Dublin was the second city of the British Empire until end of the eighteenth century. After the Act of Union of 1801, however, many prosperous land owners departed the city and, indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century Belfast’s population was greater.
The former did, however, retain a residual aristocracy who formed the clientele for the few restaurants that emerged towards the century’s end; albeit, the absence, of a significant bourgeois class over the course of the twentieth century meant there was little demand for restaurants for those on middling incomes.
It was perhaps unfortunate for Irish gastronomy to have been colonised by the English who Voltaire described as being a nation of forty-two religions but only two sauces. Besides, Ireland was a poor country by European standards in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. The Great Famine was among the most devastating of its kind in human history. Culinary celebration was muted.
Nonetheless, numerous French chefs had already emigrated to Ireland to work in aristocratic households and gentlemen’s clubs by the time the first recognisable restaurant emerged in Dublin in 1861. The Café du Paris on Lincoln Place was intriguingly linked to a Turkish baths on the same premises. They advertised both dinners ‘a la carte and table d’hote; choicest wines and liqueurs of all kinds, [and] Ices.’
Jammet’s
Any history of Dublin restaurants lingers on the legendary Jammet’s which was founded by two brothers from the Pyrenne,s Michel and Francois Jammet in 1901. They purchased the Burlington Restaurant and Oyster Saloon on Andrew’s Street in 1901 and renamed it Jammet’s. Michel had been chef to the lord lieutenant so knew all about what appealed to the aristocracy whose descendents continued to patronise the establishment until its demise in 1967.
In 1908 Francois Jammet returned to Paris leaving his brother in sole charge until 1927 when he handed the reigns to his Belvedere educated son Louis. By that time it had moved to Nassau Street to the site of the Porterhouse Central.
One observer from the 1940s describes the interior of the restaurant: ‘the main dining room was pure French second Empire, with a lovely faded patina to the furniture, snow white linens, well cut crystal, monogrammed porcelain, gourmet sized silver-plated cutlery and gleaming decanters.’ It was the hangout for artists and the literary set such as W.B. Yeats, Michael MacLiommar and Dudley Edwards as well as wealthy professionals and men of commerce.
The family first lived in Queen’s Park, Monkstown but moved to the sixteenth century Kill Abbey in the 1940s where vegetables were grown for the restaurant. A 1928 article in Vogue describes Jammet’s as ‘one of Europe’s best restaurants … crowded with gourmets and wits, where the sole and the grouse was divine.’
It was during the years of the Second World War that Jammet’s really came into its own as the location for the ‘finest French cooking between the fall of France and the liberation of Paris.’ Like other Irish restaurants, Jammet’s managed to evade restrictive rationing and serve customers the fare they were accustomed to. According to one observer ‘American servicemen, cigar-chomping and in full uniform, were streaming across the neutral border to sample the fabulous food in the prodigious quantities available here.’
Red Bank
If Jammet’s was the location for Allied excess another long-established restaurant the Red Bank was the place of Axis intrigue. On April 22 1939 the German colony in Ireland celebrated the birthday of Adolf Hitler there. The Irish Times records: ‘A large portrait of Herr Hitler occupied special position in the special decorations. On either side of it were swastikas and every guest wore a swastika or Nazi party badges.’
Disturbingly in May 1940 as the Nazis Blitzkrieged through Europe, the ‘Irish Friends of Germany’ (aka the National Club) held a meeting in the restaurant that was attended by fifty people. George Griffin, veteran anti-Semite and ex Blueshirt, spoke on the subject of the ‘The Jewish Stranglehold on Ireland’. Griffin mentioned many Jews by name and went onto advocate that … we should never pass a Jew on the street without openly insulting him’.
The Blueshirts salute their leader Eoin O’Duffy.
The Unicorn
But Jewish émigrés were themselves involved in the restaurant trade and could dish out their own retribution. It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold but for Austrian Jews Erwin and Lisl Strunz from Vienna it could be salty too.
They escaped from Vienna in 1938 and purchased a premises on Merrion Row which they called the Unicorn. They bought it for a song as Irish people thought the premises was haunted after W.B. Yeats had supposedly conducted séances there.
Lisl would cook her mainly Austrian dishes while Erwin entertained at the front of house. He reminisced ‘during Christmas 1940 when all the lights had gone out over Europe I played my guitar in the restaurant and sang Christmas carols and folk songs in eight languages.
But not all comers were welcome. When Edouard Hempel and his acolytes from the German legation visited Erwin became apoplectic with rage. But he kept his wits about him and calmly took their orders. Before each plates was delivered he doused each one with enough salt to clear a frosty driveway. Hempel nearly choked and the whole table walked out and never returned.
After the war the Unicorn was sold to an Italian family the Sidoli’s and it brought exotic ingredients like pasta to its Dublin clientele. It also involved females chefs which was unusual for the male dominated profession in Dublin.
Another immigrant who came to Ireland to work in the restaurant trade was Zenon Geldof a Belgian citizen who set up a restaurant called Café Belge. His grandson Bob retained an ambition to feed the world.
Steeped in the haute cuisine tradition of Escoffier Jammet’s continued to prosper after the war when it was joined by other restaurants including The Russell.
Ireland’s first phD in the history of food, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire argues that on a per capita basis in the 1950s Ireland was the gastronomic capital of the British Isles. Although this may not have been that great an achievement as given the nadir that English food had reached by the 1950s. Elizabeth David wrote of her experience in one English restaurant of the time: ‘there was no excuse, none, for such unspeakably unpleasant meals as in that dining room were put in front of me. To my agonized homesickness for the sun and southern food was added an embattled rage that we should be asked – and should accept – the endurance of such cooking.’ Perhaps she should have visited Dublin.
The theme of ‘late art’ was recently explored by the art historian Carel Blotkamp in The End: Artists’ Late and Last Works(2019) focusing on the visual arts, but in an age nonspecific way.
Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’ is central to the argument of the book. After Raphael’s death, the author notes his body was laid out beneath the painting in his studio. Vasari tells us that ‘the sight of his dead body and this living painting filled the soul of everyone looking on with grief.’
Raphael died aged just over thirty years of age. Picasso in a much later blasphemous parody had Raphael fucking. More on Picasso and indeed fucking later. This is an article about The Rolling Stones after all.
More representative of late art in literary terms is Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus 1947, which was written when he was nearly eighty years of age, and was his second to last work. The last being Felix Krull, both of which were discussed in a previous article for Cassandra Voices. In these works his style loosens and is fresher than his earlier work. I attribute this revitalisation to his hatred of fascism and fakery.
Both of these books were written in old age when the light was dimming, which is remarkable. Great art arrived against the odds, with physical and presumably mental powers failing. Like Michelangelo finishing off the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel with the Last Judgment or even more so the late sculptures.
Picasso approaching ninety, as the aforementioned book references, famously started working faster and faster, painting in a sketch-like figurative way: parodies, exhumations of the western tradition such as by Valazquez Los Meninas; in contextual or parodic form; painting as ideas with the clock against him. He famously said in this respect: ‘I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say.’
Well, what a drag it is getting old.
heatfield with Crows — oil on canvas 101×50 cm Auvers june 1890.
More commonly…
But Mann and Picasso are uncommon. More commonly, artists repeat earlier tropes or descend into sentimentality, commercial opportunism or simply kitsch as they age. The late works of Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí fall into these categories. Opera Designs or endless recycled Kitsch is very evident in the Dali Museum in his hometown of Figures.
The phrase ‘late style’ is also relevant in this context and is, in fact, culled from Theodor Adorno’s 1937 essay on Beethoven. Adorno – and, more recently, Edward Said, whose own last book was on late style – both suggest in a distinct echo of Picassos observations that regularity, precision, and tidiness no longer matter when an artist is faced with death. The writing and painting become more scabrous, irreverent with a lightness and incompleteness but also harrowed.
One thinks above all else of the finest achievement in the history of art the late paintings of Rembrandt, where the artist is merciless in self-portrait particularly his damaged and aged eyes. Though the formal precision is, remarkably, retained. Another notable achievement is in the late work of Goya, his Black Paintings In particular. These are visceral images of human torture, misery, cannibalism, and insanity.
Adorno wrote that late art or style ‘does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are not round, but furrowed, even ravaged.’
Many great artists of course die young and without the necessary anticipation of doom. Egon Schiele tragically dies in the ‘Spanish’ Flu Pandemic of 1919-1920. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned after a boat accident. So, the suddenness of a departure does not affect the art for good or ill.
Van Gogh hadn’t reached the age of forty, when he died, but the Wheatfield with Crows is one of his greatest works, the crows above providing a doom-laden portent. In contrast, the truly writer of The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald was dead by forty-four having been dismissed as a burn out and a has been. He had felt compelled to hack for money, with the Pat Hobby stories. As he said there are no second acts in American life, although Donal Trump might disagree!
Some artists try and go out on top before retreating into isolation. Neither Harper Lee nor the reclusive J. D. Salinger published much after To Kill Mockingbird and The Catcher on the Rye.
We might tentatively say that generally the best work comes first or close to first, before decline sets in, often with coincident celebrity and accolades. The philosopherJürgen Habermasonce remarked that when they shower you with awards you know you are finished. Stressed vines make the best grapes by all accounts.
In this respect The Nobel Prize is often the kiss of death for creativity. Exceptions to that rule are of course Gabriel Marquez. He wrote as good if not a greater novel than One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) after the award with Love in The Time of Cholera (1985). And then there is the incomparable Samuel Beckett, about whom more later.
Kurosawa the great Japanese film director was effectively persecuted by the Japanese state by being snubbed at awards ceremony. Suicide attempt followed, and but for the intervention of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas he would not have gone on to produce a work as incandescently brilliant as Ran, his Samurai adaption of King Lear, which is one of the greatest films of all time that he completed at nearly eighty years of age.
Better to burn out…
In Rock music there is a discernible trend in late art achievements. Leonard Cohen’s late albums include Old Ideas (2012), which includes the sublime song, or poem, ‘Going Home’. And Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) is a continuous flow of genius.
But both Dylan and Cohen were geniuses and not a bunch of blues-thieving, decadent often priapic monsters with a not undeserved reputation for all sorts of destruction of many of those around them.
Giving them their begrudging due, the shows are of course truly spectacular, as anyone who had the privilege of witnessing them in Glastonbury would attest.
The youthful audience, and some bemused older curiosities, largely came to bury Caeser, or Satan, but Sir Michael will not be buried easily and strode on stage in red barbed devilish gown, 28-inch waste and barnstormed, not least with sympathy for the devil.
Well yes, a tour band par excellence re-threading their hits from the 60’s and early 70’s and producing nothing of note in over two decades of self-enrichment. Bigger and Bigger Bangs of the same thing. Outrageously reliving their satanic rebelliousness. Funding Keith Richards drugs, albeit no longer indulged in apparently, and Mr Jagger’s endless libido – growing old as disgracefully as possible. Aged eighty, he is married to a woman almost fifty years younger. The lucky sod.
But the artistic community could rest assured there would be nothing further. No further trouble.
And then it landed ‘Angry’, the opening song of their recent studio album, Hackney Diamonds, a better starter I think than ‘Start Me Up’ and a better song than ‘Shattered’. Propulsive not 1970’s but 60’s revitalised and pared down. And Mr J. certainly sounds angry.
And so, three well preserved and ostensibly vigorous elderly gentlemen in casual costume get in touch with their north London roots and step fearlessly into Hackney, which of course they never hailed from, to introduce a brilliantly named album Hackney Diamonds, with a glorious smash and grab cover.
By any reckoning it ought to have been a re-thread or a bombastic disaster. But is simply a great rock n’ roll album. In my view the best pure rock and roll album since The Clash’s London Calling with a not to dissimilar mining of styles. It even includes a punk song with Paul McCartney on bass, who seems like he was having a ball with the band he had recently described asa Blues cover band. But what a cover band!
Burst of Blues Energy
The bursts of blues energy with at most one longueur is sustained through its forty-five propulsive minutes. The best comparison in terms of form and antecedents is Exile on Main Street, with the odd ballad mitigating the relentless noise. There are many great or near great songs. There is a rose in Hackney and not just Spanish Harlem. OMG.
In ‘Sweet Smells of Heaven’ Jagger sounds as great as in ‘You Can’t Always Get Want’ and ‘Angie’. In short it is one of the greatest ever Rolling Stones songs. Whether it ranks in the top ten is a matter for debate. In my view very close to the absolute pantheon Sympathy For the Devil.
Notably Keith Richard’s is in flying form. I wonder is arthritis loosening his playing style?
Geoff Dyer has recently published a book called The Last Days of Roger Federer and it is not intrinsically about Federer though he was also an artist but is about the dying light augmenting the enormity of the achievement.
Sir Michael who prompted the album to stir the wild beasts from their slumber now suggest they are three quarters way through a new album. A sense of enormous anticipation should now prevail. One hopes though it is not a set of discards and out takes.
