The Fears of an Eighties Kid: A Blog Post from 2018

In this post, I continue to count down to Friday's ten-year anniversary of this blog by rerunning a blog post from each year. We've now reached 2018. This post seems very appropriate to the Covid era!

I've started reading Lord of the Rings again. It's a book I've read at least twice in my life-- once when I was very young (perhaps as young as seven), and again in adulthood. Despite this, I don't remember the details of the plot that well-- not all of it, at any rate. 

I'm very familiar with the opening chapters, though. I read the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring again and again in my childhood. The second chapter, "The Shadow of the Past"-- the exposition-heavy chapter where the wizard Gandalf explains to the protagonist Frodo the true nature (and peril) of the magic ring he has inherited-- has always been one of my favourite passages of fiction. The scene is set in a cosy front room on a sunny morning, but Frodo is chilled to the soul by Gandalf's story. "Fear seemed to stretch out a vast hand, like a dark coud rising in the East, and looming up to engulf him."

Reading those lines brought me back to my childhood, and the fears of my childhood.

It was one memory in particular that sent me into this reverie. I used to visit the farm-house of my aunt Kitty (RIP), who lived in county Limerick in the south-west of Ireland, for my summer holidays. She was an avid reader of trashy magazines and tabloid newspapers, and I gorged on them when I visited her.

One morning, reading such a tabloid, I came across a report that an experimental laboratory had somehow managed to mix cancer with a virus. The newspaper report suggested it was only a matter of time before this virus escaped from the laboratory and became a pandemic. I remember standing under the eaves of the house, after reading this, and being gripped by fear. Even then, I was conscious of the contrast between my bucolic surroundings-- a quiet farm on a summer's morning-- and the apocalypse I was imagining. It was very similar to the contrast between Frodo's cosy home and Gandalf's terrifying tale.

Young as I was, I knew that tabloids were sensationalist, so it didn't take me long to get over this scare. But something about my aunt's farm seemed very conducive to getting the spooks. It happened on many other occasions.

On another occasion, I'd read a story about Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. According to the story, Jackson's "spiritual advisor" had warned him that he was putting his soul at risk by playing with demonic forces. The magazine showed a large colour still from the music video, which was undoubtedly creepy. Again, I have a vivid memory of standing outside the house on a sunny morning and getting a cold blast of "daylight horror".

My aunt and uncle told me a story (true, for all I know) that an old man's face had been seen in the wallpaper of the bedroom in which myself, my brother, and my mother were sleeping. The way I interpreted this was that, upon staring into the wallpaper, the pattern "resolved itself" into an image of the old man-- much as you suddenly "see" a hidden image in a visual riddle. Somehow, this seemed much creepier to me than the other interpretation (which only occurred to me years later)-- that a photographic image simply superimposed itself over the wallpaper. I avoided looking at the wallpaper.

My biggest Limerick scare came upon reading an article about the Third Secret of Fatima- I think it was in Ireland's Eye magazine. The article suggested that the Third Secret of Fatima predicted the end of the world, and that it was going to happen in 1992-- the very year in which I read the article.

I remember lying awake that night and waiting for the bombs to fall. We were going to return to Dublin the next day. I desperately wanted to get back to Dublin, as I knew the fear of apocalypse would seem silly there. But in the silence and darkness of the Limerick countryside, it felt very believable.

Nuclear war was a terror which haunted my childhood and early teens. Doubtless every eighties child experienced this, to some degree or other. Somewhere I encountered the claim that, in the event of a nuclear attack, the first thing that would happen would be a black-out. Every time there was a power-cut, I was terrified it was the precursor to a nuclear attack.

My fear reached its height on the first night of the 1991 Gulf War. I was thirteen years old. Some sadistic adult had told me that, if the Americans attacked Iraq, "You can put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye". I can vividly remember the newsflash in which the invasion was announced. It came during a football broadcast, and the first image was an American soldier in silhouette.

That night, I lay awake until morning reading David Copperfield for the first time. "This world was so wonderful for so many centuries", I kept thinking, as I read. (Even the adversities of David Copperfield's early life seemed gloriously romantic, compared to the imminent apocalypse.) "Why are we going to destroy it all? How did it ever come to this?".

When the bombs didn't fall the first night, my fears quickly evaporated.

(I can barely imagine the terror that the recent false alarm in Hawaii must have created.)

I had many dreams about the announcement of a nuclear attack on television. The sheer inevitability of the thing was the greatest horror-- there would be no chance of escape, not even an outside chance. It would jut be a matter of waiting to be incinerated. I often had nightmares which ended with the bombs visible outside my window.

I wonder how many of my readers have seen "A Little Bit of Peace and Quiet", the eighties-era Twilight Zone episode in which a housewife comes into possession of a medallion which can freeze time? Spoiler alert....in the final moments of the episode, she freezes time just as a nuclear missile is about to hit her town. To me, that was blood-curdlingly terrifying, too terrifying for fiction.

It wasn't only nuclear war that petrified us in the eighties, of course. It was also AIDS. (Back then, the name of the dread disease was always rendered in capitals.)

I was only really beginning to learn about sex when AIDS came on the scene. I remember reading that it affected both homosexuals and heterosexuals, and I had no idea what those words meant-- I assumed that a heterosexual was someone who slept around, and that a homosexual was someone who only had sex with a single partner. I think this was a pretty good guess, in retrospect.

I can remember one Irish current affairs show in which a panel and a studio audience were all discussing AIDS. It gave me a sense of crisis, of something enormous unfolding, a civilizational threat.

