Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • The Ninth Rose

    In an undisclosed year, Decency took something marvelous away from me, and by extension away from you. Away from… I want to say, everybody. Decency took it, and left me…decency.

    Decency now obliges me to make fiction of this, and set it far away and long ago, but how I want to blast that for the sake of its long debt to me, Seifert!* Hmm, Decency. Alright, then.

    Long ago and far away, in an Eastern European country called…

    (My own Soviet-bloc memento, from a time when we spoke in parables, is a little mental collection of those fictional Eastern European countries. Syldavia. Borduria. Rovenia. But I’m not going to use any of those; I’ve sworn off that, as you’ll see.)

    In an Eastern European republic, called Padobron, at a pivotal juncture for me, when I was celebrating the derring-do of my expulsion from the Narodna Misočana Technical University (expulsion had become a countercultural badge of honor) the question of how to get a job was just beginning to grow on me, someone called Jaromir Seifel published something good. Something which everyone said was good, but which betrayed his true greatness by being first, published over-the-table by a state-owned press, and second, not as great as he was.

    Small, in every way, our coterie was one of young people thrown together for being delivered by the same midwife, or confirmed in the same parish, or expelled for exhibiting the same cheek, or stuck in the same tavern-corner because they have the same feeble ideas of looking grown-up at twenty, but who believe that they’ve coalesced at the draw of stars and gods, through possessing a similar gallantry, genius, and destiny.

    That May, my peers, whose dreams were to either reform or undermine collectivism, if not get a job within it, attributed to me a certain dashing, because of my expulsion, and because I wrote things, copied them by hand, and circulated them as if they were dangerous, like an authentic counterculture. I think the writing and the expulsion melded in their minds (though I was not, in fact, expelled for writing, but because of an uncle’s alleged black-market prosperity) and that they accorded me a position among them, rather like Seifel’s among the real writers and agitators. Seifel’s must have been the one because, though I had never mentioned him, when his Eight Roses appeared, Miroslav Kinsky and Petra Raha both told me separately that they thought I should read it, that I would like it. I learned later that neither of them had read it.

    Well, what do you think I did? I bought The Eight Roses. I carried it quite proudly under my arm, with the spine showing nicely. I was only sorry it was so narrow; people might have to stop me, stoop, and stare to read it. Well, I was a little sorry, too, that the cover was such a hideous pink, like unhealthy skin. But I carried it, first to the “Golden Shield,” where I could casually let it be seen by two comrades in a corner, drinking a cheap wine our self-conscious slang referred to as ‘rope,’ and then home, for I was honest enough to read alone.

    I read it. I was prepared, you know, to adore it, and I did. To the very last page, until, I saw what it might have been.

    I don’t know how to talk about this. Love was never my strong point; I once described a man I was besotted with by saying, “In his striped sweater he looked like a large Easter egg,” and thought I was being poetic. When I want to talk about what happened in the blank space under the last words on the last page of Seifel’s The Eight Roses, my pen becomes enormous and my brain feels like the sort of thing you would serve in thin slices on a canapé tray. But allons! Seifel would be equal to this, so I will. On the page…

    Oh, it was bigger than Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs, deeper than Meung’s Romance of the Rose, more universal than Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; more romantic than Keats, tougher than Kafka, more acute than Tolstoy. I didn’t know all those names then, but I knew a thing that I knew was greater than all of them; since then I have known those names and something of what they are, but I have never known the thing of which I speak. I felt it then, and what I felt most certainly about it was that it was real. However clumsy, I would get it on the paper, it was real: what The Eight Roses would have been if Satan had never fallen. Don’t misunderstand me: I still adored The Eight Roses, and that’s why this thing was so big.

    The thing was The Eight Roses, it was what would burst out of The Eight Roses if I could somehow slit the chrysalis. The huge joke was that Seifel had never known it was there. That was as plain as the sun; for if Seifel had known it was there, he would never have written the thin little state-approved thing with its hideous pink cover. Seifel was a genius, everybody knew that; he could have pulled it off. But he had dashed off this Eight Roses thing on table-napkins, probably, and sold it to the National Scholastic and Aesthetic Press, probably to pay his rent, and was probably flirting with his housekeeper while he scribbled the last chapter with his left hand. Even the title was botched. If he had written it two inches further into his peripheral vision, he would have noticed that good poetics, numerology, theology, plot dynamics, or even floristry would have made it either seven or nine roses. But no. He had eight.

    I was stunned, goosepimpled, teary, prayerful with my gift. I wanted to kiss Seifel’s hands and put my wet face against his knees. I wanted him to lay his hand on my head and bless me, like Haydn blessing young Beethoven. He would see, he alone would see now, before it had pages and flesh, the great soul of my conception; he would laugh and be glad, though he had only been its modeler, that someone would bring the true Eight Roses into the world. I felt that Jaromir Seifel must have a rich, deep laugh, and a kindly, rounded face, lined from a thousand smiles. My writing hand curled. Before I knew what I was doing, I had piled ink, pens, my ragged notebooks on the tea table I used as a desk. The cleanest notebook was folded open before me, and I had written the date. Then…

    Something was wrong, but not nearly so wrong as what was right; an inexorable force moved my hand to the left margin, my pen formed I,n, space, f,i,v,e…

    The wrong thing, pain and roar, rose in my hand to snatch that first line from me. I wrote laboriously, shoving on my pen like Tepl’s Plowman of Bohemia.

    “In five hundred lifetimes Mařek Klubaš would never see again what he saw now.”

    The sensation was as if the bare lightbulb had fallen from its socket and exploded on the floor. I leaned forward, crouching over that single line like some terrible wound. For I posessed that greater Eight Roses, but the world could only have it at the price of my crime. This line was the identical line with which Seifel opened his Eight Roses. And this was not the only line of mine that would be identical with his. The first. The fifth. The eighth. The whole third paragraph… For Seifel was a genius, and even his garbage was partly immortal. This would be no wholly original cousin to Seifel’s book; the daughter could never be less than half her mother. That date I had dashed onto the top-right of the page got tattooed backwards across my hot, sticky cheek.

    When I was upset, I had an unfortunate habit of pinching and rolling the skin on my upper arms, which left them blotched and bruised purple that night. As I lay on the floor with my feet on the bed, Barbora, my chaste, almost viceless, older sister, who was working at one of the electric plants then, came home and cooked something. She tried to get me downstairs to eat what she had prepared, and vaguely I remember that she entered my room very late, on one of her raids for my cigarettes, which she despised. Rooting through my handbag and both coats, she might have frisked me too, for all I did about it. I must have known when she fell asleep because later I remember suffering and even rationalizing out loud a bit.

    So sure was I that Seifel would more than forgive me, I even wanted to give him the manuscript and beg him to publish it under his own name; I knew his upright soul wouldn’t do that, and although my huge, Beethoven-sort of ideas earlier would have considered joint publishing a condescension on my part, with the novel so much nearer now, in my fingertips, I was suddenly humble and realistic, and afraid that Seifel, the great Seifel, wouldn’t let his name stand by mine on anything. I was ready to write the thing and ask questions later, but both times I sat up at the tea table again, where that wrong thing, painful and roaring, stood between me and my Eight Roses. Seifel’s words would come next—only two words—and then mine, but I couldn’t write those two. I said them over and over. I said that second line to myself; it was beautiful when it first came to me, but I gave it a touch of assonance, switched a synonym, moved a verb, and it was even more beautiful. I chanted it to myself, under my breath, and the third sentence tripped after it like an obedient little sister; but I had to stop, because those three together broke my heart and I would have died

    I sat Seifel in the broken swivel-chair opposite my bed, and said I wanted to approach this individually, head to head. We were alone with eons of space around us. What would it mean, if I took his clay pinch-pot ? Such a nice one! The best a pinch-pot could be—and made an Attic vase of it? Love! Miracle! Fate! Of course Seifel could see that. He was so understanding. He winked at me. Individual, elemental, primal, me and Seifel. There was nothing wrong at all. The sweat dried on my temples. We had been born for this, he in 1901 and I in ’38, so that he could write a little outline called The Eight Roses and I could make of it a lifegiving epic called, The Nine Roses. We would undermine Totalitarianism and fire noble, honest brains to seize the hour and steer democracy, social justice, and agrarian abundance. We would finally say what the haunted eyes of frescoed saints had wished the stuffy priests could. People would one day forget us, but humanity would ever be drawn into nobler lines. Again my face wanted to press Seifel’s knees.

