The Gold Ring

About a year ago I read The Catcher in the Rye. I've been haunted, intermittently, by the famous climactic passage: "Then the carousel started, and I watched her go round and round... All the kids tried to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them."

When I look at life with a little bit of detachment, the quest for the gold ring seems so futile and depressing. One person wins the gold ring; everybody else fails. Even the person who wins the gold ring only really wants it because other people also want it. Probably it brings them no lasting joy anyway.

One thing that fascinates me about Christian saints is that sanctity is completely non-competitive. I'm inclined to think the same applies to holy people of other faiths, although I think they are ultimately barking (or not barking) up the wrong tree. At least they are not trying to grab the gold ring.

(I've just realized that most critics see the gold ring as a symbol of maturity and adulthood. Maybe they are right. I think my reading of it is reasonable, though-- especially given Salinger's Buddhist leanings. Although it doesn't seem like only one person can win the gold ring, literally speaking.)

Happy Feast of St. Celestine I!

He was, according to tradition, the Pope who sent St. Patrick to Ireland. There is actually a street named "Celestine Avenue" in a Dublin suburb.

If we celebrate St. Patrick's Day, why shouldn't we celebrate the Pope who sent him?

The papacy is such a strange thing. They have the most spiritual power (and responsibility) of everybody in the whole world, and have often wielded great temporal power as well. But how many of us know more than a handful of them? I actually rather like this fact, and not for any Ozymandias-style sense of forgotten grandeur. Perhaps I like it because it makes history seems so spacious and irregular.

Interesting Words

I've frequently bored my blog readers to death with my fascination with words. And here I go again! Take it as your Friday penance!

Recently I've started keeping a notebook of interesting words. I've done this for two reasons:

1) Because I love interesting words, mostly for their aesthetic value-- "aesthetic" understood as a combination of sound and sense.

2) Because of the gargantuan, colossal, extraordinary amount of time we spend in limbo, doing nothing in particular. Taking the lift, and waiting for the lift. Walking down corridors. Waiting for buses. Waiting for meetings to begin. The US military has a saying I like, and that I find applies to much of life: "Hurry up and wait". So I like to carry notebooks with which I might, possibly, improve my mind while hurrying up and waiting. (Quickly looking in a notebook seems respectable no matter what you're doing. It appears official and diligent. As opposed to browsing your phone.)

How many of these words did you know, and do you have any other suggestions? (Guidelines follow the list.) Please tolerate my approximate definitions and correct them if they're wrong. There's a good few architectural terms at the start.

Symploce: A figure of speech in which the middle of a phrase is changed while the beginning and end stay the same, e.g., "Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley deep enough, ain't no river wide enough to keep me from you..."

Apse: The rounded end of a cruciform church where the altar is.

Architrave: The lintel of a row of column capitals.

Ashlar: Masonry that is finely cut and symmetrical.

Cantilever: A structural element attached to a fixed structure at one end, unsupported at the other. I'm glad I know what this means now as I've been hearing it all my life and felt stupid.

Clerestory: The upper part of a nave of a large church, containing windows.

Dentil: A small block used as a repeating motif in a cornice.

Heliograph: An early form of photography using bitumen. Used to create the first surviving photograph. (I wrote a poem about that photograph in my teens, and I still find the idea poetic.)

Calotype: Early photographic process that used paper.

Corral: A "slot" in a race (like a marathon), so that people begin at times commensurate with their ability.

Aspect ratio: The proportion of a movie picture's width and height.

Foot lambert: A unit used to measure luminescence on a movie screen.

Pop-o-matic: That plastic bubble in the centre of a board game that contains dice, and that you press to roll them. (I'm particularly fond of this word.)

Transom: The beam between the door and the pane of glass (or panel of wood?) above the door. The glass above it is called a "transom light" in the USA and a fanlight in British English. 

I know this word mostly from the movie This is Spinal Tap, in which the lead singer says: "Before I met Jeanine, my life was cosmically a shambles. I was using bits and pieces of whatever Eastern philosophies happened to drift through my transom."

Dewar: Name of a particular sort of flask and also the container in which cryonically preserved people are preserved (upside down, since the theory is that their heads will be preserved longer that way if there's a power-cut). Named after a Scottish guy called Dewar.

Non-rhotic: Languages, dialects and accents that only pronounce "r" when it comes before a vowel.

Cornea: The transparent "windshield" over your eye. Probably everybody knew that apart from me, right?

Sclera: The white of the eye.

Conjuctiva: The delicate tissue that lines the eyelids.  (Before we move on from eye-related terms...isn't the eye the most beautiful part of any human body?)

Hyperopia: Far-sightedness, the opposite of myopia.

Hue: In colour theory, one of the twelve basic colours of the colour wheel.

Chromaticity: In colour theory, the "purity" of a colour on the colour wheel. Measured by the presence of otherwise of black, white, or grey. (I'm not sure what that means exactly.)

