Cassandra Voices

Tag: 2019October

  • The Doomsday Machines

    Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film ‘Dr Strangelove’ dramatizes the still not-altogether-remote scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It begins with a deranged U.S. Airforce General, Jack D. Ripper, overriding Executive Command and ordering a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The Russians, unbeknownst to the Americans, have developed a deterrent – the Doomsday Machine – that automatically detonates, with devastating global effect, if a nuclear device explodes in Soviet territory.

    Kubrick masterfully conveys the absurd conformism of a military organisation obeying orders to a point of self-annihilation. In the end, Major T. J. ‘King’ Kong, the B-52 commander delivering its payload, straddles the bomb, whooping as he descends to his own, and humanity’s, demise. Despite its apocalyptic message, the film remains enduringly hilarious, reflecting its alternative title: ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’

    A recent viewing in Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema left me wondering, though, whether Kubrick derives too much comedy from an appalling vista we still confront. Laughter remains a safety valve, permitting an audience to carry on with business-as-usual, while the ultimate stupidity of nuclear war remains a real possibility. Are we, unconsciously, making light of President Donald Trump’s recent euphemistic warning of an ‘official end’ to Iran?[i] As Friedrich Nietzsche puts it: ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’[ii] Regular doses of humour are one of life’s balms, but sometimes we laugh along to the exclusion of more serious engagement. Fittingly perhaps, the serious work of producing Cassandra Voices generally occurs in a studio above a crowded comedy club in the heart of Dublin, from where laughter often wafts upstairs!

    Millenarian doomsday scenarios have haunted humanity since time immemorial. A ‘Great Survey’ of England and Wales in 1086, used to ascertain the proportion of the national wealth owing to King William ‘the Conqueror’ (also less flatteringly known as ‘the Bastard’), was subsequently labelled the ‘Book of Domesday’ (Middle English for ‘Doomsday’). This accumulation of data in the hands of a monarchy had terrifying connotations at a time when many perceived the end of the world, and its Final Judgment, to be nigh.

    Today humanity confronts varied doomsday scenarios – generally gleaned from scientific analysis rather than metaphysical speculation – with anthropogenic climate chaos, mass extinctions and the still unresolved danger of a nuclear Armageddon topping the list. We remain in many respects, in Carl Jung’s phrase, technological savages[iii], operating machinery with capacities far exceeding our wisdom as operators. It just takes one fat finger to push the button, or an unimpeded algorithm.

    But perhaps it is not nuclear warheads, or even coal-powered stations, that represent the Doomsday Machines of our time. After all, humanity could quite easily seize control of its fate, elect reasonable leaders, bring about a Green New Deal and decommission nuclear weapons. So what is holding us back from taking the action required for the benefit of the great mass of our species, and the rest of the natural world? Another mechanism, operated by most adults in developed countries, is, I believe, befuddling our wits and deterring a collective shift in consciousness.

    Developed simultaneously in the early 2000s by a number of manufacturers, the smart phone is replicating the Book of Domesday by tracking our movements and online preferences to the benefit of vested commercial interests, and shadowy state emanations.

    Of greater concern, perhaps, than the hollowing out of our privacy is the addiction the vast majority of us have to the narcissistic, solipsistic and often pugilistic ‘social’ media of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Twitter, conveyed through apps on our smartphones. Staring into the void of communication-without-end from dawn-to-dusk, successive ‘hits’ are delivered, revealing who messages us, ‘likes’ our image or words, or offends us. Notably, Donald Trump is the acknowledged master of the soundbite Twitter update (maximum length two-hundred-and-eighty-characters), heralding the short-attention-span-politics evident in most countries.

    Social media is the thief of time and an agent of homogenisation. Writing in the early twentieth century, the

    Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935

    Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa seemed to anticipate the contemporary malaise. ‘Given the metallic, barbarous age we live in,’ he wrote, ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’[iv]

    The smartphone provides a simulacrum of varied technologies, such as an automated camera providing the semblance of a real one, but where the necessary application to understand the apparatus is no longer needed. The capacity to share easily what we have created has overtaken the creative process. The necessary isolation of the artist has been abandoned in favour of the instant hit of validation from our peers.

    Likewise, through digital attenuation, music is debased and choice diminished when we succumb to the algorithms of Spotify and YouTube that are carried with us everywhere we go on our Doomsday Machines.

    Of particular concern is a generation of teenagers who know of no other life other than that mediated by the Doomsday Machines. What is missing from their lives is the crucial ingredient of tedium, which again according to Pessoa is ‘that profound sense of the emptiness of things, out of which frustrated aspirations struggle free, a sense of thwarted longing arises and in the soul is sown the seed from which is born the mystic or the saint.’[v] Being bored can have its advantages.

    I would like to say I had the willpower to renounce my own device, but as is so often the case in life, the end of the affair occurred by accident. Fiddling with its AMAZING properties, for the umpteenth time that day, as I double-jobbed playing with my young nephew, the Machine slipped from my grasp and hit a hard stone floor. The glass did not shatter exactly, except in one corner which felt the full impact, and from which a few glittery shards crumbled away. But, faintly detectable, three deathly cracks ran up from where it had landed, strangely mirroring the lifelines on my hand. When I tried to switch it on, all I found was a faint blinking light, which soon lapsed. Still looking sleek and powerful, though now veiled in a black hood of inoperativeness, it appeared to me like the corpse of a young soldier, handsome features intact, save for a bullet wound to the neck.

    I felt deflated, angry and increasingly tetchy. How was I going to survive without it after a decade-long reliance? Like any addict, I felt pangs for the addled communication, information-gathering and idle scrolling that had become my early morning ritual, as I lay prostrate in bed.

    As it transpired there was still some life in the Machine — I had simply smashed the screen, which I replaced at a reasonable price in a shop on Capel Street. But the liberation of a few days had changed my perspective. I had an unmistakable feeling of a great weight being lifted off me. In the meantime, I had purchased a ‘brick’ phone for next to nothing and now alternate between the two,  only using the Doomsday Machine, now shorn of most, though not all, social media apps, when strictly necessary. I am a work in progress.

    I know many people, more sensible than I, who have deleted all social media apps from their smartphones save for WhatsApp. This is, however, the Gateway Drug that maintains the addiction, leaving the impression that you cannot live without the Doomsday Machine. In a sinister twist, WhatsApp cannot be used on  a laptop, for example, without already being connected to a Doomsday Machine.

    Facebook has become the lightning rod for much of the bad press around social media – those pesky Russians again – and its distorted algorithm is a distinct nuisance if one is attempting to share meaningful content, as the cutesy image will always win out. Used strategically, however, it has its advantages, especially as a means of staying in contact with a large number of people, and for the purpose of events. It only really becomes problematic as an app on a smartphone that sends out regular notifications, prompting idly scrolling. I can live with it on my laptop, although I have given up on the hope of using it as a conduit for radical journalism.

    As regards the confessional nature of posting our thoughts, I was struck by further prescient words from Pessoa: ‘What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former, it has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible.’[vi] I am coming to recognise that most of the online outbursts I am prone to are perhaps better left unsaid.

    Instagram offers a good medium for photographers to display their work, but is overwhelmingly narcissistic, not only through that ultimate expression of Doomsday Machines, the selfie, but also via the look-at-my-beautiful-life imagery that abounds. Planet Instagram is full of beautiful people who overcome life challenges, reveal plenty of tanned flesh and speak in a patois of hashtags.

    Selfie by name.

