Cassandra Voices

Tag: 2019December

  • Jeremy Corbyn, Percy Shelley and Ireland

    The Irish media generally looks askance at Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘radical socialist manifesto.’[i] An historically warm relationship with Sinn Féin, Brexit neutrality, and lifelong commitment to the redistribution of wealth receive a cool reception in reports and commentary, while grossly inflated charges of Antisemitism within the Labour Party are threaded through articles.[ii]

    Yet the Labour leader belongs to a tradition of English radicals with an abiding sympathy for Ireland. His anti-colonial, republican and Chartist outlook has also brought commitment to the downtrodden Palestinian people, and opposition to the machinations of the arms industry in Britain – which is the second largest exporter in the world, including to dictatorships such as that ruling Saudi Arabia.[iii] Corbyn’s enduring idealism is reminiscent of the poet and radical Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).

    In fact Corbyn drew the slogan ‘we the many, they the few’ that resonated so powerfully during the 2017 General Election, from the Romantic poet, who drowned tragically off Lerici in Italy at the age of just twenty-nine.

    These lines from Shelley’s poem ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, were written in the wake of the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd of over sixty thousand unarmed civilians, killing eighteen, who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. The atrocity actually led to the foundation of The Guardian newspaper, and was the subject of a Mike Leigh film in 2018.

    Shelley calls on the downtrodden people:

    Rise like Lions after slumber
    In unvanquishable number,
    Shake your chains to earth like dew
    Which in sleep had fallen on you —
    Ye are many — they are few.

    The poet’s links to Ireland extend beyond his second wife Mary Shelley’s maternal grandmother’s Ballyshannon origins; or the Irish painter Emilia Curran’s 1819 iconic portrait. Having been expelled from Oxford in 1811, after authorities discovered him to be the author of a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ – the first such argument printed in England – he went on to display an abiding interest in ‘John Bull’s Other island’.

    At the end of the Napoleonic War Ireland’s plight remained a vital cause for English radicals, at a time when the Irish population – in the midst of a Malthusian demographic crisis after colonisation and the introduction of the potato at the start of the seventeenth century – was almost half that of England’s. Soon after expulsion from Oxford, Shelley travelled to Dublin in 1812, along with his first wife Harriet, with whom he had just eloped.

    The young poet was greatly perturbed by the poverty and inequality greeting him in a city whose wealth and status had been greatly diminished by the Act of Union of 1801, which meant Irish M.P.s took their seats in Westminster not Dublin. He wrote: ‘I had no conception of the depth of human misery until now. The poor of Dublin are assuredly the meanest and most miserable of all.’[iv]

    His experience of Ireland appears to figure in what he described as his ‘poetic education,’ in the preface to the long poem ‘Laon and Cythna’ (1818): ‘I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war … the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds.’[v]

    The precocious nineteen-year-old addressed the Catholic Committee, containing the dying embers of the United Irishman movement, in what is now Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. Asserting a pacifism that is also prominent throughout the current Labour leader’s career, he urged: ‘In no case employ violence, the way to liberty and happiness is never to transgress the rules of virtue and justice. Liberty and happiness are founded upon virtue and justice. If you destroy the one you destroy the other.’

    The future leader of Catholic Emancipation, Daniel O’Connell, is believed to have been at the meeting, although he may not have been present for Shelley’s speech itself. O’Connell shared a distaste for armed conflict, a view which prevailed as the mainstream approach in Irish nationalism until World War I.

    Shelley’s sympathies lay with the historically oppressed Catholic community in Ireland, just as Corbyn’s lay with Northern Irish Catholics during the Troubles. There is little doubt that Shelley would share Corbyn’s principled opposition to Trident, Britain’s thirty-billion-pound nuclear weapons programme.

    Another link between Shelley and Ireland is that he completed what is considered his most revolutionary poem ‘Queen Mab’ while holidaying on Ross Island on Killarney Lake. This strident work, which he later partly disavowed, became a standard text for English socialists, including an approving Karl Marx. In this we discover a condemnation of commerce: ‘beneath whose poison-breathing shade / No solitary virtue dares to spring.’

    Corbyn’s antipathy to big business has long antecedents, therefore, in British culture, albeit the trenchant views on the subject of Shelley’s near contemporary ‘the Father of Economics’ Adam Smith (d. 1790) are generally overlooked: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ A suspicion of commercial self-interest in politics is well founded.

    Shelley has been an inspiration to a host of Irish writers including W.B. Yeats who claimed Shelley shaped his life,[vi] as well as Sean O’Casey who described himself as a Shelleyan Communist. Another devotee George Bernard Shaw described Shelley approvingly as: ‘a republican, a leveller, a radical of the most extreme sort.’

    Shelley was an inspiration for another of Shaw’s lifelong causes: vegetarianism,[vii] which the former laid out in an 1813 book: A Vindication of Natural Diet, although the term itself only came into being in the 1840s. Until that point anyone renouncing flesh was referred to as being a ‘Pythagorean’, after the Greek philosopher and mathematician of Antiquity, Pythagoras.

    Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn has been a vegetarian for almost fifty years. Considering the influence of the Irish livestock lobby on mainstream Irish media, this may have aroused further suspicion. Corbyn has, however, tended to play down that feature of his politics, perhaps forewarned by George Orwell’s condemnation of sandal-wearing vegetarians ‘burbling about dialectical materialism’ in The Road to Wigan Pier.[viii]

    Nonetheless, socialists such as Corbyn are stigmatised as forming part of a ‘north London, metropolitan, liberal elite’ by right-wing Populists such as the Home Secretary Priti Patel,[ix] who herself previously suggested using the possibility of food shortages in Ireland to force the E.U.’s hand over Brexit.[x] Corybn’s lifetime commitment to the redistribution of wealth, including resistance to austerity, may be the fruition of Shelleyian idealism: ‘a consciousness of good, which neither gold / Nor sordid fame, nor hope of heavenly bliss / Can purchase.’[xi]

    Corbyn, like Shelley before him, might have appeared naïve at times, including in his approach to Ireland. But he could yet emerge as the first British Prime Minister to feel genuine remorse for the damage wrought by British colonialism on Ireland. Moreover, notwithstanding the ongoing instability of the European project in the wake of Brexit, the genuine warmth he feels towards Ireland may harmonise relations between the peoples of these islands – the vast majority of whom have suffered under the yoke of tyrannical government over the course of a shared history.

    I for one dearly hope the British people “Rise like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number.” and vote Labour in the General Election on December 12th.

    [i] Simon Carswell, ‘It’s a means to an end – I want Brexit’, Irish Times, December 6th, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/uk-election-it-s-a-means-to-an-end-i-want-brexit-done-1.4105840

    [ii] See, Finn McRedmond, ‘ The Labour leader seems temperamentally incapable of apologising for the anti-Semitism that has wracked his party,’ – ‘Political rot has spread from US to UK,’ Irish Times, December 6th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/political-rot-has-spread-from-us-to-uk-1.4105894:

    [iii] Dan Sabbagh, ‘UK reclaims place as world’s second largest arms exporter’, The Guardian, July 30th, 2019,  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/30/uk-reclaims-place-as-worlds-second-largest-arms-exporter

    [iv] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘An Address to the Irish People’, 1812, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/p-b-shelleys-address-to-the-irish-people,

    [v] Author’s own recording: https://soundcloud.com/frank-armstrong-649911741/shelleys-preface-to-laon-and

    [vi] W.B. Yeats ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, 1900, http://www.yeatsvision.com/Shelley.html.

    [vii] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Vindication of Natural Diet’, 1813, http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/shelley01.htm

    [viii] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Part 2, 13, http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/RoadToWiganPier/wiganpierpart_13.html

    [ix] Daniel Sugarman, ‘Why I don’t think Priti Patel’s reference to “north London” was an anti-Semitic dog whistle’, October 3rd, 2019, New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/10/why-i-don-t-think-priti-patel-s-reference-north-london-was-anti-semitic-dog

    [x] Gráinne Ní Aodha, ‘Tory MP suggests using possible ‘no-deal’ food shortages to force Ireland to drop the backstop’, December 7th, 2018, https://www.thejournal.ie/brexit-threat-food-shortages-ireland-4381228-Dec2018/

    [xi] ‘P. B. Shelley, ‘Queen Mab,’ Book V

  • Randal McDonnell – ‘I’d gladly strike the first match at his cremation and spit paraffin on his embers’

    I was sickened to read a fawning obituary to an absolute creep and impostor Randal McDonnell. It fails to mention that he was a predator and pederast with an insatiable lust for young boys.

    He made a misery of my late teenage years and I carried for way too long the shame and guilt for what he did to me as though it had been my responsibility.

    Twice he seriously abused me, even once video recording the abuse so he could press pause and marvel at the highlights of his wickedness. I didn’t have the luxury of pressing pause on what was happening to me, nor was I later able to scrub the tape of my life clean.

    In my own delusional way, I put it all down to a wild adventure, but I know now that was just a hopeless coping mechanism. They say not to speak ill of the dead but I’d gladly strike the first match at his cremation and spit paraffin on his embers. When a few years back I wrote these lines, it was him I was referring to. Go rot in hell!

    ***

    As the calendar grew thinner and the water colder, I swam further out into October and November’s waves….cold. Cycling down to the Forty Foot on the green bicycle my mother had bid on in Buckley’s auctioneers, Sandycove. The bike locked with a combination of my age my year in school.

    Undressing, the breeze all salty around my jangling Autumn bollox. Holding the hand rail, my feet on the went granite, down into the waves, nerve enough to swim out to the buoy.

    Arms of rock on either side, at low tide, laced with green weed, kelp and periwinkles, full tide, they were harbour champions, granite guardians.

    And I swam out beyond their embrace, a wink from the Bailey light house, staining their wet side in crushed orange, a neon wink from Howth.

    The currents singing their own wild liquid song and me tossed about like drift wood, soaked, fucked, dream song. My arms, all fifteen years of them, ploughing through the dark spilt ink waves.

    Into the neon Dún Laoghaire, sea-salted, cold blankets of water.

    I saw the spires of the Town Hall, Saint Joseph’s and Saint Michael’s, the clock on the Town Hall, a tiny pale moon chained to Time. The lit front rooms of the houses that looked out on Scott’s Man’s Bay as I swam further into the night.

    And there I saw him first, a shadow on the shore. Me bobbing like a seal, him, fawn coat, tall and dry.

    Late night eel in the water, I weaved through the water, home to the railing that would hoist me back to land again.

