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  • Review: The Occupant by Jennifer Maier

    How would you feel upon discovering the objects of your daily, habitual use—ordinary objects of every imaginable function and variety—were inspirited, sensitively keen observers with their own desires, gripes, preoccupations, and ways of understanding the world?

    This is precisely the brain-tickling puzzle Jennifer Maier’s newly-released third collection The Occupant (University of Pittsburgh Press) shakes, opens, and pieces together with feeling and skill. A deft mingling of prose and traditional poems offer pathos, wit, and vulnerable, costly wisdom as 30-odd objects speak from the vantage point of their respective individual existences alongside the titular “occupant,” – an unnamed woman living alone to whom they belong; and whose point of view is also poetically inhabited.

    Maier is at her best in these moving poems, which deliberately rely on the rhythms of one person’s quotidian existence and ‘stuff’ to raise urgent, profound questions about human life and experience. Take, for instance, the goosebump-inducing rebuke of “Alarm Clock” –

    –                       How like you not to see

    that even I, untouched by time, can’t keep it.
                –           Some days I want to drop my hands

    in futility at the way you equate passing with
                –           dissolution: each tick a small erasure,

    like the beat of your own heart: one less,
    –           one less. And have you ever stopped to think
    not even you can spend a thing you can’t possess?

    The wonderful tonal panoply of this collection—which moves with the poet’s characteristically fluid grace through everything from wry humor (Think opposites attract?//Ix-nay on that) to loneliness (The woman wonders if she has taken up knitting because she has no children) to existential angst—is enabled by the dynamic marriage of Maier’s own prolific emotive range with the metaphysical conceit at play throughout The Occupant; which includes in its opening pages Paul Éluard’s words—“There is another world, but it is in this one” –a marvelous and discreet key unlocking the pages that follow.

    In penning this review, I found I couldn’t waste my privileged position as Jennifer Maier’s MFA student-advisee. She was good enough to tell me (following the careful consideration with which she approaches even the smallest endeavor) what inanimate object she would herself elect to become for eternity. (I told her I’d be a gargoyle, which is accurate, if mildly out-of-pocket) She went with a rather more elegant selection—

    ‘As ever, I would be torn between beauty (my French Empire walnut bookcase) and utility (a whisk, or a pair of scissors).  But if I had to be a single object for eternity, I think I would be a mirror – a beautiful one, to be sure.  As a mirror, I could encounter a wide variety of faces and objects and reflect them back, neutrally, without preconceptions. And I would certainly enjoy observing the private responses—satisfaction, dismay–of those searching my reaches for “what they really are,” or believe themselves to be.’

    Because of the immense and obvious thematic consistency, I wondered if Jennifer had encountered a recent, fascinating-if-head-scratching development in philosophy. I shot her an email:

    Are you familiar with the (quite new!!) trend in metaphysics called Object-oriented Ontology?? There’s SO much natural overlap with your book that I think I’ll have to highlight the connection.

    In brief:

    Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. For object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal ontological footing with one another.

    She replied—

    I was not aware per se of Object-oriented Ontology, but the objects in my home – or in the Occupant’s, for that matter – may well be “ontologically exhausted,”

    especially today, when I’m trying to get everything back in order after last week’s renovations and painting (I decided to do the same color in the living room—Farrow & Ball’s “Elephant’s Breath,” partly for the name, and partly because I love how it slouches between gray and lavender, depending on light and time of day)

    Ontological exhaustion is no joke—person or saucer or spider—and the remedies seem few and far between. Even so, The Occupant’s occupant appears to find a strange, imprecise respite in Maier’s closing poem; in the character of the light, which may be instructive for us all:

    –             Time is flowing forward again; sunlight gilding
    this still room in the house of the mind that deplores a vacancy as, then and
    now, the Occupant looks up from her writing to trace particles of dust drifting
    everywhere in the air, alighting on every surface.

    Jennifer Maier’s work has appeared in Poetry, American Poet, The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, The Writer’s Almanac, and in many other print, online, and media venues. Her debut collection, Dark Alphabet, was named one of “Ten Remarkable Books of 2006” by the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. Her second book, Now, Now, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2013. She serves as writer in residence and professor of modern poetry and creative writing at Seattle Pacific Universit

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Fearful Times, and Canada

    On Tuesday last I had an email from the Chancellor of UMass Lowell, where I sometimes teach:

    “I am sorry to let you know that this changed over the weekend. As part of the university’s proactive effort to support and inform our international students, the International Students & Scholars Office (ISSO) has been regularly monitoring the federal database used to monitor and track international students. On Saturday, the university discovered that federal authorities had revoked the visa and terminated the immigration status of a UMass Lowell undergraduate student.”

    It seems U.S. politics are circling the drain. The U.S. Constitution, I had thought, was designed to prevent the ‘Mad King’ phenomenon, but it turns out that that depended on everyone–executive, legislators, judiciary–playing by rules which, it seems, aren’t rules after all, only habits and customs.

    The U.S. has done irreparable harm to its power in the world.

    Some Canadians are inclined to jeer at the U.S. and its embarrassment on the world stage. That could become a dangerous habit. Instead let’s be honest and clear-sighted on the strengths and vulnerabilities within our own system of government and our own societal & cultural norms. We need to support leaders who understand Canada’s position within the world and have strategies to strengthen it as the rules of global trade are rewritten. Alliances, military and (is in trade agreements) economic, are not love-fests, but strategic partnerships.

    I am uncomfortable when some Canadians get all teary–the other side of jeering–about how much and how blindly they have ‘loved’ the U.S.. The goal of any Canadian government must be to strengthen Canada’s position in the world, with the understanding that no economy or society in a smart, fluid, and connected world is or should be “independent”, and that a system that works to benefit of all players is best for us. (The devil is in the details, of course.)

    I admire Prime Minister Mark Carney–the little I know of him– (three Co. Mayo grandparents!)–but he is a new type of Canadian PM: an internationally-minded elitist technocrat. Effective leadership in our decentralized democratic confederation will also demand other, quite different skills. PM Carney is the man of the hour now, though, which is his good fortune and, I hope, Canada’s. Like WSC in 1940, the man is meeting the moment, perhaps.

    I respect the measured, sensible language that Prime Minister Carney and Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly use.  They accept that the U.S. “Administration” (I think “Régime”, with its suggestion of autocracy, ossification, and damage, is a better noun) can cause immense trouble. They accept the necessity of accommodation, but in their speeches and interviews they have maintained a firm tone and offered clear warnings that somethings are not negotiable.

    A good relationship with the U.S. will always be in Canada’s interest. At certain times such may not be possible, but we should work to keep those breaks as short as possible, while maintaining a clear awareness of our own interests, and being willing to sometimes pay a price for standing firm…

    Right now, many smart people in the U.S. – undergraduates on student visas, scientists and researchers working at the highest levels – are feeling vulnerable. Canada ought to be reaching out to these victimized people with offers not just of asylum, but of freedom–to study, learn, research, contribute (and freedom to protest Israel’s project in Gaza, though that might be as career-threatening in Canada as in U.S.). Intellectual immigrants would give an invaluable, game-changing boost to the knowledge base and skill set of the nation. Just like the thousands of émigré Hungarians who sparked up Montreal and Toronto starting in the 1950s, and other waves of immigrants before and after that…

    To offer people in flight from the U.S. educational and research ecosystems place to land, Canada needs to commit to developing the quality, scale, and scope of research in Canadian universities, which have been, for most of our history, second-rate.  It will be hard to beat the Chinese in this area, but we can try. (The multitude of Chinese students and graduate students I’ve encountered as Harvard and UCLA this year–suggests that U.S. schools are still a powerful draw globally … up until January 2025, anyway). Many faculty, researchers and students in U.S. schools and institutions feel furious, scared, and – rightly – vulnerable. Canadian schools and institutions should be making offers, backed with serious support for studies and research. As an editor and writing coach, I work with tenured faculty in the highest reaches of Ivy League acclaim and renown who feel censored, threatened, and sickened by the atmosphere. Their world-renowned institutions are poisoned by fear.

    Can Canada make an all-out effort to scoop international research and teaching talent from U.S. universities? That will require the federal govt stepping in and up. Canada’s universities are for the most part significantly underfunded. And there are aspects of the U.S. university system, particularly the great public schools like U of Michigan, UTA, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, UMass, U of Wisconsin, UVA, OSU, etc. that Canadians ought to take a closer look at. (Beyond the NCAA football and basketball seasons!) These are large public research institutions with global reach. Asking Canadian undergraduates to pay more, while offering them ready access to scholarships and loans might be step one in improving the landscape for scholarship and research in Canada. I can’t think it’s a bad thing to ask people to invest more deeply in their own education. And I’ll shut up now.

    Feature Image: Thomas K. 

     

  • Fiction: The Text

    Saturday morning and Lil’Johnny was on his way to work on the Market. He walked along the long curve of street that ran along the bottom of the hill bordering the old marshes where now stood council estates. The tall towers stood like giants against the clear cold blue sky where the first rays of orange-golden sunlight lit up the morning sky. The road was shiny and quiet, anticipating the monotonous roar of traffic that was sure to follow. A pair of skittish wood pigeons leapt from the ground at Lil’Johnny’s approach, the heavy beat of their wings breaking the silence. 

    Lil’Johnny walked the long road until the bend where he turned into the park. The park too stood at the bottom of the hill, a great field ringed by trees. Up on the hill the close-knit silhouettes of Victorian facades looked down into the park and out over the marsh. In the park the sky opened out as if one looked up at an ocean above, a great blue expanse. He crossed the park, entering the walkway beneath the railway line and from there along a long sliver of park-lined path. Then abruptly right heading cross-country to the gate on the far side of a grassy green playing field.

    As Lil’Johnny turned right the Singing Bush tweeted and chirruped making him smile. The Singing Bush is a large undistinguished shrub that emits the sound of chirruping finches although not one of the little birds can be seen, completely invisible in the thicket of branches and leaves. Looking at the Bush one sees and hears a spirited shrub singing.

