The Half-Full Jug

2011-08-03T12:55:00.001+01:00

What a mess it is.

A non-nugget

2011-05-06T15:58:00.002+01:00

Last Saturday - I just remembered - a psychologist said something like, "We might have to deal with the idea that life isn't good or bad, it's just life." It might be a useful idea when you are in a bad way: it is bad to be told life is good when yours isn't. It seems as if one has a lot to live up to. The idea that things are what they are gives one a lease on the small pleasures anyway.

But it is a bad idea on the whole, something to say to someone, perhaps not inclined to think too much about it, who can nevertheless feel the bright side.

In some ways I can't believe it was quoted as a nugget of wisdom.

2011-05-06T12:39:00.001+01:00

Job advertisement for an O'Brien's sandwich bar:

"weekend work will be part of the roll."

The commonest thing

2011-05-06T00:16:00.000+01:00

Category mistakes.

Nature

2011-04-28T10:46:00.003+01:00

One of the deadlier illusions on the intellectual scene is disbelief in nature. I don't mean human nature. (Though I wish that more of those who don't like that as an excuse for bad things would realise we really cannot solely rely on ourselves to transcend our grubbiness, and self-justifications of one stripe or another. Properly conceived this would be a project of glory not self-subjugation.) I mean literally, not metaphorically, "the birds and the bees". And their importance, beyond pollenation. Trees, pretty flowers too. Creepy-crawlies, dangerous things also. Yes, they all really matter, for us.

You'll have to forgive a certain looseness of terms. I hope, clear what I'm driving at.

Presumably

2011-04-26T08:41:00.001+01:00

As Marx was not a Marxist, so God is not a dogmatist.

Ask me a question.

2011-04-25T10:07:00.002+01:00

Ask me a questions in the comment box about anything, and I will reply with what I think.

Quasi una fantasia

2011-03-06T22:40:00.004Z

I have first of all to say that I am to an extent sick of being ironised, even if it all takes place in my head! Knock it off. I do the deepest serious writing I see about me. I am vastly impressed with the capabilities of others, and I greatly prefer that the weirdness of the direction I find myself taking mine not be the only thing noted. Nor did I exactly choose it. It is the unavoidable apex of a number of considerations. It behoves us to be serious. Many months ago it came to me that every statement read or heard should be looked at as a possible object of belief. (And then, a little while later, that this was not a rule, but an enlivener.) Last weekend I read William Blake: "Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth." Both of these mean that you should try to agree or disagree with all this. At the least it should be asked if it has an internal consistency, because this is something different from a newspaper article, in which that might be no achievement.

One knows deeply that the perspective of an unwontedly unusual and serious young man is not the only one on the world. Still I am not really caught in a bubble, on the contrary, I think the sound eight hours sleep I get each night are not enough. I am awake the rest of the time. I admire creativity above all, but really have not got much creativity, which does not really make me a Pharisee when I get bored at the lack of self-criticism when other people are "creative." In reality, rude boy that I am, I like that too, most of the time. I must use what comes to me, limitations too. I plan to be less weird. In some ways I wish I were different. If I weren't blind I'd join the army. If I were in another time I would farm, honestly. The experience of writing has always a certain lightness, but life has a seriousness that I would never wish to dishonour by that. The increase of happiness matters.

You will find no elegance or pizzazz here in the style of the writing, because that is long superfluous. Why write at all, so, when there is no fun in the style of doing it? But no. We are all content with this superfluousness, we are beyond elegance or wow, and let it be so. For most of us, me included, whatever reading is done, is done as a matter of praxis, from medicine bottles to poetry. I cannot apologise for the seeming jarring of registers of thought. It comes to seem the only way. The failure of current journalism is that is not personal enough.

I advocate only freedom; everything else is a mud. Mill makes his big distinction in the opening of On Liberty: "The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual." I say that in the end the two go together, attempts (by people other than Mill) to put them in oppostion are vexatious, and since we live in societies, or better say, with other people who make them, everything begins from that point.

But the Imagination has a stake in the Liberty of the Will, and so demands effective Civil Liberty. Whether it should get it is an interesting question.

I do not overestimate the scale or even as it were the importance of the crisis in Ireland: people will live as ever they have done. I do not share Mary Hanafin's confidence that, "...we will come through this. I know we will." Or not her kind of confidence. (The first time I think I have heard anyone say such a thing.) But nothing can be said against people who keep the show going. But if ideas really exist, and if our concern is really with serious things, then our crisis has the interest of making many gross accommodations look silly. It is like living under a persistently cloudy spell. Some people will not mind, no matter how long it goes on. Some people will be pissed off, even if it's not raining on them. I am one of those who would be pissed off. And don't tell me it doesn't matter. Actually, one can do a bit more than with the weather.

