Cassandra Voices

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  • Musician of the Month: Éamonn Cagney

    I realised that I really like writing through doing this, and that there’s plenty more to write, but for now here are a few aspects I’d like to share with you.

    Vision

    Something I’ve learned, beyond a doubt is how essential it is for any musician, artist or human being to cultivate a vision for yourself. Have an inner vision and find ways to develop it. It’s for you alone and gives you confidence and uniqueness. Working on craft matters too. But for me, vision comes first and is fundamental. It’s what inspires the consistent work. It animates practise, creativity, relationships, and brings wellness in ways that are hard to see except when it is absent.

    Influences

    I grew up in the rural coastal Donegal community of Clooney, one of the most beautiful places in the world. Our horizons growing up were both small and vast. From the top of our hill you look out over the Atlantic, with Iniskeel, Arainn mhór and Roaninish islands, the incredible Gaoth Beara river estuary, Cashelgoland and Narin strand; the magical Bluestacks, the south Donegal mountains sometimes called the Sliabh Aduaidh range, and a huge blanket bog that stretches from our house to Donegal town.

    In terms of the wider world and a vision of that, our doorway was TV. But we lived in a bubble really. It was honestly an amazing upbringing. Our parents gave us a lot of trust and freedom to wander and explore. There was a hazel wood beside our house and we were the only people that were ever in in it, apart from our neighbour farmer when he was looking for cattle.

    At the bottom of our lane is an old and vibrant oak bush growing out of the centre of a boulder.

    It’s a well-known local landmark especially with elderly people who said it was a parting stone for emigrants when they were leaving their families. There were fairy bushes, deer, seals, wild geese and winter swans, enchanted and haunted places, and really funny local characters.

    Our school had forty kids and two teachers. I tell stories to my friends about growing up, and, as the decades go by, I realise there’s a great book in it.

    This upbringing and environment is probably my biggest musical influence. Many other forms and shapes of music and experience have also influenced me but something in this is fundamental. When I’m daydreaming or even just dreaming, it’s this landscape: hazel woods, the hill, the mountains, the sea, the bog, the beach and the lake: this is my dreaming.

    Going Home, from my first album Convergence:

    The next greatest influence on me is the people and musicians I’ve had the joy of developing relationships and spending time with. But that’s for another time.

    As a teen, the bubble opened, and the wider world started to show me what else was there. I liked hip hop and loved metal and electronic music. Then I left the bubble. Moving to Dublin, I quickly realised how much I love music. No Internet in those days, so magazines, record shops, word-of-mouth and hanging out with people were the main ways of finding out about new music and interesting things.

    And so, around this time the djembe came along.

    My percussion group RITHIM:

    Djembe

    My beloved djembe, an ancient instrument that’s young in Ireland. Learning to play the djembe has taught me how to play music in a way that I could never otherwise have experienced. Djembe music, constructed in parts and played for hours, is really ingenious.

    Hand-drumming gave me a spiritual body experience that I loved. I wanted to learn how to have that experience all the time. It took me to places and to people I couldn’t have imagined meeting. I trained mainly in and around West African drumming for twenty-five years, learning what I could.

    My vision throughout was and still is to harness the drum’s energy, power and beauty as an artist, to make my own music and collaborate with others. Being Irish and having many worlds of inspiration, I was always going to do my own thing.

    A piece entitled Macaomh Mór inspired from the Irish folktale Young Conall of Howth:

    Envisioning

    I practice meditation. In this, everything in our awareness – thoughts, emotions, physical sensation – is observed from a place of stillness. This place of stillness and peace is always available. In this moment your vision emerges and develops. It is here where the freshness and originality is.

    It can inform on a micro level like with a musical idea, an arrangement, a video or a difficult conversation. It can be on a macro level with longer range aspects: albums, career moves, relationships. The crazy human world typically doesn’t support a process involving stillness so it can be easy to forget about it. But hey, don’t.

    One thing I can say for sure is that it always works for me and it’s life-changing.

    In a non-stop changing world it shows me that one thing doesn’t change. My essence, your essence, is always the same.

    The vision that emerges is completely unique to you. I say you can trust it, it’s yours, and enjoy it.

    Treelan: The Long Walk:

     

    Éamonn Cagney is currently working on his second solo album, teaches percussion in The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at University of Limerick, and is about to release a collaboration album with Congolese guitar maestro Niwel Tsumbu.

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eamonn.cagney.3/

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

    Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/eamonncagney

  • Interview: Belfast on the Twelfth

    In interview with Daniele Idini, photographer Graham Martin reveals he was drawn to cover the Twelfth in Northern Ireland after developing an interest in geopolitical events while living in Brazil. Before his trip North he expected trouble, but encountered a surprisingly welcoming atmosphere, even in hardcore Loyalist areas, although much of the iconography remains disconcerting to any visitor from the South.

    Daniele Idini: Are you a regular visitor to Northern Ireland?

    Graham Martin: No not really, and that’s part of why I wanted to go with a camera. As you know, photography is a great tool for attempting to explain things to others, but also to yourself. It’s a great way of coming to terms with things, understanding things and I, like many in the South am aware of all the stigmas attached to the North. Having been born in the 1980s I do remember going up with my parents as a kid and although already relatively peaceful, there was still a physical border and I can remember passing through the checkpoints, seeing the walls and turrets without fully understanding what it all meant. Since then, any visit I made up there and over the border was for a shopping trip or for touring the Giants Causeway and Antrim coastline. My initial impression crossing the border was how good the quality of the roads were compared to the South, the red letterboxes, or the Union Jack painted on the curbs. Later, when I had a cell phone, there was the network switching over; it always felt slightly surreal. It was only in later years, when I started to orientate my photography more towards photojournalism that I started taking an interest in geopolitical events. Mostly abroad at first (I really began to take photography seriously when I emigrated to live In São Paulo, Brazil from 2012 to 2016), but then, you start to become curious about your own backyard; which you mainly ignore at first, because it always seems like it’s something that you want to get away from. So, for me, this recent trip was the first time I went up looking at it in a new light, and that was because of photography.

    A child adds to the pyre before the Eleventh Night bonfire at Mountview Street estate off the Crumlin Road

    Daniele Idini: In a previous article, which included interviews with a number of influential actors, we reported on rising tensions. We encountered a delicate situation, with a multitude of factors are at play. A combination of a Covid-19-related crisis; the effect of Brexit negotiations on the Good Friday Agreement, which was implemented in the context of the UK being a part of the European Union. What did you expect to happen on the Twelfth this year, and did it transpire?

    Graham Martin: I genuinely thought it could go either way. There was all this talk of it potentially being heated, and I did reach out to some contacts who are originally from the North, and from the Protestant community, to ask advice on where would be interesting for me to go to see the parades and what bonfires would be accessible to outsiders. They gave their advice and warned that it looks like it’s going to be quite a heated Twelfth this year, because of everything that is going on at the moment. The advice I received was generally like “So, you know, keep your distance, keep your accent down, be sharp, keep your wits about you”, that kind of thing. When you get that kind of advice from people who are from there and who know the place, that colours your perspective and perception of things. I still went with an open mind, but like with everything, whenever there’s a lot of discussion, build-up and anticipation, quite often it doesn’t quite end up amounting to much at all, which ended up kind of being the case. There were some contentious bonfires built close to peace walls and talk of the PSNI forcibly removing some, which ultimately they didn’t.

    Smoke rising in the Sandy Row area on July 10th indicates a pyre has been set alight a night early perhaps by Nationalists saboteurs…

    Some of the bonfires were set alight the night before and I think there was one youngster, of maybe fourteen years-of-age, who got badly burned, which is a separate issue, but that was kind of the extent of any major incidents or outbursts and I actually felt warmly welcomed there. Any kind of feeling of apprehension was ultimately my own based on preconceptions. I arrived there with my guard up and found that there was no real need for that. I could walk around freely, could photograph in any neighborhood, could approach and talk to people on the streets. Even on the Shankill, which is notoriously Loyalist, I was taking pictures of people openly and they would want me to send them to them by email.

    Orangemen march down the Shankill Road on July 12th.

    There was a little bit of bemusement and surprise when they realised that I was from the South, but perhaps they respected that. So I got comments like “fair play to you” . You could say that that general calm I experienced was very much a planned thing, in light of everything in the news and I think there was a marked intention to keep things civil and peaceful.

    Spectators at the Sandy Row bonfire on July 12th night.

    On seeing my camera one guy at the bonfire on Sandy Row came up to me  and said, “don’t go making this look like something it’s not. Nobody’s fighting here. Everybody’s happy. You know, everybody’s peaceful. There’s going to be no violence here. Don’t go back reporting something that it isn’t, like the papers tend to do.” They notice that this big night of the year for them is always marked with negative press, with criticism, and I think there was an intention overall to show people that the Twelfth could pass off peacefully, and there was going to be no tension.

    Orangemen march down the Shankill Road on July 12th.

    Daniele Idini: We can say then that there was an effort to keep the tension to a minimum. Yet, as I see from your pictures, there were some controversial messages and flag burning. What do these provocations, if we can call them this, really mean in this context?

    Graham Martin: Every year the same flags and slogans are burnt on the fires. The Irish tricolour is burnt. You have effigies of Bobby Sands burnt, the gay flag, the Palestinian flag. You have pro-Israel graffiti around on the walls, which is just as provocative. It seems paradoxical that they identify themselves with Israel as a kind of a small nation that has the right to be in that particular territory. It’s just very confusing to see the Tricolor and the Palestine flag up in flames, and yet the people are warmly welcoming. They’re quite civil in person, but at the same time you see graffiti around stating K.A.T. (“Kill All Taigs”). Taigs is what they call Catholic nationalists, the Irish. You’re walking around meeting people, photographing people, and to your left, there’s K.A.T. graffiti, to your right, there’s a big, multi-storey bonfire with your nation’s flag on!

    Bonfire Pyres on July 10th ready for The Eleventh Night celebrations at Sandy Row, Shore Road, Tigers Bay and Donegal Pass.

    They’re demonstrating that they hate you and at the same time, they’re willing to open up and talk to you and shake your hands, so what’s the true feeling there? It’s very jarring. On the other side, when you walk through Catholic neighbourhoods like Ardoyne, not too far from the Shankill, in peace time, although IRA murals still exist, most of the more aggressive ones have been decommissioned. Many now are promoting sports and social community activities, environmental issues, and there are little or no flags. The odd tricolor maybe, but when you cross over onto the Shankill the murals feel more aggressive, more provocative. You’ve got those kind (such as the U.V.F murals and graffiti) up around the Shore Road, that would make you weary to enter into such areas. I walked up to one pyre as it was being built, the one that commenting on the Irish News (see image in grid “Fuck the Irish News”)* and there were a few guys hanging around finalising it’s construction. They basically told me to get the fuck out of there, so not such an open vibe. That’s the thing though; they put up these things, huge pyres with large signs and slogans that are clearly intended to seek attention, but then if you go and try and document it, you’re quickly warned to get the fuck out, so it’s quite challenging .

    A line of PSNI Land Rover Tangis approach passing a conflagration in the Sandy Row area.

    Daniele Idini: I guess it would depend on who is the intended audience for these displays. Some might include the press, but some, might be predominately intended for the community itself, and the aversion toward media is actually part of the message.

