It’s easy to despair in the face of our species’ (homo sapiens: ‘wise man’) apparent unwillingness to recognise environmental constraints. The facts of life on planet Earth have been laid bare to most of us by now. We cannot go on consuming as many of us do in the West indefinitely, especially with populations in developing countries increasingly adopting our lifestyles.
Denial is the default, including by chipping away at the edges of an incontrovertible proposition that humans are out of balance with nature; but also in terms of how we satisfy our desires individually – sure a little more won’t do any harm. There is always some excuse or other available to avoid taking responsibility for our actions.
Pope Francis previously described a dysfunctional relationship with Mother Earth:
This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.
Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine ought to bring this serious imbalance home to us. Underlying the aggressive posturing in response – and crazed talk of no-fly zones that could precipitate nuclear war – is a hard-nosed recognition that European countries will continue to purchase oil and gas from Russia. So, how should conscientious individuals respond to the impasse?
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement comes to mind: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ In moments of crises holding back from holding forth is often appropriate.
The reflection required is also facilitated by viewing Bob Quinn’s short (16 minutes, 48 seconds) film ‘Bog Graffiti’, which mostly wordlessly documents the co-existence of his art work and nature on land he has regenerated in Conemara. The unspoken context is climate change. Another of the old masters, pioneering electronic music composer Roger Doyle provides a score that artfully integrates the elements.
Art in nature in Bog Grafitti.
Bob Quinn explained the concerns animating the film in a 2019 blog post:
The desertification of the Sahara happened suddenly.
Six thousand years ago northern Africa had as temperate a climate as Europe, had two lakes as big as Munster. It was fertile enough to support a settled agricultural population and their gods. There were fauna too, antelope, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, crocodile roaming as freely as the human animals.
Over a couple of centuries – the blink of a geologist’s eye, according to a computer simulation (Milutin Milankovic Medal, 2005) – a combination of local vegetative and atmospheric changes in the area (recorded in deep land and sea cores) caused a local climate event – the Sahara event.
It should not surprise us. During another of this planet’s many interglacial warming periods , alligators thrived at the north pole; there are fossils to prove it.
A blindspot of our species is that we confuse weather with climate. Humans do not cause destructive climate events; we accelerate and intensify their frequency. Unexpected change follows unregulated ‘progress’: our cars, our holiday flights, our excessive consumption.
Present climate change is, like politics, global but people experience it in local terms: a drought in one place, a tsunami in another, forest fires here and there. Tough luck on poor people, faraway. It couldn’t happen here?
Alas, homo sapiens is all the one, seven billion of us, all on the same tiny planet, as voracious and unthinking as mice sailing on a ship of cheese.
The film puts on a display of the natural world, from bees to butterflies, in all its glory, and gore. A poignant moment is the sight of a bat writhing in agony in a pool of cooking oil. At least we are a little more aware now that the bat may yet have its revenge, over humankind at least.
A bat fails to recover its flight in ‘Bog Grafitti’.
Filmed in 2019 at a point when – prompted by a certain teenager from Sweden – many of us were facing up to the challenge of climate change, it is appropriate perhaps that the scenes in the film are seen through the eyes of a young girl – Bob Quinn’s granddaughter Sasha May Quinn. She seems destined to inherit this Garden of Eden, but as we see in the film, storms are moving in – interspersed with scenes of motor cars, cattle marts and aeroplanes demonstrating the excesses of consumption. It begs the question: what will remain for the generation to come?
Bog Graffiti is the work of a master craftsman teaching us what we know already in our hearts but generally fail to acknowledge in our conscious actions. The film ends with the Latin motto: ars longis, vita brevis ‘skilfulness takes time and life is short,’ which originates in a Greek text, Aphorismi written by the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates.
Appropriately perhaps, the lines following from that text state: ‘The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.‘ Thus, art such as Bob Quinn’s can impart a lesson, but it remains to be seen whether we take this on board in our actions and deeds.
Oscar Wilde said that the tragedy of being old is that one is still young.
I am eighty-six, going on nineteen. Is this a record?
I’ve been pruning and wood carving with my chainsaw for years. There is no shortage of wood from the trees that I planted thirty years ago. The resultant grotesque heads are visible all around my garden (all wearing face masks – you must keep a sense of humour). Now they mock me.
In the week before Christmas I took out my chain saw to clear away two full-grown pine trees that had fallen on our oil tank.
