Each witch hunt is a tribute act to the last.
There is always a committee of three.
The gravity in the room is such
they struggle to manoeuvre
the enormity of their serious
faces in the door.
Except in the TV version,
there is hardly ever a microphone.
Though they will usually give you
a glass of water and, if you ask,
tea in a slightly chipped cup.
The better quality of witch hunt
will provide you with a plate
of sandwiches which, these days,
would likely include
coeliac and vegan options.
One member of the panel interviewing you
is always a man with a shaky voice
who obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing.
His wife thinks he’s at the garden centre.
Another is a woman trying
on a posh accent for size
who looks like she’s dreaming
of killing you
in some way that would give her
special pleasure.
It is written,
somewhere deeper than law,
that no such committee
shall ever be constituted
unless it contains
at least one ex-hippy.
There is always the moment
when a pile of typed pages emerge
from an already opened envelope,
and one of them asks you: how, then, do you explain this?
And the three of them sit there,
pretending it’s a real question.
And you realise this committee is history
paying you the huge compliment
of making you (and people like you)
the only item on the agenda;
that in asking you about what you said,
did, or typed on the mentioned dates,
they reveal themselves
like the black tree at the bottom of the garden
that only shows its true self in winter.
By the time I got to Lenny’s place he was pacing up and down out front; his unusually frantic movement a poor advertisement for the stuff he was peddling; the stuff I was there to collect. He had his navy blue Boy Scout shorts on with a sleeveless t-shirt that allowed tanned biceps to stick out. His sparklingly clean teeth screamed ‘fake’, and his slightly balding black hair was gelled back so he could just as easily pass as a mafia boss as a guy working in hotel estates maintenance with me. When he walked his feet stood out ever so slightly, pointing to the left and to the right. For some reason my lateness, by perhaps ten minutes at most (deemed pretty acceptable where I was from), was stressing Lenny out beyond what I would consider normal. He really didn’t want to be considered a drug dealer. The house that he shared with his partner was at the end of a long row of typical island dwellings, two story detached wooden houses inclusive of a big porch out front; where the inhabitants could sit and relax in the evenings. A traditionally wooden white garden fence was just beyond the porch, decorative more than functional. A section of scorched grass lay underneath the fence, peppered by spurts of water from a nearby sprinkler. I strolled down around the corner to the house. Lenny slipped over, pushed his hand through his hair and said:
‘Where in Hell’s name were you? You should have been here ten minutes ago.’
There was sweat dripping from my forehead – the August so oppressive even in such close proximity to the sea – I exuded near monuments of it. That whole morning had been spent slouching from one end of the island to the next on various errands, the sweat from my bones burning in the summer sun. Taken aback by Lenny, I just replied,
‘I was hitchhiking over. Lifts were slow today. I didn’t think you’d sweat it.’
I was attempting to calm the air. But Lenny was still pacing up and down the path, the frantic movement that confronted me only slowly beginning to ease. He was chewing gum intently, biting into his mouth like crazy, before finally slowing down. He then walked around to the garage at the side of the house, swung the door open and ushered me in; slowly closing the garage door so that a bright sun gave way to a fully darkened room. Bits of storage stood out behind a small ford coupe car on which a number of boxes were left. The car had put been away for summer. Lenny grabbed a box from one of the top shelves and carried it down. He lifted a bunch of old newspapers that had become browned around the edges and left them on the ground beside the car. He mooched around with these for a few minutes, before taking out a small translucent bag, filled with dark green bundles of grassy textures. A waft of marijuana filled the room. He opened up the bag and took out a sticky bud. ‘Feel the stickiness on that one Dara,’ he said; the tension that had resided now flittering away in the stuffy garage air. Lenny’s disposition changed when the black bud was held up to his nose. ‘Look at the tentacles, he said ‘little beauties. Real Chappaquiddick Green.’
I took the bud and held it up to my nose, the little black squidgy form like a spider out of which red tentacles protruded towards me. The plant was so exquisitely tender and beautiful it seemed – at once – cruel to have to actually smoke it; its poignant odour so carefully organic while – at the same time – intrinsically seductive. ‘Wow, that’s lovely,’ I said to Lenny as he leant back, a horticulturalist’s gleaning grin making its way across his face like a Cheshire cat. I could see that my comment brought instant gratification; a certain pride in having procured this planted product bursting through his smile. Again, his hand pushed back through his gelled balding hair, and his teeth – no doubt false – glistened like they were commissioned for a new Colgate ad. I decided, given the degree of satisfaction he was receiving from holding up his product, to massage his ego even more. ‘So, you’re one of the main growers behind Chappaquiddick Green, number seven in The High Times list of top ten variants US weed? I’m impressed.’ Lenny has been telling me all summer about the plant he grew every year on the small island of Chappaquidick. He told me he just sprinkled the seed in an area of wild overgrowth only to return sporadically to water it throughout the summer months, when the drought hit. He harvested his plant in the final weeks of July. The island, whatever the geographic specificity, was particularly fertile, unearthing a potent strain of weed known far and wide across the United States. Chap green, he called it. I gave him fifty bucks in exchange for the luxurious product.
I was handing over the dough when Lenny pulled back the bag and reverted momentarily to his earlier frantic self. Jitteriness returned; the momentary calming of mood offset by the powerful odour of the product. This Irish kid he was selling his dope to could end up putting it in whiskey, getting so fucked up on it he’d need ferrying to hospital on the Cape. How could he be sure the kid wouldn’t smoke himself into such a slumber the cops would be called and the trail would make its way back to Lenny? ‘Lenny, relax,’ I said, trying to calm his nerves, ‘I’ll whack it into a bong and avoid any cookies, or any of that shit. You don’t have to worry. I’ve smoked a lot.’ But it didn’t seem to work. He remained beyond edgy. He started pacing around the garage again, banging into boxes, and knocking over old discarded items. ‘What the fuck was he giving me? Mango juice shit,’ I thought to myself glancing at my watch, wondering about my schedule for the rest of the day (meet Don, get home, get bombed, meet Sarah, get home again, get bombed again). I didn’t have time to calm the dude down; whatever the reason for his overly zealous jitteriness. ‘Calm the fuck down Lenny. I’m meeting my sister’s friend for a Chinese. My friend can’t get off work. She’s coming from Boston for a night to see her brother. We’ll eat and grab a beer. I’ll smoke a joint, play some pool. Nothing too far off the charts.’ It worked. He looked at me, and seemed, for a moment, properly relieved. ‘Ok, ok, man’ he then replied, moving back to his Lenny-is-a-bit-chilled gear, and then confirming that my attempts to assuage his many-years-smoking-weed induced paranoia seemed to work.
I worked with Lenny and his boss Sandy in the Harbour View Hotel in the village of Edgarstown that summer, doing maintenance around the estate. I got some standard Mexican weed off Lenny after a few weeks into the job. Lenny had no problem supplying the commercial Mexican stuff. But he kept waxing lyrical about the stuff coming down the line: the real stuff. Once that fancy stuffy arrived, so too did his paranoiac alter-ego, mistrustful of the same Irish kid he had worked with all that summer. I drifted away from his garage that day excited by the potential thrashing to be had from the infamous Chappaquiddick. I had a full schedule ahead. I had to get back to meet Don, give him some of the green, and find out where to meet his sister. Then I had to make my way back to the house, have a shower, get changed, returning again to Oaks Bluff to meet Sarah, show her around a bit, before making it back home. I had to be up early for work the following morning, so the level of blastedness had to remain low. I hitchhiked back from Lenny’s place, wandered up the main street of Oaks Bluff to drop off some stash to Don. He was dressed in his geeky Subway gear when he came out to meet me. I told him Lenny was more edgy than normal when making the pick up so he should try not to overdo getting heavily baked at work; who knows what might happen? He just replied ‘Jerry’s Dead.’ A whole street of kids standing outside shops had given a carnivalesque atmosphere to the village’s activities. The summer was really starting to kick off, and humidity levels were rising. ‘Jerry’s Dead’, what the fuck is he talking about? I thought before asking to elaborate.
‘Jerry who?’ I asked.
‘Jerry Garcia, one of The Grateful Dead. They’re a band, apparently.’
‘Never heard of him or them,’ I said, realising that there was more to it than a rockstar dying and that Don was somewhat perturbed.
‘You wouldn’t believe it man. Jamie and Shaun rang in to say they were out for a week. That depressed this dude is dead. It’s JFK levels of impact. I’m not shitting you.’
‘A week? What the fuck?’
‘Yea. It’s like their fucking mother died. Left in the dock. I’m practically on my own here.’
‘This Garcia dude. Some kind of Jesus figure or what? A whole week because he died?’
‘Yeah. Weird. Apparently, they’ve been deadheads for years…Some fan cult thing. Can you make sure to meet Sarah tonight? And I’ll see you tomorrow? Don’t forget?’
‘No problem, man. It’s all on the itinerary.’
I handed a nugget of Chad G from the bag Lenny had given me earlier, and began to make my way back along the country roads to the trailer park where we were staying, the stultifying humidity causing spots of sweat to burst into lathers of salt; white lines marking the blue t-shirt I was wearing that day. I took off up through the country roads, up through the part of the island where workers and all year-round inhabitants lived. Beyond the huge, ostentatious mansions, the billionaire estates, was the other part; the part of the island where those who had given their life to the island lived. Once beyond the sumptuous coastline, making your way into the inner beast of the vineyard, a distinctive odour washed over you; the smell of the large population of skunks that had become endemic on the island. When I got to the trailer-house I had a quick shower, and noticing no one was around, got the first bong of the day in order. I pulled the curtains, whipped my top off, and ploughed into the big bottle of murky smoke that hovered in the bottle as the water spilled out from the sides. Then, watching the water trickle out, the smoke hovered like a volcano about to erupt. The sweet smell of sumptuous marijuana filled the room. As I stood watching in my underpants, the smoke filtered out across the room like a genie freed from a bottle; floating up into air, sun rays cutting through it as little patterns of smoke dissipated in the light. The hit was inhaled deep into my lungs, the smoke soothing my senses.
And then nothing happened. I sat on the bed, feet sticking out, bong in hand, sweat dripping down from my hair onto a near naked body. ‘Lenny, talking shit, as usual,’ I thought to myself, plucking a significant portion of the black bud with the sticky red tentacles and readying it for another hit of the bong. Five or possibly ten minutes passed, most of it spent cursing Lenny for bigging up the product to such dizzying heights. I lay back on the bed, head resting against the wall, angry that someone had duped me who I had come to regard as a friend. ‘Fuck you Lenny,’ I thought again to myself, ‘you’ve stung me for half my wages for this powerdust.’ In it went again, folded neatly into the foil wrapped around the bottle neck, the water beginning to gush out again from the bucket, smoke hovering around the depleting watermark before – in one big breath – I sucked deep it into my lungs. Coughing and spluttering, I pushed the smoke out into the stuffy humid air. Again, there was nothing of significance. I waited. I waited more. And still, nothing of significance came to pass.
