Anthony Caleshu’s forthcoming book, from which this pair of poems is taken, is titled, A Dynamic Exchange between Us (Shearsman, 2019). He is the author of three previous books of poems, including The Victor Poems (Shearsman, 2015), and Of Whales: in Print, in Paint, in Sea, in Stars, in Coin, in House, in Margins (Salt, 2010; named a ‘book of the year’ in The Daily Telegraph). He is also the author of three books of criticism on contemporary poetry, most recently as editor of In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan UP, 2018)). He is Professor of Poetry and Programme Manager for the MA Creative Writing at University of Plymouth.
I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O’Siadhail’s book-length poem, The Five Quintets, is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O’Siadhail’s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter a paradise of compromise, love and engagement, whilst crisscrossing the disabling specialisms that bedevil our time.
Inspired in particular by Dante Alighieri’s thirteenth century journey through heaven, hell and purgatory in The Divine Comedy, O’Siadhail introduces us to men especially, and women, who have shaped, and distorted, our modernity. The Italian poet himself is channelled, offering to guide O’Siadhail’s journey through hell to ‘heaven’s vertigo’, ‘And summing up an era work the seam / Between the modern world and its aftermath’.
T.S Eliot’s influence also lurks in the poem’s title – an allusion to his The Four Quartets – which, O’Siadhail writes in the introduction, ‘feels it needed a fifth part’, as it ‘never really gets to the joy and let-go of an imagined heaven’. The influence of that American poet is held in check, as this literary shark, ‘demands an absolute / To order seas of doubt which rage inside’.
Moral absolutists are, without fail, scorned in O’Siadhail’s schema. The heaven which he glimpses is never fixed, but in play, and informed by the principle of uncertainty. Similarly, utopia, ‘no place’, is a term frequently used to denigrate those theorists whose intellectual pride obscures a vision of an elusive paradise.
O’Siadhail’s muses are numerous, but ‘Madame Jazz’, an earlier incarnation, acts as a Virgil-like sidekick throughout.
Although each sacred book’s a lip-read score,
Improvising there is always more;
You jazz on what’s our own and our rapport.
Each solo and ensemble of a piece,
Grooves and tempos shifting without cease,
We flourish in a syncopated peace.
In all our imperfections we advance,
Trusting in creation’s free-willed chance;
Sweet Madam Jazz, in you we are the dance.
Her gyrations allow O’Siadhail to fix on a horizon in constant, though not immediately apparent, motion.
In the final section, we also encounter Dante’s Beatrice, who perhaps best captures the rupture which O’Siadhail’s work seeks to heal:
You mortals down below can fail to see
how marvels coded in the universe
reflect the face of God’s infinity.
Too graceless, too constrained, you still immerse
yourselves in steps and miss out on the dance –
the scientists and poets don’t converse
or celebrate each quantum of advance,
discovering a heaven’s cameo
in God, the gambler’s mix of love and chance.
Laurens van der Post wrote: ‘For me the passion of spirit we call “religion”, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.’ O’Siadhail’s work may help restore a moral compass to the great scientific adventures, which have brought mastery over planet Earth, but often with unintended, or unacknowledged, costs. Religious, including many poets, in turn, might no longer see themselves as being in opposition to science, but in fruitful communication with its inherent mysteries.
II – The badger and the fox.
In the first quintet, Making, we meet a host of writers, musicians and artists, who are assigned in haikus (or ‘saikus’ – a neologism) an animal or plant spirit. These are followed by carefully crafted sonnets, combining narrative accounts and artists’ voices, channelled through O’Siadhail. He rhapsodises on the achievements of many, but there are stinging observations on the artistic limitations, or myopia, of others.
Thus, William Wordsworth’s legacy is tainted by a failure to generate the epics he had dreamed of, his Prelude represents: ‘All Foothills to the peaks you never reached’; while Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Youth’s promise’ was diminished ’in opium’s malaise’.
That arch-worrier Franz Kafka is consigned to a ‘sleepless hell’, as O’Siadhail condemns him for feeding ‘… the wizened dreams of minds withdrawn / Your nightmare’s broken trust denying dawn.’ While Pablo Picasso has become, ‘A famous for being famous millionaire’, unhinged by fortune and acclaim.
For others there is reverence, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for never deviating from a desire ‘to stanch life’s sufferings’, and having, ‘No truck with any cause but moral truth’. In his compassion we find a ‘glimpse of paradise’.
Classical composers including Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gustav Mahler and J. S. Bach are also celebrated, but Richard Wagner, ‘a lone wolf’, is condemned for mustering dark nationalistic forces. Elsewhere, O’Siadhail’s George Frederic Handel conveys the sublime balance of his oeuvre.
I only want to hold the music’s line
A flighty psyche focused on its goal
So every voice can shine but not outshine,
From all the woven parts create the whole.
Painters are less evident among these shades, but his description of Francisco Goya’s ‘Third of May’ ’merits retelling:
Where fusiliers have turned their nameless back
And bend to execute their point blank prey;
My lamp of pity lights the victim’s face.
The ‘Third of May’, by Francisco Goya.
Irish readers will be intrigued by his encounters in our literary pantheon. Suitably, W.B. Yeats is depicted as a badger, ‘the churning digger / With its nose close to the ground’. O’Siadhail hails him as ‘the archpriest of sound’, and, unusually, integrates and adapts many of his lines, such as ‘Old lecher with a love on every wing’, from the still smouldering Tower.
But there is a stern rebuke for his promotion of eugenics: ‘scorning base-born products of base beds’, and unwillingness to look beyond a fantastical world that is, ‘dead and gone … That perfect past your mind’s own cul de sac’. Instead O’Siadhail urges: ‘Retrieve best thoughts once shed and then move on’.
Characterised as a badger, W.B. Yeats.
O’Siadhail is similarly conflicted over James Joyce’s legacy, admitting to loving a language ‘burbling up in play’. From one great linguists to another, O’Siadhail tells him he is as good a reader as, ‘you’ll get to understand your punning riverrun’, but counters, ‘I know the charge of words, and yet and yet’.
He wonders if his fellow Jesuit-educated writer’s works hold, ‘a microscope that is too small in scale’, and whether, ‘in the end does anything take flight’. This might come as a relief to those who have baulked at Finnegans Wake’s circumlocutions.
O’Siadhail is suspicious of a character ‘so proud and so obsessed’, for whom others are ‘walk on parts in your world’s play’. He scorns the, ‘dreamlike doodling of an introvert’. But there is high praise indeed for Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses, including a playful pun of his own:
Still once at least, though in a woman’s voice,
I didn’t pun or try to be opaque
But spoke my shortest playful work of praise
And yes, in Molly’s yes I did reJoyce.
The other two Irish writers we meet are Patrick Kavanagh, ‘A kamikaze trusting in God’s wind’, who, ‘In hungry times’, paid the price’, for being a ‘peeping Tom who lusts for paradise’; along with praise for Brian Friel’s ‘impish wit’.
Notably absent are Seamus Heaney (who has perhaps been canonized prematurely?), and Samuel Beckett. Elsewhere O’Siadhail has criticised the interiority of Modernists, who refused to take responsibility ‘for shaping a wider meaning’. He continues:
Apart from the risk of solipsism and plain self-indulgence, there is the risk of turning poetry into a kind of private piety, which ends up marginalising poetry or branding it as some kind of academic pursuit not appropriate to the ordinary reader of books.
Refreshingly, however all-encompassing his themes, O’Siadhail’s language is never self-indulgent, and always endeavours to inform.
III – ‘The Dismal Science’
O’Siadhail tells the story of the making and undoing of our modernity by theorists and movers and shakers, as he seeks to reshape our current approaches. The self-imposed constraints of metre, and often rhyme, bring a pleasant economy of expression.
O’Siadhail’s ambition to tell the story of our time in The Five Quintet recalls the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which draws together the mythologies that informed an understanding of the ancient world in order to forge a new consciousness. Here the Classical titans give way to seminal figures such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, J. M. Keynes, Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen, along with men of commerce, who are today often vemerated as heroes.
The bargain struck, the business done,
The dealer’s will and drive for wealth,
Our new concern with number one.
One self-interested specimen on display is Ireland’s own Michael Fingleton:
Still bent on short-term deals to boost
A bottom line. A bonus-gained,
Already on your way to ruin
All caution to the winds – who cares?
Ambitious tiger burning bright
And brazen in your riot-run
You do not know the dust you’ll bite.
It seems unlikely O’Siadhail sought legal advice on the potential for defamation in this section. It would certainly make for quite a trial to find the poet in the dock against the disgraced banker. A defence of justification should be available for the following lines:
Small loaners find you’ll go to law
To take your pound of flesh to pay
What’s owed; for bigger borrowers
You bend or buck to make the rules,
Indulge whatever debts occur.
There is a nuanced treatment of Adam Smith’s contribution to economic theory. Laissez faire, permits ‘the hidden hand’ to operate, leading to competition which generates efficiencies, but which at all times requires vigilance against ‘crafty dealers’ in league, ‘to fix a price and profit by intrigue’.
O’Siadhail’s ‘modern mind’ cannot understand, however, Smith’s failure to rail against children being harnessed in black holes ‘Deep down in Durham’s shafts and pits’. He also points to the irony of merchants, ‘Whose mean rapacity you taunt’, adopting Smith as their first forebear.