    Through the gate onto a little path along a row of houses, across the road, down a backstreet and then up the grafitti-ed cobbled alleyway onto the Market. The metallic clink of poles of stallholders erecting their metal-frame structures, greets Lil’Johnny. Boxes litter the road, vans parked across, the movement of bodies, soul music from a radio, a cluster of chain-smoking locals sitting outside the cafe. Lil’Johnny walks briskly down the street, looking neither left nor right, dodging the assorted obstacles living and inanimate.

    Lil’Johnny arrives at the Shop, just one of the hodge-podge of shopfronts lining either side of this mile-long medieval street that acts as Market on some days and High Street on others. “Robert Walkers” is written in large golden letters over the Shop. Below the sign is a large plate-glass window and to the right a single doorway leading inside. The Shop consists of a long wide corridor bordered on either side by high shelves overflowing with cut-price groceries and products – an Aladdin’s cave.  At the far end of the Shop is a wooden table with cash register. Out the back is a vast storeroom.

    Outside, Raja patiently sets up the stall, his slow thoughtful movements speak of his three decades performing this ritual. He turns his old lanky frame and smiles at Lil’Johnny’s approach, revealing a set of brilliant white teeth set against his dark Tamil skin, a sharp hooked nose and streaky black hair combed over his shiny pate. As usual he is smartly turned out in shiny dress shoes, sharp suite trousers, button-down shirt and overcoat. Lil’Johnny salutes him as he passes though the door into the Shop.

    As Lil’Johnny is about to head into the back he brushes against the corner of a shelf inadvertently and CRASH! An avalanche of junk falls off. ‘Fucking, fuck, fuck – Big Johnny you bastard – clean your shit up!’ he curses to the empty shop. He hastily clears up the fallen boxes, dirty plates, cups of mouldy rotting tea-bags and assorted out-of-date packets of god-knows-what. He heads out the back into the storeroom, down the rickety wooden stairs and dumps the smeared crockery in the small sink. “You can clean up this bloody mess yourself,” Lil’Johnny says to the Boss who is not there.

    Thus his workday begins. Lil’Johnny leverages the weighty front door off its hinge and drags it into the  back; he hoovers the floor with the trusty but mutilated Henry patched up with masking-tape; he fills baskets with nuts and, bending over the stall outside, flips the bags expertly into rows. In the middle of his routine Lil’Johnny spies Big Johnny, the Boss, sauntering towards the Shop. The Boss’ belly sticks out before his tall wide ageing frame, his white button-down shirt falling out of his baggy trousers and comfortable shoes adorn his feet. “Here comes Johnny!” calls Lil’Johnny to the approaching figure. “Mornin’” the Boss says by way of return.

    Big Johnny is vexed as usual. “Come on, come on, we’ve got to get this stall out,” he says impatiently, pulling out a box here, dumping something out of another there, rearranging one corner then another in a seemingly pointless haste. Raja gesticulates wildly at the Boss and shouts something about buying too much junk which the Boss ignores. Lil’Johnny smokes an insolent cigarette, watching the passing scene of early shoppers and day-trippers. Lil’Johnny hears the beep-beep of his phone. He pulls out the little brick of plastic and looks into the archaic screen which reads:

    “How was the DJ gig last Saturday? (heart)”

    Yes, there was a gig last Saturday, and yes Lil’Johnny had DJ-ed. But who was the text from? Lil’Johnny hates it when people did not sign off their texts with their name. It made for the situation that had just arisen. The number, ending 611, had not been saved to his phone. He had no idea who had sent it. “Come on, come on,” orders Big Johnny, “Get me a barrel out the back.” Lil’Johnny snaps to attention and rushes out the back leaving the Text till later.

    The stall consists of a long low table out in the street, piled with goods – herbal teas, 2litre olive oil, boxes of latex gloves, bags of sweets, 3kg brown sugar, packets of broken biscuits, nuts and dried fruit, bars of chocolate, spaghetti and lasagna sheets, dried chickpeas and tins of powdered milk. The stall’s flank is protected by a wall of blue barrels. On a stack of yellow crates sits a round battered Quality Street tin which acts as the cash register. Looking behind, Lil’Johnny can see through the door and into the back of the Shop where Raja and Big Johnny stand serving customers; there’s an animated conversation going on Lil’Johnny can’t hear. “Ah – that Text…” he remembers.

    “Sat woz good fun. Sorry u couldn’t make it. What u up to 2nit? Lil’Johnny” he punches into the keypad – Send – thinking, thinking – Sent.

    This gets Lil’Johnny wondering who it could be. Marta –lovely long legs, wide strong back, cute bob? Sally – older, tresses of long golden hair, a subtle bust he hasn’t quite figured out yet? Or one of those random meetings in the pub which had lead to a conversation and exchange of numbers? It puzzled Lil’Johnny. “Stop slacking and serve that customer,” barks Big Johnny pointing to a woman at the end of the stall holding out a box of tea. Yikes! Lil’Johnny pulls out a blue plastic bag and slopes across the stall with a servile “Madam…”.

    Thereafter the trade begins. “Yes sir, that’s £1….4 for £1 on those Madam….Would you like bag?……The price of the oils? £7 for the Extra Virgin, £6 otherwise…..Oi kid stopping hitting that packet…..What’s it like? I am afraid I can’t eat it for you sir, you need to decide for yourself……That’s £3.50, you’ve given me £10, £6.50 change coming….No Madam we don’t take cards, only cash…..A bank transfer? Sorry we only take hard currency ……Price for that? Let me check” – Lil’Johnny holds the item high in the air and shouts into the back of the Shop; Big Johnny signals with his fingers ‘4’ which Lil’Johnny repeats verbally to the customer. “It’s cheaper in the supermarket,” gripes the customer and walks off. “Yeah well buy it from there then” Lil’Johnny imagines himself saying.  Things quieten down and Lil’Johnny pulls out his phone. There is a message waiting. It reads:

    “Hey – that’s great. At the Bolton Arms tonight. There is a good band lined up. Hope to see you down there?! xx”

    “Bah! Sign your name!” thinks Lil’Johnny aloud. He wasn’t really planning on heading so far from his usual stomping grounds. The Bolton was an old Victorian pub someway along the path that runs beside the Great River. Would it be worth it? It all depended who it was on the other side of that number – 611. The number started to fascinate him. “Who are you Madam 611? I’ve got to find out. I’ve got to know,” he concluded with a determined air.

    The day proceeded in its timeless routine. Come 4pm Lil’Johnny starts packing up the stall, moving its constituting parts into the back of the Shop. By 5pm he is supping on a can of beer. By 6pm Raja has surreptitiously handed Lil’Johnny a little bundle of cash that constitutes Lil’Johnny’s wages. Lil’Johnny carefully deposits the cash in his secret pocket. Then there passes much banter and familial conversation between the three as they wait for the last of the custom to evaporate. At last they vacate the darkened Shop and lock up. Raja’s nimble fingers weave the weighty metal chain through gaps in the shutter and with the ‘snap’ of the lock, Lil’Johnny feels released.

    ————————————

    The Oxford Arms sits on a forgotten corner between a busy road, a raised railway line and the Creek. It’s a spit-and-sawdust, no frills live music pub. Lil’Johnny decides to go there first. At the end of a road coming off the Market sits the handsome, lonely building acting as a beacon for pirates and other ne’r-do-wells.

    Lil’Johnny enters, orders a lager and slips back outside. He sups the clear pishy liquid quenching a thirst more mental than physical. He takes a deep pull on a spliff and breathes a deep sigh of relief.

    Inside the pub there is a band playing some of sort of naff pseudo-punk. One of their songs is called “Wisdom of the Blues”. Lil’Johnny goes in. The lead singer struts his stuff on the dance floor while an older crowd bop to the music. It’s boring music – a mish mash of everything and nothing at all – a noisy mess, played overloud. Two sexy older ladies dance, mobile phones in hand. Members of the band strut off the stage whacking people in the face with their instruments. “Thank you, good night”. “One more” the crowd shout. This last song has a terrible guitar solo.

    Phil Sick – critic, DJ, music nerd – arrives. He is short with a great bush of ratty white hair; he wears glasses, long shorts, canvas Converse trainers and a black-and-white polka dot shirt. “Oi oi, Sick” calls Lil’Johhny. Phil starts waxing lyrical about the “orgasmic” female noise artist he has just seen at a bar at the end of the road; he describes the dry-ice and strobe in the dark basement. “It was loud,” he says looking up at Lil’Johnny with a glow of euphoric bliss. Sick then goes to stand in front of the speakers waiting for the next band looking like an untidy teenage girl.

    The pub is busy. DJ Toffee is playing between sets, a munchkin of a man peeping out from behind the decks. There the crackle from his overworn records. He plays an eclectic mix of: “The Israelites”, “I want to hold your hand”, “Disco inferno”, “Leader of the pack”, “How long has this been going on…” and “Black Betty” in succession. The Soundman moves about the pub like a malevolent force, vexed because he can’t play HIS playlist of neurotic trance. Will – patron saint of the Oxford Arms – is at his usual seat at the bar wearing a camouflage baseball cap, pint in hand, looking on blankly.

    Lil’Johnny looks up at the clock on the wall – it reads 8:00pm. “Time to move on me’thinks. Don’t want to be too late, just fashionably” he says to himself. The Coyote Men, a four-man Newcastle rock band, its members dressed in tutu’s and Mexican wrestling masks, come on stage. They start playing a surfy caveman rock with a funky rolling bassline; Americana rock-and-roll with a Mexican twist. As Lil’Johnny leaves through the side door, he catches a line from one of their songs: “Loopy Loopy Lopez \\ Break my heart, I break your legs..”. “Geez! Just when the bands were getting good. Oh well, it can’t be helped.”

    *************

    Along the Creek and over it, through the busy town centre and onto the path that runs alongside the Great River. The almost-full moon hangs high and bright in the inky-black sky; Lil’Johnny salutes it. The Great River is at high-tide and tonight it has a flat, reflective surface like a field of mud – smooth and defined. One can just hear the rushing river like the rustling of paper over the mournful drone of the air traffic above.