‘Fuck him,’ was the lurid expression of choice to curse my newly perceived conman workmate, as I dressed myself at the speed of Superman, checked my wallet for cash, and took to the road. It was a about a twenty-minute walk to Oaks Bluff where I would meet Sarah, take her out for a Chinese and a beer afterwards. I was hoping the bong hits would relinquish any residual social unease, so that the evening would flow. Tasked with entertaining my friend’s sister, a professional and holidaying banker, I need to be suitably caned for the occasion; to lighten the mood accordingly. Instead, I was deliberating on the non-effect of the previously purchased weed. It wasn’t working. I was down half a week’s work on a fucking placebo. I got to the Chinese, met Sarah and we started talking incessantly about the island. Then, as I was about to order noodles or something to that effect, I took a blow full blast to the back of my head from some imaginary psychedelic tennis racket, such was the speed which all sense of reason and normality evaporated from my reckoning. ‘It just creeps up on you, and then boomp’ were words trickling out from my increasingly fractured consciousness, a brain with which it was more and more difficult to maintain any rational contact. I stood up, dizzy and lacking in motion control, stuttering in Sarah’s direction ‘back in a sec.’ It was probably forty minutes since I had wandered skeptically from my digs, cursing Lenny for the low-grade product he passed off as high grade. Rushing out the door of the restaurant, I began cursing him for precisely the opposite reason: not informing me of the potency of the product. I began to see colour vibrations everywhere, waxed out collages on vineyard specific shop designs.
Beside the harbour where ferries pull in there was a restaurant I worked in, one that specialised in ripping off tourists before returning to the mainland. It sat beside a nicely engineered boardwalk; a buffer zone between Martha’s Vineyard and the Cape. Leaving the restaurant in a mess, I looked to dip my head in the seawater beside the restaurant; a last gasp attempt to push back the slow unraveling of my brain. There was no way I could conduct a civil conversation with Sarah, serious intake of food or not. The immersion of head in water, a head that seemed to be slowly severing from its body, was offered as the perceived panacea to newly ingrained paranoia.
I arrived as a mass of energy, stumbling from the street where the restaurant was situated, sound and vision forming symphony of its own accord, to the sea. In it went. The water ebbed and flowed, trinkets of foam pushing up from the sea onto the lathered wood of the boardwalk. Past, present and future were no longer distinctly discernible as moments giving rise to others, but one long durational flow. I lay down on the boardwalk, my hands withholding my body mass from slipping into the water. In it went again; immersed in the cold saltiness of the water. Out it came. In it went again; before the rush of the marijuana induced caning slowly subsided. But not gone.
Not gone. Instead, it mellowed to a manageable state, defined by the slightly less crazy universe my head emerged back into. Time became a lovely fuzzy concept. Brain fog gave way to a sudden appreciation of my surroundings: the beautiful sunset in the distance, the sound of families nattering to one other; holiday time emerging in its essence. Newly self-baptized, I stumbled back towards the restaurant, ringing the water from my shortly cropped hair; a hardly noticeable after effect of the immersion. Sarah’s laugh made for a mutual laugh, as the night began with noodles and chat.
We finished the Chinese with some sort of weird oriental ice cream and then made our way to a pool bar on the main street, where – in typically American fashion – we shot pool. We ordered a tray of bottles of Bud, before a feeling of breezy elation carried me through the two or more hours we spent there. Like a living replica of the Paul Newman hustler in The Color of Money, every shot I hit seemed to hit its target. The earlier discombobulating unease surrendered to merry exultation. I moved around the room with a swagger, the exuberant array of colours generated from the lighting that fell on the red-carpeted pool tables, giving an intense aura to the balls that lay upon on it. By the time we said goodbye, Sarah still brushing off the final traces of jetlag, the sun was setting outside, and the sea was calm. The boats moored at the harbour were lying motionless, a pink afterglow over the setting sun making for a serenely painterly affect. I sat at the edge of the seashore, and smoked a one-skinner joint of pure Chap Green. Darkness came in in a blanket of incursions; my head pushed back upon the wooden boardwalk as I imagined hugging roguish Lenny; a person I had since given his VIP status; most important work colleague in the world.
I still had to get home: the morning promised a wholly different experience cleaning up recently let condominiums. My second job was usually undertaken in the throes of a mind-numbing hangover, brought on by the reliably miserable quality of bar tap beer. The weed was proving itself to be all things Lenny had promised: slowing time down so that my presence alone seemed to sync seamlessly with the island’s inchoate rhythms. Once I said goodbye to Sarah, a moon began to shine upon me; ushering in all sorts of strange prisms; its rays no longer extraneous to nature’s form but part of a mysterious essence; the universe clicking into being as a monolithic life force. It was a force slowly propelling me back towards the trailer where I left the main stash of luscious Chad, a piece of which was nestled in my pocket. Darkness slowly introduced itself, and the trees that line the road reached out to say hello. I moved back and forward across the road with trucks steaming past, lights momentarily blinding me before pushing off into the night. Dogs barked from the back of trucks, echoing like drum beats from an evolving consciousness. I passed through the ever-changing shadows; the smell of the unseen community of skunks one of the island’s unyielding mysteries. I was about to skip over to the other side of the road when a long, elongated Cadillac came around the corner, driving at the speed of a casual cyclist, before brushing up towards me. Once lit up by the moon, I could see the spray-painted gold surface of the old, yet well-kept automobile, flowers decorating its surface along with a load of signatures written with permanent coloured markers. The Caddy had been custom designed, like some trace of a forbidden past; parsed with an accumulation of markings of a once forgotten land. I struggled to adjust my eyesight to the newly arrived vehicle, struggled to account for an intrusion of immense colour upon the dusty island road. Trees shepherding the walker from swirling Atlantic winds cast shadows all around. A man resembling Arthur Lee from the sixties psychedelic band Love, hair banded in the same manner, smiled up at me from the driving seat, before declaring – punctuating the slow drone of crickets nestled invisibly somewhere in the roadside ditch – ‘Ok, brother. Jerry’s Dead.’ I stopped in my tracks, the spoken words echoing some earlier moment that day – travelling from a past that existed only as memories rolling along the surface of a disaffected consciousness. ‘Jerry’s what?’ I said, trying not to attract undue attention in response.
‘Jerry’s Dead,’ he replied again, the Caddy glistening in the heavy moonlight. A big flower was painted on the gold-sprayed bonnet, under which the words ‘The Bad Cat’ were lightly scrawled. My eyes squinted to recognise the driver in profile, but as soon as I did I could see that he was the same guy tourists gathered around on sunny days, when he drove his Caddy slowly through the island villages. Throngs of tourists would gather around his car, looking to make out the myriad of famous signatures that adorned its sides and rear. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Robert de Niro, James Taylor and Carly Simon, Spike Lee, were just a few of the famous autographs that people spoke about as they walked around the Bad Cat’s Caddy. Every time I had tried to get near, tried to nestle up beside the fawned over Caddy, I was usually brushed aside by over eager tourists. ‘Rick, aka The Bad Cat’ he said to me, one hands lying over the side of the car. Before I could get my bearings, light piercing my vision, I heard the words ‘hop in.’ I pushed my body over the side of the car, as we journeyed into the night. ‘Jerry’s Dead’ the Bad Cat said again, words to which I muttered some episodic sense of affirmation, before passing through the island’s belly like surfers cutting into the sea.
Suddenly, the Bad Cat, who was by then smoking a joint he quickly passed back to me in the rear, took a turn down a small road where a white-sanded beach lay empty in the sullen moonlight, small waves trickling in upon the shore. It was a picture of exotic serenity, so unlike the tourist hotspots adjacent to the island’s main villages, most notably The Inkwell Beach in ear shot of Oaks Bluff. We swooned down upon the white fluffy sand where the wetter sand glistened in the sumptuous moonlight, the smoke from the final embers of the Cat’s joint lingering in the sea breeze before drifting off into some alternate stratosphere. Very little was said as the Caddy pulled in at the dunes. All that was felt between us was our mutual recognition of the night; an ostensible collective hymn to the legacy of a dead man. ‘What’s happening?’ was the question that first left my lips, as the Cat walked around to attached massive audio wires to the car stereo. He opened the boot and then proceeded to take out two considerably sized speakers. ‘The music of the spheres,’ he remonstrated smiling in my direction, my head fizzing as the beach at night began to open up and entice us in. I was standing in the presence of a stranger, but the pulses of time were moving to a kind of rhythm. ‘Muzak,’ I spluttered, still unsure as to how the night had taken its turn; wondering if the Cat was an hallucinogenic vista or a dream I had come upon walking home; my brain’s unfettered response to the mysterious impact of the Chad G. ‘Yeah, cool,’ I said, ‘put on some tunes.’ Then the Cat placed the two speakers on the bonnet of the Caddy, just above the painted on pink and yellow flower. He then rumbled around in the glove compartment, before producing an old battered cassette.
At that point the night began to calm. Lights began flickering on the horizon, fireflies buzzing in the moonlight sky, waves dancing along the shore. Sand bugs jigged around at our feet. The Cat blew the dust off an old cassette that he took from the glove compartment, that he then pushed above him in order to see the title. He glanced over at me and smiled, whispering the words ‘music.’ Before I got a chance to respond in any way he declared aloud ‘I’ll play you two songs before the other cats arrive.’ My mind seemed to slow to nothing, before I eventually asked ‘what other cats?’ still piecing together the prior events of the night to include the present destination. Any trace of linearity had banished, time taking the form of a continuum of moments, a seemingly never-ending present. I still struggled to respond to his statement. ‘The deadheads, who else?’ he said; fiddling with the cassette player. He then walked over to the car bonnet, before throwing a warm Pabst in my direction.
The slow silence that followed ended with music spilling out from the attached speakers like sun piercing through drawn curtains, drumming a mysterious essence into the warm summer night. A fast-paced bluegrass beat began to play as the Cat suddenly jumped up onto the bonnet of the Caddy and shouted out the words ‘Cumberland Blues.’ He started to sing along to the beat, stamping his feet to make a clanging noise on the bonnet. The last thing I expected was a rush of energy propelling me onto the sanded area in front of the Caddy. Before I knew it, the Cat was jumping liked a lunatic, singing the words ‘I can’t help you with your troubles, if you won’t help with mine.’ As his arms and legs splashed out in all different directions, he bellowed out the refrain ‘I GOTTA GET DOWN, I GOTTA GET DOWN.’ I looked over to see his whole physical demeanour transforming in an instant. He leapt up and down at rapturous speed; his whole life looking to depend on making as big a movement as possible, pushing out the words into the hazy night sky.
Soon my heels could be felt skipping to the beat with him, with each verse accompanied by the refrain ‘I GOTTA DOWN.’ A baseline arrived, making our bodies more susceptible to the pulsating rhythms of the night. The Cat jumped down on the sand again, syncing movement to the pervasive rush of a banging refrain ‘I GOTTA GET DOWN.’ As the song pushed to a close, the Cat leaned over to press stop on the stereo, before a short monologue ushered from him. ‘Now, listen sir,’ he began. My t-shirt was ripped at the side, so as to reveal red lines of sunburn. My converse runners had begun to tighten around my ankles, their sides filling up with sand. Then it suddenly dawned on me that I had hardly spoken with the Cat; that he was on some sort of night crusade; that he barely asked my name. He was staring into the night sky, over across the Atlantic, his baggy trousers accompanied only by near worn out sandals. His hands were pushed in front, his tie-dyed t-shirt a perfect match for the loose headband that was now used to keep his Afro in place. Then he spoke:
The mines man. All fuckin day. The government owned mines. You work all day. You know nothing different. And then the light. You see the light. You dig? You can’t not see it anymore. You dig? Fuck Cumberland. You’re not going down anymore. Jerry knew that man. He knew it in his heart. I gotta get down…a double fucking metaphor man. You dig. I gotta get down the mine. And I gotta get down..you know.. You know like get the fuck down…I gotta get the fuck down.
