Cassandra Voices

Tag: Neil Burns writer

  • The Powerful Nature of Addiction

    Back in 2016, I was embarking on a road towards sobriety after nearly eighteen years of committed alcoholism, homelessness, depression, and, in many ways, desperation. I needed to change. However, I did not know how or where to begin. I started with ‘one day at a time,’ taking small, manageable steps. If I don’t drink this week, I will try it next week. That was my mantra, and that’s how it went initially.

    That was when I happened to be in Manchester on my way from Salford, where I had been staying in a homeless night shelter, and walking into town to go to work one Sunday morning, when a fresh-looking can of Carlsberg was sitting all alone on the low or a brick wall near a small park. As to where its owner had gone, I had no clue. Still, I wanted to down that can of fizzy beer. I wanted to guzzle its beery contents down my throat and for it to wash around freely in my guttiwuts (as they put it in Clockwork Orange). Filling me with the desire for more beer, to smoke fags, and to fall about like a drunken imbecile, not being at all the responsible person that I used to be and aligning foolish behaviour(s) I know all too well – being the eternal alcoholic bum.

    Cut to the previous year prior, 2015, on a Sunday, the first of November, I had the worst hangover of my life, and wanted to kill myself. I simply had had enough of being an alcoholic.

    The scenario was that I was at Birmingham International Airport’s train station, lying on a bench in the small waiting room, suffering from a desperate hangover, holding onto a sausage baguette with congealing red sauce in a paper bag, murmuring in pain. I didn’t see how I could continue in life, having failed at it so badly.

    I wanted to throw myself under an oncoming train.

    I had been out on the lash in Birmingham the night before and spent a lot of money on a premeditated drinking session. The following day, I jumped on an earlier train, and the conductor came round and asked for my ticket and, inspecting it, said, ‘You’re an hour early; either buy a new ticket which will cost you £35.00 or get off at the next station and wait for your train.’ I choose to get off.

    Feature Image: David Kwewum

    Sobering up has been rather hellish. Seriously, it has.

    For the first five years, I was ill. I was lethargic and had a rumbling stomach. I believe I developed GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease), where the lining of the stomach is decimated due to all the booze I tipped down my throat, where it swilled around in there like a dark, seething, twisted, broiling sea.

    During my recovery, if I drank strong, cheap tea bags, the tannins in the tea played havoc with my liver, leading to a dull, searing pain in the lower right-hand side of my upper body.

    In 2017, I went to the GP in Derry, where I was living in a hostel, and he informed me I was having recurring liver infections. He didn’t know what I knew.

    I had a liver scan. There was some ‘superficial’ scarring on my liver, the nurses at Altnagelvin Hospital said. If it was superficial, I didn’t want to know what actual, deeper scarring felt like. No way. This had been painful enough so far.

    The reality was, after years of alcohol consumption, I had liver disease – let’s make no bones about it, leading to recurring infections. And my diet was atrocious, which contributed to my poor health.

    I drank far too many fizzy drinks. I scoffed far too many biscuits – once I sat down with a cup of tea, I would ‘clear the decks’ in terms of consuming high-sugar and high-fat content junk food in one sitting. Tunnock’s Teacakes were a firm favourite; I could consume at least four in one go. I ate crisps by the tonnage and ballooned to nearly fifteen stone in 2020. That’s big for someone of my height of 5ft 7¾, with a small enough frame. I was a greedy, unmitigated, irresponsible (health-wise) git.

    Two years ago, I went to the GP for a checkup as I was feeling lightheaded and had chest pains. My blood pressure was up six points, and I had high cholesterol, I was informed. I was on the danger alert for a heart attack. I think I have had some minor ones. Or Angina, at least. That or it was the GERD.

    These days, I rarely drink fizzy drinks. I seldom eat crisps and opt for baked ones. I would have a chocolate bar at least twice a week. Rarely more than that. I prepare most of my meals from scratch and mostly drink water.

    I recently saw an advertisement on a billboard at 8:44am for a pint of the black stuff, and wanted to imbibe it so badly that I considered going on the ‘drink.’ I swear to goodness that one millisecond glance up at that foamy pint with roasted barley, and I was there with one in my hand, ready to take a good draught.

    That is the powerful nature of addiction – that pull is as strong as it ever was, even though I am currently nine years alcohol-free.

    It takes work to remain sober. I don’t think I ever will be free from alcoholism.

    Only now can I say that I am not drinking. And that’s what I intend for the foreseeable future.

    I’m aware of the downsides, and it’s far from ideal: the anxiety, the guilt, and the worthless feeling(s) that soaking oneself in booze brings.

    At least now that I am sober, I can focus on my hobbies, including writing and making music – two things which bring me joy. And if that gets me out of bed in the morning – I now rise every morning at around 5am – sleeping right through from the night after usually going t to bed around 10pm.

    That is something which I can control and manage. I opt to be busy, which is something I aim to maintain. Things change when people have to.

    Feature Image: Pixababy

  • Ode to the Sausage Roll

    In George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up For Air, at the beginning of chapter 4, issue is taken with substandard food products, which do not taste like the product promoted and, indeed, taste like something else:

    At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and—Christ!

    I can’t honestly say that I’d expected the thing to have a pleasant taste. I’d expected it to taste of nothing, like the roll. But this—well, it was quite an experience. Let me try and describe it to you.

    The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.

    This brings me to mass-produced sausage rolls. We have been socially engineered to accept inferior products due to being ‘always on the go’ and ‘eating on the hoof.’ Thus one may enter a high-street establishment – the name of which I will not mention here – to purchase one of their sausage rolls in an act to stave off the morning hunger.

    Yet, it is a tube of pink cooked sludge – faintly reminiscent of pork –encompassed in a uniform pastry that is almost parcel-tight; a small, perfectly wrapped parcel.

    Imagine venturing into the post office and asking the lady behind the counter,

    ‘Can I post this sausage roll to Scandinavia here, please?’ With a stamp attached to one corner and a Sharpie scrawl to its destination. Would a mass-produced sausage roll make it in one piece to say, Gothenburg?

    I have eaten them.

    In a pinch.

    Don’t get me started on their bean thingy, which gives me rising acid reflux like molten lava in the chambers and corridors of the heart.

    The problem is with quality, which the main protagonist is concerned with in Robert M. Pirsig’s modern, philosophical treatise work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.

    Quality has dissipated due to mass-produced products.

    I remember in Botanic, Belfast, on the city side of the small hill, there was a bakery beside a laundrette. This was twenty-odd years ago. I remember they sold great sausage rolls. Inside, along with the pork meat was a little chopped-up white onion. The flaky, buttery pastry was fresh and delicious. A wee drop of red or brown sauce and I was in foodie heaven. The staff were friendly locals, and I recall the hearty chatter and warmth of the welcome. That bakery is long gone. I am unsure of its name now, which escapes me. Sadly.

    Wee bakeries – the one on Chapel Lane, city centre Belfast – served great homemade vegetable soup and sausage rolls. And Fifteens. Oh, yes.

    There was one near The Arches, East Belfast, and I was in one day as the baker was letting warm soda farls clatter onto the baking table. They were still steaming warm, fresh from the oven. I wanted to hit one with a drop of butter and strawberry jam, taken with a mug of tea. Who hasn’t wanted a fresh soda farl with crumbed ham, cheese, and tomato? Or a soda farl made with treacle? Or with Indian cornmeal?

    Years later, I would work with very that baker during nightshifts in a homeless hostel – how strange being in Belfast is at times, an almost Jungian synchronicity on the one hand, but due to the size of the city, perhaps no happenstance at all. He told me about the early morning starts and the wee bakery on the Woodstock Road, the cramped workspace above the shop. The lone baker works away in the early morning, while patrons sleep deeply through the morning darkness. Hard, honest graft.

