_ I thought that I would read the beginning
_ Of the last gospel, but
_ The book fell open at
The beginning of the first, my thoughts misdeeming
_ What I needed to write this poem,
_ But the book satisfying them.
_ My intention was to write about
_ A father and a son
_ Hand in hand upon
A curving shore, a memory I doubt,
_ But fitting image for
_ All such memories I here recall.
_ Those early summer evenings spent
_ With my dad on that outcrop
_ Watching peregrines drop,
Or in the woods, off way-marked paths, intent
_ To find the fabled stand
_ Of Weymouth Pines, which we, at last, found.
_ Our lingering at Mickla Bridge,
_ Discoursing about Yeats,
_ As the sun politely waits
To set behind the bluing fields’ high ridge.
_ My making for my first son
_ My arm a pillow to rest upon.
_ But while I thought on these things, behold,
_ An angel of the Lord
_ Appealed to my words and implored,
All things are created through the Son, that child,
_ Conceived of the holy ghost,
_ Praised suddenly by a heavenly host.
_ What have I written? And what have I
_ Imagined and not written?
_ And what remains unwritten
And unimagined in this poem? Before I
_ Knew it, my thoughts were lost,
_ Or found with child of the holy ghost.
Edward Clarke’s Eighteen Psalms was published by Periplum Poetry in 2018. He is also the author of two books of criticism, The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry (Iff Books 2014) and The Later Affluence of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), and poetry editor Cassandra Voices.
As French President, François Mitterrand enjoyed his fair share of sumptuous feasts in the haute cuisine tradition. His enduring esteem reflects a wider French anxiety, in an era of Globalisation, expressed by Pascal Ory, as to whether French cuisine will be ‘all that remains when everything else has been forgotten?’[i] Thus, in 1996, for his final supper, the dying statesman made an unusual request – alongside requests for the familiar capons and oysters – for a small, yellow-throated songbird, the ortolan, supposedly representing the French soul, to appear on the menu. As is customary, Mitterrand consumed the plucked bird whole in a sauce of Armagnac, crunching the little bones with his face behind a napkin – ‘so that God himself could not witness the barbarity.’[ii]
Even committed carnivores might baulk at devouring a morsel of flesh from a rare creature that fills the air with song, and, apparently, the mouth with blood – providing another use for the napkin. There was, nonetheless, a brutal honesty to Mitterrand’s act, acknowledging the wantonness of a food culture that permits the sacrifice of a songbird for the sake of a fleeting corporeal pleasure.
French authorities prohibited the hunting of ortolans in 1999. Nonetheless, 30,000 birds are still trapped every year, and are said to fetch up to €150 apiece on the black market. Tragically, ortolan numbers have dropped by 84% between 1980 and 2012.[iii]
For most of us, however, the sins of the table are indirect and unacknowledged, as where virgin habitat makes way for grazing the animals we raise for meat, or to grow the crops used to feed them – rather than ourselves. A blindfold of distance prevents us from witnessing the nesting grounds of birds going up in smoke on hillsides; or hedgerows being eviscerated; let alone the pesticides bringing Insectageddon,[iv] which are wiping out the primary foodstuff of many birds.
Nonetheless, since the French Revolution, there has been a clear distinction between a gluttony associated with the vice of excess, and the virtue of gastronomy – ‘the art and science of delicate eating’, underpinning French cuisine in particular. Yet this gastronomy often acts as a blindfold to the gluttonous excesses of a food culture that has attained global dominance. French cuisine has much to recommend it, especially in terms of the value ascribed to unique environmental contexts or terroir, but it remains excessively dependent on animal agriculture.
It might be helpful to chart the emergence of the Sin of Gluttony, originally encompassing both excess and delicacy. In Roman times Seneca (d. 65 CE) was appalled by his decadent contemporaries who would ‘vomit in order to eat, and eat in order to vomit’, bemoaning the wastefulness of ‘banquets for which they ransack the whole world.’[v] Later, St. Paul writes of enemies of the cross whose end is ‘destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.’[vi] This reflects Adam succumbing to the temptation of an apple, the Original Sin of greed, but distinguishing between greed and necessary – and invariably enjoyable – consumption of food is not straightforward.
St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 CE) provides an archetypal insight into the moral confusion wrought by appetite in the autobiographical Confessions. He acknowledges he must eat for the sake of his health, but is wary of the ‘dangerous pleasure’ he draws from it: ‘it is difficult to discern whether the needed care of my body is asking for sustenance or whether a deceitful voluptuousness of greed is trying to seduce me.’[vii] For St. Augustine, all bodily appetites are indicative of the fallen state of Man, a form of cupiditas: ‘Ardent desire, inordinate longing or lust; covetousness.’
It fell to Pope Gregory I (d. c. 604 CE) to develop the most lasting definition of gluttony, when he laid out the seven ‘deadly’ or ‘cardinal’ sins. Building on St. Paul’s condemnation of those who treat their bellies as ‘God’, he defined that Sin as being more than merely eating too much. For Gregory, the contagion resided in the eater’s thoughts, as much as his actions:
the glutton eats before he is hungry and continues to eat when he is no longer hungry; he craves costly and gratuitously sophisticated dishes; he eats too much and with excessive eagerness; he seeks not sustenance, but pleasure; he becomes the slave of his stomach and his palate.[viii]
Breaking any taboo, however, tends to exert a fascination, and wealth and prestige are often expressed in conspicuous consumption. Thus, while gluttony was considered the ‘mother of all sins’, the medieval European nobility revelled in excess, enjoying stupendous, Bacchanalian banquets, memorably evoked by the sixteenth-century French writer François Rabelais in his tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel (c. 1532-64). Folk ambivalence towards orthodox theology is revealed in the popularity of a fictional land of fantastical abundance called ‘the Land of Cockaigne’. Herman Pleij reveals:
Everyone living at the end of the Middle Ages had heard of Cockaigne at one time or another. It was a country, tucked away in some remote corner of the globe, where ideal living conditions prevailed … food and drink appeared spontaneously in the form of grilled fish, roast geese and rivers of wine … One could even reside in meat, fish, game, fowl, or pastry, for another feature of Cockaigne was its edible architecture.[ix]
The reach of the myth of Cockaigne attests to a yearning for a sensuality in food consumption which the deadening moral schema prohibited: the reach of the mortal Sin of Gluttony failed to accommodate what is simultaneously a pleasurable and necessary activity. The early modern period witnessed an ideological shift that continues to govern our understanding.
Mainly due to improvements in agriculture and the discovery of New World crops, by the late eighteenth century a rising bourgeoisie could enjoy the privilege of plenty, with wealth diffused more widely across society. Previously the nobility’s social superiority could be expressed in gargantuan banquets, but, for that style of eating to impress, hungry onlookers are required. How could consumption remain conspicuous? The answer lay in increasing the demands made upon chefs to innovate. New dishes became increasingly complex, a process accelerated by accumulated culinary knowledge in recipe books. The emphasis turned to quality, mainly dependent on human ingenuity, rather than largesse. The introduction to one French recipe book from 1674 signals the shift in fashion:
Nowadays it is not the prodigious overflowing of dishes, the abundance of ragoûts and gallimaufries, the extraordinary piles of meat … in which it seems that nature and artifice have been entirely exhausted in the satisfaction of the senses, which is the most palpable object of our delicacy of taste. It is rather the exquisite choice of meats, the finesse with which they are seasoned, the courtesy and neatness with which they are served, their proportionate relationship to the number of people, and finally the general order of things which essentially contribute to the goodness and elegance of a meal.[x]
According to Stephen Mennell this newly discovered sense of delicacy implies ‘a degree of restraint too, in so far as it involves discrimination and selection, the rejection as well as the acceptance of certain foods or combinations of foods, guided at least as much by social proprieties as by individual fancies.’[xi] The trend for more varied and delicate ragoûts predictably spread from elite circles to the burgeoning bourgeoisie. What was crucial, however, to upending the private banquets of the ancien regime was the French Revolution, which established the public restaurant as the location for fine dining, par excellence.
The word ‘gastronomy’ seems to have first appeared in 1801 as the title of a poem b Joseph Berchoux.[xii] It was rapidly adopted in both France and Britain to designate ‘the art and science of delicate eating.’ The meaning of ‘gastronome’ overlaps with the older terms ‘epicure,’ and ‘gourmand,’ as well as the newer one ‘gourmet.’ Both ‘epicure’ and ‘gourmand’ had formerly pejorative meanings close to ‘glutton’ – applied to those who ate greedily and to excess. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, ‘epicure’ had acquired a more positive meaning in English as ‘one who cultivates a refined taste for the pleasure of the table; one who is choice and dainty in eating and drinking.’[xiii]
In France, the word ‘gourmand’ had the same favourable sense and was used by the first ever restaurant critic Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière as the title for his series of restaurant reviews: Almanachs des Gourmands (1803-12). In contrast, today English writers commonly draw a distinction between a ‘gourmand’, which has the same negative connotation as ‘glutton’, and a ‘gourmet’, who is considered a person with a refined palate. But as Mennell notes, ‘gastronome’ differs from all the other terms in one key respect: a gastronome is generally understood as a person who not only cultivates his own ‘refined tastes for the pleasure of the table’ but also, ‘helps to cultivate other people’s too.’[xiv]
The first restaurant critic, Grimod – a dispossessed noble who held democracy in contempt – was alive to the possibility that he could be attacked for being a glutton, asserting: ‘Let it be said that of all the Deadly Sins that mankind may commit the fifth appears to be the one that least troubles his conscience and causes him the least remorse.’[xv] He grapples with the challenge of altering the understanding of the term:
If the Dictionary of the Academy is to be believed, gourmand is a synonym for glutton or greedy, as gourmandise is for gluttony. In our opinion this definition is inexact; the words gluttony and greed should be reserved for the characterisation of intemperance and insatiability, while the word gourmand has, in polite society, a much more favourable interpretation, one might say a nobler one altogether.[xvi]
It was, however, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (d. 1826), a bachelor lawyer of a more democratic persuasion than Grimod, who most clearly distinguished gastronomy from the medieval concept of gluttony. In the opinion of Balzac, Brillat-Savarin’s La Physiologie du gout was a work of literature beside which that of Grimod’s was ‘too much of a pot-pourri.’[xvii] Even Grimod, upon reading his contemporary’s work, magnanimously observed: ‘Beside him I am no more than a kitchen skivvy.’[xviii] Brillat-Savarin’s Gourmandism was ‘an impassioned, reasoned and habitual preference for everything which gratifies the organs of taste.’ Importantly, he distinguished this from excessive eating and drinking, arguing that gourmandism is ‘the enemy of excess; indigestion and drunkenness are offences which render the offender liable to be struck off the rolls.’[xix] Brillat-Savarin embraced the sensual pleasure of food, beyond sufficiency, arguing it ‘is one of the privileges of mankind to eat without being hungry and drink without being thirsty.’[xx]
This appears to be a refutation of Gregory’s definition of the mortal sin, where ‘the glutton eats before he is hungry and continues to eat when he is no longer hungry’, repudiating Gregory’s conviction that drawing ‘pleasure’ as opposed to ‘sustenance’ from food is gluttonous. This, Brillat-Savarin contended, showed ‘implicit obedience to the commands of the Creator, who, when He ordered us to eat in order to live, gave us the inducement of appetite, the encouragement of savour, and the reward of pleasure.’[xxi]
Brillat-Savarin’s book has been in print every year since publication in 1826 and his bon mots remain staples in gastronomic literature. He can be credited with altering our understanding of gluttony and liberating sensual appreciation of food from the grip of the dualistic philosophy of the medieval Church. But Brillat-Savarin left an inaccurate picture of French food, which became a global hit.