Hackney Diamonds would be an incomparable way to put a full stop, but what if the next album is even better? After all, The Beatles in their pomp followed Revolver with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but that is now almost fifty years ago. Let us be clear Hackney Diamonds is the greatest stones album in forty years.
They have ascended the charts in Britain and the USA In a way unprecedented since their heyday. And methinks Mr Richards will not be thinking about the money. One senses that old rubber lips thinks the best is yet to come and will force them back into the studios. No pressure then lads.
The anthropologist Jack Goody pours scorn on modern dining habits. Solitary consumption he says reverses the customary habit of ‘public input and private output’, making eating alone ‘the equivalent of shitting publicly.’
Dining, after all, as the great gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, put it: ‘is the common bond which unites the nations of the world in reciprocal exchanges of objects serving for daily consumption.’
The restaurant emerged as a distinctive forum for public consumption in eighteenth century France. Prior to that it was the simple table d’hôte, where a traiteur would present a large pot to the assembled diners, who arrived at the appointed hour.
This could present difficulties, however, if agreed conventions were lacking on how diners were to participate. On his travels in France, the agronomist Arthur Young bemoaned the greed of his dining companions in hostelries, saying, ‘the ducks were swept clean so quickly that I moved from the table without half a dinner’. In the wake of the French Revolution, an upwardly mobile bourgeoisie sought a more recherché experience.
Originally, restaurants (deriving from the verb restaurer ‘to restore to a former state’) sold medicinal broths. In her history, The Invention of the Restaurant (2000), Rebecca Spang recalls how the restaurants of eighteenth-century Paris differentiated themselves from other eateries by offering sustenance at any time of day. Eventually they began offering more solid fare, thereby encroaching on the traiteurs.
The strict laws regulating the division of business between the different food guilds in France at the time led to a landmark court case in which the restaurateurs carried the day. This allowed the restaurant-style of dining, ‘characterized not by commonwealth but by compartmentalization’, to emerge as the dominant form of eating out in the Western world.
Fine Dining,
Elitist Quality
Today, restaurants invariably ‘plate’ each dish before presentation to the individual customer a style known as service à la russe, which replaced the more medieval display of service à la Francaise during the mid-nineteenth century.
The elitist quality of the restaurant experience is part of its appeal. Indeed, according to Sprang, the ‘restaurant fantasy implicitly required the presence of somebody outside: some poor devil with his nose pressed to the window’.
Thus, a restaurant is more than merely an establishment where food is served. It involves the division of diners into parties and, generally, serves separate portions to individuals. It remains synonymous with French food, and the dominance of French cuisine is apparent in the early history of Dublin restaurants, although this has changed radically in recent decades.
Apart from chefs, waiting staff and often indulgent investors, the most important person for a restaurant’s survival is the food critic. A bad review can sink a restaurant, while praise can bring customers flooding into the next big thing, although in recent times food criticism is being overtaken by online reviewers that are subject to manipulation.
Grimod de La Reynière
The First Gastronome
A food critic may also be referred to as a gastronome. The first of this kind was Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière who wrote his Almanach des Gourmands in the wake of the Revolution.
He issued his pronouncements in the name of tradition as a member of the departed ancien regime. The son of a rich farmer-general, in his early life he displayed liberal tendencies but became disillusioned with the new order, condemning ‘everything that is despicable and vile; there in two words you have the Revolution’.
He asserts: ‘I will never be the friend of a democrat. It is atrocious that men of letters should think as the majority do today (MacDonogh,1997).’
According to his biographer MacDonogh, he began to write about food after being told to write about something harmless, or give up writing altogether. In this medium he ‘masked his vicious attacks behind harmless idioms’. Gastronomy became a vehicle for his reactionary views.
An awareness of ‘good’ food revealed the true aristocrat. After the Revolution he founded what he referred to as a Jury des Degustateurs, and between 1803 and 1812 set about writing his Almanach des Gourmands. The aristocratic display of pre-Revolutionary France could re-emerge in the new forum of the public restaurant.
De la Reynière was also alive to the possibility that he could be labelled a glutton, asserting: ‘Let it be said that of all the Deadly Sins that mankind may commit the fifth appears to be the one that least troubles his conscience and causes him the least remorse.’ Henceforth a glutton would be one who eats too much rather than a refined individual with an interest in talking about food.
The gastronome in his or her most evolved form is not a professional cook. He or she is a man of letters. His or her real table is not the one where he eats but where he or she writes. It is with the flourish of the pen that he or she achieves success rather than through their knowledge of the arcane culinary arts, as ultimately the gastronome is not the one who knows the most, but the one who speaks, and writes, best.
Garden café of the Hôtel Ritz Paris (1904), Pierre-Georges Jeanniot.
‘Lightning Sketches on the Table Cloth’
Curnonsky, the pen name of the great French food critic Maurice Edmond Sailland who was elected Prince Elect of Gastronomy by Le Soir magazine in 1927 describes the role as follows:
There are those who stare with gluttonous resentment, and those who snap impatient fingers at every passing waiter: those who flap huge newspapers in their companions’ faces, and those who shake defiant powder-puffs in their neighbours soup; those who devour bread to repletion, and those who chat so gaily, to the restaurant at large. But there are others, a chosen few who, having developed to a fine degree the study of physiognomy and, coupling this with a skilled pen or pencil, combine their talents in lightning sketches on the tablecloth.
Pascal Ory poses the question ‘Does the chef make the gastronome or vice versa?’. Culinary evolution is largely independent of gastronomic evaluation, but without a critical audience chefs may be insensitive to diners’ tastes.
Moreover, just as when we cook for ourselves we don’t tend to perform heroics, a cook without a responsive audience might take a more functional approach. But innovation and high standards become an imperative when the food critic is there to evaluate.
Even if they may claim to have nothing but contempt for the breed, virtuoso chefs usually seek the validation of critical approval, and boundaries are only broken when gastronomes are there to describe them as such. More to the point, the imprimatur of the critic brings great rewards. Perhaps unfairly, the pen is often mightier than the kitchen knife.
Notwithstanding increasing costs in a fraught business, the back breaking labour of chefing, improved takeaways, the strains of Covid and the distortion of food criticism through sites like TripAdvisor, restaurant dining endures as a sought after experience. After all, where else would anyone refer to me as “Sir”.
It coincides with the hundredth anniversary of Druid’s production of O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: ‘The Plough and The Stars’, ‘Juno and the Paycock’ and ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ which opened recently at the Galway Arts’ Festivaland will tour Belfast before coming to The Abbey in September. But, with the publication of Timothy Murtagh’s new book Spectral Mansions on how the once graciously lofty Henrietta Street turned into tenements adding to the mountain of scholarship about Dublin tenement life, O’Casey’s plays, are, on that basis alone, destined for immortality.
As enduring testimonies of the unflinching reality of Dublin tenement life, no playwright evokes and captures the life of Dublin’s tenements as does O’Casey and that is the central theme of this tour-de-force of scholarship.
Sean O’Casey was born in 1880 into a lower middle class Protestant family – the youngest of eight children – and was raised in Lower Dorset Street, where the family enjoyed a relatively comfortable lower middle-class life until after his father’s death in 1886. His father had been employed in the Irish Church Mission and his older brothers attended the Central Model School in Marlboro Street for which a small fee was required.
In reduced circumstances after his father death, and when O’Casey was nine, the family moved to the East Wall – a hot bed of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) and the ITGWU. His entire oeuvre dramatizes with unflinching realism and lack of sentimentality the grim realities of tenement life in Dublin, infusing his characters with compassion and humanity.
By the 1930s, Dublin’s tenements were among the worst slums in Europe with a very high mortality rate, rampant prostitution and disease reflected in ‘The Plough and The Stars’ in the character Mossler Gogan dying of TB and the prostitute Rosie Redmond. Indeed, according to O’Brien ‘[i]n 1914 it was believed that tenement dwellers had a better chance of survival on the Western Front than in the diseased-ridden hovels of Dublin.’ Thus, O’Casey became ‘a life-long activist for the preferment of dwellers of tenements, reflecting their lives with scrupulous realism and compassion, their humanity always shone through as did their heroism and their promise.’
Henrietta Street, Dublin.
Excruciating Detail
Paul O’Brien biography on O’Casey charts with intense and excruciating detail the development of O’Casey’s politics and how those politics fused and informed his writings, especially his dramatic works. In that sense, O’Brien’s book takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach to O’Casey’s life.
While O’Casey’s older brothers attended the model school in Marlboro Street, Sean, a delicate child was largely home schooled, self-taught and, for a time, taught by his older sister, a teacher. Later, O’Casey was immersed in all the key political movements of his time, the ICA, the Gaelic League, the GAA and was a big admirer of, and influenced by, Parnell.
He mastered Irish, hence the change in his birth name from John to Sean and he studied the Classics. From early in his life, he was interested in the national movement but it was the emergent labour movement, gaining momentum under his life-long hero, James Larkin that really gripped him and the entire dynamic of his subsequent political and writing life revolved around his failure to find a synthesis between Irish Republicanism and the international struggle of the working classes.
In other words he never could accommodated the ‘green’ of Nationalism with the ‘red’ of Labour and this unreconciled tension remained the central dilemma of his entire life and, in exploring it in minute intensity, Paul O’Brien uncloaks it as both the triumph and tragedy of O’Casey’s life too. While Paul O’Brien clearly admires his subject, he is candid about the unjustified personal animosity of O’Casey towards James Connolly. O’Brien does not shirk from revealing any of O’Casey’s flaws in judgement and personality, while never losing sight of his overall genius.
Imbrications between the cause of the working classes in Dublin and accelerating nationalism were unavoidable after Parnell and were so fused as to often be indistinguishable; the overlaps were everywhere, not least in the Irish Citizen Army (ICS) of which O’Casey was a member until he finally severed all ties in 1914. He also derided the Irish Volunteers which emerged in the South, in parallel with the formation of the Ulster Volunteers in response to the Home Rule Bill of 1912.
James Larkin.
James Larkin
James Larkin arrived in Dublin in 1907 and inspired O’Casey to use ‘words as weapons against exploiters of the Dublin poor.’ O’Casey first gave vent to his rage in Larkin’s paper The Irish Worker. Later, in his biographies, O’Casey lacerated the corruption of Dublin Corporation.
From an early age, O’Casey’s love of literature was manifest. The hope that Irish life would be transformed died with the early and tragic death of Parnell in October 1891. In the aftermath, the prospect of peaceful evolution along the lines of Dominion Status enjoyed by Canada and Australia receded.
O’Casey saw Larkin as the greatest Irishman since Parnell. ‘The Plough and The Stars’, O’Casey’s most controversial play premiered in the Abbey in 1926 and was well received on its first night. But on the second night, a combination of 1916 widows and Republicans escalated into full blown riots with added moral consternation at the prostitute Rosie Redmond awaiting clients and the un-named figure in the window, identifiably Patrick Pearse extolling the sanctity of bloodshed.
The first two acts of the play are set in 1915 looking forward to the liberation of Ireland, but the second two acts are set during the 1916 Easter Rising.
In the evolution of his political ideals, O’Casey had a number of influences aside from Parnell; the writings of James Fintan Lalor (1809-1849) and John Mitchell (1915-1875) influence him. The 1913 Lockout in Dublin was a watershed moment for O’Casey.
Parnell had provided a vision for Ireland with no conflict between the Protestant religion and the principles of freedom which had a democratic and libertarian pulse, rooted in Constitutionalism. But contemporary conditions would sweep O’Casey away from family and Protestant traditions.
A Dublin Tram conductor and an Abbey actor introduced him to rawer politics. This, combined with the ICA and the ITGWU provided different currents on O’Casey’s development. In terms of his literary work, Dion Boucicault remained a strong influence in how he used songs and comedy to lighten the tragedy of his own writings. (O’Casey wrote many, long forgotten, ballads) While Boucicault’s plays are traditional melodramas there is also a ‘political ambivalence that challenges the stereotypical image of the stage Irishman; ‘Arrah-Na-Pogue’ and ‘Peep O’Day’ are about the 1798 rebellion. Boucicault created a more trustworthy image of the Irish, replacing the racial stereotype in English literature which was finally killed off by George Bernard Shaw in Larry Doyle in ‘John Bull’s Other Ireland.’ O’Casey draws on the techniques of Boucicault, Shakespeare’s history plays and on Shaw to create a unique synthesis of his own. O’Brien argues that O’Casey’s conclusions are ‘open-ended.’
Dion Boucicault.
The Boer War
Defining nationhood was intensified by anti-British sentiments after the Boer War, the centenary celebrations of 1798 and the Jubilee celebrations in 1889.
O’Casey imbibed the sentiments of the Gaelic League like many other Protestants. The plough and the stars was the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, and O’Brien identifies O’Casey’s problem was to ‘hitch the plough to the stars.’
He joined the Gaelic league in 1901 and took up hurling. He became an apprentice bricklayer and worked for a number of years on the Great Northern Railway Line. In 1908, he became secretary to the Drumcondra branch of the Gaelic League and spent ten years promoting Irish language and culture but increasingly he saw the chief enemy as the crushing force of capitalism, and, as he matured, he rejected romantic nationalism.
