Cassandra Voices

Tag: society

  • Bullying: It’s You, Not Me

    Bullies can take many shapes, forms, and disguises. It seems a daily occurrence that can be defined as repeated behaviours that are intentional or have malicious intent to cause fear or to instil feelings of superiority in the bully, while also causing anxiety and hopelessness in the victim, due to the bully’s relentless behaviour.

    Northern Ireland, where I grew up, is a hotspot for bullying. It seems to thrive in an environment where tribalistic differences are constantly debated, leading to hostility, sectarian violence, hatred, and ultimately, often, murder.

    When I was a boy, from about the age of six for a few years I was indeed a bully myself. I should add that I have been bullied many times.

    Anyway, I bullied a girl at primary school who had an eating disorder. She used to make large bubbles with her mouth because her stomach was troubled. I mocked her over it, because I was a damaged child and did not know any better. She was thin, wore glasses, and I was a pig-ignorant, angry little boy with blonde hair and blue eyes. It was as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, adults used to say about me once they realised, I was a bully without an emotional processor.

    But I could not understand what I was doing due to poor emotional regulation and underdeveloped emotional skills. One thing was certain: I was damaged.

    I come from a broken home and a troubled, all-encompassing background where violence was often inflicted by a parent or guardian. They were young themselves and did not know any better.

    I was constantly on the defensive. And I remained so for decades. Fight or flight with pounding anxiety, cortisol coursing through my system.

    It is a difficult paradigm to break – the cycle of aggressor abuse and the inflicted aggressions, both verbal and physical.

    I was aggressive and used to demand that other school kids bring in a football to school until two much tougher brothers roughed me up out the front of the school on the grass one afternoon. And the bullied girl’s mother accosted me at the school gates, calling me out, rightly so, but I did not know any better. My bullying was reactive without conscious thought. My prefrontal cortex was not developed. Anyway, that was the end of my primary school bullying career.

    Cottonbro Studio

    Bullying in Adulthood

    There is always an opportunity to make money, poke fun at someone, or treat someone like a lesser human being; and here’s the thing: people definitely do, and try to do it, daily.

    I have watched several TEDx Talks on bullying and other YouTube videos on the topic. There seem to be two types of bullying: implicit and explicit.

    It’s a complex human behaviour to gauge on the social barometer. That is, many people are involved in these actions. It is part of us. Indeed, one wonders which circle of Dante’s Hell houses bullies and what they have awaiting there.

    Is it a deliberate choice or a visceral response to something in their psyche? Sometimes, individuals with damaged self-esteem find it challenging to know how to repair themselves. They have become so deeply traumatised that they cling to what they know, or rather, have become.

    There is the Dark Triad of Personality: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and, in a pitiful corner, Psychopathy, which is quite common in Northern Ireland if you ask me.

    In Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis, he posits that some individuals employ mind games and manipulate others’ emotions to achieve their goals.

    In my teens, a bigger mate bullied me because of his size and skill as a fighter. Needless to say, we are no longer friends.

    A few years ago, he emailed to ask how I was and say that he missed me, or something to that effect. I replied telling him that he had bullied me, and I had dark thoughts about getting revenge on my bullies.

    He emailed back, saying he didn’t believe it, that he, it, the bullying ‘was that bad.’ But he was – he was a bully. He is probably still in denial.

    In some ways, he was a rather unusual character. I believe he was bisexual and concealed it, using aggression as a coping mechanism. He also tried to project an image of being a tough man.

    In Northern Ireland, the projected image of ‘don’t mess with me sunshine’ is all. The knuckle-dragging image of the hard man, the person feared and respected for his reputation as a fighter, is deeply ingrained in the collective, broken Northern Irish psyche.

    Loudmouth

    When I turned eighteen, I was quite the loudmouth, and a young, tough bloke at a local disco bullied me.

    One night, he was waiting outside the disco, itching for a fight, slouched against the wall under the arch of the local hotel. I was walking alone, leaving the disco, and he decided to pick a fight with me. He approached and swung a big, balled-up fist. I took it without ducking, as I was intoxicated – as usual – and he clocked me. Since I was skinnier and therefore fair game, it was on for him.

    He thumped me, and I staggered away. Afterwards, I sat on a low stone wall, and I think I had a bloodied nose – I cannot quite recall, but I do remember putting my jeans in the bath with warm water and salt, which drew the blood out of them.

    On another occasion, I was a bundle of nerves due to anxiety, excessive drug use, and simply not being well. I suffered from cannabis-induced psychosis and alcoholism. When he came over and threatened me I soiled myself. I sat there in the front seat of my mate’s car, let it happen, and wetted my trousers. I didn’t show anything to my friends inside the car, but that’s what occurred. The bully left after realising I wasn’t taking the bait or accepting the challenge of a fight. I was very skinny then, not eating properly, and most likely he would have beaten me to a pulp.

    Years later, I wanted to attack this individual. Full of rage, I was letting him dominate me in a way. I often thought of killing him. Decades of pent-up rage came to the fore in my psyche, and I was not going to lie down and take it anymore. The fact is that he was an ignorant halfwit and would have had little insight into his behaviour.

    Then there was the self-proclaimed ‘Christian’ in a homeless hostel in Belfast. A ‘Baptist’, ‘turn the other cheek?’ They were full of shite. He was, and probably still is, a narcissist who ‘knew better’ than the rest. He bullied me, well, it was institutional abuse, while I was resident in a homeless hostel. He became insanely jealous of the friendly relationship I had with one of the female staff. Getting through that situation over a year severely tested me because I had finally a bit of strength about me then, and I wanted to test that out.

    After that there was bullying, from a verbally abusive, ‘celebrity’ chef, who I worked for. He called me ‘a useless bastard.’ because I didn’t dress a plate of raw salmon to his standard. I informed him that I would not talk to a dog the way he talked to his staff, and I walked away not to return. He was well known as a bully. One day, allegedly, he grabbed one of his smaller trainees by the neck and pinned him up against a fridge. Needless to say, he doesn’t come across as a bully on the television or radio.

    Image: Pietro Lang

    Owning up to my own Failings

    I intentionally bullied a rather large, but chilled out guy with whom I shared a house as he was one of the laziest people I have ever met. He would not lift a finger to keeping the house in shape. He lay in bed all day nursing a hangover, something I had plenty of experience with.

    He was angry with me, but I later apologised and explained I only tried to motivate him when he lay in bed all day. Once I pulled him and his mattress off his bed and took him downstairs, as it was a lovely day outside, and he was lamenting his life while suffering from a hangover. This was his, or rather our norm.

    One day, I made a loud noise behind him in the kitchen, as he didn’t know I was there, which startled him while making a sandwich. He held a steak knife in his hand, turned around, and said: ‘Just you wait, Burnsy. One day I will get you.’

    Bullying also occurs in relationships. They must always be right. They will gaslight you into believing that you are the problem. They play the victim and are rather good at emotional manipulation. They cannot comprehend that a relationship is a collaboration. They call the shots, hold the power, and you must bend to their ways.

    I have been gaslight into believing that I was always the problem. Playing the victim is a form of emotional manipulation. Some cannot comprehend that a relationship is a collaboration. They must call the shots. Bullies rarely change. I work on it.

    Yet, sometimes you have to act aggressively when no other option is working.  Once, back home, a letting agency with questionable ethics, known for rather shoddy practices, failed to answer my calls, refusing to return a deposit of £527.00 owed to me. They dragged their heels and told me one date and then another, and wouldn’t pay.

    The owner has been done for fraud multiple times. It seemed as if the ‘management’ were trying to rip me off for the sheer fun of it. So, I went to their office and told them they had ten minutes to pay me, or I would have to get a bit rough. I got my money back within an hour or so.

    Robert Greene

    Robert Greene on Bullies

    Robert Greene, in his book The 48 Laws of Power, doesn’t explicitly discuss bullying as a primary topic, but he does address behaviours and tactics that are often associated with bullying, particularly in the context of power dynamics and social interactions. He highlights how insecurity and a desire for control can motivate individuals to engage in manipulative and aggressive behaviours towards others.’

    I do not stand for bullying nowadays. Although I wonder whether challenging or confronting a bully is really only a Pyrrhic victory? Or perhaps it’s a way to square the circle of your own trauma. I will leave it the reader to decide. I wrote this piece to confront my own mistakes and bullying behaviours to help build clarity and humility in myself, from now on.

    Feature Image: Mikhail Nilov

  • Teenage Sex for Meth

    Aged sixteen, I started trading sex for meth. There was no discussion about this with the drug dealers. It was understood. To me, this was a natural progression. My stepfather began to gawk at me when my first breast bud appeared, then molested me when I was twelve. Until I left home for college, I suffered his ongoing body comments and threats, which proved him interested in his sexual excitement and not his fatherly duties. Perhaps even worse, the predatory behavior I experienced within my own family created a dangerous foundation that others soon would exploit.

    By thirteen, many adult men would stare and some asked me out. That year, an eighteen-year-old had sex with me on a beach, when I couldn’t find the words to say no. A family friend molested me while I was on the phone with my mother, apparently confident I wouldn’t tell her. He was right as that didn’t occur to me because she never intervened when my stepfather beat me. By sixteen, I’d had sexual encounters with at least six men more than ten years older. They all expressed astonishment at my prowess but otherwise had not referenced the age implications.

