Favourite Poems: Golden Stockings by Oliver St. John Gogarty

This poem is fairly well-known in Ireland but, I'm guessing, almost completely unknown outside it. I have mixed feelings about introducing such poems to an international readership: I like the idea of a "national literature" and literary provincialism. But my little corner of the internet is hardly going to make much of a difference.

Do I have to say anything about this poem? Words like "dainty", "delicate", and "delightful" suggest themselves. It has enough pathos to avoid being twee. The last line is perfect.

Golden Stocking by Oliver St. John Gogarty

Golden stockings you had on
In the meadow where you ran;
And your little knees together
Bobbed like pippins in the weather,
When the breezes rush and fight
For those dimples of delight,
And they dance from the pursuit,
And the leaf looks like the fruit.

I have many a sight in mind
That would last if I were blind;
Many verses I could write
That would bring me many a sight.
Now I only see but one,
See you running in the sun,
And the gold-dust coming up
From the trampled buttercup.

And While I'm Posting Videos...

...here's a video of my talk in Belfast in 2019. The only time I've been in that city, and almost the only time. I've made one day-trip to Newry since then.

It's managed to chalk up a colossal 329 views! And one comment!!

A Candle's Flame

 

I put this poem up on YouTube two years ago and it's only had eighty-five views. That's pathetic. Maybe if I post it every now and again I can get it into triple figures.

It was my effort to simply concentrate on atmospheres and phrases that I really like. 

Favourite Album Covers: Working in the Soul Mine by the John Schroeder Orchestra

 

This album was in my home when I was growing up. I've never listened to it, but I always remembered it. These girls look very serious about working in the soul mine. I like it when a metaphor is followed through.

The Best Irish Ads...Ever!

Advertising is a part of life. Some ads are good enough to create shared memories. If you're old enough, watching old television ad breaks (people have uploaded quite a few of them to the internet) is a real trip down memory lane. ("A trip down memory lane" might be a cliché, but it's one of my favourites. Think of it as a "Proustian moment" instead, if it makes you feel better.)

Here are my favourite Irish TV ads from down the years. (Well, some of them are from the cinema and the internet.)

Tourism Ireland's 2011 advertisement for the then-new Terminal Two in Dublin Airport.

A rather naughty ad for the chocolate bar Moro. Yes, the humour is bawdy, but it's undeniably funny, and sharply observed in terms of how Dubliners spoke at this time.

A 2007 ad for the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority, which might have been better occupied trying to avert the 2008 banking crisis than making ads. "I don't know what a tracker mortgage is" became something of a catchphrase in Ireland. This is the sort of "everyday surreal" that I love so much. Believe it or not, a spin-off documentary was made twenty years later. Well, sort of.

No list of memorable Irish ads would be complete without this famous 1987 ESB ad, which features the Dusty Springfield song "Going Back". This seems to have lodged in everybody's memory. It certainly did in mine. I remember this ad making me very conscious of my mortality, for some reason. Emigration was a big theme of the period.

Speaking of emigration, this is a 1991 Scottish ad for Tennant's lager that was shown in Ireland, replacing the name "Caledonia" with the words "my land". It's a great piece of story-telling in little more than a minute.

Apparently it was pulled as SNP propaganda. I didn't know that until now!

This 1986 ad for Bórd na Mona (who sell peat briquettes), The Marino Waltz by the Dubliners, is in my view the single greatest Irish TV ad of all time. Such a simple concept, so brilliantly executed. Back when romantic Irishness was still allowed.

I can't resist including this Drifter ad from 1990, even though it was UK rather than Irish. I think I read somewhere that it was shown in Ireland for longer.

"Doctor, doctor, can I have a prescription?". This public health ad was shown on UTV (Ulster Television) in the 1980s, and the character has a strong Northern Irish accent. But, interestingly, the voice-over at the end sounds like a Dubliner.

I remember this one from the cinema rather than the TV, and it was effective on the big screen. I think it's from 2001, but I'm not sure.

