Cassandra Voices

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  • The Dog that Sang the Blues

    It feels like centuries must have passed, but it is only decades. Years grow shorter as they multiply. Back then a year was long. Winters moved slowly through the seasons, bookending the boundless summers. I remember the newness of things then. When I was a boy, in my imagination, I could picture death, but it seemed unreal, like a dream that evaporates with the morning mist. I never thought about anything but life. Immortality was existence. Leaving church on a bright sunny day the thought that death could be overcome, outlived, outwitted even, was mere common sense. It seems different now, now that I have felt the rain. Maybe you remember that strange feeling in the early mornings when you were a child, the first minutes of a new day where a vague belly hunger is usurped by the rush of life. The seedling imagination growing, nurturing its petals under an indefinite sky. The day you say ‘I am’ and soon after, ‘we are’. Mornings absent of fear. A day in the sun’s warmth. Growing in the scent of cut grass that grew in the meadows of the town. I had a feeling then that all roads would be trodden, but only if I could harness time, the impossible trick. Between sadness and hope, lies adventure, and that’s where the story begins.

    It was around that time, at the beginning of this century, I travelled around South America. What a beautiful time it was to be alive. I even knew it then, as it was happening. I didn’t need retrospect. I never doubted things of beauty then, and that helped me to find solace later, from what would reveal itself as pitilessness. We can say doomed to die, but not to love. Even if love fails and falters, if it was true, it was worthwhile. It has taken its place in the hallowed halls. My heart was broken by a rejected love, and because she was everything and all else paled, the rejection made everything the world could offer dour, grey almost, even on the brightest of days. She robbed me of its flavour, but she wasn’t to blame. When you fall in love with someone that isn’t in love with you, you rob yourself. Even if it is accidental. The fire in life’s colour was doused. I was one of the heart broken ones. The heartbreak gave off a physical pain as I walked one morning to the inter-city bus station in Buenos Aires and searched on the departures board for the bus that would take me to Bolivia.

    The journey from Buenos Aires to La Paz was long. It took days. Up through Paraguay. My only previous contact with that country and been as a boy, and the 1986 World Cup sticker album, and now here I was. Asuncion the capital city and the accompanying thought, ‘I never imagined I’d be here.” Quite right. I spent a happy night there. Alone but never lonely, the gentle prospect of adventure held me in its embrace. No one to talk to, alone with my cigarettes, the hotel bar and thoughts and dreams and memories and ideas, paintings on the walls, anticipations, and then return to the twirling of smoke. And now those times, like all those unrecorded, exciting moments brimming with life, love and expectation, have now become mysteriously void of most of their content. The thought processes blurred and misty, the shower and shit, what was I reading? What was the room really like? The hotel foyer? Gone forever, lost in times rip tide, taken out to sea by its vast whirlpool. Only the vivid haunts. Maybe God is only time, the thing that has dominion over all things.

    We were driving down the highway in Paraguay on the thundering bus, over the rattling bogs, when suddenly there was an almighty thud and the bus shook with the explosive cacophony of the passenger’s screams. Delight ensued when it was confirmed it was a large hog we had hit, so the passengers dragged the great dead boar onto the bus and away we went. There would be some full bellies that night. Quite right again. Waste not, want not. Their good fortune was greeted with singing, and I remember that I smiled. I must have slept plenty as the next part of the journey on to Bolivia has become vague. I remember looking out of a bus window for hours as it went through the lowlands, green and tumbling to the horizon, with still white clouds in the reddening sky, dreamlike, unfolding the night.

    At last, I arrived in the town of Humahuaca deep in the north of Argentina. The lunar landscape surrounding it gave the impression at dusk that we were driving on Mars. In the distance I could see the so called ‘Hills of Many Colours.’ I was the only one to disembark the bus and found myself totally alone in a town that seemed deserted. Night had fallen. There were no people anywhere. The desolate town greeted me with both tranquillity and foreboding, as if I was being watched secretly. It felt as if someone or something had been expecting me. I looked up and saw the galaxy was visible, our suburb looking magnificent, truly. Perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever seen outside the smile in her eyes. I stared up, and my insignificance equalled my luck.

