Cassandra Voices

Tag: Billy O Hanluain

  • A Fairy Tale of Dún Laoghaire 2

    I knew the game was up when my mother told me that Santy had given her a list. I had heard about his many imitators and knew they were just benign North Pole ambassadors who lacked his Arctic magic.

    I met one of them once in Lee’s on the main street of Dun Laoghaire, in a family sized camper tent with a strip of silver tinsel stretched around the entrance. His cotton wool beard dangling on an ear-itching elastic band as his nicotine coloured fingers rummaged in a plastic laundry basket that was loaded with presents. There were two baskets, one dark blue for boys and one pale blue for girls.

    He sounded just like the driver of the 7A bus who brought me home from school every day. “Ah, son have ye been a good lad?” It was like First Confession all over again except with different costumes and just like my first time in the confession box armed with a few well-rehearsed sins, I told him that apart from puncturing my neighbour’s bike I had been a good boy. He coughed and scratched the stubble under his beard. “Ah, you’re a decent lad, a fine fella….” He was a little unsteady in the deck chair where he was sitting and I was afraid he might fall over and injure himself. That wouldn’t do, not with it so close to Christmas; there was lot of work to be done yet. That’s how Santy was in Lee’s. Or was he one of the ambassadors? I couldn’t tell. Whoever it was, he seemed very anxious to leave George’s St as soon as he could and get back to The North Pole. This was the busiest time of year and every hour spent here in Lee’s was time lost from directing operations in his snow drifted toy factory, far from Dun Laoghaire. All of that cold and blizzard white frightened me, I imagined the North Pole as a television screen of swirling frozen static, with no button anywhere that could ever switch it off.

    Why had he ended out living in such a desolate place? Something eerie hovered around Santy. Who was he really? Had he done some terrible thing? He spent his life making toys in the world’s most inhospitable place. Was he trying to say sorry for something? And who were the elves? The only dwarf I’d ever seen for real was the one who sold newspapers outside Glasthule church on Sundays. He frightened me; I’d take my mother’s hand and cling to it like a gold ringed shield as we walked inside. My mind chalked up questions. How had a team of news-paper-men ended out working with Santy? How had they met?

    Then one night, a few days before Christmas, a dream came to me that put me right about so many things. There were seven other dwarfs I’d heard of before; the ones who lived with Snow White. I always liked that story but felt it ended very unfairly for them, with all their joy taken away from them by a tall Prince on horse. Each time I read it, I hoped that she would stay with them, that she would explain to the Prince that he’d have to find another story but she always rode off with him, leaving them behind, unhappily ever after.

    In the warm cinemascope of my pillow, I saw the seven of them trekking towards the world’s darkest corners and everywhere they went they wept for losing her and cursed themselves for being short.  Their tears froze when they fell to the ground. Everywhere they went to forget their sadness; they’d leave behind acres of ice and snow, a dark white continent of loss that spread out behind them like a cape that would never be big enough to conceal their seven tiny broken hearts.  And that was how I learnt that The North Pole had come to be.

    Trailing far behind them I saw a man, who looked like a drawing from a story book, swaying in the cold and losing his balance on huge grey mirrors of ice. He was weeping too and cursing what he had done years before. He had let go of a rope that dangled deep down into a well. Children used to speed up and down the well, like a thrill ride, collecting pebbles down below but one day he, the village well man, had let go of the rope, his trembling hands not sure of themselves and two children were drowned. I learnt at age eight that the saddest people wander the furthest.

    And so the world’s saddest tall person and the shortest tearful seven met each other and started on this strange enterprise together. Santy was forever lamenting what he’d done and the dwarves learned to forget just a little, the young woman who’d once danced through their days, as they helped him build his toys in the cold.

    I was always relieved when a dream put me at ease and whispered some new part of an old truth to me. I’d add it to the old truth and for a moment my mind would ring clear as bell with fresh understanding. It was as if I saw further and more clearly how things really were. I kept these truths, the old and the new, like nuggets, deep in my story pockets, to help me along my way.

    When I was leaving the tent in Lee’s he handed me a package from one of the baskets. I pointed at him and asked him, “Santy, did you really once work at a well? I know how The North Pole was born.”

    “Am I well? Sure, Santy is always well, off with ye now”

    My mother pulled impatiently at the hood of my duffel coat.

    “Ah, what are you saying to the man, Billy…?”

    She had said it, “The Man.”

    So he was not Santy, he was “a man”

    I knew that Santy wept most days for what he had done.

    I tore my package open and saw that he had mistaken me for a girl; a string of plastic pearls, a tiny mirror and a comb.

    I went home, put on my necklace and waited for the real Father Sadness to come.

    Feature Image: O’Connell Street, Dublin, Christmas Tree, Lord Mayor Ben Briscoe, Santa Claus, Dublin Photographic Archive, 1988.

  • Poetry: Billy O Hanluain

    Gold Fish

    I envy the gold fish
    the dignity of his fits
    and spasms mid the
    glass shards of his
    smashed aquarium,
    the water that was his
    air, evaporating, floor
    board sucked around
    him, gills screaming,
    cold blood pierced by
    the furnace of room
    temperature, epileptic
    defiance as oxygen
    congeals his world.

    The brittle bowl that
    held my world has been
    drained of chance and
    flooded with numbers.
    The days are stale and
    plain, the months are
    undercooked, the year
    unseasoned. But I have
    no gilled valour. I do not
    scream among my shards
    or gasp for air and tremble.
    I walk like a patient, long term
    on the ward, round the well worn
    radius of park and asphalt and wait
    and wait, binge watching banalities,
    downloading instructions for how
    to pant on.

     

    Rare Aul Pompei

    Town was at its eeriest today.
    A rare aul times Pompeii. Its streets
    broad and narrow, frozen by the
    shuttered and unlit lava of lock
    down. A hollowed out commercial
    carcass. Sleet spitting gulls circling
    the wreckage like white painted
    vultures. It appeared to me, like
    a join the dots puzzle in a macabre
    children’s book. The outline of some
    familiar things visible, the numbers
    though were like memories I struggled
    to evoke, as when I swim against the high
    tide of waking, trying to remember a
    dream. The numbers were a maze of
    dull dots, the pencil of my mind’s drawing,
    faltering and I was forgetting how to count,
    hardly knowing where I was. All the familiar
    turning to fog as I got lost in an echo’s frail
    memory of the sound that first bore it.

