Is Hype Good?

This question is occurring to me more frequently in recent years.

"Hype" is usually used negatively, to denote commercial advertising and marketing and publicity drives: the sort of thing that most people hate (or profess to hate).

But ultimately what is the difference between "hype" and a sense of wonder?

You might say hype is fake and contrived, while a sense of wonder is authentic and spontaneous.

But how clear is this distinction? I can find very little in life that is spontaneously wonder-provoking. Nearly everything that inspires us with wonder is much-heralded.

Think about it. First love. Parenthood. Travel. The Aurora Borealis. The giant redwoods. Looking at cells through a microscope. Most things that we associate with wonder have been very heavily promoted to us before we experience them (if we ever do).

And is this such a bad thing? I think it's a good thing. I think one of the roles of culture is to prime us for the experiences of life and also to magnify those experiences.

But this "hype" is also something that (I think) accompanies us throughout the day. I know in my own case, I make a conscious effort to "hype" my ordinary experiences. The deadening force of habit is so strong that I feel myself pushing against it constantly.

Much conversation (perhaps most conversation) also feels like hype to me-- trying to make the most of an experience, an anecdote, a funny observation, and so on. And it's hard to imagine what else it could be.

I'd planned a longer post, but it's past midnight and I'm tired. Maybe I've made the point anyway, and perhaps started an interesting train of thought in your own mind.

Time and Eternity

If our lives in time somehow determine or influence our lives in eternity...does it follow that this very moment, when you are reading this line-- and, indeed, every moment of our lives-- will be as consequential (and much more consequential) than any moment in human history in its relation to all of human history...more consequential than the death of Socrates, the sack of Rome, the sinking of the Titanic, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and so forth?

What will any of that mean in eternity, compared to the fate of a single soul?

I don't know if this is the case. But I wonder.

The Church and the Bible

I've just left this comment on a previous post, arising out of an interesting discussion with someone who left a comment (and I'm always very grateful for comments): The doctrine of the Trinity is one of those things where I believe because the Church has told me. It seems to me that the Arians had a spectacular proof-text in John 14:28 "The Father is greater than I". The fact that the Arians were rejected as heretics convinces me that proof-texts aren't the way of interpreting the Bible. My own belief in the Church is prior to my belief in the Bible and based on other evidences. I'm aware that all sounds very pompous and nasal, put like that; I was just trying to be concise.

St. Augustine famously said: "I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me." I'm quite willing to admit that I come to faith in Christ through my trust in the Catholic Church. This trust is based on viewing the history and life of the Church as a whole, over centuries and continents-- volumes could be written finding fault with this or that aspect of its history or influence or practice, but this fact doesn't dent my faith. The Church really does behave, as Chesterton said in The Everlasting Man, like the bearer of a message, and not its inventor.

This doesn't mean that I think everything a Pope says is right, or everything a saint says is right, or even that the Church has always been wise or enlightened in all its actions. Pope Leo X condemned Martin Luther for opposing the burning of heretics! Saint Ambrose of Milan refused the Eucharist to an Emperor who had demanded the rebuilding of a synagogue burned down by a Christian mob. It's quite easy to find such scandals, reaching into our own time.

But if you take an overview, the consistency, sublimity, wisdom, and goodness of the Catholic Church-- compared to all other institutions-- is startling, and to me bespeaks a supernatural origin.

First Things First

"When and how the Universe originated is one of the greatest mysteries of science."

The first line of Multyfarnham Parish History by Peter Wallace, published in 1897. (Multyfarnham is a small rural parish in Westmeath.)

The Hunger for Injustice and Grievance

This seems to me the biggest problem with the whole mentality of the left.

Every group (and individual) has grievances and has suffered injustices. It's right to acknowledge these and, where appropriate, to address them.

I say "where appropriate" because it seems obvious that sometimes trying to correct an injustice might cause more trouble than the injustice itself-- if it's a relatively minor injustice, if it's hard to define and isolate, if trying to correct it would involve a serious assault on freedom, if you're simply going to create an opposite injustice, etc.

Both the left and the right, conservatives and liberals, and everybody else, has their pet grievances and injustices-- but grievance seems essential to the left. To them, grievance seems to constitute group identity above all else-- so that it's hardly an exaggeration to say that a group not only has grievances, but is its grievances.

This occurs to me most often when I'm reading something a progressive has written about Irish history. It generally reflects a strange sympathy with the Catholic majority in Ireland, despite all the reasons progressives should have for lacking sympathy with them (including the fact that they were a majority!).

