In Praise of Solemnity, Revisited

In my last blog post, I used the word "solemnity", and linked to the poem "In Praise of Solemnity" that I published here eleven years ago. I decided it would bear re-posting. It's the closest thing to a "verse essay" I've ever written and it articulates many of my abiding feelings about solemnity, "kitsch", irony, and several other important subjects.

If you're the kind of person who thinks Monarch of the Glen (the painting below) is kitsch, or who has ever sarcastically used the phrase "ye olde tea-shoppe", then you might be the kind of jerk I'm reacting against in this post. As for me, I'm a different kind of jerk.

In one line, I complain about the blanket coverage of sport at the weekends (on radio, for instance). This isn't an attack on sport itself, or even spectator sports, or even commercialized spectator sports. I'm not one of those people who talk snootily about "sportsball", and in fact, such people annoy me greatly. I think sport is a valuable part of life. Actually, if I rewrote the poem, I would remove that reference, just to put as much clear blue water between me and the "sportsball" crowd. But I'll let it stand for now.

In Praise of Solemnity

Call it pomposity, bombast, what you will;
Call it vulgarity, but I crave it still;
The cinema called the Odeon or the Lux;
The epigraph of Everyman's Library books;
Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide--
The monument that is not too proud for pride
Splendid in bronze or marble; the public house sign
That blazons "licensed to sell beers and wine"
In gold italics; The Monarch of the Glen;
The silhouette of ladies and top-hatted gentlemen.

I have seen so much of death, this past two years;
The awful shock when a whole life disappears;
The empty words at the funeral home, the walk to the grave;
Name after name some adoring mother and father gave
Etched onto stone. It won't let me forget
The rarity of every heartbeat, every breath.

They cannot convince me that life is a trivial thing;
A pretty toy that a man should be ready to fling
Away with a laugh; (were mine to be sacrificed
I would leave it with tears and agony, just like Christ);
The world may rebuke me with taking life seriously;
But I cannot get my tongue round the verb to be
As easy as that. Existence itself should shame
The whimsicalists who teach us that life is a game.

But let there be games, and laughter, and nonsense, and sport,
And idleness, and whimsy of every sort.
Let life be complete, let life be filled to the brim
And overflowing. But-- should all life be a whim?
What relish has laughter, when laughter goes on all the time,
When mirth may not even give way to let in the sublime
For a half hour, or less? As love is to aimless lust
True mirth is to this. I don't want to laugh if I must.

But laughter itself has its dignity stolen away
And the man who walked into a bar is considered passé--
For a joke is a rite, and a joker a ritualist,
And a punch-line's too formal a thing to allow to exist
In a era when randomness stands for all humour, all art,
All beauty, all meaning; a world with a whirligig heart.

But on a clear night, when I go out and look at the stars
How painfully, painfully, all our frivolity jars
With so lofty a sight; those pinpricks of iciest flame
In the ocean of night put our freaks and our follies to shame;
Under the clear silver gaze of the stars and the moon
How can a man not feel degraded to play the buffoon?

But still we have gameshow on gameshow, and hip-hop, and memes,
And bachelor parties with weird and un-wonderful themes,
And twelve magazines about cars on the newsagent shelves
And eighty-eight photos on Facebook we took of ourselves
All exactly the same. We have advertising campaigns
About doughnuts and dogfood and toothpaste and hard-to-shift stains
And the news gives us Hollywood gossip and fighting in court
And Saturday morning to Sunday evening of sport,
And playwrights write plays about nothing, and artists splash mud
On a canvas, and newspaper critics declare it is good,
And in the museum there are interactive displays
Where once there were exhibits. Nobel laureates praise
The lyrics of rappers, and nobody thinks this is odd;
Oh man! Man! The heir of the ages! The image of God!

Enough! We belong to eternity. We have a soul.
All around us, unthinkable clusters of galaxies roll;
Behind us lie millions of years, and before us our doom;
Imagination and wonder find limitless room
In the ocean of being. Around us, our brethren, mankind;
Each one with a measureless soul and a fathomless mind;
And calling us onwards, the joy that is higher than mirth,
The joy of the unsmiling stars and the serious earth,
The dim light of dusk and the pale light of dawn, and the ghost
Of the myriad dead; all the joy that moves us the most;
The joy of the straight-faced urchin consumed in his game
Or the worshipper's eyes lit up by the candle's soft flame
Before his saint's shrine, or the lover lost in his love,
Or the girl alone in a field, agape at the glories above.

Blanchardstown Oratory

I was going through my archives and I came across this photograph of the oratory in Blanchardstown shopping centre. I've been there about a half a dozen times, including attending several Masses there. I'm quite drawn to it, it has a solemn and catacomb-like atmosphere.

