Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • Poetry: Stefano Schiavocampo

    Dawn highlights the East

    while becoming towards it
    the tide patterns paper tigers
    on the wet silent sand
    oblivious of the night short-lived
    naked in a pristine bath
    Magherabeg glistens with gold;
    straight after a single breath
    a far-flung rest of the wind
    the waves slow to an interlude
    extended by awe, by the vision
    of today’s displaying.
    (the journey within the light
    of the day we followed, peaked
    at midday for a blinding gaze
    at the fields of Ireland, thriving)
    Passed a hundred lakes
    we reach the line of an edge
    at Aughrusbeg, silver pledge
    welcoming pot of mussels
    and a lamb under the sand
    tendered by hot round stones 

    Feasting by the rippling shore
    mouthes to thank the gods for
    a shot of whisky, a shot of vinegar
    and the songs shouted to sea,
    with the eyes at rest on the last red view
    of today displayed.

  • Poetry: Marc Di Saverio

    ODE TO THE MOUNTAIN BROW
    (dedicated to Richard Greene)

    Cliff-topped at dawn in a euphoria so high
    I Paradise-verily see your wan white Pisa-
    Towering street-lights well-tipping utmost fealty
    to me, one I electrify back toward
    you with this Ode I compose under cadaver-
    soullessly blackening clouds — street-lights well-tipping
    with dew-new currency of gray-brown fogs and truth-
    pellucid allusions to Expressionist movies I adore.
    Now, forthwith, I live throughout those movies while I
    stroll throughout you till I disremember
    your entendres and see I’m new-born-baby tender, stepping
    through actuality, through you, not a film-
    set, O Mountain Brow, where I’ll never be panorama-
    spoiling, nor granted-takingly peripheralizing
    you, while I’m here with others; to others I sing
    your graces and discuss your day, that I may sing my
    soul-eternal ardour for you – for your verve in a time
    of dying – so you may over-hear and feel
    esteemed, welcome, invited, O Mountain Brow, where I sing
    the Scenic mansions you visit in forms of flower-
    blended balmy breezes. I whisperingly sing to
    your peach-blooms flashback-fast-bursting in the stilling
    air. Pilgrimaging you amid the crimsoning
    Staghorn Sumacs swaying, I see: you mean
    measurelessly more to me than city-views for
    which most others come to you…Vultures,
    after cliff-side-congregations – seemingly
    free-wheeling feelingly — beat their wings in time
    to the water-fall’s phantom-eerie hiccuping, to which
    anyone may calibrate. O Mountain
    Brow, remember those nights, at the Flat Rock, with the San
    Boys who hallucinated hundreds of faces
    on your Orcus-shadowy crags. How many
    first kisses transpire at this look-out — beyond the Ravine-
    bounds — where-on I behold the high-wind-blown-stone-for-a-second-
    seeming roses, O Mountain Brow, whose Scenic
    Drive is never littered as much as other parts
    of Hamilton — sometimes Elysium-seemingly
    clean? O Mountain Brow, the greying Italian bocce-
    ballers playing in the twilight sometimes
    soften their footfalls, as though they have concluded
    you feel, as you do. O Mountain Brow, I even proposed
    to a yes-exclaiming girl upon your north-most Ravine-
    opposing bench, one time, O Mountain Brow,
    where I kneel in prayer upon the purple-bluing pond-
    shore sands, O Mountain Brow, where your back-to-life-
    welcoming-warm wind once spoke to me through evening
    rustles of the oak-leaves’: “life-long-seeming
    kisses will electrify the lilies of
    the cliff until they shiver in the fervour
    you’ll soon feel in this same place.” O Mountain Brow,
    let us share this daybreak before other
    Mountain Browers come…crag-magnetized since boyhood,
    I so wish to share this dawn with you, alone.

    ___________________________

     

    A SONNET TO THE TRINITY

    O Violet-Eye-Light-Beaming Trinity,
    O how Your Bride of Saints so speed the butterfly-
    turning of souls toward You; O how our slavery —
    O Star-Far-Eye-Near One — twilights our children to infinity-
    incalculably embracing their bondage — to proclaiming
    they are free, when, all-the-astral-projection-immeasurable
    while, they are slaves who will not free themselves —
    slaves who’ll wish to rename constellations;
    slaves who’ll wish for numbering to replace naming;
    slaves who’ll wish to replace freedom with shaming;
    slaves who’ll wish for their own cancellations;
    therefore, O Redeemer, in your name I am reclaiming
    myself for these slaves’ reclaimants; in your name I’d die as You’ve
    in mine; help me die like a lion when time to prove!

    ________________

     

    JUDGMENT DAY

    When ray-right-rain-fair Judgment Day does break;
    when, upon a purple carpet of cloud-bursts — the moon setting —
    the Maker nears His aurora Throne in the wake
    of Saint-Cecile-conducted Seraphim trumpeting
    His every quintessential motion; When He does
    sit on air and deem our every thought and action,
    whose names among ours will be sung from the slim Book of Life?
    How morning star-core-white-and-burning is your faith in the Son?
    When the violet-eye-light-beaming Redeemer does
    return, on whom among us will He shine his rife
    rays? When you wake soon or sleep unto your
    deaths — will you suffice for the Paradise of our Creator?
    when Shadows will be cast but no sun will beam,
    will you ascend in lonely Lord-light gleaming supreme?

    _________________

     

    A TRANSLATION OF EMILE NELLIGAN’S ‘WINTER SENTIMENTS’

    So now I drink the liquors of your eyes!
    Don’t soil yourself while gazing at the masses!
    A blast from Norway turns the fields to steel!
    May hearts turn warm when the cold wind passes!
    Like soldiers mourning level sands at Thebes
    so let us always court our rancours
    and, despising life, with its sophistic song,
    Let Death lead us to Orcus, where we belong.
    You’ll visit like an icy spectre; we won’t be old,
    but already so weary of living we will fold;
    O Death, take us out on such an afternoon
    when I’m etherized by my lover’s guitars,
    whose dreamy motifs and ambient bars
    keep time to our ennui on the waltz to the end!

    __________________

     

    WHILE BEGGING UNDER FEBRUARY STARS

    While begging under February stars
    that I might be my closest to the beggars
    and scatter my soul through the forecasted storm
    and brave them on toward the laze and warm
    of spring, a stinging wind ascended and engraved
    in my ear the whimper of a girl I had saved
    from her own hand, inside her freshman dorm;
    then nursed, at once, from her childhood wars.
    She whispered, “please reverse the weather in my
    eyes,” empty as two open sunless graves,
    which simply realigned the little troth
    I’d sided for the sewing of my wounds
    back to the Father and the snow then falling
    on the woman in my arms, no longer calling.

  • Irish Housing: Historic Roots of a Crisis

    As a UCD undergraduate I recall Professor Tom Bartlett likening Irish history to a pint of Guinness, ‘with black representing ownership of the land, and the white froth everything else, including all the political movements.’

    Old habits die hard. The issue of property remains a paramount concern. By the year 2004 Ireland’s rate of private home ownership was the highest in the OECD at approximately 82%, a proportion that only declined, to 69% in 2014, after the Crash from 2008, precipitated by reckless lending, often to ‘sub-prime’ borrowers. This reflects the ongoing effect of a global financialisation of property as a speculative asset from the 1980s, leading to the exclusion of a substantial proportion of a younger generation from home ownership across most of Europe, North America and beyond.

    Ireland’s housing crisis is a special case however. In order to understand its long term causes – Dublin is now the most expensive city in the euro area primarily due to staggeringly high rents – it is necessary to explore an historic relationship with land, arising out of a colonial experience. This has brought an economy where the land grabber reigns ascendant.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Urbanisation

    A nation derives characteristics from its relationship to the land it inhabits. Over recent centuries, in Ireland, as elsewhere, mass urbanisation, disproportionately directed at Dublin, has occurred, but we have built our cities on historical patterns of land ownership.

    There are two defining, and intertwining, legacies of the Irish relationship to property that have seeped into the broader culture. The first is the impact of English colonisation, in particular the Plantations, beginning in the sixteenth century, and the subsequent partial de-colonisation through the Land Acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    The second is the dominance of pastoral, livestock agriculture, particularly since the late nineteenth century under a system of individual land ownership – as opposed to treating property as a collective patrimony under Brehon Law in Gaelic Ireland.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    It is incorrect to assume cattle-farming has always been the dominant form of agriculture in Ireland. Since the first human settlements emphasis has swung back and forth between tillage and pasture; and in earlier centuries cattle were kept for domestic milk production rather than to produce a (beef) commodity for export.

    Moreover, the introduction of the wonder crop of the potato from the seventeenth century created a novel opportunity for subsistence on small holdings, bringing marginal land into cultivation for the first time. Although, ominously, according to John Reader in The Untold Story of the Potato (2008), ‘the innocent potato has facilitated exploitation wherever it has been introduced and cultivated.’ It acted like cheap credit in generating a ready source of subsistence on small parcels of land, but the potato cannot be preserved for a long period like grain so cannot easily be traded, thereby impeding development.

    Over time, the impact of Irish agriculture, especially extensive grazing, on Ireland’s nature has been profound. According to Frank Mitchell in Reading the Irish Landscape (1997): ‘from about five thousand years ago when the first tree-felling axes made woodland clearance possible man’s hands have borne down ever more heavily on the Irish landscape.’ This left a mere twelve per cent woodland coverage by the 1400s, before the most intense period of colonisation at the end of the eighteenth century when a poet lamented:

    Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan adhmad? / Tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár;
    Now what will we do for timber, / With the last of the woods laid low?

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Today among EU countries only Luxembourg has lower coverage, and much of our woodland is in the form of sitka spruce plantations that further degrade the land, while offering little scope for biodiversity.

    The sixteenth and seventeenth century Plantations trapped an overwhelmingly Catholic peasantry, denuded of a departed upper stratum of Gaelic society, in a Malthusian grip that culminated in the Famine.

    Portrait of Seán Ó Faoláin by Howard Coster, 1930’s

    Describing the acquisition of annual leases by small farmers, who had previously held land in common under the Brehon Law system, Seán O’Faoláin wrote in The Irish (1947): ‘The thirst for security is, above all things, the great obsession of the peasant mind. And, in a long view, a deceptive obsession.’ Security of tenure under the new dispensation was illusory, as land became an asset to be bought and sold, rather than a collective patrimony.

    Trade conditions shifted in the nineteenth century. The raising of cattle, often exported ‘on the hoof’ to England for eventual slaughter, began to enjoy a comparative advantage over tillage as the British discovered cheaper sources of grain after Napoleon’s blockade ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Henceforth, the cheap labour of the Irish peasantry – a substantial proportion unconnected to the market economy – were an anachronism to the British administration in Ireland.

    The Famine (1845-1851) was, according to Charles Trevelyan the architect of Britain’s response ‘a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence’, which laid bare ‘the deep and inveterate root of social evil.’ Anticipating the Shock Doctrine, the Famine, he declared, was:

    the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected… God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part…

    Wood engraving, 1886. cc Library of Congress

    Strong Farmers

    The Famine was a catalyst for change that brought about the dominance of cattle agriculture, increasingly under the native so-called Strong Farmer. The key point about this mode of production was (and is) that profitability depends on a low labour input. It made no sense for numerous sons and daughters to remain on the land, and so the tsunami of emigration that formed during the Famine gave way to steady migratory waves. Over the long term this brought precipitous population decline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

    As Joseph Connolly put it in his Labour in Irish History (1910): ‘Where a hundred families had reaped a sustenance from their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of large farms, a dozen shepherds now occupied their places.’

    This process should not, however, be attributed solely to remote authorities in Westminster working on behalf of absentee landlords, as is commonly assumed. Significant gains were made by Catholic Irish farmers holding farms above twenty acres. As Kerby A. Miller wrote in The Atlas of the Great Famine (2012): ‘an unknown but surely very large proportion of Famine sufferers were not evicted by Protestant landlords but by Catholic strong and middling farmers, who drove off their subtenants and cottiers, and dismissed their labourers and servants, both to save themselves from ruin and to consolidate their own properties.’

