Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • Coronavirus – a Poem

    My life’s ambition is to write a poem
    For you to quiver in ecstasy,
    Transcending the storms that have become
    For us a weakly reminder
    That all is not as it should be
    For a generation to come
    All out of shape without
    Any need for eugenics,
    Or medical scapegoats,
    As my face takes on a comical twist,
    And the log fires send out particles,
    And governments negotiate continued support measures,
    While the weathermen occlude
    The longer stretch in the evenings,
    But I won’t cough,
    Lest it gives away the position,
    And we enter the sublime
    Reverence for irrelevance.
    It’s word play OK?
    Designed in their own way.
    I can’t wait for the pattern,
    Or the pull of Saturn.
    Enough, enough, enough,
    Your voice is increasingly rough,
    Hand us over a last puff.

  • Public Intellectual Series: Slavoj Žižek

    No picture of the modern world is complete without a Marxist analysis. The fundamental point – even for anyone who is not a fellow traveller – is that a materialist analysis of capitalism’s inherent instability is essentially correct, and now more relevant than ever.

    The problem has always been around how a post-capitalist society emerges without savage bloodletting and numbing totalitarianism. The bearded figure scribbling away in the British Museum would no doubt have been horrified by the barbarous regimes – from Lenin to Kim Jong-Il – that have laid claim to his legacy.

    Slavoj Žižek is perhaps the best known representative and synthesiser of contemporary Marxist theory. Anyone who has viewed his films The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2009) or The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2012) can only marvel at how this middle-aged, slovenly Slovenian Marxist is taken so seriously. Despite the spittle that pours involuntarily out of his mouth as he expostulates, it seems his ideas are judged on merit; albeit a somewhat comedic appearance has probably made him seem less of a ‘danger’ – especially when set against a straight-backed sparring partner such as Jordan Peterson – and ‘Ted-Talkily’ acceptable.

    Žižek is a complex political thinker, noted for his observations on ideology. Yet his writing is dense, often impenetrable, and even, at times, frankly nonsensical. Sadly, the content can be obscure, and the ideas often wildly over-stated, though recent books have seen him curb this tendency, leading to greater traction. With age he has mellowed, or at least he has become far more coherent in his critique of the late capitalism disaster movie unfolding before our eyes.

    His thought processes are, nevertheless, eminently contestable. Former Irish President Mary McAleese – who lectured me – always despised recklessness, as do I, but in a different sense. It is intellectual recklessness I hold in low regard. Žižek is full of it, at least in terms of his wilder statements calling for insurrection.

    Žižek argues that the widespread belief that our world is post-ideological is an ‘arch-ideological’ fantasy. Today, he asserts, ideology entails what people impute to others, whether left or right.

    This demonization of others, and the exclusion of outsiders, is indeed very much to the fore in his recent writings, and in our end of day’s capitalist order. Tribalism, nationalism and the targeting of non-nationals and immigrants is an endemic feature of our time.

    For a subject to adhere to an ideology he argues, he must have been presented with it, and accepted it as true and right – such that anyone sensible should believe in it. In a seminal text, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) Žižek claims that ideology has not disappeared, but has come into its own, and because of its success, it has been dismissed as non-existent. Or should it be that ideology has been internalised?

    Ideological Disidentification

    Žižek also puts forward the idea of ‘ideological cynicism.’ Ideology today is not as it was for the proletariat for ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it.’ He disagrees that for ideology to be effective it has to effectively brainwash people, as Marx contended in his famous religion being the opium of the people assessment; rather Žižek contends that a successful ideology always permits a critical distance towards that ideology – this he terms ‘ideological disidentification’; saying: ‘I know well that (for example) Bob Hawke / Bill Clinton / the Party / the market do not always act justly, but I still act as though I did not know that this is the case.’

    Or perhaps it should be said that behaviour has been modified or controlled, and widespread passivity makes it is irrelevant what we do in a spectator democracy. In effect, we are irrelevant to changing any of this, as the supporters of Bernie Sanders are finding out.

    Žižek points to a ‘big O other’, who legitimates control through ‘God’ or ‘the Party’. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, (1989) he argues that such important or rallying political terms are ‘master signifiers,’ even though they are ‘signifiers without a signified’, i.e. words which do not refer to any clear and distinct concept or demonstrable object. Thus, they induce control and a false sense of belonging, but are meaningless.

    This claim of Žižek’s is related to two other ideas:

    1. That subjects are always divided between their conscious and unconscious beliefs towards political authority;
    2. That subjects do not know what their beliefs are that leaves them open to domination and control.

    Jouissance

    Žižek further contends, following the critical theorist Louis Althusser, that ideology is embedded in our everyday lives. In particular, he uses the term jouissance to describe transgressive pleasure that we derive from the master signifiers, such as ‘nation’ or ‘people,’ through cultural products as sports, music, alcohol,  drugs, festivals, or films.

    Another central idea in Žižek’s initial political philosophy is that any regime only secure a sense of collective identity if their governing ideologies afford subjects an understanding of how these relate to what exceeds, supplements or challenges its identity. Or, in layman’s terms, bread and circuses is the glue that binds identities – ‘Football’s Coming Home’ to quote Baddiel and Skinner.

    Žižek adopts the term ‘ideological fantasy’ for the deepest framework of belief that structures how political subjects, and/or a political community, come to terms with what exceeds its norms and boundaries. He identifies Law with the Freudian ego ideal.

    But Žižek argues that, in order to be effective, a regime’s explicit Laws must also harbour and conceal a darker underside – a set of more or less unspoken rules which, far from simply repressing jouissance, implicate subjects in a guilty enjoyment in repression itself, which Žižek likens to the ‘pleasure in pain’ associated with the experience of Kant’s sublime.

    Žižek’s final position about the sublime objects of political regimes’ ideologies is that these belief-inspiring objects represent the many ways in which the subject misrecognises its own active capacity to challenge existing laws, and to found new laws altogether.

    He repeatedly argues that the most uncanny or abysmal aspect of the world today is the subject’s own active subjectivity – explaining his repeated citation of the Eastern saying ‘Thou Art That’. It is, finally, the singularity of the subject’s own active agency that leads to subjects’ recourse to fantasies concerning the sublime objects of their regime’s ideologies.

    Like a Thief in Broad Daylight

    Žižek’s technical term for the process whereby we recognise how the sublime objects of political regimes’ ideologies are, like Marx’s commodities,  fetishised objects – concealing from subjects their own political agency – is ‘traversing of the fantasy.’

    Traversing the fantasy, for Žižek, is the political subject’s deepest form of self-recognition, and the basis for his own radical political position, or defence of the possibility of such positions.

    Žižek also references Alain Badiou, who argues for an elevation or an insurrection. Žižek also seeks a form of Jacobin army, the intellectual irresponsibility of which needs to be emphasised. Even if these ideas are metaphorical the extremism provides ample ammunition to right-wing critics, who argue he condones or even approves of terrorist methods.

    Sadly, in more recent times, the Marxist left has been self-sabotaging, and the cause of its own downfall. They have also had their good arguments stolen and mangled by the right.

    Yet it seems that radical Marxists are at last growing up and that the post-modernist wing is grappling with its self-contradicting, and implicit approval, of a valueless universe.

    In his recent book Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (2016) Žižek distils many of the abstruse elements of his ideas into manageable and helpful commentaries that have a broader base of appeal. The ethical political order, notwithstanding Habermasean attempts at a reconstituted normalization, have collapsed, he argues.

    Freedom of choice is an illusion in a world of disinformation, plummeting educational standards, short-terms contracts, imposed services and privatization. Any alleged freedom we have arrives in a narrow spectrum of choices, subtly imposed upon us through social influencers and technological nudges controlling choices. Or as John Gray put it in The Soul of The Marionette (2015) ‘we are forced to live as if we are free.’

    Žižek and others have demonstrated the sinister developments within late capitalism. Including how a rent for profit model means most of us on low salaries serve undeserving sponsors, leading many into the informal market or the black market by violence or the violence of regulation – as David Graeber explores in his epochal work Debt: the First 5000 Years (2015).

