Homage to Myles – Friday – Mind your Language

Himself was in rare form when he reached the pub last night. Coming in on the bus, he was afflicted by a notice: Room for 10 standees only. “It’s the same when some young fellow does a bunk from Mountjoy: the next day the papers have headlines about the escapee. And are we burning our copies of the Irish Times, or screaming that there is no such thing as an escapee, that it is an impossibility?” 

The Writer had the misfortune to suggest that the mistake was around for so long now, it was probably approved by the Oxford English Dictionary. That really drove Himself wild. He laid into the Writer. Accused him and his kind of crimes against language. Then he demanded to know where the apostrophe had gone from the Irish Writers Centre.

He claimed there should be public floggings for such crimes. Look at the hash they were making of Yeats’s poetry on his 150th. Hadn’t a bull’s where to stick the apostrophe. Might as well keep it for scratching their backs. What we needed was a bunch of greybeards, as the French had, to protect the language against atrocity. You wouldn’t catch those boys inserting their dangling apostrophes into inappropriate places.

The Cynic snorted at the ribald innuendo. “What you’re looking for,” he said, “is a CIA or an MI5 for homeland language security”.

“Bloody right, I am, and a Guantanamo for offenders.”

But the Writer was game and rose to it. He said it demonstrated the flexibility of the English Language. Yeats himself, he said, wouldn’t have had a clue where to stick the apostrophe in Yeats’s poetry. He could write, but he couldn’t spell, and he wouldn’t recognise grammar if he met it marching down the street, led by a fife and drum band.

When the Writer gets the wind up, he is well able for Himself. He took a long draft from his Guinness, wiped his lips, and sat back, good and square. “The English Language,” he said, “is infinitely flexible. It is organic, always growing, not like French, which has been fossilised since the Eighteenth Century.”

“Stop waffling,” said Himself, “and tell me how the Writers’ Centre became the Writers Centre.”

“They just decided to drop the apostrophe,” said he, smug as you like – and he sounded like the boy in class who knew the answer when no one else did.

“Apostrophe – you might as well be talking to yourself.”  Himself looked around to see if anyone twigged his witticism, but was disappointed. It was two minutes later when I twigged it, and smiled, but the conversation had moved on by then.

“But is it right or wrong?” asked the Young Lad. “To leave out the apostrophe.”

“It’s right if you decide it’s right,” said the Writer, “and wrong if you decide it’s wrong.”

Himself was winding, like a cock looking for a cockfight. “You sound like a Jesuit,” he said. “Tell me the answer you want and I’ll give you the justification.”

“Those boys were ahead of their time all right,” piped in the Cynic.

“So what’s your justification for leaving out the apostrophe?” Himself had decided to drive for home.

“As with the Jesuits, you first decide what outcome you want. If you decide that the Centre belongs to the writers, then it is the Irish Writers’ Centre, apostrophe included. But if you decide that it is a Centre dedicated to Irish Writers, then no apostrophe, the words Irish Writers become an adjectival phrase qualifying Centre. Both are grammatically correct.”

Himself shifted uneasily on his high stool.

“And what about standees?” asked the Young Lad.

“You mean you don’t know your ‘ers’ from your ‘ees’!” scoffed the Cynic with mock astonishment.

“For God’s sake, give him a lesson” said Himself, as he got up abruptly and headed for the door marked WC.

“Alright,” said the Cynic. And the Young Lad was all ears. “Once upon a time Paddy the Irishman and his dear friend, Jock the Scotsman, boarded a bus in London without tickets. It was a Thursday evening and they didn’t have a red rex between them. They sat on the top deck, but after a while they heard the dreaded words behind them, ‘tickets, please’. As the Inspector was making his way towards them, Jock whispered, ‘What will we do, Paddy?’ ‘Don’t panic,’ said Paddy. ‘We’ll pretend we’re two lawyers. They’re scared shitless of lawyers. Now put on your poshest accent and your best English, and start talking.’ So good and loud, and posh as hell, Paddy said, ‘So you were in court today, Jock. How did you get on?’ ‘Oh, very harrowing, very harrowing indeed, a dreadful case.’ ‘Really? What kind of case was it?’ ‘Oh it was that dreadful rape case that is all over the papers today. Dreadful.’ ‘And tell me, Jock, were you representing the fucker or the fuckee?’ ”

There was a bit of a guffaw but it was drowned by the whine of the hand-drier behind the door marked WC.

“Right so,” said the Young Lad as he took a long draught from his pint and thought about it.

 

 

 

 

Homage to Myles – Thursday – Appreciating Poetry

It was a strange contraption that Himself brought into the pub last night. He parked it on a bench but wouldn’t talk about it until the Teacher came. It was only on a Wednesday night that he graced us with his presence. Celebrating the crossing of the ‘hump’, as he called the mid-week day. Even then he would arrive late and drink only two or three pints. A scabby way of celebrating anything. With his moaning about his workload you’d think he would need at least a dozen pints. Still he seemed to be short of money too, with his five children, two of them in college.  Ah well.

As soon as he arrived, Himself said, “I have just the job for you.”

“I have a job,” replied the Teacher, “and it’s killing me.”

“Just the job to make your job lighter.”

“I could do with that. What is it?”

“Last week you were complaining about how hard it was to teach poetry.”

