Did I mention that I remember seeing Queen Elizabeth II not as a very old or medium-old or middle-aged woman, the way everyone alive now remembers her, but as a youngish-looking woman in her forties? Okay, my seeing her didn’t take place in real life, but still… for a child living in the Soviet Union, it was a bit unusual. Here’s how it happened.
My father had a huge stamp collection in Moscow. In the sixties he corresponded with stamp collectors—philatelists—from all over the world, and when I say “the sixties,” it’s important to keep in mind that those were the Soviet sixties, and if you know what the Soviet sixties were like, and what Soviet censorship was like, you might imagine what it felt like to correspond with people from Australia, New Zealand, France, FRG/ФРГ (the usual Russian acronym for West Germany), Belgium, and so on, simply to exchange some stamps for a stamp collection. My father’s stamps were kept in special albums—kliassery in Russian.
I learned names of foreign countries from them: a stamp from Sweden, a stamp from Hungary, a stamp from Denmark, and always the British stamp, with a portrait of dainty Queen Elizabeth, still a youngish-looking woman in her forties, with a little crown on her head, like a silvery bird on a dark nest.
It was thanks to my father’s stamp collection that we were able to leave the Soviet Union. I won’t go into all the details of what it was like, in the early seventies, to apply to the OVIR (Office of Visas and Registration) for permission to emigrate, and I won’t compare the process to Russian roulette, although it would have been the right comparison.
One day we were lucky and got our permission. Now my parents had to buy four plane tickets to Vienna, and they didn’t have enough money. My father sold his whole stamp collection to a well-known philatelist in Moscow, and with that money, he was able to buy us four plane tickets to Vienna.
So here’s how I saw Queen Elizabeth II. If you missed the part about the queen… Psst-psst, it was in the middle.
And the people came from far, And they came from near, To see the troubadours. From ‘The Troubadours‘ by
Van Morrisson.
I – Lockdown Daze
I was strung out on the bed, for the zillionth time, listening to a Van Morrison record. For a large part of the lockdown Van’s music played over and over. I walked the driveway at Glenstal Abbey in the evenings with my dogs, mostly in dark. And most of the time, I would side with Van: his music luring me into the ‘viaduct of a dream.’
The lockdown isolation was anything but a lightning rod for the imagination; but music was a panacea for the humdrum banality of days lurching into each other. Music satiated my thoughts as I wandered up a driveway originally designed by the Barrington family in the nineteenth century. The same estate was handed over to the Irish state in the 1920s and handed over to the Catholic Church later. It is now Glenstal Abbey, a Benedictine monastery and elite boarding school for boys.
Every day I walked the dogs, one a mature border collie, the other a young puppy of the same breed, to the top of the driveway, I imagined a different century. I would enter the ‘viaduct of a dream’ Van sings about on ‘Astral Weeks’, the song from the album of the same name that has been my guiding light since my teens.
And to further escape the banality of lockdown my mind would conjure up a time when the young mistress of Glenstal, Winnie Barrington, rode her horse along the driveway, her friend following on a bicycle, en route to Newport.
There she would encounter the notorious Black and Tan officer, Ronald Biggs and his entourage. They would drive to their death at Coolboreen in Tipperary – killed in a rebel ambush during the War of Independence. Winnie had worked as a nurse during WWI in London, and her savage death – many believe – sparked the familial retreat.
And as the spirit of Winnie’s seemed, for me, to linger somewhere on the landscape, pushing into my thoughts, Van’s focus on rebirth on the song ‘Astral Weeks’ was like a sumptuous call to the imagination. It triggered my desire to escape the lockdown boredom. I would imagine Winnie, a woman gunned down a century before (May 21st 1921) engulfing the spirit of a puppy called Janey Mac.
Janey Mac.
Janey Mac, a gift from a friend the previous September, was a handful for six months. Border collies are such energetic, intelligent dogs that to raise one is not entirely different to raising a child. A certain level of care and attention is required. They push you to your limits, bite at your ankles at dawn, chew treasured sofas, display an incessant need to engage everything in sight. And then, just as you begin to reach the tether of your wit, along comes a lifelong companion, attentive to every need.
The tarantula becomes a soul mate, as close to you as a family member. The rain kept pouring down as the dogs pulled me along the former Barrington Estate. I imagined the ghost of a woman dead almost a hundred years to the day passing into the soul of a little collie pup. ‘Could you find me,’ Van sang, ‘could you kiss-a my eyes, lay me down, silence easy, to be born again.’ ‘Born again’? As the Indian mystics say.
Winnie Barrington.
The same evening, I was sprawled on my bed, having just finished a short manuscript that gave expression to these ideas in prose. The manuscript weaved the facts of the assassination on Winnie and Biggs a century prior, into a tapestry of the imagination.
Janey would embody the young mistresses’ ghost, and I would bear witness to rebirth: the phrase ‘to be born again’ simmering in my thoughts as I walked the driveway each day. In my mind it was no mere coincidence my daily walk with a puppy in tow was taking place a century after the ambush had led to the young woman’s untimely death: it was an arrow pointed in my direction from the angel of history. I would tell her story in my own way.
I would draw inspiration from music. I lay on the bed googling upcoming Van Morrison concerts, as answers began to trickle in on-screen. For some reason I purchased – tired and wine sodden – and with an electronic swish of the hand, two tickets for a rescheduled festival gig in Derry that coming November. It was still months away. The Delta Wave was consuming the airwaves and the pandemic seemed never-ending. I was nervous. For two years I had been working from home, with intermittent days on site. I was a natural extrovert confined to a small circle of contacts.
Most of my free time at this time – mostly in the early hours of the day – was taken up writing interconnected stories about the border collies in my life. The second, From This World, is a fiction woven from within the ‘viaduct of a dream’ – the imagined life that hovered like a ghost over the surrounding landscape. I would travel back in time, back to an Ireland before independence – when corncrakes sung out in nearly every valley – and when vast swathes of land lay unclaimed by commerce.
Along the driveway the dial on my phone would always seem to congregate on the name Van Morrison; ‘Crazy Love’, ‘St Dominic’s Preview,’ ‘Sweet Thing’; songs that directed my thought to the story of Winnie like an obsession that would not relent until her death made its way onto the page. I sourced material from journals, sought people from the village from whom the story had been passed as a product of myth as much as truth, visited her grave in the cemetery. I even hovered around the Church of Ireland in Abington thinking of her playing with friends before Sunday service.
Abington’s Church of Ireland church.
In the end, the limitations of the factual confronted me. No matter how much rooting I did, how many articles I read, the same hollowed truth edged out: we must always imagine certain details of the past. In uncovering the myths of the ambush, piecing together reasons for Winnie’s motivation in travelling that day into a text worth reading, I would set upon the same thing set upon plodding through the fields listening to ‘Saint Dominic’s Preview’: imagination. I imagined Van wandering the streets of San Francisco, thinking of home. Suddenly, a sign for a forthcoming mass dedicated to peace in Northern Ireland at the Church of St. Dominic appears.
Entrenched in thought, mystery overcomes him: someone, irrespective of religion, is thinking of his home in a corner of the world. ‘It’s a long way to Belfast city too’ he will later write, San Francisco and Belfast City edging close together in his heart. All around him is a banal conformity, preying on the modern urban city.
Some otherness of spirit has materialised in this unforseen act of care: prayers offered in a distant church for the Troubles in his homeland. Years later, as if these prayers have been answered, a US envoy helps to broker peace in Northern Ireland. And around the same time, I begin to suspect, Van starts to think about the album he will call The Healing Game. The album is a much-heralded return to form for the singer; a compelling vision of healing in its many forms.
I was on a long journey through a catalogue of music while dreaming of a dead woman, letting each of Van’s albums spark new ways to think about landscape. The Waiting Game played a role. Alone in my thoughts one evening the first side played through. The song ‘Waiting Game’ shuffled into the light with its recognizable harmonica. ‘I am the observer who is observing’ ushered forth in those enticingly vague lyrics, giving no indication that the song is anything but a personal lament. Perhaps Van is passaging through middle age, seeking ‘the presence deep within you.’ But it is the same presence he calls ‘higher flame,’ in possible reference to the wait for peace in Northern Ireland. Here’s the thing: it was a spiritual quest I identified with in these songs; a yearning to connect with something beyond the material grist. Is it possible the goal of Van’s search in song is the same thing that I was yearning for?
In the early days of the pandemic, before Winnie’s story gelled in my mind with the music of Van Morrison, I spoke for some amount of time with a priest about the effects of isolation; the wave of destruction he believed would result from delayed grief. We stood outside a church in conversation.
My thoughts began to drift back to a time when I had stood in a funeral parlour, shaking hands with the different people who came to pay their respects. My hands were so badly blistered after. Yet the procession of people, their faces contorted in shock, was a panacea for the grief that would begin to manifest in the months that followed. What might have happened without that show of tradition unique to Ireland and its culture, I thought? A delay of sorts. A drift into unfettered pain: a world without others to soften a fall?
The faces that evening were pillows laid out in time. When removed a body would fall on a cold floor. These thoughts came to me outside a church while I was talking about death with the priest of a religion I no longer practiced, each of us struggling with the covid restrictions in our own interminable way. Our two-bit conversation brought some relief from the sudden descent into a half-life of zoom classes and waited upon DHL deliveries. At that time my social life consisted of one weekly outing: a trip to a supermarket to see those waiting in line.
Then something strange happened during the lockdown. I was listening to Van Morrison records when Van began speaking out about lockdowns and restrictions on musicians. Rolling Stone ran a story about Van as anti-lockdown.
Then Van took to YouTube in defense of his views. The comments below his video post unfolded in a spew of hate. He was selfish, inconsiderate in wanting to play live music. He was working on Latest Record Project, a record with a considerable number of protest songs rallying against the state’s incursions into his life.
For Van, the lockdown policy was a gross overreach, an intervention he felt lacked scientific proof. Fair enough, I thought at the time. Our world is made of different points of view. But then I began to think about these statements in relation to my own frustrations. Was it really that strange that a seventy-five-year-old old man wanted – in whatever way possible – to play live during a pandemic?
‘Stay home, stay safe’ was the public health moto of the time but it was far too obtuse in the way it equated isolation with being safe, particularly at a time when the WHO called isolation a major killer. So much public health policy in the period leading up to that time had focused on ageism: attempts to determine a person’s value based on age alone. Van was ageing. He wanted to play the music that defined his profession. Like me, he found it frustrating to stay away from others. Beyond everything, I admired his honesty in speaking.
But suddenly Van’s name brought the baggage of Covid 19 politics to bear on pop music. Lifelong fans dumped his catalogue in a show of partisanship. Van called out Northern Ireland health minster Robin Swann for intervening in his life. He did not help himself when a video began to circulate of him cavorting with Ian Paisely jnr. in a Belfast hotel. Undoubtedly irked by the ban on music events in Northern Ireland, maybe at his age, I thought, time was slipping away.
Each minute away from the stage was an incursion into a life of music. Was this selfishness? Was it a lack of concern for those who believed we could defy the virus? Or was his decision to risk his health to perform music for others something eminently admirable in him? I lay on the bed thinking about this, as the needle dropped on a cover of Van’s ‘Sweet Thing’ by The Waterboys from the album Fisherman’s Blues. Then, all at once, the next song played. ‘Strange Boat’ seemed to reach from the past into the present:
We’re living in a strange time Working for a strange goal We’re living in a strange time Working for a strange goal
And then – of course – the conclusion:
We’re turning flesh and body into soul
Things then began to click. At Abington cemetery the epitaph ‘here lies all that could die of Winifred Frances Barrington’ appeared on a newly renovated gravestone. Flesh and bone withered away, leaving something of a ‘soul’? It was an ephemeral quality that had lost currency in our time. And just as The Waterboys turned their strange times into a spiritual quest, it felt I was searching – not even consciously so – for something eternal in a world defined by fear. It was fear directed at a future point; a time that might never even materialise as real. Every evening I walked into the blanket darkness of the pandemic night, the ghost of a dead woman breathed down upon me. I moved into the ‘viaduct of a dream.’ It began to dawn on me I was searching for something that had yet to die, something known in the vernacular as soul. ‘Chambois, cleaning all the windows’, I heard Van sing on ‘Saint Dominic’s Preview’ – a metaphor he returns to on mid-career masterpiece ‘Cleaning Windows’ — before stressing, ‘singin’ songs about Edith Piaf’s soul.’ Maybe Van’s window cleaner is a soul seeker, I thought, cleaning away the grime that prevents us from seeing clearly?
In my imagination Van was standing on a Derry stage singing ‘Cleaning Windows’, the lights shining down. Love, labour, the transcendence sought after in the blues dwindled into rock n roll bliss. Is there a beter celebration of pop as a panacea for the ills of working-class life, I imagined, than a song about a window cleaner who dreams of Jimmy Rodgers? Perhaps not?
The song, beyond all of Van’s songs, concerns perseverance in the mundane: physical labour typical of urban life. As I started to dream of a journey North, passing from County Limerick to County Derry, passing along the stonewalls of Galway and Mayo, against the looming shadow of Ben Bulben, a crystalline image of a window cleaner formed in my mind. The image ushered me back to a summer spent packing tiles in a Bavarian factory. Loneliness and boredom marked each passing day. What did I dream of then? Was it music? Love? Was it the desire to turn flesh and body into soul?
All the time away from family and friends during the never-ending pandemic impacted upon on me to such a degree I yearned for some kind of mystical experience: a kind of commune. On ‘Deadbeat Saturday Night’ Van gives voice to a similar craving, a yearning to escape the daily grist and to finally to sing for others. ‘I’m alone, telephone, virtual reality,’ he bristles angrily, ‘it’s no life, no gigs, no choice, no voice.’
Latest Record Project is made up of protest songs slammed by critics. More online criticism surfaced on its release. Van was called an anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist etc. There was even talk of burning his records. It was difficult to express a judgment of Latest Record Project without succumbing to the politics of the pandemic: the pro or anti binary regarding lockdown.
Rarely had the politics of popular music been so intensely focused on a singular point of view in my lifetime. One evening during the lockdown – long before I began contemplating journeying North – I looked for inspiration in old live albums, turning eventually to Nirvana’s Unplugged.
As the album played out, all knowledge of the junkie Kurt Cobain became in later life, prisoner of his body, seemed to dissipate in a moment of soul. Beyond the opprobrium of fame and celebrity, beyond the cravings of a drugged body, was a sense of peace. ‘I formulate infinity,’ Kurt sings on the band’s sumptuous cover of The Meat Muppet’s ‘Oh, Me’ cushioning the lines by saying ‘and store it deep inside me.’ Years after death something like a soul still resided as the aura of the physical record: the infinite.
II – Northbound
You were only waiting for this moment to be free..
‘Blackbird’
The Beatles.
The night before the journey North I had two dreams. Both would resurface in my consciousness when driving the next day. In the first dream I was walking in a forest. A metal object in the shape of a breast stared up at me. I turned to look around, peering through the gap in the trees, as the sun made its way in through the branches. A bird swooped down upon me, its lifeforce fading in my presence.
I picked up the body to see if it was dead, before attempting to replace its breast with the metal object that had been left on the ground. But I was unable to make the object work. Instead, I ran home in tears.
In the second of the dreams, I was lying on a steel bed in a room that formed part of an office in a university accommodation. Several staff members were welcoming me onto a campus in a country that seemed to be somewhere in Eastern Europe. I mentioned that the lodgings were perfect for my stay and that I planned to stretch my legs. The others got up to leave the room, smiling at me, saying goodbye in a broken English. No sooner had they gone than a sudden urge of excitement – one that travel brings – overcame me. I got up from the bed, grabbed my jacket, and checked around for my keys. I tentatively opened the door to discover the apartment was on ground level, situated at the center of an old Roman university. The door opened to a sea of students moving at pace. They were all bunched together into groups, in deep conversation.
There was something unusual about the second dream: none of the students wore face coverings. There were just faces, of which no two are the same. It was a thought that heralded my waking up: no two are the same. Life had returned to normal. The lockdown was over. I was on route to Derry, thinking of where to stay in Sligo and of what to do while in Donegal.