    We are on the edge of our Galaxy, if its centre is Trafalgar Square, we are Theydon Bois, or perhaps Croydon. I recently learned that there is a giant black hole at the centre of our milky way so this could be a good thing. I sat on a wall where the bus dropped me off and lit a cigarette, dazzled by the stars. I looked around for the neon light of a hotel but there was nothing. I was three puffs in when I realised something was watching me. It was like a feeling that some entity is boring into your skull without you knowing. I looked down from the silent night to the uneven cobbles of the street and there in front of me was a rag tag dog, looking up as if we had met before. Its head was slightly tilted to the left. It was dark brown, very dark brown with unkempt matted hair and had wide friendly brown eyes, full of sorrow and expectation. I said hello. It didn’t react. Maybe it doesn’t speak English I thought. ‘Hola’ I said. It tilted its head slightly to the right with an inquisitive look. That made me smile. My loneliness seemed to evaporate into the balmy night of stars and sands.

    I stood up and it lifted its head with an air of loyalty. I walked on to where I thought the town centre was and the dog immediately followed, walking alongside. I reached a crossroads and my spirits lifted again. I began to walk towards the sign that said HOTEL with an independent air. The Bois de Boulogne it was not. The dog followed. I looked down and straight away noticed that it was limping. Wait, was it a limp? I stood a step to the side and focussing in the dim light noticed it only had three legs. Three legs. Poor thing. Must be a hard life out here on Mars. I looked up again at the stars and as I did so two drifting clouds ate the moon. I lit another and said to the dog, ‘Alright hop-a-long. Vamos.”

    The three-legged dog walked beside me, looking up at my face. The immediate fealty impressed me, there was a certain loyalty in its manner and an irrepressible eagerness for life. I stopped and waited. The dog stopped too, looking curious as to what I was doing. I breathed a plume to the night sky and carried on walking, and the dog followed by my side. We parted company for a while as I booked in and put my bag in my room. The hotel was old but clean. I lay on the bed for a while staring at the ceiling, wondering what to do. ‘A beer’ I thought. I looked at the clock on the wall and it read nine, so I launched off the bed and returned to the warm evening. The cripple dog was waiting for me at the end of the path to the hotel.

    As I approached, he looked up at me in friendship, so I smiled back and said ‘Hola.’ Then I went to look for a bar and sure enough, the three-legged dog followed. I stopped walking just to see what it would do. It stopped and looked up at me. I carried on. The dog followed by my side. I stopped again. So did he. He looked up but now with an expression that read ‘don’t fuck about.” No more testing. I saw some empty plastic chairs outside a well-lit window and presumed it was a bar so I crossed the desolate street. The dog hobbled along with me to the door and then stopped and sat down under the beer light, awaiting my return.

    I drank many beers, smoked my mind, and indulged in whiskey until the light’s glow behind the bar told me that I was drunk. I have for many years found it difficult to both get in and out of bed. Could be a sign of depression, not sure. I’m usually happy. Maybe content is a better word. I thanked the barman in Spanish and he nodded warmly and waved me goodbye. I was surprised to see hop-a-long waiting for me. It must have been hours. I looked up at the waxing moon lighting the night world dreaming. I lit a cigarette and started the wander back to my hotel in the full knowledge the dog would follow. In the middle of the empty square, I sat down on a wall to take my measure of the town. The crippled dog stood in front of me on three legs where I sat. We looked at each for a while under the watchful gaze of the night. Then he began to sing.

    The first note sat still on the air, full of loss and pity, but constructing a harbour for hope out of notes alone. It was full of duende. Fulloftheheartbreakingbeautyoftheworld. And then the music soared up to the stars above us. How could such a perfect blue note be produced by an unwanted animal like this? I thought. Then I saw that the answer was in the question. It put its head by its missing leg and again the song came. It was the rawest blues I’ve ever heard. I remember thinking to myself, well raise my rent, you make Muddy Waters sound content. But it was just a three-legged dog on the lunar earth. He made me smile on a low ebb, which is what good friends can do. In the perfect moment, just as the moon disappeared behind the clouds, the dog stopped singing. All that could be heard was silence. I realised music, like poetry, is not academic. All academic pursuits require evidence. Music does not. I don’t know how long I stayed with the three-legged dog, untalkative. After a time, the beer began to wear thin in my mind and I decided to go to bed.