The meat-heavy diet promoted by the early gastronomes is still equated, misleadingly, with traditional French rustic fare. In fact, Fernand Braudel writes: ‘the diet of peasants, that is the vast majority of the population, had nothing in common with the cookery books written for the rich.’ Peasants, the great bulk of the French population (and beyond) until the mid-twentieth century, might eat meat in the form of salted pork just once a week [xxii]: traditional French fare is basically soup and bread.
Nevertheless, aristocratic ‘French’ food went viral as the ultimate expression of privilege far beyond France. The great chef Auguste Escoffier (d. 1935) boasted: ‘I have ‘sown’ two thousand chefs all around the world … Think of them as so many seeds planted in virgin soils.’[xxiii] It became the dominant idiom in Western elite cooking over the course of the nineteenth century and France remains the pre-eminent gastronomic destination. An implicit appeal of that cuisine, expressed in restaurant dining, is the impression of aristocratic sophistication, an aura maintained to the present day, where otherwise plebeian patrons are addressed as ‘sir’ and ‘madame’ by besuited waiters.
The extensive use of French words in English-language gastronomic discourse (notably cuisine, chef, and even bon appetit!) accentuates divisions between the diets of rich (many of them with a command of the French language) and poor. Working class communities often lack a vocabulary to talk about ‘posh’ food. One’s upbringing generally exerts an influence throughout life, as Pierre Bourdieu remarks: ‘[I]t is probably in tastes in food that one would find the strongest and most indelible mark of infant learning, the lessons which longest withstand the distancing or collapse of the native world and most durably maintain nostalgia for it.’[xxiv] Thus, altering patterns of consumption, as Jamie Oliver discovered, is no simple matter, but the prevailing appetite, especially for meat, is causing untold damage to the planet.
A diet based on plants – whether undertaken for ethical, health or environmental reasons – is still viewed as the poor gastronomic relation, and as even involving a drudgery that campaigns like ‘Meat-free Mondays’ may actually compound. Moreover, high-profile gastronomes – especially celebrity chefs – maintain a food tradition that is mistakenly viewed as timeless.
Leaving aside the burning issue of climate change, explosive growth in human population from just 1.5 billion in 1900 to over 7 billion today is exacting a terrible price on many wild animals, which are rapidly losing habitats. A recent comparison of global populations of domesticated animals and wild animals reveals that humans and their livestock now account for an astonishing 96% of the total mammal biomass on planet Earth.[xxv] Animal agriculture, including the expansion of monoculture agriculture for feedstuffs is the leading culprit: close to 70 percent of the planet’s agricultural land is used for animal pasture alone,[xxvi] while barely half of the world’s cropland is to devoted to food for direct human consumption.[xxvii]
Most people would hesitate before eating an endangered species, such as a rare songbird like the ortolan, but recognition that the lifecycles of livestock are largely responsible for these extinctions is less commonly acknowledged. To bring about what The Lancet describes as the ‘Great Food Transformation,’[xxviii] involving a substantial reduction in meat consumption, a new generation of gastronomes must instil new tastes. A vast array of edible plants, both wild and domesticated, are available at a far lower environmental price. These can form the basis of a new gastronomy that will not demand blindfolds to avoid the shame.
[i] Pascal Ory, ‘Gastronomy’ in Nora Pierre (editor) Realms of Memory: The
Construction of the French Past, Volume II, Traditions. Translated by Arthur
Goldhammer. New York, Columbia University Press, 1997, p.444
[ix] Hermann Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life.
Translated by Diane Webb, New York, Columbia University Press, 1997, p.3.
[x]L’art de bien Traiter, L.S.R., 1674 quoted in Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and Francefrom the Middle Ages to the Present, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985, pp.73-74.
[xxii] Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible: Civilisation and Capitalism 15th-18th Century: Volume 1, Translated from French by Sian Reynolds, London Phoenix Press, p.187.
[xxiv] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. Translated from French by Richard Nice. London, Routledge Press, 2010, p.71.
[xxv] Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, ‘The biomass distribution on Earth’, PNAS June 19, 2018 115 (25) 6506-6511, https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506, accessed 8/4/19.
St. Helens University agronomy department was not the stuff of which headlines are made, but as a professor of horticultural science, he knew that his recent discovery, and the terrifying message he was entrusted to deliver, had to reach people with maximum impact. There was no time for academic papers. It had to be hammered into the public consciousness, or it could be fatal. More than individually fatal, it could have horrible consequences for the entire world.
When did he first know? He remembered being fascinated with the thought of communicating with other beings as his scientific mind started to develop.
At primary school there was a teacher who encouraged his talking to plants and he listened to her theories on how plants responded even though the rest of the class thought she was a nutter.
And there was that short story in Playboy magazine, read surreptitiously in his teenage years, behind a locked door having worn out the fantasy of the photographs. It was a story of a man who experimented with talking to plants. It was pure fiction of course, but Wynam had always remembered the repetitive, eventually fatal line the plant researcher, scientist and adulterer had used while giving his wife a tour of his laboratory: ‘contrary to popular belief.’
The scientist’s wife shot him and his alluring female assistant, saying: ‘Contrary to popular belief, dear, daisies do tell.’
When Wynam’s university studies in horticultural science called for a speciality, his became the psychology of plants. First, because no one knew much about it then and what was known amounted to folk tales and urban myths and outside the mainstream of science, so it left the playing field open for him. Second, since plants played such an important part in world welfare, he felt he could make a scientific contribution to benefit all mankind, but really he wanted to do something that would be remembered, that would make a difference. He often daydreamed of being pictured on a postage stamp.
This discovery about which he had to tell the world was pressing on Wynam’s mind to the point of migraine. He faced the most difficult trial of his entire career in presenting his plea to the university hierarchy, and it was centred precisely on the premise of communicating with plants. Except Wynam now knew it was more than a premise. He had proof.
It wasn’t until just last summer that his efforts in plant communication became focussed, and that happened only when he started learning more about his late parents.
It was just after his Aunt Clothilde had died and he had to clear out her house that he discovered an old leather suitcase laid flat in a corner of the loft filled with his parents’ diaries, papers and ephemera. He had never felt the need to ask about his parents and she had never volunteered.
It was Aunt Clotilde, his mum’s spinster sister, who saw to Wynam’s rearing after Mr and Mrs O’Nion’s untimely deaths. There were no photos of them around the house as Wynam was growing up, so these ancient artefacts Wynam was unfolding and reading were like discovering a lost civilisation, except that this civilisation had begat him.
‘Mum. Dad,’ Wynam tried the words aloud as he sat in Clothilde’s old sitting room surrounded by the chaff of their life. He was entranced by what he had discovered about his parents in a single container and by what they thought and how they acted. There was no overall blueprint for their lifestyle, but it was starting to form in Wynam’s mind as ‘Hippies Gone Back to Nature’ the more he read.
Wynam had been pretty much on his own since his parents, medieval history academics, died horribly in an accident during a recreation of the Battle of Evesham when he was seven. It was noted at the funeral service that Wynam’s father, as Simon de Montfort, the Earl of Leicester, had actually died one year earlier than was historically accurate. Or, that’s the story he was told at their funeral.
Not that Wynam and his parents were ever that close in his seven years with them. He was accidentally their only child and had been left alone with his books much of his early years. If pressed, Wanda and Wilfred would have admitted it was partly because their child’s unusual appearance prompted too many questions, but mostly because a child was a burden on those long weekends away celebrating life.
So, the heir to the O’Nion name continued his solitary life, resigned to the fact his presence made people uncomfortable, but content with his abilities, his reading and passion for science filling his life. Until now, that is, when this parcel from the past conjured up a new light in his life that would illuminate many unanswered questions.
Inside the box that smelled faintly like wet on dogs there were research papers on the early forms of the Maypole celebration in England, Greek gods, Pagans and witchcraft; a smallish leather-bound copy of a book titled ‘Rites Omnia in duos’ that contained ancient hand-written barely legible notes accompanied by some erotic drawings and a few black and white photos. It was the photos that grabbed Wynam’s eye, for there were his Mum and Dad staring back at him over the lost decades in their time capsule tie-dyed shirts and long flower-bedecked hair. There they were again, only this time with different retro dress. As he shuffled through the photos, Wynam noticed a theme – they were all taken outdoors at some sort of rural gathering. Wynam noticed the photos also frequently included a curly headed man referred to as ‘Wheat’ on the back. ‘Wilfred, Wheat and me, Devon 1965’; ‘Wheat and me, ’66; Near Grimslade’, May Day 1967.’
Wynam remembered opening a leather-bound A4 journal that apparently had been used by both his mother and father and set about deciphering the hand-written entries.
They appeared to have been fascinated with Greek and Roman mythology, for there were entries like:
“Marsyas flayed by Apollo. His skin put up on a pine tree at Celaenae – ritual perpetuated as reviving the life of vegetation in spring.” (his resurrection)
ref: Persephone/Demeter power of yearly renewal of vegetation. Girl’s virginity taken to bring forth offspring.
Roman Floriala – 28April- 1 May..sex
“Mother goddesses mated each year in rituals to ensure the fruitfulness of the ground, essential to the propagation of plants. The Golden Bough, Frazer.
Fertility of the soil depended on intercourse of women with strangers. Gods bestowed on them favours. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, Col Yule”
Sympathetic magic, as people sought to recreate what they saw in nature, so intercourse in fields they believed help helped to make the earth more fertile. God and goddesses consummate ‘marriage’, symbolic gesture of fertility. Fertility for crops and women and animals.
