In Ireland literary deities hover over us like U.S. Presidents carved into Mount Rushmore. It is a stirring thought that it isn’t philosophers, engineers, scientists, painters or even composers that summoned the Irish nation and gave us international renown, but poets, novelists and playwrights. Yet conversely these looming presences barely register in contemporary discussions; just as most contemporary Florentines scurry below Brunelleschi’s dome, with precious few looking to the sky in awe.
Poets build bridges of a more indeterminate kind than engineers. As W.H. Auden writes in a poem occasioned by the death of Yeats in 1939: ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. / Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, / For poetry makes nothing happen.’
Auden goes too far with that dismissal of poetry – whatever about his contemptuous view of Ireland – but corrects this by acknowledging a few lines later: ‘it survives / a way of happening, a mouth.’ This ‘way of happening’ is in the realm of quantum uncertainty where the extraordinary occurs: coincidences beyond logic, or the ill-defined emotion generated by a sight of great beauty. Poetry does not fit with empirical renderings of reality, the routines of life and the seemingly static laws of nature are defied. It is unsurprising that poets then – Yeats foremost – should dabble in mysticism, scouring every system of thought for explanations for the mysteries they encounter.
June 13th 2020 is the 155th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats. Born in Sandymount on the Ballsbridge side of the DART tracks he spent much of his adult life in London, before moving permanently to Ireland after the War of Independence, purchasing a former tower house Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway where he ‘paced upon the battlements and stared’ at the birth pangs of the Irish state.
Thoor Ballylee
County Sligo
Yeats will always be identified with County Sligo, the home of many of his ancestors. Innisfree on Lough Gill, Lissadell, ‘far off Rosses’, Knocknarea and Ben Bulben under which he is buried, form the mythical backdrop to his Romantic musing. The stunning landscape triggered romantic verse perhaps unsurpassed in the English language during the twentieth century: ‘Come away oh human child / To the waters and the wild / With a fairy hand in hand / For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.’ The enchanting surroundings engendered Yeats’ poetry but simultaneously he bestowed poetry on that landscape.
When we view stunning Ben Bulben we are, to some extent at least, honouring the Songlines that brought its majesty into being. But for all his evocations of that county, in his descriptions the people are more ethereal than real, moulded in the fairy-realm of his imagination. A far cry from the gritty characters in Joyce’s Dubliners.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
Staying Put
Like rebellious children questioning the authority of a cruel parent, most of the Irish literary pantheon have had a difficult relationship with their homeland, often preferring exile and ruminating on it from afar. Samuel Beckett went so far to write in French to escape the excesses of Irish speech. But Yeats stayed and grew embittered that the nation did not accord him the accolades he felt his due. Politics is the art of the possible, its grubby affairs a torment to the idealist.
Long before independence Yeats was bemoaning a Romantic Ireland dead and gone and castigating those that fumbled in their greasy tills. But the lofty aspiration he had for the nation were always doomed to failure, like his enduring affection for Maud Gonne that he finally consummated in later life before proposing to her daughter soon afterwards. Independent Ireland could never match his expectations, as a relationship based entirely on romance has failure encoded in its DNA.
Crucially Yeats came from the Protestant Ascendancy ‘the men of Burke and of Grattan’ and to many among the ascendant Catholic nation who inherited the independent state his claim to being Irish were shallow. This separation worked both ways as the poet who initially embraced and breathed life into Irish nationalism through the cultural revival and plays such as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, later identified himself with an aristocracy that he saw as a natural leadership for a Creole nation.
Here he fought a losing battle against the enduring tradition of republicanism that rejected aristocracy and prized equality and democracy. He also contended with the powerful force of sectarianism. Many would have considered it unacceptable for someone of Yeats’s background to be in a position of authority. For many hard-bitten Catholics who retained a collective memory of the privations of the Penal Laws and the Famine, independence was an opportunity to build a Catholic state for a Catholic people.
Fascist Leanings
The inter-war period (1918-39) were terrible years of fear, poverty and continued conflict in Europe that foreshadowed the cataclysm of World War II. In the immediate aftermath of World War I Yeats wrote prophetically: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,’. In the end, in response to what he perceived as the failings of democracy, he chose a reactionary Right as opposed to a levelling left which – as he saw it – would brutally sweep aside an aristocratic elect and usher in a doomed era of materialism. This made Yeats sympathetic to fascism and perhaps even Nazism.
In his exploration of what is the ill-defined ideology of fascism the historian Roger Eatwell writes:
Fascism has become a latter-day symbol of evil, like the Devil in the Middle Ages. Demonising all aspects of fascism, a founding form of Political Correctness, has its uses. But dismissing anyone associated with fascism leanings in the 1930s makes it impossible for us to understand how fascism still attracts a significant following.
We might therefore talk of fascisms, and see it in historical context: a reaction to the chaos unleashed by the Great War and the responsibility of rampant capitalism for the Great Depression, as well as the shocking excesses of triumphant Marxism in Russia.
To many inter-war intellectuals democracy was on the brink of collapse and there existed a stark choice between fascism and Communism, which had just as little respect for human rights. Also, in its early stages, it should not be conflated with anti-Semitism, especially the genocidal character this assumed, which had a far longer history and was not initially a feature of Mussolini’s approach in Italy.
One recent biography of Yeats Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats, The Life, The Death, The Politics by W.J. McCormack outlines aspects of Yeats’s fascist sympathies. He provides details of Yeats’s letter of thanks to Freidrich Krebs, Oberburgmeister of Frankfurt, acknowledging receipt of an award in 1934, his public approval of Nazi legislation depriving Jews of their property in 1938, and other aspects of his anti-Semitism. McCormack concludes that Yeats was a fellow traveller: ‘on occasion. He did not travel early, and he did not travel often’ but he ‘gave comfort to democracy’s enemies, to decency’s enemies.’
Yeats can justifiably be excoriated for this, but he shouldn’t be judged on what happened subsequently, but instead on the Europe of the 1930s, where he saw a stark choice between the extremes of right and left.
