Frustration

I have been feeling a lot of frustration recently. For various reasons, I have not been outside of Ireland since December 2019. I have barely been outside Dublin in that time. It's a long time since I've been on a train, a mode of travel that I love. (I don't include the Dublin area light rail.) This is the time of year when people start asking about holidays and I can only say, again: "I have no holidays planned".

I have had some blessing in recent years, and I'm grateful for them. But in other ways I'm in quite a rut. I applied for two jobs this year-- a promotion and a sideways move-- and I didn't get either. I got lots of good feedback and encouragement on the first, mind you.

As I've mentioned before, I gave up Facebook and Twitter at the beginning of the year, for various reasons. One was my ever-increasing frustration at hardly anybody reacting to my poetry, whenever I posted it. Not even to criticize it! Also, a lack of reaction to my posts about poetry.

There were other reasons. I had friends spanning the spectrum from fairly liberal Catholics to heavy-duty Traditionalists. I didn't want to get into arguments with them, and the political and (to a lesser degree) theological climate made arguments seem inevitable. I have a quirk of personality that makes me very reluctant to fall out with anybody, or even antagonise them-- once a friendship has been established. On the other hand, I can't really keep quiet on big issues.

But being off Facebook means that I'm not in contact with my "tribe", to any significant extent.

I've tried to get some diversion at free and low-cost events. For instance, I went to the launch of  a UCD literary journal which had published one of my poems (hurray!). This week I attended a seminar on Korean reunification in UCD. Being me, I couldn't restrain myself from being the first person to ask a question, one which related the discussion to Ireland in a very politically incorrect way! It went down like the proverbial lead balloon. I even went to a Mind, Body, Spirit fair in the RDS-- which was almost entirely New Age nonsense, of course, but I enjoyed the atmosphere, especially the smells. I just looked and wandered around. I didn't inhale.

I have many other frustrations I won't go into-- some big, some small, some completely trivial. Of course, it's the completely trivial that bother me the most. (That's a joke, but not entirely.)

I've been reading a lot of biographies and, in biographies, doors just seem to open for people. For instance, in the most recent biography I'm reading, a priest insists on the subject of the biography going on retreat-- and arranges it. As I've mentioned, I tried to get the chaplaincy in UCD to hold a spiritual retreat for staff, and after an initial display of enthusiasm (and when I expanded the idea on request), the suggestion was dropped. Little things like that.

Yes, I would like some cheese with this whine, thank you. Cornish Yarg, for preference.

I will probably take this post down after I've had my belly-ache for a bit. But prayers are welcome-- specific prayers for doors to open, even cat-flaps. Honestly, if someone so much as gave me a box of chocolates right now, I think I would cry. Not literally cry, because I'm a MAN, but you know what I mean.

Habemus Papam!

Well, we have a new Holy Father! My prediction of Cardinal Tagle was wrong. I'm not upset about that.

The mood of conservative Catholics seems to be cautious optimism, and I share that mood. The fact that Leo XIV wore a mozzetta on his first appearance is promising. He doesn't seem to have a record of wading into controversies. Being an American might give him a more sympathetic approach to American Catholicism than has been current in the Vatican recently. (Remember "the ecumenism of hate"? I thought that was very unfair.)

Bishop Barron said in a recent interview that he would really appreciate a quiet pontificate. I think most of us can identify with that. I know I can.

As we all know, younger priests in the West are now much more likely to be orthodox. (And priests in the developing world were already more orthodox.) It might take a decade or two for that generation to reach senior roles in the Church. Perhaps a long pontificate from a relatively young and apparently moderate Pope is the best we could have hoped for.

Here's an interesting (and encouraging) reaction from Jimmy Akin, who's generally on the money. But Raymond Arroyo is rather more pessimistic.

In any case, God bless our new Pope, and may the Holy Spirit guide him!

The Aesthetics of Jokes

Here's a joke. There's a particular park in America where people always play chess. One day, it started raining so all the chess-players adjourned to a swanky hotel just outside the park, one that had a fancy lobby with soft chairs and nice marble-topped tables. The manager wasn't too happy about this, so he asked the doorman to get rid of them. "I'm afraid not, sir", said the doorman. "It's not my job to pull your chess nuts out of the foyer".

Did you laugh?

That's one of my favourite jokes. I first encountered it in one of Isaac Asimov's joke books. Doubtless my version of it isn't nearly as well-told.

It's a good entry-point for this blog post, though. As with most of my favourite jokes, its appeal to me goes beyond the fact that it's funny-- although I do find it very funny, and I wouldn't care about it if it wasn't funny.

But it's more than that. The whole set-up of the joke is immensely pleasing to me, and this is what most of my favourite jokes have in common.

First off, I like the idea of chess players playing chess in a park. Who doesn't? It's picturesque and pleasingly public. Buskers, street preachers, street vendors-- they all add to the character of a public place, making it seem more public and less a collection of private "bubbles".

Secondly, the fact that all the chess players go to the lobby together suggests that they're not just different pairs of players, but they're some sort of community-- and that is also very appealing.

A.I. is good for something...

Thirdly, they move to a hotel lobby. Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time, and also anybody who knows me at all, knows that "lobby" is one of my favourite words. I use it as often as I can. The same applies to "foyer". Indeed, I don't know which I prefer!

It's not just the word lobby that I like, but the idea of a lobby, and indeed the reality of a lobby. Especially cinema lobbies and hotel lobbies, which are usually rather splendid.

