Cassandra Voices

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  • Taylor Swift is our Greatest Confessional Poet

    Confessional poetry has had a haunted reputation from its post-war onset. The literary legacies of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and W. D. Snodgrass—widely considered ground zero for the entire confessional school—are crucified at least as frequently as they’re praised, and a healthy allergy to what contemporary teachers of writing pertly refer to as ‘trauma porn’ has seeded in the DNA of most graduate-level writing programs.

    When in 1959 Robert Lowell published Life Studies (the book of Genesis as far as confessional poetry is concerned) the idea of a poem’s author unambiguously self-identifying as the first-person ‘speaker’ was unthinkable. In intentionally shattering—and the method of shattering was simply ignoring—the public/private barrier, Lowell had done something truly new, setting off an irreversible trend in American poetry. If one wrote, before this, from autobiographical experience, it was duly air-brushed and sanitized for public consumption. Taboo subjects like mental illness and sexuality were no-fly zones. One did not say, for example,

    I hear
    my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
    as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
    I myself am hell

    Robert Lowell by Elsa Dorfman.

    The dominant and ongoing beef with confessional poetry is not entirely unreasonable. At its worst, (or I should say, perhaps, when it fails) readers are startled and not led into a world they didn’t ever wish to explore, trapped in the speaker’s garishly personal agonies and ecstasies with no window looking out, and no resonant ‘me too’ chime.

    When confessional poetry germinates exclusively at the level of the individual—meaning there is no bridge, on-ramp or springboard to universal human experience, some place of wider echoing beyond the speaker and confines of the poem—it devolves into drudgery, if dull, and trauma porn, if shocking. In this sense, confessional poetry is always a tightrope walk, a precarious style with precarious risks. But I digress.

    Fast forward to the twenty-first century. Confessional verse needed a new hero, a lone voice powerful enough to lift it from the ashes of ceaseless academic squabbling and into the hearts and ears of eager culture-consumers. When Taylor Swift released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, in April of 2024—she confirmed (with a moody noir photoshoot and a perfect cat-eye) what I’d long suspected, namely that she’s the all-American GOAT of contemporary confessional writing. Taylor’s entire deck of cards is comprised of aces. She mines herself and her experiences, writing from her own lifeblood in a way that *never* fails to merge with the shared experiences of women—indeed, of people—everywhere, and her level of celebrity has successfully inoculated her against the most common affliction ailing the Confessionals: the event of people really not wanting to know.

     

    Now, I personally contend that with a sufficient level of ingenuity and craft people will stomach just about anything, whether they should have to is another question entirely. Sexton in particular is often out-and-out lurid, but her syntax is so surprising, so fresh and deftly handled, that her brilliance is rarely the disputed thing. The disputed thing is that whatever Sexton’s level of creative prowess, readers don’t necessarily resign themselves to (let alone rush to devour) accounts of dysfunctional sexcapades or manic episodes, preferring on the whole to be spared. She never overcame, in life or death, the miasma of ‘ick’ generated by gutter content, specifically, however immaculate the form. Of course, defiant exposure of the quote unquote gutter may well have been the point, and every exhibitionist needs more than a little pluck, but you see the problem.

    If only there was someone so fascinating, so simultaneously winsome and relatable and fun and clever and coy that society’s desire to really know absolutely everything was utterly frenzied. This is precisely the empire TS half-inherited (by being a young and beautiful woman reared in the public eye) and half-created (by being a confessional song-writer so savvy it amounts to legitimate genius)

    Swift on the Speak Now World Tour in 2011.

    It must be said that Taylor has not historically descended to the Sextonian depths of genitals, slime and latrines (see “Angels of the Love Affair”) as such. Or if she DOES go there she makes it, well, hot (see in the middle of the night//in my dreams//you should see the things we do) Even her punchiest lines, say “fuck me up, Florida” are always a little sugared by a sprawling pop foundation. I do firmly believe that even if she did descend to darker depths, everyone would want to come along for the ride. Taylor’s gargantuan appeal means, literally, that everyone WANTS to know, all the time. Fan appetite is insatiable. And TS knows how badly we want to know, which brings me to her other confessional stroke of genius—

    Taylor deliberately toys with us. Despite the morally dubious efforts of the tabloids, we plebeians have no real access to T’s lived life, let alone her inner life. She offers us the private portraiture we long for on her own terms. A long-confirmed tradition of writing songs about herself, her thoughts and relationships notwithstanding, we are frequently given over entirely to speculation regarding which songs are indeed autobiographical and how precisely autobiographical they are. In this regard, Taylor is wonderfully ballsy, unafraid to have an unambiguous go at men who did her dirty— (see “Dear John”) many Swifties make riddling out her more nebulous lyrics and mapping them onto her actual history a full time job.

