Cassandra Voices

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  • The Empty Unconscious

    Banality is the byword of mass consumerism

    There’s a piece of public art that for a year or more languished on the edges of Union Square in Manhattan, before moving to a more innocuous location in Midtown.

    It’s a piece of bronze and laser cut steel in the form of a thick-waisted businessman, peering up into the sky. The statue, by Jim Rennert, is called, “Think Big.” This rotund figure struck me as a bizarre but predictable contrast with Union Square itself, site of labor protests, political demonstrations, and various working class events over the past century and a half.

    Then, on its cusp, a fattened, besuited, becalmed, moronic middle-manager stands, gazing into the clouds wonderingly. The figure itself looks like the Everyman of modern capital, depicted in the altruistic framing of business propaganda: a harmless, innocent, well-intentioned, exceedingly milquetoast middle-aged man of the people who does his earnest best to help his genteel corporation make a tidy profit, and drawing his modest share of the revenues to support his family. What could be wrong with that?

    Aside from the stomach-churning inanity of it, the statue has elided every conceivable aspect of its form that might imply or evince the raging class war between workers and suit-wearing corporate servants, themselves alighted like parasites on the broad husk of the Big Capital. A class war that is blood-soaked and pitiless.

    Yet our statue goes to great lengths to present the antithesis: the anodyne complacency of the humming mid-century office space, a hive of drones doing their daily duty. It is truly nondenominational, reflecting the most catholic of images, the most generic.

    “Think Big is a sculpture that serves to inspire everyone who works hard every day to achieve their dreams and goals. The towering businessman gazes upward at the Manhattan skyline, contemplating the possibilities that lay within his vast surroundings and reminding us that if we “think big” any dream is attainable.” – jimrennert.com

    Ersatz Replica

    Philosopher and aphorist E.M. Cioran once wrote that, “Existing is plagiarism.” If to be is to simply be an ersatz replica of the palatable, then why exist, either as individual, artist, or work of ‘art’? Nobody has asked Rennert.

    The statue, the name of which is like much modern advertising – quite clearly it is the first name that entered the brain of the artist (or advertiser, as the case may be). Thinking big, as it were, entails thinking big on behalf of the corporation for which you work; the ideas are not truly your own; the mission of the business is not your mission (unless you internalize it); and the life trajectory, even, is one set by the whim of the corporate market to which you sell your labor.

    Rather differently, the labor strikes and protests that once occurred in this space, were fuelled by men and women fighting to have all of the things elided by the statue, shaved away by the sculptor’s judicious hand: your own mission; your own ideas; your own life and career trajectory. Thus, Herbert Marcuse wrote: ‘Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties, but work in alienation.’

    How well the Think Big man resembles this perception: a drone, like others in appearance and wardrobe and function, alienated from his own desires, subordinated to those of a faceless overlord of industry. As a representation of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), it is equally apt, as that class sits as a bourgeois buffer between elitism and populism, between a secular aristocracy and the abject proletariat, both classes growing exponentially so that the metaphorical abyss widens in two senses: vertically and horizontally.

    This bourgeois buffer provides an aesthetic disguise for the dirty business of capitalism. They are not the sweat-drenched coltan miners in the Congo, but the svelte marketers who ply the ether with iPhone ads. His hard edges have been sanded down; he is perfectly polished, nonthreatening, inoffensively bland.

    Eugene V. Debs five times candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States.

    Virtue Hoarders

    In her book Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu historicizes this class. As the Socialist Left in America was progressively destroyed by the public relations efforts of big business, the haute bourgeoisie sided with capital. She writes:

    When the tide turned against American workers, the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying the favor of capitalists it once despised. The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable.

    She describes them as ‘salaried mental workers,’ including doctors, lawyers, advertising managers, IT professionals, and bank managers who reproduce the status quo, having abandoned political radicalism in favor of cultural wars and careerism.

    This is the buffer class, idealized in the sanitized vision of Think Big. Yet Think Big betrays the idea of simple reproduction, revealing the compulsion of neoliberalism to shave cost to stave a falling rate of profit. As Liu puts it:

    In the United States, generations of allegedly neutral experts have hollowed out public goods, degraded the public sphere, facilitated the monetization of everything from health to aptitude, and indebted generations of Americans in a fantasy of meritocracy enhanced social mobility. Liberals have sat by while finance capital and corporate interests gutted the public treasury.

    Image: © Constantino Idini.

    Delirium

    E.M. Cioran says Western societies are beholden to – fatally obsessed with – technology, innovation, and the drive of capitalism for rapid obsoletion, and the process of ceaseless enhancement and replacement. He says they are in a state of ‘delirium,’ but adds (in Drawn and Quartered) that this kind of breathless preoccupation with novelty is itself relatively new in history:

    Archaic societies have lasted so long because they know nothing of the desire to innovate, to grovel before ever-new simulacra. If you change images with each generation, you cannot anticipate historical longevity. Classical Greece and modern Europe typify civilizations stricken by a precocious death, following a greed for metamorphosis and an excessive consumption of gods, and of the surrogates for gods. Ancient China and Egypt wallowed for millennia in a magnificent sclerosis. As did African societies, before contact with the West.

    Given that societies are anchored in historical circumstance, they are subject to the same iron law of all civilizations, that they will eventually ‘sag and settle’ as the initial dynamism dies. How much more likely in a society built on an idée fixe, a fetishistic mania.

    And yet – small consolation for those whose lives are on a far faster downward trajectory than civilization itself.

    Hence the siren call of rebellion will continue to outline itself precisely against this insipid, pulseless figure paradoxically anchored at the center of a monomaniacal society. A society the signature of which is the fixity of its preoccupation with profit – and the consumption that enables it.

    U.S. President Donald Trump displays the signed Executive Order for the Establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity on May 11, 2017.

    The American Dream and Authenticity

    This cultural underbelly outlined above is eviscerated not just by the corporate art we are confronted with, but by the modern narrative of the American Dream™ ; this statue is just a recent embodiment of it.

    Anyone, color and creed aside, through their efforts and ingenuity, can do or be anything they wish to be. No material circumstances obtain in their pursuit of happiness. Class is a byword of another era, trampled underfoot by the ascent of free-market capitalism, which brooks no discriminatory practice in its market-rendered even-playing field.

    As any sentient being can observe, this is a historical fiction, a deceit reproduced daily through the channels of mass media and its advertising, entertainment, and news content, all of which is owned and operated by elite capital and managed by its flyblown class of sycophants.

    Essayist and playwright John Steppling gets at much the same thing in his book Aesthetic Resistance And Dis-Interest (2016). He writes, in the context of the dissolution of art as an anchor of culture, of the loss of art’s radical conscience in favor of corporate cliche.

    Steppling would despise the ‘Think Big’ statue. Its banality is that of a Jeff Koons work, the more celebrated the less memorable. He argues that mass electronic screen culture has destroyed something critical in the collective consciousness, namely the space for authentic art.

    He also notes that art is radical insofar as it refuses to adopt particular meanings, just as space is forever unyoked to purpose, yet radically ratifies none, and is the necessary background to all purpose.

    He quotes Robert Kullot-Kentor, biographer of Theodor Adorno, ‘Art’s truth appears guaranteed more by its denial of any meaning in organized society…’ As Steppling later adds, ‘It’s purposelessness is its radical expression.’

    And again: ‘Art is self destructive. It is guided by impulses that are anti-social, but only insofar as they question the status quo, because the status quo cannot survive history or memory.’

    What artists like Rennet and Koons produce is effortlessly mainstream; it doesn’t challenge the status quo but rather reifies it. It is therefore not art. There is no question posed by the skygazing statue, no threat emerges. It is the reproduction of the placid mind of endless consumption, of ceaseless salesmanship, the mind of the individual cog in a system that it neither sees nor questions. Deification of the quotidian.

    Steppling says the clue to the decay of society is the sense that culture is themed by ‘the inauthentic and counterfeit.’

    That sensibility, that sinking feeling, for me, is most evident in the hypocrisy of modern advertising. Ads relentlessly tell us they are making commodities to make our lives better – that is their mission and purpose. Yet that is a half-truth at best, a full-blown deceit on a bad day.

    Products are produced for profit, first and foremost. They are made to solve the sometimes real but largely artificial needs of consumers only insofar as they must. The initial aim of the product line is the MVP, or Minimally Viable Product.

    This is the industry jargon for a commodity that meets the minimum threshold for sale-ability. Beyond that – innovations that improve the product – are seen as incurred costs, unnecessary but sometimes preferable if the cost-benefit analysis predicts higher profits with higher quality. This corrosive smile that fronts modern culture is the clue to the erosion of meaning but also somehow echoes the voice of the Cassandra exposing its desiccated spirit, having submitted itself to the hegemonic ideal, represented by the bland everyman that serves none but the needs of blind profit.

    Mass Infantilism

    Alongside the denuded character of the Think Big skygazer – alongside the erasure of individuality, i.e., authenticity, in its homogeneity – is its infantile sensibility; yes, the only quality it truly has.

    Its puffy childlike hands loose at its side; its rounded babyface; its gaze more wondrous than critical. Steppling says the infantile is a product of capitalist culture.

    To paraphrase: the Oedipal narrative of the child overcoming his father as a path to self-actualization is denied by modern neoliberal society.

    Neoliberalism denies meaningful work in a race to the bottom rungs of servitude. It denies meaningful leisure as labor is stripped evermore of its rightful surplus, no small measure of that margin being lost time. And it ultimately leaves in its infectious wake a featureless figure, bereft of purpose and means, a man unable to exceed or even succeed the father.

    In such a state, the man opts for a permanent infantilism. Hence our recidivist culture that seems to drag us back, back, back toward childhood, finally into the warmth of the womb, the original safe space, protected by ignorance just as ignorance is unconscious bliss.

    Benjamin Barber was an earlier prophet of our devolution. His seminal work Consumed detailed the ways in which commodity culture manufactures artificial needs beyond the realm of actual needs, an entirely predictable eventuality given the desperation of capital to continuously expand the marketplace of consumption.

    Industry compels consumers to confuse needs with wants and then promises happiness through the instant gratification of that wanting. As one reviewer astutely noted, Barber, ‘…ably identified many of the contributing factors, not the least of which are our collective cultural boredom and our naive but doomed expectations of fulfillment via uncontrolled acquisition.’

    The consequence of unlimited choice and acquisition is an infantile impatience with what one has as one is perpetually enthralled by novelty, the tradition-destroying feature Cioran lamented.

    We see this trend everywhere. Often in Hollywood, which has found a stupendous revenue stream in the marketing of superhero comics to adults. Once, Superman was a movie for kids; now it is a movie for adults who have yet to put away childish things. Which is all of us.

    As Steppling notes, the superhero story is the dream of childish omnipotence, a kind of puerile fantasy that adults once shed by the time they exited their teens. Now the happy myth persists well into adulthood. Its Manichean quality is a mirror of the imperial narratives of the state: one side is all good and the other all bad.

    This reductive dichotomy is the cornerstone of modern consumer narratives, whether in entertainment or news, and has been instantiated in the programming strategies of major media entities.

    Another feature of the infantile is what Stuart Jeffries alludes to in Grand Hotel Abyss (2016), his biography of the Frankfurt School. Namely, the infantile nature of modern man as his culture radicalizes identity politics by the insistence that its demands be instantaneously gratified, less an urgency than an hysteria. What more emblematic aspect of childhood than the baby that screams when denied what it wants?

    But we see it in advertising, especially, and in general marketing. What does a professional basketball franchise ask its roster of players when interviewing them for promotion? [Giggling] What would your superpower be (if you could have a superpower)? As game show music plays in the background.

    Likewise in broadcast advertising. A bank commercial shows a middle-aged father dancing around in a virtual reality headset while his more mature daughter plays on her mobile. Faces of consumers are increasingly banal in disposition, blank gazes, wide innocent eyes, awaiting information from the sales shill embedded in the commercial, the messiah of commerce. In the idealized playground of consumerism, modern man is a tabula rasa at 35, eyes awaiting the advent of the next shiny distraction.

    If the endless spectacle of mathematically correct diversity casting is defended as reflecting the social ideal, and hence instructive, what is the repetition of the unsophisticated and simpleminded consumer in ads but an admonition?

    Steppling interestingly notes that the infant mindset in adults feels incomplete, perhaps through its Oedipal failure to assert its worth and power. As such it must deny many facets of reality that might undermine its fragile psyche.

    It must turn away from the wars raging, the coming barbarities narrated by arbiters of power, the afterthought that is endemic poverty and illness. We must turn to safer, more simplistic answers and the narratives that attempt to legitimate them; the ones espoused by the cult of decrepit professional liberalism, window-dresser of society’s distemper, pollyanna in purgatory, to whom we light a votive every day at dusk.

    What Lies Beneath: Sometimes Nothing

    As an art theorist, Steppling notes a simple dichotomy in art that applies more broadly: good art, or art, shows an artificial reality and then shows the actuality beneath it; bad art, or non art, just show the artificial reality. In this sense, most broadcast advertising is bad art, or non art. It normalizes artificiality, the uncritical acceptance of every sales pitch, taking the pitch at face value.

    This is reflected in bourgeoisie art criticism, which seems to again and again strip art of its system critique and either reinterpret it as a celebration of industry or a critique of individual foibles within a benign landscape of earnest employee/consumers.

    Hence the narrative of history is penned not by the victors but by their dutiful scribes, the professional parasitic class who earn their livelihood through sycophancy and servitude. In service to the status quo.

    Fold your hands behind your back and think big—on their behalf. Your passage through will be as frictionless as first class air travel. But say bon voyage to your dreams. This is inimical to the artist. Because art undermines. Art challenges. Art unsettles. There is no safe space in art. No diversity calculus. No appeasement of the herd.

    We are thus left with a modern culture which no longer understands the term ‘sell-out’, which sees brand partnerships as a path to social uplift, not recognizing the inherent contradiction of allying with the perpetrator of inequity in order to rectify inequity. The irony is lost on us because there is no irony. The artificial is all. Irony would require a second perspective. In the marketplace of consensus, no second opinions exist.

    Feature Image: © Constantino Idini

    Jason Hirthler is a writer, media critic, and veteran of the digital media industry. He has published in a variety of progressive publications including CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and The Hampton Institute.

  • Ciarán O’Rourke: Breaking the Cycle

    One Big Union is a self-published collection of essays by Irish poet Ciarán O’Rourke. The essays, many of which have been previously published in such outlets as Poetry Ireland Review, Irish Marxist Review, and indeed, Cassandra Voices herself, are a mix of literary criticism, political theory, and personal writing.

    The book’s introduction locates itself in the burgeoning genre of pandemic writing. Thus he writes:

    Between the winter of 2019 and the summer of 2021, a period of cascading social and ecological crises, I found myself returning to the work of a number of poets, artists, and political firebrands, with a fresh sense of discovery and gratitude. This miscellany of essays is the result.

    In essence, this book is a polished version of a reading diary, with O’Rourke responding to the artists he was confined with over quarantine. As such, it’s an intensely personal and vulnerable work, even when the directly autobiographical material is minimal. 

    You finish the book with the impression that Percy Bysshe Shelley plays a leading role in O’Rourke’s inner life ; that Irishness is something O’Rourke feels strongly attached to; and that he is passionately devoted to left-wing political ideals, even though he finds the atmosphere of devoted Communist organisations mentally stultifying. 

    This is a lot to know about a relative stranger, and it’s a testament to O’Rourke’s ability as a writer that this distinct, personal voice is present throughout, even in moments when the subject matter veers into academic territory.

    Hole in the Wall Blues

    Perhaps it’s scholarly fatigue, but I must admit I found the moments of personal, autobiographical writing the most compelling parts of the book. 

    In ‘Hole in the Wall Blues’, O’Rourke writes about a topic made timely by the Save the Cobblestone protest – the erosion of Dublin’s cultural geography – in an endearingly personal way.

    The example he uses is the Screen cinema on Townsend street, now a building site for what O’Rourke believes will be a “rental hub”.

    It wasn’t like the Screen cinema was some beautiful location, he argues. No, it was dingy, cheap, and outmoded. But, O’Rourke writes, “just by being there and providing the service it did, this rather run-down space had made the city a home of sorts”. 

    In another essay, ‘Sea Music’, he talks about the strange intimacy that has grown between himself and the other regular bathers at Seapoint. These accounts of his private life made me care about the more abstract essays, helping me, as a reader, trace the thread of emotional necessity behind his discussions of Percy Shelley or Langston Hughes.

    Satisfying Punch

    Although most of these essays are ruminative and introspective, there are a few that pack a satisfying punch. My favourite is ‘Smashing the Mirror’, where O’Rourke excoriates Poetry Ireland’s toothless humility in front of the strong arms of cultural hegemony, exemplified in their partnership with the Dublin office of Facebook for national poetry day in 2017, and their use of a video of Joe Biden giving a merry, public-relations-approved speech about the beauty of Irish poetry for their fundraising campaign in 2019. 

    What does it mean for the institutions of Irish poetry to flatter the centres of power so shamelessly? O’Rourke is excitingly sharp in his rhetorical denouncement:

    The emerald glint in Biden’s eyes, the nostalgic quaver in his voice, is meant to reinforce, for voters at home and lackeys elsewhere, a relation (between lord and vassal, say, or centre and outpost) that each of these circumstances also exemplifies – all under the guise of celebrating Irish poetry. And Poetry Ireland, it seems, is happy to play along: cosying up to power, for the sake of PR, and presumably on the long-term promise of cash.Admission of Bias

    I may be biased when it comes to reviewing this book. In the first year of my English Studies course in Trinity College, Ciarán O’Rourke was working as a teaching assistant while he finished his phD, and I happened to be placed in his Romanticism tutorials. 

    Ciarán was a wonderful teacher, with a gift for generating class discussion. He also had the touch of eccentricity required to deliver a course on Romanticism. At one point he had the whole class stand up and communally recite Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in early Spring; as if we could hurry the pace of the seasons through the right incantation of the words.

    With that said, I had no idea I was reading my former teacher’s book until after I had read through the collection. From the tone of the writing, and the subjects covered (bathing in Dun Laoghaire, Marxist politics, nineteenth century poets), I had assumed the author was in his fifties or sixties. I imagined a Terry Eagleton type – hip enough to know about Ursula Le Guin, but whose outlook on life has been shaped by figures from a deeper past. Then I looked up some interviews, and, with a jolt, recognised the fresh-faced, tall figure of my Romanticism tutor.

    Critique

    One criticism I have is in relation to the structure of the book. First, it lacks certain features of a professionally published work. There is no publication date. The cover image, by Lewis Hine, is not credited on the back cover, or on one of the first pages, but in the ‘Introduction and Acknowledgements’ section.

    These may seem minor issues, but by failing to follow conventions, it becomes harder to work with, and conveys an attitude of slight carelessness, unbefitting of its important contents.

    My second criticism is of the repetition between essays. As many of the essays were published in different publications, it appears the author was unconcerned at repeating a few key points. When gathered together in a book, however, these repetitions jar on the reader.

    For example, several pieces of information related to Shelley in the essay entitled ‘Shelley’s Revolutionary Year’ are duplicated without development in the title essay ‘One Big Union’, for example. This certainly conveys the extent of Shelley’s psychological importance to the author, but it doesn’t expand on the issue.

    Overall, this is an intriguing collection of essays from a young Irish poet. Those interested in O’Rourke’s poetry will gain insights into his artistic influences, and anyone looking for topical cultural critiques will be well served by some of the later essays in particular. Its main value is as a political statement of purpose for the poet. It also represents an opportunity for those interested to support a promising Irish writer, whose work has been hitherto largely available to readers for free.

    One Big Union is available for purchase through Ciarán O’Rourke’s website, ragpickerpoetry.net

  • The Most Natural Thing in the World III

    To tell you the truth, I could easily have been a father, and I would be a father now, had my wife J not miscarried a baby we once made. This was in 2002, so he or she would have been eighteen by now. So strange to envisage it: another life – for me, for J, and for that life. And had that bundle of multiplying cells survived to become an independent living being, would it have fundamentally altered the attitudes I am expressing now? Or confirmed them? Although I have to confess that for the most part I was just going along with the whole plan for J’s sake.

    Women feel motherhood from the time of conception. Men don’t feel fatherhood until they are holding their child. I even remember a trip to Holles Street Maternity Hospital to make a sperm donation, so that it could be tested for any abnormalities, due to side effects from other medical treatment I had been receiving. The next time I went to that place was to visit J in a ward when she was recovering from losing the baby. She hadn’t even known that she was pregnant.

    I said terrible things to her, while she’d been campaigning for me to father her child, before I acquiesced. I’d told her she was only making love in order to conceive. I’d told her she would be a terrible mother.

    Despite having her own human foibles, I was wrong – if for no other reason than the fact that she is nothing like my mother. Just as I am nothing like her father – a fear she speculatively expressed early in our relationship. Of course, she could have been a bad mother for entirely different reasons than my mother was, but, just as equally, possibly not. And how will we ever know, now?