Everything went well until I became ambitious. For the first time, instead of placing the machine on the ground with my foot on it, I tried to start it as they do in the movies: hold the machine in my left hand, push it down while pulling up on the starter with the right hand. That’s what the pros do. I had never tried it before.
The result was dramatic. There was a sharp crunch in my left shoulder, plus pins and needles in my hand. A month later that is still my painful condition.
On that day before Christmas I admitted for the first time that I’m old and it got me thinking about the disparities between age and youth.
Demographically speaking, we oldies will soon outnumber youngsters. This is because young females are postponing reproduction until their mid-thirties. The costs of childcare and housing are prohibitive, there is a lack of confidence in the future. Also, many want an independent career. It’s a first world scenario.
Women traditionally reproduced at about 25 years of age. Now it’s their mid-thirties and two kids are the ideal. However, since 1981 the worldwide replacement rate for us humans is down to 1.58 kids per woman. Ultimately that is not enough to prevent the extinction of the race.
Demographics is destiny
Thanks to modern medicine we superannuated oldies will soon outnumber fit young workers; the latter group’s taxes keep our health service going. We non-taxpayers (if you overlook VAT) will soon consume over 50% of health costs.
Will this trend continue? Probably. The young don’t vote enough. The seniors vote early and sometimes often. Governments know that older voters tend towards the status quo and shape their manifestos accordingly. This ensures that conservative policies preserve existing evils as distinct from liberal policies which wish to replace such evils with others. In the end the government always wins.
We used to worry about overpopulation in the world; now we are in reverse gear, or at least the wealthy West is. I’ve cooperated in the production of six children, so I can’t really be blamed.
But the centre cannot hold.
The gaps in the supply services, witnessed by the shortage of truck drivers during the pandemic, are a symptom of the new malaise. Older skilled workers are retiring with few to take their place. Employers are desperate for employees.
Don’t worry, I hear, the immigrants will eventually make up the numbers. Already they are the prime carers – for us, the oldies! Now a world of opportunity is there for immigrants (and about time too). Instead of denigrating them, fighting to keep them out, we will have to compete for their services, especially the skilled tradesmen.
How many of us can fix a puncture, replace a fuse, stop a leak, change a tyre, do any of the tasks that were once second nature to my generation? Very few. We have all become a dysfunctional, middle-class burden on the young and fit. Have we passed on these humble skills? No, the young have been too absorbed in their screens to learn such mundane tasks. Now we don’t repair; we replace with newer models which are programmed to break down after the guarantee expires. Thanks to the advertising industry the world of the consumer is chasing its tail. Everybody knows.
Is this an argument for despair? Not at all. Some oldies have opted for the Zurich solution but most of us will cling on desperately to the last vestiges of our functionality.
Unless euthanasia and trips to Zurich become mandatory…
Featured Images: Carvings by Boby Quinn: ‘De Profundis’; ‘After Brancusi’; ‘Me Worry’.
Unaware of the roaring cataract ahead, a small boy splashes in the dark river named Dodder, cheap buoyancy aids on his arms, flailing them in the manner called the dog’s paddle, eyes and mouth squeezed shut, neck stretched to keep his head above the surface. I shout a warning, which he must hear because he squints one eye open, manages an uncertain glance at me before he drops in slow motion towards the froth and blackness below, not screaming. An unseen piano makes clichéd sounds in the background and this musack is the main element that irritates me awake. I already know that all the children are safe in their beds, and this can only be a cheap movie scenario in which I am the small boy.
Even my nightmares are cinematic clichés, retribution for spending most of my life trying to avoid them. It’s a bit late for me to invent a new scenario in which life itself might be a dream, the music not potently cheap, the mise-en-scène not too close to the bone; too late to wake up and start all over again. Best to count my blessings and face the end of my ninth decade with equanimity.
Not much older than me, my island home has survived the past hundred, vaguely independent years before falling over the economic cliff. Despite having lived the greater part of my life in a contented region called Conamara in the waste of Ireland, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that my personal and cultural identity are also falling to bits.
My fellow-citizens and I have shape-shifted from being the credulous members of an imperial Roman Church, then being shanghaied as reluctant subjects of the British Empire, finally citizens of an embryonic European Empire, which looks like ending up as the Fourth Reich. But unconsciously we are, and have been for many years, carriers of the most recent imperial virus, this time North American. Now, as Hubert Butler predicted many years ago, ‘…there is nothing but Anglo-American culture to unite us.’