    Taylor always leaves sufficient room for us to step into her music, inhabiting our own adjacent experiences more deeply for knowing—dare I say vibing—with hers: this is her triumph, and also the confessional jackpot. She manages to showcase every emotion unapologetically—heartache, bitterness, yearning, envy, the lot. She can be minxy (handsome, you’re a mansion with a view//do the girls back home touch you like I do?) She can be nostalgic (I knew you//leaving like a father//running like water) She can be melodramatic and vengeful, (You caged me and then you called me crazy//I am what I am cause you trained me) and she is rarely—however widely lauded she is—given enough credit for being a military-grade confessional tactician. Taylor’s extended metaphors are breezy, memorable, and open to myriad interpretations. Let’s take a look at the recent smash hit “Down Bad,” a single representative example. In it, Swift is (nominally, and never to the point that it actually gets too weird) a humanoid cast off the mothership by her lover. At the song’s climax, she croons:

    I loved your hostile takeovers
    Encounters closer and closer
    All your indecent exposures
    How dare you say that it’s –

    Four lines of dazzling ingenuity. “I loved your hostile takeovers” – you once took powerful initiative with me/this relationship. “Encounters closer and closer” – things got intimate and vulnerable. “All your indecent exposures” – I personally understand this line ‘thanks for the sexts,’ but of course I don’t know. “How dare you say that it’s—” and the song’s speaker (Is it Taylor!?!? Did someone leave THE QUEEN HERSELF down bad?!?!) cannot bring herself to say the word ‘over.’ We have four lines of a single extended confessional metaphor explode in a Molotov cocktail of relatability and alien-core cheek. Been there? I’ve been there. Almost everyone has been there, and that’s why the song soared immediately to the top of the charts and was ensconced there for weeks.

    Let’s recap. When Confessional Poetry emerged in the 1950s, its most zealous defenders insisted it would humanize us to each other, offering tender glimpses at tender subjects in a way that engendered compassion and deeper understanding. I believe good confessional poetry does this, even if the truth it tells is wildly dark. If we cannot call her a poet in the strictly traditional sense, no one in a hundred years has harnessed the staying power of confessional writing like Taylor Swift, and no one possesses her unique, precise vaccination against the disease of over-sharing. Aspiring confessional writers would do well to take a page (or many pages) from the Swift Gospel, unifying introspection with an outward gaze generous enough to the human condition to compel readers in, make one’s own head an inviting (or interesting or evocative or profound) place to visit. I began with Confessional Poetry’s founding father Robert Lowell, and it seems fitting to close with him, too:

    Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing—I suppose that’s what vocation means—at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I’m thankful, and call it good.

  • Ten Faery Tales for Our Time

    This article is dedicated to Patrick Healy.

    The Irish people have a long-standing relationship with ‘numinous presences in the landscape’, often referred to as the little people, or faeries. The literature provides a complex set of illusions. The writer, philosopher and independent scholar, my friend, Patrick Healy on a recent visitation tendered me a painting of Mad Sweeney (buile shuibhne), which forms part of his forthcoming exhibition in Amsterdam.

    It made me consider the enduring relevance of the faeries, although I now live in Leatherhead in leafy Surrey, where the little people are well hidden.

    In H.G. Welles’ remarkable parable of the future invasion by aliens from outer space, The War of the Worlds, we find the ultimate understanding of an existential threat. When Orson Welles put out his infamous 1938 broadcast, he set it in New York, causing a level of consternation that led some to flee to the nearby hills. The original book is of course set in Leatherhead, which is clearly not immune to faery tales.

    Most contemporary faery tales often provide binary messages of good and evil for children – or even child-adults susceptible to manipulation – who see battles between good and evil and a Manichean Universe. Thus, children and adult minds can be manipulated, and often nefarious agendas can be set using their effect.

    According to the plagiarised – but well received at the time – work of the psychologist Bruno Bethlehem The Uses of Enchantment, faery tales help children resolve Freudian oedipal conflicts. But on whose behalf? They are cautioned to stay safe from ‘evil’, but the meaning of good and evil is far from clear in this day and age.

    Historically, faery tales contain a surprising level of terrifying violence, often involving gruesome acts such as cannibalism, witchcraft, and bodily metamorphosis, as with werewolves. They play to latent fears that can be deployed to manipulate or control the human psyche.

    I will now draw out some crucial messages for the profound structural ways we organise our present lives around faery tales.

    Illustration of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” by Vilhelm Pedersen (1820 – 1859).
    1. The Emperor’s New Clothes

    Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 tale is based on a 1335 story from the Libro de los ejemplos (or El Conde Lucanor). It is short and alarmingly precise, involving an emperor of such vanity and so susceptible to flattery that his dressmakers get him to pose and preen naked.

    It seems to me that most of the politicians of Ireland, the UK, the EU, and the world at large are the vain inheritors’ of the Emperor’s new clothes, with fake experts and insiders flattering and manipulating them. Political leadership is always subject to vanity and therefore susceptible to flattery.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    Where there is no leadership, the people perish.
    Proverbs 29.18.