    All she ever wanted was for us to be a family. All she wanted was to nurture, to have some extension of herself to love. I was not mature enough at the time to grasp that. Instead, I’d asked her, fearing for our freedom, “What will you do with this baby?” To which she’d replied, not seeing any problem, “Love it.” (‘What you get married for if you don’t want children?’ T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, II. A Game of Chess. Companionship, Tom?) I can only excuse such wretched behaviour by pointing to Paul Stewart’s study of Beckett, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work (2011), where he deflects accusations of misogyny in the maestro’s oeuvre by positing that because for him women represent the threat of progeny, they are therefore simultaneously desired and reviled.

    Reincarnation?

    Speaking of women, not to be upstaged, my mother chose to end her time on Planet Earth while J was miscarrying (which began before but ended after Mam died). Had J gone on to discover that she was pregnant, and had we given birth to a healthy baby, I would have read that as my mother giving us a parting gift, almost a reincarnation of her spirit.

    As it turned out, I see it as my mother robbing us of our unborn child, taking our unformed baby away with her, instead of leaving it to us – as though we were unworthy, as though she didn’t trust us with it: the last thing she took from me. My mother was always terrified that I’d get someone pregnant out of wedlock. Hey Ma, not to worry: I didn’t. But when I did get married and make my wife pregnant, nothing came of it. Is that some kind of subtle revenge? And if so, by who on whom?

    I could still be a father now. But not if I can help it. J can no longer be a mother. If this is still a source of sadness and regret for her, I apologise profoundly and profusely.

    Foreign Adventures

    Freedom?

    ‘Fearing for our freedom.’ Did we do so much more with it, than the breeders in our circle of friends and acquaintances? Sure, we were able to holiday in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Morocco and India, while they had to settle for annual summer trips to the Aran Islands; and we were able to take weekend city breaks to Paris, Amsterdam, Delft, Bruges, Ghent, Prague and Tallinn, while they were not kicking back but rather gearing up to arrange play dates and other activities to keep the children occupied during the days off, and ferrying them to and fro  – because we didn’t have to worry about getting kids on and off aeroplanes, and because we had more disposable income.

    Not that we had that much more: we just didn’t have to make as much, and what we had went further. I certainly got to go to way more gigs than my peers, not having to worry about sourcing competent and reliable babysitters and being able to afford to pay them. I’ve probably read a lot more books than someone preoccupied with childcare.

    If you think the trade-off wasn’t worth it, then prove me wrong.

    Paternal Bonding

    Son or Daughter?

    If I had had children, would I have preferred a son or a daughter? The latter, hands down. Fathers favour daughters, mothers favour sons (and, generally, vice versa) – or rather, a parents’ relationship with a same sex child is usually more complex and fraught than it is with a child of the opposite sex.

    Shakespeare was fond of daughters as redeeming of all fathers’ misdeeds, at least in the later ‘romances’ (Pericles’ Marina, The Winter’s Tale’s Perdita, Cymbeline’s Imogen, The Tempest’s Miranda). However, his earlier King Lear, that most mistreated of parents – even if he did bring much of it on himself – also had daughters, and it didn’t really work out so well with the first two.

    Admittedly, he did have one loving, dutiful daughter, notably getting it right with the youngest, to compensate for the elder two cruel, self-interested termagants he also spawned. One out of three ain’t bad. But Cordelia dies anyway. That’s the difference between romance and tragedy. But while there may be some slim hope for a daughter, becoming a father of a son instantly marks you out as a bad guy, to be rebelled against and toppled – even, if we are to take the story of Oedipus literally rather than metaphorically, to be killed.

    While much depends on the extent of your offspring’s sedition, it is kind of impossible to win, as a Dad. No way am I re-enacting that particular little domestic yet universal drama. Some may say I am merely operating out of fear of failure as a father, and am crippled by such anxiety, which is itself a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: because I think I will fail as a father, I will fail as a father. But all fathers, and mothers, fail, to a greater or lesser extent.

    To recast a favourite formulation from Beckett: to be a parent is to fail, as no other dare fail. Then again, ‘Try again, fail again, fail better.’ But how many0 chances do you get in one life to succeed? Maybe better not to try at all. Others may posit that my lack of progeny, because of distaste at the world, because of its inherent unfairness, is also a self-fulfilling prophecy: that is, because I view the world as distasteful because it is unfair, having progeny would have turned out to be distasteful and unfair too, for me and also for them – rather than redemptive. And, indeed, it is true that one has to somehow believe in life, and the future, to have children. Or, at least, it helps. But for those who identify with Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense Of Life, the whole enterprise can seem somewhat futile. In any case, I view the failure of parenthood as inevitable – because even the most conscientious of parents will tell you that you can look after your children only up to a certain point, and you can’t stop them from making all those stupid mistakes that you made (even those you know about).

    Actually, I think I would be – or rather – would have been, a pretty good father, all told. But what if, for a myriad of unforeseen reasons and circumstances, I wasn’t? I see no reason to make an irreversible bet on finding out. I don’t think the odds are great, and I still don’t see the percentage in it.

    The Act of Parturition

    I have always found the thought of the act of parturition, that is giving birth by pushing a baby out into the world, vaguely repulsive, definitely messy and probably very painful.

    How do women do it? Maybe I’m just a wimp. Or maybe not, since quite apart from all the blood and guts involved, you can even die while doing it. (Is it really any wonder that 10 to 15 per cent of women suffer some form of postnatal depression, and that one in a thousand develop puerperal psychosis, given the utter physical trauma attendant on forcing yet another member of the next generation out into this hostile world?)

    It has always reminded me of the chestburster scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), a sequence specifically designed to prey on male fears, according to critic David McIntee in his Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to the Alien and Predator Films (2005). ‘On one level, it’s about an intriguing alien threat. On one level it’s about parasitism and disease. And on the level that was most important to the writers and director, it’s about sex, and reproduction by non-consensual means. And it’s about this happening to a man.’ He notes how the film plays on men’s fear and misunderstanding of pregnancy and childbirth, while also giving women a glimpse into these fears.

    Similarly, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) taps into themes of tokophobia and fear of fatherhood, while Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) envisions pregnancy and childbirth as a form of Satanic possession.

    But birth is where we all come from (unless we’ve been cloned, or are the products of in vitro fertilisation, without the subsequent implantation in a uterus – a far safer and more sensible way of doing things, in my opinion), so there must be nothing to it. (Ducks and runs for cover.) I’m joking, of course.

    Any account of giving birth I’ve heard or read makes it sound like it takes place in a low circle of hell. (‘They don’t call it labour for nothing’, etc. ‘Push! Push!’ Adam’s – and, more’s to the point, Eve’s – Curse.) Anne Enright, Claire Kilroy, Sinead Gleeson and Jessica Traynor have all written eloquently on the vicissitudes of accouchement (some more affirmatively than others), but the prize for most visceral description must go to Shulamith Firestone, who in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1971) wrote that ‘…childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun. (Like shitting a pumpkin, a friend of mine told me when I inquired about the Great-Experience-You-Are-Missing.)’

    Always allowing for the possibility that those describing the process are exaggerating for effect in order to elicit kudos, there still has to be a better way of doing the thing – if doing the thing must be done. Indeed, it is the same Firestone who was an early proponent of cyberfeminism, that is the idea that women need technology in order to free themselves from the obligation of reproducing, thus pointing to a future in which individuals are more androgynous and views of the female body are reconstructed. Her arguments have been subsequently developed by Donna Haraway, who in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) sought to challenge the necessity for categorisation of gender, positing that gender constructs should be eliminated as categories for identity.

    About the many and various sexual acts I have performed, I can attest to no corresponding squeamishness, or horror of bodily functions, on my part.

    Stroller or Buggy?

    I also have a morbid fear of the vehicles known variously as Buggies (European English), or Strollers (American English). Can we settle on the more universal and neutral Pushchairs, or the perhaps posher Perambulators? – although which term we employ can create some ambiguity as regards signifier and signified: are we referring to the smaller, fold-up apparatuses where the baby sits facing away from the pusher; or the larger, more solidly built contraptions resembling nothing so much as a Sherman tank going into battle, where the little stranger faces their means of locomotion?

    Whatever you care to call them – and in any case it is both I have in mind – I defiantly distance myself from them in the street and in supermarkets, full sure that they have no other purpose or mission than to nip at my heels, or crash into my shins, or crush my toes. Those in charge of them should really be more careful. Perhaps these ‘go-cars’ and ‘prams’ should come with a health warning; or better still, be licensed.

    Cyril Connolly famously singled out ‘the pram in the hall’ as one of his Enemies Of Promise (1938), a phrase, along with ‘the tares of domesticity’, that has been seized on by a subsequent generation of feminist criticism as blatantly misogynistic (although maybe not so anti-women as previously thought: vide the reference to Sheila Heti’s Motherhood above). ‘The overarching theme of the book…’, according to that ever-reliable critic Wikipedia, ‘is the search for understanding why Connolly, though he was widely recognised as a leading man of letters and a highly distinguished critic, failed to produce a major work of literature.’ And we think we invented ‘creative non-fiction’? The full quotation from Connelly reads: ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’ Me? I don’t even have that excuse.

    Bouncy Castle

    While we’re on subject of loathsome objects best avoided, here are two words guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any prospective parent: bouncy castle. Also, on the positive side, it’s an unalloyed boon that I will never be obliged to read the Harry Potter books, and pretend to like them. For these small blessings, much thanks.

    Most young parents of my acquaintance seem to spend their lives merely running a busy creche with someone they used to go out with (or ‘date’, as the Yanks say). More generally, openly declaring oneself an anti-natalist from the outset (out of the closet!) does help to circumvent that tiresome “Where is this relationship going?” discussion, raised at a certain point in most fledgling liaisons – at least by people whose main objective in their amatory affairs is to conduct a round of interviews for potential husbands and fathers (or wives and mothers); while furthermore, in the longer term, contributing to the avoidance of the workmanlike rigours of ‘trying for a baby’ (those daily doses of folic acid!), which can only turn what should be a spontaneous pleasure into a meticulously planned duty roster.

    Imagine even having to attend a Parent/Teacher Meeting – as a parent or as a teacher. To listen to your hope for the future be praised or blamed by a jobsworth who probably hasn’t as broad an education or as much life experience as you.

    Or to listen to a pushy parent, convinced their little tyke is a genius, and that the fault for any deficiencies the scamp may manifest is to be placed firmly at your door. That’s the difference between school when I was going through it, and school now: back then, parents deferred to teachers, and sat there and took it; nowadays teachers are constantly on trial by parents, and everything their little darlings say is believed. Rate My Teacher? Nah, Rate My Student, more like; or, more’s to the point, Rate That Parent.

    Again, I have personal experience of this phenomenon: my mother wouldn’t talk to me for a week after my educators informed her at one such confab that “He’s only using half his ability.” I wonder whose fault that was? The teachers’ or my mother’s? The school’s or my home’s? It certainly wasn’t mine, at that age.

    ChildrenofMen

    Children of Men

    The literary and filmic genre most concerned with human extinction is dystopic science fiction. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men (2006) (based on P. D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name, with the addition of the definite article) envisages the world of 2027, when two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse.

    The narrative arc of both book and film is a journey from despair to hope, sponsored by the notion that any such hope depends on the birth of future generations. Otherwise, all we can look forward to is despair, chaos and anarchy.

    It is, in many ways, a modern-day nativity story, where the birth of a child is elevated to the status of The Coming Of The Saviour, who will redeem humanity from its many sins and vices. James herself has referred to her book as ‘a Christian fable’.

    Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) (a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1992), which was in turn based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) makes great issue of fertility as a prerequisite for, or at least an indicator of, humanity: the ability to reproduce makes replicants more human-like, and therefore more sympathetic and relatable.

    Thus, if Deckard (whose standing as human/replicant is left ambiguous) has fathered a daughter with Rachael (a replicant), it renders the termination of replicants not only futile, but unethical and murderous. In the novel, the android antagonists can indeed be seen as more human than the human (?) protagonist. They are a mirror held up to human action, contrasted with a culture losing its own humanity (that is, ‘humanity’ taken to mean the positive aspects of humanity).

    Klaus Benesch examined Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in connection with Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’. Lacan claims that the formation and reassurance of the self depends on the construction of an Other through imagery, beginning with a double as seen in a mirror. The androids, Benesch argues, perform a doubling function similar to the mirror image of the self, but they do this on a social, not an individual, level.

    Therefore, human anxiety about androids expresses uncertainty about human identity and society itself, just as in the original film the administration of an ‘empathy test’, to determine if a character is human or android, produces many false positives. Either the Voigt-Kampff test is flawed, or replicants are pretty good at being human (or, perhaps, better than human).

    This perplexity first found an explanation in Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s influential essay The Uncanny Valley (1970), in which he hypothesised that human response to human-like robots would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as a robot approached, but failed to attain, a life-like appearance, due to subtle imperfections in design. He termed this descent into eeriness ‘the uncanny valley’, and the phrase is now widely used to describe the characteristic dip in emotional response that happens when we encounter an entity that is almost, but not quite, human.

    But if human-likeness increased beyond this nearly human point, and came very close to human, the emotional response would revert to being positive. However, the observation led Mori to recommend that robot builders should not attempt to attain the goal of making their creations overly life-like in appearance and motion, but instead aim for a design, ‘which results in a moderate degree of human likeness and a considerable sense of affinity. In fact, I predict it is possible to create a safe level of affinity by deliberately pursuing a non-human design.’

    Brave New World

    Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) paints a dire picture of society in 2540, rendered selfish, consumerist and emotionally passive through the (mis)application by a ruling elite of huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology (prefiguring that tabloid terror, ‘test tube babies’) and narco-conditioning.

    But what if these grim prognostications about the disappearance of humanity, either literally or metaphorically, could be turned on their head? In fact, they have been. This horrifying dystopia could without too much trouble and just a little finessing be flipped into a much-to-be-aspired-to utopia, as Huxley himself attempted in Island, the 1962 revision of his more famous work.

    This exploration of the possibilities opened up by biochemistry and genetic engineering for curing man, the sick animal, of his desires, violence and neuroses, sometime in the distant future, is taken up in more depth by Michel Houellebecq in The Possibility of an Island (2005). The distant descendants of Daniel have been culled from his DNA, with all the annoyingly rancorous human traits ironed out of the mix. So, we are transported to 2000 years in the future, where Daniel25, like the rest of these ‘neohumans’, passes his days in neutral tranquillity, adding his commentary to his ancestor’s personal history, striving to understand what could have made him so unhappy, while the remnants of the old human race roam in primitive packs outside his secure compound.

    It’s a startlingly beautiful planet, Mother Earth. But we are royally fucking Mother Nature up, big time. We don’t deserve it, or her. An analogy can certainly be drawn between the harm humankind has caused to its own environment, and the harm that parents do to their own children. High time we terminated those relationships; or, at the very least, radically recalibrated them.

    How do you explain to a child a world in which Donald Trump was the President of the United States of America for four years? And that his cabal of ghouls, grifters and vampires – many of them members of his own brood – held sway? And that seventy million people still voted for him a second time around? Worse, what if that child grows up thinking that state of affairs is somehow normal? Worst, what if s/he grows up into the kind of person who would vote for him or his ilk themselves, despite your best parental efforts at instruction, guidance or influence? That such people are even permitted to exercise the franchise, let alone allowed to breed, is deeply disturbing (because they would seek to curb your voting and reproductive rights). What if you, however inadvertently, breed one of them?

    But, irony of ironies: to my father, I would be a failson, in terms of passing on his values and beliefs, the thing he held most dear: his Roman Catholic faith. Devotion to God sorted everything out for him, made sense of his world. God never meant much to me, after a certain age, except for the hassle encountered if you admitted to scepticism regarding his existence.

    Donald Trump is a person who could have an infinitive number of pejorative adjectives affixed to his name, but none of them are necessary: everyone already knows what he is; yet many people voted for him regardless, either because they endorse this, or in spite of this. The same is true of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, where 40 per cent of the British electorate will always vote Tory, no matter what! Tell that to the children. Or, given the questionable quality of the main opposition to either Trump or Johnson, try telling them that two-party democracy is somehow a good idea. Perhaps I am just losing it. Maybe I am at the end of my tether.

    Have I missed out? Undoubtedly, parenthood is a common human experience I will not share. But I don’t feel particularly bad or bereft about it, especially when I look at the hassles of child-rearing, and the often fractured relationships and tensions between my peers and their offspring (although I will concede that I estimate that this generation is making a better fist of fostering good relations with their children than the previous generation did – a vast generalisation, I know, but something in the air due in some part to less authoritarian parenting styles. I’m thinking here about witnessing a good friend of mine taking a phone call from his thirteen-year-old son, and promising when prompted to send on a copy of Led Zeppelin IV for his boy’s delectation). I read in an interview with poet Michael Longley where he said that having children was the most profound thing he’s ever done, more so than all the poetry. But would I have felt the same way? There is no guarantee.

    There is the question, already broached, of who will look after me in my old age? Peasants are supposed to churn out lots of nippers, as the kind of security provided by insurance policies. (Aristos don’t need as many, because they can already rely on their inherited wealth, which will be duly passed down to their heir and the spare, which was all that was necessary and sufficient for them to sire.) But these days, such indemnification is more likely to have relocated to Australia than to be on hand for your decay and demise. They could even predecease you. The idea that your children will be a comfort to you in your old age is at best a cosmic gamble – as is bringing them into the world in the first place. It is fruitless to speculate on whether or not your offspring can or will help to alleviate the indignities and sufferings of your senescence. Such mortifications, and how I manage them, may be something I am only beginning to find out. As I would have had to do anyway, with or without children.

    If I had children, would I be writing this? No, and for more than just the obvious reason (that is, that I don’t have children). Odds on I’d be so busy looking after them and preoccupied about their welfare and their future that I wouldn’t have the time, energy or inclination to write at all (just as Sheila Heti speculates). Which leads to a further consideration concerning children as a form of sublimation for personal ambition, as a kind of compensation for lacks and voids and failures in your own life up until you have them. You may believe that they complete you, but is that fair on them? Or on the world? For whom, or for what, do these proud parents think they are doing a favour? The world, or themselves? Whatever their justification, the answer is neither, I suspect.

    We were all kids once. Would we really like to go back there?

    Maybe it all comes down to Eros and Thanatos. What if the death instinct is stronger than the sex instinct? It always is, in the end. Love doesn’t conquer all. It doesn’t conquer Death. Unless you are talking about what you leave behind, after your own extinction. For many people, for good or ill, that is their children. But there are other things you can leave behind. Even if it is only a form of negative space. I still regard my childlessness as almost unquestionably my greatest achievement. It is part of what I will leave behind. It is my gift to the world. I bequeath to all my unborn children, imagined and unrealised, forever unsullied and unfulfilled, mercifully untainted by human existence, all my Love.

    Feature Image: Three daughters of King Lear by Gustav Pope

  • The Grandfather Clause

    ‘Where DID we come from?’

    Coincidence?

    The Sahara was not always a desert.

    As evidenced by fossilized pollen, it was once covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, It was green, verdant, populated by antelopes, giraffes, rhinoceros, supporting all life forms including settled human beings. Cave drawings in southern Algeria (Tassili) testify to this lifestyle.

    Disaster came in the year 3,440 B.C..

    According to carbon-14 dating of cores from the Atlantic coast of Senegal as well as from Lake Koa in Chad, Summer temperatures increased sharply in the Sahara region and precipitation decreased. This event devastated the people and their socio-economic systems. The recently-introduced farming techniques no longer supported life.

    It was a case of global warming in a specific place.

    According to climate theoretician, Dr. Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institue, the disaster was partially initiated by one of the regular changes in the Earth’s orbit and the tilt of its axis (earth wobble). July happened in January!

    The ensuing warming and feedback effects on Vegetation and Atmosphere in this particular area combined to produce a sudden, localised desertification which resulted in the Sahara.

    This transition to the Sahara’s present arid climate was not gradual, but occurred in two specific episodes. The first, which was less severe, occurred between 6,700 and 5,500 years ago (4,700 B.C. and 3,500 B.C.). The second, which was brutal, lasted from 2,000 B.C.to 1,600 years ago.

    What has this to do with Ireland?

    Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne)

    Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne), the finest and greatest Megalithic structure (earlier than Stonehenge) in Europe,  was built by ‘unknown farmers’ in approx. 3000 B.C.

    At the same time the first Egyptian dynasties were founded.

    It is my thesis that Newgrange and the Egyptian dynasties were developed by a long-civilised and cultured people whose origins were in the Sahel of North Africa.

    Where to?

    Once their lifestyle was destroyed, where did the people of the Sahara go? Many escaped northwards to the still fertile coasts of North Africa and eastwards to the Nile. This sudden incursion created extreme pressure on the existing inhabitants of the thin North African coastal littoral. Something had to give. What did they do?

