Forty Years Ago: A Poem

I wrote this poem in 2005, in a rented bedroom in a family home in Stillorgan, which was probably the nadir of my fortunes-- or at least, felt like it. I was obviously still suffering from the "end of history" vibe which 9/11 was supposed to have dispelled.

The critique of modern life is quite unfocussed but I do like the lines: "Time is an air-conditioned office now, and history an infinite replay." I could even claim that this is prophetic given the horror of limitless office space expressed by the film The Backrooms (which I haven't yet seen), and also the now-widespread observation that pop culture is just regurgitating the past indefinitely.

My notion that this "end of history" would be a post-ideology, post-deprivation, post-compulsion landscape of endless consumerism couldn't have been more wrong, though. I didn't foresee Covid lockdowns, the development of political correctness beyond purely negative speech-codes towards demands for positive affirmation, Trump, Brexit, and all that. Little did I realize there were a whole load of new taboos, privations, and social upheavals on the way. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that these are often more welcome to me than the stagnation of the "end of history" that I feared-- although I'm not saying that's a healthy reaction.

I don't think this a great poem. I think I've written about ten good poems in more than thirty years of writing poetry. It's not as bad as others.

One of the weaknesses of my poems has always been the use of characters and settings that seemed clear to me, but that really weren't. In this poem, a young man is watching old movies and TV shows, behind closed curtains, alone.

Forty Years Ago

Behind closed curtains, forty years ago
Fills up the screen in black and white.
Oh, what he wouldn't give to grow
Amongst the craters the Luftwaffe made,
To be a baby of the Blitz! But night
Has fallen now on history's parade.

He watches mini-skirted women jive
The pale young hero cursing TV sets
And package holidays. To be alive
When time was like the weather! When the news
Was like a story! Now nobody gets
Excited about class, no-one has views

About the Common Market, no-one talks
About how things were different in my day.
That's gone the way of Cromwell and Guy Fawkes.
Time is an air-conditioned office now
And history an infinite replay.
There's nothing left the world will not allow;

No rationing; no walking half a mile
To hear a radio, no being called
To spend two years in khaki, no big trial
For dirty books; at last nobody cares.
Curse on the telly, no-one is appalled;
Puncture your face with studs and no-one stares.

Nostalgic for small-mindedness, he feeds
On scenes of caps and queues and kitchen-sinks
And every month the whole damned lot recedes;
That guy who played the miner's son just died
And she's a Dame, that mini-skirted minx
In this last room where history can hide
He lives a past unseen, self-mummified.

The Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook-- Perhaps my Favourite Church

Today I went to Sunday Vigil Mass in the Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook. I'm falling in love with this church, despite having visited it for the first time many years ago.

A few years ago I started a series of blog on Dublin churches, and I included this church in it. I actually stopped that series because I had a few whingy comments (not from regulars) about the modern churches I featured. Personally, I'm very fond of many sixties and post-sixties churches, and I think the inability to see anything good in them is a form of philistinism, a lack of imagination. Ugliness is just ugliness, but there are different sorts of beauty.

Funnily enough, it was the post on the Sacred Heart where I announced my intention to end the series.

Plainness has generally been the thing that has pleased me the most about churches, so now I'm surprised to be falling under the enchantment of a more ornate church. Actually, the marble altarpiece is one of my favourite things about the Sacred Heart. But my absolute favourite thing about it is the very finely-detailed gold ornamentation on the walls behind the altar, and in other places. I also like the marble pillars. The profusion of little detail greatly pleases me, but it never becomes overwhelming or gaudy or heavy.

Churches that appeal to me nearly always do so because they have an atmosphere I can only describe as "spacey"-- transcendent, otherworldly, outside of time. This one seems very spacey to me.

It was deliberately built on the location of the old Donnybrook Fair, an event which became notorious for its drunkenness and fighting, giving rise to the term "donnybrook". I like the historical transposition of that, the palimpsest quality. Perhaps all that was good about the Donnybrook Fair is redeemed and sublimated in this sacred space.

(Anticipating a potential "nobody goes to the Ordinary Form" reaction to my pictures-- no, I'm not being paranoid, yes, I have had this reaction before-- I should mention that I took the pictures long before Mass began. There was a good congregation.)

The First Defenestration of Prague

This historical event occurred on this day back in 1419. It's described by an "On This Day" website I subscribe to thus: "First Defenestration of Prague: Anti-Catholic Hussites, followers of executed reformer Jan Hus, storm Prague Town Hall and throw the judge, mayor, and several city council members out the windows. They die in the fall or are killed by the crowd outside."

This was obviously a real tragedy and I pray God's grace on the souls of the victims. But it's also an example (perhaps the best example) of a historical (or perhaps historiographical) phenomenon that I like very much: that is, unique and often poetic names being given to historical and political events.

Here are some more examples:

The Election of the Snows: The 1917 by-election in which Count Plunkett was elected for Sinn Féin, a turning point in Irish history. As you might guess, it took place amidst snowy conditions.