Benito Mussolini, Rome, 1939.
Orwell’s Assessment
There were other intellectuals such as George Orwell who rejected the extremes of both. It is instructive to consider his views on Yeats, which we find contained in a review of an early biography written in 1943, at the height of the war.
Orwell is surprisingly unimpressed by Yeats’s poetry, and we hear similar anti-Irish prejudices to those found in Auden’s writing. He says that ‘one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech’.
This criticism may be attributed to Orwell’s affection for sparse, attenuated language which he expresses in his seminal essay The Politics of the English Language. The attitude is encapsulated in his evaluation of one poem that: ‘It would probably have been deadlier if it had been neater.’
Nonetheless, even Orwell swoons at some poems: ‘Yeats gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is often irritating, it can also produce phrases (“the chill, footless years”, “the mackerel-crowded seas”) which suddenly overwhelm one like a girl’s face seen across a room.’
Not surprisingly, Orwell lambasts Yeats’s occult dabbling: ‘As soon as we begin to read about the so-called system we are in the middle of a hocus-pocus of Great Wheels, gyres, cycles of the moon, reincarnation, disembodied spirits, astrology and what not.’ These he links to reactionary leanings: ‘if everything is indeed cyclical then the kind of society based on equality and democracy that Orwell prized was in some sense Sisyphean, a doomed effort. Orwell concludes that ‘Yeats’s tendency is fascist.’
A poem has a life of its own
For any devotee of Yeats it is difficult to confront the fairly compelling body of evidence for this tendency, but as has been stressed these sympathies came at a time when the horror of Nazism was not apparent; when Communism might have seemed more contemptuous of human life, and when the few surviving democracies at the time were in the grip of the Great Depression. Yeats was wedded to archaic notions of aristocracy and fascism appeared to fit with his prescriptions. He failed to recognise the genocidal evil that lurked there.
He was never, however, implicated politically in any fascist movement. In fact the political campaigns that Yeats became involved in during his lifetime: the Irish Cultural Revival in the early 1900s and the campaign to retain divorce in the Irish Free State of the 1920s were progressive in character.
We find a flawed character in W.B. Yeats, like Orwell himself who informed on his associates, but one who produced verse perhaps unsurpassed in the English language in the twentieth century. His political leanings do not diminish the greatness of his poetry. We may still bask in his words without subscribing to his fluctuating political ideas.
Once a poem is written, the chord attaching it to the author is broken, and it assumes a life of its own.
It was the silence. The sound of total silence. A deep peaceful vibration carrying the bells from a church I never knew I could hear from this window. The acoustic of silence was able to carry it as if it was across the street, like an apartment in Paris or Vienna, but here in NYC around the corner from Leonard Bernstein Way, birds were singing louder than any singer at nearby Juilliard or Lincoln Center. This was April 4th 2020 and the city for the first time, the world for the first time, was totally shut down. No noise on West 66th Street except for the sound of birds and the feel of a clear breeze. A personal miracle just happened to me because of the pandemic, I don’t have to move out of my apartment of twenty-four years in a building I’ve lived in for thirty-five.
Twenty-nine years ago, 1989 my first Saturn return, I had been given my first big break by one of the greatest channelers of music, of language, of life, Leonard Bernstein. LB chose me to go on for an ailing famous singer, it was the only time he conducted Candide the operetta/musical he wrote for Broadway after his signal identifying masterpiece, West Side Story.
Leonard Bernstein
I had been anointed by the master. Though I was in love with Prince as much as Mozart, LB was a conduit, a crystal microcosm to what my life would be about for the next twenty-nine years. My second Saturn in 2019 resulted in an amazing bookend, I was onstage singing several roles – one of them Queen Elizabeth I – in the world premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando, at the Vienna State Opera. I had sung in just about every major opera house except for this jewel of a theater which has been bedazzled by the presence of all the great opera composers. But Saturn brought me to this mystical coda and with it, I brought ten years of having had a Uranian shock, a change in musical direction from a very successful classical career into the realms of pop, funk, rock, jazz not only singing and on keys, but as a songwriter, music director, producer, arranger and record label founder.
So on December 9th 2019 – almost twenty nine years to the day when I stepped on stage with LB and the London Symphony orchestra – the call coming on a pay phone outside of the Belgian National Opera in Brussels; all happening so quickly and inexplicably, that no one could be there to witness it, having to patiently wait years before the video that was made could be viewed on something not even invented yet: YouTube. However, in 2019, this Saturn return, this opening night there was the time to make sure everyone could be there that was important in my musical life. George Clinton, the Godfather of Funk with whom my beloved funk-rock band, Miss Velvet and The Blue Wolf had toured the globe for the past three years; friends, family, fellow musicians, all were there in the hallowed hall of Mozart, Mahler, Beethoven and Berg, documenting this spectacular evening on iPhones, Instagram, Facebook, and live streaming.
New York
The planets were all converging behind the scenes to set the stage for the coming Age of Aquarius; the convergence of Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn; heralding the end of an era and the last big party before Covid-19. I returned to New York from Vienna in mid-January after spending my birthday there alone, enjoying the solitude and loneliness after a busy and exciting year. Always superstitious of how one spends one’s birthday and New Year’s, as a way to set a tone for the coming year, in hindsight, it was not only precognitive, but I guess good to know I felt pretty damned good in my solitude.
I walked around Vienna on January 13th and reflected on what had happened in just a year’s time from one birthday to the next: the release of my second solo album, High Tides with a radio tour on the label I founded, Isotopia Records; accompanying George Clinton and his wife on the red carpet at the 2019 Grammy’s; a tour to Hawaii, Australia and Japan with Miss Velvet and the Blue Wolf; playing with the band upon our return at the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards to honor George Clinton, then forty-five more shows with George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic on the One Nation Under the GrooveTour; the release of the band’s second album which I produced this time with George Clinton as featured guest; the release of a new artist, Lemoyne Alexander and then suddenly it was October and the contract I had held in my hands for three years for the Vienna State Opera, was about to become more than a promise and a piece of paper, it was about to become real. And this time, my two mini dachshunds would come with me as I would be in Vienna for three months.
