Category: Culture

Ancient Irish Sagas

The following is a short retelling and interpretation of a number of Irish sagas, including two, ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ and ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, from the golden age of Gaelic literature in the early middle ages.

I – The Second Battle of Moytura

Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Second Battle of Moytura’) c. 875 is the centrepiece of the extraordinary Irish Mythological Cycle, relating how the Tuatha Dé (‘god-peoples’) had been oppressed by their enemies the Formorians (Fomoire). It consists of a series of fantastical episodes of enduring interest. We meet a Tuatha Dé exhausted by impossible labours and tributes after the half-Formorian Bres becomes High King of Ireland. He replaces Nuada who had lost his arm and authority in battle.

We learn that the court physician Diancecht fashions Nuada a prosthetic silver limb in its place. In the meantime, Diancecht’s son Miach begins to heal Nuada’s real severed arm, but the father prefers his own methods and surgically kills his son by removing his brain. Miach is buried by his sister Airmed and from his grave sprout three hundred and sixty-five healing herbs, which she orders in her cloak. Diancecht has other ideas, however, scattering the herbs, each of whose value would remain obscure to humanity.

In the account of Diancecht’s preference for an artificial arm over Miach’s more complimentary approach, the anonymous poet may be suggesting that the best healing comes from within the body itself, while the scattering of the healing herbs could represent ignorance of the cures freely available in Nature. It also appears that a professional body will seek to preserve its privileged position, in which case this remains a powerful metaphor for the modern pharmaceutical industry. A man with a silver arm presages the contemporary spectre of transhumance, whereby human beings propose to upload their bodies into computers, in fulfillment of René Descartes’s dualistic idea of a homunculus controlling a mechanical body.

The ‘Second Battle’ parades scenes of Rabelaisian excess, especially involving one character, the Dagda, who undertakes a mission inside the territory of the Formorians. There he meets a distortion of hospitality, whereby he is compelled to consume vast quantities of porridge to a point where is belly is the size of a cauldron. Afterwards he must loosen his bowels before sexual congress with a Formorian princess. In Mark William’s ‘less genteel’ translation: ‘The girl jumped on him and whacked him across the arse, and her curly bush was revealed. At that point the Dagda gained a mistress, and they had sex’. Smutty Irish humour has long antecedents.

In Jungian terms the Formorians seem to represent the nefarious shadow of the Tuatha Dé, an external, exploitative force that corrupt and indebt the native inhabitants, a narrative familiar to contemporary Ireland. However, the half-Formorian Bres is eventually succeeded by Lug, who is also of mixed parentage. Yet he combines all the highest attributes of the áes dána (skilled people). Lug and Bres differ in that the former’s father is Tuatha Dé and his mother Formorian, while the latter’s ancestry is the reverse.

This might appear as simply an expression of approval of patriarchal descent. There is however a richer symbolic meaning available if we see a balance in Lug’s mixed ancestry between the thrusting, will-to-power of male energy on his Formorian mother’s side, and the earthier characteristics of the Tuatha Dé, that equate with female love, on his father’s side. He achieves wholeness when, paradoxically, the female characteristics arrive through a dominant male parentage wherein the thrusting Formorian energies are contained (Mf:Fm = Fm). Bres differs in that the ‘male’ Formorian outlook is ascendant as it arrives from a dominant male father, repressing his ‘caring’ Tuatha Dé ‘feminine’ energies (Mm:Ff = Mf).

Another fascinating scene occurs after the Formorians are vanquished and Lug captures the errant Bres, who pleads for his life by proposing the Tuatha Dé should plant crops four times a year. Lug recognises this as impossible, or unsustainable, and only spares his foe when he reveals how the men of Ireland could operate a plough. According to Mark Williams in his indispensable Ireland’s Immortals: The history of the gods of Irish myth (2017): ‘the Formorians in the saga are characterized by a monstrously exploitative and unnatural relationship to the organic world, in a strange anticipation of contemporary agri-business’. This may be so, but Lug’s character also has a Formorian dimension, that, crucially, is contained positively by his (Fm) parentage. Similarly, in this episode, when Bres’s knowledge is refined from the approach of ploughing the earth four times a year, we find he confers a crucial skill. The relationship between the Tuatha Dé and the Formorians may also have been a commentary on the benefit of accommodating the skills of Norse raiders, then besetting Ireland, who also brought technological advances in agriculture and sailing.

There are lessons here for a contemporary audience insofar as we need both a thrusting, male, Formorian, energy, to put a plan into action but crucially it is the caring, ‘female’ Tuatha Dé approach that should guide our endeavours. It is the dominance of the Formorian mind that brought us the Atomic bomb.

II – The Wooing of Étaín

Tochmarc Étaín (‘The Wooing of Étaín’) c.800-1000 is a colourful tale of romantic intrigues and magical spells, featuring perhaps the greatest femme fatale in Irish literature. Based on recurring shape-shifting, we find hints of belief in metempsychosis – the transmigration of souls – preceding Christianity. Only fully translated in 1930, Irish Revivalists such as W.B. Yeats were besotted by the intrigues. Here the Tuatha Dé are reduced from the giants of the ‘Second Battle’ to ethereal síde, ‘faeries’, living in síd mounds, familiar in folklore today.

When Midir of the Tuatha Dé demands that Aengus his foster son gives him the most beautiful woman in Ireland in compensation for the infliction of an accidental injury trouble begins. She is Étaín, who Aengus ‘earns’ by performing a series of tasks for her father, the high king of Ireland. Aengus then presents her to Midir, who, however, already has a wife in Fúamnach. She does not take kindly to the new arrival, eventually turning her into a giant bluebottle with a magic spell. Even in this altered state Midir finds fulfilment in her company, and the divine Calliphora vomitoria performs various miracles along the way. Furious, Fúamnach summons great winds to drive Midir’s buzzing consort away. Eventually, exhausted, she falls into the drinking vessel of a woman who swallows her and becomes pregnant, reproducing Étaín 1,002 years after her original birth.

The beauty is then married off to another high king of Ireland Eochu. Unfortunately his brother Ailill, upon setting eyes on her, falls hopelessly in love, and starts to waste away. Ailill confesses his feelings to her whereupon the blood returns to his cheeks. In order to cure him fully the obliging Étaín assents to an amorous exchange, but insists, for the sake of propriety, this should not take place under the king’s roof. In the meantime, the apparently immortal Midir puts Ailill to sleep and assumes his form, revealing to Étaín their ancient love when they finally meet. She agrees to give it another go, but only if Eochu agrees to sell her. Naturally he refuses, only for Midir to win her from him in a game of chess after bluffing for the first two rounds. Still Eochu refuses to give up his wife, defending Tara, the seat of the Irish high king, with all his men. Undeterred, Midir miraculously appears inside Tara where the lovers embrace and transmogrify into swans that escape through the skylight together. In response Eochu orders his men to dig up every síd mound in the country. At this stage Midir plays a trick on him by returning a replica of Étaín, who, it transpires, is actually Eochu’s daughter, Étaín having been pregnant with her.

Eochu’s fate is in an interesting inversion of the Oedipus myth, and echoes Jung’s understanding of the collective unconscious whereby ignorance and unawareness carry the greatest offence. As van der Post puts it: ‘in Greek myth, legend and art, the villain is always the ignorance where it serves as representative of inner unawareness.’ In this tale the folly lies in denying the expression of love, especially when the Tuatha Dé are involved. Nevertheless Étaín is a moral exemplar bound by social conventions reflected in her refusal to dishonour Eochu’s home with Ailill whose recovery reflects the benefit of giving vent to passions. Also, Étaín only agrees to return to Midir if Eochu consents. Having lost Étaín in chess he welches on the bet and is punished by unconsciously committing the taboo of incest. The enduring image is of two swans, who in nature mate for life, joyfully escaping. The idea of beauty inhabiting the generally disparaged bluebottle attests to a joyful relationship with Nature. As the Eesha-Upanishad says: ‘Of a certainty the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.’

III – A Change in Attitude

From 900 there is a shift in the name of the Túatha Dé, crystallizing as Túatha Dé Danann, ‘the Peoples of the Goddess Danu’ in about 1200 which Williams suggests may have been ‘a deliberate attempt at inducing mental estrangement’. In the later middle ages we find pseudo-histories such as ‘The Book of Invasions’ (Lebor Gabála Érenn) c.1150 which tells the story of Ireland and its various waves of settlers and invaders from the time of Noah’s Flood to the era of the Gaels or ‘Milesians’, meaning the ethnic Irish themselves. Here the Tuatha Dé are stripped of godlike qualities and are instead imagined as a race of pagan necromancers preceding the Gaels. Historicising the Tuatha Dé also winnowed the creative possibilities available to poets, and Irish language literature thereafter fails to scale the earlier heights. The Tuatha Dé become darker presences usually associated with human failings.