    In 2001, I recall being in Sallynoggin, Dublin. I was labouring for a plasterer at the time. We were in Dublin, travelling up and down from the North over the course of a month or so, and in a Spar, I saw chicken-filet burgers – proper ones, bread-chicken-filet burgers with lettuce and tomato – and they looked delicious. There were also big sausage rolls with grated cheese in them, so when you warmed them up, they created an unctuous cheesy goodness with the meat and pastry. Oh my.

    When we enter a reality of accepting inferior products, we become ‘modified’ slaves to the corporate dominion and accept the way things are…

    I don’t accept.

    It’s easy to call into a high-street establishment without thinking.

    It takes a bit of choice to make a better decision to opt for a better product to consume.

    The other day, I was in a wee ‘local’ bakery and had a sausage roll with a drop of red sauce and a hot cup of tea; on a cold January day, it hit the spot. I left refreshed and warm, entering the biting, frosty air, wrapped up in my coat as I trudged home.

    You could support the local bakery. Goodness knows they need it.

  • The Nascent Age of the Self -Involved

    One must begin by asking a begging question: is literary criticism, in Ireland, dead?

    Recently, reading Susan Sontag’s 1966 essay ‘Against Interpretation’, this reviewer noticed the absence of the pronoun ‘I’, which has become ingratiated in the ‘I’ singular, the most fantastic, the singular phenomenological self-view.

    The singular ‘I’ – the Me, Myself, and I routine. This reviewer sees this everywhere due to social media. Me, Glorious Me, forever Me, and Me. Like some demented character from Roald Dahl’s children’s book adapted into a musical.

    In Susan Sontag’s piece, in the essay’s opening channels, she discusses Mimesis – Mimetic theory from the Ancient Greek world, and how Western consciousness has since seen all art as a representation of the past. This is a fair and accurate point. Some musical pieces of the modern era are inspired by what has gone before – take Poculum Harlem’s A Whiter Shade of Pale – some of the music was borrowed from Johanas Sebastian Bach (Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major (BVW 1068), movement II, better known as the ‘Air on the G String’) and Intertextuality and other forms of tweaked reproduction for the public, consuming sphere. In other words, capitalism.

    Has the woke agenda razed the literary Towers of Babel to hark on with their overt, aggressive liberalism so that anyone with a rational, logical mind with an understanding of a particular subject outside their, the philistines’, own parameters are pillaged and vociferously vilified if they dare have a masculine view/take on, in, a broader sphere?

    Oh, if we could be visited every day with the dove of learning or visit Borges’ library to select another book after returning the one we have read back to its endless shelves.

    Or will they, the literary critics, routinely be ignored and silenced into oblivion as to engage in something outside of their (the braying rabble) comprehension – is to admit concession to something?

    Susan Sontag.

    Bonfire of the banalities

    Social media has helped create agentic and situational narcissists by the acreage, who are self-involved, selfish, and unable to challenge themselves to see a world beyond the digital screen in front of them with scrolling videos. On and on it goes … like a long narrative poem dedicated to the self.

    The era of banality is thrust upon us. There is, no doubt, a proliferation of mainstream publishing content waxing lyrical about this and that, but when you question writers on what and who they have read they shy away from answering. Why?

    Mainstream mediocrity is part of the problem.

    They are fearful of criticism. They cannot contend with criticism because its connotation is ‘not to like,’ which impacts their overt sensitivities and victimisation mindset(s). Fear is integral to them being found out for the half-baked, badly-read charlatans they really are.

    In the Irish Literary Scene, Wokeism is a dominant model the media has embraced.

    The Philistines’ rendering of Art toward annihilation through their immaturity and blind-sided emotionality sees a casual shift towards to a lesser formulation in production and the end product. The celebration of the banal – the cumulation of a taping a banana to an art gallery wall. What is this tokenistic, attempted gesture or symbolism? A chimpanzee’s take?

    A middlebrow mediocrity has taken most of the literary, mainstream positions and loves nothing more than to espouse its own form of ‘I, I, me myself and that of my friends’ view.

    They do not really serve literature – the thing itself, Art; instead, they serve the din and hype spin for the work they are trying to publicise.

    It is tonal naïveté due to a lack of maturity. Instead of seeking logic, they seek out an entirely narrow pedestal upon which to place themselves. This is their desire: to be talked about, admired and adored. It could not be any less further from the childhood pages The Princess and the Pea or The Emperor’s New Clothes, straight from the Fairy Tale Rule Book. Rule No.1: Take an arrogant, self-involved, aggrandising trait and go through many tribulations to finally learn humility. And peace of mind. I see it playing out in real time. Facetiously.

    Humility is a great virtue one may have to learn in life’s travails. This is the paradigm I see time and again in life and on the socials.

    All works of Art should speak for themselves. As in, the work should speak for itself.

    Silence by maturer, and should know-better, enablers who stay mute. To take a stand is to raise one’s head above the parapet, and who wants to be dog-piled or cancelled by the braying rabble once they start?

    RDNE Stock Images.

    Nepotism in Ireland

    This is not complex—we do not have to draft in hermeneutics to examine the Nepotistic biases. Nepotism is an unutterable word in Ireland, North and South, but it is dominant. It is so dominant that those in positions of power live in a kind of comfortable, headstrong, warm denial that there is no Nepotism in the literary Arts in Ireland. Ireland and Irish people have a way of not looking at the end of their introspective fork … why?

    What they forge on the bow of their ship, without foresight, is the transitory nature of the imbued self in the nectar-sweet plateaus, which they seek to ascertain and commandeer for their greed – the promotion of the self.

    They seek to publicise their own and only agenda – themselves. It has become entirely predictable and wholly pedestrian.

    They do not read critical literary theory – therefore, they are not considering critical literary theory. If you do not read or consider theory, how can you know what a logical take with substance is, and what it is not? To weigh up literary theories and ideas help enshrine the mind’s understanding of prior accepted literary texts, never mind toward growth and maturity.

    Ireland, North & South has always had nepotism and nepotistic biases – you have to be ‘someone’ to get published. Where does this way of prejudicial thinking come from?

    The perfect image represents the proposed product displayed, but the product is a much inferior facsimile. It has crept into the literary world, too.

    Overrated Novels

    A lot of mainstream novels have a naïve bluntness in terms of tonality. In terms of literary Art, seeking out relational emotionality, as the model for the plot is overrated – there, I said it.

    The predictable chatter and babble that encompasses spin are endless. It is senseless. It has no basis in logic, and this hyperbole operates in a moral vacuum with tendrilled emotionalism as its core foundation.

    Take any mainstream novel, the college-girl mentality has read this work and resonated emotionally. The formula is predictable: the girl meets the boy and falls in love with the boy. Falls out of love with the boy. The developing mind relates so much with the story and the characters that they overrate the novel. It has been heavily publicised by the capitalistic dyad of agents/publishers to make money and profit, and it appeals the sensibilities of young women who have their own money to purchase it.

    It is not, however, Art. Again, it is a novel, verging on the YA formula, to reiterate this point, to drive it home: sells an easily digestible plot that is relational and has relatable characters of young types to readers within its flimsy paragraphs. The writing is wooden and clichéd, and it runs along the vein of ‘Sam sat down, uncorked the wine. Then he tried some…. While Michelle munched on a croissant.’

    This prose is immature, tiresome, wane, and tedious to the committed reader. These clauses and sentences are flat. Where along the way did well-written prose lose its pomp, jolt and creative juice to arrive at this stale juncture? A good, sturdy breeze would blow its walls and roof away.