Why? Well, I guess it's a liminal space. There's been a lot said about those, but I'm intrigued by the fact that it's both public and private. Not a place you're supposed to linger in for a long time, but not made just for passing through, either.

(In my experience, the happiest times in life are often "in-betweeny" times, when you're either pausing or in transit between other experiences. Such moments often occur in lobbies, and they're also like a symbol of such moments.)

I don't actually have access to the Asimov book where I found the joke, and I can't find the joke on the internet. (I can find similar jokes, which I'll get to in a moment.) But I'm pretty sure that, in the Asimov version, it was a policeman who is called by the manager to use the chess-nuts.

I've changed it to a doorman in my version. Partly this is because those other jokes I mention use a doorman instead. But, more importantly, it's because I like that the whole joke occurs "in-house". I like buildings and institutions that resemble little societies; universities, for instance! Besides, don't we all like doormen, with their splendid uniforms and air of ceremony?

Anyway, I think you're probably getting the point by now. Very often, it's not just the punchline, or even principally the punchline, that appeals to me in a joke. It's the whole little world conjured by the story-- the atmosphere, the setting, the flavour, the incidentals. A punchline can only surprise you once (though it can still amuse you), but the background details can give a more lasting pleasure.

I mentioned a different version that I found online. Here it is:

A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse.

“But why?” they asked, as they moved off.

“Because,” he said “I can’t stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.”

This is also a good joke, but I don't think it's quite as good. For one thing, I've never heard anyone use the phrase "open foyer". So it doesn't quite have the pleasure of the other punchline, where the situation fits the idiom perfectly.

One thing that I like about both jokes is their innocuousness. First off, they're both clean-- and while I've laughed at hundreds (or maybe thousands) of smutty jokes, clean jokes seem much more pleasing, especially at the "deep" level I'm discussing here.

But these jokes are innocuous in another way. Compare them to this common joke:

Doctor: I have some bad news and some really bad news. The bad news is that you have twenty-four hours to live.

Patient: Oh God! What's the really bad news?

Doctor: I've been trying to contact you since yesterday.

This isn't a joke I find particularly funny, for a start-- although it seems plenty of people do find it funny, given how often I come across it. But, aside from that, it's quite depressing. A man with only an hour to live? That doesn't fill me with the sort of warm glow created by my favourite jokes.

The "chess nuts" in the foyer jokes are at the opposite pole of seriousness. Nothing really bad happens in this joke. Nobody is dying. Nobody is in distress. The chess players have enough time, leisure, and health to at least play chess. And the existence of hotels and city squares are a good thing in themselves.

Honestly, I think jokes act as a sort of sudden illumination that show us that the human condition is, for the most part, pretty good. There's enough drama in the story to make it interesting, but not the sort of three-hankie or white-knuckle drama that feature films or novels require. Just enough to engage the brain, while the less analytical part of the mind savours this wonderful world of ours: a world of chess, hotel lobbies, doormen, and so on.

In case you thought I'd analysed this joke to death, I do indeed have more to say. This much, at least: another reason it appeals to me is its basic realism.

There's nothing improbable in the story. It could reasonably happen. It could happen tomorrow, or today. Personally, I much prefer this kind of joke to the whole comic galaxy of talking dogs, little green men, genies in bottles, and so forth. Even if we set aside all supernatural and paranormal elements, I also prefer a joke like this to all the jokes that involve far-fetched or exotic motifs such as lottery wins, cannibals, desert islands, and the like.

How could a blog post about jokes have so few laughs? Well, I'd better round it off by another of my favourite jokes. I've lifted it straight from the first place I found it on the internet. (I actually suspect this was lifted from Asimov, too!)

A man went to his dentist because he feels something wrong in his mouth. The dentist examines him and says, "that new upper plate I put in for you six months ago is eroding. What have you been eating?"

The man replies, "All I can think of is that about four months ago my wife made some asparagus and put some stuff on it that was delicious...Hollandaise sauce. I loved it so much I now put it on everything --- meat, toast, fish, vegtables, everything."

"Well," says the dentist, "that's probably the problem. Hollandaise sauce is made with lots of lemon juice, which is highly corrosive. It's eaten away your upper plate. I'll make you a new plate, and this time use chrome." "Why chrome?" asks the patient.

To which the dentist replies, "It's simple. Everyone knows that there's no plate like chrome for the Hollandaise!"

The Tea Lady: A Self-Analysis

In May 2022, I wrote a poem entitled "The Tea Lady". I wrote it very slowly, on my morning tea-breaks, taking as much care as I reasonably could over every single line. I decided that, if I sat all through any given tea-break and never wrote a word, that was time well-spent.

This was a return to the compositional methods of my late teens, when I started writing poetry. I tried to make every single line as close to my ideal as possible. Later on, I started writing more quickly.

In the case of "The Tea Lady", I thought that this new-old approach paid off. It took several weeks, I seem to remember, but eventually the poem came together. As I wrote, I was sending drafts to a poet friend, who gave me a lot of good criticism, and was also enthusiastic about it.

Eventually, I decided to post it on Facebook, and...

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Deafening silence. I think a couple of people "liked" it, but that was about all. I even posted it a second time a good while later, but the result was the same.

Having my poetry routinely ignored on Facebook is one of several reasons I deactivated my account at the end of last year, and have no plans to reactivate it. I found it devastating, to be honest. Letting it be known how much my poetry meant to me made no difference. Nada. Rien. Tada. Zilch.