    As Ireland did not witness an Industrial Revolution, except in the North-East corner, this shift from tillage to pasture led to unprecedented population decline. Ireland is perhaps the only substantial country in the world with a lower population now than in the 1840s, when the population stood at almost nine million. In the same period the global population has increased seven-fold.

    National Independence

    The struggle for Irish independence was taken up by Strong Farmers, a comprador class selling their primary products on the Imperial market, who emerged with enlarged holdings after land clearances, to become the dominant faction of an overwhelming Catholic ‘nation’ at the end of the nineteenth century. Through a succession of legislative measures, culminating in Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903, the British administration sought, but failed, to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness’, allowing tenants to obtain freeholds over much of the country.

    This allowed their sons to set about dominating local government, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and later Sinn Féin. This cohort entered the professions, established a National University in 1908 (Maynooth University had also been established in 1796) and eventually won an independent state in 1922, wedded to an individualist and competitive approach to land, in contrast to collaborative arrangements typically associated with tillage, including the Clachan settlements of pre-Famine Ireland. The first Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan (in office from 1922-32), was a cattle farmer, and duly aligned the national interest with the economic fortunes of his ‘grazier’ class.

    After independence in 1922, pastoral Strong Farmers continued to sell mostly cattle onto the Imperial market, notwithstanding the aspiration of idealists like Robert Barton, the first Director of Agriculture (1919-21), for a reversion to more labour-intensive tillage for domestic consumption; except, that is, for a period in the 1930s and 1940s when national survival demanded increased focus on growing subsistence crops.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Individualist Outlook

    The outlook of the peasant-pastoralist has informed our laws and values since the inception of the State, spreading from rural Ireland into an increasingly urbanized society. As O’Faoláin put it:

    we have seen the common folk of Ireland rise like a beanstalk out of the Revolution of 1922 and, for a generation, their behaviour was often very unpleasant to watch.

    The arrival of mechanisation in the Green Revolution after World War II put tillage at a further disadvantage as, despite enjoying among the highest global yields, high levels of precipitation and humidity make Irish-grown cereals, apart from oats, unsuited to mechanised harvesting. The traditional method of ‘bindering’ – drying the harvest over months in stacks – became uncompetitive due to high labour inputs, and so the population drain form rural Ireland continued.

    Moreover, since the 1970s price supports from the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy have reduced flexibility and dynamism in land use, by inflating values as farmers were guaranteed payments, even on poor land, without adequately addressing the associated population drain.

    Legal Protections

    As the sons and daughters of peasant-proprietors migrated to cities, especially Dublin, Ireland’s politics of clientelism embodied in the two main political parties took hold. An urban population with roots in raising livestock prizes land as an asset from which profit is derived, as opposed to a situation where crops are cultivated for the family table and traded within the community.

    An inherited skill in deal-making was readily applied to urban development, which is also reflected in strict judicial interpretations of private property, allowing enterprising developers to make a killing. Thus, State institutions have favoured the landed interest over the property-less, in a troubling reminder of a bygone era.

    In 1973 the Kenny Report recommended that land around the hinterland of Dublin should be compulsorily purchased by local authorities for 25% more than its agricultural value. According to Frank McDonald, the former Environment Correspondent of the Irish Times, Dr Garret FitzGerald, a member of the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government that received the report could not remember why it wasn’t acted upon. ‘It just slid off the agenda’ he said, and no subsequent government acted upon it. McDonald said that ‘Ostensibly, the reason for this was that Kenny – a constitutional lawyer himself – had proposed something that would be unconstitutional. But no attempt was made to test this in the courts.’

    That was until Part V of the Planning Act 2000. This was referred to the Supreme Court which held that the acquisition of land for social and affordable housing did not offend against the Constitution. Unfortunately, however, that provision did little to ameliorate the housing crisis during the Celtic Tiger as developers evaded responsibility by paying over sums to local authorities, and successive Ministers watered down the provisions.

    The reluctance of politicians to implement the Kenny Report reflected a genuine fear that any such provision would fall foul of the Court, which has tended to vindicate a constitutional right to property under Articles 40.3.2 and 43.1.2 over competing interests of renters to security of tenure or a controlled rent.

    Thus, in 1981 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional attempts to introduce rent controls under The Housing (Private Rented Dwellings) Bill, while the wide scope of Article 45 has been given little attention.

    This reflects a sectional bias as the common good (to which all constitutional rights are subject) should allocate a reasonable prospect of basic accommodation to all permanent residents.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Unenumerated Rights

    The idea of an ‘unenumerated’ Constitutional right – in that instance a right to bodily Integrity – was first identified by the same Justice Kenny in his landmark High Court judgment of Ryan v Attorney General (1965). A right to adequate shelter may also be unenumerated. For instance, Kenny’s seminal Ryan judgment cited the papal encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) which states that: ‘every man has the right to bodily integrity, and to the means which are necessary and suitable for the proper development of life. These means are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care and finally the necessary services.’ Yet the Court has avoided vindicating a basic human right to adequate shelter.

    Now, underpinned by legal and political deference to the property interest, we see huge swathes of land and buildings that have been left fallow in urban areas: a 2016 report in The Dublin Inquirer identified at least 389 derelict sites. We are unaccustomed to urban density, or community developments, except as a sign of poverty – with the 1930s schemes of Herbert Simms a rare and inspiring exception. Strict demarcation between properties, and a lack of community spaces, may be interpreted as a legacy of extensive cattle-rearing for the imperial market.

    Furthermore, the sons and daughters of nineteenth century pastoralists, accustomed to low-density living with few neighbours on the horizon, sought distance from their neighbours, and the assurance of owning a motor car. This accounts for the sprawl, and prevalence of needless boundary walls, in Irish suburbia; as well as a preference for one-off housing.

    The commercial culture can also be linked to the pastoral outlook. It is revealing that few successful Irish businesspeople have been technological innovators. Rather, success has been built on buying low and selling high, just as a cattle farmer buys a calf and seeks to sell him at a higher price – the entrepreneur Tony Ryan was quoted as saying ‘you make your profit the day you buy.’ Thus developers often purchase land at a low price and sit on this until financial conditions improve. The Irish dream is built on living off the fat of the land, creating conditions to the liking of the vulture and cuckoo funds our government now accommodates.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Historic Failings

    No Western economy experienced growth, at least in the period 1995-2007, comparable to that of the Celtic Tiger, but this was achieved, at least in part, through the availability of cheap, and ultimately ruinous, loans, by unscrupulous bankers. But like the wonder crop of the potato, these loans generated ultimately ruinous growth.

    Failure of both property and potatoes emanated from America. In the case of the Famine it was the dreaded blight, phytophthora infestans, which first blackened the leaves and then reduced the crop to inedible mush. The pin that burst the Irish property bubble, a large boil on a global wart, was marked with another American sign, that of the ruinous Lehman Brothers. Both the potato blight and subprime mortgages afflicted other countries, but perhaps nowhere as severely as Ireland.

    The austerity that followed may be likened to the extreme Shock Doctrine practised by Charles Trevelyan, while the feeding frenzy that occurred through NAMA recalls the land-grabbing in the wake of the Famine.

    In order to address Ireland’s Housing Crisis we must face up to the sins of our fathers, including an enduring bias in favour of strict individual ownership preached by the two main political parties in government, as well as the judiciary.

    A version of this article appeared in Village Magazine.

    Title Image: House in proximity to Dog’s Bay, Connemara. ©Daniele Idini

  • Review: Strumpet City

    Picture the scene: the small backyard of a tiny working-class pub in Belfast at around 8pm on a dark Autumn night. I am smoking with a friend, older by a few years, and with way more life experience, talking about books. A dim-light is ebbing away, further subdued by the frosted glass of the bar-door. He looks at me and says: ‘Strumpet City (James Plunkett‘s 1969 novel) is a good book’. I did not take the time to ask about the work as the conversation was rolling along, covering other novels about Ireland which we had both read, and were reading, or intended to read.

    Here were two talking heads, tongues loosened and wagging after a couple of pints. Yet somewhere in the back, ploughed, crow-lifting fields of my sub-conscious, the adjective ‘Strumpet’ and the noun ‘City’ lodged as an unlikely pairing; lighting a candle of intrigue that would burn inside my brain. A decade has sailed past since then.

    Cut to a month ago, and I am in my local library with the mad literary hunger on me – the reading hunger. This is where one desires material to satisfy personal taste and preference. For me this is for a well-written and narrated book. And not what I find so demoralising: one that bends down on one knee to the easily accessible, clichéd fountain whose water(s) flow tepidly, and which is, in the beginning, saccharine sweet but gives way to a brackish and unpalatable torpor.

    I pick the work up and thumb through its 549 pages. A novel of heft, requiring dedication it seems. I bring it to the desk, and steal away into a showery, sun-lit Wednesday evening with the novel safely stowed inside my bag.

    Strumpet City is an historical-led novel which sets out… well… this is a work which, ostensibly, is about the Dublin Lockout(s) of the early twentieth century, narrating fictional, and real, lives of the people involved, including the almost mythological Union leader, Jim Larkin (1874-1947), who James Plunkett previously worked for as his secretary.

    This is a novel of coal, ash, and soot. Of wasps amongst blackberries; of hunger and of greed; a novel of slum dwellings and collapsing dockside houses; a work which radiates a stench of unclean bodies and souls, in dire need of cleansing and thorough rituals of purification brought to task.

    There is an alcoholic priest who loses his mind due to the drink, whiskey, and on one occasion, topples a coffin off its trestles. It tips over, and the enclosed incumbent resident, due to the lid springing open, falls out, rolling on to the floor. The widowed wife, upon seeing this, screams and two priests soon come over, calm her down and take her away from the morbid scene. The priest, a Father Giffley (memorably played by Cyril Cusack in a memorable 1980 RTE adaptation), is found, soon thereafter, prostrate at the foot of the altar, face-down, unaware of the immoral chaos he has just created and is dozing away.

    There is Rashers Tierney, the almost toothless, romantic wanderer who is dirt poor but in the ownership of a rarefied wit and tongue which darts rebuttals in defiance of perceived, and real, attacks; with his mongrel, Rusty, and a penny-whistle in tow. Rashers, as my Belfast friend would have said, ‘Hasn’t a bar in his grate.’

    Father O’Connor is the moral authority in the book, a ‘sky pilot’ who turned his back on the riches of a diocese more becoming of his class. He finds his spiritual bedfellow in the form of Mrs. Bradshaw, the face of female humility; in contrast to the encompassing greed of her ideologue, capitalist husband. However, there is an artifice to O’Connor too, which yields a quavering hatred to his position as sitting tenure in the local, disenfranchised, Dublin district which he does acknowledge but does not run away from, which would be the coward’s option. No. He has staying commendable power and you feel for him.

    There is a terrible accident at a coal yard and you feel empathy for big Mulhall and the further poverty his family will suffer in its wake.

    There are wonderful characters, including Fitz, Hennessy and Mary, set against the backdrop of the 1913 Lockout; striking dockers; the stamping foot(s) of the law and the piercing, shrill whistles of authority. This novel, let me tell you, has a social-economic range, and has it in abundance.

    This is not a work to compare to the quotidian, creative deliciousness’ of Joyce’s Ulysses. On this, I have read a good few books, and have many, many more to grapple with, but having read some of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, and other Russian masters’ creations, this work here, Strumpet City, is, in my view, the Irish equivalent, and a masterpiece.

    Feature Image: Jim Larkin

  • Fiction: Train Station

    Awarded one of the Tidiest Towns in the nation, the place was profoundly inept and utterly corrupt. Indeed disturbing, because winning the competition was proof positive that the town represented how things operated in the entire country. In terms of organisation, it was the stuff of nightmare. Everything had to go through countless committees, and the people you’d want absolutely nothing to do with were the kind who joined the committees.