Sure enough last week he and the Writer were hard at it about poetry. The Writer claimed that schools should be barred from teaching poetry because after fourteen years all the students wanted was never to see a poem again. The Teacher defended the system and claimed that the students learned plenty of useful literary and verbal skills by analysing poems. But the Writer would have none of it. They could learn the same skills by analysing a football match. They could fake ecstasy at the rhythm of the Arsenal football team when they were in attacking mode. They could verbalise about the lyricism of Aidan McGeady’s left foot.

At this the Cynic had snorted. Try that and you would have a visit from a few football heavies in crew cuts. Leave football alone or we’ll break your legs. We don’t want you doing for football what you did for poetry.

“The problem, if I can summarise,” said Himself, “is that students have to prove their enjoyment of poetry by verbalising their reaction, and this destroys any pleasure they may have got. Am I right?”

The Writer and the Teacher nodded in synchronised agreement.

“Now supposing you could gauge their pleasure without forcing them to verbalise, without asking them to prove they enjoyed the poem.”

“That would solve the problem,” said the Teacher.

“It would,” agreed the Writer.

“So, I have invented the machine to do just that.” Himself waved his arm grandly in the direction of the contraption he had parked on the bench. He took a long slug from his pint and then put the glass up on the ledge behind him. “Clear the table.”

There were a lot of leads and wires, and there was a monitor that looked like your common or garden computer tablet. Himself sorted out the leads and then plugged in the gadget. “Now,” said he, “we are going to have the trial-run of the Pleasureometer.”

“What is it? The latest in sex toys?” asked the Cynic.

“It is a revolutionary new method of assessing the pleasure that a student gets from a poem. It is foolproof and will eliminate the faking and learned responses that earn students high grades at the moment, even when they hate the stuff.”

“Too good to be true,” said the Teacher. “How is it supposed to work?”

“Like a lie detector,” said Himself, proud as Judy, taking up two leads. “You wire someone up, read a poem to them, and you watch their heartbeat. If they get excited, it will show up on the monitor. Simple but ingenious. Now who wants to go first?”

The Teacher was really curious, but reluctant. “It’s not dangerous, is it? There’s two twenty volts coming out of the wall there?”

“And going through a transformer. The gadget operates on six volts.”

He attached about six terminals to the teacher, then told him to relax, and fiddled with the gadget. When he was satisfied, he took out a battered copy of The Golden Treasury from his pocket and began reading. He read a bit from The Lady of Shallot, but there was no response from the Teacher. Then a bit from Tintern Abbey. The Teacher’s needle didn’t budge. Then he tried one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Not a gig.

Himself seemed disappointed. So he took the wires off the Teacher and attached them to the Writer, no doubt expecting a better response to the poetry of the immortals. He read Keats’s Nightingale, but the Writer’s pulse didn’t soar. He thought it might be an ethnic problem, so he fingered through the book until he found Yeats. But Sailing to Byzantium similarly left the needle floundering in the doldrums.

The Young Lad asked to have a go, and was wired up. They read what seemed to me like a religious poem by John Donne. But to my surprise there was a great ooh after a few lines. I was elbowed out of the way in the excitement. They tried a modern poem, Eliot’s Prufrock, and again with the same result. Every few lines the needle would soar, and there would be an ooh from the observation team.

Himself was really excited. He got out a notebook and handed it to the teacher, telling him to make a note of which images sent the Young Lad’s needle soaring. They were working their way through the Golden Treasury trying to establish a pattern, what it was that excited the Young Lad’s imagination. I had been elbowed out, as I said,  and began to lose interest. My gaze wandered around the pub.

Over among the theatre crowd there was a young one sporting a lovely pair of legs. She was sitting on a high stool and her mini-skirt kept receding up her thighs. Every now and then she would swivel around, or cross her legs, or uncross her legs, and each time there would be a teasing flash of her knickers. It kept my interest while the rest of them were so absorbed in their pedagogical experiment. Then I noticed the strange synchronicity of the flash of the young one’s knickers and the ooh from the scientific community. I made a closer observation and noticed that the Young Lad was eyeing the girl on the high stool, and every time there was a flash of her knickers, his needle must have soared because there was a resultant ooh from the observation team.

I thought about telling them of my own scientific observation. However I was enjoying the show too much, with the flash and the ooh coming ever closer, as if they were about to eliminate the middle man.

 

 

 

Homage to Myles – Wednesday – Art is for everyone. Right?

Himself is into art now. Or so he says. He always had a passion for art but realised when he was a kid that he couldn’t draw for nuts. If he brought a line for a walk, the line would jump over the fence and bolt across the fields, never to be seen again. No, Himself and the pencil never got on. And if you couldn’t keep manners on a pencil, how could you expect a paint brush to behave for you. So he abandoned his art career before it could make a mockery of him.

It was different nowadays, he maintained, and he pulled something from the pocket of his overcoat and put it on the table in front of us. We drew back our glasses to have a better view.

“What’s that?” he asked.

Straight away the Young Lad, not yet having acquired the circumspection of the mature, blurted out, “A beach stone. I always wondered how all the holes are made in those stones. Looks like they were eaten away by some insect in the sea.”

