Cassandra Voices

Tag: society

  • Magick or Rationale?

    the perpetuation of debt, has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burthens ever accumulating.
    Thomas Jefferson, 1813.

    Laura’s Decision

    Laura has not found the job that will make her happy – more accurately, she does not want a job. Her vocation is reading, playing the cello, and, maybe, teaching. She is serene and calm when she has a decent amount of money in her account. This allows her to do her job. But a job should produce an income, and her one does not: so she must get work that pays a salary, although such employment does not create a sense of self-realisation.

    Taking up those mundane jobs puts Laura on a spending track that leads to her contracting further debts with two credit card companies. This aggravates a need for her to keep up salaried employment. The money Laura earns just about allows her to repay those debts.

    It would make her very happy to have a lump sum, let’s say €10,000, that would eliminate them in one go. So, Laura’s desire is to obtain €10,000 to repay the outstanding balance on her credit cards.

    Laura lacks that amount of money, it seems impossible for her not to repay it; instead what seems unbearable to her is the slow pace of getting to €10,000; this is excruciating to her. Just thinking about it makes her anxious, and almost in a state of panic.

    The reality is she does not have that lump sum of €10,000. There are two ways to approach this problem: one is through Magick, the other is rationality. This latter approach involves repaying the sum weekly using her salary – which means that for a year or so she will have a deprived and miserable life.

    She could manage that if she was on her own. In fact, she has a family with needs and wants and this puts her under pressure. In other words, the context makes it harder for her to use her salary to pay back the credit card debt.

    Now the Magick approach is for her to use her mind to negate reality and believe that she already has €10,000.

    This second approach makes her happier but, while the first one seems feasible, the second one appears delusional. She dreams of dedicating herself to thinking, reading, playing the cello, and performing in concerts without a feeling that she is stealing time from someone or some other activity.

    She could use the affirmation I have €10,000 to pay off the outstanding balance on my credit cards which seems more realistic, or instead, use another approach exploring what are the steps to quickly gain €10,000? To be clear, borrowing must be avoided as one does not own the money one borrows.

    Last month Laura finished the repayment of another loan of €10,000, and she felt so good but the thought that she has still this other outstanding debt is making her anxious; the thought that it will take so long is very tough. It means regular work, restrictions, fights with her family over spending, etc. She must get €10,000 as soon as possible, but how?

    Laura is aware that this situation is due to errors she made in the past, and to the fact that she was previously made redundant and lost her job.

    Afterwards, she spent nearly two years without a proper income, living on welfare for a time and then on a grant. She did not manage her finances well either, overspending regularly; a certain laziness has contributed to the accumulation of that debt. In the last year, however, she has worked at a nine-to-five job which should continue until April.

    Unfortunately, she has started feeling frustrated and bored with the job itself, and all the rest. This is a very dangerous condition that threatens her efforts to maintain her present occupation.

    If she could just summon an indomitable will, she would be able to move up the career ladder. Then she would succeed in repaying her outstanding balance and keep her job, but she knows also that this is not going to happen without internal conflicts and quarrels. She will have to be rational and reflexive before taking any major step; she must avoid impulsive decisions and reactive behaviours.

    Picture This

    Is there anyone who has not dreamt of receiving life changing news of an unexpected sum of money that will radically change your life?

    This is a wish that can easily come true. You close your eyes; you picture your bank account with €10,000 more, and there it is!

    This Magick thinking is so beautiful. It carries the same fascination as falling in love at first sight. You meet someone and a few moments later your life is completely transformed. It is different from instant gratification in that one does not forego a future benefit in favour of an immediate but less rewarding satisfaction. It is by definition Magick thinking: creation out of nothing.

    We all live beyond our means, as we are incapable of controlling our desires. The entire economy is based on the masses contracting debts regularly, and the biggest illusion is that we cannot imagine life without debt: the individuals borrow; the companies and the State borrows.

    Any new-born has his share of debts already. Larger debts mean larger interests extracted out the individuals’ pockets.

    If we give birth to indebted beings, the future of the money lenders is assured. If we have a stable job the future of the banks and of the financial institutions is assurred: we ultimately work for them by contracting debts, by spending money we do not have.

    But have you spent any moment of your existence wondering what life would be like if we did not have debts?

    Imagine

    This can be your task for the next few weeks because if you can imagine your life debt-free, then you will see how delusional you are about your life with debts.

    Now you must choose. You cannot postpone anymore this decision. You will payback all the money you owe to the credit card companies in the shortest possible timeframe, and you will never borrow money any more at any cost. The only issue you have at present is how to accelerate the repayment.

    This is a common fate. Laura is certainly not the only person with some debts, although she is amplifying the gravity of the situation. It is now an ungrounded preoccupation. The anxiety derives from the desire to make the indebtedness disappear quickly. It makes her feel imprisoned in a rut. She tells herself: ‘Accept it and embrace it’.

    This is causing the repression of her desires. This reveals her timid personality, the tendency to mull over things, to retire into herself instead of looking at the bigger picture.

    There is another aspect to this, which is that Laura wants to prove that she is right because she is right! A life with debts is imprisonment. Repaying the debts gradually is painful.

    Magick is the best way, the one that she prefers and is in harmony with who she is. Do not expect her to go out there and get a highly paid job, or to organize a robbery, or to act boldly in any other way in order to acquire the €10,000 she needs quickly.

    Laura will do this through Magick, which she has been practicing for years. And this is not about the amount, it is about the power. If she can actualize this amount, she will be able to do it for any other amount. ‘Let’s get to work on this.’

    There is another aspect in following this path and it has to do with the image she projects onto her family, it is about her reputation. She must succeed.

    The image is clear in her mind. It has a sculptured appearance. It stands out against the dim background. She can nearly touch it. She can sense the reality of it. €10,000.

    Image: Daniele Idini

  • Shakespeare’s Wisdom in Troubled Times

    As a barrister I am given to quoting from Shakespeare’s plays in closing speeches. This may seem pretentious, but I find his acute observations on the human condition continue to speak to juries, and judges. He remains highly relevant to legal education, and indeed the practice of law. I would go so far as to say that a good knowledge of his work provides a real advantage to any practitioner.

    William Shakespeare’s Birthplace.

    Stratford-upon-Avon

    Recently, I was delighted to have the opportunity to appear in a rare in-person trial in Royal Leamington Spa, which is in Shakespeare’s home county of Warwickshire. I recalled John Betjeman’s poem about dying in the town, whose name conjures images of Bertie Wooster on a bucolic retreat:

    oh, you know that the stucco is peeling.
    Do you know that the heart will stop?
    From those yellow Italianate arches
    Do you hear the plaster drop?

    Times have changed. To my chagrin, Leamington Spa is not actually a spa town – any longer at least – but is just a short hop from Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, where I stayed for the duration of proceedings.

    The house where Shakespeare was born was previously an ale house and is now a museum. Nearby, in The Holy Trinity Church, lies his grave, which contains a stern warning that his bones should remain in situ.

    Unfortunately, the well-preserved Anne Hathaway House was closed for the duration of my stay, but the exterior and gardens were at least visible. Likewise, the complex of theatres – home to the Royal Shakespeare Company – were also no go in this bleak period for the performing arts.

    Shakespeare himself often confronted the closure of puppet shows for sowing subversive ideas as Puritanism gained ground, as documented in James Shapiro’s, 1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) and 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (2015).

    Shakespeare’s era was marked by recurring plague, tyranny and civil strife, themes according to Stephen Greenbelt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018) the Bard approached obliquely, for fear of persecution. Under conditions of tyranny, public art may still be an outlet for mockery of the powerful. Thus we find in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’

    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

    In what follows I recite some of Shakespeare’s lines that inform my understanding of our present world.

    Neither a borrower nor a lender be. (Polonius, Hamlet)

    In the light of the bailing out of toxic banks – socialism for the mega rich – and the infliction of austerity, being indebted now brings serious dangers. With so much crime linked to social exclusion and poverty, it is as if we are returning to an era of Debtors’ Prisons, ubiquitous in Shakespeare’s day.

