Cassandra Voices

Tag: Friedrich Nietzsche

  • It’s All Academic: Bad Ideas Bloom

    A few years ago, I had occasion to walk regularly past the university in Galway. My journeys took me across the Salmon Weir Bridge, which had narrow footpaths and has since been relieved by a new footbridge, and up past the cathedral and the university. Often, I found myself walking against the current of students coming from the university. The various encounters along the way were sometimes surprisingly hostile. Many of the students seemed fired up with startling aggressive intent. Their demeanour reminded me of us as kids pouring out of the cinemas having watched a Bruce Lee movie, flexing fledgling muscles, feeling ready to take on the world.

    Naturally, I wondered: is it just me or is this a thing? On one occasion, when a young black woman glared at me on sight, for no apparent reason, a paraphrase of Ali G’s line popped into my mind, “Is it cuz I’s white?” That made me smile, for a while anyway, until I realized there was likely more than a grain of truth in it.

    I had attended that university as a mature student, took an arts degree, majored in English and sociology/politics (soc ‘n’ pol) and I do recall feeling similarly fired up at the time about the injustices of capitalism and so on, leaving me inclined to glower at men in suits. Was I now the man in the suit?

    I read up on what was being disseminated in the universities that was causing students in England and across the West to tear down statues and demand reparations for slavery, among other outraged activities. Back in the 70s and 80s, this same type of young person would be forming bands or theatre troupes, annoying no one, but neighbours and critics. What has changed?

    Pilgrims Going to Church by George Henry Boughton (1867).

    The New Puritans

    I came across a very helpful book by Andrew Doyle called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, which pretty much laid out the entire state of play: woke ideology filling the place that religion used to occupy and becoming a pseudo-religion itself.  It seemed that I, as a “white hetero male with colonialist tendencies,” as a student might put it, was actually the new framed culprit for everything wrong with the world. A kind of latter-day elder of Zion, guilty of everything, with an innate desire to colonise as a result of an innate desire for violent expression and appropriation. In a word, I’m “bad”, and not in a good way, as in rapper “cool”. And not even salvageable. To put it religiously, I’m beyond redemption.

    This idea of the “white hetero male”, as being “violent” likely stemmed from a confusion of terms, where male competitiveness was equated with “aggression”, which then brought the word “violent” into the word family, to be used for effect in argumentative debate, because everyone responds to scare stories and everyone loves a villain to make themselves look “good” in comparison. And what is a lecture after all but a kind of performance, the students filling the lecture theatres of the western world being the audiences. From this perspective the idea of the violent white male is a kind of pulp fiction, designed to thrill, while giving the freshers something to shoot at.

    But as philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris puts it, there usually aren’t that many bad people around at any one time. Maybe only 1% or so of people are psychopaths and sadists in any one historical moment. More often there are bad ideas that good people act upon with good intentions and usually disastrous consequences.

    And it seems from what I’ve learned from Doyle’s book and other sources, that Western universities have been disseminating some very bad ideas for a long while now, among them the idea that all white men are innately violent and all their works corrupt and deserving of destruction. But they don’t call it “destruction”. They call it “dismantling”. Meaning, I suppose, polite destruction.

    “No, Marie Antoinette, we’re not chopping off your head, silly girl, we’re simply dismantling you.”

    Then as if things weren’t complicated enough, meaning itself is regarded as a “construction” to facilitate patriarchal power, and that definitions of anything you care to name are totally subjective. Meaning, everything has many meanings. As many meanings as there are people. Which means that nothing has any real meaning, only subjective interpretation. Which means that everything is meaningless and ultimately the best yarn wins.

    All these bad ideas then became cornerstones of black studies, leading to the conclusion of the increasingly discredited doctrine of Critical Race Theory, which itself is racist, and often proudly so – “Now it’s our turn!” – that “violent” white people owe people of colour big time, with, apparently, justified hell to pay. A belief system which is perhaps even inspiring the killing of white farmers in South Africa.

    Incidentally, the “Now it’s our turn” idea also comes from feminism, and was used by some feminists to justify abuses of power when they gained authority over others, conveniently failing to recognize that far from creating equality Heaven on Earth, many of them seemed instead quite determined to create the same old same old, with themselves in the seats of power. Proving, at least, that power and ambition still have very definite meanings.