But what was I hoping for, you ask? Flattery and buttering up? Well, that's always nice, but any kind of engagement would have been very welcome. Even strident criticism. I've never been one of those people who write entirely for its own sake.

Yes, I know any particular person might be scrolling down their Facebook feed in an odd moment and have neither time nor inclination to read a poem. But when there is almost never any reaction, from anybody-- well, I wasn't happy about it.

My Facebook friends can claim to have been vindicated by the poem's reception elsewhere. I sent it to the few publications that accept verse submissions, including First Things. They all passed on it (if they replied at all). So maybe it was just bad.

The thing is, though, I don't think it was bad. I think it was at least accomplished. Writing traditional, formal poetry isn't easy. Just to rhyme, scan, and avoid bathos takes some effort.

It might have been the length that put people off, even though I don't think it's a long poem. It's fifty-five lines long, divided into eleven stanzas. Hardly an epic. But I'm pretty sure that people see a poem longer than a page and think: "I won't bother."

The sorts of poems I was emulating with "The Tea Lady" were poems such as "Church Going" and "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" by Philip Larkin, as well as "A Prayer for my Daughter" and "Among School Children" by W.B. Yeats. These are reflective poems that need room to "breathe". Of course, these are also classic poems, and mine isn't even comparable in terms of its quality. But this is the sort of poem I was going to write. (I won't throw in any more self-deprecating comments like that, as I think they quickly becom tiresome. You can take them as read.)

As my blog title declares, I'm going to analyse my own poem, but I'm going to analyse it before I post the text itself. For two reasons:

1) A well-founded fear that people just stop reading when they see poetry. So, if I leave the poem to the end, they'll at least have read the analysis.

2) My own experience, fairly frequent, of growing interested in something after I've read an analysis of it. I've had this experience with books, films, and music. So who knows? Someone might want to read the poem after reading my analysis.

In any case, sometimes literary criticism or analysis can be enjoyable even apart from the text it's analysing. I've also had that experience myself.

"The Tea Lady" is set in the lobby of a conference centre. This is partly a case of "author appeal". I love conference halls, conference centres, convention centres, conventions, trade fairs, expos, or anything of that nature. I love the atmosphere, the sense of event, the sense of a horizon. I also love the word "lobby".

The main character in the poem is the titular tea lady and the whole poem is about her thoughts and feelings. I like the term "tea lady", but she's not really a tea lady in the traditional sense of someone who serves tea in a school or office. She's a member of the conference centre's catering staff, and she's helping to put out the tea and coffee during a break in a political party's conference. (I don't explicitly say it's a party conference, but I think it's fairly clear.)

The main theme of the poem is belonging, the sense of a "we". I'm endlessly fascinated by this.

Who are "we"? That's a permanently vexed question, asked in all sorts of different contexts. Who are the people? Who are the Irish? Who are the left? Who are the right? Who is Christian? Who is liberal? And so on.

I've just finished reading an excellent history of East Germany called Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer. This eternal question "Who are we?" presented itself to East Germans (and West Germans) in a particularly powerful way after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Were "we" East Germans? Were "we" socialists? The German people overwhelmingly decided that they were one people, despite forty years of conflict between East and West. (It seems to be the case that sentimental ties, in the end, often turn out to be more powerful than any practical considerations.)

Another big theme of the poem is the difference between male and female attitudes to this idea of "we". Basically, my thesis is that men tend to have a wider interpretation of "we", while women have a narrower one. Men are more public, and women are more private. This is obviously a generalization, and doesn't apply in every case. I don't even insist that it's true, and I don't think it even has to be true for the poem to work. It's an idea to play with.

If you don't think this public-private dichotomy is really a male-female one, you can just accept it on its own terms. I think almost everybody feels this tension within themselves, to some extent. Patrick Pearse expressed it very powerfully: "Two things have constantly pulled at cross-purposes in me: one, a deep homing instinct, a desire beyond words to be at home always, with the same beloved faces, the same familiar shapes and sounds about me; the other, an impulse to seek hard things to do, to go on far quests and fight for lost causes."

In the poem, the feminine attitude is represented by my tea lady, while the masculine attitude is represented by her father, of whom she finds herself thinking while the attendees of the conference come out to have a tea-break.

The tea lady's father is based on my own father. Although he was a devoted family man, he was always very much focused on public affairs. In later life, he used to lament that he had paid so much attention to the public good, rather than his own good. I don't think he really regretted this, though. I think it was quite rhetorical. I think he would have made the same decisions if he could do it all again.

The tea lady in my poem thinks the attendees at the political conference (mostly men) are rather ridiculous, with all their high-flown rhetoric and social ideas. And they are! How much of male hunger for a crusade, a cause, is down to simple ego and the quest for excitement? Quite a lot of it, I'm guessing. ("Fierce in the fray like Arthur's knights" is supposed to be sardonic; I'm not sure this is clear, which is a weakness.)

But my tea lady won't let herself despise the attendees, because they remind her of her father, and her father's political idealism. She knows this was essential to his character.

The dichotomy between private and public is one of the eternal dichotimies that gives life much of its drama and flavour. Attempts to eliminate it (such as totalitarianism and anarchism) are not very convincing-- or even appealing, in my view.

My tea lady is inclined to favour private life entirely, but she knows in her heart that this isn't possible. Political, social, and other allegiances are natural to human beings; to seek to escape them is to reduce our humanity. The heart of the poem are the lines:

Nation and party and politics--
They all began in a baby's cry.

