Born in 1875, like many in his era Thomas Mann was initially a Great German Conservative, but by the outbreak of World War II he was making anti-Nazi speeches for the BBC.
Mann won the Nobel Prize in 1929 for his chronicles of German families in Buddenbrooks (1901), and for his bildungsromanThe Magic Mountain (1924), along with a number of well received novellas and short stories. Among his later publications, the novella Death in Venice (1929) is a terrific book, expressing his repressed same-sex attraction; it is a worthy expression of a hyper-civilised, fin de siècle aesthetic intelligence. The film by Luchino Visconti with Dirk Bogarde, though laboured, is also a masterpiece. It includes the famous adagio by Mahler, with whom Mann was acquainted.
Mann seems to have known almost everyone who was anyone in his time, and was very catholic in his tastes and company. He remains, however, a crucial bridge between the tradition of nineteenth century letters and the twentieth century. Indeed, the earlier novels referenced above may appear at times like caricatures of that tradition.But great aestheticism does not necessarily equate to human greatness.
As alluded to, Mann was a supporter of Kaiser Wilhelm during the First World War, and a romantic German nationalist with a lifelong fascination with Nietzsche. He lived for most of his adult life in Munich and his lifestyle consisted of work, an eclectic set of friends and a digression into unconventional Germanic behaviour. He was married to a Jewish woman, Katia, who he adored, notwithstanding a suppressed homosexuality or bisexuality: they had six children.
As a novelist, not only Kafka but also Musil and arguably Broch, are greater twentieth century writers of fiction or prose within the Germanic tradition. But greatness also involves moral influence. Although, there was little until the 1930s to disclose his abundant moral courage, it was almost unparalleled among great writers even including Albert Camus. The stakes were higher.
Colm Toibin’s recently published zeitgeist book on Thomas Mann The Magician (2021) reveals at one level a set of character traits crucial to how he achieved greatness. He was innately Protestant, despite a Brazilian, Catholic mother, modest and hard working. Commenting on his own prose style, Mann said it was ponderous, ceremonious, and civilised. This he said was all that fascists hate.
And boy did he hate them. He hated in fact all forms of human fakeness, lies, deceptions and misinformation; an inclination very evident in the early novel Mario the Magician (1929). He also hated a lack of order and fecklessness, which was apparent in his attitude towards his brother Heinrich. And he hated barbarism.
Thus, the arch conservative of Lubeck, in response to the rise of fascism and barbarism, changed his colour. Like Fernando Pessoa in Portugal, the caterpillar became a butterfly.
The change was gradual. First, he had supported the Social Democrats in the Weimar government, writing treatises on his conversion to socialism as the Nazis emerged triumphant over the course of the 1920s and early 1930s.
Mann simply could not deal with Nazis. At an implicit level, it might have been simply a matter of bourgeois taste, as he had an impeccable personal and aesthetic sensibility and was cosmopolitan but not decadent in his outlook.
In American exile, where he was suspected of harbouring communist views, he was asked about his views on the avowedly communist Bertold Brecht. He said he did not like his writing, but that if he liked a communist writer he would have no problem saying so.
Book burning in Berlin, 10 May 1933.
Exile
On holiday in 1933 he was advised not to return to Germany after many of his books had been burned in the modern day auto–da–fé. It is noticeable that it was mostly the books of Jews and communists that were burnt, but the German Student’s Union, spurred on by Goebbels, also burned Mann’s work.
In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard Joseph Goebbels deliver an address saying:
No to decadence and moral corruption … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. … And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.
Mann was excommunicated as a citizen in 1936. His life was threatened, and he was a moving target for the fascists for the rest of his life. Thus he left Germany when he was almost sixty, and apart from some brief post war visits never returned to reside there again.
One wonders what would have happened if he had been more compliant. He was not Jewish and only a socialist at a stretch. It is possible that they would have showered him with hollow accolades if he had shown more deference. But unlike Martin Heidegger, he did not succumb, and thereafter in exile in Switzerland and America he became a more complete human being, which is reflected in the marked improvement in the quality of the prose thereafter.
His wartime broadcast relayed on the BBC might be regarded as a kind of inverse Lord Haw Haw. On one of his eight-minute broadcasts from 1940 Mann condemned Hitler and his ‘paladins’ as crude philistines completely out of touch with European culture.
In another noted speech, he said: ‘The war is horrible, but it has the advantage of keeping Hitler from making speeches about culture.’
‘Crude Philistines’…
At the end of the war, he refused to allow his nation off the hook. They had turned mad; it was collective hysteria and even the 1945 atrocities documented so well in Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: the Downfall 1945 (2002) were in context to him condonable:
Those, whose world became grey a long time ago when they realized what mountains of hate towered over Germany; those, who a long time ago imagined during sleepless nights how terrible would be the revenge on Germany for the inhuman deeds of the Nazis, cannot help but view with wretchedness all that is being done to Germans by the Russians, Poles, or Czechs as nothing other than a mechanical and inevitable reaction to the crimes that the people have committed as a nation, in which unfortunately individual justice, or the guilt or innocence of the individual, can play no part.
Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the ten.
Unamerican Activities…
Extremism cuts both ways. In exile he was forced to testify before the House for unamerican activities as a suspected communist. Here is how he responded:
As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’. … That is how it started in Germany.”
Moreover, when Mann joined protests the jailing of The Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found ‘the media had been closed to him.’ Finally, he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress, and in 1952, he returned to Europe. Th Overton window of the thought police fell on the great writer, as it does to many today. He was now nearing eighty years of age.
Exile created both a looseness and precision of prose style. A spring in the step. Dr Faustus (1947) is one of the best books ever written. It is a masterpiece and worthy of Broch or Musil or indeed Kafka. The stilted Germanic prose style becomes freer. The theme inspires: good versus evil.
The book is about the composer Leverkuhn who sells his soul to the devil. The Faustian pact is Fascism. It is also about the corrupting influence of atonal music and its nihilistic dissonance which creates a valueless universe, like the structuralists and deconstructionists of our time. The great prose meister was having none of it.
In my view, Dr Faustus is also about Martin Heidegger the other central intellectual figures in Germany at the time. Heidegger fell for the bait and took all the Nazi accolades, entering the Faustian pact despite his Jewish mistress Hannah Arendt, who wrote eloquently subsequently about the banality of evil. Mann, though a man of considerable means, said no.
A theme central to his existence was that an artist cannot abandon politics at least not in such a period as the 1940s, and must recognise the moral consequences of his actions.
Dr Faustus frequently references Leverkuhn’s veneration of Albrecht Durer, the great Renaissance artist, and his pictorial representations of moderation, judgment, melancholia and the apocalypse. Indeed, as the Nazi state collapses, he becomes obsessed with melancholia.
In the search for spirituality, Mann invokes in a man who has lost all reason and his soul. When composing Dr Faustus, Mann showed and lectured on this to a fourteen-year-old girl who was visiting, who was Susan Sonntag. Thus, the magician bridges generations and resonates through the ages.
And then at the end of Days with the light dimming he showed in his book about the conman Felix Krull the darkly comic humour at the heart of capitalist chicanery, which, if left unchecked, culminates in fascism.
Mann is the great Protestant Germanic intellect of the last century, but he was also an ethereal magus and magician.
His legacy lies in the assertion of standards, of discipline, of stable family values, and of a certain amorphous sexuality. Above all it is in the condemnation of extremism, the condemnation of barbarism, the assertion of civilised values, the rejection of censorship, the hatred of chauvinism and the social cleansing from the left or right. A consistent hatred of intolerance from all sides.
That is what is needed now.
His life is also an example of moral courage. The Germans wanted the magician back, but he was not satisfied that they had changed. It was him judging them not them judging him. He did not think they were displaying appropriate contrition for what they had done. He was right.
In a different context, in Chile, when Pinochet was forced to call an election – as our conservative rulers will soon be required to in Ireland – a persecuted advertising expert advised the opposition as to how to orchestrate a campaign. No reference to mass murders or internment camps, just young Chileans with the slogan JUST SAY NO.
That is what Mann said to fascism, and what we must now say to the ruling parties in Ireland. No images of homelessness, no incessant exposure of state corruption and criminality. JUST SAY NO, before it is too late.
The Irish people have a long-standing relationship with ‘numinous presences in the landscape’, often referred to as the little people, or faeries. The literature provides a complex set of illusions. The writer, philosopher and independent scholar, my friend, Patrick Healy on a recent visitation tendered me a painting of Mad Sweeney (buile shuibhne), which forms part of his forthcoming exhibition in Amsterdam.
It made me consider the enduring relevance of the faeries, although I now live in Leatherhead in leafy Surrey, where the little people are well hidden.
In H.G. Welles’ remarkable parable of the future invasion by aliens from outer space, The War of the Worlds, we find the ultimate understanding of an existential threat. When Orson Welles put out his infamous 1938 broadcast, he set it in New York, causing a level of consternation that led some to flee to the nearby hills. The original book is of course set in Leatherhead, which is clearly not immune to faery tales.
Most contemporary faery tales often provide binary messages of good and evil for children – or even child-adults susceptible to manipulation – who see battles between good and evil and a Manichean Universe. Thus, children and adult minds can be manipulated, and often nefarious agendas can be set using their effect.
According to the plagiarised – but well received at the time – work of the psychologist Bruno Bethlehem The Uses of Enchantment, faery tales help children resolve Freudian oedipal conflicts. But on whose behalf? They are cautioned to stay safe from ‘evil’, but the meaning of good and evil is far from clear in this day and age.
Historically, faery tales contain a surprising level of terrifying violence, often involving gruesome acts such as cannibalism, witchcraft, and bodily metamorphosis, as with werewolves. They play to latent fears that can be deployed to manipulate or control the human psyche.
I will now draw out some crucial messages for the profound structural ways we organise our present lives around faery tales.
Illustration of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” by Vilhelm Pedersen (1820 – 1859).
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 tale is based on a 1335 story from the Libro de los ejemplos (or El Conde Lucanor). It is short and alarmingly precise, involving an emperor of such vanity and so susceptible to flattery that his dressmakers get him to pose and preen naked.
It seems to me that most of the politicians of Ireland, the UK, the EU, and the world at large are the vain inheritors’ of the Emperor’s new clothes, with fake experts and insiders flattering and manipulating them. Political leadership is always subject to vanity and therefore susceptible to flattery.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
Where there is no leadership, the people perish. Proverbs 29.18.
Vilhelm Pedersen illustration for “Ugly Duckling”
The Ugly Duckling
This 1843 tale by Hans Christian Anderson is perhaps my favourite faery tale. Anderson was not a transcriber of faery tales – as the Brothers Grimm were – but a great creative artist. Here the eponymous ugly duckling is hounded out of the tribe, simply for being ugly, but a new tribe welcomes her as she is really a swan, not an ugly duckling at all. At one level this is about finding your niche and not associating with quacks – including those who force you out of town.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’
H. G. Welles
What we need now are more ugly ducklings, and not clean-cut conformists – the inappropriate adults in the room.
Hobbit holes or smials as depicted in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
The Hobbit
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 fantasy classic, an insignificant shire hobbit, Bilbo Baggins with the aid of dwarves and a magician defeats the dark forces in the battle of the five armies. Written just before World War II, it anticipated an Allied victory against the dark forces of fascism. A parable for that time and our own, which is elaborated upon in The Lord of The Rings.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
‘We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo, men women men women and children recognised that what was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. Lemay said if we HAD lost we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals, and was right’
Robert McNamara, ‘The Fog of War’
Always keep in mind who the dark forces are, and that winning is not everything, or not always. Manichean battle between good and evil rarely occur. Who is evil today? Is it just Vladimir Putin or those who seek to prolong the war? And if Mr Putin is a war criminal, what of Bush, Blair and Biden?