     

    One Year Anniversary

    I walk through the shuttered reminders of my life before.
    An abandoned theatre, the play I acted in is long over,
    the poster curling on the tobacco stained walls of a
    a boarded up, once
    Flowing Tide.

    The unbrowsed books on Dawson St peer out at a
    camp site of shame; tents pitched in the doorways
    of travel agents that sell trips of a life time to locations
    that shimmer azure blue like lotto day dreams. A bronzed
    honeymoon couple jet ski over the sodden reef of a
    a sleeping bag that has a dormer extension of rain pulped
    Amazon stamped cardboard.

    The shops tremble, empty, like DT sweat sheets, withdrawal
    symptoms from the sugar rush of compulsive shopping. Stephen’s
    Green Shopping Centre is a stale wedding cake whose icing has fallen to the
    ground, like vast sheets of nuptial glaciers, so you can see the putrid fruit,
    held inside by a frayed, once loved silver band.

    The place is emptied, like sink poured Tesco wine,
    the broken promise to never drink again.
    The whole place is a broken promise.
    Window displays of garish coloured children’s
    clothes turn and stare at me with uneaten
    crumbling cupcake eyes.

    The mannequins are mute Midwich
    orphans, stranded on the low tide shore of stunted
    commerce, their plastic, cash starved eyes look right
    through me.

    It is a drained aquarium full of writhing, rusting gold fish,
    a carol whistled out of season, a joke that nobody
    has laughed at for a year, lurching, searching for a
    punchline to belt up his trousers with.

    Outside morsels of memory
    from the time before
    are being torn at by
    gulls whose pen sharp
    beaks scrawl the grey
    parchment sky with manifestos
    of a new clawed and feathered
    city, not mine but theirs.

    The headlines in Bus Stop Newsagents read:

    “Search for Teen Torso”

    I have come too far in one year
    I turn away and try to remember
    the way home.

    Featured Image: © Daniele Idini

  • Head Shop

    Tedium was tip tapping on the pane of Gibbo’s day, the hours slouching into another shite night alone, like the slow but certain, annihilating course of ink on blotting paper. A visit to Tosh in the Head Shop “Happy Daze” on George’s St might just resurrect the dregs, if not by consuming a selection of the products for sale there, then at least by listening to Tosh describe them and the effects they’d produce, the feelings and sensations they’d induce once ingested.

    The shop was dimly lit like one of those places that sell lizards as pets to stoners; it smelled of stale joss sticks and half eaten Govinda take away trays. Dub reggae oozed like liquid hemp from two battered vintage speakers that stood at either end of the glass cabinet containing all the pills, powders and shrooms, which looked like the moist, fecund sex organs of alien amphibians. And then there was, Tosh.

    Some people become caricatures of themselves but Tosh took it to another level entirely, becoming a parody of the caricature itself. He was pencil thin and tall enough for half of his body to be in an entirely different, Himalayan weather system, to the rest of him. He didn’t wear clothes; they hung from him like sheets of washing out to dry. The brown, round neck Aran sweater that he wore like a second knitted skin, billowed at the slightest twitch of his body.

    He had that wizened pirate look that comes from years on the high seas of late nights, rolling spliffs in other people’s kitchens, at parties that always ended with dawn breaking on crushed green cans that spread like metallic spawn from butt soaked sinks.

    Of course he had a benign, pointed satanic beard too! And he wore an earring that was given to him by a German girl he’d spent the night with after seeing Marley in Dalymount Park, years back. Everything was “Years Back” with Tosh except for his eye brows which were fierce as fresh printed font. He wouldn’t have looked out of place on the cover of “Mojo” magazine talking about his comeback album but he had little to come back from, other than his greatest hits played in the kitchens of Dublin where he’d roll the best numbers while talking about Syd Barret,  arcane sub clauses in the Brehon laws and mumbling something about the Tuatha De Danann being connected to the Mayans.

    “Ah Gibbo, my man! How are we today? Are ye in for a buzz or a chat or a bit of both? I’ve got some crackin’ new stock in from a warehouse in Budapest. I’ll talk ye through it in a minute but c’mere, how did ye get on with them ones I sold ye last week?

    Did you do as I told ye?

    The cheeky half, chased by a full one just as the half is settlin’ in nicely, then when you’re tilting full gear on the whole one, drop the last half, see, that’s how ye play a two pill game!

    D’ye remember I wrote it down for ye? Like how to take them properly, in the right order, there’s no point in double droppin’ these, that’d just be bein’greedy and ye wouldn’t be lettin’ them tell their story, it’s a three act thing, ye got yer intro, yer crescendo and yer beautiful sunrise fade. Apart from the obvious whack off them, did ye get any of those subliminals, I’was tellin’ ye about? There’s a nuance to them, like they’re not in yer face, but they’re all over ye at the same time.

    So Gibbo, I have another fella like yerself who comes in most Fridays, now, he loves his food, he’s all culinary, mad into his ingredients, would know his way around all them African spices on Moore St, so, when I’m talkin’ him through the pills I go all Master Chef with me metaphors but you’re a man like meself who’s into his tunes  so I’ll keep it musical for ye, so ye get me drift, I love doin’ the R+D on this shit, I take it seriously, I want me good customers like yerself to know what they’re getting’ into and always remember Gibbo, when ye feel yer bowel howl, ye’ll know they’re kickin’ in, c’mon, are ye ready?

