When I’m Allowed Leave The Cancer Ward with thanks to Claire Higgins for four of these lines
When I get out of here
I plan to open a factory
that manufactures miniature guillotines
which will be given away gratis
to bullied schoolchildren
to keep hidden in their bedrooms
until I give the signal.
When I get out of here
I plan to finally take that evening class
in Industrial Espionage for Beginners
where I’ll learn to break into laboratories
to steal the antidotes
to Elon Musk and
Ursula von der Leyen.
When I get out of here
things will be given their proper names;
the centre of every town re-titled
Oppression Square, during a ceremony
in which the Mayor (or someone prepared
to dress up as the Mayor)
tells the truth about who died,
how, and why.
Worst of all,
I’ll start a new Irish Literary Awards
to be held annually at an imaginary hotel.
Categories will include: least authentic
poetry collection, most intellectually empty
novel, most cowardly book review,
publisher who made the biggest
eeijt of themselves this year,
most over obvious networker,
most irrelevant but self-important
anthology, most incestuous
“My Books of The Year” list
in which the author chooses
pals who’ve all given him
fab reviews too.
And you’ll sit there constricting
the exact same muscle
Auntie Mary did when she was in fear
someone was about to take
the Archbishop’s name in vain.
It was Saturday morning. Maher was lying in bed. He had just woken up. It was early yet, before eight he could tell. When he had been a much younger man, he had been able to lie in for hours on end but ever since he had passed 30, which was almost twenty years ago now, he had found it impossible to sleep on once he had woken, which was typically before eight on the weekend, maximum, and 5 or 6am minimum on the weekdays.
He looked around him. Light was already beginning to filter through the dark yellow curtains that he had bought particularly for his bedroom. This had been one of his greatest discoveries in terms of interior decoration, as the soft light they diffused helped him to acclimatise gently to his surroundings. And, considering he was such an early riser, he needed this bit of morning douceur. It was the first in a complex and methodical line in his defences against the onslaught of the day. For Maher, life was an unending struggle, or at least, series of struggles. War in short. He had always felt this, ever since he was a young boy. So, when he finally came across the figure of Heraclitus, in his first year in university while majoring in philosophy, he had been endlessly consoled to read fragment 64, literally translating as the thunderbolt steers all things. In other words, from out of conflict came everything!
As he lay lying there on his bed watching the wedge of light widen a little through the gap in the heavy curtains, Maher could not but help think of the unending cosmos. This was reflexive. Maher, obviously, was a morning person. It was, without any doubt, one of the plethora of reasons why he was single. His ex-wife used to joke to him, after they had separated of course, of the years of abuse he used to subject her to with cosmologically ruminations like this, first thing in the morning. She would joke, sometimes almost seriously, that she was sure that she would be open to pursuing a claim for psychological abuse after the years that they had spent together and all the subsequent trauma she had faced after being subjected to Maher’s monologues.
She had a rich sense of humour, Maher smiled, thinking about her now. However, obviously not rich enough.
As Maher finally lifted himself up off the bed, he heard the pitter patter of Dave, the dog. Dave was a Jack Russell. Mad as a box of Jacks! Maher had read somewhere that the breed was rather particular as they were convinced, apparently, that they were human, not canine, which as far as Maher could tell kind of helped to explain their rather anti-social behaviour vis a vis their four -legged brothers and sisters. Dave, for example, basically wanted nothing to do with other dogs. Except of course when he had an urge, and that was basically it. Apart from random acts of sodomy, typically rather perversely involving a rather aged mongrel, Dave, as far as Maher could see, did not particularly give a shit about his fellow quadrupeds.
Maher sat on the side of the bed, half contemplating the face of his pet who was, as was his systematic habit, sitting in the most physically endearing position imaginable, for human empathy at least. That was another character trait, Dave the dog had a most uncanny knack how to make himself cute as possible, somehow shrinking himself by adapting a very specific posture, typically first thing in the morning, making his shoulders go in, contracting every part of himself so that he appeared physically as small and so as defenceless as possible. The head would tilt then slightly, that was when he really wanted to work on Maher, he would tilt his head in this impossibly cute angle, the eyes then would look appealingly at him so that the invisible bubble-like memes above his head would float up.
“I need you.”
And Maher would just look on, indeed as he always seemed to, helplessly with some amazement at the eternal ingenuity and downright cleverness of the creature. Only that very year, animals had been granted sentient status in a government bill, in the UK. Maher had greeted the news with incredulity. After two thousand years and counting, finally, they were now recognised legally as being thinking creatures! Christ, Maher, could not think of any human who met a Jack Russell’s level of conniving and sheer trickery. Personally, such attributes he found rather admirable.
“Okay, Dave, I’m with you man!” he addressed the dog.
All too often, Maher observed, Dave was the instigator of communication. Non-verbal, of course. Dave was only prone to bark on two occasions. Firstly, when someone approached the front door, typically in the form of a courier or the postman and secondly, when they were down on the beach and Dave wanted Maher to play fetch, typically with a common stone that Maher would throw for him along the beach.
Maher sat in a face-off with Dave for a further few moments before Maher eventually capitulated and got up off the bed.
In the kitchen, Maher approached the coffee machine. He had ordered it from Italy directly from the manufacturer. Oh, it was nothing fancy. It was more like something from the nineties, Maher’s favourite decade. In other words, it was still quite mechanical, rather than electronic. Maher didn’t trust technology, at the best of times. He was of that generation that was somehow in between both worlds. Not quite wholly 20th century, not quite wholly 21st century. Born on the cusp, as it were. And, fundamentally so.
He ground the coffee which he retrieved from the big golden foiled packet which he also ordered online. It came from Naples. The Neapolitans were great blenders, and particularly of coffee. Maher had once visited the city with Claudia when they were still in their honeymoon period. Oh yes, the days of magic they still remained in the great storehouse of the mind. Golden memories reflected back to him now in the reflection of the light on the coffee packet, such were the unholy correspondences. There was never any escape from memory. It was Proustian, that equation.
After grinding the beans, he filled the cartridge with five spoons of the precious powder, before screwing it in place. He prayed that the filter was clean before pressing the start button. Miraculously, it sprung to life and poured, literally, into life. When the espresso cup was three quarter’s full, he flicked the switch and admired the colour of the coffee against the white quartz of the counter top. It was a thing of beauty, he told himself. Then, he filled a mug with soya milk and placed it in the microwave heating it for 75 seconds. It was the same beautiful ritual every single day. Finally, when the latte was ready, Maher versed the content of the espresso cup into the mug of warm soya-milk. It turned a beautiful tan. The first sip was always delicious. This is what he needed. Such continuity. Every single morning. It was, after all, the only thing he could be certain of each and every day. This, along with the incredibly rich taste of the coffee in the warmed milk, was what made his morning ritual so particularly special. Maher stood in the kitchenette staring down at Dave. Mornings never got any better, he thought.
Once Maher had taken Dave outside the front door, the usually circus started. Every time it was the same. Dave, the minute the collar was placed around his neck, would start barking and jumping about. I had forgotten, there was indeed a third criteria for Dave when it came to barking. This was inevitable, the barking. Also, the omission. Maher, considering himself to be a prisoner himself, in the most global existential terms, he had nothing but sympathy for Dave’s predicament, and what is more, rather than get frustrated by Dave’s constant frustration and ultimately his persistent rebellion, Maher openly approved of it. It only cemented, at least for Maher, their already precious bond.
“Good man Dave, that’s it!” Maher would encourage him.
“Don’t take any shit, from any of them!”
It was almost as if by addressing the dog thus, Maher was in fact talking to his alter-ego.
