Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • Poetry – Haley Hodges

    Make of me, too, a microcosm

    Make of me, too, a microcosm—
    Merger, marry, manifest
    As the bridegroom, as the stone-melted
    Heart. Move but do not remove me, for monsters
    Maraud in madness here, and we meet
    Mettle to mettle about the place. But you—
    Magnificent as mystery, as morning, you
    Are mooring the ship of me, mastering the maze
    Of my malaise to run like marrow through bronze
    Bones, an unmappable river overlapping the
    Mayhem. You mumble or hum of Spring-things,
    May-things made for me, mighty and bright
    As midnight meteor, final as eucatastrophe
    Mounting in stillness. You dip Ursa Major
    Into the pail with a wink milky as motherhood:
    Come meadow, come minnow, come maple
    And mink, come drink, (you say) come marvel!
    Our blue marble maiden—mess though she may be—
    Her majesty is mineral-deep! Minstrels sing it and mages
    Know it. Myriad music still marks her mind, her memory,
    Music of mending and meaning, naming and being—
    Music of mackerel meandering, matter and mass,
    Metaphysical music marching from moment to minute
    To minute and back in a palindrome line, meticulous
    And light as a match, hatchling fresh. You say much more,
    All unmeasurable, and to the unending moment of you I say:
    Make of me, too, a magic.

  • The Club

    Part I

    “DON’T QUIT” My father’s mantra was taped to the dull beige wall above his bed. Its edges were a little worn after being ripped down from one hospital wall and taped to another, for years. Deafening was the respiratory wheezing which somehow managed to be erratic and yet, constant at the same time. As a family, we were drowning in an aching cesspool of disease, but it defined that life was still present. It defined that my father was still alive. So we sat. We waited. Held on to each breath. Hour after hour. Night after night. For the better part of those last three months. The reality was, if not in the physical sense, in an emotional one, I’d been there for seven years.

    That hospital was an all-too-familiar environment. Homey to us all. The room scattered with bits of our life. A keyboard, magazines, photos, Dad’s guitar, a soapstone carving of a seal he was crafting. It was all there, in an attempt to provide us any peace. The doctors and nurses, porters and administration, housekeeping and parking attendants, other patients and their visiting families. Everyone within that sphere were part of what was to us, “home.”

    Better than sleeping upright in the chair, or awake and listening to my Dad struggle for breath, was the penthouse stairwell landing. It morphed into a makeshift sleeping area we siblings fought for, and as the youngest, most often I lost.

    It had been seven years since we got the news. My mother and father were in the hospital room. While out in the dim hall, I waited. Glancing around at the sterile surroundings, I was excited to see my father again, but nervous. Why were we in this strange place? He’d been tired and required some tests. Whatever that meant.

    “Your father has cancer.” Those were the words.

    “Can I catch it?” I asked.

    “No.”

    I wondered what cancer was. It made Mom’s eyes puffy. She’d been crying. She was sad. At Daddy’s side, I held his hand, like I always had. Squeezing my little fingers, he looked into my eyes and smiled. My mother held his other hand, small gasps escaping her lips, and tears in her eyes.

    “Your Dad will have some treatments to make the cancer go away,” they said. “He will be losing his hair.”

    HALT! I was horrified. What did they mean “lose his hair?” Why? Where was his hair going? Dad would be bald?

    “It could come back in any color.”

    “Like pink, or purple or red or blue?” I quizzed.

    “Sure!”

    Dad’s hair didn’t matter, but I knew by the look in their eyes, and their strained voices, that something was wrong. All attempts to convince me made it more obvious that life would never again be the same. At age six I was unable to comprehend the scope of sadness that would become our reality. From this moment forward, the course of my life would be altered. Forever.

    He was given thirty days to live. My mother was just thirty-six and would be left to raise a family of five alone. Then, during the subsequent seven years, in cycles of thirty to ninety days, he was given additional time to live. It would prove to be an unimaginable journey: fear, insecurity, loneliness, lack of identity, hardening, pain. The canvas appearing bright, a guise brimming with fun, friends and popularity, Yet, the brush strokes, and the mediums were layered; opaque textures veiling a stark and sombre reality.

    Dreading the last buzzer of the day at school became a mainstay. What would I come home to? I turned age seven, eight, and nine. The years went on, and some questions remained the same, some changed. Would I end up all alone? Would that old lady with the weeping mole be my nanny once again, or would I be shipped off to whomever would take me? I wondered this knowing I might be with them for more than a month. Ages ten, eleven, and twelve passed, and the pain continued. Would my parents be home, or would the chemo-induced nightmare have Dad slumped over the porcelain, convulsing, heaving, and regurgitating nothing again? Would he remember me today? Would he get lost driving, if he could even drive? Would Mom be crying? Of course, she always cried. And would the ambulance be backed up to the door with Dad crawling to the stretcher, as a form of pride? At age 13, I wondered would Mom survive? Would I?

    He was dead. My father. Lifeless. Hollow. Dead. Dad died from a harrowing seven-year battle with cancer. A battle I would ultimately recognize as being a significant moment in my own life. It would serve as a catalyst for the person I became. Silent. Sober. Glazed, I sunk into a therapist’s worn velvet sofa, deep in that tearstained domicile of heart wrenching human agony. Behind a calm façade, the only evidence of anguish I saved for that lacerated outlet of my pain, were the petals of a crimson poinsettia. Sympathetic yet, clinical, I felt my therapist’s analytical eyes summing me up. I didn’t want to be here. I wanted a reprieve. Wanted to melt into the blueness of his sofa. Blend into his flat, silent walls. Walls which had absorbed the malaise of multitudes.

    That excruciating sound had ceased. The agonizing gasps for life that accompanied each passing second for the past month stopped. That last breath of life had taken him with it, leaving a silent, still, deserted form laying there. My Dad was dead. I didn’t know it then, but I was now part of a club. A club that I’d find out, in later years, was unlike any other. Neither prestigious, nor chic, it was nevertheless a club. It was a club that would give bearing, and direction to the future me. The club would open doors. And these doors would lead me into the lives of others.

    Part II

    Club Life. Who are we but an assemblage of clones. Xeroxed human forms convinced that by seeking individuality, we don’t exploit its very existence. As club members, we attend the club of the moment, striving to be a part of the in-group; a clique, attempting to carbon copy the look, speech, smell, and thoughts of others. Lost in a sea of conformity, we’ll adapt to anything familiar for that feeling of wholeness. Righteousness. Acceptance. Gregarious sheep, we follow our instinct to flock, and when separated from the group, we become agitated and crave safety from lurking predators who may challenge us, or our character. We search for the lead sheep to follow down the road. The road to conformity right over an imminent cliff at the peril of what makes us unique. Original.

    We could choose to believe that we are beautiful. Singular individuals. Designed to be a happy result. An impeccable concoction of experiences that when blended together become our life as we know it. Like a recipe, we are just ingredients, temperatures, measurements, outer elements, and mediums, and who is cooking. All these play a role for the outcome of the dish that is this life. Our ingredients and our process contain variables both habitual and fortuitous. Making each and every decision, experience and moment, directly affect the core of who we become. Internally. Externally. These uncertainties and variables add the fundamental flavour and the texture to our souls. Our lives mould us into who we will be.

    So, let’s talk food, spices to be specific. For the most part, spices are added in small, portions. Sometimes so insignificant they are invisible to the eye. When blended, they often vanish. Yet their potency and flavour are a game changer. How much spice, tasty or disgusting has been added to the lives of others and while unaware of why, still we somehow sense something in their presence.

    Some ingredients seem similar. But there exists a vast difference between, vinegars for instance. Selecting white, cider, malt or balsamic, would we then pour the potent fluid directly from its bottle, or over a fire, find its thick sickly sweet reduction? Faced with different conditions, the same ingredient reveals otherwise hidden characteristics from the inside, out.

    Measurements; a pinch, an ounce, a cup; the abundance of an ingredient or lack thereof can build or destroy what we perceive as the expected end result. Do we have enough? Is it too much?

    And who is cooking in your kitchen? Is that a Three Star Michelin Chef preparing avocado mousse with green pistachio oil, garnished with fleur de sel?  Or is it Grandma’s loving hands putting her warm heart fondly in to preparing her mother’s, age-old family recipe of roast beef and mashed potatoes? Then there’s the fifteen year old kid slinging burgers at the local drive-thru, just to make a buck.

    How’s the heat? Low and slow? Is the lid on or off? Are we baking or grilling over mesquite on the barbeque? Have you tried deep fried? Is stuff sautéed on the stovetop or simply served, cold and raw? An utter absence of heat changes everything. Regardless of method employed, each element plays an intrinsic role in what will be plated and served to please or repulse one’s appetite. And at the end of the day all we can say is that dinner is served, or Bon Appetit!

    As humans full of a variety of ingredients; mediums, measurements, methods and so forth, we differ and yet find what we share in common. Lonely in our fight to be profoundly unique, conversely, we crave to fit in and be part of a group. We want a club that will unify us. Bring us together in a harmonious and understanding manner, and thus the recipe.

    The universal understanding of clubs comes decked out in the all-knowing perceived costume of book clubs, tennis clubs, rotary clubs, dance clubs, bike clubs, yacht clubs, even golf clubs. But the clubs in disguise that resonate in all of our lives each and every day are blatantly obvious yet not drafted or defined. These are the clubs of reality, the clubs of experience, the clubs of heartache, sorrow, joy, bliss, danger, and courage, LIFE.

    These clubs build the foundation within us to erect relationships with others based on empathy and understanding of shared mutual knowledge and experiences. These clubs categorically hoist us into levels of sameness. Ultimately allowing us to relate with one another in a way that can be truly understood. The clubs become a vast and endless springboard to deeper relations. Club menus adorned in new attire are decorated and large; lost a parent club, pregnant club, married club, divorced club, singles club, couldn’t have a child club, owned a business club, the LGTBQ club, been an addict club, had a daughter club, had a son club, had a sister club, was abused club,  lost a job club, went bankrupt club, made a million club, survived cancer club, chronic pain club, attended university club, wrote a dissertation club. I think you get the picture.

    Part III

    It was overcast when I left my scheduled ultrasound, childless, except for the unborn one inside me. I was enjoying every moment of being seven months pregnant with my second. A clingy camouflage dress did anything but that for the basketball-esque lump that bulged beneath it. I ran my hands down and around us both, saying, “I love you.” I even pressed on its body parts. Hoping to awaken our little one. Feel those movements that made me feel so whole. So beautiful. So utterly complete. Growing at the proper pace, meant together we were squished behind the steering wheel, in order for my feet to touch the pedals. But these nuances are nothing. These petty discomforts, which arise with pregnancy, pale in comparison to being a conduit of life.