    These ones here I call Kittsers, after yer man David Kitt, half an hour or so after takin’ the first half, ye’ll feel a warm acoustic vibe comin’ over ye, a half full but well in to it crowd in Whelan’s buzz, but ye’ll feel a slight stitching of electronics studded around the hinterland of things, I don’t wanna say “a glow” but ye get what I mean, the Kittsers aren’t too strong though, when ye drop the full one, it’s more of a Boutique festival vibe, like Whelan’s morphin’ into a Body and Soul stage and it goes on like that a while, a more genteel “Gloaming” vibe than yer urban “Lankum” trad, they’re smooth, the muchies with these pills are organic, d’ye get me, I found them a bit shite in the end to be honest, like being at some gig in the Iveagh Gardens and ye wonderin’ how ye ended out there?

    Nah, I like a bit of grit in me pills.

    These ones here are more like it, though may I say, they are strictly for well-seasoned travellers like yer self. I call them, “The Gaffs”.

    About twenty minutes after taking the first half, remember yer maths Gibbo, half + full + half, the only way to do it, the narrative, the flow, that’s what yer after,

    It’ll start to feel like there’s a house party in yer head, a good one with all yer mates there, you’ll feel them coming in, a mad rush at the front door, swingin’ bags of cans, it’s not Whelan’s anymore man, it’s a stairwell full of people ye hardly know, that you’ve never seen in yer house before, one of them nights that’s goin’ to swell, it has its rough edges too though when ye start comin’ up proper, a Garda siren lickin the walls blue and white, ye might feel a tremor, a panic but it’ll pass with a rattle of worry farts, when ye drop the full one it’ll be like the house has been dipped in spirits and torched with new beats you’ve never heard before, some Brazilian dude is DJ-in in yer front room, Favela-Fuckin’-Chic, wadin through a block party, a carnival and a  sudden flash of asphalt wasteland in the room, there’s no lettin’ up with these ones, pure ritual,

    ye’ll be all alone but surrounded by people, nice bit of hallucinatin’ on these too, the party will become external, people will leave yer head and pour into the kitchen, ye’ll meet people there ye haven’t seen in years, ye’ll feel the erotic rush of a whole house heavin’ with the dance, like a greedy snort of Pentecostal Poppers,

    the colour range on these is like a serious fuckin’ festival rig, ye’ll end out focusin’ on the colour of the kitchen door for way longer than’s natural, ye might even feel a Oneness with shit that’ll make ye oblivious to all the other shit around you,

    ye know like when all of life’s asteroids are comin’ at ye, thick n fast and ye do a Han Solo on it and go straight into Spiritual Hyper Space, bypassin’ all the mundane crap that brings ye down, it went like that way for me anyway,

    these really are quality pills, all the colours get like a Biblical Dulux paint catalogue, ye’ll start makin’ connections between things that’ll fade as soon as ye try thinkin’ of them again, ye’ll remember nothin’ later, yer mind’ll be like The Shining maze, bein’chased by half formed feral sentences, ye’ll wish ye had a brain stenographer with ye to record yer thoughts, ye’ll think they are important but they might just be shite but who’s to know,

    they’re roarin’ “Tune” in the front room, ye’ll have strobe light black outs on the dance floor, not knowin’ how ye arrived into the glare of the kitchen light, ye’ll feel epic and loved, all the walls of the house throbbing like a heart pumpin’ speed, the kitchen and the front room will seem like they’re different hoods in some huge smudged metropolis that yer racin’ through now, high as some released captive thing, a vertigo in your stride, fearless, ye’ll have flashes of being all alone because you are all alone, reality sneaks in the fuckin’ cat flap the odd time with these pills, like morning light torn from a drawn curtain, a prison break on the dance floor,

    there’ll be a blonde PR bird at yer living room door with a clipper board, askin’ ye what guest list yer on, ye’ll have to choose carefully or ye’ll be fucked out high as a kite cut loose, tremblin’ alone on the quays, freezin’, neon taxi slur in the puddles, ye’ll look back at the entrance to The Liquor Rooms and ye’ll realise it’s yer own gaff, the door into yer own livin’ room and everyone there is bein’ sliced by strobe, tribal Batucada Beats, and the bird who had the clipper board has lassoed you with her eyes, ye’ll get a lust rush but it’ll be a brain boner, yer lad will be limp as a droopin’ glove, ye’ll think of Lou Reed, “between thought and expression there lies a lifetime”, the music will go all,

    ah- whacka-whacka-whacka, ah-whacka-whacka-whacka,

    ye’ll get down on yer hands and knees and try crawlin’ away from the echo but soon enough ye’ll surrender to it sweatin’, relieved that it’s yer new Master.

    these pills can have quite a rough come down, the worst kind of psychic turbulence but they’re worth it for their plasma screen clarity and the integrity of their buzz, when ye come down proper, all the people who weren’t there will have gone but ye’ll be glad ye met them anyway.

    Are ye with me Gibbo? Am I givin’ ye a few ideas for later? C’mon, I got a couple more to show ye.

    I call these pills “The launches”, they’re cunnin’ little bastards, the first half comes on all warm like yer at some art openin’ in a warehouse, somewhere in the Batter, NCAD heads wearin’ vintage gear, some lad in a knit wear bobble hat, stooped over a lap top playin’ Ricardo Villa Lobos minimal techno, craft beards and shite lager but it’s free, so ye dive in and talk crap about the installations, ye’ll get these comin’ up jitters, feelin’ that what yer sayin’ about the installations isn’t the right thing to be sayin’ about them, like yer out of yer depth at a party full of those Irish Times “ 50 People To Watch in 2009”, ye know the fuckers, video sculptors ‘n vegan choreographers.