Wynam reached inside the old suitcase unconsciously as he read and pulled out an old audio cassette tape. It was Frank Zappa, Absolutely Free and snapped it in Clothilde’s multi-purpose boom box he remembered being always tuned to Radio Four. Now it spit out early Zappa music, not exactly Wynam’s favourite, but he wanted something to break the quiet of the house while he read.
He was getting a sense now that his parents were more than just flower-power hippies. A pattern was emerging here that they studied ancient rituals that had to do with the fertility of crops; that they were actually researching how humans looked at the universe, their gods, and the crops that gave them life. More than researching, it seemed. Hell, they were living it. Not that medieval history crap he had been told.
“The life-giving properties of sacrificial blood soaking into soil demonstrated in several ancient rituals globally. Human sacrifice for the good of the crops – also Mindinao (Wild Tribes of Davao District 1913 – Bagobos)”
Pagan Beltane (English Roodmass), pre-Christian rites of fertility including intercourse, then toned down. Fire. Water. Earth, Air.
Greenwood Marriages. May Day celebrations. Couples went off to the woods to find branches/Maypoles and spent the night with each other. Maypole phallic symbol representing the seed, spirit of summer, new growth the fertilizing spirit of vegetation; women the earth, the womb.
Carline – sacrifices, human then animal, then Wicca-men sacrifices. Usually burned. Ashes considered good fertility for soil.
Agnus Castus anaphrodisiac.
And a separate untitled journal which was handwritten on the inside:
Le compte du géant de Bartone
Fr Vaultier
On and on, Wynam pored through the notes of his creators building a picture of a human interpretation of the natural cycle very close to his work. The import of it was sinking in when the music in the background took over his consciousness and he heard the lyrics.
Call any vegetable call it by name
Call one today when you get off the train
Call any vegetable and the chances are good
Aw, the vegetable will respond to you.
He listened for more.
Call any vegetable pick up your phone
Think of a vegetable lonely at home
Call any vegetable and the chances are good
That a vegetable will respond to you
Was that what he heard? Here he had been following a theory and suddenly it hit him.
No one will know
If you don’t want to let them know
No one will know
‘less it’s you that might tell them so
Call and they’ll come to you
Covered with dew
Vegetables dream, of responding to you
There were prophetic words. His research was with the wrong kind of plants.
Standing there shiny and proud by your side
Holding your hand while the neighbors decide
Why is a vegetable something to hide?
You know a lot of people don’t bother about their friends in thevegetable kingdom. They, they think: what can I say? Some timesthey think: where can I go?
Thanks Mum. Thanks Dad. Thanks Frank. That’s when I first knew. Frank Zappa told me.
FIRST CONTACT
EVOLUTION OF PLANTS ENCOMPASSES MANKIND
Man has officially made contact with beings from an alien civilisation and they are not pleased with us, Quentin Bartholomew writes.
In a monumental scientific discovery, a St. Helens University plant scientist has established a method of communicating with plants. Professor Wynam O’Nion has had months of conversations with various vegetables through a device that receives then translates their speech into English. In turn the same device sends English words back in the vegetables’ language.
That we have made contact, indeed true communication with the ‘Verdure’ as they call themselves, is an established fact. I personally have talked with them and can report they represent a cultured, sensitive race of beings capable of expressing feelings similar to that of man.
I am fully aware of Pathetic Fallacy, the John Ruskin (1819-1900) originated figure of speech that attributes human feelings to nature. But Professor O’Nion has taken us beyond that fanciful asseveration which provided writers with many profitable pages, to the stage where mankind now faces the reality of speaking directly to what previously were thought to be inanimate, though living, objects. And not only speaking, conversing.
There is no parisology in talking with the Verdure. They are straightforward, brutally honest, even clever in their speech. And they are pissed off.
Let me explain. Over the centuries mankind has dealt with its inhumanities to man with shock, shame, then more of the same. The genocide we saw in World War Two, and were shocked and shamed by, we saw in Bosnia, in Africa, in Iraq in later years. Again we were shocked and shamed, but it was more of the same.
The Verdure want the world to know of another genocide — scientific genocide– medical experiments on the genes of various vegetables which threaten their culture. It is a genuine concern and hurt to the Verdure that we have laboratories working to change the way vegetables flower, react to sunlight, fight disease and insects. A hurt they consider a crime against nature itself. A genocide.
These are proud vegetables — a race that has a language, culture and history, and has the means to decide its own fate. The Verdure have asked mankind to stop.
I should mention it is a request with an ‘or else’ at the end of it. One might ask, as I did, what kind of ‘or else’ can a carrot have? How will a beetroot beat you? What threat is a cauliflower to your life? Considerable, once you learn what I have learned.
The Verdure do have the ability to become toxic –poisonous to humans — if they choose. It is this toxic ability which the Verdure are using as their leverage in this request from us. It’s more power than any other victim of the world’s atrocities ever had, yet the Verdure are asking the world politely for humane treatment. It would be a pathetic fallacy if we did not listen.
Over the past year I developed a musical work reflecting the precarious times we are living through. This composition HERE WE ARE NOW is music for an ensemble of four electric guitars, bass, drums, percussion, and saxophonics. My aim was to produce art with radical import. As well as creating an engaging, innovative, and powerful musical experience, I wanted to explore how co-operation and collective action could happen by drawing musicians from classical, electronica, jazz, and rock music together.
As a composer and musician I operate across boundaries and systems. My own work spans the peripheries of classical and popular music – primarily, avant-rock, improvised music, and post-minimalist composition – frequently involving cross-disciplinary exchanges with literature, video, video games, and visual art. Rather than being ‘marginal’ in import, these endeavours aim to challenge, empower, enliven, and provoke.
There is an overlap here with ‘popular modernism’, as Mark Fisher termed it, a deviation from popular culture that challenges the heterogeneity and ideological complicity of mass culture; work that provides a means to engage critically with, and reimagine, the world as we know it.[i] The beneficial social power of art and its ability to spread new ideas are also characteristic of the avant-garde – as originally conceived by Henri de Saint-Simon in 1825.
After picking up the guitar in the mid-1990s, I experimented with the forms, instruments, and techniques of popular music through performances and recordings. When I returned to study the arts and music in my mid-twenties I came into contact with the work of avant-garde composers and musicians who I felt an affinity with, and who opened up new possibilities for me creatively. By the time I completed my doctoral studies in 2017 I had worked with composers Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, and Jennifer Walshe, and established my own artistic practice, which became the focus of my energies.
Challenging, engaging, and stimulating art is particularly vital at present, as is co-operative and collective action, drawing upon the interdependence of individuals. Content or cultural diversions that seek to maintain a faltering status quo are surplus to requirements. Many of our current woes – consumerism, environmental disaster, and inequality – are perpetuated and sustained by a neoliberal ideology reigning over late capitalism. This model of economic growth-without-end is impossible and unsustainable, a reality confirmed by a recent and conclusive UN report on the matter.[ii]
Neoliberal governments prioritise corporate profits and the interests of a tiny minority, to the detriment of the majority, and the planet. It is an ideology that predicates upon competition, individualism, manufactured precarity, and scarcity of resources. This hits the lower- and middle- income strata in particular, through erosion of job security and diminished working conditions (longer hours, stagnant wages), and the privatisation of public resources (land, gas, oil, water, etc.) and services (education, hospitals, housing, and transport). Meanwhile, the personification of ignorance and intolerance occupies the Oval Office in Washington.
What is the role of the artist in a global scenario where inequality and intolerance are on the rise, and catastrophic climate change appears imminent? Marina Abramović suggests the function of the artist in a disturbed society is to ‘ask the right questions, to open consciousness and elevate the mind.’[iii] That sentiment is echoed in Jennifer Walshe’s work, which is alert and responsible to the present, ‘dedicated to grappling with the times we live in.’[iv] An artist certainly has a responsibility to be aware of, and respond to, the present moment. The Anthropocene we are living through – where humans are the dominant influence upon the environment – is not a dystopia as it may ostensibly appear: the possibility to reimagine and reconfigure the world we live in exists within the human mind.
HERE WE ARE NOW uses new sounds and structures in order to open new possibilities. The music is concerned with rhythm, timbre, and volume – instead of conventional harmonic progressions or melody derived from common practice – as a musical means to engage constructs of subjectivity, and expand or alter them through affect, perceptualization, and rhythmic entrainment. This is an evocation of the imagination through a sublime of music; to experience life in its fullness, to reimagine and reconfigure how we are now.
[iii] Marina Abramović quoted in Sarah Thorton, 33 Artists in 3 Acts, London: Granta Books, 2014, p. 33.
[iv] Jennifer Walshe, ‘Notes on Being an Irish Composer’ in The Invisible Art: A Century of Music in Ireland: 1916-2016, edited by Michael Dervan, Dublin: New Ireland, 2016, p. 244.
A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock. Charles Lamb
In 1954, when I was aged nine, my youthful uncle, aged twenty-five, returned to Ireland from what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. To a child growing up near Sligo town this was a dramatic arrival. The KLM baggage labels read, ‘B K Fitzsimons, passenger from Dacca to Dublin.’
A retired British army major had fixed Bryan up with a three-year position as personal assistant to the managing director of an English company in the jute trade. Born in Liverpool, of Irish immigrant parents, his father had died young and his mother had returned to her native Sligo during World War II. A period of schooling as a boarder at St. Nathy’s College in Ballaghadereen had not yielded pointers to a suitable career for a student who had not shone academically, but had shown a keen interest in the good things in life, especially the company of friends.
The regimen at St Nathy’s had not suited Bryan’s tastes or his appetite, requiring his doting mother to send weekly food parcels to supplement the standard fare. Eventually this drew a postal edict from the headmaster banning the practice. Whereupon Bryan wrote to his mother, ‘if you don’t send me food you can send John Gallagher.’ The latter person was Sligo’s foremost undertaker.
My mother, I believe, had hoped that Bryan’s overseas posting might place a family embarrassment at a safe and permanent remove. The daughter of an impoverished widow, she had made what was seen as a socially significant marriage to a successful solicitor in the town. But BKF was back.
Bryan lived with our family, off and on, for years. I had two fathers. He took an interest in my education and brought me on many expeditions in my father’s car. Schooling me in the manners of the remnants of the British Raj, he paid particular attention to elocution. He openly announced the hope his protégé would manifest ‘the brains of his father, and the personality of his uncle.’ A caution occasionally uttered, courtesy of Oscar Wilde, was the possibility of the reverse occurring.
