Cassandra Voices

Tag: (i)

  • The Most Natural Thing in the World (I)

    Build me a cabin in Utah
    Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
    Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”
    That must be what it’s all about
    That must be what it’s all about
    Bob Dylan, ‘Sign On The Window’, from New Morning (1970)

    When I was eighteen, during a summer spent working as a bus conductor while waiting on Leaving Certificate results, I thought I’d got my then girlfriend pregnant. Through a warm, endless July, she crept from two to three to four weeks ‘late’.

    Finally, one evening, a phone call came with the good news that she was happily surfing the crimson wave, and there was great relief all around. It must have just been prolonged exam stress, we agreed. But the strange thing is, while obviously not quite ready to be a father then, I have never really been as open to the possibility of parenthood since.

    During the extended period of waiting for her period to arrive, we discussed what we might do if worse came to worst. She contemplated an abortion – a big deal in Ireland in 1979, even if she was, rather too neatly symbolically, nine months older than me, and already in college; as was, if you can believe it, the very fact of having premarital teenage sex itself – while I was prepared to abandon all immediate plans for further studies and instead get a job to support her and our offspring. Never such innocence, or foolhardiness, again. It must have been Love.

    Throughout my twenties, I hardly ever gave much thought to reproduction, unless it was as to how to forestall it. Of course, there were girlfriends, but I was never with anyone with the underlying agenda of ‘getting married, settling down and having a family’ (or any combination thereof). That was something I put off, along with having a proper career, until my thirties – if at all. The procreative function of sexuality would have come a severely poor second to the pleasure involved, and its pursuit. Enjoy yourself while you’re young. (Or at least give it your best shot.) You won’t be young for ever. (So get your kicks before you get too old.) You can’t have fun all your life. (So have as much as you can now.)

    Perhaps such attitudes are not so unusual among the under-thirties, and even more so now than then (in the 1980s’). Yet, as I approach my sixtieth birthday, and having even experienced the establishment of a stable relationship which led to marriage, I can confirm that this viewpoint has still not changed significantly and, if anything, has only solidified into a worldview.

    While my sexual needs may be marginally less clamorous than they were when I was a younger man, it is time to make the bald, bold declaration: the urge to replicate one’s genes is an impulse I don’t understand. The reflections that follow are an attempt to understand why that might be, to unravel the reasons for this mindset within myself, in the context of the culture which surrounds me.

    Extraordinary Lengths

    Walk down any street, enter any populated space, public or private, go anywhere where there are people: almost every person you see is the result of an act of sexual intercourse, and a subsequent pregnancy and birth. Propagation of the species is clearly popular. Or, at least, sex is. Multiplication/That’s the name of the game/And each generation/They play the same.

    Some people go to extraordinary lengths to have children, if they find it doesn’t come easily, what with the rigours and disappointments and sometimes multiple pregnancies associated with IVF treatment. Observant Christians, Muslims and Jews will all tell you that their God commanded them to “be fruitful and multiply”.

    Indeed, for strict adherents of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, procreation is the only function of sexuality, and sex for its own sake, much less as a good in itself, is sinful. Atheists will argue that child-bearing and child-rearing are more basic than that: they are biological imperatives. The drive to reproduce is part of how scientists define living matter.

    Why do I not feel this biological imperative? It is, apparently, the most natural thing in the world. So why do I feel such a general indifference, and even a personal aversion, to the concept? And in how much of a minority am I, in this regard? But also, conversely, if the topic doesn’t really matter all that much to me, why do I care enough to spend time thinking about it, and go to the bother of trying to write something cogent about it, in the first place?

    My choosing, or at least accepting, a child-free existence must worry me, at some level, if I feel a need to defend my position. Is that because it has now become part of my biography, even my identity? Perhaps, but the more obvious answer probably lies in the familial and societal pressure and expectation that one will reproduce (“Do you have any kids (yet)?”), and should very much want to reproduce.

    This ‘to do’ list approach to human existence – albeit the result of cultural mores, religious teachings, socially engineering legislation, economic necessity or prosperity, and a myriad other prisms through which it can be viewed – becomes internalised, no matter how unconcerned with or questioning of society’s norms and agendas one regards oneself as, and is by all accounts felt even more intensely by women than men. (Forget about the biological imperative, what about the biological clock?) But a little reading around reveals that the naysayers are no longer such a tiny minority, if they ever were. To be anti-natalist is not to be unnatural. Nor is being child-free.

    Eugenio Zampighi

    Misanthropic and Philanthropic

    Before we go any further, and risk becoming mired in ambiguity or contradiction, let’s define our terms, and where I would locate myself in the current state of the debate. Being ‘child-free’ (as opposed to the involuntary ‘childless’) is a choice that could be made for financial, physical, emotional, or any other number of reasons, whereas the more extreme ‘anti-natalism’ is a distinct philosophical position, as argued for by South African philosopher David Benatar in his 2006 book, Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. Anti-natalists feel it is unfair to the children who are born and then left with the mess we leave behind.

    There are two general categories of anti-natalism: misanthropic and philanthropic. Misanthropic anti-natalism is the standpoint that humans have a presumptive duty to desist from bringing new members of our species into existence because they cause harm.

    Ecological anti-natalism (sometimes called environmental anti-natalism) is a subset of misanthropic anti-natalism that believes procreation is wrong because of the inherent environmental damage caused by human beings and the suffering we inflict on other sentient organisms.

    The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is representative of this type of anti-natalism. Philanthropic anti-natalism is the position that humans should not have children for the good of the (unborn) children because, in bringing children into the world, the parents are subjecting them to pain, suffering, illness and, of course, eventual death. Why become a cog in this endless cycle? Of course, there is a lot of room for misanthropic and philanthropic anti-natalism to overlap.

    Furthermore, far from being the purview of some weirdo outliers, this essentially tragic worldview is a perfectly respectable literary-philosophical tradition, espoused to varying degrees by writers and philosophers as diverse as Sophocles, Flaubert, Poe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Beckett, Cioran, Larkin, Peter Wessel Zapffe and the anhedonic Thomas Ligotti. (Season One of the HBO series True Detective (2014) drew heavily on Lovecraft’s and Ligotti’s pessimistic, anti-natalist philosophy, as expressed by the character Rust Cohle.)