    Other disturbing trends are in evidence, Roberto Saviona in Zero, Zero, Zero (2015) through a sustained analysis of drug cartels, shows how the corporate model of Mafiosi loyalty has been exported into law firms. The lines between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism are thus blurred to a point of near non-existence.

    The ‘woke’ left cannot escape blame for failing to identify the socio-economic issues that really count in peoples lives. Pseudo-feminism plays a class game, marginalizing lower class men as harassers and even demonizing migrants. Indulgence of victimhood has created the abuse excuse.

    The Wretched of the Earth

    Frantz Fanon

    Žižek is quite critical of the great post-colonial Marxist Frantz Fanon and his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth (1961). But Fanon was surely right in identifying a colonial order wherein, ‘the people’s property and the people’s sovereignty are to be stripped from them.’ The Untermensch were obliged to pay the debts of the occupying powers, which is now the international model of austerity.

    Žižek argues that our society of depoliticized and compliant sheep invite disaster. He references the film Blade Runner (1980), which is a useful cultural trope as the older replicants – baby boomers – now need to let go of their accumulated wealth and power. Generation X are at least conscious of false memory syndrome or implanted hopes, and some have the wherewithal to do something about it and no longer settle for being victims. So despite the victim excuse, Fanon and Žižek have much in common in their analysis.

    The reality is that the analysis of Fanon is now in place across the world. The elite or the corporatocracy are a gang, and what amounts to a mafia is running the planet like a colony.

    So the slovenly Slovenian has hit the zeitgeist, and now interacts with more common sense than was evident in his wilder pronouncements of the past. But unfortunately it appears as if the lunatics have already taken over the asylum, and to an increasingly docile audience what he is saying will appear mad, a point that his appearance would appear to affirm.

    Or at the very least his ideas will be packaged by Facebook, so he plays a bit part in the drift or acceleration into the abyss that we must resist.

  • Plagues of Prejudice

    In December 1899 Honolulu-based physicians attributed two deaths to bubonic plague, and a local paper duly announced that the ‘scourge of the Orient’ had arrived.[i] Within months a first plague fatality was reported in continental U.S. as Chinese-American Chick Gin (Wing Chung Ging or Wong Chut King depending on the transliteration) succumbed to the disease in San Francisco. The cause of death was based on a classic plague symptom of swelling around the groin, but was disputed even after rudimentary bacterial analysis. Regardless, political and health authorities were already taking actions that resonate today.

    Fearing the economic impact of a dreaded disease, the state governor denied the existence of plague altogether, accusing his own health officials of propagating rumours and ‘injurious opinions’ detrimental to the ‘great and healthful city.’[ii] Conversely, successive quarantines had already been imposed on San Francisco’s Chinatown, excluding non-Asian homes and businesses despite their proximity. Enforced by barbed wire and a heavy police presence, the blockade led to dwindling food supplies and a steep rise in costs. An experimental vaccine with severe side effects, developed in 1897 by bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine, was made obligatory for any Chinese (and Japanese) wanting to leave the city.

    In 1900, Honolulu’s Chinatown was set on fire to in a misdirected effort to control Bubonic plague.

    Unsurprisingly, the turn-of-the-century scapegoating of East Asians in California did not occur in a vacuum. Anti-Chinese prejudice had already been formalized in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banning their immigration for undermining the ‘dignity and wage scale of American workers.’[iii] There were, likewise, widespread perceptions of the Chinese as carriers of disease. If Europeans had been imperilled by the ‘barbaric hordes of Asia’, germs represented ‘a peaceful invasion more dangerous than a warlike attack.’[iv] And while dogma of the day suggested limited danger to the West due to advances in health and civilization, extreme measures might be necessary with plague. In such cases Russia’s ‘heroic methods’ in its Chinese colonies were helpfully referenced, as firing squads for the infected ‘saved trouble and other people’s lives.’[v]

    An 1886 advertisement for ‘Magic Washer’ detergent: ‘The Chinese Must Go’.

    Old Wine, New Bottle

    Associating disease with marginalized groups, minorities and others has hardly been an exclusively American experience. And by today’s standards, persecution over illness is not necessarily as crude, but neither can toxic discourse or indeed violence be excluded. The arrival of a new coronavirus in December 2019 is a case in point. The linking of its presumed place of origin in Wuhan with East Asians generally, and Chinese in particular, did not take long to manifest itself as multiple accounts of discrimination emerged. In Western countries this played on traditional racial tropes such as sordid animal markets and uncleanliness. Reflecting an entirely different experience, namely apprehension over Chinese influence, regional reaction was also alarmist. Both say as much about perceptions of mainland China as of the disease itself.

    There is no shortage of recent examples that demonstrate medical scapegoating around a novel or poorly understood disease. In 2010, the lynching of voodoo priests in Haiti originated with rumours of pout kolera (magic cholera powder) deliberately poisoning the water supply. The choice of target was partially reflected in the complex history of voodoo practitioners and the Haitian State. At times associated with resistance to foreign occupation, at others integrated into the personality cults of Haiti’s twentieth century dictatorships, notably that of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. Confusion over the origins of the cholera epidemic ‘fed on feelings of insecurity and fear’, in turn fuelling stigmatization and violence.[vi] More sustained anger eventually shifted towards the unwitting culprits, negligent United Nations peacekeepers that had contaminated the Artibonite river with cholera-infected faeces.

    Vodou ceremony, Jacmel, Haiti, 2002. Image: ‘Doron’.

    A corollary of medical scapegoating is fear and misinformation. Fundamental weaknesses in the Pakistani health sector, combined with accusations of a fake Hepatitis B campaign orchestrated to locate and kill Osama Bin Laden, has reinforced suspicions of polio vaccinations. With rumours of polio vaccines being either harmful or simply a front for intelligence gathering, health workers have since borne the brunt of attacks by armed groups.[vii] Misunderstandings and distortions around Ebola, both in West Africa in 2014 and more recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo have led directly to the deaths of medical staff. In the latter case, mistrust over the response is rampant, provoked in part by ‘community resentment’ over the focus on Ebola while ignoring underlying problems in the country.[viii]

    The targeting of health workers as somehow responsible for bringing illness into a community, and thus the cause or at least the visible manifestation of a terrifying epidemic, is an extreme example of the need to apportion blame. But if sickness has historically been portrayed as a punishment for sin, socially excluded groups and minorities have proven most vulnerable. Whether linked to mortality or fear of the unknown, context is key to understanding the long history of how those on the margins of society have been scapegoated. Much as nineteenth century descriptions of Chinese immigrants as ‘walking time bombs of infection’ cannot be separated from pervasive Sinophobia, the frequent panic associated with novel or misunderstood illness has tended to reinforce pre-existing stereotypes.[ix]

    From Tragedy to Farce

    The fate of Chick Gin aside, apportioning individual responsibility for epidemics is unusual in that it is difficult to prove. ‘Typhoid Mary’ is likely the most infamous example as she came to be seen as ‘synonymous with the health menace posed by the foreign-born.’[x] An Irish immigrant cook, Mary Mallon was a so-called healthy carrier of typhoid bacteria, unintentionally instigating outbreaks amongst her wealthy employers in New York until she was eventually tracked down in 1906. Vilified in the papers as a ‘walking typhoid fever factory’ or a ‘human culture tube’,[xi]  Mallon would end her days in forced isolation.

    ‘Typhoid’ Mary Mallon in hospital.

    On a more grandiose scale, Canadian air steward Gaëtan Dugas was posthumously declared ‘Patient Zero’, accused of intentionally infecting his partners with HIV and provoking the spread of AIDS in North America.[xii] Although later disproved, the fear and exclusion of the five ‘H’s – homosexuals, heroin addicts, haemophiliacs, hookers and Haitians – remained commonplace in the 1980s.

    Much like the five ‘H’s, easier to trace is the scapegoating of entire groups, the archetypal example almost certainly being the pogroms and massacres inflicted on European Jews during the Black Death. Rumours of an ‘anti-Christian international conspiracy’ fit snugly with long-standing antisemitism, particularly when mortality rates among Jews were seen as inexplicably low (the fact that sensible hygiene laws laid out in the book of Leviticus had been employed was entirely ignored). Initially directed at medieval lepers and vagrants, Jews came to be accused of poisoning wells, eventually resulting in the extermination of entire communities.[xiii] Six hundred years later hygiene control of typhus, a lice-borne pathogen, became an element of Nazi propaganda intended to justify the mass murder of human carriers during the Holocaust.[xiv]

    Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium).