The real horror of AIDS was that one single drop of HIV-infected blood was a death sentence. I spent a long time thinking about this. I remember wondering whether, if one were pricked in the hand with a HIV-infected needle, one would have time to chop one's own arm off in order to stop the spread of the virus through the bloodstream.

I envisioned a future where the vast majority of people were HIV-infected. It seemed inevitable. The public information campaigns did a good job of explaining that you couldn't catch it from kissing or from toilet seats-- but how many other ways that seemed to leave! And besides, could you really trust such assurances?

In sixth class (when I was twelve), I heard the urban legend of AIDS Mary-- the woman who leaves the grisly message "Welcome to the world of AIDS" for someone she has infected. In the version I heard, I'm pretty sure it was some kind of infected booby-trap rather than a sexual encounter. But I'm pretty sure I heard it in the presence of our teacher, and I don't remember him dismissing it.

This ad (which was broadcast in Britain, but we got the British TV stations) only made the disease more terrifying. It still gives me the shivers. What were they thinking?

I can't remember worrying much about the hole in the ozone layer, which was the ecological scare of my childhood. This despite the fact that my teacher in fifth and sixth class (when I was eleven and twelve) was something of a hippie, and wrote a school play dedicated to the subject-- a musical, as a matter of fact. I was one of the extras. The narrative shifted between the present and the future, and the extras (who appeared in the future scenes) were a chorus of zombie-like creatures who were all dying of skin cancer from the sun's ultraviolet rays...or something like that. It was a grim production, but it won us first prize in an inter-school drama competition. I don't remember being in the slightest bit bothered by its subject matter. Was I sceptical, or did it just seem too far away in the future to worry about? I'm not sure.

Not all my fears were naturalistic. One evening, sitting in a field with a group of local kids and listening to them tell scary stories, I heard that Satan himself could be summoned if you said the Lord's Prayer backwards. I lay in bed that night desperately trying not to say the Lord's Prayer backwards, but my mind kept forming the first few syllables nonetheless. I despaired at the thought of going through life without ever thinking my way through the whole thing, in spite of myself.

Did I really believe that this would summon the Devil? I don't think so. I was in my early teens at this stage. But fear is a strange and perverse thing.

Much earlier, in my childhood, I can remember looking at a pile of stuff which had been covered with black plastic, in our hall, and knowing that there was nothing underneath. But I was still scared that there was.

In my first year of secondary school, when I was thirteen, I heard one boy tell another boy (as we were changing back into our clothes after P.E., or gym class) that deep-sea divers excavating the wreck of the Titanic had seen these words written on its hull: LEAVE US IN OUR WATERY GRAVE. I can remember feeling a physical chill as I walked home that afternoon...but it was a rather pleasant one.

There are so many other childhood fears I could mention. The strange thing is that I remember most of them fondly...in retrospect, they were quite exciting and enjoyable. Perhaps the night reading David Copperfield and waiting for a nuclear attack was an exception.

Did my irrational fears end in my teens? Well, apart from phobias, they pretty much did. The last real irrational scare I experienced was when I went to see The Ring (the American remake) in 2002, in the Savoy cinema in Dublin's O'Connell Street. As most of my readers may know, this movie concerns an enigmatic video which, once it's viewed, causes the viewer to die within seven days. I remember walking out of the cinema thinking: "I wish I hadn't seen that", and lying awake that night in genuine fear.

But that was the last time my imagination terrified me. Ever since then, it's been prosaic fears!

Commonality Value: A Blog Post from 2017

Looking through my blog posts from 2017, to find one to represent the year as I count down to the ten-year anniversary of this blog, I was struck by this blog on "commonality value". One of the reasons is the mention of country roads, and of meditating on country roads. I've been doing that a lot recently, as I try to improve my knowledge of Irish geography. It's hard for me to really believe that there are places outside of Dublin! I half-think they disappear when I come back to the capital. I actually wrote about this very subject on Facebook last night!

We all understand the concept of "rarity value". It's often occurred to me that its opposite also exists-- I suppose it should be called "commonality value". 

The appeal of many things is that they are so common. The awareness that they are so common, that there are innumerable other instances of them, is a big part of their appeal.

This theme occurred to me (though far from the first time) when I was going to Mass today. As readers will know, I'm not a Traditionalist. I'm not anti-Traditionalist, in fact I've found myself leaning in that direction quite a lot recently. But something keeps me in the Ordinary Form, and partly it's the desire to join in the same liturgy that innumerable Catholics participate in all around Ireland (and all around the world) every single day.

This same feeling often strikes me in regard to other things, though. It struck me on Friday evening, when I went to see the movie It in the cinema. Like most Stephen King films, it's set in Anytown, USA. Well, actually, it's set in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, and the town is anything but ordinary under the surface. But, on the surface, it's the ordinary American small town with white picket fences, low skyline, box-like buildings, and doubtless plenty of Mom and Pop stores. This environment, so common in horror and science fiction, seems so endearing precisely because it's so ordinary.

The same is true of love stories. The world will never grow tired of love stories. Sir Paul McCartney addressed this very theme in "Silly Love Songs": "You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs, but I look around me and I see it isn't so..." The fact that men and women have been falling in love (etc. etc. etc.) since the species began doesn't make love stories any less interesting to us. It makes them more interesting.

The themes of Christian art are another example. How often can the Crucifixion be pictured? Or the Nativity? Or the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden? When do these themes get played out? They never get played out. In fact, the artistic tradition enriches each new treatment of them.

This feeling also occurs to me when I'm listening to homilies. I take great pleasure in the knowledge that the Bible passage the priest is enlarging upon has been discussed innumerable times, millions of times, in the history of Christianity-- that it's a "living word".