    In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus posits that the only serious philosophical problem is that of suicide: having been born, is life worth living? One could counterargue that perhaps an even more serious philosophical problem is that of parenthood: rather than deciding whether or not to end a life that is already in existence, to decide whether or not to bring a life into existence in the first place.

    Of course, most people don’t even give such a weighty problem a second thought. Or, if they do, it’s all part of their plan.  Nor is it only men who can be less than enthusiastic about propagating the species, for social or personal reasons. Apart from obvious examples like Simone de Beauvoir – for whom marriage, child-rearing and family life represented a prison house for women – thirteen of the writers who contributed to Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids (2015), edited by Meghan Daum, were women.

    More recently, Sheila Heti’s autofictional novel Motherhood is framed around a choice between having a child and writing a book. Exhibit Number One, regarding the outcome of this dilemma, is the object we are holding in our hands as we read. We should add the qualification that this dichotomous set-up is at best fallacious and at worst false, since many if not most writers – even female ones – somehow manage to do both. (How do they do it?) However, that the topic provides the focus for a bestseller is in itself noteworthy.

    Eugenio Zampighi

    To Each Their Own

    Where do I lie on this scale? Well, what began as carefree child-freedom has probably hardened over time, and with some thought – as these things often will, into full-blown anti-natalism, roughly equal parts mis- and phil-. However, I should qualify the last assertion by saying that I am not prepared to go to war with anyone who fervently wants to have children: to each their own.

    I am not about to undertake a crusade, or even launch a campaign, against those desperate to reproduce. I have never understood people who want you to be like them, or do as they do, who elevate their personal preferences into a modus vivendi for all.

    I would only question their choices and beliefs to the same extent that they would question mine. The basic tenet of anti-natalism is simple but, for most of us, profoundly counterintuitive: that life, even under the best of circumstances, is not a gift or a miracle, but rather a harm and an imposition. According to this logic, the question of whether or not to have a child is not just a personal choice but an ethical one – and the correct answer is always no. So, if genuine anti-natalism means opposing all births, under all circumstances, then I am still of the merely child-free persuasion. I don’t necessarily consider all procreation to be unethical: I just believe in the individual’s right to choose.

    I have had personal, up-close experience of this pressure to propagate, as applied not so much by my parents – as is generally the case – but by an ex-sister-in-law, and a brother-in-law.

    Aged twenty-six, I had brought my then girlfriend, an Italian woman I had met during a sojourn teaching there, back to the homestead for a visit. In our sitting room one evening, in front of said girlfriend, then sister-in-law chose to launch into what she probably thought of as a homily, but I took to be a tirade, about how I should settle down and start a family, as though this was the only possible course of action now open to me. (Said lady had in the past opined, “I don’t want people like you teaching my children” – although I never quite worked out what was meant by ‘people like me’.)

    She even went so far as to culminate in querying indignantly, “What do you believe?” Is there really any sane, let alone succinct, counter to this line of inquiry? Did she think she was establishing some sort of solidarity with my girlfriend? Similarly, when I was in my forties and married, my brother-in-law, of the fundamentalist evangelical Christian persuasion, while doing some tradesman work in the house I shared with my wife, started pontificating about the necessity of having children if you are married.

    One is, it seems, not respecting the sacrament of marriage if one doesn’t. I subsequently complained to my sister about her husband’s behaviour, not least about the upset it had caused my wife, and we didn’t see him again for a very long time. Again, I ask: why does everyone else want you to be like them? Is it because they feel threatened by, or envious of, other, different lifestyles? Or because they are so sure they are right? Because accepting the same burdens and responsibilities they have taken on will make you a better person (in their eyes, anyway)? Could it even maybe be because they are happy, or think they are, and they want you to be happy too?

    My own reading of these events is that, given the severe socio-religious strictures against pre-marital sex, and the shame and suffering of pregnancy ‘outside wedlock’, I guess in early 1960s Ireland (and elsewhere), when these people were courting, the only way to have guilt-free sex was to get married; and so, given the lack of available contraception, as a corollary that meant no option but to have children – whether you wanted them or not. Hence the Irish Family. So these people became seriously invested in the nuclear family as a universal norm. They had no other choice, except abstinence; and they certainly didn’t want you having something they never had. Heaven forbid, you might even enjoy it.

    ‘The Surprise Baby’ 

    From the foregoing, it will be surmised that my brother and sister are somewhat older than me. This is indeed the case: the brother is twenty-one years my senior, and the sister has seventeen years on me. I am the youngest of three, by a considerable stretch: the afterthought, the heart’s scald, perhaps even a mistake. (And colloquially, in some circles, ‘the shakings of the bag’. Although also known in Swedish, I’m reliably informed, relatively more benignly if not entirely unambiguously, as ‘the surprise baby’.)

    My brother and sister have four kids and six kids respectively. Looking back, I can see now that maybe my place in this familial structure took the onus off me to continue the lineage, and even that my own lack of motivation to have a family could have been an equal and opposite reaction to their extreme fecundity. I also retrospectively realise that, despite my parents’ relative reticence, the act of my bringing a girl home signified to them that my ‘intentions were honourable’, and that I was probably serious about marrying her.

    Now that this essay has taken an unfortunately autobiographical turn, I recognise that the psychologists in the audience (both amateur and professional) will look to my childhood and adolescence, and my experience of being parented, as a revealing explanation for my indifference to procreation, rather than my having a genetic predisposition towards a certain frame of mind and worldview.

    Maybe it’s how I was nurtured, rather than my nature? Perhaps they may even be right. Was my mother a monster? Did my parents have a fractious relationship? Were they neglectful, or did they regard their issue as a luxury they could ill-afford? While I recoil at the prospect of making this meditation on childlessness all about me, it occurs to me that I would have to field accusations of evasiveness were I not to engage with how my own formation has influenced my current thinking.

    My father was twenty-four when my brother was born, and my mother was twenty-one. They were twenty-nine and twenty-six, respectively, when my sister came along. They were forty-five and forty-two when I rocked up. Do the sums. That is quite a chasm in the so-called generation gap. In fact, it is more like two generations, and growing up with my parents was a little like the reported experience of many people who are reared by their grandparents: they may love you, but they don’t exactly prepare you for dealing with the contemporary world, or help you to negotiate it.

