Words of Undiminished Relevance

The following passage features in a new show, 1916: Visionaries and Their Words, which was devised by Lorcán Mac Mathúna and which will be performed this weekend as part of Tradfest. Follow the link for details http://www.templebartrad.com/artist/1916-visionaries-and-their-words-sun/

“I put it that what education in Ireland needs is less a construction of its machinery than a regeneration in spirit. The machinery has doubtless its defects, but what is chiefly wrong with it is it is mere machinery, a lifeless thing without a soul. A soulless thing cannot teach; but it can destroy. A machine cannot make men, but it can break men.

Education has not to do with the manufacture of things, but with fostering the growth of things. And the conditions we should strive to bring about in our education system are not the conditions favourable to the rapid and cheap manufacture of ready-mades, but the conditions available to the growth of living organisms………………..”

“……………I knew one boy of whom his father said to me: ‘He is no good at books, he is no good at work. He is good at nothing but playing a tin whistle. What am I to do with him?' I shocked the worthy man by replying (though really it was the obvious thing to reply): ‘Buy a tin whistle for him.'”

Patrick Pearse in ‘The Irish Review’ January 1913 

Pearse’s words seem to me to be particularly relevant today. My experience is that, in the interests of satisfying the requirements of the marketplace, accountability, transparency, point-scoring, and being  politically correct, we are replacing the heart and passion that is required for real education (education that inspires) with a process that has more to do with commercial production and the maintenance of the attendant statistics.

The relationship of teacher and learner is a human one. Its success is based on the teacher’s ability to engage, with warmth and passion, the student’s interest.  A committee-horse system of education, over- prescribed and requiring a stifling degree of regulation leans more to the requirements of its own over-bearing institutions than it does to the people it is supposed to serve.

Famine Memory

 

November, month of charcoal cloud

slung low to the earth;

labourers hunched double,

grubbing for the bright potatoes

  that scuttle like mice back into the sodden soil.

 

Scrabbling fingers chase each fugitive light

with the desperation of the starving.

I rest a moment on the spade,

my hands, around the shaft, 

rough with working that same soil;

fingers with the same DNA inside them.

Joseph Mary Plunkett's 'A Wave of the Sea'

Joseph Mary Plunkett’s  beautiful lilt in   

“I see his blood upon the rose 

And in the stars the glory of his eyes, 

His body gleams amid eternal snows, 

His tears fall from the skies.” Etc.

is, itself, enough to make the poem exceptional. The words skip over the page like the lightest feet. The lightness is as admirable here as in the most polished dance.

The following poem has the same quality. To speak out the words is to surf the wave; to feel, as close as one can, propulsion on a crest of words.  

A Wave of the Sea 

 

I am a wave of the sea

And the foam of the wave

And the wind of the foam

And the wings of the wind.

 

My soul’s in the salt of the sea

In the weight of the wave

In the bubbles of foam

In the ways of the wind.

 

My gift is the depth of the sea

The strength of the wave

The lightness of foam

The speed of the wind.

End

 

She loves me,

loves me not,

loves me,

loves me not;

 

 

 

and there the flower bald.

Now I must go to the wrong end

of the telescope

like someone never loved at all.

 

I want to be away, far away;

but no, I’m close,

 

far too much so 

for all this distance.

Three scenes from a sixties town

i.

In Mc Stay’s window

there are four turkeys and two legs of lamb

hanging behind signs:

GIGOT CHOPS    CORN BEEF    RIB ROAST

There is a side of lamb and a cut of round,                       

and Mary Hopkin is singing

‘Those Were The Days My Friend’.

ii.

Market day, a scatter of clothes in Emily square.

Scarved women are gulls

picking, pecking, digging. 

 

Shoes higgledy-piggledy,

their uppers and stitch-work bent this way and that,

fingers inserted to the toe.

