Cassandra Voices

Tag: uncategorized

  • An Irish Poet Attains Greatness

    I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O’Siadhail’s book-length poem, The Five Quintets, is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O’Siadhail’s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter a paradise of compromise, love and engagement, whilst crisscrossing the disabling specialisms that bedevil our time.

    Inspired in particular by Dante Alighieri’s thirteenth century journey through heaven, hell and purgatory in The Divine Comedy, O’Siadhail introduces us to men especially, and women, who have shaped, and distorted, our modernity. The Italian poet himself is channelled, offering to guide O’Siadhail’s journey through hell to ‘heaven’s vertigo’, ‘And summing up an era work the seam / Between the modern world and its aftermath’.

    T.S Eliot’s influence also lurks in the poem’s title – an allusion to his The Four Quartets – which, O’Siadhail writes in the introduction, ‘feels it needed a fifth part’, as it ‘never really gets to the joy and let-go of an imagined heaven’. The influence of that American poet is held in check, as this literary shark, ‘demands an absolute / To order seas of doubt which rage inside’.

    Moral absolutists are, without fail, scorned in O’Siadhail’s schema. The heaven which he glimpses is never fixed, but in play, and informed by the principle of uncertainty. Similarly, utopia, ‘no place’, is a term frequently used to denigrate those theorists whose intellectual pride obscures a vision of an elusive paradise.

    O’Siadhail’s muses are numerous, but ‘Madame Jazz’, an earlier incarnation, acts as a Virgil-like sidekick throughout.

    Although each sacred book’s a lip-read score,
    Improvising there is always more;
    You jazz on what’s our own and our rapport.

    Each solo and ensemble of a piece,
    Grooves and tempos shifting without cease,
    We flourish in a syncopated peace.

    In all our imperfections we advance,
    Trusting in creation’s free-willed chance;
    Sweet Madam Jazz, in you we are the dance.

    Her gyrations allow O’Siadhail to fix on a horizon in constant, though not immediately apparent, motion.

    In the final section, we also encounter Dante’s Beatrice, who perhaps best captures the rupture which O’Siadhail’s work seeks to heal:

    You mortals down below can fail to see
    how marvels coded in the universe
    reflect the face of God’s infinity.

    Too graceless, too constrained, you still immerse
    yourselves in steps and miss out on the dance –
    the scientists and poets don’t converse

    or celebrate each quantum of advance,
    discovering a heaven’s cameo
    in God, the gambler’s mix of love and chance.

    Laurens van der Post wrote: ‘For me the passion of spirit we call “religion”, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.’ O’Siadhail’s work may help restore a moral compass to the great scientific adventures, which have brought mastery over planet Earth, but often with unintended, or unacknowledged, costs. Religious, including many poets, in turn, might no longer see themselves as being in opposition to science, but in fruitful communication with its inherent mysteries.

    II – The badger and the fox.

    In the first quintet, Making, we meet a host of writers, musicians and artists, who are assigned in haikus (or ‘saikus’ – a neologism) an animal or plant spirit. These are followed by carefully crafted sonnets, combining narrative accounts and artists’ voices, channelled through O’Siadhail. He rhapsodises on the achievements of many, but there are stinging observations on the artistic limitations, or myopia, of others.

    Thus, William Wordsworth’s legacy is tainted by a failure to generate the epics he had dreamed of, his Prelude represents: ‘All Foothills to the peaks you never reached’; while Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Youth’s promise’ was diminished ’in opium’s malaise’.

    That arch-worrier Franz Kafka is consigned to a ‘sleepless hell’, as O’Siadhail condemns him for feeding ‘… the wizened dreams of minds withdrawn / Your nightmare’s broken trust denying dawn.’ While Pablo Picasso has become, ‘A famous for being famous millionaire’, unhinged by fortune and acclaim.

    For others there is reverence, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for never deviating from a desire ‘to stanch life’s sufferings’, and having, ‘No truck with any cause but moral truth’. In his compassion we find a ‘glimpse of paradise’.

    Classical composers including Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gustav Mahler and J. S. Bach are also celebrated, but Richard Wagner, ‘a lone wolf’, is condemned for mustering dark nationalistic forces. Elsewhere, O’Siadhail’s George Frederic Handel conveys the sublime balance of his oeuvre.

    I only want to hold the music’s line
    A flighty psyche focused on its goal
    So every voice can shine but not outshine,
    From all the woven parts create the whole.

    Painters are less evident among these shades, but his description of Francisco Goya’s ‘Third of May’ ’merits retelling:

    Where fusiliers have turned their nameless back
    And bend to execute their point blank prey;
    My lamp of pity lights the victim’s face.

    The ‘Third of May’, by Francisco Goya.

    Irish readers will be intrigued by his encounters in our literary pantheon. Suitably, W.B. Yeats is depicted as a badger, ‘the churning digger / With its nose close to the ground’. O’Siadhail hails him as ‘the archpriest of sound’, and, unusually, integrates and adapts many of his lines, such as ‘Old lecher with a love on every wing’, from the still smouldering Tower.

    But there is a stern rebuke for his promotion of eugenics: ‘scorning base-born products of base beds’, and unwillingness to look beyond a fantastical world that is, ‘dead and gone … That perfect past your mind’s own cul de sac’. Instead O’Siadhail urges: ‘Retrieve best thoughts once shed and then move on’.

    Characterised as a badger, W.B. Yeats.

    O’Siadhail is similarly conflicted over James Joyce’s legacy, admitting to loving a language ‘burbling up in play’. From one great linguists to another, O’Siadhail tells him he is as good a reader as, ‘you’ll get to understand your punning riverrun’, but counters, ‘I know the charge of words, and yet and yet’.

    He wonders if his fellow Jesuit-educated writer’s works hold, ‘a microscope that is too small in scale’, and whether, ‘in the end does anything take flight’. This might come as a relief to those who have baulked at Finnegans Wake’s circumlocutions.

    O’Siadhail is suspicious of a character ‘so proud and so obsessed’, for whom others are ‘walk on parts in your world’s play’. He scorns the, ‘dreamlike doodling of an introvert’. But there is high praise indeed for Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses, including a playful pun of his own:

    Still once at least, though in a woman’s voice,
    I didn’t pun or try to be opaque
    But spoke my shortest playful work of praise
    And yes, in Molly’s yes I did reJoyce.

    The other two Irish writers we meet are Patrick Kavanagh, ‘A kamikaze trusting in God’s wind’, who, ‘In hungry times’, paid the price’, for being a ‘peeping Tom who lusts for paradise’; along with praise for Brian Friel’s ‘impish wit’.

    Notably absent are Seamus Heaney (who has perhaps been canonized prematurely?), and Samuel Beckett. Elsewhere O’Siadhail has criticised the interiority of Modernists, who refused to take responsibility ‘for shaping a wider meaning’. He continues:

    Apart from the risk of solipsism and plain self-indulgence, there is the risk of turning poetry into a kind of private piety, which ends up marginalising poetry or branding it as some kind of academic pursuit not appropriate to the ordinary reader of books.

    Refreshingly, however all-encompassing his themes, O’Siadhail’s language is never self-indulgent, and always endeavours to inform.

    III – ‘The Dismal Science’

    O’Siadhail tells the story of the making and undoing of our modernity by theorists and movers and shakers, as he seeks to reshape our current approaches. The self-imposed constraints of metre, and often rhyme, bring a pleasant economy of expression.

    O’Siadhail’s ambition to tell the story of our time in The Five Quintet recalls the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which draws together the mythologies that informed an understanding of the ancient world  in order to forge a new consciousness. Here the Classical titans give way to seminal figures such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, J. M. Keynes, Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen, along with men of commerce, who are today often vemerated as heroes.

    The bargain struck, the business done,
    The dealer’s will and drive for wealth,
    Our new concern with number one.

    One self-interested specimen on display is Ireland’s own Michael Fingleton:

    Still bent on short-term deals to boost
    A bottom line. A bonus-gained,
    Already on your way to ruin
    All caution to the winds – who cares?
    Ambitious tiger burning bright
    And brazen in your riot-run
    You do not know the dust you’ll bite.

    It seems unlikely O’Siadhail sought legal advice on the potential for defamation in this section. It would certainly make for quite a trial to find the poet in the dock against the disgraced banker. A defence of justification should be available for the following lines:

    Small loaners find you’ll go to law
    To take your pound of flesh to pay
    What’s owed; for bigger borrowers
    You bend or buck to make the rules,
    Indulge whatever debts occur.

    There is a nuanced treatment of Adam Smith’s contribution to economic theory. Laissez faire, permits ‘the hidden hand’ to operate, leading to competition which generates efficiencies, but which at all times requires vigilance against ‘crafty dealers’ in league, ‘to fix a price and profit by intrigue’.

    O’Siadhail’s ‘modern mind’ cannot understand, however, Smith’s failure to rail against children being harnessed in black holes ‘Deep down in Durham’s shafts and pits’. He also points to the irony of merchants, ‘Whose mean rapacity you taunt’, adopting Smith as their first forebear.

    O’Siadhail has interesting reflections on Robert Malthus, who may yet be vindicated in his prediction that food production capacity will not keep pace with the demand of a growing population:

    Your thesis bites so near the bone.
    Malthusian views now haunt our thoughts;
    These times will know a darker tone.

    Is this the onset of a devastating Climate Change he is referring to?

    O’Siadhail is conflicted in his appreciation of Karl Marx, hailing him as a visionary who foresees ‘as no one else had seen’, that four hundred billionaires would hold just half our wealth, alongside the ‘constant gyres of boom and bust’, apparent in late capitalism.

    Karl Marx, ‘a know-all coldness’.

    But according to O’Siadhail, the Communism that Marx imagines contains a core failing evident in its designer, ‘a know-all coldness at your core’. Indeed, being a ‘know-all’ is an oft-repeated barb, leading to the delusion of utopia. This point is central to O’Siadhail’s diagnosis of what has brewed many of our present troubles. Thus Marx is condemned for failing to conceive of compromise, ‘Where conflicts would be reconciled’.

    We also meet J.M. Keynes who learns by listening to his peers, and is thus lionised as a ‘Soft changer, saint of step by step’, who recognises how, often, only government stimuli will lift an economy out of the doldrums:

    The system does not cure itself;
    So maybe it needs money lent
    To make it flow and multiply

    Far less favourable is O’Siadhail’s assessment of Milton Friedman, another ‘know-all’, whose rigour ‘will room no doubt / Your mind demands all black and white’. While acknowledging he served up some neglected thoughts, O’Siadhail chides him for using Keynes’s ‘one defect’ – of failing to appreciate the significance of monetary supply – to justify opposition to all state interference with the ‘hidden hand’.

    Instead we find: ‘Free flow finance gives quick-fix gains / But blows up bubbles that must burst’, where, ‘The wily then are winners all’. O’Siadhail plumbs for the Scandinavian laws: ‘Where weak need not go to the wall’.

    One Scandinavian theorist we meet is Thorstein Veblen, who reveals an acute understanding of why workers are not always sympathetic to Marxist ideas.

    Society does not cohere in hate–
    All workers really want to emulate
    Their boss – the weak are would-be rich at heart;
    If Marx had not been wrong and me not right
    The poor would tear society apart.

    O’Siadhail sees a need for more than Marxist materialism to meet the challenge of inequality. The height of wisdom arrives from a woman, and ‘cub economist’, Kathryn Tanner, who finds in the ‘love-dream born of Bethlehem’ the possibility of mending the distortions of the market place.