    Of course, as a child you are not aware of such anomalies at the time, and even into adolescence and adulthood you mostly just try to get on with things and play the hand you’ve been dealt.

    It is only very gradually that the singularity of one’s own background becomes apparent to oneself, and can be crushing. It many ways, it is a lifelong, ongoing, realisation, constantly refined into old age. We are all works-in-progress.

    Not that my parents were especially old school. In many ways they were more liberal than my brother and sister – who as young parents themselves, married and gone from the family home and starting their own families by the time I was four, were already becoming responsible authority figures, according to their own lights. Actually, it is more appropriate to write of my father and mother as separate entities, since they never exactly operated in tandem.

    My father was traditional, conservative and dogmatically religious; but he was also kind. It is difficult to conceive of today, but he organised annual pilgrimages to Knock shrine for his colleagues, the busmen of C.I.E. He was praying the rosary in the front room while I was listening to The Sex Pistols in the kitchen. It broke his heart when, in my early teens, I announced that I didn’t want to go to Mass anymore.

    My mother was a reader, and therefore could possibly be described as more open-minded and, if nothing else, she probably helped to inculcate in me a love of literature (although, curiously, not music – at least not the kind of music I was interested in: rock’n’roll was the work of Satan, and she put as many obstacles as possible into my path when I was trying to pursue a career in it; of course, she may well have been right, in that rock’n’roll is the Devil’s music, at any rate it is if you are doing it right – but she saw this as a bad thing, while I thought it was great), but she was domineering, exigent, and prone to exaggeration (‘The Queen of Hyperbole’ I dubbed her); she was also strict.

    She was creative – a brilliant knitter and designer – but, like many intelligent and talented women of her generation, frustrated by domesticity, even if she would never have admitted it openly, or even to herself. Plus, we were working-class and poor, with the concomitant money worries and lack of opportunity and limited horizons.

    As well as not having economic capital, there wasn’t much social or cultural capital knocking around either. Neither of them had got beyond primary school. I’m sure they’d had hard lives, struggling to make ends meet, with a boy born in 1939 and a girl in 1944, neatly parenthesising the privations of the Second World War, which continued into the dour 1950s.

    However, while for a small child any given reality is accepted as normal and taken for granted, looking back from an adult vantage point, with some experience of observing other parent/child relationships, I would define my mother as simultaneously both distant and overbearing – or overbearingly distant, or distantly overbearing.

    There is some history here: while expecting me, she moved out of the family home and decamped to a damp flat above Walton’s Music Shop on North Great Frederick Street, Dublin, taking my brother and sister with her (thus disrupting the former’s accountancy studies), apparently amid accusations from my father concerning her ‘clandestine inclinations’ (my old man had a very superior vocabulary, for a busman), the implication being that I wasn’t his child.

    I suspect this was a complete fabrication on my mother’s part, although he would not have been above fits of jealousy. More likely (and for reasons I don’t fully comprehend), he was shamed by ribbing from his work colleagues about becoming a father again aged forty-five. Or perhaps it was these co-workers who, for a laugh, planted seeds of doubt in his mind regarding her fidelity and my paternity.

    While these complexities are shrouded in mystery and the mists of time to me, accessible only through often conflicting second-hand retellings, it is certain she did have some cause for grievance. It is acknowledged that he would come in late from work when the rest of the family were in bed asleep, and bang around the kitchen making as much noise as possible, all the while taking protracted silences with his spouse when they did happen to meet up. (Joke: it was a typical Irish marriage – they spoke to each other once a year, whether they needed to or not.)

    But then again, apart from his workmates preying on his insecurities, maybe he had his reasons too. As a simple working man, maybe he would have just appreciated having some dinner left out for him, after working double-days on the back of a bus. Taking silences was also my mother’s métier, for expressing her frequent displeasure, again alternating with loud, vehement outbursts of anger. I was much subjected to this parenting method, even as a small child.

    Eugenio Zampighi

    ‘Dutch Uncle’ 

    Guilt came early, and was ladled from a great height, for anything construed as misbehaviour – like innocently being too boisterous when playing with my nieces and nephews. It was as though she always, sometimes faintly and sometimes outrightly, disapproved of me at some basic level. (What did she expect an eight-year-old boy who didn’t get out all that much to do when said nieces and nephews were around? Just sit there in silence, minding my own business, or venturing occasionally to make polite conversation?) She talked to me, as she used to say herself, ‘like a Dutch uncle’.

    I used to think the phrase meant someone who talked at length. Only recently did I find out that it is an informal term for a person who ‘issues frank, harsh or severe comments and criticism to educate, encourage or admonish someone…thus, a “Dutch uncle” is the reverse of what is normally thought of as avuncular or uncle-like (indulgent and permissive).’ But, predominantly, silence was the air she moved in, and its ambience extended to all and everything around her, at least when we were home alone together, which was a lot of the time. (Conversely, when in other company, and doubtless as a form of unconscious overcompensation, she could be loquacious to the point of tedium – there was rarely a happy medium.)

    Dad was too busy working long hours, topped up with copious amounts of overtime, trying to keep the show on the road. She would quickly lose interest in being cooped up with a small boy for days on end. Consequently, I spent a good deal of time as a little lad in solitude, more than average for a child of that age, and was left to my own devices. I had to make my own fun. I was lavished with toys, but other humans – even those of around my own age – were strange, otherworldly creatures.

    While I largely welcomed them when they invaded my world, I wasn’t always sure how to deal with them. (‘How do I work this new toy?’) Later, when I was around nine or ten, she went out to work, as a seamstress in the linen room of a hotel, and then as a general operative in a local pharmaceutical factory, and my aloneness was complete.

    I came home every day from school to an empty house. But my mother’s greatest sin, as an extremely manipulative individual, who fought strenuously to control the family narrative (in which my role was to become the rebellious bad boy) was that she sought to turn me against my father (easily enough accomplished, due to his long, work-related absences and her being the chief caregiver – when the humour took her), but then later and depending on her mercurial moods, as if by fiat, she would blame me for disrespecting him. Being a powerless pawn caught in this crossfire between the king’s limited movement and vulnerability, and the queen’s infinite space and resources, would be enough to wreck anyone’s head. I was just another means for them to get at each other in their ongoing war of attrition, collateral damage in our bizarre love/hate triangle.

