John Calder spoke at the Abbey Theatre some years ago. The founder and director of Calder and Boyars had published a host of Nobel Prize winners, including Samuel Beckett. Calder stressed that Beckett’s early writing, his novels, had attained modest success. His reputation grew slowly…”Ideas take time” Calder explained.
Seamus Deane was born in Derry on February 9 1940. In 1972 he was lecturing in English in UCD, when I, aged nineteen, studied English and Latin there. One lecture of his stands out in my memory.
It had to do with Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. Although there are no Irish characters in the story, Conrad records that the book issued out of the political milieu of late Victorian London in which the Fenian dynamitards featured.
Conrad’s labyrinthine plot focusses on a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The anarchist Verloc, his wife Winnie, her somewhat retarded brother Stevie head a cast of characters which includes European conspirators and the British police.
1972 was not short on political and military action.
Seamus weaved the novel into the historic tapestry of Victorian London, and demonstrated how it foreshadowed some of what was happening in 1972. He unveiled an idea: politics and literature are closely linked.
In 2021 that proposition might not cause a stir. In 50 years, its caught on. In UCD, in 1972, it was radical and novel. It struck me forcibly and changed how I viewed things. An image of the pale young man from Derry talking about Joseph Conrad remains with me.
Featured Image is of (from left to right) Seamus Deane, Ann Kearney, Richard Kearney, Imelda Healy, Marion Deane and Ronan Sheehan in c. 1985.
Help keep this show on the road! We depend on readers’ support. You can contribute on an ongoing basis via Patreon or through a one-off contribution via Buy Me a Coffee. Any small amount is hugely appreciated.
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Dante Alighieri
Religion is an emotional need of mankind. The rationalist may not want it, but he has to admit that other people may… Let’s not leave out a single god! […] Let’s be everything, in every way possible, for there can be no truth where something is lacking. Fernando Pessoa
The Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan came as a shock to Western consciousness. It was not merely that a U.S.-sponsored regime proved so fragile once the troops pulled out; but the apparent enduring appetite among Afghans for policies at least purporting to be Islamic flies in the face of a starry-eyed view of humanity steadily evolving towards a uniform set of customs and beliefs.
That is not to argue that common principles cannot be agreed by sovereign states – and peoples – but to expect uniformity in outlook across a global population living in starkly differing circumstances, and at varying historical junctures, appears naïve at best. Any globalisation project striving for homogeneity will surely fail.
In abandoning religious traditions – as many of us have done – it may be that we are losing ethical frameworks grounded in those traditions with profound consequences for relations among ourselves, and with Earth itself. It begs the question: at a critical juncture for humanity does faith, or transcendence, offer a path out of despair, and indeed a Theology of Hope? We may further ask whether, without this ethical grounding, if the direction of scientific research is guided by a reliable moral compass, or simply the exigencies of a Capitalist market?
Without subscribing to the banal equanimity of moral relativism disregarding gross human rights violations, we should question all military interventions in pursuit of peace. Saint Augustine in the City of God stated: ‘there is no man who does not wish for peace… even when men wish a present state of peace to be disturbed … they do so not because they hate peace but because they desire the present peace to be exchanged for one that suits their wishes.’ The Hippocratic Oath might be adapted in international relations whenever the invasion of another country is contemplated: ‘first do no harm.’
The idea of peace for eternity is an illusion. So Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) – where ‘the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism’ is ‘replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands’ – now seems an increasingly absurd notion, formulated in a moment of peak post-Cold War hubris.
Likewise, a Marxist assumption that History will simply end, thereby removing a requirement for politics, or for difficult choices to be decided is also, sadly, Utopian; this is notwithstanding the continued relevance of Marxist analysis to current economic relations, in particular a seemingly inexorable widening in the gap between rich and poor in an age of technology; and the idea of metabolic rift, meaning, broadly: the alienation of exploited workers from their environment.
Thus, both Liberals and Marxists have fallen prey to an assumption that we are bound for a Promised Land governed by Enlightenment Values. In fact, Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume called into question fundamental rights derived from an Aristotelian tradition, developed in Europe over centuries. Science only emerged as a distinct discipline in the 1830s, untethered from an ethical foundation in philosophy.
U.S. President Reagan meeting with Afghan mujahideen at the White House in 1983.
Religion in Global Diplomacy
The Taliban’s victory demonstrated that religious identity remains a galvanising force in politics, beyond even national identity, in the developing world especially. Although, it should be noted that the Taliban is largely drawn from the dominant Pashtun ethnic group. We may also safely assume a long Afghan tradition of resistance to foreign occupation remains an inspiration.
Nonetheless, as the case of ISIS also highlighted, and indeed the perseverance of the Religious Right in the U.S., we in Europe especially should reconcile ourselves to the endurance of belief systems other than our own dominant secularism. For, as the authors Philip McDonagh, Kishon Manocha, John Neary and Lucia Vázquez Medonza of a new work On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy (Routledge, London, 2020) point out, it is a fallacy to equate ‘modernisation’ with a decline of religious observance.
This work provides an important guide to negotiate challenges in a world where those professing no religion amount to just 16% of the population. Globally, atheism is a strictly a minority taste, a point its often evangelical advocates are wont to ignore. Thus, in the half century since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, we have witnessed a succession of political movements emerge shaped by religious identities – if not the humane insights contained within all traditions.
Show on the life of Jesus at Igreja da Cidade, affiliated to the Brazilian Baptist Convention, in São José dos Campos, Brazil, 2017
Religion as a Force for Good and Ill
Anyone advocating in favour of a place for religion in the public sphere must grapple with a strong tendency for this to be expressed in fundamentalist politics – a word, incidentally, deriving from the description of Protestant sects of the early twentieth century. All too often, where religion lies behind political formations it has brought harsh ordinances, generally to the detriment of women – in terms of their status relative to men – in a patriarchal order.