    Ye won’t feel like yer one of them, me and you Gibbo never make it on to them lists, but once ye drop yer first full “Launch” ye’ll feel better than all them cunts collaged together

    You’ll feel like you’re the artist, that it’s your launch, you’ll have interviews about your work runnin’ through yer head, ye’ll feel like ye own the room, on top of yer mad out of it game, ye’ll see yer self on the box talkin’ about yer difficult second album even though you’ve never played a note in yer life, it’ll be like ye become whatever music yer listen’ to, it’s so real, ye’ll feel ye’ve got the fingerin’ all sorted on the tenor sax yer mimin’ the fuck out of in the mirror, ye’ll see posters for “An Evenin’ With Gibbo” flappin’ on the lampposts in yer twisted, head fucked streets, you’ll believe you’ve really gone and learnt an instrument, then the most fucked up, loved up shit kicks in,

    Yer playin’ stadium concerts now, yer the lead singer or the guitarist, ye can be whoever the fuck ye want to be, snortin’ lines of adulation, ye grab yer crotch and gurn, “I am Live Aid. I am Freddie Mercury”, a Nuremberg crowd rush of pure fuckin’ love, the best gig ye ever gave to yer reflection in the mirror, yer all alone and shittin’ yerself, a stab of the fear, but ye mange to pull yerself back into a pub sized gig, yer listenin’’ to Howlin’ Wolf, built for comfort, “300 Pounds of Joy”, it’s Walters in Dún Laoghaire and ye command the room, ye’ll see everyone ye knew there when ye were young and they’ll love ye, ye’ll feel Savoy 1 screen stretched, everythin’ about ye will feel epic, it’s the maddest rush.

    I, like, became Marley in Dalymount an’ I seen meself singin’ as Marley to me younger self and the German bird that gave me the earring, fuckin’ multiple identity trippin’

    The come down from these is smoother than you’d than ye’d think, like a class of farewell tour, a “for one night only” vibe, ye’ll see posters for yerself again but they’re smaller, ye’ll be back to playin’ Whelans, but it’ll be a good crowd, when ye come round ye’ll have forgetten all the interviews ye gave but ye’ll know ye did give them,

    ye won’t even have a ticket stub to one of yer own gigs.

    The rest of the gear I got is natural, herbs and shrooms, Inca gear, it’s not really party gear, it’s all about foliage and mad ancestral voices,

    These first two herbs work in seconds, they both wreck yer sense of time, one makes nine hours seem like it’s just two minutes that’s passed and the other stretches two minutes into what seems like nine fuckin’ hours, so, you choose dependin’ on how yer fixed for time, both have the same immediate effect of ye seein’ foliage growin’ on yer walls, it’s Amazonian, the green is so deep ye could swim in it.

    The Shrooms are ancestral though, I got an intense Ogham Stone vibe off them, like I was rubbin’ my hand up one of them and understandin’ this 8th century braille that was chipped into them by some mad mason monk years back before, like when ye know some of the Brehon Laws were still standing, I felt like a kind of gutter with all this mythology streamin’ through me, playin’ me Bothy Band and me Ó Riada sa Gaiety albums backwards and hearin’ messages from The Tuatha, ancient secrets that would make Fatima blush, d’ye get me, I had some experience of knowledge, somethin’ unbroken, like I was totally plugged in to the whole meaning of shit, like, I saw through it all, connected it all up, wrote a new fuckin’ alphabet and found a story way out of it all, I was it all, I had Prophet deliriums, I sweated two languages and learned a third, I tied myself to a post and crawled through centuries to tell people what I’d learned , the further I went the less I remembered until I had no idea where I was or what I was doin’ and I’d forgottin’ what I was supposed to tell them and they didn’t like me for that.

    Ye just don’t know what portals the shrooms are goin’ to open up for ye Gibbo.

    Are ye with me Gibbo?

    So, what’s it goin’ to be? A bit of herb and nine hours of Kittser?

    A mad one or a quiet one?

    You tell me.

  • Unforgettable Year: October 2020

    The Irish winter came early in October with another lockdown, to the disappointment of Billy O Hanluain:

    Lockdown measures remind me of the prescription of anti-depressants and other psychiatric medicines. They are both harsh, and both are administered in response to a moment of crisis; both often have severe side effects, which in time often obscure the initial malady that required their prescription.

    Frank Armstrong, meanwhile, recalling Fintan O’Toole’s earlier criticism of NPHET’s ‘top-down, command-and-control approach’, called for a new approach:

    It is high time we re-examined how the government is being advised to bring the population to the promised land of ‘living with the virus.’ At this stage other forms of advice should be sought. Presumably the government is already receiving significant inputs from the business sector, but other important viewpoints are not part of the conversation.

    Dr Billy Ralph was even more critical of the damage that had been done to the fabric of Irish society over the course of the pandemic:

    Policies were adopted by an unelected government on the erroneous advice of experts listening to other experts, who predicted an enormous death toll from Covid-19 that has not come about anywhere on the globe. These same experts are now doubling down on initial errors and inflicting incalculable harm on the delicate fabric of society.

    Image (c) Barry Delaney.

    Meanwhile, prompted by warnings from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that 85,000 could die over the course of the pandemic photographer Barry Delaney revealed the grim foreboding he felt back in March:

    The thing to watch for was the breathlessness I had heard. This was what caused the dangerous pneumonia. On the Saturday night I went to bed early alone, and suddenly had problems breathing. It being Saturday I could not disturb my Doctor, nor did I want an ambulance arriving to take me to quarantine in hospital, where I’d be met by Hazmat-clad Doctors and become Patient No. 3. Laid low by fear and shortness of breath I could not sleep. By 5am I made a decision to complete my final book, Americans Anonymous and get my things in order in case this was it.

    This proved a false alarm, but it gave way to a period of creative impotence in his photographic practice:

    As lockdown eased more and more people descended to summer in Dun Laoghaire around the Forty Foot. To swim, to escape, to even have fun in our new Covid world.

    Gradually I began to photograph this migration, at first people were cautious, masked, socially distancing on the newly opened beach, but as May turned to July people began to summer properly. The beaches became crowded, like normal, not the new normal; no one wore masks. The virus didn’t spread outdoors, or so we believed.

    Image (c) Barry Delaney

    Classicist Ronan Sheehan, meanwhile, drew attention to the etymology of the terms in common use during the pandemic:

    Epidemic: from Greek ἐπί epi ‘upon or above’ and δῆμος demos ‘people.’

    Pandemic: from Greek πᾶν, pan, ‘all’ and δῆμος, demos, ‘people.’

    Virus: from Latin ‘poison, slime, venom.’

