"What on earth is the Blood Royal Saga?" asked Laurence.
All three of them were sitting on a King Bed, their shoes off and their legs crossed. They had taken a taxi from the pub to the centre of town-- it was a town called Dunsaggart. Laurence's Monstrous Mystery Tour card worked just as well as Helen's as a credit card. In the town centre, they had found a two-star hotel called the Minstrel Inn. They had booked a room each, all together on the third floor.
"I don't know" said Helen. "But I saw people reading it".
"Loads of people", said Laurence. "Two people in the pub, and the taxi driver was listen to it on audiobook. I saw the CD case."
"And when we passed a bookshop, I saw a huge display for it in the window", said Helen. "The tenth book had just come out. Omens of Nightfall, or something like that."
"What does it matter?", asked Karla, irritably.
"Anything could matter", said Helen.
"They are written by some guy called Fergus Fortune", said Laurence. "He sounds like he could be Irish."
"Is it too much to hope that Harry Potter was never published here?", asked Karla, taking another chip from the plate they had in the middle of the bed. She dipped it in garlic sauce and began to chew it vigorously. There was nothing dainty about her manner of eating; Laurence thoroughly approved.
"What's wrong with Harry Potter?" he asked. "I like Harry Potter."
Karla grimaced. "Why doesn't that surprise me?" she asked, when she'd swallowed. "You're a dreamer. But hey, if they haven't been published here, you can try to copy them and make a fortune."
"How do we know we don't have a fortune already?", asked Laurence. "We don't know what limit is on these cards, do we?"
There was a brief, thoughtful silence.
"Or", said Karla, "they could stop working at any moment. That's another possibility."
"You're not much into positive thinking, are you?", asked Laurence. He gave a little smile to take the edge of the comment.
"Karla is right", said Helen. She wiped her lips with a napkin. "We have no reason to assume these cards will keep working indefinitely. We have no reason to assume anything. But it seems to me reasonable that we would not assume the worst, or there will be no end to it. Let's just rely on the cards for now, and if they let us down...well, then we can cross that bridge when we come to it."
"I never liked that expression" said Karla. "Shouldn't it be, we'll cross that river when we come to it? Why does it assume there's a bridge?"
Considering she had been complaining about irrelevance a moment before, this contribution seemed a little ill-timed. But Karla didn't seem at all conscious of the irony.
"OK", said Helen. "We'll look for a bridge when we come to that river. If we come to that river. But first we have to work out-- what is it we are trying to do?"
"I would have thought that was obvious" said Karla, frowning. "Work out what the hell is going on!"
"That's reasonable enough", said Helen.
"And Ferryman is the one who knows", she said. "We have to find Ferryman. I mean, that tour bus isn't too difficult to track, is it?"
"Well, perhaps not", said Helen, slowly and ruminatively. She looked tired. Laurence wondered how she could feel tired, in the circumstances. "But if he could bring us...here, wherever here is...I don't see why he couldn't go back to the world we came from."
"But isn't that assuming the worst?", asked Karla.
Helen gave a little nod. "You're right", she said. "We have to start somewhere and we may as well start there. It seems like a logical place."
Laurence took a chicken ball from the plate of fast food and popped it in his mouth. It was warm and greasy. Just the way he liked it.
"You look beat", Karla said to Helen. "We should let you get some sleep".
Helen nodded and said, "Thank you. Yes, I'm pretty exhausted. I need to find a doctor in the morning." She had told Karla about her illness. "That's our first port of call, if nobody has any objections."
Laurence, his mouth still full of chicken ball, shook his head. "Of course not", said Karla. "Now you get to sleep. Laurence, grab that food, I'm not finished with it."
Laurence took the plate from the bed as he rose, though he felt a little bit nettled by the way she had given the order. He slid his feet into his shoes, Karla putting her own runners on more deliberately.
"Be careful, both of you", said Helen, as they stepped towards the door. "And wake me up if anything happens."
"Will do" said Karla. "Sleep tight."
She clicked the door behind them, and they were alone in the corridor.
"I need a coffee" said Karla. "I saw coffee machines in the foyer. How about you?"
"Sure", said Laurence, as casually as he could.
"I'm not a bit tired", she said. It was a little past midnight.
"Me neither."
"OK, then, let's go."
They made their way to the stairs and walked down in silence. The hotel, Laurence thought, was pleasant enough; the walls of the corridor were painted a sky blue, and there were occasional landscape and animal paintings on the walls. Laurence had always preferred budget hotels to fancy ones, anyway. The thick carpet muffled their footsteps.
"How old are you?" asked Karla.
"Twenty-eighth on the fifth of August", said Laurence. "How about you?"
"I can't believe you'd ask a lady her age", said Karla.
They had reached the foyer. A large copy of a Mattisse painting there, and a bookshelf sat in the corner. A girl was sitting by herself at one of its tables, reading a hefty novel. Laurence wasn't surprised when he saw it was Omens of Nightfall.
"Hot chocolate", said Karla, examining the drinks machine. "Nice."
"I'll have one of those too", said Laurence. "Large."
"My, my, you do live it up", said Karla.
Laurence looked at the girl. She was a real cutie, he thought. She looked a bit like Kirsten Dunst, but with darker hair and large glasses. She was wearing a Snoopy t-shirt and pink pyjama bottoms. Her feet were bare.
He looked at the book. Some kind of barbarian warrior was screaming on the cover. It was an impressively accomplished painting.
The girl looked up at him, and gave him a bewitching smile. He was surprised at its warmth.
"Omens of Nightfall" said Laurence, not knowing what else to say, and pointing at the book.
"OMG!" said the girl. "It's so awesome! Tonight is going to be an all-nighter! Are you a fan?"
"I've never read a single one of them", said Laurence.
"OMG!" the girl said again. "A Blood Royal virgin! You have to read them! Seriously, I didn't read them for ages because I'm not really into the sword and sorcery thing and I think I was put off by all the hype and I heard they were kind of gory but then I just read the first and, my God, it kept me up for nights!"
"I might give it a go", said Laurence. "What's the first one called again?"
"The Edge of Everything" replied the girl-- except she half-sang it, rather than saying it.
"Here's your large hot chocolate, sir?", said Karla, joining them and handing Laurence a styrofoam cup. "Hey", she asked the girl, "what do you think about Harry Potter?"
"Harry Potter is cool", said the girl. "But nothing like The Blood Royal."
"My brother is a massive Harry Potter fan", said Karla, slapping Laurence on her shoulder.
"Oh yeah?" the girl asked, with an approving smile. Her eyes widened.
"Maybe not massive", said Laurence, taken aback at the eagerness of the question. "I mean, I don't know the rules of Quidditch or anything."
It was a fair enough joke, Laurence thought, but hardly worthy of the belly laugh that it drew from the girl. "You're too funny", she said. "What's your favourite Harry Potter book?"
"Um....the one where Dumbledore died", said Laurence.
"Half-Blood Prince", said the girl. "You know, that might be my favourite too."
There was a silence, the girl smiling at Laurence expectantly. Karla had wandered back to the drinks machine and was flicking through some magazines.
"Well", said Laurence, "I'm sorry to interrupt your reading. I'll let you get back to it."
"Read The Edge of Everything!" said the girl, pointing at him. "Promise me!"
He raised his hand, palm open. "I promise, I promise", he said. "Enjoy!".
"Byeee!"
Laurence walked back towards where Karla was sitting, and sat beside her.
"The Pope is the same", she said. "The President of America is the same. The British Prime Minister is different. Liverpool are the champions in British soccer."
"Liverpool?"
"European champions, too."
"Huh. Hey, why did you say I was your brother?"
Karla looked up, surprised. "Because she was all over you, that's why."
"She was?"
"Oh, come on", said Karla, returning to the magazine. "What's the matter with you?"
Laurence looked back at the girl. She was absorbed in her book once more. He wondered if Karla could possibly be right. She seemed way out of his league. He knew he was no Cary Grant.
"I'm not sure I want to be your brother", said Laurence.
"Yeah, deal with it", muttered Karla, turning the page. "You should be so lucky. Hey, Metallica called it a day!".
Laurence sipped his hot chocolate, wondering at this response, and whether Karla meant anything by it. The hot chocolate was creamy and sweet, milky rather than watery. It filled him with warmth.
He looked at the girl again, and couldn't help doubting Karla's judgement. Girls like that didn't go for guys like him. But her smile had been awfully friendly.
"Dammit", said Karla. "Dammit, dammit, dammit!" She had raised her hand to her forehead.
"What is it?", asked Laurence, wondering what catastrophe she was reading about.
"Migraine", she said. "I get them. Do you have any Paracetomol?"
"No", said Laurence. "Let me check with reception."
"Thanks", said Karla. "You're a honey."
Laurence stole another glance at the cute girl as he passed her, but she didn't look up. Her mouth was a little agape, and her head was bent over the book.
The guy on the reception desk looked as though he might be Pakistani or Indian. He was reading a book, too. Laurence fully expected it to be Omens of Nightfall, but it was a driving test theory book.
"Excuse me."
The receptionist looked up. "Alright mate?". He had an English accent-- Birmingham, Laurence thought.
"Do you have any Paracetomol? My friend has a migraine."
"Sorry mate", said the receptionist, shaking his head. "But there's a 24 Hour Pharmacy just a little bit away. Out the exit, turn left, walk to the bank, turn left down the alley-way, you'll see it to your right."
"Thanks."
Outside, the air was pleasantly crisp but not cold. It was mild for an Irish November, and Laurence didn't miss the coat that he'd left in his own room. He took his hot chocolate with him, sipping it as he went.
The town was dead. Cars still moved along the roads, but there were no people to be seen. He couldn't see any shops open, though most of them still had their lights on. Laurence had always found something strangely eerie about lit-up shops with nobody in them.
