Prose/Miscellaneous
Shaving
I’m not superstitious. I have no morning prayer with which to steel myself against the day’s exertions. No affirmations, no clichéd mantra to repeat over and over until I believe it. What I have instead is a ritual.
I reach up, take the razor down from the cabinet, as if arming myself. I lather on cream, run the tap, avoid eye contact with the mirror. I prefer a wet shave over the annoying buzz of an electric razor; the steam rising from the sink, the water’s hot calm, the blade’s triple sheen. I’ve been shaving since I was fifteen. As with any ritual, it’s taken me a while to get right. But the motion of lather, stroke and rinse has now become so routine, so automatic, I barely even notice it. Muscle memory does all the work.
Outside, Annie makes coffee. I hear the familiar sound of our usual mugs – hers plastic and reusable, mine the heavy drink-in variety.
I rake the blade along my jaw and chin, under my nose, along flesh that has never known cold or bruises. I stop only to dunk the blade in water, slosh it around and raise it once more to look for loose stubble. Bristles float in the basin, the dregs of myself. I shear it all off. But I cannot shear off the look of shame molding my face.
Annie knocks on the door, asks me when I’ll be finished. I tell her I’ll be out in a second; I’m hoping she’ll walk in and cut my thoughts loose. But I don’t want her to see the blood.
The razor is a household object; it has its purpose, and, unlike most of the things I fill my life with, always will. Adverts for it make promises of upgrade, greatness, betterment, worming and whispering their way into my head. Shave with our razor and you’ll be a better man, they urge.
The razor can be cleaned and replaced, sharpened and repaired. It is formidable in its simplicity. When it’s no longer suitable for the job, it will be discarded.
I’ve read somewhere that young Roman men would shave before an audience, as part of a rite of passage into maturity. But I do this alone, without any audience or witness. I still manage to cut myself here and there, and have to start again. A scarlet bead oozes down my neck, plops onto the tiles before I can catch it. I curse to myself. I should have stopped making that mistake by now. But my mistakes always bear repeating.
I am finished. I drop the blade in the water, hear it clatter off the porcelain. The mirror is misted over, so I give it a quick wipe. Unavoidable now, I don’t recognize the man staring back at me. I look raw and pink, as if sunburnt. I pull the plug in the sink, listen to the low gurgle of the water escaping, rinse off any stray hairs still clinging to the basin.
I’m still standing there when Annie walks sleepily in, and wraps her arms around my chest. We hold each other for a while, exchange a few cozy kisses, and then she goes to shower. Soon she’ll dry herself down, get dressed, and go through a ritual of her own before work.
When she eventually leaves, belted and buttoned in a black coat, evoking a tip-off seeking spy, she’ll walk briskly and with intent, closing the door with a promise that I’ll see her later that night. She vanishes at the corner, her absence guessed by an interval of hours.
I sit down at the laptop.
Note: This piece was commissioned by the Irish Writers Centre for the annual Culture Night celebrations of 2017, which took place on the 22nd of September of that year.
Review for Michael J. Whelan's Peacekeeper
Peacekeeper, by Michael J. Whelan, Doire Press, 80p, €12.00, ISBN: 978-1-907682-46-9
Review by Daniel Wade originally for Writing.ie
In a 1732 letter addressed to Charles Wogan, Jonathan Swift wrote admiringly of the legions of displaced Irishmen who served in various European continental armies following the 1691 Treaty of Limerick (and whose mass departure from their homeland is known to history as the ‘Flight of the Wild Geese’), praising in particular the bravery of their decision to enlist: “I cannot but highly esteem those gentlemen of Ireland, who, with all the disadvantages of being exiles and strangers, have been able to distinguish themselves by their valour and conduct in so many parts of Europe, I think above all other nations.”
It is true that the Irish have a long history of fighting other nation’s wars. From the galloglaigh or ‘gallowglass’ corps of elite mercenaries deployed to assorted conflicts across mainland Europe in the 1500s, to the 40,000 documented Irish ex-pats who fought for the Union and the 20,000 who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, the Republican and Blueshirt volunteers who signed up to fight one another in the Spanish Civil War, as well as the thousands who swelled the British Army’s ranks in WWI (and indeed, the countless more who wore a British Army uniform down the centuries), not to mention the 5,000 members of the Defence Forces who enlisted to fight in WWII, following Ireland’s officially neutral position in that particular conflict, and who were later branded deserters by the Irish government of the day upon their return. This isn’t even including the pioneering work undertaken by Irish-born war correspondents such as Peter Finnerty and Sir William Howard Russell, who covered the Napoleonic wars and the Crimean war respectively, as well as Samuel Beckett, who volunteered with the French Resistance in WWII and was awarded a Medaille de la Resistance for his efforts.
The nuance and increasingly complex gradations of Irish identity that resulted in this mass involvement with the military affairs of other nations is perhaps best summed up by Christopher St. Lawrence, the 10th Baron Howth and a captain in the Earl of Essex’s army during the Nine Years War, who, frustrated by the ridicule he received as both an Irish-born peer and a loyal follower of the Crown, declared: “I am sorry that when I am in England, I shall be esteemed an Irishman, and in Ireland, an Englishman. I have spent my blood, engaged and endangered my life, often to do her Majesty’s service, and do beseech to have it so regarded.”
To this end, it is no surprise that Irish poetry has rarely shied away from addressing bloodshed and the full effects of warfare. The Tain Bo Cuailnge arguably counts as the definitive Celtic war saga, while Piaras Feiritear, who fought in the Confederate Ireland wars, ranks as an invaluably early example of a soldier-poet writing in the Irish language. In the contest of the Easter Rising, Padraic Pearse, Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh were each published poets, and the outpouring of poetic tribute to them subsequent to their executions, from authors as disparate as James Stephens, Katherine Tynan, AE and Francis Ledwidge, proved once more that poetry is instrumental in making sense of bloodshed’s aftermath throughout the nation’s most historic events.
Meanwhile, in the trenches of WW1, Tom Kettle and the aforementioned Ledwidge (both avowed nationalists) would become known for their poignant verses, if not for their direct depiction of the war itself, and would come to symbolise the loss of the Irish involvement of in the trenches. W.B. Yeats repeatedly addressed the thorny and troubling effects of the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War upon Irish life during both their duration and aftermath in poems such as ‘Easter 1916’, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, ‘The Second Coming’ and the long poetic sequence ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (and also infamously refused to write about WW1 in ‘On being asked for a War Poem’).
Later on, the growing sectarian tensions that would eventually culminate in the Northern Irish Troubles and the growing crisis of same is tackled by a plethora of poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Michael Longley (the latter in particular noting time and again the lingering after-effects of battle on his father, who had seen service in WW1). Yet for all this, and in spite of exquisitely exhaustive anthologies such as the 2009 Gerald Dawe-edited Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry 1914-1945, there is no longstanding equivalent tradition of Irish war poets to equal the pantheon of that encompassed Owen, Sassoon, Brooke, Gurney and Thomas.
Despite all this, and despite the long-standing stereotype of the ‘Fighting Irish’ embodied by the G.K. Chesterson line concerning the alleged inborn Gaelic readiness for battle:
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad:
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad...
it is actually Ireland’s long association since the founding of the State with overseas peacekeeping operations that has proven to be its most prominent and exemplary martial endeavour on record. Following Ireland’s 1955 entry into the UN, the Irish Defence Forces has found itself involved in various peace support and crisis management missions, chiefly in the Middle East. Irish peacekeeping missions, under the various auspices of UNFICYP (the Congo), UNDOF (Syria-Israel Border) and UNIFIL (Lebanon), to name but a few are examples of this tradition. Indeed, the recent return of Irish troops from the 50th Infantry Group, on April 7th, to Dublin Airport after a six-month deployment to the Golan Heights on behalf of UNDOF, indicates the currency of this aspect of Ireland’s international relations. Since the beginning of these operations, there have been 85 recorded deaths among Irish military personnel.
Hence, the debut collection of Tallaght-based poet Michael J. Whelan, entitled Peacekeeper, is the first such volume of poetry to address this fascinating if often-overlooked aspect of Irish history and current affairs. Whelan himself is a member of the Irish Defence Forces and has seen service in South Lebanon and Kosovo as an Irish United Nations support operative. Because his poetry has the added credential of being authored by a former member of the Irish Defence Forces, it draws immediate comparisons with the poignant and often harrowing poetic accounts of modern warfare by contemporary American war poets Brian Turner (Here, Bullet) and Kevin Powers (Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting), both veterans of the Iraq War. As such, it is a slim and unassuming volume, but certainly not a trivial one.
Whelan is no propagandist, but nor is he condemnatory. He certainly details the horrors and attendant upset a war-zone will induce, and does so with an admirably unflinching eye. His poetic voice is that a survivor and an eye-witness, not of a triumphalist. The complex nature of being a soldier fighting to preserve the peace in a combat zone is an ever-present source of tension within the book. The work is brutal and thankless, yet necessary. There is no glory to be expected. Indeed, early on in the collection he writes,
I come in peace not victorious or triumphant
no palms will be thrown under my feet
when I enter the City of David.
His poetry serves as a valuable and even historically-significant document of the Irish soldier’s experience in peacekeeping work. Arguably, Whelan proves that those most qualified to talk of war and war’s alarms are those who see it from the coalface, as in ‘Portal’, when he writes: “The rest is just history/shovelled down the neck of a hungry war feeding/on souls, a monster that’s never satisfied.”
Whelan makes it clear that he and his fellow soldiers are in as much as danger as those they either sent in to protect or fight. The human cost is never far away. The danger is ever-present, and is devoid of any glamour or adrenalin-inducing thrills that might be expected in a warzone. Whelan makes it clear that, for the peacekeeper, every footstep taken is risk for the peacekeeper “whose only armour/was the feeble weave of a blue flag”. Their status does not shield them from being shot or bombed (“Our presence does not halt their conflict”), and in fact gives them a clear indication of both sides being equally lacking in compromise:
“...we who keep the middle ground will feel
the vibrations of their vengeance.”
In ‘Moral of the Story’ which details the shooting on an IDF checkpoint by a runaway squad of Hezbollah fighters fleeing the Israeli army, he states:
Peacekeepers in Lebanon may not always
hold the centre ground but they are always
caught in the middle.
Combined with these moments of heightened chaos, the boredom of down-time is mixed with the ever-present anxiety of sudden, random outbursts of carnage, as in the poem ‘Funeral’, where the speaker’s enjoyment of a televised World Cup match is interrupted by the sudden attack of Resistance fighters: “all commentary lost in emotions,/I reach for my helmet and gun,/in a moment the shells will start falling.”
But perhaps most poignantly is the aftermath of such encounters, as exemplified in ‘Prishtina’, wherein the speaker finds himself having to confront a seriously injured comrade after a detonation, and, in a space of a few short seconds, getting a glimpse of his and everybody’s mortality:
It was only a moment
but he looked into me.
Could see me as clearly
as I see him after all this time,
his eyes piercing my soul,
digging deep.
This poem easily ranks among the collection’s best. It most clearly demonstrates Whelan’s ability to bring alive the most harrowing of scenes with the most economized of language. The helplessness of the situation described above is lessened only the mutual, unspoken understanding the two men come to have, an understanding which perhaps could not have been reached in less traumatic circumstances. The poem’s conclusion is terse and superficially matter-of-fact, but the reader is left with no doubt as the effect such an encounter will leave on the speaker: “I couldn’t help him/but I know he sees me,/like I can see dead people.”
As already stated, there is no prettification or avoidance of the sanguine realities of warfare in Peacekeeper. The imagery Whelan makes use of is visceral, uncompromising, cinematic and yet, the reader instinctively feels, somehow true to life, reaching a stark vividness on a par with the horrific nightmare-verses of Wilfred Owen. A boy buried in rubble is found by his grandmother: “his shrapnel body lashed to the ruins/and mixed with false promises,” fresh rain falls “to wash away the footprints of killers/and the hopes of the hurting,” a fatal wound is “the ball of his knee hanging,/attached by loose skin and gristle/and wrapped in a bloody white shirt.
But to counterbalance the carnage are the evocative landscapes in which Whelan the soldier finds himself deployed to. Binaries are in the very nature of peacekeeping, insofar as soldiers fighting to keep the peace is in itself a contradiction in terms. The sheer physical beauty of the Lebanese countryside acts as a fragile counterbalance to the carnage threatening to engulf it.
It is contrast that informs the collection’s longest poem and easily its thematic mission statement, Paradox of the Peacekeeper in the Holy Land, a prolonged and moving meditation on the long, diverse and complex nature of the land he has been sent to. Myth, history and current affairs are each brought to bear: Lebanon is “where Gilgamesh cleaved the cedars for his ships” as well as a place where “so much metal has been fired in this cauldron/from arrowheads and spears to icons and the corrupted jagged shards of bombs,/shrapnelled landmines and bullets.” In stanzas such as these, we see the landscape serve as a witness and a theatre to the chaos that has tainted and moulded its history, a history which Whelan knows is ongoing, where chariots are replaced by tanks, yet with the effect of these war-machines being much the same:
This is the land of the Canaanites,
the Phoenecians who traded from these beaches and ports
and I know it can never be as it was.
Alexander’s siege of Beirut can still be heard,
in the tracks of a tankthat replaced the chariot,
the bullet that replaced the arrow,
the rise and fall of empires.
Overall, Peacekeeper is a challenging, robust debut collection and a clear result of years of contemplating and traversing such disturbing terrain where violent death is an everyday occurrence. With these poems, Michael J. Whelan has achieved something very singular that deserves to be read by soldier and civilian alike.
Divertimento: The Muse is a Dominatrix, by Peter O' Neill, mgv2>publishing, €12.00, ISBN: 978-1-326-62734-B
The title poem of Peter O Neill’s twelfth poetry collection Divertimento: The Muse is a Dominatrix begins with the following lines: “After every beautiful encounter/Someone is bound to end up getting hurt.” In that opening salvo, the cadence of O’ Neill’s aesthetic is made clear to the reader: visceral, sexually-charged, well attuned to the realities of life, and almost determinedly resting beyond the pale of the Irish house-style poetic. Taking their stylistic cues from the hallucinatory revelry of Baudelaire and the early Modernists than from the more customary guidance of Yeats, Heaney et al, the poems to be found here are visceral and sexually-charged, each one acting as a surreal report for O’ Neill’s awareness that sex and death, two key drivers in human experience and endeavour, are inextricably tied:
O love is a limousine built for two
Driving down the open road,
And where all of the signs seem to be leading me to you.
And death is a motorcycle cop
Who flags you down for driving too fast.
O’ Neill keeps his personal life at arm’s length in the book, but does not leave it entirely at a remove. Poem by poem, the reader is held in a state of uncertainty, feeling they are being teased as to whether a personal account of wretchedness or an equivocated fever dream is being read. O’ Neill is a poet, and the final litmus test of poets is to know and confront the failure of language itself in broaching the thorny intricacies of life, when the reliable store of eloquence finally runs out. All that can then be expressed is one’s inability to express. This ambiguity runs through even the moments of seemingly-naked vulnerability:
But the other [words]
that somehow escape my aim,
pulling the whole mortal weight of my time with them
with those few
I can only lower my gun and marvel
at their brief moment of eternity,
before they slip behind the sun.
O’ Neill’s finely-tuned sense of the macabre does not stem from a puerile desire to shock, but an unflinching affinity to the abject, of the uglier side of passion. In ‘History’ there is a disturbing sense that the speaker may be addressing their beloved, or someone recently departed, after a particularly draining bout of sex:
You float like the dead,
ferried across the Styx
in my veins
It is ghastly.
And our mutual silence
is the silence of the dead…
O Neill’s binding of the sexual and the macabre recalls the stately darkness of Les Fleurs du Mal, but curiously, also lends the poems the same nightmarish atmosphere of a psychological thriller. In ‘This Side of You’, he finds that there is still much to be discovered about his muse. He concludes that “Love is hate in reverse, the world upside down,” whilst also accusing the addressee: “Go on, you would never even dream of showing this side of you to another.”
Poems such as these illustrate T.S. Eliot’s principle of the psychological fissure existing between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” O’ Neill has turned his hand to poems which reveal an inner life acutely in the grip of an existential and spiritual turmoil, yet also one that is supremely aware of this condition and quite determined to weather it. The seemingly conventionally-romantic sentiment of poems such as The Mona Lisa are warped into something decidedly more sinister with lines such as:
Through the smooth corridors of urbane
Domesticity I go to sometimes view you,
Secretly applauding how magnificently you’ve been framed
To this writer at least, the poem calls to mind the malevolent hand-wringing of Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess. O’ Neill’s classic affinity with the poet as outsider, a theme arguably as timeless as war, death or love, is expressed throughout the collection like an obsessive motif. There is also Beckettian sense of nihilism permeating poems such as ‘Rumours Break Upon the Air’, where O Neill asserts that:
The truth is, we were born to suffer,
At every chance destroy.