Upon my return to 66th street, dragging twelve suitcases and the nostalgia of leaving Europe behind, I found that the front door to my apartment had been taken down and replaced with a new door by the building’s management company. Of course, no one noticed that on the door they disposed of was a painting I had done years before and the new door was a plain white generic one made to fit in with the ‘new renovations’ to ensure everything looked uniform, corporate, anodyne. The dis-ease of greed and herd decorating. I left my suitcases unpacked tripping on them every day, with the excuse ‘well you have to move and now with this vulgar white door, who cares, you can do it’.
Creative Sanctuary
You see this apartment was my spot, my creative sanctuary I came back to ten years earlier after my life had fallen apart. Discovering that having doormen who knew me since I walked through those doors as a hopeful twenty-three year old singer – being there through my parents’ divorce, two failed marriages, bringing stepchildren back and forth, the deaths of close friends and pets, my successes and disappointments, discrete and not so discrete love affairs and always the suitcases – were more comfortable and reassuring than family at times.
The Wheel of Fortune allowed me to keep my apartment in New York City and staying in this spot had become mystical – not only because 65th street would be named Leonard Bernstein Way – but also because I had inherited Andrew Watt’s piano, the great pianist who also received his big break from LB.
Andre was approached at the last minute to go on for an ailing Glenn Gould for the nationally televised broadcast of the Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic Live from Lincoln Center series. Andre would be the first African-American pianist and classical artist to break that glass ceiling. His story is what brought me to this building and New York in the first place: the longtime partner of my piano teacher’s daughter in my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, Andre and my parents’ generosity opened the door to my dream of being able to move to NYC, as he had an apartment across the street from Lincoln Center with a piano he wasn’t using. So, in 1984 after a summer as the youngest apprentice with Santa Fe Opera, I was told the best way to build a career as an opera singer was to move to New York or Europe; little did I know that history would magically repeat itself presenting me with the same opportunity as Andre, to jump start my career.
I didn’t unpack after Vienna and for weeks tripped on my suitcases, what was the point of unpacking since I had to move – the new door being a daily reminder. I was finding the emotional strength to say goodbye to my adult roots: my paintings all over the walls and my recording studio, the foundation of Isotopia Records.
In February, I saw more Broadway shows than I had in years; I went to New York City Ballet as often as possible, off and off-off Broadway shows, foreign films, it was as if I knew something was coming. I was voraciously having every New York experience as if for the last time. I even produced a music video on the coldest day in February – all over the city – with everyone involved feeling the love and magic of this one of a kind world haven for creativity and inspiration.
We could be next…
By the time the week of March 11th came around and the rumour of this virus running through Italy had ravaged and shut down that country, I was feeling like we could be next as New York is a city of international visitors. Friday March 13th, our lives changed on a dime. By April 4th it was clear I wasn’t going to have to move. They were going to let me stay another year. With the shutdown in place I couldn’t move my suitcases to storage, so as I write this on day seventy-five, they sit as a reminder of the years of being a global citizen, artist, the adventure of travel and discovery.
I painted the new door and it looked better than the one before it. I went to the piano and pressed the record button.
Every day at 7:00 pm when those of us who don’t have second homes to run to or the finances to escape, we cheer out the windows to remind each other we are here, we are not alone in our circumstantial solitude; the cheers, whistles, pot banging and trumpet blowing applauding the health care workers who for me had personal meaning as they saved a cherished friend’s life during this disaster; a five minute expression of our love and memory of the dream for what this city was and will be again, but it will be in a new way of discovery and communal survival. And then there will be the music…
So few cars on our Manhattan street
Pigeons leaving nests that swirl between
Highrise ledges, fearless land to eat
Any mid-street grain or scrap they glean.
Told to stay at home most acquiesce.
Now we learn how unbeknownst we spare
Our New York as we’re emitting less
Long-lived greenhouse gases in the air.
Same in Paris, London, Madrid, Rome.
If our frenzied whirl restarts, when pressed
To create more jobs and we leave home,
Will we foul then worse our global nest?
Covid fear amends our habitat –
Nature’s own backhanded caveat.
Micheal O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets was published in 2018, he now lives in New York.
‘Art is only a ‘substitute’ as long as the beauty of life is deficient’ (Piet Mondrian, ‘Pure Art and Pure Plastic Art’ (1937)).[i]My work notebooks are full of quotes I have written out similar to this. Looking through the notebooks I have made over the past twelve years I find I am drawn repeatedly to artists who tend to be on the austere side. And I go beyond even these artistic “saints” and scribble down quotes from actual saints, monks and nuns. It was while reading Paul Schrader’s book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer that I came upon the only recorded statement from Fra Angelico: ‘art requires much calm and to paint the things of Christ one must live with Christ’.[ii]
I jotted that down in February 2017 – I must have already achieved my New Year’s resolutions by then and thought I could set the bar a bit higher. The second track on the album Joy, ‘a’ once had a subtitle which I had heard the Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho recite at the beginning of a talk he gave: ‘brothers and sisters in suffering, old age, sickness and death’.[iii] I eventually hid this subtitle as I was worried it might scare people away – I had even forgotten until this week that I had this text in my mind when I wrote the piece. I had spent the last few months wondering to myself what on earth this piece might be about and now I know!