James Connolly was able to unite nationalism and socialism, but O’Casey could never fuse them into a cohesive theory remaining haunted by the voice of the urban poor. O’Casey resigned from the IRB in 1913 when they refused to take the workers’ side in the Great Lockout.
He ditched the Gaelic League for Larkin and the momentum behind Larkin radical labour movement became the driving force for his plays. This transition is reflected in his earlier plays The Harvest Festival, The Stars Turn Red and Red Roses For Me which deal with the labour history of the 1913-1914 Lockout. After the failure of the Great Lockout O’Casey’s views were crystallised into the view that the ‘struggle was not one of English Imperialism versus Irish Republicanism but between international capitalism and the workers of the world’ and this is reflected uncompromisingly in his plays.
In 1914, Larkin went to America to organise the international workers of the world and was jailed for criminal anarchy. The Ulster Covenant saw 4,000 Ulster volunteers sign up and the respondent Irish Volunteers were despised by O’Casey who saw it as dominated by ‘overfed aristocrats’.
He clashed with Tom Kettle and Pearse and wrongly accused them of not supporting workers. In 1914, along with Larkin, he drafted a new constitution for the ICA but the problems of aligning the red of Labour with the green of nationalism persisted for O’Casey.
Countess Constance Markiewicz.
‘a spluttering Catherine Wheel of irresponsibility.’
When Connolly expressed his vision for the re-conquest of Ireland in a pamphlet in 1915, O’Casey saw it as Connolly lowering the red flag in favour of the green and made a sudden and final split with the ICA. The Countess Markievicz joined the Irish Volunteers and the ICA.
O’Casey was intensely hostile to her ‘hauteur’: ‘she whirled into a meeting and whirled out again a spluttering Catherine Wheel of irresponsibility.’ His motion, however, to expel her from the ICA failed. According to O’Brien ‘he rushed headlong into one dispute after another, damaging himself and alienating his friends.’
O’Casey published a book on the ICA in 1919 but, according to O’Brien it lacks balance and is saturated with vitriol and opinions. His core argument was that nationalism gained and labour lost as a result of the ICA’s involvement with 1916. ‘O’Casey was alone is seeing Irish history from a working-class perspective when, after 1916, The Labour movement was subsumed into the struggle for independence.’
When Connolly joined the Volunteers in 1916 it completed the fusion with the ICA. 220 members of the ICA rose on Easter Monday 1916, but 1,200 Irish Volunteers did. As O’Brien points out, Connolly had little choice but to fight on nationalist terms in 1916.
Connolly had grasped the importance of a united front where O’Casey failed. O’Casey never acknowledged Connolly’s attempts to unite Labour and Nationalism but in later years he did acknowledge Connolly’s standing in the Labour movement but ‘he never lost an opportunity to denigrate Connolly in favour of Larkin.’
O’Casey became ‘a disgruntled outside, a hurler on the ditch, shouting the odds as history passed him by.’ Many critics put O’Casey’s vitriol against 1916 in ‘The Plough and the Stars’ down to ‘survivor’s guilt.’ The summary execution of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, a socialist and passivist abhorred him. He felt successful revolution on nationalist terms only empowered the new Irish ruling classes – the very people who had reduced the Dublin poor to abject poverty.
O’Casey was in sympathy with the views of Ernie O’Malley who resented the legendary status that emerged in the aftermath of the 1916 martyrs as they were twisted and idealised by a new state to consolidate its position. O’Brien argues that ultimately O’Casey neither deified or vilified the 1916 heroes but rather projected the realities of the new Free State that emerged, and, in that, he saw it as advancing commerce over the plight of the poor.
In ‘The Plough and The Stars’ he ‘inverted the nationalist myth … and summoned his characters from the margins of history and placed them in the spotlight.’
‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ was influenced by Ernie O’Malley’s views in the character of Davoren, an opportunistic carpetbagger who capitalised in the new Free State which the play mocks. The rhetoric of romantic nationalism is ridiculed and critiqued.
In all of O’Casey’s plays his characters are overwhelmed by events outside of their control. Unlike ‘The Dublin Trilogy’ his plays ‘The Cooing of the Doves’ and ‘Kathleen Listens In’ supports the pro-treaty side. Kathleen also counters the glorification of dead heroes and martyrdom.
Bertolt Brecht.
Influenced by Brecht
‘Juno and the Paycock’ (Abbey 1924) fuses tragedy and comedy: Captain Boyle, a figure broken by poverty and drink is still a sympathetic character. The life of the tenements is always pitched against the life outside and many saw the play as a condemnation of all war.
Juno too has been seen as an attack on the Republican movement. The character Juno is Brecht’s Mother Courage of Dublin with her strength and humanity. O’Casey was influenced by Brecht, Ibsen and other experimental dramatist. In common with Shaw and Joyce, he despised the cult of Cathleen Ni Houlihan as symbol of Ireland. In a feminist twist, Juno does leave her abusive husband and goes off to make a new life with her unwed pregnant daughter.
O’Casey moved to London in 1926 to receive the Hawthornden prize and produce the London production of Juno. He met and fell in love with actress Eileen Carey and he married her and the couple moved to Devon where they went on to have three children.
Yeats refused to produce The Silver Tassie at the Abbey in 1928 causing an irrevocable breach between the Abbey and its most successful playwright. When Juno opened in London O’Casey was a minor celebrity and controversially hobnobbed with a succession of high society grandees, especially with Lord and Lady Londonderry, even spending a week at their residence, Mount Stewart, on the Ards Peninsula in 1934.
They were the direct descendants of Lord Castlereagh, ruthless executioner of the United Irishmen in 1798. He rubbed shoulders with figures as controversial as Oswald Mosely. On the other hand, his Communist activities led him to clashes with George Orwell who, in 1949 supplied O’Casey’s name as part of a secret list of about a hundred writers, artists and intellectuals who should not become ‘cheerleaders in Britian’s fight against communism’ to British intelligence (see issue 3, History Ireland, Autumn 1998).
O’Casey’s was unable to deal objectively with the Stalinist pogroms and took the Russian side against Hungary in the uprising of 1956. For all his human lapses, O’Casey emerges largely as mostly being on the right side of history and was an ardent supporter of Noel Browne. His later plays too were polemics against Nazism and Fascism. He was bitterly disappointed by the failures of his expressionist plays, ‘The Silver Tassie’ and ‘Within the Gates’.
Dublin, 1916.
An Exhaustive Feat
Paul O’Brien’s book, with some occasional unavoidable repetition is an exhaustive feat of research and scholarship that should become an indispensable handbook to all aficionados, practitioners, academics and teachers of Irish drama. In addition to existing scholarship, O’Brien opens a new window of insight into O’Casey’s passion, commitment and motivations while never eschewing his human flaws.
This is also an indispensable history of the development of the Irish labour and nationalist movements and their fraught and intricate interface in the aftermath of Parnell and into the early twentieth century; through The Easter Rising, The War of Independence, The Civil War and its aftermath.
As a writer, O’Casey developed his own unique style and never failed to move with the modernism of Ibsen, the Expressionism of Ernst Toller – the German anti-Nazi playwright – Brecht and Shaw who were early influences. He disliked pessimistic theatre but made an exception with Beckett. Paul O’Brien makes a compelling case that O’Casey’s expressionist and modernist plays are overlooked. His book certainly inspires a fresh look at O’Casey overall oeuvre.
With ‘The Dublin Trilogy’ currently enjoying a successful run as part of the decade of centenaries his place in the pantheon of Irish dramatists seems assured, and, as the history of Dublin tenement life continues to burgeon, his plays are set to endure as visceral, dramatic slices of that life. Perhaps the most astute accolade O’Brien accords O’Casey is to observe that; ‘he was one of the most sensual writers of his era’ where ‘sexual love is always presented as positive, joyful and life affirming’ and that was the common humanity that placed the characters of Dublin’s tenements on a par, as O’Brien suggests, with ‘Maud Gonne, the Countess and their aristocratic circle.’
Paul O’Brien richly deserves the accolade of O’Casey’s biographer, Dr Christopher Murray, Emeritus Professor of Drama at UCD who greeted, ‘An extraordinary achievement bringing O’Casey centre-stage again with supreme skill. Bravo!’
Sean O’Casey Political Activist and Writer by Paul O’Brien is published by Cork University Press in hardback at €49. It is 297 pages with a Foreword by Shivaun O’Casey. There are an additional 100 pages of notes, bibliography and index.
Feature Image: Study of Seán O’Casey by Dublin artist Reginald Gray, for The New York Times (1966)
Julian Lloyd’s iconic portrait of Nick Drake now forms part of the U.K.’s National Portrait Gallery’s photographic collection. Lloyd’s friendship with the archetypal singer-songwriter, who died, tragically, aged just twenty-six in 1974, permits a rare intimacy between photographer and an elusive subject.
In some photos Drake looks to be at peace with himself and his surroundings, but in others of the doomed troubadour – featuring in Lloyd’s new exhibition running in the Horse Gallery, Dublin 1, from July 6th to July 17th – we find a less playful figure, with Drake brooding beneath a heavy coat on a Welsh beach, inhaling urgently.
Lloyd says Drake was “a nice, easy going, companionable man, very private, but not particularly buttoned-up. Obviously he became ill – a cruel mental illness which locked him up and made him miserable. Nick was just one of the gang, but obviously he had a talent.” The budding artist, who only achieved posthumous fame, was “happy to play in front of a few of us in a room. Never anything boastful or show-offy about him.”
Lloyd claims that it was “pure luck and happenstance” that brought him into the same social circles as figures such as Drake, and later, after he moved to Ireland – to work with horses – musicians such as Ronnie Wood and Dolores O’Riordan, along with actors such as John Hurt.
Despite many of his subjects being celebrity figures, there is a lightness to the work. You really get the impression that Julian Lloyd was simply a photographer among friends.
Crystallising Memories
Julian Lloyd clearly possesses a keen eye for the poignancy of a fleeting moment in time, crystallising memories, whether at a carefree party or even outside a funeral, which is the hallmark of great photography, and art more broadly. Choosing when to take out the camera and start shooting is a fraught exercise, as a subject may recoil or put on a false persona before the lens. Lloyd seems to have a knack of timing this to perfection.
Lloyd is not in the least bit precious about his photography, confiding that on occasion he is not averse to having a few drinks at a party, and allowing auto-focus to prevent any mishaps. Nor does he feel threatened by the ubiquity of smart phone photography, recalling the insight of the American photographer David LaChapelle, who put it to an audience that while everybody in the world has access to pen and paper, few writers attain the level of Shakespeare.
He also dismisses the idea that photographers conform to a particular personality type, recalling meeting with “ebullient, chatty, noisy photographers, and also furtive ones, who creep around in corners.” His own work has been in “fits and starts”. He was pretty broke for periods, and had no camera to work with after a theft for some time.
Hippie Trail
Apart from the glamour of his rock ‘n’ roll and aristocratic subjects, we also find an abiding love for Ireland in the collection, especially the characters he encountered along the way, such as the parking attendant at the Cliffs of Moher who sold tin whistles on the side.
After leaving school he first plied his photographic trade for a local newspaper in Northumberland near the English-Scottish border, where ships would occasionally pull in undetonated World War II mines for him to photograph.
He then moved to ‘Swinging Sixties’ London, where he secured a job in a photographic studio, and met his future wife Victoria, whose sister was going out with Eric Clapton at the time. George Harrison was also on the scene.
There reached a point, however, when, like other hippie idealists, he wanted to move to the country. Back then “people would set off in barrel topped wagons.” He and Victoria followed suit, found one for themselves and purchased a mare to take it from Swindon to Somerset.
This proved a life-changing experience. Despite no family or other background with horses, he grew fond of the mare and “the whole relationship with horses.” Later he found a job with a horse dealer, learning the business “from the ground up.”
Lloyd’s unusual hippie trail eventually brought him to Ireland. This was he says “a very vivid experience.” He and Victoria found “a very different culture living in Ireland than it was in Britain. It was very, very attractive.”
In 1975 he came to work for Tim Rogers in Lucan in county Dublin, who had, he says “the best stallion operation in Europe at the time.” It would be over forty-five years before he finally returned to the U.K.. He has recently moved to live in Shropshire near the Welsh border, where Victoria’s family is from.
He recalls a friend, Sean Doyle saying to him that “to succeed in life you must have an unfair advantage.” But unlike the relatively easy world around his photography, Lloyd enjoyed no unfair advantage when it came to horses, making it “very, very difficult.” It was a seven day a week job, to which he “gave it everything” and possessed “the zeal of the convert”. Nonetheless, he spent “plenty of years skint” during a time when it was “very, very hard to make a living.” If photography was a playful mistress, the breeding and raising of horses was a demanding master.
Lloyd describes Ireland as “a safe haven” – away from a prying media – for many of the English musicians and other artists who took up residence here from the 1970s. Some like Marian Faithfull found a more receptive audience for their work.