It was common to have oratories in Irish shopping centres, back in the day. The Omni Centre in Santry has one, with Eastern Orthodox icons on the walls. The Ilac Centre had one up until a few years ago. Naturally, new shopping centres don't.

The shortest Mass I ever attended, by far, was in the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre oratory. I think it lasted all of six minutes. (I was so surprised I checked my phone as soon as it was ever.) I don't think this is a good thing, although I tend to prefer short Masses to long one. (An Australian friend told me once that Irish-Australian Catholics are known for their preference for short Masses. The more pious will happily attend several Masses a day, but they want them to be short. Personally I prefer short Masses because otherwise my concentration and sense of reverence lags.)

I don't know how easily it can be seen in the photograph, but in this oratory, the window at the back is behind a wall so you only see the light filtering out from it. I like that very much. It's very solemn. It satisfies my priggishness and my craving for solemnity.

Sometimes I think there should be completely dark rooms in every building, where somebody can go and sit periodically and then re-emerge into the wonder of light.

The Feast of the Holy Trinity

Today is the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, the first Sunday after Pentecost. I've just learned that it was instituted in 1344, so it's way older than I assumed.

This is probably my favourite Sunday of the year because priests have to preach a doctrinal homily on Trinity Sunday.

I knew one priest whose Trinity Sunday homily was always about St. Augustine, trying to write a tract about the Trinity, walking along the seashore. He came across a child carrying water into a hole he'd dug in the sand, with a bucket. (Well, that was his version.) Asking him what he was doing, the child said he was trying to fill put the sea into the hole. Augustine drew the obvious moral.

So that's a bit of a dodge. But generally priests make an effort to preach something solid on Trinity Sunday.

The Decline of Hiberno-English

Last year I was on a beach on the Beara peninsula of West Cork. Until recently, the local accent was regarded as particularly strong. Beside me were two women speaking in the local dialect. Further away was a group of children, who I assumed were from Dublin. Then one of the women called them and I realised that the children were in fact local. Within one generation, the local speech had been replaced by the metropolitan variety.

A depressing quotation from a very interesting essay on the decline of Hiberno-English.

As the essay points out, the decline of the Irish language is a familiar lament, but the loss of Hiberno-English is rarely mentioned. However, I'm increasingly worried about this as well. I'm currently reading a novel written in 2000, by an Irish writer born in 1926. It's full of dialect words and turns of speech which are already archaic.

I think everyone is obliged to push against cultural homogenization however they can. Personally I have started peppering my everyday speech with Irish language words. It's a bit awkward and I've only made a tentative start, but I'm determined to keep it up.

I'm sick of fatalism. I think everyone should be doing something. Perhaps not to do with the Irish language, or Hiberno-English, but with the protection and promoting of some sort of endangered tradition. Learn and sing an old song, revive an old game, observe a lapsed holiday such as Oak Apple Day or St. John's Eve, do something.

And if you are already doing something (and you probably are)...well done!

Living in a Post-Significance Society

I'm writing this blog post feeling tired and disillusioned, and it's a good mood in which to write about something that really bothers me about the modern world.

This is it: that modern society spends so much time talking and writing about things whose significance (or even whose existence) it simultaneously denies, or at least downplays.

God is probably the main one. Modern society isn't inherently atheistical, but it does seem to insist that we can't have any real knowledge of God except (perhaps) for direct numinous experience. There is no coherent theology. So the modern world is full of talk about salvation, hell, eternity, grace, Nirvana, karma, enlightenment, etc. etc. but none of it really means anything. It might be a metaphor or it might be meant literally or it might be something in between. There's no way of knowing.

Nationality is another example. The modern world is committed to the idea that, ultimately, nationality doesn't matter and it would be best if there was no such thing. And yet-- it can't stop talking about it. Stand-up comedians constantly resort to national character or national quirks as material. Film-makers and novelists and poets use it for "flavour". Indeed, the whole idea of "diversity" can't get away from nationality and ethnicity, because what else is diversity built out of? What are the colours of that rainbow?

The same applies to sex. I won't labout the point here. It's an article of faith today that differences between men and women are mostly socially constructed, and basically undesirable in any case. And yet-- they are the theme of countless romantic comedies, songs, poems, conversations, etc. Perhaps not the innate differences, since these are denied or minimized, but the perceived (or socialised) differences at least. For instance, you might have a book about a woman trying to make her way in the tough world of sports management. The underlying assumption is that it would be best if there was no difference between the masculine and feminine realms-- at least, not enough of a difference to create a "fish out of water" scenario-- and therefore it would be best if the book had no reason to exist. Society is basically hostile to the man-woman difference, but it can't stop chewing on it. Becase we have to chew on something.