In power as such, we have witnessed the crushing of dissent, or heresies. Indeed, the approach of many rulers claiming faith-based authority resembles that of the Grand Inquisitor from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamoz, who Laurens van der Post described as ‘the visionary anticipation of Stalin and his kind.’ This tale or parable, which the character of Ivan Karamazov’s recounts in the novel, is set in post-Reformation Spain, where the all-powerful Inquisitor is visited by a resurrected Christ. The fearsome leader, however, dismisses the putative saviour, revealing that the Church has embraced the devil:
we have accepted from him what You had rejected with indignation, that last gift that he offered You, showing You all the kingdoms of the earth: we accepted Rome and the sword of Caesar from him, and we proclaimed ourselves the only kings on earth, the only true kings.
The Grand Inquisitor maintains that he is serving the common people, who will be lost if freedom of conscience is permitted. He thus banishes the saviour with the words: ‘we shall withhold the secret and, to keep them happy, we shall opiate them with promises of eternal reward in heaven.’[i]
Characteristics of the Grand Inquisitor’s approach were evident in the Irish Catholic Church after independence that opiated the people “with promises of eternal reward in heaven.” Thus, Ronan Sheehan describes a ‘Theology of Incarceration’ – associated in particular with the legacy of Matt Talbot in his visionary Dublin: Heart of the City (2016).
However, notwithstanding criminal actions of Catholic clergy, we may question whether contemporary Ireland is a more, or less, caring society. There are certainly greater opportunities for women – but in an increasingly two-tier society in housing, health and education it is a shrinking number that can avail of these.
In an increasingly neoliberal society political ambitions have given way to passivity. The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy remind us that twentieth century history witnessed resistance to National Socialism, and plans for the Welfare State ‘inspired to a large extent by leaders who were religious leaders.’ There are numerous examples of religious leaders and movements in developing countries, from Gandhi to Hamas, that have emphasised the importance of social programmes. The Catholic Church under Pope Francis is also now engaging seriously with many of the profound social and environmental questions of our age.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822.
Poetic Origins
A more acceptably entry to the idea of religion – for a younger generation anyway – is perhaps through poetry. The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy locate religion in poetic inspiration, which has often arrived in response to tyranny, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s plea in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (1819):
Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free–
Shelley wrote the first public argument for atheism in England as a young student in Oxford, but this may be considered an undergraduate flourish, designed to provoke. As his career developed, according to his wife Mary Shelley, he became a ‘disciple of the Immaterial Philosophy of Berkeley. This theory gave unity and grandeur to his ideas, while it opened a field for his imagination.’[ii]
Shelley’s work emphasised a divine inspiration, and believed a poet’s ‘impartial care for the birth of situations’ reaches towards goodness. Likewise, Osip Mandelstam said ‘the consciousness of our rightness is dearer to anything else in poetry.’
Many poets maintain, at least in private, that their inspiration, including that conveying moral ideas, is in a sense, god-given, or at least derived from an ‘other’ world. Thus, the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod describes a certain kind of judge, touched by the Muses, who ‘can put a quick and expert end even to a great quarrel.’ Viewed as such, religion may yet offer a poetic space for developing empathy, imagining a new world, and holding on to what remains sacred in a dying planet.
For the authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy, the formulation of ‘a more just arrangement of human affairs’ comes about not only through philosophical reasoning, but also in a Theology of Hope. Thus, the say ‘the meaning or pattern in events shines out in the perspective of eternity.’ This is the faith of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer who believed that ‘something new can be born that is not discernible in the alternatives of the present.
Therefore, the authors ‘do not argue for theocracy in any form,’ and instead ‘argue merely that to try to exclude God and religion from the conversation would be about our global future is to aim deliberately low.’
Everything is Permitted?
Does the negation of religion – however tenuous and abstract – leave us operating within a moral void, where, as in the words of Ivan Karamazov: ‘everything is permitted,’ including murder? This is not to say that all atheists operate without moral scruples, but ultimate justifications for “rightness” or “goodness” may prove elusive in the absence of faith or transcendence. Through the character of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky wonders what deeds we are capable of in the absence of divine judgment.
More broadly, we may ask whether a new species of evil develops in a value-less neoliberal setting, where callous murders are increasingly commonplace – not least in the gangland shootings we have grown accustomed to in Dublin in recent times? Is it simply fear of being caught in the act that holds back more of us from committing heinous crimes?
Contemporary alienation has been powerfully expressed by Michel Houellebecq the French author of Atomised (1998) and other novels. His latest offering, Serotonin (2019) again plumbs the depths. Here, we find a narrator contemplating the murder of the four-year-old son by another father of the love of his life, after coming to the conclusion the child would stand in the way of a successful revival of their relationship.
His mind returns to his own feelings as a young child after a New Year celebration. Adopting a neo-Darwinian, (scientific?) outlook, he observes:
it was as that memory came into my mind that I understood Camille’s son, that I was able to put myself in his place, and that identification gave me the right to kill him. To tell the truth, if I had been a stag or a Brazilian macaque, the question wouldn’t even have arisen: the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of her genotype. This attitude has been maintained for a long time in the human population.
He continues:
I don’t think that contrary forces, the forces that tried to keep me on track for murder, had much to do with morality; it was an anthropological matter, a matter of belonging to a late species, and of adhering to the code of that late species – a matter of conformity.
Overcoming “conformity”, ‘the rewards would not be immediate’ he says, ‘Camille would suffer, she would suffer enormously, I would have to wait at least six months before resuming contact. And then I would come back, and she would love me again.’[iii]
Houellebecq’s “contrary forces” represent an increasing loss of moral conviction. As the characters conformity diminishes, the “code” of our “late species” breaks down and the possibility of violence increases, as we see in the book’s characterisation of the violent response of farmers to a neoliberal order that is putting them out of business.
