Imaginative fiction offers invaluable insights into everything from national characteristics to institutional malaise and pathological violence. The musings of psychologists, philosophers and historians often appear clumsy and verbose beside the epiphanies that flow from the creative hand. Thus, the visions of long dead novelists continue to colour our understanding of who we are, and where we’re heading.
We can draw a distinction between imaginative fiction and the fantasy genre. The latter according to Iain McGilchrist ‘merely recombines what we are already familiar with in a new way,’[i] (p.340) whereas works of imagination bring new experiences into being. ‘A defining quality of the artistic process’ he argues ‘is its implacable opposition to the inauthentic.’[ii]
Authenticity should be distinguished from realism. Mythology and indeed allegory – as in the The Lord of the Rings – are distinct from fantasy. A myth is not a lie, as many, including our Taoiseach, seem to assume. Rather, as Northrop Frye put it: ‘It is obvious that the world we want to live in is mythological. That is, the world we construct is built to the model of a common social vision produced by the imagination.’[iii]
Besides a lack of authenticity, fantasy does not reveal a common social vision. Usually, it aims at entertainment – a gripping thriller for example – often featuring cardboard cut-out characters representing a particular virtue or vice. At worst, we find simplistic manifestations of good and evil in a synthetic world.
This review explores whether Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Prophet Song (One World, London, 2023) belongs to the genre of fantasy. My motivation is to assess the artistic value of a recipient of a prestigious prize, and further examine why such an accolade might have been bestowed.
Successively Increasing Violence
The novel charts the struggles of a middle-class Irish family – seen mostly through the eyes of the mother Eilish – living under a far-right, fascist and, according to the headline writer in the Irish Times, totalitarian regime inhabiting what is recognisably Dublin. Here, constitutional rights no longer apply, and a malevolent Garda Síochana are imprisoning, without trial, opponents of a government we learn little about.
Members of the family are subjected to successively increasing levels of violence perpetrated by agents of the state, beginning with the arrest of the father of the house Larry, a mild-mannered trade unionist. It is certainly not fantastical to assume that a trade unionist would be targeted by a fascist regime. During the 1930s many were imprisoned and sent to Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, but especially under Mussolini in Italy ‘many even held key posts.’
A more subtle, and perhaps credible, account could have explored how a fascist regime co-opts individuals in positions such as that occupied by Larry – or even Eilish, a scientist working for a bio-tech firm. Larry does not appear to hold particularly radical views. He comes from the same background as an interrogating Garda, who he claims to have played GAA against while in UCD (p.9). Foregrounding the character of a trade unionist seems like a device allowing the author to proceed with his gory account.
Thus, we find police with batons ‘beating the marchers into grovelling shapes’ (p.30); ‘talk of internment camps in the Curragh (p.36); journalists being imprisoned (p.36); government control of the judiciary (p.58); and unmarked cars pulling up silently to lift people off the street (p.76).
What is seriously lacking in the novel, however, is any attempt to portray the insidious soft power of a fascist regime, which historically appealed to a bourgeois desire for stability and prosperity. Subtle forms of this were evident under Salazar in Portugal, who demanded that literary works observe ‘certain limitations,’ and embrace guidelines defined by the New State’s ‘moral and patriotic principle.’
Further, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels saw maintaining a feel-good factor as the essential role of propaganda. He did not want even der Fuhrer to appear in cinema news reels, believing that a subservient people should not be over-exposed to politics. Although conditions did worsen dramatically in Nazi Germany after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, throughout much of their rule the Nazis maintained high living standards, only inflicting extreme cruelty on minorities and ideological opponents among the German people.
In contrast, Prophet Song portrays a cascade of violence carried out by agents of the state in public spaces, alongside a rapidly failing economy, where food commodities run scarce. This culminates in what seems to be the wanton murder of the adolescent child Bailey: ‘The skin before her clouded with bruising, the missing and broken teeth… nails torn from his hands and feet … a drill through the front of his knee… the cigarette burns along the torso’ (p.272). The purpose of this horrifying sequence is unclear. Perhaps it reflects the author’s dark broodings on the latent malevolence of the human condition. Later, revealingly, we are informed that insurgents are ‘just as bad as the regime. (p.206)’
True believers, such as Mrs Stamp (the wife of the nominatively determined Garda Stamp), are colourless stooges, while Eilish’s new boss, the Teutonic-sounding Paul Feisner speaks ‘not the company speak but the cant of the party, about an age of change and reformation, an evolution of the national spirit, of dominion leading into expansion.’ (p.71) These are formulaic utterances, anachronistically recalling the 1930s. However, we find none of the magnetic charisma we might expect in a fascist leader, or the stored-up resentment and scapegoating that fuel their rise.
At best, we have Larry telling Eilish that ‘the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and say it enough times, then it must be so (p.20). But we can only wonder why anyone would accept such lies. There is no evidence of the infectious cynicism that Hannah Arendt observes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951):
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their tactical cleverness.
Ignorant Savages
Supporters of the regime are portrayed as ignorant savages: ‘tattoos emblazoning arms and throat … the man bringing down a bat upon the windscreen … [he] takes out his sex and urinates on the car, the apish laughing teeth as the man zips up and jumps down the gravel (p.139); who are barely literate: ‘the word TRAITER sprayed again and again in red paint.’
Thus, we find support for the regime emanating from unfortunate people at the bottom of the social ladder: ‘Two civilians are helping to build the checkpoint and she knows one of them, an odd-jobs man from the flats nearby, an ex-junkie with hardly a tooth in his mouth.’ (p.187)
There are suggestions that those in power are targeting minorities – such as when we learn that a certain Rohit Singh has been arrested – but no account is offered from the perspective of any minority group. A novel should not be an exercise in empowerment, but the prevailing cultural homogeneity in Prophet Song hardly diminishes the deadness of this account.
There are also apparent endorsements of an Irish economic model that produces galloping growth rates amidst a housing crisis and rampant homelessness. A sign, therefore, of the country’s decline in the novel is where ‘every day another international firm closes its doors and makes its excuses’. (p.124) We must assume the presence of multinational corporations in Ireland is ipso facto a good thing, rather than underlying the development of a two-tier society, now generating serious social cleavages.
There are nods to contemporary concerns, such as when Larry points to the ceiling and warns his wife to keep her voice down (p.5), but the characters rarely appear concerned about creeping surveillance, as violence is largely inflicted in random fashion.
Raqqa, Syria.
Depicting Another Country?
Prophet Song is a novel that seems better suited to the depiction of a post-colonial country, where a distinct ethnic or religious group has assumed control over the levers of power and monopolises violence in a divided society. It might have been written about Syria, where army and state have long been dominated by a distinct religious group.
It provides no insight into the insidious means by which a fascist government could take power in Ireland. The regime is a resident evil inflicting at times wanton suffering. Any such government would surely only appeal to the most base or desperate. This may reflect the author’s assessment of the human condition, but even if we accept there is a murderer in us all, it is surely incumbent on a fictional account to demonstrate how any diabolic metamorphosis occurs. Here the main characters are simply victims. In the absence of authenticity or a common social vision it should be consigned to the fantasy genre.
I do wonder why the novel has received critical acclaim, and the accolade of a Booker Prize? Aside from a general neoliberal degeneracy now infecting most cultural organisations that place a higher premium on sales potential than artistic expression, the best explanation I can think of is that it reflects, and arguably exploits, the anxieties of the British cultural establishment in the wake of Brexit and Trump, making it ‘crucial reading’ according to the The Guardian.
Essentially, it is a politically correct thriller ungrounded in political reality. Contrary to the feverish headlines, the November Dublin riot can be traced to decades of government neglect of the inner city; sporadic attacks on refugee housing do not reveal a broad-based political movement on the brink of power in Ireland. Perhaps the panel of Booker judges are oblivious to how – unlike many European countries – Ireland has not seen an upsurge in support for far-right parties. Even to suggest that we face the prospect of fascist, totalitarian governments across Europe stretches credulity.
With shifts in technology, contemporary forms of totalitarianism may be very different to what we have witnessed in the past, which is not to dismiss the relevance of dystopian prophecies such as Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). Sadly, Prophet Song offers no such timeless lessons.
Why does any of this matter? In an interview in 1994 Harold Bloom argued that what he described as a school of resentment had destroyed the art of reading, marginalising three thousand years of imaginative literature. He added ominously that if shallow authors are promoted for political reasons you will not augment memory or cause the mind to grow and that ultimately this would impoverish our imaginations.
[i] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (Yale, 2009), p.341
I sat for a while by the gap in the wall
Found a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball
Heard the cards being dealt and the rosary called
And a fiddle playing “Sean Dun Na Ngall” lyrics from ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’ by Shane MacGowan.
I wasn’t close to Shane – celebrity brings an understandable reserve – but he was someone I hung out with in latter years, travelled alongside, and helped take care for a short time.
I have also been told he gave a typically back-handed compliment to an article I wrote describing his last trip to London for the launch of an exhibition of his art work: “God he’s a windbag, but then so was James Joyce.” Needless to say, I am still chuffed. Alas, he was rather less enamoured by my amateurish songwriting – which I recall later in this piece. This at least provides some reassurance that he wouldn’t give a compliment unless he meant it.
Shane MacGowan‘s funeral mass on Friday, December 8 might have re-awakened a Catholic faith in its most ardent opponents, while conservatives regard it as scandalous. Who else could have summoned leading mourners into dancing joyously before the altar, after a sublime ceremony that merged tradition with frivolity, and formality with raucousness? In death, as in life…
Holy Mary Mother of God / pray for us sinners / now until the hour of our death…
In Shane’s mind, Mary was a powerful female icon. A warrior woman, ‘Calming her people’. He was capable of reconciling – as only a poet can – anger at the Church over covering up paedophilia, and what he viewed as a betrayal of the Irish Revolution, with a simple Catholic faith.
As with many second-generation Irish emigrants, Catholicism seemed intrinsic to his identity. Importantly, this was a choice rather than an imposition. However, while his heart throbbed with a paradoxically profane Catholicism, this was not to the exclusion of other faiths and traditions. The array of deities, daemons and angels festooning his mantlepiece suggested syncretic beliefs. Spiritual nourishment was maintained by a steady supply of pre-blessed Eucharists, ferried up from Nenagh. Shane could always get his hands on the best stuff.
Importantly, once the wild touring years with The Pogues had drawn to a close, he decided to move to Ireland to take up residence in his mother Therese’s (née Lynch) ancestral cottage in Carney Commons, County Tipperary.
Having been born in Kent, he could easily have lived out his days in England, mournfully recalling the old country, but Shane remained ‘Loyal, true and faithful’; coming home like a Fenian prisoner ‘From dying in foreign nations’. Even the demise of The Pogues can partly be attributed to his insistent Irishness: creative differences emerged when others in the band, many of them with no Irish background, proposed moving beyond an Irish sound, as the documentary If I Should Fall From the Grace of God – The Shane MacGowan Story reveals.
He returned, as he saw it, to Ireland when the Celtic Tiger was in full roar, restricting the pre-modern society he had encountered as a youth to the margins. It’s fair to say he struggled to reconcile himself to a brash, individualistic and increasingly homogenous society, but never departed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfEuXYpMIYc
Patrician and Spailpín
The Romantic poet W.B. Yeats and the Punk singer Shane MacGowan might be viewed as being at opposite points on a spectrum of Irishness: one epitomising a patrician Anglo-Irish literary tradition; the other a performer representing what Joe Cleary has described as the ‘spailpín [lit. ‘journeyman’] culture’ of ‘hard labour and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss … nurtured by two languages.’
Thus, when declaring his will in ‘The Tower‘ (1928), Yeats portentously claimed to be one of the ‘people of [Edmund] Burke and of [Henry] Grattan’. He also scorned ‘Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter’ and the ‘base born products of base beds’ in his valedictory ‘Under Ben Bulben‘ (1928).
In contrast, Shane MacGowan explicitly portrays ‘the slaves that were spat on’ from the Tower in his song – based on personal experience – about rent boys, ‘The Old Main Drag’ where the protagonist is ‘spat on, and shat on and raped and abused’. His oeuvre positively celebrates intoxication and fornication, although he was in many respects even more of a romantic, as tracks such as ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ and ‘The Song with No Name’ attest.
I heard Shane express his dislike of the Anglo-Irish poet – although he did record a version of Yeats’s anti-war poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’. He preferred the aesthetic of Brendan Behan in particular.
There is, nonetheless, a striking parallel. Both poets while living in London a century apart, consciously embraced their Irishness, which helped each of them develop distinctive voices. Yeats would no longer simply be a Romantic poet in the mould of Wordsworth: he forged a distinctively Irish Romantic tradition. Likewise, MacGowan would no longer be another Punk singer in the shadow of Johnny Rotten: he became an Irish Punk balladeer, and an inspiration to a rising generation of distinctively Irish song-writers.
