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’.
As evidenced by fossilized pollen, it was once covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, It was green, verdant, populated by antelopes, giraffes, rhinoceros, supporting all life forms including settled human beings. Cave drawings in southern Algeria (Tassili) testify to this lifestyle.
Disaster came in the year 3,440 B.C..
According to carbon-14 dating of cores from the Atlantic coast of Senegal as well as from Lake Koa in Chad, Summer temperatures increased sharply in the Sahara region and precipitation decreased. This event devastated the people and their socio-economic systems. The recently-introduced farming techniques no longer supported life.
It was a case of global warming in a specific place.
According to climate theoretician, Dr. Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institue, the disaster was partially initiated by one of the regular changes in the Earth’s orbit and the tilt of its axis (earth wobble). July happened in January!
The ensuing warming and feedback effects on Vegetation and Atmosphere in this particular area combined to produce a sudden, localised desertification which resulted in the Sahara.
This transition to the Sahara’s present arid climate was not gradual, but occurred in two specific episodes. The first, which was less severe, occurred between 6,700 and 5,500 years ago (4,700 B.C. and 3,500 B.C.). The second, which was brutal, lasted from 2,000 B.C.to 1,600 years ago.
What has this to do with Ireland?
Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne)
Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne), the finest and greatest Megalithic structure (earlier than Stonehenge) in Europe, was built by ‘unknown farmers’ in approx. 3000 B.C.
At the same time the first Egyptian dynasties were founded.
It is my thesis that Newgrange and the Egyptian dynasties were developed by a long-civilised and cultured people whose origins were in the Sahel of North Africa.
Where to?
Once their lifestyle was destroyed, where did the people of the Sahara go? Many escaped northwards to the still fertile coasts of North Africa and eastwards to the Nile. This sudden incursion created extreme pressure on the existing inhabitants of the thin North African coastal littoral. Something had to give. What did they do?
In approx. 3000 B.C. they took to the sea. Their DNA traces (E1b1b1- Y) are to be found in the southern regions of most Mediterranean countries. Far from being a far-fetched idea, a North African Berber DNA haplotype is shared by, among others, people as faraway as the the Pasiegos of Cantabria in Northern Spain and the Saami people of Finland!.
Newgrange in Ireland is the oldest and finest example of a megalithic culture that spread along the Atlantic coast from North Africa to the Baltic.
Newgrange has been dated to 3000 B.C. and is slightly older than the Pyramids of Egypt. It and Ireland’s impressive megalithic heritage were built in about the same period as the desertification of the Sahara. The megalithic culture spread up the Atlantic coasts from North Africa where similar structures proliferate.
Thirty years ago this writer found the equivalent of Newgrange in Larache, Morocco – which was also colonised by Phoenicians after 800 B.C. – and indicates a continuity of Atlantic coastal movement.
Medina of Larache, Morrocco.
The Sea is Key
Professor John T. Koch of the University of Aberystwith wrote the following in Celtic from the West:
No one has taken the possibility of Celtic coming from ‘Hispania’ to the other Celtic countries seriously since we stopped taking Lebor Gabála Érenn seriously, but it is now at least worth pausing to review what it is we think we know that makes that impossible.
Professor Barry Cunliffe (Oxford) co-editor of the same collection of essays, repeats his long-held advocacy of the reality of an Atlantic coastal trading community, active at least as long ago as the Bronze Age – and probably much earlier – along which people moved and shared languages and cultures. The area in question stretches from Scandinavia as far south as Mogador – which was once a Phoenician colony. The sea is, as always, the key to such perspectives. The sea connects, does not divide.
Linguists such as Heinrich Wagner, Pokorny, Orin Gensler, Vennemannet alia have long held that there is a substratum of North African languages (Hamito-Semitic) underneath the first official language of Ireland – Gaelic.
The Grandfather Clause is a legal entity in Western Law. It is an exemption in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations. Sometimes, the exemption is limited; it may extend for a set period of time, or it may be lost under certain circumstances.
It means that traditional customs and rights cannot be arbitrarily abolished by new legislation.
The simplest example is a claim to a traditional right-of-way through private property. The courts often entertain such claims.
Suppose that a North African appeals for asylum in Ireland, is refused and threatened with deportation. Might he/she invoke the Grandfather Clause?