    The transatlantic journey of yellow fever holds particular irony in the history of racial stereotyping over disease. The mosquito-borne virus’s first documented appearance in the New World was in 1647 Barbados. Even if thoroughly misunderstood at the time, much like malaria there was an assumption that black Africans were immune to the disease, all the more so as white Europeans were so highly susceptible (in reality this was largely due to early exposure during childhood). This immunity in turn became one of the justifications on which the Atlantic slave system was built. Brutal conditions on the sugar plantations and corresponding high mortality rates ensured continued new arrivals, often with the same immunity, all the while reinforcing the original racial stereotype. It was only as slavery was gradually abolished in the nineteenth century, a period coinciding with multiple outbreaks of yellow fever in the American South, that former slaves were themselves accused of spreading the disease.[xv]

    Skibbereen, west Cork, in 1847 by James Mahony.

    Cholera likewise has a special place in the history of medical scapegoating and became highly politicized. Despite having long circulated locally on the Indian subcontinent, it only emerged on the global stage in the early nineteenth century, an appearance closely intertwined with colonial trade policies. As the bacteria must be ingested through contaminated water or food, the poorest and most deprived urban areas proved most vulnerable. And given the profile of its victims, the spread of cholera inevitably took on class connotations that shifted smoothly towards immigrants, even as disease transmission came to be better understood. The Irish migratory experience was strongly marked by outbreaks of cholera, with higher mortality rates used as ‘corroboration that they were carriers of the disease’ rather than a reflection of widespread discrimination and impoverishment.[xvi]

    The link between poverty and disease was particularly apparent with venereal disease, more specifically syphilis (and gonorrhoea with which it was often confused). Referred to at times as the ‘secret plague’ given the strong underreporting, symptoms had been recognizable since the late fifteenth century. And while there had long been a feminized connotation as per responsibility, hence the expression ‘one night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury’, apportioning syphilitic blame took on far more sinister connotations through the later association with underprivileged women. Various incarnations of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1860s Britain essentially allowed the arrest and forced treatment of prostitutes in an attempt to limit venereal disease in the military, and subsequently the broader population.[xvii]

    The emergence of syphilis also provoked an unusual example of xenophobic scapegoating, essentially a bizarre etymological battle that took on global proportions. As the disease spread throughout Europe and beyond, rivals were duly named responsible. For the French it was the Neapolitan disease, the Italians vice versa; the Russians blamed the Poles; the Dutch turned towards the Spanish; in Japan it emerged as the ‘Chinese ulcer’; while the Turks were less discerning, simply referring to the Christian disease.[xviii] The 1918 influenza pandemic likewise went through multiple national incarnations before settling on the familiar Spanish flu, a reference to the neutral country that first reported the disease. Both examples border on the farcical and if there are lessons to be learned, at least as far as 1918 is concerned, it is rather the impact of censorship and misinformation in controlling a pandemic.[xix]

    Lessons Unlearned

    Being reminded of past madness has a purpose, especially as we have a nasty habit of repeating our errors. Our understandable fear of disease sadly has often revealed our basest instincts, further stigmatizing the most vulnerable and endangering the health of all. Barbaric reflexes are never far from the surface. The emergence of a new pandemic has provoked ugly reactions very much reminiscent of the past, and counterproductive to controlling both the disease and the corresponding panic. While there are no rules to the patterns of hate linked to epidemics, just as increased social cohesiveness is also a potential consequence, the choice of scapegoating targets is not random. Facile demonization of the ‘foreign’ remains a perpetual risk, and disease a convenient pretext.

    As for Chick Gin, he was merely the first of many plague fatalities in 1900 San Francisco. Over the next eight years at least one-hundred-and-seventy-two others would perish, both Chinese and non-Chinese.

    Duncan McLean is a senior researcher with the Research Unit on Humanitarian Stakes and Practices, Médecins Sans Frontières – Switzerland. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and in no way represent the organization to which he belongs. The content is an extension of a short editorial published in French and German, available as follows: https://www.letemps.ch/opinions/fleaux-sanitaires-aux-prejuges-sociaux; and https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/coronavirus-seuchen-suendenboecke-gesucht-ld.1543032.

    [i] ‘Bubonic Plague, Breed of Filth, Here’, The Hawaiian Star, Honolulu, 12 December 1899.

    [ii] ‘No Plague Says Governor Gage’, The San Francisco Call, San Francisco, 14 June 1900.

    [iii] Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the ‘Immigrant Menace’, John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1994, p. 80.

    [iv] ‘Chinatown is a Menace to Health’, The San Francisco Call, San Francisco, 23 November 1901.

    [v] ‘The Scourge of a Century’, Lincoln County Leader, Toledo, 11 May 1900.

    [vi] Ralph R. Frerichs, Deadly River: Cholera and Cover-up in Post-earthquake Haiti, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 2016, p. 148.

    [vii] ‘Winning the War on Polio in Pakistan’, International Crisis Group, Asia Report 273, 23 October 2015.

    [viii] ‘DRC Ebola Outbreaks: Crisis Update’, Médecins Sans Frontières, 9 March 2020. https://www.msf.org/drc-ebola-outbreak-crisis-update

    [ix] Quote taken from testimony to Congress in 1876 over the state of Chinese immigration, Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, Arno Press: New York, 1969 (original 1909), p. 106.

    [x] A. Kraut, see above note 3, p. 97.

    [xi] ‘Woman ‘Typhoid Factory’ Held a Prisoner’, The Evening World, New York, 1 April 1907.

    [xii] Charlie Campbell, Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People, Duckworth Overlook: London, 2011, p. 161.

    [xiii] John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An intimate History of the Black Death, Harper: London, 2006, pp. 232, 248.

    [xiv] Samuel K. Cohn, Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S., Historical journal (Cambridge, England), 2012 November 1; 85(230): 535-555.

    [xv] Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism, Yale University Press: London, 1999, pp. 245-246.

    [xvi] Philip Alcabes, Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu, Public Affairs: New York, 2009, pp. 74-75, 77.

    [xvii] S. Watts, see above note 15, pp. 153-54.

    [xviii] Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis, Basic Books: New York, 2003, p. 23.

    [xix] Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, Jonathan Cape: London, 2017, p. 63.

  • Elemental Concepts and Sounds

    In October 2016, I vacated my room in Dublin and moved to a cottage on the seaside in isolated, rural Louth. The day before I did this I broke up with my girlfriend of eighteen months. Though, in hindsight, the breakup had been coming for a while, it was coincidental, or at least unplanned, for these two major life changes to occur at the same time. Though a large part of the motivation in moving to the countryside was to have more time and a better headspace for making music, a record was never a part of the plan. Rather, I felt compelled to express feelings and thoughts that I didn’t feel comfortable speaking to anyone about.

    The majority of an album, Matter, was subsequently written over a twelve-month period from late 2016: sparse, emotionally-bare songs with ambience, noise and mind-bending soundscapes – a modern take on the Irish singer-songwriter tradition. A large amount of it is dedicated to sonifying grief, regret and sadness. However, I think there is a sense of resolution and finality found throughout the work as well.

    A lot of my work focuses on extremes and dichotomies and this record is an example of that. I realised as I was writing these songs that I used a similar process for many of them and that they have a comparable form. They start out as sweet, sad songs and eventually get washed away in a sea of noise. This is probably most explicitly represented on the track ‘Over’, though it’s done with more subtlety (though not that much more!) on other occasions on the record. I think ‘Not Quite Parallel’ is the most important and effective example of this, which was the first one that I wrote which came out fully formed. The day I moved into the house in Louth I wrote this, and it quickly became evident that there was something I needed to get out and this was the first installment of it.

    As well as the explicitly personal content, the sudden change of circumstance gave me a great deal of time to think about my own life and its insignificance. Perhaps this is the real reason that I decided to release this music, as I have written a great deal of work which will never see the light of day. I’m getting older and I find it hard to measure the value of my life thus far, and am beginning to realise the importance of documentation and milestones.