    When he did think about them, White merely pictured those broken plastic corrugated sheets which had been haphazardly assembled to form a makeshift roof over the old train station. Effectively it was the first view any observant person would have upon arrival. What did this tell you about the country? Here was the town voted, again by countless committees, as being the Tidiest Town in Ireland, and yet the minute you got off the train, you looked up at the train station itself, at these gaping holes in the shattered corrugated plastic sheeting. It was pathetic, thought White, as it revealed the corrupt nature of an entire island. The whole nation, by voting in this way, or rather the Committees who had voted for the town, by recommending that the town should receive the highest accolade in the land, were actually complicit in praising the most mediocre of towns. Mediocrity was their aim. It was as if, for White, these loose panels of plastic, which during winter would let in buckets of rain, while every year the town’s commuters sheltered under the awful structure, getting wet in the process, had become symbolic of the country’s lack of rigour. Its shambolic state.

    He understood why large sections of people in the North wanted nothing to do with the place. Because the level of ineptitude and corruption was shocking. There it was. Visible for all to see, pondered White, who stood under the atrocity. I mean corrugated plastic sheeting! Who in their right mind was going to use such a material to protect the town’s citizens and visitors from the elements? It was the first of many signs that discreetly whispered, These people don’t really care about anyone in the first place. And, if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. That was it, wasn’t it? The “Ah sure, it’ll do!” attitude his neighbour Stan was always banging on about whenever he spoke of the place. Stanley was rarely in country, spending the majority of his time working as a consultant around the world. About what, White didn’t actually know. It was kind of a mystery, but Stan made it very clear to White how much he hated the place and a lot of his fellow Irishmen.

    The open hole in the sheeting spread out in a star formation. It was frayed into bits. Where it was not broken, it was black with dirt, moss and other under growth. As if nobody had actually thought about cleaning it up, not to mention fixing it by replacing it with, at the very least, new sheets.

    “Ah, sure it will do!”

    “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” Stan would say. “Bunch of fucking morons!”

    Every word was spoken with that crisp nearly perfect enunciation that Stan possessed.  It would be the closing punch line in these sessions after having looked at and examined the problem from every possible angle. White had never before brought up the lamentable condition of the roof of the town train station with him before. You see, unlike White, Stan wasn’t a commuter. They inhabited very different worlds. Whereas White was grounded firmly in the everyday world that he saw around him, in other words that of the town, and the city beyond, where he worked, and which was only thirty minutes south by commuter train, Stan’s world was one of airports and hotels. Corporate zones. Stan was very corporate. He exuded the spirit and parlance of international corporatism. White was more about the local.

    Stan was unaware as to the everyday workings in a town where they both lived, and that never ceased to amaze White. While he looked at Stan with incredulity at times, about his innocence, Stan would throw White some pretty incredulous looks when in turn, his lack of savvy on certain matters at an international level was too obvious to ignore. Merging their knowledge of the micro and the macro, together, the two men were, in a sense, whole.

    But they discussed countless other issues together. No, the broken corrugated plastic sheeting hanging over the heads of commuters on the platform outside of the town’s train station was a topic from which he had spared Stanley. Smiling now, White, regarded the drab excuse for a roofing feature. The sheer gombeenism. The degree of decay on a shameless exhibition to all and sundry had to be seen to be believed.

    White put it down to Ireland’s post-colonial heritage. Casting a condescending glance at some of the town’s inhabitants as he did. For instance, if you looked at the actual railway station itself, apart from the roofing, it was a fine old building, as many of the old train stations were, having been designed and built by the former occupying power. There you had it then. The very infrastructure had been inherited. Nothing, not the laws of the land, nor the great buildings that housed their government and courts (bar one) had all just been taken over. That was a century and three generations ago. White’s own grandfather had fought in that war. The War of Independence, they called it. What a joke. They were no more independent of their so-called old enemy as the man in the moon.

    White looked at his watch. The train would be coming soon. He walked with a quick pace further down the platform. He wanted to get away from the broken corrugated plastic roofing. Another joke. And there were so many of them too. Sick jokes, that is.

    Once inside the train, White’s mood improved slightly. At least he had a seat. That was another thing. There were so few trains now that he noticed more and more people would have to stand, and starting with the commuters from the town just after his own. Imagine that, every day, five days a week, getting on the train with your commuter ticket that you had paid for and you would never have, or only rarely, the opportunity to sit down! That was more of it, the chronic sense that nobody really gave a shit about anyone or anything anymore. There was no sense of community. No civic pride. Why would there be? What had they done? In over a hundred years, what had they actually done to the country since their newfound freedom?

    While White sat there looking around him, the recorded voice came over on the intercom system. It announced the next town in Irish. Nobody spoke the language, or hardly anybody, and yet that was even more of it. The con. Our government printed every document out twice, first in Irish, which was the official language of the country, and then in English which was a language everyone actually spoke. Why they insisted on imposing the language in this way was all part of it. Keeping up Appearances. A great little nation, the Republic of Ireland, for keeping up appearances. Truth be told, White couldn’t stomach it. This Ireland created by all of its little committees. You couldn’t fart without some fucker complaining to a committee.

    He remembered reading somewhere that all revolutions were destined to fail. It was inevitable. Once a revolution had taken place, corruption set in from the word go. This was human nature. There would always be some kind of favouritism. And the types of people who got involved politically, no matter where you were, were always one and the same. Barring, of course, the very rare exception. Chancers who, for the most part, were merely looking out for number one. It was the same the world over. Why should Ireland be any better, or any worse.

    While the train slowed, pulling into the next town, White watched the disappointed faces of new commuters who boarded the train. And who had, as usual, missed the opportunity of sitting down. When he was much younger, White would no doubt have given up his seat to one of them. Women in particular, as that’s the way he’d been brought up. But not now. This was the age of equality. White looked hard at some of the women who were now standing up around him. Resigned faces staring out a window at the Irish sea. How did they like this brave new world? Sometimes, very rarely mind you, some guy would grow embarrassed and offer up his seat to one of them, but it was rare now. Pathetic. And all part of it. Everybody hermetically sealed in their own little bubble. Nobody speaking to anyone else. Addicted to their phones. Passive, they listened to radio propoganda or some endless podcast, or perhaps even watched a feature film. Not a sinner reading a real book.

    That was another myth, a nation of great readers! Ha! Cunts. Not one of them had read a book by James Joyce. His wife, an Italian who had studied both law and literature at university, worked in a busy solicitor’s office in the city centre. The ignorance of the people there had been appalling. Joyce was revered as essential reading, and yet here, in the cuntry of his birth, (a country from which he notoriously sought exile) hardly anyone at all had ever read him. Anything intellectual was immediately disdained. A myth? No, that was indeed the reality here.

    Joyce made White’s mind jump to an idiot who lived in the same town. He had met him under the plastic corrugated roofing on the train station one sunny morning. For some reason Joyce had come up in their brief discussion.

    “My opinion is as good as anyone else’s, isn’t it?” He had asked White.

    White just laughed, knowing that by the man’s own admission he’d hardly read him at all, and yet he felt compelled to ask such a ridiculous question. Not only that, but he genuinely believed it too. It simply beggared belief how stupid some people could be.  But as Stanley’s almost obnoxious North American drawl came crashing in. Every word was perfectly enunciated, to double the effect.

    “Bunch of fucking morons.”

    Just hearing somebody voice the truth out loud made White feel better. Smiling now from ear to ear, he decided that what made us human was the pleasure of sharing.

  • Poetry: Christoph Hargreaves-Allen

    KUNG FOOL
    •••••••••••••••

    So you think you’re the Master?
    Meet the Master of Disaster:
    Bring your whole crew!
    I’ll just steal all your shoes.

    I’ll shoot the boot with cold Krug.
    Wised up? Tooled up?
    Tribed up? Bribed up?
    Congratulations. You wanna medal too?
    Bring the Joker & I’ll see you with a Fool.

    Flying daggers. Kung Foolish matters.
    Maddest of the hatters. The Heinz, it splatters.
    I raise hell like Kane. I belong to no name.
    While you convert, all I do is subvert.
    I win every time ‘cos I don’t spend a dime.

    Don’t give a fuck about bread and I don’t count heads.
    Think you’re sleek? Meet my pet.
    He’s scaly as fuck, and his name’s Cryptique.
    He’s half rat crossed with snake and, boy, he likes to eat meat.

    Follow my moves, you’ll learn a thing or two.
    You won’t learn three cos I don’t rock the trinity.

    Every third step I make, I make to fake.
    My views are pure illusions, my cares just grand delusions.
    I’m here to fuck with you – and your whole crew too.
    Group think ain’t my thing.

    I belong to no one; I believe in nothing.
    I’m the void to your ‘droid.
    My favourite word is ‘destroyed’.
    Apple? Google?
    I prefer Bimbo and noodles.

    I already notched your plays, yesterday.
    You can’t step to me, you can’t get to me.
    I’m nothing but a trickster. I exist to magimix ya.
    Take your algo’s and blow.
    Shove ’em where the wind don’t go.

    So you think that you’re a hacker?
    You reckon you’re a tracker?
    Say hullo to the
    Grand Felonious Hijacker.
    Pirate from the seas,
    I eat up land like fried cheese.

    I already left this planet.
    Only returned to throw a spanner in it.
    I chill with snakes and street skeez’s.
    I suck up ozone like Febreze.

    I sleep in ironed sheets,
    Keep my mind firmer than concrete.
    I guess I’m some sorta wizard?
    A devil, yes. And a monitor lizard.

    All I do is react, that’s how I counteract.
    I preplay your grooves.
    I break vinyl in two
    When I’m a nasty mood.

    Hold your Aces, keep the whole pack.
    I fold green tables just to kick back.
    No, I don’t always play.
    I live to remove obstacles in my way.

    My homeboy is Godzilla.
    My mentality’s guerilla.
    I’m free like a condor.
    Once I start, I want it all.

    There’s no logic to my game,
    I just like to go insane.
    I choose madness over method,
    From time to time.

    I like to get hunch backed,
    Never had to throw a punch back.
    All I care about is winning.
    My day job’s all about sinning.
    Victory?
    It’s priced into my rhymes.

    Featured Image: Orson Welles as Citizen Kane (1941)

  • Corporate Social Responsibility

    A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business”
    Henry Ford.

    “Improving Employee Wellbeing”. “Creating Social Good”. “Sustainable Procurement and Consumption”. “Fair Pay for Fair Work”.

    These are just some of the slogans used by people talking about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR, hereafter), which refers to practices benefitting society at large, or developing a fair and transparent working environment.

    The ‘people-planet-profit’ (3P or Triple Bottom Line) concept also falls within this ambit. It has been of great interest to businesses since the 1980s.

    However, Milton Friedman once said ‘the business of business is business’ and rightly so in many regards, since the primary objective and also the responsibility of a business is to survive as a profitable entity, regardless of how socially responsible (or irresponsible) it is.

    Nonetheless, one of the commonly ignored aspects of his work is that he added, “…shareholders want to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society”, and this brings the wider society into context.

    Friedman’s classic work on the ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits gained significant traction throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but clearly the ideal situation is where a business is both profitable and also meet the needs of other stakeholders. This creates a ‘win-win’ scenario, in addition to ensuring business sustainability in the long run.

    Defining Corporate Social Responsibility

    CSR can be viewed as a form of business self-regulation with the aim of being socially accountable and – to more cynical – being seen as a ‘good’ social entity. We live in a conscientious and environmentally aware society, where employees, customers, suppliers, and civil society in general, places significant weight on choosing and supporting organisations that prioritise CSR. CSR is also a way for companies to measure and control their impact on society.

    CSR can be also be perceived as demonstrating how a business can be organised in a particular way that could empower them to act in a socially responsible way. So, indeed again, it could be seen as a form of self-regulation that could manifest in say, social or environmental initiatives or strategies, without compromising organisational goals and agreed stakeholder objectives.

    CSR does not have to be a distraction from a company’s main goal, and instead could aim simply at aligning a company’s social and environmental activities with its purpose and values. Many examples in recent years show that CSR activities can mitigate risks, enhance reputations, and even contribute to the bottom line.

    Contributions via CSR initiatives, therefore, can be both positive and negative (also known as externalities) to the economy, environment, and wider civil society.