Ferrule: The metal band on a paintbrush.

Emesis basin: A metal basin for holding medical instruments and also for puking into.

Debridement: Removing dead and infected tissue from a wound.

Alickadoo: A member of a sports club who isn't actually a player, just a hanger-on. Said to have been coined in Ireland. (I also particularly like this one.)

Mysophobia: A morbid fear of germs. (I personally wash my hands more often than almost anybody I know.)

Thaumatrope: A Victorian era toy or optical illusion. There are pictures on two sides of a disc and when the disc is spun fast enough, it looks like the images merge. Cool!

Zoetrope: Simple form of animation using a cylinder on a rotating wheel. I've watched videos of this and honestly I don't think it's all that impressive.

Theremin: Musical instrument that is played without being touched. Developed by some Soviet scientist. Most associated with "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys although that wasn't exactly a theremin but some kind of variation on the idea.

Krieg light: The big light they use on film sets.

Carcenet: A type of jewelled metal necklace from medieval times. I came across this while reading Idylls of the King by Tennyson. it's pronounced carkenet.

Diagetic: Something that exists within a fictional world. Most commonly music: diagetic music is music the characters can actually hear, as opposed to most film scores.

Libfix: A "liberated affix". Like the -gate in every scandal that was called -gate after Watergate, or like the -thon in telethon, walkathon, etc.

From that list, you probably have a good idea of the sort of words I'm looking for, but these are my basic principles:

1) It has to be a real word that has a real function, no matter how obscure or rare it might be. I'm not really interested in funny or whimsical words, although these seem to predominate in every "interesting words" list I can find. (The compilers of such lists have a particular love affair with "flibbertigibbet".)

2) I like words that are drawn from some particular field or specialty, such as (on this list) optics or film projection. But not so obscure that they would never be relevant for general usage.

3) I like somewhat extravagant names for inventions: Jumbotron, kaleidoscope (probably my favourite word of all), Pop-o-matic. (When I was a kid, I became acquainted with a machine called a ray-ionizer which supposedly purified the air.)

4) I like words with a bit of a Greek sound to them, like zoetrope and symploce.

That's about it. Don't forget, I'd be interested in hearing how many of these words people already knew, as well.

Interesting Anomalies

Lord Alfred Tennyson asked for every copy of his Collected Works to end with the poem "Crossing the Bar", which expresses his hope for the afterlife and the circumstances of his death. And so they have, as far as I can make out.

Nepal is the only flag in the world which is non-rectangular.

You can't pump your own "gas" (as the Americans say) in New Jersey, by law.

I love anomalies like these and I have an endless appetite for them. Does anyone have any other examples? (No facetious responses, please. This is serious business.)

The Ghostliness of Buildings

Have you ever thought about the ghostliness of buildings? Once a building (of any kind) is thirty or forty years old, several generations have most likely passed through it. Not necessarily generations in the strict sense, but generations of occupants.

Who were they? Where did they sit? What were their routines? What did they think of this space you are currently occupying? How has its mood flickered over the decades?

It's the complete lack of a record (in most places) that is most ghostly of all. It's not like every house and train station and shop has its historian. The vast, vast majority of the events that take place are utterly forgotten in the place where they happened.

Another strange thought is this one: "Some day I will never see the inside of this building again." Whether that's because you die, or because you move, or because you change jobs, or because you change towns...One way or another, the thought often strikes me on the mental funny-bone.

St. Praxedis

 

Today is the Feast of St. Praxedes, an early Roman martyr. I'd never heard of her before. The painting above is by Vermeer.

These early saints and martyrs are fascinating, partly because we know so little about them and yet their fame must have been considerable for generations after their death. How did the details fade from living memory?

I've always liked that one of the busiest train stations in London is called St. Pancras. It seems strangely appropriate, Perhaps because so much of national life is built on train stations, and the ancient Roman saints are a foundational stratum of the Christian society that still undergirds our world.

Definition of a Sadist

Somebody for whom "hurt you" is its own reward.

A Faint Memory

Today a long-ago memory swam back into my consciousness, a throwaway reference in some movie review (I think it was a review of Poltergeist) that referred to "the good old nuclear family"-- something like "the good old nuclear family triumphs again".

I think I was a kid when I read this, and I can't remember what I thought of it at the time. But it seems a good example of something that's been going on my entire life-- that is, the constant diet of obliquely dismissive comments regarding this or that social institution. But never saying exactly what's wrong with them.

A common example of this used to be sardonic references to "2.4 children." Of course, the birthrate has dropped well below that now, and our societies are dying, so maybe 2.4 children wasn't so bad after all.

But nobody ever really said what was wrong with it. It was just a standard snide comment meant to portray people as-- what? Bourgeois, average, complacent, white-bread, banal...something like that. It was never actually articulated.

