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  • Make Greenland Great

    In his last great novel The Plot Against America (2004) Philp Roth posited plausible circumstances where President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the great social democrat, could be dislodged by the proto-fascist Charles Lindbergh.

    Sadly, a failure to understand history bedevils our time. We have sleepwalked into a similar scenario after the last U.S. Presidential election. Now I fear it is too late. A fascist leader appears to have been re-elected President.

    In 1935, as much of Europe was succumbing to fascism, Upton Sinclair penned his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here in which Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip enters the presidential election campaign on a populist platform. He promises to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, offering each citizen $5,000 per year. Portraying himself as a champion of ‘the forgotten man’ and ‘traditional’ American values, Windrip defeats incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, and then goes on to beat his Republican opponent.

    It can happen here and now. Trump is emblematic of how, worldwide, a new form of corporate fascism, or corporate communism, has become dominant. So let us examine the initial pronouncements.

    Inauguration Day

    What did his flurry of executive orders mean, apart from braggadocio and sabre rattling? This is quite apart from the caveat that executive decrees short-circuiting the legislative process are the hallmarks of fascism, as Carl Schmidt the legendary jurist argued. American democracy appears to be in tatters.

    In an inaugural address that was remarkably coherent and lucid in conceptual terms, Trump invoked President McKinley (1897-1901). The implications are clear. McKinley colonised Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Cuba, and was also hostile to global cooperation.

    So, resignations from the admittedly corrupt WHO and the revocation of the Paris Climate Change Agreement are the first two steps. Now, all directly or indirectly funded citadels of world governance are under siege if they oppose or sanction American interests.

    Danish author Peter Høeg penned a famous bestselling book Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1982) about Greenland and more precisely the Danish government’s treatment of the indigenous Inuit community The engine of the plot is the concealment of a state secret: a lethal meteorite and a parasitic worm that serves as an existential threat. The ruling Danes are not portrayed sympathetically with respect to Greenlanders. Indeed, according to a recent poll Greenlanders aspire for autonomy, but not another external coloniser.

    Yet Donal Trump wants Greenland and seems prepared to invade. Thus, he sent his son to a resort in the island’s most populous town Neuk armed with the slogans about making Greenland great. The thought did occur that Inviting homeless people into a 4-star hotel, albeit accidentally, is a policy he could replicate in his domestic policies, though I doubt he will.  The whole staged visit was of course bellicose posturing, and the shape of things to come.

    Why then the sudden interest? Well, it’s not so sudden frankly, but it’s most revealing. The interest stems from what is apparent in the Trump regime’s agenda: a zero-sum game of competition between nation states, leading to a global competition for diminishing resources. Texan and indeed Arabian oil supply may run dry and is certainly being exhausted at current consumption rates.

    Greenland is terra nullius or virgin territory, unspoiled in one crucial respect. It is among the last outposts where the riches of the earth can be extracted – to enrich the few and destroy the planet. More to the point, it will soon be exploitable given that climate change is overwhelmingly likely to cause the glaciers to melt.

    Black Gold

    Oil! (1927) is the title of Upton Sinclair’s epic novel about American greed, which was adapted into the film There Will Be Blood (2007). Today, American capitalist colonialism wants not just Greenland, but the Northern Territories of Canada. Drill Baby Drill.

    The Northern Territories of Canada are also an Arctic landmass of untapped resources. In his speech, he specifically mentioned tariffs – incidentally also a Mckinley policy – and tariffs were only just averted from coming into force against Canada and Mexico. China was also hit with retaliatory measures. Yet, it is the plain people of America who voted for him who will pay the bill, only after he has fired half the federal government.

    Thus, invocation of McKinley in his speech is also the invocation of a solid hard currency President that is for the few, not the many.

    The concept in international law of domestic jurisdiction is to respect national sovereignty, and only where there have been systematic human rights abuses to interfere in the domain reserve of a state. The justification of a breach of an obligation ergo omnes or a Crime Against Humanity is, ideally, filtered and ratified by the U.N.. This has often occurred in a bogus fashion, such as the dodgy dossier that led to the Bush-Blair war on Iraq. Trump also wants oil, but is going about it in a different way.

    So, he will not accept any international sanction or control, and will move with autocratic impunity. Play ball or we will invade, or refuse to recognise the UN, or perhaps force it to decamp from New York. Should the General Assembly object to any of this it may simply be liquidated. The statement above might seem alarmist but there are few checks and balances left.

    That seems to me to be what is happening is with the division of the world into trading blocs or sectors. Trump does not want to spend hard dollars on wasteful wars in the Ukraine or Gaza but that is not to say he gives a rat’s arse about human rights. Instead, he aims to establish a profit-driven North American confederation, to include Canada and Greenland, and, of course, reclaim the revenue of American businesses.

    Hi ally, or puppet master, Elon Musk, also has limited respect for national sovereignty, but a different mechanism of attack. He destabilizes through funding political actors such as the ADF in Germany and agitates online against the Starmer administration.

    America wants pliant co-operative regimes, with Musk acting as a modern-day Kissinger-without-portfolio. Trump has no doubt suspended the ban on Tik Tok to allow his bestie to buy it up and pollute the minds of an entire generation. This is Freedom of Expression if we will tell you what to say.

    ICE and Department of Homeland Security agents detaining a man.

    Ethnic Cleansing

    We will also see de facto ethnic cleansing, as in his proposal that two million Gazans should vacate their land to make way for a new Riviera. Also, the removal of undesirable aliens, even those for whom America is a birthright, and the development of a Mexican Iron Curtain.

    The new form of cleansing is akin to the McCarthyite Red Scare, given the removal of employment rights of those who are opposed to his interests and thus by definition seditious. Most of this action will be upheld by a compliant and docile judiciary. In short federal employees with even a trace of Red will be summarily dismissed.

    And what of Ireland? The extension of American trade will surely lead to the decamping of multinational corporations. American hedge funds already enjoy a dominant interest in our domestic housing market. Nevertheless, I predict tariffs will be employed against Ireland and Europe if regimes are less than favourable towards the United States.

    Further, the entire liberal WOKE agenda, which in my view has been deeply troublesome and counterproductive, is being dismantled. ‘His Christians’, as he calls them, form the Bible Belt will see a return to very traditional female and male roles. This is of course after his Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. His Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has very extreme views on homosexuality, so watch this space.

    There were also pardons for far-right protestors after he lost the last election, and a promised investment in more lethal injections and an escalation of the death penalty. The previous few years have seen the US Supreme Court block off appeals for ineffective assistance of Counsel. One senses that his emergency powers remit of executive action will not be confined to the Mexican border, but the legislative remit will be much wider and internal, and will be upheld by SCOTUS.

    It is apparent that the worldwide human rights post-Second World War consensus is over save for a few enclaves. State authoritarianism – with his acolytes in Argentina and Italy present at the inauguration – will now increase at a rapid pace.

    More fundamentally, if American democracy doesn’t survive this then all democracies are threatened. We all contract pneumonia, politically speaking, when they catch a cold.

    Karl Kraus

    The legendary Austrian journalist Karl Kraus died in 1936 after editing Die Fackel for thirty-seven years, shortly after Hitlers ascension to power in Germany. At the height of collapse, and after a self-enforced interregnum of nine months he published one last edition that included the extended essay ‘The Third Walpurgis Night’.

    The essential argument is that with their devotion to palaver and tactics, the Social Democrats facilitated Hitlers rise. He despaired at their belief that ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss as anything other than Hitler was needed. Well, the lunacy of liberal political correctness and their failure to focus on real issues facilitated misguided Populism.

    The opening paragraph of the extended essay is devastating in its implications for today:

    As to Hitler, I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly—but mistakenly—expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor…

    The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht, as Patrick Healy has suggested, is that satire should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility – use of mockery, insult, indignation etc. – but also to its fusion with the voice of the moralist, employing the skill of a standup comic. The word has also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together. However, just as with Hitler, so with Trump, we are now beyond satire. At one level we must remain silent, or use words sparingly.

    Kraus, in his masterly analysis of Goebbels (a precursor to Musk), accepts that so deeply clever and embedded is the propaganda – and the appearance of culture and progress – that we forget that they intend to do what they are going to do.