    Each traumatic event, including the regular physical attacks at home, propelled me into a search for escape. Within a month of the initial sexual assault, I often consumed alcohol. I added marijuana, then pills, then acid. At sixteen, I found my drug of choice, methamphetamine, and began shooting up at seventeen. I was in full-bore addiction when I graduated high school.

    I had disconnected from my body and emotions long before I used drugs. This strategy helped me endure life in a house of horrors. The chemicals made this technique easier to maintain. As my substance use disorder progressed, so did my promiscuity statistics. I earned the approval of men at the top of the local drug dealer tier because of my sexual skills and attractiveness. If they weren’t available, I’d have sex with almost anyone who filled my spoon with meth, even strangers. With the guys from my hometown, I accommodated them to reinforce the friendship bond or in an unstated exchange for speed. Once a dealer I’d known since childhood suggested I blow him, handed me a half-ounce bag of meth, and told me to take as much as I wanted.

    The “sex and drugs and rock and roll” motto of the day afforded me a bit of cover. But that slogan’s fun aspect didn’t apply. Sometimes these men, even those I categorized as buddies, would become aggressive if I said no to sex. For example, I occasionally slept with the ex-con who first provided me with meth. One afternoon, he tried to convince me to give him oral sex, which I politely refused, since I needed to sleep after a three-day drug run. He pushed my head down repeatedly, trying to force me. I cried and after a while he left. Later, when I ran into him at the bar, he bought me a drink and gave me a speed vial. I interpreted this as an apology. Afterward, I’d hang out with him in a group but never alone.

    This was a rare healthy decision. More typical, I took rides from men I barely knew or went to their apartments to shoot up. The other meth-addicted girls warned me against this. But I didn’t care about the risk, as long as I gained access to the drug I craved. Plus, in addition to the deep drive to consume meth, threatening situations felt familiar and energizing. I often wondered if I’d survive the night but did it anyway.

    And to be pretty provided a rare feeling of power, as short-lived and superficial as it was. At times, my promiscuity caused me to writhe in disappointment with myself. But I shoved aside such thoughts. I wasn’t thrilled when someone mentioned that, behind my back, people said I was a slut, that horrible word society uses to put down women but not their male partners. Still, I didn’t care enough about my reputation to change. In my mind, the greater the number of boys, and especially adults, who desired me, the greater my value. I didn’t appreciate that the validation I sought through promiscuity exacerbated the pain that compelled me to fall even deeper into my addiction.

    So, when I entered recovery for my methamphetamine use disorder, I felt ashamed of my promiscuity. Until, in treatment for post-traumatic stress and anxiety, my counselor pointed out that most of my earliest sexual experiences were crimes against me. This list includes my stepfather’s molestation and sexual threats, the family friend who grabbed my naked breasts, every adult male who had sex with me when I was under the legal age of consent, and each sexual encounter where I complied due to fear.

    Gradually, as a result of hard work in therapy, I came to understand the connection between trauma, addiction, and my actions. I also learned that one-third of abused adolescents develop a substance use disorder by age eighteen. And those, like me, with four childhood traumas or greater, are six times as likely to do so in their lifetime. Similarly, this group is four times more likely to start sexual activity earlier, to become pregnant as a teenager, and to have over fifty sexual partners. While it is true that some women make these choices freely, which is their right, many fall into the behavior for reasons they barely fathom.

    I didn’t have any of this information when I was sleeping around. Gaining this new understanding released the self-condemnation and allowed me to empathize with my younger self. I had made these self-harming and life-threatening choices because all these sexual assaults, and the physical abuse, destroyed any belief that I deserved better or had anything else to offer. Looking back, I even congratulated myself for entering into a monogamous relationship in my early twenties. Because this was long before I began the long slog to heal from my addiction and the emotional scars from my childhood.

    It’s been thirty-one years since I began my recovery journey. During this process, I married my long-term partner, went to law school, and was appointed a federal judge. I also learned to recognize and then address the numerous effects of my trauma history. While I still struggle with anxiety, these episodes are less intense and briefer. Instead of making choices that add to my pain, I now value serenity and contentment.

    Still, I clearly recall how, when I engaged in high-risk activities like sex with strangers, I intermittently would think, “I’ve lost my mind” or “I must not care if I live or die.” This message also came from others, mostly through their horrified expressions when they heard what I’d done.

    What I, and my drug cohorts, should have thought was, “What happened to you that you’re driven to act this way?”

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • The Release of Love

    Todo lo que vemos o nos parece, no es sino un ensueño en un ensueño!
    ‘Everything we see or seem to see is nothing but a dream within a dream’
    – Ruben Dario

    My father was cremated in Dublin, but he belonged to the heat. In Ireland, he carried Nicaragua on his shoulders—low, heavy, as if the land itself rode with him. He spoke in a voice that never lost the edge of elsewhere –somewhere tropical, somewhere distant. He loved it here, but never lost fully his unique Latin American flair, which, as you can imagine, stood out in a place like Dublin. He wasn’t like the other Irish dads. I used to think he sounded like a story half-told. Now I wish I had asked for the remainder of that story. However, when we wish, it is always too late.

    As I stood there, the street, Calle Cuba, was quieter than I remembered it. After many years, I had returned to Central America, my father’s land –  the land of my origins and where half of my blood line lies. I wondered what I was going to do. I was now twenty-five, no longer a child, and no longer accompanied by my mother – or, by my father. Having decided to go back to Nicaragua with a backpack, a grief-stricken heart, and many unanswered questions, I was now present in the liminal space of my father’s past. This was where his roots lie. Where he grew up, worked hard. Where he looked to escape from. This particular neighbourhood in Managua now seemed dusty and desolate, with only the curious eyes of the odd passerby and the noise of distant traffic from the main street. The fragments that remained in my memory from when I saw it last seemed louder– brighter. I had come here when I was twelve years old, too young to know the meaning of what was rooted in this land, or the meaning of what it is to be of mixed nationality. Or the meaning of anything, really. No one at home in Ireland ever talked about this side of my heritage. But dad, he ensured I made the journey with him across the wild Atlantic to see the little house that he was building – for me. He always spoke with a quiet pride about what home was to him, or about relatives that I didn’t know. There were a multitude of them. I knew names and names knew me. But that was about it. Even then I felt like a guest in my own story – always listening intently – yet thinking that the stories seemed too hot, too loud, and too far away.

    Memory plays funnily in soft focus. Sun-drenched and half-formed, Nicaragua, until I returned, lived more in feeling than in reality. Both he and the past were never truly mine to hold. Learning to count to ten in Spanish when I was twelve was the closest I ever got to it. Jumping up the staircase in the family home with a cousin, one step at a time. Uno, dos, tres. The numbers slipped easily off my tongue, like butter. They were always there, but never had the chance to emerge. Little me was so estranged. Happily Irish, but unaware of this other world that ran through my blood. I remembered the mango tree that grew above this unfinished house, and eating the fruit that would drop lazily onto the roof. I would suck the tropical, flesh-like yellow goodness, right down to the seed, and eat it with salt. I recall the noise of the streets and the colourful birds—how alive everything felt. Even the pavement was breathing, or shimmering rather in the hot sun my mother could not handle.

    I remembered the bitter, cacao smell of the coffee plantations we would visit, the sun-lit bamboo, the verdant palm trees and the wild dogs whose bones protruded like knives. I remembered the distant relatives that embraced me with besos and amor. How loved I felt – as the big brown eyed, curly-haired Anita, who had come all the way from Ireland. I felt almost like a prize that my dad had brought to showcase from that far away, capitalistic land in the Western world. And mostly I remembered how, over there, my father was central to it all. The magnet that connected the pieces. His energy was magnetic – too powerful at times – causing friends and family to flock to him. Fast forward sixteen years, and things had changed. He was no longer there to protect me, and the stillness that I felt when I stepped out onto the street reflected exactly that. 

    Rivas, Nicaragua. Image: Fabian Wiktor.

    Perhaps a part of the reason for my going there again amidst a backpacking trip throughout Central America was to gain some sense of closure. I thought that by being in this foreign and mystical land far from home, I would feel a noteworthy connection and something within me would stir. This, I suppose, was ultimately the goal of my trip, having travelled down through Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and finally, five months later, to Nicaragua. When we arrived on a night bus from El Salvador, the air was hot and heavy as everyone unloaded from the van. There were no presents under a tree, no jingle bells, and certainly no partridge in a pear tree. But this is where I chose to spend this Christmas. A year and a half after my father’s funeral, I guessed being there would allow the unresolved within me to resolve itself. Untangle the threads of grief gently full of quiet resolve, like loosening a knot in silk– carefully, slowly, so nothing tears. Perhaps this was all I thought I had left to reach my father again. And when it didn’t, when it wouldn’t budge, I felt the stillness, the nothingness, that comes after death. The quiet whisper in the dark that tells you ‘there are no more chances’. No more years to resolve the distance or work on a relationship that, just maybe, could have been better. I discovered then, that with death comes release. And instead of idealising and imagining the place in my mind from afar, I saw it in its true colours, miles and miles across the rough Atlantic.

