Back on the Hobby Horse

I mentioned Keith Waterhouse's 1979 collection of newspaper columns Rhubarb Rhubarb in a previous post. It contains an article on the role of aunts at Christmas, in which he writes: "Some aunts sing. They sing: "Come Into the Garden, Maud". Some aunts recite. They recite "The Lady of Shalott" (by the author of "Come Ito The Garden Maud".)"

Here's an excerpt from another book I'm reading, A Memoir by Terry De Valera: "It was while she was in Edenderry that mother took up serious reading. She read Dickens, Scott, George Eliot, and a great deal of poetry, particularly Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Longfellow. She had of course a great love for, and knowledge of, Shakespeare's works, and her love of poetry was apparent throughout her entire life. She said: "I have always had a delight in poetry. When I saw the rain drops on the leaves in the morning, Byron's lines came into my mind:

And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves

Dewy with nature's tear-drops as they pass."

Many years later, I remember Father often asked her to find some apt quotation, and seldom, if ever, did she fail to find or provide one, often from memory alone."

How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear twenty-first century! It's impossible for me to imagine anybody reciting "The Lady of Shalott" at a Christmas party today. Presumably, it must have seemed at least plausible in 1979, or Waterhouse wouldn't have conjured it. Remember he was writing for the Daily Mirror, not some posh paper.

Everybody has their hobby-horse, and this is mine. (Well, it's one of them, at least.) Perhaps a hobby-horse is not the best vantage-point from which to see clearly. But I'm convinced that the decline in poetry-reading has had profound effects on society. We hear constantly (and I mean constantly) about the addictive, "dopamine-seeking" behaviour which is inherent to social media and smartphones and all the rest, and the way it's reshaping our brains. It's such a cliché, in fact, I'm ashamed even to mention it, except...

Except that it seems to me that this is really just a continuation of something that was already happening even before computers or smartphones came along. Even before television came along! It seems to me that most fiction involves the constant arousal and satisfaction of curiosity. Who knocked on the door? Who is that mysterious figure in the mist? How did Sherlock Holmes know what Dr. Watson was thinking about at that precise moment?

You might say: that's not fair, not all fiction is like that. Literary fiction is not like that.

But all fiction and almost all prose is more like that than poetry. There is no suspense in a sonnet.

And even when there is a story, even when it's the most popular poetry imaginable-- a folk ballad about a murder, say-- the essence of the work is not suspense and gratifying curiosity. Because you could do that much better in prose.

I think the essential difference is that poetry is inherently contemplative and prose-- along with most other artforms and entertainments-- is inherently analytical. (I realize I have said this before.)

They don't have to be in competition. Of course you can enjoy both-- you should enjoy both. But the inescapable truth is that, although people used to read combine fiction reading with poetry reading, they no longer do so. People today seem more willing to read even the most difficult and longest fiction (or books, films, music) etc. than to read even the most accessible poetry.

And I'm aware of this reluctance myself. I never feel like reading poetry. The reward always comes later. Either during the reading itself-- like the glow that you get during exercise-- or much later, when the lines and rhythms and phrases have entered into your mind and become a part of you.

As media become more based upon instant gratification, we're all going to have to make a more conscious effort not to enter a vegetative state. Maybe it's a good time to make that little bit of extra effort and read some poetry, especially some long poetry.

How to Deal with Anti-Label People

You've probably heard them: "Ooh, I don't really go in for labels. I can't be pigeon-holed as conservative or liberal, left-wing or right-wing, traditionalist or progressive, nationalist or internationalist, or anything else. My thinking is far too subtle and profound to be contained in boxes. I fly, eagle-like, beyond the nets of convention and your limited human frameworks. I am large, I contain multitudes."

I suggest such people should be called anti-labellists, or an-labs for short. That will settle their hash.

Trucking Horror Stories

Are you familiar with the YouTube channel Mr. Nightmare? It's a brilliantly simple concept. People send in their "true" horror stories and Mr. Nightmare reads them out. It's on the internet, but it could have been done eighty years ago on the wireless. The videos get millions of views.

Many of the videos are themed, which I like. Today I was listening to these three trucking stories. They were pretty good.

I can't even drive, but I'm quite fascinated by truckers. Now that's a manly job!

Tea in the Poolside Café

There's a café called The Poolside Café in UCD. It's beside the fifty-metre indoor swimming pool that dominates the cavernous Student Centre. I like to drink tea and coffee there, read a book, and enjoy the atmosphere of the swimming pool-- the sounds, the beautiful colour of the water, the shimmering light, etc. (The pool itself isn't pay-as-you-go and the annual fee is more than I would want to pay.)

I bought a cup of tea there at the weekend. The tea in the poolside café costs 1.50, which is cheaper than you'll get anywhere-- except, perhaps, a church fete or a school jumble-sale or something like that. All the same, they only ever fill two-thirds of an already small paper cup. I like my beverages filed to the brim. (And in a big mug, for preference.)

The lady serving me asked if I wanted her to leave room for milk. I said: "Yes". When she handed it to me, it was half-way filled. I said with a smile: "That's a LOT of room!" If she heard me, she didn't react.

The thing is...why did I say "Yes" when she asked me if I wanted to leave room for the milk? I foresaw clearly what would happen.