He began bopping his head up and down, waving his hands waving around like some manic preacher, spelling out the words ‘I gotta get down’ over and over again. ‘I never heard of this guy Jerry. I never heard anything about this guy before today. I only heard he died from my friend earlier,’ I shouted back, yet he was oblivious. The Cat kept shuffling around; looking so unconvinced that I had never heard of the band. The Cat simply wasn’t buying my protestations; such was the impression his body gave off of sheer and utter disbelief. I gathered myself to pluck out the ends of a joint from my pocket, before playing around with it for a few minutes and then passing it towards the Cat again. ‘Rickie’ I said, ‘he was obviously some kind of Dylan dude?’ For whatever reason, once the song ended time seemed to stagnate, with just the waves crashing against the shore a sign of the island’s intrinsically calming force. The Cat still wasn’t offering to answer my question; his mind seemingly elsewhere entirely. Raising his finger to his lips to make a ‘ssshhh’ noise, he leant back over the windscreen of the Caddy and pressed play on the stereo again. At that point, I considered running back home so as to make it to work the following morning, but I couldn’t just leave. It would be so unmannerly to go. But then a punchy base line pulsated through the speakers the Cat had placed on the sand. My body began to jerk in all directions, to a rush of harmonic vibrations. A luscious Hammond organ echoed in the night, before an electric guitar solo intervened and the refrain rang out. All I could hear was the Cat singing along to the song, bellowing out words to the effect of ‘China Cat, China Cat;’ instruments meshing into an cacophony of sonic commotion.
The instrumentation and chorus reached a near transcendent crescendo only for the sound of numerous cars on the dunes above us to interrupt the scene. Flashing lights arrived with the cars, piling along the road towards the beach where we parked. The Cat was pushing his arms up in the air, as a mass of bodies, all with similarly styled hair – all wearing black t-shirts with a skull like form just about discernible in the flittering darkness. There must have been twenty or more in the crowd of people who made their way from the number of cars that had suddenly arrived, quickly descending onto the beach and forming a crowd of people around the Caddy and the Cat. The Cat jumped onto the car’s bonnet again and screamed out ‘the Dead!!’ Like a murmuration of swallows that had descended from rooftops on a warm spring evening, a crowd of people – impossible to discern as individuals in the dark – formed a circle around the Caddy and the speakers. Once a lone voice singing out the words ‘China Cat’ in a moonlit sky became upwards of twenty people in a group that moved only in rhythms; an inchoate meshing together of people into a singular multiplicity.
‘China Cat’ was the last refrain to stick in my head as we danced until darkness was slowly swallowed by the dawn. As the sun rose over the sluggishly beating waves, my head spun off into a distant universe; the once shadowed figures who emerged from the series of cars at the side of the beach – the vast array of Deadheads as the Cat called them – suddenly emerging as individuals in a drug and booze haze. As the dial on my hand watch edged towards ‘4 am’ I made my way through a crowd of people all wearing black t-shirts with a variation of skull illustrations, perhaps grieving but joyously celebrating the life of a once great American icon. There were a number of small stalls, put together with pieces of board and collected beach pebbles, selling off juice drinks and long elongated mushrooms, various strands of weed and homemade beer. It was like a little festival had initiated itself around me, the exact point of installment a mystery from the night that had engulfed me. The Cat was no longer at his Caddy. He was with a group of oblivious Deadheads. When he saw me alone, he stood up, brushing the sand off his shorts and t-shirt, smiling over in my direction. He was no longer delirious with excitement, but calmer in his demeanour. The night had moved on and the Caddy’s sound system had played a significant part. A bright red glow of a newly arrived morning sun, appeared to cast its rays onto a glittering sea, marked the transition from night to morning; the point when time would remerge intact. I was about to leave the last remnants of the party, the words ‘Jerry’s Dead’ still echoing in my mind, when the Cat put his arms around me and said ‘One minute, good sir.’ He began walking me over towards the Caddy, where the shiny gold spray paint adorning it could be seen clearly in the light. There were loads of signatures written in permanent black marker along the sides of the automobile, some even on the boot. The Cat pointed to a scrawl from which, once focused on, the words, ‘Hi Rick, thanks for the ride, Bill Clinton’ appeared. He smiled to say ‘here last summer.’ Then he spent a few minutes eyeballing the other side, pushing his nose up against the panels to make out what I presumed was another signature by some visiting celebrity.
Standing back, he pointed his foot again at another scribble. ‘Hey Rickie, thanks for the ride, Jerry Garcia, 94’ was a near illegible scrawl, the Cat proudly asserting ‘he sat right where you sat.’ I tried to reciprocate his enthusiasm; such was the considerable distinction of fan revealed to me over the course of the evening. Nodding in affirmation, my feet still dragging in the sand, I again moved to get away. But before I could turn around to begin the slow walk home, with two or possibly three hours sleep beckoning, the Cat made his way to the other side and began pushing me down towards the shore. The speakers had all but silenced, although people’s voices could be heard speaking in hushed tones against a mellowed-out flutter of psychedelic guitars and singing voices; the tempo of the music altered to fit the sun’s morning glow. ‘I want to tell you something before you go,’ he said. He began to walk again towards the sea, turning around and nearly tripping himself on the soft sand. His baggy pants were hanging down by his sandals, and a tie-dyed sleeveless t-shirt that reflected the early morning sun revealed an array of colours: yellow, pink, and mauve.
I stumbled along the sand wanting to initiate the conversation that hadn’t taken place when the Caddy pulled up beside me the previous evening; memory that now seemed liked a scene from a television series I had somehow played a starring role in. The connection between then and now was a blur; like two islands separated by a vast sea, not unlike the sea that had confronted me walking with the Cat. Like the post all night partying Marcello who stumbles on the seashore in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, when an amorphous sea creature confronts the unsavoury hedonist, I staggered in a disheveled state down towards a lightly trickling sea upon a cleanly kept seashore. The small granules of crushed seashells mixed in with the sand were like diamond crystals reflecting back the low din of newly expressed sunlight. In the distance was a glimmer of sunny haze, lights that speckled out upon the skyline like the morning dew in a garden when the party is over and daylight penetrates the newly evacuated space.
‘Look out over there,’ the Cat said, pointing out at the sea, towards the glimmer of light that shimmered against the dawn signaling another island day. ‘America,’ he said, pointing out again. Feeling a new brush of sobriety, the wind pushed through me, my words trickled out from a newly alerted consciousness ‘this is it, Rickie. The real America. This reason I came here. Jerry is the Elvis I never knew.’ The Cat went quiet all of a sudden, his silence a cue for me to leave. But on turning around, hoping to avoid another soliloquy about a song, I was soon sucked into another chapter in a night in thrall to the shape-shifting legacy of the band. I had to wait, had to listen, and to hear. Just as the capricious residue of night began to lose sway in the chirpy magnitude of an incoming morning, the Cat lost all sense of reason. ‘This isn’t America,’ he began shouting, suppressing the sound of music still loudly discernible from the Caddy parked at the other end of the beach. ‘This isn’t America, you fool, how can you think that?’ echoed out like trinkets across the island bay, cutting through the temporary lull. The changed atmosphere hit me straight away. He kept shouting out the words, more animated with each passing gesture. ‘This isn’t America,’ he raged, wagging his finger around. And then, pointing to the sea, towards the Cape I imagined was the repository of light sparkling against the shedding glow of the moon, he shouted out ‘that’s America, over there. That’s America.’ When he spoke, white froth began to build at the sides of his mouth, fury spat out into the wind.
An eerie quiet descended from all directions, the Cat’s once serene behaviour relenting to the inchoate ramblings of a megalomaniac. The need to stop him – to avert the look he directed at me – penetrated my own illusory attempt to cut through the malevolent anger; anger that seemed to be a cosmic corrective to the tantric balance of the previous night: the return of some deeply repressed energy to the world’s wholeness. ‘Look Rickie,’ I muttered, the sound of the music tempering – somebody had obviously turned it down – ‘I’m just saying thanks. I’m only here, on the island, in America, for a few months. A J1.’ A flock of seagulls swooned down from beside a small group of rocks at the edge of the shore, before some litter blew from one of the groups of people still huddled together in the aftermath of the party; a party that seemed like a celebration and a wake. The Cat began to hyperventilate as soon as I said this to him, becoming more and more animated in the interval between my words leaving my lips and gathering relevant meaning for him. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ I rushed out in an instant, a futile attempt to calm his nerves. But then he shouted out ‘this isn’t America,’ before pointing out again towards the sea, at the flickering lights in the distance that intimated a remote otherworld, ‘that’s America.’
Morning’s arrival saw the lights fade on the horizon; curious markers of a land of which the island was a surrogate child. The distant lights were the embers of another universe; an affirmation of a distant elsewhere. The Cat fell to his knees holding his head, screeching the words as before ‘this isn’t America.’ And then, with the aura of the previous night dissipating into the morning light, he held his hands out crying ‘Jerry’s Dead.’ He bellowed out the words with such force that his whole body was thwarted on the sand. Some of the deadheads careful not to interrupt the discussion until then dropped everything and rushed from the congregations on the beach. A bunch of them ran down to the seashore in a desperate attempt to help the Cat to his feet. They came to form a circle around him as he shouted out the words again: ‘Jerry’s Dead.’ I took a chance to run back to the Caddy, along the road we had driven the night before, when we travelled to the beach for the first time. The mood, by that point, had changed. There was no longer any mysteriousness to the day. I skipped out along the road with my thumb held out, hoping to hitch a ride to Oaks Bluff to begin a new workday. Some semblance of music tickled my consciousness. But it was impossible to know if it was real or my hallucination. Perhaps it really was music emanating from another cosmic dimension; the hidden recesses of a new America.
When the film is over, with the lights still off and the low buzz of people leaving the room, I like to stay in my seat while the credits roll. There is a special kind of magic hidden in the image of thousands of scrolling names, like a vibrant tapestry carefully knitted, carrying the ideas of countless people working together for one single creative outcome.
We met in Dublin, as students. It was in the MA room, in the recording booth, in a fully-packed Ryan Air flight with destination to Sofia that a small but important concept emerged in my mind. By experience, or by force of habit, I had a fixed idea of the isolated composer working for countless hours on end; a dim light, a dark room, a head full of ideas. A familiar concept really, that’s how I had been making music for years. But the familiar changes, and it was in that MA room, on that crowded plane, sitting by the cliffs of the Irish west coast or on a summer night in the living room of a beautiful countryside house in Spain, that I realised that being a composer doesn’t necessarily have to be a one-woman show; that composition feeds on other creative forms, it feeds on other people, and that’s when many seemingly impossible things start to happen.
American writer Kurt Vonnegut once said, ‘We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.’ I find this phrase to be a very concise and accurate representation not only of life in general, but also of creative practice and expression. Sitting in front of an empty page, hands hovering a few centimetres above the piano, scattered thoughts trying to form an idea, all often feel like standing in front of a cliff, both terrifying and exhilarating. I find that when other people enter the scene the picture changes substantially.
I am standing just a couple of steps away from the cliff, and I get to see one, two, three, seven, or even ten jumpers. Displayed right in front of my eyes, there’s a whole new collection of movements and wings; I want to try all the different shapes and colours; I can jump on my own or hand-in-hand with someone, eyes closed, eyes on the ocean, or facing the sky with my back turned around – the possibilities are infinite. It still is terrifying, it still is exhilarating, it feels new and different every single time.
The entire neighbourhood is out of power, Néstor and I are stuck in the rental house with a huge set of lighting equipment to carry, the recording starts in a couple of hours, and it’s pouring rain outside. The team is scattered around the city in pairs, each with a mission, each with a problem or two to solve. I can feel the energy, I can feel the tension, the impetuous movement, and the meticulous detail. After almost an hour of anxiously waiting, we manage to find our way out and get to the church in Rathgar. Everyone is in motion, the room swirls with zeal. Cables rolled on the floor, music stands upright, paper lanterns hanging, fog machine on, mics in place, parts laid out. I am standing in the second row, score in hand. We all are in position and ready to charge when I see the silhouette of the baton coming down and the music starts to play… nothing else matters.