    Like taking a gondola down the Tigris. Like sending a bowling ball skirting along a millpond.

    They soon lose their gloss these books. Once braced around the work, when the PR scaffold is taken away and is no longer there, it is sent plummeting to the depths.

    To spell it out plainly for the Philistines, they diminish Art. They admonish themselves.

    This has descended into a cultural ‘war’, pitting defenders and lovers of Art against the emotionally-led, shallow comprehension (not yet developed in an emotional sense) Philistine(s).

    And then others have dictators in the wheelhouse, and what they say goes…

    To be a literary critic in 2024 is to be an exile. To scratch out a meagre existence in the swampy fens while within the walled citadels of comfort – on the internet – poets, flunky wizards and flaky white witches dwell with their immature poetry and mulchy sentimentality.

    Syncretism and Neoplatonism are required. Over time, what is needed is based on a hegemonic principle – and it happens without much effort. The strongly composed works hold up, and others, the ones that were once regaled with great infinity, now have a wilderness of non-plussed minds that do not engage at all. Shameless!

    Criticism leads to Censorship

    The reviewer of this piece dealt with some of the mentalities above, but it did not go well.

    One well-known literary magazine editor in Ireland had asked for articles on homelessness, and I had a piece ready and fired it off. I received an initial email response saying it had been received, but then there was nothing. Silence. I emailed again, and eventually, after about four or five months, I received a reply which stated, ‘This was the best piece out of them all, but I cannot publish it due to possible legal reasons down the road.’

    I had changed names in the piece. No one was identifiable unless the main culprit involved became prissy, but they are not a literary lover, and why deny a person’s literary voice? The editor patronised me with a tardy sign-off, talking of homelessness generically as a terrible thing, while I was currently experiencing it, probably unbeknownst.

    I was annoyed and let loose a volley of sentences criticising some of the work I had already read in Ireland, saying he was, in a way, silencing me and my work. He did not reply and continued to refuse my submitted work. I did not know the guy, but after viewing some videos of him online, I realised that he comes across as an individual in a position of power and, in my experience, cannot take any criticism. Petty then.

    On reflection, my response was immature, yet here was an editor who was not brave enough to take a chance on a ‘new Irish writer,’ and continued to ignore any work I submitted to their magazine. I ceased all contact as it is a waste of energy competing with such a narrowminded, selfish mentality. This is censorship, pure and simple.

    An individual I met at university bravely stood up and questioned the selected nepotism. They are now part of the tiny, elitist cabal in ‘literary’ Dublin, and once told me in a private message on social media that they ‘deserved it’ – to be part of the select few. I couldn’t help but notice they were in a relationship with someone running a literary magazine.

    If your face fits. If you are ‘someone,’ you are in. That is, if you are fulfilling an Ireland Ltd PR spin function. You are censored and ignored if you are intelligent, rational, and well-read, because being well-read strikes fear into the philistine. They respond with a snarl because you may be ‘better’ at something than them, and they cannot have that. In the depths of their rotting psyche, the insecurity bubbling away in the pitch of their being, they really know that they are the better. This is how immature and petty these scenarios roll. Awful.

    But they won’t engage with the criticism because engaging is a way of dealing with it, and they don’t want to. They want gloss, spin and saccharine nonsense – here today, gone tomorrow.

    Some more rational and democratic literary outlets will see the literary merit, but … those are rare. Support goes to the mainstream, as that’s where the money is.

    Literary Art will always outlast the mediocre after the rabble stops squabbling and the dust settles.

    Feature Image: Lukas Kloeppel

  • The Cult of Literary Narcissism

    No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity, but I know none, therefore am no beast.
    William Shakespeare, Richard III

    I anticipated the takeover of the vast majority of the publishing industry by fourth or fifth-wave feminism. It has been in the mix for five years or so, and it dominates this arena; and not just mainstream publishing, but most alternative avenues too, as far as I can see.

    These mindsets want fluffiness. Cats. And Tote bags with witty slogans in an interesting font. There are writers whom they laud and publish; and their work, at best, to quote an agricultural analogy (Not just Beckett), is fair to middling.

    Writers are reaffirmed by their agents et al and subsequently develop and own this logic of, ‘I am being published; therefore, I am good.’ But by whose metric? Your own? Qualitative? Profit and dross.

    Many seem more interested in being revered as ‘a writer’ than creating Art. This is the cult of personality – a celebrity projection of the ultimate performer, different from the norm. They believe they are special. The core issue is, I believe, that the celebrity culture now at work in the book industry places an over-emphasis on persona and mythos as persona – a literary, bookish cult – whether it be hyped-up media or others, at the behest of Art.

    One is reminded of the lines from Bukowski’s The Genuis of the Crowd, ‘Beware those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone’; and ‘Not being able to create Art, they will not understand Art’.

    Peering into some of these marketed texts, I do not see a lot of literary merit among the prose. Pallid, wane, and an emotionally-led, safe register is my takeaway. More like Young Adult books than adult fiction. The age of banality is upon us.

    Charles Bukowski

    Every sentence should fight for its place…

    I suspect that this is part of a wider, individualistic desire, for fame, fortune, and glory. To be looked upon and admired. Put on a pedestal. To have the fine robes of a writer bestowed upon and wrapped around you. Speculated upon in your sartorial elegance.

    I hear them on the radio and see them on the TV, these writers of ephemera, here one day, gone the next. Until the next one comes along.

    It’s a Warholian, factory process of endless, emotionally-led drones pumping out emotionally-led, dry, grey mush. The sentences are short and adverbs are plentiful, John loves Trudie. Trudie really loathes John. Fred absolutely dislikes Stewart. Or, DCI Kelly DI Slater, investigates…

    These novels are tumbling dice and have little or no truck with pushing the literary envelope. They lie prone on the racks and shelves in stores and in the minds of their reader. Would you not rather have something that inspires you to shout from the rooftops? I relate to this! This sentence here is bloody brilliant! Look, the prose is literally leaping off the page. It burns!

    The reality that they fail to recognise this is disheartening.

    When was the last time Middlemarch was talked about? Dickens? Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar?

    To quote Howard Jacobson, ‘The problem isn’t with the novel, it is with the reader.’ In an age of frenetic online activity and electronic meandering there is a distinct lack of originality. A absence of creative juice. And a dearth of creative reading.

    Challenging books…

    Aspersions cast on, for example, James Joyce’s Ulysses, which many have not read, are immature, and rooted in a jealousy that the text holds a higher position in the literary pantheon than their offering(s). Disingenuous assaults are derived from manifest insecurity.

    They scoff at bigger, therefore harder, and difficult – but they would not come it and say it – literary texts. Due to the social embarrassment that this may cause and what might be inferred. They do not like to be embarrassed socially. This has its roots in a more organic state of grace.

    They do not desire to read ‘challenging’ books, preferring a certain reading homogeneity and inevitable selective stasis. They do not care for a rampant display of maleness. The kind of masculinity on show, say, in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is scorned and discredited. Man as Dog is the ravenously portrayed symbolism.

    But freedom of expression should be allowed. Even in Miller’s canine-like, Parisian existence. If a man is de-fanged, de-barked, and thus emasculated, where is he to go? To be banished into exile? To become prohibited? Becoming chthonic beings like the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Subterranean, knuckle-draggers whose jobs(s) are to fertilise and provide financial support. If that is even the case in these attitudes.

    We are in an interesting meridian. I wonder would Tropic of Cancer be published today?

    The demographic target for the marketers is predominately female, but it does not commandeer in totality and speak for all things literary.

