Place of storks and green-
clad chalk. Are the Gypsies still
perched on ‘The Warren’?
Camargue
Flamingo heaven,
white horses, black madonna.
Heart’s grey forgiven.
Camargue
Red dust on the shoes
of Gaditans carrying
Sara-la-Kali.
Storrington
At the age of eight:
the camp fire by their wagon
shed heavenly light.
Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He is the author of six collections of poetry. Faber and Faber published his Selected Poems in 2016 and he is editor of their 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004).
A cormorant dives to feed, then perches, its wings spread to dry. There are fish, there is a break in the clouds.
A freighter embarks, laden with necessary goods, including toys,
much as a researcher presents his findings.
This world is henceforth one in which these things have taken place,
and the gates that would prevail against them have so far failed.
J.D. Smith’s fourth collection, The Killing Tree, was published in 2016, and his individual poems have appeared in publications including Dark Mountain, New Verse News and Terrain. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science and the children’s picture book The Best Mariachi in the World. He works as an editor in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare, their rescue animals and no small amount of trepidation. More information and occasional updates are available at www.jdsmithwriter.com.
The following is a short retelling and interpretation of a number of Irish sagas, including two, ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ and ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, from the golden age of Gaelic literature in the early middle ages.
I – The Second Battle of Moytura
Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Second Battle of Moytura’) c. 875 is the centrepiece of the extraordinary Irish Mythological Cycle, relating how the Tuatha Dé (‘god-peoples’) had been oppressed by their enemies the Formorians (Fomoire). It consists of a series of fantastical episodes of enduring interest. We meet a Tuatha Dé exhausted by impossible labours and tributes after the half-Formorian Bres becomes High King of Ireland. He replaces Nuada who had lost his arm and authority in battle.
We learn that the court physician Diancecht fashions Nuada a prosthetic silver limb in its place. In the meantime, Diancecht’s son Miach begins to heal Nuada’s real severed arm, but the father prefers his own methods and surgically kills his son by removing his brain. Miach is buried by his sister Airmed and from his grave sprout three hundred and sixty-five healing herbs, which she orders in her cloak. Diancecht has other ideas, however, scattering the herbs, each of whose value would remain obscure to humanity.
In the account of Diancecht’s preference for an artificial arm over Miach’s more complimentary approach, the anonymous poet may be suggesting that the best healing comes from within the body itself, while the scattering of the healing herbs could represent ignorance of the cures freely available in Nature. It also appears that a professional body will seek to preserve its privileged position, in which case this remains a powerful metaphor for the modern pharmaceutical industry. A man with a silver arm presages the contemporary spectre of transhumance, whereby human beings propose to upload their bodies into computers, in fulfillment of René Descartes’s dualistic idea of a homunculus controlling a mechanical body.
The ‘Second Battle’ parades scenes of Rabelaisian excess, especially involving one character, the Dagda, who undertakes a mission inside the territory of the Formorians. There he meets a distortion of hospitality, whereby he is compelled to consume vast quantities of porridge to a point where is belly is the size of a cauldron. Afterwards he must loosen his bowels before sexual congress with a Formorian princess. In Mark William’s ‘less genteel’ translation: ‘The girl jumped on him and whacked him across the arse, and her curly bush was revealed. At that point the Dagda gained a mistress, and they had sex’. Smutty Irish humour has long antecedents.
In Jungian terms the Formorians seem to represent the nefarious shadow of the Tuatha Dé, an external, exploitative force that corrupt and indebt the native inhabitants, a narrative familiar to contemporary Ireland. However, the half-Formorian Bres is eventually succeeded by Lug, who is also of mixed parentage. Yet he combines all the highest attributes of the áes dána (skilled people). Lug and Bres differ in that the former’s father is Tuatha Dé and his mother Formorian, while the latter’s ancestry is the reverse.
This might appear as simply an expression of approval of patriarchal descent. There is however a richer symbolic meaning available if we see a balance in Lug’s mixed ancestry between the thrusting, will-to-power of male energy on his Formorian mother’s side, and the earthier characteristics of the Tuatha Dé, that equate with female love, on his father’s side. He achieves wholeness when, paradoxically, the female characteristics arrive through a dominant male parentage wherein the thrusting Formorian energies are contained (Mf:Fm = Fm). Bres differs in that the ‘male’ Formorian outlook is ascendant as it arrives from a dominant male father, repressing his ‘caring’ Tuatha Dé ‘feminine’ energies (Mm:Ff = Mf).