In his autobiography, Yeats describes walking homesick through Fleet Street in the 1880s and hearing a little tinkle of water, whereupon he saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball on its jet that reminded him of lake water. ‘From that sudden remembrance’, he wrote, ‘came my poem “Inisfree,” my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.’
A body of water provides the title for perhaps MacGowan’s most poetic song, ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’, which features an aging Irishman dwelling on his youth in County Tipperary after many years of living in London. The rusty tin can and the old hurley ball is Shane recalling his own childhood. It’s a song that also conveys homesickness, joining Shane MacGowan’s soul to the great river of Ireland flowing through Tipperary – where his ashes are to be scattered – just as places in Sligo will forever be identified with Yeats.
Perhaps one day tourists will flock to The MacGowan county, just as they travel from far and wide to The Yeats County.
Protest Song
A few years ago a good friend of Shane’s and I took a song we had composed to him. It was a naive protest song about the government’s inaction on public transport that appropriated a melody from another song about trains popularised by Johnny Cash, called City of New Orleans. I added a few verses in a different key and thought perhaps it could work.
I continue to maintain that my friend’s decision to bellow it a capela was fatal to its reception. A little guitar might have taken the edge off it. In any case, Shane became apoplectic, demanding he stop singing, and immediately identified the source of the melody.
I guess you don’t become one of the leading lyricists in the world without having finely honed critical faculties. Having trawled my hard drive I can find no evidence of the recording I made of it, which is probably for the best!
It would have been nice to sing more songs with Shane, but he seemed depressed a lot of the time, and expressed frustration at a writer’s block that was inhibiting him. At least when we were travelling to London there were a few sing-songs, but it was clear then that the isolation and inactivity of the Covid years had taken a toll.
The scene before the funeral mass of Shane MacGowan in Nenagh.
Regrets
I hung on Shane’s every word, but he wasn’t the easiest of company. At times, I felt awkward about not being able to make out exactly what he was saying. A self-preservation instinct may also have inhibited me from being drawn too closely into his orbit. The atmosphere could be heavy and a bit self-destructive if you weren’t careful.
It wasn’t that he was drunk all the time. As he once put it, tongue-in-cheek, on the Late Late Show when he was interviewed by Pat Kenny: “in England I’d be regarded as an alcoholic but in Ireland I am a sissy drinker”.
He always seemed to have a drink in front of him, but was a sipper, abiding by certain rules agreed with Victoria. As she alluded to in her remarkable eulogy at the funeral, there are lessons on addiction to be drawn from Shane’s example.
Being drunk – playing the fool – might also have been part of Shane’s public persona. Exhibiting intoxication could also mask the insecurities of a savant or autodidact, who was expelled from school in his early teens. His reading and creativity were haphazard and unsystematic, and worn lightly. I suspect he would have been intimidated by haughty scholars interrogating his work.
Shane spent most of his final months in hospital, but I didn’t feel up to visiting him as my own father had passed away in the same hospital the year before. Anyway, I had the impression that a steady stream of friends and admirers were at hand.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
The music was the code. It was the transliteration of the style. It was not giving a bollocks in a thoroughly musical manner. It was fuck this and fuck that and frankly fuck you. A rockety life came with the territory. You didn’t have to be Irish. Their England had been influenced by that Ireland of the 50’s. Behan, Kavanagh, O’Brien. Roaring Boys all. Drunken, rackety, genius bores. And Shane could be as drunk and boring and rackety or he could write as beautifully as any of them. Bob Geldof, Waiting for Herb, 2004.
Night Crossing
As the ferry lurched out of Dublin port we reminisced on crossings of yore. In response to regretful talk about the withdrawal of the service out of Dun Laoghaire – which at least had a rail connection – Shane MacGowan recalled, with typical belligerence, “Dun Laoghaire was there before a fucking DART line,” before hissing reassuring laughter.
He then spoke wistfully of his grandfather telling him about how ‘lower order’ passengers would have to share decks with the livestock on board. It seemed a very different world to a Stena Lounge bereft of passengers on this night crossing, but at least the wine was complimentary, and Tina didn’t mind a fewmessers on board.
Indeed, the aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, of the Pogues was a throwback to a bygone Ireland – and Irish – often scorned by ‘respectable’ people. In particular, those compelled by economic circumstances to take up jobs ‘across the water’.
Shane MacGowan was born in Tunbridge Wells in Kent in 1957 to Irish immigrant parents, but spent his early youth living with maternal aunts and uncles in Puckane, Co. Tipperary. Formative teenage years were spent in 1970s London.
For the emerging poet, rural Ireland – for all its faults – seemed a fairy realm, enlivened by song and alcoholic excess, compared to the industrial decay and entrenched class system of England at that time. Having dabbled in punk with The Nipple Erectors he returned to his musical roots, forming the Pogues (from the Irish phrase póg mo thóin, meaning ‘kiss my arse’) in 1982.
He previously described the ‘Irish look’ the band self-consciously adopted:
The suits, black suits with white shirts which we wore, were Brendan Behan uniform and that’s why we chose them, not to look smart, but to look as if we could have come from any decade … We could have looked like people from the fifties, sixties, or seventies … we just looked like classic Paddies.[i]
Extended Fairground
As the night wore on, in particularly good cheer, Shane began humming a medley, beginning with the ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’, “When off Holyhead wished meself was dead / Or better far instead”, culminating in a vision of Irish inclusivity – at least before the men in the mohair suits moved in – at the ‘Galway Races’:
There were half a million people there
Of all denominations
The Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew,
The Presbyterian
Yet not animosity
No matter what the persuasion
But failte hospitality
Inducing fresh acquaintance
With me wack fol do fol
The diddle idle day
This evocation of carnival wherein social hierarchies disappear in joyful Bacchanalia helps understand what Shane MacGowan engendered with the Pogues during the 1980s: a two-fingered reaction to Thatcherism that helped define our Irish identity.
As the cultural critic Joe Cleary put it in Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Field Day, 2007) in the music of the Pogues: ‘The [Irish] nation is imagined as a kind of extended fairground.’[ii]
He adds, however, that with the Pogues: ‘this version of carnival is never allowed to become cosily celebratory because it is always shot through with sentiments of anger and aggression, sometimes strident, sometimes more muted.’[iii]
Hooliganism
The word hooligan derives from the surname of a fictional rowdy Irish family in a music-hall song from the 1890s. Later, applied to the antics of English football fans, steeped in post-imperial hubris, it took on angry connotations.
But the Pogues were all about the hoolie – a big noisy party – and unashamedly “Up the RA”, when it was still risqué to be so. Their song ‘Streets of Sorrow / Birmingham Six ‘refers to the plight of the Birmingham Six and Guilford Four and was censored by the BBC.
Their old school, rumbunctious hooliganism, fused elements of punk and traditional Irish music with the incantations that arouse from Shane MacGowan’s errant soul.
As Cleary puts it the Pogues, ‘merged the ‘modernist’- and ‘avant-garde’-coded aesthetics of punk with the ‘romantically’-coded idioms of the Irish musical forms.’
He argues:
For the Pogues to yoke together … the avant-garde future-orientated metropolitan aesthetics of punk, with the retro aesthetics of céilí and the broadly political edginess of the pub-ballad scene was an inspired act not only of musical synthesis but of semantic sabotage as well.[iv]
Alongside self-destructive excess there was something serious going on, ‘saving folk from the folkies’ as Elvis Costello put it[v], while asserting a brash, yet accommodating Irish identity – after all, many of the band were not even Irish – notwithstanding an unashamed approval of violent Republicanism, based on a long historical memory of famine, torture and resistance.
The success of the Pogues and Shane MacGowan – who transcended traditional Irish music to become a rockstar celebrity – may go some way to explaining an enduring, relative openness among Irish people to new cultural encounters – even multiculturalism – at least by comparison with erstwhile colonisers.
Like it or not, any witness to an average Saturday night in Dublin can testify to the presence of a carnival of sexual deviancy, donnybrooks and nonsensical pranks. This has become a generally inclusive ritual for Irish self-expression.
In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (London, 2021), David Graeber and David Wengrow suggest ‘[t]he really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world.’[vi] That just about sums up the Pogues’ contribution to Irish culture.
After the Pogues, along with their precursors and followers, we would wear a distinctively wild Irishness as a badge of honour, invite everyone to the party, then regale each other with far-fetched stories of nights that should have ended sooner, at least before the cops turned up, when the fun really started.
The Big Red Fun Bus
With the Irish Sea bathed in pale moonlight on a blissfully calm night, conversation turned to Westerns. With a glint in his eye Shane reeled off his favourites – ‘The Life and Times of Judge Roy Beans’ (1972), ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962), “with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne competing for the same girl”, and ‘The Searchers’ (1956).
But fittingly for a bard whose songs are steeped in tales of underdogs – like the navigators who ‘died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where / Save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur’ – his favourite was the more recent ‘Geronimo: An American Legend’ (1993), in which, unusually, a Native American victim is the hero.
By now the rest of our posse seemed to be asleep – it must have been passed 4am – but Shane’s mind was racing in this liminal phase. The high life of London beckoned and the rockstar in him was growing giddy.
We had another Brendan to thank for the drive to London. He and Shane’s full-time carer Elizabeth provide vital assistance and crucially, a sense of humour, in support of Victoria, Shane’s loving wife.
Once installed in the hotel room there was a chance for more songs, including a few Percy French ditties. Then an overlooked classic from his underrated period with the Popes: a homage to the nineteenth century poet James Clarence Mangan: ‘The Snake with Eyes of Garnett.’
It begins fittingly:
Last night as I lay dreaming
My way across the sea
James Mangan brought me comfort
With laudnum and poitin
The vision moves to the scene of a public execution being held on Stephen’s Green in 1819, before another crossing
If you miss me on the harbour
For the boat, it leaves at three
Take this snake with eyes of garnet
My mother gave to me!
The snake is a symbol of renewal, and for Shane perhaps the republican ideal. It also reveals his engagement with the literary canon. After all, he did once earn a scholarship to the exclusive Westminster public school.
He chimed in:
This snake cannot be captured
This snake cannot be tied
This snake cannot be tortured, or
Hung or crucified
It came down through the ages
It belongs to you and me
So pass it on and pass it on
‘Till all mankind is free
Contrary to the association of the snake with deceit and temptation – a phallic devil – according to Chevalier and Gheerbant’s Dictionary of Symbols, the serpent is ‘a continuation of the infinite materialization which is none other than primordial formlessness, the storehouse of latency which underlies the manifest world.’
It is an archetype representing ‘an “Old God”, the first god to be found at the start of all cosmogenesis, before religions of the spirit dethroned him.’[vii]
This becomes the moving spirit of another vagabond poet, James Clarence Mangan who as a Young Irelander renews the spirt of the nation, suffers and dies, apparently of malnutrition at the height of a cholera epidemic, but re-appears in spectral form.
He swung, his face went purple
A roar came from the crowd
But Mangan laughed and pushed me
And we got back on the cloud
He dropped me off in London
Back in this dying land
But my eyes were filled with wonder
At the ring still in my hand
‘this dying land’
Arriving in central London I am struck by the imperial grandeur. The scale and ambition of the architecture makes Dublin seem like a provincial town, but there’s a cold reserve that used to send a shiver down my spine when I lived here.
So many buildings appear uninhabited; unimaginably grand hotels seem more like fortresses with concierge-sentries posted outside to keep the hoi poloi at bay; uttering “can I help you sir,” with a snarl. We’d have to make our own fun.
The launch of Shane MacGowans’s art exhibition ‘The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold’ took place at the boutique Andipa gallery in Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from Harrods, where his art resides alongside that of Banksy’s.
Walking in I pass Bob Geldof, an unlikely presence, given his aversion to Irish nationalism, but he has credited Shane and the Pogues with awakening an interest in traditional Irish musical forms that he had previously disparaged.
In the relatively narrow confines of the gallery, with the king sitting contentedly on his throne, a carnival atmosphere asserts itself. He had escaped from all this, but that night he was enjoying a return to the crazy celebrity madness, which in England is built on a bedrock of aristocracy.
The champagne flowed, as minor celebrities converged – “he’s Liam Gallagher’s brother you know” – when the ocean parted before the eternal beauty of Kate Moss. A face to launch a thousand camera phones, and sell a few paintings.
Then on to Soho, where the weather at least remained dry. The police were even called. It took seven of them to take old Tom down, or so they say: never let the truth get in the way of a good yearn…
Critics
Acording to Joe Cleary:
Ever since the Great Famine and the Devotional Revolution, and especially when they came to power after the establishment of the Free State, the traditionalists had been concerned to make Irish culture more refined and respectable by filtering out, as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘degraded’, all its more licentious and anarchic or uncouth elements – those very elements that were to make such a whoopingly triumphant return of the repressed in the Pogues’ music.[viii]
In many respects, the unapologetic Shane MacGowan remains an embarrassment to the Official Ireland narrative, now principally articulated in the Irish Times, which inculcates a new breed of conformity that brooks no divergence.