    Vaccine: from the Lain ‘vacca,’ meaning cow, a named conferred by Louis Pasteur in honour of Edward Jenner who pioneered the concept by using cowpox to inoculate (mid-15c., ‘implant a bud into a plant,’ from Latin inoculatus, past participle of inoculare ‘graft in, implant a bud or eye of one plant into another,’) against smallpox.

    Exponential: from Latin exponere ‘put forth.’

    David Langwallner continued his Public Intellectual Series with an account of the English radical historian E. P. Thompson:

    His lasting contribution is the seminal The Making Of The English Working Class (1980), possibly the greatest work of history of the twentieth century that emphasised a new form of bottom-up history, related to the subaltern history that was emerging at the same time in former colonial societies.

    In another article Langwallner also discussed Amy Coney Barrett and ‘Originalism’

    We have entered a dark era dominated by the religious right, involving literal and historical interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. A return to eighteenth century values is upon us, including the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament, neglecting to remember that Thomas Jefferson was a deist, if that. Let’s not forget that the United States required a Civil War to end the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery that was not even mentioned in that document, apart from in the three-fifths clause that represented a African-American slaves as three-fifths of a white person for electoral purposes, in order to maintain a balance between slave and non-slave owning states.

    We received two submissions from underwater photographer Daniel McAuley that month, the first featured shipwrecks, which become reefs:

    With the combination of a long history of maritime traffic and often quite ferocious seas, it comes as no surprise that the Irish coastline is strewn with shipwrecks, many of which date back hundreds of years. Each one provides a fascinating porthole on a bygone age, telling stories that are often of historical significance, as well as allowing divers a chance to encounter what are often quite intriguing new environments for marine life.

    The next introduced us to the seals living along the Irish coastline, now threatened by fishermen disturbed by a competitor as over-fishing reduced catches.

    The playful nature of seals reminds any snorkeler of a dog looking for affection from its owner. So listening to news stories where people are saying the best solution to the problems afflicting the fishing community is to take a high powered rifle to these playful creatures filled me with rage and frustration around the management of our coast, and what the future holds for it.

    Musician of the Month for October Fergus Kelly drew inspiration from a Fine Art background:

    I’ve been passionate about music from an early age, and my love of the post-punk spirit of DIY and experimentation found a crossover with the further reaches of sonic exploration coming from the Fine Art approaches to sound as a sculptural medium. I then discovered improvised music and was smitten. The possibilities just seemed wide open. There was a directness and a simplicity that was really appealing. It was also a much quicker route to producing music by sidestepping years of training. Of course, it’s not just musical ability you bring to the table, it’s imagination and intelligence too.

    By DonkeyHotey – Donald Trump – Caricature, CC BY-SA 2.0.

    In poetry Kevin Higgins appears to have been inspired by the forthcoming elections:

    A barrel of industrial waste poured into a suit
    donated by a casino owner who knows people
    with a tangerine tea towel tossed strategically on top
    because it was the only available metaphor for hair
    was running for re-election as CEO of South Canadia
    against an old coat with holes in it.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    While Ernest Hilbert mused on ‘Models, slender and famished as cheetahs,’:

    The bathroom’s OUT OF ORDER. Sewage seeps
    Into the restaurant. The manager’s
    Frantic, alone today. The line’s

    Become a mob. A voice from an SUV
    Barks at the drive-through speaker. In the back,
    Children cheer a whirl of color on a screen.

    I feel the boredom underneath the beauty.
    It’s weird, and getting desperate these days.
    In auction rooms, the arms go up. And . . . sold.

    The next exquisite investment’s on the block.
    The views—the hills, the seas—are still pristine for those
    Who can afford the heights. Who’s this beauty for?

    Beauty’s boring. I do go on and on,
    Don’t I? Oh, you have a nosebleed.
    Here, drip some in my drink. See this?

    Flick this switch. Now listen. Someone will scream.

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020

    Unforgettable Year: April 2020

    Unforgettable Year: May 2020

    Unforgettable Year: June 2020

    Unforgettable Year: July 2020

    Unforgettable Year: August 2020

    Unforgettable Year: September 2020

  • Unforgettable Year: April 2020

    April is generally associated with fresh flowers and cooling rain showers. It is also the dreaded deadline to file taxes. Whether you were enjoying the foliage or sitting down to calculate your tax refund, I think we can all agree that April was particularly cruel this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

    That month Frank Armstrong examined the underlying conditions exacerbating the pandemic in most Western countries:

    The dangers posed by this outbreak, and future ones that nature will throw at us, require a thorough reappraisal of public health priorities. Medical systems in advanced Western countries – especially those dominated by the private sector – tend to prioritise treatment of the symptoms of the main non-contagious diseases. We ‘live’ with cancer and heart disease as opposed to addressing multifarious lifestyle causes, which the virus is now preying on.

    As Boris Johnson’s predicament underlines, anyone is susceptible to Covid-19, but chances of exposure – without recklessly ignoring medical advice – are often determined by social class, which intersects with lower life expectancy already.

    NGO worker Justin Frewen drew on his experience of the Ebola epidemic in Guinea. He recognised that ‘the potential onward transmission of Covid-19 is far greater than for Ebola, as it does not require direct physical contact with the carrier of the virus.’ By that stage, however, it seems it could not ‘be transmitted through the air directly which would greatly increase its range and ease of transmission.’

    Frewen also recalled the failures of the WHO during the Ebola epidemic, and speculated as to whether the organisation had been too slow, again, in controlling the outbreak.

    Meanwhile a pandemic doctor was steeling himself to the arrival of the grim reaper:

    By recognising what death is we recognise what life is. That is maybe why this feels like such a moment of quickening. Death has come knocking at our doors and we are forced to open and acknowledge him. The door will close again, but the collective memory will remain, and when the pandemic is over this may help us to invest life with more meaning.