This freedom is what comes after a moment of abjection, and, coming from the recognition of abjection, makes no claims on its possessor nor can draw its power from any source other than its recognition, so it is an eminently practical one. The truth of real abjection is that it is open to all, when real power is not. This little essay can be taken as an attempt to raise the stakes; or, as a reminder.

A reminder because what is most obvious is highly forgettable. Surely every life is built on what is called a way of life; in which the most different things can happen, but be reconciled by being of the person's time and of the time itself. We have this of course, what is perhaps new is the unprecedented level of choice in, using Mills' words, Social Society. There is one way of life, being composed of the idea of many available choices. It is breathtaking, I unironically insist (see first paragraph), for those who jump out of it briefly; it is of course very livable (look about). More worryingly, it gives the impression of unreality to those who look hard, as if there were an attempt at the bleaching of the atavistic, and the question arises of what can come of it. Where it does not come with the gravity of some personal experience, every basic defence of it has the squealed quality of assertion in the face of almost physical realities. The kind of insinuative attacks on the way things are can have the quality of extremely polite bullying.

To speak very mundanely, one knows Burke was a Whig, and so those who would moderate all change, and ultimately defend their given life and time, (what is called its "way of life," from a historical point of view, well beside the point), can claim a good heritage. It would be the defence of people; the defence of a workable order (or one that has been working); the defence of the consistency and amorphousness of the present. I say these are good things.

It is not a choice, quite, to point out that ultimately freedom must be an oppositional force to the conservative instinct. These ideas have a considerable reality, if they exist. Ultimately the liberal idea must come down to the extremely good question, "Why should I do that?", a question any individual can ask, and for whom the question is as real as day. Our time can only be called one of contending Romanticisms, in the seeming (and in a way, real) lack of necessity, defined by their relationships to it, and to time.

So while it was a sideshow to the rest of the election, the question of Irish as a core subject on the Leaving Cert remained interesting as a kind of horizon. It is a debate whose energy is long gone, proponents and opponents alike surlily defending turf. I think it should be abandoned, indeed, and this is a change from hesitancy on matters like this before. The hesitancy has always been because of a deep (in myself, almost as a part of personality; not about the great consequence in the world) worry about "unbinding" change. (I could worry for Ireland.) And it will be noted that many who want to keep it, do so because of the "binding" effect, despite of course not being able well to speak Irish, keeping us all as Irish people, or people who did Irish in school.

Why do I want shot of it, compulsorily? Yeats wrote, "In Ireland I am constantly reminded of that fable of the futility of all discipline that is not of the whole being." That is the "Why should I do that?" part of it, but also to do with the liberty of the will. Questing for motives is dangerous always. People who would prefer to have it, not nation- or people-builders necessarily by any means, mildly overlook the mild coercion of it; but again it is not just that. It is not a case of angry disavowal, or throwing the toys. But it might be to do with a certain justified impatience.

But I think I do love a change of this kind; it takes us into fresh air, it is a small reminder of freedom. People who indulge their scorn might do so against people who keep doing Irish... one cannot defend against all possibilities. It looks like history, what a beautiful sight! Change, it might be noticed, is what is happening.

Social Liberty - pragmatically part of the capacity for moral choice, and the liberty of the will - cannot be maintained without people rich, rather than poor, in spirit; proud people, people who cannot stand hearing certain things, who can come to be oppositional people. But that richness has to be maintained for its own sake. With an equally strong "but," it is nevertheless found that mutual aid, care - and also achievement, things done out there - are a great part of life. (And of course care is an achievement, one of them, and one of the more beautiful and valuable ones.) Experientially, it is the case that these two can be hard to reconcile. Therefore, above all, one must be oneself. To be assertive on the matter of Irish, having no effect on it, knowing that, and commenting anyway, is not to be difficult, it should be something like a necessary reserve. It is keenly to feel a superfluity, a very mild abjection, and anyway to pronounce oneself.

I am now genuinely amazed to remember how much it seemed plausible to me, to think of life as an endeavour in which the imagination might play a great part; I do so still. Having an imagination, part of which I take also to be receptivity to works of imagination, to be under their sway, and yet no creativity, it might seem a danger to continue repetitive time. But I intend, not being given firm command or reason to do otherwise, to convert every weakness to a practical strength. What does it mean to be imaginative without a means of expression for it? It would seem like a great mistake, or worse, a potential political danger. And yet if it were something other than a botched job, it would give licence to assume that the imagination had something to do with the world.

Being what it is, no determinate course of action can be got from it, and being what generously it should be, it could not wish to coerce. An imagination might be taken to be a great part of the self. A difficulty comes with the truth of experience: the extent of a happy fidelity to its finest suggestions - or perhaps what seems to be suggested by it, by the most absolute logic, or by the most extreme imagination. To be generous is best again. This way, its strongest hints - which again must have a reality if they come, if their coming is not part of a vaster madness - are always in the service of things that have to be. There is a generosity that is really an uncertainty; so again one must be oneself, if generous. (I am finally uninclined to listen to churches; my motives are mixed, more than that not wholly subject to reason; I advise others to my view; it does not matter; and I can stand by the purer ones. Beyond that I can be generous.)

To hold to one's first perceptions, that I contend have a value, that are so easy to forget for however long, it is necessary. If I cannot exactly really imagine what had me value the imagination so, at least I know I did, and could see it again.

It is not to say there is nothing to learn, but that we must know something to know what to make of what we have to learn. Already, much is known to us. Experience must count, not only as recognition of what is, but of what can be. The danger in disillusion is not only disavowal of wishes, but the accommodation born of time. With the strike of intensity, I know that I want not any moment of my experience to have been unconnected, and that this is merely sensible; I know that an attractive renunciation is the loss of something; and that a pleasant new binding out of necessity is change for change's sake; I know that what can seem like the tawdriest dreams - of an experience of the unity of being, of freedom, of nature, of peace, of history, of the erotic - must be real and true, if anything is real or true. Some of that experience would want to be redeemed, simply because of its timely insubstantiality, which is not really my restiveness; and as it was worldly pain, and as I am a type of man, it would want worldly redemption, rather than a reasonable silence that is not too kind.

I imagine a piece of writing such as this, distressingly immaterial in its depiction of our conjuncture, could sympathetically be read two ways, as something as it were new to one, or old to one. Whatever, it cannot be surprising that I prefer none, nor is agreement exactly right, when fresh recognition is better. It is not surprising that we are free; what else can we be?

Geography

2010-11-26T09:09:00.002Z

I think geography is a big influence on human affairs. I can understand why history and geography are taught as one subject in French schools. I would guess that in the same way there are instinctive psychologists and philosophers: there are instinctive geographers; they just have to look around.

Before the Road

2010-11-25T08:43:00.002Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfnBJNzXDH8

Sadly

2010-11-24T09:25:00.004Z

Most people who advertise themselves as interested in politics are not really interested in discussion or debate. One can see why to some extent because of class interests and so on. But that surely cannot be the whole story. Recently after I spoke pretty briefly at something, someone addressed me later in a pub, to say "I thought you were wrong," and then went back to chatting with someone else. Extraordinary.

Good morning!

2010-11-23T09:14:00.001Z

Another day in the fucking Matrix, what?

Desideratum

2010-11-22T11:44:00.003Z

An advance in the time of history that isn't a lurch in the dark.

Lovelock, April 15th 2009

2010-07-27T13:13:00.003+01:00

Wrote the following after the climate scientist James Lovelock talked in UCD last year. (The whole talk itself is available at the link.) Thought I should put it up. Read it carefully! I'm not Jeremy Clarkson. The piece might have overdone the exhilarated mockery. But I could hardly fail to have been sickened by people who were more interested in implying Lovelock was so evil, rather than asking: Are we really so bad? This is what the philosopher Graham Harman made of it.

On April 15th, the climate-change scientist and Gaia theorist James Lovelock was in town (“to promote his book,” some might feel the need to add). There was a packed crowd at the very big Smurfit Hall in UCD who wanted to have a bit of fun hearing about the end of the world, and we weren't disappointed.

The Q and A was brilliant. If Lovelock weren’t already so pessimistic for the near-future, he would have been after politely answering the concerns of the concerned.

Let me state right here that I (no more than yerself, perhaps) have no idea whether man-made climate change (or the “heating,” as Lovelock science-fictionally calls it) is happening. And I don’t know if it is reversible, or can be mitigated.

Living in ignorance is no excuse, to be sure, and this summer I’m going to read Lovelock’s and others books and get a serious fix on it. What’s important so far as this meeting was concerned is that the questioners were all sure of what they thought on these things, and that they still didn't get the point.

Newspapers have used terms like “member of the awkward squad” and “genial prophet of climate doom,” regarding Lovelock. I might add that in some ways he seems like a very English “hell in a handcart” type of conservative. But really he is a dead-serious anti-humanist. All that means is that he doesn’t think humans are the centre of the universe, or even the world.

We don’t even have much control over our own natures. So we can’t pretend to control the climate. “Would any of you trust the United Nations to control the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere?” Despite the current context, this is not just an anti-public-sector opinion. Instead, controlling the oxygen is what the earth itself has always spontaneously done.

“Hell in a handcart” types like to blame someone: immigrants, politicians, industrialists… But Lovelock isn't a bitter misanthrope, and he isn’t blaming anybody. We do what we do, seems to be his attitude. He is just a little sorry that we “do” blame. On the contrary, on a video available on YouTube, he shows the most tender concern for the future of his grandchildren. On the radio interview that alerted me to the visit, he said he had wanted to give his book the subtitle, “Enjoy it while you can.”

In the past week, I saw a house with two Jaguars and a BMW convertible outside it! I thought various things like “Christ!” and “a bit much, isn’t it?” and “that would be really exciting!” I mean to say, it would be fun to ride around in a Jag and think: “If the worst of the worst should come to pass, as they say in insurance adverts, and this one gets totalled, I’ll still be able to drive the other one…”

It would be nice to knock on the door of that house and ask: “Do you guys believe in man-made global-warming?” And I’d say it's 50-50 that they do. But this is where things become too-easily-parodiable. Most of us don’t have three luxury cars, and it seems things are still going to be fucked up. “That's why I've got the cars,” the owner might say. And Lovelock subscribes to this essentially tragic view of things.

He intends to enjoy it while he can: Sir Richard Branson has offered Lovelock (who’s 90-years-old, but seemed to have the energy of a sixty-year-old) the chance to fly into space for free on his Virgin-Cola-powered spaceship. The interviewer at UCD, Professor Frank Convery, asked him about the carbon footprint. Lovelock said, “I don't give a damn!” and that he wanted to see all of Gaia before he died.

Doing his own thing has been the thing for him. Convery of the privately-financed UCD was quick to reassure us that Lovelock had preferred being in the private sector throughout his career, for reasons that are indeed intelligible to anybody honest.

He worked in Shell, and in the 70's bravely set up as an independent scientist on the Beara peninsula, where he discovered the build-up of CFC's in the atmosphere. Getting them banned was easy: all the CFC products in the world were produced by just seven corporations.

Reducing carbon emissions is harder, because we’re all doing it. Lovelock isn't clear that it shouldn’t be. He pointed to the ban on DDT, in reaction to the death of birds in the States in the 60's and the famous “Silent Spring”. But DDT was used to combat malaria in Africa, which went straight back to bad old “normal” levels.

Lovelock thinks it was as natural for us to start using fossil-fuels as it was to start farming. Greens who propose 1-2-3 solutions are a permanent target of Lovelock’s ire. Partly to avoid offending local cultural sensitivities, Lovelock didn’t advise the Irish to go nuclear, but he thinks the British should adopt it as the only realistic option. There’s another reason why we don’t need to go nuclear, but I’ll save the good news for later.

The bad news (which is to say, the science bit) is as follows. It’s not only that carbon is “heating” things up, melting the polar ice caps, and raising sea levels. It's that, literally, with the reflective “whiteness” of the ice caps gone, the sea will take in more heat. Algae, a bit absorber of CO², will die, making things that bit worse. (With the algae gone, the northern seas will have the clarity of the Caribbean.)

And the northern permafrost will melt, releasing more of the stuff. And the rainforests are out of the picture as well. It's a chain reaction in the way that you might consider a destruction derby a chain reaction.

Lovelock gamely best-cases human population at 1 billion by 2100, as a relatively high-tech society. The other scenario is 100 million hunter-gatherers, “just a few breeding pairs dotted around Arctic Ocean,” as Lovelock said with perhaps some pleasure in the image.

The good news is: Go on the lads! The Irish will do grand! Lovelock thinks that the British Isles will be “life-boats to humanity” whose climate will be untouched. (Temperate islands are the places to be: New Zealand and Tasmania are also favoured.) Britain is overpopulated, and needs nuclear power to support its big cities. But Ireland can do as it pleases, with space aplenty.

I read Lovelock’s forecast for Ireland last year, and had various reactions: I laughed a little (I am giggly), felt abashed a little at my relief, and thought “Well, that’s nice”. The reaction of the audience was similar. Lovelock revealed to us our special status at the end of the formal interview, saying Ireland not using fossil-fuel would be like telling the captain of a life-boat, “ ‘Oh, you can’t run the engine, it spoils our carbon footprint.’ I mean it’s just a lot of nonsense!”

Convery said “OK, I think that’s a good note to, ah…” Relieved applause. Like just about winning the Six Nations again.

Now the ugly part: a public Q and A session which I generously assume was conditioned by the first stage of grief: denial. Ingenious, polyvalent denial, of a kind that would have been boring were it not so funny. Lovelock had led us to a panorama of bracing despair; and everybody was complaining about how their feet were sore.

The first questioner was a gruesome comic turn. He asked: “Will we need nuclear weapons, to keep people from boarding the life-boat?”

It prompted a couple of reflections: Where would we bomb? France, where people might be coming from? Probably not practical; best to set up MAD and a hotline. Southern Spain? Doable, and would set up a nice safety barrier… Sub-Saharan Africa? Yeah, but how much of it? And this wouldn’t help with the heating would it?…

At the time, I couldn’t tell whether this was a sick joke, or a moron, and listening to the recording, I still can’t. Lovelock said, to appreciative laughter, “That would be overkill.” (Implication: they’re going to die anyway.) “But you will need weapons, I’m afraid!” Humans will move in response to the climate, as other animals are already doing.

Lovelock’s answer shows that “hell in a handcart” attitude. If you sat him down one-to-one, he would say something strictly empirical, like: Ireland is a place that will be able to sustain human life, whatever cultural form it might take. But he does want to shock. He does it by being honest. The actual comment isn’t even deeply cynical, because if we are to sustain a civilised life, it would indeed be necessary to take steps to preserve it. But you’d rather not think of all that.

Three wise men got up during the Q and A to avow that the problem was population. One of them said, “Three words: population, population, population.” I feel it is relevant to note here that one of them was comfortably overweight… The moral fault here is a lack of decorum. The logical fault is to pretend that we’re all throwing up the same amount of CO².

If the questioners had said, “Look, we can’t afford all those Chinese and Indians having fridges and broadband,” it would have the virtue of honesty. But these questioners, while seeming to agree with Lovelock’s direst projections, refuse to grasp the dimensions of what he is really saying: that fuel-use is what matters, and that those of us who really used it have already used too much.

Equally, Lovelock isn’t going to pretend that turning on the central heating isn’t a logical decision sometimes. “It’s the way we live… But we don’t have much option.” We do what we do.

One of the big contingents on the night was the group who thought it was an interview with Dr Strangelove: they were horrified that he wanted to “go nuclear.” At one point, a questioner asked, “What’s the half-life of nuclear waste?” Lovelock said it was about 600 years, and the questioner began to walk triumphantly to his seat. Like a parent saying, “you still live in this house, young man,” Lovelock called out, “The half-life of CO², incidentally, is also quite long.”

If it seems I am mocking heartless goons, who think there are too many of you, and Luddites who can’t recognise a good change when they see one, well, the “soulful” response isn’t much better. Some people wanted us to feel real guilty.

The Chairman of An Taisce, Charles Stanley-Smith, said he gave school presentations, and that all he did was apologise to the children for what his generation has done. What!? Apologise to snotty kids who want to be driven everywhere and spend eight hours a day on the Playstation?

An ordinary member of the Green Party asked, “Do you not think that humanity, certainly over the last 200 years, should be ashamed of itself?” It shows that the Greens are humanists after all, that they think we’re really different from the other animals. But Lovelock’s point is that we’re not. If cute fluffy rabbits could stand on their hind legs, speak, and make tools, they probably would have done the same things as us. And they would have bred even more.

The other side of feeling ashamed is feeling there has been some injustice. This happened during an interview Lovelock gave the day before on Radio 1. He said the survivors would be the strong and the intelligent. “But that’s - eugenics!” gasped Myles Dungan. Lovelock the Eugenicist said, “Yes. But nobody’s doing it.”

An “ordinary citizen,” as she presented herself, was the one who really got the point. Referring repeatedly to Lovelock’s book, she said that wind-turbines only operated at peak efficiency 17% of the time. She was concerned with the beauty of the countryside, and seeing as the turbines wouldn’t do much change the climate, wouldn’t it be better to leave things as they are?

I agree with this sentiment. Anybody going on too long about the beauty of the turbine is putting a brave face on things. But it was still horribly funny, facing into ecological collapse, to see somebody trying to get the world’s leading climate-change scientist to agree that those things shouldn’t be in her backyard! She might have been equally happy to get a prominent theologian to condemn mobile phone masts. Lovelock was happy to reaffirm what he’d earlier said on the matter, and the questioner was no doubt mollified.

George Orwell said that no Christian believes in God the way that he believes in Australia. It is probably the same with most Greens and the prospect of ecological collapse. A Green reads the latest newspaper report on the environment, and shivers. Then he goes outside, and hears some stupid birds singing and, in May, the unresting trees threshing, and thinks on some level, This isn’t going to end. Even a Green finds it hard to believe what the maths and the projections are telling him. And he, differently from the rest of us, wants to believe it.

If I was a Green, I would say: “Remember that talk two years ago about a soft landing?” The credit crunch is the Greens’ best example of how a ‘virtual’ threat can become the real deal overnight. It might have some rhetorical effect. But we didn’t choose the new circumstances. And we don't have any conception of just giving everything up for good. The bargain in the cutbacks at the moment is: it’ll all be better soon.

But after that meeting, what I feel most deeply is: strange that those who are most convinced of the threat are least prepared to face up to what it would really mean.

Derek Mahon's troubles

2009-01-23T15:30:00.004Z

The dangers attendant in writing about war, or politically volatile situations generally, are the opposite extremes of letting the violence pollute the mainspring of the poem, or a humane liberal scepticism that can only regret that those people - whoever those people are - are doing those things in the name of their beliefs. An example of the latter is James Fenton's war poetry since 1983, which has been bland even when, as in “Jerusalem,” it has been exciting to read.

So it is bracing to come across “Spring in Belfast” the first poem in Derek Mahon's Collected Poems, first published in 1964 when he was 23. For Mahon, who has studied in Dublin and Paris, there can be no easy identification with his (Ulster Protestant) tribe. But equally he sees the limitations of the tendency to patronise the place. “[T]his desperate city,” he concludes,

Should engage more than my casual interest,
Exact more interest than my casual pity.

Mahon regains the possibility of a more than anthropological sympathy with his tribe, while coolly rejecting the violence of the “squinting heart”. Read on 22 pages, to “Ecclesiastes,” and see the loss of that opening. What struck me on rereading this poem is its violence, its spitting consonances, its blank-verse harangue:

God, you could grow to love it, God-fearing, God-
chosen purist little puritan that,
for all your wiles and smiles, you are...

The poem was originally published, as Hugh Haughton points out in The Poetry of Derek Mahon, on the resonant date of 1st May 1968, in The Honest Ulsterman. In England, it was published as “Ecclesiastes Country,” and once again Mahon is writing of his Ulster Protestant tribe. The Civil Rights Assocation had been set up the previous year, and no doubt Mahon could sense that hard-line unionists felt nettled. Violence was in the water, and dismally seeps into the poem.

Mahon adopts the voice of a Paisleyite preacher, and addresses himself in stern self-condemnation. This has its uses as a poetic tactic. (Good poets blame themselves, bad poets blame other people.) But Mahon is too hard on himself: the only thing he and the Rev. Paisley have in common is that they spring from the same Planter stock. And Mahon acknowledges this when he depicts himself carrying "that red / bandana and stick, that banjo". So the only reason why Mahon could have these disturbing authoritarian tendencies is that he's an Ulster Prod. Certainly, Gerald Dawe has no doubts about this when he disappointingly writes in his collected criticism that in this poem “[Mahon] came closer to an understanding of the nature of that community than any other poet I know”.

As for the motives he presents for himself to follow the path of the Loyalist preachers, Mahon writes, “this is your / country, close one eye and be king”. The trouble is: nobody does this. You can accuse the Rev. Paisley of any number of things, but you couldn't say that he was regal, or in it for the money. Rather, the problem was that he did believe what he believed. One of his eyes was always closed.

Most people don't believe what they believe very much, but, as Mahon writes on much firmer ground in “Spring in Belfast”

yield instead to the humorous formulae,
The spurious mystery in the knowing nod...

The community offers a way of living, “a perverse pride”, which can be taken on without necessarily acceding to all its pieties. This allows the poem to intimate that the difference between the community and the ‘alienated’ intellectual like Mahon is not one of blindness and sight, but of perspective. Neither attitude is wrong: both can see the “spurious mystery”, and both should be able to see its value. It couldn't even be said that this ironic distance in members of the community is politically or personally liberatory, but it is always there. I'm told of one old man who, when the parish priest is mentioned, smiles and says laconically, “Ah, Father Keogh…” And despite this common attitude, priests were nevertheless able to eat people in the streets for much of his life. Does anyone doubt that many Protestants felt the tied-up swings on Sundays as an oppression?

In politically volatile situations, the priests have the run of the streets. They get that by creating havoc on the streets. They can harness other people's enjoyment in doing horrible things. And if fear can't keep people quiet, violence will.

Why does this matter? After all, a good poem can make up for any number of bad poems. It matters partly because “Ecclesiastes” was on the Irish Leaving Certificate syllabus the year I did the exam (rather, the first of two years, alas) and again last year. Apart from being an inferior work, it passes on large assumptions about the people the students will share the island with. And the atmosphere of a Leaving Cert classroom isn't always one of asking fundamental questions. See here and here for example.

It matters also because some academic critics have been slow to ask important questions. Hugh Haughton, in what has already become the standard work (and deservedly so) on Mahon, treats it merely as an autobiographical assertion. He then shows its rhetorical structure, its consonances and so on, full of unnecessary bold and italicisations to clinch the point. He says it's a rejection of rhetoric, but not to see its unironic rhetorical violence is not to have read the poem. Dawe also, as we have seen, makes things easy for himself in the ‘Irish Studies’ world, and easy for nationalist critics to assent to his broad sweep of the Protestant community. His criticism might have some value in a Protestant context, but the way things are, nationalist critics can have a Field Day with it.

Finally, irony is the proper poetic course between violence and liberal scepticism. Mahon writes - not really meaning it - of how he might

love the January rains when they
darken the dark doors and sink hard
into the Antrim hills...

But, refusing to grant the extremists final proprietorship of the Antrim hills, and seeing their beliefs as a freakish human product, not an eternal truth, Mahon writes much more strongly - more truly ironically - in “Spring in Belfast”,

We could all be saved by keeping an eye on the hill
At the top of every street, for there it is,
Eternally, if irrelevantly visible.

Everyday happy days

2008-11-02T01:07:00.002Z

Here's a review I did of the Deborah Warner production of Sam Beckett's Happy Days at the Abbey. It's at the flattering domain name of theirishcritic.com. I'm slightly proud of the first paragraph:

Lots of us know Beckett’s famous words from The Unnameable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” This is tragicomic; but it’s also arrived-at, accounted-for. Whatever else he’s doing, the character who says this is definitely thinking it also. In Deborah Warner’s brilliant production of Beckett’s Happy Days, the central character, Winnie, played by Fiona Shaw, does as little thinking as possible. Instead we get a more domestic tragicomedy, one that we can recognise more as part of our own everyday happy days. Because the play’s strength is to see that our normal way of life is more like the inverse of Beckett’s famous formula: “I’ll go on! (I can’t go on.)”

It gets less Fintan O'Toole-like after that. I go on to give the impression that I went to the play.

The Three Attitudes of Love

2008-11-02T00:36:00.002Z

Acis and Galatea (1629-31)
Nicolas Poussin
Oil on canvas,
97 x 135 cm
National Gallery of Ireland

Harold Bloom on Shakespeare

2008-09-06T22:15:00.006+01:00

"...if you want to get any serious drinking done you've got to go to Shakespeare. What Shakespeare offers is cognitive power. For example, Freud's work was the systemisation of what he saw in Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Freud's post-modernist Parisian scions, academic feminism, Marxism, Lacanianism, Foucaultianism, Derrideanism, contribute nothing to a critical appreciation of Shakespeare. I once thought otherwise, but now I rather doubt it (alas, now I am old). What others have called Bardolatry seems to me nothing other than an authentic response to Shakespeare. You know, Charles, you go to Shakespeare for the characters. Of course, in Shakespeare, we come to confront the anxiety of influence. Personality is a Shakespearean invention... One goes to Shakespeare because one doesn't have enough friends..."

What we know

2008-08-30T17:31:00.021+01:00

Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667)
Man writing a letter, 1664-65
Oil on panel, 53 x 40 cm
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

A refined, foppishly dressed, golden-haired young man writes a letter. His face is expressionless, but concentrated on the business of writing. This picture has a pendant, Woman reading a letter, so he is writing that letter. In the background, there is a landscape, which seems to bear no relevance to what is going on, the kind of stuff nobody minds or notices. The letter-writing is the only thing going on in this picture. Even if we could read the letter, we would have no idea what it meant. Any face the young man made would not give that secret away. The elegance of the man's dress and his casual pose might make you distrust him, but that evidence too is merely circumstantial. The picture is "unreadable". Watching the scene, in the act of looking at it, we realise we can have no idea what goes on, in writing, in life. It makes the painting a peculiar piece of literary criticism.

Dutch materialism. This is in all the art-historical books, but it is worth wringing it out of them in reference to this picture. The art-history books concentrate on the Dutch reverence for, as Derek Mahon puts it, "the chaste / Perfection of the thing, and the thing made". The table-mat, the tile-floor, the bulbous thing on the table, even the young man's clothes, even the pen and paper, all seem simply to be what there is. But the writing gives the lie to that. It says one thing, but does it mean another? Meantime, look.

Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667)

Woman reading a letter, 1664-65

Oil on panel, 53 x 40 cm

National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

A domestic comedy. That ridiculous dog. The woman smiles, liking what she reads. The seascape painting, outlandishly, but nevertheless easily, symbolising the difficulties of love. This is what we know.

Looking at pretty pictures!

2008-08-20T15:02:00.009+01:00

It's rainy in town and coffee is now €2.70. (The rule is: you're only allowed to complain about price rises once; after that, it makes sense to fork out cheerily.) So go to a gallery. The great (dry, relatively inexpensive) joy of Dublin in the past few months has been the three top-class exhibitions in the National Gallery, the Hugh Lane and the Chester Beatty Library.

The National Gallery exhibition, now over, was Impressionist Interiors, thereby smoothly catering to the main cultural interests of the middle classes who go to this kind of thing: Impressionism and Interiors. Some of the paintings that were supposed to be there never made it (lost in the post). And it could just as easily been called Degas and Friends. But that is no complaint. My angle here is just to reproduce the experience of dawdling through the rooms and stopping and staring, and thinking, idly. I also want to help the middle classes who go to this kind of thing. Many of them look at the gobbets of prose to the right of the picture and move on as though it was a treasure hunt. Relieved to be in the world of moveable type (such as you might find in a newspaper), they don't know that the thing to do is have a look.

