Cassandra Voices

Tag: –

  • Reviving Martin Heidegger’s Dasein – Be-ing

    Before a recent online poetry reading I was invited to meet with other international participants. I assumed the purpose was to gain a little insight into the other writers’ work. In fact, one of the main reasons – I was informed by our overtly gracious American host – was to establish which pronouns we would feel happiest to have ourselves described with.

    It was the first time that I had experienced first-hand the increasingly bizarre world of contemporary gender politics. While the subsequent exchange of pronouns went on its way, I couldn’t help thinking of Martin Heidegger’s radical alternative to Descartes cogito.

    Shortly after the reading I took down again my English translation, a first edition, of Beiträge zur Philosophie ( Vom Ereignis ), written between 1936 and 1938, though not appearing in print in Germany until 1989 – at Heidegger’s insistence thirteen years after his death – and Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ), which was also published posthumously in 1999.

    For the purposes of the present essay, I would like to contrast some of my findings on From Enowning, also known as Of the Event due to a later translation by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (2012), with those of Charles Bambach, who published a book called Heidegger’s Roots; Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Cornell University Press, 2003). I believe this may be useful in the context of identity politics today – as illustrated in the anecdote above.

    As I see it, Heidegger’s ideas on Be-ing, along with other useful insights, have been completely railroaded through the excesses of so-called Woke culture. These ideas could have profound implications as we confront contemporary challenges, including climate change.

    Peter O’Neill. Image (c) Victor Dragomiretchi.

    Nazism and Wider Work

    Among the most sinister aspects of contemporary academia is a declining rigor in argument. Thus, for example Heidegger’s undoubted Nazism is being used to undermine all aspects of his work which are simply unparalleled in the context of modern philosophical ideas is. As his former, Jewish, student Hannah Arendt put it:

    The gale that blows through Heidegger’s thinking – like that which still, after thousands of years, blows to us from Plato’s work – is not of our century. It comes from the primordial, and what it leaves behind is something perfect which, like everything perfect, falls back to the primordial.

    In Heidegger’s Roots[1], however, Charles Bambach attempts to demonstrate that the political ideology of the Nazis infects all of Heidegger’s thought, and so, by implication, this thinker can have very little to contribute to society. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    I take the case of Bambach here in this essay, but he is just one of many over the last few years who have jumped on the “Heidegger was a Nazi” bandwagon, which may be located within the context of woke ‘cancel culture.’ Against this I argue that if one reads the books Heidegger wrote during the 1930’s – and indeed also during the war – you find his thought has actually nothing to do with Nazi ideology.

    I will be making this case based on two books here, one written in the mid- to late- 1930’s, which I will be referring to as Vom Ereignis/From Enowning[2]; and another from the early 1940’s, at the height of the war as the fate of Stalingrad was being decided, written on the subject of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.[3]

    But let us begin with Bambach in Heidegger’s Roots, who discusses Heidegger’s now infamous Rectoral Address at Freiberg University in 1933, after he had been appointed to the position with the support of the Nazi party. Bambach states that unlike other academics he will actually read the text as a serious piece of philosophical writing, wholly consistent with his Heidegger’s overall contribution to philosophy.

    This is the substance of Bambach’s book: that Heidegger’s politics is an intimate extension of his entire philosophical outlook and that one cannot distinguish between the Nazis and his thought, as they come from the same source. This is a very interesting idea, and Bambach puts up a meticulous case, at least when it comes to this very questionable period in Heidegger’s life and thought.

    Under the Influence

    Even as late as 1935, with the publication of Introduction to Metaphysics[4],  there are still pro-Nazi passages, deeply shocking to read today, revealing the extent to which Heidegger was under the influence of Nazi ideology, and how he tried to use it to promote his own ideas.

    I remember putting this particular book down, despite having been excited by Heidegger’s notions on early Greek thinkers, such as Heraclitus. I simply found the cheap Nazi sentiment really difficult to stomach.