    Their mandate is revenue – at all costs. No matter if the book is well-written. If it has a plot, narration or thought-provoking, relatable characters. They are only interested in appeasing the god of Profit.

    James Joyce 1882-1941.

    Art and Persona

    Entering a Joycean reverie of Leopold Bloom allowing ‘his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again.’

    In the proverbial outhouse, we recognises our shit stinks, like everyone else’s. Are you a writer at all times? In bed, a writer? Asleep, a writer? At stool a writer? Walking down the street?

    I have to inform you that, you are not a cut above. Your Art should be your Art and you should stay the hell out of it, if it’s Art you are creating. You deny your organic, biological self but continually project the ideal that you are indeed a writer, and all must lay down prostrate before you and worship at your altar.

    That is the central tenet here, the separation of one’s Art and persona; both are not one and the same. They are mutually exclusive. They should be de-compartmentalised. Art is an exposition; a creative process and it emerges predominantly from, boffins say, the right hemisphere of the brain.

    It comes down onto the page and then it’s gone; albeit it remains as text. Except the marketers wants to conflate the two. Look at this Kurtz-like, mysterious figure, look at the chatter around them. If there is none, we will create it ourselves.

    Beat those jungle rhythms. Not letting the work speak for itself. The vehicle of the plot. An ensemble cast of characters. Dialogue. You know, the three basics of the novel. The holy trinity.

    Writing as surrogacy: a biological denial forfeited into writing projects and projections of the writing, literary mother who gives birth to ingenuity and creativity.

    There is a certain emotional naiveté at work here.

    Being noted as special is an inherent part of being desired to be seen as a writer. It locks into an awakening narcissism so succinctly.

    Gatekeepers

    As agents, they behave like Amazonian women and gatekeepers. If you do not play into their modal form(s), you will be truncated below the waist and stung with arrows.

    I recently undertook a couple of counselling courses. On a Level 4 Diploma, in-house, I was the only male left in a classroom of a dozen or so females including the two female tutors. One of them, I believe, was a feminist and was going to put the squeeze to get rid of me, a male. She succeeded.

    I believe there are other feminist cabals that spring up in offices and colleges and publishing houses, and if you don’t like cats and cutesy stuff, and you’re a manly man, with a hint of aggression, possibly, towards them, or unconsciously dominate with your masculinity, in any way, you are a danger. And will be ostracised.

    It’s a form of sexism of course – in, on, their own terms. They circle their wagons. They have vested interests – their own cultish mentalities. Dance by firelight.

    But what they forget is that if it were not for men, as writer and academic, Camille Paglia relayed: ‘If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.’

    Paglia had it down too when she relayed that a lot of angry women who had been hurt by men were now in positions of power wanted revenge, and to make all men suffer because of their experiences.

    A bit like Estella and Miss Havisham at the beginning of Great Expectations, who emasculate Pip and desire to see him become passive. They want masculinity to be humiliated, suffer, and become truncated below the belt. They want men to be their inferiors, servants, and in the end, inert eunuchs.

    What a cadre of selfishness, rank hypocrisy, and flaccid tribalism.

    This Jungian projection of man in the female mind as an unconscious symbol of taker, abuser, and destroyer is a possibility.

    In Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. If object A exerts a force on object B, object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A. In other words, forces result from interactions.

    Men work in the dirt. They mix concrete. They lift and lay blocks. They raise buildings. They work on boats. Rigs. Implement dangerous jobs. Men write too. And some men write, craft, brilliantly. They should be respected. Not all men are dangerous predators. It is a dual thing. Let’s value compromise, equality and respect.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Gull

    Try to envisage Odysseus, on stiff headland, on the Western Atlantic coast of Ireland, tilling the soil with an ancient looking hoe. His hands are dry, chapped and his thick fingers curled around a parched shaft, steady palms supporting the implement, with which he works effortlessly. The slap, jut, and pull of the short blade into the earth turns up an odd purple worm which twists its belly upwards to the hot palpitating sun; and a hessian sack, half-filled with grass seed ready for planting, is slung over his back; its strings stretched across his well-defined, sinew-led, shoulder. Small dragon neck swathes of lime-coloured samphire shoots slowly emerge in sandy verges of the high field where he works. There is not a cloud in the endless ream of blue sky.

    When he spreads grass seed, as he has done in the past, many times, the canvas bag becomes a sail and his hand arcs as minuscule seedy flints shoot out over fertile mother earth and come to land among waxy ribbons of grass.

    The man looks now over a fluttering Atlantic Ocean, and it could almost be the Aegean Sea. It roars, breaks, and shatters into lucidity and calm, with white horses crashing on out further, out towards the ellipsis of the infinite horizon of his gaze. Gleaming, smooth black cattle, way off to his right, graze in a greenfield, in a verdant county. A county older than the Celts. Even Mother Nature does not know of its name. The herd, glistening, serves as a bovine footnote of nature’s essayistic form. They bellow and holler at each other with an incongruity that floats on the air. A brocade of whitethorn keeps them penned in. The enigmatic cattle are dark forms, staples of a slowly sifting tenure and lenient to the west’s wilder ways and moods. It suits them to bellow here in the hull of infallibility, amid the streaming whitethorn, sea Campion, and sandwort. The whitethorn is in flower, billowing, and its scented blooms are carried by the wind.

    Atop these cliffs, sat Eoghan whose hands were worn, he rubbed the soil and clasped his hands together to smell the earth, the olfactory bulb flickers, antediluvian and almost pristine in a broken social world. He drew a deep draught and took in the living earth with one unbroken breath. These were the elements, indeed, the pastures of his making. After a few minutes of solitude, he heard the scrunch of footsteps on seashells and sandy screed in a lane nearby. Eoghan turned his head to see a girl in her early twenties walking towards him.

    “Hi-yah”’ she called out as she approached. He cleared his throat, smiles, and replies,

    “Hello there; nice day…”

    “Oh, aye, it’s a grand one, that’s for sure…”

    Coming closer, he noted her translucent plastic sandals, linen-white shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt of navy blue with white stripes. Her auburn hair, worn in a ponytail, danced and bounced as she walked in the golden sunlight. She studied him and then cast a glance at a shred of olive green kelp which had blown up from the shore and was now stuck to the barbed wire fence on the headland.

    “Bladderwrack… I believe they call it,” he said mildly.

    She turned to him with an almost startled look, her tawny eyes furtive and her lips thinning, then biting her bottom lip she said,

    “That’s a rare auld name for some seaweed, isn’t it now?”

    Eoghan nodded and smiled up at her in the summer sun. She dropped down onto her knees just in front of his sitting position.

    “I remember, the other morning, on Inch Island, disturbing an old heron that was in a settled way…” he began.

    “What happened?” She exclaimed, looking at him more attentively.

    “I was just walking past when he looked at me,” he continued in a quiet voice, “and rose, languidly, from a clutch of rushes and off he took, one foot trailing behind the other slightly and flapping away towards Lough Swilly.”

    “Sure. It must have made a good picture. Did you upload it on to Instagram?” She asked smiling.

    “No.” He replied, softly, “No Instagram.”

    “Then what use is that?” she said, giving him a look of yearning.

    “Mother Nature has the table ready and all we have to do is go and eat. When I rise very early in the morning and go out to nature, I like to immerse myself in the landscape, to see the countryside come alive and open up in front of me; to see bright buttery gorse flower flourish, to smell honeysuckle; to smell wild garlic in woodland, Nature’s larder.”

    She was quiet, looking nonplussed and uncomprehending. An uncomfortable silence then passed between them.

    “Are ya on Snapchat or Twitter?” She asks her voice suddenly brightening.

    “Twitter?” He tentatively queries.

    “Yeah.”