Up in the castle grounds, Dave, typically, was in his element. Maher had taken him across the cove as the tide had been out and then they had walked across the sandy expanse of coastline, which was usually completely devoid of any human activity. Maher found it was a real tonic as it helped to clear away all of the white noise that still lay combusting in the furnace that was still his mind; all the accumulated stress of the commute, the apparently unending tension which earning a monthly paycheck necessitated, life being reduced as it was to a strict timetable and series of schedules involving train times, scheduled appointments with customers or clients and all of the countless minutiae that made up a working day X 5.
So, in this way, just watching his dog run about the castle grounds without so much a care in the world somehow seemed to ease Maher’s peace of mind. It was almost as if the dog’s delight was a symbol or sign of Maher’s own peace and contentment so that he began to see Dave almost as an extension of him, in some way.
Typically, Maher would then take Dave through the small wood which ran alongside the edge of the cliff looking down onto the beach below, although you couldn’t see the cliff’s edge from the paths as they were too far inland, approximately 25 meters or yards away from the edge and whose visibility was also blocked by so many trees and plants and other forms of vegetation.
Maher loved to walk under the great boughs of the trees and while Dave typically would scamper about the wood, going in and out between the trees just enjoying the general feeling of freedom of movement without having the leash attached to him, Maher would, at the same time, stare up at the sky directly above his head and marvel at the colours that would confront him. The deep azure of the sky contrasted sharply by the verdant colours of the leaf in spring and summer say, although now it was midway through Autumn and there was a slight chill in the air as if someone had switched on the fridge.
There was a certain section of the wood where the path joined two others and some beautiful old trees formed a kind of island in the center of the junction forming a clearing, effectively, where the sunlight would stream in, particularly during the summer months, but even in the Autumn too like right now. Maher stood there as if appraising the phenomenon of the light pouring into the clearing almost as if in liquified form. It was a phenomenon that he really enjoyed as it made him think of Heidegger who likened these kinds of clearings, for he too was a great woodsman, or Lichtung, to the spaces in the mind where thought could occur in illumination…
Maher thought it was an extremely poetic analogy or idiom and he often thought of the German thinker when he passed this clearing in the wood. Thinking, in general, is one of the reasons why Maher would come up here as he found the great expanse of space and time, the unlimited acreage of the demesne allied to the timeless nature of the walk, in that he was, for once in the week, not bound to some schedule be it train or academic (Maher was a Lecturer in a third level institute in the city), brought a truly metaphysical dimension, in the proper meaning of the term that is, in other words when spatial and temporal notions collided in a rather fortuitous manner, so actual thought, as opposed to mere reaction, could actually take place.
Indeed, Maher often found himself engaging in discourses with Dave his dog, in other words, while he was up walking in the local castle grounds, which most of the time were devoid of people, Maher found that it helped him to actually give physical embodiment to his thoughts in the form of his own voice using Dave the dog as a receptacle. It was the old Socratic method of uttering what one thought, (or was it Platonic?) and by doing so one could actually physically embody one’s thoughts in one’s voice so that one could clearly see them better, as opposed to just leaving them unvoiced in the cocoon then of one’s mind.
“The current situation, it seems to me,” Maher began, throwing cursory looks around him there in the wood to make sure once again that he was in fact alone and seeing that he was he felt further emboldened so that he could continue his discourse proper.
“Concerning the sexes, that is. It would appear to be really quite clear that there is a profound discord in the nature of popular discussion today between the sexes, that is to say between men and women. Why is this? Well, first of all, let’s try to clarify further what it is exactly we mean by this statement. So, when I say that there seems to be a rupture in communication between men and women I really want to further specify between heterosexual men and heterosexual women as public discourse between the two seems to have become completely splintered or fragmented into the overall discussion of identity politics which seems to be interminable now and which is really strange as both heterosexual couples would appear to be completely excluded in current popular debates, having been taken over by fifth wave feminists now and queer ideologues.”
Maher laughed aloud at this pronouncement as he imagined the startled sighs of dismay if he had actually dared to utter such a statement on an unsuspecting public in a public forum, it would go off above their heads rather like an invisible bomb. This was good, he imagined himself now preparing to support his thesis before them, standing behind the rostrum. Dave his dog, meanwhile, ran on through the vast expanse of fields embracing, without question, the unlimited nature and scope of physical freedom.
“I mean, take poetry, for example. In the current context, here in the Republic of Ireland today, you have an almost ludicrous situation where heterosexual men have almost been banished from the public spectrum of debate and in many public readings because of the extremely predominant nature of identity politics which indeed has completely taken over the realm of all public discourse and particularly in the arts, poetry, always being the poorest medium, being the place where the damage has been almost terminal. What are the reasons for this? Well, without a doubt, poetry was always the preserve of white male middleclass privilege in this country, especially since the origins of the state right up to the 1980’s and nineties. You only have to look at an anthology of Irish poetry from this time, take John Montague’s Faber Book of Irish Verse, for example first published in 1974 and you can see that the representation of Irish men to Irish women is 52 white male Irish poets, and generally hetero, to 2 Irish female poets covering the period from W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939) to Montague, which is a truly shocking figure, I grant you. The two Irish women poets represented in the book were Evan Boland and Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin. That ratio is worth repeating so as in order to better take it in.
52 / 2
That’s covering a period of say, 100 years.”
Maher let some time pace, as he walked with his dog, in order to let the content of the figures sink in. This was the country that he had grown up in, after all. If this wasn’t a sign of patriarchal orthodoxy, he didn’t know what else to call it. And it certainly existed, until the sudden war of feminism, which started in the eighties, and then the other voices entered in the nineties. First Gay, Trans, and then Lesbian. Maher remembered it all well and clearly growing up in Cork and the arrival of the first gay bars and vegetarian coops. They were the original pioneers in the new quest for cultural and personal identity.
Maher stopped to take in the view of the Irish Sea before him, the vast expanse of mercury tinted liquid shimmered before him in the breeze.
Those were such very different times, he thought. The shoe now was very much on the other foot. Maher was representative of the white middleclass heterosexual poet personified and completely sidelined to such an extent that he couldn’t even get a book published in the country, so under-represented was the nature and style of his work. The situation was actually bordering on the ludicrous. He remembered only just a few weeks previous sitting in a public park where the Arts Council had installed a screen with a number of black and coloured poets reading their work, all women of course with a token gay or other ‘under-represented minority’, that was the preferred terminology, wasn’t it? And this was all happening as a response to the Black Lives Matter protests that had recently happened in the USA and also in the UK. Here was the thing, the percentage of black Irish nationals in the country was hardly similar to the percentage per head in the populations of both the UK and the USA. But that point, extremely relevant you would think in the context, did not seem to occur to the blessed powers that were. No, they were just conforming to the international zeitgeist of identity politics, as opposed to actually considering the literary value of the work. Maher had watched the lectures and talks of Harold Bloom dating from as far back as the nineties when he had seen the whole catastrophe of identity politics taking over. And, he had been right. Look at the situation today!
Maher just laughed and continued his walk with an even greater vigor. He wanted to go to the walled garden where the flowers were, they were his quarry. He wanted to savour the aroma of a carnation, whatever type of flower was currently on display, Maher wasn’t discriminating, flowers after all were flowers. Though some, it is true, had a greater, or better, aroma than others, it was fair to say.
Upon entering the enclosure, Maher kept a firm hold of Dave as he seemed to grow even wilder within the enclosed formal garden tethered to the leash once again.