I'm sure you can think of many other examples of this. Perhaps the most obvious one these days is "white male". If you refer to somebody (or an institution, or an audience) as "primarily white and male", or something like that....you don' t have to explain what the problem with that is. It's just a generalized expression of disapproval or disdain. Somehow just using the words is scoring a point.

"Middle America" is another example.

I think this is one of the way the left has exerted its cultural dominance for decades now...a constant drip-drip-drip of this sort of derogatory reference, so pervasive and almost subliminal that it's a type of conditioning.

Because really, what's wrong with the nuclear family?

(When I hear leftists use the slogan "It takes a village to raise a child", I have the strong sense that they really mean: "It takes the government to raise a child". The slogan itself is unobjectionable.)

Possibly My Favourite Newman Quotation

"Here I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction, that it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be. Not, of course, that I think the tempers of mind herein implied desirable, which would be an evident absurdity; but I think them infinitely more desirable and more promising than a heathen obduracy, and a cold, self-sufficient, self-wise tranquility."

This is a passage from John Henry Newman's sermon "The Religion of the Day". It very often comes to my mind.

It come to my mind especially when I read about some religious controversy of the past. For instance, the hostile reaction in England when the Catholic Church restored its hierarchy there in 1850, definitively emerging from its post-Reformation underground.

I hesitate to use that example, since the last thing I ever want to do is appeal to Catholic triumphalism. (In fact, I rather regret calling this blog "Irish Papist"; I'm scared it sounds whingy and petulant, since "papist" was a pejorative term.) What I'm saying is that I entirely sympathise with the Protestant reaction. I entirely sympathise with almost all religious passions.

If religion is the most important thing in life, then surely it should be the focus of public controversy.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I've recently been watching episodes of The Journey Home, the EWTN programme in which converts to Catholicism tell their story. The show is American, so most of the guests are American. Quite often they relate stories of family turmoil and estrangement arising from their conversion. This is sad, of course, but it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me. It seems quite understandable.

I greatly admire Americans for taking religion so seriously.

As Newman's quotation suggests: it's better to not be bigoted, it's better to not be fanatical, it's better to not be narrow-minded. But only if you've actually risen above such failings, not if you've never even risen to them.

Happy Feast of our Lady of Carmel!

Today is the Feast of our Lady of Carmel. Remarkably, it was approved all the way back in 1587.

I'm always fascinated to hear people talk about different "spiritualities" within the Catholic Church, often associated with different religious orders. Some people even become lay members of tertiaries of these Orders. (I've just learned that Bishop Fulton Sheen was a member of the Third Order of Carmelites. So was Eamon De Valera, and he was buried in the Carmelite habit.)

I've pondered whether I feel especially drawn to any such "spirituality". I don't think I do, but I do feel a certain attraction towards the Carmelites. I was married in a Carmelite church and I especially like reading about Carmelite saints, since they are contemplatives. But it's only a faint attraction-- Carmelite Lite, as it were. (I couldn't resist that.)

Poems I Like: "The Workman's Friend" by Jem Casey (AKA Myles Na Gopaleen AKA Flann O'Brien AKA Brian O'Nolan)

This comic poem is from At Swim Two Birds, the staggeringly precocious novel written by the young Brian O'Nolan, who accumulated an impressive list of pen-names throughout his life. In the novel, it's attributed to Gem Casey, a working-class poet. Apparently Jem Casey was a stealthy dig at the Irish priest-poet James Casey, who wrote temperance poems. The irony is plain (pun intended).

At Swim Two Birds is a complex and intellectual novel, but the poem is delightfully simple. Myles (I think of him as Myles) probably intended it entirely as a joke, and possibly tossed it off in a few minutes. It has that air of inspired breeziness. It's clearly a comic poem, but it's seriously good. I like any poem with a running refrain, if it's done well.

"Your only man" is a Dublin term that means "just what the doctor ordered". It's still occasionally used, albeit rather archly. "A pint of plain" is a pint of porter or stout. "Darlint" must be an ephemeral version of "darling"; I've only ever encountered it in this poem. Many versions render it "darling", which seems fine to me.

My favourite line is "and no rashers grease your pan". Everyone knows rashers are streaky bacon, right?

The Dubliners recorded a spoken version of this poem. Try not to die of nostalgia as you watch it.

The Dublin literary scene in Myles's time was an immensely boozy one, as immortalized in one of my favourite books, Dead as Doornails by Anthony Cronin. Personally, I'm not much of a drinker (I was a teetotaler till I was twenty-seven), and I haven't spent much time in pubs. But do I have a rather romantic view of them-- I grew up listening to stories of all the discussions, debates and drama that happened in pubs. My own experience of them has been more disappointing. But isn't that life?

The Workman's Friend

When things go wrong and will not come right
Though you do the best you can
When life looks black as the hour of night
A pint of plain is your only man.

When money’s tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran
When all you have is a heap of debt
A pint of plain is your only man.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange
And your face is pale and wan
When doctors say you need a change
A pint of plain is your only man.