    “No.”

    “Why? Are you eighty, like?” Her teeth glittered with the brightness of the sun as her mouth curved into a cynical smile.

    Eoghan looked down from the headland towards the sea; the sea breeze caught his thoughts and corresponded with the ripples in the blue torn water. He drew a deep breath as if to acknowledge her persistence.

    “Well, I guess, I just don’t really like this modern stuff …is the honest answer,” He replied turning his blue eyes back on her hazel brown ones.

    “We live in an age,’ he began again, but looking at her, taking stock, he realised he did not know her name. She comprehended this and gave him the thought he was seeking.

    “Aoife.”

    He smiled.

    “Aoife, we live, as I say, in an age known to thinkers, and to those logical enough to figure things out, as Neoliberalism. In an age of instantaneous gratification, of wishes granted instantly. And this is a kind of curse, this culture is a throwaway culture, and it’s not really for me that stuff…these belief systems.”

    The imbroglio of her young mind sent her into a dream state. Yes, she thought this young man, this guy was, “Oh, Janey-Mac, pure gorgeous,” but she was still on the faltering line between being a young girl, and the precipice which would send her into womanhood, and which had not yet been delivered fully formed to her feminine threshold. Just then her phone buzzed. She shook off her teenage sensibilities and looked at the phone’s screen.

    “I have to go,” she said, looking back up to him. “Me Mam wants me to look after our Daniel, a wee dote.” And she took off, saying as she went, “Hope to see you around sometime,” smiling. He smiled as he watched her disappear into the horizon.

    Early the next morning, very early, before any hint of daybreak, Eoghan was at the water’s edge in Inishowen, by Inch Island. He was in deep silence as images entered into his consciousness: yew trees; blue milk; a honey drop caught in pure amber sunlight, wheat-chaff which dances away in a furmy haze; three girls were strolling across a golden beach, past a wooden curragh laden with salt and beginning to crumble into wisps of wooden flakes that disintegrate in the hand. Insects given a firmer design by ancient runes with Neolithic symbolism, crawl, swirl and settle down to become geometrical shapes and patterns, known as Celtic Art. They retire and pass into the art and geometry of stone. A cow’s loin and flanks turn on a spit over a fire pit in the hill fort, Grainán of Aileach. The creature’s dead eye, bulbous, staring, almost bull-like, reminded Eoghan of the tearful eyes of sage storyteller, Paul Auster. Whose gaze could strike the bullseye of fear and desire among those he knew with big, wet eyes, like he had been crying. Bull-eyes.

    A crowd of screaming dark crows broke from branches where there was no tree trunk or tree and scattered across the immediate skyline of his memory’s eye. A spearhead of mackerel which were shifting and turned in a giant ball in the ocean; the sky darkening and rabbits and hares quaking in laneways; stars agleam in a bowl of night water strewn with a garnish of seawrack, seaweed, a mermaid’s shawl.

    He exhaled for a long moment and slowly opened his eyes; the sun continued to traverse its solitary hike towards the noon-time hour. He was down upon his haunches, almost kneeling, but had begun to rise. Feathers grew over his skin like a soft suit of pallid armour. He rose from the reeds, water dripping off his golden, feathery membrane, and gave out a loud piercing squark. He took off towards the beckoning sun which knew the bipedal, avian shapeshifter. This majestic bird that was soon flying high and then gone. Unwatched by man.

  • Kafka’s Café

    Levi ‘Lev’ Driscoll, wrote the odd sentence or two when creativity revealed itself to him. This month, albeit at a snail’s pace, he’d immersed himself in Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune. How he relished reading the exploits of Paul Atreides and his mother Jessica, deep into the vast inhospitable desert on Planet Arrkais. Lev marvelled at how the novel’s plot had been devised to move the narrative forward – like the colossal sandworms burrowing at its centre, the sci-fi story tunnelled and lunged into a distant future, simply by devouring and expelling sand.

    At age forty-five, Lev’s daily garb consisted of jeans and a plain t-shirt. When he was in the mood, he donned Cherry Red Doc Martins, or might dye his lank auburn locks an astonishing Hulk Green. In younger days, he’d sported the facial accoutrement of two studs and a nose ring. A soul-patch still featured below his lower-lip. He listened to Wayne Shorter, Van Morrison, and The Blue Room Jazz Sessions. Some Punk. A recent listen was that band called Idles. Lev watched what he ate, adding pomegranate seeds and blueberries to his a.m. porridge. A breakfast which steeled him for the day.

    This morning’s thought had already been jotted down on a writing-pad, where he sat in the breakfast nook of his small Rathfarnham apartment, Good literary fiction is a desert citadel visited only a few times in one’s life. Breeching those stone walls brings with it a knowledge and invigorating power all of its own.

    Turning on the radio he heard writer Colm Tóbín, talking about Irish writers’ fathers and their lives, whereupon Lev thought, Jazyhus, yer man Colm Tóbín’s voice sounds like it went off to Grasse in France for an apprenticeship in perfumery. Like it rolled in a field of lavender and chamomile!

    Lev left his flat, caught the No.16 bus into town and went dandering about in Dublin city centre. He mooched for a few deals in Dunnes before deciding to walk the 8km home. It was late autumn and the sun was bright but the air very cold. Wind-raked dead leaves heaped at the sides of pavements with their muted browns, and October yellows.

    Quiet were the white swans of Portobello, and their amorous dalliances on the Grand Canal went unnoticed by busy Dubliners in the early afternoon sunshine. He walked south of the city centre, into Rathmines and regarded a church’s chiselled proclamation, SUB. INVOC. MARIE. IMMACULATE. REFUCII. PECCATORUM (of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, or possibly “Shinners,” as the IRA once stored weapons and ammunition in its vaults during the War of Independence). A Neoclassical colonnade and four columns stood proud as the façade, sprouting fleur-de-lis, under a copper-covered dome. The original burnt down in a fire of 1920 where a new one sits in its place, peeping over the skyline, in a shade of aquamarine flaring with copper hues and an impressive, oxidised jade patina. Rumoured to be destined for Saint Petersburg’s Russian orthodoxy, the impressive architecture conjured places such as Rome, or indeed, Russia, thought Lev. Yet, it seemed like an opal set in granite.

    To get off the street, Lev didn’t even look up at the sign above its door before entering one Rathmines establishment. Without registering its high-windows, tables and chairs, or mute patrons within, what he wanted was a hot drink and to sit down. Maybe a freshly baked Danish, if there was one? And for some reason, at that moment, he mused about Vermeer’s chequered black & white tiled floor. Would it, he wondered, have been mopped, regularly? Also, he pictured Joseph Decker’s painting, Green Plums. Then Lev summoned from memory, some NASA photos he’d seen, of Jupiter’s meteoroid scarred moon, Europa.

    Inside the café, a Gaggia coffee machine operated at full steam. Out of it gurgled runnels of a dark, bubbling, black gold. At its side, feldspar porcelain espresso cups piggy-backed on top of each other along with small white matching saucers stacked and ready for dispensing. An alluring aroma of roasting coffee beans permeated the café where chatter was subdued. The high-fi-system played Handel’s Water Music, seemingly on a loop. Not a flat-screen television in sight, and a sign stated that it was forbidden to use smartphones. Plastic mother-in-law’s tongue sat sterile in plastic pots. Fake ferns and philodendrons were fixed with grey pebbles inside sable-coloured wooden borders. A glass cloche covered some raisin-studded scones nestled beside the cash-register up front.

    When his turn came to be served, Lev stepped forward and almost absentmindedly asked, “Can I have a cappuccino, please?”