Sure enough, it was one of those perforated stones that litter the shores of Ireland. And it was a good question, how do they get so many holes? But himself was not to be distracted by such curiosity. He had a new perspective.

“That’s where you are wrong,” said Himself. “It’s a work of art.”

“Is it valuable?” asked the Cynic. “If it is, I’m heading for Killiney Beach.”

“You can bring a tractor and collect a trailer-load, but they will be worthless. What makes this one unique is the concept.”

“Conceptual art,” sighed the Writer rolling his eyes heavenwards.

“It makes art accessible to all,” said Himself. “Even to someone who has two left hands, like me. All you need is the concept.”

“What are you going to do with it?” The Young Lad had taken it up and was turning it over in his hands.”

“Mind what you’re doing,” said the Cynic. “That’s a work of art you have there, not a bloody stone.”

Himself took it back. “I am going to have it mounted on a plinth, with the title underneath, ‘Holey Stone’. Spelt with an ‘e’. And then I’m going to submit it to the RHA.”

The Young Lad’s eyes were wide as saucers. “And do you think they’ll take it?”

“Why wouldn’t they? It’s a clever concept, isn’t it?”

“We’ll go out tomorrow with you and collect some more. Then you can have a one-man show.” The Writer didn’t look impressed.

“An original talent never repeats himself. Anyway, I have my one-man show all planned out.”

“What gallery?” asked the Writer.

“It won’t be in a gallery. That’s passé, bourgeois. I want to bring art to the people. The important thing is to engage the public, get the people to use their imagination. So my exhibition will be out in Herbert Park. I am going to have a set of little plates made up, the kind you can stick in the ground. Like the ones that say ‘Do not walk on the grass’, that type of thing. I will have a plate stuck in front of a park bench with just the word ‘Grass’ on it. That will be the title of one of my pieces. And people can sit on the bench and think about grass, what it means to them. I will be inviting them to use their imagination. That’s what conceptual art is all about. And if it goes well, I will have themed exhibitions. For example, Sport. In front of each bench in Herbert Park, I will have a plate saying, ‘Soccer’, ‘Cricket’, ‘Hurling’, etcetera, and people will sit there thinking of the game, maybe remembering matches they saw.”

“Bohemians must have discovered that. It’s the way they train, without going out, just looking through the window of the clubhouse, thinking about it.” The Cynic could make all the jokes he liked about Bohs, so long as he kept his snide remarks off Rovers.

 

 

 

 

Homage to Myles – Tuesday – Writer’s Arse

 

The Writer had us all in a quandary when he came into the pub last night. He looked like a cat that had eaten ten mice for the dinner. Out of his pocket he took a piece of plastic, smoothed it out until it was a nice circle with a hole in the centre of it. There was a nozzle, so he inflated it into what looked like a ring a child would wear learning to swim. Except that no child would fit into the hole in the middle.

“What’s that for?” says he with the tone of a challenge.

“You’re going to teach your hamster to swim,” suggested the Cynic.

“It’s for keeping the banks afloat,” said Himself.

The Young Lad took it and was turning it over, looking at it front and back, looking through the hole as if a different world might manifest itself.

“It’s a cure for my medical condition,” said the Writer.

“I didn’t know you had a medical condition,” said the Young Lad.

“Oh he does,” said the Cynic. “It’s a social disease, so sit well away from him.”

“You heard of Tennis Elbow,” said the Writer to the Young Lad – who nodded. “And Golfer’s Knee.” The Young Lad nodded again. “Well what I have is Writer’s Arse.”

There was a general guffaw. We had often had to listen to the moans of the Writer complaining about the pain in his rear end. A professional hazard, he called it, a condition of the work he did. An occupational injury. Of one thing we were all convinced, that the rear-end was central to the practice of the literary art. And the Writer had been a prophet of doom, in regard to the same. Many a night he issued admonitions that there should be a public health warning with every advertisement for creative writing classes. And if the numbers of writers in the country continued to swell, there could be unbearable pressure on the public health resources.

“It’s an orthopaedic cushion,” said the Writer. “I could put up with the pain in my arse no longer so I went to the doctor and he prescribed this, an orthopaedic cushion.”

Himself took it to have a look. “So it lets you sit on your hole without sitting on your hole!”

“It makes it easier to do what you’re good at, talking through your hole,” said the Cynic.

The Writer grabbed it back and put it under his backside. He swayed from side to side. “See,” he said. “It distributes your weight evenly.”

“They should distribute them around the bars of Ireland,” said Himself, “full of old codgers who claim they could write a book, but that they couldn’t bother their arse. Now they will have no excuse”.

“Do you think they might prescribe them for readers too?” said the Cynic. “We get a pain in the arse too, you know, from having to read your stuff.”

“They would just write longer novels if they thought our arses would be up to it. Still it could be the beginning of something, of a revolution perhaps,” said Himself.

“How so?” asked the Young Lad, all ears.

“Wasn’t it Edgar Alan Poe who said a short story was a narrative that could be perused at one sitting?”

The Writer nodded.

“In other words he linked the length of a short story to the staying power of the arse. Now if everyone had that cushion, then they could sit for longer and the short story could be extended by what, twenty, or thirty percent. See what I mean. That cushion could trigger a shift in literary genres: what used to be a novella could become a short story to a reader equipped with that cushion.”