    I was at the tea table.

    Pain. Roar. Wrong.

    Seifel and I were not alone with humanity. Something that was never quite humanity gazed reproachfully on us, with their own just claims…the artists. For centuries, emaciated savantes had trudged penniless back to their shabby lodging houses because some plump profiteer was turning out penny broadsides of their intellectual property, pocketing everything with full blessing of the inept Law. What I found pain and wrong, was their long deferred hope of just protection. If even one copy of this epic, and even my inebriation knew it would cost something to print a tome of the size this would be, changed hands for a koruna, and Seifel, the most deserving artist of Padobron, would be robbed; his deep, thoughtful eyes—oh! I could see the tired, pathetic lines around them—would still smile on my work, would lose every pinprick of reproach in a selfless, true artist’s rejoicing at my victory, but I would be damnable. I may have knelt by his swivel-chair to ask his forgiveness; I don’t remember, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

    Then, I could only go to him, Pán Jaromir Siefel of…wait, where did he live? Torný Street? And ask permission; like a hopelessly infatuated ragpicker going to ask for a Duchess’ hand. I could have bawled. The Duchess, of course, fully deserved my humiliation and my absurd, mad courtship, but I could not bear the inevitable rejection. Gallantry was hard and could bear it, but Love was soft and couldn’t. Too much was at stake for grandeur.

    Maybe I did bawl; I don’t know.

    Wouldn’t he give me full permission? In original and onionskin, signed and filed with the Department of Trades Protection? If I begged and orated, if I showed him five pages of prospective…? I was ashamed to fall back on this, but I was a girl, if a plain one, and very young; perhaps he would feel some gallantry—Wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he?

    Would he? What if he really had written it for his rent, and I came along, offering to outwrite and outsell him with his own book? What if he felt he couldn’t afford to split royalties on its improved revision? Or what if he only believed I would ruin it ? Thought me a…

    Starstruck, egotistical, talentless, deluded…

    Nineteen-year-old.

    I was a nineteen-year-old. Oh, pain!

    Unfortunately for that sickly pink book, my eyes fell on it at exactly that moment. How I hated it. Not what was in it. I hated Seifel, at the top of his career (I felt then that anyone who could publish articles in the Brava was at the top of his career), daring to dash off something so beneath his abilities and its own potential, to unload it on a literate, intelligent population, cased in airtight legal protections to keep earnest, less-endowed artists from ever achieving with it, what its semi-occasional flashes of genius taught them to love and long for. Oh, I hated his complacency. I hated his flirting with that fat housekeeper, I hated his hand paying the rent, I hated the half-koruna I had paid for the pink heartbreak.

    I held it between my two hands. Never before or after was The Nine Roses so near me. Again it’s hard to talk about what The Nine Roses was, perhaps because the pain or longing was so acute that it is unconsciously suppressed. I know that one of the principal characters was a woman. I think she was to have been very important, and I know that she was only, in the vaguest way, suggested by ‘Marie Kepys’ in The Eight Roses, that she was profoundly, fundamentally different, not opposite, just so different that they must have been born in different spectrums of light. But for all that, I can’t remember anything about that woman. I know her name was Karoline Svít, that her hair was yellow, she was twenty-six years old, had ancestry in the mountains of northeast Padobron. That one side of her lower lip looked larger than the other, and that when she was nervous, she would blink a lot; but what she was—oh, it was stupendously human and yet inexplicable, unpredictable, something that blasted Determinism to bits, and yet, I don’t remember a thing.

    Another character was deterministic, kind of a foil, who would be involved in a tragic devolution of some sort—obviously he was Heinrich Räder from Eight Roses, and I have to admit now, even with that neurotic curtain drawn across the shining glory of The Nine Roses, that he may have been its weakness, because I was too young to write tragedy well. But I am not sure of that. I’m surer, even now, of the greatness of that Nine Roses than of anything I’ve learned about writing since, which is a lot, at least compared to what I knew then.

    It wasn’t Seifel across from me in the swivel chair then, it was humanity, posterity, and Art. Not the artists, but Art, with her own peremptory, maybe holy, demands, which were not the demands of the artists at all. Art sat in the swivel chair and smiled at me, her own old, youthful, smirking, blessing smile; my shoulder muscles finally released. I smiled too, with my head hanging to one side. The Nine Roses was not mine, had never been; it belonged to Art, loaned to me by her inscrutable purposes, and it was my part only to act, beatify the world, and disappear. The disappearing part especially soothed me. It seemed perfectly fitting and reasonable, just then, that if I produced the miracle and then disappeared, there would be no crime; I didn’t wonder how I would disappear…a galloping consumption, I suppose? An open manhole? This death-wish absolved me, to the extent that absolution is a psychological event, and I returned to the tea table.

    I wrote only that second line, and not all of it, in its entirety. It was not a roaring, painful wrongness that stopped me; it was quiet, weakening my pen-hand. I turned around.

    I was a bad Catholic then, a worse one later, and a poor one now; but God was in the swivel chair, and He was with the artists, the law, and the blasted State. I felt my own fists against my eyes.

    You may have noticed that a good deal of that night is unclear to my memory, but the next part, unfortunately, is not. I was so tired and so…, I put the pen down, closed the notebook, stood, pushed my stool in, and pulled the light-cord. That was the end of The Nine Roses.

    On pensive nights sometimes, I used to try to bring it back. Especially May nights like that one. More than once I walked into the Golden Shield with that hideous pink book under my arm, stood around, wandered back to our east-bank apartment, read the whole thing in one sitting, and stared at that last page, for minutes, more minutes, and then finally, a few more minutes. I don’t really know why I tried, knowing all along that it would never… Well, I used to wonder how the copyright would expire, cutting some unconscious inhibition that was keeping The Nine Roses from me. I even calculated its life-expectancy more than once; after the Berne Convention, it was based on Seifel’s plus fifty years… and he lived to be quite old. I’m even surprised I’ve outlived him. I don’t begrudge him for it.

    In the seventies, I began to hope someone would find nine roses in eight, in some other century when Seifel’s work would be as free as air. But slowly I realized that the only person who would ever find it, was the one who found it that May night. What I saw was so tightly bound to what I was, to going in the Golden Shield, to my expulsion, to Miroslav and Petra, and the exact figure that Seifel was in Padobronsky culture just then, and the exact thoughts that went through my head reading his book, and the exact sickly pink shade of the cover of that particular edition. Perhaps someone reading some other genius’s potboiler will be gifted with an analogously grand reproduction. There are lots of those books about. As for The Eight Roses, I saw a used copy for sale in London a few years ago. Not in English; it was never translated, and it surprised me tremendously. Its copyright will undoubtedly outlive its sales. I think it’s out of print, unless a passage in that new Seifel anthology counts.

    If this story comes to you just when a similar prospect is facing you, (and how can I forbid such a miraculous coincidence, when it has happened to me?) how shall I advise you? I could hardly urge, Write! I, who backed down, cringing and purehearted, from the stare of God that night.

    But I know God now, Seifel better, the law and what the law is for. The only thing I don’t know better is an epic novel called The Nine Roses.