At various points in the 1950s, Bryan went on the high seas. His superior social skills and affinity for the good life helped him find a position with P&O Liners, serving as a waiter in the first class dining compartment. He seems to have been popular with crew at all levels, including the captain and upper echelon. In the course of duties, however, subservience did not come easily to him. Passengers whose dismissive demeanour implied he belonged to the lower orders met with brusque treatment. A drawling American woman who put the question, ‘What’s black pudding waiter?’, received a curt reply not designed to enhance her appetite: ‘pigs intestines madame.’ Other diners deemed ‘trouble’ by virtue of excessive demands could be pitilessly dealt with. One such had a dollop of Silver Dip added to her soup, confining her to cabin for several days, or at least that is how he recalled the episode to his amused nephews and nieces.
Bryan returned to Sligo after such voyages with a little money in his pocket, which was quickly dispensed in socialising. Staff at the Great Southern Hotel would not have guessed this high society figure in their dining room, entertaining in grand style, was one of their own. Always at ease in company, he was, indeed, the life and soul of any party, and a considerable raconteur. His signature apparel was definitely ‘Çountry’: extrovert plaid sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers.
After the seafaring interlude my father found clerical work for Bryan at his solicitors’ firm, dealing with insurance claims and the like. His disposition towards hilarity contrasted with the rather sombre atmosphere that had previously prevailed, and an easy telephone manner was increasingly called upon; he would develop a taste for the bustle and excitement around sittings of the District and Circuit courts.
Along the way he decided to read for the Bar. Undeterred by a lack of savings – it was always his practice immediately to spend any money that came his way – he talked the manager of the Provincial Bank into granting him a substantial loan. I assume my father augmented that regularly over the years that followed – and there were many of those years. Bryan found it difficult to settle into a life of study, and several exams had to be repeated. Yet he had also managed to woo a doctor’s daughter – one of the most admired young women in the town – and needed to do justice to that relationship.
After five years at boarding school myself, I caught up with Bryan in the realms of third level education in Dublin. It felt a little odd to have an uncle as a fellow law student. However, he entertained my friends enormously, always the last to leave a party and a dogmatic adherent of the ‘rounds’ system of ordering drinks.
I even shared a flat with him at one point, which became rather a drain on my own modest student allowance. One weekend, when I too was broke, he raided the landlady’s telephone call-box, which delivered a cascade of noisy copper pennies that he transported to a pub in Ranelagh, laying fistfuls on the counter in exchange for his nightly quota of Smithwicks. In due course, I began to see a situation where I might complete my legal education leaving my familial senior behind. I therefore put the skids under him to get him to apply himself to his final exam for the Bar. My sister and I reined him in, virtually standing guard over him by night, with no drink allowed unless several hours of study had been completed.
On the day of the exam I arrived early in the morning at his digs. To my relief he was awake and looking chipper. After a hearty breakfast I escorted him out the door whereupon we met glorious morning sunshine. He paused. I said, ‘let’s get going Bryan.’ To which he responded by throwing back his head and laughing, before sauntering down the street, in the wrong direction.
But ‘the uncle’ was not without resources. During a later attempt at his finals, he deployed the full possibilities of emerging short-wave technology. ‘I’m wired for sound’, he confided in the run-up to his repeats, opening his coat to reveal an array of the latest electronic equipment. These would enable him to communicate with a loyal friend on the outside, who could supply answers to the questions submitted sotto voce in the cavernous dining hall of the King’s Inns.
Indeed, he had been previously implicated in a plot designed to get an entire class of his aspiring barrister friends through oral tests for the ‘Junior Victoria Examination.’ These were administered by the fearsome Professor Fanny Moran, who charged her students with being, ‘ferociously accurate and ruthlessly precise.’ For her oral exam, students were herded into a room from which there was no means of exit, save through another room where the redoubtable Fanny lay in wait as examiner. Only after the interview were they released, one by one.
In the interests of fairness, each student was asked the same question, which was the reason for the incarceration. Bryan, however, had by this time formed a friendship with a wireless engineer, who lent him the latest in walkie talkie sets. The scheme ensured a level playing field for all candidates, except for the first to be examined. There had to be one martyr, who was tasked with carrying news of the question to a car waiting outside the King’s Inns, from whence the message would be radioed back to the rest of the students, who could consult their textbooks for the correct answer.
Unfortunately the first candidate misunderstood the question, which was, nonetheless, dutifully relayed to those remaining in the room. By the fourth interview Fanny Moran burst forth: ‘I don’t know why it is, but all of you seem to give the same wrong answer.’ When this frightful intelligence reached the control vehicle feverish attempts were made to regain radio contact with the rest of the candidates, who had by this stage switched the equipment off. In the course of the failed operation a barrister-tutor, later a judge of the Superior Courts, chanced to pass down Henrietta Street. Glancing at the car and its occupants, he immediately surmised the situation. ‘Lads’, he said, ‘ye have gone a long way since we used to slip five shillings to the porter to get hold of the question.’
By fair means or foul, Bryan did receive a call to the Bar. Money, however had run out and there were debts undischarged. He went to London from time to time to replenish his coffers, returning at intervals. In the course of a visit home, my father having passed away, Bryan was called upon to give away my eldest sister. By this stage he was drinking heavily. The family exerted all manner of pressure to ensure he would be ‘in form’ to discharge this role with style and dignity.
In spite of solemn undertakings, Bryan visited Sligo town on the morning of the wedding and returned the worse for wear. Shortly before the bridal car departed for the church he was seen grasping, not a glass of gin and tonic, but a jug. As bride and uncle linked arms in the traditional passage up the aisle one onlooker was heard to say it was unclear who was supporting who.
In the late 1970s Bryan again took the boat to England, and effectively disappeared for some years. The family attempted to trace him, but without success. By this time I was established in corporate law practice and had occasion to visit London on business. On receiving a tip-off of an address where he might be located I managed to make contact, and arranged to meet him at my hotel.
After consuming as many drinks as were compatible with my work assignments for the following day, I invited Bryan to share my twin-bedded room at the hotel. I had learned that he was living in cheap accommodation and had taken up casual employment as a waiter for banquets and the like. The suit and shoes he wore were the only outer garments in his possession. The following morning he asked if I would meet him again that evening, saying, ‘there’s a friend of mine I’d like you to meet.’
Joining up, we set off towards a smart address in Chelsea, arriving at one of those elegant bijou dwellings where curtains are left undrawn, allowing passers-by to peer enviously into elegantly furnished rooms. A tall, handsome woman opened the door, and I was introduced to ‘Jane’ as ‘a friend from Ireland’; I was just glad to be wearing my business suit in this rarefied environment. Chit-chatting over a glass of Sherry in the drawing room, Bryan mentioned a connection with the politician Garrett FitzGerald, who was known to the lady. He then asked her in jest, ‘where are you taking me now?’ Jane expressed a desire to go out for dinner, so we made our way to ‘The Gay Hussar’ restaurant in Soho.
Settled at a comfortable table, the ordering complete, Bryan looked at our guest (mine really – it was obvious who was going to foot the bill), and in a most sympathetic tone said, ‘my dear, you look tired.’ ‘Well I am’, she replied, ‘I have been in the house all day.’ I had a momentary vision of her bent for hours over domestic tasks. Then it twigged, as I recalled an invitation card addressed to one ‘Jane Ewart-Biggs’ lying on her mantelpiece. ‘The House’’ I realized, was the House of Lords, and this was the wife of the former British Ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, assassinated by the IRA in Dublin in 1976.
Bryan confided to me afterwards that he had written a letter to the grieving widow to express his abject shame at what his countrymen had done. He further added that that if she was ever in need of company of an evening he would be glad to give what comfort he could offer, to which she had responded.
Having been run to ground in this way, the family resolved to repatriate him and provide some level of support. A little house was purchased on the edge of Sligo town. My then circumstances enabled me to pay him a modest stipend to provide for his basic needs. Banking systems had advanced sufficiently to allow an account to be programmed so that a maximum amount could be withdrawn every week, thereby avoiding splurges when the monthly transfer arrived in the account.
From this base Bryan attempted to develop a legal practice. A number of solicitors in the town were willing to pass undemanding District or Circuit Court cases his way, and he was said to be impressive on his feet. Where a case demanded a greater level of legal knowledge, he would post the papers to me in Dublin and I would endeavour, with the help of my office library, to ghost the sort of reply that I hoped would meet the satisfaction of his clients. Bryan ‘got by’ for a number of years pursuant to these arrangements. He also struck up a relationship with a good and loving woman, whom he had known in his youth.
During this period, while visiting a renowned tailor from Sligo, Martin & Son, with a base on Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin, I asked whether it ever happened that a client, for example one from the U.S. – this tailor visited California regularly to take orders – failed, for whatever reason, to take delivery of a suit. I was thinking of Bryan, I explained, who was well known to the Sligo native. ‘Leave it to me’, he said.
I heard nothing more until another family wedding came around. This time the family were taking no chances. I was to give away the bride. Bryan was, in fact, well behaved on the day. He took his place in a pew looking the proverbial million dollars in an impeccable dark suit and pink tie. I caught up with him in the bustle of the reception at the family home, and asked how he had come by such a fine suit. ‘The suit?’, he responded, ‘I thought you knew all about that!’ ‘Tell me more’, I said.
‘Well’, he answered, ‘I was walking down Wine Street and a head peeped out from the tailoring emporium. ‘Bryan’, a welcoming voice said, ‘there’s to be a suit for you.’ I thought to myself – this is the chance of a lifetime. I asked them to bring out the finest quality English and Italian materials available in the shop, but I didn’t like any of them so I asked for the sample books and chose another to be ordered in.’
As I listened, my jovial mood ebbed away somewhat. Some weeks later, I called into the tailor, and it became obvious a serious breakdown in communication had occurred. We agreed a settlement satisfactory to neither of us.
A short time after these events, Bryan, perhaps under the influence of his good woman friend, abstained from alcohol throughout the Lenten period. We had high hopes. But Easter Sunday arrived with a vengeance. After a course of pre-prandials at Austie Gillen’s pub in Rosses Point he weaved an unsteady course down the driveway to the family home. As he approached, my mother was heard to rasp, ‘here comes trouble.’ Some days later Bryan breathed his last. It was speculated that the transition from Lenten abstinence to Easter inebriation was more than his system could tolerate.
I was in Dublin and dissolved on hearing the news. As the arrangements for the funeral proceeded, I received a call from my solicitor brother. He said the tradition had been for burial in a funerary habit, but that this was beginning to change in favour of contemporary dress. ‘He does have a fine suit’, he said, ‘but it’s barely worn.’ ‘Bury him in the suit’, I gasped.