    As much as I understand the positive effects of living in the moment, sometimes it detracts from thinking about the big picture. If everything is fleeting and transitory, how can we aim for anything in the future? And equally, what are we going to look back on – except for a collection of moments? Maybe life is just a collection of moments anyway, but I’d like to think that they all add up to something bigger. Even if that’s not true, I’ve decided that I’m going to believe in it anyway. I’m currently doing my best to believe in the greater good, despite the evidence that would suggest otherwise. I think that all of this relates to another dichotomy which is dealt with in the record – the balance between the individual and the universal.

    The record was largely written in isolation and, prior to its release, only a handful of people had heard any of it. However, I got a bit of an insight into the process when I showed the demos to my friend Des Garvey, who engineered a lot of the album. I sent the music over to him and his response was something along the lines of ‘that’s what I would have expected an album of your solo music to sound like’. This came as a bit of a shock to me, as it seemed so at odds with the way I viewed myself. It made me realise that very often, the people around you know you much better than you know yourself. Their view of you isn’t obscured by the bias of your own ideas of your ideal self.

    There are more particular themes evident throughout the album, though I think a lot of them relate back to these core concepts. For example, the title track deals with individual loss in the face of universal insignificance and the relationships between people, as well as those between waves and matter, in the physical world. The world seems to be quite obsessed with material objects and sometimes I feel like my obsession with waves is at odds with that. ‘Matter’ also plays with the multiplicity of meanings that a lot of words have. With that in mind, it’s worth noting that I’m also interested in homophones and concepts that explicitly have multiple meanings, as it gives the listener more space to infer their own ideas from it. The track ‘Weight’ is reliant on the use of homophones as well, in order to play with listener expectation.

    Finally, though the record is heavily built around synthetic sounds (synthesisers, digital noise, processed vocals), at its core, it’s heavily influenced by organic sounds and elemental concepts. A lot of the lyrical themes deal with water and the sea and this is no coincidence. As well as being written mostly in a seaside cottage in winter, the key relationship which the record deals with was defined by a shared love of the sea and will forever be associated with that in my mind. When I listen to it, the sounds of the waves crashing on rocks and the sea gusts permeate every aspect of the music. I hope that other people can hear that as well.

     

    The Line is the new solo project of musician, sound designer, and producer Brian Dillon. The debut album, Matter was released on Dublin label Bad Soup Records on 28 February 2020. Matter is now available to download and stream across online platforms: https://ampl.ink/4xpyV. Follow The Line on social media via Facebook and Instagram.

  • Poetry – Kathleen Scott Goldingay

    The Lamps of the Virgins
    from Bearers of the Broken Vessel

    At dawn, weaving through hills,
    go Daughters of Jerusalem in white,
    faces illumed by the flames
    of their lamps.
    They sing a song about lovers,
    become a string of dancing lights.

    At dawn, before babes awakened
    and bawled to take suckle,
    their mothers lit fires
    and filled the girl’s lamps.
    “Where are you going?”
    asks a sister too young for a lamp.
    “To remember, to remember,
    the daughter of Jep-thah.”

    “Why are you crying?”
    “The daughter of Jep-thah
    ran dancing,
    shaking her tambourine.
    She was the first
    to greet her father,
    returning victorious in battle.”

    “But why are you weeping?”
    “We go to the hills like she did,
    with our friends.
    We go for one who is soon
    to kiss her father goodbye
    and leave to be married.”

    Jep-thah, whose mother
    was without blessing,
    had not trusted Yahweh
    to hand to him his victory.
    He had sworn an oath:
    in return for winning my battle,
    I will give Yahweh a gift-
    the first soul
    who runs out from my house-
    as a burnt offering, whole.

    The daughter of Jep-thah
    ran dancing,
    shaking her tambourine.
    She was the first
    to greet her father,
    returning victorious in battle.

    Jep-thah tore his cloak
    and fell to the ground.
    “I love you, my daughter.”
    She knelt,
    put a kiss on his forehead,
    “I love you, my Abba.”

    On hearing what Yahweh
    was promised,
    Jep-thah’s daughter did not flee.
    She avowed,
    “Here I am, Yahweh, I’m yours!”

    But first, with her friends,
    she climbed up in the hills
    to grieve,
    singing, “My love will not perish
    in flames.”
    She would never know the tug
    from the cry of a babe.

    At dawn, a soldier’s widow weeps,
    looks out her latticed window.
    She sees the flickering lamps
    dance on the hill and remembers.
    She puts a kiss on her babe’s
    waking warm cheekand sings to her daughter
    of Yahweh.

    Feature Image: William Blake, Wise And Foolish Virgins, 1826, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

  • The Continuing Story of Óglaigh na hÉireann

    The Continuing Story of Óglaigh na hÉireann

    All around the snot-nosed parishes of Ireland
    small people of both genders, and neither,
    are flapping open
    copies of The Sunday O’Duffy
    getting worried
    about the continued existence
    of the Citizen Army, Fenian Brotherhood,
    Official IRA.

    We can’t have
    parties who perspire to government
    secretly controlled by cabals
    of men (and ladies) whose faces
    we never see; apart from those
    faces prescribed by prevailing winds
    and the agreed rules
    of the European Union,
    which we need never see
    but rest eternally assured
    are there. Or thereabouts.

    The only weaponry allowed
    those seeking elected office
    are five piece suits to help little
    men appear substantial,
    and no more than six
    plastic chairs on which the faithful can
    every other month gather
    to recite the Our Father,
    or discuss the rising
    price of sewage. Even

    the Social Democrats must come clean
    about the continued non-existence
    of their army council, and what role precisely
    Fintan O’Toole plays in its
    military high command.

    A mature democracy like ours
    needs parties whose manifestos
    political correspondents
    with excellent haircuts (and none) can safely
    spread across their living room floors
    and roll around naked on
    without fear of being interrupted
    by men and women wearing
    illegally held
    balaclavas.

  • Musician of the Month: Judith Ring

    Listening is a powerful skill. It’s one of the most important things you can learn in life. There are many different ways to listen and many different things to listen to, such as music, thoughts, emotions, facts, and opinions. For as long as I can remember I’ve always been trying to listen just that little bit closer.

    I developed a hyper-awareness of sound in particular during my first years of piano tuition. One of my teachers was always playing random pieces of music off the top of her head as I arrived for my lesson. I loved to hear her play like this and longed to be able to do the same. I quickly realised that it was possible to play all the popular songs of the day just by sitting down and listening. The most important lesson I ever learnt and have never forgotten was when I was about 11 years old.

    I brought a piece of music on cassette tape to my lesson for the same teacher to listen to and teach me. It may have been Bohemian Rhapsody or some other song with an epic piano part. She had a quick listen and told me to go home and figure it out for myself. This baffled me at first but I thought I’d give it a try. I went home and listened, and then really listened, and I figured out how to play the piece… note for note. What a revelation! From then on I took on everything from Billy Joel to Guns and Roses and became obsessed with learning these piano parts exactly as they were played on the recording. I didn’t just play something similar, I had to have every note correct.

    As a teenager I had a deep attachment to the piano and had a pact with myself that I had to play every day or the spell would be broken. Even playing just a few notes would suffice. I generally practiced for a couple of hours every day and even more once I got to university. Piano was a massive part of my life. I also drew a lot and developed a love of black and white photography, so between art, photography and music I didn’t have much time for anything else. I was lucky that I went to a school that somehow allowed me to focus on all three subjects. All this has continued to feed into my compositional life, which only began in my early twenties when I did a Master’s in Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin (graduating class of 2000).

    Having broken the piano spell and replaced it with electronic music I quickly turned my attention to found sounds and musique concrète. Using sounds from everyday life to create vast soundscapes further broadened and deepened my listening experience. Every sound around me became music! Sounds that other people tried to block out while going about their daily business became the building blocks of my compositions. Being able to transform them even further through various electronic processes was mind-blowing to me and incredibly exciting.