 

For they have more coins than notes,

more copper than silver,

and always far less than plenty.

iii

The old men are sitting, hunched against the wall,

replaying, over and over, in the half-light of the dayroom,

the footage of their lives.

 

A ray of sunlight is a projector beam that falls dead-

centre of the room. It seems to say, not only heat

but life itself is to be found somewhere else.

The Country Child

 

The country child

runs in and out of rain showers

like rooms; 

sees the snake-patterns in trains,

the sun's sword-play in the hedges

and the confetti in falling elder blossoms; 

knows the humming in the telegraph poles

as the hedgerow's voice

when tar bubbles are ripe for bursting; 

watches bees emerge from the caverns

at the centres of buttercups,

feels no end to a daisy chain, 

feels no end to an afternoon;

walks on ice though it creaks;

sees fish among ripples and names them; 

is conversant with berries

and hides behind thorns;

slips down leaves, behind stones; 

fills his hands with the stream

and his hair with the smell of hay;

recognizes the chalkiness  

of the weathered bones of sheep,

the humour in a rusted fence,

the feel of the white beards that hang there.  

The country child

sees a mountain range where blue clouds

are heaped above the horizon, 

sees a garden of diamonds

through a hole scraped

in the frost patterns of his bedroom window  

and sees yet another world

when tints of cerise and ochre

streak the evening sky. 

He knows no end, at night

he sneaks glimpses of Heaven

through the moth-eaten carpet of the sky.

Crowd Control

  CROWD CONTROL

 

THE DOGS:    

        taut with anticipation, grabbing photographs of the crowd

        for their own special consideration. 

THE HANDLERS:     

        at ease,  the satisfying  tug of leashes in their fists,

        the occasional pulling of a dog up short; 

        (an enthusiastic dog must learn to relish).

 

THE SUPPLY OF DOG HANDLERS: 

        boys who have the bristling love for smashing glass

        cooped up in their heads.  

     

THE HANDLERS OF THE DOG HANDLERS:

 

       the passion for cleansing forever tugging

       and the stains of humanity spreading through the streets.

Trolls, Kings and Other Solitary Souls

 

 

 

 

 

Many years ago, while on a geology fieldtrip in Norway, I had an interesting experience that clarified for me the origin of those ever so popular trolls in the tourist shops there.

One day, while mapping in the mountains, I came into a very remote and lonely valley that had at the far end of it a single stone cottage. A strange sight in that remoteness, I walked towards it to investigate. But as I approached, I saw there was an old person bent over, working at something on the ground. I approached slowly and with growing apprehension. The person seemed totally unaware of me and continued at his or her task.

Being in such a wilderness, so remote and alone, all the possibilities of the old fairytales solidified in my mind. A childish fear flooded over me. I moved towards the forbidding spectre, heart in my mouth. It wasn’t until the last moment that I saw that it was a gnarled old tree.

As did Patrick Kavanagh in his ‘Christmas Childhood,’ one crisp moonlit Christmas morning, I saw the three kings travelling up the hills outside Roscommon. It was a magical Christmas sight, and I stopped to look at it for a long time.

Now I am looking out at some scattered hawthorns on the slopes of the hills above Barnesmore. They pitch themselves against the winter gales and flaying rain. They stand, rooted in boulder strewn, thin soil, crabbed old codgers with tobacco coloured dead bracken all about. On another day, when the mist is heavy, they bend into the wind and prepare to walk. For eons they have passed travelers on the road without a word, or maybe they have lisped some message that seemed to come from souls long since departed.

Heaven or not, we are reborn

 

 

Padded out from a stand of sycamores,

confident, purposeful.

Stopped opposite the newly dug ridges

to listen for the lithe young collie.

Glanced behind, indecisive for a moment,

ambled on.

Loped past the gable where the dark-haired boy

kicks a football,

slipped through a hole in the hedge

onto the road.

 

ii.

Morning:

the fox, stretched lifeless on the grass,

a cloud of flies at its eyes,

already stinking of resurrection.