    And there he was with his hard leather glove applause, chiming with the wave lapped steps.

    Shaking with the cold, I stepped out of the water.

    “You are a brave young man, you must be freezing…such a brave young man”

    He had my towel, all ready in his hands. Up the jelly fish licked steps I climbed towards that blue Dunne’s Stores towel that had just a while ago been in my bag.

    Rubbed down like a gold medal otter. Who was he? Why me?

    “Such a brave young man, and so cold, let The Count warm you up”

    My shoulders first, then my shivering ass. The Count knew well how to warm up a trembling lip biting lad.

    I saw the smudged lights of Dalkey as he grabbed my pleasure.

    I came with shame. My white seed floating on a wave that bit my toes with a fresh assault of cold. Who was he? And why did I let him? He held me tight around the neck as I wept into the waves, tears in salt water. His huge leather gloved hand over my mouth, a dark cloud hiding the moon. Forty Feet of silence and salt sprayed shame.

    I dreamt of a knife, a blade that would rise out of the water, a sharp tool of the tide that would slice him.

    I passed out, so as not to feel his Terra Ferma paws on me. I am a wave not a boy. I am not here.

    And then he let me go and all fifteen years of me clung to the rail that led down to the deep and I watched my vomit float, an angry broth on on the night water…..

    Obituary: ‘The life and death of Randal MacDonnell – the most remarkable Irish figure you’ve probably never heard of’ – Independent.ie

  • Garden of Forgetting

    Back in the 1990s, you may not believe this, even if you actually lived through that decade it’s hard to believe it now, but people went about in all kinds of crazy outfits: fake fur, feathers, sequins, lycra, metallics, colour-change intelligent fabric, you name it. Not for Pride or a summer festival, but for everyday.

    This one dude I knew used to go out dancing with a pair of wooden shades on his head. I’m telling you. Solid wood, no glass at all, just slits carved across for him to see through.

    Amazing face on him, sharp ebony cheekbones, hyper-alert like he was going full tilt at some secret mission no one else would ever get the point of, but he didn’t mind, he was damn well going to get through it anyhow. An odd sort of perfectionist.

    And he didn’t look stupid at all in his wooden shades, I swear, he was the coolest dude ever. Coulda been a rapper but he was teacher by day, part-time DJ by night.

    Back then everyone under thirty wanted to be a DJ, but in his case it was true. I asked him once how could he even see the turntables through those shades, and put out my hand to try them on. He shook his head, said I’d have to make my own. But he did tell me this:

    The weird thing about wooden shades is, your vision compensates: once you have them on the wood disappears, your eye registers only the view between the slits.

    It’s all so far off now, the 1990s. Almost further off than the 1950s. Just barely the far side of the millennium, a time when everything was on a roll — music, fashion, economy, peace, technology — it seemed every new thing was the coolest thing on the planet. We had no idea then that a load of less cool stuff was just over the horizon.

    All we wanted was to be at the best party, to dance all night and through the sunrise, to get a pair of those silver throwaway glasses in time so we could watch the next eclipse without going blind.

    For half that decade we didn’t yet have email and the idea of usable mobile phones was like something off Star Trek.

    Back then, climate change was called global warming and was just a significant maybe that we still hoped was not true — not the inconvenient fact that today burns down homes, villages, forests and fields, spawns hail drifts at the height of summer, sweeps people and cars away in flash floods.

    When the internet arrived, a glitchy as yet unpopulated net full of holes and white error space and ‘did-you-means’, we welcomed it and cherished its absurdly clashing links, not knowing this http://wwworld wide web kkshhhhhhteeupppoppmeeeia would lure us in with anarchic, random amusements, then trap us in a life governed by algorithms. That it would force us to fill in online forms, accept cookies to track our every move, offer no safe return to the out-of-date earthly world.

    And now? Now that the Nineties are a long way off, yet their legacy still with us. Or we buried in it? I can’t explain. My brain goes fuzzy at the left temple when I try to get it straight. Somehow it’s linked to the wooden shades worn by my DJ friend, because it seemed after a while that we were all of us permanently wearing sunglasses.

    Not the old kind which made reds go brown and the sky turquoise instead of blue, so you knew you had them on. These shades were different. Smarter. They made everything so clear, so colourful and so detailed, you could keep zooming in and in, from coastal map to city street, from exterior to interior, from the human standing in front of you right in close on the iris and the clouds reflected in the gaping pupil. If you looked carefully you’d see a camera reflected there also.

    A mechanical eye as witness to your own, and vice versa, so at the point where your gaze ended and the digital image or electronic gaze began, no join was visible. This was the infinite excitement of digital, a playground of looped possibility, invisible glasses producing such perfect images of the world, we forgot they even were images.

    Reality, though. What is it really? A warm summer night spent tossing and turning because things are not going as you hoped. The knowledge that ‘warming’ does not necessarily translate to sunnier  weather.

    Reality tonight is knowing you are alone, either because everyone you know is asleep, or because you have gradually let go of your friends, avoided their birthdays after birthdays, their need (like your own) for a repeat audience to hear old stories.

    Reality is the cool touch of shadow on skin, walking from the coffee shop to the unfinished building that is home. A space where energy is diminished, where it costs more and its use makes you uneasy.

    Reality is hearing from Athens that Nea Demokratia won the election, and knowing ‘new democracy’ in this case means Old Fascism. A trend pinging round networks and nations, improbable yet seemingly unstoppable, because it’s hard to chase a thing without a physical presence, hard to stop an online joke that suddenly is no joke at all.

    In a mundane world, humans (s)elect the bizarre. Election by algorithm. Reality can be all kind of goodness but right now this is not the case. Truth refracted through digital is squashed, re-versioned, bounced through the parabola and comes out the far side as untruth. This is not reality. Not the reality you want to inhabit.

    Or is it up to us where we look, what shades we choose to wear? Reality might be a warm hand in yours, unfiltered voices, music. Yes, maybe reality is music. We lost the beat is all, are having trouble finding it again. We must try a little harder, gather up the strings and feathers we threw for fun into the sky while dancing, which now lie scattered on the sands. Bring them together.

     

    Swans and stones

    you with your white hair and your negatived face, with your quick words and quicker laughter, your voice in the idiom of my youth. perhaps not particularly _your_ voice, perhaps it could be any dublinish voice, belong to any one of thousands of people, but yours is the voice I hear and it transports me in and out of that time. and later, in and out of a time and place made with you

    something here about time travel – being kidnapped by or in time. silvery anthropoid outlines on a spaceship transporter. gaps in the  continuum. moving through time on the USS Ellipsis…

    glitches

    the timecode on the video fucked. randomly disintegrating or  scratched up on purpose, it’s hard to tell

    time displaced

    until i read, in a book on time called pip-pip about a language spoken on a remote island, that this language uses the same word to mean both time and place. think also of the greek kairos we spoke of, which if we had it right is time as season, the perfect moment for a thing. those messages are gone now. deleted, or lost in the old phone. what remains suggests perfect moments are easily missed

    something feathery re-tunes the white noise and flaps into frame

    a man found a swan on a dublin street and wrapped it in his jacket, carried it back to water. someone put up a photo on the w-w-web, and the man was that day’s social media hero in minutes… how embarrassing all that for the swan, i am sure there’s a perfect explanation if we only got swan point-of-view, and besides we are the ones who put all that concrete in the swan’s way. who tamed it with stale crusts, left it to swim with cars for company on a straight-edged codicil to some long forgotten river

    is it this swan i’m seeing, or is it a group of swans? 

    the swans photographed in the garden that day when the guards ripped my film from the camera and exposed it to the sun’s slant rays. hard to unremember that moment, it stole some fragile link to the garden’s long-ago use as a corral for dublinish rebels

    sunken concrete garden that today’s dubliners hurry past, drone of traffic surrounding it, iron railings hiding it in plain view

    garden of forgetting

    since the arrest there’s been no point going back there, no point walking past the water and up the steps to the tall dark metal swans

    before, standing there made me one of them

    one of four swans circling back to a land known before we were banished to the cold seas, four swans changing back into children, our put-on feathers leaving us, and after our feet touch down we get old in sudden bursts like time-lapse until we are four white-haired children a thousand years old, our lives all used up in faraway places, happy now to be touching down on solid ground for one last sped-up, blood-warm moment

     

     

  • Helping Artists at Risk – Evgeny Shtorn in conversation with Mary Ann DeVlieg

    Mary Ann DeVlieg is an internationally experienced consultant, facilitator and trainer with a background in the arts, arts mobility and policy. She evaluates international cultural collaboration projects for the European Commission and charitable foundations. Since 2010 she has been working to protect and defend the rights of artists-at-risk, she founded the EU working group, Arts-Rights-Justice, co-founded Artsfex, advises and trains artists and arts organisations on protection and defence.

    Evgeny Shtorn is an LGBT activist, organiser and researcher from Russia. In 2018, he was forced to leave Russia and claim asylum. He currently works as Cultural Diversity Researcher at Create – National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts and co-facilitates a project ‘Something from There‘ with people seeking asylum, supported by the National Gallery of Ireland. As an activist he started the grassroots initiative Queer Diaspora Ireland in order to highlight issues of gender based violence and bullying in a hostile system of institutionalised living.

    All Images © John Malcolm Anderson.

    Evgeny: Mary Ann you are working a lot with artists who are coming to Europe seeking international protection. Some of them had a very well-established life and professional record. But when they were targeted by their governments and had to flee their countries of origin they found themselves completely isolated in the hosting countries, going through a difficult asylum process, without any perspective for the further development of their careers and arts practice. What makes you step into this field and why are you putting your time and energy helping artists at risk.

    Mary Ann: There were two assassinations of people working in the arts that affected me a lot. First was Mark Weil, founder of Tashkent’s Ilhom theater, who was murdered at the entrance to his apartment building in the Uzbek capital. Second is Juliano Mer-Khamis, Israeli-Palestinian film actor who was working in Palestine for many years, running the Freedom Theatre in Jenin. All my life I had been working with artists in relatively luxurious settings. But when you find out that people were killed just for being an artist, for doing what they do, then you have to ask: ‘Are we a sector that has some kind of solidarity?’, ‘Does this link of being from the same field create an extra responsibility to ensure that other artists are safe?’.

    Also, I’ve always worked in the arts and as much as I would like to help other people who are perhaps more deserving, I thought a lot and concluded that I can really only do best in the milieu that I know so well. Then I found out that someone (Todd Lester, founder of freeDimensional, based in New York) was putting artists residencies together with artists who were in danger. I offered to help and became a volunteer case-worker and subsequently ended up co-directing the organisation. But everybody’s story is completely different. With artists at risk you find stories spanning the whole spectrum. People who maybe are not that much at risk, but they don’t see any career path for themselves in their countries.