The Cheshire Cat.
Alice Adventures in Wonderland
In Lewis Carrol’s famous 1865 story Alice falls into a rabbit hole, and witnesses a succession of fantastical creatures, including The Queen of Spades who conducts a trial in breach of due process: sentence first, verdict later.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
This cannot be improved upon in terms of a commentary on this age of prejudgement and guilt by social media, or in the wake of any accusation.
One modern version occurred when then Spanish minister Donna Luzon in advance of the Catalonia trials referred to those accused as the ‘convicted.’ We continue to find prejudgement of pre-crime, and conviction by association of those we disagree with. Quasi-internment. Deportations and extraditions. The obliteration of due process. The end of human rights. Endgame. Off with your head or to Rwanda.
Well mercifully the Court of Appeal disagrees in the U.K.. But what about Julian Assange’s final appeal?
Humpty Dumpty and Alice, from Through the Looking-Glass. Illustration by John Tenniel.
Alice Through the Looking Glass
The second Wonderland visit is best interpreted as being about language and the distortion of tradition.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
‘I know of only one authority which might justify the suggested method of construction. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be the master, that’s all.” After all this long discussion the question is whether the words “If a man has” can mean “If a man thinks he has”. I have an opinion that they cannot, and the case should be decided accordingly.’
The above quote comes from Lord Atkin in his dissenting judgment in Liversidge v Anderson(1942). It concerned the decision to intern someone as a subversive without due process. Thus we find a direct transcription from the book in the great English language decision upholding due process at the height of the Second World War. A sole dissenting judgment from a man and lawyer in touch with working class sensibilities
First combined edition (publ. Ted Smart, 2000)
Northern Light / His Dark Materials
The ultimate anticipation of medievalism, with orcs seeking to undermine our hero Lyra, with her supportive, if ambiguous, daemons. Here we find the oppressive authority of organised religion and the death of the great bear Irek Brisson, who has fought so valiantly on her side.
Philip Pullman was clearly influenced by John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), where Lucifer seems to be seeking to save humanity from institutional religion – as opposed to Christian belief which is a force of good – thereby undermining the satanic myth of the fallen state from Original Sin.
Original Intent interpreting a legal document from its inception, and not dynamically. Thus, America recognises the right to bear arms because it was acceptable over two hundred years ago. As Amy Coney Barrett put it after her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court: ‘[Catholic judges] are obliged by oath, professional commitment, and the demands of citizenship to enforce the death penalty. They are also obliged to adhere to their church’s teaching on moral matters.’
From Sleeping Beauty (1959 film).
Sleeping Beauty
Based on the faery tale ‘La Belle Au Bois Dormant, published in 1697 by Charles Perrault, this story has been sanitised for popular consumption. In Disney’s retelling, the kiss of the prince awakens the sleeping beauty, but in the original telling of the tale she is not roused, and he falls in love with her body and essentially rapes her.
It is only at the birth of her twins when one of the babies suckles at her breast that she wakes up. The prince then tells her what has happened. As if all this was not bad enough it turns out that the prince’s mother is an ogress, who is longing to eat her grandchildren. The tale first appeared in England in 1729 in Stories or Faery Tales from Past Times.
Pantomimes and Disney have thus obliterated everything but the kiss.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
The idea of a prince coming to the rescue is also a theme in Rumpelstiltskin, and is the driving force in Cinderella too, although what makes for a prince is far from clear. Is it a man who abuses women or a coercive structure which abuses men and woman? Or worse still, those individuals who rape the earth. Thus, we should be careful about what and who we consent to, whether princes or princesses. Stay safe from sexual predators if you can.
The main cast during filming in 1970.
Willie Wonka and The Chocolate Factory
Let us remind ourselves of the plot of the 1971 movie (based on Roald Dahl’s novel), in which Willie Wonka owns a chocolate factory, but has closed it down, because of espionage and betrayal. Here a race of Oompah Lumpas work under him, who seem like incorruptible souls, like Norwegians perhaps or Icelanders.
So, in seclusion he creates the Wonka chocolate bars containing elusive golden tickets to a factory for a competition, as he is getting old and realises that someone else needs to take over the place.
The children lucky are given a series of tests, for he only trusts uncorrupted children to run the business. He is a man-child adult himself, or a magician or sorcerer. But he finds that the children have also been corrupted. Fallen angels in a world of illusions.
Charlie Buckets is the last recipient of the golden ticket. He fails because after cheating along with his grandfather. But is redeemable, as Wonka comes to the conclusion that the ideal child to run the chocolate factory is working-class. At one level his poverty has produced an element of dishonesty.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
Let us be wary of the inappropriate adults in the room and conscious of how poverty and social exclusion are an increasing feature of our time. So let us also be wary of going it alone, for the poor fall into traps set by the rich. And in an age of limited mobility to escape the debt trap, let us be wary of how and by what mechanisms the poor can inherit the earth or even achieve a basic income.
Puss in Boots
The oldest written telling version is Costantino Fortunato (Italian for “Lucky Costantino”) by Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola.
Charles Perrault’s transcription is about a miller’s son who is left a cat in his father’s will. The miller’s son is none too delighted with his inheritance until the cat assures him that he can make the young man’s fortune. All the cat needs to accomplish this is a pair of boots. Thereafter, the cat makes him richer than his wildest dreams, and he marries the most beautiful princess.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
Beware of charming con men who claim they will make you rich, a lesson learnt by as all those who suffered from subprime mortgages and banking misrepresentations from the wolves of Wall Street in Ireland and elsewhere. Lies and misrepresentations that have been rubber stamped by the courts.
Beware of dynamic self-made monsters such as the unlamented Peter Sutherland for they have destroyed and pillaged the earth.
Readers should by now understand how we have been manipulated since childhood by faery tales in a deeply structural way, through the creation of a simplified world of good and evil.
Wilde Encounters…
I recently acquired a first edition Oscar Wilde’s Salome with illustrations by Beardsley. Now as I alight daily in Clapham Junction station on my way to court there is a plaque to Oscar Wilde as I change trains. I am reminded of being an aspiring young thespian in Trinity College 1989 where I played Edward Carson opposite to Patrick Healy as Wilde. So I conclude with Oscar Wilde’s faery tales – above all ‘The Nightingale’, along with ‘The Rose’, ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’.
By serving their masters selflessly, the swallow and the rose die and only the selfish giant gains a measure of redemption through the generosity of his soul. He had allowed Christ or Christ’s emblem into his garden and now he gains the garden of paradise, or is it the kingdom of heaven?
Feature Image: The Fomorians, as depicted by John Duncan (1912).
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone. Martin Amis, in an interview with TheParis Review (1998)
The empty streets, quiet from dawn to dusk and beyond. No noisy, polluting rush hour traffic, or at any other time of the day. No shuffling, stifling crowds of commuters on packed public transport, or gaga revellers in sweaty pubs and clubs. Not having to go to work, and feeling okay about it because most everyone else was not obliged to either (there’s social solidarity, if ever I saw it). Getting a modest stipend from the government for staying at home. Being able to do whatever you wanted to all day long (within the law, and a five kilometre radius of your residence). If you were living alone or parenting alone you could even pair with one other household as part of a support bubble, and two households could meet outdoors within the travel limit. If you were a renter, no threat of imminent eviction by a rapacious or capricious landlord; if you had a mortgage, a temporary freeze on payments. In short, what utter bliss.
I was alive during lockdown, and I was alone – and although maybe ‘most alive’ is a stretch, I grew to love the sequestered state, to the extent that I still have not fully readjusted to things being ‘back to normal’. But it troubles me that perhaps ‘most alive’ is not quite the same thing as being good, or even happy. I liked lockdown: does that make me a bad person?
Dublin, April, 2020.
Of course it was bewildering at first, and a little frightening – because no one really knew how severe the pandemic might be, or for how long it could last. (Let’s get our priorities straight here: there was a run on toilet rolls.) But after a few weeks, we settled into it. What I missed most upon entering the altered reality: 1) being able to meet friends face-to-face in the flesh; 2) being able to experience the giddy, healing rush of live music I get from going to concerts; 3) being able to travel, if and when I wanted. But I soon adapted to the new dispensation. After all, we now have all these wonderful machines with screens to help us keep in touch with people electronically, if we feel the need for company without risking the possibility of infection. Plus, we can use them to purchase pretty much anything we might want, as long as we are in funds or have access to lines of credit, and have said items delivered directly to our doors, thus obviating the need to ever stir outside, whether we are permitted to or not.
I thought of Oceane in Tibor Fischer’s Voyage to The End of The Room (2003) (itself a riff on the antisocial aesthete Des Esseintes in J. K. Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884)); and, more recently, of the unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018): both protagonists who have, insofar as is practicable, retired from social interaction. I thought of many of Cormac McCarthy’s heroes – men invariably configured as some variation on the theme of first or last person on earth. Mainly, I thought of Kate in David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), who either is, or imagines herself to be, the last woman on earth. All in some way extend the trope, with its origins in science fiction, of the depopulated world, brought to perfection in the dirty metaphysics of J. G. Ballard’s best work. To put it more simply, as a reclusive friend once described his habitual living circumstances to me, it was ‘Howard Hughes without the money.’
Obviously, there were downsides. For a start, people were dying – often the poorest and oldest and most vulnerable in other ways. Then, some people still had to work, whether they wanted to or not, and not only health care professionals, but supermarket staff and take-away deliverers were deemed ‘essential’ or ‘key’ or ‘front line’ operatives – thus risking sickness and death for minimal reward. Yet others were acting like idiots, with their bizarre conspiracy theories and their deliberate flouting of restrictions. Personally, my greatest hassle was the way my eyeglasses steamed up every time I masked up.
Dublin, April, 2020.
But I was lucky: I had a house to myself with a garden, and a car and a bike and a fridge and a freezer, and a television and a hi-fi system and internet access, and I was mobile and could venture to shops when supplies ran low, or take long walks and cycles for exercise. Roaming around the Hellfire Club or the adjacent Massy’s Wood for hours on end, while listening to Éliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la Mort on the headphones, was a favourite pastime, if I felt the need to get out of the house and blow the cobwebs off – not something I would necessarily have done if I’d been working five days a week. Furthermore, I did not have any very youthful or very elderly dependents relying on me for their daily needs or morale-boosting support. Reports of domestic abuse among those living in cramped, overcrowded conditions circulated and increased steadily, and I pitied anyone trapped in a fraught, tension-filled environment. My nutjob survivalist’s instinct began to kick in.
I was alone because my wife had taken up a job abroad a few months pre-pandemic. When rumours of imminent lockdown first hit she had wanted to return home, but I managed to dissuade her. We had been going through an elongated rocky patch, and I reasoned that a) if forced isolation was short-lived, then it wasn’t worth her while uprooting herself all over again; and b) if having to stay indoors lasted for a longer time, then sooner or later we might well drive each other to distraction, if ensconced under the same roof for such a lengthy period. We were then trying to establish independent lives, and in retrospect I still feel my decision was the correct one – in as much as later we experienced a ‘Covid-bounce’ and were reconciled. Not that coming together again was a direct consequence of being apart, but being together under duress certainly wouldn’t have helped us in resolving our difficulties. Does anyone really need to be with a partner/lover every hour of every day? Each time I saw him/I couldn’t wait to see him again (‘Then He Kissed Me’ by The Crystals, 1963) is the stuff of teen anthems and first love. Constant companionship in a confined space may even be detrimental, if not wholly destructive, to a relationship. Or, at least, to one with me. Am I a bad person?