    In approx. 3000 B.C. they took to the sea. Their DNA traces (E1b1b1- Y) are to be found in the southern regions of most Mediterranean countries. Far from being a far-fetched idea, a North African Berber DNA haplotype is shared by, among others, people as faraway as the the Pasiegos of Cantabria in Northern Spain and the Saami people of Finland!.

    Newgrange in Ireland is the oldest and finest example of a megalithic culture that spread along the Atlantic coast from North Africa to the Baltic.

    Newgrange has been dated to 3000 B.C. and is slightly older than the Pyramids of Egypt. It and Ireland’s impressive megalithic heritage were built in about the same period as the desertification of the Sahara. The megalithic culture spread up the Atlantic coasts from North Africa where similar structures proliferate.

    Thirty years ago this writer found the equivalent of Newgrange in Larache, Morocco – which was also colonised by Phoenicians after 800 B.C. – and indicates a continuity of Atlantic coastal movement.

    Medina of Larache, Morrocco.

    The Sea is Key

    Professor John T. Koch of the University of Aberystwith wrote the following in Celtic from the West:

    No one has taken the possibility of Celtic coming from ‘Hispania’ to the other Celtic countries seriously since we stopped taking Lebor Gabála Érenn seriously, but it is now at least worth pausing to review what it is we think we know that makes that impossible.

    Professor Barry Cunliffe (Oxford) co-editor of the same collection of essays, repeats his long-held advocacy of the reality of an Atlantic coastal trading community, active at least as long ago as the Bronze Age – and probably much earlier – along which people moved and shared languages and cultures. The area in question stretches from Scandinavia as far south as Mogador – which was once a Phoenician colony. The sea is, as always, the key to such perspectives. The sea connects, does not divide.

    Linguists such as Heinrich Wagner, Pokorny, Orin Gensler, Vennemann et alia have long held that there is a substratum of North African languages (Hamito-Semitic) underneath the first official language of Ireland – Gaelic.

    Dara Beag O Fatharta.

    Sub plot

    The Grandfather Clause is a legal entity in Western Law. It is an exemption in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations. Sometimes, the exemption is limited; it may extend for a set period of time, or it may be lost under certain circumstances.

    It means that traditional customs and rights cannot be arbitrarily abolished by new legislation.

    The simplest example is a claim to a traditional right-of-way through private property. The courts often entertain such claims.

    Suppose that a North African appeals for asylum in Ireland, is refused and threatened with deportation. Might he/she invoke the Grandfather Clause?

    He/she might perhaps claim that when the ice melted his/her ancestors were the first tentative inhabitants of  Northern Europe – including Ireland – 10,000 years ago and that in Ireland there exists physical, linguistic and literary evidence of a continuity of such seaborne immigration and occupation by his/her ancestors down the years – seven thousand years!  This continuity would embrace the first Neolithic farmers, then the Phoenicians, then the Algerian Corsairs of the seventeenth century.  Could it be recognised as a legal, or at least a moral, precedent?

    The science of genetics i.e. evidence from the human genome project would support such a proposition.

    The argument would be that his/her ancestors arrived here long before we were the ‘Irish’ and took possession of the island. Therefore he/she, as a putative descendant of, say, the Fomorians, the Fir Bolg’s or the De Dannan, the Phoenicians, had a right to stay here! The fact that their occupation predated the concept of Land Deeds is relevant. (Of course the abused rights of native American Indians – who also had no land deeds – are also relevant to the case.)

    he Irish Gaelic chieftain receives the priest’s blessing before departing to fight the English.

    A More Recent Analogy

    In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Elizabethan and Cromwellian soldiers came to Ireland and were paid off with stolen tracts of Irish land. Nevertheless, after four centuries of such (often absentee) ownership no one could realistically take a case challenging the rights of the Anglo-Irish descendants of those soldiers. The suggestion that the Irish State might repossess such lands and forcibly deport the descendants without compensation would be treated as absurd – as well as inciting violence! It would be a stretching of the Grandfather Clause which only a despairing defense lawyer might use as a persuasive metaphor.

    However, the rehearsal of the above asylum seeker’s argument – before being laughed out of court – would be an opportunity to reveal the complex background of colonialism and racism that has resulted in attitudes to immigrants of colour. In Ireland, native biodiversity is considered sacrosanct. Foreigners (esp. black) are considered an invasive and basically threatening species.

    The ancient Europa is now Fortress Europe!

    Sarcophagus of Ahiram, which bears the oldest inscription of the Phoenician alphabet (Beirut, Lebanon).

    The Phoenicians

    The Phoenicians were a classic case of a such a blackguarded culture and people. Although prominent in the Bible, they were written out of history by Greek and Roman authors. However, an ancient and deep-rooted anti-semitism also informed the historical prejudice against those Canaanite pioneers whom some accounts say reached these northern islands in the late Bronze Age – approx. 600 B.C.  An extensive tin trade with Cornwall is widely believed.

    Examining the Phoenicians can be an illuminating approach to Irish identity as well as European attitudes and racism in general.

    Irish passports have in the recent past been doled out for cash, thereby entitling rich Saudis and their families to come and go as they please. This is not an unusual practice. At one time the Cypriot president Präsident Nikos Anastasiades is offering citizenship as compensation to rich foreign (i.e Russian) investors.  In modern usage, Irish international sports teams liberally use the ‘granny rule’ to acquire talented non-Irish players.

    There is nothing immutably sacred about Irish or any national citizenship. The arguments for excluding or including certain ethnic types are implacably economic but can raise questions of discrimination on ethnic grounds.

    After working and living in Ireland for a certain number of years many ‘non-nationals’ are granted Irish citizenship. What is the essential difference between these favoured ones and those asylum-seekers who may have endured living for three/four/five years in prison-like circumstances on this island? Those who are forbidden to work, who are given pocket money of €19.10 per week?

    A court hearing as hypothetical as the above might reveal the shaky grounds on which our historical assumptions of identity are based.

    Suppose the old, once-sacred, Irish legends of immigration from Africa and Spain, the Fomorians from Africa, the Milesians from Spain, the De Danaan, the Fir Bolg are not entirely mythical?

    Suppose that seventeenth and eighteenth century Irish scholars who believed in the literal truth of those legends were not entirely mistaken?

    Suppose that modern Irish writers (Heaney, McGuinness, Friel, Durkan et al) were not entirely taking artistic license or imagining things when they invoked the Carthaginians as an anti-colonial metaphor?

    Tradition is never entirely true but never entirely false.

    Rabbit Beach in the southern part of the island of Lampedusa.

    In recent years the island of Lampedusa and the ancient island of Ireland have had this in common: the incursion of desperate people from the other side of the Mediterranean, particularly from North Africa.

    Note

    The changes in Earth’s orbit occurred gradually, whereas the evolution of North Africa’s climate and vegetation were abrupt. Martin Claussen and his colleagues believe that various feedback mechanisms within Earth’s climate system amplified and modified the effects touched off by the orbital changes. By modelling the impact of climate, oceans, and vegetation both separately and in various combinations, the researchers concluded that oceans played only a minor role in the Sahara’s desertification. The earths axis wobbled. The desertification of North Africa began abruptly 5,440 years ago (+/- 30 years). Before that time, the Sahara was covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, as evidenced by fossilized pollen.

    The Sahel is the ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition between the Sahara desert in the North and the Sudanian Savannas in the south, having a semi-arid climate. It stretches across the north of the African continent between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. In Arabic the word Sahel means  ‘a coastline’ which delimits the sand of the Sahara.

    The Sahel covers parts of (from west to east) Senegal, southern Mauritania, central Mali, southern Algeria and Niger, central Chad, southern Sudan, northern South Sudan and Eritrea.

    In the history of this planet geologists say there have been five major Ice Ages, each lasting hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. There have been periods when this entire planet was covered in ice. At other periods the tectonic plates supporting continents were all jammed together in the southern hemisphere and Ireland was located below the equator – beside the African tropical zone. We were all neighbours once.

    An ice age is defined as when both polar caps are covered in ice. We are presently in an ‘ice age’.

    There have been hundreds of ‘inter-glacials’ or global warmings. During one of the interglacial periods – perhaps fifty million years ago – conditions favoured the emergence of the first primitive life forms.

    In another, more recent, period the sudden desertification of the Sahara occurred. This event had a dramatic and long-lasting effect on population movements around the Mediterranean.

    Featured Image: Landscape of the Erg Chebbi, Morrocco.

  • The Most Natural Thing in the World II

    Are you satisfied now, ladies and gentlemen, you counsellors and therapists of all stripes, with my do-it-your-self-psychoanalysis?

    Despite my disdain for the so-called misery memoir, it is time to declare: my childhood was better than being brought up in an industrial school, or by an alcoholic or physically abusive parent; but, certainly by today’s ideals, only just.

    Often, I am surprised that I even survived my upbringing, if not exactly thrived. It is an achievement, in itself, to be alive. Maybe I’m suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, after all, and have been for most of my life. Which, in turn, has led to a bad case of Imposter Syndrome. Or better still, Postnatal Depression, which cuts both ways, and is a synonym for Life.

    But, as Flannery O’Connor wrote: ‘Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.’ In the long run, you learn that parents are just people who looked after you when you couldn’t look after yourself, with whom you have very little in common – except what they put there.

    ‘misery on to man’

    So, there you have it: I don’t have kids because I didn’t feel wanted as a child. I am just another classic example of the classical Sophoclean tale of the complexity of Oedipus, and how it wrecks. How neat, but how utterly facile – the kind of typically trite conclusion to which a therapist will always jump.

    For the psychological scaring of one’s own upbringing is hardly enough to explain a lack of interest – or rather, an unwillingness to participate in procreation. After all, people with much more unsavoury childhood experiences than I still manage to produce children of their own. That’s part of the recurring cycle of man passing ‘misery on to man’, in Larkin’s phrase, from the one poem of his which everyone can quote from memory.

    It is what he means by ‘Still going on, all of it, still going on!’ to quote from another, less anthologised of his works. No doubt the mind-doctors will predictably claim that I am merely in denial here about the effects of my formative childhood experiences on my psyche. But denial is such a difficult concept to prove in practice. Not that I reject outright the idea that there may be some residual influence – how could there not be? My parents may well have given me ‘all the faults they had’ and added some more, just for me. But does that inevitably make me, in the words of a fictional Larkin biographer from another of his more well-known poems, ‘One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’, the sort who notoriously cautions ‘Don’t have any kids yourself’? Hardly – anyone who knows me will attest to my lively sense of humour.

    Ah, but maybe I’m just trying to cover something up with a jokey, rock’n’roll exterior? Ah, but aren’t we all – with whatever masks work best for us? We all ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’, like poor old Prufrock.

    In the end, your relationship with your parents, and your perspective on your childhood, is a bit like your relationship with and perspective on the place where you were born and grew up, or even with your country: some people become expatriates; some people stay close to home; and some people are at peace with whichever arrangement, and some are not.

    One can treat that relationship with as much seriousness or triviality as one likes, although for many professional mental healthcare workers, it will always be serious. In any case, this excavational writing project I am engaged upon vouchsafes that I am not in denial: I have acknowledged the debt the past has burdened me with; what you are reading can be construed as my effort to (clears throat) ‘move on’.

    Sinatra Family, 1949.

    It’s Parents

    (Joke: It’s not the mother and father I blame: it’s the parents.) Except, for me, it’s more a case of

    ‘It’s not children I don’t like: it’s parents.’ For here’s the thing: for someone who appreciates, if not quite advocates, childlessness, I quite like children. Obviously, one cannot generalise about all children, as individual children can differ from one another almost as much as adults do. But, in general, I prefer the company of most children to that of most adults.

    This has something to do with the hope projected on to them: they haven’t quite been beaten down and made bitter by life experience, yet. If there is hope, it lies in the children. But there is no hope, because of the parents. Little people have usually regarded me quizzically, probably because they perceive me to be unlike most other adults in their lives. I can usually speak to them on their own level. I am not an authority figure.

    You can learn a lot from children about looking at the world in an original way, if you listen to them, which so few adults do. But I like being able to give them back to their biological parents, when the fun is over. I only want the good parts. (Joke: I like children, but I couldn’t eat a whole one.)

    Fortunately, this seems to suit most parents, who are only too glad to have their children taken off their hands for a while. I’m thinking of all those poor little rich kids, from all over the place but especially the progeny of Russian oligarchs, whom I taught (i.e. babysat) on summer courses over the years. All the neglected boys could do was play computer games; all the neglected girls could do was go shopping. Of course, they are the issue of the class of people who view having children as a lifestyle choice rather than as a luxury.

    Parents may lavish fortunes on the education of their children, but they actively seek to avoid spending too much time with them. Just as children may look forward to hefty inheritances, but are quite prepared to deposit their parents in residential care homes while they are waiting for their windfall, rather than look after them at home themselves. Family values, eh?

    The 1937 Irish Constitution.

    The Family

    ‘It’s not children I don’t like: it’s parents.’ Which means, of course, that what I really don’t like are families, or rather, the fetishisation of ‘The Family’ as an abstract concept, as for example in monotheistic religions, or in Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Constitution of Ireland. (Article 41.1.1. ‘The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.’ Article 41.1.2.

    ‘The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.’ Okay, so. But what about all the citizens who, for whatever reason, have never lived in families, and/or never will live in families – unadopted or unfostered orphans, for a start, or Catholic clergy?) And I reserve a particularly virulent animus against ‘The Good Family’, as in “He/She is from A Good Family” or from “Good Stock” or “Decent People”, ‘good’ and ‘decent’ here invariably meaning church-going, law-abiding, well-connected, prosperous middle-class, and ‘respectable’ – except most of them are not.

    Thus, the origin of the phrases ‘The black sheep of the family’, and ‘Disgracing the family name.’ If I had a fiver for every time I’ve been to a job interview – and even in supposedly liberal operations like newspapers or publishing houses – and been asked “Who are your family?’ or “What is your father doing now?”, I’d have a tidy sum squirrelled away. “Where do you stand on the church?” was also an old favourite when trying to land a teaching job, as recently as the late 1980s.

    Needless to say, the potential employers were not overly impressed with my answers. If it were not for hereditary privilege, many monsters (themselves the offspring of monsters) throughout history would not have got within even an ass’s roar of power. Just think: wouldn’t the world be a better place without contemporary manifestations of the phenomenon, such as Lochlan Murdoch or Ivanka Trump, having easy access to global media and political influence?

    Prashant Shrestha from Kathmandu, Nepal.

    The Dialectic of Sex

    Before you peremptorily dismiss me as a crackpot, please hear me out, for I am not a lone voice crying in the wilderness in this predilection. In The Dialectic of Sex (1970), second wave feminist Shulamith Firestone criticised the nuclear family as a construct, arguing that it not only limits women’s independence, but inhibits child development too. In her view, children are hindered in their abilities to develop because of their education, predetermined positions in the social hierarchy, and ‘lesser importance’ in comparison to their parents and other adult figures in their lives, who control all these aspects of the children’s lives. She believed that nuclear families, as a form of social organisation, creates inequality within a family, as the children are considered subordinates to their parents.

    This, in turn, has increased maternal expectations and obligations, which is something Firestone thought society should outgrow. This dependency on maternal figures makes the child(ren) more susceptible to physical abuse and deprives them of the opportunity to work towards being independent themselves, economically, emotionally and sexually. She sought to solve these problems by eliminating families for the raising of children, and instead to have them raised by a collective.

    William S. Burroughs also advocated for the disintegration of the family unit, most vociferously in The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs by Daniel Odier (1989), since he believed it to be redundant.

    Jean Genet wrote in The Thief’s Journal (1949): ‘In my opinion, the family is probably the first criminal cell, and the most criminal.’ ‘Ah, but those guys were queer’, I hear members of the right-wing Christian fraternity proclaim, ‘so what else would you expect from them?’

    Alright, let’s enlist some good, straight, honest Irishmen as well. Poet Dennis O’Driscoll wrote that ‘Every family has passed its own version of the Official Secrets Act’, and doubtless with good reason.

    Time and again in his work, Samuel Beckett targets parents as irresponsible criminals, by dint of their bringing more life into this sordid and corrupt world, and thus creating families. ‘You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that,’ says Hamm to Clov in Endgame, and addresses his father Nagg as ‘accursed progenitor’. Indeed, Beckett could easily be construed as a proto-supporter of women’s reproductive rights, as the narrator of First Love is horrified when his lover Lulu/Anna reveals that she is pregnant: ‘Abort! Abort!’ he says, adding, ‘If it’s lepping, I said, it’s not mine.’

    Furthermore, for Stephen Dedalus in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (even if it can be configured, as Hugh Kenner chooses to do in Joyce’s Dublin, as callow – in contrast with Leopold Bloom’s mooted fatherly maturity), ‘Paternity is a legal fiction’ (or, as my own father used to put it more plainly: “There’s manys the man rocks another man’s child when he thinks he rocks his own.”).

    Stockbrokers, New York, 1966 from United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.03199.

    Wealth Accumulation

    It can easily be argued that marriage, monogamy and parenthood exist primarily to foster and protect property and inheritance, and to encourage wealth accumulation. These arrangements sponsor and attempt to justify the greed and acquisitiveness of rampant laissez-faire capitalism, since parents can always claim that they are not acting disreputably out of their own selfish interests, but rather are indulging in seemingly self-serving and nakedly avaricious behaviour merely for the good of their offspring, by endeavouring to give them the best start in life and ultimately securing their future.

    Thus the casting of family formation as somehow having a Stake in Life, or in Progress, or in The Future, or some such nebulous notion. But would people really be so competitive economically, to the detriment of others, if their children were raised communally, and all the children of the nation were really cherished equally – i.e. have exactly the same resources available to them?

    This alternative method of social organisation would certainly give the lie to the oft-repeated right-wing mantra that free market capitalism is a meritocracy – where the harder you work, the more you are rewarded – because all children would be starting life on precisely the same footing. After all, ‘It takes a village’, as even prominent neo-liberals like to tell us.

    Besides which, is the family really such a Haven in a Heartless World, as historian Christopher Lasch had it, in his 1977 tome of that title? Lasch traced over a century’s worth of sociological and psychological theories on the contemporary family, situating his observations in the context of expanding social institutions and their besieging of the family’s power and influence, and taking issue with most of them.

    However, while Pope John Paul II may have opined that ‘as the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live’, surely if the family is a microcosmic unit within the macrocosm of society itself, then the overall health of the family should be a good indicator of the overall health of the culture at large. If the world is indeed heartless, then perhaps the first place in need of reformation is, in fact, the family. In this alternative cosmology, friends may well be God’s apology for family since, unlike your family, you get to choose your friends.

    There is at least as much evidence to suggest that, far from being a haven, families can just as equally be claustrophobic minefields of unbearable tension and resentment. From the patricides, matricides and fratricides of Greek tragedy, to a headline ripped at random from yesterday’s newspaper: ‘Domestic violence by adult children against parents rises as stress peaks under lockdown’, this assertion is incontestable. A recent statement from the Garda Commissioner informed us that domestic violence claims more lives in Ireland every year than gangland crime.

    Of course, you can counter-argue that these kinds of pressures on family life are direct consequences of consumer capitalism (adult kids can’t afford to rent, much less buy, which is why they are living at home), but the fact remains that the concept of the happy and supportive family is an aspirational mirage, with little tangible substance: some parents may get on with each other, but many don’t; some parents may get on with their children, but many don’t; some siblings may get on with each other, but many don’t; some children may get on with their parents, but many don’t; some families may work, but many don’t; some may work at different times, but not at others.

    Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina.

    All Families are Alike

    Here we can invoke Tolstoy’s famous opening line of Anna Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ But are all happy families really alike? Perhaps their happiness is just as idiosyncratic as the unhappiness of the unhappy. In addition to which, I can’t help but ascribe a degree of conscious irony to Tolstoy’s declaration. After all, we do not encounter any ideally happy families in Anna Karenina. Perhaps he knew, as well as anyone, that the Happy Family is a myth, an ideal to which we may aspire, while having no palpable earthly iteration. But whenever Family Values types start pushing The Family ‘as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society’ at me (unfortunate enough as that phrase is in its easy slide into Margaret Thatcher’s infamous claim that ‘…there’s no such thing as society.

    There are individual men and women and there are families’), I usually refer them to the Christmas dinner scene in Joyce’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, which is, if nothing else, a needful corrective to the sentimental ghosts of Dickens, and bolsters Wilde’s epigram to the effect that ‘Sentimentality is merely the bank holiday [e.g. Dickens’ Christmas] of cynicism’. For, despite the episode’s grounding in personal autobiography and the particular politico-religious strife among nationalists in Ireland at the time, the reason for this Yuletide row’s universal appeal is that Joyce wasn’t just writing about his own family: rather, he was writing about everyone’s family, in every time and place.

    There is always something to argue about, and it hurts more to argue with relatives who espouse views diametrically opposed to your own than it does with anyone else. Or will you just sit there and bite your tongue for the rest of your life?