Julian Lloyd’s photography captures that carefree world, which existed, unimpeded, alongside surviving remnants of a peasant society, which also features in his work. It was perhaps to his great advantage that he did not depend on photography for an income, but could instead indulge a passion in intimate settings, where he could blend in seamlessly with the crowd.
In the essential Boomer text, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance one of the chief ideas was the difficulty of defining what we mean by “quality”. Almost everyone knows what quality is and can easily spot the presence or lack of it in something. But the word itself, the concept, the thing of it, is difficult to describe. So, in the absence of a clear definition, the presence of quality can become a claim by a person selling a thing which, their patter maintains, possesses the elusive attribute.
So even though everyone knows what quality is, it is possible, with a good enough story, to convince someone that something which may not actually possess quality, does possess quality. The key is the story. With a good enough story, anything is anything. You can even sow doubt in a person’s mind, making them believe that they actually lack the ability to discern quality, but that luckily, you are there to help them; for a small fee.
The old story of the emperor’s new clothes is an illustration of what happens when a lie reaches critical mass to leave an entire herd deluded. If everyone claims to be able to discern the quality of the invisible garment, it takes balls to go against the herd, and, herds being what they are, the balls to differ is rare. So, an attribute which is difficult to define, leaves wriggle room for the unscrupulous and the potential danger of delusion for the naïve. You can almost hear Arthur Daly or Dell Boy spin it, “Look at that! That’s quali’y that is.”
Value
This is where Mariana Mazzucato starts out from in her book on economics, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. In Mazzucato’s thesis the word “value” is in many ways a synonym for “quality”, and she shows how some clever-clever salespeople have sold a pup to the entire world with a fancy story that somehow has the effect of equating value with price: if a thing is expensive it must be good, right? “Look at that! Now that’s quali’y.”
Mazzucato shows how this simple con has allowed the Arthur Dalys of big finance to enrich themselves and their friends by extracting value from goods created by the wider working community. They do this primarily by blurring the distinction between value creation and value extraction. This is the Making and Taking aspect of the book.
We see it all the time in the arts. Irish musicians and actors will be more than familiar with the publican who asks them to work for nothing because, unlike him, they “enjoy” their work. Therefore, so his thinking goes, that is reward enough and the publican can extract the economic value from the skills of the artistes. The story the publican spins in this transaction is the implicit suggestion that the arts are actually worthless.
Mariana Mazzucato 2016.
The Con
Everyone can see the con when it’s that glaring, but in the wider world of high finance it’s all a bit faster and meaner: worker’s wages stagnate while shareholders extract fat bonuses. Energy company shareholders holiday in the sun while families decide between food and heat. Mazzucato’s book is a reveal of the stories and patter and understandings used and exploited by corporations and swallowed by the public and by governments, that results in wealth being sucked to the top while wages stagnate and inequality increases.
Mazzucato’s goal is to unmask the tawdry yarns of modern capitalism’s snake-oil salesmen who profess to be the high priests of identifying value: the bankers and corporations essentially claiming welfare in the form of tax breaks while creaming from the top of community-created wealth to transfer to their shareholders, all with the connivance of a bought-out political class, many of whom are corporate shareholders themselves. She writes:
“If the assumption that value is in the eye of the beholder is not questioned, some activities will be deemed to be value creating and others will not, simply because someone – usually someone with a vested interest – says so, perhaps more eloquently than others… If bankers, estate agents and bookmakers claim to create value rather than extract it, mainstream economics offers no basis on which to challenge them, even though the public might view their claims with scepticism.”
Side Street in Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon.
Fake Stories
Derelict American cities are a living example of wealth extraction, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake while the top 1% live the high life. It is in untangling these stories, these modern myths of economics, that Mazzucato hopes to bring clarity in the necessary project to somehow reimagine capitalism, so that it works once more for the benefit of all, creating a thriving world rather than a dying one.
At the centre of this entanglement of fake stories, spun by the elite like so many spider-webs, she shows that what is afoot is nothing more than a cheap con being perpetrated by groups of people with stories so shoddy that as soon as you see the move and the angle you can’t unsee it. Theirs is a strategy that depends essentially on the manipulation of one human weakness: convincing people that they are solely to blame for their own condition. Not the system. But their own character defects.
And people buy it, every time. It’s not unlike the original sin the church used to so successfully sell. In the end, they claim, it’s all your own fault. So, while the poor sit self-tortured in self-flagellation for their own condition, which is almost always an outcome of social and economic inequality, the sales shaman steals away with the pensions and anything else he can manage to capture.
Quality
Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance spent a book trying to get a grasp on the meaning of the term “quality”, an attribute whose presence or absence is clear to everyone. That was the mystery he was trying to pin down. How is it everyone knows when something has quality but can’t quite describe it?
In the same way, you don’t need a PhD in economics to see that the attribute of quality is severely lacking in today’s capitalism. You have only to look at the manner in which business is being conducted that it is delivering neither quality nor value, just endless bonuses to a select few and endless grinding poverty to the many, no matter how hard they might work.
Marianna Mazzucato has unmasked the shoddy yarn driving this fountain-pen theft of communal wealth, in a book so timely and revealing that it simultaneously exudes the twin attributes of quality and value while providing much-needed insights into the vexing question: why is capitalism only really working for a select few? The answer is simple: the herd has been deluded by clever economic patter: “That’s quali’y, tha’ is.”
Inspired by Michel Houllebecq’s novel Atomised (1998), Ben Pantrey considers the endurance of the Christian idea of the apocalypse in contemporary debates. Note: This article contains plot spoilers for Atomised!
Atomic Particles
Last week, I was in the magazine office, where I picked up a copy of Michel Houllebecq’s book Interventions 2020, which is a collection of short essays. I was instantly struck by the humour, the choice of topics, and the easy-to-read-but-thoughtful analysis of contemporary society. I was shocked.
“I thought Houllebecq’s books were all about whining about women and immigrants.” I said to the magazine editor.
“No, of course not. He’s a great writer.” he replied.
A few days later, I started reading Atomised.
That book is also extremely readable. In fact it’s the most engaging book I’ve read by a living author. His description of modern life, and the meaningless existence elevated to an ideal in our society, is right on point. The situations he depicts are funny, grotesque, or just plain depressing, but he never wallows. There is a good balance between ideas and plot.
Miniatur Wunderland.
Miniatur Wunderland
More than anything, I was struck by how Houellebeca’s vision matched an idea that had been pressing upon me for some time. In January 2020, I visited Hamburg, and went to an exhibition called the ‘Miniatur Wunderland’.
It was a building with floor upon floor of model railways in different settings: famous cities, woodlands, desserts, mountains and so on. A miniature model of Hamburg itself was there, with its red light street, the Reeperbahn, where model women posed in red-lit windows, and model men with beer bellies gathered.
Although constructed from wood, acrylic, steel and plaster, this world was a moving world. Trains and trams shuttled to and fro, aeroplanes took off, and ambulances raced through intersections with their blue lights flashing. I was amazed by the amount of detail that went into this work. They were like Brueghel paintings, with little stories and humorous incidents everywhere you looked: a man falling off a ladder; a love affair; a protest.
It didn’t happen immediately, but as the years passed, the vision of life suggested by the Miniatur Wunderland wormed its way into my thinking. Standing in the street, I would start wondering how it would look if I was staring down from the sky. How would I perceive the world if I had nothing at stake? If all I was bringing to bear on it was my own curiosity?
The downside of comparing the world to a model is that it makes everything seem flat and mechanistic. It denies the one real truth of life – subjectivity – and puts in its place a deterministic universe, full of cause-and-effect situations and atoms endlessly shuttling to and fro. There is no space for inner truth, no space for change. Only matter in a void. A big round ball of Being.
But, since the age of Lucretius this has been exactly the view underpinning the development of scientific thought, and worked out in capitalist economics. Atomistic, materialistic, deterministic. One apple is equivalent to another. Through the medium of money, the variety and uniqueness of physical reality is squashed into a flat virtuality.
One day Banzan was walking through a market. He overheard a customer say to the butcher, “Give me the best piece of meat you have.” “Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You cannot find any piece of meat that is not the best.” At these words, Banzan was enlightened. (Zen Koan)
The notion of a commodity with a fixed price (your used copy of a book is worth the same as another person’s used copy of a book in the same condition) ignores the sentimental value of an object.
‘Sentimental value’, by which we deem everything that belongs to the domain of actual lived and meaningful experience, is excluded from the reckonings of the marketplace. All the worse, then, that our entire society has become a marketplace, where individuals compete for status: monetary, cultural and sexual. It is this last arena that most fascinates Houellebecq.
Miniatur Wunderland.
Love is an anomaly…
In Atomised, Houellebecq satirises the dominant ideological model of society, exposing it as spiritually barren, dominated by selfishness, exploitation and ruthless competition in every sphere of life. Love is an anomaly, and quickly snuffed out in a cold world.
The novel loosely follows the story of two brothers: Michel and Bruno. Their parents are divorced, and they grew up with very different childhoods.
Michel was fascinated by the natural world, and in his adolescence met by chance with a beautiful girl who loved him in an almost spiritual way, but was met by coldness on his side.
Bruno, meanwhile, was bullied mercilessly, had no success with girls, and cared more for literature.
In their adult life, their paths diverge widely. Michel has no desire for life, he drifts onwards, pulled only by his own curiosity to understand the world scientifically. He ignores romantic opportunities, and eventually commits suicide after putting his scientific insights down on paper.
Bruno, meanwhile, is a sex addict. He pursues sex relentlessly, seeking a validation that no experience can ever provide. No matter the sexual pleasure, or how many orgies he participates in or taboos he breaks, he cannot develop a sense of wholeness. He is always frustrated. This frustration is expressed in his misogynistic and racist articles that nobody wants to publish.
There isn’t a plot, per se. The main interest lies in the various hijinks Bruno gets up to, and in the bits of social commentary Houellebecq the narrator includes along the way. When describing the protagonists’ father attending school, for examples, the narrator says:
“Martin’s teacher was keenly aware that there was more to his job than spoon-feeding elementary facts and figures to every untrained citizen. His task was to seek out the qualities that allowed a child to join the elite…” (p. 18)
Here, Houellebecq is able to bring social critique into his narrative quite effectively, posing provocative interpretations of the role of schooling to the reader. In general, novels act as great mediums for this. The all-knowing tone typical of a novel’s narration, and the fact that they are consumed in private, allows for a direct, and didactic engagement with the minds of readers. The length allows the author to present a totalising view of life all in one go, unlike an article that can only sketch at a perspective.
Miniatur Wunderland.
New Age Society
The most damning portrayal of contemporary society arrives in a part of the novel where Bruno attends a festival-cum-self-help-weekend. Houellebecq’s description of the activities at this event could be seen as a a damning assessment of New Age Society as a whole:
“All around him human beings were living, breathing, striving for pleasure or trying to develop their personal potential. On every floor, human beings were improving, or trying to improve, their social, sexual or professional skills or find their place within the cosmos.” (p. 100)
Obviously, Houellebecq is not impressed.
The prime example of Houllebecq’s critique of this self-help 60s-influenced culture is in Michel and Bruno’s mother, who abandons her children in favour of an endless quest of self-discovery and spiritual development.
Atomised is a bitter and satirical portrait of the modern world where only isolated instances of illogical love redeem a landscape that is otherwise cold, selfish, brutal and crude. Death haunts every moment, with the decaying of our bodies, the shocking cruelties of fate, and our obsession with sex: the one means of delaying the extinction of the species.
It’s definitely a cynical point of view that Houellebecq promotes, but it’s hard to argue against, and really isn’t so different to that expressed in such popular fiction as The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins, 2008). Here, too, society is depicted as a ruthless arena of competition. A zero-sum game where those in the lower rungs of society desperately vie to join the elite in a viciously enforced hierarchy.
Miniatur Wunderland.
Sci-fi Twist
The final pages of Atomised turns the book on its head, adding an unexpected sci-fi twist. Michel, who has spent his life devoid of romance, devises a way to allow humans to propagate without the need for sex.
It will all be done in a lab from now on, as with Dolly the sheep, and this lab-based reproduction will allow for genetic modification to create healthier humans that won’t develop crippling conditions like cancer, dementia, cystic fibrosis etc.
In hindsight, our age of sexual competition, desperate consumerism, and widespread anxiety and paranoia seem rather laughable and superficial. Everything will be settled in peace by a race of sexless, immortal post-humans.
What do we make of the idea that we are at the cusp of a vast historical shift? The start of a new Millennium, paired with vast strides in technological innovation, certainly put this idea in many people’s minds. This apocalyptic notion manifested first as a fear of the Y2K bug – that computers worldwide would crash at the start of the new Millennium due to dating difficulties, wreaking havoc in the world of finance, medicine and transport.
Next, there was murmuring over the date 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar, after the Western calendar had ceased to be a problem. This, of course, passed without a hitch. Now we project our apocalyptic fears onto the climate, or on advancements in AI.