Probably the most austere of all is one of my longtime heroes: the painter Agnes Martin. As if to chastise myself for the way I have spent my life I wrote this into my notebook: ‘art work… is not beneficial, nothing is gained from it, and it does not tell the truth. It is enjoyed or not according to the condition of the observer. A very small gesture of exultation’ (Agnes Martin from ‘The Untroubled Mind’).[iv]
Notes and sketch from the composer’s notebook
You may ask why on earth do you find these quotes useful? I fully own up to having a tendency towards the austere myself: over the past five years I have gone at least twice a year on silent retreats in a Buddhist monastery and my biggest disappointment during this lockdown has been missing out on a cancelled ten-day silent meditation retreat at the monastery led by an amazing nun. But also reflecting on it for this article I suddenly realised that I probably need a corrective or balance to clichéd notions of what the arts exist for and the gush spewed out from the art and music worlds to continue making anything. Maybe I am very contrary (okay, I am) but when I read blanket statements about how art needs to reflect life (whatever that means and what if mine is really boring and mundane?!) I think of Martin at her fiercest: ‘art work…does not represent life because life is infinite, dimensionless. It is consciousness of itself. And that cannot be represented’ (Agnes Martin from ‘What We Do Not See If We Do Not See?’).[v]
So to save me from being lost forever in extreme austerity and the writings of Saint Theresa of Avila, I, and maybe you, have to thank the fact that I started performing my own work fourteen years ago. It has forced me to engage with the messier sides of life and realise the creative act is a bit blurrier than Martin might believe. After the first time I performed a piece of mine solely by myself a close friend came backstage and sobbed in my arms for around five minutes. It was a bit awkward as I had not expected such a reaction. Twenty minutes later another man had a good cry in front of me due to what he had felt my piece had said. A year later a couple asked me to play this piece ‘In Beautiful May’ at their wedding: I asked them repeatedly “are you sure? It doesn’t seem the most celebratory piece and seems to make grown men sob?” But, I ended up performing it at their wedding and everyone seemed extremely happy. As an aside, this is a good lesson in never second-guessing your audience.
‘The Spirit of Art’ performance by Betzwieser, Syha, and Hamilton at Halle 14 in 2011
And the first track on the on this new album ‘The Spirit of Art’, is far from austere and was the result of a process of what could be called grown-ups playing. A gallery in Leipzig, Halle 14, invited myself, the writer Ulrike Syha and the designer Hagen Betzwieser to make a work responding to the idea of archives. This was due to the gallery being the repository of failed applications for an Art fair. In the end we built a castle of boxes filled with the rejected artists’ work and we imagined some type of Art God living in the castle and I sang ‘The Spirit of Art’ inside the building while Hagen manually made dry ice.
Another of these new works, ‘product #1’ started as a love song and thank you to the man who organized a trip to Gdansk for us in 2008 after a particularly dark time. And ‘May’ was a melody that appeared from nowhere as I walked near Alexanderplatz in Berlin full of sadness and apparently a “sick stomach” missing an absent friend. It is clear from these examples that life always seeps in.
Andrew Hamilton with an array of birds visiting Sopot, Poland in 2008
It is there, also, of course in the monastery, sitting for hours on the ground where the real messiness of life presents itself but after a few days looking unflinchingly at the mess sometimes you can find brief glimpses of happiness that does not rely on anything external – maybe this is akin to what Agnes Martin refers to as ‘a very small gesture of exultation’.[vi] Perhaps that is the best I can aim for and in all my work I try to take these personal moments and transform/convert them into the abstract, to distill them. Indeed this process can be heard worked out over the duration of ‘product #1’. What begins as a love song gradually gets cut-up and manipulated until by the end it is like viewing an abstracted memory of that song, the personal becomes what Martin would call ‘dimensionless’.
Sketch for ‘May’ (2008)
And how even if one piece begins with a clear idea or emotion during the work many other scraps get ‘pulled in’ to the creative momentum. For example I remember ‘a’ was also the result of seeing a painting by Klee called Freundlicher Ort (Friendly Place): I thought no one writes pieces about ‘friendliness’ in new music and that might be fun. Perhaps this made me reflect on childhood as I ended up using different systems of solfège in ‘a’ to recall the embarrassing memories of myself as an upstart boy during theory exams at the Royal Irish Academy of Music on Westland Row. During the sight-singing exams I would inform the examiner I could do it without solfège (I had an irrational hatred of solfège) and they, kindly and without laughing, allowed me.
The text by Ajahn Sumedho ‘brothers and sisters in suffering, old age, sickness and death” is saying, maybe, that we are all in this together and that is what the piece ‘a’ is probably about but it is also about friendliness, solfège and I even threw fragments of other pieces at it. But then again I forgot all of this completely when I had to find a way to actually structure the material and ultimately I went back to Mondrian and it was his dictum of ‘It is necessary that a horizontal or vertical line be constantly interrupted: for unopposed, these directions would again express something ‘particular’’ that guided how I wrote the final result. So, for me, once the actual writing begins, I often forget what gave the piece the initial ‘ignition’, the abstract takes over (perhaps Martin is saying that life ‘cannot be represented’ because it is so multi-faceted and memory so unreliable).
Sketch for ‘a’ (2014)
The ‘beauty of life’ Mondrian referred to in the opening quote is found in the transformation of individual emotions or moments into pure energy and structure. We can experience a form of liberation from being able to ‘drop’ life in the actual making, performing and listening. Maybe Martin and on the opposing side, those who want art to reflect life and the world today are both right? (or maybe both completely wrong!).
Ultimately, then for me, it is about how I can combine and try to balance the man who loves abstraction, distilling everything down and goes on silent retreats with the man who often gets disapproving looks in the monastery for laughing loudly and sobs every time at that scene when Meryl Streep sings in Mama Mia! Here We Go Again (2018). I hope both can belong: I think the writer Robert Walser finds the balance and distills what could be my borrowed manifesto when he writes (in ‘My Endeavours’), ‘if I sometimes wrote at a venture, on impulse, it looked a bit comical to deadly earnest people; but I was experimenting with language, hoping that it contains an unknown livingness, the arousal of which is a joy’.[xi]
Around 200 people gathered in front of Sligo City Hall this Friday afternoon. The majority of those attending were young, and they spoke about George Floyd, supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, but also raised questions about Direct Provision in Ireland.