When the credits roll and the room is dark, I can see the names scrolling. And if I read between the lines, figures start to emerge in my mind; a playground full of curious children, a pool for stirring sparkling thoughts, a collection of manifold imperfect pebbles washed up by the shore, eleven jumpers facing the edge of a cliff and ready to develop wings on the way down.
Sharing
Néstor Romero Clemente
The throne room of the Aljafería Palace is a serious place – it was, after all, meant to be one. I have vivid memories as a child, listening amongst the audience, and gazing upwards at the golden pinecones that hung from the ceiling. They looked heavy. Would they fall and smash my head? I was often suppressing a cough, terrified to disrupt the revered atmosphere of the moment, but always enjoying the music. As a kid, I was lucky to attend a couple of old music concerts that took place in that room. My mother’s mentor, Jorge Fresno, was an Argentinian guitarist – a pupil of Narciso Yepes and good friend of Tomás Marco – and used to play there quite often. It is safe to say that Jorge was one of the greatest guitar players to grace the concert halls (and throne rooms!) of Spain.
I must have been eight-years-old or so at the time. It would have been unlikely for someone my age to be spotted in that room, not for lack of access, but for lack of interest. Often, in these concerts, the room was half empty. The thought would have seemed unlikely too of me and my friends recording our music in that very same place almost twenty years later.
I often feel that composers and musicians are unlikely beings, but I hesitate to word it that way, for I am one them. And the thought of naming them as such invokes a narcissistic feeling in my gut, which I dislike. I don’t want to feel special, nor meaningful – that would be distracting – and I don’t think I am. I don’t mean unlikely as a synonym for ‘better or worse than.’ What I mean by ‘unlikely’ is that it requires a succession of demographically unusual events for someone to not only want to be a composer or a musician, but to be able to pull it off to the extent that it becomes a liveable existence. There is a lot of drive, hard-work, discipline and all that. But I feel that there’s also a lot of luck. You have to be lucky to be given the opportunity to do this, to grow up in a place where it is a possibility, where your family and friends support it, where you can share it openly and sincerely, where you can progress academically, professionally, mentally, emotionally… Actually, maybe the word isn’t ‘unlikely’, but ‘lucky’!
Either way, to me, the formation of our collective is a consequence of two things. On the one hand, that very series of unlikely situations happening simultaneously in each and every one of our lives. On the other hand, once together, a great reciprocal need to share between the people that form our also unlikely group of friends. Matan comes from Australia, Caterina is Colombian-Italian, Haku is South Korean, Jan is German, Ciaran is Irish, Edu is Brazilian, Rekha is Malaysian, Guillaume is Belgian, Rob and Jeremy are American, and I myself am Spanish. We all come from tremendously different cultural backgrounds, educations, faiths and musical traditions. And we share so much. Above all, a great friendship, fuelled by our common interests and passions, and by that need for sharing them all with each other, to keep in touch, to collaborate and make things together, music, films, whatever comes. If the path is shared, then it is special and meaningful. And I dare now say this, for it is common, and it is shared.
Back in the throne room, during the recording, there were some new faces, and many familiar ones as well. Some of these musicians had held me as a baby on their laps. A few of them I had just met. My mother, my uncle, my childhood mate at the town’s children’s orchestra, my new composer friends. And the lovely members of O’Carolan. How unlikely that a local band which I listened to on repeat as a kid – the very one that introduced Irish traditional music into my life – was in that room, as members of the ensemble, smiling as part of this unlikely project of Irish conception. Ireland has been a blessing to me as a composer, filmmaker and in general as a person – but that’s a story for another time… That day I was as sick as I’ve ever been. I had a terrible fever and I was feeling nauseous. And I felt like the happiest person, lucky to be sharing with all these people, back in that room that all of a sudden didn’t seem that serious.
And that’s really what it’s all about. Sharing and learning together. Meeting new people, reconnecting with old friends, making music, filming stuff, and having a good time together.
Sadly, Jorge passed away in 2015. I only met him a handful of time, but I somehow miss him so much – he played such a huge role in my life, and he didn’t even know. The image of Alba, his daughter, playing her Viola da Gamba next to my mother, first in Aljafería, and then in the Christ Church down in Rathgar, bringing to life the music of this wonderful group of people, makes me feel that perhaps it wasn’t all that unlikely. It was such a gift! Being a musician, a composer, is indeed an uncertain path. However there is something that I know for sure within all this. If I grow to be an old man, I will joyfully look back on a life well shared.
https://vimeo.com/371108468
Strength in Numbers
Matan Franco
The common thread, it can be argued, which unites most music composers and their creative practice is that, in most instances, their work unfolds in intense isolation. Sure, there may be elements of collaboration – rehearsing with an ensemble, working with a writer whose libretto you are setting to music, or, in the case of music for film and media, working closely with the director to achieve a common vision. However, when it comes to the nuts and bolts of composing, the actual meeting of pen and paper, when small black dots, lines and dashes are applied to an overwhelmingly blank manuscript, it is these extended periods of time which most commonly occur in laborious solitude.
This idea of walking a singular (and at times lonely) path is often reinforced by the tertiary institutions which train us, in their critiques/feedback/emphasis that we should be aspiring to find a ‘unique’ and highly ‘individualised’ compositional voice – no pressure! And so, going against this dogma can feel somewhat counterintuitive to many young composers in the early stages of their careers.
And yet, this is exactly how Sonic Gate Studios came to be. As we reached the conclusion of our 12 months of full-time study together, two things became abundantly clear:
With most of us being international students and having left our families behind in our home countries, we found a deep friendship and kinship with one another – we had become a family, and an incredible support system that we could each depend on. This was a serendipitous meeting of souls, one which we were eager to nourish and grow well into the future;
Each one of us had a unique skillset and ‘area of expertise’, which were fully complementary and compatible – so why not make the most of it?
And so, the idea to form SGS, to go ‘into the world’ as a united collective of multidisciplinary artists, came quite intuitively and organically. It has been a means for us to keep in constant contact, even from all corners of the globe (we have fortnightly SGS Zoom meetings). More so, it has held us all creatively accountable, both individually and collectively. While many of us were faced with the challenge of having to re-integrate and re-settle back into our local creative communities in our home countries following graduation from the course, our SGS projects have enabled us to expand our horizons while lessening the distance which separates us.
To date, we have created a music-driven non-narrative film exploring the history and significance of the Aljafería Palace in Zaragoza, Spain (in collaboration with musicians local to the area); we orchestrated the music for a Malaysian horror film, which was recorded by a 60-piece orchestra in Sofia, Bulgaria (for which we typeset and prepared all the music); we have recorded an EP in a church in Rathgar in collaboration with Irish musicians – a ‘love letter’ to the country in which all members of SGS met; we have composed bespoke music for the 2020 European Press Prize, celebrating the best journalistic stories to come out of Europe in the last year; and we are currently composing a suite of works in collaboration with a Belgian-based Piano Trio, to be performed and recorded in Ireland next year, as well as a number of choral works (composed by our female members) with texts by female Irish poets, also to be performed in Ireland in 2021 – with each passing project, it feels as if the distance between each of us diminishes, enabling us to ‘visit’ parts of the world we may not otherwise have been able to.
In light of the unprecedented global pandemic which has severely impacted the whole world at large this year, as well as the serious climate concerns, social and political unrest we are witnessing, the idea that ‘strength lies in numbers’ perhaps rings true now more than ever before. Our ability to weather these storms and reach the other side as intact as possible will heavily rely on our putting aside our differences and coming together in support of one another. With the global arts industry being one of the first and hardest hit, and which will likely be the last to fully recover, our ability and desire to collaborate with one another (as we do in Sonic Gate Studios) will go a long way not only in extending our individual arts practices and revitalising and rebuilding our industry, but in reminding the world of the magnificent beauty that exists all around us – and this is something which we shouldn’t have to experience in isolation.
Sonic Gate Studios is a collective of international sound artists engaged in interdisciplinary projects.
The team comprises:
Néstor Romero Clemente (Spain, based in Ireland)
Caterina Schembri (Colombia/Italy, based in Ireland)
Before we turned our eyes from nudity,
Or banished certain words, death was the first
Obscenity—the one from which the rest,
In time, would find their way. The first
To make a joke of life. The first
To show us what may come of children’s games:
A skull left caked in mud, the slicing rain.
What is a rude word if not a reminder
Of the grave in which one’s coffin will be lowered?
An old man’s kiss upon a young girl’s navel
Would not be possible if not for death.
Dressed up in our Sunday best, our deaths
Seem almost hypothetical. They’re not.
Plastic surgeons, age-defying creams,
Air-brushed waistlines on the cover of Cosmo—
These prove our distaste. Death’s in the ghetto.
But only look out past your green kept lawn,
And there it is, unfazed, a grinning fact.
Around the beginning of the second century AD, the Greek writer Plutarch unknowingly created the spark for a flame of artistic inspiration which, not unlike the notion of the ancient Olympic torch, has transcended millennia until today. He might, perhaps, have nourished the expectation that his work’s renown would outlive him, but he could not have imagined that his words would be traced through the 20th century poetry of Cavafy to the 21st century songs of Leonard Cohen and Laura Marling.And yet, in a single stunning example of ancient influence and contemporary Classics, one particular story of his has been read, performed, spoken, sung, enjoyed, downloaded, streamed and reflected on in a chain of inspiration which spans over a century of creativity. The remarkable longevity of one small digression in the mass of Plutarch’s extant work demonstrates beautifully the basic humanity which has connected us from antiquity to now, reflected and refracted through the lens of varying personal and societal perspectives. As a result, the historic loss of Alexandria has become, paradoxically, our cultural gain.
Mark Antony Offering a Sacrifice.
The spark in question is embedded in Plutarch’s account of the downfall of Mark Antony, Roman general and lover of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, at the hands of the future Emperor Augustus. Antony’s defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31BC was already distant history in Plutarch’s time, but its seismic influence on the governance of Rome – replacing the failing Republic with the dictator-led regime of the Empire – would have been ubiquitously understood. Plutarch, however, was not in the business of writing purely historical accounts: his Lives, under which Mark Antony’s destiny is recorded, are self-proclaimed biographical character studies rather than dispassionate factual recordings; as such, curious digressions and titbits of hearsay weave their way through his narratives. One such side-story is related in the description of Mark Antony’s final night in Alexandria before his monumental defeat at Actium:
And it is said that during the middle of that night, as the city lay subdued and downcast from fear and expectation of what was to come, the harmonious sounds of all manner of instruments could suddenly be heard, along with the sound of a crowd of Dionysian revellers and satyr-like carousers, as if some Bacchic band was processing out of the city in a raucous fashion: their collective course seemed to take them through the middle of the city to the outer gate facing the enemy; at this point the noise, which had reached its peak, fell away. It seemed to those who analysed this sign that the god to whom Antony continually sought to compare and attach himself was leaving him.
This folktale-like aside could be dismissed simply as adding little more than narrative colour to the portrayal of Antony’s demise. And yet, this physical representation of Antony’s personal loss also serves as a powerful reminder of the inevitability and ineluctability of a foregone fate. The god, representing the general’s aspirations and inspirations, deserts him in a flutter of fictitious revelry; the irony of the joy in the Bacchic procession and its solemn symbolism is all too present. The nuance of Plutarch’s story, it seems, lies in the act of reconciling with an unavoidable destiny; it is theme which fans the flame of inspiration in modern artistic endeavours.