Footage (at about 4:40) of Bryan in that suit, with gin and tonic in hand, can be seen in this family movie shot by my fourteen-year-old nephew Ed Rice.
I was pretty sure I was going to die, sooner rather than later, one midsummer’s night in Libya’s desert. It was 1988. A cousin of Colonel Ghaddafi, a military man, was driving us to meet the Great Man himself. In the darkness, we had turned left off the tarmacadamed main road between Benghazi and Tripoli, and were bumping over scrub and dunes on an invisible track, when the realisation dawned on me.
The convivial chat amongst my companions – an Irishman, an Englishman and my Arab interpreter – dried up, and silence filled the jeep. Suddenly it was quite clear: we were being brought out here to be shot.
I knew the Englishman had lied about his Public School background. Had Ghaddafi found this out and deduced he was a spy for the Brits? This was around the period Libya was supplying arms to the IRA.
I was mixing in strange company, but my excuse was scholarship: my work on the Irish/North African connection had brought me to the regime’s attention as a person sympathetic to Islam, and who might also be sympathetic to Libya and its Leader.
My interpreter told me that twelve months previously he had turned down an offer to become Minister for Information: ‘You don’t say No to this man, but how could I work for the regime, having seen friends hung in the public square?’
He too had good reason to be nervous. He was the one who introduced me to the concept: ‘Bone in My Meal’ – meaning there’s a fly in the ointment or, life is great except for one tiny thing.
We two Irishmen could not think of any reason why they should try to get rid of us, except as awkward witnesses. On the other hand, maybe we had corrupted his aides by persuading them to smuggle our hard liquor into this strictly dry country. Worse, I had allowed one of them to polish off half my vodka (he explained that vodka didn’t leave a smell on his breath). Were they suspicious because I wrote my daily notes in the Irish language, and their regular surveillance of my room frustratingly divulged nothing?
One morning, after crying off on an excursion, I answered a knock on the door to find three burly and embarrassed men. They carried one towel between them and pretended that was the purpose of their visit. They entered, installed the towel, and departed sheepishly.
Perhaps I had not shown sufficient enthusiasm in the discussions about writing the Leader’s biography. Yes, it’s true. This was an exploratory visit. In preparation I had read most of the existing accounts of the man. The indigenous works were grossly sycophantic, the foreign ones mostly antagonistic, many written in British tabloid style.
Apart from a few objective demographic and economic descriptions of the country, I found only one account, Ghadaffi’s Libya, by Jonathan Bearman, with a preface by Claudia Wright, which struck me as fair-minded.
Perhaps I had insulted the Great Man at our first meeting when I spoke in Irish, leaving him and the interpreters upstaged until I translated my own words? I knew I was privileged. Five years earlier Kenneth Clarke, a Minister for Health representing the Thatcher Government, had hoped to meet Ghaddafi but was fobbed off with functionaries. My guides said the access granted to me was unparalleled in their experience. But I already knew flattery as the lingua franca of North Africa.
There again, it might have been my direct question: ‘How, sir, with the absolute power at your disposal, have you not become corrupt?’ Could the interpreter have translated that as an accusation?. No, not likely, because Ghaddafi replied: ‘But I do not have absolute power. The People have it.’
Hence the nervous silence as the jeep groaned and bucked all over the place. The military man seemed unsure of his path: he constantly peered around into the blackness, and occasionally up into the dark sky. I followed his glances into the dark and thought: ‘Yes, this would be a handy spot to lose four bodies.’ I had already seen the Kalashnikov resting handily on the floor beside him.
The driver suddenly jammed on the brakes. ‘This is it’, I thought. But all he did was get on the radio, and apparently ask for directions.
We resumed our helter skelter ride, and an hour later saw lights across the scrub. A circle of car headlamps greeted us. Should we be relieved, or was this to be some kind of show trial and execution?
At the far side of the circle stood a figure straight out of Sigmund Romberg’s 1926 Broadway Musical ‘Desert Song’: a tall sheikh in flowing robes.
I have to confess that my first ever ‘encounter ‘ with North Africans was in a musical comedy in which I sang and acted in 1961, and in which I was described by the music critic of the Irish Times, the late Charles Acton, as ‘the only unconvincing character on stage’; a comment which fortuitously saved me from making a greater fool of myself in the theatre for the rest of my life. This did not, of course, prevent me from exposing my inadequacies in other areas.
A quarter of a century later Acton penned an enthusiastic endorsement of my Atlantean speculations, saying he was entirely convinced of an Irish-Bedouin musical connection. We never met.
The real Sheikh who now faced me was Ghaddafi. I realised this was his answer to my question about avoidance of corruption: the implication was that he was at heart a Bedouin, a man of the desert. The utter cleanliness of the desert kept man pure.
He answered my first question – about Bedouin incorruptibility – by handing me a jackrabbit and a pigeon which, to judge by their warmth and the tiny pulse I could still feel in the rabbit, were only recently sacrificed. These gifts did not reassure me.
I thought I might as well get a photograph and sought his permission. He gestured to his Bedouin costume and half-grinned: ‘If they see me dressed like this they will certainly say I am a terrorist.’
A rug was spread on which we sat, in front of a small fire. Our host lowered himself onto a stool, deftly slipped into place by an armed female bodyguard, one of his so-called ‘revolutionary nuns.’ He did not even glance behind him. ‘Now that’, I thought, ‘is the confidence of power’. She also draped a cloak around his shoulders and made sure we kept a respectful distance. Then, of all things, he poured us each a cup of tea.
In an effort to avoid staring, I ventured that in his youth in the desert he must have often drunk tea round a fire like this. ‘No’, he said. ‘We did not have the luxury of tea in those days.’
That put me in my privileged Western place. Conversation with this man had not been easy. Perhaps he just wanted to be stared at.
Then I had an inspiration: I remembered that the feast of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac was imminent. It had seemed to me that Ghaddafi’s father was sparsely mentioned in accounts of his life – even though the father lived to the age of ninety-five – whereas the Leader’s mother was very prominent in despatches. ‘Ah-ha’, thought I, ‘maybe there’s something Oedipal in the background’.
‘I wonder’, I said, ‘about Abraham and Isaac and your relationship with your own father’.
‘I share your wondering’, he said and refilled my cup.
No more questions for the moment, your honour.
The Englishman referred to an alleged whipping episode of Arab boys by the Brits in Egypt. He asked whether this had fuelled the Leader’s anger.
‘Not especially’, he replied, ‘I saw all of humanity being whipped, I saw cruelty towards humanity everywhere.’
I realised this man should have been a film director. He did in fact finance the epic ‘Lion of the Desert’, at a time when oil revenue was unparalleled. His four months of army training in England were largely spent at Beaconsfield – now the location of the National Film School. The elaborate scenario he had set up for us was a masterpiece of wide-screen cinema. Only the dialogue needed a little polishing. We were flattered at the show put on for us but, needless to say, were, quite literally, a captive audience out there in the desert.
There was a certain amount of polite conversation which did not last long. My fellow Irishman made a reference to Samuel Becket, quoting the phrase ‘Imagination dead Imagine’, which resulted in blank looks all round. I’m still not quite sure what his point was.
I enquired, fairly disingenuously, whether Mr. Ghaddafi saw himself as a kind of philosopher king in the Socratic mould. I forget the answer, if he gave one at all. The conversation was desultory. What must he have thought of these idiot Irishmen who spoke of literature and philosophy as if they were keys to understanding life’s great mysteries?
In a practical tone, Ghaddafi referred to a letter he had written to Kurt Waldheim about Bobby Sands and the Hunger Strikers. I mentioned the book Ten Men Dead by David Beresford and Peter Maas, and he asked me to send him a copy. I never sent it.
After perhaps a half-hour he stood up. The conversation petered out. Our minds, I suspect, were running on parallel tracks miles apart, and consequently doomed never to meet. He seemed to be satisfied he had made his general point: that the ascetic life of a desert Bedouin was the ideal on which to base one’s life and society. Mind you, the fancy suit, possibly Armani, that peeped out from under his desert robes slightly undermined the homily.
A large dormobile drove up. The Leader rose, shook hands, vanished into its interior and off it trundled into the blackness. Our guide explained that the Leader suffered from some arthritic condition; hence the dormobile. I was assured that I would have at least sixteen – a figure plucked out of the air – meetings with the man, and that if the biography was successful I would be commissioned to make a film of his life with an unlimited budget. With these dreams of grandeur we were left to face the uncomfortable ride home across the scrubland. At least we were still alive.
It wasn’t the end.
On the way back a couple of jackrabbits were trapped in the corridor of our headlights. Our driver stopped the jeep suddenly, grabbed his rifle and leaped from the vehicle. Laughing, he began blasting away at the terrified animals. It was as if he was relieving the tension of the past few hours. He missed. I got out to stretch my legs and he offered me the rifle. I declined, much to his surprise.
We slept uncertainly that night wondering what other scenarios Mr. Ghaddafi had in store for us.
********
Some months later in the Crane Bar in Galway I met five American students bound for London to catch a PanAm flight back to New York, and their University in Syracuse. I admit this may be hindsight, but even in the presence of my lively two-year-old, they seemed unusually subdued for young people. I don’t believe in premonitions. Maybe they were just worn out with travel.
A couple of days later I heard about the horror of the plane crash in Lockerbie, Scotland. The news bulletin said many of the passenger were students from Syracuse University in New York. When it emerged that a bomb was the cause, the finger was pointed at Libya.
I did not refer publicly to my encounters with Ghaddafi until much later. I feared my musings might endanger the people who confided in me there – despite their urgings at the time to tell the world. I hope it is safe for them now if I mention in passing that one of them brought me to a beach in Cyrenaica and said: ‘When you go home, tell the Americans that this is the easiest place to invade.’ Not far away was a place called Tobruk, which even I had heard of.
I arrive twenty minutes late for a casting, but it doesn’t really matter. Only three other girls have found their way into the casting room so far; ‘girls’ being a euphemism – the youngest person in the room is a women in her early twenties. At a fashion casting we are never ‘women’, always ‘girls’ – most likely because no grown-up woman would tolerate the treatment we endure on a daily basis.
I sit down on one of the few cheap chairs propped up at the back of the room, next to the other girls. Most idly scroll on their phones, knowing they have time on their hands, because this is not a regular casting. This is a casting with the dragon.