Ultimately, however, Houellebecq’s narrator proves incapable of pulling the trigger as he has intended, entering what he refers to as an endless night, ‘and yet’, he says:
deep within me, there remained something less than a hope, let’s say an uncertainty. One might also say that even when one has personally lost the game, when one has played one’s last card, for some people – not all, not all – the idea remains that something in heaven will pick up the hand, will arbitrarily decide to deal again, to throw the dice again, even when one has never at any moment in one’s life sensed the intervention or even the presence of any kind of deity, even when one is aware of not especially deserving the intervention of a favourable deity, and even when one realises, bearing in mind the accumulation of mistakes and errors that constitute one’s life, that one deserves it less than anyone.[iv]
Hope springs eternal it seems, even in a novelist-of-despair such as Houellebecq.
Moreover, if we refuse the temptation to pull the trigger and reset our lives; if we embrace an idea of hope; we may conceive the Earth itself to be sacred; a view shared by all religious traditions, which enjoin respect towards all life on the planet. One wonders whether a view of all life on Earth being sacred is shared by pure materialists. Moreover, untethered to any faith tradition is “everything permitted” in scientific research?
Niccolò Machiavelli 1469-1527.
The Political Craft
Contemporary politics often appears to operate within a moral vacuum, where warfare is conducted through drone strikes, and the planet reels under the impact of over-exploitation; while even in Advanced Economies, millions endure shocking poverty. New forms of propaganda have been unleashed via a social media that is removing agency, implanting ideas that distort politics. Most politicians claim to care, but as often as not they distract from the structural questions and emphasise issues of only peripheral relevance to the lives of ordinary people. In particular, identity politics has been used to divide and conquer, while the wealth of billionaires continues to accumulate.
The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy come down squarely against the statecraft associate with Niccolò Machiavelli, which now appears ascendant in a contemporary politics of spin – where September 11 was ‘a good day to bury bad news’. Here, according to the authors: ‘Deceit, and even cruelty, are justified by results – by their results as measured over time – which requires very sharp judgment by the Prince if his recourse to realpolitik is not to undermine the moral standards of ‘ordinary people.’’ Means cannot easily be distinguished from ends, while the body politic is contaminated by mendacious politicians.
They argue: ‘Not to tell lies or to make contradictory promises would seem to be a rule of peace-building that we should never set aside.’ Lies erode trust in institutions and tend to catch up with political actors. Tony Blair and his 45-minuteclaims before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is an obvious example, albeit one unmentioned in the book.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
Pandemic Response
A Populist wave emanating from the Americas has, thus far at least, failed to propel a European equivalent into power. Nonetheless, distrust in politicians and the media is probably at an all-time high, and with some justification. Moreover, all too often, scientists guiding government policy have adopted Machiavellian approaches that only fuel paranoia.
The origins of the pandemic itself are shrouded in mystery, amidst a growing suspicion that the COVID-19 virus is a product of so-called ‘gain of function’ research, involving US government agencies and China.
Attempts to supress this involvement – including by EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak, who jointly authored an article in The Lancet dismissing the idea out of hand at the beginning of the pandemic – generates serious concern. A recent slew of emails released under freedom of information: ‘indicate involvement by individuals with undisclosed conflicts of interest; limited peer-review; and a lack of even-handedness and transparency regarding the consideration of lab-origin theories within the scientific community.’
Would anyone who believes in the sacredness of life on Earth engage in work so fundamental to all life on Earth? It recalls the inventor of the Atomic Bomb Charles Oppenheimer’s quoting The Bhagavad Ghita: ‘I am death destroyer of worlds.’
Ethical debates in science would surely benefit from religious insights. As Laurens van der Post put it: ‘For me the passion of spirit we call ‘religion’, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.’
Fauci speaks to the White House press corps on COVID-19 in April 2020.
Bioterror Czar
Damningly, in 2011, in the capacity of George Bush’s ‘bioterror czar’ the long-time Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President Anthony Fauci argued that the benefits of ‘engineered viruses’ made it a ‘risk worth taking.’
During the pandemic Fauci appeared as a rational antidote to the bleach-belching Trump, but is prone to an arrogance assuming he can do no wrong. This is epitomised by the remarkable statement: ‘A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.’ In other words, Le Science C’est Moi.
An early example of Fauci’s mendacity was his claim that he committed a ‘white lie’ in relation to the efficacy of masks. He said that he shaded the truth to avert a run on scarce equipment. Even if we take him at his word, why should the public believe what he is saying thereafter is not also a white lie? This is the attitude of a Grand Inquisitor who believes the little people cannot hope to understand the big questions. But this Machiavellian approach easily backfires.
In this testimony, as in much of his conduct over the past two years, Dr. Fauci was speaking “nothing but the truth.” Yet he was mindful of what Jesuits used to call a reservation.
A reservation, in this sense, is an unspoken qualification. The speaker telegraphs a public meaning, confident it will be misunderstood. He holds in reserve a private meaning whose release might damage a higher cause (a cause known to the speaker and God, of which God approves). For God, in this context, we should read: “US government institutions of scientific research.” Yet American support of catastrophically hazardous experimentation was by no means the only pertinent fact withheld from American citizens.
There are perhaps programmes that a government can justifiably occlude, but it enters dangerous territory in doing so. Fauci’s over-weening arrogance – tying his own fate to the credibility of science which is enshrined as the guiding light for humanity – appears to have led him to the moral failings of the Grand Inquisitors that we associate with religions in power.
Black Lives Matter Dublin Protest June 1st 2020.
A Point of Inflection
The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy stress a need for preserving universal values, and institutions, while upholding a spirit of hopefulness in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges for humanity. History shows that democratic institutions alone cannot be trusted, given the extent to which opinions are moulded using increasingly sophisticated propaganda. This is one reason why we have constitutions that purport to contain immutable and even transcendent values.