Constantine Peter Cavafy 1863-1933.
The primary reinterpretation of Plutarch’s curious digression appears in Constantine Cavafy’s 1911 poem The God Abandons Antony. Cavafy’s frequent evocations of influential figures and events from antiquity in his poetry often serve as a mechanism for exploring wider, more universal moral and psychological themes – as is expertly demonstrated in another of his poems, Ithaka – and in this poem, too, the past is blended eloquently with the present. Where Plutarch’s biographical purpose constrained him from offering explicit comment on the story he presents, Cavafy’s poetry freely re-interprets the situation in the form of a didactic monologue:
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear an invisible procession going by with exquisite music, voices, don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving. Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say it was a dream, your ears deceived you: don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city, go firmly to the window and listen with deep emotion, but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward; listen—your final delectation—to the voices, to the exquisite music of that strange procession, and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
(trans. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard.)
Knowledge of the poem’s classical context clearly identifies the addressee of this moral admonition as being Mark Antony, but the poem can be read from two perspectives: one as a dramatised portrayal of a piece of historical biography, and the other, divorced from its ancient inspiration, as an edification of endurance, that most human of experiences. The former poignantly captures the mood of despair, realisation and tragic inevitability in Plutarch’s original story, set against the background of Antony’s approaching demise. The encouragement of stoicism and acknowledgement in the face of defeat chimes particularly with Plutarch’s own presentation of Antony on the eve of the battle: in the first part of the chapter narrating the rumoured Dionysian revelries, the biographer describes how Antony, having decided to mobilise his attack on Octavian the following day, orders a lavish feast on the premise that he did not know whether he would ever be able to do so again. In the second, universalised interpretation of this poem, we are encouraged to view the ‘invisible procession’ as a metaphor for realising and confronting our destinies. In turn, the desired stoicism in recognising that our futures are uncertain and never fully under our control is as pertinent now as it was to Antony. Cavafy, in a style similar to psychologists and cognitive behavioural therapists today, encourages us to replace the ‘what ifs’ with the ‘now whats’ when coming to terms with complications in our lives; in his reinvigoration of Plutarch’s words, therefore, the poet expertly blends specific story and general advice, ancient context with modern relevance.
Almost a century later, the next reincarnation of Antony’s loss was brought to life by another poetic genius in the form of Leonard Cohen’s song Alexandra Leaving. Mirroring Cavafy’s simultaneously faithful and creative relationship with his ancient model, Leonard’s lyrics are at once recognisable to those familiar with his poetic source, and yet strikingly innovative in their new shape.
Suddenly the night has grown colder The god of love preparing to depart Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder They slip between the sentries of the heart
Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure They gain the light, they formlessly entwine And radiant beyond your widest measure They fall among the voices and the wine
It’s not a trick, your senses all deceiving A fitful dream, the morning will exhaust Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost
Even though she sleeps upon your satin Even though she wakes you with a kiss Do not say the moment was imagined Do not stoop to strategies like this
As someone long prepared for this to happen Go firmly to the window. Drink it in Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing Your first commitments tangible again
And you who had the honor of her evening And by that honor had your own restored Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving Alexandra leaving with her lord
Even though she sleeps upon your satin Even though she wakes you with a kiss Do not say the moment was imagined Do not stoop to strategies like this
As someone long prepared for the occasion In full command of every plan you wrecked Do not choose a coward’s explanation That hides behind the cause and the effect
And you who were bewildered by a meaning Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost
Linguistic resonances to Cavafy abound: phrases such as ‘exquisite music’, ‘one long prepared’, ‘go firmly to the window’, and, critically, ‘say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving’ are all re-worked into Leonard’s musical response, weaving their way through the fabric of the work to ground it unmistakeably in its origins. The themes of stoicism in the face of loss or change are also concurrent with his 20th and 2nd century sources; in essence, at least, Leonard Cohen’s interpretation stays close to its predecessors. However, it is the striking innovation of replacing the physical Alexandria with an abstract name, Alexandra, that gives the song its own life independent of its sources. Cohen’s poetic artistry lies in his concealment of exactly who Alexandra is and what she represents: instead, snapshots of vague reminiscence are brought sharply into focus when interrupted suddenly by didactic commands familiar from Cavafy. It is as if he descends momentarily into reverie, only to be dragged back to the present by the imitations of his poetic source. Through the deliberate mystery invested in his subject, Cohen is able to generate in the listener a milieu of emotions – nostalgia, wistfulness, longing, regret – all brought together by the abstract concept of ‘Alexandra’. As such, the exact context of Alexandra’s leaving is laid open for us to decide, with some fascinating results. A brief glance at online forums discussing the meaning of song lyrics reveals that many have sought to tie the song to their own particular experiences of love, loss, and betrayal, while others acknowledge that the lyrics have taken on different meanings over time; one man, for instance, was particularly struck by the song’s affinity with his emotional state after giving his daughter away on her wedding day. In this way, Cohen’s boldest innovation – the abstract Alexandra – becomes simultaneously his tightest bond with its predecessor; as in Cavafy’s poem, Antony’s plight is universalised, but this time through the lens of another most human of emotions: love.
The final link in this intriguing chain of interpretation comes in the form of Laura Marling, a singer-songwriter who, not unlike Plutarch himself, invests an element of biography into her work. Her song, Alexandra, is as much a tribute to Leonard Cohen after his 2016 death as it is to Alexandra Leaving in particular, while Marling has herself described the 2020 album in which it falls, Song For Our Daughter, as ‘essentially a piece of me’. With pride of place as the opening track, Alexandra offers a fascinating new perspective on the Alexandra of Cohen’s song, taking her abstract and forming it into a tangible, intelligible persona. Crucially, Marling’s take offers something which Alexandra Leaving could not: a female voice, rather than a perception of the situation necessarily filtered through Leonard’s ‘male gaze’.
What became of Alexandra Did she make it through What kind of woman gets to love you?
Wrote us all a little note Nothing left to lose What kind of woman gets to love you?
I need to know Where did Alexandra go?
Alexandra had no fear She lived out in the woods She’d tell you what you’re doing wrong If she thinks she’ll be understood Pulls her socks up to her knees Finds diamonds in the drain One more diamond to add to her chain
I need to know Where does Alexandra go? Where did Alexandra go?
It won’t change how I’m feeling You can try to help me understand If she loved you like a woman Did you feel like a man
I need to know Where did Alexandra go? Where did Alexandra go?
You had to say You feel too bad You could not bear Be understood I had to try A fuck to give Why should I die So you can live
What did Alexandra know? What did Alexandra know? What did Alexandra know?
The sense of inevitability which permeated Plutarch and Cavafy finds its place once more in this work, but it does so instead through the juxtaposition of gender and love, while Marling’s more overt debt to Cohen provides the frame within which to discuss wider issues of masculinity and self-discovery. When interviewed about the meaning of Alexandra, Marling emphasised her fascination with Leonard Cohen’s attitude towards women as a leading part of the song’s inspiration, but it feels more like a wider portrait of the negative tropes of masculinity and love. My own interpretation of the song rests on Marling questioning a male interlocutor about the fate of Alexandra and his relationship with her, asking powerful questions like ‘what kind of woman gets to love you?’ and ‘what did Alexandra know?’. As more details about Alexandra’s character are revealed, portraying her as free-spirited and forthright, it sets up the contrast between masculine and feminine perceptions of love: ‘if she loved you like a woman / Did you feel like a man’. The song’s climax, however, is when the male perspective is revealed. ‘You had to say / You feel too bad / You could not bear / Be understood’ highlights the all-too-prevalent issues of masculinity as meaning emotionally closed-off, especially when confronted with a woman who would speak her mind and challenge his behaviour.
For me, the central lines – ‘why should I die / So you can live’ – embody the frustration of women (in this case, ‘Alexandra’) feeling compelled to mute their own needs in order to accommodate the emotional detachment perpetuated by norms of masculinity. Although Plutarch himself may have been far from Marling’s mind in the composition of Alexandra, his story’s themes of self-reflection and facing up to an unavoidable fate resonate throughout the song, only this time the sense of inevitability is linked to the very current issue of gender conventions and their consequences.
Stoicism, introspection, loss, endurance: these are universal ideas which, after finding their place in a smattering of ancient lines, have been reincarnated in ever more innovative ways through the mediums of modern poetry and song. In this way, the spark of Plutarch can be found, via a convoluted relay of beacons through Constantine Cavafy and Leonard Cohen, in the flame of Laura Marling, even though their ancient and modern contexts bear no direct resemblance to each other. There is much in our world which can be attributed – directly or indirectly – to antiquity, but there is little so poignant as this literary lineage of Alexandria’s loss.
A barrel of industrial waste poured into a suit
donated by a casino owner who knows people
with a tangerine tea towel tossed strategically on top
because it was the only available metaphor for hair
was running for re-election as CEO of South Canadia
against an old coat with holes in it.
The barrel of waste was trailing
histrionically among professors emeritus
whose brains were in the process of being dismantled
by lethargy and time, and among those
who, as and when the stock market permits,
take a year off to celebrate their dividends
by doing good works among brown people in far countries
not lucky enough to have stock markets or dehumidifiers.
Such people agreed with each other that the barrel of waste
made the raging boil on the nation’s privates
way too obvious, and hoped by throwing
the old coat over it they could again
forget it was there.
The barrel of waste said the old coat couldn’t deliver
on the promises he wasn’t making,
and maintained good leads among morticians,
pimps, and police informants
and had the total bastard vote
ninety nine percent sewn up –
in essence everyone except the late John DeLorean
and perhaps Alan Dershowitz.
There was a minority faction who wanted the boil
on the nation’s privates given free antibiotics, lanced
with a big needle imported from Sweden
and then cauterised. But most people found
though they were in favour, in their hearts,
of lancing the boil,
in practice they were for
allowing the boil to grow redder, angrier, more toxic
under the old coat with holes in it.
So the minority extremist faction
who wanted the thing treated
were sentenced to the echo chamber
to argue about whether the old coat
with holes in it really
was the lesser evil.
The midwife of history,
grown bored with the year twenty twenty,
had decided to play one of her jokes.
Britain has produced its fair share of major public intellectual figures. Having surveyed the legacies of George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, the Irish-born Edmund Burke and contemporary leading lights John Gray and Jonathan Sumption, I now turn my attention to the great radical historian E. P. Thompson.
Intellectuals often stand apart from a mainstream radical tradition. Hitchens, for example, while broadly adhering to Thomas Paine and The Rights of Man was a contrarian and dedicated atheist who tendentiously supported George W. Bush’s War in Iraq, although perhaps the waterboarding he voluntarily submitted to, and declared to be a form of torture, acted as a form of atonement.
It is unthinkable, however, that Edward Palmer (E. P.) Thompson (1923-1993) would have performed such a volte-face. Thompson held himself squarely within the English radical tradition of William Cobbett, Thomas Paine and Robert Owen, as well as his hero the poet William Blake, and to a lesser extent William Morris. Thompson’s ideology was a form of socialitist libertarianism for the ordinary man.
I grew up reading his work, and indeed watching his grey mane flowing in the wind as he addressed CND rallies, although I understand he was a difficult colleague, a hopeless administrator and an egotist. It seems to have been another case of don’t meet your heroes.