    Vilhelm Pedersen illustration for “Ugly Duckling”
    1. The Ugly Duckling

    This 1843 tale by Hans Christian Anderson is perhaps my favourite faery tale. Anderson was not a transcriber of faery tales – as the Brothers Grimm were – but a great creative artist. Here the eponymous ugly duckling is hounded out of the tribe, simply for being ugly, but a new tribe welcomes her as she is really a swan, not an ugly duckling at all. At one level this is about finding your niche and not associating with quacks – including those who force you out of town.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’
    H. G. Welles

    What we need now are more ugly ducklings, and not clean-cut conformists – the inappropriate adults in the room.

    Hobbit holes or smials as depicted in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
    1. The Hobbit

    In J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 fantasy classic, an insignificant shire hobbit, Bilbo Baggins with the aid of dwarves and a magician defeats the dark forces in the battle of the five armies. Written just before World War II, it anticipated an Allied victory against the dark forces of fascism. A parable for that time and our own, which is elaborated upon in The Lord of The Rings.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    ‘We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo, men women men women and children recognised that what was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. Lemay said if we HAD lost we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals, and was right’
    Robert McNamara, ‘The Fog of War’

    Always keep in mind who the dark forces are, and that winning is not everything, or not always. Manichean battle between good and evil rarely occur. Who is evil today? Is it just Vladimir Putin or those who seek to prolong the war? And if Mr Putin is a war criminal, what of Bush, Blair and Biden?

    The Cheshire Cat.
    1. Alice Adventures in Wonderland

    In Lewis Carrol’s famous 1865 story Alice falls into a rabbit hole, and witnesses a succession of fantastical creatures, including The Queen of Spades who conducts a trial in breach of due process: sentence first, verdict later.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    This cannot be improved upon in terms of a commentary on this age of prejudgement and guilt by social media, or in the wake of any accusation.

    One modern version occurred when then Spanish minister Donna Luzon in advance of the Catalonia trials referred to those accused as the ‘convicted.’ We continue to find prejudgement of pre-crime, and conviction by association of those we disagree with. Quasi-internment. Deportations and extraditions. The obliteration of due process. The end of human rights. Endgame. Off with your head or to Rwanda.

    Well mercifully the Court of Appeal disagrees in the U.K.. But what about Julian Assange’s final appeal?

    Humpty Dumpty and Alice, from Through the Looking-Glass. Illustration by John Tenniel.
    1. Alice Through the Looking Glass

    The second Wonderland visit is best interpreted as being about language and the distortion of tradition.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    ‘I know of only one authority which might justify the suggested method of construction. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be the master, that’s all.” After all this long discussion the question is whether the words “If a man has” can mean “If a man thinks he has”. I have an opinion that they cannot, and the case should be decided accordingly.’

    The above quote comes from Lord Atkin in his dissenting judgment in Liversidge v Anderson (1942). It concerned the decision to intern someone as a subversive without due process. Thus we find a direct transcription from the book in the great English language decision upholding due process at the height of the Second World War. A sole dissenting judgment from a man and lawyer in touch with working class sensibilities

    First combined edition (publ. Ted Smart, 2000)
    1. Northern Light / His Dark Materials

    The ultimate anticipation of medievalism, with orcs seeking to undermine our hero Lyra, with her supportive, if ambiguous, daemons. Here we find the oppressive authority of organised religion and the death of the great bear Irek Brisson, who has fought so valiantly on her side.

    Philip Pullman was clearly influenced by John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), where Lucifer seems to be seeking to save humanity from institutional religion – as opposed to Christian belief which is a force of good – thereby undermining the satanic myth of the fallen state from Original Sin.

    The reversion to biblical historicism of the Old Testament is a dangerous feature of our age, not least in the US Supreme Court. As Pullman put it elsewhere: that great man Jesus and that scoundrel Jesus Christ.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    Original Intent interpreting a legal document from its inception, and not dynamically. Thus, America recognises the right to bear arms because it was acceptable over two hundred years ago. As Amy Coney Barrett put it after her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court: ‘[Catholic judges] are obliged by oath, professional commitment, and the demands of citizenship to enforce the death penalty. They are also obliged to adhere to their church’s teaching on moral matters.’

    From Sleeping Beauty (1959 film).
    1. Sleeping Beauty

    Based on the faery tale ‘La Belle Au Bois Dormant, published in 1697 by Charles Perrault, this story has been sanitised for popular consumption. In Disney’s retelling, the kiss of the prince awakens the sleeping beauty, but in the original telling of the tale she is not roused, and he falls in love with her body and essentially rapes her.

    It is only at the birth of her twins when one of the babies suckles at her breast that she wakes up. The prince then tells her what has happened. As if all this was not bad enough it turns out that the prince’s mother is an ogress, who is longing to eat her grandchildren. The tale first appeared in England in 1729 in Stories or Faery Tales from Past Times.