A Post from Eleven Years Ago: Ten Reasons I Believe in God

1) Because I am alive. I've never been able to get over the surprise of this. It seems completely unlooked-for and gratuitous. It fits with the idea of a God who didn't have to create anything, but did so out of pure love.

2) Because the world is so dramatic. Nothing had to exist at all. But, given that something does exist, why wasn't it a static, lifeless, unchanging mass of some kind? Or, on the other hand, why wasn't it a chaotic flux with no pattern, no form, no breathing space? As it is, we have a playground for the human intellect, a theatre for the human soul. (I am partly indebted to Carl Sagan for this point. He was merely pointing out how the universe we inhabit allows the emergence of science. He might have been horrified if he realised he was planting a seed of theistic belief in an innocent teenager's mind.)

3) Because things are fundamentally good. We hear a lot about the "problem of evil", but not about the "problem of good". Most of us can expect to live out this day, and the one after that, and the one after that. We can expect that the person sitting next to us on the bus would sooner help us than hurt us. Most of the things we do every single day bring us joy, from the first scoop of breakfast cereal to the caress of a soft pillow on a tired head. Even the things we don't want to do, like working or exercising or waiting in a queue, often end up bringing us an unexpected satisfaction. Whose fault is it that we become blasé about such abounding joy?

4) Because of my thoughts. I am unable to conceive how my memories of a Christmas morning twenty-five years ago are basically made of the same stuff as a pebble, a screwdriver or a tub of lard. I am not sophisticated enough to understand eliminative materialism, just as I would gape at someone who told me that, from the viewpoint of advanced mathematics, two and two actually equalled a pear tree. And the fact that my thoughts seem somehow outside the realm of the physical makes me unable to believe that only the physical realm exists. It also makes me think that there must be an intelligence behind the universe, on the grounds that the greater cannot come from the lesser.

5) Because I have an idea of good and bad. Though I am often successful-- spectacularly successful-- at rigging those notions of good and bad to line up with what I want to do, now and again I find they become stubborn and won't cooperate. Besides, why should I even want to rig them? Why not just ignore them? And I find that other people not only have these notions, but have them to a degree far in advance of myself. It seems as though my notions of right and wrong have a source outside the physical world, too.

6) Because of Jesus Christ. Talk about a magnetic personality! Even the enemies of Christianity seem unable to find anything to say against him. Bertrand Russell accused him of petulance for withering the fig tree that would yield no fruit. It wasn't one of Bertie's better moments; this is plainly a kind of concrete parable for the benefit of his disciples.

I don't know of any character, real or invented, who combines an air of absolute authority with utter humility, as does Christ. He is not some stoic, otherworldly, blissed-out sage, as one might expect of a visitor from the heavens. And yet, how banal that would be! But no; Christ weeps, becomes irritated, has a flair for the dramatic, and dreads his final suffering. And yet every word he spoke seems to glow with irresistible truth.

7) Because of the saints. The saints have the paradoxical quality of being fanatical and yet not fanatics. They were men and women addicted to doing good in the way a teenager is addicted to video games. But, though they seemed to have a kind of craving to feed the poor and comfort the afflicted, none of them seemed to find that these practical acts of charity clashed with spending long hours in prayer and devotion. It even seems as though the two things are-- contrary to appearances and the "social gospel" critics of the Church-- actually one thing!

When you have a group of witnesses who stick to their guns through every persecution, who are even willing to give up their lives for the truth of their claims, and whose stories "check out" with one another to an extraordinary degree, you begin to think there is something to what they are saying.

8) Because of the Catholic Church. Whatever else you may say about the Catholic Church (and everything else has been said, at one time or another), it is undoubtedly the greatest show on Earth. It has run and run and run-- through the rise and fall of empires, the birth of nations, the passing of whole civilizations. I don't know how to account for its survival through persecution, schism, wicked Popes, ideological opposition and the utter changing of the world. What keeps the show on the road? I believe it is the Holy Spirit.

9) Because of the banality of secularism. I cannot believe that the goal of mankind is that we should all have more leisure time to visit museums and art galleries whose masterpieces no longer mean anything to us. "Well, maybe the universe is banal!". But if it is, where did we get this overpowering thirst for the sublime and the transcendental?