    Graham Martin: Essentially, you know, you’re seeing slogans that are saying ‘Kill Catholics’. It’s beyond provocation. They can say it’s their culture and “let us let us have our night”, but there has also been homophobic and other racist graffiti on the Protestant side, denouncing the Black Lives Matter campaign for example. There a lot of topical issues that they are intentionally taking a side on. So this seems to me like a statement and not just aimed at their own community. There are paralells with the global push to a more Populist, right-wing ideology, you’ve seen pre-Brexit with Nigel Farage, and with ethnic nationalism in the U.K.

    Spectator at the Sandy Row bonfire on the Twelfth.

    Daniele Idini: The discontent in Loyalist communities, still focused on the Partition question, now seems to be directed equally towards Westminster. There’s a feeling of betrayal aimed at the likes of Boris Johnson, a Conservative. It has created an identity crisis, wherein there’s a feeling of abandonment from the rest of the United Kingdom; which brings a sense of fragility.

    Graham Martin: It’s been building for years, I suppose. You’re talking about communities there that are really marginalised, under-developed and it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see why they would be jumping on that kind of thing, and out of frustration picking on the Black Lives Matter campaign, Climate Change, or adopting the anti-masks / anti-vax campaigning. It’s really masquerading as something else. It’s a kind of rhetoric that it’s normalised that it doesn’t even get questioned anymore. The burning of flags, for example, could be seen as a form of hate crime, yet it’s completely normalised and permitted. Also, the bonfires aren’t regulated at all. There’s nobody in an official capacity to make sure they’re safe. If one falls over, which happens from time to time, it’s the size of a building falling, and on fire, It’s kind of surreal that it’s allowed to proceed as it does.

    Rex Bar, a well-known UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group) meeting place on on the Shankill Road, July 12th.

    Daniele Idini: I guess there is a level of negotiation going on with the authorities to try to keep the tensions to a minimum. To go back to the wider issues, Northern Ireland finds itself for the first time facing the possibility of a United Ireland that is being seen as not too remote of an option, and the result of Brexit’s negotiations is perceived by some as incompatible with the Good Friday agreement. It could be a treacherous path to save a peace treaty.

    Graham Martin: There needs to be good faith and efforts from both sides, and a period where controversies aren’t dug up from the past. The difficult thing for sure is that the Troubles are within living memory for many people still; it’s not ancient history. And it’s going to take a long time for people to forgive and forget. Now it’s the Sea Border that’s causing fresh tension, and the announcement of the Statute of Limitations on investigation into the Bloody Sunday Massacre. Who knows what it will be next. It seems like it’s such a consistently fractious and volatile situation.

    ‘Summer of ’69’ mural on Hopewell Avenue in the Loyalist Shankill Road area, referencing the August 1969 violence which helped spark the Troubles.

    And it’s not about religion, of course, but the symbolism of the churches, and the ephemera surrounding the divided beliefs remains ever present in the murals, tattoos, and the wearing of either the Catholic Celtic or Protestant Rangers football shirts. I think it’s harmful to be carrying that around as a constant reminder of superficial dividing lines between communities. But I don’t think young people are really identifying with their own faith any more, or their religion they’re born into quite as much as they used to. I think there’s a move away from labelling people based on their beliefs. That might sound naively optimistic, but I think that’s going to help things there. People can inform themselves better with the Internet and the global exchange of information, and question ingrained fears or hatred of their neighbours. You’ve seen how such a turnaround can happen in Southern Ireland over the last twenty years, where the power of the Church has waned, and all positives that have come out of that with marriage equality and Repeal the 8th. That is happening in the North also: an easing of hardline traditions which are loaded with sectarianism. And I think it’s going to hopefully have positive knock-on effects in time.

    Graham Martin’s work is available below:

    www.grahammartinphotography.com

    https://www.instagram.com/graham.martin.photo/?hl=en

  • The Daymaker

    For my Aunt Josie.

    Mamma died today, last year, at this very hour. I took care of her “Like an angel,” she would say, and I would never cry within her sight, nor anywhere in earshot, so that, at her funeral, and she died on the eve of her fortieth birthday, my eyes felt like eternal springs.

    Earlier this morning, after Dr. Dziurdzy had just signed my Weekend Pass, I strode a mile to the mall where I buy blue roses, and a bouquet in hand, descended the stairs of the Hamilton Mountain. From there, I pressed on, a pied, all the way to The Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. I only stopped at Sassoon’s Cafe, just before the James Street Bridge – to make Mamma a card.

    Across from me, in the form of a marble statue of herself signed by Michelangelo, sat St Dhymphna. Typically, whenever we’ve completed an exchange, and it is time for us to part, she lingers with me a while, in one form or another, once even, as the lily-like scent of her long flaxen hair, perhaps to stave my loneliness.

    It was so sweltering in Sassoon’s café that I swear I saw some sweat-beads glisten on St. Dymphna’s smooth marble brow. A barista fanned herself with the menu, placing before me my café au lait. She sighed over her shoulder at the young man sitting stiffly in one of the booths, wearing a camouflaged hat. I surmised him to be “ the soldier” St. Dymphna had mentioned to anticipate, “the soldier who resembles your father in that photo of him in the viridian shirt – the one where he barely resembles himself.”

    Like other frequenters of Sassoon’s Café, the soldier was in mid-conversation; but what bothered the barista was that the seat he faced was empty.  In his white t-shirt, gray dress pants, and black Wallabees, he placed before him, on the table for two, an open notebook and what appeared to be an emerald-green fountain pen.  The soldier wore a week-old beard so handsomely I wondered if that was his intention; I wondered if it was a look he was going for, or if he simply did not shave that often. Beyond the notebook, and farthest from him, lay his laptop, closed and recharging.

    “Send one platoon west, and one platoon south; over,” he ordered, after which, for about ten seconds, he seemed to listen attentively to a response, carefully, his eyes barely blinking, but dilated; then, he continued his orders. The barista, with hands contrived on hips, took three steps, robotically stopped, then glared down at the soldier. With calculated firmness, she coldly stated:

    “Excuse me, Sir. I’m afraid, I’m going to have to…Ask you to leave”

    A loaded silence reigned in the room.

    “Why, exactly?” asked the soldier.

    “Why do I have to go?”

    Again the barista glared down at him.

    “Why?” he demanded of her for the third time, after some intense silence.

    “There’ve been complaints. More than one. About your…behaviour.”

    “My behaviour?”

    “Yes, Sir.”

    In the silence of Sassoon’s, that soldier and I simultaneously stood up. We were moving slower than two war-weary battle-horses who had once galloped wild. Lifeless as ping-pong balls, all eyes in Sassoon’s Cafe bounced between the soldier and me.

    “My name is Avi Baxter,” said the soldier with warmth, to the entire room.

    “I’m sorry, Sir. But you have to go.” continued the barista. “My manager makes the calls.”

    “Where’s the manager?” asked Avi.

    The barista nodded toward the kitchen’s swinging door, and from behind it the manager could be heard yelling.

    “I’ve called the police!”

    I’d been leaning on a pillar, but now facing Avi, I stood at attention.

    “My name is Carlo, Carlo Di Carra,” I said to Avi, alone. And turning toward the barista, “Leave him alone. He’s done nothing wrong.”

    “Do you have a Thursday edition of the Hamilton Spectator?” asked Avi, peering hard at the newspaper piles. “I’m in no condition to defend myself, cause I’m in and out, so…”

    The barista didn’t answer, but I darted toward the bunch of newspapers to locate the Thursday edition.

    “Avi, here it is.”

    “Thank you, Carlo.

    Anticipating the police, for a few moments I looked outside the window. When I turned around, Avi’s pupils were dilated again. In a tone as solemn as it was dolorous, he whispered a few words I couldn’t understand.

    “Avi,” I said. “Avi?’ I repeated, but he didn’t respond.

    I looked outside and back at Avi, whose eyes were now serene.

    “Could you please open the newspaper to A2?” Avi asked.

    “Yes, of course.”

    Opening the newspaper, there before me was a large picture of Avi in military fatigues. I showed the article around, from table to table, ensuring everyone could see the published picture of the very veteran among us. Avi stepped toward me.

    “Could you please read the article out loud? Cause, like I said, I’m in and out these days. I’d be forever grateful to you, Good Samaritan.”

    There was no time to answer, since the police were on their way. So I launched straight into the article:

    “The headline reads: The Language of Madness: A Conversation with Avi Lyon Baxter. Written by Kimberly Stone.”

    “Over coffee, I asked acclaimed Hamilton poet, Avi Lyon Baxter, 27, questions regarding literature, politics, and family, but it was when I asked him about the effects of warfare, that Baxter seemed most engaged, most ardent, and most poignant. ‘The years of warfare triggered what my doctor calls schizoaffective disorder, which runs in my family. I also suffer from PTSD.’ Baxter has been hospitalized for his conditions several times; during his admissions, he became acquainted with what he calls ‘the culture of the patients,’ and also ‘the struggle of the patients.’”

    I stopped for a moment and looked up at Avi. He’d slipped into another trance.

    “Through our conversation, a polarity arose. That of language as a saviour for those suffering from severe mental illnesses, like in Baxter’s case, and language as a dehumanizing force that is inflicted, often unknowingly, on the psychotically ill. ‘Too often, those who consider themselves politically correct loosely use words like psycho, nutjob, and crazy. Now, hear me: I think freedom of speech should reign supreme. I am against language policing, since I believe it divides people, as it is designed to do. Yet, at the same time, I have a huge problem with the hypocrisy.’”

    “The hypocrisy is that of how the so-called politically correct treat various groups in routine language, and the discrepancies in political correctness. While they treat many demographics with sensitivity, like people of the LGBT community for instance, the language of mental illness and, Baxter notes, specifically psychotic disorders, continues to colour their conversational speech. ‘If policing language, shouldn’t that extend sensitivity to anyone who needs it, not just to those dictated by a biased media?”

    “While I wouldn’t recommend injecting offensive terms into one’s vocabulary to correct the imbalance, those who do choose to be mindful of political correctness might consider how they cherry-pick which terms to be mindful of, and the message they’re sending to those left out of their apparently progressive dialogue.”

    “Baxter says the effect is that many of those who suffer from psychotic disorders ‘feel like people treat them as sub-humans.’ Especially in the context of individuals whose own minds are often frightening places for them, having others in society express to them, through their word choice, that their condition does not warrant sensitivity, is further dehumanizing.”

    “‘There’s no safe space for them,’ laments Baxter. ‘If you have been granted equality you have not received it. If you want equality, you must take it. True equality is something taken, never given.’”

    Here I paused and peered into the faces of the café customers and out the window. No police.

    “Why should we care? Well, because the connection between mental illness and creativity is not just one founded on an outlet for suffering. There is also an innate relationship between mental illness and creative genius, and this combination has historically brought great works of art, and important inventions of many kinds, into the world. The image of the brooding or unhinged artist has merit beyond the stereotype.”

    “Baxter explains, ‘there is an infinitesimally fine line between madness and genius since, recently, scientists have proven that the two share a similar genetic makeup, called Neuregulin 1. We revere and adore Van Gogh, Nash, Plath, Schumann, Beethoven, Cobain, Hemingway, Pound, Nelligan, Blake, and other great minds affected by mood disorders or schizophrenia. We love our mad geniuses. We’re eager to take their gifts, but we most often reject the very illness that spawned the gift, and thereby reject the person.’”