    The late David Graeber’s excellent book Debt: the First 5,000 Years (2011) precisely illustrates how debt, and now student debt in particular, is creating a permanent rentier class with no educational outlet for upward mobility, and low prospects of home ownership, at least for those who don’t have access to the bank of Mum and Dad.

    The power of bankers in contemporary society should lead to consideration of The Merchant of Venice, which, apart from dreadful antisemitism – Shakespeare often expressed the prejudices of his day – provides a searing attack on the sin of usury, the existence of which is conveniently ignored by far right Christians today.

    In the play, Portia (Bassano’s betrothed who finds himself in a spot of bother after taking on a debt on unfavourable terms from Shylock) presents herself in court, disguised as a male lawyer, and pleads for mercy against the enforcement of the bond, which is the extraction of a pound of flesh.

    Shylock and Portia (1835) by Thomas Sully

    In a famous passage she argues:

    The quality of mercy is not strained, it dropped as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed, it blessed him that gives, and him that takes, tis mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown, His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings: But mercy is above this sceptred sway, it is enthroned in the heart of kings, it is an attribute to God himself; and earthly power doth then show likes god’s, when mercy seasons justice…

    Shylock responds with a narrow vision of justice that sadly is all too familiar in our time of dispossessions:

    I crave the law, the penalty and forfeit of my bond.

    Portia then shifts ground and cleverly argues that the bond should be enforced but:

    The bond gives thee there no jot of blood – The words expressly are a pound of flesh … Then take they bond, take thou thy pound of flesh, but in the cutting it, if thou dost shed one drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods are by the laws of Venice confiscate … For as thou urge justice, be assured, thou shalt have justice more than thou deserts.

    In this morality tale, therefore, Shylock – unlike our contemporary bankers in most cases – is forestalled in his extraction of the pound of flesh. If only such arguments against the extraction of financial flesh were available to barristers defending the disposed today.

    Three daughters of King Lear by Gustav Pope

    The True Criminals

    So who are the true criminals today? Shakespeare offered an answer through the medium of the wise Fool in Kind Lear:

    What art mad. A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear, change places, and handy dandy, what is the justice which is the thief.

    Governments bail out Goldman Sachs and other banks. There are no repercussions for their reckless lending, save in Nordic countries like Iceland. But If Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread, they pursue him to the ends of the Earth to extract the pound of flesh.

    Similarly, if you become a whistle-blower and reveal the machinations of the powerful such as Julian Assange, then you are turned into a criminal, while Messrs Blair, Kissinger, and indeed Varadkar, are never forced to face the music.

    Amanda Knox

    The lady doth protest too much, methinks, (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2).

    Stacey Schiff’s Witches: Salem 1692 (2015) observes how the hysteria of witch hunts appear to represent a sublimation of pre-existing grievances, and envy. This remains the case for modern day witch hunts such as that directed against Amanda Knox, which have been highlighted by the Innocence Project.

    The book makes clear that children can be manipulated into holding false belief, even to the extent that they incriminate themselves. False allegations are also linked to hysterical parents or authority figures. As occurred in Amanda Knox’s case, young minds are easily turned to mush by persistent questioning, fear of authority, and interaction with nefarious police officers and social workers.

    This is what is referred to as falsely implanted memory syndrome, on which subject Elizabeth Loftus and Maggie Bruck are experts.

    Categorising someone as a witch or a warlock also reflects jealousy if that person holds a gift you do not possess. Seen in Freudian terms, it is a form of transference of perceived inadequacies.

    All that glisters is not gold. (The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 7)

    This zeitgeist is one of post-truth amorality, a phenomenon with long antecedents. In King Lear we hear that ‘a scurvy politician seems to see the thing thou does not’; while Henry VI speaks of: ‘Stuffing the ears of men with false reports’, which seems curiously relevant to Covid Times.

    Purveyors of nonsense and incomprehensible prose – the structuralists and post-modernists who took over the universities – represent a movement, or grouping, united in their rejection of universal values. Relativism leads to the dismissal of evidence, rationality, science, rigour, precision and all the integrative forces that tie society together, as Noam Chomsky has observed: ‘if I am missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand.’

    The first point to note about the post modernists nonsense is that it has encouraged a distrust of the truth and an atmosphere of looseness and imprecision, wherein any old argument, or moral position, is accorded equal weight.

    In 2005 the late David Foster Wallace observed that this created an epistemic free-for-all in which any truth is seen from the vantage of perspective and agenda.

    Relativistic and structuralist ideas such as the indeterminacy of texts, alternative ways of knowing and the instability of language fed into Trump and his aides saying that every word he utters should not be taken literally. Just as a text by Derrida could contradict itself, similarly Trump can jump from one inconsistency to the next.

    The work of The Innocence Project is littered with examples of perjured evidence, false and fabricated claims and cognitive and confirmation bias by experts or pseudo experts, which have led to wrongful convictions. All too many innocent people are incarcerated on the basis of lies. With the embrace of subjectivity, we are celebrating opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts.

    Confirmation bias applies where people rush to judgment, and give into their prejudices, rather than evaluating evidence.

    According to Evan Davies in his recent book Post Truth, one aspect of all this bullshit is a desire to believe something unreasonable to be true. Pope Francis sagely remarked that ‘There is no such thing as harmless disinformation: trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.’

    To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3)

    In general, social media is weaving a web of deceit and destroying the social fabric through lies, disinformation, smears, and character assassination. Pierre Omidyar a founder of eBay argued that the monetization and manipulation of information is rapidly tearing us apart.

    Trolls and bots were unleased by Trump, Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica to spread disinformation in the U.S presidential election, undermining democratic institutions and fact-driven debates.

    Now the social media platforms have moved on to shilling for Big Pharma – laying the ground for a Screen New Deal – while shutting down alternative assessments of the pandemic, and unprofitable treatments.

    It leads me to an unhappy conclusion that we increasingly developing a generation of technocratic fascist, selfish, materialistic ultra-conformists receptive to post-truth deception. The silos they occupy reinforce their prejudices. It is less important now to establish the truth than to ask whose side you are on.

    As Cicero, a minor character in Julius Caesar remarks:

    Indeed, it is as strange, disposed time but men may construe things after their fashion clean from the purpose of things themselves.

    Lies in fact have become intrinsic to commercial and business interaction. In The People of the Lie (1983) Scott Peck contends that Evil is untruth, undermining life and liveliness. Such people operate by covert means. Evil people, Peck argues, scapegoat others, and cover up their misdeeds. They prevent the rest of us from making informed choices. Evil is also linked to a self-image of respectability and, as Peck defines it, the exercise of coercive power, often by authority figures. Evil is also surprisingly obedient to authority.

    In contrast, in times of stress those who genuinely good people, even in times of acute stress, do not desert principles.

    Hannah Arendt presaged our Brave New World.

    The ideal subject for totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exists.

    Cry “havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war, (Mark Antony, Julius Caesar)

    The film, Wag the Dog witnesses the beginning of a fake war. Today, apart from military engagements that are generally played out on our television screens – such as Iraq and Afghanistan – there are new types of fake wars. The War on Drugs is a smokescreen that obscures failure to deal with the root causes in poverty and austerity. Now the war on the virus – a disproportionate reaction to a significant but not overwhelming public health crisis – has generated unprecedented panic.

    People are told to comply or face gruesome death. But how safe are we really in these circumstances? We will not be safe in authoritarian police states with restrictions on liberty, freedom of movement, privacy and associational or community ties. Nor will we be necessarily safe from a plethora of hastily tested pharmaceutical products, enforced by so-called vaccine passports.

    How to subjugate the world population? Create a hyper real sense of emergency. Engender panic, leading to compliance and deference

    Should we disassociate ourselves from the unvaccinated? Even putting it in these terms shows how admen dominate the discourse.