    Bambach is very good when explaining the mood of the times, and the extent to which Heidegger was carried along by Hitler being made Chancellor of Germany, thus legitimating the Nazis as the most powerful party in all of Germany, an idea unthinkable in the 1920’s.

    If other Germans responded to the National Socialist takeover with “a widely held feeling of redemption and liberation from democracy”and felt relief that an incompetent and petty-minded government would no longer be left to solve the profound crisis of the times, Heidegger concerned himself with greater issues. He interpreted the events of early 1933 not as a political transfer of power, but as an epochal shift within being itself, a radical awakening from the slumbers of Weimar politics as usual.[5]

    Two years later, in the summer of 1935, still as Rector of the University of Freiburg, Heidegger, while offering an interpretation of Heraclitus’s fragment number 59 – generally translated as ‘War/conflict is the Father and King of all,’ – claims that ‘along with the German language, Greek (in regard to the possibilities of thinking) is at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages.’

    This is just one quote among many peppering a text written in the context of German rearmament that would culminate in World War II, which makes for very unsavoury reading, particularly when considering his standing in German academia.[6]

    Heidegger in 1960.

    Change of Track

    One year later, however, after the Introduction to Metaphysics, in 1936, one meets a radically different text: Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).

    It is as if the book is written by a different author altogether. Gone is the hyperbole. The very register and tone are completely different. But, most importantly, there is no mention of German supremacy. There is no mention of Germany at all!

    Along with Sein und Zeit (1926) or Being and Time, Vom Ereignis or From Enowning (1936) this is the most important of all Heidegger’s texts and the one that he considered the most important of all his books.[7]

    Ten years earlier in Being and Time Heidegger claimed that his task was to ‘destroy’ the history of Ontology, or Western metaphysics as we know it; in other words Descartes cogito  by replacing it with Dasein or Be-ing, in Vom Ereignis/ from enowning/ of the Event. Here Heidegger sets out, for the first time, a philosophical structure in six parts, in which he attempts, using the concept of Be-ing/ Dasein, to return to inceptual Greek thinking.

    This will become the most important concept for Heidegger to put down in writing. Bambach actually acknowledges this shift , but with nothing like the emphasis it deserves.

    The contents of Vom Ereignis/From Enowning/Of the Event retains real significance for us today, particularly considering our current environmental crisis – a crisis even more severe than the one that Heidegger confronted in the 1930s in Nazi Germany; given today we face actual extinction if we do not radically change the way we live as a species (Dasein) on planet Earth.

    Machination

    One of Heidegger’s central concerns with the world of men he expresses in Vom Ereignis is machination. In part two of the book Echo, Heidegger attempts to grasp inceptual historic thinking originating from the Greeks.

    This involves an attempt at recuperating Be-ing which has been abandoned as he sees it, as opposed to following cause and effect metaphysics, which are the result of Christian thinking.

    There are whole passages in this text which are profoundly at odds with Nazi German policy at the time of the book’s composition, and which, frankly, apart from a mere sentence acknowledging this fact, Bambach largely ignores in this his most fundamental work. It is, after all, referred to as ‘the turn’ or the seminal event in his thinking, in which he decisively takes his own path in philosophical thinking, which remains completely unparalleled today.

    One is accustomed to calling the epoch of “civilisation” one of dis-enchantment, and this seems for its part exclusively to be the same as the total lack of questioning. However, it is exactly the opposite. One has only to know from where the enchantment comes. The answer: from the unrestrained domination of machination.[8]

    Notably, at the time of writing, in March and in June 1936, the German army had marched into the Rhineland, and were also supplying General Franco with ‘several formations of Junkers 52’s’.[9]

    The German military was to become one of the most technologically advanced armies in the world. Heidegger was not only critical of this particular phenomenon, but in the same passage, he continues:

    The bewitchment by technicity and its constantly self-surpassing progress are only one sign of this enchantment, by virtue of which everything presses forth into calculation, usage, breeding, manageability, and regulation. Even “taste” now becomes a matter for this regulation, and everything depends on a “good ambiance”.[10]

    Joseph Goebbels views the Degenerate Art Exhibition.