(The fact that people subconsciously want these differences to endure seems obvious to me. A few years ago, I came across a book called Sea State by Tabitha Lasley in which a female journalist chose to spend a year, or some period of time, on an oil rig-- presumably one of the last purely masculine environments in existence. She has an affair with a rigger who, as the Guardian reviewer solemnly informs us, has attitudes to women and immigrants which leave much to be desired. Do I need to point the moral here?)

And what about life itself? Life itself no longer seems to be the bedrock, since euthanasia is becoming increasingly accepted. There's nothing sacred or ultimate or self-justifying about life. When it becomes irksome, we can (and perhaps should) just shrug it off. Life isn't sublime or infinitely valuable in itself. It's not holy.

There's no innate meaning or purpose or direction to anything. We are left observing the phenomena passing through consciousness-- "Hey, look, that's cool!". There's nothing to build on, nothing to delve into. Everything "is what it is", which I think should be the motto of the modern world-- for all its notorious (and highly selective) denials of reality.

I will probably take this blog post down soon because it's so whingy. (Even though I came back to it overnight, no longer feeling tired but still disillusioned.)

In Praise of Sitcoms

(A few years ago, I wrote this article for the short-lived Irish Catholic magazine Leaven.)

One of the last shared experiences I had with my father, who died in May 2019, was watching the American situation comedy Frasier together. For more than a year, we watched three or more episodes most nights. We went through all eleven seasons several times.

Is this an unworthy activity to have as my last shared experience with my father, before his final illness? I suppose it would sound better if it was fishing, or building a model town together, or having long conversations about the eternal verities. A shared immersion in a particular piece of pop culture seems ignobly passive and consumerist.

And yet, I have very happy memories of this last phase in my relationship with my father. I wouldn't wish it to have been different. It deepened a conviction that I'd felt already; that the situation comedy, far from being a trashy and disposable genre by nature, can be a powerful vehicle for exploring the human condition and modern society.

I'm here talking about situation comedies which are, more or less, realistic. I'm not talking about surreal sitcoms such as The Young Ones, or fantastical sitcoms such as the science fiction comedy Red Dwarf. I mean sitcoms which concentrate on the daily lives of fairly ordinary people; shows such as Frasier, Cheers, Only Fools and Horses, Friends, and so on.

One great difference between the sitcom and other forms of fiction--such as the novel, the drama, or cinema-- is its episodic nature. Movies are one of the great loves of my life, but they do have this limitation: that, for the most part, they are confined to the great crises and dramas of human life. This represents a very small fraction of the whole. Most of life is lived on the plains, not in the peaks or the abysses.

The situation comedy can occupy itself with events that play a big part on human life, but that are rarely seen (except in passing) in movies and novels; sick days, traffic jams, a trip to the dentist, a pub debate, swimming lessons. One famous episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, a seventies British sitcom following two friends who live in the North of England, has them doing their utmost to avoid learning the result of a big soccer game, to the extent of hiding in a church and finding themselves in an uncharacteristic discussion of God and eternity. Another episode I think of in this regard is "The One with All the Thanksgivings", a Friends episode in which the characters are reminiscing about their worst Thanksgiving experiences, which we see in flashbacks. I find this episode quite profoundly evocative of life's journey-- holiday memories are something we are all familiar with, and they are generally freighted with bittersweetness and significance.

Television dramas which are lauded as great rarely represents ordinary life. I haven't actually seen many of the recent shows hailed as masterpieces, such as Breaking Bad or The Sopranos. But, from what I know of them, they tend to concentrate on extraordinary people in extraordinary situations. Although it's true that all good fiction speaks to the universality of the human condition in some way, the great strength of the sitcom is that it elevates ordinary suburban life as something interesting, something meaningful, something full of possibilities. It enchants ordinary life.

Another strength of the sitcom is that, in a strange way, it emphasizes the dignity of the individual. Each of the characters tends to pass through the full spectrum of human emotions and vicissitudes; each has their moments of humiliation, their moments of triumph, their phases and fads, their infatuations and disillusionments. Seeing them fall flat on their faces allows is to laugh at our own failures and idiocies, and takes the sting out of them. Seeing them get up again encourages us. Life, the sitcom reassures us, is episodic.