10) Because of G.K. Chesterton. I think every open-minded agnostic and atheist should read Chesterton's Orthodoxy. They could read it in a day, and it might change their whole view of the universe. It changed mine.

The Growth of Love (I)

I know my title sounds like it might belong to a marriage guidance manual from the seventies, but that's not what this blog post is about. It's not about romantic love or even interpersonal love. It's about "love" in the sense of enthusiasms, interests, pursuits, and so on. And it's unabashedly personal. I hope it's of interest to someone out there, but even if it's not, I want to write it for myself.

I was watching a horror film earlier today (the one I mentioned in a previous post), and it occurred to me: horror is probably my oldest love in this sense.

I can't remember when I started to love the horror genre. More than anything, it's horror films that I love. I was allowed to any number of horror films as a child, perhaps because my father also liked horror. At least, he liked ghost stories. He often mentioned staying up late as a boy, after everyone else had gone to bed, and reading a collection of ghost stories.

I once asked him why he was so tolerant of ghost stories, when he only had mockery for science fiction and fantasy, which he generally regarded as childish trash. "Because ghosts are real", he said.

How many horror films did I watch in my childhood? I have no idea, and I find it hard to even remember particular horror films. They all blend together in my mind, but they were mostly English: Hammer, Amicus, and other films of that kind.

Horror has always felt like home to me. I feel about horror-- the horror atmosphere, which has to be somehow cosy or appealing as well as scary-- the same way English people feel about the white cliffs of Dover, or Americans feel about Mom's apple pie. 

But speaking of the white cliffs of Dover...my anglophilia, my love of Englishness, was also a very early acquisition, though not as old as my love of horror. Somehow, when I think of it, I think of the image of Big Ben in the cartoon Dangermouse, even though Dangermouse was not a big part of my childhood. I think it was mostly to do with English comics (such as The Eagle) and English TV programmes, though none of the latter suggest themselves to me right now. I do remember that the first "grown-up" book I ever read-- that is, the first book that was mostly text-- was Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

What about my love of poetry? This was a rather late arrival. It wasn't until my early teens that I discovered poetry, and the discovery was sudden. It's hard to write this without sounding obnoxious, but I was astonished-- even then-- at the realization that I had a mature taste for great poetry. As soon as I read W.B. Yeats, I loved him, in the same way that I love him today. I expected poetry to be over my head, but it wasn't. I have no idea how this happened, other than my father reciting poetry to me. (I can still remember the first time I heard the "Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow" speech from Mabbeth-- when my father recited it to me-- and the frisson I felt at the words "a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing").

My love of the cinema was even later. I'd gone to the cinema exactly seven times in my childhood, each of them memorable occasions. But it hadn't sparked a particular love of the cinema per se.

My passion for cinema-going actually began in 2001, when I was already in my early twenties. It sounds ridiculous (and it is ridiculous) but for many years I was reluctant to go to the cinema on my own, being unsure what exactly you did when you walked up to a box-office. I thought there was some kind of mystique to it, like ordering from the menu in a French restaurant.

Perhaps this nervousness was Providential, because when I finally overcame my cinema hesitation, I became an avid cinema-goer, and I experience a profound sense of revelation. I went every week, several times a week, for several years. I read the movie magazines. When people saw me, they asked me what films I'd seen recently-- which irritated me.

The cinema I attended was the Santry Omniplex, which was part of the Omni shopping centre in Santry, not far from Dublin Airport. Importantly, though it was part of the shopping centre, it was semi-detached, as it were-- which meant that, when I left a screening (and I always preferred morning screenings), I would walk from the darkness back out into the cold light of day.

The Santry Omniplex was the sort of suburban cineplex which is called "soulless", but it was exactly what I needed-- although it would take too long to explain this.

The more this great era of my cinema-going recedes into my past, the more important it seems to me. It was like an imaginative rebirth, even a spiritual rebirth. It reminds me of this great line from John Denver: "He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year, coming home to a place he'd never been before..."

But that's all I can write for now...