O’Siadhail has interesting reflections on Robert Malthus, who may yet be vindicated in his prediction that food production capacity will not keep pace with the demand of a growing population:
Your thesis bites so near the bone.
Malthusian views now haunt our thoughts;
These times will know a darker tone.
Is this the onset of a devastating Climate Change he is referring to?
O’Siadhail is conflicted in his appreciation of Karl Marx, hailing him as a visionary who foresees ‘as no one else had seen’, that four hundred billionaires would hold just half our wealth, alongside the ‘constant gyres of boom and bust’, apparent in late capitalism.
Karl Marx, ‘a know-all coldness’.
But according to O’Siadhail, the Communism that Marx imagines contains a core failing evident in its designer, ‘a know-all coldness at your core’. Indeed, being a ‘know-all’ is an oft-repeated barb, leading to the delusion of utopia. This point is central to O’Siadhail’s diagnosis of what has brewed many of our present troubles. Thus Marx is condemned for failing to conceive of compromise, ‘Where conflicts would be reconciled’.
We also meet J.M. Keynes who learns by listening to his peers, and is thus lionised as a ‘Soft changer, saint of step by step’, who recognises how, often, only government stimuli will lift an economy out of the doldrums:
The system does not cure itself;
So maybe it needs money lent
To make it flow and multiply
Far less favourable is O’Siadhail’s assessment of Milton Friedman, another ‘know-all’, whose rigour ‘will room no doubt / Your mind demands all black and white’. While acknowledging he served up some neglected thoughts, O’Siadhail chides him for using Keynes’s ‘one defect’ – of failing to appreciate the significance of monetary supply – to justify opposition to all state interference with the ‘hidden hand’.
Instead we find: ‘Free flow finance gives quick-fix gains / But blows up bubbles that must burst’, where, ‘The wily then are winners all’. O’Siadhail plumbs for the Scandinavian laws: ‘Where weak need not go to the wall’.
One Scandinavian theorist we meet is Thorstein Veblen, who reveals an acute understanding of why workers are not always sympathetic to Marxist ideas.
Society does not cohere in hate–
All workers really want to emulate
Their boss – the weak are would-be rich at heart;
If Marx had not been wrong and me not right
The poor would tear society apart.
O’Siadhail sees a need for more than Marxist materialism to meet the challenge of inequality. The height of wisdom arrives from a woman, and ‘cub economist’, Kathryn Tanner, who finds in the ‘love-dream born of Bethlehem’ the possibility of mending the distortions of the market place.
Tanner, through O’Siadhail, says:
Is this utopian, I hear you ask,
A heaven here on earth, a hopeless task,
Another revolution run roughshod?
O no! It’s here and now we must uphold
The common right of all to gifts of God.
This is perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Christianity of this world’, grounded in earthly challenges, rather than lofty metaphysics. One might also discern the influence of his intellectual brother-in-arms the theologian David Ford.
IV – The Art of the Possible
The next section, entitled Steering, meditates on good governance. O’Siadhail decries the fantasists of left and right, while bemoaning ‘tweedle dee’ and ‘tweedle dum’ politics, such as we find in Ireland. He warns: ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy.’
O’Siadhail’s continues to inveigh against ‘know-all’ attitudes, warning the reader to guard against the real sympathies of utopians.
Fear ideas that outreach the heart,
Chilled compassion of the ideologue.
What purports to pity broken lives
Often hides a know-all arrogance
That wants to own the future and the past,
So refuses, starting from the now.
Greedy for the perfect all create
Hells of blood and soil and golden age.
Readers might be intrigued by his descriptions of Margaret Thatcher, ‘Forthright Grantham grocer’s girl’, as an autocrat. Her parvenus attitude reflects Thorstein Veblen’s earlier insights into the aspirational, “would be rich”, working class:
Some who shin the tall and greasy pole
Carry in their bones a sympathy,
Want to spare all comers such a climb;
Others vaunt their courage and condemn
Weakness they had fought to overcome,
See all frailness as a threat to power.
Margaret Thatcher: tearing apart society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.
In O’Siadhail’s account Thatcher is prompted by Keith Joseph, ‘To rethink all in Milton Friedman’s words’. This leads to the tearing of society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.
There is also an intriguing description of the arch-networker, Jean Monnet, one of the original architects of the European Community. O’Siadhail traces the current fraying of the Union right back to the failure of Monnet and others to conjure, beyond simply commerce and trade, a European identity, based on ‘deeper bonds and ties’.
Perhaps writing in the wake of the Greek and Irish bailouts, O’Siadhail seems wary of ‘Brussels’ one-fits-all’ approach:
Starred blue flag so dutifully raised,
Still not fluttering in our chambered hearts
Heaven is no timeless superstate.
In Canto 5 of this section, ‘A Beckoned Dream’, O’Siadhail reveals a political paradise comprising of William Ewart Gladstone, who accepted Irish Home Rule, Mahatma Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold, the ‘United Nations’ guiding star of peace’, Nelson Mandela and, less convincingly, former Irish President Mary McAleese, who is commended for building sectarian bridges among ‘Ghosts of Europe’s once religious wars.’
I found this choice puzzling as McAleese was more of a figurehead as Irish President, and did less to interrogate the rising tide of inequality in Ireland than her successor Michael D. Higgins. Moreover, McAleese was an electoral candidate (in the 1987 General Election) for Fianna Fail under the corrupt leadership of Charles Haughey, who also tactically rejected the reconciliatory Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and her Presidential candidature came during the tenure of another tainted figure in Bertie Ahern.
I would prefer to have seen greater emphasis on environmental responsibility in this cockpit, as humanity stares down the barrel of self-inflicted ecological collapse. Perhaps some will be frustrated by the idea that political change cannot arrive more quickly than in ‘Fractions less imperfect than before’, considering the challenges that now press against us, but his emphasis on the value of dialogue is surely correct: ‘Gaze-to-gaze in our humanity / Enmity we can thaw … ’
V – God and Science
The two final cantos Finding and Meaning, covering Science and Philosophy, might stretch most readers more than the first three; although O’Siadhail never succumbs to drawing too liberally from his rich pallet of languages and knowledge. It will be intriguing to encounter scientific responses to his account of the great leaps forward in our understanding of the universe.
Following his rejection of the fixity of political utopias, O’Siadhail sees a cosmos born of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, as opposed to a ‘knotty crossword yielded clue by clue’ that is capable of completion. Here we encounter a God that plays dice.
In Meaning, O’Siadhail continues to riff (in Dante’s own terza rima) on the unknowableness of the divine:
Allow our God a purpose not our own
and here outside a timeless roundelay
we dance within our fragile ecozone
Here we meet the shades of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and a sneering Friedrich Nietzsche, who is condemned for a lack of compassion, and an unwillingness to compromise, yet:
Despite his detached mind’s strange solitaire,
for all mad Nietzche’s overreaching claims,
his genius shows how humans overbear;
Next come Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre – dismissed as a ‘a braggadocio of angst that sinks / to vanish in the nothingness of hell’ – Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricouer, Said Nursi, and Jean Vanier, who wonders ‘What if the weak become our first concern / what if such love decides our balance sheet’.
Vanier also offers encouragement to the poet:
this poem may be a slow fuse to guide
the moments in our psyches which allow
an amplitude, a deeper second sight.
Then Hannah Arendt again condemns:
Utopians who weave their gossamer
ideal never see the here and now;
for such far sight the present blur,
We also meet O’Siadhail’s first wife, who died some years ago after a long illness:
In your compassion, Bríd, I think I grow
and understand how only love can heal;
I learn to feel what others undergo.
Finally, there is a dreamy vision of Paradise in which O’Siadhail travels along a path between two parallel rows of trees each ‘interwoven with its counterpart’, ‘in curves of paradox which shape the light’.
VI – Poetic Futures
O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets synthesises many of the great intellectual questions of our time. In so doing O’Siadhail fits Robert Graves’s description of a poet as, ‘the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster’s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that.’ O’Siadhail keeps asking the big questions, having refused the easy chair of academia, where poetry often becomes an obscure word game, and a private members’s club. Authentic poetry may still be difficult, but this arises from considering profound questions.
The length of The Five Quintets also poses the question as to whether long form, epic, poetry may come back into vogue.
Previously, the Canadian literary critic Northrope Frye argued that Edgar Allan Poe’s essay ‘The Poetic Principle’, published posthumously in 1850, had a ‘tremendous influence on future poetry’. Poe proposed that a long poem was a contradiction in terms, and that all existing long poems of genuine quality consisted of moments of intense poetic experience, ‘stuck together with a connective tissue of narrative or argument which was really versified prose.’
Frye regarded this as preposterous, but a preference for brevity, which may mask a lack of ambition or vision, is still apparent.
May we revisit a Romantic Age to recover long form poetry, when poets, such as Coleridge and Shelley, were participants in scientific debates? Indeed the word science was only coined in the 1830s. Since then it has become the preserve of specialists.
The master poet. Image (c) Julia Hembree Smith.
I was a little disappointed not to meet the shade of Shelley, who had less than thirty years to impart his genius. Perhaps O’Siadhail shrank from the apparent violence of his near namesake’s earlier pronouncements on the ‘necessity’ of atheism and the revolutionary sentiments of much of his early verse, but over the course of his short life his outlook mellowed.