The dragon, among the most feared casting directors in the fashion world, is responsible for the booking of models for clients like Calvin Klein, Balenciaga and Jil Sander. She got into hot water in 2017, when it came to public attention that before Paris Fashion Week she had locked one hundred and fifty models in a dark stairwell while she went out for lunch.[i]
Though not well received, the conduct was insufficiently reprehensible for her to lose a seat on fashion’s Mount Olympus once and for all. A rap on the knuckle and the incident was soon forgiven, though certainly not forgotten by the models left in the cold stairwell for up to three hours – a duration the dragon still denies.
At the end of the room someone has pushed together some tables, forming a long line. Behind the tables there’s an abundance of sweating assistants typing into their MacBooks. But I am not paying attention to them, as I cannot take my eyes off the dragon, seated at the left hand side of the table. In front of her – weirdly reminding me of the feasts in Harry Potter – there lies a pile of greasy McDonalds paper bags.
It seems sickly ironic that a woman who hires other women based on the suitability of their bodies (preferably size XXS) is unashamedly spooning an Oreo McFlurry into her mouth in front of us. Now the windowless room is beginning to fill with the smell of grease, but the dragon takes no notice of this, or of us, lurking in the back of the room.
At this stage she seems to be enjoying herself, wise-cracking with her assistants,. The room is starting to fill up with other I models. I recognize a few of them; some I know from previous castings, others I have seen in campaigns or in magazines. There are insufficient chairs for everyone, models start to crouch on the floor. The casting was supposed to begin forty minutes ago.
Stale sweat and make-up stains
Suddenly there is movement. One of the assistants gets up and asks the first five girls to put their names down on a list. We are led to a small toilet and handed undergarments to put on. The assistant tells us to be quick, blushing as she says so. With few words we strip down in front of each other. We are used to it.
My dress, black, cheaply-made nylon – the sort you might pick up at the checkout of a drug store – has undoubtedly been worn before, smelling of stale sweat and caked in make-up stains.
The assistant returns. ‘Low ponytail’, she says, and orders us to line up – as if we are being chosen for a game of dodge ball. We walk back into the room. The McDonalds paper bags have magically disappeared. Instead there’s a list in front of the dragon. She calls my name.
It feels odd standing in front of her; her name – taken in vain more often than not – being a staple in fashion industry gossip. Even odder is how charming she becomes once you are in front of her, and no longer a nameless model, but an actual person. Almost like a human being?
Why we put up with it…
I now wonder when I first became habituated to the absurdity that is the fashion industry. I remember how glamorous it all seemed at the outset – like a high school clique that I desperately wanted to be a part of – and once I had made it, I was even more desperate to remain a part of it.
It took a while for me to realise that it is not all glamour and champagne. It demands countless hours at airports, sleepless nights in lousy hotel rooms, and blue lips from icy shooting locations.
Latterly I no longer feel as exclusive as I once did. The features that made it so exciting to begin with are now annoying routines: constantly having your hair done becomes irritating; sitting still for hours while you are made-up causes back pain; waiting for what seem like eternities during lighting tests makes it all become a blur.
I wonder if all so-called dream jobs crash against reality at some point. Or is it only models who are not supposed to talk about the negative sides of their profession, and who must pretend every day is glorious and lock away their mental problems?
An insider gag is that we all want to quit, and yet here we remain. While the lows may be really low, it seems the highs are too addictive to let go of. It is all too alluring to earn a regular person’s monthly salary in the space of a day; too tempting to visit places you would otherwise never reach; too fascinating to abandon the dream.
How can anyone who travels the world and meets people we all grew up seeing on TV complain? It seems tasteless to moan about non-sensical work conditions, when life could be so much harder.
Most of the time models keep quiet. The only safe space for venting our annoyances seems to lie within the industry itself. Though competitors, fellow models are often the only allies we have. Every model understands the pressures, stresses, body dismorphia, loneliness and petty jealousies.
We exchange knowing looks before pulling out phones to broadcast our fabulous life on social media. We are models after all, so we must maintain the fantasy.
They probably all want to quit
The casting is over within five minutes. The dragon is precious with her own time – it is ours that is of no value to her. She orders me walk in a straight line, scribbling down something on a sheet of paper. She asks me to walk again. And again. I walk up and down the room three times, the eyes of everyone in attendance following my every step.
The dragon makes no comment, she just watches. When I am finished she asks the next girl to do the same walk, I stand with the others and watch. After the five of us have done our walk she calls me up again and takes some pictures with a 2007-esque bubble gum-coloured digital camera.
I have met her before, at another casting in another city. She pretends to remember me when I tell her, though fails to look me in the eyes. Yet I can feel her gaze all over my body, scanning every flaw, comparing ‘it’ to the countless (and to her nameless) other bodies she has surveyed before.
I am ordered to look left, right, chin up, chin down, profile, smile, smile with teeth, smile with less teeth, sit-down, fetch. When she has finished the examination she moves on without addressing me again. As I turn, her assistant waves me over to her. She has an amateurish spreadsheet in front of her with a set of questions.
‘Would you walk topless?’
‘Would you wear fur?’
‘Would you wear leather?’
I wonder if anyone ever dares to say no to any of these questions. If so I have never heard of it. We didn’t make it this far to limit our chances by refusing anything we are offered. She ticks every category next to my name.
Then I am free to go. I hurry back into the toilet, handing my disgusting gown over to the next girl, waiting alongside the others in the tiny room, like battery chickens at a factory farm.
As my eyes adjust to the sunshine outside, it all seems surreal – that there are some of the most beautiful girls of Paris stuffed into a back room in a nameless shop in a nameless street. They probably all want to quit.
‘Roxanne Smith’ is a pseudonym, if you have stories you wish to share in confidence contact us at admin@cassandravoices.com.
Sail-Rail passage between Dublin and London currently takes about eight hours – but could be slashed to under four. The emergence of what the Swede’s call ‘flight shame’ in this era of Climate Change, may motivate many to look for alternatives on what is Europe’s busiest air corridor.
I – Outset
An era of climate challenge requires changes in all sectors. Among those calculated, air travel is reckoned to have one of the fastest-rising greenhouse gas emissions’ profiles – with each passenger trip disproportionately contributing to man-made climate change.[i] Accordingly, where an alternative mode is viable, it seems reasonable to consider, and indeed try this out.
For inhabitants of Ireland, it is noteworthy that the Dublin-London air corridor is the ninth busiest in the world, and the busiest in Europe, accounting for 15,000 flights per annum.[ii] According to ‘the Man in Seat 61’ website, a trip by plane from London to Dublin produces 174.8 kilograms of CO2 emissions per passenger.[iii]
This is not an exact science, nonetheless, with numerous passengers conveyed by Boeing 737s, which typically carry one-hundred-and-eighty passengers, a reasonable guesstimate is that this results in almost half-a-billion kilograms of CO2 emissions per annum. In contrast, as also noted by the Man in Seat 61, choosing to travel sail-rail rather than by air between the two cities brings a 71% reduction in emissions, or 46.8 kilograms of CO2 per passenger.
In a recent flight of fancy, I decided to take a trip to London with bicycle by boat and train. This journey involved a planned detour via Oxford, but these observations apply also to the direct London trip.
II – Preparation
Departure times are available on the British Rail website, along with those of the ferry operators. Both Irish Ferries and Stena Line sail from Dublin ferry port to Holyhead. Irish Ferries has two early morning crossings: the first, a slightly faster ferry leaves at 7.30am – having previously departed at 8.30am – while the second, slower ferry, leaves at 8.05am. The Stena Line ferry leaves at 8.10am, and is even slower. Passengers must check-in a half-hour before departure.
The journey time for the one-hundred-and-twenty-kilometre crossing is typically three-and-a-half hours – with the fastest currently operating taking two hours. Previously there was a faster ferry, which only took one hour forty minutes,[iv] travelling between Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire, where it met Dublin’s DART rail service. Alas this is no longer operating.
As with air travel, it is prudent to check ahead regarding weather conditions as ferry crossings can be affected, particularly the fast crossing, which may be cancelled in rough conditions; although it is extremely rare for the slower crossings to be held ashore.
Trains departing and arriving in Holyhead do not necessarily align with the arrivals and departures of ferries. However, the ferry departing Dublin at 7.30am docks at Holyhead and connects with a service train to London – requiring a change at Chester involving a twenty-minute layover (12.15pm to 12.35pm) – with scheduled downtown arrival at 2.38pm.
A number of differences are apparent with the experience of travelling by sail-rail, rather than by plane, on this route. An obvious drawback is the time involved; a minimum of almost eight hours – as opposed to approximately four for the equivalent by air. The journey is, nonetheless, generally less stressful, and has a lower environmental impact; nor are passengers exposed to the potentially hazardous atmosphere associated with airline travel.[v]
Moreover, as the price is a set at a flat rate of €53/£43, increasing by small increments depending on the distance from Holyhead, which can be booked via www.thetrainline.co.uk, or the Irish Ferries or Stena Line websites up until the last minute – or even at the port itself – this may compare favourably with the cost of an air ticket between the two cities, if booked only a day or so beforehand, especially during peak periods.
Sail-rail may thus suit a variety of people: not least families with young children; persons with heart or other health conditions; older people; and those happy to exchange more time for less stress.
Other differences in the journey experience which may attract prospective travellers include, an absence of weight restriction on passengers’ baggage, and, in general, lesser queues at passport controls.
While booking a sail-rail ticket is straightforward, making a bike reservation is complicated, when attempted from Ireland. In this case calling a helpline to ask an operator – seemingly unfamiliar with such a request – was required to book the bike on board the train. Contact then also had to be made with each of the train companies involved with each leg of the journey.
Ironically, rail privatisation in the U.K. has become a bureaucrat’s dream. For persons already in the U.K., sail-rail with a bicycle is far simpler, as bike tickets can be purchased along with the rail ticket itself at any station – although, in this instance, when travelling back to Dublin from Oxford, the process resulted in a ludicrous number of about ten tickets being produced to cover each leg of the journey.
III – Departing Dublin
Cycling to the ferry port from Dublin city centre could be more pleasant and safer. The 3.2 kilometre route to the ferry terminals from the Point Depot was approached via Alexandra Road – rather than Tolka Road, which is much busier. Neither have cycleways, and the surface along Alexandra Road is ridged concrete that is uneven and pot-holed.
There are also Iarnrod Eireann tracks along this route, which, alas, only convey freight rather than foot passengers – or indeed cyclists! Consequently, foot passengers generally rely on taxis or rare and relatively expensive buses – while cyclists must negotiate the Iarnrod Eireann rail tracks criss-crossing the road, as no cycle provision has been made.