Cruelty, by implication, is by design.
O’ Neill’s skill for the redolent image, the evocative vision, are on full display. A crowd of rush-hour Londoners is described as ‘battle-hardened Amazons/In their mid-thirties march through the labyrinth/of streets and corridors in pairs’; a page-three girl becomes ‘a paper Venus, Madonna of the celibates/who kneel before you to offer up their prayers’; ‘blood and death coagulate in the mercy cup’ in ‘Burlesque’; a speedboat observed from a distance in Dunmore East is ‘an amphibious car.’ The synthetic ostentation of contemporary pop culture and advertising is aligned (and implied to possess the same sense of time-defying durability) with the lofty masterworks of the Renaissance era, and past, present and future are in constant friction with one another. Under an Armani billboard in Rome depicting David Beckham “like a colossus/evoking Michelangelo”, the immediacy of the present moment and the timeless are conjoined like yin and yang forces, perennially at odds yet inextricably defined by their very contrast.
In the book’s final section, entitled ‘Divertimento’, a great sense of cosmopolitanism in O’ Neill’s work is presented; his affinity for Baudelaire and the luminaries of modernist poetry have led directly to poems set in London, Italy and France. Yet cosmopolitan does not necessarily equal refined, nor does it lend a superficial veneer of worldliness to the proceedings. Ugliness and danger have their place even in the most seemingly quaint of locations. ‘Avenue Arthur Rimbaud’ describes:
Blocks of flats, urban
Tissue box, tower above us.
And above them, as a backdrop,
The sky lit up, a safari.
O’ Neill writes occasionally as a flaneur and always as an outsider, but his understanding of the reality of far-off destinations as real, lived-in places and not airbrushed receptacles of exotic sojourning is what keeps these poems rooted in their humanistic nucleus. In ‘Siliqua’ the atmospherics of a small Italian town square are cemented by the elucidations of a local tour guide: “The authenticity of the guide/Is always revealed in the quality of the information received -/Mine did not to me just about buildings/And if she did it was only in relation to the living.” And in ‘Needles’, a poem mercifully void of the mawkish introspection or smug self-referentialism that characterise so many poems concerned with sightseeing foreign travel, O’ Neill addresses his own displacement and the anxiety that arises thereof:
So that I appear to be lost in a nameless country,
Without a map, whose country is northless.
Meanwhile, patron saints of the grim and grotesque, such as John Milton, Bram Stoker and Francis Bacon, are also given clear, if offbeat, homage. At times a frustrated relationship exists between the avidly contemporary O’ Neill and the great men of letters of the past whose influence he yearns to escape and yet knows that he can never fully evade. In ‘Milton’, he imagines the necessary but often devastating isolation the author must undergo in order to master their craft:
On first contact, it was as if we were both thrown
From a cliff, and holding onto one another,
As unforgiving angels, we wrestled together
Seemingly oblivious to our fall, so concerned
Were we in our own actions.
There is indeed a darkness to O’ Neill’s work and yet it is necessary darkness, one that any poet worth their salt must try to look unflinchingly in the eye. And yet the love poems, which form the bulk of the collection, are not entirely marked by despair or depravity. ‘A Game of Chess’ brings the failures of macho posturing to bear when the speaker has ‘…talked myself silent,/Like some ritualistic male unburdening, my embarrassment is then so acute -/For all this while you have been constantly giving.” It is lines such as these that form the tempo of O’ Neill’s profane lyricism. In addition, the recurring theme of empathy and tenderness in the face of near-catastrophic breakdown adds a greater dimension to the collection. To the idea that love can be simultaneously a source of great elation and crushing despondency, O’ Neill claims that: “Love is the currency, a regal tender,/And each is to their throne, in the valley of Kings and Queens./Yet all about you now lies desert.”
Divertimento is ultimately a book of dualities and nuance. O’ Neill emerges as poet operating with a plethora of influences looking over his shoulder, yet also resolved to exert his own style and poetic identity. His work stands as a singular and under-looked, at a remove of the Irish canon, but not completely disengaged from it. This ability to stand alone and to also be able to shoulder that aloneness are what makes this collection an absorbing and challenging read.
Beyond the Pale: Dalkey Island
I.
‘Islands are the wellheads of the world’s salvation,’ the poet John Hewitt once wrote. It’s only now, as I stand squinty-eyed in the sun’s cold glint, watching sea-breezes ripple the high tides of Dalkey Sound, that I find I no longer agree with him.
I scan the bay for a boat with a white-painted hull and an outboard motor attached to its stern. The man steering the boat apparently named it the Lilly Rose after his grand-daughter who died shortly after being born. I read this on the website which advertised his ferry services to the island; I still don’t know whether to find it moving or macabre. Over the years, people have drowned in the same silver stretch of water that now laps quietly against the rocks below me. I wonder how many of them planned to.
Already the daybreak chill is subsiding, fluid and slow. It’s a cool, bright September morning in 2015, and I’ve come out here prepared. I’ve recently started attending a series of workshops called ‘The Pale Project’ in the new Lexicon library in Dun Laoghaire, organised and overseen by the then writer-in-residence Selina Guinness. The aim of the workshops is to draw up a psychogeography of a particular area in order to make sense of how it shapes our hopes, dreams and daily lives. They are called the ‘Pale Project’ due to what the ‘pale’ was once defined as – the centre of what is lawful, acceptable and normalized. Anything beyond the pale, that exists outside the borders and limits of official, allegedly civilised society, is frightening, unknown, deviant. I therefore have chosen Dalkey Island as my pale, as islands, by their very nature of being surrounded by water, operate beyond the pale, the central regulation of things, due to their natural condition of not being directly part of the mainland, and the alluring hold they have on the imagination.
I’ve arranged to meet up with Ken, the ferry operator, on what’s turned out to be the last of his daily tours before the winter season. For a fee, Ken conveys passengers out to the island in his motor-powered skiff, and leaves them there for a few hours until they stand in a particular spot and either phone or signal to him that they wish to leave. My particular passage is booked for ten that morning; I plan to stay on the island until I know what it is I want from it.
I’ve packed my gym bag with a notebook, some packed sandwiches and a four-pack of Grolsch, and have cycled all the way down the hilly coast road from Sorrento Point, from towards Coliemore Harbour. I’ve chained my bike up near the small side-wall just above the white stone shed that houses the local rowing club’s gear, beside the slipway. The morning itself is blue-grey, the sun’s light occasionally muted by a rush of smoky clouds. From the quayside, in the limpid gleam of dawn, I see Dalkey Island more clearly, becalmed like a green leviathan across the water, a dark-green chunk of dense bracken and granite, situated just off the coast and a stone’s throw away from Dun Laoghaire.
Not for the first time, I think what a curious irony it is that the island is so close to a capital city, and yet possesses all the wildness of an Atlantic atoll. Despite lying not even a mile offshore, I know the island is too open and wild to be in any way habitable. And while I am not a sailor, I know it is one thing to trace it on a map; quite another to approach it in a boat and see its granite foreshore and murky hillocks loom towards you on the swell. Death and beauty haunt the island, coalescing together in the one location.
Despite the island’s proximity, I’ve only set foot on it twice in my twenty-four years: the first time when I was ten years old, on a family day trip; the last time being only now, when I began to undertake this project. It’s always featured prominently on my life’s landscape, a striking yet everyday piece of the background. Yet the opportunity to sail out to it and take in its surroundings has always been scarce to me. As a child, I only had to look at Dalkey Island for my imagination to churn into a frenzy, wondering what dark secrets nestled in its waters and under the Martello Tower’s grim, Napoleonic profile. Being enthralled by stories of pirates and marauders who lived beyond the law, eschewing the enshrined precepts of society, of smugglers, bloodbaths and mutinies, buried treasure and men lured to their deaths on the rocks, remote isles, gun battles and the baleful magnificence of the sea itself, the island seemed, to my mind, a facet torn out of mythology and left to ride at permanent anchor in Dublin Bay’s outer reaches. Thus, I’ve always imagined it to be a site of utmost intrigue, where shady adventures were embarked upon and illicit deeds committed.
And I’m not alone in thinking this. ‘A local historic place of beauty and interest’ and ‘beautifully unspoiled by facilities’ are the kind of things you read about it on TripAdvisor. The various ruins dotting its terrain are clear indicators of Dalkey Island’s having once being inhabited, that human beings viewed it as a viable place to live. The same ruins led me to wonder why people eventually decided to leave it alone, stationary and abandoned, on the coast. It is an old cliché that there is always more than meets the eye with unclaimed places; but all clichés, I believe, carry some morsel of truth. Perhaps the island was never abandoned; rather, its inhabitants decided to simply leave it be.
As it turns out, Ken is out of the country and won’t be operating the boat today. He’s explained to me over the phone that his brother John will be assuming ferrying services for the day. I knew which vessel to look out for: a white-hulled motor boat with a red waterline, its name painted in black on the stern.
The sail of a pleasure yacht glides past on the blue springtide. Far out to sea, a white passenger ship out of Dublin Port, the Ulysses if I remember correctly, is coasting round the Baily Lighthouse. I count my blessings that I’ve chosen a good day to view the island. It’s better when the place is still, void of regatta or storm. The tide is relatively low, though already starting to roil with incoming surges. Coliemore is a fishing hotspot after all, one of five along this serrated stretch of coast. As such, early as it is, the quays are lined with men and their fishing gear, who have risen early in order to get started on the day’s trawl. Rods are fastened in holders or leaning against the wall, lines already cast. There are probably several dozen of them this morning, an angling mafiosi scattered along the coastline, from here to Scotsman’s Bay.
I think back to Hemingway and The Old Man and the Sea, how the opening passages describe the sleepy Cuban fishing village in which Santiago, the eponymous aged angler of the title, resides. Of course, Coliemore is nowhere as big or industrious as the port in the book. There is more solidarity than competition among the fishermen here, whereas in Hemingway: “They spoke of her [the sea] as a contestant or a place or even an enemy.” Fishing is a pastime in Coliemore; nothing more.
Nor is the water as crystalline that of Cuba. The first thing I notice, despite the quayside gathering, is how quiet it all is. A few of the boats, skiffs and rowing craft mainly, are either overturned on the slipway or else moored together in the harbour. John, as far as I can see, is nowhere to be seen. I keep an eye on the sound for any distant boats, especially any with a motor. I don’t mind the delay, though. It gives me more time to drink in Dalkey Island.
It loiters there, like the far, macabre strand of the river Styx, where the Underworld begins, waiting for me as if waiting for Aeneas, or for Dante and his Roman mentor. However, the current is not dark and bubbling, but clear and strong in the morning’s dim glare. The quayside I stand on doesn’t swarm with damned souls awaiting punishment. But it’s funny how the banality of such a scene can summon the most macabre of thoughts. That does not mean, of course, that the island itself is free of dark overtones. I know its waters bristle with the cadavers of sunken ships that ran aground on its reefs throughout the centuries. On the Irish coast, this is hardly unusual.
Finally, I see the boat I’m looking for rounds the reef from the direction of Killiney Bay, leaning heavily back in its wake. It trundles into the harbour-mouth, and the heavy-set, lifejacketed man gripping the engine tiller slows it down, almost to a halt, the engine growling mutedly. He climbs out and has a quick chat with one of the men fishing on the quayside. I see that he is clearly a man of position in the locality, moving and talking at ease amid the anglers, all of whom seem to know him by name. As soon as he’s finished his smoke, he climbs back in and stands aft.
I call to him: “How’s it going? You Ken’s brother?”
He looks up and eyes me. “I am, yeah. Who’s askin’?”
I tell him my name and that I’ve booked passage for that morning. He nods, lights a cigarette. “Hop in, so. While the tide’s still with us.”
I inch down the seaweed-clogged slipway and step awkwardly onto the thwart. It rocks slightly under my movements. I see a pair of lifebuoys tied near the bow, and a thin pond of bilge-water rolls around at my feet. I glance around the dock for any other passengers who might share in the journey, and see there are none. I am alone in my crossing.
John tosses me a lifejacket. “Here, you’ll want that.” I put it hurriedly on.
“You right so?”
I tell him I am. He nods and revs the motor, fixing his eyes dead ahead to the island, turning the steel tiller in a precise, circular motion.
If only because they share similar professions, John reminds me of Charon, the demonic boatman whose duty it is to ferry damned souls across the Stygian waters to hell. But, despite the gruff jocularity with which he greets me, he doesn’t cut nearly as ominous a figure as Charon, nor are his eyes ringed with flame. Nor is he as lowly or defeated as Santiago, of Hemingway’s book; he isn’t weighed down by coils of rope and a gaff rig thrown over his shoulder. He seems more of a custodian, a gatekeeper and a guide. Were this fiction, his role would be benign. I don’t need to offer him a golden bough as payment to cross the water, or even an obol placed over both my eyelids; just the usual charge of seven euro, which I can give him when he comes to pick me up. And I won’t be stuck out on Dalkey Island for eternity; just five hours at most.
“Here, is it possible to only sail out to the island in a boat like this one?” I ask, nodding at the Sound.
He grins. “Trust me, pal, I could row yeh over there if I felt like it.”
The engine growl and the boat chugs steadily out of the harbour, shoving surf aside. I don’t say much during the crossing; just sit back and let John do his work. I want to enjoy the journey, short as it is. Being out in a boat, encircled by water, your nostrils stung by spray and salt, your lifejacket buckled and tightened against the wash, can still even the liveliest conversation. And if you’re a born lubber like me, then even a short voyage across a narrow 300-meter seaway can be a stirring novelty. I think of taking my phone out and snapping a few many photos. In the end, I think better of it.
II.
Islands festoon Ireland’s coast, be they sandbank or safe haven, connected to the mainland by ferry or bridge, or else left in a most unsplendid isolation when storm conditions rise to fever pitch. On the west coast in particular, entire archipelagos, long since abandoned, lurk like rocky fragments ripped from the mainland. The Blaskets, Skelligs and Inishbofin, to name but a few, count among these. But, as I’ve said, they are all to be found on the west coast, where storms are normal. Dalkey Island is on the east, and is as solitary as the best of them.
Ireland’s eastern seaboard is decidedly more level than its western counterpart, unscarred by the Atlantic’s bitter hammerings; but all the same, the Irish Sea operates by its own design, keeping the treacherous reefs and silted mudflats hidden from the eyes of both landsman and voyager. Its storms are textured with a different ferocity to those of the Atlantic; because they are crammed into a narrower, shallower and more enclosed waterway, the high winds and running waves are still keenly felt.
Dalkey Island is no exception. It stands through dawn and dusk, indifferent to the seasons. Its beauty and menace lie hand-in-hand. When viewed from a level vantage-point, from the beach for instance, it is a pastoral landmass, ringed on all sides by craggy rock formations. But if viewed from above, say from the altitudes of Killiney Hill, it starts to resemble something more vicious, such as a blade or a hawk’s talon (indeed, the name ‘Dalkey’ translates as ‘thorny island’, derived from the Irish word ‘Deilg-inis’).
Crouched off its northern shore is the uninviting rock-chain known as the Muglins, which was historically used as a hanging point from which the bodies of condemned criminals (frequently those found guilty of piracy, mutiny or smuggling) were hung as a dissuasion to future or potential lawbreakers. The Muglins themselves posed such an acute hazard to shipping prior to the construction of the lighthouse, which now stands like bloodied candle on its base, that Captain William Hutchinson, a former harbourmaster of Dun Laoghaire, referred to them as “these siren rocks.”1 Lighthouses are both symbols and machines of hope; but even hope must not forget what it shines against: the Muglins lighthouse is painted red for a reason.
The Dalkey Sound is notorious for its heavy undercurrents. Lying eastward of the main island are a vicious cluster of reefs with benign-sounding names like Maiden Rock, Carrig Rock, Clare Island, and Lamb Island. We see them only at low tide. According to irishwrecksonline.net, a grand total of nine vessels, a coal ship and anti-U-boat steam drifter among them, have foundered in the island’s waters over the years.2
Despite this abundance of wrecks, the Sound was deemed by many to be a workable harbour: “At these periods of time, it is supposed, the harbour of Dublin was not navigable for ships of burden, who might lie in the Sound of Dalkey, land either men or merchandises on the common, and send them to the castles (which, perhaps, were then made use of as store-houses) where they could remain in security from the depredations of the mountaineers, until they were conveyed to Dublin; on the road to which, are other castles, built at proper distances, to ensure their safety in the passage.”