Holiday customs are another example. A Christmas tree is beautiful in itself, but it's more beautiful because there are Christmas trees in almost every home, office, shop and square throughout the Christian world. The same is true for Halloween bonfires, New Year's fireworks, St. Patrick's Day parades, Thanksgiving parades, and so on.

Another example: popular songs, stories, plays, and other works of art. When does a work of art become a "classic" or a "staple"? And doesn't it seem to become more than it was at first, when it attains this status, as though there is now a kind of aura around it?

Another example is days. Days are beautiful (in my view) because there are so many of them. Nobody could hope to remember all the days that make up their lives...I keep a diary and one of the pleasures of reading it is remembering days that I'd forgotten. This is even more true of history, whether it's the history of the world, the history of a nation, the history of a soccer club, or the history of some institution. Individual days blur into that delicious shimmering timescape, the past imperfect...

One instance of "commonality" value which gives me special pleasure to think on is country roads. I take tremendous pleasure in daydreaming about the thousands of miles of country road, many of them deserted or almost deserted, which must stretch all over Ireland. The same is true of cinemas and pubs. And yes, I wrote about this fascination in this blog post, where I made an effort at prose poetry. I tried to evoke a similar atmosphere here.

I suppose you either feel this or you don't.  Personally, it's something that I think about very often, that I've always thought about, that moves me profoundly on almost on a daily basis. I wish I could find words to do it justice. Perhaps that would require poetry, rather than prose.

A Personal View of the Seven Signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic

Today I continue my countdown to the tenth anniversary of this blog by rerunning a blog post from each year. This seems like an appropriate representative post for 2016.

Though you'd be hard pressed to tell it, it's still the centenary of the 1916 Rising. Given the importance of the anniversary, I think it's a shame that the commemorations were mostly bundled into a few weeks around Easter, even if that was the exact anniversary of the events. 

To keep the ball rolling, I am going to write a little about the seven men who signed the Irish Proclamation of Independence, a noble document which adorns the walls of many pubs, schools and private houses in Ireland.




First of all, a few remarks about the Rising itself. I'll keep it brief because I've written all this before.

I don't necessariliy condone the Rising. I have mixed feelings about it. There has been a vast amount of discussion, ever since it happened, on whether it fulfilled the criteria of a just war. I lean towards the negative in those debates. But I'm not sure.

The deaths of innocent civilians is the most difficult aspect of it. Who can forget the story of the little girl who was shot through the head, because she was peering through a keyhole when a rebel shot the lock? There are many such stories.

All the same, Easter 1916 happened, and is a crucial part of Irish identity. It is hard for non-Irish people to appreciate the extent of this. It is akin to the American Revolution for Americans, or the Battle of Britain for the English.

Whatever my scruples about the Rising, I do have a great deal of respect for the men and women who fought in it. Seven men signed the Proclamation, and I will deal with them individually.



Patrick Pearse was (and is) undoubtedly the most celebrated of the 1916 leaders, and he is the one I admire the most. My upbringing has something to do with this. We owned a copy of his Political Writings and Speeches, and it had almost Scriptural prestige in our house. My father often quoted him.

I reacted against this in my teens. I can remember, pettily, inserting a self-drawn cartoon which condemned him as a psychopath into the school library's copy of Political Writings and Speeches. But this was just a phase.

Who was he? He was an Irish language activist, a teacher, a headmaster, an orator, a poet, and the President of the Provisional Government which was proclaimed in 1916.

There has been much discussion of whether he was attracted to boys. He undoubtedly loved and romanticised boys and some of his writings praising them read very suspiciously to our over-sexualised era. There is no evidence of any romantic relationships with women in his life (he was extremely shy around women). However, there is also no hint of any actual inappropriate behaviour towards boys. He was the headmaster of a boys school and virtually all of his pupils seem to have idolised him.

Pearse was a galloping romantic, and I think this is why I have such a high regard for him. One of his essays was entitled 'The Spiritual Nation'. He viewed nationhood as something spiritual, as do I. He was not interested in a national liberation which did not involve cultural renewal. He memorably expressed this aspiration in this classic formula; "Not free merely, but Gaelic as well; not Gaelic merely, but free as well".

(In fact, he was a political moderate until very late in his short life. initially, he was much more interested in cultural renewal than in politics. But his experiences as a headmaster of an Irish-language school-- a pioneering enterprise, at that time-- convinced him that political revolution was required for cultural renewal.)

He was not without faults. Though he was an observant Catholic, and sincerely religious, some of his writings seem to treat Irish nationalism as a kind of secular religion. The most disturbing instance of this are these words, from his oration at the grave of Wolfe Tone, a hero of Irish nationalism:

We have come to the holiest place in Ireland; holier to us even than the place where Patrick sleeps in Down. Patrick brought us life, but this man died for us.

I have always found these words shocking, and the perfect example of the danger of idolatry which haunts nationalism. Nevertheless, Pearse was a fervent Catholic, and he received confession and absolution before his execution. In fact, he was so pleased to hear that his fellow-signatory, the Marxist James Connolly, had also received absolution, that he said it was the one thing he had been worried about.



Pearse's poetry is, in my view, absolutely first rate. He seemed to have been a complete naif when it came to poetry, writing haunting lyrics in free verse. They are marked by their directness and artlessness, and seem to owe nothing to any poetic tradition, unless it is the prophetic writing of the Bible. Take this poem which was written on the eve of his execution:

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass;
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,
Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,
Or little rabbits in a field at evening,
Lit by a slanting sun,
Or some green hill where shadows drifted by
Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht,
Things young and happy.
And then my heart hath told me:
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Sorrowful.

Perfection. "The Fool" is another masterpiece, as is "The Risen People".