    Tanner, through O’Siadhail, says:

    Is this utopian, I hear you ask,
    A heaven here on earth, a hopeless task,
    Another revolution run roughshod?
    O no! It’s here and now we must uphold
    The common right of all to gifts of God.

    This is perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Christianity of this world’, grounded in earthly challenges, rather than lofty metaphysics. One might also discern the influence of his intellectual brother-in-arms the theologian David Ford.

    IV – The Art of the Possible

    The next section, entitled Steering, meditates on good governance. O’Siadhail decries the fantasists of left and right, while bemoaning ‘tweedle dee’ and ‘tweedle dum’ politics, such as we find in Ireland. He warns: ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy.’

    O’Siadhail’s continues to inveigh against ‘know-all’ attitudes, warning the reader to guard against the real sympathies of utopians.

    Fear ideas that outreach the heart,
    Chilled compassion of the ideologue.
    What purports to pity broken lives
    Often hides a know-all arrogance
    That wants to own the future and the past,
    So refuses, starting from the now.
    Greedy for the perfect all create
    Hells of blood and soil and golden age.

    Readers might be intrigued by his descriptions of Margaret Thatcher, ‘Forthright Grantham grocer’s girl’, as an autocrat. Her parvenus attitude reflects Thorstein Veblen’s earlier insights into the aspirational, “would be rich”, working class:

    Some who shin the tall and greasy pole
    Carry in their bones a sympathy,
    Want to spare all comers such a climb;
    Others vaunt their courage and condemn
    Weakness they had fought to overcome,
    See all frailness as a threat to power.

    Margaret Thatcher: tearing apart society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.

    In O’Siadhail’s account Thatcher is prompted by Keith Joseph, ‘To rethink all in Milton Friedman’s words’. This leads to the tearing of society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.

    There is also an intriguing description of the arch-networker, Jean Monnet, one of the original architects of the European Community. O’Siadhail traces the current fraying of the Union right back to the failure of Monnet and others to conjure, beyond simply commerce and trade, a European identity, based on ‘deeper bonds and ties’.

    Perhaps writing in the wake of the Greek and Irish bailouts, O’Siadhail seems wary of ‘Brussels’ one-fits-all’ approach:

    Starred blue flag so dutifully raised,
    Still not fluttering in our chambered hearts
    Heaven is no timeless superstate.

    In Canto 5 of this section, ‘A Beckoned Dream’, O’Siadhail reveals a political paradise comprising of William Ewart Gladstone, who accepted Irish Home Rule, Mahatma Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold, the ‘United Nations’ guiding star of peace’, Nelson Mandela and, less convincingly, former Irish President Mary McAleese, who is commended for building sectarian bridges among ‘Ghosts of Europe’s once religious wars.’

    I found this choice puzzling as McAleese was more of a figurehead as Irish President, and did less to interrogate the rising tide of inequality in Ireland than her successor Michael D. Higgins. Moreover, McAleese was an electoral candidate (in the 1987 General Election) for Fianna Fail under the corrupt leadership of Charles Haughey, who also tactically rejected the reconciliatory Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and her Presidential candidature came during the tenure of another tainted figure in Bertie Ahern.

    I would prefer to have seen greater emphasis on environmental responsibility in this cockpit, as humanity stares down the barrel of self-inflicted ecological collapse. Perhaps some will be frustrated by the idea that political change cannot arrive more quickly than in ‘Fractions less imperfect than before’, considering the challenges that now press against us, but his emphasis on the value of dialogue is surely correct: ‘Gaze-to-gaze in our humanity / Enmity we can thaw … ’

    V – God and Science

    The two final cantos Finding and Meaning, covering Science and Philosophy, might stretch most readers more than the first three; although O’Siadhail never succumbs to drawing too liberally from his rich pallet of languages and knowledge. It will be intriguing to encounter scientific responses to his account of the great leaps forward in our understanding of the universe.

    Following his rejection of the fixity of political utopias, O’Siadhail sees a cosmos born of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, as opposed to a ‘knotty crossword yielded clue by clue’ that is capable of completion. Here we encounter a God that plays dice.

    In Meaning, O’Siadhail continues to riff (in Dante’s own terza rima) on the unknowableness of the divine:

    Allow our God a purpose not our own
    and here outside a timeless roundelay
    we dance within our fragile ecozone

    Here we meet the shades of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and a sneering Friedrich Nietzsche, who is condemned for a lack of compassion, and an unwillingness to compromise, yet:

    Despite his detached mind’s strange solitaire,
    for all mad Nietzche’s overreaching claims,
    his genius shows how humans overbear;

    Next come Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre – dismissed as a ‘a braggadocio of angst that sinks / to vanish in the nothingness of hell’ – Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricouer, Said Nursi, and Jean Vanier, who wonders ‘What if the weak become our first concern / what if such love decides our balance sheet’.

    Vanier also offers encouragement to the poet:

    this poem may be a slow fuse to guide
    the moments in our psyches which allow
    an amplitude, a deeper second sight.

    Then Hannah Arendt again condemns:

    Utopians who weave their gossamer
    ideal never see the here and now;
    for such far sight the present blur,

    We also meet O’Siadhail’s first wife, who died some years ago after a long illness:

    In your compassion, Bríd, I think I grow
    and understand how only love can heal;
    I learn to feel what others undergo.

    Finally, there is a dreamy vision of Paradise in which O’Siadhail travels along a path between two parallel rows of trees each ‘interwoven with its counterpart’, ‘in curves of paradox which shape the light’.

    VI – Poetic Futures

    O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets synthesises many of the great intellectual questions of our time. In so doing O’Siadhail fits Robert Graves’s description of a poet as, ‘the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster’s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that.’ O’Siadhail keeps asking the big questions, having refused the easy chair of academia, where poetry often becomes an obscure word game, and a private members’s club. Authentic poetry may still be difficult, but this arises from considering profound questions.

    The length of The Five Quintets also poses the question as to whether long form, epic, poetry may come back into vogue.

    Previously, the Canadian literary critic Northrope Frye argued that Edgar Allan Poe’s essay ‘The Poetic Principle’, published posthumously in 1850, had a ‘tremendous influence on future poetry’. Poe proposed that a long poem was a contradiction in terms, and that all existing long poems of genuine quality consisted of moments of intense poetic experience, ‘stuck together with a connective tissue of narrative or argument which was really versified prose.’

    Frye regarded this as preposterous, but a preference for brevity, which may mask a lack of ambition or vision, is still apparent.

    May we revisit a Romantic Age to recover long form poetry, when poets, such as Coleridge and Shelley, were participants in scientific debates? Indeed the word science was only coined in the 1830s. Since then it has become the preserve of specialists.

    The master poet. Image (c) Julia Hembree Smith.

    I was a little disappointed not to meet the shade of Shelley, who had less than thirty years to impart his genius. Perhaps O’Siadhail shrank from the apparent violence of his near namesake’s earlier pronouncements on the ‘necessity’ of atheism and the revolutionary sentiments of much of his early verse, but over the course of his short life his outlook mellowed.

    Just as Shelley’s challenged vested interests, similarly I suspect The Five Quintets will make some readers distinctly uncomfortable: first, it exposes gaping holes in most of our appreciation of the wonders of human thought and creation; secondly, it challenges the social and economic structures we live under; thirdly, it dismisses the delusional quick-fixes of utopians; finally, he challenges a prevalent view that religion and science are irreconcilable.

    I also anticipate that the poem will only be given the credit it deserves in Ireland once it has received the imprimatur of international critics.

  • The Key Change to Fix the Irish Constitution

    The Harp needs more than tuning. The single most important and useful change we should make to our Constitution is to remove the first paragraph of Article 45 which reads:

    Directive Principles of Social Policy

    The principles of social policy set forth in this article are intended for the general guidance of the Oireachtas. The application of those principles in the making of laws shall be the care of the Oireachtas exclusively, and shall not be cognisable by any court under any of the provisions of this constitution.

    As detailed below, this article provides clear instruction to the Oireachtas to ensure the material welfare of the people, but, crucially, prevents any meaningful judicial enforcement.

    Article 45 covers a lot, instructing the Oireachtas:

    • to promote the welfare of the entire people.
    • to secure wage equality and sufficiency.
    • to manage the natural assets to ‘subserve the common good.’
    • to prevent free competition from detrimental concentration of essential commodities.
    • to manage credit for the benefit of the people.
    • to ensure private enterprise is efficient and where lacking be supplemented by the State.
    • to safeguard the interests of the weak and needy.
    • to ensure the health of the people and prevent exploitation.

    There is so much to welcome here. It is clear, humane, balanced, and entirely workable. Sadly, our Constitution grants the Oireachtas, and hence the Government, a judicial free-hand, and so allows them to ignore their responsibilities.

    An amendment to remove the offending ‘cognisable’ clause, highlighted above, would allow judicial oversight of the vast majority of Government business, requiring efficiency, charity and compassion.

    There is limited jurisprudence on the matter. Initially the courts refused to countenance any argument appealing to Article 45, but it has also served as guidance, insofar as it has been used to inform decisions. This progressive approach to allow reference to the Article has yet to be accepted by the Supreme Court, and current conservative thinking reckons it to be clearly beyond the competence of any court: ‘an invalid usurpation of legislative authority’, and a breach of the separation of powers.

    Quite apart from rendering these goals easily ignored by the government, as citizens we have no recourse in law against any government for failing in its duties. Witness the Housing Crisis, Direct Provision, wage inequality, the gap between the minimum and a living wage, the destruction of natural habitats, commercial exploitation of natural resources, multinational tax avoidance, and the general inefficiency of public services, especially health care in all its forms.

    Instead, our government suggests we turn our attention to the Blasphemy clause. This is welcome among secularists, profoundly uncomfortable for the devout, and so will stir a lot of debate but it will make no meaningful difference to the lives of people.

    Consider one issue afflicting the Nation: the Housing Crisis

    The ideology that free markets are inherently efficient is rampant across the world, and clearly evident in Ireland. The common belief that only very lightly regulated business can achieve efficiencies unobtainable in the public sector is especially clear in our Government’s current policies. This avoids both the fundamental conceptual problem of measuring efficiency in terms of money, or more generally wealth creation, and also breaches sections 1, 2-ii, 2-iii, 2-iv, 2-v, 3-ii, and 4-1 of Artcle 45.

    There are almost 100,000 empty houses in Ireland, and about 10,000 homeless people, of which some 3,755 are children, in 1,739 families.

    Rents are rising rapidly, and are already 23% above the pre-Recession peak.

    Rather than exercise Eminent Domain and issue Compulsory Purchase Orders, an old and well established technique of Government, to buy and re-use exiting property to house families, the Oireachtas is considering the Home Building Finance Ireland Bill, which proposes:

    to provide for the establishment of a company called Home Building Finance Ireland (HBFI), to increase the availability of debt funding for residential development in the State. HBFI will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.

    The Bill facilitates funding of HBFI from resources currently held by the Irish Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), the granting of the necessary power to the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) to provide staff and services to HBFI on a cost recoverable basis, the granting of specific powers to HBFI to enable it to carry on the business of residential development finance, and ensures appropriate accountability for HBFI.

    This overtly favours property developers, contrary to the common good. Indeed, the cost of administering this HBFI will likely run to many millions, millions which could be spent directly by the Government on building and maintaining public housing.