Previously, Irish Times journalist Joe Breen suggested that his distaste for the Pogues resembled the attitude of contemporary African-Americans who preferred contemporary music to a musical tradition obsessed with the miseries of slavery and Jim Crow.
Breen’s reference to American culture betrays the apparent objective of many Irish neoliberal cheerleaders to establish a deracinated Americana in Hibernia, a tax haven for multinationals where the atmosphere of the carnival is strictly commodified. Here, Irish history is reduced to the struggle of modernisers against religious authority – with nothing in between – and where celebration of the national struggle is associated with Populism, or even an exclusive ‘white’ nationalism.
The art of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues offer a rowdy alternative to a creeping homogenisation. He endures, seemingly just to spite them, and even in the dying land he can still revive the spirit of the carnival.
Born in 1875, like many in his era Thomas Mann was initially a Great German Conservative, but by the outbreak of World War II he was making anti-Nazi speeches for the BBC.
Mann won the Nobel Prize in 1929 for his chronicles of German families in Buddenbrooks (1901), and for his bildungsromanThe Magic Mountain (1924), along with a number of well received novellas and short stories. Among his later publications, the novella Death in Venice (1929) is a terrific book, expressing his repressed same-sex attraction; it is a worthy expression of a hyper-civilised, fin de siècle aesthetic intelligence. The film by Luchino Visconti with Dirk Bogarde, though laboured, is also a masterpiece. It includes the famous adagio by Mahler, with whom Mann was acquainted.
Mann seems to have known almost everyone who was anyone in his time, and was very catholic in his tastes and company. He remains, however, a crucial bridge between the tradition of nineteenth century letters and the twentieth century. Indeed, the earlier novels referenced above may appear at times like caricatures of that tradition.But great aestheticism does not necessarily equate to human greatness.
As alluded to, Mann was a supporter of Kaiser Wilhelm during the First World War, and a romantic German nationalist with a lifelong fascination with Nietzsche. He lived for most of his adult life in Munich and his lifestyle consisted of work, an eclectic set of friends and a digression into unconventional Germanic behaviour. He was married to a Jewish woman, Katia, who he adored, notwithstanding a suppressed homosexuality or bisexuality: they had six children.
As a novelist, not only Kafka but also Musil and arguably Broch, are greater twentieth century writers of fiction or prose within the Germanic tradition. But greatness also involves moral influence. Although, there was little until the 1930s to disclose his abundant moral courage, it was almost unparalleled among great writers even including Albert Camus. The stakes were higher.
Colm Toibin’s recently published zeitgeist book on Thomas Mann The Magician (2021) reveals at one level a set of character traits crucial to how he achieved greatness. He was innately Protestant, despite a Brazilian, Catholic mother, modest and hard working. Commenting on his own prose style, Mann said it was ponderous, ceremonious, and civilised. This he said was all that fascists hate.
And boy did he hate them. He hated in fact all forms of human fakeness, lies, deceptions and misinformation; an inclination very evident in the early novel Mario the Magician (1929). He also hated a lack of order and fecklessness, which was apparent in his attitude towards his brother Heinrich. And he hated barbarism.
Thus, the arch conservative of Lubeck, in response to the rise of fascism and barbarism, changed his colour. Like Fernando Pessoa in Portugal, the caterpillar became a butterfly.
The change was gradual. First, he had supported the Social Democrats in the Weimar government, writing treatises on his conversion to socialism as the Nazis emerged triumphant over the course of the 1920s and early 1930s.
Mann simply could not deal with Nazis. At an implicit level, it might have been simply a matter of bourgeois taste, as he had an impeccable personal and aesthetic sensibility and was cosmopolitan but not decadent in his outlook.
In American exile, where he was suspected of harbouring communist views, he was asked about his views on the avowedly communist Bertold Brecht. He said he did not like his writing, but that if he liked a communist writer he would have no problem saying so.
Book burning in Berlin, 10 May 1933.
Exile
On holiday in 1933 he was advised not to return to Germany after many of his books had been burned in the modern day auto–da–fé. It is noticeable that it was mostly the books of Jews and communists that were burnt, but the German Student’s Union, spurred on by Goebbels, also burned Mann’s work.
In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard Joseph Goebbels deliver an address saying:
No to decadence and moral corruption … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. … And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.
Mann was excommunicated as a citizen in 1936. His life was threatened, and he was a moving target for the fascists for the rest of his life. Thus he left Germany when he was almost sixty, and apart from some brief post war visits never returned to reside there again.
One wonders what would have happened if he had been more compliant. He was not Jewish and only a socialist at a stretch. It is possible that they would have showered him with hollow accolades if he had shown more deference. But unlike Martin Heidegger, he did not succumb, and thereafter in exile in Switzerland and America he became a more complete human being, which is reflected in the marked improvement in the quality of the prose thereafter.
His wartime broadcast relayed on the BBC might be regarded as a kind of inverse Lord Haw Haw. On one of his eight-minute broadcasts from 1940 Mann condemned Hitler and his ‘paladins’ as crude philistines completely out of touch with European culture.
In another noted speech, he said: ‘The war is horrible, but it has the advantage of keeping Hitler from making speeches about culture.’
‘Crude Philistines’…
At the end of the war, he refused to allow his nation off the hook. They had turned mad; it was collective hysteria and even the 1945 atrocities documented so well in Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: the Downfall 1945 (2002) were in context to him condonable:
Those, whose world became grey a long time ago when they realized what mountains of hate towered over Germany; those, who a long time ago imagined during sleepless nights how terrible would be the revenge on Germany for the inhuman deeds of the Nazis, cannot help but view with wretchedness all that is being done to Germans by the Russians, Poles, or Czechs as nothing other than a mechanical and inevitable reaction to the crimes that the people have committed as a nation, in which unfortunately individual justice, or the guilt or innocence of the individual, can play no part.
Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the ten.
Unamerican Activities…
Extremism cuts both ways. In exile he was forced to testify before the House for unamerican activities as a suspected communist. Here is how he responded:
As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’. … That is how it started in Germany.”
Moreover, when Mann joined protests the jailing of The Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found ‘the media had been closed to him.’ Finally, he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress, and in 1952, he returned to Europe. Th Overton window of the thought police fell on the great writer, as it does to many today. He was now nearing eighty years of age.
Exile created both a looseness and precision of prose style. A spring in the step. Dr Faustus (1947) is one of the best books ever written. It is a masterpiece and worthy of Broch or Musil or indeed Kafka. The stilted Germanic prose style becomes freer. The theme inspires: good versus evil.
The book is about the composer Leverkuhn who sells his soul to the devil. The Faustian pact is Fascism. It is also about the corrupting influence of atonal music and its nihilistic dissonance which creates a valueless universe, like the structuralists and deconstructionists of our time. The great prose meister was having none of it.
In my view, Dr Faustus is also about Martin Heidegger the other central intellectual figures in Germany at the time. Heidegger fell for the bait and took all the Nazi accolades, entering the Faustian pact despite his Jewish mistress Hannah Arendt, who wrote eloquently subsequently about the banality of evil. Mann, though a man of considerable means, said no.
A theme central to his existence was that an artist cannot abandon politics at least not in such a period as the 1940s, and must recognise the moral consequences of his actions.
Dr Faustus frequently references Leverkuhn’s veneration of Albrecht Durer, the great Renaissance artist, and his pictorial representations of moderation, judgment, melancholia and the apocalypse. Indeed, as the Nazi state collapses, he becomes obsessed with melancholia.
In the search for spirituality, Mann invokes in a man who has lost all reason and his soul. When composing Dr Faustus, Mann showed and lectured on this to a fourteen-year-old girl who was visiting, who was Susan Sonntag. Thus, the magician bridges generations and resonates through the ages.
And then at the end of Days with the light dimming he showed in his book about the conman Felix Krull the darkly comic humour at the heart of capitalist chicanery, which, if left unchecked, culminates in fascism.
Mann is the great Protestant Germanic intellect of the last century, but he was also an ethereal magus and magician.
His legacy lies in the assertion of standards, of discipline, of stable family values, and of a certain amorphous sexuality. Above all it is in the condemnation of extremism, the condemnation of barbarism, the assertion of civilised values, the rejection of censorship, the hatred of chauvinism and the social cleansing from the left or right. A consistent hatred of intolerance from all sides.
That is what is needed now.
His life is also an example of moral courage. The Germans wanted the magician back, but he was not satisfied that they had changed. It was him judging them not them judging him. He did not think they were displaying appropriate contrition for what they had done. He was right.
In a different context, in Chile, when Pinochet was forced to call an election – as our conservative rulers will soon be required to in Ireland – a persecuted advertising expert advised the opposition as to how to orchestrate a campaign. No reference to mass murders or internment camps, just young Chileans with the slogan JUST SAY NO.
That is what Mann said to fascism, and what we must now say to the ruling parties in Ireland. No images of homelessness, no incessant exposure of state corruption and criminality. JUST SAY NO, before it is too late.
The Irish people have a long-standing relationship with ‘numinous presences in the landscape’, often referred to as the little people, or faeries. The literature provides a complex set of illusions. The writer, philosopher and independent scholar, my friend, Patrick Healy on a recent visitation tendered me a painting of Mad Sweeney (buile shuibhne), which forms part of his forthcoming exhibition in Amsterdam.
It made me consider the enduring relevance of the faeries, although I now live in Leatherhead in leafy Surrey, where the little people are well hidden.
In H.G. Welles’ remarkable parable of the future invasion by aliens from outer space, The War of the Worlds, we find the ultimate understanding of an existential threat. When Orson Welles put out his infamous 1938 broadcast, he set it in New York, causing a level of consternation that led some to flee to the nearby hills. The original book is of course set in Leatherhead, which is clearly not immune to faery tales.
Most contemporary faery tales often provide binary messages of good and evil for children – or even child-adults susceptible to manipulation – who see battles between good and evil and a Manichean Universe. Thus, children and adult minds can be manipulated, and often nefarious agendas can be set using their effect.
According to the plagiarised – but well received at the time – work of the psychologist Bruno Bethlehem The Uses of Enchantment, faery tales help children resolve Freudian oedipal conflicts. But on whose behalf? They are cautioned to stay safe from ‘evil’, but the meaning of good and evil is far from clear in this day and age.
Historically, faery tales contain a surprising level of terrifying violence, often involving gruesome acts such as cannibalism, witchcraft, and bodily metamorphosis, as with werewolves. They play to latent fears that can be deployed to manipulate or control the human psyche.
I will now draw out some crucial messages for the profound structural ways we organise our present lives around faery tales.
Illustration of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” by Vilhelm Pedersen (1820 – 1859).
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 tale is based on a 1335 story from the Libro de los ejemplos (or El Conde Lucanor). It is short and alarmingly precise, involving an emperor of such vanity and so susceptible to flattery that his dressmakers get him to pose and preen naked.
It seems to me that most of the politicians of Ireland, the UK, the EU, and the world at large are the vain inheritors’ of the Emperor’s new clothes, with fake experts and insiders flattering and manipulating them. Political leadership is always subject to vanity and therefore susceptible to flattery.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
Where there is no leadership, the people perish. Proverbs 29.18.
Vilhelm Pedersen illustration for “Ugly Duckling”
The Ugly Duckling
This 1843 tale by Hans Christian Anderson is perhaps my favourite faery tale. Anderson was not a transcriber of faery tales – as the Brothers Grimm were – but a great creative artist. Here the eponymous ugly duckling is hounded out of the tribe, simply for being ugly, but a new tribe welcomes her as she is really a swan, not an ugly duckling at all. At one level this is about finding your niche and not associating with quacks – including those who force you out of town.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’
H. G. Welles
What we need now are more ugly ducklings, and not clean-cut conformists – the inappropriate adults in the room.
Hobbit holes or smials as depicted in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
The Hobbit
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 fantasy classic, an insignificant shire hobbit, Bilbo Baggins with the aid of dwarves and a magician defeats the dark forces in the battle of the five armies. Written just before World War II, it anticipated an Allied victory against the dark forces of fascism. A parable for that time and our own, which is elaborated upon in The Lord of The Rings.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
‘We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo, men women men women and children recognised that what was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. Lemay said if we HAD lost we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals, and was right’
Robert McNamara, ‘The Fog of War’
Always keep in mind who the dark forces are, and that winning is not everything, or not always. Manichean battle between good and evil rarely occur. Who is evil today? Is it just Vladimir Putin or those who seek to prolong the war? And if Mr Putin is a war criminal, what of Bush, Blair and Biden?
The Cheshire Cat.