In Middlemarch (1872) George Eliot has her ‘godless’ heroine Dorothea Brooke suggest that if religion were actually true and God existed, and achieving eternal salvation (and avoiding a similarly enduring damnation) was our main priority, then we should all devote our whole lives to this pursuit as cloistered contemplatives, rather than just leaving it at attending church on Sunday and doing a few good works. One of the few modern-era Catholic writers I can read with pleasure and profit, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968), wrote in Thoughts in Solitude (1956): ‘We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our bosom.’ He continues:
When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.
Still, not all of us can become Trappist monks, or opt to lead a comparably ascetic life. For one thing, belief in God, or some conception of divine transcendence, appears to be a necessary, if not quite sufficient, prerequisite. For another, the need for sex, or even the search for secular love, does require one to be ‘out there’, however nominally. As my wife once opined, ‘You should have been a monk – except you like sex too much.’ Not that a vow of celibacy is always mandatory for the anchoritic life, or acts as an insuperable impediment to a long withdrawal – at any rate not nowadays, and not outside of the western tradition. For example, it is on record that the flexible arrangements surrounding Leonard Cohen’s five year stint living at the Mount Baldy Buddhist retreat centre, where he was given the name ‘Jikan’, meaning ‘Silence’, did not preclude female callers, or indeed boozing marathons with his Zen Master teacher, Old Roshi. But he was Leonard Cohen, not your average seeker after enlightenment, and Mount Baldy is located outside L.A., not Kyoto, so exceptions were made and such privileges extended.
But even setting aside the vagaries of libidinal desire, ultimately I think monastic life, which for many people lockdown could be said to have resembled, would be too social for me, certainly in its Cenobitic, or community form, if not in its Eremitic, or solitary practice. I like doing things – eating, sleeping, writing, reading – when I feel like doing them, rather than adhering to a strict schedule with other devotees. Interestingly, the Trappists, who are an essentially cenobitical order (in contrast to, say, the enclosed Carthusians), maintain a custom under which individual monks or nuns who have reached a required level of maturity within the community may pursue a hermitical lifestyle on monastery grounds under the supervision of the abbot or abbess. Merton was one such allowed to undertake this mode of living. Yet even then he fell into an earthly love, with Margie Smith, a student nurse assigned to his care while he was recuperating in a Louisville hospital from surgery he underwent in April 1966, to treat debilitating back pain. She was twenty-five, petite and demure; he was fifty-one, stocky and bald, with a wandering intellect and a boisterous laugh. Although in several diary entries (see Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom, The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six: 1966-67) he expressly denies sexual consummation, on July 12th he wrote:
Yet there is no question I love her deeply … I keep remembering her body, her nakedness, the day at Wygal’s (the office of his psychologist, which he ‘borrowed’ for a tryst on June 11th – the diary entry for which day notes that they shared a bottle of champagne), and it haunts me … I could have been enslaved to the need for her body after all.
A previous entry for June 14th notes his discussions with his abbot about this affair, and his intent to follow the instruction to end it. When he did, he still remained in occasional contact with Margie, and some recent Merton scholars have even argued that the monk regretted giving her up so much, and was so remorseful that she had married someone else (a doctor in Ohio, with whom she raised three sons), that he no longer felt life was worth living.
Also, incidentally, according to The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) the youthful Merton loved jazz, but by the time he began his first teaching job he had forsaken all but ‘peaceful’ music. Later in life, whenever he was permitted to leave the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky, for medical or monastic reasons, he would catch what live jazz he could, in Louisville or New York. So maybe there is hope for me yet, to entertain a life of socially sanctioned solitude (with sporadic forays to musical events) – although I fear I would not take kindly to that clerical ‘supervision’.
More to the point: I am not under thirty, or even under forty – so I would not expect those in that demographic, who are eagerly trying to establish relationships and careers and lives, to share my guarded enthusiasm for society grinding to a halt, or for taking a lifelong holiday from it. I have managed to attain some perspective on matters carnal, and on those of the heart (not to mention on my fluctuating sources of income) – even if this equanimity is, I suspect, largely hormonally determined, rather than an intellectual or emotional insight. Having said that, while I may still be partial to the odd ride, much less to a touch of romance, it was not impossible to hook up during lockdown, with a little technological aid, and within certain geographical limitations. Much like ordinary times.
Dublin, April, 2020.
Naturally, I reread Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) during the time of Covid, like many others. For, whether the surge in its popularity consisted chiefly of first-timers or revisitors, in this activity I was hardly alone, as publishers reported a huge worldwide increase in sales of the novel, once the virus had taken hold. Figures for the English translation went up by 150% in the last week of February 2020 as compared with the same period in the preceding year, while the original French version rose in number by a staggering 300%. (Boccaccio’s Decameron (1348-1353) and Defoe’s Journal Of The Plague Year (1722) enjoyed similar stupendous bumps up the charts, courtesy of the reading public.)
What I discovered about The Plague was that it could have been written yesterday. So accurately did its descriptions of how individuals, and the general populace, behave in Oran during that escalating crisis chime with contemporary events, many passages could have been culled from the newspaper headlines and news bulletins of 2020-21. Which tends to make one despair of human nature, and embrace the cliché that it doesn’t change much. Here are three choice snippets, in case you didn’t get around to it this time:
‘There have been as many plagues in the history of the world as there have been wars; yet always plagues and wars find people equally unprepared.’
‘How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.’
‘The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.’
Compiling lists was something else which really caught on, and if you hunt around the internet you will turn up the catalogues of my favourite novels, favourite albums, favourite films, worst jobs, and all that. Everyone started baking sourdough or banana bread, and posting photos of the results on social media, me included. If it hadn’t been for lockdown, I doubt I’d have got through nearly every one of the over twenty films directed by the prolific Sion Sono (the Japanese David Lynch), or worked my way through as many of The Guardian’s ‘Top 20 J-horror films – ranked!’ as I could find, or rewatched all of Michael Haneke’s filmography in chronological order, or lapped up the entire boxset of The Wire for the third time (which I would gladly do again), or discovered the best of Dario Argento (and what, really, had been so important in my previous life as to account for this grievous omission?). I played online chess with a couple of musician acquaintances, and some anonymous randomers (happy to report that my game improved exponentially). I even recorded my versions of every song on Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks (1974) and had the temerity to upload the attempts to YouTube.
All of which prompts the question: what had we all been doing with ourselves before the plague descended?
Mainly, lockdown was a boon for me because I started writing again, having lost my way – aside from journalism and reviews – for a number of years. But this time it was not fiction, as previously, but rather essays, akin to this one. Martin Amis is not alone among writers when, in the epigraph to this piece, he expresses the tribe’s preference for solitude. Here’s James Baldwin, writing in ‘The Creative Process’ (1962): ‘The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.’ It’s almost enough to convince you that seclusion is an indispensable component of creation (although theatre, film, music and dance are clearly collaborative arts – and even desk-bound writers engage with agents, editors and publishers). But, perhaps in common with painters more than any other arts practitioners, writers live in their heads, and are solipsists par excellence. The interior world of imagination is always more stimulating to them than what Roland Barthes referred to dismissively as ‘The trivial kitchenry of doing.’ As for living, our servants can do that for us – if only we had servants.
When I first had notions of becoming a writer, one of the most appealing aspects of the calling was the option of anonymity: like J. D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, you could be famous, or let’s say influential, without anyone recognising you in the street or bothering you in public. Nowadays, however, one has to be ready to be interviewed at the drop of a hat, and take a strenuous part in one’s own publicity campaign (“What? No social media presence?”). One is also expected to become a member of ‘the writing community’ – whatever that is, and wherever it lives. So many of today’s writers spend so much of their time being on television and radio and going to literature festivals – in other words, promoting themselves and their work – that it is difficult to imagine how and when and where they ever manage to get any writing done. You might as well be in a touring rock band. (And when do they do their songwriting? At soundchecks? In hotel rooms? In the recording studio? I suppose they are not on the road all the time – but since the digitalisation and free filesharing of music, needs must to make a living, which means playing live and selling merch.)
In more recent years – primarily due to the ubiquity of television and the rise of the internet – writers have at times been presented – many of them willingly – as another type of media celebrity. Yet, in the not so distant past it was still quite difficult to reach an author from outside the circuit of the publishing world. Writers used to be identified mostly through their written work, and it was the norm for a reader to be aware of an author, to like or even love their work, and continue to be fully ignorant of their physical appearance, and also unaware of most of the biographical information that now is routinely accessed. One could scarcely imagine Franz Kafka or Fernando Pessoagiving an interview. Indeed, it is legitimate to question if individuals with such reclusive personalities would, in today’s climate, be offered a publishing deal at all.
Publishing is a business, and a publishing house is unlikely to invest in a writer’s work if it stands to lose money, or to not make very much (unless a few hugely commercially viable wordsmiths subsidise all the ne’er-do-wells). Yet writers are, arguably, very different from performers of popular entertainment. In practice, of course, not many authors differ significantly from performance artists, and what they say on stage is at least as vital to their process as what they write on the page. But to bring about an increase in links between the two activities, whether intentionally or unwittingly, will certainly result in fewer published authors who are characterised by acute introversion.
Now, it may be argued that the attraction of retreating inside a Proustian cork-lined study to do one’s writing means that the work produced will have a very narrow focus, and that you will have fewer stories to tell, except the ones about yourself. Such confinement implies that your daily ‘life experience’ will be extraordinarily circumscribed. However, in my opinion, most people have more than enough ‘life experience’ by the time they are twenty-five or thirty to be going on with for the remainder of their lives. If, indeed, life experience is really a requirement for writing well at all, especially in comparison with the transformative power of the imagination – for those who have one. That ‘smiling public man’, Senator W. B. Yeats, in ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ (1912), bemoaned the distracting vicissitudes of ‘Theatre business, management of men’ which he had earlier so eagerly embraced, and also elsewhere wrote ‘Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.’ Or, as has been remarked with reference to Jorge Luis Borges: ‘A man may lead an exciting life without ever leaving his desk.’
(Note to television and radio producers, and festival organisers: I am now available for any interviews or promotional junkets going, and I promise to wax eloquent about the topic of this essay, or any other subjects about which I have written.)
Dublin, April, 2020.
Does much of the foregoing sound like plain old misanthropy? I do not regard myself as overly misanthropic, even if I have a low opinion of much of the human race. I still like the people I like, and like them a lot. It’s when people organise themselves into groups that my suspicions are raised. As Jonathan Swift wrote, in a letter to Alexander Pope, ‘I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.’ Doubtless the proponents of wellness fads, and associated quackery, will diagnose me as ‘anti-social’, and conclude that I ‘lack empathy’. Not so. If anything, I’m more asocial than anti-social, and I can have oodles of empathy, when I want. Granted, maybe I should ‘want’ more. However, I do not place quite so high a value on empathy as an attribute as the esteem with which it is held in the current discourse appears to require. Too much empathy can get you into all sorts of bother.