    Beams of light shine across the River, shimmering pillars. On the other side skyscrapers are lit up like constellations organized by bureaucrats, geometric glittering anthills. Its dark by the river and people cut figures against the glowing skyline. Cylindrical metal buoys pockmarked with raised ridges make black patches against the luminescent river as if mines waiting for contact. A river bus pulls out of the quay and rides gracefully up the river trailing waves in its wake. A few seconds later the Great River speaks: the lapping of water, gurgle – slap – wash – the elemental crashing of waves.

    Lil’Johnny stops along the path, leans against the balustrade and looks out over the Great River, that still molten pond of glass. It exudes its primal silence. Lil’Johnny gets to thinking: “What the hell am I doing? Does it really matter? I wouldn’t be out this evening if I didn’t have this mission to fulfill, this mystery to solve.” “My little manor,” he thinks panning from the hills behind to the Great River before him. “I hardly ever leave this place. My little corner of the Earth. Some people want to travel but I just want is to follow my little circuit, see me old muckers, listen to music and dance the night away. In short – to party. Am I looking for love tonight? I don’t know. I’m looking for something….I’m just not sure what it is yet. An answer, a sign, an auspice, destiny?!”

    The stupid clump of a jogger and their loud rasping guttural breathing disturbs Lil’Johnny’s train of thought. Then the gabble of voices in the dark, moving forms. Lil’Johnny pulls himself together and continues along the river path, gazing dreamily up at the evening star stuck up in the sky like a brilliant satellite.

    Off the river path, halfway down a side street, a corner pub sits – a dumpy Victorian relic – painted black. It’s the Bolton Arms and Lil’Johnny quickens his pace because he knows he’s late. In through the door and straight to the bar; he’s gasping for a drink. The pub is packed.

    Lil’Johnny looks around making a visual inspection of the punters. While he is never good at remembering names or numbers, Lil’Johnny has an uncanny memory for faces – he knows that if Madam 611 is there, he’ll know. She is not there in that mass. While Lil’Johnny waits to be served he surveys his surroundings. The pub is painted in a dark coat; there in one corner a raised stage stands with a cut-glass mirror behind and neon-red lights spell out “Bolton” above – the red light reflects off the black ceiling and splashes across tables. A discoball, small and lonely, hangs high above the stage. There is a band setting up. Fairylights strung from the ceiling reflect in the large handsome windows creating a starry infinity. A big stuffed fish sits in a glass case above the bar.

    “What you having?” asks the young barmaid. “Pint of the pale ale please”. Pour – clunk – “Cash or card?” – beeeep! Lil’Johnny takes a long sip and returns to surveying the pub. People wearing leather jackets and denim shirts, young men with long hair, quiff’s black and grey, blonde bobs, pates, leopard print, glasses of white wine, teeth, smiling faces. There a mobile phone so sparkly that a magpie would be off with it. At the bar long blonde hair frames an angelic face with long eyelashes. A wealthier set than Lil’Johnny is used to. They talk and eat and generally look bored.

    Its the “Magic City Trio” playing tonight. Lil’Johnny knows them. A husband and wife outfit who sing and play guitar. The band includes a double bass, brass and drums. There are lots of pairs of glasses in the band. The husband wears a floral-print Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, tall with big lips and long greying hair; she is short and wears a glittery silver dress. They start off with “Spoil it all by saying something stupid like I love you…”. Their sound is a vibrant country honky-tonk with drawling vocals and twangy guitars. A mother with a snub nose sitting near the stage covers her young daughter’s ears with her hands; the child has a big unhappy look on her face. The young child looks askance at an older lady dancing wildly in front.

    Lil’Johnny decides to go out into the garden – a strip of gravel on which sit rows of wooden picnic benches. He lights a cigarette, takes a deep drag and watches the curling of smoke rising and dissipating into the sky. Looking up he sees the sweep of new build flats. From the flats emanates a dull green-grey light punctuated by chaotic, disjointed, angular shapes of the stuff inside;  there the flitting light of a large TV screen. “Sorry, the girls are coming with me” says a lady to some leery lads chatting up her friends perched on the benches nearby. Lil’Johnny surveys the garden and no Madam 611.

    The reader may ask why Lil’Johnny doesn’t just text Madam 611? Why not just ask who she is and where she is? That would be unthinkable to Lil’Johnny. He believes in fate, in chance – what adventure would there be if we just got all our answers from pressing some buttons on a phone? Its a matter of principle. If Lady Luck should favour him tonight he will meet up with Madam 611. She will appear from around a corner, they will recognize each other, embrace and sit down to talk; they will move closer to one another and nuzzle. Lil’Johnny must continue on his mission until the battle is won or lost.

    The beer has loosened Lil’Johnny’s hips and inhibitions. He joins the throng of dancers inside. “Burning ring of fire…” plays from the stage. Being the hill-billy he is, Lil’Johnny slaps his thighs and keeps time to the music with his stomping feet. He sees the back of bobbing heads and heads and heads behind which the band can just be seen. Closing his eyes the rhythm runs through him and into his moving body. Things become fuzzy, ephemeral and euphoric, the spirit of Dionysus unleashed. Around him bodies pop, shuffle, jiggle and jive. Shaking hips, dancing bums, tossed hair and furtive glances. Lil’Johnny is carried away, lost in the scene.

    Time passes and the band has come to an end. The Strokes plays softly off a playlist. Lil’Johnny falls into a large leather armchair and once more surveys the pub. The crowd has thinned and empty glasses fill the tables. Lil’Johnny strikes up conversation with a pretty lady sitting nearby. They get to talking about how they each came to be here this night. “Well, I got this text from a number ending 611 and I had to see who she was…”. The lady looks at Lil’Johnny biting on her curled finger, laughing. “I was just being honest…” protests Lil’Johnny feebly. She leaves shortly thereafter and he is alone once again. An old couple trundle out of the pub, fingers intertwined in a caring embrace.

    Lil’Johnny gets his things and pats his secret pocket to see that his wages are still safe – all is well. He does one more circuit of the pub. Just as he thought – Madam 611 is not there. He knows the routine – she won’t text him again, he won’t text her, a stalemate of obstinate wills – such is the way in this cosmopolitan dump. He will now never know who Madam 611 is, she will be just another unsolved and soon forgotten mystery of his life. Despite his inebriated state, Lil’Johnny He takes his leave of the Bolton and joins the darkness of the river path. The moon has shifted round and the tide on the Great River has dropped. Lil’Johnny is drunk, happy and alone. He walks along the dead quiet river path homeward bound with an uneven swinging step, singing that classic reggae song out loud: “I got money in my pocket // But I just can’t get no love….”

    —

    Feature Image: Katerina Holmes

  • Exit through the Vestry

    Vestry 

    /ˈvɛstri/                                         

    Noun

    • a room or building attached to a church, used as an office and for changing into ceremonial vestments.
    • a real estate investment trust (REIT), incorporated in the Republic of Ireland.

    There comes a moment when you discover a person the trajectory of whose business affairs appears to embody the rotten nature of Irish housing. Such people are often perceived as visionaries of the real estate market, top of their class in producing a return on investment through a system that permits widespread human suffering. One such visionary is Richard Moyles, director and largest shareholder of The Vestry General Partner DAC, one of Ireland’s most powerful landlords. Moyles is also a director of Be Lettings, the letting agent Vestry uses to manage its tenancies and properties. Characters like Moyles are endemic in our communities. We are told that their investments are what make the world spin. Sure, only for them, wouldn’t it all be so much worse? Or, as the American President laughed with the Taoiseach on the subject of the Housing Crisis, “It’s a good problem to have.” In this piece, I push against this narrative – with Richard Moyles as a touchstone, and paint a picture at the iceberg’s tip. This is not, however, Richard’s story. It’s the story of a mother and her young son with nowhere to go; the same story as thousands of other tenants whose lives are determined by the decisions of men and women like him.

    Jen has lived in an apartment in Dublin 1 for a decade, becoming Vestry’s tenant when the group acquired the property in 2021. Her son, Danny (aged 5), has known no other home. Vestry bought the apartment from Grant Thornton for €325,700, after the previous landlord went into receivership and Grant Thornton took control of the property. “The landlords were changing like socks,” Jen told me over the phone. She received a letter through the door, explaining that the property had changed hands, and that she would now be Vestry’s tenant. “No one asked me”, she said, “if they want to sell the apartment, I should be the first person they asked.” Vestry’s control over the property immediately made Jen and Danny’s situation insecure. Under the previous owner, Jen had signed a lease until January 2026. Vestry were under no legal obligation, however, to honour this agreement. “The law is on their side,” Jen said.

    Jen’s case is among the fifteen disputes between Vestry and their tenants that have come before the Residential Tenancy Board over the last six months. Her story is quite typical of many of those before the RTB – the landlord wants to sell, and the tenant, caught in the tempest of the housing crisis, cannot leave. Jen told me that Dublin City Council offered to buy the property under the tenant-in-situ scheme. Vestry, however, declined the offer which would have secured a “market rate” purchase for Vestry and a home for Jen and Danny. A win-win scenario, one would have thought. “My main issue is that there is no transparency between government bodies, landlords, and tenants. I don’t understand why it [the DCC offer] was so secret.” A representative from Be Lettings told Jen that they were looking for between €350,000 and €375,000 for the apartment. When Jen asked the DCC worker charged with acquisitions under the tenant-in-situ scheme what offer was made to Vestry, she was looked at “like (she) had two heads.”

    When I went to visit Jen and Danny, accompanied by members of the Mountjoy-Dorset branch of the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), Danny’s energy and curiosity was infectious. Jen and the CATU members decided to knock on every door in the apartment building, with Danny’s exuberant voice echoing through the stairwells as his mother pleaded her case to her neighbours. He showed us his favourite book, Torben Kuhlmann’s Lindbergh – The Tale of the Flying Mouse. The book tells the story of what Danny described as a “genius mouse”, who is forced to flee Germany after the humans create a labyrinth of mouse traps, leaving himself and his friends on the run. The similarity between Danny and the little mouse was, frankly, striking. Surplus to Vestry’s requirements, little Danny and his mother must now make their way in a city filled with the sorrow and stress of displacement.