The second most famous figure in the Rising was James Connolly. Since he was a Marxist, and the leader of the left-wing Irish Citizens' Army (several different military organisations fought in the Rising), he has always been the left-wing hero of the Rising, and indeed the saint of the Irish left in general.

I've never had all that much interest in him, despite his prominence, even when I was a socialist. (I was a socialist in my early twenties, but I was never a Marxist. Indeed, I was a self-consciously anti-Marxist socialist even then.) He left many writings, but I wouldn't dream of reading them-- my few encounters with Marxist theory have been enough for me.

As a person, however, Connolly seems to have been entirely noble and admirable. An ex-soldier, he directed the fighting in the main garrison of the General Post Office, and all acounts of his leadership show him to be valiant, humane and inspiring.

I also admire his history as an organiser of trade unions. It's a long time since I've been a socialist, but a concern for the poor seems to me an entirely Christian outlook. The working conditions in Dublin at the time of the Rising were appalling. An apostle of the free market might tell me that this was entirely due to government regulation or tarriffs, or some such thing, and that the perfect liberation of market forces would eliminate such poverty. Maybe. In the meantime, people have to live, and to live with some dignity.

As before mentioned, he had the last rites and absolution before his execution, despite having been a lapsed Catholic before this. The Irish radical left has always found this 'an inconvenient truth'. Indeed, it was Connolly who sent runners to request the presence of Catholic priests during the fighting, so his men could have confession.



The next figure I will mention is Joseph Plunkett. I knew very little about him before this year, when I started reading about the Rising in more depth. Since then I have read and watched a good deal about him, and he is undoubtedly my second favourite of the leaders after Pearse.

He was a devout Catholic, though not a daily Mass-goer or particularly outspoken about his faith. He was also a big fan of G.K. Chesterton-- he read The Man Who Was Thursday at least four times, and he wrote a poetic tribute to him.

Plunkett came from a wealthy family, though he also had a deprived childhood since his mother was neglectful. He was fascinated by machinery and war games-- indeed, it was Plunkett who devised the military strategy for the Rising. That strategy has had very mixed reviews-- one writer wondered what success an uprising could have when it involved "occupying bases and waiting to be attacked". In any case, it's hard to assess his plans fairly, since the entire thing was so botched that it mostly had to improvised.

Plunkett is the most romantic figure of the Rising for two reasons. One is that he was dying of TB-- he would have been dead within weeks, even if he had not been executed. The other is that he married his fianceé Grace Gifford in the prison chapel, shortly before his execution. They were not allowed to exchange a single word, other than their vows.

He was a poet, and one of his poems has become a classic:

I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.

I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice—and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.

All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.



 
I will pass swiftly over Éamonn Ceannt, who seems to me by far the least interesting of the signatories. He was a military man and a cultural nationalist. Other than his role in the Rising, the most notable thing about him is that he once played the uilleann pipes (Irish bagpipes) for the Pope. I don't mean any disrespect to him, but I have little to say about him.



We have been dealing with the visionaries so far. But not all of the signatories were visionaries. The pairing of Thomas Clarke and Séan MacDiarmada were the 'hard heads' of the Rising. Between them, they laid most of the groundwork of the rebellion, long before the other five became involved. It was these two who insured that the secret organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, infiltrated and took control of the Irish Volunteers, an open citizen's 'defence force'.

Tom Clarke is the 1916 signatory I find least appealing. He was, to be blunt, a fanatic-- a man whose life was utterly dedicated to getting the British out of Ireland. He was involved in a dynamiting campaign in his youth, and spent years in prison a a result. He came out a prematurely aged man, and even more fanatical. His tobacco shop in O'Connell Street was in many ways the hub of the rebellion.

What I find most unappealing about Clake is his apparent lack of any vision for a post-independence Ireland. He wanted to get the British out, and that was it. He had very little interest in cultural nationalism. And he was a hardliner-- when the other leaders wanted to surrender, to spare further civilians from being killed, he pleaded with them to keep fighting to the death.

He was not a religious man-- he was embittered against the Church for its hostility to the Fenians, a previous group of Irish insurrectionists. He told the priest who came to minister to him before execution to leave, when he urged him to repent.

I read a biography of Clarke recently, intrigued as to why someone would devote his life to Irish independence, with apparently so little consideration of what an independent Ireland would look like. I didn't find the answer, but I can at least say that he was a loving husband and father. If he was a fanatic in public life, he was quite sentimental in private life-- which, at least, I find endearing.



His close friend Sean MacDiarmada is like Clarke is a lesser key. He was much more a political nationalist than a cultural one. He was a man of action rather than a man of ideas. He has been called an 'amiable fanatic'-- indeed, everybody seems to have liked him. What I find most endearing about him is that he helped convince the footsoldiers of the rebellion to surrender when they wanted to fight on. He told them that he expected to be executed, along with the other leaders, but that the rank and file would live to fight another day-- which they did.

On his census form, he recorded his religion as 'Irish nationalist'. However, it's obvious from his other answers that he was doing his best to irritate the census-takers, and he did not chase the priest away from his cell in the manner of Tom Clarke.

In my mind, Clarke and MacDiarmada represent the tough-minded, anti-romantic strain of Irish nationalism, where Pearse and Plunkett represent the romantic and idealistic strain. I definitely identify with the latter, rather than the former.



The final signatory, Thomas MacDonagh, is someone about whom I know very little, even though he is a flamboyant figure-- the third poet of the Rising. He was also a teacher in Pearse's school, and a lecturer in English at the university where I work.

Since I have always been an anglophile, and Irish nationalism has all too often involved anti-Englishness, I cherish the story of the last words he spoke to his students, after a class on Jane Austen: "Ah, there's nobody like Jane, lads".