Terence McKenna introduced the doomsday date of 2012 into mass culture. He was vague about what exactly would happen, but believed it would be something new and unexpected. His listeners, high on the drug of Christianity, took this to mean apocalypse.
Shows like Charlie Brooker’s ‘Black Mirror’ explore the idea of human minds being uploaded into virtual reality when our bodies expire, where we can live in an Eden of our own construction. Is this what Christians meant when they thought of history as a long journey starting and ending in paradise?
Michel Houellebecq in 2008.
Edenic State
The paradisal state of Eden is that of ignorance: paradise was lost once humanity became self-conscious. In our hedonistic pursuits, I wonder, do we strive for that same unselfconsciousness we have lost?
It is clear that we see our faculty of reason as something of a curse, even if it does bring us closer to the state of angels. Gnostics lament that nature didn’t bring us one step closer: let us keep our psyche, but free ourselves from the physical body. Let us be like angels!
With this context, we see how Western science has really been a gnostic dream, with the destruction of physical reality (ecological collapse) and the ascension to pure spirit (cyberspace) its logical goal. We haven’t reached this impasse by accident, but by design.
Only by recognising and consciously rejecting the gnostic message can we take control of our situation. That involves acceptance of the body, and a rebellion against the tyranny of the mind.
Am I calling for a plunge into the irrational? After the horrors of the twentieth century, Western man has an understandable fear of the irrational. But remember it was distorted Reason that led to the horrors propagated under Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.
No ‘primitive’ society could have arranged the Holocaust. No, this horror was the dark face of civilisation and a perverse ‘rationality‘. The ‘greater good’: the cold inhumanity of reason. This is what comes of rejecting emotion and feeling, of being out of touch with the messages of the body, our one tangible link with Nature.
Although we call ourselves a secular society, Christianity still lurks in the shadows of our thinking. Take, for instance, the apocalyptic tone that inevitably attends discussions around climate change or Artificial Intelligence. World leaders packed two by two in Bezos’s Ark. A just reward for our sins. Mr Beast healing the sick. It’s all a bit hellfire and brimstone.
I’m not saying these areas won’t pose issues in the future, but I think it’s concerning that we always think in black and white: either it’s business as usual or it’s the apocalypse. This blindsides us from acting and reacting in the face of more subtle forms of change. This is, after all, the most likely result of our ecological challenge: the Earth will become slowly more inhospitable. Can we train our eyes on this without jumping to hyperbole?
This obsession with apocalypse is of course a remnant of Christianity. For Christians, history is linear and has a clear end point: the Day of Judgement, or the Return of Christ. Everything we do until then is fleeting, and only relevant insofar as it affects the judgement that will be meted out to us (unless you’re a Calvinist, in which case there is no relevance whatsoever to these happenings on Earth).
Christianity has the concept of an End of History built into it, in contrast to cultures that see time as cyclical, just like the seasons of a year or the passing of generations.
The end of history, or civilisation, does not mean the end of life on this planet, nor even human life necessarily. But it does mean the end of “progress” as we have previously considered it. Our buildings will not always grow taller. Our phones will not always become more sophisticated. Our food will not get more processed. Is that so bad? To live closer to the Earth and to one another?
For Houellebecq, the end of history means the end of sex as a means of reproduction. And this he considers a form of liberation. The Buddha would agree. He said all desire is suffering. Yet, there’s such a thing as enjoyable suffering. What kind of music would Houellebecq’s post-humans make?
Another day ends. Throughout the building, lights are flicked off. Conversations slow to a light murmuring, and then drop off completely. At what cost will we keep living in Wunderland?
In 1841 the population of county Leitrim stood at 155,297. By 1901, however, it had fallen to 69,343, dropping further to 41,209 by 1951, before reaching a nadir of just 25,057 in 1996. The 2022 census records a population of 35,087 – a significant increase, but still a staggering 77% reduction on the 1841 figure.
No other Irish county has experienced such a dramatic decrease over that period; although all witnessed varying levels of decline apart from two Northern counties, Dublin (which experienced a 289% increase) and its adjoining counties. The Western seaboard’s demographic pattern merits comparison with the impact of European colonisation on the native populations of the Americas.
The presence of both abandoned stone cottages and tumbledown bungalows bear witness to this long-running decline; these are nestled in a bewitching but ecologically scarred landscape of craggy mountains, gushing falls and still pristine lakes. Lough Allen, the source of the majestic Shannon, divides a mountainous north from the flatter lands of the south. A short stretch of coastline positions the county on the Wild Atlantic Way.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, according to CSO datathe vacancy rate for Leitrim in 2022 was 15.5%, down from 19.9% in 2016. Indeed, Leitrim has the highest rate of vacancy of any county in Ireland, followed closely by its neighbours Roscommon and Mayo. In contrast 5.5% of Dublin properties were vacant – still an unsatisfactorily proportion given there are currently (as of February 10, 2023) just under six hundred properties available rent for all of Dublin city and county listed on daft.ie.
There are various explanations for the stark population decline along the western seaboard since the Great Famine (1845-51), most obviously the Famine itself, but also a shift in agricultural priorities from tillage to pasture after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1847, which brought cheaper grain to the British market.
As John Mitchel wrote sarcastically for The Nation in 1847:
You may be surprised to hear of a country having, at one and the same time, a “surplus produce” and a “surplus population” – too much food for its people, and too many people for its food. Your surprise arises from ignorance of the great principles of political economy. All produce that can be spared for export is, in the technical language of that science, “surplus;” and all people who cannot get profitable employment are also “surplus.”
Pastoral agriculture depends on low labour inputs for profitability, meaning few children from any family could stay on the land. After independence, it became state policy to encourage beef and dairy exports. Since then, European subsidies have calcified an agricultural system that produces (as of 2020) just 61,800 tonnes of fruit and vegetablesfor the domestic market, compared to imports of 890,000 tonnes.
It is also notable that two railway lines serving Leitrim were dissolved in the 1950s: the Cavan and Leitrim Railway running between Dromod and Belturbet with a branch from Ballinamore to Arigna; and the Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties Railway, which ran between Enniskillen and Collooney near Sligo, taking in the north of the county, including Manorhamilton.
The Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant provides for a sum of up to €50,000 to refurbish a vacant property. It appears tailor-made for a significant proportion of the housing stock of Leitrim. As of February 7, 2023 there are 33 properties for sale under €100,000 in the county out of 197 according to the website daft.ie. Many appear suitable candidates for the Grant.
In line with national trends, property prices have been rising steadily in Leitrim, albeit from a low base. Research on daft.ie indicates a 13.8% increase in the average price of property in the county over the course of 2022, the second steepest increase for any county apart from Donegal. Such a figure could be skewed by a few expensive purchases, but is a good indicator nonetheless.
The prospect of purchasers receiving a Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant might lead vendors to apply a premium. Anyone availing of the Grant, meanwhile, must retain the property as a principal primary residence, and be a first-time buyer or qualify for the fresh start scheme.
After receiving the Grant, if you decide to sell up or rent the property out within ten years of a successful application local authorities will claw back the Grant. If it is less than ten years, you must repay it in full; over five years, but less than ten, you have to repay 75%.
Anyone availing of the Grant would want to be sure of their desire to live in a particular area, and of this fitting with their employment prospects. Moreover, the sum involved would hardly put a roof on many of the dilapidated properties dotted around the Irish countryside, given the current cost of building materials.
The Grant does not apply where an individual is living in the house after the purchase. One contributor to boards.ie, who claimed to be sleeping on a mattress in a house in need of significant refurbishment, said he was denied the Grant on this ground alone, which seems unfair.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the onerous terms and conditions, there has been little uptake. Last year, 765 applications were made for the Grant. 105 of these were approved while another 102 were rejected. The remaining 558 are still in progress.
One can understand a need for due diligence before pay outs are made. However, assuming the Department is insufficiently staffed to carry out numerous inspections, it is surprising to hear ads on the radio promoting the Grant. Perhaps this is simply to create the impression that a beleaguered Government is taking action on the hot topic of vacancy.
On January 30 2023, Minister Darragh O’Brien launched the Vacant Homes Action Plan 2023 – 2026. In its preamble the Minister sensibly stated that the ‘most efficient home to deliver is the one which already exists’.
One of its key objectives is to support the regeneration, repopulation and development of rural towns and villages to contribute to local and national economic recovery, and to enable people to live and work in a high quality environment.
There is, however, scant evidence that Government measures are encouraging people to settle in rural Ireland, in contrast to insatiable demand for Dublin property, where almost thirty percent of the population lives. In contrast, less than 15% of the UK population inhabits London, which is generally considered disproportionate.
The rather insipid planned actions include further budgeting for the Better Energy Homes Scheme; reference to the previously established Rural Regeneration and Development Fund; plans to harness European Regional Development Funding; and perhaps significantly a new programme for the Compulsory Purchase of vacant properties ‘for resale on the open market.’
Use of CPOs is the most obvious means of addressing vacancy, as well as bringing land into use for housing and other development projects. Historically, Irish Governments have evinced a reluctance to use CPOs to generate land for housing, notably the failure to act on the recommendations of the Kenny Report (1973) recommending that local authorities should be empowered to acquire undeveloped lands at existing use value plus 25% by adopting Designated Area Schemes.
Historically, the Courts have also generally weighed a constitutional right to property over what is, arguably, a concurrent constitutional right – flowing from a generalised Right to Life – for citizens to secure reasonable accommodation. Father Peter McVerry has pointed to a paradox whereby a constitutional right to property is ‘being used to prevent Irish people getting their own home.’
The Vacant Homes Action Plan is thin on ambition, merely stating that with ‘regard to compulsory purchases/acquisitions is being reviewed with a view to streamlining and consolidating the CPO process. This will arrive alongside a review of the Planning Act and the Law Reform Commission’s examination of the use of CPOs which is ongoing.’
Although the Plan states:
The Department in partnership with the Housing Agency will examine each local authority’s Derelict Sites Register with a view to identifying potential properties that could be brought back into use through compulsory acquisition. Local authorities will be requested to review these properties in the first instance with a view to engaging with owners.
And that
Under Action 19.9 of Housing for All, it was agreed that all Government Departments would examine their existing portfolio of properties and, subject to any obligations under the Public Spending Code, the Land Development Agency Act 2021 or the State Property Act 1954, would place them on the market if they were not required and may be suitable for residential housing.
Existing Schemes
The Plan also refers to the Ready to Build Scheme, which was launched in September, 2022:
Under the Scheme, local authorities will make serviced sites available in towns and villages at a discount on the market value, to individual purchasers for the building of their home which will be their principal private residence. It is intended that the local authority will develop existing sites in their control or purchase sites.
And to The Living City Initiative, a scheme of property tax incentives first enacted in the Finance Act 2013 and commenced on 5 May 2015 aimed at the regeneration of older heritage buildings in the historic inner cities of Cork, Dublin, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick and Waterford.
The Plan acknowledges that there been a low take-up of this initiative, but points to a number of measures included in the Finance Act, 2022 aimed at accelerating uptake.
The Vacant Homes Action Plan also says that in Budget 2023, ‘the introduction of a Vacant Homes Tax was announced. Legislation providing for the introduction of the new tax is included in the Finance Act 2022.’
It estimates that 57,206 (3.2%) of all Irish properties were indicated by their owners as being vacant. A property is considered vacant for the purposes of a forthcoming tax if it is in use as a dwelling for less than 30 days in a 12-month chargeable period. Owners of vacant properties are to be charged at a rate equal to three times the property’s base Local Property Tax liability for 2023, which will apply in addition to a property’s LPT charge.
This, however, will only apply in relation to vacant properties ‘that are habitable, and therefore suitable for occupation as a dwelling.’
The Plan also provides for important exemptions to ensure, as it puts it, ‘property owners are not unfairly charged for temporary vacancy arising from genuine reasons.’ These include recently sold properties, or those currently listed for sale or rent.
It would seem that simply by putting up a property on the market for sale or rent – at whatever price – the penalty may be avoided. We seem to be in the realm of performative politics again, rather than substantive action.
There appear to be two broad categories of vacancy in Ireland. An awareness of this distinction might inform policy and the law. The existence of designated rent pressure zones already distinguishes between regions of the country.
We may observe the first category occurring in mainly urban areas – rent pressure zones – especially Dublin and its hinterland where housing is in short supply. Here, a dominant player, or players, could collude by withdrawing accommodation from the market in order to maintain, or generate an increase in, rental income. This is especially insidious and severe penalties should be available to stamp out any suspicion of any such monopolistic practices.
A second category of vacancy arises in a rural county such as Leitrim which has experienced historic de-population, leading to the abandonment of many houses. Draconian penalties serve little purpose here. Instead, there should be greater incentives for renovation and refurbishment. Here at least, the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant should not be restricted to principal primary residences.
In the case of much of county Leitrim, even for people to live for a part of the year there would be a boon for retail and hospitality businesses, and could restore life to sleepy villages that have experienced emigration over many generations. For the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant to inhibit sales for a period of ten years seems prohibitively restrictive, and would likely deter many from availing of it.