As with all untamed places, stories cling to it like barnacles on a keel. St. Begnet, alleged patron saint of the Dalkey parish, had a stone church built in her name, presumably by missionaries who wished to spread the faith. During the Viking Age, Norse raiders used it as a type of ‘harbour of convenience’ from which to conduct their sorties on the mainland. Indeed, an entry for the year 938 in the Annals of the Four Masters states that:
“Coibhdeanach, Abbot of Cill-achaidh, was drowned in the sea of Delginis-
cualann while fleeing from the foreigners.”
The same volume records that, several years later, in the year 942:
“The destruction of Ath-cliath by the Irish … The destruction brought upon it
was this, i.e. its houses, divisions, ships, and all other structures, were burned; its
women, boys, and plebeians, were carried into bondage. It was totally destroyed,
from four to one man, by killing and drowning, burning and capturing, excepting
a small number who fled in a few ships, and reached Deilginis.”
Several centuries later, in 1302, Edward I’s military campaign of Scotland saw Dalkey Island utilized as a citadel from where supplies and weaponry were loaded for shipment to the English army. Two hundred years after, following an outbreak of bubonic plague ‘not only in the City and County of Dublin but all over the English Pale’3, the island found itself playing host to a legion of refugees fleeing the epidemic. This episode was described by James J. Gaskin hence:
“When the city was visited and wasted by a most remarkable plague in 1575, the
terrified inhabitants, with one accord, rushed to Dalkey as a sanctuary, a sure refuge
against the awful visitation. An immense camp was formed on the hills, on the shore,
on the common, and also on Dalkey Island. On this occasion the grass grew in the
streets of the deserted city.”4
1766 saw The Gentleman’s Magazine report on the execution of a band of mutineers, the bodies of whom were later brought to the island:
“On Monday last (3rd) George Gidley, Richard St. Quinton, Peter McKinlie, and
a Dutchman Andres Lukerman, late mariners aboard the brig Earl of Sandwich,
belonging to London whereof John Cochrane was master, were executed near St.
Stephen’s Green pursuant to their sentence for having murdered their captain,
Captain Glass, his wife and daughter, also Charles and James Pinchert. Their bodies
were brought from the place of execution to Kilmainham Jail and they were afterwards
hung in chains in the most conspicuous places at Poolbeg and the Muglins.”
The same magazine, several years later, published an article, authored by a Peter Wilson, entitled A curious Description of Dalkey and its Seven Castles. In it, Wilson writes somewhat incredulously of the island’s growth from a place of solitary spiritual development to a community of ardent, even fanatical, believers:
One supposes that the island was formerly united with the neighbouring coast,
by an isthmus or neck of land, long since destroyed; a second that it was the residence
of some hermit, who caused the church to be built for the exercise of his private
devotion; a third, that it was erected for the accommodation of the principal inhabitants
of Dublin, who retired hither, when the city was visited by an extraordinary plague
or pestilence; and a fourth, that the clergy, by building this and other churches,
in places remote and difficult of access, thereby meant to inflame the devotion
of their followers, and possibly to impose a penance, when they obliged them
to frequent such obscure places of public worship.”
Some years after, in 1796, the island found itself under the governance of its own ersatz king, namely: ‘His factious Majesty, King of Dalkey (island), Emperor of the Muglins, Defender of his own Faith and respecter of all others and Sovereign of the Illustrious Order of the Lobster and Periwinkle.’ This ruler was allegedly sanctified with whisky upon being crowned, and appointed his officers. The Dalkey Gazette reported on the proceedings of his coronation: “On Sunday morning, at the dawn of day, his Majesty King Stephen came in a private coach to the Palace, attended by his graces… His Majesty’s arrival [at Dalkey] was announced by firing of rockets, discharges of artillery and the most unbounded shouts of applause from the surrounding multitude…”4.
In 1801, Captain William Bligh, of Mutiny On The Bounty fame, was commissioned by the Corporation for Preserving and Improving the Port of Dublin (or the Ballast Board, as it was better known) to conduct a deep-water engineering survey of Dublin Bay. The purpose of this report was to record the myriad dangers the bay posed to shipping, as well as recommend what measures might be undertaken to improve them. Bligh estimated that Dalkey Sound was too exposed to work as a harbour, though he did not rule out the construction of a breakwater extending to the island for the benefit of fishing vessels.
Shortly afterwards, in 1805, the Martello tower and its associated gun battery were built, following an Act of Parliament decreeing that coastal defences be set up all along Ireland’s shores in preparation for an expected French invasion. As overseen by Lieutenant-Colonel Benjamin Fisher of the Royal Engineers, a two-gun Martello Tower was built on Dalkey Island’s southern precipice as a lookout (and later immortalised by James Joyce in the ‘Telemachus’ episode of Ulysses). In any event, the expected incursion never took place.
An 1840 account of the island, originally published in the Irish Penny Dreadful, clarified the meaning of Maiden Rock’s name: “an appellation derived from a tradition said to be of twelve hundred years’ antiquity, that twelve young maidens from Bullock and Dalkey, having gone over to this rock to gather duilisk, … were overtaken by a sudden storm so violent as to prohibit assistance from the larger island, and all miserably perished…”
Up until then, the island had been under the ownership by the archbishop of Dublin - now it was granted to the Board of Ordnance, and was run as a military outpost until 1913, when the Dalkey Urban District Council acquired it and designated it as a nature reserve. This is in keeping with the ever-changing role of ownership that has marked the island’s history, yet, it also designates it specifically as a public space, open to the entire community, and not as privately-owed land, which, to my mind, is a small but crucial advantage. It has quite wisely been left alone as a sanctuary for the rabbits, goats and birds that now inhabit it.
I believe this is wise because islands, uninhabited islands especially, are stark reminders of the finiteness of society, of the limits to its laws and customs and systems of security. Encroached on all sides by an untameable element, they force our respect. This is why humanity always seeks to colonise them, claim them for our own, imprint them with chosen names and allegiances before sucking them dry of their resources. They can function as military outposts as much as holiday destinations.
We live in constant fear of a chaos that we know, deep down, cannot be tamed by civilisation and its assumed measures of law and order. The flows of trade, science, exploration and art are all driven by this very fear. Even after we believe such archaic practises to be thrown logically aside, islands remind us still of our own inborn ferocity, against which we draft up ever-more desperate laws, statutes and decrees. We may seek asylum on islands, use them as shelters or hideaways, but we may never claim them as our own. In effect, they do not just lie beyond the pale, but are pales unto themselves.
And if I had to guess, I’d say this fear also stems from the unspoken understanding most people have that they do not belong on the island, and have no real right or claim to it, either as shelter or chattel. Even in writing about Dalkey Island, I demonstrate how little I truly understand it. Every attempt to describe it and list its particulars amounts to just one more wretched attempt to control it and subdue its ferocity.
Yet, hand in hand with that fear walks the exoticism and implicit romance of an island life - perhaps from the stories heard and absorbed in childhood. To live as a castaway, an exile, a hermit or an outlaw, cut entirely off from the mainland and presiding over your own minuscule realm carries a distinctive appeal. To get even an inkling of Odysseus’ struggle of being washed up on Calypso’s shore, or the grand privacy of Crusoe’s solitude, one must retreat to an island. The reality, of course, is no doubt nothing like this. Yet even the empowering nature of solitude (a chosen, almost vocational state, as opposed to loneliness) often leads a person to want to live entirely on their own terms, and in remote places.
III.
We motor through the lumpy swell. I grip the thwart on which I sit for balance. The current is strong and sure, sliding in a lateral drift. The wake churns, bubbling behind us like ragged lace. We aren’t crossing an especially deep or perilous stretch of water, but John’s clearly a seasoned boatman, who knows he can’t afford to leave even a minute-long passage to chance. Even the most seasoned mariners know the sea will always be bigger, and untamed, and must therefore be respected.
To someone like John, I imagine, the sea is many things, but never dull. To him, there is always something more to learn about it. It’s very easy to get complacent on land, sealed off from the brine; once you know you’re surrounded by ocean, under a wakening sky, the boat weighed down by nothing but the portable motor clamped to her stern and the lifejacketed body she carries, the vigilance of survival returns to you. Weather is something we either take shelter from or avail of on land; but at sea, it’s a crucial language to learn, the tide’s grammar, the erratic dialects of wind, how abruptly the conversation can change. No two waves break in the same way, and currents show loyalty to no-one. Its very presence can either lull you into serenity or drive you mad with fear. You learn to work with the sea’s many moods, or else you drown.
John steers like a man born into that way of life, setting the boat to an even motorized glide. It seems that the business of navigation and lifejackets and boat maintenance and tide-watching are about as normal as life gets for him. Clearly, he’d works this passage a thousand times before, and is on the ball every time.
Dalkey Island seems to wait for us, looming nearer and nearer, a whale-like mass silhouetted against the sky, its hills dotted with bone-white boulders, widespread and plain like carbuncles on flesh, neither beckoning me nor coercing me to leave. A new breeze whips up, heavy and sure. The feel of it swiping my face refreshes me. For a moment, I feel something like wonder.
I see the roofless stone chapel on the lowland ridge that dwindles into the sea. Further up, on the northward hill, the Martello loitered in stark greyness, like a seat of forbidden power, steadfast as a lighthouse but not in the least bit heartening. Behind them both, though I can’t see it from the water, squats the rusty outer wall of the derelict gun battery, no doubt bristling with weeds and toothed scraps of flint. To think, in all its years of service, it never once fired a shot, whether in anger or warning. Just ahead of us, jutting out into the water, is the concrete slipway for boats to make berth. Along with the Martello, chapel and gun battery, it’s the only evidence left of humanity’s attempt to exert control over the land.
John lowers the engine with familiar precision and I unbuckle my lifejacket. I hand it to him and disembark.
“How long d’yeh reckon you’ll be?” he asked. “Four hours? Five?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Five hours at most. Should be grand.”
“No bother, so. See y’when I see yeh.”
“Sound. Thanks.”
He turns the boat around and back out towards the bay, picking up speed as he goes. I watch him leave before turning to walk up the jetty. Leathery heaps of kelp and crushed shells speckle the small strand beside me. A dirt track, trampled into existence by a millennia of footsteps, lead upward towards the chapel, fringed with a yellowed morass of bracken and marram.
I am now alone with the sun, sea, sky, and the island’s grassy pale. Only then do I realise, all too late, that I have no business being on it.
A minor saint. Viking marauders. Drowned monks. Civilians massacred by fire or plague. Men hung by the neck until dead for crimes of mutiny and rapine. Fanatics, smugglers, mock rulers who sent up the office and title of kingship, yet still benefited from the position. A former Royal Navy officer, disgraced for his association with history’s most notorious mutiny, now brought in for his cartographical skills in order to chart the island’s tempestuous waters. A bevy of shipwrecks. Ghostly kelp gatherers, lending the name to the place of their death. Men of God and carnage, each using the island for their own singular purpose. Such is the cast of characters that has trod the wind-lashed boards of Dalkey Island; all, in some lasting way, were estranged from the mainland.
And that’s the paradox: Dalkey Island is a place of safety as much as peril. War, pestilence, drowning, shelter, shipwreck, mutiny and all manner of gruesome occurrences have coloured its history. The sanctuary for one person may well have been a nightmare of captivity for another. It is both the showground and plaything of authorities, an arena whereupon games of power were mercilessly played out, where debauchery and self-denial have competed with one another.
Facts such as these give Dalkey Island a far richer and more interesting quality beyond its physical properties, at least in my mind. They also serve to reinforce the idea that history informs and fleshes out the local and supposedly banal everyday world, as much as it does the bigger world beyond.
IV.
When I look out to sea, I stare eternity right in the eye.
Took me twenty-four years and one boat journey to realise that little cliché. But this is it, I know: the last stretch of land before the open sea. I stare out at the endless blue realm, awash with light, rapt by the way it unfolds into eternity. The last of the fog has burned away. The cold is gone, dispelled by the hammering sun. Tongues of heat-haze lick the air. I feel a calm that only comes from viewing seismic things; a reminder that the sea isn’t and never was mine to claim or tame. I feel blessed, as I often do, to have grown up in a coastal region, so near to the sea and escape. Had I not, the ocean’s sheer size alone would have had me shaking in my boots.
Whatever life I had before coming ashore, whatever life I will return to, whatever worries I have, may now rest, temporarily, on the backburner.
Don’t think like a poet out here, I remind myself. Thinking like a poet is fatal. You must never think like a poet when faced with danger or even the possibility of danger. Even and especially in the chaos of the water, or of water-ringed places, one must think instead like an engineer: functional, clear-eyed, precise. Think like a poet and you’re good and set for damnation. There’ll be plenty of time yet to admire the beauty that closes in on all sides; right now you need to stay alert for rogue waves and running currents. The sound might be small, but it has no favourites.
My name, my age, my sins, my triumphs, my shames, my loves, my rivalries, my work, my pride, my angst, my strengths, my failings - all are now flotsam, left to lie at half-ebb.
I’ve been on the island for a good half-hour. Standing on it feels abnormal and a little perilous. Its black rocks and green terrain called attention to one another, a salient dance of divergent colour. The tower and battery soar behind me, far above sea level. On the main precipice, facing southward, I realise how cunning Dalkey Island is in its form, how easily deceived the passing traveller could be by it. It is no longer my choice to stop and take in my surroundings. My attention is commanded by them. The incessant, 21st-century impulse to document everything in sight, to whip out the iPhone and start snapping away, has no business here. I see as far as Greystones to the south, and Lambay Island to the north. A mere stretch of thirty miles; it is enough to rob my breath.
The tide climbs from its black element; the sky is a changeable ceiling.
Waves are short-lived by nature; they are doomed to a short roll of existence. That’s the tragedy of them; were it not for the land curbing their rampage, they could roll on forever, an endless phalanx of salt, momentum, and surf, grinding, churning, hissing on all sides. At least in their breaking there is a glory, a primal hypnosis. But even a dead calm does not necessarily mean the island is washed clean of history’s burden. Until now, the waves burned. And were the island further out to sea, I would know better than to think the waves harmless.
I need the island the way saints and outlaws need a desert.
The distance to the mainland is short, but the contrast is clear; terraced, post-modern houses with their undoubtedly fine views, shored up by a wall of stone, cluster together by the harbour, while the barren island and throbbing sea eddy opposite and beneath them. Killiney Hill looms over me, the obelisk tiny and barbed from its peak, and Bray Head crouches far behind, like a leviathan. The mountains beyond are be clearly seen, as can the golden-brown stretch of Killiney Beach. Looking at the opposite shore, there’s the Victorian row of houses in Sorrento Terrace and then the tall oaken trees of Dillon’s Park, their branches leaning forward as if to brush the water, and tiny figures of men casting lines on the boat slip beneath. I see the apartment blocks towering over Coliemore, and the Vico Road snaking on into Dalkey village. Further north, there is the Gothic silhouette of Loreto Abbey and then Dun Laoghaire pier, and onwards, the crystalline bay itself, Howth and the Poolbeg Towers visible in the sun-haze.
Wait for it: the sound of the sleeping giant rubbing sand from his eye.
The island is peppered with rabbit holes and bulging knolls of grass. I watch the goats. A group of them laze on the big rock protruding just over by the far shore, grazing amid the bracken, their horns stark in the sun. Were this a more benighted time, perhaps I’d have mistaken them for demons, lying in wait to snag the souls of unsuspecting visitors. But then, birds and beasts seem like the island’s true protectors and inhabitants. They know when to leave the place alone and when to avail of it. They know and respect territory better than humanity ever has - the goat has its domain on the crag, rabbits delve into the undergrowth, droves of gannets and terns assemble on Maiden’s Rock. It is off those rocks that I imagine the kidnapped abbot had drowned.
Is the island truly deserted? Or does some shadowy force await me here?
I should have come to the island in harsher weather, or even after dark. I should have checked the forecast for a stormier night, and made my way out. Pitched up a tent, lit a fire, and let the sea’s jarring voice lull me. There’d be no escape and no way to drown out the waves’ snarling. The chapel - roofless, windowless, decrepit - would not shield me from the weather. It was in the Chapel that the men who built the Martello slept, with only the lone fireplace to warm them, shivering in the torchlight’s amber glow. What did they listen for, I wondered? The reeling hollers of seagulls, ghostly voices singing in some strange language on the wind? Dragon-headed longships coming about, cannon fire, or just the echoing hiss of breakers on the rocks below?