He was a handsome, debonair and charming figure. He offered cigarettes to his executioners. He seems to have had a religious temperament, though not in a particularly orthodox mode.

Well, God bless them all. They all paid the ultimate price for their beliefs, and I pray they are all with the Lord now. And God bless everybody who died in the fighting. And God bless Ireland!

Why I Love Star Trek Voyager: A Post from 2015

This might be a bit of an unusual choice from 2015, as I approach the tenth anniversary of this blog by "re-running" a blog post from each year. I'm not sure if any of my current readership are Trekkies. But here goes, anyway. I'm fond of it, especially the musings on provincialism towards the end. Please forgive the wonky formatting, I've tried to fix it for about fifteen minutes and I don't want to waste any more time on it.

It occurred to me today to write a post devoted to Star Trek: Voyager, a programme I've mentioned often enough. I've watched a lot of it in the last few months-- or half-watched it, since I usually have it on when I'm making dinner or cleaning up.

It's true that I've written a post on Star Trek as a whole (and if I link to it again, I'm liable to prosecution under the Control of Self-Promotion Act of 1932), but I think Voyager deserves an article of its own. It's a very different show.

(I am a little bit hesitant of going all Trekkie on my blog. But, then I think-- why ever not? Most people like Star Trek, after all.)

 

 
Star Trek: Voyager has been described as 'the red-headed step-child' of the franchise, and I can understand why. Despite running for a whole seven seasons-- which is impressive, considering the cancellation-happy nature of American TV networks (after all, the original Star Trek was cancelled after two seasons)-- it hasn't got a very good reputation. Most people who are at all interested in science-fiction TV profess a fondness for The Next Generation and for Deep Space Nine, but are withering about Voyager.

It's hard to disagree with most of their criticisms. I don't usually like bullet point lists, but I feel one coming on here:

• The whole Maquis/Starfleet device is dropped almost as soon as it is introduced. To those who don't know, the set-up of Voyager is that a Starfleet ship is stranded in a far part of the galaxy, out of contact with Starfleet, and-- through plot mechanics that I won't go into-- many of the crew belong to the Maquis, a terrorist/resistance organisation on which Starfleet frowns. This was obviously to set up dramatic tension in the series. But the two groups gel so quickly that it hardly seemed worth setting up, despite occasional (rather clumsy) attempts to revive this plot element later in the series.
• Many of the main characters are just dull. Commander Chakotay, the Native American second-in-command of the ship, has a face tattoo instead of a personality. The Vulcan head of security Tuvok, like all Vulcans, eschews all emotion in favour of logic. How exactly are the audience supposed to relate to such a character? The fresh-faced Harry Kim is everybody's little brother, but he doesn't really have much going for him apart from that-- he seems to have no interests or passions, other than an occasional amorous streak.
• Time travel is overused mercilessly. I'm not a big fan of time travel myself. It doesn't make sense to me. If you can change the past (or the future), isn't everything infinitely provisional? Doesn't that leech the drama out of everything?
• The aliens are terrible. When it came to inventing antagonist races (or even other races in general), Voyager was really the pits. Nearly all the races they run into are militaristic, beligerent, honour-obsessed races like the Klingons-- who are themselves the most boring of the classic 'Trek' aliens.
• The Borg and the Q, both brilliant concepts when they are introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation, are overused in Voyager to the extent that we grow contemptuous of them. The Borg, when first glimpsed, were terrifying and all-but-unstoppable. By the end of Voyager, they are about as terrifying as a koala bear.

But Voyager had a lot going for it, as well. Since I perpetrated one bullet list, I might as well have another:

• The captain, Katherine Janeway. When I first saw Voyager I was rather dreading a female captain. Not because I have anything against the idea of a female captain per se. But because I assumed they were going to make her the antithesis of every stereotype of femininity, and we would have a hardass, ball-busting Captain with ne'er a streak of tenderness.
  
  Thankfully, this counter-stereotype was avoided. Captain Janeway is as tough as anyone could ask for, but she's also very feminine. She's even maternal towards the crew. Above all, she is simply a very well-drawn character. Her particular combination of toughness and tenderness is very believable. A lot of this is surely down to the skill of the actress, Kate Mulgrew-- who is staunchly pro-life, as it happens!
•  There are other excellent characters, as well. Tom Paris, the jaunty and fun-loving pilot who has a love for twentieth-century Americana, is someone I would like to have as a friend. I'd like to be more like him, too. His romance with the half-Klingon Bel'anna is very believable, and their rocky courtship is well portrayed. I've always had a crush on Bel'anna. Fiery, brilliant women are the best, even when they have head ridges.
  
  Neelix, the perpetually upbeat alien they take along for the ride, is also an endearing and well-delineated character. And then there's the Doctor and Seven of Nine...but I want to devote a whole bullet to those.
  
• The set-up of the story is very compelling. A protagonist (or a set of protagonists) trying to get home is one of the most timeless and powerful narratives you could imagine. Indeed, I think that only the Christ story runs deeper in our collective consciousness.
  
  It's just occurred to me that, although Voyager is a very obvious reversal of the basic Star Trek premise-- "to boldly go where no-one has gone before"-- it actually has the best of both worlds. They are exploring unknown parts of space, but they are not exploring for its own sake-- they are desperately trying to get home.
  
  Star Trek Voyager has an 'all or nothing' dimension that The Next Generation lacked. The crew will either get home, or they won't. It gives the whole drama an added intensity and poignancy.
  