    Consider section 2-iv of Article 45 states:

    that in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole.

    This bill favours developers over the people who are in most need of housing. It is against the spirit of Article 45, but our current Government is happier delegating responsibility to poorly overseen private quangos. This is just one example of why we need to be able to challenge our Government in our Courts.

    Were we to remove the offending paragraph we could not only pursue our indolent government in our Courts for their derelictions of duties to the people; we could also ensure that all future legislation would take full account of our socio-economic rights.

    This is not a charter for vexatious litigants, it should not and would not allow suit against the Government for minor infringements. The Supreme Court is, by necessity, selective in the cases it hears, and once a matter is decided there the precedent is binding on lower courts. But the doctrine of Separation of Powers should not allow the Supreme Court to deny jurisdiction over any part of our Law.

    Let us recall that these principles of Article 45 are already for the guidance of the Oireachtas. That our elected representatives neglect their responsibilities is nothing short of abhorrent.

    It is our Constitution and we must change it. It is up to us as citizens to elect representatives that will introduce legislation for a referendum to fix this broken string.

     

  • RTÉ Says: ‘Stars’ In Their Own Cars

    One trail runs dry, but a scent hangs in the air. Pursuant to Stephen Court’s Drivetime article for Cassandra Voices deconstructing the Irish media’s – including RTÉ ’s – relationship with the motor car sector, I lodged a Freedom of Information (FOI) request with the national broadcaster.

    I sought records of payments, or payments-in-kind, from car dealership to leading RTÉ stars, approved by RTÉ ’s management since January 1st, 2017 under the Personal and Public Activities Guidance.

    RTÉ’s FOI officer responded on June 6th to say there was no record of any such payments or payments-in-kind.

    So can we be sure that RTÉ ’s ‘star’ personalities are appropriately objective in their reporting on transport issues?

    Unfortunately not, as an FOI is a request for records containing information, rather than the information itself. According to a recent judgment (quoted by RTÉ’s FOI Officer): ‘If the record does not exist the body concerned is not required to create records to provide the information sought’ (Case 170505, Ms X and Louth County Council).

    In other words, the FOI officer is under no obligation to dig for information on behalf of an applicant if the question posed misses records containing the targeted information; albeit an officer must take reasonable steps to comply with a request, which usually takes thirty days.

    There is ample evidence of a permissive culture among RTÉ management towards employees’ earnings from third party sources. This was revealed in another FOI application I took earlier this year, unrelated to enquiries into the motor sector. But RTÉ’s officer chose to withhold details of who received what from whom – for reasons of commercial sensitivity.

    As long as the national broadcaster does not provide a publicly accessible register of all transactions between employees (including so-called ‘external employees’ who avail of tax breaks available to companies) with third parties, as the BBC does, then suspicion lingers.

    At the very least the national broadcaster should reveal the text of the Personal and Public Activities Guidance, which regulates employee’s third party relationships.

    Any media organisation in receipt of a disproportionate proportion of its advertisement revenue from a particular sector is exposed to a charge of bias, which may operate in subtle ways.

    II – Bring Cyclists to Justice

    A recent example of what appears to be ‘Groupthink’ in the national broadcaster came from the unlikely source of Olivia O’Leary on – you guessed it – her weekly Drivetime column on June 19th.

    Drivetime’s website adopts the incendiary title: ‘Olivia O’Leary on Cyclists: ‘It’s time we called in the law and fought for our footpaths’. It is a case of ‘we’, the ‘normal’ people, presumably motorists, ranged against ‘them’, that strange species of two-wheeled fanatics, invading ‘our’ footpaths. The title invites confrontation beyond legal enforcement.

    The column itself is more balanced than the title suggests, but contains serious lapses of judgment. O’Leary said she was in favour of banning cars from between the canals and acknowledged that ‘cars destroy a city’, but then proceeded to lambaste the behaviour of cyclists in Dublin’s city centre.

    She limits her complaint to a certain type of (male) cyclist on a Dublin bike ‘thundering along’ footpaths, but that nuance is lost in the following statement:

    But, you know, there is one thing that private cars, for all their faults, usually do not do. They do not drive down the middle of the footpath, scattering pedestrians left and right. Cyclists, on the other hand, do this all the time.

    O’Leary also, remarkably, jokes about using an umbrella to unseat any cyclist who engages in ‘Panzer tank stuff’, before adding that she would not actually recommend this. Ha ha ha. Hopefully some hot head has not had ideas put in his head.

    This seems particularly insensitive, to put it kindly, considering how that very week in June ten people including three pedestrians had been killed by motor vehicles. Two were hit-and-runs. Unlike those killers, O’Leary missed the real culprits.

    Moreover, as Cian Ginty points out in a column for Irishcycle.com, a simple Google search yields examples of pedestrians on footpaths being killed by motorists.

    O’Leary is relating her personal experiences as a pedestrian in Dublin, which is fair enough, and of course there are lunatics out there. But what she fails to acknowledge is that friction between pedestrians and cyclists is largely a product of the deficient cycling infrastructure in the capital.

    Mounting the footpath in Dublin’s centre is often a safety measure in a crush of buses, taxis and private cars. Most cyclists will then glide at the pace of the average pram, and give right of way to pedestrians, some of whom, nonetheless, will take the opportunity to scream into the cyclist’s ear.

    O’Leary should have known better than to target cyclists for long failures in urban planning. She also ought to be pissed off with how the Drivetime producers have distorted her column.

    III – Motor Mouths

    Transparency in terms of external payments and gifts is especially important where, as Stephen Court’s article illustrates, there is a record of high profile figures – including Ryan Tubridy and others – apparently receiving free cars from dealerships, and also where numerous programmes from Drivetime to Liveline are sponsored by car companies, who also dominate commercial breaks.

    If a presenter’s salary is linked to the advertising revenue his or her programme attracts this could be seen as an indirect payment, which might inhibit the expression of views unsympathetic to the sponsor. At the very least large scale advertising by any sector creates an objective bias, i.e. an appearance of bias, even without direct evidence.

    No doubt these are existential questions for a state broadcaster, whose business model relies on advertising revenues of €151.5 last year, along with TV €186.1 million in licence fees.

    One of the reasons I say that we have to have our numbers up [is] because it only works when the numbers are up.
    Joe Duffy, Irish Times, Saturday, December 9th, 2017.

    Is a widespread devotion to ratings really a pursuit of advertising revenue? With RTÉ consistently losing money (€5.6 million last year), it is time to cut its cloth, and focus on its primary public service: the delivery of news and current affairs at a remove from vested interests.

    This should involve an end to exorbitant salaries. The country is awash with aspiring journalists, most of whom would happily work on an average RTÉ salary of €70,000 per annum.

    The BBC manages to perform this role satisfactorily in the UK, while allowing commerical competitors. The population might be more willingly pay their TV licenses if the broadcaster delivered a better service. The country has among the highest evasion rates in Europe.

    It is time to kill the radio star on the national broadcaster.

    IV – A Broader Malaise

    The extent of payments from external sources to RTÉ’s household names was revealed in another FOI application I took earlier this year. But the officer refused to divulge precise details, claiming this could be advantageous to competitors, might result in financial loss to contractors, and potentially ‘prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations in respect of future engagements with independent contractors’.

    I saw details of payments by third parties to Ryan Tubridy, Ray D’Arcy, Miriam O’Callaghan, Damien O’Reilly, Marty Morrissey, Claire Byrne, Bryan Dobson, Sean O’Rourke, Joe Duffy, Philip Boucher-Hayes, Joe Duffy, Kathryn Thomas, Mary Wilson and Marian Finucane

    The officer responded that for 2017, ‘the total number of requests to engage in external ventures that RTÉ received was 122. Of that number, 114 were approved and 8 were refused. Of those granted, 97 were independent contractor requests and 1 was a RTÉ employee request. Of those refused, 7 were independent contractor requests and 17 were RTÉ employee requests.’

    That the vast majority of requests were approved in 2017, particularly to independent contractors, shows the organisation takes a liberal view on potential conflicts of interest. Indeed, it is a matter of public record that management approved a payment by Origin Green/Bord Bia to Damien O’Reilly last year despite an obvious conflict of interest.

    RTÉ’s Damien O’Reilly.

    RTÉ claimed the majority of payments were for ‘non-commercial events, and mostly in support of charitable or other not-for-profit organisations’. In the absence of further details, however, it is impossible to verify this claim. It begs the question: if the work is harmless, or even benign, why did they withhold the information? Bord Bia is a not-for-profit semi-state body, but there was still a conflict of interest for RTÉ’s main agricultural correspondent to be receiving money from that organisation.

    We cannot now tell whether any of the third parties have connections to the motor car industry in Ireland. And even if an organisation is charitable, or not-for-profit, this does not imply neutrality on contentious issue.

    The claim that divulging information would “prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations” suggests the likes of Ryan Tubridy – who has been outspoken in his criticism of cyclists –  could be lost to commercial competitors if damaging information enters the public domain.

    That contention may be questioned, in the case of Tubridy at least. After moonlighting with the BBC in 2016 Tubridy admitted he found connecting with UK listeners difficult, while leaving for Newstalk or TV3 would represent a career regression.

    Most of RTÉ ’s household names found fame, and fortune, through extended exposure on RTÉ. The failure of Pat Kenny to draw a substantial number of his former listeners away from the station, when he departed for Newstalk, indicates most people are in the habit of tuning into the state broadcaster, rather than the radio ‘star’.

    V – A Tool of the Sector

    The state broadcaster is certainly not alone in the Irish media in its reliance on advertising from the motor car industry, and the objective bias this brings. Our ‘paper of record’, the Irish Times, seems to do little investigative work into subject-matters impinging on its leading advertisers; and while generally virtue-signalling in its approval of cycling, has also contributed to negative stereotyping.

    One such portrayal came from Fintan O’Toole in 2013. O’Toole, whose father was a bus driver, as he has reminded his readers, does not drive. But seemingly that does not extend to sympathy for cycling. During National Bike Week in 2013 he wrote, tongue-in-cheek, that cyclists were the ‘spawn of the devil’, no doubt to the guffaws of his colleagues on the editorial floor.

    But the article was actually a genuine indictment of the behaviour of cyclists, who are portrayed as casually mounting footpath and endangering pedestrians, even where they have been provided with their own lanes.

    As with Olivia O’Leary, O’Toole posited a false dichotomy between pedestrians and cyclists, ‘us’ and  ‘them’, which ignores how the problem is not with either form of locomotion, but the utter dominance of the motor car in Ireland’s urban areas.

    Many of Dublin’s cycle lanes are defective: the track might be potholed, or simply a part of the road that is coloured red, a simulacrum of a real cycle lane without a protective curb, where parking is often permitted outside rush hour.

    O’Toole recently wrote an article criticising plans to remove motorized traffic from College Green, a measure which would also be advantageous to cyclists. O’Toole’s argument was that this would work to the detriment of mostly working class bus passengers. Cycling is not mentioned once in the article.

    College Green c.1890.

    The implication is that cycling is not a realistic mode of transport for the working class, but instead the preserve of middle class, lycra-clad, fitness enthusiasts, which is certainly not the case in cities where the bike is king. O’Toole is right insofar as he draws attention to the poor provision of public transport in Dublin, and to emphasise the continued importance of the bus.