The sitcom tends to be a window into social and cultural history, in a way that entertainments which aim to be more enduring, and to appeal to international markets, do not. There are frequent references to current TV shows, popular songs, political controversies, advertising slogans, and so on. One example of this is a discussion about the discovery of North Sea Oil, in the British seventies sitcom Porridge. Another example is a passing mention of a pub shove-ha'penny tables in the British eighties sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles.

Finally, the sitcom is a sentimental genre. Sentimentality has a bad reputation in our time, but it is after all the glue which holds ordinary life together. We are sentimental about family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, pets; those we deal with most often. The sitcom tends to view its characters as we view those we deal with every day; exasperating, pompous, fickle, touchy, ridiculous, and, ultimately, loveable. At the end of the episode, equilibrium returns, friends and family are reconciled, and the world goes along on its old and reliable way. I particularly like, in this regard, this piece of dialogue from Only Fools and Horses, in which the wheeler-dealer brothers have a falling-out:

Del: Alright Rodney, alright, why don’t you do that small thing. You decide where you go, what you do and with whom you do it, because I’m finished with you– I’ve washed me hands of you– as far as I’m concerned you don’t exist, right? And Rodney?

Rodney: What?

Del: Been raining, them roads’ll be treacherous. Drive carefully.

All in all, I don't regret spending much of my last months with my father watching Frasier.

Fr. Walter Macken RIP

I was saddened recently to hear of the death of Fr. Walter Macken, whose life is recalled here in the Garvan Hill blog. It's an interesting slice of social history as well as a fitting tribute.

Fr. Macken was a priest of Opus Dei. I'm not involved with Opus Dei myself, but I've been invited on two occasions to give short talks in their student residence in the city centre. On one of those occasions, Fr. Macken was there, and I found him very kind and courteous. 

I also live in a parish run by Opus Dei. That's how I heard about Fr. Macken's death. (I'm always grateful the parish offers Mass at 7:30 a.m. on weekdays and 9 p.m. on Sundays.)

Fr. Macken was the son of Walter Macken, an Irish novelist who died in 1967. I was an avid reader of his novels in my teens. I didn't just read them once, but (in three instances) several times over. He's perhaps most celebrated for his trilogy of Irish historical novels, but I didn't like those much. I much preferred his novels about ordinary people. My favourite was I Am Alone, a novel that was actually banned in Ireland (I've only learned that now).

I Am Alone follows the experiences of Pat, an Irish emigrant in London...are you yawning just from that description? Actually, it wasn't boring at all, nor was it worthy or whingy. It describes Pat's efforts to find a job in London, his experience lodging with a landlord who's a religious fanatic, his work as a labourer on a building site (and how difficult he finds it), his hopeless love for a beautiful woman who he finally realizes is shallow and selfish, and his eventual marriage to a woman who is not beautiful but is much more worthy of his affections. He also becomes friends with a man who turns out to be involved with the IRA (the pre-Troubles version). I forget what happens to the friend, but Pat does not approve of his activities. The book ends with the birth of his child, who arrives safely after a nerve-wracking labour sequence.

I returned to the book again and again because of Macken's ability to describe the flow of consciousness. Not in a gimmicky Joycean way, but in a very realistic and observational way. For instance, when Pat gets off the boat and takes a train through England, he's taken aback to see how green the fields are, then wonders if he expected them to be red. There's another passage which describes a visit to a pool hall, in the early days of his marriage, when he knows he should be going home to his wife, but he can't help staying for another game, and another... The atmosphere of the pool hall is brilliantly captured, as well as the particular frame of mind of lingering somewhere when you know you should be somewhere else.

Above all, I loved I Am Alone because it took as its subject ordinary life-- it's a very "low concept" novel. It caught the texture of ordinary life brilliantly, which is something I greatly prize in writers.

I also loved his novel The Bogman, about a local poet and songwriter in a loveless marriage. Some of the little poems included in the book are excellent. I also liked (though to a lesser extent) Quench the Moon, the story of a would-be writer and poet enduring poverty and other trials.

I wasn't at all surprised to hear that Walter Macken's son became a priest. His novels are not pious at all, but religion and the clergy are presented in a sympathetic and very human way. (I particularly remember, in I Am Alone, a scene in which Pat unsuccessfully tries to persuade his wife-to-be to become a Catholic. She's insistent she wants to remain Church of England. When he points out to her that she doesn't even go to church, she says: "It doesn't matter. I was born Church of England and I'm going to die Church of England." Pat admits to himself that he rather admires her for this. I think it's probably an accurate description of an ordinary Church of England member at that time, and for some decades after.)

Like J.P. Donleavy or some other writers, he seems to belong to a particular phase of my life, and I can't really imagine revisiting him. But he fed my imagination in his youth, and I'm saddened to hear of his son's passing.