Laurence surveyed the street around him, remembering again how much he disliked Irish towns. They always seemed to him grey, and narrow, and crumbling, and stagnant, and full of the memories of poverty and deprivation. No amount of neon and superficial glitz drowned that out. Not that there was much of that here, anyway.
He looked about him for things that were different. Nothing stood out. It looked exactly like the world that the tour bus had left.
Walking with only his hot chocolate for his companion, the strangeness of the situation struck him afresh. Mere hours ago he had been about to end his life. To end everything. He'd wondered, when he was a child, how anybody could deliberately give up life, since even the worst life was better than nothing.
Somehow, though, he hadn't really been thinking of it in such existential terms. He hadn't made a decision against life in favour of death. He was just sick and tired of his life. He felt he'd peaked at twenty-seven; he felt he'd overachieved at twenty-seven, to be honest. What other job was there for him, except teaching? And what other hope of love was there for him, when he'd given up everything in his soul once and been utterly rejected? Wasn't it better just to fold, than to keep playing a losing hand?
The thing is, Laurence wasn't so sure of the value of his own soul. He was achingly average at everything-- average, or below average. He'd often tried to think of something that he did exceptionally well, but he'd always come up blank. Karla had called him a dreamer. He was a dreamer. But what was the point of being a dreamer, when nobody else found your dreams interesting, or exciting, or worthwhile? He was no artist, or entrepreneur, or visionary. All his dreams ever did were rattle around his skull, adding to his loneliness.
Now, though...now, something was happening. Something different. Something special. And now he had...not friends, perhaps, but companions. And surely they would become more than companions? Surely an experience like this guaranteed a deeper bond than any he had known before?
He passed the bank-- a glowing electronic advertisement boasted about its new eight a.m. opening-- and turned into the alley beyond it.
There were no shops here. Just a short stretch of grey walls, and wheelie bins piled up against one side of them.
And graffiti. Mostly just names and slogans, but one image had been daubed in red paint just above the wheelie bins. The sight of it made Laurence go cold.
It was a figure in a cloak. The face was hidden in shadow, but two curved eyes looked out from the shadow. The drawing was very stylized, but very effective. One arm was reaching out to the onlooker, one finger pointing towards him.
Laurence stood staring in the alley-way, staring at the hooded figure, marvelling that a crude painting on the side of a wall could have such a horrible sense of reality.
Then a hand clamped over his mouth, dragging him backwards, and something sharp jabbed against his neck. The smell of aftershave filled his nostrils.
"Wallet", said an East European accent. "Now."
Monday, September 14, 2015
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Mystery Tour Chapter Six
The story so far: Laurence is a young man whose life has taken a few wrong turns. He decides to jump off a bridge, but just as he's about to do so, a mysterious tour bus pulls up beside him and a man in a skull-faced costume, who calls himself Mr. Ferryman, offers him a free ride on a new horror-themed mystery tour. He accepts-- of course he accepts!-- and he joins two others, Karla (a young lady) and Helen (a middle-aged academic). He is rather attracted to Karla-- of course he is! The bus hits a storm, and for a moment Laurence thinks he sees a mysterious cloaked figure moving towards the bus, against a green flash. The first stop of the bus is a creepy graveyard, but as they are being guided around it, the company hear the hysterical screams of a woman from some distance away. Despite Mr. Ferryman's warnings that he won't wait for them, they go to help-- of course they do! They come to a pub and learn that the screaming was only a local woman having nightmares-- but, reader, you're not taken in by that 'only' for a moment, are you?
Also, our heroes have noticed a few odd things about this place they've found themselves in. An ad for The Fellowship of the Ring movie advertises Patrick Stewart rather than Ian McKellen as Gandalf. Also, Osama Bin Laden is still alive. What's going on, reader? You'll have to read to find out...
Oh, and Mr. Ferryman drove away and left them behind, just as he threatened. Or course he did!
"We have to be careful", said Helen, her voice low.
The trio were sitting in a corner of the pub, as far from the other occupants as they could get. And it wasn't difficult; if it was ever busy in Casey's pub, it certainly wasn't tonight.
"I think it might be too late to be careful", said Karla. Her face was pale. "That bus just left. Pun very much intended."
"Well, yes", said Helen. She spoke as calmly as she might speak if she was giving a lecture, although she looked every bit as frightened as Karla-- and as frightened as Laurence felt. "That bus has left. But let's not make any more mistakes."
"It doesn't seem to me like we have any cards to play one way or the other", said Karla.
"There are always cards to play" said Helen. "First off, let's just admit it-- this isn't the world we left, is it?"
There was a long silence, filled with 'Two Princes' by the Spin Doctors, which was playing on the sound system of the pub. At the bar, somebody laughed.
"What does that even mean?" asked Karla.
"Well, Karla, what do you call it when a world-famous terrorist mastermind apparently comes back to life and nobody thinks there's anything strange about this?"
Karla was silent. She looked angry.
"It's not the world we left", said Laurence. It was a wrench to say it, even though he was aware of a certain exhilaration buried deep under his panic.
"There's only one world", said Karla, and for a moment she seemed childishly petulant. "What other world could this be?"
"Oh come on", said Helen, in a patient tone. "We've all heard about alternate dimensions, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, time travel...."
"Next you'll be telling me we're subjects of some....some government mind control experiment", said Karla. The way she said it made Laurence suspect that this was the very thing she feared the most.
"Anything is possible", said Helen, shrugging. "But this is the point I'm making; I don't think it's a very good idea for us to go around asking people what happened to the world we knew, or what year it is, or who the President of America is at the present moment."
"Or who the latest James Bond is. Or the latest Dr. Who." Karla's tone was sarcastic.
"Precisely", said Helen. "Though I won't pretend I could have answered either of those questions this morning."
"It's Ferryman", said Laurence. He felt a strong reluctance to dwell on the subject of what world they were occupying. "We have to find Ferryman. He's the key."
"That might be difficult", said Karla, rather heatedly. "Did you see how quickly he pulled away? Don't tell me he wasn't breaking the speed limit-- whatever the speed limit is in this alternative universe of yours."
"You're not being very constructive, Karla", said Helen, with a little frown.
Karla stood up. She looked more frightened than ever, and now she looked angry to boot.
"You know what?" she asked. "I don't know anything about either of you. It seems to me that you're both taking this a little too calmly. I recognize a put-up job when I see one."
"Sit down" said Helen-- and now her tone was that of a school-teacher rather than a university lecturer.
"No thanks", said Karla, her eyes flashing. "Ever since I stepped on that bus, I've had the very strong feeling that I'm part of some kind of sick game. And, sorry to say, but there seems something a little off about both of you. I'm not playing any more. Deal with that!"
She rose from their corner table, and strode towards the door, without looking back. A few moments later she had disappeared into the night. One woman, watching her from the bar, looked accusingly at Laurence.
"Should we follow her?", asked Laurence.
"I don't think that would serve any purpose" said Helen. "She'd just storm away."
"I don't know why she got mad at us", said Laurence. He was surprised how distressed he felt at this turn of events, considering the weirdness of the situation as it already stood.
"It's the kind of person she is", said Helen. "If she was taken hostage in a bank robbery, she'd take that in her stride. But anything she can't make sense of, anything that challenges her worldview-- well, she can't deal with that."
Helen spoke with such conviction that Laurence asked: "Did you know her...before?"
Helen shook her head. "I just know the type."
Laurence found himself wondering if Helen knew his type, as well. If she did, she knew him better than himself, because Laurence had spent almost thirty years feeling like a stranger in his own soul.
A barmaid approached them. She looked very tired, but she smiled gamely. "Can I get you guys anything?"
After a brief silence, Helen said: "A pint of Guinness for me, and Laurence...?"
"A Coke", said Laurence. Suddenly, the thought of a Coke was very, very appealing.
He half-expected the barmaid to ask what a Coke was; but she simply nodded and said: "Anything else?"
"Do you do food?" asked Helen.
"Only sandwiches this time of night", said the barmaid. "Cheese and ham."
"A sandwich each", said Helen. "Ham for me."
"Me too", said Laurence, who felt less enthusiastic about food.
The girl nodded again, and withdrew. She was very pale.
"I don't have any money" said Laurence. "I lost my wallet."
"No, you didn't" said Helen, her voice soft but firm. She looked straight into his eyes. "You gave it to a beggar, just as we were about to turn onto the bridge."
Laurence flushed. "You saw that?" he asked. For a moment, embarrassment drowned out his fear.
She nodded again, and now he noticed a new look in her face-- sympathy.
"I think", she said, reaching out and taking his hand, "that we are going to have to be honest with each other, in this situation. A man who gives away his wallet-- it seems like the act of a man who has reached the end of his tether."
Laurence looked at the bar. The woman who had given him an accusing look was now putting on her coat.
"Sure", said Laurence.
Helen squeezed his hand, and-- to his horror-- tears came into his eyes. He lowered his gaze, unwilling to let anyone else see his emotion. It had been a long time-- it seemed forever-- since anybody had offered him any sympathy.
Please don't let me lose it, he prayed-- to the God he'd never really believed in.
"I understand", said Helen, her voice firmer now, as though realising the effect that her sympathetic tones had had upon him. She withdrew her hand. "Laurence, I'm an extremely private person, but I'm going to tell you something personal because I think it might be relevant."
Laurence looked up, curious, and a little startled.
"I have very few years left to live", she said, dispassionately. "And the years that I have-- they are likely to be increasingly unpleasant."
"I'm sorry" said Laurence, feeling foolish even as he spoke the words.
"Not as sorry as I am", said Helen, with a smile that was grim but not bitter. "This very morning I had made my mind up to ask my sister....if she would help me avoid the unpleasantness, when it became too unpleasant."