    Another pandemic doctor surveyed the chaos in Ireland’s care homes, in an article that was subsequently republished on the state broadcaster RTÉ’s website:

    Last I saw her, rendered unrecognisable behind sheets of dehumanising plastic, she clutched at my hand with her failing limbs and begged me not to leave. But in every room, each now unadorned with the usual ersatz trappings of home and identity one finds in nursing homes – photographs, homespun blankets, love letters from grandchildren – fellow residents lie awaiting their rushed assessments. Oxygen saturations, pulse and respiratory rate, a survey of existing co-morbidities, and finally resuscitation and transfer status to be revisited and revised: who might possibly be saved by hospital transfer, and whose last comfort would be the inevitable cocktail of morphine and midazolam, slipped quietly under the skin at intervals until death arrives.

    The pandemic created an enormous burden on the finances of most European States. By April according to Kyran FitzGerald the E.U. was teetering on the brink:

    Across Europe, national Governments have moved to tackle the crisis by propping up incomes. Northern European states tend to have efficient bureaucracies and reasonable resilient national balance sheets. But even in places such as prosperous Denmark, there are concerns that many businesses will not reopen after what is increasingly looking like a long shut down.

    The picture in Southern Europe is as mentioned much more bleak. In Italy and Spain, there is a real sense of let down amid the crisis, though better off nations like Germany have latterly moved to show solidarity by sending supplies and flying some patients from Eastern France and northern Italy to their hospitals for treatment.

    Lockdowns…

    Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    The lockdown will live long in cultural imaginations, and as an instrument of government control; its pros and cons will be debated endlessly. We published an account from China, where the policy first emerged by an anonymous correspondent, who saw it as the beginning of another Cultural Revolution.

    I had booked a hotel – but ended up alongside five families living in a large apartment for seven days. Only two of us were allowed outside to buy food – everyone else had to stay inside. Before leaving we were covered head-to-toe, in gloves, face masks and head coverings. On our return we went through elaborate cleaning procedures before re-entering the apartment. We had to remove our ‘outside’ clothing and spray everything with 75% alcohol.

    No cars with registrations from outside the capital city were allowed in. The schools were on holiday and due to return the first week in March but are still closed all over China. Only students doing important exams at the end of term will be allowed to return initially, which hasn’t happened yet.

    Leaving Beijing, I returned to my home city of ****. You are supposed to scan your phone so they can track potential carriers arriving into the city – which I hadn’t, having used a private firm for the airport collection. This meant my car registration didn’t show up on the cameras. So the next day the authorities were in touch to find out how I made it back from the airport.

    Italy was the first European country to adopt the measure, and from Piedmont Silvia Panizza observed how the confinement was diminishing her physical health:

    Our bodies, already weakened by sedentary lifestyles, are becoming weaker, muscle-mass decreasing quickly through lack of exercise. We do what we can, setting up home gyms, doing yoga in our bedrooms, a few push ups in the morning. No running, swimming, no going for walks; hardly breathing in the fresh air, panting, moving, or sweating. I do a little gardening in pots on the balcony, which I hadn’t done before. All of a sudden tomato seeds seemed the most important item on my shopping list during my weekly, stressful visit to the supermarket.

    It was a particularly challenging period for older people who were advised to cocoon in Ireland, another unwelcome neologism from this period. Fergus Armstrong reflected on the experience:

    We can have a gnawing sense that our civilisation got things wrong, that it is being, somehow, punished. A year ago I heard a retreat-giver say that we had lost the ability to read the signs of the times. We had belonged, or thought we belonged, on a planet that although under threat, and although subject to disaster more or less randomly distributed, was broadly on a path of progress, of improvement, even for under-developed regions. Nature mostly provided balance and harmony.

    Modern science reinforces this optimism at the cosmic level. We now know that the total universe that includes our Milky Way as one of nearly a hundred million galaxies has been expanding since the Big Bang. But if the rate of its expansion had been even a millionth of a percent slower, the whole thing would have collapsed, imploded in upon itself. There was fine tuning. Now trust is at issue with a particularly severe jolt for the Western world. It could be said that most of our strategies of coping are in the nature of distraction. To the extent this is so, the underlying unease remains. Call it dis-ease in fact.

    While over in Porto, Brazilian Fellipe Monteiro observed:

    What I, other immigrants, and the Portuguese hope is that we can return to the life we had before, and be able to leave this prison, without bars, that our homes have become. While we try to renew ourselves, the city is still and visibly lacking the energy and joy of the local population.

    What is most intriguing in this situation, at least for me, is that we are trying to reinvent ourselves. For example, I have started to cook a lot more during these days of confinement, learning new recipes, in addition to adapting the house for new activities we never used to do at home, like dancing and exercising.

    Despite everything I believe that together we will overcome this difficulty, which is happening on a a global scale; staying at home admiring the birds and their songs that echo along with an inaudible cry for freedom from the citizens.

    In Sweden, however, a softer approach was being taken to the pandemic, the merits of which, or otherwise, are also still being fiercely debated. A correspondent based there revealed the philosophy underpinning the policy:

    The Swedish approach to the Covid-19 pandemic is a sign of underlying differences in how they understand morality in the public sphere, and how they relate with each other: this comes from a more utilitarian perspective.

    Utilitarianism has earned a bad reputations as it has been incorrectly conflated with crude capitalism, when it is really about taking peoples’ wellbeing seriously, or ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ As Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mills understood it, utilitarianism is extremely equalitarian .

    Notably, the Swedish government has taken the advice of moral philosophers who come from a moral utilitarian perspective. The core difference between their approach and what we are seeing for the most part elsewhere is they attempt to avoid an understandable reaction to save lives immediately. They put aside an emotional response and consider the future consequences.

    Also, across the water in the United States, Bull Moose was typically bullish about opening up, in a dispatch from Atlanta:

    What the hell? Most people in the U.S. appear to be freaking out about Georgia ending its lockdown before anyone else. Even Trump weighed in, saying he disagreed with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. As we stand, restaurants here opened yesterday, as have bowling alleys, parks, nail salons and other facilities. The State also just declared its one thousandth death from COVID-19.

    On April 2nd Kemp admitted that he didn’t know that this coronavirus could spread asymptomatically, something the world knew since late January. Kemp may be an idiot, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong to re-open Georgia’s economy. With all respect to those who have lost loved ones or suffered from a bout, it’s time collectively we get back to our new normality.