    For many years I travelled around with a portable minidisc recorder and a small microphone recording anything and everything of interest. Machinery and transport fascinated me the most, especially when I started to pull these sounds apart to see what they would reveal. Electronic music opened my ears to so many incredible compositional possibilities during that time. The idea of sculpting and shaping sounds that had never been heard before was infinitely satisfying.

    In a world where there are so many types of music and ways of approaching the arrangement of sonic elements in time, it has always been a challenge to come up with fresh ideas. Classical music was built on a very specific musical language. Composers who understood the power of this language and how to manipulate it most effectively managed to develop their own voice and have stood the test of time. These rules began to be broken down and abandoned at the beginning of the twentieth century. The strict rules of harmony and counterpoint were challenged and new ideas and concepts were introduced. From then on it was a free-for-all to some extent and now you can literally write whatever you want.

    This makes things more challenging in many ways as you have nothing to hold on to. You can derive ideas from other works of course but creating a unique soundworld is very ambitious.

    Delving into the world of musique concrète gave me a very important and lifelong obsession with timbre. Through working with found sounds I started to explore acoustic instruments for their sonic possibilities. Over the years I have collaborated very closely with professional musicians to explore their instruments and listen deeply to the intricacies of timbre that can be drawn from them.

    Through the use of microphones I have built large libraries of sounds from every instrumentalist I have worked with and have explored their timbre even more by layering recordings of certain sounds together to make delicious textures. By using recordings you can enhance even the tiniest sound just by amplifying it within the mix to give you almost a macro-engagement with sound. This process became the basis of a PhD in composition that I completed at the University of York in 2009.

    The endless combinations of sonic possibilities in this world will continue to inspire my life and work. Although living the life of an artist has lead me down quite an unconventional path, and can be a struggle at times, I wouldn’t change it for anything. I will continue to listen deeply and I encourage you to do the same.

     

    For more of Judith’s work see her:

    Official website: www.judithring.com

    Soundcloud: www.soundcloud.com/judith-ring

    YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1vVA69QkacFPkOPLdiILOQ?disable_polymer=true

    Judith is currently writing pieces for flautist Lina Andonovska and drummer Matthew Jacobson’s duo
    SlapBang and a piece for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra as part of The Contemporary Music
    Centre’s composer lab.

     

  • Meeting Samuel Beckett’s Genius in Person and his Plays

    Undeniably, Ireland has produced some of the finest creative writers in the history of the English language. From the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) through to Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), who ultimately abandoned English in favour of French, a body of work has expressed a contradictory national character.

    A recurring theme in Irish writing has been what a therapist would refer to as abreaction – the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion. Thus, the drama of colonisation and sectarian division enthralled a global audience, at a remove from what is often the painful direct experience of a dysfunctional state and troubled society.

    On the other hand, we have seen little in the way of philosophical wisdom in Irish letters, apart from George Berkeley (1685-1753), and Edmund Burke (1729-1797) at a stretch. So Ireland must make do with imaginative writers as intellectuals: our novelists of departure, and poets of abstraction.

    I had the good fortune to encounter in the flesh arguably the last in the line of towering figures, Samuel Beckett, in a café in Montparnasse, Paris in 1982.

    Ireland had just won rugby’s Triple Crown in what was then called the Five Nations, before succumbing to the French team at the Parc de Princes, and Beckett was primarily inclined to banter about rugby and cricket with his countrymen. It must be stressed that he was a charmingly convivial person, and while austere, decidedly good company; even when pressed to do so he sedulously avoided discussion of his own work, preferring to muse on the artistic contributions of others.

    That slightly detached dignity, captured in John Minehan’s award-winning photograph was exactly as I found him. A kind and decent man, who concealed a madness arising out of intense creativity. A burning gaze alone revealed the creative fire that raged inside.

    The Last Modernist

    Beckett was the last of the great Modernists. His crucible and training ground was the Paris of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, as well as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a great pity that Beckett never had the chance to meet the author of The Great Gatsby – that great work exploring the vacuity of capitalist aspirations. Fitzgerald matched him for pithiness, although he lacked the same profundity.

    Those were heady days on the Seine, albeit Beckett was late to the party. He acted as a sort of amanuensis to Joyce, assisting him, in a way that is still unclear, in the completion of Finnegans Wake (1939). At one level he seems to have operated like a staff nurse, or what today we call a carer, leading Joyce – who was almost blind by that stage – to his final statement of total incomprehensibility, or brilliance, depending on your viewpoint.

    Photographic portrait of Samuel Beckett as a young man.

    Yet Joyce’s torrent of words – full of richness and fecundity – the psychobabble of tongues and the fiddling with language, had a depressing effect on Beckett aesthetically. It is widely agreed that the latter’s early works, such as Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), and Murphy (1938), did not scale the heights of his post-World War II masterpieces.

    Similarly, I would argue the polyglot innovation found in Joyce’s final work is a form of literary escapism of limited relevance in this dark age of casino capitalism. Linguistic accuracy in marshaling facts is what I prize most highly, and Beckett delivered powerfully in this regard.

    Beckett laconically described the relationship between the two literary titans in the following terms: ‘James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyser, trying to leave out as much as I can.’[i]

    Irish Bluffers

    In my experience the Irish often display a tendency towards loquacity and linguistic chicanery. Unfortunately this provides scope for bluffers and often brings a resistance to facing up to the truth. Too often we take refuge in the deliberate self-deceptions of lyricism, or display a love of rhetoric and bombast that permits falsities.

    As Seamus Heaney puts it in the poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ (1975):

    O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
    Of open minds as open as a trap,

    Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,

    Having said that Joyce in his early work, particularly Dubliners, captures some of the spoofing that is still a feature of life in the city, particularly evident politics, where the theatrical pseudo-debaters of hucksterdom are out in force.

    Perhaps if we Irish were better listeners, and concentrated on using language with greater precision, we would not have dug ourselves, collectively and individually, into the awful hole we found ourselves in when the Banks crashed in 2007.

    Uncharacteristically as an Irishman, Beckett is famous for the compression of language, which may explain his departure into French. Not a word is wasted in his writing; but like Joyce, words are sometimes re-invented or used in novel ways. Thus Beckett mangles and distorts language, stripping it to the bone to devastating effect, yet generally enhancing our understanding of it.

    I cannot say I have enjoyed reading all of his oeuvre. The later works, particularly the plays, are heading towards the extinction of language itself, and offer an unsparingly bleak take on both art and human communication. I should add that all of this was in marked a contrast to the chatty and open person I encountered in Montparnasse.

    However, the quartet of plays, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapps Last Tape and Happy Days bear the unmistakable hallmark of genius, a commendation that should also apply to All That Fall, a play for radio memorably dramatized by Michael Gambon in 2013.

    In my view the only playwrights his equal over the course of the twentieth century have been Eugene O’Neill for his A Long Day’s Journey into Night (which is also an exercise in Irish psychosis); Arthur Miller with Death of a Salesman and The Crucible; and perhaps David Mamet for Glengarry Glenn Ross; as well as the best of Bertolt Brecht. Indeed, Brecht was the only twentieth century dramatist of comparable stature, and even then he falls short in my view.

    I would argue the only real modern rival – and that excludes the Bard of Avon –  to Beckett’s Godot or Endgame is his near Irish contemporary Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Surviving an Irish upbringing is never easy. It is perhaps no coincidence that Wilde died a broken man in Paris having endured imprisonment in Reading Gaol – immortalized in verse – his downfall coinciding with the Importance of Being Earnest becoming the toast of London.

    Beckett preserved his genius to the end through an intelligent exile, the default option for Irish creatives and intellectuals. Yeats died in France. Beckett and Wilde in Paris. Joyce in Zurich. Most Irish writers get out Hibernia – ‘the land of winter’ which the Romans chose to steer clear of – if they can.

    In my experience the Irish can be a deeply malicious lot. Anything goes and always has. Our downfall, collectively as a nation, lies in the art of cutting tall poppies down to size, and destroying national heroes. Thus the great nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) was driven to an early grave for an affair out of wedlock with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea.

    Charles Stewart Parnell, driven to an early grave.

    Not all artists, it should be emphasised, lack wisdom and judgment. Beckett aged gracefully and is now buried in modest Parisian grave, where he is treated as a French writer and a hero of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France, where he demonstrated true courage.