The Dominican Crest

I went to a school run by Dominicans nuns, although even during my time there the nuns were thin on the ground and elderly. I wonder if there are any left. (I've just checked. There aren't. They handed over control to some trust in 2009, although the school apparently still has a "Dominican ethos".)

One thing I really liked about the school was the presence of the Dominican crest. It wasn't exactly everywhere, but it was a fairly common sight. My favourite instance was where it was worked into the linoleum in at least one place, and maybe more. (It's hard to remember.)

I think the Dominican crest, in purely visual and aesthetic terms, is one of the most pleasing and elegant of all symbols.

I'm not aware of having been influenced by the Dominican atmosphere of the school, or even having been very much aware of it. But who knows? Maybe I was.

Why Do People Enjoy Horror?

This is an old question and an interesting one. I've pondered it myself and I've enjoyed hearing the various theories on the subject (though they only ever seem partially satisfying to me).

And yet, it seems odd that we ask this about horror and rarely about other genres.

Why do people like thriller and action films? Danger and the threat of imminent death is unpleasant. Most people avoid it. So why are so hungry for fictions about it?

What about medical dramas? Most of us want to spend as little time in hospital as possible.

Romance films? They mostly seem to be about relationship drama, something few people actually relish.

Dystopian science-fiction films? Does anyone actually want to live in a society where faceless all-powerful rulers impose harsh living conditions on the majority and drain society of all individuality and character? Surely even the staunchest supporters of the EU don't consciously want that?

And yet...horror is the genre that perplexes everybody.

I'm not suggesting we should retire this timeless debate. I rarely want to close a conversation or a discussion-- rather the opposite. I'm simply suggesting that this is an interesting sidelight on it.

This is Great

A huge statue of Mary erected in Poland.

I like statutes, I like huge statues, I like white statues, I like religious statues, and I especially like Catholic statues.

I doubt I'll ever get to see it, but it would be quite an experience, I'm sure.

Back on the Hobby Horse

I mentioned Keith Waterhouse's 1979 collection of newspaper columns Rhubarb Rhubarb in a previous post. It contains an article on the role of aunts at Christmas, in which he writes: "Some aunts sing. They sing: "Come Into the Garden, Maud". Some aunts recite. They recite "The Lady of Shalott" (by the author of "Come Ito The Garden Maud".)"

Here's an excerpt from another book I'm reading, A Memoir by Terry De Valera: "It was while she was in Edenderry that mother took up serious reading. She read Dickens, Scott, George Eliot, and a great deal of poetry, particularly Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Longfellow. She had of course a great love for, and knowledge of, Shakespeare's works, and her love of poetry was apparent throughout her entire life. She said: "I have always had a delight in poetry. When I saw the rain drops on the leaves in the morning, Byron's lines came into my mind:

And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves

Dewy with nature's tear-drops as they pass."

Many years later, I remember Father often asked her to find some apt quotation, and seldom, if ever, did she fail to find or provide one, often from memory alone."

How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear twenty-first century! It's impossible for me to imagine anybody reciting "The Lady of Shalott" at a Christmas party today. Presumably, it must have seemed at least plausible in 1979, or Waterhouse wouldn't have conjured it. Remember he was writing for the Daily Mirror, not some posh paper.

Everybody has their hobby-horse, and this is mine. (Well, it's one of them, at least.) Perhaps a hobby-horse is not the best vantage-point from which to see clearly. But I'm convinced that the decline in poetry-reading has had profound effects on society. We hear constantly (and I mean constantly) about the addictive, "dopamine-seeking" behaviour which is inherent to social media and smartphones and all the rest, and the way it's reshaping our brains. It's such a cliché, in fact, I'm ashamed even to mention it, except...

Except that it seems to me that this is really just a continuation of something that was already happening even before computers or smartphones came along. Even before television came along! It seems to me that most fiction involves the constant arousal and satisfaction of curiosity. Who knocked on the door? Who is that mysterious figure in the mist? How did Sherlock Holmes know what Dr. Watson was thinking about at that precise moment?

You might say: that's not fair, not all fiction is like that. Literary fiction is not like that.

But all fiction and almost all prose is more like that than poetry. There is no suspense in a sonnet.

And even when there is a story, even when it's the most popular poetry imaginable-- a folk ballad about a murder, say-- the essence of the work is not suspense and gratifying curiosity. Because you could do that much better in prose.