     

    I lost him in a physical sense in June of 2023. Though we hadn’t always been close, his absence tore something open in me—something I hadn’t known was holding me together. It felt like I had lost a layer of myself, the kind that only one who has lost a parent can conceive of. Grief quickly arrived as a hole in my heart that I thought could never be filled again. It’s funny how time works, it plays tricks. Now I feel guilty that I am not sad enough. At first, the sadness was all-consuming. Now, it feels insufficient. When I think back to the weeks following his death, the loss seemed unconquerable- almost like an impassable landscape. Tears would come as I drove to work, causing me to pull over. A song would play, and sadness would follow, my mental state undone by a single lyric. I thought then that this hole could never be filled, that this experience, or the dark shadow of it, would shape me forever more. Now I know that, although this hole can never be truly filled, light can filter in. It can come streaming gracefully in hues of gold, through love, people and moments, and slowly allow me to come back together.

     

    I found out he was sick in spring, and he died in summer. The sun was beginning to slip behind the terracotta rooftop of my home in Central Valencia, Spain, when my phone began vibrating. I had finished teaching English for the evening and my feet were outstretched on the terrace, as I took in the honeyed light that makes you forget that the world can be cruel. When the phone rang I picked up right away, delighted to practice my now fluid Spanish with my father.

    He spoke, ‘the doctor says my cancer is terminal, and that I only have months to live’.

    I paused. I questioned. The soft breeze blew.

    ‘What do you mean?’

    ‘The cancer has spread- to my skin, my lungs, all over.’

    I drew in a breath.

    And with that, came the kind of loud silence that hangs, the only kind that follows the word terminal.

    Dublin. Image: Mark Dalton

    Dirty Old Town

    With that I made a return to Ireland, heading straight to my dad’s apartment in a heavy mist, the grey weather cloaking the city like a shroud. It was a stark contrast from sunny Valencia. Dublin was the same as it always was, red brick and grey, the dirty old town I had grown up in. I loved it and hated it at the same time. I sensed that there was a storm coming. The car radio had said so.

    When I arrived at his building, I paused before knocking. He opened the door, and immediately I could see the physical decline. In just a matter of months, the cancer had begun to eat him alive. Inglorious sickness, and soon to be untimely death. Through cigarette smoke, he pulled me into a hug, but the strong and macho man that I knew him to be was fading. He had grown more fragile, and instead of muscle I felt bone. His face had lost some of its colour. It was still my father’s embrace, but it carried the unmistakable weight of what had begun to slip, slip away. The potential to build on our relationship, get closer again – slipping and scattering like sand through open fingers.

    I saw in him, the fading light of a slow dying star.

    In the following weeks, I came to understand that there is no substance to time. Like light or air, it is ever present but cannot be grasped; even if you know it is running out. I also learned that there are limitations to language, and that sometimes more than words are needed to express meaning. Words cannot fill the void which follows such a loss. I did not want to believe that the doctor’s words were real when a fresh afternoon in April brought us to the GP. Sitting in a cold room in the practice in Phibsborough, she repeated the words again: ‘Months, or weeks, to live’. The words were loud, flying off her lips and into my consciousness. My father laughed when she said them, but I saw the pain in his eyes. He didn’t want me to hear them either.

    How can one possibly process this information? Did his life, or what it had been until this moment, flash before his eyes? Did the unfinished house in Managua, far, far away, rise like a mirage in his mind?

    But the doctor didn’t laugh, she was dead serious in fact. She furrowed her brow.

    ‘You’ll need to consider making funeral arrangements’, she said. I didn’t respond, and neither did he.

    Her words hung in the air and we allowed them to sit there for a while.

    Outside, cars whizzed by and people went about their daily lives, chatting about this, that, and the weather.

    The Hospice

    In the months that followed I was consumed by hospice visits, surrounded by illness.

    I was very much alive, and a regular attender in a space filled with dying people. His room was at the back, and had a view over the beautiful garden where flowers were in bloom. Pink hydrangeas, mostly, and potted plants that were scattered all around. On good days, we spent afternoons outside in the sunshine.  I would bring him out in a wheelchair, as by then, walking left him breathless. We sat together in the sunshine and shared cigarettes. It felt like a quiet rebellion on his part. No chemotherapy, no quitting smoking. The killing object between his lips had, perhaps, lost its power to kill. Without saying so, he knew the damage was done. Ordinary instants passed uneventfully as I waited for the world to shift beneath my feet. But the days were normal. We did not speak much about death. In fact, we spoke about everything other than what was actually happening. Denial and avoidance echoed – loud, and strangely comforting. Family came from overseas – Nicaragua and Atlanta – to visit. We took pictures, shared meals, and still, I could not cry. I felt as if I was a character in Dali’s Dreamscape, ever present to witness his melting clock and the unraveling of time. Reality danced and played and all we could do was wait for him to become the photograph on the mantelpiece.

    Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931.

    They say that people choose their time to die. When it happened I was the only one in the hospice room with him. It was a sunny day in mid June, in St Francis Hospice, Raheny. The head nurse, Anne, an angel complete with white hair and a heart of gold, had called me out of work to say that his condition had grown weaker; he was slipping. I got there as soon as I could, and once I ran into the room, his frail body reached out to me. The flip had officially switched, I was now the strength that my father needed, just as I had, my whole life, needed his. Although he could not speak properly, he saw me. There was still life in his eyes although the rest of him had given up. I think he knew that it was his time. Over the course of an hour or so, nurses came and went from the room. Outside, I could hear the soft clatter of trolleys and the low murmur of them exchanging life updates. They attended to us as they attended to other patients. His condition was notably weaker, but nothing unusual – they still thought he had weeks. Every noise from outside or notification on my phone was a terrifying reminder that time hadn’t stopped. But, to me, it had.

    We were approaching the summer solstice and the clouds outside drifted and resembled white silk on a canvas of deep blue. As the light in the room changed, my dad’s breathing did too—long, deep, and laboured breaths. He was slipping like smoke from a fire no longer burning. My heart racing, I panicked, rang the bell. Anne came to help. I spoke to him, telling him everything would be okay. He looked at me; a helpless look that still haunts me. Anne began to speak, words of comfort and affirmation. Softly she said ‘yes, nice and easy, that’s it, it’s happening’. I just held his hand. He gasped. And gasped again. Looked at me with those shining brown eyes. Fixed his gaze. And suddenly they were glazed. A glazed look that I will never forget. His hand slipped from mine, and went cold. Silence. Anne walked over, gently took his silver bracelet off and placed it on my wrist. The room was still. But of course, it was filled with pain and release. She closed his eyes.

    There is a fine line between life and death, and in that moment I experienced it. I left the room and went into an adjacent one; a reading room overlooking the garden, intended just for visitors. I cried out louder than I ever had before. Everyone around heard me scream. Finally, the emotion had surfaced. The tears had come.

    Or should I say: the release of love.

    There is no proper way to grieve, just as there is no overarching meaning to be found to life. Letting go feels like a betrayal. But perhaps it is essential for the living to stay living, while the dead remain close to our hearts, forever. Just maybe this is how we keep living—carrying our loved ones; not in the past, but in the breath between ordinary moments.

  • The Comics of Yesteryear

    Most people whose Irish childhood was spent between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s wistfully remember the comics then available. They were mostly published by the DC Thomson company based in Aberdeen, Scotland. The Beano and The Dandy were read by boys and girls, and girls’ comics like Bunty and the School Friend (this for older girls) had wide appeal. For older Boys there were masculine comics like Hotspur, Tiger and Eagle, choc-a-bloc with soccer and World War II action stories. Brothers and sisters took an occasional peek at each other’s favourites out of curiosity.

    Nowadays I sometimes buy The Beano weekly or the Dandy Annual and give them to a woman I know who passes them on to her nieces and nephews. I notice that Lord Snooty and his Pals are still around; Desperate Dan still enjoys monster cow pies with an oxtail protruding through the side; the Bash Street Kids are up to their madcap antics, but they don’t get whacked nowadays by angry teacher because caning has been outlawed. Minny the Minx, tomboy forever, still enjoys smashing things with her home-made catapult, but is not smacked with her parent’s slipper. Multicultural Britain is deftly integrated into The Beano with Asian girls from Hindu and Muslim homes. Afro-Caribbean ethnicity is also given a place. There is no discussion as such about religious beliefs, but festive events like Christmas and Diwali are featured.

    Cultural Self-Confidence and Irish Comics

    Some efforts were made from the 1950s onwards to produce Irish comics that promoted the cultural norms and references of a state that broke from the values of the British Empire after 1922. These entrepreneurial efforts had limited success. Economies of scale was one limiting factor. The Irish population was either stagnant or only slowly increasing. The Irish comics had no income from advertising.

    In the 1950s there was a monthly Irish comic called The Leprechaun. In the 1960s and 1970s a comic titled Our Boys appeared, and one called An Gael Ōg which was for young readers learning Irish. These latter titles were produced by the Christian Brothers. Since the 1970s the educational Folens company has published Christmas annuals with titles like Súgra, Siamsa and Spraoi for parents to place beneath Christmas trees. Some Celtic themes, some aspects of contemporary life and some Irish language fun are included in the titles. These only appear once a year. Irish children still go to shops and newsagents to buy The Beano, Spiderman and a few American publications.