    A lump rose in my throat and I wanted to cry, but resisted my instinct. I searched everyone’s eyes, none of which were holding back tears, none of which shone with the dimmest twinkle.

    Confronted with an aura of indifference in the room, Ari’s eyes welled up before closing as he took a deep breath. I too took a deep breath. But when my head bowed the way an iris’s bloom will, when weighed down by too many dew drops, my eyes were open and staring at the image of Ari, printed on the page.

    “Those with the combined traits of creativity and psychiatric instability who can harness and channel them into careers are the fortunate ones, who were able to take challenging life states, and make from them a thing of beauty to share with the world. However, these are, more than likely, the people you avoid on the street, or snicker at on the bus, as they grapple with untreated psychotic symptoms.”

    “Baxter’s critically hailed debut book of poems, The Flowers of My Battles, became a bestseller in both Canada and the United States. The book won both the Governor General Award For Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is currently nominated for a Trillium Award, the gala of which will be held this fall. In The Walrus magazine, critic and poet Dylan Yardly called Baxter’s debut ‘the greatest poetry debut of the past 25 years. Baxter is perhaps the most commanding and relevant war poet since Wilfred Owen.’ Last year he was awarded the Medal of Sacrifice, for his brave fighting during the War in Afghanistan.”

    “Though often debilitated, Baxter has established a career that allows him to share his insight, and lend his voice to others struggling with mental illness, so many of whom are silenced rather than celebrated.”

    I savoured that article to the extent I could, while all around me, a palpable aura of indifference persisted. When I checked on Baxter, he was beyond reach. Pupils dilated and tears streaming down his cheeks. That’s when, through the window, I spotted two police cruisers pull up and park.

    By the time both officers entered Sassoon’s, Saint Dymphna’s presence, manifested in the form of a marble statue had, alas, vanished. Avi was consumed by one of his hallucinations. And as for me, I encountered the kind of anxiety a blue iris must, when its growth flourishes from the protection of a private garden, to project out onto the unsympathetic surface of a well-traveled urban sidewalk. Mind you, unaccompanied by any other backyard blue irises and at the mercy of the masses.

    Or was it more that loneliness two horses might feel when, without warning, their riders steer them away from each other. Often so fast that neither has a chance to neigh good-bye.  Avi and I stood side by side. Solid as two pillars. Sympatico as high-school students passing doobies around a fire-pit party.

    “And, furthermore, I bet you’ve been completely off your meds?” continued the first officer, who wore short sleeves.

    “Now listen, Avi.” began the second officer, who wore long sleeves, “I sympathize with you, for real. I’m saddened as hell by your tears. And I get why having to leave this café may be troublesome for you, but it is time to go now. One way or another.”

    The officers made eye-contact. As did Avi and I. On Baxter’s table, a book lay open to pages 33 and 34. It was The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke, and next to it was Disabled, by Wilfred Owen.

    “Do you really want us using force to get you out of this place?” asked the first officer.

    “Do you really want to rip away the integrity of a veteran?” I interjected.

    “I’m warning you, Boy. Shut it!” exclaimed the first officer. “Are you gonna leave this place peacefully, on your own, or do you want to be taken out of here violently, by two cops? Which would most certainly be bad for your integrity, too.” the first officer demanded of Avi.

    “We don’t want to have to call C.O.A.S.T. on you. You’re well aware that C.O.A.S.T. will cuff you. And drag you straight to St. Joe’s for psychological assessment. Oh, and then, they’ll

    send you for a grand ole stay at the Mountain Sanatorium.” pressed the second officer.

    “What is C.O.A.S.T.?” I had to inquire.

    “It’s a…Well, it’s a special police unit that comes around collecting the crazies. You know, psychopaths and such. So they can go to the hospital for …For treatment or whatever the fuck.” hissed the second officer to me, so Avi couldn’t hear. Anyway, Avi had zoned out again.

    “Uh…but what does C.O.A.S.T. stand for?” I asked.

    “Crisis Outreach And Support Team,” officer one said with a smirk.

    At that, Avi’s head drooped like a raindrop burdened daisy blooming on a starless, moonless night. Moments later, Avi raised his head. He gathered his materials and gripping his satchel, pivoted like a ship points to a lighthouse to lock eyes with me.

    The two of us paused in a dilapidated and vacant parkette, where we were surrounded by spiralling lilies shedding their wealth of pure white petals in the morning sunlight.

    “What’s your name, again?” Avi asked.

    “Carlo Di Carra,” I replied.

    “How old are you, Son?”

    “Nineteen.”

    A warm wind wafted.

    “Carlo, I feel a strange paroxysm of utmost thankfulness toward you, and utmost loathsomeness toward them.” That said, he spat into a nearby patch of grass, “You showed me more support in ten minutes than most people have shown me in ten years, and so: SALUTE! Salute to you! Salute to the mercy you shared with me! Salute to you, the Stranger’s angel!” Then, forthwith, his eyes dilated into a thousand-mile stare, while he commenced. “No, Sergeant, I am not a coward. I’m just human. There are civilians in that building. I cannot open fire as you have just ordered, Sir.”

    Then…

    “No! No! Stop pointing that at me, Sergeant! Please, Sir! Okay! Okay! Okay!” Avi screamed. Then he started aiming his invisible machine gun, whose trigger he repeatedly pulled, until finally, he emerged from his fugue.

    “Anyway Carlo, as I was saying, SALUTE to you, Salute to you and your blood of love!”

    After Carlo finished his exclamatory salutations, he paused, then started: “My will to electrify the Patients Movement is hella stronger now that I’ve endured what happened today .Thank God for this shock I feel. Which will, I hope, continue to numb me from the memory of what we witnessed in Sassoon’s Café. I must affix and delight in the numbness that a proper shock provides. Wretchedly, must I revel in an inner glade which exists between my… self, and what has occurred. Yes, the dictatorship of the psychiatric patient will be commandeered so much sooner now.  Do you, by chance, believe in God?”

    Yes, very much so.”

    “And do you believe Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah?”

    “Yes. I do.”

    “Ok. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, swear that you will never repeat anything I’m saying here. Promise me. In his name.”

    “I swear, in the name of Jesus Christ, that I will not repeat anything you are saying here.  I promise. In His name.”

    “Say this: May I go straight to Hell if I repeat anything Avi Lyon Baxter tells me in this lilied parkette near James Street North”

    “May I go straight to Hell if I repeat anything Avi Lyon Baxter tells me in this lilied parkette near James Street North.”

    Avi sighed.

    “In the name of my own vengeance to a world that treats me as a sub-species. In the name of what I think is right and essential. In the name of any and all oppressed psychotics, the Psychiatric System will be dismantled and rebuilt. From within and without. There will be both predetermined and spontaneous uprisings at St Joe’s, and there will be simultaneous intifadas coordinated inside the world’s most prominent psychiatric institutions. In all three arenas, our revolution will detonate simultaneously and worldwide!”

    “Then the revolution, or shall we refer to it as The Rev? At any rate, under its own steam, the movement will spread to other sanatoriums like pollen does. In a vigorous wind. To neighbouring towns. All insurgents bound by sheer conviction to The Rev. To a common list of demands. Rights refrained, again and again, by ambassadors representing the revolution. And in these aforementioned, simultaneous, pre-plotted intifadas, guerrilla patients will take fellow guerrilla patients, hostage, consensually of course. Both hostage and hostage-taker will shadow each other into dual defense from our enemy. And, the revolutionaries, from Port-Au-Prince to Toronto, will be disciplined to shoot our enemies: security guards, soldiers, and officers. Below the waist.”

    “My cugino, Armando, a made guy who lives in Palermo, will arm our rebels. And may very well agree to advance us, in solidarity, whatever we need. See, he’s been hospitalized. Numerous times. For schizophrenia. He can fathom our marginalization.”

    “So you’re half-Italian. On your mother’s side, I’m assuming?”

    “Yes,” Avi replied. “Listen, Carl…”

    “It’s Carlo.”

    “Carlo, please. Don’t interrupt my precarious stream of consciousness. It’s the sole palisade between me and that trauma-induced platoon following me even as we speak.”

    “I’m so sorry, Avi. Forgive me.”

    Avi nodded his head, even smiling slightly.  It had been a relatively long respite since he’d fallen into a fugue.

    “I can’t wait to blow up the bubble rooms! To terrify the snakes of The System. Homicidal doctors signing off on premature discharges. Knowing full well they’ll end their lives thereafter! Rapist nurses fondling their way out of the night-room rounds. All of whom we will kidnap and try in a court presided over by psychotics!

    Our ransom for the prisoners will be a list of demands, including but not limited to:

    1) Swift implementation of a law worded as follows: That to be granted a psychiatric license, doctors must score in the top percentile on a standardized emotional intelligence test.

    2) Food service and accomodation to be modernized and upgraded so as to adhere to hospitality standards.

    3) Establishment of a fund dedicated to the disbursal of victim reparations, and immediate handover of similar criminals currently working under the evil administration, regardless of rank.

    4) Definitive discharges for select patients, such as political prisoners, for example.

    5) Smoking priviliges and designated areas for doing so to be reinstated.

    6) Redistribution of psychiatric authority, via the Vortex Accords initiated by me last summer.

    7) Pass executive orders composed by me on my bus ride to Montreal last year.

    “To be elaborated. Just so long as that list of demands can wrap my soul’s wide wound, like a bandage, the way forward seems somewhat possible. I’ll not, like a mummy, lie petrified inside the tomb that is my basement bedroom. If even a few of the uprisings succeed, the world would suddenly know the patients’ collective power, now wouldn’t they? Who would ever fuck with us again, if we executed what I’ve just proposed? Yes, us. Do you think I cannot see that you are struggling with your own psychosis? Who would still suppose the diagnosed insane are wholly powerless? We will assume our equality, which is the only way we can truly receive it. And the world, even the blasted, double-edged mass media, will finally see that we will no longer tolerate being abused, raped, and used by our own so-called ‘caretakers.” Shamed, despite the fact that it is we who open the doors of invention for humanity.”

    One glance at Avi’s eyes, twinkling as they were with zeal, and I saw his essential place in the universe.

    “I see a Million Man March of the mad!” Avi exclaimed. “And, as for the aforementioned Patient’s Revolution, I will recruit guerrilla-patients from the many online psych ward whisper networks. Plus, I’ll recruit my friends from Mad Pride, who know it is impossible for a person to be proud of one’s self, when not only openly, directly and indirectly, being discriminated against, but also scorned, mocked, hated, abused, mistrusted, beaten, and murdered.”

    Avi jolted, his mind seemingly struck by sheet lightning of afflatus, which is better than being struck by the vipers of his traumas. Again, he shook off the fog that dogged him to refocus anew.

    “You see, Carlo, not only will the psych world be faced with the patient’s revolution, but so will anyone outside the system. Who treats us as a subspecies. Who thinks we are not worth as much as the so-called sane. And that means a whole lot of motherfucking people. And they will answer to us. To the insurgents.