    Pantomimes and Disney have thus obliterated everything but the kiss.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    The idea of a prince coming to the rescue is also a theme in Rumpelstiltskin, and is the driving force in Cinderella too, although what makes for a prince is far from clear. Is it a man who abuses women or a coercive structure which abuses men and woman? Or worse still, those individuals who rape the earth. Thus, we should be careful about what and who we consent to, whether princes or princesses. Stay safe from sexual predators if you can.

    The main cast during filming in 1970.
    1. Willie Wonka and The Chocolate Factory

    Let us remind ourselves of the plot of the 1971 movie (based on Roald Dahl’s novel), in which Willie Wonka owns a chocolate factory, but has closed it down, because of espionage and betrayal. Here a race of Oompah Lumpas work under him, who seem like incorruptible souls, like Norwegians perhaps or Icelanders.

    So, in seclusion he creates the Wonka chocolate bars containing elusive golden tickets to a factory for a competition, as he is getting old and realises that someone else needs to take over the place.

    The children lucky are given a series of tests, for he only trusts uncorrupted children to run the business. He is a man-child adult himself, or a magician or sorcerer. But he finds that the children have also been corrupted. Fallen angels in a world of illusions.

    Charlie Buckets is the last recipient of the golden ticket. He fails because after cheating along with his grandfather. But is redeemable, as Wonka comes to the conclusion that the ideal child to run the chocolate factory is working-class. At one level his poverty has produced an element of dishonesty.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    Let us be wary of the inappropriate adults in the room and conscious of how poverty and social exclusion are an increasing feature of our time. So let us also be wary of going it alone, for the poor fall into traps set by the rich. And in an age of limited mobility to escape the debt trap, let us be wary of how and by what mechanisms the poor can inherit the earth or even achieve a basic income.

    1. Puss in Boots

    The oldest written telling version is Costantino Fortunato (Italian for “Lucky Costantino”) by Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola.

    Charles Perrault’s transcription is about a miller’s son who is left a cat in his father’s will. The miller’s son is none too delighted with his inheritance until the cat assures him that he can make the young man’s fortune. All the cat needs to accomplish this is a pair of boots. Thereafter, the cat makes him richer than his wildest dreams, and he marries the most beautiful princess.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    Beware of charming con men who claim they will make you rich, a lesson learnt by as all those who suffered from subprime mortgages and banking misrepresentations from the wolves of Wall Street in Ireland and elsewhere. Lies and misrepresentations that have been rubber stamped by the courts.

    Beware of dynamic self-made monsters such as the unlamented Peter Sutherland for they have destroyed and pillaged the earth.

    Readers should by now understand how we have been manipulated since childhood by faery tales in a deeply structural way, through the creation of a simplified world of good and evil.

    1. Wilde Encounters…

    I recently acquired a first edition Oscar Wilde’s Salome with illustrations by Beardsley. Now as I alight daily in Clapham Junction station on my way to court there is a plaque to Oscar Wilde as I change trains. I am reminded of being an aspiring young thespian in Trinity College 1989 where I played Edward Carson opposite to Patrick Healy as Wilde. So I conclude with Oscar Wilde’s faery tales – above all ‘The Nightingale’, along with ‘The Rose’, ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’.

    By serving their masters selflessly, the swallow and the rose die and only the selfish giant gains a measure of redemption through the generosity of his soul. He had allowed Christ or Christ’s emblem into his garden and now he gains the garden of paradise, or is it the kingdom of heaven?

    Feature Image: The Fomorians, as depicted by John Duncan (1912).

  • SUVs: A Symbol of Our Demise

    This article has been gestating for some time. I must admit to a long-standing loathing for cars. Far from mellowing, this hatred has only escalated with the passage of time.

    Into my mid-fifties, I still recall over thirty years ago when I was working as a kitchen porter in a family-run restaurant in one of the suburbs west of Paris, awaiting a lift from my then father-in-law. and actually hurling insults at the espace des boites en métal sur quatre roue!

    So, where is this anger coming from? What’s up? Well, as the title of this piece suggests, the SUV has become symbolic, for me anyway, of many of the fundamental ills of the Western world.

    In the relatively wealthy enclave in north county Dublin I have lived for the last decade or more, the SUV is the ultimate symbol of middle class affluence.

    I grew up with them. Indeed I remember their origins. The Range Rover dates from the 1970s when British Leyland unrolled them and they were pretty utilitarian in design and generally, as four-by-four vehicles, designed for multi-terrain or cross-terrain purposes.

    So, farmers and builders and other rustic types would have been the first customers, but as the vehicles grew in popularity, second generation models began appearing from the 1990s, targeting high-end users such as the Sloan Rangers in London, named after Sloan Square, an affluent part of London where the horsey types in jodhpurs and boots became a social phenomenon.