    Pessoa would take an uncompromising view:

    Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible that that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable either to see his face or to look into his own eyes … he could only see his face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of his seeing his own face … the creator of the mirror poisoned the human race.[vii]

    There are times when access to the Internet while on the move is of great value. Google Maps makes travel immeasurably easier. But are we comfortable with all our movements being tracked? Smart-phone maps also reduce the sum total of our interactions with fellow human beings, and makes us less observant of the world around us.

    A good rule of thumb is that, unless we are sitting upright, communication is unsatisfactory. The same applies to reading news sites – I had become all-too-prone to only partially reading articles. Indeed, the ‘most read’ articles on most sites tends to be prurient ‘click-bait.’

    I suggest you forget about the hurried message and make time for real expression in communication. There is no point attempting to stay in touch with everyone, because it is impossible. Leave more time for reading books, making music, being present to friends and family, and allow space for the tedium that brings daydreaming.

    The Internet can open new horizons of knowledge, bringing to fruition Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (d. 1716) dream of a bibliotheca universalis, a ‘universal library’, where expert insight is available to all, everywhere. It could lead us into thinking more globally. But this beast needs considerable taming. Its great potential may be more easily realised by abandoning Doomsday Machines altogether. The wider consequences of a less mediated society could be profound. If enough of us can escape the clutches of the Machines, perhaps we can eventually develop the focus required for collective action.

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    [i] Seung Min Kim, ‘Threats would mean ‘official end’ of Iran, Trump warns in tweet’, May 19th, 2019, Washington Post.

    [ii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated from the German by Graham Parkes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, p.202.

    [iii] See Laurens van der Post, Jung and the story of our time, Vintage, London, 1976, p.200

    [iv] Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, The Serpent’s Tail, London, 2017, p.107

    [v] Ibid, p.363

    [vi] Ibid, p.197

    [vii] Ibid, p.91

  • Bull Moose – Climate Crisis to Opportunity

    As Washington swirls with the drama and intricacies of the impeachment enquiry, spare a thought for climate. Yes, our climate.  

    Much was written in Europe, and elsewhere, about the remarkable Greta Thurnberg. The effectiveness of her singular obsession with the issue – seemingly aided by an Asperger’s condition that leaves her unaffected by social cues that would deter most of us – caused a storm.  She was honest, impassioned, and right about the dire consequences awaiting our planet if we fail to take action. Yet, her message was also largely ineffective this side of the pond.      

    Not that she was a hypocrite, having made her way to the US on a solar-powered sailing boat. Everyone remembers Al Gore’s huge mansion powered by low wattage light bulbs.

    Just last month, the rich and famous made their way to Sicily by way of private jet and luxury yacht to discuss climate change. Really. It made for great headlines here in America: ‘further evidence of the liberal elite telling ‘us’ what to do, while abiding by a different set of rules…’ 

    For the host, Google, being tone-deaf in the climate debate counted for little. It was a lobbying effort.  Besides, compared to the Exxon Mobile’s of the world, at least they’re trying to do something.

    Even in America it’s apparent that the climate is accelerating faster than expected. Anecdotal evidence is piling up. In cities like Houston, Miami, Charleston, and San Francisco, historic rains, drought and storms are starting to sway public opinion. 

    In Atlanta this September more heat records were broken than any ever before. Even some Republicans – accustomed to towing the party line of sowing seeds of doubt about the cause of climate change – are beginning to acknowledge the changing conditions.

    This is a first step. As one ardent Trump supporter, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, put it bluntly: ‘I didn’t come to Congress to argue with a thermometer.’[i]

    Whether Republicans are prepared for real measures is another matter as, for many Americans, taking away an automatic right to a supercharged engine is akin to taking away their guns – not on your life.

    In this context, let’s examine how Greta was received in the US. While many praised her direct message and blunt language, not a single person we spoke to had actually changed their mind; while Fox News’s depiction – satirizing a Stephen King novel ‘children of the climate’ – generated lots of laughter, regardless of political conviction.

    Also, Greta Thunberg’s angry accusations against politicians, paradoxically, made them seem sympathetic by comparison. In America even a dagger to the back is often accompanied with a smile; in the political culture and day-to-day-life outward politeness is a constant, especially in the South, which is where most people need convincing about the human impact of climate change. 

    Maybe Greta’s speech at the UN swayed some young people, and gave momentum to environmentalists. But it did little to sway public opinion, define a clear strategy, or mark a way forward.

    So, with the oxygen sucked from the pages of the news by impeachment, how can real change be inspired in America?

    For America to take a leadership role on climate two things need to occur. First, Republicans, who make 30-40% of the national electorate, need to be convinced that this is an urgent priority. Currently a majority either think it’s a non-issue (outright denial), or that it should not be a priority. 

    Secondly, the issue needs to be reframed into one of opportunity, rather than as a daunting problem because of our past and current habits. This last point is often missed. America has thrived on being a nation of opportunity. Obama got elected on the back of a message of hope; Trump on a ticket of change to the status quo.

    When it comes to climate, we are far more adept at talking in terms of catastrophes than we are at talking up opportunities. Perhaps it is because obvious solutions simply don’t exist, or perhaps it’s the size of the task appearing too big. 

    Yet for there to be real action this issue needs to be reframed. Environmentalists should stop trying to inspire fear, and instead talk in terms of opportunity, disruption, innovation, the American Dream, leadership – appeal to America’s pride rather than guilt. And perhaps remember that the Chinese character for crisis is the same as opportunity! Taking on board this message is key to winning the next election.

    [i] Rebecca Beitsch and Miranda Green, ‘GOP lawmaker parodies Green New Deal in new climate bill’April 4th, 2019, The Hill, https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/437244-gop-lawmaker-introduces-viable-alternative-to-green-new-deal

  • Lament for Áirt Uí Laoire

    In August of  1969 I was driving across Ireland with the late Bearnard Ó Riain, the older brother of a good friend of mine, the late Dinno Ryan. Most of my old friends are now ‘late’.

    We were going to join others in a mountain-walking weekend. Bearnard had participated in the nineteen-fifties IRA campaign in the North of Ireland, was captured and interned in the Curragh. He could not stand being locked up and he signed a statement renouncing his involvement in the IRA and undertaking to leave Ireland. He had gone to Africa, married an English girl named Carol, had two children and spent the next ten years there. The marriage had broken up and he was now back in Ireland to gather his resources.

    I switched on the car radio to get the news and we heard that the North had exploded again, that Orangemen were burning Nationalists out of their homes in Belfast.

    [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”3″ display=”basic_slideshow”]He turned to me with a look that said: ‘I have to go up there’. I knew that he needed some distraction from his domestic circumstance. I also suspected he needed to exorcise his old guilt at signing himself out of the IRA and I turned the car northwards.

    We arrived in Derry as the Rossville flats siege was ending. On the roof of the flats we met Bernadette Devlin. Bearnard asked her if we could help in any way. ‘You could help to clear up this mess,’ she said and we started clearing away the broken bottles and stones, remnants of Molotov cocktails.

    We found a bed for the night on the floor of RTE reporter Seán Duignan’s City Hotel bedroom. Word came that  there had also been serious trouble in Dungiven.  Seán was excited, predicting a civil war.

    Belfast

    The following morning we drove to Dungiven, which was now peaceful, recovering from a night of violence. It was all very anti-climactical. I later wrote an article which the Evening Press published with the title: ‘Trouble will always be where I am not.’

    The same applied to Belfast. The only sign that there had been trouble on Bombay Street was a lone figure whose bald head I recognised from newspaper photos as belonging to Joe Cahill. He was keeping guard with some kind of rifle.

    Bearnard and I acted like tourists and strolled up the ravaged street. Encountering some suspicious young men of whose allegiance we could not be sure we prudently claimed to be Canadian journalists. Our years of travelling had smoothed the rough edges of our Dublin accents so that we could pass ourselves off as harmless. 