    “Reports of rape, assault, degradation, and other forms of ill treatment occurring in the Sanatorium never reach the minds of the masses. More and more mental health activists are therefore going underground. Radicalizing into revolutionaries. It is time for the Patients’ Revolution.”

    “I’ll seek out like-minded patients. O Carlo! O Patients! Hear my voice! We must leap from our closets, lest too many of us die by our own world-guided hand, to explode upon the world that jeers us! Like, who really cares about patient rights and their little lives? How many

    souls are suffering downtown in the streets, alleys, and alcoves; poor, dilapidated, ‘vile bodies’ for whom no one weeps.”

    “And so, now with intifada’s force, at last, at last, at last, the ‘Ship of fools,’ will dock at the Bay of Honour and Equality. At last, at last, at last, the ‘ship of fools,’ captained by revolving ‘crazies,’ will barge between the large and empty yachts of the fogless harbour, to crash ashore this society that has exiled us. At last, at last, at last, this listing and trimming of the ship will end and, for the first time, we will stand stable upon sturdy earth. This will be our Santa Clara!”

    “The hospital will soon be ours! A guerrilla unit of eighty patients! The world will know the patients’ powers! Viva la revolución de los pacientes!” Avi yawped, so the whole parkette could hear, though no one, besides us, was there. “Viva-a-a-a-a!” Avi bellowed, the echo of his voice blasting beyond the boundaries of the parkette.”

    Remember, you promised never to repeat anything I’ve said. Will you keep your promise?”

    “I will keep my promise because none of this can ever happen.”

    “What the hell are you saying, on?”

    “Don’t you see? If you do what you have planned, you will only FURTHER the divide, the apartheid, between those presumed sane and those diagnosed insane.  Avi, you will sow hatred in the hearts of the “Insane,” and shame in the minds of the “sane”.  Your idea is an understandable but regrettable one.”

    “Oh really? Well what the fuck are you going to do about it, Carlo?”

    “I want you to make a deal with me. A pact.”

    “What the fuck are you talking about?”

    “We are going to make a deal.”

    “A deal?”

    “Yeah. Look, I’ll, I’ll…“

    “You’ll?”

    “Ari, I’ll take away your illness if you promise not to carry out the Patients’ Revolution.”

    “What?” asked an almost ferocious Avi.

    Taking great strides, he headed for the gates of the parkette. That is until I caught up to him, and stopped Avi from leaving. I convinced him to return within the parkette, where we had been talking, among the still spiraling lilies.

    “Please explain to me what the hell you mean by proposing this pact. Like, what the fuck are you talking about, Son?”

    I sighed.

    “Listen, Avi. Inside that eerie bedlam by the bluffs, you could clean that place with all its tears, I struggle to fathom who I am. Rest assured, I’m going somewhere. So, anyway, check this out. I was born on Christmas Day, my mother on the Summer Solstice.  My Father was born on an Easter Sunday morning.  My father’s name, numerically, equals 137; my mother’s name, numerically, equals 137. I was raised on San Francisco Avenue, in the San neighbourhood, near the West Mountain Brow, where the streets are named after saints. The 33 Sanatorium bus still winds through these streets. It can be heard from my childhood home, at number 1101.”

    “Throughout my life, countless people have testified that I either; saved their souls, their minds, or their corporeal lives. In my boyhood, I endured a connective tissue disorder that ensured the onset of Pectus Excavatum, which means the malformation of cartilages, near my sternum. By age thirteen, this condition eventuated the grotesque caving in of my chest. An audible gasping for each breath deepened with every passing day. Gradationally, I was asphyxiating.

    And this body’s hideousness couldn’t have been more excruciating to my mind. Dashing what was left of my self-image, it spent my self-worth. To such an extent, that since I nearly never spoke, my nickname in high school became ‘The Mute.’”

    “For five years, not once did I smile, dragging myself through the days like a half blind horse too old to be drawing anything but air. At age eighteen, I underwent The Nuss Procedure. That being an experimental operation, to possibly truss the excavatum into convexity. A one-foot-long, one-inch-thick, bowed steel bar, was forced through my right side, then inside my pulmonary cavity, converting asphyxiation to easy breathing, concavity to convexity, disfiguration to beauty. After a week of recovery, I was released from the hospital just in time to celebrate my nineteenth birthday. Where my right side was penetrated, the Nuss Procedure left a 3-inch-scar. One still very visible.”

    Raising the hem of my shirt, I showed Avi the scar on my side.

    “Earlier this year I heard what identified itself as being ‘The Voice of the Father from the Three Personned God.’ He said…Well, what he said was this; that I would be henceforth transmuting into a secret being, whose identity I too, alas, would not know until my absolute transfiguration. Sublime and vivacious, this voice disclosed that I’d soon be in the hospital healing patients. It said that seraphim would shield me from demons. That soon, as I should be, I’d sermonize to the patients unfettered. And that I’d never have to worry about corporeal repercussions for voicing the Truth. For voicing His Vision. My family hospitalized me when I insisted this had been a direct correspondence with God.”

    On this note, I paused, taking a couple of breaths.

    “It was actually the morning of that massive storm, and just after one of my hour-long sermons, that the coda of The Voice was transmitted through me to the patients. We took shelter from the elements beneath a red-roofed smoking pavilion. It had been downpouring from tenebrous clouds for an hour and a half. Amid seemingly inexhaustible lightning which struck its riled electric vipers in such a way as to block our path. In these conditions we, who were out on passes, were waiting for the wind-whipped rain to cease, so that we could return to our respective wards.”

    “Which is when we were startled to see two demoniacs burst upon us, in blurs of wide spasmodic movements preternaturally generated by the notable force of the Devil. Screaming immeasurably discordant baritones, the rabid youths raged and rived the restless crowd, both asserting their Latin as petrifying as it was precise. At last, they alighted on the pavilion’s long picnic table. Forthwith, I shot toward the two youths, each foaming and seizing till apparently exhausted from the merciless exertion perpetuated by the power of the Devil himself.”

    “Firm, but calm, I lay my left hand on the one youth’s head, and my right hand on the other. O Satan, in the name of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of us all, and the Son of the Living God, flee from these two boys at once! Flee from these two boys at once! Flee from these two boys at once! I tore my crucifix from my neck then, and with the force of the Holy Spirit inside me, pressed it into each of their chests, imprinting it over their hearts.”

    “Just then, two shower-weary mountain vultures perched upon a nearby statue of some lofty lobotomist from the early 20th Century. At once, I cast, like two eternally long shadows, both demons, into the mountain vultures. The scavengers gyred higher and higher before zigzagging away to vanish over the cliff.”

    “However, overtaken by a whirlwind of rain, the gyre reunited in a dance puppeteered by ever greater gales, till both mountain vultures were at last, simultaneously slammed headlong into the cliff’s vertiginous summit. Lingering in the moments left of their lives, their miserable necks and bones were as blasted and shattered as is humankind.”

    “The two youths lay exhausted and unconscious on the picnic table. Lightning still struck everywhere around our pavilion. Even striking the stone body of the lobotomist. The lampposts were so tipped, it was as if  we were starring in an early expressionist movie. And whirlwinds whisked uprooted saplings heavenward, only to drop them back to the earth. Alas, the patients were ripped about, one to unconsciousness. A wind whipped woman wearing white screamed, ‘Make it stop!’”

    “That’s when, driven by the Holy Spirit, I leapt out into the gales, the rain and all that lightning, to lift my arms like a ladder, into the chaos of a spewing sky. O Lord in Heaven, hear this prayer. Please Dear God, put to death this pitiless storm! And within 3 minutes, the colossal storm concluded. Lightning lessened, gale calmed to wind and in the end, became but a breeze.”

    “Some of the patients panted, while others sprinted from the pavilion to the Sanatorium doors. Staggered as they were, I shadowed the patients swiftly striding ahead for what took about thirty seconds, after which we found ourselves bone dry. Only a drizzle resumed, during our dash back to the sanatorium doors. The rumour spread that I had dried a downpour, dismantled the wind, and annihilated lightning.”

    “The following day, some patients accosted me. ‘Might I heal their minds of illness? Would I lay my hands upon their heads?’ They had come to believe I possessed powers, that I was a channel, a vessel if you will, of the Lord. His mercy. And His words. ‘I will,’ was the only answer, as then I remembered what the Voice told me before my hospital admission.”

    “Laying my hands upon their heads, many reported they were healed; I was quite efficacious in exorcism, and at healing depressives and drug addicts. Some said they believed themselves healed, but only when my hands were upon them. More and more patients approached me expressing a vehement desire to be healed.”

    “I was released, readmitted, released, and readmitted again, eventually seeing a need to disremember the plausible miracles under my belt, along with deep wonderment about my identity, all of which exhausted the high spirit inside me. In a world where soulfulness is scrubbed from people like mildew, miracles are seen as absurd to all.”

    “So, on the evening of Holy Thursday Evening this year, after having wept for Christ, in particular I’d envisioned Judas’ betrayal and Jesus’ arrest, having seen Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth. My prayer to The Lord pleaded, ‘I do not know who or what I am. Can you please tell me? Give me a clear sign, even though my transfiguration is incomplete? After praying, I fell asleep.And on Good Friday I awoke to a piercing pain in my right side. It was coming from the place where the Nuss Procedure was performed. Where I still have the scar.”

    “As if I’d been stabbed, the throb in my right side was so severe, that I screamed out to the patients who slept in my room, amid miserable throes. Via electro-magnetic vibrations, a seraphim paid me a visit, to stress that by Monday Morning, my stigmata would fade and disappear. At which time the piercing in my side ceased.”

    “Avi, isn’t it true that you have been less ‘in and out,’ and more focused, than you were when we met at the café?”

    He didn’t respond. Instead, he started whistling Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor with his eyes closed, his face not tense as it was when we were in the café.

    “I believe you, Carlo. And yes, I have been more present and more focused than when we met at the café. What’s happening?”

    “Listen, together you and I will start the Psychiatric Reformation, and apart, will never resort to revolution. Listen, you are slowly healing.  But this will speed up the process.”

    “I lay my cupped hands on Avi’s head, then prayed: “O Jesus of Nazareth! O my Redeemer! O Prince of Peace! O violet eyelight-beamer! I feel your sea-sky horizoned lips softly kiss my spirit! O Almighty Taskmaster, please whisper this away. Sing Avi’s madness to death. Tame his traumas until they die in anonymity as do the loneliest of winds at sea. As do the holiest of saints. As do those white and black Popes of the Vatican, reflected like a solar eclipse inside a yellow puddle of urine.  O Lord, I’d die for you as you have for me, so please. Please free this beauteous man, Avi Lyon Baxter. Free him from his tormenting traumas, O free him of his tormenting illness.  Please, please heal him.”

    I removed my hands from Avi’s head. Avi threw himself onto the grass where in the diaphanous dew, he wept. For a moment which then passed, he knelt and his head bowed.”

    “Why are you crying, Avi?” I finally asked.

    “I’m healed,” he whispered.

    Then, suddenly, he jolted to his feet as though amid a street fight for his life.

    “I’m healed! I’m healed, do you hear me, Bello!” he blasted, “I don’t hear voices anymore! The only voice outside me that I hear is my own echo, and the only voice inside me that I hear is my own! Carlo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o Di-i-i-i-i-i-i Car-r-r-r-r-a! No, no wait! Santo-o-o-o-o-o-o-! Santo Carlo Di Carra! I like the sound of that!” Avi smiled widely in the warm wind.