Once I got to Ballyboffey a friend would drive us to Derry. Everything was planned to get to the gig on time but the dreams, so incredibly different in tone, troubled me. I mulled over their content pushing into a turbulent sky. The dying blackbird had brought such sadness I immediately fled the forest of my dream.
In contrast, the second dream brought some elation. All the months of isolation, unable to identify the faces of people I met in shops, relented into antithetical bliss. Were the dreams an oracle of the future? A wish? And if so, was the blackbird shorn of its essence? Why did faces bring such elation? What did it mean? The time I had spent thinking through the two contrasting dream sequences passed quickly when driving. Then it appeared on the landscape like it always does: a signal of majesty in the land.
Image (c) Daniele Idini.
Ben Bulben towers over the county of Sligo like a beached whale. It interrupts all movements of the gaze. We stand aghast in its shadow. Once it appears the mystery of the landscape also makes itself known.
As you follow the sign for Bundoran, when bypassing Sligo, Ben Bulben meets your every gaze. I had planned to walk at Mullaghmore, before pulling into a B&B for the night. But no sooner had I arrived at the car park and stepped out of the car to begin walking, then along came a torrential downpour.
Image (c) Fellipe Lopes
It was near impossible to appreciate the views. An elderly woman, decked out in the gear needed to survive the weather, saluted at me while walking with her dog. ‘Not a bad day for a walk’ she said smiling. But I was soaked to the bones, and my jacket was still battling hard to resist the rain. I saluted back at the lady before closing the car door and taking a deep breath. I was glad to escape the weather. Twenty minutes later I drove through a village that, because of the rain, was difficult to make out by name: not knowing whether I had ventured into the North (as Donegal is known in the vernacular). Usually, it is clear: hillside sheep signal an untrammeled beauty in your midst.
It was at that point a small B&B sheltering a little shebeen-like pub appeared on my eye line. Both establishments seemed like variations on traditional cottage style, devoid of the thatch roof typical of pre-nineteenth century builds (signifiers of an older time persisting in the present).
I rang the B&B bell a few times before a hunched over woman suddenly appeared inside the door. Her mask concealed a smile, her soft Northern brogue welcoming in tone. A room on the ground floor was available for a night, she said, and a Chinese takeaway would open in the village at seven.
The pub didn’t do food since reopening, apart from toasted sandwiches, and there was no restaurant in the vicinity. If it was cooked food I was after – I think she meant a gastropub – I would have to drive to Donegal town. Whatever the name of the village – and I didn’t want to know given the point of the journey was to cultivate uncertainty – drinks followed by a takeaway seemed more than an ideal proposition.
I had a shower in the room, changed clothes and did a little jig to celebrate the unknown breaking through the habitual. The jig was designed to augur in the wrenching back of a spontaneity from the clutches of the Covid pandemic. I was at the pub in minutes, ready to forget the rain.
It took me some time to locate the cert adopted for pubs and restaurants by the Irish government, before I stumbled in the door. Since the restrictions were introduced, I had hardly ventured near a pub, feeling a certain unease with everything: the virus and the regulations.
Maybe it was a distrust of authority, a yearning for the old ways. But once I had opened the door, expecting to see one or two people, the artificial light was blinding, like it was battling the darkening of winter. A young man – with a moustache and a Kangal hat turned the wrong way around – appeared on my right behind the bar. A sprightly young woman was stood beside him. The bar was full of drinkers in breach of the protocols. My instinct was to turn away, but the occasion lured me in. It was a ‘life before’ that called to me.
On the bar counter baskets of sandwiches were sitting beside baskets of cooked food. It seemed like I had interrupted a party. There were people standing at tables, sandwich and sausages baskets untouched, yet no television or music was on that would distract from conversation.
The lights were blinding bright. I crept to the bar, trying to blend in as best I could. Faces turned in my direction: I was taken aback by the groups of people together. It was like stepping back in time. And then the occasion made itself known. I had arrived at some kind of Irish wake. A blown-up photograph of a man’s face was placed at the cabinet bar.
It was the familiar that me pushed me in the door. I would come to learn of the man in the photograph’s fate when ordering my first drink, once it had seemed ok to intrude. The people at the bar welcomed me in without any fuss. Although difficult to understand the brogue, to adjust to the old way of life – a culture temporarily replaced with the public health protocols of the Covid pandemic – that had vanished to such a degree in the years that had passed since the pandemic began, I settled in at the bar. It was just folk waking the dead in the only way they knew. Soon I was helping them on their way.
Public houses, bars subject to much criticism during the years of the pandemic, saw purpose return as a place of communion. We come to drink and remember. We come to raise a glass to the eternal: the soul that lives on after death. A local GAA man, wearing a green and yellow Donegal scarf, returned from the toilet to take his seat beside me. He spoke about a ‘wild sadness’ that had befallen the village.
But, in truth, it was not all sadness. It was a scene I understood: a ritual of sorts. To raise a glass is to say – in the gesture of a tradition – ‘we miss you.’ You, the other person, one of a community transcending the ‘I.’ The time that I spent in the pub was a sort of unexpected gestural confirmation of what the journey North was meant to affect. All the isolation of the previous months gave way to something immeasurable. I stayed to hear about the man in the photograph; to hear he left the pub in good spirits; waving goodbye to his friends in good health. He was known all around for his wit, the numerous pranks he liked to pull on friends.
The man’s face stayed with me as an image waiting in the rain beside the local Chinese takeaway in a village that name of which I cannot recall. As I write now, I wonder did the village exist? Did the pub exist? Or had a dream taken the place of reality?
Two friends had passed away during the pandemic. When news broke, I walked country roads trying to repress a desire to jump in the car and drive; to pay respects in whatever capacity possible. On one occasion, my group of friends took to a Zoom meeting as a virtual substitute for the pub experience. We wanted to raise a glass to a friend, celebrate his life. But the screen meant to connect people seemed to contradict the message it was meant to impart.
Cut off from the other, material bodies were mere images, dependent on the vagaries of a Machine. At any point the connection could break, the face of another no longer visible. Presence is shadowed by an imminent threat of absence: a void that can swallow up the connection at any given time.
I returned to the B&B with a fried rice in one hand and my phone in the other. In the distance Ben Bulben bore down like a God of the mountains. There was such a mystique to its presence: a gateway into the sublime landscape of the Northwest. When driving the same landscape the next day, bypassing Donegal town in the process, I took the decision to stop at Murvagh Beach. I wanted to gaze across the terrain – so impressive in reach – at the cliffs of Slieve League.
In more accessible counties, the cliffs would attract huge numbers. The morning was taken up in conversation with the proprietor of the B&B, a retired lady in her late 60s, over cups of tea. She said the cliffs viewed from Murvagh are the biggest in Europe.
A few hours later I was waiting in my friend’s car outside Jackson’s Hotel in Balyboffey for him to return. A river bridge was at my rear, like a postcard. Its autumnal colour seemed designed for the gaze. Tommy would drive that evening, once we had eaten. The last stage of the journey North would see us lost in conversation. Time would pass unnoticed. Darkness soon began to cover the night as our car moved from country roads into Derry’s urban décor, a contrast to the distant bogside. We passed by the new developments along the river, before a P sign stood out for a carpark Tommy said was in walking distance of the Theatre. Once we had parked and arrived at the Theater, the concert goers were waiting outside, ready to enter.
The venue was practically full when Van and his band arrived on stage. Van was a diminutive figure who had lost a significant amount of weight. He was an elderly man with renewed purpose. From our balcony seats we could gaze at the band from ahigh. Wearing black sunglasses and a trilby hat, Van had the aura of a singer finally given back a stage; happy to know he could do his job again.
For the duration of the show, he just leapt from song to song, never speaking directly to the audience. He began the gig by playing songs from his most recent album, all – to some degree – commentaries on the stay-at-home orders he was so critical of. But he then went on to play a load of songs from his back catalogue that drew me in so many different directions. ‘Sometimes We Cry’ was a cue for joy, Van moving between numerous instruments during the song, his saxophone like a magical wand.
Awe of a sort arrived with ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go,’ drifting into a rendition of Muddy Waters’ ‘Got My Mojo Working,’ signaling that we were witness to a great blues musician and testament to a lasting tradition. It was also testament to the power of live music, a feeling the performance of ‘Cleaning Window’ confirmed. I had played the song repeatedly throughout Covid, trying to harness the pleasure of labour and music in our youth. But it soon began to dawn on me, however, as I gazed upon an elderly man singing ‘what’s my life?’ that Van was asking his audience an important question. Is to sing for people – nothing more – a source of our being?
It was the affecting moment the journey North was intended for: the words ‘no 36’ sang in a soothing Belfast twang. Van has a singular (as an artist) ability to alter intonation to maximize lyrical affect. The way he sings ‘No. 36’ in a Northern accent is one example. But there are many. ‘Angelou’ builds by way of difference and repetition, ‘in the month of May, in the city of Paris’ repeated with intonation amplified each time.
The music, all the while, builds in tempo. Van left that evening after two hours performing on stage, departing the scene with an affirming rendition of a song that personifies the above-mentioned lyrical affect: ‘Gloria.’ Once he had left the stage the band members went solo for a few minutes. The crowd then began to clap and sing along with the remaining musicians, shouting ‘G-l-o-r-i-a’ in something of a fervour. I looked around, thinking, for no reason, of Winnie, of Janey, of lockdowns and isolation. Then a strange sensation came over me: a grandiose feeling of hope.
In 1978, ten years after the release of Astral Weeks legendary music critic Lester Bangs wrote,
My social contacts had dwindled to almost none; the presence of other people made me nervous and paranoid. I spent endless days and nights sunk in an armchair in my bedroom, reading magazines, watching TV, listening to records, staring into space. I had no idea how to improve the situation and probably wouldn’t have done anything about it if I had.
Lester’s reflections chimed with my own experiences during the stay-at-home policies of the pandemic. The famous critic found in Astral Weeks something of a spiritual retreat: an album that helped release him from paranoia’s clutches. Lester’s was a dilapidating malaise, a condition pushing body and soul into competing realms.
Astral Weeks was a Godsend. The album helped him to live again. It was a cold and dark winter night when we left the Millennium Theatre once the concert had ended. There was a film crew in situ outside, shooting the latest series of the TV show Derry Girls set in the city. The night, nonetheless, seemed to glisten with possibility. ‘It’s the great search,’ I thought, recalling those writings on Astral Weeks, ‘fuelled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable.
Or may at least be glimpsed.’ Illumination, a glimpse of the divine, seemed more than abstraction. Maybe, faithful to Lester’s experience, I too had glimpsed something of the divine, without really knowing, like watching a firefly moving in the sky at dawn.
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The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. Knightsbridge. Notting Hill. Property. Harrods. Money. Bourgeoisie. Rolls. Bentley. Chelsea Tractor. White & uptight. Rich.
A series of stereotypes. A series of assumptions made. A series of images. Of great wealth; of London gentry, all suits and ball gowns; of the richest in society; of politicos and financiers; of big businessmen and banks; of embassies and Royalty.
An Alternative View
Wornington Word is about none of these. It is an alternative view of a complex, multi-layered place, as told by the residents who live there, and by reading between the lines of the propaganda of gentrification.
The project focusses on and celebrates the numerous overlapping communities that make up this diverse area. The gentrification is reflective of broader trends across London, but seen through the specific lens of a single housing estate in the midst of redevelopment.
Wornington Green is an estate of mixed council and private homes, built between the 1960s and 1980s, comprising of 538 flats, housing approximately 1,700 residents.
The regeneration was initiated by what was then Kensington Housing Trust (now Catalyst Housing Ltd), in response to ‘problems arising from both its design and construction methodology; … inherent problems with access, security, poor design and layout of homes.’
Initially – when the redevelopment was first proposed in the early 2000s – long-term residents, mindful of the shared experiences and community which had flourished, fought hard to save the current buildings on the estate.
Keith, former Chairman of the Wornington Green Residents’ Association, has been an active voice in the community since the 60s: ‘These buildings should have lasted a lot longer than this from the 60s and 70s. You shouldn’t be building buildings like this and then have to pull them down again after such a short time. It’s ridiculous. It’s only because they weren’t maintained to a decent living standard.’
‘Changes? Nobody likes changes. We was all in uproar when we heard that they were going to knock it down. My block, which is fortunate for me, is in Phase 3 [of the development] and I love my little flat so I’m hoping they’ll run out of money by the time they get to me, but I know that’s not going to happen,’ adds Cheryl, who has lived in Ladbroke Grove since the 70s, first moving into her current flat in 1975. ‘It’s a nice quiet block I’ve been living in, and I’ve been fortunate to have good neighbours. What I used to like; if anyone in the block died, you’d get someone come and knock and say ‘Oh do you know so and so died’, and they collect money, you can put in 50p,10p, £5 and they’d buy a wreath and say this is from Pepler House …’
Many residents have thankfully been rehoused in the new builds on the estate. Vanessa experienced a similar sense of community spirit growing up in Wornington Green in the 1990s: ‘There was a good community feel, very multi-cultural, especially on our floor. We had Moroccans, we had Vietnamese, we had Ethiopians, we had Africans, and us Colombians. So on our grounds, you know you would walk down the corridor you could smell lots of nice food from all around the world… When they were allocating the [new] flats we did try [and make] it so we could be together, next door to each other because that’s all we’ve known. But it didn’t work out that way. So yes, it’s different. We don’t have that same familiarity … We are starting again.’
Whilst Vanessa has now moved away from her family home to start her own family, housing co-op resident Micky laments the difficulties younger generations have if they want to stay in the local area: ‘…you know they can’t afford to live there, unless they’re living at home with their parents you can’t rent a flat in Notting Hill, it’s really, really expensive.’
‘My fondest memory of the area is bringing up my children here and being happy with the diversity, the different people that they meet, people they play with from all over the world. Really important to me… They’ll talk to anybody, they’ve got no prejudice and I really put that down to living on this estate.’
Renegade
This diversity is rarely discussed in relation to Kensington – it is usually only in the context of tragedies such as the Grenfell fire in 2017, or the Notting Hill Carnival that such rich cultural heritage is acknowledged.
The Wornington Word project, instigated by Renegade Theatre, aims to record and archive the everyday of this diverse community through the history of Wornington Green estate residents, from the 1960s to the present, through a time when the estate was permanently changing.
The images here were made in partnership with Renegade, to develop a personal documentary response to living on the estate, alongside a programme of residents’ workshops, to capture these stories before they disappear into London’s background hum.
Natasha of Renegade Theatre managed the project:
The people who live on the Wornington Green estate have contributed to the diverse, close and distinct character of Portobello and Golborne roads. They are part of North Kensington’s culturally rich fabric and their warmth, experience and history cannot be allowed to fade away. Nor can the estate’s expansive views across London, wide walkways and mature green trees disappear without record. The Wornington Word catches the estate at the end of its era. So that, after the buildings are demolished, it can still be seen, and its unique working-class voices still heard.
The project began through uniting two independent practices. Natasha conceived of the oral history side of the project as a result of her previous community theatre projects and her interest in documentary theatre, whilst I had been documenting the local area and the development on-and-off for several years.
When Natasha began working on the proposal for Wornington Word, it became clear that she wanted to explore several methods of recording the estate. We began to collaborate together- I donated my existing archive of photographs, and added more as we engaged residents in recording oral histories.
We ran workshops for the residents: photography, filmmaking, creative writing, oral history taking, social media training and acting. Part of my role involved documenting the community participation as well as continuing my on-going photography of the estate.
As we had both lived on the estate for a long time, it was essential to us that the residents be involved throughout the process. At the beginning of 2020 there were three key outcomes: a collection of seventeen oral histories and accompanying portraits, a collection of over two hundred photographs taken by residents, and a forty minute documentary film.
All of the above were archived on a purpose-built website and at RBKC Local Studies & Archives.
One of the most densely populated regions of the UK, a 2017 study by Trust for London and the New Policy Institute found that, Kensington & Chelsea has the greatest income inequality of any London Borough.
Private rent is the least affordable in London – yet these communities still exist, in many cases over multiple generations, on the same estates.