From the corner of his eye, Maher saw the first flourish of orange roses. These were the L’oreal Trophy which were being buffeted by the breeze. Maher could barely contain himself any longer, he approached the first big carnation, the superlative as it were, which could be clearly distinguished by its vibrant colour. Dave seemed to become even more agitated as he approached the flower. Les Fleurs du Mal. Its many-formed leaf burst in a dazzling display of rich and light orange hues depending on the intensity of the sunlight and the degree of strength of the individual pigment of the leaf. Maher stooped down placing his nostrils firmly yet gently over the flower. The aroma or perfume emitting from the flower penetrated in an unmistakable scent of vanilla with hints of tea. Yet, Maher only thought of her cunt, and how he missed it so!
We have endured long in the dark.
It is a burden (A magic? A madness?) particular
To us. Long endurance of darkness is not light,
But speaks of a belief that light’s radiance
Merits enduring long in the dim we know—
In the dusk we are.
The world is a bone
Full of Christ-marrow; its sun a merely
Mortal star, spending itself to lighten
What it can, just as the Godman upon
Entering our long dark did, except
In his mortality—no mereness.
He will put flesh again on this
Old bone, the world, his own
Milk-fed flesh in the great
Stable dark, a holy darkness:
All the void
Is not.
This is, and has been,
And shall be.
What Mary treasured up
In her heart was Death
Leaving the carcass of the world
At his arrival. She treasured up
The world alive, all alive
With a brightness
That turns the noble sun
To pitch.
Feature Image Advent and Triumph of Christ by Hans Memling, 1480.
Over the last seven years, I have been reshaping my practice from being primarily hermetic, manual and materially fixated into a more fugitive, performative state. Around 2015, I had a rising feeling that my drawings, prints and collages no longer had the capacity to hold the kinds of storytelling and speculation that I needed to transmit. I was frustrated that my core desires: to communicate, speculate, pronounce, denounce, seduce and lead up the garden path, were being limited by what I had come to view as the chicanery of my materials.
Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati in 2022, image Teresa Burkey.
One of very few consistent back-channels to my material practice that stayed open during the rearrangement process was a project called Going Postal. In 2013 I had entered into an iron clad arrangement with the MSURS – the Museum of Contemporary Art of Republika Srpska (the Serb part of Bosnia). I had solemnly committed to sending them a flat artefact, unenveloped in the postal system at least four times annually until my projected year of death in 2077. I have faithfully maintained this undertaking over the years and when the project concludes on 19/11/2077, 256 items will have been integrated into their collection.
Dispatch 2015112 (2015) courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Republika Srpska.
Around the time I was taking a sabbatical from the physical manufacture of artworks, I was deep in the guts of a multi-annual film project called GLUE with my dear friend Oisin Byrne. We had both left Ireland a couple of years earlier, I went to Brussels, and he relocated to London. For over half a decade, the making of GLUE was the structure that kept us embedded in each other’s everyday lives. The final shape of GLUE was a semi-fictional concoction of my experiences of the sleep disorder narcolepsy told through manic and confessional monologues. The project was the first time I positioned my verbal and physical performativity as tip of the spear of my work. The public premier of GLUE was in Salzburger Kunstverein in the summer of 2018.
Angry letter scene from GLUE (2017) directed by Oisin Byrne
In January 2015, I met Berlin based photographer and sound artist Chris Dreier. We were introduced to each other over dinner in the Germany city of Wuppertal. Our first conversation was about Charleroi, the mangled capital of Belgium’s post-industrial rustbelt. Our alliance was instantaneous. Since then, we have been sending each other weekly postcard briefings obsessively focused on our shared interests in corporate architecture, finance, disasters, institutions, political assassinations and magic. From the beginning, we always understood the correspondence as a receptacle for some shared knowledge we were both trying to capture. On October 3rd, 2015 we codified our relationship into an institution and established the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence O.J.A.I..
A selection of Office for Joint Administrative postcard correspondence. Image Fabrice Scheider.
Office for joint Administrative intelligence is configured as a DIY para-intelligence agency operating between Brussels and Berlin. I would describe our process as having some research components, in that we gather knowledge based on hyper-specific fields of enquiry – pedestrian tunnels, market shocks, plane crashes, dried up fountains, lonely office blocks, pornography staged in modernist architecture and public announcements (over Tanoy). The research component is not an end in itself. We use the information mined from economic, political and architectural sources as a departure point for uncanny speculation and highly subjective fiction making.
This process manifests in the public space as performances, fieldtrips, audits, annual reports, office installations, audio wallpaper, vinyl records, architectural plans, psycho-cartography and our monthly radio show transmitting on Dublin Digital Radio and Cashmere Radio Berlin.
In 2021, I enrolled at a.pass in Brussels, an artistic research environment coalesced around performativity and scenography. My project, in close cooperation with the office, departed from the work of deceased American conservative conspiracy theorist William Milton Cooper. Cooper’s work was a precursor to QAnon and encountered the public through the polemical Hour Of The Time radio show which synthesized economic and political ‘research’, occult knowledge, personal grievance, and manic episodes into a paranoid tsunami designed to undermine public confidence in institutions.
During my time at a.pass, I developed various performative versions of myself as an agent for disinformation, including: the bureaucrat, the crossdresser, the seducer, the charlatan, the guide, the joker, the devil’s advocate, the instructor and the Cassandra.
a.pass end performance, Brussels (2022). Image Karolien Chromiak.
My current exhibition Proximity Papers – new works from an organisational self – is my first solo exhibition since 2015 and my first major project outside the office in as many years. On the curatorial initiative of Various Artists, the show signals a reignition of my attraction to slow and repetitive processes of hand manufacture such as stitching, stencilling, typing, folding, labelling and redacting. Channeling the same set of political and architectural imaginaries that inhabit the more bombastic performance work, the pieces in the show are encoded with systemic fictions, self-referencing data, geographical imaginaries and lots of modernist ghosts.
Proximity Papers invitation postcard
My starting point was a series of postcards that I made for the Project Arts Centre BAE publication a couple of years back. They depict Dublin’s most iconic modernist office blocks: Liberty Hall, the civic offices, Apollo House, the Irish Life Centre etc. These were the first buildings I ever loved.
I have always been perversely attracted to the unequivocal, disciplinarian presence of post-war buildings in cities. Even as a kid, I knew that these erections were encoded at a genetic level with simultaneously seductive and coercive political instructions. Buildings are dangerous. I have spent my adult life pondering the question: what subliminal messages are these structures asserting into the public space? What do the buildings want?
Proximity Papers opening night at Nadine, Brussels. Image An Goovaerts.
Most of the materials in the show were subjected to prolonged direct physical contact with my body. I carried the A4 drawings folded up in my pocket for prolonged periods, larger works were digested at the bottom of my tote bag or flattened under my mattress. I took the two main pieces of the show – a set of watercolour election result maps – into the shower with me every day for a month, carefully bleaching the constituency areas to simulate transitions of power. These processes were extremely destructive to the integrity of the materials and at some stage the works risked disintegration. The second set of processes consisted of repairing, restoring and devoting care to the surfaces. Bringing them back from the dead.
Proximity Papers opening night at Nadine, Brussels. Image An Goovaerts.
The work is characterised by a jaded bureaucratic, architectural sensibility. Some of the works consist of repetitive text piled up to look like tower blocks ‘IT IS OFFICIAL POLICY TO APPEAR UNMOVED’.
The only human presence in the show is a screen-grab from a gay pornographic film where a young heterosexual male hustler is paid to receive oral sex from a gay protagonist. He doesn’t like it. I intervened in the image with delicate rows of my patented embroidery pattern the quasi-autonomous stitch. This work is part of straighsploitation – my ongoing ‘research’ into representations of straight male bodies in gay porn. Other works in the show include: Teri Garr International Airport, Grosser flughafen verspätung taurigkeit (Big Airport Delay Sadess), Systems Merger, Gray Parliament and Regional Conflict Map.