“And every novel could become a blockbuster,” said the Cynic. “Don’t be encouraging him. Armageddon is always around the corner. No point rushing to meet it.”

 

 

 

Homage to Myles – Monday – Gender abuse in Irish Soccer

Himself was in the pub last night. In flying form. Back from a soccer match in Dalymount between Bohemians and Shamrock Rovers. And his beloved Rovers lost. He said he was going to report the FAI to the Gardai. And to UEFA and FIFA. For failing to stamp out Racism. He claimed that the abuse and intimidation of the Referee was what lost Rovers the match.

The men in black with their little whistles and their little cards in their back pockets were all that stood between civilisation and chaos. And what do they get for their heroic efforts? Nothing but abuse. And what is the FAI doing about it? Nothing.

Oh he was in flying form alright. The nub of the problem was the chanting of the fans. He claimed it contravened everything the soccer authorities said they opposed in their multiple campaigns – Fair Play, Respect, Stamp out Racism, No to Racism, and what have you. You would think these campaigns never made it across to Ireland. But the Irish are quick enough to complain about the Scottish and Rangers fans chanting the Famine Song.

What Himself heard in Dalymount made the Famine Song sound like a sentimental ditty. Abuse on the basis of sexual orientation, that’s what it was. And no one was raising a whisper in protest. No, but Himself was going to start the campaign, There and then. In the pub. Last night. Historic moment.

He took out his phone, slapped it on the counter, and played what he had recorded. Evidence. You could hear the sounds of the match, the cheering, the oohing, the aahing, the shouts of indignation, then the clear chant:

Referee, you’re a wanker, you’re a wanker,

Referee, you’re a wanker, you’re a wanker.

Now, he challenged us, is that not abuse on the basis of sexual orientation?

Mmm. We pondered.

Look at it this way, he said: it’s against the rules to abuse someone on the basis of his skin-colour, his race, his religion. Right? It’s against the rules to slag him for being gay, or transsexual, or a cross-dresser. So why should there always be open season on wankers? If sexual preferences are to be kept out of the arena, why are wankers not given the protection of the law like everyone else? And why should the referee’s sexual orientation be flaunted in an effort to humiliate and intimidate him?

You’re dead right, said the Cynic. Wankers have suffered enough in recent years. Time was when they were discreetly shielded by rhyming slang, and referred to as ‘bankers’. Now it’s vice versa, and the bankers are shielded by the same rhyming slang. The poor wankers are doubly humiliated by that association. I’m with you, said he.

The Writer pretended to take a long draught from his pint, but whispered to me from behind his raised glass: with the Cynic behind you, you’d want to watch your back.

But Himself is going to go hell for leather for the cause. Nothing less than having the FAI cited for Racism will do him. He won’t stop, and he won’t be satisfied, until referees are free to execute their duties without the threat of their private lives being flaunted to influence their decisions.

Padraig J Daly’s new collection ‘God in Winter’

Padraig J Daly’s new collection of poems, God in Winter, is extraordinarily good. It comes with a health warning on the package: this is religious poetry, or poetry of ‘faith’. The warning is obviously intended for people of delicate sensibility, like me, for whom the only useful purpose of a personal God would be to take institutional dogmatic religion of every hue, and with a kick of his almighty boot to send it sailing out of our particular space-time continuum. But even if God were to thus oblige us, and furthermore if he fired an angry envelope through Earth’s letterbox, with his keys inside, and a note: ‘don’t dare try to contact me’, it would not make a whit of difference to poetry such as that of Padraig J Daly. Because poetry, or any kind of art, is not validated by anything outside its own guiding principles and discipline.

The categorising is not only inane and condescending, it is counter-productive. If a reader is searching for a new experience through poetry, why warn him off? Imagine picking up Homer’s Iliad, and being touched on the elbow to alert you that ‘this is full of interventionist-god stuff, but, if you can stomach that, it is really very good’.

What I want, what any reader wants, is to get inside the skin of the writer, to walk in his boots, to see and feel the world as he sees and feels it. Poetry, more than any of the other literary forms, is capable of delivering such an experience. From my reading I want to understand the poet as a man or as a woman, to receive any insights he or she may have into our shared predicament as human beings. If the poet comes from an interesting background, or one that is very different from my own, then all the more welcome is his viewpoint. If he is a coalminer, I am interested in seeing and feeling the world through the perception of one who spends much of his life under the surface of the earth; or if he is an aircraft pilot, I want to experience the world through the eyes of one who sees it mostly from a height of 35,000 feet.

So what can be more interesting for an atheist or a pagan than to see and feel the world from inside the skin of a Roman Catholic priest in the present age!

Daly presents his world and his world view with precision and clarity, diamond clear, but diamond hard as well. There is no sentimentality in his world or in his poetry. His poems are not an apologia for his religious beliefs nor an attempt to propagate them, and they are certainly not aids to piety. Instead he gives us the purest of pure poetry, his personal experiences distilled, his material carefully wrought until it stands apart glittering, its own justification.

His subjects and themes are wonderfully varied. Even if sexual love is absent, as one would expect, the book abounds in human love in all its richness. He celebrates the lives of friends and relatives with a passionate intensity. His over-riding theme is beauty – of life, of the earth, of the universe. And he relates the abundance of love and beauty that he observes to an overseeing personal loving Creator.