He/she might perhaps claim that when the ice melted his/her ancestors were the first tentative inhabitants of Northern Europe – including Ireland – 10,000 years ago and that in Ireland there exists physical, linguistic and literary evidence of a continuity of such seaborne immigration and occupation by his/her ancestors down the years – seven thousand years! This continuity would embrace the first Neolithic farmers, then the Phoenicians, then the Algerian Corsairs of the seventeenth century. Could it be recognised as a legal, or at least a moral, precedent?
The science of genetics i.e. evidence from the human genome project would support such a proposition.
The argument would be that his/her ancestors arrived here long before we were the ‘Irish’ and took possession of the island. Therefore he/she, as a putative descendant of, say, the Fomorians, the Fir Bolg’s or the De Dannan, the Phoenicians, had a right to stay here! The fact that their occupation predated the concept of Land Deeds is relevant. (Of course the abused rights of native American Indians – who also had no land deeds – are also relevant to the case.)
he Irish Gaelic chieftain receives the priest’s blessing before departing to fight the English.
A More Recent Analogy
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Elizabethan and Cromwellian soldiers came to Ireland and were paid off with stolen tracts of Irish land. Nevertheless, after four centuries of such (often absentee) ownership no one could realistically take a case challenging the rights of the Anglo-Irish descendants of those soldiers. The suggestion that the Irish State might repossess such lands and forcibly deport the descendants without compensation would be treated as absurd – as well as inciting violence! It would be a stretching of the Grandfather Clause which only a despairing defense lawyer might use as a persuasive metaphor.
However, the rehearsal of the above asylum seeker’s argument – before being laughed out of court – would be an opportunity to reveal the complex background of colonialism and racism that has resulted in attitudes to immigrants of colour. In Ireland, native biodiversity is considered sacrosanct. Foreigners (esp. black) are considered an invasive and basically threatening species.
The ancient Europa is now Fortress Europe!
Sarcophagus of Ahiram, which bears the oldest inscription of the Phoenician alphabet (Beirut, Lebanon).
The Phoenicians
The Phoenicians were a classic case of a such a blackguarded culture and people. Although prominent in the Bible, they were written out of history by Greek and Roman authors. However, an ancient and deep-rooted anti-semitism also informed the historical prejudice against those Canaanite pioneers whom some accounts say reached these northern islands in the late Bronze Age – approx. 600 B.C. An extensive tin trade with Cornwall is widely believed.
Examining the Phoenicians can be an illuminating approach to Irish identity as well as European attitudes and racism in general.
Irish passports have in the recent past been doled out for cash, thereby entitling rich Saudis and their families to come and go as they please. This is not an unusual practice. At one time the Cypriot president Präsident Nikos Anastasiades is offering citizenship as compensation to rich foreign (i.e Russian) investors. In modern usage, Irish international sports teams liberally use the ‘granny rule’ to acquire talented non-Irish players.
There is nothing immutably sacred about Irish or any national citizenship. The arguments for excluding or including certain ethnic types are implacably economic but can raise questions of discrimination on ethnic grounds.
After working and living in Ireland for a certain number of years many ‘non-nationals’ are granted Irish citizenship. What is the essential difference between these favoured ones and those asylum-seekers who may have endured living for three/four/five years in prison-like circumstances on this island? Those who are forbidden to work, who are given pocket money of €19.10 per week?
A court hearing as hypothetical as the above might reveal the shaky grounds on which our historical assumptions of identity are based.
Suppose the old, once-sacred, Irish legends of immigration from Africa and Spain, the Fomorians from Africa, the Milesians from Spain, the De Danaan, the Fir Bolg are not entirely mythical?
Suppose that seventeenth and eighteenth century Irish scholars who believed in the literal truth of those legends were not entirely mistaken?
Suppose that modern Irish writers (Heaney, McGuinness, Friel, Durkan et al) were not entirely taking artistic license or imagining things when they invoked the Carthaginians as an anti-colonial metaphor?
Tradition is never entirely true but never entirely false.
Rabbit Beach in the southern part of the island of Lampedusa.
In recent years the island of Lampedusa and the ancient island of Ireland have had this in common: the incursion of desperate people from the other side of the Mediterranean, particularly from North Africa.