This drastic, clean-cut deprivation and our complete ignorance of what the future held in store, had taken us unawares; we were unable to react against the mute appeal of presences, still so clear and already so far, which haunted us daylong … The plague forced inactivity on them, limiting their movements to the same dull round inside the town, and throwing them, day after day, on the illusive solace of their memories. For in the aimless walk they kept on coming back to the same streets and usually, owing to the smallness of the town, these were streets in which happier days, they had walked with those who now were absent …
And the narrator is convinced that he can set down here, as holding good for all, the feeling he personally had and to which many of his friends confessed.
It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile – that sensation of a void within which never left us, the irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.
Albert Camus, The Plague p.60, 1947
‘Mood 1: Suspension’ from ‘The Timelapse’. (c) Letizia Lopreiato
Of trauma and of the exile from self and the world we once knew …
My handcrafted trauma therapy
I only recently got back to this book, and how strongly these pages resonate with my tireless work to bring to life my “Timelapse” project experience during this time of self-isolation. It has left me speechless. A poet left with no words, almost ironic in fact … These words truly have been marked by an imposed distancing from all things social so beloved to me, which is starting to feel quite painful at times whilst all these photos and all those words and all these memories have no other place for now, other than the walls of my apartment …
This book was left to me by a good friend, one of Dublin’s main characters if you ask me. He was working at “Dublin’s best kept secret café” as the signs says, right behind one of my favourite bookshop. Paco knew, I remember the first day I went there, I just felt his humanity. And so since then I came back every day, my refuge in time of pain and sorrow whilst traveling back and forth, at one stage even every week, and for over a year, in between so many spaces, so many memories … Paco knew I was exhausted but he also knew I had a story tell, letting me write, taking photos for hours in the garden. Always the same seat, by the corner, where it was safe for me to hide. One day he came to me with a flower and a glass of bubbly with a strawberry, a big smile, which would have cheered the entire city up. He just knew though I never told him what was happening. He knew now I know, because we have all, for one reason or another, from the ones we love, the ones far from what we knew as an anchor to our self, we have all been there, in that no man’s land that trauma throws you on. Like a massive wave it carries you to a foreign land. It is a shore, you just can’t see the rest of the island … yet. For many years the sensation of exile following the death of my father truly followed me too, just like the narrator in The Plague, until I arrived home. Ireland, Dublin, its magical people, its incredible feeling of community, allowed me to be present, to slow down, to feel my own thoughts. Thoughts that I have had for so long but that I could not hold the energy to engage with, it was like I couldn’t handle the intensity of them for so long, until when It finally felt like I had no escape from the awareness of them, if I truly want to make through it and still be myself.
Paco left me this book the day before he left, after almost twenty years in Dublin, to return to his home town. A return I could never see for myself, as Ireland is already home, it truly always had been for me since I first came here as a kid to practice English. I just knew it was where I belonged, this magical land where healing is led by the creative force of its nature, if you only allow it to flow through you. And thankfully now my mum is here, she is back home too. Her healing began when she asked me for help two years ago, up to then she tried everything in her power not to “disrupt” my life she said. When the only thing I could have asked for, what I was waiting for, was for her to be ready to let me in, and be present. I have never seen myself as the type person living so close to their family, I always aimed to live abroad. I never felt at home in my country, never like I have always done here. But one thing is to choose not to, another thing is to feel you can’t reunite with what you feel as family, simply because trauma took it away, because the losses became unbearable, because the world you knew, the life you had, simply ceased, simply leaving you wondering around like a ghost amongst ghosts, haunted by the sensation of feeling betrayed by life somehow … Losing faith in the unexpected, in the positive, fearing any new beginning, perpetually condemned to relive that painful past, which is always so present, over and over again.
Love does not equal hurt, it might equal pain, so does life, because that is what life means, it makes us feel. The state of being frozen, collapsed in one’s own perception of constant risk, as if the entire world is aiming to hurt us sooner rather than later if we only allow it. It is that dimension whereby expressing feelings equals weakness, the “better be numb and selfish” mentality, rather than admitting we still feel too hurt. When we think nobody cares anymore, as everybody moved on, somehow, with their lives. Everybody but us … It is hard to dismantle false beliefs, put there to protect us in the first place, when by nature we are drawn to think firstly of all negative possible consequences to our actions. We are animals after all, and nature is something to be feared, the unexpected is a threat, and it can only be fought back, by staying constantly alert.
‘Mood 2: Anxiety’ from ‘The Timelapse’. (c) Letizia Lopreiato
Getting out of the hole in which we stick ourselves in whilst experiencing trauma, and where we ourselves decide to remain even after the event, is because of the self-complacency bubble, the of victimhood, which is way too easy to live in versus the admission of being always able to save ourselves, which does requires effort, accountability and above all which involves the need to learn (or to learn again), to be response-able.
It might be not what we really want to do what matters in this case, to me at least, it has been more a case of, “did I really feel like leaving that state”, and for this, timing is crucial and it is different for each and every person.
In this story, I needed to reach rock bottom, and so did my mum, to realise, to feel, that we weren’t betrayed, that trauma has always been there as the most precious healing opportunity, in its pain and apparent unfairness.
And so surely this is a long way of saying, the way to healing, it requires a choice, and this choice should be recognised as growth, and not as threat, it requires awareness, and awareness to grow, it needs a fearless space, which can only be built through gentleness, compassion, self-love and loads of self-respect, for our need for safety and security, to finally be met. Because fear means resistance, and within resistance, change is nor recognised as growth, but a self-inflicted pain, chaos, anxiety, which becomes the only comfort zone.