In this chameleon state we exist, of course, less in the literal sense than imaginatively which, in the Irish psyche, certainly in mine, tends to be more real. Our new masters’ films – pardon me, movies – and TV shows have filled our waking hours and daydreams.
Not many years ago I counted ninety cinema screens in Dublin in which not a single Irish film was to be seen. The bulk were American. Although I now require subtitles for the more recent manifestations of their staccato, one-phrase dialogue I have not quite mastered the Tarantino fashion of peppering my scripts with four letter expletives. Must try harder.
The empire’s audio-visual avalanche has forged mine, my childrens’ and my grandchildrens’ dialects and tastes. We of an older generation cannot be excused; Jack Nicholson was for long my ideal actor and Humphrey Bogart taught me to smoke fifty years ago.
It should not upset me that my grandchildren prefer Rap to O’Riada. The truths of the three Williams – Faulkner, Saroyan and Goulding – were once gospel to me. American playwrights Arthur Miller and Edward Albee were in my mind long before Brian Friel became my favourite.
We are now fortunate to speak the American dialect of English because we need go no more with our bundles on our shoulders to Philadelphia in the morning. Philadelphia has come to us in the form of Google, Facebook, Pfizer, Hewlett-Packard and the rest of the multinationals, which are now the core of our island’s economic wellbeing as well as a reminder of our anxious dependency.
The fact that up to seventy five percent of the resident I.T. multinational employees are non-Irish, while four hundred thousand of our youngest and brightest have in the last five years slipped quietly away only confuses the matter, but must not be brooded over. At least the multinational surveillance company (SGS) from which I must beg renewal of my driving license is harmlessly Swiss.
Apart from the last exception, our cultural credentials are impeccable. If forty million United Statesians are deluded enough to call themselves Irish we must be entitled to return the compliment and claim documentation as Yankee Doodle Dandies. Unfortunately the US immigration authorities now screen us potential emigrants at source, literally on our native soil in Shannon airport. As Peter Fallon urged – and I know very well I am retooling his context – in a recent poem:
Say never again to The Wild Irish Rover,
No more to The Minstrel Boy.
Give us back our sons and daughters,
Say that Ireland is over.
How fragile our illusions of sovereignity have been, how transformed has been this trading post in the last century, since a teenager named James Toner – along with 200,000 other Irishmen who needed a job – ran away from his home in Dublin to join the British Army. As a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps young James’ task was to collect the body parts of his fellow youths killed among the bloomin’ roses in Picardy. He survived the horror and grew up to be my uncle Jim.
I just looked him up in the British Military Archives.
Conferment of the D.C.M. gallantry award was announced in the London Gazette (1920) and accompanied by a citation:
Award Details: 61586 Pte. J. Toner. During the period 17th September to 11th November, 1918, while acting as a bearer, particularly at the capture of Bohain. There being a congestion of wounded, he repeatedly led forward squads of bearers over very difficult country during the night and greatly assisted in the evacuation of them.
This means that Jim did something foolhardy, at least under cover of night, in the midst of a carnage that was never revealed to us, his nieces and nephews.
Back in Dublin with a small war pension, Jim married, begat no children and endured Irish patriotic resentment at his fighting for the Old Enemy. Even his brother-in law disapproved of him. When my father made the drawing of four-year-old me, Jim was not impressed. He acidly pronounced: “The boy may be alright, but he has the head of a bloody rogue.”
I overheard that remark and worried about it. Surely he was joking? Or was he envious because he had no children himself? I now surmise that it was general bitterness because nobody, especially not my father, wanted to hear about the horrors Jim had witnessed in France. He had been informally decreed an Irish traitor in the British army.
Sometime in the 1950s he decided to abandon his golf, at which he was local champion, and his buoyancy aid, whiskey, and put an end to the pain that was identified too late. It is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is applied to the euphemism ‘veteran’. Uncle Jim put an end to his pain with the aid of a gas oven.
There are other associations. When the British army abandoned our sacred soil in 1922, Uncle Jim’s sister Kathleen ran away with her boyfriend, a Tommy named George Thomas.
A possible fatal attraction was the fact that both of their fathers kept pigs; science now says that personal odour is a most powerful sexual signal. I met the ageing lovers in their home at Abingdon, Berkshire in 1964 when Uncle George unexpectedly said to me: “I glory in you, Bob.”
