Honestly, This Sort of Thing Makes Me Sick

I idly wondered if CNN would actually summon some patriotism for America's 250th birthday. But their top story, at the time I accessed their website, had this headline: The World Cup's unexpected gift to America: A game the rest of the world knows as football is teaching America something about itself on its 250th birthday. (If you click on the article itself, the headline changes to: "America held a big birthday party — and a soccer extravaganza broke out.")

Here's a passage from the story: "The game the rest of the world knows as football is teaching America something about itself on its 250th birthday and reminding international visitors that the nation is far more welcoming and complex than its bitter political caricature. The World Cup’s gift of joy is a unifying distraction after tough years marked by ideological divides and a pandemic’s economic fallout. And its blend of European and South American superstars and rising African and Asian teams is also holding up a mirror to the country’s own diversity and its enduring political experiment, enriched by immigration."

Seriously, can they get off the hobby-horse for even one day?

But it's more than that. This sort of rhetoric seems so self-defeating to me.

Liberalism wants to celebrate America for its diversity. It also wants to celebrate Ireland, America, Spain, etc. etc. for their diversity. Everything is diversity, all the time. But if everything is diversity, doesn't diversity itself become...monotony?

And what is diversity composed of? What are the ingredients of diversity? Well, they are national and ethnic and religious traditions, that's what. Diversity is like artificial intelligence-- it can't create anything. (Although immigrant ethnic communities do create their own traditions, like the Italian-American Feast of the Twelve Fishes. But that's still national and ethnic and religious cultures, even if they happen to be displaced.)

As for "tough years marked by ideological divides"-- why is ideological diversity a bad thing, while cultural and ethnic diversity is seen as a good thing?

It's all so tiresome.

Happy 250th Birthday, America!

I won't be online tomorrow so I'm taking this opportunity to turn red, white and blue in honour of America's 250th birthday!

I firmly believe that 1776 was a turning point in world history, and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the principles of the American Revolution should be exported worldwide-- and that this would protect, rather than harm, the unique and organic traditions of each people and nation.

And I love America, aside from politics. True, I haven't spent more'n a few weeks there-- but people who have lived their entire lives in the USA have drastically differing views of it, just as people who grew up in Dev's Ireland had (and have) drastically differing views of it. So, I'll boldly insist that I love America.

God bless the USA!

The Twinkly Nineties Aesthetic

Sometimes it's hard to tell if something is a feature of the world or just a feature of your own mind.

About this time last year, I wrote a post about the different aesthetic associations that, in my mind, come along with different "currents" of Catholicism.

But there are "aesthetics"-- in my own mind-- associated with so many things. Sometimes they're so specific, I wonder if they can be real.

I was sitting in a café in the Ilac Centre the other week, talking to a fellow poet. I was specifically talking about my frustrated efforts to write a poem about the Ilac Centre. Specifically, the poem was about the Ilac Centre in the nineteen-eighties. I said: "Well, it had a very specific atmosphere back then. There was a fountain in the middle, and a big balloon rising up and down above the fountain, and there were windowed lifts that went up to the top of the centre, and there was a mezzanine café, and there was a mosaic of street traders there, and..." All of this came together in a definite aesthetic for me, but as I tried to describe it, it seemed evanescent to say the least.

Anyway, recently I've been thinking of a very specific aesthetic which I called the "twinkly nineties aesthetic". I think it can best be exemplified by this scene from Groundhog Day. (The bit where the music begins.)

This aesthetic had a few elements which I'll try to identify:

1) It was unabashedly sentimental and upbeat.

2) It tended to use nature imagery, either literally or metaphorically.

3) This is harder to articulate, but it seemed to assume an equilibrium of social forces. For instance, liberalism and conservatism, religion and science, masculinity and femininity, tradition and progress-- there was a certain sense of stability.

4) I somehow associate it with blue jeans, hazy blue mountains in the distance, running brooks, stepping stones, and...that kind of thing.