  Of course, as the journey goes on, the crew more and more come to see the experience as something valuable in itself. This is a theme that is very deliberately and quite skillfully brought out. Harry Kim, the eager-beaver young crewmember who is most intent on getting home, at one point gives a toast to that effect: "To the journey!". I just googled "To the Journey" and the first result was a Voyager fan podcast. I think this is an important theme, too. So many of the challenges in our lives are challenges we would never have chosen. If we can embrace them all the same, if we can affirm them, it is quite a triumph.
  
  The plot conforms to another classic story-telling convention-- the group of people who are thrown into a common situation, a common dilemma. This may be a cliché, but it's a cliché for a reason-- it works. There is such a loneliness at the core of the human condition that having a similar experience to others is of huge importance to us. It's why people join support groups and veteran groups and, well, groups of every kind
  .
• The Doctor and Seven of Nine. The Doctor is an emergency medical hologram on a ship with no human doctor. As the series unfolds, his programme is enhanced, so that he becomes more and more like a human.
  
  Seven of Nine is a liberated Borg drone who was captured by the Borg as a little girl. At first, she is none-too-happy about being restored to humanity, and her path to becoming an individual (the Borg are a 'hive mind') is long and painful.
  
  Obviously, both of these characters are 'Pinochhio' characters-- they are both striving to become human. This could be seen as a blatant retread of Data, the android who wanted to be more human from The Next Generation. And indeed, it is. But I don't see anything wrong with this kind of self-plagiarism. Indeed, I think the Doctor and Seven-of-Nine out-Data Data.
  
  Seven-of-Nine was introduced in season four, and immediately boosted ratings. It's easy to see why-- she is undeniable eye candy, and she wears a skin-tight catsuit that shows off her impressive physique to its best effect. There were complaints about the cynicism of this move, and understandably so.
  
  But there's a lot more to her than eye-candy. Her story arc is incredibly poignant, especially in episodes like 'Raven' and 'Someone to Watch Over Me'. First of all, there is the fact that she has gone from being part of a hive mind to being an individual, with all the sense of isolation that would entail. Secondly, she has to come to terms with her past as a Borg, where she helped to 'assimilate' millions of others into the Borg collective. And thirdly, she learns about her own personal past, and the fact that she was herself 'assimilated' as a little girl, when her parents-- who were scientists studying the Borg-- were captured. She feels conflicted about whether she should explore this past or not. At the end of one episode, she very poignantly puts aside the newly-discovered diaries her parents kept, accepting that she is not ready to look at them yet.
  
  Seven-of-Nine used to be my favourite character, but she has now been overtaken by the Doctor. (He has no name, as he keeps putting off choosing one.) Indeed, the Doctor has become my favourite Star Trek character of all. He has a longer story arc than Seven-of-Nine, featuring from the first episode to the last. He gets more humorous moments than Seven-of-Nine, given his tendency towards gross vanity and pomposity. (Obviously, there is a tender side to this, too, as his vanity is frequently both bruised and subsequently salved by his crewmates.)
  
  Most importantly, he is played by Robert Picardo, a wonderful actor. I'm not the biggest fan of the acting profession. I think rather too much noise is made about (and indeed by) actors in this world. And yet there are some actors I greatly admire, and Robert Picardo is one of them. He has the sublime confidence of the best actors.
  
  He seems to be a pretty good and fascinating guy, too. I follow his Twitter account (it's the only Twitter account I do follow) and I've watched various videos of his speeches at Star Trek conventions, which are always funny and graceful, and display an obvious desire to give the fans their money's worth. He's a practicing Catholic, too, who sometimes tweets about his faith! (Although, unfortunately, he did celebrate the SCOTUS decision on gay 'marriage'. Oh well.)
  
  This is what I said about both these characters in my 'purple notebook' series (perhaps a bit too self-revelatory, but I need to be self-revelatory to explain, and I want to explain):I find these characters fascinating because they are both learning to be human, painfully and in unusual circumstance. Apart from finding this dramatically compelling in its own right, I identify with them. Other than reading or writing, I was a slow starter in nearly everything-- sometimes to a spectacular degree. Tying my laces, flying on a plane, leaving the country, having a job, making friends, drinking alcohol, going to a party, dating, experiencing a first kiss-- I did them all later and often way later than most people. So much so that it's often hard to find my experience mirrored in fiction, other than Seven of Nine and the Doctor. And the fact that their story is interesting, that they are sympathetic and admirable characters, makes me feel better about my own story.

Star Trek: Voyager isn't really a quarter as good as Star Trek: The Next Generation. (I don't really care very much for the original Star Trek or for Deep Space Nine, and I've barely seen Enterprise.) But, in a way, I'm actually fonder of Voyager-- maybe even because it's not as good.

I suppose I've always had something of a tenderness for the second-rate. It's hard to describe. I'm not talking about a fondness for the underdog. I do have a fondness for the underdog, in buckets and buckets, but that's not what I'm talking about here.

I think it has something to do with being born in Dublin, and growing up there, and spending the vast majority of my time on Earth there. Not only is Dublin a capital city, but I think it's fair to say that it's one of the great cities of the West. Dublin was the second city of the British Empire (though I see that other cities vied for that title, but let that pass). You couldn't throw a stone without hitting a house where some famous writer, artist, statesman or intellectual was born. Every back alley is knee-deep in history. Indeed, Dubliners are often accused of forgetting that there is an Ireland outside Dublin.

As for myself, I was never a very proud Dubliner. (Though it's more complicated than that...but that's a story for another time.) Dublin always seemed to me like the bastion of metropolitan and liberal values, while rural Ireland was the stronghold of traditional Ireland. On my summer holidays to my aunt's farm in Limerick, I always felt more of an affinity with the red-necks (or 'culchies') than I ever did with cynical Dubliners. (And I grew tired of being confidently informed that "You wouldn't like it as much here in winter".)