    At any rate, however positive or negative your view of family life, I have no particular desire to be part of the hurdy-gurdy of what a friend calls, speaking of his own familial ups and downs, ‘the great human dance’. Or, at least, his version of family dancing and enforced role-playing. I am more partial to jitterbugging than waltzing, to doing the watusi than executing a quadrille.

    Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)

    Irish Social History

    These considerations take on a particularly lurid hue in the light of 20th century Irish social history, especially when juxtaposed with the aspirational ‘official version’ rhetoric which is still regularly trotted out around the Irish family (see Articles Article 41.1.1. and Article 41.1.2. of Bunreacht na hÉireann, above).

    The record of incarceration and institutionalisation of Irish citizens in Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalen Laundries, Industrial Schools and Psychiatric Hospitals is grim, and involved the blatant rejection of children and grandchildren by their parents, siblings and extended families, in the name of a church-and-state-sponsored ‘respectability’ based on the notion of ‘legitimacy’. These wounds are still raw in many peoples’ memories. As a younger acquaintance recently put it to me: “I was born in 1993 to a single mother who raised me. The last Mother and Baby Home in Ireland closed in 1998. It could have been us.”

    Therefore, I salute the scholarly tenacity of both Clair Wills, in her article Architectures of Containment (London Review of Books, Vol. 43 No. 10 · 20 May 2021), and Catriona Crowe, in her piece The Commission and the Survivors (Dublin Review, #83, Summer 2021), for their persistence in wading through 2865 pages of what is essentially obfuscating, buck-passing apologetics contained within the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes (Government of Ireland, October 2020), and their deep excavation and dismantling of it.

    Wills refers to the ‘inalienable family logic’ of the system, and speculates that: ‘Arguably the rhetoric of the Irish family was a smokescreen for the absence of the family as a private sphere of emotional and affective ties’, declaring that ‘the Irish church and state, with the passive acceptance and sometimes active collusion of Irish families, was willing to sacrifice its own children – of whatever age – for what it considered to be survival.’ Crowe comments: ‘One has no right to expect dazzling prose in such a document, but it is striking how badly written, argued and organised the commission’s report is. The tone is at times hectoring, at times defensive, at times cryptic – and sometimes all three…’ The cover-up continues…

    While some may read more recent progress in Irish social legislation – such as the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the repeal of the eighth amendment – as forms of ‘respectability politics’, they at least demonstrably signal significant shifts in attitudes as to what constitutes concepts of the Irish Family, moving on from a theocratic patriarchy to a broader and looser inclusivity.

    Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, imagined here in a Bible illustration from 1897.

    Patriarchy

    ‘Which means, of course, that what I really don’t like are families…’.  Which means, of course, that what I really don’t like is patriarchy. Men can be victims of patriarchy, just as much as women. (Although, even if they aren’t, they should still dislike it, out of solidarity with their womenfolk.) I myself have suffered my whole life at the hands of all manner of male authority figures (e.g. priests and Christian Brothers to whom my parents deferred, and so who consequently had inordinate control over my formative years; teachers too interested in favouring students with more upwardly-mobile parents than mine to pay attention to me; doctors and surgeons who would not admit mistakes when they treated me, when it was obvious mistakes had been made; potential employers who found my performances at interviews too idiosyncratic to countenance employing me, despite abundant relevant qualifications and experience).

    Bumptious, self-important fools. I could never imagine myself in the role of a patriarch, or even a more benign paterfamilias. Hence, perhaps, another reason why I don’t have children. Not that I hold much brief for matriarchy either – which, curiously, has markedly strong manifestations in Ireland: just look at the ubiquity of mariolatry imagery.

    I myself have suffered my whole life at the hands of all manner of female authority figures (e.g. women in many of the same roles as the men already listed – proving, paradoxically, that equality isn’t always an unalloyed ‘good thing’). Brash, conceited harridans. I could never imagine putting someone in the role of a matriarch, or even a more benign materfamilias.

    Hence, perhaps, another reason why I didn’t want to give a woman a child. So maybe it’s not so much patriarchy (etymology: ‘from patriarkhēs “male chief or head of a family” ’) or matriarchy (etymology: ‘government by a mother or mothers; form of social organization in which the mother is the head of the family and the descendants are reckoned through the maternal side”, formed in English 1881 from matriarch + -y and “patterned after patriarchy”) that I dislike, as ‘archy’ itself (etymology: ‘word-forming element meaning “rule”, from Latin -archia, from Greek -arkhia “rule”, from arkhos “leader, chief, ruler”, from arkhē “beginning, origin, first place”, verbal noun of arkhein “to be the first”, hence “to begin” and “to rule”.’)

    As a good ex-punk (is there really any such thing as an ‘ex’ punk? – no, of course not, old punks never die, they just sign to CBS, and/or get into country music), perhaps the only -archy I like is an- (from Greek, ‘without’) -archy. All rules are arbitrary. They are mutually agreed conventions, employed for as long as those with power consider them useful, until they are convinced otherwise, or in advance of them losing power. As with the power of parents to rule the lives of their children.

    Meet the Parents

    It is plain to see that parents get a bad press, in both popular culture and theoretical discourse. From ‘Mom jeans’ to ‘Dad rock’, from Meet The Parents (and The Fockers) to The Happiest Season, parents are presented as embarrassingly and quintessentially naff. Parental units are decidedly unerotic, and are easy targets for comedic caricature. Sometimes they bring it on themselves: consider Parental Advisory Explicit Content stickers on album covers.

    No offspring wants to sit watching grown-up films or television series with their ‘Old Pair’, or even share their musical tastes and latest tunes with them. Picture Sherilyn Fenn’s iconic small screen epiphany as Audrey Horne in the first season of David Lynch’s seminal series Twin Peaks (1990), where during a job interview at One Eyed Jacks she knots a cherry stem with her talented tongue, and the large cringe factor of your Old Dear piping up from her rocking chair, perplexedly, “What does it mean?” (Mind you, it wasn’t just the Mother; the Sister dissed the show after seeing Audrey swaying around the Double R Diner to Angelo Badalamenti’s theme music “Like she was on drugs”.)

    Hands up if you can remember being told to “Turn that racket down” while losing yourself in the latest punk masterpiece (e.g. The Clash’s eponymous debut album). I even have a more precise memory of ma mère’s shocked chagrin on overhearing the line ‘By the devil’s holy water and the rosary beads’ in The Radiators’ classic ‘Song of the Faithful Departed’, from Ghosttown (1979) – a song “mocking God”. ‘Who were your parents?’ and ‘What was your childhood like?” are the first questions any self-respecting and well-trained psychotherapist is going to ask you in a consultation (€50+ an hour, and they’re fifty-minute hours too), and we all know where the blame for your troubles and woes, your utter fucked-upness, is going to lie.

    Personally, I struggle to listen to any opinion being expressed when it is prefaced by the age-old, ingratiating formula “Speaking as a parent…”. Is there any more grating conversation-stopper, guaranteed to shut down any debate, than “You’d understand if you had kids”? “I have kids to support” is used as an excuse by parents for every unenviable life choice they make, from staying in an insalubrious work situation (“My boss is such a bully”) to, worse, staying in a bad marriage (“Not in front of the children”). For the majority of parents, their children represent hostages to fortune.

    Bonkers Parenting

    Literature furnishes plentiful examples of misguidedly inadequate or blatantly bonkers parenting. Passing over the treatment of daughters by their parents – usually their mothers – in the fictions of Jane Austen, I could also cite Mrs. Kearney in James Joyce’s short story ‘A Mother’, who mortifies her daughter Kathleen, an aspiring pianist, by sweeping her out of a concert hall and irritating the promoters and other artists, with her impatience to get paid immediately for Kathleen’s contribution to a recital series, thus ruining her career in Dublin musical circles.

    But I’m thinking specifically and more contemporaneously of Donald Barthelme’s very short short story, ‘The Baby’, a succinct satire on the arbitrariness of parental discipline and punishment.

    My wife said that maybe we were being too rigid and that the baby was losing weight. But I pointed out to her that the baby had a long life to live and had to live in a world with others, had to live in a world where there were many, many rules, and if you couldn’t learn to play by the rules you were going to be left out in the cold with no character, shunned and ostracized by everyone,

    reasons the father of a fifteen-month-old baby girl, sentenced to spend four hours alone in her room for every page she tears out of books. ‘We had more or less of an ethical crisis on our hands.’
    To be fair, fiction is also replete, from a parent’s perspective, with skewering specimens of outrageously uncontrollable children. I’m thinking here of the monstrous Marmaduke, the ten-month-old toddler from Martin Amis’ London Fields (1989), an infant his parents agonised over bringing into the world, given its less than perfect state, who then turns out to terrorise their lives like a violent dictator. But perhaps the most equanimous artistic depiction of parents’ burdensome redundancy to their busy children is Yasujirō Ozu’s unbearably moving Tokyo Story (1953), a masterpiece of such universal resonance that it regularly tops polls as one of the greatest films ever made. Do you seriously believe your parental journey will be significantly different from any of the examples highlighted above?

    Some people get to resolve their differences with their parents, usually as they move into middle age and take on the trials and tribulations of parenthood themselves. This will not happen for me. My father died when I was thirty-three; my mother died when I was forty-one. They were both six foot under, and I had failed to produce an heir, to add to their already numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They are united now at last in death, for ever, as they never were in life, decaying together in Deansgrange Cemetery, in the wet, mulchy earth, underground.

    More than Enough

    To look at the broader picture, and to echo some anti-natalist arguments: there are more than enough people in the world. (Roughly 8 billion, give or take a few hundred thousand, and rising by – at a conservative estimate – at least 1 per cent annually: that’s 80 million a year, in plain language. Visit www.worldometers.info for impressive minute by minute stats. There is way more than one born every minute.)

    What kind of bloated egotism does it take to believe that your priceless strands of DNA are going to make any difference whatsoever to anyone other than yourself and/or your partner, much less make that world a better place? Particularly when the species isn’t exactly in imminent danger of completely dying out anytime soon.

    In fact, on the contrary, more people are more likely to hasten the demise of humanity’s living space, Planet Earth, through the devastation that overpopulation brings. To those who would admonish me to the effect that my child freedom is merely an unwillingness to shoulder adult responsibility, I say: in all likelihood I am more responsible than you, by not having any children. To say nothing of the fact that there are huge swathes of people who, for a variety of reasons, have great difficulty or ultimately find it impossible to reproduce.

    Both LGBTQ+ couples and heterosexual couples with fertility issues are required to take circuitous and sometimes difficult routes into parenthood, either through assisted reproductive technologies like IVF and donor insemination, (which detractors would call ‘unnatural’, and which is why, of course, they are considered such an abomination by the Godly ‘pro-lifers’), or via other complicated arrangements such as surrogacy, co-parenting, adoption or fostering.

    Then there is the childcare issue. Despite the good intentions of the aforementioned Constitution (Article 41.2.1. ‘In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’ – itself the subject of much controversy and contentiously archaic because of its gender specificity), Irish society has organised itself over the years into the current shambles whereby, under the influence of Anglo-American neo-liberalism rather than European social democracy, both members of a couple are required to work to maintain a roof over their and their potential or actual offsprings’ heads, which in turn means they are required to stump up exorbitant fees for private creches to look after said offspring while they are out slaving to provide food and shelter for them. (So much for Article 42.1.2. of The Constitution: ‘The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.’)

    Does that seem like a fair deal? So, essentially, unless you have other family members (usually grandparents) or friends willing to take them off your hands for the best part of the day, or you move to a mainland European country with proper public services, you are snookered.

    The professional classes, i.e. those in the best position to exploit and therefore gain most from the present system, solve this conundrum by availing themselves of au pairs, or by hiring and underpaying Filipino nannies. Here, as with so much else, they ‘go private’ – doubtlessly believing that this is the natural order of things. Here, as elsewhere, my hardwired class antagonism – which some will doubtlessly dismiss as merely ‘a chip on his shoulder’ – burns brightly.

    Alfred Nobel’s will.

    Legacy Issue

    Then there is the legacy issue. If you happen to have done well for yourself, whom do you leave your fortune to? In that case, having some blood heirs might be a good idea – although as previously mentioned, perhaps you have only done well for yourself because you had heirs in the first place. And what of those, the majority, on average incomes, or the poor, who have amassed little or no capital to pass on to their sons and daughters – many of whom, in any case, may be just waiting around for parents to pass on so that they can get their greedy paws on what loot there is? Many people still have children as a form of long-term investment, because they think their offspring will contribute to the household budget – although these days parents are more likely to get stuck for stumping up deposits for their first time buyer children’s houses (in Ireland, we actually have an ex-Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and current Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister), who recommended in the Dáil (Parliament) that young people go to “The Bank of Mum and Dad” as just such a method of securing a mortgage); or because they think their flesh and blood will be a comfort to them in their old age, or at least look after them in their declining years and decrepitude – when in reality they are more likely to be packed off to a care home, so that the ungrateful fruit of their loins can get on with their own mid-life lives.

    In fairness, given the lack of state services for elder care as well as child care (described above) under the present dispensation, and the inter-generational disparity in access to property ownership, the overworked adult children and parents often have no other choice but to outsource caring roles for family members younger and older than themselves, which were traditionally performed by family members.

    Thus, privatisation begets more privatisation, and neo-liberal capitalism actually works to the detriment of The Family, or, more accurately, non-affluent families, which it ostensibly trumpets upholding.

    Americanization of California (1932) by Dean Cornwell

    Enlightened Self-Interest

    In any case, the inheritance question is not one that applies much to me personally, either as recipient or as donor, because amassing a nest egg to make life easier for his litter was not high on my father’s or mother’s list of concerns.

    “There are no pockets in the last suit,” quoth he, perhaps hoping to imbue me with the same fatalistic attitude. I dare say he succeeded. He clearly had no ambitions towards founding a dynasty, at least not one based on the accumulation of financial wealth and economic power. His plans for his bloodline probably extended no further than ‘put them on the right road’ and ‘let them find their own way’, with the Catholic religion, the ‘one true church’, as their guide.

    Naturally, if I were the progeny of a wealthier or landed lineage, perhaps my analysis of inherited wealth would be entirely other. With notable exceptions, altruistic or aspirational, most people tend to espouse the socio-political philosophies and policies which are best tailored to the fullness or emptiness of their own pockets, rather than worrying about an ill-defined ‘greater good’. ‘Enlightened self-interest’, I believe it’s called.

    Who knows, what a great Fine Gael/Tory/Republican Party fascistic scumbag I would have made, and what horrors I could have perpetrated, if only I had had a family fortune to protect and grow.

    Given these considerations, probably the only truly selfless and ethical way of having children and creating a family is by adoption. At least you are caring for already born orphaned or abandoned kids, whose own parents could not or would not look after them. Failing that, get a dog or a cat.

  • In the Blink of an Eye

    In the blink of an eye everything can change in the way we live our lives. How do we manage to live, socialise and maintain public health?

    A recent article by Jennifer O’Connell ‘We are world experts at anomalies and blind eyes’ led me to recall how turning a blind eye brought incarceration of pregnant women in laundries and to others living out their lives in psychiatric institutions. But also, that the default creative solution taken by those who do not have the luxury of access, or the means, to survive and thrive within rules laid down by those who do, is to selectively blinker themselves to such rules. And how turning a blind eye to such anomalies is a usually unacknowledged aspect of the way a tate functions.

    A Belgian psychiatrist, speaking from the floor at one of the meetings called to form the European Association for Psychotherapy, proposed ‘an ability to deal with ambiguity’ as a definition for mental health.

    Jagged Lines       

    In a time of extreme change, such as that witnessed during the pandemic, and which climate change may well produce, we may have to live with increasing contradictions.

    I remember attending a talk given by the late Virginia Satir in Dundrum in Dublin. Satir was one of the earliest family therapists in the United States, focussed on bringing about system change through communication.

    She drew a jagged trajectory from one straight line to another. The jagged part indicated the chaos experienced as a system, or family, moves from stasis through change.

    As I was pregnant with my first child at the time, it was helpful to recall the jagged line as I struggled to change nappies, deal with nappy rash after soaking the cloth ones in buckets and washing them (we aspired to mind the planet in the 1980s too), before surrendering to the absorbent benefits of paper while, getting by on less sleep than I’d ever managed.

    “The first weeks of parenthood are chaotic,” a thoughtful friend rang me to say. ”It will be a lot better in six weeks’ time.”

    The jagged line has been a handy reminder in later periods of change and adjustment too, not least during lockdowns and when getting used to wearing a mask.

    Catch 22

    Pain-inducing contradictions can arise. This may lead either to a psychological pathology or, by way of rising above it, creative solutions.

    A subject explored in essays by Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Paladin, 1973) in which he critiques previous work from his Palo Alto team proposing the Double Bind theory.

    The double bind is a situation requiring the subject – in a relationship which cannot be escaped from – to choose between alternatives in which they will be wrong-footed either way. In other words, they experience themselves living in a continuing Catch 22.

    Mount Fuji

    ‘Benefits of Inconvenience’

    A recent interview on the Design Talks Plus programme from NNK Japan television offers encouragement. In what may be a turning from the belief that technical progress is always to our advantage, Professor Kawakami Hiroshi of Kyoto University of Advanced Science has spent a decade researching what he calls ‘the benefits of inconvenience’. He argues for less convenience and that the effort required to make sense of the world, while facing challenges, may contribute to a better sense of meaningfulness and wellbeing.

    Hiroshi cites a return to the use of rough earth in children’s playgrounds (balance challenging) and finding the way on foot around a city without satnav – ensuring the need to pay attention to surroundings – as examples. To emphasise his point he began by asking: ‘If you were climbing Mt. Fuji would you want an escalator’?

    The inconvenience in rising to the challenge of struggling with contradictions in rules for living with Covid 19 (and our recent further re-opening of opportunities to socialise) could be seen as an opportunity.

    Maybe the rewards will offset the difficulties. Providing, that is, those struggling are not punished for choices that, either way, will put them in the wrong.

    If restrictions spawn imaginative solutions, in line with the spirit of preventing the spread of variants of Covid-19, crucially, formulated in ways appropriate to particular local situations, then the sense of satisfaction might end up enhancing a sense of well-being

    Unlikely? Maybe. But maybe not. These regularly madden me but, and as Jennifer O’Connell indicated in her article, they are the kind of ‘Irish solutions’  we might be said to excel at.

    Mark Zuckerberg at the Congressional Hearing

    Where to Look

    I was relieved – hope restored –  hearing Roger McNamee, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s early mentors and author of Zucked (UK Harper Collins,2019), on the RTE radio morning news bulletin on October 29th 2021 saying that the Facebooker owner’s launch of Meta, his new holding company, is his way of distracting the world from Frances Haugen’s account. The Facebook whistleblower revealed to the U.S. Congress and a UK Select Committee in the last couple of weeks the ways Zuckerman prioritizes profits over safety. McNamee thought it was also aimed at saving Zuckerman from being held to account.

    What’s hopeful about that? Only that Roger McNamee spoke out and RTE radio reported what he had to say. In the same week I was fuming about an article in the Business Post (Oct, 24th) by Dan O’Brien ‘Covid 19 has brought out the inner catastrophist in our national psyche’.

    I forced myself to complete it several days after I had put it to one side. I wanted to be able to respond to it, but also to offer him at least the courtesy of considering what he had to say, especially given he has had to listen to that he clearly has found difficult in the national conversation.

    I had no argument with the generally accepted facts outlined. However, his omission of the crucial fact that the Irish health system has been more inclined towards collapse than the other European countries he mentions bothered me. That, alongside his use of adjectives, indicated a bias I saw as otherwise unacknowledged. Although mention of his Brazilian wife did offer clues.

    Photo by Daniele Idini.

    Catastrophising

    What most annoyed me was that Dan O’Brien wrote of Irish ‘catastrophising’ conversations. Longer lockdowns here contrasted with the reactions of Italy or Brazil. His hypothesis is that this might be due to their twentieth century experiences of living with war.

    How ought we best manage the fears evoked by a threat? Our bodies are wired for fight or flight. The extreme version of flight is denial, ignoring of facts that we cannot face.

    It can allow us to hide from reality or feel unrealistically invincible in our fighting. Maybe that’s what is needed in wars. In contradiction to O’Brien’s argument, the truth generally is that the more traumatised we are the more likely we may be to use these defences.

    Of course, we need psychological defences that enable us continue to cope during difficult times. Talking about our difficulties and continuing to take the difficult decisions, to find the least bad solutions that we can manage to act on, is usually considered the healthiest way of managing.

    We need to put on blinkers at times and to remain focused on the direction required. But blinding ourselves entirely to the traffic – the many difficulties and demands of the times we live in – can only lead to more of the same.

    In Addition

    We are drawn to solutions that best serve our own interests. Financial Times journalist, Tim Harmon’s book How to Make the World Add Up (2021) reveals research showing that we are more likely to make decisions based on the attitudes of the groups with which we identify than with scientifically proven facts, and that this has also been shown to be true of scientists themselves.