In many ways Daly, in this book, is re-asserting the vision of his first volume of poems, Nowhere but in Praise, published forty years ago. There the immanence of a loving God in the world was the central theme. But if Daly has come full circle, he certainly hasn’t ploughed a straight furrow over the years. When the disclosures of crimes committed against children by his colleagues deluged public awareness, Daly, like his decent and dedicated fellow-priests, was pushed to despair. He questions and castigates his God in the collection, The Voice of the Hare, and articulates a feeling of despair and desertion, far more visceral even than that of Hopkins’s Dark Sonnets.

As a storyteller myself, I have always admired Daly’s ability to infuse a single image with narrative potency. I will quote just one poem and it illustrates this. It could be a short story by Hemingway, if Hemingway could be as concise.

Eggs

It was a place of pigeons fluttering.

A thrush tugged at a worm.

A solitary cloud boded rain.

 

In the middle of the field

A giant chestnut was white with blossom.

 

A cyclist pushed against the hill.

Men gathered by the ruined factory

In faded overalls.

 

Behind a window,

Someone broke eggs into a pan.

 

Although highly respected among his fellow poets, Daly is not as well known to the general public as he should be. He does not promote himself, does not swagger his importance around town, does not bellow his poems into the ears of the populace. Indeed he has been accused of being ‘humble’. Yes, I imagine that even the concept of ‘promotion’ is anathema to him. However humble he is not. From start to finish his poems exude a pride in craftsmanship, in achievement, in the successful delivery of his experience to the eye or ear of his public. He sets his poems out in book after beautiful book and leaves it to the reader to make what he or she will of them.

I began by talking of the ‘health warning’, and I will end by issuing a ‘health clearance certificate’. I myself have been exposed to Daly’s poetry for the past forty years, and it has not at all affected my absolute disenchantment with and aversion to the Roman Catholic Church. So it is perfectly safe to read this book. I recommend it to anyone who simply loves wonderful poetry.

 

The Laughing Boy

September 2014 and the Greeks are back on the street.

 

The following is the text of my piece that was broadcast by Sunday Miscellany on RTE Radio One on 12 April. It was recorded live in the Peacock Theatre as part of the Easter Monday celebrations titled, Road to the Rising. If you wish to listen to the podcast, here is the link:

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/sunday-miscellany/podcasts/

When I heard from a friend, Elias Tsonis, in Greece that Brendan Behan’s song, The Laughing Boy, was as famous there as Danny Boy or The Fields of Athenry is here, I was puzzled. I had never heard the song, nor heard of it. The only recording of it seemed to be a rather odd one that Behan himself made. When Aoife Nic Cormaic commissioned Barry Gleeson to sing it for the programme, he had to arrange it himself. What a fine job he did. If you are fascinated by this story, then explore the links hereunder and listen to the extraordinary renderings of the song in Greek. Behan’s original is also included.

 

*         *         *

 

When I received an invitation to participate in the World Philosophical Forum in Athens, I couldn’t turn it down, could I? Especially as it was scheduled for September, 2014, forty years exactly since I last set foot in that city.

That summer of 1974 was momentous. The military dictatorship of the Colonels, who had ruled Greece for the previous seven years, was wobbling. They sought to buttress their rule by pulling off the annexation of Cyprus. We were boarding a ship to sail from Crete to Santorini when we heard that President Makarios had been ousted by a military coup. During the following week we heard of the unfolding events in fragments of broken conversations. The Turkish Government had read the intentions of the Greek Colonels, and reacted instantly by sending in their army to occupy the northern half of Cyprus. A war between Greece and Turkey seemed inevitable.

On Santorini the atmosphere was tense. The mobilisation of militias saw old men in faded khaki, with ancient rifles, patrolling the streets in pick-up trucks. Conscripted young men, many just boys, were wailed over by their broken-hearted mamas. With no chefs or waiters, restaurants closed shop. The banks and all public offices were closed too. Ships had stopped sailing, having been commandeered by the army to transport troops. Essential supplies ran out quickly. There was not enough food to sustain the thousands of tourists stranded on this tiny volcanic island.

When a ship eventually arrived, it was to evacuate all tourists. The advice was to leave the country fast. We boarded, but jumped ship again at the next big island, Paros. We were committed to our three-month holiday in Greece, and were not leaving, especially now that events had become so ‘interesting’. All summer the sense of Greece’s enormous discontent  filtered through to us. Because we had stayed, the Greeks treated us as guests rather than tourists. We spent the time going from island to island. One night we were sleeping rough under the canopy of a closed cafe on Mykonos. Suddenly there was gunfire and noise, wild shouting. We thought the Turks had invaded. But when we peeped over the sand dune we saw only the Greek army, and the soldiers were dancing on the beach, waving their guns over their heads, shouting. Citizens were arriving, all shouting, waving arms in delight. Then we learned the cause of the uproar. The Colonels’ Regime had collapsed. Greece’s seven-year nightmare was over.

We danced all night on the beach with the delighted Greeks, danced Zorba style. The Zorba tune had not been heard openly in Greece during the rule of the junta. Its composer, Mikis Theodorakis, had been the chief cultural antagonist of the Colonels, and every bar of his music was banned. Now the country was vibrating to Theodorakis songs. And when we joined the hundreds of thousands dancing on the streets of Athens it was all Theodorakis we were singing. His songs of resistance and rebellion seemed the absolute expression of the Greek soul.