    Degenerate Art

    The Degenerate Art Exhibition (Die Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst ) took place from July to November of 1937, while Heidegger was working on his masterwork Vom Ereignis – From Enowning – Of the Event.

    Heidegger’s use of the term ‘bewitchment’ is interesting considering the mesmeric effect Hitler had on the masses at Nurnberg. During the same year, 1937, the ‘Rally of Labour’ was held (Reichsparteitag der Arbeit) in which masses of people converged on the city.

    In the Pathé newsreels of the time you can see the machination of people converging in the stadium. They are marching just like machines. Heidegger repeats the phrase again, even placing it in italics in the text: ‘the epoch of total lack of questioning of all things and of all machinations.’[11] Heidegger did not allow the book to be published for fifty years after its composition. So far, it has been translated into English twice. It is the most extraordinary testament to Martin Heidegger’s thought, as it is a complete break with Western metaphysical thinking.

    Regenerative Ideas

    Having begun this essay with a discussion of the use of pronouns today, in terms of gender identity, I now consider Heidegger’s concept of Dasein or Be-ing in English as an alternative designator for the subject.

    Heidegger is an Aristotelian in his thinking, who views the multiple in the One, Be-ing as representative of all living creatures, regardless of race, sex etc. It is a wonderfully free and natural idea, totally revolutionary in concept, and here is the thing: the majority of people living in the world today have absolutely no sense of the existence of such a rich philosophical idea

    People are far more interested in banging on about an extremely regrettable period in the German thinker’s career. But if we are really serious as a species, in other words if we are really serious about surviving as opposed to going extinct, we had better put such petty notions of self aside, and concentrate instead on regenerative ideas on the way we perceive one another as Dasein.

    Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia – Heraclitus (believed to be Democritus) 1652-53 – Luca Giordano

    Heraclitus

    As stated in the introduction, I want to speak about two of Heidegger’s works. The second book that I turn to is Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos[12] which was originally written at a point when the Wehrmacht met disaster at Stalingrad in 1943.

    One of the first things I noticed was, again, the register or tone of the book. Especially considering when it was written, it is a miraculously peaceful work. None of the posturing that appeared in Introduction to Metaphysics is on display in this book.

    Bambach does not refer to this work as it was only published in English for the first time in 2018. So a period of fifteen years separates the publication of his 2003 book and this second posthumous work.

    My focus here is Heidegger’s beautiful meditation on a god so synonymous with Heraclitus, who is of course Artemis, goddess of the hunt.

    Heidegger refers to fragment number 51 which he translates as, ‘The jointure (namely, the self differentiating) unfolds drawing – back, as shows itself in the image of the bow and lyre.’

    This meditation is taken from the first section of the book, whose title is The Inception of Occidental Thinking. This point is important to underline as it forms a continuum with Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).

    Heidegger sets out in the former work the six ways to inceptual thinking (1. Preview, 2. Echo, 3. Playing Forth, 4. Leap, 5. Grounding and finally 6. The Last God.). He rejects all causality in place of what he defines as inceptual Greek thinking. In other words, pre-Platonic.

    Nietzsche had already made this distinction in his lectures from Basel in the 1870s,[13] so Heidegger was following his former master in many respects. For Heidegger, the elegance of this fragment, contrasting the bow and the lyre, is emblematic of all of Heraclitus’s essential doctrine of unity in opposites.

    Drawing on the laws of attraction, Heidegger uses the terms ‘submerging’ and ‘emerging’ to remarkable effect. He draws out the subtlety of Heraclitus’s thought in his own very particular way through the idea of unconcealment, which for Heidegger is the essence of authentic Greek thinking before Plato.

    At that point truth was emerging from the abiding sway of Be-ing and could only be perceived in the clearing of the mind momentarily, before being obscured again. There is something profoundly sensual about Heidegger’s engagement with the Artemis fragment, and it is a testament to the translators who have managed to capture the wonderful poetry of the meditation throughout the entire work.