    We want to remain part of our group or tribe. This is research worth taking into account with regard to vaccine take up and hesitancy. Maybe it is important to acknowledge that Dan O’Brien is interested in economics and business and that my background, which also began with a social science perspective, has been a thirty-year career in psychotherapy before I turned to writing. We may have different loyalties affecting our perspectives.

    A quick re-read of what Tim Harford had to say about our use of statistics led me to his first rule for evaluating their use: ‘What are you feeling?’

    He goes on to suggest that looking at how those feelings might be influencing your use of figures can be the best way to ensure accuracy, and the avoidance of spreading ‘false news’.

    I asked myself about the anger fuelling the fingers on my keyboard. I realised it was driven by fear. My own catastrophising of how O’Brien’s article might undermine the national effort. My fear that Covid numbers are rising. I don’t want another lockdown.

    However accurate or questionable O’Brien’s hypothesis, he has given me a timely reminder about rushing to the page. Writing can be a way of working things out. Emotion may fuel effort, but it had better be interrogated to discover what it is really saying if the greater truth is to be served.

    The need to keep financially afloat and the need to save as many lives as possible can be at odds, nor are they unrelated. Funds are necessary.

    Basic services, food and shelter are as essential and contribute as much to public health as other considerations, and have to be paid for. The challenge is to engage with, and work to rise above, fear and strive to find the least damaging solutions. We are left to wonder how we decide what is best amidst the confusion during  times of change.

    Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

    Politics of Distraction

    What do Trump, Zuckerman and Johnson have in common? They are masters, albeit not alone, in offering distraction, a form of click-bait news that feeds  a greed for sensation that briefly satisfy but cannot ultimately sate humanity.

    The distraction makes us look away from what is really at hand and makes us focus instead on what we prefer.

    ‘Get Brexit done’ for Johnson. In Trump’s case, spreading so much false news that there is no longer any focus on the truth, or otherwise, in his own assertions. Listeners are led to believe all news is untrustworthy and that he alone should be listened to and receive votes.

    And, then there is the  promise of a future, technologically ‘advanced’ virtual world – with new toys – in the case of Mark Zuckerman. This is leads to a temptation to avoid looking too closely at the degree of control he has, and the damage that control has done.

    Commentators other than Roger McNamee acknowledge that Zuckerman’s plans for his venture were long in the making, and point to the direction he would like to go in future while trying to re-engage a younger demographic, but the timing of the announcement means that Roges McNamee is making sense.

    Eye on the Ball

    There will be many anomalies, distractions and frightening challenges to confront as we endeavour to live with the pandemic, while keeping our eyes open to the threat of the Earth becoming uninhabitable, at least for humans.

    We’ll need to recall Satir’s jagged line between the two straight ones that each indicated more settled times. Sometimes a withering eye may be needed and sometimes we will need to challenge ourselves to recognise our prejudices and look again, turn ourselves away from simplistic blame and less urgent conflicts, save our energy for the war by being willing to lose relatively insignificant battles.

    There will also be occasions when turning a blind eye will be compassionate and politically essential and others again when we just need to manage to turn off the news and blind ourselves to what is going on around us for our own sanity. Hopefully we will also find the fortitude in time to turn again to face what needs to be faced and take the right actions within our ambit of control.

    Featured Image: The Blind Leading the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

  • Musician of the Month: Marie Awadis

    I still don’t know musically where I belong. Being classically trained as a pianist, but listening also to Jazz, World, Indi Pop, Nordic, Heavy Metal or Ambient music, and loving them all, I keep losing myself in whichever direction I go. I wouldn’t say I want to compose Heavy Metal, but I am influenced by many genres and many composers…

    Also, maybe because, as a child, I never had this feeling of having a home. Being Armenian – although born in Lebanon and living the last twenty years in Germany – has had a huge impact on me. I’ve never been in Armenia although I always wanted to visit; at least to experience how it feels to be in the motherland.

    Instead, I learned to believe home is where I feel safe and where I feel happy. Mostly, I am happy when I am creative; when I sit on the piano and ideas flow from my head into my fingers, without knowing what I’m playing, but it just feels right, at least in that moment.

    Then, I think to myself “you’re doing great, this is beautiful”. I continue writing, I dedicate all my energy, ideas start to flow one after another, until the time comes, where I feel I have something to share.

    That’s the moment where my self-destructiveness appears, as I begin to paint black thoughts, telling myself that what I have created is actually pretty boring. I start comparing myself to artists I love and respect.

    I know that it is not the right thing to do. But I have no control over my thoughts. I keep pulling myself down until I hit rock bottom. Then there is only one way up. I gather myself and continue the work I started.

    After many years of dealing with this situation, I am still the same, this habit is part of my daily life, sometimes I have better moods, other times less so.

    The one thing I have really learned is to remind myself nothing stays the same. Creating music is like bringing life to something: once it emerges from your mind, it doesn’t belong to you any longer.

    A mother will never think that her child isn’t good enough. I try to remind myself that after the thoughts are on paper: these doesn’t belong to me, and it’s not up to me to judge the piece. It is out into this world, and it will find its way.

    I have to continue what I have started, and trust that work and effort are the only seeds to plant. Also, to live and feel alive. Music tells a story, and to tell a story you need to live. Sometimes, it’s sunny, other times stormy; life is full of such movements. Duality is part of this world, and I believe only when we accept both sides of the coin, will life become exciting.

    I grew up with music, my father was a musician and had a band that performed Armenian music. I even used to sing on stage with him, when I was as young five. Almost every day growing up there were band rehearsals. Music was everywhere. And then I discovered the piano and Classical music.

    Childhood.

    I remember at aged thirteen it becoming clear to me that I wanted to be a pianist. So every day I came home after school and sat for many hours on the piano, before doing anything else. Playing Classical music became my own world. There I could create my own stories, be anything I wanted to be, transferring my feelings and emotions into the music and finding peace.

    Playing with the Lebanese National Symphony Orchestra.

    Music is now part of my being. One of the biggest achievements of my Classical career was playing the Schuman concerto with the Lebanese National Symphonic Orchestra, while I was studying in Germany. But that was also one of my latest concerts. A few years later, I developed a passion for composing, and my life took another path.

    My latest album ’Una Corda Diaries’ is very special to me, as it was recorded on the Klavins concert Una Corda M189 in Budapest.

    It is a musical diary. The idea came to me as I was visiting the Klavins workshop. Seven Days-Seven Pieces, is the story of the people, the atmosphere, the Una corda and my own experience discovering this unique instrument. I was also very lucky that I managed to complete the recording just few weeks before the pandemic hit and borders were closed.

    After arriving in Germany to continue my studies, I realised that interpretation alone was not enough for me. I didn’t want to just repeat and play the repertoire which have been played a million times perfectly.

    Also, I started feeling lonely and froze at the stage playing Classical music. I don’t know why, but the thing that I loved the most in the world started to make feel isolated. So I decided to stop, but again, after a while it was too difficult to live without the world I had created for myself through music. The place where I used to feel free was missing. Music had become part of my being. Tt was what I had become. And then I discovered composing.

    Image Evgeny Ganeev.

    My music is not purely Classical, nor is it neoClassical, nor jazz, and not Armenian. It dives through the lines, just like my feelings, belonging nowhere, which makes me feel awkward while also holding a wish to belong.

    I love layers of melancholic melodies over each other, telling the same story from different perspectives, mostly centred around my instrument. My piano draws out all the emotions I want to express, sometimes through elegant soft notes, at other times with restless melodies, merging into each other. I also improvise sometimes, even though I like the process of working on an idea.

    When I feel creatively blocked, and I have nothing but a dark space to wonder around, I prefer to stay still and take my time. My mind doesn’t stop working. I listen to a lot of music, I do research, I discover new artists, until I find my calmness and a clear path to put the melodies back on a paper.

    Image: Ghazaleh Ghazanfari

    One thing is for sure, whatever I write is the expression of my authentic feelings, which emerge out of my life experiences. I work through myself, confronting all the joy and the struggles I have inside me, to understand myself better, with the hope that people will connect to those musical and emotional expressions and find comfort in recognising their own stories.

    All those words sound like I am pessimistic, but I am not. I’m only too self-critical, and about the music I create. But I also believe that only by repeating and failing can we get better.

    I know that everything is a process to get somewhere. Perhaps I just need to enjoy the path more. I don’t want to belong to a genre or a style. The most important thing is for music to touch the heart, whether it is Classical or jazz, technical or slow; there is enough space in these world for all kinds of expression, as long as it is honest and true. True to the the artist first, and then to the person who feels connected to it.

    I will never be entirely happy with what I have created, because I know there is always a better version, but I have learned to accept things the way they are for that moment, letting it go, making space for new experiences, and trusting the path that I am dedicated to walk.

    Website https://www.marie-awadis.com

    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7hmy8Td2c8HSzUAPayPKkN? si=kqx59qVVQieTf6iMSPVi9g&dl_branch=1

    iTunes: https://music.apple.com/de/artist/marie-awadis/1221326499

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Marie-Awadis-267354403421116/

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marieawadismusic

    Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/marie-awadis

    Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB4jkk58v8–f6N2Rs82d6g?view_as=subscriber

     

  • The Most Natural Thing in the World (I)

    Build me a cabin in Utah
    Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
    Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”
    That must be what it’s all about
    That must be what it’s all about
    Bob Dylan, ‘Sign On The Window’, from New Morning (1970)

    When I was eighteen, during a summer spent working as a bus conductor while waiting on Leaving Certificate results, I thought I’d got my then girlfriend pregnant. Through a warm, endless July, she crept from two to three to four weeks ‘late’.

    Finally, one evening, a phone call came with the good news that she was happily surfing the crimson wave, and there was great relief all around. It must have just been prolonged exam stress, we agreed. But the strange thing is, while obviously not quite ready to be a father then, I have never really been as open to the possibility of parenthood since.

    During the extended period of waiting for her period to arrive, we discussed what we might do if worse came to worst. She contemplated an abortion – a big deal in Ireland in 1979, even if she was, rather too neatly symbolically, nine months older than me, and already in college; as was, if you can believe it, the very fact of having premarital teenage sex itself – while I was prepared to abandon all immediate plans for further studies and instead get a job to support her and our offspring. Never such innocence, or foolhardiness, again. It must have been Love.

    Throughout my twenties, I hardly ever gave much thought to reproduction, unless it was as to how to forestall it. Of course, there were girlfriends, but I was never with anyone with the underlying agenda of ‘getting married, settling down and having a family’ (or any combination thereof). That was something I put off, along with having a proper career, until my thirties – if at all. The procreative function of sexuality would have come a severely poor second to the pleasure involved, and its pursuit. Enjoy yourself while you’re young. (Or at least give it your best shot.) You won’t be young for ever. (So get your kicks before you get too old.) You can’t have fun all your life. (So have as much as you can now.)

    Perhaps such attitudes are not so unusual among the under-thirties, and even more so now than then (in the 1980s’). Yet, as I approach my sixtieth birthday, and having even experienced the establishment of a stable relationship which led to marriage, I can confirm that this viewpoint has still not changed significantly and, if anything, has only solidified into a worldview.

    While my sexual needs may be marginally less clamorous than they were when I was a younger man, it is time to make the bald, bold declaration: the urge to replicate one’s genes is an impulse I don’t understand. The reflections that follow are an attempt to understand why that might be, to unravel the reasons for this mindset within myself, in the context of the culture which surrounds me.

    Extraordinary Lengths

    Walk down any street, enter any populated space, public or private, go anywhere where there are people: almost every person you see is the result of an act of sexual intercourse, and a subsequent pregnancy and birth. Propagation of the species is clearly popular. Or, at least, sex is. Multiplication/That’s the name of the game/And each generation/They play the same.

    Some people go to extraordinary lengths to have children, if they find it doesn’t come easily, what with the rigours and disappointments and sometimes multiple pregnancies associated with IVF treatment. Observant Christians, Muslims and Jews will all tell you that their God commanded them to “be fruitful and multiply”.

    Indeed, for strict adherents of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, procreation is the only function of sexuality, and sex for its own sake, much less as a good in itself, is sinful. Atheists will argue that child-bearing and child-rearing are more basic than that: they are biological imperatives. The drive to reproduce is part of how scientists define living matter.

    Why do I not feel this biological imperative? It is, apparently, the most natural thing in the world. So why do I feel such a general indifference, and even a personal aversion, to the concept? And in how much of a minority am I, in this regard? But also, conversely, if the topic doesn’t really matter all that much to me, why do I care enough to spend time thinking about it, and go to the bother of trying to write something cogent about it, in the first place?

    My choosing, or at least accepting, a child-free existence must worry me, at some level, if I feel a need to defend my position. Is that because it has now become part of my biography, even my identity? Perhaps, but the more obvious answer probably lies in the familial and societal pressure and expectation that one will reproduce (“Do you have any kids (yet)?”), and should very much want to reproduce.

    This ‘to do’ list approach to human existence – albeit the result of cultural mores, religious teachings, socially engineering legislation, economic necessity or prosperity, and a myriad other prisms through which it can be viewed – becomes internalised, no matter how unconcerned with or questioning of society’s norms and agendas one regards oneself as, and is by all accounts felt even more intensely by women than men. (Forget about the biological imperative, what about the biological clock?) But a little reading around reveals that the naysayers are no longer such a tiny minority, if they ever were. To be anti-natalist is not to be unnatural. Nor is being child-free.

    Eugenio Zampighi

    Misanthropic and Philanthropic

    Before we go any further, and risk becoming mired in ambiguity or contradiction, let’s define our terms, and where I would locate myself in the current state of the debate. Being ‘child-free’ (as opposed to the involuntary ‘childless’) is a choice that could be made for financial, physical, emotional, or any other number of reasons, whereas the more extreme ‘anti-natalism’ is a distinct philosophical position, as argued for by South African philosopher David Benatar in his 2006 book, Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. Anti-natalists feel it is unfair to the children who are born and then left with the mess we leave behind.

    There are two general categories of anti-natalism: misanthropic and philanthropic. Misanthropic anti-natalism is the standpoint that humans have a presumptive duty to desist from bringing new members of our species into existence because they cause harm.

    Ecological anti-natalism (sometimes called environmental anti-natalism) is a subset of misanthropic anti-natalism that believes procreation is wrong because of the inherent environmental damage caused by human beings and the suffering we inflict on other sentient organisms.

    The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is representative of this type of anti-natalism. Philanthropic anti-natalism is the position that humans should not have children for the good of the (unborn) children because, in bringing children into the world, the parents are subjecting them to pain, suffering, illness and, of course, eventual death. Why become a cog in this endless cycle? Of course, there is a lot of room for misanthropic and philanthropic anti-natalism to overlap.

    Furthermore, far from being the purview of some weirdo outliers, this essentially tragic worldview is a perfectly respectable literary-philosophical tradition, espoused to varying degrees by writers and philosophers as diverse as Sophocles, Flaubert, Poe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Beckett, Cioran, Larkin, Peter Wessel Zapffe and the anhedonic Thomas Ligotti. (Season One of the HBO series True Detective (2014) drew heavily on Lovecraft’s and Ligotti’s pessimistic, anti-natalist philosophy, as expressed by the character Rust Cohle.)

    In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus posits that the only serious philosophical problem is that of suicide: having been born, is life worth living? One could counterargue that perhaps an even more serious philosophical problem is that of parenthood: rather than deciding whether or not to end a life that is already in existence, to decide whether or not to bring a life into existence in the first place.

    Of course, most people don’t even give such a weighty problem a second thought. Or, if they do, it’s all part of their plan.  Nor is it only men who can be less than enthusiastic about propagating the species, for social or personal reasons. Apart from obvious examples like Simone de Beauvoir – for whom marriage, child-rearing and family life represented a prison house for women – thirteen of the writers who contributed to Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids (2015), edited by Meghan Daum, were women.

    More recently, Sheila Heti’s autofictional novel Motherhood is framed around a choice between having a child and writing a book. Exhibit Number One, regarding the outcome of this dilemma, is the object we are holding in our hands as we read. We should add the qualification that this dichotomous set-up is at best fallacious and at worst false, since many if not most writers – even female ones – somehow manage to do both. (How do they do it?) However, that the topic provides the focus for a bestseller is in itself noteworthy.

    Eugenio Zampighi

    To Each Their Own

    Where do I lie on this scale? Well, what began as carefree child-freedom has probably hardened over time, and with some thought – as these things often will, into full-blown anti-natalism, roughly equal parts mis- and phil-. However, I should qualify the last assertion by saying that I am not prepared to go to war with anyone who fervently wants to have children: to each their own.

    I am not about to undertake a crusade, or even launch a campaign, against those desperate to reproduce. I have never understood people who want you to be like them, or do as they do, who elevate their personal preferences into a modus vivendi for all.

    I would only question their choices and beliefs to the same extent that they would question mine. The basic tenet of anti-natalism is simple but, for most of us, profoundly counterintuitive: that life, even under the best of circumstances, is not a gift or a miracle, but rather a harm and an imposition. According to this logic, the question of whether or not to have a child is not just a personal choice but an ethical one – and the correct answer is always no. So, if genuine anti-natalism means opposing all births, under all circumstances, then I am still of the merely child-free persuasion. I don’t necessarily consider all procreation to be unethical: I just believe in the individual’s right to choose.

    I have had personal, up-close experience of this pressure to propagate, as applied not so much by my parents – as is generally the case – but by an ex-sister-in-law, and a brother-in-law.

    Aged twenty-six, I had brought my then girlfriend, an Italian woman I had met during a sojourn teaching there, back to the homestead for a visit. In our sitting room one evening, in front of said girlfriend, then sister-in-law chose to launch into what she probably thought of as a homily, but I took to be a tirade, about how I should settle down and start a family, as though this was the only possible course of action now open to me. (Said lady had in the past opined, “I don’t want people like you teaching my children” – although I never quite worked out what was meant by ‘people like me’.)

    She even went so far as to culminate in querying indignantly, “What do you believe?” Is there really any sane, let alone succinct, counter to this line of inquiry? Did she think she was establishing some sort of solidarity with my girlfriend? Similarly, when I was in my forties and married, my brother-in-law, of the fundamentalist evangelical Christian persuasion, while doing some tradesman work in the house I shared with my wife, started pontificating about the necessity of having children if you are married.

    One is, it seems, not respecting the sacrament of marriage if one doesn’t. I subsequently complained to my sister about her husband’s behaviour, not least about the upset it had caused my wife, and we didn’t see him again for a very long time. Again, I ask: why does everyone else want you to be like them? Is it because they feel threatened by, or envious of, other, different lifestyles? Or because they are so sure they are right? Because accepting the same burdens and responsibilities they have taken on will make you a better person (in their eyes, anyway)? Could it even maybe be because they are happy, or think they are, and they want you to be happy too?

    My own reading of these events is that, given the severe socio-religious strictures against pre-marital sex, and the shame and suffering of pregnancy ‘outside wedlock’, I guess in early 1960s Ireland (and elsewhere), when these people were courting, the only way to have guilt-free sex was to get married; and so, given the lack of available contraception, as a corollary that meant no option but to have children – whether you wanted them or not. Hence the Irish Family. So these people became seriously invested in the nuclear family as a universal norm. They had no other choice, except abstinence; and they certainly didn’t want you having something they never had. Heaven forbid, you might even enjoy it.

    ‘The Surprise Baby’ 

    From the foregoing, it will be surmised that my brother and sister are somewhat older than me. This is indeed the case: the brother is twenty-one years my senior, and the sister has seventeen years on me. I am the youngest of three, by a considerable stretch: the afterthought, the heart’s scald, perhaps even a mistake. (And colloquially, in some circles, ‘the shakings of the bag’. Although also known in Swedish, I’m reliably informed, relatively more benignly if not entirely unambiguously, as ‘the surprise baby’.)

    My brother and sister have four kids and six kids respectively. Looking back, I can see now that maybe my place in this familial structure took the onus off me to continue the lineage, and even that my own lack of motivation to have a family could have been an equal and opposite reaction to their extreme fecundity. I also retrospectively realise that, despite my parents’ relative reticence, the act of my bringing a girl home signified to them that my ‘intentions were honourable’, and that I was probably serious about marrying her.

    Now that this essay has taken an unfortunately autobiographical turn, I recognise that the psychologists in the audience (both amateur and professional) will look to my childhood and adolescence, and my experience of being parented, as a revealing explanation for my indifference to procreation, rather than my having a genetic predisposition towards a certain frame of mind and worldview.

    Maybe it’s how I was nurtured, rather than my nature? Perhaps they may even be right. Was my mother a monster? Did my parents have a fractious relationship? Were they neglectful, or did they regard their issue as a luxury they could ill-afford? While I recoil at the prospect of making this meditation on childlessness all about me, it occurs to me that I would have to field accusations of evasiveness were I not to engage with how my own formation has influenced my current thinking.