Another fascinating scene occurs after the Formorians are vanquished and Lug captures the errant Bres, who pleads for his life by proposing the Tuatha Dé should plant crops four times a year. Lug recognises this as impossible, or unsustainable, and only spares his foe when he reveals how the men of Ireland could operate a plough. According to Mark Williams in his indispensable Ireland’s Immortals: The history of the gods of Irish myth (2017): ‘the Formorians in the saga are characterized by a monstrously exploitative and unnatural relationship to the organic world, in a strange anticipation of contemporary agri-business’. This may be so, but Lug’s character also has a Formorian dimension, that, crucially, is contained positively by his (Fm) parentage. Similarly, in this episode, when Bres’s knowledge is refined from the approach of ploughing the earth four times a year, we find he confers a crucial skill. The relationship between the Tuatha Dé and the Formorians may also have been a commentary on the benefit of accommodating the skills of Norse raiders, then besetting Ireland, who also brought technological advances in agriculture and sailing.
There are lessons here for a contemporary audience insofar as we need both a thrusting, male, Formorian, energy, to put a plan into action but crucially it is the caring, ‘female’ Tuatha Dé approach that should guide our endeavours. It is the dominance of the Formorian mind that brought us the Atomic bomb.
II – The Wooing of Étaín
Tochmarc Étaín (‘The Wooing of Étaín’) c.800-1000 is a colourful tale of romantic intrigues and magical spells, featuring perhaps the greatest femme fatale in Irish literature. Based on recurring shape-shifting, we find hints of belief in metempsychosis – the transmigration of souls – preceding Christianity. Only fully translated in 1930, Irish Revivalists such as W.B. Yeats were besotted by the intrigues. Here the Tuatha Dé are reduced from the giants of the ‘Second Battle’ to ethereal síde, ‘faeries’, living in síd mounds, familiar in folklore today.
When Midir of the Tuatha Dé demands that Aengus his foster son gives him the most beautiful woman in Ireland in compensation for the infliction of an accidental injury trouble begins. She is Étaín, who Aengus ‘earns’ by performing a series of tasks for her father, the high king of Ireland. Aengus then presents her to Midir, who, however, already has a wife in Fúamnach. She does not take kindly to the new arrival, eventually turning her into a giant bluebottle with a magic spell. Even in this altered state Midir finds fulfilment in her company, and the divine Calliphora vomitoria performs various miracles along the way. Furious, Fúamnach summons great winds to drive Midir’s buzzing consort away. Eventually, exhausted, she falls into the drinking vessel of a woman who swallows her and becomes pregnant, reproducing Étaín 1,002 years after her original birth.
The beauty is then married off to another high king of Ireland Eochu. Unfortunately his brother Ailill, upon setting eyes on her, falls hopelessly in love, and starts to waste away. Ailill confesses his feelings to her whereupon the blood returns to his cheeks. In order to cure him fully the obliging Étaín assents to an amorous exchange, but insists, for the sake of propriety, this should not take place under the king’s roof. In the meantime, the apparently immortal Midir puts Ailill to sleep and assumes his form, revealing to Étaín their ancient love when they finally meet. She agrees to give it another go, but only if Eochu agrees to sell her. Naturally he refuses, only for Midir to win her from him in a game of chess after bluffing for the first two rounds. Still Eochu refuses to give up his wife, defending Tara, the seat of the Irish high king, with all his men. Undeterred, Midir miraculously appears inside Tara where the lovers embrace and transmogrify into swans that escape through the skylight together. In response Eochu orders his men to dig up every síd mound in the country. At this stage Midir plays a trick on him by returning a replica of Étaín, who, it transpires, is actually Eochu’s daughter, Étaín having been pregnant with her.
Eochu’s fate is in an interesting inversion of the Oedipus myth, and echoes Jung’s understanding of the collective unconscious whereby ignorance and unawareness carry the greatest offence. As van der Post puts it: ‘in Greek myth, legend and art, the villain is always the ignorance where it serves as representative of inner unawareness.’ In this tale the folly lies in denying the expression of love, especially when the Tuatha Dé are involved. Nevertheless Étaín is a moral exemplar bound by social conventions reflected in her refusal to dishonour Eochu’s home with Ailill whose recovery reflects the benefit of giving vent to passions. Also, Étaín only agrees to return to Midir if Eochu consents. Having lost Étaín in chess he welches on the bet and is punished by unconsciously committing the taboo of incest. The enduring image is of two swans, who in nature mate for life, joyfully escaping. The idea of beauty inhabiting the generally disparaged bluebottle attests to a joyful relationship with Nature. As the Eesha-Upanishad says: ‘Of a certainty the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.’
