A Feast of Facebook

You all know the drill at this stage. I have limited access to a desktop or laptop, and trying to blog on a smartphone is very awkward. But Facebook is all-too-accessible. So here is a smorgasbord of my Facebook jottings. Old hat to my blog readers who are also Facebook friends, of course!

(Given the censorship and liberal propaganda on the established social media networks, I've decided to register a MeWe account, which I did today today. MeWe is a sort of Facebook substitute which is said to be more amenable to conservatives and those outside the woke bubble. But I'm not jumping ship from Facebook yet. Anyway, bon appetit...)

"The same androgynous figures are to be found in many masterpices of the irish Revival - in Shaws Bluntschli and Dauphin, two sensitive men brave enough to admit their fears; in Synge’s Christy Mahon, whose daintiness of speech and patent narcissism appeal to the robust countrywomen who fall in love with him; even in Yeats’s adoption of the female voice as he wrote the “Crazy Jane” poems. While nationalists, addicted to a militarist ideal, sought in emulations of Cúchulainn to purge themselves of the last degrading traces of Celtic feminitiy, these male writers happily embraced the female dimension, the anima, as one basis for liebration." Declan Kiberd

I guess this is why Irish nationalists used Cathleen Ní Houlihan, Dark Rosaleen, and the Shan Van Vocht (Poor Old Lady) as symbols of Ireland, almost ad nauseum. Declan Kiberd is an ass.

* * *

My anglophilia is an integral part of my Irish nationalism. Everything in Irish nationalism that stemmed from whiny colonial victimhood was decadent and destined to turn into leftist resentment against other Church, family, etc. once we had independence. And I think this was a false in even the most admirable nationalists like Patrick Pearse.

* * *

Matt Fradd makes a good point in this interview; that Catholics can't overcome their reluctance to read the Bible without acknowledging that they do find it irksome.

As a matter of fact, I often do enjoy reading the Bible, but buckling down to it is always a task. It's like physical exercise, it regularly gives you a glow but you still don't want to do it.

Even when I was agnostic I felt guilty for my lack of Bible knowledge, given its importance to literature and culture, and made sporadic efforts to become familiar with it.

* * *

"When I tell a new person that I work both as a teacher and a therapist, and enjoy using stories in my practice, I often get the response: 'Oh, that sounds really interesting....' The words will be uttered in a distant, dreamy kind of way. Nowadays this doesn't surprise me, but when it first happened I couldn't help but feel that these words were meant to prepare me for an imminent conversational closing move. However, more often that not, something else occurred. The person who had just asked me what I did would continue with: "But what kind of stories? Like Snow White or Peter Pan?". Then, ignoring the usual give-and-take of discourse between newly acquainted people and as if they very mention of Snow White and Peter Pan activated some distant realm, my interlocutor's personal reflections would come tumbling out. The very word "story" triggered a long-since unvisited store of early memories and longings. Suddenly, I would be granted entry into the private world of favourite stories, the circumstances of telling or reading, of secret whisperings, buttered scones and tea, grandparent's visits or tree huts."

From Reflections of Therapeutic Storymaking: The Use of Stories in Groups by Alida Gerse

* * *

OK, half of my FB friends are Traditionalist Catholics, so I want to say first off that I'm not attacking Traditionalists here. Nor am I attacking Brian Holdsworth, who I really like. I'm not even attacking the content of this video, which is actually good. It's more the title of the video, which reflects a certain attitude among some Traditionalists.

This is the attitude: Traditionalism is the coming thing, it's the rising tide, it's hip, it's what the kids want. Parishes with young families, booming vocations, etc. etc. The spirit of Vatican II crowd are the old guard, they're dying out, they belong in the dustbin of history.

All my life, since I was a little kid, I've considered such triumphalism vulgar and contemptible. I've never wanted to be on board with the coming thing or the rising tide. I'd rather be with the embattled, clapped-out minority fighting the losing battle. If I wanted to be on board with the coming thing, I'd be a liberal secular globalist.

Yes, I would like some cheese with this whine, thank you.

* * *

Among the nice Christmas books I got from my wife this year was A Poem for Every Day of the Year edited by Allie Esiri. I especially like it because there is a commentary on every poem. I read "Poem before Birth" by Louis MacNeice aloud to her and she remarked that MacNeice is not well known in the States. It got me thinking about him. I could immediately think of a couple of poetry-loving Irish friends who told me they've never read him. He's often described as "under-appreciated".