Just as Shelley’s challenged vested interests, similarly I suspect The Five Quintets will make some readers distinctly uncomfortable: first, it exposes gaping holes in most of our appreciation of the wonders of human thought and creation; secondly, it challenges the social and economic structures we live under; thirdly, it dismisses the delusional quick-fixes of utopians; finally, he challenges a prevalent view that religion and science are irreconcilable.
I also anticipate that the poem will only be given the credit it deserves in Ireland once it has received the imprimatur of international critics.
A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person’s eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes care of all his mirrors. Milan Kundera The Festival of Insignificance
In the beginning, I thought about him endlessly, night and day, over and over again. I didn’t think the thoughts would ever stop. They were constant, circular and exhausting, and the crushing pain of the descending reality had me questioning everything about my life. I wondered what he was thinking, if he missed me, if he had realised what he had done or if knowing that he’d never get me back would mean there would be no self-reflection. If so, now he would despise me with even more conviction than he had before. It was a limb amputation, an exorcism I didn’t want but knew I needed, an offering of my very cells back to the universe.
I yearned for him because I didn’t know the truth. How could I? I had believed him, believed who he was pretending to be. Who could intentionally deceive another like that? It couldn’t be so. We had played together, laughed together, cried in each other’s arms. Protected each other. Championed each other. Loved each other.
It took forever to see past the act. To understand that my baby didn’t care about me, that he wasn’t able to. That my darling didn’t see me, just the things that he could manipulate to draw me in. Everything I gave him, every way I depleted myself, every single thing I sacrificed for him, for us, was invisible to him. Instead, he branded me an ungrateful, unloving, pathological, pathetic joke. And this is what he believed.
The hardest part for me in the aftermath of my discovery that my love was a narcissist, was accepting that there was nothing I could do to change him. It was the injustice of knowing that despite everything he promised me, he could close himself off to my pain, and move himself on with no remorse. He could convince himself that I was bad, and shred my heart to pieces without a dent to his conscience. And I could never get him to see otherwise because you cannot reason with somebody that depends upon delusion for survival.
The abandonment hits you like a freight train. There is no way to soften this collision. You may fear that the impact will kill you, or that you will dissolve in desolate depression – your forgotten, worthless, ragged body strewn upon the tracks. Worthless, because nobody could treat another this way, unless it was somehow deserved.
You find that it takes more strength to stay still than to chase after the train, with all its precious cargo. You desperately want to lasso your ropes to the back of the carriage as it thunderously speeds past you, but you know that if you do so, you will be dragged along those haunted rails toward a phantom promise, forever. And so you wait, but for what you do not know.
This is not the end. It’s the beginning. Change is coming and this change is going to teach you how to free yourself. Because you are a survivor, and survivors have a deep and powerful instinct to keep on moving, no matter how torn your skin and battered your bones, no matter how much your swollen heart might weigh you down. You survive without becoming like them because despite the pain of choosing someone that manipulated and abused your sacred, trusting offering of love, you do not close yourself to it.
Slowly, you begin to understand, and later to believe, that none of this was your fault. And that you are not the person your narcissist convinced you that you were. That the world is full of bruised and damaged people that are not as strong as you. People that inflict pain, to feel pleasure in their power, while you and your loving heart absorb their abuse to lighten their load. It’s easy to be like them. They are weak.
You are here because you have been tough enough to take what they have given you, tough for far too long. You are here because you were chosen for your gorgeous light and your beautiful soul. If you did not shine so brightly, you would not have been valuable to them. They may have learned to drain this light but they did not deplete you. You will regenerate. Because this is who you are.
Your narcissist fed off you because they cannot create their own goodness. With a closed heart and a suffocated soul they have no true power at all. None. You do. Love, the most powerful energy source on earth is what kept you with your abuser, what caused you to shoulder burdens that were not yours. And love is what will set you free.
But first, you need to learn to direct it at the person that really deserves it – yourself. Learn to parent yourself with love and see how strong you become. Practice the art of supporting yourself, and refusing to self-abandon and you will never be caught again. Feel the nourishment of your own love and kindness and watch the joy that will spring forth from your powerful heart.
Float confidently away from those heavy iron tracks. You’ve got something so much better than the train now. You’ve got wings.
The Harp needs more than tuning. The single most important and useful change we should make to our Constitution is to remove the first paragraph of Article 45 which reads:
Directive Principles of Social Policy
The principles of social policy set forth in this article are intended for the general guidance of the Oireachtas. The application of those principles in the making of laws shall be the care of the Oireachtas exclusively, and shall not be cognisable by any court under any of the provisions of this constitution.
As detailed below, this article provides clear instruction to the Oireachtas to ensure the material welfare of the people, but, crucially, prevents any meaningful judicial enforcement.
Article 45 covers a lot, instructing the Oireachtas:
to promote the welfare of the entire people.
to secure wage equality and sufficiency.
to manage the natural assets to ‘subserve the common good.’
to prevent free competition from detrimental concentration of essential commodities.
to manage credit for the benefit of the people.
to ensure private enterprise is efficient and where lacking be supplemented by the State.
to safeguard the interests of the weak and needy.
to ensure the health of the people and prevent exploitation.
There is so much to welcome here. It is clear, humane, balanced, and entirely workable. Sadly, our Constitution grants the Oireachtas, and hence the Government, a judicial free-hand, and so allows them to ignore their responsibilities.
An amendment to remove the offending ‘cognisable’ clause, highlighted above, would allow judicial oversight of the vast majority of Government business, requiring efficiency, charity and compassion.
There is limited jurisprudence on the matter. Initially the courts refused to countenance any argument appealing to Article 45, but it has also served as guidance, insofar as it has been used to inform decisions. This progressive approach to allow reference to the Article has yet to be accepted by the Supreme Court, and current conservative thinking reckons it to be clearly beyond the competence of any court: ‘an invalid usurpation of legislative authority’, and a breach of the separation of powers.
Quite apart from rendering these goals easily ignored by the government, as citizens we have no recourse in law against any government for failing in its duties. Witness the Housing Crisis, Direct Provision, wage inequality, the gap between the minimum and a living wage, the destruction of natural habitats, commercial exploitation of natural resources, multinational tax avoidance, and the general inefficiency of public services, especially health care in all its forms.
Instead, our government suggests we turn our attention to the Blasphemy clause. This is welcome among secularists, profoundly uncomfortable for the devout, and so will stir a lot of debate but it will make no meaningful difference to the lives of people.
Consider one issue afflicting the Nation: the Housing Crisis
The ideology that free markets are inherently efficient is rampant across the world, and clearly evident in Ireland. The common belief that only very lightly regulated business can achieve efficiencies unobtainable in the public sector is especially clear in our Government’s current policies. This avoids both the fundamental conceptual problem of measuring efficiency in terms of money, or more generally wealth creation, and also breaches sections 1, 2-ii, 2-iii, 2-iv, 2-v, 3-ii, and 4-1 of Artcle 45.
Rents are rising rapidly, and are already 23% above the pre-Recession peak.
Rather than exercise Eminent Domain and issue Compulsory Purchase Orders, an old and well established technique of Government, to buy and re-use exiting property to house families, the Oireachtas is considering the Home Building Finance Ireland Bill, which proposes:
to provide for the establishment of a company called Home Building Finance Ireland (HBFI), to increase the availability of debt funding for residential development in the State. HBFI will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.
The Bill facilitates funding of HBFI from resources currently held by the Irish Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), the granting of the necessary power to the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) to provide staff and services to HBFI on a cost recoverable basis, the granting of specific powers to HBFI to enable it to carry on the business of residential development finance, and ensures appropriate accountability for HBFI.
This overtly favours property developers, contrary to the common good. Indeed, the cost of administering this HBFI will likely run to many millions, millions which could be spent directly by the Government on building and maintaining public housing.
Consider section 2-iv of Article 45 states:
that in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole.
This bill favours developers over the people who are in most need of housing. It is against the spirit of Article 45, but our current Government is happier delegating responsibility to poorly overseen private quangos. This is just one example of why we need to be able to challenge our Government in our Courts.
Were we to remove the offending paragraph we could not only pursue our indolent government in our Courts for their derelictions of duties to the people; we could also ensure that all future legislation would take full account of our socio-economic rights.
This is not a charter for vexatious litigants, it should not and would not allow suit against the Government for minor infringements. The Supreme Court is, by necessity, selective in the cases it hears, and once a matter is decided there the precedent is binding on lower courts. But the doctrine of Separation of Powers should not allow the Supreme Court to deny jurisdiction over any part of our Law.
Let us recall that these principles of Article 45 are already for the guidance of the Oireachtas. That our elected representatives neglect their responsibilities is nothing short of abhorrent.
It is our Constitution and we must change it. It is up to us as citizens to elect representatives that will introduce legislation for a referendum to fix this broken string.
Donald Trump’s former confidante Steve Bannon has been on a latter-day American Grand Tour around Europe. But rather than making his peace ‘With learned Italian things / And the proud stones of Greece’, he embarked on an ideological excursion through the newly constituted enclaves of extreme right wing Populism; spreading a gospel on behalf of his erstwhile ally Mr. Trump, who unceremoniously dumped him last year.