    The disproportionate response to the pandemic represents a fascist creep. People are desensitized to loss of liberty once they are in fear of their lives, and increasingly dependent on the state for the pile of gruel it so generously provides, having removed any prospect of employment for hundreds of thousands in precarious work.

    Meanwhile, the corporate law firms and mega rich have won big in our new version of disaster capitalism using Modern Money Theory to oil the chains of patronage.

    Thus, whether centrally orchestrated, or more likely arising out a coalition of vested interests, and made possible through an increasingly uneducated, desperate and compliant population, COVID-19 has brought us the Shock Doctrine par excellence.

    Procession of Characters from Shakespeare’s Plays. Artist unkown.

    The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. (Mark Anthony, Julius Caesar)

    The problem of evil in our times is embodied in extremism, fundamentalism, draconian laws, high consumerism, and the negation of the rule of law. Today, unselfish communal behaviour go unrewarded, while the innocent are framed.

    What is left of compassion, sincerity, truth, community, and optimism? Well at least we can still find it in the poetry of Shakespeare.

    Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
    Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
    Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
    And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
    Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
    And often is his gold complexion dimmed.
    And every fair from fair sometime declines,
    By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
    But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
    Nor lose possession of that fair thou owls.
    Nor shall death brag thou wander in his shade,
    When in eternal lines to time thou grow’s:
    So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

    Put simply, love conquers all. Or should. The Bard of Avon has much to say in these troubled times.

    Featured Image: Lear and Cordelia by William Blake.

  • Death

    I’m of an age to be intrigued by death.

    My 84-year-old grandmother, widowed, came to live with our family, and took over my bedroom. I was forced to give up the room, to share instead with a sibling.

    The old woman was hale and hearty, retained her wits, preserved her down to earth assessment of life, had referred to her late, much loved husband – my favourite male relation – as ‘the old fool.’ One day she said to me: ‘Ye’re just waiting for me to die, aren’t ye? Well yiz’ll be waiting a long time.’ I was taken aback at her frankness. She died a year later.

    When my old friend Dinno was on his deathbed handled matter-of-factly by his ex-nurse wife Oonagh – I asked him what he was thinking of. He said: ‘Gone-ness. I’m wondering what gone-ness will be like,’ and did not need to elaborate. We had understood each other well.

    My father roared indignantly on his deathbed in the old Mater hospital. His wife and other children had gone home, reassured that he had survived the first heart attack and would survive until morning. I stayed and was the only witness to his last belligerent protest.

    My mother spent her last days carefully organising her own funeral and the disposal of her one asset (a house). She waited only for my return from Canada until, in my presence she removed the oxygen mask from her mouth and stopped gasping for breath.

    I am of an age to be intrigued by these quite normal  dramas. Love dies. Beauty dies. Everybody and every thing dies. As Woody Allen said: ‘I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’

    What he might have meant was: better to lose your mind before your body gives up.

    Dementia and altzheimers are tragedy for the nearest and dearest but a blessing for the sufferers because they don’t suffer at all; they are unaware of the impending disaster. What a way to go!

    One of my brothers died in that condition. I envied him. One of my sisters died, still worrying about it. Poor thing. Another sister, the eldest in the family, is fortunately still alive. She’s lucky too; has no idea whats going on around her, I think.

    The phenomenon is an everyday one and still we wonder at it: In what sense are we alive one day and gone the next, vanished without trace? No body. No soul. All disappeared, remembered briefly, forgotten forever. How extraordinary. Even when we breed frantically, seeking immortality, knowing our seed will also die, we still do it, procreating, making stains on life, producing work, writing, building solid bridges and skyscrapers, empires. All made of dust. Even dinosaurs lived a million years and now are merely known as skeletons.

    People invented the idea of heavenly immortality: wishful thinking. They even invented god.  We are at heart optimists.

    There is no sting in death without consciousness; and nobody knows yet of what precisely that consists of. Fortunately death can be simulated under the surgeons knife until we wake and are reminded by pain of what we have mindlessly endured. Think of that.

    Some people choose euthanasia but that’s a sin, we’re warned. It’s a cop out. We should be allowed to enjoy this once in a life experience. It is unique to each of us, just like our birth, to be celebrated as a never-to-be-repeated exercise. We are born astride a grave with, not a silver spoon, but a shovel in our hands.

    I once speculated that nobody dies. We are bundles of transformed energy – the frantic impulses of copulation when we are conceived. Food becomes our energy fuel. What happens this energy at the point of death? Energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed like breath into gas, into condensation, into water into ice into steam etc etc. So what happens to us – bundles of energy? My speculation involves the millions and billions of galaxies and further billions of stars in each galaxy. Each of us, I suggest, becomes a twinkling star in the endless infinity of the universe. There is room for everybody out there.

    There’s a happy thought. Perish our tiny worries. We are immortal. We just leave our egos behind. And good riddance.

    A number of chapters from Bob Quinn’s latest memoir A Monk Manqué, mixing moments of hilarity with profound statements on the state of the world, are available on Cassandra Voices.

    Prologue

    Thaura Mornton

    Making Films

    Early Days in RTÉ

    Waiting for Colonel Ghaddafi

    Culchies – An Excerpt from A Monk Manqué

    Last Days in RTÉ – ‘I have come to kill you’

    Lament for Áirt Uí Laoire

    The Conman and Correspondence with Kurt Vonnegut

    Old Man Talk – ‘I used to ride young wans in here’

    ‘what a young girl in love will say to keep her man’

  • A Grá for the Language

    An grá is an gráin, say these two words out loud, say them out loud to yourself, out loud to the listening others around, and feel in your mouth how subtle the shift is between them; how the open mouth of love — grá — gets slighted by the brush of your tongue’s curled tip shaping hate — gráin; feel the quick lick it gives the roof of your mouth. It’s that kind of sliver, isn’t it, the one we know to be true; the one that suddenly shifts the friend or the lover to the one we don’t know or want to know. In shape and in sound, there in your mouth, Irish gathers together a distinction of meaning in a unity of resonance. Where the mind of English fragments and scatters, (say them too out loud, say love, say hate), Irish holds in an elemental poetry we need to participate in to sense.

     

    Sometimes what language teaches us can be that visceral.

    I am digging words in the Burren when I hit upon this realisation —

    tá go leor eile, more abound, Siobhán chirps; an saoirse is an daoirse, an solas is an dolas; seo é an fhilíocht nádur atá le fáil sa teanga! Siobhán is leading us in an archaeological word excavation, amuigh san aer i gciorcal Hedge School, uncovering from Irish some sense of a way of being in the world we have only just forgotten. If we lost it in a generation, we can reclaim it in a generation. Dictionaries are scattered all around, I hold one in my lap, but there is no discussion here of the tuiseal ginideach, we are not being questioned about the modh coinniollach and all mentions of Peig are with endearment and jest. We are just picking words at random and letting the connective threads be woven from there and we weave them without trying. It feels illicit to use a dictionary in this way, and I love it. Here a space is opened of pure play, without the plámás of getting anything right. Here the severed head of Irish we suffered in school is reunited with our bodies — the vibrations in Irish are cosúil le Sanskrit — tugann sí fuinneamh láidir duit. Just feel and the rest will follow; this seems to be the unspoken mantra of the Wild Irish Retreat weekend.

    Earlier that morning, the sun rising from behind Slieve Elva, Cearbhuil leads the women down to the hazel wood chun macnamih a dheanamh, to meditate, and we follow, trusting this woman who is keeper of this land; and we go down to the hazel wood, and there’s a stillness in our hearts. We’ve been invited to observe a noble silence and so our passage through the curly tendrils is punctuated only by snaps of twigs, the brush of branches newly leafing and birdsong from birds I have no name for, not in either tongue. And we pause then as Cearbhuil stops and simply says — éist — just listen. No crossed legs, no chanting, nothing specific to learn, we are simply tuning in to what is here, all around us; we are simply letting our civilised bodies contact the coill, and letting the coill touch deep into us. And later, when Cearbhuil leads us again, now through a forage walk on the land chun lón a sholáthar, we listen then too, not just to the names that fall like small prayers to all the invisible Gods, slanlóg, nóinín, neantóg, casairbháin, but to all the reverence is an méad meas atá ann in this woman’s gestures; we’re listening to all the wisdom in her fingers that know when to pluck, what to leave and how to reap without plundering. It is simple, even obvious, and so all the more unbelievable that we need to be shown how to see what is in front of us and all around us; an leigheas is an maitheas ag fás go fiáin. As if nothing has happened, all the goodness and plenitude of the land is still offered— here, the seamsóg extends itself —here, the seamair dhearg —had we but sense and right vision to see. Tá gach rud fós ann, I hear whispered in my head.