    “Did you submit Form 1A?” enquired the lady behind the counter. A pair of lacquered chopsticks held her brown locks in place and she sported tortoise shell-coloured glasses. White shirt. Black apron, trousers, and shoes. Her elaborately embossed name tag said simply, “Server.”

    “No, I’m afraid I did not,” Lev was lost.

    Pink slips of paper were piled high in an in-tray before him, but he hadn’t noticed.

    “You still have to submit Form 1A.” She said glaring through her glasses at Lev.

    “I just want a coffee,” replied the writer, now sheepish. She sighed.

    Another customer stepped forward to order and Lev stood back a little, letting the other customer pay for and receive her green tea.

    “There’s your receipt, and here’s my receipt, for your receipt.” clarified the lady in the glasses, securing her own slips in the till. Thinking about writing, Lev conjectured, You have to keep a full-stop dancing on its tippy-toes. He then moved forward again. At this, the lady clucked her tongue.

    “I’m still waiting,” Lev reminded her. She looked at him again with an imbibing eye, imagining he was an outlier and hence, a troublemaker.

    “Which street do you live on?”

    “What does it matter which street I live on?” Lev began to show signs of incredulity.

    “Because, Sir,” she snapped, “We only serve some streets on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and others on Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays. It’s all here in the rules,” She said, tapping a laminate posted at the till. And on it was a map depicting which streets were allowed to order coffee on what days. Lev found it all rather formal. Something about it didn’t sit well with his socialist perspective.

    “This is wile bad craic, Hey!” He uttered, entirely exasperated.

    “Now, you’ll have to fill out Form 1A. With adjuncts A1 and B1, Sir.”

    What fresh hell is this? Lev pondered.

    “Why?” was all he asked.

    “Because, Sir, you fail to follow protocol.”

    A speaker above the coffee-machine barked out, ‘More A32 Forms, immediately!’

    On the counter was a box of black ink Biro ballpoint pens, and a photocopier behind the counter ran pink slips of paper which were bakery warm to the touch.

    While all around him customers filled in their forms in quiet acceptance, he regarded the server in question and her carapace of harshness with a mixture of bemusement, anger and wonder. Was this Stalinist Russia or Thatcher’s Britain, where civil servants replaced all working roles with their applications and forms inhabiting long corridors to the sound of opening and closing doors behind which were row upon row of file cabinets filled with documents ranging from ordering a clothes peg, Form 2344ABX, to marriage vows, Forms 32 C & D. Entering here meant submission to an authoritative power and being controlled by it. Out in grey society, the faceless masses walked around with their heads drooped, proles going about their conforming lives. No individuality permitted. Conform through endless bureaucracy or go insane in the process. Few go insane. Most do conform. But, under no circumstances would Lev. He aimed for coconut shampoo, raspberries and cream, lemon-curd sandwiches, a three-day weekend with Habanero sauce. Peaking cream puffs and apple-turnovers. Falling popcorn, the fifth of November, and bonfire night. Dance music. Pubs. Freedom of choice. Not this, whatever this was.

    “May I have a scone with my cappuccino?’ asked Lev.

    “Oh, you want a fruit scone?’ She said with all the vigour of a congregating sloth at a sleepover in Connecticut. Lev sensed that his request was bothersome, but he would hold out to see how far this would go.

    “Please move over to the other line. This line is for people with slips. The other line is either for those who have not made their minds up yet, or Sabos like yourself. That’s short for Saboteurs around here,” she explained. Lev saw no other line, but he spied a stand which read “Sabos.”

    “Does this work the same way for a bacon sandwich?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

    “To have a bacon sandwich, you’ll have to make an appointment.”

    “To have a freaking BLT?”

    “An appointment with the chef.” She stipulated.

    “Lemme get this right. To order a simple bacon sandwich, I have to make an appointment with the establishment’s cook?”

    “His title is Chef Martine, Sir,” said the server, adding, “And yes, that’s the rule. There are no exceptions to the rules. Not here. Would you like to make an appointment?”

    Stunned, Lev nodded his assent, as the server spoke into an intercom.

    “A Sabo requests an appointment, Chef Martine.”

    Lev stood for forty minutes before being ushered into a small yet neat stainless-steel kitchen where, with a square blade, the chef was decapitating a head of lettuce from its white neck. Luscious and wet, the green leaves fell open in that kind of surreal slow-motion Lev had only seen in advertisements on TV. This was the inner sanctum of scones and other closely held secrets. Chef Martine’s accent was fabulously French. “No. Get rid of dis, and dis, and dis. Out!” Pausing his pointing at which produce needed to be replaced or replenished, in less than a split second, he looked Lev up and down, before waving him away.

    “I have no time to…to…to deal with the likes of you, Monsieur!”

    Backing out to the café, again Lev attempted to ask for a drink and without the appropriate paperwork. He was denied. Lev wondered about the hivemind rolling over to authority. The weak-livered acceptance. Rising up, he steadied himself upon a table top and announced, “You! All of you!” Around twelve café patrons looked up from their flat-whites, green-teas and Americanos. “You have freedom of choice to come in and order a drink without having to fill in mundane forms!” No one dared to agree with his rebellious talk. “To spend your lives in cubicles fulfilling meaningless work just because it’s been set out for you, is a form of bondage and slavery! You in your Birkenstocks, reading gossip magazines full of middle-class morality and intolerance by the cart-load!”

    “SIR! Can you calm down?” called out the server, white face contorted in confusion, indignation and trembling with anger.

    “I WILL NOT CALM DOWN, you… COG! What kind of establishment is this place, anyway? What’s it called?”

    “Sir, you are in Kafka’s Café.”

    Something clicked and so he saw it all now. The endless bureaucratic processes. The strict adherence to these formalities. The authoritarian staff. The server’s clerkish comportment. He felt anger. Despair. Hopelessness. This was not just a comment on the establishment in question, but to a wider enslavement of human beings. Freedom of expression was viewed as distrustful and downright careless. Dangerous even. People like Lev were to be ridiculed and ignored. They were insane outliers who were not at all loyal to the state.

    “Okay, I’ve read The Trial. The Castle and this…This is circumvented madness towards a form of totalitarian rule. I just wanted a fucking coffee!” said Lev out loud.

    With a nod, the server sent a staff member out back to alert the relevant authorities. Stepping down from his table top pulpit, Lev sat quite still playing The Clash’s Rock the Casbah on his smartphone. Café personnel looked on and whispered at the bizarre behaviour of this madman. Lev did not hear a van screech up to the pavement outside. Nor did he notice as burly men in dark uniforms stormed in, until they grabbed hold of him. His phone was sent crashing to the floor, where its plastic housing cracked and scattered.

    Screaming “Poseidon! Poseidon!”* Lev was brought out into the street by a balaclava-clad, snatch-squad and dragged into the back of a waiting van. His demonstrations were soon silenced by its doors when they were slammed shut behind him, before the vehicle roared off and disappeared.

    The citizens in the café merely blinked as they began filling in their 1A forms again. The age of banality was long and continued unabated as, outside, a stroke of raindrops dashed the Dublin pavement, people filed along the streets where, once more, normality pervaded. The white floating petals of the swans’ feathers, the hue of hedge bindweed (Calystegia Sepium) drifted down the canal water’s surface and on into the diminishing autumn evening.

    *Poseidon is a piece of prose by Franz Kakfa.

    Featured Image: Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Physalis, 1912.

  • Unforgettable Year: September 2020

    As summer gave way to a season of mist and mellow fruitfulness in September Covid-19 returned with a vengeance, but by now there was considerable disagreement over elusive facts.

    Frank Armstrong interrogated unreliable accounts in the Irish media, and the doomsday scenarios of a number of scientists.