    The reaction to the camp fascist Nazi salute by Musk is a clear indication that seriously cultivated people should not take these barbarians seriously, but they ought to be taken seriously, as globally, in a state of collective hysteria, people are voting for them into office. So, is it that we, the civilised, are no longer to be taken seriously?

    Watching this shit show unfold is like being the Isherwood figure in the film Cabaret at the German been garden as he hears a version of the Horst Wessel being sung.

    Trump, unlike nativistic Greenlanders, wants ownership of land and people’s minds, but in a very unstable situation there is an alternative. Remember what happened to President Mckinley.

  • My Mother (at the Time)

    This is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, where host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy.

    In a suburb of Tokyo, sometime in the future, a Japanese scholar of Irish literature is studying an obscure text. He has heard of it through a Joycean friend. The work is Beyond the Pale, an immersion into the mind of a character not unlike its author, Patrick Healy, who was an Irish critic and philosopher who spent much of his life in Amsterdam. The whole heavy volume of Beyond the Pale sits before him. It is a little daunting.

    Who is Patrick Healy?  The Japanese scholar has been finding out, bit by bit. Reliable information is hard to find.

    Some of this is by design. Some of it because of the cruelty (or at least indifference) of the writer’s early fate. Healy was a gifted child, but born to an unmarried mother in postwar Ireland, and thus was sent to foster families and to the care of various “Sisters” of the church.

    The Japanese scholar has been able to locate a separate, early text published by Healy back  in 1985, called Up in the Air and Down. It is a short novella, a stream of consciousness spoken from the point of view of a child living through such a reality. Near the start of this work he reads:

    I didn’t have a mummy or daddy because they died just like one of the cats who was Snowy’s mammy and now I remember I cried because the cat would never come back (p.10).

    The Japanese scholar likes this detail of the cat. However, he already knows this account of the parents may be an untruth told to the boy narrator, if the character can be said to closely match the real Healy. He finds more of this apparent attempt to placate and to steer the boy’s thinking on the next page:

    Sister was my mammy now and so were all the big girls and I was lucky because I had lots of mammies and daddies and Sister said that some little boys and girls have only one and I had lots and I should be very happy and that these two nice people who were going to be my mummy and daddy are waiting for their new boy and I wasn’t to be afraid and they lived far away but we would see them soon, but I wanted to go back and play and why was Sister taking me away and not being my mammy anymore, maybe Sister was going to heaven too, and I was afraid. (ps. 10-11)

    The short book ends with the boy narrator affirming his existence in the celestial terms of his day, showing his need for play and exploration:

    I am not a secret because God knows who I am even when I play with the yo-yo that goes Up in the Air and Down. (p.55)

    All of this is important because the huge, late-life opus the Japanese Joycean will now begin to study is likewise framed around a life in 20th century Ireland. A growing up given form by a dislocation of parenthood, and an attempt to seize upon a renewed existence in young adulthood, through language and music and sensation.

    The Japanese scholar knows that the Irish cultural output of books and films addressing the plight of “fallen” women who were separated from their offspring and often pressed into misery and forced labour in laundries and convents has been substantial. Yet here it is: a little-known testament by someone who emerged from such circumstances and sought to form his own mind, rather than let it be formed negatively by them. Not directly concerned with the young boy’s voice, it instead forms an internal, semi-conscious portrait of the man who emerged, grasping life through an adoration of words and ideas.

    The Japanese scholar begins to read Beyond the Pale, and he can hear the melodies of Healy’s voice, which he already knows from his epic recording of Finnegan’s Wake. It thrills him that this Joyce-evoking book begins with an unexpected burst of Japanese words: as the “story” (if it is a story) meanders out into existence, we encounter a young Irish lad being tutored in Japanese by a “Viscount Taffe”, who seems to be simultaneously preparing a beef consommé; a consommé “devoutly to be wished.”

    Unlike this hypothetical Japanese scholar, in the summer of 2024 I had the opportunity to meet Patrick Healy, in Amsterdam, where he was completing work on Beyond the Pale in a cavernous apartment looking like the workshop of an ancient Egyptian priest. Confined there during Amsterdam’s hard lockdowns, he had begun to submerge more deeply in his memories.  This was something of an intimidating foray into his world for me, at first. I had heard stories, including from my own father, and other intellectually-minded people of their generation, about this brilliant and erudite figure. Perhaps more than a little rogueish, he would sit in Bewley’s in 1980s Dublin and mesmerise them all with his sophistry. The reputation for seduction and for cunning behaviour was reinforced for the Healy of that long ago time by many. Yet his life in the meantime, hard to unwind and with very little detail available, made more sense through the encounter with him and with his work. He had invented a career for himself unlike those of his peers: as a scholar he spent significant time in Germany and German archives, mastering that language, eventually settling in Holland where he taught at the university of Delft. HIs links to Ireland were kept in tenuous health over the years. He was a very close friend of the barrister and historian Frank Callanan, also a personal friend, who had sadly passed away unexpectedly in 2021.

    Healy—who once performed a read through and recording of Finnegan’s Wake in the early 90s, getting through the whole thing in four days—has a famously fine voice.

    Selections from our affable 3-day conversation in Amsterdam follow here. After, you may access the bonus episode to hear more of Patrick reading at length from Beyond the Pale. Don’t worry about the Ariadne’s thread of the story, if there is one. Just try to hear the Irish soul that is alive in his voice. This is, I feel, the best way to savor the hidden currents and magical word play that Healy has worked into his text.

    Here below are two testimonials from writer and journalist Bridget Hourican and human rights lawyer David Langwallner

    Bridget Hourican

    I’ve been haunted by a poem of Patrick Healy’s called ‘Stoic Fire’ since I read it maybe ten years ago. The title, and as I recall it, the poem itself, is a kind of oxymoron because fire is passionate, a conflagration, and stoicism is dispassionate, quietly enduring. I think stoic fire describes Patrick.

    He is poet, visual artist, art critic, translator, philosopher of aesthetics and novelist. Before he was all those, he was – I’m told reliably by everyone who was there then – the best debater in UCD and Trinity (he attended both). His heckles were legendary, his voice astonishing. Reviewing his translation of Karl Kraus’s epic play ‘Last Days of Mankind’, Eileen Battersby shrewdly noted that ‘Healy’s musicality and feel for the rhythms of speech… possibly explains why his Kraus is so vibrant’. Perhaps the greatest use of his voice is his recording of Finnegans Wake, which my late husband, Frank Callanan told me, he listened to right through one night with Margaret O’Callaghan, and it left them shattered, delirious, in tears, ecstatic. I believe this was one of the things that spurred Frank to write his book on Joyce.

    Luke Sheehan introduced me to podcasts, more or less. Before he (or anyone) was making podcasts, he was seeking out unusual and arcane material and people. He would come back and recount his findings in ways that were unanticipated, circuitous, marvellously detailed (by marvellous I mean the detail was not where you would expect it) and funny, always very funny. Luke is also poet, critic and short-story writer but I’ve always thought his great gift was for oral narratives (or as we now call them, podcasts).

    Although I know both of them, I’m not quite sure how Luke tracked Patrick down and got him on the record, but what a fabulous thing that he has done this, and that we have Patrick’s voice telling his story and exploring his ideas, in this immensely subtle and moving curation by Luke. I noticed, very early on when I was with Frank, that every time he mentioned Patrick’s name, someone would whip round and demand with fierce urgency ‘Patrick Healy? where is he?’  It is like Luke to have acted on his own fierce urgency and brought us this.

    David Langwallner

    I am very pleased that Luke Sheehan is doing this podcast on Patrick Healey. From the late 1970’s through the late 1980’s  often in great penury he was one of the most outstanding cultural figures in Dublin. A winner of The Irish Times debating competition as he stresses as an individual where he became the kind of fool to the King Lears of his contemporaries.  Mostly dead.
    He is the greatest conversationalist and cafe side philosopher I have ever encountered and that includes the jurist Ronald Dworkin.
    He is man of Olympian intellect and great personal grace charm and civility which the Dutch through his architecture Professorship have recognized. The loss was Irelands. He was also a great mentor to me and when he played Oscar Wilde to my playing Edwards Carson in a reenactment of the trial of Oscar Wilde strange to say now with David Norris and Alice Glynn as expert witnesses he queues to the graduate memorial building extended the full extent of Westmoreland street. 
    In this trial Oscar won and so has Patrick! 
    Since then an interest we very much share in common and crucial to our times he has become an expert in the Viennese intellectuals of the Weimar Repubic most noticeable Karl Krauss.
    He is the last of great old Dublin Joycean in fact and one hopes his new book gets the attention he richly deserves.
    Otherwise he will be most upset.