The Making of the English Working Class
His lasting contribution is the seminal The Making Of The English Working Class (1980), possibly the greatest work of history of the twentieth century that emphasised a new form of bottom-up history, related to the subaltern history that was emerging at the same time in former colonial societies. Notably, Edward Said’s Orientalism, which was published in 1978.
Thompson methodology is well captured in the following quotation from this canonical text:
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience.[i]
Also, In The Making Of The English Working Class, Thompson places himself firmly within the British rights-driven tradition and focuses on The Liberty Tree, and its essential components of freedom under the law, freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury, habeas corpus and the spectrum of individual rights now under threat of obliteration.
I suspect, just as Lord Sumption is a libertarian, albeit in a different sense, who has spoken out about the restriction on our current restrictions on liberties, Thompson would be horrified at the course of current events in the U.K. ushered in by Coronavirus Emergency legislation and recent Counter Terrorism Legislation.
Although a Marxist – albeit unlike his contemporary historian Eric Hobsbawm he resigned from the Communist Party of Great Britain after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 – he was also a historian in the empiricist tradition, distrustful of great meta narratives and the abstract musings of structuralists, which culminated in his famous polemic against Althusser The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors(1978).
He argued that individuals were agents of activity though caught within the agency of history. They have room to achieve what they do, but only under specific conditions and defined constraints. His sense of the developmental nature of the working class is perhaps best illustrated in the following quote: ‘The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.’[ii]
This led to the famous opening passage of The Making of the English Working Class, and his emphasis in his teaching on bottom-up or grassroots analysis, rather than a top-down, theory-driven, approach. He prized empirical evidence derived from the activities of human subjects. A true historian.
That great book in fact has many resonances for our age, not least in how the chiliasm of despair and poverty awakened renewed religiosity – Wesleyan Methodism in particular. His bottom-up analysis pointed to how religion became the opium of the people. This may also explain the rise of religious fundamentalism in our own period of profound economic security.
Thompson demonstrated how local worker communities were often collective, and how a moral economy operated that distributed goods and services according to the respective needs of those who traded and bartered. These localized and community-driven economies were also explored by the late David Graeber in his Debt: the First 5,000 Years (2011).
key point, "it's not our hedonism that's destroying the planet, it's our puritanism," the fact we feel everyone has to be working constantly, regardless of whether there's anything needs to be done, to justify our consumer pleasures
It would be a mistake to view Thompson as anti-religious, or to put it another way, he saw a values in religion or in certain religions. On the one hand he rejected what he saw as an authoritarianism implicit in the hierarchical structure of Catholicism, but in Protestantism he found a pragmatism that chimed with his distrust of system-building.
Influence of Antonio Gramsci
Thompson was greatly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, in particular his famous concept of hegemony and a war of position for proletarian emancipation. Gramsci identified an ongoing war of position occurring between the elites and workers, a category which extends conceptually to embrace anyone who is not part of an ever-narrowing plutocracy or billionaire class.
Gramsci allocated a substantial role to intelligentsia and politicians, but also to workers’ councils in altering the course of history to achieve a Communist society. The working class would first have to attain a cultural hegemony before gaining political power he argued: ‘The workers could only win if they achieved cultural hegemony before attaining political power.’
Occasionally, he seems to identify it (hegemony) with political power exercised by coercion, but as a rule he distinguishes the two concepts, so that hegemony signifies the control of the intellectual life of society by purely cultural means. Every class tries to secure a governing position not only in public institutions but also in regard to the opinions, values and standards acknowledged by the bulk of society. The privileged classes in their time secured a position of hegemony in the intellectual; as well as the political sphere; they subjugated the others by this means, and intellectual supremacy was a precondition of political rule. The main task of the workers in modern times was to liberate themselves spiritually from the control of the bourgeoisie and the church and to establish their own cultural values in such a way as to attract the oppressed and intellectual strata to themselves. Cultural hegemony was a fundamental and prior condition of attaining political power. The working class could only conquer by first imparting its world view and system of values to the other class who might be its political allies; in this way it would become the intellectual leader of society just as the bourgeoisie had done before seizing political control.[iii]
The Rule of Law
Thompson diverged from conventional Marxist theory in his approach to the role of law. A conventional Marxist view consider this as:
by definition a part of a ‘superstructure’ adapting itself to the necessities of an infrastructure of productive forces and productive relations. As such, it is clearly an instrument of the de facto ruling class: it both defines and defends these rulers’ claims upon resources and labour-power – it says what shall be property and what shall be crime – and it mediates class relations with a set of appropriate rules and sanctions, all of which, ultimately, confirm and consolidate existing class power. Hence the rule of law is only another mask for the rule of a class. The revolutionary can have no interest in law, unless as a phenomenon of ruling-class power and hypocrisy; it should be his aim simply to overthrow it.[iv]
In contrast Thompson was a qualified supporter, arguing that: ‘Law may be seen,’ he argued, not only instrumentally and ideologically, but also ‘simply in terms of its own logic, rules and procedures – that is, simply as law.’
In Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (1975) Thompson argues against the idea that the law could be reduced to a superstructure, reflecting the class interest of the ruling class, but offered instead a more complex truth inherent to which was the fact that ‘it could not be reserved for the exclusive use only of their own class.’
He concluded that the law did mediate existing relations and was ‘a superb instrument by which these rulers were able to impose new definitions of property to their even greater advantage,’ for example, in terms of his historical works by extinguishing agrarian use-rights and by enclosures but on the other hand, the law mediated these class relations through legal forms, which imposed, again and again, inhibitions on the actions of the rulers.
Also, Thomson argued that rulers ‘believed enough in these rules, to allow, in certain limited areas, the law itself to be a genuine forum within which certain kinds of class conflict were fought out.’ On occasion the government itself was defeated in the courts: ‘Such occasions served, paradoxically, to consolidate power and to enhance its legitimacy,’ but also ‘to bring power even further within constitutional controls.’
Thompson suggested that this role of law was in essence: ‘a legacy as substantial as any handed down from the struggles of the seventeenth century to the eighteenth and a true and important cultural achievement,’ and further that ‘the notion of the regulation and reconciliation of conflicts through the rule of law’ was ‘a cultural achievement of universal significance’
He asserted that though imperial in its origin, the rule of law inhibited that imperial power such that:
Transplanted as it was to even more inequitable contexts, this law could become an instrument of imperialism. For this law has found its way to a good many parts of the globe. But even here the rules and rhetoric have imposed some inhibitions upon the imperial power. If the rhetoric was a mask, it was a mask which Gandhi and Nehru were to borrow, at the head of a million masked supporters.
His classic position from Whigs and Hunters is encapsulated in the following statement:
But the rule of law itself, the imposing of effective inhibitions upon power and the defence of the citizen from power’s all-intrusive claims, seems to me to be an unqualified human good. To deny or belittle this good is, in this dangerous century when the resources and pretensions of power continue to enlarge, a desperate error of intellectual abstraction. More than this, it is a self-fulfilling error, which encourages us to give up the struggle against bad laws and class-bound procedures, and to disarm ourselves before power.
Later he elaborated that:
If I have argued elsewhere that the rule of law is an ‘unqualified human good’ I have done so as a historian and a materialist. The rule of law, in this sense, must always be historically, culturally, and, in general, nationally specific. It concerns the conduct of social life, and the regulation of conflicts, according to rules of law which are exactly defined and have palpable and material evidences – which rules attain towards consensual assent and are subject to interrogation and reform.
Criticism
Thompson has been criticised for upholding what is considered by some to be the conservative doctrine of the rule of law, and not an unqualified good according to Morton Horowitz; or as Adrian Merritt argues: its logic is ‘the logic of class formation.’
Bob Fine also suggests that the Rule of Law need not be characterized as ‘an unqualified human good’ for one to recognize that it is superior to bald authoritarianism, and that other institutions such as democratic elections limit power and that, rather than limiting power, the law serves in various ways to enhance the power of the ruling class.
Nonetheless, in Thompson’s defence it can be argued he is only suggesting that the rule of law was neutral and not conservative and neither promoted nor impeded substantive justice. In this context Thompson insists that he was ‘not starry-eyed’ about the law. On the contrary he was bent on ‘exposing the shams and inequities which may be concealed beneath this law.’
Nevertheless, for Thomson the rule of law was ‘an unqualified human good,’ because it is invariably superior to unbridled authoritarianism, and what makes the rule of law an unqualified human good for Thompson is the lack of any available substitute mechanism for limiting arbitrary power in complex societies.
His faith in the common man is again evident in his assessment of jury trial.
Jurors have found, again and again, and at critical moments, according to what is their sense of the rational and just. If their sense of justice has gone one way, and the case another, they have found “against the evidence,” … the English common law rests upon a bargain between the Law and the people: The jury box is where the people come into the court: The judge watches them and the people watch back. A jury is the place where the bargain is struck. The jury attends in judgment, not only upon the accused, but also upon the justice and the humanity of the Law.
British Empirical Tradition
Like all British empiricists from Burke to Hitchens and Orwell, and especially as an historian, Thompson was acutely sensitive to issues of truth and lies, shabby cover ups, semi-truths and disinformation.
The Twelve Days of Cassandra Voices: On the 5th day… for those of an intellectual bent, David Langwallner reclaims perhaps Ireland’s foremost public intellectual, Edmund Burke, from the jaws of conservatism:https://t.co/xYR31JeaqH#essentialholidayreading
Thompson’s book on Blake, his last, endorses the attack on the beast, which is in effect the state or state religion classified by Thomson as the whore of Babylon.
As an educationalist he was incidentally a humanist, recognising the importance in his teaching of objectivity and tolerance, but seeing these not as important matters in and of themselves – in that we are all a product of our time – but as offering useful educational and heuristic methods.
His focus on ordinary people, on human rights and the rule of law and his distrust of great systems and absurd generalisation and abstractions is now of great relevance, as are his warnings and research into religious fundamentalism. Alas, E.H. Thompson’s devotion to the determination of facts, detail and accuracy is sorely lacking in contemporary discourse.
[i] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, p.14
Models, slender and famished as cheetahs,
Shed their imperial haute couture—
Already in sweatpants, they hail their cabs
Behind the Grand Palais before
Applause dies down inside around
The vacant runway. Afternoon sunlight’s
Lambent overhead on friezes of Lutetian Limestone.
Violinists grimace at their scores—
Haydn, Hollywood, the B’s and Broadway hits,
Rehearsal house-lights hard above,
Rosin fine as cocaine settling on the boards.
They’re not arrogant. They’re bored.
They’re paid to make the beauty go.
Why else? We all make beauty pay.
Gourmands’ are all aglow as it arrives—
Voila, another flambé. Cherries, drenched
In century-old brandy, burn like coals.
The waiter itches to check his phone. He grins.
I’m given to hyperbole, I know,
But something’s got to me. It’s all around.
You have to learn to make it pay you back.
The bathroom’s OUT OF ORDER. Sewage seeps
Into the restaurant. The manager’s
Frantic, alone today. The line’s
Become a mob. A voice from an SUV
Barks at the drive-through speaker. In the back,
Children cheer a whirl of color on a screen.
I feel the boredom underneath the beauty.
It’s weird, and getting desperate these days.
In auction rooms, the arms go up. And . . . sold.
The next exquisite investment’s on the block.
The views—the hills, the seas—are still pristine for those
Who can afford the heights. Who’s this beauty for?
Beauty’s boring. I do go on and on,
Don’t I? Oh, you have a nosebleed.
Here, drip some in my drink. See this?
Flick this switch. Now listen. Someone will scream.
Crypt
The cities burn above me as I sleep.
I’m walled by trophies looted long ago
Along the routes of conquest, centuries
Of funereal remains, gold that’s dimmed
By dust and bound by web, as valueless
As the dirt that slowly takes it back again.