    Compulsory

    When I started in university in the early 1990s, one of the things that struck me as odd at the time was that gender studies was compulsory. The last time I’d been in “school”, Irish language was compulsory and eventually people saw that this was a bad idea because it created a system of inequality, favouring some and side-lining others. Now here I was, back in “school”, and the university, which I understood as being a place of free-thinking, had a compulsory subject. It all seemed a bit “off” to me.

    I asked some people I knew who worked in education about the oddity of having a compulsory subject in the free-thinking university, and both just looked back at me and said absolutely nothing, immovably shtum, although both exuded the vibe that this was some kind of unmentionable thing and that I would be best off saying no more about it, which I duly did, obediently attending the various compulsory gender studies lectures and seminars, to no great advantage.

    “To put it clearly, girls: white men are bad, but white women are good. We’re their first victims. And there’s hell to pay”

    Ironically, feminists also appear to have placed themselves in the role of white saviour to the Third World. Now heading up NGOs and helpfully inviting millions to “deserved better lives” in the likes of Newtownmountkennedy, they continue the task of identifying “bad” people, most of whom, oddly enough, come wrapped in white skin with male genitalia, making them easy to spot.

    “Look! A violent colonialist misogynist! Get him!”

    On top of all that, those radicalised students emerging from Western universities appear to believe that anyone who disagrees with them, on even the most trivial point, is actually evil, if not in direct league with Satan, and possibly psychically and spiritually contagious, justifying physical reprimand, as was demonstrated recently in Limerick when student Jamie O’Mahoney waved an Israeli flag during a pro-Palestine meeting. It’s little wonder then that these unfortunate students, at the receiving end of an education seemingly designed to make enemies of their fellow countrymen, now appear to have so much in common with radical Islam.

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Theory to Practise

    Well-intentioned theory, as was so strikingly demonstrated by the Nazi misreading of Nietzsche, doesn’t always bloom beautifully into reality. For instance, one of the current real-world consequences of the teachings of comfortable academics serenely creating theoretical paper models in ivy-decked tenure, is mass immigration. The thinking and moral lesson being that male white Europe owes reparations to the Third World for colonialist crimes committed in previous centuries. This idea is partly driven by another text called The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, which was a big ideas source in my university time.

    The ensuing academic-influenced invitation to the actual wretched of the Earth has resulted in, among other perplexities, the village of Dundrum in County Tipperary, with a population of 200 or so, being joined by almost 300 male strays – sans WAGs – from the Third World who no one quite knows, least of all our government, with locals being labelled criminally racist by the apostles of the global equality agenda for even questioning this more than extraordinary imposition. If there was any real social justice, those migrants would be housed in the universities. Chickens coming home to roost and all that.

    “Now girls, listen up! I want you to give a big feminist ‘Hey there’ to your new exotic boyfriends.”

    John Rawls

    The Pot is Black

    If the Humanities become selectively humane, as appears to be happening, it’s no longer the Humanities. It’s something else entirely. And the particular slant of “humanities” that is becoming evident in universities across the West seems more than a little racist and sexist, the very things it claims to be attempting to eradicate, itself apparently unwittingly succumbing to malignant Freudian projection on a grand scale.

    Referencing political philosopher John Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice, Thomas Sowell, economist and historian writes in his 2010 book “Intellectuals and Society”:

    Justice is the first virtue of institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory, however elegant and economical, must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise, laws and institutions, no matter how efficient and well-arranged, must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

    The way things are going, we may one day see a social movement demanding reparations from the universities.

  • RTE Kitsch: Room to Improve

    Patrick Freyne’s satirical 2020 Irish Times article ‘It is now late-period Dermot Bannon. He is on the verge of losing it’ was an unusually humorous appraisal of the kitsch that state broadcaster RTÉ tends to dollop out.

    In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech author Milan Kundera explains that kitsch is an aesthetic ideal ‘in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist’. This he argues, ‘is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.’ The Montrose cultural bubble has long served a crucial political purpose: denying shit while everyone acts as though it does not exist.

    Through no fault of his own, the feel good factor of Dermot Bannon’s show obscures the suffering associated with an enduring and arguably preventable housing crisis, and also, more broadly, provides an insight into how the Irish overreaction to Covid-19 occurred; which has done incalculable damage to the lives of children especially.