    Had I seen a penis? Was it a boy or girl? Would it go to an Ivy League school? Questions about my unborn child played out in my head as I drove down the street that afternoon. Wait, would my little girl adjust or object to her new room? Her new sibling? And what about the nursery? What about the crib? The decorating around it was nowhere near complete. There would be plenty of time for that, although I anticipated an early arrival. This would be a carbon copy of my previous little miracle who entered the world two weeks early. I had so many questions and thoughts. So much newness, I was about to burst.

    In a couple of months, we’d have two children. Two years apart. Perfect! Oh and I wouldn’t split my love. There was enough of me to go around! I would DOUBLE my love. Yes. It would all be perfect. U2’s song, “It’s a Beautiful Day” played on the radio. I sang along. Well, the words I knew. “It’s a Beautiful Day, don’t let it get away, it’s a Beautiful Day, don’t let it get away.” “You’re on the road but you’ve got no destination you’re in the mud mmm mmm mmm . . . you’ve been all over and it’s been all over you.”

    I hummed and mumbled through the rest. It was perhaps a grey day, but it was still beautiful to me. Seemed I always left those ultrasounds in such a euphoric state, after observing the little life inside me. A life I had played a major part in creating. And for those nine precious months, I took seriously and welcomed all responsibility for controlling the wellbeing of this little miracle inside me.

    The phone in my lap vibrated before it rang. Competing with Bono’s, “What you don’t have, you don’t need it now,” my husband answered my singsong hello.

    “Honey, great news! Your doctor just called and has the results from your ultrasound.”

    Thump, thump, thump. Heart pounding. Pounding. I veered off the road. I wanted to back up, Wake up. Start the day anew. You don’t get results from ultrasounds unless they are bad. And no, not personal calls from your doctor, only minutes afterward. I couldn’t hear anything. The world spiralled around me. I needed air. At that moment, I knew. All those hopes and dreams I’d entertained in my head moments before, of my unborn child, would NEVER be. I knew.

    The five days to follow were some of the most agonizing, I’d ever experienced. Ultrasounds. Amniocentesis. Internal exams. External prodding. Counselling. Tears. Decisions. Conclusions. Devastation.

    Four days later, I huddled with my husband in the boardroom of a hospital in another city. White walls surrounded the big brown table where we sat on insignificant office chairs forged from metal and woven fabric. Other than that, the room felt empty. Lifeless. Not counting the dozen or so medical professionals gathered to go over the prognosis, answer any questions and hear our decision.  Considering that my husband chose to leave it in my hands, head and heart, our decision was actually mine.

    Introductions were made after everyone was seated. Dr. Jones. Dr. Ramirez. Dr. Denard. Dr. Hall. There was a blur of specialists, a handful of nurses, a couple of psychologists and some pre-med students. Inconsequential formalities. My heart was pounding again. I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry.

    The professionals spoke. “Your son.” A son! Son. “Severe heart defects.” Their mouths moved but the words were muffled. Muted. The cold, rawness of the first words spoken “Your son. Severe. Heart. Son. Defects. Son. Severe. Son,” skipped like a scratched vinyl record. “His chances of survival through the birthing process are next to none, if he lives that long. Upon birth he’ll need an immediate heart transplant only possible in select hospitals thousands of miles away. You’d have to relocate for quite some time. That heart may be rejected, that is if we can find a heart for him. He’ll need more transplants as he grows. Chances. A son. Survival. Immediate transplant. Relocate. Thousands of miles. A son rejected.” For what seemed like an eternity, the whirlwind was spinning. And then it stopped.

    The room held a thunderous silence. I looked out at the blank faces staring back at me. I felt so small. Why couldn’t they make my decision? Why did it have to be me? I opened my mouth to speak, but my voice cracked. Breathe, breathe, breathe, I told myself, clearing throat again. “I want to terminate my pregnancy.”

    I said it. Said the words I did not want to say. But knew I had to. The words I had prayed to receive. And then I heard the sighs. Sighs of relief. Escaping the mouths and hearts of everyone in the room. Sighs offering me comfort about a decision well made. We left the hospital. Silenced. Dispirited. I would return to the hospital at 9:30 the following morning to voluntarily end the life of my child.

    We’d stayed at the same hotel, a year prior, during my husband’s heart surgery. It felt comfortable. Homey. They addressed us by name, and we were treated well. For me, the hotel held many memories. My first experience there had been a private party with a rock band on their world tour. Then a “Bride-to-be” wedding gala and the list goes on. It was a place where the infamous and “B” actors stayed while shooting on location. Falling in to conversation with them in the elevators or the lounge happened all the time. To be honest, the sheer retail therapy available; shopping at close proximity and bag drop at my fingertips, would’ve been a draw. But that night, thoughts so banal, didn’t enter my mind.

    They gave me drugs to aid my sleep that night and maybe I did. Don’t know. Had to remind myself to breathe. Just breathe. Deeply. Inhale. Exhale. BREATHE. Faith Hill’s lyrics ran through my head, “Caught up in the touch, the slow and steady rush. Baby isn’t that the way love is supposed to be? I can feel you breathe. Just breathe.”

    Unable to sleep any longer, it was early the next morning, when we went downstairs for breakfast. Happier times had been had in this very restaurant for us. This not being one of them, and well aware I’d need superhuman strength for the self-administered labour, I ordered Eggs Benedict.

    Nearby a man and a woman sat together, laughing over their coffee. I’d never been so desperate for a laugh, myself. But her laugh was so familiar. Familiar enough to make me look up. And I realized it was the actress who had played Marion Cunningham, the perfect mother from the television show, Happy Days. How many hours of my childhood had been spent, after school, sprawled on a bean bag chair enjoying the Cunningham family and their antics, while my parents were away at the Cancer Clinic? It is then I smiled. Because, like some kind of surrogate mother who had been there for me before, she made me feel safe. She’d no clue about who I was. Of the trauma I was facing. Nor how, at that moment, she gave me, in a small way, a glimmer of hope.

     

    When it was time, we drove to the hospital. I needed to take anything and everything I could from this moment. I needed to remember every detail. I wanted my senses to never forget. With chunky crimson red boots, I was again wearing my camouflage dress. It wasn’t a maternity dress. Simply a stretchy form fitting, high necked, short sleeved, three quarter length dress. Of ever so slightly see-through fabric. I felt good in this dress. Even though it was the same dress I had on when they told me the news. Out of what I was about to experience, I was desperate to accentuate any ray of light I could. And if some trivial piece of fabric could boost my senses even an iota, I was going to take it.

    Hand in hand, we walked through the doors. The only brightness in a flatly lit room were the walls lined with colorful paintings and clay works by young children. The smell was that ever present hospital smell. Clinical, yet sort of stale and so familiar from my past, that oddly I found some comfort in it. Behind a desk, where we would register, sat two ladies. One was on the telephone. I’m pretty sure her unlucky colleague was wishing she’d been the one on the telephone too, after she greeted us with an appropriate, “Good morning. Can I help you?”  “Uh yes, I am here to…” Someone stepped in for me, as I broke down. We were then ushered to an elevator.

    Stepping out, we turned left twice, circumnavigating a maze of linen carts in the hallway to the room where I would give birth to my son. A room that felt forgotten. Obscure. Hidden. It was like a place to hide a dirty little secret. Inside, medical instruments hung on its walls which were white. The bedding was bright on a lone single bed. There were dismal peach coloured drapes around a window with no view. The room was brighter than its small, dull and grey bathroom with just a toilet, sink and an emergency pull cord.

    The alternatives to inducing my labour had been discussed and it was agreed that I would take part in a study. Meaning, throughout the day, I would insert a series of pills. Vaginally.  Labour to ensue. And like the beginning of a bad joke, a couple of doctors, an intern and two nurses entered the room. After signing the forms, I was handed a package of pills and told to go into the washroom to insert one. I was then told I could leave the hospital, but not to venture far. In case my labour came on too quickly. And oh yes, try to keep calm. In a daze, and for lack of anywhere else to go, we hit a nearby shopping mall. Aimless, we wandered the halls, to buy nothing. Looking, we saw nothing. Listening, we heard nothing. Thinking, we tried hard not to feel. My emotions were so contradictory, so raw. Wanting to experience everything, and at the same time, nothing.

    Blessed with a high pain threshold, the intensity I am capable of enduring is legendary. To my amusement, after our first child, my husband said, “I’ve a new respect for you. Bet I could take an axe to your leg and you wouldn’t flinch.” That labour lasted thirty-nine and a half, (Can’t miss that half) hours. And except for short intervals, with all I had, I was pushing for four. Well this was no different.

    Soon enough, mental torment became secondary to physical agony. The pills were working.

    And this labour began with a vengeance. Because this baby wasn’t entering our world to stay, I’d expected the labour to be less severe. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.

    My husband wanted to return to the hospital, because the labour was so severe, but I insisted we keep walking. Non-contracting moments were filled with emotion. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Not yet. Didn’t want to lose this feeling of my son inside of me. Didn’t want to lose part of myself. I wanted to continue talking to him. Playing with him. Moving his little body about me and rubbing love all over him. Desperate, I didn’t want to let go of the hopes and the dreams. I didn’t want to make my decision a reality.

    Excruciating, when the contractions came, my head went somewhere else. Breathe, Breathe, Breathe. I was stubborn. I would not go. Not yet. We walked out to the truck, where I couldn’t stop crying. Looking at my despondent husband, I knew it was he who could take no more.

    I didn’t care. Body and soul, I was in my finest form, with no intention to vacate either. And loving myself pregnant, the occasional whimper escaped me, but louder was the emotional pain. We drove back to the hospital parking lot, only to sit in the truck for as long as I could convince him to stay. Walking back through those doors, going up in the elevator, and down the dingy hallway, again we skirted around the linen carts and entered the white room in the hospital’s most remote corner. Pausing every 45 seconds or so to breathe through the pain, indeed we had succeeded in arriving. To my son’s birthplace, where he would also die.

    I wasn’t dilating. The nearby nurse monitored my progress and though attentive, my husband was terrified. Now clothed in a dreadful blue hospital gown, I lay in the white linen of the bed, trying to find calm. Embracing these last moments with the child within and praying for the strength to deal with it all. Breathing through the pain that would not give me a moment’s peace, as hour after hour flew by and yet, time stood still.