    There is increasing realisation among business leaders that companies should not choose to be driven solely and exclusively by profit, and that they have a responsibility to do what’s right, not only for shareholders but also to hit the Triple Bottom Line, i.e., people, planet, and global civil society.

    Typically, CSR list four categories of responsibilities that organisations can cater for: environmental, ethical, philanthropic, and economic. Now we have examples of companies that rebranded themselves as B Corporation (B Corps), social purpose corporations (SPCs), low-profit limited liability companies (L3Cs), and a variety of ‘green companies’.

    Creating Social Good

    Research by Cone communication has shown that over 60% of US citizens expect businesses to participate in social and environmental change in the absence of government regulation. Interestingly, about 90% of surveyed consumers said that they would purchase a product because a company supported a social cause or environmental challenge that personally appeal to them.

    These initiatives could many forms, including: proactive environmental efforts (e.g., reducing carbon footprints, recycling innovation, managing e-waste); funding philanthropy (e.g., Tom Shoes whose slogan is ‘one for one’, whereby they donate one-third of net profits to various charities, supporting physical and mental health); ensuring ethical labour practices, i.e. treating employees fairly and ethically, including employment outsourced in the supply chain; or finally, through volunteering. Thus, how Vodafone World of Difference Challenge has assisted community development in most parts of the world already.

    There is an important caveat. While CSR may help brand the image of a company, if this does not come from a genuine moral conviction or altruism it can easily backfire, and lead to accusation of hypocrisy. So any approach has to be embedded in the core of what any company is doing.

    Examples of CSR initiatives creating ‘social good’

    An early ‘good’ CSR initiative was one taken up by Starbucks when they secured the ‘Fair Trade foundation’ certification. Thereafter all of their products had the Fair-Trade logo (resembling the Chinese ‘ying-yang’ sign) on them, this logo insists that farmers and everyone else in their supply chain are all paid fairly and are free from illegal exploitation.

    Starbucks remains the largest purchaser of fair-trade-certified coffee, globally. Fair-Trade initially started as a social movement, saying their goal was ‘to help producers in developing countries achieve better trading conditions and to promote sustainability.’

    For businesses, it is a matter of being fully aware of their responsibilities towards the society as much as being about delivering value for business and society via creating social, environmental, or economic (similar to people-planet-profit) benefits, thereby ensuring the sustainability of a company.

    Interestingly, most of the business CSR initiatives these days are connected to SDGs or the global development goals. This could be about ensuring good health and well-being through a work-life balance, safety at the workplace, or supporting mental health of employees.

    Amongst other approaches are: decent work and economic growth (i.e. global goal 8), particularly in reference to the sharing or ‘gig’ economy. where the workers are not considered to be ‘employees’ and therefore not guaranteed benefits or entitlements; Responsible consumption and production (i.e. global goal 12), which does connect back to the Starbucks example, and also how certain University campuses in the US were terming ‘fair trade’ universities where students and academic faculty would only buy and consume products labelled fair-trade.

    Also, we have partnership for goals (i.e., global goal 17) where newer forms of institutional arrangements are created and sustained, moving on from the generic public-private partnership models, towards more inclusive and innovative ways of actor engagement via public-private-people partnerships.

    Build it and they will come…

    Lego has invested a fortune in addressing climate change, developing alternative energy usage, and reducing waste. Since this is also a part of the company’s philosophy, Lego’s environmentally conscious moves include reduced packaging, and also the use of sustainable materials.

    This is somewhat similar to Ben & Jerry’s, whose core goals have always revolved around supporting local dairy farmers and investing in the community where they have operations.

    Johnson & Johnson, another familiar brand, focuses heavily on reducing its environmental impact by investing in various renewable energy sources. At the global level, they also work towards providing cleaner and safer water to communities.

    Proctor and Gamble (P&G) is another example since their development of the two laundry products, Ariel and Tide, were sourced based on identifying environmental problems. Their research demonstrated that the most significant environmental impact that our laundry has is the energy used to heat the water in washing machines. 90% of the energy in a load of wash is expended on heating water, contributing to about two-thirds of all the greenhouse gas emissions in the Tide lifecycle. So, they developed products that could easily use cold water for washing, thereby reducing the total carbon emissions significantly as well as helping to save up to $150 a year on household energy bills.

    At the same time, it is not so much what the companies do, e.g. becoming environmentally friendly or ‘going green’ in its operations, it also about helping to generate a sufficient amount of awareness across society. For example, through adverts around packaging of P&G’s product Ariel would inform customers how to save energy by turning down the washing temperature on washing machines to thirty degrees Celsius.

    Similarly, Plan A by Marks and Spencer (M&S) has the goal of building a sustainable future by enabling their customers to have a positive impact on wellbeing, communities and also the planet through everything (process and product) that the company does. For example, in spring 2021 they launched their most sustainable denim range that was made using 86% less water, kinder chemicals and 100% responsibly sourced cotton. During the pandemic, the company distributed more than 11.8 million meals to those most in need and also raised £8.3m for NHS Charities Together in the UK through their M&S rainbow sale.

    No Longer Optional

    In recent years, however, companies cannot brag about ‘good’ practices and their ‘greenwashing’ philosophy anymore since the EU has now developed product requirements criterion; an environmental policy audit system for organisations; and EMAS certification, as a way of governing progress and control of eco-management.

    So, what was considered to be a ‘proactively good’ social action by a company is now somewhat mandatory by law. For example, the EU’s principles for global trade and sustainable development, development of sustainable development criteria and CSR in individual trade agreements can impact sustainability assessments of trade deals.

    Over the years, however, there has been numerous scandals around ‘brand image’. Among the questions we should be asking of businesses would be: What does a good corporate citizen mean? Is ‘profit’ a dirty word?  How much should society pick up the ‘external’ business costs such as pollution?  Does society really care about ‘fair trade’ or getting a good value in price and quality suffice?  How are ethical decisions made by businesses?

    Another important issue is how we address all these questions before jumping to conclusions based on subjective judgment and at times, situational ethics.

    Cases of workers exploitation, harsh working conditions, paying a wage that is lower than the statutory minimum wage are plentiful. From the customers’ perspective, organisations are not always transparent and honest. A plethora of issues include: false labelling, misleading pricing, quality differentiation, misleading information on packaging and advertising, and in worst cases, dumping products.

    Greenwashing

    The term ‘greenwashing’ was coined in 1980s by Jay Westervelt, which essentially means companies either misleading consumers about the green or environmentally-responsible credentials of a product or service, or misleading consumers about the environmental performance of the company.

    Then the question turns to whether companies ‘should’ tell customers everything. Corporate Governance plays a huge role in determining whether a school of thought that dismisses CSR altogether dominates.

    There is also a widespread assumption that businesses cannot be trusted, and that terms such as ‘sustainability’ or ‘community development’ are meaningless concepts for multinationals. It is interesting that the two key contrasting views that we come up with when reviewing CSR comes from two individuals, Milton Friedman and Edward Freeman.

    Briefly, Milton Friedman believed that businesses need to simply keep their shareholders and business owners satisfied, while Edward Freeman believed that businesses should be run for the benefit of all stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, civil society, government amongst many others).

    Stakeholders vs Shareholders

    The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham once opined that ‘action is best that produces the greatest good for the greatest number’.

    In the context of CSR, it is also a matter of fact that satisfying different stakeholders while maintaining profit isn’t everything, the idea of ‘contractarianism’ is equally relevant which is when no action by a business should cause uncompensated harm to ‘anyone’ else. So, it is also about the rights and responsibilities of a business. This is clearly not a black and white area, although dismissing CSR may seem an easy idea.

    For example, every stakeholder wants a ‘good deal’ for themselves. Employees want good pay, customers want value for money, suppliers expect a decent contract and fair prices. But this leads to inevitable friction. While customers want low prices, employees expect good wages. However, good wages lead to higher costs, thereby increasing the price of the products, which ultimately makes a customer unhappy.

    Similarly, suppliers want a good price for their supplies, which again could lead to higher costs (e.g. Starbucks works with the Fair-Trade Foundation), while a high price could leave a customer unhappy. Whether we take the example of a multinational or an SME, these challenges are common and unavoidable while also illustrating that a business cannot possibly satisfy all stakeholders. Therefore, the question becomes what CAN a business do?

    Three options, are possible: deliberately ignore all stakeholders, except shareholders, and go ‘flat-out’ for profit; pretend to take account of stakeholders and still go all out for maximum profit (e.g., ‘greenwashing’); engage with stakeholders and balance their ‘aspirations’ while not losing sight of profit.

    Bad Actions…

    Foxconn has been in the news with CSR scandals for over two decades now, particularly for violating employment laws.

    The company used to make Apple products in China and more recently Amazon’s Echo Smart Speakers and Kindle Devices. However, there have been reports of workers in hazardous factories run by Foxconn who are given sick or holiday pay. They can also be fired without notice during lulls in production. 40% of the staff that Foxconn used in their factories are ‘agency staff’ or ‘dispatch workers’. Those who worked overtime were paid at the normal hourly rate, which is illegal since both under Chinese law and even Amazon’s supplier code of conduct says that workers should receive time and half rate for such work.

    Foxconn has a history of worker exploitation, witnessed after a wave of workers committing suicide back in 2010, when Apple used to heavily outsource their manufacturing of iPhone and iPad to them. Besides, wage and worker exploitation, Foxconn also had serious factory accidents where workers died of electric shock in 2011, and also a factory explosion that killed four people and injured eighteen others in the same year.

    On top of that there have been frequent employee riots, use of underage (from as low as eight years-of-age) and illegal workers, along with violation of local laws. All of which has been to reduce costs.

    More recently, the company had invested in robotic technology to replace workers in manufacturing and to tackle the diminishing trust in the company name.  At some level we (as customers) should also wonder, how much and how badly do we really have to use the products of these giant companies such as Amazon and Apple?

    Just Do It?

    Similarly with Nike, 593,468 hours of overtime work went unpaid between 2010-2012 in Indonesia, which sent shockwaves through the Indonesian labour movement. Eventually after strikes and negotiations, Nike agreed to pay off $1 million to about 4,500 workers at a Nike plant in Serang, Banten in Indonesia.

    Again, there is nothing new about Nike’s labour exploitation and maintenance of sweatshops since the 1970s. From the early 1990s reports were flooding in detailing poor wages, child labour, and harsh working conditions in Nike’s outsourced factories (called ‘sweatshops’).

    After initially shrugging its shoulders, Nike said it was up to the outsourced parties. But subsequently, as the brand suffered, the company started auditing their factories for occupational health and safety. Their ‘bad reputation’ as an employer made them go to greater lengths than usual, while competitors adopted similar procedures.

    In the mid-2000s, several ‘anti-sweatshop’ groups were established, and at Brown University, Nike had to pull out of a contract with the Women’s ice hockey team after a student activist group demanded the company establish an ethical code of conduct. Similar cases occurred between 2010 and 2016 in Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and China, while at the same time the community activities on these matters became stronger, through fair labour associations and workers’ rights consortiums which exposed how child labour represented 70-80% of their workforce.

    Further examples can be drawn from fast fashion companies such as Zara, H&M, Gap, Primark, who all adopted exploitative labour practices at one time or another.

    Balancing Priorities

    Multinationals mentioned in this article are major players in our economies. Many multinationals have exploited workers or like Google, Coca Cola, and Starbucks systematically exploited tax loopholes across the world over the years. Of course many of these companies have simultaneously done some ‘social good’ with their CSR or ‘responsible image’ campaigns. This makes any assessment of the role of CSR difficult and prevents us from drawing definitive conclusions, such as that multinationals are inherently bad, or perform a social good that may be a part of the company’s culture.

    CSR activities can be designed in such a way as to align with the companies’ business purpose, the values of the companies’ key stakeholders, while identifying the local or glocal needs that the company (local or global) can serve in a particular community where they have their operations, among other considerations.

    Thus, for example, in countries that lack sufficient government funding for public health, business organisations can step in with philanthropic funding to develop clean water and sanitation. A strategic CSR can still create various levels of continued ‘win-win/s’ for a company, its wider list of stakeholders, and the community.