    The following morning we investigated a burnt out factory on, I think, the Falls Road. Someone shouted ‘sniper’ and everybody dived for cover. I could not take it seriously and simply lined myself up behind a lamppost. If there actually was a sniper in the factory building, I reasoned, he would need to be a very good shot and at worst I could only be winged.

    But there were no shots. I was beginning to think the whole situation was quite exaggerated by journalists. Later that day we witnessed the first contingent of British soldiers taking up positions on the Falls Road and being applauded by the grateful citizens. What struck me was the nervousness of the lieutenant in charge and the gaucheness, the mystified expressions of the soldiers under his command.

    How were they – or we – to know that we were witnessing the beginnings of a Nationalist revolt and an occupation and vicious war that would dominate our island for the next thirty years?

    The above mentioned Bearnard O Riain lived in Johannesburg. He had written a most interesting memoir of his dramatic life. It opens with the scene of a drunken man kicking a woman lying in the gutter. To his horror, the writer realises that the woman is his wife and he himself is the violent drunk. Bearnard’s book is quite unlike my fanciful reminiscences. It is that unique object: a well-written, honest memoir. No publisher in Ireland was interested in publishing it.

    It would be five years before I again braved the North of Ireland, next time as  the guest of ‘Official’ Sinn Féin.

    Conamara

    By 1974 I was entrenched in a cottage in Baile na h-Abhann, Conamara where TG4 would be built over a score years later.

    A softly spoken man named Eamon Smullen called one day. He had the idea of making a film on the subject of the epic poem, Caoineadh Áirt Uí Laoire. It had been a favourite of mine in school. He could even offer some money to make it.

    I jumped at the chance. It took me six months to research, write and direct the film with an amateur cast entirely from the area. It took a few more months to edit and finish it. Essentially it was a tragic love story.

    The (true) context was a hopeless one-man protest against the Penal Laws imposed by the English in the 18th century. Joe Comerford and myself were the only crew with film experience, Joe on camera, myself on sound. My then wife Helen was the indispensable production support.

    When the film was finished, my neighbours – including the cast of the film – were a little bewildered by my quite unconscious use of Brechtian alienation techniques. This was a pragmatic solution to the problem of using an all-amateur cast. I needed to creep up on and defuse, audience prejudices against both amateurs and the Irish language.

    I did this by using authentic native speakers rather than urban Gaeilgeoirí and scripted it accordingly as an amateur rehearsal with roughly dramatic re-enactments. It worked very well because it offended the proper targets. When it was shown at the Savoy cinema in the Cork Film Festival, actors Niall Tóibín and Donal McCann happened to be seated behind me. At the end Niall tapped me on the shoulder and whispered: ‘Quinn, yer a clever hoor.’

    That was as fine a compliment as I could get and certainly took the sting out of the Irish Times’s Fergus Lenihan describing the film as ‘formless as the Connemara rocks.’

    Dermot Breen, Director of the Festival, was delighted to be offered the film – the only other Irish entry besides my friend Louis Marcus’s fine Waterford Glass job.

    Naturally I thought my baby was a work celebrating the genius of Conamara but, considering the pleasant expectations of film audiences, Louis’s beautiful cinematography won.

    Later, Dermot Breen who was double-jobbing as Irish Film Censor, demanded cuts to certain mild profanities in my English subtitles – e.g. ‘shit’ and ‘Jesus’. I refused and he confined the film to viewers over sixteen years. The Dublin premiere was launched by Síobhán McKenna in the Drumcondra Grand cinema in 1975 while I was having a quiet little breakdown.

    Dance Hall charge

    It also seemed a good idea to show it at the first night of our little ‘cinema’ in Carraroe in the same year. Although I was entirely to blame for the film the titles included a credit for the ‘Education Department of Sinn Féin’ of which Eamon Smullen was director and who had provided the £6000 towards its making.

    The war in the North was in full swing;  Sinn Féin was split into Provos’ and ‘Stickies’. I had no interest in either group, nor in the subtleties of North/South politics. All I saw was an opportunity to make a film about my favourite poem in Irish, which is still a landmark in Irish literary history.

    Oblivious to the political implications I went ahead with the job. But politicians have longer memories than their constituents. I had previously, on our closed-circuit video, made fun of the Minister for the Gaeltacht’s poor command of the language of the Gaeltacht. There were two political black marks against me.

    Thus on the night of the Carraroe showing of the film the local Garda arrived at the door asking to see my licence to show films. No such licence existed. The only legislation the State had ever bothered to enact concerning film was the Dance Hall Act of 1935. Nobody could dance in our cinema because the seats were bolted to the floor.

    The Garda, a decent man named Rice, mentioned the suspicion that  I was raising funds for the IRA!  I was summonsed to appear in court on the Dance Hall charge. It was a petty case of political harassment and the Garda was the messenger: don’t mess with the Minister, the message said.

    The Case for the Defence

    George Morrison of Mise Éire fame brought a sample of old flammable nitrate film as an exhibit in my defence. This was the dangerous stuff for which the British had legislated in 1904 and which had long fallen into disuse. 

    George intended to ignite an inch of it and detonate it in court as a smoke bomb – a game we had played as children. The demonstration would show the difference between it and the modern safety film which I handled.

    Perhaps fortunately, George did not get the chance as the case was summarily dismissed with no blot on my escutcheon. Nevertheless some of the mud stuck and forever afterwards I was considered locally to be somehow not politically kosher.

    Officially, I was bordering on the subversive. When some maverick IRA man named ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchy was being sought high and low throughout Ireland there were only three houses searched in Conamara. One of them was mine. The Special Branch found and formally confiscated a child’s popgun which did not work.

    Belfast drinking club

    President Cearrbhaill O Dálaigh had a private peek at the film in the Project Theatre in Dublin and wrote a complimentary note to me. Film critic Ciaran Carty had kindly described it as ‘the Irish film I for one have been waiting for.’

    But the film was not really respectable until the Northern war was over. It has never been shown on RTE but TG4 is more daring and have shown it twice. When Channel Four showed it they cut out the credits for Sinn Féin. Meantime Eamon Smullen wanted to show the film in a Republican drinking club in Belfast and brought Joe Comerford, cameraman, and myself up there. 

    The film also seemed to confuse that audience. A lady turned to us and asked: ‘What are yiz? Some kinda antellectuals?’ While we were there the club was raided by the British Army who moved silently and grimly through the crowd. 

    I found it strange that there was no heckling, not a voice raised in protest and deduced that, yes, there is something frightful happening in this part of Ireland.

    We were accommodated that night in the house of a man named Billy MacMillan whom I gathered had been shot by the rival Provisional IRA. In Ireland the first thing on the agenda is the split.

    I noticed a  man in the tiny back yard of the house carrying a revolver, presumably to protect us. It felt as if we were in a film. We were escorted to the eight-o’clock train the next morning by Eamon Smullen, the gentle man who had asked me to make the film.

    At no stage did I feel in danger. I think I must sleepwalk through life, incapable of  taking anything seriously, not even the darkness. All is at arm’s length. It still surprises me that

    Caoineadh Áirt Uí Laoire has become a kind of icon in the lexicon of Irish film making. In recent years it was exhibited for a month in Trinity’s Douglas Hyde Gallery. It was also featured in the Irish Museum of Modern Art as an example of the work of modern Irish artists.

    A couple of years ago it was restored and Joe Comerford and I showed it in Derrynane, the Kerry home of Daniel O’Connell’s family which features in the film. In the introduction I mentioned the film’s small budget.

