Work Day and Holiday

I've been reading train-related ghost stories recently. It's really been getting me in a railway spirit. I haven't been on a train in years. (Light rail not included.)

Anyway, it reminded me of this poem that I wrote some years ago. I can't remember if I published it here before. It's not on the blog now. It describes a real experience I had.

I've written hundreds of poems, but I'd say I'm actually happen with a dozen at most. This is one of them. It was published a few years ago in The Lyric, a traditionalist verse magazine in the USA.

I am quite proud of this poem because I think the question in the last stanza is an important one. Who has the best perspective on a place, a situation, or anything else? An insider? An outsider? Somebody else?

I think this applies to a lot of things. For instance, Catholic Ireland used to be seen (arguably) in a rather romantic and sentimental way by the Irish themselves. Today (inarguably) it's seen through a filter of cynicism and disillusionment. Which is right?

It's not a perfect poem by any means. The second verse is a bit awkward. But "holiday fizz" is good, I think.

I also like poems that take a very ordinary experience and find meaning and poetry in it. That is the idea behind the Suburban Romantics manifesto.

Anyway, here you go. 

(Whenever I offer poetry or anything to do with poetry-- online or in an interpersonal situation-- I brace for apathy. I was at a coffee morning on Thursday and I ventured to express my views on the decline of poetry to a colleague, since she had recently given a presentation on a poetry-related theme. After a few minutes of listening to my captivating theories, she announced she was going to get more coffee and didn't come back. Oh well. I keep trying.)

Work Day and Holiday

I sat alone on a morning train

And savoured the landscape's novel glory.
A new world gleamed past the window pane
And seven free days stretched out before me.

We came to a town, and suddenly
A crowd of commuters filled the carriage
En route to office and factory,
To lab and station and school and garage.

Soon each was lost in a mobile phone
A laptop, a book, or a magazine.
A handful, glued to their earplugs' drone,
Stared out at the vista so often seen.

I sat there, robbed of my holiday fizz,
And thrust in the role of the raw outsider.
But which of us saw the place as it is--
Was it them? Or me? Or both? Or neither?

Another Win for the Culture of Death

The House of Commons in the UK has narrowly voted in favour of "assisted dying" for terminally ill people.

What is there to say about this? The arguments have been well-rehearsed. My friend Angelo Bottone has an excellent article on the inevitable creep of euthanasia laws once they are established. The slippery slope is not only real but demonstrable.

Euthanasia is deeply disturbing. There seems to be a foundational, cross-cultural, cross-ideological consensus that one of the main purposes of society (even its overriding purpose) is keeping people alive. When there is an earthquake or a wildfire or a terrorist situation, expense and effort is no object when it comes to saving lives-- every last life.

Similarly, suicide is universally seen as a bad thing, something to be prevented. We have suicide hotlines, counselling services, suicide watch in prisons, and so forth.

How long will this consensus exist in the shadow of euthanasia? There is only an academic difference between the proposition: "I will help you kill yourself because you want to die", and "I will help you kill yourself because I agree that your life has ceased to have value."

What is the value of life, anyway? Once you start to quantify it, you are in very dangerous territory. It either transcends all such calculations, or it's already on a scale of more and less valuable.

A very dark day. God help us!

Dream Cities

I'm as worried about A.I. as anybody else, but I'll admit I've dabbled with it. Sometimes I've used it to generate pictures for this blog when I can't find anything suitable online.

Another thing I've used it for is to create visualizations of my dream cities.

For a long, long time (I can't remember how long) I've had dreams-- dreams in both a literal and figurative sense-- of marvellous, futuristic cities, cities which satisfy particular deep-seated yearnings of mine.

When the dreams are literal, they're often of the high-rise suburb where I grew up, Ballymun. But Ballymun transformed into something more like a science-fiction film.

My dream cities are never clearly imagined, because I have very little visual imagination or visual recall. But they have a few essential characteristics:

1) They are bustling. I love activity. I love the phrase "the city that never sleeps". I love the title of the Smiths song, "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out". I love the word "public". Basically these cities are hotel lobbies (or airport concourses, or train stations, or conference centres) on a grand scale-- not quite, but close enough.

