New Year's Eve 2019

This was a poetic experiment I made a few years ago. I was trying to write directly from my own experience, without using fictional characters or scenarios, and I was trying to write about very specific themes.

This poem is about a New Year's Eve party I attended in Ballymun, the working class housing estate in Dublin where I lived most of my life, on the last day of 2019. Everything mentioned in it is true.

My father had died that May. Every New Year's Eve, he would attend a party held in his best friend's house, where the crowd was very Irish republican and there was much singing of ballads and other songs. This would be the first such party without him.

I did indeed spend about a half an hour that evening trying to find some documentary or TV show looking back on the decade ending that night, and I was indeed unsuccessful. And I did find myself wondering if decades, as we had come to understand them, had simply stopped happening.

The housing estate where the party was held, Sillogue Gardens, was a particular area in Ballymun that I associated with the youth culture of the 1980s. When I was a kid, it always seemed full of teenagers. Even when I lived there myself, later on, it didn't lose this atmosphere.

My father used to say "Next year in Jerusalem" every New Year's Eve. I'm not sure exactly what he meant. Presumably it was a vague wish for a better year. 

I describe my father as a "myth-maker" as he had a rare gift for lending significance to his own experiences, through the stories he told of them. I've only met about three people who had this talent, if that's the right word, to the same degree.

I describe history as an "uncertain sure thing" because it's definitely going to happen (barring the destruction of the whole human race), but it's impossible to anticipate.

The people at the party did go from singing Irish rebel songs to singing rock and pop songs, which I found depressing.

What I don't mention in the poem is that I recited "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe. It didn't go down well. I could tell everybody was bored and listening politely.

Is it possible for a poem with such personal themes and subject matter to speak to a general reader? Well, you decide.

New Year's Eve 2019 

In the last hours of a decade with no name
I flicked through channels, looking for some show
Where guests would put the decade in a frame
And hang it. Surely there’d be one…but no.

The fifties, sixties, seventies…had they
Expired like this, uncommented upon?
I didn't think so, even though they say
You never see the Zeitgeist till it's gone.

My father hated end-of-year reviews
Nostalgist though he was, the same as me.
A dinosaur addicted to the news.
This was the first New Year he wouldn't see.

Tonight, bizarrely, he’d be missing from
The New Year's hooly that his best friend threw
Year after year. So I’d agreed to come
Although I felt uneasy in that crew.

They sang all night and drank to beat the band
And I'd heard decades of familiar tales
About them (sometimes more than I could stand,
Weary of tracing their well-trodden trails).

All socialists, republicans, and such,
Children of Pearse and Connolly and Sands.
Their slogans (though not mine) were double Dutch
To this new Ireland of Big Tech and brands.

We’d moved to Sillogue Gardens just a bit
After my mother’s death, when the Twin Towers
Were newly fallen. Though we’d lived in it
For eighteen years, it never quite seemed ours.

Our New Year hosts had lived there all the time
I’d been alive. It was their realm. And yet
Its atmosphere was not the sad sublime
Of rebel ballads, rosy with regret.

To me, at least, the Gardens still preserved
Their nineteen-eighties vibe, all teenage pop
And roller-skates and bubble-gum. It’s where
I’d seen most of that kid’s stuff, growing up.

Who would recall the twenty-teens like that?
And what about the noughties? Just a name.
The view down twenty years was almost flat.
I strained for images and nothing came.

Well, New Year’s Eve. I took my corner spot.
The early-party awkwardness went by.
(They spoke more Irish than I thought, this lot.)
I listened to a story from some guy.

The night advanced. The rebel songs began.
The grievances of decades filled the air.
Songs lend us life beyond man’s natural span.
My father sang these songs. He wasn't there.

And as the night wore on, the party seemed
Almost a wake…the old spoke of the dead.
So few this year, where once this house had teemed
Each New Year's Eve. That's what my father said.

The rebel ballads ended, and they sung
“The Boxer” and “the day the music died”.
The decade's final hour was almost done.
We went to see the fireworks start outside.

Kisses and hugs and phone calls and bad jokes.
“Next Year in Jerusalem” my father said
Each New Year's Eve. We stood and tried to coax
Some sense of wonder. Someone went to bed.