Nor am I agoraphobic (from Ancient Greek ἀγορά, meaning ‘an assembly of the People’, or ‘a marketplace’ (the typical spot for such an assembly); and φόβος, meaning ‘fear’) – although I do have a problem with ‘the market’ as a determinant of value, and therefore fear it. People who had known me in a previous life might even have described me as a bonvivant or man about town, such was my propensity for attending live artistic happenings, chiefly concerts. (In fact, there are those who would say that I have only two settings when it comes to my preferred mode of being: the quiet fragility of tremulous silence, or the overpowering loudness of raucousness sound. Signal to noise ratio.) However – and I don’t know if it is attributable to incipient old age, or whether it has been accelerated by quarantine – I now no longer need to be out all the time. Maybe I had always been a potential hermit, who simply lacked the courage of his convictions. Still, it’s quite a momentous revelation when you realise that you could get used to being content enough never seeing anyone for the rest of your life. ‘Man is a social animal’ Aristotle tells us in his Politics. ‘Virtue is social’ admonishes a voice in Philip Larkin’s astute poem on this theme, ‘Vers de Société’. Yet there is such a creature as a gregarious recluse, however paradoxical that might sound. Lots of animals hibernate for winter: why can’t homo sapiens (wise man!) do it for three or four months annually, if not for the whole year? But what of the need for company and companionship, if only to stave off the loneliness? The answer to this objection is that being alone and feeling lonely are two entirely different conditions. Some people feel lonely at the heart of a crowd of people; others are at peace staring at the stars by themselves.
So, am I a bad person? Not really, although I may concede to selfishness. But all artists are selfish, or certainly no more or less so than the majority of the rest of humankind. There are fully socialised reasons for being selfish, just as there exist selfish reasons for being social. How bad a person does selfishness make you?
I repeat: am I a bad person? No, I’m just an introvert – and there is nothing wrong with that. (Note to self: future essay comparing the relative merits and demerits of introversion and extroversion.)
Mostly, I can’t be bothered arguing and debating with people much anymore. I mean, I kind of like it, sometimes, when it takes place at a level I consider ‘intelligent and informed’, but most discussion, it seems to me, exists at a standard that makes it hardly worth talking about or engaging in, and amounts to nothing more than people repeating their opinions and beliefs at each other at contrasting pitches. I guess this view makes me a snob, and of the worst kind – an ‘intellectual’ one. But really, as is in the nature of friendship, I like being with people who agree with or broadly share my worldview, and I get irritated being around people who are coming from the opposite end of the religious or political or literary or whatever spectrum. Perhaps that is my great character flaw; but it’s tiring, to the point of exhaustion, always being called on to defend yourself. And yet, it is ingrained that we can only change things (or maintain the status quo) through exchange of ideas in a public forum. That’s how much vaunted democracy, such as it is, functions. However, as far as I can make out, people who talk too much have nothing much to say. Or, at least, one has to put in quite a shift to discern what it is they are actually trying to express. Talk is cheap. A still tongue in a wise head. Have we gleaned nothing from Wittgenstein’s dictum: ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent’? Or have we not heard the sagacious Borges’ counsel: ‘Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence’?
But even I am human. I have slowly crept back to attending gigs, going to the cinema and theatre, meeting friends, even going to parties, and making a couple of journeys abroad – although I did suffer from Covid-hesitancy at first. The intensity of crazed moshing at black midi in Vicar Street was disconcerting, as was the surprise that Mitski Miyawaki had morphed from being an act with a relatively mature audience of twenty and thirty-somethings to a TikTok sensation for fifteen-year-old girls queueing around the corner at the same venue, before it opened its evening doors. In both cases, I forsook my usual front row vantage point, and retreated to the back of the hall.
I have noticed a greater than usual degree of incompetence on my part, in almost every piece of daily business that I do. Nothing feels the same as it did, in The Before Times. When you step off the carousel, you are not sure you want to get back on again – finally acknowledging that it may have really been a treadmill all along. I returned to work, because I had to, but more than ever before was plagued (apologies) by the nagging question ‘What am I doing?’ (with my time, with my life, with my endless numbered days), asked with an existential weight that was spirit-crushing. It was back to the small talk, or as its components are also called, pleasantries. Some colleagues were in agreement with me that we have all become ‘a little more Zen’, post-hiatus. Although there is an underlying apprehension that we are just dazed and confused zombies. After all, how could we tell the difference?
Inevitably, and in spite of obeying all official directives and taking all reasonable precautions, I contracted the plague myself, having successfully dodged it for over two years. The perils of being out and about, mixing with the throng, instead of sheltering safely at home. I may even have picked up some form of Long Covid, given my occasional breathlessness and sudden bouts of tiredness, and general brain fog and word soup. What is all this mad rushing around for?
Dublin, June, 2020.
The most disappointing thing about the easing of lockdown is that it seems, both individually and as a society, that we have learned nothing from the experience. We are still pursuing the mythic chimera of endless economic ‘progress’; we are still subjecting ourselves, or being subjected to, lives of pointless wage-slavery; we are still pillaging the planet’s natural resources for short-term solutions and private gain. We still have not learned that we are not landlords here on earth. We are not even tenants. We are guests, just passing through. At the time of our leave-taking, wouldn’t it be preferable to know that we had made things a little better, or at least no worse, for all present and all of those to come, rather than just making sure that we took as much of the world’s bounty as we could get for ourselves and our own, and had as a good time as possible while doing so, at the expense of others?
Maybe I did not feel ‘most alive’ during lockdown, but I do feel ‘most alive’ when writing, and lockdown facilitated me towards that end. Therefore, it was one of the happiest times of my life, and it is little wonder that I harbour residual nostalgia for those halcyon days. In fact, it is tempting to declare: that’s what life should be. In ‘The Choice’ (1933), Yeats tells us ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work.’ In response, Derek Mahon takes issue with this high-flown assertion, in ‘Knut Hamsun in Old Age’ (1980):
One fortunate in both would have us choose “Perfection of the life or of the work.” Nonsense, you work best on a full stomach As everybody over thirty knows – For who, unbreakfasted, will love the lark? Prepare your protein-fed epiphanies, Your heavenly mansions blazing in the dark.
So, should I get out more? No, not if going out means writing less – which, in my case, it usually does. ‘No man is an island’ averred John Donne, in a phrase which that mischievous mystic Merton referenced when he took it as the title for one of his finest essay collections. Alas, just as it is not given to everyone to be a monk, not all of us are writers or artists. My only hope garnered from lockdown is that I can retain the writerly momentum I gained during it, now that the world has opened its doors and windows once again, and everything is returning to a not-so-very-new ‘normal’.
According to Western medical science I suffer from a condition called depression. And from my perspective, I suffer. The conditions of my reality are such that sometimes no matter the environment – with loved ones, by myself, in mediation or not, eating or fasting, sleeping or awake – I feel a sense of dissociation, dread and low energy levels in my body. It comes and it goes and the time it stays can never be predicted. It’s not a comfortable existence.
Practicing yoga has been a wonderful way to help with depression. Lonely and isolating thoughts can’t intrude when those thoughts have been stilled: yogas chitta vritta nirodha [trans: yoga is the stilling of the movements of the mind].
When I told a good friend recently that my yoga practice didn’t seem to be helping with the symptoms of my depressions, as it had in the past, she said, “maybe it’s not working? Maybe you should try something else? Like a hobby?”
My instant reaction was, “how dare you question my practice?” I got defensive. She didn’t understand. She’s not a yogi. These practices are fundamental to my life. Yoga has helped me overcome substance abuse, break ups, a mid-life crisis, and poor work/life balance. What do you mean “it’s not working”?
As it turns out, she was both right and wrong. She was right: the yoga wasn’t working. She was also wrong: yoga always works.
My yoga practice wasn’t working because I was expecting it to alleviate my suffering like a drug alleviates the symptoms of disease. I practice and I stop suffering. Like buying a salad at a restaurant. Like purchasing a bicycle. A contract.
I was offering my dedication and daily practice and expected to receive something (bliss, freedom, insight) in return of equal or greater value. And the harder and longer I practice, the more and more rewards I receive. In this case, I expected to be delivered from my depression in return for my yoga practice: daily meditation, kriya and pranayama, and Japa practices.
So, my friend was right: yoga wasn’t working because that is not the way yoga works. In a spiritual practice, the investment is the return. The discipline, the devotion, the surrender, these are the practices AND the results. And this includes surrendering any expectation that your suffering will end just because you practice yoga.
Our daily lives are comprised of contracts or agreements. We aren’t aware of this most of the time. We work to make money. We use money to pay for food and shelter. These are transactional agreements we make many times a day.
I use money to buy a thing and I expect a thing in return for payment. The expectation is of something foreseeable with pretty good accuracy: I see an orange, I pay money, I go home with the orange.
Let’s go further. The dentist says if I brush my teeth, I won’t get cavities. Doctor says If I eat a healthy diet, I’ll avoid heart disease. I shower to keep my body free of germs. I eat to nourish my body. My friend and I agree to meet for lunch at 12:30pm.
These are what we might call causal agreements: I do one act and expect a certain result or effect in the future in return. The expectation is foreseeable based on past experience and current knowledge with reasonable accuracy: if I brush my teeth, it is reasonable to expect that I will get fewer cavities than if I did not.
The Wrong Dressing…
Sometimes the orange you buy isn’t ripe, or the salad you purchase doesn’t have the right dressing. You can bring it back and get a refund or buy another orange or salad. Sometimes no matter how much you brush your teeth, you get a cavity. And sometimes your friend texts you a half hour before lunch to cancels.
In the manifest world, events are sometimes out of our control and agreements are broken. That’s why we have contracts: to incentivize performance and provide a reasonable expectation of performance in the future. With incentive (cause) the seemingly chaotic world develops a certain stability (effect).
I was seeing my yoga practice as just another transaction. As with buying an orange, I assume that if I practiced hard and consistently enough, I would see a change in my mood, my health, and my overall happiness would improve. As if there were some sort of Rewards program that grants more freedom and happiness the more we meditate, perform religious rituals, and/or bend ourselves into pretzels.
This contract is made with our egos, “I” want to avoid suffering so I will practice āsana. I want to achieve enlightenment so I will meditate every day. If I practice this kriyā long enough I’ll feel refreshed when I am done.
Spiritual (not religious) work is done internally. By definition, it should always be under our control. So why is there no guarantee that the spiritual work you do today will pay off tomorrow? Because spiritual work is not transactional: if it were, we’d always have a return because we are the only ones that need to perform.
A refined spiritual practice transcends the ego and the deal-making we engage in with it. Part of that transcendence is letting go of expectations and the ego incentives that feed them. All of the practices and the effects of yoga happen only if I commit totally and let go of “I.” And the practice of letting go of “I” never ends.
In moments of union or yoga we experience totality. There is no lack. There is no restriction. We are liberated, filled with vast silence. This can last seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months or years depending on the effort involved, if we can let go of the ego and its tendencies.
And so there is no need for a contract in the first place; there is no lack to be fulfilled. But to do that there must be constant effort and a discipline that becomes devotion. Resistance that arises from conditioning must become love. So that the act becomes the gift itself in the present instead of something to be had in the future.
Hunger
If I am hungry, I need food to satisfy hunger. This is a basic function of the body. As long as the body is alive we must eat to keep it nourished. Hunger will always arise though, and needs to be dealt with (food is but one option, actually). There is no such biological prerequisite for the ego, however. And yet most of us feel there is, and this is one source of suffering.
The ego will never be satisfied, no matter how much you feed it. Ego hunger, like actual hunger, will never go away unless we transcend it through practice.
There is no causal/transactional link between the practice and the state of union or state of “no lack”. The practice is the state, and the state is the practice.
Transcendence as a result of practice involves moving past the perceived separation between cause and effect, between past and present, and present and future. A strong spiritual practice never ceases, there is no past and now and future. There is only now. And now. And now. And now.
We are humans and it is human nature to suffer, to make mistakes, to lie, to steal, to cheat, to hurt others just as it is human nature to tell the truth, give to others, to love and to forgive.
We have a great capacity for growth as well as destruction. That will never change. The gift of a spiritual practice is not the removal of depression, lying, cheating or suffering from your experience but the transcendence of how you perceive them.
