A New Birthday

"[Baptism] is like a birthday because baptism makes us reborn in Christian life. That is why I advise you to teach your children the date of their baptism as a new birthday: that every year they will remember and thank God for this grace of becoming a Christian." Pope Francis.

Thank you, God! Míle buíochas!

This is the day in 1981 when I was baptised in the Holy Spirit church in Ballymun. I was born in October 1977, so there's a bit of a delay there, as you see. Not sure why. I only learned the date of my baptism a few years ago, although I suppose I could have discovered it easily enough if I'd tried. As it happened, a cousin (baptised on the same day) sent me this picture and told me the date.

That's my uncle holding me. I don't know the name of the priest, or the identity of the person on the right.

It's easy for me to believe that we are "primed" for Christianity by nature. I can't remember a time when my imagination was not steeped in images of immersion and regeneration. For instance, I've had recurring dreams about swimming pools for as long as I can remember. But it's not just literal immersion: I'm captivated whenever I read about people who immerse themselves in some particular activity, like chess-players or extremely prolific artists of any kind. I love all immersive environments, such as swimming pools and cinemas.

Similarly, the motif of regeneration, rebirth, has never been far from my mind-- conscious and unconscious. For instance, the title of the William Shatner album The Transformed Man speaks to me like poetry. (Yes, that's the album that features his spoken-word rendition of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".)

I think this is one of the reasons I love snow so much. A landscape transformed by snow is like an image of Christian regeneration: made new, but still what it was.

Favourite Poems: "Sad Steps" by Philip Larkin

On the night of a full moon, a Philip Larkin poem that has grown and grown on me over the years. I think of this poem every time I see a full moon (although the poem doesn't actually describe the moon as full, which I've somehow just realized). 

I'm not a fan of vulgarity in poetry, but the vulgarity in the first line of this poem earns its place for all sorts of reasons. It's a very earthy beginning for a poem with such an etheral subject, which supplies contrast. It also describes a relatable situation. And it rhymes.

The poem appeals to me partly for autobiographical reasons. For most of my teens I needed glasses but never got them, out of self-consciousness. I couldn't see the moon for many of my formative years. When I finally got glasses and could see it, its brilliance took me aback, and it did indeed seem "laughable and "preposterous", as Larkin puts it-- almost cartoonish.

The central idea of the poem-- the linking of the moon and childhood-- is brilliant. It seems surreal to me both that my childhood is utterly and irretrievably gone, and also that other people are living through childhood right now-- a childhood just as real as mine was. It's the sort of strangeness that can only be evoked by poetry. 

I don't think the poem is perfect. In all honesty, I think the second and third stanzas are poor, aside from the line There's something laughable about this. In fact, the line Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below seems positively awkward and tongue-tripping to me. But what do I know, and who am I to criticize Larkin? It's just my opinion, man.

On the other hand, the fourth stanza is miraculous. Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! is a brilliant evocation of the moon's surreal purity. (It reminds me of Yeats's description of the moon:

So arrogantly pure, a child might think

It can be murdered with a spot of ink.)

But even these lines pale compared to my favourite line in the poem: Oh wolves of memory! I'm not exactly sure what Larkin was trying to convey by that phrase, but to me, it suggests the ruthless and ravening nature of memory, how it penetrates to your very core at a moment you're not expecting it.

"Wolves of memory" is one of those phrases that, in my view, proclaim the genius of the poet. I know I wouldn't be able to come up with such a phrase in a hundred years. Encountering such pure inspiration is both sobering and exhilarating. It's the sort of line that literally gives me goosebumps.

I also like the fact that Larkin spells out the meaning of the poem in the concluding stanzas. He doesn't take refuge in obliqueness, the tactic of most modern and measly poets.

On a more technical note, the shortness and flatness of the line: "One shivers slightly, looking up there" is very effective. It adds variation to the metre, but also transitions from the crescendo in the middle of the poem to the rather more subdued and prosaic ending.

Anyway, here is the text:

Sad Steps

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

Happy Bonfire Night!

As I've often said, I love traditions. I've even created a whole blog about them, although whether it will ever get off the ground is another matter...

Tonight is Guy Fawkes' Night, or Bonfire Night. Two friends in different parts of England reassure me that there are fireworks galore. I'm glad to hear that.

I'm intrigued that Bonfire Night is never mentioned in the British media (I check the BBC news website several times a day, and have done so for years) and yet it's still widely observed.

In previous years, some commenters on this blog have suggested that Guy Fawkes Night is too anti-Catholic to celebrate. But surely the anti-Catholic aspect is purely historical at this stage. And even when it wasn't...well, religion seems to me like a good thing to get worked up about, whatever side you're on. It's religious indifference I don't understand.

From an Irish perspective, Guy Fawkes' Night always seemed doubly exotic to me. It didn't exist in my lived environment, but it also didn't exist in the American media that gave us most of our representations of everyday life, then as now. Nothing is more exotic than something which is just one step away from the familiar. (It recalls to me that uncanny line in The Everlasting Man by Chesterton, about finding an unknown room in your own house-- an image that is endlessly evocative to me.) 

I was a raging anglophile from my boyhood, and most English things seemed familiar, but Guy Fawkes Night was totally unknown.

A few weeks ago, I'd planned to write an article on Guy Fawkes' Night for my traditions blog. That never transpired, but I did find this interesting academic article on the history of the commemoration in Ireland. You need a JSTOR registration to read it, though. Interestingly enough, at one point the tradition was more keenly observed in Ireland (although obviously not among the majority) than in England, where it was believed to have gone into decline! Later on, it was discouraged here by the Ascendancy establishment itself, eager to avoid tensions.