    ***

    CooOOoo-woo-woo-woooo! CooOOoo-woo-woo-woooo! call the mourning doves. Kneeling at Mamma’s grave, and before arranging the flowers, first I spread the babies’ breath I bought to festoon her tombstone. Over the past year, I’ve gotten attached to the cemetery’s resident doves. Their call is a sound that soothes my soul. I coo right along with them and in doing so, fail to fight back the fierce tears flowing. Droplets that are falling down. All over those brand-new blue roses.

    ***

    Like a couturier’s thread through the eye of a needle, I entered the revolving doors of the Sanatorium. High on it’s hill, I was out on our ward’s terrace, when I painted a watercolour called “One Blue Rose.” I posted a high pixel photograph of the $1,500 dollar painting, to the website of an online art gallery. It wasn’t five minutes before I received a notice on my phone, that a former buyer of mine had purchased the piece.

    Mamma relished a rose of any colour. But blue roses most of all. Because they were her mother’s favourite. Grandma Maria adored blue roses because she was an amateur inventor. In her mind, blue roses were humanity’s most ravishing invention.

    Mamma died today, last year, at this very minute.  Through the diamond patterned bars of the terrace cage, I pray to her and sob. My head droops downward like the bough of a Weeping Willow. One that has endured an ice storm.

  • A Grá for the Language

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

     

    Sometimes what language teaches us can be that visceral.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Could Ivermectin End the Pandemic?

    The bacterium streptomyces avermitilis was discovered by Satoshi Omura at the Kitasato Institute in Japan in conjunction with William C. Campbell at MSD (Merck, Sharpe and Dome) in the early 1970s. From this compound the medicine Ivermectin was developed. Ever since, it has proved a wonder drug for the treatment of parasites in humans and animals.

    Most of these infections occur in Africa and Latin America, but it was nevertheless a lucrative drug for MSD. Nonetheless, in 1987 they provided the drug to the world free of charge as the Kitasato Institute gave up rights to any further royalties from its sale. This was an exceptionally generous gesture as it was a $1 billion per year product, and had been for several years. Its extensive and widespread use in humans has been described by Chris Whitty, Chief Scientific Advisor to the British government throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as ‘a drug with a good safety profile’, with a serious adverse drug reaction rate of 1/800,000’

    Another paper says ‘Ivermectin was generally well tolerated with no indication of associated CNS (central nervous system) toxicity for doses up to 10 times the highest FDA approved dose of 200mcg/Kg’. In a nutshell, it is a safe drug, in use for a long time, and the nuances of clinical usage are therefore known to many physicians.

    A recent paper from India using ivermectin as a preventative used 15mg on average, twice per month at a cost of $1.20 per month in healthcare workers resulted in a 72% reduction in infections. In a recent online enquiry to a wholesaler in India I was offered 100 x 3mg tablets for $12. Yet remarkably this same dose in Ireland would cost €100 per month.

    As is well known by now, in early 2020 the WHO alerted the world to a pandemic virus that apparently emerged out of China, a virus for which there was no known treatment available and which was most dangerous in elderly patients with underlying conditions.

    The illness presented with cold-like symptoms that after a period of between five and eight days could develop into severe respiratory symptoms, requiring hospitalisation and sadly in some cases leading to death.

    Guidelines for General Practitioners

    The Irish College of General Practitioners stated in their guidelines to general practitioners in April 2020: ‘Clinicians should be aware of the potential for some patients to rapidly deteriorate one week after illness onset’ (members access only: https://www.icgp.ie/speck/properties/asset-Interim Guidance for General Practitioners).

    The same document lists those conditions and age groups in which this is a possibility. It goes on to state that ‘no medications have shown any therapeutic benefit on the progress of Covid-19 pneumonia.’

    This advice has not been updated since April 2020. So ‘do nothing until the patient turns blue’ appears to be the invaluable advice from a national body sixteen months into this crisis. However, in the spring of 2020 if you were unfortunate enough to find yourself in a nursing home your blue pallor would not summon the arrival of a flashing blue light, but instead you would receive midazolam and morphine, both respiratory depressants, whilst you awaited the Grim Reaper.

    GPs were discouraged from examining their patients. Even the use of the stethoscope was deemed unnecessary. Shades of blue were everything. The ‘do nothing’ approach is still supported in the guidelines issued by HIQA in February 2021, despite over forty studies demonstrating the efficacy of ivermectin in the intervening period.

    HIQA Advice

    HIQA currently advise that ‘individuals do not prescribe or use interventions for the treatment of COVID-19 that do not meet the necessary minimum criteria’, but don’t outline what these criteria are.

    They go on to ensure that ‘practitioners are not criticised for not prescribing these interventions.’ This latter is a somewhat curious statement if a body is so confident that their evaluation of the evidence is above reproach.

    Yet William C. Campbell co-discoverer of Ivermectin with Satoshi Omura – with whom he shared the Nobel prize – in a speech to the Royal Irish Academy in April 2020 stated: ‘there is the possibility that a safe dosage of Ivermectin might reduce the rate of viral replication in the mammalian body, or affect the virus in other ways that might be revealed by further research.’

    Ivermectin (IVM) bound to a C. elegans GluClR.

    Fortunately for some Irish patients, a few brave GPs looked beyond this island for guidance. Asking doctors to do nothing, and specifically indicating certain actions that they should not take, is a restriction that disconcerts many experienced doctors, if not being a downright interference in the doctor-patient relationship.

    As GPs in the community we deal with people who are part of a family within a social setting. We are therefore cognisant of many features of health – which outsiders might consider superfluous to the ‘science of medicine’.

    Now I laugh each time someone juxtaposes those words, especially when I consider the absolute chaos that is general practice’s interaction with people. At the end of some consultations, I’m lucky to be able to spell my own name correctly, let alone apply the cold, steely, rational logic of science to solving any problems.

    But no matter how chaotic or complex, or even futile, medical interventions may be, one must never vanquish a patient’s hope. Even when close to death, hope – if not for further life at least for a peaceful death – is something the GP can bring to the situation.

    So who are these people in the ICGP or HIQA to say to GPs that there are no treatments available for their vulnerable patient who develops a SARS-CoV2 infection; to say ‘well let’s wait and see, and sure if you turn blue we’ll get an ambulance’?

    We won’t visit or examine you, and you won’t be coming to our surgeries, but we’ll look after you by proxy. So why were we as doctors advised to do nothing? Not even to try a cheap, effective and safe drug, if only to elicit the placebo effect?

    Criminal Charges

    In India WHO’s chief scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan is facing criminal proceedings brought by the Indian Bar Association for disseminating disinformation about ivermectin and its effectiveness as a preventative and early treatment for SARS-CoV2 infection.

    Should those in HIQA who made recommendations to Irish doctors not face similar charges? Is this not a case of wilful blindness?

    In the USA two distinct groups of doctors-intensive care physicians lead by Drs Pierre Kory and Paul E. Marik set up the FLCCCA (Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance), and community-based physicians led by Professor Peter McCullough of Texas A+M University, in conjunction with AAPS (American Association of Physicians and Surgeons), devised protocols in their respective fields using Ivermectin and other medications, deemed ineffective by the WHO.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEmOCWOZPk8

    Their rationale was based on medical ethics and a professional desire to give their patients a fighting chance against this condition. They have faced vilification and attempted sanctions, as have doctors in Ireland who were simply trying to help their patients. And some patients even had the temerity to get better.

    I’m not sure what irked the Medical Council of Ireland more, the survival of the patients despite being given a HIQA/WHO proscribed substance, or some previous impotence at not being able to impose their second hand thoughts on all members of the medical profession.

    There is no money in helping patients as the current system is set up. One makes more money merely by ascertaining how ill someone is by using the phone. Even if these medications do nothing beyond the placebo effect why has there been a concerted effort to block the use of what has already been shown to be a relatively low risk intervention?

    Meta-Analysis

    The most recent Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines by Laurie, Bryant et al in the American Journal of Therapeutics found a 62% reduction in death in a meta-analysis of fifteen RCTs. It concludes:

    Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.

    The WHO’s own assessment of seven trials showing an 81% risk reduction was diminished in significance because of ‘imprecisions’ resulting in the WHO falling short of recommending the use of ivermectin. Fudge, fudge and more fudge.

    Let’s cut to the chase here with this and perhaps many other substances. There are powerful vested interests steering advisory bodies away from the evidence, buying up integrity and burying it in a deep dark place.

    The current vaccines are deemed to be the only safe and reliable treatments. This is ironic given that these products are all still in phase 3 trials, and safety data will not be fully available until late 2022 at the earliest.

    The fact is that emergency use authorisations (EUAs) issued by the FDA in America and the EMA in Europe are contingent on there being no other treatments available in a public health emergency deemed to be effective. This is about money, vast sums of money. It is about wilful blindness at the highest echelons of the WHO, national governments and so called scientific advisory bodies.

    It is about conflicts of interest, and the damaging and intellectually limiting dependency that science has placed on large corporations, and it would seem that now governments are in the same stranglehold.

    As it is often said, the first casualty of war is truth. Clearly this also applies to pandemics, where body counts mean money, power and influence. And as in war inflation of body counts has always been good for business. Death may evoke much front of camera hand wringing but behind the scenes there is even more palm rubbing and back slapping.

  • Covid-19: The View from Turkey

    On March 11th, 2020 the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed in Turkey, followed by the first mortality on March 15th. Then on April 1st Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced that cases had spread all over Turkey. So how has the pandemic been managed since? And how have measures affected people.

    A total of 5.34 million cases have been diagnosed by May 2021, with 48,795 people losing their lives. Various measures have been implemented in Turkey, with opinions divided on whether they have been too harsh or too lenient.

    The first restriction was placed on air travel, with the installation of thermal cameras on airlines. As of March 11th, 2020 flights from China to Turkey were put on hold. Also, an attempts were made to allow Turkish citizens to return to Turkey from Iran, but with an obligatory 14-day quarantine period in a government facility.

    Afterwards, passengers returning from Umrah for religious purposes were allowed to quarantine at home. This brought opposition amidst fears the disease would spread. In response student dormitories were used for those returning from Umrah. There was, however, a reaction to this from both students and those placed in quarantine, especially as the students were suddenly removed from their dormitories.

    Restrictions were also imposed on overland travel. The borders with neighbouring Iran were closed. After the initial period, restrictions continued to be imposed on various flights and areas within a framework of broader rules. In addition to the use of masks and similar precautions, the Ministry of Health in Turkey launched a mobile health app that was supposed to be used by everyone, called HES (Hayat EveSığar – Life Fits Into Home). This made access to airlines and similar places easier. However, question marks lingered around how well the system worked.

    Specific precautions were also taken in public areas as well. Schools, sports competitions and cultural and artistic events were suspended. Online education modules were offered to students. Restaurants, cafes and bars were also forced to close, and asked to switch to takeaway.

    Offices were recommended to work remotely. However, many workplaces unable to do so at that time attempted to protect themselves through their own initiatives.

    Restrictions were also imposed on working hours as a precautions for employees, although, measures were not followed strictly by many employers. The situation caused financial difficulties for many companies, especially restaurants and cafes. Many claimed that that the government support packages were insufficient.