  • Literature: Ireland’s Last Minotaur

    In Ireland, North and South, the Arts Sector, currently, is a sinecure. Those middle-class mentalities which dominate, and, indeed, hold most high profile positions, would argue vehemently against such – as they would see it – an offensive statement, but nevertheless I believe it to be a fair characterisation.

    ‘Stephen says bitterly, “It is the symbol of Irish Art. The cracked lookingglass of the servant.” This was Stephen Dedalus’s view in Joyce’s modernist magnum opus, Ulysses, and we find this idiom pre-settling into an ‘independent’ Republic as a statement on colonial subjugation, and a lack of confidence in the national character. And since that imperial rule withdrew, neoliberal, self-serving attitudes, have moved – and settled – in as they have done across the Western World.

    With the arrival of mass market production, relentless advertising and consumerism, which took over Irish sensibilities around twenty years ago, Ireland became no different to elsewhere.

    Up to €7 for a pint of ‘Stout’ in Temple Bar?! Dublin rents going through the roof, past the cloud-clapped ivory towers and beyond into the dazzling astral heights, for pure unadulterated profit. This is an Ireland I do not care to recognise anymore. Everything, including morality, is up for sale.

    With the internet, one can purchase the ‘lookingglass’ and have it in your hand the next day if one so wishes; but it will, inevitably, end up being tossed away, into landfill, soon thereafter. We live in ephemeral ‘throwaway’ times. Qualities like validity, truth and morality are diminished – and indeed ‘blend’ into ‘fiction-meets-truth’ in an Orwellian-era of ‘fake news’, outright lies and endless spin.

    Ireland enjoys intellects but only if they are not overtly clever, and don’t create a sense of inferiority. Does the cracked lookingglass serve as a basis for the national character or identity?

    Indoctrination and Subjugation

    A deep resonance of shame bubbles up from oppressiveness, whether it is indoctrination through the Catholic Church and a State which could not separate the two; and, in the wake of centuries of Viking, Norman, and indeed Anglo-Saxon, subjugation a deep hurt has not even been addressed. The need for a healing process in the collective psyche has not been considered by the remote heads of the post-modernist, mildly liberal, and increasingly secularised state.

    Ireland was banished, but she was not razed and buried; she would return. And return she did onto her fertile isle, on the edge of Western Europe – the land of milk and honey, so rich in potential and verdant imagination.

    It is true: I am in love with Ireland as landscape; and the mythical potency brings to mind an unconforming otherness – which espouses freedoms that rouse the romantic variant in a wanderer.

    There is, however, now the prescient, palpitating and unresolved issue of the published writer: the ego, which conflates on the surface area of their proposed brilliance, leading to the belief that they, and their literary output, rival, and even surpasses the authors of literary Classics. In effect, canonising their own brand – this is where we are.

    Let me add, that the Western World’s Canonical Works are up there for a reason, they are regarded as ‘the Classics’ and should be read and championed as such. A ‘Classic’ can be considered a strongly composed noteworthy book.

    Among the writers who are generally considered the most important in Western literature are: Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, François Rabelais, Jean Racine, Molière, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Walt Whitman, Gustave Flaubert, Emily Dickinson, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett.

    First Usage

    The first writer to use the term ‘classic’ was Aulus Gellius, a second century AD Roman writer who, in the miscellany Noctes Atticae (19, 8, 15), refers to a writer as a classicus scriptor, non proletarius (‘A distinguished, not a commonplace writer’). Such classification began with the Greeks’ ranking their cultural works, with the word canon (‘carpenter’s rule’).

    Moreover, early Christian Church Fathers used canon to rank the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them, given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being placed in a canon ensured a book’s preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization.

    Contemporarily, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes (‘the admitted’, ‘the included’) to identify the writers in the canon.

    If you are a writer with a couple of books in print, and if you deride these works because you are so high upon your stamping, nose-blustering, mighty charger, due to being published, I am sorry, but this is out-and-out naïveté. It is emotional, inferior narcissism and ego-led savagery and in its way, denigrates the reputations of great writers of the past and their output.

    Recently, reading an interview in which a writer stated that they did not, or could not, raise a little interest towards Jack Kerouac’s Beat Classic, On the Road, equating the experience with hitting one’s head ‘with a plastic spoon.’ – a petulant and unworthy response.

    Infantilised Youth Culture

    Infantilization of culturally accepted ‘norms’ through Happy Meals’ language, ‘LOLs’, and other solipsistic accepted ‘bant’ has led us down this cul-de-sac. Snowflake is used as a pejorative term. Other ‘trendy’ Smartphone-induced abbreviated terms such as ‘Merch’ and ‘Bae’: are now the common argot of an infantilised youth culture that permeates mainstream discourse.

    Any perceived ‘criticism’ of these so called ‘established writers’ i.e., a writer who has a recent published book on the shelves, is meted out with condemnations and calls the gallows! In this solidarity, an insidious, irrational, emotionally-charged cabal is missing the point.

    The media in Ireland love to promote long established writers and their works, but they routinely forget the Garret-based writers who slog bravely away by a figurative candle over their ‘Art’.

    Please, fellow scribes, do not ‘Drown’ your ‘book’ like Prospero. Do not become disheartened because you are not alone. Your magic is your own and do not let it die because of the success of mediocre fare, which publishing houses choose to release.

    Irish publishers, like UK publishers, and American publishers, are greedy for a quick return on profit and this mantra only serves their deity, the golden calf of money. Forget this wide-eyed, commandeering for a few hedonisms, and continue on.

    Yeatsian Revival

    Simply because Ireland has a vibrant literary-cultural inheritance – which came to the fore especially during the Yeatsian Irish Literary Revival from the turn of the twentieth century – should not, ergo, give prominence to literary reputations simply on the assumption they are part of a great tradition. Extreme reverence is the death-knell of strongly composed literature, which is kept in its primordial place for lack of oxygen, dragging itself off to the literary hinterlands, to peer through fissures of granite rock – redundant.

    There are simply too many Creative Writing Courses being run in universities, which gladly take a student’s money – assuming they pay it up front and often – in order to place their ego on a pedestal; but the massive issue with this kind of fawning is that it misses the whole point of literature, which is to enjoy the simple immersive experience of reading something new, fresh, challenging that sets you upon the unknown territories of an adventure, knapsack in tow.

    In Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come, the main protagonist, ‘Gar’ Gareth O’Donnell, has a public and private self, played by two actors. The mimetic structures of the ego, in the Irish Literary Art’s Scene(s) do not allow for any logical critique – this kind of thought is placed in emotional narcissism, firmly rooted in insecurity: the public image of oneself in a position of power and the private self behind pulled chintz curtains. Seemingly, the paradoxical self is difficult for the Irish mentality to examine closely.

    The Commentariat

    Who are the Irish commentariat on which these assertions are based? One does not have to look too far: remember when Roddy Doyle, a decent Dublin novelist, took a few naïve swipes at Joyce’s masterpiece:

    ‘Ulysses could have done with a good editor,’ Doyle told a stunned audience in New York gathered to celebrate the great man who is credited with inventing the modern novel.

    ‘You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top ten books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.’

    ‘I only read three pages of Finnegans Wake and it was a tragic waste of time,’ he added. ‘Dubliners was Joyce’s best work, but Ulysses was undeserving of reverence.”

    According to Richard Ellmann’s biography Joyce was once described as ‘A corner boy who spits in the Liffey.’ Jealously appears to lie behind denunciations such as Roddy Doyle’s.

    Working Class Writers

    The reality is that many aspiring Irish novelist are forced into work that prevents them from writing: no one doubts this, but many working class writers are living on the breadline; the cultural establishment response: ‘Ah, he’s grand’ desensitizes them to this struggle.

    They may console themselves, ‘Sure, he was rejected thirty-seven times.’ Well, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected over a hundred times – so statistics have little relevance, especially considering a lot of agents don’t know their furnished onions from their hot potatoes? The author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, died in abject poverty. Those who seek justification in ‘statistics’ lack in the cold reasoning of logic.

    The effete North – once a fertile ground for freedom of expression, and in around the harrowed fields of poetry, has been conquered by a small literary clique, who look out from their parapets, pouring scorn on anyone who dares to have the tenacity to write ‘good’ work – work which they see as threatening to their output.

    A few diminutive literary-based, artsy, types run pop-ups and suchlike, now and again, as an alternative to the mainstream, but some, most, fall like a bright star into the slopping wetness of the Lagan, or the Foyle, only to have their inner-core frazzled and inevitably extinguished – another avenue burnt-out.

    There will be those who will be quick to trot out, on horseback, with lances aloft, with ‘Ah, sure he has a chip on his shoulder,’ and other negative, quick-to-judge, comments. My riposte to this is: yes, I do have a chip, or rather the plural, ‘chips’, one on each shoulder, which helps balance me out. They will use the term ‘bitterness’, but ‘frustration’ is more apt. Ingratitude will be another conceited proclamation.

    Also, the Halo-Effect: this being the over-promotion of well-established writers, with no love left for the outsider, unknown writer. Ireland’s cultural media embargo on new and fresh writing is wan to say the least; anytime an important event comes along they wheel out figureheads. Michael Longley’s poem, ‘Ceasefire’ is often wheeled out upon a gurney; again to be speculated upon; again in times of conflict; but I can safely say Ulster Unionism, which Longley would identify himself with, would never get down upon their knees to kiss anyone’s hand except their aristocratic, they believe, betters.

    Ireland’s media has an infatuation with their well-established poets – poets who have been hanging around for thirty years –  waiting for them to come on stage to deliver homilies of breathy, dramatic words. A false panacea for ongoing violent times.

    The cult of literary reverence and priesthood in the Irish poetry scene is archaic, embarrassing, and non-progressive, and equates to the mystical sorcery in a Harry Potter inspired world of fakery. The ‘everyone wants to be famous’ and well-regarded, and thought highly of as a ‘writer’ is a trope which has simply gone too far.

    It is fine to have dreams and aspirations, but one has to put the hard work, through falling, in failure, by rejection, after derision, and in managing jealousy. One only has to look at the work which is coming out of university produced magazines to see this. Recently, I read a short story in an Irish newspaper, online edition, and I despaired. What I see is diaphanous clichéd fare time and time again.

    Given Up

    Not so long ago, I conversed with a very fine, and clever, female Irish poet who is not well known in Ireland. She told me that she has given up trying to have her work published in any Irish Arts-led magazines as her work is continually rejected.

    I have read her work, it is good, and all that I can summarise is that some of these Arts folk do not know what they are doing, but, or rather, what they really are doing is selecting the work of their chums and, indeed, the work of themselves, for publication.

    These are magazines which are supposed to have a fair-handed, even democratic, selection process for work which is submitted from the four tent-pegged corners of the island of Ireland. Nepotism is rife in the Irish Arts scene. If you are a friend of a friend, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, then you are ‘A-Okay, pal…I will get you published,’ literary merit notwithstanding.

    There are of course exceptions, with real talents. Colm Tóbín is up there with the alive Irish intelligentsia, as is John Banville, both are true novelists in the sense of sitting down to read, to learn, then to write their own work, in conformity with the traditional literary model, and they should be applauded for their due diligence. They have hauled long nets and reeled in empty lines for their patience and perseverance to their Art, to pay off in the end.

    What is to be done?

    Easy – read more books. Read the Classics. A good novel will lead you to a wood at dusk, whereupon you will find a finely woven thread of golden-silk, and, as night falls, slowly traverse the wood and feel, along with the golden-thread, a growing self-belief. That is the power of strong writing. Do not shy away from challenging yourself with any prejudicial assumptions around what a reading experience is, should, or could, be.

    Feature Image: Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) Studio Party (Soirée).

  • The Daymaker

    For my Aunt Josie.

    Mamma died today, last year, at this very hour. I took care of her “Like an angel,” she would say, and I would never cry within her sight, nor anywhere in earshot, so that, at her funeral, and she died on the eve of her fortieth birthday, my eyes felt like eternal springs.