    Nurse on one side and husband on the other, I was escorted to the washroom numerous times, to relieve the enormous pressure on my poor bladder. In my modesty pleading that they leave me alone. Time and again the routine was the same. Until the last time which differed, in that as I sat down, the labour pains came. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I had an urge to push, just as a wave of nausea washed over me. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could do this. Was I supposed to push? At that moment my world changed.

    “Oh my God! What is happening to me?” Feeling something. I screamed, “Help me, help me, someone, please help me! God, help me!” Between my legs, I saw my son’s small hands grasping at my legs. He was out. He was flailing beneath me. I only heard my own screams. “Anyone. Somebody hold me. Take me away. I need to die now. He’s alive. He’s not supposed to be alive. Oh my God, what have I done?” In seconds the nurse and my husband were there. Alarms sounded, and people came running.

    Told to hold my baby, that they might get me back in bed, I didn’t want to. I couldn’t touch him, I was afraid. Managing to get me and my son onto the bed, they then cut the umbilical cord. I so wished the noise in this hospital would stop. Not realizing the noise was me, screaming.

    The life that called my body home had moved out. After no more than a few minutes of chaos everyone left, and I lay there alone. Empty. Hollow.

    Dismal and omniscient, the peach-coloured curtains were now closed. And as though choreographed, a dark grey shadow cast itself against them, making the room more muted and mundane than before. It was like the natural light of a foggy day and this broken only by a tiny beam of electric light coming from beyond the bathroom door. Where moments before, I’d borne my son. The blue gown I wore was wet. Blood-soaked, it lay limp and lifeless over an abandoned abdomen, and almost as dreadful was a deafening silence that echoed between the four walls of my room. Tormented I asked myself, “Why was my child moving? Why was his heart beating? Why was my son alive?”

    The door to the hall opened and there he stood. My husband. With a nurse, he entered the room. Holding my son. Swaddled in the satin and flannel blanket his Grandma had made just for him. Taking the baby in to my arms, I wept. My soul ached with so many questions that still went unanswered. I had to stay in the moment. This one moment in time I knew would end without any kind of closure. There would be nothing more than this.

    We spent the next three hours alone with our son. His small chest was moving rhythmically but with no breath. I held him and told him stories of his sister and the life he would have had. Pum pum. Pum pum. Pum pum. He was perfect. Small, but perfect, and his skin was slightly transparent. He had little fat on his body. His heart continued to beat and mine was beating faster. His long delicate fingers wrapped around mine as I held him. I tried to make each and every piece of him a photograph in my memory, a keepsake of my son. A son I would never see again. Pum pum. Pum pum. I apologized to him and told him how much I loved him. He had the sweet aroma of all newborns. That scent bottled, would be an immediate success. Why wouldn’t his heart just stop beating? Damn. Why wouldn’t mine?

    We lit a candle, named our son and the hospital’s pastor blessed him. I felt peace for a moment. However, that peace was short lived. Quickly kyboshed, it was absorbed by one resounding question. A question lurking, to which I needed an answer. Due to severe heart defects, I had made the difficult decision to end my son’s life. Yet he’d been born with a beating heart, and three hours later as I loved him in my arms, it continued to beat.

    That day stands alone for leaving me emptier than anything I’d ever encounter. Equipped only with my previous life experiences, I’d entered an unknown abyss, and come out hollow, yet grown. And I didn’t want to belong to this. Nobody asked if I wanted to be a member. But that was the day I joined another club.

  • Musician of the Month: Undine

    For more about Undine’s work see:

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MusicUndine

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/musicundine/

    Official site: http://undinemusic.com/um/undine.asp

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/MusicUndine

     

     

  • Sé Merry Doyle: James Joyce – Reluctant Groom

    Andrea Reynell caught up with renowned documentary filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle to discuss his new film ‘James Joyce – Reluctant Groom‘ in which poet Niall McDevitt guides us through a London landscape with unknown Joycean associations. The film takes us back to period in 1931 when Joyce and his long-term partner Nora Barnacle moved to London for a year in order to secure a legal marriage. The film also demonstrates that in this period of Covid-19 necessity is the mother of invention.

    Andrea Reynell: Why was Joyce’s marriage to Nora worthy of a documentary?

    Sé Merry Doyle: Well, it mainly came about through Niall McDevitt – the person who leads the whole story – and a well-known poet in London; an Irish poet, very well known in Irish poetry circles. Niall gives literary cycle or walking tours where he uses the landscape to tell stories. He often draws large crowds. I filmed him pre-Covid-19 doing one on Oscar Wilde just to have the material. There were about twenty people traipsing around Wildean landscapes. I noticed how brilliant he was and we became friends and then we did a small film called The Battle of Blythe Road, which was a temple dedicated to the goddess Isis in Hammersmith that W.B Yeats used to run, and where he got into feats of daring do with Aleister Crowley, who was into black magic. Nobody knew about this place in London.

    Before telling you how the Joyce film happened, I’ll backtrack a bit. I came to London to show some films, documentaries I had made in The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith and while I was here I ended up making a feature documentary called The Knitting Ring featuring older Irish women, and then Covid-19 hit and the whole place got locked down. Then the Irish Cultural Centre decided to start a digital channel. So we got together lots of musicians, poets, and writers. I was coordinating this with Rosalind Scanlon who’s the cultural director. So since then we’ve been posting weekly on ICC Digital.

    The Battle of Blythe Road was my first commissioned piece for them and I went out with Niall. It was just shot on the iPhone, rough and ready but became a viral hit let’s say. Then we decided to take on James Joyce after Niall told me the story. Again the attraction was that it was just me, Niall, and the iPhone with some sound editing. So it was perfect in a Covid-19 world.

    It’s about James Joyce coming to London in 1931 to get married because of a law saying you had to live there for a year beforehand. So he came for a year with his wife Nora and his daughter Lucia, and his son Giorgio came over quite a lot as well.

    AR: How have current circumstances had an impact on your work?

    SMD: Funnily enough before I came to London, I was living in Abbeyleix in Co. Laois, with my daughter and there wasn’t much work. I don’t want to be negative about Ireland, but there was very little happening and I felt like I couldn’t afford to live in Dublin anymore and that’s why I had to move out. I found the environment slightly hostile whenever I tried to put anything out, but then I came to London, and all of a sudden all these people were asking: do you make documentaries and would you make this and that? It felt like a breath of fresh air. People admired me for what I could do and I didn’t have to go out for a pint with someone and find nothing would happen afterwards.

    Since Covid-19 in a way I’ve been busier than ever. I go out and shoot little films for ICC Digital. We’re filming some stuff next week under controlled measures. Then I return to my editing suite and balcony near Wimbledon Woods. So my environment is safe from Covid-19.

    I see the Joyce film as something that could sit very well on RTE, even though it’s shot on an iPhone; a half-hour film produced extremely economically. So I’m enjoying this new relationship with my iPhone and I’ve been filming poets and actors like Nora Connolly. She did a Bloomsday event. I know certain musicians are having a terrible time right now. Musicians are suffering more than others in the pandemic. They are out there all the time. Now I like going out as well. I like nothing more than bringing all the material back. So, it’s suiting my particular field.

    AR: How would you say that independent differ from mainstream films?

    In the last couple of years I’ve been mainly working on feature-length documentaries films that are 70-75 minutes long and do well on the festival circuit. I did a film recently on Simon Walker’s father the architect Robin Walker; also on the famous animator Jimmy Murakami who animated When the Wind Blows and The Snowman, and came to Ireland and married. His childhood secret is that he was interned in a Concentration Camp in America for Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbour.

    At least in the Covid-19 era RTE are starting to show feature-length documentaries again. So I would say there is a very fine line between mainstream and non-mainstream. I think TV stations are in danger of losing a large audience though who are not necessarily all intellectuals, but who like a good story and don’t want to be spoon fed: they want to engage with the material and to think for themselves. I think if they took more chances they’d have more success. Fine, at 8 o’clock schedule Coronation Street, but after 9.30 let’s make it a little more loose. We are seeing the same trends is Britain. My colleagues tell me that BBC Four is closing soon or being ‘dumped’ as Boris puts it.

    Media is a very complex. A lot of people are streaming, and don’t watch TV any more. I still like watching TV. I like saying “oh this is on now” and just sitting back.

    It’s a huge world for our little film on James Joyce. It’s reliant on word of mouth. It’s very hard to know where to place yourself. I think it’s a film that could easily sit in the mainstream. The story is very well told, Nial McDevitt doesn’t over intellectualise. He’s joyous. But finding outlets is extremely hard.

    AR: Do you think that 28 Campden Grove, James Joyce’s London residence should hold greater significance?

    SMD: I don’t know. London always was the flight path for Irish artists, going back to Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and all sorts of people. London was a jewel of a city for extending creativity. And you see all the blue plaques around the place. A lot of the film involved Niall talking but then he encountered the man who lived there (on Campden Grove) and another guy was moving out. It’s moments like these when a documentary comes alive: somebody coming into the frame unexpectedly, and if you’re a good documentarian you hope to capture that. Another person might say “oh no somebody’s moving out, you better stop filming you know,” but I prefer to take all that in. Films that are set on the street involve people telling a story. All of a sudden somebody reveals a whole lot of things that you never knew. It makes the street much more interesting to be able to say: “oh look, James Joyce lived here for a year.”

    It is interesting with all the statues being pulled down. A statue is not a blue plaque, but it is something saying this person fought in India, or where ever, and it may be contentious, but should we take it down?

    I did a film long ago about the sculptor John Henry Foley called ‘Sculpture to the Empire.’ But John Henry Foley also made ones of Daniel O’Connell and Henry Grattan and Oliver Goldsmith too. He probably has more statues standing in Ireland than anybody else. But a couple of his statues like the one of Field Marshall Gough in the Phoenix Park were attacked several times by the IRA. Eventually it was moved out of Ireland. So you have this dichotomy around what to do. In India one guy said that we should leave the statues and say that this person was a bastard, and he can bring his children to tell a history. Maybe we have to find a way to absorb them and so in India they put them all in sculptured graveyards. Most of the films I’ve done are set in Dublin. You walk out the door and you can find a story in five minutes. It’s all around you.

    AR: In October 2019 it was proposed that Joyce’s remains should be repatriated for the centenary of the publication of Ulysses in 2022. It was not met with enthusiasm. What are your thoughts on the matter?