    And then on the beach with Diarmuid, the same principles we have absorbed from Siobhán and Cearbhuil without any direct tutelage apply now to the game of hurling; listen, play, be here in your body. There are real players on the trá, none more so than Diarmuid who seems to skip through the sand goat-like, whilst my legs are heavy pillars that have to be heaved and hefted to keep up with the ball. But this game is not about cé mhéad blianta atá ar do dhroim; it’s not about how many times you’ve kitted out in any coloured jersey. Here, now, with the crashing waves of Fanore in our ears, we return to the pleasure of simply pucking a ball. We léim go hard, we scuttle for the liathróid, we roar anseo to each other, and when we scramble too fast ahead of ourselves, get too caught up in a race to get, Diarmuid beckons us to stop and asks us to check in with ourselves; éistigí cad atá ar siúl i do chorp. Stay with the place of ease, cé comh éasca can you make it lads, don’t strain. And while there may be taithí go leor leis an cluiche ar cuid daoine, none of us have much experience in that. Play till you’re played out; win at whatever cost. Something in us knew that wasn’t the way it had to be, but we had no guidance in respecting the rhythm of our nádur; how to join effort with ease, doing with non-doing. And then, as if in an ancient ritual of bowing to our human limitation, when the hurls are finally cast aside, we throw ourselves into an Atlantach fiáin herself; engulfed in the white and the rush of her embrace; tógtha.

    Of course, there is much more that could be shared here about cad atá ar siúl leis an Wild Irish Retreats. I could tell you about the food, not just cé comh blásta is atá sé, but how it is prepared with such care and attention; slow cooking at its finest. And even more, how it is served to you, with grace and kind eyes; accompaniments you didn’t know you needed and that nourish far into the depths of you. And the music, and the fire, and the joy of being together at last. But I am not offering an advertisement here. If this sounds like a sale’s pitch, it isn’t. If you think I’m trying to convince you of something, I’m not. The arguments for Irish are many; many more those for how to rescue ourselves from our current catastrophe and our abominable alienation from the land. This is not a proof, nor is it a plea, this is simply a love song; a song of praise. This is just a need to acknowledge my luck of having returned home, after many years away, to find myself among mo mhuintir arís, ag caint as gaeilge, le mo dhá chosa ar an talamh. This is just to sing that it feels like a dream I am still not waking from; to sing because it is hard to say what it has all opened in me, because I feel it to be opening still. I offer these words as a return song then, a homecoming tune for the other way; what these wild Irish legends are demonstrating. There’s nothing you need to know, nothing to do, nothing to fix, there’s just letting go; there’s just peeling back the thick layers of our resistance, our wilful control, so that other dimension of our being can re-surface; the one who did not get us into this mess; the one whose skin trembles and dances with the sheer delight of being here; the one who is fós fiáin. Go down to Clare, go down to Kerry, and be with the Wild Irish Retreat folk if it calls you, if it be within your means. If it doesn’t, if you can’t, find your own way back. But claim it —claim the part of you that can’t be claimed; the place in you no worldly concern, no worry or slight of ill-will can reach; the place in you that is open, playful, fluid flúirseach. You don’t need anything special. Open your mouth, lig amach í; slip back i ngrá

  • 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

  • Crappy Sleeper

    I have a story for all kinds of weird sleep-related shenanigans. Walking, talking, singing, dancing, fucking, wanking.

    One of my earliest memories is of sleep misadventures. Waking in my parents’ bathroom, freezing cold, alone in the blue predawn hue. The long narrow room, icily humid like all 90s Irish lavatories, except filled with a fear I didn’t yet know. No Video Nasty I had seen inappropriately young felt like this. This was real. I was afraid to call for help, early onset male ego: it’s ok to die, just don’t be caught whinging about it.

    Some of said issues have been worse than others.

    Take sleep paralysis. Stephen Hawkinged to the bed, seeing everything in black and white, entombed in my mind, while in the corner of the ceiling the witch in grey is glued like spiderman, supersonic wailing at me, the dimensions of the wall palpitating somehow bringing her closer to me with every pulse.

    As frightening as that was, I don’t count it as full on binge-induced sleep paralysis because it only felt like a twenty minute experience. Everyone else says it feels like hours. Maybe they’re just pussies. Maybe the taste of madness that psychosis gives us chosen ones hardens us up to comparatively mundane horrors of everyday life.

    I’ve seen videos of after parties where my legs are more alive to the beat, passed out on the couch, than they ever were in the club earlier in the night before finding their way to this den of street urchins. Oddly, I could gum a 50 bag of Mandy or unwrap 25 dollars of sneachta from a folded single to the back of my skull with ferocious snorting, and sleep like it was a benzo treated suicide Tuesday.

    This particular story all started with atypical innocence. Laying down to sleep in San Francisco with Evelin, the lady I shared some nights with during that period of my life.

    As off the rails as my drinking had been – and rails being fitting as the joy of blow will knock the fear of drink dependence out of your mind as long as the ocht liathróid will roll, it being a barometer of a weekend’s deviance – I had responsible adulting nailed down that night. It was a rare night of sobriety. I know this because I remember burritoing myself up in the lightly chilled duvet, or comforter, when in Rome. You know the kind where the fabric is so cold it feels slightly damp. I panic set my alarms with one eye open, hanging off the bed, and then rapid fire flipped the pillow to the frosted side, to join my face with it in a deep passionate embrace.

    Then I was blinking myself awake. On the toilet. At the end of a shite I didn’t even realise I was having. Boxers around my ankles, pondering whose toilet am I in again? as I wiped. I stood up and pulled my boxers up in one motion – I’m a busy 21st century man – splashed hands with water in the way us men commit to the bare minimum of hygiene when and where we can get away with it. I stepped out into the hall, sleep falling out of my eyes, where an angry man, speaking American in an angrier Arabic twang demanded:

    ’Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you doing in my house??’

    ‘Relax”, I said, speeding out the door of what I assume was his home, ‘I was just taking a shit.’

    On the street I thought, I don’t know that man, where I am, or what I’m doing on the street in my boxers.  A much deeper cool washed over me, with no pleasantry of the pillow, and I started to run. Internally crying, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.  I run as fast as my drug induced malnourished legs will take me. I jump over broken glass, I dodge a traffic cone used as near always for construction site safety purposes, me the real hazzard, I use a tree to steady my panicked pacing speed wobbles. I run like Forest Gump, only signs could stop me:

    Cross street?

    CROSS STREET. Quickly calculate where I am.

    THE MISSION

    I slept in Evelin’s ‘til now! Where does she live again? But where is her house? Oh. The opposite direction.

    The mission district was, and maybe still is, one of the greater parts of San Francisco. Historically it was a Latina district. I say Latina as I favour Latina porn. I do not like Latino porn, if he’s not fat enough to be a Mexican wrestler, he’s so ludicrously over-chiselled to be an MMA, but not ultimate fighter. On the day labour sites, us Micks used to affectionately joke

    ‘What’s the difference between a Mexican American, and a gay American? About 4 corona and lime’ . To which my favoured brothers in back breaking labour would reply

    ‘How many potatoes does it take to kill a Paddy? None.’