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan
When hunger grows as your meals are rare
A pint of plain is your only man.

In time of trouble and lousy strife
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life
A pint of plain is your only man.

(This is a painting of the author that, extraordinarily, I came across in UCD today, purely by accident. It hangs in the Engineering Building, five minutes walk from the library where I've worked for twenty-five years. I'd never been in it before.)

The Late Ted Bonner

More than ten years ago, I wrote this article about Don't Shoot, I'm Not Well!, an excellent book of humorous essays by the late (indeed, the Late Late) Ted Bonner, who died in 2002.

I think he's a much-undervalued Irish humourist. He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page!

I've been doing some research on Mr. Bonner but I've hit a bit of a wall. So-- this is a long shot, but if any relatives or close friends of Ted Bonner come upon this blog post, could you get in touch? My email address is Maolsheachlann@gmail.com.

Mr. Bonner was a frequent guest on The Late Late Show, and even presented it once. Hence the reference above.

(And maybe this appeal is not such a long shot after all. My poem on a record-breaking snooker marathon that occurred in Preston Polytechnic in 1981-- or, more accurately, a photograph of the post-marathon celebrations from an old Guinness Book of Records-- gleaned, over a few years, three comments from people who had been in attendance, including one of the record-breakers.)

The School of No Escape

What happens when a mysterious new headmistress called Miss Voor takes over a girl's school called St. Juniper's and starts making mysterious changes?

Well, you can find out by reading The School of No Escape, a serialized story from the comic Misty which appeared in full in the Misty Annual 1979, free to read on the Internet Archive. It begins on page sixteen. It's pretty good. I like stories set in schools and other self-contained environments.

(I was curious to see if there was actually a St. Juniper. There is, kind of. Brother Juniper was the name of one of St. Francis's original companions. He's never even been made venerable, but the famous Franciscan missionary St. Junípero Serra was given his name when he joined the Order. Whether the writers knew this, or whether they just plucked the name out of the air, who knows?)

To a Shopping Channel Presenter

I was scanning through my blog archives and came across this bit of silliness. I rarely engage in free verse, but this is one of those rare occasions, and I'm mildly fond of it. It's not a satire on consumerism or anything lame like that.

To a Shopping Channel Presenter

I'm sincerely sorry that I can't afford
To buy your non-stick frying pan.
But listening to your evangelical zeal
Makes me strangely happy.

We seem to live in an age without belief;
An age, it often seems,
Where socialists don't believe in society
Liberals don't believe in freedom
And Christians don't believe in God.

But you!
You believe in this non-stick frying pan
(And the free spice rack, if you phone in the next hour)
More than anyone has ever believed in anything.

I get the impression, hearing your excitement,
That if everybody bought this non-stick frying pan
All the wars of the world would cease
Dandruff would go away
And teenagers would never fight with their parents again.

Alas, alas, I cannot afford to buy it.
And the agents who are just waiting for my call
Are destined to wait
And wait
And paint their nails
And look out the window
And say to one another, mournfully,
"I don't think that he's ever going to call."

My Two Reasons for Reading

I've noticed that I read (watch YouTube videos, etc.) for two main reasons:

1) To learn something.

2) To savour an atmosphere.

I get annoyed at myself for the second motive. What do I ultimately get out of it? That's what I ask myself.

Recently I became very drawn to the whole idea of "campus horror". I read a horror novel set in a university and watched two horror films set in a university. I wanted to savour the atmosphere. But then I feel a bit guilty, thinking: what do I take away from it? What did I get from it? How am I enriched or improved?

Of course, you can both learn and savour an atmosphere at once. Sometimes I start reading a particular author or blogger (or just a book) to learn something, but then revisit it to savour the atmosphere. I can't seem to liberate myself from this preoccupation with atmosphere, and I'm not even sure I want to.

Effort Inflation

If you can give 101 per cent, then why are you holding back on 110 per cent?

And if you're giving 110 per cent, why not 200 per cent?

And if 200 per cent...

Maybe we should just keep (or rather, restore) 100 per cent as the ceiling.

(No Nigel Tufnel references, please.)

People Should Use Their Titles

I've just been watching an interview with a bishop (on a Catholic TV show). The host was addressing him in quite a familiar way. Which is fine, but I did find myself once again thinking: "I prefer it when people use their titles, and other people's titles."

There's no self-interest in this belief, since I have no title, unless it's "Mister".

It seems more suitable, and interesting, to address a Bishop as "Your Grace" rather than "Bishop", as the host was doing. (Although I've just seen that American bishops are generally addressed as "Your Excellency", and "Your Grace" is reserved for Archbishops-- which is interesting in itself.)

My job involves emailing academics a lot, and I greatly enjoy addressing them as Dr Such-and-Such or Professor What's-His-Face. They worked hard to get that title. (Even if they're a doctor of Media Studies or a Professor of Women's Studies or something.)