    SMD: I always wanted to see his statue in Trieste. I liked the fact that he wandered the Earth. Removing his remains at this stage is not a big deal for me. It’s a sideline issue. I was running Bloomsday for a number of years in Dublin in a Duke Street Gallery and various poets and people would come on that day to sing a song or read a poem. John Behan, Ireland’s most famous sculptor always had this fascination with Leopold Bloom and we’re part of a little campaign now to get a statue of Leopold Bloom erected in Dublin. He is one of the most famous fictional characters in the world and is emblematic of fair play and experiences racism too. We thought that this would be a great subject for a statue. I’d love to get Leopold more into the consciousness of Dublin. Joyce used to imagine Dublin in his consciousness and he gave us that great gift in Ulysses. It’s more the atmosphere of Joyce and his works that should be celebrated I think. So leave him be and let him rest in peace wherever he is and God bless him.

    Joyce in Trieste

    AR: James Joyce never set foot on Irish soil after he left the country for the last time in 1912. Do you think his exile and the fact that he has no living descendents as of January 2020 has an impact on his legacy in Ireland?

    SMD: I think he’ll shine on. He broke the mould like Shakespeare. He had a tragic life in lots of ways. I was just discussing his daughter Lucia suffering from schizophrenia. He dictated most of Finnegans Wake to her; a fairly incomprehensible book for a lot of people, but Joyce said it should be read aloud, and I think the schizophrenia in the language uses Lucia’s fragmented mind. She lived and died in an asylum in Northampton, leaving no children. Giorgio gave us Stephen who was a very difficult character in terms of Joyce’s legacy.

    AR: Did the documentary turn out differently to what you had envisioned?

    SMD: The Battle of Blythe Road was a rehearsal for doing this one, but It was odd for me as I’d normally have Paddy Jordan on camera. A lot of technical stuff has terrified me. And I remember the iPhone ran out of memory at one point and it started deleting shots, and we also had to go to a café to get a bit of charge, but I got through it, and really enjoyed the experience. I’m not saying I’d like to take this approach all the time. I’d like to have somebody on sound. It was just me and Niall and I’d never experienced that before and I enjoyed it, but it’s nicer having a crew, but needs must.

    AR: Do you have any further plans for collaborating with Niall McDevitt?

    SMD: We’re planning an Oscar Wilde film, and are currently at the drawing board stage as to what that might entail. Again it’s going to a product of this Covid-19 period. With Joyce we were talking about going to Dublin, Zurich, Trieste, Paris – you know the story of James Joyce’s life – but until Covid-19 abates we’ll stay in an area that we can control, but we’re out filming again on the 27th of July. We’re bringing a lot of artists into The Irish Cultural Centre for lectures and poetry. It’s just three days of filming with people. It’s a very strange time for everyone as you have social distancing. Nobody’s working properly. We don’t know when it’s going to end. So everyone has to find new outlets and new ways of keeping going.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vQBobNjSw

  • Covid-19 and the Gig Economy: Hope Springs Eternal

    He wants to work Monday nights but not Tuesday afternoons; she is available on Saturday evenings but not on Sunday mornings… Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises often find it challenging to recruit part-time workers, with abundant choices available to gig workers in different sectors, but the pandemic has vividly demonstrated the nature and depth of insecurity of this form of employment.

    Gig economy workers can range from traditional independent contractors to freelancers and temporary employees, who work at different times during the week. A few examples of companies where gig is the norm include TaskRabbit and Lyft in the U.S.; Uber, Swiggy and Zomato in India; and DiDi, Ele.me and Meituan riders in China.

    Some may use gig work to supplement the income they receive from a traditional job. In the U.S., research shows that at least one-third of the total workforce[1] relies on gig economy work as a primary source of income.

    Trade Unions generally oppose gig work and have tended to be resistant to independent contractors[2]; for years state legislatures have sought to enforce employment law and regulations on companies operating in the gig environment.

    Bearing Risk

    The platter of risks that gig workers bear not only relate to labour inputs, but also capital investments, as continuing in work is dependent on circumstances beyond the control of the worker.

    For example, Uber, DiDi or Ola drivers use their own money, or borrow it, to pay for their cars. Yet companies may ‘decommission’ drivers in the event of: (a) the company changing the amount it pays to drivers or; (b) the ride-hailing industry experiencing increased competition; or (c) if the company gets flooded with new Uber (or other ride-hailing companies) drivers, due to low barriers of entry; (d) a driver may receiving low satisfaction ratings from customers.

    A decommissioned driver may then be burdened with debt, with no ready means of repayment. The platform providers ensure that their workers are not classified as employees in any form, and thereby owe no entitlements to workers.

    This is despite the gig ‘employee’ paying for and providing a physical asset that the platform relies on to carry out its business. The objective of the platform providers is to ensure that gig workers are considered independent contractors, and not employees.[3] Contractors in the traditional economy, such as truck drivers, may also sometimes supply their own ‘tools’, but the gig economy differs in that the gig worker doesn’t accumulate any goodwill that can be sold-on or leveraged for financial gain. The goodwill accrues to the platform provider, leaving the worker with few options.

    Conventional employers attract full-time talent by offering a stable work environment, a retirement plan, along with other ‘soft’ benefits such as a modern office space, free food and drink and other fringe benefits[4].

    However, there is a rational for businesses to engage ‘non-employee’ freelancers to work with their internal teams. The most compelling reasons are: (i) flexibility, (ii) access to expertise, (iii) speed, and (iv) cost. Thus in a survey conducted by Deloitte in 2014, 51% of executives said they expected the use of contingent talent to increase over the next 3-5 years.[5]

    Temporary, irregular work ideally fits someone looking for extra money on the side, or a person who prefers an ad hoc schedule. However a large demographic among the middle class simply cannot afford instability, and are not getting fairly remunerated for their work. Gig work does not bring sufficient security for anyone planning a family, nor does it fulfil at least three of Maslow’s five Hierarchy of Needs (i.e. physiological, safety, social, esteem and self-actualisation) that many full-time positions come with.

    Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

    The insecurity is very real. Recently, the U.S. Department of Labour (DOL) established that many workers, depending on contractual specificities, in the gig economy should be considered contractors for the purpose of federal wage and hour regulations[6].

    Just as gig work can increase one’s earnings to an unlimited extent, the opposite can also hold true, with pay rates varying dramatically, and with a fixed minimum wages rare. The ‘feast or famine’ style of income can, therefore, become increasingly stressful; fluctuation in earnings can make it difficult to save for the future. This is exacerbated by not having an entitlement to a retirement package or pension contribution. Then there is the formidable issue of no sick leave – if gig workers are unable to work, they simply cannot earn.

    Along Comes COVID-19…

    Once the pandemic struck, gig workers’ income plummeted to an unprecedent extent, and most of them were not on healthcare plans either. This has placed many gig workers in an even more precarious situation.

    The ILO recently remarked that Covid-19 could lead to ‘the worst global crisis since World War II’. The pandemic is projected to remove 6.7 per cent of working hours globally, in the second quarter of 2020 – this is the equivalent to the annual salary of 195 million full-time workers: accounting for 8.1 per cent, equivalent to 5 million full-time workers in Arab States; 7.8 per cent, or 12 million full-time workers Europe; and 7.2 per cent, or 125 million full-time workers in Asia and the Pacific[7]. This will affect the motivation levels of gig workers too, particularly those who have recently moved into this form of employment from full-time paid work that had enjoyed associated health insurance and other benefits.

    The retail, airline, and hospitality sectors have all witnessed significant layoffs. A couple of months ago some of the leading gig-economy companies responded by offering basic sick leave provisions and safety equipment, including hand sanitizer for drivers.

    Importantly, U.S. ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft decided to pay workers’ income for fourteen days of work if they received a Covid-19 diagnosis and needed to self-isolate, [8] while providing disinfectant products to their workers[9]. Nonetheless, last week Uber announced a 14% reduction to its workforce, while Lyft is on the brink of cutting 17% of its staff[10].

    Uber taxi in Moscow.

    Whether it is Deliveroo in the U.K., or Meituan in China, or Zomato in India, the fragility of ride-hailing, food-delivery or furniture building work is increasingly apparent through extended lockdowns in many countries, with social distancing set to continue indefinitely. As gig workers are considered ‘freelancers’ and not ‘employees’, companies are excused from offering employment protections like guaranteed wages and sick pay, which is particularly crucial during this crisis as sick individuals should not feel obliged to go out to work.

    Huge job losses are now expected across higher income countries. The sectors most at risk include accommodation and food services, manufacturing, retail, and business and administrative activities. There is a high risk that end-of-year global unemployment figure will significantly exceed the initial ILO projection of twenty-five million redundancies[11].

    Essential Services

    As gig workers are not ‘employees’, most of them are caught between choosing whether to remain at home, self-isolating to avoid potentially passing the virus onto others or remaining in ‘essential’ service work to support themselves and their families.

    Those affected include medical workers who are taking significant risks to treat the sick. They are, however, generally low-paid grocery store workers, delivery workers, Amazon factory workers, street cleaners, and others, who have not knowingly entered their chosen occupations expecting elevated health risks, but have nonetheless had to work through the lockdown. Otherwise, if they don’t work in an ‘essential’ line of work during the COVID-19 crisis, they are in lockdown along with everyone else, and may not easily secure employment.

    Responses to the U.K. Quarterly Labour Force Survey suggest that workers in manufacturing , sales and service, cleaners, among others are unsuitable for adjusting to remote work. While some countries have provided assistance to workers unable to perform tasks from home, there are certain categories of workers who tend to fall through the cracks of these programmes. Among these are zero-hour contract workers, and small or off-market, self-employed workers such as those who deliver food and clean homes.

    To insure against a repeat of this crisis impacting on gig workers, we require policies to support businesses, employment and incomes including: provision of essential healthcare benefits, economic stimulus incentivising job creation, enhanced workers’ rights; and, equally importantly, mechanisms for dispute resolution between government, workers and employers. The right measures could make all the difference between the economic survival or collapse of not just individuals but the economy as a whole.

    De Blasio Protests the Layoffs of 500 LICH Nurses and Health Care Worker.

    ‘Chaos is a ladder’

    It should be acknowledged that the crisis has also created opportunities for both the companies reliant on flexible employment and even the workers themselves. For example, it has led to partnerships in India between governments and private enterprise including Ola, Flipkart, Swiggy, Urban Company and Uber. This is playing a crucial role in containing Covid-19, according to a report published by the Ola Mobility Institute.

