Willing the World

An Interesting Paragraph

"It was a melancholy time for my family, too, because my brother James was slowly dying from cancer and I remember, on referendum day, crying all the way in a bumpy bus from Galway to Clifden, in Connemara, thinking of his thin shoulders underneath his jacket as he turned to pour tea. He was an Irish Nationalist who did not care for either side in the abortion referendum. He disliked Holy Joes, or anyone he thought was parading virtue; he also disliked the secularising liberals and smart alecks who he thought were out to destroy Ireland's Gaelic and Catholic heritage. When I woke in Clifden the next morning and heard the result, I knew that James would be gratified; the referendum had been carried by two to one, though the turnout had not been spectacular. It would please James that the secularising liberals had been defeated and that Gaelic Catholic Ireland had spoken; and yet he would also be glad that it had not been too decisive a turnout and that the Holy Joes would have scent cause for triumphalism."

That's a paragraph from Mary Kenny's Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, a book I have read several time. This particular paragraph lodged in my memory, and provides a good entry-point to my theme in this blog post.

It seemed interesting to me that James (RIP) was about to depart from the world, and yet he cared about what kind of Ireland would exist after him. And not even a long view of what Ireland would be like, which somehow seems appropriate to the dying, but a strong preference for what would happen in the short term. He was pleased at the continuation of a very specific status quo.

We all seem to will certain things about the world. Obviously, we have self-interested desires. We want to be prosperous, free, healthy, and many other things. Most of us also have altruistic desires. We hear about people buried under rubble in the news and we want them to get out alive. We buy free range eggs because we don't want hens to suffer unnecessarily. And so on.

What interests me in this blog post is a third category of desires, desires which can't quite be categorised as either self-interested or altruistic. For instance, the desired outcome of Mary Kenny's brother for the referendum, as described above. If abortion was a straightforward moral issue to him, he would have presumably preferred a more emphatic pro-life victory. But he didn't. Even if he did in fact care about the substantive issue, he wanted Ireland to be a certain way; for it to preserve its Catholic Gaelic heritage, but not in such an emphatic way that the Holy Joes would be gloating.

Some Examples

I'm intrigued by this third category of desires, that are neither self-interested nor altruistic. I think we all have very many of them, and I've pondered a lot on their nature.

For instance: every now and again (often in UCD) I see people playing cards in public. This pleases me immensely. It's not that I want to join in. I have no intention of joining in. It's not that I'm altruistically pleased at the enjoyment of the card-players. They might enjoy watching bad television more. If their enjoyment was the point, there are probably thousands of activities that might give them more enjoyment. I'm pleased because I'm glad to see people still playing cards, even though there's nothing tremendously worthy or elevated about card-playing. (Why does it please me? Perhaps it's the aesthetic element of cards, perhaps it's nostalgia, perhaps it's that no electronics are involved, perhaps it's the sense of continuity with the past, perhaps all these things and more...)

Here's another example that just came to mind: trick or treaters. How disappointed would you be if there were no more trick-or-treaters, one Halloween? Even if you curse when the doorbell rings on Halloween night, even if you find the whole thing a nuisance, I think most people would feel some sense of loss if trick-or-treaters just weren't there either anymore, or if they dwindled away to nothing over five or ten years. The trick-or-treaters, in a way, are there as much for the sake of the people giving the sweets as they are for their own sake. Not that the trick-or-treaters themselves are taking this into consideration, but this is why the practice endures.

What kind of a world do you want? What kind of a society do you want? This question is thrown around rather nonchalantly, and responses tend to focus on ideals or principles: a world where everybody can develop their talents to the fullest, a world where nobody is discriminated against unjustly, and so on. I just googled the phrase and one of the first hits I got was: "I want a world where everything is welcome, everything is valid, everything is acknowledged, embraced, and accepted."

That's a noble vision (maybe), but I would suggest that the world that any of us really want is much more specific than this. It would be a long list of particulars which would be considerably bulkier than a telephone directory, most likely. And most of it would be things we haven't even thought about before, but-- if we did think about them-- we would agree they are part of the world as we would have it.

A Walk in the Park

These considerations bring me to this question: what do we will about the world? I could write this blog post without bringing up this phrase of "willing the world" (though I'd need a different title), and it might be easier, since I'm finding it hard to put it into words. But it's really the kernel of the matter, in my view.

I think we are all willing a particular version of the world all the time. The aggregation of all those ideals makes a composite, a collective ideal. This might not correspond to the actual concrete way things are, although surely it shapes it significantly. But it does become a reality of its own-- a sort of mental model of how the world should be, including contradictions and tensions.

But what do I mean by "willing"? Well, here's an example.

Imagine you are walking through a city park one weekday morning. You see an old man and his grandson (presumably) feeding the ducks. Seeing this pleases you. If you were to choose the world down to its smallest detail, you would make sure to find a place for people feeding ducks.

On one of the benches, a teenage Goth girl is reading some absurdly pretentious book, like Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. You think the whole Goth phenomenon is rather silly, but at the same time, you can't help feeling it adds something to the world. It seems fitting that a certain number of young people should become Goths. Besides, you're glad to see anybody reading a physical book and not just staring at their phone. And therefore, we can say that you will this young Goth's activity and current activity.

Then you look up, and you see a billboard just outside the park. It's for a washing powder. It's very gaudy and brash and vapid. The grinning faces on it are ludicrously happy about the whiteness of their whites. The triviality bothers you. You will it not to exist.