It's only a small thing, but I think it adds a little bit of colour to life.

Congratulations To Me

I'm awarding myself the Basil Fawlty Award for not mentioning the war-- I mean the thing-- you know, the thing that every other Catholic blog on the face of the earth is talking about. (Well, not blogs per se. There aren't any blogs anymore-- this is the last Catholic blog, except its sister blog across the Irish Channel. I mean Catholic YouTube channels and Substack columns and the like.)

On the one hand, why can't the Vatican duh duh duh. What about the German bishops duh duh duh. On the other hand you can't openly defy duh duh duh.  Faults on both sides duh duh duh let's pray for reason to prevail duh duh duh. Large families duh duh duh homeschooling duh duh duh accusations of Pharisaism duh duh duh go back to the actual documents duh duh duh.

I almost mentioned it there but I think I got away with it.

Leftists Talk About Bread-and-Butter Issues for Public Consumption...

...but, when it comes down to it, what they really seem to care about is identity politics and political correctness.

This fact was borne upon me for the thousandth time recently when I got an election flyer for a left-wing candidate. Everything in the flyer was about local amenities, public transport, and the like. Not a single mention of the liberal social agenda, globalism, or anything like that.

It always seems to be what they lead with in ordinary, everyday debates as well. I'm constantly asked, by my leftist friends and colleagues, why the rich should dominate society like they do-- or some such question. I rarely have the courage (or the appetite) to reply: "But this doesn't really seem to be what you care about, or the threat I think you represent. What you really seem to care about is changing all the immemorial traditions of mankind."

More of the Same

The BBC posting another highly newsworthy and socially relevant story-- some women (enough to make a news feature, apparently) are wearing "divorce rings" to celebrate the destruction of their marriages.

For a long time now, the media and entertainment industries seem to have gone full blast to sow hatred and resentment between men and women.

Every time I see a couple walking hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm along the street-- especially an old couple-- it feels like a little victory against this agenda of hatred and separation.

The Protestant Champion

I never talk to myself, and until I heard other people doing it, I believed that talking to oneself was a merely literary of dramatic convention-- that people didn't really do it. But I do have a habit which seems even more eccentric-- that is, suddenly laughing at something I've remembered at random. I don't see why one shouldn't do this, but I don't notice other people doing it.

Today I was laughing at the memory of a passage from GK Chesterton's autobiography, which I think might be his best book. I'm sure I've posted this passage before, in some form or other, but here it is again. I think it's very funny.

For scene-setting, all you have to know is that Chesterton's grandfather and father were estate agents. The family were Unitarian, but not particularly religious.

I cannot help having a dim suspicion that dignity has something to do with style; but anyhow the gestures, like the songs, of my grandfather's time and type had a good deal to do with dignity. But, used as he was to ceremonial manners, he must have been a good deal mystified by a strange gentleman who entered the office and, having conferred with my father briefly on business, asked in a hushed voice if he might have the high privilege of being presented to the more ancient or ancestral head of the firm. He then approached my grandfather as if the old gentleman had been a sort of shrine, with profound bows and reverential apostrophes.

"You are a Monument," said the strange gentleman, "Sir, you are a Landmark."

My grandfather, slightly flattered, murmured politely that they had certainly been in Kensington for some little time.

"You are an Historical Character," said the admiring stranger. "You have changed the whole destiny of Church and State."

My grandfather still assumed airily that this might be a poetical manner of describing a successful house-agency. But a light began to break on my father, who had thought his way through all the High Church and Broad Church movements and was well-read in such things. He suddenly remembered the case of "Westerton versus Liddell" in which a Protestant churchwarden prosecuted a parson for one of the darker crimes of Popery, possibly wearing a surplice.

"And I only hope," went on the stranger firmly, still addressing the Protestant Champion, "that the services at the Parish Church are now conducted in a manner of which you approve."

My grandfather observed in a genial manner that he didn't care how they were conducted. These remarkable words of the Protestant Champion caused his worshipper to gaze upon him with a new dawn of wonder, when my father intervened and explained the error pointing out the fine shade that divides Westerton and Chesterton. I may add that my grandfather, when the story was told, always used to insist that he had added to the phrase "I don't care how they are conducted," the qualifying words (repeated with a grave motion of the hand) "provided it is with reverence and sincerity." But I grieve to say that sceptics in the younger generation believed this to have been an afterthought.

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.

Poems I Like: "Ringsend" by Oliver St. John Gogarty

Gogarty had a wonderful gift for polished, mellifluous verse. "Streel" is an Irish term that usually means to stagger drunkenly. I've loved this poem for at least two decades but, so far as I can remember, I'd never encountered its subtitle ("after reading Tolstoy") until now. My two favourite lines in this poem are: "Imagined, outrageous, preposterous wrongs", and the brilliant last line. (Well, strictly speaking, they are both couplets, but we don't do pedantry on this blog.)