    Additional examples include Uber’s announcement in early April of two new Business-to-Business (BTB) partnership arrangements in India. Firstly, with UberMedic, a 24-7 service that works with health care authorities. It provides transport for front-line health care providers to and from their homes and medical facilities. Secondly, BigBasket driver are assisting with last-mile delivery of everyday essential items in four cities.

    Notably also, Uber’s main competitor, Ola Cabs agreed to provide five hundred vehicles to the Karnataka government to transport doctors and other Covid-19-related activities.

    Also Flipkart, which still competes with Amazon in India, is currently in talks with cab aggregators and the Indian Railways to ensure smooth and hassle-free movement of essential products from vendors to customers. One of the objectives is to offer incentives to supply chain and delivery executives.

    These sorts of collaboration allow governments to recognise the potential of gig workers in this crisis, and have produced two non-fiscal strategies; first, by actively engaging the technological capability of the gig platforms and their logistical networks (a hands-on approach); and secondly, passively facilitating their operations through legal protection (a hands-off approach).

    The agility of businesses reliant on gig workers brings fewer staffing challenges. This flexibility is certainly of arguable advantage to workers, but at least it may be keeping a small percentage of gig workers in employment that might not otherwise exist.

    Also, some gig work employers are sending staff for certification courses run by the likes of Apollo Hospitals in India. This learn how to stay safe and vigilant while delivering goods and services to customers.

    In India, many, if not most, gig workers are also economic migrants, and a large proportion returned to their hometowns following the nationwide lockdown. Organisations are now unsure about the extent to which this trend will be reversed once restrictions are lifted.

    Analytics on the many impacts of Covid-19 remain thin, apart from some well-researched and presented data available from John Hopkins. Nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that low-income workers have an elevated risk of contracting the virus, and thus the income support system currently in place will leave some low-income workers exposed if they feel compelled to go back to work. Greater protection of their income should be prioritized around the world, particularly in countries like India and the U.S. where gig work is slowly being formalised.

    Research into the motivation levels of gig workers in mainland China demonstrates[12] that gig employers generally prefer to wield ‘sticks’ than offer ‘carrots’ to employees, leading to a precarious standard of living.

    So far a few progressive steps have been taken in India, and a few more in the U.S., in companies such as Google, Facebook and Uber, who are coming around to recognise their contingent workers as ‘employees’.

    At least this crisis creates the space to re-evaluate the operation of the gig economy, especially as we now recognise how ‘essential’ certain forms of work are. We can effectively rebalance our regulations and reward-systems, safeguarding the interest of gig workers, and creating a brighter future for the gig economy.

    [1] Habans, R. (2017). The Gig Economy in Illinois An Exploratory Analysis of Independent Contracting, School of Labor and Employment Relations Labor Education Program

    [2] Sparkman, D. (2019) The Gig Economy Poses New Safety Threats and Liabilities, EHS Today

    [3] Jelani, V. (2016). In a ‘’Gig” Economy, Workers Taking on More Risk, Harvard University

    [4] Alan Kohll (2019) How Your Office Space Impacts Employee Well-Being, Forbes

    [5] Schwartz, J., Bohdal-Spiegelhoff, U., Gretczko, M., and Sloan, N. (2016). The gig economy: Distraction or disruption?, Deloitte

    [6] Pasternak, D. (2019) U.S. Department of Labor Says “Gig Economy” Workers Are Independent Contractors, Not Employees (US), Employment Law Worldview

    [7] ILO (2019) ILO: COVID-19 causes devastating losses in working hours and employment, COVID-19: Stimulating the economy and employment, International Labour Organization

    [8] Pandemic Erodes Gig Economy Work, The New York Times, 2020

    [9] Higgins, T. and Olson, P (2020) Uber, Lyft Cut Costs as Fewer People Take Rides Amid Coronavirus Pandemic, The Wall Street Journal

    [10] Mukhopadhyay, B. and Chatwin, C. (2020). ‘Your driver is DiDi and minutes away from your pick-up point’: A Thematic case of DiDi and worker motivation in the gig economy of China. International Journal of Development and Emerging Economies, 8 (1), 1-17

    [11] ILO, 2019.

    [12] Mukhopadhyay and Chatwin, 2020.

  • Plagues, Autos-da-fé, and Music

    I was looking for an excuse to sing with some of my favourite musicians: Nick Roth, Francesco Turrisi and my sister Deirdre O’Leary. I’d had the pleasure of working extensively with all of them in the past, but never all together at once. Since we all come from and inhabit different musical worlds I had to find a place where those worlds could overlap harmoniously. Nick plays saxophones and percussion in mostly jazz and contemporary realms. Francesco plays keyboards and percussion in mostly early music and jazz domains. Deirdre is a classical and contemporary-classical clarinettist and I sing mostly early music and traditional songs. We all delight in improvising.

    I’ve long been drawn to the fabulously intricate music of the fourteenth century Ars Nova and Ars Subtilior, an even more sophisticated sub-genre of the Ars Nova that developed in the last quarter of that century especially at the court of the anti-pope in Avignon. This music features rhythmically and contrapuntally complex lines that remind me of avant-garde jazz, lines of notated ornamentation playing against each other like wild improvisations.

    I wanted a story that could be spun into a musical project and, having a penchant for all things gothic (especially of the fourteenth century kind), started researching the Black Death. While I was studying the effects of the plague in Ireland I came across a remarkable story of colliding cultures in medieval Kilkenny, a story so grimly enthralling that it could have come straight out of Hollywood (I wish it could have been directed by Stanley Kubrick!).

    The story took place in Ireland at a turbulent time, a time of invasions, war, lawlessness, famine and plague. A time of fear, violence and almost unimaginable mutability.

    In 1317 Richard de Ledrede – an English Franciscan of the Order of Friars Minor – arrived in Kilkenny, appointed by the papal court in Avignon as the new Bishop of Ossory (1317–1361) and immediately set about challenging the secular authorities and making a name for himself as a zealous moraliser and “scourge of heresy”.  In 1324 he arraigned Dame Alice Kyteler, a wealthy businesswoman and serial espouser (she married four times) on the charge of being a witch. He alleged that she denied Christ, enchanted the citizens of Kilkenny with magic potions – made from entrails of cocks which had been sacrificed to demons, dead men’s nails, hair and brains of boys who had been buried unbaptised – all cooked up in the skull of a decapitated thief, that she had an incubus named Artisson with whom she had sex and who manifested as either a cat, a shaggy black dog or a black man, and that she murdered her first three husbands and was poisoning her fourth.

    Dame Alice, however, had powerful allies who protected her and facilitated her flight to England where she vanished from history. The notorious inquisition that ensued was peppered with political intrigue, excommunication, charges of heresy and counter-charges of heresy with the bishop himself being imprisoned in Kilkenny castle for seventeen days during which time he placed the entire diocese under interdict (no masses, baptisms, marriages or burials could take place). When released, he refused to leave quietly, but had his full episcopal regalia brought to him and, with his clergy and parishioners, made a solemn procession to St Canice’s Cathedral where a Te Deum mass was celebrated.

    Though Dame Alice escaped with her life, her servant Petronilla de Meath was not so fortunate. She was captured, flogged through six parishes and a confession of sorcery was extracted. She was burned alive at the stake for the heresy of witchcraft, the first person in history to be thus charged and immolated.

    Dame Alice’s son William Outlaw was charged with heresy for defending his mother. He was forced to recant, hear at least three masses a day for three years, feed the poor and to pay for the roof of St Canice’s Cathedral to be covered with lead. The roof subsequently collapsed under the weight.

    This became the backdrop to our music.  

    The Red Book of Ossory is a fourteenth century medieval manuscript compiled in Kilkenny. Pre-eminent among the manuscript’s texts are sixty remarkable Latin poems by Bishop Richard de Ledrede. The same fertile imagination (Ledrede’s) that composed the phantasmagoric sorcery charges also composed beautiful, esoteric and richly imagistic poetry. The bishop instructed that these verses be sung by the priests, clerks and choristers of St. Canice’s “on the important holidays and at celebrations in order that their throats and mouths, consecrated to God, may not be polluted by songs which are lewd, secular, and associated with revelry, and, since they are trained singers, let them provide themselves with suitable tunes according to what these sets of words require”.

    “Well,” I thought, “I’m a trained singer!”. So I set to work finding suitable tunes. I spent countless (happy) hours wandering through various medieval music sources (Chansonnier du Roi, Llibre Vermell de Montserrat, Codices Chantilly, Modena, Squarcialupi, etc.) and made speculative reconstructions of many of the bishop’s hymns.

    Then, together with my fellow band members, in what was a charmed and wondrous process, we deconstructed those reconstructions. It was a true joy to make music with Nick, Deirdre and Francesco, a very happy and collaborative collision of cultures both in our rehearsals and onstage. And when we came together to make a record of our project, the synergetic spirit lived on as we made an essentially live recording, making music together in the same space and time.

    With the name Anakronos I feel we are allowed (if not obliged) to take certain liberties with traditional notions of proper chronology. So, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone and Nord synthesizer breathe electric life into music that was written at least five centuries before electricity was harnessed, music that was written before and after the bishop’s poems, but that could have been sung to his words in his lifetime. And music that I wrote and we improvised.

    But why sing the words of a witch-burner? Because they’re beautiful and I find it interesting to contemplate the contradictions that exist within people. As Stanley Kubrick said when asked if his characters were good or evil, “They are good AND evil!”.

     

    For more about Caitríona O’Leary’s work see her official website. Anakronos ‘The Red Book of Ossory’ is now available via Heresy Records as a CD and high-quality download (available here) and streaming across online platforms.

    Caitríona O’Leary (photograph by Laelia Milleri)

  • COVID-19 and SMEs: Survival, Resilience and Renewal

    In a recent survey of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) by Ernst and Young [i], 79% of board members stated that their organisations were not well-prepared to deal with a crisis such as today’s pandemic. Several other analyses also indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic will push down the full-year gross domestic product (GDP) globally from the 2.5% that was forecasted in January 2020 to 0%.[ii]

    In this climate, corporations are urgently attempting to satisfy the dual key targets of meeting strategic goals and also customer demands (which tend to be bespoke in several sectors). However, a closer look at these two goals reveals that strategic goals also includes employee wellbeing (a particular problem during this period), maintaining brand image and overall reputation, supply chain and procurement essentials, while staying clear of legal challenges that the current situation might inadvertently throw up.