    The Novels

    Moving on to the novels of Beckett, including the famous, or infamous, post-War trilogy of novels: Molloy (1951); Malone meurt (1951), Malone Dies (1958); L’innommable (1953), The Unnamable (1960). It is here we see a gradual dismantling and delimiting of language. In my view by the time of The Unnameable the artifice has gone too far and the conceit frankly tiresome.

    My favourite novel, suffused with humanity, is Company (1980), which was part of an Indian summer of later works. Company, and indeed Worst Ward How (1983), also demonstrate the compression of language of the greater plays, as well as a playful sense of humour, something he is often unfairly accused of lacking.

    Company is a lyrical and profound statement of his childhood in Leopardstown. Coincidentally, I was born just up the road from Beckett’s childhood home – not two hundred yards away – although not to the same conditions of privilege.

    The compression of language at times in the novels is aphoristic and the statements on the human condition act like gelignite in their exactitude: ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on,’ from The Unnameable, and in the and in the 1983 story Worstward Ho – ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

    There is an effortless font of ridicule in this. Woody Allen would have a field day, as he did in his essay on Irish writers.

    In Our Times

    I am not a literary critic and do not pretend to be one, so I am appropriating Beckett’s legacy for my own purposes.

    It is clear to me that in our post-truth universe we require searing honesty rather than linguistic chicanery of a sort that provides us with ‘known unknowns,’ associated with the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. We need to concentrate on that which matters, which is the truth, forensically researched and conveyed with precise language – and barbed if necessary – thereby providing an accurate portrayal of the human condition and the challenges we confront.

    The extent to which Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou, the great Marxists or post-Marxists of our age, quote Beckett is revealing, although less surprising in the case of the latter given he is French. They quote Beckett to couple both absurdity and engagement, and to demonstrate the effective use of language.

    Thus every lawyer committed to the truth, particularly a criminal defence lawyer, would do well to read and absorb Beckett in order to focus precisely on what is chosen to be said and, equally importantly, left unsaid. Beckett also helps us to recognise the nuances and tropes of language.

    Moreover, a close reading of Beckett embeds a faculty for detecting bullshit: contained in his works you will find an unstinting focus on the essentials to human life.

    What do you mean when you say this? What do you mean by what you say you mean? What do you mean by what you say or said or said then? Why did you do what you did? Who are you, and what do you say you have done?

    Cross examination techniques are of course a poor excuse for a Beckettian aphorisms, but the importance of a literary appreciation in a lawyer should not be underestimated.

    Samuel Beckett in 1977.

    Swift Return

    Other great Irish writers besides the Modernists are also relevant to our present dark age, Jonathan Swift above all else. The Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral received a disappointing sinecure after a controversial career as a journalist in London, where in carrying out his duties he alienated a large amount of influential people. The culmination of his rage arrives at the end of his life in the totemic work: ‘A Modest Proposal’.

    The conceit of that piece, based on acute recognition of the Malthusian capitalism operating at the time, and contempt for absentee landlords, is that rather than letting the poor die in increments it would make ‘economic sense’ to eat their babies whole. This was the ultimate cost benefit analysis approach to law and economics, still evident in our dangerously commoditized world.

    Finally, another Irish Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats is also relevant in this regard, not for the Romantic murmuring of Innisfree, nor the more insightful political poems surveying the grubby inception of the state – ‘And add the halfpence to the pence. / And prayer to shivering prayer’ – but for the mystical poems from 1919 onwards, with their anticipation and exploration of the totalitarianism on the horizon.

    Thus in ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) Yeats anticipates a world of immoderate extremism that has returned to haunts us.

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    he falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    So notwithstanding a tendency towards bluffing and linguistic chicanery, Irish writers have much to offer. Above all Beckett. He reminds us to be precise and exact with our words, while anticipating the age of extremes we have entered – a dark age of neo-liberal meltdown and capitalist excess, with fascism rearing its ugly head again.

    Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy

    [i] Mel Gussow, ‘BECKETT AT 75- AN APPRAISAL’, New York Times, April 19th, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/19/theater/beckett-at-75-an-appraisal.html

  • A Composer’s Story

    When I was sixteen I gave up learning the piano. In her report my music teacher (who had terminated my studies) wrote: ‘what an awful shame’.

    The story is a common one. Young peoples’ lives become filled with music on records, video, in films, on radio and TV, during Saturday nights, in supermarkets, in amusement arcades, on the streets and in concerts. Culturally exploded thus, they sit down to Mr. Beethoven and wonder what on earth this glaring composer from the distant past has to do with the rhythms they feel and the harmonies they hear.

    When I left school I was drumming on a local pop group and living at home, sleeping till lunchtime. I hadn’t qualified for university and my father wanted me to get a job. I remember replying in writing in answer to an advertisement for a shop assistant and saying that my hair was long and I wouldn’t get it cut. I only had the music. I used to sit at the piano for a few hours each afternoon, improvising.

    Pop band The Unkind with drummer Roger Doyle (centre)

    The Royal Irish Academy Of Music 

    Over a period of months I gradually composed a four-page piano piece and showed it to my former piano teacher. She suggested I contact Dr. A.J. Potter in the Royal Irish Academy of Music. I played my four-page piece for him; he had a vacancy and the following week I started composition studies with him – once a week for an hour. From then on I had to have something composed for every Monday afternoon.

    Dr. Potter never said ‘you can’t do that’. On the other hand he never told me exactly what to do. Maybe this was his approach. We talked about life and art and he gave me the musical space I needed. He said you could read all the books you liked about instrumentation but if you really wanted to know how a trombone works you should buy a trombonist a drink after the concert. He never encouraged me and I needed a little.

    After a year at the Academy I submitted my compositions for the Junior Composition Scholarship which would mean a year’s free tuition. At the beginning of the next term I received a phone-call from the office of the Academy: ‘With regard to your recent application for the Junior Scholarship in Composition we wish to inform you that you have been successful in…’. I had never planned on being a composer; necessity was the mother of my invention.

    I wanted to write a piece for orchestra in my first scholarship term. Dr. Potter said: ‘Well go ahead!’. I had a drawing of the highest and lowest notes of each instrument in front of me as I composed Four Sketches for orchestra. It took me five months and was later performed, when I was twenty two, by the Dublin Symphony Orchestra (because it won second prize in its competition for composers), and the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra (the National Radio/Television orchestra).

    The first radio broadcast of any work of mine was of Four Sketches. In 1969 at the end of my second year at the Academy I was awarded the Vandeleur Scholarship in Composition. During my third year I began experimenting with my tape recorder at home in my search for new sounds and compositional approaches. I took to tape music like a duck to water without ever being bothered about the ‘do you call this music?’ syndrome.  I never stopped and thought too much – I just did it.

    When I first heard tape music (loosely termed electronic music) on record, it was as though it had been brought back to me as a memory. It was strangely familiar. It was what I was looking for.

    The next time I submitted taped works to the Academy, I wasn’t awarded the scholarship. Since the Academy only had a cheap mono tape recorder and I needed a recording studio I thought: ’Three years is enough’, and so I left. The Academy is not a University so there was no degree to get even if I had stayed I was twenty one and still sleeping till lunchtime.

    Utrecht

    Soon after, a small record company in Dublin promised to bring out a record of my music, recorded some of my pieces, and then went bust. Then in 1974 I was awarded a Dutch Government Scholarship to enable me to study electronic music at the Institute Of Sonology at the University of Utrecht. This changed everything. In Holland I had the chance to come in out of the cold and join the stream of European avant-garde music. I attended three weeks of the World Music Days Festival in five Dutch cities.

    At the Institute Of Sonology in Utrecht the students had to complete fourteen studio exercises before they were allowed to submit a compositional or purely technical project, to a committee which would decide if it was ‘of sonological interest’ (sonology is the study of sound), or not. It took me ages to understand the principles of how the studio worked, about voltage control, amplitude modulation etc.. I was the last to complete my fourteen studio exercises. In the second term I was allotted twelve studio hours per week in response to my project, all on my own. I used to get heart poundings opening the door of my allotted studio – one of the best equipped in Europe.