    Others are people who were physically maimed, beaten up, almost left for dead, people who have to go from one safe house to another, women who were repeatedly raped, members of the family targeted. The first guy I was working with was told to stop making films but he didn’t. Then the secret service came to him and told him that they knew that his father had heart problems, and that if his father was beaten up he probably wouldn’t survive. This threat to loved ones is a common way to intimidate and pressurise people.

    There is also censorship of work that can range from not posing too much danger, all the way to really endangering the artist.  I was working with an art critic in China who had his work published widely in journals, catalogues and other critical research outlets. The government wouldn’t allow anyone to hire him anymore, so by the time I found out about him he was living on the street from handouts of food and money.

    We call it ‘censorship’ but the term encompasses deleting words from a text all the way through to people who are being physically harmed, put in prison or killed. One can generalize by saying that there is something in the art work or art practice that upsets either a political party, or government in power, or religious faction, or some sort of social custom. And it could be the artist even just being who they are, as in the case of female singers in some countries. It might be work that that is not necessarily confrontational, but shows behaviour that somebody doesn’t like in the country, all the way through to work which is definitely oppositional: songs or a fictional film which criticises the government. There are as many strategies as there are people; there are as many reasons for the persecution as there are people persecuted, but the majority of the perpetrators are the organs of state. Isn’t it ironic that the state which is legally charged to protect people and to uphold any kind of universal legislation protecting freedom of expression, including freedom of artistic expression, is in effect the most common perpetrator!

    Evgeny: Could you describe the most successful case in your practice?

    Mary Ann: I don’t think I can, and to explain my answer, it is that now I’m much more interested in what happens after the relocation of the at-risk artist to a safe place, or what happens perhaps during the relocation. Organisations and funding bodies that support so-called ‘temporary relocation’ have to say it is temporary, probably because otherwise they wouldn’t get visas, but we all know it’s not necessarily temporary.

    So what I’m really concerned with is that after the honeymoon period – while people are happy, they are safe, perhaps they have a three month or even two year residency and everybody is nice to them – after this 90 days they often realize they can’t probably ever go home; maybe they have family there, and they realize they have lost their audience, the language may be a huge factor in creating a new audience, the gatekeepers (curators and programmers) either treat the artist as a sort of exotic victim asking her or him to constantly relate their sorrows and pain or they may reject the artist arguing that the aesthetic the artist was trained in, is not what their audience likes.

    So my main concern is how to set up a system that helps – not to get any special help more than the artists native or settled in the host country, because let’s face it, being an artist in any case is really tough. But at least it’s possible to ‘level the playing field’; to give these newcomer artists some training and support to bring them to the same level of opportunity as other artists established in the country, a chance to work in the art world, which is a competitive environment.

    For me it’s not about the aesthetic, it’s not helping this or that person because their aesthetic is the same as mine. It is about something that should link us together. In the art world, which is not the easiest world to be, people should have that feeling of solidarity. Sometimes this lack of solidarity might have to do with the nature of the artistic discipline. When you make films for example you are working in international teams, musicians are also very united, in some artistic sectors, people tend to work together in groups or the sector is very well networked, and they make friends who love, respect and support them. It’s different with someone whom nobody knows, or, for example, young artists who had been doing very good work, but don’t have international connections and thus they would not have as much support.

    Evgeny: Would you agree that this solidarity often depends on the colour of skin of the artist who was persecuted?

    Mary Ann: First of all, the divide between Global North and Global South is very marked. Here in the Global North we have arts councils, we have awards, we have money, we have a system and people to manage it. This is not at all the same in all countries of the Global South.

    In the last 15-20 years, Arab artists have made huge and very successful strides to enter the international market, especially in the visual arts. I would dare to guess that the majority of them are not practicing Muslims or perhaps are Christians and this may be why it’s easier for the people in the West to reach out to them. That would be an excuse, but not a reason! Do you feel the difference? We should not excuse behaviour that gives preference to people we feel easier around, or closer to, but it happens. And I think if you have someone who is not speaking western European languages, someone whose work is not in the currently trending aesthetic of the West it’s probably much harder for people to relate to.

    A lot of rappers get in trouble in many countries, including the West, and it’s harder for the human rights campaigning organisations to relate to them, because their lyrics can be quite upsetting, confrontational, even violent. It’s not only about the artistic discipline, but also about the transferability of that discipline into the aesthetic that is accepted by the West and the nature of the work. Many of the at-risk artists that have been relocated were trained in the West. Now to go further than that and say whether there is racism involved I would suggest that there is a kind of racism involved if you are only sympathetic to things that you can relate to and that goes back to my solidarity argument. Is there something about us working in the arts field where even if we might not particularly like somebody’s work, or we might not particularly understand the context, we can still say that we are all in the arts sector and we will support one another?

    Evgeny: You work a lot with organizations on the level of European Union what do you think the EU is already doing to protect artists at risk and what is not doing, but from your point of view should do?

    Mary Ann: I can speak very briefly about what it is doing. In the last couple of years, the European Union and the European Commission’s Directorate in charge of Culture as its implementing institution, have been supportive of initiatives where artists go and work with refugees. And I think it’s wonderful work when and if the artists want to work in the refugee camps or wherever, with kids, mothers, fathers – that’s absolutely fine, but that is not where I am specifically working.

    What is really my concern is the pathway of an artist who, like a human right defender, is in grave danger and needs to move to safety.  And for that, it is harder and harder to get a visa. Especially when the person has a partner or a family. I can mention for example, the Goethe Institut in a certain country had been working with an artist-at-risk and was talking to the Foreign Office in Germany, begging them to give him a visa, but the person had a family and it was soon obvious there was no way they would give him a visa.

    This has been hardening in all countries. It’s not quite as bad as Trump’s travel ban, but this anti-migrant sentiment is everywhere. So what I feel the countries, via the EU, should be doing is training people who are in charge of giving visas with the deeper understanding of what is art and how an artist can be in danger. Now the visa system is outsourced in many countries and those who are looking at visas don’t have any idea of what they are looking at; they are asking absurd questions. But at the same time it’s hard to claim for special treatment for artists – and what about other professionals, doctors, engineers and so on!

    To be fair, the EU has really done a lot in terms of setting up, training and funding initiatives to support human rights defenders with emergency grants and other assistance including temporary relocation, and ‘artists’ can in many cases be defined as defenders.

    Evgeny: Could you say what country within the EU would be the best example of receiving artists in need of international protection and the most hostile one.

    Mary Ann: Regarding the most hostile I don’t know, because I obviously don’t work with them! But good examples are in the Nordic countries who host the most writers and artists at risk via ICORN (International Cities of Refuge Network). In Sweden, some years ago the relevant minister mandated the Swedish Arts Council to give more support for people at risk needing temporary relocation. There is legislation and methods to make it easier. But in each case it depends on the political will, and the political will depends on the will of the party, its ideology and also the general opinion in the street. Denmark is a good example. It was a Scandinavian paradise and the politics changed and people are incited to blame migrants for all the problems. I know one temporary relocation city in Sweden where the politics changed and the far-right local government have announced the closure of the programme because they don’t want any more migrants.

    Evgeny: In what countries artists are at risk mostly? Can we make a list of countries where we have to look with more attention?

    Mary Ann: I don’t have the answer to that from the top of my head. The EU ProtectDefenders has a newsletter in which they announce which countries are currently particularly dangerous. In general the danger also depends on what the artist talking about. Mexico, for example, is terribly dangerous for journaists or artists who are trying to uncover things related to the mafias, corrupt police or assassinations; China is particularly bad in terms of censorship. Every year Freemuse publishes statistics about artists who have been prosecuted, but of course they are limited to the cases that are made known – there are many countries that still are off the radar, or where artists might not want to make noise about it, just to keep a low profile until the difficulties die down.

    A couple of years ago, I was part of a research team who assisted in a study launched by the Artists At Risk Connection, an initiative based in New York. Many Turkish artists answered it, and even though at that time the purges hadn’t got as bad as now, a lot of them didn’t want to make a big deal about their persecution, even if they told their story, they preferred to remain anonymous, in the hope that if they were quiet it would just go away. But we do have the best statistics that we can make, even if partial, published every year; they are accessible; people who are interested can easily find them online, from Freemuse, and for writers Index on Censorship or PEN.

    Evgeny: Do you think that an artist who has success in the West can benefit more from support in a critical moment, even if they are very critical and vocal about problems in their countries?

    Mary Ann: It really depends on the country and on the case. A very famous Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera keeps going back to Cuba and being ‘disruptive’, but she is well supported by the West, and when she was in jail in Cuba, the City of New York offered her a symbolic artists residency. I think these things can help. At the same time many of us have been working on the case of the poet, curator and artist, Ashraf Fayadh, in Saudi Arabia – he was put in prison because just one person said that his poetry was blasphemous, and he’s been given sentences from beheading, to years in jail and hundreds of lashes. Even though he has had several appeals, the number of years and lashes just changes. His is a very particular situation, because the Saudi government does not have competence to rule over religious affairs.

    The Saudi monarchy most likely would be happy to get rid of this embarrassing case, because people in the West are constantly advocating on his behalf, but only the religious authorities there have the competence to rule over that case. Recently we saw the exchange of political prisoners between Russia and Ukraine and filmmaker Oleg Sentsov who spent 5 years in jail in Russia has been released among them. It was interpreted as a favour that Russia gave to the West.

    Evgeny: I would like to touch now a very problematic topic, quite popular among some post-colonial scholars and anti-racist activists, which is an idea of so called ‘white saviours’. Do you think this critical approach is valid for the work you and other people in the field have been doing?

    Mary Ann: It is valid and for already quite a long time in the field of human rights defenders and artists at risk there has been recognition and a movement to stress that it shouldn’t be all about coming to the West – there should be temporary relocation in the other world regions, as close to home as the person can be and still be safe.

    Once again, that would mitigate the problems of the loss of the language, of the time zone, of the family, of everything basically that would make the artist or defender feel less isolated. The idea is that if there are more possibilities to stay close to home, there won’t be such a massive negative impact on a person who has to flee. It is already happening in the arts. There are some programmes for the MENA region and in Africa. One woman in Lebanon who has a house in the mountains and hosts artists in danger there. But as I said the divide between Global North and Global South is massive. In many of those countries they don’t have properly functioning arts funding programmes, so they don’t even properly fund local artists nor those who have to flee seeking safety. I see this problem as complex; it’s not necessarily the ‘white saviour’ attitude, it is the Global North where you can get subsidies, where you can get a whole system of support, where you simply have more possibilities to do art, which doesn’t remove the question of what is the most ethical way to use those resources.