    I’m thinking of Raymond Carver’s very short short story ‘Popular Mechanics’, in which an argument over custody between a departing husband and his wife concludes thus: ‘She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back. But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard. In this manner, the issue was decided.’

    Christmas Morning

    A memory, of Christmas morning, when I was aged about ten or eleven. The scene, my sister and brother-in-law’s house, where my mother had decamped for the duration, with me in tow, in another of her flits from my supposedly tyrannical father. I remember her eyes on me, watching me as I opened my presents from Santa, and I was conscious of the obligation to perform happiness and joy for her, because she was having such a sad life, and as her young dutiful son I was obliged to cheer her up.

    It struck me, even then, that this was not how most of my contemporaries were required to behave, and it marked me apart. But there was always something performative about my mother, and those interacting with her. She spoke frequently of Love, but she used the apportioning of it as a form of punishment and reward. She constantly felt that others – not least her youngest child – should strive to gain her approval. In turn, I felt a constant pressure to show that I was having a happy childhood, and an equal pressure not to be any trouble – at least until adolescence hit.

    This giving and withdrawing of affection, a constant tightrope walk of appeasement, has definitely made its mark on the quality of my adult relationships, especially with women: I associate people loving me with people wanting something from me, and with it arbitrarily being taken away if they don’t get what they want. Perhaps this experience of love is not so different from most people’s – for how often is any love offered unconditionally?

    It is, however, one of the foundational and enabling myths of parenthood that parents are supposed to love their children more than themselves. But how many do? My mother did not love me more than herself. Maybe my father did. If work is love in action, he certainly slogged his guts out to keep us in the comfort to which we had no right to become accustomed. She, on the other hand, far from providing unconditional love, instead veered towards viewing me as a needless vexation and a thankless nuisance.

    I can see now that, as a good-looking and quick-witted young woman, my mother thought she could have done much better in the marriage stakes, but she had been cajoled by her parents into a very early alliance with my father, because he was a kind man and they knew he would do his best to look after her. Which, understandably, wouldn’t have made my father feel great, especially since she was the love of his life.

    Did I mention that she’d given birth to a stillborn girl, carried to full term, a year or two before I was born? She hadn’t expected me to live. When I was born healthy, and did live, I was ‘a miracle’. But then she had to deal with the consequences of this miracle. She left the grubby flat in North Frederick Street, diagonally opposite the Rotunda Hospital where I first saw the light of day (damn, my real dirty little secret is finally out: although I was bred on the Southside, I was born on the Northside – which side of the river is more opprobrious I will leave it to readers, informed by their own personal prejudices, to decide), and returned to the suburban council house I was brought up in, because it had taps with hot running water.

    Did I also mention that she fell ill with double pneumonia after I was born? My seventeen-year-old sister looked after me for the first few months of my life – fed me, burped me, changed my shitty nappies, all the things it is assumed mothers do with their new-borns. I have the impression that my mother never bonded properly with me.

    Despite her previous maternal experience, she didn’t know how to be around me. To a degree that was unhealthy, she wanted to be wooed – by her son rather than by her husband. Or, failing that, she wanted to be placated. I harbour the notion that my mother harboured the notion that she would have had some great second act to her life, had I not been born.

    I also harbour the notion that she was suspicious of those who had ‘notions’ – especially her children – because she had never been given the opportunity to indulge her own notions. She embodied avant la lettre, and would certainly have been an enthusiastic appreciator of, The Cult Of The Difficult Woman. But, as Jia Tolentino astutely argues in her essay of that title, these days it is not so difficult to be a difficult woman. Be that as it may, I can categorically state: as a very small child, having a disappointed menopausal and/or post-menopausal mother, is not a good thing. And not just not good for the child, but also for the mother.

    I very much doubt my mother was up for the sleepless nights, and the many other demands of child-rearing, at her age, in her delicate state of health, and having done it all before and thought it was all over. I was not, as a psychiatrist once asked me – clearly ignorant of the history of access to contraception in Ireland, due in no small part to the acquiescence of her profession in the machinations of the great church/state sponsored lie – a planned pregnancy.

    Candidates for Divorce

    If you love someone, you want to have children with them, it is said. As will be surmised from the foregoing, in my opinion, if my parents had been living now, and been more solvent, they would have been prime candidates for divorce, and very likely much better off for it. Or, at least, I would have been. During a discussion between the Ma and me on contraception and the ‘risks’ of pre-marital sex (still a hot topic in the early 1980s), she informed me that I was the result of ‘one lousy intercourse’.

    Somehow, I don’t think I figured greatly in her plans. In a similar disquisition on the whys and wherefores of abortion (although now at long last safely legal in Ireland, still something of a red rag to a bull in some quarters) she revealed, “You could have been an abortion”, to which, if I’d had enough presence of mind, I should have countered, “Well, if I had been, I wouldn’t have known about it.” (Echoes here of the perennial cri de coeur of teen angst: ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’)  What things for any mother to say to her son!

    I have heretofore been ashamed of airing these exchanges for public consumption, possibly in an effort at blocking out the damage they would have done to the still evolving me, and a refusal to acknowledge how singularly and egregiously brutal they were. After all, the first love in your life is supposed to come from your mother. But I am ashamed no longer. I am too old now for it to matter what other people think of me, or of my mother, or of our troubled relationship, or of her memory.

    Apropos: I am writing this as personal memoir because if I tried to write it as fiction, no one would believe it. I am used to not being believed. You decide whether or not you believe me now.

    Defining ‘Natural’

    Was my mother ‘unnatural’ in her attitude to motherhood? Well, that very much depends on your definition of ‘natural’, doesn’t it? In this regard, it is instructive to quote from Laura Kipnis’s essay in the aforementioned anthology, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids, entitled ‘Maternal Instincts’:

    …despite my proven talents at nurturing, I don’t believe in maternal instinct because as anyone who’s perused the literature on the subject knows, it’s an invented concept that arises at a particular point in history (I’m speaking of Western history here) – circa the Industrial Revolution, just as the new industrial-era sexual division of labor was being negotiated, the one where men go to work and women stay home raising kids. (Before that, pretty much everyone worked at home.) The new line was that such arrangements were handed down by nature. As family historians tell us, this is also when the romance of the child begins – ironically it was only when children’s actual economic value declined, because they were no longer necessary additions to the household labor force, that they became the priceless little treasures we know them as today. Once they started costing more to raise than they contributed to the household economy, there had to be some justification for having them, which is when the story that having children was a big emotionally fulfilling thing first started taking hold.