At one level this is a rapprochement with a mentor, who he praises gushingly when given the opportunity, and also an exercise in lobbying on behalf of the corporate interests he serves. All of this is treated as Populism, which originated as a recognition of the socio-economic rights of the working class.
The U.S. Populist Party was a movement of the 1890s, involving Midwestern and Southern farmers and some labour unions, which denounced an economic system in which the fruits of the toil of millions has been stolen to build colossal fortunes for a few. It was also laced with religious fundamentalism. This latter is also an important ingredient to the Trump formula too: the rights of the poor are ultimately subordinate to the Never Never Land promise of an afterlife. Some consider Trump a latter-day Nebuchadnezzar, ‘sent by God to wreak vengeance on an idolatrous and wicked people’.
In Europe Populist movements have also been left wing, and even Communist: including the Popular Front governments of France and Spain during the 1930s, which ultimately succumbed to Fascist invasions. Mr Bannon pretends to be unconcerned whether Populism is of the Right or Left; although Mussolini, who he praises for his virility, was also in some respects a Populist, having begun his political journey as a socialist.
Usage was revived, erroneously, in the 1950s to describe the ‘Populist’ anti-Communist ‘witch hunt’ of Joseph McCarthy, reflecting how Populism had drawn closer to an appeal to prejudice and selfish sectional interest.
On his recent tour Bannon sang the praises of recently elected Populist governments in Italy and Hungary, some of whom bear more than a family resemblance to fascists. Power to the people. As long as they vote for us of course.
I – Ordinary Working Joe
Bannon paints a picture of conflict in broad brush strokes, between a global elite and the Ordinary Working Joe. A distinction is drawn between populist nationalism, and the global establishment of what he terms ‘crony capitalism’.
Bannon’s blue-collar upbringing and conservative Catholic faith undergird his populist ideas. He argues that his platform of economic nationalism has been misrepresented by critics that label it racist. Cutting immigration and erecting trade barriers will help people of color by tightening the labor market, thereby raising wages. In the White House, he argued to increase tax rates on the wealthy and has problems with the G.O.P. tax plan (although he ultimately supports it). Bannon also argued to end the country’s decades-long entanglement in Afghanistan and spend the money at home. “You could rebuild America! Do you understand what Baltimore and St. Louis and these places would look like?” And he told me he thinks the government should regulate Google and Facebook like public utilities. “They’re too powerful. I want to make sure their data is a public trust. The stocks would drop two-thirds in value.
I was reminded of the famous description of Richard Nixon being about as honest as a three dollar bill, and, as Noam Chomsky puts it: ‘language in the service of propaganda’.
Let us ascertain what Steve Bannon is really saying: he wants national sovereignty reasserted against the global elite, but curiously Populist governments, such as his own, tend to favour the global elite in their tax programmes.
There is ample resistance in Europe to transnational corporations, so Bannon’s real mission appears to be to retain European markets, and undermine the European Union, which brings unnecessary encumbrances to the interests of his sponsors: American elite capitalism; his cronies; his global elite; his gang.
The real objection is to those global elites that threaten the agenda of Goldman Sachs and transnational U.S. capitalism. He does not appreciate the “crony capitalism” of those elites that are not his cronies.
Superficially he favours the working man and protection of indigenous citizens. Meanwhile his mentor, after riding a wave of blue collar support, displayed his gratitude by dismantling ‘horrible’ Obamacare, ironically affecting his own constituency far worse than Democrat voters.
By reneging on the Paris Climate Change agreement, and placing industry ‘yes men’ in the EPA, Trump and Bannon may precipitate another Dust Bowl in Middle America; creating new Grapes of Wrath, and accelerating the destruction of blue collar America, which voted for him under false pretenses.
In the words of Zizek the working class are being sold ‘ideological misidentification’, which Marx understood as a form of brainwashing to vote contrary to one’s interests.
II – The Scapegoat
How better to pander to the working class than by invoking the threat of a Satanic Other, or enemy within, such as the Jews were defined by the Nazis. Today we have undocumented aliens stealing ‘our’ jobs, or foreigners polluting ‘our’ gene pool.
Bannon emphasises sovereignty and economic autarky, but this should not prevent the free flow of ethnically-diverse American business people – commonly referred to as ex-pats – from selling into European markets.
On the other hand, the surplus populations of the Global South and those fleeing war zones such as Syria – which he expressly invokes in the context of Hungary – are to be stopped at the borders and their human rights annihilated. The quid pro quo for adopting U.S. economic norms is that populist European states can maintain their ethnic cleanliness.
Syrian refugees strike at the platform of Budapest Keleti railway station, September 2015.
Their exile is of course the responsibility of the Military Industrial Complex that Bannon serves, which destabilised the Middle East. Although he criticises Bush and the GOP establishment, one wonders how much of this is a smokescreen.
Those legal Hispanic and working class Blacks workers that are pandered to will be abandoned when their American Dreams turn to nightmares. They will remain poverty-stricken, working longer hours for less, without health insurance or pension entitlements: a source of cheap labour. ‘Power to the people’ is a carefully constructed ruse. They will have no power and be told what to do.
Critical media has to be aligned with Globalised capitalism, or treated as an enemy of the people. They cannot be allowed to speak the truth to power, or at least to Mr Trump. Such people do not answer questions which are asked of them because they avoid them.
Mr Bannon speaks and writes in carefully-crafted soundbites and pseudo-intellectualisms, which do not stand up to serious scrutiny. His new-found Populist narrative requires Bannon to ignore his long association with the handmaiden’s of globalisation, Goldman Sachs, while Trump’s administration comprises an assortment of cronies from the global elite.
Ideological opposition to NAFTA, which serves certain U.S. interests, does not extend to supporting the EU’s current stance on the TTIP, which would allow American and other corporate interests to override national sovereignty, and sue the living daylights out of national governments and small businesses.
Steve Bannon is against radicalisation, which is given an etiolated definition as anything that exposes his agenda. The new radicals he despises are liberal professors, human rights activists and journalists who expose the horrendous economic and environmental effects of neo-liberalism. In short, those who speak candidly on the media, and cannot be bought.
The new generation of soft-skilled snowflakes cannot be exposed to what the likes of Steve Bannon has in store for them. They must be compliant and vote for the Right candidates. Self-immolation of the innocents.
Interestingly, Bannon is now appealing to Bernie Sander’s constituency, as Sanders is the real deal and must be neutralised, and his ideological clothes appropriated. For a genuine Populist to represent working class interests would be disastrous.
Mercer funded Cambridge Analytica, whose advertising played on people’s emotions having profiled them to good effect, a key strategy in orchestrating Trump’s electoral success.
Bannon opposes artificial intelligence and robots as China has stolen a march on his Capitalist cronies. He wants his artificial intelligence and his robots.
I regard Steve Bannon as an ubermensch fascist who believes in Social Darwinism, and the control of the worker by the insanely rich. He does not care a jot about the working class, save as objects of exploitation to be duped.
He is a shameless transnational capitalist, and only opposes it when regulation (referred to as red tape, as if polluting a river is just a matter of red tape) challenges his interests. He is a demagogue, who preys on the insecurities and prejudices of the working class to buttress his faction.
He is aware of an impending environmental and economic meltdown, and is recommending compounds for the mega rich, who expect to be enriched further through his propagandistic grand tour to the now proto-fascist and compliant enclaves of Italy, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
He is even more dangerous than Trump because he is cleverer, his rhetoric a disturbing marriage of psycho-babble and neo-liberalism.
What is needed to counteract him is what he despises: fearless criticism, and genuine Populism divorced from religious fundamentalism. This is coming from Bernie Saunders, NGOs, human rights activists and anyone who still believes in a liberal education, the Rule of Law, and sees the dangers inherent in an appeal to the mob.
*******
The aspiring Emperor Bannon has no clothes, and offers hope in the manner of a quack doctor or false messiah.
Behind the toxic combination of Neoliberalism and demagoguery, the presentation of relativistic half-baked shibboleths, is what Chomsky describes as the most dangerous organisation on earth: the right wing of the Republican Party, controlled by religious maniacs envisaging the end of days.
Steve Bannon is of course carefully providing escape hatches for the mega rich to weather the coming storm in compounds away from the Populist mob, which they simultaneously exploit and undermine.
Death on the installment plan, as mortgage owners in Ireland find out, or as George Orwell put it: How the Poor Die.
This piece came from a little sound I heard in my head, an atmosphere, which I wanted to explore.
First, I made myself a soundbed to play in, and allowed two journeying violin lines to hatch out of my imagination; then I captured them in a digital suspension, wherein I gave one of them a delay and placed them in a pleasant and warm space.
The piece still surprises me when I listen back to it; it went in unexpected directions. But then, I wasn’t planning for it to be any way in particular; I set out to explore in the atmosphere I had created: to see what I could find.
I barely remember making it.
The file tells me the date alright, and I found it on my computer, so I know it must have been me. I have found this is a useful tactic for keeping track of recordings, as my brain cannot organise like this.
My handwritten notes tend to make sense only within about thirty minutes of completion. I often forget having played things.
Once I have worked on something a bit I will do a ‘save as’, and give it some sort of name.
The other day, I had a difficult morning and decided to ‘be productive’, as a way of dealing with my emotions. That was when I found this piece, recorded three weeks earlier. I cleaned up the files, and mixed it a little. It felt like a healthy coping mechanism, and tasted as fresh as spring sorrel.