Alice Adventures in Wonderland
In Lewis Carrol’s famous 1865 story Alice falls into a rabbit hole, and witnesses a succession of fantastical creatures, including The Queen of Spades who conducts a trial in breach of due process: sentence first, verdict later.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
This cannot be improved upon in terms of a commentary on this age of prejudgement and guilt by social media, or in the wake of any accusation.
One modern version occurred when then Spanish minister Donna Luzon in advance of the Catalonia trials referred to those accused as the ‘convicted.’ We continue to find prejudgement of pre-crime, and conviction by association of those we disagree with. Quasi-internment. Deportations and extraditions. The obliteration of due process. The end of human rights. Endgame. Off with your head or to Rwanda.
Well mercifully the Court of Appeal disagrees in the U.K.. But what about Julian Assange’s final appeal?
Humpty Dumpty and Alice, from Through the Looking-Glass. Illustration by John Tenniel.
Alice Through the Looking Glass
The second Wonderland visit is best interpreted as being about language and the distortion of tradition.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
‘I know of only one authority which might justify the suggested method of construction. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be the master, that’s all.” After all this long discussion the question is whether the words “If a man has” can mean “If a man thinks he has”. I have an opinion that they cannot, and the case should be decided accordingly.’
The above quote comes from Lord Atkin in his dissenting judgment in Liversidge v Anderson(1942). It concerned the decision to intern someone as a subversive without due process. Thus we find a direct transcription from the book in the great English language decision upholding due process at the height of the Second World War. A sole dissenting judgment from a man and lawyer in touch with working class sensibilities
First combined edition (publ. Ted Smart, 2000)
Northern Light / His Dark Materials
The ultimate anticipation of medievalism, with orcs seeking to undermine our hero Lyra, with her supportive, if ambiguous, daemons. Here we find the oppressive authority of organised religion and the death of the great bear Irek Brisson, who has fought so valiantly on her side.
Philip Pullman was clearly influenced by John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), where Lucifer seems to be seeking to save humanity from institutional religion – as opposed to Christian belief which is a force of good – thereby undermining the satanic myth of the fallen state from Original Sin.
Original Intent interpreting a legal document from its inception, and not dynamically. Thus, America recognises the right to bear arms because it was acceptable over two hundred years ago. As Amy Coney Barrett put it after her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court: ‘[Catholic judges] are obliged by oath, professional commitment, and the demands of citizenship to enforce the death penalty. They are also obliged to adhere to their church’s teaching on moral matters.’
From Sleeping Beauty (1959 film).
Sleeping Beauty
Based on the faery tale ‘La Belle Au Bois Dormant, published in 1697 by Charles Perrault, this story has been sanitised for popular consumption. In Disney’s retelling, the kiss of the prince awakens the sleeping beauty, but in the original telling of the tale she is not roused, and he falls in love with her body and essentially rapes her.
It is only at the birth of her twins when one of the babies suckles at her breast that she wakes up. The prince then tells her what has happened. As if all this was not bad enough it turns out that the prince’s mother is an ogress, who is longing to eat her grandchildren. The tale first appeared in England in 1729 in Stories or Faery Tales from Past Times.
Pantomimes and Disney have thus obliterated everything but the kiss.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
The idea of a prince coming to the rescue is also a theme in Rumpelstiltskin, and is the driving force in Cinderella too, although what makes for a prince is far from clear. Is it a man who abuses women or a coercive structure which abuses men and woman? Or worse still, those individuals who rape the earth. Thus, we should be careful about what and who we consent to, whether princes or princesses. Stay safe from sexual predators if you can.
The main cast during filming in 1970.
Willie Wonka and The Chocolate Factory
Let us remind ourselves of the plot of the 1971 movie (based on Roald Dahl’s novel), in which Willie Wonka owns a chocolate factory, but has closed it down, because of espionage and betrayal. Here a race of Oompah Lumpas work under him, who seem like incorruptible souls, like Norwegians perhaps or Icelanders.
So, in seclusion he creates the Wonka chocolate bars containing elusive golden tickets to a factory for a competition, as he is getting old and realises that someone else needs to take over the place.
The children lucky are given a series of tests, for he only trusts uncorrupted children to run the business. He is a man-child adult himself, or a magician or sorcerer. But he finds that the children have also been corrupted. Fallen angels in a world of illusions.
Charlie Buckets is the last recipient of the golden ticket. He fails because after cheating along with his grandfather. But is redeemable, as Wonka comes to the conclusion that the ideal child to run the chocolate factory is working-class. At one level his poverty has produced an element of dishonesty.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
Let us be wary of the inappropriate adults in the room and conscious of how poverty and social exclusion are an increasing feature of our time. So let us also be wary of going it alone, for the poor fall into traps set by the rich. And in an age of limited mobility to escape the debt trap, let us be wary of how and by what mechanisms the poor can inherit the earth or even achieve a basic income.
Puss in Boots
The oldest written telling version is Costantino Fortunato (Italian for “Lucky Costantino”) by Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola.
Charles Perrault’s transcription is about a miller’s son who is left a cat in his father’s will. The miller’s son is none too delighted with his inheritance until the cat assures him that he can make the young man’s fortune. All the cat needs to accomplish this is a pair of boots. Thereafter, the cat makes him richer than his wildest dreams, and he marries the most beautiful princess.
Juxtaposition and Commentary
Beware of charming con men who claim they will make you rich, a lesson learnt by as all those who suffered from subprime mortgages and banking misrepresentations from the wolves of Wall Street in Ireland and elsewhere. Lies and misrepresentations that have been rubber stamped by the courts.
Beware of dynamic self-made monsters such as the unlamented Peter Sutherland for they have destroyed and pillaged the earth.
Readers should by now understand how we have been manipulated since childhood by faery tales in a deeply structural way, through the creation of a simplified world of good and evil.
Wilde Encounters…
I recently acquired a first edition Oscar Wilde’s Salome with illustrations by Beardsley. Now as I alight daily in Clapham Junction station on my way to court there is a plaque to Oscar Wilde as I change trains. I am reminded of being an aspiring young thespian in Trinity College 1989 where I played Edward Carson opposite to Patrick Healy as Wilde. So I conclude with Oscar Wilde’s faery tales – above all ‘The Nightingale’, along with ‘The Rose’, ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’.
By serving their masters selflessly, the swallow and the rose die and only the selfish giant gains a measure of redemption through the generosity of his soul. He had allowed Christ or Christ’s emblem into his garden and now he gains the garden of paradise, or is it the kingdom of heaven?
Feature Image: The Fomorians, as depicted by John Duncan (1912).
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone. Martin Amis, in an interview with TheParis Review (1998)
The empty streets, quiet from dawn to dusk and beyond. No noisy, polluting rush hour traffic, or at any other time of the day. No shuffling, stifling crowds of commuters on packed public transport, or gaga revellers in sweaty pubs and clubs. Not having to go to work, and feeling okay about it because most everyone else was not obliged to either (there’s social solidarity, if ever I saw it). Getting a modest stipend from the government for staying at home. Being able to do whatever you wanted to all day long (within the law, and a five kilometre radius of your residence). If you were living alone or parenting alone you could even pair with one other household as part of a support bubble, and two households could meet outdoors within the travel limit. If you were a renter, no threat of imminent eviction by a rapacious or capricious landlord; if you had a mortgage, a temporary freeze on payments. In short, what utter bliss.
I was alive during lockdown, and I was alone – and although maybe ‘most alive’ is a stretch, I grew to love the sequestered state, to the extent that I still have not fully readjusted to things being ‘back to normal’. But it troubles me that perhaps ‘most alive’ is not quite the same thing as being good, or even happy. I liked lockdown: does that make me a bad person?
Dublin, April, 2020.
Of course it was bewildering at first, and a little frightening – because no one really knew how severe the pandemic might be, or for how long it could last. (Let’s get our priorities straight here: there was a run on toilet rolls.) But after a few weeks, we settled into it. What I missed most upon entering the altered reality: 1) being able to meet friends face-to-face in the flesh; 2) being able to experience the giddy, healing rush of live music I get from going to concerts; 3) being able to travel, if and when I wanted. But I soon adapted to the new dispensation. After all, we now have all these wonderful machines with screens to help us keep in touch with people electronically, if we feel the need for company without risking the possibility of infection. Plus, we can use them to purchase pretty much anything we might want, as long as we are in funds or have access to lines of credit, and have said items delivered directly to our doors, thus obviating the need to ever stir outside, whether we are permitted to or not.
I thought of Oceane in Tibor Fischer’s Voyage to The End of The Room (2003) (itself a riff on the antisocial aesthete Des Esseintes in J. K. Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884)); and, more recently, of the unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018): both protagonists who have, insofar as is practicable, retired from social interaction. I thought of many of Cormac McCarthy’s heroes – men invariably configured as some variation on the theme of first or last person on earth. Mainly, I thought of Kate in David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), who either is, or imagines herself to be, the last woman on earth. All in some way extend the trope, with its origins in science fiction, of the depopulated world, brought to perfection in the dirty metaphysics of J. G. Ballard’s best work. To put it more simply, as a reclusive friend once described his habitual living circumstances to me, it was ‘Howard Hughes without the money.’
Obviously, there were downsides. For a start, people were dying – often the poorest and oldest and most vulnerable in other ways. Then, some people still had to work, whether they wanted to or not, and not only health care professionals, but supermarket staff and take-away deliverers were deemed ‘essential’ or ‘key’ or ‘front line’ operatives – thus risking sickness and death for minimal reward. Yet others were acting like idiots, with their bizarre conspiracy theories and their deliberate flouting of restrictions. Personally, my greatest hassle was the way my eyeglasses steamed up every time I masked up.
Dublin, April, 2020.
But I was lucky: I had a house to myself with a garden, and a car and a bike and a fridge and a freezer, and a television and a hi-fi system and internet access, and I was mobile and could venture to shops when supplies ran low, or take long walks and cycles for exercise. Roaming around the Hellfire Club or the adjacent Massy’s Wood for hours on end, while listening to Éliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la Mort on the headphones, was a favourite pastime, if I felt the need to get out of the house and blow the cobwebs off – not something I would necessarily have done if I’d been working five days a week. Furthermore, I did not have any very youthful or very elderly dependents relying on me for their daily needs or morale-boosting support. Reports of domestic abuse among those living in cramped, overcrowded conditions circulated and increased steadily, and I pitied anyone trapped in a fraught, tension-filled environment. My nutjob survivalist’s instinct began to kick in.
I was alone because my wife had taken up a job abroad a few months pre-pandemic. When rumours of imminent lockdown first hit she had wanted to return home, but I managed to dissuade her. We had been going through an elongated rocky patch, and I reasoned that a) if forced isolation was short-lived, then it wasn’t worth her while uprooting herself all over again; and b) if having to stay indoors lasted for a longer time, then sooner or later we might well drive each other to distraction, if ensconced under the same roof for such a lengthy period. We were then trying to establish independent lives, and in retrospect I still feel my decision was the correct one – in as much as later we experienced a ‘Covid-bounce’ and were reconciled. Not that coming together again was a direct consequence of being apart, but being together under duress certainly wouldn’t have helped us in resolving our difficulties. Does anyone really need to be with a partner/lover every hour of every day? Each time I saw him/I couldn’t wait to see him again (‘Then He Kissed Me’ by The Crystals, 1963) is the stuff of teen anthems and first love. Constant companionship in a confined space may even be detrimental, if not wholly destructive, to a relationship. Or, at least, to one with me. Am I a bad person?
In Middlemarch (1872) George Eliot has her ‘godless’ heroine Dorothea Brooke suggest that if religion were actually true and God existed, and achieving eternal salvation (and avoiding a similarly enduring damnation) was our main priority, then we should all devote our whole lives to this pursuit as cloistered contemplatives, rather than just leaving it at attending church on Sunday and doing a few good works. One of the few modern-era Catholic writers I can read with pleasure and profit, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968), wrote in Thoughts in Solitude (1956): ‘We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our bosom.’ He continues:
When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.
Still, not all of us can become Trappist monks, or opt to lead a comparably ascetic life. For one thing, belief in God, or some conception of divine transcendence, appears to be a necessary, if not quite sufficient, prerequisite. For another, the need for sex, or even the search for secular love, does require one to be ‘out there’, however nominally. As my wife once opined, ‘You should have been a monk – except you like sex too much.’ Not that a vow of celibacy is always mandatory for the anchoritic life, or acts as an insuperable impediment to a long withdrawal – at any rate not nowadays, and not outside of the western tradition. For example, it is on record that the flexible arrangements surrounding Leonard Cohen’s five year stint living at the Mount Baldy Buddhist retreat centre, where he was given the name ‘Jikan’, meaning ‘Silence’, did not preclude female callers, or indeed boozing marathons with his Zen Master teacher, Old Roshi. But he was Leonard Cohen, not your average seeker after enlightenment, and Mount Baldy is located outside L.A., not Kyoto, so exceptions were made and such privileges extended.