    I began a new composition using almost entirely electronically generated sounds for the first time. This
    piece later became Solar Eyes, which was broadcast backwards on Irish radio.

    Letter from Roger Doyle to the Irish Times, July 1976 (courtesy of the composer)

    During the Easter holidays I got a great idea: why not bring out the LP myself that had met such a disastrous fate a year earlier – the covers had already been made and were sitting at home. I had saved enough from the scholarship spending money to be able to do it. I sent to Ireland for the recordings of my instrumental pieces and set about making copies of my tape pieces in the Institute’s studios – revising a section of my piece Oizzo No in the process, improving it immensely.

    I took my new master tape to Phonogram in Amsterdam and asked them to make me 500 records and gave them the money. When I told them I couldn’t afford a test pressing they said: ‘don’t worry Mr. Doyle, we’ll keep trying till it comes out ok’. And they did, and it did.

    I wanted to cover up the name of the record company that had gone bust, on the back cover, so I had 500 new backs printed with some new information on them, which I began to stick on individually with glue over the existing ones – thus becoming the first composer in the history of the world to stick his own record covers together. I was twenty five and had a record of my own music out, called Oizzo No.

    I shipped them off to Ireland and sold one to a customs man at Dublin airport on my arrival home. I had to sell 330 copies to break even, which I did after two years.

    ‘The Curious Works of Roger Doyle’ documentary (directed by Brian Lally) is being shown in the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray on 17 April. Tickets available here: https://www.mermaidartscentre.ie/whats-on/events/the-curious-works-of-roger-doyle

    For more on Roger Doyle’s work see: http://rogerdoyle.com/

    Bandcamp: https://rogerdoyle1.bandcamp.com/

  • Synapse Fire

    One of the main things I characterize my misspent youth by, is a knack for exploiting the trust my middle-class parents misplaced in me. At seventeen, I was too old to be dragged along with them on what seemed like monthly getaways, but too young to exercise any degree of responsibility or restraint. My folks had a mobile home near Ballymoney beach, which had hosted many a night of debauchery for my older brother and his cronies. He was away in Amsterdam, so I’d decided it was my turn. That bank holiday weekend, I had access to a car, three malleable mates and in the palm of my hand, an assortment of different colored pills.

    My mother’s arty liberal ideals had long since crushed my father’s more traditional views into dust. You’d only ever get the faintest of grumbles from him, dampened behind a rumpling newspaper. This self-censorship wasn’t always prevalent or so he told me, over glasses of scotch, his tongue unbinding nostalgically in the wake of my recent nuptials. I am now a man it seems. After what they’d been through with my older brother, Dad found it best to defer parenting us to my mother, who for lack of a better term, had notions.

    My father had been ‘too strict’ with my hyperactive brother who had some violent tendencies. The significant shift of power happened when his bright idea of sending my brother to boarding school backfired in a big way, offering more of a breeding ground for criminal activity than an educational utopia. Kenny’s expulsion from the school brought a great shame to my father. A gang of boys in the year ahead of him had caught wind of Kenny’s lucrative little drug trade and expected a sizeable cut in exchange for their silence. If their demands had been more diplomatic he’s always maintained, there wouldn’t have been a problem. They were too greedy, couldn’t be reasoned with, and Kenny refused. These boys were all “somebody’s son” and were bred to get their way.

    Junior Cup team rugby players could use the pool and it was common knowledge that Kenny swam late at night. He was always the last to leave. So when three of them jumped in on top of him, he thought they were trying to drown him. One boy had a chunk of flesh ripped out of his cheek, and another suffered a fractured skull. But it was the ring leader who got his teeth knocked out, some of an ear bitten off, and lost the sight in one eye. So obvious was it a  three-on-one attack, that no charges were pressed against my brother Kenny. However, his dealings were exposed, and he was turfed out.

    My mother employed a more permissive style of parenting with me, indulged my every whim, never punished bad behavior and challenged my thought process in ways she must have thought Socratic. I got away with fucking murder. Although I did appreciate the level of freedom this afforded me, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for my father, subjected to the periodic “I told you so” moment, anytime my report card pleased her or I’d been involved in some minor sporting victory. It brought me no joy seeing him voiceless and defeated. I had this recurring dream, before I got medicated, where he manifested as a wounded fox, caught in a trap, bleeding from his soft eyes.

    So my folks fecked-off somewhere abroad for the long weekend, as did my mate Dan’s parents, whose neighbors had no visibility of their driveway. No one to notice the missing car. Dan and I had gone to primary school together. We had not been friends, but gravitated toward each other in secondary school, given we were among the few token posh-lads at the community school. His Dad was self-made and didn’t believe in private education, but my mother gave me the option to choose where I thought would best meet my developmental goals. I’d love to say it was my selflessness that led me there, being aware of my father’s crumbling business. Private school fees would have been a strain. Then again, the boarding school my grandfather, father, and brother had attended did not have a football team and rugby was compulsory for all first years. That and it was full of wankers. I made the case that I would become a more well-rounded individual given the opportunity to carry on playing competitive football and also broaden my worldview immersed in an environment boasting a more diverse student population. A more prominent priority was my overdeveloped libido that had been cultivated, I believe, by early exposure to a wealth of magazines and conspicuously labeled VHS tapes in my brother’s bottom drawer. The community school was co-ed and I’d been assured, full of ‘damp yokes.’

    Dan and I were placed in A1. The tiered class structure was supposedly based on an aptitude test we’d taken, but I’m positive that in seeing where we’d come from, the Year Head had employed mercy. A1 was no cake-walk, but it wasn’t exactly Dangerous Minds, like C2 for example. Woodwork and Metalwork were housed in the C-Area and despite me disregarding my brother’s advice to “batter someone on day one to let people know you’re not to be fucked with,” I did feel compelled to jump in and help Dan, who was himself on day one, getting “battered.” His expensive shoes, pressed shirt and an accent he couldn’t convincingly conceal, made him an easy target. I did manage to get one good dig in, bloodying the nose of Barry O’Neil, but ultimately was booted around with Dan until burly Mr. O’Brien came rushing out of his classroom to put a stop to the ‘madness.’ Dan was soft as shit and I didn’t feel like we’d anything in common, but sticking together seemed necessary.

    Stu’s experience was ours in reverse. His mother had notions too, and identified in him a level of intelligence that had escaped his siblings. He traversed the gauntlet of his council estate covering up our primary school’s crest with his definitive black bomber jacket. He’d bate through that estate early each morning and came skidding into the yard on his orange BMX. He and I would kick a football around together. We were schemers, thieving whatever was in fashion, taking turns every few days at the small-break. Pogs, Premier League stickers or whatever was going. We had another little racket that proved more lucrative, both of us having somewhat of an entrepreneurial spirit instilled in us by our older brothers. We’d get to school early and pilfer the strawberry and chocolate milk left out on the school steps, which were very much in demand, most parents having opted for low-fat regular milk for their little darlings. We’d sell our spoils. Shamefully now, I must confess we did abuse the good nature of an elderly newsagent proprietor in our boldest of schemes. We’d drop a box of one bar or another from the shelf and kick it underneath the stall, only then to enquire about said missing bar. He’d potter into the store room to fetch another box. Stu’s hands were as fast as lightning and his bomber jacket’s pockets were deep. I’d keep sketch at the counter and stall the shopkeeper when necessary. Most of our classmates had money and no one dared rat on us given our brothers’ reputations. Our little enterprise drew us close together. His mother adored me, finding my little posh-lad witticisms funny. Mine found his salt-of-the-earth Dublin attitude a charm, often dropping Stu into conversation with other parents as though it were proof of her open-mindedness or some such shit. Stu didn’t think it was shrewd to associate ourselves with Dan in our rough secondary school, but ultimately shared my sympathies for our pretty and effeminate alumnus.