    And if not too low on brain cells from the previous night, we’d chase back:

    ‘ANDELE ANDELE ARRIBA’

    My reason for staying there (other than the party reputation of the place) was that I didn’t want to spend too much time with my ancestral brethren. It would take from the traveling experience: prevent the expansion of my mind, the myriad cultural influences, the chance of having sex with women that weren’t Irish. Within a fortnight I was on a middle name basis with all the bog folk in the region who’d escaped the fields.

    I kept running. The tree looks and lunges for me more menacingly, the traffic cone is judgmental this time, the broken glass wants to kill me, the mirrored tracks of classic arcade racers were always more sinister.

    Back past angry troll’s dwelling, I ran, flop-sweating like I had been bingeing hard– something I suddenly and seriously felt I needed. The harbinger pre-dawn fiasco started earlier this time than at 5 years of age. It was the depth of night, black, yet. Fewer homeless people frequented this street, which I found strange, as its darkness and quiet would make a better place to rest your hat, if they were fortunate enough to own one. The residential street was poorly lit compared to the main street and its tributaries, streets of odd industries, bars, churches, dollar stores, 24 hour pie, blended into a shake. Or those hotdog stands that appear out of nowhere, and the between-the-lines dealers that pop up at the perfect times, both like other realm folklore magical traders.

    Evelin’s place was one of those three story bay windowed houses repurposed into naff flats. They seemed so charming at first. Maybe my labouring jobs in the swankier homes spoiled them, where afterwards I went home to shit in one wardrobe and wash my hands in another.

    When I got to her house there was a long thin streak of excrement running down the low wall before the gate. Not uncommon in cities with large numbers of intravenous drug users, or a crack epidemic as the case was in San Francisco, but I would put my life on it being mine.

    I was a shit altogether. I was a junkie, but the kind living in a house with a bed and clean dishes, and my drugs went up my nose and down my trap or sometimes absorbed through the soft defenceless skin of my cavities.

    Thank the lord, sleepwalking me left the door ajar. I raced up the stairs to Evelin’s room. All was ok in there, my clothes still laid out on the floordrobe. But I was terrified. The room, at least how I was seeing it, awash blue like the onset of a stress-induced psychotic break. The illumination reminiscent of my parents’ bathroom, the sun rises and falls so much faster than the west of Ireland. I made the decision to dress and go home to attempt sleep, preparing myself for all the fears and endless scenarios that kept me awake at night. Not before having another cautionary wipe though, I’m not an animal.

    I texted Evelin to say I had to go home to take my upset stomach medication, which was true. I wasn’t lying, only leaving out information, just like when I tell a chosen few people this story I leave out the part about definitely shitting on a wall outside this good lady’s house.

    Walking, yet again, by the angry Arab man’s house, who deserved to be fucking furious, I threw up my hood and saw him speaking to the cops. Such an American image: furious man on his stoop, blue and red cycling flashes. Me on the verge of feeling the brunt of the militarized police force’s personal PTSD vent. Even if you’re white, you can’t read the news and not fear the American po po five-o yo. It’s hardly Spain, but I have enough Irish mates who have received beatings to found that fear, and I fucking deserved it.

    The greatest of all walks of shame in my life, and I’ve hardly walked any other way. Strolling home into the horizon of sun rise was of no pride that day, I shared the city streets with no one but sleeping homeless people. Hotdog foil dusted the streets, excess mustard and long since sweated onions with charred edges. The city -or at least the Mission seemed in that moment more dangerous to me than it ever had done before. Fortunately, I was too empty to actually shit myself. Utterly horrific wretches brought on by self-contempt were yet to greet me at home after my adventure.

    I don’t think that was any sign of the drinking problem that was flowering like an invasive weed at that stage in my life, I had a sensible head laid down on the bed that night, but it sure as shit scared the shite out of my sleep walking problem.

  • Roll Model: Dervla Murphy

    Dervla Murphy’s father was one of Pádraig Pearse’s patriots. Schooled in St Enda’s, aged eighteen he was incarcerated in an English prison for three years, ‘sewing sacks for the post office, wretchedly fed and crawling with lice’, as she wrote in her autobiography, Wheels Within Wheels. The Murphys were anti-Treaty Republicans. Every one of the family was jailed ar son na cúise.

    Her mother’s family the Dowlings, on the other hand, were terribly respectable, and wealthy, until her mother’s father, a drinker, fell into the Royal Canal and died. His wife, Jeff, happened to be passing when his corpse was lifted out. Maybe as a result of this trauma, Dervla’s grandmother Jeff retained ‘a tight-lipped aversion to pleasure, however innocent.’

    But at the home of Dervla’s father’s people, in Charleston Avenue, Rathmines, ‘there was poverty too, but it was happy-go-lucky rather than gloomy and self-pitying,’ Dervla wrote.

    When Feargus Murphy and Kathleen Dowling married they immediately left Dublin for Lismore, a remote and beautiful tiny town in the Blackwater Valley of Waterford. Feargus had been appointed county librarian, and immediately settled in to create literary centres out of country libraries. He founded Ireland’s first mobile library with the help of Kitty – the couple sometimes sleeping in the library van as they toured the county.

    Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford.

    Dervla was born in 1931. By the age of two, her twenty-six-year-old mother had been crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. After travelling to England, Italy and Czechoslovakia in search of a cure she returned to Lismore, a hopeless cripple whom doctors advised to avoid having any more children.

    The family loved and cosseted their one fierce chick. Dervla spent time in Dublin with her mother’s people, the enduringly Unionist Dowlings, and with her beloved paternal grandparents and cousins in Rathmines. There she roamed a house filled with Pappa Murphy’s books and her grandmother’s endless bridge games. Pappa had been on hunger strike in England for six weeks at the age of forty-eight, dragging his health down, and Granny had also been jailed.

    In Lismore, Dervla grew up with a healthy level of wilfulness. Among her friends were the neighbouring Ryans, a conservative family. She spent as much time in their home as in her own; their son Mark, an intellectual priest, became a second father to her.

    At home, she was raised on her mother’s preferred diet for her only child of raw beef, raw liver, raw vegetables and brown bread, with four pints of milk a day, with no place for tea or coffee let alone fizzy drinks. Cooking could be problematic: at one stage Dervla and her father made dinners on an improvised electric cooker which he had repaired; they wore wellington boots to prevent fatal shocks!

    For her tenth birthday received a a secondhand atlas from her Pappa, and a second hand bicycle from her parents. This combination brought the realisation one day as she cycled up a favourite hill near Lismore that she could actually get to India if she simply kept pedalling.

    At twelve she was supposed to enrol in St Angela’s Ursuline College in Waterford – her aunt Kathleen wrote to her enthusiastically from Mountjoy Prison promising she’d love it – but on account of the circumstances of her mother’s illness and perhaps also the meagre pay of librarians in the new Irish State, this was not possible until 1944, when she was thirteen.

    Dervla loved the school and thrived there, but by the following year a crisis had developed in Lismore. A series of housekeepers had nursed her mother and kept the ragged home together. But this situation could not endure, leading to a conference with her parents where three options were laid before her: Dervla could leave school and nurse her mother; she and her mother could go to live with relatives in Dublin where it would be easier to find help and Dervla could attend another school; or Dervla could return to school in Waterford and her parents could somehow soldier on.

    The decision was left to the fourteen-year-old Dervla: ‘We had just finished dinner and I saw my father’s hand shaking as he lifted his coffee cup to his lips,’ she remembered. Of course she chose to leave school and look after her mother.

    The Murphys in Dublin were incandescent at the decision. A cataclysmic row erupted leaving the family at permanent loggerheads. ‘As a result of our tribal warfare I never saw Pappa again,’ she wrote. A period of love and funniness had come to a sudden end.

    Dervla became her mother’s full-time carer until she was almost thirty, nursing by day and by night an increasingly helpless woman. Even in the early stages of her illness she was compelled to manipulate knitting needles just to turn the page of a book.