But even setting aside the vagaries of libidinal desire, ultimately I think monastic life, which for many people lockdown could be said to have resembled, would be too social for me, certainly in its Cenobitic, or community form, if not in its Eremitic, or solitary practice. I like doing things – eating, sleeping, writing, reading – when I feel like doing them, rather than adhering to a strict schedule with other devotees. Interestingly, the Trappists, who are an essentially cenobitical order (in contrast to, say, the enclosed Carthusians), maintain a custom under which individual monks or nuns who have reached a required level of maturity within the community may pursue a hermitical lifestyle on monastery grounds under the supervision of the abbot or abbess. Merton was one such allowed to undertake this mode of living. Yet even then he fell into an earthly love, with Margie Smith, a student nurse assigned to his care while he was recuperating in a Louisville hospital from surgery he underwent in April 1966, to treat debilitating back pain. She was twenty-five, petite and demure; he was fifty-one, stocky and bald, with a wandering intellect and a boisterous laugh. Although in several diary entries (see Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom, The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six: 1966-67) he expressly denies sexual consummation, on July 12th he wrote:
Yet there is no question I love her deeply … I keep remembering her body, her nakedness, the day at Wygal’s (the office of his psychologist, which he ‘borrowed’ for a tryst on June 11th – the diary entry for which day notes that they shared a bottle of champagne), and it haunts me … I could have been enslaved to the need for her body after all.
A previous entry for June 14th notes his discussions with his abbot about this affair, and his intent to follow the instruction to end it. When he did, he still remained in occasional contact with Margie, and some recent Merton scholars have even argued that the monk regretted giving her up so much, and was so remorseful that she had married someone else (a doctor in Ohio, with whom she raised three sons), that he no longer felt life was worth living.
Also, incidentally, according to The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) the youthful Merton loved jazz, but by the time he began his first teaching job he had forsaken all but ‘peaceful’ music. Later in life, whenever he was permitted to leave the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky, for medical or monastic reasons, he would catch what live jazz he could, in Louisville or New York. So maybe there is hope for me yet, to entertain a life of socially sanctioned solitude (with sporadic forays to musical events) – although I fear I would not take kindly to that clerical ‘supervision’.
More to the point: I am not under thirty, or even under forty – so I would not expect those in that demographic, who are eagerly trying to establish relationships and careers and lives, to share my guarded enthusiasm for society grinding to a halt, or for taking a lifelong holiday from it. I have managed to attain some perspective on matters carnal, and on those of the heart (not to mention on my fluctuating sources of income) – even if this equanimity is, I suspect, largely hormonally determined, rather than an intellectual or emotional insight. Having said that, while I may still be partial to the odd ride, much less to a touch of romance, it was not impossible to hook up during lockdown, with a little technological aid, and within certain geographical limitations. Much like ordinary times.
Dublin, April, 2020.
Naturally, I reread Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) during the time of Covid, like many others. For, whether the surge in its popularity consisted chiefly of first-timers or revisitors, in this activity I was hardly alone, as publishers reported a huge worldwide increase in sales of the novel, once the virus had taken hold. Figures for the English translation went up by 150% in the last week of February 2020 as compared with the same period in the preceding year, while the original French version rose in number by a staggering 300%. (Boccaccio’s Decameron (1348-1353) and Defoe’s Journal Of The Plague Year (1722) enjoyed similar stupendous bumps up the charts, courtesy of the reading public.)
What I discovered about The Plague was that it could have been written yesterday. So accurately did its descriptions of how individuals, and the general populace, behave in Oran during that escalating crisis chime with contemporary events, many passages could have been culled from the newspaper headlines and news bulletins of 2020-21. Which tends to make one despair of human nature, and embrace the cliché that it doesn’t change much. Here are three choice snippets, in case you didn’t get around to it this time:
‘There have been as many plagues in the history of the world as there have been wars; yet always plagues and wars find people equally unprepared.’
‘How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.’
‘The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.’
Compiling lists was something else which really caught on, and if you hunt around the internet you will turn up the catalogues of my favourite novels, favourite albums, favourite films, worst jobs, and all that. Everyone started baking sourdough or banana bread, and posting photos of the results on social media, me included. If it hadn’t been for lockdown, I doubt I’d have got through nearly every one of the over twenty films directed by the prolific Sion Sono (the Japanese David Lynch), or worked my way through as many of The Guardian’s ‘Top 20 J-horror films – ranked!’ as I could find, or rewatched all of Michael Haneke’s filmography in chronological order, or lapped up the entire boxset of The Wire for the third time (which I would gladly do again), or discovered the best of Dario Argento (and what, really, had been so important in my previous life as to account for this grievous omission?). I played online chess with a couple of musician acquaintances, and some anonymous randomers (happy to report that my game improved exponentially). I even recorded my versions of every song on Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks (1974) and had the temerity to upload the attempts to YouTube.
All of which prompts the question: what had we all been doing with ourselves before the plague descended?
Mainly, lockdown was a boon for me because I started writing again, having lost my way – aside from journalism and reviews – for a number of years. But this time it was not fiction, as previously, but rather essays, akin to this one. Martin Amis is not alone among writers when, in the epigraph to this piece, he expresses the tribe’s preference for solitude. Here’s James Baldwin, writing in ‘The Creative Process’ (1962): ‘The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.’ It’s almost enough to convince you that seclusion is an indispensable component of creation (although theatre, film, music and dance are clearly collaborative arts – and even desk-bound writers engage with agents, editors and publishers). But, perhaps in common with painters more than any other arts practitioners, writers live in their heads, and are solipsists par excellence. The interior world of imagination is always more stimulating to them than what Roland Barthes referred to dismissively as ‘The trivial kitchenry of doing.’ As for living, our servants can do that for us – if only we had servants.
When I first had notions of becoming a writer, one of the most appealing aspects of the calling was the option of anonymity: like J. D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, you could be famous, or let’s say influential, without anyone recognising you in the street or bothering you in public. Nowadays, however, one has to be ready to be interviewed at the drop of a hat, and take a strenuous part in one’s own publicity campaign (“What? No social media presence?”). One is also expected to become a member of ‘the writing community’ – whatever that is, and wherever it lives. So many of today’s writers spend so much of their time being on television and radio and going to literature festivals – in other words, promoting themselves and their work – that it is difficult to imagine how and when and where they ever manage to get any writing done. You might as well be in a touring rock band. (And when do they do their songwriting? At soundchecks? In hotel rooms? In the recording studio? I suppose they are not on the road all the time – but since the digitalisation and free filesharing of music, needs must to make a living, which means playing live and selling merch.)
In more recent years – primarily due to the ubiquity of television and the rise of the internet – writers have at times been presented – many of them willingly – as another type of media celebrity. Yet, in the not so distant past it was still quite difficult to reach an author from outside the circuit of the publishing world. Writers used to be identified mostly through their written work, and it was the norm for a reader to be aware of an author, to like or even love their work, and continue to be fully ignorant of their physical appearance, and also unaware of most of the biographical information that now is routinely accessed. One could scarcely imagine Franz Kafka or Fernando Pessoagiving an interview. Indeed, it is legitimate to question if individuals with such reclusive personalities would, in today’s climate, be offered a publishing deal at all.
Publishing is a business, and a publishing house is unlikely to invest in a writer’s work if it stands to lose money, or to not make very much (unless a few hugely commercially viable wordsmiths subsidise all the ne’er-do-wells). Yet writers are, arguably, very different from performers of popular entertainment. In practice, of course, not many authors differ significantly from performance artists, and what they say on stage is at least as vital to their process as what they write on the page. But to bring about an increase in links between the two activities, whether intentionally or unwittingly, will certainly result in fewer published authors who are characterised by acute introversion.
Now, it may be argued that the attraction of retreating inside a Proustian cork-lined study to do one’s writing means that the work produced will have a very narrow focus, and that you will have fewer stories to tell, except the ones about yourself. Such confinement implies that your daily ‘life experience’ will be extraordinarily circumscribed. However, in my opinion, most people have more than enough ‘life experience’ by the time they are twenty-five or thirty to be going on with for the remainder of their lives. If, indeed, life experience is really a requirement for writing well at all, especially in comparison with the transformative power of the imagination – for those who have one. That ‘smiling public man’, Senator W. B. Yeats, in ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ (1912), bemoaned the distracting vicissitudes of ‘Theatre business, management of men’ which he had earlier so eagerly embraced, and also elsewhere wrote ‘Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.’ Or, as has been remarked with reference to Jorge Luis Borges: ‘A man may lead an exciting life without ever leaving his desk.’
(Note to television and radio producers, and festival organisers: I am now available for any interviews or promotional junkets going, and I promise to wax eloquent about the topic of this essay, or any other subjects about which I have written.)
Dublin, April, 2020.
Does much of the foregoing sound like plain old misanthropy? I do not regard myself as overly misanthropic, even if I have a low opinion of much of the human race. I still like the people I like, and like them a lot. It’s when people organise themselves into groups that my suspicions are raised. As Jonathan Swift wrote, in a letter to Alexander Pope, ‘I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.’ Doubtless the proponents of wellness fads, and associated quackery, will diagnose me as ‘anti-social’, and conclude that I ‘lack empathy’. Not so. If anything, I’m more asocial than anti-social, and I can have oodles of empathy, when I want. Granted, maybe I should ‘want’ more. However, I do not place quite so high a value on empathy as an attribute as the esteem with which it is held in the current discourse appears to require. Too much empathy can get you into all sorts of bother.
Nor am I agoraphobic (from Ancient Greek ἀγορά, meaning ‘an assembly of the People’, or ‘a marketplace’ (the typical spot for such an assembly); and φόβος, meaning ‘fear’) – although I do have a problem with ‘the market’ as a determinant of value, and therefore fear it. People who had known me in a previous life might even have described me as a bonvivant or man about town, such was my propensity for attending live artistic happenings, chiefly concerts. (In fact, there are those who would say that I have only two settings when it comes to my preferred mode of being: the quiet fragility of tremulous silence, or the overpowering loudness of raucousness sound. Signal to noise ratio.) However – and I don’t know if it is attributable to incipient old age, or whether it has been accelerated by quarantine – I now no longer need to be out all the time. Maybe I had always been a potential hermit, who simply lacked the courage of his convictions. Still, it’s quite a momentous revelation when you realise that you could get used to being content enough never seeing anyone for the rest of your life. ‘Man is a social animal’ Aristotle tells us in his Politics. ‘Virtue is social’ admonishes a voice in Philip Larkin’s astute poem on this theme, ‘Vers de Société’. Yet there is such a creature as a gregarious recluse, however paradoxical that might sound. Lots of animals hibernate for winter: why can’t homo sapiens (wise man!) do it for three or four months annually, if not for the whole year? But what of the need for company and companionship, if only to stave off the loneliness? The answer to this objection is that being alone and feeling lonely are two entirely different conditions. Some people feel lonely at the heart of a crowd of people; others are at peace staring at the stars by themselves.
So, am I a bad person? Not really, although I may concede to selfishness. But all artists are selfish, or certainly no more or less so than the majority of the rest of humankind. There are fully socialised reasons for being selfish, just as there exist selfish reasons for being social. How bad a person does selfishness make you?
I repeat: am I a bad person? No, I’m just an introvert – and there is nothing wrong with that. (Note to self: future essay comparing the relative merits and demerits of introversion and extroversion.)
Mostly, I can’t be bothered arguing and debating with people much anymore. I mean, I kind of like it, sometimes, when it takes place at a level I consider ‘intelligent and informed’, but most discussion, it seems to me, exists at a standard that makes it hardly worth talking about or engaging in, and amounts to nothing more than people repeating their opinions and beliefs at each other at contrasting pitches. I guess this view makes me a snob, and of the worst kind – an ‘intellectual’ one. But really, as is in the nature of friendship, I like being with people who agree with or broadly share my worldview, and I get irritated being around people who are coming from the opposite end of the religious or political or literary or whatever spectrum. Perhaps that is my great character flaw; but it’s tiring, to the point of exhaustion, always being called on to defend yourself. And yet, it is ingrained that we can only change things (or maintain the status quo) through exchange of ideas in a public forum. That’s how much vaunted democracy, such as it is, functions. However, as far as I can make out, people who talk too much have nothing much to say. Or, at least, one has to put in quite a shift to discern what it is they are actually trying to express. Talk is cheap. A still tongue in a wise head. Have we gleaned nothing from Wittgenstein’s dictum: ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent’? Or have we not heard the sagacious Borges’ counsel: ‘Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence’?
But even I am human. I have slowly crept back to attending gigs, going to the cinema and theatre, meeting friends, even going to parties, and making a couple of journeys abroad – although I did suffer from Covid-hesitancy at first. The intensity of crazed moshing at black midi in Vicar Street was disconcerting, as was the surprise that Mitski Miyawaki had morphed from being an act with a relatively mature audience of twenty and thirty-somethings to a TikTok sensation for fifteen-year-old girls queueing around the corner at the same venue, before it opened its evening doors. In both cases, I forsook my usual front row vantage point, and retreated to the back of the hall.