"You mean...?"
"I mean euthanasia", said Helen, briskly. "Assisted suicide. Whatever term you want to use."
Another long silence intervened. 'Two Princes' had changed to a song that sounded like Michael Jackson but that Laurence didn't recognise. Perhaps it was a song that Michael Jackson had never released in the world they had come from. It was pretty catchy. He found himself wondering, irrelevantly, whether the King of Pop was still alive and breathing here.
"So you think", he asked, "you think this isn't just a coincidence, that we were both....?".
"We have to consider every hypothesis", said Helen.
"So that would mean Karla...?"
Helen nodded. "A nice girl", she said. "But didn't she strike you as being a little...high-strung?"
Laurence, who only ever fell for high-strung girls, nodded. "I guess so", he said.
"She struck me as somebody who has recovering from a recent....episode of some kind", said Helen.
Laurence thought about Karla wandering the streets of this strange new world. Where on earth had she gone? What would happen to her?
She's a tough cookie, he told himself. But he wasn't convinced.
"But what difference does any of this make?" asked Laurence.
"Maybe no difference at all", said Helen, with that air of detachment of which only intellectuals-- and doctors giving bad news-- seem capable. "But it might make all the difference in the world. Maybe we are here for a reason, and maybe knowing that reason can help us get back to where we came from. If we even want to get back, that is."
Laurence was only surprised at the last remark for a brief moment. After all, he had been about to top himself, Helen was dying, and Karla seemed to have some trouble of her own.
"Are you saying...this is some kind of second chance?" asked Laurence, feeling suddenly hopeful at the idea.
Helen nodded. "It could be. It could be. If so many things are different in this world, how do I know that I'm still dying here? How do we know that whatever...whatever might be the matter with any of us might still be the case?"
Laurence wasn't sure how to reply to that, so he was grateful when the barmaid reappeared, carrying her tray of drinks and sandwiches. He was pleased to see that the sandwiches were far from skimpy.
"Here you go", she said, laying the glasses and plate out on the table. "That comes to fifteen twenty."
Helen reached into her jacket pocket, and after a moment's fumbling produced a twenty euro note. She extended it towards the barmaid.
But the barmaid, not reaching out for it, looked at it strangely. "Uh..." she said.
"I'm sorry", said Helen, giving a little laugh and crunching the twenty euro note in her fist. "I've just been on holiday..."
The barmaid laughed a little awkwardly. "Where to?", she asked. "I didn't think they took euro anywhere anymore", she said.
"Monaco, believe it or not", said Helen. Laurence was impressed at her quick thinking. "Card?"
"Sure", said the barmaid, taking the Visa from Helen's fingers. As she did so, she glanced at Laurence, and she seemed to give a start. For a moment, she stared at him intensely.
But almost immediately, she turned her gaze away, and she was running the card through the portable card reader she had on her belt. She seemed very shaken.
Laurence glanced at Helen, wondering if she had noticed the barmaid's reaction. Her eyes told him that she had.
"Uh..." said the barmaid. "Uh, I'm sorry but this, but the payment is being rejected."
"Oh dear", said Helen. "Try this one."
As the waitress took the second card from Helen's hand, she looked at Laurence again. It was only for a moment, but once again Laurence saw her eyes widen in what seemed like alarm.
"No", said the barmaid. "This one too. I'm sorry."
"My fault", said Helen. Now she had her wallet out on the table, and she was drawing out card after card. She took out a blood donor card, a business card, and a university ID card before she hit on another credit card. "Try this."
This time the barmaid kept her eyes averted from Laurence. "No", she said. "Rejected."
"I don't have anything else on me, I'm afraid", said Helen. "Is there an ATM around here?"
"How about that one?" asked the barmaid, pointing. "We certainly take Excelsior."
Helen looked down at the table. The barmaid was pointing at the laminated card that Ferryman had given each one of them. Helen had left her own lying on the table beside her. It was a rather goofy-looking card with the words Monstrous Mystery Tour written in cartoonish letters.
"Of course", said Helen, picking it up. "I forgot all about it."
The barmaid ran the ridiculous-looking card through her machine, and gave a smile of relief. "That's fine", she said. "I'm sorry about all that."
"Not at all", said Helen, signing the slip that the barmaid offered her. "I'm sorry, I don't know what could have happened with the others. I was sure they were still good."
"Don't worry about it", said the barmaid. "I've, uh, I've been there myself."
Once again-- as though she couldn't help herself-- she looked at Laurence. Once again alarm filled her face.
"What's wrong?", asked Laurence.
"I'm sorry" said the barmaid, forcing her expression into an almost-neutral smile. "It's just....I think maybe I recognize you. Are you from around here?"
"From near about here", chimed in Helen, before Laurence could respond.
"It's really weird", said the girl, suddenly dropping her professional tone, "but I think I've been...I've been dreaming about you."
Laurence was embarrassed. Only one girl had ever told him she'd dreamed about him. And she'd turned out to be crazy.
The girl flushed suddenly, as though the connotations of her confession had just struck her. "Well, when I say a dream, I really mean...a nightmare."
Laurence shuddered. Somehow, he had the strange sensation that he knew what the girl was going to say-- even though he didn't.
"What kind of nightmare?" asked Helen.
The girl didn't turn to look at her. Her eyes seemed glued on Laurence now. She replied in a low, strangely child-like voice.
"It's the middle of nowhere", she said. "A place I've never been before....a place that nobody's ever been before. That's what it feels like. It feels like a completely empty place, like a wasteland, except that....I can't see anything around me. Everything is surrounded by a mist. A green mist."
Laurence began to tremble. The vision he'd seen from the tour bus window came to his mind.
"I know I'm asleep in the dream", the barmaid continued. "And I'm frightened I'm never going to wake up again."
The unidentified Michael Jackson song had now changed to 'God Only Knows' by the Beach Boys. It had always seemed a spooky song to Laurence. Not it seemed spookier and more haunting than ever before.
"And then...then I see three figures coming out of the mist. They are all wearing cloaks and hoods, and they are walking towards me. I want to run away, but I can't."
Now the girl seemed to be shivering, too. She seemed to have completely forgotten her surroundings-- almost as though she was hypnotized.
"And then one of the figures steps towards me. At first I think his face is a skull, but I realize it's a skull mask when he takes it off."
Now Laurence did know what was coming next.
"It's you", said the barmaid. "Not somebody who looks like you. You. Except...except the look on your face is completely and utterly evil. And you say...."
The girl fell silent, and the sound of the Beach Boys seemed to be coming from a whole world away.
"Yes?", asked Helen. "What does he say?"
"You say, I am the end of your world."
"Mandy!"
The call came from the bar. The barmaid seemed to wake up from her trance, and looked around in surprise. Then she looked embarrassed.
"I'm sorry", she said, backing away. "It's probably just...it's just a stupid dream." She laughed unconvincingly. "But it's been keeping me awake for nights."
She hurried away, but not without one last look over her shoulder at Laurence. And once again, it was a look of fear.
Laurence reached for his Coke and took a deep gulp of it. He didn't want to look at Helen, or discuss what had just been said. At least, not for a few moments.
As the girl had described the dream, it was as though he could see it himself.
The Coke tasted better than any Coke he had ever tasted in his life.
"Karla", whispered Helen.
Laurence looked up, towards the bar. Karla had reappeared, and she was walking towards them. She looked angrier than ever-- but chastened, too.
"OK", she said, when she had reached them. "I'm sorry. I freaked out there. My bad. I shouldn't have said what I said. I think we should stick together. I most definitely think we should stick together."
It had been raining, and her hair was plastered down across her forehead. She looked prettier than ever, Laurence thought.
He was still shivering.
Also, our heroes have noticed a few odd things about this place they've found themselves in. An ad for The Fellowship of the Ring movie advertises Patrick Stewart rather than Ian McKellen as Gandalf. Also, Osama Bin Laden is still alive. What's going on, reader? You'll have to read to find out...
Oh, and Mr. Ferryman drove away and left them behind, just as he threatened. Or course he did!
"We have to be careful", said Helen, her voice low.
The trio were sitting in a corner of the pub, as far from the other occupants as they could get. And it wasn't difficult; if it was ever busy in Casey's pub, it certainly wasn't tonight.
"I think it might be too late to be careful", said Karla. Her face was pale. "That bus just left. Pun very much intended."
"Well, yes", said Helen. She spoke as calmly as she might speak if she was giving a lecture, although she looked every bit as frightened as Karla-- and as frightened as Laurence felt. "That bus has left. But let's not make any more mistakes."
"It doesn't seem to me like we have any cards to play one way or the other", said Karla.
"There are always cards to play" said Helen. "First off, let's just admit it-- this isn't the world we left, is it?"
There was a long silence, filled with 'Two Princes' by the Spin Doctors, which was playing on the sound system of the pub. At the bar, somebody laughed.
"What does that even mean?" asked Karla.
"Well, Karla, what do you call it when a world-famous terrorist mastermind apparently comes back to life and nobody thinks there's anything strange about this?"
Karla was silent. She looked angry.
"It's not the world we left", said Laurence. It was a wrench to say it, even though he was aware of a certain exhilaration buried deep under his panic.
"There's only one world", said Karla, and for a moment she seemed childishly petulant. "What other world could this be?"
"Oh come on", said Helen, in a patient tone. "We've all heard about alternate dimensions, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, time travel...."
"Next you'll be telling me we're subjects of some....some government mind control experiment", said Karla. The way she said it made Laurence suspect that this was the very thing she feared the most.
"Anything is possible", said Helen, shrugging. "But this is the point I'm making; I don't think it's a very good idea for us to go around asking people what happened to the world we knew, or what year it is, or who the President of America is at the present moment."