Take great care if using these roads, as there are also frequently fast-moving large articulated lorries – of the kind notorious for blind spots, and disproportionately associated with fatalities of cyclists in Dublin in recent decades.[vi]
It is regrettable, but necessary to observe, that cyclists that consider themselves potentially more vulnerable – such as parents travelling with children – would be advised to travel by taxi along this section. Moreover, as the road is quite long and runs through industrial areas, walking is not advised.
Upon reaching the Dublin ferry terminal, cyclists must check in at the same desk as foot passengers. Rather than walking onto the boat with one’s bicycle, however, direction was given on this occasion to cross the road and cycle up the same ramp as that used by articulated lorries and cars – albeit empty at the time.
This adds a circuitous route of circa three hundred and fifty metres up a steep ramp, which should not pose any problems for more athletic sorts, but could be off-putting for more vulnerable cyclists. If this is a concern, the ferry company could be contacted prior to booking to allow the bike to be carried on by different means.
IV – En Route
On arrival at Holyhead, cyclists must wait until all cars and lorries have disembarked from the ferry. A bus then conveys all foot passengers to the ferry terminal. Bicycles must be held by the rider on what are often crowded buses, although, fortunately, it is a short ride of about three minutes. An improvement for both pedestrian and cyclist would be for an external hook to be attached to the back of the bus to convey bicycles. Or, better again, if cyclists were permitted to disembark from the ship ahead of motorized vehicles, as happens elsewhere.
Travelling on a Sunday, regrettably the experience involved trains carrying excessive numbers of passengers. Seemingly, it is often necessary to perch in between carriages on busy routes. Unlike other jurisdictions, conditions of travel on U.K. train tickets only specify passage on board a train, rather than assurance of an actual seat. Staff seemed genuinely well-meaning and helpful, yet regrettably refreshment carts were rare, while dining cars operate only on the busiest of routes.
British people understandably bemoan the standard of their rail services, especially considering these are among the most expensive in Europe.[vii] For Paddy going to and from London, however, the cost is far less than for a person travelling similar journeys within the UK – and tickets can be booked at a fixed price until the last minute.
V – The Arrival
One of the great advantages of travelling by rail instead of air is that termini are generally sited in the heart of the destination city. London is no different, where melodious station names may be familiar to many Irish people – having featured in countless ballads over the last century. And for the cyclist, the recently built network of so-called Super Cycle Highways developed across the metropolis offer a pleasant way to peruse it. This is far superior to previous provision, and allows the the often-over-crowded London Underground to be avoided.
Buckingham Palace, London.
VI – The Return
The fast ferry from Holyhead leaves at 4.45pm, returning to Dublin at 7.00pm, with the latest train departing London at 12.10pm, and arriving at 4.14pm, half an hour before departure.
On this occasion, travelling from Oxford, alas the last leg of the journey from Chester to Holyhead did not prove reliable. With the train running twenty-five minutes late, the ticket inspector helpfully offered to phone ahead – presumably via his own superior – to let Irish Ferries know the train was delayed. We proceeded ‘to make good time’, by bypassing a number of stations, which resulted in the delay being cut to ten minutes.
Regrettably, however, on arrival at the port it emerged that the ferry had already departed. Staff stated they had not been forewarned, in which case they would would have held the boat. It is not possible to say where the communication breakdown occurred inconveniencing twenty people.
At least a Sail-Rail ticket allows for exchange of tickets between operators, and all Irish Ferries passengers were accommodated on the Stena Line ferry departing a few hours later at 8.30pm. Stena Line are to be commended for allowing bicycles to travel for free, unlike Irish Ferries which levies a rather mean-spirited additional €10 charge each way.
VII – Holyhead
Unfortunately, for passengers stranded in Holyhead no lockers are apparent. These basic facilities would facilitate anyone wishing to store luggage while visiting the town. Happily, in this instance, freight was light.
In times gone by, the gap between the joint port terminal-rail station and the town of Holyhead was notorious among foot passengers, as it required an onerous and relatively lengthy journey. Hence, the ‘Celtic Gateway’ pedestrian bridge linking the station and Market Street in the town, which opened in 2001, is a notable improvement, resulting in a journey of circa two-hundred-and-eighty metres, rather than approximately eight-hundred-and-fifty metres by road.
Although the bridge is a distinct improvement and visually attractive, arguably it is due an upgrade. It could be covered, heated, and equipped with a travellator to entice visitors out of the station and into town. Dowdy looking tiers of terraces overlooking the harbour that greet the arriving traveller could be transformed by a colourful paint-job.
Holyhead, one of the more deprived areas in the UK,[viii] is the shop window of Wales for Irish people, who generally otherwise travel non-stop through the principality. Unfortunately Holyhead fails to capitalise on its assets of human-scaled urban spaces with vernacular Victorian architecture, as it is car-dominated. The town also contains ruins of a Roman fortified settlement,[ix] yet sadly the closure of the local tourist office[x] will not help publicise this any time soon.
VIII – Arrival In Dublin
Despite departing later than originally planned, the voyage back across the Irish Sea with Stena Line was pleasantly uneventful. Disembarkation, however, after midnight means foot passengers without bicycles may rely on taxis to reach the city centre. Yet, for cyclists not only have they already their own means of carriage, but also the disembarkation process was markedly more straightforward than it had been when departing Dublin and around Holyhead – with no ramps or buses, but instead, simple disembarkation as a foot passenger carrying a bicycle as hand luggage.
IX – Summary of Experience
At present the journey from Dublin Port to central London using Sail-Rail takes a minimum of seven and half hours, with trains arriving in the U.K. capital just after 2.30pm. By comparison a trip by air from Dublin typically takes three and half to four hours, including boarding time at Dublin airport and the overland journey to the centre of London.
Taking a plane seems a no-brainer for anyone but the intrepid crank or someone wishing to avoid luggage weight restrictions. It could, however, be so much better.
X – Opportunities for Future Development
Restoration of the high speed catamaran ferry between Dun Laoghaire and Holyhead would cut journey time by twenty minutes. Separately, a high speed rail line, the HS2, is being developed between London and Liverpool, with expected journey times of just one hour twenty five minutes.[xi]
This will leave a relatively small gap of a hundred kilometres between Liverpool and Holyhead. If this stretch is upgraded to HS2 standard so as to be a mere fifteen minutes travel time, it would bring the overall journey time between the city centres of Dublin and London to just three hours and fifty minutes (including checking-in time) – providing a serious alternative to the four hours often needed via air.
Amidst the ongoing Brexit debate, the Irish authorities have emphasised the importance of the so-called ‘land bridge’ route via Wales and the U.K. to Dublin – yet this is in marked contrast to the silence regarding ease of conveyance for foot passengers, cyclists, or train users along the same route.
In recent decades, numerous other European cities have been building up their high-speed rail connections, linking cities and different jurisdictions, such as Copenhagen in Denmark to Malmo in Sweden via the iconic Oresund Bridge.[xii]
The current standard of the service from Dublin through Wales and England to London varies between local, regional, and intercity – rather than international. It is sub-optimum, with gaps, and, consequently, slower passage than is necessary.
XI – EU Funding
It is puzzling that little improvement is seemingly envisaged given the E.U. specifically prioritises funding for transnational infrastructure to better inter-connect Member States[xiii] – rather than projects within a single country for which far fewer funds are generally available.
As the HS2 Project has been developing, there was the opportunity for an Anglo-Irish-Welsh bid to seek funding from the E.U. on the basis that it would improve the international corridor between London and Dublin. Naturally, it would be a prerequisite that any such bid would be include the aforementioned Liverpool-Holyhead HS2 Spur as a core component. In a best case scenario, overall project costs could be slashed for the British Exchequer – while journey times would be greatly diminished to and from Ireland.
Inherently, this voyage should be very pleasurable – emerging out of Dublin Bay into the Irish Sea, before reaching the incredible scenery of Snowdonia, and passing beside the striking medieval and picturesque buildings of Conwy along the rail route. Passage for foot passengers and cyclists should – and could relatively easily – be encouraged. This would greatly benefit both parties, with tourism for Wales from Ireland, and with Wales offering a pleasant approach to Ireland, and the prospect of inducing more affluent tourists from Europe, and further afield.
Indeed, cycling based ‘green tourism’ is now demonstrated to be a great opportunity for an area to develop itself.[xiv]
Separately, given Ireland’s overall CO2 emissions’ profile, and notwithstanding Brexit, it would seem prudent for the Irish authorities to advocate for an upgraded link to Holyhead.
It should, however, be noted that any construction using concrete releases almost a tonne of CO2 into the atmosphere from every tonne of concrete manufactured.[xv] Accordingly, the embodied energy involved would have to be taken into account in the contemplation of any such scheme.
Therefore, the environmental cost of the construction of any tunnel between Dublin and Holyhead would probably prove prohibitive. And, based on other Irish projects, the incredibly high financial cost of €20 billion euro and upwards appears to rule out such a notion. As such, a HS2 spur and a high speed ferry appear to be the optimum improvements that could be made to the London-Dublin route.
XII – Absence of Advocacy
In 2015, as preparations were being advanced for HS2, a Request for Access to Environmental Information was submitted to the Irish Department of Transport, seeking a record of any correspondence with their counterparts in the U.K. as to the possibility of extending a spur from the HS2 to Holyhead.
The response indicated that no formal correspondence had occurred. It seems unlikely there have been any developments since.
Closer to home, regrettably there is little evidence that the approaches to Dublin’s ferry terminals will be improved for cyclists or public transport passengers any time soon.
Stranger things have happened however: recently Irish Rail rediscovered another Dublin railway under the Phoenix Park for new use by passengers[xvi] – a move long advocated by this writer.[xvii] As such, is it unthinkable that a service could be developed along the port railway to link with the ferry terminals?
A conceivable option would be to extend an existing Intercity or regional service that presently terminates at Heuston or Connolly to operate as far as the port; complimented by new platforms at Docklands Station. Such a scheme should not incur inordinate expense.
As with Holyhead, an inter-terminal bus could be used for any local gaps. Hence, access by rail would be reinstated for Dubliners traveling by boat – while arriving tourist would have the option of services to destinations beyond Dublin, such as Cork, Kerry, Galway, Sligo, Waterford, or Limerick. Separately, the development of safe cycleways to the ferry terminals is long overdue. Again, this could surely be achievable at minimal cost.
In comparison with Dublin Airport, which carries over 30 million passengers per annum,[xviii] Dublin Port only carries circa 1.5 million,[xix] where the emphasis is clearly on facilitating freight rather than foot passengers.
Different factors are obviously at play: Dublin Port is presently best suited for foot/cycle passengers with a U.K. destination, whereas Dublin Airport obviously has global reach.