2) They are completely interior with no windows-- or, if there must be windows, high windows and/or skylights. The sky and the moon and the stars are beautiful, but...well, I don't know why, but I like indoors to be utterly indoors. I like the concentration of that. I especially like rooms within rooms within rooms.

3) They have balconies, flags, escalators, and fountains. Especially fountain. Is there any more moving symbol of life-- public, collective, intergenerational life-- than a fountain?

4) They have many levels.

The A.I. website I was using doesn't always follow one's instructions to the letter, though.

This one is my favourite and the closest to my ideal. I like mirrorballs, as well!

I'm rather afraid that everyone else will find these visions to be nauseating rather than beautiful! Sure, I can appreciate the poetry of a little village in the middle of nowhere which is in harmony with the sounds, sights, and cycles of nature. But in all honesty, I prefer these!

Would You Like to Read a Horror Story?

It's less than four pages long.

If you would, drop me an email at Maolseachlann@gmail.com.

If you wouldn't, have a nice day. But not too nice.

The Poetry of Long Corridors

Who do you think wrote the following stanza?

All hail, Sublimity! thou lofty one,

For thou dost walk upon the blast, and gird

Thy majesty with terrors, and thy throne
Is on the whirlwind, and thy voice is heard
In thunders and in shakings: thy delight
Is in the secret wood, the blasted heath,
The ruin'd fortress, and the dizzy height,
The grave, the ghastly charnel-house of death,
In vaults, in cloisters, and in gloomy piles,
Long corridors and towers and solitary aisles!

The answer is Lord Alfred Tennyson, and he wrote it by the time he was eighteen. It's a stanza from a longer poem, "On Sublimity".

For some time now, I've been embarked on the ambitious project of reading all of Tennyson's surviving poetry, from his juvenilia onwards. Some of his juvenilia is as good as the mature works of many acclaimed poets-- at least in patches.

My three favourite poets are W.B. Yeats, Philip Larkin, and Lord Alfred Tennyson. Of those three, I think Tennyson is the least regarded today. Part of the reason is that he's hard to pigeon-hole. He's as classical as he is romantic, as optimistic and he is pessimistic (though shading towards pessimism), as backwards-looking as he is forwards-looking, and so forth.

The stanza above reminds me of some other poems I love very much, including Byron's ode to the ocean (from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) and Keats's "Ode to Melancholy".

I especially like "long corridors and towers and solitary aisles". I love the word "corridor". I think it's a little poem in itself!

Associations

I was sitting in the front pew of the UCD church today, trying to commune with God, when I found myself thinking of associations.

This isn't at all unusual. I think about associations all the time. I'm thinking about them more and more, actually.

I don't have a picture of UCD's church handy so I'm going to swipe one from another website, and hope they don't mind.

You can just about make out the tabernacle there, underneath the Taizé cross and the randomly-patterned stained glass. It's a very simple tabernacle, gold-coloured with a cross on the front. It's much better than the atrocity the church had until recently-- a similar box, but with a chaos of colours on the front as though it had been painted by a toddler.

I actually like Our Lady Seat of Wisdom very much.

As I was saying...looking at the tabernacle, I began to feel certain associations. I seemed to hear the voice of a young-ish, rather bookish woman saying: "I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys..."

Actually, I didn't imagine her saying any specific words, but I imagined her quoting the Song of Solomon.

And why? Because that seemed somehow in keeping with the atmosphere of the place, with the aesthetic.

This atmosphere even had a period attached to it. For me, it was the sixties or seventies in Ireland, or even a little later. I think this was about the period a fairly bookish young woman might find the Song of Solomon to be especially beautiful and quotable. She needn't even have been a particularly religious young woman.



This was a time in Ireland when, although liberalism was certainly making inroads, an ordinary young person might be expected to have a certain sentimental attachment to Catholicism. But the poetry of the Song of Solomon would speak to a new respect for sensuality and sexuality.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Catholicism, to me, is associated with a whole range of different aesthetics and associations. Usually very specific associations and aesthetics. It's like there are different aesthetic or atmospheric strains of Catholic devotion. And I like most of them.

