.
The image of Aeneas and pater Anchises has been painted often, the story told many times. It is inscribed upon the psyche of Europe because it epitomizes the ancient Roman virtue pietas. Aeneas was ‘Pius Aeneas’.
Pietas means a reverence for tradition, and a reverence for the father at the heart of it. It is a way of looking to the past. It is also a virtue which informs a vision of the future.
The action of Richard Kearney’s novel Salvage is set in West Cork in the late 1930’s. An island lies off the coast, by Glandore and Union Hall to be precise. In the Irish language, and since time immemorial, it has been known as Oileán Bhríde, Brigid’s Island after the sixth century patroness saint (or ‘mother saint’) of Ireland.
It has a sacred stream with healing properties, and is a place of ancient pilgrimage, like Croke Patrick in County Mayo, if not on the same scale. The Ordnance Survey of the 1820’s called it Rabbit Island.
Maeve O’Sullivan, the teenage heroine of the story, is one of the few remaining inhabitants of the island. Her father, a farmer and fisherman, is a practitioner of what nowadays might be dismissed as folk medicine.
But his collection of special plants and herbs are intimately associated with Brigid’s sacred well and stream. He instructs Maeve in the ancient medical/spiritual knowledge of the island. And in the lore of Brigid generally. She is more than a saint. A pagan earth goddess. A spirit.
Maeve’s father dies. Her mother loses her reason. Society on the island collapses. Maeve moves to the mainland. Her friends Helen and Seamus,with whom she is in love,encourage her to integrate into a world dominated not by Brigid but by the Cork bourgeoisie.
Helen and Seamus betray her and break her heart. At no stage in the story does Maeve lose faith in her father and what he taught her.
In the final scene of the book – in a wonderful and affecting action of cleansing and rebirth – Maeve swims from the mainland back to her beloved island. She is her father’s daughter. She is Brigid’s daughter.
Semper et ubique fidelis: always and everywhere faithful.
The author Richard Kearney’s family on his father’s side lived in the nearby Union Hall district for generations. Salvage lovingly recreates, in some detail, that native ground. It is itself an expression of pietas.
This article has been gestating for some time. I must admit to a long-standing loathing for cars. Far from mellowing, this hatred has only escalated with the passage of time.
Into my mid-fifties, I still recall over thirty years ago when I was working as a kitchen porter in a family-run restaurant in one of the suburbs west of Paris, awaiting a lift from my then father-in-law. and actually hurling insults at the espace des boites en métal sur quatre roue!
So, where is this anger coming from? What’s up? Well, as the title of this piece suggests, the SUV has become symbolic, for me anyway, of many of the fundamental ills of the Western world.
In the relatively wealthy enclave in north county Dublin I have lived for the last decade or more, the SUV is the ultimate symbol of middle class affluence.
I grew up with them. Indeed I remember their origins. The Range Rover dates from the 1970s when British Leyland unrolled them and they were pretty utilitarian in design and generally, as four-by-four vehicles, designed for multi-terrain or cross-terrain purposes.
So, farmers and builders and other rustic types would have been the first customers, but as the vehicles grew in popularity, second generation models began appearing from the 1990s, targeting high-end users such as the Sloan Rangers in London, named after Sloan Square, an affluent part of London where the horsey types in jodhpurs and boots became a social phenomenon.
Going from agrarian utility to gender and empowerment, you see how these vehicles are symbolically so charged as to be of interest to anyone who wishes to cast a critical eye on contemporary society!
Of course, the military element is also there, as the SUV stems from the jeep, which had such iconic status in both World War II and the Vietnam War. And here we come to the crux of the matter: might is right! When you are sitting up in an SUV, you command the road. Particularly the fifth-generation types that you see on the roads today, and which are so vulgar in their display of wealth.
I am thinking especially of the polar white coloured models with so much chrome and bling that you generally associate them with red-carpet type celebrities. Every wannabe designer or football wife now seems to be sitting inside one, suitably suited and jack booted, with god- knows what lying in her trunk(s)?
So, it’s a metaphor for ostentatious living, opulence and success. So much so that if you wish to appear to be successful you need to have one of these sleekly curved, designer beasts if you really wish to assert your societal success.
This is how shallow life has become in the West, and it has been that way since the 1980s. Of course, we haven’t even brought in the themes of the energy crisis and the environment yet! All evoked by the same means of transport…
As a writer, and poet particularly, metaphors are what I need to traffic in. And when I think of today, and the era that we are living through, going back the last thirty or so years, I am also reminded of how literal we have become in our expressions.
Take the world of poetry. In a realm where you would imagine metaphor to be found in abundance, you literally could not be further from the truth, as it is mostly Spoken Word these days. What the hell does that even mean?
We have become literally so literal, in other words, so lacking in metaphorical thinking, that we literally can’t even think in metaphorical terms any longer. Hence the appalling state of poetry at the moment, particularly in this c(o)untry where Spoken Word poets are more dominant than any other kind of beast!