It is wrong of me to do this, to write about lives of which I know nothing.
Having grown up with the illusive safety streetlights and torches, walking after dark through a place where no sodium light glares, can be a daunting experience, capable of leaching the mind of reason, until all that’s left is terror and teeth and detonated nerves. It is hard to comprehend what lies across the water when you are too used to solid earth ceding to your boot-heel. There is a world sleeping on the island, sleeping the way volcanoes sleep, yet also wide awake and carefully eyeing the baffling new world of pleasure craft, outboard motors and containerships that exceed the island itself in size. If I believed in ghosts and goblins, then perhaps going to the island at night would have led me to half-expect the spectres of all the people I have named, adrift in eternity, summoned forth by my sudden intrusion of their island. I’d lie there in the cold, watched by their flickering eyes, their forms luminous under a riot of stars, indifferent to the rampaging wind.
Pilgrims once came here, and refugees also; I have a choice that they did not.
I guess I’m on a pilgrimage as well, though I don’t think the term is really merited here; I’ll only be gone for a few hours, at most; I won’t linger on the island until I feel I’ve made whatever peace I set out to and I’ve been spiritually expunged. The mainland, and therefore human society, is dead within my sights; after dark, the sickly red-gold orbs of streetlights will simmer on the coast, their haze shrouding the stars to invisibility. It remains so very easy to imagine one’s capacity for survival in the wilderness, stripped of the creature comforts of civilian life, such as food, heating, a social life and plentiful entertainment. Only when you are in it does the hard, lasting reality hit you.
When you put out to sea, every law you followed on land no longer applies.
Now that I stood on the island, it was the sea I was unable to take my eyes off. The water can never be truly understood. Poets attach bombastic metaphors to it. Oceanographers jot down estimates of wind and tide, swirling fog patterns, the height and force of swell, waypoint and position, the variations of tidal velocity. Swimmers watch diminishing waves according to a set timetable. As for me, no matter how many books and instruction manuals I read, YouTube clips I watch, people I speak to, or even how many voyages I may embark on in the future (be they for business or pleasure), I know I’ll never quite understand the water, as I’ll never understand the island. It’s an old obsession. And old obsessions have a curious habit of following me, even as far out as here.
I carry no treasure, no illicit imports to consign to the dusky fathoms.
I am both outlaw and coloniser, recluse and sightseer. I am not the island’s honoured guest, but a prowler vandalising its privacy. Some plans you know you cannot explain nor give reasoning for, not even to yourself - you just know something that must be done, some committed action must be taken. Coming out to Dalkey Island was such a plan - I had to do it, and would not feel at ease otherwise. Yet, if you were to ask me why I felt I had to go out to it, I’d be lost for words. I know can turn around any moment and know the mainland is still there, that John will come motoring by any minute and pick me up. There is relief to be had as well; in a certain light, when the sun has boiled has the last of the fog away, and the sea turns a certain lazy shade of green, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were on a resort.
I am a pilgrim; I have no blessing to give or receive.
It’s high tide by the time I leave. The water is still calm, but the waves surging in from the wakes of ships and ferries that crawl to and from the port, churn the current. John asks me if I enjoyed myself. I tell him that I did.
The Confidence Man*
‘I say the word ‘forever’ less and less, the more I understand it.’
It’s a good line. I might get it tattooed on my chest. Or carved on my tombstone.
During the heatwaves and increased storm warnings of the summer, I felt my heartbeat for the first time in a while. The seasons change so rapidly now; I can barely keep up.
It’s quarter to five on a Friday evening. I’ve been awake since twelve, but only forced myself to get up an hour ago. I sleep in my clothes more and more nowadays. Eventually I’ll stop writing and try and tidy my house up. Or at least shower, and shave. Sometimes I want to jack the writing in, and put a bullet in my mouth. Other times I wake up ready to hold onto life like it’s all I have - because it is all I have.
I also know I have a talent, but it’s not a very useful one.
I barely sleep anymore. I can’t concentrate on anything. The noise in my head is never still. I have what could be charitably described as a ‘rich inner life’. My brain keeps snaring itself into knots; I go from wired to exhausted in a matter of minutes.
I have my wins, I have my losses; living with both requires skill.
Christ. I sound like I’m scribbling down ideas for a GQ op-ed.
‘Though my problems are meaningless/That don't make them go away.’
As always, Neil Young says it better than I or anyone else can. All this year, I’ve been playing the ‘On the Beach’ album on repeat. The title song’s jangling bassline and weary falsetto are good reminders that at least my life has a belter soundtrack.
That phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ keeps coming back to me. A quick google search of the term yields over 10,100,000 results. Every time there’s a mass shooting or an assault or even a film or a comedian that arouses controversy, it’s listed as among the chief factors. A lot of us, myself included, engage in it. I don’t doubt or deny the concept or its validity. But it also sounds like a good name of a beer to me. Like a stout or an ale or even an IPA. Occasionally I half-joke to myself: if the writing doesn’t work out, I’ll start my own microbrewery, and the Tox-Mas IPA will be my premium product. Blonde, red, unfiltered. Whatever you want.
Being alone is natural, yet people don’t know how to be. It’s not a skill they teach you in school, or during office hours. We’re tired of living with the inner cavity, of the disappointment, and of letting each other down. Yet the disconnect that’s become so prevalent in recent decades is now the norm. People seize up just texting each other. The more we anchor ourselves to our hope, the more let down we inevitably feel. The let-downs, both the ones you’re responsible for and the ones visited upon you, pile up and you start measuring them. I don’t live without hope, but I don’t wholly rely on it, either.
Loneliness is considered a mental-health problem nowadays. As most aspects of the human condition are. It’s a symptom of being Irish, I suppose; the inability to countenance that someone or something is worth loving. Whatever suffering I’ve faced in this life is fairly minor compared to that faced by most people I know. I've lost friends to suicide, and others to their own inner demons. Because I can't afford therapy, I turn to language.
I am often alone, but rarely lonely. Loneliness is inevitable; it cannot be escaped. Loneliness rarely means being alone. It usually means no-one caring. I have no sense of community; no real sense, anyway.
Loneliness rarely means being alone. It usually means no-one caring. Overfed with an endless scroll of stories, posts, newsfeeds, articles shared from newsites blasting the latest cause for concern. Some call it an overpopulation issue; others say it’s the pervasive influence of technology and social media in everyday life. Actual face to face contact is waning. At any given point our eyes are glued to some sort of screen. Mass disconnection - is it any wonder?
The hackneyed, social-media friendly refrain of “love yourself!” rings hollow when people seem to care little about each other. The constant reminders to put oneself first, of the paramountcy if one’s own immediate happiness and gratification, how if should always take precedence over the needs of one’s family and friends. I am often alone, but rarely lonely. Loneliness is inevitable; it cannot be escaped. Being involved with someone for a long period of time has only increased my worries and knowledge of how bad I am. I don’t need anyone else finding that out.
I wonder if all this intensity is necessary. Or if I am over just over-enthusiastic and say yes too much, too quickly. I follow the reformed alcoholic’s recommendation, and take each day as it comes, work on what I have to. Scripts, reviews, my novel, my poems.
This is new for me; the low-lovel exhaustion that simmers quietly at the back of each day. In college, I used to churn out multiple 3, 000-word essays, poems, playscripts by the week. I badly needed a girlfriend then. Confidence, too. If I had more confidence, my life would be very different.
Now, I just need a job. Or at least, something to keep me occupied. I don’t care about forging a career or drafting up five-year plans. A job is just a way of keeping afloat, so I can write.
I should still teach myself a few new things, though. Like how to make fire from kindling, without matches or a lighter. Manage my finances better. Jog, cycle, lift weights. Programme a computer from scratch. Things that are quite necessary for a life of competence, and which don’t engage me in the slightest.
Being involved with someone for a long period of time has only increased my worries and knowledge of how bad I am. I don’t need anyone else finding that out.
I need no-one and no-one needs me. Is that a strength or a weakness?
Now that I’m back living in my parents’ home, and leading a warped version of my adolesence again. The dynamic with my parents and younger sister is closer to that of roommates than a family unit. We lead our individual lives, work our own jobs, and interaction remains minimal, even under the one roof. We are either too busy or don’t care. We just lack the energy to care. Hence why I rarely speak or expect anything from them. The bond of blood ties everyone, but I’m not sure.
My father’s boots clumping on the wooden floorboards, the shower’s hiss and the extended sigh of the kettle boiling, the scorch of black coffee at the back of my throat. These are the reminders of how things can change and remain the same.
They say adulthood is just the slow realisation that all the wisdom fed to you since infancy is categorically false.
I am single, and yet I am not isolating myself anymore. When I was with my ex, she was my priority. Putting other friendships aside seemed like a virtue, as it meant I was prioritizing my partner. This is what men do in relationships, apparently. When the breakup happens, they find they’ve no mates to turn to. I’m not in the humour to be anyone’s boyfriend now; I lack the energy to care about being with someone.
I keep thinking about women, as always. They seem to move faster than me, their footsteps ablaze with purpose. I look at their hands more and more, to see if they wear rings. Most of them aren’t. It’s not something I ever thought I’d do. It’s become another reflex, like checking the time or my emails. Do all men do this?
Occasionally I look my exes up online, like the creep I am. I don’t go on dates that much. There’s always the need to impress, and I rarely feel that impressive. I’ve no business being someone’s boyfriend.
I was someone’s boyfriend for three years; in all that time, I never quite believed that she loved me. I couldn’t see any reason why she would. But she did. And I loved her back.
She used to look at me as if I was a god. I knew it was only a matter of time before the reality of what I am would become clear. I could only keep the masquerade up for long, and then she’d want me gone. As she eventually did.
Every woman I’ve been with I’ve inevitably let down.
Most blokes seem to make it their life’s work to pester women until they either give in or set their brothers on them. I’m more willing to take ‘no’ for an answer. Usually, I expect it.
I’ve never felt wanted anyway. I’d say I’ve been out of the game for too long, but that would imply I’ve even been in the game in the first place.
The beginning of things are always exciting. Once I see the ambit of work that must go into something, I lose interest.
I don’t know if I have a stunted capacity to feel or recognise love, or am just incapable of feeling it.
I’ve also trained myself not to get sentimental anymore. To the point that major losses or setbacks don’t hit as hard as they should. The mawkishness is repulsive to anyone who witnesses it.
More and more in my newsfeed about Brexit, climate change, the housing crisis here, banking layoffs in Germany, mass drownings in the Mediterranean, multi-millionaire men of the people taking selfies at Everest’s peak, immigrant detention centres at the Mexican border. The inevitable and deserved comparisons to Auschwitz and Dachau. There’s no ignoring it anymore.
Armageddon, Ragnorok, Kali Yuga, Al-Qiyammah, the Anthropocene. Every society, in every era, puts a name to the inevitable, to the moment of its collapse. It continues to this day.
I remember chatting up this girl once, in the smoking section in Workman’s. Whether she fancied me, or was just bored, I couldn’t tell. I never can. She was confident in the way only young people are.
A man sitting alone in a pub is usually best avoided, but she came up to me and got the conversation going. I say we had a conversation, but really I just let her talk about this upcoming art exhibition she was about to have in Amsterdam. Its overall theme was about body image, how men and women percieve theirs, for good or for ill. Five years ago, this would’ve impressed me.
She asked me did I like my body, the way I looked, did I feel comfortable in my skin. I didn’t really have an answer for her. If she was waiting for me to make a move, she was sorely disappointed. Not that I didn’t want to, I just didn’t know when. It’s a very delicate dance, and I have very heavy feet.
I know I am far less than what I could be. I don’t need a self-help guide to realise that.
The mind is a cave; the brain peels back. I can’t be alone for very long without the craving for a cold beer breaking the surface. I need to stay numb. I need to forget that I exist.
I want to be somebody else. I’m tired of being a burden to everyone. But this is the flesh I am sealed into.
Only a few days ago, I was invited to go on a hike through Glendalough. Sweat on my torso and mud on my boots; feeling the winds at such a high altitude, overlooking the swirl of black water that is the Upper Lake in the valley, scrape at my face. Strangely enough, it cleared my head.
At home, I got back to work. Wrote and felt the old strength come back. I know the value of hope now, the necessity of keeping going. I still know better than to rely on it, but it isn’t unwelcome for now.
*This essay was published in the October 2019 edition of Cassandra Voices, with thanks to Frank Armstrong for selecting it: https://cassandravoices.com/society/the-confidence-man/?fbclid=IwAR204NRQdD2cMcxeB8_HAJp1xoGwZ6pjWWAxG2G4fNRIdKgQJh2qTBVu2JA
Dermot Healy: A Belated Appreciation.
By
Daniel Wade
‘What would the living do
If they had not the dead to see to?’
In the winter of 2019, I was working as an assistant cameraman on a documentary covering the Sligo-based rock band Indian. I was asked by Shane Collins, the documentary’s director, to head up to Rosses’ Point for a week, where the rest of the film crew were staying, and we’d get to work on what we needed, setting up equipment for shots, interviewing the various band members, filming them at rehearsals and gigs and so forth. There was also a decent wage packet at the end of it for me.
They were a good few days, mostly spent driving around various locations of that glorious county and town in search of some gorgeous scenery to film (and in Sligo, gorgeous scenery is abundant). We’d get up at six in the morning and clock off in the late evening. For my part, I was happy for the work and to get some street-level experience on a working film set. I had other reasons to be up there, however.
As a child, back in the mid-nineties, my parents brought myself and my sister down to the townland of Ballinfull, usually in the autumn or the summertime. It was a bit further up the coast from Rosses Point, where my aunt Margaret lived at the time with her partner, Mary. It was something of an unofficial artist’s colony, though I was too young to fully appreciate this at the time. My memories of that time were happy enough; Sligo made a welcome change to Dublin and there was no shortage of wild beaches and seemingly-untracked fields to explore. It was also, as I was to gradually find out, a place of savage mythology and storytelling, of Ben Bulben and Streedagh, of Yeats and Countess Markievicz, sunken Spanish Armada ships and Granuaile, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Dairmuid and Grainne, and all the warriors of the Fianna. To work on the documentary in that glorious county offered me a rare opportunity to see it again, and to perhaps view it through more mature eyes.
Sligo has been particularly, and rightly, storied due to its association with the formidable W.B. Yeats, who once described it as “the country of the heart”. Indeed, Ben Bulben could be clearly seen from the living room window of my aunt’s house, hulking regally over the landscape around it. Nearby was Lissadell Strand, Drumcliffe Church and graveyard, and of course, the famed Lake Isle of Innisfree, becalmed in the placid waters of Lough Gill, all of which are immortalised in Yeats’ majestic verse. To say my young imagination was ignited by all this is a massive understatement.
But I was to associate the county with a very different poet, albeit one who was still alive at the time. This was Dermot Healy. He lived with his wife Helen in a whitewashed, clapboard cottage in Maugherow; it was situated on a remote cliff at the peninsula’s far end, on the very cusp of the Atlantic. Flocks of migratory barnacle geese flew in from Greenland every six months to winter on the offshore islands. Dermot once told me they were his way of marking the passing of each year. "You can tell the time by them, the daily clock of the sky," he said.
His house kept watch over the northern Sligo coast with the constancy of a lighthouse. I had an inkling that, were you to dive off the cliff and miraculously survive the considerable drop onto the rocks below, you could swim out and, were you to keep swimming, the next landmass you’d reach was Canada. That’s how remote it was. On the crescented strip of beach below was a long, blackened barricade hewn from limestone, lashed tautly together by wire net - a sea wall, built to protect his home from the beautifully vicious conditions of the Irish coast. Dermot built it after his house had suffered repeated flooding (‘The house/Turns into a ship/And rides out to sea… thunder strikes the earth from under the bed,’ he writes in The Ballyconnell Colours). ‘Move the wrong stone,/the ocean pours in’ are the concluding lines of his poem July Storm, from What the Hammer. In his poem The Wall I Built he wrote:
The wall I built
the sea took.
The stones I gathered
the sea scattered ...
Clearly, the fragility of the place, the gradual reclaiming of the land by the ocean, was a daily reality with which he had to contend, though that sea wall managed to hold true throughout the years. His work was both an affirmation and refutation of what the classic writerly bromide ‘write what you know.’ The writer of fiction, and of poetry is fundamentally dedicated to possibility. Possibility is the root of all creation as well as the urge to engage in it.