    Perhaps there’s a market for an Irish-produced monthly childrens’ comic? We have many illustrators of stimulating children’s books in Irish and English who could surely be attracted to such an enterprise. The movie animation industry in Ireland has contributed to films that were nominated for Bafta and Oscar awards. I hope some of this artistic talent can be garnered for the launch of a comic or two that Irish children and their parents would gladly read.

    Continental Comics

    Since the early twentieth century Italian children’s comics called fumetti (smoke puffs – the bubbles with cartoon dialogue) have appeared. During the turbulent 1930s and ‘40s chauvinism and fascism were extolled unfortunately, but contemporary Italy has happy-go-lucky children’s comics that appeal to nonpolitical tastes. In France and francophone Belgium since the early twentieth century there has been a plentiful supply of bandes dessinées comics. Astérix comic stories have portrayed ancient France to the delight of children and adults around the world for many decades.

    Incidentally, comics with lots of bubble dialogue are published by language teaching companies for people learning French and other foreign languages. The TEFL teaching English as a foreign language industry in Ireland could follow suit.

    A Zambian Comic

    While living in Zambia I occasionally read a comic called Orbit – the magazine for young Zambians, which was subsidised by the Ministry of Education. The magazine could be read by children from aged twelve upwards and promoted science, technology, nature study and fun within an African context. See this link for sample pages: Discovering “Orbit” – Zambia’s unique science and comic magazine – downthetubes.net.

    I recall posting copies of the comic to youthful Irish relatives and hope they absorbed positive impressions of African life.

    Indeed, at the Carnsore anti-nuclear rally in 1980 I sold specially imported copies of Orbit along with modern African novels and collections of proverbs.

    Perhaps, if kids today were to read more comics they might be less attracted to the dark world of the internet, and their imaginations might roam more freely. Finally, a comprehensive history of Irish comics might assist our understanding of the cultural formation of the children of yesteryear.

  • Ностальгия

    ‘I confess I do not believe in time.’
    Vladimir Nabokov

    On a hostel rooftop in Morocco, I met a Russian man who had not been home since the war broke out. I was there to catch the last of the sun and read my book in peace so when he first introduced himself I made no effort to be friendly. It soon became clear that he wasn’t motivated by any particular attraction to me, as I had immediately and arrogantly presumed, but because he had seen that I was reading Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. Some mingled instinct of nostalgia and boredom had led him to overcome his aversion to intruding on strangers, he explained.

    I invited him to sit and the conversation roamed freely. He described late spring in St Petersburg and the peculiar sense of dissolution that comes with moving through endless bars and the sun never setting. I told him about the St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin and people in green hats strewn on the bridges at dawn. We spoke about the war and about La Rochefoucauld and about rap. We agreed that Tolstoy was better than Dostoevsky; we disagreed about Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Soon it was dark so we got a six pack of Casablanca beers and sat by the pool. We shared a pack of Marlboro Golds and began to talk about heartbreak, naturally. He said that in Russian there are more specific words for sadness: Тоска, Надрыв, Грусть, Ностальгия. I gave him my pen so he could write them in the back of my book. When we finished all the beers he retrieved a half bottle of vodka from his room. We made light of our romantic humiliations. You can speak most openly with people you know you’ll never see again.

    I didn’t think about him again until recently, in a bookshop in Dublin, when I came across a copy of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which had come up that night. He’d urged me to give it another go, insisting it was worth it, even going so far as to say it was his best work, which isn’t an opinion you hear much. Even Nabakov said it was a dismal flop, and he wasn’t known for his humility.

    I should get it out of the way that I read Lolita at a formative age, close to Lolita’s age, in fact, and that I loved it completely without understanding it in the slightest. (I used to think this was a unique experience but over the years I’ve met many women like me.) Lolita is the book I’ve returned to most and my love for it has only deepened, though now I understand its awfulness. So, as a long time fan of Nabokov, I’m disposed to forgive his more unlikeable traits, which I admit are unlikeable in the extreme: his aristocratic disdain, his insistence on his own brilliance, his exhausting multilingual wordplay, his obsessive control over interpretation, his stylised indifference. Updike put it best: ‘I don’t like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.’ All Nabokov’s vices are displayed most opulently in Speak, Memory.

    It’s less of an autobiography than a record of personality. He sets down a few of his passions, such as lepidopterology, but more importantly, he catalogs his many hatreds. They range from small gripes with Freud’s theories or disagreements with ignorant critics to the amazingly vague, such as music (‘an arbitrary succession of more or less annoying sounds’), or sleep (‘I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of genius…the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.’) Every time I’ve attempted to read Speak, Memory I’ve gone in with good intentions and every time I’ve been thoroughly defeated.

    This time, however, the book seemed to speak directly into the conversation with the Russian man on the hostel rooftop in Morocco. I saw it as a story about exile and nostalgia, and I wondered if he had urged me to reread it because he understood that neither of us had been home for years, though his reasons were far graver and sadder than mine. The word nostalgia, as you may already know, comes from the Greek νόστος, ‘return home’, and ἄλγος, ‘ache’.

    Speak, Memory tells the story of the author’s aristocratic childhood in Russia at the turn of the century, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that forced him to flee, and his attempts to build a new life in America. Early on, Nabokov makes it clear that his project is not political but sentimental, addressing a brief chapter to ‘the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.’ ‘My contempt for the emigre who hates the Reds because they stole his money and land is complete,’ he explains. ‘The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.’

    Out of that childhood he creates something mythical and shadowless. He elevates to epic proportions something that is, in fact, very ordinary. He misses his beautiful mother and the garden where he used to play. He wishes he could go back. But he can’t admit it so straightforwardly so he invokes the Muse, like Homer. The Muse steps in and the past rushes back, intact. ‘I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.’ The motivating impulse is against oblivion. Like with the butterflies he pins to a board, he wants to take the moment in all its impossible detail, to fix and immortalise it. The enemy is time, which pulls you away from everything you love. Memory is a tool for defeating time.

    Nabokov’s exile isn’t just a matter of geography or politics; it’s a spiritual condition marked by the loss of a world that no longer exists. Speak, Memory doesn’t progress logically, it circles back on itself, drawing connections through motif and image rather than sequence. Its structure mimics the strange, folding logic of memory, where one detail can suddenly trigger a whole Proustian journey of the mind.

    This associative structure is how diasporic cultures preserve history. It is encoded in fragments, in music, in idioms, in rituals that seem personal but are weighted with collective meaning. The longing for return, or for a wholeness that never fully existed, becomes formal rather than simply emotional. Nostalgia is a structural feature. It organizes the past via symbols. In such contexts, the ache of memory is not a flaw. It is how identity endures across distance.

    In the back pages of my book, I still have the man’s careful, looping words in Cyrillic: Тоска, Надрыв, Грусть, Ностальгия. I’ve forgotten the precise differences between these shades of sadness, but the point remains: not all nostalgia is the same. There is the soft kind, the sentimental kind that sells postcards and heritage tours. But there is also a harder kind: nostalgia as mnemonic, as survival instinct.

    Feature Image: Walter Mori

  • Review: The Occupant by Jennifer Maier

    How would you feel upon discovering the objects of your daily, habitual use—ordinary objects of every imaginable function and variety—were inspirited, sensitively keen observers with their own desires, gripes, preoccupations, and ways of understanding the world?

    This is precisely the brain-tickling puzzle Jennifer Maier’s newly-released third collection The Occupant (University of Pittsburgh Press) shakes, opens, and pieces together with feeling and skill. A deft mingling of prose and traditional poems offer pathos, wit, and vulnerable, costly wisdom as 30-odd objects speak from the vantage point of their respective individual existences alongside the titular “occupant,” – an unnamed woman living alone to whom they belong; and whose point of view is also poetically inhabited.

    Maier is at her best in these moving poems, which deliberately rely on the rhythms of one person’s quotidian existence and ‘stuff’ to raise urgent, profound questions about human life and experience. Take, for instance, the goosebump-inducing rebuke of “Alarm Clock” –

    –                       How like you not to see

    that even I, untouched by time, can’t keep it.
                –           Some days I want to drop my hands

    in futility at the way you equate passing with
                –           dissolution: each tick a small erasure,

    like the beat of your own heart: one less,
    –           one less. And have you ever stopped to think
    not even you can spend a thing you can’t possess?

    The wonderful tonal panoply of this collection—which moves with the poet’s characteristically fluid grace through everything from wry humor (Think opposites attract?//Ix-nay on that) to loneliness (The woman wonders if she has taken up knitting because she has no children) to existential angst—is enabled by the dynamic marriage of Maier’s own prolific emotive range with the metaphysical conceit at play throughout The Occupant; which includes in its opening pages Paul Éluard’s words—“There is another world, but it is in this one” –a marvelous and discreet key unlocking the pages that follow.

    In penning this review, I found I couldn’t waste my privileged position as Jennifer Maier’s MFA student-advisee. She was good enough to tell me (following the careful consideration with which she approaches even the smallest endeavor) what inanimate object she would herself elect to become for eternity. (I told her I’d be a gargoyle, which is accurate, if mildly out-of-pocket) She went with a rather more elegant selection—

    ‘As ever, I would be torn between beauty (my French Empire walnut bookcase) and utility (a whisk, or a pair of scissors).  But if I had to be a single object for eternity, I think I would be a mirror – a beautiful one, to be sure.  As a mirror, I could encounter a wide variety of faces and objects and reflect them back, neutrally, without preconceptions. And I would certainly enjoy observing the private responses—satisfaction, dismay–of those searching my reaches for “what they really are,” or believe themselves to be.’