    It seems that our best, and perhaps only, response in Ireland to these traumas is comedy, but this has clear pitfalls.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    “fronted by classical pillars”

    Patrick Freyne reveals:

    Dermot Bannon is my muse. I would write about him in every column if I could (God knows I try). If I were the arts editor I would make the arts pages of this paper entirely Dermot Bannon-themed. If I were taoiseach, I would declare a Dermot Bannon day …

    He observes that

    On every episode of Room to Improve, Dermot Bannon goes into battle with the plain people of Ireland in the cause of justice and light. Mainly light, to be honest. In his philosophy, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed by turning a wall into a window. He’d build all of his houses from windows if he could. The man is a martyr to big windows.

    Explaining that Bannon:

    is creating a metaphorical window into the heart of the Irish people, who are for the most part entirely unco-operative, ungrateful and obsessed with dark holes fronted by classical pillars and filled with Ikea furniture …

    He also marvels at how:

    Ireland is the only country with a celebrity quantity surveyor. Patricia has no time for any of Dermot’s nonsense, which is why we like her. He wants to double the size of his new house for just €350,000. The nation scoffs at this even before Patricia has a chance to say: “Not a hope.” In fact, we all say it along with her, panto style.

    As one of the jesters permitted to ply his trade in the national media, Freyne exposes RTÉ’s consistent denial of shitness – which perhaps accounts for a prevalent uncooperativeness, ingratitude and obsession with dark holes “fronted by classical pillars.”

    Much of the Irish landscape bears testament to the tragedy of the commons. It is a sad reality that most of what has been built since independence is inferior to what came before it.

    Moreover, a programme such as Room To Improve, and it’s not the only one in this genre, is devoted to the improvement of private dwellings in the possession of a shrinking middle class still transfixed by the ups and downs of the Irish property market. It is instructive that according to the website www.daft.ie at the start of May, 2022 there are just over one thousand properties available to rent in all of Ireland at a point when the Irish government has just committed to welcoming tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine. Is it any wonder so many people are disinclined to have children.

    In essence Room to Improve translates into: how can someone increase the market value of their property. The lurking presence of the celebrity quantity surveyor ensures that any project is seen in terms of adding financial value to the holding.

    It is particularly tone deaf as we reach another high-water mark in an ongoing housing crisis. Missing on RTÉ is serious engagement with the corruption of a planning process, which lies behind enduring inequalities and sprawl, or the financial structures that embed generational inequalities, and permit a creeping dominance of transnational capitalism.

    It is not that housing dysfunction is denied on RTÉ – that we are lied to as such – it is that the issues are almost completely ignored amidst the day-to-day mixture of light entertainment and vox pop nonsense that are their mainstays. Room to Improve is a form of kitsch because it denies the shitstorm going on in the society around it.

    And like the rest of their programming, it appears to rely to an ordinate extent on advertising from a motor car industry that allows for the trail of bungalows that blight our landscapes. After all, living in one of the detached houses that Bannon mostly works on would be very difficult without a motor car.

    It also appears that RTÉ’s longstanding tendency to bury shitness – which is also evident in legacy print media – led to the catastrophic handling of Covid-19 in Ireland.

    Ongoing Kitsch

    It will be many years before we come to terms with what happened during Covid-19 around the world, and confront the traumas, especially to children, of living through lockdowns. It is instructive that despite having the youngest population in the EU, Irish children were subjected to among the longest school closures in the world. Simply blaming teaching unions ignores how teachers were subjected to relentless fear messaging that made them reluctant to do their jobs, despite international data from early on showing that their concerns were generally misguided.

    Yet for RTÉ ‘The deadly virus’ of COVID-19 seemed to arrive as a godsend – and an advertising windfall, or so-called Covid bounce. A slavish devotion allowed the channel to almost completely ignore all other difficult news for the best part of a year-and-a-half. The daily totals of cases and deaths, uncritically conveyed, became the staple of every radio and television news bulletin and headline on their website.

    Then, almost overnight, the issue vanished from sight, without any kind of meaningful post-mortem or reflection on the damage inflicted on the patchwork of communities that make up our society.

    It gives way to relentless coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – thick on spectacle and almost devoid of critical analysis. Images of wasted buildings now bury discussion of other stories.

    A lack of intellectual rigour – albeit their Brainstorm section is a notable exception – that is essential to RTE’s kitsch reaches right to the top it would appear. Thus, RTE’s head of news Jon Williams claims in article ‘For the first time in Europe since the end of World War Two, one country had been invaded by another.’ The mind boggles.

    Comedy appears to be the only response available; it’s just that the consequences are quite serious. Simply because political protestors aren’t subjected to imprisonment or torture as under other regimes doesn’t mean that the Irish state isn’t failing its people, and that the state broadcaster isn’t complicit for failing to interrogate our inadequacies that surely begins with a deficient education system.