    Earth Day

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    April 22nd marked the fiftieth anniversary or Earth Day, and leading environmental writer John Gibbons recalled how this had been closely followed by the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon in 1972, along with a host of other key environmental protection legislation, writing:

    Viewed through the political prism of today’s deeply dysfunctional and hyper-partisan U.S. politics, it seems almost quaint to recall a time when people, irrespective of their politics, religion or skin colour, broadly agreed that eliminating deadly toxins from the air that they breathed and the water that their children drank was a good idea.

    Fifty years later, the ideologically toxic Trump regime is busily dismantling large chunks of the progressive regulatory framework that the actions of the U.S. environmental movement ushered into being in 1970. Most sane people think it’s probably a bad idea to allow high levels of mercury, a potent and irreversible neurotoxin, to be released into the air from coal-burning plants.

    The Public Intellectual Series continued with assessment by David Langwallner of John Gray, the U.K.’s leading intellectual, and Jonathan Sumption the former U.K. Supreme Court judge who became an outspoken critic of lockdowns, and a defender of civil liberties first formulated in England in the Magna Carta (pictured above).

    Meanwhile Musician of the Month Niwel Tsumbu asserted the universality of music:

    It is very strange for me to hear people talk about pure ‘African Music’ that doesn’t exist – unless you go back thousands of years before humans started roaming around the globe. This concept is simply not true, and frankly, it drives me crazy when people, especially African musicians who use equal-tempered tuning with Western instruments, say so.

    We also published the lyrics of the song ‘Iguatu’ by Bartholomew Ryan:

    I sauntered up to the sertão
    in the northeast to a town called Iguatu
    to find the river
    where my cousin drowned in 1973
    the name of the river was the Jaguaribe
    they called it the dry river
    but as his sister Joan said –
    ‘there was nothing dry about it that day.’

    One surprisingly popular article explored how the Longford town of Ballinallee featured in the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ with a suggestion that it may have come about after a night Dylan spent in the company of fellow bard Shane MacGowan.

    Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too,
    The flowers are dyin’ like all things do,
    Follow me close, I’m going to Ballinalee,
    I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me.

    Uluc Ali Kilic in his studio in Istanbul. Daniele Idini

    Artist of the month was the extraordinary Uluc Ali Kilic from Turkey:

    My subject-matter is often the harm and destruction humanity inflicts on its surroundings, or other traumatic issues occurring in our time, such as the refugee crisis and homelessness. I try to make long-lasting artworks using plastic material which isn’t biodegradable in nature. Likewise, these artworks aim to last long in any viewers’ consciousness.

    In fiction there was the unmistakable style of Ilsa Monique Carter in Dumaine:

    Glacial and dark by design, her house inhaled the heat if by the gliding open of a sliding glass door, its hermetic seal was compromised. And like a large lung, the house then exhaled a quixotic draft of cooler air, which carried me with it out on to the balcony. Before she’d bolted the door behind me, no matter how briskly, and believe me she was… The sweet swelter had swallowed me whole.

    While Gary Grace brought us to the chaotic streets of Dublin to life after a night out in ‘A Slice’:

    Robbie was in what his friends referred to as “swaying tree mode”. This meant the slender greying hipster was pissed, his eyes barely open, and not engaging with anyone but moving slowly side to side, mouthing the lyrics to a song that wasn’t playing.

    There was poetry in English and his native Romanian from Radu Vancu.

    As well as a series of poems to mark Holy Week, including:

    A Corona Sonnet
    by Paul Curran

    With no less haste than the crisis deserves,
    All faces one mask of consternation,
    We’ve learnt, through conversing in spikes and curves,
    This virus respects no race or nation.
    Virgil could not have foreseen the Tiber
    Would fill so fast with the fallen of Rome,
    Hospitals built with sinew and fibre,
    Children in hiding, on their own, at home.
    His toll’s still rising, but Death, if he could,
    Would make no attempt to keep numbers down;
    Warm April predicates wearing no hood,
    His scythe keenly sharpened shines like his crown.
    Unfasten quick this dead pathogen’s trick
    Lest lists of the late outnumber the quick.

    And another from Billy O Hanluain:

    Stock Pile On Hope

    Walk down the bare,
    trembling aisles of your
    self. Everything dispensible
    is now after its Best Before.
    Pass by the Two for One indulgences
    of fear and doubt. Shelves stripped
    of the superfluous. The tattered packaging
    of novelties that amused us
    fade behind their
    spent Use By dates. Remembered now
    as infatuations bought to distract us.
    Is it time to close shop?
    Turn out the lights?
    Time for the din and dirge of shutters?
    We are open twenty four hours
    and we must never close.
    No matter the Feast Day.
    The Plague or The Hour.
    Turn toward that aisle within,
    so often passed in the hurry
    of what seemed to matter
    there you will find the plenty that
    always was and will be.
    Load your cart, fill your bags,
    weigh your trolley down.
    Stock pile on hope!

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020

  • Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Here begins our journey back through the #unforgettableyear of 2020…

    The drone-strike assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January 3rd, 2020 seems a long time ago now, but to our U.S. columnist Bull Moose it suggested a new phase in U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Who knows what would have happened in that region during an election year, if a certain respiratory pathogen hadn’t risen to such prominence.

    Paul Hennessy/Alamy

    January’s Musician of the Month Hilary Woods also appears to be speaking of a different age, when live music was still to be found in Ireland.

    In October last, I was at a Russian Circles gig in Galway. It gave me a much needed stark reminder of the power of live sound: washing over me, enveloping, reverberating my insides, shaking me out of an internal slumber. Requiring a medium to travel, the body is a conductor for sound. Filtering vibrations moving through it. Sound percolating in time through tissue and sinew, connecting, evading, resonating, confronting, decoding, making pliable.

    I emerged from the show a renewed being: sensorially realigned, perceiving things afresh, and happy I made the effort to go. As Rumi says, ‘whatever purifies you is the right path’.