    But rather than abandoning plans for a plan that would make the centre of the city more accessible to pedestrians and cyclists, a better outcome would be investment in quality bus corridors and the introduction of radial routes.

    *******

    With a climate comparable to Copenhagen’s and Amsterdam’s, Dublin is regarded as the Great Bike Hope of Emerging Bicycle Cities. But the media, from state broadcaster to the national ‘paper of record’ have failed to drive home that message, and few politicians, beyond the Green Party, have consistently campaigned on behalf of cycling, which should be a viable and healthy alternative for most healthy urbans residents.

    A deficient cycling infrastructure is another blot on the copy book of a country ranked second worst in Europe for tackling Climate Change, and which confronts an obesity pandemic.

    The national broadcaster might insulate itself from claims of objective bias by not treating news and current affairs as cash cows. Then we might be offered better reporting on important issues, such as reforming a sclerotic transport infrastructure. And if RTÉ’s ‘stars’ reckon they are not being paid well enough, they should be told to get on their bikes.

  • The Origins of Poetic Creation

    We can only imagine how poetry entered human consciousness. I intuit that its emergence was linked to the first use of fire, that most seminal of technologies, whose devouring mysteries transfix us with a spirit that endows our own.

    I see one among a band awakening from a dream, and entering a trance. She incants a tale of the fire’s origin, her words embodied in physical expression, which inspires the band to adapt the tools to summon the first, intentional spark.

    In the flickering light that ensues the poet appears to shift shape. She is a streak of light morphing into the appearance of other animals of the forest. Her words are not common speech, but arrive in measured cadences, uncannily familiar to a mesmerised audience.

    The tale she recounts, though fantastical, resonates with commonplace experiences and includes practical insights. As the narrative arcs to a point of heightened tension the poet breaks the spell with a joke, seizing the assembly with laughter, but a few remain silent.

    Transfixed by the incendiary words, the band begins to chant; eventually a chorus chimes, integrating non-verbal melodies. Next a rhythm is struck, then a communal dance previously employed to intimidate a long extinct primeval beast, still lurking in our nightmares.

    For a moment the forest itself is convulsed by these energies. Afterwards, or even coinciding with this, a visual representation of the performance is crafted. It is kept as a sacred object for subsequent rites.

    Out of this poetic source I see four springs generating story, song, dance, and visual art. These intertwine and will eventually merge into an oceanic consciousness. The continuity between words, music and dance is apparent, while the symbol is not only the origin of painting and sculpture, but also of the word, ‘made flesh’, in script, which over time migrates from pictographic representation to alphabets, rejoining and completing its journey along the great river of poetry.

    The spoken word is an animating spirit and crucial catalyst joining language to a musical faculty. The written word records and even amplifies this. Only later does abstract, disembodied reasoning in the form of philosophy arrive.

    Musical Language

    According to Walter Ong: ‘More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness’. The Greeks were not the first to develop it, but improved on earlier models by representing vowels for the first time, making literacy far easier to achieve.

    Through this the Greeks derived great technical and intellectual benefits, but it brought the danger of abstraction, and a distancing from Nature. Socrates, a confirmed townsman, claimed he had nothing to learn from fields and trees, but only men.

    In writing we encounter the dominance of the written word itself, a logo-centrism, which finds us in the narrow purview of the left hemisphere of the brain.

    But according to Iain McGilchrist the origins of language lie ‘in the empathic communication medium of music and the right hemisphere, where it is deeply connected with the body.’ There is no conflict he says between this belief, and the idea language developed out of gesture: ‘Music is deeply gestural in nature: dance and the body are everywhere implied in it.’ He continues: ‘To the extent that the origins of language lie in music, they lie in a certain sort of gesture, that of dance: social non-purposive (useless).’

    The origin of language, therefore, should not be seen in pure utilitarian terms.

    “Useless” play in language is the stirring of poetry, but a creation that is the catalyst of Art, which acts as a form of revelation, where metaphor, according to McGilchrist, ‘links language to life’. The absence of utility in poetry is therefore superficial. It is a creative spark, bringing perception at new vantages, and sight through different lenses. Art is the resolution of the image.

    Human communication is not uniquely ingenious, but we display a particular ability to measure speech in song and poetry – a mathematical sensibility in communication.

    According to McGilchrist, what distinguishes our music is that ‘no other creature begins to synchronise the rhythm, or blend the pitch, of its utterances with that of its fellows, in the way that human singing does instinctively’. It would appear that we gravitate to a musical order that was established in the West by Pythagoras, who divined that a musical note produced by a string of fixed tension could be converted into its octave if the length of the string was reduced in half, and its fifth when reduced by two thirds.

    Unlike ourselves, most bird species have a syrinx in their throats, allowing two notes to be sung simultaneously, as they exhale and inhale. But birdsong, however bewitching, is unmeasured. The dawn chorus is an unintentional unity, representing disconnected currents emanating from the varying concerns of often competing species; harmonious only as the voice of one Nature, spiritus mundi, or Gaia.

    At its lofty height, poetry combines the order of music with profound questioning and metaphorical vision. This is a mysterious hallmark of humanity.

    Grammars of Creation

    Artistic beauty in its ideal, unrealisable, state is the expression of the diffuse and infinitely complex voices within Nature’s harmony. What we consider aesthetically pleasing derives from an ascetic order in music that finds an analogy in all artistic forms. The spark is poetry.

    Poetry is the lute through which the voice of Nature sounds. But the instrument may be misshapen, perhaps through misuse. More tragic is when the pitch of beauty is too high for an audiences to hear.

    What is poetic has a dual nature: generative and disruptive. Just as in Nature Heraclitus envisaged a fire of renewal, so poetry devours and renews. Philosophy may define beauty, including justice, at any point in time, but this is primarily exegesis rather than creation. Thus Yeats argued ‘whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent’.

    Nature demands that plants and animals of diffuse species assist one another, but we appear to be alone in imaginatively standing outside our immediate frame, situating ourselves in the lives of others through fictions, as we see first in cave paintings.

    The paintings in Chauvet Cave in France were begun approximately thirty thousand years ago.

    To convey such imaginings required novel linguistic constructions. George Steiner points to a grammar of creation in the use of a future tense, allowing us ‘to discuss possible events on the day after one’s funeral or in stellar space a million years hence’.

    This, he says, looks to be specific to homo sapiens, as do ‘the use of subjunctive and of counter-factual modes’, which are kindred to future tenses. Steiner intuits that these emerged at the end of the Ice Age to discuss food storage. He links this to the discovery of animal breeding and agriculture.

    But I see a capacity for inter-subjectivity, including a subjunctive ‘if’ clause, arriving earlier: in the symbolic language of poetry, rather than to facilitate practical exchange. To chart this grammatical genesis I turn to Rene Girard’s idea of the scapegoat, which, he argued, emerged as a means of settling differences arising out of competition acquisition of scarce resources.

    ‘Man is not naturally a carnivore’, Girard writes, ‘human hunting should not be thought of in terms of animal predation.’ He argues that animal domestication arose out of the use of animals in sacrifice, not as food: ‘What impelled men to hunt was the search for a reconciliatory victim’.

    After mining anthropological literature he found a ‘common denominator’ of a ‘collective murder’ of a scapegoat, attributed to animals or men. To conceive of this reconciliatory victim required a subjunctive ‘if’ clause, enabling the band to channel their grievances away from self-annihilation.

    When an animal victim is chosen instead of a human and ritually slaughtered the smoke rising from the sacrifice is seen to appease the gods. Thus, in the Odyssey after Odysseus returns in disguise to Ithaca, he shares a meal with his loyal servant Eumeaus who performs the necessary rites of sacrifice:

    The swineherd, soul of virtue, did not forget the gods.
    He began the rite by plucking tufts from the porkers’ head,
    threw them into the fire and prayed to all the powers,
    “Bring him home, our wise Odysseus, home at last!”
    Then raising himself full-length, with an oak log
    he’d left unsplit he clubbed and stunned the beast
    and it gasped out its life …
    The men slashed its throat, singed the carcass,
    quickly quartered it all, and then the swineherd,
    cutting first strips for the gods from every limb,
    spread them across the thighs, wrapped in sleek fat,
    and sprinkling barley over them, flung them on the fire

    In Christianity this culminates in the ‘lamb of good that takes away the sins of the world.’ The language of these fictions, therefore, appears to originate in symbolic representation, which is a hallmark of poetry.

    These new grammars imparted a capacity for planning, and an understanding of natural cycles, which can lead to the outlook of the suzerain: the ‘keeper or overlord’ personified by Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, who says: ‘Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent’.

    But it also engenders empathy with other life forms, which recalls the Isha Upanishad: ‘Of a certainty the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.’

    McGilchrist writes: ‘I believe that the great achievement of human kind is not to have perfected utility through banding together to form groups, but to have learnt through our faculty for inter-subjective experience, and our related ability to imitate, to transcend utility altogether.’ That is the essence of true poetry.

    Poetry and Justice

    Art often awakes sensitivity to injustice indirectly, as the eighteenth century Swiss philosopher Johan Sulzer observed:

    Wisdom knows about everything that man ought to be; it points the path to perfection and happiness which is related to it. But it cannot give strength to go down that often arduous path. The fine arts make the path smooth and adorn it with flowers which by their delightful scent, irresistibly entice the wanderer to continue on his way.

    A shift in sensibility created by exposure to the beauty of Art operates unpredictably on ethical choices as, unlike a rational choice, shifts in sentiment rarely involve a decisive, eureka moment, when an argument is settled.

    Rather, encountering beauty may lead to impulsive moral decisions based on heightened sensitivity, as where a person refrains from eating meat, when it does not ‘feel’ right.

    Encountering a crowning achievement in music or poetry may awaken action in an apparently unrelated domain. Great music, and other Art, stills the mind, and engenders benevolence.

    In divine rapture the poet builds a mythology out of imaginative materials located in Nature, and in the process incubates conventions and laws: ‘the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ wrote Percy Shelley.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822.

    Firm moral convictions may bring a poet into conflict with temporal power, and demagogues appropriate and distort mythologies. The false poet, and prophet, appeals to the vanity of a sovereign.

    A poet may feel compelled, nonetheless, to compromise with a patron – even a tyrant – to allow their work to reach fruition. In Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ the artist mocks a haughty ruler before posterity:

    I met a traveller from an antique land,
    Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

    A true poet’s opposition to political power is, however, based on principle, not an anarchic reflex, and he may support a wise and just regime. For example, Dante favoured the Holy Roman Empire, as he saw a strong transnational authority as necessary to maintain peace in the Italian peninsula. A contemporary poet could support the notion of a European Community, or the United Nations, for similar reasons.

    Poetry remains a vital commodity in any culture, foregrounding and guiding other artistic endeavours, channelling empathy, and forging justice. Defining its nature is elusive, and perhaps futile, but it is apparent that philosophers are increasingly drawn to its revelation.

    It is not restricted to composition of metrical verse: any writer aspires to it. Alasdair MacIntyre writes: ‘Knowing how to go on and to go further in the use of the expressions of a language is that part of the ability of every language-user which is poetic. The poet by profession merely has the ability to a preeminent degree’.

    Shelley saw poetry in metrical verse as being its ‘imperial form’, but recognised its presence elsewhere. ‘The parts of a composition may’ even be poetical, ‘without the composition as a whole being poetical’, he said. Poetry inhabits the best prose as a flow that carries a listener into the vision of the writer.