Oumayma still lives on the estate with her mother, in what has been their family home for three generations: ‘I feel like Moroccans in general just decided to stay here and I feel like my grandad made that decision to stay here, because he didn’t have to fear […] experiencing you know racism or anything like that, because it was already quite integrated at the time. Spanish, Portuguese, Jamaican, Caribbean; really mixed which is really good.’
The importance of the diverse community came up time and again in conversations throughout the project, but the reality is that the cost of living in the borough is gradually reducing this diversity and forcing many residents to re-evaluate.
Though many on the council register will be able to stay in new flats on Wornington Green, their children may find themselves priced out of living locally to their parents. In addition, many of the prejudices shown by RBKC, their contractors and associates during the on-going Grenfell Tower Inquiry, continue to be present in discussions with residents on the Green.
‘It’s always been a diverse area.’ Latifa begins very carefully. ‘However, at the moment, people have just come in from other places and [those] people have found that this place is very trendy and they want to claim it for themselves. We were having a viewing of [my mum’s] new flat, her new permanent flat, and my sister and I, were saying that it was, “Oh, it’s a bit small” blah, blah blah. And then somebody turned round and goes, “Do you know how much this cost? At least £2 million”. Do you know what I mean? So you already feel like somebody’s doing you a favour by letting you stay here.’
Latifa’s experience is not unique. When the original plans were drawn up, resident consultation indicated a strong preference for low-rise accommodation at a similar height to the current blocks, and the regeneration was designed accordingly.
These plans were approved by RBKC (despite fierce resident objection on other grounds), who indicated that the new buildings should not exceed the height of those currently on Wornington Green. Having started in 2006, the final phase is currently under consultation, as the original planning permission was granted so long ago.
Catalyst are now proposing to include a fifteen-storey tower block in Phase 3 of the regeneration program.
And the new-build flats already have teething problems. Oumayma’s grandmother moved into one of the new flats and quickly had difficulties: ‘…they build them too quickly, she’s not a massive fan because she’s experienced some issues – no heating, no hot water.’
Other complaints include burst water pipes and cracking plaster. In 2021, scaffolding was erected around some of the first new builds completed on the grounds of fire-safety.
Set against a background of austerity and gentrification; crime and poor design are often cited as the primary motivations for the estate redevelopment.
Though Catalyst do admit that the perception of crime was in many ways far worse than the reality, due to the closeness of the community. However strong the argument for the development, it remains important to acknowledge what will be lost – how residents’ connection to their homes, their place, will be changed.
As I write, the latest phase of demolition is in full-swing outside my window in the blistering June heat (on what will be the hottest day of the year).
Despite the temperature (nearing 25C at 10am) my windows remain closed. The blocks opposite: five inter-connected low-rises, have been largely reduced to grit.
The earth movers grind brick and concrete ever smaller, ever finer in preparation for their final exodus. Dust worries at my ageing glazing and coats cars throughout the estate in sticky layers.
Gallons of water are sprayed across the grinding diggers and over a procession of cars, in a Sisyphean endeavour to enable residents keep using their vehicles.
With some luck the interlocking communities of Wornington Green will continue to exist in west London, but it seems clear that their place will remain forever changed.
As for my existence on the estate, this will come to an end within the next two years or so, and whilst I’ve enjoyed my time in this community, I will not miss the relentless reminders of gentrification. It seems appropriate to give the final word to estate resident Rashid: ‘We made the estate, and the estate made us.’
You can hear more of the resident’s stories in their own words and watch the documentary film here: https://worningtonword.renegadetheatre.co.uk/ around the balance of council housing to market flats.
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In 1960 when I was seven, before TV, Radio Éireann was our window on the worId. I understood the gist of rumblings on the news over breakfast in the kitchen. The Congo. It used to be called the Belgian Congo now it was just the Congo. My father intimated, buttering a piece of toast at the kitchen table before whacking the top off a boiled egg with the knife, that the Belgians were still sticking their noses in.
His remark was to no one in particular, almost sotto voce. Over the years on matters of the Irish nation you’d be listening out a long time without a single revelation concerning his party-political pedigree. Years after his passing, my adult siblings had no idea was he a de Valera man or a Michael Collins man.
On global affairs he was only marginally more loquacious. Maybe, I inferred in this case, the Belgians were the Congo’s version of the English only not as big. Over the radio newly familiar names resonated across our kitchen. Patrice Lamumba- he had something to do with it. Lamumba was the new man in charge over there and he didn’t want any English or Belgians or outsiders of any sort coming over and interfering in the newly decolonized country. That seemed fair to me.
Katanga, that was another new name on the news. It was a province, like Leinster. They wanted to rule themselves; the Katangans didn’t want Lamumba running things at all. Tshombe was the big man in Katanga. Congo, Lamumba, Katanga, Tshombe; distant names were rendered close by the radio, formed part of the backdrop to the morning kettle steaming, bobbing eggs boiling in a pot on the cooker and toast smoking aromatically under the grill.
Irish lads were to be sent off with other U.N. troops to keep the peace; stop the Katangans and Lumunba’s army from getting stuck into each other. The Baluba tribe in Katanga, it turns out, were also very unhappy about the whole situation – so we heard another new name on the radio. Baluba.
Two Irish battalions were being dispatched. I hadn’t a clue what a battalion was only it was a lot. My father took me into town on the 13 bus to see them off.
Our journey started at the terminus behind Beechwood Avenue Church, officially the Church of the Holy Name. I loved hopping onto the open-backed bus, straight up the narrow stairway to the front seat at the top, to wait a few minutes for the busmen to finish their cigarettes and start her up to head into town via Ranelagh, Appian Way, Leeson Street, Stephen’s Green and Dawson Street.
The soldiers’ journey from Ireland to the Congo started with a march down O’Connell Street (picture above) to mark this moment of significance in our national life. After marching, the troops were to be loaded onto gigantic transport planes along with armoured carriers at Baldonnel airfield outside Dublin.
We got off the bus on Dawson Street near the Hibernian Hotel and joined the masses walking along Westmoreland Street, kept going and got across O’Connell bridge. Near Daniel O’Connell’s statue, in the middle of the street where cars usually parked, up toward Clery’s department store, my father was trying to squeeze me up to the front row but he couldn’t get by with me so we sandwiched in as best we could, he lifting me up from time to time.
Throngs crammed the streets and footpaths to gawk or cheer the column of soldiers marching by, their hob-nailed boots clattering along with a metallic after-sound. A man said the Garda Band had led the way with big brass instruments but we missed it. We couldn’t get near the GPO; people were jammed ten thick or more. Dignitaries, someone said, were on a platform in front of the GPO reviewing the troops.
A woman said there were Guards and soldiers holding the crowds back. Some lads had climbed up near the top of lampposts – to the part where two iron handles stuck out near the light. How they got up there was something of a marvel; I envied them the birds-eye view.
“They’ll roast in them outfits,” one woman said presciently. (It transpired that the troops were woefully unprepared – with not enough gear or the wrong gear, wooly dark green uniforms that would hamper them in the ferocious equatorial heat).
A man asked if they’re walking all the way to Africa and people laughed. Another wag said they’d be getting a free trip in a Yankee plane blessed by his Holiness John Charles McQuaid, a reference to the fearsome Archbishop of Dublin.
Archbishop John Charles McQuaid (1895-1973)
I joined my father in frowning at that bit of disrespect for the lofty bishop while wondering did we not have our own planes. I was a bit confused by the parade, unsure what the Army was doing parading down the middle of the street – though I got a look in between the adults in grey coats at bands of red-faced soldiers bunched together swinging their arms, stomping their way down O’Connell Street with intent. There were swarms of them – hundreds- and they had guns over their shoulders, real guns. I had never seen real guns before, never mind so many.
It was a new thing for Irish soldiers to be sent off into the middle of an African civil war. The last civil war any Irishman took part in was our very own one in 1922 and the contemporary national army, such as it was, hadn’t seen combat of any kind. But they were dispatched off anyway because everyone knew Irish people were respected the world over.
As a boy, I only heard of the Irish Army in jokes – passing around the one gun like a shared cigarette; halting maneuvers in the Furry Glen because the missus forgot to pack the sandwiches.
That we were Irish I knew, but there was an accompanying feeling that Ireland was barely a country. For decades government ministers made an art of going on the radio insisting that nothing could be done about anything ailing the nation: dire poverty; a shite economy; high unemployment; mass emigration.
Sure Ireland is a small country, they’d say, the message being we should not get our hopes up about ever approaching England’s standard of living, never mind row in with the U.N.
We’re a small country – for years that was the party-political consensus for upholding and excusing a mediocre status quo. We were scarcely a country so every family, including ours, had relatives who had been forced to climb aboard trains, boats or planes, to England, America or as far away as Australia. American wakes they used call the send-off parties for emigrants in towns and villages across the country.
Despite being underdeveloped, Ireland the fledgling republic had joined the U.N. at the end of 1955 just like a proper country. England had nothing got to do with it this time. The troop deployment bypassed England and the uncomfortable fact of our complete economic dependence on trade with and emigration to England.
This was U.N.-led, strictly international. Our soldiers representing the U.N. were to wear blue helmets. I had a plastic replica of a blue helmet for playing war down the end of the back garden with a bit of rifle-shaped ash.
Though I couldn’t know it, this was a big moment in the emergence of Ireland into nationhood. As relatively new members of the U.N., we were taking on an international commitment, helping out in a fight not of our making.
For my father among the many who turned out, to go and bear witness in O’Connell Street must have been important. He was born in 1906 into the last throes of the British empire in Ireland, bore witness to the civil war as a teenager.
To have me along was to teach me about Ireland, to affirm that we had our own place among the nations of the world. To the legions of gallant nuns and priests that routinely went off to Africa on the missions to spread the one true faith, we could now add battalions of our very own troops.
Outings with my father for big occasions were rendered all the more significant by their rarity. He was distant though affirming and not lacking in affection for his offspring; unquestioned Lord of the household, ministered to and royally fed by my mother, who mediated and did what she could to prevent occasional eruptions of his anger, though it simmered like a bubbling stew more often than exploded.
Always impeccably dressed, his black brogues shined to a sheen, he was not around much during a work week, just one evening and week-ends.
Weekday Routine
The family just got on with the weekday routine, ended the day listening to Radio Éireann, later it would be watching American TV shows on Telefís Éireann.
When it arrived into the house, my mother thought the TV was no harm, a bit of diversion. My father worried quietly to her that we would get notions from American rubbish like the Donna Reed show with its idealized portrayal of privileged, prosperous suburbia. Luckily for me, cowboys like Bonanza were fine all around.
Appointed County Manager of Meath, adjacent to Dublin, in 1959 he had moved the family from Sligo where he had been manager to 42 Merton Road in Dublin’s Rathmines, down the road from our grandparents Joseph and Margaret Hynes of 72 Cowper Road.
Commonly, houses were given names – Ivydeane, Cospicua. As we were moving in a man came to paint the name on two concrete pillars by the front gate, black Gaelic lettering on a white painted background – Dún Mhuire, the fort of Mary.
I suspect my mother was the instigator but it seemed natural enough. We were a Catholic household in a Gaelic Catholic culture. Clear but unspoken messages were conveyed to me – nobody sat me down to declare it explicitly – that being Irish and under the auspices of a dominant church whose parish Mass we attended faithfully every week along with crowds of our neighbors, offered a form of protection, a kind of psychic immunity, from the seeping depravity of England.
People in England, unsanctioned, could get a divorce and skip Mass if they were Catholics or not even attend church at all if they were Protestant. The English were more likely than the Irish to be in danger of falling off the cliff edge we all traverse that overlooks the fires of hell.
My father had landed us squarely in the emerging professional middle class respectability of 1960’s Dublin, my siblings and I in the best schools. Gifted with brains he had forged his own road, starting off as a lowly clerk in the Port and Docks Board in the Custom House, going to night school in Rathmines Tech to qualify as an accountant.
His big break into the civil service as County Secretary in Kildare came after winning the 1938 Gardener Gold Medal for attaining first place in Ireland in accountancy subjects – I still have the medal. He progressed from County Secretary to an appointment as County Manager of Sligo, a place I still love deeply having been born there, then Meath.
Throughout the 1960’s, unprecedented in those days, he commuted along country roads to Navan, the County seat, taking the guts of an hour to get there. Nowadays, thanks to urban sprawl, Navan is a dormitory suburb of the capital.
Throughout the 1960’s he would stay one or two nights a week at the Headford Arms hotel in Kells, “the Manager” becoming a well-known local fixture. We had no idea what his life there was like. Instead of watching TV in the bosom of his family he would, no doubt, be in the hotel bar nursing a pint or a snifter, getting the full Irish served up for his breakfast of a morning before driving over to the town hall in Navan.
I remember precious little dinner table conversation about his work. Meath had the richest grassland in the country – cattle would be moved from the West to fatten them for export, we were told. Sure, wasn’t Irish beef the envy of the world? The inference being that it was a more prestigious County to manage than Sligo.
He would arrive home on Wednesdays and on Fridays with a prime side of beef for the Sunday roast, set aside by the butcher especially for the Manager. At Christmas, he would land home with seasonal fruitcake, the kind it takes ages to make with marzipan and white frosted icing to look like snow courtesy of the nuns who ran the hospital. There was never a question, let alone a debate, about whether he should be home more often.
Though absent a lot, he seemed no more distant than the fathers of my friends who were always at home. That was the way things were; the mothers were warm, the fathers diffident, to be addressed formally. Without exception my pals’ fathers were cut from the same cloth. Like my own, most of them were not native Dubliners but were making it in Dublin.
Entrepreneurs, lawyers and civil servants, they had roots in rural Ireland, including rugged Western counties like Mayo and Kerry. They wore greatcoats and sported hats, didn’t smile much and enquired how we were doing in school, thinly disguising a suspicion that there was too much playacting going on and not enough knuckling down to study.
A weekend stayover in a small caravan in Donabate North of Dublin by the perpetually grey-clouded seaside – a treat hosted by my mate’s old man for a couple of pals – involved a degree of tension as the ogre-like father complained crankily about the poor quality of the boiled egg served up by his son at breakfast, while the other guest boy and I stifled tense giggles behind the curtain drawn across the caravan.
We were accustomed to our eggs and toast or cornflakes being served up by our mothers; we weren’t called upon to service our fathers. We surely didn’t envy our mate his role as butler to his old man. Shortly after breakfast, relieved, stepping out the caravan door into the morning wind, we scarpered and stayed gone for most of the day.
1903 Gordon Bennett Trophy. Athy. Alexander Winton in the Winton Bullet 2.
Athy
It was far from the middle class that my father was reared. He was the seventh of nine to be born in a single room in a one-up-one-down two roomed place, 15 Leinster Street, Athy, Southwest of Dublin in County Kildare, for years a British garrison town where the grand canal from Dublin meets the river Barrow.
My grandfather Michael was a carpenter employed as casual labor in a local factory while my grandmother, a Doyle, labored at home, trying to manage the scarcity of necessities including food and shoes, her home caught in abject poverty.
As an adult, I stood in the claustrophobic upstairs room with my Aunt Patricia and two cousins, one who had bought the place, another who grew up and still lived in Athy. You couldn’t swing a cat in the place.
We cousins shared awed glances as my devout aunt Patricia sprinkled holy water about in honor of her parents. “They were great people, God bless them,” she said as the hair raised along my arms.
A cousin recalled a story his mother – another aunt of mine – had told once about remembering as a girl a visit from a priest who offered a blessing to the household – perhaps someone had been newly born or more likely was very ill as a clerical visit would have been rare to a poverty stricken household.
Protocol dictated that the priest be offered money when leaving, money he had no hesitation in accepting despite the blindingly obvious. He was pocketing the last note and bits and pieces of coins from the household cash tin. The little girl looked on knowing they would miss a meal as the priest stuffed the note and coins into his pocket on his way out the door. Such callous treatment would have been the norm; people were “read out” from the pulpit at mass, poor families shamed as donation amounts were publicly announced by the priest.
“I’m going places.”
There’s a photo – a family portrait (see featured image above) – grandfather looks resigned, grandmother holds a vacant stare; to me they appear defeated. A sheet hangs precariously forming a partial backdrop to the scene. One of the standing elder sisters rests her arm on my father’s shoulder who sits in the center with arms crossed – twelve years old maybe- as he beholds the camera with a confident look as if to say, “I’m going places.”