    Going from agrarian utility to gender and empowerment, you see how these vehicles are symbolically so charged as to be of interest to anyone who wishes to cast a critical eye on contemporary society!

    Of course, the military element is also there, as the SUV stems from the jeep, which had such iconic status in both World War II and the Vietnam War. And here we come to the crux of the matter: might is right! When you are sitting up in an SUV, you command the road. Particularly the fifth-generation types that you see on the roads today, and which are so vulgar in their display of wealth.

    I am thinking especially of the polar white coloured models with so much chrome and bling that you generally associate them with red-carpet type celebrities. Every wannabe designer or football wife now seems to be sitting inside one, suitably suited and jack booted, with god- knows what lying in her trunk(s)?

    So, it’s a metaphor for ostentatious living, opulence and success. So much so that if you wish to appear to be successful you need to have one of these sleekly curved, designer beasts if you really wish to assert your societal success.

    This is how shallow life has become in the West, and it has been that way since the 1980s. Of course, we haven’t even brought in the themes of the energy crisis and the environment yet! All evoked by the same means of transport…

    As a writer, and poet particularly, metaphors are what I need to traffic in. And when I think of today, and the era that we are living through, going back the last thirty or so years, I am also reminded of how literal we have become in our expressions.

    Take the world of poetry. In a realm where you would imagine metaphor to be found in abundance, you literally could not be further from the truth, as it is mostly Spoken Word these days. What the hell does that even mean?

    We have become literally so literal, in other words, so lacking in metaphorical thinking, that we literally can’t even think in metaphorical terms any longer. Hence the appalling state of poetry at the moment, particularly in this c(o)untry where Spoken Word poets are more dominant than any other kind of beast!

    When I think of a master of metaphor, I have to go back to Beckett which, again, like the Range Rover, was still around during the 1980s. His whole world of tramps, hats, dustbins and solitary trees; in that constellation of metaphors, I can see the whole post World War II years. Beckett could only have come out of the total ruins of a global conflict that resulted in the deaths of over sixty million people.

    It’s all there contained in his metaphors. As Hugh Kenner was to point out, Waiting for Godot was both directly and indirectly inspired by Beckett’s only flight with Susanne from Paris, when the Gestapo were quite literally looking for the two of them and they both had to, quite literally, hide by sleeping rough or finding lodgings.

    The play, which became synonymous with post-war Europe, having been born from very real vagrancy and all of the anguish that might come from such a tenuous life; the couple hid out for the remainder of the war in Roussillon.

    Two other poets, masters of metaphor, were of course Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. The former employed bog bodies, while the latter adopted the crow, but when compared to the bleak visions of Beckett, in sheer terms of metaphoric power, any one can see that the Sage of Foxrock far out-does them.

    Perhaps one of the greatest examples of the stupidity of our current predicament, a predicament which now sees us in direct conflict with the great powers of the East, who see how weak we have become, is perhaps the famous ‘End of History’ phrase used by Francis Fukuyama in 1992.

    Here we can identify, at the end of the Cold War, the collective West’s deluded belief in its omnipotence. This we should remember was a period of unparalleled wealth, which finally gave way in 2008 to a global downturn that was really the culmination of corporate greed, of which the SUV is now the best metaphor for.

    In the figure of Fukuyama, we can see, again quite literally, how literal people were thinking. Even historians. Whatever happened to the philosopher historians, a dead breed that included Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Hegel and Giambattista Vico? These were metaphorical thinkers who could imagine history as another idiom and thereby create metaphoric space in which to speculate on the nature of history and origins.

    Vico, with his three ages of man theory, would have declared, no doubt, that the period we are now living through in the West is in the third age, when society, as we know it has peaked.

    In architectural terms, think of the Corinthian columns, which resemble great flowering heads spilling out in opulent abundance, which is a natural phenomenon. Compare them then to the spartan simplicity of the Ionic and Dorian column.

    The Corinthians were a civilisation in excess. Apparently, their columns heralded a demise. Only the metaphor remains, and, of course, the ruined columns!

    To return now to the SUV. The sports utility vehicle. I only have to look out my apartment window here to see one. There it is, parked glistening in the sun, awaiting its bold glamazon.

    My wife (she drives a Fiat Panda, so a mini one) has often remarked on how the very worst drivers tend to be the women who drive SUVs, as they are generally so contemptuous of everyone.

    Might is Right, remember! Fuck You! They seem to say just by merely being; both driver now and vehicle. And, this is a sign for us to emulate, as a society! These are the values that we have now been brought up to revere! The Fuck You arrogance of absolute veneer.

    It’s funny, when I was last rereading Thomas Kinsella’s The Táin I was struck immediately by the brash vulgarity of the local Irish princes and princesses. Merely substitute the SUVs for their chariots, and you find the same vulgar trappings of power and wealth.