I could go on describing the various things in the park, but let's take a step back and look at the situation itself.

For instance, the weather. Let's say it's a bit colder than you would like and that it's beginning to drizzle a little. You wish the weather was a little nicer right now, but you don't will it. You don't will a world where the weather was always nice, because that seems to be a negation of the very concept of weather. (Although maybe some people would will this, or perhaps, just will that the country they live in would have a different climate to the one it does.)

But let's go even more basic. Let's look at the whole existence of public places. I think nearly everybody wills the existence of public places, common areas. I can find floods of articles online about this. So walking through the park you might be willing the existence of this park as a public space, if you come to think of it.

Going Deeper

Or you could go even more basic. Everybody is in the park because they want to be. "We live in a free society", as people like to say. (I love that phrase.) Everyone who is in the park might also, conceivably, be working as slave labour somewhere, or just imprisoned. Most of us will  be glad about this, presumably.

And you could get ever more basic, right down to the fabric of reality itself; time, space, embodiment, consciousness.

Ultimately we reach existence itself, the irreducible fact of existence.

How energetically do we will existence itself? I'm of the mind that we should all will it as energetically as G.K. Chesterton: "There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude."

Strangely enough, some people are enthusiastic (even passionate) about particular aspects of existence, but rather half-hearted or even averse to existence itself. This is baffling to me.

Willing and Social Philosophy

How does all this make a difference to anything? Well, first of all, I would say it makes a difference to one's own mental life. The more things in the world you can affirm, or will, the happier you're likely to be. (I'm not saying that people should will things just for the sake of being a Pollyanna. I'm just making the simple observation that if you are more at odds with your environment than otherwise, you're less likely to be happy. It might be the case that you should be at odds with your environment, nonetheless.)

I think it also makes a difference when it comes to social philosophy.

Since the Second World War, I'd imagine the most popular social philosophy has been "live and let live". There's a lot to be said for that philosophy, and it's especially attractive against a history of religious wars and totalitarian states.

But it's always seemed like a very cold philosophy to me, and I suspect it generates a great deal of alienation.

The philosophy of "you do you" has strengthened in Ireland with the ebbing of Catholicism and Irish nationalism. Today, most people would probably say that a person's choices are their own business, provided they don't hurt anybody else and that they are a good citizen.

And yet, personally, I prefer a world where everybody does have an opinion when it comes to everybody else's choices.

Take, for instance, the time between the foundation of the Irish Free State and the social revolution of the sixties and seventies.

What was expected of you? Well, I think it's fair to say that every baptized Catholic in Ireland was expected to go to Mass every Sunday, to pray, and to follow the teachings of the Catholic Church. To do so was seen as admirable, and not to do so was seen as negligent.

It's easy (give our current dispositions) to see the downside of this. But isn't there any upside, too? What you did actually mattered, way beyond just being a good worker or a good citizen.

"I will not make windows into men's souls", said Queen Elizabeth I, when she wasn't persecuting Catholics. It's an admirable sentiment in many ways. But who wants to live in a windowless cell?

What I've already said about Catholicism also applies to Irish nationalism. Nationalism sees human being as an asset. They embody the life of the nation. Nationalist governments generally want to encourage baby-making.

When Irish nationalism was the governing social philosophy of Ireland, Irish people were called upon to learn the Irish language, to revive traditional Irish music and sports, to give their children Irish names, to holiday in Connemara, and so forth. Obviously, this wasn't a perpetual campaign being dinned into everybody's ears all the time, but it was always there in the background.

I sense this atmosphere most of all in evocations of the West of Ireland at this time. A painting or a photograph of the Aran Islands or the Burren wasn't just a picturesque image. It was an ideal, a symbol. The geography itself was willed.

Today, learning and using the Irish language is still seen as a good thing, but it's no longer seen as a duty. The same applies to all the other manifestation of Irish nationalism I mentioned.

But, but, but...

I can imagine someone arguing: "But this is all fine as long as you approve of the governing philosophy, as you approve of Catholicism and nationalism. But what if it's a social philosophy of which you disapprove? What if it's leftism and political correctness?

Even in that case, and without ever wanting to celebrate evil, my own preference is for a society that wants something from-- besides my taxes and my vote and my obedience.

This is what I wrote in a blog post from 2017: "I must acknowledge that I also like the whole idea of a paternalistic society. Despite having some libertarian leanings when it comes to free speech and other issues, I'm not at all in sympathy with the libertarian temperament, still less the anarchist temperament. I want society to have hierarchy, expectations, obligations, privileges, roles-- I don't want the shared life of society to consist simply of housekeeping. I want it to be much more than that. I want it to be more like the life of a family."

I push back against political correctness with all my strength, but I'd rather have something to push against than just nothing, a void.

I was very taken with a particular moment in the excellent German film The Lives of Others, when a dissident writer finds himself talking to an ex-Stasi officer after the fall of communism. The ex-Stasi officer says: "But what's this I hear? You've not written since the Wall fell? That's not good. After all our country invested in you. Although I understand you, Dreyman. What is there to write about in this new Germany? Nothing to believe in, nothing to rebel against...
Life was good in our little Republic. Many people only realize that now."

The Stasi officer is not a good guy in the film, but he has a point. Indeed, search for "end of history malaise" on the internet and you'll get quite a lot of hits. We'd won the Cold War, but what now?