As the authors stress, ‘we have reached a point of inflection in the global story’ and if they are to address forthcoming challenges religions ‘need to make themselves understood in the common language of reason.’
The input of the billions of religious should be welcomed in our public discourse, and not associated with ignorance in a one-track view of development. In particular, the idea of all life on planet Earth being sacred should be affirmed, although tendencies towards authoritarianism and mendacity among representatives of religions requires attention.
In an age of science, where humans act as gods, altering the building blocks of life we can draw on wisdom contained within religious traditions on the sacredness of life. In a world of mounting challenges, even those of us who have dismissed religion from our lives may benefit from consideration of core principles contained therein. In any case, we must navigate a path through a world where, like it or not, religious belief remains the norm.
Featured Image: The Thinker in the Gates at the Musée Rodin
[i] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Ignat Avsey, Oxford World Classics (1994), p. 322-325
[ii] Kenneth Neill Cameron ‘Philosophy, Religion and Ethics’ in Shelley: The Golden Years, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1971, p.151
[iii] Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin, London, 2019, p.265-266
In a rousing introductory speech, retired diplomat Philip McDonagh described the publication of Cuban Love Songs as a ‘significant moment for the Irish province of the Republic Letters.’ He spoke of the ‘importance of the Republic Letters for us all’, that space where we ‘can explore intelligently and in a disinterested way both the world and our place in the world.’
McDonagh also spoke about his concerns over the blockade against Cuba. He argued that there had never been a level playing field to allow the Cuban economy to prove itself and looked forward to a better dialogue between Washington and Havana.
Reflecting on a challenging period in international relations, McDonagh wondered:
are we prepared to wait for the gifts of the muses, on political truths that do not depend on what Shelley called the calculating faculty? Are we prepared to work towards restoring the resonance of great fundamental words: mercy, discernment, justice, trust and hope?
He said:
we need the poets and the public authorities to come together in something like the Republic of Letters to practise humility and re-evaluate key aspects of our culture, and this must be done of course in freedom … where citizens are prepared to discuss public challenges on the basis of first principles.
There were also readings from Anthony Colclough, Caoimhe Lavelle, Karl O’Neill, Anne Haverty, Luke Sheehan, and Ronan Sheehan.
The event took place in Merrion Cricket Club and drew a colourful crowd.
Lockdown measures remind me of the prescription of anti-depressants and other psychiatric medicines. They are both harsh, and both are administered in response to a moment of crisis; both often have severe side effects, which in time often obscure the initial malady that required their prescription.
It is high time we re-examined how the government is being advised to bring the population to the promised land of ‘living with the virus.’ At this stage other forms of advice should be sought. Presumably the government is already receiving significant inputs from the business sector, but other important viewpoints are not part of the conversation.
Dr Billy Ralph was even more critical of the damage that had been done to the fabric of Irish society over the course of the pandemic:
Policies were adopted by an unelected government on the erroneous advice of experts listening to other experts, who predicted an enormous death toll from Covid-19 that has not come about anywhere on the globe. These same experts are now doubling down on initial errors and inflicting incalculable harm on the delicate fabric of society.
Image (c) Barry Delaney.
Meanwhile, prompted by warnings from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that 85,000 could die over the course of the pandemic photographer Barry Delaney revealed the grim foreboding he felt back in March:
The thing to watch for was the breathlessness I had heard. This was what caused the dangerous pneumonia. On the Saturday night I went to bed early alone, and suddenly had problems breathing. It being Saturday I could not disturb my Doctor, nor did I want an ambulance arriving to take me to quarantine in hospital, where I’d be met by Hazmat-clad Doctors and become Patient No. 3. Laid low by fear and shortness of breath I could not sleep. By 5am I made a decision to complete my final book, Americans Anonymous and get my things in order in case this was it.
This proved a false alarm, but it gave way to a period of creative impotence in his photographic practice:
As lockdown eased more and more people descended to summer in Dun Laoghaire around the Forty Foot. To swim, to escape, to even have fun in our new Covid world.
Gradually I began to photograph this migration, at first people were cautious, masked, socially distancing on the newly opened beach, but as May turned to July people began to summer properly. The beaches became crowded, like normal, not the new normal; no one wore masks. The virus didn’t spread outdoors, or so we believed.
Image (c) Barry Delaney
Classicist Ronan Sheehan, meanwhile, drew attention to the etymology of the terms in common use during the pandemic:
Epidemic: from Greek ἐπί epi ‘upon or above’ and δῆμος demos ‘people.’
Pandemic: from Greek πᾶν, pan, ‘all’ and δῆμος, demos, ‘people.’
Virus: from Latin ‘poison, slime, venom.’
Vaccine: from the Lain ‘vacca,’ meaning cow, a named conferred by Louis Pasteur in honour of Edward Jenner who pioneered the concept by using cowpox to inoculate (mid-15c., ‘implant a bud into a plant,’ from Latin inoculatus, past participle of inoculare ‘graft in, implant a bud or eye of one plant into another,’) against smallpox.
Exponential: from Latin exponere ‘put forth.’
David Langwallner continued his Public Intellectual Series with an account of the English radical historian E. P. Thompson:
His lasting contribution is the seminal The Making Of The English Working Class (1980), possibly the greatest work of history of the twentieth century that emphasised a new form of bottom-up history, related to the subaltern history that was emerging at the same time in former colonial societies.
We have entered a dark era dominated by the religious right, involving literal and historical interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. A return to eighteenth century values is upon us, including the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament, neglecting to remember that Thomas Jefferson was a deist, if that. Let’s not forget that the United States required a Civil War to end the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery that was not even mentioned in that document, apart from in the three-fifths clause that represented a African-American slaves as three-fifths of a white person for electoral purposes, in order to maintain a balance between slave and non-slave owning states.