Suspicion extends to their bewitching music. In one episode of the ‘The Colloquy of the Elders’ (Accalam na Senórach) c.1220 the character of St. Patrick expresses these reservations: ‘Good it was,’ said Patrick, ‘were it not indeed for the magical melody of the síde in it.’ Yet their creative presence is still acknowledged in traditional Irish music: the word for session is derived from síde.

‘The Tragic Death of the Children of Lir’ (Oidheadh Chloinne Lir) c.1450 is a tale familiar around the world. The story involves a wicked step-mother Aoife whose magic transforms Lir’s two sets of twins from his first wife into swans. Forced to endure what is portrayed as an unhappy fate their resolve is strengthened by one of them, Fionnghuala, who seems to have an inner knowledge of Christian revelation. Eventually they meet a saintly monk called Mochaomhóg who baptises them, whereupon the spell is broken and they become aged human beings who die and ascend to heaven. It is worthwhile comparing this to the ‘Wooing of Étaín’, where shape-shifting into swans is an affirmative escape into Nature.

But according to Laurens van der Post:

the bird always and everywhere from Stone-Age man to Stravinsky has been the image of the inspiration, the unthinkable thought which enters our selves like a bird unsolicited out of the blue, it was for Jung … one of the signs of confirmation from nature that sustain the spirit in its search for enlightenment and emancipation from the floating world of appearances.

In ‘The Tragic Death of the Children of Lir’ a censorious cage is placed over the bird of imaginative possibilities, which fitted neatly with the domineering Catholicism of independent Ireland. The worth of life as a swan is rejected, as a dissipated human form is preferred, as long as salvation is available from the one true Apostolic Church.

‘The Tragic Deaths of Children of Tuireann’ (Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann) c.1500 returns to the subject-matter of the ‘Second Battle of Moytura’, but at this point internal rivalry bedevils the Tuatha Dé, leading to the murder of Cian, the father of Lug, by the sons of Tuireann. The sons attempt to bury Cian’s mangled remains six times but each time the Earth rejects his body, illustrating Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious where nature itself rises up against a nefarious deed. This idea is also found in Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin (1868) where a murdered husband haunts the landscape of those responsible for the deed, his wife and her lover who are driven to commit suicide together.

Lug intuits that the sons are responsible for the deed and succeeds in gaining a commitment for them to pay éric, the legal compensation for homicide. Unsurprisingly the sons meet a sorry fate in their quests to satisfy this, but perhaps more interesting is the depiction of the Tuatha Dé as an enfeebled race incapable of contending with the Formorians. The illusion to the fractious politics of that period is obvious, and as Gaelic Irish culture crumbled after the Tudor conquest and subsequent plantations the vibrancy of the side diminished in parallel, until their resuscitation, ironically mainly via descendants of the conquerors, during the Irish Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

September 7, 2018
Artist of the Month – Moira Tierney

[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”20″ gal_title=”Featured Artist of the Month: Moira Tierney”]

The beach is one of the few places you’re going to see New Yorkers immobile, supine, sleeping in the sun … everyone piles onto the F train to Coney Island, or the Q to Brighton Beach, or the A to the Rockaways, with the coolers of food and booze, the umbrellas, the boomboxes … the lifeguards at the Rockaways are the handiest with their whistles (Rip Tide Alert); Brighton Beach has the all-seasons Russian swimmers (Odessa represent); Coney Island is bearing up under the assault of developers, who haven’t quite managed to kill the vibe (Reggae and Old School House on the Boardwalk) … there’s always someone hefting a cooler of nutcrackers down along the beach (you mightn’t know exactly what’s in them, but the buzz is guaranteed), as well as beer (cold beer! holodni pivo!) and bottled water … the chislers go mad when they see the ice-cream cart approaching (also hauled down along the beach in the soft sand) … after the summer eases on out and the streets lose their heat, the boardwalk is still buzzin …

Moira Tierney is a film-maker based in Dublin and NY. You can find out more about her work here:
http://moiratierney.net/ + http://www.mexindex.ie/artist/moira-tierney/?_sf_s=moira+tierney

September 7, 2018
Two Poems

Anthony Caleshu’s forthcoming book, from which this pair of poems is taken, is titled, A Dynamic Exchange between Us (Shearsman, 2019). He is the author of three previous books of poems, including The Victor Poems (Shearsman, 2015), and Of Whales: in Print, in Paint, in Sea, in Stars, in Coin, in House, in Margins (Salt, 2010; named a ‘book of the year’ in The Daily Telegraph). He is also the author of three books of criticism on contemporary poetry, most recently as editor of In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan UP, 2018)). He is Professor of Poetry and Programme Manager for the MA Creative Writing at University of Plymouth.

September 5, 2018
An Irish Poet Attains Greatness

I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O’Siadhail’s book-length poem, The Five Quintets, is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O’Siadhail’s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter a paradise of compromise, love and engagement, whilst crisscrossing the disabling specialisms that bedevil our time.

Inspired in particular by Dante Alighieri’s thirteenth century journey through heaven, hell and purgatory in The Divine Comedy, O’Siadhail introduces us to men especially, and women, who have shaped, and distorted, our modernity. The Italian poet himself is channelled, offering to guide O’Siadhail’s journey through hell to ‘heaven’s vertigo’, ‘And summing up an era work the seam / Between the modern world and its aftermath’.

T.S Eliot’s influence also lurks in the poem’s title – an allusion to his The Four Quartets – which, O’Siadhail writes in the introduction, ‘feels it needed a fifth part’, as it ‘never really gets to the joy and let-go of an imagined heaven’. The influence of that American poet is held in check, as this literary shark, ‘demands an absolute / To order seas of doubt which rage inside’.

Moral absolutists are, without fail, scorned in O’Siadhail’s schema. The heaven which he glimpses is never fixed, but in play, and informed by the principle of uncertainty. Similarly, utopia, ‘no place’, is a term frequently used to denigrate those theorists whose intellectual pride obscures a vision of an elusive paradise.

O’Siadhail’s muses are numerous, but ‘Madame Jazz’, an earlier incarnation, acts as a Virgil-like sidekick throughout.

Although each sacred book’s a lip-read score,
Improvising there is always more;
You jazz on what’s our own and our rapport.

Each solo and ensemble of a piece,
Grooves and tempos shifting without cease,
We flourish in a syncopated peace.

In all our imperfections we advance,
Trusting in creation’s free-willed chance;
Sweet Madam Jazz, in you we are the dance.

Her gyrations allow O’Siadhail to fix on a horizon in constant, though not immediately apparent, motion.

In the final section, we also encounter Dante’s Beatrice, who perhaps best captures the rupture which O’Siadhail’s work seeks to heal:

You mortals down below can fail to see
how marvels coded in the universe
reflect the face of God’s infinity.

Too graceless, too constrained, you still immerse
yourselves in steps and miss out on the dance –
the scientists and poets don’t converse

or celebrate each quantum of advance,
discovering a heaven’s cameo
in God, the gambler’s mix of love and chance.

Laurens van der Post wrote: ‘For me the passion of spirit we call “religion”, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.’ O’Siadhail’s work may help restore a moral compass to the great scientific adventures, which have brought mastery over planet Earth, but often with unintended, or unacknowledged, costs. Religious, including many poets, in turn, might no longer see themselves as being in opposition to science, but in fruitful communication with its inherent mysteries.

II – The badger and the fox.

In the first quintet, Making, we meet a host of writers, musicians and artists, who are assigned in haikus (or ‘saikus’ – a neologism) an animal or plant spirit. These are followed by carefully crafted sonnets, combining narrative accounts and artists’ voices, channelled through O’Siadhail. He rhapsodises on the achievements of many, but there are stinging observations on the artistic limitations, or myopia, of others.

Thus, William Wordsworth’s legacy is tainted by a failure to generate the epics he had dreamed of, his Prelude represents: ‘All Foothills to the peaks you never reached’; while Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Youth’s promise’ was diminished ’in opium’s malaise’.

That arch-worrier Franz Kafka is consigned to a ‘sleepless hell’, as O’Siadhail condemns him for feeding ‘… the wizened dreams of minds withdrawn / Your nightmare’s broken trust denying dawn.’ While Pablo Picasso has become, ‘A famous for being famous millionaire’, unhinged by fortune and acclaim.