    Alongside this, citizens aged sixty-five and over were asked to ‘cocoon’ from March 22nd, 2020. Those under the age of twenty were also subsequently required to quarantine. Later, a 48-hour lockdown was declared in thirty-one provinces. This was announced by the Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu just two hours before it applied, which caused a certain degree of panic.

    People rushed to markets and shops in surprise, and the crowds of people were unable to maintain social distance as crowding ensued in many markets and bazaars, which led to the resignation of the Minister. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan refused to accept his resignment however. So the Minister kept his job.

    On May 10th, 2020, the transition period to a controlled social life began. However, in reality for many the transition period had already been happening, as many, old and young had refused to obey the prohibitions in the first place. Retail stores in most shopping malls across Turkey were allowed to open from May 11th.

    On July 1st, 2020, venues such as cinemas, theatres, and cultural and artistic centres opened in accordance with various rules. Later, on July 21, 2020, restrictions on the hours of businesses such as cafes and restaurants were also lifted.

    By mid-July, however, case numbers has doubled, but this did not translate into an increase in the number of patients in hospitals. For this reason, the public began to question the authenticity of the number of cases.

    At the same time, the Minister of Health’s statement that only those who show symptoms should be considered sick created a question mark in people’s minds.

    On January 1st, 2021, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca stated that fifteen people had been detected with the so-called U.K. variant. As a result, the Minister of Health temporarily halted all arrivals from the U.K. By January 2nd, 2021, variants of the Covid-19 virus first detected in the U.K., South Africa and Brazil were discovered for the first time in Turkey. This has heightened anxiety in many people.

    From the beginning of 2020 vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, SinoVac, Moderna, Sputnik V and AstraZeneca became available around the world. Two vaccines were offered in Turkey, first SinoVac and then Pfizer/BioNTech.

    This led to questioning as to which one was more effective, and what were the side effects. Especially on social media, many articles and appeared about the side effects. Many worried about being vaccinated, while others wanted to get vaccinated as soon as possible.

    The government set up a priority list for who should be vaccinated. President Erdoğan himself received a first dose when the social vaccination process began on January 14th.

    Then, more than 250,000 health workers received their first dose. The vaccination process continued in line with the groups determined after health workers: people aged 65 and over started to be vaccinated according to their wishes.

    With the vaccination process being carried out through family doctors, some complained about over-crowding and disorder. Many just wanted to get their vaccinations and return home as soon as possible.

    Over time, teachers, soldiers and policemen were offered the jab. Afterwards, the vaccination process continued with the determined priority groups.

    A total of over 34.8 million doses of vaccine have been administered in Turkey. The number of fully vaccinated people stands at 13.8 million out of a population of over eighty million.

    However, the public has been worried about this vaccination process, and continues to be, amid rumours the vaccines don’t work, and worries around side effects.

    As in many countries, the pandemic has witnessed a shift towards online work in Turkey. Businesses and individuals have developed remote working methods. Transactions such as online meeting, e-commerce, onlinebanking and digital payment have increased.

    In short, we can say that Turkish people have moved more and more online. Also, in this period, with longer periods spent at home, many have also developed an increased interest in cookery, sharing recipes online for bread, yogurt and other dishes.

    Moreover, various hobbies such as sports moved online, as people got used to innovating. Despite social distancing and the use of masks, people have continued to live their lives. But normal activities are still missed. Everyone is certainly looking forward to the end of this process and full normalization!

  • The Literary ‘Outsider’ Novel

    Does an age of frenetic online activity afford time for literary masterpieces, especially Outsider Novels, transcending what is considered ‘normal’?

    He whose vision cannot cover
    History’s three thousand years
    Must in outer darkness hover
    Live within the day’s frontiers.  

    The above stanza is from a twelve-book, poetry collection by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which was inspired by the work of fourteen century, Persian poet, Hafez.

    Rather than take the above stanza as concrete, it is worth taking it as an allegorical device, and metaphor, for what this piece sets out to champion: the work of the literary Outsider.

    With various electronic devices such as, the laptop, smartphone, iPad, and media outlets like Netflix, YouTube and other broadcasters, vying for our attention(s) – and successfully so – one must enquire into whether serious, attentive reading means anything anymore?

    Has the modern age – the tempered, electronic milieu – filtered out literary tomes?

    The very idea of ‘The Outsider’ literary work may be unnerving in what is an age of tantamount addiction to a frenetic social media; what the writer Will Self refers to as ‘bidirectional media.’ The resulting anxiety disinclines us to engage with what many may deem ‘difficult’ books, or ‘heavy’ tomes. Knocking the bottom out of the known literary universe.

    It might be said in relation to reading such books: who has aeons of uninterrupted time? In response you might say that the pandemic and lockdowns have afforded us such time. Note: no banana breads were harmed in the writing of this piece.

    Critics sometimes venture towards difficult literary works from a canon such as that identified in Harold Bloom’s tautological, yet, feverish and impassioned, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. These are the works of literature which ebb in from the external to the field of the Literary Arts, and which Bloom eulogises in his reviews.

    In 1812 by the Russian artist Illarion Pryanishnikov.

    War and Peace

    Who has read Tolstoy’s big bangers? War and Peace anyone? History’s frontiers fought over during the Napoleonic Wars, backed up with sweeping pastoral symphonies; with a charge of Russian calvary sweeping through the narrative, backed with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. A silver Samovar dispensing tea in the officers’ mess, the colour of unearthed rubies; tea sweetened with a cube of sugar, held between the drinker’s teeth.

    Or Tolstoy’s more subdued asides, with bucolic scenes of bleating lambs; and navvies sitting down in a wooded glade to consume their lunches. While out there in high summer, in the protracted Russian steppe, brown bears nosey along through tall grass to hallowed fishing grounds. With a scurry of gnats flitting at their ears.

    Or what about Joycean punnery – the nightbabble of Finnegans Wake – or Beckettian gurglespeak?

    If the safe, go-to novel is a halfway-house where thoughts run easily along the neuron-led rafters; where sable-eared bats hang, unruffled, in the belfry; where a forgotten greenhouse with cracked panes of burping green glass dwells in the back garden of the mind, they are there serving as a concrete, model village. Known territories; safe catch-all neighbourhoods, which imbue the reading-self with tangibility.

    There has been a loss of faith in big difficult books due to less than attentive mindsets; and upon latching on this, Mediocrity Inc., sweeps in to garner easier-to-read works, which dominate book charts. What does this say about the demographics so enamoured by ease of access?

    Literary, like most paradoxes, operate through conflating, and contracting, obligations. They are in a constant state of flux. (Not helpful for the binary-seeking world of the definite article, which Mediocrity Inc., often seek out to nail to the masthead.)

    Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, William Blake (1808)

    Self-Made

    When all the joy of writing is being sucked out of it by marketing mentalities, then things are in a bad way; they are, rather, Miltonesque: bleak; morally obtuse. Greed has taken over the minds of formerly, we hope, reasonable people.

    Quality dissipates in such trends.

    If you put your faith in the superficial, then the meaning of actual literature – that with substance – is diluted. Worship at the golden calf and you cannot expect your palpating thirst to be quenched.

    However, the brave, writing for themselves, writer(s) will always venture out towards a different plane to help buck these acclamatory, accepted trends. The strongly composed novel could be summed up as a transference of the quotidian whereby one’s will becomes the whole of the fictional law in an expansive, infinite world.

    Will Self is such a writer whose output is ‘challenging’. A writer, thinker, who goes it alone and does not yield to the Mediocrity Inc., whose plaintive, rebellious, immature cries rail that they know better, but which do not.

    Outsider Novel

    The stolid mentalities who often quip, “I couldn’t get into it”, say this, because, I believe, they are not prepared to challenge their perceptions of what the Outsider Novel means to them – an ungraspable leviathan which slips away into the listless fog.

    Five or six literary Outsider ‘heavy’ novels from the Western Literary Canon dominate and stand on the rostrum; representing the cornerstones of the literary house that encapsulate the Canon.

    Two have already been alluded to, and then there is: Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman. Bellicose in its exposition from conception to the screaming infant through to his uncle’s nose and to maturity.

    One of the first ‘Outsider’ works, it is inspired by the Rabelaisian, and inhabits the world of the absurd and the fabulist. There are long paragraphs on his Uncle’s Toby’s European adventures with his servant, Trim, and of course, reams of information on the prowess of his conk. It will have you amused if not bewildered at the thought of how he got away with publishing it in the 18th century.

    James Joyce’s Ulysses is a tome in tribute to the mimesis of life, and everything which Joyce termed ‘A shout in the street.’ It takes the epic towards modernism, and a rebirth of consciousness in the early-to-mid twentieth century. There are diegetic elements to the inner monologues of the characters and the streets of Dublin. You will find an urban mammoth with its quarry caught upon its wide tusks, braced with metal struts to keep the weight of the tome from falling.

    This is no Cuneiform script to procrastinate over, it is a layered, complex novel to be discovered. Through two main characters, Leopold Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus we find an unparalleled commentary on twenty-four-hours in Dublin on June 16th, 1904. That is the plot. Simple. Yet, all-encompassing. Tributaries, feeding into the literary infinity pools of the Liffey, and further afield.

    Hopefully readings of Ulysses will soon resume in Sweny’s Pharmacy.

    Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest

    Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is thronged – absolutely imbued – with a myriad of characters, and a talking lightbulb. Each copy of Gravity’s Rainbow should include its own Philharmonic Orchestra to play alongside the running-hare-prose. It is about the Second World War and V Rockets and their trajectory before falling to Earth on the places where a main character is having coitus.

    Sounds mad, right? Yes. Quite, but fantastical and industrious. The prow of this literary Gridiron, in a reading, a universal, Manhattan bearing down on the sugary pap and mulch which is dished out – and is not at all, nourishing.

    Launch of a V-2 rocket.

    David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is totemic in its appreciation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, with a nod to Don DeLillo, and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A trilogy, mainly, The 42nd Parallel.

    The plot of Infinite Jest is initially tertiary to Wallace’s intellect and ego in fluidity. The beginning is pure vaudeville to the main circus, big-top act which is the intellect of Foster Wallace himself and the prefrontal cortex mythology, which he conspired to create and then exuded, seemingly, so effortlessly. But did Foster Wallace write a capable work? Yes he did, but it is an apostrophic set of hymnals on tennis, drug addiction and geo-political set-ups.

    I looped the meta-modernist, hyper-realist circle and went along for the ride on David Foster Wallace’s encyclopaedic, metadata novel; figuring that while sedate prose is at the behest of book seller’s, and publishers – means and modes of production for the masses – I thought ‘To hell with this, give me a novel with shtick.’

    So, by means of reposed epidural, I plugged into Foster Wallace’s acicular vein, man, and plunged the diviner right on into the other side. And it is shtick all the way.

    Foster Wallace’s reliance on using nomenclature, acronyms are, well, trifling when you forget all the organisations he coins; we do know, for example, that O.N.A.N stands for Organization of North American Nations, a kind of dystopian superstate which is comprised of Mexico, the United States and Canada, and that the novel takes place during ‘The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’ Y.D.A.U. It opens with tennis. Wallace was a court man, he liked to court tennis and he schlongs his racket into being more often than enough in this work.