    Because of the immense and obvious thematic consistency, I wondered if Jennifer had encountered a recent, fascinating-if-head-scratching development in philosophy. I shot her an email:

    Are you familiar with the (quite new!!) trend in metaphysics called Object-oriented Ontology?? There’s SO much natural overlap with your book that I think I’ll have to highlight the connection.

    In brief:

    Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. For object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal ontological footing with one another.

    She replied—

    I was not aware per se of Object-oriented Ontology, but the objects in my home – or in the Occupant’s, for that matter – may well be “ontologically exhausted,”

    especially today, when I’m trying to get everything back in order after last week’s renovations and painting (I decided to do the same color in the living room—Farrow & Ball’s “Elephant’s Breath,” partly for the name, and partly because I love how it slouches between gray and lavender, depending on light and time of day)

    Ontological exhaustion is no joke—person or saucer or spider—and the remedies seem few and far between. Even so, The Occupant’s occupant appears to find a strange, imprecise respite in Maier’s closing poem; in the character of the light, which may be instructive for us all:

    –             Time is flowing forward again; sunlight gilding
    this still room in the house of the mind that deplores a vacancy as, then and
    now, the Occupant looks up from her writing to trace particles of dust drifting
    everywhere in the air, alighting on every surface.

    Jennifer Maier’s work has appeared in Poetry, American Poet, The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, The Writer’s Almanac, and in many other print, online, and media venues. Her debut collection, Dark Alphabet, was named one of “Ten Remarkable Books of 2006” by the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. Her second book, Now, Now, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2013. She serves as writer in residence and professor of modern poetry and creative writing at Seattle Pacific Universit

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • The Inscrutable Mr. Scruton

    At the end of Roger Scruton’s short book On Hunting, an out-of-print memoir about the British conservative philosopher’s discovery and participation in fox hunting during middle age, Scruton focuses on the final days of his cob Bob. Shorn of the energy needed to gallop in herd-like fashion through the landscape as a part of the hunt, B cuts a forlorn figure. Like a boxer no longer fit for the ring, he appears to live a half-life, waiting ominously for the end to come:

    The time came when he could no longer hunt; nor could he stay in the field, where he would overeat and become bloated and hobbling. Nor could he be ridden, since deprived of hunting, he became increasingly curmudgeonly and depressed, shying at every flutter in the hedgerow (p.131).

    Scruton’s memoir is a defence of country life as it manifests in the sport of fox hunting, a sport banned in the UK on animal rights grounds. Some call the text polemic. Others a rant. Disillusioned with life, the ‘post-modern’ as he calls the contemporary age, Scruton takes refuge in the Cotswolds where he begins riding a pony called Dumbo. Slowly, like a magnet pulling him in, he discovers the hunt. He is soon a true believer. His life changes dramatically through this discovery, as an obsession takes him in its grip. At one point, having taken up a US academic post, Scruton flies home every Friday to hunt at the weekend. He finds in the hunt the essence of an England he academically locates as the springboard of conservatism, a melting point of class interest that pushes against the prevailing accusation that fox hunting is the domain of the posh. Scruton claims fox hunting is an alliance of country folk across class barriers, the trace of an older community life that respects nature as Other to the human realm.

    But he doesn’t stop there. A sentimental urge to dismiss fox hunting as a sport, Scruton argues, lends it cruel and barbarous as an activity, lacking modern sophistication. The fox is invested with piety. Animals are rendered redundant rejoinders of pity and sentiment. Nature, Scruton believes, has little room for pity: the wild takes root in the multiple forces of the herd. Scruton writes of Bob’s impending retirement as a lament to the cob’s lack of purpose when he has been removed from the expenditure of hunting – the ‘flourishing’ of the horse in a multi-species environment.  He turns to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence by way of defending the practice of fox hunting as a sport that requires the eternal recurrence of the individual fox to protect the general species. The traditions of country life depend on renewing the species to maintain the hunter-gatherer on the land. This, ultimately, accounts for an attachment to the natural world.

    To read and engage with Scruton’s writing is not to necessarily agree. One of his critics Jeanette Winterson, appears on the sleeve lauding the book as brilliant and horrible in equal measure. Scruton’s father lamented Old England’s vanishing but had little truck with countryside traditions his son was drawn to. My father, in contrast, was a hunt master and a GP heavily invested in the family planning movement in the West of Ireland (he was involved in legalising family planning as a medical resource). He saw little contradiction in sitting atop nature’s totem as a progressive modern. His interest in tradition did not extend to the Church, its hierarchy or the power it yielded. Like Scruton, my father was drawn to the cross-class dalliance of a sport I was introduced to as a child, a multispecies environment made up of horses, hounds and humans that left a considerable mark as a source of moral debate. The impact of my own involvement with the sport was not just experiential. It was philosophical to the point of ontological. For in the throes of the hunt, horse and human give up their singularity, adrenaline mounts and the normal limits of everyday life are transgressed. The horse jumps fences it would not ordinarily entertain, outside of the collective embroglio of the hunt. An energy pulsates through the collective, as Scruton notes, that engenders the primeval, pre-modern, pushing the group beyond the boundaries of a day to day ‘identity’ that takes root as a singularising force. Like Winterson, I find Scruton’s text both fascinating in parts and deeply problematic in others.

    Scruton’s distaste for modern culture is prevalent across his memoir. He has a disdain for New Labour and Blair’s alliance with Britpop: a regressive force he finds wrapped up in the trimmings of progress. He fails to look outside the official corridors of power, at the parallel culture that rose in the late 80s amidst the slack spaces of recession England. Rave was banned and supressed like fox hunting in the 90s. Scruton hardly mentions a phenomenon that shares many of the melting pot properties he finds in fox hunting, albeit settling in rural spaces after its suppression. Rave culture, as Simon Reynolds and Jeremy Deller respectively argue, loosened the class divide so that tradesmen meshed with students, hooligans with new age travellers, and a culture evolved that transmutes the becoming-animal of the herd into the collective imbroglio of the dance. Scruton does, funnily enough, equate hunting with dancing at one point in his text. The point of intersection, however, lies in class dissolution, de-individuating properties of the collective and an energy manipulated by the adrenaline-fuelled order of the huntsman qua DJ. Hunting and raving manifest in collectives, the chaos of the herd managed and given unity by the totemic figure of the huntsman and the DJ. Both forms of congress are marked by slow tempos succumbing to the impetus of insistent speed: the beat line that affects the dancers, the scent that regales the horse and hound moving, pack-like, across terrain humans follow in suit.

    Does Scruton miss these cultural outlets? Outlets that generate the same collective spirit Scruton finds in hunting? Scruton laments the erosion of rural practices that bind people in labour. Profound alienation comes with modernity, a symptom of a society Scruton feels increasingly enframes nature as instruments. Animals that roamed the land as fellow beings across a multitude of species are readily encountered as instruments with no recourse to the broader collective challenges of the species. One does not have to agree with Scruton, or indeed agree with his support of fox hunting, even his turn to Heidegger, to feel some kind of affinity with the malaise that drives him from the city. I felt a similar malaise. I became disillusioned with suburban city life. Like Scruton, I was fed up with middle class suburbs and customs. I moved to the country in 2017 to get close to a more organic life.

    Scruton leaves London to embrace the last vestiges of old England. Later this year, I will publish a memoir A Sheepdog Named Oscar: Love and Companionship in Rural Ireland with Dopplehouse Press in the US about moving to the country like Scruton from the perspective of a sheepdog I found on a desolate farm. I discover the old of Ireland. For many years, I disliked Scruton. I saw him as a toff philosopher who represented everything I disliked about toffs in general. I read his book on hunting out of curiosity, and although far from seduced by his argument, valued his reflections on the old. I began to recalibrate my memories of riding horseback in the West of Ireland. One of my abiding memories, and one triggered by Scruton’s text, is jumping stone walls pushed on by the adrenaline that seemed to lift me out of myself. The ‘I’ of individuated self-trappings seemed to momentarily evaporate in time. I resisted the lure of the hunt as a sign of moral decay and spent a lifetime exploring the collective dissolution of the ‘I’ in other transcultural forms. Two events occurred that led me to reflect on this earlier time in my life as part of a book that pressed my own interest in an old vanishing Ireland. First, my father died in a car crash. He was travelling home from a point-to-point in Ballingary in County Tipperary when he collided with another car (Scruton mentions point-to-points as social extensions of the hunting community in his book). I missed a call the evening before, when I was driving from Ballybunnion with kids in tow. My father was doing something he always did, I thought. He could wait. He left behind horses, cats and dogs, and acres of land.

    The second event is captured in the memoir title. It concerns finding a sheepdog named Oscar on a rundown farm, part of an old ascendency listed estate in the wild of East Clare. Oscar was living there alone, and little is known about his early life. He was undoubtedly bred to work sheep and cattle. His demeanour, long-haired and a little bigger than a typical border collie, has been described as a collie and working sheepdog. An animal that is not a pet. The book tells of rehabilitation against the rhetorical ‘where are you?’ that aggravated the mind of a son dizzy with loss. Over the four years explored in the book, a rabbit hole is travelled similar to the hole Scruton discovers in middle age. Scruton absconded to the countryside from London, took refuge in age-old traditions of the land. I too, absconded and took refuge. Unlike Scruton, however, who found in nature the mantra of the herd, the hole pulled me back into an Ireland I had lost touch with over decades of city living, rooted in the symbiotic cultivation of care between a sheepdog and me. Simply, I had to understand a ‘companion animal’ that beyond all consideration of creatures and pets I had encountered before seemed to live on my timeline alone. I wanted to understand symbiosis between species as an ontological foundation of life.