    “Well, good night.” I said, but the Argentine hound didn’t understand. I looked at him in the eye and he understood I had acknowledged his song. Then I turned and went into the hotel and slept. I awoke the next morning to the sound of voices and the distant rumble of a motor car. I got up scratching my spinning head. I realised I hadn’t gotten undressed which saved some time and headed out of the hotel to find the bus that would take me on to Bolivia. Hop-a-Long was gone. I felt a pang of sadness and regret. I looked up and down the desolate street but there was no sign of him. That afternoon I boarded the bus and departed. I looked out of the window as the bus passed by the frontier of town and saw a truck being loaded. There in a cage carried by the dog catchers was hop-a-long looking forlorn and scared. I jumped up with my bag and guitar, ran up to the front of the bus and banged on the window as he pulled out. I asked the driver to stop and he obliged. I ran back and told the dog catchers the he was mine. They believed me after I gave them some money, and the dog looked up at me and smiled. I looked away to the horizon and pictured distant La Paz in my mind’s eye. I noticed he was also looking out to the distance.

    ‘Looks like we’re walking there’ I said.

    Hop-a-long sang. And off we went together, towards the childhood of mountains.

    Feature Image: Hector Perez

  • Scratch That: Taylor Swift is a Dime-Store Novelist

    The poet Haley Hodges has recently written a winsome essay for Cassandra Voices claiming that the Galactic Empress, Her Swiftiness, Queen of Ubiquity, is our “greatest confessional poet.” Let’s leave aside that Tay-Tay isn’t a poet—that song-writing and poetry-writing are different games with different rules—she is certainly a confessional, and one in the terms Hodges outlines. So far, so good. But I want to take issue with the hyperbolic praise in which that essay bathes the Golden Girl.

    One has, of course, to account for her success, and I do so by thinking of her as some latter-day Tennyson striding into the enormous gap left in literature by the passing of the Romantics. He became, despite his frequent mediocrity, the national poet simply because there was nothing else around—in much the same way that whatever show aired after Seinfeld in the era of broadcast television was bound to be popular simply because people couldn’t be bothered to get up and change the channel.

    So it is with Miss Swift. Despite the fact that she can barely sing, play guitar, dance, or write songs, she has somehow become our late empire’s troubadour simply because, well, it seemed like we should have one, and she was there.

    I will say, however, that she does seem to have both the sense and the good taste to enlist the talents of better musicians when she finds them as aides-de-camp. I don’t know whether there’s a real relationship here or if he’s just a hired gun, but in finding the guy from The National and letting him do his thing across a couple of her albums, she has shown shrewd awareness of the limits of her own powers. It’s just unfortunate, to me anyway, that she sings over it.

    Also in the plus column for Miss Swift is something called “vibes,” which I have on good authority is how the youngsters are measuring musical quality these days. The alternative is to measure something like albums, songs, or performances, but I do have to admit that the vibes on an album like folklore—or even the new tortured poets record—are just right. The album art and production quality are suggestive of very specific kinds of scenes, which is to say, ways of being in the world that I think most people are quite hungry for. Perhaps it’s okay that music is serving a different role for this generation than it did for previous ones. Rather than, say, producing memorable songs that one might sing out loud with friends or tap one’s foot to in bars, Swift produces a kind of mood. If that mood is principally tepid, leftist, feminine revenge porn, well, what is that to me?

     

    But actually, is such a posture all that new? Take punk music, for example. How many of those records are about posture—about a certain way of being in the world—more than they are, say, about musicianship or song-craft? Rather more than a few, I’d think.