III – A Change in Attitude
From 900 there is a shift in the name of the Túatha Dé, crystallizing as Túatha Dé Danann, ‘the Peoples of the Goddess Danu’ in about 1200 which Williams suggests may have been ‘a deliberate attempt at inducing mental estrangement’. In the later middle ages we find pseudo-histories such as ‘The Book of Invasions’ (Lebor Gabála Érenn) c.1150 which tells the story of Ireland and its various waves of settlers and invaders from the time of Noah’s Flood to the era of the Gaels or ‘Milesians’, meaning the ethnic Irish themselves. Here the Tuatha Dé are stripped of godlike qualities and are instead imagined as a race of pagan necromancers preceding the Gaels. Historicising the Tuatha Dé also winnowed the creative possibilities available to poets, and Irish language literature thereafter fails to scale the earlier heights. The Tuatha Dé become darker presences usually associated with human failings.
Suspicion extends to their bewitching music. In one episode of the ‘The Colloquy of the Elders’ (Accalam na Senórach) c.1220 the character of St. Patrick expresses these reservations: ‘Good it was,’ said Patrick, ‘were it not indeed for the magical melody of the síde in it.’ Yet their creative presence is still acknowledged in traditional Irish music: the word for session is derived from síde.
‘The Tragic Death of the Children of Lir’ (Oidheadh Chloinne Lir) c.1450 is a tale familiar around the world. The story involves a wicked step-mother Aoife whose magic transforms Lir’s two sets of twins from his first wife into swans. Forced to endure what is portrayed as an unhappy fate their resolve is strengthened by one of them, Fionnghuala, who seems to have an inner knowledge of Christian revelation. Eventually they meet a saintly monk called Mochaomhóg who baptises them, whereupon the spell is broken and they become aged human beings who die and ascend to heaven. It is worthwhile comparing this to the ‘Wooing of Étaín’, where shape-shifting into swans is an affirmative escape into Nature.
But according to Laurens van der Post:
the bird always and everywhere from Stone-Age man to Stravinsky has been the image of the inspiration, the unthinkable thought which enters our selves like a bird unsolicited out of the blue, it was for Jung … one of the signs of confirmation from nature that sustain the spirit in its search for enlightenment and emancipation from the floating world of appearances.
In ‘The Tragic Death of the Children of Lir’ a censorious cage is placed over the bird of imaginative possibilities, which fitted neatly with the domineering Catholicism of independent Ireland. The worth of life as a swan is rejected, as a dissipated human form is preferred, as long as salvation is available from the one true Apostolic Church.
‘The Tragic Deaths of Children of Tuireann’ (Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann) c.1500 returns to the subject-matter of the ‘Second Battle of Moytura’, but at this point internal rivalry bedevils the Tuatha Dé, leading to the murder of Cian, the father of Lug, by the sons of Tuireann. The sons attempt to bury Cian’s mangled remains six times but each time the Earth rejects his body, illustrating Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious where nature itself rises up against a nefarious deed. This idea is also found in Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin (1868) where a murdered husband haunts the landscape of those responsible for the deed, his wife and her lover who are driven to commit suicide together.
Lug intuits that the sons are responsible for the deed and succeeds in gaining a commitment for them to pay éric, the legal compensation for homicide. Unsurprisingly the sons meet a sorry fate in their quests to satisfy this, but perhaps more interesting is the depiction of the Tuatha Dé as an enfeebled race incapable of contending with the Formorians. The illusion to the fractious politics of that period is obvious, and as Gaelic Irish culture crumbled after the Tudor conquest and subsequent plantations the vibrancy of the side diminished in parallel, until their resuscitation, ironically mainly via descendants of the conquerors, during the Irish Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”20″ gal_title=”Featured Artist of the Month: Moira Tierney”]
The beach is one of the few places you’re going to see New Yorkers immobile, supine, sleeping in the sun … everyone piles onto the F train to Coney Island, or the Q to Brighton Beach, or the A to the Rockaways, with the coolers of food and booze, the umbrellas, the boomboxes … the lifeguards at the Rockaways are the handiest with their whistles (Rip Tide Alert); Brighton Beach has the all-seasons Russian swimmers (Odessa represent); Coney Island is bearing up under the assault of developers, who haven’t quite managed to kill the vibe (Reggae and Old School House on the Boardwalk) … there’s always someone hefting a cooler of nutcrackers down along the beach (you mightn’t know exactly what’s in them, but the buzz is guaranteed), as well as beer (cold beer! holodni pivo!) and bottled water … the chislers go mad when they see the ice-cream cart approaching (also hauled down along the beach in the soft sand) … after the summer eases on out and the streets lose their heat, the boardwalk is still buzzin …
Moira Tierney is a film-maker based in Dublin and NY. You can find out more about her work here:
http://moiratierney.net/ + http://www.mexindex.ie/artist/moira-tierney/?_sf_s=moira+tierney
I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O’Siadhail’s book-length poem, The Five Quintets, is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O’Siadhail’s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter a paradise of compromise, love and engagement, whilst crisscrossing the disabling specialisms that bedevil our time.