The word ‘YES’ is recurring throughout the show, part act of self-encouragement/partially ironic. All the works are stamped on the rear with my name, date of birth and projected expiry date- Gary Farrelly (1983-2077). I will be ninety-six-years-old if the prediction is accurate. Specially constructed display units were designed and built by Remy vanderhaegen. The show was executed with the generous support of The Arts Council and Fingal Arts Office. Sincere thanks to Various, Phyllis, An and Loes and Remy vanderhaegen.
Proximity Papers opening night at Nadine, Brussels. Image An Goovaerts.
Formation of a Young Irish Intellectual after Nazim Hikmet
You will go far young person
if as soon as you enter this building
you follow standard operating procedures
and stop thinking altogether.
We will do the thinking for you.
For the more intellectually curious of you
this will be as difficult initially
as nailing yourself to a chair.
But the appropriate doses
of the right sort of alcohol will ease
you into it.
Before long, you’ll find yourself
not thinking a thing.
In your lunch break, you’ll write poems
that are secretly okay with NATO
and won’t know where they came from.
But we’ll know,
and that’s all that matters.
We have a library of pre-existing think pieces
from which you can choose your opinions,
which we’d like you to massage
so they seem different at first
but end up being exactly the same as the rest of us.
For there is no opinion worth having
that someone in here hasn’t already had.
You will be in favour of all the right wars
without having to sweat the niceties
and put the appropriate flag
on your Twitter handle
without us ever having to mention it.
You have no idea yet
the thoughts we have in store for you.
this is tropical truth this is celtic truth this is Hy Brasil in the Kerribrasilian sea
for Joan, Bríd, Ezimar and Tereza
Sometimes the dead do not die. Those of us alive can fall into shadow until we learn how to listen to the voices of the dead, and the hermetic messages they transmit. The signs are here and there, although with each passing decade in this paradoxical age of amnesia, they become harder to access. Yes, it is so, the present is absent until we penetrate the absence that is present.
In 2020, I made a journey, travelling thousands of kilometres to reach the town of Iguatu in the interior of northeast Brazil, known as the sertão [a hinterland or backcountry] in the Caatinga biome. This was where I would find out more about my cousin Patrick. I arrived in Fortaleza, the capital city in the state of Ceará on 3rd February. I was still dressed in white after attending a celebration of Iemanjá, the spirit of rivers and queen of oceans, in Salvador da Bahia the previous day, which was also the birthday of James Joyce, author of the great river-book Finnegans Wake. There are no coincidences when we allow ourselves to be entangled with places, temporalities and creative practices.
Saying aloud the word ‘Brazil’, and dreaming about what that vast land may be, has resonated in me ever since I was a boy. For my first school project at eight years of age, I decided to dedicate my time to drawing and writing about the Amazon Jungle, as my young imagination was dazzled, from afar, by the overflowing matter that all seemed so alarmingly alive. In the books I found everything seemed to be flourishing and decaying along the moving floors and rustling canopies of that great forest of the earth through which many rivers flowed.
My drawing of the Amazon jungle from a school project as an 8-year-old.
Much of the area along the enormous coastline of Brazil was once called Pindorama (‘land of the palm trees’) by the Tupi-Guarani indigenous peoples. When Portuguese navigators landed, accidentally, on the shores of Bahia in 1500, they called it Ilha da Vera Cruz (‘island of the true cross’). Today, the country is referred to as Brazil, named after a dye wood called ‘brazilwood’ or pau-brasil, which once grew in abundance along that coastline. The word ‘brasil’ probably derives from the Latin brasa which means ‘ember’ (with the suffix ‘-il’), as the wood was red like embers.
But there is another story: the name may have a connection with the lost island of Hy Brasil, which once upon a time was located off the west coast of Ireland and appeared on European Medieval and Renaissance maps.
The word probably comes from the Old Irish Uí Breasail, which means descendants (Úí) of the island (il) of beauty, worth or might (bres). With the arrival of the Age of Reason, the age of magic faded into song and oblivion and into the earth, or transferred into science, and Hy Brasil disappeared off all maps to become an obscure myth. But I follow the trail of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote: “myth is the nothing that is everything”.
Hy Brasil were on my mind when I took the seven-hour bus journey from Fortaleza to Iguatu through a prehistoric landscape of uncanny rock formations jutting out of the earth. I found out much later these were the Quixadá monoliths. My great capixaba friend Fabricio, who had roadtripped with me by land from Vitória to Salvador, called this ‘profundo Brasil’. As we got nearer to Iguatu, the landscape began to remind me of the west of Ireland. I was getting closer to the heart of the story, and to an encounter with my cousin.
The Quixadá monoliths.
‘Some Say the Devil is Dead’
Let me tell you a little of what I know of Patrick and his story, which is what stirred me to write this text. This story shows the effect the land can have on us and the effect we can have on each other. It reverberates through my own inner and outer journeys to Brazil over the years, and resonates emotionally and spiritually. This story is a way into an absence that has become vibrantly present.
Patrick was born in Scart House in Castlecove in Kerry, on the south-west coast of Ireland. He was the son of Maurice Fitzgerald and my grandfather’s sister Lil O’Sullivan. My grandfather (my namesake), known as Batt, was born at home in Caherdaniel, six kilometres from Castlecove.
Patrick had three older sisters – Mary, Joan and Bríd. Mary, the oldest, died in 2007, and Joan and Bríd are alive and well in Kerry today. He also had two younger siblings: Maurice – born in 1949, and Eilis – born in 1951. Both died very young: Maurice in 1951 of pneumonia after a small surgery; and Eilis in 1953 of spina bifida and hydrocheplus. Born on 8th June 1945, Patrick was remembered as a joyful, gleaming boy, much loved by all, who went on to be ordained as a Redemptorist priest on 5th July 1970. Patrick left Ireland in 1972 (a year that began with Bloody Sunday and had the highest death toll of the Troubles in the north of Ireland) and arrived in Brasilia with his luggage and guitar.
Patrick’s sister Joan Rayle, in Castlecove, in front of Scart house where all the six children were born.
Brasilia had been founded twelve years previously and, like so often in Brazil, the mystical and ancient fused with extreme modernism in the new capital. Something similar can be seen in the astonishing novel by João Guimarães Rosa called Grande sertão: veredas, which was published in 1956, the same year Brasilia was proposed as the new capital by Brazil’s new president Juscelino Kubitschek. This visionary masterpiece begins with the word ‘Nonada’ [which can mean ‘into the nothing’ or ‘it is nothing’], and ends with the word ‘Travessia’ [‘crossing’ or ‘passage’], and whose protagonist’s name is ‘Riobaldo’ (literally river [Rio] deficient [baldo]. After three months in Brasilia to learn something of Brazil’s language, history and culture, Patrick was sent to Iguatu in the summer of 1972. Iguatu derives from the Tupi-Guarani words ‘ig’ or ‘i’ – meaning ‘water’; and ‘catu’ – meaning ‘good’. In a landscape so dry for much of the year, its name indicates an inviting location. It seems by all accounts that he fell in love with the place instantly. At a congregation, he said to his superior Padre José: ‘Sempre quero ficar em Iguatu’ [I always want to stay in Iguatu]. His wish would be granted.
Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s was for the most part a closed-in space. There was no electricity in parts of Kerry, and there was extremely high emigration. To suddenly be in Iguatu must have felt like being transported into another dimension. What was going through Patrick’s mind as he made his way across the Atlantic and crossed over to the Southern Hemisphere? What was it like for him taking the same journey I made through the Quixadá landscape? Such exhilaration and wonder must have filled the soul of this ebullient man. Everything around him would have seeped into his outlook and inner thoughts: the extreme weather conditions from Biblical rainfall to drought; the cacophonic sounds of all the bichos [creatures] throughout the night; the electric energies in the earth and air so close to the Equator; the rapid sunrises and sunsets; the mixed communities of indigenous peoples, Africans and Europeans. At this time, the music of bossa nova, MPB and Tropicalia, which would seduce the world, were exploding, not only down south in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but also in the northeast in Bahia and Pernambuco. And the Brazilian football team, with Pelé as the poster boy, had won the World Cup in Mexico for the third time in 1970. All these elements would have dazzled any visitor.
But there was also a very disturbing current running through Brazil at the time (which continues to this day). A military dictatorship had ruled Brazil since 1964, and people opposed to the government were being tortured. There was an aggressive vision to quickly modernise Brazil, which meant cutting down the Amazon Jungle at a relentlessly accelerated rate. The population was starting to increase rapidly but lacked access to material resources, and there was a massive disparity in monetary wealth, which resulted in huge poverty across the country. This was Brazil: dance and music everywhere; a military dictatorship; mass poverty; Catholic beliefs fusing with Candomblé and Umbanda; indigenous communities (many still uncontacted) living profoundly with the land; and the beginning of the Christian evangelical movement. And then there were the distinct landscapes of the vast Amazon rainforest, the interior of the sertão regions, what remained of the Mata Atlântica, the endless coastline of golden and white sandy beaches, and the Pantanal wetlands to the west. I heard someone say that the US didn’t really have a name but it had a country while Brazil had a name but didn’t really have a country. When Tom Jobim (co-writer of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and one of the pioneers of bossa nova) was asked about the differences between living in New York and Rio do Janeiro, his response was: ‘Morar em Nova Iorque é bom, mas é umamerda; morar no Rio é uma merda, mas é bommmmm’ [living in New York is good, but it sucks (literally ‘it’s a shit’]; living in Rio sucks, but it’s so good].
In Iguatu, the youth were immediately drawn to Patrick. He was energetic and exotic; he wore funky shirts and loved to crack jokes. He sang folk songs on his guitar. He got to know a kid who had a band and they become great buddies. Endearing himself naturally to the people and culture, he listened avidly to singers such as Dalila and Roberto Carlos (another capixaba)- known as ‘o Rei’ [the King] (who has the same birthday as my brother, though he was born thirty-four years before him). Patrick was soon playing Carlos’s song ‘Jesus Cristo’, which was released in 1970, and he was always listening to another religious rock classic called ‘A Montanha’, which came out the year he arrived. Roberto Carlos was at his peak, having found God and adapting brilliantly to the grittier sound of the 70s – a perfect combination for a new generation of Brazilians.
Before visiting Iguatu, Patrick’s sister Bríd gave me the number of Father Dick Rooney, who was living in Dundalk after spending decades in the northeast of Brazil. Over the phone, Father Rooney fondly remembered Patrick and recounted how he used to be always singing an Irish folksong called ‘Some Say the Devil is Dead’whose chorus tells of the devil supposedly buried down in Kerry, and who then rose from the dead and joined the British army. Whether unconsciously or not, I felt that Patrick had tapped into something of the soul of Brazil through this song: in the proximity of humanity with God and the devil in the land; of the displacement and mixing of influences and peoples; and of the ever-present reality of vivid death and life residing side by side.
On the afternoon of 16th April 1973, at the end of a two-day retreat with more than fifty kids from the Iguatu area, Patrick decided to take a plunge in the Jaguaribe River, which runs alongside the town. It was to be his first and last swim in the volatile river. It was the beginning of Easter Week, the day after Palm Sunday or Domingo de Ramos. His body was found by fishermen three days later further down the river. He was twenty-seven years of age.
Fourteen years later, Bríd came to Iguatu, thinking to bring his remains back to Ireland. Sister Bríd was a trained nurse and member of the Mercy Order in Trujillo and Lima in Peru from 1984 to 1990, and made the visit to Iguatu during this time, staying in the same room as Patrick. She decided that he should stay where he was in Iguatu, as that is what he had requested. Some of Patrick’s nephews and nieces also visited Iguatu later on backpacking trips.
Patrick in funky shirt standing by the river.
Amhdhorchacht
Years later, it was my turn to go to Iguatu. I also sauntered there with a guitar, and could speak Portuguese after living in Lisbon for almost a decade. A few years previously, Bríd had sent me a bunch of phone numbers for priests from the Redemptorist order out in the sertão who had known Patrick. I had gone to Brazil in 2017 with the idea that I might investigate this old family story, but after teaching for a few weeks at the federal university, I ended up following the trail of the humanitarian and Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, which took me down 3000 kilometres of the Amazon River. I only rang the numbers Sister Bríd had given me in 2019, from Lisbon, which led me to Tereza Cavalcante, the current parish secretary. She had never met Patrick, but offered to introduce me to the people in Iguatu who had known him.
My drawing of northeast Brazil. The Jaguaribe can be seen running into the sea at Fortaleza on the top right of the map.
Tereza sent a taxi driver to pick me up at Iguatu bus station and take me to the Diocesano Hotel. The taxi driver’s name was Ishmael. ‘God hears’. Nomen est omen. Every name carries a message. Call me Ishmael. The human protagonist of that great wandering American novel Moby Dick that begins with the word ‘Call’ and ends with the word ‘orphan’. Ishmael didn’t speak to me. His company and silence were calming. I said goodbye, got out of the car, and checked into the hotel. I will never forget the sounds I heard that first night. The dark damp air was emphatically awake to me, the noises and rhythms were weaving in and out of each other in call and response, sounds that I had never heard in my life. I suddenly felt the urge to say aloud a favourite Irish word – amhdhorchacht – which can be translated as raw darkness, gloaming or dusk. Although the sun sets very quickly in this part of the world, the sound and meaning of this word at that moment invoked another way of seeing and hearing. Forty-seven years after the death of Patrick, arriving and sleeping here with all those intensified sounds closing in, I felt a sort of homecoming. The spirits in the trees and in the water had heard me coming.
The next morning, Tereza picked me up and took me to the parish office in the centre of the town. Three people were waiting for me there: a young parish priest called Padre João Batista, an older priest called Mons. Queiroga, and a woman called Ezimar Araújo. Ezimar was the former secretary of the parish. She had fourteen brothers and sisters and was the daughter of Mãe dos Padres [‘mother of the priests’] (I will return to her later). She was just a few years younger than Patrick and had spent a lot of time with him during his brief time in Iguatu. She could remember so much – dates, places and what people had said. We immediately began talking in Portuguese about Patrick – or Padre Patrício, as he was known. Our mutual enthusiasm helped us understand each other despite my thick Irish-Portuguese accent and her regional Ceará accent. Ezimar and Mons. Queiroga told me stories. They talked about Patrick’s joy and youthful vigor, and how he looked like Elvis with his big mop of hair. They had lovingly kept a photo album full of black and white photographs. To me, these were precious illuminations, time-travelling portals into the past.
There was even a photograph of two of Patrick’s nieces, twins Hilda and Colette, now 56 years of age as I write these words. I had met two more of his nieces, Siobhan and Bridget, by chance on Derrynane Beach in Kerry only a few months before going to Iguatu (Patrick’s sister Joan had six children: four girls and two boys). Patrick must have travelled with this photograph, or it had been sent to him.
There was also a photo of Patrick in priestly attire, holding up the chalice:
A photo of Patrick and Ezimar where they were clearly unaware they were being photographed:
And another of Patrick sitting by the Jaguaribe River with a bunch of people. Squinting and laughing heartily, he is wearing one of his colourful shirts and his sideburns are long and shaggy. He is the only one looking at the photographer.