For others there is reverence, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for never deviating from a desire ‘to stanch life’s sufferings’, and having, ‘No truck with any cause but moral truth’. In his compassion we find a ‘glimpse of paradise’.

Classical composers including Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gustav Mahler and J. S. Bach are also celebrated, but Richard Wagner, ‘a lone wolf’, is condemned for mustering dark nationalistic forces. Elsewhere, O’Siadhail’s George Frederic Handel conveys the sublime balance of his oeuvre.

I only want to hold the music’s line
A flighty psyche focused on its goal
So every voice can shine but not outshine,
From all the woven parts create the whole.

Painters are less evident among these shades, but his description of Francisco Goya’s ‘Third of May’ ’merits retelling:

Where fusiliers have turned their nameless back
And bend to execute their point blank prey;
My lamp of pity lights the victim’s face.

The ‘Third of May’, by Francisco Goya.

Irish readers will be intrigued by his encounters in our literary pantheon. Suitably, W.B. Yeats is depicted as a badger, ‘the churning digger / With its nose close to the ground’. O’Siadhail hails him as ‘the archpriest of sound’, and, unusually, integrates and adapts many of his lines, such as ‘Old lecher with a love on every wing’, from the still smouldering Tower.

But there is a stern rebuke for his promotion of eugenics: ‘scorning base-born products of base beds’, and unwillingness to look beyond a fantastical world that is, ‘dead and gone … That perfect past your mind’s own cul de sac’. Instead O’Siadhail urges: ‘Retrieve best thoughts once shed and then move on’.

Characterised as a badger, W.B. Yeats.

O’Siadhail is similarly conflicted over James Joyce’s legacy, admitting to loving a language ‘burbling up in play’. From one great linguists to another, O’Siadhail tells him he is as good a reader as, ‘you’ll get to understand your punning riverrun’, but counters, ‘I know the charge of words, and yet and yet’.

He wonders if his fellow Jesuit-educated writer’s works hold, ‘a microscope that is too small in scale’, and whether, ‘in the end does anything take flight’. This might come as a relief to those who have baulked at Finnegans Wake’s circumlocutions.

O’Siadhail is suspicious of a character ‘so proud and so obsessed’, for whom others are ‘walk on parts in your world’s play’. He scorns the, ‘dreamlike doodling of an introvert’. But there is high praise indeed for Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses, including a playful pun of his own:

Still once at least, though in a woman’s voice,
I didn’t pun or try to be opaque
But spoke my shortest playful work of praise
And yes, in Molly’s yes I did reJoyce.

The other two Irish writers we meet are Patrick Kavanagh, ‘A kamikaze trusting in God’s wind’, who, ‘In hungry times’, paid the price’, for being a ‘peeping Tom who lusts for paradise’; along with praise for Brian Friel’s ‘impish wit’.

Notably absent are Seamus Heaney (who has perhaps been canonized prematurely?), and Samuel Beckett. Elsewhere O’Siadhail has criticised the interiority of Modernists, who refused to take responsibility ‘for shaping a wider meaning’. He continues:

Apart from the risk of solipsism and plain self-indulgence, there is the risk of turning poetry into a kind of private piety, which ends up marginalising poetry or branding it as some kind of academic pursuit not appropriate to the ordinary reader of books.

Refreshingly, however all-encompassing his themes, O’Siadhail’s language is never self-indulgent, and always endeavours to inform.

III – ‘The Dismal Science’

O’Siadhail tells the story of the making and undoing of our modernity by theorists and movers and shakers, as he seeks to reshape our current approaches. The self-imposed constraints of metre, and often rhyme, bring a pleasant economy of expression.

O’Siadhail’s ambition to tell the story of our time in The Five Quintet recalls the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which draws together the mythologies that informed an understanding of the ancient world in order to forge a new consciousness. Here the Classical titans give way to seminal figures such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, J. M. Keynes, Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen, along with men of commerce, who are today often vemerated as heroes.

The bargain struck, the business done,
The dealer’s will and drive for wealth,
Our new concern with number one.

One self-interested specimen on display is Ireland’s own Michael Fingleton:

Still bent on short-term deals to boost
A bottom line. A bonus-gained,
Already on your way to ruin
All caution to the winds – who cares?
Ambitious tiger burning bright
And brazen in your riot-run
You do not know the dust you’ll bite.

It seems unlikely O’Siadhail sought legal advice on the potential for defamation in this section. It would certainly make for quite a trial to find the poet in the dock against the disgraced banker. A defence of justification should be available for the following lines:

Small loaners find you’ll go to law
To take your pound of flesh to pay
What’s owed; for bigger borrowers
You bend or buck to make the rules,
Indulge whatever debts occur.

There is a nuanced treatment of Adam Smith’s contribution to economic theory. Laissez faire, permits ‘the hidden hand’ to operate, leading to competition which generates efficiencies, but which at all times requires vigilance against ‘crafty dealers’ in league, ‘to fix a price and profit by intrigue’.

O’Siadhail’s ‘modern mind’ cannot understand, however, Smith’s failure to rail against children being harnessed in black holes ‘Deep down in Durham’s shafts and pits’. He also points to the irony of merchants, ‘Whose mean rapacity you taunt’, adopting Smith as their first forebear.

O’Siadhail has interesting reflections on Robert Malthus, who may yet be vindicated in his prediction that food production capacity will not keep pace with the demand of a growing population:

Your thesis bites so near the bone.
Malthusian views now haunt our thoughts;
These times will know a darker tone.

Is this the onset of a devastating Climate Change he is referring to?

O’Siadhail is conflicted in his appreciation of Karl Marx, hailing him as a visionary who foresees ‘as no one else had seen’, that four hundred billionaires would hold just half our wealth, alongside the ‘constant gyres of boom and bust’, apparent in late capitalism.

Karl Marx, ‘a know-all coldness’.

But according to O’Siadhail, the Communism that Marx imagines contains a core failing evident in its designer, ‘a know-all coldness at your core’. Indeed, being a ‘know-all’ is an oft-repeated barb, leading to the delusion of utopia. This point is central to O’Siadhail’s diagnosis of what has brewed many of our present troubles. Thus Marx is condemned for failing to conceive of compromise, ‘Where conflicts would be reconciled’.

We also meet J.M. Keynes who learns by listening to his peers, and is thus lionised as a ‘Soft changer, saint of step by step’, who recognises how, often, only government stimuli will lift an economy out of the doldrums:

The system does not cure itself;
So maybe it needs money lent
To make it flow and multiply

Far less favourable is O’Siadhail’s assessment of Milton Friedman, another ‘know-all’, whose rigour ‘will room no doubt / Your mind demands all black and white’. While acknowledging he served up some neglected thoughts, O’Siadhail chides him for using Keynes’s ‘one defect’ – of failing to appreciate the significance of monetary supply – to justify opposition to all state interference with the ‘hidden hand’.

Instead we find: ‘Free flow finance gives quick-fix gains / But blows up bubbles that must burst’, where, ‘The wily then are winners all’. O’Siadhail plumbs for the Scandinavian laws: ‘Where weak need not go to the wall’.

One Scandinavian theorist we meet is Thorstein Veblen, who reveals an acute understanding of why workers are not always sympathetic to Marxist ideas.

Society does not cohere in hate–
All workers really want to emulate
Their boss – the weak are would-be rich at heart;
If Marx had not been wrong and me not right
The poor would tear society apart.

O’Siadhail sees a need for more than Marxist materialism to meet the challenge of inequality. The height of wisdom arrives from a woman, and ‘cub economist’, Kathryn Tanner, who finds in the ‘love-dream born of Bethlehem’ the possibility of mending the distortions of the market place.

Tanner, through O’Siadhail, says:

Is this utopian, I hear you ask,
A heaven here on earth, a hopeless task,
Another revolution run roughshod?
O no! It’s here and now we must uphold
The common right of all to gifts of God.

This is perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Christianity of this world’, grounded in earthly challenges, rather than lofty metaphysics. One might also discern the influence of his intellectual brother-in-arms the theologian David Ford.

IV – The Art of the Possible

The next section, entitled Steering, meditates on good governance. O’Siadhail decries the fantasists of left and right, while bemoaning ‘tweedle dee’ and ‘tweedle dum’ politics, such as we find in Ireland. He warns: ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy.’

O’Siadhail’s continues to inveigh against ‘know-all’ attitudes, warning the reader to guard against the real sympathies of utopians.