    Earlier this morning, after Dr. Dziurdzy had just signed my Weekend Pass, I strode a mile to the mall where I buy blue roses, and a bouquet in hand, descended the stairs of the Hamilton Mountain. From there, I pressed on, a pied, all the way to The Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. I only stopped at Sassoon’s Cafe, just before the James Street Bridge – to make Mamma a card.

    Across from me, in the form of a marble statue of herself signed by Michelangelo, sat St Dhymphna. Typically, whenever we’ve completed an exchange, and it is time for us to part, she lingers with me a while, in one form or another, once even, as the lily-like scent of her long flaxen hair, perhaps to stave my loneliness.

    It was so sweltering in Sassoon’s café that I swear I saw some sweat-beads glisten on St. Dymphna’s smooth marble brow. A barista fanned herself with the menu, placing before me my café au lait. She sighed over her shoulder at the young man sitting stiffly in one of the booths, wearing a camouflaged hat. I surmised him to be “ the soldier” St. Dymphna had mentioned to anticipate, “the soldier who resembles your father in that photo of him in the viridian shirt – the one where he barely resembles himself.”

    Like other frequenters of Sassoon’s Café, the soldier was in mid-conversation; but what bothered the barista was that the seat he faced was empty.  In his white t-shirt, gray dress pants, and black Wallabees, he placed before him, on the table for two, an open notebook and what appeared to be an emerald-green fountain pen.  The soldier wore a week-old beard so handsomely I wondered if that was his intention; I wondered if it was a look he was going for, or if he simply did not shave that often. Beyond the notebook, and farthest from him, lay his laptop, closed and recharging.

    “Send one platoon west, and one platoon south; over,” he ordered, after which, for about ten seconds, he seemed to listen attentively to a response, carefully, his eyes barely blinking, but dilated; then, he continued his orders. The barista, with hands contrived on hips, took three steps, robotically stopped, then glared down at the soldier. With calculated firmness, she coldly stated:

    “Excuse me, Sir. I’m afraid, I’m going to have to…Ask you to leave”

    A loaded silence reigned in the room.

    “Why, exactly?” asked the soldier.

    “Why do I have to go?”

    Again the barista glared down at him.

    “Why?” he demanded of her for the third time, after some intense silence.

    “There’ve been complaints. More than one. About your…behaviour.”

    “My behaviour?”

    “Yes, Sir.”

    In the silence of Sassoon’s, that soldier and I simultaneously stood up. We were moving slower than two war-weary battle-horses who had once galloped wild. Lifeless as ping-pong balls, all eyes in Sassoon’s Cafe bounced between the soldier and me.

    “My name is Avi Baxter,” said the soldier with warmth, to the entire room.

    “I’m sorry, Sir. But you have to go.” continued the barista. “My manager makes the calls.”

    “Where’s the manager?” asked Avi.

    The barista nodded toward the kitchen’s swinging door, and from behind it the manager could be heard yelling.

    “I’ve called the police!”

    I’d been leaning on a pillar, but now facing Avi, I stood at attention.

    “My name is Carlo, Carlo Di Carra,” I said to Avi, alone. And turning toward the barista, “Leave him alone. He’s done nothing wrong.”

    “Do you have a Thursday edition of the Hamilton Spectator?” asked Avi, peering hard at the newspaper piles. “I’m in no condition to defend myself, cause I’m in and out, so…”

    The barista didn’t answer, but I darted toward the bunch of newspapers to locate the Thursday edition.

    “Avi, here it is.”

    “Thank you, Carlo.

    Anticipating the police, for a few moments I looked outside the window. When I turned around, Avi’s pupils were dilated again. In a tone as solemn as it was dolorous, he whispered a few words I couldn’t understand.

    “Avi,” I said. “Avi?’ I repeated, but he didn’t respond.

    I looked outside and back at Avi, whose eyes were now serene.

    “Could you please open the newspaper to A2?” Avi asked.

    “Yes, of course.”

    Opening the newspaper, there before me was a large picture of Avi in military fatigues. I showed the article around, from table to table, ensuring everyone could see the published picture of the very veteran among us. Avi stepped toward me.

    “Could you please read the article out loud? Cause, like I said, I’m in and out these days. I’d be forever grateful to you, Good Samaritan.”

    There was no time to answer, since the police were on their way. So I launched straight into the article:

    “The headline reads: The Language of Madness: A Conversation with Avi Lyon Baxter. Written by Kimberly Stone.”

    “Over coffee, I asked acclaimed Hamilton poet, Avi Lyon Baxter, 27, questions regarding literature, politics, and family, but it was when I asked him about the effects of warfare, that Baxter seemed most engaged, most ardent, and most poignant. ‘The years of warfare triggered what my doctor calls schizoaffective disorder, which runs in my family. I also suffer from PTSD.’ Baxter has been hospitalized for his conditions several times; during his admissions, he became acquainted with what he calls ‘the culture of the patients,’ and also ‘the struggle of the patients.’”

    I stopped for a moment and looked up at Avi. He’d slipped into another trance.

    “Through our conversation, a polarity arose. That of language as a saviour for those suffering from severe mental illnesses, like in Baxter’s case, and language as a dehumanizing force that is inflicted, often unknowingly, on the psychotically ill. ‘Too often, those who consider themselves politically correct loosely use words like psycho, nutjob, and crazy. Now, hear me: I think freedom of speech should reign supreme. I am against language policing, since I believe it divides people, as it is designed to do. Yet, at the same time, I have a huge problem with the hypocrisy.’”

    “The hypocrisy is that of how the so-called politically correct treat various groups in routine language, and the discrepancies in political correctness. While they treat many demographics with sensitivity, like people of the LGBT community for instance, the language of mental illness and, Baxter notes, specifically psychotic disorders, continues to colour their conversational speech. ‘If policing language, shouldn’t that extend sensitivity to anyone who needs it, not just to those dictated by a biased media?”

    “While I wouldn’t recommend injecting offensive terms into one’s vocabulary to correct the imbalance, those who do choose to be mindful of political correctness might consider how they cherry-pick which terms to be mindful of, and the message they’re sending to those left out of their apparently progressive dialogue.”

    “Baxter says the effect is that many of those who suffer from psychotic disorders ‘feel like people treat them as sub-humans.’ Especially in the context of individuals whose own minds are often frightening places for them, having others in society express to them, through their word choice, that their condition does not warrant sensitivity, is further dehumanizing.”

    “‘There’s no safe space for them,’ laments Baxter. ‘If you have been granted equality you have not received it. If you want equality, you must take it. True equality is something taken, never given.’”

    Here I paused and peered into the faces of the café customers and out the window. No police.

    “Why should we care? Well, because the connection between mental illness and creativity is not just one founded on an outlet for suffering. There is also an innate relationship between mental illness and creative genius, and this combination has historically brought great works of art, and important inventions of many kinds, into the world. The image of the brooding or unhinged artist has merit beyond the stereotype.”

    “Baxter explains, ‘there is an infinitesimally fine line between madness and genius since, recently, scientists have proven that the two share a similar genetic makeup, called Neuregulin 1. We revere and adore Van Gogh, Nash, Plath, Schumann, Beethoven, Cobain, Hemingway, Pound, Nelligan, Blake, and other great minds affected by mood disorders or schizophrenia. We love our mad geniuses. We’re eager to take their gifts, but we most often reject the very illness that spawned the gift, and thereby reject the person.’”

    A lump rose in my throat and I wanted to cry, but resisted my instinct. I searched everyone’s eyes, none of which were holding back tears, none of which shone with the dimmest twinkle.

    Confronted with an aura of indifference in the room, Ari’s eyes welled up before closing as he took a deep breath. I too took a deep breath. But when my head bowed the way an iris’s bloom will, when weighed down by too many dew drops, my eyes were open and staring at the image of Ari, printed on the page.

    “Those with the combined traits of creativity and psychiatric instability who can harness and channel them into careers are the fortunate ones, who were able to take challenging life states, and make from them a thing of beauty to share with the world. However, these are, more than likely, the people you avoid on the street, or snicker at on the bus, as they grapple with untreated psychotic symptoms.”

    “Baxter’s critically hailed debut book of poems, The Flowers of My Battles, became a bestseller in both Canada and the United States. The book won both the Governor General Award For Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is currently nominated for a Trillium Award, the gala of which will be held this fall. In The Walrus magazine, critic and poet Dylan Yardly called Baxter’s debut ‘the greatest poetry debut of the past 25 years. Baxter is perhaps the most commanding and relevant war poet since Wilfred Owen.’ Last year he was awarded the Medal of Sacrifice, for his brave fighting during the War in Afghanistan.”

    “Though often debilitated, Baxter has established a career that allows him to share his insight, and lend his voice to others struggling with mental illness, so many of whom are silenced rather than celebrated.”

    I savoured that article to the extent I could, while all around me, a palpable aura of indifference persisted. When I checked on Baxter, he was beyond reach. Pupils dilated and tears streaming down his cheeks. That’s when, through the window, I spotted two police cruisers pull up and park.

    By the time both officers entered Sassoon’s, Saint Dymphna’s presence, manifested in the form of a marble statue had, alas, vanished. Avi was consumed by one of his hallucinations. And as for me, I encountered the kind of anxiety a blue iris must, when its growth flourishes from the protection of a private garden, to project out onto the unsympathetic surface of a well-traveled urban sidewalk. Mind you, unaccompanied by any other backyard blue irises and at the mercy of the masses.

    Or was it more that loneliness two horses might feel when, without warning, their riders steer them away from each other. Often so fast that neither has a chance to neigh good-bye.  Avi and I stood side by side. Solid as two pillars. Sympatico as high-school students passing doobies around a fire-pit party.

    “And, furthermore, I bet you’ve been completely off your meds?” continued the first officer, who wore short sleeves.

    “Now listen, Avi.” began the second officer, who wore long sleeves, “I sympathize with you, for real. I’m saddened as hell by your tears. And I get why having to leave this café may be troublesome for you, but it is time to go now. One way or another.”

    The officers made eye-contact. As did Avi and I. On Baxter’s table, a book lay open to pages 33 and 34. It was The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke, and next to it was Disabled, by Wilfred Owen.

    “Do you really want us using force to get you out of this place?” asked the first officer.

    “Do you really want to rip away the integrity of a veteran?” I interjected.

    “I’m warning you, Boy. Shut it!” exclaimed the first officer. “Are you gonna leave this place peacefully, on your own, or do you want to be taken out of here violently, by two cops? Which would most certainly be bad for your integrity, too.” the first officer demanded of Avi.

    “We don’t want to have to call C.O.A.S.T. on you. You’re well aware that C.O.A.S.T. will cuff you. And drag you straight to St. Joe’s for psychological assessment. Oh, and then, they’ll

    send you for a grand ole stay at the Mountain Sanatorium.” pressed the second officer.

    “What is C.O.A.S.T.?” I had to inquire.

    “It’s a…Well, it’s a special police unit that comes around collecting the crazies. You know, psychopaths and such. So they can go to the hospital for …For treatment or whatever the fuck.” hissed the second officer to me, so Avi couldn’t hear. Anyway, Avi had zoned out again.

    “Uh…but what does C.O.A.S.T. stand for?” I asked.

    “Crisis Outreach And Support Team,” officer one said with a smirk.

    At that, Avi’s head drooped like a raindrop burdened daisy blooming on a starless, moonless night. Moments later, Avi raised his head. He gathered his materials and gripping his satchel, pivoted like a ship points to a lighthouse to lock eyes with me.

    The two of us paused in a dilapidated and vacant parkette, where we were surrounded by spiralling lilies shedding their wealth of pure white petals in the morning sunlight.

    “What’s your name, again?” Avi asked.

    “Carlo Di Carra,” I replied.

    “How old are you, Son?”

    “Nineteen.”

    A warm wind wafted.