    I regretted it for decades. I still do! But something different is precious to me now, as precious as the best Art was to me then. Perhaps not as precious! for I shall never feel so strongly again. Perhaps more precious than my estimates are : less storm and more truth. What I cherish now is the nineteen-year-old that pulled the light cord and went to bed, walking carefully around the broken swivel chair. Perhaps I understand God better, as I am more like Him.

    For surely only He, who alone besides myself knew The Nine Roses, would say, “The girl is better than the book.” In that moment I chose to make art of myself. Was it worthwhile, for the sake of one night’s low-grade, possibly naïve morality, to give up what I still, only I!, know to have been so great? To throw away what so plainly told me it was bigger than the Nibelung, for a simple, few minutes’ act of elementary acceptance and approval? To forego a thousand master strokes in oil, for a single blunt stroke at human spirit?

    Again and again I cannot answer it, as an artist. But an artist did not sit last in my swivel-chair.

    Tonight, it is with a wonderous joy, I feel again something like that last page of Eight Roses. Not very like, for I do not feel in such storms now. But wonder, excitement, a glimpse of something better behind something good. That perhaps…

    Oh, it is hard to write, my pen is enormous, and my brain is like…

    Yes, that God, who sat in my swivel chair that night, holds a small, ugly, loved, but utterly unrealized work under His arm; that he will one day slit it and release the real…

    I cannot say. He alone knows what it will be.

    *Jaroslav Seifert was a writer, around whom revolved a competitive literary scene, made up of young people moving within the 1950s Czech counterculture.

  • Photo Essay: Mallorca after the Pandemic

    The resorts of Magaluf, Palmanova and Santa Ponça on the southwest coast of Mallorca are among the island’s most popular destinations. By May, they are usually heaving with a mix of young families, pensioners and stag and hen parties – all availing of cheaper low season prices and temperatures in the high 20s and even low 30s.

    To give an idea of the numbers involved, in May of 2019, 1.8m tourists visited the island – out of a total 16.5 for the year – and there was a hotel occupancy of 62.2%. Yet this May, because of Covid-19, the island is virtually cut off from the rest of the world and no tourists have arrived since early March.

    These images show hotel balconies that in other years would have been a sea of towels, pools that would have been full of holidaymakers and restaurant terraces that would have been packed with drinkers and diners. The streets are empty, the beaches are almost deserted and the children’s play areas sealed off. Some businesses haven’t even bothered to open.

    Like a scene from a disaster movie, but without any physical damage, the resorts gather dust under the Mediterranean sun.

     

  • The First Cassandra Voices Podcast – Italian Library Music

     

    Without music, life would be a mistake. Friedrich Nietzsche

    ‘Library Music’ is a vast catalogue of Italian records made mainly in the 1960s and 1970s by some of the finest musicians in the country, with Rome and Milan the centres of this exciting scene. Generally commissioned by RAI, Italy’s state broadcaster, musicians of the calibre of Piero Piccioni, Egisto Macchi, Alessandro Alessandroni –  to mention a few – were hired to score background music to accompany TV shows, advertisements, and documentaries.

    Although this phenomenon began life as generic soundtrack music, it was the genesis of a fertile music scene. Many of the musicians carried on their careers outside RAI, pursuing different styles, breaking new borders, forging a peculiar spaghetti western or polizziescogroove. Or like Ennio Morricone achieving worldwide recognition for scoring soundtracks like Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966).

    This Italian Library — while sometimes referred to as obscure — encompassed avant-garde composition, classical harmony, psychedelia, and funk with brash horns, guitars, and futuristic synths prominent. It was a fertile ground for experimentation and creativity, strongly influenced by the social, economic and political dynamics of that epoch.

    Voice and writing: Nicola Bigatti

    Podcast Editor: Massimiliano Galli

  • Spent Batteries

    The shop sign was in a Youghal side street, and it said Afro Crafts and Groceries. The right half of the window displayed cooking oil, tinned spices, bottled sauces and small bags of beans and lentils. On the left, a selection of small paintings of village and river fishing scenes, were cramped by colourful patchwork, miniature handcarved drums, wooden masks, animals and human figures. The carving of a village woman carrying a water jug on her head jolted Hal’s memory. Dark as the one his Dad had kept on the mantelpiece.

    “Let’s come back here tomorrow, after a day at the beach,” Hal suggested to Jeanette. During the drive to the caravan they’d rented in Ardmore, though it was thirty years ago, Hal told her about his father’s stint as a volunteer agriculturist in Tanzania.

    The following day, after a swim and a stroll, Jeanette ambled off on her own. The Afro Crafts and Groceries was open and empty, in the after dinner shade. Among the groceries were Barry’s Tea, tins of sardines and processed peas. Packets marked Siucra, shared shelves alongside cane sugar from Mauritius. Bags of maize meal, couscous and soya beans proclaimed the shop’s African dimension, and even more so the display of wrapped frozen cuts of goat, oxtail and whole bream in the display freezer. Hal selected a plastic jar of mild Caribbean curry, and a small tin of Kenyan pineapples; souvenirs that would not go astray in his Cork kitchen cupboard.

    Placing the items on the counter beside the cash register, he headed over to browse the alcove laden with crafts.

    First he flipped through a colourful bundle of batiks decorated with a motif of women and men at work, and wild animals. The wood carvings showed skill, but some of the masks erred on the side of kitsch.

    Stretching deeper into the window, he lifted out the black ebony carving of a woman balancing a water jug on her head.

    “From south-central Tanzania, Bwana. She is taking water from the river to her hut in the village.” The African shopkeeper now appeared quietly at Hal’s side.

    “Made from a single piece of timber?” asked Hal, turning the figure he held upside down, and fingering the varnished grain of the heavy base.

    “From a tree trunk. They first cut the local forest trees and chop the branches for firewood with pangas.”

    “And the trunks?”

    “Two men sawed these tree trunks. Kazi kweli – lots of work, we say in Kiswahili. But the carvers pay them, some local, some in other places of Tanzania, such as Kondowe.” The shopkeeper smiled faintly after his burst of English fluency. “You want other carvings? Some more I have in boxes behind.” nodding towards an open rear door.

    “This woman with the water pot interests me.”

    A holidaymaker entered the shop and began browsing around, which brought the African shopkeeper back to his cash desk.

    Hal recalled snatches of conversation with his father. Peter Sheridan hadn’t opened up often about his East Africa days. He and a young British volunteer had driven around in a 4-wheel drive Toyota pickup. If they didn’t have bundles of timber, pipes or cement in the back, they took on casual passengers: pedestrians flagged them down, on the way to Kilosa or on the potholed dirt roads to distant Dar-es-Salaam. The isolated town itself, offered limited craic.

    “My late father did agricultural work in Tanzania in the late sixties, helping small farmers with livestock and growing food.“ Explained Hal, approaching the cash register once the only other customer had left.

    “Kazi ya maendeleo – development work, as we say.“ The African’s eyes brightened as he extended his hand. Hal grasped it. “There were some young wageni –  foreigners-  in the town near our village. They worked for the British company.”

    “Voluntary Service Overseas: VSO. They recruited from Ireland too,“ Hal elaborated. He raised the wood carving still in his left hand. “He brought back something like this from a place called Tar… Tarande, I think.“

    “You mean Tarandawe? Kweli kabisa!“ Dropping any semblence of formality, the shopkeeper stared Hal in the face.

    “Tarandawe, as you say. Some hours drive south of Kilosa, beside a tributary of the Rufiji river. He said there were elephants in a forest upriver.“

    The African’s demeanour changed from surprise to certainty. “The Mindenzi is a small river near our village and passes through the forest into Rufiji. The men hunt small animals there but that government does not allow to kill the elephant.“

    “Any more carvings like this?“ Hal stood the pot-carrier on the counter, beside the tinned pineapple and plastic curry jar.