As long as I perceive my yoga practice as something to be bartered with it will forever be one half of a transaction with my ego, and my suffering will only increase.
Image: Daniele Idini
Separateness
One need not be a Hindu or even a yogi to have a spiritual practice. Many faiths lead to a transcendence of the ego and cause and effect in the material world. Prayer, service, devotion and keen insight require total commitment of your being and isn’t just an intellectual exercise.
Much of the modern world is based on an intellectual concept – the presumed individuality of existence. Each of our bodies are a thing with a brain that controls it and heart that sustains it.
One aspect of this view is actually the contract: by definition, there must be two parties to a contract. So, we view each other as separate and separate ourselves on a daily basis, many times a day. This point of view will always lead to internal and external conflict because conflict requires two parties as well.
Separateness is one of the great illusions of the modern world. It is a belief that is reinforced again and again. A belief is an intellectual understanding based on assumptions. You see this everywhere. People “believe” in lots of “things.”
Again, two parties must exist: me and the concept. This is totally different to Faith. Faith is a knowingness, a surrender to what is: that there is no separation.
In a state of Oneness there is no contract. There is no conflict. It takes discipline to overcome the feeling of separateness created by our conditioning and our ego. That constant discipline is devotion. In that state of constant effort, we are free from the suffering of separateness.
And so my friend was also wrong. It was the practice which led me to these insights about my condition. All the benefits of a spiritual practice happen now, not sometime in the future as a return on the investment of your practice.
The promise of yoga IS the sustained practice: be that pranayama, meditation, yamas and niyamas, āsana or puja. Yes, you may reach an enlightened state sometime in your life.
Yes, it may happen in the future. Yes, daily practice can make enlightenment more likely to happen. Yes, sometimes your friend cancels and you are disappointed. Yes, sometimes you will feel like you want a spiritual refund. But that’s not the point. A spiritual practice, once started, never ends. It is action, not passively waiting for suffering to end.
According to the recently deceased Kevin Higgins: ‘Poets may be divided into three types: those of us who must be and are, or have been, suppressed, at least until after we are dead; those whose subject matter is so commonplace/banal that it doesn’t matter either way; and then those who become pure decorations of the Regime.’
Responding to his assessment by email (sadly, I never met Kevin in person despite publishing over twenty of his poems) I wondered whether the three archetypes he had identified could be located in the Romantic canon as the suppressed Percy Bysshe Shelley, the rather banal John Keats and the decorative Poet Laureate William Wordsworth.
He replied from his death bed on Tuesday, January 3rd:
I wouldn’t count Keats among the banal. I would more be thinking of the older academicised poet of the post WWII world, who is mostly locked into an Irish Times/Guardian/NY Times world view whereby the only permitted historical variables are their own divorces and their parents’ deaths. Keats wasn’t that. Though you have categorised Shelley and Wordsworth right in that regard.
Note to self: read more of John Keats.
Paul Muldoon
Kevin’s final poem for Cassandra Voices ‘Congratulations’ responded to what he regarded as ‘a terrible, long poem taking one side in a war in a most crude and unthinking way’ by Paul Muldoon in the Irish Times. As he saw it, for establishment poets:
Life will be mostly festivals
of enforced grinning,
during which you’ll pass the hours
counting each others’ teeth.
I had no option but to vote for
that tax on women’s shoes
but greatly admired the fight you put up against it;
have kept all the press cuttings,
especially those that took care not to mention me.
Another barbed poem, which he confided was written in the voice of Michael D. Higgins (as he imagined it), ‘having known him for forty years’ was Memorial to Myself:
I was not bought and sold at the market stall
where you can get (third hand)
Fianna Fail senators cheaper
than Mayo flags two weeks after
an All Ireland defeat.
Kevin Higgins was a poet unusually animated by political events. Invariably, he took the side of the oppressed, whether desperate migrants, or Travellers on the fringe of Irish society.
His verse took aim at those poets who engaged with what he considered the commonplace and banal. The first poem he ever published with Cassandra Voices Advisory Epistle From Literature Quangocrat offers a caricature of a contemporary Irish poet:
I only read novels
which interrogate the relationship
between gout and Islamist terrorism,
translated from the obligatory French;
and poets whose words make me sink
more comfortably into
my brown swivel chair.
Categories will include: least authentic
poetry collection, most intellectually empty
novel, most cowardly book review,
publisher who made the biggest
eeijt of themselves this year
And in ‘Formation of a Young Irish Intellectual’ he expressed deep concern about what he considered a homogeneity of thinking around a damaging consensus reigning ascendant in Irish universities:
We have a library of pre-existing think pieces
from which you can choose your opinions,
which we’d like you to massage
so they seem different at first
but end up being exactly the same as the rest of us.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, he expressed indifference for ‘grunts of approval / from fully clothed minor male poets’ in ‘My Approach to Literary Networking‘.
Kevin unmercifully pilloried what he perceived as latent fascistic tendencies in Ireland directed against the forces of radicalism he identified with. As he put it in ‘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.
It’s fair to say Kevin Higgins despised advocates of neoliberal policy in Ireland. In ‘The Ballad of Lucy Kryton’ he described her fiscal policy as ‘dampness moving / down other people’s walls.’
Further afield, Kevin reserved particular scorn for realpolitik pragmatists such as Henry Kissinger, who as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State presided over a particular brutal phase of US foreign policy under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Kevin seemed to have little faith in karma catching up with Kissinger:
Someone dies of politically necessary starvation
but that someone is never Henry Kissinger
A bomb is dropped on someone whose name you’ll never have to pronounce
because it’s not Henry Kissinger
He also railed against ‘the adults in the room’ of this neoliberal era, depicting an anti-democratic slide in ‘After Recent Unfortunate Results’:
So when all’s said and counted,
people who shouldn’t matter
can go back to not mattering.
A barrel of industrial waste poured into a suit
donated by a casino owner who knows people
with a tangerine tea towel tossed strategically on top
because it was the only available metaphor for hair
was running for re-election as CEO of South Canadia
against an old coat with holes in it.
Nevertheless, he viewed the phenomenon of Trump as symptomatic of a sick American society, rather than the causative agent necessarily – the ‘old coat’ – which he saw as embedded in power.
Such people agreed with each other that the barrel of waste
made the raging boil on the nation’s privates
way too obvious, and hoped by throwing
the old coat over it they could again
forget it was there.
Each witch hunt is a tribute act to the last.
There is always a committee of three.
The gravity in the room is such
they struggle to manoeuvre
the enormity of their serious
faces in the door.
our gathering will resemble
less a revolution
than a church group
on its way somewhere
to pray for a cure
for rheumatism,
or even better,
no cure;
Time and again he expressed a serious worry about the neoliberal hegemony in comedic terms. Thus in ‘Our Posh Liberal Friends‘ he wrote:
This Future has a face that one day
might raise the corporate tax rate
by zero point five percent,
and is a little too insistent
that poor people be allowed live,
give or take, as long as the rest of us.
And mocked a neoliberal tolerance of diversity that provided cover for any manner of outrage, as in ‘Liberals and Death’:
… you’re the first village
no-one’s ever heard of
successfully abolished
from thirty thousand feet
by a transgender person
pressing a button;
No doubt the period of the lockdowns was tough for someone in ill-health who had previously attempted to bring poetry to the people with live events and workshops. While he appears to have been generally supportive of lockdown measures, we do find worries expressed around the arrival of a techno-dystopia in ‘The Happy Song of Us’.
Okay to buy your grandchild an ice-cream.
Illegal for them to lick it.
Fine to bake granny
a gleaming fruit cake,
as long as you only email her
a high resolution photo of it.
Kevin Higgins was an uncompromising poet. His verse vented a deep disenchantment with the economic structures of our time. He fought against the spiraling inequality and outright cruelty he saw in the contemporary world, sparing no one he believed was collaborating with this system. Not even Michael D..
He inveighed against the well made poem that puts on a dicky bow, and ‘which walks to the top of the hill, / and has what it calls an epiphany.’
The well made poem believes
nuclear weapons are necessary
to keep poems like it safe
from all the rough language
gathered ungovernable at the border
forever threatening to invade it.
Above all perhaps, he scorned the hypocrisy of people who only speak out only when it is safe to do so, as in ‘Safe To Say’:
Sometime the century after next.
I’ll be against giving the children of Bethlehem
something from Lockheed Martin
to occupy themselves with for Christmas.
Like I was against rhino-whipping the blacks
into line in Port Elizabeth, Ladysmith, Pietermaritzburg
after it stopped happening.
But, for now, see no alternative.
Thanks for your support Kevin! We’ll do our best to keep going.
Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.
The New York Evening World, 1906.
Perhaps others, better acquainted with the genre, may argue to the contrary, but Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle is surely a contender as the Great American Novel. Though far from an ideological bedfellow, Winston Churchill nonetheless wrote admiringly that Sinclair had marshalled his forces like the general of an army on the attack.[i]
That the work is not better known today is probably on account of the butcher’s blade it takes to the American Dream, and the presentation of an alternative vision for humanity. Thus, Socialism is described as ‘the new religion of humanity – or you might say it was the fulfilment of the old religion, since it implied but the literal application of all the teachings of Christ (p.346)’.
The Jungle is generally credited with the swift passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in June 1906 – eventually leading to the creation of the FDA – after laying bare to the American public the unsanitary practices of the Beef Trust in Chicago’s Packingtown.
Notably, however, action was only taken when the health of the US population at large seemed at stake. Sinclair claimed the “embalmed beef” scandal ‘killed several times as many soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards(p.105)’ in the war of 1898.
The Act did not, however, address the frightful working conditions of mainly immigrant workers in the meat packing industry; let alone the millions of animals subjected to industrial slaughter. Moreover, in certain respects, the industrial food system is now more disturbing than ever, while the FDA has long been subject to Regulatory Capture.
At least we have The Jungle to remind us of ongoing fraudulent misrepresentations:
The storekeepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of lies to entice you; the very fences of the wayside, the lamp-posts and telegraph-poles, were pasted with lies. The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country – from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie(p.82).
A Time of Hope
The opening chapter introduces an unlikely hero, Jurgis Rudkus – ‘he with the mighty shoulders and the giant hands (p.4)’ who is ‘the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of(p.23)’ – a recent Lithuanian immigrant to ‘Packingtown’, Chicago, along with an extended family group, who are being ground down by unrelenting work and squalid conditions.
In spite of abject poverty the family nonetheless insists on a proper occasion for Jurgis’s wedding to his beloved Ona: ‘these poor people have given up everything else; but to this they cling with all the power of their souls – they cannot give up the veselija(p.15).’
At that point, still imbued with optimism, Jurgis’s response to any of the multiple challenges he confronts is to shrug his broad shoulders and say he will just have to work harder. It makes him an early model for Boxer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. His love for Ona – recalling in certain respects Odysseus’s journey towards Penelope – means he resists the lure of the saloons, which most workers frequent.
But in a pedagogic aside – after the family are confronted with a higher than expected bill for the wedding – Sinclair intimates that the brutal nature of the work in Packingtown erodes moral as well as physical beings: ‘for men who have to crack the heads of an animal all day seem to get into the habit, and to practice it on their friends, and even on their families.(p.20)’
At the time about ten thousand head of cattle and as many hogs and half as many sheep were disposed of every day, amounting to eight to ten million live creatures turned into food every year.
It was ‘the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place’, employing thirty thousand men, supporting directly two hundred and fifty thousand people in it neighbourhood, and indirectly half million, and ‘furnished the food for no less than thirty million people(p.45)’ – or at least whatever could be passed off as such.