    I began the text as a project. A story that would tell of finding and rehabilitating Oscar in words and illustrations, against the realisation that my father was really gone, during the Covid 19 lockdown. I had extra time on my hands due to the restrictions and sought to make hay while I could. The story starts in 2017 in East Clare, on an abandoned farm and ascendency estate before coming full circle in the summer of 2020. By writing a book about a companion dog that led me to the inscrutable Mr. Scruton, along with many of those who sit on the opposite side of the animal rights debate – Nobel Laureates such as J.M Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk – I was able to find solace, away from the debilitating lockdown, in a world of thought and action.

    The book focuses on symbiosis and companionship. How does symbiosis manifest between a dog and handler? How important are interspecies relations based on work? Unlike nimble short haired dogs running at break net speed, spitting their fire at sheep beckoned to move at the command, subject to a master’s whistle, Oscar is a slow and meticulous mover. Everything happens through his eyes. To understand his behaviour, a being that arrived when the reality of my father’s death was beginning to hit home, I did a Scruton and turned my focus on working animals – went down a rabbit hole of all consuming proportions. But unlike Scruton, I returned to the surface with one unanswered question. I was propelled by a more obtuse problem. Is it possible, I ask, for a nonhuman animal, a dog, to care for a human? For Scruton, the animal fascinates in its instinct, coming alive in the multispecies hunt, like a sheepdog running the galley in line with the farmer’s commands. Symbiosis between nonhuman and human brings benefits. But the question that propels my focus in A Sheepdog Named Oscar is another: can nonhuman animals really care for humans? Is to care a transaction that brings more than utility?

    Perhaps a rhetorical question. A question, or plural, destined for the never-ending to and fro of analysis. But in asking this question I was delving into a minefield that encompassed so much of what is real. By standing on this minefield, I was peering into another world. For years I tried to get Oscar to swim in some way. At the beach, when the tide had come in, I would run into crashing waves in the pretence that I was engulfed by water, the froth of the ocean spinning around in all directions. And though he became visibly frustrated, agitated, dipping his toes in, he refused to swim. He never made it past first base. Sometimes, when crossing a stream near the woods around the corner from our house, I motioned to push him in. I hoped instinct would kick off and he would overcome his fear. But it was too difficult. I could not entrust myself to do it. He trusts me not to hurt him. And I worry that pushing him into the water will hurt him. He looks at me, like he knows things are awry, and his drooping and begging face seems to say so. Scruton criticises animals’ rights activism that, he believes, confuses nonhuman and human. He believes a kind of confusion satiates the impulse to do good (the Disnifying process, as he calls it). Perhaps, in not pushing Oscar, I am not shielding him. Maybe he wants to fall in and swim, and I inevitably hold him back? Walt Disney writes the script and draws the animation. Or something like that. But this argument doesn’t convince me entirely. Too much runs counter.

    Anecdotes rush in. There’s one about swimming, from Sunday of the August Bank Holiday, in 2021. We are driving across county lines to collect our son Anton from a friend’s house in Kilkee and decide to make a family day out. It is high summer, perfect for a picnic and swim. We stop off in Kilrush after seeing, from the car, groups of people picnicking and sunbathing beside water. Then we wander down to the rocks, lay our towels out and keep Oscar on a leash. There are kids and dogs on the beach and people might start to get uppity about him wandering.

    I decide to cool off and tell the gang to mind my stuff. I release Oscar from the leash and let him sit at the rock. I am of the impression he will wait on the sand while I swim, his concentration fixated on my body descending into the water. I make my way further, submerging myself in water shallow for a considerable distance. To swim I need to walk out at least a hundred meters, where there is only one person whose body is fully submerged in water. I push through the water, making incremental advances until the water reaches my waist and then I dive through the water, swimming as best I can in the shallow terrain. The water deepens until eventually I am swimming freely, the silver rays of sunlight bouncing off the surface.

    ‘Get him out. He’s filthy. Dogs aren’t allowed to swim in the estuary,’ the other guy swimming beside me shouts over in my direction. I remember realising it was the estuary we were in, and it was why the water was so shallow for so far, but not really taking in what he meant about a dog. Then I turned to face in towards the beach, where the other swimmers were looking. About one hundred and fifty metres from the shore, Oscar was swimming towards me.

    His head was just above the water line, but I could see that his legs were working in overdrive beneath. I told the other guy swimming who began remonstrating about Oscar swimming like a war had broken out to take a hike. The ‘F’ word might even have been used. I made the point that Oscar was probably a lot cleaner than most of the humans happily swimming in the estuary.

    Oscar swam around my back, circling me until I could hold him, my feet touching the ground. In the moment of touch, the two hearts of two species rubbing against one another, I thought of many times I tried to coax him into water and failed. What had changed? Why did he leave the others and act, pushing against whatever sensation is made manifest in language as ‘fear,’ to be by my side. What was he doing when pushing himself into an experience so foreign to his nervy nature? He was not a swimmer. He hated water. He was a sheepdog bred for land.

    Few sights have overwhelmed me to a point of astonishment, as the one of Oscar swimming in the estuary so far from the beach, an astonishment that captivated my wife and son to the same degree as they watched him swim towards me. In Jason Molina’s ‘Lioness,’ the artist sings of two lions who fall in love. One is on one side of the Nile, the other lives across the river. Their attraction compels them to risk their lives to swim out into the river so that they can meet each other eventually. At a pivotal moment, Molina sings the critical refrain on repeat ‘I will swim to you, I will SWIM TO YOU.’ The song is not really about a lioness. It is about burning rocks of love, that makes two hearts beat as one. It is, for me, about an animal too afraid to swim until a friend and master is in danger. A Sheepdog Named Oscar is an attempt to understand these burning rocks, as expressed in Molina’s refrain ‘I will swim to you.’ These lines manifest as a kind of love that evolves from the blood of a sheepdog and touches a human. Care that emits from a human and touches the life of the nonhuman who swims to him. The sheepdog who watches another fall into water and who leaps into action. What compels Oscar to swim through the cold and alien water, so that ‘I’ and ‘you’ can melt into the temporal plane of ‘we?’ Is it simply love, designed to show humans it exists outside the limitations of the human realm?

  • Electronic Music: ‘stepping into a space of anticipation’

    I play electronic music, experimental ambient sets or hypnotic techno sets. It’s exciting to begin a set, stepping into a space of anticipation. The audience doesn’t know what’s to come, nor do I. I start with something and if I’m lucky, I catch them – they follow me. Together, we create a journey in the very moment. I feel the concentration in the room, the energy shifting, and I adapt, choosing the next track, deciding when to layer it on the other, manipulating the tonality, intensity and speed of the track, laying the foundation stones for the subsequent trip…

    It needs a little while to let go of the rest of life, of everyday thoughts, to feel into yourself with your eyes closed and then – finally to dissolve in the darkness accompanied by flashes of coloured light, immersed in the mass of moving bodies. You become part of the whole, swaying as one, moving uniformly, like a vast, flowing, breathing organism – connected here on the dancefloor where identity dissolves and perception reshapes itself: time blurs, bodies merge, the individual dissipates into the collective.

    It can be truly spiritual. In this experience, you forget yourself entirely, your body, your thoughts, your presence. You let go of everything. You don’t think, you just feel, you follow, you become. Like water you adapt, you yield, you move with the currents, faster, slower, dissolving into rhythm, merging with vibration. Water is fluid, like identity, layered, ever-changing, in a constant process of becoming. It carries both clarity and ambiguity, flowing freely yet shaped by its surroundings, suspended between movement and stillness. Boundaries shift, the line between self and environment blurs. You are neither fixed nor defined; you are in motion, open to change. Everything is allowed, everything can happen.

    Image: Olena Goldman

    These are transitional moments, where structure dissolves and individuals arrive at a threshold where identity is fluid and communal experience transcends social hierarchies. This is how Victor Turner describes rituals (1969). The dancefloor, much like a ritual space where music dictates movement, where sound sculpts space, is where a new kind of freedom emerges. It is a place outside of everyday roles, outside of expectations, where for a moment, nothing is fixed. Turner speaks of liminality, of states in which the usual order is suspended, and something new can take shape. That is exactly what happens here: identities blur, connections form in ways they wouldn’t elsewhere, and everything feels open, undefined, possible.

    It is rare to be carried away like that. It’s magical. Unpredictable and each time original. Both the DJ and the audience are surprised, overwhelmed, grateful for this truly sacred moment of presence and synchronization. A fleeting peace of mind.