Inspired in particular by Dante Alighieri’s thirteenth century journey through heaven, hell and purgatory in The Divine Comedy, O’Siadhail introduces us to men especially, and women, who have shaped, and distorted, our modernity. The Italian poet himself is channelled, offering to guide O’Siadhail’s journey through hell to ‘heaven’s vertigo’, ‘And summing up an era work the seam / Between the modern world and its aftermath’.
T.S Eliot’s influence also lurks in the poem’s title – an allusion to his The Four Quartets – which, O’Siadhail writes in the introduction, ‘feels it needed a fifth part’, as it ‘never really gets to the joy and let-go of an imagined heaven’. The influence of that American poet is held in check, as this literary shark, ‘demands an absolute / To order seas of doubt which rage inside’.
Moral absolutists are, without fail, scorned in O’Siadhail’s schema. The heaven which he glimpses is never fixed, but in play, and informed by the principle of uncertainty. Similarly, utopia, ‘no place’, is a term frequently used to denigrate those theorists whose intellectual pride obscures a vision of an elusive paradise.
O’Siadhail’s muses are numerous, but ‘Madame Jazz’, an earlier incarnation, acts as a Virgil-like sidekick throughout.
Although each sacred book’s a lip-read score,
Improvising there is always more;
You jazz on what’s our own and our rapport.
Each solo and ensemble of a piece,
Grooves and tempos shifting without cease,
We flourish in a syncopated peace.
In all our imperfections we advance,
Trusting in creation’s free-willed chance;
Sweet Madam Jazz, in you we are the dance.
Her gyrations allow O’Siadhail to fix on a horizon in constant, though not immediately apparent, motion.
In the final section, we also encounter Dante’s Beatrice, who perhaps best captures the rupture which O’Siadhail’s work seeks to heal:
You mortals down below can fail to see
how marvels coded in the universe
reflect the face of God’s infinity.
Too graceless, too constrained, you still immerse
yourselves in steps and miss out on the dance –
the scientists and poets don’t converse
or celebrate each quantum of advance,
discovering a heaven’s cameo
in God, the gambler’s mix of love and chance.
Laurens van der Post wrote: ‘For me the passion of spirit we call “religion”, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.’ O’Siadhail’s work may help restore a moral compass to the great scientific adventures, which have brought mastery over planet Earth, but often with unintended, or unacknowledged, costs. Religious, including many poets, in turn, might no longer see themselves as being in opposition to science, but in fruitful communication with its inherent mysteries.
II – The badger and the fox.
In the first quintet, Making, we meet a host of writers, musicians and artists, who are assigned in haikus (or ‘saikus’ – a neologism) an animal or plant spirit. These are followed by carefully crafted sonnets, combining narrative accounts and artists’ voices, channelled through O’Siadhail. He rhapsodises on the achievements of many, but there are stinging observations on the artistic limitations, or myopia, of others.
Thus, William Wordsworth’s legacy is tainted by a failure to generate the epics he had dreamed of, his Prelude represents: ‘All Foothills to the peaks you never reached’; while Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Youth’s promise’ was diminished ’in opium’s malaise’.
That arch-worrier Franz Kafka is consigned to a ‘sleepless hell’, as O’Siadhail condemns him for feeding ‘… the wizened dreams of minds withdrawn / Your nightmare’s broken trust denying dawn.’ While Pablo Picasso has become, ‘A famous for being famous millionaire’, unhinged by fortune and acclaim.
For others there is reverence, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for never deviating from a desire ‘to stanch life’s sufferings’, and having, ‘No truck with any cause but moral truth’. In his compassion we find a ‘glimpse of paradise’.
Classical composers including Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gustav Mahler and J. S. Bach are also celebrated, but Richard Wagner, ‘a lone wolf’, is condemned for mustering dark nationalistic forces. Elsewhere, O’Siadhail’s George Frederic Handel conveys the sublime balance of his oeuvre.
I only want to hold the music’s line
A flighty psyche focused on its goal
So every voice can shine but not outshine,
From all the woven parts create the whole.