My father, myth-maker, was now a part
Of that uncertain sure thing, history.
Covid was next. Oh, hapless human heart,
What hopes and fears you fix on memory!

Poems I Like: Nelson Street by Suemas O'Sullivan (1912)

I've decided to separate my poetry posting into three categories: my own poems, my favourite poems, and poems that I like but that I wouldn't call "favourite".

As the eagle-eyed will have noticed, this is one of the latter. I came across it in an anthology of Irish poetry many, many years ago. Other than that, I know nothing of Seumas O'Sullivan.

But I really like this poem and it often comes into my head, especially since it captures the atmosphere of "the morning after the night before". (I love that phrase; like most clichés, it's a little poem in itself.)

I like this poem for several reasons:

1) Its sheer virtuosity. This, in my view, is the element of poetry that is most neglected in the modern world. Can the poet handle formal verse? Does it read awkwardly and incongruously, or smoothly and naturally? Elegance is its own beauty, whether it's a brilliantly-plotted farce that all comes together (or falls apart) in the last scene, a pirouette on an ice-rink, or a masterful handling of the rigours of rhyme and metre, as in this case.

2) The title "Nelson Street". Apparently this is in Phibsborough, a suburb of Dublin. I love titles that are place names, especially place names of smaller places-- such as streets. "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty is one of my favourite songs. This is a form of enchantment. It throws a glow over the place, whether it's a celebration or the opposite.

3) As I said previously, I love the atmosphere, particularly the "morning after the night before" atmosphere. I love drawn curtains, lowered blinds, and dark morning kitchens-- especially a morning of seclusion after a night of sociability. I love "in between" times. Admittedly, the atmosphere the poet is invoking in this poem doesn't seem intended to be particularly cosy or pleasant. But I still like it.

4) Ending the poem on the title of another work is a nice touch. 

 Nelson Street by Seumas O'Sullivan

There is hardly a mouthful of air
In the room where the breakfast is set,
For the blind is still down though it’s late,
And the curtains are redolent yet
Of tobacco smoke, stale from last night.
There’s the little bronze teapot, and there
The eggs on the blue willow-plate,
And the sleepy canary, a hen,
Starts faintly her chirruping tweet
And I know, could she speak, she would say,
“Hullo there, what’s wrong with the light?
Draw the blind up, let’s look at the day.”
I see that it’s Monday again,
For the man with the organ is there;
Every Monday he comes to the street
(Lest I, or the bird there, should miss
Our count of monotonous days)
With his reed-organ, wheezy and sweet,
And stands by the window and plays
“There’s a Land that is Fairer than This.”

To Change a Lightbulb

Here's a poem by me that I posted before, but that I'm posting again now.

I worked on it for ages, trying to stitch together all of my thoughts and feelings about the loss of oral lore, the ties that bind generations, the presence and absence of historical memory, and the lived experience of recent decades. I was quite pleased with the outcome. Of course, it sank without trace.

My favourite of my own poems are "think pieces" which involve a solitary character doing something fairly mundane and expressing the thoughts that go through their head. They are strongly influenced by Philip Larkin poems such as "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" and "Church Going".

Maybe I asked for it, giving it the title that I did, but it seemed the best possible title. I've smuggled in some of my favourite words and phrases, such as "phantasmal", "winter's tale". And I'm proud of the last line.

To Change a Lightbulb by Maolsheachlann Tiernan Finbarr Ó Ceallaigh

Not even looking up, he flicks the switch.
The room lights for a moment, then goes back
To evening gloom.
He mutters to himself: "Son of a bitch..."
Then stomps off to another room
Irked that his train of thought was thrown off track.

He reappears, still cursing, with a new
Sixty watt bayonet lightbulb in his hand.
He drags a chair
To the centre of the room, and in a few
More moments, the new bulb is hanging there
Waiting to light the room at his command.

Still standing on the chair, he finds himself
Staring out at the night's phantasmal fall.
Out of the past
A scene comes, from some high-up mental shelf;
Him and his father, laughing, as they cast
A host of shadow puppets on the wall

One power-cut night some fifty years ago.
He'd thought of that, in college, when he'd heard
Of Plato's Cave.