An Image to Finish With

This has been such an unusual blog post, I'm not sure how to end it, just as I'm not sure if the reader has any idea what I'm talking about-- or even if I'm making any sense. (The Irish playwright Hugh Leonard recorded this saying of his father's: "What are you talking about, or do you know what you're talking about?")

But here's an image from my own life experience to finish up on.

It's of Ballymun Shopping Centre (since demolished), back in the early nineties. It was sometime near Halloween. There was a nip in the air and a gloom in the early evening, both of which I tend to find galvanising. I think I was about fourteen or fifteen.

I was looking in the window of Miss Mary's, one of the centre's newsagents. I was specifically looking at the boxes of AirFix model airplanes, a hobby I had recently developed (and which was very much a passing thing). I was also enjoying the Halloween display in the shop window.

Although I'm not musical, the best comparison for what I felt at that moment (or, more likely, when I remembered the moment) is a musical chord. Everything harmonised; the shop window, the time of year, the atmosphere of Halloween, my own presence. For perhaps the first time, I didn't feel at odds with my environment. My imagination, somehow, had absorbed it all and invested it with meaning. I willed it.

Who's for Western Values?

This commencement address by Konstantin Kisin came up on my YouTube feed. It's very funny and he makes a lot of good points, but once again I find myself lacking sympathy with the idea of "Western values".

Of course, the Western values that are defended, whenever anyone sets out to defend them, are generally things such as democracy, free speech, the rule of law, meritocracy, and individualism.

And I'm all in favour of those things (albeit some more than others). I have defended democracy time and time again, in the many online debates that arise between conservatives. I'm almost an absolutist when it comes to free speech (although not quite, because I do think it's legitimate to censor obscenity, extreme violence, and some other bad stuff in entertainment).

When it comes to meritocracy and individualism, I'm in favour of both but with much bigger reservations, especially as regards individualism-- which I won't go into here.

My problem with the idea of "Western values" can be summed up in two points:

1) As well as all the good stuff above, Western values surely include many things that are nowhere near as admirable; political correctness itself, consumerism, bureaucracy, desacralization,  hedonism, standardization, atomic individualism....you get the picture.

2) More importantly, I think conservatives should be more concerned with preserving cultures rather than values.

Values are abstractions. We need them, but the human spirit can't live on them. I would argue that the instinct gripping conservatives today (and not just conservatives) is that it's particular things that need to be preserved.

The conservative movement in America has realized that America is not an idea, as the neoconservatives assumed it to be. And the same applies elsewhere. Ideas are important to the life of a nation, but the nation can't be reduced to an abstraction.

What distinguishes a nation is not ideology but culture; language, festivals, food and drink, social customs, music, traditions, sports, dance, etc.

You could preserve your values while losing your culture. For instance, America could preserve its love of freedom while giving up baseball and basketball for soccer and cricket, fully adopting the metric system, becoming as secularized as Europe, having its last rodeo, and becoming drained of everything that makes it culturally American.

In our time, I believe that cultural distinctiveness is in much greater danger than any supposed Western value system.

I care about red lemonade and Jacob's Mikado biscuits more than I care for anything that could be labelled "Irish values". Even though I haven't consumed either of them in years.

"All cultures are not equal" is a bullish slogan that has been adopted by many on the right. It's always uttered as though it's a heresy, but I can't remember ever hearing anyone claiming the opposite. If you google the words "all cultures are equal", you'll get a lot of hits, but it's nearly always in the context of somebody pugnaciously denying it.

I don't think all cultures are equal (whatever that means), but I do think all cultures are precious and equally valid. At least in the sense I'm using "culture" here-- to mean cultural practices like language, music, sports, etc.

If we found a hitherto-uncontacted island where human sacrifice and cannibalism were being practiced, we would certainly want to bring these practices to an end. Does that mean we should want to suppress the language, dress, art, and dance of this people? Surely not.

To sum up...I think Western values are a mixed bag, and I don't think they should be the totem of conservatism. I think we should focus on defending national cultures instead. (As well as defending those rights which are a part of the universal natural law, like the right to life.)

Prayer for the Holy Father

Almighty God, watch over our Holy Father, Pope Francis. Give him healing, comfort, and better health, and many years of life to come. Amen!

My Article on Mary Aikenhead and the Irish Sisters of Charity...

 ...is the cover story of this week's issue of Ireland's Own!

Shocking attack on a Priest in Ballycosgrove

 

Startling reports today of an attack on Fr. Jack Cheevers, parish priest of Ballycosgrove in Tipperary.

An enraged parishioner ran down the aisle and, according to witnesses, "rugby-tackled" the popular priest to the altar, causing him shock and distress.

Fr. Cheevers had just begun his homily. His last words were: "A man woke one morning to find his house surrounded by a flood..."

The Gardaí have decided that a prosecution is not in the public interest.

Fr. Cheevers is said to be unharmed.

Eyewitness Gemma O'Bringlóid said: "Thank God somebody realized the seriousness of the situation and responded immediately." 

When asked "So a third person rushed to the altar?", Gemma looked confused and said: "What do you mean, a third person?"

Full story here.

Happy St. Bridget's Day!

To mark the day, here's an interesting blog post by one of my colleagues in UCD.

https://ucdculturalheritagecollections.com/2025/01/23/a-crown-of-lighted-candles/

I had somehow never heard of "Biddy Boys" before, but I already want to revive them.