When I think of a master of metaphor, I have to go back to Beckett which, again, like the Range Rover, was still around during the 1980s. His whole world of tramps, hats, dustbins and solitary trees; in that constellation of metaphors, I can see the whole post World War II years. Beckett could only have come out of the total ruins of a global conflict that resulted in the deaths of over sixty million people.
It’s all there contained in his metaphors. As Hugh Kenner was to point out, Waiting for Godot was both directly and indirectly inspired by Beckett’s only flight with Susanne from Paris, when the Gestapo were quite literally looking for the two of them and they both had to, quite literally, hide by sleeping rough or finding lodgings.
The play, which became synonymous with post-war Europe, having been born from very real vagrancy and all of the anguish that might come from such a tenuous life; the couple hid out for the remainder of the war in Roussillon.
Two other poets, masters of metaphor, were of course Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. The former employed bog bodies, while the latter adopted the crow, but when compared to the bleak visions of Beckett, in sheer terms of metaphoric power, any one can see that the Sage of Foxrock far out-does them.
Perhaps one of the greatest examples of the stupidity of our current predicament, a predicament which now sees us in direct conflict with the great powers of the East, who see how weak we have become, is perhaps the famous ‘End of History’ phrase used by Francis Fukuyama in 1992.
Here we can identify, at the end of the Cold War, the collective West’s deluded belief in its omnipotence. This we should remember was a period of unparalleled wealth, which finally gave way in 2008 to a global downturn that was really the culmination of corporate greed, of which the SUV is now the best metaphor for.
In the figure of Fukuyama, we can see, again quite literally, how literal people were thinking. Even historians. Whatever happened to the philosopher historians, a dead breed that included Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Hegel and Giambattista Vico? These were metaphorical thinkers who could imagine history as another idiom and thereby create metaphoric space in which to speculate on the nature of history and origins.
Vico, with his three ages of man theory, would have declared, no doubt, that the period we are now living through in the West is in the third age, when society, as we know it has peaked.
In architectural terms, think of the Corinthian columns, which resemble great flowering heads spilling out in opulent abundance, which is a natural phenomenon. Compare them then to the spartan simplicity of the Ionic and Dorian column.
The Corinthians were a civilisation in excess. Apparently, their columns heralded a demise. Only the metaphor remains, and, of course, the ruined columns!
To return now to the SUV. The sports utility vehicle. I only have to look out my apartment window here to see one. There it is, parked glistening in the sun, awaiting its bold glamazon.
My wife (she drives a Fiat Panda, so a mini one) has often remarked on how the very worst drivers tend to be the women who drive SUVs, as they are generally so contemptuous of everyone.
Might is Right, remember! Fuck You! They seem to say just by merely being; both driver now and vehicle. And, this is a sign for us to emulate, as a society! These are the values that we have now been brought up to revere! The Fuck You arrogance of absolute veneer.
It’s funny, when I was last rereading Thomas Kinsella’s The Táin I was struck immediately by the brash vulgarity of the local Irish princes and princesses. Merely substitute the SUVs for their chariots, and you find the same vulgar trappings of power and wealth.
The Táin is an old work apparently first originating in the first century AD, yet the manuscript dates from the twelfth century. We need, it seems to me, fresher chronicles. Fresher metaphors, more room to breath. What a culture; Spoken Word and SUVs, my arse!
I’ve let the world of people go
in favour of growing
spring evenings,
what all the buds know,
the jonquils and the willow,
the prattling birds,
water chasing water to river,
fold of showers.
What sage said April is the cruellest month,
the year’s promise
in its tall shadows?
Let the world of people go.
It isn’t just a house.
It’s the sacred place I took my babies home to after their tiring journey into this world.
Their sweet new born cries filled the air
with beautiful, new life!
Their laughter, first steps, the almighty tantrums.
Will the walls whisper their names when we are gone?
It isn’t just a house.
It’s our beloved home
All of life taking place right here.
For six years we have felt protected by these walls,
Wrapped in a warm embrace,
The fear vanished.
It isn’t just a house.
It is a sense of belonging,
Community and friendship.
A safety net when the world was a frightful place,
A comfort to me and my children in hard times.
It isn’t just a house.
Will our laughter echo through the void?
The shouts and cries signalling the demise of a big love,
The tears and tender moments shared,
Where do those go? once we are gone….
This house holds the very spirit of my family.
We reluctantly, tentatively, leave
And step once again into the unknown.
It isn’t just a house.
It is part of us
A piece of our lives we will never forget
To you, a prudent financial decision, nothing personal.
To us, a nightmare
Forcing us into a life of fear and uncertainty and I ask…. for what?
Adding insult to injury,
The vaguely similar, misspelled surname on the eviction notice.
Don’t you even care enough to know the name of the family you are making homeless?