If life was only one long puppet show
Was that so bad? Nostalgia's balmy wave
Sweeps over him, and hits him unprepared.

Why had he never shadow-puppeted
For Liam or Deirdre, down through all those years?
Guilt seizes him:
He pushes back. If that's the worst a kid
Has to complain about... But in the dim
And dying light a vast assembly nears

Of long-dead relatives he never knew.
He thinks of them, filling whole nights like this
With winter tales
And ballads, legends, riddles, all that grew
From fire and shade. His cynicism fails
Faced with this world he never thought to miss.

A few stray ghosts were all he'd ever known
Lingering by the camp-fire, long ago.
Where were they now?
Had that all-seeing eye, the mobile phone,
Spared any? Could the internet allow
A single local legend skin and bone?

A sort of strangled panic fills his soul.
Was it past helping? There was, after all,
Still candlelight.
But that was crazy-- time would only roll
One way. It was futility to fight
That conqueror, the white switch on the wall.

He steps down to the floor. They start to fade--
The all-too-quiet dead, the mute banshee,
The ghosts of ghosts,
As sad as a tired child, the games all played,
He hits the switch, and all that fading host
Are gone. The light falls on solidity.

Memorable Descriptions from Obituaries

This morning I was reading Great Lives: A Century in Obituaries, a book of prominent peoples' obituaries from The Times.

I was greatly pleased by two particular passages, taken from two different obituaries. Can you guess who the obituarist is writing about?

Here's the first: "He remained a teenager even in his eighties-- and a late Victorian one, at that. Boat Race Night of Mafeking Year may be roughly the point at which he came to a standstill." This person died in 1975.

And here's the second, for somebody who died in 1980: "A Billy Bunter who had somehow turned out to be a great artist."

I had a quick look to see if the authors of the obituaries were given anywhere, but they don't seem to be.

(Incidentally, I was going to give this blog post the title "Guess The Stiff". But then I remembered my dislike for this kind of cheap levity which pervades our culture. Today even bus advertisements routinely make bawdy puns or double-entendres. But it's not just bawdy jokes I'm complaining about here. I regret all the jokey blog post titles I ever posted on this blog. Even museum and gallery displays now use titles that are drawn from famous movies or songs. I don't mind this kind of thing in tabloid newspapers, where it's raised to an art-form and is part of the whole atmosphere. My problem is that it's getting everywhere. I'm trying to be more priggish.)

Favourite Poems: "Ode to Melancholy" by John Keats

"On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" has been a candidate for my favourite poem of all time since I first encountered it in my teens, and "Ode to a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale" fully deserve all their plaudits.

This poem isn't quite as sublime as those, but it's still magnificent and rather overlooked. My favourite lines are "feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes" and "in the very temple of delight veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine"-- not only beautiful poetry, but a profound observation.

(I also like the assumption that every reader has a beautiful mistress with peerless eyes and soft hands, who is routinely angry.)

I've always thought the poem's last lines aren't quite worthy of it, and rather anticlimactic-- certainly compared to the closing lines of the three masterpieces named above. But who's to say I'm right? I might be talking out of my hat!

Ode to Melancholy by John Keats

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Blue Jeans and Western Decadence

 

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer is one of the best books I've read in recent years. I read it last September, but I found myself thinking of it just now for a particular reason. It's a history of communist East Germany, with an emphasis on culture and social history.

One section of the book describes the mania for blue jeans that swept over East Germany in the 1960s. Blue jeans were a symbol of youth, freedom, pop culture, etc. etc.

The communist authorities frowned on blue jeans and rock music, and condemned them as decadent.

Here's the thing...although communism was (and is) evil all the way through, and the fall of the Soviet Union was a great victory for humanity, I can't help thinking the communist authorities were right in this instance.

Blue jeans did indeed symbolize everything rubbishy and decadent about the West, and still do. (I can never join in the celebration of "Western values"-- they're a very mixed bag, if you ask me. It was the West that spawned political correctness.)

It's a wonderful thing that the Soviet Union fall, but rather embarrassing that blue jeans, rock and roll, and Dallas had quite a lot to do with its fall.

But then again, Western governments also tried to severely restrict the radio airtime given to pop and rock music. In retrospect, this seems an entirely reasonable sort of paternalism. Pirate radio stations weren't doing anything noble.