However, I'm veering off the subject a little. My original point was that, as a metropolitan, I have always been fascinated by all things provincial-- by the very notion of the provincial. (This is why I like Trollope.) I still can't really get my head around the idea of living in a city that isn't the capital. Being at the centre of things seems like the ordinary, humdrum thing to me. Being a provincial seems downright exotic.

That is, perhaps, one source of my fascination with the second-rate, the second-place, the not-quite, and the off-centre.

Another source is that it seems less intense, in a way. Personally, I can never understand why anyone would want to stand in a noisy pub on a Friday or Saturday night, fighting to get the attention of the barman and making reluctant trips to a filthy bathroom. I like pubs where there is enough liveliness to create an atmosphere, but you have room to sit down and relax-- midweek pubs. Similarly, I don't really get the appeal to cramming into a cinema on the release day of a big movie. I prefer half-empty cinemas. And so on.

More abstractly, I like things that are a little bit neglected-- relatively neglected. I like the fact that I'm in a minority when it comes to being a Voyager fan. It's a popular show, but not nearly as popular as Picard and Co. I like that. It makes it more mine, somehow. It makes it more special, somehow.

But the thing I like most about Star Trek in general- both Voyager and its big brother-- is the basic set-up. 

In my favourite book of all time, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote: "Nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable." I think that this is the magic of Star Trek. It combines the ideal of adventure, of exploring new places and new situations, with the ideal of home-- of community-- of family. Wherever the crew go, they are always on Voyager, or on the Enterprise. That's very comforting.

And the tightness of community on Star Trek is something I find very appealing. Part of the reason I like my job in UCD library is because it's almost military in terms of how immersive it is. University College Dublin isn't just like a small town. Essentially, it is a small town. All the amenities are there-- shops, cafes, restaurant, bank, post office, church, swimming pool, cinema-- almost everything. It's a world unto itself.

I grew up in UCD. I was twenty-three when I arrived, and extremely shy and immature. I had no friends. I made my first friends in UCD-- many of whom I still have. In fact, I had an experience very similar to the Doctor and Seven-of Nine.

The drama of the individual is something I find fascinating.  Perhaps this is not very conservative of me. Perhaps I have been infected by our era of life coaches, self-actualisation, self-esteem, navel-gazing, 'head space', personal growth, and the inner child. But I don't really care. I do think there is something sublime in the fact that every man and woman is a unique personality in the history of the world. I do think it's fascinating that we have so many different needs, beyond our purely physical needs-- the need for community, the need for self-expression, the need for belonging, the need for adventure, the need for growth. I like Star Trek because it follows its characters not only in their external journeys but in their internal journeys. Perhaps more than anything else, that is what keeps me going back to it, when there are so many other TV shows and movies I've never watched, and so much else to see and do in our little span of time.

On a Dedication: From 2014

I like to think that this blog is, amongst other things, a tribute to the essay form. (I know I've written a lot about the essay form already, but bear with me.) When I was a kid, the word 'essay' had the same flavour as 'multiplication table' or 'technical drawing'. I couldn't imagine anything less exciting, less fun.

Even back then, this didn't make very much sense, as there were essays that I enjoyed reading without considering them essays. I had a collection of newspaper articles by Keith Waterhouse, the veteran English journalist and all-round literary jobber, which I read again and again. Later on, I became a fan of Flann O'Brien, the Irish literary genius and newspaper columnist, whose Best of Myles was such a favourite amongst several members of my family that it took on that familiar look of favourite books; not only was it missing the front and back cover, but several pages from either end, too. (It's heartily recommended, by the way, although much of the observational humour and the pastiche might pass you by if you're not Irish.)

Of course, much of my dislike for the idea of essays came from the sort of essay we were taught to write (and often given to read) at school-- the sort of essay where you start off by declaring what you are going to write, you write it, and you finish up by summarizing what you've written. I'm certainly not criticizing English teachers for requiring this from their students. The whole idea that education should focus primarily upon 'unleashing creativity' seems very silly me. Children, and learners in general, need to learn how to plod before they can somersault. (When I was about fourteen, our English teacher made the class come up with a list of words to use instead of 'nice'. When I grew older, I looked back on this exercise with scorn. But then I grew up a little more, and it occurred to me that, although there is nothing at all wrong with the word 'nice', youngsters are indeed all too inclined to pepper it in places where another word would make a nicer distinction.)

But, though the kind of essay I encountered in school was valid as a teaching exercise, there was nothing very inspiring about it. So it never occurred to me that a lot of the stuff I did enjoy reading was, actually, in essay format. Newspaper columns were essays. Magazine articles were essays. Memoirs, when they were reflective rather than just chronologies, were essays. Biographies, subject to the same condition, were essays. Film reviews were essays. Book reviews were essays. History books were essays. Introductions and prefaces (which were so often the best part of a book, in my view) were essays. And then, when the internet came along, blog posts and website articles were essays.

Or rather, they could all be essays. An essay, to me, implies a certain infusion of personality, a willingness to step back a little from the subject at hand, an atmosphere of being at ease rather than on duty.

Having developed a taste for the essay, I've found myself occasionally borrowing anthologies of essays from my library. I'm invariably disappointed. They're nearly always full of essays by 'masters of the form' such as William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Michel De Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Hilaire Belloc, Richard Steele and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Chesterton, too, although they usually choose his least interesting essays-- 'A Piece of Chalk' and 'On Lying in Bed', for instance.)