    In the end, I think of Miss Swift’s accomplishment like I think of the accomplishment of the McDonalds restauranteurs. The fare offered is easy and everywhere. It appeals to an extremely broad base of persons looking for an easy fix. There’s something uniquely American about both products. Some people, of course, may turn their noses up at both. At other times, though, it can be just the thing wanted—especially if it’s late, you’re tired, and hanging out with friends, and no one can think of where else to go.

    No. I think the more apt literary key for understanding Swiftian appeal contra confessionals is the early novelists. Here’s the oft-forgotten American critic William Dean Howells on what the youngsters were then ingesting: bad writing that does “a great deal of harm in the world.” “[Figures like Swift]” he argues, “that heroine, [have] long taught by example, if not precept, that Love, or the passion or fancy she mistook for it, was the chief interest of a life which is really concerned with a great many other things; that it was lasting in the way she knew it; that it was worthy of every sacrifice, and was a finer thing than prudence, obedience, reason; that love alone was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly in comparison with it.” (From “The Editor’s Study” 1887).

    This is precisely Swift’s contribution to world culture, in my view. She works to elevate not-even-the-state-of, but the feeling of being in love to the ne plus ultra of human experience. Her obsession with dopey, high-school boys and floppy hair made sense when she was a teenaged songwriter, appealing mostly to other teens whose concerns tend to be similarly circumscribed. But I expected—I thought we all expected—that she’d grow out of them.

    We were wrong. Her emotional range is the same. Her jealousies are the same. Her available subjects are the same now, in her 30’s, a billionaire, as they were walking past the lockers hoping to be noticed. That too would be fine; cases of arrested development are legion, except that she foists this worldview so broadly about. Thanks to her, several generations of women have been baptized into the shallow end of the kiddie pool, there to thrash about and encourage one another in their Mean Girls affectations.

    I don’t know. At the beginning of his essay, Howells cautions about reading to much into these pulp offerings: “the [art] that aims merely to entertain—the [art] that is to serious fiction as the opera buffe…and the pantomime are to the true drama—need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply.” That’s probably right. That’s what she’s doing. It’s entertainment. We don’t have to take it so seriously. It’s what Liam Gallagher of Oasis once referred to as “junk food music.”

    And there’s nothing wrong with a little junk food! This is America! Have some. Enjoy yourself. But let’s not make the category mistake of thinking it counts as cuisine.

  • Review: ‘That They May Face the Rising Sun’

    Some viewers have noticed the numberplate on the Ford Cortina in That They May Face the Rising Sun, the recent film based on John McGahern’s 2002 novel of the same name. The plate reads ‘OZU 155’. Surely this is a reference to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu? In interview, the director, Pat Collins, has said that the coincidence of the number plate was unplanned, but deliberately retained.

    Ozu is not well known in the West now, but he is certainly a canonical name among people, like Collins, who know their cinema history. Ozu is celebrated for an observational, restrained style of storytelling, with minimal music or camera movement and, indeed, minimal plot. Collins’s admirable adaptation of McGahern’s final novel bears more than passing resemblances to key Ozu films, such as Late Spring from 1949, Early Summer from 1951, Tokyo Story from 1953 and An Autumn Afternoon from 1962. Like Collins, these all share a concern with the gentle unfolding of inter-generational time, with subtle domestic interactions, and with the challenge (sometimes welcome, sometimes not) posed by the visitor from outside.

    What is most pertinent about this playful reference, however, is the common take on Ozu that he addressed ‘universal’ themes, and that his appeal is ‘universal’. Similar observations litter the reception of That They May Face the Rising Sun, and of another recent Irish breakthrough hit that I consider a companion piece to this, 2022’s An Cailín Ciúin, directed by Colm Bairéad. Both of these films are set in isolated, unnamed rural locales, with ordinary folk as lead characters, and have plots that are not besmirched by the concerns of urban existence (crime and punishment, politics, violence, money, addiction, social isolation, class conflict), which tend to dominate the stories we watch on screen. As with Ozu, paring away as many specific plot details as possible makes these films feel, to reach for vocabulary favoured by reviewers, ‘timeless’, ‘classic’, ‘profound’, ‘dreamlike’, ‘beautiful’, ‘delicate’.