Indeed, he was and he did. But growing up we knew little of his roots or the road he had travelled from poverty to the middle class. I had an inkling, a feeling that he felt he had escaped, broken free of Athy, and wanted to leave all that behind him.
For years I never knew how many siblings he actually had. We had lots of contact with my mother’s family – I knew all of my cousins on her side.
Silence enveloped the partial story emerging about our Kildare roots. He was close with Patricia in Dublin and her husband John O’Brien of Kimmage Road West, a gentle uncle to us who, smoking Sweet Aftons, held court in their dining room at the top of a large table squeezed into the room, with barely enough space for chairs and a sideboard.
My hospitable aunt doled out scaling tea, sandwiches and fruitcake. We grew up connected to our O’Brien cousins. Visits from them or my mother’s family were occasions of joy and celebration, especially the Christmas night gathering around our piano played by my aunt Ita and lubricated by my father as barman, conductor and on rare occasion warbler in chief.
River Barrow, Athy.
Kildare Connection
The Kildare connection though was opaque. As a boy, I remember from time to time – once or twice a year – my mother and father would get all dolled up and go off for a Sunday drive to Athy.
No account of their day would later be offered. As an adult, I learned that one of the nine siblings had been institutionalized – but where, more to the point why? Were they put in the county home or mental hospital? We never knew.
As children we had overheard whispers. The lore I picked up as an adult was that one sister had unspecified mental health issues but was really put away for falling in love with a British soldier. That didn’t add up. Such romance would hardly have been an aberration in a garrison town, surely?
Despite emerging Home Rule and fledgling republican movements Athy had, per capita, one of the highest rates of young Irishmen volunteering themselves into the British army for the great war of 1914 – 1918.
For the survivors, participation would end up placing them on the wrong side of Irish history. Whether generally tolerated or frowned upon, surely at least a few local young women were forming liaisons with working class squaddies in barracks in the town. Or perhaps the very presence of soldiers billeted in the town lends plausibility to the narrative I received – Irish families clamped down on liaising with British troops, even locals. To this day, a blank canvas remains where that story should be.
In Dublin, rare paternal expeditions are preserved to me as wisps of memory, incomplete fragments encased in my mind like the gold ornaments in the glass cases of the archeology section of the National Museum in Kildare Street, where he took me and my sister once or twice when we were eight or nine to see the Ardagh Chalice.
Some young lad dug it up out of the ground over a hundred years ago, he said. I was thinking I would have held on to it if I were him, or maybe flogged it for a new bicycle. At least once he dragged us around the National Gallery, frog marched us past white marble sculptures on plinths to a gallery beyond to eyeball the Jack B. Yeats paintings.
Jack B. and his more famous brother the poet had Sligo connections, developed a love of the county while spending youthful time with relatives there. Jack had painted Memory Harbour in Rosses Point and was known as the painter who chronicled the emergence of Ireland into nationhood, representing Sligo fishermen going about their hard labor as “men of destiny.”
As County Manager, my father had walked behind the painter and Yeats family members in the procession to reinter the remains of W.B. Yeats in the churchyard at Drumcliff. Whether on approaching our pre-teen years we balked or he abandoned the cultural outings based on a sense of having completed our cultural education or maybe felt it a waste of his time “casting pearls before swine” was never clear.
The blank page of his family narrative dramatically came alive in three dimensions one routine winter early evening enshrouded in the usual darkness and damp. I was around ten, waiting for my mother to dish up the tea when she, my sister and I were stunned into incredulity, the lot of witnesses.
I answered a ring at the door to find an uncle from Kildare, brother of my father, smilingly arriving for an impromptu visit. The doorway banter drew my mother from out of the kitchen. She welcomed him in officially and directed me to sit with him in the living room to the left off the hall while she improvised a pot of tea and a few of her prized home-made sweet buns.
The brother, a bit disheveled, sat in front of the fire in one of two chairs with the red covers; asked me how was school going, wasn’t completely sure who he was looking at, not distinguishing me one hundred percent from my older brothers.
I got that a lot; my elder brothers were six and seven years older; occasionally relatives lost track of me. I was happy enough to pour him a cup of tea, the better to get my hands on a one of the old dear’s prized buns; after baking she typically hid them to prevent their rapid disappearance.
He took a sip of tea from his mug; kept smiling with a slightly vacant, almost wondrous glint in his eyes. My mother excused herself, explaining that she was in the throes of cooking the teatime meal, though she didn’t automatically invite him to stay for it. That would have been the usual protocol; insisting over the mild protests of guests that of course they’ll stay for a meal; we wouldn’t hear of you stepping out the door on an empty stomach. We were anticipating my father’s arrival for tea – our supper; dinner was the midday meal.
I heard him pulling the black Ford Cortina in the front gates and was waiting in the hall when he turned the key in the front door, eagerly on hand to give him the good news, “Dad, your brother is here!”
Far from the joy I was expecting, his jaw dropped as the news registered. Failing to acknowledge or greet me, he brushed by without removing coat or hat, almost dived in the living room door.
Left behind in the hall, suddenly without warning I could hear him erupt on the brother, shouting and roaring at the top of his lungs. I poked myself just inside the door as my father continued unloading, upbraiding him from a height, what the hell was he doing here, how dare he, get out this minute, called him a right blackguard showing up in that state – an uninterruptable diatribe that went on for several minutes.
“Sure, I only stopped by to see you,” the taken aback brother said defensively. My father had completely lost the plot. I froze in shock, wanted to head for the hills.
My sister remembers hiding in another room scared by the roar of unrestrained anger. Our household followed the Irish norm, emotions were kept bottled up tight, corked. Like the seafarers of the Aran islands, their curraghs bobbing on a rolling sea, we lived with the awareness, unspoken, that a storm induced wave could any minute sweep us away without warning.
But a deadly wave was a rare phenomenon, feared yet far from the normal run of things. My father’s emotion was a storm unleashed, out in the open, triggered we’d call it today, and landing not only to sting him and his brother but collaterally to unnerve my mother, sister and I. M
y upset father marched out of the living room, disappeared up the stairs, his part in the drama for now complete, to stew in his own upset. Mother was left to pick up the pieces. She had to drop everything – never mind the meal. She surely felt rattled, perhaps herself annoyed at having to mop up after him, because she asked me to accompany her as she loaded my uncle into her brown Austin A40. I sat in the back.
We never did this, drop our daily routine to drive into town in the darkness of the early evening. She drove down Palmerston Road, then over the canal and into town via Camden and Georges Streets, around by College Green and Westmoreland Street where animated neon advertising lit up the city, to turn left down the quays near McBirney’s department store where he could get a bus back to Kildare.
There was quiet in the car but tension had abated. She was concerned for him. “Are you all right,” she asked him as he alighted, “do you have enough for a sandwich and the bus?” He thanked her and got out to walk across to a parked bus. I hopped into the front seat wondering if that was the right bus, who would meet him at the other end.
We drove home wordlessly through the Dublin rush-hour, ate our teatime meal in silence, my father quiet, not a word out of anyone. The visit, the anger, nothing was alluded to. He turned to the newspaper. A calm had redescended. Later that night I came upon her practically whispering into the phone, ringing a relative to make sure he had made it home in one piece.
Baluba militiamen in 1962.
The Niemba Ambush
Having seen the soldiers off to the Congo my father made it his business to take me up to Phibsboro in November 1960 for the second massive gathering in Dublin in a single year. Once again, we joined thousands, this time crammed along a funeral route to Glasnevin cemetery. Nine Irish soldiers from the Congo were to be buried, the first to be killed in combat in the modern era. The Niemba ambush.
I thought that nobody was supposed to really attack or shoot at soldiers with blue helmets- not guns nor poisoned arrows nor anything of the kind. Yet, eight of them had been wiped out in Katanga in a Baluba-led ambush, smitten by arrows we were told, in what was thought to be a case of mistaken identity, the assailants having possibly mistaken Irish U.N. troops for European mercenaries.
A survivor wandered in the wrong direction only to be caught and killed later. The funeral after a solemn high mass led by the archbishop was massive. I’m not sure how I got chosen to accompany my father; my elder brothers tells me he would have made his own way there on the bus.
My father and I set out in the Ford Cortina. I watched him closely as he as he worked the wheel-mounted gearshift. Crossing the Liffey near the Four Courts, he parked on a residential street before we walked to join legions of others gathering from all directions near Dalymount Park.
The closer we go to Glasnevin the thicker the crowds got, thicker even than at the send-off parade only much quieter. When we could get no further, he huffed and puffed, tried to lift me up to see. Soldiers with blue UN shoulder patches and guards saluting solemnly lined the route in front of the crowds.
Eventually, slowly, quietly, as the cortege drew nearer, all the men took their hats and caps off. A green jeep appeared pulling a gun carriage for the officer, with an honor guard astride at walking pace.
The slowness of it, respectful, solemn, gave me a sad feeling, like a pang of hunger in my belly. Someone whispered the officer’s name, Gleeson. God be good to them, a woman intoned. Four huge open top lorries followed at that same slow pace and flanked also by the uniformed comrades of the dead.
Four lorries with two coffins each for the ordinary soldiers. Nobody remarked on the different treatment for the officer and enlisted men. The coffins had Irish flags, with flowers and soldier caps on top, along with blue UN insignia.
They were crawling toward Glasnevin cemetery and there was no talking or bantering going on this time– just silence in the crowd, everyone blessing themselves, straining to get a look at the coffins, then staring at the ground, a few people working rosary beads, reciting away in murmurs.
The cortege passed in slow motion; slow marching soldiers’ accompanying the lorries to the sounds of their own boots and the low hum of engines. I got a really good look at the gun carriage. Gleeson.
The mournful funeral procession gliding by, honored by the presence of thousands standing in respectful silence, made sense in my young boy’s world, a blend of reality and fantasy – national solidarity expressed in Catholic prayers.
Glasnevin Cemetery.
“You couldn’t get near Glasnevin with the crowds and dignitaries,” Dad told my mother later.
“Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, is buried up there,” he told me, “the soldiers will be up there with him.” I used to get mixed up between the multiple patriots across the seven centuries we were under the thumb of the English, except for the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising at the GPO – Pearse, Connolly, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Tom Clarke and all. They issued a proclamation to Irishmen and Irishwomen – lots of people had it framed on their walls but I never read the whole thing. “Imagine shooting a sickly poet or a wounded Labour man; that’s what the English did after the Rising. The gobshites,” I heard people say, even fifty years on.
The crowd thinned away slowly after the last of the procession passed but my father lingered, knowing the funeral was still going on up the street at the cemetery where the Taoiseach, Lemass, and government ministers awaited hats in hand. Finally, we started the long trek to where he had parked the car, near the North Circular Road. He threw his shoulders back and walked quickly. I had to take big steps, nearly run, to keep up.
When we got home, my mother doled out scalding hot tea, a rasher, egg and fried bread in the dining room. “God rest them and keep them, the poor divils,” she said. Later, the old man would read the paper and smoke a Carroll’s Number One at the table when she cleared off his plate. I would have scampered out the back garden to kick a plastic ball with my black brogues or maybe donned the plastic blue helmet and marched in the twilight along the path to the bottom of the garden, keeping a sharp eye out for Balubas or Belgians.
We hadn’t talked in the car on the way home – there was nothing to say. As the light faded in the garden, I was wondering if the soldiers would still be up there in Glasnevin now that everyone had left; were they glad to be home in Ireland; would they be lonely, miss being at home for their tea; were they in heaven or Glasnevin or where were they?
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John Calder spoke at the Abbey Theatre some years ago. The founder and director of Calder and Boyars had published a host of Nobel Prize winners, including Samuel Beckett. Calder stressed that Beckett’s early writing, his novels, had attained modest success. His reputation grew slowly…”Ideas take time” Calder explained.
Seamus Deane was born in Derry on February 9 1940. In 1972 he was lecturing in English in UCD, when I, aged nineteen, studied English and Latin there. One lecture of his stands out in my memory.
It had to do with Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. Although there are no Irish characters in the story, Conrad records that the book issued out of the political milieu of late Victorian London in which the Fenian dynamitards featured.
Conrad’s labyrinthine plot focusses on a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The anarchist Verloc, his wife Winnie, her somewhat retarded brother Stevie head a cast of characters which includes European conspirators and the British police.
1972 was not short on political and military action.
Seamus weaved the novel into the historic tapestry of Victorian London, and demonstrated how it foreshadowed some of what was happening in 1972. He unveiled an idea: politics and literature are closely linked.
In 2021 that proposition might not cause a stir. In 50 years, its caught on. In UCD, in 1972, it was radical and novel. It struck me forcibly and changed how I viewed things. An image of the pale young man from Derry talking about Joseph Conrad remains with me.
Featured Image is of (from left to right) Seamus Deane, Ann Kearney, Richard Kearney, Imelda Healy, Marion Deane and Ronan Sheehan in c. 1985.
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Five takeaways from my experience at Sattva Yoga Academy in india:
Have an experience without using words to describe the experience at least once a day.
I am much more than my mind.
My ego is not the center of me, my heart is.
Miracles and mystical experiences happen all the time – be open to them and life will become richer,and more abundant.
There are no avocados in India. People ask: was there anything you missed while you were there? Yes, I did.
Questioning
One of the most influential lessons I learned from my parents was the value of the question. Always ask why. I clearly remember learning this in school as well: who, what, when, where, why (and sometimes how). These are the basics of problem solving. When a problem presents itself, ask the questions,answer them and you have your solution.
This thinking was so influential for me that over time these questions became automatic in every interaction I had with others and myself. I didn’t have to consciously ask these questions, my mind just did it. They became a habit, a reaction to every event, stimulus, interaction and emotion.
Asking questions has helped me greatly. This mindset helped me succeed in areas we might consider beneficial and desirable: I got a good education; I have a great job; I have a house of my own; I am healthy; I have many loved ones in my life. Much of that is due to how I frame the world and see people in it. If I lived my entire life without anything else, many, including my parents, would say I did a good job (and I would say they did a good job raising me-thank you mom and dad. I love you.)
And yet, I have questions. Constantly. Because of my conditioning, I feel I don’t have a choice. These questions encompass most of my thoughts during any given day. So much so that when someone starts talking I immediately start thinking: why? when? who? what? when? As if the only reason people talk to each other is when there is a problem. Even if there isn’t one, I create one to solve in every situation I find myself in.
So I am a seeker.
But I am also a skeptic. I want answers but am only willing to accept them if I am satisfied they meet the criteria of logic, reason, and experience in the database of my mind. Every question, from the mundane to the existential must be answered before I can rest and let it go. Rest easy, knowing that the question is answered for all eternity. And I never have to ask the question again.
And yet I don’t. I keep asking questions. I keep being skeptical of my answers. I must ask questions or I get bored, distracted or worse, become self-destructive.
And so while I have all the things one would want in life, my day to day experience is one of relative suffering. I can’t answer all the questions no matter how much I think. But I must try continually because my conditioned existence demands answers with the end goal that one day I will know them all.
And so I began the practice of yoga. Not to find all the answers, but to stop asking the questions.
I’ve been practicing yoga for ten years now,asana mostly (or the practice of postures or poses). I liked it so much I became a yoga teacher. I always knew that asana was only a small fraction of the tradition of yoga and wanted to learn more. So I went to India to Sattva Yoga Academy, a small yoga center outside of Rishikesh in the foothills of the Himalayas.
In one of our last lectures Anand Ji (the lead teacher at Sattva Yoga Academy) suggested we keep a Wisdom Journal instead of an Emotional Journal because Emotional Journals are just ways to help us believe the lies we tell ourselves. I agree. What is wisdom and what is emotion are not always easy to separate though. So I wrote it all in the moment and left the parceling of Wisdom and Emotion for later
Below is my Wisdom journal from the trip as I see it now. With a little emotion.
Note on the use of “I” and “you” in the Journal entries – we occasionally use these terms as a way to separate ourselves from each other as distinct forms of being when we speak to each other. In written, journal form this changes. Sometimes when I use “you” in a sentence, “you” is really my mind I am addressing and “I” is my intuitive experience or my Self. Sometimes when I use “I” in a sentence I may mean my mind and “you” as my Self. Keep that dynamic in mind when you read these words and let the thoughts you have about “I” and “you” be fluid.