    I have been very vocal about certain initiatives which have been set up in the Western countries, because from my point of view, the money should go to the countries in other world regions for special programmes, training, networks for local people so that they can create their own systems relevant to their own contexts. It might be a different model, taking into account culture and context, than what we set up in terms of temporary relocation here and we shouldn’t be the ones who say what is the best way to deal with this. There should be more discussions and understanding to find solutions, but to have more regional support systems is definitely one of them. Of course if you are a visual artist and you are invited in New York you may be happy to go there, but it shouldn’t be the only possibility, when we speak about real dangers and risks.

    Evgeny: Do relocated artists feel excluded in the arts sector of the hosting society, that their aesthetic is not welcomed, that their art is perceived is something less important and valuable?

    Mary Ann: Yes, I have heard a lot of them reflecting the same sorts of concern. First of all, in order to get funding, they have to play the victim forever, due to a certain ‘fetishisation’, as a colleague of mine calls it, of the refugee artists. Secondly, artists who have relocated, envision projects bridging what they know of their home country, with the local community, including the diaspora there. They have wonderful project ideas, but are not getting grants because they don’t know how to work the system, they don’t yet know this special way of using the language needed for funding applications; they often don’t have enough weight behind them even though their ideas are brilliant and better than initiatives devised by artists who have not lived the situations themselves.

    Evgeny: You intend to start a PhD in the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research in TU-Dublin. Did you decide to summarize all the decades you’ve been supporting artists at risk?

    Mary Ann: All my life I’ve been advocating for policy improvement. The way I’ve done it is to get people together to talk – artists, gatekeepers (the organisers, people with the power to decide who is and who is not shown or presented), the policy makers, the funders, sometimes politicians who are managing cultural funds in their city or in their country.

    I think, having worked as a funder and as a policy maker myself in the past, it’s easy to get further and further away from the reality, so bringing together these cross-disciplinary, cross-professional and international groups helps people actually to start to understand. When you start in the early days advocating for policy, you usually mistakenly start by asking policy-makers to do things which are not in their competence. Understanding what they can and cannot do is essential, and to understand this, frank discussions really help.

    However, for the last couple of years I have been seeing what I would call hypocrisy: a certain rhetoric in arts policies, especially around cultural diversity, which speaks about openness, about new voices, about support for everybody, but when we look at relocated artists, those who I am calling ‘artists impacted by displacement’, there are multiple obstacles and legal restrictions such as the prohibition to work and earn money, for people seeking asylum.

    When the artist can only be defined as an artist by how much, as a percentage of their total income, is earned from art, it is absurd. Only if you can prove that this percentage of your income is your artistic work can you be labelled as an artist. The arts council in a certain country can’t even consult with artists still waiting for refugee status, because they are not legally allowed to be called ‘artists’. They can’t even consult with these artists on how they could make their policies better! I’m getting more and more angry about ridiculous situations like this.

    In my PhD I try to look at various philosophical and sociological texts about the role of artist in the society, legal texts on cultural rights and human rights, research into migration and diaspora, to build up a strong intellectual argument and then to look at selected countries’ policy rhetoric to compare it with what is happening on the ground. My main hope is that I will be able to use it to advocate for policy change.

  • Old Man Talk – ‘I used to ride young wans in here’

    I made the following notes in an old factory that was built in 1906 at a cost of six hundred pounds. It was a draughty one story building which has stood for over a century on the eastern shore of Loch an Mhuilinn in Carraroe, Conamara.  Jack B. Yeats and John Millington Synge referred to it in their Manchester Guardian reports about the West of Ireland. It stimulates my memory. Five of my six children grew up during the twenty years I previously occupied it and in my mellowing years I returned to inhabit the place.

    The exterior is unchanged except for the slate roof replacing a rusty corrugated covering which was no protection from the elements. When it rained heavily we had to deploy five pots and pans to catch the leaks. Since then it has been modernised but the mice still run up the wainscoting. I trapped and murdered one every couple of days and felt sorry for the creatures. The heating system was idiosyncratic, suffering from convoluted wiring, a faulty water pump, thermostat and oil burner. I wore layers of clothes and walked a lot on Trá an Dóilín (the Coral Strand) to keep warm.

    The original purpose of the factory was to teach local maidens lacework and knitting, provide them with a small income and thus keep them at home as potential breeders. I possess a photo of thirty-five girls in white pinafores and four teachers in dark skirts posing outside the building. Most of the girls saved up the pittance they earned and used it as their fare to America. The factory survived as various forms of cottage industry, until 1975 when I took it over and turned part of it into a cinema. My eldest son has since made a fine documentary film about that enterprise, which ended in 1994.

    Once, when my then wife advertised for extras for a small film, a burly farmer from the Gaeltacht of RathCairn in county Meath arrived with a present of a sack of barley on his shoulder. His antecedents from Conamara had been encouraged to colonise land in county Meath in the nineteen-thirties. It was one of the exotic ideas conjured up by De Valera when he looked into his own heart. The Meathman dumped his sack on the floor of the kitchen, surveyed the place and announced: ‘I used ride young wans in here.’

    In 1994 we swapped the factory for a cottage four miles west. This had six acres of bog on which I planted a thousand trees to compensate for driving a carbon monoxide vehicle. By then  I had changed partners, for better or worse, and would soon have a final total of six children.

    I found that this factory hadn’t been occupied for a couple of years and I rented the place again for the precise purpose of writing these words. I’m of an age when reminiscence is a compulsion, self-pity is tempting; the gyroscope is wobbling and there’s nobody around to catch it.

    The person indirectly responsible for the building was Rachel Lady Dudley, wife of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Her real surname was Gurney. ‘Shut your gurney face’ is now, I understand, an urban insult in Britain.

    Unlike her husband, Rachel was concerned for the poverty of the peasants. Those English aristocrats had a summer residence in Rosmuc, just across the road from Pádraic Pearse’s cottage. I am sure that the doomed Irish teacher and the enforcer of the King’s writ never met socially. However, James Joyce’s Ulysses records the occasion of Lord Dudley’s cavalcade across Dublin in June 1904 – a detail which may be the lord’s only memorable action in the history of human affairs. He was going to a charity bazaar on behalf of Mercers Hospital in which, by the way, my father later had his final heart attack. Mercers is now a hotel in which I long ago had a one-night stand and wept, perhaps finally mourning my father.

    As was the custom in the early twentieth century, especially in the social circles of his friend the Prince of Wales, Lord Dudley was having an affair – or as it was delicately described at the time, ‘concupiscent capers’ – with a music hall star named Gertie Millar.

    Gertie was the wife of Lionel Monckton, successful composer of the Quaker Girl hit, my old love Thaura M’s party piece, an affair I have already recounted in these pages.

    In between bearing seven children for the Lord Lieutenant the neglected Rachel needed something to occupy herself. She immersed herself in the work of the Congested Districts Board who erected this building. She took up photography and recorded the misery of Irish peasant life. She also initiated a bursary scheme to provide nurses for the impoverished poor. In 1970 when I came to Conamara they were still called Dudley Nurses and there is many a child in Conamara named Dudley.

    The Lord Lieutenant – whose real name was William Humble Ward –  also served briefly and unnotably as Governor General of Australia. Andrew Deakin, a contemporary Aussie politician wrote of the Governor’s short career in the Antipodes: ‘His ambition was high but his interests were short-lived … He did nothing really important, nothing thoroughly, nothing consistently … He remained … a very ineffective and a not very popular figurehead.’ A perfect cartoon of the English monied classes.

    However, the energetic Rachel founded the jubilee nurses Down Under to service the poor people of the Outback. It was the forerunner of the Flying Doctor service which still functions.

    Rachel and the Earl were divorced in 1912.

    I laboriously copied the above photographs by Lady Dudly in my darkroom. Several elderly neighbours have told me that their aunts and mothers and grandmothers worked in the knitting enterprise. When I wanted to exhibit this and copies of several other of her pictures, I wrote a polite note to her son, the next Viscount Dudley, asking his permission to do so. It would have been nice for my neighbours to see pictures of their long departed mothers, fathers, aunts and other antecedents.

    This Viscount – whose second wife was Maureen Swanson, film actress – replied, threatening me with legal proceedings if I infringed the family’s copyright. I desisted, realising that what the absentee colonist seizes, he still holds onto, very tightly.

    It has just occurred to me that if Rachel took the photographs as a functionary of the CGB perhaps the photos should now be in the public domain. The Viscount who refused me permission died recently, in fact within two days of my own birthday. It is on my list to write to the present incumbent of the Dudley title.

    Lady Dudley will be remembered for her good works and also her tragedy. One fine day in June 1920, she walked into Screebe lake in Rosmuc. Local tradition maintains that she drowned herself. She was fifty-one.

    Four years later the original Lord Lieutenant was free to marry Gertie the musical hall artist and he sailed on until dying of cancer in 1932. Some day I will summon the daring to have that photographic exhibition in that old factory which still echoes with the voices of my children.

    Originally I was warned that because the building bordered the main road it was a dangerous place to bring up toddlers. In fact it taught them road sense. The only member of the family who came to grief outside was our beautiful and headstrong border collie, Laddie.

    Nowadays the constant swish of traffic outside – teachers commuting from Galway and workers commuting to Galway – suggests that the warning would be more apposite today. As in every other rural culture, few people now walk the roads to shop, school, pub or church in Conamara.

    They mostly stay in at night, no longer drink poitín in quaint thatched cottages, but tipple – if they drink at all – in fine, modern, mortgaged mansions and watch Netflix. The heart of rural Ireland, the pub, is dead. But that old factory is again for sale and, for me, still vaguely alive. Each of us inhabits a small personal world where time and space converge.

  • Special Report: Punitive Policies Inflict Further Exclusion and Trauma on Syrian Refugee Children

    The future of a generation born during over eight years of conflict in Syria is under threat. More than half of all school-aged Syrian children living as refugees in neighbouring countries do not have access to formal education. In this second of a two-part series humanitarian activist and author Bruna Kadletz addresses the educational crisis for school-aged refugees.