There's a joke that Oliver St. John Gogarty was famous as a poet and a surgeon; famous as a poet to his patients, and a surgeon to his readers. He was in fact an excellent poet, and is much underrated today-- although he does have a pub named after him in Dublin's Temple Bar, which seems always to be thronged.

Ringsend by Oliver St. John Gogarty

I will live in Ringsend
With a red-headed whore,
And the fan-light gone in
Where it lights the hall-door;
And listen each night
For her querulous shout,
As at last she streels in
And the pubs empty out.
To soothe that wild breast
With my old-fangled songs,
Till she feels it redressed
From inordinate wrongs,
Imagined, outrageous,
Preposterous wrongs,
Till peace at last comes,
Shall be all I will do,
Where the little lamp blooms
Like a rose in the stew;
And up the back-garden
The sound comes to me
Of the lapsing, unsoilable,
Whispering sea.

A Phrase I Hate

I recently blogged on clichés that I love, although I also mentioned two clichés that I hate: "bucket list" and "life hack". (In this I was prompted by a blog post from Bruce Charlton.)

Here's another one, and I'll be amazed if anybody disagrees with me: "elevator pitch".

Never mind that we don't call it an elevator on this side of the Atlantic, the phrase has become a standard one anyway.

Come to think of it, "bucket list", "life hack", and "elevator pitch" all seem to share the same atmosphere, to belong to the same mental world. A world of efficiency, go-getting, and utility maximization. We all live in that world and have to play along to some extent. But we don't have to like it!

And I think we can at least resolve to avoid ever saying "bucket list", "life hack", or "elevator pitch"...

(Just compare "elevator pitch" to one of my favourite phrases, "till the cows come home"...what a world of difference!)

I can't help including this cartoon I drew some time ago, though I think I've posted it before.

Parlour Games in the Jury Room

This is an article I wrote for the magazine Leaven, which is now (as far as I know) defunct. Yes, it's an old hobby-horse of mine, so I hope regular readers don't groan. I really like the title-- it has a certain ring to it.

Six years ago, I was called for jury duty. The case was quite dramatic and dragged on for two weeks. Much of that time was spent in the jury room, as the barristers duked it out among themselves. Juries are not supposed to discuss the case until it comes to discussing the verdict. Most of my fellow jurors discussed it anyway, but we still had a lot of time to kill.

There was a whiteboard in the jury room, which was presumably intended for the serious business of sifting evidence and presenting theories. One day, the boredom became such that we decided to put it to a less civic-minded use; playing Hangman and drawing visual riddles.

After days and days of boredom, I suddenly felt energised. It had been a long, long time since I played Hangman. It brought me back to childhood, back to the eighties when the only computer in my life was my cousin's Spectrum console-- which I never actually got to use, being restricted to watching my cousin and my older brother play games like War of the Worlds and Back to Skool. (I remember the games took longer to load than they did to play.) It felt good to be back to playing games that didn’t require the mediation of a glowing screen; “making our own entertainment”, as the saying goes.

I assumed my fellow jurors were experiencing the same nostalgia, the same relief from the tyranny of the passive. Then one of them said: “They should have televisions in these jury rooms”. It felt like a kick in the teeth.

All my life, I’ve felt an anxiety about this matter. But what exactly is “this matter”?

It’s difficult to put a name to it. The decay of oral tradition? The loss of folklore? The tyranny of entertainment? The triumph of the electronic? None of those exactly seem to cover it, although all of them apply.

It seems fair to say that, since the advent of radio and television, mass media have become a bigger and bigger part of everyday life. We all live in a mental universe of pop culture. The passivity of radio and TV may have been mitigated by the arrival of the internet-- now anyone can write their own blog or start their own online forum, on any subject whatsoever. However, the mediation of the electronic screen remains, eliminating barriers of time and space in a way that surely has costs as well as benefits. Today we can send a message across the world in a moment, but what of the local legends and sayings and customs that were once protected by those very barriers?

Take, for instance, the case of Irish ballads. Ireland has a phenomenal heritage of ballads-- patriotic, sentimental, local, humorous, and of many other kinds. Up until very recently, as far as I can tell, most Irish people would have had a wide repertoire of these ballads, which often seeped into the written literature of our country. My own father could sing hundreds of them, or so it seemed. Now and again he would recite a verse or two from some obscure ballad, and then comment: “It must be fifty years since I last heard that”. I remember many sing-alongs, during which he and his friends would belt out song after song, from “Monto” to “James Connolly, the Irish Rebel”, never hesitating over a single line.

By the time my father died in 2019, the situation had changed. After his funeral reception, in the Brian Boru pub in Glasnevin, those who lingered over drinks made an effort at a sing-along. Now, however, the words did not come so easily. The youngsters knew no ballads at all, and even the older mourners-- who would have had innumerable ballads on the tip of their tongues twenty years ago-- struggled to get through more than a verse or two. Smartphones were produced to call up the lyrics. “Do you remember when we didn’t need phones to have a singalong?”, asked one person, gloomily.