    Poet Theo Dorgan was present and later in the pub said to me: ‘I know where that £6000 came from. I think I even know the post office from which it was stolen.’ I still hope he was joking.

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    Bob Quinn directed Poitín, the first feature film entirely in the Irish language, while his documentary works include the four-part Atlantean series tracing the origins of the Irish people. His recent memoir A Monk Manqué is being serialized in Cassandra Voices.

  • Poetry – Ben Keatinge

    Black Vulture

    You loom at Madzharovo
    then at Bosilovo
    roost at Kalanjevo.

    Black pilgrim
    cowl of the air
    crossing these skies,

    come, we are prone
    and torn, numbed,
    expecting your news.

    Cormorants at Dojran Lake

    The fisher Christs are drying their wings
    a great white pelican gawps
    and gives a wide September yawn
    a prudent heron heeds, and waits.

    The Tetovo Buzzards

    The Tetovo buzzards loop high and swoop low,
    they circle the plains across Tetovo,
    with the Vardar they bend, drift the ravines,
    wider and deeper, hunting in teams;
    the valleys are empty, the villages small,
    the fields unfenced and the minarets tall;
    did I hear one give a shriek-like ‘Shqip’
    when crossing the canyon next to Chiflik?
    Swinging from Saraj to Kumanovo
    they reckon the wind, climb as they go.

    Pelicans at Prespa Lake

    Some pelicans festoon the bay
    like summer boats at Howth or Bray
    here to forage, to fish
    and fly back across the spit
    like local geese as day grows late
    in Prespa or at Donabate
    who swoop on Sutton, or on Rush,
    then tail it to Achilleios.

    Benjamin Keatinge is a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His poetry has appeared in Orbis, Eborakon, The Galway Review, Agenda and Flare and is forthcoming in Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets (Dedalus Press, 2019). He is editor of Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy (Cork University Press, 2019).

    Pictures by Hristo Peshev. Bulgarian conservationist and wildlife photographer who works as field work co-ordinator at the Fund for Wild Flora and Fauna, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria specializing in vulture conservation.

  • What Separates us from Monsters? Dylan Tighe’s Redubbing of Pasolini’s Saló

    Before even taking my seat, three times I was warned of the ‘gory content’ in Dylan Tighe’s redubbed rendition of ‘Salò’, or ‘120 Days of Sodom.’ Then announcements made at the start, noting our nearest fire exits, and the two-hour-and-ten minute performance length (sans interval), warned us again that we could leave at any time.

    Those familiar with Pasolini’s final film will understand that this performance is not for the faint hearted. Having run since last Thursday, it has received a critical Irish Times review claiming it abuses the relationship between spectator and performer by traumatising its audience.[i]

    But abuse, as we so brutally learn, is not something that can be left behind at the theatre door. Abuse is not a choice. And a choice we had – we were reminded of it four times. ‘120 Days of Sodom’ is not a new discovery, nor are the stories echoed from the Magdalene Laundries and Christian Brother schools. So, please be advised: if you think that you can’t handle it, then you probably can’t.

    Tighe has no interest in merely entertaining. He seems to have anticipated backlash, telling the Irish Examiner: ‘I was thinking about what it means to be outraged by a representation when there is not as much outrage, culturally, about the facts.’[ii] This is the general theme explored, and it is likely to provoke outrage. I even received a note from my editor afterwards saying: ‘I understand if you had to leave before it was finished.’

    On stage, chairs, small screens, bottled water and microphones are set up for the determined and brave cast. Centre stage, an Irish flag is placed on top of a filing drawer. The flag is later dropped on and discarded to access the files. Later, a European Union flag will be draped, notably when the death reports of young refugees are read out in a clinical and matter-of-fact tone.

    The film is given a new setting, Sligo – later there’s a nod to W.B. Yeats’s notorious line: ‘Base-born products of base beds’ – and our performers give us sound effects of whimpering, aggressive rape and sniggering, while a scattered script draws together a story based on the brutal scenes unfolding onscreen. Context is built from the verbatim accounts of clinical abuse stories. Parallels are easily and purposefully drawn.

    Perhaps the most shocking incident in the film is when a female adolescent is forced to eat the faeces of her abuser. More shocking is the link between that and an exact report of a priest admitting to demanding that a young boy lick faeces off his shoe. ‘I didn’t mean for him to actually do it,’ he says.

    Similar accounts are read throughout, oftentimes in upbeat and haughty tones. Tighe has scripted it so that many of the accounts are dubbed over an older, well-dressed courtesan in the film, assumed to signify a nun.

    I also questioned: what makes the older women exempt from abuse? Is it merely that they are past the age of abuse, or is it something deeper? Have they already endured something similar? One scene where an older lady is flouncing around in a manic way, and then flashes the crowd of male abusers, signifies the latter.

    I found myself waiting in anticipation for the accounts to be read out, for meaning to be given to the disturbing images and events onscreen. Although exercised intelligently, it could have made more sense to stick with one dominant theme: the sexual and physical abuse inflicted on thousands of children by members of the Catholic clergy.

    The list of deceased refugee adolescents was, nonetheless, more than moving, like many of the recollections. I cried silently in my seat. And, while I understand this was Tighe’s point – that this is not history, this is present day – it felt too ambitious. Hadn’t we suffered through enough already?

    I considered leaving around as many times as I was told that it would be OK if I had to do so. But I stayed. Perhaps because of a feeling that this was necessary. To bear witness to the brutality, to face it without a shield, to remove the mask on the truth.

    The play began with an introduction from Tighe himself, addressing the audience in Italian with subtitles onscreen. But one cannot simultaneously look at his facial expressions and read from the subtitles. A choice needs to be made. Similarly, towards the end, as the adolescent characters are shown being abused horrifically, smoke is released onstage, eventually covering the screen, leaving us back in a position of safety.

    This subtle occlusion served as a representation of our daily reality. By ‘our’ I really mean those of us who may not have suffered first-hand these harrowing crimes, but who have listened to many accounts. As a telephone counsellor volunteering in the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, I can say I have listened. I have acknowledged. I have heard stories such as those depicted on onstage. I also appreciated finding the Crisis telephone number listed on a laminated sign in the cubicles after the performance ended.

    Yet there was something different to this type of listening, something even more foul-tasting, which is a knowledge that these crimes have not been accounted for. These crimes have been covered up and excused. So much so that it falls to Tighe, and others, to recreate the trauma in order for us to face up to it.

    Understandably, this production is not for everyone. But the fact that such a production is being staged in the Abbey – the theatre of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory – is significant. An uncomfortable, unpleasant necessity – acting in a way like the Playboy of the Western World questioned other sides of the Irish character. This is why I did not leave.

    The performance explores consumption and an inability to satisfy that consumptive greed which seems to accompany positions of power. It led me to question our own present, overwhelming need to consume. The adolescents could easily stand in for how we exploit the Earth’s resources, how we abuse and ignore the plight of wildlife, farm animals – all in the name of perceived necessities that we assume to be needs.

    I don’t believe that it is Tighe’s intention to put blame on his audience. Rather, this production demands we ask ourselves ‘what separates us from monsters?’

    Feature Image: Luca Truffarelli 

    [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”2″ display=”basic_imagebrowser”][i] Ciara L. Murphy, ‘Pasolini’s Salò Redubbed review: Aims for greatness but falls significantly short’, September 30th, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/pasolini-s-sal%C3%B2-redubbed-review-aims-for-greatness-but-falls-significantly-short-1.4034991

    [ii] Alan O’Riordain, ‘Classic 120 Days of Sodom redubbed for Irish context’, September 22nd, 2019, Irish Examiner, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/lifestyle/culture/classic-120-days-of-sodom-redubbed-for-irish-context-952326.html

  • Musician of the Month: Phil Christie | The Bonk

     

    A Digest

    For most of us, the stomach is positioned around our middle. In East-Asian cultures, this area is usually considered the seat of the subjective self – the centre, from which we extend outward towards the world. Closer to home, we usually think of ourselves as residing somewhere behind the eyes, perhaps at one of the busier junctions of brain fold. Testing both locations within myself for signs of existence, I’m most aware of a ‘self’ when something goes wrong; when things are going well, I don’t occur to myself at all.