    From the balcony on the second floor where an orphanage shelters around forty Syrian children, you can see on the horizon a majestic natural wall of snow-capped mountains. Between the building, the clear blue sky and the highlands, plantation plots, mosques and other edifices adorn the fertile valley, which served as foodstuffs for the Roman provinces of the Levant, during antiquity.

    The Beqaa Valley, in eastern Lebanon, has since become a place of intense pressure, oscillating between hospitality and hostility. In the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War (1975 – 90), the government dedicated itself to rebuilding the capital Beirut, but neglected rural areas. As a result, the Beqaa Valley has one of the highest levels of inequality in the country, concentrating a mix of poverty and political abandonment.

    Since 2011, the influx of Syrian refugees, have exacerbated the inequality and poverty in the valley. Due to its proximity to the Syrian border, with Mount Lebanon to the west and the Anti-Lebanon range to the east, it received approximately three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand[1] refugees, who escaped the brutality of the on-going Syrian Civil War. This influx has had a profound impact on the region´s political, social and economic environment.

    Throughout this period, waves of hospitality have been punctuated by xenophobic attacks, harming refugees in need of protection, and generating further hostility. In June 2019, an apparently accidental fire[2] near the Deir al-Ahmar Refugee Camp displaced around six hundred refugees in the valley, exposing the latest tensions between residents and refugees. According to Nasser Yassin, researcher at the American University of Beirut, the incident, and how it was handled, is an example of ‘collective punishment’ perpetrated by local governments in order to push Syrians away.

    Despite the harsh living conditions for both local populations and newcomers, punitive responses and policies inflict further exclusion and trauma on refugees, with particularly adverse effects on children, who are restricted from enjoying a dignified life and education.

    In April 2019, I travelled to the Beqaa Valley to visit the Molham House, an orphanage housing Syrians kids who have lost their parents or the families taking care of them. The Molham team is responsible for the physical, emotion and social well-being of the children, particularly those who carry the trauma of the war.

    Before moving to the orphanage, many of the Syrian children did not enjoy access to education, food, or a clean and safe place to live. Some could not speak on arrival in the house, reflecting psychological wounds, while others were scarred with physical injuries. The Molham team has been working to improve the children’s lot by offering a home, medical care, psychological support and education.

    We arrived in the late morning, when the children were getting ready for school. Ghaithaa, a Syrian refugee herself, who works and lives in the Molham House, introduces the house to us. As we walk through the building´s chambers, the playful children follow us excitedly.

    After our short tour, I found my way to the balcony. The view was breathtaking not only for its natural beauty, but also because of the tough living conditions of refugees. There were countless informal tented settlements spread next to plantation plots. During the wintertime, when freezing temperatures, snow and torrential rain wreck the settlements, refugees are left in desperate need of emergency aid.

    Access to decent housing is one of the many challenges in the region. Preventing child labour and ensuring an education for school-aged children and youth is another. In early 2015, the Lebanese government suspended the registration of Syrians entering the country and imposed legal restrictions on those already inside the territory, suspending access to formal work, documentation and freedom of movement, and implementing a yearly residency renewal fee of US$200.

    Adults are thus unable to provide for their families and live with scarce resources in precarious conditions. In this extreme context, families end up depending on child labour to survive. Recent research published by UNICEF: Survey on Child Labour in Agriculture in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon: The case of Syrian refugees[3], revealed that ‘4,592 children, between the ages of 4 and 18 years, were reported as actively working, out of a total of 6,972 children living in the surveyed households.’ The research also found that 74.8% of surveyed children work in the agriculture sector and for 85.6% of the working children, family support was the leading motive to work.

    Besides insufficient public schools, lack of financial resources to pay for transportation, school supplies and registration fees, child labour also curtails education opportunities through non-enrolment, school dropout, and/or poor academic performance.

    In the orphanage in the Bekaa Valley, children face familar challenges on arrival. The main reasons for low enrolment levels are lack of documents and financial problems.

    Another issue for the children is the period in which they are permitted to study. Lebanese public schools segregate Lebanese students from Syrian refugees. Ensuring education for all, schools work double shifts. In the morning, it´s learning time for Lebanese students and other foreigners, whereas in the afternoon, it´s the Syrian refugees’ turn to learn.

    Ghaithaa tells us that ‘some kids complain about going to school in the afternoon, they feel tired studying from 1 to 7pm. They return home very tired. Plus, they´re not psychologically fit to study.’

    ‘Refugees in Lebanon have a very hard life,’ she concludes.

    Despite all the difficulties, the sentiment permeating the environment is one of care. In the orphanage, Ghaithaa is responsible for ten girls, ranging in age from six to twelve.

    ‘Each one carries a story. Of course, all of us have fled from Syria, from the war, and we left in harsh conditions. Many of the children have lost someone they love, so this house is a shelter for them, a place where they feel safe, where they are loved, where they are being educated.’ she says.

    ‘Kids are the most important thing for us,’ she says, with tears in her eyes.

    During times of humanitarian crisis and uncertainty, access to a quality education is a daily challenge faced by millions of refugee children and youth around the world. Maintaining access to education in times of crisis is complex, demanding local, regional and international efforts, and political will. Beyond dismantling punitive politics toward refugees, ensuring inclusive policies and developing plans for education, we must cultivate a culture of care and affection.

    In creating a safe, healthy and playful environment for children deeply wounded by the atrocities of wars, armed conflict and social collapse, we may regenerate lost generations.

    [1] Data on registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon, UNHCR. Available at: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria/location/71

    [2] ‘Lebanon´s Deir al-Ahmar: how an incident displaced 600 refugees,’ Anchal Vohra for Al Jazeera. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/lebanon-deir-al-ahma-incident-displaced-600-refugees-190609095940222.html

    [3] Rima R. Habib (2019). ‘Survey on Child Labour in Agriculture in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon: The Case of Syrian Refugees.’ Beirut, Lebanon: American University of Beirut Press. Available at: https://www.unicef.org/lebanon/media/1621/file/ChildLabourSurvey_2019.pdf

  • Not in Our Name – the Fall and Fall of Conor McGregor

    Greater in combat
    Than a person who conquers
    A thousand times a thousand people
    Is the person who conquers himself
    Gautama Buddha, the Dhammapada, (third century B.C.E.)

    There is no opponent
    Who the fuck is Jose Aldo?
    There is no Jose Aldo,
    There is no no-one
    You’re against yourself,
    You’re against yourself.
    Conor McGregor, Interview, (2013)

    Anyone with even a passing interest in combat sports cannot but be aware of the terminal decline of a one-time candidate for the greatest Irish sportsman of all time, Conor McGregor.

    For a time, when he could do no wrong, it seemed like the entire Irish nation was behind McGregor. The pride of a fighting nation. There were a few dissenting voices admittedly, who wisely recognised a crassness and thuggery to his character. A premonition, perhaps, of what was to come. The rest of us were mesmerised by the meteoric rise of the dual-weight UFC champion.

    The Irish sportsman has almost always been a plucky underdog, destined to fail at the highest level.

    Our national rugby team, ranked number one in the world going into the last World Cup, recently imploded with barely a whimper before the might of the All Blacks.

    There have been exceptions, it is true – Padraig Harrington and Brian O’Driscoll, for example – but Irish people seem to bear a psychic wound handed down from a colonial legacy of brutal suppression. As a nation, we don’t believe in ourselves.

    Mould-breaker

    McGregor broke that mould, and for a time, we celebrated him for it. Many of us, myself included, were seduced by the story of a plucky kid from Crumlin who became champion of the world.

    McGregor was the law of attraction in action, and became probably the most recognisable Irishman in the world. His self-belief, audacity and sheer natural athleticism were a sight to behold. He was that most un-Irish of Irish sportsmen, one who backed himself against the very best, and won.

    For a time, everything he touched turned to gold. I vividly remember the high points: getting up at 5am to watch his six-second-demolition of the reigning champion Jose Aldo; he showed what dedication, self-belief and hard work could do. ‘Who the fuck is Jose Aldo?’, he said, ‘You’re against yourself.’  Did he have any idea how prophetic those words were?

    Pantomime Gangster

    It is time to call McGregor out for what he has become: a caricature of a nineteenth-century punch-drunk, stage Irishman. An empty vessel behind which lurks self-destruction and self-loathing. A false hero. A morally bankrupt shell of a man.

    An immutable law of the universe is the higher you rise, the further you have to fall. Just as McGregor’s rise was meteoric, so his fall has been catastrophic. It is like watching a brutal car crash in slow motion.

    The decline of McGregor is not just as a sportsman, but as a man. A would-be role model has been reduced to one whose demons have taken control. He is someone who clearly needs help, not selfies and adulation.

    If you invoke the gods of war, expect to be their victim in the end. In Irish mythology Cú Chulainn is our greatest warrior-hero. Unsurpassed in battle, even he eventually meets his doom when An Morrígan, the Celtic goddess of the battlefield, turns against him, leaving his corpse tied to a standing stone with his own spear driven through his gut. W.B. Yeats evoked the scene in ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, (1939)

    A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
    Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
    Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

    Similarly, McGregor invoked the gods of war, who smiled on him for a time, before turning on him.

    Yet McGregor’s fall began slowly, almost imperceptibly. For a long while we, as a nation, looked the other way and ignored the excesses. This seemingly loveable rogue could do no wrong. He said controversial things, ‘but sure that’s grand, he’s Irish.’ With a twinkle in the eye he could get away with it.

    But no more. Now he serves as a warning to our children on what fame and excessive wealth can bring – that empty promise of chronic materialism which is the real sickness of our age.

    First came the money. Ostentatious, crass and tasteless displays of wealth at a time when there are ten thousand homeless in Ireland; McGregor buys an €80,000 Gucci mink coat and brags about it on a social media account which bears painful witness to his slow descent into delusion and madness.

    Gone was the bright-eyed kid from Dublin, whose positive attitude and laughter were contagious.

    The press conferences, which at one time were sharp and witty, steadily grew nastier and more vindictive. The wit and humour of the early years soon dried up.

    We looked away in shame at the racial taunts directed against Flyod Mayweather before that circus of a fight. He may have made one hundred million dollars, but he lost his soul that night. Or maybe he lost it last year when he was brutally demolished, choked out, by Khabib Nurmagomedov, a disciplined martial artist.

    Arrested Development

    And so the glint in McGregor’s eyes grew darker, his face harder, and the fuse shorter. The losses seemed unbearable for him, and his demons came out to play. Surrounded by yes-men, with no one calling him out, there was no bounds to his mis-behaviour.