The Night of the Long Knives: Most infamously the night when Hitler violently purged the SA leadership, but (more interestingly, because more figurative) the cabinet reshuffle in which British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan gave seven of his ministers the boot.

The Three-Year Summer: A term used by Harry Potter fans for the long wait between the fourth and fifth books of the series. Presumably because it represented the summer term in Hogwart's. (I'm not involved in Potter fandom. I just came across this factoid on TV Tropes.)

The Winter of Discontent: A time of heightened industrial action in the winter of 78-79, in Britain.

The Tallaght Strategy: When the leader of the Irish party Fine Gael announced (in a speech to the Tallaght Chamber of Commerce) that his party would not oppose the economic policy of the Fianna Fáil government when it was in the national interest. (Shouldn't that just go without saying?) Not quite following the pattern of this list, but close enough.

The Barebones Parliament, the Rump Parliament, the Mad Parliament, the Cavalier Parliament: Colourful names given to various parliaments in British history.

The Spring Tide: The 1992 General Election in Ireland, in which the Labour Party doubled its representation under the leadership of Dick Spring.

The Pilgrimage of Grace: A violent rebellion against the dissolution of the monasteries in Reformation England.

The War of Jenkins' Ear: An eighteenth-century war between Spain and England supposedly sparked by an English sea captain having his ear chopped off.

The Battle of Britpop: When Oasis and Blur both released their new singles on the same day in 1995, prompting intense media speculation on which of them would reach number one. Blur won the battle, although Oasis won the war. (I like to joke: "I saw some hard times. I lived through the Cola Wars and the Battle of Britpop.")

You get the point. Any other suggestions? I'm agog.

Blessed Barney Casey

Today is the feast day of possibly my favourite saint (although John Paul II is another candidate). That's Solanus Casey, the Irish-American Capuchin friar whose life was filled with extraordinary miracles. He's not actually a saint yet, he's only been beatified so far, but I fully expect him to be raised to the altars before long. (He was called Barney before he took the name Solanus.)

I like him for many reasons, but one reason is that he was a humble man who (so to speak) had a lot to be humble about. It's never easy to be humble, but I can't help thinking that it's a bit easier for people like St. Thomas More or (indeed) St. John Paul II-- people whose brilliance is quite obvious to everyone.

Solanus Casey wasn't like that. He just barely managed to be ordained. In fact, he was ordained a "simplex" priest, which meant that he couldn't hear confessions or give homilies. (I've never encountered the word "simplex", in this sense, outside his life story.) He actually had to sign this declaration: Since I do not know whether as a result of my meager talents and defective studies I am fit to assume the many-sided duties and serious responsibilities of the priesthood, I hereby declare that I do not want to become a priest if my legitimate superiors consider me unqualified.

(Admittedly, part of the reason he struggled in his seminary studies was because much of the instruction was through Latin and German. He went to seminary in Milwaukee which had a large German population.)

Solamus had to do the more menial jobs in the monastery, such as sacristan and porter-- the latter, Providentially, became the ideal context for his calling, as a never-ending stream of visitors sought his advice and prayers.

He wasn't even good at his hobby. He loved to play the violin but apparently he was terrible at it. Also, he was disappointed in love before he pursued his vocation!

A Big Light on Misinformation

I regret to inform my readers that I have committed the deadly sin of misinformation. In my recent blog post on interesting words, I claimed that those big lights that you see on movie sets are called "Krieg lights."

This is not the case. This was a mistaken claim.

They are actually called "Klieg lights", named after the brothers who invented them, whose surname was Kliegl. (Why they dropped the final "l", I don't know.)

I'd like to apologize to my blog readers, to my family, to my blog readers' families, to their pets, to the interesting words community, and most of all, to God. This morning I am a sadder and a wiser man. I am going to work hard to regain the trust of my blog readers. God bless you all.

Happy Feast of St. Celestine I!

He was, according to tradition, the Pope who sent St. Patrick to Ireland. There is actually a street named "Celestine Avenue" in a Dublin suburb.

If we celebrate St. Patrick's Day, why shouldn't we celebrate the Pope who sent him?

The papacy is such a strange thing. They have the most spiritual power (and responsibility) of everybody in the whole world, and have often wielded great temporal power as well. But how many of us know more than a handful of them? I actually rather like this fact, and not for any Ozymandias-style sense of forgotten grandeur. Perhaps I like it because it makes history seems so spacious and irregular.

Interesting Words

I've frequently bored my blog readers to death with my fascination with words. And here I go again! Take it as your Friday penance!

Recently I've started keeping a notebook of interesting words. I've done this for two reasons:

1) Because I love interesting words, mostly for their aesthetic value-- "aesthetic" understood as a combination of sound and sense.

2) Because of the gargantuan, colossal, extraordinary amount of time we spend in limbo, doing nothing in particular. Taking the lift, and waiting for the lift. Walking down corridors. Waiting for buses. Waiting for meetings to begin. The US military has a saying I like, and that I find applies to much of life: "Hurry up and wait". So I like to carry notebooks with which I might, possibly, improve my mind while hurrying up and waiting. (Quickly looking in a notebook seems respectable no matter what you're doing. It appears official and diligent. As opposed to browsing your phone.)