  • The Secondary World

    Christopher Tolkien, referring to his father, defined what J.R.R. called his ‘secondary world.’ He said ‘it is a world that cannot be seen, it cannot be found, it exists only in the mind.’[i] He goes on to say for many people when they first realise the existence of this place, this secondary world, they find the experience to be a very delightful thing.

    This desire for a secondary world, if not perhaps intrinsic to every individual, is intrinsic to humankind. That is to say this relationship with the secondary world goes back to ornate prehistoric burial sites. It is ghosts and banshees; it is gods and elves. It is found in the art of Blake and the science of dreams. The Hellenic culture, among the most advanced societies of the ancient world, created a secondary world on top of an actual mountain, which they then honoured and worshipped. The volcanoes, the rivers, the sky, the sea, the wine, each aspect of the tangible world endowed with its own God, its own secondary being. Consequently, belief in this secondary world manufactured the temples. This poses the question: what would the world be like if no one ever had conceived of a secondary world? We can say if this were the case there never would have been the burning of a witch, and certainly no heavens and hells beyond. Is our world, our universe even, not sufficient at times for our complicated brains? Newton was an alchemist, and Einstein sourced many of his breakthroughs from his imagination, which suggests a scientist of pure reason can also be subject to fantasy.

    Did the secondary world begin with the people who sat around the first fires? Jung thought so, but in reality we can’t know – we would have to ask them, or at least study their behaviour to know for certain. As with all history where there is no evidence at all, there is only the sound of the wind. Where there is scant evidence, we are obliged to speculate and theorise. In this spirit of conjecture, I would suggest the secondary world is a form of reality. It would be useful to make a distinction at this point between what can be solely attributed to the imagination, and neurological shifts that can occur under the influence of drugs and hallucinogens in particular. The world of the imagination, where William Blake should be interpreted, does not in of itself need intoxicants. It is its own entity. This leads to another question: is what is imagined in the mind real, or is it unverifiable? When does the imaginary become reality? If I imagine a story and then write it down, I have worked to bring the imaginary into the world of reality. But what if I just keep it in my mind? Does this mean it wouldn’t be real? What is real in one person’s mind that cannot be detected by others, is of course often interpreted as madness.

    To William Blake, the secondary world could be thought of as the real first world, that is the world perceived through the senses, because he perceived the secondary world with his senses. When he was a boy, he witnessed the spirit of his brother Robert rise out of his dead body at their house in Soho and stated categorically the apparition was clapping for joy. He watched angels illuminating the boughs at Peckham Rye. Did Blake have a condition akin to synaesthesia? What modern medical prognosis can we make? Perhaps the most scientific explanation would be that to some people the secondary world is reality itself. We can however say with absolute certainty that Blake would have dismissed any scientific analysis of the imagination. Reason cannot bound the imagination.

    Is there a relationship between the unconscious and the imagination in association with the secondary world? According to the basics of psychoanalysis, the unconscious mind is always unconscious, but it can be perceived through dreams. Is there a connection between Freud and Jung through Blake’s oeuvre? Not conspicuously. Blake, or indeed any artist, should not be attempted to be understood through the lens of science. It would be like turning Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto into a formula. It strikes me that no one has ever even attempted to turn the source of art into an equation for good reason.

    Tolkien’s secondary world lives within our imagination. Perhaps his greatest gift was the extraordinary way he was able to make this secondary world so believable for so many. Remember, there is moon and starlight, as well as cheese and salted pork and tobacco and pipes, in the imaginary world he invented. In this instance the primary world has been superimposed on the secondary world, or the other way around.

    In medieval England there was the ‘land of Cockaigne’ an imaginary land of plenty. According to one source ‘Cockaigne was a ‘medieval peasant’s dream, offering relief from backbreaking labour and the daily struggle for meagre food.’[ii] This may provide an insight into the function of the secondary world. Necessary escapism. Or as Tolkien put it, escapism in it’s true meaning, ‘as of a man getting out of prison.’ This also may provide an answer as to why the desire for the secondary world is not universal, simply because there are many among us who do not wish to escape the primary world. They are more than happy where they are, but this is not to say those who seek the secondary world are somehow inherently unhappy. It can be invoked simply for the joy of the thing, like a magic trick. Think of Alice in Wonderland, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This brings up the subject of our agency through our imaginations and the effect this has upon the world itself and ourselves. Scrying, palm reading, divination, horoscopes and so on. These are attempts to impose our own agency into the supernatural world that evidentially doesn’t exist. The secondary world is distinct from hocus pocus and bogus truth claims, but its claim to existence does, however, hinge on the power of the imagination.

    William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Terence McKenna and memorably Aldous Huxley experimented with Ayahuasca, all giving vivid accounts of a world that hides behind a veil. This other plain, or higher state of consciousness is not what Tolkien meant by the secondary world. The secondary world is not drug-induced. It is a state that can be accessed by all people. It is the sober world of the imagination, of fantasy, that being the secondary world in our senses, in the reality we have evolved.

    It is a mistake to compartmentalise the secondary world solely into the world of fantasy but that the secondary world is a function of fiction is valid. In other words, if it is based on real events, it is biographical. As mentioned, Einstein’s major breakthroughs in science were sourced from his imagination and this is also partly true of Newton. But when Einstein imagined the movements of space time as he looked at the church clock from the window of a tram, had he entered the secondary world, or was he simply using his imagination? Perhaps we can deem the secondary world as a desire for fiction and escapism rather than fact and truth, but fiction is perhaps the best way we have to understand truth. And here lies the riddle.

    Arguably, the imagination has an evolutionary function. To imagine a possible attack by wolves or bears out in the forest was likely extremely useful. It may in fact be the reason we dominate the animal kingdom. Our imaginations work in tandem wit reason in the battle for survival. It is the duality and relationship between imagination and reason which must be explored when trying to understand the secondary world, which, once discovered, remains a very delightful thing.

    Featured Image: ‘Beatrice’ by William Blake from Illustrations to Dante – The Divine Comedy (1824).

    [i] JRR Tolkien – A study of the maker of Middle Earth

    [ii] “New York Public Library: Utopia”. Utopia.nypl.org. Archived from the original on 2012-07-16. Retrieved 2012-10-02.

  • Ode to the Sausage Roll

    In George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up For Air, at the beginning of chapter 4, issue is taken with substandard food products, which do not taste like the product promoted and, indeed, taste like something else:

    At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and—Christ!

    I can’t honestly say that I’d expected the thing to have a pleasant taste. I’d expected it to taste of nothing, like the roll. But this—well, it was quite an experience. Let me try and describe it to you.

    The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.

    This brings me to mass-produced sausage rolls. We have been socially engineered to accept inferior products due to being ‘always on the go’ and ‘eating on the hoof.’ Thus one may enter a high-street establishment – the name of which I will not mention here – to purchase one of their sausage rolls in an act to stave off the morning hunger.

    Yet, it is a tube of pink cooked sludge – faintly reminiscent of pork –encompassed in a uniform pastry that is almost parcel-tight; a small, perfectly wrapped parcel.

    Imagine venturing into the post office and asking the lady behind the counter,

    ‘Can I post this sausage roll to Scandinavia here, please?’ With a stamp attached to one corner and a Sharpie scrawl to its destination. Would a mass-produced sausage roll make it in one piece to say, Gothenburg?

    I have eaten them.

    In a pinch.

    Don’t get me started on their bean thingy, which gives me rising acid reflux like molten lava in the chambers and corridors of the heart.

    The problem is with quality, which the main protagonist is concerned with in Robert M. Pirsig’s modern, philosophical treatise work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.

    Quality has dissipated due to mass-produced products.