    My father was twenty-four when my brother was born, and my mother was twenty-one. They were twenty-nine and twenty-six, respectively, when my sister came along. They were forty-five and forty-two when I rocked up. Do the sums. That is quite a chasm in the so-called generation gap. In fact, it is more like two generations, and growing up with my parents was a little like the reported experience of many people who are reared by their grandparents: they may love you, but they don’t exactly prepare you for dealing with the contemporary world, or help you to negotiate it.

    Of course, as a child you are not aware of such anomalies at the time, and even into adolescence and adulthood you mostly just try to get on with things and play the hand you’ve been dealt.

    It is only very gradually that the singularity of one’s own background becomes apparent to oneself, and can be crushing. It many ways, it is a lifelong, ongoing, realisation, constantly refined into old age. We are all works-in-progress.

    Not that my parents were especially old school. In many ways they were more liberal than my brother and sister – who as young parents themselves, married and gone from the family home and starting their own families by the time I was four, were already becoming responsible authority figures, according to their own lights. Actually, it is more appropriate to write of my father and mother as separate entities, since they never exactly operated in tandem.

    My father was traditional, conservative and dogmatically religious; but he was also kind. It is difficult to conceive of today, but he organised annual pilgrimages to Knock shrine for his colleagues, the busmen of C.I.E. He was praying the rosary in the front room while I was listening to The Sex Pistols in the kitchen. It broke his heart when, in my early teens, I announced that I didn’t want to go to Mass anymore.

    My mother was a reader, and therefore could possibly be described as more open-minded and, if nothing else, she probably helped to inculcate in me a love of literature (although, curiously, not music – at least not the kind of music I was interested in: rock’n’roll was the work of Satan, and she put as many obstacles as possible into my path when I was trying to pursue a career in it; of course, she may well have been right, in that rock’n’roll is the Devil’s music, at any rate it is if you are doing it right – but she saw this as a bad thing, while I thought it was great), but she was domineering, exigent, and prone to exaggeration (‘The Queen of Hyperbole’ I dubbed her); she was also strict.

    She was creative – a brilliant knitter and designer – but, like many intelligent and talented women of her generation, frustrated by domesticity, even if she would never have admitted it openly, or even to herself. Plus, we were working-class and poor, with the concomitant money worries and lack of opportunity and limited horizons.

    As well as not having economic capital, there wasn’t much social or cultural capital knocking around either. Neither of them had got beyond primary school. I’m sure they’d had hard lives, struggling to make ends meet, with a boy born in 1939 and a girl in 1944, neatly parenthesising the privations of the Second World War, which continued into the dour 1950s.

    However, while for a small child any given reality is accepted as normal and taken for granted, looking back from an adult vantage point, with some experience of observing other parent/child relationships, I would define my mother as simultaneously both distant and overbearing – or overbearingly distant, or distantly overbearing.

    There is some history here: while expecting me, she moved out of the family home and decamped to a damp flat above Walton’s Music Shop on North Great Frederick Street, Dublin, taking my brother and sister with her (thus disrupting the former’s accountancy studies), apparently amid accusations from my father concerning her ‘clandestine inclinations’ (my old man had a very superior vocabulary, for a busman), the implication being that I wasn’t his child.

    I suspect this was a complete fabrication on my mother’s part, although he would not have been above fits of jealousy. More likely (and for reasons I don’t fully comprehend), he was shamed by ribbing from his work colleagues about becoming a father again aged forty-five. Or perhaps it was these co-workers who, for a laugh, planted seeds of doubt in his mind regarding her fidelity and my paternity.

    While these complexities are shrouded in mystery and the mists of time to me, accessible only through often conflicting second-hand retellings, it is certain she did have some cause for grievance. It is acknowledged that he would come in late from work when the rest of the family were in bed asleep, and bang around the kitchen making as much noise as possible, all the while taking protracted silences with his spouse when they did happen to meet up. (Joke: it was a typical Irish marriage – they spoke to each other once a year, whether they needed to or not.)

    But then again, apart from his workmates preying on his insecurities, maybe he had his reasons too. As a simple working man, maybe he would have just appreciated having some dinner left out for him, after working double-days on the back of a bus. Taking silences was also my mother’s métier, for expressing her frequent displeasure, again alternating with loud, vehement outbursts of anger. I was much subjected to this parenting method, even as a small child.

    Eugenio Zampighi

    ‘Dutch Uncle’ 

    Guilt came early, and was ladled from a great height, for anything construed as misbehaviour – like innocently being too boisterous when playing with my nieces and nephews. It was as though she always, sometimes faintly and sometimes outrightly, disapproved of me at some basic level. (What did she expect an eight-year-old boy who didn’t get out all that much to do when said nieces and nephews were around? Just sit there in silence, minding my own business, or venturing occasionally to make polite conversation?) She talked to me, as she used to say herself, ‘like a Dutch uncle’.

    I used to think the phrase meant someone who talked at length. Only recently did I find out that it is an informal term for a person who ‘issues frank, harsh or severe comments and criticism to educate, encourage or admonish someone…thus, a “Dutch uncle” is the reverse of what is normally thought of as avuncular or uncle-like (indulgent and permissive).’ But, predominantly, silence was the air she moved in, and its ambience extended to all and everything around her, at least when we were home alone together, which was a lot of the time. (Conversely, when in other company, and doubtless as a form of unconscious overcompensation, she could be loquacious to the point of tedium – there was rarely a happy medium.)

    Dad was too busy working long hours, topped up with copious amounts of overtime, trying to keep the show on the road. She would quickly lose interest in being cooped up with a small boy for days on end. Consequently, I spent a good deal of time as a little lad in solitude, more than average for a child of that age, and was left to my own devices. I had to make my own fun. I was lavished with toys, but other humans – even those of around my own age – were strange, otherworldly creatures.

    While I largely welcomed them when they invaded my world, I wasn’t always sure how to deal with them. (‘How do I work this new toy?’) Later, when I was around nine or ten, she went out to work, as a seamstress in the linen room of a hotel, and then as a general operative in a local pharmaceutical factory, and my aloneness was complete.

    I came home every day from school to an empty house. But my mother’s greatest sin, as an extremely manipulative individual, who fought strenuously to control the family narrative (in which my role was to become the rebellious bad boy) was that she sought to turn me against my father (easily enough accomplished, due to his long, work-related absences and her being the chief caregiver – when the humour took her), but then later and depending on her mercurial moods, as if by fiat, she would blame me for disrespecting him. Being a powerless pawn caught in this crossfire between the king’s limited movement and vulnerability, and the queen’s infinite space and resources, would be enough to wreck anyone’s head. I was just another means for them to get at each other in their ongoing war of attrition, collateral damage in our bizarre love/hate triangle.

    I’m thinking of Raymond Carver’s very short short story ‘Popular Mechanics’, in which an argument over custody between a departing husband and his wife concludes thus: ‘She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back. But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard. In this manner, the issue was decided.’

    Christmas Morning

    A memory, of Christmas morning, when I was aged about ten or eleven. The scene, my sister and brother-in-law’s house, where my mother had decamped for the duration, with me in tow, in another of her flits from my supposedly tyrannical father. I remember her eyes on me, watching me as I opened my presents from Santa, and I was conscious of the obligation to perform happiness and joy for her, because she was having such a sad life, and as her young dutiful son I was obliged to cheer her up.

    It struck me, even then, that this was not how most of my contemporaries were required to behave, and it marked me apart. But there was always something performative about my mother, and those interacting with her. She spoke frequently of Love, but she used the apportioning of it as a form of punishment and reward. She constantly felt that others – not least her youngest child – should strive to gain her approval. In turn, I felt a constant pressure to show that I was having a happy childhood, and an equal pressure not to be any trouble – at least until adolescence hit.

    This giving and withdrawing of affection, a constant tightrope walk of appeasement, has definitely made its mark on the quality of my adult relationships, especially with women: I associate people loving me with people wanting something from me, and with it arbitrarily being taken away if they don’t get what they want. Perhaps this experience of love is not so different from most people’s – for how often is any love offered unconditionally?

    It is, however, one of the foundational and enabling myths of parenthood that parents are supposed to love their children more than themselves. But how many do? My mother did not love me more than herself. Maybe my father did. If work is love in action, he certainly slogged his guts out to keep us in the comfort to which we had no right to become accustomed. She, on the other hand, far from providing unconditional love, instead veered towards viewing me as a needless vexation and a thankless nuisance.

    I can see now that, as a good-looking and quick-witted young woman, my mother thought she could have done much better in the marriage stakes, but she had been cajoled by her parents into a very early alliance with my father, because he was a kind man and they knew he would do his best to look after her. Which, understandably, wouldn’t have made my father feel great, especially since she was the love of his life.

    Did I mention that she’d given birth to a stillborn girl, carried to full term, a year or two before I was born? She hadn’t expected me to live. When I was born healthy, and did live, I was ‘a miracle’. But then she had to deal with the consequences of this miracle. She left the grubby flat in North Frederick Street, diagonally opposite the Rotunda Hospital where I first saw the light of day (damn, my real dirty little secret is finally out: although I was bred on the Southside, I was born on the Northside – which side of the river is more opprobrious I will leave it to readers, informed by their own personal prejudices, to decide), and returned to the suburban council house I was brought up in, because it had taps with hot running water.

    Did I also mention that she fell ill with double pneumonia after I was born? My seventeen-year-old sister looked after me for the first few months of my life – fed me, burped me, changed my shitty nappies, all the things it is assumed mothers do with their new-borns. I have the impression that my mother never bonded properly with me.

    Despite her previous maternal experience, she didn’t know how to be around me. To a degree that was unhealthy, she wanted to be wooed – by her son rather than by her husband. Or, failing that, she wanted to be placated. I harbour the notion that my mother harboured the notion that she would have had some great second act to her life, had I not been born.

    I also harbour the notion that she was suspicious of those who had ‘notions’ – especially her children – because she had never been given the opportunity to indulge her own notions. She embodied avant la lettre, and would certainly have been an enthusiastic appreciator of, The Cult Of The Difficult Woman. But, as Jia Tolentino astutely argues in her essay of that title, these days it is not so difficult to be a difficult woman. Be that as it may, I can categorically state: as a very small child, having a disappointed menopausal and/or post-menopausal mother, is not a good thing. And not just not good for the child, but also for the mother.

    I very much doubt my mother was up for the sleepless nights, and the many other demands of child-rearing, at her age, in her delicate state of health, and having done it all before and thought it was all over. I was not, as a psychiatrist once asked me – clearly ignorant of the history of access to contraception in Ireland, due in no small part to the acquiescence of her profession in the machinations of the great church/state sponsored lie – a planned pregnancy.

    Candidates for Divorce

    If you love someone, you want to have children with them, it is said. As will be surmised from the foregoing, in my opinion, if my parents had been living now, and been more solvent, they would have been prime candidates for divorce, and very likely much better off for it. Or, at least, I would have been. During a discussion between the Ma and me on contraception and the ‘risks’ of pre-marital sex (still a hot topic in the early 1980s), she informed me that I was the result of ‘one lousy intercourse’.

    Somehow, I don’t think I figured greatly in her plans. In a similar disquisition on the whys and wherefores of abortion (although now at long last safely legal in Ireland, still something of a red rag to a bull in some quarters) she revealed, “You could have been an abortion”, to which, if I’d had enough presence of mind, I should have countered, “Well, if I had been, I wouldn’t have known about it.” (Echoes here of the perennial cri de coeur of teen angst: ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’)  What things for any mother to say to her son!

    I have heretofore been ashamed of airing these exchanges for public consumption, possibly in an effort at blocking out the damage they would have done to the still evolving me, and a refusal to acknowledge how singularly and egregiously brutal they were. After all, the first love in your life is supposed to come from your mother. But I am ashamed no longer. I am too old now for it to matter what other people think of me, or of my mother, or of our troubled relationship, or of her memory.

    Apropos: I am writing this as personal memoir because if I tried to write it as fiction, no one would believe it. I am used to not being believed. You decide whether or not you believe me now.

    Defining ‘Natural’

    Was my mother ‘unnatural’ in her attitude to motherhood? Well, that very much depends on your definition of ‘natural’, doesn’t it? In this regard, it is instructive to quote from Laura Kipnis’s essay in the aforementioned anthology, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids, entitled ‘Maternal Instincts’:

    …despite my proven talents at nurturing, I don’t believe in maternal instinct because as anyone who’s perused the literature on the subject knows, it’s an invented concept that arises at a particular point in history (I’m speaking of Western history here) – circa the Industrial Revolution, just as the new industrial-era sexual division of labor was being negotiated, the one where men go to work and women stay home raising kids. (Before that, pretty much everyone worked at home.) The new line was that such arrangements were handed down by nature. As family historians tell us, this is also when the romance of the child begins – ironically it was only when children’s actual economic value declined, because they were no longer necessary additions to the household labor force, that they became the priceless little treasures we know them as today. Once they started costing more to raise than they contributed to the household economy, there had to be some justification for having them, which is when the story that having children was a big emotionally fulfilling thing first started taking hold.

    All I’m saying is that what we’re calling biological instinct is a historical artifact – a culturally specific development, not a fact of nature. An invented instinct can feel entirely real (I’m sure it can feel profound), though before we get too sentimental, let’s not forget that human maternity has also had a fairly checkered history over the ages, including such maternal traditions as infanticide, child abandonment, cruelty, and abuse.

    I might add, similarly, that belief in a God or the gods was rather more popular in the past – and, in fact, for most of recorded history – than it is today. All life comes from God, the believers tell us: that is why they are ‘Pro-Life’. Are we contemporary godless atheists somehow, then, wrong?

    My mother would have looked askance and jeered at today’s required standards of parenting. One time, when I was around twenty-two, she presented me with an itemised bill she had taken the trouble to compile, for how much it had cost to rear me.

    It was high time I started paying it back. “There’s no return in you” was a common theme. Do I not have kids because I thought they would have cost me too much, because I could not afford them? “We did our best for you,” she told me another time. And perhaps they did. “I reared two gentlemen and a lady,” the Da would often boast. Except you don’t need to be well-off to praise and encourage your children. You just need to love them, and want what’s best for them. Never mind loving them more than yourself.

    Featured Image: Idyllic Family Scene with Newborn by Eugenio Zampighi (1859-1944)

  • The Zenith of Pessoa

    In how many garrets and non-garrets of the world
    Are self-convinced geniuses at this moment dreaming.
    Álvaro de Campos, ‘The Tobacco Shop’, 1928

    In the early days of the Internet – end of the 1990s for me – while a history student in UCD, a friend took a passionate interest in a volatile political situation beyond Ireland’s shores. Although aroused by injustices perpetrated by both sides, the drama itself also seemed to be a source of entertainment. He participated, in a small way, by adopting email aliases that represented varying, even opposing, viewpoints.

    In a time before the arrival of a fully-fledged ‘social’ media, friends might call into his smoke-filled non-garret room to find him participating in online fora. There, we might encounter bursts of laughter and guffaws – to the bemusement of anyone lacking an intimate understanding of his predilection.

    These were not simply pseudonymous accounts. In creating and projecting characters that seemed to reflect his own uncertainties my friend had, unconsciously, adopted a version of a dramatic form of communication – the heteronym – invented, or at least fully realised, by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). This approach is of enduring interest given the extent to which multiple selves prevail in online communication, including in the common use of anonymous handles on Twitter that often depart from a primary, mild-mannered self, into a more transgressive, ‘other’ personality.

    A new, ground-breaking biography of Fernando Pessoa in English by Richard Zenith, Pessoa: An Experimental Life (Allen Lane, London, 2021) brings into the mainstream – to the English-speaking world at least – a Portuguese poet, whose extraordinary capacity for invention, sensitivity to language, and, ultimately, attention to human liberation places him in the highest echelon of a discipline he recast in his own images.

    Moreover, unlike other Modernist writers of his generation, Pessoa is profoundly accessible. As Zenith puts it: ‘We don’t need to look up words, hunt down references, or read up on some period of history or current of philosophy to follow his poetic trains of thought and feeling. (p.324)’ Indeed, Pessoa expressed reservation regarding the art of James Joyce, which he described in 1933 as ‘a literature on the brink of dawn’ that was ‘like that of Mallarmé… preoccupied with method. (p.831)’

    Pessoa was inspired by aspects of the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century, and even drafted a complimentary letter to W.B. Yeats, whose esoteric tastes he shared. However, as Zenith puts it, lacking Yeats’s ‘grand ambitions and conviction, Fernando Pessoa was more like a jazzman of higher, occult truth, improvising on standard doctrines of the esoteric repertoire and introducing his own variations, without staying in any one place for long. (p.849)’

    It is the combination of Fernando Pessoa’s simplicity of expression and an apparently endless capacity for experimentation that make him such a valuable guide to our confused and uncertain time.

    Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.

    The Heteronyms

    The poet is a feigner
    Who’s so good at his act
    He even feigned the pain
    Of pain he feels in fact
    Fernando Pessoa-Himself, ‘Autopsychography’, 1931

    Distinguishing pseudonymous works from heteronymous works in 1928, Pessoa wrote that ‘Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymous works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write. (p.xviii)’

    Pessoa wrote to a relatively small reading public in the early decades of the twentieth century – in 1910 up to 70% of Portuguese adults  were illiterate (when it was just 2 percent in England p.291)  and his work hardly reached Brazil or other parts of the Portuguese-speaking world. He completed just one book – a visionary work of poetry infused with Romantic nationalism called Mensagem (Message) in 1934 – in his lifetime. Now Zenith’s extensive autobiography, masterfully capturing the historical context, brings global attention to an author whose ‘literary dispersion faithfully mirrors our ontological instability and the absence of intrinsic unity in the world we inhabit. (p.xxvi)’

    From his earliest days, Pessoa produced a bewildering array of heteronyms – often as a form of play – amounting to well over seventy throughout his life. Some hardly assumed a life at all, including a personal favourite, the contradictory Friar Maurice: ‘a mystic without God, a Christian without a creed. (p.254)’

    These became, according to Zenith, ‘ingenious vehicles for producing literature,’ and ‘also paths to self-knowledge. (p.119)’ The self-fragmentation seemed to come at a serious cost to Pessoa himself, however. Towards the end of his life he remarked: ‘Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. (p.41)’

    From the outset, Pessoa’s poetry was identified with fingimento, a difficult word to translate, which can mean a kind of ‘feigning,’ ‘faking,’ ‘pretending ’ or forging (which has the double entendre of making and counterfeiting). This extended into an apparent unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to ever consummate a love affair, including his courtship of the forlorn Ofélia Queiroz, his only girlfriend; or to act on apparent homosexual urges – ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ – that pepper his work.

    Throughout his life, according to Zenith there was ‘no clear lines of demarcation between’ the heteronyms, or ‘between fiction and reality. (p.146)’ Perhaps, unsurprisingly alcohol featured prominently – he died aged forty-seven after a life of excess – although contemporaries insist he always maintained an appearance of sobriety, perhaps his greatest pretence of all.

    According to Zenith, Pessoa was ‘monosexual, androgynously so. The heteronyms can be seen as the fruit of his self-fertilization. (p.871)’ Thus, ‘daunted by the expectation of the world all around him’, he ‘preferred to inhabit the story of his heteronym. (p.192)’

    Notably also: ‘Pessoa’s communicators, on at least a couple of occasions, gave him not merely poetic metaphors but actual poems. They were his impromptu muses, vivid manifestations from the spiritual realm where – he liked to think – his poetry and his heteronyms originated. (p.516)’

    Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.

    Alberto Caeiro

    I have no philosophy, I have senses …
    If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is
    But because I love it, and for that very reason,
    Because those who love never know what they love
    Or why they love, or what love is.
    Alberto Caeiro from The Keeper of Sheep, 1914.

    In later years Pessoa revealed that Alberto Caeiro began life as a joke figure of ‘a rather complicated bucolic poet’. He claimed he wrote ‘thirty-some poems at one go, in a kind of ecstasy I’m unable to describe. (p.379)’ But Pessoa – ever the feigner – was an unreliable witness. Zenith reveals that a thorough examination of his archive revealed ‘a rather different literary genesis. (p.379)’

    Nonetheless, the invention of Caeiro in 1914 brought a creative release for Pessoa; liberating him from what Zenith describes as the ‘chrysalis formed by so much learning’ which had, until that point, inhibited him from coming ‘into his own as an astonishingly original poet’. Albeit this was a status ‘he would never have attained without the chrysalis. (p.159)’ He certainly fully understood the forms and rules of poetry, before breaking them.

    Having spent ten years of his life, and schooling, in Durban, South Africa where he gained fluency in English, Pessoa had been vacillating between writing in Portuguese or English. Zenith maintains that Pessoa ‘did not know how to intensely feel in English; his poetic diction in this language was, oddly enough, too “poetical” (p.148)’, although he did produce a chap book of verse that was reviewed favourably in the London Review of Books no less.

    One can imagine Pessoa in South Africa as a slightly effete adolescent surpassing his peers in academic learning, but whose accent always marked him as an outsider, a status which he unconsciously absorbed, and which generated a lifelong antipathy to the British Empire.