3) Twinkly keyboard music.

4) A spring atmosphere-- sunshine, green fields, light sparkling on rippling water, etc.

I particularly associate this atmosphere with religion class in my school in the nineties. The religious education was terrible and was mostly watching "inspirational" films, or films about moral issues. They weren't all from the nineties, but the ones that were (or close to it) tended to have this atmosphere, at least in parts. For instance: Regarding Henry (1991), Shadowlands (1993), Scrooged (1988), Alive (1993) On Golden Pond (1981). In fact, although it's the earliest (and a long way from the nineties), On Golden Pond might be the prime example.

We'd also have retreats which involved a lot of lying around (literally lying around) listening to twinkly keyboard music like the music in the Groundhog Day video. At least, that's how I remember it.

A still from The Stand (1994)

I also associate this aesthetic with The Stand (1994), which I watched on my thirtieth birthday. Despite its post-apocalyptic theme, it still had this sort of atmosphere-- partly because the survivors of the devastating virus are returning to nature, out of necessity. Cocoon (1985) also has this sort of atmosphere. So does The Bucket List (2007) and The Twilight Saga: New Man (2009) which shows that it's not necessarily confined to the nineties.

If anyone reading this video thinks I'm just talking about "hippie-ness", I'll have failed to express what I mean. It's something much more specific. Yes, it is hippie-ish, sort of. But a specific kind of hippie-ish, a long long way from gentle people wearing flowers in their hair in San Francisco.

Whether it exists outside my mind is quite another matter. I'd be interested to know if anybody else know what I'm talking about.

Spooky

 

Happy Feast of St. Oliver Plunkett

Today is the feast of St. Oliver Plunkett, as well as the date he was executed. He was the last Catholic martyr in the British Isles. He's an interesting saint and worth reading about.

In fact, you might say that the first of July is mired in blood-- St. Oliver's is the least of it. This is also the date that the Battle of the Somme began, as well as the Battle of Gettysburg, as well as the Battle of the Boyne!

Poetry by Heart

I've recently been returning to a project (for want of a better word) that I call An Tobar. An Tobar means "the well" in Gaelic, and it's basically a repertoire of poems that I've memorized.

Why did I do this? Well, I did it for various reasons, but ultimately it's a sort of visceral reaction to the way our society is going. I've often quoted the words of Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter who said: "The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint." The more our lives are lived in cyberspace and on screens, the more we drift into a world of artificial intelligence and whatnot, the stronger need I feel to have a decent amount of oral lore inside my own head. 

Having said that, I've neglected An Tobar for years at this stage, and I'm only returning to it recently. It's definitely rusty. Some of these poems I could recite at the drop of a hat (another cliché I like), word perfect or close to it.. With others, I'd struggle with a few lines here and there. And with some others, I've probably lost most of the words. I'll have to build it up again. (Or dig it again, perhaps, given my "well" metaphor?)

I've sometimes recited some of these poems at social gatherings, principally "The Raven" by Poe and "Ulysses" by Tennyson. However, I've generally been discouraged by the reception. I can see people's eyes glaze over pretty quickly.

Revisiting An Tobar again, I made the decision to drop some poems that would just never "take", for whatever reason. One was "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray. This poem is justly one of the most beloved in all of English poetry-- but, for whatever reason, it's never been one of my own favourites. And, for some reason, it wouldn't "stick" in my memory, and it took a lot of "maintenance". I memorized it because I thought that, being such a general favourite, it might be a poem people would like to hear recited. That never happened.

Other poems that kept sliding from my memory were "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas and several of Shakespeare's sonnets.

One of the reasons I started neglecting An Tobar is that I had an unhealthy "not an inch" attitude towards it. I didn't want to give up any poem once I'd committed it to memory. I've got over that now.