    The Táin is an old work apparently first originating in the first century AD, yet the manuscript dates from the twelfth century. We need, it seems to me, fresher chronicles. Fresher metaphors, more room to breath. What a culture; Spoken Word and SUVs, my arse!

  • Our Barmy Bread

    The appeal of exotic cuisines and esoteric diets has done little to diminish bread’s status as the primary foodstuff of the Western world, and many areas besides. Symbolic as the ‘staff of life’ and ubiquitous, the Oxford English Dictionary describes it in wholesome simplicity as a ‘well-known article of food prepared by moistening, kneading, and baking meal or flour, generally with the addition of yeast or leaven’.

    But charges of adulteration have long been laid against the baker, the miller and the farmer. Today, more than ever, bread has departed from the purity of its essential elements: flour, water and usually salt for flavour. In the early modern era, however, fast-acting yeast, derived from brewers’ barm, began to replace the traditional sourdough leaven: simply flour and water containing a live culture similar to yoghurt. The addition of yeast was the beginning of a downward spiral culminating in today’s industrial loaves, products of the insidious Chorleywood Bread Process.

    A list of the ingredients, wheat apart, of a familiar brand of sliced white bread reads like pharmacopoeia: Emulsifiers, E471, E472e, Soya Flour, Preservative, Calcium, Propotionate (added to inhibit mould growth), Flavouring, Flour Treatment Agents, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), E920, Dextrose. Such bland uniformity and chemical defilement led the great cookery writer Elizabeth David to muse: ‘A technological triumph factory bread may be. Taste it has none. Should it be called bread?’[i]

    The quality of loaves from an Irish market worth €1.9 billion in 2019 should be a matter of public concern, as the consequence for our health of inferior bread is devastating. Perhaps more importantly, the satisfaction derived from the breaking of quality bread approaches the divine.

    Wheat

    The most commonly used grain (or ‘corn’ as this was referred to historically) for bread is wheat. A grass native to the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, where agriculture and civilization originate, it is now cultivated across the globe, though often in marginal climatic zones. Worryingly, the last century has seen erosion of the genetic variety of wheat strains, and dependence on artificial fertilization.

    From the 1940s Norman E. Borlaug and his collaborators developed new strains of wheat, correcting a structural deficiency in the stalk which couldn’t support heavy grains. Previously the most fruitful plants collapsed under the weight of their own seeds, before maturity. Borlaug’s group developed dwarf strains that could stand up to the weight of bulbous grains, thereby more than doubling yields.

    Today, almost every kernel of wheat consumed by man and beast is derived from Borlaug’s selective breeding. But the resulting monocultures require greater use of pesticides than genetically diverse plants, while farmers must purchase hybrid seeds from large corporations.

    Animal waste and crop rotation – traditional methods of restoring nitrogen to the soil after each growth cycle – are insufficient for the dwarf strains, which require synthetic fertilization. Wheat is now dependent on human intervention, just as modern domestic turkeys are generally unable to reproduce unless artificially inseminated.

    The manufacture of synthetic fertilizer requires natural gas, both for heat and as a source of hydrogen. According to Fraser and Rimas ‘without a secure supply of nitrogen the world would starve’.[ii] Our agricultural model, and perhaps survival, is hopelessly dependent on a finite fossil fuel.

    Further, it is said that stressed vines make better grapes. The same principle applies to today’s pampered wheat crop, insulated from any struggle with nature by human intervention. The diverse strains of wheat from yesteryear offered superior nutrition, and more varied flavours.

    Two Methods

    Notwithstanding the use of unleavened bread in Western (though not Orthodox) Christian ritual, it might be argued that such bread is not deserving of the the name, as the flour is not fermented before baking. Fermentation is achieved using one of two agents: the age-old sourdough leaven method, or through the addition of yeast.

    Sourdough is a combination of yeast and bacterial culture, which aids digestion of the grain. This compensates for our relatively short intestines compared to dedicated herbivores like cattle. Human ingenuity has produced what amounts to an external stomach.

    Good bread, like Swiss Cheese, contains holes or ‘eyes’ left by carbon dioxide produced by fermentation and trapped by glutinous flour. This is especially apparent in strong white flours with a high gluten content; lower-protein ‘soft’ flour is usually reserved for cakes and biscuits, although it is now used in mass-produced breads.

    A late-seventeenth century French journal succinctly describes the two methods of fermentation in use at the cusp of modernity:

    the most commonly used one, called French leaven, is dough made with only water and flour and kept until it becomes sour… The other, which is called yeast, is the foam released from beer when it ferments. French leaven acts more slowly, causes the dough to rise less, and makes a heavier, denser bread. Yeast ferments more quickly, makes it rise more, and the bread it makes is light, delicate and soft.[iii]

    These same methods are in use today, though since the breakthroughs of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), brewers’ barm (usually derived from barley beer) has been replaced by cultured yeast with the same fast-acting effect but greater consistency.