    One of the CATU members pointed to a leaflet poking out from under the door of one of Jen’s downstairs neighbours. He had left it there a couple of weeks previously. “Well, there’s no one in that house”, the member remarked. How could it be that this woman could be facing homelessness, while a perfectly suitable house seemingly lay vacant, right under where they slept? Such is the effect of a political economy whereby a basic human right, housing, is treated as a speculative asset for men like Moyles to gamble with.

    CATU are currently representing a number of Vestry tenants who are facing eviction by the investment trust. “⁠It’s typical that our members are being put at risk of homelessness due to no fault of their own. It’s also typical that private landlords are prioritising their shareholder profits at the expense of housing insecurity for our members and other tenants,” Lily Palmer, communications officer for CATU Mountjoy-Dorset told me. In response to the evictions, and fearing that Vestry may be carrying out mass, citywide evictions, CATU Mountjoy-Dorset have purchased a dedicated phone for Vestry tenants to contact them, should they want representation from the Tenant’s Union, called the “Vestry Hotline”.

    In 2023, The Ditch reported that Vestry controlled more than 850 homes in the Irish rental market, posting more than €20 million in profit. Company records show that Moyles is the company’s largest single shareholder, through an investment firm wholly owned by him, called Apsone Investments Ltd. Mr Moyles keeps good company with his fellow shareholders, a who’s who of property moguls. Let’s take Silk Shadow Ltd, who control 10% of Vestry. Silk Shadow is owned by property power couple Hilary and Christy Dowling . In 2011, Newlyn Homes Limited, which controls 100% of Silk Shadow had €22 million of its loans transferred to the National Management Asset Agency (NAMA). Christy is also a co-director of Vestry and Beo Ventures Ltd, along with Robert Kehoe and Andrew Gunne. Andrew Gunne, incidentally, was previously a director of Focus Ireland, a charity apparently tasked with alleviating the humanitarian crisis of homelessness. The Vestry group reveals a complex web of companies, all with their fingers in the Irish home market, or indeed, the Irish homeless market.

    Moyles, along with Vestry co-director, Robert Kehoe, are directors of Be Lettings. Be Lettings describe themselves as “a leading residential letting and management business with a nationwide portfolio of houses and apartments”. In at least one case Be Lettings has sold properties to Vestry itself. One effect of such ‘house flipping’ is rampant inflation in the housing market. For example, a 3-bed, 2-bathroom, semi-detached house in Dublin 15 was bought in November 2019 for €287,500.00. In January of 2025, the same property was sold to Moyles’ Vestry by Moyles’ Be Lettings for €400,050.00. Land registry documents show Vestry is this property’s current owner. It was surely no coincidence that Be Lettings facilitated the sale, allowing Moyles to benefit through his shareholdings both from the sale of the property, and from its future tenancies. According to Vestry’s accounts this home, and Jen’s, are listed as a security for a company called Situs Asset Management Limited. This means that should Vestry fall into financial trouble, the home can be seized by Sistus, with little recourse or security from homelessness for whatever tenant may be renting the property.

    Moyles currently has a case before An Bord Pleanála, which was lodged in October of 2024. The case concerns an application for a fire safety certificate for a property he leases at 21 Denmark Street, Dublin 1. The case file reads “for material change of use from flats/bedsits to B&B rooms with other material alterations”. This is precisely what Dublin does not need: more B&Bs at the expense of permanent residences.

    When I visited the property it was clear that work was ongoing in the building. Stacks of rubbish were piled high next to it, and the door was bolted shut with two heavy padlocks. This property – a listed building built in c.1790 – is not owned by Vestry, Moyles, or other associated entities. The building’s Land Registry file shows that it is currently held under a leasehold from a company by the name of Dubres Strategies Limited. This company is not registered in Ireland, but Malta, according to leaked documents found in the Paradise Papers. The Paradise Papers is a global investigation into the offshore activities of some of the world’s most powerful people and companies, led by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. A man named Rodney Lee Berger is Dubres Strategies Limited’s director. He and Corinne Hilary Berger are directors of Dubres Capital Limited, a company incorporated in the Republic of Ireland, with an address at 13 North Great George’s Street, a stone’s throw from the property at 21 Denmark Street.

    Vestry’s purchase of Jen’s apartment was not the first time Moyles had cause to deal with Grant Thornton, in their capacity as receivers. In 2011, when Moyles was a director of Shelbourne Development (Europe) Limited, The Bank of Scotland appointed Grant Thornton as receiver. According to the receiver’s abstract submitted to the Companies Registry Office, dated 18/12/2019, Grant Thornton collated receipts of €33,511,913. In 2014, National Asset Loan Management Limited appointed Mazars as receivers to Moyles’ Shelbourne Properties Limited. Remarkably, this is a different entity to Shelbourne Development (Europe) Limited. According to the receiver’s abstract presented by Mazars, they took control of €23,975,661.56 of assets associated with the former company. It’s strange how the same man can be a supporting character in the downfall of one property giant, dust himself off, and appear on the other side of the ledger, purchasing a stressed asset from the very same receiver who had previously confiscated his holdings. As Mac from the 2005 comedy TV series ‘It’s always Sunny in Philadelphia’ put it: “I’m playing both sides, so I always come out on top!”

    Artist’s impression of the ‘Chicago Spire’.

    Moyles shared his directorship in both companies with Garrett Kelleher, who tried to sue NAMA for $1.2billion in a U.S. court, after his Anglo-Irish Bank-funded “Chicago Spire” vanity project failed to get off the ground. In 2009, prior the  resignation of Chris O’Connell as the head of Shelbourne Development (Europe) Ltd, O’Connell told the Irish Times: “In the short term it’s (referring to the establishment of NAMA) going to mean uncertainty for developers, bankers and investors alike, but it’s the key to the resurrection of this market over the next decade and it’s going to generate significant business opportunities at a number of different levels,”. And indeed, the offloading of bad loans from the bankers’ books by NAMA has created significant business opportunities. It could certainly be argued that this mechanism has allowed Moyles, Kelleher, Dowling and the crew to continue their honest work as lowly property moguls.

    “He doesn’t want to leave”, Jen told me, “he has his swimming lessons here, he has his little pals, his little life is going to be disrupted”. We must confront Jen and Danny’s reality, and the reality for some 15,286 people currently in homeless accommodation in this “Republic”, 4,653 of whom are children, with countless more contending with crippling rents, inflated high prices and insecure tenancies. If this is a “good problem to have”, who is it good for? Certainly not those people, and certainly not those paying exorbitant rent for mouldy studios. Is the problem housing supply, that “Ireland is Full”, or something else entirely? When we start asking the right questions we may start putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Once we establish, as a basic cultural norm, that little Danny’s right to a roof should take precedence over Moyles’ right to make money from that roof, then, we might start excavating what is rotten about Irish housing. Until then, the carousel of real estate investment will keep turning, and little Danny and his mother will remain on the sidelines, not knowing what comes next.

  • Musician of the Month: Ronan Skillen

    Music has always been my favourite mystery. As a medium, an energy or exchange, there’s no other frequency that carries as much potential.

    I grew up learning classical music as a French horn player in orchestras. Most of my teenage years were spent exploring musical brass ensembles from the Baroque era. However, deep down, I was always drawn to rhythms and unusual textural sounds, and fascinated by music production. I initially discovered improvisation by playing the didgeridoo, before going on to study tabla in India and other hand percussion in West Africa and South Africa. I’ve continued to explore a combination of hybrid contemporary percussion, which I incorporate in my music and ever-changing percussive set-up.

    A large part of my musical career has been influenced by me having lived in different parts of the world. I was born in Northern Ireland and grew up in Germany, where I spent 18 years before moving to South Africa, where I lived for 25 years. Now I’m back in Ireland, living in Dublin. As a performing artist, I’ve had a very diverse career, spanning many genres, bands and projects, both as a side man and band leader. I’ve toured extensively, and have had the great fortune of sharing the stage with greats such as Johnny Clegg, Rodriguez and Manu Dibango.

    Much of my experience as a percussionist has involved me refining the process of capturing the sounds of my instruments, especially in a live context. This has given me a better understanding of the sonic spectrum of sound, production and recording, prompting me to explore production music for films. This knowledge, coupled with my years of experience as a recording artist who’s played on more than 100 albums to date, further enhanced my understanding of the role of a producer in studio contexts, and has characterised my more current and recent projects.

    As with many artists, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to reinvent myself as a musician, and saw me pivoting from being more of a performing artist to creating soundtrack music. What fascinates me about this genre is the simplicity with which music can function: the musical score provides the emotional content, setting the tone and directly influencing the dramaturgy of a storyline. This type of music-making has been a constant source of exploration, ever since I was involved in creating the score for the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary film, My Octopus Teacher. Ultimately I’d like to be involved in scoring a feature-length film or providing the theme music for a TV series. I’m always working on some sort of soundtrack music, and have made specifically curated library music for several labels over the past few years.

    Soundtracks

    There is a downside to making this kind of music, though. It can be quite solitary and often takes hours of recording specific sounds in sequence, like a puzzle that forms over time. Also, this process can become quite self-indulgent, which is why I’ve been realising of late that the performer in me would like to get back on stage and be part of a new project that I could collaborate on.

    The Dublin music scene is still very new to me, and I’ve not had a chance to explore my place in the live music scene as yet. Irish traditional music fascinates me and I’d be interested in collaborating with trad musicians. I have great respect for the cultural significance of traditional music of this nature, and I realise that my role as a percussionist would have to be carefully curated. I’ve always felt that as long as you learn the basics and don’t disrespect the origins, then you’re in honest territory. It’s important to understand the heritage of musical offerings and find appropriate ways to build bridges with old and new sounds. Instruments evolve, compositions adapt accordingly, and people and new collaborations shape new contemporary styles and genres.