    This dissolving is in the purest sense meditative – also for the DJ. A set is never just their own, it is co-created, woven together in the moment, unique, ephemeral, unrepeatable. The DJ is not a solitary figure but a responsive entity, deeply intertwined with the audience. They do not dictate the atmosphere, they translate and amplify it and therefore have to be deeply concentrated. The energy in the room is never the same, it is dependent on the sound system, the light, the composition of people, their level of awareness of the fact that everything contributes to the situation, the experience. And it depends on the kind of space that is given. Can people trust, do they feel safe, are they open, do they respect? The energy changes constantly and the DJ has to sense these shifts, adapting to them in real-time, building, withholding, intensifying, releasing. DJs are looked at as in charge, they are in a power position but it is much more a collaborative, spontaneous cooperation of the delicate, symbiotic relationship between the DJ and the crowd. Everything is a shared responsibility: every time searching for a new balance.

    Image: Francesco Paggiaro.

    We shape everything by the way we interact. And all is based on the shared possession and experience of our senses at this very moment; overlaying everything: the music we all hear.

    Techno is a pulse, a steady bum bum bum bum, as Underdog Electronic Music School puts it in words in their YouTube Video “The Ten Rules of Techno“. The kick, four-on-the-floor or broken-up, lays the foundation, a force that grounds everything in 1, 2, 3, 4… But this is not rigid. Techno moves, it steers, it teases. The drum machine drives the sweat, bouncing off rumbles, basslines, toms, syncopations pull against, making you want to move while acid synths carve out liquid, geometrically branching paths that make you follow in unknown heights and depths. It is simultaneity, the parallel pursuit of different sequences, complexly layered, sometimes offset, mixed up, chaotic. Then there is the play between fullness and emptiness, it’s a game of tension and release, build things, fill things, scoop it up, scoop it up and then drop it: release back into simplicity or – into silence. Suddenly.

    It is an adventure, fluid, unpredictable. The presence becomes an experience: to dive into the sound, to let it carry you, beyond thought, into the here and now, into somewhere in space, into a dark forest deep within yourself, and then back into this room where you stand among others, feeling their presence, their nearness. You sense they are on the same journey. Your breathing synchronizes, heartbeats align. You are connected, finally, existing together, in this fleeting moment of peace. Finally.

    The British anthropologist and music journalist Simon Reynolds explores this idea in Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (1998), where he describes techno not as a genre built on melody or lyrics, but as something far more primal: a textural experience, a hypnotic layering of sound that dissolves the listener into a state of flow. He argues that techno’s essence lies in its ability to bypass conventional musical structures and instead operate on a deeply physical and neurological level – music that is felt rather than merely heard – an architecture of sound where basslines function like heartbeats, where synth waves stretch and contract like breath, where the absence of words opens space for unfiltered emotion.

    Music moves us, sooner or later, inevitably. We cannot resist, it happens naturally, subconsciously. It affects us on a fundamental level. It is human to be touched by music. And it is not just emotional, it is also physical. The sound waves go through our bodies, we shiver. The beat carries us forward, makes us move, quickening our breath, accelerating our heartbeats, making us sweat. We are hypnotized by the repetitive patterns, captivated, entranced, seized, our entire brain capacity taken up by it. It is uncontrollable. And it is so, so sweet to surrender to the power of sound, to let go, to dissolve into the collective moment, open and unguarded. This shared experience, this mutual surrender, this collective awareness of the here and now, it unites. It brings people together. It is a purely human experience, perhaps the most human experience. In that moment, you are stripped back to your essence, reduced to your body, to sensation, to togetherness, regardless of age, origin, social background, gender, or religion, it is unity, and that is incredibly valuable. It brings peace. It is gratitude, fulfillment. It reminds you that you are enough – all of us, together, each of us individually, free from pressure, from expectations, from obligations, from time, from fear. You do not have to do anything. You just are. And you are part of something vast, something beautiful.

    Image: Mark Angelo Sampan,

    Techno pulses through bodies, vibrating between structure and chaos, identity and anonymity, self and collective. Its relentless repetition, its resistance to narrative, creates an experience that is both deeply personal and entirely communal. A space where bodies are freed from definition, where identity becomes a shifting echo of sound and sensation. Here, structure collapses not into chaos, but into something more elusive: a moment outside of time, a fleeting immersion into something beyond the self. You follow the music, and you do not know where it will take you. That is trust. To listen to, to dance to, to experience techno is to let go, to be carried, to become rhythm. It is freedom.

    Feature Image of the author by Saskia Schramm
     

  • Who Let the Dogs Out? A Review of Babygirl

    If you count my two unsuccessful (all cough no high) undergraduate attempts to smoke weed and the later (nominally) more successful fractal bits of gummy I consumed (once) at a wedding reception, you must grant I possessed sufficient knowledge and experience with recreational imbibing to feel I was setting myself up for an evening of hilarity when I decided to get drunk and high (with friends, in case you were staging an intervention) to watch Nicole Kidman’s latest brow-raising toast of Tinseltown, Babygirl. Following an oyster repast and several gin martinis, my desire to witness the infamous milk scene in its original context (I’d seen an endless stream of momfluencers parodying it) became oddly irrepressible and very, very funny.

    Admittedly, the film and its lengthy press tour—red-hot topics for keen culture-vultures in the run up to Christmas—are slightly old news: Babygirl has been thoroughly ravished, digested, reviewed and psychoanalyzed by critics everywhere, and resultantly a chorus of voices primed a cacophony of conflicting expectations (liberating! brave! fresh! tired! cliché! smutty! dull! THE PERFORMANCE OF NICOLE’S CAREER!) I was eager to interrogate and settle. I’d read enough about the movie to anticipate a slightly intellectualized 50 Shades of Grey filtered through a modern, sex-positive female gaze. In this regard, the film delivers.

    “I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, the more you beat me, I will fawn on you: use me but as your spaniel,” cries love-sick Helena in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Forgive my mildly drug-addled brain for recalling this text—between severe bouts of giggling—and thinking ‘ok, so, same-same, but different’ upon encountering Kidman’s icy boss-bitch (woof) Romy Mathis, a powerful CEO who is so unhappy with her beleaguered conjugal sex life that she fakes *every single orgasm* with husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and self-pleasures to BDSM porn afterwards.

    We are quickly given to understand that Romy—beautiful, successful, and comfortably past age 50—is the deeply depressed prisoner of sexual repression and malaise. Her obvious adoration for her family (laid on rather too thickly by the writers, who *really* need us to understand women can be simultaneously kinky and family-oriented) and work-place chops do not sufficiently off-set the deficit she feels.

    Enter much-younger corporate intern Samuel, (Harris Dickinson) whose mysterious and increasing erotic appeal (situated squarely in classic dominance) ultimately overwhelms Romy, as the two engage in a very risky and protracted entanglement. Claims about Kidman giving the performance of her career are a somewhat doubtful—between Big Little Lies and A Family Affair, I’ve seen enough of her sighing deeply and speaking in breathy, hyper-feminine tones while gazing moodily toward the horizon. Kidman’s acting in this film is basically her classic haunted shtick, plus long, motel-entrenched orgasms.

    Speaking of the big o—if I withhold praise for this film’s acting, I mustn’t do the same for its valor. Lauding Babygirl for boldness makes sense. It does not merely permit, but celebrates unreserved expressions of female sexual pleasure in an ostensibly middle-aged woman; the key takeaway for every feminist with eyes and ears.

    After the big 4-0, female representation in tv and film is generally reduced to variations of ‘matriarch,’ ‘spinster,’ or ‘embittered housewife’; it has certainly not been the standard in Hollywood to explore (or even acknowledge) the sprawling erotic realities of women from whom the bloom of youth has departed. The film is self-aware enough to showcase Romy herself facing this pressure and subsequent insecurities—despite her high-powered position—and receiving Botox injections. In a moving, intimate nude scene, she is fragile and unable to accept Samuel’s assertion that she is beautiful. We can and ought to credit writer/director/producer Halina Reijn’s vision for liberated, integrated female sexuality defined by the mutual emergence of self-acceptance and at any/every age.

    The film attends partially and imperfectly to the psychology of kink, which we experience vicariously in Romy’s need to be told exactly what to do and when to do it, to the tune of the affirmation “good girl.” This is delivered in low, husky tones by Samuel, whose intuitive understanding of challenging dogs ambiguously imparts an intuitive understanding of Romy in the bedroom. The importance of consent gets a cursory dialogue nod, as does the oft-stymying intersection of power dynamics and danger with human sexuality. A savvy (if reductionist) review I read recently was entitled ‘She’s His Boss At Work, He’s Her Boss In Bed.” I was hoping for a deeper, more profound dive into the mental landscapes of Babygirl, but only Romy’s gets serious attention. Samuel’s character verges on lapsing into a one-dimensional tool or supplement to churn up her inner life—even at the end of the movie, we know next to nothing about him.

    For a dark erotic thriller, Babygirl delivers something like a fairytale ending. The explosive discovery of Romy’s trysts with Samuel ultimately serves to usher in a new age of sexual understanding and compatibility between Romy and Jacob, who are happily going at it (in a way that finally fulfills Romy’s needs) at the film’s close. The message is almost disappointingly simple—accept yourself and your desire to make rabid eye-contact whilst downing a very tall glass of milk ordered to the purpose on your behalf in three consecutive gulps..or something.

    I jest, but Romy’s liberation is achieved (too) quickly and (too) decisively; her guilt at being caught red-handed and abusing her professional position along the way all subsumed in new-found erotic contentment. Babygirl asks good questions, but ventures slightly pre-packaged, inadequate answers on the difficult and ever-evolving topics of sexuality, aging-while-female, and the corrosive nature of power.