It is in the public interest for the stock of quality housing to rise through the availability of such grants. A three year restriction seems sufficient.
A second, ‘holiday’, home would offer an opportunity for residents of built-up urban areas to undertake small scale agriculture on a part-time basis in summer retreats, as one still sees in Central and Eastern European countries where an apartment in the city is often complimented with a rural residence that includes a market garden. The availability of alternative garden space for the summer months might lead “empty-nesters” and retirees to downsize from houses into apartments.
A sparsely populated country like Ireland ought to have available a stock of affordable housing in low density rural locations for second homes, such as is the case in Scandinavian countries.
Game Changer?
Policy makers need to look beyond housing itself to encourage re-population of rural Ireland, while confronting car dependency. We require a radical improvement in public transport. Extending quiet ways on treacherous roads would also allow for safer cycling. E-bikes could be a game changer for rural Ireland, permitting extended journeys for older less physically fit people, while expending far less energy than even electric cars. Buses and trains need to offer free and secure carriage for bicycles.
Hopefully the Department of Housing is working in conjunction with the Department of Transport, following Eamon Ryan’s recent proposal for rail lines to be restored in the West, to identify areas suitable for development in rural Ireland.
Reversing the decline in Ireland’s rural population, especially along the western seaboard, requires joined-up thinking and innovative approaches. Cheap, modular housing might be considered for new housing arrangements that depart from the conventional idea of the family home in a changing society.
Co-operative agricultural enterprises, inspired by the tradition of the Clachan, offer the prospect of sociability and affordability, while potentially reducing greenhouse gas emissions and decreasing reliance on imported foodstuffs.
One way to address a seemingly intractable housing crisis concentrated in the city of Dublin is surely to make other parts of the country more attractive to live in, especially in an era of remote working.
There have been encouraging trends over recent decades along the Western seaboard, with renewed appreciation of resilient traditions and greater opportunities for adventure sports – but there is a hidden Ireland, generally at a remove from the coastline, that tends not to see benefits from tourism.
As we approach the bicentenary of the Great Famine novel approaches to life in Ireland ought to enter the mainstream. Government should act decisively and imaginatively to encourage more people to live in counties such as Leitrim.
Did you a struggle to understand and navigate your way through events surrounding our response to Covid-19 in Ireland? Did what at first appear to make sense, as a reasonable and decisive reaction to a dangerous virus, seem, over time, to become increasingly absurd?
Even cursory examination of the data shows large inconsistencies in our response, which at the very least warrants further investigation. The facts and primary data kept pointing to a counter-narrative, very much at odds with the official line relentlessly and consistently being pushed on us from the media and official sources.
From mask mandates, lockdowns, the media campaign against Ivermectin, mass vaccination and finally and most chillingly, the vaccination of children and pregnant women. Policies did not appear to stand up to even the most basic medical or scientific scrutiny. Yet few appeared to be questioning them. Apart from a few dissenters who were cast away as heretics, there was a complete absence in traditional Irish media, or the medical and scientific communities, of scrutiny or challenge.
So we now find ourselves, almost three years from the start of this unprecedented event, in a world that seems to want to move on, and forget what happened as fast as possible. There is little appetite for reflection, or any possiblity of individuals acknowledging mistakes and suggesting we will respond differently in future.
Indeed, in a recent interview on RTE’s Brendan O’Connor Show, when gently prodded by the presenter as to whether we might have been a bit stringent, Professor Luke O’Neill claimed ‘the only option we had at that time was to lockdown’ in March, 20202, otherwise ‘a lot of people could have died’. As this was on radio it was impossible to know whether he was saying it with a straight face, but he is surely aware that Sweden, despite refusing to lockdown, had one of the lowest death rates in Europe over the course of the pandemic.
Across the political spectrum, there is almost complete denial of errors and even less appetite to take responsibility for the long-term consequences of policies. Yet, as more and more facts emerge showing the fundamental flaws in our response to Covid 19, the larger questions that remains are: why did policies that were clearly not in the public’s best interest become government policy, and how did this come about?
Unless we understand why this happened the questions on how it was handled will be candles in the wind. Untethered to a motive it makes no sense. This requires an understanding of context and motive.
Mattias Desmet’s theory of Mass Formation offers an extraordinarily insight into both why and how this kind of event can happen. Desmet, a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, draws on his clinical experience of the behaviour of crowds and group think, as well as the work of others in the field, in particular Hannah Arendt.
Unsurprisingly, Mass Formation and its role in our response, did not occur as a result of Covid nor is it the first time in human history it has happened. The roots and causes have been emerging for many years with the growth in what Desmet describes as the mechanistic society.
Since the Industrial Revolution began in the late eighteenth century, the Western world has seen continuous improvements in wealth, living standards and health. No matter what the problem, there seems to have been a scientific solution or medicine to solve it.
However, we have become increasingly averse to risk and uncertainty as technology has solved problems and cured illnesses.
In parallel, the steady decline in organised religion and a spiritual dimension to our lives has left us increasingly adrift and rudderless. We have been left without a north star of substance, dependent on a mechanistic world to deliver food, entertainment and pleasure in never-ending supply.
In that mechanistic world there are no grey areas. There is either a solution or no solution. The application of the mechanistic model to social and philosophical questions has left no space for ambiguity. The nuances and complexity of life that our poets express is lost in a world where you are either right or wrong.
It is within this social milieu that Mass Formation can occur, but for it to take hold requires a number of specific conditions. Desmet outlines the first condition as generalised loneliness, social isolation and lack of social bonds in society.
The digitalised society we live in has given us immense connectedness with our fellow humans, from next door or the other side of the world, but the quality and texture of that connectedness does not compare to direct human-to-human contact, which we have been drawn away from.
That lack of connection to a religious or spiritual grounding has left people in a constant state of underlying anxiety. Desmet talks about the vibrations of a people and how this anxiety is a constant in their lives, as evidenced in the relentless increase in the use of antidepressants and anxiety medication.
The global market for antidepressants in 2020 grew from $11.7bn to $14.9bn representing a 28% increase in a single year. At a time when we have never had such abundance, we have never been more unhappy. The more we own and can do, seemingly, the more unhappy we have become. The connectedness, sense of purpose and spirituality we enjoyed, has been replaced with an ‘always on’ digitised anxiety.
Finally, there is the search for meaning in life. As our worldly needs and desires are met, we are confronted with a more fundamental question as to the meaning of our lives. The connectedness we had in the past, where we interacted with the people who manufactured a product or povided a service has almost completely disappeared. Most of us are now small cogs in the global supply chain. We are part of a mechanistic world, which seeks efficiency and productivity, but which leaves the human cogs feeling soulless and lost.
Image (c) Daniele Idini.
Suggestive Story
So how does Mass Formation emerge from this world? Desmet describes how the catalyst for Mass Formation can be a suggestion or story in the public sphere. With society so conditioned, any suggestive story causing anxiety and fear can be the ignition point. The process leads to psychological gain. The anxiety that roamed through society like a fog can attach itself to a specific cause. It is no longer free-flowing but has a cause to attach to and draw energy from.
As the level of fear increases, the cause developing it draws in the masses with a call to solidarity and collectivism. Those refusing to participate are accused of lacking solidarity and civic duty. “You don’t want to kill granny” was levelled against offenders as an unarguable fact that only the most callous would ignore. As the Formation deepens it no longer relies on facts or data. The masses believe the story, not because it is accurate, but because it creates a new social bond.
The strategy of dealing with the perceived object of anxiety creates ritualistic behaviours. The function of ritualistic behaviours is always to create group cohesion. They are symbolic and aimed at subjugating the individual to the group. The more absurd the ritual, the more power it has in forming group cohesion. We think of space markers in public parks, fences around concert goers and Ireland’s most renowned scientist appearing on prime time TV in a plastic bubble, as only some of the ridiculous ritualistic behaviours we were sucked into performing. Few questioned them: the more outrageous they were the more we adhered.
The psychology of crowds is well researched and to those that ask well ‘surely all the doctors and scientists can’t be wrong’ one can point to the well-known conformity experiment by Solomon Asch. Participants are asked which line from A B or C is the same length as Exhibit 1. The experiment is set up with a single participant in a group of 8 where the other 7 members are Asch’s employees. The 7 employees declare that line B is that same length as 1. Faced with the pressure of the crowd 75% agree to what a blind man could see to be untrue. Group formation is more important than the accuracy of the story.
Enemies of the People
Finally, the masses need an enemy. The dominant group needs to contrast the virtues of good citizens with the demonic followers of a counter-narrative. Pent-up frustration and aggression are released. Those that do not go along with the Mass Formation feel the brunt of this behaviour. There evolves a rapidly reduced empathy and intolerance towards those not in the group.
Statements from public figures that those who choose not to take vaccines should be denied hospital care were greeted by the mob with relish. Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president stated in Dec 2021 that the “EU must consider mandatory vaccination”.
The Nuremberg Code of 1947 and codified into law by the UN in 1966 was built on the principle of informed consent, yet this fundamental human right was jettisoned without debate or question.
Statements from ‘liberal’ Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada and Ahern in NZ intimating they would make the life difficult for the unvaccinated difficult contained an explicit menace and threat that is not normal in our society. It betrays a shocking abuse of power.
Frank Armstrong reviews a new book on the Irish government's response Covid-19 and wonders whether it will be said once again: “We didn’t know, no one told us”https://t.co/vikPQsuFMa@broadsheet_ie@danieleidiniph1
So, the remaining question is whether those in power knowingly planned and executed the greatest breakdown and dismantling of some of the most cherished values in Western society? Was there a master plan with covert meetings and messages shared among the key players? The answer is probably no, or at least that’s not necessary for it to happen in what appears to be a cohesive manner.
The world was ripe for a Mass Formation and the leaders of the Western world, one by one, consciously or unconsciously, seized on the fear and anxiety that Covid generated to exercise extraordinary power.
They stood by and allowed power to move from elected officials to technocrats who previously held no authority. Their technocratic authority, Holohan in Ireland, Fauci in the US, Whitty in the UK, made them unchallengeable. The most benign questioning was met with a cry of being anti-science and idiotic.
Hannah Arendt used the term the ‘banality of evil’ to describe the dull bureaucrats who participated in the Holocaust, and who wielded extraordinary power without a moral or ethical compass. They were just following orders. There may not be a conscious awareness of the harm being done, as most of these technocrats, and leaders, will have bought into and have been victims of the Formation themselves. What they were conscious of, however, were the levers they could exercise to deepen and extend it.
As soon as it started it became very obvious, they could exercise almost unlimited power over the public without challenge. Almost no force was necessary. The number of occasion where police were needed to enforce lockdown rules were very rare. Mass Formation ensures self-governance. Those who disagree are forced by the crowd to comply or face being banished as outcasts.
So where to now? Covid has subsided for now, but the costs and damage have yet to be fully accounted. It will take many years to tally that human suffering and the financial bill. It may require the current actors to leave the stage to allow the facts to become readily available, and for the public to see the full tragedy of our self-inflicted wounds.
The possibility arises that this will reoccur in the event of another pandemic. Are those who tasted almost complete power really satiated?. Unfortunately it’s hard to imagine the crack-cocaine-appeal of that kind of power will not draw them in again. The question is what event will they weaponise, what fear will they jump on as the catalyst for the next Mass Formation and the return to a totalitarian regime?
this is tropical truth this is celtic truth this is Hy Brasil in the Kerribrasilian sea
for Joan, Bríd, Ezimar and Tereza
Sometimes the dead do not die. Those of us alive can fall into shadow until we learn how to listen to the voices of the dead, and the hermetic messages they transmit. The signs are here and there, although with each passing decade in this paradoxical age of amnesia, they become harder to access. Yes, it is so, the present is absent until we penetrate the absence that is present.
In 2020, I made a journey, travelling thousands of kilometres to reach the town of Iguatu in the interior of northeast Brazil, known as the sertão [a hinterland or backcountry] in the Caatinga biome. This was where I would find out more about my cousin Patrick. I arrived in Fortaleza, the capital city in the state of Ceará on 3rd February. I was still dressed in white after attending a celebration of Iemanjá, the spirit of rivers and queen of oceans, in Salvador da Bahia the previous day, which was also the birthday of James Joyce, author of the great river-book Finnegans Wake. There are no coincidences when we allow ourselves to be entangled with places, temporalities and creative practices.
Saying aloud the word ‘Brazil’, and dreaming about what that vast land may be, has resonated in me ever since I was a boy. For my first school project at eight years of age, I decided to dedicate my time to drawing and writing about the Amazon Jungle, as my young imagination was dazzled, from afar, by the overflowing matter that all seemed so alarmingly alive. In the books I found everything seemed to be flourishing and decaying along the moving floors and rustling canopies of that great forest of the earth through which many rivers flowed.
My drawing of the Amazon jungle from a school project as an 8-year-old.