Fear ideas that outreach the heart,
Chilled compassion of the ideologue.
What purports to pity broken lives
Often hides a know-all arrogance
That wants to own the future and the past,
So refuses, starting from the now.
Greedy for the perfect all create
Hells of blood and soil and golden age.

Readers might be intrigued by his descriptions of Margaret Thatcher, ‘Forthright Grantham grocer’s girl’, as an autocrat. Her parvenus attitude reflects Thorstein Veblen’s earlier insights into the aspirational, “would be rich”, working class:

Some who shin the tall and greasy pole
Carry in their bones a sympathy,
Want to spare all comers such a climb;
Others vaunt their courage and condemn
Weakness they had fought to overcome,
See all frailness as a threat to power.

Margaret Thatcher: tearing apart society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.

In O’Siadhail’s account Thatcher is prompted by Keith Joseph, ‘To rethink all in Milton Friedman’s words’. This leads to the tearing of society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.

There is also an intriguing description of the arch-networker, Jean Monnet, one of the original architects of the European Community. O’Siadhail traces the current fraying of the Union right back to the failure of Monnet and others to conjure, beyond simply commerce and trade, a European identity, based on ‘deeper bonds and ties’.

Perhaps writing in the wake of the Greek and Irish bailouts, O’Siadhail seems wary of ‘Brussels’ one-fits-all’ approach:

Starred blue flag so dutifully raised,
Still not fluttering in our chambered hearts
Heaven is no timeless superstate.

In Canto 5 of this section, ‘A Beckoned Dream’, O’Siadhail reveals a political paradise comprising of William Ewart Gladstone, who accepted Irish Home Rule, Mahatma Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold, the ‘United Nations’ guiding star of peace’, Nelson Mandela and, less convincingly, former Irish President Mary McAleese, who is commended for building sectarian bridges among ‘Ghosts of Europe’s once religious wars.’

I found this choice puzzling as McAleese was more of a figurehead as Irish President, and did less to interrogate the rising tide of inequality in Ireland than her successor Michael D. Higgins. Moreover, McAleese was an electoral candidate (in the 1987 General Election) for Fianna Fail under the corrupt leadership of Charles Haughey, who also tactically rejected the reconciliatory Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and her Presidential candidature came during the tenure of another tainted figure in Bertie Ahern.

I would prefer to have seen greater emphasis on environmental responsibility in this cockpit, as humanity stares down the barrel of self-inflicted ecological collapse. Perhaps some will be frustrated by the idea that political change cannot arrive more quickly than in ‘Fractions less imperfect than before’, considering the challenges that now press against us, but his emphasis on the value of dialogue is surely correct: ‘Gaze-to-gaze in our humanity / Enmity we can thaw … ’

V – God and Science

The two final cantos Finding and Meaning, covering Science and Philosophy, might stretch most readers more than the first three; although O’Siadhail never succumbs to drawing too liberally from his rich pallet of languages and knowledge. It will be intriguing to encounter scientific responses to his account of the great leaps forward in our understanding of the universe.

Following his rejection of the fixity of political utopias, O’Siadhail sees a cosmos born of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, as opposed to a ‘knotty crossword yielded clue by clue’ that is capable of completion. Here we encounter a God that plays dice.

In Meaning, O’Siadhail continues to riff (in Dante’s own terza rima) on the unknowableness of the divine:

Allow our God a purpose not our own
and here outside a timeless roundelay
we dance within our fragile ecozone

Here we meet the shades of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and a sneering Friedrich Nietzsche, who is condemned for a lack of compassion, and an unwillingness to compromise, yet:

Despite his detached mind’s strange solitaire,
for all mad Nietzche’s overreaching claims,
his genius shows how humans overbear;

Next come Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre – dismissed as a ‘a braggadocio of angst that sinks / to vanish in the nothingness of hell’ – Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricouer, Said Nursi, and Jean Vanier, who wonders ‘What if the weak become our first concern / what if such love decides our balance sheet’.

Vanier also offers encouragement to the poet:

this poem may be a slow fuse to guide
the moments in our psyches which allow
an amplitude, a deeper second sight.

Then Hannah Arendt again condemns:

Utopians who weave their gossamer
ideal never see the here and now;
for such far sight the present blur,

We also meet O’Siadhail’s first wife, who died some years ago after a long illness:

In your compassion, Bríd, I think I grow
and understand how only love can heal;
I learn to feel what others undergo.

Finally, there is a dreamy vision of Paradise in which O’Siadhail travels along a path between two parallel rows of trees each ‘interwoven with its counterpart’, ‘in curves of paradox which shape the light’.

VI – Poetic Futures

O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets synthesises many of the great intellectual questions of our time. In so doing O’Siadhail fits Robert Graves’s description of a poet as, ‘the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster’s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that.’ O’Siadhail keeps asking the big questions, having refused the easy chair of academia, where poetry often becomes an obscure word game, and a private members’s club. Authentic poetry may still be difficult, but this arises from considering profound questions.

The length of The Five Quintets also poses the question as to whether long form, epic, poetry may come back into vogue.

Previously, the Canadian literary critic Northrope Frye argued that Edgar Allan Poe’s essay ‘The Poetic Principle’, published posthumously in 1850, had a ‘tremendous influence on future poetry’. Poe proposed that a long poem was a contradiction in terms, and that all existing long poems of genuine quality consisted of moments of intense poetic experience, ‘stuck together with a connective tissue of narrative or argument which was really versified prose.’

Frye regarded this as preposterous, but a preference for brevity, which may mask a lack of ambition or vision, is still apparent.

May we revisit a Romantic Age to recover long form poetry, when poets, such as Coleridge and Shelley, were participants in scientific debates? Indeed the word science was only coined in the 1830s. Since then it has become the preserve of specialists.

The master poet. Image (c) Julia Hembree Smith.

I was a little disappointed not to meet the shade of Shelley, who had less than thirty years to impart his genius. Perhaps O’Siadhail shrank from the apparent violence of his near namesake’s earlier pronouncements on the ‘necessity’ of atheism and the revolutionary sentiments of much of his early verse, but over the course of his short life his outlook mellowed.

Just as Shelley’s challenged vested interests, similarly I suspect The Five Quintets will make some readers distinctly uncomfortable: first, it exposes gaping holes in most of our appreciation of the wonders of human thought and creation; secondly, it challenges the social and economic structures we live under; thirdly, it dismisses the delusional quick-fixes of utopians; finally, he challenges a prevalent view that religion and science are irreconcilable.

I also anticipate that the poem will only be given the credit it deserves in Ireland once it has received the imprimatur of international critics.

September 1, 2018
Sunset Over a Seizing Civilisation

This piece came from a little sound I heard in my head, an atmosphere, which I wanted to explore.

First, I made myself a soundbed to play in, and allowed two journeying violin lines to hatch out of my imagination; then I captured them in a digital suspension, wherein I gave one of them a delay and placed them in a pleasant and warm space.

The piece still surprises me when I listen back to it; it went in unexpected directions. But then, I wasn’t planning for it to be any way in particular; I set out to explore in the atmosphere I had created: to see what I could find.

I barely remember making it.

The file tells me the date alright, and I found it on my computer, so I know it must have been me. I have found this is a useful tactic for keeping track of recordings, as my brain cannot organise like this.

My handwritten notes tend to make sense only within about thirty minutes of completion. I often forget having played things.

Once I have worked on something a bit I will do a ‘save as’, and give it some sort of name.

The other day, I had a difficult morning and decided to ‘be productive’, as a way of dealing with my emotions. That was when I found this piece, recorded three weeks earlier. I cleaned up the files, and mixed it a little. It felt like a healthy coping mechanism, and tasted as fresh as spring sorrel.

I often wonder how much denial is involved in my creative process. This piece in particular has a very unconscious feel, revealed in the following elements: I barely remember making it – suggesting I entered a deep flow state while playing; I find it hard to remember how it sounds when I think of it; and it takes an unexpected turn.

I seem to have succeeded in tricking my own brain.

On the other hand, denial is such a powerful force. Maybe I did plan it out and have conveniently blocked this out. How can I speak authentically about my own subjective, mercurial mind?

I consider the unconscious, flow state, to be hugely important in the creative process, and very nourishing to engage with, but I could just be fooling myself completely and creating psychological scaffolding – it is impossible to be sure about any of this.

Home EKG rigs are getting more and more affordable. It could be so interesting to measure brainwaves during different states of consciousness. On the other hand, purchasing one of these definitely involves an unsustainable civilisation squeezing out yet more material goods… Hang on, where did I put my fiddle?

LISTEN to ‘Sunset Over a Seizing Civilisation’

Cora Venus Lunny is Cassandra Voices’ Musician of the Month for July.