"Or who the latest James Bond is. Or the latest Dr. Who." Karla's tone was sarcastic.
"Precisely", said Helen. "Though I won't pretend I could have answered either of those questions this morning."
"It's Ferryman", said Laurence. He felt a strong reluctance to dwell on the subject of what world they were occupying. "We have to find Ferryman. He's the key."
"That might be difficult", said Karla, rather heatedly. "Did you see how quickly he pulled away? Don't tell me he wasn't breaking the speed limit-- whatever the speed limit is in this alternative universe of yours."
"You're not being very constructive, Karla", said Helen, with a little frown.
Karla stood up. She looked more frightened than ever, and now she looked angry to boot.
"You know what?" she asked. "I don't know anything about either of you. It seems to me that you're both taking this a little too calmly. I recognize a put-up job when I see one."
"Sit down" said Helen-- and now her tone was that of a school-teacher rather than a university lecturer.
"No thanks", said Karla, her eyes flashing. "Ever since I stepped on that bus, I've had the very strong feeling that I'm part of some kind of sick game. And, sorry to say, but there seems something a little off about both of you. I'm not playing any more. Deal with that!"
She rose from their corner table, and strode towards the door, without looking back. A few moments later she had disappeared into the night. One woman, watching her from the bar, looked accusingly at Laurence.
"Should we follow her?", asked Laurence.
"I don't think that would serve any purpose" said Helen. "She'd just storm away."
"I don't know why she got mad at us", said Laurence. He was surprised how distressed he felt at this turn of events, considering the weirdness of the situation as it already stood.
"It's the kind of person she is", said Helen. "If she was taken hostage in a bank robbery, she'd take that in her stride. But anything she can't make sense of, anything that challenges her worldview-- well, she can't deal with that."
Helen spoke with such conviction that Laurence asked: "Did you know her...before?"
Helen shook her head. "I just know the type."
Laurence found himself wondering if Helen knew his type, as well. If she did, she knew him better than himself, because Laurence had spent almost thirty years feeling like a stranger in his own soul.
A barmaid approached them. She looked very tired, but she smiled gamely. "Can I get you guys anything?"
After a brief silence, Helen said: "A pint of Guinness for me, and Laurence...?"
"A Coke", said Laurence. Suddenly, the thought of a Coke was very, very appealing.
He half-expected the barmaid to ask what a Coke was; but she simply nodded and said: "Anything else?"
"Do you do food?" asked Helen.
"Only sandwiches this time of night", said the barmaid. "Cheese and ham."
"A sandwich each", said Helen. "Ham for me."
"Me too", said Laurence, who felt less enthusiastic about food.
The girl nodded again, and withdrew. She was very pale.
"I don't have any money" said Laurence. "I lost my wallet."
"No, you didn't" said Helen, her voice soft but firm. She looked straight into his eyes. "You gave it to a beggar, just as we were about to turn onto the bridge."
Laurence flushed. "You saw that?" he asked. For a moment, embarrassment drowned out his fear.
She nodded again, and now he noticed a new look in her face-- sympathy.
"I think", she said, reaching out and taking his hand, "that we are going to have to be honest with each other, in this situation. A man who gives away his wallet-- it seems like the act of a man who has reached the end of his tether."
Laurence looked at the bar. The woman who had given him an accusing look was now putting on her coat.
"Sure", said Laurence.
Helen squeezed his hand, and-- to his horror-- tears came into his eyes. He lowered his gaze, unwilling to let anyone else see his emotion. It had been a long time-- it seemed forever-- since anybody had offered him any sympathy.
Please don't let me lose it, he prayed-- to the God he'd never really believed in.
"I understand", said Helen, her voice firmer now, as though realising the effect that her sympathetic tones had had upon him. She withdrew her hand. "Laurence, I'm an extremely private person, but I'm going to tell you something personal because I think it might be relevant."
Laurence looked up, curious, and a little startled.
"I have very few years left to live", she said, dispassionately. "And the years that I have-- they are likely to be increasingly unpleasant."
"I'm sorry" said Laurence, feeling foolish even as he spoke the words.
"Not as sorry as I am", said Helen, with a smile that was grim but not bitter. "This very morning I had made my mind up to ask my sister....if she would help me avoid the unpleasantness, when it became too unpleasant."
"You mean...?"
"I mean euthanasia", said Helen, briskly. "Assisted suicide. Whatever term you want to use."
Another long silence intervened. 'Two Princes' had changed to a song that sounded like Michael Jackson but that Laurence didn't recognise. Perhaps it was a song that Michael Jackson had never released in the world they had come from. It was pretty catchy. He found himself wondering, irrelevantly, whether the King of Pop was still alive and breathing here.
"So you think", he asked, "you think this isn't just a coincidence, that we were both....?".
"We have to consider every hypothesis", said Helen.
"So that would mean Karla...?"
Helen nodded. "A nice girl", she said. "But didn't she strike you as being a little...high-strung?"
Laurence, who only ever fell for high-strung girls, nodded. "I guess so", he said.
"She struck me as somebody who has recovering from a recent....episode of some kind", said Helen.
Laurence thought about Karla wandering the streets of this strange new world. Where on earth had she gone? What would happen to her?
She's a tough cookie, he told himself. But he wasn't convinced.
"But what difference does any of this make?" asked Laurence.
"Maybe no difference at all", said Helen, with that air of detachment of which only intellectuals-- and doctors giving bad news-- seem capable. "But it might make all the difference in the world. Maybe we are here for a reason, and maybe knowing that reason can help us get back to where we came from. If we even want to get back, that is."
Laurence was only surprised at the last remark for a brief moment. After all, he had been about to top himself, Helen was dying, and Karla seemed to have some trouble of her own.
"Are you saying...this is some kind of second chance?" asked Laurence, feeling suddenly hopeful at the idea.
Helen nodded. "It could be. It could be. If so many things are different in this world, how do I know that I'm still dying here? How do we know that whatever...whatever might be the matter with any of us might still be the case?"
Laurence wasn't sure how to reply to that, so he was grateful when the barmaid reappeared, carrying her tray of drinks and sandwiches. He was pleased to see that the sandwiches were far from skimpy.
"Here you go", she said, laying the glasses and plate out on the table. "That comes to fifteen twenty."
Helen reached into her jacket pocket, and after a moment's fumbling produced a twenty euro note. She extended it towards the barmaid.
But the barmaid, not reaching out for it, looked at it strangely. "Uh..." she said.
"I'm sorry", said Helen, giving a little laugh and crunching the twenty euro note in her fist. "I've just been on holiday..."
The barmaid laughed a little awkwardly. "Where to?", she asked. "I didn't think they took euro anywhere anymore", she said.
"Monaco, believe it or not", said Helen. Laurence was impressed at her quick thinking. "Card?"
"Sure", said the barmaid, taking the Visa from Helen's fingers. As she did so, she glanced at Laurence, and she seemed to give a start. For a moment, she stared at him intensely.
But almost immediately, she turned her gaze away, and she was running the card through the portable card reader she had on her belt. She seemed very shaken.
Laurence glanced at Helen, wondering if she had noticed the barmaid's reaction. Her eyes told him that she had.
"Uh..." said the barmaid. "Uh, I'm sorry but this, but the payment is being rejected."
"Oh dear", said Helen. "Try this one."
As the waitress took the second card from Helen's hand, she looked at Laurence again. It was only for a moment, but once again Laurence saw her eyes widen in what seemed like alarm.
"No", said the barmaid. "This one too. I'm sorry."
"My fault", said Helen. Now she had her wallet out on the table, and she was drawing out card after card. She took out a blood donor card, a business card, and a university ID card before she hit on another credit card. "Try this."
This time the barmaid kept her eyes averted from Laurence. "No", she said. "Rejected."
"I don't have anything else on me, I'm afraid", said Helen. "Is there an ATM around here?"
"How about that one?" asked the barmaid, pointing. "We certainly take Excelsior."
Helen looked down at the table. The barmaid was pointing at the laminated card that Ferryman had given each one of them. Helen had left her own lying on the table beside her. It was a rather goofy-looking card with the words Monstrous Mystery Tour written in cartoonish letters.
"Of course", said Helen, picking it up. "I forgot all about it."
The barmaid ran the ridiculous-looking card through her machine, and gave a smile of relief. "That's fine", she said. "I'm sorry about all that."
"Not at all", said Helen, signing the slip that the barmaid offered her. "I'm sorry, I don't know what could have happened with the others. I was sure they were still good."
"Don't worry about it", said the barmaid. "I've, uh, I've been there myself."
Once again-- as though she couldn't help herself-- she looked at Laurence. Once again alarm filled her face.
"What's wrong?", asked Laurence.
"I'm sorry" said the barmaid, forcing her expression into an almost-neutral smile. "It's just....I think maybe I recognize you. Are you from around here?"
"From near about here", chimed in Helen, before Laurence could respond.
"It's really weird", said the girl, suddenly dropping her professional tone, "but I think I've been...I've been dreaming about you."
Laurence was embarrassed. Only one girl had ever told him she'd dreamed about him. And she'd turned out to be crazy.
The girl flushed suddenly, as though the connotations of her confession had just struck her. "Well, when I say a dream, I really mean...a nightmare."
Laurence shuddered. Somehow, he had the strange sensation that he knew what the girl was going to say-- even though he didn't.
"What kind of nightmare?" asked Helen.
The girl didn't turn to look at her. Her eyes seemed glued on Laurence now. She replied in a low, strangely child-like voice.
"It's the middle of nowhere", she said. "A place I've never been before....a place that nobody's ever been before. That's what it feels like. It feels like a completely empty place, like a wasteland, except that....I can't see anything around me. Everything is surrounded by a mist. A green mist."