I have noticed a greater than usual degree of incompetence on my part, in almost every piece of daily business that I do. Nothing feels the same as it did, in The Before Times. When you step off the carousel, you are not sure you want to get back on again – finally acknowledging that it may have really been a treadmill all along. I returned to work, because I had to, but more than ever before was plagued (apologies) by the nagging question ‘What am I doing?’ (with my time, with my life, with my endless numbered days), asked with an existential weight that was spirit-crushing. It was back to the small talk, or as its components are also called, pleasantries. Some colleagues were in agreement with me that we have all become ‘a little more Zen’, post-hiatus. Although there is an underlying apprehension that we are just dazed and confused zombies. After all, how could we tell the difference?
Inevitably, and in spite of obeying all official directives and taking all reasonable precautions, I contracted the plague myself, having successfully dodged it for over two years. The perils of being out and about, mixing with the throng, instead of sheltering safely at home. I may even have picked up some form of Long Covid, given my occasional breathlessness and sudden bouts of tiredness, and general brain fog and word soup. What is all this mad rushing around for?
Dublin, June, 2020.
The most disappointing thing about the easing of lockdown is that it seems, both individually and as a society, that we have learned nothing from the experience. We are still pursuing the mythic chimera of endless economic ‘progress’; we are still subjecting ourselves, or being subjected to, lives of pointless wage-slavery; we are still pillaging the planet’s natural resources for short-term solutions and private gain. We still have not learned that we are not landlords here on earth. We are not even tenants. We are guests, just passing through. At the time of our leave-taking, wouldn’t it be preferable to know that we had made things a little better, or at least no worse, for all present and all of those to come, rather than just making sure that we took as much of the world’s bounty as we could get for ourselves and our own, and had as a good time as possible while doing so, at the expense of others?
Maybe I did not feel ‘most alive’ during lockdown, but I do feel ‘most alive’ when writing, and lockdown facilitated me towards that end. Therefore, it was one of the happiest times of my life, and it is little wonder that I harbour residual nostalgia for those halcyon days. In fact, it is tempting to declare: that’s what life should be. In ‘The Choice’ (1933), Yeats tells us ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work.’ In response, Derek Mahon takes issue with this high-flown assertion, in ‘Knut Hamsun in Old Age’ (1980):
One fortunate in both would have us choose “Perfection of the life or of the work.” Nonsense, you work best on a full stomach As everybody over thirty knows – For who, unbreakfasted, will love the lark? Prepare your protein-fed epiphanies, Your heavenly mansions blazing in the dark.
So, should I get out more? No, not if going out means writing less – which, in my case, it usually does. ‘No man is an island’ averred John Donne, in a phrase which that mischievous mystic Merton referenced when he took it as the title for one of his finest essay collections. Alas, just as it is not given to everyone to be a monk, not all of us are writers or artists. My only hope garnered from lockdown is that I can retain the writerly momentum I gained during it, now that the world has opened its doors and windows once again, and everything is returning to a not-so-very-new ‘normal’.
In the insular, it felt like it at times, enforced statelet of Northern Ireland, sexual repression was a thing. (And probably still is.)
Faggot. Queer. Bent. Gayboy. Bender. Fruit. OOOOooooooooo like an effeminate caricature: going around, mincing, limp-wristed, and nothing but a bum-watching, bumboy. These were some of the names I heard levied at me when I was eighteen and on into my twenties.
At the time, my mental health was on skid row. I had depression, was low on self-confidence; suffered terrible social anxiety, and an alcoholic experimenting with harmful drugs . I did not realise at the time that I was in pain due to my background. Yes, family and subsequent cognitive development. Impaired. Yes. Immaturity. And I was unwell. Really. I did not stand up for myself. I had no response to these verbal demarcations.
They used to say, ‘Burnsy, why haven’t you got a girlfriend then?’ And I would take – as the colloquialism goes – a reddener. Pure scarlet. Flustered and embarrassed and already a wreck. I started to think maybe I was. One of them, and I was struggling with my sexual identity. My gayness was trying to come up to the surface and out. But I was suppressing it.
Image: Daniele Idini.
I can recall some twenty years later, sitting in a working-class bar, one Saturday afternoon two decades ago, in Belfast, alone at a table with a drink, and coming to the end of the line on the subject – asking myself: ‘Am I gay? Do I really want to be in a relationship with a man?’
I knew that this situation had become a neurosis in my mind. And I had to venture out there to find out. I went online and looked at Transexual escorts in Belfast. I picked one. Of an Asian background. I went to a hotel the next week and found out that I was not gay after all. The physicality of what is a man’s frame/body and the presentation gender of a man, was, is, something that I was not attracted to. At all. And that’s fine.
My sexual identity had very little bearing on my mind’s stunted growth. It was all familial.
Image: Marina Azzaro
There was the time whilst I was living in Dublin that I went along to a reading group after being asked by a guy who is gay. I knew he was gay and did not have an issue with it. I did not have a secret fantasy or agenda to get better acquainted. During the reading, he tried to play footsie, or, leggsy, rather, under the table with me and I did not reciprocate. From then on, he has given me the old round around and does not converse or communicate and I thought that was rather selfish, but there you are.
Indoctrinated media draws very clear lines on the subject of sexuality: binary codes, definitions and stereotypes.
I do wonder about the repression back home, though, the religious doctrines and institutions which repressed people and silenced others. The subsequent abuses.
I did wonder for a long time about homophobia and innate homosexuality and violence meted out in manifest self-anger as one reads and hears so often about attacks on gay men. Gay women. Gay people.
People are people they have their preferences and proclivities.
I went on a trip to Berlin a couple of years ago to visit the museums and check out the city. Cut to a Friday evening; there was slight drizzle and when I was walking down through Rosa Luxemburg-Platz, I saw a man in full-make-up, a pink latex jacket, leather biker’s hat, a black mesh over his face, black leather trousers, and black boots, and to me, he looked happy.Free. I was happy for his freedom and thought to myself, ‘You wouldn’t see that in certain areas of Belfast on a Friday night. Sadly.’
You just don’t know the great struggles people have in their lives.
Covid is a nightmare from which we are still trying to awake. But whether the unprecedented response represents a singularity, or the beginning of an era of authoritarian capitalism, is unclear.
Many of us remain incapable of distinguishing a reliable version of reality from lonely projections. Thankfully, telling insights arrive in a new publication: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor – A Critique from the Left. Authors Toby Green (a professor of African history and culture) and Thomas Fazi (a writer and journalist) navigate a path through the scientific thickets, to reveal the socio-economic and cultural factors that shaped the pandemic response.
The temporary elevation of public health officials in many countries to positions of almost unfettered power led the Mozambique writer Pedrito Cambrao to observe that ‘the secular West has essentially turned science into a religion and scientists and healthcare workers into a priestly caste that cannot be challenged. (p.346)’
Media, new and old, brought unrelenting focus to a single challenge, while only rarely surveying accumulating evidence of collateral damage. As in Albert Camus’s great novel, The Plague: ‘Rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street.’[i]
Additionally, as I propose in this review, a “left-brained” positivism appears to have informed the Covid Consensus that Green and Fazi define.
Positivism is a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified, or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, but this can lead to a narrowing of perspective. Thus, long-standing challenges yielded to a singular metric, the waxing and waning of “the virus” – as defined by the PCR test, a dubious diagnostic tool that accounts for exaggerated mortality statistics.
Positivism is identified with the nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte (d.1857), whose conclusions, according to Albert Camus, ‘are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.’
Comte conceived of a hierarchical society that looks similar to what we witnessed over the course of the Covid Consensus:
[S]cientists would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience ‘of action, of thought, and of feeling’ would be given to the high priests who reign over everything.[ii]
In our time, technocratic rule relied on an underlying hysteria founded on a generally irrational fear of premature death, whipped up by social media in particular.
Only once this dissipated – arguably when wide availability of rapid antigen tests revealed the widespread prevalence of basically harmless infections – was normality restored. As in Camus’s novel The Plague: ‘Once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended.’[iii]
Questioning Authority
The paucity of left-wing lockdown critiques, ignoring the plight of Global South, where more than one hundred million people fell below the poverty line (p.286), despite the minimal impact of the virus itself, demonstrates an intellectual impoverishment in a broad-based movement that achieved extraordinary progress during the twentieth century, by questioning established authority in terms or wealth, gender and race.
In contrast, the veteran Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris observed that what went missing during the pandemic was an understanding that ‘science and technology are not neutral’.
All too many who identify as left-wing, Green and Fazi argue failed to recognise, ‘something much more profound than a straightforward conflict between left and right’, but instead,
a struggle at the heart of capitalism between the traditional press and business interests it has always represented (hotels, restaurants, high street shops) and the new corporate giants which did not require such promotion. (p.19)
A sympathetic explanation might trace broad left-wing approval for what were ineffectual lockdowns to the accompanying state largesse. Below the surface, however, a huge transfer of wealth occurred to billionaire owners of giant corporations. Thus, the ten richest men in the world doubled their fortunes during the pandemic, while supports to workers proved transient, and were based on unsustainable quantitative easing, which has, predictably, given way to inflation.
Through effective control over online content, including outright censorship, and regulatory capture – including of the WHO – the corporate giants successfully narrowed the Overton Window of acceptable discourse. Dissenters from a dominant narrative were stigmatised as far-right, libertarian or conspiracy theorists.
Importantly, statements of President Donald Trump were weaponised by architects of the Consensus. Green and Fazi contend that it was ‘no longer possible for left-leaning progressives to question ‘the science’ since that is what Trump had done. (p.78)’
Various conspiracy theories purport to explain the decisions of governments to quarantine almost half of humanity for almost two years to inhibit (rather than eliminate) a virus with a median infection fatality rate of c. 0.27% (the figure for Spanish Influenza in 1918-19 was > 2.5%) that posed a vanishingly low risk of death to anyone under the age of seventy, prior to the arrival of vaccines that were not designed to save lives.
The Covid Consensus addresses a more interesting question however, namely: why did Western populations overwhelmingly consent to unprecedented infringements on civil liberties, culminating in the population-wide, medical coercion of vaccine mandates and passports?
Indeed, leading experts seem to have been surprised at the power they wielded. Thus, after the British government adopted Chinese lockdown policy, Professer Neil Ferguson observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’
It should also be noted that any idea of locking down healthy people was contrary to best practice in global health prior to 2020. An article from 2014 on the history of quarantine, ‘Gold, fire and gallows: quarantine in history’ by Médecins Sans Frontières’s Duncan Mclean found:
There is limited and far from definitive research on quarantine effectiveness and far too many other factors at play that are difficult to ascertain from the historical record. Yet while present understanding about the pathology and transmission of hostile pathogens is far advanced on centuries past, there are some basic conclusions that can be made. For example, it is fairly certain that isolating a healthy population alongside an unhealthy population risks causing more harm than good, especially when access to food, water and medical care is taken into account. For quarantine to be successful, it requires perfect compliance and transmission without symptoms.
Moreover, notwithstanding the dubious achievement of temporarily excluding Covid-19 from certain countries through a Zero Covid policy, the idea that a highly infectious respiratory pathogen causing a low level of morbidity (a U.K. study from October, 2020 found 76.5% of a random sample who tested positive reported no symptoms and 86.1% reported none specific to COVID-19) could have been eliminated was never a serious proposition.
The lockdown-to-vaccine strategy was also predicated on a misplaced article of faith, which is that vaccines – what Boris Johnson referred to as “the scientific cavalry” – would essentially eliminate Covid-19, or at least the transmission of the virus. The progressive – or “left-wing” – argument to take vaccines for the sake of others never stood up to serious scrutiny from the outset; but mainstream media had suspended critical assessment as part of what was immediately likened to a war-time effort.
Despite failing to achieve what most people assumed it would, i.e. block transmission, which its inventor claimed it could achieve, seemingly pre-planned measures were rolled out, while serious harms largely went unreported in a mainstream media dangerously reliant on ‘philanthro-capitalism’.
According to the authors of the Covid Consensus the pandemic ‘provided a radical continuity of many trends which had been latent in global society.’ They point to a steady growth over many years in social inequality, ‘the power of computing, information wars, and the shift towards increasingly authoritarian forms of capitalism across the world had all been growing.(p.2)’ Arguing:
we should perhaps consider the troubling hypothesis that the Chinese and Western regimes, far from representing two opposites may actually have come to embody two different types of authoritarianism, conflictual but symbiotic at the same time – as the striking convergent responses to the pandemic would seem to suggest. (p.398)
Notwithstanding the similarities Green and Fazi point to, the approaches of East and West did diverge in one significant respect: China’s early adoption of a highly authoritarian Zero Covid policy ensured life continued for most of the time “as normal”, whereas Western governments promoted a more consensual social distancing approach that relied on an unprecedented propaganda campaign.