I wake and wonder where I am. I move
My arm and bottles clink. I raise my head
Enough to see I must have drunk them all.
I’m underground. I know because the light
That works like stars in chinks is far
Above me. Even in this dusk I find
There’s something left inside a bottle here.
Sitting up, I take a swallow and get it down
Before I choke, and spit out warm urine.
I half-remember falling off the edge
Of the world. Then nothing else. I barely breathe,
The air’s so thick and sapped of oxygen,
A gas of churned-up worms and sporous loam.
I want to learn the way back up. I try
To name the things I see—sextants, I-Phones.
An avian chorus summons me. What years
Have gone? I fall toward sleep again. The soil becomes
A lake that’s darker than the night. My dreams
Are long as centuries, of wars and new words,
All telling me “you are gone,” but I’m still here,
Curled up, and cold, in my crown of amethyst.
Apollinaris, Medicus Titi Imperatoris hic Cacavit Bene
I check my e-mail. There’s nothing there for me.
I check the wall. Not much, some recipes
I’ll never cook, some boasts, some oaths, some jokes,
Advice, little different from graffiti
Scrawled on Roman stone two thousand years ago,
Small bursts of unofficial human hopes,
And on we go, unchanged, forever griping
Era to era—it’s almost comforting—
Election slogans packed in ash at Pompei,
Billboards on the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek,
Winged lions tagged on the Great Enclosure,
Signs of the Khufu Gang left in Giza,
So many words, like air exhaled to air,
Like tiny helium hearts escaping
In a delirium of approval up a wall,
Or displeased emperor’s thumb aimed down.
Last week Andrea Reynell met renowned Irish man-of-letters Ronan Sheehan in his Dublin home. They discussed his abiding passion for Latin poetry, the challenges and opportunities for young writers and what has inspired him to assemble a volume of translations of Cuban poetry from a range of Irish writers.
I was welcomed into a cosy sitting room with a green/blue sofa, a pale wooden table with chairs, while dozens of photographs and art works adorned the walls. The Libyan Sibyl and another painting reminiscent of the great Irish epic, An Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) caught my eye. A well-used fireplace lay to my left behind Ronan, as the open door to the back garden let in a cool breeze as we sat at the table.
A: How did you get your start in writing poetry?
R: I don’t really write in poetry. I write more prose which I started writing when I was at school and I got interested in literature then. I had two things published when I was sixteen one was a short story in The Irish Press which was a big thing in my day. And the other was a poem in a magazine called The Kilkenny Review, or something like that. But subsequently I learned to love poetry, but I don’t really write poetry. I can write translations which is a different thing.
A: I’d be the same myself. I prefer writing prose to poetry. I’ve been doing a few bits and pieces but don’t have anything published. But as long as I enjoy it really. How much do you reckon the Irish literary society has changed since you first started writing?
R: That’s a good question. I think It’s changed a lot. When I was in my teenage years the nineteen-sixties. I suspect you weren’t born then Andrea.
A: (laughs) No. Not even close.
R: For starters there was very little or no publishing houses in Ireland and when The Irish Press started to publish stories and poetry that was kind of revolutionary because the only other places were a couple of literary magazines that was all that was there. And consequently, to get something published was a big deal. And now there are a lot of publications and in some way that’s better, in the sense that there’s more chances for people to start off. In other ways I have reservations about it because I often get the sense that there’s too much going out. I hope that doesn’t sound mean spirited.
A: How important do you think the arts are today?
R: I think the arts are very important if you like but, for this reason that what you might call the world of culture. It’s really dominated by enormous interests, the high-tech companies like Google and also by Hollywood and big music companies so that the small country and the individuals are really cowed by the sheer power of those things. So, whenever the arts afford individual voices to be heard I think that’s very important for that reason. I mean I could name other reasons as well but that’s one cultural reason as to why I think the arts are very important.
A: What poets, or writers past or present would have an influence on your work?
R: Jorge Luis Borges
(There’s a photo of the late, famous Argentinian writer on top of the book case across from me) Do you know who he is?
Jorge Luis Borges (right).
A: Yes, I’ve read up on him.
R: Did you read it from my essay?
A: I did indeed, and it was very interesting.
R: Thanks a lot. Sorry I wasn’t looking to drag that out of you!
In school I studied Classics and I studied Latin and English when I went to UCD. While I really loved that engagement with books and so forth and as I got older I realised that there were some books and some writers and even some works that touch you. In a way that is not necessarily quite rational. You don’t look at all the points in Ulysses like you’re taught and say: “oh that’s a great book.”
But it’s different when something affects you right? So I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious but a writer whom I loved in Latin was Catullus who was a Latin poet and I did a project about Catullus some while ago. And another writer was Tacitus who was a historian so that’s one thing, don’t want to go on forever. Another person that I loved, as I wrote a book of short stories was Borges and it was a thrill for me to meet Borges. And if you read the essay that I did I think I’ll always remember. When I quoted to him something that he’d said about Tacitus. And he said, “Tacitus records the crucifixion but does not perceive it” and Borges just looked across and said “Did I write that? I don’t think I’m a very good writer you know, but maybe in the sixty years trying I’m entitled to the odd good line.”
A: That’s brilliant
R: Isn’t it?
A: That just really encapsulates who he was.
R: Yeah it does. It’s a very good position for a writer to be, you know. Not to be arrogant, not to be presumptuous that you’re great. In my case I’ve written a few things I think came out well, a lot of things that didn’t. But I’d much prefer to be in Borges’s camp and say well, I think one or two things came up, you see. So, you’re sort of at ease with yourself in that position, does that make sense?
A: It does indeed. And how much of an impact do you reckon he’s had on your future and current work?
R: He had an influence on some of the essays that I’ve done, and he has an influence on a book that I’m writing now, and I’ll tell you why. That while I say an influence, it’s something that I have in my ear or try to do well is, he has a terseness, a succinctness about his sentences that I love because they’re so resonant. And when you leave down a page that Borges has written you feel this resonance of meaning and possibility and a richness of language so it’s beautiful you know it’s lovely. That’s what writing is for and I would love to try and imitate that.
A: So, for the readers of this article, where did the idea for the book of poetry come from?
R: Many years ago I edited an issue of a magazine called The Crane Bag on Ireland and Latin America and for one reason or another I don’t think I was able to do anything Cuban in that issue. One of my favourite books is a Cuban book called The Kingdom Of This World by a writer called Alejo Carpentier which is about the slave revolt in Haiti in the 1790’s, then Santo Domingo. So when I was on the board of Poetry Ireland about twenty years ago, the possible of going to Cuba came up. So, I went and met people in the writers’ union including the president and we made an agreement that we would do a joint anthology of poetry together, that’s how it came about.
A: What would your favourite poem of the anthology be and why?
R: That’s a good question. It is a poem that translated by Trudy Hayes and it’s called, It’s a poem about. (He trails off here) How about I go get it? It’s very short, I’ll read it, it’ll be nice.
A: Yes, go ahead.
He walks out of the sitting room, which leaves me a chance to take in the abundance of things on the walls. A clock ticks away, a steady beat, as I wait for him to return. He soon reappears with a black book.
R: This is a proof copy of the book. If I may say a little bit about the book?
A: Yes, absolutely.
R: So, see what you make of this, this is called ‘Blessed are the Mean Spirited’ (Interpreted/translated from Spanish by Trudy Hayes)
Blessed are the unperturbed spirits Not born of a poisoned womb
Or terrorised by a lurching ghost,
Or by their own raging seed, Those erupting with a terrible sickness Doomed to wander eternally a path in the wilderness that never leads home. Blessed are those not burning on a furnace of love, The unmarked smiling ones,
The behatted archangels In fishnet tights, The patters of bellies, the jellied ones, the loved ones, the virtuous ones, The pied pipers and their enchanted mice, the business tycoons
and the Superheroes,
The movers and shakers, the poised, collected, unshaken ones, The fragile ones, the wise ones, the palatable ones, the smiling and waving ones,
The truly fine ones and the truly sweet ones sweet to the core. Blessed are the Innocent birds of paradise, the steaming cow
dung, the Implacable stones.
But MAKE WAY for the creatures of the Dream and the Nightmare. Make way for the lost, damned, grief-stricken souls wandering a lonely path. Madder and drunker than their ancestors. Scorched by love. Trying to find a way home to the house of straw hats, for they saved you.
A; Wow, that’s haunting and ominous but powerful
R: Isn’t it? I hate sounding like a professor, but one of the things I like is the kind of writing that makes a point, which communicates something. Lots of poetry doesn’t do that but that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. I read that out at a street party during the summer and Trudy read it out somewhere and people responded to it. Do you know they thought that was good. Ok so that’s one thing. It either speaks for itself or it doesn’t. Another thing I’d like to say about this book. It’s about fifty Cuban poems and about fifty translations and without going into the entire history of the whole thing, it’s quite powerful if you bring it into a book, lots of different voices. Some of the people translating are really well-known poets who are lauded, others are people I brought in, they’re not poets at all. But they’re good, they’ve got something to say, they can use language, they’ve got some spirit. So that when you’re reading this you don’t know what to expect next, so the idea is to give a book a kind of potency like that.
A: I find that’s exactly what it does, so moving along to another question. I found there was a big difference in formality between some of the poems, so for example The Boy and the Moon with lines like:
The moon and the boy play A little game between them;
They see each other without looking, they talk in fits of silence.
Versus in ‘Pineapple’ where we have a lot more of what you could call Irishisms.
Indulge me, pineapple. Imagine if bould Fergus, leppIng from Tara had given Glasgow a miss, Ryanairing it instead to hotter shores.
I love that line.
So, What are your thoughts on the differences in this language?
R: Ok can I be theoretical for a bit? This is going to sound academic or whatever. Ten years ago, I did a translation of the Latin poet Catullus called The Irish Catullus or One Gentleman of Verona. It was a protest against the closure of the Classics Department in Queens University. The phrase the Irish Catullus really derives from a translation of the Aeneid which is called the Irish Aeneid. What was called the Irish Aeneid was the first ever translation of the Aeneid into a vernacular language in the thirteenth century by a bard of Ireland. They translated it before anybody in Oxford or Cambridge or anything, ok? But the way he did the Aeneid was he really rewrote the whole thing right, like he reshaped it. (Ronan gives a laugh here)
A: As you do.
R: As you do. The whole point of this was so that the people of Sligo, and Mayo and Galway and that culture could receive it otherwise there was no point in doing it.
A: So, I guess you could say in ‘layman’s terms’ more or less.
R: Yes, exactly. In the culture that it was going into. So I invited the people, including Mia and the people who were translating the Catullus poems to do it in what I call the Irish Aeneid spirit. To reshape it, to put it into our context if they wanted to. There’s a hundred translations of Catullus. What’s the point in doing another in just the same way? So, people did that, and Mia did it brilliantly. There’s lot of sex in Catullus. Roman street sex poems and Mia translated them into Dublin sex poems and they’re brilliant, they really work. So here what she’s done is something similar and a different idea. She hasn’t just followed word for word the poem, she responded to it and she’s introduced her own language and that’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do.
A: So, what challenges did you face when translating poems from Spanish to English, do you think some things may have got lost in translation?
R: Yes, I think it’s a truism that something gets lost in translation but equally if nothing is translated everything gets lost. So I think Spanish in a way is deceptive in that you’d think that because the words are specific, that you can’t just use a dictionary and translate them, but you can. But the thing that’s not so easy to do is the rhythms of Spanish like they have noche que noche oscura (‘night what a dark night‘s’). It doesn’t sound the same in English so that’s in some of the poems. I have a little Spanish, and I can see there’s a whole atmosphere and world in those poems that doesn’t necessarily come out through translation, but something else does come out which makes it all worthwhile.