    All I’m saying is that what we’re calling biological instinct is a historical artifact – a culturally specific development, not a fact of nature. An invented instinct can feel entirely real (I’m sure it can feel profound), though before we get too sentimental, let’s not forget that human maternity has also had a fairly checkered history over the ages, including such maternal traditions as infanticide, child abandonment, cruelty, and abuse.

    I might add, similarly, that belief in a God or the gods was rather more popular in the past – and, in fact, for most of recorded history – than it is today. All life comes from God, the believers tell us: that is why they are ‘Pro-Life’. Are we contemporary godless atheists somehow, then, wrong?

    My mother would have looked askance and jeered at today’s required standards of parenting. One time, when I was around twenty-two, she presented me with an itemised bill she had taken the trouble to compile, for how much it had cost to rear me.

    It was high time I started paying it back. “There’s no return in you” was a common theme. Do I not have kids because I thought they would have cost me too much, because I could not afford them? “We did our best for you,” she told me another time. And perhaps they did. “I reared two gentlemen and a lady,” the Da would often boast. Except you don’t need to be well-off to praise and encourage your children. You just need to love them, and want what’s best for them. Never mind loving them more than yourself.

    Featured Image: Idyllic Family Scene with Newborn by Eugenio Zampighi (1859-1944)

  • Lessons From the Great Depression (I)

    This is the first instalment of a three part essay on the legacy of the Great Depression..

    The Great Depression began in 1929, leading Wall Street bankers literally to throw themselves from windows. I was shown one such exit site on 45th Street 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Lives were destroyed as a favourable market collapsed. The fundamental point then, and now, about a favourable or unfavourable market is it is always an illusion. Smoke and mirrors.

    Bull leads to Bear and back, and that cycle since 2008 is certainly where we are again, as confidence is lost in markets and neo-liberal non-interventionism. The effect in 1929 emphasised how when America catches a cold Europe contracts pneumonia. In the 1930s, the fragile, well-intentioned experiment in Wilsonian democracy collapsed virtually overnight. Now the effect is global.

    We are now seeing unmistakable signs of stagflation and even hyperinflation, accentuated by the additional disease burden of the virus on health systems subjected to decades of sneaking privatisation; while health inequalities widen, as transnational organisations and Big Pharma – using so-called philanthro-capitalism as a front – collude at the expense of the population at large.

    The prospect looms of fuel and food shortages, decreased life expectancies – already evident before the pandemic – repossessions, and evictions, with limited support in countries without social democratic support structures.

    In terms of civil liberties, we are entering dangerous territory too, with compulsory vaccination and quarantines. A long winter is coming. And what are we to make of most non-essential court cases in the UK being adjourned until September of next year?

    The New Deal

    In 1932 at the height of its destitution, America elected its greatest ever leader the aristocratic bon vivant socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who brought in the New Deal to save the country from ruin.

    In contemporary America, no such leadership exists. Biden is no Roosevelt. He is unwilling to develop a true social market. All too many in America are ‘Bowling Alone’ as communities fall apart in a digitally mediated age of social atomisation.

    The Great Depression represented a failure of the American idea of government. Apart from a few dissenters, such as the legendary Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, the business of America has always been business, until it goes bust.

    In a tremendous refutation of free market economics in Lochner v. New York (1903) Holmes said: ‘The third amendment does not enact Mr Herbert spencer’s social statics’

    Holmes was at least a quasi-socialist, who corresponded with Harold Laski. But neither an intellect like him or a proper social democratic deal maker and integrator like Roosevelt is evident in American politics today.

    Obama received money and recruited Goldman Sachs alumni to his cabinet which is a bit like inviting a cuckoo into the nest.

    Studs Terkel

    Hard Times

    Another Chicago native and reporter of the last century, Studs Terkel chronicled American life in his book Hard Times, which is an oral history of the Depression era. Terkel argued that ‘the worst day-to-day operators of businesses are bankers,’ and quotes one source who has fallen on hard times:

    We thought of the poor, at that time, as quite divorced from us, who were not poor. By the exercise of one’s charity, life could be made all right. You would always have the poor with you, they were the unfortunate, and you made donations. You could handle them. It was mildly unpleasant, but not fundamentally upsetting. Now, for the first time, we face the dreadful reality that we are not separated. They are us.

    And another describes a scene of acute desperation:

    They would just walk all over and kill each other. They got more than they ever need that they would just step on anybody to keep it. They got cars, they got houses, they got this and that. It is more than they need, but they think they need it, so they want to keep it. Human life isn’t as important as what they got.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Worse Still?

    I fear that this collapse will be on a greater scale. Indeed, despite deprivation, life expectancies actually increased in America over the course of the 1930s, but since the turn of this century epidemiologists have been predicing a decline.

    The successful application of the ideas of the master J. M. Keynes generated a worldwide social democratic model in the wake of the Great Depression, which became the consensus before the resurgence of neo-liberalism. This has undermined humanity since the late 1970s, and its effect now appear irreversible, given the absence of an alternative Communist model that compelled even governments devoted to capitalism to maintain a basic standard of living and healthcare.

    In contrast, the neo-liberal model of marketisation of human activity has intruded into all sectors of life. This has denuded and in some cases destroyed what Habermas describes as the public sphere.

    A set of unworkable ideas have spiralled out of control, and are generating a disaster. Liberal democracy is failing and becoming unworkable. In effect, the End Of History is the acceptance of discredited ideas, which have led us to this impasse.

    Capitalism is not working because capitalism is not allowing people to work. Joseph Stieglitz, a former economist for the World Bank remarked: ‘Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor.’ And increasingly basic liberties are being sacrificed at the altar of security.

    Artistic Response

    More than statisticians or economists, artists convey the individual effects of world historical events such as the Great Depression.

    Although written in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is one of the core texts of the Depression, demonstrating the appalling work conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry. Many of his works including Oil, which became the film with Daniel Day Lewis ‘There Will be Blood’ attack unbridled capitalism and its depressing effects on the human spirit.