    Nietzsche

    In Laughter All Evil is Compacted

    Freyne is one of a number of comedic writers and performers – Oliver Callan is another working for RTÉ itself – operating in legacy media who are permitted ‘to take the piss’ out of our national obsessions. Comedy has its advantages but arrives with a health warning.

    Theodore Zeldin traces its historical trajectory: ‘since truth cannot be easily swallowed whole or raw, jesters were usually also poets, magicians or singers, able to convey unpalatable insights in an epigram, a witty story or a song.’

    But this routinely slips into cynicism, as comedy can reinforce conformity ‘by being its safety valve.’ Zeldin points out that carnivals, such as the medieval festival of fools: ‘have throughout history made fun of authority, and turned hierarchy upside down,’ but ‘did so only for a few days.’ In a sense, comedy normalises the damaging excesses of a culture by turning it into a humorous spectacle.

    Jokes can be truly sick, as the history of totalitarianism demonstrates. Jonathan Glover notes that ‘In the death camps the Nazis turned the cold joke into an art form, with increasingly imaginative embellishment on the themes of cruelty and humiliation.’

    Friedrich Nietzsche provides a psychological insight into how this occurs when claiming that ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’ The gay release of laughter allows depraved participants to evade consideration of their actions. Thus, humour may confront tyranny, but it may also reinforce it.

    A parade of tanks of the ČSLA in Prague on Victory Day, 9 May 1985.

    Not Dangerous In Itself

    In Kundera’s view political kitsch is not dangerous in itself. Indeed, most democratic politicians cultivate a clean-cut, artificial, image. The real danger lies in totalitarian kitsch such as that encountered by the character of Sabina in the aforementioned novel, who recalls the Communist parades of her youth.

    These projected an idealised vision of the worker removed from the corruption, suspicion and cruelty that had by then infected her society. Indeed, it is recalled in Czechia that under Communism love for one’s family required some of form of theft in the course of one’s professional career.

    Kundera contrasts totalitarian airbrushing with the plurality of voices that he believed still lay in Western democracies.

    Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality. The artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

    Prior to Covid-19 RTÉ’s kitsch could largely be avoided, but when the state followed the example of its European partners in imposing undifferentiated house arrest we entered the dangerous territory, as we were subjected to a form of mass formation.

    Ireland Inc has returned to business as usual. Room to Improve carries on with an architect that looks suspiciously like Ryan Tubridy, as the housing crisis continues to the benefit of a few, and all we have are tears of laughter for consolation.

  • Homer

    He who fights with monsters should look to it
    that he himself does not become a monster…
    when you look into the abyss the abyss also
    gazes into you.
    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Day 1.

    On the question of the one against the many, as opposed to the many against the one, White was decidedly with the former after having proven, to himself at least, that his poor father was a lost one without any direction having given himself to the latter and now, after spending his life among his own, was fundamentally on his own more than ever, isolated more so than White himself was, for whereas White had taken the conscious decision to oppose the many by choice, thus accepting to lead a life of solitude, whereas his poor father by accepting to choose a life among the many, sharing their so called ‘core values’, White’s father, all his life, would go on and on about shared values; now, at the end of the day, nearing his end, ironically he was perhaps more alone now than he ever was! This was something that White, to a certain degree, could take satisfaction in. The fact that no matter what way you decided to lead your life, in the end, you always ended up on your own. Solitude was, in this sense, always the end result. Of course, this is something that White had always taken into consideration. It is, you could say, the reason why he chose to accept a life of solitude in the first place. If the truth were known, White was always intensely anti-political, which is why he hated groups. He always had. So, the idea of any kind of group consensus was anathema to him. Family being the first! The first group. He had always hated being apart of it, at least since he started to see through it. That is to say when he first started to question it when he was a very young man.

    Even White’s friends, some of whom were considered to be quite wild, were shocked by White’s initial coldness. White would refer to certain animals who would leave the family to fend for themselves. Why did humans insist on remaining in contact with their parents? Out of all the animals on the earth, only humans, as far as he could see, remained in such close proximity to their parents, and at what cost?