Dermot was an imposing presence, both in life and on the page, though it would be a while before I would encounter and fully appreciate his work. Over the years, we often saw him, nursing a pint at the dimly-lit bar in Ellen’s pub, chatting with whoever was in. I was reading Treasure Island at the time, which, by, coincidence, had also been Dermot’s favourite book as a child. His admiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s piratical yarn remained. The influence is clear; Stevenson’s skill for strikingly grotesque characters whose humanity remains nonetheless unobscured was something Dermot was also a master at. In Sudden Times, we have the ominous figure of Silver John, an alleged protection racketeer on a London building site whose name invokes Stevenson’s one-legged ship’s cook, and who looms large in both the reader and protagonist’s consciousness. We bonded over that book, over its buccaneerish thrill and deceptive simplicity, and Dermot encouraged me to start keeping a notebook in which to jot down ideas (a habit I’ve sustained to this day).
Several years later, I saw him read his work in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin in 2002 - poems from his then just-published collection The Reed Bed, now set to music by the composer Bill Campbell. Amid the luminous elegance of the Sculpture Hall, which was cluttered with a piano and various music stands for the quartet of musicians, Dermot began to intone his work aloud, his voice rising like smoke above cello and woodwind. In that moment, I remember feeling a veil in my head was drawn steadily back, to reveal something strange and magnificent to me.
I was then only on the cusp of adolescence, and deeply mystified by the world beyond my window. Yet now, sitting in that drafty museum, hearing Dermot breathe life into his poems, I felt I’d come across something I understood and would maintain an abiding passion for. I could allow myself to run with language, find joy and wonderment in poetry, could be stirred to frenzy or calm by the magic of a story well told. Not only that, I felt intrigued that perhaps I could do it myself. Far from feeling daunted by Dermot’s prowess, I was sparked by it. When he began reading his poem ‘All the Meteors’, it was as if a trail of gunpowder had been ignited from within.
I’m pinned
down here in a wind
from the south
among the wooden poor
of Ecuador,
the hee-hawing ass,
a dog,
a limping cat,
and whatever in the wide world
awaits me
after that.
Then and now, I am now struck by the quiet ache of these words, the internal convulsions of the psyche. Dermot’s writing was of chaotic interiorities as much as the ever-alive physical world around him. The poems were luminous, thrumming and rippling with a mysterious vigour, one that perhaps could be netted, given a rhythm and melody of its own, moulded into shape and form to the many untamed thoughts that roiled relentlessly around in my brain.
Kindly as he was, I must admit to being slightly intimidated by him. To my young eyes, Dermot seemed like a figure freed from the pages of a storybook, with the weather-roughened features of a druid or an Old Testament prophet. Weather seemed to be his sanctum, what Yeats called ‘the murderous innocence of the sea,’ enlivening and giving his work vigour.
I don’t mean to suggest he was romantic or mystical - he was neither. But he knew his world with the intimacy of an expert. In many ways, it was his kingdom. He and Helen drove me and my younger sister Layla in his battered red Toyota, showing us a still-wild landscape that hadn’t quite embraced the minutiae of civilization. He showed us everything - the Cave of Diarmuid and Granine, the Valley of Jealousy, the length and breadth of Streedagh where the Armada ships met their rocky destiny. He once even ferried us out in a boat to the offshore island of Inishmurray - the tide came in and we were nearly stranded there for the night!
His world was one of salt winds screeching, white eruptions of surf and foamy geysers soaking the rocks below as breakers hurled themselves in fizzing repetition off the reef. The air was marinated in spray, chorused by the shrieks of gull and cormorant. Ships had been wrecked by such weather, galleons from the Spanish Armada dashed against this very coastline. The beach below his house was an ever-changing strip of pebbly sand, strewn with lank tendrils of blackened seaweed and bits of driftwood. Dermot once wrote in one of his poems from The Reed Bed:
Storms are promised
that never come,
and some not promised
that do.
And this from the title poem of What the Hammer:
Tide-maker,
hoarder of salts,
thirst-maker,
stiff mirage by the pier,
you haunt the rocky bar
with danger.
That was Dermot all over: he had the master mariner’s instinct for living alongside storms. His appreciation for the calm’s transience was a direct result of this. In part six of A Fool’s Errand, his long poem of the barnacle geese that wintered near his house, he writes of losing a stone ‘meant for my mantelpiece’ and concludes with the startling line:
That night a bomb in Baghdad
cleared the old lettering off another page.
Storms, natural or human-wrought, formed the life-blood of Healy’s work. For every storm leaves wreckage, and wreckage was what Dermot understood thoroughly, having witnessed so much of it in his own life and using it to fuel his page-bound creations. Jack Ferris of A Goat’s Song and Olly Ewing of Sudden Times are both men made of wreckage, who must live with wreckage, and must make peace with the wreckage of their lives. Ferris, the occasional trawlerman who too often founders on self-made reefs, feels 'exhilarated to be a part of the world, then would come the low pitiful sound of his own breathing,’ whilst Olly Ewing, whose psyche lies in smithereens throughout the book, describes himself as ‘a victim of mirror images.’
Dermot’s appreciation for the calm grew directly from his understanding of how fragile it was, how easily engulfed it could be by chaos and rough weather. To read his work was to step into another plane that fell somewhere between nightmare and reverie. His novels Sudden Times and A Goat’s Song remain haunting accounts of a psyche torn brutally asunder by the mercilessness of the world. A strong sense of isolation, of being stranded on the rim of the world, of a self-chosen exile, rippled through his work.
What Dermort understood was exile, as so many Irish of his generation did. Having uprooted to London in his young manhood, his experience was typical of the migrant labouring class in the mid-sixties, working on building sites and factory floors, pubs and diners while also keeping his voracious appetite for language sated. In his poem ‘Larkin’s Room in a Storm’, he relays this existence thusly:
In the manager’s office of Pellet and Son,
I’m the security man reading Dostoevsky.
I saw London for the first time myself at the age of fifteen, coincidently the same age Dermot was when he first embarked to London from his native Cavan. It was on a school trip, and while I’m sure the place was markedly different from when Dermot was there, I felt overwhelmed by its enormity. I imagined he did, too, particularly with the added burden of exile on his shoulders.
Yet Dermot could see beauty even in exile, and in fact wove beauty from it in his prose. The writer is the monarch who must first imagine his domain. To write is to engage in an act of creation. And even exile can lead to creation, to possibility renewed. As a laureate of exile, Dermot’s work was set in a variety of places, including London, Belfast, Dublin, and the west of Ireland. And yet there are consequences to living in isolation, whether splendid or otherwise. Ollie Ewing, Sudden Times’ psychologically battered narrator, is a man exiled both from his home in Sligo and from himself: "There was no looking back. You have to break out before you can learn the laws of the tribe. And you have to break inside before you can learn your true nature."
Dermot’s own exile within his art was his outright refusal to anchor himself to any one genre. With poetry, novels, plays and film scripts to his name, he would blend styles and genres together, evading conventional literary classification like a hare evading traps. The very human, instinctive need towards storytelling is in itself proof of our ability to transcend reality but also our need to avoid and escape its severity. The need to retreat to fiction can lead dangerously down the road to madness. Yet the imagination is a source of immeasurable power when wielded correctly. In Long Time, No See, Mr Psyche’s father declares to his watchful son: ‘What you imagine soon becomes a law. Isn’t that so?”
Exile, whether self-imposed or otherwise, is very complex as both a concept and a lived experience. By definition, a person under exile cannot return to or re-enter their homeland. But not all forms of exile are necessarily that of a group of a people. In ancient Greek tragedy, exile is deemed to be a fate comparable to death. The Roman satirist Ovid invokes its insidious effects in the Tristia: “Rescue my shattered spirit from a savage death, if one who’s already perished may not have perished,” while the Indian anthropologist Binesh Balan theorizes that a more comfortable version of exile exists for:
“people who have been excluded from the mainstream of society. Such people are considered 'aliens' or internal 'others' on the grounds of their religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic or caste-based identity and therefore they migrate to a comfortable space elsewhere after having risked their lives to restore representation, identity and civil rights in their own country and often capture a comfortable identity to being part of a dominant religion, society or culture."1
For Dermot Healy, exile was a lesson in estrangement, though the inability to return to one’s place was origin is not due to external factors like border security and financial inability, but of a deep-running shame of having achieved nothing abroad, of gradually being moulded by the rhythms of one’s adopted city, to the point of dependence. The Irish experience of immigration and exile is one often seen as a mutually-shared trauma, a collective suffering spanning centuries and its legacy found across continents. Exile as experienced by an individual no doubt gives great cause for despair; there is at least potential for solidarity to be had in group exile. Yet, as noted by Tony Murray:
“Migration is sometimes perceived as a form of traditional narrative itself. It appears to have a beginning, a middle and an end. When migrants recount their experiences, however, they rarely opt for linear forms of storytelling.”2
Thus, fiction becomes a necessity against traumas both personal and public. As disgraced former RUC sergeant Jonathan Adams muses to himself in A Goat’s Song: ‘Sometimes he might counter with the weak excuse that fiction was the outcome of idleness, that it was fantasy rather than fiction, but the real reason was that he had a fine memory which could not be induced to recall an imagined narrative. He read fiction as a child, but in the aftermath it remained a blur. Fiction was the shameful stories prisoners made up to escape prison. It was created to obscure guilt. Fiction for him was irreligious, the act of imagination itself was a door opening onto the void. His mind baulked at characters who entered the first line of a novel but did not reside in the real world.’ Adams’ daughter Catherine, and the object of Jack’s estranged affections, is later on described as being ‘delighted by the thought of how fiction removes hurt.’
Dermot has always been held in great esteem by writers in his time. As noted by Flore Couloma:
‘His untimely death in June 2014 prompted many a tribute both in Ireland and abroad, yet his work still has not reached a wider audience, despite the unqualified admiration professed Seamus Heaney—who called Healy the heir to Patrick Kavanagh— and Patrick McCabe and Roddy Doyle, amongst others. Anne Enright famously declared that “among the Irish, Dermot Healy is the writer’s writer. He is the man.”3
Yet, mainstream awareness of Dermot’s ouvere remains somewhat lacking, though this may change over time. This is perhaps largely due to the innate strangeness of his work. He lacked Heaney’s scholarly poise or Mahon’s precision with rhyme and meter, Doyle’s whip-crack dialogue or McCabe’s toothed-and-clawed vision of engulfing madness. Nor of course, did he need to imitate them. Certainly, the plots of his novels appeared deceptively simple, almost parable-like, yet their execution defied the finality of a label. To transcend genre, to let the work breathe as its own singular being - that was Dermot Healy’s sacred calling. Occasionally one forgets each novel is a linear narrative and simply lets the language work its strange hypnosis. What to make of this, the potential danger of imagined lives and landscapes? “If you’re kind to yourself, you can be kind to others,” Joejoe says in Long Time, No See. Everyday wisdom surmised in a phrase with the simplicity of a platitude, but no wisdom is easily-earned. To paraphrase Derrmot himself, ‘the lonely man is a proud man,’ indeed.
During the end of my first year in college, the International Literature Festival Dublin (then known as the Dublin Writers’ Festival) was underway, and Dermot was one one of the featured authors. His then-latest book, Look Time, No See, having only recently been published after a decade-long silence. In the velvety darkness of the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Trinity College, he read alongside the Libyan novelist Hisham Matar. Despite his frequent and prolonged silences between books, he’d lost none of his power. There was controversy at the time surrounding the book, as the Irish Times reviewer Eileen Battersby had given the book a less-than-glowing review. There was uproar, I recall, with the Letters to the Editor section filled with writers and readers angrily expressing their support for Dermot’s work. The review wasn’t even that bad, but clearly Battersby’s view was a minority one (and not one I shared, it should be noted). Every writer has their share of rejections and bad reviews; they just come with the territory. Dermot himself, however, responded neither to the review or the resultant controversy. In an age where people seem hellbent spewing online vitriol over slights both real and imagined, he was a beacon of quiet, assured dignity. He only responded when a member of the audience asked him about it in the Q&A that followed the reading. His response was simple: “She’s allowed her view. As are we all.”
At the signing afterward, he smiled in gruff recognition at me and we chatted for a bit, his eyes glinting behind his glasses above his beard. At the time, I was chancing my arm with writing and had hoped to visit Maugherow to see him, and hopefully get his feedback on some poems I’d written, at some point in the future. As he scribbled his autograph, I nervously put the idea to him. He wasn’t averse to it, and in fact seemed quite happy to know that his earlier encouragement of me to pursue the written word had taken such a permanent effect. This I was overjoyed by, but did not want to make too much of it. Because he was a true writer, I felt, one who had mastered his interior troubles in full alignment with the storms that broke over his home each winter, the wind whispering harshly through the marram grass, the taste of salt, roar of freshly-broken waves, geese in full flight, the bristling life in everything he set down so carefully on the page. To have his mentorship would be a high honour indeed.
Yet, in any case, I never arranged to make that trip down nor ever had that conversation with him. I have few regrets, and this is one of them. If I felt a neophyte’s awe for the master, then so too did I feel the young man’s harsh sense of being an annoyance. There were also many people around, also waiting to speak with him. We shook hands with vague promises to meet up again soon. As I left the theatre, I saw Dermot immersed in conversation with Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Roddy Doyle, all of whom had been in the audience. Four of this country’s finest writers, whose work I’d read and admired and poured over, were all together in the same room. At the time of writing this, two of them are now deceased. To a young writer, it felt a bit like seeing the gods, though that is perhaps stretching things a bit.
Instead, I tentatively emailed him some of the poems I’d written. Looking back, they are not poems I’d ever dare allow into the light of day, but they were the best I could offer at the time. Dermot’s response, also via email, was heartening: ‘Great physical and philosophical poems; you have a great grip on the brain and the surrounds of jazz and rhyme; on you go’. To receive words of encouragement from a master was enough to keep me going.
While I regret not being able to meet him for a final time, I choose not to excoriate myself for it. Upon hearing of his untimely death in June of 2014, I was indeed shaken to my core. It was months and even years before I could bring myself to even begin putting down the loss in words. Yet the canon he left behind and the memories I have of him are imperishable.
“Know the worth of what you're doing before anyone else," was what he'd tell me. I was glad to have known him as I did, and I urge you all to read his work.
I’ll leave you with his poem ‘Light’:
Each scrap of daylight
that crosses the sill
is a blank page
which I must fill.
Works Cited
1.Balan, Binesh. Making of Comfortable Exile Through Sankirization: Reflections on Imagination of Identity Notions in India. Amsterdam: Vrije University, 2019. Print.)
2.Murray, Tony. London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. Print.
3. Coulouma, Flore: Reveries of the Solitary Self in Banished Misfortune, Writing the Sky, Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy; ed. Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper Illonois Dalkey Archive Press, 20. Press)
A shorter version of this essay appeared on the literary blog Trasna.
King of a Rainy Country: Baudelaire at Two Hundred
Paris, 1860s.
Behold now this vast city: a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching Reformation…”
What is not injurious to the city does not injure the citizens either. On the occasion of every imagination that you have been injured, apply this canon: ‘If the city is not injured by this neither am I injured.’ But if the city is injured you must not be angry, only point out to him who injured the city what he has failed to see.
An early chapter in Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal depicts the chillingly methodical title character taking a stroll through the streets of Paris. Hired by shadowy OAS agents to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle, he immerses himself in the French capital’s architectural splendour, but, the reader soon learns, for reasons of business rather than pleasure:
He spent three days roaming round the Arc de Triomphe or sitting on the terrace of the Cafe de L'Elysee scanning the monument and the roof-tops of the great buildings that surround the Place de I'Etoile. Anyone who had followed him in those days (and no one did) would have been surprised that even the architecture of the brilliant M. Haussmann should have attracted so devoted an admirer. Certainly no watcher could have divined that the quiet and elegant English tourist stirring his coffee and gazing at the buildings for so many hours was mentally working out angles of fire, distances from the upper storeys to the Eternal Flame flickering beneath the Arc, and the chances of a man escaping down a rear fire escape unnoticed into the milling crowds.1
That same urban topography and milling crowds (not to mention the intermingling of aesthetic beauty and violent death), both synonymous with contemporary Paris, were viewed quite differently by one of the city’s more local poets, whose active years took place almost a century earlier, when the self-appointed ‘demolition artist’ Baron Haussman’s new urban layouts had reached completion following years of construction. That poet is, of course, Charles Baudelaire, and April 2021 sees the bicentenary of his birth. Here is a poem to salute his ghost:
Far from the slack-jawed lookout of gargoyles
and the belfries’ hourly clang, far
from the bistro’s sulphurously-lit
terrace and the Seine, briefly mirror-clear
against a livid laudanum sky, far
from boulanjeries and airbrushed views
of Île Saint-Louis from an AirBnB pied-à-terre
where neon slithers over drenched asphalt,
far from the demi-monde burning in autumn’s
low fervour, you are reminded this is still your city
of daedal arcades, you who were lulled
by the golden melting point
of a hashish smog, laureate of amber dusk
and of the traffic jam’s low gear chansonnier
serenading the cathedral’s smoking husk.