    Poetry is perhaps best defined by what it is not, which is the everyday speech often imitated in novels and plays. It aspires to originality and even prophecy, as Aristotle says: ‘it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen’.

    It has an essential orality. Thus Yeats wrote: ‘Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble and much pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by friend, lover by beloved.’

    The Sacred Spring

    Poetic language need not be extravagant, but the true poet is never entirely in control of composition. Thus Socrates complained that a man cannot accede ‘to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses.’ This seeming loss of consciousness in a deep flow state may lead to extravagant language, but this is unintentional.

    Kathleen Raine points to the lofty style that distinguishes poetry from regular speech. She notes how Jung, who generally disliked high-flown speech, found that when what he called ‘mana, daemons, gods or the unconscious speaks in words its utterances are in a high style, hieratic, often archaic, grandiose, removed as it is possible to be from the speech of that common man the everyday self’.

    Raine identifies this with a primal poetic impulse she encountered in the composition of folk songs: ‘The singing of the ballad was by no means in common speech. It was extremely slow, dignified and highly mannered’. She concludes that: ‘It is a mark of imaginative inspiration and content to write in a high and mannered style, removed from common speech; as it is of the absence of imaginative participation to write either in a conversational tone or to write in a deliberately vulgar idiom.’

    Raine further opines that: ‘What was written for the sake of easy comprehension is precisely that part of poetry which becomes incomprehensible within a few years.’ This we find in the lyrics of most contemporary popular music, which sounds dated almost at the point of release.

    On the other hand, today we see a widespread trend whereby difficulty is equated with quality. This may originate in contemporary economic structures, where many professional poets survive on government grants, and as academic specialists. Linguistic obscurity may be a cynical calculation, which contributes to a widespread, and tragic, alienation from poetry.

    It appears to have a meaning and form internal to itself, beyond any individual poet. Jahan Ramazani observed, ‘time and again’, how poems, ‘reasserted themselves as poems even in the moments of seeming to fuse with their others.’

    Similarly, when Dadaists and Russian futurists tried to fabricate new languages they found their imagined syntaxes led back to established moulds. Any poet travels a path overlaid with uncountable footprints guiding their course. The poem knows where it wishes to travel in the anticipatory stillness of creation. The great challenge in today’s digital fog is to encounter this tranquillity.

    Poetry in Language

    Many poets agree that composition is an ongoing revelation, conventionally attributed to the muse. But in the discussion of poetry there is perhaps too great an emphasis on individual genius, although the individual experience cannot be discounted.

    We find in creation a dialectic between individual expression and the treasures hidden in all languages. The linguist Edward Sapir suggests that it is intrinsic to language every one of which ‘is itself a collective art of expression.’ He asserts that ‘An artist utilises the native esthetic resources of his speech. He may be thankful if the given palette of colours is rich, if the springboard is light. But he deserves no special credit for felicities that are the language’s own.’

    Similarly Marcel Duchamp wrote: ‘Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ‘readymades aided’ and also works of assemblage.’ The poet, however, renews and recasts these materials, sometimes bringing new colours to the palette, and reviving the use of others.

    In some cases we find a mingling of tongues as new words enter languages in neologisms, as in Shakespeare’s heroic contribution to the English language. But this process is fraught with the risk of contrivance. Great poets are not necessarily polyglots, though they often are.

    The expression of poetry should not be seen as an evolutionary display of verbal plumage, although troubadours will always seek to enchant. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke firmly rejects meretricious verse. ‘Young man’ he warns:

    it’s not about love, when your voice
    forces open your mouth – learn to forget

    your sudden outburst. That will run out.
    True singing is a different breath. A breath
    around nothing. A breeze in the god. A wind.

    Rainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926.

    The mythos of poetry is an intuitive response to life’s challenges, unconnected to the logos of philosophy, or scientific observation.

    Its wisdom adds layers to a mystery lying beyond direct inquisition. ‘The abstract is not life’, Yeats wrote on his deathbed, ‘and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence’.

    The poet is never in control of the process of composition, and eminent authorities such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Milton have attributed inspiration to their dreams.

    Charles Simic criticizes: the assumption … that the poet knows beforehand what he or she wishes to say and that the writing of the poem is the search for the most effective means of gussying up these ideas: if this were correct, poetry would simply repeat what had been said and thought before.’

    Untuning the Sky

    William Dryden, the first Poet Laureate, proposed in his Essay of Dramaticke Poesie that, ‘if natural causes be more known now than in the time of Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that poesy and other arts may, with the same pains, arrive still nearer to perfection’. Rather than affirming an alternative role for poetry, he was suggesting it should be informed by natural philosophy, as science was referred to until the 1830s.

    In fact George Steiner observes a contrary trend: ‘Where the sciences, pure and applied, wherever mathematics came to map, to energize, to expand human experience and possibilities, the retreat from the word proved correlative and ineluctable.’

    The greatest poetry looks beyond the real world of immediate perception and reinvents it, travelling at a different pace to the often linear progression of a philosophical argument. Thus the work of hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago may be compared with, and often exceeds in quality, the best available today.

    The poetic vision arises from a sensitivity that sees the tears of a sycamore tree, as opposed to its biological classification. Nontheless, the greatest scientists – such as Alexander van Humboldt – have been animated by poetry, and poets, of course, do learn from science.

    There are signs of stultifying premeditation as opposed to poetic vision, in Dyrden’s Grand Chorus to ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’ (1687), signalling the Final Judgement.

    So when the last and dreadful hour
    This crumbling pageant shall devour,
    The trumpet shall be heard on high,
    The dead shall live, the living die,
    And music shall untune the sky.

    The idea of music, which is the expression of harmony, signalling the end of days is troubling, and almost paradoxical. Samuel Johnson described this image as ‘so awful in itself, that it can owe little to poetry; and I could wish the antithesis of music untuning had found some other place’.

    *******

    A poet can be foolish, even sinister, without this undermining the aesthetic appeal of her work. Poetic ability does not equate with individual moral virtue. Posterity excuses the obnoxious behaviour and statements that are not intrinsic to the poetry itself, assuming Art to rise above the mundane, and that its beauty will engender justice.

    Artistic censorship is a grave danger for any society, but in an era of free speech we may be facing greater dangers still, as George Steiner warns: ‘The patronage of the mass media and the free market, the distributive opportunism of mass consumption, could be more damaging to art and to thought than have been the censorious regimes of the past’.

  • A Hurler’s Silver Branch Perception

    One evening, while walking on Derada Hill, a hare sprung from under my feet. I found myself, all of a sudden, on the ground burying my head in the warm form left in the grass, and I asked that primordial form to act as a poultice, to draw out my expensive European education from my head, because in my western way of thinking I was damaging the earth. It had set me up in opposition to what is natural and native to us. 
    John Moriarty, Nostos, (Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1994).

    I can’t say when I first played hurling. It was with me on all of the great moments of self-discovery I can think of. Once I had a decent footing in the world I became aware of a stick being close by.

    It defined my youth; this game, this skill, this way of spending time. It was frustrating and it was ordinary and it was miserable at times, but a current ran through me, a note that intensified as I played. It got more serious as I grew up, the stakes got higher, my identity hardened, a community of people formed and goals were unconsciously set, if not assumed.

    A former captain of the Wexford Intercounty team, Diarmuid Lyng analyses games for TG4 and Newstalk , and contributes to national print media.

    And when the final curtain fell, amid the chaos of going from the all-encompassing nature of modern sport to the great vacuum of retirement, I found myself in West Kerry, with the writings of John Moriarty, trying to read my way through a depression, in the hope that I would once again, make sense of me, to me.

    I was wandering the countryside a lot during that period, learning to forage wild plants while growing comfortable in swathes of time dedicated to the question of how the outer world was interacting with my inner landscape.

    I remember sitting at the foot of Ceann Sibéal on the evening of an honest storm, marveling at waves rolling in and crashing against the foot of the cliff. Inwardly, I thought of the net in Croke Park shaking. The waves of energy emanating from the player, the sliotar bypassing the goalkeeper and crashing into the net, creating a wave like that at the foot of the cliff in front of me.

    I sat on Clogher Beach and marvelled at the ability of a player standing fully ninety yards apart from another, who hits a ball at over one hundred miles an hour, reaching a height of seventy yards at its apex, and within the first second or two of him striking it – in it’s very initial ascent – to move to the exact spot where the ball arrives so as only to have to extend an arm in order to catch it. What remarkable qualities of mind and body are at work there? What more are we capable of? And why doesn’t anyone refer to this? Shouldn’t it turn our spines in to question marks to interrogate the magnificent of it all?

    Silver Branch Perception

    What I found in West Kerry is that when the fences around me fell away, when I went out to the wild places, the boundaries in my mind disintegrated too, and these thoughts and feelings had their way with me. It brought me back to the soul of the game: to Silver Branch Perception.

    Silver Branch Perception was bestowed on Bran Mac Feabhal by Mananánn Mac Lir in Irish mythology. It is a gift, a way of seeing the world for the paradise that it is; the awareness that when we separate ourselves from our social story, we can see the world paradisally.

    The Tuath Dé would later defend this gift at the Second Battle of Maigh Tuiread against the Formorians.

    Balor of the Evil Eye led the Formorians, who, according to Moriarty, looked on Ireland purely for its resources, the reducing eye – the Súil Mildeagach –seeing only uses and benefits. Thus a cow is looked on as pounds of beef, and a tree for the lengths of its timber.

    The Tuath Dé, led by Lugh, held the Silver Branch and they fought to defend it. According to Moriarty, The Third Battle of Maigh Tuiread is being enacted within us today.

    I recognise from my hurling experiences what he meant. We are disconnected from the parts of the game that are essential to the overall health of society. We have adopted a Formorian mindset, we have assumed Balor’s evil eye. It is disconnecting us from the essence of the game.

    But Nature is lying us down on the psychiatrists couch and asking hard questions. The ash die-back disease is one of the symptoms diagnosed. This will decimate the most common Irish hedgerow tree over the next thirty to forty years. Its chances of survival are uncertain. Still 50,000 trees are cut down a year for 350,000 hurls to keep it business-as-usual.

    But what of the ash tree? Could most GAA players identify what one even looks like? Do we care? Do we feel a responsibility for its survival beyond what is needed for our ‘use and benefit’? Is Nature reminding us of one of the fundamentals of the game?

    We know now that the forest floor is alive with a web of mycelium that function along the lines of the Internet: a ‘tree wide web’. When a bush is sick it can tell a healthy tree, which may send the necessary nutrients to its ailing friend. Can we play the same role for the ash? Can we listen to what the tree needs, and come to its assistance?

    If we don’t go back to listening, to being humbled by nature – if we ignore the possibilities of the Silver Branch – we will be paying lip service to bridging the great disconnect, choosing the dis-ease of the Formorian mindset so prevalent in modern Irish society.

    Spiritually, there is a shift going on here from Rome to the Orient. Meditation, yoga, Tai Chi and mindfulness are rooted in Eastern ideas of existence. True to form, we look beyond our cultural inheritance to negotiate an internal crises in our perception of reality.

    But answers are here, all around us. Let us plant ash trees in every GAA club in the country in the hope of identifying strains resistant to the disease, and ensure its survival. Let us reduce dependence on a food system in danger of implosion, by subsidising polytunnels for anyone willing to work one. Let us go out to the wild places and allow our own wildness to surface, and, in so doing, revive an awareness that what is primeval inside us is not to be feared, but valued.

