This is an article I wrote for the magazine Leaven, which is now (as far as I know) defunct. Yes, it's an old hobby-horse of mine, so I hope regular readers don't groan. I really like the title-- it has a certain ring to it.
Six years ago, I was called for jury duty. The case was quite dramatic and dragged on for two weeks. Much of that time was spent in the jury room, as the barristers duked it out among themselves. Juries are not supposed to discuss the case until it comes to discussing the verdict. Most of my fellow jurors discussed it anyway, but we still had a lot of time to kill.
There was a whiteboard in the jury room, which was presumably intended for the serious business of sifting evidence and presenting theories. One day, the boredom became such that we decided to put it to a less civic-minded use; playing Hangman and drawing visual riddles.
After days and days of boredom, I suddenly felt energised. It had been a long, long time since I played Hangman. It brought me back to childhood, back to the eighties when the only computer in my life was my cousin's Spectrum console-- which I never actually got to use, being restricted to watching my cousin and my older brother play games like War of the Worlds and Back to Skool. (I remember the games took longer to load than they did to play.) It felt good to be back to playing games that didn’t require the mediation of a glowing screen; “making our own entertainment”, as the saying goes.
I assumed my fellow jurors were experiencing the same nostalgia, the same relief from the tyranny of the passive. Then one of them said: “They should have televisions in these jury rooms”. It felt like a kick in the teeth.
All my life, I’ve felt an anxiety about this matter. But what exactly is “this matter”?
It’s difficult to put a name to it. The decay of oral tradition? The loss of folklore? The tyranny of entertainment? The triumph of the electronic? None of those exactly seem to cover it, although all of them apply.
It seems fair to say that, since the advent of radio and television, mass media have become a bigger and bigger part of everyday life. We all live in a mental universe of pop culture. The passivity of radio and TV may have been mitigated by the arrival of the internet-- now anyone can write their own blog or start their own online forum, on any subject whatsoever. However, the mediation of the electronic screen remains, eliminating barriers of time and space in a way that surely has costs as well as benefits. Today we can send a message across the world in a moment, but what of the local legends and sayings and customs that were once protected by those very barriers?
Take, for instance, the case of Irish ballads. Ireland has a phenomenal heritage of ballads-- patriotic, sentimental, local, humorous, and of many other kinds. Up until very recently, as far as I can tell, most Irish people would have had a wide repertoire of these ballads, which often seeped into the written literature of our country. My own father could sing hundreds of them, or so it seemed. Now and again he would recite a verse or two from some obscure ballad, and then comment: “It must be fifty years since I last heard that”. I remember many sing-alongs, during which he and his friends would belt out song after song, from “Monto” to “James Connolly, the Irish Rebel”, never hesitating over a single line.
By the time my father died in 2019, the situation had changed. After his funeral reception, in the Brian Boru pub in Glasnevin, those who lingered over drinks made an effort at a sing-along. Now, however, the words did not come so easily. The youngsters knew no ballads at all, and even the older mourners-- who would have had innumerable ballads on the tip of their tongues twenty years ago-- struggled to get through more than a verse or two. Smartphones were produced to call up the lyrics. “Do you remember when we didn’t need phones to have a singalong?”, asked one person, gloomily.
We don’t sing songs anymore. We don’t tell stories. We don’t swap riddles. We don’t play parlour games. This may be an exaggeration, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. Even joke-telling seems to be on the decline. When is the last time you told or heard an actual joke? When did you last encounter that once-familiar trio, Paddy Englishman, Paddy Irishman, and Paddy Scotsman?
Surely you don’t have to be a galloping reactionary to regret this. You don’t have to deny the virtues of television, cinema and comic books (or even computer games and memes!) to feel that we are losing something.
Where does oral culture persist today? The only vibrant examples I can think of are terrace chants and popular devotions in religious communities. “Ooh, Ah, Paul McGrath” and “Who Ate All the Pies?” may not exactly be poetry, but at least such ditties have their own independent life, passing spontaneously from mouth to mouth without any debt to the culture industries. And it’s comforting to think of the tens of thousands of worshippers, across the face of our land, who can rattle off “Hail Glorious Saint Patrick, the Saint of our Land” or “Sweet Heart of Jesus, Fount of Love and Mercy” at the drop of a hat (or the ring of a bell).
Whether skipping chants and “haunting children’s rhymes” still exist in schoolyards is a question I’m not qualified to answer. I’m rather afraid to find out.
Surely this is something we can all address in our own ways. For my part, I have been memorizing poems for the last few years. I have about ninety of them stored in my brain now. I mentally recite them when I am washing dishes, walking to work, even (though perhaps I shouldn’t admit it) sitting in boring meetings. As long as I keep them refreshed, they’re all mine-- even on a desert island.