Far from the firemen who broke through her
wrought-iron portals as Le Gardes Français
might, smoke whirling a grey monolith
skyward, and the flèche in its oaken acuity
like a smouldering pillar stoked by God,
collapsing with grimmest of ceremony
far from vault bricks plummeting and leaden
ribs fractured, you are reminded of hailstones
that rattle like coffee beans in a mason jar
off zinc rooftops, the horses you can no longer
hear trotting apocalyptically off the cobbles
and the copper, sea-green statue
of the aporetic disciple helicoptered off
for repairs, fodder for tourists’ Insta feeds,
here is your city’s riot-prone heart,
now ablaze with neon, her ossuaries cached
with aeons of tibias and femurs, shivering
archive for the dead. Odd to think that,
as long as the light from our headlamps crawls
over graffiti, civilisation is still near,
even far below the familiar rumbles
of the métro. Far from the laser light’s blinding,
ultra-violet sweep, from neon-painted faces
and smoke-bombed walls and sweaty
light, far from the PAs thudding loudly as war,
far from the DJ spinning a remixed web
from the turntable, from the damp floor
of the city’s graffitied bowels, you can crawl
on your stomach through the cubelike tunnels,
and, rattling in concert, all these ivory skulls.
You might turn a corner, only for death to offer
you a cigarette, perhaps even greet the skeletal
reaper as a friend, its notched scythe threshing
the soul-crop at characteristic random. Yet we
have the privilege of paralysis, the luxury
of lawlessness, until we see for ourselves
that rosy dusk tingeing the arrondissements
like an Impressionist’s fleeting blur,
and wave at the cruise boats paddling
under the Pont Neuf bridge, and remember
this is your city still, Charles, unrecognisable
as it might be, C'est La Ville Lumière.
Once the flavour of beaujolais wine dissolves
with each oenophilic swallow, might we regain
the city in your name, O patron saint of ivory
skulls that keep the catacombs fully stocked,
our hands placed on scorched balustrades?
The morning fog hovers thin as a veil
that perhaps once sheathed the gorgeous limbs
of Herodias’ daughter, though not enough
to see clearly. Bloody paint splatters
colonial statues, a colonnade’s bone-white trusses
glisten as graffiti smears them like oil and fear
hovers in doorways and parking meters
and masks hanging below chins. Do you smell
the courage on my breath? It’s lingered for hours,
drowned out by sweat and craft lager,
smoke slurred by the wind, petrol fumes snarled
and heavy aftershave. We are the generation
that gave up on intimacy by all accounts,
calmly eating lunch under patio heaters as glass shards
season the pavement, but I’m not here for volunteer
cleanup crews rinsing down a graffiti-splattered
plinth from where the statue of a long-dead trafficker
of human cargo was toppled, nor for the boarded-up
windows of La Roche Posay, Le Coq Sportif
and Gucci, each entrance and exit manned by flics.
Though I have opal scales for eyes these days,
ears immune to the brush of your whisper,
there are your verses, black-eyed, cravated flaneur,
slum socialite, to whose verses my reddened eyes
keep returning, that intrigue, mystify, lure
and even, after two centuries, inspire awe again.
Turn to Baudelaire the art critic instead of Baudelaire the poet and flaneur, and it becomes clear his worldview is a singular one, making itself felt across many mediums, as he exhorts fellow poets to seek out creative fuel in the city's very bowels:
The majority of the writers who have concerned themselves with really modern subjects have contented themselves with the certified, official subjects, with our victories and our political heroism. They do this reluctantly, and only because the government orders them and pays them for it. Yet there are subjects from private life which are heroic in quite another way. The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences - criminals and kept women - which drift about in the underworld of a great city; … all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our heroism… The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.2
An etching of 19th century Paris by engraver Charles Meryon.
A similar atmosphere of the marvellous offered itself to me in my mid-teens. Between the ages of 15 to 21, myself and my brother-in-arms Sam Comerford would head out to various jazz gigs around Dublin’s city centre in the after-hours. This was during the boom years of Ireland's so-called Celtic Tiger economy - an era of unprecedented wealth and accelerated progress (allegedly).
Despite being underage, we were usually let in and even served because it was clear we were there for the music above all else. In the now sadly-closed upstairs room of JJ Smyths on Aungier Street, we saw some cracking acts, including the mighty guitar shaman Louis Stewart.
Louis is dead now, and Sam has long since made his home in Brussels, making a life for himself as a musician-maestro in his own right. Since the advent of COVID-19 and resultant lockdown measures, curfews are, for the first time since WWII, once more a reality in that city. But a strong memory for me from those days was the jolt of excitement, the illicit thrill of a concrete jungle, where damp glazed the footpath and chains of sickly amber shimmered from street lights, radiating a halogen glare off the graffiti and metal shutters, coupled with the danger I suspect many cities radiate after dark. Not just a lifetime ago, but another time entirely, unmoored from the present. As Baudelaire writes in his poem ‘Le Soleil’:
Je vais m'exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trebuchant sur les mots comme sur les paves,
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps reves.
(I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, —
Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away;
Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street,
Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.)
Two more memories from that time: the sheer number of cranes bristling along Dublin's skyline, and my first encounter with the work of Charles Baudelaire. It was the curtain call for the boom years - the alleged property bubble, long inflated by reckless spending from a neoliberal government, European banks and foreign investment, was fit to burst - though at the time, I didn't fully grasp this.
La Bievre River, photographed by Charles Marville, 1865.
My French was and remains minimal, and so my first encounter with Baudelaire's writing was via translation, namely the 1993 version of Les Fleurs du Mal by James McGowan, bought for a tenner from the Easons in Blackrock in the early spring of 2007. The text was bilingual, with the poems in the original French appearing alongside their English interpretations.
I was fifteen by then, my body and mind roiling with the breakneck oscillations of adolescence, and Baudelaire's vision of 19th-century Paris at its most seamily intriguing was a welcome rerouting of the daily drudgery of double classes, evening study and various unreciprocated pinings for girls that was my life at the time. In that five-part, darkly melodious fever dream, beauty and decay move together as counterparts, with the speaker bearing perturbed witness to such devastating changes from the fringes. In his poem ‘Spleen’ he refers to himself as 'king of a rainy country':
Je suis le roi d'un pays pluvieux,
Riche, mais impuisant, jeune et pourtant très vieux
...
ll n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété
Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé.
(I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,
…
he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood).
My own, by now very dog-eared copy of MacGowan’s 1993 translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, featuring Eugene Delacroix painting The Death of Sardanapalus on the cover.
As an Irishman, for whom inclement weather is as stark a reality as ineptly corrupt politicians or Covid-19 restrictions, this verse never fails to raise a laugh from behind clenched teeth (though whether Baudelaire intended it to be humorous is a separate question).
A master of self-sabotage, blood and opium soak his memory through. His mind becomes a torture chamber, wherein a thousand grisly scenarios play themselves out with vivid, grinding inevitability. Au Lecteur, the collection’s intro poem, describing the state of apathy as a devilish, draining force, anathema to imagination and to be resisted at all costs:
C'est l'Ennui! L'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
II rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère -
(It is BOREDOM! – from its eye drips an involuntary tear,
As it dreams of scaffolds while firing up its Bong.
You know this delicate monster of which I speak,
Dear reader -You Hypocrite - mon semblabe, mon frère!)
seemed to my young mind as punkishly violent and intoxicatingly subversive as anything unleashed by The Doors, Iggy Pop, Stiff Little Fingers, Rage Against the Machine, the films of Leone, Scorsese or Fincher, the standup of George Carlin, the artwork of HR Giger, or even some of the Old Testament's more ferocious passages. TS Eliot, another supreme chronicler of urban disenchantment, once said of him: “He is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important.’3
Rue de Jardinet, Charles Marville, 1853-70
It only got better from there. In a move no doubt saluted by any anarchist, his collection addressed and celebrated themes of lesbian sexuality, the nascent Parisian underclass, the inescapable reality of death and the dissafectations of urban life. Ahead of his time, certainly, yet he wasn’t without his parallels. Dickens did much to address the virtual slaughter-house of the poor that was London, whilst Victor Hugo and Emilie Zola turned their pens on the sufferances of the working classes without flinching. And consider this from Fyodor Dostoevsky, born the same year as Baudelaire and who navigated similarly troubled waters in his own prose:
Everything is so huge and sharp in its individuality. One could even be deceived in this individuality. Each sharply differentiated thing, each contradiction, exists side by side with its antithesis and stubbornly goes hand in hand with it, contradicting each other and, apparently, in no way excluding each other. Everything here, apparently, stubbornly insists upon its own way and exists in its own fashion and, apparently, does not harm anytime else. Yet at the same time, here too the same stubborn, obscure and by now chronic struggle, the struggle unto death between the whole Western world’s individualistic bent and the necessity to live together at least in some form, to create at least some communal form, and to set up house in a single anthill: at least one can turn to the anthill, only in order to live there without eating each other up-without that we would turn to cannibalism. … the same desperate striving to remain in status quo out of desperation, to rip out of oneself by the roots all hopes and desires, to curse ones own future, in which perhaps the foremost leaders of progress have insufficient faith, and to bow down to Baal... You recognise a gigantic idea. You feel that something is almost achieved here already, that this represents a victory, a triumph. You almost seem to fear something. No matter how independent you may be, you begin to be terrified for some reason.
My own adolescent scribblings were shameless and pale imitations of Baudelaire’s style - for, despite being at least two centuries removed from 1850s Paris, I recognized something of the world he reported from. As I said, I was fifteen. I had just started Transition Year. My life wasn’t much except for school and poetry and music and open mics and jazz gigs and all the good things about a city after dark. Yet he was difficult to ignore.
The Celtic Tiger was prowling through its steel and glass jungle, eerily similar to the ‘échafaudages’ (scaffolding) witnessed by Baudelaire. The gradual urbanisation of Irish society throughout the twentieth century found its logical architectural conclusion in the Celtic Tiger, which saw the establishment of Dublin as an ultramodern metropolis of cosmopolitan glamour and multicultural receptivity. In turn, the national obsession with investment properties, exemplified by overpriced buy-to-let housing units and a bulging property section in the Irish Times, was in full swing.
Being only in school at the time, I wasn't really aware of this level of affluence, though, or what it was leading to. Which isn’t to say I was completely oblivious, either. The more of them I saw, the more profoundly Baudelaire’s words imprinted themselves on my mind with the clarity of a schematic. I took to taking the bus into town and wandering the streets for hours, well past nightfall on occasion, taking in the angrily-coloured warning signs and the red pulse of the crane lights.
The sun was a red orb
rippling
as heaven halted.
I left the skylight to it,
overnight
condensation,
a glaze of pallid opacity
thawing
to cold sweat at dawn.
Stone or milk, bronze
or honey;
all of this lost time
can’t be retrieved for anyone.
I quarantine
in this room
fumigated with sea-salt,
fingers damp
with cleansing acid.
I tumble down
late-night
online rabbit-holes;
Google
has made an amateur
classicist of me
A jury of eyes
follow without blinking,
clank of hammer
and file deafen me
as I founder on
what I might say
when I see you again…
if I’ll ever see you again.
I remind myself of this
whenever I pass the building site
to the Luas stop, as ruby lights
rig the crane tower
and jib to a glittering,
high-rise skeleton:
frost salts my boots
and smears everything,
even a stainless
steel rail liviried
with warning signs
and the moon
riding at anchor
in its bruise-blue sky.
During that time, the Irish construction industry had skyrocketed, resulting in Dublin becoming a citywide building site, a vast open-air laboratory wherein graffiti-splattered hoardings and multiple reckless experiments in architecture were underway. The poverty and urban decay that had marred the inner city since the foundation of the state were replaced by the glossier edifices of the boom years. Office block brand names - words invoking dominance and dynamism, the sacred principle of capitalist primacy - battled for possession of the skyline.
The corner shops, chippers and car repair outlets along the Liffey quays, built in place of demolished Georgian structures, now gave way to a swathe of new apartment and office blocks, as well as the boardwalks. O’ Connell Street, the nation’s main thoroughfare, saw its footpaths widened and the erection of the sculpture known officially as the Millennium Spire and known locally under a variety of caustic nicknames, ‘the stiletto in the ghetto’ being perhaps the most generous. Temple Bar developed into an overpriced tourist trap masquerading as Dublin’s cultural quarter. The new Lúas line linked the suburbs to the city centre, though it would be years before it was expanded into the city’s northside. It was as if the city itself had become a brand-protected wall of glass and steel, which saw dilapidated ruins bulldozed to be replaced by high-rent apartment blocks.
Arguably, those heady years have come to be defined by fiscal excess and state-sanctioned greed (and I have no argument that they weren’t), but for me, it was defined by that forest of steel, that cluster of skeletal cranes looming in the sky, statically iron, set in stone or steel, balanced against all weather, jibs shredding cloud as the wind’s high grip rattled through bony lattice and chain-sling as they slowly swiveled to lift granite slabs to the roof: pulleys and outriggers and bolts set in a concrete base, concrete vomited from mixers, giant rust-scuffed boxes stacked high with rollers and chains, corrugated ridges. I wondered how soon it’d be before funding got pulled and the whole thing was left derelict, not even a quarter of the way finished: the rich weight of industry, injurious as scorn. Was it any different for Baudelaire, seeing Paris upended into a city-wide building site? Surely it was a great time to be alive, pulsing with opportunity and heralding a future of luxury apartments and more commercial office blocks than ever before, the glazed candour of their windows snagging sunlight, blurred as a daguerreotype, striking as an etching by Meryon? In his poem 'Paysage', Baudelaire writes:
Les deux mains au menton, du haut de ma mansarde,
Je verrai l'atelier qui chante et qui bavarde;
Les tuyaux, les clochers, ces mâts de la cité,
Et les grands ciels qui font rêver d'éternité.
(There from m attic, chin in hand, I’d look
Out at some workshop loud with song and talk
At mast-like chimneys in the steepled city,
And skies that feed dreams of eternity.)
When the financial crash of 2008 hit, recession broke over the country like a rogue wave, forcing the nation to look its own inadequacy dead in the face. The collapse of the banks and the austerity measures and subsequent bailout from Nama had since made recovery seem virtually impossible to conceive of - at least, as I remember it. As unemployment and emigration rates once more soared and macabrely-named ‘ghost estates’ littered the countryside, more and more of the cranes vanished. The skyline seemed oddly bare and atomised, abandoned almost.
Now what, you may ask, does all this have to do with Baudelaire? Much, it turns out - Baudelaire arguably pioneered urban poetics, and, as a Dub, I found this very appealing. Moreover, as a resolutely urban poet, deeming the cityscape as fit a subject for poetry as longing or mythology or the grand sweep of nature, his relationship with Paris is a famously troubled one - indeed, the source of inspiration for a poet may not strictly make for a positive relationship. Paris’ influence was inescapable to him, its sheer effect vital to his vision, however problematic or troublesome. I felt as tied, however resentfully, to my home city and its chequered history, uncertain present and trackless future, as much as Baudelaire seemed towards his. This effect of one’s immediate living environ, especially an urban one, is defined by Ivan Chtchelov as being a marker for the past:
“All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of the legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.”4
This ‘fragmentary’ vision that Chtchelov mentions is precisely what informs Les Fleurs du Mal as poetry, not of ethnography or journalism. Rather than invalidating Baudelaire’s efforts as an authentic chronicler of a personal, adopted urban identity, this elusive form of inspiration in fact granted him the freedom to interpret the city as however he will, extracting its influence and offering frank and forthright reports gleaned from his experience as an urban dweller. This counts as a form of self-sustained simulacrum – the poet puts their own slant on the space they inhabit, without apology.