    Two crucial quotes from The Jungle are as follows:

    The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.

    And

    Into this wild beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.

    Sinclair paints a familiar scene, now throw in the disinformation of our post-truth universe and you have a neo-liberal Molotov cocktail. At least at that time there was vibrant social commentary, and a less captured media.

    All little lives need protecting as Sinclair and above all John Steinbeck in his portrayals of the Okies in dustbowl America clearly recognised. His great novel The Grapes Of Wrath depicts a migration from the dustbowls of Oklahoma to California, which turns out to be no Promised Land, as any unionization or collective action is supressed, just as has been the case over the last thirty years.

     

    More relevant than even Sinclair or Steinbeck as an evocation of the Depression-era in America is a book by James Agee, and photographer Walker Evans called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941. The phrase originates in the Jewish religion. The complete sentence is: ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the fathers that beget them.’

    The book, partially governmentally funded, chronicles dustbowl America. Evans adds the pictorial record of the devastation wreaked by the great economic depression in the dustbowl.

    From the pictures of Walker Evans it is noticeable how grim the faces are. The anguished expressions on children is particularly harrowing. Lives lost by neglect and the degradation of poverty.

    It’s A Wonderful Life

    Austerity

    It is well documented how austerity in our present age has killed people by stealth through the gradual removal of social supports. Lawyers and NHS workers might share the same fate. Whatever ramparts of social protection that previously existed are being whittled away by Covid. And

    Any yet we cannot give up. Produced and directed by Frank Capra in the wake of World War II, ‘It’s a Wonderful life’ is about a good banker memorably played by Jimmy Stewart, who helps people to build new homes.

    Capra, made many great films, but ‘It Happened One Night,’ which came out at the height of the Depression captures a spirit a popular spirit of defiance. So there is cause for optimism in poor folk.

    Featured Image: Lunch atop a Skyscraper, Charlie C. Ebbets, 1932.

  • Last Days in RTÉ – ‘I came to kill you’

    In 1967, the fidgets struck again. That was the year my mother died, rapidly following my father.

    I confess now that I was not obviously upset by the deaths of my parents. In the culture of my generation and class, love, certainly any public expression of it, was an embarrassment. Such namby-pamby language was confined to the worship of film stars, sentimental songs, Jesus Christ and drink. This lack I often regret, having, in the area of emotional expression a limited palette.

    Affection, attachment, addiction, obsession, sentiment, desire, lust, liking, fondness – I am familiar with them all. But love itself is awkward territory, partly because the language of its expression is so inadequate, so debased that I have come to believe that, ‘whereof man cannot speak, let him be silent.’ Predictably, when I am confronted by the technicolour emotions of a funeral, however tragic, what usually comes to mind is a black and white war etching by Goya whose chilling caption is: ‘Shut up and bury your dead.’

    But this is merely a defence, a carapace adopted because I have a dread of being caught weeping, which weakness I am occasionally prone to, especially on occasions musical. Only an embarrassed few have ever been allowed to witness this, my Achilles heel.

    Besides, there is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, ‘Goldengrove’, in which a young girl, Margaret, grieves over the fall of Autumn leaves. Hopkins gently points out to her that as she ‘grows older she will come to sights colder’ and realise that it is actually her own demise she mourns. This applies to all funerals.

    I have no doubt that my parents – from their astral heights, of course – now understand the convolutions of my career. Including, for instance, why I declined to have my own children baptised in any faith, and why I have sung in both Catholic and Protestant choirs with no residue of belief in either of their dogmas – except as a useful social glue. I also admire the Semitic cultures of both Islam and Judaism and wish they would return to their pre-colonial mutual tolerance. My bets are therefore hedged. Music is my sole spiritual sustainer and default position on religion.

    What else could one expect from a flibbertigibbet?

    Decision Time

    Finally in 1967 I had had enough of the commercial dimension of television corrupting the concept of public broadcasting. Brilliant people in advertising were conspiring with TV managers, using reason to control the irrationalism of the masses and turn them into numbered consumers. But vestiges of common sense told me I needed to learn more about how the real world worked.

    A friendly philosopher, the late Jack Dowling, advised me to study Shakespeare. That was not drastic enough for me. I went to the RTÉ Programme Controller, said I had developed mental indigestion and was leaving television. That aesthetic man with a cigarette holder, the late Michael Garvey, said ‘stay brave’ and told me he would treat it as a sabbatical and pay my salary for three months. In retrospect it felt like compassionate leave. I got character references from people like Professor Ivor Browne and Mother Mary Nicholas and other sane people with whom I had made films. I then persuaded Tomás Roseingrave to get me into the University of Antigonish as an auditor in sociology. That’s when I really woke up.

    The philosopher, poet and ex-Jesuit Philip McShane once wrote to me: ‘Happy the man who preserves his illusions’. In Nova Scotia all of my more naïve illusions were demolished. I met Philip again, at a New Year’s party in Antigonish. Our pleasure at renewing acquaintance, expressed in the normal Irish epithets that hide affection e.g. ‘howiya, you old bollocks’, was overheard by our host, an old-fashioned Belfast Catholic immigrant. This stocky little man exploded, shouted that he would not tolerate ‘such fackin language in my house,’ and summarily evicted us into the snow and sub-zero temperature. We started walking, Philip forgetting his new young wife in the excitement. Loyally she followed in her car and saved us both from hypothermia.

    Through lectures in sociology, especially from Italian-American Vito Signorile,  I learned about the relativity of all cultural concepts, including religion, even knowledge itself. Vito was married to a feisty woman from Northern Ireland and he warned me about women: ‘When she has her period, she’s a monster.’  I learned that lesson too late.

    The last absolute I vainly clung to was a simplistic version of Marxism, even contradicting a young lecturer who derided that ideology as one which had never caught on. I sharply reminded him that Marx had not set a time limit for the self-destruction of Capitalism. That marvellous event did not happen for another forty years, in 2007, not too long after Socialism itself had self-destructed.

    Peace Outbreak

    My innocence of political reality also received a cold douche. To acquaint the Canadian students with their democratic system the youngsters were encouraged to imitate the national parties – Labour, Conservative and Liberal – by organising elections and establishing a mock parliament.