I think he meant that I appeared not to have inherited my father’s prejudices against the English. He was wrong; our parents’ prejudices are lodged in our DNA but, as a form of energy, can happily be redirected at more fitting targets, such as the English Public School system and all their imitators closer to home. Oh, the bitther word!
When World War II (like War Number 1, a civil war between blood brothers, the Germans and the English) came along, one of Uncle George’s sons, Sidney, enlisted as a teenage frogman and acted, at nineteen, as one of those cockleshell heroes who attached limpet mines to enemy ships. He became a hero of mine and survived to produce a pretty daughter named Cathy whom I subsequently persuaded to elope with me briefly to Ireland where we had midnight swims at Killiney beach and were referred to as kissing cousins. Cathy later married a Red Devil, one of those RAF people who put on daring aerial displays.
These connections make me wonder if I am not still a bloody rogue and worse, a fellow-traveller of that suspect class, a West Brit rather than a putative citizen of America.
For a start, I was born in the Pale: Dublin and its environs. My first language was English, albeit in a dialect light years away from the BBC accent, whose Home Service provided most of my childhood listening pleasure; Radio Éireann broadcast only a few hours per day.
My early reading was what we called the comicuts, The Rover, The Hotspur, The Eagle, all published in England. My favourite authors were Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.A. Henty, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, John Wyndham, Leslie Charteris and so forth. Even the Irish language detective story writer Reics Carlo, who was obligatory reading in school, turned out to be English.
But as I grew up I betrayed them all for the likes of Irwin Shaw, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Hemingway, and now I know I’m a virtual Yank. I assure you that this is less a form of ingratiation with the American Chamber of Commerce than one of realisation and resignation. No problemo.
There are more ingredients in this cultural Irish stew.
Among our official heroes, Pádraic Pearse’s father was from Birmingham; James Connolly came from Edinburgh and James Larkin was a Liverpudlian. No wonder I am ambivalent about nationalism, Irish, English and American and still cling to that long-lost cause: socialism.
The last night of the Proms in the Albert Hall disturbs me, with its sea of Union Jacks and Hooray Henrys rendering Land of Hope and Glory – because I am moved by Elgar’s music (although he did not write the lyrics, which are as Kiplingesque and vainglorious as Deutschland Ueber Alles).
When filming American schoolchildren with their hands on heart, reciting the daily oath of allegiance to their flag, I am also uneasy. Indoctrination of the unruly young starts early on that continent but, by contrast, nationalism has in recent years become a vulgar word in Ireland.
How do the British and the Yanks get away with their jingoism? And where, apart from everywhere and nowhere, do we Irish really fit in? To those who, like myself, find all of this disconcerting I say, cop on, get a life, get the message, get over it, get with it, and other such novel and useful imperial edicts. No worries.
Staying for a moment with the phenomenon of British and American nationalism, I wonder if the answer may not be that they were both empires whereas Ireland’s only imperial conquest was spiritual – mainly among the black babies of Africa – and that appears to have been erased by our national amnesia. As very soon must happen to me as, dragging my feet like a reluctant schoolboy, I approach four score and ten, intending that looming watershed to be more an act of defiance than any petty celebration.
On my ninetieth birthday I shall beware of those who say: “You’re looking great, haven’t changed a bit.”
My exact contemporary, the late Ben Barenholtz, a survivor of Naziism and a New Yorker, who produced Coen brothers’ films and gave me a present of a book of all of Cole Porter’s lyrics, told me that he has an ex-friend, a liar who has said exactly the same thing to him every year for the past twenty years.
The astonishing thing about this compliment is that we ancients believe it. We skip and dance down the road until we are forced to pause, whereupon we resemble the silent nun in Elizabeth Jenning’s poem who was breathless with adoration. We oldies, by contrast, have merely run out of breath, full stop, or period, as I should really learn to say.
The truth of the above platitude, ‘yourelookingreathaventchangedabit’ is simply this: we are decommissioned. Joseph MacAnthony has described our aged generation as tourists in the departure lounge. We exist, persist, only in our anecdotage.
Who would have thought that little Riobárd, the boy in the drawing, would survive so long? Certainly not himself, whose life expectancy as a film and TV maker was long ago estimated by an insurance Actuary to be no more than forty five years.
What matter that this little Jackeen has spent more than half his life in the least colonised part of Ireland – the Gaeltacht of Conamara which, paradoxically, he has long known to be spiritually and economically closer to Boston than to Dublin.