Note
The changes in Earth’s orbit occurred gradually, whereas the evolution of North Africa’s climate and vegetation were abrupt. Martin Claussen and his colleagues believe that various feedback mechanisms within Earth’s climate system amplified and modified the effects touched off by the orbital changes. By modelling the impact of climate, oceans, and vegetation both separately and in various combinations, the researchers concluded that oceans played only a minor role in the Sahara’s desertification. The earths axis wobbled. The desertification of North Africa began abruptly 5,440 years ago (+/- 30 years). Before that time, the Sahara was covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, as evidenced by fossilized pollen.
The Sahel is the ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition between the Sahara desert in the North and the Sudanian Savannas in the south, having a semi-arid climate. It stretches across the north of the African continent between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. In Arabic the word Sahel means ‘a coastline’ which delimits the sand of the Sahara.
The Sahel covers parts of (from west to east) Senegal, southern Mauritania, central Mali, southern Algeria and Niger, central Chad, southern Sudan, northern South Sudan and Eritrea.
In the history of this planet geologists say there have been five major Ice Ages, each lasting hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. There have been periods when this entire planet was covered in ice. At other periods the tectonic plates supporting continents were all jammed together in the southern hemisphere and Ireland was located below the equator – beside the African tropical zone. We were all neighbours once.
An ice age is defined as when both polar caps are covered in ice. We are presently in an ‘ice age’.
There have been hundreds of ‘inter-glacials’ or global warmings. During one of the interglacial periods – perhaps fifty million years ago – conditions favoured the emergence of the first primitive life forms.
In another, more recent, period the sudden desertification of the Sahara occurred. This event had a dramatic and long-lasting effect on population movements around the Mediterranean.
Featured Image: Landscape of the Erg Chebbi, Morrocco.
By February 15th there was a scent of danger in Bull Moose’s nostrils. Discussing which Democrat candidate would take on Donald Trump – would Mike Bloomberg have beaten Trump? – he brought our attention to coronavirus, a new viral danger emanating from China, which seemed quite exotic at that point.
Coronavirus might be the trigger to collapse this deck of cards. How soon? Probably by April, maybe May. The virus is expected to peak around April, but by then the quarterly earnings will have been impacted.
Should most of us in the U.S. be afraid of Coronavirus? It depends. If you’re healthy and don’t work in healthcare you’ve little to worry about. Based on the limited information we can glean from the Chinese news bubble, people with an otherwise healthy immune system, who are not regularly exposed to the virus, can rest easy. Apparently it is doctors, the elderly and other vulnerable categories who are susceptible to infection.
But that won’t stop many of us from cancelling cruise ship vacations, holidays to Asia, and even overseas trips to trade fairs. It will also impact global supply chains, which rely heavily on China. All this means lost revenue, which will hit the markets once results first show up on balance sheets in April.
The length of this market downturn will ultimately decide November’s election result.
Meanwhile in Ireland, Frank Armstrong was contemplating a ‘political earthquake’ in advance of February’s Irish General Election, with Sinn Féin predicted to become the largest party in the Dáil chamber for the first time. He also charted the emergence of the far right in Ireland.
For the moment opposition to the centre-right mainstream of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is coming from the left, responding in particular to an ongoing Housing Crisis. But Ireland is not immune from the wave of identity politics sweeping far-right Populists into power elsewhere.
Another recession might easily trigger far-right Populism within the existing framework, bringing together an unholy trinity, seen elsewhere, of xenophobia – including opposition to E.U. membership – climate change denial and opposition to abortion services.
It is a natural reaction for us to want to cast blame somewhere. We point the finger at nameless, faceless entities manifesting greater evil than we would ever be capable of – whether trolls, social media or the tabloids. We assure ourselves these remote actors are the true killers.
The hardest thing I have ever had to learn – one I am still struggling to get my head around – is that with suicide, we never fully know.
February was a major month in our music coverage. First, we had renowned fiddler Musician of the Month, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh discussing his forthcoming duo album with Dan Trueman called ‘the Fate of Bones’, that would feature his 10-string hardanger d’amore fiddle and a fascinating collaboration with graphic designer Rossi McAuley.
Centuries of suffering and persecution of people on this island become a footnote to the realignment of power structures, our identity shrouded in myth and broad sweeps, as bit-part actors in nearly a millennium of recent existence. And I think, an internal struggle between our natural impulses as sardonic inhabitants of a dark, wet and green North Atlantic island.