The mind likes to see and then make the world around it static and finite but experience is dynamic and infinite. Consciousness exists within and beyond the boundaries of thought, sense, memory and reason. So, if it helps, let the distance between our distinct forms of being dissolve and let “you” and “I” be One.
April 9th 2022
Plane flight to India. Departure 9:30pm and landed 9pm April 10th
Ate paneer on the plane. Super tasty. I am now a vegetarian
Business class is awesome.
April 10th 2022
Mysticism. The words we use to describe a thing say more about us than the thing. It’s impossible to describe a thing in it’s entirety. The more we try the more we reveal our thoughts about a thing rather than the thing we wish to describe.
No one wears shorts at the airport in India. Except me. I might have packed the wrong clothes. All I packed were shorts.
The experience speaks for itself in the moment. Everything else is your reaction from that instant pulled through time.
Lots of cows here.
Lots of Indian tourists white water rafting on the Ganga. It’s sort of like Northern Virginia but with huge shrines and statues of deities at major intersections instead of fast food restaurants. More like Maine. In fact, this is definitely Maine. Only its 99 degrees here.
No one wears black. I may have packed the wrong clothes, all the clothes I own are black
Anand Ji welcomed us during an opening ceremony where we all shared whatever we wanted to share. That was cool. The recovering lawyer phrase I usually use when people ask me to describe myself got laughs. Told them I was a fitness professional and had been leading teacher trainings. Some people are wandering and left their lives wherever they were to go on a journey. I guess I am too. From a variety of countries: Romania, Australia, Philippines, India, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Kuwait, India. The United States has a lot of folks here.
The food is great. Very nourishing and light. I am definitely not going to get enough to eat to sustain my current physical shape. And I’m okay with that.
April 11th
Got 3 hours of hardcore sleep the first night and woke at 2am. Tried reading the Economist and Wikipedia but stopped since it wasn’t helping my mind.
Pretty sure I heard monkeys screaming last night. Better than the fucking crows we have in the States, although I’ll probably want to shoot them after a week or two as well.
I must remember that I came here of my own volition to learn what is offered. It is a much different world here than the one I am used to. I feel like an outsider, a visitor. Hopefully in a week or two I will feel more in tune.
Morning Puja: offering of flowers, food, water and fire. Mantra.
Morning mediation. I hate meditating but I’m pretty sure that’s the main thing that will make my meditation practice awesome.
Everyone talking at morning fruit and juice despite the rule that we must be silent until after breakfast. I wonder if they are making spiritual progress even though they are not following the rules. Then I wonder why I care what they are doing and I stop the judgement. I’m not as hungry after puja and meditation. My mind does seem less cluttered and I am not pressed for time or thought.
I smell like the donkey that hangs out down by the river. I am gonna stink bad after 26 days.
First yoga practice- pranayama. Lots of pranayama. Kundalini yoga with lots of Kriya work. Pranayama, then kundalini with a few vinyasas. Repeat.
Donkeys wear bells. Unclear what the donkeys do besides drink from the river. I wish I was a donkey sometimes. I probably am most of the time
Breakfast was good. They serve hard boiled eggs. All is not lost. Lots of Chai too- will help me stay alert.
Morning wisdom session, origins of Yoga lecture was amazing. Spent the month prior to this training reading the Tao of Physics. Its main theme is that you can’t reduce mysticism to a single thing just like atoms/quanta and then we spent two hours categorizing yoga in this lecture. Lol.
So much breathing today. I’m utterly exhausted. Can’t remember the last time I had so little sleep.
Evening Asana practice, slow vinyasa class. So many kriyas. So much pranayama. Thought my hips were gonna fall off. They still might. This was only day one.
April 12th
Went to bed at 9pm and woke up at 4am. Dead asleep. I feel much better. My third eye is throbbing. That could also be my prefrontal cortex just not knowing what to do with all this new information. Or jetlag. Probably all of those things.
I have no idea how I am going to use what I am learning here in my classes back home. The practices here are so much different than the usual vinyasa class in DC.
April 13th
Yesterday I felt 100% better. The energy was there and I felt more at ease with the Kriyas and meditation. Especially the Kriyas, I am starting to get it. They induce a type of euphoria that is pleasant for me. The instructors say we are forming new neural pathways (samskaras) with this work and as we tread the path it gets deeper and deeper into our consciousness. This makes sense to m: by forming new habits, we drop old ones. A new habit must contain an element of pleasure for us to pursue it and if not pleasure then a faith in the principles set forth that will lead to a result we seek once the habit is formed as related by those who have tread the path before. This is no different than telling a person new to physical fitness that they need to workout for six weeks to see results: sometimes the workouts will produce endorphins that make us want to return. Other times this won’t happen. The key is to stay on the path.
Some may say It is better to have bees circle around your body than flies. Bees are attracted to honey and flies are attracted to shit. The flower is only one manifestation of the plant. 90% of the plant is needed to produce that beauty. Beauty which is very fleeting for most plants. Flies are attracted to the shit in the soil. Soil that feeds the roots. Roots that feed the plant that make the flower possible. So don’t be worried if you attract flies. Without the shit there is no flower. Start to worry if you never feel like a flower. Or you only attract bees.
April 14th
Skipped Puja today. It now starts at 6:15am. I’m like, 6:30am I can be there. But 6:15am? No way. That’s too early.
Meditation sucked less worse than it usually does. I didn’t look at my watch once. I’m very proud of myself but, strangely, there wasn’t a trophy waiting for me at breakfast.
Then the hippie stuff started. Morning Journey was 45 mins of seated kriya and pranayama. Then 30 mins of dancing with our eyes closed. Then staring into people’s eyes. Then hugging. Then face holding. Lots of crying. More hugging. More crying. Then singing. Giving up all ego, giving fully to others, creating an energy that is quite literally beyond words and left me speechless. A mystical experience. Which is what I came here for. It was truly lovely. I am a hippie.
I think to myself, the same class probably wouldn’t fly in Washington DC. There’s just too many personal and legal boundaries. But, what the hell, I’ll give it a try anyway.
Morning talk entitled “what is the Self” was a good one. Most of it was stuff I was aware of and had read elsewhere.I it is good to have that validation. I feel a little less like a fraud or at least if felt good hearing it from someone other than a yoga teacher in DC or Bryan Kest or the 30 guests I had on my podcast or a book I read whose author I don’t know. I guess I shouldn’t feel like a fraud after all.
Memory is linked to time in a linear way. And so life can seem linear but it isn’t. That’s just memory. And time is both a way for the ego to distract us and a thing for us to use because without time there is no growth.
April 15th
One week down. Three to go. Time flows differently here, especially in classes. Our morning journey seems to last longer than a 90 min class. Meditation has become a little more enjoyable. I don’t look at my watch every 5 mins anymore.
April 16th
Received a mantra yesterday based on my energy, date of birth, place of birth and time of birth. I may not have gotten the time right. I wonder if that will make a difference? Probably not – it was a good faith effort on my part though
Downward facing dog is also upward facing Donkey. Think about it for a second.
Drum circle and fire pit tonight with the full moon out. Dancing and singing mantras. A little taste of home. There was a time when I would have felt pretty awkward dancing and singing but after doing Zumba auditions for the last 8 years nothing is embarrassing.
The people here are super kind, supportive, and loving. I fucking love them.
April 17th
You’ll never find the right answers if you keep asking questions. Sit with the experience and you will gain wisdom. “Learn to be wise instead of right.” – Anand Ji
Chasing the right answer is an intellectual addiction. Like any zealous addiction, it feeds itself and not your Self.
Sometimes the temptation is to “figure it out” and then make a conscious choice to believe or not believe “it.” “figuring it out” may only be building an intellectual outcome you are comfortable with based on your own superimposed structure, your learned behavior. “It” then becomes a product of your mind instead of the observance of reality. And your memory is then one of you instead of the experience.
April 18th
Day off from training. Morning Meditation and Journey and then taxi into Rishikesh.
Lots of shopping. Got scarves for people back home and for myself. Got white clothes for the closing ceremony.
Lunch at a cafe overlooking the Ganga. Then more shopping.
Aarti in the evening at the Ganga. There’s a elephant that bathes on the other side of the river.
Took off my shirt and went in the Ganga. It was really cold but not so cold that I went numb. Growing up at the New Jersey shore where the water is so cold it makes your testicles crawl up into you stomach comes in handy sometimes.
April 19th
Went back to Puja this morning. 6:15am isn’t so bad after all.
We get angry at ourselves for making mistakes as if we shouldn’t. Without mistakes there is no growth. It is arrogance to think the last mistake will be your last. You’ll come face to face with this arrogance the next time you get angry at yourself for making a mistake.
There are limits to what you can know if you are only using your mind.
April 20th
Meditation continues to be a challenge. There is much resistance from my mind which is not surprising- I have spent a lot of time making my mind fit a certain pattern that sustains me. Unfortunately that pattern hasn’t brought me peace. So meditation it is!
A group of cows came down the path this morning by the river. One of them ate the apple core out of my hand. When I went into the river to clear trash out of the small dam, another cow drank my Chai.
During class today I rolled my eyes further than I ever have in Agni Mudra. Felt like I was looking into my brain. How can the brain look at the brain through the eyes? Like placing a mirror in front of another mirror?
When you ask a question are you inviting an opinion or an experience? If an opinion, can you let that pass and accept or do you feel the need to argue? If you argue what is your goal? If you want an experience can you let that pass without judgement? If so, you’ll finally be listening.
April 21st
Started the day off with a hike to a waterfall. We walked up a mountain and I never felt out of breath. Sat under the waterfall and after someone said it looked like I was being baptized. It was an apt observation.
I asked Anand Ji a question during our session on the Koshas.
“How do we know the difference between reaction from learned behavior and insight? How do we know we aren’t manifesting deep learned behavior?”
Answer: “insight comes from stillness and conditioned activity comes from a place of disturbance.”
Word.
My follow up question was “how does this relate to Dharma?”
Answer: “Dharma is to live a life of spontaneous right action”
Which fits nicely: if you have stillness Dharma will flow because insight will always lead to right action.
April 22nd
A Pundit is a learned person or keeper of knowledge and they are usually advisors to leaders in India. Ironic that we call experts on television who yell at each other Pundits. I haven’t seen a Pundit do that here.
April 23rd
Meditation isn’t getting any easier to do. My mantra brings up certain images that are repetitive. My mind goes elsewhere to avoid the images and when I bring my mind back to my mantra, I see the images again. I will try to see past the images until they no longer arise in my mind.
“I think, therefore I am” is taking on new meaning for me. I have always understood the phrase to mean, to think is to exist as a human. It has been interpreted that rational thought derived from the mind makes us human and separates us from other life forms. And Descartes may have indeed meant the saying as meaning: we have rational thought, therefore we are human. It has been acted on frequently as a rejection of any action that isn’t logical or rational. But I can recognize the mind and so as an observer of that intuition, I must be more. I think therefore I am becomes the whole of the human, not just the mind, I experience, therefore I am.
What they teach here is- when you have an experience you can’t explain, don’t try just because your mind needs to put the experience into words Wait until you have more insight/knowledge. Know that you don’t know and let that be okay until you do KNOW instead of rejecting the experience or putting the experience in a box limited by your current knowledge. Grow from the experience – evolve.
It’s quite liberating actually. We always want to know the answer Now. And if we don’t have the answer now, we just go with reacting with what we know. We put words to experience that frame the experience with our accumulated knowledge. We put the experience in a box before letting the experience settle. When we do that we stagnate. To grow and understand we sometimes need to let experience settle.
Growth (and understanding) take time to happen. A tree doesn’t grow in a day. I always knew that, now I know that.
At least that’s what I’m experiencing. Try this: if you want to teach a baby language, you need to show them meaning. You can’t explain English by using baby language. The baby has to accept that arm means arm. You have to accept the new learning on its own terms, not on the reference points you have in your current conditioning. If you never do that, then there is a limit to what you can know because language is a crude (and artificial) way to describe experience. For example: how do you describe subatomic particles like electrons? As a wave? As a particle? It’s both actually. But if you only accept waves and particles, then you’ll never know what an electron actually is.
Of course, you don’t have to accept that subatomic Quanta are waves and particles. That’s your choice.
And a baby can go through life just babbling. But it doesn’t. So why are you?
April 25th
There are some who walk up the stairs and trip on the first step because they aren’t looking directly ahead of them. There are some who put the first foot down successfully but trip as they place the second foot on the first step because they are only looking ahead and don’t know what is behind. There are some who look ahead AND know what’s behind and realize that you need to do both without tripping. That is being present.
Sadhviji (Sahvi Bhagawati Saraswati) from Parmarth Niketan came to speak to us yesterday at Sattva. She gave the speech about Earth Day at Arti last week. She has a grace and vibration about her that I could feel very strongly. I asked her: why do toxic people seem to be rewarded for their behavior and do not suffer. A topic I wrote a little about in my Article- Compassion for Trump. Her answer was that they may be rewarded financially but not spiritually. They are not happy: “when you feel joy you make others happy. When you feel toxic you make others around you toxic.” I feel the truth of that statement. I’ve been there
April 26th
I realize now I can only help others if they ask. It isn’t up to me to decide that someone needs help. I can no longer assume that everyone I see with a problem wants my help in solving it. And I can no longer accept responsibility for the solution. I can give advice and support but I can’t make someone else’s problem go away with the force of my will. Will has limits
May 3rd
200 hour YTTs graduated today. Was delightful to see everyone so happy and full of wonder. The spiritual path is a river, always there in the Self. Every once in a while, no matter who you are, your mind becomes aware that it is swimming against the current of Self. When your mind awakens to the spiritual path your mind struggles even more to stop the struggle because it does not know how to stop and doesn’t have the courage to learn how. As You become fully aware that the mind struggles and not the Self there is an even greater awakening. The struggle with the mind ceases and you feel the flow of the river. You let it take you downstream. Flowing downstream, you make adjustments to your Self so that the river doesn’t overwhelm you. The mind is now your ally. You make ever more refined movements with the mind that lead to stillness without effort as you float. Every once in a while you will need to readjust and regain the flow. But you never feel the need to turn around and start struggling again. That is yoga.
May 5th
Pointing out that someone is a hypocrite is like going to a baseball game and filling out the scorecard and then bringing that scorecard to the next game and getting pissed off when the teams don’t play the same exact game as they did the day before. The teams have the same names, the players have the same names, the rules are the same but everything else has changed from the day before:the weather, the line up of the teams, the individuals who make up the teams, and most importantly, you have changed (whether you admit it or not). All those changes result in a totally different game that is played by others and perceived by you. It’s the reason we go to games, to see the unexpected, to be an active participant in the unexpected. Not to be an observer from afar who judges every action. If we go expecting the same game as the day before we are deluding ourselves and playing the role of an all-knowing God, which we are not.
If a person says they believe or act in one way on Saturday and then don’t act the same way on Monday, from your point of view, they are a hypocrite but from their point of view they may be acting or believing based on a new set of circumstances that you are unaware of. Who are you to keep score of their lives? Are they just part of a game in your mind for your entertainment? If they did care that you are keeping score then don’t you become the master of their future actions? To approve what they do based on your scorecard? Why would a person want that? Why would you want that? That’s an awful lot to keep track of. And who keeps your scorecard? You? If so, maybe you should pay more attention to yourself and keep score. If someone else, then be prepared to give up your own agency to that person. If that is God then great. But who are you to be God for someone else? They didnt authorize you to be that for them so you have no right to take on that role from their point of view.
You could spend your entire day keeping the scorecard for other people and then making sure they aren’t hypocrites tomorrow. But you would only be an observer and never a true participant. Going to the game but never being a part of it. Where’s the joy in that?
May 6th
I can here not knowing what to expect but trusting in every way. I wouldn’t have believed a future me who came back in time and tried to tell me what would happen. I guess that’s what a Journey is: an experience beyond what you could have predicted then when you look back. Evolution is the Journey in the present moment. Flight home. A little over half way through the 15 hour flight dawn started. And for the next seven hours it stayed dawn until we landed. The most amazing thing. I’ve never seen dawn last that long.