Despite being historically built from such solid materials such as stone and wood, and, more contemporaneously, from steel, glass and concrete, cities are subject to structural change all the time. The modern metropolis is often in a state near-constant flux - modes of production and urbanisation often proving detrimental to social cohesion and leading to increased alienation amongst the populace. This fluidity of understanding, allowing for multiple perspectives and insights, reflects the generally transitory nature of urban spaces in general. Jonathan Culler has written: ‘City life in this poetry is not modern inventions, but commerce, and progress by dangerous passage through a forest of anonymous figures imbued with mystery, who produce a vivid sense of a world not masterable except by arbitrary and unstable acts of imagination.’5
In his lifetime, Baudelaire bore witness to much social upheaval and change that seemed to accelerate with ever-worrying velocity. Haussman’s extensive remodeling of the city, which was undertaken with an eye for surveillance and dissuasion of potentially revolutionary action as much as for aesthetic and improving measures, resulted in rubble fields and the wide boulevards and squares, so beloved of tourist manuals today, as the Parisian proletariat skyrocketed.
Systematic demolition of great swathes of Paris coincided with the toppling of the July Monarchy, the short-lived Second Republic, and the ascendance of Napoleon III as ruler of the Second Empire (and who also commissioned Haussmann’s building projects). As noted by Walter Benjamin: "Haussmann set to work in 1859. His work had long been regarded as necessary and the way for it had been prepared by legislation. 'After 1848,' wrote Du Camp in the above-mentioned work, 'Paris was about to become uninhabitable. The constant expansion of the railway network . . . accelerated traffic and an increase in the city's population. The people choked in the narrow, dirty, convoluted old streets where they remained packed in because there was no other way.' At the beginning of the fifties the population of Paris began to accommodate itself to the idea that a great face-cleaning of the city was inevitable. It may be assumed that in its incubation period this clean-up could have at least as great an effect upon a good imagination as the work of urban renewal itself."’6
All occurred over the space of four years, and the sense of time’s mercilessly ever-onward march rings clear in Baudelaire’s poetry, who tackles the realities of this new cityscape. Enough inspiration to justify his aesthetic and bolster Eamonn Jordan’s claim of idealised pastoral poetic tradition set firmly in marked contrast to the city, so-often perceived as a site of deviance and corruption: “…the city is not so much commodified as a marker of deviance. Where the rural is aestheticized, sanitized, repressed and celebrated, a mythic sanctuary with the fantasy of intimacy, the city is under surveillance, hedonistic, transgressive, deviant and violent, with its criminal underworld feared, fetishized and equally mythologized.”4 And then this from Baudelaire’s Le Cygne ('the Swan'):
Je ne vois qu'en esprit tout ce camp de baraques,
Ces tas de chapiteaux ébauchés et de fûts
Les herbes, les gros blocs verdis par l'eau des flaques,
Et, brilliant aux carreaux, le bric-a brac confuse.
(I picture in my head the busy camp of huts,
And heaps of rough-hewn columns, capitals and shafts,
The grass, the giant blocks made green by puddle-stain,
Reflected in the glaze, the jumbled bric-a-brac.)
Here we have Baudelaire, as is his wont, patrolling the streets of Paris, now utterly transformed by Haussmann's renovations, and taking it in with horrified awe. The speaker recalls the tiny warren of streets known as Quartier du Doyenné, once flanked by the Louvre and the Carrousel Arch ('le nouveau Carrousel'), now in the process of being demolished, to be replaced by the current public square there.
The 89th poem in the collection, Le Cygne directly addresses the overall effect of all this radical industrialisation on the human condition, and on the city’s social character. His referencing the exiled Trojan princess Andromache, in despair over her native city reduced to ash by Greek invaders in Book III of Virgil’s Aeneid, mirrors his own profound sense of loss. The city as it once was is consigned to memory, demolished and rebuilt in the industrialized, imperial Bonapartist image.
The result of Haussmann's urban planning is complex. Reviled in his lifetime for supposedly vandalizing what Victor Hugo called the city's 'medieval charm', his legacy of elegant ashlar buildings and wide, tourist-friendly boulevards remain the subject of controversy to this day. Yet Baudelaire, witnessing these changes in realt-ime, senses he is not alone in his disquiet: the swan of the title, far from its native lake and impotently facing its wings against the refuse serves as having escaped from captivity now having to contend with the grim reality of the urban zone it must traverse:
Un cygne qui s'était évadé de sa cage,
Et, de ses pieds palmés frottant le pavé sec,
Sur le sol raboteux traînait son blanc plumage.
Près d'un ruisseau sans eau la bête ouvrant le bec
Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre,
Et disait, le coeur plein de son beau lac natal:
«Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?»
Je vois ce malheureux, mythe étrange et fatal,
(Once free, it made for what it took for a wet gutter. It had not rained in two weeks. Webbed feet dragged white plumes across a scorched street. At the dried-up pool, the thirsty creature became frantic. Flapping its wings, it shaded itself in a mist of acrid dust. The neck twisted and the beak scraped the dirt. Lifting its head to the cloudless sky, it scraked for water. I can still hear that unhappy bird scolding the dreaming azure. The amused owner tied a rope around the swan's neck and used a broom handle to prod it back into its cage)
It is doubtful that Baudelaire sought creative and aesthetic momentum in the uglier side of life. He merely chose to show it as unflinchingly as possible; in doing so, steeling himself and hopefully his readers against it. The swan, Andromache and the poet are united in this displacement.
Through corruption, poverty, addiction and other social blights, cities breed alienation, but they have also always attracted exiles, immigrants, expats and tourists (this is especially true of coastal and port cities, or those with an otherwise strong maritime linkage, such as being located riverside); hence, they are also sites of opportunity wherein a population diverse in its ethnic, socio-cultural and economic makeup is likely to thrive. As noted by James Connolly in his 1899 essay 'Landlordism in Towns': ‘To permanently remedy the evils of city life, the citizens must own their city.’ I don’t disagree; yet there is little sense of Paris as Baudelaire portrays it truly being in the hands of its denizens. Writing to his friend Victor Hugo, who was living in exile from the Second Empire’s regime and to whom the poem is dedicated, Baudelaire says:
‘What was important for me to record so rapidly all that a casual occurrence, an image can offer by way of suggestions, and how the sight of a suffering animal can urge the mind towards all those beings that we love, towards all those who are absent and who suffer, towards all those who have lost something that cannot be found again.’4
A later verse in the poem hammers home the cruelly unique exile that a city can underscore to one unfamiliar with its workings:
À quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve
Jamais, jamais! à ceux qui s'abreuvent de pleurs
Et tètent la Douleur comme une bonne louve!
Aux maigres orphelins séchant comme des fleurs!
(Of those who've lost what they cannot recover:
Of those who slake with tears their lonely hours
And milk the she-wolf, Sorrow, for their mother:
And skinny orphans withering like flowers.)
—Trans. Roy Campbell, 1952
The exile endured by the city’s outcasts, the title swan, the classical princess in the opening stanza, the Negress in later stanzas who is depicted as ‘cherchant, l'oeil hagard,/Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique/Derrière la muraille immense du brouillard’ all fall within the poet’s ‘la forêt où mon esprit s'exile’. Towards the poem's end, he speaks of:
Je pense aux matelots oubliés dans une île,
Aux captifs, aux vaincus!... à bien d'autres encor!
(I think of sailors left forgotten on an isle,
Of captives, the defeated… many others more!)
As noted by Anthony Mortimer, 'One need hardly stress the continuing resonance of that line in the twenty-first century - not only for the hapless millions uprooted by poverty and war, but for all those who feel left behind - exiled in the extended Baudelairean sense - by a society that moves inexorably onwards, destroying our old landmarks with such bewildering speed.'6 In writing of Paris as he saw it, Baudelaire navigated its changing streets and became one of the earliest chroniclers of les défavorisés, its emergent underclass, and of the city as a site of often-startling transition. Mortimer continues:
‘… Baudelaire’s poetry does indeed register the sights and sounds of the ‘teeming city’, the chimneys belching smoke, the fashionable restaurants, the theatres, brothels and gambling dens, the glittering shops and the jumble of building sites, the plodding workmen and the ageing coquettes, the clouds of dust raised by the street-cleaners, the dense yellow fog, the blaring of brass bands, the clatter of the omnibus, the rattling of carts and hiss of kitchens - an abundance of detail worthy of Balzac that he admired so much.7
Yet few, if any, descriptions are given of Paris’ topology in these poems. Instead, he documents the effect the metropolis has upon his psyche. Nor is he nostalgically blind to what the city was pre-Hausmann: ‘sinuous coils of the old capital’. The city life is one closer to a dreamlike realm, its architecture uncatchable as smoke. In many respects, Baudelaire’s Paris is as much a city of the mind, conjured by imaginings of the real thing, that occupies and informs his poetry, ‘Le Cygne’ in particular. In his seminal travelogue The Soft City, Jonathan Raban asserts: “The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs or urban sociology and demography and architecture.”8 It is also a site of battle, where antiquity and modernity collide in its streets like two chariot racers ramrodding one another in the hot sand of an arena:
I’m on Grand Canal Bridge, watching fireworks ignite
the amber monolith of Google Docks, towering
over empty wharfs and warehouses at its feet;
from where I stand, I should probably be amazed
they’re up for re-development at all: drydock and coalquay
bulldozed so trendy cafes and start-ups can be raised,
like keystones, in their place. But I don’t see
the diggers or MEWPs, just the ashen pit where history
once stood. Developers mean to improve the city,
make it carbon to any other boomtown, smooth its rough
edges down, rebrand and gloss it over with LEDs, impose
Silicon Valley-imported values and applaud us
for deleting ours in the name of progress.
And sure, maybe it’s all a necessary part of change: bulldoze
the place, re-forge it nice and new in steel and glass
and accessible only by keycard and passcode, future means.
I glimpse that future, in light of the fireworks.
It is imperative to remember that poetry is the result of an individual’s perception of both the world and their place in it, and therefore remains as open to critique as any other form of expression. Baudelaire’s representation of Paris is a result of his own documentation and aesthetic observance, as well as his capacity to relay the French capital and its cultural, political and geographical layout through poetry instead of prose. As with an ethnographer or a sociologist, his own vision of the city forms an imposed impression through language and the adroit and subversive use of a specific persona. Thus, those evil flowers continue their lethal pollination. The street itself becomes a spectacle, as feverish as any dream. The fog is incense-heavy, the lanes suffused with the reek of crushed flowers, heavy as rubble or a malediction, every kiss was a model of spleen, and Baudelaire’s own nagging sense that his perception of things is as flawed as anyone else’s. His deliberate cultivation of impersonality, eschewing of sentimentality in his poetic voice and adherence to poetic forms that required craftsmanship as much as visionary elan reflect on this wholesale. According to Anthony Mortimer: ‘Fatal to his finances and damaging to his health, Paris was necessary to Baudelaire’s creative self-examination. In more ways than one it was the city where he found himself.’9
And yet there is also this, from ‘The Painter of Modern Life’: “The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate ob-server it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes… He gazes at the landscape of the great city, landscapes of stone, now swathed in the mist, now struck in full face by the sun. He enjoys handsome equipages, proud horses, the spit and polish of the grooms, the skilful handling by the page boys, the smooth rhythmical gait of the women, the beauty of the children, full of the joy of life and proud as peacocks of their pretty clothes; in short, life universal. If in a shift of fashion, the cut of a dress has been slightly modified, if clusters of ribbons and curls have been dethroned by rosettes, if bonnets have widened and chignons have come down a little on the nape of the neck, if waistlines have been raised and skirts become fuller, you may be sure that from a long way off his eagle’s eye will have detected it. A regiment marches by, maybe on its way to the ends of the earth, filling the air of the boulevard with its martial airs, as light and lively as hope... And now, whilst others are sleeping, this man is leaning over his table, his steady gaze on a sheet of paper, exactly the same gaze as he directed just now at the things about him, brandishing his pencil, his pen, his brush, splashing water from the glass up to the ceiling, wiping his pen on his shirt, hurried, vigorous, active, as though he was afraid the images might escape him, quarrelsome though alone, and driving himself relentlessly on. And things seen are born again on the paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and better than beautiful, strange and endowed with an enthusiastic life, like the soul of their creator. The weird pageant has been distilled from nature.”
I was still going out into Dublin’s city centre after dark, but this time it was to appear on-stage myself and play my own artistic wares. Baudelaire’s nocturnal reveries were never far from my mind, and my own poetry was moulding itself into something more tangible than cheap imitation. Life at that stage was college and working the night shift in pubs and occasional weekly open mic nights for poets adn comedians and all the usual chaos of one’s 20s.
For a while this suited me just fine. I’d get on stage in the International or the Patriot’s Inn or Sin E or any of the dive bars that littered the city centre at the time. Under the luminous glare of the spotlights, I’d stare down the throng of sweaty, half-lit faces gathered before me and read my poems aloud as if they were news reports. Fire and blood and misplaced cockiness were the order of the day, but so was music, so was the joy in at least being able to do this. The country was in a heap; yet poetry still crawled out of the ashes, shaking the cinders off its darkly-burnished wings and making itself clear in these dingy backrooms and dimly-lit basements.
In these havens, these round tables of musos and chancers and silver-tongued dipsos, this sanctum, this downstairs sweatbox of music and laughter we all kept coming back to and bask in the warmth of a song or a hand held in the dark for less than the price of a pint: packed to the rafters, slamming doors rumbled in our ears as the logo’s blue nimbus throbbed like a tattoo as if around Saturn or an index finger ring of suds on a pint, smeared moisture on beermats; MCs gesticulated, nerves crackle at finely-tuned intensity for notes poised on a keyboard under stage-lights’ molten glare, and, amid the heckles, cheers, the cash register’s whine and clicked fingers, someone’s name would be hollered out and they’d walk on-stage. I made friends, enemies, girlfriends, exes. And my own writing was improving, becoming more and more ablaze with some strange coal. The word was made to be spoken as much written, its impermanence on the air making it all the more precious. My old friend Sam Comeford by now well on his way to becoming an accomplished saxophonist and jazz composer, knew that world very well too:
And there’s you, trundling down Wicklow Street
Saxophone case belted to your shoulder,
Decked out in a black evening suit from H&M
On the way to your next gig or recording session.
Burnout is something you’ve gotten used to,
A payoff from performing at weddings
In Dundalk or Castlebar on the weekend.
You’re a man out to earn a living now
And though we rarely see each other,
Our smoking paths will cross and cross again.
Our bristled brotherhood won’t waste away.
You memorise a Dolphy or Monk solo,
Rolling melodies to halt all conversation
Among tangled mic wires, wah-wah pedals,
Foldback monitors bunched onstage.
The saxophone’s stainless sigh
Fill up Arthur’s or the International Bar.
These are rough times to be young
With rent to pay, debts left unsettled,
The donation jar jangling with spare coins
And playing your heart out after hours.
But these are paltry irritations, not enough
To dampen your need for adventure.
Having survived the breakneck turmoil
Of adolescence, you walk barefoot
Across beds of unexpected coal.
In a Dublin pub, where unemployment
Darkens the conversation, we speak
Of hot labour, the nuts-and-bolts drudgery
By this symphony, the wind is paralysed,
Thunder crowns the tree’s green skull,
And mountains learn to tremble.
Unleash your sax’s strafing harmonic, each rolling
Missile of song, every note of cacophonous intent,
Rhythms cannonading. Dredge up your sunbeamed
Soul, like a flower you feared extinct forever,
And take on the monolithic city that awaits you.
In 2017, ten years after I first encountered Baudelaire and 160 years after Les Fleurs du Mal's initial publication, I was living and working near the city centre with Anne, my then-girlfriend. Despite the fact that we both worked full-time, our existence together was precarious, and money was often tight. My daily walk into my job as a security guard in a bookshop on Parnell Street was marked by the reappearance of cranes once more, a sign that perhaps the country was at last picking itself up again. But this time, the cranes seemed to loom larger somehow, and a knot of foreboding lodged itself in my stomach.
Heading into work one of the days, I amble down
past the Charlemont Street flats, where breeze blocks,
prefabs and chrome, wind-worn hoarding
cordon off the sledgehammer knocks
while a hard-hatted foreman
sparks up a rollie before inking X’s and Y’s
on his clipboard. The flats, ripe for demolition,
are to be bulldozed and a newer, glossier edifice
raised in their place, with past tenants not even alerted.
Were I to nick a keepsake from the detritus
can I hope for a better standard of living?
And sure, the days of plenty and profit are back,
but is now really the time for thanksgiving?
Just as before, a thicket of cranes snag the skyline,
iron jibs grab at cloud or star, as the wind’s high grip
rattles through the bony lattice and chain-
sling as they slowly swivel to lift
granite slabs to the roof.
At a temporary bus-stop, I take screenshots of the site,
levelled as if by earthquake or war,
dust-sprays gasping amid clearance.