     

    Currently, I’m part of the Ingrid Lukas band, which is based in Zürich, Switzerland. We have regular shows and usually tour at least once a year. There is also a new album in the making. Apart from that, I am a guest lecturer at the University of Limerick’s World Music Academy, teaching tabla and percussion on a part-time basis. One of the concepts I’ve been developing with the students is part of a future project that I’ve been distilling for a few years and is finally coming to fruition. Essentially, it’s a space within which rhythmic exercises can take shape in a group dynamic, where the focus is on listening, working as a unit and understanding the “ghost notes” that make up the space between the beats.

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/didgi_taal/

    Website: http://ronanskillen.com/

    Linktree: https://linktr.ee/didgitaal

  • The Inscrutable Mr. Scruton

    At the end of Roger Scruton’s short book On Hunting, an out-of-print memoir about the British conservative philosopher’s discovery and participation in fox hunting during middle age, Scruton focuses on the final days of his cob Bob. Shorn of the energy needed to gallop in herd-like fashion through the landscape as a part of the hunt, B cuts a forlorn figure. Like a boxer no longer fit for the ring, he appears to live a half-life, waiting ominously for the end to come:

    The time came when he could no longer hunt; nor could he stay in the field, where he would overeat and become bloated and hobbling. Nor could he be ridden, since deprived of hunting, he became increasingly curmudgeonly and depressed, shying at every flutter in the hedgerow (p.131).

    Scruton’s memoir is a defence of country life as it manifests in the sport of fox hunting, a sport banned in the UK on animal rights grounds. Some call the text polemic. Others a rant. Disillusioned with life, the ‘post-modern’ as he calls the contemporary age, Scruton takes refuge in the Cotswolds where he begins riding a pony called Dumbo. Slowly, like a magnet pulling him in, he discovers the hunt. He is soon a true believer. His life changes dramatically through this discovery, as an obsession takes him in its grip. At one point, having taken up a US academic post, Scruton flies home every Friday to hunt at the weekend. He finds in the hunt the essence of an England he academically locates as the springboard of conservatism, a melting point of class interest that pushes against the prevailing accusation that fox hunting is the domain of the posh. Scruton claims fox hunting is an alliance of country folk across class barriers, the trace of an older community life that respects nature as Other to the human realm.

    But he doesn’t stop there. A sentimental urge to dismiss fox hunting as a sport, Scruton argues, lends it cruel and barbarous as an activity, lacking modern sophistication. The fox is invested with piety. Animals are rendered redundant rejoinders of pity and sentiment. Nature, Scruton believes, has little room for pity: the wild takes root in the multiple forces of the herd. Scruton writes of Bob’s impending retirement as a lament to the cob’s lack of purpose when he has been removed from the expenditure of hunting – the ‘flourishing’ of the horse in a multi-species environment.  He turns to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence by way of defending the practice of fox hunting as a sport that requires the eternal recurrence of the individual fox to protect the general species. The traditions of country life depend on renewing the species to maintain the hunter-gatherer on the land. This, ultimately, accounts for an attachment to the natural world.

    To read and engage with Scruton’s writing is not to necessarily agree. One of his critics Jeanette Winterson, appears on the sleeve lauding the book as brilliant and horrible in equal measure. Scruton’s father lamented Old England’s vanishing but had little truck with countryside traditions his son was drawn to. My father, in contrast, was a hunt master and a GP heavily invested in the family planning movement in the West of Ireland (he was involved in legalising family planning as a medical resource). He saw little contradiction in sitting atop nature’s totem as a progressive modern. His interest in tradition did not extend to the Church, its hierarchy or the power it yielded. Like Scruton, my father was drawn to the cross-class dalliance of a sport I was introduced to as a child, a multispecies environment made up of horses, hounds and humans that left a considerable mark as a source of moral debate. The impact of my own involvement with the sport was not just experiential. It was philosophical to the point of ontological. For in the throes of the hunt, horse and human give up their singularity, adrenaline mounts and the normal limits of everyday life are transgressed. The horse jumps fences it would not ordinarily entertain, outside of the collective embroglio of the hunt. An energy pulsates through the collective, as Scruton notes, that engenders the primeval, pre-modern, pushing the group beyond the boundaries of a day to day ‘identity’ that takes root as a singularising force. Like Winterson, I find Scruton’s text both fascinating in parts and deeply problematic in others.

    Scruton’s distaste for modern culture is prevalent across his memoir. He has a disdain for New Labour and Blair’s alliance with Britpop: a regressive force he finds wrapped up in the trimmings of progress. He fails to look outside the official corridors of power, at the parallel culture that rose in the late 80s amidst the slack spaces of recession England. Rave was banned and supressed like fox hunting in the 90s. Scruton hardly mentions a phenomenon that shares many of the melting pot properties he finds in fox hunting, albeit settling in rural spaces after its suppression. Rave culture, as Simon Reynolds and Jeremy Deller respectively argue, loosened the class divide so that tradesmen meshed with students, hooligans with new age travellers, and a culture evolved that transmutes the becoming-animal of the herd into the collective imbroglio of the dance. Scruton does, funnily enough, equate hunting with dancing at one point in his text. The point of intersection, however, lies in class dissolution, de-individuating properties of the collective and an energy manipulated by the adrenaline-fuelled order of the huntsman qua DJ. Hunting and raving manifest in collectives, the chaos of the herd managed and given unity by the totemic figure of the huntsman and the DJ. Both forms of congress are marked by slow tempos succumbing to the impetus of insistent speed: the beat line that affects the dancers, the scent that regales the horse and hound moving, pack-like, across terrain humans follow in suit.

    Does Scruton miss these cultural outlets? Outlets that generate the same collective spirit Scruton finds in hunting? Scruton laments the erosion of rural practices that bind people in labour. Profound alienation comes with modernity, a symptom of a society Scruton feels increasingly enframes nature as instruments. Animals that roamed the land as fellow beings across a multitude of species are readily encountered as instruments with no recourse to the broader collective challenges of the species. One does not have to agree with Scruton, or indeed agree with his support of fox hunting, even his turn to Heidegger, to feel some kind of affinity with the malaise that drives him from the city. I felt a similar malaise. I became disillusioned with suburban city life. Like Scruton, I was fed up with middle class suburbs and customs. I moved to the country in 2017 to get close to a more organic life.

    Scruton leaves London to embrace the last vestiges of old England. Later this year, I will publish a memoir A Sheepdog Named Oscar: Love and Companionship in Rural Ireland with Dopplehouse Press in the US about moving to the country like Scruton from the perspective of a sheepdog I found on a desolate farm. I discover the old of Ireland. For many years, I disliked Scruton. I saw him as a toff philosopher who represented everything I disliked about toffs in general. I read his book on hunting out of curiosity, and although far from seduced by his argument, valued his reflections on the old. I began to recalibrate my memories of riding horseback in the West of Ireland. One of my abiding memories, and one triggered by Scruton’s text, is jumping stone walls pushed on by the adrenaline that seemed to lift me out of myself. The ‘I’ of individuated self-trappings seemed to momentarily evaporate in time. I resisted the lure of the hunt as a sign of moral decay and spent a lifetime exploring the collective dissolution of the ‘I’ in other transcultural forms. Two events occurred that led me to reflect on this earlier time in my life as part of a book that pressed my own interest in an old vanishing Ireland. First, my father died in a car crash. He was travelling home from a point-to-point in Ballingary in County Tipperary when he collided with another car (Scruton mentions point-to-points as social extensions of the hunting community in his book). I missed a call the evening before, when I was driving from Ballybunnion with kids in tow. My father was doing something he always did, I thought. He could wait. He left behind horses, cats and dogs, and acres of land.

    The second event is captured in the memoir title. It concerns finding a sheepdog named Oscar on a rundown farm, part of an old ascendency listed estate in the wild of East Clare. Oscar was living there alone, and little is known about his early life. He was undoubtedly bred to work sheep and cattle. His demeanour, long-haired and a little bigger than a typical border collie, has been described as a collie and working sheepdog. An animal that is not a pet. The book tells of rehabilitation against the rhetorical ‘where are you?’ that aggravated the mind of a son dizzy with loss. Over the four years explored in the book, a rabbit hole is travelled similar to the hole Scruton discovers in middle age. Scruton absconded to the countryside from London, took refuge in age-old traditions of the land. I too, absconded and took refuge. Unlike Scruton, however, who found in nature the mantra of the herd, the hole pulled me back into an Ireland I had lost touch with over decades of city living, rooted in the symbiotic cultivation of care between a sheepdog and me. Simply, I had to understand a ‘companion animal’ that beyond all consideration of creatures and pets I had encountered before seemed to live on my timeline alone. I wanted to understand symbiosis between species as an ontological foundation of life.

    I began the text as a project. A story that would tell of finding and rehabilitating Oscar in words and illustrations, against the realisation that my father was really gone, during the Covid 19 lockdown. I had extra time on my hands due to the restrictions and sought to make hay while I could. The story starts in 2017 in East Clare, on an abandoned farm and ascendency estate before coming full circle in the summer of 2020. By writing a book about a companion dog that led me to the inscrutable Mr. Scruton, along with many of those who sit on the opposite side of the animal rights debate – Nobel Laureates such as J.M Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk – I was able to find solace, away from the debilitating lockdown, in a world of thought and action.

    The book focuses on symbiosis and companionship. How does symbiosis manifest between a dog and handler? How important are interspecies relations based on work? Unlike nimble short haired dogs running at break net speed, spitting their fire at sheep beckoned to move at the command, subject to a master’s whistle, Oscar is a slow and meticulous mover. Everything happens through his eyes. To understand his behaviour, a being that arrived when the reality of my father’s death was beginning to hit home, I did a Scruton and turned my focus on working animals – went down a rabbit hole of all consuming proportions. But unlike Scruton, I returned to the surface with one unanswered question. I was propelled by a more obtuse problem. Is it possible, I ask, for a nonhuman animal, a dog, to care for a human? For Scruton, the animal fascinates in its instinct, coming alive in the multispecies hunt, like a sheepdog running the galley in line with the farmer’s commands. Symbiosis between nonhuman and human brings benefits. But the question that propels my focus in A Sheepdog Named Oscar is another: can nonhuman animals really care for humans? Is to care a transaction that brings more than utility?