Ezimar recalled a Christmas party that Patrick had organised in 1972. It was his first and only Christmas outside Ireland, so it must have been a big occasion for him and he obviously wanted to show his new friends in Brazil how it was celebrated back home. He decorated a tree, wrapped up presents, and sang songs. They ended up listening to Roberto Carlos for the rest of the night. Ezimar gave a big warm smile after finishing the story, and then looked at me directly as if trying to see who I really was. I saw determination and hardship in her eyes, a will to live and to give. I listened and recorded Ezimar and Mons. Queiroga. Tereza and Padre João Batista made sure we were all comfortable.
The plan was to take me to the church, Igreja Nossa Senhora do Perpétuo Socorro-Prado-Iguatu, then down to the river, but as we were leaving the parish office, I noticed Patrick’s portrait on the wall. I was stopped dead in my tracks. It was the only portrait on display, and here he was staring out at me with a good old Kerry glint in his eye. I was struck by a resemblance to my nephew Barra and for a second I saw myself in the image. It suddenly seemed very right that I was here now. Ezimar placed her hand on my shoulder. Then we left the building and walked together to the church.
There on the altar was Patrick’s gravestone for all to see. I had no idea that he would be so present. Real absence. Each step of the way on this day seemed like a natural unfolding with Patrick as our host. Ezimar, Mons. Queiroga, Tereza and I are captured in a photograph, showing us embracing, looking down at the gravestone on the altar. For a fleeting moment, I wondered whether this magnanimous memorial to Patrick was a kind of post-colonial gesture, a bowing down before a European visitor. But looking around, feeling the atmosphere, and hearing Ezimar speak, this thought quickly dissipated: I knew this was much more. It was a tragedy for the town and for Patrick; and now it was a joy and healing for Iguatu, for Patrick, and, ultimately, for me. We had crossed the Kerribrasilian sea. It was time to go down to the river.
At the gravestone on the altar. From left to right: Mons. Queiroga, Tereza, myself and Ezimar.
The Jaguaribe River is the largest dry river in Brazil. But as Patrick’s sister Joan said to me down on Derrynane Beach six months before I arrived in Iguatu: ‘there was nothing dry about it that day’. For half of the year there is no water, and then suddenly the rains come down and the river rises and rises, usually bursting its banks and flooding the town, before swerving and flowing east into the Atlantic Ocean. River of Jaguars. The word Jaguar derives from yaguara in Tupi-Guarani, meaning ‘wild beast that overcomes its prey at a bound’. But jaguars and onças have not been seen in this region for a long time.
At the river that afternoon in April 1973, along with the young kids and teenagers, there were three men, all Irish: Father Anthony Branagan (Padre Antonio), Father Michael Lavery (Padre Marcelo) and Patrick Fitzgerald (Padre Patrício). Both Anthony and Patrick went in for a swim. Some of the children were already in the water and warned them of the danger. Antony assured them that Patrick was a champion swimmer. But that was in a swimming pool. This was a river in Brazil. Minutes later he was caught in a whirlpool. Father Anthony and the children thought he was play acting as his head bobbed up and down and then down again, then up and down. Then he disappeared. The third of the three men watched helplessly from the shore.
Father Michael Lavery worked at Iguatu and then later went to work in Fortaleza. In January of this year he died in Fortaleza aged about eighty-seven. Father Anthony Branagan was in Brazil (in Ceará and then Goiás) from 1963 to 1995, and then went to work in Siberia (in the region of Kemerovo Oblast) from 1996 to 2020. With the breakout of Covid-19, he returned to Ireland to live in Clonard Monastery in Belfast. As I write, Father Anthony is eighty-eight years old. There were others who came to work in the parish during the 1970s, a generation of Irish missionary priests and volunteers. Ezimar vividly recalled more details with each passing moment I spent in her company. She told me that there was another man called Father Brendan Callanan who arrived in Iguatu a few months after Patrick’s death. They called him Padre Brandão. She said that Brandão was now living in Ireland, working in a parish somewhere but she didn’t know the name of the place. She also knew Father Dick Rooney; and there was a priest called Brian Holmes (known as Bernardo in Iguatu) who had been a close friend of Patrick’s. They had studied together back in Ireland. He is now living in Mozambique. Father Holmes, originally from Cork, was travelling from Fortaleza to Iguatu to visit Patrick on the day he died.
One of my drawings imitating an image from The Books of Kells, an Irish illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin from ca. 800 AD, now kept in the Trinity College Library in Dublin.
Four of us got into a car – Ezimar, Tereza, Mons. Queiroga and I – and we drove out of town for about ten minutes, following a road with shrubs, or mata, and buriti palm trees on either side. Raindrops began to fall for the first time in eight months. We stopped the car and walked the rest of the way along a dusty path littered with plastic waste with a rotting wooden fence on one side. Patches of mata were everywhere until we came to a wide-open treeless space where the Jaguaribe would soon be filling up again. No one spoke. I walked lightly out onto the cracked earth where Patrick had gone swimming. Each of us was in our own space, each of us dwelling on the same subject. After a while, I walked over to Ezimar. And then she broke the silence by telling me that the people of the Iguatu pray to Patrick and ask grace from him, like one does with the saints. She came close and said: ‘I pray; I ask things of him, and he intercedes. I receive my wishes in my prayers, thanks to him.’ [Eu peço; eu faço pedidos a ele, e ele intercede. Alcanço, graças por ele]. Then she said wistfully: ‘he always wanted to live here [ele queria sempre morando aqui] … He played guitar and he was happy’.
Dona Laurenise Araújo and I.
We drove back into town to visit Dona Laurenise Araújo, mother of fifteen children including Ezimar, and known in the town as Mãe dos Padres and mother of Brazil. She served me some snacks and coffee. Radiant and welcoming, with dyed purple hair, she must have been in her late eighties, and we laughed and flirted with each other. She told me that Patrick was beautiful. She was too, with her enormous hospitality, and the way she carried the weight of her ancestors with lightness and joy.
Lunch is served at the parish centre.
Then the four of us walked back to the parish office where volunteers were serving food for nearly one hundred people from the community – volunteers from the parish prepare a meal every day for those who need it. I was struck again by the kindness and tough life here. The words of the writer Jan Morris echoed in my head: ‘kindness, the ruling power of nowhere’. This is a region that has been abandoned by the Brazilian establishment, a place where liberation theology would be welcome. A proponent of this movement from Ceará, Padre Hélder Pessoa Câmara, once said: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.’ Here lies a deep tragedy in attitudes in Brazil and the world.
The volunteers who prepared lunch.
That night, Padre João Batista held a mass in the church. At the end of the sermon, he invited me up to the altar to face the full congregation and everyone stood up and gave a long round of applause. Later, when it was already pitch dark, I walked the quiet streets and passed by a gym filled with sweating human bodies working in motion with the exercise machines. I stared through the large window and watched. Most people were on running machines, half of them had earphones in, and some commercial pop music was blaring out into the street. I moved along. Ten minutes later, I was already at the edge of town. There were mounds of rubble and dirt on either side of the road, and only a few streetlights working. A cow was munching on the last tufts of grass available. In the middle of the dirt, there stood a sign that read “Vende-se Este Terreno” [This land is for sale] . After keeping the cow company for a few minutes, I briskly made my way back to my lodgings, longing to hear nature’s night orchestra once more. Outside my room I listened again to the sounds out there in the dark. Was that the spirit of the long gone jaguar growling into the night sky and through the trees? Calling out to me through Patrick?