    Therefore, she roams, as the huntress, the entirety of what we call ‘nature’. We certainly must not think about the essence of ‘tension’ in modern dynamical and quantitative terms, but rather as the lightened apartness of an expanse that is, at the same time, held together. In emerging, emerging receives the self-concealing in itself, because it can emerge as emerging only out of self-concealing: it draws back into this. [14]

    Again, as in Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ), in Hercalitus, Heidegger departs from the twentieth century and all of its woes – its abandonment of Dasein Be-ing – in order to return to historic thought.

    Image Daniel Idini (c)

    The Turn

    Such is ‘the Turn’ – at least what has become known as ‘the Turn’ – in his thinking. When Heidegger abandoned not only Nazi ideology, at least in the thinking expressed in these books, but also Western metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche. The results are simply extraordinary.

    This is why I feel compelled, living in a world that seems to have abandoned all sense, to critique writers like Charles Bambach, who focus myopically on the very negative elements in Heidegger’s work, but which seems to me much more a part of the man, the lesser part, as distinct from the essential work.

    [1] Bambach, Charles: Heidegger’s Roots – Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Cornell University Press, London, 2003.

    [2] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions from Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999.

    [3] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus – The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, Translated by Julia Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018.

    [4] Heidegger, Martin: Introduction to Metaphysics, New Translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press, 2000.

    [5] Bambach, Charles: Heidegger’s Roots; Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Cornell University Press, 2003, p.70.

    [6] The German TV miniseries Generation War ( Unsere Mütter, unsere Vätter ) has one of the leading characters mention the possibility of attending a lecture by Heidegger when he gets his leave and he can return to Germany from the Eastern Front. Once can only imagine the very powerful feelings generated in the minds of young Germans who were exposed to such very powerful and interesting ideas, yet which were put to the service of National Socialism.

    [7] In a marginal note of Letter on Humanism, the Editor F.-W. von Hermann notes, that Heidegger wrote the following; “enowning” has been since 1936 the guiding word of my thinking’.

    Heidegger, Martin: Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ) – p.364.

    [8] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions From Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p.86.

    [9] Fest, Joachim C.: Hitler, Penguin, Classic Biography, Penguin Books, London, p.500.

    [10] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions From Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 87.

    [11] Ibid, p.86

    [12] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus, Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p.115.

    [13] Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Translated from the German and Edited, with an Introduction and Commentary, by Greg Whitlock, University of Illinois Press, First Paperback Edition, 2006.

    [14] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus, Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p.116.

    Feature Image: German POWs at Stalingrad

  • Poetry – Elliot Moriarty

    Nicholas of Bari

    Another night fifth in a row
    unsettled but unfrozen
    thinking I get it I get it
    (I don’t, but I have skin and nerves):

    Whatever sustains someone doing what you do,
    I mean never mind the privations! that unseen hand,
    Shoulder cupped, steering towards the leper colony –
    the Big Bewk saints, the Seenitalls, Tell-you-what-I’d
    do-if-I-were-yous…
    (enthusiasts who sleep one to a room
    and who if we just roll up that sleeve
    for a couple hundred spare months)
    yes that too. If we just….

    And you break away and plod on
    As they foretell your grit will kill you.

    Well this too, a mile away: Perpetual Motion!
    Wind or tide or compressed chipboard or wherever they’re
    frisbeeing the tax breaks this current? cycle?
    into laps of pals slash creditors ABCing
    a redesigned polity, where battery tech –
    Sorry – Nology – excuseme, will…
    (impilmentated across the economy)
    Will save…

    The child in the lithium mine, fingers
    deformed, the first knuckle gone.
    Overheads, always overheads.
    But we’ll outsource to Europa
    when the talent pool is Exhausted.

    Which will take a while yet.