A baby is, of course, completely devoid of politics, partisanship, and ethnic allegiance. But all those things are latent within it, just as language and abstract thought are latent within it. There's nothing artificial about them.

I chose the coffee break of a political conference as my setting because I wanted to compare the heady atmosphere of ideas with the steam of tea and coffee in the air.

I aimed for a Yeatsian, Larkinesque clicher at the end, the sort of lines that might get quoted in books. I was quite pleased with it:

The tug-of-war of fidelity,
The ancient conundrum “Who are we?”,
The timeless task of togetherness.

Well, that's my analysis. I could, of course, go on and on-- but I won't.

Here is the poem, for anyone who still wants to read it. It seems inevitable there will be no comments.

The Tea Lady

The catering staff put out the tea
In the lobby outside the conference hall.
A voice from within, resoundingly,
Said something about diversity
And how inclusion would help us all.

There were cheers, and cheers, and then more cheers,
And the crowd streamed out in twos and threes.
One lady deep in her middle years
Poured tea and coffee and shut her ears
To the talk of polls and majorities.

She was thinking of somewhere long ago
And far away, on a winter’s night.
Her father walking her through the snow
His hand in her’s, and a secret glow
That filled her heart, as their hands squeezed tight.

She was thinking of how, down forty years,
That grip seemed stronger than time or space.
That voice, long silent, rang in her ears
Much louder than party conference cheers
Much louder than anything in this place.

But Da was a devil for politics.
He would have been right at home here now;
Right in the thick of it, getting his fix,
Calling out chancers and dirty tricks
Never a neutral any which how.

All this grand strategy, over tea–
She couldn’t despise it, for his sake.
Because the sacred syllable “we”
Meant more in his philosophy
Than the little world love makes.

“We” to him was the working class,
And Ireland, and people he’d never met,
“We” to him was as common as grass.
To her it was the Waterford glass
Kept in the china cabinet.

She looked around at the mostly men
All loudly setting the world to rights.
Doing today what Da did then
World without end, amen, amen,
Fierce in the fray like Arthur’s knights.

She had to bless them, even though
None of their slogans touched her heart.
But that night’s walk in the secret snow
And all of this braggadocio
Somehow couldn’t exist apart.

Nation and party and politics–
They all began in a baby’s cry.
Love meant taking the whole damn mix
The Christmas crib and the crucifix,
The marching song and the lullaby.

Here, with the steam from coffee and tea,
Hovered all history, more or less:
The tug-of-war of fidelity,
The ancient conundrum “Who are we?”,
The timeless task of togetherness.

Exceptionally Exciting

As I've mentioned before, I browse the website TV Tropes a lot. A lotta lot. It might be my favourite way of relaxing, decompressing, kicking back, and so forth. And it has been for at least a decade.

Today, I came across this sentence on TV Tropes: "A San Francisco youth made national news when saw the movie Rocky eighty-one times (and possibly more) during its first-run release in 1976 and 1977. After the twenty-seventh viewing, the theatre started letting him in for free."

I don't know why, but this sort of thing makes the Christmas tree of my imagination light up, flash, and play holiday tunes.

What sort of thing do I mean? Well, anything to do with an exception, an irregular situation, a freebie, an informal arrangement, or an anomaly.

For instance: I once read that the Abbey National Building Society, having a branch very close to the (only ever fictional) address of 221B Baker Street, employed a full-time secretary to answer Sherlock Holmes's mail. And this is true!

For instance: one year in secondary school, when I was about sixteen, a quirk of the timetable meant that we had an English class sandwiched between two physical education classes. So the teacher let us stay in our gym clothes for that class.

For instance: I once went to a takeaway and bought some garlic sauce. Just that. The guy behind the counter threw in a good amount of chips, free of charge and unasked.

For instance: on Liechtenstein's national day, all the citizens are invited to a party in the Prince's castle.

For instance: once, when I was a kid, my school organised a treasure hunt. I remember me and my brothers going into the vegetable shop in the shopping centre to ask about a particular clue. The shopkeeper gave us a mysterious, knowing look, reached under the counter, and handed us an envelope. This completely floored me.

For instance: in the film Wayne's World 2, the protagonist says: "Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs, you were issued with it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide."

Please note, the appeal I'm talking about doesn't just apply to freebies or special privileges. It can go the opposite way, too. It pleases me when someone has a special power or obligation.

I've just discovered, from a quick internet search, that barmen don't really have the right to confiscate someone's car keys. But apparently, businesses did once have the right to cut up your declined credit card. Both ideas appeal to me.

When I was a kid, and I went a long time between haircuts (as I always did), I'd regularly get this taunt from other kids: "The barber has a warrant for your arrest." The idea always charmed me.

In 2003, Coke was banned from being sold in UCD Student's Union shops because of controversies about their operations in Colombia. That was lifted more recently, but now it's banned because the sugar content is too high. It's a bummer that you can't get a Coke in UCD when you want one, but I enjoy the anomaly.

Speaking of Coke, for many years it was forbidden to use the name Pepsi in their corporate headquarters in Atlanta. You had to say "the imitator" instead. (For real. Look it up, if you don't believe me.)

In New Jersey, you can't operate petrol pump yourself-- you have to get a petrol station attendant to do it.

And then there are the anomalies of convention. If children were to knock on your door and demand sweets on 364 days of the year, you'd send them packing. But on Halloween night, it's almost mandatory to indulge them. (Or, as the carol puts it about another season, "Once in a year it is not thought amiss to visit our neighbours and sing out like this...")