    So, while sending out a responsible business image that needs to be maintained, at the same time longer term stakeholder management and internal coherency in management decisions are equally important. All of this while keeping healthy financial charts, tables and projections in today’s remote board room meetings.

    An OECD analyses show that new business registrations in the U.S. fell by more than 75% relative to the prior year from 15-16 March onwards [iii] – the day when lockdowns started. Similarly, in the Netherlands, the number of start-ups dropped by 34% in April 2020 compared to April 2019 [iv], in particular in business services and construction.

    Also, in China venture capital investment in new companies declined by 60% in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the first quarter of 2019. In Canada, a survey suggests that 59% of Canadians are considerably less likely to start a business after COVID-19 than before.[v] While these numbers indicate how deeply the aspiring start-ups and entrepreneurial initiatives have been hit in several leading countries, it also demands an exploratory look into how existing and relatively new businesses (especially, smaller ones) are coping under the circumstances.

    The Competitive Engine

    Over 50% of SMEs have already experienced strong decline in revenues and more than half of them do not have reserves to survive more than 3 months without help.[vi] Yet SMEs account for 60% of employment and 50-60% in value added across OECD countries.

    They remain the competitive engine of many regions and cities while contributing to the fabric of local communities. Policy makers in several countries, including most BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India, China] have responded by deferring payments and assisting with temporary layoffs, enhancing access to credit, providing grants and wage subsidies – amongst many other short-term measures. However, these quick fixes cannot continue indefinitely. Therefore, strategic action is required to enhance SME resilience by opening new markets and by helping them to adopt new technologies and work practices.

    The vigour, agility and the general wellbeing of employees should be a priority for small and large businesses alike. Despite the image portrayed on social media, throughout the lockdown limited working hours, work from home, virtual leadership and new strategies for remote engagement have brought considerable difficulties in all major sectors.

    For progressive organisations, small and large, the challenges are on several fronts, beginning with identifying the current bottlenecks, before listing challenges and potential (and implementable) solutions.

    The primary concern of any business should be the wellbeing of employees and their families. This should look beyond the ‘duty of care’ component of management and take a more humane and ‘affiliative’ leadership approach.

    Secondly, perhaps the most important consideration should be communication. Not only how clear and concise a message should be, but also how well-coordinated and standardised the communication systems is to ensure clarity when engaging with key stakeholders.

    A third consideration is the challenge of ensuring sustainable financing and stable cash reserves in the period following lockdown.

    A fourth component is to assess what kind of models and constructs are in place for companies to assess risk and crisis management.

    Fifthly, despite talks of a ‘new’ normal etc., the empirical demand patterns in some markets will not witness a sea change immediately after the crisis lifts. The challenge is to address the impact of demand disruptions, which businesses will need to recover from. This will hit the supply chain and entail procurement risks that businesses need to mitigate both in the medium and long term. The practical foresight of resilience and prudence will play a colossal role.

    Staffing Limitations

    The emphasis on driving production efficiency, strong yield, and high first pass quality is even more urgent now as many companies have reduced capacity utilization due to staffing limitations. Data shows that even after the reopening of factories, most sites are still struggling to achieve 50% of their previous capacity.

    Most companies are likely to experience significant disruption to their operations and will underperform for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. Companies that are operating in, or exposed, to countries that are significantly affected by COVID-19 will experience disruption to their supply chain and production commitments.

    A greater emphasis on employee wellbeing should be as a priority since employees are the one true asset, even more so if they are motivated as much as their line managers towards a common larger goal.

    For SMEs, staffing and recruitment should remain key components during times such as today. At least the market has provided a brief window to rethink the acquisition, management and retention of talent. This has as much to do with change management as with determining the culture of the company as it will be in the future. One tip that might prove worthwhile is to be empathetic in reducing employee hours.

    Particularly in the case of businesses that have not been in complete lockdown, or those that have been partially open with restricted hours every day, or those slowly expanding their opening hours as lockdowns are lifted in phases: it is often best to speak directly with employees about their financial situations.

    Most zero-hour contract workers in retail outlets, food and beverage, fast-fashion and also the hospitality industry are self-selecting towards reduced hours, thereby, saving the time and energy of line manager cutting the hours of those who may be more dependent on the income from that employment.

    Provide Reassurance

    An equally prudent approach towards customers is to provide reassurance during this period. That is easier said than done for companies that are widely visible on social media. The question is how personalised, accurate and contextual that message should be.

    Clearly, there is a temptation to post often on social media, but this also carries challenges and long-term risks. A lack of clarity, and meaningless assurances to customers could do far more damage than not posting at all. A recent survey showed that 34% of customers,[vii] especially concentrated in the Gen-Z cohort use social media platforms channels as an information source.

    To keep a business’s head above water, this may also be a good time to reach out to lenders to negotiate short-term reliefs. This could come either in the form of deferred payments or extended credit lines. As mentioned earlier, the focus on supply chain and procurement in this period is essential.

    This is also important because there may be significant changes in stakeholder relationships arising out of current decisions. Equally timely and important is reaching out to business vendors to confirm supply continuity. Some of these businesses may be facing their own hardships. This is a good time to work closely with them and explore opportunities for mutual benefits. Some of these businesses could offer deferred payment terms as well.

    Going forward, survival, resilience, and renewal strategies need to be independently developed if the pandemic is to teach businesses a crucial lesson or two.

    [i] Ernst and Young (2020). Is your organization prepared to respond?, EY Global Risk Survey (accessible at https://www.ey.com/en_ie/covid-19/is-your-organization-prepared-to-respond-)

    [ii] World Bank (2020). Pandemic, Recession: The Global Economy in Crisis, World Bank (accessible at https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/06/08/the-global-economic-outlook-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-a-changed-world)

    [iii] OECD (2020). Coronavirus (COVID-19): SME policy responses, OECD Policy Responses to Coronavirus (COVID-19) (accessible at http://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/coronavirus-covid-19-sme-policy-responses-04440101/)

    [iv] OECD (2019), OECD SME and Entrepreneurship Outlook 2019, OECD Publishing, Paris (accessible at http://www.oecd.org/industry/smes/SME-Outlook-Highlights-FINAL.pdf)

    [v] McKinsey & Company (2020). COVID-19: Briefing note: June, 2020, COVID-19: Implications for business (accessible at https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business)

    [vi] Yoshino, N. And Taghizadeh-Hesary, F. (2016) Major Challenges Facing Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in Asia and Solutions for Mitigating Them, ADBI Working Paper Series, Asian Development bank (accessible at https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/182532/adbi-wp564.pdf)

    [vii] The Asean Post (2020). Gen Z’s use of social media has evolved, The Phillipines (accessible at https://theaseanpost.com/article/gen-zs-use-social-media-has-evolved)

  • Artist of the Month: Kari Cahill

    Introduction

    The word ‘landscape’ not only refers to the topography of an environment, but also to its existence within society, consciousness and experiences. As we move through our existence we traverse thousands of constantly shifting landscapes – geographic and experiential- moulding them around us. Boundaries shape how we think, move and express ourselves. Our ability to understand ourselves, and our place in this world, rests on our collective responsibility to protect and celebrate our surroundings.

    My work is grounded in an exploration of ‘landscape’ through colour and texture. Visually, I create bold, visceral works that stretch between two and three dimensions. My work is site-responsive and my large scale works are created and exhibited in remote, wild locations, inviting audiences to experience the works in situ. I describe myself as a painter, although my practice spans various mediums including bio colour, printmaking, sculpture, photography, installations. In 2016 I created a site-responsive arts organisation with artist Hazel Mc Cague. Lay of the Land strives to support artists and communities through the production of art.

    Paying heed to ‘landscape’ requires acknowledgement of its physical, cultural, historical, economic and social influences. This is intrinsic to both my practices. My own work focuses on colour as a means of investigation, whereas Lay of the Land employs large scale exhibitions and residency structures to empower artists and communities to respond to “site” collaboratively.

    Site Responsive Art

    Site-responsive art serves to enliven the relationship with the natural environment. It is an immersion in, investigation of, and response to ‘site’. In my mind, site-responsive art is a kind of collaboration, between artist and place. Having a site-responsive practice requires me to spend periods of time immersed in nature, exploring sites by actively engaging with them. These journeys are integral to my work. Not only do I respond to thecol landscape but I create colour from within the landscape. The act of searching for the colours forces me to approach the environment with a bold investigation and is as much part of the process as the resulting palette. The process of creating bio-pigments and paints this past year has allowed me to contrast factory produced colours with a more circular-centred approach to making. I am shifting my work away from reliance on disposable, unsustainable, petroleum-based materials such as acrylic. The resulting paintbox of bio-colour highlights the spectrum of materials that grow in abundance around us.

    What my work looks like

    I have a direct and intuitive process of energetic mark-making which allows me to better understand the physical and visceral experience of an environment. I use strokes and colour combinations as a way to invite the audience to explore the landscape. My work features the interplay of light and tone to create a balance of motion. I drip, scrape, bruise and blush colour onto surfaces. I sketch, paint and draw. This creates a visual map from which the aesthetic and form of my larger paintings or installations stem from. I record the energy of crashing rain, the piercing light at sunset and the slow shadows across the mountain, weaving them between stories and folklore I hear through conversations along the way.

    Colour-making from the Environment

    I create paint from seaweeds along the coast, from rocks and sand at diverse, geological sites, from local wildflowers in maritime grasslands, from cliffs and ledge habitats. I dig earth pigments from mineral-rich, low-lying valleys and extract botanical pigment from native trees. I search for hues found within lichen, moss, algae and fungi. Paying attention to the industrial and maritime heritage of our island, I collect copper and iron scraps at industrial and port areas. I gather, grind, pulverise and suspend the materials in order to produce ecologically friendly paint particular to each environment. The pallets of colour form the foundation of my artworks.

    The parameters for colour creation expands considerably in a controlled environment. Using my studio as a laboratory I tweak ph levels and apply lake pigment extraction methods to alter viscosity. I oxidise copper scraps with vinegar to make a beautiful blue colour and modify the vibrance of berry ink using iron oxides from rusty nails. Allowing the materials to decay or chemically change through these natural processes I can connect with the ephemeral, geographical, and cultural nature of the landscape. I pool, drip and soak pigments onto the surface of paper and canvas, calling them to interact with each other. Precipitation occurs as the pigments permeate. As the painting dries new colours emerge. Through my research and experiments I am creating a compendium of colour; detailing the shades and hues achieved from.