I think the essential difference is that poetry is inherently contemplative and prose-- along with most other artforms and entertainments-- is inherently analytical. (I realize I have said this before.)

They don't have to be in competition. Of course you can enjoy both-- you should enjoy both. But the inescapable truth is that, although people used to read combine fiction reading with poetry reading, they no longer do so. People today seem more willing to read even the most difficult and longest fiction (or books, films, music) etc. than to read even the most accessible poetry.

And I'm aware of this reluctance myself. I never feel like reading poetry. The reward always comes later. Either during the reading itself-- like the glow that you get during exercise-- or much later, when the lines and rhythms and phrases have entered into your mind and become a part of you.

As media become more based upon instant gratification, we're all going to have to make a more conscious effort not to enter a vegetative state. Maybe it's a good time to make that little bit of extra effort and read some poetry, especially some long poetry.

How to Deal with Anti-Label People

You've probably heard them: "Ooh, I don't really go in for labels. I can't be pigeon-holed as conservative or liberal, left-wing or right-wing, traditionalist or progressive, nationalist or internationalist, or anything else. My thinking is far too subtle and profound to be contained in boxes. I fly, eagle-like, beyond the nets of convention and your limited human frameworks. I am large, I contain multitudes."

I suggest such people should be called anti-labellists, or an-labs for short. That will settle their hash.

Trucking Horror Stories

Are you familiar with the YouTube channel Mr. Nightmare? It's a brilliantly simple concept. People send in their "true" horror stories and Mr. Nightmare reads them out. It's on the internet, but it could have been done eighty years ago on the wireless. The videos get millions of views.

Many of the videos are themed, which I like. Today I was listening to these three trucking stories. They were pretty good.

I can't even drive, but I'm quite fascinated by truckers. Now that's a manly job!

Tea in the Poolside Café

There's a café called The Poolside Café in UCD. It's beside the fifty-metre indoor swimming pool that dominates the cavernous Student Centre. I like to drink tea and coffee there, read a book, and enjoy the atmosphere of the swimming pool-- the sounds, the beautiful colour of the water, the shimmering light, etc. (The pool itself isn't pay-as-you-go and the annual fee is more than I would want to pay.)

I bought a cup of tea there at the weekend. The tea in the poolside café costs 1.50, which is cheaper than you'll get anywhere-- except, perhaps, a church fete or a school jumble-sale or something like that. All the same, they only ever fill two-thirds of an already small paper cup. I like my beverages filed to the brim. (And in a big mug, for preference.)

The lady serving me asked if I wanted her to leave room for milk. I said: "Yes". When she handed it to me, it was half-way filled. I said with a smile: "That's a LOT of room!" If she heard me, she didn't react.

The thing is...why did I say "Yes" when she asked me if I wanted to leave room for the milk? I foresaw clearly what would happen.

I suppose I said it because I can't imagine replying: "No, you already leave more than enough room for the milk, thank you very much."

Or because I can't imagine just saying: "No", and then putting milk into it in front of her.

What abominable cowardice!

A Personal Contradiction

I've noticed this contradiction about myself:

1) I'm becoming more and more libertarian all the time, more of a believer in the principles of the American Revolution. Ten or fifteen years ago, I would have said I was a traditionalist conservative rather than a libertarian because freedom-- while it's obviously an important value-- isn't the most important value, or the overriding value.

But in recent years my position has changed to this one: freedom isn't the most important value in itself, but it's the most important political value. Not only because authoritarian government always has the potential to become a flat-out totalitarian regime like the USSR or the Nazi Germany (and surely preventing that is the most important thing), but also because of the more insidious soft tyranny we've seen creep over all publicly-funded or government-controlled institutions over the last few decades. The arm of government only stops short of your own home and your own mind. Political correctness is omnipresent. Civil society is replaced by NGOs. "Human rights" have become an excuse to hammer society into the shape desired by our elites-- which inclines me to think that positive human rights were a mistake from the first, and we should instead favour the "negative" human rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Yes, corporations can be just as enthusiastic at spreading political correctness (or any other ideology) as government. But government always has the whip-hand. Recent events in America have shown this to be the case. (The fact that this whip-hand might sometimes be used for good doesn't make me any more keen on it.)