    Perhaps a rhetorical question. A question, or plural, destined for the never-ending to and fro of analysis. But in asking this question I was delving into a minefield that encompassed so much of what is real. By standing on this minefield, I was peering into another world. For years I tried to get Oscar to swim in some way. At the beach, when the tide had come in, I would run into crashing waves in the pretence that I was engulfed by water, the froth of the ocean spinning around in all directions. And though he became visibly frustrated, agitated, dipping his toes in, he refused to swim. He never made it past first base. Sometimes, when crossing a stream near the woods around the corner from our house, I motioned to push him in. I hoped instinct would kick off and he would overcome his fear. But it was too difficult. I could not entrust myself to do it. He trusts me not to hurt him. And I worry that pushing him into the water will hurt him. He looks at me, like he knows things are awry, and his drooping and begging face seems to say so. Scruton criticises animals’ rights activism that, he believes, confuses nonhuman and human. He believes a kind of confusion satiates the impulse to do good (the Disnifying process, as he calls it). Perhaps, in not pushing Oscar, I am not shielding him. Maybe he wants to fall in and swim, and I inevitably hold him back? Walt Disney writes the script and draws the animation. Or something like that. But this argument doesn’t convince me entirely. Too much runs counter.

    Anecdotes rush in. There’s one about swimming, from Sunday of the August Bank Holiday, in 2021. We are driving across county lines to collect our son Anton from a friend’s house in Kilkee and decide to make a family day out. It is high summer, perfect for a picnic and swim. We stop off in Kilrush after seeing, from the car, groups of people picnicking and sunbathing beside water. Then we wander down to the rocks, lay our towels out and keep Oscar on a leash. There are kids and dogs on the beach and people might start to get uppity about him wandering.

    I decide to cool off and tell the gang to mind my stuff. I release Oscar from the leash and let him sit at the rock. I am of the impression he will wait on the sand while I swim, his concentration fixated on my body descending into the water. I make my way further, submerging myself in water shallow for a considerable distance. To swim I need to walk out at least a hundred meters, where there is only one person whose body is fully submerged in water. I push through the water, making incremental advances until the water reaches my waist and then I dive through the water, swimming as best I can in the shallow terrain. The water deepens until eventually I am swimming freely, the silver rays of sunlight bouncing off the surface.

    ‘Get him out. He’s filthy. Dogs aren’t allowed to swim in the estuary,’ the other guy swimming beside me shouts over in my direction. I remember realising it was the estuary we were in, and it was why the water was so shallow for so far, but not really taking in what he meant about a dog. Then I turned to face in towards the beach, where the other swimmers were looking. About one hundred and fifty metres from the shore, Oscar was swimming towards me.

    His head was just above the water line, but I could see that his legs were working in overdrive beneath. I told the other guy swimming who began remonstrating about Oscar swimming like a war had broken out to take a hike. The ‘F’ word might even have been used. I made the point that Oscar was probably a lot cleaner than most of the humans happily swimming in the estuary.

    Oscar swam around my back, circling me until I could hold him, my feet touching the ground. In the moment of touch, the two hearts of two species rubbing against one another, I thought of many times I tried to coax him into water and failed. What had changed? Why did he leave the others and act, pushing against whatever sensation is made manifest in language as ‘fear,’ to be by my side. What was he doing when pushing himself into an experience so foreign to his nervy nature? He was not a swimmer. He hated water. He was a sheepdog bred for land.

    Few sights have overwhelmed me to a point of astonishment, as the one of Oscar swimming in the estuary so far from the beach, an astonishment that captivated my wife and son to the same degree as they watched him swim towards me. In Jason Molina’s ‘Lioness,’ the artist sings of two lions who fall in love. One is on one side of the Nile, the other lives across the river. Their attraction compels them to risk their lives to swim out into the river so that they can meet each other eventually. At a pivotal moment, Molina sings the critical refrain on repeat ‘I will swim to you, I will SWIM TO YOU.’ The song is not really about a lioness. It is about burning rocks of love, that makes two hearts beat as one. It is, for me, about an animal too afraid to swim until a friend and master is in danger. A Sheepdog Named Oscar is an attempt to understand these burning rocks, as expressed in Molina’s refrain ‘I will swim to you.’ These lines manifest as a kind of love that evolves from the blood of a sheepdog and touches a human. Care that emits from a human and touches the life of the nonhuman who swims to him. The sheepdog who watches another fall into water and who leaps into action. What compels Oscar to swim through the cold and alien water, so that ‘I’ and ‘you’ can melt into the temporal plane of ‘we?’ Is it simply love, designed to show humans it exists outside the limitations of the human realm?

  • The Dog that Sang the Blues

    It feels like centuries must have passed, but it is only decades. Years grow shorter as they multiply. Back then a year was long. Winters moved slowly through the seasons, bookending the boundless summers. I remember the newness of things then. When I was a boy, in my imagination, I could picture death, but it seemed unreal, like a dream that evaporates with the morning mist. I never thought about anything but life. Immortality was existence. Leaving church on a bright sunny day the thought that death could be overcome, outlived, outwitted even, was mere common sense. It seems different now, now that I have felt the rain. Maybe you remember that strange feeling in the early mornings when you were a child, the first minutes of a new day where a vague belly hunger is usurped by the rush of life. The seedling imagination growing, nurturing its petals under an indefinite sky. The day you say ‘I am’ and soon after, ‘we are’. Mornings absent of fear. A day in the sun’s warmth. Growing in the scent of cut grass that grew in the meadows of the town. I had a feeling then that all roads would be trodden, but only if I could harness time, the impossible trick. Between sadness and hope, lies adventure, and that’s where the story begins.

    It was around that time, at the beginning of this century, I travelled around South America. What a beautiful time it was to be alive. I even knew it then, as it was happening. I didn’t need retrospect. I never doubted things of beauty then, and that helped me to find solace later, from what would reveal itself as pitilessness. We can say doomed to die, but not to love. Even if love fails and falters, if it was true, it was worthwhile. It has taken its place in the hallowed halls. My heart was broken by a rejected love, and because she was everything and all else paled, the rejection made everything the world could offer dour, grey almost, even on the brightest of days. She robbed me of its flavour, but she wasn’t to blame. When you fall in love with someone that isn’t in love with you, you rob yourself. Even if it is accidental. The fire in life’s colour was doused. I was one of the heart broken ones. The heartbreak gave off a physical pain as I walked one morning to the inter-city bus station in Buenos Aires and searched on the departures board for the bus that would take me to Bolivia.

    The journey from Buenos Aires to La Paz was long. It took days. Up through Paraguay. My only previous contact with that country and been as a boy, and the 1986 World Cup sticker album, and now here I was. Asuncion the capital city and the accompanying thought, ‘I never imagined I’d be here.” Quite right. I spent a happy night there. Alone but never lonely, the gentle prospect of adventure held me in its embrace. No one to talk to, alone with my cigarettes, the hotel bar and thoughts and dreams and memories and ideas, paintings on the walls, anticipations, and then return to the twirling of smoke. And now those times, like all those unrecorded, exciting moments brimming with life, love and expectation, have now become mysteriously void of most of their content. The thought processes blurred and misty, the shower and shit, what was I reading? What was the room really like? The hotel foyer? Gone forever, lost in times rip tide, taken out to sea by its vast whirlpool. Only the vivid haunts. Maybe God is only time, the thing that has dominion over all things.

    We were driving down the highway in Paraguay on the thundering bus, over the rattling bogs, when suddenly there was an almighty thud and the bus shook with the explosive cacophony of the passenger’s screams. Delight ensued when it was confirmed it was a large hog we had hit, so the passengers dragged the great dead boar onto the bus and away we went. There would be some full bellies that night. Quite right again. Waste not, want not. Their good fortune was greeted with singing, and I remember that I smiled. I must have slept plenty as the next part of the journey on to Bolivia has become vague. I remember looking out of a bus window for hours as it went through the lowlands, green and tumbling to the horizon, with still white clouds in the reddening sky, dreamlike, unfolding the night.

    At last, I arrived in the town of Humahuaca deep in the north of Argentina. The lunar landscape surrounding it gave the impression at dusk that we were driving on Mars. In the distance I could see the so called ‘Hills of Many Colours.’ I was the only one to disembark the bus and found myself totally alone in a town that seemed deserted. Night had fallen. There were no people anywhere. The desolate town greeted me with both tranquillity and foreboding, as if I was being watched secretly. It felt as if someone or something had been expecting me. I looked up and saw the galaxy was visible, our suburb looking magnificent, truly. Perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever seen outside the smile in her eyes. I stared up, and my insignificance equalled my luck.

    We are on the edge of our Galaxy, if its centre is Trafalgar Square, we are Theydon Bois, or perhaps Croydon. I recently learned that there is a giant black hole at the centre of our milky way so this could be a good thing. I sat on a wall where the bus dropped me off and lit a cigarette, dazzled by the stars. I looked around for the neon light of a hotel but there was nothing. I was three puffs in when I realised something was watching me. It was like a feeling that some entity is boring into your skull without you knowing. I looked down from the silent night to the uneven cobbles of the street and there in front of me was a rag tag dog, looking up as if we had met before. Its head was slightly tilted to the left. It was dark brown, very dark brown with unkempt matted hair and had wide friendly brown eyes, full of sorrow and expectation. I said hello. It didn’t react. Maybe it doesn’t speak English I thought. ‘Hola’ I said. It tilted its head slightly to the right with an inquisitive look. That made me smile. My loneliness seemed to evaporate into the balmy night of stars and sands.

    I stood up and it lifted its head with an air of loyalty. I walked on to where I thought the town centre was and the dog immediately followed, walking alongside. I reached a crossroads and my spirits lifted again. I began to walk towards the sign that said HOTEL with an independent air. The Bois de Boulogne it was not. The dog followed. I looked down and straight away noticed that it was limping. Wait, was it a limp? I stood a step to the side and focussing in the dim light noticed it only had three legs. Three legs. Poor thing. Must be a hard life out here on Mars. I looked up again at the stars and as I did so two drifting clouds ate the moon. I lit another and said to the dog, ‘Alright hop-a-long. Vamos.”