    Of course, White’s whole vision of the world had been profoundly altered or shaped by the tragic death of his brother. His brother had committed suicide when White was still a very young man, and this act had such an incredible knock-on effect on everything that White would do. This act had fundamentally altered White. Utterly, you could say. It wasn’t the only act to have had such a powerful effect on him, there was another, but it was the first event rather which was to have such a radical impact on his whole worldview, if one could say that White did have such a thing, a view of the world, as it were. I should probably say what the second event was now after having already alluded to it and in this way setting out the trajectory of the present tale. Building up the horizon, as it were.

    The second great event to influence White, after his brother’s suicide, was when he eventually was to separate from his wife, whom he was to eventually divorce. This was the second great event in his life. The second of the great Ds. So, first Death and secondly Divorce. Life was made up of a series of Ds, White had noticed. The 3 Ds, he called them. White being Irish, alcohol, or Drink, was the 3rd. It was a so- called coping mechanism. The results, of course, were disastrous as a man who has already been struck by two of Life’s greatest events, Death and Divorce, to then resort to Drink to get over them is simply asking for even more trouble, and of course this is what this story is all about. Stories all involve trouble, the interesting ones at least.

    I’d like to get back to White’s father now, after having presented you, the Reader, with an overview of the overall substance of the narrative of the following tale, having thus fulfilled, to a certain degree, the duties of the Author – ha, dead me arse!

    If there was one person in the world who was to have such a singular effect on White, apart from his late brother and former wife that is, it was the old pater familias. God, what an absolute cunt! A curse on his kind, indeed, as that is in fact what he was, White had surmised. The Patriarch! The cunt! The superlative arsehole of the Universe! The sum total of all his woes! As when it came to the Patriarch, the many were truly the One. They all conformed to the same depths of depravity. Hitler being the superlative. You had to nail your colours to the mast.

    Because of the dire nature of White’s relationship with his father, to a large degree White’s relations with men in general were pretty shitty. Indeed, it was rare that he actually liked one. Though not an impossibility too, having said that. He had had great friendships with some men, over the years. But, in general, White was more a Woman’s man than he was a Man’s man and this was primarily to do with the whole very complex relationship that he had had with his parents. White’s poor mother, for example, had been a martyr to all women as she had come from that very particular generation of women in Ireland who simply stood by their men, come hell or any amount of assorted high water! High water indeed, the expression was literally true now, now that they were all expecting a biblical like deluge to submerge them all due to global warming. Patriarchy and Fossil Fuels, now how many academic papers were headed in such a way in Humanity Departments in progressive universities all around the world?

    One could dream of Noah and his drunkenness. White saw again Uccello’s depiction, all cascading in glorious Rouge, or Reds….

    The fact of the matter was, no matter how you wished to look at it the situation was truly awful. The man had been the worst possible fucking cunt of his kind. There were no redeemable qualities, the more he looked the more shit was uncovered. How many could say the same? These shits, shits of their kind, this kind, this kind of shit kind, the shitty fucking shit kind, the kind of shitty fucking shit that you wouldn’t want to shit next to nor sit beside mind, that kind, mind your backside! The fucking shitty shitters and their fucking shitty shitting shits! Those kind of shitty fucking shitters… That Kind!

    End of Day One!

    Day 2

    Now White hadn’t always been an aggressive son of a gun. He had become one. His nature then was historic, you could say. Informed as it had been by the unending deluge of experience that had gone on over his time in the world. Planet Earth. What they had done to it! It was nothing short of disastrous. The so-called strong men. What a bunch of dipshits. Strong men my ass. Show me a man and I’ll show you an ass, that is what White would say. As he had lived with one. Oh yeah, he had survived him too. Mister Universe spinning around in his tight leopard skin briefs. Bikini briefs! God forbid. It was infectious. The briefs that is. “Be brief!” Puts a whole new context on it…

    When he thought about his childhood, which was rare, White remembered particularly the long torturous dinners which went on in the depths of winter. The family, all six of them, surrounded the table upon which the food had been placed. Every Patriarch worthy of the name has his place at the table and mealtimes are a particular pleasure for control freaks of this nature as these events allow for a certain element of theatricality and ceremony. Placing people at the table involves a whole network of categorisation. Hierarchy within families, for example. Directors on Boards. They all involve systems of power, and so invoke a little ceremony.

    White, for example, used to sit at the head of the table directly opposite his older brother who eventually committed suicide. White was the second in command, following the patriarchal hierarchy. His sister sat beside his mother on the left side, important detail, as you came in the door and then on the right- hand side sat the Father and on his right side his youngest son whom neither White’s older brother nor sister could stand. He was the porte parole while the eldest brother was the weakest link. White could see it all, how he had been set up to fail. As he was not a natural leader, White’s eldest brother. This had been his great tragedy and which was to kill him, literally, in the end. It would have been better, in many respects, if White had been the eldest as he had leadership qualities but then they had been acquired by White from a sustained practice of observation. This is how White seemed to have learned everything, from the point of observation. Seeing how Not to do something, typically then in everything in later life also the very point of departure.