Painters are less evident among these shades, but his description of Francisco Goya’s ‘Third of May’ ’merits retelling:
Where fusiliers have turned their nameless back
And bend to execute their point blank prey;
My lamp of pity lights the victim’s face.
The ‘Third of May’, by Francisco Goya.
Irish readers will be intrigued by his encounters in our literary pantheon. Suitably, W.B. Yeats is depicted as a badger, ‘the churning digger / With its nose close to the ground’. O’Siadhail hails him as ‘the archpriest of sound’, and, unusually, integrates and adapts many of his lines, such as ‘Old lecher with a love on every wing’, from the still smouldering Tower.
But there is a stern rebuke for his promotion of eugenics: ‘scorning base-born products of base beds’, and unwillingness to look beyond a fantastical world that is, ‘dead and gone … That perfect past your mind’s own cul de sac’. Instead O’Siadhail urges: ‘Retrieve best thoughts once shed and then move on’.
Characterised as a badger, W.B. Yeats.
O’Siadhail is similarly conflicted over James Joyce’s legacy, admitting to loving a language ‘burbling up in play’. From one great linguists to another, O’Siadhail tells him he is as good a reader as, ‘you’ll get to understand your punning riverrun’, but counters, ‘I know the charge of words, and yet and yet’.
He wonders if his fellow Jesuit-educated writer’s works hold, ‘a microscope that is too small in scale’, and whether, ‘in the end does anything take flight’. This might come as a relief to those who have baulked at Finnegans Wake’s circumlocutions.
O’Siadhail is suspicious of a character ‘so proud and so obsessed’, for whom others are ‘walk on parts in your world’s play’. He scorns the, ‘dreamlike doodling of an introvert’. But there is high praise indeed for Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses, including a playful pun of his own:
Still once at least, though in a woman’s voice,
I didn’t pun or try to be opaque
But spoke my shortest playful work of praise
And yes, in Molly’s yes I did reJoyce.
The other two Irish writers we meet are Patrick Kavanagh, ‘A kamikaze trusting in God’s wind’, who, ‘In hungry times’, paid the price’, for being a ‘peeping Tom who lusts for paradise’; along with praise for Brian Friel’s ‘impish wit’.
Notably absent are Seamus Heaney (who has perhaps been canonized prematurely?), and Samuel Beckett. Elsewhere O’Siadhail has criticised the interiority of Modernists, who refused to take responsibility ‘for shaping a wider meaning’. He continues:
Apart from the risk of solipsism and plain self-indulgence, there is the risk of turning poetry into a kind of private piety, which ends up marginalising poetry or branding it as some kind of academic pursuit not appropriate to the ordinary reader of books.
Refreshingly, however all-encompassing his themes, O’Siadhail’s language is never self-indulgent, and always endeavours to inform.
III – ‘The Dismal Science’
O’Siadhail tells the story of the making and undoing of our modernity by theorists and movers and shakers, as he seeks to reshape our current approaches. The self-imposed constraints of metre, and often rhyme, bring a pleasant economy of expression.
O’Siadhail’s ambition to tell the story of our time in The Five Quintet recalls the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which draws together the mythologies that informed an understanding of the ancient world in order to forge a new consciousness. Here the Classical titans give way to seminal figures such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, J. M. Keynes, Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen, along with men of commerce, who are today often vemerated as heroes.
The bargain struck, the business done,
The dealer’s will and drive for wealth,
Our new concern with number one.
One self-interested specimen on display is Ireland’s own Michael Fingleton:
Still bent on short-term deals to boost
A bottom line. A bonus-gained,
Already on your way to ruin
All caution to the winds – who cares?
Ambitious tiger burning bright
And brazen in your riot-run
You do not know the dust you’ll bite.
It seems unlikely O’Siadhail sought legal advice on the potential for defamation in this section. It would certainly make for quite a trial to find the poet in the dock against the disgraced banker. A defence of justification should be available for the following lines:
Small loaners find you’ll go to law
To take your pound of flesh to pay
What’s owed; for bigger borrowers
You bend or buck to make the rules,
Indulge whatever debts occur.
There is a nuanced treatment of Adam Smith’s contribution to economic theory. Laissez faire, permits ‘the hidden hand’ to operate, leading to competition which generates efficiencies, but which at all times requires vigilance against ‘crafty dealers’ in league, ‘to fix a price and profit by intrigue’.
O’Siadhail’s ‘modern mind’ cannot understand, however, Smith’s failure to rail against children being harnessed in black holes ‘Deep down in Durham’s shafts and pits’. He also points to the irony of merchants, ‘Whose mean rapacity you taunt’, adopting Smith as their first forebear.