St. Bridget's Day has become a much bigger phenomenon in Ireland recently, especially with the introduction of the bank holiday. This is a wonderful thing. It's true that contemporary Ireland has big difficulties with celebrating a Christian saint, so it does it's best to repackage her as a pagan goddess or some kind of feminist symbol. What the heck. I've always been inclined to think that any festival is better than no festival, unless it's celebrating pure evil. The theme of this year's "Brigit Festival" is "celebrating women", and I can certainly get behind that, even if I might celebrate women differently (that is, celebrating their femininity and their glorious differences from men, as well as all their achievements in arts, culture, science, and so on).

My favourite poem that mentions St. Bridget's Day is this wonderful translation by Frank O'Connor of a famous old Gaelic poem by Anthony Raftery, "the last of the wandering bards". O'Connor's version has a marvellous vernal gusto it, that seems to mirror the return of life to the winter-wearied world. Of course, St. Bridget's Day is traditionally the first day of spring in Ireland.

As with all my favourite poems, lines from this one frequently come into my mind unbidden. Generally, it's the very first words "Now with St. Bride's Day the days will go longer", and I think of it whenever I hope things are on the up in some way or other.

"I give you my word that the heart in my rises" is a wonderful line, and there's an immense poignancy in the phrase: "Could I but stand in the heart of my people". I'm increasingly of the view that "nationalism" is a stupid and even objectional word. It's like having a formal term for the social philosophy that people should wear clothes, or that children should be innocent, or that human beings should occasionally laugh. To be a member of a people has been so much the universal experience of humankind that it was a very crafty and nasty trick to claim that this idea first came into currency among German intellectuals in the nineteenth century. (Yes, the poet is talking about his local people here, rather than his nation, but we tend to have concentric circles of "peoples". Globalism and international wants to eliminate them all.)

Anyway, here it is. I could only find the Frank O'Connor version in one place on the internet, and there were some significant differences from how I remembered it. I've "corrected" it to my own recollection of it, unapologetically. The poetry of the place-names in it is also very beautiful.

Now with the springtime the days will grow longer,

And after St. Bride’s day my sail I’ll let go,

I'll put my mind to it and never will linger 

Till I find myself back in the County Mayo

'Tis in Claremorris I’ll stop the first evening,

And at Balla beneath it I’ll first take the floor;

I’ll go to Kiltimagh and have a month’s peace there, 

And that’s not two miles from Ballinamore. 

I give you my word that the heart in me rises 

As when the wind rises and all the mists go, 

Thinking of Carra and Gallen beneath it, 

Scahaveela and all the wide plains of Mayo; 

Killeadan’s the village where everything pleases, 

Of berries and all kinds of fruit there's no lack, 

And could I but stand in the heart of my people 

Old age would drop from me and youth would come back.

My own poem on St. Bridgit is one of my better efforts and got some traction last year.

A Biblical Parallel in Dracula?

 I've been re-reading Dracula, the original novel by Bram Stoker, which unleased the unkillable Count on an endless spree through literature, cinema, theatre, and every other form of culture imaginable.

I'm rather excited to notice a Biblical parallel which has, I think, eluded everyone so far. (At least, I can't find any reference to it on the internet, and surely everything is on the internet.)

In this passage, Professor Van Helsing is beginning to suggest to his protegé and fellow Man of Science, Dr. John Seward, that something vampiric may be at work in the strange events they have experienced.

He subjects Dr. Seward to a series of rhetorical questions:

There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and ‘Old Parr’ one hundred and sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men’s blood in her poor veins, could not live even one day? For, had she live one more day, we could have save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps? Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them, and then—and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?”

“Good God, Professor!” I said, starting up. “Do you mean to tell me that Lucy was bitten by such a bat; and that such a thing is here in London in the nineteenth century?” He waved his hand for silence, and went on:—

“Can you tell me why the tortoise lives more long than generations of men; why the elephant goes on and on till he have seen dynasties; and why the parrot never die only of bite of cat or dog or other complaint? Can you tell me why men believe in all ages and places that there are some few who live on always if they be permit; that there are men and women who cannot die? We all know—because science has vouched for the fact—that there have been toads shut up in rocks for thousands of years, shut in one so small hole that only hold him since the youth of the world. Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it, and the corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and then men come and take away the unbroken seal and that there lie the Indian fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before?”

This, to me, seems clearly inspired by the Book of...

Well, reader, what do you think? Which Book?

(I've just discovered that I'm not, alas, the first to notice this parallel. Well, it was too good to be true. It's still interesting, though.)

Thoughts on this Blog

I've always hated it when anybody claims to be very busy. It seems self-important and pompous. If you're busy, you don't have to tell everybody how busy you are. After all, we all have the same amount of time in the day, and we're all doing something with it.

So I won't say I've been very busy recently. I have, however, been preoccupied with other things than this blog for the last month or so.

Today was actually the first day I had time to contemplate writing a proper blog post. The longer I contemplated, however, the harder I found it to think of something adequate to write.

There's no shortage of subjects, really. Life is a dizzying kaleidoscope. It would be easy enough to pick a subject at near-random and set my keyboard clacking.

But I was trying to think of a subject that's important to me, and that might be important to other people.

Every time one occurred to me, I thought of a previous blog post (or many blog posts) that I'd written on that topic previously. Everybody has themes that exercise them. If you're a painter, or a poet, or a musician, you can revisit those themes endlessly, since artistic expression has the power to make the old (or the timeless) ever-new. But it's not really the same with the essayist (and a blogger is essentially an essayist). The essayist risks becoming a bore.