    Half a mile away:

    Our Vegan Monday grinners,
    Off setting off in the fake jeep,
    Eerie silence til the gas kicks in
    Over Charlemont bridge, arc of
    Our hero stolidly crossing,
    Dashboard screams, driver jolts,
    keels, (rest of car buried in phones)
    “Watch where YOU’RE going!” he starts
    To shout
    As the eyes turn
    the whole corpus twists
    toward him and through him –
    an air-conditioner chill then gone,
    no trace in the rear-view.
    He tells himself he dodged, but…
    This has been happening
    More often lately. Overtired, that’s all.
    Newstalk. And an early night tonight.

    They sleep eight hours.
    Belatedly, worry entered their guts
    once they had genetic skin in the game, but
    Ours will be fine: Business Cantonese, crypto,
    Young Scientist, fun size beers (better
    they’re in the house than eff-knows-where) and
    The Talk About…
    They sleep nine hours.
    A theatrical yawn.
    Back to the salt mine, conference call.

    I get it in the sense that I wouldn’t either,
    I think you’re right, and if I had your honed instincts
    and scalpel humour—
    But on days such as this, fifth and counting
    Surely a den of thieving fuckers is better
    than another wet gutter screaming match
    with a fifteen hour night?
    Husband your fuel and your wits. Arm yourself
    with a rock or a crunched up can
    in your goto pocket. Breathe out, finish anything you’ve left,
    stride towards the LED light.

    Don’t be late, they’ll lock you out to die.

    “you’ve made your point
    you holy few
    you’ve made your point!”

    Jesus Christ, like.

    I mean Jesus Christ, they’d fling you in
    the Liffey stamp “buried at sea” on the docket—
    Quickly – pick three: Psychiatric History, Known to Gardaí,
    Mintil Hilth™, Engagement Izzyous – which is why –
    Refusal, Reluctance, the cracks –  and again this is
    Again why – yet another – yet
    Another No Fixed Address – sponge, waste, nosh Abel
    for…For?
    Well, whether the brown liar was once his thing,
    He wasn’t using: he wins. He haunts at his pleasure.

    Remember that as ever decimating rootless scum
    was an inexpensive way to impress upon sit-in
    students down a year of Law, sneering at
    the empty Jay One cancellation threat: –
    “Australia America Canada New Zealand,
    we will see them all while you’re here minding
    Your handicapped kids, you inbred bogscum” but
    but what if – surely a contingent?:

    Cracks invisible under carpeted floors,
    The weight of Relying On You, son,
    And such a long way down.
    “We know you’ll get your act together.
    Perhaps you’re just overthinking, your—”
    Fogged vocation? or, The base fear:
    marooned and slowly draining amid the dying
    amongst the dying in between the bonesunk husks,
    our holy dying knackers dying at midday without a fuss,
    town on a weekday, going peaceful after years howling
    into their mobiles their streets those trams,
    dying for no reason, dying without ever even
    presuming to arrogate a version of what same
    Artsblock Stephen Heroes claim’s birthright
    to lose, yet perhaps too they’re just
    dying for a lungful of a dreamt cracked Rome:

    nicotine and subway vents and rumour.
    Harlem, The Bowery, The Hands That.

    Twenty years later the bootlace daredevils’
    Conspicuous Return: Lo! It Can Be Done Son, says
    the cute one, a quiet deal on a struggling licence
    (add strip lighting, carvery, Guinness mid-strentt’)
    While the others…

    Vanished Camden or Rockaway or Justfuckedoff,
    never left the tower no matter how far they fled
    from the ripped places those ripped up were next sent,
    those banished home staring at the wall of unsaid,
    sleepless over decisions unmade, failed
    stabs at intercession with mute smiling friends
    that went early on,

    back when the junk suddenly dropped from the sky
    like manna – sufficient for each day

    turns out most people don’t want to die,
    so explain it to me again.

    *Concurrent to the events depicted in noted docu-drama Rambo III, western cities were flooded with cheap Afghan heroin. Dublin – largely unfamiliar with opiates –came out of it badly.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

     

     

  • Palestine – To Exist is to Resist

    I have just returned from Hebron in the West Bank, a city where nearly sixty Palestinians have been extra-judicially executed by Israeli forces since the end of September 2015.