    The only respite for Dervla were long walks with Mark Ryan, the neighbouring priest, and long cycle rides. On one such, aged seventeen, she met a solitary Englishman who, like her grandfather and her father, had been imprisoned for the cause – in his case in a Japanese POW camp in Burma during World War Two. Godfrey and Dervla established a private companionship until his death in 1959 in London when she was aged twenty-eight.

    She had been writing since childhood, but in these years she did so with greater discipline and intent. She completed a novel about an illegitimate girl growing up in a small Irish town, which she sent out to half-a-dozen publishers; one of whom hinted that a happy ending would make it publishable, but Dervla was not prepared to compromise.

    At least Dervla gained some relief from her onerous duties with a few long cycling trips – to Wales and Spain, through Italy, France, Belgium, Germany – but her increasingly mentally ill mother’s autocratic insistence on perfect housekeeping brought on a complete crack-up.

    Her mother passed away in 1961 and her father a year later. Then in the terrible winter of 1963, Dervla headed off on her bicycle Rozinante, with a meagre bag of supplies, a few quid and a pistol. She was on her way to India.

    Her thrilling account of the trip, Full Tilt: Ireland to India on a Bicycle was snapped up by the prestigious British publisher John Murray. This was before the days of the hippie trail. Her journey had been unimaginably exotic (and yes the pistol did come in handy) as she cycled over the mountains of Pakistan, breaking her ribs, experiencing ravings after heatstroke, among other mis-adventures.

    Dervla travelled and wrote about it for another forty years. Her books became classics in their genre. These covered work with the Dalai Lama’s sister in a camp for Tibetan refugee children that was a central experience in her spiritual life; riding a mule through Ethiopia, along with travels in Nepal, India, Madagascar, Peru, Cameroon, Palestine, Romania, Laos, and even Northern Ireland.

    Dervla Murphy with Michael Palin in 2012.

    When she gave birth to a daughter and brought her up single-handed, she may just have kicked out the first stones of the wall that then surrounded Irish women; this was in the age of Magdalen Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. She demonstrated that a single woman with a baby did not have to be at the mercy of church and state and all-seeing respectability.

    Dervla Murphy’s books have remained in print for longer than any other modern writer. She remains our greatest explorer, and a stirring voice of a liberal worldview that Ireland has only gradually accepted; a voice calling for a new world.

    Lucille Redmond’s collection of stories, Love, is available on Amazon and on Apple Books

  • The Doomsday Machines

    Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film ‘Dr Strangelove’ dramatizes the still not-altogether-remote scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It begins with a deranged U.S. Airforce General, Jack D. Ripper, overriding Executive Command and ordering a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The Russians, unbeknownst to the Americans, have developed a deterrent – the Doomsday Machine – that automatically detonates, with devastating global effect, if a nuclear device explodes in Soviet territory.

    Kubrick masterfully conveys the absurd conformism of a military organisation obeying orders to a point of self-annihilation. In the end, Major T. J. ‘King’ Kong, the B-52 commander delivering its payload, straddles the bomb, whooping as he descends to his own, and humanity’s, demise. Despite its apocalyptic message, the film remains enduringly hilarious, reflecting its alternative title: ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’

    A recent viewing in Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema left me wondering, though, whether Kubrick derives too much comedy from an appalling vista we still confront. Laughter remains a safety valve, permitting an audience to carry on with business-as-usual, while the ultimate stupidity of nuclear war remains a real possibility. Are we, unconsciously, making light of President Donald Trump’s recent euphemistic warning of an ‘official end’ to Iran?[i] As Friedrich Nietzsche puts it: ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’[ii] Regular doses of humour are one of life’s balms, but sometimes we laugh along to the exclusion of more serious engagement. Fittingly perhaps, the serious work of producing Cassandra Voices generally occurs in a studio above a crowded comedy club in the heart of Dublin, from where laughter often wafts upstairs!

    Millenarian doomsday scenarios have haunted humanity since time immemorial. A ‘Great Survey’ of England and Wales in 1086, used to ascertain the proportion of the national wealth owing to King William ‘the Conqueror’ (also less flatteringly known as ‘the Bastard’), was subsequently labelled the ‘Book of Domesday’ (Middle English for ‘Doomsday’). This accumulation of data in the hands of a monarchy had terrifying connotations at a time when many perceived the end of the world, and its Final Judgment, to be nigh.

    Today humanity confronts varied doomsday scenarios – generally gleaned from scientific analysis rather than metaphysical speculation – with anthropogenic climate chaos, mass extinctions and the still unresolved danger of a nuclear Armageddon topping the list. We remain in many respects, in Carl Jung’s phrase, technological savages[iii], operating machinery with capacities far exceeding our wisdom as operators. It just takes one fat finger to push the button, or an unimpeded algorithm.

    But perhaps it is not nuclear warheads, or even coal-powered stations, that represent the Doomsday Machines of our time. After all, humanity could quite easily seize control of its fate, elect reasonable leaders, bring about a Green New Deal and decommission nuclear weapons. So what is holding us back from taking the action required for the benefit of the great mass of our species, and the rest of the natural world? Another mechanism, operated by most adults in developed countries, is, I believe, befuddling our wits and deterring a collective shift in consciousness.

    Developed simultaneously in the early 2000s by a number of manufacturers, the smart phone is replicating the Book of Domesday by tracking our movements and online preferences to the benefit of vested commercial interests, and shadowy state emanations.

    Of greater concern, perhaps, than the hollowing out of our privacy is the addiction the vast majority of us have to the narcissistic, solipsistic and often pugilistic ‘social’ media of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Twitter, conveyed through apps on our smartphones. Staring into the void of communication-without-end from dawn-to-dusk, successive ‘hits’ are delivered, revealing who messages us, ‘likes’ our image or words, or offends us. Notably, Donald Trump is the acknowledged master of the soundbite Twitter update (maximum length two-hundred-and-eighty-characters), heralding the short-attention-span-politics evident in most countries.

    Social media is the thief of time and an agent of homogenisation. Writing in the early twentieth century, the

    Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935

    Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa seemed to anticipate the contemporary malaise. ‘Given the metallic, barbarous age we live in,’ he wrote, ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’[iv]

    The smartphone provides a simulacrum of varied technologies, such as an automated camera providing the semblance of a real one, but where the necessary application to understand the apparatus is no longer needed. The capacity to share easily what we have created has overtaken the creative process. The necessary isolation of the artist has been abandoned in favour of the instant hit of validation from our peers.

    Likewise, through digital attenuation, music is debased and choice diminished when we succumb to the algorithms of Spotify and YouTube that are carried with us everywhere we go on our Doomsday Machines.

    Of particular concern is a generation of teenagers who know of no other life other than that mediated by the Doomsday Machines. What is missing from their lives is the crucial ingredient of tedium, which again according to Pessoa is ‘that profound sense of the emptiness of things, out of which frustrated aspirations struggle free, a sense of thwarted longing arises and in the soul is sown the seed from which is born the mystic or the saint.’[v] Being bored can have its advantages.

    I would like to say I had the willpower to renounce my own device, but as is so often the case in life, the end of the affair occurred by accident. Fiddling with its AMAZING properties, for the umpteenth time that day, as I double-jobbed playing with my young nephew, the Machine slipped from my grasp and hit a hard stone floor. The glass did not shatter exactly, except in one corner which felt the full impact, and from which a few glittery shards crumbled away. But, faintly detectable, three deathly cracks ran up from where it had landed, strangely mirroring the lifelines on my hand. When I tried to switch it on, all I found was a faint blinking light, which soon lapsed. Still looking sleek and powerful, though now veiled in a black hood of inoperativeness, it appeared to me like the corpse of a young soldier, handsome features intact, save for a bullet wound to the neck.

    I felt deflated, angry and increasingly tetchy. How was I going to survive without it after a decade-long reliance? Like any addict, I felt pangs for the addled communication, information-gathering and idle scrolling that had become my early morning ritual, as I lay prostrate in bed.