2) And yet...the sort of community I would like to live in is a paternalistic and closely-knit and somewhat rigid community. I like reading about boarding schools and monasteries and old-fashioned colleges with dormitories and honour codes and all that sort of thing. I love the word "canteen", both because of how it sounds and because I like the idea of a communal eating space where everybody eats the same thing, or chooses from a limited menu. (The word "canteen" is intrinsically poetic, in my view.) I want some rules that are a little bit arbitrary and nonsensical and unreasonable. I want village elders, town worthies, and city fathers...even if they have feet of clay, even if I thumb my nose at them. My own taste would not run to the maximum amount of freedom-- except in the all-important areas, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Triple-Take

 I've frequently noted this "triple-take" in my own mind, including this morning:

1) Reading about some other time or place, before I was born, and finding myself yearning for the idyll I have constructed around it. In this case (although I've never really been a proud Dubliner) it was an ill-defined idyll of old Dublin life, the sort I would glimpse when I heard people talking about "the rare auld times": images of barefoot children playing hopscotch and chanting rhymes, streets without billboards or engine fumes, thick Dublin accents, "porter running from the taps with a head of yellowed cream", broad Dublin salt-of-the-earth accents, a general atmosphere of piety, shabby gentility, patriotism, etc.

(It could, of course, just as well be some other idyll attached to some other time and place.)

2) The painful realization that it wasn't like that...that people back then also made stupid, smutty jokes (as I frequently have), that there was just as much small talk, that people craved excitement and novelty and convenience and garishness, that the washerwoman would have preferred a washing machine (who can blame her?) and the kids playing hop-scotch would have dropped it for video games at the speed of light.

3) The sudden, momentarily overwhelming urge to at least-- as far as I can-- live my life as purged of banality as much as possible, even to the point of caricature and becoming an object of ridicule. Much as I love jokes and comedy, I have very frequently felt the sudden urge to become completely humourless, as a a sort of counter-weight to all the tedious and depressing buffoonery around us.

Of course, this "overwhelming urge" has quickly passed on every occasion...

The Ilac Shopping Centre and the Daffodills

A fountain bubbled dreamily.

Above it, a hot air balloon
Rose and descended endlessly
Then higher still, a tiled cartoon
Of Moore Street shawlies. Just across
Tinkled a mezzanine café
And, further up again, there was
A mirrored ceiling. All the way
Above that ceiling, Space Age-style
Glass lifts took shoppers up to see
The streets below. My juvenile
Soul swooned in quiet ecstasy.

One year they put some banners up
With lines from Wordsworth's "Daffodils"
I guessed this was the FA Cup
Of poetry; the Orson Welles,
The Sergeant Pepper, Everest,
The Parthenon, all that could boast
Of being best, the very best,
The poem the whole world loved the most.

I was a Stars Wars baby with
Strange knowledge of things long ago
Things all but lost, like sunken myth,
From long before the Late Late Show.
Optimus Prime and Patrick Pearse
Looked over me from infancy
Queen and Iron Maiden filled my ears
Arcadia my memory.

My innocence was ten miles deep
To think the world loved poetry
Enough to care that much. The creep
Of time-thieving technology
Had choked us less, and Ireland still
Trailed clouds of glory from its birth
(Since grand ideals take time to kill
And dreamers to be thrown to earth)
But even thirty years ago
The gig was up, and Pegasus
Was saddled tight and kept to show
The kids around the syllabus.

Must shopping centres kill the soul?
Can daffodils sustain the heart
At second-hand? Does time unroll
Away from nature and from art
Unstoppably? Or did I snatch
A glimpse of something possible?
Some promise that the soul can catch
(Even in suburbs, even still)
The light that never was on sea
Or land, or blue remembered hills?
Is there a place for poetry
So far from daffodils?

Keith Waterhouse Again. Words Again.

I've written previously about Keith Waterhouse, the English newspaper columnist, screenwriter, novelist, and general man of letters, whose writing career stretched more than fifty years until his death in 2009. He's not exactly forgotten today. But he's not exactly remembered, either. I've actually toyed with the idea of creating a Keith Waterhouse website as none seems to exist at the moment.

(In terms of politics and cultural politics, Keith Waterhouse very much fulfils the recent stereotype of a "centrist Dad. He was a Labour supporter, but something of a cultural conservative and nostalgist, while also being dismissive of Euroscepticism and concerns about immigration.)