July 1, 2018
The Origins of Poetic Creation

We can only imagine how poetry entered human consciousness. I intuit that its emergence was linked to the first use of fire, that most seminal of technologies, whose devouring mysteries transfix us with a spirit that endows our own.

I see one among a band awakening from a dream, and entering a trance. She incants a tale of the fire’s origin, her words embodied in physical expression, which inspires the band to adapt the tools to summon the first, intentional spark.

In the flickering light that ensues the poet appears to shift shape. She is a streak of light morphing into the appearance of other animals of the forest. Her words are not common speech, but arrive in measured cadences, uncannily familiar to a mesmerised audience.

The tale she recounts, though fantastical, resonates with commonplace experiences and includes practical insights. As the narrative arcs to a point of heightened tension the poet breaks the spell with a joke, seizing the assembly with laughter, but a few remain silent.

Transfixed by the incendiary words, the band begins to chant; eventually a chorus chimes, integrating non-verbal melodies. Next a rhythm is struck, then a communal dance previously employed to intimidate a long extinct primeval beast, still lurking in our nightmares.

For a moment the forest itself is convulsed by these energies. Afterwards, or even coinciding with this, a visual representation of the performance is crafted. It is kept as a sacred object for subsequent rites.

Out of this poetic source I see four springs generating story, song, dance, and visual art. These intertwine and will eventually merge into an oceanic consciousness. The continuity between words, music and dance is apparent, while the symbol is not only the origin of painting and sculpture, but also of the word, ‘made flesh’, in script, which over time migrates from pictographic representation to alphabets, rejoining and completing its journey along the great river of poetry.

The spoken word is an animating spirit and crucial catalyst joining language to a musical faculty. The written word records and even amplifies this. Only later does abstract, disembodied reasoning in the form of philosophy arrive.

Musical Language

According to Walter Ong: ‘More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness’. The Greeks were not the first to develop it, but improved on earlier models by representing vowels for the first time, making literacy far easier to achieve.

Through this the Greeks derived great technical and intellectual benefits, but it brought the danger of abstraction, and a distancing from Nature. Socrates, a confirmed townsman, claimed he had nothing to learn from fields and trees, but only men.

In writing we encounter the dominance of the written word itself, a logo-centrism, which finds us in the narrow purview of the left hemisphere of the brain.

But according to Iain McGilchrist the origins of language lie ‘in the empathic communication medium of music and the right hemisphere, where it is deeply connected with the body.’ There is no conflict he says between this belief, and the idea language developed out of gesture: ‘Music is deeply gestural in nature: dance and the body are everywhere implied in it.’ He continues: ‘To the extent that the origins of language lie in music, they lie in a certain sort of gesture, that of dance: social non-purposive (useless).’

The origin of language, therefore, should not be seen in pure utilitarian terms.

“Useless” play in language is the stirring of poetry, but a creation that is the catalyst of Art, which acts as a form of revelation, where metaphor, according to McGilchrist, ‘links language to life’. The absence of utility in poetry is therefore superficial. It is a creative spark, bringing perception at new vantages, and sight through different lenses. Art is the resolution of the image.

Human communication is not uniquely ingenious, but we display a particular ability to measure speech in song and poetry – a mathematical sensibility in communication.

According to McGilchrist, what distinguishes our music is that ‘no other creature begins to synchronise the rhythm, or blend the pitch, of its utterances with that of its fellows, in the way that human singing does instinctively’. It would appear that we gravitate to a musical order that was established in the West by Pythagoras, who divined that a musical note produced by a string of fixed tension could be converted into its octave if the length of the string was reduced in half, and its fifth when reduced by two thirds.

Unlike ourselves, most bird species have a syrinx in their throats, allowing two notes to be sung simultaneously, as they exhale and inhale. But birdsong, however bewitching, is unmeasured. The dawn chorus is an unintentional unity, representing disconnected currents emanating from the varying concerns of often competing species; harmonious only as the voice of one Nature, spiritus mundi, or Gaia.

At its lofty height, poetry combines the order of music with profound questioning and metaphorical vision. This is a mysterious hallmark of humanity.

Grammars of Creation

Artistic beauty in its ideal, unrealisable, state is the expression of the diffuse and infinitely complex voices within Nature’s harmony. What we consider aesthetically pleasing derives from an ascetic order in music that finds an analogy in all artistic forms. The spark is poetry.

Poetry is the lute through which the voice of Nature sounds. But the instrument may be misshapen, perhaps through misuse. More tragic is when the pitch of beauty is too high for an audiences to hear.

What is poetic has a dual nature: generative and disruptive. Just as in Nature Heraclitus envisaged a fire of renewal, so poetry devours and renews. Philosophy may define beauty, including justice, at any point in time, but this is primarily exegesis rather than creation. Thus Yeats argued ‘whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent’.

Nature demands that plants and animals of diffuse species assist one another, but we appear to be alone in imaginatively standing outside our immediate frame, situating ourselves in the lives of others through fictions, as we see first in cave paintings.

The paintings in Chauvet Cave in France were begun approximately thirty thousand years ago.

To convey such imaginings required novel linguistic constructions. George Steiner points to a grammar of creation in the use of a future tense, allowing us ‘to discuss possible events on the day after one’s funeral or in stellar space a million years hence’.

This, he says, looks to be specific to homo sapiens, as do ‘the use of subjunctive and of counter-factual modes’, which are kindred to future tenses. Steiner intuits that these emerged at the end of the Ice Age to discuss food storage. He links this to the discovery of animal breeding and agriculture.

But I see a capacity for inter-subjectivity, including a subjunctive ‘if’ clause, arriving earlier: in the symbolic language of poetry, rather than to facilitate practical exchange. To chart this grammatical genesis I turn to Rene Girard’s idea of the scapegoat, which, he argued, emerged as a means of settling differences arising out of competition acquisition of scarce resources.

‘Man is not naturally a carnivore’, Girard writes, ‘human hunting should not be thought of in terms of animal predation.’ He argues that animal domestication arose out of the use of animals in sacrifice, not as food: ‘What impelled men to hunt was the search for a reconciliatory victim’.

After mining anthropological literature he found a ‘common denominator’ of a ‘collective murder’ of a scapegoat, attributed to animals or men. To conceive of this reconciliatory victim required a subjunctive ‘if’ clause, enabling the band to channel their grievances away from self-annihilation.

When an animal victim is chosen instead of a human and ritually slaughtered the smoke rising from the sacrifice is seen to appease the gods. Thus, in the Odyssey after Odysseus returns in disguise to Ithaca, he shares a meal with his loyal servant Eumeaus who performs the necessary rites of sacrifice:

The swineherd, soul of virtue, did not forget the gods.
He began the rite by plucking tufts from the porkers’ head,
threw them into the fire and prayed to all the powers,
“Bring him home, our wise Odysseus, home at last!”
Then raising himself full-length, with an oak log
he’d left unsplit he clubbed and stunned the beast
and it gasped out its life …
The men slashed its throat, singed the carcass,
quickly quartered it all, and then the swineherd,
cutting first strips for the gods from every limb,
spread them across the thighs, wrapped in sleek fat,
and sprinkling barley over them, flung them on the fire

In Christianity this culminates in the ‘lamb of good that takes away the sins of the world.’ The language of these fictions, therefore, appears to originate in symbolic representation, which is a hallmark of poetry.

These new grammars imparted a capacity for planning, and an understanding of natural cycles, which can lead to the outlook of the suzerain: the ‘keeper or overlord’ personified by Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, who says: ‘Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent’.

But it also engenders empathy with other life forms, which recalls the Isha Upanishad: ‘Of a certainty the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.’

McGilchrist writes: ‘I believe that the great achievement of human kind is not to have perfected utility through banding together to form groups, but to have learnt through our faculty for inter-subjective experience, and our related ability to imitate, to transcend utility altogether.’ That is the essence of true poetry.

Poetry and Justice

Art often awakes sensitivity to injustice indirectly, as the eighteenth century Swiss philosopher Johan Sulzer observed:

Wisdom knows about everything that man ought to be; it points the path to perfection and happiness which is related to it. But it cannot give strength to go down that often arduous path. The fine arts make the path smooth and adorn it with flowers which by their delightful scent, irresistibly entice the wanderer to continue on his way.

A shift in sensibility created by exposure to the beauty of Art operates unpredictably on ethical choices as, unlike a rational choice, shifts in sentiment rarely involve a decisive, eureka moment, when an argument is settled.