    The solar plexus is where the feeling of danger registers whenever it appears I am under threat (emotionally or physically). This reaction happens in my guts before any wordthoughts have time to log the incident in my head. Recent scientific investigations show the extent of the neural network in and around the stomach, and lend credibility to the idea that we exist much more in our bellies than we think we do. I like this idea. It makes sense when I think about playing and writing music, and what can be considered ‘my own’ in any of it.

    The word ‘stomach’ traces back to stoma, a Greek word having the sense of a kind of mouth; an opening; an inlet or an outlet. Interestingly, the entire alimentary canal – oesophagus through to the large intestine – can be strictly considered external to our bodies from an anatomical perspective, in that it has openings at either end. If we consider the stomach as the seat of the self, we might concede that we exist outside ourselves in a certain way all the time. The ear is another stoma, another digestive organ, where voices are metabolized and absorbed into the nerve stream.

    I find the most enjoyment in making sounds when it lends strangeness to the experience of being. When you listen to another person or another thing, you’re initiated into another world, churned around in another belly. Within the transmission process, you are suspended between selves, with an ability to be inside and outside simultaneously, accessing all the feelings on both sides of the exchange.

    As you listen and digest the sounds you hear, you’re not only receiving – the ear also gives a voice to the other person or the other thing. Anytime I hear Roy Orbison sing ‘In Dreams’ now I can’t help but hear what David Lynch heard in the piece for Blue Velvet. His ear has edited what Roy Orbison and ‘his’ song are forever.

    All of this is a preface to my admission that I always find it difficult to write about what I do with music, ‘my own stuff’. I think everyone should find that difficult. I’m suspicious of those who don’t. There is a well-founded anxiety that comes with the notion of having a genre, image, piece of music, or slogan, represent you.

    Because when things are working well and when music is working well, there is no need to think about what you are doing. You shouldn’t be able to name it.

    The boundaries between what you hear and digest and what you try to say, or sound, are fluid and always shifting. Artists like R. Stevie Moore and Robert Wyatt, whose songs present a healthy digestion of the sounds and perspectives of others, for me always come out sounding the most original.

    This makes me reflect on the obsession we have with our selves, and also, the idea of eclecticism in music. Everyone wants to find what is unique and self-identical and unmixed and quintessential in themselves. The commodification and marketing of music propagates this obsession because in order to sell things, we need personalities, niches, geniuses, and so on. As a musical artist, distinguishing oneself from ‘the others’ through branding, imagery, sounds, and words is deemed crucial to being able to survive the Internet.

    I think it’s worth making the case for selflessness again. This is not to suggest that we don’t reflect on the place we occupy in the world; we might do well to recognise that the need to identify ourselves with any position is questionable and also very boring. The thing that is really interesting to me in all of this is the experience of not being anything, possessing no essential qualities, having nothing particularly special to speak of, and being fully content to tip on.

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    The Bonk play The Sound House on 11.10.19

    May Feign is available for free download here.

  • The Confidence Man

    ‘I say the word ‘forever’ less and less, the more I understand it.’

    It’s a good line. I might get it tattooed on my chest. Or carved on my tombstone.

    During the heatwaves and increased storm warnings of the summer, I felt my heartbeat for the first time in a while. The seasons change so rapidly now; I can barely keep up.

    It’s quarter to five on a Friday evening. I’ve been awake since twelve, but only forced myself to get up an hour ago. I sleep in my clothes more and more nowadays. Eventually I’ll stop writing and try and tidy the house up. Or at least shower, and shave. Sometimes I want to jack the writing in, and put a bullet in my mouth. Other times I wake up ready to hold onto life like it’s all I have – because it is all I have.

    I also know I have a talent, but it’s not a very useful one.

    I barely sleep anymore. I can’t concentrate on anything. The noise in my head is never still. I have what could be charitably described as a ‘rich inner life’. My brain keeps snaring itself into knots; I go from wired to exhausted in a matter of minutes.

    I have my wins, I have my losses; living with both requires skill.

    Christ. I sound like I’m scribbling down ideas for a GQ op-ed.

    On the Beach

    ‘Though my problems are meaningless/That don’t make them go away.’

    As always, Neil Young says it better than I or anyone else can. All this year, I’ve had his ‘On the Beach’ album on repeat. The title song’s jangling bassline and weary falsetto are good reminders that at least my life has a belter soundtrack.

    That phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ keeps coming back to me. A quick Google search of the term yields over 10,100,000 results. Every time there’s a mass shooting or an assault or even a film or a comedian that arouses controversy, it’s listed as among the chief factors. A lot of us, myself included, engage in it.

    I don’t doubt or deny the concept or its validity. But it also sounds like a good name of a beer to me. Like a stout or an ale or even an IPA. Occasionally I half-joke to myself: if the writing doesn’t work out, I’ll start my own microbrewery, and the Tox-Mas IPA will be its premium product. Blonde, red, unfiltered. Whatever you want.

    Being alone is natural, yet people don’t know how to be. It’s not a skill they teach you in school, or during office hours. We’re tired of living with the inner cavity, of the disappointment, and of letting each other down. Yet the disconnect that’s become so prevalent in recent decades is now the norm. People seize up just texting each other. The more we anchor ourselves to our hope, the more let down we inevitably feel. The let-downs, both the ones you’re responsible for and the ones visited upon you, pile up and you start measuring them. I don’t live without hope, but I don’t wholly rely on it, either.

    Loneliness

    Loneliness is considered a mental-health problem nowadays. As most aspects of the human condition are. It’s a symptom of being Irish, I suppose; the inability to countenance that someone or something is worth loving. Whatever suffering I’ve faced in this life is fairly minor compared to that faced by most people I know. I’ve lost friends to suicide, and others to their own inner demons. Because I can’t afford therapy, I turn to language.

    I am often alone, but rarely lonely. Loneliness is inevitable; it cannot be escaped. Loneliness rarely means being alone. It usually means no-one caring.

    Overfed with an endless scroll of stories, posts, newsfeeds, articles shared from newsites blasting the latest cause for concern. Some call it an overpopulation issue; others say it’s the pervasive influence of technology and social media in everyday life. Actual face-to-face contact is declining. At any given point our eyes are glued to some sort of screen. Mass disconnection – is it any wonder?

    The hackneyed, social-media friendly refrain of ‘love yourself!’ rings hollow when people seem to care little about each other. The constant reminders to put oneself first, of the paramountcy if one’s own immediate happiness and gratification, how if should always take precedence over the needs of one’s family and friends.

    Being involved with someone for a long period of time has only increased my worries and knowledge of how bad I am. I don’t need anyone else finding that out.

    Low-level exhaustion

    I wonder if all this intensity is necessary. Or if I am over just over-enthusiastic and say yes too much, too quickly. I follow the reformed alcoholic’s recommendation, and take each day as it comes, work on what I have to: scripts, reviews, my novel, my poems.

    This is new for me; the low-level exhaustion that simmers quietly at the back of each day. In college, I used to churn out multiple three-thousand-word essays, poems, and playscripts. I badly needed a girlfriend then. Confidence, too. If I had more confidence, my life would be very different.