I often wonder how much denial is involved in my creative process. This piece in particular has a very unconscious feel, revealed in the following elements: I barely remember making it – suggesting I entered a deep flow state while playing; I find it hard to remember how it sounds when I think of it; and it takes an unexpected turn.
I seem to have succeeded in tricking my own brain.
On the other hand, denial is such a powerful force. Maybe I did plan it out and have conveniently blocked this out. How can I speak authentically about my own subjective, mercurial mind?
I consider the unconscious, flow state, to be hugely important in the creative process, and very nourishing to engage with, but I could just be fooling myself completely and creating psychological scaffolding – it is impossible to be sure about any of this.
Home EKG rigs are getting more and more affordable. It could be so interesting to measure brainwaves during different states of consciousness. On the other hand, purchasing one of these definitely involves an unsustainable civilisation squeezing out yet more material goods… Hang on, where did I put my fiddle?
At the age of sixteen, in 2001, I took a job in a small factory which built appliances in Cardano al Campo, near Milan’s Malpensa airport. I worked there for four years.
As with the majority of the manufacturing industries in the area, including the spring-making factory I had worked in the previous year, it was a family-run, small enterprise, with just a handful of clients. Much of the machinery dated from the first half of the twentieth century. Fortunately, as it turned out, they had invested in modern machinery that would allow them to diversify their offerings, and therefore survive the global economic crash, from 2008.
I vividly recall the three newspapers that were delivered to the factory each morning: the Sole 24 Ore, the Italian equivalent of the Financial Times; LaPrealpina, a local newspaper; and La Padania, the mouthpiece of the then rising Northern League (Lega Nord), which was allied at that time with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
I also remember my colleagues being outraged at the protestors defending Article 18, which governs labour rights, despite this being to their benefit. I heard comments such as ‘they are mainly students with nothing better to do than going about shouting in the streets and smashing shop windows.’
Back then Northern Italy was still one of the most prosperous regions in the world, and probably still is. From 1979 to 1998, Italian industrial production actually outpaced Germany’s by more than ten per cent, and most of that was in the North. But when the crisis struck businesses similar to the one I had worked in began to cascade like dominoes.
In that factory’s industrial district more than half of the businesses folded within five years. Today in their place are parking lots for Malpensa airport.
II – Separatism
Italy is a country with strong regional identities, although separatism has been rare throughout its history, apart from sporadic outbursts in Sardinia, Sicily and small Alpine enclaves of German speakers.
When the Northern League emerged in the early 1990s it captured a lot of support in my region. The then leader Umberto Bossi was born in nearby Cassano Magnago.
As the first cracks of an unsustainable economic model were becoming apparent – well before the earthquake hit – mistrust and cynicism towards the political establishment had become widespread. This was especially apparent among the working class in the kind of businesses that I worked for, which formed the backbone of the region’s, and arguably the nation’s prosperity.
In the beginning the Northern League called for a federal model of government, inspired by nearby Switzerland, but the leadership soon became outspoken in their separatist aspirations. This was, however, quite different to nationalist movements elsewhere, such as in Sardinia, as the Northern League ceased to be a genuine threat to the territorial integrity of the country once they entered the labyrinth of national politics.
Blaming Italian society’s ills on an enemy within was their main tactic for gaining support from the beginning: the corrupt political class from Rome, Roma Ladrona, the lazy Southerner and the parasitic Roma community were convenient scapegoats, at a time when political discourse had been coarsened under Berlusconi’s dominance.
The Italian economy began to fragment in the wake of joining the euro, which did not allow for the periodic currency devaluations that had kept the country competitive. The government failed to control the price of consumer goods after the changeover, while salaries remained static. This eroded significantly the purchasing power of households.
As the global banking system imploded, and businesses migrated to distant countries with lower labour costs, fortunes were lost, savings dried up and many were left unemployed. This coincided with a rapid rise in immigration; first from Eastern European countries such as Albania, then later from Africa and Asia.
Almost overnight Italy became a multicultural society, and government services, especially in housing and education, were not prepared for the influx.
The migrants who settled in Italy became symbolic of the global forces that had proved so ruinous to many. They became the new target for the Northern League, which under Matteo Salvini conveniently buried its difference with the South of Italy, re-branding itself as simply the League (La Lega), and finding new scapegoats.
III – The New Government
As I worked in the factory I managed to complete my high school education by night, which gave me the opportunity to travel and gain a greater perspective on the world. But I recognise from my region the kind of talk about foreigners that I hear now from Salvini, and others.
How do we explain the rise of Salvini? In the last election his party emerged as the third largest in the country and the main party of the Centre-Right alliance, which included Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and other Centre and Right wing parties.
After discussions which took months, an agreement was reached to form a government between the largest party, the Five Star Movement (M5S), which had insufficient representatives to form one alone, and the League. Crucially, Salvini was allowed to become Minister of the Interior, where he is in a position to implement xenophobic policies.
Salvini seems to understand that power is increasingly located in the social media space and below-the-line commentaries on newspaper articles and videos. One tolerant commentator might find himself against ten online reactionaries, who in their normal lives may have a quite peaceful disposition. This kind of short-attention-span politics is an ideal breeding ground for racist stereotypes and armchair experts.
When Salvini says we need to repatriate five hundred thousand illegal immigrants he receives a wave of online endorsement, despite this being a remote possibility without outrageous human rights violations being perpetrated.
Likewise, he says that we will expel all illegal ‘Roma’, but ‘unfortunately we will have to keep the Italian ones’. The key word here is “unfortunately.”
Of course it might just all be hot air. But he has tapped into an angry mood.
III – Migrations
I have been living beyond the borders of my native Italy for fourteen years now, but I am still transfixed by our dysfunctional politics as much as the next Italian, and have access to the world’s media. I have witnessed how state institutions fail and even persecute people, and could tell stories that only Italians would believe.
Like many among my generation, born in the 1980s, I had begun to despair that politics would continue to be dominated by corrupt elites – complicit or just plain lazy members of the public administration – and mafias with tentacles extending throughout every aspect of the Italian economic system.
At the same time, Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire seemed to have made pulp out of our collective brains. His Forza Italia party took over from the Christian Democrats and the Craxian left-wing faction as the dominant force after the Mani Pulite (clean hands) scandal in the 1990s. But real power lay with global elites and organised crime.
Not even the vestiges of our great civilisation and the Rule of Law could actually bring down Berlusconi. It was left to the European Community to deliver the coup de grâce. In return Italy was sentenced by its European partners to perma-austerity. Guess what: Berlusconi is still alive and kicking.
Italy has been the first port of call for the majority of Africans seeking to make Europe their home, and they have been prevented from moving further afield due to the unfair Dublin Regulation of 2014. Many new arrivals have been reduced to virtual slave labourers, or become entangled in the mafias of the South.
Meanwhile, in order to stanch the flow, the Italian government, along with its European partners-in-crime, entered into an agreement with the Libyan authorities, which has led to the establishment of internment camps for aspiring migrants, where NGOs report appalling abuses. Just last week, the European Community agreed to attempt to build further reception centres around Africa, and even within Europe. But reception of refugees by another state is on a voluntary basis, meaning nothing of any consequence will happen.
The Trumpian use by Salvini of the migrants aboard the rescue ship the Aquarius as political pawns was an absolute disgrace, but it is worth bearing in mind that what we are not hearing about in the news is probably worse. Every minute of uncertainly for every migrant creates further unnecessary suffering.
There are no easy solutions to the problems faced by Italy, and Europe. Migrants are entering what is already a densely populated country with an ineffective government. The absence of adequate accommodation makes migrants more visible, and an obvious target.
George Soros is a hate figure for many Italians because of his support for migrant rights. But his proposal for the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for Africa makes a lot of sense. It would also be useful for Italians to understand that the country’s declining birth rates mean the economy will soon need more workers. But short-attention-span-politics makes that argument difficult to make.
The hateful message of Salvini grows more powerful by the day.
V – The Cuckoo in the Nest
The emergence of the M5S seemed to offer the hope of revolutionary change in Italian society and politics. I followed Bebe Grillo’s blog from its inception, and it was a breath of fresh air, although I did not agree with everything he had to say.
The appeal of M5S is analogous to the League’s. It is Populist, reflecting, right or wrong, what ordinary people think. In particular it challenges the elites.
The question is whether the alliance which the M5S has entered into with the League is a pact with the Devil. But it was the only conceivable way for a government to be formed, once the Democratic Party stubbornly refused to enter negotiations to form a coalition. That party’s credibility faded when they embraced the politics of perma-austerity, and the sight of former leading figures like Elena Bosci cavorting with Berlusconi fills most left-leaning Italians with disgust.
Recent polls and local election results show clearly that the big winners of the coalition have been the League, who are now the most popular party in the country. The Guardian has even referred to Salvini as Italy’s de facto prime minister, which only serves to bolster his legitimacy.
But this is not true, and I remain hopeful that aspects of the M5S’s policies will be implemented, such as tackling the ridiculously high pensions awarded to retired officials. Grand infrastructural projects costing billions of euros, such as the Lyon to Turin high speed rail, which bring few benefits to the working class, may also be shelved. Perhaps too they can set about cleaning up the toxic poisoning of places such as Terra dei Fuochi, and just maybe challenge the extensive networks of organised crime.