Then there are some interesting rules and arrangements in the history of cinema, often done as publicity stunts. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock's rule that nobody would be admitted into Psycho after the film had begun. (Back then, films played on a loop.)

Then there are William Castle's various gimmicks, such as "fright insurance" for the audience.

In the 1967 film Wait Until Dark, the gimmick was that cinemas turned off all their lights (except the EXIT signs) in the final scene, which is set in complete darkness.

Anyway, you either get what I mean now, or you don't. Does anyone share this fascination, or this pleasure? I'd be interested to know that.

Obviously, this goes a long way towards explaining this blog post!

Do you think this is a stupid blog post? It might be, but I bet there's none other like it out there...

Some Thoughts on the End of History

I'm currently reading The End of History and The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. It's one of those books that are frequently cited but (I imagine) much less frequently read. Certainly I've known about it for decades, and I've often name-dropped it. But I'd never actually picked it up and looked inside, until now.

The book became a standard reference because it captured a particular mood in a particular moment; that is, the end of the Cold War and the feeling that this was it, that history had more or less reached its natural stopping point. Of course, life would go on, and things would still happen, but the defeat of the Soviet Union and the triumph of liberal democracy was the end of serious competition between ideologies. Capitalism and liberal democracy would eventually triumph all over the world, even if it took a long time.

As with most famous books that come to stand for a particular argument, The End of History has been rather unfairly treated. It's not at all a triumphalist book. Fukuyama is very well aware of the drawbacks of liberal democracy and modern capitalism. Nor is it as strident or definitive as it's been portrayed. The author is quite tentative in his predictions. At least, that's my impression so far.

But I can understand why Fukuyama became a name to bandy about. Although I can just about remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was very conscious of "an "end of history" atmosphere when I was growing up. I didn't particularly think of it in terms of the end of the Cold War, but it was still an atmosphere I absorbed through my pores. It was best conveyed by a top ten hit in 1990 that I can remember very vividly, and whose lyrics seemed entirely accurate to me. The song was "Nothing Ever Happens" by Del Amitri, and its lyrics began thus:

Post office clerks put up signs saying "Position Closed"
And secretaries turn off typewriters and put on their coats
And janitors padlock the gates for security guards to patrol
And bachelors phone up their friends for a drink while the married ones turn on a chat show
And they'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow

"Gentlemen time please, you know we can't serve anymore".
Now the traffic lights change to stop, when there's nothing to go.
And by five o'clock everything's dead and every third car is a cab
And ignorant people sleep in their beds like the doped white mice in the college lab.

This is exactly what the eighties in Ireland felt like to me. (Yes, the song was released in 1990-- in between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union-- but I remembered it as an eighties song.) 

But what, in my young mind, was I comparing modern banality against? A few different things, I think. 

The Lord of the Rings was one of them. Tolkien captivated me with a vision of high romance, a pre-industrial idyll. I read the book at a very young age, and although I didn't quite understand everything that was happening in it, I certainly absorbed the atmosphere, the aesthetic.

Probably more importantly, I contrasted modern banality against the legacy of Irish cultural nationalism, which I imbibed through my family, my Irish language school, and various other sources. This offered me a whole different set of atmospheres and associations: the timeless world of mythology, thatched-roof cottages and rocky Western islands, country fairs and wandering bards and rollicking ceilidhs, and all that sort of thing. Very far from the society conjured by Del Amitri.

And this sense of banality wasn't confined to the eighties. All through my childhood, teens, and adulthood I was dogged by this sense of aftermath, or perhaps of anti-climax. In one poem, I complained that: "Time is an air-conditioned office now, and history an infinite replay." (The sense that cultural history has come to a standstill is now very common. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and plenty of other sources that you can discover with a quick internet search.)

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fukuyama's End of History wasn't just the victory of liberal democracy (which doesn't seem like a bad thing in itself). It was, rather, the victory of worldwide consumerism. And what's worse, consumerism itself seems to have stagnated at a certain point, regurgitating the styles and pop culture of the past.

Interestingly, Fukuyama doesn't think that consumerism (or a desire for a Western standard of living) is what drives the expansion of liberal democracy. A robust market economy, he argues, is perfectly compatible with authoritarian societies-- and this seems clear from the recent history of China.

No, Fukuyama argues that the rise of democracy relies on another motive, one which he draws from ancient Greek philosophy and calls "Thymos".

"Thymos" is often translated "spiritedness", and it encompasses various different emotions we can name in English: a sense of one's own dignity, or the dignity of one's own community; honour; a sense of outrage at injustices against oneself, one's community, or even other people; and so on. Thymos leads people to take risks and make sacrifices which would make no sense if we were entirely ruled by rational self-interest. "It is only thymotic man...who is willing to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers", says Fukuyama.

Fukuyama relates thymos to the desire for recognition-- the desire for recognition of oneself as a human being with rights and dignity, but also the desire for one's community to be recognized and respected.

And here I'll bring in a film that I watched recently-- I just finished watching it last night, actually.

The film is Hunger (2008). It's a dramatization of the 1981 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, a strike that led to the death of ten hunger strikers. As a caption at the end of the film informs us, there were considerably more prison officers murdered by the IRA in the same time period. (I should mention here that I have absolutely no sympathy for the IRA terrorist campaign. In fact, I regard it with utter revulsion. But Hunger strives to concentrate on the human element of the hunger strikes, and to avoid taking sides.)