One remedy to this might be to write more feature-style, informational articles. Like the articles I wrote for my short-lived Traditions Traditions Traditions! blog. This requires time for research, though.

I'm actually quite proud of this blog. It's been going since 2011, which I think makes it something of an institution, and I'm all in favour of institutions. More than that, it's proof that I have, in some small way (and I'm under no illusions as regards to its smallness), fought the good fight and raised my banner on behalf of precious things.

In some ways, I think I've been ahead of the curve. Organized religion was very much on the defensive when I started blogging. Today, the New Atheism is a fading memory, and we have a whole wave of high-profile conversions to Christianity. One assumes that something similar is happening with ordinary people, except you don't hear about it. Meanwhile, the debate between atheists, agnostics and believers has become much more respectful and friendly than it was in the days of New Atheist sloganeering.

(Even on a purely personal and anecdotal level, I've seen the congregations in the UCD church becoming more reverential and traditional over the last few years. A mostly-student congregation that now regularly features several young women in mantillas, and usually one or two babies, is quite remarkable.)

Similarly, the pitiful thing that called itself "conservatism" back in 2011 (the era of Mitt Romney and David Cameron) has almost been laughed out of existence. In 2012, I wrote this trio of blog posts explaining why I was a traditionalist conservative. I think it's fair to say that conservatism today is much closer to my own vision than the sort of conservatism that was ascendant fifteen years ago. Indeed, you could even say society itself has moved much closer to my vision. Tradition and character are back, baby!

(Ireland remains an outlier. But then, we are always several decades behind.)

On the debit side, my campaigns for the revival of traditional poetry have been completely fruitless. I can't get anyone to care about poetry-- proper poetry. People listen respectfully, agree, and then go on ignoring it. Conservatives are every bit as indifferent as liberals. I see no imminent prospect of this changing.

Added to that, this blog has shown no sign of growing its audience. I'm grateful to the few people who comment, but I have no evidence of new regular readers. I've become aware that blogs themselves are going out of fashion. Which to me is just another reason to keep soldiering on. My archive is now quite extensive, but I rarely even get new comments on the old posts. I'd always harboured the fond hope that more people might discover this bIog through coming across this or that article that interested them (there are well over two thousand), but it doesn't seem to have happened. I find this discouraging.

I was delighted, however, that this blog received a lovely tribute on the excellent Some Definite Service blog, which I venture to call a sister blog to this one.

The blog will continue, one way or another. I'll just have to mull over what direction it should take. I am grateful for everybody who reads it.

Some Lesser-Known Irish Phrases

It's surprising how much flies under the radar when it comes to national differences. (Such differences as remain, I must gloomily add.) Whenever we discuss, for instance, Irishisms (or Irish idioms), it tends to be the same few that come to mind. Everybody knows "eejit" and "craic", and these are indeed used all the time in everyday life.

But there are many others that are so less-remarked that, frequently enough, I don't even realize they are Irishisms until this comes to my attention, for whatever reason.

I've been collecting these for a few months. Finding myself using one in a comment I left on the most recent post on the Some Definite Service blog, it occurred to me to share them. So here goes.

You’re some flower (or "you're some boy"): You're a piece of work! (Usually said in a tone of reluctant admiration.)

O'Reilly, the builder with the blarney from Fawlty Towers

Sent from Billy to Jack: Sent from pillar to post. "Your customer service department has sent me from Billy to Jack." Somewhat dated and rare, but I used it myself for a long time before I realized it was purely Irish.

You’re a star: You're a mensch, you're a brick. Very, very common, to the extent that it's the title of an Irish talent show on TV.

Tell me this and tell me no more: Rather old-fashioned, and now used more ironically than otherwise. Usually used in the context of something one has puzzled over for a long time, or finds baffling. I think it's more a Dublin usage than a general Irish usage, though I might be wrong. I can only "hear" it in an old Dublin accent.

Get out of that garden: Similar to Kenneth Williams's "stop messing abaht!". Used more ironically and self-consciously in my experience. Very much a Dublin usage.

You’re very good: "Thank you, you're very kind." This is probably said millions of times all over Ireland every day. It's so common I was surprised when I realized it was an Irishism.

At all at all: An emphatic ending to a statement. "He doesn't know what he's doing at all at all." Generally used for humorous effect, and even affecting a "culchie" or rural accent. I used to find this very irritating, rather randomly. The dropped comma is crucial; there's no pause.

Goodbye goodbye goodbye: This is almost the standard way to end a phone-call in Ireland. It's a form of insurance against not responding to somebody else's final "goodybe": to simply keep repeating the word until you hang up. Generally just three, though. I've observed this is especially common among women, but it's widely used by men, too.

He's a total looper: He's nuts.

In the ha’penny place: Doesn't hold a candle to. "I'm only in the ha'penny place to you when it comes to mischief." Used in the movie Michael Collins: "

No bother to you! You could accomplish that easily. Generally a compliment or an encouragement. "You should go up and sing a song. Go on, no bother to you!".

A Short Story for the New Year: The Second Hand

Happy New Year! I'm going to be very busy in the next few weeks, so I probably won't have time for blogging. To keep the blog ticking over, here is a horror short story I wrote a few months ago. A few of my regular readers have read it already. Nobody is predicting I'm going to be stealing Stephen King's crown any time soon, but I hope it's worth a read.