    White could remember the hours spent at the kitchen table listening to the voice of God drone on endlessly about some subject matter. Omnipotence. This was a key idea in the pater familias. The all seeing all knowing One, like the Sun. The King without a throne. The King looking down at his subjects, all knowing, all condescending! And oh God how he would go on and on and on and on and on and on and on…in a monotone.

    Of course, the atmosphere around the table would be unbearable. I have read accounts of Hitler at the dinner table, apparently he gave these endless monologues talking for hours and hours and hours and hours. Omnipotent. All knowing, addressing all kinds of subjects. Not really knowing all of the subjects at all, and so talking absolute horse shite half of the time. Can you imagine it? One of the World’s Most Important Figures Talking Absolute Horse Shit. And for hours!

    Yes. In retrospect, White had been well prepared. All his life. For his Life. LIFE. In screaming capitals. He could take great pleasure in that fact. That it had all, all the horror, all the boredom, all the manic pain and apparently pointless suffering. It all had some kind of purpose, in the end! It was preposterous, really. And for what? By what grand design had it all been arranged for?

    Were there reasons for it all, after all? Some universal truth? There in the great black firmament, shot through with countless stars for millennia, in the great abstraction of the night of the cosmos was there, after all, some kind cosmic arrangement where the infinitely, infinitely small and inconsequential, most insignificant of beings finds a place after all in the great scheme of things?…

    No answer. Silence. The kind of silence that could sink whole nations. A Black Hole. You are on the event horizon. Don’t fall in. Or perhaps we are already in and have come out the wrong end? That would make sense.

    Platitudes

    The people who live here will never get bored with the beautiful views…
    The truth is they do, and this kind of explains the whole god-awful mess.
    Whether it is the young man who, having finally won over his ‘beautiful
    Princess’, starts focusing now on her bad breath and tiresome habit of
    Complaining already after only two years in and who will,
    After breaking up with her one year later, dreams only about bottling that
    Same horrendous breath and keeping it as a heady perfume
    To remind him of his most cherished memories.

    Loss, that great Optician, Loss, and absence its partner,
    Are the great rose-coloured lenses that truly help us to SEE
    The many-splendored colours of the world.
    Seeing through the cracked lens offers alone true vision.

    (There’s one  for SpecSavers!)

    Day 3.

    White never actually liked his parents, if the truth were known. How could he? His mother, after all, was not very intelligent. She was smart, and quite pretty. Actually, very beautiful when she was young, but she was also extremely subservient, not very curious, she could be a real bitch and was not at all tactile, so not prone to showing any kind of affection to White nor his siblings. This was hardly surprising considering the fact that her mother before her was a horrible woman who was hysterical, fanatically religious, cunning, cruel, malicious and spiteful. In fact, whenever White did think about her, which was rare, ugly was the word he would use to describe her. Such were his memories.

    As for his father… It was even less pretty, the picture. He was a profoundly vain and ignorant man and it was this twin display of vanity and ignorance that were particularly horrendous to behold; the latter of course cancelling any reason for the former to exist, you would think! But no, the ignorance was such that it apparently clouded all judgement in the so-called thinking subject, as it had no awareness of its own faults, and what was even worse, if it did, and sometimes it seemed to show some inkling of awareness (For example, when it was eating at the dinner table, it had the habit of chewing its food with its mouth open, a truly odious habit, and then, seeing that White was actually observing it, instead of closing its mouth like any normal person would, it instead continued to masticate its food in an even more exaggerated manner like some ghoulish creature, which is why I am speaking about it as opposed to him.) but even so continued its ghoulish behaviour nonetheless. That is when White started to think of his father in terms of the mythic creature fabricated by Homer.