    Arrests followed for assault, ‘strong arm battery and criminal mischief’; lurid headlines; different cities, new countries, but the same old story.

    Images revealed McGregor on yet another rollover – out of his mind on drink and drugs. The signs of chronic cocaine and alcohol abuse evident for all to see. Then came photos of McGregor mingling with some of Dublin’s most notorious mobsters – men with the blood of many victims on their hands. McGregor had become notorious alright, but not in a good way.

    Recently he was found guilty in a Dublin court of a shameful and unprovoked assault against an older man in a Dublin pub. The CCTV footage catches him red-handed. One can only imagine what happens behind closed doors off camera.

    Worse still are the sexual assault allegations, though of course anyone is innocent until proven guilty, and McGregor deserves the presumption of innocence.

    ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story’

    McGregor was a showman, never a real person. A pantomime gangster in a twenty-first-century Punch and Judy show. The story of his notoriety is based on a lie. The hardman attitude, the association with real criminals were contrived to create a false persona.

    As they say in Dublin: ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.’ He was never supposed to start believing his own bullshit.

    Somewhere along the road, the dream became a living nightmare. Now stuck in a circus of his own making, he is the ringmaster who no longer wants to play the role. But with the lions circling, like all doomed heroes, he is in the hands of his inescapable fate.

    What we are also seeing is the moral bankruptcy of UFC itself. There is something rotten in the state of Nevada. What does it say for a sporting code when its greatest heroes, McGregor and John Jones, fall from grace in such spectacular fashion?

    False comparisons have been made between McGregor and Mike Tyson, but Tyson grew up in a real ghetto. His mother was a prostitute and from childhood Tyson had to fight just to survive. Today, Tyson has tamed the monster within and has largely redeemed himself.

    McGregor had choices. He grew up in a functional family in the working class Dublin suburb of Crumlin. The Image McGregor has cultivated of being from the ghetto are designed for his American fans. He took a decision to associate with gangland criminals and thugs, and assumed the role of a pantomime gangster.

    Out of control

    It is clear now that McGregor has been out of control for several years with illusions of invincibility. In a country with more stringent laws than Ireland, he would probably be behind bars already. For his own, and others’, safety that seems like the best place for him.

    Perhaps the demons were always there, and it’s possible that one too many punches to the head have damaged him more deeply than we are aware.

    Maybe the pressure of living a lie in a toxic world of fame and wealth inevitably leads to this. No doubt, living without constraints would test anyone’s character.

    Money can’t buy class, and it certainly doesn’t lead to happiness. It can buy you time though, but however painfully slow, the wheels of Irish justice will turn.

    The Irish state has an embarrassing record of tolerance for the rich and famous breaking the law, and our sexual assault laws, and criminal justice system more generally, are outdated and not fit for purpose. It could be years before any trial occurs, if it ever comes to pass. Money has a way of making these things go away. But even if allegations magically disappear, reputational damage cannot.

    An addict in full self-destruct mode with bottomless pockets owning a whiskey company. What could possibly go wrong? The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Like any addict who has lost the ability to make rational choices, McGregor is trapped in pit of self-pity, self-loathing and resentment.

    In archetypal Irish fashion, McGregor has become a dirty family secret. Since the spiral of his decline began, collectively we have just stopped talking about him. ‘Nothing to see here, move on.’

    But we need to talk about Conor McGregor.

    We need to draw a line.

    This behaviour is not ok.

    Not in our name

    Not in my name. When, and if, McGregor ever walks into the Octagon again, with the Irish flag on his shoulders, he does not do so in the name of the Irish people. The men and women who died in the pursuit of Irish independence would not permit this. He does not represent me or my people. Not in our name.

    What McGregor clearly needs is help, not adoration, and to be held accountable for his actions, before the courts if necessary.

    Not more selfies with the mindless fans who do not seem to care about his behaviour. No more being egged on by the sycophantic thugs who surround him, or by his equally lost family. No more glorifying the shadow side of masculinity. Do we really want teenage boys aspiring to be Conor McGregor? He is the poster-child for a failed version of Irish masculinity.

    The saddest part about McGregor is what he could have been: a role model and inspiration for kids around the world. Instead he is alone in the world, alone with his demons. For all his tens of millions of dollars, I do not envy him.

    We could be heroes

    At this time of tremendous upheaval and change in the world, we desperately need new heroes.

    As Joseph Campbell masterfully put it, a hero is someone ‘who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself’. Not to the false and empty pursuit of money and fame like McGregor. But at least we can thank him for showing us the antithesis of a hero.

    Jungian psychologist Jasbinder Garnermann describes how essential it is to confront the unconscious shadow in the human psyche in order to fight our demons:

    The hero’s obliviousness to his inner nature becomes his fatal flaw … The shadow defeats kings, princes and generals, men who have fought great wars and shown superhuman courage. These are all heroes who have vanquished the external enemy. But, to a man, they have been brought down by the enemy within. And for this battle, humankind is still in training.

    I take no pleasure in writing these words, in seeing the sorry fall of a fellow man. We all have our demons and fallen from grace at some stage in our lives. Conor just had further to fall, and no one to save him from himself.

    Yet there is always hope of redemption, even for those who have descended to the darkest depths, but that would require McGregor to confront his demons – a fight he has shown no stomach for so far.

    No matter how far we fall, each of us has the instinct for transcendence, and the hope of  redemption. Maybe one day he will indeed make amends, and remember his own words:

    I just feel like I can beat myself. I can beat my mind, I believe in myself so much that nothing is going to stop me

    I wish him well: that he can turn things around before he loses everything, if it is not already too late.

  • Better Butter

    ‘God bless all here’ as our ancestors used to say upon arrival at the home of a friend, neighbour, or stranger. Not just a blessing on all within that home, it meant he who entered possessed not the evil eye.

    In my great-grandparents’ time, curses, spells, and witchcraft were common practise. It was the 1870’s and women were careful with their milk and butter. They believed bad feelings caused concern for the precious household, products which brought valuable shillings back from the market.

    Essie Donoghue Feery was one of these extraordinary women. Her devoted husband, John ‘The Clock’ Feery was sentenced to two years in jail for severely injuring members of the stronger McCormack family, after they’d driven him, Essie and nine young children out of a cottage on land he’d worked hard for years. This left the Feerys homeless and penniless.

    The McCormack woman was of the evil eye, and had conspired with her husband and five sons to torment John off his land. He was a lone man, yet still he done them six men great harm before conceding defeat. Retreating a mile and a half back into the bog of Ring, he built a beautiful peat hut as a homestead for his wife and children.

    Feery is a name that describes the little people most gifted with a deathless courage. But back to this one woman Essie Donoghue Feery, of great faith, kindness, and compassion. Old Evil Eye McCormack saw her chance. John was in jail and Essie alone there with nine children. This was the way of it.

    The Evil Eye brought evil everywhere with her. Every few days calling to the peat hut with offers to help pretending to be in kindness and remorse for harms done. But Essie was no fool. She knew the Evil Eye meant no good. In milking Essie’s two cows the following day, the cows ceased to produce milk. On churning the butter, it failed to rise in the churn and became sour. This denied Essie much needed shillings from the market.

    Essie had been born and reared above, in the hills. Croghan was four miles away, but she called in to Old Lady Dunne, said to have far greater spells than Evil Eye McCormack. ‘What ails you, Essie Dear ?’ asked Old Lady Dunne. On hearing the story, Old Lady Dunne rose from her chair, and this she did say: ‘Musha, Musha, Essie Dear. I am an old lady but follow me. I’ve waited many years to curse the Evil Eye McCormack. Now do exactly as I tell you.’ She returned from her garden with herbs and then this she did say. ‘I am bid by God to only use the poison of plant to destroy evil and the goodness of plant to help the sick. Person, or animal.’ She began to chant and held up the herbs as if in offering.

    ‘Now Essie, half an hour before you know the evil eye to be coming, put a poker in the coals of the fire and throw a few of these herbs upon it. Just a few at a time, because too much and the smoke could leave you unconscious. Then when you see Evil Eye McCormack coming across the bog towards you, use the red hot poker to make a sign of the cross on the inside of your front door, and continue to put herbs upon the fire. Do as I bid you and this will be the last time Evil Eye McCormack ever bothers you. This done, I’ll summon the black fallen angel to drive her away.’

    It is said that once Essie made the sign of a cross on the door with that red hot poker, Evil Eye McCormack was heard roaring across the Bog of Ring and Derrycoffey. ‘My heart! My heart! Oh God, my heart is burning!’ No one saw her after that, but Essie’s cows and butter became better than ever.

    Fast forward to in our cottage in 1970, where I sat in the dark with the light of the big open turf fire blazing. About ten of us sat around Paddy O’ Reilly, who lived two cottages up from ours. He was my favourite storyteller about the Banshee. I saw the flames of that fire reflected in his eyes just at the moment he told us of the black banshee roaring in the Bog of Ring many years before. He said, so terrifying were her haunting cries heard across the bog, it drove several people into insanity. They’d never be the same again.

  • SEVEN VIVID UNINTERRUPTED DAYS

     

                                             Translation By Sally McCorry

     

    January 1st

    The first of January is always a special day. It’s as if everybody is suffering from a delicious jet lag to enjoy slowly. I, on the other hand, left my house at eight thirty in the morning, I don’t know why. Perhaps I just wanted to do things I’ve never done before. So I looked for a bar that was open. The only one I found was the Tropical Paradise, a bar owned by Chinese people. When I went in two Chinese children stared at me with wide eyes, I smiled at them and they carried on staring at me. I waited for a few interminable seconds for something to happen, then the larger child – he could only have been seven or eight – said ‘coffee.’ I nodded. The coffee pot was too high for him to get at properly, he could only just reach to fill the moka. Then he said something to the boy, who I think was his little brother, he helped him clamber on to his shoulders, and they got busy around the coffee pot. At a certain point the smaller child overbalanced backwards, and they both fell to the ground. I was worried for a moment they had hurt themselves, but then, as if nothing had happened, the smaller child pulled himself back up onto the shoulders of the larger one. After a few minutes the kids gave me my cup of coffee. It was disgusting, full of lumps, I don’t even know how that was possible. They, on the other hand, looked pretty pleased with themselves. The smaller one even gave the other a pat on the shoulder. I left them a euro and I didn’t want the change. It was just half past nine, and I didn’t know what to do. I left Tropical Paradise and waited for something to happen, but sometimes, truly, nothing happens. I could at least have had a bit of a headache, but no, nothing. So I promised myself again that I would count how many cigarettes I smoked. I didn’t want to smoke more than five a day. I went back home. G told me I was a bollocks because I woke her up. John Connor was snoring peacefully, you could hear him from the living-room. I settled down on the sofa pretending I was processing the jet lag that I didn’t have. By midday I already had three smokes. Then I went to sleep so I couldn’t smoke any more. I dreamed I had won the Olympic bronze medal for the 200 metre backstroke. I was thrilled and didn’t want to wake up. John Connor woke at five in the afternoon. He couldn’t speak and his hair was all messy and standing up, stiff with gel. ‘Que mierda,’ he slurred as soon as he saw me, and dived into the shower. Afterwards he put more gel in his hair and went back to sleep. G, in the meantime, was staring out of the window. ‘Where is everyone?’ she asked me. ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. I cooked a plate of pasta and olive oil. In the evening I watched that documentary by Herzog, the one with airplanes taking off and landing under the sun of Sub-Saharan Africa. I found it really moving. It had got dark outside. G and I screwed – actually I screwed while she lay unmoving, thinking about something else. ‘S,’ she said to me, ‘I don’t want you to take me for granted.’ We fell asleep in each other’s arms.