    “You must ask Margarethe. She stays at the hostel for asylum seekers. Her friend sends boxes from Tanzania. Her village was in the district where the VSO company put down water pipes for the shambas – small farms.“

    “You’re both from the same area? Did you know each other before coming to Europe?“ Assuming they were asylum seekers, Hal kept the questions general. No need to pry.

    “I have a Portuguese wife, and passport of Portugal. Margarethe and myself, we were strangers, but many from Tarandawe went down to Cabora Bassa to build a big dam for electricity on Zambesi River in Mozambique. Few escudos and hard work. Margarethe’s mother cooked posho for the workers and the little girl just played with other children.“

    “Did Margarethe’s father work on the dam?“

    The African hesitated. “She never knew her father. Her mother was… alone. I became like her uncle. We could sometimes collect firewood, but the Portuguese soldiers supervised. We feared their rifles. Soldiers shot freedom fighters in the forest.“

    Hal paid for his goods and asked the whereabouts of the asylum hotel. At the Cork end of town, it was a B & B cobbled together by the amalgamation of two adjoining houses. In a grassy front garden, he spied two rustic benches and a garden table. An Asian child peddled a plastic tricycle around a mother, absorbed in her embroidery, on the patio.

    A girl helping in the kitchen told Hal that Margarethe was away visiting friends in Cork, so he took the telephone number and walked back to meet Jeanette near the old clock gate on main street.

    During Sunday lunch with his mother and younger sister at the family home, Hal mentioned the Afro shop coincidence. Had Dad mentioned much about Tarandawe village? His mother denied that his talk had been anything but technical: damaged irrigation pipes, difficult road conditions, and the odd reference to wildlife and vegetation.

    “The volunteers found Tarandawe a lonesome spot. Drinking weekends in one or two decrepit bars and dancing freestyle on the bar floor with anyone around to the accompaniment of scratchy Congolese rumba music. The music got weird whenever batteries ran down. No electricity, so tilley lamps and candles lit up the gloomy nights.“

    “The one luxury he brought to Africa was his shortwave radio. Listened to it a lot in the dark evenings.“ Hal was happy to add one of the few details his dad had told him as a child. “Must have used up a lot of those batteries, too. Social life must have been pretty zero for young white fellows?“ Hal mused.

    “That’s why VSO field officers came their way twice a year in a Land Rover, bringing tinned food, wine and old newspapers. Volunteers had an annual expenses-paid get-together in Dar, and bunked down at each others’ houses during holidays.“ Hal’s mother shuffled in her armchair. “Your Dad did his development bit, saw a few sights, and came back. Then he met me at a co-op dance in Mitchelstown.“

    As his mother flipped through a Sunday supplement, Hal fetched the old photo album and pored over the ageing black and white snapshots of people. His father and an English mate posed with them. There were photos of working farmers and a longshot outside Kanjenje Bar in the village, looking like something out of a wild west film, except for the tropical flowers and palms. Among holiday snaps in faraway Dar es Salaam, there was one of his dad with two African men beside the bar entrance. Another was a closeup of his father standing at the same spot, next to a young village woman in a patterned headscarf.

    A couple of weeks later, Hal phoned the Youghal hostel and asked for Margarethe. “Miss Sichalisi hasn’t returned from the Afro grocery yet. She helps out there unofficially, until the Dublin officials decide on her application. When he inquired if she would be at the shop on the following Saturday, The response was, “Probably.“

    On a dry morning in Youghal, Hal parked his car, then strolled to the shop. The African man was again at the cash register, and introduced a fair-skinned woman who looked to be in her forties. “My wife Francesca,“ he said, after shaking hands. “We first met in Cabora, before she fled back to Tarandawe, after freedom fighters started moving against Portuguese soldiers. We got married and flew to Lisboa. But now we are trying for a new life, in Youghal.“

    “My contacts in Lisbon and Maputo send us the foodstuffs, and also some crafts. Margarethe gets the wood carvings through associates in Dar. Come into the back room and meet her.“ Explained Francesca before she led Hal into a storeroom with wall shelves and boxes.

    “Odi. Margarethe,“ Francesca called.

    A woman, wearing a short sleeved red chemise over smart white slacks, entered through the doorway from a kitchenette. She had to be in her late twenties, just a few years junior to Hal. Her fawn colored curls complemented a caramel complexion, interrupted by patches of paler pigmentation. Not nearly as dark as her older African “uncle,“ Magarethe extended her hand as Francesca introduced, “Mr. Hal is from Cork city. He likes the Tarandawe wood carvings.“

    “I have to be in the shop, so you can show Mr. Hal the new stock from Dar,“ suggested Francesca, before she left them alone.

    Margarethe unloaded several carved objects from a packing case, for Hal’s inspection.

    He picked up a carving of a woman with a water pot on her head. “My father told me that many villages in Tanzania have no piped water.“

    Her eyes were on the carving as Margarethe answered, “African women have walked to rivers and water holes for thousands of years. Our village was near the river. The women got water and washed clothes at the river bank.“

    “Was it the Mindenzi River?“ asked Hal, eager to show an informed interest.

    At this, Margarethe’s polite reserve dissolved, and eyes sparkling, she placed the bust of a bearded old man on the table. “Mindenzi. You know it? No, it was a smaller river that soon joined Mindenzi. A British aid company brought pipes. Our villagers dug trenches. My mother helped, and so my grandparents had water for the kitchen. But still the women go to the river to wash clothes.“

    “Your uncle mentioned the Mindenzi, last time I was here. He says it flows through Tarande.“ Hal knew he was once more mispronouncing the name of the place.

    “Tarandawe“ corrected Margarethe, “is the market village of the district. The foreign workers lived there.“

    “My late father, Peter…Peter Sheridan, worked for VSO… the British aid group, in Tarandawe. It was about thirty years ago. Perhaps he helped your mother and others to lay those water pipes.“ Hal was looking directly at Margarethe now. Her left hand  went up to her cheek, before it covered her mouth in an attempt to conceal the soft sigh she emitted. Dabbing under her eyelids, she excused herself, producing a paper tissue from her handbag. Once composed, she looked at Hal. “My mother took me, as a child, to Cabora Bassa. She cooked for the workers. My friend, now Uncle Josam, was there. Sometimes we returned to our village for holidays. You are Hal… Sheridan?“

    Hal nodded.

    “Then you are the son of Bwana Peter, the white boy that drove the Toyota truck?“

    “My father Peter worked in Tanzania after graduation. Yes, Peter Sheridan – he died of cancer in 1998. He was a volunteer in Tarandawe. After a two-year stint he came back to Cork.“

    “My mother, she passed away, so I came to Europe with the help of Josam and Francesca. I think I am now home – if the Dublin office gives me a residence permit. With God’s help, here is my home.“

    Hal selected two carvings of water pot women, and another of a giraffe.

    “I’d like to come here again with my fiancé, Jeanette. We could take you to a restaurant. I’m curious to know more about Tarandawe and my father’s time there.“

    Hal paid Francesca at the cash desk. As he turned towards the exit, Margarethe offered him a business card.

    “I am sure we will meet often.“ She smiled as Hal stuffed the card unread into his shirt pocket. She followed him out and extended her hand in farewell. “You are welcome here always, Hal. Always,“ she said, sounding almost like a sister.

    Back in the Cork flat, Hal put the carvings on his mantelpiece. Sipping lager from a stem glass, he withdrew the business card from his shirt pocket. At the left edge, he saw a silhouette of a palm tree, with Afro Crafts & Groceries prominently centered in green capital letters. Underneath appeared the rubric Manager: Francesca da Silva. In smaller print, at the bottom of the card, Hal read a second rubric – Craft Sales Agent: Margarethe Sichalisi-Sheridan.