    As it transpired there was still some life in the Machine — I had simply smashed the screen, which I replaced at a reasonable price in a shop on Capel Street. But the liberation of a few days had changed my perspective. I had an unmistakable feeling of a great weight being lifted off me. In the meantime, I had purchased a ‘brick’ phone for next to nothing and now alternate between the two,  only using the Doomsday Machine, now shorn of most, though not all, social media apps, when strictly necessary. I am a work in progress.

    I know many people, more sensible than I, who have deleted all social media apps from their smartphones save for WhatsApp. This is, however, the Gateway Drug that maintains the addiction, leaving the impression that you cannot live without the Doomsday Machine. In a sinister twist, WhatsApp cannot be used on  a laptop, for example, without already being connected to a Doomsday Machine.

    Facebook has become the lightning rod for much of the bad press around social media – those pesky Russians again – and its distorted algorithm is a distinct nuisance if one is attempting to share meaningful content, as the cutesy image will always win out. Used strategically, however, it has its advantages, especially as a means of staying in contact with a large number of people, and for the purpose of events. It only really becomes problematic as an app on a smartphone that sends out regular notifications, prompting idly scrolling. I can live with it on my laptop, although I have given up on the hope of using it as a conduit for radical journalism.

    As regards the confessional nature of posting our thoughts, I was struck by further prescient words from Pessoa: ‘What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former, it has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible.’[vi] I am coming to recognise that most of the online outbursts I am prone to are perhaps better left unsaid.

    Instagram offers a good medium for photographers to display their work, but is overwhelmingly narcissistic, not only through that ultimate expression of Doomsday Machines, the selfie, but also via the look-at-my-beautiful-life imagery that abounds. Planet Instagram is full of beautiful people who overcome life challenges, reveal plenty of tanned flesh and speak in a patois of hashtags.

    Selfie by name.

    Pessoa would take an uncompromising view:

    Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible that that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable either to see his face or to look into his own eyes … he could only see his face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of his seeing his own face … the creator of the mirror poisoned the human race.[vii]

    There are times when access to the Internet while on the move is of great value. Google Maps makes travel immeasurably easier. But are we comfortable with all our movements being tracked? Smart-phone maps also reduce the sum total of our interactions with fellow human beings, and makes us less observant of the world around us.

    A good rule of thumb is that, unless we are sitting upright, communication is unsatisfactory. The same applies to reading news sites – I had become all-too-prone to only partially reading articles. Indeed, the ‘most read’ articles on most sites tends to be prurient ‘click-bait.’

    I suggest you forget about the hurried message and make time for real expression in communication. There is no point attempting to stay in touch with everyone, because it is impossible. Leave more time for reading books, making music, being present to friends and family, and allow space for the tedium that brings daydreaming.

    The Internet can open new horizons of knowledge, bringing to fruition Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (d. 1716) dream of a bibliotheca universalis, a ‘universal library’, where expert insight is available to all, everywhere. It could lead us into thinking more globally. But this beast needs considerable taming. Its great potential may be more easily realised by abandoning Doomsday Machines altogether. The wider consequences of a less mediated society could be profound. If enough of us can escape the clutches of the Machines, perhaps we can eventually develop the focus required for collective action.

    Follow Frank Armstrong on Twitter

    [i] Seung Min Kim, ‘Threats would mean ‘official end’ of Iran, Trump warns in tweet’, May 19th, 2019, Washington Post.

    [ii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated from the German by Graham Parkes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, p.202.

    [iii] See Laurens van der Post, Jung and the story of our time, Vintage, London, 1976, p.200

    [iv] Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, The Serpent’s Tail, London, 2017, p.107

    [v] Ibid, p.363

    [vi] Ibid, p.197

    [vii] Ibid, p.91

  • The Secret Model – Subtle Complaints

    Entering the dragon’s den

    I arrive twenty minutes late for a casting, but it doesn’t really matter. Only three other girls have found their way into the casting room so far; ‘girls’ being a euphemism – the youngest person in the room is a women in her early twenties. At a fashion casting we are never ‘women’, always ‘girls’ – most likely because no grown-up woman would tolerate the treatment we endure on a daily basis.

    I sit down on one of the few cheap chairs propped up at the back of the room, next to the other girls. Most idly scroll on their phones, knowing they have time on their hands, because this is not a regular casting. This is a casting with the dragon.

    The dragon, among the most feared casting directors in the fashion world, is responsible for the booking of models for clients like Calvin Klein, Balenciaga and Jil Sander. She got into hot water in 2017, when it came to public attention that before Paris Fashion Week she had locked one hundred and fifty models in a dark stairwell while she went out for lunch.[i]

    Though not well received, the conduct was insufficiently reprehensible for her to lose a seat on fashion’s Mount Olympus once and for all. A rap on the knuckle and the incident was soon forgiven, though certainly not forgotten by the models left in the cold stairwell for up to three hours – a duration the dragon still denies.

    At the end of the room someone has pushed together some tables, forming a long line. Behind the tables there’s an abundance of sweating assistants typing into their MacBooks. But I am not paying attention to them, as I cannot take my eyes off the dragon, seated at the left hand side of the table. In front of her – weirdly reminding me of the feasts in Harry Potter – there lies a pile of greasy McDonalds paper bags.

    It seems sickly ironic that a woman who hires other women based on the suitability of their bodies (preferably size XXS) is unashamedly spooning an Oreo McFlurry into her mouth in front of us. Now the windowless room is beginning to fill with the smell of grease, but the dragon takes no notice of this, or of us, lurking in the back of the room.

    At this stage she seems to be enjoying herself, wise-cracking with her assistants,. The room is starting to fill up with other I models. I recognize a few of them; some I know from previous castings, others I have seen in campaigns or in magazines. There are insufficient chairs for everyone, models start to crouch on the floor. The casting was supposed to begin forty minutes ago.

    Stale sweat and make-up stains

    Suddenly there is movement. One of the assistants gets up and asks the first five girls to put their names down on a list. We are led to a small toilet and handed undergarments to put on. The assistant tells us to be quick, blushing as she says so. With few words we strip down in front of each other. We are used to it.

    My dress, black, cheaply-made nylon – the sort you might pick up at the checkout of a drug store – has undoubtedly been worn before, smelling of stale sweat and caked in make-up stains.

    The assistant returns. ‘Low ponytail’, she says, and orders us to line up – as if we are being chosen for a game of dodge ball. We walk back into the room. The McDonalds paper bags have magically disappeared. Instead there’s a list in front of the dragon. She calls my name.

    It feels odd standing in front of her; her name – taken in vain more often than not – being a staple in fashion industry gossip. Even odder is how charming she becomes once you are in front of her, and no longer a nameless model, but an actual person. Almost like a human being?

    Why we put up with it…

    I now wonder when I first became habituated to the absurdity that is the fashion industry. I remember how glamorous it all seemed at the outset – like a high school clique that I desperately wanted to be a part of – and once I had made it, I was even more desperate to remain a part of it.

    It took a while for me to realise that it is not all glamour and champagne. It demands countless hours at airports, sleepless nights in lousy hotel rooms, and blue lips from icy shooting locations.

    Latterly I no longer feel as exclusive as I once did. The features that made it so exciting to begin with are now annoying routines: constantly having your hair done becomes irritating; sitting still for hours while you are made-up causes back pain; waiting for what seem like eternities during lighting tests makes it all become a blur.

    I wonder if all so-called dream jobs crash against reality at some point. Or is it only models who are not supposed to talk about the negative sides of their profession, and who must pretend every day is glorious and lock away their mental problems?

    An insider gag is that we all want to quit, and yet here we remain. While the lows may be really low, it seems the highs are too addictive to let go of. It is all too alluring to earn a regular person’s monthly salary in the space of a day; too tempting to visit places you would otherwise never reach; too fascinating to abandon the dream.

    How can anyone who travels the world and meets people we all grew up seeing on TV complain? It seems tasteless to moan about non-sensical work conditions, when life could be so much harder.