    This is not a linear prose tale as we know it.

    Transcendental Idealism

    These literary works fail to fall into the crushing jaws of a Western, ‘easy’ read sunset; they transcend the ‘normal’.

    The oddity of the largess of such peripatetic works are still revered by committed readers. Literature, and indeed, great literature was, and is, and will forever be, a magical portal which has the power to transport consciousness into another realm. Some works, some bigger, well-crafted works exist outside the normally accepted coda of what is regarded as ‘the novel,’ and do so by existing beyond the ‘day’s frontiers’, beyond paragraphs, in marginalia.

    And out there beyond the environs of ‘known-knowns’ lies the quotidian, infinite in its readiness to bypass the grassy verges of rhetoric, and up beyond ionosphere and stratosphere.

    On the y-axis of a line-graph in the evolutionary trajectory of the Outsider Novel, one could hope for, works which operate outside the perceived, ‘normative’ structures of the known, easy to digest novel. In a sense they occupy the strata of the strange, the unfamiliar; their tentacles reach into the dark nooks and cervices of the mind and bring lax grey-matter in there forward, and into pulsating, roving life.

    Kant’s house in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad).

    If one postulates further, and looks at Kant’s Transcendental Idealism in The Critique of Pure Reason, it can be said that space and time are merely formal features of how we perceive objects; not things in themselves, existing independently of ourselves, or properties or relations among them.

    Objects in space and time are said to be ‘appearances’, and Kant argues that we know nothing of substance about the things in themselves, of which they are appearances. He calls this doctrine (or set of doctrines) ‘transcendental idealism.’

    Ignorance along the lines of myopic conjecture about a novel one has not read, is the syphilitic chancre on the body of literature – based on appearances and perceived conjecture on what a novel is, without taking the trouble to read it. This is harmful, detracting from the creativity behind such a work.

    Literary Keys

    There are literary keys available to break those harder to ‘crack’ literary tomes. Those keys are in other books; yes, books which help you with books. Isn’t that what a dictionary is for, or a thesaurus for that matter?

    Take, again, Finnegans Wake, the indolent reader’s worst nightmare – they start by gambolling around in search of the missing apostrophe ignoring the entrée; and hell, they proclaim it to be the most difficult of books.

    In Christopher Marlowe’s adaptation on the stories of Faust, Doctor Faustus says, ‘Hell is just a frame of mind.’ The demonic Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus does, however, imply a similar idea by saying that losing his place in heaven gives him experience of hell wherever he is:

    Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
    Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,
    And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,
    Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
    In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?

    If one was to take the evolution of the novel, we could look at Sterne, Joyce then David Foster Wallace and who knows where the creative literary genre will head next?

    To Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann?

    Maybe the form has hit its parabolic arc, and now needs to descend for a while from its illustrious meridian.

    Break the mould – escape the insular, self-created Hell and free yourself. Read as far and as wide as the splendid sun, and beyond.

    Feature Image: Marilyn Monroe reading Joyce’s Ulysses in 1955 by Eve Arnold.

  • Musician of the Month: Ciara Sidine

    In Blood, Sex and Death, I Found Her

    Janet is pregnant and alone. Her boyfriend is god knows where and her dad is having none of it and wants to marry her off to a man of his choosing. She’s having none of that, and wants an abortion. And she’s damned if any man will tell her what to do. It is any time between the eleventh and the sixteenth century, in Scotland.

    Frankie Baker loved her boyfriend Allen Britt but she shot him anyway. Her gun was a .38 pistol, and when the time came, her aim was true. By the time Allen died, slowly and painfully in hospital days later, from a single shot wound to his stomach, a ballad about the event was already selling on street corners. It told a story in notes that swung, capturing the imagination of generations. It just wasn’t her story.

    A .38 pistol. In ‘murder’ ballad ‘Frankie and Johnny’, the real-life perpetrator of the shooting, Frankie Baker, was unhappy with how she was represented. Among other things was the gun detail. ‘It wasn’t a .44,’ she said, ‘it was just a little old Harrington & Richardson .38. And it couldn’t have gone roota-toot-toot, ’cause I only shot once.’ My new song ‘Don’t Do Me Wrong’ sets the record straight on the events of that fateful night in 1899.

    The old woman who lived in the woods killed a baby. We don’t know why she was left holding it, just that she was. Her chorus is a keening wail, a weile-weile-waile that rises from the depths of the well. It is so transcendent, so collective, that others can carry out its ancient, visceral work. Locate the cry in Famine times and its echoes might offer a clue to the circumstances that gave to it.

    Lily goes to war to be with her lover, which means pretending she’s a man. Into the bargain she saves his life. She gets to be a soldier and a heroine of the battlefield. You have to hand it to her. But I’m not completely convinced she set out on her heroine journey just to be with her guy. Perhaps she believed in the cause. Perhaps she was just deathly bored with her lot and craved some action.

    Polly Amorous

    Polly was savagely murdered while pregnant, by her boyfriend, who threw her body in a hole in the ground he’d chillingly spent the night before digging. She had it coming, he saw how other men looked at her – how would he ever truly possess such a woman? He goes off to sail the seas, but her ghost is furious and manifests on his ship, in her arms a revenant child. And he will not resist her beauty now, of this she makes sure, as she lures him to his death among the waves using the temptress charms of his projection.

    These were some of the voices that called out to me, as I set about exploring women’s experience in the folk music canon two years ago, voices that were captured at a moment in time, that shape-shifted according to its passage, and that carry with them its cultural and social context. As a singer-songwriter interested in and inspired by women’s perspectives, explored in such songs as ‘Finest Flower’ and ‘Trouble Come Find Me’, I hungered to know them, to explore their possibilities, their hidden aspects, their hearts. Were there new expressions asking to emerge?

    Ciara at the Unbroken Line album launch at the Sugar Club, Dublin, with members of Tuam Home Survivors Network Peter Mulryan, left, and Michael Flaherty, right. Ciara’s song ‘Finest Flower’ was inspired by the testimony of home mothers. Image © Lucy Foster.

    Spotify link to ‘Finest Flower’.

    Live recording of ‘Trouble Come Find Me’, inspired by the life of pioneering midwife Philomena Canning, with whom Ciara campaigned for justice for five years, until Philomena’s death in 2019:

    ‘Frankie and Johnny’

    It began with ‘Frankie and Johnny’. First written in 1899 in St Louis, Missouri, it was my grandmother’s party piece, the unlikely star of a repertoire that was more readily identified by rousing rebel songs of bold Fenian men, and mournful ballads to Cathleen Ni Houlihan, penned by her beloved uncle, songwriter Peadar Kearney.

    But Frankie and Johnny, telling the story of a cheating man and his jealous girlfriend, was the favourite of us kids, with its bold declaration that ‘there ain’t no good in men’, inevitably delivered with finger-pointing gusto by my grandmother Kay Considine. When I later discovered that the ballad was based on real-life events, I wanted to know more.

    Through available writings, along with newspaper reports and court documents of the time, I pieced together an alternative tale, which shifted it from a crime of passion into an act of survival, for a young black woman, a sex worker, who was the breadwinner in the relationship and asked in exchange for respect.

    The song, created in the direct aftermath of this pivotal event in her life and which dogged her until its end, failed to reflect an important fact, one which led to her acquittal on Friday 13th of October, 1899. (According to Frankie’s testimony, being granted her freedom on this most damned of dates had the welcome bonus of vanquishing her superstitious ‘omens black’.)

    As for what happened: Allen had entered Frankie’s bedroom in the small hours of the morning drunk, angry and wielding a knife. She shot in self-defence.

    Frankie Baker.

    This seemingly small detail blew me away. As I stared at my computer screen into the arresting, disquieting gaze of this queenly young woman – finely dressed, notably composed – I felt deep love for her memory.

    Later in life – ground down by events, unable to shake off the story that had been landed upon her, no matter where she went, and powerless over its representation of her (she even tried to sue two movie studios, to no avail) – she would live out her last days in penury, in an asylum.

    ‘Don’t Do Me Wrong’ is an homage to Frankie Baker and gives life to her perspective of the fateful night in 1899 when her young lover met with an early grave.

    Menstruation

    As I explored the folk music archives deeper – an uninvited, self-styled confidante of Her – I felt alive and open to nuance, to the spaces between the lines, to that which could not be spoken, and my love for the embattled heroine expanded.

    Her blood is lavishly spilled in folk balladry, but there is no mention of menstruation. Her body is readily filled with extra-marital pregnancies that locate her as an outcast, and yet there is no mention of male responsibility.

    She is raped and left bereft, and there is no justice. She commits infanticide in extreme desperation, and is cast as a crazed crone. All of women’s struggles through time – the desperate lot of wounded or deprived agency – find expression in our song heritage, and at times I wondered at how deep our keening goes, and if it is indeed as bottomless as a well. Yet her endurance, inner strength and tenacity reminds us that just as a wrecking ball can turn a world to rubble, something new can always be created from the ruins.

    The songs of Blood Sex Death platform heroines whose brave, often embattled, lives are offered new expression in unexpected ways, where Gothic tragedy, twisted tenderness and fierceness abound.

    A grant from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media as administered via the Music Industry Stimulus Package 2020 enabled me to begin recording this six-song EP of original material inspired by her voice, and once I secure funding to complete them, I look forward to releasing and performing the new material.

    Musical Origins

    As to how I came to music, perhaps motherhood was the metaphorical wrecking ball out of whose rubble I located my creative desire, and pursued it. In the new world order of an upended life, as two babies slept I fought maternal panic and exhaustion with poor guitar skills, an ear for melody and the strangely solid sensation that came from writing lyrics. Late-night bouts of songwriting alone in the kitchen were, my husband sensed, something urgent and tension-laced, not to be disturbed, even if it meant distance and loneliness for us both.

    And he was right. It was only through an imagined creative life being ripped from me as easily as a wet Band-Aid that I knew I’d been sleepwalking. A living heroine, Joni Mitchell, spoke of her grandmother’s descent into madness, and I sensed thwarted creativity in its mix.

    Fear can be a great motivator, and the chaos of early motherhood an effective stoker of its flames, especially when you’ve long had a nose for the smoky scent of female madness-terror. It was time to wake up from the dream. There is never a good time to start, so I might as well start now.

    Over a decade and two albums on, both independently produced, I can’t say it has been an easy road, but it has been a fascinating and rich one that has led me to places I could not have dreamed of in that kitchen space, late at night, afraid for what I would become if I hadn’t found a means of artistic expression. I’ve gotten to steer a course in music through a career in book publishing, motherhood, and activism, and keep on keeping on, through highs and lows.

    My latest project ‘Blood Sex Death’ feels like a coming of age. As I move steadily towards my half-century birthday, some might say it’s about time. For a late developer like me, dabbling in songs hundreds of years in the making, perhaps it is right on course.

    Feature Image: Fran Veale

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  • Flann O’Brien Labs Assess the €9 Lunch

    Breaking news from The Kimmage Chronicle: everything you need to know about live music and €9 lunches in the shifting Covid-19 landscape.

    Following rigorous retrials in the Flann O’Brien Laboratory, the €9 lunch – hitherto thought to be just a step too far in terms of potentially spreading Covid-19 – has been found to be safe.