I suppose I said it because I can't imagine replying: "No, you already leave more than enough room for the milk, thank you very much."

Or because I can't imagine just saying: "No", and then putting milk into it in front of her.

What abominable cowardice!

A Personal Contradiction

I've noticed this contradiction about myself:

1) I'm becoming more and more libertarian all the time, more of a believer in the principles of the American Revolution. Ten or fifteen years ago, I would have said I was a traditionalist conservative rather than a libertarian because freedom-- while it's obviously an important value-- isn't the most important value, or the overriding value.

But in recent years my position has changed to this one: freedom isn't the most important value in itself, but it's the most important political value. Not only because authoritarian government always has the potential to become a flat-out totalitarian regime like the USSR or the Nazi Germany (and surely preventing that is the most important thing), but also because of the more insidious soft tyranny we've seen creep over all publicly-funded or government-controlled institutions over the last few decades. The arm of government only stops short of your own home and your own mind. Political correctness is omnipresent. Civil society is replaced by NGOs. "Human rights" have become an excuse to hammer society into the shape desired by our elites-- which inclines me to think that positive human rights were a mistake from the first, and we should instead favour the "negative" human rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Yes, corporations can be just as enthusiastic at spreading political correctness (or any other ideology) as government. But government always has the whip-hand. Recent events in America have shown this to be the case. (The fact that this whip-hand might sometimes be used for good doesn't make me any more keen on it.)

2) And yet...the sort of community I would like to live in is a paternalistic and closely-knit and somewhat rigid community. I like reading about boarding schools and monasteries and old-fashioned colleges with dormitories and honour codes and all that sort of thing. I love the word "canteen", both because of how it sounds and because I like the idea of a communal eating space where everybody eats the same thing, or chooses from a limited menu. (The word "canteen" is intrinsically poetic, in my view.) I want some rules that are a little bit arbitrary and nonsensical and unreasonable. I want village elders, town worthies, and city fathers...even if they have feet of clay, even if I thumb my nose at them. My own taste would not run to the maximum amount of freedom-- except in the all-important areas, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Triple-Take

 I've frequently noted this "triple-take" in my own mind, including this morning:

1) Reading about some other time or place, before I was born, and finding myself yearning for the idyll I have constructed around it. In this case (although I've never really been a proud Dubliner) it was an ill-defined idyll of old Dublin life, the sort I would glimpse when I heard people talking about "the rare auld times": images of barefoot children playing hopscotch and chanting rhymes, streets without billboards or engine fumes, thick Dublin accents, "porter running from the taps with a head of yellowed cream", broad Dublin salt-of-the-earth accents, a general atmosphere of piety, shabby gentility, patriotism, etc.

(It could, of course, just as well be some other idyll attached to some other time and place.)

2) The painful realization that it wasn't like that...that people back then also made stupid, smutty jokes (as I frequently have), that there was just as much small talk, that people craved excitement and novelty and convenience and garishness, that the washerwoman would have preferred a washing machine (who can blame her?) and the kids playing hop-scotch would have dropped it for video games at the speed of light.

3) The sudden, momentarily overwhelming urge to at least-- as far as I can-- live my life as purged of banality as much as possible, even to the point of caricature and becoming an object of ridicule. Much as I love jokes and comedy, I have very frequently felt the sudden urge to become completely humourless, as a a sort of counter-weight to all the tedious and depressing buffoonery around us.

Of course, this "overwhelming urge" has quickly passed on every occasion...

The Ilac Shopping Centre and the Daffodills

A fountain bubbled dreamily.

Above it, a hot air balloon
Rose and descended endlessly
Then higher still, a tiled cartoon
Of Moore Street shawlies. Just across
Tinkled a mezzanine café
And, further up again, there was
A mirrored ceiling. All the way
Above that ceiling, Space Age-style
Glass lifts took shoppers up to see
The streets below. My juvenile
Soul swooned in quiet ecstasy.

One year they put some banners up
With lines from Wordsworth's "Daffodils"
I guessed this was the FA Cup
Of poetry; the Orson Welles,
The Sergeant Pepper, Everest,
The Parthenon, all that could boast
Of being best, the very best,
The poem the whole world loved the most.

I was a Stars Wars baby with
Strange knowledge of things long ago
Things all but lost, like sunken myth,
From long before the Late Late Show.
Optimus Prime and Patrick Pearse
Looked over me from infancy
Queen and Iron Maiden filled my ears
Arcadia my memory.

My innocence was ten miles deep
To think the world loved poetry
Enough to care that much. The creep
Of time-thieving technology
Had choked us less, and Ireland still
Trailed clouds of glory from its birth
(Since grand ideals take time to kill
And dreamers to be thrown to earth)
But even thirty years ago
The gig was up, and Pegasus
Was saddled tight and kept to show
The kids around the syllabus.

Must shopping centres kill the soul?
Can daffodils sustain the heart
At second-hand? Does time unroll
Away from nature and from art
Unstoppably? Or did I snatch
A glimpse of something possible?
Some promise that the soul can catch
(Even in suburbs, even still)
The light that never was on sea
Or land, or blue remembered hills?
Is there a place for poetry
So far from daffodils?