We received two submissions from underwater photographer Daniel McAuley that month, the first featured shipwrecks, which become reefs:
With the combination of a long history of maritime traffic and often quite ferocious seas, it comes as no surprise that the Irish coastline is strewn with shipwrecks, many of which date back hundreds of years. Each one provides a fascinating porthole on a bygone age, telling stories that are often of historical significance, as well as allowing divers a chance to encounter what are often quite intriguing new environments for marine life.
The next introduced us to the seals living along the Irish coastline, now threatened by fishermen disturbed by a competitor as over-fishing reduced catches.
The playful nature of seals reminds any snorkeler of a dog looking for affection from its owner. So listening to news stories where people are saying the best solution to the problems afflicting the fishing community is to take a high powered rifle to these playful creatures filled me with rage and frustration around the management of our coast, and what the future holds for it.
I’ve been passionate about music from an early age, and my love of the post-punk spirit of DIY and experimentation found a crossover with the further reaches of sonic exploration coming from the Fine Art approaches to sound as a sculptural medium. I then discovered improvised music and was smitten. The possibilities just seemed wide open. There was a directness and a simplicity that was really appealing. It was also a much quicker route to producing music by sidestepping years of training. Of course, it’s not just musical ability you bring to the table, it’s imagination and intelligence too.
By DonkeyHotey – Donald Trump – Caricature, CC BY-SA 2.0.
In poetry Kevin Higgins appears to have been inspired by the forthcoming elections:
A barrel of industrial waste poured into a suit
donated by a casino owner who knows people
with a tangerine tea towel tossed strategically on top
because it was the only available metaphor for hair
was running for re-election as CEO of South Canadia
against an old coat with holes in it.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
While Ernest Hilbert mused on ‘Models, slender and famished as cheetahs,’:
The bathroom’s OUT OF ORDER. Sewage seeps
Into the restaurant. The manager’s
Frantic, alone today. The line’s
Become a mob. A voice from an SUV
Barks at the drive-through speaker. In the back,
Children cheer a whirl of color on a screen.
I feel the boredom underneath the beauty.
It’s weird, and getting desperate these days.
In auction rooms, the arms go up. And . . . sold.
The next exquisite investment’s on the block.
The views—the hills, the seas—are still pristine for those
Who can afford the heights. Who’s this beauty for?
Beauty’s boring. I do go on and on,
Don’t I? Oh, you have a nosebleed.
Here, drip some in my drink. See this?
Flick this switch. Now listen. Someone will scream.
By February 15th there was a scent of danger in Bull Moose’s nostrils. Discussing which Democrat candidate would take on Donald Trump – would Mike Bloomberg have beaten Trump? – he brought our attention to coronavirus, a new viral danger emanating from China, which seemed quite exotic at that point.
Coronavirus might be the trigger to collapse this deck of cards. How soon? Probably by April, maybe May. The virus is expected to peak around April, but by then the quarterly earnings will have been impacted.
Should most of us in the U.S. be afraid of Coronavirus? It depends. If you’re healthy and don’t work in healthcare you’ve little to worry about. Based on the limited information we can glean from the Chinese news bubble, people with an otherwise healthy immune system, who are not regularly exposed to the virus, can rest easy. Apparently it is doctors, the elderly and other vulnerable categories who are susceptible to infection.
But that won’t stop many of us from cancelling cruise ship vacations, holidays to Asia, and even overseas trips to trade fairs. It will also impact global supply chains, which rely heavily on China. All this means lost revenue, which will hit the markets once results first show up on balance sheets in April.
The length of this market downturn will ultimately decide November’s election result.
Meanwhile in Ireland, Frank Armstrong was contemplating a ‘political earthquake’ in advance of February’s Irish General Election, with Sinn Féin predicted to become the largest party in the Dáil chamber for the first time. He also charted the emergence of the far right in Ireland.
For the moment opposition to the centre-right mainstream of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is coming from the left, responding in particular to an ongoing Housing Crisis. But Ireland is not immune from the wave of identity politics sweeping far-right Populists into power elsewhere.
Another recession might easily trigger far-right Populism within the existing framework, bringing together an unholy trinity, seen elsewhere, of xenophobia – including opposition to E.U. membership – climate change denial and opposition to abortion services.
It is a natural reaction for us to want to cast blame somewhere. We point the finger at nameless, faceless entities manifesting greater evil than we would ever be capable of – whether trolls, social media or the tabloids. We assure ourselves these remote actors are the true killers.
The hardest thing I have ever had to learn – one I am still struggling to get my head around – is that with suicide, we never fully know.
February was a major month in our music coverage. First, we had renowned fiddler Musician of the Month, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh discussing his forthcoming duo album with Dan Trueman called ‘the Fate of Bones’, that would feature his 10-string hardanger d’amore fiddle and a fascinating collaboration with graphic designer Rossi McAuley.
Centuries of suffering and persecution of people on this island become a footnote to the realignment of power structures, our identity shrouded in myth and broad sweeps, as bit-part actors in nearly a millennium of recent existence. And I think, an internal struggle between our natural impulses as sardonic inhabitants of a dark, wet and green North Atlantic island.
The coming wave can be extrapolated to a similar battle in the area of artistic self-expression that has been raging for most of our history. What do we value about ourselves and how should we express that in the public sphere? Is society thriving? If not, then am I hearing this reality represented in the everyday art that I encounter?
Live Music in Dame Street, Dublin, October 2019. Pic Daniele Idini
Paul Gilgunn was also contemplating the challenges involved in creation in the digital era. Thus:
In an attention economy devised to distract and occupy consciousness, the exponential flow of information generates continual flux in its wake.
Image: Daniele Idini
There was also an essay by electro-acoustic composer Roger Doyle who charted his journey into experimental music in A Composer’s Story.