In the last couple of days, I've been reading a collection of his newspaper columns that I'd never encountered before, Rhubarb Rhubarb. They're hit-and-miss in quality, but one thing that makes the book interesting are the period and ephemeral allusions-- the view from 1979, as it were. Newspaper columns are similar to sitcoms in that they give a particularly vivid window onto the time they were created (much more so, I think, than films or novels or almost anything else).

In one column, "Words for the Weary", Waterhouse writes about words: specifically, "hundreds of new words that we have had to familiarise ourselves with as our lives have been mucked about with over the last few years. Or, if not exactly new words, words that have taken on a different or sharper meaning."

The rest of the column is mostly a list of these words. Many of them greatly surprised me, and made me think: can that really have been a new word (or even a new usage) in 1979? I won't reproduce the whole list, but here are some of them-- not just the ones that surprised me, but a fairly representative sprinkling.

Aggro

Additive

Audio

Backlash

Bionic

Computer

Gay

Graffiti

Hostage

Immigrant

Inflation

Junkie

Mugger

Motorway

Multi-storey

No-go

Security

Topless

Unisex

Vandal

Whizz-kid

Zone

Can all these words really have been unfamiliar in 1979? In many cases, it's hard for me to believe. But Keith Waterhouse's whole career was focused on words and the use of words, so presumably he's a trustworthy commentator.

Things that are newer than one might think are fascinating. At least, they fascinate me. There's a whole TV Tropes page called Newer Than They Think which lists all sorts of surprising examples across different categories. I've spent hours reading and re-reading it and I wish it was ten times longer than it is.

One example that particularly intrigues me is abortion and the religious right in America. I'd picked up the notion that Christianity has been on a path of continual liberalization from about the late nineteenth century. So it seemed only natural to assume that, the further back in time you go, the more solidly pro-life you'll find Christians to be.

So I was very surprised to learn that this isn't the case, at least not in America. Conservative evangelical Christians were not nearly as anti-abortion in the seventies as they are now. (The rise of IVF has complicated the whole issue, though.)

A more trivial example is the white smoke in Papal elections. It seems like the kind of thing that might go back a thousand years, or even further. But, even though the cardinals burned their ballots for many centuries, the smoke only became a signal to the public in the eighteenth century-- and that was accidental, when a chimney was installed in St. Peter's to protect the frescoes from it. And white smoke was first used in 1914!

Bruce Charlton on Children's Chants

A few days ago I read Professor Bruce Charlton's autobiographical fragment Lucky Philosopher, which I found very interesting.

I was especially interested in this passage:

At playtimes in primary school, we would gather in large mixed groups to perform ritualistic singing and chanting games such as Oranges and Lemons, or the Farmer's in his Den.

I used to get a strange and excited feeling from engaging in these, because they seemed incomprehensible yet significant. Why was the farmer in a den? Why did the Farmer song end with patting a bone? Why did Oranges and Lemons end with someone having their head chopped off?

One factors was the frisson of playing with "the girls" en masse - of having an excuse to play with girls. There was a strange thrill from dancing hand in hand, or being the farmer then choosing a 'wife' in the Farmer's in his Den.

The whole thing was bizarre - almost as if we kids had-to perform these things for a forgotten reason: it was our special job in a way that did not apply to the normal free-for-all games or the chasing-and-catching games (like Up-and-Down or British Bulldogs). Certainly, they left behind a special satisfaction when completed.

Some scholars have suggested that these games are garbled pagan or magical religious residues - this may not be true, but certainly it felt like that.

This truly speaks to my depths!

I've had very similar reactions to childhood games, chants, and rituals. "A strange and excited feeling" is exactly what they provoked in me.

When I was a kid, there was a sort of game whereby someone would say: "Silence in the courtyard, silence in the street. The biggest fool in all the world is just about to speak. Speak, fool, speak!"

The joke, of course, was that the next person to speak was the biggest fool in all the world.

But what excited me were the opening words: "Silence in the courtyard, silence in the street". "Courtyard" was an archaic word which made me imagine a royal court, so that pleased me in itself. I further imagined silence falling suddenly on all the people in the royal court, and in the street outside, as though some enchantment had come upon them.

The fact that the biggest fool in all the world was just about to speak make the event seem grandiose, epic, even awe-inspiring.

And this little idyll was invoked by the words of a child-- that was the best part of it, although I was only dimly aware of it.

There was another game called King Silence which involved children having to walk across a room without making a sound. I learned about this one from a book, although I think I persuaded some of my friends to play it once. It was the name that enchanted me-- the idea of an actual King Silence.