    On my last stint in Hebron, West Bank, while doing check point duty one morning one of my team mates overheard two very small children chatting:

    One said: ‘Will we throw some stones?’ To which the other child replied: ‘No, it’s the first day back at school.’

    That is how normal the fight for freedom from military occupation has become for Palestinian children, even if they are under age ten.

    We saw four small children, aged about ten, throwing stones at Qitoun checkpoint at 7.15 am, like 4 mice attacking an elephant. The response from the Israeli soldiers was to put on their gas masks, adjust their weapons and attack the children with sound bombs and canisters of tear gas.

    This new tear gas used by the Israeli forces pierces your eyes so badly you cannot open them. It scrapes across your throat so that you cough and cough. And all of this ensures that you cannot run away from it because you cannot see where you are going, and, even if you could see, you cannot breathe to move. Ten tear gas canisters landed in playgrounds of schools that morning. A little boy aged about four, with a Smurfs school bag on his back, and protected by his seven-year-old brother coughed and choked considerably longer than the other children. He was innocent, and the victim of the collective punishment that is systematically meted out to Palestinians by the Israeli state.

    That evening I arrived in Jaffa, Tel Aviv for a few days break, still coughing badly from the tear gas, and an Israeli man in a shop tells me that Israelis have had ‘enough’!

    And I’m thinking – you have no idea what ‘enough’ really means.

    ‘Enough’ is when you lock up seven hundred Palestinian children a year, from aged twelve to eighteen; when you arbitrarily arrest many of them at night from their beds.

    I have seen many children detained and arrested. The strongest memory I have is of one little boy, who looked about eleven, being detained. His little dark eyes locked hard on to my eyes. We looked at each other for a long time, he fearfully, pleading with hope in his eyes, and me with desperation and helplessness.

    ‘Enough’ is when you handcuff and blindfold children and abuse them while they lie on the floor of the military jeep, while you take them to prison. ‘Enough’ is when you ensure they will not see their parents until the day of military court, which can be four to eight days later.

    ‘Enough’ is when you beat them and put them in solitary confinement, you threaten that their family members will be arrested or that their home will be demolished or that you will sexually abuse them, if they do not confess. You force them to sign a confession in Hebrew, a language they do not understand, and this forms the basis on which the majority of Palestinian children are convicted in children’s court

    ‘Enough’ is when you ensure those children from twelve-years-of-age will not see a lawyer until a few minutes before their court case. You accuse the majority of throwing stones and you convict them in over 99% of cases with only 0.02% having a full evidentiary trial.

    ‘Enough’ is when you see that these children are brought into the military court in lines of four with chains on their feet joining them together.  I have heard the sounds of those chains clanking – twelve-year-olds with legs inn shackles in case they might escape from the fourth largest army in the world.

    The little child’s sad eyes pierce through the distraught eyes of their parents who have to sit in the back row of the military court, and who are not allowed to touch or hug their little ones. The public conversation that usually takes place between child and parent consists of: ‘Are you ok? Have you enough to eat?’; while he responds: ‘Are you all ok at home? What did the soldiers do after I left?’’

    And then the case is over in two minutes – cut and paste – same as all the other cases. Then the children are taken back to jail with their leg shackles clanking.

    ‘Enough’ is when you see from your child’s eyes that he has now completely lost his childhood.

    And none of this happens with Israeli settler children who are living in illegal settlements in the centre of Hebron.

    And you expect you will beat Palestinians into submission? Have you no idea that you are creating a university of learners who will react?

    This is life under Israeli military occupation in Hebron, West Bank. Enough.

    The Seanad and Dail recently passed the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018. 

    Despite the fact that it was passed by a 75 to 45 vote majority, and that all opposition parties voted for it in the Dail and in the Seanad, Fine Gael voted against this Bill and it is understood they will use the ‘Money Message’ procedure to block it.