This is a hard-hat area, waspy drill-rasp driving
each bolted screw into place, gloved and harnessed
scaffolders drudging above potholed tarmac.
And Death walks among them always, a rumble of certainty
in its step. They waste no time on sorrow or awe
for the flats and their damaged goods. Cement mixers
pour grey sludge through caked chutes,
a JCB lies toppled on its side, a grubby sphinx
muck-caked and waiting. In an hour,
ice pellets will plummet, knifing the air, rhythmical
as drill-beats, echoing across the site. Excavators lurch over
to chomp down infrastructure-lumps and steel
bracing dismantled, all the wiring torn by the roots,
compressed into dust. Green netting shrouds the links
and the ladders are fixed in propped positions
yet not a single storey contains a soul to soar
aloft to hallowed gates, for careworn morticians,
disposing of a deadweight carcass, to adore.
Monoliths of stylised brick, I’ve seen more and more
of them sprout up, slow but sure as the sunrise,
skyline-usurpers, their banners marked
with company logos and bashed by breeze.
I keep on walking, pressed now for time,
hands scalded by a Costa cup and unremarked
by the foreman, away from the site perimeter
to where traffic lights bleep from green
to red, and headlamps swarm to Harcourt
as if joining in a pitiless, ultra-modern raid.
The screenshots are stored away in my phone
and I pick up the pace. But I’m afraid,
for what future is being reaped, there and then?
Writing in the Guardian in October of 2019, Una Mullaly states of the changes made to the Irish capital as a result of all this newfound construction work:
… the development and demolition that is altering streetscapes has had a massive impact on cultural and creative spaces. Several large clubs have closed and been demolished, but the saddest and perhaps most symbolic is the ramshackle but much-loved Bernard Shaw pub, which is set to shut at the end of October. This venue was seen as a cultural outpost in a neighbourhood now bookended by WeWork office buildings. Such closures aren’t just about venues or dancefloors, they’re also about the sidelining of communities that have emerged from such places: young, music and art-focused.
It is only human to view one's perceived authentic vision of a city and the changes that now render it unrecognizable, as well as viewing these changes and theor results, whether for good or ill. Economic growth propels change on the landscape. Construction work is also of course necessary for urban growth. Would any of this be happening were there no demand for it? Perhaps it is all inevitable. Cities change, the changes brought about by Haussmann, roundly decried in his day, are now viral parts of Paris' charm. While gentrification is far from perfect, it is inevitably a part of the change. I have my ambivalence. It has its benefits as much as its drawbacks.
There is a tendency to view the 'real' essence of a city through the lens of how one first knew said city, usually growing up or knowing. The recent gentrification of Dublin city, especially in the wake of many tech companies including Facebook, Google and Apple establishing their European headquarters on the south banks of the Liffey in the Docklands area (a part of the city that had languished in beleaguerment until these companies’ arrival and which has undergone a near biblical transformation). Rents were driven up, the Docklands went from an industrial wasteland to a tech and digital quarter, with the black-and-yellow monolith of Google Docks towering above the decrepit silos and warehouses surrounding it. They were up for re-development: old hubs of industry demolished for trendy cafes and office blocks to be raised in their place. Change the city, make it carbon, to any other major city, it’s rough edges smoothed down and rebranded and glossed with LED lights. The shifting symbolism attached to these spindly edifices of commercial metropolitan development dotting the horizon chanted with the times. As Saskia Sassen writes:
‘Epochal change, as in our shift to the global, is often a source of new types of urban capabilities. Today, given globalization and digitization - and all the special elements they entail - many of these conditions have once again undergone change. Globalization and digitisation produce dislocations and destabalizations of existing institutional orders that go well beyond cities… In our global era, cities have emerged once again as strategic sites for cultural and institutional change. The conditions that today make some cities strategic sites are basically two… One of these is the rescaling of the strategic that articulate th new politico-economic system and hence at least some features of power. The other is the weakening of the national as container of social process due to the variety of encompassed by globalisation and digitization. 5
The response to such changes can be complex - welcoming the alleged economic improvements wrought by whilst also lamenting their homogenising, gentrifying and atomising effects. For all the increased architecture, Dublin’s homeless population rose alarmingly within the last five years as rental increases and laws favouring the landlord over the tenant were enacted (a situation compounded and thrown into further relief by the pandemic).
Now, the entire world must take things day by day, and I can no longer see my city. Drone footage of a deserted Grafton Street shows up on my newsfeed; a fox scavenges for food under the shuttered awning of Victoria’s Secret. The city would have its literature eventually. The factory chimneys retching smoke and coal dust, the gnarled alleyways, all the late-night grandeur of the finest film noir, all given way to the Therefore, it seems oddly fitting to revisit his work in a world riven by the after-effects of Brexit, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and increased urgency of the climate crisis. Drawing a comparison between now and then is perhaps futile, though rereading Les Fleurs du Mal has given me pause. News of a vaccine seems to change by the second. For a city that seemed at its most alive after dark, seeing its streets void of people made for unsettling viewing. But even before that, the sense of the city being in a state of savage and unscalable transition took its toll on myself and Anne:
Aubade
Call it a healthy disrespect for money - the holes burnt
in your pocket, coins and Leap Card to hand, coffee
leeched of flavour, bills clogging the postbox,
your ritual of dry shampoo and blush at the hall mirror,
hair bobby-pinned, keys bunched on the table
with the rest of your small necessities. Through the ceiling,
the footsteps of the couple living above us wake you;
grudgingly, we hoist roller blinds to meet the sun’s polar
clarity. Where we live, landlords charge 500 squids just
to view a property. We’re lucky to be where we are, I suppose.
Down the street, our more well-off neighbours
flaunt their au pairs through half shut windows.
Everyone else walks, resigned, doggedly, to work;
it’s how we live in the shadow of something,
insufficient funds, rent increase. Threat of eviction.
All morning, I’ll watch you climb out of your pit
of sleep, your blouse unbuttoned, skirt unzipped, a Xanax
setting you quietly adrift. Metallic clouds waft over
as we walk into work; the city clears its throat around us,
wind shakes beads of acid from branches, you go your
way, I go mine at the College Street traffic lights.
What’ll it be, so? Asleep on your morning commute, ash
filling your mouth, fire-seeds for breakfast, savage to the taste?
Or else the minted air, cooling you to radiance?
That was 2018, with Covid yet to unleash itself. In the summer of that year, my old friend Sam Comerford was reading the crest of a wave. The music had been going great for him, as a composer and saxophonist. All the late nights in those now-demolished jazz bars finally paid off.
By now, he was living in Brussels and he’d been selected for an artist’s residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, in the heart of Paris. By coincidence, my younger sister Layla was also living in Paris, working with the European Parliament. I got to see them both while there, and the city is palace to be savoured.
Péniches crawl under each stone-faced bridge
stealthy as swans, the water roiling aqua green,
and dusk's dazed zinzolin, triumphantly arch
like a jacaranda, fumes the stale musk of rain.
Me, Layla and Sam Comerford stroll the boardwalk,
a pichet of chilled rosé passing between us.
The Seine slurs its swash, reflecting our talk
and adrift banter of art, of politics, groveling praise
heaped feintly at tyrants’ feet. Sunburned,
I relish the rosé dregs, glad they’re both here.
Anne was meant to see this, too - it was our three-year
anniversary, after all; soon we’d be split and I’d return
to my childhood home. But for now, both my sister
and my oldest friend remind me: I amn’t fully spurned.
It's heartening to consider how far they’ve both come,
eking out lives for themselves in an entirely new world
without being engulfed. Flames ravage the inner slum
but Paris isn’t engulfed either, even with gnarled
graffiti and the bellowed simplicity of a slogan
at risk of being retweeted into triteness, je suis Charlie,
baiese la flics, Isis suicides-by-bomb, Opération
Chammal, an extended state of embrouillamini,
chômeurs in high-viz marching across the boulevard
intent on torching a toll booth - anarchy Rimbaud
might’ve praised, or Jim Morrison would surely applaud,
as clouds of tear-gas smear his hotel window.
As for me, I watch and wait for dusk to fully darken
among lightly-aged cobbles, the river now a jade glow,
elegiac thoughts of Anne, Sam and Layla talking.
The thrum and whoosh in that gridiron of tunnels
swallowing all other sound, high-speed
screech of an inbound métro, grind of metal
off metal, turnstiles steeled, headlights luminous,
wind puncturing the sinuses with a nosebleed.
From the platform we see it shunt into the station
and board with local ease, ignoring the headway
of doors sliding in shadow, metropolitan
sweep of tiled enamel, and, on a terminal stairway,
alight together in shuffled exodus. Like a utilitarian crypt,
bass solos slap to the rafters, brassily frumious
against hipstery applause, deceptively derelict
as the mural smearing the porch’s Art Nouveau maw,
cheap Stella on tap, candles, a shroud of drizzle
gently hosing us down in the beer garden, as encore
and medley follow the sax’s cadenced sizzle.
Is this the last I’ll see or hear of le quartier populaire?
Time is unaided as smoke. Beer becalms me, jazz
lets me drift. Paris remains; I’ll be elsewhere.
The city as Baudelaire saw it remained, yet there was much to enjoy of it still. In the meantime, as my own work took off, I was also introduced to my now-good friend Peter O’ Neill, poet and English teacher and translator, history buff and wine-lover and Cork-based flanuer, an avid disciple of classic film noir, Joyce, Beethoven, Beckett and of course Baudelaire, and a scathing iconoclast when it came to the Irish literary heritage as Bord Failte knew it, and who cared little for whatever current trends were currently reaping the spoils in contemporary literature.
Alcohol fueled much of our discussions on the nights we’d head out and take to the stage. If Baudelaire was our dark messiah, an urban chronicler to whom we owed a writer’s weighty debt, then we gladly preached his opium-hazed gospel. Everything that formed our work from adolescence could be traced back to Charles; his poems reminded us of life, even as death reigned supreme at street level. He taught us about the inner flame, and yet he remained shrouded in his own mythos, one which, despite his much-vaunted modernist credentials, cast him in the role of the sickly, Byronic, goth-pated dandy, wandering aimlessly through fog-wreathed Parisian streets in an opium haze, unable to absolve himself of the perennial city he was forced to call home.
It turned out Peter had also lived in Paris during the Celtic Tiger years, and his own poetry blazed with a certain Baudelarian fire as well. In writing his poems of Henry Street Arcade, and his Dublin Trilogy of and his own transversions of Baudelaire’s work, he aimed to keep Charles’ spirit alive, and to learn to live with the prospect of cataclysm, but in the Irish capital this time - an aim I readily shared with him. A poem we both found ourselves united over was Charles ‘L’homme et la Mer (Man and the Sea) - a poem that I wrote a response to, and to Peter it is dedicated:
No, not brothers, or even foes, but dependants,
And even then, certainly not forever. For some,
Ocean is a sleepless mirror to be overcome
Or stilled. Grey-green sluices surge in segments,
Inky calm roils back the tide. The sunken heart
And dredged soul, both locked to its labour,
Confound it for a gold-stashing neighbour,
Sea-traffic tossed long as litanies on a chart.
Chasmal master and fleshy slave, ill-at-ease
With clumps of bronze kelp tonguing the brine
Like smugglers, murky as a plunged bloodline.
It does not serve our soft-focus chanteys,
Stoked by rhythm. Beyond the salvors’ reach,
Strapwork smearing rust over its agate-
Strung lunalae, reef-grooved, waves set
To rattle stones with the suck of their drainage,
The calm they bring to us illusory and brief.
Mercy is small here. Fog, hellish spurts of rain,
Make its drive of death knowable and akin
To the hearts of men. Or, so you wish to believe.
Man is a tourniquet for leechings of harmony,
A windbound anchor clinching the basalt.
His works are swallowed by the cold rise of the sea.
The upsurge brims, crashing to a halt.
In Baudelaire's original poem, he expresses the idea that the ocean and humankind are direct reflections of one another, in that they are both unfathomable, unpredictable and filled with the endless mystery of themselves. While I don't entirely disagree with this assertion, I take issue with Baudelaire's idea that human beings and the sea are entirely at odds with one another. I believe that humanity, for all our works of progress and will for survival and innovation, ultimately pales in comparison to the ocean's might. Given the damage inflicted on the global ecosystem by human endeavour, and the increase in recent years of hurricanes battering the Irish coast, where I live, it would seem that the might of the ocean and its capacity to engulf even the sturdiest cities is being clearly demonstrated and it is humanity who will pay the price.
But there is little call for pessimism. Baudelaire made us a little more at ease with the darker side of life, and with the strange glory even cities own. I’ll finish with this, a final tribute to Charles Baudelaire and to the final resting place in the City of Light:
Whisperings (Montparnasse Cemetery)
And here's the pewter gates, open wide
to my footsteps’ touristic curiosity,
glances stolen downward as I stroll
amongst statues, kiss-smeared
cenotaphs of Montparnasse -
'til at last I round a noticeable corner
and am face to face with a family plot: his.
Enough dead writers here to fill a library:
Beckett and De Beauvoir, Sontag and Sartre
share this place as anchorage
to eternal sleep, under seasonal whisperings
of pagoda and yew tree.
I decide against snapping a photo,
captioning it with a line from one
of his prose works, hastagging the others.
The names of his mother and stepfather
(whose death he was heard
to bellowingly welcome during a riot)
are engraved above his, stark
as a reminder. Wind hustles coolly
against all three, sweeping
the lettering's deep-cut intricacy clear.
Strange question to mull over - would me
and him have been mates? Sharing in-jokes,
getting pissed together on rotgut absinthe,
trading fists in a pub carpark somewhere
before breaking down laughing?
I doubt it, somehow.
His verses are friendship enough.
For each night to come, crows cackle
over his headstone, sensing fresh burial
and even fresher carrion. I wince
at the the sun, rose-tinted, quietly volcanic,
the world still reeking
of what isn't yet lost: an angel’s bronze frown,
burgundy leaves, the shadow-rich necropolis,
shivery wind-whispers between lime
trees,his body woven and bound
in stony sarcophagus, walls garlanded
in a greenery I cannot name.
Perhaps it’s what we all await:
toppling of statues,his parents'
details saltily erased, jewellery pulped
and the globe’s heaving curve blasted by cold,
drab and havoc-purged in a reckoning
by chart and graph; dandy and demolition-artist,
changeable, imprecise, enraptured brine,
the old margin between
civilisation and wreckage too brittle
for repairs of steel and glass, a rustling tide
where no shore can be reached with few bones
to salvage and only gulls left to squabble
over soggy plankton, a fresh colony of stars
shining amid the stones' dead calm,
shaded whisper of ash and sophrae
just within earshot, the graveyard mapped
and laid-out with the precision of an alexandrine,
the lanes long, spacious and beckoning.
He and graveyards go hand in hand together.
There is an evergreen conifer pumping acid
into dry soil, where he lies cradled by eternity.
At the necropolis’ southern entrance, facing
the old gristmill, there is the hulking, sandstone
mausoleum of Le Congregation De La Mission,
flanked by smaller graves and with a statue
of St Vincent de Paul, brandishing his crucifix
like a shooting iron, free hand raised in stern blessing,
a red-eyed Messiah thorning redemptive blood loss
through his tears with a menace redolent
of Baudelaire. The crypt is built to resemble a door
lined with plaques, the Latin inscription
at its weathered core: Opera illorum sequntu illos
(Their works follow them). To that Latin hauteur,
that profound simplicity, I genuflect before
the bicentennial altar, strewn with charred bones,
suffused with decayed perfume, his written gift.
[i] F. Foysyth: The Day of the Jackal, Hutchinson, London, 1971.
[ii] C. Baudelaire: ‘On the Heroism of Modern Life’, in Salon of 1846, Paris 1846.
[iii] T.S. Eliot, ‘Baudelaire’, Selected Essays, Faber, London, 1972
[iv] I. Chtchelov, Formulary for a New Urbanism, Paris, 1953
[v] J. Culler, ‘Introduction’, The Flowers of Evil, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993.
[vi] W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in The Era of High Capitalism, London, 1973.
E. Jordann, Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre Dublin, 2008.
[vii] A. Mortimer, ‘Extra Material’, The Flowers of Evil, Alma Classics, Surrey, 2016
[vii] ibid.
S. Sassen, ‘’
C. Baudelaire, ‘Letter to Victor Hugo’, December 1859.
[v] U. Mullaly, ‘Ireland: no country for the young, creative or homeless’, The Guardian, October, 2019.
[v] ibid.