    Garreth Byrne worked in schools and promoted agriculture in East & Central Africa, and later taught English in China. He now lives in Leitrim and has no African progeny to declare.

  • Banned

    “I couldn’t care less!” announced Roger, sucking down the last drops of champagne from the flute, fashioned of Baccarat crystal, he held fast before refilling it.

    “But what did you do to be banned from the restaurant? ” asked Tanya.

    “I simply said the music was too loud, and the paintings were not up to scratch.”

    At this, Tanya eyed him with some suspicion.

    “I guess they are getting all high and mighty,” she said.

    “Perhaps I said it twice.” Offered Roger, in a lower voice.

    To herself, Tanya thought, “Only twice? That would be a first.”

    “The Contessa was with me. She saw the whole thing. All I said, was that the music was too loud, and then I saw the band leader come over to thank Nick.”

    “What do you mean, thank Nick?”

    “What the fuck do you think I mean? The band leader walked right over, and thanked him…”

    Roger’s famous temper was flaring. Again. His face turning red and blotchy.

    “And after all the business that you brought them…”  said Tanya, in a conciliatory tone.

    “The Contessa is my witness. She saw the whole thing. All I said, was that the music…”

    “I heard you, Roger. The music was too loud and the paintings were crap. I got it.”

    “The music was deafening. You know how loud it can get? Well, it was even louder than that, and the band leader came over to thank Nick…”

    “So…Nick was doing him a favour ? Letting him play that loud, and blast the place to hell?” she didn’t quite comprehend.

    “What’s wrong with you? I’m just telling you that the band leader came to thank him.”

    “Right…” Tanya knew better than to point out a few historical facts. Why risk it?  But recently she’d noticed that his manner, always exaggerated, even grandiose, was becoming more erratic. Ordering a cappuccino at the local cafe, he’d begun to wag his finger at the waitress in a peculiar way. Incapable of self-reflection, Roger was oblivious to the abrasiveness of his own comportment and consequently, the now resentful waitress’s  scowl.

    Tanya concluded it’s better to be banned from your favorite restaurant than to admit you are an arsehole after all. Next time they had a coffee at the cafe, when he wagged his finger, she joined in with him, wagging her finger at the waitress too. He laughed at that and even the waitress smiled.

    She didn’t remind him that a month earlier, he’d gotten drunk and shouted abuse at Nick. What would be the point ? She could predict what he would say. That one event had nothing to do with the other. After all he’d been back to apologise and his apology had been accepted. Done and dusted.

    He couldn’t see that the magic was gone. Once someone saw the ugly side, they couldn’t unsee it. It was unforgettable. Up until that point, he’d been like the Godfather. Sitting at Nick’s restaurant, at a corner table, with a bottle of champagne, or at the bar, greeting his friends and looking so important. Everyone thought he was “someone,” because he behaved like he was “someone” and maybe he was. The facade was convincing and it had worked for so long.

    That bad temper. It was always there. No one was more familiar with his temper than Tanya, and until now, it had been reserved for his nearest and dearest. She wondered if the famous facade  was crumbling, due to old age. There were now holes in the fence and the world was watching what before only Tanya saw. The flaws, that for so long, she had bent over backwards to hide.

    “Even this year you introduced new customers to Nick’s place, and they’re serious spenders. You can be sure he’s shooting himself in the foot.” Tanya foretold.

    “I don’t care.”

    “Nick must have taken this personally.”

    “All I said was that the music was too loud….”

    “How many times are you going to repeat that? I told you, I got it the first time.”

    “I don’t usually repeat myself. You are the only one that I have to repeat myself to.”

    “So what will you do now?”

    “I’ll go to the restaurant next door. I’ve never gone there before, but I guess I’ll go there now. “

    It’s happening, she thought to herself. The choices are being made for him because of his misbehavior. He’s not a bad person. It happens because he doesn’t question himself. He is so sure of himself. He has convinced himself that he is beyond reproach. He is certain that everyone else is at fault, not him. Or else it’s the opposite. He fears that he is a fraud and is afraid of being found out.

    “Actually, I prefer it at Freddi’s Bistro. The room is just as nice, and the food is better.”

    “Nick is just an ordinary Joe. He’s no loss to you.” She was saying something she didn’t mean, to see where it would lead. How could she convey that he was cutting all his lines loose ? And if he wasn’t careful, he’d soon be adrift and all alone. But maybe, just maybe she had it all wrong. Maybe it had all happened as he recounted. Maybe it was Nick who was going through a midlife crisis. All the same, and here she felt quite vindicated, he was out of order, like a geysers shooting up, frequently with no pressure at all.

    What amazed her most, was how he continued to find new people to admire him. They’d get taken in by the front, the impressive walls and large gate, and that distant look that implied I’m beyond your understanding. I am a man of substance. I am thinking lofty thoughts. Don’t take me Lightly. Sucking down his booze with the kind of dedication that would shame a baby.

    But is it so? Is there a palace behind the impressive gates, or is it a decaying dump? Tanya couldn’t make her mind about that. Though she could read his mind, did she really know him ? And if not, was that important? He was a human being, full of flaws like everyone else.

    Unless he was an alien. He could be so heartless, so programmed, so circular in his dialogues. Repetitious, as a broken machine. Or was that his most human trait? There was a terrible aggression in repetition, like hammering nails into a wall. It drove her insane with a rage she had to swallow each and every time. You can’t have two people living together and both losing their temper with each other. They wouldn’t be living together for long. One of them would have to be a wonderful person. God knows, it takes stamina to be wonderful. To eat humble pie. To be bored out of your mind. And well, blow me if the other half doesn’t go and congratulate himself for having survived so long.

    “What are you thinking?”

    “Oh…Nothing.” she said, somewhat distracted.

    “What did you say?” he insisted.

    “Nothing. I didn’t say anything. Since when are you interested in what I think?”

    “I am interested. Of course I am. It’s just that you always interrupt me.” Roger corrected.

    “Right. Anyway, Charlie says that it’s a badge of honour to be banned from “Nick’s. His wife agrees about the noise. They are all fed up with the noise.”

    “So you told Charlie, did you?” Roger sprinted to accuse.

    “It’s not a secret is it?” asked Tanya.

    “It’s none of your business. It’s my business. It’s up to me to tell.”

    “I’ll keep that in mind. Must be a coincidence but Nick’s has been quiet since you’ve been banned.” Tanya confided.

    “I don’t care one way or another. I don’t wish them any ill will.”

    “And Tanya knew he was telling the truth. Roger really didn’t. His outbursts were brief and tempestuous, but once vented, they blew over, as if nothing had happened. It was only the people on the receiving end of them that obsessed about his tantrums. Tanya contemplated the question… Can a brilliance simply disappear? Be hidden, forgotten somewhere, deep in someones mind? Would that brilliance, dying to break loose, remain forever locked in, because of a simple lack? The ability to let it find it’s way out?

  • Declan Costello and the Decline of the Just Society

    Fifty years ago a politician published a manifesto which, if implemented, would have changed the nature of Irish society, would have defied the ethos of contemporary political culture and would have spared us so much of the misery caused by the recent crisis.
    (Vincent Browne ‘Remembering when Fine Gael flirted with a left-wing agenda’, Irish Times, February 12th, 2014)

    As a young man I was an admirer of the former President of the High Court, Attorney General and architect of Fine Gael’s Just Society, Declan Costello. I was then privileged to engage with him on an informal basis, appearing before him in court on a number of occasions. He was a complex and often divisive figure, and I disagree profoundly with many of his judgments, but there is no doubting the profundity of the intellect.

    He was one of the most impressive public speakers I have seen in action. It was a marriage of content and rhetoric abetted by a dry – very dry – sense of humour, albeit his diction was marred by a faintly detectable lisp. He was a remarkably civilized human being – a petite mannequin – whose pristine intellect was ill-suited to the rough and tumble of Irish politics.