Young peoples’ lives become filled with music on records, video, in films, on radio and TV, during Saturday nights, in supermarkets, in amusement arcades, on the streets and in concerts. Culturally exploded thus, they sit down to Mr. Beethoven and wonder what on earth this glaring composer from the distant past has to do with the rhythms they feel and the harmonies they hear.
In his Public Intellectual Series in February David Langwallner’s explored the legacy of Christopher Hitchens, who he once encountered:
I had a brief encounter with the man himself one enchanting and admittedly drunken evening. Being then youthful I was somewhat dazzled by his presence, yet more so when the bill for the wine and cognac arrived.
I found Christopher Hitchens almost preternaturally eloquent, even when plastered. Industrial quantities of booze only seemed to inspire him to new heights, as it does many artists. Nonetheless, he was fortunate to have the constitution of an ox – a unique case and liver to boot. Predictably, it was the cigarettes that killed him in the end.
David Langwallner clearly got around as evidenced by another treatment of Samuel Beckett, who he also encountered:
I had the good fortune to encounter in the flesh arguably the last in the line of towering figures, Samuel Beckett, in a café in Montparnasse, Paris in 1982.
Ireland had just won rugby’s Triple Crown in what was then called the Five Nations, before succumbing to the French team at the Parc de Princes, and Beckett was primarily inclined to banter about rugby and cricket with his countrymen. It must be stressed that he was a charmingly convivial person, and while austere, decidedly good company; even when pressed to do so he sedulously avoided discussion of his own work, preferring to muse on the artistic contributions of others.
That slightly detached dignity, captured in John Minehan’s award-winning photograph was exactly as I found him. A kind and decent man, who concealed a madness arising out of intense creativity. A burning gaze alone revealed the creative fire that raged inside.
Dublin and Monaghan people remember where they were on the 17th May 1974, the day three bombs exploded in Dublin and one in Monaghan. A UCD undergraduate at the time, I was in the library in Belfield when news of the bombs in Parnell Street, Talbot Street and South Leinster Street came through.
We were shocked. Some rushed from the library. Others, myself included, obeyed a caution from the librarian to stay put. My father’s office at 1 Clare Street faced onto South Leinster Street. When eventually I reached my mother by telephone, I learned he was OK. The blast had smashed all the windows in his office and knocked him over. Otherwise, he was unhurt.
Image courtesy of Dublin City Public Libraries.
One of the most amusing articles we have ever published came from Bob Quinn that month in his account of how one summer night in 1956 Gene Shepherd invited his listeners to conspire with him in inventing a book which actually did not exist.
There was also coverage of rugby from Frank Armstrong, who looked forward to the guilty pleasure of the Four Provinces of Ireland coming together to form the national team:
I yearn for Six Nations matches at this time of year. Despite my worthier self, I cannot take my eyes off a psychological drama and physical spectacle offering respite from interminable winter.
The violence is terrible, but it seems life-affirming that these specimens can, for the most part, withstand the battering. At its best, it conveys life-in-action, a primal dance and irrepressible human spirit.
In what was a frenetic month for Cassandra Voices there also fiction form Daniel Wade, whose Heart of the City evokes the unmistakable atmosphere of Dublin city:
On O’ Connell Street, rush-hour crowds pitch and roll at traffic lights. She ignores seagulls screeching from the boardwalk, convoys of buses and LUAS clangs, Deliveroo cyclists dodging cycle-lanes, bouncers invigilating in doorways, the fluorescent glare from Supermac’s, haggard junkies lurching between double-yellows and taxi ranks. Under the GPO’s bullet-bejewelled portico, she spots a young girl huddled in a sleeping bag, forlornly holding out a styrofoam cup like an offering. Homeless in her hometown. She leans and drops a few coins in the cup, then keeps on walking, barely hearing the weary “Ah, thanks, Love” the girl murmurs after her. Two guards turn to watch her pass. They notice her scar, but she ignores them. Their high-vis jackets sting her eyes.
And from Gary Grace, whose Synapse Fire contemplates the excesses of a misspent youth.
One of the main things I characterize my misspent youth by, is a knack for exploiting the trust my middle-class parents misplaced in me. At seventeen, I was too old to be dragged along with them on what seemed like monthly getaways, but too young to exercise any degree of responsibility or restraint. My folks had a mobile home near Ballymoney beach, which had hosted many a night of debauchery for my older brother and his cronies. He was away in Amsterdam, so I’d decided it was my turn. That bank holiday weekend, I had access to a car, three malleable mates and in the palm of my hand, an assortment of different colored pills.
The light that streams across the universe
Brings evidence of other worlds than ours
Where midst the flux of fields and particles
Eternal wisdom older than the stars
Unweaves her web of possibilities
The patterner experiments and plays.
Last week Andrea Reynell met renowned Irish man-of-letters Ronan Sheehan in his Dublin home. They discussed his abiding passion for Latin poetry, the challenges and opportunities for young writers and what has inspired him to assemble a volume of translations of Cuban poetry from a range of Irish writers.
I was welcomed into a cosy sitting room with a green/blue sofa, a pale wooden table with chairs, while dozens of photographs and art works adorned the walls. The Libyan Sibyl and another painting reminiscent of the great Irish epic, An Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) caught my eye. A well-used fireplace lay to my left behind Ronan, as the open door to the back garden let in a cool breeze as we sat at the table.
A: How did you get your start in writing poetry?
R: I don’t really write in poetry. I write more prose which I started writing when I was at school and I got interested in literature then. I had two things published when I was sixteen one was a short story in The Irish Press which was a big thing in my day. And the other was a poem in a magazine called The Kilkenny Review, or something like that. But subsequently I learned to love poetry, but I don’t really write poetry. I can write translations which is a different thing.