The sort of essays that appear in these collections, almost without exception, are written in either a 'whimsical' style-- as effervescent and flavourless as sparkling mineral water-- or are as ponderous as a speech at a headmaster's conference. A common perception of the essay seems to be that it should be a burst of linguistic and rhetorical fireworks expended upon a trivial subject-- the more trivial, the better. (This is why 'A Piece of Chalk' and 'On Lying in Bed' are the usual choices from Chesterton.) This sort of essay always has the tone of a clever, precocious schoolboy amusing his elders. On the other hand, essays by luminaries like Montaigne and Bacon, though I shudder to admit it, are so general and abstract as to be unreadable. (I have an ally in C.S. Lewis here, who wrote very witheringly of Bacon's essays.) The supposed masterpieces of the essay format tend, in my view, to be either too specific in subject matter, or too general-- 'How to Name a Dog' on the one hand, 'Of Friendship' on the other.

Anyway, all of that is-- believe it or not-- simply by way of preamble. It's not what I set out to write about at all.

A particular collection of 'essays' that I prize (though more for its atmosphere than its quality) is the splendidly-titled Don't Shoot-- I'm Not Well! by Ted Bonner. Ted Bonner, who died only two years ago at the age of 85, was a businessman, a motoring correspondent, a raconteur, an after-dinner speaker, and a writer and broadcaster. He was once a stand-in host for The Late Late Show, the most famous television show in Irish history.

(I couldn't find a picture of the book in question, so I used another one instead.)

I've never read anything he wrote other than this book, which has a very 'after-dinner speech' flavour to it. It's full of anecdotes of hilarious (or not so hilarious) mishaps and misadventures, observations on the absurdities and frustrations of everyday life, and so on. A fishing trip where it rains non-stop, an unsuccessful attempt to find the Washington Bridge, recollections of the author's enormous appetite as a child-- you know the kind of thing. It was published in 1974, so it has a nostalgia value for me (even though I was born in 1977). It belongs to that period in Irish history when we had a modern standard of living but we were still solidly nationalist, Catholic and genteel. (Genteel, at least, to the extent that explicit vulgarity and nastiness in print was rare.)

But even all that is preamble, and not my subject proper. I don't want to write a review of Don't Shoot-- I'm Not Well! I only want to discuss eleven words out of the whole text. And that's the Dedication at the beginning.

This is it: For anyone, anywhere, with whom I have ever shared a laugh.

I've found that dedication coming into my mind again and again recently. As a matter of fact, and in all sincerity, I find it profoundly moving.

Partly this is because I've been thinking about prayer so much lately. The more I pray, the more I find myself trying to remember as many people as I can in my prayers. And the more I do that, the more I realize how many people there are to cover, and how easy it is to leave them out. And I especially find myself thinking of all the people whose names I never even knew, or whose names I've forgotten; people I spoke to once at a party, or who did me a kind deed, or who laughed with me when we both witnessed something funny.

And that gets me thinking about the abundance of life. This is a thought that haunts me constantly. I haven't had a very eventful life-- less eventful than those of most people my age, or even younger. But every human life is packed with such a variety of character, incident, scene, atmosphere and plot that it outdoes the most ambitious of epic novels. I wrote this post to express it, once, but I still feel I haven't got close to expressing the wonder of the thing.

I once owned a children's encyclopedia (or, more accurately, a compendium of questions and answers) which included a reproduction of a painting called Dickens' Dream. It showed Charles Dickens asleep in an armchair, surrounded by a cloud of the characters he dreamed up. But we are all like Dickens in that picture. It fascinates me to think how any man, woman or child sitting in an armchair, alone, is surrounded by a similar cloud-- not of fictional beings only, but of memories and sights and sounds and knowledge.

Since I was a boy, and long before I started to write poetry in a disciplined way, there was a poem in my mind that I could never successfully translate into words-- a poem about how the lustre of a human eye is more wonderful than any precious stone's lustre. The pupil of a human eye is a gateway to infinity. Even a five-year-old child remembers and thinks more than he could ever tell you. This seems marvellous and surprising to me.

The closest this poem has come to existence is a poem by Pat Tierney, a local Ballymun poet, that appeared in a community newspaper. It was written to a priest (a athair is Father in Irish), and the only lines I can remember, and probably misremember, referred to the priest's eyes in this way:

Those God-made galaxies, a athair
How deep God made those galaxies.

In this light, a line like For anyone, anywhere, with whom I have ever shared a laugh takes on a certain sublimity, like the sky at night or the view from the top of a mountain.

But isn't it funny how important such acts of remembrance are, even for those who don't pray or don't believe in prayer? Why does the human race build memorials and statues? Why do we have days of remembrance? Indeed, why do we dedicate books? What does dedicating a book do? Ted Bonner dedicated Don't Shoot-- I'm Not Well! to everyone, everywhere, with whom he ever shared a laugh. Presumably, many (if not most) of those people will never know he dedicated it to them. But it doesn't feel like an empty gesture, any more than a song or a movie or a book dedicated to a dead person feels like an empty gesture. It feels very meaningful.

It's not just prayer that is a strange notion. It's thought itself. What is a thought? How long does it last? How complex can it be, and remain a single thought? Why do we feel that thinking of something, and especially of someone, can be a generous and meaningful act in itself? "There wasn't a day I didn't think of you" is the kind of thing one person might say to another to show how important she is to him. Or, conversely: "Did you ever even think of me?".

Even if you don't believe in prayer, finding a place in your thoughts for everyone you've ever loved, or liked, or shared a part of your life with, or even felt any kind of connection with-- the people who died in 9/11, or your remote ancestors, or some skeleton you saw in a museum-- somehow seems like an imperative. At least, it does to me. I don't imagine I'm alone.

But enough. I realize I've written hundreds of words on an eleven-word dedication, and I thus qualify for The Penguin Book of Essays.