Laurence began to tremble. The vision he'd seen from the tour bus window came to his mind.
"I know I'm asleep in the dream", the barmaid continued. "And I'm frightened I'm never going to wake up again."
The unidentified Michael Jackson song had now changed to 'God Only Knows' by the Beach Boys. It had always seemed a spooky song to Laurence. Not it seemed spookier and more haunting than ever before.
"And then...then I see three figures coming out of the mist. They are all wearing cloaks and hoods, and they are walking towards me. I want to run away, but I can't."
Now the girl seemed to be shivering, too. She seemed to have completely forgotten her surroundings-- almost as though she was hypnotized.
"And then one of the figures steps towards me. At first I think his face is a skull, but I realize it's a skull mask when he takes it off."
Now Laurence did know what was coming next.
"It's you", said the barmaid. "Not somebody who looks like you. You. Except...except the look on your face is completely and utterly evil. And you say...."
The girl fell silent, and the sound of the Beach Boys seemed to be coming from a whole world away.
"Yes?", asked Helen. "What does he say?"
"You say, I am the end of your world."
"Mandy!"
The call came from the bar. The barmaid seemed to wake up from her trance, and looked around in surprise. Then she looked embarrassed.
"I'm sorry", she said, backing away. "It's probably just...it's just a stupid dream." She laughed unconvincingly. "But it's been keeping me awake for nights."
She hurried away, but not without one last look over her shoulder at Laurence. And once again, it was a look of fear.
Laurence reached for his Coke and took a deep gulp of it. He didn't want to look at Helen, or discuss what had just been said. At least, not for a few moments.
As the girl had described the dream, it was as though he could see it himself.
The Coke tasted better than any Coke he had ever tasted in his life.
"Karla", whispered Helen.
Laurence looked up, towards the bar. Karla had reappeared, and she was walking towards them. She looked angrier than ever-- but chastened, too.
"OK", she said, when she had reached them. "I'm sorry. I freaked out there. My bad. I shouldn't have said what I said. I think we should stick together. I most definitely think we should stick together."
It had been raining, and her hair was plastered down across her forehead. She looked prettier than ever, Laurence thought.
He was still shivering.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
"Are you Writing Much These Days?"
My father asked me that question yesterday. I replied, "I'm writing my Catholic Voice articles and my Open Door articles."
"That's not much, is it?" he asked.
It occurred to me that he was right, and that I haven't even been writing much on this blog.
The truth is, I have been in a period of withdrawal. Partly, in terms of this blog, it's because I wrote a lot of posts that expressed some of my deepest and oldest ideas, and I felt rather cleaned out in terms of blogging.
But partly it's because I've had my own struggles. This blog expresses all the things I believe in, all my ideals; but I fall miserably short of those ideals. I used to post prayer requests at difficult times, but I stopped doing it, because I felt I was worrying people. I would get concerned emails, which I always appreciated, but which made me feel bad for causing anxiety and seeking attention. (And seeking attention was exactly what I was doing.)
If I ever seem like I am sermonizing in this blog, I realize I am the last person who can afford to sermonize. Please pray for me to overcome my faults, most especially pride and fear. Or, more accurately, please pray for me to let God's grace overcome my faults.
I also want to thank everyone who's ever read this blog, and everyone who's commented, and everyone who's prayed for me. This blog has meant so much to me, especially the fact that there are no boundaries to what I can write about; the more I have pushed the boat out, the more I have been delighted that people continued to read it, and to respond.
I cannot ever remember a time, from my earliest boyhood, when I didn't have the urge to express the things that excited my imagination in written words (and, back then, in pictures). I remember once, watching a TV programme about Def Leppard, my enthusiasm must have been so obvious that my older brother said: "Maolsheachlann will be writing about a heavy metal band called Blind Cheetah next." That's the kind of thing I did. It's so wonderful when somebody is there, on the other end, to be an audience. It makes all the difference.
So thank you, and please pray for me (as I pray for you), and don't go away-- this blog is a going concern.
"That's not much, is it?" he asked.
It occurred to me that he was right, and that I haven't even been writing much on this blog.
The truth is, I have been in a period of withdrawal. Partly, in terms of this blog, it's because I wrote a lot of posts that expressed some of my deepest and oldest ideas, and I felt rather cleaned out in terms of blogging.
But partly it's because I've had my own struggles. This blog expresses all the things I believe in, all my ideals; but I fall miserably short of those ideals. I used to post prayer requests at difficult times, but I stopped doing it, because I felt I was worrying people. I would get concerned emails, which I always appreciated, but which made me feel bad for causing anxiety and seeking attention. (And seeking attention was exactly what I was doing.)
If I ever seem like I am sermonizing in this blog, I realize I am the last person who can afford to sermonize. Please pray for me to overcome my faults, most especially pride and fear. Or, more accurately, please pray for me to let God's grace overcome my faults.
I also want to thank everyone who's ever read this blog, and everyone who's commented, and everyone who's prayed for me. This blog has meant so much to me, especially the fact that there are no boundaries to what I can write about; the more I have pushed the boat out, the more I have been delighted that people continued to read it, and to respond.
I cannot ever remember a time, from my earliest boyhood, when I didn't have the urge to express the things that excited my imagination in written words (and, back then, in pictures). I remember once, watching a TV programme about Def Leppard, my enthusiasm must have been so obvious that my older brother said: "Maolsheachlann will be writing about a heavy metal band called Blind Cheetah next." That's the kind of thing I did. It's so wonderful when somebody is there, on the other end, to be an audience. It makes all the difference.
So thank you, and please pray for me (as I pray for you), and don't go away-- this blog is a going concern.
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Unpaid Advertisement
I had a request from ClergyshirtsUK.com to publicize their business, which makes shirts for clergy. And here is the link: http://www.clericalshirtsuk.com/
I don't know how many clerical readers I have (though I can think of at least two), but it may be of interest to some.
Now and again I get these kind of requests. I'm happy to oblige (unless I forget about it). Trying to run a business, or indeed, trying to start or pursue any (or almost any) kind of venture at all, is a laudable activity. I think it's only right to facilitate it where possible.
I don't know how many clerical readers I have (though I can think of at least two), but it may be of interest to some.
Now and again I get these kind of requests. I'm happy to oblige (unless I forget about it). Trying to run a business, or indeed, trying to start or pursue any (or almost any) kind of venture at all, is a laudable activity. I think it's only right to facilitate it where possible.
Saturday, August 15, 2015
The Ireland I Had Dreamed Of (VI)
Brown is of the conventional school of Irish historiography that holds that the 'humanism' (to use his word) of the 1916 Rising and the Irish Literary Revival was betrayed by a narrow-minded, stultifying, conservative establishment after the Irish Free State came into existence in 1922.
I can't agree with this. I believe that the vision (cultural, rather than political) of the Irish Free State was exactly what the Irish people, as a whole, had been seeking during the struggle for independence. I believe it was a fine vision, and I'm sorry it was abandoned.
I'm not going to comment too much on the economic aspect. Brown believes that the first governments of the new State were excessive in their determination to balance the books and limit public spending. This may be the case. Certainly, their slowness in tackling the overcrowding problem in Dublin-- where, as Brown points out, there were 22,915 families living in one room dwellings-- seems lamentable. He admits that there was some anxiety about whether the new State would be economically or politically viable, and that the new rulers were entirely unused to holding the reins of government and were understandably cautious. But think of all those people living out either the best years of their lives, or the last years of their lives, in such overcrowding. (Children, on the other hand, tend to be more buoyant, and most of them would have encountered better conditions later on.)
Personally I am in favour of pretty extensive government spending. I don't think microeconomics and macroeconomics are the same, and I think a government has much more latitude than private individuals and private companies in running up debts and borrowing. There are many parts of the world, like Germany and Scandinavia, that seem to have high levels of public spending and do just fine. As for Greece, in my recent reading of Evelyn Waugh's diary, I came across an entry from the 1920's where Waugh complained that it was always a bank holiday in Greece and nobody did any work, so I think that their problems are very long in the making.
And that's as much as I am going to say about economics-- aside from the admission that the Irish economic and social model of the time seems to have been dependent on enormous levels of emigration, and that economic modernization probably should have happened sooner rather than later-- a primarily agricultural country, where most of the farms were small and where inheritance generally went to the eldest son, didn't have a whole lot to do with the other kids (and though there was a great deal of celibacy in Ireland at this time, those who did marry had significantly bigger families than was the case in other countries).
But my whole argument is that economic modernization did not necessarily demand cultural 'modernization'.
Brown seems to think otherwise:
"In the 1920s, it was the notion of the virtuous countryman that writers, artists and commentators accepted as the legacy of the Literary Revival period, rather than the heroic aristocratic figures of the mythological cycles. A vision of rustic dignity and rural virtue was popularized in speeches, poems, play and paintings...patriotic writers had produced countless poems in which peasants and farmers had appeared not to reveal human possibility but to exhibit the unspoiled simplicity of the essential Irish who for many centuries had endured the ravages of climate and opppression. Poems of this kind had exploited essential properties, such as the bog, hazel trees, currachs, the hearth, primitive cooking utensils, ploughing, sowing, and rough weather, employing a verse technique that owed its simple repetitions and structure to folk-song...They celebrated a vision of Irish pastoral, when rural life was a condition of virtue in as much as it remained an expression of an ancient civilization, uncontaminted by commercialism and progress.
The social reality of the countryside was more dynamic, unheroic, hardly bucolic, and involved in change in ways which were to disrupt in entirely...."