Much of the area along the enormous coastline of Brazil was once called Pindorama (‘land of the palm trees’) by the Tupi-Guarani indigenous peoples. When Portuguese navigators landed, accidentally, on the shores of Bahia in 1500, they called it Ilha da Vera Cruz (‘island of the true cross’). Today, the country is referred to as Brazil, named after a dye wood called ‘brazilwood’ or pau-brasil, which once grew in abundance along that coastline. The word ‘brasil’ probably derives from the Latin brasa which means ‘ember’ (with the suffix ‘-il’), as the wood was red like embers.
But there is another story: the name may have a connection with the lost island of Hy Brasil, which once upon a time was located off the west coast of Ireland and appeared on European Medieval and Renaissance maps.
The word probably comes from the Old Irish Uí Breasail, which means descendants (Úí) of the island (il) of beauty, worth or might (bres). With the arrival of the Age of Reason, the age of magic faded into song and oblivion and into the earth, or transferred into science, and Hy Brasil disappeared off all maps to become an obscure myth. But I follow the trail of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote: “myth is the nothing that is everything”.
Hy Brasil were on my mind when I took the seven-hour bus journey from Fortaleza to Iguatu through a prehistoric landscape of uncanny rock formations jutting out of the earth. I found out much later these were the Quixadá monoliths. My great capixaba friend Fabricio, who had roadtripped with me by land from Vitória to Salvador, called this ‘profundo Brasil’. As we got nearer to Iguatu, the landscape began to remind me of the west of Ireland. I was getting closer to the heart of the story, and to an encounter with my cousin.
The Quixadá monoliths.
‘Some Say the Devil is Dead’
Let me tell you a little of what I know of Patrick and his story, which is what stirred me to write this text. This story shows the effect the land can have on us and the effect we can have on each other. It reverberates through my own inner and outer journeys to Brazil over the years, and resonates emotionally and spiritually. This story is a way into an absence that has become vibrantly present.
Patrick was born in Scart House in Castlecove in Kerry, on the south-west coast of Ireland. He was the son of Maurice Fitzgerald and my grandfather’s sister Lil O’Sullivan. My grandfather (my namesake), known as Batt, was born at home in Caherdaniel, six kilometres from Castlecove.
Patrick had three older sisters – Mary, Joan and Bríd. Mary, the oldest, died in 2007, and Joan and Bríd are alive and well in Kerry today. He also had two younger siblings: Maurice – born in 1949, and Eilis – born in 1951. Both died very young: Maurice in 1951 of pneumonia after a small surgery; and Eilis in 1953 of spina bifida and hydrocheplus. Born on 8th June 1945, Patrick was remembered as a joyful, gleaming boy, much loved by all, who went on to be ordained as a Redemptorist priest on 5th July 1970. Patrick left Ireland in 1972 (a year that began with Bloody Sunday and had the highest death toll of the Troubles in the north of Ireland) and arrived in Brasilia with his luggage and guitar.
Patrick’s sister Joan Rayle, in Castlecove, in front of Scart house where all the six children were born.
Brasilia had been founded twelve years previously and, like so often in Brazil, the mystical and ancient fused with extreme modernism in the new capital. Something similar can be seen in the astonishing novel by João Guimarães Rosa called Grande sertão: veredas, which was published in 1956, the same year Brasilia was proposed as the new capital by Brazil’s new president Juscelino Kubitschek. This visionary masterpiece begins with the word ‘Nonada’ [which can mean ‘into the nothing’ or ‘it is nothing’], and ends with the word ‘Travessia’ [‘crossing’ or ‘passage’], and whose protagonist’s name is ‘Riobaldo’ (literally river [Rio] deficient [baldo]. After three months in Brasilia to learn something of Brazil’s language, history and culture, Patrick was sent to Iguatu in the summer of 1972. Iguatu derives from the Tupi-Guarani words ‘ig’ or ‘i’ – meaning ‘water’; and ‘catu’ – meaning ‘good’. In a landscape so dry for much of the year, its name indicates an inviting location. It seems by all accounts that he fell in love with the place instantly. At a congregation, he said to his superior Padre José: ‘Sempre quero ficar em Iguatu’ [I always want to stay in Iguatu]. His wish would be granted.
Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s was for the most part a closed-in space. There was no electricity in parts of Kerry, and there was extremely high emigration. To suddenly be in Iguatu must have felt like being transported into another dimension. What was going through Patrick’s mind as he made his way across the Atlantic and crossed over to the Southern Hemisphere? What was it like for him taking the same journey I made through the Quixadá landscape? Such exhilaration and wonder must have filled the soul of this ebullient man. Everything around him would have seeped into his outlook and inner thoughts: the extreme weather conditions from Biblical rainfall to drought; the cacophonic sounds of all the bichos [creatures] throughout the night; the electric energies in the earth and air so close to the Equator; the rapid sunrises and sunsets; the mixed communities of indigenous peoples, Africans and Europeans. At this time, the music of bossa nova, MPB and Tropicalia, which would seduce the world, were exploding, not only down south in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but also in the northeast in Bahia and Pernambuco. And the Brazilian football team, with Pelé as the poster boy, had won the World Cup in Mexico for the third time in 1970. All these elements would have dazzled any visitor.
But there was also a very disturbing current running through Brazil at the time (which continues to this day). A military dictatorship had ruled Brazil since 1964, and people opposed to the government were being tortured. There was an aggressive vision to quickly modernise Brazil, which meant cutting down the Amazon Jungle at a relentlessly accelerated rate. The population was starting to increase rapidly but lacked access to material resources, and there was a massive disparity in monetary wealth, which resulted in huge poverty across the country. This was Brazil: dance and music everywhere; a military dictatorship; mass poverty; Catholic beliefs fusing with Candomblé and Umbanda; indigenous communities (many still uncontacted) living profoundly with the land; and the beginning of the Christian evangelical movement. And then there were the distinct landscapes of the vast Amazon rainforest, the interior of the sertão regions, what remained of the Mata Atlântica, the endless coastline of golden and white sandy beaches, and the Pantanal wetlands to the west. I heard someone say that the US didn’t really have a name but it had a country while Brazil had a name but didn’t really have a country. When Tom Jobim (co-writer of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and one of the pioneers of bossa nova) was asked about the differences between living in New York and Rio do Janeiro, his response was: ‘Morar em Nova Iorque é bom, mas é umamerda; morar no Rio é uma merda, mas é bommmmm’ [living in New York is good, but it sucks (literally ‘it’s a shit’]; living in Rio sucks, but it’s so good].
In Iguatu, the youth were immediately drawn to Patrick. He was energetic and exotic; he wore funky shirts and loved to crack jokes. He sang folk songs on his guitar. He got to know a kid who had a band and they become great buddies. Endearing himself naturally to the people and culture, he listened avidly to singers such as Dalila and Roberto Carlos (another capixaba)- known as ‘o Rei’ [the King] (who has the same birthday as my brother, though he was born thirty-four years before him). Patrick was soon playing Carlos’s song ‘Jesus Cristo’, which was released in 1970, and he was always listening to another religious rock classic called ‘A Montanha’, which came out the year he arrived. Roberto Carlos was at his peak, having found God and adapting brilliantly to the grittier sound of the 70s – a perfect combination for a new generation of Brazilians.
Before visiting Iguatu, Patrick’s sister Bríd gave me the number of Father Dick Rooney, who was living in Dundalk after spending decades in the northeast of Brazil. Over the phone, Father Rooney fondly remembered Patrick and recounted how he used to be always singing an Irish folksong called ‘Some Say the Devil is Dead’whose chorus tells of the devil supposedly buried down in Kerry, and who then rose from the dead and joined the British army. Whether unconsciously or not, I felt that Patrick had tapped into something of the soul of Brazil through this song: in the proximity of humanity with God and the devil in the land; of the displacement and mixing of influences and peoples; and of the ever-present reality of vivid death and life residing side by side.
On the afternoon of 16th April 1973, at the end of a two-day retreat with more than fifty kids from the Iguatu area, Patrick decided to take a plunge in the Jaguaribe River, which runs alongside the town. It was to be his first and last swim in the volatile river. It was the beginning of Easter Week, the day after Palm Sunday or Domingo de Ramos. His body was found by fishermen three days later further down the river. He was twenty-seven years of age.
Fourteen years later, Bríd came to Iguatu, thinking to bring his remains back to Ireland. Sister Bríd was a trained nurse and member of the Mercy Order in Trujillo and Lima in Peru from 1984 to 1990, and made the visit to Iguatu during this time, staying in the same room as Patrick. She decided that he should stay where he was in Iguatu, as that is what he had requested. Some of Patrick’s nephews and nieces also visited Iguatu later on backpacking trips.
Patrick in funky shirt standing by the river.
Amhdhorchacht
Years later, it was my turn to go to Iguatu. I also sauntered there with a guitar, and could speak Portuguese after living in Lisbon for almost a decade. A few years previously, Bríd had sent me a bunch of phone numbers for priests from the Redemptorist order out in the sertão who had known Patrick. I had gone to Brazil in 2017 with the idea that I might investigate this old family story, but after teaching for a few weeks at the federal university, I ended up following the trail of the humanitarian and Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, which took me down 3000 kilometres of the Amazon River. I only rang the numbers Sister Bríd had given me in 2019, from Lisbon, which led me to Tereza Cavalcante, the current parish secretary. She had never met Patrick, but offered to introduce me to the people in Iguatu who had known him.
My drawing of northeast Brazil. The Jaguaribe can be seen running into the sea at Fortaleza on the top right of the map.
Tereza sent a taxi driver to pick me up at Iguatu bus station and take me to the Diocesano Hotel. The taxi driver’s name was Ishmael. ‘God hears’. Nomen est omen. Every name carries a message. Call me Ishmael. The human protagonist of that great wandering American novel Moby Dick that begins with the word ‘Call’ and ends with the word ‘orphan’. Ishmael didn’t speak to me. His company and silence were calming. I said goodbye, got out of the car, and checked into the hotel. I will never forget the sounds I heard that first night. The dark damp air was emphatically awake to me, the noises and rhythms were weaving in and out of each other in call and response, sounds that I had never heard in my life. I suddenly felt the urge to say aloud a favourite Irish word – amhdhorchacht – which can be translated as raw darkness, gloaming or dusk. Although the sun sets very quickly in this part of the world, the sound and meaning of this word at that moment invoked another way of seeing and hearing. Forty-seven years after the death of Patrick, arriving and sleeping here with all those intensified sounds closing in, I felt a sort of homecoming. The spirits in the trees and in the water had heard me coming.
The next morning, Tereza picked me up and took me to the parish office in the centre of the town. Three people were waiting for me there: a young parish priest called Padre João Batista, an older priest called Mons. Queiroga, and a woman called Ezimar Araújo. Ezimar was the former secretary of the parish. She had fourteen brothers and sisters and was the daughter of Mãe dos Padres [‘mother of the priests’] (I will return to her later). She was just a few years younger than Patrick and had spent a lot of time with him during his brief time in Iguatu. She could remember so much – dates, places and what people had said. We immediately began talking in Portuguese about Patrick – or Padre Patrício, as he was known. Our mutual enthusiasm helped us understand each other despite my thick Irish-Portuguese accent and her regional Ceará accent. Ezimar and Mons. Queiroga told me stories. They talked about Patrick’s joy and youthful vigor, and how he looked like Elvis with his big mop of hair. They had lovingly kept a photo album full of black and white photographs. To me, these were precious illuminations, time-travelling portals into the past.
There was even a photograph of two of Patrick’s nieces, twins Hilda and Colette, now 56 years of age as I write these words. I had met two more of his nieces, Siobhan and Bridget, by chance on Derrynane Beach in Kerry only a few months before going to Iguatu (Patrick’s sister Joan had six children: four girls and two boys). Patrick must have travelled with this photograph, or it had been sent to him.
There was also a photo of Patrick in priestly attire, holding up the chalice:
A photo of Patrick and Ezimar where they were clearly unaware they were being photographed:
And another of Patrick sitting by the Jaguaribe River with a bunch of people. Squinting and laughing heartily, he is wearing one of his colourful shirts and his sideburns are long and shaggy. He is the only one looking at the photographer.
Ezimar recalled a Christmas party that Patrick had organised in 1972. It was his first and only Christmas outside Ireland, so it must have been a big occasion for him and he obviously wanted to show his new friends in Brazil how it was celebrated back home. He decorated a tree, wrapped up presents, and sang songs. They ended up listening to Roberto Carlos for the rest of the night. Ezimar gave a big warm smile after finishing the story, and then looked at me directly as if trying to see who I really was. I saw determination and hardship in her eyes, a will to live and to give. I listened and recorded Ezimar and Mons. Queiroga. Tereza and Padre João Batista made sure we were all comfortable.
The plan was to take me to the church, Igreja Nossa Senhora do Perpétuo Socorro-Prado-Iguatu, then down to the river, but as we were leaving the parish office, I noticed Patrick’s portrait on the wall. I was stopped dead in my tracks. It was the only portrait on display, and here he was staring out at me with a good old Kerry glint in his eye. I was struck by a resemblance to my nephew Barra and for a second I saw myself in the image. It suddenly seemed very right that I was here now. Ezimar placed her hand on my shoulder. Then we left the building and walked together to the church.