    The main go-to-man among Irish scientists for the Irish media has been Trinity Professor of Immunology Luke O’Neill. On June 22nd he claimed that Ireland would have had 28,000 deaths if there hadn’t been a lockdown.

    The piece earned praise on Twitter from Irish Times journalist Ronan McGreevy.

    Andrea Reynell, meanwhile, looked for new ways of socialising during The New Abnormal; although having to order a meal made the idea of going out for a drink less appealing.

    It is easy for some premises that already served food. But it is a bit of a pain knowing that you’re spending more than you want, all for the sake of a socially-distanced drink.

    Divers on Dublin Bay.

    That month we receive the first in a series of articles from underwater photographer Daniel Mc Auley. The first acquainted us with the hidden world below Dublin Bay.

    The silt and sandy bottom around Dublin Bay is in a state of constant motion, drawn by the strong tidal flows moving down the east coast of the country. These massive sand banks are also easily disturbed by strong southerly or easterly winds, leading to dramatic drops in visibility when a strong wind blows. Unlike the deep water off the west coast, Dublin Bay is a relatively shallow body of water with a primarily sandy bottom.

    Coral Garden Dalkey Island, Dublin Bay. Image (c) Dan Mc Auley

    Another new contributor Neil Burns wrote movingly following his work in addiction services:

    Heroin addicts tend to mate for life. Like dilapidated swans – twisted in a deadly alliance they dance and embrace towards a finality of breath. Like a sculpture in a Giorgio de Chirico painting. It is an ersatz marriage of sorts, sharing needles – inveigling that sharp, finite pain. Into the vein. The arm. The thigh. Leaving rack-marks like horse gallops that tear up the grass on a racecourse. Puckered, indeed, punctured skin. Delving into the life’s blood. The blood’s life which is cherished. Next to Godliness. Spike island. Feel like Jesus’ son was The Velvet Underground’s lyric. Warm blanket to insulate against the world’s harshness. Being judged. Much of it in the head and coveted paranoia.

    While Boidurjo Rick Mukhopadhyay was considering The Rise of the Machines:

    f you have already worked out that whoever lives inside your phone when you say ‘Hey Siri’ or ‘Hey Google’ can read emails out to you, find the nearest movie theatre, or reserve a restaurant table, then Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already in your life.

    Image: Luke Fitzherbert

    Next, Luke Fitzherbert despaired at Lebanon’s rotten leadership after a massive explosion that rocked Beirut:

    The impact of the explosion is hard to understate. Its sound and force stretched for miles, releasing a huge mushroom cloud that killed close to two hundred people, and scarred thousands both physically and mentally; destroyed countless homes, and leaving once vibrant streets desolate. The immediate aftermath was dystopian: “It was like a movie. People moving slowly, covered in blood, glass shattered everywhere. Leaving a whole city riddled with PTSD,” recalled one witness.

    And in the wake of Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court David Langwallner reckoned it was game over for American democracy.

    We found a gem to be September’s Musician of the Month:

    My name is Gemma Dunleavy and I’m a yapper. I’d talk the handle off a cup. I also write and play music. I see myself as a storyteller first, then a musician. It’s where I feel my true gift is, my natural comfort is in meandering through my memories, picking out the best details to paint the clearest picture in the heads of those listening.

    Also in music coverage Brian Mooney was keeping the conversation going after the tragic loss of his wife to cancer:

    six months now. A year of firsts. A lot of lessons learnt. A new wisdom.

    And I feel quite stupid and not quite intelligent enough. Exposed, as my better half who I was always so proud to be beside has gone away.

    I have to build now. My friends are close and music has kept the conversation going…

    We enjoyed futuristic fiction from Camillus John:

    Gasping for a hit, Carl made himself a fresh cup of coffee. But big-nosed and bat-eared, when he tried to slam it, the steaming brown liquid dribbled down his chin to piddle over his pink tie and white shirt. His accountant’s uniform.

    Also in fiction, Yona Shiryan Caffrey brought a portrayal of cocooning widows in rural Israel in Tina.

    There were poetry submissions from Haley Hodges ‘Make of Me a Microcosm’:

    …. Myriad music still marks her mind, her memory,
    Music of mending and meaning, naming and being—
    Music of mackerel meandering, matter and mass,
    Metaphysical music marching from moment to minute

    As well as a number of works from Mischa Willett, along with the irrepressible Kevin Higgins, who wondered at the longevity of Henry Kissinger:

    For its birthday, a baby gets Spina bifida
    A Bengali family have all their arms sawn off.
    Fifty bodies topple into the sea off Indonesia
    but none of them are Henry Kissinger
    Each time Henry Kissinger again fails to die

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020

    Unforgettable Year: April 2020

    Unforgettable Year: May 2020

    Unforgettable Year: June 2020

    Unforgettable Year: July 2020

    Unforgettable Year: August 2020

     

  • Aye, Dead On

    It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted.
    Aeschylus

    Protestations against James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ House on Usher’s Island being ear-marked for a hostel are rooted in cultural-bias and emotional-led egocentrism, and exhibit blatant hypocrisy among the denouncers. Artsy sentimentality can be the lesser evil, but it is still based on emotional, and, cultural biases.

    The Aeschylus quote above may seem naïve with society unsettled by the Covid-19 pandemic – anxiety heightened and spurred on by the populist mediocrity – but the reality is, these past twenty years, we have never had it so good, especially with plenty of food at our disposal, alongside acres of indoor comfort available from pulsating warm radiators, hot water galore, and lest we forget our electronic devices yielding Netflix.

    A festive analogy may be relevant here, the geese have gotten fat and inactive. Selfishness abounds. Narcissism and the age of the red-carpeted self are traits which are promoted rather than rationalised.

    A thought-tormented age

    This was perhaps anticipated in James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’ from Dubliners (1914), when the character of Gabriel Conroy says:

    But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, well lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality of kindly humour which belong to an older day.

    Regularly trudging past ‘The Dead House’ on the banks of the Liffey I have noted its square, flat Georgian edifice. Its jet-black door. Joyce describes it as ‘the dark, gaunt house’.

    Over the past few years, it has come to light that this building on Usher’s Island is set to become a tourist hostel. This has led to cries of ‘cultural vandalism,’ but why were the same journalists and commentators silent when the building sat derelict for years? Unused. Unravelling and falling apart at the seams.

    For a year, I sat in on Readings of Joyce’s Ulysses in Sweny’s Pharmacy on Lincoln Place, and did not encounter a single Irish writer of any standing. At the end of each session a wooden bowl was passed around to the attendees, who would dispense a few coins to help pay the rent. No rich, successful Dublin-based writers were coughing up dough to keep this cultural institution afloat.

    The reality is that Dublin-based, and Dublin-enthralled, writers do not admit to themselves that Dublin has been swallowed up by the capitalist project. They are simply in denial.

    The cultural embargo comes out in plaintive cries of ‘How dare they wreck our heritage?’ from behind computer screen in comfortable homes. Keyboard heroes. One and all. It has to be said that some are indolent and sly, with one eye on anything Joyce-related to enhance their own reputations and further book sales.

    I do wonder – the Diogenesian cynic may ask –  whether many of them have actually deigned to read much of Joyce’s work bar a few short stories from Dubliners? They may want to be associated with his masterpiece Ulysses but are they possessed by it?

    Do they want to recreate the Cabman’s shelter under Butt Bridge or Bella Cohen’s bordello down on the now gone Tyrone street?