It's notable that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, surely one of Soviet communism's most determined enemies, also lambasted the West for its "intolerable music" (among other things).

To my boundless shame, I have had a lifelong addiction to this intolerable music-- pop, rock, and all the rest. I've spent endless hours listening to it. Now and again, I've been overcome with remorse for this, and I can even remember throwing out all my rock music CDs on more than one occasion. However, I always drifted back to listening to it.

I read The Closing of the American MInd by Allan Bloom in my twenties, and was greatly affected (and brought to shame) by its chapter on music, especially this much-quoted passage: "Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy." (The book was published in 1987.)

I felt shame, and yet...I came back to listening to rock and pop music, again and again and again. Mea maxima culpa, indeed!

Tolerance and Indifference

I've long harboured a rather contradictory attitude towards prejudice. Sometimes I find prejudice maddening, other times I find myself defending it-- indeed, sometimes I find myself thinking of it as a sign of health.

I think it comes down to this formula: it's good to avoid prejudice through tolerance (or broadmindedness), but it's bad to avoid it through indifferentism. It's especially bad to congratulate yourself on tolerance when you're simply indifferent.

And I'll go so far as to say that, sometimes, prejudice-- or even bigotry-- seems preferable to indifference. To me, anyway.

There was an epidemic of ersatz tolerance in the Ireland of my youth. Citizens of the Republic looked down on their Northern counterparts and wondered why they couldn't just "get over" or "get past" the Protestant-Catholic enmity.

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely believe that it's highly desirable for Christians to "get over" the Protestant-Catholic enmity. In fact, I've complained about Catholic triumphalism regularly on this blog. (I've never really encountered Protestant triumphalism.)

But secularists have absolutely no right to congratulate themselves on overcoming the Protestant-Catholic division. Why should they congratulate themselves on this? They think it's irrelevant anyway. The same applies to wishy-washy Christians.

Personally, I am all for ecumenism-- but all against an ecumenism of indifference. If you don't think doctrinal differences matter, you're not really ecumenical anyway. You're a non-denominational Christian, or a mere theist, or something of that sort.

Even by the time I was growing up, most people in the Republic had effectively become secularists, even if they retained a cultural or sentimental tinge of Christianity. So they really had no right to lecture (or even congratulate) their Northern cousins on tolerance. It was a non-issue for them.

For the most part, of course, the Northern Irish conflict wasn't really about religion. But there were people for whom it was fundamentally about religion, such as Dr. Ian Paisley. And for many others, religion entered into it to some real degree.

It was the declared policy of the United Irishmen, founded in 1791, to unite "Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter", and this became a watchword of Irish republicanism ever since. Personally, I've always felt ambivalent about this motto, and about the "non-sectarian" nature of Irish republicanism. Insofar as it was inspired by the Voltairean ideas of the French Revolution, I consider it a bad thing. (I get the impression that most United Irishmen were not Voltairean, though.)

I apply the same principle to nationality. There's no virtue in rising "above" nationality if you don't care about nationality. Honestly, I would feel more affinity with any national chauvinist than I would with a cosmopolitan or internationalist.

The truth is that I've come to feel more affinity with the Northern Irish Orangemen than I do with almost all of their critics-- precisely because they do care about national loyalties, religious belief, and cultural traditions.

Similarly, I'm very dubious about most advocates for a united Ireland today. I suspect they want to get rid of the border because they want to get rid of all national borders. And personally I would rather have ten more borders on the island of Ireland than get rid of the current border in that spirit, or with such allies.

I've mentioned my lifelong anglophilia in many previous posts. Honestly, I probably love English culture more than I love Irish culture. Naturally enough, I have a bit of an allergy to anti-Englishness.

And yet I can't disagree with this point made by D.P. Moran in his book The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (1905): "The cry of the friendly Englishman fully responded to by the “reasonable” Irishman is, “Let us know more about Irishmen and let Irishmen know more about us; we will learn to like and understand one another.” As against this view it is absolutely clear to me, though the expression may appear to have some of the form of a “bull,” that when two nations understand one another there is from that moment only one nation in it. International misunderstanding is one of the marks of nationhood."

Well, I think I have made my point.