    I am aware of the intellectual ease with which many will digest this notion, but can we live it? Can we make the hard choices? Colonisation introduced many well-documented ills. Being the bastard child of Americana has brought even greater woes, though less appreciated, as we remain in a cultural, political and economical stranglehold. But as the neon lights of superficiality fade, what will anchor us?

    I think about the role of hurling, the tree, and the way we play the game. I examine my own role. I wonder about my role as a father; I wonder how the win-at-all-costs mentality will affect my son. I wonder about what caused a woman to email me last week to say she was relieved a torn cruciate ligament would keep her away from the stresses of GAA.

    The Minotaur

    I ask Moriarty what we need. He tells me about the Minotaur.

    The great Greek legend of the Minotaur is King Minos’s tale of woe. His wife Pasiphae becomes transfixed with the Bull God that emerges from the sea.

    The Bull won’t mate with any human, so she orders the carpenter Daedalus to construct a wooden cow. Once completed she enters the cow, assumes the position, and the Bull impregnates her.

    Soon she gives birth to a half-man half-bull: a monstrous creation. Out of shame King Minos constructs a labyrinth beneath the city of Knossos and banishes the Minotaur beneath the royal carpet.

    Once a month a virgin child is sent from the city of Athens and dispatched into the labyrinth as food for the insatiable beast. Theseus takes umbrage that the maidens of his city are being devoured, and travels to Crete vowing to slay the monster. There he meets Ariadne, stepdaughter of the king and half-sister of the Minotaur, at the gates of the labyrinth. She gives him a ball of wool to navigate his return.

    Theseus fulfills his destiny as a warrior by killing the monster and emerges in triumph from the labyrinth. That, to Moriarty, is the mythical story, but he sees another dimension.

    The Minotaur represents our animal nature, and it is the appeal of this that Pasiphae has succumbed to. Minos as King has dominion over the people, and regulates his society. Animal nature, primordial wildness, runs contrary to civic virtue. He drives his shame beneath that which he controls. He then must feed that shame with sacrifice.

    Enter the Warrior Theseus. He has bloody murder on his mind and awaits a triumphant return. But according to Moriarty this win-at-all-costs mentality must change; this is where we cross over from the mythological into the real, to the battles at Croke Park.

    We don’t need another Theseus, or another Cuchulainn. We need a medicine man, someone that can dive into the depths of the Irish psyche and take a comb of walrus ivory to Caitlin Ni hUllachain’s hair: to comb our Cartesianism, to comb out our sins against Nature, to comb out our theories and creeds that put us on a collision course with this gorgeous blue jewel hanging in space.

    If Theseus or anyone else wants to be a real hero, he must join King Minos and return to the labyrinth, take the Minotaur by the hand and walk him into the cityscape, accepting his shame in order to transcend it. This is the great journey.

    We have a great opportunity now within the GAA to create a healing space in which coaches can heal: where they can tune into the deeper messages of the game, of the hurl, of the tree. Where they hear the medicines of Nature, which heals them of their anger and shame. Where they reconnect to purpose and are reminded of agency. Where they rediscover their place in the world, and where outcome is secondary to the journey.

    Fulfilling a Heroic Destiny

    Spiritually, we are at sea. That’s why we don’t feel the plight of the ailing ash. The Catholic Church took on the role of guardian of the great message of the Christ story. The message that we can be at one with the unfolding moment, that we can transcend our suffering and open ourselves to a greater potential.

    The Church became moral arbiters of that message and pursued power and control, which divorced them from the source. They were not equipped for the gravity of the message that we are, in fact, already in Paradise. But independently we can create a space to engage with it, with humble invitation, we can heal ourselves and return to abundance.

    Nature is abundant. The law of the universe is balance. When we are in balance we are in abundance. When we chose with agency to be in imbalance, we no longer live in abundance; instead we become locked in a mentality of scarcity, which furthers the imbalance.

    Those that benefit most from these conditions are those that are most fearful of the scarcity complex within themselves. Those that are in imbalance have lost the ability to trust in the unfolding moment. They replace that trust with sufficient control of the moment to ensure they don’t slip into a reality that their minds are incapable of digesting.

    We must deal with our fear in order to be whelmed and overwhelmed by the majesty of the natural world. In crossing that threshold we slip into a paradisal view of the Earth, and no longer want to damage it. This is free energy. We allow ourselves to re-integrate, we play our Orphic note that resonates with the universe.

    This is where we identify our purpose, from this place. As though in sitting with Nature, in being psycho-analysed by Nature, where our preconceived stories about ourselves fall silent; the messages that we need to hear can be heard above the din: from the universe demanding we fulfill our heroic destiny; where we recall our gravity and our greatness, and make the contribution the universe requires of us.

    Then we can identify the most pressing needs in the world, and apply our tremendous talents and resources to meet those needs, therein lies our purpose.

    Croke Park

    I spoke about some of these things in Croke Park recently, ideas that have been forming around me and inside of me, inspired by John Moriarty and my experience of hurling. He gave me leave to understand the world for myself, deferring to no one.

    I don’t need experts to tell me about Climate Change, or the effect of EMF’s on bee populations, or young men’s suicide rate, to know the disconnect is for real. It’s everywhere. It’s screaming at us to stop, to look around, to renegotiate our most sacred and primal contracts with Nature, and hurling has a role to play.

    Moriarty is guide. He is a guide because he went to these places. He let go of his conditioning and walked the earth with a barefoot mind and a barefoot heart. The last pages of Nostos, his autobiography, are written from the paradise he so often refers to. This is not a philosophical concept, it is the reality of the universe, which will lead us away from calamity. I know it is real because I have experienced it.

    Its appreciation brings great possibilities for our young people, who are less hampered by the toxic legacy of shame lying on us as a people, on our language and on our landscape. With minds blown open by the Internet, they have the energy of youth to take great strides, but require mentors more than ever. Can the GAA offer a space where coaches harrow their own great depths to become the mentors we need?

    Can we encourage balance in our young people so they can make their great contribution? Where they play sport to experience the union that is central to all creative pursuit, the feeling that comes when time and effort cease and a blissful harmony prevails. Can we value those moments once again, and in valuing them permit our young people to experience the world in a different way, beyond the limitations of outcome?

    This is a journey Moriarty opened up for me, on which I constantly take wrong turns, but one worthy of continuing. If you are still with me, I encourage you to stand on the edge of a lake, or in front of a tree and just breathe. Breathe and resist the temptation to label and to understand and to intellectualise, and see what fills the gaps. It may be a fleeting experience, it may be difficult to hold on to, but it will heal.

    And if you happen to see the wild form of the hare, bury your head in that wild form, and ask it with humility and reverence to guide you on this heroic journey out of the Formorian labyrinth, and back to the great and sacred Earth.

    Diarmuid Lyng facilitates group exploration of spirituality in nature, masculinity, meditation, resilience, yoga to a wide range of audiences including schools, university, GAA clubs.

  • Leopold Bloom and the Art of Loafing

    What does it mean to be a loafer? Loafing as an activity has always existed. It has been carried out, witnessed, imagined and sung since the dawn of human time; from the ancient Aborigines on their walkabout, to the modern idling of the nineteenth and twentieth century dandies. Today, loafing as a mode of existence, may well be one of the last subversive acts and means of combating and living affirmatively amidst the information and technological age.

    The loafer is more than just a flâneur, epitomised by a Baudelaire or Wilde; he or she can be bucolic or urbane, a scientist or poetic seeker – anyone from Einstein to Yeats. And far from lazy in the vulgar sense, on the contrary, the loafer is never really at rest, but attuned to the present, and observing from various perspectives at the same time.

    A loafer is not bored; boredom comes from a forgetfulness of the power of the imagination; boredom is the great trick of marketers who vomit out messages demanding we purchase our entertainment, and sell us things we don’t need. Most of us live in a world where the power of advertising effectively distracts us from the impact of what we are consuming, and implicitly accepting.

    A loafer can enjoy waiting and musing; a loafer does not become irritated that he or she has to wait an extra minute for change at the supermarket, or partake in beeping and cursing obscenities to others while stuck in traffic, when they are part of the traffic; a loafer does not do a mountain or a country, but rather ascends a mountain and wanders a country. To paraphrase the Irish philosopher John Moriarty, the geography of the loafer’s mind becomes the geography of the landscape he or she travels in.

    As an example, James Joyce’s novel Ulysses emphasises loafing in at least two major ways. Firstly, in its conception, Joyce – as external and internal itinerant – creates a work that is an alternative journey or odyssey on the periphery of war-torn Europe.

    This is a difficult work that unfolds before the reader’s eyes with Joyce making his way as he writes, a book that becomes ever more sprawling as the episodes proceed. It defies schematic dogmatism, but simultaneously the work – merging chaos and cosmos expressed in Joyce’s words ‘chaosmos’ and ‘thisorder’– is contained within strict boundaries. Out of difficulty, arrives a wealth of possibility.

    Hardly any aspect of Western culture is left out in that account of a single day in Dublin on June 16th 1904, the day in which Joyce went on his first official date with Nora Barnacle who would become his muse, lover, wife, mother of his children, and companion throughout his entire adult itinerant life. Thus, the day marks a day of love and affirmation as well as being a universal modern bible of homelessness and homecoming.

    Secondly, there is the main character of Leopold Bloom – the majestic loafer – at once sad-eyed and sharp as a hawk in his observations. If the scientist seeks to understand reality and the mystic seeks to experience it directly, then Bloom, as loafer, does both.

    Statue of James Joyce in Trieste, where he lived on and off between 1904 and 1920.

    Real time is that of the observer. Many Westerners have lost the secrets derived from mystical sources, but these are only other aspects of a wider reality in less alienated societies. Thus deprived, many seek for this connection in exotic realms which are removed from their society and detached from their own suffering. It is often easier to access the magic in strange, unfamiliar landscapes than in one’s own seemingly all too familiar, cynical and faithless culture.

    Throughout the course of our lives, like Leopold Bloom, many of us will be confronted by tragedy at some point or enter dark places from which we find it difficult to escape. And each one of us is going to experience an apocalypse – our own particular death. As established religions have declined, a spiritual void has emerged in many people’s lives. But perhaps our own poetic traditions can offer the solace that many people seek, offering answers to which we are culturally attuned.

    The secrets and the answers are right here in front of us in slowness, in loafing, in singing. Yes, because music too can lift the spirit, as both Joyce and Leopold Bloom attest. As the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain (although himself a chief critic of Finnegans Wake) put it: ‘In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly’.

    As Joyce famously said himself of Finnegans Wake, if you cannot understand the text – then simply read it aloud and hear the music of it. The same goes for Ulysses. Walter Pater’s line is the key to Joyce’s experimental writing of the challenging music episode of Ulysses when Bloom wanders into the side room of Dublin’s national concert hall in the afternoon: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.

    Loafers have sung eloquently throughout history, from the first Provençal troubadours who invented our modern idea of Romantic love, down to some of our finest popular late twentieth century musicians from the Brazilian Bossanova and Tropicalia movements, to the Celtic Soul fusion of Van Morrison.

    Our contemporary society prizes speed, efficiency and growth and looks askance at activities deemed unproductive. In particular the loafer is anathema to a culture which has absorbed a work ethic equating time with money.