I love being a family man, but I still hanker for time on my own. So when Marion and Eamonn flew off to my niece-in-law’s wedding, and I couldn’t go– it was the weekend of the Yeats conference, and I’d already committed to give a paper– I’ll admit I was looking forward to the time away from them.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my wife and son more than I’ve ever loved anything. Would I sacrifice myself to save them from a fire, or a terrorist attack, or some such situation? Without a moment’s hesitation. I’ve been in love with Marion since we were both fifteen years old, and my whole universe changed when Eamonn came into the world, that blizzardy January evening six years ago.

But…well, I can’t help it. Sometimes I hanker for brief but total isolation. I like pottering and daydreaming and looking at the reflection of a lightbulb in a cup of coffee. I like listening to the ticking of a clock, the whistle of the kettle. Marion is always listening to the radio, and Eamonn is already enraptured with the computer screen— something I’d resolved to protect him from in my idealistic days of early fatherhood, but which became (to be honest) an all-too-convenient pacifier before long. Really, I don’t think I’m any more indulgent with technology than most harried parents. At least I can say he’s well ahead in his reading age.

I drove them to the airport around eight. Eamonn was excited, but I wonder how he’d hold up on the six-hour flight to New York. Or, for that matter, on the hour-long stopover in JFK, before they fly to Rhode Island. I was glad he was having an adventure.

He’d had a tough year of it, with the fall and the broken leg this time last year. He’d fallen down the stairs one night, making his way to the kitchen to get a glass of water. It must have been hereditary, as I’d done the same thing about ten years ago, breaking my wrist.

And, in the meantime– the house was all my own, for two glorious evenings! I could do anything I want– watch any of the DVDs Marion never wanted to watch (mostly historical dramas), read uninterrupted for hours, or just soak in the bath all night and listen to some podcast. Actually, that sounded like just the thing.

So, ten minutes after I’d got home from the airport, I was laying back in a just-hot-enough tub while half-listening to a podcast on Yeats. I’d decided I should make it a Yeats podcast, given the conference this weekend, but I made it something as light and frothy as the bubble bath– a fairly middlebrow account of his unrequited love for Maud Gonne.

Lying there, feeling my body responding gradually to the warmth, I realised that I'd always felt sorry for Yeats. No, not just sorry….but a little bit condescending.

I was convinced that winning the love of your life was the jackpot prize in life, by far the best thing that could possibly happen to anybody. Even genius and fame and a Nobel Prize paled in comparison. I would never say such a thing out loud– it sounds horribly smug–  but I couldn't help my conviction that I was a member of a very small fraction of amazingly lucky people. From the first moment I'd laid eyes on Marion, I knew she was It. Yes, I've had plenty of other crushes down the years, both before and after we’d married. But it wasn't the same, it wasn't even comparable. 

I'd never had to settle, like most people had to settle. I never had to lie awake at night thinking of “the one that got away”. Poor old Willie Yeats! Poor everybody that ever had to do that!

All this gushing about my wife-- what about Eamonn, you might ask? Well, my feelings for Eamonn seemed like a natural overflow of my feelings for Marion. The two loves were like the light and heat of a flame (to take a comparison I would probably dismiss as hackneyed in my professional capacity).

I sunk deeper into the tub so that the water was up to my ears. I found myself enjoying the podcast, not for its narrative of Yeats's great passion– that was old hat to me, and the podcast added nothing new– but for its description of the love-letters he wrote. All of a sudden (this kind of reaction was quite common with me) the very idea of handwritten, personal documents seized my imagination; each one a unique expression of a distinctive personality, a moment in time and place. Not living in a computer server somewhere, in the digital ether, but in satisfying, tactile paper and ink.

So strong was this impression that I had a hankering to put my hands on handwritten documents at that very moment.

It only took me a few moments to remember the filing cabinet in the attic. It was full of my parents’ old papers, and I probably hadn’t looked into it (aside from the odd cursory glance) in over ten years.

Within moments I was in my bathrobe and slippers, and making my way upstairs.

The attic was a place I rarely entered, and the panel opening onto it was stiff. It took some effort to push it open, after finding the wooden stepladder to make my way up there. But I hoisted myself up without great difficulty. It was a fairly roomy attic, though nowhere near roomy enough to be converted to a bedroom. We had left an electric lamp up there, which I found after a little groping. It threw a pale white light in the little space, though it wasn’t bright enough to reach the corners.

Aside from boxes of books, there wasn’t much in the attic other than the filing-cabinet. Neither Marion nor I were clutterbugs– although we were both voracious readers.

The filing cabinet was small, metal, and olive-green. It had a very seventies or eighties look about it. It was mostly full of my father’s papers. A professional historian, his one book The Irish Huguenots was still a standard text in universities. There had been three different editions, and with his typical perfectionism he’d written draft after draft after draft of each one; I’d proofread the last one. In all honesty, it was a solid but dull piece of work; my father saw books as receptacles for knowledge. He was baffled by my love of poetry and literature.

My mother was no great writer, either, but she was a fairly dutiful correspondent. There were dozens if not hundreds of letters to her sister in Australia and her parents in Cork, written in her characteristically spiky writing.

I spent about two hours going through the papers in the filing cabinet, savouring the smell of the old paper and the dusty air. The only sound was the ticking of the second hand of my watch. It was such a soft sound, it only made the silence seem deeper, more peaceful.

I smiled at my mother’s frequent references to my health. I’ve never been seriously ill in my whole life, but she was a confirmed hypochondriac. I found it irritating at the time; now, with both my parents gone, their foibles suddenly seemed endearing.