Hunger is a gruelling film to watch. Not only are we shown the main character's physical deterioration as he starves himself to death, but the movie lingers on the grim details of the prisoners' lives: excrement-smeared walls (as they refused to "slop out"), cavity searches, beatings, and other horrific spectacles. (Incidentally, I can't imagine Patrick Pearse or Eamon De Valera smearing excrement on their cell walls under any kind of provocation.)

The 1981 hunger strikes were a classic case of what Fukuyama calls thymos, and indeed a classic case of the struggle for recognition. The hunger strikers were seeking recognition as political prisoners, while the British insisted on treating them as ordinary criminals. This struggled centred on apparently trivial matters such as the right to wear civilian clothes (rather than prison clothes) and the right not to do prison work.

And this, to me, illustrates very well the futility and pointlessness of the Northern Irish "Troubles", and indeed the futility and pointlessness of identity politics in the West today.

At their heart, the Northern Irish Troubles seemed like a conflict between two tribes who were barely distinguishable, and who were becoming more like each other all the time. They looked the same, spoke the same, and (for the most part) had the same way of life.

Hunger tends to emphasize this sameness, especially since it mostly minimizes dialogue and concentrates on the nitty-gritty of bodies, spaces, and procedures. 

Catholicism is shown as a negligible factor in the life of the prisoners. One scene shows the celebration of Mass in the prison, but only one prisoner pays any attention to the priest-- the others are loudly chatting and fraternizing. 

The dramatic centre of the entire film is an extended debate between the protagonist and a visiting priest on the ethics of the hunger strike. But the debate is conducted in entirely secular terms, and any reference to religion are more or less ironic. As for the Irish language, we hear one prisoner try to speak to another in Gaelic, but his cell-mate has no idea what he's talking about.

All of this very much fits with my own impression of Sinn Féin supporters and Northern Irish republicans, growing up. For all they invoked the 1916 Rising, they were a million miles from the Irish nationalism of Pearse and De Valera. They seemed determinedly anti-romantic and hard-headed. They wore jeans, cursed, told smutty jokes, immersed themselves in pop culture, and basically lived like any other member of Western consumer society. If they spoke some Gaelic or sang Irish folk ballads, it was only as a tribal badge. Cultural revival wasn't even an aspiration; "Brits Out" was the aspiration-- apparently an end in itself.

The same applied to Catholicism-- that, too, was a tribal badge, and almost certainly didn't extend to going to Mass or listening to the Church about divorce, abortion, or artificial contraception.

And that logic seems to have worked itself out fully today. Sinn Féin now support the European Union and globalization, are gung-ho for secularization, and have leaders who hardly even pretend to speak Irish anymore. 

These days, Northern Ireland has signage in Gaelic and Ulster Scots-- the product of long and bitter political battles-- while everybody carries on speaking in English. (Arlene Foster once claimed that more people speak Polish than Irish in Northern Ireland. I'm sure she was right. It's true of the Republic, as well.)

I think this is typical of identity politics everywhere. We have ever more demands for recognition from "communities" of every sort, while the great blender of consumer culture keeps crushing us all into one homogenous mush.

This is why I think nationalists (and groups of every sort) should stop fretting about recognition and representation, and start fretting about reality. Does it really matter if some Hollywood romantic comedy indulges in Paddywhackery or "stage Irishness"? Does it really matter if somebody calls Bono British? Does it, ultimately, really matter whether there is a United Ireland, if there's no real difference between Ireland and the rest of the world anyway?

I don't care about a nationalism focused on national prestige, or the respect of other people, or even independence as an end in itself. To me, nationalism is mostly about the preservation of distinctiveness. Why? Because it makes the world richer and more interesting. One's nation doesn't have to be any better than any other nation, from this point of view. In fact, it could be the crummiest nation in the world and it would still be worth preserving.

If thymos has a role in Ireland today, perhaps we should use it to resist a much more insidious foe than the Black and Tans or the B-Specials: consumer culture, globalization, and the loss of anything that made Ireland (or anywhere else) worth fighting for in the first place.

(I also believe that nationalism and liberal democracy are perfectly compatible, and I'm in favour of both. Here is an excellent critique of Fukuyama's rather sniffy attitude towards any nationalism other than the anoydne civic nationalism that progressives love to imagine but that barely seems to exist in the real world.)

Willing the World

An Interesting Paragraph

"It was a melancholy time for my family, too, because my brother James was slowly dying from cancer and I remember, on referendum day, crying all the way in a bumpy bus from Galway to Clifden, in Connemara, thinking of his thin shoulders underneath his jacket as he turned to pour tea. He was an Irish Nationalist who did not care for either side in the abortion referendum. He disliked Holy Joes, or anyone he thought was parading virtue; he also disliked the secularising liberals and smart alecks who he thought were out to destroy Ireland's Gaelic and Catholic heritage. When I woke in Clifden the next morning and heard the result, I knew that James would be gratified; the referendum had been carried by two to one, though the turnout had not been spectacular. It would please James that the secularising liberals had been defeated and that Gaelic Catholic Ireland had spoken; and yet he would also be glad that it had not been too decisive a turnout and that the Holy Joes would have scent cause for triumphalism."

That's a paragraph from Mary Kenny's Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, a book I have read several time. This particular paragraph lodged in my memory, and provides a good entry-point to my theme in this blog post.