“Vende-se Este Terreno” [This land is for sale]The next morning, Tereza arranged for another taxi driver to take me to the bus station to return to Fortaleza. His name was Joaquim and we immediately began chatting. As soon as I told him why I was there, he pulled the car over to the side of the road. He was only nine years old at the time but he vividly remembered the day Patrick faleceu, and when fishermen found his body further down the river a few days later. There was silence for almost a minute as I listened to the hum of the taxi’s idling engine. Then Joaquim spoke again, this time to say that he wanted to show me something. He took me to an area of Iguatu called Vila Centenário, which was mostly constructed in 1974. We drove down one of its main streets. This street is named Rua Padre Patrício. I got out of the car and touched the street sign and smiled. Joaquim then took me to the station, and I was back in Fortaleza that night.
The Retirantes – from Ceará to Curitiba to Espírito Santo
Time for one more intermezzo before I conclude this tale. It is another shock, a rupture of real absence, showing me perhaps how I was on the right caminho, beyond trained knowledge or logical articulations. As the Irish saying puts it: Éist le fuaim na habhann agus gheobhaidh tú breac [Listen to the sound of the river and you will get trout]. In 2017, I was invited to teach philosophy and literature at the federal university of Espírito Santo in the capital city Vitória by Professor Jorge Viesenteiner who was a good friend of my friend and colleague Marta in Lisbon. They had met while studying in Germany during their doctoral studies. Marta was meant to go to Vitória but she had to cancel and suggested that maybe I would like to go in her place. So off I went, landing in Brazil for the third time.
The state of Espírito Santo is wedged between Bahia to the north, Rio do Janeiro to the south, and Minas Gerais to the west. Anyone from Espírito Santo is called a capixaba. It is a Tupi-Guarani word meaning ‘cleared land for planting’ [upi caá and pixaba]. The indigenous peoples who lived in Espírito Santo called their corn and manioc plantations capixaba. The name stuck. During the time I spent in Vitória, I became good friends with Jorge. We stayed in contact afterwards and happily saw each other again in 2019 in Lisbon. When I released my solo album in March 2022, which was written in Brazil, I sent it to Jorge, and told him a little bit about the final song called ‘Iguatu’. On 12th March, I received a voice message from Jorge. He had listened to the album, and was particularly drawn to ‘Iguatu’, as his mother had been born there, which was news to me. He said he couldn’t understand some of the details and words of the song but that it moved him profoundly. He decided to share the song on his WhatsApp family group, saying it was a friend’s song about a cousin who was a priest who had drowned there. His mother – who didn’t understand any English – wrote back to say that she remembered a priest who had drowned in the river Jaguaribe a long time ago. Jorge was amazed. ‘You knew this priest?’ he asked her. ‘Of course I knew him!’ she said. ‘Padre Patrício. I worked with him in Cáritas.’
Jorge’s mother, Francisca Iranilda de Lima, was born in Iguatu in 1951 only five years after Patrick was born. She told Jorge that Patrick was young and beautiful (‘jovem e bonito’). In the voice message, I could hear Jorge laughing. His mother remembered so many details from what seemed so long ago. They had had formed a close relationship working together in the parish. She recounted to Jorge that on the day Patrick arrived in Iguatu, he was taken to the parochial centre, where a reception and lunch awaited him. Jorge’s mother and her superior Expedita Alcântara (affectionately called ‘nenzinha’) had prepared potato puré with peas and stuffed turkey, which was served with malt beer. After drinking the beer, Patrick suddenly felt very sick. It may have been an allergic reaction, and he had to be taken to hospital. Francisca Iranilda remembered that day very clearly. Jorge said that his mother began to cry softly as memories flooded back of the land she had left a long time ago. A life before another life.
At the end of 1974, Francisca Iranilda left the northeast, like so many others at that time, for the south of Brazil. Curitiba is the city that Francisca Iranilda moved to, where Jorge was born, and also where a girl I fell in love with is from; the town’s name is said to come from old Guarani ‘kur’-‘ity’-‘ba’. ‘Ty-ba’ is a suffix for ‘many’, and ‘kur y’ refers to the pine tree, which points to the large number of Araucaria brasiliensis pine trees in the region. Francisca Iranilda still has cousins in Iguatu, but the majority of her family left. They were part of the so-called Retirantes – a large movement of peoples who came down from the sertão regions because of drought, and extreme poverty. Iguatu was just another small town in the sertão, a land of forgotten people in Brazil. After teaching in Vitória, I voyaged down the Amazon River, and I came to understand why the Amazon represents the lungs of Brazil (and maybe the world). But now I understand that the sertão is the heart.
I could feel and hear in the audio message that Jorge was getting emotional. How was any of this possible? Had some strange energy called me to Espírito Santo in 2017 so we could become friends? Did Jorge know unconsciously something else was going on? To whom am I speaking? Jorge began and ended his audio message by repeating words I had said to him from the marvellous poem ‘Le souffle des ancêtres’ by Senegalese poet Birago Diop: Os mortos não morrem. Les Morts ne sont pas morts. The dead do not die.
Jaguaribe River, 5 February 2020.
Riverrun
Language is like a river: starting with a stutter, springing up, then moving under and over stones, building up speed and increasing volume, meandering and digressing, curving and slowing down, gathering and carrying dirt and grime and rubbish, becoming stagnant, getting wider, then picking up rhythm again before emptying out into the open sea. ‘The water of the face has flowed’, as Joyce writes in Finnegans Wake. Rivers and languages are states of wandering. I am a wanderer too. Iguatu – that ‘good water’ – becomes a song of call and response, where singing is existing, and where the jaguar’s breathing rises and falls in the night.
I hear the Minas Gerais poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s words: A ausência é um estar em mim [Absence is a presence in me]. I hear Patrick on the streets of Iguatu. I hear him in the voices of Ezimar, Francisca Iranilda, Joan and Sister Bríd. I hear him in the stones of the church where he is buried. I hear him in the hum of the taxi and its drivers Ishmael and Joaquim taking me home. I hear him in the children playing and laughing together by the dirty, dusty roadside. I hear him in Roberto Carlos’s pop songs of salvation from 1972. I hear him in the bichos’ sounds in the amhdhorchacht. I hear him in the rivers, an ever-changing space of whirlpools, deep as a human soul.
Jaguaribe River, 18 March 2020 at the bottom left corner is Djalma, the sacristan of the Prado-Iguatu church.
Zagreb, October, 2022.
Many thanks to Tomica Bajsić and Croatian PEN Centre for supporting me and giving the space and time to write this text.
Rezo are long-time friends and musical collaborators Colm O’Connell & Rory McDaid. Colm is based in Dublin, Ireland and Rory in Malaga Spain. Borne largely out of the Covid pandemic (Rezo means “I pray” in Spanish), the pair worked entirely remotely to create their critically acclaimed debut album Travalog which was released in May 2021. They have just released their follow-up, Sew Change. Colm describes how they got here.
It kind of amazes me that we are putting out a second album less than eighteen months after the first. I’ve been called lots of things in my life but never prolific – and let’s just say my recording output bears testament to that!
I’ve been smitten by music for as long as I can remember. Santa Claus brought me a second-hand Ferguson 3-in-1 music centre at the age of eight and I don’t think I turned the thing off for ten years!
Taping from the radio (Soft Cell), pilfering from my older brother’s (Doors-heavy) record collection, or scrimping and saving pocket money for the latest Now That’s What I Call Music, no family occasion or friend’s birthday was safe from my DJ-ing prowess.
My ability as a musician never quite matched my ambition – long stints singing with a choir as a kid (the Dublin Boy Singers) and endless piano lessons through primary and secondary school brought little in the way of proficiency. But that never held me back and I don’t think there was ever a time in school or in college that I wasn’t in a band of some kind or another.