Back in Athens in 2014, I had settled in to the conference when a Greek delegate smiled at me. With an interrogative lift of the eyebrows, he said ‘Ireland?’ I nodded. If he was going to ask for my analysis of Eriugena, I was flummoxed. But he just nodded, winked, gave me a thumbs up, and said, ‘Brendan Behan’. I was mystified as to Behan’s contribution to western philosophy, so I sought out my friendly colleague, and over coffee was briefed on the enormous status of Brendan Behan in Greece. Mikis Theodorakis composed the music for Behan’s ‘The Hostage’ which was staged in Athens in 1962. There were 16 songs, but one that made a huge impression, ‘The Laughing Boy’, a song Behan wrote about the death of Michael Collins. So popular was this song that the Greeks eventually forgot it was an Irish song, and attached it to various figures of Greek resistance by subtle adjustments or additions to the lyrics. During the Colonels’ Regime it became attached to the students who died in the army attack on Athens Polytechnic in 1973. To the present day it is sung in schools as one of the best loved ‘Greek’ patriotic ballads.

In 1974 that was the Greek song we danced to on the beach in Mykonos, that we chanted on the streets of Athens with hundreds of thousands, celebrating the liberation of Greece from dictatorship. But we never realised that what we were singing was Brendan Behan’s ‘The Laughing Boy’.

 

Links to Greek performances of The Laughing Boy

 

http://youtu.be/iBRqMynXFuw (song, lyrics Brendan Behan)

http://youtu.be/gUn9n1MzmbU (Music of The Hostage)

http://youtu.be/j_r2NVwn6J4?list=PLD0E6FEA1CDEECEF0  (song, lyrics Bredan Behan)

http://youtu.be/n8j4luPWPmk  (song, lyrics Brendan Behan)

 

 

Brendan Behan’s original version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5VMdqoRl5c

 

My Passage to India

I wasn’t unaware of the commotion in the media about the upcoming fifth anniversary of the so-called 9/11 atrocities. I hadn’t deliberately chosen to fly to India on the 11th September, 2006. I was going there for the launch of a collection of my short stories, translated into Hindi, and the publishers had a reading tour organised, taking in venues around Delhi and Mumbai. That was excitement enough for a writer, enough to keep his mind off threats, and portents, and significant dates.

So I didn’t pass much heed in late August when the rumour of a threatened attack on an aeroplane entered the media. The authorities were taking the threat seriously, though. A ‘spectacular’ on the fifth anniversary of the Twin Towers event was not to be discounted. Reports suggested that a suicide bomber might try to assemble an explosive in the aircraft cabin by mixing two liquids brought on board in separate bottles.

But I had other things to think about, a visa, currency exchange, medical precautions. With all of these ticked from my list, I set off  without a care. In Dublin Airport I scoured the shops for suitable presents for my hosts, and in the Duty-Free shop there was a special offer on two litres of Irish Whiskey. That was perfect. Alcohol was scarce and dear in India, as I knew from an earlier visit. Armed with two litres of Irish I would be a very welcome guest indeed.

I flew out from Dublin to Heathrow having left myself several hours to catch the connecting flight to Delhi. Just as well. Heathrow was the epicentre of this security scare. When I arrived in Terminal Two I could sense the tension. There was a feeling of disorder, not usual in airports. I passed no heed. I had to get to Terminal Four so I caught the shuttle. Arriving at Terminal Four, however, I was whacked by the sight of thousands of passengers milling around in front of an extensive security screen.

I hadn’t expected a security check between the two terminals, but luckily I had plenty of time. So I began filing towards the screening area. Then vague memories of the half-digested news stories began to surface and congeal in my head. The word ‘liquids’ began to shake a rattle right between my ears. And I looked down at my right hand carrying two litres of the best Irish whiskey.

When I reached the first security official, who looked like a bewildered soldier on sentry, I decided to play naive. I explained that I had bought the duty-free whiskey in Dublin Airport and was on my way to Delhi. He smiled ruefully but sympathetically. ‘Not a chance, mate. They’re confiscating baby’s milk, so you don’t stand a chance’.

‘Can I appeal to anyone?’ I asked.

He looked around the chaos in which he was engulfed. ‘Go ahead to the girl at the start of the electronic screening. She will know. But I am certain you can’t take that through.’

So I followed on to the girl he nodded at. ‘No, sir, I’m sorry, but we have to confiscate that,’ was her immediate reply to my query.

‘But I bought these bottles at Dublin Airport. Here is the receipt. And look the seals have not been broken.’ She looked a little uncertain.

‘Ask my colleague on the other side’, she said, and placed my two-bottle pack in a tray.

On the other side of the scan, her colleague, a corpulent black man of pleasant demeanour, smiled. ‘Where do you think you are going with that?’  He laughed. And I gave him my story too.

‘No, no, my friend, you have to leave that here with us.’ And he laughed again.

‘But it doesn’t seem sensible, because the seals are still intact. Can I speak to whoever is in charge. There might be a case for letting them through.’