It seemed interesting to me that James (RIP) was about to depart from the world, and yet he cared about what kind of Ireland would exist after him. And not even a long view of what Ireland would be like, which somehow seems appropriate to the dying, but a strong preference for what would happen in the short term. He was pleased at the continuation of a very specific status quo.

We all seem to will certain things about the world. Obviously, we have self-interested desires. We want to be prosperous, free, healthy, and many other things. Most of us also have altruistic desires. We hear about people buried under rubble in the news and we want them to get out alive. We buy free range eggs because we don't want hens to suffer unnecessarily. And so on.

What interests me in this blog post is a third category of desires, desires which can't quite be categorised as either self-interested or altruistic. For instance, the desired outcome of Mary Kenny's brother for the referendum, as described above. If abortion was a straightforward moral issue to him, he would have presumably preferred a more emphatic pro-life victory. But he didn't. Even if he did in fact care about the substantive issue, he wanted Ireland to be a certain way; for it to preserve its Catholic Gaelic heritage, but not in such an emphatic way that the Holy Joes would be gloating.

Some Examples

I'm intrigued by this third category of desires, that are neither self-interested nor altruistic. I think we all have very many of them, and I've pondered a lot on their nature.

For instance: every now and again (often in UCD) I see people playing cards in public. This pleases me immensely. It's not that I want to join in. I have no intention of joining in. It's not that I'm altruistically pleased at the enjoyment of the card-players. They might enjoy watching bad television more. If their enjoyment was the point, there are probably thousands of activities that might give them more enjoyment. I'm pleased because I'm glad to see people still playing cards, even though there's nothing tremendously worthy or elevated about card-playing. (Why does it please me? Perhaps it's the aesthetic element of cards, perhaps it's nostalgia, perhaps it's that no electronics are involved, perhaps it's the sense of continuity with the past, perhaps all these things and more...)

Here's another example that just came to mind: trick or treaters. How disappointed would you be if there were no more trick-or-treaters, one Halloween? Even if you curse when the doorbell rings on Halloween night, even if you find the whole thing a nuisance, I think most people would feel some sense of loss if trick-or-treaters just weren't there either anymore, or if they dwindled away to nothing over five or ten years. The trick-or-treaters, in a way, are there as much for the sake of the people giving the sweets as they are for their own sake. Not that the trick-or-treaters themselves are taking this into consideration, but this is why the practice endures.

What kind of a world do you want? What kind of a society do you want? This question is thrown around rather nonchalantly, and responses tend to focus on ideals or principles: a world where everybody can develop their talents to the fullest, a world where nobody is discriminated against unjustly, and so on. I just googled the phrase and one of the first hits I got was: "I want a world where everything is welcome, everything is valid, everything is acknowledged, embraced, and accepted."

That's a noble vision (maybe), but I would suggest that the world that any of us really want is much more specific than this. It would be a long list of particulars which would be considerably bulkier than a telephone directory, most likely. And most of it would be things we haven't even thought about before, but-- if we did think about them-- we would agree they are part of the world as we would have it.

A Walk in the Park

These considerations bring me to this question: what do we will about the world? I could write this blog post without bringing up this phrase of "willing the world" (though I'd need a different title), and it might be easier, since I'm finding it hard to put it into words. But it's really the kernel of the matter, in my view.

I think we are all willing a particular version of the world all the time. The aggregation of all those ideals makes a composite, a collective ideal. This might not correspond to the actual concrete way things are, although surely it shapes it significantly. But it does become a reality of its own-- a sort of mental model of how the world should be, including contradictions and tensions.

But what do I mean by "willing"? Well, here's an example.

Imagine you are walking through a city park one weekday morning. You see an old man and his grandson (presumably) feeding the ducks. Seeing this pleases you. If you were to choose the world down to its smallest detail, you would make sure to find a place for people feeding ducks.

On one of the benches, a teenage Goth girl is reading some absurdly pretentious book, like Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. You think the whole Goth phenomenon is rather silly, but at the same time, you can't help feeling it adds something to the world. It seems fitting that a certain number of young people should become Goths. Besides, you're glad to see anybody reading a physical book and not just staring at their phone. And therefore, we can say that you will this young Goth's activity and current activity.

Then you look up, and you see a billboard just outside the park. It's for a washing powder. It's very gaudy and brash and vapid. The grinning faces on it are ludicrously happy about the whiteness of their whites. The triviality bothers you. You will it not to exist.

I could go on describing the various things in the park, but let's take a step back and look at the situation itself.

For instance, the weather. Let's say it's a bit colder than you would like and that it's beginning to drizzle a little. You wish the weather was a little nicer right now, but you don't will it. You don't will a world where the weather was always nice, because that seems to be a negation of the very concept of weather. (Although maybe some people would will this, or perhaps, just will that the country they live in would have a different climate to the one it does.)

But let's go even more basic. Let's look at the whole existence of public places. I think nearly everybody wills the existence of public places, common areas. I can find floods of articles online about this. So walking through the park you might be willing the existence of this park as a public space, if you come to think of it.

Going Deeper

Or you could go even more basic. Everybody is in the park because they want to be. "We live in a free society", as people like to say. (I love that phrase.) Everyone who is in the park might also, conceivably, be working as slave labour somewhere, or just imprisoned. Most of us will  be glad about this, presumably.

And you could get ever more basic, right down to the fabric of reality itself; time, space, embodiment, consciousness.