    Yet perhaps the greatest achievements occur when the mind is at rest and seemingly unproductive. Peripheral vision allows us to look beyond conventional ideas and draw inspiration. One has only to think of Einstein discovering the theory of relativity while daydreaming in a patent’s office, or of Newton grasping a theory of gravity while dawdling under a tree. It is often as the poet, the philosopher or the scientist roam the busy city streets, or rolling hills, that the real work is done.

    By embracing loafing now and then, we remove ourselves from the maelstrom of a contemporary culture where slowness and alternative ideas are devalued. The world is motored by rampant consumerism despite our knowledge that it creates great anxiety and is rapidly destroying and usurping much of the landscape for other animal and plant species to continue to exist.

    Only by taking time out for undistracted reflection can we think about what is really happening and what we really need for our wellbeing. Crucially, the loafer Leopold Bloom’s first conversation is not with a human being but with a cat, and he treats the animal equally and with humor and tenderness, and it is from there that Bloom begins his odyssey through Dublin – observing, walking, feeling, ogling, helping, dreaming and loving for the world, rather than merely being in the world.

    Loafing might thus be seen as a revolutionary act, which, if taken seriously, has the capacity to bring meaningful benefit and transformation to individuals and society at large. Our world which, to quote Joyce, is ‘ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void”. This expression, buried deep in the penultimate episode of this colossal book of loafing, may well be the definition of art, beauty, Ulysses and existence itself.

    Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research coordinator at the New University of Lisbon (http://www.ifilnova.pt/pages/bartholomew-ryan) and leader of the international band The Loafing Heroes (https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com/)

  • Twosome Twiminds in Casement and Joyce

    Where to begin the story of Roger Casement, humanitarian crusader, knight of the British realm, and 1916 revolutionary? Lawrence of Arabia wrote that he had ‘the appeal of a broken archangel’; Joseph Conrad said: ‘He could tell you things! Things I have tried to forget, things I never did know”; Edmund Morel described him as ‘suggestive of one who had lived in the vast open spaces’.

    Casement’s life involved crisis, fissure, disintegration, newness and transformation, enduring intersections at the heart of our modernity. He is open to endless interpretation, and also – crucially – by reading and judging him we may better understand ourselves. He remains an enigma not only to others but also to himself; a complex and infinitely curious human being in troubled and confused times.

    Born in Sandycove (close to where Joyce’s Ulysses begins) in Dublin in 1864, he spent much of his childhood on the coast of his beloved Antrim, Casement left for Mozambique while still in his teens, rising from a ship purser to an explorer under Henry Morten Stanley (the man who supposedly said ‘Dr. Livingston, I presume?’), and then to British consul. He was one of the central figures in exposing the genocide of millions[1] in the Congo region, then privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium. His groundbreaking Congo Report in 1904 caused an international sensation.

    Eight years on, Casement was again in the international spotlight after the release of another even more horrifying report on the brutal mistreatment, enslavement and murder of thousands along the Putumayo River[2] in the Amazon, led by the Peruvian Amazonian Company, which was registered in Britain. Both massive atrocities emerged out of the Western powers’ demand for rubber. At that time, wild rubber could only be harvested in the great jungles of the Congo and Amazon. He was knighted for his pioneering humanitarian work by the British Crown in 1913, which did not prevent him becoming a revolutionary in 1916.

    The Putumayo atrocities in Peru, 1908 (photograph by Walter Hardenburg)

    Casement’s journey may lie ahead of us, providing a compass to rediscover our humanity in living for the world rather than merely in it. That is why I consider him a Joycean hero. Firstly, James Joyce’s heroism is to be a radical cosmopolitan – combining the local and global – which is, for example, to be and feel Irish and simultaneously think and feel globally, and even cosmically.

    A paradox central to radical cosmopolitanism is that we serve the present age by betraying it: Casement is hanged as a traitor for trying to liberate a people; Joyce is censored for endeavouring to revive a defeated people and celebrate their landscape and speech.

    In 1904, when Joyce and his future wife Nora Barnacle left for Trieste, he wrote a letter to her revealing his vocation: ‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond.’ For Joyce and Casement, to be a radical cosmopolitan is to be an exile soul – ‘self exiled in upon his ego’ as Joyce put it in Finnegans Wake –  perpetually on a homeward journey. Thus, while every page of Ulysses is rooted in a specific place in Dublin, it is also what Yuri Slezkine called, ‘the Bible of universal homelessness’.

    II

    To be a Joycean hero is, secondly, to be driven by love – love for all living creatures, defined by a courage to oppose oppressive political systems; listening to an inner voice reminding us of our core values, shutting out belittling and paralysing chatter. The one time Leopold Bloom really sticks up for himself in Ulysses is in the Cyclops episode, when faced with patriotic bigotry and racism. He declares that true life is love. It is no coincidence that the only mention of Casement in Ulysses is in this same episode, as one who stood up for the indigenous peoples of the Congo and Amazon:

    —Well, says J. J., if they’re any worse than those Belgians in the Congo Free State they must be bad. Did you read that report by a man what’s this his name is?
    —Casement, says the citizen. He’s an Irishman.
    —Yes, that’s the man, says J. J. Raping the women and girls and flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can out of them.

    Ulysses is set on a single day – the 16th June 1904 – itself a symbol of love for Joyce as this was his first official romantic encounter with Nora Barnacle. As the patriarchal, colonial powers of Britain, France, Germany and Russia locked horns in a horrific world war, sending millions of young men to needless slaughter, Joyce wrote his masterpiece of ineluctable love – embodying truth, beauty and freedom.

    ‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond.’ – James Joyce, 1904

    Love incorporates both sundering and reconciliation, and remains a consciously unstable force in Joyce’s work. It resides ‘ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void’ – a sentence from the penultimate episode of Ulysses, which could serve as Joyce’s definition for art, beauty and human existence.

    ‘… and finally when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold I found also myself – the incorrigible Irishman – I realised then that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race’ – Roger Casement, 1907

    Casement’s affirmation of life drove his love for the marginalised populace of an unprotected wilderness. Like Joyce, who wrote in the language of the coloniser on behalf of both the colonised and coloniser, Casement recognised the tensions between coloniser and colonised. He concluded a letter to his friend William Cadbury in 1911 with these words: ‘PS. If I wrote a history of the slavery I’d be kicked out of the public service.’

    III

    Thirdly, a Joycean hero acknowledges the ‘epic of the human body’ – Joyce’s  description for Ulysses. With nations and empires obsessing about war, obliterating the body and any hint of joyful sensuousness, Joyce and Casement’s war is an affirmation of the body, a resounding ‘Yes’ to life that is the last word of Ulysses.

    Joyce’s solitary writing of Ulysses, with each episode representing an organ of the body during the life-negating years of World War I, and Casement’s tireless campaign for the voiceless oppressed in the Congo, Amazon and Ireland – along with his anti-colonial and anti-war essays collected under the title The Crime Against Europe – represent a grand defiance and affirmation of the human spirit.

    Casement can be found buried deep in the fourth and final section of the second part of the four books that make up Finnegans Wake set in the ocean off the coast of Ireland, on embarking and disembarking: ‘… and after that then there was the official landing of Lady Jales Casemate…’ There is allusion here to both Casement and checkmate (‘Casemate’), jale (to work) and jail (prison). The Lady can imply Britannia a symbol of the British Empire, and equally can allude to an idea of a crossdresser or homosexual – also echoing the description of Bloom as the ‘new womanly man’ in the hallucinatory ‘nighttime’ episode of Circe in Ulysses.

    To Bloom’s ‘new womanly man’ and Protestant Jew subjected to racism and betrayal, Casement is a sensitive homosexual, who was also well positioned to understand deeply the oppression and silencing of the marginalised. As the mischievous, plural voice will say to the reader in the middle of Finnegans Wake, “do you hear what I am seeing?”

    IV

    Fourthly, the Joycean hero embodies the antinomies and conflicting identities of the human self, such that Casement is, what Joyce calls in Finnegans Wake, “two thinks at a time” and “twosome twiminds” – as Protestant/Catholic, British consul/Irish revolutionary, Christian/homosexual, and traitor/humanitarian. The “twosome twimind” is key to understanding Joyce’s thought and vision – seen in words such as ‘chaosmos’, ‘thisorder’ and ‘jewgreek’. The conflicted, dissolving, plural hero reveals the cracks and anxieties of his age – with Ireland a site of contradictions culminating in a bitter civil war (1922-23).

    The phrase “twosome twiminds” comes from the chapter on Shem Skrivenitch – Joyce’s thinly disguised self-portrait – in Finnegans Wake:

    […] a nogger among the blankards of this dastard century, you have become of twosome twiminds forenenst gods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiersiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul.

    I attempt a translation of this passage, alluding to our unconscious designs:

    a nigger among the white bastards of this dastard century, someone who has developed a dual or conflicting mind, going against the gods, condemned and foolish, containing elements of the archetype of the anarchist, egoist and heretic, and raising up your disunited kingdom upon the void of your own most doubtful or despairing soul.

    This could be an illuminating description for Casement as well as Joyce, who both performed the role of outsider. Each employed the term ‘the language of the outlaw’, and Joyce’s use of the word ‘nogger’, alluding to the offensive word ‘nigger’, is used in an opposition he shares with Casement to the colonial master. These controversial and conflicted figures – each one simultaneously magnanimous and egotistical – intertwined as servants and traitors of the ‘disunited kingdom’ (Ireland and/or the United Kingdom).

    In dueling opposites, Casement is a powerful example of combining the realist and the romantic: as one who casts a suspicious eye over human systems in his clear, jargon-free, reports on Congo and Putumayo. He was among those dangerous dreamers, living a mythic life of complexities and great challenges, a mediocre poet whose life became an epic poem.

    The Amazon River in 2017 (photograph by Bartholomew Ryan)

    V

    Finally, the Joycean hero’s journey is one of transformation. Casement became an orphan at the age of thirteen and then spent twenty years in Africa and seven years in Brazil. He embarked on a transformative journey from advocate of British colonial rule to humanitarian crusader and anti-imperialist.

    If we observe the stylistic differences between Casement’s diaries from the Congo and those from the Amazon it is as if each has been written by a different man. The cryptic statements, short-hand daily reminders and mini weather reports in the Congo diaries give way to the sprawling, dense, meandering Amazon journals, opening out like the great river itself.

    It is no accident that Casement loved and collected butterflies – the epitome of transformation. Transformation is deeply ecological. Casement was acutely sensitive to his environment. As he moved up river he was surrounded by the vegetation of the two largest jungles of the world. In his journals we find the eye of an ethnographer and environmentalist, who understands the intimate connection between any land and the people living there.

    This frontier environment at the limits of human endurance raises his awareness of the truly global struggle he was involved in. In a letter from Brazil after publishing the Congo Report, he wrote that it was deep ‘in the ‘lonely Congo forests’ where he found King Leopold II, who directed the enslavement of the country, along with himself – ‘the incorrigible Irishman’. The rivers and trees of the two mightiest jungles on Earth lead Casement to places few are willing to travel.

    The James Joyce Bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin today.