It was then that I found it.

It was standing on its spine against the left-hand edge of the bottom drawer, hidden behind piles of other documents. It was a hardback copybook with a marble-effect cover.

The first page read The Personal Diary of S.J. Ward, 1995.

I was taken aback. I vaguely remembered having written a diary once– not for very long– but I’d assumed it had disappeared forever ago.

I turned the page, and there was a notice on the next one, in block capitals: TURN BACK, UNWELCOME READER! NOTHING GOOD WILL HAPPEN IF YOU KEEP ON READING!

Smiling at my teenage self’s sense of drama, I turned the page.

The diary was from my sixteenth year. It was written with the intensely self-conscious purple prose of a teenager just discovering the magic of the written word. There were three whole pages describing the rock of Cashel during a school visit.

A little later, on the tenth of March, there was this entry: “Went to see Outbreak with Marion Treacy. Pretty hokey. Eddie Rocket’s afterwards, hot dog and milkshake. Kept talking till seven p.m., walked her home. She seemed to have a good time.”

I couldn’t help smiling at my adolescent understatement. This was a truly life-changing day, our first date. There was a sense of unreality about it, a sense of unreality that endured for weeks afterwards, as I waited for her to discover what a dud I was. It never happened, miraculously. I’d probably been so matter-of-fact because I didn’t want to jinx it, or some such notion.

For the next few couple of days, there was nothing other than the trivia of the school timetable, television, and my first encounter with Hamlet, reading it off my own bat.

Then, on the thirteenth: “Shocking news this morning. Finn Marlowe was hit by a truck in the early hours of the morning. Dead instantly. Very weird atmosphere. Lots of whispering, girls crying. All sorts of rumours.”

All sorts of rumours? I strained my memory, trying to recall them. Oh yes…Finn was supposedly on LSD when he was hit by the truck. Or magic mushrooms. Or something.

It wasn’t hard to believe, because he was a bit of a weird kid. He didn’t speak much, and when he did speak, it tended to be a long monologue. He was ordinary height, thin, and always seemed very stiff. He had very fair hair, almost white-looking, and a sort of whiny expression. He always did up his shirt’s collar button, which most of the boys (including me) left open.

He wasn’t really bullied, that I know of, but he wasn’t popular, either. He didn’t seem to want to be popular. I do remember girls crying that morning his death was announced, but I’m pretty sure it was from shock rather than grief. 

Finn was fairly bright, and unquestionably talented when it came to art. He was always drawing between classes, but his pictures tended to the weird and macabre: the Grim Reaper, gargoyles, that sort of thing. I think he was into heavy metal or something.

Marion told me about a time he’d actually shown her his sketch-book, out of the blue. They were alone in the art class at the time, just after putting their portfolios away, and everybody else had cleared out. He seemed excited, she said. There were a few normal pictures, like studies of birds, but mostly it was really dark stuff. She remembered a picture of a witch being burned at the stake; the witch was a beautiful woman and flames were barely obscuring her abundant bosoms.

Marion remembered telling him his drawings were were great, then clearing out as quick as she decently could, embarrassed.

Of course I remembered Finn dying– a kid dying at school seems like a radical departure from the script of normality– but I had no idea it had happened so soon after I’d started dating Marion.

The funeral didn’t come till the 26th. My entry was: Finn’s funeral today, in St. Laurence’s. As ever, death comes along with a stream of platitudes, the horror masked by conventions, not to forget the inevitable sick jokes. 

The memories were coming back to me, clearer now. 

Decades later, I could admit to myself something that I was barely aware of, at the time; that death, especially premature death, gives a certain added relish to life. I noticed the same thing in the wake of 9/11. The shock and horror  were quite genuine; but, somehow, daily life around that time seemed sharper, heightened, more palpable. (I suppose if my work as an English academic has done anything for me, it’s made me more sensitive to atmospheres, even atmospheres we don’t like to admit to.)

The silence of the attic was broken by the jingle of an ice-cream van, coming from streets away. It’s always seemed to me a perversely melancholy sound. I found myself, randomly enough, remembering the refrain of the Wallace Stevens poem: The only Emperor is the Emperor of ice-cream.

I turned back to the diary. A sixteen-year-old in love took death in his stride, to say the least. I could watch myself, in entry after entry, becoming more confident that Marion (miracle of miracles!), actually liked me. 

On July the ninth I wrote: “Long conversation with M. outside the library, all about life and joy and honesty with yourself. She told me she can speak to me better than she can speak to anyone. Joy unsurpassed!”

As the diary went on, and aside from the ever-pressing business of tests and essays, my mentions of Marion became more lyrical, sometimes not even tied to any incident.

Then, when I turned the page to August, there was a shock.

Under a description of a morning’s browsing in bookshops with Marian, I’d written: “I have to admit, I can’t imagine feeling about anyone the way I feel about M. And– can it be true?-- I think she feels the same about me!!

Written underneath, in somebody else’s handwriting, were the words: Scum scum scum.

Incredulously, I examined them. They were unmistakeable. They were so neat and even, they looked almost like print at first, but a second look showed them to be handwritten.

I stared at them for minutes on end, baffled. Who on earth could have put them there? Why? My brother or sister? I couldn’t imagine it. They were always absorbed in their own lives. It was hard to imagine them ever reading my diary, much less writing a nasty comment. Besides, it wasn’t their handwriting.

I sat there, staring at the light from the electric lamp, listening to the gentle ticking of my watch.