    In ‘The Dead’ itself, Gabriel’s face colours when asked about his writing for the Daily Express, a Unionist newspaper, and is even labelled as a ‘West Briton’ by Miss Ivors. In Dublin parlance a ‘West Brit,’ or ‘Castle Catholic,’ remains someone who would have no home-spun patriotic scruples in dealing with the mother colony for purposes of profit; the comprador elite of an ex-colony.

    How many Irish-based writers now have English agents, English publishers? How many have made their careers in London? More power to them, but the wedge of Anglo-Irish relations should narrow at least somewhat in the near-future. Here is hoping. Better to work together than at difference.

    ‘the dark mutinous Shannon’

    There is a great irony contained in Gabriel’s epiphany as he observes snow falling from outside of his hotel window in the closing monologue. He does not mention the Liffey, but instead dwells on ‘the dark mutinous Shannon waves.’

    In his biography of Joyce Richard Ellmann states:

    The fine description: “It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless bills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves,” is probably borrowed by Joyce from a famous simile in the twelfth book of the Iliad, which Thoreau translates: “The snowflakes fall thick and fast on a winter’s day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where the lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved by the waves.” But Homer was simply describing the thickness of the arrows in the battle of the Greeks and Trojans; and while Joyce seems to copy his topographical details, he uses the image here chiefly for a similar sense of crowding and quiet pressure. Where Homer speaks of the waves silently dissolving the snow, Joyce adds the final detail of “the mutinous Shannon waves” which suggests the “Furey” quality of the west. The snow that falls upon Gabriel, Gretta, and Michael Furey, upon the Misses Morkan, upon the dead singers and the living, is mutuality, a sense of their connection with each other, a sense that none has his being alone. The partygoers prefer dead singers to living ones, the wife prefers a dead lover to a live lover.

    There are the true Joyceans who love Joyce for his unrivalled creative genius and dedication to his Art and more power to their elbows. Kudos my fair-weathered literary friends.

    A Hostel for Creatives

    What about it keeping it as ‘The Dead House’ by way of a Hostel? Let creative folk add their work inside: paintings. Musings. Writings. Musical nights. Don’t let it become a shell. A phantom dedicated to Joyce Ltd. The Irish Tourist mentality to wring money and promotion out from every Joycean occasion. He would really have detested that.

    Joyce’s attitude towards his ‘fatherland’ are perhaps best encapsulated in a memorable speech of Stephen Daedalus from Portrait of an Artist:

    I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.

    There are plenty of Joyce tributes/buildings in the city, including, The James Joyce Centre, on North Great George’s Street, Davy Byrne’s on Duke Street, and Sweny’s Pharmacy, on Lincoln Place

    Dublin is a bustling city. A garrulous metropolis. Where many, many tourists flock. No doubt they will return. Let ‘The Dead House’ vibrate and echo some of that human activity; and wouldn’t it be great if funds were apportioned to update and renovate some of the sagging grey buildings of Usher’s Island on that stretch of the quays?

    As Mary Jane says in the story that the coffin, ‘is to remind them of their last end.’ An empty, dilapidated house is a soulless thing. A crypt, devoid of life.

    And as Gabriel says in his speech to the rapt attendees of the party on Usher’s Island, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, it is not for the first time we have been gathered together under this hospitable roof, around this hospitable board.’

    And it wouldn’t be quite something to hand-over to the Land of the Living, salvaging something from the Land of The Dead?

  • The Horse That Kicks

    For Daniel and Others

    ‘Is Heroin still a thing in Dublin?’ The academic, and Professor of the field asked me somewhat perplexed. This is 2019, don’t you know, boy. Heroin is pastiche here in my wood-panelled mind of tenure and privilege. The arrogance and elitism illustrated the issue: there is a disconnect from warm offices, fragrant welcoming baths, internet browsing and the addict out there, anonymous. In pain. In want. Shivering. In desperation. Rattling.

    Heroin has always been a thing in Dublin since members of the Dunne family brought it into the inner-city flats, in the eighties, and now, forty years on, there are many struggling people firmly atop its precarious cliff-face.

    Heroin addicts tend to mate for life. Like dilapidated swans – twisted in a deadly alliance they dance and embrace towards a finality of breath. Like a sculpture in a Giorgio de Chirico painting. It is an ersatz marriage of sorts, sharing needles – inveigling that sharp, finite pain. Into the vein. The arm. The thigh. Leaving rack-marks like horse gallops that tear up the grass on a racecourse. Puckered, indeed, punctured skin. Delving into the life’s blood. The blood’s life which is cherished. Next to Godliness. Spike island. Feel like Jesus’ son was The Velvet Underground’s lyric. Warm blanket to insulate against the world’s harshness. Being judged. Much of it in the head and coveted paranoia.

    This is a process of annihilation. A nuclear war on the self. Total destruction of the physical form. Heroin strips the body and brain of all nutrients. That’s why the addict cannot respond well to reason because there is no reason to grasp onto. The only clench is the death-watch grip of the next score. To score goes beyond food. Love. Understanding. Addiction is a monster. A hairy, unrelenting, unfulfilled beast. The might just of garnering the score. A little cellophane baggie of fine brown dust which brings so much for relief for the addict.

    Hepatis C is big.  Blood-borne virus. Hep C is a worry. For many.

    There is the messy out-of-control user who will leave used needles everywhere. These addicts are very chaotic. They, usually, have had a big negative event which has impacted their life to such an extent that the mantra of ‘Fuck it!’ colours their small outlook. Hence a headstrong dive into heroin.

    The addict through heavy usage draws themselves into a bare corner. The retreat into that inner-world. Not harmonious if you have no Art to draw upon to help alleviate you. Some become that solitary user. They alone are ensconced in a safe place to cook and shoot up. A singing yellow-blub overhead. They ride the snake, to the acid-filled lake. It is easy to romanticise The Doors’ version of Heroin use. There is an outlier aspect to the lone user.

    That fine line between life and death – you crawl down along that line. Sluiced and carried along on that geometrical plane. Like crayfish in need on the wide open, busy streets. Needing that score half-an-hour ago to take the sickness away.

    Sheets of tinfoil. The black scorched shadow of the chased dragon high.

    The skin is cold. Sometimes it takes on a deadened, marbled-hue. Pallid. Eyes are shrunken back into hollow sockets. Fear lies therein. A desperation cranks the features.

    Cook-pot –

    Bent over the cookpot. The wagging flame of the lighter, Sapping the golden-brown, liquid-funk through the swab. The beating eyes upon the arm or leg. The measure up. The careful dart – the hospital-like plunge. Needle bleeding in. The foetal position. The meridian of death. Which belts around the cold.

    I recall one Saturday listening to the silence, in a project, and knowing that one of the residents was up there and there was this deathly silence. I went up to his room. There he was.  Behind the door. Lying there. Upon his back. Eyes wide open. Lifting him like a corpse, lightweight, he came to, and immediately grabbed a brush and began sweeping around his bed. He said ‘Thanks’ and continued in a manic way. His debilitating high was over, for now.

    Every recovering addict, and it does not, necessarily, have to mean ‘Heroin’, learns that the strength to be able to not partake in whatever vice it is, grows and that turns into confidence. Yet, a silent confidence, and welcome abstention.

    Yes, it’s your gear. Your decision. But now you tear a fabric in the shell of your being and you let blood’s life-flow ebb out. The branch is torn.

    I am very sorry for your loss.

    A workman stopped me outside the project one day and told me the year before, he watched a seagull with a needle in its mouth looped up onto the roof and dared it to be remonstrated. A needle. For a nest. The junky’s nest. Stark symbolism against a soft blue sky.

    Neil Burns worked in a Dublin city centre emergency accommodation for just under two years, experiencing the visceral nature of heroin up close and personal.

    Neil Burns Twitter: @Foreverantrim