Brown actually admits that this traditional country life remained intact to a great degree, but then adds that the Irish countryman was "ready to use horse-driven threshing machines, prepared to experiment with steam, and in the 1930's he began to welcome the tractor, which would render the agricultural labourer increasingly redundant, into his rural world. By the 1920s the countryman had willingly accepted mass produced articles of clothing, boots and shoes....the bicycle had introduced a new mobility to the Irish countryside and life in the long dark winters was made more agreeable by the widespread use of commercially produced paraffin oil lamps which replaced the traditional rushlights."
Well, there you go. Farmers started using tractors and so pastoral became obsolete.
Does this strike you, as it strikes me, as being rather silly? Are the arts required to keep perfectly abreast of social change? Or are they not inherently selective?
It seems to me that the same argument would apply to any social ideal. I don't read any modern Irish literature or modern Irish poetry (because I don't read any modern literature or modern poetry full stop), but I see from the colour supplements in the broadsheets, and from advertising, and from various other sources, that twenty-first century Ireland holds up an imaginative ideal of itself that is every bit as unreal as the agrarian vision Brown complains about. For instance, in newspaper articles and in advertising I am always reading about wild office Christmas parties where a great deal of seduction and letting off steam and interpersonal bonding goes on. (And it's always office parties, because apparently everybody works in an office.) I've been to lots of office Christmas parties (or library Christmas parties, anyway); they've always been pleasantly dull affairs.
Similarly, all the literature and journalism and advertising of our era-- in Ireland and elsewhere-- seems to suggest that most people are sexual promiscuous, whereas (from what I can tell) very few people are actually sexually promiscuous.
You get the point I'm making. All art, all social aspiration, tends to be somewhat unrealistic. I would further say that every social vision tends to romanticize either tradition or change. Personally, I am all for romanticizing tradition. To some extent, surely, it must help preserve that which it romanticizes.
But the part of the book which really excited me-- I found it so moving, I was quite overpowered-- was the section about the idealization of Ireland's West coast. As you can imagine, it excited me in a way that Brown did not intend.
The West of Ireland at this time was seen as the bastion of unpolluted 'Irishness'. The biggest Gaeltacht areas (the term for an area where Irish is actually spoken as the language of the people) was in the West, as are the Blasket and Aran islands-- islands where a very traditional way of life survived, and which were a fashionable subject for artists and dramatists and poets during the Gaelic Revival. (Biographies by some of the actual islanders, in Irish, also became popular).
Brown quotes this very interesting account of a visit to the West from the Irish writer Séan Ó Faoláin, which seems very typical of the self-conscious artist's horror of all things romantic and populist:
It was like taking off one's clothes for a swim naked in some mountain-pool. Nobody who has not had this sensation of suddenly 'belonging' somewhere-- of finding the lap of the lost mother-- can understand what a release the discovery of Gaelic ireland means to modern Ireland. I know that not for years and years did I get free of this heavenly bond of an ancient, lyrical, permanent, continuous immemorial self, symbolized by the lonely mountains, the virginal lakes, the traditional language, the simple, certain, uncomplex modes of life, that world of the lost childhood of my race where I, too, became for a while eternally young.
Now, what was Ó Faoláin so afraid of? Why spurn something like that? I can understand the restlessness of the artist, the desire to break out of a box, the need for new horizons and new subject-matter. But need there be a conflict? Does it have to be all or nothing, every artist and poet and novelist restricting himself or herself to writing about the Blasket islands, or all serious artists discarding the theme completely? Is there not an infinity of ways such an ideal can be featured in art, in the same way that Christian art has found an infinitity of ways to meditate on the Cross and the Resurrection and the scenes of the gospel and the lives of the saints? Can it not inform urban and 'modern' life, as well as rural life?
And if some artists had an allergic reaction to this, and had to let their imagination roam free in some completely different atmosphere, did artists as a whole have to rebel?
And if artists had to rebel, why should the people rebel?
Indeed, the people never did really rebel. To a great extent, the myth of the West and of a primordial Irishness remained popular, in advertisements and tourism and popular art and in all the things aesthetes disdain.
I've never been to the Aran Islands (the Blasket Islands are now uninhabited). I'm not personally particularly keen on literature and art from the West of Ireland. But I do cherish the kind of idyll that found its fullest expression there, and I think there was no need to assume it was played out or stale or obsolete. I could easily imagine hanging paintings of West of Ireland landscapes in my home or office.
Terence Brown himself shows an almost amusing fear of the West's hypnotic power as the cradle of the race:
"In the 1920's a number of literary works were published which attempted a more realistic treatment of the western island and the Gaeltacht, in a tradition that had begun with the short stories of the Irish language writer Pádraic O'Conaire and Seumus O'Kelly. Novels such as Peadar O'Donnell's Islanders (1928) and Adrigoole (1929) and Liam O'Flaherty's Thy Neighbour's Wife (1923) are works therefore not of romantic discovery but essays in rural naturalism and social criticism..."
And yet! "In both O'Donnell and O'Flaherty's writings there are passages of epic writing therefore which obtrude in their realistic settings. At such moments class politics and social analysis give way before an apprehension of the west as a place of fundamentally natural forces, of human figures set passively or heroically against landscapes of stone, rock and sea in a way that makes their work less radical than they perhaps thought they were. There is implicit therefore in their writings a sense that Gaelic Ireland in the west is the authentic heroic Ireland in a way that confirms rather than contradicts the conventional image of the west as 'certain set apart'. The power of this conventional image was perhaps so great that it affected as intelligent a social commentator as Peadar O'Donnell and overwhelmed the turbulent anger of Liam O'Flaherty's social criticism. "
On the next page, Brown quotes what seems like a most erudite insight from 'an English visitor':
The West is different. Its spirit was used by the intellectuals in the late struggle [for national independence] but it was never theirs'. It seems to come from some primitive elemental force which smoulders on, like a turf fire, long after such movements have spent themselves. It is a permanent factor to the existence of which no Irish statesman can safely shut his eyes.
Indeed, this 'primitive elemental force' has haunted Ireland-- intellectual included-- long after it was supposedly debunked. Certainly Irish artists have never found an equivalent matrix of images and ideals.
I think the human imagination is drawn instinctively to something timeless, to folklore and 'elemental energies', to some kind of dignified simplicity. Personally, I find this in the practice of the Catholic faith. I am a Catholic because I believe Catholicism is true; but I do think that, in the rhythms of the liturgy and the rosary, and the cycles of the liturgical calendar, and the treasury of saint stories, and the timeless unity of Catholic life, I also find what artists and tourists and so many others sought in the West of Ireland.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
My Weird Appetites
Today I found myself thinking about
something that I've often thought about in the past, but that recent
circumstances have given me particular cause to ponder. And that is, how
bizarrely specific our appetites and desires and inclinations can be.
When I say "recent circumstances", I mean my own experience, as this has happened to me quite a lot in recent weeks.
The first strange hankering I want to mention concerns the American show The Office. (After Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, which I tend to lump together as one show, this is my favourite television programme. I'm not sure I can even yield the supremacy to Star Trek. I like them in different ways.)
There is one excellent episode of The Office called 'Business Trip'. (The scriptwriters of The Office had a difficult time spinning storylines out of such a restrictive set-up, which was simply the life of a paper merchants and its employees. They often stretched the premise too far into wackiness. But 'Business Trip' is pleasingly simple, and it's hard to believe that it took them five seasons to use the storyline of a business trip.)
The story-line of 'Business Trip' involves Michael Scott (the office manager and central character of the show, played by Steve Carrell) and two other characters (Andy, a preppy salesman who is engaged to one of the office accountants) and Oscar (a gay, Mexican accountant) all going on a business trip to Winnipeg in November. Michael is boyishly excited about the trip, but it doesn't turn out to be very exciting.
(David Wallace, their CEO, mentions at one point that: "It's pretty tough to find somebody who wants to go up to Winnipeg mid-November." The lack of glamour in the business trip and its location is a big theme of the episode. This is part of what I find appealing; as I mentioned a few times previously, I like all things provincial. I don't know if Winnipeg is 'provincial', but you know what I mean.)
The scene that excited me particularly was one involving Andy and Oscar. They visit a local bar, one that is portrayed as being not particularly exciting. They get drunk and Oscar starts asking Andy what he can possibly see in his fiancee. Andy mentions that they haven't yet had sex (and in a modern comedy, of course, two engaged people remaining chaste is seen as bizarre-- though Oscar does ask, "Are you guys waiting to be married?" and Andy says: "Honestly, I don't know what we're waiting for!", so at least the concept of premarital chastity is acknowledged). Oscar drunkenly persuades Andy to phone his fiancée and ask her to explain herself, which he does.
It's a reasonably funny scene, and quite a sweet episode. (As Andy says at the end: "I had to go all the way to Canada to get to know a guy who sits twenty feet away from me".) But the point of my story is that, weeks after watching this episode, I suddenly found it coming into my mind over and over again. It was the pub/club/bar atmosphere that excited me. It had been a long time, a record time, since I'd been in any drinking spot.
Then, one evening, on a bus that was passing through the suburb of Phibsborough in Dublin, I looked at a particular pub and thought: "I'd really like to visit a pub, just to be in one." The desire grew and grew, and I hopped off the bus a few stops later, and went looking for a suitable tavern.
But the point is, I couldn't find one. I'd gone too far into the suburbs. There was only one rather sleepy suburban pub, full of regulars-- the kind of pub I would usually prefer. But that scene from The Office had got into my head and I wanted a pub that wasn't sleepy, and that wasn't full of regulars-- something with a bit of animation, just like the pub in the scene, and where there would be a flow of different and new people (not that I intended to talk to any of them).
Eventually, I satisfied my craving by visiting a local hotel lounge. It was on a Saturday morning, but there were lots of people there from the nearby hotel, so it wasn't just regulars.
What I really wanted was to visit a bar in Winnipeg in November, on a business trip.