The magic of children's games and chants is very closely related, in my own experience, to the magic of tradition and ritual in general.

I don't know why, but the sight of a Halloween bonfire or a Christmas tree has always excited me in a way that's very hard to describe. It's like it awakens something deep in my soul.

But not just a Christmas tree or a Halloween bonfire. I have the same reaction from things like:

The green cross on a pharmacy or the red and white pole outside a barber's shop. (The serpent wrapped around a staff, even more so.)

The suits and characters of playing cards.

Astrological symbols.

All the traditional iconography of the cinema-- deep red curtains, the stylized image of celluloid film, cinema marquees, projector beams, etc.

Proverbs.

Highly decorated pub mirrors.

Old-fashioned jokes with a fairly elaborate set-up and a punchline.

Children's games like Blind Man's Bluff (or Buff?).

Coats-of-arms.

The image and idea of Big Ben or the white cliffs of Dover.

But traditions, especially-- rituals, observances, customs.

When a ritual is performed, even if it's something totally banal-- like hanging Christmas tinsel in an office, or reading fortune cookies, or answering the door to trick-or-treaters-- it feels like something deeply important has happened, something that somehow creates or opens another world, or another dimension to this world.

I have such a craving for tradition that once I even persuaded some friends to participate in a totally made-up, arbitrary one. I called it Sliggens's Day. I decided we would all get together in a pub, drink red lemonade (distinctive to Ireland) and read out a one-act play by Lord Dunsany called Mr. Sliggen's Hour. I chose the play at random and, in fact, none of us really understood the point of it-- which rather added to the occasion.

There was never a second Sliggens's Day. It was more than ten years ago. I keep thinking I should try to hold a second one.

In fact, I constantly feel a sense of shame that I haven't created more traditions. This really bothers me. I feel especially that it's lamentable to have worked in a university for twenty-five years (on October the 15th of this year) and not have created at least one tradition. Universities are incubators of traditions. You might think I'm joking here but I'm serious. I really do feel very bad about this.

For the past three years I have attended the annual Ivy Day commemoration in Glasnevin cemetery, when a wreath is laid on the grave of Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish nationalist leader who died in 1891. The tradition has been held every single year. Only a few people turn up, even though it's generally a prominent figure who lays the wreath and gives the speech. (Last year it was the Taoiseach.)

I'm not really a fan of Parnell, not particularly-- in terms of Irish leaders, I think, he very much falls into the category of a modernizer. I'm more a De Valera kind of guy. But I go for the sake of the ritual. I hope never to miss it again.

I especially love hearing about hyper-specific traditions such as standing for the Hallelujah Chorus at performances of Handel's Messiah.

I haven't even mentioned religious traditions. They go without saying, I think.

This is such a huge subject for me that I could write this blog post for the rest of my life-- so I might as well stop now, with a threat to continue at some point.

Time and Space

One of the themes of my life has been a fascination with special times and places, or rather, the specialness of times and places. And one of the anxieties of my life is a fear that this specialness is declining.

I have occasionally suspected that this is a projection or morbid fear, but I have heard other people express the same fear, unprompted by me. (People seem much more concerned about a loss of specialness in place rather than time.)

I do believe that this loss of specialness is happening. But at the same time, there seems to be a certain irreducible diversity in time and place.

I've noticed how often it arises when somebody is talking about something else. For instance, the inspiration of a work of art. Somebody will say quite spontaneously: "Well, you have to take into account the sort of city I was living in..."

Or take, for instance, the episodes of the Journey Home I've been watching, the show in which Catholic converts describe their paths to the Church. Geographical location seems to play a massive role in many of the stories. A convert might say something like: "In the area where I'm from, I'd never met a Catholic in my whole life..."

When I look for this specialness it's hard to find-- when I'm not looking for it, it seems to be everywhere.

Here's another example. A while ago I visited Newry, a town just across the Irish border. I wandered around it for an hour or two and was disappointed that there was nothing to see. But, in retrospect, I have found myself mentioning several things I saw, almost without noticing. (Its hilliness, a historic enclosed market that was just closing as I got there, the number of statues and particular statues, a cheap restaurant that served very abundant cheap meals and whose waitresses were extremely friendly....)