The coming wave can be extrapolated to a similar battle in the area of artistic self-expression that has been raging for most of our history. What do we value about ourselves and how should we express that in the public sphere? Is society thriving? If not, then am I hearing this reality represented in the everyday art that I encounter?
Live Music in Dame Street, Dublin, October 2019. Pic Daniele Idini
Paul Gilgunn was also contemplating the challenges involved in creation in the digital era. Thus:
In an attention economy devised to distract and occupy consciousness, the exponential flow of information generates continual flux in its wake.
Image: Daniele Idini
There was also an essay by electro-acoustic composer Roger Doyle who charted his journey into experimental music in A Composer’s Story.
Young peoples’ lives become filled with music on records, video, in films, on radio and TV, during Saturday nights, in supermarkets, in amusement arcades, on the streets and in concerts. Culturally exploded thus, they sit down to Mr. Beethoven and wonder what on earth this glaring composer from the distant past has to do with the rhythms they feel and the harmonies they hear.
In his Public Intellectual Series in February David Langwallner’s explored the legacy of Christopher Hitchens, who he once encountered:
I had a brief encounter with the man himself one enchanting and admittedly drunken evening. Being then youthful I was somewhat dazzled by his presence, yet more so when the bill for the wine and cognac arrived.
I found Christopher Hitchens almost preternaturally eloquent, even when plastered. Industrial quantities of booze only seemed to inspire him to new heights, as it does many artists. Nonetheless, he was fortunate to have the constitution of an ox – a unique case and liver to boot. Predictably, it was the cigarettes that killed him in the end.
David Langwallner clearly got around as evidenced by another treatment of Samuel Beckett, who he also encountered:
I had the good fortune to encounter in the flesh arguably the last in the line of towering figures, Samuel Beckett, in a café in Montparnasse, Paris in 1982.
Ireland had just won rugby’s Triple Crown in what was then called the Five Nations, before succumbing to the French team at the Parc de Princes, and Beckett was primarily inclined to banter about rugby and cricket with his countrymen. It must be stressed that he was a charmingly convivial person, and while austere, decidedly good company; even when pressed to do so he sedulously avoided discussion of his own work, preferring to muse on the artistic contributions of others.
That slightly detached dignity, captured in John Minehan’s award-winning photograph was exactly as I found him. A kind and decent man, who concealed a madness arising out of intense creativity. A burning gaze alone revealed the creative fire that raged inside.
Dublin and Monaghan people remember where they were on the 17th May 1974, the day three bombs exploded in Dublin and one in Monaghan. A UCD undergraduate at the time, I was in the library in Belfield when news of the bombs in Parnell Street, Talbot Street and South Leinster Street came through.
We were shocked. Some rushed from the library. Others, myself included, obeyed a caution from the librarian to stay put. My father’s office at 1 Clare Street faced onto South Leinster Street. When eventually I reached my mother by telephone, I learned he was OK. The blast had smashed all the windows in his office and knocked him over. Otherwise, he was unhurt.
Image courtesy of Dublin City Public Libraries.
One of the most amusing articles we have ever published came from Bob Quinn that month in his account of how one summer night in 1956 Gene Shepherd invited his listeners to conspire with him in inventing a book which actually did not exist.
There was also coverage of rugby from Frank Armstrong, who looked forward to the guilty pleasure of the Four Provinces of Ireland coming together to form the national team:
I yearn for Six Nations matches at this time of year. Despite my worthier self, I cannot take my eyes off a psychological drama and physical spectacle offering respite from interminable winter.
The violence is terrible, but it seems life-affirming that these specimens can, for the most part, withstand the battering. At its best, it conveys life-in-action, a primal dance and irrepressible human spirit.