    I remember in Botanic, Belfast, on the city side of the small hill, there was a bakery beside a laundrette. This was twenty-odd years ago. I remember they sold great sausage rolls. Inside, along with the pork meat was a little chopped-up white onion. The flaky, buttery pastry was fresh and delicious. A wee drop of red or brown sauce and I was in foodie heaven. The staff were friendly locals, and I recall the hearty chatter and warmth of the welcome. That bakery is long gone. I am unsure of its name now, which escapes me. Sadly.

    Wee bakeries – the one on Chapel Lane, city centre Belfast – served great homemade vegetable soup and sausage rolls. And Fifteens. Oh, yes.

    There was one near The Arches, East Belfast, and I was in one day as the baker was letting warm soda farls clatter onto the baking table. They were still steaming warm, fresh from the oven. I wanted to hit one with a drop of butter and strawberry jam, taken with a mug of tea. Who hasn’t wanted a fresh soda farl with crumbed ham, cheese, and tomato? Or a soda farl made with treacle? Or with Indian cornmeal?

    Years later, I would work with very that baker during nightshifts in a homeless hostel – how strange being in Belfast is at times, an almost Jungian synchronicity on the one hand, but due to the size of the city, perhaps no happenstance at all. He told me about the early morning starts and the wee bakery on the Woodstock Road, the cramped workspace above the shop. The lone baker works away in the early morning, while patrons sleep deeply through the morning darkness. Hard, honest graft.

    In 2001, I recall being in Sallynoggin, Dublin. I was labouring for a plasterer at the time. We were in Dublin, travelling up and down from the North over the course of a month or so, and in a Spar, I saw chicken-filet burgers – proper ones, bread-chicken-filet burgers with lettuce and tomato – and they looked delicious. There were also big sausage rolls with grated cheese in them, so when you warmed them up, they created an unctuous cheesy goodness with the meat and pastry. Oh my.

    When we enter a reality of accepting inferior products, we become ‘modified’ slaves to the corporate dominion and accept the way things are…

    I don’t accept.

    It’s easy to call into a high-street establishment without thinking.

    It takes a bit of choice to make a better decision to opt for a better product to consume.

    The other day, I was in a wee ‘local’ bakery and had a sausage roll with a drop of red sauce and a hot cup of tea; on a cold January day, it hit the spot. I left refreshed and warm, entering the biting, frosty air, wrapped up in my coat as I trudged home.

    You could support the local bakery. Goodness knows they need it.

  • Poem: ‘If I Could Only’

    If I Could Only

    I dream of roses blooming in the sky,
    of boys with guns, of body parts slung
    over broken toys in some unholy rite.
    And through mind-searing noise, I hear
    the  wail of mothers keening for their young.
    I dream of hell.

    But when dawn breaks,
    I wake to find that, silently,
    a veil of snow has fallen in the night.
    No severed limbs,
    no sightless, disembodied faces.
    Just snow.
    Its cooling calm fills all the small, slight
    spaces where, yesterday, deep shadows
    seized the waning light.

    No bombs. No blood.
    Here every twig is dressed in vestal white;
    and even while the cold-eyed, brooding
    dawn still dawdles into day, the sky is bright
    with snow, caught by its primal purity –
    the indrawn hush.
    This lustrous, arcane alchemy:
    the mint-ness of a clean-wiped slate.
    It seems a consecration, soft as
    the laying on of hands. It bears the grace
    of prayer – an urgent dream for respite
    everywhere.

    If I could only catch it up, reach out
    and gather in this white of new-washed
    sheets, flung over fields and trees;
    garner it in, then loose it on the scorching,
    hope-burned world. Stifle the fires and guns,
    the screaming drones. Re-write the
    countless stolen, rubbled lives.

    If I could only soothe this quenching
    silence over all the weeping and the
    wounds; make real this gift of new
    beginning. Of absolution.
    This unflawed state of grace.
    If I could only.

    Feature Image: Francesco Goya, Y son fieras (And they are fierce or And they fight like wild beasts), c. 1810.

  • Scratch That: Taylor Swift is a Dime-Store Novelist

    The poet Haley Hodges has recently written a winsome essay for Cassandra Voices claiming that the Galactic Empress, Her Swiftiness, Queen of Ubiquity, is our “greatest confessional poet.” Let’s leave aside that Tay-Tay isn’t a poet—that song-writing and poetry-writing are different games with different rules—she is certainly a confessional, and one in the terms Hodges outlines. So far, so good. But I want to take issue with the hyperbolic praise in which that essay bathes the Golden Girl.

    One has, of course, to account for her success, and I do so by thinking of her as some latter-day Tennyson striding into the enormous gap left in literature by the passing of the Romantics. He became, despite his frequent mediocrity, the national poet simply because there was nothing else around—in much the same way that whatever show aired after Seinfeld in the era of broadcast television was bound to be popular simply because people couldn’t be bothered to get up and change the channel.

    So it is with Miss Swift. Despite the fact that she can barely sing, play guitar, dance, or write songs, she has somehow become our late empire’s troubadour simply because, well, it seemed like we should have one, and she was there.

    I will say, however, that she does seem to have both the sense and the good taste to enlist the talents of better musicians when she finds them as aides-de-camp. I don’t know whether there’s a real relationship here or if he’s just a hired gun, but in finding the guy from The National and letting him do his thing across a couple of her albums, she has shown shrewd awareness of the limits of her own powers. It’s just unfortunate, to me anyway, that she sings over it.

    Also in the plus column for Miss Swift is something called “vibes,” which I have on good authority is how the youngsters are measuring musical quality these days. The alternative is to measure something like albums, songs, or performances, but I do have to admit that the vibes on an album like folklore—or even the new tortured poets record—are just right. The album art and production quality are suggestive of very specific kinds of scenes, which is to say, ways of being in the world that I think most people are quite hungry for. Perhaps it’s okay that music is serving a different role for this generation than it did for previous ones. Rather than, say, producing memorable songs that one might sing out loud with friends or tap one’s foot to in bars, Swift produces a kind of mood. If that mood is principally tepid, leftist, feminine revenge porn, well, what is that to me?

     

    But actually, is such a posture all that new? Take punk music, for example. How many of those records are about posture—about a certain way of being in the world—more than they are, say, about musicianship or song-craft? Rather more than a few, I’d think.

    In the end, I think of Miss Swift’s accomplishment like I think of the accomplishment of the McDonalds restauranteurs. The fare offered is easy and everywhere. It appeals to an extremely broad base of persons looking for an easy fix. There’s something uniquely American about both products. Some people, of course, may turn their noses up at both. At other times, though, it can be just the thing wanted—especially if it’s late, you’re tired, and hanging out with friends, and no one can think of where else to go.

    No. I think the more apt literary key for understanding Swiftian appeal contra confessionals is the early novelists. Here’s the oft-forgotten American critic William Dean Howells on what the youngsters were then ingesting: bad writing that does “a great deal of harm in the world.” “[Figures like Swift]” he argues, “that heroine, [have] long taught by example, if not precept, that Love, or the passion or fancy she mistook for it, was the chief interest of a life which is really concerned with a great many other things; that it was lasting in the way she knew it; that it was worthy of every sacrifice, and was a finer thing than prudence, obedience, reason; that love alone was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly in comparison with it.” (From “The Editor’s Study” 1887).

    This is precisely Swift’s contribution to world culture, in my view. She works to elevate not-even-the-state-of, but the feeling of being in love to the ne plus ultra of human experience. Her obsession with dopey, high-school boys and floppy hair made sense when she was a teenaged songwriter, appealing mostly to other teens whose concerns tend to be similarly circumscribed. But I expected—I thought we all expected—that she’d grow out of them.

    We were wrong. Her emotional range is the same. Her jealousies are the same. Her available subjects are the same now, in her 30’s, a billionaire, as they were walking past the lockers hoping to be noticed. That too would be fine; cases of arrested development are legion, except that she foists this worldview so broadly about. Thanks to her, several generations of women have been baptized into the shallow end of the kiddie pool, there to thrash about and encourage one another in their Mean Girls affectations.