It is possible to rewrite our story, at any moment, anywhere you are. And each and everyone’s story is always different, but that is the thing, this is not a competition about who had the worst in life. And I won’t go into the details of what exactly happened to me because it is not what I believe the value of sharing this experience is. This is just one experience, one story, which has been sitting in my room making me almost unable to breath properly at night when looking at all those photos hanging on my wall. Every day, I have been reliving the feeling of all those memories, It wasn’t pleasant, but I knew it was “a storm I had to face” to find my land, to find peace. Writing this piece, I have started reflecting on why this was happening, and what this creative process has meant for me. Reflecting on where I stand now after all this, and why I was resisting looking at how this crisis, this storm, changed me and led me to feel love again, to open my heart again.
I was risking stagnation, the elephant was not even just in my apartment, it was sitting on my chest wherever I was going before I embraced this experience and let it flow through me … My shadow was there, asking me to look at it and become friends. And so I did, I befriended my demons, I accepted my shadow, and now I am at peace. And my mum is on her way to heal too, embracing the last phase of her life, leaving the sensation of shame, of guilt, of abandonment that trauma shuffles you with when not explored, when not embraced.
This process to me, the one of embracing my shadow, as my dear Jung would have defined it, it has been the highest lesson that self-love could have led me to.
And I did it through art. Art for me has not only meant survival, art has brought meaning to my life, without which in all likelihood, I would not be here to tell this story.
My mum is now starting her first ever art therapy course, as well as her English classes, encouraged by how therapeutic this project has been to her too. Her reactions passed from outburst of irritation, to laughter, to surprise when looking at herself in this project’s photos. Hanging on my walls for the past month and a half since lockdown started, there are the photos of the incredible journey within of two women, out of their roles of mother and daughter, two friends, coming back home, home to themselves, and to one another.
‘Mood 3: Grief’ from ‘The Timelapse’. (c) Letizia Lopreiato
A journey of self-healing, of self-empowerment.
If we would only choose to be present, to gift our time when we sense discomfort, within us and in others, if we would only train our hearts and our minds to hold that space, the space needed for everybody to share their stories of difficulty, of pain, of trauma, of guilt, of shame even … This world would be a better place, a place for empathy, a place for self-acceptance and for truth, rather than a comfortable fiction dimension with “positivity 24/7” as one solution fitting all purposes.
We have our own unique narratives. But it is important always to keep in mind that history is shaped by those who tell the story.
So why not being ourselves, to tell our story? To share our truth? To reshape our narrative?
“Nobody better than you could depict your feelings”, John Gunn, another Dublin’s icon if you ask me, once told me to encourage me to start taking photos of myself in order to portray my poems. This was instead of my original choice to find a photographer for this purpose.
In Trauma Therapy from a somatic approach, we study that in order to heal from trauma, what needs to be guided is a work reconnecting one’s images, feelings, meaning, expression, actions and relationships. This is because of the disconnection that trauma creates, and which fractures one and / or many of these links.
If you would ask me what photography helped my mum and I with, I would tell you:
Using photography along with poetry and reflective journaling, helped the reconnection through images, of the meaning of our feelings, to find a reason and closure for our actions, and even for the hurtful actions of others. It allowed us, to give ourselves a path towards forgiveness.
It has represented a free form of expression for our relationship with ourselves, with what happened and with one another.
Art in the form of what I call “my handcrafted art therapy during lockdown”, truly allowed for this reconnection to start happening.
This film photography and poetry project, titled “The Timelapse”, is the result of the last two-and-a-half years of documentary work, which felt more like an exploration, and a deep dive into the experience of trauma, bereavement and all its consequences for the mind, the body and surely the spirit.
The consequences created by the unexpected sudden void which opens under our feet when death knocks at the door. Death, as well as love, triggers within us the more primordial fears, but also the most shining of all glimmers: the one of hope, the one of happiness, the one of that on-going learning process that is the letting go of what has already happened, and which is no longer with us.
No matter how long we feel we should wait and hold on to the memory of it, how long we feel we should do so, to honour its prior existence … It is a call for the acceptance of the inevitable change that is the jump into the unknown after the experience of loss that has to be embraced to start healing. That beginning of a new cycle in life, where, luckily, everything has already changed, us included, no matter how long it takes for us to admit that.
We grew. We evolved. It was painful, it was harsh, but it did happen. No matter how long we chose to numb ourselves for, by trying not to look in that mirror. Trauma equals change.
Trauma is that breaking point, for the no-return to the ones we once were. In its toughest form and shape it is the deepest of all lessons, it is there for us to learn, once and for all, to avoid stagnation.
Resistance to the inevitable change that trauma imposes translates into stagnation for the spirit, for the mind, an intoxication for the body, that is desperately trying to follow up with a mind that can’t fit the memories of the experience anymore into any of the drawers which once were so orderly, storing the reality we knew before the event. It is a shock to our system.
This project and deciding to finalise and release it during lockdown anyways, with a digital launch instead of a physical one originally due at The Darkroom, here in Dublin, on April 30th, for Poetry Day Ireland, it was surely a journey of exploration for both myself and my mum.
A deep dive into the the ocean of those memories which truly didn’t fit with any of own or my mum’s drawers anymore. The cabinet of our hearts and of our minds needed to create a new filing system. I write poetry in outbursts, an uncontainable impulse, I feel it as a real need for me to maintain my mental health, rather than an aesthetic exercise. Only recently I started remembering what I write, and this I believe happened because the work of matching poetry with photography allowed me to finally reconnect my mind, my heart, and my spirit.
Before starting using film photography, I used to write, fill diaries with my poetry, and never open them again. Almost like my poems were truly some little creatures which I was growing until they came of age when they could be let out and about in the world and out of my mind.
‘From the Front’ from ‘The Timelapse’ (c) Letizia Lopreiato
I only now realise that I wasn’t taking proper care of them once I released them into the world though, I have realised this now through a deep self-love journey, that I was probably scared of them somehow, scared to see what parts of me I was releasing into the world, scared of what they truly meant to me. Of what they have been representing of me. Basically I realised that there is a lot of “fear of self” in the mere fact of not wanting to be fully accountable about my own art and in not having wanted it to become a final product until now, an independent creature.