A: I’d be the same myself. I prefer writing prose to poetry. I’ve been doing a few bits and pieces but don’t have anything published. But as long as I enjoy it really. How much do you reckon the Irish literary society has changed since you first started writing?
R: That’s a good question. I think It’s changed a lot. When I was in my teenage years the nineteen-sixties. I suspect you weren’t born then Andrea.
A: (laughs) No. Not even close.
R: For starters there was very little or no publishing houses in Ireland and when The Irish Press started to publish stories and poetry that was kind of revolutionary because the only other places were a couple of literary magazines that was all that was there. And consequently, to get something published was a big deal. And now there are a lot of publications and in some way that’s better, in the sense that there’s more chances for people to start off. In other ways I have reservations about it because I often get the sense that there’s too much going out. I hope that doesn’t sound mean spirited.
A: How important do you think the arts are today?
R: I think the arts are very important if you like but, for this reason that what you might call the world of culture. It’s really dominated by enormous interests, the high-tech companies like Google and also by Hollywood and big music companies so that the small country and the individuals are really cowed by the sheer power of those things. So, whenever the arts afford individual voices to be heard I think that’s very important for that reason. I mean I could name other reasons as well but that’s one cultural reason as to why I think the arts are very important.
A: What poets, or writers past or present would have an influence on your work?
R: Jorge Luis Borges
(There’s a photo of the late, famous Argentinian writer on top of the book case across from me) Do you know who he is?
Jorge Luis Borges (right).
A: Yes, I’ve read up on him.
R: Did you read it from my essay?
A: I did indeed, and it was very interesting.
R: Thanks a lot. Sorry I wasn’t looking to drag that out of you!
In school I studied Classics and I studied Latin and English when I went to UCD. While I really loved that engagement with books and so forth and as I got older I realised that there were some books and some writers and even some works that touch you. In a way that is not necessarily quite rational. You don’t look at all the points in Ulysses like you’re taught and say: “oh that’s a great book.”
But it’s different when something affects you right? So I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious but a writer whom I loved in Latin was Catullus who was a Latin poet and I did a project about Catullus some while ago. And another writer was Tacitus who was a historian so that’s one thing, don’t want to go on forever. Another person that I loved, as I wrote a book of short stories was Borges and it was a thrill for me to meet Borges. And if you read the essay that I did I think I’ll always remember. When I quoted to him something that he’d said about Tacitus. And he said, “Tacitus records the crucifixion but does not perceive it” and Borges just looked across and said “Did I write that? I don’t think I’m a very good writer you know, but maybe in the sixty years trying I’m entitled to the odd good line.”
A: That’s brilliant
R: Isn’t it?
A: That just really encapsulates who he was.
R: Yeah it does. It’s a very good position for a writer to be, you know. Not to be arrogant, not to be presumptuous that you’re great. In my case I’ve written a few things I think came out well, a lot of things that didn’t. But I’d much prefer to be in Borges’s camp and say well, I think one or two things came up, you see. So, you’re sort of at ease with yourself in that position, does that make sense?
A: It does indeed. And how much of an impact do you reckon he’s had on your future and current work?
R: He had an influence on some of the essays that I’ve done, and he has an influence on a book that I’m writing now, and I’ll tell you why. That while I say an influence, it’s something that I have in my ear or try to do well is, he has a terseness, a succinctness about his sentences that I love because they’re so resonant. And when you leave down a page that Borges has written you feel this resonance of meaning and possibility and a richness of language so it’s beautiful you know it’s lovely. That’s what writing is for and I would love to try and imitate that.
A: So, for the readers of this article, where did the idea for the book of poetry come from?
R: Many years ago I edited an issue of a magazine called The Crane Bag on Ireland and Latin America and for one reason or another I don’t think I was able to do anything Cuban in that issue. One of my favourite books is a Cuban book called The Kingdom Of This World by a writer called Alejo Carpentier which is about the slave revolt in Haiti in the 1790’s, then Santo Domingo. So when I was on the board of Poetry Ireland about twenty years ago, the possible of going to Cuba came up. So, I went and met people in the writers’ union including the president and we made an agreement that we would do a joint anthology of poetry together, that’s how it came about.
A: What would your favourite poem of the anthology be and why?
R: That’s a good question. It is a poem that translated by Trudy Hayes and it’s called, It’s a poem about. (He trails off here) How about I go get it? It’s very short, I’ll read it, it’ll be nice.
A: Yes, go ahead.
He walks out of the sitting room, which leaves me a chance to take in the abundance of things on the walls. A clock ticks away, a steady beat, as I wait for him to return. He soon reappears with a black book.
R: This is a proof copy of the book. If I may say a little bit about the book?
A: Yes, absolutely.
R: So, see what you make of this, this is called ‘Blessed are the Mean Spirited’ (Interpreted/translated from Spanish by Trudy Hayes)
Blessed are the unperturbed spirits Not born of a poisoned womb
Or terrorised by a lurching ghost,
Or by their own raging seed, Those erupting with a terrible sickness Doomed to wander eternally a path in the wilderness that never leads home. Blessed are those not burning on a furnace of love, The unmarked smiling ones,
The behatted archangels In fishnet tights, The patters of bellies, the jellied ones, the loved ones, the virtuous ones, The pied pipers and their enchanted mice, the business tycoons
and the Superheroes,
The movers and shakers, the poised, collected, unshaken ones, The fragile ones, the wise ones, the palatable ones, the smiling and waving ones,
The truly fine ones and the truly sweet ones sweet to the core. Blessed are the Innocent birds of paradise, the steaming cow
dung, the Implacable stones.
But MAKE WAY for the creatures of the Dream and the Nightmare. Make way for the lost, damned, grief-stricken souls wandering a lonely path. Madder and drunker than their ancestors. Scorched by love. Trying to find a way home to the house of straw hats, for they saved you.