Some of these "strains" are attached to particular periods and places, and some aren't. They're very hard to put into words.

For instance, nineteenth century Catholicism has (to me) a very particular flavour, a certain austere intellectualism mixed with a baroque romanticism. Perhaps it all boils down to the personality of John Henry Newman, and the very specific mixture of masculinity and femininity in that complex figure.

Here's another example. Some years ago, they used to have mid-week Eucharistic adoration in the Holy Spirit Church in Ballymun. It was always to the backing of soft devotional music, guitar music with pious ejaculations sung in different languages.

Regular readers will know that I am not a fan of internationalism. But I liked the internationalism of this backing music. I was a friendly, non-threatening sort of internationalism. There were "swirly" sounds between the music.

The gleaming gold monstrance harmonised very pleasingly against the warm colours of the church. The whole experience was very soothing. It made the love of God seem very tender and healing.

Another example is the sort of atmosphere invoked (for me) by the groups of statues you sometimes see outside Irish Catholic churches; that is, large white statues, often showing Calvary scenes, usually quite weather-beaten.

Tenderness and softness don't come to mind here. Rather, heroism and purity and sacrifice. Hardness. But it's just as moving and elevating an "atmosphere".

Here's the thing; I find it very difficult to approach God except through the intermediary of one of these atmospheres, one of these aesthetics. It's not for me to say whether this is a good or a bad thing. But, unless convinced otherwise, I'm assuming that it's not a bad thing.

I'm grateful for these associations. They point me to God.

There's a much bigger point arising out of all of this. I suspect that I am not unique or special, and that many (or even most) of our loyalties, beliefs and even our quests come from associations such as these-- whether in religion, politics, working life, love, or any other realm of human activity. How much of our lives are determined by a fragrance, a particular tone of voice, a pattern of light and shadow, that grasped our imaginations at just the right moment?

The Silly Season

I probably shouldn't blog when I'm in a bad mood, but I'm irritated by an article in the Catholic Herald which is an example of a tendency I really dislike in Catholic writing. I won't mention the author, but you can read it at the link below. The headline is "Paul McCartney's Catholic Pulse":

https://thecatholicherald.com/paul-mccartneys-catholic-pulse/

McCartney's music, don't you know, has been shaped by his Catholic background:

You can hear it if you listen closely—not in grand declarations, but in the tremble beneath the chord changes. Catholicism doesn’t shout; it seeps. And in McCartney’s work, it’s everywhere. It’s in the longing, the ache, the dignity of sorrow that feels too ancient to be accidental. The Beatles may have been the soundtrack of a cultural revolution, but underneath the haircuts and heresies was something older, quieter, heavier. Something liturgical. Even when the lyrics weren’t explicitly religious, the emotional architecture often was: guilt, grace, reverence, loss, redemption. Take “Let It Be.” Most hear a gentle plea for peace, a soft balm in the chaos of the times. But listen again. That “Mother Mary” isn’t just his mum. It’s the Blessed Virgin, cloaked in the ambiguity McCartney has always favored. Raised on Hail Marys, candle smoke, and the slow solemnity of Sunday Mass, McCartney didn’t need to spell it out. Catholicism teaches you that not everything sacred has to be brazenly broadcast—it can be whispered, veiled, encoded in melody.

Well, really. Couldn't you say that about any music that you happen to like?

Paul McCartney must be one of the most interviewed people in the history of the human race. If his Catholic background was important to him, he would have said so by now. It's clearly not important to him.

As for the "Mother Mary" reference in "Let It Be"...McCartney is an affable fellow and has always been happy to have this interpreted in a religious way, if anybody wants to do so. But he's said quite explicitly that it refers to a vision of his mother.

This kind of thing is reminiscent of the Greek father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who insists that every word is ultimately derived from Greek. It's endearing in that case, but in a published article one expects a more serious argument.

It wouldn't be worth mentioning if it was an isolated case. But there are a lot of articles like this.

(For a group of Liverpudlians of Irish extraction, what's remarkable about the Beatles is how little their Catholic or Irish upbringing seems to have influenced them. George Harrison's last album featured a song mocking the Church.)