More recently, I became completely fascinated with the idea of days. Yes, days. It's something I've written about on this blog several times, though I've always struggled to express what I mean exactly. I'm fascinated by the fact that human life is divided into days. I'm fascinated by their texture, their pulse, how they are remembered. I'm always fascinated to hear people talk about particular stretches of their lives ("I spent three days in bed with the curtains closed...I tramped the streets for a week...we spent a month discussing the idea...") The past imperfect thrills me.
So I suddenly wanted to read a good diary. But every diary I contemplated reading seemed to lack what I was looking for. What about the famous diary of Samuel Pepys, the naval secretary who witnessed the Great Fire of London and whose diary is a goldmine of seventeenth century social history, as well as a much-lauded work of art? I'd tried reading it before, and there was a little bit too much bureaucracy and statecraft for my liking. Besides, it was so old-- I wanted something more recent, so that I could relate to it better. The diary of his contemporary John Evelyn was out for the same reason.
Some of the diaries I came across were first-hand accounts of important moments in history; diaries by senior politicians, for instance. But I didn't want anything so specialised, or so dramatic. I didn't want war, or high politics, or expeditions in far off lands. The craving I felt was for the whole rich tapestry of life; dull days, busy days, sick days, red letter days, dark days, holidays, and every other sort of day. I wanted a diary that had as much of the mundane as the picturesque; more of the mundane, for preference.
So how about The Diary of a Country Parson, by James Woodforde, who died in 1803, and who lived a rather uneventful and routine existence? It's had fans since it was published in 1924. However, I found Woodforde's rather plodding account of dinners and expenditures and other daily incidents to be a bit too plain and lacking in reflection or introspection.
Next I tried the diaries and letters of John Henry Newman. The university where I work, University College Dublin, is the descendant of the Catholic University that John Henry Newman founded (though he only really got it started, before trouble from the Irish bishops forced him to leave). This fact, and the mere fact that it was the first dedicated Catholic university in Ireland, means that we have a huge amount of Newman material in the library, including a complete run of his collected diaries and letters-- over thirty volumes. (Newman kept everything.) I started on the first volume, knowing in my heart that there was no chance I would read them all, but rather taken with the idea of doing so. (I always love the idea of going off the beaten track.)
I managed to keep it up for almost a whole volume. Newman was certainly more stimulating company than the Rev. Woodforde, and lived life at a higher pitch, both intellectually and spiritually. But...it was a bit too high of a pitch. Newman lived a life of heroic dedication, and it's rather exhausting even to read about.
Besides, he wasn't much of a diarist. He jotted down the events of the day, but he didn't expand upon them. The meat of the volume was much more in the letters than the diary, and these were indeed much more of a chronicle of his reactions, anxieties, hopes, impressions, and all the other things we expect from a diary, than was his diary proper. But even here, the obliqueness of the thing became frustrating. I was always pleased to come across a letter to his mother or one of his sisters, where he tended to pour out his heart, but one might just as easily find oneself wading through a long and dry correspondence with some distant acquaintance.
I gave up on diaries for a few days, reading a book about Shakespeare instead, but the hunger overtook me again. And I seemed to have found exactly what I was looking for when I discovered Evelyn Waugh had kept a diary for most of his life. (He destroyed some parts of it, but most of his life is represented.) And even better-- it was much more than just a record of events. He put down his thoughts and ideas and reactions and emotions, too. This seemed like the jackpot. And he was a Catholic, to boot!
But even here, I felt frustrated. It was pretty good as long as he was at public school (for my American readers, this means a private boarding school; they feature heavily in much English writing and many English memoirs of the time, but Waugh was-- as the introduction pointed out-- pretty much the only writer to keep a diary of the experience as it happened.) But then he goes to Oxford-- he destroyed his Oxford diaries, probably because of homosexual experiences recorded in them-- and graduates to a boozy and party-filled young adult life that, despite the presence of many eminent friends, is surprisingly tedious to read about. In fact, the most interesting passages are the ones where he is working as a teacher in a rather obscure school. Too much freedom, I have always noticed, makes everything dull.
I was looking forward to his conversion to Catholicism, which came after his career as a novelist took off, and after the failure of his first marriage (all of these events are missing from the diaries themselves, since he also destroyed this sequence). Unfortunately, when the curtain rises on his successful years, his diary persona becomes blasé and cynical and impersonal (as the volume's editor admits), and the entries are shorter and less heartfelt. I jumped a decade and more, to the end of World War Two; then, when I found him bitterly listing his low opinions of his own children, I gave up on Waugh.
And on diaries, too, at least for the moment. My trawl through them had partly satisfied my hunger, and partly convinced me that I wasn't going to find what I was looking for. Perhaps I had been too influenced by fictional diaries, like The Diary of Adrian Mole (a favourite in my early twenties) and The Diary of a Nobody (a perennial favourite, and my candidate for the funniest novel in the English language). Or perhaps I had learned that the diary of a real somebody is less interesting than the diary of a fictional nobody.
My final strange appetite is the most recent, and the mildest. As I was reading that book about Shakespeare that I mentioned, I found myself (not for the first time) becoming infatuated with the title The Winter's Tale. I think it's one of the most evocative titles ever; and perhaps thinking about it at the height of summer (though it's not very summery in Ireland right now) adds to its charm.
I recently offered readers an "e-book" (i.e., Word file) collection of my poetry entitled While The Wind Howls on a Winter's Night. The title comes from this verse:
In an old, old story spoken
By a low fire’s dying light—
Of promises made and broken
Or old wrongs put to right;
That hushes the room, while the wind howls on a winter’s night.
I have to admit I'm pretty proud of that line. I quote it now to try to explain what magic I find in the title The Winter's Tale. (Not that it's needed, I'm sure. I mentioned in a recent post a Youtube video of old Irish ads that I was watching over and over. One is for a sherry called A Winter's Tale, and it seemed to be evoking the same kind of idyll.)
I'd already read through A Winter's Tale not long ago, motivated by the same fascination; I liked it well enough, being a product of Shakespeare's later mellow and dreamy phase. But I like The Tempest better, for the same reason. All the same, I found myself seeking out another edition of The Winter's Tale, purely for the sake of the title. I would, I told myself, read the introduction at least. By the time I had finished the introduction (thoroughly enjoying it), I was already interested in something else....
Yeats once wrote:
Hands, do what you're bid;
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
Should that be my attitude too (though Yeats himself is obviously ambivalent in this poem)? Or should I let these fancies flow freely? One way or the other, I think the mind's tendency to suddenly be attracted to a bizarrely specific idea is quite fascinating.
And more that fascinating; I think that it is very often the seed for works of art and other enterprises. I'm very interested in the creative process, and it's amazing how often a song or a film or a book grows out of one image, one character, or one atmosphere. I also think that a person's philosophy of life very often has such a genesis; something speaks to that person's depths, in such a way that it influences their entire lives, and it can very often be something as madly specific as the things I list here.
When I say "recent circumstances", I mean my own experience, as this has happened to me quite a lot in recent weeks.
The first strange hankering I want to mention concerns the American show The Office. (After Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, which I tend to lump together as one show, this is my favourite television programme. I'm not sure I can even yield the supremacy to Star Trek. I like them in different ways.)
There is one excellent episode of The Office called 'Business Trip'. (The scriptwriters of The Office had a difficult time spinning storylines out of such a restrictive set-up, which was simply the life of a paper merchants and its employees. They often stretched the premise too far into wackiness. But 'Business Trip' is pleasingly simple, and it's hard to believe that it took them five seasons to use the storyline of a business trip.)
The story-line of 'Business Trip' involves Michael Scott (the office manager and central character of the show, played by Steve Carrell) and two other characters (Andy, a preppy salesman who is engaged to one of the office accountants) and Oscar (a gay, Mexican accountant) all going on a business trip to Winnipeg in November. Michael is boyishly excited about the trip, but it doesn't turn out to be very exciting.
(David Wallace, their CEO, mentions at one point that: "It's pretty tough to find somebody who wants to go up to Winnipeg mid-November." The lack of glamour in the business trip and its location is a big theme of the episode. This is part of what I find appealing; as I mentioned a few times previously, I like all things provincial. I don't know if Winnipeg is 'provincial', but you know what I mean.)
The scene that excited me particularly was one involving Andy and Oscar. They visit a local bar, one that is portrayed as being not particularly exciting. They get drunk and Oscar starts asking Andy what he can possibly see in his fiancee. Andy mentions that they haven't yet had sex (and in a modern comedy, of course, two engaged people remaining chaste is seen as bizarre-- though Oscar does ask, "Are you guys waiting to be married?" and Andy says: "Honestly, I don't know what we're waiting for!", so at least the concept of premarital chastity is acknowledged). Oscar drunkenly persuades Andy to phone his fiancée and ask her to explain herself, which he does.
It's a reasonably funny scene, and quite a sweet episode. (As Andy says at the end: "I had to go all the way to Canada to get to know a guy who sits twenty feet away from me".) But the point of my story is that, weeks after watching this episode, I suddenly found it coming into my mind over and over again. It was the pub/club/bar atmosphere that excited me. It had been a long time, a record time, since I'd been in any drinking spot.
Then, one evening, on a bus that was passing through the suburb of Phibsborough in Dublin, I looked at a particular pub and thought: "I'd really like to visit a pub, just to be in one." The desire grew and grew, and I hopped off the bus a few stops later, and went looking for a suitable tavern.
But the point is, I couldn't find one. I'd gone too far into the suburbs. There was only one rather sleepy suburban pub, full of regulars-- the kind of pub I would usually prefer. But that scene from The Office had got into my head and I wanted a pub that wasn't sleepy, and that wasn't full of regulars-- something with a bit of animation, just like the pub in the scene, and where there would be a flow of different and new people (not that I intended to talk to any of them).