    The Cyclops was, at least for White, the most truly amazing poetic metaphor in all of western creation. White never ceased to be amazed by Homer’s creative genius when he did think about it, which was a lot due to his particularly horrendous relationship with his father. White wondered was he alone, in this, and, by the fact that Homer’s metaphoric beast was being re-invented time and time again for generations and generations of people down through the millennia so that they too could understand the truly epic horror show that they were dealing with which was, in a word, PATRIARCHY

    There it was. The bullet stopped here. This ten- letter word fell off of the pen or the tongue with all of the monumental obstinacy of the one-eyed monster himself. The cave dweller of old, horribly blinded by the clever and equally intelligent Odysseus himself. It is this twin pillar of cleverness And intelligence that had made Odysseus the truly remarkable hero that he is and again this is a further testament to Homer, or the Greeks, their incredibly astute insight into man’s nature. In other words, what it meant to be a Man. A Real Man, that is, as opposed to some One-Eyed King of some barren cave dwelling along the coast. You could of course say, perhaps must, here we have the two kinds of man, in the end. The Cyclopean Monster, or what we would call in modern parlance – The Narcissistic Toxic Male. TNT M. Nietzschean dynamite. All metaphors being carved specifically from the finite, as good old Friedrich knew.

    Back at the kitchen table, White could only look upon the creature before him as the Cyclops personified. There before him, that grotesque vision of the creature masticating on the meat before him. Contemptuous, almost, of him. The beastly couldn’t give a FUCK look of him. I AM THE KING. The Cock-eyed face of power on him. Tunnel vision. Hence the voice. HMV. His Master’s Voice. Lacanian. Tripping on the Real. The lexical field filled with metaphors is far more really lasting then the mere sports field with all its associated bruises and weather stains, for they will all be memories. Whereas, the symbolism will reign eternal. Such then is the very potent power of poetry. This is why the intelligent princes feared it. Not only the Greeks but in every culture.

    White saw again his Irish Master incontinent with piss- stained grey pants, his face a travesty of a man. More a Terminator in decline, his rusting member leaking out like some old oil well. Grotesquerie. For teenage boys a male mockery.

    White would go home alone and strip and slip into his mother’s room would steal, like countless boys before him, tights and underclothes. Fetishes that he would take away to his cave where he would sit alone unmanned and Freudian.

    Enter the imagery of Salvador Dali. The Great Masturbator. Eros and Thanatos. Sex and Death. Such were the twin pillars guarding the Exit, from the mad man’s lair. Such was the wonder of her hair. The other worldly feminine. That offered some kind of safe-haven. From IT. From Him.

    Enter then the Muse.

    Feature Image: The blinded Polyphemus seeks vengeance on Odysseus: Guido Reni‘s painting in the Capitoline Museums.

  • The Hero’s Journey

    Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church, Dublin.

    Twelve years ago I was asked to sing a selection of traditional Irish love songs in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, for the launch of an anthology of Irish love poems. This collection had poems which were written over a period of 1,200 years, between 800 AD and the present era.

    Whitefriar Street of course contains relics of the even older tragic hero of many a love story, St. Valentine, who was executed for marrying young couples at a time of prohibited love. However, as I read through the love poems in the collection, the earliest ones struck me for their vivid rawness. The first poem, The Lament of Créide starts with the striking words,

    “The arrows that murder sleep
    At every hour of the cold night
    are love lamenting”

    In 8th century Gaelic these words have a sibilant, chilling cadence that invoke a dark and desperate trauma. Créide had just come on her lover Dínertach’s body on the battle field and grief menaced her mind.

    The emotions depicted create a surge in me. This was something worth expressing with music I though. It has all the essence of human feeling that great and tragic drama is made of.

    It sucked me into a renewed appreciation of early Irish mythology, and I started looking at other examples from the canon of early Irish literature, such as The Táin, for this exquisite portrayal of drama and character archetype. As a singer and a composer I found that these stories had an emotional and dramatic template that interested me.

    These were stories that lasted throughout the centuries; that contained great dramatic archetypes. They described patterns of being that seemed timeless and epic. They were crying out for melody and musical interpretation.

    In my journeys through these myths and historical perspectives I started to notice that character portrayal frequently represented archetypes within meta-narratives. Some of these archetypes could be found in similar thematic stories throughout the world. Cúchullain had his echo in Achilles, and Ferdia might be compared to the Trojan Hector.

    These archetypes manifest values of what the 17th century Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico called The Age of Gods. Nietzche calls this the age of heroes

    I was using the modality of sean nós to interpret these stories through music, but it took me a long time to notice that perhaps I was doing so because folk music and folklore was a parable-ist way of interpreting these thematic issues and explanations of life, to the people who shared them. Traditional songs did indeed trade in the wisdom of fable and parable to enable an understanding of the world. It is a metaphorical world full of tropes and archetypes.