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

    Born into a Fine Gael dynasty – as the eldest son of Taoiseach and barrister John A. Costello – he seems to have cut a dash as a young man. According to one story, Jackie Beauvoir (future Kennedy-Onassis) became infatuated with what would have been a slightly frail young man – he recovered from a bout of tuberculosis in his teens – after they met on her visit to Ireland in 1950.

    An unlikely match.

    I suspect she would not have had to worry about a husband having affairs with the likes of Marilyn Monroe if the match with Declan had borne fruit.

    The curse of hereditary connection is a disease that afflicts Ireland. A privileged few families have dominated power and patronage throughout the history of the state, with the GPO in 1916 Rising acting as an Irish Mayfair. W.B. Yeats presciently described his fellow Senators in the 1920s in the following terms: ‘hot and vague, always disturbed always hating something or other … [they] had … signed the death warrant[s] of their dearest friend[s] … Yet their descendants, if they grow rich enough for the travel and leisure that make a finished man, will constitute our ruling class, and date their origin from the Post Office as American families date theirs from the Mayflower.’

    Reference to an Irish ruling class recall a remark that Aneurin Bevin made of Anthony Eden that for all his apparent sophistication, he had the unplayable stupidities of his class and type. The charge of stupidity could not be levelled against Declan Costello, who, despite his flaws, sought to remould Ireland along Christian Socialist lines. Sadly, despite being one of the richest countries in Europe, almost three quarters of a million Irish people were still living in poverty in 2019, a figure that seems likely to rise in the months and years to come.

    I remember Paddy McEntee once referring to him once as a cold fish. I am not so sure. Dispassionate might be a better description. Anyway I’d be more inclined to trust someone with Declan Costello’s detachment than the kind of avuncular, back-slapping figure that one often encounters in Ireland.

    Declan Costello was legendary for his work ethic, which perhaps compensated for an obvious social awkwardness. His practised remoteness even seemed to extend to his fellow judges at social gatherings.

    ‘Fine Gael: Social Democratic Party’

    Declan Costello will always be associated with the authorship of the Just Society document in 1966 that set out the ideals of the Christian Socialist movement which he promoted within the party.

    Despite being clearly at variance with the current neo-liberal hegemony this tradition occasionally crops up in debates within Fine Gael. Notably, during the leadership debates in 2017 Simon Coveney implausibly differentiated himself from Leo Varadkar by claiming to represent it.

    The document speaks of ‘the very wide areas in our society where great poverty exists, poverty which is degrading and capable of remedy, to appalling social conditions.’

    And, ‘We are not living in a just society. This fact must be understood and complacency must be dispelled and enthusiasm created to remedy the social injustices in our midst.’

    Fine Gael, it was said, sought ‘office to work towards a society in which freedom and equality are not concepts from an academic textbook but are expressed in real and tangible conditions which all our people can enjoy.’

    However, in February 1967, having served as T.D. for Dublin North-West, Declan Costello announced his retirement from the rough and tumble of politics. But the ideals of the Just Society were carried on by ideological fellow travellers such as his brother-in-law Alexis FitGerald, Michael Sweetman, Jim Dooge and Garret Fitzgerald.

    FitzGerald went on to become an unsatisfactory two-term Taoiseach in the 1980s. During this period a new kind of party crystallised, influenced by the Progressive Democrats, with figures like John Bruton coming to the fore, that adopted a laissez faire approach at variance with the Keynesianism of the previous generation.

    Remarkably, the Fine Gael party was on the brink of changing its name to ‘Fine Gael: Social Democratic Party’ at the 1968 Árd Fheis. Apparently the majority in attendance were in favour of the motion but the coup was resisted on a technicality by the old guard.[i]

    Looking back on the period Vincent Browne recently recalled:

    I was one of those beguiled by that at the time, believing that a right-wing party, such as Fine Gael, could be hijacked by a left agenda and be transformed via a procedural, albeit unintended, ambush. The ambush occurred at a time when Fine Gael felt self-conscious about standing for nothing and offering no alternative to a resurgent Fianna Fáil led by Seán Lemass.

    Since then the conservative faction of large farmer and comfortable professionals serving multinational corporations has assumed pre-eminence. The party now led by Leo Varadkar is distinctly neo-liberal, with concessions to individual rights. The pole opposite of Declan Costello’s political credo.

    Yet senior members of the party do continue to claim allegiance to the Just Society. The current Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe, who has been elected to the same constituency as Declan Costello seat, claimed in 2017 that he possessed a copy of the document and that ‘he [Leo Varadkar] values the just society as much as I do and places its spirit in a modern, outward-looking and dynamic Ireland.’

    Judicial Appointment

    Like many of his contemporaries Declan Costello was a devout Catholic, which informed the noblesse oblige of the Just Society. Under Garret Fitzgerald and beyond, however, Fine Gael diverged from Costello’s ideals, embracing a socially liberal approach on issues such as contraception, marriage equality, and finally abortion, but an increasingly non-interventionist approach to the economy. This was anathema to Declan Costello’s moral outlook. His religion foregrounded a Christian Socialism that presaged John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness, but also brought an overly moralistic approach to the private lives of individuals.

    Former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

    The conversion of Fine Gael from authoritarian conservatives to social liberals has, however, been cosmetic, even under Garret Fitzgerald. It is clear that a neo-liberal consensus began to emerge in the wake of Fianna Fail’s landslide election victory in 1979, and individual rights gradually took the place of social supports as policy planks.

    Declan Costello was appointed a High Court judge in 1977 having served as Attorney General under Liam Cosgrave. Owing to the tribalism bedevilling Irish politics successive Fianna Fail administrations. ignored his undoubted abilities as a jurist, passing him over for appointment to the Supreme Court.

    This diminished his opportunities for progressive judicial leadership. Only towards the end of his career was he appointed to the largely administrative position of President of The High Court. But by that stage, frankly, the arteries had hardened and the reforming zeal that marked his earlier life had ebbed away.

    Socio-Economic Rights

    Costello’s judicial record on socio-economic questions is in marked contrast to his political career. The case of O’Reilly v. Limerick Corporation 1989 ILRM 181 suggests he had caved into a prevailing neo-liberal mindset of laissez faire. He claimed the Courts had no business allocating or redistributing resources, which was, he argued, a matter for the Dáil in Leister House alone.

    The plaintiff Travellers sought a properly serviced halting site in order to vindicate their constitutional rights under Articles 40.3 and 41.2. Costello refused to grant it on the basis that such an order would involve:

    [T]he imposition by the Court of its view that there has been an unfair distribution of national resources. To arrive at such a conclusion, it would have to make an assessment of the validity of the many competing claims on those resources, the correct priority to be given to them and the financial implications of the plaintiffs’ claim.

    This appears to contradict his stated view that the Irish Constitution was informed by natural law, which in the Thomistic tradition encompasses fundamental socio-economic rights. Importantly, he recanted the O’Reilly decision a few years later in the case of O’Brien v Wicklow UDC 1994.

    But damage had been done with his introduction of a neat Aristotelian distinction between commutative and distributive justice. This absolves the courts from any role in ensuring that elected representatives maintain basic standards of living – so elegantly articulated in the Just Society and also expressed in Article 45 of the Constitution – which underpins any true republic.

    This argument was seized on by the libertarian Adrian Hardiman in the case of Sinnott v. Minister for Education 2001 IESC 63, to dismiss the claims of the intellectually disabled plaintiff to an ongoing education. Since then fundamental rights to housing or a living wage have been dismissed by the courts on grounds of non-justiciability.