    Katie came from the same estate as Stu and was in a similar boat. Her mother had intended to send her to the all-girl convent school, but when her parents split, Katie’s cunt of a Da was not forthcoming with chipping in on her tuition. She was into boxing and as a result, rumoured to be a lesbian. I can attest to the fact that she was not, after our ‘five minutes in heaven’ shared in Stu’s downstairs bathroom, during a game of Spin the Bottle, back in first year. She was also better at football than Stu and me put together. She’d definitely been a tomboy growing up, but had blossomed into an athletic goddess and never abandoned us. She did harbor though, a great deal of hatred for those girls that had ostracized her and the lads who only started paying her attention when her breasts filled out. We, her real mates, dared not taint our genuine friendship by trying it on with her. She wasn’t interested in us that way more like, and we knew it. One good thing her Da had done, was teach her to drive, and any chance we got, we’d borrow Dan’s parents’ Jeep and have adventures to which no one else in school was privy.

    I’d been taking a pill, here and there, from my brother’s stock. He often tasked me with cutting up coke for him and for my trouble, I’d also taken a little sample of that. Stu was doing the same with his older brother’s weed. Dan’s folks had a never-ending supply of wine, and with Katie able to drive, we were sorted for our weekend by the sea.

    I’d been involved in school debates since first year, much to the glee of my mother who’d heard about them in a parent teacher meeting and hadn’t ceased encouraging me not to waste my ‘gift,’ the ablity to talk my way out of essentially, anything. If I’m honest, I did enjoy the debates. The most recent one was about different types of civilizations, Eastern and Western philosophy. I’d been arguing publicly, that to our society’s detriment, foundations laid for us by the Greeks and Romans were being forgotten,. I argued that in a perfect society, like many of the great Greeks, everyone would be bisexual, citing the statistical odds being for more love in a world where marriages end in divorce and of those ‘successful’ marriages, only a fraction are purported to be happy. Privately, I’d made known to the lads my personal opinion, that there wasn’t one good way, and that we should be learning from all cultures, taking meditative practices from the East and hallucinatory journeys from the Native Americans.  “Are you fuckin’ high, Man?” Stu asked in response to this. I said I wasn’t, but that I highly recommended ‘getting high’ together. With a smirk, Dan added “Theory AND Practice. ” I’d fuck all practical knowledge, but in theory, the lads agreed. Even Katie.

    The plan was for all four of us to trip on something different, together. We would get out of our heads around a bonfire on the beach. We’d get to know each other, and ourselves, on a deeper level. We weren’t live-for-the-weekend piss-head, druggy wasters like lots of our classmates. Our trip was about enlightenment. That and our heads were fucking melted from Leaving Cert propaganda, to which we were not immune.

    On the Saturday we’d gone swimming and had a BBQ. We drank copious amounts of red wine and even dusted off a holy grail type bottle of scotch. It’s absence would certainly be attributed to my brother. Our experience was to be had on the Sunday night, us having Monday off to recover. Stu and I gathered firewood, while Dan and Katie discussed our path to enlightenment, deciding who should do what drug, and why.

    When darkness fell, we were all fairly buzzed on Dan’s fancy wine, and Katie revealed our missions, should we choose to accept them. She was highly strung, admittedly, and had never smoked a cigarette, let alone weed. She would get blazed and allow herself to relax and submit to the humour that was all around us. Stu was quiet, so he was to do some white, freeing himself from the shackles of self-consciousness and let his words flow. Dan was the consummate jester of the group, and we were often plagued by his seeming inability to share his true feelings, veiling everything in jokes. A yoke was to be had, whereby his heart would unfurl in waves of sincerity. I, being the depressive of the group, had issues sleeping and because of the meds, never remembered my dreams. We’d all been listening to a lot of Bowie, and were aware that if one were to take certain sleeping tablets, and force themselves to stay awake, they’d enter into this trippy dreamy state. Even if I couldn’t remember, the group would let me know what I could see and what I was saying. I was up for it, on the condition that they try their utmost not to let me drown in the sea.

    The ironic ceremony began with Dan raising up our offerings to the drug gods, and I blessed them with the sign of an upside down cross. Stu gave us his iteration of something resembling a Gregorian chant and drummed away in rhapsodic gesture on a Jacob’s biscuit tin. Our sage Katie danced around us, puffing plumes of weed smoke to protect us on our journey.

    Wine-red tongues told the stories of our lives up to that symbolic juncture and proclaimed what the future would bring. That sacred fire erupted between each speaker, fueled by my bottle of lighter fluid, with a well-timed squeeze. A handful of sand was sprinkled, let to trail in to the sparking flames, as a gesture to mark what had passed. This, before we acknowledged the infinity of what lay ahead, with a nod to each end of the pale grey beach. Faces were warmed with the memories of our shared experiences and an assurance that from what we had been born in to, we would indeed escape. Then we sat in silent reflection. Only the moon moved, slipping down the back of a starlit sky until the horizon bore an orange hue.

    As the sun was coming up, Dan and I had wandered from our camp, walking at the water’s edge. The cold ends of each wave rushed over our pale freckled feet. Dan’s drug-sticky palm was on the back of my neck. He was expressing some sense of loss for not having taken part in the debate, but said that he shared my sentiments. Stu was burning the ears off Katie, who lay euphoric in the sand, her muscles rippling in the morning light, her face awash serene, unperturbed by Stu’s rapid hand movements, wild eyes and practically unhinged jaw.

    We had always joked about Dan’s sexuality, in good humour. His overtly heteroerotic jokes and signature pelvic thrusts accompanied by animal noises were a daily occurrence when discussing girls ‘we’ fancied., He’d had girlfriends, so none of us were really sure, but we wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d come out to us. It might even have made his life easier.

    The other two weren’t moving, Katie unable to peel herself from the sand and Stu entranced by her beauty. Dan and I walked, arms around each other’s shoulders, through the endings of rushing waves.

    He kept banging on about ancient Greece and then he stopped me. Looking into my eyes and cupping the back of my head, he leaned in and kissed me. Drunk would have been an understatement, but I was not so drunk that I lacked the capability to immediately push him away, had I wished. I allowed him his moment, before sensitively withdrawing. I explained to him that there was no problem at all, but that he’d gotten it wrong. It was just an argument that I’d been making in the debate, an ideal that I believed in, but sorely lacked the capacity for, because, I was straight. I said, “Sorry.” He was unperturbed to say the least, smiling and gripping the prominent erection pitched in my shorts.

    I’d nicked the wrong blue pills from my brother and had not enjoyed the hoped for dreamy state. They weren’t Ambien, they were feckin’ Viagra. Watching the sun rising, my dick became hard out of nowhere, and my error became painfully clear. If Dan had been high like Katie, he might have gotten paranoid, but in his euphoria all he did was stroke my face and sympathize with my obviously hilarious situation. How did I know if I never tried? I never tried, that’s how I knew, I told him. This did not convince him. He brought up something we’d spoken about more than once. We had both been pining away for Katie for years. Lust only distorted the truth that it was primarily a physical attraction and that he and I shared more in common and were better suited as partners, ‘if only’ we were gay. He walked ahead and declared the beach his stage. A compelling speech ensued, arguing that in the spirit of our exploratory weekend, we should have a real kiss, purely to decipher whether there was something there or not. If I felt nothing, he’d forever go in peace.

    My inebriation coupled with comfort in my own sexuality allowed me to humour this proposal. I can’t say that it was a wholly unpleasant experience. He took me in his arms, embraced me and kissed me with tenderness, withholding any predilection he may have had for groping. When he released me, dough eyed, I couldn’t help but make a joke that the absence of any ‘magic’ had defied the boundaries of biological science, and actually eradicated my erection. I expressed my love for him, and offered our relationship as an example of how a platonic love might be the purest form. I could love him more than anyone on earth, my feelings unsullied by lust. He echoed my sentiment that we’d be friends forever, and we hugged before he started walking back to the others. I maintained I was going to hang back to let my lad fully go down, but really, I just needed a moment.

    I had achieved my dreamy state, but this was due to sleep deprivation and being full of Shiraz. Blood dripped out of the sun.

    Turning to face my friends, now nestled around the still smoldering fire-pit, I took note of Dan’s long wide footprints in the sand. I walked in his same path, placing my small feet inside the impressions he’d made, knowing that the following days he’d shroud his embarrassment in jokes, though there was no need. I wished I could get inside my friend to take away his pain, and carry him through the undoubted hurt to come.