    I needed to look deep into the psychology of folklore and folk songs to understand why the anthology of sean nós exists. This was my reason for an enlightening return to the roots of my tradition; to try and explain how this song tradition navigates a psychological portrayal of human nature.

    Band Photography | Musicians | | Holst Photography Ireland

    The following extract is the introduction to An Bhuatais & The Meaning of Life, a book and CD collection of contemplative songs and essays. It is a hard-backed 112 page edition, based on the philosophical themes of the accompanying CD. The CD and book are complementary elements of a contemplative philosophical experience:

    A song, like a story, speaks from a time and a place. Time passes, and its voice diminishes. But sometimes a story speaks to the essence of human nature and its power lasts through time regardless of space; regardless of place.

    An Bhuatais [The Boot – the album’s title track] has a context related to a changing social dynamic between the late 18th and early 19th century in Ireland. The native Catholic population of Ireland in the 17th century were suppressed by a series of penal laws designed to disenfranchise them and leave them firmly outside the protection of public and legal institutions of state. These penal codes were defined along sectarian divides which delineated the native Irish from the coloniser.

    The native population had at least a religious institution which offered solace and sanctuary. The Catholic clergy who tended to this disenfranchised population were outlawed, and for a time had a bounty on their head. Sharing in the fate of their flock, they had spiritual and moral credibility.

    The penal code relaxed over the 18th Century and in 1795 Catholicism was officially permitted into the fold, most visibly with the establishment of the Catholic University of Maynooth.

    This is all interesting to our story because it makes the animosity of the author of An Bhuatais towards the local Priest all the more comprehensible. As opposed to the hunted priest of the recently repealed Penal period, the priest in this song clearly doesn’t suffer along with his parishioners. He doesn’t share the suffering of the songs author; he is not one of the people.  He is castigated for abandoning spirituality for profane wealth. Betrayal and hypocrisy; they are powerful themes, and they incite gut felt creativity.

    There is something basic and fundamental in the representation of the hero in the tragic mythological perspective. Friedrich Nietzsche, the harbinger of resurgent nihilism, recognised this in his analysis of the heroic archetype. This helped him form theories on the pre-eminence of the dominant will – the natural state of an amoral being – and the end of belief. While it is a helpful filter on the mythological perspective of death, it is a perspective which creates a lot more problems than it solves.

    Illusions of “the end of history” and the implication that we have no more to learn from the past are, it seems, endemic with humanity. It’s an arrogance which seems to consistently blind our species. The American playwright, Arthur Miller, enacts this folly in the character of Judge Thomas Danforth in The Crucible, where he says: “This is a sharp time, now, a precise time – we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.”

    Danforth’s error, and burning certainty, illuminate something that has been observed by historians of civilisation throughout the ages. Ibn Khaldun and others have told us that civilisations and empires flourish and wither in cycles. Giambattista Vico, argued that the cycle of civilisations went through three stages which he called: the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men.  Although he is ruled by superstition, Danforth’s speech is paradoxically of the “Age of Men”. His certainty that the institution of his court is the nexus of reason is an arrogance of every age. The “precise time” he talks of is his certainty in the error of past ages and the enlightenment of his own.

    Vico’s theory tells us that the age of reason is an epoch, not a culmination. That man-kind keeps cycling through the spiral of civilisational rise and fall, and that we keep refining our myths and reinventing our stories.

    Stories and songs can carry more than eternal narratives. I recall a drive on a narrow rural road, playing a recording of An Captain Ó Máille sung by Stiofán Ó Cualáin, and feeling an overwhelming sense of belonging; of returning home. O Cualáin’s unaccompanied phrasing, which emanates a familiarity with landscape, living, and language, has a close familial sense.

    His performance – though I think performance is the wrong word for something that sounded so spontaneous and lived in – is unique, and I was surprised by how much I felt I knew intimately the essence of what this voice carried. This singing has its own inscape. It’s one that is as much shaped by cultural phenotype as by the rugged landscape of Connemara.  I felt my soul could make its home there.

    An Bhuatais & The Meaning of Life is available through:

    Website:
    www.lorcanmacmathuna.com

    Bandcamp:
    https://lorcanmacmathuna.bandcamp.com/album/an-bhuatais-the-meaning-of-life

    Spotify:
    https://open.spotify.com/album/4ughUTW4jIawqVLiY8D5am?si=p6hJeIqsS0yr_3HgPBv2Kw

    Featured Image (of Connemara) by Daniele Idini.