We don’t sing songs anymore. We don’t tell stories. We don’t swap riddles. We don’t play parlour games. This may be an exaggeration, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. Even joke-telling seems to be on the decline. When is the last time you told or heard an actual joke? When did you last encounter that once-familiar trio, Paddy Englishman, Paddy Irishman, and Paddy Scotsman?

Surely you don’t have to be a galloping reactionary to regret this. You don’t have to deny the virtues of television, cinema and comic books (or even computer games and memes!) to feel that we are losing something.

Where does oral culture persist today? The only vibrant examples I can think of are terrace chants and popular devotions in religious communities. “Ooh, Ah, Paul McGrath” and “Who Ate All the Pies?” may not exactly be poetry, but at least such ditties have their own independent life, passing spontaneously from mouth to mouth without any debt to the culture industries. And it’s comforting to think of the tens of thousands of worshippers, across the face of our land, who can rattle off “Hail Glorious Saint Patrick, the Saint of our Land” or “Sweet Heart of Jesus, Fount of Love and Mercy” at the drop of a hat (or the ring of a bell).

Whether skipping chants and “haunting children’s rhymes” still exist in schoolyards is a question I’m not qualified to answer. I’m rather afraid to find out.

Surely this is something we can all address in our own ways. For my part, I have been memorizing poems for the last few years. I have about ninety of them stored in my brain now. I mentally recite them when I am washing dishes, walking to work, even (though perhaps I shouldn’t admit it) sitting in boring meetings. As long as I keep them refreshed, they’re all mine-- even on a desert island.

Poems I like: The School in August by Philip Larkin

This is a rather tongue-in-cheek poem that Larkin wrote when he was twenty-one, but it always comes to mind in the summer. I work in University College Dublin library and, as you can imagine, there's row upon row of empty desks from early May to late September.

(Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time would realize I work in UCD. But I have a bit of an allergy to people presuming others are familiar with their circumstances-- more particularly, to people who assume that I'm familiar with their circumstances. It seems so self-important.)

Anyway, I wrote an analysis of this poem for the Philip Larkin Society website, which can be read here. I wrote it twenty years ago this year! (The Philip Larkin Society used to have a forum which was one of my very first internet "haunts". I've memorialized it here.)

I'm not claiming this is a great poem, but it definitely catches an atmosphere.

The School in August by Philip Larkin

The cloakroom pegs are empty now,
And locked the classroom door,
The hollow desks are lined with dust,
And slow across the floor
A sunbeam creeps between the chairs
Till the sun shines no more.

Who did their hair before this glass?
Who scratched 'Elaine loves Jill'
One drowsy summer sewing-class
With scissors on the sill?
Who practised this piano
Whose notes are now so still?

Ah, notices are taken down,
And scorebooks stowed away,
And seniors grow tomorrow
From the juniors today,
And even swimming groups can fade,
Games mistresses turn grey.

An Extraordinarily Accurate Prediction

This passage is from an article that appeared in The Irish Press on 12th April 1966, in the midst of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. It was written by Charles McCarthy, the secretary of the Vocational Teachers' Organisation, and it's remarkably prescient:

"There was in the men on 1916 a sense of destiny. In these rather concrete and somewhat cynical times I imagine our organized commemoration this year, with its renewal of emotion and almost of sanctification, may well be followed by a period of more critical assessment, inevitable anyway as personal involvement gives way to history, and all the more inevitable as a reaction to romantic restatement.

"Both the messianic patriotism of Pearse and the socialistic patriotism of Connolly will come in for sharper intellectual examination than they have before; and both will be faulted, I have no doubt, very intelligently and quite validly. But while this will be appropriate to a lecture-room, we must remember that these were not lecture-room men..."

(Whenever someone ties a discourse or attitude or atmosphere to a particular setting, like a lecture room in this case, it gives me a thrill. I like the idea that reality shifts-- or at least, shimmers-- according to what space we're standing in.)

The reaction McCarthy was predicting was accelerated by the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland three years after he wrote. Of course, he couldn't have predicted that.

I'm always impressed when people can see past the atmosphere of the moment. For instance, St. John Paul II was by no means misled by his triumphant reception in Ireland in 1978. If you read the speeches he made on his tour, he could quite clearly see that secularism and materialism were on the rise in Ireland.

Favourite Poems: "Death of an Irishwoman" by Michael Hartnett.

This poem is a bit of an anomaly in my list of favourite poems. It was published in 1975. Other than the work of Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, I don't really bother with poetry that recent. (And, by a strange coincidence, I've just learned that Betjeman and Larkin's last collections were both published in 1974.)