    “Carlo, I feel a strange paroxysm of utmost thankfulness toward you, and utmost loathsomeness toward them.” That said, he spat into a nearby patch of grass, “You showed me more support in ten minutes than most people have shown me in ten years, and so: SALUTE! Salute to you! Salute to the mercy you shared with me! Salute to you, the Stranger’s angel!” Then, forthwith, his eyes dilated into a thousand-mile stare, while he commenced. “No, Sergeant, I am not a coward. I’m just human. There are civilians in that building. I cannot open fire as you have just ordered, Sir.”

    Then…

    “No! No! Stop pointing that at me, Sergeant! Please, Sir! Okay! Okay! Okay!” Avi screamed. Then he started aiming his invisible machine gun, whose trigger he repeatedly pulled, until finally, he emerged from his fugue.

    “Anyway Carlo, as I was saying, SALUTE to you, Salute to you and your blood of love!”

    After Carlo finished his exclamatory salutations, he paused, then started: “My will to electrify the Patients Movement is hella stronger now that I’ve endured what happened today .Thank God for this shock I feel. Which will, I hope, continue to numb me from the memory of what we witnessed in Sassoon’s Café. I must affix and delight in the numbness that a proper shock provides. Wretchedly, must I revel in an inner glade which exists between my… self, and what has occurred. Yes, the dictatorship of the psychiatric patient will be commandeered so much sooner now.  Do you, by chance, believe in God?”

    Yes, very much so.”

    “And do you believe Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah?”

    “Yes. I do.”

    “Ok. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, swear that you will never repeat anything I’m saying here. Promise me. In his name.”

    “I swear, in the name of Jesus Christ, that I will not repeat anything you are saying here.  I promise. In His name.”

    “Say this: May I go straight to Hell if I repeat anything Avi Lyon Baxter tells me in this lilied parkette near James Street North”

    “May I go straight to Hell if I repeat anything Avi Lyon Baxter tells me in this lilied parkette near James Street North.”

    Avi sighed.

    “In the name of my own vengeance to a world that treats me as a sub-species. In the name of what I think is right and essential. In the name of any and all oppressed psychotics, the Psychiatric System will be dismantled and rebuilt. From within and without. There will be both predetermined and spontaneous uprisings at St Joe’s, and there will be simultaneous intifadas coordinated inside the world’s most prominent psychiatric institutions. In all three arenas, our revolution will detonate simultaneously and worldwide!”

    “Then the revolution, or shall we refer to it as The Rev? At any rate, under its own steam, the movement will spread to other sanatoriums like pollen does. In a vigorous wind. To neighbouring towns. All insurgents bound by sheer conviction to The Rev. To a common list of demands. Rights refrained, again and again, by ambassadors representing the revolution. And in these aforementioned, simultaneous, pre-plotted intifadas, guerrilla patients will take fellow guerrilla patients, hostage, consensually of course. Both hostage and hostage-taker will shadow each other into dual defense from our enemy. And, the revolutionaries, from Port-Au-Prince to Toronto, will be disciplined to shoot our enemies: security guards, soldiers, and officers. Below the waist.”

    “My cugino, Armando, a made guy who lives in Palermo, will arm our rebels. And may very well agree to advance us, in solidarity, whatever we need. See, he’s been hospitalized. Numerous times. For schizophrenia. He can fathom our marginalization.”

    “So you’re half-Italian. On your mother’s side, I’m assuming?”

    “Yes,” Avi replied. “Listen, Carl…”

    “It’s Carlo.”

    “Carlo, please. Don’t interrupt my precarious stream of consciousness. It’s the sole palisade between me and that trauma-induced platoon following me even as we speak.”

    “I’m so sorry, Avi. Forgive me.”

    Avi nodded his head, even smiling slightly.  It had been a relatively long respite since he’d fallen into a fugue.

    “I can’t wait to blow up the bubble rooms! To terrify the snakes of The System. Homicidal doctors signing off on premature discharges. Knowing full well they’ll end their lives thereafter! Rapist nurses fondling their way out of the night-room rounds. All of whom we will kidnap and try in a court presided over by psychotics!

    Our ransom for the prisoners will be a list of demands, including but not limited to:

    1) Swift implementation of a law worded as follows: That to be granted a psychiatric license, doctors must score in the top percentile on a standardized emotional intelligence test.

    2) Food service and accomodation to be modernized and upgraded so as to adhere to hospitality standards.

    3) Establishment of a fund dedicated to the disbursal of victim reparations, and immediate handover of similar criminals currently working under the evil administration, regardless of rank.

    4) Definitive discharges for select patients, such as political prisoners, for example.

    5) Smoking priviliges and designated areas for doing so to be reinstated.

    6) Redistribution of psychiatric authority, via the Vortex Accords initiated by me last summer.

    7) Pass executive orders composed by me on my bus ride to Montreal last year.

    “To be elaborated. Just so long as that list of demands can wrap my soul’s wide wound, like a bandage, the way forward seems somewhat possible. I’ll not, like a mummy, lie petrified inside the tomb that is my basement bedroom. If even a few of the uprisings succeed, the world would suddenly know the patients’ collective power, now wouldn’t they? Who would ever fuck with us again, if we executed what I’ve just proposed? Yes, us. Do you think I cannot see that you are struggling with your own psychosis? Who would still suppose the diagnosed insane are wholly powerless? We will assume our equality, which is the only way we can truly receive it. And the world, even the blasted, double-edged mass media, will finally see that we will no longer tolerate being abused, raped, and used by our own so-called ‘caretakers.” Shamed, despite the fact that it is we who open the doors of invention for humanity.”

    One glance at Avi’s eyes, twinkling as they were with zeal, and I saw his essential place in the universe.

    “I see a Million Man March of the mad!” Avi exclaimed. “And, as for the aforementioned Patient’s Revolution, I will recruit guerrilla-patients from the many online psych ward whisper networks. Plus, I’ll recruit my friends from Mad Pride, who know it is impossible for a person to be proud of one’s self, when not only openly, directly and indirectly, being discriminated against, but also scorned, mocked, hated, abused, mistrusted, beaten, and murdered.”

    Avi jolted, his mind seemingly struck by sheet lightning of afflatus, which is better than being struck by the vipers of his traumas. Again, he shook off the fog that dogged him to refocus anew.

    “You see, Carlo, not only will the psych world be faced with the patient’s revolution, but so will anyone outside the system. Who treats us as a subspecies. Who thinks we are not worth as much as the so-called sane. And that means a whole lot of motherfucking people. And they will answer to us. To the insurgents.

    “Reports of rape, assault, degradation, and other forms of ill treatment occurring in the Sanatorium never reach the minds of the masses. More and more mental health activists are therefore going underground. Radicalizing into revolutionaries. It is time for the Patients’ Revolution.”

    “I’ll seek out like-minded patients. O Carlo! O Patients! Hear my voice! We must leap from our closets, lest too many of us die by our own world-guided hand, to explode upon the world that jeers us! Like, who really cares about patient rights and their little lives? How many

    souls are suffering downtown in the streets, alleys, and alcoves; poor, dilapidated, ‘vile bodies’ for whom no one weeps.”

    “And so, now with intifada’s force, at last, at last, at last, the ‘Ship of fools,’ will dock at the Bay of Honour and Equality. At last, at last, at last, the ‘ship of fools,’ captained by revolving ‘crazies,’ will barge between the large and empty yachts of the fogless harbour, to crash ashore this society that has exiled us. At last, at last, at last, this listing and trimming of the ship will end and, for the first time, we will stand stable upon sturdy earth. This will be our Santa Clara!”

    “The hospital will soon be ours! A guerrilla unit of eighty patients! The world will know the patients’ powers! Viva la revolución de los pacientes!” Avi yawped, so the whole parkette could hear, though no one, besides us, was there. “Viva-a-a-a-a!” Avi bellowed, the echo of his voice blasting beyond the boundaries of the parkette.”

    Remember, you promised never to repeat anything I’ve said. Will you keep your promise?”

    “I will keep my promise because none of this can ever happen.”

    “What the hell are you saying, on?”

    “Don’t you see? If you do what you have planned, you will only FURTHER the divide, the apartheid, between those presumed sane and those diagnosed insane.  Avi, you will sow hatred in the hearts of the “Insane,” and shame in the minds of the “sane”.  Your idea is an understandable but regrettable one.”

    “Oh really? Well what the fuck are you going to do about it, Carlo?”

    “I want you to make a deal with me. A pact.”

    “What the fuck are you talking about?”

    “We are going to make a deal.”

    “A deal?”

    “Yeah. Look, I’ll, I’ll…“

    “You’ll?”

    “Ari, I’ll take away your illness if you promise not to carry out the Patients’ Revolution.”

    “What?” asked an almost ferocious Avi.

    Taking great strides, he headed for the gates of the parkette. That is until I caught up to him, and stopped Avi from leaving. I convinced him to return within the parkette, where we had been talking, among the still spiraling lilies.

    “Please explain to me what the hell you mean by proposing this pact. Like, what the fuck are you talking about, Son?”

    I sighed.

    “Listen, Avi. Inside that eerie bedlam by the bluffs, you could clean that place with all its tears, I struggle to fathom who I am. Rest assured, I’m going somewhere. So, anyway, check this out. I was born on Christmas Day, my mother on the Summer Solstice.  My Father was born on an Easter Sunday morning.  My father’s name, numerically, equals 137; my mother’s name, numerically, equals 137. I was raised on San Francisco Avenue, in the San neighbourhood, near the West Mountain Brow, where the streets are named after saints. The 33 Sanatorium bus still winds through these streets. It can be heard from my childhood home, at number 1101.”

    “Throughout my life, countless people have testified that I either; saved their souls, their minds, or their corporeal lives. In my boyhood, I endured a connective tissue disorder that ensured the onset of Pectus Excavatum, which means the malformation of cartilages, near my sternum. By age thirteen, this condition eventuated the grotesque caving in of my chest. An audible gasping for each breath deepened with every passing day. Gradationally, I was asphyxiating.

    And this body’s hideousness couldn’t have been more excruciating to my mind. Dashing what was left of my self-image, it spent my self-worth. To such an extent, that since I nearly never spoke, my nickname in high school became ‘The Mute.’”

    “For five years, not once did I smile, dragging myself through the days like a half blind horse too old to be drawing anything but air. At age eighteen, I underwent The Nuss Procedure. That being an experimental operation, to possibly truss the excavatum into convexity. A one-foot-long, one-inch-thick, bowed steel bar, was forced through my right side, then inside my pulmonary cavity, converting asphyxiation to easy breathing, concavity to convexity, disfiguration to beauty. After a week of recovery, I was released from the hospital just in time to celebrate my nineteenth birthday. Where my right side was penetrated, the Nuss Procedure left a 3-inch-scar. One still very visible.”

    Raising the hem of my shirt, I showed Avi the scar on my side.

    “Earlier this year I heard what identified itself as being ‘The Voice of the Father from the Three Personned God.’ He said…Well, what he said was this; that I would be henceforth transmuting into a secret being, whose identity I too, alas, would not know until my absolute transfiguration. Sublime and vivacious, this voice disclosed that I’d soon be in the hospital healing patients. It said that seraphim would shield me from demons. That soon, as I should be, I’d sermonize to the patients unfettered. And that I’d never have to worry about corporeal repercussions for voicing the Truth. For voicing His Vision. My family hospitalized me when I insisted this had been a direct correspondence with God.”

    On this note, I paused, taking a couple of breaths.

    “It was actually the morning of that massive storm, and just after one of my hour-long sermons, that the coda of The Voice was transmitted through me to the patients. We took shelter from the elements beneath a red-roofed smoking pavilion. It had been downpouring from tenebrous clouds for an hour and a half. Amid seemingly inexhaustible lightning which struck its riled electric vipers in such a way as to block our path. In these conditions we, who were out on passes, were waiting for the wind-whipped rain to cease, so that we could return to our respective wards.”

    “Which is when we were startled to see two demoniacs burst upon us, in blurs of wide spasmodic movements preternaturally generated by the notable force of the Devil. Screaming immeasurably discordant baritones, the rabid youths raged and rived the restless crowd, both asserting their Latin as petrifying as it was precise. At last, they alighted on the pavilion’s long picnic table. Forthwith, I shot toward the two youths, each foaming and seizing till apparently exhausted from the merciless exertion perpetuated by the power of the Devil himself.”