O’Siadhail has interesting reflections on Robert Malthus, who may yet be vindicated in his prediction that food production capacity will not keep pace with the demand of a growing population:
Your thesis bites so near the bone.
Malthusian views now haunt our thoughts;
These times will know a darker tone.
Is this the onset of a devastating Climate Change he is referring to?
O’Siadhail is conflicted in his appreciation of Karl Marx, hailing him as a visionary who foresees ‘as no one else had seen’, that four hundred billionaires would hold just half our wealth, alongside the ‘constant gyres of boom and bust’, apparent in late capitalism.
Karl Marx, ‘a know-all coldness’.
But according to O’Siadhail, the Communism that Marx imagines contains a core failing evident in its designer, ‘a know-all coldness at your core’. Indeed, being a ‘know-all’ is an oft-repeated barb, leading to the delusion of utopia. This point is central to O’Siadhail’s diagnosis of what has brewed many of our present troubles. Thus Marx is condemned for failing to conceive of compromise, ‘Where conflicts would be reconciled’.
We also meet J.M. Keynes who learns by listening to his peers, and is thus lionised as a ‘Soft changer, saint of step by step’, who recognises how, often, only government stimuli will lift an economy out of the doldrums:
The system does not cure itself;
So maybe it needs money lent
To make it flow and multiply
Far less favourable is O’Siadhail’s assessment of Milton Friedman, another ‘know-all’, whose rigour ‘will room no doubt / Your mind demands all black and white’. While acknowledging he served up some neglected thoughts, O’Siadhail chides him for using Keynes’s ‘one defect’ – of failing to appreciate the significance of monetary supply – to justify opposition to all state interference with the ‘hidden hand’.
Instead we find: ‘Free flow finance gives quick-fix gains / But blows up bubbles that must burst’, where, ‘The wily then are winners all’. O’Siadhail plumbs for the Scandinavian laws: ‘Where weak need not go to the wall’.
One Scandinavian theorist we meet is Thorstein Veblen, who reveals an acute understanding of why workers are not always sympathetic to Marxist ideas.
Society does not cohere in hate–
All workers really want to emulate
Their boss – the weak are would-be rich at heart;
If Marx had not been wrong and me not right
The poor would tear society apart.
O’Siadhail sees a need for more than Marxist materialism to meet the challenge of inequality. The height of wisdom arrives from a woman, and ‘cub economist’, Kathryn Tanner, who finds in the ‘love-dream born of Bethlehem’ the possibility of mending the distortions of the market place.
Tanner, through O’Siadhail, says:
Is this utopian, I hear you ask,
A heaven here on earth, a hopeless task,
Another revolution run roughshod?
O no! It’s here and now we must uphold
The common right of all to gifts of God.
This is perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Christianity of this world’, grounded in earthly challenges, rather than lofty metaphysics. One might also discern the influence of his intellectual brother-in-arms the theologian David Ford.
IV – The Art of the Possible
The next section, entitled Steering, meditates on good governance. O’Siadhail decries the fantasists of left and right, while bemoaning ‘tweedle dee’ and ‘tweedle dum’ politics, such as we find in Ireland. He warns: ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy.’
O’Siadhail’s continues to inveigh against ‘know-all’ attitudes, warning the reader to guard against the real sympathies of utopians.
Fear ideas that outreach the heart,
Chilled compassion of the ideologue.
What purports to pity broken lives
Often hides a know-all arrogance
That wants to own the future and the past,
So refuses, starting from the now.
Greedy for the perfect all create
Hells of blood and soil and golden age.
Readers might be intrigued by his descriptions of Margaret Thatcher, ‘Forthright Grantham grocer’s girl’, as an autocrat. Her parvenus attitude reflects Thorstein Veblen’s earlier insights into the aspirational, “would be rich”, working class:
Some who shin the tall and greasy pole
Carry in their bones a sympathy,
Want to spare all comers such a climb;
Others vaunt their courage and condemn
Weakness they had fought to overcome,
See all frailness as a threat to power.
Margaret Thatcher: tearing apart society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.
In O’Siadhail’s account Thatcher is prompted by Keith Joseph, ‘To rethink all in Milton Friedman’s words’. This leads to the tearing of society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.
There is also an intriguing description of the arch-networker, Jean Monnet, one of the original architects of the European Community. O’Siadhail traces the current fraying of the Union right back to the failure of Monnet and others to conjure, beyond simply commerce and trade, a European identity, based on ‘deeper bonds and ties’.