    Authoritarian Streak

    Declan Costello became an enforcer of a dominant Catholic morality that pervaded the country until the 1990s. The disgraceful decision to uphold Eileen Kelly’s sacking from her position as a secondary school teacher after she became pregnant during an extra-marital affair was perhaps a nadir.

    On due process he displayed equally authoritarian tendencies. Thus in O’Leary v. Attorney General 1995 1 IR 254 he determined that possession of an incriminating document provided sufficient proof that a person was a member of an illegal organisation. The documents in question amounted to thirty-seven posters of a man holding a rifle, with the words ‘IRA calls the shots’ printed on them. Costello determined that the provision was consistent with the presumption of innocence and benefitted from a presumption of constitutionality.

    Growing up in a privileged family, he perhaps assumed that the police force could do little wrong, and counted on their probity in executing public function. One wonders what he would make of the case of Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe, and the dirty tricks campaign against him and others. The litany of Garda abuses is well attested to in Adrian Hardiman’s ferocious dissenting judgment in D.P.P. v J.C. 2015 IESC 31.

    Thus, after doing the state some service in displaying authoritarian tendencies Declan Costello saw out his career as an occasionally despotic President of The High Court. I appeared before him in the inception of the Gilligan Litigation, which, in fairness, he handled with even-handedness; at one point booting out a certain barrister of ill-repute, who had appeared unauthorized in private proceedings. It was an intellectual thrill to appear before him.

    In my view his most disgraceful, and certainly his most notorious, decision was in Attorney General v. X 1992 1 IR 1. In that case, the facts of which are well known, Costello granted an injunction preventing a fourteen-year-old rape victim from leaving the State for nine months (with the purpose of preventing her from going to the U.K. to obtain an abortion), a decision that was overturned in the Supreme Court, which decided that abortion was permitted where there was a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother, including suicide.

    Place in History

    Adrian Hardiman.

    Alongside Adrian Hardiman, Declan Costello was the finest Irish judge since the halcyon days of judicial activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Alas figures of that calibre are not evident on the judicial benches today. I fear the intellectual decline is irreversible, which represents a threat to decent governance of the state.

    We are all products of our time and looking back on history we enjoy the benefit of hindsight. Declan Costello was a great man, with flaws. He had a quiet charm and displayed a courtly graciousness towards others. His brilliant mind was activated by a concern for social justice and, crucially, he possessed a sense of humour.

    Within the establishment his intellectual calibre was a form of subversion, meaning he was always the Man Who Would Be King, but never the king. There was nevertheless a certain contradiction between his progressive, even transgressive, instincts as a politician and the reactionary tendencies he displayed as a judge.

    The Just Society document stands unsurpassed as one of the last political statements of substance on social reform in Irish history. It displays a coherent vision for a better Ireland that politicians would do well to take off their book shelves today.

    [i] Ciara Kelly, ‘Michael Sweetman and the Just Society’, from The Widest Circle: Remembering Michael Sweetman, Edited by Barbara Sweetman-FitzGerald, A&A Farmar, 2011 p.69

  • Poetry: Alex Winter

    AREOPAGITE

    The cloud moves, low, across the landscape,
    leaving a slick of rainwater on the backs of cows.
    It passes through the mind of a priest
    and into the eyes of a fourteen year old girl.
    It is a pestilence.  A curse upon the territory.

    In the villages they are rasping for bread.
    No chickens hobble through the shit-strewn lanes.
    Damp is a curse which slowly infiltrates
    clothes, rafters, firewood, children’s skin.
    The crops are sunk. The sheep are full of worms.

    You dole out sermons on disintegration.
    An aged woman is driven from her home
    and burnt to cinders on a makeshift pyre.
    The chancel windows cast brightness inward,
    towards the stunted candles of the choir.

     

    THE RAM IN THE THICKET

    It was a boutique hotel in the Dolomiti
    and each door could be locked from inside by a golden key
    and each key was hung with a sculpted animal.
    Hummingbird, hedgehog, fox or snake.
    The hotel offered a view across the lake.

    My room was cramped.  Pushed up against the table
    was a bookcase which was nearly waist high.
    In it stood a copy of Fear and Trembling.
    The pale lettering along the spine reminded me
    of the ubiquity of schizoid features.

    I took it with me to the loo.
    Outside the rain was spitting.
    The lake surface was thatched with miniature waves.

    As I read about Isaac being tied down by his dad,
    I heard an angel bellowing from heaven,
    “Abraham, ease off, untie the boy.”

    There was a denouement, there on the mountain.
    The angel came down. The angel flew.
    A sharpness in my intestines.

     

    PLAN FOR THE FUTURE

    I’ve worked it out and we’re going to be just fine.
    Your job will pay for mango and mine for baby wipes.
    My heart throbs dyspeptically when I think of our son.
    Where is he now? Does he wear leather and carry a scar?
    I’m less than a man.  I don’t even know how to drive.
    On the other hand I’ve worked out how to arrive on time.
    I was sobbing all morning as my heart went out –
    unlike the flames on Grenfell, which raged until lunch.
    Inside the staircases, lift shafts, flats, nothing withstood.
    Tears became gas.  Screams caught fire and burned.
    Everything that wasn’t blame became ersatz.
    It’s hard to stay focused.  Our dreams are so grotty.
    And the housekeeper creaks on the upstairs floor.
    I picture her stroking her long Hispanic body,
    which opens, closes, then empties itself completely.

     

    SICKERT

    My arm across your body.
    These fingers ending in a brush.

    How the light falls on my shirtsleeve,
    causing the outline to crackle.

    In the background a green overcoat
    hangs from a glass

    partly obscuring your neck and shoulder.
    It’s mine.  I’m clothing you.

    You turn steadily toward me,
    like a satellite dish

    hacked into
    by enemy agents.

    What, I wonder, do you withhold?
    And how do I prise you open?

     

    HIATUS

    Death coiled in one lung.
    (Don’t cough!)
    Like a tilted ampersand
    in a bed of alveoli.
    Breathe gently.

    A skull beside an inkwell.
    Not quite an ‘objet’,
    but artfully positioned.
    We look back.
    Tick… tick…

    Primo goes to it.
    Mounts the handrail.
    96.5cm.  For a short man,
    navel height.
    To fall he has to climb.

  • Musician of the Month: Maija Sofia

    “It was like somebody realized you could take the surface of a song, paint a door on it, open it and walk through.”

    Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

      

    I’m going to start with a secret: I haven’t written a single good song since last August. It was the night after the sudden death of one of my favourite songwriters in the world, and I had spent the whole day writing an obituary. The summer had passed me by in a long, slow unshakeable depression, I was reeling from one too many painful happenings, and my desire to stare at the ceiling alone and cry and do nothing had far-overpowered any constructive desire to write.

    Then, one hot night in August I was dog-sitting alone in an echoey, affluent house in Rathmines. The lights kept flickering off and the dogs kept barking at vague invisible things and I was on edge and jittery. To distract myself, I sat down at a plastic toy-keyboard in the kitchen and my first song in months fell fully-formed out of my hands. I played it over and over again and made a rough recording on my phone. The next day I walked around in the sun listening to the song over and over to remind myself that there is something in me, despite everything, that comes out when I least expect it, and gives me a song.

    Ever since my album came out last November, I’ve been asked to talk about songs almost constantly – how I write them, why I write them, songs that I like, songs that have been important to me – and the more I have found myself trying to talk about songs, the more I become convinced that to talk too much about songs, to unpick them too delicately, is to do them a great disservice. The whole point of making a song is to evoke the strangeness that occurs when the right words are put to the right chords and something that cannot be addressed in everyday speech is expressed. I’m talking about good songs, there are plenty of dreadful songs out there that evoke nothing but the need to immediately switch it off.