Here's another example. I recently found myself in Granby Lane, the little side-street where the famous Dublin ascetic and holy man Matt Talbot collapsed and died. It isn't much to look at, aside from a plaque commemorating Talbot. But in the time I lingered there, to say a rosary, a couple of people passing by stopped to touch the plaque. I was there such a short time, it must be a very regular observance.

Forty Years Ago: A Poem

I wrote this poem in 2005, in a rented bedroom in a family home in Stillorgan, which was probably the nadir of my fortunes-- or at least, felt like it. I was obviously still suffering from the "end of history" vibe which 9/11 was supposed to have dispelled.

The critique of modern life is quite unfocussed but I do like the lines: "Time is an air-conditioned office now, and history an infinite replay." I could even claim that this is prophetic given the horror of limitless office space expressed by the film The Backrooms (which I haven't yet seen), and also the now-widespread observation that pop culture is just regurgitating the past indefinitely.

My notion that this "end of history" would be a post-ideology, post-deprivation, post-compulsion landscape of endless consumerism couldn't have been more wrong, though. I didn't foresee Covid lockdowns, the development of political correctness beyond purely negative speech-codes towards demands for positive affirmation, Trump, Brexit, and all that. Little did I realize there were a whole load of new taboos, privations, and social upheavals on the way. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that these are often more welcome to me than the stagnation of the "end of history" that I feared-- although I'm not saying that's a healthy reaction.

I don't think this a great poem. I think I've written about ten good poems in more than thirty years of writing poetry. It's not as bad as others.

One of the weaknesses of my poems has always been the use of characters and settings that seemed clear to me, but that really weren't. In this poem, a young man is watching old movies and TV shows, behind closed curtains, alone.

Forty Years Ago

Behind closed curtains, forty years ago
Fills up the screen in black and white.
Oh, what he wouldn't give to grow
Amongst the craters the Luftwaffe made,
To be a baby of the Blitz! But night
Has fallen now on history's parade.

He watches mini-skirted women jive
The pale young hero cursing TV sets
And package holidays. To be alive
When time was like the weather! When the news
Was like a story! Now nobody gets
Excited about class, no-one has views

About the Common Market, no-one talks
About how things were different in my day.
That's gone the way of Cromwell and Guy Fawkes.
Time is an air-conditioned office now
And history an infinite replay.
There's nothing left the world will not allow;

No rationing; no walking half a mile
To hear a radio, no being called
To spend two years in khaki, no big trial
For dirty books; at last nobody cares.
Curse on the telly, no-one is appalled;
Puncture your face with studs and no-one stares.

Nostalgic for small-mindedness, he feeds
On scenes of caps and queues and kitchen-sinks
And every month the whole damned lot recedes;
That guy who played the miner's son just died
And she's a Dame, that mini-skirted minx
In this last room where history can hide
He lives a past unseen, self-mummified.

The Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook-- Perhaps my Favourite Church

Today I went to Sunday Vigil Mass in the Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook. I'm falling in love with this church, despite having visited it for the first time many years ago.

A few years ago I started a series of blog on Dublin churches, and I included this church in it. I actually stopped that series because I had a few whingy comments (not from regulars) about the modern churches I featured. Personally, I'm very fond of many sixties and post-sixties churches, and I think the inability to see anything good in them is a form of philistinism, a lack of imagination. Ugliness is just ugliness, but there are different sorts of beauty.

Funnily enough, it was the post on the Sacred Heart where I announced my intention to end the series.

Plainness has generally been the thing that has pleased me the most about churches, so now I'm surprised to be falling under the enchantment of a more ornate church. Actually, the marble altarpiece is one of my favourite things about the Sacred Heart. But my absolute favourite thing about it is the very finely-detailed gold ornamentation on the walls behind the altar, and in other places. I also like the marble pillars. The profusion of little detail greatly pleases me, but it never becomes overwhelming or gaudy or heavy.

Churches that appeal to me nearly always do so because they have an atmosphere I can only describe as "spacey"-- transcendent, otherworldly, outside of time. This one seems very spacey to me.

It was deliberately built on the location of the old Donnybrook Fair, an event which became notorious for its drunkenness and fighting, giving rise to the term "donnybrook". I like the historical transposition of that, the palimpsest quality. Perhaps all that was good about the Donnybrook Fair is redeemed and sublimated in this sacred space.

(Anticipating a potential "nobody goes to the Ordinary Form" reaction to my pictures-- no, I'm not being paranoid, yes, I have had this reaction before-- I should mention that I took the pictures long before Mass began. There was a good congregation.)