    I don’t know. At the beginning of his essay, Howells cautions about reading to much into these pulp offerings: “the [art] that aims merely to entertain—the [art] that is to serious fiction as the opera buffe…and the pantomime are to the true drama—need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply.” That’s probably right. That’s what she’s doing. It’s entertainment. We don’t have to take it so seriously. It’s what Liam Gallagher of Oasis once referred to as “junk food music.”

    And there’s nothing wrong with a little junk food! This is America! Have some. Enjoy yourself. But let’s not make the category mistake of thinking it counts as cuisine.

  • Fiction: Change

    Neil went to tea break for the gossip, to find out what was going on, although he screened out the small talk about football and politics. The canteen overlooked the carpark with the smoking shed at the other end – another good source of information. It was raining the day he heard a replacement boss was coming at the end of the month. She was something new, a bit of an innovator. The rain continued as the men discussed this new woman. Some were dismissive of anyone making a difference. Neil was silent. Sometimes change was a good thing, there was certainly no point in avoiding it. He had joined the organisation five years ago after college and he still daydreamed about the future. Nothing would stop him, he smiled slightly. He had his plans and maybe this new woman would help him.

    By three thirty the rain had stopped, but the roads were flooded, pooling around the drains in large puddles. It was dark when Neil got on his bike to cycle home and, on the way, he was soaked through by unforgiving passing cars. His mother was in the kitchen boiling potatoes the windows running with condensation.

    ‘I have a lamb chop for your tea,’ she said accusingly.

    Neil took off his backpack and hung up his wet jacket in the hallway.

    ‘How’s the captain of industry?’ his father asked amiably as he passed.

    One day Neil thought, they’ll all see. He ate his dinner without comment reading The Evening Herald unenthusiastically and then went to his room. It was his belief that things would change, his life would be transformed. He was certain of it.

    The office was a large room on the third floor. Desks were mainly clustered around the windows with managers discreetly hidden behind wooden framed screens. They were the middle managers; the senior managers had their own offices filled with books and manuals of all kinds. One of them kept a full set of golf clubs leaning against a cupboard under the window while a framed picture of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca hung on the wall. Neil wasn’t even a middle manager; he was an executive assistant which meant he was a nobody. In the afternoons after lunch he let his thoughts wander to his amalgamation project. Imagine consolidating all the programmes and centralising the funding. Think of the savings! He’d done the research, and it was possible. Why had no one thought of it before? It came up at his last annual appraisal. They were in the process of discussing his Key Core Deliverables when he took out his folder with all his ideas and the costings to back them up.

    ‘That would be a matter for Corporate Affairs,’ his supervisor said primly.

    Neil shouldn’t have expected more from Amanda. She’d been in the job so long she could remember when they’d worked things out on their fingers.

    Down in the pub he complained to his mate Kevin.

    ‘No one can see the bigger picture,’ Neil said taking a gulp of his pint. ‘They’re all so busy squirrelling away at their own jobs no one puts their heads above the parapet.

    ‘Good way to get it shot off,’ Kevin said glumly.

    ‘What do you mean?’

    ‘Well if nobody does anything then nobody makes a mistake.’

    Neil had to admit to himself that Kevin was right. He was having doubts about spending much more time in the place anyway. He’d already done two competitions for promotion without success largely because Amanda had commented that he needed to improve. She said he needed more training to bring him up to speed on the organisation’s mission and objectives. It was a polite way of saying he didn’t know his job, but the idea of training wasn’t a bad one and he toyed with it over his ham and cheese sandwich in the canteen. He thought about the training courses he’d done so far in management skills and accountancy. He really needed to get a qualification like a Masters of Business Administration. Meanwhile the replacement manager was due to arrive on Monday. Rumours spread wildly, on the one hand describing her as a ruthless manipulator to a listening ear on the other. Neil decided to wait and see.

    Over the weekend he googled admissions criteria for an MBA. None of the colleges were taking applications until the spring, still it was something to aim for. He took out his C.V. It wasn’t impressive. For the last five years he had been working for Amanda in the same job. It didn’t look good, and HR had blocked his application for a transfer because of his poor performance at his appraisals. On Monday Kevin emailed him:

    ‘Just met the new boss. Her name is Stella Reynolds, and she has the corner office across the hallway from the D.G.’

    So she was a highflyer, well that could be a good thing.

    Usually Neil didn’t discuss work with his parents. Occasionally his mother asked him if he was happy at the office. It wasn’t a question he asked himself. The job wasn’t about happiness. We’re not here to enjoy ourselves Amanda was fond of saying. He had good days when he got something done and he felt satisfied for a little while. A lot of the time though the days were long and tedious. He was twenty-six and Neil didn’t consider himself young anymore. At this stage he should be getting on with his career, things should be happening! Instead he woke each morning with a heavy feeling of apprehension about the day ahead. He looked at Kevin’s email again and wondered if he was fooling himself thinking there was anything significant in her arrival. At tea break he skipped the canteen and went down to the smoking shed. Kevin was there smoking and drinking a can of Red Bull.

    ‘Everything OK?’ Neil asked cautiously.

    ‘I’ve had enough,’ Kevin blurted out. ‘I’m going to my brother in New Zealand. He says he can get me a job.’

    ‘When are you going?’

    ‘Next month.’

    So Kevin had found an escape route. Neil was envious, but also felt a surge of energy, now he really had to do something. When he got back to his desk there was a notification about a presentation on Financial Efficiency in the board room on Friday at three. Stella Reynolds was the lead speaker. So this was Neil’s opportunity to meet her. He accessed the slides for the talk and the topics covered coincided with the work he had done on amalgamation. This was it; this was his chance. Kevin once asked him if he believed in God. Neil was so surprised that for a few minutes he didn’t say anything. Then as if it was obvious he said:

    ‘No I believe in myself.’

    ‘But what if you’re not enough,’ Kevin said. ‘What if you try and try and it’s still not enough.’

    Was that why he was going to New Zealand? Was Kevin looking for God on the other side of the world? It wasn’t true that Neil just believed in himself, he also knew that luck had a large part to play in it. Even the best plan could come asunder if you were unlucky. He thought about Stella Reynolds and looked up her staff details on the HR link. She wore glasses and peered anxiously towards the camera. It wasn’t a good picture. She was probably nervous about having her photo taken. Then he looked at his own staff details. The photo wasn’t too bad, but he was wearing that striped shirt that always made him look like a wide boy. On Friday he would look his best and his most confident. If this plan didn’t work, it wouldn’t be because he didn’t make the effort.

    On Friday morning he left for the house early and noticed that the day was fine and dry. The trees were still bare and wintry, but there was a brightness in the sky that suggested spring. At his desk he took out his folder and went through his spreadsheets again. It wasn’t perfect, but he was sure some of his ideas would work. Then he looked up and saw Amanda was standing beside his desk.

    ‘Come with me,’ she said tersely.

    He followed her to a large cupboard hidden by a row of filing cabinets at the bottom of the room. She opened the cupboard to reveal a mess of documents lying higgeldy piggeldy on the shelves.

    ‘These have to be ordered by subject and date then filed away.’

    ‘But this will take days.’

    ‘Have you anything else on hand?’

    ‘I wanted to go to the presentation.’

    ‘This takes precedence.’

    Neil reminded himself that there was nothing to be gained by getting angry and set to work. He tried to work quickly, but the task was more complicated than he realised. By Friday evening he reckoned he was about halfway through. He took a break around four and went down to the smoking shed. Kevin looked up and asked the obvious question:

    ‘Where were you?’

    ‘Don’t ask.’

    ‘Let me guess, Amanda. Why not bring your stuff up to Stella Reynolds anyway? You’ve got nothing to lose.

    The two young men sat in silence for a few moments, smoke hung in the air and the light faded gradually as the day ended. They talked about New Zealand and staying in touch. There was a note of sadness in their conversation. Neil finished the filing job although it was difficult to tell if Amanda was happy with it. She was nowhere in sight when he left the room and climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. He walked slowly to the corner office, the door was open, he went through. Stella Reynolds smiled at him and said:

    ‘What can I do for you?’

    ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ Neil said.