Some of the selections are odd, I know. I'd be astonished if anybody else had ever heard of "A Fragment" by Alfred Austin. This is a relic of a plan to memorize a poem (or passage of poetry) by every Poet Laureate of England. These are the kinds of whims that seize me. Anyway, many of the Poets Laureate are completely forgotten now and didn't leave behind anything memorable. I've dropped most of the Poet Laureate pieces, but "A Fragment" is charming.

Will this list be of any interest to anybody? I don't know. Here it is, anyway.

Death of an Irishwoman by Michael Hartnett

Snow by Louis MacNeice

The Fool by Patrick Pearse

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

“Our revels now are ended” by William Shakespeare

“To Helen” by Edgar Allan Poe

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by William Shakespeare

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats

“Ay, but to die…” by William Shakespeare

Lines Written on Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth

The Wayfarer by Patrick Pearse

The Kraken by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

A Birthday by Christina Rossetti

Heraclitus by William Johnson Cory

The Owl by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Planster’s Vision by John Betjeman

“My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun” by William Shakespeare

“When I Consider” by John Milton

“Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth” by Arthur Hugh Clough

“The Burning Babe” by Robert Southwell

Remember by Christina Rossetti

The Song of the Strange Ascetic by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Forget Not Yet” by Sir Thomas Wyatt

“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

“September 1913” by William Butler Yeats

The Workman’s Friend by Flann O'Brien

“If—” by Rudyard Kipling

When I was One-and-Twenty by Alfred Edward Housman

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now by Alfred Edward Housman

Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by William Butler Yeats

How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Yonder See the Morning Blink by Alfred Edward Housman

Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Robert Louis Stevenson

Into My Heart an Air That Kills by Alfred Edward Housman

Peace by Henry Vaughan

She Walks in Beauty by George Gordon, Lord Byron

Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost

John Anderson My Jo, John by Robert Burns

When He Who Adores Thee by Thomas Moore

Golden Stockings by Oliver St. John Gogarty

Ringsend by Oliver St. John Gogarty

Shakespeare by Matthew Arnold

Adlestrop by Edward Thomas

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Fisherman by William Butler Yeats

The World’s a Stage by Hilaire Belloc

No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats

All Things Can Tempt Me by William Butler Yeats

On a House Shaken by the Land Agitation by William Butler Yeats

Aedh Tells of the Rose in His Heart by William Butler Yeats

The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats

Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland by William Butler Yeats

“Ring out, wild bells…” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“I to my perils…” by Alfred Edward Housman

Surprised by Joy by William Wordsworth

When I Set Out to Lyonesse by Thomas Hardy

Easter 1916 by William Butler Yeats

The Coat by William Butler Yeats

Song of an Old Philosopher by Walter Savage Landor

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh

Thomas MacDonagh by Francis Ledwidge

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats

When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats

The Planter's Daughter by Austin Clarke

Advent by Patrick Kavanagh

Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats

“Oh friend, I know not…” by William Wordsworth

Jerusalem by William Blake

The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Should fickle hands…” by Alfred Austin

“This royal throne of kings…” by William Shakespeare

“Happy the man” by John Dryden

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Nahum Tate

The Beatitudes by St. Matthew

Everyone Suddenly Started Singing by Siegfried Sassoon

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

I Used to Think All Poets Were Byronic by Wendy Cope

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats

To My Daughter by Thomas Kettle

Epitaph on a Tyrant by Wystan Hugh Auden

Epic by Patrick Kavanagh

“The Quality of Mercy” by William Shakespeare

To Althea from Prison by Richard Lovelace

So We’ll Go No More a-Roving by George Gordon, Lord Byron

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars by Richard Lovelace

“Breathes there a man…” by Sir Walter Scott

The Daffodils by William Wordsworth

Determination by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ecce Puer by James Joyce

Dublin by Louis MacNeice

The Rainy Day by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The distant Seychelles are not so remote…” by Osbert Lancaster

Date Stamp Mosaic

I took this picture today. I always like it when something which is purely functional turns out to have an aesthetic or decorative dimension to it.