    Sourdough bread, leavened by a fermented dough ‘starter’ which has ‘caught’ yeast from the air, is denser than yeast bread. This starter contains a lactobacillus culture with sufficient yeast for bread to rise, though it is less active than pure yeast. The acetic note – its extent depending on the culture and method used – emanates from lactobacilli assisting the benign bacteria in our digestive tract.

    Lactobacillus

    Police Enquiry

    In the seventeenth century, bread was a vital element of the diet for the average poor Parisian, who ate an impressive kilo-and-a-half per day. Indeed, the price of bread was one trigger of the French Revolution, inspiring Marie Antoinette’s famous – though apocryphal – solution: ‘let them eat cake’.

    The perceived adulteration of bread with barm was, therefore, controversial. A dispute between guilds of bakers and innkeepers over the sale of bread brought the matter to a head. Innkeepers claimed that traditional sourdough Gonesse bread, purchased from out-of-town traders for retail, was superior to the yeasted ‘Queen’s bread’ sold by bakers. This bread, the innkeepers alleged, was a corruption of pure bread, i.e. dough made with only water and flour and kept until it became sour.

    This early health scare led to the formation of an expert medical panel to address the issue of the use of barm, mostly imported from breweries in Flanders, sometimes in a state of autolysis. The origin of the adjective ‘barmy’ recalls the distrust, even in beer-friendly Britain, for this puzzling, fizzing substance. At that time, as today, wine was the preferred beverage in France and the inclusion of barm from beer in bread making was considered unpatriotic.

    Following the debate between the guilds, a French police inquiry observed that one could take precautions against bread that was visibly poorly baked, but added: ‘It is not the same with fermentation, which makes the dough rise; which refines it and makes it lighter. Because the worst is sometimes what gives bread the best appearance of goodness.’[iv]

    This echoes the sentiments of Elizabeth David centuries later in relation to the deceptive scent of baking, as she put it: ‘it is a fact of life that all bread, homemade, factory-made, bakery-made, good, indifferent, gives out a glorious smell, but to buy bread on its smell while hot is asking for disillusion.’ It seems that human senses are not always equipped to immediately discern good quality bread. Quality is revealed not just by sight, smell, or even taste, but through digestion, or rather the extent to which micro-organisms have already digested it. This accords with the oft-misrepresented Epicurus, who argued that one should avoid those foods which, though giving pleasure at the time, afterwards leave one feeling deprived.

    Peasants sharing bread, from the Livre du roi Modus et de la reine Ratio, France, 14th century.

    In condemning the use of yeast, the leading medical expert in the case Gui Patin stated:

    To say, as those who defend it do, that they have not seen anyone drop over sick or dead from eating this bread is not a good way to clear it of the faults with which it has been charged. It is like sugar refined with lime or alum, or heavily salted, peppered and sliced meats, or wines in which one tosses lime or fish glue, or other things bad in themselves which men concerned about their health avoid, even if none of these things causes death or threatens one’s health on the day it is ingested.

    In spite of this advice the Paris parliament maintained a policy of laissez faire. The preference for yeast may be explained by its faster action than leaven, and in truth many still prefer the fluffiness it imparts. Today in France pain au levain is less common than baguette de tradition française made with yeast, which is now, ironically, a symbol of France. In most countries fast-acting yeast has taken the place of the slow action of traditional leaven. Yet worse was to follow with advances in industrial technology.

    Elizabeth David.

    Caustic Assessment

    Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery, first published in 1977, provides an outstanding contribution to the subject of baking, exploring the history, science and practice of the craft. It offers a caustic assessment of the baking industry that remains as vital today as when first published, though one limitation is that most recipes call for yeast rather than sourdough leaven.

    David wrote in the wake of the Chorleywood Bread Process, invented in 1961, and known in chilling Orwellian language as the ‘no-time method’. Eighty-percent of bread in the U.K. is currently prepared using this method, which involves a super-quick fermentation; the slow maturation of dough is replaced by a few minutes of intense mechanical agitation in special high-speed mixers. This sounds miraculous, but solid fat is necessary to prevent the loaf collapsing and a large quantity of yeast is added: David asserts that sixteen times as much yeast is used with the CBP as in some traditional recipes; a bit barmy really.

    Such a huge amount of yeast is used in order to speed up the process, and to increase volume by maximizing dough expansion. Powdered gluten may also be added to lower-protein soft flour. Admittedly this has reduced the U.K.’s dependence on the ‘harder’ strains of wheat imported from warmer countries. Writing in the wake of the CBP, Elizabeth David remarked: ‘It will be interesting to see the efforts of the milling industry to sell us bread which is more suitable for cake, or at any rate for cattle cake.’

    In fact preparing bread with soft British and Irish wheat strains is possible using artisanal methods, it just requires a longer fermentation period to develop the gluten. Perhaps as a result, over-worked bakers in the past acquired a reputation for being strong, and dumb. But the convenience of modern methods comes at a nutritional cost.