The overall experience of passage is not the worst – perhaps a six out of ten on a good day. The withdrawal of the one-hundred-minute ferry and separately the additional charge now levied for bicycles by Irish Ferries is lamentable – as arguably was the relocation of all ferry services away from Dun Laoghaire, where previously ferry passengers had immediate access to DART and regional rail services.
For a capital city of an island nation, conveyance to and from ferry port terminals should and could be a lot easier and safer. Whether reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or inducing ‘green tourism’, proportionally speaking, any money spent would buy little beer – yet yield great returns. With or without Brexit, the Dublin-London route will continue to be heavily used. Perhaps, one or two of the suggestions contained above may yet be considered.
The year is 1500 and Jesus Christ returns – to the city of Seville in Spain. There he performs a sequence of miracles, whereupon he is arrested and hauled before the Grand Inquisitor, as imagined by Ivan Karamazov – a character from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1880 novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
In his infinite mercy he walked once again among men, in the same human image in which he had walked for three years among men fifteen centuries earlier.
Surprisingly the aged Grand Inquisitor is decidedly unwelcoming to the putative messiah, warning him that ‘man seeks to bow down before that which is indisputable, so indisputable that all men at once would agree to the universal worship of it.’ There can be no muddying of the message; this interloper cannot be permitted to renew the Christian gospel.
He resolves to hide the true Christ’s identity from the masses, ‘for this time we shall not allow you to come to us’, and intends to burn him as a heretic. He acknowledges: ‘We shall deceive them again, for this time we shall not allow you to come to us. This deceit will constitute our suffering, for we shall have to lie.’
The Grand Inquisitor holds those under his power in low esteem: ‘never will they able to share among themselves.’ Instead they should marvel at their rulers: ‘man seeks to bow down before that which is indisputable, so indisputable that all men at once would agree to the universal worship of it.’
In addition, he adds, ‘we will allow them to sin, too; they are weak and powerless, and they will love us like children for allowing them to sin.’[i]
Five centuries later in Spain, a new breed of Grand Inquisitor sits atop the judicial tree, sending out an indisputable message, insisting on the territorial unity of the state under the rule of corrupt men, who appear to see women as ‘fair game’, and where left-wing and secessionist parties are subjected to espionage and fake news stories calculated to discredit them.
For the past year, nine Catalan leaders have been incarcerated before being tried on charges of violent rebellion for the crime of holding a peaceful independence referendum. A leaked text message from a leading Partido Popular (PP) senator claimed a proposed carve up with the Socialist government of judicial appointments, which would see the trial’s presiding judge, Manuel Marchena, being made president of the Supreme Court would allow conservative forces to dominate the judiciary ‘through the back door’.[ii] Legal experts in Spain say that a guilty verdict seems a foregone conclusion, with a draconian sentence of up to twenty years in prospect.
Moreover, bizarrely, the Far Right party, Vox, has been permitted to act as a third ‘people’s prosecutor’ along with the public prosecutor and state’s council.[iii]
The treatment of the Catalan leaders is in marked contrast to the leniency shown towards a group of men, coincidentally from Seville, calling themselves ‘the wolf pack’ who appear to have gang-raped a woman during San Fermin – the running of the bulls festival in Pamplona.
In April 2018, all five were acquitted of rape, but found guilty of the lesser crime of ‘sexual abuse’. This came down to a fine point of law: as the men had not used violence to coerce the woman into the act, the crime could not technically be categorised as sexual assault, a crime which includes rape. The men were thus sentenced to nine years instead of the twenty-two to twenty-five years sought by the prosecution.
On June 21st, however, there was another twist as the five men were released from jail on bail, pending an appeal against their sentences. In their decision, the judges said the men’s ‘loss of anonymity’ through the trial made it ‘unthinkable’ that they would attempt to flee the country or commit a similar crime.[iv] Or perhaps: “they are weak and powerless, and they will love us like children for allowing them to sin.”
Most recently, Spain has been rocked by allegations of spying directed against the left-wing Podemos party and prominent Catalan nationalists. This surveillance was not justified by suspicion of any crime – it was simply the ruling party using the organs of state security to wage a dirty trick campaign against opposition parties. High-ranking officials in the Interior Ministry granted residency to a Venezuelan man in April 2016 in exchange for documents purporting to show the existence of offshore bank accounts belonging to its leader Pablo Iglesias and other Podemos leaders.
Although these payments were revealed as bogus, the information was, nonetheless, circulated throughout national media, at a time when Podemos and the Socialists (PSOE) were negotiating over a possible government coalition.
Recordings have been leaked featuring a police officer saying that whether the evidence is good or bad doesn’t matter, the only thing important is to be able to accuse Podemos of illegal party funding from Venezuela.[v] It was carried out in a way similar to how fake Swiss bank accounts were used to discredit the Catalan independence movement. In other words “We shall deceive them again, for this time we shall not allow you to come to us.”
As the rest of Europe stares goggle-eyed at the Brexit drama, a more sinister drama is being played out on the Spanish stage, where three Grand Inquisitorial parties – the Partido Popular, Ciududanos and the Far Right newcomer, Vox, compete with one another in their vilification of Enemies of the One, True Spanish State – “so indisputable that all men at once would agree to the universal worship of it.”
Cassandra’s Cultural Roundabout is a light-hearted take on the cultural scene of Dublin and beyond, containing the odd acerbic note.
Make Merry
We know precisely how fine a documentary film maker Sé Merry Doyle is from our experience working with him on his short film, ‘Cassandra Voices – the Hard Copy.’ Sé put two chronically camera-shy characters at ease, while shooting amidst general hilarity, but with a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve in the short time allocated.
Man about town, Sé Merry Doyle.
Fittingly, his work is now reaching a wider public through the availability of the Loopline Collection on the IFI’s player. More treasures await, for this is only Volume 1. Mainstream media have predictably drawn attention to unseen U2 footage from the early 1980s, but there is much more than that to enjoy in documentaries that are often hymns to the town he loves so well.
Sé’s work is simultaneously featuring in an exhibition in Trinity College’s Douglas Hyde Gallery, which also includes Garret Phelan’s new radio station FREE THOUGHT FM, offering the general public an open platform, where all voices will be heard.
The seemingly indefatigable Sé has a number of projects on the go, having just returned from showing his films at Belgrade’s Irish Festival. We hear rumours of a forthcoming Brexit documentary, exploring comparisons between the ongoing British drama and the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
His most immediate concern, however, is to finish ‘Hannah and Me’, an account of the life of one of Ireland’s foremost suffragettes of the early twentieth century, Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, seen through the eyes of her granddaughter, Micheline – a doughty fighter for gender equality and justice herself.
That documentary recreates Hannah’s campaigning journey around the United States in the wake of the summary execution, by a deranged British officer, of her pacifist husband Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, during the 1916 Easter Rising.
Given Sé’s outstanding record, and the importance of restoring these sadly overlooked characters to the narrative of the state’s independence movement, it is unthinkable that the minimal funding required should not be forthcoming.
Music in Film
Myles O’Reilly has single-handedly carved out his own genre of short Irish music films. He now collaborates with many of the big names in the music business, but still seems to find time for what must be labours of love.
His latest offering ‘Rhob Cunningham Verses the Alps’, follows the impish troubadour, and Cassandra Voices Musician of the Month for February, as he climbs, bare-foot, for seven hours, with a guitar strapped to his back! There awaits a cabin where he plays what must have been a delightful gig. Rhob’s alluring tones and playful guitar harmonises perfectly with Myles’s stirring shots of the Alpine landscape.
We like the pun on “Verses” in the title, recalling Bruce Chatwin’s account of the aboriginal population of Australia, who believe their ancestors sang the land into existence, writing: ‘In aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land; since if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die.’
Chatwin concludes that the Songlines are not necessarily an Australian phenomenon, but universal: ‘the means by which man marked out his territory, and so organized his social life.’ Or, as Rainer Maria Rilke put it: ‘Gesang ist Dasein’ – ‘song is existence’. Unfortunately Rhob was unavailable for comment as his voice is still recovering from the feat of singing the Alps into existence, but we expect to hear from him soon – or his lawyers anyway.
Album Releases
Meanwhile April’s Musician of the Month Bartholomew Ryan led his Visionary crew of Loafing Heroes, Giulia Gallina, Jaime McGill and Judith Retzlik, on another tour of Ireland and Portugal this month, following the release of ‘Meandertales’, their sixth album, which mixes distorted fairytales into their dream-folk brew.
The Loafing Heroes in Concert, Image (c) Daniele Idini
According to the press release: ‘The band’s vision of entanglement, transformation and subversive joy responds to the technological overload and ecological catastrophe of our troubled times.’ Just prior to the album launch, they put out an outstanding video for the track ‘stairs’, made by the Austrian filmmaker Otwin Bernat, featuring Portuguese, Irish and Brazilian locations. It is now in the running for a number of awards.
We travelled with The Loafing Heroes all the way to Waterville in Kerry, where they played a concert in Tech Amergin to rapturous acclaim, with not one, but two encores demanded. Sensing it might get ugly, they sensibly acceded to the rising clamour of the audience’s demands, to the bemusement of their impatient driver…
‘Forest’, Bartholomew’s spoken-word final song on ‘Meandertales’ is published as a poem in the current edition. He closes with the words:
never before has there been such an open sea
never before did I see so many trees
the endlessness of the forest swallowed up my consciousness
take me, eat me, drink me, drown me
we are all strangers now
we are all tyrants now
we are all shamans now
we are all charlatans now
it’s all good. the animals are here.
Another Cassandra Voices contributor Anna-Mieke Bishop also launched her first album, ‘Idle Mind, this month. Anna’s outstanding voice and lyrical sensitivity make major success inevitable. Or is that her star already visible in the night sky?
The aforementioned hard copy edition – our own labour of love – Cassandra Voices – Volume I, along with the work of photographer-in-chief, Daniele Idini, will be appearing in ‘Social Commons’, a multi-disciplinary exhibition exploring issues experienced by communities, both local and global. We are in the company of May’s Artist of the Month Jota Castro, Áine Ní Chíobháin, Francis Fay, Gillian O Shea, Kate O Shea, Dr Katherine Nolan, Eve Olney, Kathryn Maguire, Siobh McGrane, Sphere 17, A Homeless Hub in Ireland and Durty Words. The launch is happening on May 2nd at 6.30pm in Liberty Hall, Eden Quay, Dublin 1. Bring your dancing shoes!
Until next time, and do keep us posted on major happenings in Dublin and beyond: admin@cassandravoices.com