After flying for 14 hours at 30,000 feet The most comforting thing in the world is seeing the ocean at 1000 feet. a grey, early morning where the Sea is tinted dark green, blue and white- the lights on the container ships, the fishing boats, the white caps framed by low lying clouds complete the tapestry entitled “Welcome Home.”
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‘We dream – it is good we are dreaming – It would hurt us – were we awake – But since it is playing – kill us, And we are playing – shriek –‘ ‘We dream – it is good we are dreaming’ Emily Dickinson
There are quite a few things in life which I deem to be frankly repulsive – cancer, world hunger, terrible Twitter takes, right wing politics, capitalism et cetera but truly the worst thing of all is when a writer writes about their own work. So please forgive me, dear wonderful reader, because I’m about to do just that.
It Is Good We Are Dreaming runs from May 31st – June 11th in the New Theatre here in Dublin. It’s the first in person play from a new emerging queer theatre company called LemonSoap (yes, we’re James Joyce fans) of which I am delighted to be a member.
The play explores the relationship between two estranged siblings, Fionn and Fiadh. Unexpectedly one morning Fionn arrives at his elder sister Fiadh’s house and over the course of a morning they end up discussing everything from the man made of rock their mother fell in love with, the nature of inheritance, the ecological collapse of our world, Just Dance on the Wii and their respective love lives.
It’s a strange little play about family and Irish mythology and how difficult it is to live in Dublin city and I’ve realised over the course of writing and rehearsing this piece that there were three impulses behind it’s creation. Three thoughts I wanted to think through in a play and of course being a writer of an utmost writerly disposition I find I do my best thinking while pretending to be someone else inside a literary framework of my own creation and so a play was born. See! Writers writing about their own work is horrific!
I have been thinking a lot recently (while pretending to be someone else, obviously) about living at a time when it feels like the world is ending. I can’t put my finger on when it became a part of my daily existence to wonder about these things – worlds ending, civilisation collapsing and the like.
Maybe the pandemic, the recession, the wars or too much time during lockdown to bake brownies and stare at myself. But I think about them, the end of the world as we’ve known it, a lot now. Probably to an unhealthy amount really but then I am a writer so hopefully people (you) won’t call me crazy but rather contemporary or finger on the pulse or some such and I’m not a fan of doomsday talk in general really but my god how can you avoid it at this rate?
I’m always it would seem thinking about Mary Robinson’s righteous anger and tears at COP26 or the rise in anti-LGBT hate across the globe or how there’s months left to avoid mass extinction events or how it seems the slow march towards oblivion for us doesn’t seem like it can be avoided anymore and I’ll tell you a secret: I lied earlier.
I can put my finger on when Armageddon thoughts became daily daydreaming for me and it was while writing this play. Which is hilarious! But true. Existential despair caused by playwriting. I betya Beckett and Caryl Churchill would say the same thing. Well, I hope they’d say it anyway because that would make me feel better.
With this show, I wanted to write about a brother and sister who have a frank and honest conversation about how to continue to exist in the world right now, how to push on and live and love despite the creeping sense that the life we’ve been sold, the life our parents and grandparents and great grandparents were able to afford, more than likely may never come true for us.
Our two characters, Fionn and Fiadh, find very different ways to deal or not to deal with the dying of the light. Fiadh’s decided to learn to actually like oatmilk, to buy a pair of wellies and a gas mask too.
Fionn’s taken to railing against the world and struggles to come to terms with the gross unfairness of it all and throughout the play we see these two siblings clash up against eachother as they attempt to navigate and explore their own relationship and the world around them.
This is a play with two characters under the age of thirty at its heart and I’m excited and terrified to see how people, particularly older people, respond to the conversations these two are having. Conversations which firmly reflect the ones I am having with my peers, us much maligned Generation Zs.
Questions about existence and living and climate collapse and how we emerge into and are meant to thrive when the notions of thriving we’ve been force fed are actually literally contributing to the world’s dying.
While I don’t think literature can solve the climate crisis or housing crisis or stem the rising tides of inequality, I do think what it can do is provide voice and space to those concerns and provide some much needed catharsis for those of us who need it. That’s what, amongst other great things like funny and riveting and not boring, I hope this play is. A rumination on existing.
I am always and forever fascinated by how we as people are defined by what we inherit. How it’s written in our bones really from birth some things about us that we maybe in ways can’t really escape.
There are countless studies out there about how traumas can be inherited from our forefathers and they all are eminently debatable and fascinating and so with It Is Good We Are Dreaming I set out to try and explore what can be inherited in many little ways. In the play we hear whispers from Fionn and Fiadh’s mother coming from the walls. She whispers bed time stories which the two siblings would have heard growing up, each of them with a decidedly Irish mythological bent to them.
Their mother, played in a voice over role so mercurially by Fionnuala Murphy, is a complex enigmatic figure who spent her life chasing after the ghost of a man made of rock. She’s someone who in very many ways slips in and out of our known world and into another and the play explores the myriad ways in which that’s defined and repulsed her two children.
Fionn and Fiadh too are half siblings, joined together in life by the mother they share. They were raised separate to one another, Fiadh raised by her father and Fionn by both his Mam and Dad. Because of that they come from very different material backgrounds. Fiadh was raised in a wealthy suburb and went to a private school while Fionn was raised in a working class environment and has had to work to put himself through college.
I wanted to see in this play what happens when you place two people, two siblings, born into very different material circumstances together and how their difference in circumstance and class would manifest itself throughout.
Class is something I don’t think is often represented enough or interrogated on Irish stages. We either see families falling apart in wealthy suburbs or peasant farmers from Donegal or Kerry fighting over land, rarely in Irish theatre do we see examinations of the material reality of class and how it impacts us today.
With this play, I wanted to explore the subtle ways in which our class defines and differentiates us. These are two characters bashing up against each other who have inherited many different things from their families and the world around them. Their socio-economic status or a mother who dreams of another world or a planet riddled and rank with issues near even beyond their comprehension.
The weight of history and family and their inheritance sits in this room with these two siblings and in ways they escape, subvert and succumb to that which they’ve had no choice in being given.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that we are all boats, borne back ceaselessly into the past. I’d like to think we are more than what came before us or at least that if we want to we can escape it. But I don’t know really and so I felt wrestling with the role of inheritance in our lives would be worthwhile subject for a play and I hope you’ll think so too.
Image (c) Daniele Idini.
Myths and Legends
In case you haven’t noticed by now I am really fascinated by intergenerational trauma and the ecological collapse of our world. But what really and truly set me off on writing this play was the idea that it would in its way explore the vast array of rich and crazily original Irish mythological stories, legends and fairy tales which underpin this island we live on. We know the stories, we’ve read many of them as kids.
The Children of Lir, Tir Na nOg, The Giants Causeway and The Fianna. We know of them as children’s stories but when you begin to discover just how rich and detailed and earthy and ethereal these Irish legends are you won’t be able to get enough of them. I wanted to capture the essence of the mythology of our Island and infuse it with this play and so it became about a mother who lives in the mythological realm and her two children who sit in the mundane one reaching out for the mythological, reaching out for her.
It became a play about two siblings puzzling through the enigmatic myths and legends their mother told them. Stories of the man made of rock she fell in love with. The crystal fish that float in the sky. The person in the attic saying prayers late at night. The four swans taking flight.
I think sometimes we are afraid in this country of the stories our ancestors told. I think that’s probably colonial and also the fault of the church who stole a lot of those stories to make saints.
Yeats and Lady Gregory however brought our stories and our mythologies so vibrantly onto the stage with their Celtic revival in the early 20th century and today Marina Carr with her extraordinary body of work explores Irish and Greek mythologies with startling insights. But by and large we shy away from our legends, we leave them as stories to be told to kids and that’s it. I think they are too rich, too complex, too full to the rafters with brilliance to be hidden away because of some post-colonial theocratic embarrassment.
So I’ve stuffed this play to the gills with obscure references. To the Children of Lir, the Fianna, Diarmuid and Grainne. To the Gods we worshipped once and the peoples our ancestors would say came to this land before us. In It Is Good We Are Dreaming the mythological joins us at the kitchen sink. It whispers from the walls in stories told by a mother who has always had one foot in either world.
The image of Ben Bulben looms large over this play, which in our mythology is said could act as a gateway to the other side. The third and final impulse for this piece was that it must be epic yet tiny in scope, it must be a naturalistic drama where the mythic bleeds in to warp and distort, it must pay tribute to the legends our ancestors gave to us while forging new ones that Fionn and Fiadh tell one another. It must be a play that in many ways is hard to define.
A slippery complex piece about family and myth and climate change and more. And I think, dear reader, you probably have most of all gotten the impression that this play is hard to define after all of my ramblings. But that’s why you should come see it. To define it for yourself.
One last thing. The title of this play, as you’ve probably noticed, is taken from the above quoted Emily Dickinson poem. I chose the title because I believe it’s a perfect encapsulation of in the end what this play is aiming to be. Because despite the many horrors of life right now, despite the inheritance that defines us or haunts us or the crises that besiege us, we continue to dream. We have to.
To hope for better. To hope for change and for beauty and for joy. To dream so that all the future generations can too. It is good we are dreaming. And despite all that awaits us and the portents of doom ahead we can’t lose it, we mustn’t. Because even if everything else leaves us, we’ll always have and we always will be dreaming. And despite everything, I think that’s really beautiful.
Feature Image: Laoise Murray as Fiadh and Luke Dalton as Fionn. Photo by Owen Clarke
If you follow me baby I’ll turn your money green I show you more money Rockerfeller ever seen Furry Lewis, ‘I Will Turn Your Money Green’ (1928)
First of all, it is good to have some of it. Second of all, it is good to have enough of it – which means not too much. I define ‘enough’ as that which allows you to avoid having to have any dealings with bank managers or landlords, or debts or debtors in general.
No one should have to live in constant fear of the spectre of homelessness. No one should have to tie themselves to a twenty-five year mortgage, simply in order to avoid the precarity of the private rental sector (by entering the equal precarity of perhaps not being able to keep up their mortgage repayments to a bank or other lending institution – which are here acting as de facto landlords). No one should have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
Is an elephant big? Is a mouse small? They are only big or small relative to each other (or to some other object or objects, bigger or smaller than they are). Enough is sufficient. But, given the cost of living where I live (including the cost of somewhere to live where I live, whether renting or buying), ‘enough’ has come to mean ‘a lot’.
Ostensibly, this is a problem of human greed, but its real roots are meretriciousness. Does it really matter whether you live in a multi-bedroom mansion in Killiney or in a two-up, two-down in Stonybatter or Ballybough (from the Gaelic, ‘Poor Town’); in a four-story Georgian house on Fitzwilliam Square or in a two-bedroom apartment anywhere? Is it necessary or desirable to own multiple properties?
The only reason for dwelling in one of the former over one of the latter – outside of having many dependents to shelter, or lots of ‘stuff’ to store – is simple showing off. It is the flaunting of conspicuous wealth and consumption, an ostentatious one-upmanship which betrays an underlying insecurity.
Is it the safety of living in a ‘good neighbourhood’ that you seek, or the status? I suspect that most instances of greed stem from snobbery, which then becomes a vicious circle feedback loop, with snobbery engendering more greed. Which is all the more risible when one considers that most snobbery – social or intellectual – is merely tuppence ha’penny looking down on tuppence.
‘But I have worked hard for it’, say those who have it, sometimes aggressively and other times defensively, and maybe they have. But, under the present dispensation, most people work at something, unless a) they are independently wealthy enough not to have to work, or b) they cannot find or make work. How hard they work is difficult to determine, given the variety of walks of life, and the disparity in their relative financial rewards. Are we talking about physical or mental work? And what about ‘labours of love’?
Many people work less and earn more than others who work more and earn less – mostly because the latter are exploited by the former. Also, implicit in the argument of those who claim to be worthy of their earnings is the idea that they should therefore be allowed to keep most if not all of what they have accumulated to themselves. (One thinks of a former President of the United States boasting that dodging his taxes ‘makes me smart’. It is also worth remembering that we live in a country where Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney think they are deserving of their more than generous state pensions.)
They prize their individual wellbeing, and that of their charges, over the common good, with the masses of ‘other people’ invariably dismissed as too stupid or too lazy to make something of themselves and do well for themselves (and thus, in their terms, they are contributing to society by not taking anything out of it). The premise of ‘When you’re not doing so well, vote for a better life for yourself. If you are doing quite nicely, vote for a better life for others’ would be alien to them, as they believe a better life for others would dimmish a better life for themselves.
So don’t even try quoting the familiar Marxist motto, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ to them, unless you expect short shrift.
But, as David Foster Wallace hypothesised in his last, unfinished novel The Pale King (2011), tax payment and collection is an excellent index of civic virtue. As unlikely hero Mr. DeWitt Glendenning Jr., the Director of the Midwest Regional Examination Center, puts it: ‘If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine [his] whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.’
Musk
Juxtapose this attitude with Elon Musk’s warning that President Joe Biden’s proposed ‘billionaire tax’ would eventually increase taxes on everyone else, quoting the hoary monetarist mantra, ‘eventually they run out of other people’s money and come for you.’
FYI, it would take someone on the average industrial wage 800,000 years to earn what Mr. Musk made on a single day in October 2021, a cool $36.2 billion. But, in the eyes of the right, I am ‘just envious’. No, I’m not. Really, I don’t need that much – even if I would quite like to try ‘Life On Mars’ someday – and, given the extent to which our home planet has been run into the ground, may well have to do so. Although, clearly, as a faint-hearted socialist trying to survive in an aggressively late-capitalist world, I would never be able to afford the ticket – not even one-way, let alone return.
Besides which, the glorification of the Protestant work ethic is just a neat trick to get some people to slave their guts out for other people’s profit (cue easy signifiers such as ‘wealth creators’, ‘employment opportunities’, ‘increased productivity’, ‘trickle down’, etc.). Everyone actually, if secretly, knows that – unless you are doing something you like – ‘work’ is vastly overrated.
As Les Murray has it, in his gloss on TheBook of Common Prayer, ‘In the midst of life we are in employment.’ Or, as Dennis O’Driscoll recast it, ‘We are wasting our lives, earning a living.’
The whole dream of winning the lottery is that of never having to work for a living again. This is the real meaning of ‘hitting the jackpot’: being able to tell the boss what you think of him or, if you are self-employed, not even having to be your own boss anymore.
As David Graeber contends in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates employment with self-worth. He credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labour of capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances in productivity (or technology) as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm, they have been indoctrinated to believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they find that work pointless.
Graeber describes this cycle as ‘profound psychological violence’ and ‘a scar across our collective soul.’ Yet, as he notes, people are not inherently lazy: we work not just to pay the bills, but because we want to contribute something meaningful to society. The psychological effect of spending our days on tasks we secretly know do not need to be performed, or could be performed by anyone, or by a machine, is deeply damaging.
This abuse is internalised at the level of language itself. Have you ever read people’s job descriptions of their own career summaries on LinkedIN? An example, taken at random:
– – is the M.D. of the European branch of the Australian boutique consultancy – -, where she leads the delivery of impactful and sustainable organisational diversity models, promoting inclusive leadership, collective intelligence, and creative innovation. – – has over 15 years of programme delivery experience and success in the development of cross-sectoral, scaled innovations for learning, informed by evidence-based research. She has a keen interest in interdisciplinary team approaches that promote diversity and inclusion, creative problem solving, leadership development, and change expertise. A former Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, – – is an expert on social impact and has a proven track record in the strategic development of pioneering creative innovation models and has presented her research internationally, including at the European Parliament. She is part of Trinity College Dublin’s Women Who Wow mentorship scheme which promotes an ideal collaborative environment to launch new start-up ventures.
What does any of this mean? Lest you conclude that this type of balderdash is the product of Civil or Public Service speak, be assured that it more than extends to the Private Sector too:
I am a Dublin-based Customer Success Manager, with experience across Mid-Market, Enterprise and Global accounts in both Corporate and Search & Staffing industries. I am a trusted partner to my clients and cross-functional internal stakeholders. I use data and insights to mitigate churn, demonstrate ROI and encourage utilisation of the product suite in which they have invested. I am proactive, customer-centric and thrive in fast-paced environments.