    The three-legged dog walked beside me, looking up at my face. The immediate fealty impressed me, there was a certain loyalty in its manner and an irrepressible eagerness for life. I stopped and waited. The dog stopped too, looking curious as to what I was doing. I breathed a plume to the night sky and carried on walking, and the dog followed by my side. We parted company for a while as I booked in and put my bag in my room. The hotel was old but clean. I lay on the bed for a while staring at the ceiling, wondering what to do. ‘A beer’ I thought. I looked at the clock on the wall and it read nine, so I launched off the bed and returned to the warm evening. The cripple dog was waiting for me at the end of the path to the hotel.

    As I approached, he looked up at me in friendship, so I smiled back and said ‘Hola.’ Then I went to look for a bar and sure enough, the three-legged dog followed. I stopped walking just to see what it would do. It stopped and looked up at me. I carried on. The dog followed by my side. I stopped again. So did he. He looked up but now with an expression that read ‘don’t fuck about.” No more testing. I saw some empty plastic chairs outside a well-lit window and presumed it was a bar so I crossed the desolate street. The dog hobbled along with me to the door and then stopped and sat down under the beer light, awaiting my return.

    I drank many beers, smoked my mind, and indulged in whiskey until the light’s glow behind the bar told me that I was drunk. I have for many years found it difficult to both get in and out of bed. Could be a sign of depression, not sure. I’m usually happy. Maybe content is a better word. I thanked the barman in Spanish and he nodded warmly and waved me goodbye. I was surprised to see hop-a-long waiting for me. It must have been hours. I looked up at the waxing moon lighting the night world dreaming. I lit a cigarette and started the wander back to my hotel in the full knowledge the dog would follow. In the middle of the empty square, I sat down on a wall to take my measure of the town. The crippled dog stood in front of me on three legs where I sat. We looked at each for a while under the watchful gaze of the night. Then he began to sing.

    The first note sat still on the air, full of loss and pity, but constructing a harbour for hope out of notes alone. It was full of duende. Fulloftheheartbreakingbeautyoftheworld. And then the music soared up to the stars above us. How could such a perfect blue note be produced by an unwanted animal like this? I thought. Then I saw that the answer was in the question. It put its head by its missing leg and again the song came. It was the rawest blues I’ve ever heard. I remember thinking to myself, well raise my rent, you make Muddy Waters sound content. But it was just a three-legged dog on the lunar earth. He made me smile on a low ebb, which is what good friends can do. In the perfect moment, just as the moon disappeared behind the clouds, the dog stopped singing. All that could be heard was silence. I realised music, like poetry, is not academic. All academic pursuits require evidence. Music does not. I don’t know how long I stayed with the three-legged dog, untalkative. After a time, the beer began to wear thin in my mind and I decided to go to bed.

    “Well, good night.” I said, but the Argentine hound didn’t understand. I looked at him in the eye and he understood I had acknowledged his song. Then I turned and went into the hotel and slept. I awoke the next morning to the sound of voices and the distant rumble of a motor car. I got up scratching my spinning head. I realised I hadn’t gotten undressed which saved some time and headed out of the hotel to find the bus that would take me on to Bolivia. Hop-a-Long was gone. I felt a pang of sadness and regret. I looked up and down the desolate street but there was no sign of him. That afternoon I boarded the bus and departed. I looked out of the window as the bus passed by the frontier of town and saw a truck being loaded. There in a cage carried by the dog catchers was hop-a-long looking forlorn and scared. I jumped up with my bag and guitar, ran up to the front of the bus and banged on the window as he pulled out. I asked the driver to stop and he obliged. I ran back and told the dog catchers the he was mine. They believed me after I gave them some money, and the dog looked up at me and smiled. I looked away to the horizon and pictured distant La Paz in my mind’s eye. I noticed he was also looking out to the distance.

    ‘Looks like we’re walking there’ I said.

    Hop-a-long sang. And off we went together, towards the childhood of mountains.

    Feature Image: Hector Perez

  • The Powerful Nature of Addiction

    Back in 2016, I was embarking on a road towards sobriety after nearly eighteen years of committed alcoholism, homelessness, depression, and, in many ways, desperation. I needed to change. However, I did not know how or where to begin. I started with ‘one day at a time,’ taking small, manageable steps. If I don’t drink this week, I will try it next week. That was my mantra, and that’s how it went initially.

    That was when I happened to be in Manchester on my way from Salford, where I had been staying in a homeless night shelter, and walking into town to go to work one Sunday morning, when a fresh-looking can of Carlsberg was sitting all alone on the low or a brick wall near a small park. As to where its owner had gone, I had no clue. Still, I wanted to down that can of fizzy beer. I wanted to guzzle its beery contents down my throat and for it to wash around freely in my guttiwuts (as they put it in Clockwork Orange). Filling me with the desire for more beer, to smoke fags, and to fall about like a drunken imbecile, not being at all the responsible person that I used to be and aligning foolish behaviour(s) I know all too well – being the eternal alcoholic bum.

    Cut to the previous year prior, 2015, on a Sunday, the first of November, I had the worst hangover of my life, and wanted to kill myself. I simply had had enough of being an alcoholic.

    The scenario was that I was at Birmingham International Airport’s train station, lying on a bench in the small waiting room, suffering from a desperate hangover, holding onto a sausage baguette with congealing red sauce in a paper bag, murmuring in pain. I didn’t see how I could continue in life, having failed at it so badly.

    I wanted to throw myself under an oncoming train.

    I had been out on the lash in Birmingham the night before and spent a lot of money on a premeditated drinking session. The following day, I jumped on an earlier train, and the conductor came round and asked for my ticket and, inspecting it, said, ‘You’re an hour early; either buy a new ticket which will cost you £35.00 or get off at the next station and wait for your train.’ I choose to get off.

    Feature Image: David Kwewum

    Sobering up has been rather hellish. Seriously, it has.

    For the first five years, I was ill. I was lethargic and had a rumbling stomach. I believe I developed GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease), where the lining of the stomach is decimated due to all the booze I tipped down my throat, where it swilled around in there like a dark, seething, twisted, broiling sea.

    During my recovery, if I drank strong, cheap tea bags, the tannins in the tea played havoc with my liver, leading to a dull, searing pain in the lower right-hand side of my upper body.

    In 2017, I went to the GP in Derry, where I was living in a hostel, and he informed me I was having recurring liver infections. He didn’t know what I knew.

    I had a liver scan. There was some ‘superficial’ scarring on my liver, the nurses at Altnagelvin Hospital said. If it was superficial, I didn’t want to know what actual, deeper scarring felt like. No way. This had been painful enough so far.

    The reality was, after years of alcohol consumption, I had liver disease – let’s make no bones about it, leading to recurring infections. And my diet was atrocious, which contributed to my poor health.

    I drank far too many fizzy drinks. I scoffed far too many biscuits – once I sat down with a cup of tea, I would ‘clear the decks’ in terms of consuming high-sugar and high-fat content junk food in one sitting. Tunnock’s Teacakes were a firm favourite; I could consume at least four in one go. I ate crisps by the tonnage and ballooned to nearly fifteen stone in 2020. That’s big for someone of my height of 5ft 7¾, with a small enough frame. I was a greedy, unmitigated, irresponsible (health-wise) git.

    Two years ago, I went to the GP for a checkup as I was feeling lightheaded and had chest pains. My blood pressure was up six points, and I had high cholesterol, I was informed. I was on the danger alert for a heart attack. I think I have had some minor ones. Or Angina, at least. That or it was the GERD.

    These days, I rarely drink fizzy drinks. I seldom eat crisps and opt for baked ones. I would have a chocolate bar at least twice a week. Rarely more than that. I prepare most of my meals from scratch and mostly drink water.

    I recently saw an advertisement on a billboard at 8:44am for a pint of the black stuff, and wanted to imbibe it so badly that I considered going on the ‘drink.’ I swear to goodness that one millisecond glance up at that foamy pint with roasted barley, and I was there with one in my hand, ready to take a good draught.

    That is the powerful nature of addiction – that pull is as strong as it ever was, even though I am currently nine years alcohol-free.

    It takes work to remain sober. I don’t think I ever will be free from alcoholism.

    Only now can I say that I am not drinking. And that’s what I intend for the foreseeable future.

    I’m aware of the downsides, and it’s far from ideal: the anxiety, the guilt, and the worthless feeling(s) that soaking oneself in booze brings.

    At least now that I am sober, I can focus on my hobbies, including writing and making music – two things which bring me joy. And if that gets me out of bed in the morning – I now rise every morning at around 5am – sleeping right through from the night after usually going t to bed around 10pm.

    That is something which I can control and manage. I opt to be busy, which is something I aim to maintain. Things change when people have to.

    Feature Image: Pixababy

  • Podcast: Patrick Cockburn on Syria and Ukraine


    Are the Eurocrats and their allies most delusional about the topics they profess to find most urgent? Or are they just setting out to delude the rest of us?

    This was Ursula Von Der Leyen speaking at the 9th Brussels Conference on Syria, on Saint Patrick’s Day last:

    The agreement between the central authorities and the Kurdish SDF… is nothing short of historic. As is the signing of a constitutional declaration by interim President al-Sharaa. On the other hand, the attacks on security forces and the violence against civilians in Syria’s coastal region show that the situation remains fragile…

    The Syrian authorities’ commitment to bring the perpetrators to justice, to protect minorities, and form an inclusive government – all of this is vital for reconciliation.