    Finnegans Wake may be viewed one day as the great novel of ecological thought, a theme hinted at in Ulysses. This is apparent on every page of his last work as words mutate in each sentence to become living, breathing entities, and as all things, animate and inanimate, metamorphise. Ultimately in this extravaganza of ecological vision, the river is crucial to emptying out, recycling and renewing. Hundred of rivers from all over the world are woven through the famous chapter involving the two washerwomen gossiping about Anna Livia Plurabelle on the bank of Dublin’s River Liffey (whom she is); the first word used in the book is ‘riverrun’; and Joyce’s final soliloquy is delivered by Anna Livia Plurabelle – meaning the plural, beautiful, river of life. The rivers and the trees are the site for transformation, creativity and redemption for Casement, Joyce and humanity.

    Bartholomew Ryan co-wrote (with Christabelle Peters) and performed a two-act monologue play on Roger Casement in Lisbon, Strasbourg and Bergen in 2016. He is a philosophy research coordinator at the New University of Lisbon (http://www.ifilnova.pt/pages/bartholomew-ryan) and leader of the international band The Loafing Heroes (https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com/)

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

    [1] See Hochschild, Adam; King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

    [2] See Goodman, Jordan; The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man’s Battle for Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

  • Hard at It – A Short Story

    And so the time came to rent an office space. We must all find our space. I wanted to read and create and explore, and where was everyone? Where were all the artists? Apparently they had ‘spaces’. One Friday evening I woke up in the National Library, my cheek pressed to the desk and a man’s face a few inches from mine. It was a big, sympathetic face.

    “Are you alright?” he asked softly.

    “I’m fine.”

    The library clerk was picking up books, the room was almost deserted.

    “You look awfully pale”, he said, and started gathering my books and papers for me. “Would you like to come and have a drink of something?”

    I wanted a drink of something alright but not with him. The man was a regular in the National Library, and on Fridays these many regulars edged up to you and asked if you’d like to join them for a drink over in Buswells that evening, or in Kehoes or the Duke. Where were all the young historians, the promising intellectuals pursuing PhDs? Absent from here.

    At this time I was reading many books on theatre, hatching my various theatre projects. I was going to the theatre too sometimes. I was definitely up to something, going somewhere, that was for sure. So I followed the inevitable drift into Stoneybatter. Everyone was in Stoneybatter, where rent was cheap. The artists, the few writers. They were all there. You passed them smoking rollies in the doorway of Walsh’s, or cycling down the easy hill that brought you into town, or they made you coffee in the friendly Italian place. In the mornings I would cycle in over the James Joyce Bridge with a mind full of ideas. I had big ideas for the stage then, ideas that collected in my head and conversed with each other; so many bubbling characters in my pot, for plays never to be staged. Never to be staged.

    The office space was on that narrow, twisting street, paved with rubbish and closing in with redbrick houses. You might know it as a historic street, a street not bothered by the present day. It wasn’t unusual to see a piebald horse clapping down it with a boy riding bareback, and the hardware shop and the fishmonger’s and the chipper had handwritten signs in the windows. Whenever I left the office the prostitutes were waiting on the street. They sometimes stood in the rain, and the raindrops splashed down their faces and soaked through their little outfits.

    The office had been set up by some business-like artists. I didn’t rent an office space because I wanted somewhere to work, but because I wanted a something like a husband, or just someone to have a kid with. Or just someone to bring me to the theatre.

    He was waiting the day I went to see the place. The artist with the keys took me upstairs, past a heap of broken lamps and old rucksacks and art nobody wanted. She opened the door, and his head swung out from behind a silver Mac screen. Thick tanned arms were spread around the desk. Kind brown eyes smiled and twinkled under a helmet of rich dark curls. He looked around the room shiftily, in the way of a person suddenly forced to assess their surroundings, because they’ve been intruded upon. He was eating chocolate biscuit cake from tinfoil. I was this intruder and this was my home. He was my collaborator and this was our home now. I told the artist I’d take the ‘space’.

    The rent wasn’t that cheap for a kip. The furniture was salvaged though it shouldn’t have been, and the bursts on the dog-brown arm-chairs were duct-taped. There were no floors, just bare concrete marbled with the remnants of older floors, the effect being that of a terrible skin condition, or gangrene. Lying here or there was your standard frayed Persian rug. The kitchen was a back-slum falling down with herbal teas and jars of delicacies, delicacies grown dusty with abandonment. These jars of dusty delicacies suggested there had been something like happier times in the building, but that those times had long passed, remembered only, maybe, on old Facebook pages. Everyone had moved on. Where were all the artists, who you saw outside Walsh’s and going somewhere on their bikes and serving you coffee all the other days? They didn’t have ‘spaces’ here. They were all in bed maybe. No one except the odd business-like artist with keys came into the building. But that did mean it was just me, and him.

    He was an artist. He came from Coolock, and he worked on apps. It was hard to say what he did but he was there behind his computer every morning when I got in, hard at whatever it was. With that same wistful sparkle in his eyes when he looked at me. On the first day I placed my bike carefully next to his. On the second day I thought, Hell, and let my bike relax into his, so the pedal caught in his spokes. It was winter all year round in that place, and every morning we lit a wood burner. We took it in turns to make coffee in the repulsive little kitchen. The coal ran out, and he got his hands on an old heater and kicked it until it worked. There was a balcony where we sat sometimes when it was summer, looking onto the neighbouring yards. Sometimes the woman from the friendly Italian cafe barbecued sausages underneath us, and the smells of someone’s comforting meal reached us. We felt, I think, very happy.

    He was handy around the place, as you might imagine. He installed apps on my phone. He gave me a cracked copy of Adobe Reader. He removed a virus from my computer. Pop-up screens had started appearing; dragons with spiked tails and little men bearing spears with ads for online poker, and then a real women with gold thighs straddling a heart-shaped chair. He ran a load of programmes and wiped them all from my machine.

    There was a lot of sexual tension in that space, I was almost certain of it. The dank and wet afternoons heaved with possibilities, when we could do anything together – go for a swim in the sea, to Walsh’s for pints, go to see a play, any time of day. We could cycle to a stream I knew near the woods in the Phoenix Park, and fall down on a carpet of leaves and get this thing over with for once and for all. Or I could march up to his desk, take him by the collar and yank him up – then a terrific scene would unfold, a blaze of passion, an unplanned pregnancy, a life of hardship, community spaces, theatre.

    We talked about our lives before Stoneybatter. London, Paris, Helsinki, West Cork. But Dublin was exciting, we’d say, and look up at the skylight that brought a single shaft of natural light into the rotting little room. There was loads going on in music, loads of art exhibitions, we’d say. The theatre scene was exploding.

    Though when I mentioned theatre, the space went quiet. He was from Coolock. He played Gaelic football. He liked Quentin Tarantino films. He was a bit of rough, but he was also a bit cultivated. If he talked about his degree he would say, “I done my degree”, but he’d also say “prior to”, instead of “before”, moving to Helsinki. He had a pride you didn’t want to mess with. I knew he would feel awkward if he knew that I knew more than him about something. I didn’t want him to know how much more I knew. I had no wish to emasculate him. The thing to do was to just get him out and knock back pints with him, to be swallowed whole by some night of pints and noise and theatre and more pints, with him.

    I trembled when it came to asking him for a pint. Some days, I was certain he was going to ask me, first. The room would howl with our silence and I’d catch him glancing over at me, then quickly back at his screen, and my chest would boil up unbearably until he stretched out his arms and said, “Aren’t there just so many passwords to remember? I have so many fuckin’ passwords”.

    Then he’d get back to his screen. He was shy. And I was buying time, a lifetime – I let too many nights go by. I let months go by, tapping away at my fucking theatre projects. Finally one evening the minutes droned on and on and when it came to asking him, my breath got trapped. I was stiff, I was being seized and throttled. I stood at the door, my chest an ice pack breaking open.

    I said: “I’m going for a pint in Walsh’s.”

    He raised a drooping head. There was dejection, misery and boredom in his eyes, distaste in his hanging jaw.

    “If you’re free?” I went on.

    “I’m not actually – eh, just, really busy.” He went back underneath his screen.

    This drove me wild.

    I really wanted to drink a pint with him. I really wanted to order a pint with him, down it fast, and drown in a load of pints together; head to the theatre and hang there with our heads spinning at the bar and everyone around us watching and then sink down together under a universe of pints. I could taste the particular pint one evening. It was cold and bittersweet and so refreshing, I had a glorious thirst for it. I was standing at the door, dangling my bike keys. But I was stiff and hot and being throttled again.

    “Want to just scratch all of this?” I asked.

    “What exactly do you propose,” he asked.

    “A pint,” I said.

    “I dunno,” he said. “I’m strung out with…”

    “I’ve tickets to a play,” I broke in – I couldn’t stop now. “Would you like to go a play?”

    “Fuck it, yeah, why not,” he said.

    He was getting up. Out of his seat. I needed to act on the panic before I could feel it, before it overcame us. I told him we had to rush – It started at 7.30. You could never be late to the theatre. Did he know that? They didn’t let you in. I wasn’t sure he knew that. He got the bikes ready and as I waited on the phone to Box Office – I didn’t really have tickets to a play, had to sort them then – he was downstairs, extracting the bikes from each other. We cycled through the city, me behind him – the heat was so unbearable I didn’t notice what was wrong until I pulled off my winter layers in the foyer. Tickets awaited us; the place was busy with half-familiar faces. It’s here, I thought. This is my home, and it’ll be our home.

    The play was set in a pub in the west of Ireland. It was your standard Irish play. When the curtain rose he sat back and exhaled. I too was relieved it was set in a pub. A barmaid was leaning on the bar, gazing stoically before her. She wore a yellow pinafore, and had a face from another time. Country lads arrived in one by one from the fields or the mines or what had you – all from another time. The script was witty, the boy and I laughed at every opportunity. “Your man’s gas?” I whispered to him. His laugh was a muffled guffaw, a TV laugh, not a theatre laugh. The space between our arms was warm. I was pretty light-headed now, pretty thirsty. I decided I would let him buy the pints at the interval.

    The first half dragged on and on. He checked his phone at least twice. I wished he had just switched it off.

    There were fisticuffs and the barmaid went hysterical. There was fratricide. There was howling. It was a bloodbath, in the country pub. After the bloodbath, the barmaid resumed her poise at the bar and gazed stoically out. It had all happened in another time. He shifted around and clawed at his jeans.

    The lights went down and everyone rose to their feet. We glanced at each other, then did the same. There were a lot of curtain calls, much bowing and beaming laughter from the people on stage. There was no interval.

    It was cold outside, and almost dark. We strolled towards our bikes in a strange hell. At the corner of O’Connell and Parnell Street I asked him what he thought of the play. “Your man,” I said. “Blew my mind.” He agreed, haltingly, as he reached for, I assumed, his money with which to buy me a pint. We were outside Foley’s bar now, where smoking men eyed us with possessive smirks. Beer taps flashed around my mind, I wondered what he drank; I pictured the pubs of Coolock, the slabs of lager bought for the boys after the GAA finals, by uncles and loyal supporters. He would drink Carlsberg, and so would I.

    He produced his bike keys then and nodded at Parnell Street. He was heading up that way, he said. I fished around for something to say. Oh yes.

    “The one thing that confused me though was the ending. In the play the girl emigrates. They must have changed – .”

    He stopped me.

    “I don’t know the play,” he said.

    He did not know the play: that much was clear. He said cheers for the ticket though. I watched him mount the bike, and rock forward on the handlebars. He cycled away and I went off fairly sharply myself. We never again mentioned the whole theatre thing. Even when we were lying in bed, we talked about Quentin Tarantino films.

    Maggie Armstrong is a writer based in Dublin.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini