Quasi una fantasia

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?