    Most of the time models keep quiet. The only safe space for venting our annoyances seems to lie within the industry itself. Though competitors, fellow models are often the only allies we have. Every model understands the pressures, stresses, body dismorphia, loneliness and petty jealousies.

    We exchange knowing looks before pulling out phones to broadcast our fabulous life on social media. We are models after all, so we must maintain the fantasy.

    They probably all want to quit

    The casting is over within five minutes. The dragon is precious with her own time – it is ours that is of no value to her. She orders me walk in a straight line, scribbling down something on a sheet of paper. She asks me to walk again. And again. I walk up and down the room three times, the eyes of everyone in attendance following my every step.

    The dragon makes no comment, she just watches. When I am finished she asks the next girl to do the same walk, I stand with the others and watch. After the five of us have done our walk she calls me up again and takes some pictures with a 2007-esque bubble gum-coloured digital camera.

    I have met her before, at another casting in another city. She pretends to remember me when I tell her, though fails to look me in the eyes. Yet I can feel her gaze all over my body, scanning every flaw, comparing ‘it’ to the countless (and to her nameless) other bodies she has surveyed before.

    I am ordered to look left, right, chin up, chin down, profile, smile, smile with teeth, smile with less teeth, sit-down, fetch. When she has finished the examination she moves on without addressing me again. As I turn, her assistant waves me over to her. She has an amateurish spreadsheet in front of her with a set of questions.

    ‘Would you walk topless?’

    ‘Would you wear fur?’

    ‘Would you wear leather?’

    I wonder if anyone ever dares to say no to any of these questions. If so I have never heard of it. We didn’t make it this far to limit our chances by refusing anything we are offered. She ticks every category next to my name.

    Then I am free to go. I hurry back into the toilet, handing my disgusting gown over to the next girl, waiting alongside the others in the tiny room, like battery chickens at a factory farm.

    As my eyes adjust to the sunshine outside, it all seems surreal – that there are some of the most beautiful girls of Paris stuffed into a back room in a nameless shop in a nameless street. They probably all want to quit.

    ‘Roxanne Smith’ is a pseudonym, if you have stories you wish to share in confidence contact us at admin@cassandravoices.com.

    [i]Landon Peoples, ‘The Plot Thickens In The Casting Directors Vs. Models Case’, March 2nd, 2017, Refinery29, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/03/143463/balenciaga-james-scully-models-casting-drama, accessed 27/4/19.

  • HEY POCKY WAY

    In the year of our Lord 2019, what remained engrained was an émigré from the hoi omphaloi of confusion and strife. The Easter in question came late on the calendar but much like the highly controversial transubstantiation, the bitter end of Holy Week started as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. In other words, all at once.

    Living in the mountains one can’t escape the effects of a full moon and my particular suburb of the Vatican that is Ireland has finally ended its unconscionable 90 year Good Friday booze ban. So there I am in the supermarket, and U2 with whom despite a vast disparity in our respective net assets, I’ve been periodically privileged to mingle, were piping over the sound system. I noticed there was a sale on vodka. So I mixed a pitcher of Bloody Mary and let the games begin. Think Joaquin Phoenix playing his role as the emperor Commodus in that movie he stole from Russell Crowe called Gladiator shouting ‘AM I NOT MERCIFUL?’

    So, I whipped up a polenta, mostly because I was craving grits and I’ll let you in on a little secret… they are and always have been one and the same. Irresistible on my second drink, just ask anyone I’ve shamelessly hit on, I stirred the pot and began to twang melancholy as Dolly, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.”

    Dancing barefoot in one’s own living room provides all the benefits of a Pilates course or an extramarital affair with none of that nasty documentable collateral damage and I am nothing if not prudent in my pursuits. The solitude of sleep did not elude me, furthermore it elucidated a dream from my childhood.

    Hours before church I awoke with a lurch to the bleat of an atypical fauna for the sauna that is my beloved Big Easy. A live goat was yoked to a wagon loaded with lovingly hand decorated eggs and sticky store-bought jelly beans. From the centre of this embarrassment of riches, the obligatory bunny leaned toward me like a chocolate Tower of Pisa. Its stature notably stunted by the harsh amputation of what had been fine upstanding ears. Still partially wrapped in jewel toned tin foil, the spoiled candy was a solemn crime scene yet somehow reassuring in that its carnage by friendly fire was an annual event.

    This animal sacrifice was no trespass by a neighbouring spaniel, fancy treats foraged while we ate our porridge. No indeed, it was none other than the predictable ritual of our pedigreed bitch. The eternally fertile Irish Setter, Kathleen Haggerty O’Shane, whose thirteen pups had been hijacked under cover of darkness was addicted. Probably on account of those bags of Oreo cookies I shared with her on a regular basis.

    It was not our habit to bet if she’d get the rabbit, just when. Only then did we pause in alarm for the second act. Not charming at all in fact, while the goat, who had taken this opportunity to escape, was being confiscated by local authorities, our impeccably bred show dog’s finale included an overwhelming urge to purge her decadent sins with a roiling encore of blood and semi-digested chocolate-soiled tin regurgitated across the floor. Cave Canem.

    Years pass and now I’m an extra-cold Cava sippin’ lass livin’ ass backwards but six hours ahead of the time zone I left behind. The import tax on Champagne resigns me to Spanish bubbles for washing away my troubles with a lava-like curry. I write in a hurry because no matter how bold, the past becomes a blur and then you’re just old. It’s late and I’d hate to mention how many Mardi Gras I might’ve seen. It’s not the naughty nights that get you, but more the mournings.

    Cancer snuffed another friend on Friday. Felt like a power failure and I can’t find the phone number to report the fault. Alternatively, I’m thinking Lent put a dent in my drinking year. At least the feast of Easter promises a queer quench for that wrenching thirst.

    Easter is called Pâque in French and in Louisiana’s patois, especially around Ascension Parish like Lafayette, ‘pâque-ing’ is a verb that refers to a sort of seasonal combat. Kissing cousins bang boiled eggs that, in anticipation, were dyed on Good Friday. We bang’em until one breaks. See, that’s the loser and beware because next time, it could be you.

    If you were from Orleans Parish like me, at this stage you’d break into a funk tune by The Mighty Meters, ‘HEY POCKY WAY.’ The illustrious musician, Dr. John, explains: ‘This talk was the Indians’ own Creole language, part French, part Spanish, part Choctaw, part Yoruba, and part mystery to an outsider like me. What the first one said basically was, ‘Where yaatt, bro?’ or the like. And the second one said, ‘Everything’s oaks and herbs’ – which means everything’s cool because they had smoke lots of herbs. If the second one responded ‘No om bah way,’ then y’all had problems…

    Saw my first lambing, leaning on a doorjamb here in Wicklow. Don’t forget Joaquin, bein’ a prophet of PETA, wouldn’t have watched the wool I’d always worn being born in the dappled light of a chapel-like barn. It’s the darndest thing to recall my Crescent City slicker’s eyes finally falling on a supersized old poster of Bertie Ahern looking unconcerned. Ain’t no harm in nailing him way up there in the rarefied air, with spare farming gear. After all, Christ rhymes with heist.

    Libations risen from Malin to Mizen Head, the grateful dead will come back one day and like pearls before swine, even porcupines and protestants will line up in designer tops. The corks popped should sop every drop of the popish black pool while the so-called cool twine their way like vines exhausted by Pentecost. When the last ground seems lost, between you, me and Jesus, even he knew it’s no use hanging around.

    Amazingly, I awoke safe under a duvet in bed. Miraculous, mostly because my mandatory mid-century modern spiral staircase whose perilous design challenges both the sensual and sober, lends that compulsory edge for this over-examined life I’ve yet to deem not worth living.

    It’s dawn and smoking the last cigarette in the house, a prayer comes into my head… ‘If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to …’ Never mind that. Take me to the river. Considering the difference between the words slaughter and laughter is a single  ‘S’, a letter of the alphabet which also sits, like a little snake, at the beginning of the word ‘sacrifice’, my advice to you is : Never let’em get your goat.