    Caeiro therefore represented a form of homecoming – a statement of ‘Portugueseness’ – for a cosmopolitan young man struggling to form an identity. In this sense, Pessoa may be likened to W.B. Yeats, who also spent many years of his development in a country, which he ultimately rejected for an Irish mistress in Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

    Caeiro, according to Zenith was also ‘a reaction against Fernando Pessoa – against all learning and incessant intellectual wrangling (p.386)’, thus the heteronym writes: ‘I lie down on the grass / And forget all I was taught.’

    Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.

    Ricardo Reis

    Let us also make our lives one day,
    Consciously forgetting there’s night, Lydia,
    Before and after
    The little we endure.
    Ricardo Reis, July, 1914

    Richard Zenith observes of Ricardo Reis – the second of Pessoa’s three main heteronyms and fictional disciples of Alberto Caeiro – that he ‘espoused a revival of Greek moral, social, and aesthetic ideals, and the introduction of a new paganism, adapted to the contemporary mentality. (p.404)’

    In part, Reis represents Pessoa’s view that ‘Religion is an emotional need of mankind (p.541)’, but also – having rejected doctrinaire Christianity, along with monarchy, in his youth – the imaginative possibilities of undogmatic polytheism, alongside a lifelong dedication to astrology and the occult.

    Pessoa urged: ‘Let’s not leave out a single god! … Let’s be everything, in every way possible, for there can be no truth where something is lacking.’ Thus, according to Zenith, over the course of his life Pessoa, ‘groped like a blind man in maze of occult mysteries that, by definition, could never be fathomed. (p.541)’

    The persona of Reis also represented a stoicism reconciled to the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. Acceptance of fate, and the remote tragedies we encounter in news reports, is memorably conveyed in ‘The Chess Players’ (1916), where two protagonists play a game while around them a city is ransacked by an invading army. This is a kind of acceptance of events  we generally cannot control that we might do well to learn from Ricardo Reis.

    Notably, Ricardo Reis attained a literary afterlife in Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago’s 1984 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which the heteronym returns to Lisbon from Brazil in 1935 to meet his death alongside Fernando Pessoa. A film based on the book was released in 2020.

    Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.

    Álvaro de Campos

    Faint vertigo of confused things in my soul!
    Shattered furies, tender feelings like spools of thread children play with,
    Avalanche of imagination over the eyes of my senses,
    Tears, useless tears,
    Light breezes of contradiction grazing my soul …
    Álvaro de Campos ‘Maritime Ode’, 1915

    The last and most important of Pessoa’s heteronyms, Álvaro Campos, was born, in Pessoa’s imagination at least, on Friedrich Nietzsche’s birthday. According to Zenith he represents ‘the Dionysian impulse – the intoxicating affirmation of life, felt in all its pains and pleasures. (p.397)’ In profound contrast to Pessoa, who regarded sex as dirty, Campos’s motto was to ‘To feel everything in every way possible. (p.521)’

    The open-minded de Campos could be the liberated person Pessoa would never become: ‘Have fun with women if you like women’ he recommended, ‘have fun in another way, if you prefer another way. It’s all fine and good, since it pertains to the body of the one having fun … morality is the ignoble hypocrisy of envy” for “not being loved. (p.626)’

    Yet the ghost of de Campos inhibited Pessoa, as ‘he’ attempted to get in the way of a relationship with the tragic Ofélia. ‘Today I’m not me, I’m my friend Álvaro de Campos, (p.589)’ he would warn his only meaningful girlfriend.

    According to Zenith, Álvaro de Campos’s appetites in Freudian terms personified Pessoa’s id. Then perhaps the phlegmatic Ricardo Reis operated as ego, mediating the unrealistic id’s relationship to the world. These figures emerge under the tutelage of their acknowledged master, the Zen-like Alberto Caeiro – who was according to de Campos, ‘The Great Vaccine – the vaccine against the stupidity of the intelligent. (p.388)’

    Thus, Caeiro can may be seen the superego, the ethical touchstone of a tripartite personality built around his universal Portuguese personality; similar to that constructed around the universal Russian character in Dostoyevsky’s Brother Karamazov that seemed to have informed Freud’s original understanding of these characteristics.

    Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.

    The Book of Disquiet

    Dead we’re born, dead we live, and already dead we enter death. Composed of cells living off their disintegration, we’re made of death.
    The Book of Disquiet    , Bernardo Soares

    Fernando Pessoa described the main author of The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares, as a semi-heteronym, or ‘mutilation (p.721)’ of his personality, and as such The Book of Disquiet served as a semi-factual autobiography. Of course, nothing is ever as it seems with Pessoa, so the character of Soares is an unremarkable bookkeeper who endeavours to avoid contact with the bustling world around him, while Pessoa himself was a relatively sociable bachelor.

    Bernardo Soares he confided: ‘always appears when I am sleepy or drowsy, such that my qualities of inhibition and logical reasoning are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. (p.870)’

    In a sense, The Book of Disquiet is a book of the night, if not of quite of dream time, then of solitary down time and retreat. According to Zenith the book, which took years for scholars to reassemble from often scrawled notes, ‘never ceased being an experiment in how far a man can be psychologically and affectively self-sufficient, living only off his dreams and imagination. (p.364)’

    It is a book of ideas and self-analysis. Thus, Soares reveals: ‘We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love,’ and also, of self-reliance in solitude, where the intellect rises above material limitations.

    It displays a belief in the magical quality of words. At one point he remarks – triggered by Walter Pater’s description of Mona Lisa’s smile containing: ‘the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of Borgias’ – ‘How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn’t see it. (p.670)’

    In his imagination Soares/Pessoa is ‘the naked stage where various actors act out various plays.’ Thus, The Book of Disquiet, according to Zenith ’magnificently illustrates the uncertainty principle that runs throughout his written universe. (p.xxiii)’

    Also, in a time when we are urged to fulfil our potential, as a Capitalist economy demands constant self-improvement, the Book of Disquiet reconciles us to anonymity and the inner life of the imagination that we may rely on in times of adversity.

    Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.

    Political Commentator

    The dazzling beauty of graft and corruption,
    Delicious financial and diplomatic scandals,
    Politically motivated assaults on the streets,
    And every now and then the comet of a regicide
    Lighting up with Awe and Fanfare the usual
    Clear skies of everyday Civilisation!
    Álvaro de Campos, ‘Triumphal Ode’, June, 1914,

    Hired as a columnist for the newspaper O Jornal in 1925, Fernando Pessoa, writing as himself, proclaimed that ‘only superficial people have deep convictions.’ insisting that a modern intellectual ‘has the cerebral obligation to change opinion … several times in the same day.’ This person, presumably himself, might, for instance, be ‘a republican in the morning, and a royalist at dusk. (p p.450-51)’

    Abiding by this injunction, Pessoa presented a dazzling array of viewpoints in the 1920s, having renounced Catholicism in his youth, and embraced republicanism prior to the Revolution of 1910. He also acquired a distaste for British imperialism while living in Durban, albeit not necessarily imperialism itself.

    Pessoa was a roving provocateur, who, according to Zenith, ‘had a fondness for ardently defending a certain idea one day and then attacking it the next, with equally impassioned arguments. (p.340)’ Confrontationally, he opined in Nietzschean terms that the ‘plebeian class should be the instrument of the imperialists, the dominating class,’ and ‘linked to them through a community of national mysticism, such that it is voluntarily their slave. (p.453)’ The feigner’s tendency towards outlandish, objectionable views should be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the artist often played with literary tropes in political statements.

    This applies to a frankly disturbing 1916 pronouncement that ‘Slavery is logical and legitimate; a Zulu or Landim [an indigenous Mozambican] represents nothing useful to the world. (p. p.533)’ Importantly, however, according to Zenith, who devotes considerable attention to the theme of race he never ‘publicly supported any racist ideology, (p.534)’ and in the 1920s remarked that ‘Mahatma Gandhi is the only truly great figure that exists in the world today, (p.78)’ while he was opposed to fascism from the beginning.

    Until the 1930s Pessoa’s political views were in a chrysalis of café talk, untested by real authoritarianism, including censorship and a nascent police state under the dictator António Salazar.

    Moreover, Pessoa was expressing his views during the chaotic first Portuguese Republic (1910-26), which experienced a series of political convulsions generating forty-four ministries and nine presidents, with frequent political assassinations. As Zenith puts it: ‘[t]he nation’s political centre, rather than being caught in a tug-of-war between ideological extremes, was caving in on itself. p.220)’

    Pessoa was disgusted by the chaos, and rejected ‘the positivist project of certain republicans, who envisioned a science-based society of secular citizens illuminated by the twin virtues of order and progress. (p.424)’ ‘All radicalism fosters reaction,’ he warned, ‘since the informing spirit is the same. (p.312)’ In response, he developed his own reactionary idea an aristocratic republic. Progress, he argued, ‘could be achieved only through an aristocracy of superior individuals’ that, mercifully, have ‘nothing to do with blue blood or inherited privilege. (p.412)’

    In 1928 he published The Interregnum: Defense and Justification of Military Dictatorship in Portugal where he argued that Portugal required a new political system but that this system had first to be discovered, and until then a military dictatorship was the best alternative. However, according to Zenith he ‘set himself apart from those who favoured a long-term authoritarian solution. (p.700)’

    Only when put to the test would he display his true qualities, dismissing narrow appeals to national identity – proclaiming (as Bernando Soares) ‘My nation is the Portuguese language (p.791)’ – and defending individuals ‘whom he regarded as the true creators and only deserving beneficiaries of civilization. (p.742)’

    Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.

    Under Salazar

    Ah, what a pleasure
    To leave a task undone,
    To have a book to read
    And not event crack it!
    Reading is a bore,
    And studying isn’t anything.
    Fernando Pessoa-Himself ‘FREEDOM’, 1935

    According to Zenith, Pessoa ‘smelled a rat in Mussolini (p.640).’ The Italian dictator had become a popular figure among the Portuguese intelligentsia of the period in search of a solution to the country’s catastrophic instability.

    Zenith writes: ‘Pessoa continually oscillated between a Promethean impulse to help humanity, to be involved in the world, and a contrary inclination to retreat and seek perfection in the artistic space of a poem. (p.217)’ Confronting dictatorships across Europe in the 1930s he ceased feigning and honoured that Promethean impulse, at a significant cost to his career.

    Pessoa opined, in the heteronym of Thomas Crosse, that Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Salazar were all ‘unbalanced characters,’ whose ‘limited vision of reality’ might, he acknowledged, make them effective but they shared the same ‘hatred of intelligence, because intelligence discusses.’ They were all, therefore, ‘enemies of liberty’, which if ‘not individual, is nothing,’ and saliently observed that, by nature, dictators ‘are unhumorous, because a sense of humour preserves a man from that maniac confidence in himself by which he promotes himself dictator (p.841).’

    The priest-like – another lifelong bachelor – Salazar may have been a less monstrous character than other dictators of that era, but his “interregnum” would last almost fifty, stultifying years. A trained economist, who summarily banned gambling halls in Lisbon on taking power, before introducing austerity measures that appear suspiciously similar to those inflicted during our neoliberal era. A motto of ‘faith, moral guidance, and the spirit of sacrifice (p.705)’ is also reminiscent of public health exhortations under lockdown.

    According to Zenith, Pessoa ‘instinctively bristled when he was expected to be a willing and even joyous participant in a mass movement, whatever it was. (p.293)’ Unsurprisingly, he reacted against propaganda projecting a ‘myth of a peaceful, bucolic Portugal where peasants joyfully hoed corn, tended cattle, picked grapes and wove baskets, while singing traditional songs and dancing in their spare time. (p.892)’

    As a writer he was also infuriated by Salazar’s demand that literary works should observe ‘certain limitations,’ and embrace ‘certain guidelines’ defined by the New State’s ‘moral and patriotic principle.’ Salazar said that writers should be ‘creators of civic and moral energies’ rather than ‘nostalgic dreamers of despondency and decadence. (p.880)’ This remark seemed to have been aimed at Pessoa himself.

    In response, he caustically observed that the word Salazar was made up of sal (salt) and azar (bad luck), and that rain had long ago dissolved the sal, leaving Portugal with nothing but azar (p.883). He would also write a sarcastic poem wishing that for once the radio announcer would tell listeners ‘what Salazar did not say (p.891).’

    By the time of his death in 1935 Pessoa had come around ‘full circle’ according to Zenith ‘returning to the high-minded and large-hearted ambitions of his youth (p.903)’, arguing democratically that the nation is ‘worth the sum of its individuals (p.914).’

    In response to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, Pessoa would ask: ‘what are we all in the world if not Abyssinians?’ Between us and them he saw a ‘vast and broad human fraternity (p.915)’

    In response to the censorship of an article he wrote condemning Mussolini’s invasion, as well as discrimination against openly gay poets such as António Botto and the banning of the Freemasons and other secret societies, he took the dramatic decision to quit publishing in Portugal. In return for this he received an unwelcome visit from Salazar’s secret police, although he was largely left to his own devices until his death aged just forty-seven.

    Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.

    In History

    No, I don’t want anything.
    I already said I don’t want anything

    Don’t come to me with conclusions!
    Death is the only conclusion.

    Don’t offer me aesthetics!
    Don’t talk to me of morals!
    Take metaphysics away from here!
    Don’t try to sell me complete systems, don’t bore me with breakthroughs
    Of science (of science, my God, of science!)–
    Of science, of the arts, of modern civilization!
    Álvaro de Campos ‘Lisbon Revisited’ (1923)

    What to make of an artist such as Fernando Pessoa almost a century on from his death?

    First, huge credit goes to his biographer Richard Zenith, who has assiduously assembled the parts of an extraordinarily complex life. Readers may feel daunted by such a weighty tome, but this represents a bible for English speakers, at least, conjuring a literary titan, deserving our attention alongside Shakespeare, and few others, such is his contribution to world literature.

    Once suspects that Zenith himself must have struggled to maintain a coherent sense of self in the face of such a fecund imagination as Fernando Pessoa’s.

    In the characters of the three heteronyms, the semi-heteronym and Pessoa as himself we find spiritual resources that may guide us – like Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy – through the labyrinth of an increasingly mediated age of increasing homogenisation and fake authenticity in the arts. And, like Virgil perhaps, he takes us to the gates of heaven, and no further.

    With Alberto Caeiro – the vaccine against the stupidity of the intelligent – we may see nature in its glorious parts, at a remove from crippling intellectual conceits. Or we may dance with Ricardo Reis, maintaining order and composure in the face of chaos and deceit. That arch-sensualist, Álvaro de Campos, meanwhile, demands we appreciate all aspects of our journey through life, while taking aim at hypocrisy when required.

    Then Bernardo Soares should be appreciated for his self-sufficiency and celebration of the interior world of the mind. Lastly, Fernando Pessoa as himself represents a narrative arc, wherein a true love of humanity, and human wellbeing, eventually asserts itself in the face of tyranny.

    All these voices, and more, are what make Fernando Pessoa an essential poet for age.

    Poetry translated by Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Classics, London, 2006.

    With thanks to Bartholomew Ryan for editorial assistance.

    Featured Image: Image of Ser Poeta by Florbela Espanca in Lisbon, Portugal (2019).

  • The Black Hand Cafe

    My ear is pressed up against the past as if to the wall of a house that no longer exists.
    Richard Brautigan

     At 2pm on Friday the seventh of May, 1971, as Peter “Flipper” Groat coasted gently on his customized Triton 650 into the gravel car park to the rear of The Black Hand transport café, a red-winged cinnabar moth alighted on his acne-scarred nose. As the hapless Groat’s eyes momentarily crossed, attempting to get a better view of his diurnal visitor, the front wheel of the Triton lost its grip and slowly slipped sideways on the loose gravel.

    Two truanting schoolgirls sitting at a mossy picnic table eating Pineapple Ripples giggled as the Groat tried to counterbalance the motorbike. In slow motion it inexorably toppled.

    Plunked unceremoniously on the gravel, Flipper Groat sat, legs askew, with the motorcycle on his lap. Beneath the shadow cast by his German military helmet the cinnabar moth steadfastly remained on the Groat’s nose. It was as if the plucky Lepidoptera had at long last found its natural habitat.

    The Black Hand Café was a low, flat-roofed building situated in a layby on the A road that linked my provincial market town to the nearby coastal resorts that looked out over the Channel. This once-busy thoroughfare had recently been by-passed by a two-lane motorway and already the roadside café had begun to display signs of neglect and encroaching obsolescence. The layby, like the car park at the rear, was tufted with couch grass and ragwort. The pre-molded concrete streetlamp flickered on and off throughout the day and remained resolutely off at night. No longer did coaches filled with singing holidaymakers and “happy wanderer” OAPs pull up for Lyons Maid Raspberry Mivvis or mugs of Reg’s foul Dividend Tea. Already the Black Hand Café seemed doomed by its isolation. But all was not yet lost. Lorry drivers still pulled in for greasy early morning breakfasts and the country bus crews used the cafe as an unofficial resting spot, especially if they were ahead of schedule. Then there were the old ladies from the village who waited in the café for the bus. They would be travelling to the town to collect their pensions or heading off to the coastal resorts to waste their coppers on bingo, penny arcades and nylon bloomers.

    Reggie Jilkes was the proprietor. A tall gaunt man with sunken cheeks and a sepulchral Bela Lugosi pallor, he was mostly silent, going about his business behind the counter in an old-fashioned grocer’s coat. Inexplicably Reg wore a black leather glove on his left hand. No one knew the reason for the glove, and no one ever asked. The real name of the café was The Egg and Spoon, and you could still see the remains of the name in flaking yellow and red paint above the wooden façade. But nobody ever called it The Egg and Spoon. It was The Black Hand Café and that was that. If Reg objected to that nomenclature he certainly never voiced it. And to be fair to Reg, he never objected to the “Rockers” and their motorbikes, or even to us, that is until the incident with Jimmy O’Keefe and the old ladies’ tea – but more of that in a while.

    Flipper Groat dusted himself down, parked the Triton alongside the line of other bikes in car park and entered the café by the rear entrance. The two schoolgirls were still giggling.

    I was sitting at the table by the rear window with the twin sisters Evelyn and Yolanda. Our group always sat there unless the bus drivers bagged the spot before we arrived. We had witnessed the Groat’s tumble. He limped past our table.

    “Are you alright, Flipper?” asked Evelyn.

    Looking straight ahead the Groat mumbled an obscenity out of the corner of his mouth and limped across the café to the pinball machine. Clustered around the machine on high stools were several of his fellow leather-clad Rockers who comprised The Night Hawks MCC.

    I had always felt sorry for Flipper Groat. Although we had attended the same secondary school our paths rarely crossed as he was in the lowest stream. What struck me back in those schooldays was that he never seemed to have any friends. He came from those deprived narrow streets at the railway end of town behind the gasworks, with its old back-to-back terraced housing. You could tell his family was poor. He was a short stout boy, always dressed in the same shabby dark clothes. I would see him sometimes as I walked to school in the mornings. He would be in front of me shuffling along with his flat left foot flipping out awkwardly. Sometimes he would stop and peer down as if searching for something on the pavement. He would then blow out spittle from his curled tongue. He wore round national health spectacles with one lens covered with a grubby bandage. He had a “lazy eye”.  With the casual cruelty only found in schoolboys, the Groat was nicknamed “Flipper” and it stuck. I guess he accepted it in the end, and perhaps one could say it was oddly prophetic, as he became a serious player on the Black Hand’s pinball machine in later years. And it was during in these later years that the Groat, just like the cinnabar moth, found his natural habitat. The Night Hawks MCC accepted Flipper Groat as one of their own and looked out for him.

    With their studded black leather jackets, oily denims and Nazi war regalia, the Rockers were already an anachronism. The Mods were long gone, mostly married off, working their lives away as pen pushers or home insurance salesmen, slotting easily back into the niches society had ordained for them. The more extravagant Modernist stream had, however, evolved into something else. Meshing with art students, Carnaby Street dandies and rhythm and blues fans, they metamorphosed into a sub-sect of fashion-conscious hippies. And there were other folk-devils about now. The skinheads were a dissident group, entrenched in their urban working-class identity and despising the bourgeois element they perceived in the “underground” movement. They could be found lurking in the back-alleys of the towns or stalking the fringes of pop festivals, seething with resentment and looking for bother. We kept out their way as much as possible and left them to harry the Pakistanis.

    If the Night Hawks and their ilk were in a cultural cul-de-sac, they were self aware enough to know they were going through a phase. The aggression and American pattern of outlaw biker rebellion no longer interested them. Fast and dangerous riding was the way they demonstrated their power. Even without US style freeways or the European autobahns, their catalysts remained always “on the road”, with its ribbons of glittering cat’s eyes and out-of-town roadside cafes. Maybe the Rockers still had the power to frighten the whey-faced families crammed into Vauxhall Vivas as they thundered past on Bank Holiday traffic jams, but by now that was an unintended consequence. They were largely indifferent to those outside their group, except, of course, the police. They avoided pubs, and wouldn’t have been served anyway. Instead, when not huddled together around Formica tables in greasy transport cafes or speeding through suburban back-roads in the dead of night, they preferred to gather around wasteland bonfires, drinking cans of warm beer and getting their wives and girlfriends to take their tops off.