How many of these words did you know, and do you have any other suggestions? (Guidelines follow the list.) Please tolerate my approximate definitions and correct them if they're wrong. There's a good few architectural terms at the start.

Symploce: A figure of speech in which the middle of a phrase is changed while the beginning and end stay the same, e.g., "Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley deep enough, ain't no river wide enough to keep me from you..."

Apse: The rounded end of a cruciform church where the altar is.

Architrave: The lintel of a row of column capitals.

Ashlar: Masonry that is finely cut and symmetrical.

Cantilever: A structural element attached to a fixed structure at one end, unsupported at the other. I'm glad I know what this means now as I've been hearing it all my life and felt stupid.

Clerestory: The upper part of a nave of a large church, containing windows.

Dentil: A small block used as a repeating motif in a cornice.

Heliograph: An early form of photography using bitumen. Used to create the first surviving photograph. (I wrote a poem about that photograph in my teens, and I still find the idea poetic.)

Calotype: Early photographic process that used paper.

Corral: A "slot" in a race (like a marathon), so that people begin at times commensurate with their ability.

Aspect ratio: The proportion of a movie picture's width and height.

Foot lambert: A unit used to measure luminescence on a movie screen.

Pop-o-matic: That plastic bubble in the centre of a board game that contains dice, and that you press to roll them. (I'm particularly fond of this word.)

Transom: The beam between the door and the pane of glass (or panel of wood?) above the door. The glass above it is called a "transom light" in the USA and a fanlight in British English. 

I know this word mostly from the movie This is Spinal Tap, in which the lead singer says: "Before I met Jeanine, my life was cosmically a shambles. I was using bits and pieces of whatever Eastern philosophies happened to drift through my transom."

Dewar: Name of a particular sort of flask and also the container in which cryonically preserved people are preserved (upside down, since the theory is that their heads will be preserved longer that way if there's a power-cut). Named after a Scottish guy called Dewar.

Non-rhotic: Languages, dialects and accents that only pronounce "r" when it comes before a vowel.

Cornea: The transparent "windshield" over your eye. Probably everybody knew that apart from me, right?

Sclera: The white of the eye.

Conjuctiva: The delicate tissue that lines the eyelids.  (Before we move on from eye-related terms...isn't the eye the most beautiful part of any human body?)

Hyperopia: Far-sightedness, the opposite of myopia.

Hue: In colour theory, one of the twelve basic colours of the colour wheel.

Chromaticity: In colour theory, the "purity" of a colour on the colour wheel. Measured by the presence of otherwise of black, white, or grey. (I'm not sure what that means exactly.)

Ferrule: The metal band on a paintbrush.

Emesis basin: A metal basin for holding medical instruments and also for puking into.

Debridement: Removing dead and infected tissue from a wound.

Alickadoo: A member of a sports club who isn't actually a player, just a hanger-on. Said to have been coined in Ireland. (I also particularly like this one.)

Mysophobia: A morbid fear of germs. (I personally wash my hands more often than almost anybody I know.)

Thaumatrope: A Victorian era toy or optical illusion. There are pictures on two sides of a disc and when the disc is spun fast enough, it looks like the images merge. Cool!

Zoetrope: Simple form of animation using a cylinder on a rotating wheel. I've watched videos of this and honestly I don't think it's all that impressive.

Theremin: Musical instrument that is played without being touched. Developed by some Soviet scientist. Most associated with "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys although that wasn't exactly a theremin but some kind of variation on the idea.

Klieg light: The big light they use on film sets.

Carcenet: A type of jewelled metal necklace from medieval times. I came across this while reading Idylls of the King by Tennyson. it's pronounced carkenet.

Diagetic: Something that exists within a fictional world. Most commonly music: diagetic music is music the characters can actually hear, as opposed to most film scores.

Libfix: A "liberated affix". Like the -gate in every scandal that was called -gate after Watergate, or like the -thon in telethon, walkathon, etc.

From that list, you probably have a good idea of the sort of words I'm looking for, but these are my basic principles:

1) It has to be a real word that has a real function, no matter how obscure or rare it might be. I'm not really interested in funny or whimsical words, although these seem to predominate in every "interesting words" list I can find. (The compilers of such lists have a particular love affair with "flibbertigibbet".)

2) I like words that are drawn from some particular field or specialty, such as (on this list) optics or film projection. But not so obscure that they would never be relevant for general usage.

3) I like somewhat extravagant names for inventions: Jumbotron, kaleidoscope (probably my favourite word of all), Pop-o-matic. (When I was a kid, I became acquainted with a machine called a ray-ionizer which supposedly purified the air.)

4) I like words with a bit of a Greek sound to them, like zoetrope and symploce.

That's about it. Don't forget, I'd be interested in hearing how many of these words people already knew, as well.