    It has been a long-running complaint that Irish cinema was dominated too long by questions of national and/or sectarian identity, that its narratives were tediously populated by priests and hysterical IRA men running around in ill-fitting leather jackets. Why couldn’t we just have a ‘normal’ cinema that would tell non-political stories that would have a universal appeal? The embarrassment of a liberal commentariat, and academy, at our political backwardness means that any Irish film that is not about the British question in some form or other is greeted with praise for having achieved some kind of postnationalist maturity. The two recent Irish films that we are concerned with here are therefore feted, as evidence that we have grown up.

    It is true of any film set in the past that it is as much about the time it is made as the time it depicts. That They May Face the Rising Sun is set in the early 1980s, but the couple at the heart of the story, self-exiled from the city, are recognisably from our times. The period details are minimal, and the sense of being in the past is achieved mostly by the omission of digital devices, screens and disposable homeware. The fashion and hairstyles, so often an important guide to period, are neutral enough to belong either to the 1980s or to the present, especially if we regard Joe and Kate as ageing hipsters. (All the other characters are timelessly old-fashioned in their appearance.) As for what they do, they are engaged in what we now call remote working and the back-to-basics simplicity of their existence, with its mix of intellectual life, light agricultural activity and overpopulation-conscious childlessness, has a whiff of prepperism.

    A very memorable sequence dwells on the wake, hours after the unexpected death of the lonely Johnny, who has been marooned in a life of drudgery in London for decades. In the crowded kitchen of Johnny’s brother’s family, a woman leads the group of country people in reciting a decade of the rosary, keeping track with a set of beads on her lap. Everybody participates in the ritual, responding to her as she cycles through the prayers. We linger on the faces and voices for longer than a more distractable film would allow. In the midst of all this, our protagonists Joe and Kate remain silent. For all of their integration into the community and the vital welcome that they offer to all comers, they are nevertheless not fully part of it.

    The tone of this separateness is carefully judged; the silence of Joe and Kate is not hostile, nor is it received badly, as the story is one of tolerance. But, whereas in the novel, it is the community that kindly tolerates the blow-ins who have landed in their midst, in the film the flow of tolerance has switched, and now it is the liberal couple who tolerate the traditional, conservative values of the community. The contemporary characteristics of Joe and Kate align them with our 2024 values. The vast changes that have taken place between the early 1980s and now are palpable in this difference.

    Nobody knew better than McGahern the tightness of the stranglehold that the Catholic Church held over the life of the country, especially in rural areas and in the schools. (He lost his job as a teacher because of the content of earlier novels). It is apparent to us now that the church was in fact at an unsustainable peak of dominance, triumphant in the abortion referendum of 1983 and in the defeated divorce referendum of 1986. But events such as the outcries at the death of Ann Lovett and the persecution of Joanne Hayes would set in motion the church’s reputational freefall in the intervening decades (rapist priests, slave laundries, death camps for children of the unmarried, the list goes on) and the blanket implementation in recent times of what was in the past quaintly known as ‘the liberal agenda’.

    That They May Face the Rising Sun is a document of the final years of the previous dispensation, before the enormous transformation that has brought us to the liberal consensus that now prevails. When did this change take place, and how? Certainly the election of Mary Robinson in 1990 is a milestone, and in and around that date we could also include the Maastricht Treaty, Sinead O’Connor ripping up a photo of the pope (both 1992), the rise of globalisation and neoliberalism (Clinton, Blair, the World Trade Organisation), the 1995 referendum that introduced divorce (by a margin of 0.28%), and the world wide web.

    One other, admittedly cosmetic, landmark event was the switch in 1987 to the standard European style of car numberplates, where the numbers and letters actually mean something. ‘OZU 155’ stands for the Japanese filmmaker, whose work is celebrated for the vacuous virtue of being about everything and therefore about nothing — in other words, for being politically inoffensive. Any edge of critique present in Ozu is blunted on contact with a commentariat in search of liberal universalisms, hungry to understand ‘story’ as a virtue and ‘context’ as an embarrassment.