    “Firm, but calm, I lay my left hand on the one youth’s head, and my right hand on the other. O Satan, in the name of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of us all, and the Son of the Living God, flee from these two boys at once! Flee from these two boys at once! Flee from these two boys at once! I tore my crucifix from my neck then, and with the force of the Holy Spirit inside me, pressed it into each of their chests, imprinting it over their hearts.”

    “Just then, two shower-weary mountain vultures perched upon a nearby statue of some lofty lobotomist from the early 20th Century. At once, I cast, like two eternally long shadows, both demons, into the mountain vultures. The scavengers gyred higher and higher before zigzagging away to vanish over the cliff.”

    “However, overtaken by a whirlwind of rain, the gyre reunited in a dance puppeteered by ever greater gales, till both mountain vultures were at last, simultaneously slammed headlong into the cliff’s vertiginous summit. Lingering in the moments left of their lives, their miserable necks and bones were as blasted and shattered as is humankind.”

    “The two youths lay exhausted and unconscious on the picnic table. Lightning still struck everywhere around our pavilion. Even striking the stone body of the lobotomist. The lampposts were so tipped, it was as if  we were starring in an early expressionist movie. And whirlwinds whisked uprooted saplings heavenward, only to drop them back to the earth. Alas, the patients were ripped about, one to unconsciousness. A wind whipped woman wearing white screamed, ‘Make it stop!’”

    “That’s when, driven by the Holy Spirit, I leapt out into the gales, the rain and all that lightning, to lift my arms like a ladder, into the chaos of a spewing sky. O Lord in Heaven, hear this prayer. Please Dear God, put to death this pitiless storm! And within 3 minutes, the colossal storm concluded. Lightning lessened, gale calmed to wind and in the end, became but a breeze.”

    “Some of the patients panted, while others sprinted from the pavilion to the Sanatorium doors. Staggered as they were, I shadowed the patients swiftly striding ahead for what took about thirty seconds, after which we found ourselves bone dry. Only a drizzle resumed, during our dash back to the sanatorium doors. The rumour spread that I had dried a downpour, dismantled the wind, and annihilated lightning.”

    “The following day, some patients accosted me. ‘Might I heal their minds of illness? Would I lay my hands upon their heads?’ They had come to believe I possessed powers, that I was a channel, a vessel if you will, of the Lord. His mercy. And His words. ‘I will,’ was the only answer, as then I remembered what the Voice told me before my hospital admission.”

    “Laying my hands upon their heads, many reported they were healed; I was quite efficacious in exorcism, and at healing depressives and drug addicts. Some said they believed themselves healed, but only when my hands were upon them. More and more patients approached me expressing a vehement desire to be healed.”

    “I was released, readmitted, released, and readmitted again, eventually seeing a need to disremember the plausible miracles under my belt, along with deep wonderment about my identity, all of which exhausted the high spirit inside me. In a world where soulfulness is scrubbed from people like mildew, miracles are seen as absurd to all.”

    “So, on the evening of Holy Thursday Evening this year, after having wept for Christ, in particular I’d envisioned Judas’ betrayal and Jesus’ arrest, having seen Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth. My prayer to The Lord pleaded, ‘I do not know who or what I am. Can you please tell me? Give me a clear sign, even though my transfiguration is incomplete? After praying, I fell asleep.And on Good Friday I awoke to a piercing pain in my right side. It was coming from the place where the Nuss Procedure was performed. Where I still have the scar.”

    “As if I’d been stabbed, the throb in my right side was so severe, that I screamed out to the patients who slept in my room, amid miserable throes. Via electro-magnetic vibrations, a seraphim paid me a visit, to stress that by Monday Morning, my stigmata would fade and disappear. At which time the piercing in my side ceased.”

    “Avi, isn’t it true that you have been less ‘in and out,’ and more focused, than you were when we met at the café?”

    He didn’t respond. Instead, he started whistling Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor with his eyes closed, his face not tense as it was when we were in the café.

    “I believe you, Carlo. And yes, I have been more present and more focused than when we met at the café. What’s happening?”

    “Listen, together you and I will start the Psychiatric Reformation, and apart, will never resort to revolution. Listen, you are slowly healing.  But this will speed up the process.”

    “I lay my cupped hands on Avi’s head, then prayed: “O Jesus of Nazareth! O my Redeemer! O Prince of Peace! O violet eyelight-beamer! I feel your sea-sky horizoned lips softly kiss my spirit! O Almighty Taskmaster, please whisper this away. Sing Avi’s madness to death. Tame his traumas until they die in anonymity as do the loneliest of winds at sea. As do the holiest of saints. As do those white and black Popes of the Vatican, reflected like a solar eclipse inside a yellow puddle of urine.  O Lord, I’d die for you as you have for me, so please. Please free this beauteous man, Avi Lyon Baxter. Free him from his tormenting traumas, O free him of his tormenting illness.  Please, please heal him.”

    I removed my hands from Avi’s head. Avi threw himself onto the grass where in the diaphanous dew, he wept. For a moment which then passed, he knelt and his head bowed.”

    “Why are you crying, Avi?” I finally asked.

    “I’m healed,” he whispered.

    Then, suddenly, he jolted to his feet as though amid a street fight for his life.

    “I’m healed! I’m healed, do you hear me, Bello!” he blasted, “I don’t hear voices anymore! The only voice outside me that I hear is my own echo, and the only voice inside me that I hear is my own! Carlo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o Di-i-i-i-i-i-i Car-r-r-r-r-a! No, no wait! Santo-o-o-o-o-o-o-! Santo Carlo Di Carra! I like the sound of that!” Avi smiled widely in the warm wind.

    ***

    CooOOoo-woo-woo-woooo! CooOOoo-woo-woo-woooo! call the mourning doves. Kneeling at Mamma’s grave, and before arranging the flowers, first I spread the babies’ breath I bought to festoon her tombstone. Over the past year, I’ve gotten attached to the cemetery’s resident doves. Their call is a sound that soothes my soul. I coo right along with them and in doing so, fail to fight back the fierce tears flowing. Droplets that are falling down. All over those brand-new blue roses.

    ***

    Like a couturier’s thread through the eye of a needle, I entered the revolving doors of the Sanatorium. High on it’s hill, I was out on our ward’s terrace, when I painted a watercolour called “One Blue Rose.” I posted a high pixel photograph of the $1,500 dollar painting, to the website of an online art gallery. It wasn’t five minutes before I received a notice on my phone, that a former buyer of mine had purchased the piece.

    Mamma relished a rose of any colour. But blue roses most of all. Because they were her mother’s favourite. Grandma Maria adored blue roses because she was an amateur inventor. In her mind, blue roses were humanity’s most ravishing invention.

    Mamma died today, last year, at this very minute.  Through the diamond patterned bars of the terrace cage, I pray to her and sob. My head droops downward like the bough of a Weeping Willow. One that has endured an ice storm.

  • Fleeing Father

    If stylistically Francesca Banciu’s latest novel translated into English Fleeing Father (Vatherflucht) is a much simpler construct than her previous incarnation, Mother’s Day – Song of a Sad Mother, it is written in the same inimitable prose, rendered beautifully by Banciu’s publisher, Catharine Nicely with Elena Mancini as translator.

    I was immediately reminded, on reading the first few pages, of Ernest Hemingway’s dictum ‘write just one true sentence’ multiplied by every passing line. A rule that is simple in its apparent ruling, but whose practical implications are wrought with sinister complexity.

    You’re worthless, nothing will ever come of you. And
    no one in this world will ever marry you. Father said
    to motivate me.

    The staccato punch of the lines hits the reader as ceaselessly as I imagine Carmen-Francesca Banciu punching the keys of her typewriter-computer. The fact that all quotation marks have been jettisoned is a wonderfully seamless way of incorporating the almost casually brutality of the father’s remarks into his ten-year-old daughter’s worldview.

    It is matter of fact, a ‘this is how it is’ Hemingwayesque, simple complexity which renders the text, or rather the reality that is portrayed in the text, into a highly ambivalent and stylistic reading, which personally I find extremely refreshing.

    A kind of brutal clarity emerges akin to the visual sumptuousness of Stanley Kubrick’s visual narrative. I suppose the reason for such taut precision is the uncluttered narrative technique of the writer; the absence of sub-clauses.

    Banciu is a kind of Anti-Proust in this respect, which is curious as I happen to be a huge fan of the Parisian narrator and veritable King of complex sentence structure. But, surely this is where form fuses equally with content. Banciu is not describing the fin de siècle opulence of decadent Paris, but rather the almost spartan livelihoods of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Socialist Republic of Romania which she grew up in. So, the prose is just as spartan. Brutal.

    Ironically, as a reader who happened to grow up during the 1980s, and so can remember quite clearly the revolution and eventual fall of the Dictator, his bloody corpse appearing to me in black and white splashed across the front page of Liberation in miniature while the hawklike head of Samuel Beckett took up the majority of the page (his death having been announced and deemed more important that day in his native Paris), I see parallels with the misery of my own upbringing in the cold and extremely repressive Republic of Ireland during that same period, and so can empathise enormously with Banciu.

    The almost reflexive callousness is all too familiar. There is a sexual assault, for example, merely mentioned in passing already five pages into the novel. Domestic violence too, in the form of corporal punishment inflicted upon children, as was standard practice of the time. Spare the rod, and all that.

    So, Banciu’s childhood world will be a very familiar one to anyone reading the novel in Ireland who grew up during the eighties, which is a savage indictment in itself of the collective misery which was inflicted on a whole generation here, not to mention people growing up in socialist Romania.

    So, the Socialist Republic of Romania and Catholic Republic of Ireland, despite the superficial difference in ideologies, held a lot in common.

    One of the central ideas that conjoin both regimes, I couldn’t help noticing while reading Fleeing Father, was the obsession with maintaining appearances on the parts of the protagonist’s parents, and how parents who bought into both regimes were willing to sacrifice the lives of their children in order to maintain the appearance of social order.

    This is the most frightening thing about all of Banciu’s fiction, how mothers and fathers will put the happiness and well-being of their own children at the service of the status quo. I saw the very same subservience as a child growing up in the Irish Republic, and while the outward trappings of a police state, constantly surveying on the citizens, may have had a very different modus operandi – the Church filling in for the network of informers which supplied the state police in Romania with information on ‘undesirables’ – what were the mass confessionals which we grew up with as children but a very elaborate way of keeping us in line, even worse, when you think of it as we were programmed, and from a very young age, to inform on ourselves!

    All the familiar trappings of patriarchy are here. The subservient mother, at the service of both state and husband. Banciu’s father, as in her novel, was high up in the party and an avid believer in the subservience of the individual for the betterment of the state.

    As cognizant as Father wanted to be, he’d never
    learned Russian. Nor any other foreign language for
    that matter. It meant he was an anti-talent, unlike my mother.

    How I found reading this all too familiar. The fundamental ignorance of the man, the belittling nature of his ways to anything that was foreign to him. Governed by paranoia and fear.

    But mother wore high heels that emphasized her gorgeous
    Legs. Whether it had been her will or not. Who knows.
    Father loved it in any case. And that’s also how she was buried.

    Again, the casual way of effacement, Banciu’s staccato sentences dispatch characters with the same casual and disdainful force as the state system and apparatus that kept the Romanian people in check. Like the callous Church that lied to so many here, who suffered all kinds of abuse at the hands of so many priests, and teachers, politicians, and other so- called pillars of society that tried to protect and hide them.

    Of course, Carmen- Francesca Banciu rebelled against them all, and ran away to Berlin. Just as I went to Paris. Such a repressive upbringing fuels your creativity for life. Of course, the ideological systems change, just as the means of surveillance do, but the inherent nature to control the populace is still the same, and as long as there are people who rebel books like Fleeing Father will continue to be written. Would that they were all written as well and clearly, and well – thought out though!

    Vaterflucht (Flight from Father), 1998 by Francesca Banciu (translated from the German by Elena Mancini) 309 pages.