The disturbing effects of social distancing might be viewed as the apotheosis of neo-liberalism. The virus seems to have provided a welcome pretext for the wealthy to remove themselves from the hoi polloi.
Covid-19 also laid bare the widespread out-sourcing of manufacturing to lower wage economies (such as China). Lockdowns demonstrated that many workers in the West were no longer in productive employment, and instead engaged in what the late David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’, often as part of swollen bureaucracies.
Thus, Green and Fazi identify the lockdown response as ‘a symptom of the ever-increasing removal of people in wealthier societies from economic production. (p.2)’ For many Western consumers concern for ‘the implications of lost harvests, ruptured supply chains, and abandoned industrial plant machines was not as real as the threat of a new virus to this group of disproportionately influential people. (p.3)’
An important cultural facet the authors refer to is a crippling fear of death. Over many decades Western governments have cleansed ‘the dead from daily life’ (p.11). This contrasts with the far more obvious folk rituals and religious practices attending a person passing away in the Global South.
A collective inability to reconcile ourselves to death best explains the panic generated by coverage of events in Lombardy, Italy in February, 2020: as ‘the shadow loomed of death re-entering the normal spaces of society people sought to seal themselves away from something which terrified them. (p.11)’
Ferguson’s candid testimony suggests it is highly unlikely that anyone in power anticipated the propaganda value of “the scenes in Italy”. Indeed, many governments displayed little appetite for lockdowns initially. Most quickly rolled over, however in the face of an enduring hysteria; even after initial mortality projections of 0.9% (used by Ferguson in his infamous paper) had been show to be seriously inflated.
A fear of premature death is most obvious explanation for why peopled consented to unprecedented infringements on their civil liberties.
Left-brained?
Another cultural factor the authors point to is ‘the undermining of social science and humanities degrees by governments … in favour of STEM subjects’. They contend that ‘these subjects were routinely ignored in the shaping of major policy decisions by both government and the media. (p.14)’
This educational trend, I would argue, reflects a longer term tendency in advanced industrialised societies (now including China) to perceive the world disproportionately through the left hemisphere of the brain, which has yielded a distinctive version of reality.
McGilchrist argues that since antiquity we find an ‘increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness.’[iv] This sounds suspiciously like the prevailing state of mind under lockdown.
McGilchrist also averts to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, arguing the real horror of the Concentration Camps lay in ‘the detachment with which the detailed plans of the extermination camps were developed, often relying on expertise of engineers, physicians and psychiatrists that makes the Holocaust so chilling.’[v]
It is inappropriate to compare those who promoted lockdowns to the architects of the Final Solution, or the Gulags for that matter. Indeed, many lockdown agitators were probably motivated by a misplaced altruism. The architecture of lockdowns, however, also required a detachment from the far-reaching consequences of shuttering societies and undermining community life.
Lockdowns and vaccine roll-outs depended on (“left-brained”) technical approaches – relying on engineers, physicians and psychiatrists for disease modelling, track and trace and “psy-ops”. In an era of positivism, the role of governments essentially narrowed to curbing the spread of Covid-19. This obscured “big picture” determinants of health and well-being such as social connection, as well as causing almost incalculable educational loss by closing schools for up to two years in some countries.
An acknowledged tendency to mislead the public over the course of the pandemic may also be traced to the left hemisphere; as McGilchrist puts it: ‘The left hemisphere is the equivalent of the person who, when asked for directions, prefers to make something up rather than admitting to not knowing the way.’
Thus, more proportionate policies, such as those followed in Sweden, were sadly lacking in the response. The consequences of a detachment from other determinants of health and well-being seem to be reflected in the troubling excess death statistics we are now witnessing.
The belated repeal of emergency powers in most countries indicates that we have not entered a prolonged period of government led by public health officials. Indeed, conversely, there are strong arguments for greater emphasis on health initiatives to contend with other, more profound, challenges such as the obesity pandemic.
However, the overnight shift from blanket coverage of the virus to the War in Ukraine suggests we may have entered an era of ‘permanent crisis.’ This, according to Green and Fazi, ‘means being stuck in a perpetual present where all energies are focused on the fight against the enemy of the moment. (p.397)’
As with the response to Covid-19, the populations of Europe and America are presented with a single prescription – here a total victory for Ukraine – seemingly at all cost. This is, arguably, indicative of an ascendant “left-brained” positivism, which narrows or simplifies the range of possibilities to the “enemy of the moment”.
Moreover, our dependence on compromised technology accelerated under lockdown. This increases a susceptibility to propaganda, although freedom of association blunts the insidious power of the smart phone device.
Also, fear of Putin and Russia has not awakened a similar hysteria to that generated by Covid-19, although the plight of Ukrainians has certainly been used to garner sympathy for the war effort. A major difference, is that many, though certainly not all, on the left in Europe are questioning a dominant narrative; alert to the fingerprints of the military industrial complex; in contrast to the Covid response – where the role of Big Pharma was generally overlooked.
My concern is not simply that the billionaire class is enriching itself through proximity to power. It is also with the dominance of a “left-brained” caste of mind reigning ascendant in both the West and the East.
Perhaps Bobby Kennedy Jr’s bid for the Democratic nomination will bring greater attention to the influence of the corporate money men in power. An outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the military industrial complex over many years, Kennedy might previously have been easily dismissed as an “anti-vaxxer”, but that term may have lost its valency in the wake of Covid.
Unless, or until, there is a thorough evaluation of what has occurred during Covid-19, the possibility of a renewed assault on basic liberties at the behest of the billionaire class remains. Green and Fazi’s Covid Consensus represents an important first draft of history, which should inform that inquiry.
Feature Image: A classroom with socially distanced desks.
According to Western medical science I suffer from a condition called depression. And from my perspective, I suffer. The conditions of my reality are such that sometimes no matter the environment – with loved ones, by myself, in mediation or not, eating or fasting, sleeping or awake – I feel a sense of dissociation, dread and low energy levels in my body. It comes and it goes and the time it stays can never be predicted. It’s not a comfortable existence.
Practicing yoga has been a wonderful way to help with depression. Lonely and isolating thoughts can’t intrude when those thoughts have been stilled: yogas chitta vritta nirodha [trans: yoga is the stilling of the movements of the mind].
When I told a good friend recently that my yoga practice didn’t seem to be helping with the symptoms of my depressions, as it had in the past, she said, “maybe it’s not working? Maybe you should try something else? Like a hobby?”
My instant reaction was, “how dare you question my practice?” I got defensive. She didn’t understand. She’s not a yogi. These practices are fundamental to my life. Yoga has helped me overcome substance abuse, break ups, a mid-life crisis, and poor work/life balance. What do you mean “it’s not working”?
As it turns out, she was both right and wrong. She was right: the yoga wasn’t working. She was also wrong: yoga always works.
My yoga practice wasn’t working because I was expecting it to alleviate my suffering like a drug alleviates the symptoms of disease. I practice and I stop suffering. Like buying a salad at a restaurant. Like purchasing a bicycle. A contract.
I was offering my dedication and daily practice and expected to receive something (bliss, freedom, insight) in return of equal or greater value. And the harder and longer I practice, the more and more rewards I receive. In this case, I expected to be delivered from my depression in return for my yoga practice: daily meditation, kriya and pranayama, and Japa practices.
So, my friend was right: yoga wasn’t working because that is not the way yoga works. In a spiritual practice, the investment is the return. The discipline, the devotion, the surrender, these are the practices AND the results. And this includes surrendering any expectation that your suffering will end just because you practice yoga.
Our daily lives are comprised of contracts or agreements. We aren’t aware of this most of the time. We work to make money. We use money to pay for food and shelter. These are transactional agreements we make many times a day.
I use money to buy a thing and I expect a thing in return for payment. The expectation is of something foreseeable with pretty good accuracy: I see an orange, I pay money, I go home with the orange.
Let’s go further. The dentist says if I brush my teeth, I won’t get cavities. Doctor says If I eat a healthy diet, I’ll avoid heart disease. I shower to keep my body free of germs. I eat to nourish my body. My friend and I agree to meet for lunch at 12:30pm.
These are what we might call causal agreements: I do one act and expect a certain result or effect in the future in return. The expectation is foreseeable based on past experience and current knowledge with reasonable accuracy: if I brush my teeth, it is reasonable to expect that I will get fewer cavities than if I did not.
The Wrong Dressing…
Sometimes the orange you buy isn’t ripe, or the salad you purchase doesn’t have the right dressing. You can bring it back and get a refund or buy another orange or salad. Sometimes no matter how much you brush your teeth, you get a cavity. And sometimes your friend texts you a half hour before lunch to cancels.
In the manifest world, events are sometimes out of our control and agreements are broken. That’s why we have contracts: to incentivize performance and provide a reasonable expectation of performance in the future. With incentive (cause) the seemingly chaotic world develops a certain stability (effect).
I was seeing my yoga practice as just another transaction. As with buying an orange, I assume that if I practiced hard and consistently enough, I would see a change in my mood, my health, and my overall happiness would improve. As if there were some sort of Rewards program that grants more freedom and happiness the more we meditate, perform religious rituals, and/or bend ourselves into pretzels.
This contract is made with our egos, “I” want to avoid suffering so I will practice āsana. I want to achieve enlightenment so I will meditate every day. If I practice this kriyā long enough I’ll feel refreshed when I am done.
Spiritual (not religious) work is done internally. By definition, it should always be under our control. So why is there no guarantee that the spiritual work you do today will pay off tomorrow? Because spiritual work is not transactional: if it were, we’d always have a return because we are the only ones that need to perform.
A refined spiritual practice transcends the ego and the deal-making we engage in with it. Part of that transcendence is letting go of expectations and the ego incentives that feed them. All of the practices and the effects of yoga happen only if I commit totally and let go of “I.” And the practice of letting go of “I” never ends.
In moments of union or yoga we experience totality. There is no lack. There is no restriction. We are liberated, filled with vast silence. This can last seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months or years depending on the effort involved, if we can let go of the ego and its tendencies.
And so there is no need for a contract in the first place; there is no lack to be fulfilled. But to do that there must be constant effort and a discipline that becomes devotion. Resistance that arises from conditioning must become love. So that the act becomes the gift itself in the present instead of something to be had in the future.
Hunger
If I am hungry, I need food to satisfy hunger. This is a basic function of the body. As long as the body is alive we must eat to keep it nourished. Hunger will always arise though, and needs to be dealt with (food is but one option, actually). There is no such biological prerequisite for the ego, however. And yet most of us feel there is, and this is one source of suffering.
The ego will never be satisfied, no matter how much you feed it. Ego hunger, like actual hunger, will never go away unless we transcend it through practice.
There is no causal/transactional link between the practice and the state of union or state of “no lack”. The practice is the state, and the state is the practice.
Transcendence as a result of practice involves moving past the perceived separation between cause and effect, between past and present, and present and future. A strong spiritual practice never ceases, there is no past and now and future. There is only now. And now. And now. And now.
We are humans and it is human nature to suffer, to make mistakes, to lie, to steal, to cheat, to hurt others just as it is human nature to tell the truth, give to others, to love and to forgive.
We have a great capacity for growth as well as destruction. That will never change. The gift of a spiritual practice is not the removal of depression, lying, cheating or suffering from your experience but the transcendence of how you perceive them.
As long as I perceive my yoga practice as something to be bartered with it will forever be one half of a transaction with my ego, and my suffering will only increase.
Image: Daniele Idini
Separateness
One need not be a Hindu or even a yogi to have a spiritual practice. Many faiths lead to a transcendence of the ego and cause and effect in the material world. Prayer, service, devotion and keen insight require total commitment of your being and isn’t just an intellectual exercise.
Much of the modern world is based on an intellectual concept – the presumed individuality of existence. Each of our bodies are a thing with a brain that controls it and heart that sustains it.
One aspect of this view is actually the contract: by definition, there must be two parties to a contract. So, we view each other as separate and separate ourselves on a daily basis, many times a day. This point of view will always lead to internal and external conflict because conflict requires two parties as well.
Separateness is one of the great illusions of the modern world. It is a belief that is reinforced again and again. A belief is an intellectual understanding based on assumptions. You see this everywhere. People “believe” in lots of “things.”
Again, two parties must exist: me and the concept. This is totally different to Faith. Faith is a knowingness, a surrender to what is: that there is no separation.
In a state of Oneness there is no contract. There is no conflict. It takes discipline to overcome the feeling of separateness created by our conditioning and our ego. That constant discipline is devotion. In that state of constant effort, we are free from the suffering of separateness.