    Give Us Our Bread

    In the early feudal period a lord of the manor held a milling monopoly over grain grown within his domain. But by the late fourteenth century the situation had changed with the emergence of independent millers, who acquired a reputation for unscrupulous behaviour.

    Robin the miller, unknown 15th century artist.

    Thus, in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c.1400), millers are lampooned as cheats who over-charge for grinding corn. This is an enduring stereotype revealing resentment against the wealth of an emerging capitalist class of millers, at a time when field crops formed 80% of the diets of poorer sections of society.

    Our bread-dependent civilization has tended to generate and perpetuate social hierarchies dependent on the ownership of land, milling technology and the storage conditions required to preserve a year round supply, and sufficient seed for the following year.

    Until recently, when health authorities recognised the importance of roughage in our diets, white or, more accurately, a yellowish-shade of bread was more expensive and reserved for the wealthy. This snobbery against darker loaves can be explained by their common adulteration with inferior grains, unground husks, and even indigestible matter.

    Relative whiteness indicated purity, though the bran and wheatgerm was never entirely extracted using pre-industrial techniques. The first roller mill was opened in Glasgow in 1872 and since then white bread has been affordable for the masses, who assumed the bread esteemed by their social superiors was of a superior quality. Soon bread was even being bleached to conform to the consumer’s expectation for pristine whiteness, though most bleaching agents are now banned under E.U. (though not U.S.) law.

    Oven Ready

    The oven is the last piece in the jigsaw of technology and accumulated wisdom required in bread-making. Bread may be baked in a pan over an open fire in the form of ‘griddle cakes’, but a hot oven serves best, filled with steam which gelatinizes the outer layer of bread to give it a firm crust. A critical mass of population and wealth is, however, required for such ovens to be built, and the necessary fuel gathered. Thus, less technologically developed societies usually heat a cauldron over an open fire, consuming grain in the form of soup called frumenty and other stir-a-bouts.

    The Second Agricultural, beginning in the seventeenth, which preceded the Industrial Revolution, led to the demise of most domestic bread-making in Britain: the Enclosure Acts denied rural communities access to common land where fuel could be gathered; it was too expensive for urban households to maintain ovens; and coal which came into widespread use billows black smoke unconducive to baking.

    George Russell (Æ)

    Over the course of the nineteenth century, shop-bought bread became the norm, especially as many women joined the labour force. In Ireland this process occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1913 George Russell Æ observed the effect of the transition in Ireland:

    There is no doubt that the vitality of the Irish people has seriously diminished, and that the change has come about with a change in the character of the food consumed. When people lived with porridge, brown bread and milk as the main ingredients in the diet, the vitality and energy of the people was noticeable, though they were much poorer than they are now… When one looks at an Irish crowd one could almost tell the diet of most of them. These anaemic girls have tea running in their veins instead of blood. These weakly looking boys have been fed on white bread.[v]

    Cultural Indicator

    The story of bread is like a Russian doll, a multi-layered revelation exposing a great deal of our civilization. Perhaps above any other food it requires human ingenuity in agriculture, engineering and cuisine. No wonder it provides the metaphor of transubstantiation.

    Sadly, the dominance of indigestible white bread from unmatured dough has been a nutritional and gastronomic calamity. Constipation is the large and rather pained elephant clambering about the room, and bread is now marked with the dreaded sign of fat, as a contributor to the global obesity pandemic. But it shouldn’t be this way: unadulterated sourdough bread combines nutritional benefits with supreme gustatory enjoyment, in the true Epicurean sense.

    One issue for us to consider is an over-reliance on hard wheat strains, considering other grains are more suited to our growing conditions. The present fluctuating climate recommends diversity, and as omnivores this is to our nutritional benefit.

    The Classical Greek author Atheneaus records seventy-two varieties of bread baked in his time. Today we expect homogeneity. The spectre of food shortages looms, however, due to over-reliance on finite fossil fuels.

    Individuals and communities can begin to take control of their own bread supply. Domestic baking is tricky but rewarding. In Denmark all schoolchildren are taught how to bake, a valuable lesson that could be introduced to our schools.

    With more time on our hands during lockdown may have shown a willingness to make bread to a reasonable standard. Apart from saving money, this shouldn’t be too labour-intensive as sourdough keeps well without preservatives, and can be baked in batches. For most of us bread is a com-pan-ion for life, and nothing less than the best should suffice.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

    [i] Elizabeth David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery Cookbook, Grub Street, London, 2010,

    [ii] Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, Empires of Food , and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Free Press, New York, 2014, p.2

    [iii] Madeleine Ferrières, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, (translated by Jody Gladding), pp.111-133

    [iv] Ibid, Ferrières

    [v] Leslie Clarkson, Margaret Crawford, Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland 1500-1920 Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p.238