Perhaps writing in the wake of the Greek and Irish bailouts, O’Siadhail seems wary of ‘Brussels’ one-fits-all’ approach:
Starred blue flag so dutifully raised,
Still not fluttering in our chambered hearts
Heaven is no timeless superstate.
In Canto 5 of this section, ‘A Beckoned Dream’, O’Siadhail reveals a political paradise comprising of William Ewart Gladstone, who accepted Irish Home Rule, Mahatma Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold, the ‘United Nations’ guiding star of peace’, Nelson Mandela and, less convincingly, former Irish President Mary McAleese, who is commended for building sectarian bridges among ‘Ghosts of Europe’s once religious wars.’
I found this choice puzzling as McAleese was more of a figurehead as Irish President, and did less to interrogate the rising tide of inequality in Ireland than her successor Michael D. Higgins. Moreover, McAleese was an electoral candidate (in the 1987 General Election) for Fianna Fail under the corrupt leadership of Charles Haughey, who also tactically rejected the reconciliatory Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and her Presidential candidature came during the tenure of another tainted figure in Bertie Ahern.
I would prefer to have seen greater emphasis on environmental responsibility in this cockpit, as humanity stares down the barrel of self-inflicted ecological collapse. Perhaps some will be frustrated by the idea that political change cannot arrive more quickly than in ‘Fractions less imperfect than before’, considering the challenges that now press against us, but his emphasis on the value of dialogue is surely correct: ‘Gaze-to-gaze in our humanity / Enmity we can thaw … ’
V – God and Science
The two final cantos Finding and Meaning, covering Science and Philosophy, might stretch most readers more than the first three; although O’Siadhail never succumbs to drawing too liberally from his rich pallet of languages and knowledge. It will be intriguing to encounter scientific responses to his account of the great leaps forward in our understanding of the universe.
Following his rejection of the fixity of political utopias, O’Siadhail sees a cosmos born of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, as opposed to a ‘knotty crossword yielded clue by clue’ that is capable of completion. Here we encounter a God that plays dice.
In Meaning, O’Siadhail continues to riff (in Dante’s own terza rima) on the unknowableness of the divine:
Allow our God a purpose not our own
and here outside a timeless roundelay
we dance within our fragile ecozone
Here we meet the shades of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and a sneering Friedrich Nietzsche, who is condemned for a lack of compassion, and an unwillingness to compromise, yet:
Despite his detached mind’s strange solitaire,
for all mad Nietzche’s overreaching claims,
his genius shows how humans overbear;
Next come Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre – dismissed as a ‘a braggadocio of angst that sinks / to vanish in the nothingness of hell’ – Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricouer, Said Nursi, and Jean Vanier, who wonders ‘What if the weak become our first concern / what if such love decides our balance sheet’.
Vanier also offers encouragement to the poet:
this poem may be a slow fuse to guide
the moments in our psyches which allow
an amplitude, a deeper second sight.
Then Hannah Arendt again condemns:
Utopians who weave their gossamer
ideal never see the here and now;
for such far sight the present blur,
We also meet O’Siadhail’s first wife, who died some years ago after a long illness:
In your compassion, Bríd, I think I grow
and understand how only love can heal;
I learn to feel what others undergo.
Finally, there is a dreamy vision of Paradise in which O’Siadhail travels along a path between two parallel rows of trees each ‘interwoven with its counterpart’, ‘in curves of paradox which shape the light’.
VI – Poetic Futures
O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets synthesises many of the great intellectual questions of our time. In so doing O’Siadhail fits Robert Graves’s description of a poet as, ‘the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster’s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that.’ O’Siadhail keeps asking the big questions, having refused the easy chair of academia, where poetry often becomes an obscure word game, and a private members’s club. Authentic poetry may still be difficult, but this arises from considering profound questions.
The length of The Five Quintets also poses the question as to whether long form, epic, poetry may come back into vogue.
Previously, the Canadian literary critic Northrope Frye argued that Edgar Allan Poe’s essay ‘The Poetic Principle’, published posthumously in 1850, had a ‘tremendous influence on future poetry’. Poe proposed that a long poem was a contradiction in terms, and that all existing long poems of genuine quality consisted of moments of intense poetic experience, ‘stuck together with a connective tissue of narrative or argument which was really versified prose.’
Frye regarded this as preposterous, but a preference for brevity, which may mask a lack of ambition or vision, is still apparent.
May we revisit a Romantic Age to recover long form poetry, when poets, such as Coleridge and Shelley, were participants in scientific debates? Indeed the word science was only coined in the 1830s. Since then it has become the preserve of specialists.