    We on the Left won in a coalition with the Liberals. On the first day of ‘Parliament’ we heard shots outside and a bunch of rifle-toting students on the defeated Conservative side burst into the formal Assembly. They were shouting that it was illegally constituted. Prudence suggested we leave  with dignity.

    One of the young gunmen, barring our way out, had his jaw broken by my closest friend there, Deets Kennedy, son of a tough Cape Breton miner. As I nursed a hangover on the following day I ruminated on life imitating art and thought hard about democracy. In case the vote didn’t work in your favour, you carried a blackthorn stick or a gun. What an effective system was democracy! At least in Ireland we merely forced the people to vote again and again until they got a referendum result right. I know what Deets Kennedy’s father would do in such a situation.

    I met Mr. Kennedy for the first and only time at a family wedding up in Sydney, Cape Breton. I felt honoured to be invited. On the way back from the formal nuptials Deets drove the car and entrusted his father to me, saying that no matter what happened I must keep his father beside me in the back seat. The earnestness of his request suggested to me that there were tribal tensions abroad.

    There had, of course, been drink taken. On the way, Mr. Kennedy behaved like a lamb, singing softly in my honour ‘Shall My soul pass through oul Ireland’ to the tune of Kevin Barry. The convoy stopped outside our party destination, Deets got out with a curt ‘You two stay there.’ Some altercation developed in front of the car. I leaned forward to try to identify the cause of the melee. When I turned to inquire of Mr. Kennedy as to the cause, he had vanished from my care. I soon recognised him on the footpath ahead, delivering a haymaker to one of the disputants.

    Deets later told me that the recipient was another son, always a troublemaker. Peace broke out and we had a wonderful party. I could only think: it is a devoted father who can identify and instantly defuse the one psychopath in the family, thus restoring equilibrium to the celebrations.

    I was a slow learner in every respect, trying to work things out rather than learn them by rote as I had once done with the penny catechism.

    Star-Gazer

    In December of that year I came home to assist in burying my mother and stayed for Christmas. At the wake in Hazelbrook Road, Terenure, I revealed to five grieving siblings and in-laws that each of the countless zillions of stars in the cosmos consisted of at least one departed human soul. It was, if not a metaphysical, then certainly a mathematical, possibility. Therefore our mother still existed. Despite my siblings’ reluctance  to accept this consolation, I persisted.

    I told them that no matter how simple and blameless a life such as our mother’s might seem, each human personality was so complex as to be beyond our ken and could not vanish into nothingness. The brain itself was a miracle of billions of electro-chemical processes. As it was largely unused during a person’s life, the reality of death must focus it wonderfully. In the final micro-second into which a life such as our mother’s was frantically compressed, there must be a surge of energy imaginable as no less than nuclear fusion. This process must transform the soul into an eternal incandescence. Simply put, the soul turns into a star.

    They should therefore not grieve for the dear departed but enjoy the astronomy.

    A tidy arrangement, I felt, having just read Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of the Noosphere.

    This Jesuit palaeontologist had daringly suggested that the human capacity for reflex thought must evolve into a girdle of consciousness enveloping the planet. He called it the Pleroma and his religious superiors were not happy about his invention. I now suspect that members of my extended family also took my soul-stirring ideas with a pinch of salt.  They guessed that my peroration was a front for grief.

    Thinking back, my speculation required no more a leap of faith than the incredible religion in which we were reared and which I abandoned long ago. In my ripe old age I still believe my invention to be as reliable an explanation of life’s ultimate mystery as anything Aquinas or Avicenna, Darwin or Hawkins or Dawkins, Ibn Sina or even De Chardin invented. And for a practical reason: human consciousness is a form of energy and as such, if we are to believe Einstein, cannot die or decay; it can only transform itself – exactly as water gaily does from liquid to ice to vapour. There can be no limit to the transformation of us bundles of energy.

    Around that time too, I ceremonially flung an old copy of the same penny catechism into a fire. Jack Dowling reminded me quietly that people who burned books were capable of burning people. That pulled me up short.

    In January 1968 I returned to Nova Scotia to complete my ‘studies’ and at term’s end to have a look around North America. For three months another friendly Dominican monk named Luke Dempsey and I drove around that mighty continent, staying buckshee in his Order’s monasteries.

    We called on Chicago, New Mexico, Death Valley, San Francisco, even visited Las Vegas for an overnight. The highlight of that was a breakfast where we perched at a bar and the waitress shimmied along behind it. Her walkway was so elevated that her magnificent thighs moved directly at our eye level. To notice Luke’s eyes modestly concentrating on his empty plate was a hilarious reminder of how fortunate I was not to have had a call to the religious life.

    When we finally came back to Nova Scotia I had a lovely reunion with a sensitive mother of two, named Zane whom I had met in Montreal months before. Skinny-dipping in the local river was delightfully involved. When I returned to Ireland I wrote a poem about our encounter which fortunately I have mislaid. It could never compete with Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’, astonishing love poems which I encountered at the back of the Catholic Sunday missal when I was an adolescent. They carried me through many a boring Mass service and subsequently came in useful in the business of wooing maidens.

    ”B e h o l d ,   t h o u   a r t   f a i r ,   m y   l o v e ;   b e h o l d ,   t h o u   a r t   f a i r ;   t h o u   h a s t   d o v e s ‘   e y e s   w i t h i n   t h y   l o c k s.

    T h y   l i p s   a r e   l i k e   a   t h r e a d   o f   s c a r l e t ,   a n d   t h y   s p e e c h   i s   c o m e l y :   t h y   t e m p l e s   a r e   l i k e   a   p i e c e   o f   a   p o m e g r a n a t e   w i t h i n   t h y   l o c k s .

    T h y   t w o   b r e a s t s   a r e   l i k e   t w o   y o u n g   r o e s   t h a t   a r e   t w i n s ,   w h i c h   f e e d   a m o n g   t h e   l i l i e s .”

    They may have been intended as paeans of praise to the Creator but I found them pleasantly erotic. My course was fixed.