Could it have been me? Could I have written it? Was I harbouring some kind of sub-conscious self-hatred that manifested itself in the very place where I finally admitted Marion liked me? Pop psychology, codswallop, I would have said at any other time…but how else to explain the thing?

I began to scan through the pages more urgently.

A few pages on, I had written: “How is it possible to feel this happy? It’s a horrible cliché to say it feels like a dream. I would never stoop to such cliché. But it feels like a dream!”

And, to the edge of those words, in the same block letters: Scum filth die.

Feeling cold all over, I thumbed through the rest of the diary. There wasn’t much left of it; it ended in early May. And there were no recurrences of that weird, horrible writing.

Tucked into the middle of the hardback copy, however, were some photographs.

About half of them were of me and Mairon; at the beach, on a park bench, just hanging out in her parents’ gardens. The others were all sorts: Christmas, the school production of The Tempest, a sports day.

One, however, showed a group of us on the school trip to the Rock of Cashel, standing with it in the background, on a sunny day.

There were about fifteen of us. I was standing towards the left of the group, smiling dutifully but not very enthusiastically at the camera.

The second from right from Marion, who looked like she had been laughing.

And right beside her was Finn. 

For once, he was smiling. It was as though all the sullenness had dropped for him, and he looked like a normal, happy-go-lucky kind of kid.

I felt a twinge of pity, of sympathy. Had he positioned himself just there for the group shot? He was grinning into the camera, with no idea that he only had weeks left to live. Ecstatically happy just to be standing beside the girl he liked, I guess. I knew how that felt.

Downstairs, I heard a thud. My heart began to hammer.

I looked around the attic for something heavy, something I could have in my hand as I went down to investigate. I couldn’t. Wildly, I found myself imagining a brass candlestick.

Then I heard a beautiful sound– the miaowing of Barty, the cat from 38.

I must have left the kitchen window open, and the cat must have knocked down– a book from a table, most likely. Barty frequently wandered in when he could find a way, looking for strokes and attention.

For now, he’d have to be disappointed. I was too intent upon the mystery of the diary.

I looked at those two grotesque entries again, trying to convince myself it was some kind of sick joke. But by what hand? When? And why?

I’d always considered myself a sceptic, more or less. I was grateful that a great man like Yeats could believe in his fairies and spirits, since it resulted in such great poetry– something that was rarely created by rationalists. But they weren’t to be taken seriously.

Or were they?

I flicked through the copy-book again, drawn back towards the morning where we’d heard the news that Finn had died.

March the thirteenth.

March the thirteenth!

The very day Eamonn had fallen down the stairs, a year ago. I remembered now.

I looked at my watch, which had a date reading just below the six on the dial.

Today was the twelfth.

I felt cold all of a sudden, a coldness that had nothing to do with the temperature in the attic.

The early hours of the thirteenth of March. Eamonn falling down the stairs. Finn walking under a truck.

I had fallen down the stairs in the early hours of the morning myself, all those years ago. I couldn’t remember the date, but I was pretty sure it was spring.

Then I started remembering other things.

One day in my twenties, walking home from the chipper after a night out, well after midnight, a motorbike skidded and slid into a tree just in front of me. The guy wasn’t hurt, and neither was I, but it was a close thing.

And then there was that holiday in Salzburg, where I celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with Irish students and emigrants. The tile that had slid from a roof just as I was walking under it, in the early hours of the morning. A freak accident, everybody said. It missed me by inches.

My mind was racing now, trying to think of every possible misadventure that might have struck me, Eamonn or Marion in the early hours of March the thirteenth. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t help myself.

I couldn’t think of any others.

But the thing was, I had always been one for an early bedtime, and so was Marion. So I guessed that, most years on the thirteenth of March, in the early hours, I was fast asleep in bed. And so were Eamonn and Marion.

I sat there in the pale white light, staring at the face of the boy who had loved my wife, and trying to convince myself that he was now consigned to oblivion. Or, at least, to some other world, safely distinct from this one.

Then something occurre to me. It didn’t even make sense. If I was really onto something, if this boy could reach beyond the grave in the early hours on the date that he had died– because that’s what I was contemplating, insane as it seemed– why would I be safe even in bed?

Why wouldn’t he just block an artery in my heart, give me a brain aneurysm, make the ceiling fall on top of me, something like that?

That’s unanswerable, I thought, feeling a slow release of tension from my body. If this kid from the forgotten past really had the power to get to me, even one day a year, I would have been dead long ago.

But then…I flicked through the pages, looking at those horrible words again.

Scum scum scum.

Scum filth die.

They seemed barely coherent, like the welling up of some volcanic disembodied rage.

What did I really know about such things? How did I know what this force could do, what it couldn’t do? Whether it was Finn as we had known (or barely known him), or some horrible remnant of unreasoning hatred, jealousy and rage?

Why did I assume it made any sense, that it had any consistency, that our human logic applied to it at all?

A line from “The Dead” by James Joyce came to my mind. What was it? Ah, yes: “Some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.” I’d always loved those words. I didn’t love them now.

And then– only at that moment, somehow–  the worst thought of all occurred to me.

In the early hours of March the thirteenth, Eamonn and Marion would be exactly where they were right now: tens of thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean.

I looked down at my watch. It was a little over two hours to midnight.

The sound of my watch’s second hand, counting down the moments with horrible precision, filled the shadowy attic. They stretched ahead of me, filling the horizon with dread.