Rather, encountering beauty may lead to impulsive moral decisions based on heightened sensitivity, as where a person refrains from eating meat, when it does not ‘feel’ right.

Encountering a crowning achievement in music or poetry may awaken action in an apparently unrelated domain. Great music, and other Art, stills the mind, and engenders benevolence.

In divine rapture the poet builds a mythology out of imaginative materials located in Nature, and in the process incubates conventions and laws: ‘the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ wrote Percy Shelley.

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822.

Firm moral convictions may bring a poet into conflict with temporal power, and demagogues appropriate and distort mythologies. The false poet, and prophet, appeals to the vanity of a sovereign.

A poet may feel compelled, nonetheless, to compromise with a patron – even a tyrant – to allow their work to reach fruition. In Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ the artist mocks a haughty ruler before posterity:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

A true poet’s opposition to political power is, however, based on principle, not an anarchic reflex, and he may support a wise and just regime. For example, Dante favoured the Holy Roman Empire, as he saw a strong transnational authority as necessary to maintain peace in the Italian peninsula. A contemporary poet could support the notion of a European Community, or the United Nations, for similar reasons.

Poetry remains a vital commodity in any culture, foregrounding and guiding other artistic endeavours, channelling empathy, and forging justice. Defining its nature is elusive, and perhaps futile, but it is apparent that philosophers are increasingly drawn to its revelation.

It is not restricted to composition of metrical verse: any writer aspires to it. Alasdair MacIntyre writes: ‘Knowing how to go on and to go further in the use of the expressions of a language is that part of the ability of every language-user which is poetic. The poet by profession merely has the ability to a preeminent degree’.

Shelley saw poetry in metrical verse as being its ‘imperial form’, but recognised its presence elsewhere. ‘The parts of a composition may’ even be poetical, ‘without the composition as a whole being poetical’, he said. Poetry inhabits the best prose as a flow that carries a listener into the vision of the writer.

Poetry is perhaps best defined by what it is not, which is the everyday speech often imitated in novels and plays. It aspires to originality and even prophecy, as Aristotle says: ‘it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen’.

It has an essential orality. Thus Yeats wrote: ‘Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble and much pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by friend, lover by beloved.’

The Sacred Spring

Poetic language need not be extravagant, but the true poet is never entirely in control of composition. Thus Socrates complained that a man cannot accede ‘to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses.’ This seeming loss of consciousness in a deep flow state may lead to extravagant language, but this is unintentional.

Kathleen Raine points to the lofty style that distinguishes poetry from regular speech. She notes how Jung, who generally disliked high-flown speech, found that when what he called ‘mana, daemons, gods or the unconscious speaks in words its utterances are in a high style, hieratic, often archaic, grandiose, removed as it is possible to be from the speech of that common man the everyday self’.

Raine identifies this with a primal poetic impulse she encountered in the composition of folk songs: ‘The singing of the ballad was by no means in common speech. It was extremely slow, dignified and highly mannered’. She concludes that: ‘It is a mark of imaginative inspiration and content to write in a high and mannered style, removed from common speech; as it is of the absence of imaginative participation to write either in a conversational tone or to write in a deliberately vulgar idiom.’

Raine further opines that: ‘What was written for the sake of easy comprehension is precisely that part of poetry which becomes incomprehensible within a few years.’ This we find in the lyrics of most contemporary popular music, which sounds dated almost at the point of release.

On the other hand, today we see a widespread trend whereby difficulty is equated with quality. This may originate in contemporary economic structures, where many professional poets survive on government grants, and as academic specialists. Linguistic obscurity may be a cynical calculation, which contributes to a widespread, and tragic, alienation from poetry.

It appears to have a meaning and form internal to itself, beyond any individual poet. Jahan Ramazani observed, ‘time and again’, how poems, ‘reasserted themselves as poems even in the moments of seeming to fuse with their others.’

Similarly, when Dadaists and Russian futurists tried to fabricate new languages they found their imagined syntaxes led back to established moulds. Any poet travels a path overlaid with uncountable footprints guiding their course. The poem knows where it wishes to travel in the anticipatory stillness of creation. The great challenge in today’s digital fog is to encounter this tranquillity.

Poetry in Language

Many poets agree that composition is an ongoing revelation, conventionally attributed to the muse. But in the discussion of poetry there is perhaps too great an emphasis on individual genius, although the individual experience cannot be discounted.

We find in creation a dialectic between individual expression and the treasures hidden in all languages. The linguist Edward Sapir suggests that it is intrinsic to language every one of which ‘is itself a collective art of expression.’ He asserts that ‘An artist utilises the native esthetic resources of his speech. He may be thankful if the given palette of colours is rich, if the springboard is light. But he deserves no special credit for felicities that are the language’s own.’

Similarly Marcel Duchamp wrote: ‘Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ‘readymades aided’ and also works of assemblage.’ The poet, however, renews and recasts these materials, sometimes bringing new colours to the palette, and reviving the use of others.

In some cases we find a mingling of tongues as new words enter languages in neologisms, as in Shakespeare’s heroic contribution to the English language. But this process is fraught with the risk of contrivance. Great poets are not necessarily polyglots, though they often are.

The expression of poetry should not be seen as an evolutionary display of verbal plumage, although troubadours will always seek to enchant. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke firmly rejects meretricious verse. ‘Young man’ he warns:

it’s not about love, when your voice
forces open your mouth – learn to forget

your sudden outburst. That will run out.
True singing is a different breath. A breath
around nothing. A breeze in the god. A wind.

Rainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926.

The mythos of poetry is an intuitive response to life’s challenges, unconnected to the logos of philosophy, or scientific observation.

Its wisdom adds layers to a mystery lying beyond direct inquisition. ‘The abstract is not life’, Yeats wrote on his deathbed, ‘and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence’.

The poet is never in control of the process of composition, and eminent authorities such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Milton have attributed inspiration to their dreams.

Charles Simic criticizes: the assumption … that the poet knows beforehand what he or she wishes to say and that the writing of the poem is the search for the most effective means of gussying up these ideas: if this were correct, poetry would simply repeat what had been said and thought before.’

Untuning the Sky

William Dryden, the first Poet Laureate, proposed in his Essay of Dramaticke Poesie that, ‘if natural causes be more known now than in the time of Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that poesy and other arts may, with the same pains, arrive still nearer to perfection’. Rather than affirming an alternative role for poetry, he was suggesting it should be informed by natural philosophy, as science was referred to until the 1830s.

In fact George Steiner observes a contrary trend: ‘Where the sciences, pure and applied, wherever mathematics came to map, to energize, to expand human experience and possibilities, the retreat from the word proved correlative and ineluctable.’

The greatest poetry looks beyond the real world of immediate perception and reinvents it, travelling at a different pace to the often linear progression of a philosophical argument. Thus the work of hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago may be compared with, and often exceeds in quality, the best available today.

The poetic vision arises from a sensitivity that sees the tears of a sycamore tree, as opposed to its biological classification. Nontheless, the greatest scientists – such as Alexander van Humboldt – have been animated by poetry, and poets, of course, do learn from science.

There are signs of stultifying premeditation as opposed to poetic vision, in Dyrden’s Grand Chorus to ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’ (1687), signalling the Final Judgement.

So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.

The idea of music, which is the expression of harmony, signalling the end of days is troubling, and almost paradoxical. Samuel Johnson described this image as ‘so awful in itself, that it can owe little to poetry; and I could wish the antithesis of music untuning had found some other place’.

*******

A poet can be foolish, even sinister, without this undermining the aesthetic appeal of her work. Poetic ability does not equate with individual moral virtue. Posterity excuses the obnoxious behaviour and statements that are not intrinsic to the poetry itself, assuming Art to rise above the mundane, and that its beauty will engender justice.

Artistic censorship is a grave danger for any society, but in an era of free speech we may be facing greater dangers still, as George Steiner warns: ‘The patronage of the mass media and the free market, the distributive opportunism of mass consumption, could be more damaging to art and to thought than have been the censorious regimes of the past’.

July 1, 2018
My Fellow Americans – A Short Story

When I first moved to Dublin, I thought there were a lot of out-of-shape athletes living in the city. I later learned that my misconception was the same as the basis of a joke that had been topical fifteen or twenty years before I got there.

The joke was about a politician opening a shopping mall but not having been properly briefed by his PA first and thinking that he was opening a gym. I was never told the proper wording. But when I made known my little athletic observation one time to George Sexton, that’s what he told me: “Oh, that’s the same as this joke about the Square in Tallaght.” It wasn’t like him to be dismissive like that, so it emerges from time to time out of the settled silt of the memory of our less remarkable share of moments.