I have realised I was afraid of losing control of my own fears, my deepest and most guarded secret instincts. A fear that my sensitivity will not be protected if it is released into the world. It was fear and guilt about creating my own Frankenstein, releasing it into the world and then abandoning it with no protection in front of it, to be accepted in its diversity.
A fear I released fully and substituted with love and respect for myself and for my own creations during lockdown and thanks to this experience, and to all who supported me and believed in me and my art.
I am thankful above all, greatly thankful to life for having granted me this healing space and time.
In fact, I didn’t quite understand why It felt so natural since the very first photo I took with my one and only film camera, for me to feel the actual action of turning what I see and sense into an actual tangible creature which finally was freed from my mind.
‘When Travel Means Need’ Part 1, from ‘The Timelapse’ (c) Letizia Lopreiato
The creative process is like alchemy to me. It feels like alchemy. The transmutation of what once was mainly painful and almost unbearable, into light, into meaning, into a being which has a life of its own, for anybody who would like to take it by the hand and go for a walk with it, in the midst of their minds, their hearts, their spirits. It will be a companion for their journey, wherever they would like to be, whenever they might feel like it. It is and will be, always available, just like breath.
Photography has allowed me to understand, to slow down, always to look with the eyes of the heart, at a manageable pace, the one of the human being, the one of a creation which is and has to be one with nature to feel whole.
Any distance, any avoidance of that space we need as animals by default, deep within us, to hold understanding of our actions, based on the feeling of it, it translates into a disconnection which we can’t afford. Playing the disconnected ones leads us to not being held accountable not even to ourselves, for our actions, for our words, because if we feel love, we feel pain, we feel loss, we feel it all. Soon it is there to realise that this which seems to be an easier option, always comes at a price, but that whoever loves and cares for us will be the ones paying it, paying the price of our disconnection.
And if one thing, death, loss, or any trauma in itself, does teach anything, it is that being selfish in this journey means more pain, it means more death, it means more losses, and it means stagnation. It is the emotional resistance to the experience of a change that in our body, in our cells, in the chemistry of our being, has already happened that feeds the disconnection.
It is the way I liked to see it, and unfortunately I have learned the hard way, it is paramount to need to release the water, our emotions, to follow its flow. Because only water can carve mountains.
‘When Travel Means Need’ Part 2 from ‘The Timelapse’ (c) Letizia Lopreiato
PTSD, depression, anxiety, loss, death, the experience of bereavement itself, both experienced first-hand, as well as lived through the experience of my loved ones, only represented for me the desperate call of my heart to find home, to go back to its true identity, which I had to bottle up to feel safer. Just like we all do. Photography along with poetry and creative writing journaling filled the walls of my apartment now turned into an art studio with photos hanging on almost every wall, and filled the walls I had built within as well. The difference is that now, I can see it, I can see those walls, and they are not within me anymore.
At the highest stage of the disassociation that trauma had left me with over the past decade, I was almost feeling like I was creating different movies. In every city, evert country, every job I chose to engage with … Experiences that now feel like belonging to different lives, many different movies, that you almost can feel like you wanted to switch from or watch again, to jump in and out of the memory of them without being overly impacted by it as you were living with them in a detached way, to protect yourself, but that is not life. That is surviving. Survival mode made a life style.
It really is not fiction though, and eventually the realization that all those movies would be looking better as one, and that you truly need to find and hold the space within yourself to sit, and watch it all. You need to feel it all, as your own. Because it represents you, and there can be no shame, no guilt, no fear anymore, because you have always had a choice, to leave behind the victim’s cloak. And you do this with compassion, kindness, self-love and self-respect, whenever you have felt ready for it. Whenever you truly felt at home again, whenever you can trust that out it is safe out there again for your needs to be met, for your voice to be heard, for your feelings to be truly “seen” and welcomed.
To experience the fear, to feel the pain, and to find freedom, once again. To be at one with yourself, and with all that is around you. Because independence does not equal loneliness and others can and want to be there and meet our needs, with patience, with time, with real love, with genuine care, if we choose to let them in. All levels of trauma, from childhood to adulthood leave us with the feeling of not being able to choose a way out. Being gentle with ourselves and one another, doing all in our power to show empathy, to feel tolerance, to experience connection as many times per day as we can. Write down the sensations, carry a diary, note it down on your phone, just remember, remember what it feels like to be present, once again. Out of your mind, into your body. There is always time to breath.
With light and respect,
Letizia Lopreiato June 2nd, 2020
‘Mood 4: Suspension’ from ‘The Timelapse’. (c) Letizia Lopreiato
These below are some references for the curious minds, to my learnings in regards to the perspective I gained whilst researching on trauma therapy, from a somatic psychotherapy approach:
The Polyvagal Theory, Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, Self-Regulation (2011), Stephen W. Porges, published by W. W. Norton Company, NY, United States
The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (2014), Stephen W. Porges, published by W. W. Norton Company, NY, United States
Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory: The Emergence of Polyvagal-Informed Therapies (2018), Stephen W. Porges and Deb Dana, published by W. W. Norton Company, NY, United States
The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, Deb Dana, published by W. W. Norton Company, NY, United States
An artist’s journey is one from noise to silence. In the beginning they need and want to be heard yet, at some point, silence will be required to stay sharp. They should never choose the sound of their own voice over the work. Staying quiet is not what artists are very good at but it is what needs to be done sometimes. Silence doesn’t have to last forever and invariably there will come a time when a fork in the road is reached: one way ‘stop talking’, the other ‘continue speaking’. The artist will feel in their bones when this fateful day arrives.
When I was younger I felt a lot more confident in my inner voice. I used to think of my subconscious as a shield against outside forces that might bring me down and also, as a key into a world behind the veil – where truth could be spoken without thinking too much. Songs felt like magical opportunities, a chance to present the best of myself to the world, and receive the wonders of it in return. A typical writing session would consist of me sitting, zoning out, letting a thought or idea come. And when a worthwhile thing came along I would attempt to fashion it – using the craftsman side of my brain – into something resembling a piece of art I could stand behind, and release.