    Sustainability and the Future

    Artistically, my aim is to drive artists and the experience of art outwards into the wild environments of the natural world. High-quality artistic work energises through a sense of place-making and engagement with culture, history and heritage. By working within the public realm my work has the potential to engage with an audience outside of art institutions and galleries. These audiences are presented with work that speaks about sustainability through exciting colour interventions, while simultaneously imbuing a sense of value and appreciation for the arts into their psyche. By celebrating the resources nature has to offer us, we can alter the perception that a linear economy is necessary and open to exploring more circular based templates of development.

    My process of creating colour echoes age-old techniques that have been employed by humans for millennia. These techniques have had a huge influence over our cultures, from the charting of trade routes to the dissemination of knowledge and cultures between tribes, to the sealing of legal documents with signatures. Marking ourselves in time is part of the human condition but natural processes have been cast aside in favour of factory-produced chemicals that produce vast amounts of waste, pollute rivers and damage the overall health of our environments and therefore, our society. I will search for new forms of interaction that could transform our ambitions, values and perceptions in order to build a more sustainable future. My artistic practice can contribute to the development of new perspectives on our cultural, historical and natural landscape.

    Where I am Going Next

    I have been accumulating, gathering, foraging, collecting and recording places in Ireland.  Collectively, these pieces are beginning to emerge as the foundation of a new project – a site-responsive book tracing the experience landscape through colour and texture. The book will be a map of sorts, where facts are replaced by experiences, and place names with colours.

    The book will exist as a collection of thoughts and discoveries, bound together, archiving that place, in this era. Accompanying a pigment glossary, the book will contain musings written in situ, spoken histories captured through conversations, and small trail maps that identify locations rich in bio-diversity and bio-colour.

    The site-responsive nature of my work, paired with the deepening of my practice towards a more sustainable approach to making has increasingly made me question urban living. In March this year, I decided to move away from Dublin, which has served as my base for the past decade. I write this piece from Sligo, where I moved with my partner Fellipe Lopes, right as the lockdown kicked in. Sligo is situated on the North West Coast of the country and features looming mountains, jagged coastlines, scattered lakes, and rich woodland. It’s as well known for its literary heritage as it is ‘The Rovers’. Its accent dials from steady, almost flat, to a Donegal lilt.

    Tomorrow I move into The Model where I will have a studio for the next two years. Although there is something exciting immediate about working in make-shift, back-of-the-van studios on the edge of the Atlantic for weeks at a time, there are benefits to a longer-term studio space where my practice can unfold. I look forward to seeing the nuances of how the landscape, culture and community of Sligo shift my thinking, my production, and the development of all strands of my creative process.

    Where to find my work

    You can explore my work on my website or through Instagram. Join my newsletter if you would like a drop of colour research in your inbox every once and a while, or if you’d like to know more about my projects and events.  If you prefer real-life interactions, I invite you to visit my studio.

    Website: https://www.karicahill.com/

    Studio Artist at The Model, Sligo.

    Director of Lay of the Land.

    Instagram

  • Musician of the Month: Damien Lennon

     

    Thought Experiments from Time’s End

     

     

    History …is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.

    (Walter Benjamin, XIV, Theses on the Philosophy of History).

     

    Grammar expresses a human desire to control time. Regimented in terms of right and wrong, grammar draws lines by which people can express themselves as concurring or not with their own era. Breaking with grammar rules has often been seen as a form of resistance against the dominant forces of a time: take le verlan in disaffected French suburbs for example. But in corona times this paradigm has been inverted: the notion that humanity is at the heart of time has been annihilated. And now, our era has rejected us. Suddenly our grammar is exposed as fantasy. But wasn’t there always an implicit arrogance in the phrase “next week I will be sitting in Tulum drinking tequila”? It seems hubristic that humans are grammatically equipped to script their own future when anything can happen. Such reflections have been on my mind since our latest release flukishly coincided with the pandemic.

    In 2016 Zeropunkt recorded some dystopian improvisations and then parked them. Fort Evil Fruit expressed interest in 2019 and we jumped. We decided to call the album Future Perfect Continuous, inspired by the presumptuousness implicit in the tense, and the promise of an eternally blissful and unshakable utopia suggested in the actual words. The album took slightly longer to release than planned, ultimately concurring with the pandemic, making the title uncanny in a world where time had stopped. Life as we knew it had ended. We’d left the rigid regime of “time” and entered what Henri Bergson called durée (duration).[i] Human temporality had been exposed as an absurdity. Suddenly duration, not time, reigned over human existence, and we were in profound existential shock.

    The collapse of routine temporality can have a revolutionary feel about it. Seismic events upending time systems have occurred before. A revolutionary calendar was adopted in Republican France from 1793 to 1805. And Walter Benjamin mentions the later 1830 revolutionaries shooting at public clocks in Paris in order to stop time.[ii] A collapse of normal temporality can feel like a messianic occasion for progressive change. And it can be. But this overlooks how forms of human order can tend to just exchange places. Old order time gets replaced by revolutionary time, which becomes new order time, which in turn becomes old order time replaced by ‘new’ time, etc.. Humanity gets encircled by its own temporal systems, enclosed in its own bubble. Meanwhile, non-human time scales, the geological and the cosmic, continue happily in their duration – simply being.

    The coronavirus suggests we’re not special after all. Our personal and collective narratives hang by a thread, overblown in their significance and existing within scripted histories. Geological and cosmic history are very indifferent to our stories. There is undeniable arrogance in assuming our (hi)stories are the ultimate ones. We’re not the official account of the world – not by a long shot. Our consciousness of cosmic immensity doesn’t help us live our miniscule lives any better. Specialists in morbidity despair at the vast nothingness of the universe, but most people ignore it altogether. However, denial increases our nausea and dread doesn’t help. Being a speck in the void isn’t reassuring, but if you think about it, speck and void need each other to be.

    Remember that famous Carl Sagan “pale blue dot” poster, depicting Earth as “a mote of dust in a sunbeam”? Our planet is shown as a tiny dot in the cosmic dark. It should make us despair, but we realise that without the dot the immense darkness is indecipherable nothingness, and without the black backdrop the tiny dot cannot be seen. They both need each other to be what they are. Our microscopic relevance to the cosmos might not seem encouraging, but that immense emptiness can’t be discerned without our tiny cogitations. And, of course, if nothingness is the cosmic majority, doesn’t that make our puny somethingness a very concentrated sort of special? In a way, we register the cosmic existence because we express it. The cosmos can’t recognize itself – its recognition happens in the expression we give to it. This doesn’t mean the cosmos only exists when we exist. It just means its being is not registered – because we aren’t there. Our expression is the thing that gives being recognition.

    The desert is the best place to go if you are obsessed with these things. It immediately tames any extravagant ideas you might have about human narratives. I visit the Mojave Desert semi-regularly. There, human time really does appear pathetic. When you immerse yourself in its rocks and dust, you are stunned by the vast theatre of geological time.

    Photograph by Damien Lennon

    The desert is geological time’s grand museum. There are rocks there of unfathomable age. The time-scape of the desert constantly reminds you it can swallow you in a cosmic equivalent of less than a microsecond. In fact, gazing into it, you realise that it already has, that you are behind it in temporal terms. The “you” standing there is a premonition of the ghost you haven’t yet become to yourself. The significance of your story has already been unwritten in dust. The desert is way ahead of you, and way behind you. As a temporal expanse, it precedes you so thoroughly, and succeeds you so thoroughly, that whatever little moment you think you are having there is just an insignificant vanity. To the desert it means nothing whatsoever. Thinking like this makes it hard to reckon the place of the human story.

    Even botanical time in the desert can be extraordinary by human standards. There are creosote bushes in the Mojave called “King Clone” which are about 11,700 years old. When you see them in the searing sun they look quite mundane. You would never imagine them to be extraordinary. And I suppose, on a cosmic or geological scale, they aren’t. But we don’t process time that way. Such scales make us feel even more irrelevant when considering how difficult it is to survive the desert. Most humans wouldn’t last than 10 days there without water. That’s quite a contrast with 11,000-year-old bushes.

    Walter Benjamin both loved and doubted the human story. He dreamt of blasting fragmented instances out of oppressive narrative history, disrupting its clean lines by elevating sudden intensities that blow the continuum apart and resonate across time. A salient shard from the past would slice into a stunned present – bleeding chronological time to death. I wonder what he would have made of the Mojave, a zero point that obliterates linear time utterly. There, all credibility in human continuity from past to present to future vanishes. The desert proves continuity is not the succession of moments, not a continuum, but continuance: one cosmically long state of being.

    Ultimately along cosmic and geological scales, we are irrelevant. And despite earning our own era, the catastrophic Anthropocene, the monumental expanse of cosmic time from nothing to nothing surely relegates us to the smallest universal footnote. Maybe we take ourselves too seriously, but do we have any other option? We are clearly in some sort of time, so how do we live it? Perhaps we should abandon the sense of ourselves as a story, a narrative; a beginning, middle and end.

    Instead we could think of ourselves as a state of being only – before which we were nothing, and after which we will be nothing. If there is immense nothingness before us and after us, should we despair? We’re not as enduring as helium and hydrogen, and we are a minute blip on the universal scale. But instead of despairing, maybe we could be minimalist and egoless about it. Couldn’t we see our lives as a thrilling fluke, a fleeting thing dense with multivarious experience, like some rich sub-atomic, micro-temporal explosion? Something the cosmos knows as a glitch, but we experience as the condensed totality of our passions. Maybe we could be irrelevant and exceptional.

    For anybody these questions are pretty traumatic. For an artist they get invasive. I prefer improvising music to writing it, because I want to engage the single moment and then let it go. When it works it’s really something. But sometimes it doesn’t. We’re not always pre-disposed to being-in-the-present – we get distracted. And I’m not suggesting it’s “better” to improvise than write. I really do admire people who write great songs or pieces of music, who leave some sense of legacy. Most of my heroes are these people. Yet I’m half suspicious that this is an atavistic romanticism I got contaminated by. I can’t help feeling I’ve accepted this idea of legacy (a sort of calcified time product) as a necessary fiction we assent to, despite knowing it’s bullshit. I mean, five minutes in the desert tells you it’s bullshit.

    Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore can help us out of this paradox. They promoted the notion that poetry can happen when we recognise our existential fictions as fictions and still “believe” in them.[iii] They advocated the idea of being “literalists of the imagination”, people tasked with creating “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”[iv] That breaks with a certain type of “grammar” of course. It rejects a logical order – that distinct category between imaginary and real. But it also creates while destroying. We use the rules to break the rules, spinning in our circles. Our era has rejected us, absolutely. It wants to void us. And yet we are here, modest as a speck. Time appears perhaps to be an imaginary garden after all, but we are the real things who must inhabit it.