     

  • Taylor Swift is our Greatest Confessional Poet

    Confessional poetry has had a haunted reputation from its post-war onset. The literary legacies of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and W. D. Snodgrass—widely considered ground zero for the entire confessional school—are crucified at least as frequently as they’re praised, and a healthy allergy to what contemporary teachers of writing pertly refer to as ‘trauma porn’ has seeded in the DNA of most graduate-level writing programs.

    When in 1959 Robert Lowell published Life Studies (the book of Genesis as far as confessional poetry is concerned) the idea of a poem’s author unambiguously self-identifying as the first-person ‘speaker’ was unthinkable. In intentionally shattering—and the method of shattering was simply ignoring—the public/private barrier, Lowell had done something truly new, setting off an irreversible trend in American poetry. If one wrote, before this, from autobiographical experience, it was duly air-brushed and sanitized for public consumption. Taboo subjects like mental illness and sexuality were no-fly zones. One did not say, for example,

    I hear
    my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
    as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
    I myself am hell

    Robert Lowell by Elsa Dorfman.

    The dominant and ongoing beef with confessional poetry is not entirely unreasonable. At its worst, (or I should say, perhaps, when it fails) readers are startled and not led into a world they didn’t ever wish to explore, trapped in the speaker’s garishly personal agonies and ecstasies with no window looking out, and no resonant ‘me too’ chime.

    When confessional poetry germinates exclusively at the level of the individual—meaning there is no bridge, on-ramp or springboard to universal human experience, some place of wider echoing beyond the speaker and confines of the poem—it devolves into drudgery, if dull, and trauma porn, if shocking. In this sense, confessional poetry is always a tightrope walk, a precarious style with precarious risks. But I digress.

    Fast forward to the twenty-first century. Confessional verse needed a new hero, a lone voice powerful enough to lift it from the ashes of ceaseless academic squabbling and into the hearts and ears of eager culture-consumers. When Taylor Swift released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, in April of 2024—she confirmed (with a moody noir photoshoot and a perfect cat-eye) what I’d long suspected, namely that she’s the all-American GOAT of contemporary confessional writing. Taylor’s entire deck of cards is comprised of aces. She mines herself and her experiences, writing from her own lifeblood in a way that *never* fails to merge with the shared experiences of women—indeed, of people—everywhere, and her level of celebrity has successfully inoculated her against the most common affliction ailing the Confessionals: the event of people really not wanting to know.

     

    Now, I personally contend that with a sufficient level of ingenuity and craft people will stomach just about anything, whether they should have to is another question entirely. Sexton in particular is often out-and-out lurid, but her syntax is so surprising, so fresh and deftly handled, that her brilliance is rarely the disputed thing. The disputed thing is that whatever Sexton’s level of creative prowess, readers don’t necessarily resign themselves to (let alone rush to devour) accounts of dysfunctional sexcapades or manic episodes, preferring on the whole to be spared. She never overcame, in life or death, the miasma of ‘ick’ generated by gutter content, specifically, however immaculate the form. Of course, defiant exposure of the quote unquote gutter may well have been the point, and every exhibitionist needs more than a little pluck, but you see the problem.

    If only there was someone so fascinating, so simultaneously winsome and relatable and fun and clever and coy that society’s desire to really know absolutely everything was utterly frenzied. This is precisely the empire TS half-inherited (by being a young and beautiful woman reared in the public eye) and half-created (by being a confessional song-writer so savvy it amounts to legitimate genius)

    Swift on the Speak Now World Tour in 2011.

    It must be said that Taylor has not historically descended to the Sextonian depths of genitals, slime and latrines (see “Angels of the Love Affair”) as such. Or if she DOES go there she makes it, well, hot (see in the middle of the night//in my dreams//you should see the things we do) Even her punchiest lines, say “fuck me up, Florida” are always a little sugared by a sprawling pop foundation. I do firmly believe that even if she did descend to darker depths, everyone would want to come along for the ride. Taylor’s gargantuan appeal means, literally, that everyone WANTS to know, all the time. Fan appetite is insatiable. And TS knows how badly we want to know, which brings me to her other confessional stroke of genius—

    Taylor deliberately toys with us. Despite the morally dubious efforts of the tabloids, we plebeians have no real access to T’s lived life, let alone her inner life. She offers us the private portraiture we long for on her own terms. A long-confirmed tradition of writing songs about herself, her thoughts and relationships notwithstanding, we are frequently given over entirely to speculation regarding which songs are indeed autobiographical and how precisely autobiographical they are. In this regard, Taylor is wonderfully ballsy, unafraid to have an unambiguous go at men who did her dirty— (see “Dear John”) many Swifties make riddling out her more nebulous lyrics and mapping them onto her actual history a full time job.

    Taylor always leaves sufficient room for us to step into her music, inhabiting our own adjacent experiences more deeply for knowing—dare I say vibing—with hers: this is her triumph, and also the confessional jackpot. She manages to showcase every emotion unapologetically—heartache, bitterness, yearning, envy, the lot. She can be minxy (handsome, you’re a mansion with a view//do the girls back home touch you like I do?) She can be nostalgic (I knew you//leaving like a father//running like water) She can be melodramatic and vengeful, (You caged me and then you called me crazy//I am what I am cause you trained me) and she is rarely—however widely lauded she is—given enough credit for being a military-grade confessional tactician. Taylor’s extended metaphors are breezy, memorable, and open to myriad interpretations. Let’s take a look at the recent smash hit “Down Bad,” a single representative example. In it, Swift is (nominally, and never to the point that it actually gets too weird) a humanoid cast off the mothership by her lover. At the song’s climax, she croons:

    I loved your hostile takeovers
    Encounters closer and closer
    All your indecent exposures
    How dare you say that it’s –

    Four lines of dazzling ingenuity. “I loved your hostile takeovers” – you once took powerful initiative with me/this relationship. “Encounters closer and closer” – things got intimate and vulnerable. “All your indecent exposures” – I personally understand this line ‘thanks for the sexts,’ but of course I don’t know. “How dare you say that it’s—” and the song’s speaker (Is it Taylor!?!? Did someone leave THE QUEEN HERSELF down bad?!?!) cannot bring herself to say the word ‘over.’ We have four lines of a single extended confessional metaphor explode in a Molotov cocktail of relatability and alien-core cheek. Been there? I’ve been there. Almost everyone has been there, and that’s why the song soared immediately to the top of the charts and was ensconced there for weeks.

    Let’s recap. When Confessional Poetry emerged in the 1950s, its most zealous defenders insisted it would humanize us to each other, offering tender glimpses at tender subjects in a way that engendered compassion and deeper understanding. I believe good confessional poetry does this, even if the truth it tells is wildly dark. If we cannot call her a poet in the strictly traditional sense, no one in a hundred years has harnessed the staying power of confessional writing like Taylor Swift, and no one possesses her unique, precise vaccination against the disease of over-sharing. Aspiring confessional writers would do well to take a page (or many pages) from the Swift Gospel, unifying introspection with an outward gaze generous enough to the human condition to compel readers in, make one’s own head an inviting (or interesting or evocative or profound) place to visit. I began with Confessional Poetry’s founding father Robert Lowell, and it seems fitting to close with him, too:

    Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing—I suppose that’s what vocation means—at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I’m thankful, and call it good.

  • Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation

    Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel Annihilation offers a lengthy (526-page) disquisition on the journey to death, which is life itself, in all its tragedy and absurdity. In particular, the novel unfolds the preoccupations of an individual coming to terms with his impending demise. There is also a searing critique of prevailing cultural and institutional attitudes towards aging and infirmity. Apart from the economic dimension, the evident detachment and even callousness – strikingly apparent during the Covid pandemic – is surely linked to our inability to contend with new technologies. As Paul, the main protagonist puts it:

    What was the point of installing 5G if you simply couldn’t make contact with one another anymore, and perform the essential gestures, the ones that allow the human species to reproduce, the ones that also, sometimes, allow you to be happy?

    Annihilation is a tale, or a collection of interlinked tales, portraying a broken, unhappy, society, where the family unit has been seriously undermined, but perhaps surprisingly it offers hope to the disaffected, however obliquely.

    At first, it seems that only by embracing traditional values, including the Catholic faith, can someone experience the good life – here represented by the lives of the benevolent Cécile, Paul’s sister, and her stalwart husband Hervé, who both support the far-right National Rally.