Right, this, by Degas, did not appear at the exhibition, but it's very similar to one that did. Same pose, same light. As my art history teacher said: "It's alright to enjoy this, she's there for the scopic... taking!" What's great about Degas' nudes is that he gets the essentials: bums and breasts. As the middle classes say in galleries: "Very modern, in that sense."

This is Marxism! The maid carrying the basket and the well-off man are caught in the economic Real, therefore, they are painted in hard classicist colours. The well-dressed woman and her child can afford to be sentimenalised, therefore, they are painted in pleasure-giving Impressionist light. Don't be afraid, though, it is a beautiful picture.

Well, that's enough looking at pictures for today! Do go to the Hugh Lane show and the Chester Beatty show of Rembrandt prints. They're great.

Writers' Rooms: Eric Blair

2008-07-13T23:40:00.012+01:00

My routine is pretty unchanging from day to day. I get up late, and only get to work at about 11 a.m. But the advantage of being a writer and an elephant is that you don't have to account for yourself to other people all the time.

There's not much space in my study, really, but I don't complain. The other elephants who I share the enclosure with are always doing boring repetitive rocking motions and wandering about like lost fools. I just get down to work. The place where I go to the toilet is just out of the picture. It's great to have everything I need close by. I have a photo of my mother on the rocks in the centre.

I often have people visit me. Bernard Crick, George Orwell's biographer, said Orwell hadn't actually shot an elephant in Burma as he claimed in the essay "Shooting an Elephant". I wrote to him to confirm that Orwell had just imprisoned me and used me to write critical essays and novels. He visited me, an exciting event, but I trampled him accidentally to death.

And when I was part of the London Literary World I used to visit other peoples' studies. T. S. Eliot was an unfailing gentleman, as everybody else reports. Best drink and nosh. I'm afraid I rather made a mess of the place. I had suggested we stay outdoors. But he contrived not to notice! He even offered to recite some of the Four Quartets to me. Under the circumstances I could hardly say no. I once tried to trample Clive James on TV, but the interview was cancelled at the last minute. I simply wanted him to appear on Japanese TV.

Now people have begun to recognise me in my own right, which is welcome after a long life. People often ask me: how were you able to launch such penetrating critiques of totalitarian societies? They obviously don't know the saying, "an elephant never forgets". Children also seem to get a great kick out of me. Maybe they've read Animal Farm, which any child could read.

To be honest, I was having a laugh in that book. How could anyone believe that animals could take over a farm and attempt to distribute wealth on an equal basis? You try living on a zoo and still believe that. Animals are disgusting animals, no doubt about it.

But I haven't become conservative in my old age. I'm backing Obama for the US presidential elections. I believe he’s a really good person. He’s smart. And he does represent what the country needs most now, which is change. I think we need new voices, new blood. We need to get a whole group out, get a new group in. McCain represents yesterday.

I took the name Eric Blair in Burma because it sounds like elephant. Then Orwell stole my identity and claimed to have shot me dead. He actually had me in his London flat. If that isn't colonialist expropriation, I don't know what is. He was very discriminatory towards elephants. He said I was going through musht when he tried to shoot me. That was a fabrication. That was him. He used to try kneading the breasts of a woman in the bazaar every day, and she was having none of it, as you can imagine.

The other day I took part in an artificial insemination programme. You try to do your bit for the environment. Orwell never had 8 or 9 attractive women all arousing him with their hands at the same time. He would have resented me that. He turned against the empire when he couldn't shoot me. We all like to break the game when we aren't winning.

And his writing! All he could write were third-rate Ezra Pound imagist imitations. He would ask me for suggestions for improvement. I gave him six simple rules and he really resented them. As if I was patronising him. I didn't understand him! I couldn't understand what he was trying to do! He was an artist! He only became successful when he robbed my plain English essays and novels. He tried to change them to vent his hatreds. "The Decline of the Elephant Murder." "Big Elephant is watching you." Luckily for him the editors insisted on changing them back.

Looking back on my life as an elephant, I consider myself fortunate. Nothing to complain about, compared to other people. I will always remember conditions inside the slum housing of Paris and London. They were very cramped and uncomfortable and I don't know how the workers I was with put up with it.

I got the opportunity to move into assisted care here 2 years ago and jumped at it. I'll continue to write here till my dying day.

The International Brigade for Zimbabwe!

2008-07-13T22:12:00.005+01:00

Join my Facebook group to liberate Zimbabwe from the clutches of Mugabe here! It won't take long! My inspiration for creating this group is here. At the moment, the other group has many more members...