In what is a distressing account, the reader is introduced to a succession of despicable practices that drain away human life by degrees, while imperilling consumer health. One such is “speeding up the gang”, where a foremen alternates picked men to set up a hectic pace ‘and if any man could not keep up with the pace, there were hundreds outside begging to try(p.63)’.
As he works, Jurgis finds numerous examples of shoddy corruption. Thus, a good many so-called “slunk” calves turned up every day:
Any man who knows anything about butchering knows that the flesh of a cow that is about to calve, or has just calved, is not fit for food … if they had chosen, it would have been an easy matter for the packers to keep them till they were fit for food.
This inconvenience would lead to a loss of revenue however, thus:
whoever noticed it would tell the boss, and the boss would start up a conversation with the government inspector, and the two would stroll away. So in a trice the carcass of the cow would be cleaned out(p.68).
There were also “Downers”: cattle that are injured or die on the long journey to slaughter. These too are surreptitiously placed alongside healthier specimens.
Shockingly, the meat of tubercular cattle is also permitted to enter the food chain, in return for ‘two thousand dollars a week hush money.(p.104)’ It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the book triggered a political scandal.
Property Swindle
On arrival in Chicago the family find a dilapidated boarding house to reside, but strive to purchase a property in fulfilment of their American Dream – assuming this will be a saving in the long run for a working family.
Jurgis chances on an advertisement featuring a brilliantly painted house, under which there is a picture of a husband and wife in warm embrace. Underneath is written – helpfully in Lithuanian – “Why pay rent?” “Why not out own your own home.(p.51)”
When they view the house, however, it is not ‘as it was shown in the pictures(p.52)’ –albeit it has been freshly painted. Despite the agent’s exhortations that the sale must be closed without delay, or they risk losing the opportunity, they follow their gut instinct and hold off from purchasing. They are eventually duped into signing on the dotted line by a dodgy lawyer who assures them it is a perfectly regular deed.
So, they part with their savings, leaving them on the hook for a monthly repayment that stretches them to the limits of endurance.
As if this isn’t hard enough – especially in return for what they soon discover is a house that is barely fit for human habitation – a few months later they are presented with an annual insurance bill that threatens to starve them into submission.
Predictably, after Jurgis gets into trouble with the law and cannot work, the family loses the home – and their hard-earned savings – and are forced to return to the boarding house from whence they came, where further trials await.
Ironically, a century later millions of Americans, and others, had a similar experience of losing their homes, and savings, in the Financial Crash, in large part due to banks offering easy credit.
Cartoon from Puck, August 9, 1899 by J. S. Pughe. Angry Uncle Sam sees hyphenated voters and demands, “Why should I let these freaks cast whole ballots when they are only half Americans?”
Shenanigans
The novel explores the ethnic composition of Packingtown’s workers. Waves of cheap foreign labour have fed an industry which, Sinclair argues, is ‘every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave-drivers(p.117).’ Based on this account, it would be hard to disagree.
First came the Germans, and afterwards the Irish, who Sinclair generally casts as profiteers and political fixers. After that came Bohemians, followed by Poles, then Lithuanians, who were then giving way to Slovaks.
Having ascended a grease-laden pole, many of the Irish in the novel seem determined to keep others from scaling the heights. Sinclair’s is perhaps demonstrating that success in Packingtown depends on a willingness to embrace corruption and exploitation; at the behest of the Beef Trust itself, ‘a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land(p.346).’
Some are damaged souls, however, such as Tommy Finnegan, ‘a little Irishman with big staring eyes and a wild aspect’, who expounds on ‘The method of operation of the higher intelligence’. Finnegan informs Jurgis that ‘shperrits … may be operatin’ upon ye(p.97-98)’
Far more sinister is the ruler of the district, Mike Scully who, ‘held and important party office in the state, and bossed even the mayor of the city, it was said; it was his boast that he carried the stockyards in his pocket.’ As a result, ‘He was an enormously rich man(p.101)’.
Eventually we learn:
It was Scully who was to blame for the unpaved street in which Jurgis’s child had been drowned; it was Scully who had put into office the magistrate who had first sent Jurgis to jail; it was Scully who was principal stockholder in the company which had sold him his ramshackle tenement, and then robbed him of it(p.287).
Yet when we do finally encounter Scully he is ‘a little dried up Irishman, whose hands shook’; who is ‘but a tool and puppet of the packers(p.288).
Jurgis’s beloved Ona is also raped and beaten by Connor ‘a big, red-faced Irishman, coarse featured, and smelling of liquor(p.167).’ In revenge, Jurgis violently assaults him, landing him a spell behind bars.
This brings him before another Irish-American, ‘the notorious Justice Callahan’:
“Pat” Callahan – “Growler” Pat, as he had been known before he ascended to the bench – had begun life as a butcher-boy and a bruiser of local reputation; he had gone into politics almost as soon as he had learned to talk, and he held two offices at once before he was enough to vote.
Unfortunately for Jurgis, Callahan had developed a ‘strong conservatism’ and ‘contempt for foreigners(p.173).’
Yet another Irishman called “Buck” Halloran, ‘was a political worker and on the inside of things(p.281)’. He employs Jurgis to enlist fictional voters for forthcoming elections in a sham democracy.
At last, we meet one Irishman, working in an enterprise owned and managed by a socialist who pays a decent wage and sets reasonable hours. He explains to Jurgis ‘the geography of America, and its history, its constitution and its laws; also he gave him an idea of the business system of the country.’ Sinclair seems to be showing that in circumstances where labour is not alienated, even an Irishman is capable of decency and culture.
How were immigrants persuaded to work in such appalling conditions? Sinclair tells us that ‘old man Durham’ (the proprietor of the Beef Trust):
was responsible for these immigrations; he had sown that would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike on him and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of of work and high wages at the stockyards(p.72).
The grotesque lie places naïve workers such as Jurgis at the mercy of a system that degrades its victims by degrees. Sadly, it was not just adults who are engaged. Thus, even the young children in Jurgis’s family group are obliged to work – and die – joining the million and three-quarter of children who were at the time similarly compelled.
Sing Sing prison (New York). Date unknown.
Off the Rails
While incarcerated Jurgis encounters men for whom, ‘love was a beastliness, joy was a snare, and God was an imprecation.’ He shares a cell, and befriends Jack Duane, a likeable, though ultimately callous, rogue, who reveals the possibilities of a life in crime. Jurgis avoids this temptation for he still has a wife and child to keep him on the straight and narrow.
After being released from his first stretch, Jurgis is black-listed and thus unable to work. He then loses his beloved Ona to childbirth. From that point on – like so many others of his class – he numbs his pain with alcohol. He remains with the extended family group, nonetheless, on account of his baby son Ananas. But the tragedy is complete when the infant dies too – drowning in a puddle in an unpaved street.
At that point, Jurgis is a lost soul, with his dreams of a new life in shreds: ‘So he went on, tearing up all the flowers from the garden of his soul, and setting his heel upon them(p.235).’
He leaves Chicago in the spring as a hobo, working for farmers and foraging wild berries along the trail, which restores his health, but he cannot escape reminders of the old life:
Ah, what agony was that, what despair, when the tomb of memory was rent open and the ghosts of his old life came forth to scourge him!(p.244)
Thus, he returns to Chicago in the fall – like a moth to flame – where further obstacles and humiliations await. There he reconnects with Jack Duane, who introduces him to a life of crime. On their first outing they mug a man who, they learn afterwards, has suffered a concussion on the brain. This troubles the conscientious Jurgis, ‘but the other laughed cooly – it was the way of the game, and there was no helping it.’
Duane assures Jurgis, “He was doing it to somebody as bad as he could, you can be sure of that(p.279).” Duane seems to assume that ‘behind every great fortune lies a great crime.’
Jurgis’s moral descent is complete when he takes on a job as a foreman and then a scab worker during a general strike.
Brothel “The Paris”, 2101 Armor Street, Chicago.
The Only Way to Get Ahead
Jurgis’s career as a thief and strike-breaker brings a measure of financial success, implying the only way to get ahead in Chicago is to debase oneself. By then, however, having lost all family connection – and lacking a belief system – he cannot develop a stable existence. Instead, he frequents the saloons and sprawling flesh pots.
Earlier we learn of Chicago: ‘there was no place in it where a prostitute could not get along better than a decent girl(p.116)’:
Thousands of them came to Chicago answering advertisements for “servants” and “factory hands,” and found themselves trapped by fake employment agencies, and locked up in a bawdy-house(p.282).
One of the saddest episodes, among many, is Jurgis’s reconnection with Marija Berczynskas, Ona’s stepsister. At the beginning of the novel, like Jurgis, Marija displays all the characteristics of a model worker, but by the end she has been forced into prostitution in order to feed the family, and is addicted to morphine.
Prior to this Marija conducted a touching love affair with the fiddler Tomaszios, who previously spell bound the wedding party with his music. But Packingtown is no place for an artist – or romance. Marija tells Jurgis that Tomaszios has left her, having ‘got blood-poisoning and lost one finger(p.320)’ in a work place accident, meaning he cannot play the violin any longer.
Marija has interesting insights into her fellow prostitutes:
Most of the women here are pretty decent – you’d be surprised. I used to think they did it because they liked to; but fancy a woman selling herself to every kind of man that comes … and doing it because she likes it(p.327).
Cartoon by Udo Keppler, first punlished in New York by ‘Puck’, 15 October 1913.
Commercial Competition
Towards the end of the novel, after a quasi-religious conversion to socialism, and securing a steady job with a socialist proprietor, Jurgis meets a number of talking head intellectuals in a kind of underworld sequence.
Here he learns that the Beef Trust are just one part of the capitalist system:
There are other trusts in the country just as illegal and extortionate as the Beef Trust: there is the Coal Trust, that freezes the poor in winter – there is the Steel Trust, that doubles the price of every nail in your shoes – there is the Oil Trust, that keep you from reading at night.
This character asks rhetorically, ‘why do you suppose it is that the all the fury of the press and the government is directed against the Beef Trust?’
He informs Jurgis: ‘the papers clamor for action, and the government goes on the war path’, then ‘poor common people watch and applaud the job’, but this is ‘really the grand climax of the century-long battle of commercial competition.(p.355)’
The hysterical reaction of so many in the media to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter suggests that this age-old “battle of commercial competition” continues – as the billionaire class squabble over the spoils.
Campaign poster from his 1912 presidential campaign featuring Eugene Debs.
Much Abides
The Socialist Party of American became a powerful political force around the turn of the last century – at least until it was beaten into submission. But already by mid-century, in response to the excesses of the Soviet Union, the socialist ideal had become to many in the English-speaking world ‘The God that Failed’. A hybrid social-market ‘New Deal’ emerged under FDR in the 1930s, but neoliberalism has reigned ascendent since at least the Reagan Presidency. In today’s muddled era of identity politics, activists often lack commitment to countering the structures that produce an ever-widening gap between rich and poor.
Today, US workers are afforded far greater protection compared to Sinclair’s day, and child labour has largely been eliminated. However, in ‘the most health-obsessed society, all is not well.’[ii] Sixty percent of adults suffer from a chronic condition, and over forty per cent have two or more of such conditions.[iii]
Most Americans still live on the edge of financial ruin. A recent poll found 63% are living from paycheck to paycheck — including, remarkably, nearly half of six-figure earners, as the cost of living continues to rise.
The stress caused by this precarious existence seems to lie behind ongoing substance abuse, including an Opioid Crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands, while enriching Big Pharma that preys on the country’s pathologies. Other self-destructive behaviours – such as over-eating – are normalised in a rigid two-party political system that leaves little room for dissent.