    This is a little used procedure that Fine Gael have employed to block a number of Private Member’s Bills in the last months. This is undemocratic and a blatant political action to support Israel in its breach of International Law.  This move is in line with the non-recognition of the State of Palestine by Official Ireland, even though the elected members of the Dail and the Seanad voted unanimously to recognise the state of Palestine in 2014.

    Gerry O’Sullivan in Palestine with children.

    Gerry delivers Certified Professional Mediation Training that is accredited by the Mediators’ Institute of Ireland. She has delivered conflict and mediation training internationally with U.S. based Lawyers Without Borders, in partnership with the Director of Training from CEDR, U.K., and she is also an externally employed trainer with CEDR U.K. Gerry is a member of the Mediators Beyond Borders Consultants Team. She is a panel member with One Resolve and delivers mediation training under their auspices. Gerry was involved in the development of the Level 8 Certificate in Mediation training programme in the Law Faculty of Griffith College and she was invited to be the senior lecturer in that programme. She also delivered mediation training for the University of Limerick’s, “Masters in Peace and Development” programme. Gerry has written ‘The Mediator’s Toolkit: Formulating and Asking Questions for Successful Outcomes’, and it is published by New Society Publishing, Canada.

  • Musician of the Month – Bartholomew Ryan of The Loafing Heroes

    ‘Descend the stairs, bend your legs, melting one by one. / Open your mouth to the snake in the sand, swallowing you one by one.’ So begins the first single from our latest album. It’s one of my treasured moments in the meandering Loafing Heroes journey: in how it came about, how it was constructed, the unfolding of its words and arrangement, and how it sounds on the record.

    “Stairs” sums up much of what I dream about with this music, its vision and where I’m at – then and now. Because, really, however much I say this is the end of a project, or that it is the beginning of a new one; we are really, always, in a way, wrenched into the middle of things, into the middle of life.

    Feeling heartbroken at the end of a relationship, trying to come to terms with the death of a loved one, suddenly hearing by accident a special song from a moment in your life, or catching a smell that brings you somewhere, smothering you with longing, nostalgia, a great sadness or joy – these all throw me into the middle of things, into the middle of life.

    We are suddenly tuning in again – or rather – we may feel that we are spectacularly out of tune with the regular speed of day-to-day, calculative life, and in tune for a moment with another world that is alarmingly alive.

    Months can go by when no new song emerges, as an energy once bubbling over deserts you, and you think, well, that’s the end of that. Or, perhaps you say that I must find a way to begin again, do something new. And then it comes.

    Sometimes all it takes is to hear someone speak, watch a concert, see someone dance, or travel in the countryside away from the chatter of the city. In my case, the intervention came in the form of a visiting friend called Jonathan.

    Along the great river

    After a lifetime thinking about it, I had been travelling along the great river Amazon for almost 3000km, listening to the mesmerizing cacophony, seeing the green, green, green of all the jungle, and following the trail of an extraordinary human called Roger Casement. After making it back to Europe, I went straight on a tour with the band to Ireland for two weeks, and then finally returned to my apartment in Lisbon.

    I just wanted to be alone for a few days after being in such close quarters with people on the road. But Jonathan was staying at my place and he was still there. He was full of beans and delighted to see me, and yet he could quickly see that I was a little moody and withdrawn.

    But that wouldn’t stop him. He knew that I hadn’t written a song in at least six months. So that evening, we forced ourselves to play a game. He offered me three words – ‘hair’, ‘software’ and ‘snake’; a chord to begin; and thirty minutes to come up with something. That’s how the song ‘Stairs’ came about.

    I was thrown into the middle of things – I found myself diving, drowning and then submerged in the interlude, and suddenly I was singing about my hair being on fire and my skin turning to water. It was exhilarating, liberating, revealing. For me, that is what making music is all about. And if you can connect that creation and performance with someone else – then it really is alive.

    Jaime McGill of The Loafing Heroes Image © Sebastian Urzendowsky.

    Beginnings, endings, interludes

    I began The Loafing Heroes back when I was living in Denmark doing a Phd on Kierkegaard, where I met a wandering soul called Jamie from Arizona. We started making music together and recording the first Loafing Heroes songs.