There on the altar was Patrick’s gravestone for all to see. I had no idea that he would be so present. Real absence. Each step of the way on this day seemed like a natural unfolding with Patrick as our host. Ezimar, Mons. Queiroga, Tereza and I are captured in a photograph, showing us embracing, looking down at the gravestone on the altar. For a fleeting moment, I wondered whether this magnanimous memorial to Patrick was a kind of post-colonial gesture, a bowing down before a European visitor. But looking around, feeling the atmosphere, and hearing Ezimar speak, this thought quickly dissipated: I knew this was much more. It was a tragedy for the town and for Patrick; and now it was a joy and healing for Iguatu, for Patrick, and, ultimately, for me. We had crossed the Kerribrasilian sea. It was time to go down to the river.
At the gravestone on the altar. From left to right: Mons. Queiroga, Tereza, myself and Ezimar.
The Jaguaribe River is the largest dry river in Brazil. But as Patrick’s sister Joan said to me down on Derrynane Beach six months before I arrived in Iguatu: ‘there was nothing dry about it that day’. For half of the year there is no water, and then suddenly the rains come down and the river rises and rises, usually bursting its banks and flooding the town, before swerving and flowing east into the Atlantic Ocean. River of Jaguars. The word Jaguar derives from yaguara in Tupi-Guarani, meaning ‘wild beast that overcomes its prey at a bound’. But jaguars and onças have not been seen in this region for a long time.
At the river that afternoon in April 1973, along with the young kids and teenagers, there were three men, all Irish: Father Anthony Branagan (Padre Antonio), Father Michael Lavery (Padre Marcelo) and Patrick Fitzgerald (Padre Patrício). Both Anthony and Patrick went in for a swim. Some of the children were already in the water and warned them of the danger. Antony assured them that Patrick was a champion swimmer. But that was in a swimming pool. This was a river in Brazil. Minutes later he was caught in a whirlpool. Father Anthony and the children thought he was play acting as his head bobbed up and down and then down again, then up and down. Then he disappeared. The third of the three men watched helplessly from the shore.
Father Michael Lavery worked at Iguatu and then later went to work in Fortaleza. In January of this year he died in Fortaleza aged about eighty-seven. Father Anthony Branagan was in Brazil (in Ceará and then Goiás) from 1963 to 1995, and then went to work in Siberia (in the region of Kemerovo Oblast) from 1996 to 2020. With the breakout of Covid-19, he returned to Ireland to live in Clonard Monastery in Belfast. As I write, Father Anthony is eighty-eight years old. There were others who came to work in the parish during the 1970s, a generation of Irish missionary priests and volunteers. Ezimar vividly recalled more details with each passing moment I spent in her company. She told me that there was another man called Father Brendan Callanan who arrived in Iguatu a few months after Patrick’s death. They called him Padre Brandão. She said that Brandão was now living in Ireland, working in a parish somewhere but she didn’t know the name of the place. She also knew Father Dick Rooney; and there was a priest called Brian Holmes (known as Bernardo in Iguatu) who had been a close friend of Patrick’s. They had studied together back in Ireland. He is now living in Mozambique. Father Holmes, originally from Cork, was travelling from Fortaleza to Iguatu to visit Patrick on the day he died.
One of my drawings imitating an image from The Books of Kells, an Irish illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin from ca. 800 AD, now kept in the Trinity College Library in Dublin.
Four of us got into a car – Ezimar, Tereza, Mons. Queiroga and I – and we drove out of town for about ten minutes, following a road with shrubs, or mata, and buriti palm trees on either side. Raindrops began to fall for the first time in eight months. We stopped the car and walked the rest of the way along a dusty path littered with plastic waste with a rotting wooden fence on one side. Patches of mata were everywhere until we came to a wide-open treeless space where the Jaguaribe would soon be filling up again. No one spoke. I walked lightly out onto the cracked earth where Patrick had gone swimming. Each of us was in our own space, each of us dwelling on the same subject. After a while, I walked over to Ezimar. And then she broke the silence by telling me that the people of the Iguatu pray to Patrick and ask grace from him, like one does with the saints. She came close and said: ‘I pray; I ask things of him, and he intercedes. I receive my wishes in my prayers, thanks to him.’ [Eu peço; eu faço pedidos a ele, e ele intercede. Alcanço, graças por ele]. Then she said wistfully: ‘he always wanted to live here [ele queria sempre morando aqui] … He played guitar and he was happy’.
Dona Laurenise Araújo and I.
We drove back into town to visit Dona Laurenise Araújo, mother of fifteen children including Ezimar, and known in the town as Mãe dos Padres and mother of Brazil. She served me some snacks and coffee. Radiant and welcoming, with dyed purple hair, she must have been in her late eighties, and we laughed and flirted with each other. She told me that Patrick was beautiful. She was too, with her enormous hospitality, and the way she carried the weight of her ancestors with lightness and joy.
Lunch is served at the parish centre.
Then the four of us walked back to the parish office where volunteers were serving food for nearly one hundred people from the community – volunteers from the parish prepare a meal every day for those who need it. I was struck again by the kindness and tough life here. The words of the writer Jan Morris echoed in my head: ‘kindness, the ruling power of nowhere’. This is a region that has been abandoned by the Brazilian establishment, a place where liberation theology would be welcome. A proponent of this movement from Ceará, Padre Hélder Pessoa Câmara, once said: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.’ Here lies a deep tragedy in attitudes in Brazil and the world.
The volunteers who prepared lunch.
That night, Padre João Batista held a mass in the church. At the end of the sermon, he invited me up to the altar to face the full congregation and everyone stood up and gave a long round of applause. Later, when it was already pitch dark, I walked the quiet streets and passed by a gym filled with sweating human bodies working in motion with the exercise machines. I stared through the large window and watched. Most people were on running machines, half of them had earphones in, and some commercial pop music was blaring out into the street. I moved along. Ten minutes later, I was already at the edge of town. There were mounds of rubble and dirt on either side of the road, and only a few streetlights working. A cow was munching on the last tufts of grass available. In the middle of the dirt, there stood a sign that read “Vende-se Este Terreno” [This land is for sale] . After keeping the cow company for a few minutes, I briskly made my way back to my lodgings, longing to hear nature’s night orchestra once more. Outside my room I listened again to the sounds out there in the dark. Was that the spirit of the long gone jaguar growling into the night sky and through the trees? Calling out to me through Patrick?
“Vende-se Este Terreno” [This land is for sale]The next morning, Tereza arranged for another taxi driver to take me to the bus station to return to Fortaleza. His name was Joaquim and we immediately began chatting. As soon as I told him why I was there, he pulled the car over to the side of the road. He was only nine years old at the time but he vividly remembered the day Patrick faleceu, and when fishermen found his body further down the river a few days later. There was silence for almost a minute as I listened to the hum of the taxi’s idling engine. Then Joaquim spoke again, this time to say that he wanted to show me something. He took me to an area of Iguatu called Vila Centenário, which was mostly constructed in 1974. We drove down one of its main streets. This street is named Rua Padre Patrício. I got out of the car and touched the street sign and smiled. Joaquim then took me to the station, and I was back in Fortaleza that night.
The Retirantes – from Ceará to Curitiba to Espírito Santo
Time for one more intermezzo before I conclude this tale. It is another shock, a rupture of real absence, showing me perhaps how I was on the right caminho, beyond trained knowledge or logical articulations. As the Irish saying puts it: Éist le fuaim na habhann agus gheobhaidh tú breac [Listen to the sound of the river and you will get trout]. In 2017, I was invited to teach philosophy and literature at the federal university of Espírito Santo in the capital city Vitória by Professor Jorge Viesenteiner who was a good friend of my friend and colleague Marta in Lisbon. They had met while studying in Germany during their doctoral studies. Marta was meant to go to Vitória but she had to cancel and suggested that maybe I would like to go in her place. So off I went, landing in Brazil for the third time.
The state of Espírito Santo is wedged between Bahia to the north, Rio do Janeiro to the south, and Minas Gerais to the west. Anyone from Espírito Santo is called a capixaba. It is a Tupi-Guarani word meaning ‘cleared land for planting’ [upi caá and pixaba]. The indigenous peoples who lived in Espírito Santo called their corn and manioc plantations capixaba. The name stuck. During the time I spent in Vitória, I became good friends with Jorge. We stayed in contact afterwards and happily saw each other again in 2019 in Lisbon. When I released my solo album in March 2022, which was written in Brazil, I sent it to Jorge, and told him a little bit about the final song called ‘Iguatu’. On 12th March, I received a voice message from Jorge. He had listened to the album, and was particularly drawn to ‘Iguatu’, as his mother had been born there, which was news to me. He said he couldn’t understand some of the details and words of the song but that it moved him profoundly. He decided to share the song on his WhatsApp family group, saying it was a friend’s song about a cousin who was a priest who had drowned there. His mother – who didn’t understand any English – wrote back to say that she remembered a priest who had drowned in the river Jaguaribe a long time ago. Jorge was amazed. ‘You knew this priest?’ he asked her. ‘Of course I knew him!’ she said. ‘Padre Patrício. I worked with him in Cáritas.’
Jorge’s mother, Francisca Iranilda de Lima, was born in Iguatu in 1951 only five years after Patrick was born. She told Jorge that Patrick was young and beautiful (‘jovem e bonito’). In the voice message, I could hear Jorge laughing. His mother remembered so many details from what seemed so long ago. They had had formed a close relationship working together in the parish. She recounted to Jorge that on the day Patrick arrived in Iguatu, he was taken to the parochial centre, where a reception and lunch awaited him. Jorge’s mother and her superior Expedita Alcântara (affectionately called ‘nenzinha’) had prepared potato puré with peas and stuffed turkey, which was served with malt beer. After drinking the beer, Patrick suddenly felt very sick. It may have been an allergic reaction, and he had to be taken to hospital. Francisca Iranilda remembered that day very clearly. Jorge said that his mother began to cry softly as memories flooded back of the land she had left a long time ago. A life before another life.
At the end of 1974, Francisca Iranilda left the northeast, like so many others at that time, for the south of Brazil. Curitiba is the city that Francisca Iranilda moved to, where Jorge was born, and also where a girl I fell in love with is from; the town’s name is said to come from old Guarani ‘kur’-‘ity’-‘ba’. ‘Ty-ba’ is a suffix for ‘many’, and ‘kur y’ refers to the pine tree, which points to the large number of Araucaria brasiliensis pine trees in the region. Francisca Iranilda still has cousins in Iguatu, but the majority of her family left. They were part of the so-called Retirantes – a large movement of peoples who came down from the sertão regions because of drought, and extreme poverty. Iguatu was just another small town in the sertão, a land of forgotten people in Brazil. After teaching in Vitória, I voyaged down the Amazon River, and I came to understand why the Amazon represents the lungs of Brazil (and maybe the world). But now I understand that the sertão is the heart.
I could feel and hear in the audio message that Jorge was getting emotional. How was any of this possible? Had some strange energy called me to Espírito Santo in 2017 so we could become friends? Did Jorge know unconsciously something else was going on? To whom am I speaking? Jorge began and ended his audio message by repeating words I had said to him from the marvellous poem ‘Le souffle des ancêtres’ by Senegalese poet Birago Diop: Os mortos não morrem. Les Morts ne sont pas morts. The dead do not die.
Jaguaribe River, 5 February 2020.
Riverrun
Language is like a river: starting with a stutter, springing up, then moving under and over stones, building up speed and increasing volume, meandering and digressing, curving and slowing down, gathering and carrying dirt and grime and rubbish, becoming stagnant, getting wider, then picking up rhythm again before emptying out into the open sea. ‘The water of the face has flowed’, as Joyce writes in Finnegans Wake. Rivers and languages are states of wandering. I am a wanderer too. Iguatu – that ‘good water’ – becomes a song of call and response, where singing is existing, and where the jaguar’s breathing rises and falls in the night.
I hear the Minas Gerais poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s words: A ausência é um estar em mim [Absence is a presence in me]. I hear Patrick on the streets of Iguatu. I hear him in the voices of Ezimar, Francisca Iranilda, Joan and Sister Bríd. I hear him in the stones of the church where he is buried. I hear him in the hum of the taxi and its drivers Ishmael and Joaquim taking me home. I hear him in the children playing and laughing together by the dirty, dusty roadside. I hear him in Roberto Carlos’s pop songs of salvation from 1972. I hear him in the bichos’ sounds in the amhdhorchacht. I hear him in the rivers, an ever-changing space of whirlpools, deep as a human soul.
Jaguaribe River, 18 March 2020 at the bottom left corner is Djalma, the sacristan of the Prado-Iguatu church.
Zagreb, October, 2022.
Many thanks to Tomica Bajsić and Croatian PEN Centre for supporting me and giving the space and time to write this text.