    Now, I just need a job. Or at least, something to keep me occupied. I don’t care about forging a career or drafting up five-year plans. A job is just a way of keeping afloat, so I can write.

    I should still teach myself a few new things, though. Like how to make fire from kindling, without matches or a lighter. Manage my finances better. Jog, cycle, lift weights. Programme a computer from scratch. Things that are quite necessary for a life of competence, and which don’t engage me in the slightest.

    I need no-one and no-one needs me. Is that a strength or a weakness?

    Warped Version of Adolescence

    I’m now back living in my parents’ home, and leading a warped version of my adolescence again. The dynamic with my parents and younger sister is closer to that of roommates than a family unit. We lead our individual lives, work our own jobs, and interaction remains minimal, even under the one roof. We are either too busy or don’t care. We just lack the energy to care. Hence why I rarely speak or expect anything from them. The bond of blood ties everyone, but I’m not sure.

    My father’s boots clumping on the wooden floorboards, the shower’s hiss and the extended sigh of the kettle boiling, the scorch of black coffee at the back of my throat. These are the reminders of how things can change and remain the same.

    They say adulthood is just the slow realisation that all the wisdom fed to you since infancy is categorically false.

    I am single, and yet I am not isolating myself anymore. When I was with my ex-, she was my priority.

    Putting other friendships aside seemed like a virtue, as it meant I was prioritizing my partner. This is what men do in relationships, apparently. When the breakup happens, they find they’ve no mates to turn to. I’m not in the humour to be anyone’s boyfriend now; I lack the energy to care about being with someone.

    Women moving faster

    I keep thinking about women, as always. They seem to move faster than me, their footsteps ablaze with purpose. I look at their hands more and more, to see if they wear rings. Most of them aren’t. It’s not something I ever thought I’d do. It’s become another reflex, like checking the time or my emails.

    Do all men do this?

    Occasionally I look my exes up online, like the creep I am. I don’t go on dates that much.

    There’s always the need to impress, and I rarely feel that impressive. I’ve no business being someone’s boyfriend.

    I was someone’s boyfriend for three years; in all that time, I never quite believed that she loved me. I couldn’t see any reason why she would. But she did. And I loved her back.

    She used to look at me as if I was a god. I knew it was only a matter of time before the reality of what I am would become clear. I could only keep the masquerade up for long, and then she’d want me gone. As she eventually did.

    Every woman I’ve been with I’ve inevitably let down.

    Most blokes seem to make it their life’s work to pester women until they either give in or set their brothers on them. I’m more willing to take ‘no’ for an answer. Usually, I expect it.

    I’ve never felt wanted anyway. I’d say I’ve been out of the game for too long, but that would imply I’ve even been in the game in the first place.

    The beginning of things are always exciting. Once I see the ambit of work that must go into something, I lose interest.

    I don’t know if I have a stunted capacity to feel or recognise love, or am just incapable of feeling it.

    I’ve also trained myself not to get sentimental anymore. To the point that major losses or setbacks don’t hit as hard as they should. The mawkishness is repulsive to anyone who witnesses it.

    News thump

    More and more in my newsfeed about Brexit, climate change, the housing crisis here, banking layoffs in Germany, mass drownings in the Mediterranean, multi-millionaire men of the people taking selfies at Everest’s peak, immigrant detention centres at the Mexican border. The inevitable and deserved comparisons to Auschwitz and Dachau. There’s no ignoring it anymore.

    Armageddon, Ragnorok, Kali Yuga, Al-Qiyammah, the Anthropocene. Every society, in every era, puts a name to the inevitable, to the moment of its collapse. It continues to this day.

    I remember chatting up this girl once, in the smoking section in Workman’s. Whether she fancied me, or was just bored, I couldn’t tell. I never can. She was confident in the way only young people are.

    A man sitting alone in a pub is usually best avoided, but she came up to me and got the conversation going. I say we had a conversation, but really I just let her talk about this upcoming art exhibition she was about to have in Amsterdam. Its overall theme was about body image, how men and women perceive theirs, for good or for ill. Five years ago, this would’ve impressed me.

    She asked me did I like my body, the way I looked, did I feel comfortable in my skin. I didn’t really have an answer for her. If she was waiting for me to make a move, she was sorely disappointed. Not that I didn’t want to, I just didn’t know when. It’s a very delicate dance, and I have very heavy feet.

    I know I am far less than what I could be. I don’t need a self-help guide to realise that.

    The mind is a cave; the brain peels back. I can’t be alone for very long without the craving for a cold beer breaking the surface. I need to stay numb. I need to forget that I exist.

    I want to be somebody else. I’m tired of being a burden to everyone. But this is the flesh I am sealed into.

    Only a few days ago, I was invited to go on a hike through Glendalough. Sweat on my torso and mud on my boots; feeling the winds at such a high altitude, overlooking the swirl of black water that is the Upper Lake in the valley, scrape at my face. Strangely enough, it cleared my head.

    At home, I got back to work. Wrote and felt the old strength come back. I know the value of hope now, the necessity of keeping going. I still know better than to rely on it, but it isn’t unwelcome for now.

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    Daniel Wade is a Dublin-based author. He was awarded the Hennessy prize New Irish Writing in 2015, and his poetry has appeared in over two dozen publications. Follow his progress on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

  • Reviving the Language of Care in Climate Change Consciousness

    As a child I had recurring dreams of great waves crashing over me. Some would swallow me up, making me lose consciousness. In others I would reach the top of a hill, where I would observe the sea level slowly rising from afar, engulfing the fishing village in which I still live.

    My village is in a protected area in southern Brazil. The place is an idyllic meeting point, where hills, river, white sand dunes and the sea merge into a breath-taking view. The river, called Madre, meaning mother, dances through the wetlands, appearing like a serpent before it reaches the sea. Most days its floodplain lies well away from the houses on the coast line.

    Lately, however, we are observing higher tides and the shrinking of the sandbank. This year winter arrived late and was shorter than usual. We experienced extreme heat alternating with cold days that interfered with the mullet’s reproduction cycle. As a result the fishing season was shorter than usual.

    Climate fluctuation is increasingly evident, affecting the rhythms of nature and impacting on livelihoods.

    For millions of people around the globe, the climate breakdown is a living reality rather than a far off prediction. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 17.2 million[i] people fled their homes in 2018, due to storms, hurricanes, floods, other cataclysmic weather events or environmental shifts. Those living in the Philippines, China and India have been most adversely affected by these phenomena.

    Climate change and forced displacement are the defining challenges of our times.

    In the wake of climate breakdown last month António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General hosted the 2019 Climate Action Summit in New York, calling for concrete action to meet the global climate predicament.

    In spite of being in the company of many of the world’s most powerful political leaders, the star of the summit was clearly a Swedish teenager who had just crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a zero-carbon sailboat. Greta Thunberg, climate activist and global phenomenon, managed to capture all our attention. In a powerful speech addressed to governments, businesses and civil society, she condemned world leaders for betraying younger generations, and for indolence in response to the climate collapse and its attendant human costs. 

    I was moved and indeed overjoyed to observe Greta calling humanity’s attention to a dimension often excluded from these talks – the human and ecological costs of our destructive economic system and fossil fuel-addicted societies. 

    Visibly emotional, she uttered the now famous words: ‘people are suffering; people are dying; entire ecosystems are collapsing; we are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.’

    At a stroke Greta had restored the language of care to climate talks, having underpined her arguments with reference to the science.

    In as much as we must address issues related to carbon emissions, build creative and sustainable solutions, and change our economic systems and modes of production, the conversation must include climate justice for those on the frontline of climate change. We will only understand forced displacement in the context of climate breakdown once we revive within ourselves the language of care for others, for all living beings, and for the planet itself.