    McGahern similarly needs to be pruned of embarrassing excrescences. The problem is that in all his books he is a border writer, constantly conscious of the Troubles, the aftermath of the Civil War, the problem of political-institutional legitimacy and the family dysfunctions that flow as a result. He presents the awkward vista of rural communities that to this day persist in voting for political gombeens, seemingly unable to adapt to the fact that people in Dublin and Brussels know what is best. The film adaptation of his final novel forgives these errors by the device of celebrating the tolerant humanism of the educated outsider, stand-ins for viewers who crave forgiveness for despising the backwardness of pre-liberal Ireland and its uncomfortable, unresolved politics and its quaintly non-rational numberplates.

  • When Did You Notice That Smoking is Over?

    When discussing health these days, if we’re not dissecting the latest updates on the pandemic, we’re often focusing on nutrition and dietary choices –– or mental health and wellbeing. These are areas, after all, in which it’s possible to quickly implement practical changes. For instance, we can make easy changes to our diets, particularly with more access to vegetarian and vegan options now widely available, and eateries becoming more inclusive with their menus. Indeed, we’ve even discussed The Vegan Dining Trail from Galway to Cork, where each restaurant along the route is completely meat-free! We might not have imagined such a thing existing several years back.

    One thing that doesn’t seem to come up anymore in conversations about health and lifestyle, however, is smoking. Most millennials and older generations will remember when smoking in restaurants was totally acceptable; bars and clubs had indoor smoking areas; smoking on public transport was permitted; some workplaces would even allow ashtrays on desks.

    There‘s no significant, identifiable moment to refer to as the point when all of this stopped being normal. It all just seems to have faded into the past, so gradually yet so completely as to be somewhat baffling in retrospect. So when did we stop talking about smoking? Did anyone even notice it went away?

    The most obvious change in the quest to phase out smoking came in the form of restrictions imposed across Ireland. Somewhat ahead of the game, Ireland was the first country in the world to implement comprehensive legislation back in 2004, creating smoke-free workplaces –– including bars and restaurants. It was an historic moment, and it caused uproar amongst publicans who claimed it would be the death of the hospitality industry for Ireland. Of course, it wasn’t, like most adjustments, we accepted the inconvenience, changed our behaviours and got on with our lives.

    It was a risky step to take though. In fact, fifteen years after restrictions were imposed, the Irish Examiner took a look back and acknowledged that the extent of the knock-on effects were unknown. At the time when restrictions were imposed, there was fear of factory-floor rebellions, as well as nervousness amongst employers and employees, business owners, and smokers. The contrast to today is stark. Just imagine seeing a patron, elbows on the bar, lit cigarette in hand; you can practically feel eyebrows reaching hairlines, and mouths agog. The very idea almost seems treacherous!

    With such an immediate “nip it in the bud” change back then, the simple fact is that many had no choice but to change their habits –– though many were loathe to surrender nicotine. Plenty were not relishing the thought of standing in the path of a biting Irish wind, trying to light a cigarette whilst shivering in the bitter cold, however. Thus, in response to an influx of determined quitters, a market for alternative nicotine products emerged, slowly but surely.

    That market has evolved over time, with smokeless tobacco products, nicotine gum, nicotine patches, and various types of lozenges all helping smokers to adhere to restrictions at various points in the past fifteen years or so. Today, nicotine pouches are surfacing as the latest popular options. A post on nicotine pouches by Prilla explains that clean, discreet use and a range of flavours are proving to be appealing to consumers. In short though, numerous “nicotine replacement therapy” (or NRT) alternatives have helped smokers to maintain their lifestyles without having major issues with habits and cravings in places where smoking is prohibited.

    So, with the majority of the world following suit with smoking restrictions and the NRT industry providing more socially acceptable alternatives to puffing on a cigarette, smoking really has become almost a taboo subject. With these significant changes now well established, smoking naturally and gradually faded into the shadows rather than abruptly ceasing to be a topic of discussion.

    Recommending the best place for Mujadara, comparing the newest nicotine pouch flavours and staying safe and sanitised is truly the new norm for those who might once have been labelled “smokers.”