    Total cigarettes smoked: 6.

    January 2nd

    G and I went to IKEA. Outside it was drizzling sadly. I scraped the side of the car along a fence when I parked. I didn’t get angry though, I didn’t feel the need. Inside IKEA everything looks like it works really well, we take for granted that man has become definitively free. G wanted to buy a lamp. I was confused, why would she want to buy a lamp? I felt somehow inferior so I tried to be ironic. I started speaking in a Scandinavian accent. ‘Will you stop that,’ G asked me. I stopped that. We left after four hours with an energy-saving light bulb, a sofa cover with a moose on it, a kind of folding structure that was supposed to be a lamp, and potato fritters that I didn’t have high hopes for. I spent forty-five euro fifty cents altogether. On the upside I only smoked three cigarettes. I saw an old man fall over in the car park. He tripped all by himself and fell flat on his face. When he got up again he reassured everyone, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ He actually looked a little bit dopey and fell over again not long afterwards. G told me she thought what had happened to the old man was a solitary flashmob or something like that, only we didn’t know the context or the finale. Maybe he only wanted some attention. ‘Our generation is too shrewd,’ I said to her. G told me she felt like part of a mechanism that carried on going round even if everything was out of kilter. I told her I didn’t understand, even though really I totally understood.

    John Connor was still recovering at home from the drinking session two days ago. ‘Que mierda,’ he said, then ran into the bathroom to vomit. He came back into the living room and we assembled the lamp thing we had bought. It took seven hours because John Connor reckoned he knew alternative methods. He phoned IKEA but of course they couldn’t understand each other. Whatever, in the end it worked, well, the light turned on. We stood and stared at it in silence. We ate boiled potatoes watching that lamp, as if we had done something great for all humanity. I had smoked twelve cigarettes by eleven that evening , it was probably the lamp’s fault. I fell asleep watching the documentary about the airplanes landing and taking off. It was less interesting from an intellectual perspective, yet I was struck by the colours of Sub-Saharan Africa. In the end it wasn’t exactly an intense day, from any standpoint.

    Total cigarettes smoked: 13 + half a joint.

    January 3rd

    G and I packed our suitcases. I wanted to go away for a while. I told her I didn’t want to see the sky through the window any more, and she said, ‘so let’s pack our bags,’ so we packed our bags. I thought we could go into the mountains. She, on the other hand, had only been packing her bag to humour me. ‘I thought you’d get it out of your system,’ she told me candidly. I didn’t speak to her again all day and I went back to looking out of the window. In the meantime John Connor burnt himself on the radiator. I don’t know how he managed that. Now he is lying on his bed crying with a wet towel on his back.

    G stopped taking the pill recently, she says it makes her arse too big. Right now I really want to screw. So I went to buy condoms, I always look for Skins or Ultraslim rubbers like that because I usually feel fuck all with a condom on. However, we screwed even though the condom was too tight and it dried out almost immediately. At one point I was on top of her and really couldn’t feel anything. I was thinking about other stuff I realised. I was thinking about football and Torino’s midfield. ‘Don’t you like me any more?’ she asked, a little out of breath. ‘No, I like you.’ And I carried on pushing mechanically, like an unsatisfying and repetitive job. ‘Fuck it,’ I said to myself,  peeled off the condom and went on without it. I came on her belly and fell asleep. That’s all. G wouldn’t let me watch the documentary with the airplanes landing and taking off, she insisted on watching a Virzì film. It wasn’t bad but I would have preferred to watch the documentary with the planes landing. It was one of those days where you feel you have to try and work out whether or not you did something wrong.

    Total cigarettes smoked: 9.

    There was some space left over so I glued in this picture of the poster for the film with the airplanes taking off.

    January 4th

    G woke up irritated because she couldn’t access Facebook. Actually, last night I told her she was like a sister to me and I think she was offended. Whatever, it is sunny outside and I decided to go cycling in the hills. I sweated a lot. When I came back G was trying to change the settings on my computer, I don’t know why. We have all been a bit nervy this week. This evening is John Connor’s big moment, he will be on the television programme A Minute to Win on RAI 2.

    From what I understand, he has a minute to play some stupid games and if everything goes well he will win 500,000 euro. John has spent the last month practicing, doing things like popping the top off a bottle and making it land directly in the waste paper basket, or building pyramids of glasses, or putting a biscuit on his eye and, without touching it, flipping it into his mouth. Before leaving for Milan he hugged me. He was sure that somehow he was going to turn his life around.

    G and I sat down in front of the TV at nine sharp: John Connor was the first contestant. The first challenge, for 500 euro, was easy. He had to unwind twenty metres of paper tape with his arms. He managed it with ten seconds to spare but he looked strained. Then he started dancing to We Are The Champions with Nicola Savino. It’s one of those shows where you take your friends to be part of the audience and John had taken two of his brothers. I asked G if she knew how many brothers he had. She just said, ‘lots, I think.’

    The second challenge, for 1,000 euro, involved landing three coloured rings on the prongs of an upside-down horseshoe. My first thought was that he was going to have some problems, but he started well, in thirty seconds he had managed two out of three. The problem was the last one wasn’t having any of it. He kept trying while Nicola Savino did the countdown. Nothing doing. He lost a life. His second attempt didn’t go much better, he actually got jumpy and couldn’t even get one ring in place. He began muttering and looked irritated. His last attempt was a disaster: after twenty seconds he started shouting and throwing the rings too hard. Nicola Savino told him to relax. After that I don’t know exactly what happened but Nicola Savino kept talking, telling him to calm down while continuing the countdown, even though it was clear he was never going to win the challenge and immediately after the gong sounded, John Connor threw himself at Nicola Savino who kept shouting, ‘it’s only a game, just a game, calm down.’ G covered her eyes. I watched it all. While he tried to protect himself, John Connor kept punching and kicking Nicola Savino. Then a group of bodyguards from RAI got up onto the stage, with technicians and cameramen trying to block John, but his brothers came to defend him and the TV channel went for an ad break.

    ‘How much has he won?’

    ‘Five hundred euro I think, but he made so much trouble, I don’t know if they’ll give it to him.’

    ‘Why does everything always go to shit?’ I didn’t know what to say. Stupid day. I’ve started smoking hard again today, around 15-20 cigarettes + a number of joints.

     January 5th

    I woke up early when everybody else was still asleep. I have the constant feeling I am wasting time, as if time is something that gives life quality, that’s why I wake up early. My cousin called me. He has hooked up with a Finnish girl, he told me she is regularly trying to kill herself and he can’t cope with her any more. He asked for some advice. I told him to take her to the seaside. He was bringing her to lunch at our house instead he told me, maybe talking to other people would do her good. So I made ragù.

    For some reason I expected her to be tall and blonde, but she was minute with long black hair and a pale face. She wasn’t exactly full of vitality or shining with friendliness, she was like a crow. She started crying as soon as she sat down on the sofa. G tried to ask her something, but she just shook her head.

    ‘What’s her name?’

    ‘Tulla I think, or Lulla, something like that,’ my cousin replied.

    Naturally, Tulla ate fuck all, she rocked on her chair facing her plate making strange wheezing noises. I asked my cousin if everything was alright. He said there was nothing to worry about. We finished and Tulla went to the bathroom. Not long afterwards I heard shouting. She was trying to slit the veins in her wrists with a razor blade, only the blade was blunt and she didn’t look very capable of doing it. My cousin looked at me like someone who had been expecting this moment to come. I felt responsible somehow and slapped her but she grabbed my arm and started trying to bite me. There was blood all over the floor. We took Tulla into the living-room.

    G started to clean the blood from the floor while my cousin caressed Tulla who, incredibly, started laughing. At that moment John Connor came in. I hugged him instinctively and he hugged me back hard. Then, I don’t know exactly why, John started behaving flirtatiously with Tulla and she seemed to enjoy it. My cousin confessed to me that he didn’t want her on his conscience and so if John Connor wanted her he wouldn’t object. He looked relieved.

    ‘I knew you would help me,’ he said. Suddenly, Tulla and John Connor went outside and G, my cousin, and I stayed at home drinking.

    ‘Why does she want to kill herself?’

    ‘I don’t know, I think she’s missing Finland.’

    ‘So why doesn’t she go back there?’ G asked.

    ‘I think she hates her parents.’

    We got drunk and fell asleep. I woke up at about eleven in the evening. I went out for a walk. This city makes you feel lonely. Then I went home and started watching the documentary with the airplanes landing and taking off in Africa. Definitively beautiful.

    Total cigarettes smoked: between 15 and 20.