Who gives a tinker’s curse that the Jackeen in question, having read so many comments, references, articles, essays, even PhD theses about his minor oeuvres, now dares to give his version of the story? But age confers a protective veneer of immunity, anonymity, even a kind of invisibility on the elderly so one is free to say what one likes.
As Kurt Vonnegut – who in one of his modest communications to me referred to himself as an old fart who smokes Pall Mall – put it: “Old men are obscene and accurate.” We can experience a kind of lightheaded bliss when we notice our fuel gauge moving towards empty and we can offload petty concerns.
The present words are thus an act of memory, which is equally an act of imagination and may be approached academically as sub-Proustian because although my life sentence has been long these sentences are, with a few exceptions, not.
I also possess unlimited memorabilia – photos, letters, diaries, the usual bric-a-brac of a life – which may save me from downright lying. Besides, there are those modest films which constitute aides-memoire and, not least, may be treated as having been personal buoyancy aids, otherwise described as vain aspirations.
I occasionally wonder, as I float towards the brink of the cataract, if I do not exist in some other, gentler person’s nightmare?
My 84-year-old grandmother, widowed, came to live with our family, and took over my bedroom. I was forced to give up the room, to share instead with a sibling.
The old woman was hale and hearty, retained her wits, preserved her down to earth assessment of life, had referred to her late, much loved husband – my favourite male relation – as ‘the old fool.’ One day she said to me: ‘Ye’re just waiting for me to die, aren’t ye? Well yiz’ll be waiting a long time.’ I was taken aback at her frankness. She died a year later.
When my old friend Dinno was on his deathbed handled matter-of-factly by his ex-nurse wife Oonagh – I asked him what he was thinking of. He said: ‘Gone-ness. I’m wondering what gone-ness will be like,’ and did not need to elaborate. We had understood each other well.
My father roared indignantly on his deathbed in the old Mater hospital. His wife and other children had gone home, reassured that he had survived the first heart attack and would survive until morning. I stayed and was the only witness to his last belligerent protest.
My mother spent her last days carefully organising her own funeral and the disposal of her one asset (a house). She waited only for my return from Canada until, in my presence she removed the oxygen mask from her mouth and stopped gasping for breath.
I am of an age to be intrigued by these quite normal dramas. Love dies. Beauty dies. Everybody and every thing dies. As Woody Allen said: ‘I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’
What he might have meant was: better to lose your mind before your body gives up.
Dementia and altzheimers are tragedy for the nearest and dearest but a blessing for the sufferers because they don’t suffer at all; they are unaware of the impending disaster. What a way to go!
One of my brothers died in that condition. I envied him. One of my sisters died, still worrying about it. Poor thing. Another sister, the eldest in the family, is fortunately still alive. She’s lucky too; has no idea whats going on around her, I think.
The phenomenon is an everyday one and still we wonder at it: In what sense are we alive one day and gone the next, vanished without trace? No body. No soul. All disappeared, remembered briefly, forgotten forever. How extraordinary. Even when we breed frantically, seeking immortality, knowing our seed will also die, we still do it, procreating, making stains on life, producing work, writing, building solid bridges and skyscrapers, empires. All made of dust. Even dinosaurs lived a million years and now are merely known as skeletons.
People invented the idea of heavenly immortality: wishful thinking. They even invented god. We are at heart optimists.
There is no sting in death without consciousness; and nobody knows yet of what precisely that consists of. Fortunately death can be simulated under the surgeons knife until we wake and are reminded by pain of what we have mindlessly endured. Think of that.
Some people choose euthanasia but that’s a sin, we’re warned. It’s a cop out. We should be allowed to enjoy this once in a life experience. It is unique to each of us, just like our birth, to be celebrated as a never-to-be-repeated exercise. We are born astride a grave with, not a silver spoon, but a shovel in our hands.
I once speculated that nobody dies. We are bundles of transformed energy – the frantic impulses of copulation when we are conceived. Food becomes our energy fuel. What happens this energy at the point of death? Energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed like breath into gas, into condensation, into water into ice into steam etc etc. So what happens to us – bundles of energy? My speculation involves the millions and billions of galaxies and further billions of stars in each galaxy. Each of us, I suggest, becomes a twinkling star in the endless infinity of the universe. There is room for everybody out there.
There’s a happy thought. Perish our tiny worries. We are immortal. We just leave our egos behind. And good riddance.
A number of chapters from Bob Quinn’s latest memoir A Monk Manqué, mixing moments of hilarity with profound statements on the state of the world, are available on Cassandra Voices.