I’d come to Ireland for my Junior Year Abroad, in the early years of the new century. My explanation for going there was simple: I wanted to live in the city of James Joyce’s Ulysses. That’s what I told myself at the time. In retrospect, I know I was looking for love.

I preferred the works of William Faulkner to Joyce but Faulkner’s city of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County don’t exist, so Joyce’s Dublin seemed like the perfect alternative. I made my application and was accepted at Trinity College.

I arrived in the rain in late September and as I struggled to figure out the best means of getting into the city I felt the full and cold lonesomeness of solitary travel. Eventually I found a big blue bus, which took me right to campus, where I’d be staying for the year.

It was on the bus ride in that I first saw the athletes. So, this is Dublin, I thought, looking out the window at the people in the brightly coloured shell-suits, ambling round O’Connell Street looking to score drugs; and I was feeling ever more confused and lonely.

After getting settled in my room, I set out that evening to try and find some of the local character for which Dublin is famed.

*******

The next day, the school had organized an orientation day for us American Juniors and our European equivalents. It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d normally have gone to but when the time came, I was quite relieved. My bar-hopping adventures on the first night had not exactly gone to plan – most of the people to whom I spoke seemed surprised that I would try and make conversation with them.

And when I arrived at the lecture theatre, there they all were: my fellow Americans. It wasn’t so much that I thought I wouldn’t like any of them, it was more that, that wasn’t why I’d come over. I’d declared that I was going to Ireland, to live amongst the Irish. I was looking for something different. Determined though I was, for almost the first three months I spent there, I hung around almost exclusively with two of these orientation-day Americans: Dave and Eddie.

They were there that first day, at the library, like me, looking conspicuous amongst the sensibly dressed Europeans and kids from the Mid-West.

“You guys about ready to bail too?” I said on our way out of the introductory talk, when I saw them diverge from the tour.

They were roommates it turned out and so had met already. Dave, from Southern California, had even managed to source some weed too, so we went back to their room to get high.

A lot of our time there was spent like that, smoking weed – back in my place usually – listening to old jazz records and discussing literature. Often, as evenings wore on, Eddie, who was a Whitman nut, would end up declaiming impressively lengthy sections of Song of Myself; be it in a bar, a party, or even back in one of our rooms. I always felt a little embarrassed, but Dave encouraged it with such seriousness that I never dared reproach or make known my uneasiness. All this was before Eddie lost his marbles and his father had to come get him.

*******

It was the week before we were due to break for Christmas that we first met George Sexton.

George? It seemed so strange a name for an Irishman – it still does: George. But he was Irish all right, that’s for sure.

The name of the bar was Doyle’s, if I recall, a dive joint not far from the college. George was there wearing a cravat with funny little dogs on it, which themselves were wearing cravats and his eyes had that wild look they got sometimes. Eddie had met George in a class once, which prompted him to come over.

“I remember you from that tutorial I went to,” he said by way of greeting as he sat down. This surprised us, as it was unusual for any of our Irish classmates to initiate engagement. That evening we were there with a mixture of English kids, which may have had something to do with him coming over, I guess.

The four of us talked a while on the edge of the group. He asked a lot of questions – interesting ones – his brow stern with thought throughout.

He was silent for a time then and I’d almost forgotten he was there when all of a sudden, he leapt up and roared in this guttural Pan-American brogue, “Butter up my eyes, Shove tin-foil in my Ears, Tell me lies about Vietnam!”

It sounded like those old recordings of Nixon, oddly.

Dave said, “That’s the most dramatic thing I’ve ever seen!”

And then he was gone.

Three days later I was on a plane back home for the holidays. Two weeks of family and snow. But all I could think of was George Sexton. It frightened me a little. I would have to meet him again when I got back.

Which was easier said than done. On my return, I called Dave. He and Eddie had stayed in Ireland over the Christmas period. Dave sounded a little out of sorts when I spoke to him but glad to hear from me nonetheless.

As soon as I met them, it was clear that Eddie was unwell. Dave hovered about nervously, looking to me for a reaction. I tried to suggest to Eddie that he’d maybe had enough to drink as he went to refill his tumbler again. He became angry immediately, spitting poison at me.

His drinking got worse as the weeks went by. He became increasingly messy and had completely given up going to class. Dave, who was quite a bit upset by the whole thing, kept apologizing, saying he hadn’t seen it coming, that suddenly one day he was just like that, drinking whiskey out of his pocket, like a secret, eyes like an injured dog.

They’d spent a deal of time while I was away hanging out with George Sexton, but nobody had seen him much since I got back. Then out of the blue one day, he appeared. He’d heard about the hospital, he said, and tried to visit Eddie but had been told that Eddie had skipped out already.

Things had gotten completely out of hand and of course, Eddie’s father had to come for him in the end. Dave and I were unable to say a word to the man as he looked from us to what had become of his son.

George called by that evening. He was unshaven by a couple of days, which served to accentuate his lips, which were full and red like an open wound amid all those shocking black bristles. I felt repulsed but couldn’t look away from it either – George’s mouth.

“Hello again,” he said to me quietly before asking after Eddie. Eddie – who had already left my thoughts, like all he’d been was a portent of George.

The three of us sat up a while then, trying to remember signs or indications which might have warned us about our friend’s decline. By turns it seemed obvious, then not at all, that things would wind up the way that they did.

“We should meet again,” I said as he got up to leave late on.

“Sure…” he replied, his eyes indecipherable. The thought seemed to impede his ability to put his arms through his sleeves; he stood still, his shoulders pinned back by his heavy coat. “Yes,” he answered finally, poking his hands free.

After that, we saw quite a bit of each other. We’d meet daily at coffee shops, and talk, sometimes for hours. George studied French and Art History. He knew what he liked when it came to literature but it was Art about which he felt most strongly. He dressed impeccably but not just like an old-school dandy or flâneur, learned from a book. He had genuine style, consistent and inimitable. And he moved with such effortless grace. I never felt as oafishly American as I did when I was with George.

He had come out of a relationship just before Christmas time, having broken the poor girl’s heart seemingly. He had no interest in getting tangled up in something like that again, he kept saying. And the offers were always there: it wasn’t just that he was handsome, people just generally wanted to be around him. Always. Everybody loved him. I’ve never met anyone since who had the same effect on people as George had then.

He could be generous and good-natured and had a capacity for asking piercing questions which had a way of making you feel that he already knew you better than anyone else you’d ever met. He was perceptive, in a way that people took personally – almost as a point of pride. But there was something else too. A certain fatalistic fearlessness which made him frightening from time to time. In moods like that, he could disappear for days on end.

I’d ask him where he’d been and he would just smile and say, “No-where,” hiding a bruised knuckle or even a limp. And he’d be back to his normal self then, buying drinks and generally being the object of everyone’s attention.

“Delicious to see you George,” they’d say.

George’s response was always non-verbal. He’d smile his mischievous smile, full to the brim in his eyes, while his mouth danced around between smirk and genuine delight.

*******

It was just after exam time. Which, of course, meant a party. It wasn’t the very last time I saw him, but it was nearly so. My heart was heavy with the knowledge that I would soon be leaving but I remember feeling dizzy too about that night and what it might entail. The sense that my time was coming to an end made it exciting – an end-of-days feeling.

The afternoon was warm and mostly dry. George suggested that we have a barbeque at this perfect little beach he knew about before going to the party. Just the two of us. We locked our bikes at a nearby Dart station. George led the way and between the two of us, we managed to secure our haul of beers and charcoal to our destination.

The sun went in and out behind the clouds, like it was in a ritualized dance of courtship with the sky. George lit the fire: he was practical like that, yet he always had such neat hands and dress. He went down to the shore then, to wash the coal off, and after, suggested we go for a swim. “It’s nice,” he claimed. I was reluctant, I remember, and pointed out that we’d already lit the fire and that I was hungry.

We ate, and drank beers cooled by the sea, lying on the grass.

The sky cleared after a time and George was adamant then, as it warmed up: we had to swim. We stripped to our briefs and went in search of a spot from where we could jump straight in, neither of us courageous enough to wade in from the sand.

“Here will do,” George said, standing on a rock above the placid sea. It didn’t strike me as being terribly safe but I didn’t say so, I just followed George’s leap into the blue.

I was completely unprepared for the shock of the cold. I thrashed madly, gasping and looking all around me for the quickest way out. George just floated and laughed at the sight of my antics. The relief of being out of the water was enormous.

After a quick swim, George got out too – rather more graciously than I – laughing still and shaking his head.