And so my friend was also wrong. It was the practice which led me to these insights about my condition. All the benefits of a spiritual practice happen now, not sometime in the future as a return on the investment of your practice.
The promise of yoga IS the sustained practice: be that pranayama, meditation, yamas and niyamas, āsana or puja. Yes, you may reach an enlightened state sometime in your life.
Yes, it may happen in the future. Yes, daily practice can make enlightenment more likely to happen. Yes, sometimes your friend cancels and you are disappointed. Yes, sometimes you will feel like you want a spiritual refund. But that’s not the point. A spiritual practice, once started, never ends. It is action, not passively waiting for suffering to end.
Such sad news. Another member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement is gone. Not just any member, but Dr. Moira Woods, one of the three founders.
She was something else. By the time us younger ones were venting our rage outside Dáil Éireann in blue jeans and curly hair, thinking we were the bee’s knees, Moira had already shaved her head in support of victims of tarring and feathering in the North, conducted a mock trial of Richard Nixon on the back of a lorry during his visit here, carried an effigy of him on a coffin to the American Embassy, and burnt it. Another day she suggested setting her coat alight in Church in protest against the latest Catholic Church outrage.
Talk about fearless.
She was also very clever and enjoyed film star looks. As Marie McMahon put it, ‘besides being by far the most beautiful person in the (IWLM) group to look at, which is an awful sexist thing to say but it’s true! she also had a brilliant sense of humour. And was extremely politically courageous’.
1950s Ireland. Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)
Early Years
Born in 1934 – a child of the Raj – to an English father and an Irish mother, her family were stationed in Burma before being evacuated to Australia after the Japanese invasion. She was then sent ‘home’ to be educated by nuns, where according to Susan McKay she ‘received thrashings and expulsions’.
She was, nonetheless, a brilliant student, ready to matriculate for Oxford aged just fifteen, but switched at the last minute to study in Trinity to allow her begin her medicine degree at sixteen.
‘In her final year’ writes Susan McKay, she won ‘a medal for psychiatry, a gold medal for surgery and the hospital prize for medicine.’
Her first marriage was to a fellow student, Roger Hackett. They had two children.
She later re-married, a surgeon Bobby Woods, who was aged sixty-two, while she was thirty-one. Mary Maher, Woman’s editor of the Irish Times and fellow member of the IWLM said she had ‘never seen a happier marriage’. They went on to have four children.
While raising her family, running the big house on Ailesbury Road – Deirdre McQuillan remembers her ‘at the stove cooking something wonderful while children and people milled about’ – she became intensely committed to political justice – protesting against the war in Vietnam, the Dublin Housing Acton Committee, and the Northern Troubles.
Snooty neighbours were not always impressed. The Woods were accused of being ‘communists’, of harbouring Viet Cong. Neighbouring children were forbidden from playing there.
I don’t think it took a feather out of her. She had bigger fish to fry.
A mural outside the Bernard Shaw Pub in Portobello, Dublin depicting Savita Halappanavar and calling for a Yes vote in Ireland’s referendum on repealing the Eighth Amendment.
Justice for Women
More and more, she joined the fight for justice for women, so that one day she and Margaret Gaj, owner of Gaj’s on Baggot Street, and heroic fellow fighter for justice Máirín de Burca – fresh out of jail for pelting eggs at Richard Nixon’s car the same day Moira was conducting her mock trial – got together in Bewley’s on Grafton Street and decided – HURRAY! – to found the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement.
Pretty much every gain made in rights for women in Ireland can be traced back to that modest get together of these three women.
This was an Ireland where women were discriminated against from the day we were born. As we detailed in our pamphlet, ‘Chains or Change’, in every aspect of their lives women were hobbled.
This began with an education system which funneled us into our designated roles as wives, mothers and caregivers. After primary school we were obviously too thick to do higher level mathematics, thereby excluding us from most properly paid careers, from medicine to airline pilots to bank manager. If a few ladies managed to jump through the various hoops, the infamous Marriage Bar lay in store.
Once married you were out on your ear, and it wasn’t just for civil service jobs, but also banks, accountancy firms, respectability itself demanded you go home and become, literally, a ‘chattel’ inside your marriage, where you enjoyed few civil rights. Legally you barely existed.
Your husband could flip over to the UK, divorce you, get full custody of your children and sell the family home from under your feet – all above board!
Having made sure marriage was the only ‘career path’ open to women the powers that be – the celibate elite of the Catholic Church and the politicians who kowtowed to them – aimed to turn us into little more than domestic servants and baby-making machines.
There was no sex education, no contraception, and absolutely no termination of pregnancy available. Talk about going to war blindfolded, with your hands tied behind your back!
Life was less dire for middle class, urban women, but the damnation of a Mother and Baby Home awaited most working class and rural girls unfortunate enough to become pregnant outside of wedlock.
For many unfortunate middle class women locked into marriages – ‘drowning in babies’ in Nuala Fennell’s immortal phrase – Valium taken by the bucket load was the only source of comfort.
And women were still ‘churched’ after giving birth, that is brought in and ‘cleansed’, as if birth itself, so ferociously trumpeted by the good fathers, was filthy.
As Nell McCafferty famously found out, you couldn’t even get a television on the never-never without a male signature. Even if that male was unemployed and pulled in off the street and you’d just been hired by the Irish Times.
Naturally Moira became the go to person within the IWLM for all matters medical, and psychological. June Levine remembered warmly comforting words from Moira when accessing a nasty memory during a consciousness raising session in Gaj’s, revisiting a man thrusting his penis between the bars of her cot.
As Moira increased her involvement in women’s rights the damage wrought on our society by crazy levels of inequality, and repression became clearer to her.
It helped that she had been brought up outside of Ireland. She remained a Catholic, but totally rejected ‘Rome’s’ assumption that it could regulate women’s reproductive lives down to the minutest detail.
Her presence as an educated and privileged woman carried weight. On a practical level, as one of the few women in the IWLM with ‘means’ she was, as Máirín de Burca says, ‘always there to bail us out of the Bridewell after we’d been arrested. She was incredibly generous. I once landed a homeless family on her and she just took them in.’
By the late 1970s, Moira was helping set up the first Well Woman Centres, the country’s first menopause clinic, and had begun seeing patients referred to her by the Rape Crisis Centre.
Image (c) Daniele Idini.
The Eighth Amendment
1983 was the year when the backlash against the liberalisation of life in Ireland began in earnest, Moira was at the forefront of the campaign against the insertion of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution..
Right-wing Catholicism, representing the most repressive aspects of the religious Patriarchy, had marshaled its forces. Recalling the names of the various organisations sends a shiver down my spine: PLAC, SPUC, the Congress of Catholic Secondary School Parents’ Associations, the Irish Catholic Doctors’ Guild, the Guild of Catholic Nurses, the Guild of Catholic Pharmacists, the Catholic Young Men’s Society, the St. Thomas More Society, the National Association of the Ovulation Method, the Council of Social Concern, the Irish Responsible Society, the St Joseph’s Young Priests Society, and the Christian Brothers Schools Parents’ Federation.
Passing the infamous Eighth Amendment, giving a foetus equal rights to life to that of the mother, inserted into the Constitution was their sole aim. Shamefully, three separate governments allowed themselves to be terrified into submission and the Eighth was ‘in’.
It was a bruising battle, and Moira was at the centre of it.
Within a year of ‘winning’, the disastrous consequences for young women became apparent. Thus, schoolgirl Ann Lovett was found bleeding to death in a grotto in Longford – her little baby lying dead beside her.
Six months later Joanne Hayes was to be crucified on Ireland’s terrifying patriarchal altar, having been wrongly accused of the death of a baby found on a strand eighty kilometres away.
An indication of just how desperate things were for young women comes from a remark made by the undertaker who buried the little one found on the strand. He lived beside a quarry, and said it was not unusual to find babies bodies thrown there by desperate mothers.
How could a society descend to that level of brutality?
Cassandra imploring Athena for revenge against Ajax, by Jerome-Martin Langlois, 1810-1838.
Sexual Assault Unit
Moira’s next move was to head up a Sexual Assault Unit in the Rotunda. As Emily O’Reilly wrote in a piece for the Sunday Business Post in 2002, Ireland’s first SAU ‘sprang indirectly from the 1983 anti-amendment campaign’ after discussions between Anne O’Donnell, Moira and Dr George Henry, then Master of the Rotunda.
Dr. Henry had seen SAU’s in Australia, setting one up in an Ireland reeling from sexual violence and guilt, seemed obvious and Moira was the obvious person to put in charge.
She set about doing things with her usual vigour, but was soon stunned at the tsunami of cases coming her way involving abuse, incest and rape. The outer limits of sexual violence.
It was a rape case that once again pushed her centre stage. The so-called ‘X’ case.
A suicidal fourteen-year-old girl, pregnant as a result of rape, was taken to London by her parents to see if they could extract DNA from the foetus for a court case against the perpetrator and were told that would involve a high risk of miscarriage.
When her parents asked the Gardaí if DNA from the foetus could be used in evidence the Gardaí immediately informed the Attorney General, who sought an injunction, granted by the High Court, compelling the girl and her parents to remain in Ireland.
In the High Court Declan Costello ruled that despite the rape, the age of the victim, and her being suicidal, she had good loving parents and so the pregnancy must go ahead.
Five days later an appeal was lodged in the Supreme Court, which decided that termination, in England, could go ahead.
The child miscarried two days later in a London hospital. Moira was the doctor in charge. The misery wrought on those parents, and that raped, suicidal fourteen-year-old being put through by the system, left her shaking with fury.
Tragically for her it put her in the cross hairs of the latest iteration of misogynistic religiosity.
Working alone, with absolutely minimal resources, Moira had seen over 1,000 children in the Rotunda. Incest, barely mentioned at the time, was one of the biggest problems presenting.
Moira’s methods of work were unheard of at the time in Ireland. She actually spoke to the children, and used ‘anatomically correct dolls’ to help them demonstrate what had occurred.
She also named fathers she deemed guilty of abuse, which was also unheard of. As Deirdre McQuillan says the practice had been to keep fathers in the family no matter what.
The ‘no matter what’ was of course crucial. As Sebastian Barry has been so eloquently shouting out in publicising his new novel, God’s Old Time, abusing a child or a young person is akin to murdering them. Protecting the breadwinner – no matter what – could, and often did, mean abandoning the child.
As one lawyer who saw the subsequent crucifixion of Dr. Moira Woods unfolding put it, ‘part of the problem was she was way ahead of her time. In those days there was no culture of reporting abuse. People wouldn’t believe you, they didn’t want to believe you, that a father had sexually abused his daughter.’
‘If it happened now there would be much deeper investigation, and she wouldn’t be in any trouble at all’.
Sadly it was then, and not now. And the bad people won.
Moira’s stellar career in unflagging support for Irish women and children was mired in vileness, heaped on her by those desperate not to be named.
Just as happened with Dr. Noel Browne over the Mother and Child Scheme in 1951, the medical profession stood idly by as one of their finest was thrown to the wolves.
It was a five year, savage war of attrition, with the Medical Council producing a redacted report (as is standard Irish practice), which, wrote Emily O’Reilly, concluded ‘while Woods was found not to have observed proper protocols, it makes no claims about the validity of the accusations.’
‘Proper protocols’ were demanded while working alone, and completely under-resourced, in a bat-shit, sexually dysfunctional country.
Moira didn’t appeal.
My lawyer friend said, ‘she’d had enough’. She had just separated from her partner of twenty years, and father of her two youngest children, Cathal Goulding, and decided to leave town to live in Italy.
Deirdre McQuillan says it makes her happy to think she found a new, good life there. Met with an Italian man, Guido, ran a big house, and kept in touch with home via the steady stream of visitors from Ireland, her eight wonderful children and grandchildren – Penny, Denis, Christopher, Catherine, Timothy, Benjamin, Aodgán and Banbán with grandchildren Ben, Erin, Jack, Rowan, Katharine, Oisín, Clíodhna, Darragh, Sophie, Emily, Sophie and Cathal.
I’m torn between rage and sorrow thinking about her. Her valour. Her beauty. Her passionate advocacy for Irish women, that ‘the issues on which she campaigned throughout the 1970s and 1980s resulted in twenty changes of legislation involving women,’ (according to Stephen Dodds in the Irish Independent in 2002), and the shameful way she was treated by an embedded, religiously inspired, misogyny.
It is terrifying how blackening people’s reputation works; how repressing the truth works, including taking injunctions out against biographical works. Indeed, Google searches for one of Ireland’s greatest advocates for women, show up pitifully little information.
Here’s hoping she’s up there with the Great Spirit in the Sky fashioning flaming swords and thunderbolts to hurl down on her torturers – they know who they are. You! And You! And You!
Rest in Power beautiful Sister.
Rosita Sweetman received this message from Moira’s old friend President Michael D. Higgins in advance of the publication of this appreciation.