This is the worst kind of gobbledegook going. Naturally, it is de rigueur to be ‘passionate about the industry’, rather than stating you have a major concern about putting food on the table and keeping a roof over your head. If you are not a grafter you are surely a grifter.
"The Irish state has been reduced to the role of croupier at a casino table where the super-rich trouser their winnings without being required to even tip the attendants."@frankarmstrong2 argues that human flourishing should be the objective of politics.https://t.co/BVjveb741S
Add to Graeber’s analysis the concept of ‘time millionaires’. First named by Nilanjana Roy in a 2016 column in the Financial Times, time millionaires measure their worth not in terms of financial capital but according to the seconds, minutes and hours they claw back from employment for leisure and recreation. ‘Wealth can bring comfort and security in its wake,’ writes Roy, ‘but I wish we were taught to place as high a value on our time as we do on our bank accounts – because how you spend your hours and your days is how you spend your life.’ Here she is near-plagiarising Annie Dillard’s brilliant aperçu from The Writing Life (1989), but this idea has a long and noble historical tradition.
In ‘Of Idleness’ (1574), Michel de Montaigne cautions against the dangers of idleness, yet his essays are the product of someone who retired to his country estate at the age of thirty-eight, ‘to spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live’ in order to meditate and write, yet it is the ‘thousand extravagances, eternally roving here and there in the vague expanse of the imagination’, of which he is so fearful, which are the fuel for the depth and variety of the essays he wrote.
Samuel Johnson founded a magazine called The Idler (1758-60) and told his readers: ‘Every man is, or hopes to be, an Idler.’
Kierkegaard, in Either/Or (1843), wrote:
Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is a truly divine life, if one is not bored… Idleness, then, is so far from being the root of evil that it is rather the true good. Boredom is the root of evil; it is that which must be held off. Idleness is not the evil; indeed, it may be said that everyone who lacks a sense for it thereby shows that he has not raised himself to the human level.
Learning how to use one’s free time well is the problem, not the leisure itself.
Perhaps the most famous refusenik of them all is the central character in Herman Melville’s short story, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ (1853). Bartleby is hired as a copyist, and initially is diligent and hard-working, doing all that is asked of him. Then, shortly afterwards, he presents the narrator, his new boss, with what is to become his catchphrase: ‘I would prefer not to’.
There are several takeaways from this wonderful piece of fiction, but for my purposes let’s emphasise its focus on the dehumanisation of the copyist, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a photocopying machine.
In classic Marxist terms, the story is an exposition of the working man’s existence: oppression under the system of capitalism, in which he is alienated from his labour, offered only subsistence level wages, and is ultimately destroyed by that system if he cannot either conform to it, or change it.
Wilde reclining with Poems, by Napoleon Sarony in New York in 1882.
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
In his great essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891), incidentally a pre-twentieth century masterpiece in its reconciliation of aesthetics and politics, dandyism and left-wing thinking, Oscar Wilde argues that:
And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation.
To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
Walter Benjamin’s vast, and sadly unfinished, Arcades Project (1939) is predicated on his wanderings of Parisian streets, and according to him, ‘Basic to flânerie, among other things, is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labour.’ He also notes, ‘Idleness has in view an unlimited duration, which fundamentally distinguishes it from simple sensuous pleasure of whatever variety.’
Bertrand Russell in 1954
In Praise of Idleness
Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, in his extended consideration ‘In Praise of Idleness’ (1932), Bertrand Russell has much to offer on the topic:
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organised bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e., of advertising.
Russell’s most compelling point is the most counterintuitive – the idea that reclaiming leisure is not a reinforcement of elitism but the antidote to elitism itself and a form of resistance to oppression, for it would require dismantling the power structures of modern society and undoing the spell they have cast on us to keep the poor, poor and the rich, rich.
To correctly calibrate modern life around a sense of enough – that is, around meeting the need for comfort rather than satisfying the endless want for consumerist acquisitiveness – would be to lay the groundwork for social justice.
Derek Mahon echoes this theory in his essay ‘Montaigne Redivivus’, from Red Sails (2014), a eulogy to the kindred spirit he finds in his predecessor Cyril Connolly, whom he is anxious to rescue from undeserved obscurity. Mahon fulminates against ‘dumbing down’ (‘done to protect the market economy from criticism and to sell more junk’) and, if leisure is still regarded as a luxury, proposes in place of the lowest common denominator, a concept he calls ‘élitism for all’.
Jenni Odell has expressed similar ideas in her anti-productivity tract How to Do Nothing (2019): ‘In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living,’ she writes, ‘and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook . . . time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’. It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.’ Odell exhorts readers to recognise that ‘the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are . . . enough.’
Related themes have been explored, and comparable conclusions reached, in contemporary essays and creative non-fictions such as A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) by Rebecca Solnit, and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (2016) by Lauren Elkin; and in fictions like Pond (2015) by Claire-Louise Bennett and My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Ottessa Moshfegh. But the most pleasing up-to-date reiteration of this viewpoint comes in Ms. Bennett’s Checkout 19 (2021):
There’s a fine art to being idle in fact. That’s right, there is an art to it, and very few people are naturally in possession of the gumption and fortitude necessary to pull it off.
Russell accounts for the difference between boredom and idleness in leisure by acknowledging:
The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilisation and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no long exists.
However, it is regrettable that both Wilde and Russell were unfortunately overoptimistic in their belief that mechanisation would free us all to lead more fulfilling lives. Wilde elaborates his vision of a technological utopia:
All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
Russell simply states: ‘Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all (but) we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.’
Such late 19th century/early 20th century sanguine sunniness now seems woefully wide of the mark, from the standpoint of our early 21st century hi-tech nightmare. Computers were supposed to make all our lives easier. Instead, because of the co-option of these means of production by the forces of Capitalism, they have made our lives immeasurably harder, or at a minimum our working lives – which now don’t stop when we knock off, but continue 24/7. If computers save us time at work, we must do some other work during that time saved. Otherwise, we are shirking.
Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that entrepreneurship is a specific talent, and those who choose to spend their time engaged in it should be rewarded appropriately. But some people have this gift, and some people don’t, just as artistic or scientific inclination and aptitude is not equally distributed to everyone – even if, arguably, a certain level of functionality can be acquired.
So why should entrepreneurship as a calling be recompensed more generously than others? Why, for that matter, should tech workers earn colossal salaries, while writers, artists and musicians are driven out of the cities they grew up in, because they can’t afford the rent? For the businessperson, Time is Money; for the artist, Money is Time.
But there are more business people exploiting artists than there are artists exploiting business people. As William Burroughs has it in The Job (1969): ‘And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and above all it eats creativity.’ Incidentally, upon graduating from Harvard in 1936, the privileged Mr. Burroughs was in receipt of a monthly parental allowance of $200 – a considerable sum in those days – which he used to underwrite his corporeal and psychic travels. Arriving with welcome regularity, it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, and was a ticket to freedom which allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forego employment, and to pursue his psychotropic investigations and reports. As J. G. Ballard has commented, ‘Never has a research grant been put to better use.’
Of course, art – especially of the less commercial variety – has always depended on patronage, whether private or public. No Medici or Borgia families, including the Popes they produced = no Italian Renaissance.
Harriet Shaw Weaver funded James Joyce to the extent of over €1 million in today’s money. Samuel Johnson’s ‘Letter To Lord Chesterfield’ (1755) signalled a shift in relations between artists and private patronage, with Johnson chaffing against what he considered ill-treatment by someone who claimed to be his patron, but did nothing to help him during the years spent working on his Dictionary, but instead tried to steal the glory when it was published. These days, we may thank the Gods for state-sponsored Arts Councils, and place our trust in their judgements.
So, where is all this free money, to finance all the pleasure of all this (un)productive leisure, going to come from, I hear you ask? In my book, Universal Basic Income is a great idea. Food and shelter are basic humanitarian and constitutional rights. In proclaiming ‘By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food’, the Old Testament was wrong, as it was wrong about so many things. To have to work for most of your life, simply in order to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, will in two hundred years’ time be regarded as a mode of social organisation as ludicrous as the divine right of kings, sponsoring a feudal system. As Ursula Le Guin has written:
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Indeed, what is most depressing about the plight of the current under-30s (or is it under-40s?) generation (or ‘millennials’, as they are (un)affectionately known), is their hopelessness in the face of the impossibility of home ownership and an independent adult life, as though they have internalised and are thoroughly resigned to what the late Mark Fisher termed ‘Capitalist Realism’, and have no sense of any possible alternative.
After all, they could rebel, stage a revolution – or even just vote, for all the good it will do, if only just to register a protest – instead of stagnating in frustration and self-pity. In any case, people should be free to do nothing if they wish to, and still have at least a minimum level of security as regards the animal needs for food and shelter. If we can arrange things thus during a pandemic, why can’t we do it all the time? Because it is not sustainable in the long term? I beg to differ. Going to university is essentially doing nothing for three or four or five or six or seven years – except read books – and getting a piece of paper or two or three at the end of it, for your trouble.
But what would happen if everyone relied on this Universal Basic Income? Well, they won’t. ‘Communism doesn’t work because people like owning stuff’ Frank Zappa told us. I don’t know about ‘owning’ stuff, but I like having stuff, or rather, having access to stuff. But there are many avenues of access to stuff.
Mostly, what is in dispute is how long you have to wait your turn. However, if there was enough stuff to go around, waiting would not be an issue, and neither would ‘owning’, per se. Do you have a mortgage on your home? Then you don’t ‘own’ it: a lending institution merely lets you have access to it, until your make your final payment. But if you really must call stuff your own, then work for the money for your consumer durables, and satisfy your commodity fetishism, when you want to, not when you need to; and don’t when you don’t want to, not when you don’t need to.
But even if everybody did rely on such a subsidy (just as many businesspeople and industrialists already do), it would be no bad – or undoable – thing. For if we institute Universal Basic Income as a minimum at one end, surely we should also implement a Universal Maximum Income at the other, thus having reasonable limits at either end of the scale. The excesses of one will pay for the deficiencies of the other. This is only the next logical step in our current conception of the redistribution of wealth through taxation – or, more plainly, how we move money around to help each other.
Who wants to be a billionaire? I really can’t imagine every filthy rich plutocrat in the world suddenly giving up their extravagant earnings and lifestyle, and settling instead for a modest stipend, simply because they are debarred from infinitely growing their millions.
To be fair, after hitting maybe the 1 billion mark, or 10 billion, or whatever astronomical sum you care to nominate, the monied magnate should simply be taken aside and, like a contestant on a game show, given a prize – a big gold cup, say, or a fancy watch – and told, “Congratulations, you’ve just won Capitalism. Now, we hope you enjoy your retirement. You know, spending more time with your family.” Although, given that there will be more than one winner, and so no outright Number One, the competitive streak in such people may go ungratified, and so atrophy into seething frustration. But, we can throw in the necessary course of therapy – or ‘re-education’ – for free too. I can just see the headlines: ‘Billionaires’ Rights Infringed.’; ‘Freedom For Poor Billionaires.’
Furthermore, so much of the defence of, and endorsement of, mega-wealth is predicated on spurious notions of progress, or planning for the future – but isn’t really any kind of growth at all, except for the advancement of various small groups of vested interests, to the detriment or even outright ruination of the majority of people, and the environment.
At the same time, people in receipt of social welfare payments are frequently characterised as stupid or lazy or both, and dubbed the ‘undeserving poor’ – as though there is suddenly a class of ‘deserving poor’ at whom charity should be directed.
As Wilde has it, in the aforementioned landmark essay, ‘As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage.’
The most egregious local example of this kind of poverty porn was RTE Radio 1’s documentary series Queueing for a Living, which ran from 1986 to 1997, and featured presenter Paddy O’Gorman interviewing people in dole queues and outside prisons. (From poverty porn to property porn – and good, old fashioned porn porn – one has almost run the entire gamut of the western mediascape.)
It is rivalled only by the memory of the farcically counterproductive fiasco that was 1986’s Self Aid, both telethon concert and theme song. Meanwhile, as conservative politicians the world over rail against ‘state-sponsored idleness’, landlords produce absolutely nothing for the income they receive. They don’t even have to do very much to provide the temporary and insecure service they render.
My last landlord – when I was having a break from domestic bliss/strife – was one such specimen. When the bathroom sink in the cottage I was renting from him broke, through no fault of my own, he refused to repair it unless I paid for it. I took the case to the Residential Tenancies Board, and it turned out he was not even registered with them. He then had the gall to upbraid me with the taunt, “You cost me my pension”, and promptly issued me with an eviction notice, under the pretence of selling the property. Of course, in public, this fly-by-night presented himself as a socially-concerned community worker. My nomination for the ugliest word in the English language: ‘rent’ – it tears me apart.
Or consider the presentation of drug and alcohol addiction in the media: it’s all ‘inner city deprivation’, ‘youth unemployment’, ‘gangster drug lords’, etc. (for example, one of the aforementioned Paddy O’Gorman’s most frequent inquiries of his marks was, ‘Was alcohol involved?’), when the majority of the regular cliental for Class A drugs are the white collar professionals who can afford them.
The same wilful blindness applies to the investigation and prosecution of white collar, as opposed to blue collar, crime. The same double-standard runs through the arts and its practitioners: the only difference between the consciousness-altering psychic experimentation and stress relief practiced by William Burroughs, Keith Richards, and other master addicts, and the guys burgling your house for drug money, is relative income – that is, money. Oh, and talent. Or rather, different kinds of talents.
What is perhaps most interesting about money is how people behave around it, and what lengths they will go to in order to get it. ‘Put money in thy purse’ counsels the villainous Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. What makes banker/industrialist Mr. Bounderby such a bounder in Dickens’ Hard Times? Why is John Self so messed up in Martin Amis’ Money? Attitudes to money and its pursuit are perhaps the greatest litmus test of a character’s propensity to virtue or vice, in life as in literature. It is the chief barometer of the capacity for Evil. Most people are ‘funny about money’, in some way or another. (Where there’s a will, there’s lots of relatives.) ‘Money is the root of all evil’ is a cliché more commonplace than most, but if we return to Samuel Johnson, he fulfils Alexander Pope’s definition of wit as ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’, in his great poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) – itself an ‘imitation’ of Juvenal’s Satire X – particularly, for our purposes, in the passage on money:
But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold Fall in the gen’ral massacre of gold; Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfin’d, And crowds with crimes the records of mankind For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws, For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws; Wealth heap’d on wealth, nor truth, nor safety buys, The dangers gather as the treasures rise.
Watch what people do to make a (dis)honest buck. Or what they’ll do in order to avoid, in due course, having to toil to make a buck. Or if they’ll continue wanting to make even more big bucks, by fair means or foul, long after they have more than any one person, or their dependents, could possibly need. In which case, they are most likely much more interested in power than they are in money, money being merely a means to an end. And the wielding of power is just another way of showing off, or protecting what you have.
Of course, I cannot get through an essay (or piece of ‘creative non-fiction’, or whatever term you care to employ for these ramblings and rants) without making it personal, so I will now refer to my own family background. My father had a strong work ethic, and worked hard all his life in the state transport company ‘to support my family’ – even if his earnings were relatively meagre and his eventual non-contributary pension derisorily small.
But, in those days, so did everyone, since as the old Italian adage has it ‘Chi non lavora non mangia’ (Who does not work does not eat.) Nevertheless, watching him retire, when I was nineteen, I couldn’t help but find it both outrageous and disheartening that he had put in a lifetime’s worth of hard slog for such a paltry payoff. He had missed out on a lot of familial activity (including seeing me), due to doing the overtime he thought was necessary to ‘keep the show on the road’.
Again, as Russell has it: ‘The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.’ This perception was accompanied by my late mother – having spotted my burgeoning creativity during my adolescence – inculcating in me the notion that, ‘Art is for rich people.’ Of course, she was wrong. But, in another sense, and certainly from her perspective, she was right. Nor would she have been alone in having such an attitude, which was widespread at the time – one thinks of John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi telling him: ‘The guitar’s all right, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it’ – not that she actively hindered his pursuit of his dream of doing so.