    The more politically centrist Paul does, however, ultimately achieve contentment through romantic love, especially the resumption – after a ten-year hiatus – of sexual relations with his wife Prudence. Over the course of the novel, he seems to develop an appreciation of how such goods as pleasure, virtue, honour and wealth fit together, recalling the Aristotlean concept of eudaimonia, the highest good humans could strive toward, a life ‘well lived.’

    This intellectual and emotional journey occurs as he confronts the abyss, of death, which he considers ‘absolute destruction.’ Blaise Pacal’s words resonate with Paul: ‘The final act is bloody, however beautiful the comedy of all the rest: in the end dirt is thrown on your head and that’s it forever.’

    It is perhaps safe to assume that this reflects the author’s own eschatological assessment, although any kind of nihilism is strenuously resisted in the novel. Love, familial and romantic, and the exercise of reason, appear to be the saving graces.

    Moreover, despite the contentment that Cécile exhibits from a traditional outlook, her beliefs appear naïve – albeit her faith in a form of resurrection is vindicated. That religious adherence, however, seems to require the exclusion of doubt, and even the suspension of reason, and, importantly, the avoidance of absurdity. Revealingly, the author doesn’t acquaint us with her innermost thoughts and reflections. It’s as if these aren’t worthy of recounting.

    Sexual Obsession

    A somewhat comedic element is supplied by frequent allusions to sex and desire. Indeed, sexual references are an occasionally jarring staple found throughout Houellebecq’s novels, explaining in large measure his Marmite effect. What may verge on an obsession, does act as a useful critique of bourgeois propriety, which is artfully scorned.

    Perhaps the most amusing, and sordid, interlude among these sequences in Annihilation involves Paul deciding to visit a prostitute before he resumes carnal relations with Prudence – ‘a girl to check that it worked, as a sort of intermediary before coming back to normal sex.’

    By this point, the couple’s sex life has ended prematurely, in part because of Prudence’s New Age spirituality. Dietary choices are symptomatic of their wider alienation from one another. Revealingly, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss identified copulation with eating, as both processes involve a union of two complementary elements – une conjunction par complementairé. Prudence and Paul do not dine together.

    They also sleep in separate rooms in a luxury apartment on Paris’s Rue Lheureux. According to the narrator: ‘The coincidence’ of their joint purchase ‘was not accidental’, as ‘an improvement in living conditions often goes hand-in-hand with a deterioration of reasons for living, and living together in particular.’ The couple inhabit a neoliberal tragedy of endless choice and stifled desire.

    Having resolved to engage the services of a ‘high class’ prostitute once Prudence’s spiritual journey leads to a sexual re-awakening, he encounters a young woman called Mélodie in a dimly lit room. After some interplay – including what Bill Clinton claimed fell short of ‘sexual relations’ – Paul asks the young woman to turn on a brighter light, whereupon Mélodie’s true identity is revealed as his niece, Anne-Lise, wholesome Cécile’s daughter.

    It’s a pretty sick joke, directed perhaps at the Catholic values of Anne-Lise’s unknowing parents, although it seems no great harm is done to family relations. When next they meet Anne-Lise tells her uncle she is glad to have been able to help restore relations with Prudence. Thankfully her parents never get wind of the seedy liaison.

    Annihilation reveals a romantic side to Houellebecq nonetheless, as he tenderly depicts the re-flourishing of a loving relationship between Paul and Prudence, which endures to the end. Earlier in the novel, the narrator wonders: ‘Is it true that the first image that we leave in the eyes of the beloved is always superimposed, for ever, on to what we become?’ Despite outward disfigurement the ideal of love can endure.

    Unsurprisingly – this is a Houellebecq novel after all – there is a caveat, as the narrator portrays children as the agents of destruction:

    After destroying its parents as a couple, the child sets about destroying them individually, its chief preoccupation being to wait for their death so that it can inherit its legacy, as clearly established in the French realist literature of the nineteenth century.

    Spy Thriller

    Annihilation is also at a certain level a spy thriller, in which Paul, and his colleagues in the Ministry, untangle a wave of apparently unrelated and quite distinctive terror attacks through recourse to archaic symbols. This fascinating plotline, however, fades into the background as the more pressing question of mortality hoves into view.

    Indeed, Paul feels that the destruction of contemporary society and culture would not be an altogether unwelcome development: ‘the worst thing was that if the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.’

    Paul acts as a chef de cabinet to a senior, high-functioning Minister who is considering running for the presidency, but despite his obvious ability he ultimately lacks the egotistical drive, confiding to Paul, ‘the president has one political conviction, and only one. It is exactly the same as that of all his predecessor, and can be summed up in the phrase: “I am made to be president of the Republic”’

    The ensuing presidential election in the novel looks very like the last two that have taken place in France, where the National Rally candidate secures the largest share of the vote in the first round, but falls short in the second once disunited left-wing voters rally around a pragmatic centrist candidate. In the novel, and real life, this creates an unshifting political landscape, a technocracy dominated by a leadership cadre educated in the same elite institutions, who largely pursue the same neoliberal goals.

    The position of President thus becomes the preserve of a cynical, egotist such as the incumbent, who seems distasteful to almost everyone in France today. In the novel, Paul concludes that with the convergence of the media and political sphere, democracy is dead.

    More details Macron celebrating France’s victory over Croatia in the 2018 World Cup final in Moscow, Russia.

    Touching Account

    Above all, Annihilation is a touching account of a family brought together – at least for a while – by their father Édouard suffering a stroke that renders him ‘a vegetable’ according to his deeply unpleasant daughter-in-law, a vindictive journalist who has conceived a child with a black sperm donor, seemingly in order to humiliate her husband, Paul’s artistic and timid brother Aurélien.

    To start with Édouard is well treated in the care home, where the family, including his second wife, are permitted to play a nurturing role. This brings great improvements to his condition and despite continuing to be mute he learns to communicate once again. Conditions in the facility deteriorate precipitously, however, due to institutional in-fighting, to a point where Édouard’s life is threatened.

    This gives the author an opportunity to castigate contemporary Western attitudes towards the old and infirm left to rot in uncaring institutions. He contrasts these with the approach of many of those working in such places. Thus, ‘for most Maghrebis putting their parents in an institution would have meant dishonour.’

    In the end the family resolve to remove their father from the facility, contacting an unlikely band of anti-euthanasia activists who successfully organise a heist, spiriting the patient away. There are, however, repercussions for Paul due to it being exposed in an article by his malign sister-in-law, who has at this stage been spurned by the tragic Aurélien in favour of an African nurse. The author leaves us in no doubt about his views on euthanasia, which he sees as a symptomatic of European nihilism.

    Any novel is obviously not, and nor should it be, a systematic work of philosophy or sociology. Moreover, it would be simplistic to assume that Paul’s views cohere exactly with the author’s own. Nonetheless, Houellebecq’s unflinching account of contemporary society, mainly expressed through Paul, ought to raise alarm bells.

    Most of us are ill-equipped to deal with the deaths of those close to us, never mind our own. Technology is distorting our appreciation of reality, while supposedly rising living standards are not making us any happier. It would be easy to dismiss Houellebecq as a sex-obsessed sensationalist, but there are few contemporary novelists able to diagnose the ills of our society in such an entertaining manner.

  • A Visit to the Hague

    Late last year HHJ Gumpert KC – one of the judges in the formidable fortress that is Woolwich Crown Court the flagship anti-terrorism court in the U.K. – kindly secured for me a visit to the ICC out of court time. The tour was given by a former member of the team he led in the Congolese prosecutions.

    The ICC issued its first judgment in 2012 when it found Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo guilty of war crimes related to his abuse of child soldiers. Lubanga was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment. Gumpert also successfully prosecuted Dominic Ongwen, who was sentenced to twenty-five years for myriad crimes.

    The Rome Statute, which entered into force on 1 July 2002, established the International Criminal Court, though Israel voted against it, after murmurings on the transfer of populations that is the resettlement programme. The court works on the principle of ineffectiveness, where national courts have been derelict. It lacks universal territorial jurisdiction, and may only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, crimes committed by nationals of member states, or crimes in situations referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council.