A: In the preface you say that fifty poems by Cuban poets born prior to 1959 were chosen and fifty poems by Irish poets born prior to 1922 were chosen. Is there a significance to these dates?
R; Yes, the reason is that there was the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and there was the Irish free state (that was established) in 1922 (and the Irish Civil War) so in a way the idea was to sidestep the issue of the revolution in both countries.
A: Again in the preface, it was written that fifty Spanish poems were swapped with the Irish side and fifty poems in English were swapped with the Cuban side. But in the end fifty Spanish poems were taken and were translated into English and given an Irish interpretation. Why did you decide to take this route rather than have Irish poets write their own poems?
R: That’s another good question too. Because this is the first encounter between the two countries at this level although there’s another interesting one which I’ll come to in a minute. So it’s better to sometimes manage something like this. There was a formality in a way that perhaps made this manageable whereas if you were to open it up in the way you had described it would be a different proposition.
A: What will your next writing or poetry project be?
The criminal court of justice, Dublin. Daniele Idini/Cassandra Voices
R: The next writing project I will be doing is to revise a book that I’ve been working on for a while which is called Green Street. Green Street is the name lawyers gave to the Special Criminal Court. Did you ever hear of Robert Emmett?
A: Yes
R: Did you ever hear of Sarah Curran, Robert Emmett’s fiancée? My cousin Margaret is a descendant and looks like her and that’s her up there in the green hat. (He points at a photo framed by the door). See, so she has to go to Green Street. What do you think of that? Anyway, so that’s what I’m going to be doing. So yes the most famous thing that ever happened in Green Street was the trial of Robert Emmett. And as I say Robert Emmett was in love with Sarah Curran, and I also did cases on Green Street and a few years later my brother and I did so in a way exploring that.
Sarah Curran playing the harp. Painted by William Beechey, c.1805.
A: Is there anything else that you’d like to comment on that you feel would be important for readers to know?
R: I think that I’m going to make a compliment to Cassandra Voices shall I do that?
A: If you like, can’t go wrong.
R: A really good thing that can happen in literary culture is to have small groups or magazines that are bringing out books or magazines and programmes that are independent. That’s really what I know in my experience of such things, that’s where real creativity resides.
After I stop recording, I get a closer look at the photo of Sarah Curran’s ancestor, the green hat is indeed striking, the face shapes are similar too. I thank Ronan for his time and step out into the warm sunlight to make my way home.
I am a visual artist and improvising musician. I trained as a painter, but also worked with various media including sound, installation/performance, sculpture, print and photography during my studies. My visual work since leaving college in 1987 has largely centred around photomontage, and in recent years has moved into painting and drawing (still using photography as source).
I began using sound pretty much from the start in college, using found metals, initially to record with, and later use in live work, inspired by the work of Test Dept., Einsturzende Neubauten, z’ev & Bow Gamelan. I was also inspired by the work of Dome, :zoviet*france:, Hafler Trio, Strafe Für Rebellion, Nurse With Wound and others, and began constructing very simple tape collages which were used for tape/slide works and installations.
Apart from a brief flirtation with guitar in my teens, I am not musically trained. I got the hang of drums some years later and really enjoyed the physicality of that instrument, but never played in a band. Since college, I have continued in the vein of constructed and adapted instruments and tape collages.
Cabinet Of Curiosities instrument, in concert with Judith Ring, I&E Festival 2006, Printing House TCD (photo: Sean MacErlaine)
I’ve been passionate about music from an early age, and my love of the post-punk spirit of DIY and experimentation found a crossover with the further reaches of sonic exploration coming from the Fine Art approaches to sound as a sculptural medium. I then discovered improvised music and was smitten. The possibilities just seemed wide open. There was a directness and a simplicity that was really appealing. It was also a much quicker route to producing music by sidestepping years of training. Of course, it’s not just musical ability you bring to the table, it’s imagination and intelligence too.
The possibilities expand further when working with other players in an open dialogue with parity of presence, no grandstanding, all listening attentively as much as playing or not playing. Listening is key. I established a strong connection with drummer David Lacey early on, and went on to play and record on many occasions over the years in a very sympathetic and satisfying working relationship for which I’m really grateful – the natural chemistry is a source of great joy.
I’ve also worked with other Irish players such as Judith Ring, Jurgen Simpson, Paul Vogel, & Dennis McNulty, as well as UK players Max Eastley & Mark Wastell. We put out a trio album to critical acclaim on Mark’s Confront label in 2019, The Map Is Not The Territory.
I have pursued this area of exploration ever since because it’s really where my heart’s at. I’m in my element. It’s a completely obsessive and highly fetishised world for me. I’ve always loved the idea of making something from discarded materials, the idea of transformation; base metals into… not quite gold, but something beautiful or intriguing at least.
Percussion stand adapted from roto-tom stand photographed in studio, c.2009.
These materials inspire a particular approach with all their tactile and evocative qualities. Whole worlds can be constructed with these sounds with the compositional possibilities of the computer (4 track in the early days forced a particular discipline that’s served me well since). That’s the other side of it for me: the idea of making your own unique sound world, evolving a voice that establishes a particular presence, one that hopefully moves beyond your influences and into something different, something engaging and satisfying.
Brian Eno’s work in the 70s and early 80s was another significant inspiration for me, especially his On Land album. In his liner notes, he speaks specifically about the idea of landscape, memory, and a sense of place. He also mentions the notion of psychoacoustic space—the idea of using recording technology to create imaginary spaces and atmospheres: the suggestive power of sound. This absolutely got the hook in me.
Field recording has been a core element of my practice since 1986, when I bought a secondhand recording Walkman whilst on summer work in London (no summer work in recession-hit Ireland in the 80s). My immediate environment in all its fascinating detail became framed between my ears whilst listening on headphones. I was completely taken with the possibilities this offered for further manipulation/recombination, enriching my sound palette.
I went on to buy a DAT recorder in the 90s, and latterly have used the Zoom H4N flash card recorder, as a handy device that can be carried in a back pack. A lot of my recording would be opportunistic – hearing something that takes my fancy and capturing it, or returning later. For more involved recording, especially wildlife recording, I use a Sound Devices hard disc recorder with DPA mics in a windshield, or a Telinga parabolic reflector for capturing bird song. I’ve built up a considerable archive over the years, which I dip into for compositions which are either wholly field recording-based, or are one part of a composition, to add particular colour, texture and depth.
Feedback set-up with contact mics in metal vessels, from launch gig for A Congregation Of Vapours album at the Goethe Institute, Dublin, 2012.
When composing, improvisation is essential in building the material from the ground up, mainly because I can’t conceive of structures in the abstract as someone traditionally trained would do. But then that is only one system. Mine is another, admittedly more labour-intensive and time consuming one. I’m approaching it from an artist’s perspective – painting and sculpting with sound. Sound as raw, malleable matter to be manipulated – prodded, poked, pushed, pulled, beaten, hammered, scalded, stretched, scarred, chopped, diced, dessicated, burnt, and glued, taped, nailed and bolted back together again.
The editing of the material is where the pieces find their form. The painterly/sculptural analogy is apt as the sounds get built up and hacked back quite brutally, cross-hatched with other material, further distilled and recombined, depending on what’s working or not. Pieces can start out relatively long and end up a fraction of their original length. And sometimes shorter pieces that weren’t strong enough to stand alone end up being stitched together into a larger piece. Listening is a really important part of the editing process. I would usually put rough mixes on CD and audition them at home for a period of time, let them settle – hearing them in much the same conditions as the listener. If there’s areas where I find I’m losing interest, then it’s got to be pruned. I shouldn’t lose interest for a second. I’ve got to be totally involved all the way.
4 & 6 string devices made with guitar and bass strings mounted on teak beams, made in 2014.
In 2005 I established my CDR label Room Temperature. I’ve released mostly solo material on the label since, in EP and full length album form, as well as two collaborative albums with David Lacey and a live album with David Lacey, Paul Vogel & Dennis McNulty. I’ve also released albums on Farpoint, Stolen Mirror, Unfathomless and Confront. September 2020 saw the release of my 16th item on my label, Plundered Lumber.
This is a 52 minute album comprising 13 tracks using mostly bass guitar and metal percussion. It’s a return of sorts to a form of composing last used about 20 years ago, where an emphasis on rhythmic interactions and melodic interplay was the main driver. I’ve used little or no processing (apart from some delay and reverb) and no field recordings. Some delays were added after, some used during recording, as a phantom rhythmic element to play against.
I did a lot of this kind of thing on the technically limited but (with lateral thinking) creatively manipulable 4 track in the 90s with a mixture of drum kit, gongs, non-European percussion, found metals and bass and various small stringed instruments picked up in markets and the like. I used to put compositions on tape and give them to friends. Before graduating to digital tape and CDR, and long before online presence and downloads, the cassette underground was a lively and many-splendored thing.
One other recent development in my practice has been the creation of tribute pieces to artists whose work has had an influence on me. It began with a piece to celebrate ex-Wire member Bruce Gilbert’s 70th in 2016, and went on in 2017 to celebrate the work of Bow Gamelan Ensemble’s Paul Burwell, marking the tenth anniversary of his death. I also marked Wire’s 40th anniversary in 2017, and the 40th anniversary of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures in 2019.
These pieces usually have about a 10 – 15 minute run time, and use a combination of edits of their music and music that influenced them, as well as other cultural influences – film, TV and radio, which I combine with current affairs snippets, comedy and interviews to create a rich portrait. This year I produced my most ambitious tribute yet – to the 1970s music of David Bowie, which ran to just under 22 minutes:
Another work recently completed in a similar vein, though it’s not a tribute as such, is Spectral Vectors, which was composed for Come Hell Or High Water, a monthly series of live events on the Thames foreshore at Poplar, organised by Bow Gamelan Ensemble’s Anne Bean and others. I was to have performed at this in September but the pandemic put paid to that. So Anne suggested I make a sound work in lieu. The piece I’ve composed takes as its starting point the idea of ghosts of the Thames; river revenants in the form of lost sounds of previous times from the river’s busier industrial past, such as ship’s horns, tugboat horns, foghorns and other industrial sounds.
Expanding on this theme, the idea of things lost/buried/hidden/removed came to mind. Documentary radio footage relating to sunken unexploded WWII ordnance and tragic drowning was combined with recent field recordings of mine made with contact mics attached to cabling beneath Millenium Bridge at St. Paul’s, amplifying sounds hidden to the naked ear, when the bridge is animated by foot traffic, wind coursing through it and sun warming it.
Hydrophone recordings also capture hidden sounds – various vessels passing, sounding thin and insubstantial as wind-up bath toys from a submarine perspective. Delving deeper, recordings made inside Greenwich foot tunnel feature; resonant metallic sounds buried beneath the river itself echo along the tunnel’s length.
Municipal greed and acts of resistance also form part of the documentary material with Bob Hoskins enlightening Barry Norman in 1982 about various development scams along the river, Malcolm MacLaren talking about the Sex Pistols’ 1977 riverboat gig, and riverboat men going on strike. This footage is animated by the addition of lost ship’s horns, populating the river with a lively, boisterous presence.
Fergus Kelly is a Dublin based visual artist/composer/improvisor. Working with field recordings, invented instruments, electronics, photomontage, painting and drawing, publishing albums via his CDR label, Room Temperature (www.roomtemperature.org)