My first gigging band was The Mitcheners, a college band really, where I first met Rory. I played self-taught bass and Rory played guitar. We released one album in 2002, New Wapping Street, named after the Docklands street where we rehearsed in an old shipping warehouse – long since demolished for the glitzy office blocks that now populate Dublin’s Financial Quarter.
Despite some critical acclaim, particularly for the freewheeling slacker-Americana of lead single Cars, we went our separate ways not long afterwards. To do some adult stuff ultimately – like settle down and make a living.
Spotify link to New Wapping Street
The Mitcheners (Ronan O’Muirgheasa, Rory McDaid, Michael McCormack & Colm O’Connell).Rory and friend Jane Farley descending Tenerife’s volcanic Mount Teide – the inspiration for the cover art for New Wapping Street.Cover art for New Wapping Street.
For me, the musical hiatus ended in 2007 with an ambitious project to record a solo record in Andalusia under the moniker Noise.
Myself and my wife Beth had long coveted the idea of living in Spain, and with two young kids and the prospect of regimented schooling in the offing, decided it was now or never.
We secured cheap accommodation by the sea in the picturesque “pueblo blanco” of Sanlucar de Barrameda, southwest of Seville and shipped instruments and recording equipment over in advance.
What followed was a magical immersion into the language and culture of the area – famed for its flamboyant religious processions, fino sherry (or manzanilla) and flamenco music and dance.
With the help of local musicians as well as visiting friends from home, My Procession was recorded and released in November, 2008 and, to me, remains a document of musical adventure, cultural seduction and the emotional growth of a burgeoning family and all that goes with that.
Living the good life in Andalucia, Spain (with wife Beth and friend Erwan) while recording solo album My Procession.
Our Mitcheners family, always in touch as mates if not bandmates, decided to reactivate our creative yearnings by joining a producer friend, David Odlum, at Black Box, his studio outside of Nantes, France in 2012.
This was a bleak time economically in Ireland, following the banking crisis of 2008 and all that followed, and was just the antidote to what had been (and continued to be) a difficult time for all of us in precarious employment, varying levels of impecunity and/or indebtedness and a general malaise or foreboding back home.
What followed was a joyously creative odyssey – residential living in the countryside with our mates, making music at all hours of the day and night, rekindling friendships with the best of French food and wine.
The brief was simple – come with a song and a recipe for dinner. And we all rose to the challenge. For the next five years, it became a staple in the annual calendar and, quite apart from making some really great music, nourished us all spiritually and mentally through the bleakest of times.
For me, the song that most embodies the spirit of that time and place is Nothing Else, a kind of making-sense song for my daughter Rosa who had recently been born with Downs Syndrome. It sounds corny, I know, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt the peace and the connection with others that was present in the room on the day (and night and following morning!) that we recorded it. All beautifully captured on camera in the video for the tune.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzQiFOAK4Ds
Which takes us to the Rezo project. Rory and I had for many years been exchanging snippets of songs and musical ideas worked up on rudimentary home recording equipment. This continued with a little more frequency as the pandemic hit, both of us now having much more time at home and I guess the creative bandwidth to create.
It’s fair to say that Rory was the instigator of this chapter – it was he who sent me the folk-country strum and whispered vocal that was to be Rezo – our first lock-down collaboration.
Both of us using Mixcraft, we traded mixes and remixes over Dropbox – a vocal here, a bass there, some drum loops – building and refining as we went.
We shared the finished song on YouTube around Easter of 2020 cut to a video shot in the hills above Malaga when I had visited Rory the year previously, and the reaction was amazing. So much so that we decided to do another and another until very quickly we realised we were telling the story of the pandemic, and that we needed an album to do it justice.
Travalog – a play on the words Travel and Analog recording – was released in May 2021 to glowing reviews from Uncut Magazine and beyond, and, as such, a real vindication of the work that went into creating it, and in some senses the work that preceded it.
Our follow-up, Sew Change, has just been released. Folk Radio UK called it “even more remarkable” and “proof that Rezo are still at the forefront of generating fresh and creative collages of sounds. It shows that when you choose to colour outside the lines, the most interesting shades can sometimes appear. #This is what great music is capable of being.”
Of course we hope for mass appeal and interest, but ultimately we are guided by our own north star, making music we ourselves would like to listen to, music we are proud of. Everything else is just gravy.
Bridge of Be-ing, all arches mirrrored upon
The river running – Heraclitean ;
Looming above… turret trumpeting,
All Barnonial excess, pure 19th century.
And aligned in sheer proximity the great monolith
Of glass and concrete, its emphasis
Presenting a sheer 20th century existentialism.
Seen from the quays, it’s pure Baudelaire!
The candelabara of Street lamps whose
Illuminating auras burnish the passerby
Ghosting them with their luminance, and lustre.
Fate drops like a Stone in the water
Troubling the stillness with ripples outward,
And whose faces Flow forever onward into the Dark Pool.
There is a philosophy born of storm to encompass Be-ing,
And it assails in the tumult of the unending assault of the days.
To storm troop on and over into the assailment of the heavens;
God forbid, what is left of them those splintering fragments!
As in the woodwinds onrushing conducive to the Heart-fires
Still governing, just about, out from the holocaust of Thought.
Essence at the forefront of being, attuning to the tumult
Of the Sway, like anyone finding their ground.
Such as the down and outs rolled up in sleeping bags
On the public benches on the boardwalk,
Those pupae, or premature mummies,
Whose alarm clock would be police siren,
Heineken clock and other hallucinatory prey,
And whose breakfast would be coloured by the sweet aroma of Hashish!
Thought’s colour broodingly bleeds through to the skull,
Seeped to pour and stream into the brain.
The bridge is moored there through its anchor
Above the liquified riverbed afflux.
The skeletal fragments of a backdrop,
Etched architecture of a Gothic replica.
Its organic structure today looms out of the fog
Which to the stoner is a mesmeric enterprise to induce Funk!
Through the viral air of a city masked,
Its denizens the very harbingers of their own Hell,
Introduces the notion of Dantean comeuppance.
Tramping along on Bachelor’s Walk,
Crossing the widened Carlisle over Gandon’s hump,
Only to reach Eden – the irony sits well.
Roman Noir “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” Raymond Chandler For Daniel Wade
John A. Maher, Private Detective, peered out
The window of the fourth floor of Lafayette,
His vantage point on par with a Gargoyle!
The river split the city like a fissure, before him.
It was a city divided by accent and money.
On the northside, speech was contracted to the point
Of almost unintelligibility, which he liked
Never quite trusting language himself.
While on the south, it was all accent darling,
Barring the odd enclave. Maher moves through it all
Monosyllabic, stony-faced and with mild amusement.
Humans are weak creatures, so prone to error.
And some are driven to crime; one needs a hard fist,
Copious amounts of alcohol, and a certain penchant for metaphysics!
Crows befriend the bread-handed boy,
Squawk and battle for a bite.
Metro wires hiss and wheeze,
Spite the hills and sun-soaked fields.
New York blinks its bloodshot stare,
Recalling you and I were there.
From azure deli doors,
Whiffs of baking bread
Flirt with slow-cook sunburn.
But now I can be anywhere;
Western cities groan the same.
Riding through a London green,
Gliding through the shadowed dawn;
I’m convinced it’s just the same.
But where are you when I awake?
Where are you, voice beneath music,
Brimming with stories owned and rented,
Debates and schemes for woodsy walks.
Bottled up in bucket seats, we watch
As worlds of millions catch the day,
Battle for statues to recall their names.
We’re facing west to Hudson, south to Thames.
Do you have a friend these mornings?
Do you choose to drift and dream?
Yes, it’s just the same.
And never is again.