His famous poem "Snow" is one of my absolute favourite poems, I think it is almost miraculous, and I am constantly quoting its best line, "The drunkenness of things being various". My father used to recite his poem "Dublin" all the time, which captures the soul of Dublin better than any other poem. I also loved sections from his long poem Autumn Sequel in my teens and twenties. Before I became a Christian I think MacNeice's philosophy was the closest I had to a religion: life was absurd but the best we could do was preserve our humanity against all dehumanizing forces. A bit like Orwell.

Would any of my US friends be aware of MacNeice? What about my Irish friends, and English friends, and all the others?

* * *

I thought I would make another effort to read Ulysses by James Joyce (not Tennyson), a book I've never been able to get through. I suspect it's mostly a fraud but I want to be able to denounce it knowledgeably. Reading Declan Kiberd's introduction makes me grit my teeth: "Joyce was reacting against the cult of Cúchalainn, which was purveyed in poems, plays and prose by writers such as Patrick Pearse, W.B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. As a student of twenty-one, he had written a pamphlet attacking the Irish Literary Theatre for its surrender to vulgar nationalism." How original! How brave! How constructive! What an ass! He was undeniably talented, but decadent. All literary modernism is decadent, as is all anti-nationalism. I would have pushed him into a shallow pond.

* * *

I passed a telephone box the other day and thought it would be a good prank to have one person using it and two people queuing outside. Imagine it would turn heads.

* * * 

Signs of a book lover:

1) When you ask them "What are you reading now?", they always have an answer, even if they've barely picked it up in days.

2) When they visit a house for the first time, one of the first things they do is walk to the bookshelves and scan the titles.

3) They can't walk past a bookstall even if they have no intention of buying anything, or no money.

4) They re-read books.

5) They like at least some books which have zero or negative cultural prestige.

6) They can admit to hating at least some books which have immense cultural prestige.

(It should go without saying that you can be a book lover and a complete jerk...)

* * *

Something I read this evening reminded me of a time many years ago, in England, when I saw a guy carrying a huge painting (I assume) into a post office. It was covered in brown paper and I guess he was posting it. What else could he have been doing? Maybe it's grown in my memory, but I have an image of a guy struggling with a brown paper rectangle that was half his own size, or even bigger.

I regard someone like that with awe and intense envy. I find it difficult even to ask to have something exchanged in a shop. I could no more do what that guy did than I could vault over an oncoming truck. Just imagining the looks he got when he approached the counter makes me squirm vicariously.

* * * * 

I have been looking through some papers left by my grandfather and father. I have only a very few of the former, much more of the latter. Although it's said my grandfather wrote a ballad, all I've seen from him are letters regarding community politics. They are somewhat dry though well-written. My father left a memoir, six or seven chapters of a novel, poetry, and lots of letters, mostly to radio stations, politicians, etc. There is much more literary flair in his style, compared to my grandfather's. What I have in my possession is a fraction of a fraction of what he wrote. He wrote incessantly. He edited a community magazine called The Ballymun News for about thirty years. It was monthly back in the seventies, then annual in the eighties, then a few final issues at long intervals. He wrote most of it himself.

My grandfather was an Irish republican and a member of the Worker's Party, which was a radical left-wing party. I wish I could reconstruct his exact views but, sadly, I've been unable to. People's beliefs are the thing I find most interesting about them, but families tend to remember other things, Iike their habits and tastes in food. He died in 1991, just as Operation Desert Storm was beginning. I remember him but rarely spoke to him.

("Republican" has a very different meaning in Irish political discourse than it does in American or British discourse. Indeed, I'd be hard-pressed to describe what it means here, especially as its meaning has been so contested. But Irish unification combined with radical social and political change might be a fair description.)

My father was also, very briefly, a member of the Worker's Party. But he admitted that he could never be a party man. He was Orwellian in his refusal to toe any party line and to speak uncomfortable truths. Economically he was left-wing, but socially and culturally he was conservative, and increasingly so as time went by. I don't think his increasing conservatism came as much from age as it did from witnessing the advance of the liberal agenda. He rarely went to Mass, but he was a convinced Catholic who frequently quoted the New Testament. From my perspective, I was often surprised by both the patchiness and the depth of his religious knowledge. He could argue the truth of the Faith with anyone, but somehow he'd never heard of Gaudete Sunday. I've been unable to work out my grandfather's attitude to religion; "believing but anti-clerical" is my best guess.

My father and grandfather would argue about politics a lot. Mostly to do with Northern Ireland, my father told me. My aunt told me that, towards the end of his life, my father and uncle would argue politics with him just to keep him sharp. Or so they claimed.

Going through their papers, I feel such a strong sense of a legacy, a legacy of idealism and public-spiritedness. Apologies for the absurdly long post, to anyone who made it this far.