We sat quietly then, smiling and watching the sea as we dried out in the sun. The delicate make-up of his features was echoed in the neatness of his torso; his taut narrowness glistened.

*******

When the sun weaved its way in behind the cloud cover, the cold air touched our skin all over and I remember all the while that I was all atremble. It was the most exquisite feeling and it’s then that it happened. That’s when George said to me the thing that I’ve thought about ever since. It was so silent by the sea, I could have willed that moment to last forever. When George whispered to me, “Phillip, we’re all alone now, you know? It’s just the two of us.” It had been just what I was thinking, and it made me stop dead. George was looking at me expectantly and for a second, I couldn’t be sure whether he had said it or if I had just imagined it. I froze. I didn’t know what to say, I was so full of longing and dread. I could feel my heart thump like it was trying to escape.

“George, I know…” I started to stammer, considering his confident gaze as he edged closer to me.

“Why are you trembling Phillip?” he asked.

I closed my eyes.

And then my phone rang.

I answered it.

It was my older brother, Paul, calling to say that he’d pick me up from the airport in a week’s time.

When I got off the phone, George was looking at me still. But I looked away then.

“It’s getting late,” I said. “We should get going.”

“Whatever you like Phillip,” George smiled back. “Whatever you like.”

*******

The party was at a run-down, three-story house on Leinster Road, with the whole place rented as one. We arrived at around nine or ten and it was alive already. We were quickly separated in the throng of chit-chat about summer plans. Everybody oozed that invincibility which flares so brightly towards the end of college life before reality snuffs it out. Everyone had something to say. And more than ever, I wanted to speak only to George.

Dave was there. He seemed happier than I’d seen him in a while. Round about midnight we fell in to talking about our wild first term. Eddie was doing better, he told me. I said I was glad and we discussed what our respective Senior Years held in store for us and what we might do afterward.

A guy he knew passed then and he introduced us, explaining that his friend, John, played the trumpet and that he thought I’d very much enjoy hearing his band play.

I tried to put George out of my mind for a while as John and I got caught up in conversation. We had the same obscure records and he talked about music just the way I felt about it. Dave left us to it, saying he’d see us later. I wanted to ask him to look out for George but didn’t know how.

John, from Connecticut, was over in Dublin full-time, studying music and math. He’d had a band called the Ice-Cream Men the whole time he was there. He tried to keep the band members as American as possible, for authenticity, he said.

It was getting late by then and I was worried about where George had gotten to. An urge to rush out and find him, to see him before morning at all costs, washed over me. I had to ask him about what he’d said on the beach earlier, and thought that if I could, it might all still come right.

I didn’t know how to abandon John, while he rummaged in his bag, looking for an eighth of whiskey he had. He re-emerged excited, showing me a record he’d bought earlier that day.

“I completely forgot! We have to play it!” he said, his eyes aglow, “There’s gotta be a record player here somewhere.”

“I’ll go search the place,” I said, jumping at the chance to look for George. John followed after me.

We bled back into the party, pushing through the other bodies. Hunters in a wood of flesh, John bearing his LP; me, seeming to be searching for a record player, while really I searched for George.

Nearing the top of the building, I’d pretty much given up hope.

There were two rooms off the top-floor landing. It seemed utterly pointless at this stage but we persevered nonetheless.

John made for the room on the right, so I went to the one on the left.

I reached for the door-handle and out popped George.

“Hi,” he said shyly, a little breathless. A girl, smiling, stood behind him.

“…Phillip, this is Cathy.”

His face had that same inscrutable smile as it had on the beach earlier, like he knew just a little bit more than everyone else.

*******

I don’t remember what album it was that John was trying to play.

The week after the party, I went to see The Ice-Cream Men. That’s where I met Trudy. We were married the following fall.

Donal Flynn was born and grew up in Limerick. He lives in Dublin and works in retail. He has a story in the current edition of The Honest Ulsterman.

July 1, 2018

Psalm 95

               While someone exhorts us
               In song to sing to God,
	I've looked askance and asked, is he
               Among us here or not?
And found that question, off its no-man's land
               Uptaken then in hand,

               Lies with sheep in shade,
               And takes its rest in space,
           Beneath a large-leafed chestnut, bright
               With burning candles, placed
At intervals upon it, by that same hand,
               Which forms from sea dry land.

               Can it be we have
               A second chance of rest?
        I labour to hear a voice whose sworn
               Obscurity you blessed,
Like a bright cloud above unharvested grain,
               A clear heat after rain.

Edward Clarke’s latest book is called The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry.

Featured Image: Daniele Idini.

July 1, 2018

Displaced – Abdalla Al Omari

All our biographies, if they went back far enough, would begin by explaining how our ancestors came to be more or less enslaved, and to what degree we have become free of this inheritance.

Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London, 1995), p.7

We are facing a world in a state of perpetual conflict, which urgently requires solutions on many fronts. The sense of belonging to a place or nation has been universally and irreversibly destabilised.

Integration is a burning question, with unresolved arguments and extreme resolutions: blockages, indifference and walls.

The Refugee Crisis of 2015 was a complex phenomenon, but it was also a simple request for help: individual choices to escape miserable conditions of political and social degeneration.

I found the best response to these exhausting debates in the art of Syrian Abdalla Al Omari. His work silences the state of fear and anger flowing through news and social networks, where intelligence and compassion is failing in front of our eyes, giving way to widespread ignorance and emotive anger.

Terrified by the ‘Other’, fear reigns instead of constructive ideas and creativity. We need to re-activate the empathic part of our brains that makes us see ourselves in others, chasing a conspiracy of life instead of death.

II – Fragility

Marina Abramovic’s 1974 performance Rhythm 0 shows the fragility of the human condition. Laying on a table seventy-two objects, she invited her audience to use them in any way they chose. Once invited, they did not hesitate to select the pistol with bullets rather than feathers and roses. The performance ceased when the audience became too aggressive.

III – Empathy

Omari’s brushstrokes confront bizarre laws and bullets, and transforms his anger into an unexpected visual awakening. He portrays political leaders as refugees. Beyond the obvious comedic value this develops empathic responses.

He says:

While depicting my subjects and developing the series, I eventually arrived at the paradoxical nature of empathy, and somehow my aim shifted from an expression of the anger I had, that I thought was the trigger, to a more vivid desire to disarm my figures and to picture them outside of their positions of power.

It is a ‘sweet revenge’ on politicians and powerful leaders, whose decisions displace innocent civilians. He continues:

I wanted to take away their power, not to serve me and my pain, but to give them back their humanity and to give the audience an insight into what the power of vulnerability can achieve.

This ‘celebration of vulnerability’ is for the artist a surrealistic experiment revealing the inner face of the problem: the inner face of both refugees, political leaders, and ourselves:

It’s time for not only artists but any other kind of profession to be more involved in what is in the social-political situation universally.

IV – Identification

According to Daniel Trilling:

In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that the inability of states to guarantee rights to displaced people in Europe between the world wars helped create the conditions for dictatorship. Statelessness reduced people to the condition of outlaws: they had to break laws in order to live and they were subject to jail sentences without ever committing a crime. Being a refugee means not doing what you are told – if you did, you would probably have stayed at home to be killed. And you continue bending the rules, telling untruths, concealing yourself, even after you have left immediate danger, because that is the way you negotiate a hostile system.

Similarly Abdalli Omari writes:

When you only talk about quantity of people you totally ignore the fact that all these numbers are persons, are individual stories, are people.

What would you do in the shoes of a refugee? Would you keep moving despite the impediments?

What have we in privileged societies to fear from refugees? These are people in search of fresh opportunities, new arrivals looking to reinvent themselves. Are not many of us searching for the same thing?

*******

Portiamo Omero e Dante,
il cieco e il pellegrino
l’odore che perdeste
l’uguaglianza che avete sottomesso

We carry Homer and Dante, the blind man and the pilgrim,
the smell that you’ve lost, the equality you’ve repressed.

Erri de Luca

July 1, 2018
Gitanjali – after Rabindranath Tagore

I am made endless for your pleasure

Again and again emptied and filled

A frail vessel ever with fresh life

And melodies eternally new

Breathed through me

As though a little reed flute

Cast over the earth

And at your hand’s immortal touch

My small heart loses all limits of joy

To create ineffable utterances

And on these small hands of mine

Your infinite gifts are received

Ages pass and still they pour

And still there is room for more

Navika Ramjee was born in South Africa in 1950 into an Indian family. Her family history is marked by that of the British Raj. She now lives in Oxford. Her work has appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal and Aerodrome, a South African literary journal.

July 1, 2018