However, the agreement entered into between the parties is highly aspirational, ranging from a regressive plan for a flat tax and a guarantee of a basic income for all Italians. It is difficult to see the government lasting very long, and the worry is that Salvini, with the wind in his sails, emerges as the big winner. Like the cuckoo in the nest.
How to fathom the phenomenon of ‘fandom’? Certainly it is one of the most familiar, most recognisable, and common, of personality traits – yet oddly, one of the least analysed personality traits.
We all have a tendency towards being a ‘fan’ of something or other. It is a near-universal inclination evident in everyone from tech titans to favela-dwelling street kids. Yet that doesn’t make this thing called fandom any easier to comprehend.
Becoming a fan of the right thing, at the right time, can be a liberating gateway to an array of regular natural highs, and an excuse for completely out-of-character behaviour. But it can lead to frustration and a pain that only eases when you abandon hope.
There are genuine physiological and mental health benefits, and even employment opportunities in fandom, even if it defies rational explanation. Fandom may define a person’s life: ‘He was a fine father, a good friend, and as everyone knows, a passionate Waterford hurling fan all his life,’ it might be said.
Nick Hornby always pops to mind whenever I consider the topic (as I do more than is good for me). Like most struggling writers, Nick had been tipping along for years, when a lightbulb switched in his head. He dropped his Dostoevsky-lite pretentions, and tapped directly into his Arsenal FC obsession. He came up with the novel Fever Pitch (1992).
He followed this up with another global bestseller High Fidelity (1995) – a novel built entirely around musical obsession, and the butterfly effect it can have on a life. The success of both books lies in their unique, and accessible, capacity to get under the skin of fanatical fandom.
Hornby’s is the simplistic, embedded fandom that most of us get sucked into at some point in life. There is none of that nauseating need ‘finally to meet my hero’ – or fulfilment of a deep quest to reach ‘the destination of a lifelong journey.’ No, none of that horseshit, Nick Hornby’s global bestsellers are simply about the reality of being a fan.
One of the defining features of fandom, as Hornby explained, is that pleasure of reading newspaper reports after a favourable result, and knowing that friends and family are reading the same report and thinking of you. But my word there are many more aspects.
II – From Russia with Love
As I write I am travelling from Moscow to St. Petersburg on day seven of the 2018 World Cup, the biggest sporting event on the planet, by any metric. It really is something to behold.
The host nation is Mother Russia, and in the midst of a toxic sameness afflicting an increasingly globalized world, this place remains, unmistakably, Russia, an intoxicating brew which hits you as soon as you arrive.
Or at least that is how it was before this. As with anywhere, the World Cup month is an entirely different beast and – whether you really believe it or not – this month of madness every four years is still all about Football and Fans. Nothing else. To battle against that reality would be a fruitless endeavour.
Even the legendarily terrifying Russian authorities have succumbed to World Cup madness. To such an extent that the normally reserved Russian people have followed suit.
Y’see, just like fandom, the World Cup itself is a bizarre and inexplicable thing. It temporarily requires even the most autocratic and despotic regimes to drop tools and play nice. But it ain’t some well-meaning peace initiative organised by the UN. It is a deeply corporate enterprise – the colossal plaything of an openly corrupt and corporate governing body named FIFA.
To be given the right to host the event by the Swiss-based sportocrats, Russia has had to commit to the biggest societal and behavioural shifts since the fall of Communism, and by Jove it is running smoothly.
Napoleon may have made it to Moscow before a ruinous retreat, and Hitler came close too, but only FIFA and Football fans have found the ingredients to the secret sauce required to tame the Russian Bear – albeit temporarily.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1as1IceOALY
III – The World Cup in Unison
So here we all are now. Hundreds of thousands of the most colourful and diverse visiting fans, mixing delightfully with millions of ethnically-diverse Russians. While the spell lasts, it is bizarre and wonderful.
Everything is choreographed to within an inch of its life, but nothing is familiar. To anyone. In normal times most people enjoy the chance to show wide-eyed visitors around their homelands, taking pride as they see the place for themselves through fresh sets of eyes.
But not this time. The World Cup is entirely its own domain – familiar to nobody – a surreal pop-up-football-country and unique cultural mix built entirely around the unlikeliest blend of fans in full expression.
Everything is being made up as it goes along, and to this writer it is a joyous space to inhabit temporarily (in spite of the best efforts of the English fans). I believe everyone should make this kind of pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime.
This really is unchartered territory for all of us – even seasoned fans such as myself attending the sixth World Cup, who are brief residents of World Cup Fantasy Land.
Everyone – from the dourest cop, to the openly gay charmer who cut my hair, is on their very best behaviour for the month.
The diplomatic top brass in all the foreign embassies are on high alert too, and stocked with temporary crisis staff. Legions of PR gurus focus on protecting each country’s reputation from a potential humiliation in front of a watching world.
For instance yesterday a group of Columbians were caught sneaking alcohol into a stadium concealed in a pair of binoculars. This became a huge incident – a national embarrassment – requiring ministerial-level apologies to the Russian authorities. And that’s from a country that allowed Pablo Escobar run riot for decades, and one of whose players was shot for missing a penalty after USA 1994.
Even a train journey during the World Cup is an uplifting experience. Reportedly, all Russian train conductors have been compelled to attend training exercises in ‘pleasantries and tolerance’, and the country’s vast rail network is free-of-charge for any fan with a match ticket.
IV – Fiesta Time
Extravagant hospitality is normal at World Cups – national stereotypes go out the window – but this visiting horde of fans seem on better behaviour than usual.
My apartment until mid-July is in a leafy, well-to-do corner of Moscow called Sokolniki – a sleepy neighbourhood with playgrounds, and parks aplenty. However, an entire block in this normally placid area has been taken over by the hugely charismatic and enigmatic fans of Senegal.
Masses of wildly-enthused, tall and athletic-looking Africans are crammed into one building, spilling out in groups to dance and sing loudly on the street in support of ‘The Lions’ of Senegal, while festooning the locality with their flags.
Honestly, it’s Fantastic. The energy, the vibrant colours, the pumping music, the tribal moves – all delivered with a World Cup-imbued civility and joy that the normally stiff locals are warming to. It is brilliant and contagious.
And that is one single building – just one set of visiting fans. There are thousands of other fervent groups spread right across the enormous country for the month. Even the usually stiff and well-groomed Scandinavians and Germans are going batshit crazy.
And then there is the remarkable juxtaposition of fans gatherings in iconic places like Red Square, Nikolskaya Street, and outside the Bolshoi theatre. A wild and widespread array of colour and noise has caught all of Russia off guard, and foreigners already living here are giddy at the sight of their normally reticent neighbours smiling and casually chatting to strangers.
Even the over-organised and branded FIFA ‘Fanzones’ have a lovely vibe to them, mostly down to one simple fact: these are the places where you will find the South Americans.
Their fans raise so many questions. Even after a week of asking around, I have found nobody who can explain how so many South American fans have managed to make it to Russia. How in god’s name have they been able to afford the trip when most of these countries are falling apart economically, while so many Western Europeans have ‘sensibly’ skipped it?
Where are all these South Americans living, eating and sleeping while they are here, and how the hell did the Peruvians manage to carry their hundreds of street-long flags and blow-up Llamas? Imagine the excess baggage costs alone!
What a thing Fandom is, eh? It might be dismissed as just a curious personality trait, but as the first world gets ever blander, with toxic sameness delivered via massive global brands like Apple, Facebook and Nike – I see fandom as an important way of keeping human life interesting on planet Earth.
In this time of multiple global tensions and unreported traumas, the World Cup in Russia is arguably the most hopeful place to be in the world – now who could have guessed that?
Russia might well go back to being the stiff scary place of yore, but after this experience there will certainly be a residual warmth towards Russia felt by fans who have been caught off guard by how welcoming it has been. And the effect on Russians could be the same. That’s the brilliance of a World Cup.
*******
‘Ahhh but Ed… How can you praise an event hosted in a place with a reputation for x, y and z …?’, I was repeatedly asked by well-meaning liberal mates before leaving for Russia.
They have a point, but they don’t get it. The host country is merely a vessel for this event to bloom, a landscape where a pop-up utopia flourishes regardless of everyday norms. In fact, the more damaged a country is, the greater the benefit of a mass influx of World Cup fans.
So sod the haters and the cynics. With a fortnight to go in Russia 2018, I am already plotting how to get to the next one in 2022, due to be hosted in the utterly-illogical FIFA choice of Qatar. There you will find the full menu of human rights abuses; and strict public alcohol bans, and female repression, and dark laws against homosexuality.
But I will still go to Qatar, along with hundreds of thousands of fans, because I get it. I have seen at first-hand how transformative a month of fan-delivered warmth can be – and will enjoy watching Qataris melt in different ways when the hordes descend, and the World Cup fiesta takes over.
The legacy of an unstoppable force meeting an objectionable object is not easy to quantify, but I would defy any human with a soul to come to this event and not be moved to appreciate the joys of life as a football fan.;
My train has arrived in St. Peterburg. A Costa Rican has already invited me to/ visit his solar farm over an 11am beer. Another one has offered to help carry my equipment. Brazil kick off their second match in a space-aged stadium in the centre of the most beautiful city in Europe. If you can’t be a fan of this experience, then I pity you.