    The most subversive thread in this film’s tapestry is Romy’s tacit refusal to grovel after an intentional act of enormous selfishness—her illicit liaison with Samuel—paired with the implication that she’s not a bad person—or a bad woman—despite this refusal. Male selfishness is so culturally ingrained and expected it’s become almost acceptable in society—unavoidable, a fact of life we must simply learn to negotiate while we shake our heads resignedly. But the insidious, unforgivable sin of female selfishness (a selfish act committed by a member of the sex universally expected to be demurring and sacrificial) is given a notably fresh turn in Babygirl’s deliberate avoidance of wholesale condemnation. Romy is neither Hester Prynned nor Anna Kareninaed—she retains her status, her relationships and even her composure. What she loses in struggle, conflict and grief is carefully regained in self-acceptance. That’s enough to get a ‘good girl’ from me, and it’s not just the gin martinis talking.

  • Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation

    Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel Annihilation offers a lengthy (526-page) disquisition on the journey to death, which is life itself, in all its tragedy and absurdity. In particular, the novel unfolds the preoccupations of an individual coming to terms with his impending demise. There is also a searing critique of prevailing cultural and institutional attitudes towards aging and infirmity. Apart from the economic dimension, the evident detachment and even callousness – strikingly apparent during the Covid pandemic – is surely linked to our inability to contend with new technologies. As Paul, the main protagonist puts it:

    What was the point of installing 5G if you simply couldn’t make contact with one another anymore, and perform the essential gestures, the ones that allow the human species to reproduce, the ones that also, sometimes, allow you to be happy?

    Annihilation is a tale, or a collection of interlinked tales, portraying a broken, unhappy, society, where the family unit has been seriously undermined, but perhaps surprisingly it offers hope to the disaffected, however obliquely.

    At first, it seems that only by embracing traditional values, including the Catholic faith, can someone experience the good life – here represented by the lives of the benevolent Cécile, Paul’s sister, and her stalwart husband Hervé, who both support the far-right National Rally.

    The more politically centrist Paul does, however, ultimately achieve contentment through romantic love, especially the resumption – after a ten-year hiatus – of sexual relations with his wife Prudence. Over the course of the novel, he seems to develop an appreciation of how such goods as pleasure, virtue, honour and wealth fit together, recalling the Aristotlean concept of eudaimonia, the highest good humans could strive toward, a life ‘well lived.’

    This intellectual and emotional journey occurs as he confronts the abyss, of death, which he considers ‘absolute destruction.’ Blaise Pacal’s words resonate with Paul: ‘The final act is bloody, however beautiful the comedy of all the rest: in the end dirt is thrown on your head and that’s it forever.’

    It is perhaps safe to assume that this reflects the author’s own eschatological assessment, although any kind of nihilism is strenuously resisted in the novel. Love, familial and romantic, and the exercise of reason, appear to be the saving graces.

    Moreover, despite the contentment that Cécile exhibits from a traditional outlook, her beliefs appear naïve – albeit her faith in a form of resurrection is vindicated. That religious adherence, however, seems to require the exclusion of doubt, and even the suspension of reason, and, importantly, the avoidance of absurdity. Revealingly, the author doesn’t acquaint us with her innermost thoughts and reflections. It’s as if these aren’t worthy of recounting.

    Sexual Obsession

    A somewhat comedic element is supplied by frequent allusions to sex and desire. Indeed, sexual references are an occasionally jarring staple found throughout Houellebecq’s novels, explaining in large measure his Marmite effect. What may verge on an obsession, does act as a useful critique of bourgeois propriety, which is artfully scorned.

    Perhaps the most amusing, and sordid, interlude among these sequences in Annihilation involves Paul deciding to visit a prostitute before he resumes carnal relations with Prudence – ‘a girl to check that it worked, as a sort of intermediary before coming back to normal sex.’

    By this point, the couple’s sex life has ended prematurely, in part because of Prudence’s New Age spirituality. Dietary choices are symptomatic of their wider alienation from one another. Revealingly, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss identified copulation with eating, as both processes involve a union of two complementary elements – une conjunction par complementairé. Prudence and Paul do not dine together.

    They also sleep in separate rooms in a luxury apartment on Paris’s Rue Lheureux. According to the narrator: ‘The coincidence’ of their joint purchase ‘was not accidental’, as ‘an improvement in living conditions often goes hand-in-hand with a deterioration of reasons for living, and living together in particular.’ The couple inhabit a neoliberal tragedy of endless choice and stifled desire.

    Having resolved to engage the services of a ‘high class’ prostitute once Prudence’s spiritual journey leads to a sexual re-awakening, he encounters a young woman called Mélodie in a dimly lit room. After some interplay – including what Bill Clinton claimed fell short of ‘sexual relations’ – Paul asks the young woman to turn on a brighter light, whereupon Mélodie’s true identity is revealed as his niece, Anne-Lise, wholesome Cécile’s daughter.

    It’s a pretty sick joke, directed perhaps at the Catholic values of Anne-Lise’s unknowing parents, although it seems no great harm is done to family relations. When next they meet Anne-Lise tells her uncle she is glad to have been able to help restore relations with Prudence. Thankfully her parents never get wind of the seedy liaison.

    Annihilation reveals a romantic side to Houellebecq nonetheless, as he tenderly depicts the re-flourishing of a loving relationship between Paul and Prudence, which endures to the end. Earlier in the novel, the narrator wonders: ‘Is it true that the first image that we leave in the eyes of the beloved is always superimposed, for ever, on to what we become?’ Despite outward disfigurement the ideal of love can endure.

    Unsurprisingly – this is a Houellebecq novel after all – there is a caveat, as the narrator portrays children as the agents of destruction:

    After destroying its parents as a couple, the child sets about destroying them individually, its chief preoccupation being to wait for their death so that it can inherit its legacy, as clearly established in the French realist literature of the nineteenth century.

    Spy Thriller

    Annihilation is also at a certain level a spy thriller, in which Paul, and his colleagues in the Ministry, untangle a wave of apparently unrelated and quite distinctive terror attacks through recourse to archaic symbols. This fascinating plotline, however, fades into the background as the more pressing question of mortality hoves into view.

    Indeed, Paul feels that the destruction of contemporary society and culture would not be an altogether unwelcome development: ‘the worst thing was that if the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.’

    Paul acts as a chef de cabinet to a senior, high-functioning Minister who is considering running for the presidency, but despite his obvious ability he ultimately lacks the egotistical drive, confiding to Paul, ‘the president has one political conviction, and only one. It is exactly the same as that of all his predecessor, and can be summed up in the phrase: “I am made to be president of the Republic”’

    The ensuing presidential election in the novel looks very like the last two that have taken place in France, where the National Rally candidate secures the largest share of the vote in the first round, but falls short in the second once disunited left-wing voters rally around a pragmatic centrist candidate. In the novel, and real life, this creates an unshifting political landscape, a technocracy dominated by a leadership cadre educated in the same elite institutions, who largely pursue the same neoliberal goals.

    The position of President thus becomes the preserve of a cynical, egotist such as the incumbent, who seems distasteful to almost everyone in France today. In the novel, Paul concludes that with the convergence of the media and political sphere, democracy is dead.

    More details Macron celebrating France’s victory over Croatia in the 2018 World Cup final in Moscow, Russia.

    Touching Account

    Above all, Annihilation is a touching account of a family brought together – at least for a while – by their father Édouard suffering a stroke that renders him ‘a vegetable’ according to his deeply unpleasant daughter-in-law, a vindictive journalist who has conceived a child with a black sperm donor, seemingly in order to humiliate her husband, Paul’s artistic and timid brother Aurélien.

    To start with Édouard is well treated in the care home, where the family, including his second wife, are permitted to play a nurturing role. This brings great improvements to his condition and despite continuing to be mute he learns to communicate once again. Conditions in the facility deteriorate precipitously, however, due to institutional in-fighting, to a point where Édouard’s life is threatened.

    This gives the author an opportunity to castigate contemporary Western attitudes towards the old and infirm left to rot in uncaring institutions. He contrasts these with the approach of many of those working in such places. Thus, ‘for most Maghrebis putting their parents in an institution would have meant dishonour.’

    In the end the family resolve to remove their father from the facility, contacting an unlikely band of anti-euthanasia activists who successfully organise a heist, spiriting the patient away. There are, however, repercussions for Paul due to it being exposed in an article by his malign sister-in-law, who has at this stage been spurned by the tragic Aurélien in favour of an African nurse. The author leaves us in no doubt about his views on euthanasia, which he sees as a symptomatic of European nihilism.

    Any novel is obviously not, and nor should it be, a systematic work of philosophy or sociology. Moreover, it would be simplistic to assume that Paul’s views cohere exactly with the author’s own. Nonetheless, Houellebecq’s unflinching account of contemporary society, mainly expressed through Paul, ought to raise alarm bells.

    Most of us are ill-equipped to deal with the deaths of those close to us, never mind our own. Technology is distorting our appreciation of reality, while supposedly rising living standards are not making us any happier. It would be easy to dismiss Houellebecq as a sex-obsessed sensationalist, but there are few contemporary novelists able to diagnose the ills of our society in such an entertaining manner.