I was conscious of looking for something that could be intimate and personal and also universal in a way. The first line that came to me when I wrote ‘Graveyard’ (2008) was ‘I kissed you in the graveyard’. This deceptively simple line was the exact kind that could open up a whole banana-bunch of possibilities. I was thinking about T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922) and imagining the idea of a kiss in a world of death as a good old two-fingered salute to the grim reaper – the idea of two lovers sharing a brief, graveside moment, a microcosm of their whole lives. And the ambiguity of a line like, ‘it’s a short, short distance from the nipple to the soil’ appealed to me.
A song, about sneaking into a graveyard with a lover, could maybe communicate the shortness of life and the quicksilver importance of transcendental moments. These moments where time seems to freeze in order to allow your memory bank to open up a little wider to take in a scene you know you’ll never forget.
Experiences that make life worth living are perfect fodder for a song. Translating them is usually a sure-fire way to get people to nod and say, ‘Ahh I feel that…. where’s the merch table?’. This was how I used to write back in those times. I could kind of tell when an idea would resonate, and it was important for me to ‘be seen’ so I ran with this, and it was fairly successful for a while. Then I reached that fork in the road.
The silence began to present itself to me.
After a little success arrived for my songwriting I became suspicious of my methods. They did not provide the succour my soul was crying out for. In order to satisfy my own very personal itch I had to try something else. My work felt cheapened by taming the initial subconscious Eureka moment into something tailored to get people to notice. I could probably say goodbye to a mansion in Dalkey.
I began to dissect why the secondary part of the process felt so wrong. The craftsman side of my brain moulding the initial idea into a sellable shape bothered me and I struggled to understand why. It felt egotistical and selfish; it was like a vegetarian eating steak, completely ‘allowed’. Still, by the standards I had set myself, a failure of sorts (there’s nothing wrong with failure of course). My job as a songwriter changed. I now listened for ideas and lines except once they arrived I did not attempt to shape them. This method felt closer to a purity worth aiming for, closer to the unarguable truth of silence.
I listen to songs on my latest record Sentinel (2019) and I only have a vague idea what they are about. I like them all the more for it. In a track like the ‘The Sea Shade’ I can see it is somehow about loss but it doesn’t spell itself out. The tonality and the textures speak as much as the words, my voice submerged in the lake of its surroundings. And it’s not as much mine any more – it feels like everything – and yet it is me, inching towards saying something by not saying anything, trying to evoke silence by making noise.
On the title track ‘Sentinel’ the lyrical theme loosely revolves around kindness and accountability while it, crucially, floats above these concepts (you can check out the premiere of the beautiful 16mm video from director TJ O’Grady Peyton below). This looseness keeps me interested in continuing to work. I need to be confused by what I’m doing in order for me to allow it to be. Some might argue this could result in obtuse and self-indulgent work. I have allowed myself to place a bet that eventually this confusion will lead to understanding. That’s the artist’s wager.
Of course I have to accept that this might be folly and lead me to a place of complete redundancy. ‘The cruellest trick is that Sisyphus believes he is making progress. He would give up but the mountain peak seems closer every time’ (tweet via @ctrlcreep). I suppose we’ll see about that some day.
A few years ago I saw an artwork that was a piece of paper that the artist had stared at for many hours. The end result was this simple white sheet of paper in a frame, hung up for all to see – completely blank. This is where I know I’m heading to. The final form, the ultimate song.
Your rule has lapsed Apollo, all narrative is dead,
You said true form is timeless, but they chose me instead,
My pipe has no rhythm, but is easy on the ear,
A great tumult rise in ecstasy, precisely as you feared,
It’s true you had your time,
But as samples, your’s is mine,
The young are running in the wood,
Arm and arm, as they should,
That measure gave no pleasure,
And with rhyme we divine,
The inkwell has run dry,
Dance along with your lyre.
Lyre lyre lyre lyre lyre lyre lyre
Why endeavour to fix what is beyond repair?
The dancer knows it, but does not despair.
Such concepts as justice permit, the mighty to inflict,
Pain and suffering, so desist, with your rule of the fist!
Virtue hardly nurtures,
Such beauty as you speak.
We must dance Now,
Not ask ourselves How.
Nature is our calling,
All cities are appalling;
Let us grow our hair,
To show we don’t care,
For our time on earth is short,
Let us shed blood as we ought,
Laugh, love and lustre,
Not your cerebral bluster,
Intuition is my mission, and tradition,
I have no time for your addition;
I trust in the Earth,
And embrace the dirt.
Apollo’s Song
I now appeal to all who wish to learn,
The crafts which make of life a pleasurable span,
Or seek refuge from the beasts of prey,
In glistening cities of men who sing my name,
And communicate in tongues glorious refrain,
As without laws to curb the passion’s rule,
Their lives are spent in dreadful misery;
Instead I pray they last the course and take,
Such lessons only I may give as these.
Oh Pan you fool your passions rule your wits;
The muck of earth becomes a curse to those,
Who call civilisation their home.
To Pythagoras I brought my gift the lyre,
And from my precious instrument there came,
A lesson mathematical giving,
To all who wished to build, precious insight;
Even the stars above obeyed my rule.
And yet I shed these tears as well you see,
For man is not a worthy pupil still,
He lies and cheats and shapes belief to suit,
Vainglorious aims, intrigues and stratagems;
His wiles would make a god despair;
A time of expertise is passed indeed,
And shallow intellects run wild and mock,
The light of knowledge that I handed down.
And Pan you should recall the contest when,
Old Timulus adjudged my song above,
Your playful lute. Alone was Midas struck,
He swooned with crass desire and came unstuck,
And grew a pair of ass’s ears to show,
To those who may assume your song superior,
A fate unkind for foolish thoughts as these;
To all I urge be careful what you wish.
Feature Image: Jacob Jordaens: Apollo as Victor over Pan (1637).