    Four years later, I was living in Berlin pursuing a career as a philosophy lecturer wondering where to go next with the music. The spirit of The Loafing Heroes is that it morphs with the people that have come in and out over the years. This allows diverse flavours and colours to emerge and fade away along the trail.

    We recorded three albums in Berlin: Unterwegs (2009), Chula (2010) and Planets (2011). With Jonathan – yes the same one (from Berlin), another Jaime (this one from Nebraska), and Noni (from Dublin).

    My dear friend and gifted songwriter Michael Hall whom we all affectionately called Big Bear produced the first album (Unterwegs) and was present throughout the album. He died tragically in 2013, yet his ghost continues to haunt and inspire us.

    After four years, we all found ourselves going in different directions. I headed down to Lisbon to begin a research project on the enchanting poet of multiplicity – Fernando Pessoa; Jonathan formed another band called Fenster that have gone on to record some really special experimental pop music; Noni set off to work on solar energy in Rwanda; while Jaime remained for the time being in Berlin, but would remain committed and connected to The Loafing Heroes. She plays the bass clarinet – one of the trademark sounds of the band over the last ten years – and has recorded on all of our six albums.

    The three other albums were recorded while based in Lisbon (Crossing the Threshold [2014], The Baron in the Trees [2016] and Meandertales [2019]). I met Portuguese novelist João Tordo on my first night in the city, and he became a new loafing hero, and played double bass on the two albums before Meandertales.

    I glimpsed Judith with a violin on her back one night at The Lisbon Players Theatre, and soon she was playing with us too. From Germany, Judith actually makes her own violins and violas, and has played on all three of the last albums.

    Judith Retzlik of the Loafing Heroes, Image © Emiliano Perillo.

    Other musicians and friends have weaved in and out, but before Judith left Lisbon to return to Germany she introduced me to Giulia with a plan for her to join. From Italy, Giulia is now at the centre of the band, playing autoharp, piano, percussion, concertina, and singing and writing songs on the last two albums.

    To complete this crooked cosmopolitan tale, four of our albums have been produced and mixed by our very talented, generous comrade and friend from Greece – Tadklimp.

    Giulia Gallina of the Loafing Heroes. Image © Lucia Borro

    Chaosmos

    Many of the songs have evolved from various strange places; on the one hand, from travelling through vast expansive landscapes; and, on the other, hiding away in dark melancholy, verging on paralysis, in the interiors of a room that can sometimes seem like a shrinking capsule.

    Loafing is always essential in an age of increasing speed, technological overload, psychological detachment and environmental collapse – as we humans exhaust everything under the sun.

    Let’s slow down. Let’s wander. Let’s see and think anew, and laugh. Let’s channel and imbibe energy not into potency, possibility and power; but rather as actual, as here and now, in everything that exists. Energy as a passive ‘is’.

    These twelve new songs (constructed by Giulia, Judith, Jaime and I), from our new album under the title Meandertales, encompass the distorted fairytale and dream-folk that throw us into the middle of life. In the totality and disintegration of chaosmos, in this loafing musical endeavor, I work and play to transform my energetic pessimism into a subversive joy.

    Forthcoming Shows
    Friday, 12th of April: Clonskeagh Castle, Dublin, Ireland.
    Saturday, 13th of April, Bello Bar, Dublin, Ireland. (IRISH ALBUM LAUNCH)
    Sunday, 14th of April, Pot Duggans, Ennistymon, Co. Clare, Ireland.
    Tuesday, 16th of April, Tech Amergin, Waterville, Co. Kerry, Ireland.
    Friday, 19th of April,MUSICBOX, Lisbon, Portugal. (PORTUGUESE ALBUM LAUNCH)    ,

    Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research coordinator at the New University of Lisbon (http://www.ifilnova.pt/pages/bartholomew-ryan) and leader of the international band The Loafing Heroes (http://www.theloafingheroes.com)

    Feature Image: Otwin Biernat

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.