Alarmingly, there is little sign of political change in the US, while many other countries appear to be embracing neoliberal norms. Since the 1970s inequality has spiralled, and most political radicalism seems more inclined towards self-reliance than cooperation, but as Gabor Maté points out, in what could be a commentary on The Jungle:
If I see the world as a hostile place where only winners thrive, I may well become aggressive, selfish and grandiose to survive in such a milieu … beliefs are not only self-fulfilling; they are world-building[iv].
The Jungle characterises US society as being one where willingness to participate in a “gigantic lie” underpins success. This deceit goes on, as people continue to be persuaded to buy things they don’t need, while a successful boss still extracts as much as possible from workers. It means that even some of the best, like Jurgis Rudkus and Marija Berczynskas, are still being ground down – unless they too are prepared to display the required “aggressive, selfish and grandiose” qualities that success depends on.
[i] Hugh J. Dawson, “Winston Churchill and Upton Sinclair: An Early Review of The Jungle,” ALR, 1991.
[ii] Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté, the Myth of Normal: Trauma Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, Random House, London, 2022, p.1.
[iii] Christine Buttorff et al, Multiple Chronic Conditions in the United States, Santa Monica, CA RAND Corporation, 2017.
I immediately twitch with an almost intolerable discomfort when I hear the words freedom and equality. Alas, they have become quite meaningless.
Let’s take freedom for starters. Where does such a notion come from? Freedom implies choice and yet we are offered so few, in this world or ours.
For example, did you have a say in your birth? No, you didn’t. This singular event, without a doubt the most tumultuous and catastrophic in a whole litany of debacles you call your life – the one which possibly defines you the most – you have had absolutely no say in it.
So, right from the beginning you were forced, without any choice, to take part in the whole abominable exercise called Life. And, when you think further about it, the choices did not grow from thereon in, they only diminished all the more.
Your family, your country, your social background, your people’s history, again, you were not consulted in any of this. Nor in your sex, creed or language, might I add. All of these profoundly important features were thrust upon you.
Look at your body? Listen to your heart beating. Who determines that? And your lungs. Are you in control of them? Is it not that whole horrendous mechanism that houses that thing you call a spirit? Isn’t your body but a vast cell entrapping you in its ghastly prison?
As a language teacher, again not by choice, I call it the Grammar of Being! For, as in language there is very little freedom – if none at all – until the day arrives when you have mastered the extremely complex mechanisms of any language.
Anyone who has learned a foreign language will attest to how difficult this endeavour is; there are grammatical and lexical rules, as well as social rules, conventions and idioms – culture in a word – that you must also be aware of. There is Very little freedom until you have mastered all the systems.
Freedom? Where is the freedom in any of this, I ask you? Will you choose the day that you die? Well yes, only if… Camus spoke of suicide as the ultimate act of freedom, and, on this, he was of course totally correct.
And what about that other word: equality? I am reminded of the Spartan at Thermopylae who turned to his immediate neighbour, upon hearing him utter the word, and laughing at him pointed to the oncoming Persian army and said that one single Spartan was worthy of a thousand of ‘them.’
So, what does freedom mean here in twenty first century Ireland, the Republic of Ireland at least? That idea of a country we have.
What does freedom mean to us here? When we think of freedom, for example, what do we see? Do we see a rainbow-coloured flag? Sometimes this appears to be all it represents.
I work in a school, for example, and outside my classroom door (I teach foreign students who are obliged to learn English as a foreign language for their visas) there is a notice board which I instigated. Although originally it was to be a place for student messaging, there is now a lone flyer explaining the origins of the rainbow flag, which we see so prominently all over our towns and streets.
Indeed, on Culture Night one inevitably sees a veritable sea of multi-coloured rainbow flags, which come from the government-backed Arts Council. Indeed, when you attend any Arts Council-funded event these days, you come to expect the usual plethora of rainbow colours everywhere you go.
So, I hear you ask. What is the problem with this? Are you asking: “Is he one of them – a homophobe?”
On the contrary, as a writer and artist, I have been profoundly influenced by gay-lesbian- trans and bisexual writers and artists since I was an adolescent: William Burroughs, Jean Genet, John Cocteau, Marcel Proust, Lee Miller, Mae West… the list just goes on and on.
So, on this point, I can assure you, I am not against the LGBT community at all. What I am against, and profoundly so as an artist, is the notion of equality that the Arts Councils, and arts groups in general, would appear to be promoting. I am against this for an important reason that is often lost sight of.
A few days ago, I was on my way to catch a train when I bumped into an acquaintance. The man was familiar to me through certain public readings – open mics as they are called – as I sometimes had the occasion to join him at them.
The open mics that we both attended at the time promoted very strongly the ideas that I am now fundamentally opposed to, so much so that I have now adopted an anti-open mic policy.
This notion is that all writers and artists (just like all lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transexuals – who decides who goes first?) are equal and so should have the same time frame allotted to them at a public reading (usually a mere four minutes).
This means that a complete novice, who wouldn’t know a stanza from a portmanteau, is given the very same amount of respect as, say, a translator and poet who has had multiple books published and has been working very diligently on their art for over thirty years.
A professional musician asked me the other day if I had been attending any open mics recently. In return I asked when was the last time that he had shared a stage with a bunch of amateur musicians for free?
He suddenly smiled and about-tracked, finally realising what it was he had been asking me. And yet open mics are now all-pervading.
Where once they were regarded as a rather harmless exercises promoting ideas of inclusivity, now they are the absolute norm. Yet they are only considered normal in the world poetry.
Why is this? My friend, the musician, understood very well my situation. He knows me as a semi-professional writer and translator that is expected to share the stage with any newcomer at any number of so-called arts festivals.
I attended one recently for which I was very generously compensated. It had been funded by the Arts Council, but when I looked at the website after the event, to see what kind of photographs had been taken etc., there were simply thousands of photos of so called ‘poets’, meaning the actual poets who had attended were lost in an absolute avalanche of amateurism.
My friend at the train station also asked me what I had been up to of late. I mentioned that I was going down to Cork to present a paper at a Beckett symposium, but that I would be deliberately present on James Joyce, just to annoy the Beckett aficionados.
In response, my acquaintance looked at me with a kind triumph in his eyes – a look he could never have had twenty years ago – and declared that his opinion on James Joyce was just as valid as anyone else’s.
He made this boast with such firm conviction that I assume he actually believed what he was saying. I remained mute.
What could I say? After all, both of us knew he had never read Ulysses not to mention Finnegans Wake. As I watched my acquaintance shuffle on – with some bravado I might add – I couldn’t help, there but for the grace of God, go I!
The music was the code. It was the transliteration of the style. It was not giving a bollocks in a thoroughly musical manner. It was fuck this and fuck that and frankly fuck you. A rockety life came with the territory. You didn’t have to be Irish. Their England had been influenced by that Ireland of the 50’s. Behan, Kavanagh, O’Brien. Roaring Boys all. Drunken, rackety, genius bores. And Shane could be as drunk and boring and rackety or he could write as beautifully as any of them. Bob Geldof, Waiting for Herb, 2004.
Night Crossing
As the ferry lurched out of Dublin port we reminisced on crossings of yore. In response to regretful talk about the withdrawal of the service out of Dun Laoghaire – which at least had a rail connection – Shane MacGowan recalled, with typical belligerence, “Dun Laoghaire was there before a fucking DART line,” before hissing reassuring laughter.
He then spoke wistfully of his grandfather telling him about how ‘lower order’ passengers would have to share decks with the livestock on board. It seemed a very different world to a Stena Lounge bereft of passengers on this night crossing, but at least the wine was complimentary, and Tina didn’t mind a few messers on board.
Indeed, the aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, of the Pogues was a throwback to a bygone Ireland – and Irish – often scorned by ‘respectable’ people. In particular, those compelled by economic circumstances to take up jobs ‘across the water’.
Shane MacGowan was born in Tunbridge Wells in Kent in 1957 to Irish immigrant parents, but spent his early youth living with maternal aunts and uncles in Puckane, Co. Tipperary. Formative teenage years were spent in 1970s London.
For the emerging poet, rural Ireland – for all its faults – seemed a fairy realm, enlivened by song and alcoholic excess, compared to the industrial decay and entrenched class system of England at that time. Having dabbled in punk with The Nipple Erectors he returned to his musical roots, forming the Pogues (from the Irish phrase póg mo thóin, meaning ‘kiss my arse’) in 1982.
He previously described the ‘Irish look’ the band self-consciously adopted:
The suits, black suits with white shirts which we wore, were Brendan Behan uniform and that’s why we chose them, not to look smart, but to look as if we could have come from any decade … We could have looked like people from the fifties, sixties, or seventies … we just looked like classic Paddies.[i]
Extended Fairground
As the night wore on, in particularly good cheer, Shane began humming a medley, beginning with the ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’, “When off Holyhead wished meself was dead / Or better far instead”, culminating in a vision of Irish inclusivity – at least before the men in the mohair suits moved in – at the ‘Galway Races’:
There were half a million people there
Of all denominations
The Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew,
The Presbyterian
Yet not animosity
No matter what the persuasion
But failte hospitality
Inducing fresh acquaintance
With me wack fol do fol
The diddle idle day
This evocation of carnival wherein social hierarchies disappear in joyful Bacchanalia helps understand what Shane MacGowan engendered with the Pogues during the 1980s: a two-fingered reaction to Thatcherism that helped define our Irish identity.
As the cultural critic Joe Cleary put it in Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Field Day, 2007) in the music of the Pogues: ‘The [Irish] nation is imagined as a kind of extended fairground.’[ii]
He adds, however, that with the Pogues: ‘this version of carnival is never allowed to become cosily celebratory because it is always shot through with sentiments of anger and aggression, sometimes strident, sometimes more muted.’[iii]
Hooliganism
The word hooligan derives from the surname of a fictional rowdy Irish family in a music-hall song from the 1890s. Later, applied to the antics of English football fans, steeped in post-imperial hubris, it took on angry connotations.
But the Pogues were all about the hoolie – a big noisy party – and unashamedly “Up the RA”, when it was still risqué to be so. Their song ‘Streets of Sorrow / Birmingham Six ‘refers to the plight of the Birmingham Six and Guilford Four and was censored by the BBC.
Their old school, rumbunctious hooliganism, fused elements of punk and traditional Irish music with the incantations that arouse from Shane MacGowan’s errant soul.
As Cleary puts it the Pogues, ‘merged the ‘modernist’- and ‘avant-garde’-coded aesthetics of punk with the ‘romantically’-coded idioms of the Irish musical forms.’
He argues:
For the Pogues to yoke together … the avant-garde future-orientated metropolitan aesthetics of punk, with the retro aesthetics of céilí and the broadly political edginess of the pub-ballad scene was an inspired act not only of musical synthesis but of semantic sabotage as well.[iv]
Alongside self-destructive excess there was something serious going on, ‘saving folk from the folkies’ as Elvis Costello put it[v], while asserting a brash, yet accommodating Irish identity – after all, many of the band were not even Irish – notwithstanding an unashamed approval of violent Republicanism, based on a long historical memory of famine, torture and resistance.
The success of the Pogues and Shane MacGowan – who transcended traditional Irish music to become a rockstar celebrity – may go some way to explaining an enduring, relative openness among Irish people to new cultural encounters – even multiculturalism – at least by comparison with erstwhile colonisers.
Like it or not, any witness to an average Saturday night in Dublin can testify to the presence of a carnival of sexual deviancy, donnybrooks and nonsensical pranks. This has become a generally inclusive ritual for Irish self-expression.
In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (London, 2021), David Graeber and David Wengrow suggest ‘[t]he really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world.’[vi] That just about sums up the Pogues’ contribution to Irish culture.
After the Pogues, along with their precursors and followers, we would wear a distinctively wild Irishness as a badge of honour, invite everyone to the party, then regale each other with far-fetched stories of nights that should have ended sooner, at least before the cops turned up, when the fun really started.
The Big Red Fun Bus
With the Irish Sea bathed in pale moonlight on a blissfully calm night, conversation turned to Westerns. With a glint in his eye Shane reeled off his favourites – ‘The Life and Times of Judge Roy Beans’ (1972), ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962), “with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne competing for the same girl”, and ‘The Searchers’ (1956).
But fittingly for a bard whose songs are steeped in tales of underdogs – like the navigators who ‘died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where / Save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur’ – his favourite was the more recent ‘Geronimo: An American Legend’ (1993), in which, unusually, a Native American victim is the hero.
By now the rest of our posse seemed to be asleep – it must have been passed 4am – but Shane’s mind was racing in this liminal phase. The high life of London beckoned and the rockstar in him was growing giddy.
We had another Brendan to thank for the drive to London. He and Shane’s full-time carer Elizabeth provide vital assistance and crucially, a sense of humour, in support of Victoria, Shane’s loving wife.
Once installed in the hotel room there was a chance for more songs, including a few Percy French ditties. Then an overlooked classic from his underrated period with the Popes: a homage to the nineteenth century poet James Clarence Mangan: ‘The Snake with Eyes of Garnett.’
It begins fittingly:
Last night as I lay dreaming
My way across the sea
James Mangan brought me comfort
With laudnum and poitin
The vision moves to the scene of a public execution being held on Stephen’s Green in 1819, before another crossing
If you miss me on the harbour
For the boat, it leaves at three
Take this snake with eyes of garnet
My mother gave to me!
The snake is a symbol of renewal, and for Shane perhaps the republican ideal. It also reveals his engagement with the literary canon. After all, he did once earn a scholarship to the exclusive Westminster public school.
He chimed in:
This snake cannot be captured
This snake cannot be tied
This snake cannot be tortured, or
Hung or crucified
It came down through the ages
It belongs to you and me
So pass it on and pass it on
‘Till all mankind is free
Contrary to the association of the snake with deceit and temptation – a phallic devil – according to Chevalier and Gheerbant’s Dictionary of Symbols, the serpent is ‘a continuation of the infinite materialization which is none other than primordial formlessness, the storehouse of latency which underlies the manifest world.’
It is an archetype representing ‘an “Old God”, the first god to be found at the start of all cosmogenesis, before religions of the spirit dethroned him.’[vii]
This becomes the moving spirit of another vagabond poet, James Clarence Manganwho as a Young Irelander renews the spirt of the nation, suffers and dies, apparently of malnutrition at the height of a cholera epidemic, but re-appears in spectral form.
He swung, his face went purple
A roar came from the crowd
But Mangan laughed and pushed me
And we got back on the cloud
He dropped me off in London
Back in this dying land
But my eyes were filled with wonder
At the ring still in my hand
‘this dying land’
Arriving in central London I am struck by the imperial grandeur. The scale and ambition of the architecture makes Dublin seem like a provincial town, but there’s a cold reserve that used to send a shiver down my spine when I lived here.
So many buildings appear uninhabited; unimaginably grand hotels seem more like fortresses with concierge-sentries posted outside to keep the hoi poloi at bay; uttering “can I help you sir,” with a snarl. We’d have to make our own fun.
The launch of Shane MacGowans’s art exhibition ‘The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold’ took place at the boutique Andipa gallery in Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from Harrods, where his art resides alongside that of Banksy’s.
Walking in I pass Bob Geldof, an unlikely presence, given his aversion to Irish nationalism, but he has credited Shane and the Pogues with awakening an interest in traditional Irish musical forms that he had previously disparaged.
In the relatively narrow confines of the gallery, with the king sitting contentedly on his throne, a carnival atmosphere asserts itself. He had escaped from all this, but that night he was enjoying a return to the crazy celebrity madness, which in England is built on a bedrock of aristocracy.
The champagne flowed, as minor celebrities converged – “he’s Liam Gallagher’s brother you know” – when the ocean parted before the eternal beauty of Kate Moss. A face to launch a thousand camera phones, and sell a few paintings.
Then on to Soho, where the weather at least remained dry. The police were even called. It took seven of them to take old Tom down, or so they say: never let the truth get in the way of a good yearn…
Ever since the Great Famine and the Devotional Revolution, and especially when they came to power after the establishment of the Free State, the traditionalists had been concerned to make Irish culture more refined and respectable by filtering out, as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘degraded’, all its more licentious and anarchic or uncouth elements – those very elements that were to make such a whoopingly triumphant return of the repressed in the Pogues’ music.[viii]
In many respects, the unapologetic Shane MacGowan remains an embarrassment to the Official Ireland narrative, now principally articulated in the Irish Times, which inculcates a new breed of conformity that brooks no divergence.
Previously, Irish Times journalist Joe Breen suggested that his distaste for the Pogues resembled the attitude of contemporary African-Americans who preferred contemporary music to a musical tradition obsessed with the miseries of slavery and Jim Crow.
Breen’s reference to American culture betrays the apparent objective of many Irish neoliberal cheerleaders to establish a deracinated Americana in Hibernia, a tax haven for multinationals where the atmosphere of the carnival is strictly commodified. Here, Irish history is reduced to the struggle of modernisers against religious authority – with nothing in between – and where celebration of the national struggle is associated with Populism, or even an exclusive ‘white’ nationalism.
The art of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues offer a rowdy alternative to a creeping homogenisation. He endures, seemingly just to spite them, and even in the dying land he can still revive the spirit of the carnival.
[i] Clarke and MacGowan, A Drink with Shane MacGowan, (London, 2001), p.168
The London-based Irish Poet, Art-Activist, Musician and Psychogeographer, Niall McDeviit died at his home in North Kensington, London on Thursday September 29th 2022 aged fifty-five, after a short battle with cancer.
Born in Limerick in February 1967, McDevitt moved to Dublin as a child. There he was educated at the Jesuit-run Belvedere College secondary school, and read English literature at University College Dublin. Both institutions were also attended by James Joyce, of whom McDevitt was a lifelong devotee.
Joyce inspired McDevitt to create his popular London Bloomsday Literary Walk, which over the years attracted hundreds of followers to West London.
Niall was a deep thinker, gifted scholar, poet, actor, writer and art-activist. To some he became almost an urban shaman.
As a young poet, not long in London, he became the ‘Resident Poet Laureate’ at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith from 1995 until 2009. There he enthralled audiences with unforgettable live poetry performances.
Niall was one of the most distinguished poets on London’s avant-garde literary scene. Author of three poetry collections, b/w ((Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013), and Firing Slits – Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016).
McDevitt’s poetry was by turns, solemn and sage, and savagely witty with melancholic romance. He was lauded by fellow poets, including Iain Sinclair, Patti Smith, John Cooper Clark, and Grey Gowrie.
James Byrne described McDevitt as, ‘arguably the most significant London-Irish poet since W.B. Yeats’.
Jeremy Reed, an older contemporary who influenced McDevitt’s early style, described him as ‘a luminous custodian of the great poetic mysteries.’
Niall was also one of London’s most admired and lauded ‘psychgeographers’, leading literary walks across London, with a particular emphasis on the revolutionary poets who called London home, including Arthur Rimbaud, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, as well as Irish writers such as James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and W.B Yeats.
He recently led a five-part London Literary Walk on his fellow Poet and Visionary, William Blake. Niall himself was regarded as one of the foremost Blakeans of his generation.
Over lockdown Dublin filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle collaborated closely with Niall to make the films ‘The Battle Of Blythe Road’, which won won the ‘Special Award’ at ‘The Portobello Film Festival’ (2021) is about W.B. Yeats time practising magic at in an ‘Isis Temple’ in West London.
It’s fitting that Niall’s last collaboration with Sé Merry Doyle was five films, captures Niall leading five walks on the life of William Blake.
It was an emotional moment, just a few weeks ago, when Niall spoke at the Premiere Screening of the first of those five films, ‘BlakeLand – William Blake and Thomas Paine,’ at the Portobello Film Festival 2022, which was to be his final public appearance.
As an actor and musician, McDevitt performed in Neil Oram’s twenty-four-hour play ‘The Warp’, Ken Campbell’s ‘Pidgin Macbeth’, John Constable’s ‘The Southwark Mysteries’ and John Arden and Margaretta Darcy’s 24 hour ‘Non-Stop Connolly Show’.
He was resident Pidgen poet/translator on John Peel’s Home Truths, and appeared on radio shows The Robert Elms Show, The Verb, Bespoken Word, The Poet of Albion and he was a regular guest on Portobello Radio’s ‘Bright Side Of The Road’.
As an ‘art-activist’ Niall also campaigned to save the Rimbaud-Verlaine house in Mornington Crescent, for the release of poet Saw Waifrom Insein prison in Burma, and against overdevelopment of sites near Blake’s burial ground in Bunhill Fields.
In 2013, he read at Yoko Ono’s Meltdown in the Future Exiles: Poetry and Activism event. In 2016 Niall performed his poetry in Iraq at the Babylon Festival.
Earlier this year, Niall was invited to read at a special event presented by the Francis Bacon Society, and in May Ireland’s leading photographer John Minihan, invited him to read at the opening of Minihan’s latest exhibition ‘Poet Of The Troubles, a Tribute to The Late Poet Pariac Fiacc’ at The Irish Cultural Centre Hammersmith.
Niall’s poems have been published in many anthologies, magazines and periodicals, including The London Magazine; Wretched Strangers, an anthology of non-UK born writers; Urban Shamanism, poets from north, west, south and east London; Diamond Cutters, poets in Britain, America and Oceania; and the STRIKE! Anthology. His blogs can still be read at www.poetopography.wordpress.com.
On the eve of Niall’s death, the final proof of his last collection of poetry London Nation arrived, just in time, in the post from his publishers, New River Press. It will be launched in London in the coming months.
Niall’s poetry deserves a place alongside the work of other great poets of the past and present. He was on the cusp of greater international recognition.
Niall McDevitt leaves behind his beloved partner Julie Goldsmith, her son Heathcote Ruthven, Niall’s Mother, Francis McDevitt and siblings Roddy and Yvonne McDevitt.
Sixteen years ago, I wandered down to the Forty Foot to take some pictures of winter swimmers, one of the first swimmers I encountered was Tim; every week that winter I took pictures, building my collection and getting to know Tim and the other hardy swimmers, of which there was very few.
I was going through some personal issues and had just sobered up, so Tim prompted me to give it – swimming – a go. A few months later I took the plunge, and so began my own swimming journey, a now nearly daily addiction.
I’m now coming up to my sixteen year anniversary, I still bring the camera down and continue my study of swimmers and, more importantly, life down at the Forty Foot.
In summers it comes alive, a real life West Side Story; the winter tranquility overtaken by hordes of teenagers observing the end of school traditions; jumping into the Forty Foot in uniforms; posturing and shaping in ther gangs; drinking and flirting – the passage to adulthood.
I exhibited this work last year in the nearby Sandycove Store and Yard, and hope to produce my book next year, on a decade long study of Forty Foot life.
For many years Tim was absent, and last November he rocked up to Sandycove, dived in and then as he emerged from the water, I captured him. He remarked ‘are you not famous yet ?’
Early this summer I submitted this picture to the Zurich Portrait prize. I was pleasantly surprised to hear as the summer ended that this picture – Forty Footer – had been shortlisted for the Portrait prize and will hang in our National Gallery from December.