    January 6th

    Yesterday evening I left the shutters open so I woke with the first light of dawn. G was curled up in a foetal position and the expression on her face showed she was satisfied with her sleep. I decided not to wake her up. My cousin is on the sofa sleeping, fully dressed. He wakes up and says when we were small we used to spend more time together, and asks me if he can have a shower. I want to listen to some music but I don’t want to wake everyone up. The only answer is to go out. My cousin says he feels he needs to go out too. So he does, following me. There is a strange smell of damp trodden-on leaves. I think it’s probably easy to catch some kind of fungal infection. My cousin thanks me for what I have done with Tulla, right then and there I want to say I don’t know what he is talking about, but it would take too long, so I just say, ‘you’re welcome.’ We stroll along the avenue and he confesses his problems relating to his son, he hardly ever sees him and when he does he is overtaken by a desire to do too much and he ends messing up. He fears his son may think he’s a bit of a dickhead. I say something about simply being himself, and if you’re a bit of a dickhead, whatever, but he replies, quite rightly, that I couldn’t possibly understand. Then he says that soon we won’t see each other again because he is going to Brazil. I let the conversation drop. When we get back home John Connor is making coffee, when he sees my cousin he sniggers. My cousin looks at me, he thinks the snigger is aimed at him and says, ‘fuck you laughing at?’ John Connor, who is excitable, loses control of what he is doing and spills coffee all over his trousers and starts swearing. G wakes up, opens the door, and tells us not to wake her up again for any reason and that she is going back to sleep as soon as she can. When John Connor asks her what the matter is, she says, ‘what’s the matter with yous?’ and slams the door going back into her bedroom. I still want to listen to some music, but I leave it. Around two in the afternoon my cousin says, ‘Let’s go out and have a drink.’ I agree and light my fourth ciggie of the day. My cousin orders two dry Camparis at the first bar we come to. The sun begins to hide, and a dumb grey breeze blows in our faces. We drink another two vodka lemons, then my cousin hugs me and says he feels safe at last. Then we grab a kebab that we eat in the car. He asks me if I can go with him to pick up the kid as he doesn’t feel up to it on his own so I say yes. We stop in another bar and he offers me a Sambuca, a vodka lemon, a Borghetti, and then another vodka lemon, a beer, and finally, a Fernet-Branca for the road. Darkness is beginning to creep in. We are still rotten drunk when we get to his wife’s house. My cousin can’t find anywhere to park, so he gets out and tries to move a municipal rubbish bin, but its wheels are locked, he pulls too hard towards himself and ends up tipping it all into the street. ‘Help, S,’ he says, ‘I’m fucking up again.’ His wife comes out to see who is making all this noise.

    ‘Hi Laura,’ I say.

    ‘Is he drunk?’ she asks me.

    ‘No, he’s just really wound up.’

    ‘Drive slowly. No, actually, you drive.’

    ‘I’m drunk.’

    ‘Then don’t go anywhere for a bit.’

    My nephew must be about eight or nine, he is blond and has a baby face. I don’t think he is stupid, but to tell the truth I’ve never really had the opportunity to talk much with him. When my cousin sees his son, he pulls himself together, and runs to hug him.

    ‘Dad, you smell of alcohol!’ He says, and tries to wriggle out of the hug.

    ‘We’re going to go bowling,’ my cousin says. Then insists on driving. At the second roundabout we hit, just outside of town we end up on a flowery ‘welcome’ message planted in the middle. My cousin reverses and then drives on. ‘I am extremely calm,’ he tells me. I feel like I’m about to vomit. He puts Shine On You Crazy Diamond on really loud and starts shouting something about Pink Floyd before miming a series of instruments I can’t identify. At least we are listening to some music though. Then, as he is very emotional, he pulls into a lay-by in tears to sing Wish You Were Here. He tries to get my nephew – whose face at this point is showing a mixture of terror and embarrassment – to join in. At ‘Swimmininafishboooonnneee’ he drops his head on the steering wheel. I decide to take over the driving. ‘Thanks, Uncle,’ my nephew says. It’s such a sweet thing. In the first town we reach my cousin pulls the handbrake. ‘There’s a bar,’ he whispers. We go in. I don’t feel well so I order a tonic water, Ivan wants nothing and my cousin can’t make himself understood. We get back into the car and my cousin insists on driving again. At the first right curve, he slides off his seat and lands on top of me, and we end up in a field. The kid and I just about manage to get the car out and back onto the road. ‘I’ll take you home to sleep,’ I say.

    ‘Thanks, Uncle,’ still so very sweet. When I get home it must be about two in the morning. G is asleep. I decide to do my very, very best not to wake her up. I can’t watch the documentary about airplanes because my head is spinning too much.

    Total cigarettes smoked: about sixty.

    January 7th

    This morning I woke up with a certain degree of impatience. I quickly started making coffee while G was still asleep then I went to the bathroom. Halfway through I remembered about the coffee and ran back into the kitchen. The coffeepot was gurgling like a baby trying to swallow processed food or something. I was just in time to pour some burned coffee into a small cup while the pot agonisingly continued to spurt coffee in bursts. Some coffee dribbled down the side of the pot. It made me dry-heave. Then I went back into the bathroom.

    I woke G up, she wasn’t happy about that. She confessed that for the last couple of nights she had dreamed about her uncle but didn’t want to go into it. She got up and we decided to reorganise our bedroom. At first I tried to move a sort of wardrobe with shelves. It seemed to have got stuck in the gap between one tile and the next. I tried lifting it. I tried pushing harder, but nothing, no movement. I checked nothing was blocking the wardrobe then I pushed again, still nothing. At this point John Connor came in and offered to give a hand. I think he loves doing these things so he moved me aside confidently, pulled up his sleeves to his shoulders and started pushing, telling me to do the same. We got to a stage where the whole operation had taken on an air of mystery. Then, after a push that wasn’t even that strong, the wardrobe slid along the tiles as if it had wheels. An electric cable wound around one of the wardrobe’s legs was the key to the conundrum. By freeing the wardrobe, we wrenched the cable from the wall basically, wrecking the whole electrical system in our room. John Connor hurried to say sorry, then his dismay turned into anger against the electrician who conceived of a system like this.

    I told G. She said that in that case she may as well just go back to sleep. It was about midday. ‘Exactly,’ she said, ‘so I can think about uncle.’ I didn’t answer.

    John Connor and I went out. We started walking alongside the river in complete silence until he said, ‘me and Tulla want to get married.’ In answer to my consternation, he said that it was all happening too quickly but in his situation, he could understand fuck all so he decided to only make clear-cut decisions, such as marriages, homicides, ejaculations, or fights.

    We carried on walking until we reached a wider part of the path where around fifty South Americans were playing football.

    I told John Connor he was right.

    We joined the game. Twenty-four players on their team, twenty-three on ours. At one-metre-seventy-nine I am the tallest and most powerful and so I play centre-forward. The game develops into a complex web of sideways passes, kick-ups, pointless back heels, and incitement from the women at the edge of the pitch, until someone tackles his opponent and finds himself wedged between a sequence of double-tackles and is forced to kick the ball long. We had been playing for forty minutes and I touched the ball once – with my head – during one of those long kicks out of defence. No one had scored yet.

    Then one of the blokes, about sixty, keepy-uppying the ball in front of me, instead of passing it to a dwarf nearby, trips, and leaves it unguarded. I pull back my left foot immediately and kick the ball full force. The ball hits the left goalpost half-way and it’s in. There is a roar immediately. On the side of the pitch the women are hugging each other. My twenty-two teammates start run towards me and I am submerged. Someone tries to kiss me in the confusion of bodies. Apparently no one had scored a goal in ten or eleven matches. According to them it was because of their excellent defence. Only I, being a strong European, could breach it with my accurate kick. They started calling me ‘Bomber.’ There were no more opportunities to score after that.

    The match ended at sunset.

    At the final whistle, John Connor came to me and said I was a really tough European. I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I thanked him.

    We rolled a joint sitting on the edge of the pitch, as the sharp cold of the evening massaged our sweaty backs. I let myself fall, land backward on the hard, almost-icy ground and for a moment I felt sheltered.

    Total ciggies: no clue.

    Walter Comoglio is an italian writer, currently based in Dublin.

    This short story appears in his first book named La sera che ho deciso di bloccare la strada, published by Gorilla Sapiens Edizioni, winner of 2017 POP prize Italy for best debut.

  • Musician of the Month: Paul G. Smyth

     

    Shaking Beyond

    I’m playing with Ned on Thursday. That evening in the National Concert Hall will be the first time we meet. How strange that we’ll share some food together and follow that with as deep a conversation as I’ll have with anyone this year, to an audience of friends and strangers alike. The object is to make that moment as deep as possible, as revealing as possible, as raw and true as possible.

    It’s something this music gives me that remains almost unmatched in any other area of my life and for quite some time it was without peer. For a private person it can be a gift. For someone often lost in regrets of the past or anxieties for the future, to be pulled so forcefully into the present, into an environment that says “right now, you are here to serve the beauty and terror and wonder of being alive – there are others here to help you and you will help them too”, this can be a lifeline.

    There is no single part of that transaction that I take for granted. I know how lucky I am. I know how close I’ve come to having that door closed to me and how easily that can happen. My own chaotic past left its mark, having to sell all my instruments from when I was in a band, just to get through the day-to-day. I haven’t owned a piano for fifteen years. And yet the music continues. It’s a river. It flows on without me.

    Each time I am in it, it has changed, as I have. I still recognise it as the same river, in much the same way as people and places are recognisable despite all of that constant change. Nothing is ever still. I guess, therein lies some of the beauty in this approach to music-making. It is a music of change, free to mould itself to some reflection of the world as I’m experiencing it right now and, in doing so, tell me something about what’s happening in that world. Something I might have missed. Shaking me into some experience of the present. Shaking equations in a jar until they are solved. Shaking the silt of forty-three years until it can be moved around in. Shaking.

    That may sound like a very solitary experience, and in some ways it is, but there’s a kind of high-wire vulnerability and trust required to enter into that exchange, from musicians and audience alike, which makes every performance a great sharing; a reminder that we are a part of something. We’re a part of something right now.

    If there was no other reason to do it, that would be enough. But there are many other reasons to do it, all of which reveal themselves and hide themselves to me in a constant shift. The reasons, like the circumstances, change. Ever-changing. In so, it is a music of acceptance. It says “accept your life, accept who you are”. It is a celebration of acceptance that asks you to push beyond. To accept and shake yourself to push beyond.

    As I come back to writing now, Thursday has come and gone. Ned Rothenberg has made his first trip to Ireland and returned to New York, sadly spending most of that trip in the confines of his hotel room with a pretty debilitating throat infection. A doctor’s visit and heavy doses of Ibuprofen kept the gig on track and once we started playing, all signs of illness fell away. The broken, injured and infirm parts of my own life fell away too. We were there as servants to something beyond each of us and were rewarded by being allowed to leave our troubles behind for a while, to be in that beyond instead. Ned remarked afterwards that he couldn’t remember playing so much melody in an improvised concert before. “Neither can I”, I said. And I trust that’s what each of us needed that night. More often than not, the music gives just what is needed. This time, all that shaking left melody. Shaking away illness, shaking away grief. Shaking out the knots in our own lives and leaving melody, like sunlight, shaking.