    On 17 March 2023, ICC judges issued arrest warrants for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia for alleged child abductions in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin was charged for actions against Ukraine, which although not a party to it, has accepted the authority of the court since 2014. Should Putin travel to a state party to it, local authorities can arrest him. Later in 2023, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs retaliated by placing several ICC officials on its wanted list. On November 21 last year, when I was in Gompert’s court in Woolwich, warrants were formally issued for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu.

    It occurs to me that an informal journalistic war crimes court was initiated by Christopher Hitchen, whose book The Trial Against Henry Kissinger (2001) accused Henry Kissinger of war crimes. This led to a Parisian judge issuing an arrest warrant and Kissinger hopscotching it back to the safety of Fox News. So, Netanyahu will no doubt control his foreign trips, and Ireland is clearly out of the question. Mr Putin does not seem to need to travel to enemy states.

    The process to establish the ICC district may be “triggered” by any one of three sources: (1) a state party, (2) the Security Council, or (3) a prosecutor.

    So, there is huge independence in that there is a self-originating prosecutor jurisdiction. though he needs the approval of Pre-Trial Chamber to initiate the investigation. The factors listed in Article 53 are a reasonable basis for a prosecution. These include whether the case would be admissible, or whether there are substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice (the latter stipulates balancing against the gravity of the crime and the interests of the victims).

    Brumandinho Dam Disaster, Brazil, 2019.

    2016 Policy Paper

    During my visit there was much talk about the Policy paper on case selection and prioritisation published in September 2016, indicating that the ICC would focus on environmental crimes when selecting cases. According to this document, the Office will consider prosecuting Rome Statute crimes that result in, inter alia, the destruction of the environment, the illegal exploitation of natural resources or the illegal dispossession of land.

    Richard A. Falk coined the phrase Ecocide as a Crime Against Humanity in 1974. In my view we should also include Economicide, when one deals with the illegal dispossession of land. What about bringing banksters or hedge fund managers (including through NAMA) to justice? And what about no longer drawing a distinction between the Kinahan gang and Goldman Sachs? Or is it time bring a case against Bill Gates or Elon Musk?

    It should be born in mind that, alas, having someone prosecuted by the ICC is a tricky exercise. The Israelis clearly breached international law when they bundled Adolf Eichmann onto a plane in Argentina in 1960. How do you get Netanyahu to court? Or Putin? Or what if one indicted Trump or Bannon? A real danger is that the present U.S. administration will directly or indirectly withdraw funding for the court, even though the U.S. is not a signatory. They might even undermine American officials for working against the interests of Israel, or any of its allies in this dangerous world.

    The core concept of Crimes Against Humanity had its first incarnation during the Nuremberg Tribunal, but its inception may derive from the discourse in Sophocles ‘Antigone’ as to whether an immoral law is a law. In that play – the Rosetta stone of modern natural law – the heroine Antigone observes to the harsh, positivist Creon, King of Thebes, who will not allow her brother, who has fought against him, to be buried with the proper rites, that natural law has been breached.

    Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the justice who neither dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of to-day or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth…

    From the great Roman statesman Cicero’s perspective, an unjust law is not a law: ‘Those who formulated wicked and unjust statutes for nations, thereby breaking their promises and agreements, put into effect anything but laws.’

    Most famous of all, early Christian lawyers, St Augustine of Hippo said: ‘lex iniusta non-Est lex’ – an unjust law is not a law.

    Radbruchs’s Formula

    A crucial juristic figure was the German Gustav Radbruch (1878-1949), both a law professor and a government minister during the Weimar Republic. In Radbruchs’s Formula he argued that where statute law was incompatible with positivist law to an intolerable degree, and where it negated the principle of equality, which is central to justice, it could be disregarded.

    [P]reference is given to the positive law, duly enacted and secured by state power, even where it is unjust and fails to benefit the people unless it conflicts with justice to so intolerable a level that a statute becomes in effect false law and must therefore yield to justice…where there is not even an attempt at justice. Where equality, the core of justice, is deliberately betrayed in positive law then the statute is not merely false law it lacks completely the very nature of law.

    For him justice (Gerechtigkeit) was linked to human rights. Thus, in Funf Minuten Rechtsphilosophie he contended that there was a law which was above statute: ‘However one may like to describe it: the law of God, the law of nature, the law of reason.’

    It is important to note that his views were followed in various German cases after the War and was part of the discourse that led to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.

    Historically much later, in the 1992 cases of Strelitz, Kessler and Krenz, former East German Border Guards were convicted of offences despite section 27/2 of the East German Border Act that indicated that the protection of the border outweighed the right to life. The German Supreme Court in endorsing Radbruch indicated that:

    [A] justification available at the time of the act can be disregarded due to its violation of superior law if it shows an evident and gross violation of basic principles of justice and humanity… The contradiction of the positive law to justice must be of such unbearable proportions that the law must yield to justice as incorrect law.

    A group of Bosniaks from the Lašva Valley close by Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina that were forced out of their homes and villages by Croat forces in 1993. Photo: Mikhail Evstafiev.

    Ethnic Cleansing

    The Nuremberg Court and The European Convention on Human Rights were set up with the idea that the cataclysms of the past must never happen again. Sadly more have come to pass. In Bosnia we witnessed the arrival of a modern variant: ethnic cleansing. In 1992, the United Nations General Assembly deemed ethnic cleansing to be a form of genocide stating that it was:

    Gravely concerned about the deterioration of the situation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina owing to intensified aggressive acts by the Serbian and Montenegrin forces to acquire more territories by force, characterised by a consistent pattern of gross and systematic violations of human rights…. controlled areas of concentration camps and detention centres, in pursuit of the abhorrent policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’, which is a form of genocide.

    In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judged that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was genocide though the Court had no authority to determine whether it amounted to war crimes and Crimes against Humanity. A kind of fore runner of the ICC though ad hoc.

    The court concluded by seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces had committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general.  They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them, solely on the basis of their identity.

    Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia, was the most senior political figure to stand trial at the ICTY. He was charged with having committed genocide. The formal accusation accused him of planning, preparing and executing the destruction of the Bosnian Muslim national, ethnical, racial or religious groups, as such, in named territories within Bosnia and Herzegovina.

    He died during his trial, on 11 March 2006, and no verdict was returned. Ten years later, Radovan Karadzic was found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes and Crimes against Humanity, ten of the eleven charges in total, and sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment.

    Morality of the Law

    The natural lawyer Lon Fuller, in supporting Radbruch, argues that the German courts were correct in striking down the Nazi laws and that a legal system must have certain characteristics if it is to command the fidelity of a right-thinking person. Fuller, in The Morality of Law, (1964) argues that Nazi law did not have coherence and goodness and instances the use of retroactive legislation, such as the Rohm purge of 1934. Further, for Fuller, the Nazi laws were deeply immoral for a variety of procedural reasons. They were not published, they were vague, and they could not be interpreted in a congruent fashion.

    We are now entering such a dangerous universe. In camera, unpublished surveillance laws are violating privacy, and retroactive and overly broad legislation erode free expression. The anti-immigration hysteria and the rise of the far right may lead to de facto ethnic cleansing. The control of the world by transnational corporations has occurred through violations of privacy, data mining and economic crime.

    The real concern in northern Europe and in Brussels also is around how AI will not be controlled by a corporate economy. Why is that? Considerations of profit will ensure, as the former head of AI in Google recently argued, that within thirty years there is a ten to twenty percent chance of human liquidation. It trespasses in an unbridled way on boundaries.

    The question of compensation and reparation also arose in our discussion at the ICC, and I mentioned that the Innocence Project in all its conferences has a separate stream for the exonerated. So does the ICC. Thus, surely it is time the Irish government finally to deliver on its Magdalene Laundry promises, and compensate those disposed by banksters? Fat chance.

    The concept of obligations ergo omnes needs to be extended to new challenges. The ICC needs to be supported to extend its jurisdiction. They seem beleaguered but to quote Halldor Laxness they are at least Independent People. Independent People are important. Thus bankers were jailed in his native land Iceland when Independent People prevailed.

    Feature Image: The premises of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. The ICC moved into this building in December 2015.