Eventually, I satisfied my craving by visiting a local hotel lounge. It was on a Saturday morning, but there were lots of people there from the nearby hotel, so it wasn't just regulars.
What I really wanted was to visit a bar in Winnipeg in November, on a business trip.
More recently, I became completely fascinated with the idea of days. Yes, days. It's something I've written about on this blog several times, though I've always struggled to express what I mean exactly. I'm fascinated by the fact that human life is divided into days. I'm fascinated by their texture, their pulse, how they are remembered. I'm always fascinated to hear people talk about particular stretches of their lives ("I spent three days in bed with the curtains closed...I tramped the streets for a week...we spent a month discussing the idea...") The past imperfect thrills me.
So I suddenly wanted to read a good diary. But every diary I contemplated reading seemed to lack what I was looking for. What about the famous diary of Samuel Pepys, the naval secretary who witnessed the Great Fire of London and whose diary is a goldmine of seventeenth century social history, as well as a much-lauded work of art? I'd tried reading it before, and there was a little bit too much bureaucracy and statecraft for my liking. Besides, it was so old-- I wanted something more recent, so that I could relate to it better. The diary of his contemporary John Evelyn was out for the same reason.
Some of the diaries I came across were first-hand accounts of important moments in history; diaries by senior politicians, for instance. But I didn't want anything so specialised, or so dramatic. I didn't want war, or high politics, or expeditions in far off lands. The craving I felt was for the whole rich tapestry of life; dull days, busy days, sick days, red letter days, dark days, holidays, and every other sort of day. I wanted a diary that had as much of the mundane as the picturesque; more of the mundane, for preference.
So how about The Diary of a Country Parson, by James Woodforde, who died in 1803, and who lived a rather uneventful and routine existence? It's had fans since it was published in 1924. However, I found Woodforde's rather plodding account of dinners and expenditures and other daily incidents to be a bit too plain and lacking in reflection or introspection.
Next I tried the diaries and letters of John Henry Newman. The university where I work, University College Dublin, is the descendant of the Catholic University that John Henry Newman founded (though he only really got it started, before trouble from the Irish bishops forced him to leave). This fact, and the mere fact that it was the first dedicated Catholic university in Ireland, means that we have a huge amount of Newman material in the library, including a complete run of his collected diaries and letters-- over thirty volumes. (Newman kept everything.) I started on the first volume, knowing in my heart that there was no chance I would read them all, but rather taken with the idea of doing so. (I always love the idea of going off the beaten track.)
I managed to keep it up for almost a whole volume. Newman was certainly more stimulating company than the Rev. Woodforde, and lived life at a higher pitch, both intellectually and spiritually. But...it was a bit too high of a pitch. Newman lived a life of heroic dedication, and it's rather exhausting even to read about.
Besides, he wasn't much of a diarist. He jotted down the events of the day, but he didn't expand upon them. The meat of the volume was much more in the letters than the diary, and these were indeed much more of a chronicle of his reactions, anxieties, hopes, impressions, and all the other things we expect from a diary, than was his diary proper. But even here, the obliqueness of the thing became frustrating. I was always pleased to come across a letter to his mother or one of his sisters, where he tended to pour out his heart, but one might just as easily find oneself wading through a long and dry correspondence with some distant acquaintance.
I gave up on diaries for a few days, reading a book about Shakespeare instead, but the hunger overtook me again. And I seemed to have found exactly what I was looking for when I discovered Evelyn Waugh had kept a diary for most of his life. (He destroyed some parts of it, but most of his life is represented.) And even better-- it was much more than just a record of events. He put down his thoughts and ideas and reactions and emotions, too. This seemed like the jackpot. And he was a Catholic, to boot!
But even here, I felt frustrated. It was pretty good as long as he was at public school (for my American readers, this means a private boarding school; they feature heavily in much English writing and many English memoirs of the time, but Waugh was-- as the introduction pointed out-- pretty much the only writer to keep a diary of the experience as it happened.) But then he goes to Oxford-- he destroyed his Oxford diaries, probably because of homosexual experiences recorded in them-- and graduates to a boozy and party-filled young adult life that, despite the presence of many eminent friends, is surprisingly tedious to read about. In fact, the most interesting passages are the ones where he is working as a teacher in a rather obscure school. Too much freedom, I have always noticed, makes everything dull.
I was looking forward to his conversion to Catholicism, which came after his career as a novelist took off, and after the failure of his first marriage (all of these events are missing from the diaries themselves, since he also destroyed this sequence). Unfortunately, when the curtain rises on his successful years, his diary persona becomes blasé and cynical and impersonal (as the volume's editor admits), and the entries are shorter and less heartfelt. I jumped a decade and more, to the end of World War Two; then, when I found him bitterly listing his low opinions of his own children, I gave up on Waugh.
And on diaries, too, at least for the moment. My trawl through them had partly satisfied my hunger, and partly convinced me that I wasn't going to find what I was looking for. Perhaps I had been too influenced by fictional diaries, like The Diary of Adrian Mole (a favourite in my early twenties) and The Diary of a Nobody (a perennial favourite, and my candidate for the funniest novel in the English language). Or perhaps I had learned that the diary of a real somebody is less interesting than the diary of a fictional nobody.
My final strange appetite is the most recent, and the mildest. As I was reading that book about Shakespeare that I mentioned, I found myself (not for the first time) becoming infatuated with the title The Winter's Tale. I think it's one of the most evocative titles ever; and perhaps thinking about it at the height of summer (though it's not very summery in Ireland right now) adds to its charm.
I recently offered readers an "e-book" (i.e., Word file) collection of my poetry entitled While The Wind Howls on a Winter's Night. The title comes from this verse:
In an old, old story spoken
By a low fire’s dying light—
Of promises made and broken
Or old wrongs put to right;
That hushes the room, while the wind howls on a winter’s night.
I have to admit I'm pretty proud of that line. I quote it now to try to explain what magic I find in the title The Winter's Tale. (Not that it's needed, I'm sure. I mentioned in a recent post a Youtube video of old Irish ads that I was watching over and over. One is for a sherry called A Winter's Tale, and it seemed to be evoking the same kind of idyll.)
I'd already read through A Winter's Tale not long ago, motivated by the same fascination; I liked it well enough, being a product of Shakespeare's later mellow and dreamy phase. But I like The Tempest better, for the same reason. All the same, I found myself seeking out another edition of The Winter's Tale, purely for the sake of the title. I would, I told myself, read the introduction at least. By the time I had finished the introduction (thoroughly enjoying it), I was already interested in something else....
Yeats once wrote:
Hands, do what you're bid;
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
Should that be my attitude too (though Yeats himself is obviously ambivalent in this poem)? Or should I let these fancies flow freely? One way or the other, I think the mind's tendency to suddenly be attracted to a bizarrely specific idea is quite fascinating.
And more that fascinating; I think that it is very often the seed for works of art and other enterprises. I'm very interested in the creative process, and it's amazing how often a song or a film or a book grows out of one image, one character, or one atmosphere. I also think that a person's philosophy of life very often has such a genesis; something speaks to that person's depths, in such a way that it influences their entire lives, and it can very often be something as madly specific as the things I list here.
Monday, August 3, 2015
Jigsaw
This is a poem I wrote years ago, when I was an
agnostic (if not an atheist). I obviously wouldn't stand over all the
sentiments now, especially the assertions of cosmic meaningless. I don't think
I'd really agree that "the people who order a shape to their lives, have
ice where their eyes should be, use words like knives" etc. (Then again,
it wasn't me saying it. It was the honey-haired teacher. That is the good thing
about writing poetry from the point of view of a character; you can always
distance yourself from its content. Frankly, I can't remember if I would have
agreed to all this back then or not).
I think this is one of my better poems from back in
the day. Maybe because it has ideas in it. I like ideas to be dealt with directly
in a work of art-- explicity. If you are going to have a novel with a religious
theme, for instance, let's have actual discussions about religion in it, rather
than the religious themes being approached solely through metaphor, symbolism
and dramatisation. Perhaps it is more artistic to be oblique, but it's also
tiresome.
The themes of this poem have been much on my mind
lately. I still rejoice in the wildness of life, even if I no longer believe
that "the cosmos is chaos".
Jigsaw
A little boy piecing a picture together
Confined to the class-room in wintry weather.
The honey-haired teacher looks on him, and dreams
Of boys that grow up, and their infinite schemes:
Stop trying to make a mosaic of it;
A thousand pieces, and none of them fit.
Thousands of days, and a handful remembered,
The picture you started with scrambled, dismembered.
The people who order a shape to their lives
Have ice where their eyes should be, use words like
knives,
Are spooked by their own dreams, enraged at delay,
And know no third option to growth and decay.
Their soul is a timetable, hopes are a plan,
And they end up exactly the way they began;
A purpose incarnate, not woman, not man.
The cosmos is chaos; the stars do not dance
To any grand tune but the music of chance.
To any grand tune but the music of chance.
But chance is not everything. Some kind of choice
Is ours, and all things are not spinning of dice.
Words have many meanings, and still they must fail
To capture the essence of life’s much-told tale
For essence there is none; no ultimate why,
Just a madness of stars in a meaningless sky.
But finish your jigsaw; a world of its own.
Outside is the world of the vast and unknown
A little bit vaster and less known for you
But only a little. Do what we all do—
Built delicate webs in the infinite space,
A moment of time and a corner of place,
And fill them with voices and faces you know.
But always remember your mirror will show
A face back to you that will always seem strange;
The soul is a kingdom we cannot arrange.
And when sleep arrives, you must leave what you’ve
made
And enter that wilderness, rapt and afraid,
All
order forgotten, all purpose betrayed.
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