    Food, ranging from the modest ‘soup and sambo’ combo to more complex multi-calorie three course meals were systematically cross-referenced in terms of price, calorie count and potential infectiousness.

    Volunteers, who are now all on intensive slimming and exercise programmes, were fed multiple meals that ranged in price from €6 to €54 (six times the potency of the €9 threshold).

    The temperature monitoring of participants followed swiftly after each meal consumed, and the volunteers were suitably napkined by lab researchers, and wearing suits designed by NASA, while conducting tasks.

    The results are startling. Volunteers reported feeling a definite ‘sense of the absence of hunger’ after consuming those meals that fell into the lower price range, whereas the mid-range meals produced both ‘an absence of the sense of hunger and also a deep feeling of gastronomic satisfaction.’

    Lunches above €30 uniformly produced unsettling emotions among all volunteers such as ‘being ripped off’; ‘being made feel inadequate by words I didn’t understand on the menu’; and ‘a sense of peer pressure to eat beyond my means in places recommended by the Irish Times.’ Physical symptoms included participants feeling ‘bloating and drowsiness..’ Remarkably, all participants tested negative for COVID-19 in each of the price categories.

    Now, at the government’s bequest, the Flann O Brien Laboratory is carrying out extensive musical research on volunteers as they work off the calories.

    Three distinct live music experiences have been set up, along with cutting edge gym equipment for the volunteers, allowing them to exercise while being exposed to potentially infectious music.

    1. Live Classical Music

    This is without doubt the most expensive experiment ever undertaken by the Flann O’Brien Laboratory. It involves the RTE Symphony Orchestra with featured soloist Finghin Collins playing Beethoven’s ‘Emperor Concerto.’ Each member of the orchestra was flown to Cape Canaveral, where Astral Tailors designed suits for them that entirely sealing their bodies, save for fingers or lips where necessary for playing their designated instruments. Circled around the orchestra is the gym equipment where the volunteers vigorously work out. Their body temperatures are taken at the end of the concerto’s three movements. The test is being run nine times.

    Collins said: ‘This is definitely a Beethoven Marathon like no other. The adagio, famously used in ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ may induce feelings of almost unbearable melancholy, but hopefully without transmission of Covid-19. Who knows how we will feel after playing it nine times or indeed how the volunteers will feel having to listen to it nine times over the course of a single day, while simultaneously lifting weights and doing press ups! It’s an audience like no other. This is History!’

    1. The Jazz Improvisation Group

    To protect the Jazz musicians, NASA’s Astral Tailors joined forces with suit makers ‘Brooks Brothers,’ purveyors of the most dapper jazz attire ever conceived, to design sealed suits that wouldn’t look out of place in The Village Vanguard. Style meets the absence of gravity like never before!

    An assemblage of work out equipment has been placed around the Jazz stage. The quartet is led by tenor saxophonist Michael Buckley, who will play through John Coltrane’s entire ‘Giant Steps’ album, nine times, just as the Symphony Orchestra are doing with Beethoven.

    ‘Forget touring the world with Glen Hansard and playing ‘Falling Slowly’ a million times over, no, this is my greatest challenge ever,’ said Buckley. He concluded: ‘Playing through Coltrane’s changes on the seven album tracks, nine times in one day, is the toughest task I’ve ever been set, I love my new suit though!’

    Researchers are especially keen to ascertain if there are any signs of infection or changes in temperature between the tempo shift in a ballad like ‘Naima’ and the complex up tempo chordal changes of the opening title ‘Giant Steps.’

    1. Techno/Dance

    Here, NASA have collaborated with Daft Punk’s design team to come up with an innovative sealed costume for turntable maestro Johnny Moy. There will be no gym equipment here as volunteers will be administered with a dose of lab-tested MDMA, which will keep them dancing without pause for nine hours. Researchers are especially keen to discover if, during the Techno Test, volunteers will refrain from hugging each other and declaring their undying love. Moy said ‘Am well up for it! A nine hour set is a fuckin’ dream come true, I’ve got ten bags of bangers packed here, bring it on!’

    Preliminary data from these tests, subject to peer review, indicate we can expect the NCH to open before The Electric Picnic (which NEPHT want to see rebranded as ‘The Acoustic Brunch’) is allowed to relaunch. Jazz as always is being overlooked. Buckley and his combo are running through ‘Giant Steps’ for the eighth time now and researchers are monitoring each segue very closely.

  • Palestine: What happens when the violence ends?

    Self-defence, blood lust, ethnic cleansing, disproportionate response, mowing the lawn, genocide, death from the sky. It’s up to you however you wish to describe the unparalleled violence unleashed on Gaza.

    I describe it as shooting or in this case bombing Palestinians in a barrel. Let’s have a brief resume of what’s happened.

    The district of Sheikh Jarrah is in East Jerusalem, which was the proposed capital of a Palestinian state. The signing of the Oslo Agreement in 1993 led to further Israeli expansion into the West Bank. Since then areas like Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah have been systematically targeted by the illegal Jewish Settler movement, which uses Israeli courts to award Zionist Jews the homes and land currently occupied by Palestinians.

    If you take nothing else from this article please remember the Occupation is illegal under international law, therefore every decision taken by the Occupation army, the illegal settlers. Yet the Apartheid Israeli judiciary routinely sends Palestinian including young children to prison on extracted false confessions, many made under duress, under physical threat.

    In some cases children are handed false confessions written in Hebrew, which they cannot understand, and are told these are official release forms. The kids sign them thinking they are going home but in reality, these are confessions that will condemn them to jail.

    Add to this ‘Administrative Detention’, Imprisonment without trial, and we have the flawed corrupt Apartheid regimes conveyor belt to jail. All of this is illegal.

    As a result many Human Rights organisations describe Israel as an apartheid state. This is because Zionism, a political ideology is inherently Apartheid.

    Israelis protest against Netanyahu outside his official residence in Jerusalem on 30 July 2020.

    Corruption Charges

    Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now facing corruption charges. A former Israeli Knesset member during a CNN interview accused him of inciting the current round of violence by continuing Israel’s expansionist, illegal land grabs in the Occupied West Bank, and also through the attacks on people at prayer, men, women and children at the Al-Aqsa mosque, towards the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

    Is seems conceivable that the leader of the seventh largest military force on Earth would engineer a state of conflict between Israel and a people without an army, air force or navy, to protect themselves. All they have is local militias, composed of the fathers and sons, mothers and daughters of the local community.

    But if an Israeli Knesset member says exactly that, then it must carry some weight.

    The Dust Settles

    So, where are we now and who won and who lost?

    As the bloodletting ends, as it must, the dead are buried and the dust settles over the destroyed building, like a shroud over Gaza.

    The reality is, everything will be the same and yet everything has changed utterly.

    I have always been sceptical when I heard claims following previous attacks on Gaza that the resistance has won.

    I genuinely thought it was just bravado for the masses. When we see the death toll, the numbers injured and the devastating damage to civilian homes, hospitals and the infrastructure, I have to ask how have they possibly won?

    The loss of life alone is unimaginable in such a small environment. Twenty-five miles by six miles, that is the size of the Ards Peninsula in Northern Ireland, with the equivalent of the entire two million population of Northern Ireland squeezed into it.

    Thus far, the destruction in Gaza is an incredible scale.

    The targeting and killing of whole families is a war crime in itself.

    The systematic destruction of all roads leading to the main hospitals in Gaza, preventing ambulances and victims from accessing acute services is another war crime. The wanton destruction of family homes, farms, places of worship and work are too.

    The Resistance has Won

    The latest Blitzkrieg on Gaza is just another Zionists war on civilians that will never be forgotten. Israel claims its aims were to degrade the military capabilities of Hamas and other resistance groups in Gaza. It cites rockets fired from Gaza as the pretext.

    Under international law, however, with Israel illegally occupying the West Bank and enjoying control air, sea and land borders around Gaza, the Palestinians have a right to resist the Occupation, by any means necessary, including armed resistance.

    Then this David versus Goliath battle is one of the Palestinian David with rocks and rockets legally resisting an illegal Goliath occupation, which uses gunboats, tanks, artillery shells, drones and F16, F35 jets to bomb and murder Gazans at will, and without any recourse to the rules of war.

    The reality is that Israel will only end the bloodshed once it has expended the armaments supplied to it by America France  Britain and the EU.

    Yet Israel has failed again in its stated objective to destroy the ability of the resistance in Gaza to challenge the Occupation. It did not have the courage to commit ground troops as the cost in Israeli soldiers lives was deemed potentially to be too high.

    The resistance groups retain both the ability, and the will, to continue to resist the illegal Occupation and siege by any and all means necessary.

    The attacks on Gaza are a proxy threat to other nations in the region. We will do the same ‘to you’ is the message from Israel. Indeed, Israel routinely bombs Syria in another example of its illegal war crimes, while their military leaders have stated on numerous occasions that they will bomb Gaza back into the stone age.

    I know, it’s hard to believe, but the resistance has won! Gaza may have been levelled: the suffering of the dead, the injured and the dying is unfathomable.

    But while Gaza has been destroyed, the spirit of resistance embodied in the people has survived. This provides the impetus to continue demands for equality, peace, freedom and justice for Palestinians and Palestine survives, not just in Gaza but in East Jerusalem, in Sheikh Jarrah, in the West Bank, in Al-Aqsa and across historic Palestine, which Zionists call Israel.

    Netanyahu has only succeeded in uniting Israelis in their demand for his prosecution for corruption and united Palestinians for the first time in a generation in their defence of Al-Aqsa, East Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah and Gaza. A new generation of resistance has been born, united and unified from the river to the sea.

    Did Netanyahu help create the conditions that made this latest attack on Gaza inescapable? Is the shedding of blood in Gaza simply a political gambit aimed at a domestic audience?

    Is it a case of: he or she who kills the most Palestinians getting the most votes?

    Alas, history certainly bears that perspective out to be true.

    Moving Forward

    What Gaza needs is financial support, rebuilding materials, medicine, hope and solidarity in equal measures.

    What it will get is another 50,000 or more refugees, many of whom were previously refugees from the Israeli murder and bombing campaigns of 2014/2009/1967/1948.

    This further degrades Palestinian civil society’s ability to respond to the damage to lives, homes, infrastructure and the economy.

    Egypt is complicit in the siege. It will not help Gaza or Palestine. The humanitarian catastrophe will continue apace

    Israel sells Gaza water, gas, oil and electricity. It makes a profit from all of these utilities. The profits of Occupation.

    And yet the spirit of Resistance has prevailed once again. But the price of resisting the continued illegal Zionist Israel occupation of Palestine is a continued loss of liberty and life for Palestinians.

    The continues loss of life, homes, farms, workplaces, mosques, schools, hospitals, clinics, the loss of innocence in the young, their hopes dashed for the future, and their dreams of a life free from violent occupation, imprisonment, death from the skies. This is a psychological trauma seemingly without end.

    When the bombs stop flying in the east the people stop protesting in the West. Will you stand with Palestine. Or simply melt away like snow on a ditch until the next murderous bombing raids occur?

    Peace needs you now. Palestinians need you now. The future generations being born into captivity need you now.

    What will you do to help end the madness of a rogue Apartheid state and bring peace to the people of the Middle East and West Asia? It is in your hands

    Feature Image: Destroyed house in Gaza City, December 2012.