    Hilary Woods, by the photographer Joshua James Wright.

    Elsewhere Billy O’Hanluain seemed to have been preparing us for the joys of working from home, surrounding by unfinished tasks. ‘Procrastination is a very cunning mistress.’ he wrote, ‘She masquerades so expertly at being a muse; seducing me with an ever expanding array of tantalizing tasks that acquire greater urgency with her every whisper and sensual suggestion.’

    On Procrastination

    And if it was a form of escapism you were after last January, Desmond O’Brien’s account of his psilocybin treatment for depression and anxiety would have been the best medicine. During the trip he had the unmistakable feeling that love is the glue holding us together.

    On a less optimistic note, Frank Armstrong explored how increasing news fatigue had been orchestrated by the likes of Steve Bannon, who targeted followers of Jordan Peterson, who has earned the dubious distinction of being the first internet intellectual.

    Image by Gage Skidmore.

    Among the most important stories we published last year was Fellipe Lopes’s heart-rending account of the rapidly deteriorating conditions for refugees in Camp Moria, Lesbos in Greece. He described murder and rape, but also a strong sense of community.

    The-Smokescreen-of-Moira-Lesbos-December-2020
    The Smokescreen of Moria, Lesbos, December 2020

    Meanwhile, featured artist Keshet Zur aspired to be a photographer but felt heartbrake in the digital era, now she engages with nature and social inclusion through Expressive Art Therapy.

    Keshet Zur

    Bob Quinn’s memoir continued with an account from the 1950s of teaching English in Pforzheim, Germany, where a student Trudie falls for his teaching charms

    David Langwallner also continued his public intellectual series with an account of the life and times of Noam Chomsky, with reference to his works Manufacturing Consent, Public Intellectual, Media Control, Henry Kissinger, George Orwell.

    Next there was Frank Armstrong’s Late Risers’ Manifesto 2020, in which he quoted the late great David Graeber to the effect that ‘The real question is how to ratchet down a bit more toward a society where people can live more by working less.’ Graeber further opined that the non-working poor may be ‘pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-annihilation.’

    In fiction, Siberian Blue by Mick Sobyanin includes childhood memories of Prokopyevsk, Siberia inside the Soviet Union, dating from 1974, including insights into prevailing Russian attitudes towards Volga Germans.

    Lastly we had a satirical poem from the irrepressible Kevin Higgins irreverently portraying the grant application process.

     

  • Nobody told me there’d be days like these

    Lockdown measures remind me of the prescription of anti-depressants and other psychiatric medicines. They are both harsh, and both are administered in response to a moment of crisis; both often have severe side effects, which in time often obscure the initial malady that required their prescription.

    Anti-depressants can be beneficial in stabilizing a patient and alleviating the most distressing symptoms of whatever underlying trauma caused them to present to a doctor in the first place. The logic of medication should be that once a certain stability has been achieved, a less medicinal and more holistic approach should be available to the patient including intensive psycho-therapy, talking therapy and most crucially for any patient, being properly listened to.

    This, unfortunately, is what so rarely happens with cases of depression. The initial period of chemically enabled stability is seen as progress, and the primary causes of trauma remain unacknowledged, or only partially addressed.

    While the trauma remains essentially untreated, the patient will find himself having his doses upped and reduced, his prescription swapped and changed, leading to him suffering a range of side effects which take centre stage in the narrative of his condition. We become transfixed by the shadow but not the object that casts it.

    It is not very different to what we are now experiencing with Covid-19 and our second lockdown. Lockdown is the strongest non-pharmaceutical intervention available. It is the equivalent of ECT bolted through every nerve end of our society. One doesn’t have to look hard to see its devastating side effects.

    Like our patient, who hoped that his medically induced stability might create an environment benign and supportive enough to allow him properly to address what lay at the root of his problem. Our first and very lengthy period of lockdown should have been used to confront and mend some of the systemic flaws in our health system.

    For decades we have had a two-tier system obscenely tilted in favour of those with private medical insurance. Almost 700,000 people were waiting on a hospital appointment as of the end of May.

    We have also out-sourced the care of our most vulnerable to privately run ‘Care Homes’ that are mostly staffed by poorly paid workers. The final years of so many of our parents’ lives, and in time our own, is a for-profit-business. There’s great money to be made in dying.

    I am sure that I am not alone in feeling like a child eavesdropping on a parental row – leaning over the bannister upstairs to hear what’s being shouted in the kitchen below – when it comes to the bickering and blaming between NPHET and the government.

    It’s a reckless side show of hopeless administration and even worse leadership. There have been failures in testing, track and trace, and screening at ports and airports. It has just been reported that the UCD lab is to suspend all Covid-19 testing over two weekends due to staffing issues.

    A mere 23 ICU beds have been added since the pandemic began, despite Ireland having the second lowest number per capita in the European Union when we entered the crisis.

    Fix what is broken and we might have a better tool for confronting the virus.

    Now we are patronized with talk about ‘behaving well,’ and maybe being able to enjoy Christmas. We were encouraged to come out and clap overworked medical staff rather than see them receive an immediate increase in salary, something which the government lost no time in awarding themselves, just as hundreds of thousands adjusted to living on €350 or less a week.

    Covid-19 has held an unflinching lens to the structural inequalities in our country. Those who can, work from home, their salaries largely unaffected. Mainstream radio and print media run nauseating life style features about how much money people are saving, while another grubbier realty is far closer to the truth, that hundreds of thousands of workers are down many thousands of euros since March 13th.

    We are a great country for cake sales and 5k sponsored fun runs, but not so good at drawing a line in the proverbial sand and saying enough is enough. We acquiesce too much, and are now complicit in our predicament.

    Did anyone else find an eerie symmetry – a dark poetry – to how on the very day we went into a second lockdown, our government voted to seal the Tuam Mother and Bay Home files for thirty years?

    As we lock down now once again, we seem to be burying our past, perpetuating the shame, punishing again those who suffered in denying them light and justice. We live in the strangest and most disturbing times.

    Nobody told me there’d be days like these.