The master poet. Image (c) Julia Hembree Smith.
I was a little disappointed not to meet the shade of Shelley, who had less than thirty years to impart his genius. Perhaps O’Siadhail shrank from the apparent violence of his near namesake’s earlier pronouncements on the ‘necessity’ of atheism and the revolutionary sentiments of much of his early verse, but over the course of his short life his outlook mellowed.
Just as Shelley’s challenged vested interests, similarly I suspect The Five Quintets will make some readers distinctly uncomfortable: first, it exposes gaping holes in most of our appreciation of the wonders of human thought and creation; secondly, it challenges the social and economic structures we live under; thirdly, it dismisses the delusional quick-fixes of utopians; finally, he challenges a prevalent view that religion and science are irreconcilable.
I also anticipate that the poem will only be given the credit it deserves in Ireland once it has received the imprimatur of international critics.
A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person’s eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes care of all his mirrors. Milan Kundera The Festival of Insignificance
In the beginning, I thought about him endlessly, night and day, over and over again. I didn’t think the thoughts would ever stop. They were constant, circular and exhausting, and the crushing pain of the descending reality had me questioning everything about my life. I wondered what he was thinking, if he missed me, if he had realised what he had done or if knowing that he’d never get me back would mean there would be no self-reflection. If so, now he would despise me with even more conviction than he had before. It was a limb amputation, an exorcism I didn’t want but knew I needed, an offering of my very cells back to the universe.
I yearned for him because I didn’t know the truth. How could I? I had believed him, believed who he was pretending to be. Who could intentionally deceive another like that? It couldn’t be so. We had played together, laughed together, cried in each other’s arms. Protected each other. Championed each other. Loved each other.
It took forever to see past the act. To understand that my baby didn’t care about me, that he wasn’t able to. That my darling didn’t see me, just the things that he could manipulate to draw me in. Everything I gave him, every way I depleted myself, every single thing I sacrificed for him, for us, was invisible to him. Instead, he branded me an ungrateful, unloving, pathological, pathetic joke. And this is what he believed.
The hardest part for me in the aftermath of my discovery that my love was a narcissist, was accepting that there was nothing I could do to change him. It was the injustice of knowing that despite everything he promised me, he could close himself off to my pain, and move himself on with no remorse. He could convince himself that I was bad, and shred my heart to pieces without a dent to his conscience. And I could never get him to see otherwise because you cannot reason with somebody that depends upon delusion for survival.
The abandonment hits you like a freight train. There is no way to soften this collision. You may fear that the impact will kill you, or that you will dissolve in desolate depression – your forgotten, worthless, ragged body strewn upon the tracks. Worthless, because nobody could treat another this way, unless it was somehow deserved.
You find that it takes more strength to stay still than to chase after the train, with all its precious cargo. You desperately want to lasso your ropes to the back of the carriage as it thunderously speeds past you, but you know that if you do so, you will be dragged along those haunted rails toward a phantom promise, forever. And so you wait, but for what you do not know.
This is not the end. It’s the beginning. Change is coming and this change is going to teach you how to free yourself. Because you are a survivor, and survivors have a deep and powerful instinct to keep on moving, no matter how torn your skin and battered your bones, no matter how much your swollen heart might weigh you down. You survive without becoming like them because despite the pain of choosing someone that manipulated and abused your sacred, trusting offering of love, you do not close yourself to it.
Slowly, you begin to understand, and later to believe, that none of this was your fault. And that you are not the person your narcissist convinced you that you were. That the world is full of bruised and damaged people that are not as strong as you. People that inflict pain, to feel pleasure in their power, while you and your loving heart absorb their abuse to lighten their load. It’s easy to be like them. They are weak.
You are here because you have been tough enough to take what they have given you, tough for far too long. You are here because you were chosen for your gorgeous light and your beautiful soul. If you did not shine so brightly, you would not have been valuable to them. They may have learned to drain this light but they did not deplete you. You will regenerate. Because this is who you are.
Your narcissist fed off you because they cannot create their own goodness. With a closed heart and a suffocated soul they have no true power at all. None. You do. Love, the most powerful energy source on earth is what kept you with your abuser, what caused you to shoulder burdens that were not yours. And love is what will set you free.
But first, you need to learn to direct it at the person that really deserves it – yourself. Learn to parent yourself with love and see how strong you become. Practice the art of supporting yourself, and refusing to self-abandon and you will never be caught again. Feel the nourishment of your own love and kindness and watch the joy that will spring forth from your powerful heart.
Float confidently away from those heavy iron tracks. You’ve got something so much better than the train now. You’ve got wings.