In what was a frenetic month for Cassandra Voices there also fiction form Daniel Wade, whose Heart of the City evokes the unmistakable atmosphere of Dublin city:
On O’ Connell Street, rush-hour crowds pitch and roll at traffic lights. She ignores seagulls screeching from the boardwalk, convoys of buses and LUAS clangs, Deliveroo cyclists dodging cycle-lanes, bouncers invigilating in doorways, the fluorescent glare from Supermac’s, haggard junkies lurching between double-yellows and taxi ranks. Under the GPO’s bullet-bejewelled portico, she spots a young girl huddled in a sleeping bag, forlornly holding out a styrofoam cup like an offering. Homeless in her hometown. She leans and drops a few coins in the cup, then keeps on walking, barely hearing the weary “Ah, thanks, Love” the girl murmurs after her. Two guards turn to watch her pass. They notice her scar, but she ignores them. Their high-vis jackets sting her eyes.
And from Gary Grace, whose Synapse Fire contemplates the excesses of a misspent youth.
One of the main things I characterize my misspent youth by, is a knack for exploiting the trust my middle-class parents misplaced in me. At seventeen, I was too old to be dragged along with them on what seemed like monthly getaways, but too young to exercise any degree of responsibility or restraint. My folks had a mobile home near Ballymoney beach, which had hosted many a night of debauchery for my older brother and his cronies. He was away in Amsterdam, so I’d decided it was my turn. That bank holiday weekend, I had access to a car, three malleable mates and in the palm of my hand, an assortment of different colored pills.
The light that streams across the universe
Brings evidence of other worlds than ours
Where midst the flux of fields and particles
Eternal wisdom older than the stars
Unweaves her web of possibilities
The patterner experiments and plays.
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.
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 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.
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.
Holy Gawd, we’re back to Charles Darwin and his interpreters.
In the mid-19th century Darwin was recognised as a superb recorder of natural history and the inventor of evolutionary theory. He pointed to adaptation as a species’ key to survival. If an animal couldn’t adapt to new circumstances it faced extinction – like the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago, or the elderly to-day.
Unfortunately Darwin’s innocent findings on adaptation were used to rationalise the superiority of young, thrusting people (early entrepreneurs), and the inferiority of lazy people (the old, the sick, the unemployed and immigrants). Opportunists were bright enough to see gaps in the market and could exploit such arbitrary classification.
However, Darwin wasn’t an entirely objective scientist: he thought Tasmanian natives were inferior humans, that is to say, not useful, who could, justifiably, be annihilated. It was, after all, the culmination of the Age of Enlightenment and the Tasmanians were untutored in the philosophies of Smith, Hume, Descartes, Spinoza et alia; nor had the natives the ability to defend themselves.
The fact that neither they nor the vast majority of European working class and peasants had familiarised themselves with Enlightenment ideas was insignificant. Their ignorance was noticed by the Imperial mindset and the Tasmanians were duly culled, wiped out. Closer to home that mindset facilitated the Irish famine. The poor, the old, the weak, the lame were a drag on the fast moving herd bosses.
In these tortured times the same insight is best represented by President Trump’s sociopathology. He illustrates the simple logic of big business: if you can’t adapt to our commercial imperatives (Big Pharma, for instance), you go out of business, i.e you die.
Thus, if you cannot get on your bike, have not realised there is no such thing as society, not become an entrepreneur, not risen early in the morning, you are disposable.
The crude American and U.K. analogies of a ‘war’ against the present disease have also proved subliminally useful. Idealistic youth was once considered ‘collateral damage’ in our just wars, million-fold sacrifices to preserve freedom and the status quo, including ours.
Now apply the concept of a war to the present pandemic. In every conflict, certain leaders weigh the collateral damage against potential victory. How many body bags as against how much ground gained? In this case, political ground. It is a suitable coincidence that anyone over 65 is ‘non-productive’ and less to be cherished. Are they not a proper sacrifice in the ‘war’ against Coronavirus?
I am biased, an 84-year-old artist, outrageously healthy and still productive but, by actuarial estimates, superfluous. So, with clichéd thoughts and prayers, dispose of me. Do not resuscitate. All is well and all manner of things will be well. Darwinism rules.
Never boast to your children that you had seventeen occupations before your twenty-fifth birthday. I did so with my fifth child and it was a bad call. It relaxed him into not worrying about the aimlessness – in my view – of his life. I became the kettle calling the pot black.
‘Oh good’, he said cheerfully. ‘That gives me a few years before I start worrying.’ He was twenty-one, had dropped out of college after first year. Why?’ I asked sorrowfully. ‘It was irrelevant’. And he laughed.