    ‘Spitting blood’

    One night in 1968, having returned from Canada to resume my job in RTÉ, I saw darkness in the pale face of a man at the bar of Kiely’s pub near the RTÉ studios. I recognised him as Ed, the ex-husband of Zane. What was he doing in Ireland and especially in my neck of the woods? The old antennae of guilt immediately told me this was no coincidence, that there was something awry. My instinct was to clarify matters. I approached the bar and engaged him in as light a conversation as one can have with a brooding man. He was very pale, spoke in grim monosyllables and said he was staying in a nearby B&B. He told me he had hitched a lift from Montreal on a Canadian Air Force plane. I had never known he was a military man.

    Ignoring his clear hostility, I put on a show of welcome and resolved to keep him in my sights. I warmly insisted he come home for a drink in the house in which I was staying. After the short, wordless drive to mine host Dinno’s place, the latter – normally a sociable figure – excused himself and left the house. He told me later: ‘One look at that man’s face and I decided I wasn’t going to sleep under the same roof’.

    I didn’t sleep much that night, either.

    Next morning I boiled eggs for Ed and, as casually as possible, asked had he any particular schedule. ‘I came to kill you,’ he quietly said. So that was clear. I learned that he held me responsible for the break-up of his marriage. It was post-facto revenge because I had been given to understand by his wife that their marriage was long ended.

    ‘You really want to have a go at me?’ I asked. He nodded grimly. There was no getting away from it.  What could I say except: ‘I know the very place.’

    On the way to the wide open spaces of the Phoenix park he explained in detail that the Canadian Air Force had trained him in unarmed killing. He so worried me that I called in to my production assistant in the TV station, explained the situation and told her that, if I had not returned before lunch, she should send out a search party

    In a secluded spot in the Park we faced each other. By now I was more than nervous about his deadly skills. I had not had a fistfight since I played rugby but strict rules had governed that form of barbarism. Neither had the Marquis of Queensbury legislated for this circumstance. Ed ordered me ‘Take off your glasses.’ I reluctantly removed them, placed them carefully on my jacket and prepared for the worst. As I turned to meet my fate I was barely in time to dodge a sucker punch from Ed.  Fright made me go slightly berserk. I probably had the advantage in weight and after some minutes of my wild pummelling at him he held up his hands in submission.

    I drove him down to the nearest pub in Islandbridge where he vomited up the reviving brandy with which I plied him. As I deposited him at his B&B in Donnybrook I volunteered to meet him again that evening and show him the sights.

    He looked puzzled: this was no way to treat a sworn enemy. I pointed out that he was, after all, the son of Dublin emigrants to Canada but knew nothing of their city. The truth was, I felt sorry for him. When I later met him in the Scotch House on Burgh Quay he confessed to spitting blood since our altercation.

    I whisked him off to St. Vincent’s Hospital, then in Leeson St.,  where they decided to keep him overnight. He knew no-one in Dublin except myself, who dutifully called to the hospital the following day.  A nurse reported that Ed was suffering from kidney damage but had already signed himself out of the hospital, presumably to hitch an airlift back to Canada. I never heard from him again.

    Last year, in an email from his daughter – she found me on Facebook, where else?  – I learned that Ed’s curtains had recently been closed by cancer  and that our ancient encounter was now part of their family history.

    His daughter wanted the truth. I wrote a short hagiography of her father, stressing the honourable way he had tried to exact satisfaction from me. This was true. I had not realised that Ed was actually a mild-mannered dentist in the Air Force; he had probably never engaged in anything more violent than extracting a tooth. Apart from his pre-emptive, sabre-rattling about unarmed combat which had incited my overkill, the only other detail worth remembering is that, in Ed’s report of the encounter with me, he said ‘the old man was fitter than I thought.’ This ‘old man’ was thirty-three years of age at the time.

    Everything is relative.

    Resignation and Return

    ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind’, quoteth the tearful lady herself when she landed on my doorstep some weeks later. She and Ed  had physically fought for possession of their two young children in the mud of their farmyard. She had lost the grim struggle and got the next plane to Ireland. I had not the indelicacy to respond: ‘It never rains but it pours’. We spent a short while seeing the sights that Ed never had. She returned to Canada and married a sculptor.

    Not long afterwards I resigned from my permanent, pensionable post in RTÉ, bought an old Volkswagen and drove to Tehran and back with my first wife-to-be. That is quite another story. Alone on the return journey home at Christmas I developed a mild but uncomfortable form of tuberculosis called epididymitis which related to the testicles.

    It meant a short stay in hospital where, besides telling me I had various similar lesions on my lungs which had cured themselves, a specialist said I could never father a child. Recovering fast, but having spent all my pension contributions on the trip,  poverty forced me to crawl back and ask for contract work with RTE.

    Compassionate as ever, the organisation welcomed me and set me to the unexpected task of making a history series for children. I knew this new job was a prudent test of my boredom threshold but I persevered for four months. Then one day on a filming excursion to Belfast I had a discussion with Pat Kavanagh, the solid cameraman.

    It was 1969, one of the years when there was a questioning of all certainties.

    ‘Never trust anyone over thirty’ was one mantra. Another was ‘selling out to the system’. Yet another was: ‘If you’re going to commit suicide, take one with you.’

    Over a liquid lunch in Newry I stoutly maintained to Pat that there was a single unique point in every life when the decision to ‘sell out’ was made. Or not. He disagreed and perceptively said that capitulation to the system just crept up on a person gradually – usually accompanied by a mortgage. I agreed: we were mere puppets on strings. But it was time we looked up and noticed who was pulling the strings.

    I had no mortgage, nor any other responsibilities. I declared that here and now was one of those points of decision and ordered him and the crew to follow me to the West of Ireland. Reluctantly they followed because in those hierarchical times the crew accepted a producer/director as the unchallengeable boss. I would never get away with it now.

    I led the convoy all the way across Ireland to Roonagh pier in Mayo where we boarded the ferry for Clare Island. Then I wrote a letter for my female assistant to bring back to the station. Its intention was to exonerate the crew from any accusation of being willing accessories to my solo flight of fancy.

    A day later my immediate Head of Department, Maeve Piskorski, arrived on the island to persuade her prodigal protege to return to work. After twenty-four hours of pleasantly lubricated argument she departed without me, shaking her head in bewilderment. And that was the end of my RTE career and, I vowed, the end of my involvement with film and TV. I stayed on Clare Island for a couple of months, the guest and labourer of Michael Joe O’Malley, sheep farmer and philosopher.

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