Ultimately we reach existence itself, the irreducible fact of existence.

How energetically do we will existence itself? I'm of the mind that we should all will it as energetically as G.K. Chesterton: "There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude."

Strangely enough, some people are enthusiastic (even passionate) about particular aspects of existence, but rather half-hearted or even averse to existence itself. This is baffling to me.

Willing and Social Philosophy

How does all this make a difference to anything? Well, first of all, I would say it makes a difference to one's own mental life. The more things in the world you can affirm, or will, the happier you're likely to be. (I'm not saying that people should will things just for the sake of being a Pollyanna. I'm just making the simple observation that if you are more at odds with your environment than otherwise, you're less likely to be happy. It might be the case that you should be at odds with your environment, nonetheless.)

I think it also makes a difference when it comes to social philosophy.

Since the Second World War, I'd imagine the most popular social philosophy has been "live and let live". There's a lot to be said for that philosophy, and it's especially attractive against a history of religious wars and totalitarian states.

But it's always seemed like a very cold philosophy to me, and I suspect it generates a great deal of alienation.

The philosophy of "you do you" has strengthened in Ireland with the ebbing of Catholicism and Irish nationalism. Today, most people would probably say that a person's choices are their own business, provided they don't hurt anybody else and that they are a good citizen.

And yet, personally, I prefer a world where everybody does have an opinion when it comes to everybody else's choices.

Take, for instance, the time between the foundation of the Irish Free State and the social revolution of the sixties and seventies.

What was expected of you? Well, I think it's fair to say that every baptized Catholic in Ireland was expected to go to Mass every Sunday, to pray, and to follow the teachings of the Catholic Church. To do so was seen as admirable, and not to do so was seen as negligent.

It's easy (give our current dispositions) to see the downside of this. But isn't there any upside, too? What you did actually mattered, way beyond just being a good worker or a good citizen.

"I will not make windows into men's souls", said Queen Elizabeth I, when she wasn't persecuting Catholics. It's an admirable sentiment in many ways. But who wants to live in a windowless cell?

What I've already said about Catholicism also applies to Irish nationalism. Nationalism sees human being as an asset. They embody the life of the nation. Nationalist governments generally want to encourage baby-making.

When Irish nationalism was the governing social philosophy of Ireland, Irish people were called upon to learn the Irish language, to revive traditional Irish music and sports, to give their children Irish names, to holiday in Connemara, and so forth. Obviously, this wasn't a perpetual campaign being dinned into everybody's ears all the time, but it was always there in the background.

I sense this atmosphere most of all in evocations of the West of Ireland at this time. A painting or a photograph of the Aran Islands or the Burren wasn't just a picturesque image. It was an ideal, a symbol. The geography itself was willed.

Today, learning and using the Irish language is still seen as a good thing, but it's no longer seen as a duty. The same applies to all the other manifestation of Irish nationalism I mentioned.

But, but, but...

I can imagine someone arguing: "But this is all fine as long as you approve of the governing philosophy, as you approve of Catholicism and nationalism. But what if it's a social philosophy of which you disapprove? What if it's leftism and political correctness?

Even in that case, and without ever wanting to celebrate evil, my own preference is for a society that wants something from-- besides my taxes and my vote and my obedience.

This is what I wrote in a blog post from 2017: "I must acknowledge that I also like the whole idea of a paternalistic society. Despite having some libertarian leanings when it comes to free speech and other issues, I'm not at all in sympathy with the libertarian temperament, still less the anarchist temperament. I want society to have hierarchy, expectations, obligations, privileges, roles-- I don't want the shared life of society to consist simply of housekeeping. I want it to be much more than that. I want it to be more like the life of a family."

I push back against political correctness with all my strength, but I'd rather have something to push against than just nothing, a void.

I was very taken with a particular moment in the excellent German film The Lives of Others, when a dissident writer finds himself talking to an ex-Stasi officer after the fall of communism. The ex-Stasi officer says: "But what's this I hear? You've not written since the Wall fell? That's not good. After all our country invested in you. Although I understand you, Dreyman. What is there to write about in this new Germany? Nothing to believe in, nothing to rebel against...
Life was good in our little Republic. Many people only realize that now."

The Stasi officer is not a good guy in the film, but he has a point. Indeed, search for "end of history malaise" on the internet and you'll get quite a lot of hits. We'd won the Cold War, but what now?

An Image to Finish With

This has been such an unusual blog post, I'm not sure how to end it, just as I'm not sure if the reader has any idea what I'm talking about-- or even if I'm making any sense. (The Irish playwright Hugh Leonard recorded this saying of his father's: "What are you talking about, or do you know what you're talking about?")

But here's an image from my own life experience to finish up on.

It's of Ballymun Shopping Centre (since demolished), back in the early nineties. It was sometime near Halloween. There was a nip in the air and a gloom in the early evening, both of which I tend to find galvanising. I think I was about fourteen or fifteen.

I was looking in the window of Miss Mary's, one of the centre's newsagents. I was specifically looking at the boxes of AirFix model airplanes, a hobby I had recently developed (and which was very much a passing thing). I was also enjoying the Halloween display in the shop window.

Although I'm not musical, the best comparison for what I felt at that moment (or, more likely, when I remembered the moment) is a musical chord. Everything harmonised; the shop window, the time of year, the atmosphere of Halloween, my own presence. For perhaps the first time, I didn't feel at odds with my environment. My imagination, somehow, had absorbed it all and invested it with meaning. I willed it.