     

    Damien Lennon is a member of experimental improv group Zeropunkt. His new collection of minimalist poetry was recently published in a dual edition with Rosmarie Waldrop by hardPressed poetry (available here).

    Photograph by Paddy Kiernan

    [i] Henri Bergson. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Cosimo Inc. 2007.

    [ii] Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. In Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1973.

    [iii] Wallace Stevens. “Imagination as Value”. In The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.

    [iv] Marianne Moore. “Poetry”. In New Collected Poems. Heather Cass White ed. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2017.

  • How Can Something So Wrong, Feel So Captain Sensible?

    Stone Roses turned the stereo up a few notches, saying to to her sister, ‘That’ll teach you.’

    Smiths turned from the window to reply. ‘Teach what? That White Riot by The Clash is a good song? I already know that. It’s my album, remember? I taught you everything you know. And now Stone Roses, I’m teaching you to turn that bloody music down. Things are kicking off down below on the streets, Man.’

    Stone Roses upped it one more notch, before swiftly switching the music right off and into a nothingness where the sounds of a real riot took over the small airspace of their seventh floor apartment on Church Street in Manchester. Plonking herself down on the sofa, she rummaged for the TV remote.

    From the window, where she stared manically down on all below, Smiths said, ‘Is that Captain Sensible turning on the TV? We already know what they’re going to say’ll just rile us up. It’ll make us angry, Stone Roses. Do you really want all that in your eyes now? Venting fears? Doubts? Hatred? Do you?’ Stone Roses sat back deep into the comfort of the sofa, and folded her arms after she’d switched on the television.

    ‘Yes, I do!’

    For a second or two, Smiths stared at her sister’s nose and then said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Suit yourself.’

    ‘I always do.’

    ‘I know.’

    ‘Bitch.’

    ‘Slapper.’

    Gazing downwards, Smiths got lost in the streets below, where men, women and children were milling about the place, in an excited state of consciousness. Rising up, it seemed from the shackles of capitalism. At long last! But damn them, she thought. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. To take this form. Unable to grasp at anything solid or primary, her mind swam in strong currents of emotion. It was spinning.

    What they were after was goods, from the shops, she surmised. The meretricious glitter of a consumer society. So they wouldn’t storm an apartment complex, where there was no shop. The Arndale was up the road, and they’d go for that, she was sure. Spinning. It was then that she was awoken from what felt like a reverie by her sister’s sobs.

    Turning, she saw her there, still on the sofa, but now silent. Like transparent worms, the tears streamed down her face, while trying to hold it in, she sniffled. Smiths closed the window and sat down beside her. A strong arm went around Stone Roses, to transfer some warmth.  ‘What’s wrong? It’ll be alright you know. They won’t get in to us. They don’t want people. They want shiny things. Status symbols.’

    Tears still pumping out of her eyes, Stone Roses stood up to take three soft steps towards the television screen and kneel before it, pointing. ‘Look at the people being interviewed. The shop owners. Hear those accents? Recognise their aggression? All the tell-tale signs?’ Smiths now stood, suspecting what would come hurtling at her, hot and heavy. Knowing her sister only too well, she braced herself.

    Stone Roses said,‘Their accents! Their manner! Superciliousness directed at a certain section of society! At us! These shop owners castigate rioters as just plain dumb scumbags. They called us that when we were growing up as well, Smiths.’  Smiths tried to wrap another arm around her in vain. ‘Stone Roses, come on. Sit down. We’ll put on a DVD. Take our minds off the whole thing, you know? Like old times.’

    Animated by her own words now with every passing sentence, Stone Roses even appeared to become physically bigger in the fading light. ‘All those times I felt small in their presence. Really only in their presence. Granted, I never spent too long in there, but..but.. I wouldn’t have been able to withstand it anyway. Brought up under the yoke of their putative superiority. ‘I know it’s wrong. Oh so very wrong, to feel like this, Smiths. But how can something so wrong, feel so Captain Sensible? When I see those infuriated middle-class faces so upset on the telly, it makes me feel glad. And I’m not ashamed of these feelings any more. I see their anger and I want to laugh. I want my fist in the air, in triumph. In revenge for my youth. Our youth, Smiths. Everybody’s youth!’ At this, Smiths stood back watching her sister’s subsequent tears collect on her chin.

    Then she said, ‘It’s alright. I know what you mean. But it’s not good for the soul to ponder such things. Those thoughts will kill you. Because you can’t win. Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think. Get out of this moment. Sprint! Put on that Damien Dempsey album. Take your French pencil out and draw to his lyrics and chord progressions like you usually do. Don’t dwell on this, Stone Roses, please! Float, with Damo, instead?’

    Stone Roses’ tears were arrested by a sudden spark in her eyes. Adulterated thoughts coursed through her veins, and spread so quickly, she knew exactly what came next. What had to be done. Hands thrust into her pockets, she frog-marched over to Smiths. ‘Come on! We’re going downstairs. We’re joining up. Let’s steal back a little dignity. To make the heart strings go zing! Like that old song. The Clash song. You already know all the words backwards at this stage. The lyric made real flesh and blood, come to life.’

    She nearly walked through Smiths, as if she were a ghost. ‘Are you coming?’

    ‘No. Sit down. Calm yourself.’

    ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Smiths. Tweak your own nose, not mine. Blame it on the posh doctors of our youth who played Rugby for Ireland. The ones who called us lazy scumbags, and thus, wouldn’t treat us properly. The ones who’d no respect for patients carrying a medical card, yet on all their earnings had never paid any tax, themselves. Ah, good old Dublin. The good old days.’

    ‘But we’re in Manchester, England now. Across the Irish sea!’

    ‘It’s the same here. Look down at the street, yourself. The people feel the same pain. Maybe they don’t know it consciously, but they do. Come on. Feel the noise! Can you? Or don’t you dare?’

    Yes, Smiths knew Stone Roses only too well. So she walked to the door of the living room, as if going to the toilet. Upon opening it, she stood in the hallway, where she locked it firmly behind her. Realising what had just happened, Stone Roses rushed up to the locked door and banged her arms against it, while Smiths shouted through the keyhole. ‘Direct, non-violent peaceful protest. That’s how we’ll do it, Stone Roses. Not rioting in the streets. You know that. Relax there now, Child. Write some poetry and a literary, yet bitter, autobiography, it’s the only way.’

    In a torrent, Stone Roses drummed her hands against the door. She shouldered it. Elbowed it. Bummed it. And in lashing out at every splinter within its essence, released herself. Next up she whacked her head against it until blood oozed.

    Now back at the window, she looked down on the riot. Inhaling all its unbridled and cacophonous fumes, she smiled before running again headlong at the door and whacking herself once more. And again. Enjoying herself. And again. Rejoicing.

    ‘Now is the time Smiths. Can’t you see? Now is the time to get our own back. It’ll feel good and silky. Open the door!’

    ‘That’s not revenge. It’s just lashing out.’

    Stone Roses wiped the blood from her face with water from the kitchen tap, until the bleeding had just about stopped. She then lashed herself against the door once again, laughing inside and out. Rapping on the door three times, she asked ‘Remember Robin Hood? Well, that’s what we’re doing.’

    ‘You’re not doing anything. It’s them, Stone Roses.’

    ‘And Jesse James. Riding Black Bess. Like Dick Turpin Highwayman. That’s us. Stand and deliver! Us. Robbing the rich, to give to the poor. And oh look at the multitudes of the poor, stretched out on that rack, down below.’

    It was this comment that stabbed Smiths. So easily unsheathed, because Stone Roses knew it for the weapon it was. Right there and then, on the spot, Smiths restrained herself from unlocking the door, to go in, and ram her point home with her fist.

    Her turn now, Smiths kicked the door and head-butted it too when she said, ‘Robin Hood and Jesses James are stories, Stone Roses. They’re just stories. Outside the legends, these people were murderous thieves. Scumbags in real life. They took from the rich alright. But giving it back to its rightful owners, the poor? They forgot all about that, while they drank, raped and stabbed themselves into folklore.’

    Stone Roses knew she had her. Dabbing the blood on her face with a disintegrating hankie, she stood back from the wall and spoke calmly,‘That’s where you haven’t really understood the situation, Sis. Make no bones, you’re the person in this equation with the brain. You should be getting this. Even I know those Robin Hood stories are there, not because they’re true, but because they’re what people want to believe.

    ‘People believe in the romance of robbing the rich to give to the poor because that’s what they dream of, and by believing, they give their consent to a notion that it’s right and proper order to rob the rich and give to the poor. It’s allowed. Everyone has already cheered this past the finishing line a long, long time ago. That’s one hundred per cent. No one can argue. It’s justified and ancient. Rob the rich, and give their money to the poor. The real facts don’t matter. Only the goal and dream of ultimate justice. I think another chap with a beard said similar things in Galilee a long time ago too, Stone Roses. Do you not remember all those sermons on Sunday, when they weren‘t molesting us?’

    Everything went quiet in the hall. Ten seconds passed, before the door unlocked, and in walked an exasperated Smiths who, when she reached Stone Roses, whipped out her hands with the intention and enough sheer brute force to strangle her.

    ‘Wrong. Wrong. Wrong! You’re staying put, right here in this apartment, even if I have to strangle you to sleep, myself. The peaceful way is always the best! The peaceful way…’

    And with that, they rolled about on the floor for a while.

    ‘Jimmy would say you know. Didn’t realize you and Big Brother were such bosom buddies these days. He’d love you saying that, right about now. Probably salute your common sense.’

    Yes, Big Brother would crack up watching it all live on the T.V. back home in Dublin. And he’d spontaneously combust into a million rags like confetti as he shouted, ‘Shoot the scumbags! Shoot the scumbags! Shoot them! Why aren’t they shooting them? Why?’ he’d be screaming.

    He’d always wanted to get out. Be like the posh ones. Never did though. Uncle Tom. To ground control. But ground control wasn’t listening to him.’

    Smiths said, ‘You’re right. Come on, let’s go out and do a bit of rioting with the best of ‘em. Revenge eh? You can’t beat the feeling. Big Brother will be watching alright. He’ll see us,’ said Smiths. ‘Yes, he will,’ answered Stone Roses. ‘Big Brother will see us. We’ll wave to him from the heart of the riot. Flick the Vs. Hey! Ho! Let’s go!’