A; Wow, that’s haunting and ominous but powerful
R: Isn’t it? I hate sounding like a professor, but one of the things I like is the kind of writing that makes a point, which communicates something. Lots of poetry doesn’t do that but that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. I read that out at a street party during the summer and Trudy read it out somewhere and people responded to it. Do you know they thought that was good. Ok so that’s one thing. It either speaks for itself or it doesn’t. Another thing I’d like to say about this book. It’s about fifty Cuban poems and about fifty translations and without going into the entire history of the whole thing, it’s quite powerful if you bring it into a book, lots of different voices. Some of the people translating are really well-known poets who are lauded, others are people I brought in, they’re not poets at all. But they’re good, they’ve got something to say, they can use language, they’ve got some spirit. So that when you’re reading this you don’t know what to expect next, so the idea is to give a book a kind of potency like that.
A: I find that’s exactly what it does, so moving along to another question. I found there was a big difference in formality between some of the poems, so for example The Boy and the Moon with lines like:
The moon and the boy play A little game between them;
They see each other without looking, they talk in fits of silence.
Versus in ‘Pineapple’ where we have a lot more of what you could call Irishisms.
Indulge me, pineapple. Imagine if bould Fergus, leppIng from Tara had given Glasgow a miss, Ryanairing it instead to hotter shores.
I love that line.
So, What are your thoughts on the differences in this language?
R: Ok can I be theoretical for a bit? This is going to sound academic or whatever. Ten years ago, I did a translation of the Latin poet Catullus called The Irish Catullus or One Gentleman of Verona. It was a protest against the closure of the Classics Department in Queens University. The phrase the Irish Catullus really derives from a translation of the Aeneid which is called the Irish Aeneid. What was called the Irish Aeneid was the first ever translation of the Aeneid into a vernacular language in the thirteenth century by a bard of Ireland. They translated it before anybody in Oxford or Cambridge or anything, ok? But the way he did the Aeneid was he really rewrote the whole thing right, like he reshaped it. (Ronan gives a laugh here)
A: As you do.
R: As you do. The whole point of this was so that the people of Sligo, and Mayo and Galway and that culture could receive it otherwise there was no point in doing it.
A: So, I guess you could say in ‘layman’s terms’ more or less.
R: Yes, exactly. In the culture that it was going into. So I invited the people, including Mia and the people who were translating the Catullus poems to do it in what I call the Irish Aeneid spirit. To reshape it, to put it into our context if they wanted to. There’s a hundred translations of Catullus. What’s the point in doing another in just the same way? So, people did that, and Mia did it brilliantly. There’s lot of sex in Catullus. Roman street sex poems and Mia translated them into Dublin sex poems and they’re brilliant, they really work. So here what she’s done is something similar and a different idea. She hasn’t just followed word for word the poem, she responded to it and she’s introduced her own language and that’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do.
A: So, what challenges did you face when translating poems from Spanish to English, do you think some things may have got lost in translation?
R: Yes, I think it’s a truism that something gets lost in translation but equally if nothing is translated everything gets lost. So I think Spanish in a way is deceptive in that you’d think that because the words are specific, that you can’t just use a dictionary and translate them, but you can. But the thing that’s not so easy to do is the rhythms of Spanish like they have noche que noche oscura (‘night what a dark night‘s’). It doesn’t sound the same in English so that’s in some of the poems. I have a little Spanish, and I can see there’s a whole atmosphere and world in those poems that doesn’t necessarily come out through translation, but something else does come out which makes it all worthwhile.
A: In the preface you say that fifty poems by Cuban poets born prior to 1959 were chosen and fifty poems by Irish poets born prior to 1922 were chosen. Is there a significance to these dates?
R; Yes, the reason is that there was the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and there was the Irish free state (that was established) in 1922 (and the Irish Civil War) so in a way the idea was to sidestep the issue of the revolution in both countries.
A: Again in the preface, it was written that fifty Spanish poems were swapped with the Irish side and fifty poems in English were swapped with the Cuban side. But in the end fifty Spanish poems were taken and were translated into English and given an Irish interpretation. Why did you decide to take this route rather than have Irish poets write their own poems?
R: That’s another good question too. Because this is the first encounter between the two countries at this level although there’s another interesting one which I’ll come to in a minute. So it’s better to sometimes manage something like this. There was a formality in a way that perhaps made this manageable whereas if you were to open it up in the way you had described it would be a different proposition.
A: What will your next writing or poetry project be?
The criminal court of justice, Dublin. Daniele Idini/Cassandra Voices
R: The next writing project I will be doing is to revise a book that I’ve been working on for a while which is called Green Street. Green Street is the name lawyers gave to the Special Criminal Court. Did you ever hear of Robert Emmett?
A: Yes
R: Did you ever hear of Sarah Curran, Robert Emmett’s fiancée? My cousin Margaret is a descendant and looks like her and that’s her up there in the green hat. (He points at a photo framed by the door). See, so she has to go to Green Street. What do you think of that? Anyway, so that’s what I’m going to be doing. So yes the most famous thing that ever happened in Green Street was the trial of Robert Emmett. And as I say Robert Emmett was in love with Sarah Curran, and I also did cases on Green Street and a few years later my brother and I did so in a way exploring that.
Sarah Curran playing the harp. Painted by William Beechey, c.1805.
A: Is there anything else that you’d like to comment on that you feel would be important for readers to know?
R: I think that I’m going to make a compliment to Cassandra Voices shall I do that?
A: If you like, can’t go wrong.
R: A really good thing that can happen in literary culture is to have small groups or magazines that are bringing out books or magazines and programmes that are independent. That’s really what I know in my experience of such things, that’s where real creativity resides.
After I stop recording, I get a closer look at the photo of Sarah Curran’s ancestor, the green hat is indeed striking, the face shapes are similar too. I thank Ronan for his time and step out into the warm sunlight to make my way home.