The great Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities imagines a conversation between the Mongolian emperor Kubla Khan and the legendary traveller Marco Polo. Kubla Khan asks Marco Polo to describe for him the great cities he has visited.
After a number of vivid and enthralling accounts it becomes clear that Marco Polo is confining himself to a description of his native Venice, as if the rest of the world counts for little, a view for which I have some sympathy.
Let us imagine another fictional conversation, set in contemporary Ireland, in which Taoiseach Leo Varadkar encounters a non-national – from Lithuania we’ll say – and asks her for a description of Dublin and its hinterland.
You will indulge this far-fetched conceit I hope, dear reader, of our imperator deigning to converse with a migrant of modest means.
Suave Leo will be confident– ‘our GDP growth is off the charts’ he assures himself – in a favourable verdict on his achievements as Taoiseach, and the state of the country after almost a decade of Fine Gael in power.
‘She will surely recognise this as ‘the best little country in the world to do business in’, with near full employment; an economic powerhouse, like Venice in its day – they might have built St. Mark’s and the gondolas, but we have the Dundrum Shopping Centure and the M50; a land of céad míle fáilte – as long as you are an ‘an ex-pat’ with a decent credit line; of milk and honey, so much dairy in fact that we are the second leading exporter of powder milk to Chinese mothers, who can now work longer hours to produce the consumer goods we don’t need; of comely maidens at cross purposes. The boom is getting boomier, again!’
Using the structure of Calvino’s book let us imagine her response, chapter by chapter.
Chapter 1
She concedes Ireland has given her employment:
‘Which requires me to work long, often anti-social, hours, though I am grateful for it, as others haven’t been so lucky and ended up on the street, or involved in organised crime. But I have to say that since the economic crisis I have encountered significant hostility from native Irish, even though I speak perfect English – perfect you understand – albeit with an accent.’
‘Taoiseach I can’t help feeling I have had to work significantly harder than the younger generation of wealthy Irish, who don’t recognise my achievements. I am well educated but my academic qualifications are often disparaged. There is a Little Islander mentality, though I guess you might find the same attitudes if you came to work in my ex-Soviet republic.’
‘We Lithuanians are also a small nation, like your own Taoiseach’, she says, pausing to reflect that he might empathise with her plight, given his mixed-race background.
‘Currently I live in a satellite town of Dublin, where I work and have studied in the past. I find the environment harsh and uncomfortable, and public transport pathetic, which forces most people into their cars.’
‘Many Irish people I meet seem very nice, but this can be superficial, and I have been subjected to racist abuse for speaking Lithuanian with my friends on the bus.’
‘I have the impression the country is being run for the sake of a privileged few. I have found out quite a bit about your country Taoiseach, and it seems there are dynasties that run it, especially in politics where I see the same names cropping up again and again, just like the former Soviet officials who re-invented themselves as democratic politicians where I am from.’
‘I have also heard there are certain private schools in Dublin which most the top lawyers and businessmen attended, and now send their children to, and I think a lot politicians were educated in one of them too, including, if I am not mistaken, yourself. Do you work on behalf of these people or the wider community Mr Varadkar?’
Leo feigns a smile that looks more like a grimace – he’s hoping the conversation won’t go on much longer, but realises he can’t ignore the woman as someone might have their camera on him. He interjects, summoning all the charm that bewitched his party when Enda finally fell on his sword: ‘Look at me, I am half-Indian and gay. I made it the top, and so can you.’ But strangely he doesn’t look her in the eye when he speaks.
Chapter 2
The Lithuanian lady responds: ‘As I said Irish people are very friendly, but sometimes this masks a lack of emotional depth. They love to talk but prefer not to listen. They are highly sociable, but drink to excess. They fill their minds with absurd patriotism, and tell lachrymose tales of hardship and grievance. They give out, but generally do nothing. They are often obsessed with trivia, or with pop culture, and televised sport. Politics seems to be reduced to personalities rather than the issues.’
She continues, a steely determination entering her voice, aware that this will be her one opportunity to speak candidly to a person in power: ‘Politics, Taoiseach, is about the issues and nothing else. Irish politicians are economical with the truth, and often, frankly, lie. Compromise is not always possibly, and sometimes harsh words are required. Cover-ups of corruption are not conducive to a well-ordered society.’
‘More generally, it is difficult with such overt friendliness to work out when to take people seriously. In this context I have, as a young attractive woman, experienced numerous protestations of love from inadequate men, who only dare speak to me when they are drunk.’
At this stage Leo is getting exasperated at how ungrateful she is for all the country has given her. But he manages somehow to contain a rising disgust.
Chapter 3
She continues: ‘when people get to know you on a personal level they are nice and there is still a strong sense of community in the rural areas I have worked in – social supports and community among the older generation. But this is nowhere near as prevalent in Dublin, where I encounter greed, selfishness and casual disregard. Homelessness is rampant and, I am telling you, you would not want to get sick. The one medical emergency I experienced I had to wait for hours in A&E, and I felt the treatment was inadequate.’
‘I have now taken out private health insurance – as you advised young people to when you were Minister for Health – but even still I face queues, and that is the experience of other people I know in the same situation.’
‘And my experience with the private sector, especially the banks, is that people are not that competent, often downright rude, yet curiously patronizing.’
‘But really Leo the police are particularly rude and judgmental towards non-nationals. In my community I hear a lot of complaints about them. Some of their conduct seems to be legalized banditry, as corrupt as … any country on earth. Yet I read in the newspapers that your party does not have the will to deal with the institutional scandals, or train them properly. Frankly Leo they are in many respects as bad as the criminals they are supposed to police.’
Leo is now seething and on the point of flying off the handle. She is questioning the very essence of his Ireland, despite the opportunities it has given her. He turns accusatorial: ‘But we welcomed you, and you have lived here for over 10 years. Of course we are not perfect but which country is?’
Chapter 4
She responds: ‘It is true there is sufficient food to eat, but as for the standard of living, or quality of life, it doesn’t compare favourably with other countries, unless you are privileged. There is a glass ceiling on how far a non-national can climb in this country, and you Taoiseach are the exception that proves the rule.’
‘Non-EU migrants especially have had to endure victimisation, and the barbarities of Direct Provision. My humble abode in the sticks is far too small, and cost a ridiculous sum for negligible space, which eats into my meagre income. All around us people are being forced to live in ever-decreasing spaces. This is not conducive to emotional or intellectual wellbeing.’
She is becoming forceful again: ‘Even applying your capitalist logic: you cannot produce creative or productive people if they are forced to live in shoe boxes. People will want to leave. They will have had enough. Even if I wanted a family that would probably be impossible, which I find quite depressing.’
Leo, now astonished and increasingly irate at this candid and uniformly negative response, asks, with a surprising, but revealing, innocence: ‘well who is responsible for these mistakes?’
Chapter 5
‘Without naming names Taoiseach, I’ll offer you a biblical reference, which became an Italian film and a byword for corruption. Ireland is becoming ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, or at least Gomorrah. No one has any confidence in many of the state institutions or private actors; there is a sense that the political class is corrupt and self-serving; dispensing patronage for favours and committing the sins of simony with Big Business and the professional classes. Our banking structure is a farce: why didn’t we just nationalize them like Iceland, which got out of its recession much sooner?’
‘I have to confess Taoiseach that I bought my apartment at the height of the boom, and now have difficulty making repayments. The bank won’t allow me to get back on a tracker mortgage, even though they promised to do so. The interest rates are crippling me. I want out.’
‘My friends who are renting are in an even worse plight, and are often randomly evicted by the purchasing power of Canadian and American vulture funds linked to Goldman Sachs. This is not right. Further, it seems to be a society where, if I may be so bold as to quote an Irishism: ‘it is not what you know, but who you know ’, that gets you ahead, which is not meritocratic.’
‘I am sorry to be so forward Taoiseach but governance here does not conform with that of a functioning European social democracy. I am hesitant to be so candid as my culture has imbued me with a formal politesse and deference. I am a decent and civilized person. But Ireland has the resources to become a genuine social democracy, but can’t be as long as you misapply and mismanage your revenue.’
‘Also the endless diet of violence both real, and magnified by the press, is undermining my quality of life. As a woman I am alarmed the stories of sexual assaults I hear in the press. Whether real or exaggerated, I do not feel completely safe walking the streets of Dublin at night.
‘Newspapers trivialise and sensationalise, and do not report the truth at times. Violence has unfortunately become part of the entertainment industry, but increasingly truth and fiction are difficult to disentangle.’
But Leo, a crackle of emotion in his voice, at last gets a word in: ‘surely the youthful energy here can make this society work?’
Chapter 6
She replies: ‘Ah yes the youth. The youth want to leave Leo for a better quality of life. Many older people too. The brain drain is continuing. Even young native Irish in creative fields don’t have career opportunities, and prefer not to work for multinational companies. They don’t want to live in a satellite town in order to live independently of their parents. The environment you live in impacts significantly on your self-esteem Taoiseach.’