After all, artistic production, and its attendant activities and industries – academia, media, publishing, curating etc. – are still predominantly middle-class occupations, filled by middle-class personnel, who become the gatekeepers to acceptance or rejection. Some will raise the cavil that this perception depends on one’s definition of what constitutes middle class and working class, and if one even allows for the reality of the class system at all.
Typically, these people hold that merely by achieving a college education (however easy or difficult that may be, depending on the personal circumstances you hail from), you automatically enter the hallowed mansions of middle-class heaven. But, apart from being a self-fulfilling prophecy, this is simply untrue, because it takes no account of what has happened before college and what will happen afterwards: your social and cultural capital (what networks and contacts your immediate and extended family have and the milieu it inhabits – i.e ‘who Daddy and/or Mommy know’); and certainly not of your economic capital (how rich your parents – if you have them – are).
For who can finance the ubiquitous internships (free labour for successful companies), without independent economic support, usually from family, without incurring huge debt, on top of student debt? At least rock’n’roll used to be egalitarian, and along with football, recognised as a ‘working-class escape’.
Nowadays, you can go to college to learn how to be a rock star, or go through an academy to develop the necessary footballing skills – which makes either endeavour seem rather more anodyne. Everyone may now be entitled to a degree – but only because you can pay through the nose at a private college in the event that you did not achieve the necessary academic requirements for entry to a ‘proper’ university.
Seventy percent of the world’s population may live three pay cheques away from financial disaster – but life is definitely easier when you have a safety net. If worse comes to worst, some people can always ‘move back in with the folks’.
Others have no folks to move back in with – or the prospect or the reality would be just too difficult, for either or both parties. All of the foregoing makes it hugely problematic for people of working class origin to establish themselves in any profession, but it is especially and acutely true for writers, artists and musicians, particularly if they are producing challengingly avant garde work. Racism, sexism and homophobia are all terrible prejudices, but can they exceed the obstacles created by the structural inequality of being working class – the poor, often elided, back-of-the-bus section of intersectionality?
Launching a career in literature was and is a more onerous undertaking for university educated women writers like Jeanette Winterson forty years ago, or Claire-Louise Bennett more recently, in contrast with their middle-class counterparts, because familial understanding and support may be minimal or unforthcoming or non-existent. Then, if you do happen to gain some recognition, you have to deal with the condescension of being made a token example of: if they can do it, anyone can. When I think of the undeveloped or underdeveloped potential of so many exceptional people, juxtaposed against the developed or overdeveloped potential of so many average people, it can fair make my blood boil.
Bye the bye, even further back, during my prepubescent boyhood, my maternal unit also gave me the lowdown on the evils of Russian Communism. Russia was this dreadful place where everyone was forced to believe the same thing and behave in the same way (so unlike Ireland, where we had freedom!), and they didn’t believe in God, and they were just waiting for a chance to invade Ireland, and make the whole world Communist, and they would surely martyr me for trying to defend my Catholic faith and preserve my immortal soul. I can see now that she was just another victim of the paranoid Yankie Cold War propaganda that was rife at that time, since Ireland was a vassal state of the U.S.. Still, it was quite a heavy and fearsome burden to lay on a small, impressionable lad with an active imagination. Thanks Mom.
Read history, any history. It is essentially the repeated story of the stronger exploiting the weaker, so that they can become richer while the others become poorer. You can dress it up with any fine justifying notion you like – crusades against the infidel, the white man’s burden, survival of the fittest, bringing the benefits of ‘progress’ to backward, uncivilised people, protecting ‘the gentle sex’ – but it doesn’t say very much for human nature. In fact, when I consider the outlandishness of the excuses usually trotted out, I prefer those with an eye to the main chance who are honest enough to admit that they are just self-seeking, self-serving, land-grabbing and fucking everyone else over for the money, without bothering to proffer any fancy reasons for their rapacious cruelty. The capitalist is at base a common or garden playground bully; the rest is just PR to cover up the fact.
Yes, Communism doesn’t work, because people like owning stuff. But Capitalism doesn’t work either, because it means too many people cannot own stuff, because other people own lots of stuff, at their expense. Mostly, neither of them work because of human frailty and venality – but Capitalism grants much more free reign for these traits and their spawn – aggression, callousness, selfishness, deviousness – to run rampant. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that it could function as designed without encouraging them, however covertly. Flaubert, as Julian Barnes tells us in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984):
thought democracy merely a stage in the history of government, and he thought it a typical vanity on our part to assume that it represented the finest, proudest way for men to rule one another. He believed in – or rather, he did not fail to notice – the perpetual evolution of humanity, and therefore the evolution of its social forms: ‘Democracy isn’t mankind’s last word, any more than slavery was, or feudalism was, or monarchy was.’ The best form of government, he maintained, is one that is dying, because this means it’s giving way to something else.
Wilde, again in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, presciently agrees: ‘High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out.’
But of all the governmental systems humanity has already devised and tried, European-style social democracy would still seem to be the best bet yet. (Ireland, alas, in spite of E.U. membership, remains part of the Anglosphere, having thoroughly embraced the neoliberalism of the U.K. and the U.S..) Not that it couldn’t be improved upon – in ways I am ill-qualified enough to know I should not expostulate on here.
For it is certain that the first economic strategist who comes along will undoubtedly point to the fact that I am suspiciously short on detail in my surely flawed and embarrassingly naïve socio-economic analysis. I freely admit that I am no dismal scientist – in Carlyle’s sense of advocating for slavery, but rather a gay scientist – in Nietzsche’s sense of the art of poetry; or at least or at best, a sceptical artist. In the classical humanist tradition, I am basing my report on my lived experience, and that of those around me.
I have never flown first-class. I have never even purchased a first-class train ticket. I have no idea or experience of what it must be like to live as one of the super-rich, although fictions like the HBO television series Succession, to say nothing of practically every nostalgia-fuelled costume drama that has ever been commissioned, try to give us some inkling. Some people watch to ogle the wealth and lifestyle; I feel dirty after watching all those horrible characters doing terrible things to each other – but I keep coming back for more. To quote from Beckett’s Endgame (1957):
CLOV: What is there to keep me here?
HAMM: The dialogue.
Money Doesn’t Exist…
Ultimately, money doesn’t exist as a tangible entity. It is merely an abstract medium of exchange for goods or services rendered. A €20 note is not worth more than a €10 note, except by mutual agreement between interested parties as to what is written on them signifies.
Similarly, the stock market, and all such investment, is a giant, reciprocally arranged, confidence trick: if everybody buys in, regardless of external influencing factors, then values increase, or at least remain steady; if some people get nervous, and pull out, then others will follow suit, and the whole shooting match comes tumbling down. That’s why we have an incessant cycle of booms and busts – not because there is too much oil or not enough oil, or even because we no longer need or want oil.
The invention of credit (and its consequent debt) is what keeps people in thrall to this system. One thinks of the anecdote about Donald Trump pointing to a homeless man one day when he was $1 billion in debt, and telling daughter Ivanka, ‘See that bum? He has a billion dollars more than me.’ Not that this observation was of much consolation to the tramp – however much it may have been to Trump.
This is what makes the ending of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) so poignant: of all the things we strive for, money seems the least essential. Gatsby, the self-made ‘new man’ millionaire (and how did he make his money? – everyone has some dark, speculative theory about his past), has sacrificed everything for financial success and status, and achieving the American Dream has destroyed him. To put it simplistically, when it comes to his infatuation with Daisy: ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. ‘And so, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ The vanity of human wishes, indeed.
Like the Philip Larkin of the eponymous poem, I cannot help rueing the extent to which money controls and limits most people’s lives – those who attach much importance to it and strive, successfully or unsuccessfully – after it, as much as those who, through either ineptitude or lack of interest or a surfeit of basic human kindness, do not make a priority of pursuing it and so rarely have enough. And how it also separates us, where we live, and where we live in where we live, and how we live in where we live, while great impersonal institutions hoard, indifferently, merely dispensing charity occasionally, at their whim – after they have taken care of the shareholders. The business of business – in fact the whole money game – is, indeed, ‘intensely sad’.
I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down From long french windows at a provincial town, The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
N.B. Desmond Traynor gratefully acknowledges the assistance of funding from the Arts Council of Ireland towards the completion of this and other essays.
Patrick Freyne’s satirical 2020 Irish Times article ‘It is now late-period Dermot Bannon. He is on the verge of losing it’ was an unusually humorous appraisal of the kitsch that state broadcaster RTÉ tends to dollop out.
In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech author Milan Kundera explains that kitsch is an aesthetic ideal ‘in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist’. This he argues, ‘is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.’ The Montrose cultural bubble has long served a crucial political purpose: denying shit while everyone acts as though it does not exist.
Through no fault of his own, the feel good factor of Dermot Bannon’s show obscures the suffering associated with an enduring and arguably preventable housing crisis, and also, more broadly, provides an insight into how the Irish overreaction to Covid-19 occurred; which has done incalculable damage to the lives of children especially.
It seems that our best, and perhaps only, response in Ireland to these traumas is comedy, but this has clear pitfalls.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
“fronted by classical pillars”
Patrick Freyne reveals:
Dermot Bannon is my muse. I would write about him in every column if I could (God knows I try). If I were the arts editor I would make the arts pages of this paper entirely Dermot Bannon-themed. If I were taoiseach, I would declare a Dermot Bannon day …
He observes that
On every episode of Room to Improve, Dermot Bannon goes into battle with the plain people of Ireland in the cause of justice and light. Mainly light, to be honest. In his philosophy, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed by turning a wall into a window. He’d build all of his houses from windows if he could. The man is a martyr to big windows.
Explaining that Bannon:
is creating a metaphorical window into the heart of the Irish people, who are for the most part entirely unco-operative, ungrateful and obsessed with dark holes fronted by classical pillars and filled with Ikea furniture …
He also marvels at how:
Ireland is the only country with a celebrity quantity surveyor. Patricia has no time for any of Dermot’s nonsense, which is why we like her. He wants to double the size of his new house for just €350,000. The nation scoffs at this even before Patricia has a chance to say: “Not a hope.” In fact, we all say it along with her, panto style.
As one of the jesters permitted to ply his trade in the national media, Freyne exposes RTÉ’s consistent denial of shitness – which perhaps accounts for a prevalent uncooperativeness, ingratitude and obsession with dark holes “fronted by classical pillars.”
Much of the Irish landscape bears testament to the tragedy of the commons. It is a sad reality that most of what has been built since independence is inferior to what came before it.
Moreover, a programme such as Room To Improve, and it’s not the only one in this genre, is devoted to the improvement of private dwellings in the possession of a shrinking middle class still transfixed by the ups and downs of the Irish property market. It is instructive that according to the website www.daft.ie at the start of May, 2022 there are just over one thousand properties available to rent in all of Ireland at a point when the Irish government has just committed to welcoming tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine. Is it any wonder so many people are disinclined to have children.
In essence Room to Improve translates into: how can someone increase the market value of their property. The lurking presence of the celebrity quantity surveyor ensures that any project is seen in terms of adding financial value to the holding.
It is particularly tone deaf as we reach another high-water mark in an ongoing housing crisis. Missing on RTÉ is serious engagement with the corruption of a planning process, which lies behind enduring inequalities and sprawl, or the financial structures that embed generational inequalities, and permit a creeping dominance of transnational capitalism.
It is not that housing dysfunction is denied on RTÉ – that we are lied to as such – it is that the issues are almost completely ignored amidst the day-to-day mixture of light entertainment and vox pop nonsense that are their mainstays. Room to Improve is a form of kitsch because it denies the shitstorm going on in the society around it.
And like the rest of their programming, it appears to rely to an ordinate extent on advertising from a motor car industry that allows for the trail of bungalows that blight our landscapes. After all, living in one of the detached houses that Bannon mostly works on would be very difficult without a motor car.
It also appears that RTÉ’s longstanding tendency to bury shitness – which is also evident in legacy print media – led to the catastrophic handling of Covid-19 in Ireland.
With Irish media placing unprecedented focus on climate change during #COP26 we recall an unhealthy dependence on advertising revenue from the car industry that appears to influence transport coverage in particular.https://t.co/wXx0LOgPVB@think_or_swim@WilliamsJon@ian_lumley
It will be many years before we come to terms with what happened during Covid-19 around the world, and confront the traumas, especially to children, of living through lockdowns. It is instructive that despite having the youngest population in the EU, Irish children were subjected to among the longest school closures in the world. Simply blaming teaching unions ignores how teachers were subjected to relentless fear messaging that made them reluctant to do their jobs, despite international data from early on showing that their concerns were generally misguided.
Yet for RTÉ ‘The deadly virus’ of COVID-19 seemed to arrive as a godsend – and an advertising windfall, or so-called Covid bounce. A slavish devotion allowed the channel to almost completely ignore all other difficult news for the best part of a year-and-a-half. The daily totals of cases and deaths, uncritically conveyed, became the staple of every radio and television news bulletin and headline on their website.
Then, almost overnight, the issue vanished from sight, without any kind of meaningful post-mortem or reflection on the damage inflicted on the patchwork of communities that make up our society.
It gives way to relentless coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – thick on spectacle and almost devoid of critical analysis. Images of wasted buildings now bury discussion of other stories.
A lack of intellectual rigour – albeit their Brainstorm section is a notable exception – that is essential to RTE’s kitsch reaches right to the top it would appear. Thus, RTE’s head of news Jon Williams claims in article ‘For the first time in Europe since the end of World War Two, one country had been invaded by another.’ The mind boggles.
Comedy appears to be the only response available; it’s just that the consequences are quite serious. Simply because political protestors aren’t subjected to imprisonment or torture as under other regimes doesn’t mean that the Irish state isn’t failing its people, and that the state broadcaster isn’t complicit for failing to interrogate our inadequacies that surely begins with a deficient education system.
Nietzsche
In Laughter All Evil is Compacted
Freyne is one of a number of comedic writers and performers – Oliver Callan is another working for RTÉ itself – operating in legacy media who are permitted ‘to take the piss’ out of our national obsessions. Comedy has its advantages but arrives with a health warning.
Theodore Zeldin traces its historical trajectory: ‘since truth cannot be easily swallowed whole or raw, jesters were usually also poets, magicians or singers, able to convey unpalatable insights in an epigram, a witty story or a song.’
But this routinely slips into cynicism, as comedy can reinforce conformity ‘by being its safety valve.’ Zeldin points out that carnivals, such as the medieval festival of fools: ‘have throughout history made fun of authority, and turned hierarchy upside down,’ but ‘did so only for a few days.’ In a sense, comedy normalises the damaging excesses of a culture by turning it into a humorous spectacle.
Jokes can be truly sick, as the history of totalitarianism demonstrates. Jonathan Glover notes that ‘In the death camps the Nazis turned the cold joke into an art form, with increasingly imaginative embellishment on the themes of cruelty and humiliation.’
Friedrich Nietzsche provides a psychological insight into how this occurs when claiming that ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’ The gay release of laughter allows depraved participants to evade consideration of their actions. Thus, humour may confront tyranny, but it may also reinforce it.
A parade of tanks of the ČSLA in Prague on Victory Day, 9 May 1985.
Not Dangerous In Itself
In Kundera’s view political kitsch is not dangerous in itself. Indeed, most democratic politicians cultivate a clean-cut, artificial, image. The real danger lies in totalitarian kitsch such as that encountered by the character of Sabina in the aforementioned novel, who recalls the Communist parades of her youth.
These projected an idealised vision of the worker removed from the corruption, suspicion and cruelty that had by then infected her society. Indeed, it is recalled in Czechia that under Communism love for one’s family required some of form of theft in the course of one’s professional career.
Kundera contrasts totalitarian airbrushing with the plurality of voices that he believed still lay in Western democracies.
Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality. The artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.
Prior to Covid-19 RTÉ’s kitsch could largely be avoided, but when the state followed the example of its European partners in imposing undifferentiated house arrest we entered the dangerous territory, as we were subjected to a form of mass formation.
Ireland Inc has returned to business as usual. Room to Improve carries on with an architect that looks suspiciously like Ryan Tubridy, as the housing crisis continues to the benefit of a few, and all we have are tears of laughter for consolation.