I haven't read a huge amount of poetry by Michael Hartnett, either, although I can't really explain why. I've just looked at some of his other poems now, and they seem pretty good. I should give him a proper look. I guess I expected all his other poems would be typical modernist dreck, and that this one was just a moment of pure inspiration. His other most famous poem is "A Farewell to English", and I thought that one (or the excerpt I read from it) was pretty poor.

This poem, at any rate, is utterly magnificent. And heartbreaking. Some of its lines are actually unbearable-- in the moment that you read them, or think of them. Indeed, this is a poem that, whenever I find lines from it coming into my memory, has me turning my face away from other people, since I expect they'll ask: "Are you OK?". The sort of poem that doesn't just bring a tear to my eye, but makes my whole face crumple.

Lines such as: "She clenched her brittle hands around a world she could not understand."

Or the very next line: "I loved her from the day she died". (Like a kick in the stomach from a Doc Martin boot.)

Or the final line, pure perfection, a line as good as any written in the history of poetry: "She was a child's purse, full of useless things."

I know nothing about the circumstances of this poem's composition and I've read no critical analysis of it. But I very much suspect that it's not just about the death of an Irishwoman, but rather about the death of Ireland itself. The "child's purse full of useless things" being replaced by office blocks, indoor shopping centres, life coaches, play dates, world cuisine, designer labels, rap music, and...

Well, and all the rest of it. It's a familiar litany, and we're all tired of hearing it. Indeed, it seems self-indulgent at this point to even indulge in it. None of us are going to do anything about it, if we even could.

And yet, despite this, every now and again, we get a fresh stab or grief or horror-- at least I do. Even things we assumed would always be there start to disappear. (I've noticed that the line "There won't be a Shire, Pip", from the Two Towers film, has become proverbial in certain online conservative communities.)

Today one of my colleagues-- who describes himself as centrist-- was lamenting that he goes abroad on holidays only to find that everything is now the same as at home. I made my usual Eeyorish prediction (which I fear is really true) that Ireland will be gone in twenty years. He agreed with me.

Was this the prophecy in "Death of an Irishwoman"? I don't know. But, in any case, it's a masterpiece.

("Púcas" is pronounced "pookas" and means "ghosts").

Death of an Irishwoman by Michael Hartnett

Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew the things that moved
at night were neither dogs nor cats
but púcas and darkfaced men,
she nevertheless had fierce pride.
But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.
She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
She was a card game where a nose was broken.
She was a song that nobody sings.
She was a house ransacked by soldiers.
She was a language seldom spoken.
She was a child’s purse, full of useless things.

Happy St. John's Eve!

It crept up on me this year. I might make some goody later. My attempts at goody have been pretty messy and tasteless, but what the heck?

Here's a reasonable description of the tradition from RTE. It's pleasing to know that people still make St. John's Eve bonfires.

The Poetry of Cliché

I was reading a book this morning and I came across the phrase "the mists of time". As always I felt a frisson of pleasure. It's one of the many clichés that strike me as intensely poetic.

What is a cliché, anyway? We can't be entirely original with every utterance. Why is it OK to use an idiom and not a cliché? What's the difference?

There are some clichés I just hate, such as "life-hack" and "bucket list". (The critique in the link is from Professor Bruce Charlton.) But that's not so much because they're clichés. I hate them because they're so inelegant and banal.

I'm not saying we should always speak in clichés. I'm defending the use of clichés that are especially poetic.

Here's some of my favourites. I know I've mentioned many of them before, in other posts. But what the heck.

The morning after the night before.

A walk down memory lane.

The wit and wisdom of...

Till the cows come home.

The dead of night.

The back of beyond (and the middle of nowhere).

The cold light of day.

Calling a pub a "hostelry", "tavern", or other jokey name.

The last chance saloon (much loved by sports commentators).

Dreaming spires (of academia).

In at the deep end.

As old as Father Time.

The best thing since sliced bread. (What did they say before sliced bread?)

A bumpy ride.

Goes to the movies (as in the titles of innumerable books: Stephen King Goes to the Movies, Philosophy Goes to the Movies, etc. etc.)

The silver screen.

The stroke of midnight.

I'm sure I'll think of more, and add to this post 

A common feature of all these favourite clichés of mine is that they are (in my view) aesthetically pleasing, both in the sounds of the words and in the image they use. I don't like clichés that are coarse or grotesque. For instance, instead of using "the back of beyond" or "the middle of nowhere", people increasingly seem to use phrases such as "the armpit of Ireland"-- or a part of the body even less pleasant than the armpit. I think that's yukky and not at all something to be encouraged.

I also dislike venerable clichés such as "I have my eyes peeled", clichés that are not aesthetically appealing and don't conjure up a pleasing image.

The pleasure I take from clichés actually enriches my life. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think to myself: "This is the dead of night", which fills me with pleasure. And, on a lazy morning after an eventful day, I relish the phrase "the morning after the night before". (I barely drink so it doesn't really apply to me in the sense of a hangover or a night of carousing.)