Some of the younger generation in Ireland are doing well of course, and there is a culture of entitlement, both boorish and materialistic. Culture is commodified, and it is almost impossible for independent artists to live here with the inflated cost of living. Irish people don’t seem to read the ‘big books’ that I grew up attached to. Ignorance seems to breed a culture of compliance. Of course this is what happens when survival is the main priority. The desperation for money and pervasive avarice have coarsened social interactions. You have lost God and embraced Mammon. It is not that I am particularly religious, in fact I am an atheist, and I too want enough money for a decent standard of living, but this society seems rudderless, and unprincipled.’
This continues on for many more chapters.
Endlessly critical, endlessly precise, endlessly judgmental. Lucid, and scathing. By the end, Leo’s world is falling apart and he implores his vengeful demon to offer a dose of optimism.
Chapter 7
‘The countryside is beautiful’, she responds, ‘in particular the Atlantic coastline. Connemara is one of the most glorious places I have ever set eyes on. I often try to hike in Wicklow, which is nearly as wonderful as the West, but much of it is inaccessible without a car, as the bus services is almost non-existent. An American friend of mine also says that Ireland is a good place to play golf. And at times in bars and socializing ‘the craic’, as they say, is ‘mighty’. But Leo not even the Irish can live on craic alone, which has its disturbing shadow.’
She then stops abruptly and bids adieu. She has to get up early in the morning for a job interview in London, assuming, post-Brexit, she can get a visa. She is increasingly conscious of how perilous being a migrant is, and may be, throughout Europe in the future.
Her parting shot is that it is not just Ireland, but Europe and the rest of the world, that is increasingly hostile to migrants. She may be confronting a future of further displacement.
Leo sighs bemusedly – remaining convinced of his beneficence. He will consider carefully what she has had to say. He will make Ireland better for those willing to work. But soon the failings she has pointed to slip his distracted mind, and as the problems multiply, he sees no obvious solutions: ‘Let’s just keep it business as usual’ he says to himself.
Interstitial space: a space between structures or objects, i.e the contiguous fluid-filled space existing between the skin and body organs.
*******
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there
from ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’, by William Carlos Williams.
I – ‘It is probably a tumour’
It is 2:30 a.m. and the emergency room is at its busiest, crowded with nurses, rushing porters and patients. The doors to the ambulance bay swing open and a gurney emerges into their midsts. Lying on it is an old man, naked except for a green-paper hospital gown. His beard and matted grey hair make him an old testament prophet, the two paramedics pushing the trolley his head bowed acolytes.
I watch them as they pass. He lies prone, bone-thin and hollow-cheeked. His arms stretch and move in the air as if conducting some unseen orchestra, the sinews and ligaments of his limbs like bunches of reeds under his papery skin. As the little group moves by, he turns his head and vomits a dark brown liquid on the floor.
After he is triaged by a nurse I am directed to his cubicle to assess him. He is incapable pf answering my questions. The paramedics who brought him in tell me he was found by a neighbour, having collapsed on his kitchen floor.
No one can say how long he had been there. His mouth is dry, his pulse quick. I gently pinch the skin on his arm. As his body is dehydrated from the vomiting, the skin remains standing in folds. His abdomen is swollen and taut.
I lean in and listen with my stethoscope. If healthy his bowels will have a murmuring bass tone, like the burble of a theatre crowd waiting for a curtain to be raised. I hear nothing at first, and then a sound like water splashing on a metal surface, a high pitched tinkling. This sign, along with his other symptoms, indicate that something is obstructing his intestine.
I order intravenous fluid to be set up and walk him to the radiology department. An x-ray shows his lower intestine is grossly hyperinflated, its loops ridged like giant caterpillar pupae, the deep black of the air in the lumen overblown and the intestinal wall thinned out under the pressure.
There is something blocking his descending colon, some errant tissue the x-rays can’t penetrate, appearing asymmetric and bright white against the black of the air. It is probably a tumour. I call the surgeon to begin the preparation for the inevitable operation. He arrives in a flurry of white scrubs and begins his own assessment.
There is nothing to do now but rehydrate him and wait for a theatre to become free. I order more intravenous fluid to be set up, check on my other patients, and then walk to the doctor’s room for a short break.
II – The Interstitium
It is set away from the noise of the emergency room, down a long corridor lit by a blinking strip light. The room is empty at this hour but the low coffee table is full of the detritus of earlier shifts: paper cups half-filled with cold black coffee, pots of reheatable noodles, notepads, pens with their plastic cracked and teeth marks indented on their surface.
A television with its sound muted shows a slick-haired anchorman mouthing silently, the endless ticker tape of 24-hour news tracing its way across his tie. The room is windowless and unloved, a nothing space to be briefly passed through.
I lie down on the sofa and study the back of my hand, its dorsal surface, webbed by skin and hair. I imagine a microscopic view of the tissues: the cells inside which the organic chemical processes and genetic reproductions occur, the machinery of life.
And then I imagine the space between the cells, the interstitium, and the fluid slowly seeping into these spaces in the old man’s tissues out in the emergency room as the intravenous treatment has its effect.
III – ‘The Drunken Boat’
When doctors begin working in the emergency room they go through a kind of exposure therapy. No matter how long they’ve spent in medical school, witnessing for the first time the taboo of the sanctity of a person’s body being broken is a shock.
The first trauma case I experienced was a young man who was involved in a motorbike accident; his body crushed by the impact. My response was as anyone’s would be: a raised heart-rate, an out-of-body feeling, the running thought ‘is this real?’, ‘because this can’t be real’.
Through experience and repeated exposure this response lessened, to a point where now the shock has disappeared and these patients are now – for the first few acute minutes at least – simply a series of problems to be solved.
But the need to find meaning in these experiences is not something that wears off with time, nor is it something that is taught in medical schools. So where then to find it?
In the pocket of my scrubs there are crumpled post-it notes, a pocket light, chewing gum, and a thin book of Rimbaud’s poetry. I picked the volume from my bookshelf on the way to my night shift because of its size, slipping easily into the pocket of my scrubs.
I know nothing about the poet but I now have ten minutes before my break ends, and need some distraction. I turn the page to the only poem whose title I recognise ‘La Bateau Ivre’, ‘The Drunken Boat’, and begin to read:
As I was going down impassive rivers, I no longer felt myself guided by haulers
The poem is spoken in the voice of the eponymous boat, unmoored and adrift on a strange sea. It travels drunkenly, moving through a cascading world of imagery, going wherever it pleases.
It has, as one critic put it, ‘the authority of thought to think itself through us’. Happy to be consumed by the poem for these short few minutes, I feel my consciousness awash with the poet’s vision, as if the walls of the anonymous room where I sit have become the banks of a swirling ocean.
Rimbaud was sixteen when he wrote the poem, and wandering the roads between Normandy and Paris; there is a juvenility to the wide eyed imagery of the poem. It feels like it was written as he walked, the dynamism of his youth pumping though his body.
I look at his photograph on the book cover. He is just a boy and, despite being in black and white, his eyes appear a translucent blue. He is an unformed space, yet to be filled with life, untethered and free to produce his hallucinogenic hymn to the energy of existence.
The boat moves across an ocean where anything is possible. It is this space, that Rimbaud calls the sea, that artists try to occupy. The areas outside the quotidian, the interstitia of life where art is created and where it has its effect. (Though I imagine these interstitia are as likely to be as easily accessed when daydreaming while doing the washing up, as they are while in some kind of self-enforced ‘artistic’ meditation).
After this rush of movement and crazed imagery however, the poem resolves itself back in the everyday. The boat, after travelling the broiling ocean, becomes a toy pushed around a puddle by a child.
IV – Recovery
The modernist poet William Carlos Williams held the conviction that poetry was ‘equipment for living, a necessary guide amid the bewilderments of life.’ Williams was perhaps a connoisseur of these bewilderments, practising as a family doctor and a professor of paediatrics throughout his life.
Emergency rooms are life multiplied and concentrated: full to the brim with the drama, noise and emotion of its extreme moments. It would seem the furthest place away from the contemplative spaces where art is created and regarded.
But as Rimbaud’s boat must return from the sea to the constraints of a puddle, so these interstitial spaces must communicate with real life. And as such art can have a practical use, which can be put to work, even in the noise of an emergency room in the middle of the night.
I close the book and prepare to return to work. It is 2:50 a.m., another five hours to go before the end of the shift.
Something has changed in the short break I have had. The reading of the poem has made my body feel skittish, as if adrenaline has been released into my system. Somewhere cogs move and blocks fall into place.
When trying to assess if someone has had a heart attack I will ask them what kind of pain they have experienced. Was it sharp? blunt? heavy? stabbing?
Patients find it difficult to describe a feeling that deep and visceral. The brain is finely-honed to locate exactly a superficial sensation on the body’s surface, but is often unable to give words to a feeling that profound.
Patients will instead often fold a hand into a fist and press it against their chest to indicate what they mean. The effect of the poem is similar: some altering in the relationship between the self and the world, a communication between the interstitium and the cell, that takes place in the depths, impossible to locate precisely or accurately describe.
I return to the emergency room and check first on the old man. The intravenous bag flowing into the vein in his arm is nearly empty. A little colour has returned to his cheeks and he appears less hollowed out.
The sodium chloride has rehydrated him, filling his interstitium. These spaces, the spaces between cells, though empty, do have a function. They give the tissues of the body their tensile strength. They are the scaffolding on which life sits. Without them we would not be able to combat gravity, to walk upright, to reach high.
The old man grabs the sides of the gurney as I approach. He pulls himself up to sit.