    Unless we humanise the lived experience of those forced to flee hurricanes, floods and droughts, we will continue to externalise the human cost of climate breakdown, and carry on with business as usual: the “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” 

    If the images of Cyclone Idai, which hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, and Hurricane Dorian – the strongest storm ever to land in the Bahamas – do not awaken concern and care for the victims of climate breakdown, then humanity seems doomed.

    Often I have a sense of hopelessness. I understand many people share similar responses and feelings. When I feel overwhelmed and insignificant in the face of this global crises I take refuge in silence.        

    As an adult working with communities displaced by wars, poverty and weather events, my childhood dreams now support me. At times, caught up in the here and now, I am immersed in the sea of action; at other points, I pause and step back to reflect, restore and witness the larger picture.

    To my mind, these are complementary movements sustaining an open heart and active hands in a world in crisis. As I delve inwardly I observe my motivations. I connect with my principles and values, I feel the pain of a suffering world. As I emerge outwardly, I align my actions and speech with deeper aspects of myself. They are the in-breath and out-breath of sacred activism, that operate like the seasons of my existence.

    To confront widespread climate breakdown, and the despair this brings, one must connect with the language of deep care for the Earth and all living beings. Then we can respond from a place of transformation and embody a new way of living and relating to the planet.

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    [i] Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, ‘Global Report on Internal Displacement 2019’, http://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2019/

  • Artist of the Month: Conor Campbell

    Around four years ago I completed a drawing inspired by a childhood dream featuring a landscape of balloons, floating boats and orange trees. I then shared it on social media and a friend, Sam Clague, messaged me asking if he could use it for an EP he was releasing called ‘Balloons’. I hadn’t considered the idea of my work being used as cover art until that point. I loved Sam’s music and the music he sent me for the EP seemed to fit the mood of the drawing perfectly, so I said yes.

    A year or so later I moved to Dublin, where I befriended Brían and Diarmuid of Ye Vagabonds. They liked what I had done for Sam and eventually asked me to do the cover for their first album ‘Ye Vagabonds’. This led to many further collaborations over the following years.

    I found when a musician came to me with an idea, or with an example of the sound and atmosphere of their release, that the image emerged very easily. It also helped if I loved the music.

    Music and art have always existed in the same world for me. The mood and melody of the music guides my hand, determining the mood and atmosphere of whatever I am working on. When I really connect with the songs, it doesn’t even feel like I am doing any work. I just listen and paint. The colours and the mood are already in the song.

    I started painting after my first year studying architecture. I hadn’t really done anything artistic up to that point. The architecture degree I took in the University of Limerick had a significant influence on my visual sensibility, and liberated alternative ways of thinking creatively. In the beginning I would lie in bed listening to ambient music or psychedelic rock and discover colours and shapes coming into my mind’s eye for each song. Then the following morning I would set about drawing the imagery I recalled from that semi-conscious state.

    Various elements of my childhood and life interests have influenced my practice. I grew up around a lot of religious imagery in Catholic churches and convents. I remember going to mass and zoning out staring at stained glass windows. My father introduced me to Byzantine iconography when I was very young, instigating an interest in ancient art, particularly Egyptian hieroglyphs and medieval illustrations and tapestries.

    I usually build up my work with layer upon layer of dots and colour. Through this chaos I find an order. If I am doing something that isn’t working, I just paint over it with a new layer of dots. I see the dots almost as pixels that allow me to organically control the evolution of the image into its finality.

    I think my work is usually highly detailed because of my interest in fractals and the infinite detail of reality. So at times I find it hard to know where to draw the line (pun intended) in terms of detail.

    Recently I have started collaborating with the musician Gareth Quinn Redmond, a recent and dear friend of mine. We connected over a mutual love of ambient/environmental music. I brought some paintings over to his house and he wrote music inspired by them.

    It was a new departure to engage in this collaborative process, where I was involved in the music’s development and genesis through back and forth conversations with Gar. I usually make art to music that I am listening to, but this time there was a musician writing music to my art. It was fascinating to be almost inverting the process I was used to. Our first EP ‘Monachopsis’ was released on the 20th of September this year.

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  • Hate Crimes in Spain not as they Seem

    Some years ago I read about a small theatre in Moscow staging hard-hitting plays critical of Official Russia. It goes without saying that the authorities did not take kindly to Teatr.doc and its founders, Mikhail Ugarov and Elena Gremina (who both died of heart attacks within six weeks of each other in 2018).[i]

    In 2014 Moscow City Council closed the theatre on a planning technicality regarding the location of a window. Then, in 2018, nine of the theatre’s actors were arrested for ‘unlawfully drinking alcohol in central Moscow.’[ii] And in August of this year, unknown assailants stormed the stage during a gay-themed play.

    But despite all the bureaucratic obstacles put in its way, Teatr.doc continues because even a regime like Putin’s baulks at blatantly shutting down a tiny theatre – it prefers to use legal levers to stifle dissent.

    Unfortunately, Putin’s regime is not alone in basing its repression on the ‘rule of law’. Erdogan’s Turkey is also at it. Even in the EU, Poland, Hungary and Spain are using repressive legislation and compliant judges to shut down non-conformism.

    Flawed Democratic Transition in Spain

    The case of Spain is the most alarming because few people are aware of the problems there. Ever since dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975, the country has been portrayed as the poster child for a transition from totalitarianism to democracy. But, as is often the case with the family of an alcoholic who falls off the wagon, its friends are ignoring the warning signs, hoping that it’ll right itself, and turning a blind eye to lapses.

    Problems have long dogged the fledgling democracy. In the mid-1980s, the then Socialist government organised death squads against those suspected of links to Basque terrorist organisation ETA. A few bureaucrats and a senior minister even spent a few months behind bars for their role in the scandal.

    Then in the late 1990s, judges shut down a number of Basque nationalist publications on the grounds that they were financing ETA. The conservative prime minister at the time, Jose Maria Aznar, even boasted ‘Did anyone believe we wouldn’t dare close [them] down?’[iii] An unusual thing to say in a democracy supposedly with a Separation of Powers.

    Most disturbing of all, journalists from those publications served jail sentences of up to eleven years. The closures of all the publications were later – too late for those who had been jailed –found by Spain’s higher courts to have been unlawful.

    the ‘Gag Law’

    Those cases could be written off as once-in-a-decade incidents caused by disconcertion in responding to a terrorist campaign. But since 2015, new legislation – the Organic Law for Citizens’ Security, colloquially known as the ‘Gag Law’ – has allowed the authorities to clamp down on free speech, free assembly and peaceful acts of civil disobedience.

    Complementing the Gag Law is anti-discrimination legislation – known as ‘hatred offences’ – which was introduced to deal with, for example, racism and sexism but is increasingly being used to prosecute people on ideological grounds. And from looking at official statistics, it’s clear that such legislation is being disproportionately employed in two regions: Catalonia and the Basque Country.

    In 2017, the last year for which official figures are available,[iv] there were 1,418 ‘hatred offenses’ in Spain. Of these, 36% were prosecuted in Catalonia and 10% in the Basque provinces. That means almost half of all cases in two regions accounted for just a fifth of the population.

    ‘ideological hatred’

    And when hatred offenses are broken down, ‘ideological hatred’ in Catalonia accounted for 42% of all cases nationally. There’s an explanation for this.

    Since the beginning the decade, Catalan nationalism has gone from being satisfied with devolution within Spain to demanding a referendum on independence. After being stonewalled by the government in Madrid, they went ahead and organised one on their own. The conservative government at the time responded by sending in thousands of riot police to requisition ballot boxes. In carrying this out, the police beat voters with truncheons and fired rubber bullets into crowds queuing outside polling stations.