 

Happy Christmas, by the way; see you on the  other side.

Ha

Passing

We change,

time moves us  along.

Our loves change like trees,

like fires,

like buildings. 

They become our old books,

categorised.

The catalogue lists fond memories,

disasters,

deaths.

Visceral Art

The best art sends you away carrying some of the mood the artist wanted to convey, but you  have to be an active participant; in the case below, you must imagine yourself in that confined, airless vault. 

 

 

 

A friend’s conversation on the German artist Hans Holbein sent me back to his work, in particular, ‘Dead Christ Entombed’.

Not the only artist to depict the dead Christ to extraordinary effect, (Mantegna’s brilliant ‘Dead Christ’ with its jaw-dropping perspective is an obvious example), however Holbein has gone for the horror of the real in a way that distinguishes it from the others.

The undignified image of our stripped God is usually softened with closed eyes, a coterie of mourners, a cloth that drapes down artistically. Not here. This God is stuck, eyes wide open, in a vault that is unbearably claustrophobic. His beard, stiff in rigor mortis, accentuating the lack of room, his mouth open as though death came in the effort to get one last breath from this sliver of space. No details spared, prominent  belly-button and bump of genitalia, discolouring wounds, the all to human anatomy.

The hand at the centre of the painting has the usually absent, but here deadly accurate, colour of bruising; the nail-hole like an eye, eyeballing the viewer. This is a man with all the shocking vulnerability that can be portrayed in an emaciated human body. 

If I was a painter, I would retire after painting that.

Achilles Heel

   

 

Sunday evening, Father in gold gilt

weaving words and incense

into a melange

of heavenalia.

 

Monday noon,

wavy hair, brush eyebrows

strolling common touch

down Goff Street.

 

Sunday evening, in gold gilt again;

my eyes snagged

on his odd socks

all through Benediction.

A Weekend of Rain

Two days of torrential, flailing rain. Biblical levels, and more tomorrow. Sure, the scenery disappears, but in the city lights wriggle away from their sources, in doorways shadows become carnivorous.

     Rain Street

 

   Down the street

   rain lights running

   drizzling concrete        

   sizzling lake.

   Flashes red flashes

   running in rivulets

   yachting cartons

   crowd in a grate.

   Umbrella shadows

   with foot halo splashes

   shirt collar drippings

   shoes under siege.

   Gutters play bongos

   for galvanize tappers

   tyres make clashes

   spangling streams.

   And faces in windows

   unravel down panes

   their cigarettes burning

   their signature stains.

   Then squinting bus queue

   like socks on a line

   become runaway legs

   legs like twine.

Reflection

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gerhard Richter's Lesende (1994) is a beautiful study of the play of light on this young woman's profile. There is a beautiful peace in the work. It is poetry in light.

 

 

Reflection

 

The sunlight on the back of your neck,

ear-lobes, hair;

the page-reflected glow onto your chin,

dimming upward towards your eyes;

all else, darkness around you.

 

If I’d never seen that you are beautiful;

that day, the light that chose to steal up behind you,

to settle on you  so gently, but dazzlingly;

that light would have been light enough

to reflect forever in my mind.

Ending

 

 

He, who covered my body

with snail-trails,

whose hands were wrack

swept over my skin,

kisses on my back

a colony of shell fish.

 

He, who would have crossed a mountain range

for an hour between my thighs

now crawls over me

with wizened passion.

Gutted of love,

he comes clawing,

scavenging; 

and insults me with lies

that have made greater pincers 

of his mouth than his hands.

 

What does he see in me ?

 

Meat to excite him,

his groper's desires,

even his fingertips betray him.

But no more,

the erotic becomes ugly,

decrepit manoeuvres disconnected

from their original meanings;

the touches stain you.

 

I have watched him slither from my gaze

a thousand times a night 

while slipping the word love 

from his vocabulary;

watched him develop this communication

of knives and forks.