    As these words were being prepared in the run-up to the conference, informed observers of Syria’s situation could see a different picture: targeted sectarian massacres of Alawites, not just “violence against civilians”, had begun. To precious little outcry in the West, death squads indifferent to calls for restraint from Damascus were fanning out in coastal Latakia. Far from cohering into a place of “inclusive government”, Syria looks more likely to be approaching a condition of volatility and chaos, not a “fragile” democracy with “freedom of opinion, expression, information, publication and press”, as claimed in the text of the interim constitutional document. Quoting an acquaintance living in Maaloula, a Christian town Northeast of Damascus, Patrick Cockburn relates how multiple groups have been plunged into trepidation: “The Christians are frightened, the Alawites are frightened, even the secular Sunnis are frightened…”

    That fear relates not only to who is supposedly in charge in Damascus, but to the extent of their control, if any, over the forces made up of jihadis from around the world who are now the primary wielders of military power across most of the core of the country. The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Council, meanwhile, has actually been outspoken in its criticism of the Islamist-shaded constitution, saying it has “reproduced authoritarianism”.

    Every single premise of Von Der Leyen’s statement as quoted above is questionable.

    Its conclusions are absurd.

    Why do we start by picking out the ancient Christian redoubt of Maaloula? This frame of reference helps to show how far back in time the communities of modern-day “Syria” go, as well as Cockburn’s in-person familiarity with their inheritors’ attempts to survive in the horrible present. Writing back in 2012,  Cockburn concluded a piece for the Independent by observing that “the sufferings of the Christians of Syria are no worse than those of the Muslims, but they feel that whatever the outcome of the Civil War, their future will most likely be worse than their past.”  The omens, he felt were not good. He was right.

    In Syria, they seldom are. This Post-Ottoman, Post-French mandate state goes back to 1945 in its current form. Will it even continue to exist in another few years? The massacres now taking place in Latakia, Cockburn would write a few days after our conversation, are being “ignored”, but “may shape the Middle East”. (iPaper, March 15)

    As the second part of the conversation in this episode outlines, European leaders and their friends are prone to magical thinking in the matter of their proximate crises as well as distant. In recent coverage on Ukraine for the iPaper, Cockburn has argued that “Western governments, media and PR firms” have crafted a depiction of the conflict as a replay of WW2. In this vision, “compromise was ruled out as practical policy, meaning that the war could only end with a Ukrainian victory and Russian capitulation – though nobody seriously believed this was going to happen since… the failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023.” In an echo of that argument, Cockburn’s contemporary Peter Hitchens stated, in an interview in Slovakia’s Standard magazine:

    “The whole of the Western world has been told things about Ukraine which make it very difficult for a compromised peace.”

    On grave matters of peace and war, European leaders are failing to adopt a realistic vision, concludes Cockburn.

    This is something of an understatement.

    With Europeans apparently determined to tool up for armies that don’t exist (and would be unlikely to have much fighting morale even if they did) and prone to praising the emergence of “progressive” states that have all the long-term prospects of a snowman in the Sinai, we are looking at a new era of wishful, read delusional thinking.

    A final note:

    This conversation with Patrick Cockburn is his second with Cassandra Voices. One year ago, Patrick was our very first guest. Back then we mostly spoke about his father Claud, the subject of a new biography by his Cork-born son. This time, we jump to more familiar terrain: the battlefields of the present day, Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza. Cockburn once praised his late friend Robert Fisk as a “historian of the present”. Like Fisk, Cockburn began in Ireland, then spent decades doing mostly Middle-east-based journalism, mostly in person. This meant cultivating friendships, survival skills and a sense of discernment for the historical roots of ongoing events. More sedentary now than, say, the start of the Syrian Civil War 14 years ago, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (both of which he covered while on the ground), he is better placed than most to share useful perspectives on far-off theaters of fighting. We’re honored to have him back.

  • Electronic Music: ‘stepping into a space of anticipation’

    I play electronic music, experimental ambient sets or hypnotic techno sets. It’s exciting to begin a set, stepping into a space of anticipation. The audience doesn’t know what’s to come, nor do I. I start with something and if I’m lucky, I catch them – they follow me. Together, we create a journey in the very moment. I feel the concentration in the room, the energy shifting, and I adapt, choosing the next track, deciding when to layer it on the other, manipulating the tonality, intensity and speed of the track, laying the foundation stones for the subsequent trip…

    It needs a little while to let go of the rest of life, of everyday thoughts, to feel into yourself with your eyes closed and then – finally to dissolve in the darkness accompanied by flashes of coloured light, immersed in the mass of moving bodies. You become part of the whole, swaying as one, moving uniformly, like a vast, flowing, breathing organism – connected here on the dancefloor where identity dissolves and perception reshapes itself: time blurs, bodies merge, the individual dissipates into the collective.

    It can be truly spiritual. In this experience, you forget yourself entirely, your body, your thoughts, your presence. You let go of everything. You don’t think, you just feel, you follow, you become. Like water you adapt, you yield, you move with the currents, faster, slower, dissolving into rhythm, merging with vibration. Water is fluid, like identity, layered, ever-changing, in a constant process of becoming. It carries both clarity and ambiguity, flowing freely yet shaped by its surroundings, suspended between movement and stillness. Boundaries shift, the line between self and environment blurs. You are neither fixed nor defined; you are in motion, open to change. Everything is allowed, everything can happen.

    Image: Olena Goldman

    These are transitional moments, where structure dissolves and individuals arrive at a threshold where identity is fluid and communal experience transcends social hierarchies. This is how Victor Turner describes rituals (1969). The dancefloor, much like a ritual space where music dictates movement, where sound sculpts space, is where a new kind of freedom emerges. It is a place outside of everyday roles, outside of expectations, where for a moment, nothing is fixed. Turner speaks of liminality, of states in which the usual order is suspended, and something new can take shape. That is exactly what happens here: identities blur, connections form in ways they wouldn’t elsewhere, and everything feels open, undefined, possible.

    It is rare to be carried away like that. It’s magical. Unpredictable and each time original. Both the DJ and the audience are surprised, overwhelmed, grateful for this truly sacred moment of presence and synchronization. A fleeting peace of mind.

    This dissolving is in the purest sense meditative – also for the DJ. A set is never just their own, it is co-created, woven together in the moment, unique, ephemeral, unrepeatable. The DJ is not a solitary figure but a responsive entity, deeply intertwined with the audience. They do not dictate the atmosphere, they translate and amplify it and therefore have to be deeply concentrated. The energy in the room is never the same, it is dependent on the sound system, the light, the composition of people, their level of awareness of the fact that everything contributes to the situation, the experience. And it depends on the kind of space that is given. Can people trust, do they feel safe, are they open, do they respect? The energy changes constantly and the DJ has to sense these shifts, adapting to them in real-time, building, withholding, intensifying, releasing. DJs are looked at as in charge, they are in a power position but it is much more a collaborative, spontaneous cooperation of the delicate, symbiotic relationship between the DJ and the crowd. Everything is a shared responsibility: every time searching for a new balance.

    Image: Francesco Paggiaro.

    We shape everything by the way we interact. And all is based on the shared possession and experience of our senses at this very moment; overlaying everything: the music we all hear.

    Techno is a pulse, a steady bum bum bum bum, as Underdog Electronic Music School puts it in words in their YouTube Video “The Ten Rules of Techno“. The kick, four-on-the-floor or broken-up, lays the foundation, a force that grounds everything in 1, 2, 3, 4… But this is not rigid. Techno moves, it steers, it teases. The drum machine drives the sweat, bouncing off rumbles, basslines, toms, syncopations pull against, making you want to move while acid synths carve out liquid, geometrically branching paths that make you follow in unknown heights and depths. It is simultaneity, the parallel pursuit of different sequences, complexly layered, sometimes offset, mixed up, chaotic. Then there is the play between fullness and emptiness, it’s a game of tension and release, build things, fill things, scoop it up, scoop it up and then drop it: release back into simplicity or – into silence. Suddenly.

    It is an adventure, fluid, unpredictable. The presence becomes an experience: to dive into the sound, to let it carry you, beyond thought, into the here and now, into somewhere in space, into a dark forest deep within yourself, and then back into this room where you stand among others, feeling their presence, their nearness. You sense they are on the same journey. Your breathing synchronizes, heartbeats align. You are connected, finally, existing together, in this fleeting moment of peace. Finally.

    The British anthropologist and music journalist Simon Reynolds explores this idea in Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (1998), where he describes techno not as a genre built on melody or lyrics, but as something far more primal: a textural experience, a hypnotic layering of sound that dissolves the listener into a state of flow. He argues that techno’s essence lies in its ability to bypass conventional musical structures and instead operate on a deeply physical and neurological level – music that is felt rather than merely heard – an architecture of sound where basslines function like heartbeats, where synth waves stretch and contract like breath, where the absence of words opens space for unfiltered emotion.

    Music moves us, sooner or later, inevitably. We cannot resist, it happens naturally, subconsciously. It affects us on a fundamental level. It is human to be touched by music. And it is not just emotional, it is also physical. The sound waves go through our bodies, we shiver. The beat carries us forward, makes us move, quickening our breath, accelerating our heartbeats, making us sweat. We are hypnotized by the repetitive patterns, captivated, entranced, seized, our entire brain capacity taken up by it. It is uncontrollable. And it is so, so sweet to surrender to the power of sound, to let go, to dissolve into the collective moment, open and unguarded. This shared experience, this mutual surrender, this collective awareness of the here and now, it unites. It brings people together. It is a purely human experience, perhaps the most human experience. In that moment, you are stripped back to your essence, reduced to your body, to sensation, to togetherness, regardless of age, origin, social background, gender, or religion, it is unity, and that is incredibly valuable. It brings peace. It is gratitude, fulfillment. It reminds you that you are enough – all of us, together, each of us individually, free from pressure, from expectations, from obligations, from time, from fear. You do not have to do anything. You just are. And you are part of something vast, something beautiful.

    Image: Mark Angelo Sampan,

    Techno pulses through bodies, vibrating between structure and chaos, identity and anonymity, self and collective. Its relentless repetition, its resistance to narrative, creates an experience that is both deeply personal and entirely communal. A space where bodies are freed from definition, where identity becomes a shifting echo of sound and sensation. Here, structure collapses not into chaos, but into something more elusive: a moment outside of time, a fleeting immersion into something beyond the self. You follow the music, and you do not know where it will take you. That is trust. To listen to, to dance to, to experience techno is to let go, to be carried, to become rhythm. It is freedom.

    Feature Image of the author by Saskia Schramm