    The images were seen around the world and proved a PR disaster for Spain, which has since then tried to dismiss these events as ‘fake news’ and ‘Catalan propaganda’. The Supreme Court in Madrid is now deliberating on the fate of twelve Catalan leaders accused of violent rebellion, sedition and embezzlement for organising the referendum. They face up to twenty-five-years behind bars.

    Going hand-in-hand with the trial of the leaders is a lower level persecution of ordinary Catalans, who publicly display separatist sympathies. Many are charged with ‘ideological hatred’. And while the cases are often thrown out by the courts, on account of risible evidence, the stress of being charged and the cost of hiring a legal team might deter democratic expression of political opinions. Thus, the threat of prosecution allows the state to persecute without explicitly having to do so.

    Other targets

    That said, Catalan nationalists aren’t the only ones being targeted. The Podemos mayor of Cadiz, José María González Santos, is standing trial[v] at the time of writing on an ‘ideological hatred’ charge. He has been accused of ‘hatred of Israel’ in response to cancelling a run of Israeli movies during a film festival. Also a Barcelona University professor is being investigated for ‘calumny’[vi] after claiming that prisoners are tortured in Catalan prisons.

    Other almost comical cases that have made headlines are those of a clown with a red nose[vii] who stood beside a policeman and a car mechanic[viii] who refused to service the vehicle of a police officer. Both were Catalans and both were charged with ‘ideological hatred’. Both cases were thrown out, but not after the accused had endured months of uncertainty.

    Both cases also serve to highlight how legislation designed to protect minorities is being used to persecute members of a national minority in order to protect police from perceived slights. As the former interior minister, the conservative judge Jose Ignacio Zoido said: ‘All those who have disrespected the forces and corps of security of the state will pay for it in the courts.’[ix]

    One such case is that of Catalan satirical magazine El Jueves, which was charged with ‘hatred’[x] for a cartoon saying that cocaine supplies had run out in Catalonia because of all the riot police sent there from the rest of Spain. While people who protested outside a hotel hosting said riot police were also investigated for ‘hatred.’[xi]

    Against the Constitution?

    The crime of ‘hating’ police has given rise to some controversy among legal academics. Professor Joaquin Urias, a constitutional law expert at Seville University, has argued that ‘it can’t be applied to protect an institution.’ He added: ‘Accepting that hating the police is a criminal offence could insert us into a terrible spiral of repression.’ He was responding to the so-called ‘Alsasua 8’[xii] youths, who were jailed for between two and thirteen years for public disorder offences and ‘ideological discrimination’ after a bar fight with two off-duty policemen.

    Perhaps the most notorious cases are those of the puppeteers Alfonso Lazaro de la Fuente and Raul Garcia, who spent three days in jail, and the TV comedian Dani Mateo, who is Catalan. The puppeteers were charged with ‘hatred’ and ‘glorifying terrorism’ after parents complained about a banner held by one of the puppets in a children’s matinee in Madrid. They endured an eleven-month ordeal from their arrest to the judge striking out the case. Meanwhile, Mateo was charged with ‘hatred’ for appearing to blow his nose on a Spanish flag during a TV sketch. His ordeal lasted a mere three months.

    The situation is, to put it mildly, an affront to democracy. Amnesty International has said that it is having ‘a profoundly chilling effect, creating an environment in which people are increasingly afraid to express alternative views, or make controversial jokes.’

    Esteban Beltran, Director of Amnesty International Spain, added: ‘Sending rappers to jail for song lyrics and outlawing political satire demonstrates how narrow the boundaries of acceptable online speech have become in Spain.’

    He continues: ‘People should not face criminal prosecution simply for saying, tweeting or singing something that might be distasteful or shocking. Spain’s broad and vaguely worded law is resulting in the silencing of free speech and the crushing of artistic expression.’

    What next?

    The current caretaker government of Socialist Pedro Sanchez indicated while in opposition that it would address these worrying trends. But despite being in power for more than a year, it has done nothing other than to set up a propaganda ministry, Global Spain, which aims to fight the ‘disinformation’ about the state of democracy spread by, wait for it, ‘the enemies of Spain.’

    What can be done to make Spain change course? With four of the five big parties in its parliament fully behind the idea that Spain is protecting democracy by clamping down on freedom of expression, there are appears to be little hope. Foreign criticism, such as claims that there are political prisoners in its jails, makes the Spanish establishment bristle. But perhaps more concerted criticism from the EU and its member states might have an effect. We won’t know until the EU speaks out – up till now, it has chosen to look the other way.

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    [i] Sophia Kishkovsky, ‘Moscow Theater Rebels, Husband and Wife, Are Dead’, June 8th, 2018, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/obituaries/gremina-and-ugarov-russia-teatr-doc-die.html

    [ii] Katie Davies, ‘Actors from Russia’s independent Teatr.doc detained by Moscow police’, July 5th, 2018, The Calvert Journal, https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/10464/actors-from-russias-independent-teatr.doc-detained-by-moscow-police.

    [iii] Jose Miguel Larraya, ‘”¿Alguien pensaba que no nos íbamos a atrever a cerrar ‘Egin’?”’ July 23rd, 1998, El País, https://elpais.com/diario/1998/07/23/espana/901144814_850215.html

    [iv] http://www.interior.gob.es/documents/10180/7146983/ESTUDIO+INCIDENTES+DELITOS+DE+ODIO+2017+v3.pdf/5d9f1996-87ee-4e30-bff4-e2c68fade874

    [v] Untitled, ‘José María González ‘Kichi’ declara en el juzgado por cancelar un ciclo de cine israelí’, September 17th, 2019, Diario de Cadiz, https://www.diariodecadiz.es/cadiz/Jose-Maria-Gonzalez-Kichi-declara-juzgado_0_1392460911.html.

    [vi] Untitled, ‘El juez admite la querella de CCOO e imputa a un profesor de la UB por decir que en las prisiones “hay torturas”’ September 19th, 2019, eldiario.es, https://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/sociedad/querella-CCOO-profesor-UB-prisiones_0_942806331.html

    [vii] Jordi Pessaradona, ‘Imputado por un delito de odio el concejal catalán de la nariz de payaso’, February 23rd, 2018, Público, https://www.publico.es/politica/imputado-delito-odio-concejal-catalan-nariz-payaso.html

    [viii] Jordi Cabre, ‘Archivado el caso del mecánico de Reus acusado de delito de odio’, 23rd of March, 2019, Diari de Tarragona, https://www.diaridetarragona.com/reus/Archivado-el-caso-del-mecanico-de-Reus-acusado-de-delito-de-odio-20190325-0057.html

    [ix] Carles Villalonga, ‘Delito de odio: ¿uso o abuso?’, March 4th, 2018, La Vanguardia, https://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20180304/441143656491/delito-odio-incitacion-violencia.html

    [x] Pascual Serrano, ‘El delito de odio, la revista ‘El Jueves’ y la Policía’, November 14th, 2017, Público, https://blogs.publico.es/otrasmiradas/11541/el-delito-de-odio-la-revista-el-jueves-y-la-policia/

    [xi] Javier Álverez, ‘Fiscalía investiga por delitos de odio y amenazas la expulsión de los policías de los hoteles’, October 3rd, 2017, Seiz, https://cadenaser.com/ser/2017/10/03/tribunales/1507017054_809275.html

    [xii] Guy Hedgecoe ‘Ghost of ETA refuses to fade for Spanish Right’ June 9th, 2019, politico.eu https://www.politico.eu/article/eta-spanish-right-basque-country-alsasua/