Written the next day: According to Bruce Charlton, the festivities were livelier than ever before, at least in Newcastle...five hours of fireworks. How I love to hear that! But he does mention that the Guy is rarely burnt now, which seems a shame.

(I often wonder if Mr. Fawkes had any influence on the now-ubiquitious use of "guy" to mean "man"?)

Happy All Saints Day!

A list of my favourite saints and possible future saints, that I jotted down recently, to remind myself to pray for their intercession.  Some are old favourites, some I've only discovered recently.

Are there any of your own favourites that I've left out here?

John Paul II

The children of Fatima.

Maximilian Kolbe.

Solanus Casey.

Gemma Galgani.

Edel Quinn.

John Bradburne.

G.K. Chesterton.

Bernadette Soubirous.

Leonard La Rue.

Padre Pio.

John Henry Newman.

Cardinal Manning.

Mother Teresa.

Matt Talbot.

Mary Aikenhead.

Edmund Campion.

Robert Southwell.

Miguel Pro.

Elizabeth of the Trinity.

John Fisher.

Oliver Plunkett.

Dorothy Day.

Fr. John Sullivan.

Fulton Sheen.

Fr. Chuck Gallagher.

Fr. James Cullen.

Rock Shandy in Blackrock

Rock shandy is an Irish fizzy drink. It came about when fizzy orange was mixed with fizzy lemon, in a pub in Blackrock in south county Dublin. It's a personal favourite of mine.

You can read its interesting origin story here.

Yesterday I had dinner in Zambrero in Blackrock. When the girl asked me what drink I'd like, I saw a rocky shandy in the fridge and opted for that. When I asked her if she knew rock shandy was invented in Blackrock, she didn't. (To be fair, she obviously grew up a long, long way from Blackrock.)

It pleases me to an absurd degree to drink a fizzy drink which is not only distinctive to Ireland, but to a particular part of Ireland...and to drink it in the very place it was invented, where it's simply sold as a drink like any other!

(Also, I love the word "fizzy".)

I Hate Bank Holidays

Tomorrow is a bank holiday in Ireland. All my life I've hated bank holidays-- well, at least since leaving school.

I hate the whole bank holiday atmosphere. Instead of reducing stress it just seems to increase it. Everything around you seems to be overloaded, crowded, groaning under the weight of the holiday-makers. Even if this doesn't directly affect you, even if you stay at home, the atmosphere still seeps in.

Public holidays are different. I like St. Patrick's Day and the new St. Bridget's Day because they're about something. Bank holidays have no soul, no personality.

Because I'm a social conservative, I've spent about fifteen years (if not more) complaining about the 24-hour society.

I'm beginning to realize this was me fooling myself all along. I actually like the 24-hour society. I like the idea of the "city that never sleeps". One of my favourite things about hotels is that there's always someone on reception, at any time of the day or night.

I hated Sundays, growing up in eighties Ireland. I hated the whole atmosphere. They were not joyous. They were desolate and depressing.

I do not fantasize about little Tuscan villages where everybody stops to have lunch together and life follows the rhythms of nature. I like cities.

I liked my experience of America where everything is open much longer than in Ireland and where shutting up shop isn't the solemn ritual it is here, requiring twenty announcements and increasingly dirty looks from the staff.

My least favourite part of Christmas is when everything closes and everybody retreats to their private worlds. I like the public aspect of Christmas.

Yes, I love difference and I hate sameness, that's true. But, even in a 24-hour society, there are still big differences between early morning, late night, and so on. Everything isn't open all the time.

G.K. Chesterton was not a Sabbatarian and was quite critical of Sabbatarianism, considering it puritanical. He also thought Sunday trading laws unfairly favoured big businesses. When I discovered this, it bothered me a bit and I thought it was one of the things I disagreed with Chesterton about. I've changed my mind.

This blog post is a confession, not an argument.

I won't have much internet access over the stupid bank holiday, so apologies if I don't respond to any comments right away.

Favourite Poems: The Owl by Tennyson

Tennyson's early work "The Owl" is a delightful vignette, the poetic equivalent to a miniature in art. Even though some of the lines puzzle me (why is the stream dumb? why is the sail whirring?), its rustic simplicity never fails to please. It's both matter-of-fact and idyllic at once.

I read once, in a biography of Tennyson, that he was remarkable for his observation of nature, and invariably accurate when he described it in his poetry. Not that this little poem would have required much from those observational powers, I'm sure.

My favourite passage from this poem is undoubtedly: "When merry milkmaids click the latch and rarely smells the new-mown hay". It's a glimpse of rural life, not only as idyllic, but as Arcadian and blissful. And the sound of "merry milkmaids clink the latch" is very pleasing.

Funnily enough, I always remembered the refrain of this poem as: "The wise owl in the belfry sits", not "the white owl". Honestly, I think I prefer "wise"!

The poem is obviously heavily dependent on repetition, and is all the better for it.

When cats run home and light is come,

And dew is cold upon the ground,
And the far-off stream is dumb,
And the whirring sail goes round,
And the whirring sail goes round;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.

When merry milkmaids click the latch,

And rarely smells the new-mown hay,
And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch
Twice or thrice his roundelay,
Twice or thrice his roundelay;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.