The black man shook his head. He nodded behind him at a pretty white woman. ‘She’s in charge. Try your luck with her. But you don’t stand a chance.’

The supervisor too looked benign among the chaos. She stared at me as I related my sad tale once more. She listened, but kept staring. ‘How did you get those bottles through all this security?’ she asked in disbelief.

‘They weren’t sure, and they said to check with you. If it’s ok with you, it’s ok with them.’

She almost snorted a laugh. ‘Well if it’s ok with them, it’s ok with me.’

Scarcely believing what I heard, I thanked her, gathered my belongings and proceeded quickly before she had a chance to change her mind. How lively I stepped towards the aircraft. I had my two bottles of Irish to share with my friends, but better still, I had a story, a great story of how I got two litres of whiskey through Heathrow Airport when they were confiscating orange juice, and Coca Cola, and even water. It was a story to dine out on.

But the flight from London to Delhi left me time to think. The faces of those lovely people in Heathrow, trying to do their job, haunted me. What if I had been a terrorist? They had allowed their good nature to override their instructions. And if I had had nasty intentions, they would have been responsible for letting me through. That is where we are all vulnerable – in our humanity. And to be safe and secure we would have to set aside our humanity. Do we do that? Do we want to do that? Oh, let us not, let us not.

By the time the plane reached Delhi, I was hoping that Airport Security there might confiscate the bottles. I no longer had the taste for them nor for the story of how I coaxed them through the tightest security in the world.

Discussing Sufism and Peace in a War Zone

This piece was broadcast on Sunday Miscellany on 8 February, 2015.  If you would like to listen to the podcast, go to the RTE site:   http://www.rte.ie/radio1/sunday-miscellany/

At the centre of the top table is Salman Taseer who was assassinated a few months later by his own bodyguard – he took umbrage at Taseer’s criticism of the country’s blasphemy laws. On his way to court he was showered with rose petals by approving supporters.

I was close to Osama bin Laden when he was still alive. Of course I didn’t realise that as the bus conveying us from our well fortified hotel to the National Library of Pakistan meandered through the endless series of concrete roadblocks that punctuated the main thoroughfares of Islamabad. The steel helmets of soldiers peeping out from sand-bag bunkers, and the armoured cars before and after the bus, were further evidence that the country was in the grip of what we in Ireland might have described as an Emergency.

This was March 2010, and Bin Laden was living in the suburbs of the city with his family and friends around him. I was in Islamabad to participate in a Conference on the topic of ‘Sufism and Peace’. The motley collection of international writers and scholars included many who were deeply versed in Sufism. I myself was no more than somewhat informed on the subject. I had visited the shrines of Sufi saints in India. I had spent some time in a Dervish monastery in Turkey. And of course I had read some work of the Persian poet, Rumi.

It was a curious conference to be organised in Islamabad, with the full support of the existing Government, at a time when fundamentalists, particularly the Taliban, were perpetrating vicious attacks on Sufi shrines. The image in the West was that Pakistani officialdom was sympathetic to Muslim fundamentalists, and was conniving to assist them at every turn. But Sufism was anathema to the fundamentalists; they regarded it as a heresy that had no right to exist inside or outside Islam.

Sufism, like Islam itself, is a vast and varied religious tradition. In a nutshell it can be defined as the mystical brand of Islam. But nutshells and definitions are of little help in understanding something so complex. The central belief of the Sufis is that the experience of God is personal – and achievable, even in this life, by meditation and ascetic practice. They saw religious ecstasy as close to the aesthetic experience, so music, dance, poetry, could all be pathways to the experience of the divine. The practice and propagation of Sufism is based on the relationship of teacher and acolyte. Many of these teachers have been venerated as holy men, just as saints have in the Christian tradition.

Not surprising therefore that artists found much that was congenial in Sufism. Not surprising either that it raised the hackles of the Taliban who had carried out atrocities against Sufi worshippers at sites around Pakistan over the previous years. To them the veneration of saints was a form of idolatry.

But to judge by the absolute and unequivocal support of the government, Sufism had a very strong following in Pakistan. Presiding at each session of the Conference was a member of the Government, including the Minister for Education, and President Zardari himself, whose wife, Benazir Bhutto, had been assassinated four years earlier. The session at which I spoke was presided over by Salman Taseer, Governor of Punjab, who was gunned down by his own bodyguard a few months later because he criticised the country’s Blasphemy Laws.

Most of the delegates were from within Pakistan, and of course all of the audience. It was fascinating to talk with them and to get even a small glimpse into their lives. If I had closed my eyes, I might have been listening to the aspirations of the people of Ireland in the 70’s and 80’s. All they wanted was a peaceful world in which to rear their children and grandchildren. But they saw that world being torn from them by the militarists and the religious hard-liners. They talked of the manoeuvring of these self-appointed arbiters of theological correctness to control the minds of the ordinary people of Pakistan.