    I’m suspicious about people who talk about songwriting like it’s a day job, like it’s a tap that can be turned on at will and new words and melodies will flow out in abundance. I secretly think the people who work in this way rarely produce anything good. Maybe I’m jealous; if I sit down with the intention to write a new song, it won’t work, whatever I write will feel forced and boring and I’ll begin to convince myself I’ve lost the ability to do it. The truth I have had to accept is that if I knew how to write songs, if I knew how a song worked, I’d do it far more often. That said, there are some things that I do know.

    Firstly, I know that it is very important to not let your ‘self’ get in the way of the work. In my experience, a good song can only be written after you’ve successfully gotten yourself out of the way. You have to try and accept that you are a conduit for the work and that the work is not you, it just travels through you. This is infuriating because we live in a world that measures our human worth against our capacity to produce. I think in order to write well you have to discard any sense of your art being a reflection of you – that way you can forgive yourself for the bad work, and also not let the good work go to your head too much.

    A good song will be unshadowed by your intention or personality and will just be a mystery that reveals bit by bit itself over time, until months later will you realise – oh yes, that’s what that was about. I think I succeed to do this every ten songs or so, but it’s also important to write nine bad songs in order to really recognise a good one when it arrives.

    Secondly, I know that in order to write good songs you have to truly love songs. This is obvious, but I think I started writing songs because as long as I can remember I have loved songs more than anything.

    I recently read Mary Gaitskill’s strange and excellent novel Veronica, near the start, the pretty – dislikeable – protagonist Alison describes the want to live inside of music. To live her life as though inside of a song. She doesn’t explain quite what she means by this, but reading it, I thought, oh yes, I know. I think I’ve spent my whole life looking for ways to live inside of songs, I have an obsessive streak, an inability to ever do things gently, and when I find a new song I love I want to be folded up and made small enough to be held inside it.

    I think this kind of obsession is a bad and nauseating trait to possess in most aspects of life, but very necessary for the writing of songs. I know the difference between a good song and bad one because when I write a bad one it feels flat and rolled out and beige, but when I write a good one it feels like a full and elaborate structure, colourful and strong enough to hold me inside for days while I work the words out.

    Thirdly, when I am really stuck and feeling dreadful, I think going for a long walk, doing some physical work in the garden or having a blisteringly hot shower sometimes helps.

    Finally, I have two things I remind myself of when I’m in long phases like this one in which I haven’t written a good song in several months and it’s started to wear down my confidence in my ability. They are, firstly – that thinking your work uniquely terrible is its own form of narcissism and a self-indulgence best to be avoided, and secondly, that you always think you’ll never write again, but you always, eventually, inevitably do write again.

     

    For more on Maija Sofia’s work see:

    Bandcamp: https://maijasofia.bandcamp.com/album/bath-time

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

    Instagram: @maijasofiamakela

    Twitter: @maija_sofia

  • Poetry – Fintan O’Higgins

    Natural History Museum, Dublin 

    Necrophorus investigator bears
    The dead and follows in their footsteps. Moths,
    Beetles – anaspis maculata: stained,
    Unshielded – big names, small lives; thoughts
    Made real, embodied in machines. The spare
    Crater of earth, when all earth’s blood has drained,
    Will hold its arc and torque, all else being lost.

    The hinges in fleas’ legs, then, or the fascia
    Of armoured woodlice, or the spastic spring
    That spins itself in helical countertwists
    Of muscle in shark or frog: the coil of nature,
    Barely substantial, sustains and persists
    In solid flesh, in every blooming thing;
    In neural galaxies, in our behaviour,

    In helter-skelter shells, and seeds and petals;
    In honeycombs, in choufleur romanescu,
    In hips and waists and golden ratios,
    In ratios contrived of other metals;
    In pentads, heptads, hexagonal sections;
    In blurts of pulsing, liquid shapes or gaseous,
    In every shape in every fruit in Tesco.

    The Victorian whorl of iron, wrought or cast
    Tendrils, poised above a chessboard plot
    Staked out in dominion’s rectilinear pitches
    Like America in barbed wire; or the glass
    Holding still and fast those deep-sea creatures
    Part  water and part number, and those insects
    Obedient in angles, lines, and dots,
    Curlicue in generation’s syntax.

    If necessary shapes, not beautiful
    (Beauty being willed, exalting submission),
    Atomic and autistic, are fragmented
    Blasted, involved, in fraction not in fission;
    Then names are feathery fascinators, spells
    Whose quivering thrum resounds upon the lips
    Cross-hatches nooks in pathways where demented
    Buzzings may refer to but do not tell
    The true ring of the neurocalypse:

    The veil of nerve, the net with which the moon
    Drags heaving tides in black full swag of night,
    The filter distilling thought from spinal twitch
    The measured tension climbing to attune
    Itself to the Fall, constructing absence which
    Strobes from stencil to template, stasis and flight
    Taut as a tent, and black and high as pitch:

    The stillness in the flutter of fern fronds,
    The still of distant waters’ frothing crust,
    The clench and follow of a striking lance
    (Not real ones, though; these days there’s no such thing)
    The uninflected bow, the arc, the string
    Invisible but present in stone or bronze
    The heel of Philoctetes poised in dust
    The tension in the stone of David’s sling.

    That heroes are absences, in corridors
    Leading to chambers where no gods are housed,
    Makes words of footfalls echoing on the floors
    Creaking on wood or clacking on stone tiles
    Pronouncing sentences and syllables
    Along a winding torchlit pagan course
    Where leisurely visitors curiously browse
    And wryly nod with educated smiles;

    And turn and ask if there’s a coffee place,
    Declining middleclass children working class sugar
    And glance but do not meet the dusty eye
    Of long dead bird, or butterfly, or cougar.
    But with the trail of syllables and scents
    Drop iterations of the shapes that figure,
    As whirligigs and maelstroms live and die,
    A small eternity of absolute stasis

  • Ethical questions in the time of Covid-19? Ask a philosopher

    The Centre for Ethics in Public Life at University College Dublin is inviting questions and reflections on all philosophical aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    What are your thoughts about the crisis? Is our freedom threatened? Should we rethink the welfare system? If different countries are dealing with it better, how do we know which experts to believe? Who, if anyone, should take responsibility for the spread of the virus?

    Many of the questions we ask ourselves, and others, are ethical questions: from individual actions in everyday life like: ‘Should I go to the shop to buy non-essential items?’; to public, life-or-death decisions: ‘How should respirators be allocated if there is a shortage?’

    We are all probably thinking about what we should do, and what is right. Some of the questions we ask, and the decisions we make on a daily basis, may be so ordinary as to seem morally irrelevant, but it is likely that there is an assessment of values going on.

    The new, future-oriented questions, such as, ‘What changes, if any, should I make to my lifestyle after the crisis?’, include our ideas about what a good life ought to be; whether there’s a specific good life for me; or the comparative importance of pleasure and helping others in one’s activities.

    Some of the time our moral answers, ideas or actions, are intuitive or spontaneous. At other times we need to reflect more intensely.

    That’s where moral philosophy comes in, starting with disentangling the problem, and avoiding superficiality to reveal reveal hidden aspects; or evaluating the more relevant questions and asking what follows from each idea, and so on.

    We also know that this process works well in conversation. After all, the origins of Western philosophy include long dialogues in the public square of Athens. Our public square, these days, has to be virtual.

    So we would like to hear your questions and thoughts, and start a conversation.

    The Initiative:

    The Centre for Ethics in Public Life invites you to send a question, together with 50-100 words explaining why it’s important.

    All questions will be displayed on the centre’s website and a philosopher will respond weekly to chosen queries by a video to be published online.

    Everyone is welcome to respond to our videos on the CEPL Facebook pages, with a comment or a 1-minute video, and continue the conversation.

    Please submit your questions here: https://www.ucd.ie/cepl/publicoutreach/covid-19pandemic/readersubmittedquestions/ or email us at cepl@ucd.ie