    The bikers didn’t bother us and we didn’t bother them. I guess you could say there was some kind of mutual regard. It was obvious to them that we didn’t belong to conventional society, the “straight” world, but they knew we weren’t hippies as such. I don’t think they could place us really. Their world was straightforward and solid. Although suffocated by small-town life, they were no longer interested in challenging wider society. Wider society was there, a fact of life.  And as such, they had a conformist attitude to work. Work for them was a necessity. Beneath the threatening exterior the Night Hawks were plumber’s mates, sewage farm workers and garage hands.

    The pinball machine was squeezed into a dark corner of the café. A kind of floral metal grill, festooned with a tangled string of broken fairy lights, separated the machine from the dining area. The serving counter took up the rest of that wall. Reg sometimes had help in the café. Miriam was a homely lady from the local village. She was cheerful and friendly, and was a welcome antidote to Reg’s blank indifference.  Through the steam of beverages and boiled milk, and behind the cluttered stacks of chipped crockery, you would get an occasional glimpse of the serving hatch to the kitchen. It was here that Reg’s wife bobbed about in an opaque haze of blue fry-up fumes, rustling up the breakfasts, burnt toast and bacon sandwiches. She was the tiniest woman ever seen, and completely round like a football. Just like Reg, she never seemed to speak. It was said that she was a Native American. How she ended up here in this provincial backwater with Reg is anyone’s guess. One of the bus drivers once mentioned that Reg had been in the merchant navy. Maybe that’s how he met his wife. They lived in an old converted railway carriage nestled at the rear of the car park in a tangled ruin of blackthorn and briar. Occasionally you would see two moon-faced children peering blankly out of the smeared windows of the carriage like ghosts. I guess they went to school and had some kind of a life, but I never saw them out and about. I did ask Miriam about the kids once. She indicated her disapproval with a slow shake of her head.

    The leader of the Night Hawks was a lanky longhaired man named Spanner, better known to his mother as Albert Crouch. Spanner was older than the other bikers. He’d been around since the time of the “ton-up boys” and as such commanded the respect of a veteran. Although he never interacted with us, he would always acknowledge us with a nod when he strode into the café. What he didn’t know is that I remembered him from years back when I was a schoolboy.

    It happened like this. Some ten miles north east of The Black Hand Cafe as the crow flies was Mr. P’s farm. At that time it was a still sizable spread before Mr. P starting selling off a field here and there to make ends meet. It was mainly fruit, twenty acres of apples, a cherry orchard, and then the two potato fields. Mr. P was a good chap, rotund and jolly, and he would give us boys bits and pieces of work during the summer holidays. Lifting potatoes was a tough backbreaking job, and we were never really adept at it. Sometimes we would have to clear stones off the fields after they were harrowed. That was an easier task for kids. Mr. P didn’t seem to mind what we did, and was always happy to pay a reasonable rate for what little work we undertook. It was only pocket money really, and Mr. P said it kept us out of trouble.

    The women did the real work in the fields. There were six or seven of them, sometimes accompanied by a gaggle of small feral children. They came down from the village of Hothfield every morning in a battered old Commer van driven by Harry Hearn, a toothless old Gypsy. The women were Gypsies too. A couple of them were young but the others were old girls who’d been at the fields for years. And they were experts, stopping only twice a day when Harry opened up the back of the van. The women would then have tea with bread and cheese, and smoke roll up cigarettes. Mr. P’s orchard man, Flaky John, would appear a couple times throughout the day on the tractor. Our job would be to load the trailer while Flaky John filled in the ladies’ tally books. The women would tease us boys a little, but it was poor Flaky who really got it. They were merciless. ‘Just because you are the only one that can read and write don’t you be trying to pull no tricks on us’, they would say. This would be followed with ribald cackling and aspersions regarding Flaky John’s sexual prowess. And then they would quickly get back to the potato ridges, digging and lifting.

    I remember being fascinated by these women and their endless banter as they worked the fields. They spoke in Angloromani but I could follow most of it, the dialect was a common parlance in this part of Kent. The head picker was the most formidable woman imaginable. A giantess with a mane of black hair tied up in a paisley headscarf, hooped earrings and flashing gold teeth, Narissa Penfold was a legendary figure. She had picked hops in the old days before the machines took over, and could out-pick the experienced Cockneys who came down from the East End in droves during the season.  She was known as the Cackleberry Queen, and woe betides those who crossed her. Rumour had it that she never wore knickers. Another rumour was that she had once given Flaky John “a good seeing to” in the apple orchard. This apocryphal tale hung like an albatross around Flaky’s neck for the rest of his life, but he seemed to take it well and would sometimes grin sheepishly whenever the rumour was resurrected. The Cackleberry Queen ruled the fields.

    Looking back to those boyhood days, it always seemed to be summer. But I remember this day well, it was really was a hot one. Flaky John had brought a barrel of water out on the trailer for the pickers.  The woman had no children with them, but there was a lad I’d never seen before. He was in his late teens or early twenties, with straw-coloured hair and a long neck like a giraffe. He avoided us altogether, sticking closely to the women. It was obvious that he had never worked the fields before. The day stretched out and the flies plagued us. The women didn’t seem to mind at all, but we thrashed about waving our arms like windmills. As the day got hotter and hotter the flies would eat you alive. There were blowflies, and blue flies and green bottle flies, but it was the horse flies that worried us most. One bite and you could swell up for days.

    The heat made the potato fields shimmer like a desert. I heard the motorbikes before I saw them. Three or four bikers had pulled up at the gate. They dismounted and walked across the furrows through the heat-haze towards the pickers. I thought they looked faintly ridiculous striding out in their leathers and helmets in this heat. One of the women looked up and said ‘Aye, aye. What’s this then?’ She called out to the Cackleberry Queen, ‘Look up, Narissa. See the mushes?’

    The moment the boy with the giraffe’s neck saw the bikers he was up and away. He ran across the field with astonishing speed and dived through a gap in the hedgerow like a fox on the run. The bikers tried to run after him, but they had no chance as they stumbled about on the crusted potato ridges in their heavy boots, helmets and leathers. The boy was gone. They turned to walk back only to find themselves face to face with the Cackleberry Queen and the other women. Words were exchanged and I can still recall how the flattened Kentish vowels of the bikers’ speech made them sound more like country bumpkins than storm troopers.  Suddenly the Cackleberry Queen landed a punch on one of them. It was Spanner. Stunned, he staggered backwards, his arms flailing wildly like some kind of giant bird. And as he fell the German helmet flew off his head. Landing unceremoniously on the ground Spanner sat for a second or two seemingly not sure what to do next. But the women decided for him. A hail of potatoes and stones rained down on the bikers as they fled back across the field to their bikes. ‘Go on, you bastards!’ roared the Cackleberry Queen in her cracked voice.

    The bikers thundered off on their machines and the women laughed and cackled like jackdaws. The incident had made their day and they were delighted with themselves. ‘Did you see them mushes run?’ Old Harry Hearn clambered out of the van and did a strange jig-like dance. Ever mindful of the day’s tally, the women soon resumed work. The giraffe-neck boy didn’t return and we never learned what it was that he had done to anger the bikers. I guess he owed them money or perhaps he had stolen a motorbike. But Spanner’s German helmet did remain, lying half-buried in the turd-coloured earth like the battlefield relic of a long-dead soldier.

    Meanwhile, ten year’s later, back in the Black Hand cafe, it was April 1971. For some peculiar reason Reg had recently decided in install one of those Italian-style coffee machines. Perhaps it was a last-ditch desperate attempt to modernize the place, to catch up with the contemporary, but poor old Reg was ten years behind the time. To be sure, the Black Hand was a kind of social space, especially for us and for the bikers, but would the bus crews and lorry drivers succumb to the froth of espresso coffee with their fry-ups? Perhaps Reg was attempting to compete with the high street Italian espresso bar back in the town, but his infernal machine got on everyone’s nerves. It was the overwhelming noise as much as the coffee. It would drown out any conversation and made the jukebox redundant. Even Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps couldn’t compete with that Gaggia Pro. The only respite came when the machine broke down, which often happened. Eventually a strange little repairman with bulging eyes like Peter Lorre would turn up and slide behind the counter with a bag of tools. He would fiddle about with the machine until it started whistling and steaming again. It was Miriam’s job to work the Gaggia as Reg seemed wary of it. I think the harsh rasps and violent jets of hissing steam frightened him. ‘Get rid of it Reg!’ the bus drivers would call out from their table. And the bikers had no truck with it at all. That cappuccino stuff was for Mods, foreigners and homosexuals as far as they were concerned. We were the only ones who would drink the coffee, but god knows why. It was a hellish concoction of mocha and scalding milk that made you feel all bloated and queasy for the rest of the day.

    And it was on this day, the day when Flipper Groat fell off his Triton 650 in the car park, that Jimmy O’Keefe and the Mole came into the Black Hand. They had arrived on the Mole’s Vespa, but were savvy enough to park it further down the road outside Mrs. Entwhistle’s grocery shop. I was surprised to see Jimmy here. The Black Hand café was not his habitual haunt. In fact I’d never seen him here before. And as luck would have it the bikers had just left for the day. They would have had no truck with the likes of these two scooter boys, and if nothing else, it could have created a bit of an atmosphere.

    ‘Hello Jiminy,’ I said. ‘What brings you out here?’

    ‘Been to London to see the Queen, old bean,’ said Jimmy as he and the Mole sat down at our table feasting their eyes on Evelyn and Yolanda. The twins were unimpressed and quickly gathered up their bags and clutter. They didn’t like the cut of these boys’ jibs, and besides, they had a bus to catch.

    ‘Don’t leave on our account, my lotus blossoms,’ said Jimmy as the girls headed out in a haughty swirl of scarves and crushed velvet. The Mole just grinned like an idiot, his pointed face poking out from the top of his black Crombie.

    ‘So what are you up to Jimmy?’ I asked apprehensively. It had been years since I’d heard mention of the Queen, also known as Mother Hubbard, a terrifying West Indian cross-dressing drug dealer who held court in a dingy top-floor flat hidden in the back streets of Camberwell.

    ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out, me old liverwort,’ said Jimmy as he rustled about in the deep pockets of his parka.

    He always spoke in this manner, and I guess that was one of the reasons he grated on some people. He got on people’s nerves to be sure, but I liked him. I’d known him on and off for years, since we were school kids, and most of the time found him amusing.

    ‘I give up Jimmy.’

    ‘Take a gander, old fruit,’ he said as he surreptitiously slipped a plastic bag under the table.

    The Mole gazed up at the ceiling with a look of forced nonchalance as I peered into the bag on my lap. I swiftly passed it back to Jimmy like a hot potato just as Miriam cruised by collecting plates and cups from the tables.

    ‘Jesus Jimmy! You’ll get us locked up!’ I hissed, as a momentary sense of déjà vu surged through me.

    ‘Relax old fruit. Who’s going to see?’ Jimmy cast his eyes to the two old ladies sipping tea at the next table. ‘Hello Aunties! Bingo tonight?’

    The thing about Jimmy was that he didn’t give a hoot about what people thought. He had always been like that since he was a boy. You had to accept Jimmy on his own terms and understand that he occupied a different kind of space. In a way I found that an admirable quality and I envied him for it. But with a bag full of Duraphet capsules sitting on my lap I can say with great certainty that I felt no envy for Jimmy’s bravado at that particular moment. I hadn’t seen black bombers for years, and the very sight of those shiny little black capsules instantly dried out my mouth and brought back flashing paranoid images of drug squads, police cells and juvenile detention centres.

    ‘Roche tens,’ said Jimmy as if he was sharing some secret esoteric knowledge with me.

    ‘A thousand of them,’ added the Mole.

    ‘See…The Mole can count.’ Jimmy winked at me. ‘Get the coffees in Mole, old fruit.’

    The Mole shuffled off to the counter.

    So while the Mole has gone to get the coffees in let me momentarily digress and tell you something of Jimmy O’Keefe so you can perhaps understand him a little.

    Jimmy and I grew up on the same council housing estate. He was a year or so younger than me, and had a twin sister who looked nothing like him.  The O’Keefe family was well known in our town. Jimmy’s father was market trader, and had a stall selling fruit and vegetables in the weekly marts around the area. He was an amiable giant of a man and well respected. Not for him the “rollup rollup” market banter of those hollering Cockney traders. He was a softly spoken Irishman who quietly got on with his selling, and knew all of his customers by name. The O’Keefes were the first family on the estate to own a colour television. They were a hard working household and reasonably well off. And I think Jimmy was a little bit spoiled. Jimmy’s mother was a striking looking woman with jet-black hair and olive skin. She spoke with a slight accent and I think she may have been Italian by birth. As a child I was slightly frightened by her, but she was a decent woman. Sometimes I would call round to their house to see if Jimmy was coming out to play. ‘You boys behave yourself,’ she would say. ‘Do you know what happens to naughty boys? The policeman will put a black spot on your bottom.’ This prospect always terrified me.

    Our family eventually moved away from the housing estate. My parents bought a detached 1930s house on the other side of town and I lost touch with Jimmy. And then in the late-sixties, at the fag end of the Mod era, lads that we had known as children, at primary school and on the housing estates, boys we had lost touch with, began to reacquaint.  We were in our teens now, and it was drugs, amphetamines to be specific, that drew us all together. Speed. We were small-town boys and village kids, out-of-towners and suburban sophisticates, country bumpkins and juvenile delinquents, and speed was the central component of our recreational activities.

    And it was during this transitional period that Jimmy O’Keefe resurfaced. He was unchanged, still the same old Jimmy, except for one thing; he now had a disconcerting dark blemish on the cornea of his left eye. ‘What happened to your eye Jimmy?’ And strangely for Jimmy, he would be reticent, brushing the question aside. It was only later that I learned from his sister what had happened. His parents had bought him a pet monkey for his birthday. The family always seemed to keep exotic pets, and I remember they had a terrifying green parrot called Colin who lived in a cage in their kitchen. You could hear it squawking a mile away. That parrot frightened the life out of me, especially the way it looked at you when you entered their kitchen. The bird would suddenly go quiet, and you could sense it had a keen and baleful intelligence as its cold fish eyes followed you around the room.

    Well according to Jimmy’s sister, Colin contracted some kind of avian ailment and dropped dead in his cage. Jimmy was so devastated that his parents promised him a new pet for his birthday. Inevitably the monkey caused chaos in the household. It lived in Jimmy’s bedroom but always managed to escape and scamper about the place knocking things over and stealing food from the kitchen. Jimmy would spend hours chasing the creature around the house trying to catch it and return it to his room. And then one day Jimmy accidently slammed a door shut on the monkey’s tail. The monkey flew up off the ground shrieking and bit Jimmy in the eye. Jimmy was lucky, as it could have been worse. He spent time in the children’s hospital with a bandaged eye and then was sent home. The monkey was not so fortuitous.  It was during Jimmy’s hospital sojourn that the critter managed to escape from the house. For a few weeks it was seen swinging about in Pike’s Wood, a midge-infested patch of wooded scrubland behind the housing estate, notorious as a hangout for perverts and hedgerow masturbators. But eventually the monkey got frazzled on the high-voltage power lines sagging from the electricity pylons that stalked the area. Its blackened leather corpse hung up there for months and local kids would go there to throw stones at it trying to knock it off of the crackling cables.

    And so it was, many years later, that Jimmy O’Keefe paid a visit to the Black Hand Café. As the Mole shuffled back to our table with two Pyrex cups of coffee spilling into the saucers, Jimmy fixed me with his one good eye saying ‘I could do you a good deal, old fruit.’

    ‘A good deal?’ I replied blankly, knowing what was coming next.

    ‘A good deal on a hundred of these beans. You’d knock them out in no time, me old china. Your hippie pals love a spot of speed now and then. Just think. You could buy yourself a new lute. Are you still playing?’

    ‘I’m playing a bit here and there, but I’ll have to reluctantly pass on your very kind offer. To be honest with you it’s not really my pigeon Jimmy, and besides, I wouldn’t know the market for them.’  All I wanted was a quiet life, to play a few songs here and there on my battered twelve-string in the pubs and folk clubs, and hopefully earn a crust to pay the rent on the dilapidated caravan I rented in Mr. P’s farmyard. The thought of running about the place trying to knock out Jimmy’s “beans” was absurd. Those days were long gone and I had no desire to revisit them. Jimmy was beginning to seem like a bad penny and what’s more, I was feeling oddly guilty about this.

    I wanted to change the subject.

    ‘So what are you listening to these days, Jimmy.’ One of the things Jimmy and I had in common back in those early teenage years was our passion for Ska and Blue Beat. The first LP I ever bought was Prince Buster’s “I Feel the Spirit”. I remember well the excitement I felt when the copy I ordered arrived in Record Corner, the basement music store at the end of our high street.

    ‘I don’t have much time to listen these days, old chum. Always busy, aren’t we Mole?’

    The Mole was an odd fish. He was too was around in the old days, always buzzing about the town on a scooter with Jimmy on the pillion. Jimmy christened him the Mole when they were at primary school together on account of the fact that he really did look like a mole. Later, during the teenage years he also became known as Two-Bean Ted due to the fact that he would never take more than two pills at a time – he’d pretend to swallow a handful so as not to lose face. Everybody knew his game and he’d deny it until someone would pounce on him and retrieve the hidden pills that he had slid surreptitiously into his pockets. The poor old Mole would get a terrible ribbing, but he’d take it well. He was a harmless lad really, but easily led astray by the likes of Jimmy O’Keefe.

    Jimmy took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. ‘What’s this then? Are you sure you asked for coffee, Mole?’ The Mole peered over his cup at us. A frothing galaxy of dung-coloured bubbles clung to his nose.

    ‘This is the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted in my life, old newt’, said Jimmy as he pushed the cup away.

    ‘Well it’s not really a coffee type of establishment, Jimmy’, I said.

    ‘You can say that again, me old flower’, said Jimmy. ‘But back to business’.

    ‘Listen Jimmy,’ I began. But I was immediately cut short. Jimmy had helped himself to one of the digestive biscuits left on a plate by Evelyn and Yolanda in their haste to get away. He momentarily glanced down at his coffee before leaning across to the old ladies’ table and dipping his biscuit into one their teas. To say I was mortified is an understatement. I clutched my head and covered my eyes. There was absolutely nothing I could do to remedy this sudden and dreadful situation. I was powerless. Peeking through my fingers like a frightened child, I could see the two old aunties, their powdered parchment faces frozen in astonishment and outrage.

    ‘Oh Jimmy, what have you done?’ I uttered through clenched teeth like a ventriloquist.

    The two old ladies left their table immediately and reported us to Reg. I can still see him behind the counter listening intently to the old dears, all the while looking down to us. Miriam was promptly dispatched our table and we were politely asked to leave. I was always fond of Miriam, she was a good egg, and I could never countenance upsetting her in anyway. And so, swiftly ushering the wretched Jimmy and Mole in front of me, we duly left the Black Hand cafe.

    I knew at that moment that this was the end of something, the end of an era perhaps. Being thrown out of the Black Hand, not for dealing drugs, not for smoking hash or any other nefarious activities, but because of a biscuit, was undoubtedly a sign. Maybe it was time to move on; and perhaps Reg knew this too. One year later the Black Hand Café burned down. Evidently a faulty appliance started the fire in the middle of the night. I wonder if that accursed Gaggia Pro was culprit?

    I bumped into Miriam a few years later when she was collecting her pension in the town post-office. She told me that Reg had opened another café somewhere down on the Romney Marsh. The business didn’t go well for him and he became ill. He died in hospital a short while later. Miriam said his wife struggled on with the café for a few months before calling it a day and taking herself and the children back to America.

    And what of the Night Hawks? Spanner died in a motorcycle accident involving a milk float on the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells. Although the bike boys disdained religion, a memorial service was held at the church in Monks Horton, Spanner’s home village. Even though I didn’t know him at all really, I went to the service to pay my respects. Over a hundred bikers from clubs all over the country attended the church, and there was a formal signing of the memorial book. I was surprised to learn that Spanner was fifty-five years old when he died and that he had two grandchildren. Flipper Groat was there and I went up to him after the service. He was equable and seemed pleased to see me. He told me he had hung up his leathers for good a while back, and had joined the Salvation Army. He was looking after his elderly mother at home and had a part-time job as a park keeper for the county council. The Night Hawks MCC soon disbanded. It was as if Spanner’s death on a motorbike had called a sudden halt to the bikers’ timeless world. Since their quest had no grail, there was no sense of collective failure. The Night Hawks had made their point. Now it was time to move on.

    Featured Image: Illustration by Burcu Dundar Venner.