So, if I was not an expert in Sufism, what did I contribute to the Conference? I chose to talk about Peace. I started by reciting Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. This little poem embodied a concept of Peace for many generations throughout the literary and literate world. A sentimental concept. Peace implied withdrawal from life with its tensions and its responsibilities. I described the landscape of the Northwest, where the poem was set, the perfect place to escape to, to escape in. Then I brought them to two small rural towns not more than an hour’s drive from the said Lake Isle. Enniskillen and Omagh. I described what happened there. And they knew exactly what I meant. They had been there, except the names were different, Peshawar, Rawalpindi. And I put it to them that Peace could never be established by withdrawal from the world. And if peace was viewed merely as the absence of violence, or as an intermission between wars, there was no hope. Only a philosophy of engagement with the world had any chance, a philosophy that had to be more powerful than any creed that had heretofore sent people out to kill one another. That philosophy could not be based in any one religion. It had to transcend all religions. Or else it had to operate on a level that joined all human beings at the most basic level, beneath that benchmark line, where humanity unites us, but  religion or race has not yet defined nor divided us.

 

 

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Encountering John McGahern in the Censors’ Basement

The house in Pembroke Street, Dublin, that housed the Censorship of Publications Board, with their stock of banned books in the basement.

This is the text of a piece I wrote for Sunday Miscellany, broadcast on 25 January, 2015. If you wish to listen to the podcast, you can do so by going to the RTE Radio site:

 http://www.rte.ie/radio1/sunday-miscellany/programmes/2015/0125/675161-sunday-miscellany-sunday-25-january-2015/?clipid=1788089

 *          *          *

I first encountered, and fell in love with, John McGahern in a Georgian basement in Dublin in the mid-Sixties. It would probably have qualified as the seediest basement in Dublin at the time. But let me assure you that my infatuation with McGahern was purely literary.

 

When I signed up for a job in the Civil Service as an 18-year-old, I was allocated to the Department of Justice, and posted to an office upstairs in a house in Pembroke Street. On the Ground Floor of that building was the office of the Censorship Board, and in the Basement, behind locked doors and barred windows, was the store of books that had been banned.

 

By the 1960’s the banning of books in Ireland had reached its zenith. Thousands of books were banned as ‘indecent or obscene’. Many classics of world literature were unavailable in bookshop or public library. The list included, for example, ‘Brave New World’, and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ – which has been studied in our schools for many years now.

 

This Basement fascinated me, this vault into which the obscenity and iniquity and blasphemy of Ireland was collected, and kept under lock and key, like a silo of chemical weapons, for fear they might escape and contaminate the public. The catalogue of banned books was itself a formidable volume, hundreds of pages in tiny print.

 

I took an occasional ramble down to the Basement, but always found the door securely locked. My fascination had to be satisfied, however, and so I befriended the man who held the key to this underworld, a jovial old Dubliner called Charlie. When trust and brotherhood were established, I was soon able to express a casual interest in seeing the Censors’ Basement. No problem. Charlie agreed to give me a guided tour on our lunch break the following day.

 

It was a climactic moment for me as the heavy door creaked open and, obeying a furtive nod from Charlie, I entered Satan’s den. But, after that, it was all anti-climax. The rooms were crammed with books, mostly stacked on the floor, although there were some steel shelves with titles displayed library style. It was as if an original intent towards order had been abandoned to chaos, overwhelmed by the scale of the operation.

 

Charlie was the only source of order here. He seemed to know what books were in each bundle. He picked some up fondly and passed them to me for inspection. He seemed to have an intimate relationship with each volume, probably a result of having followed it from its original indictment, to its trial by the Board, to its eventual conviction and incarceration. I asked him if he had read many of the books. He shook his head. Reading dirty books was not for him. But he had no problem letting me borrow some.

 

The first book I borrowed was John McGahern’s ‘The Dark’. Its banning had been a major news story because the author had also been sacked from his job as a teacher. The modern reader would find it hard to see what could prove offensive in this lyrical coming-of-age novel. But I could see exactly, because the copy I was reading was the same copy that had passed around the Censors, and they marked all offending material in heavy blue pencil. A reference to a girl’s breast, for example, was strafed on sight.

 

Brendan Behan’s ‘Borstal Boy’ proved difficult to decipher, because of the continuous line of blue from beginning to end. But I managed. And progressed to an early novel by Brian Moore, ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne’, then to Frank O’Connor, Sean Ó Faoláin, Liam O’Flaherty, Benedict Kiely, Samuel Beckett.

 

What an introduction for an 18-year-old to the great literature that was barred to everyone else. Charlie eventually tired of coming down to let me browse, and just handed me the key whenever I wanted it. So I regularly spent my lunchtime down there in the bowels of iniquity, blissfully browsing through my private library.

 

By 1967 the inanity of censorship was being highlighted and criticised. The then Minister for Justice, Brian Lenihan, Senior, amended the legislation to limit a ban to 12 years. Suddenly all the great works of literature that had been banned over decades were released from captivity and were available in the bookshops.

 

Because so many great writers had been banned, there was a perception that it was a badge of honour to have been numbered among them. Twenty years later I met McGahern in person and became friends. And I put that point to him. From his reaction, I knew I had touched a sore spot. He told me that being banned hurt at the time, hurt deeply. Obviously the wound was still raw, even after twenty years of literary success.

 

After five years in the Department of Justice, I was moving on too. But it was with a heavy heart that I bade farewell to that wonderful archive of forbidden literature that formed my mind. I often wondered afterwards what happened to those sad volumes marked out for ignominy in unforgiving blue. Did they end up in a furnace somewhere in a final incineration of all our national sin?