He had thoroughly enjoyed the life of a student unencumbered by distractions like studying. His parents were worried. But like Napoleon’s favoured soldiers, he had a marshall’s baton in his rucksack: he was lucky. Somebody spotted his real talent – he was ‘cool’, a nerveless boy racer – and he trained to be an aircraft traffic controller. At first we all worried about using air transport, but it soon became obvious he was a rounded plug in a round hole. I had spotted it first. When I asked him what the hell he was going to do with his life he calmly answered:
‘You must remember, father’ (my children always addressed me like this when they were being ironic), ‘I am lazy.’ I didn’t worry about him any more. Any young man who can be thus frank with an outraged patriarch has confidence in himself. Or perhaps he realised I’m just a softy. I suspect that boy may be among the minority of my extended tribe who will not be upset by something or other in this old man’s gossip.
Years ago I delicately reminded him he was in the demographic of the four hundred males who top themselves in Ireland every year, but he reassured me: ‘Don’t worry, I’m enjoying myself too much.’ He gave me hope.
It is time to confuse this narrative with facts. There follows a list of my pre-twenthy-five-year-old occupations, and what I learned from them.
Age 13: Slop gatherer for my Granda’s pigs – a lesson in humility. Age 14: Caddie in Milltown golf club – an introduction to the Irish native bourgeosie Age 16: Milk bottle counter in Hughes Bros., Rathfarnham – I lost count after an hour. Age 18: Shipping clerk in Palgrave Murphy on Eden Quay – meeting drunken sailors and horse protestants with names like Jameson and Pakenham and Pim. Age 19: Clerical officer in Dublin County Council – how to surmount job dissatisfaction and survive boredom. Age 21: Worker in Lyons factory, Hammersmith – how to sort rapidly moving strawberries on a conveyor belt. Also that year: lifesaver on the Serpentine, London – how to attract bathing beauties. Also (it was a very busy year:, agricultural ‘praktikant’ on a farm outside Munich – learning the German work ethic. Age 22: Booking clerk and travel guide with Michael Walsh Travel, Dublin – how to entertain fifty-four girl guides on a trip to Rome. Age 23: Bottle washer with Coca Cola – I lasted a day. Also that year: Labourer in Gouldings Fertiliser, Ringsend – I lasted a morning. Also: Farm labourer in the Gaeltacht of Cúil Aodha, Co. Cork – how not to learn Irish. Age 24: Commercial traveller with Rowntree Mackintosh – how to eat a four pound box of chocolate samples meant for customers, in one day. Age 25 – Bus conductor in Leeds – the bells, the bells! Also that year: Pub piano player in the same city – as near to concert pianist as I’ll ever get. Also: English teacher in Pforzheim, Germany. I learned that Germans take their studies seriously. Every age: aspiring writer, singer, actor – I realised early that a very amateur talent is as inadequate for a career on the stage as that of Mrs. Worthington’s daughter:
…she’s a bit of an ugly duckling you must honestly confess,
and the width of her seat must surely defeat her chances of success.
Once I reached twenty-five I became a television technician, then a producer/director, then an independent film maker. All of those occupations passed the time while I was working out what I would do when I grew up. That is still a work in progress.
I console myself by thinking that such a C.V. would look interesting on the back of one of my unpublishable novels; probably even superior to the novel’s content?
Just listing the jobs makes me yawn and reach for a nicotine chewing gum. I gave up smoking years ago. The pipe tobacco had become too expensive when Social Welfare took fifteen Euros off my old age pension. I’m easing off, slowing down, reminding me of a gyroscope, a toy that amused us as children. It was a kind of posh spinning top, with a fixed protective frame and a groove in its single foot which rested on a tightrope of string held taut by us children.
The energy of its internal spinning enabled the gyroscope to defy our altering the angle of the tightrope. It seemed to have a survival instinct, like a living thing. We could make it slide up and down as we wished, admiring its balance, its defiance of gravity and our expectations. Inevitably the initial impetus of its spin weakened, it wobbled and collapsed.
We young dei ex machina would catch it and start the whole game again. More sophisticated versions of the gyroscope are nowadays used by rich and paranoid civilisations to keep tankers and telescopes, space ships and satellites, guns and drones on their straight and deadly paths. To me the gyroscope is still a toy but a serviceable metaphor for life: keep spinning until you drop.
