A FB friend whom I don’t know well but I respect his posts, and therefore his views, commented recently that he thought democracy was no longer tenable and that he thought revolution was brewing. His comment made me wonder what revolution looked like these days. I  cannot imagine ‘the people’ flowing through the portals of the Dail, swarming through the corridors of powers and re-instating a new legislative assembly that would nationalise our assets, liberate our water,  and energy resources, invest in our island and  ensure equal status and pay for all. It’s not that I don’t want this, it’s just that I am not sure that the majority of people know what they want. People know what they don’t want. They don’t want too many taxes they can’t afford and they don’t want live in a society which is obviously corrupt and uncaring.

So what results do we want from our protest? We want jobs. We want enough to live on. We want homes that we can afford to pay for. And we want a health care service that looks after us, and we don’t mind paying for it as long as we have enough money. There is no evidence to show that we are overly concerned about revolutionary slogans such as fraternity, liberty and equality, as long as poverty, brutality, injustice are not shoved in our faces. After all, we have never lived in a fair and equal society.

Okay, we don’t like bankers, particularly when they make us bail out their debts. We don’t like politicians…why I’m not sure since we are the ones who put them there. But, we all know they are pivotal to the capitalist corporate system. But, we don’t really mind the system, once it doesn’t impinge too much on our individual selves, and we can’t see its internal workings. And anyway, what else is there?

Is this being very cynical or honest? I don’t know. Is my tongue in my cheek?

Revolution? I don’t know what system will improve our society, other than working democracy. A benign dictator might work to begin with. S/he may get national services running more effectively through ruthless organisation, but I am not sure it would last. And I think that society works better on a small scale where people participate in their own governance. The problem is that small, local governments are often insular and narrowly focussed and so restrict change and progression.

Sadly, the revolution in our society appears to have already taken place…the revolution of corporate business. Our world is now too interwoven and our societies are too inextricably linked through finance, communication, investment, and corruption for revolution to work. We are too comfortable. And comfortable people do not revolt with alacrity. We protest. And that is what we are doing, rightly so, in my opinion. It is good to see people engage. I believe the only way to sustainable change though is to inveigle our way into the system and ensure that we make it as fair and equitable, and as transparent and open as possible.

So we need to stand for election. And we need to organise to encourage and support people to stand for election. And we need more input into the politicians. Our local authorities need to be more accountable. Our local politicians need to engage better with civic society rather than on an individual basis. We need more women in government. We need more auditing and regulation. So, let’s do this in 2016. That would be one great way to commemorate the events in 1916.

 a bad photo of Anselfm Fiefer’s Sunflower

Isn’t it amazing how life unfolds? What is it that makes the world go round? How does each step lead to another? For instance, what made me buy a van in 2001, go on a family camping holiday, have a late night session with friends, at 7am the next morning hand the Sunday Tribune property pages to my 10 year old to read so as to gain  an extra hour, and consequently end up visiting an amazing ten bedroom house for sale, put in a mad offer on the afore mentioned house, have the offer accepted while in Kerry where I bumped into a friend who was an auctioneer who then practically sold my Dublin home by the time we returned from the camping holiday? Was it meant to be or did I determine it?

The links between coincidence, determination, and fate have always fascinated me. I like the phrase ‘self determination’. I think it combines two related aspects of the world: the mind of the individual and the force of evolution. It is interesting how they entwine.

This train of thought has been ranging around my mind recently as a result of my sojourn in London last week to celebrate my brother’s sixtieth birthday. It was a special occasion for him. Sixty years ago, it was a special day for my mother who gave birth to her first child. Two inextricably linked but very separate events strutting and fretting their hours across the stage. So I got to thinking about the impact of time, the role of circumstance and the minds of people and, coincidentally enough, I visited three very different exhibitions which also made me reflect on the nature of life and evolution. Each one, in different ways, made me conscious of the minute and the magnified and the connection between the smallest particle to the absolute whole, between the here and the there.

The three exhibitions I visited were Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy, William Turner at the Tate Britain and The First World War at the Imperial War Museum. For me, in very different ways, each one of them focused on the importance of detail in life and how extraordinary it is when you see the detail behind the creation. If it doesn’t sound too pompous, each exhibition captured the magic of art in that art happens when the essence of life, cause and effect, is captured on canvas, on the page or in the choreography of the installation.

The first exhibition I saw was the William Turner at The Tate. I have always loved William Turner’s sea and city scapes. I was introduced to him by my first love, so there is a sentimental attachment too which will generate its own spin on my mind, but I love how the washed out strokes of his water colour paintings create the broad watery surfaces of the ocean, the fading yet brilliant intensity of sunset and dawns. His yellows, burnt oranges, hues of blue and green draw me in to the paintings. Brilliant! After a minute or two of staring, out of the swirl of colour, out of the brush strokes of sea or land scape, the details of civilisation emerge out of the storm or trees. The fine intricate lines of distant churches, bridges, buildings slowly emerge through the light. Amazing! Suddenly you see, beneath the maelstrom, the detail of people.

Next I went to the WW1 exhibition at the Imperial War museum. This was detail in your face! Loud, graphic, brash, it leads you through the perils of nationalism, hatred, love, war using historical artefacts (uniforms, helmets, rifles, powdered egg) film, art, education. It is brilliantly curated so that you journey across all fronts (educational, emotional and actual war fronts). I left feeling assaulted, exhausted, and horrified at our capacity for destruction and exhilarated at our ability to survive.

Finally, after spinning through the crowds and queues of Piccadilly, I found myself staring at the enormous canvases of German artist, Anselm Kiefer. According to the ‘blurb’ Kiefer is absorbed by our purpose on earth and our relationship with the celestial and human history. His canvases are installations of sand, shale, concrete, paint, brick, sawdust, ash. He uses sunflowers frequently in his canvases. He said “when I look at ripe, heavy sunflowers bending to the ground with blackened seeds…I see the firmament and the stars.” I loved the contrast and contradictions of humanity, destruction, re-birth and re-construction in his work.

So who are we in this universe and what role does each of us play? Are we each a black sunflower seed? We need to determine for ourselves but we cannot without each other or the various constructions we or the universe composes. To celebrate his birthday, my mother had to give birth to my brother.

Even now, here, as I write with pen and paper in the year 2014, alone in this dark early morning, in the lamplight, in the middle of nowhere, my meandering thoughts are yielded to the page and transferred to you, the reader, forcing you to stir (be it with boredom, heavy sigh or amusement), yet that is not my intention. I just want to decipher myself, but in so doing, I need you to help me by being there. So, thanks for that!

I want to know how to think. I want to train my mind in a useful way so that my thinking is a constructive process. I am tired and exhausted with my messy thinking methods.

Yes, my thinking is an untidy business. I am doing it all the time, but I am unaware of its taking place in any coherent way. I remember asking my mother when I was about five how to think. She told me that we think all the time. It comes naturally, as sentient beings (she probably didn’t use the word sentient). Well, it concerns me that I am constantly doing something that I don’t understand and that seems so ineffectual and doesn’t do very much for me.

My inner conversations are haphazard and incomplete. I have a one sided voice that constantly doubles back and questions itself  and doesn’t come up with any solutions. My thoughts conjure up images in my mind that then disappear within seconds in a blurry mess. I don’t know if I ever a complete a line of thought. I think Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ is completely inaccurate. My thought patterns are more like a Picasso, full of lines, figures, bends, and shapes with a splash of colour here and there.

Now, I don’t want to appear stupid. Of course, if I have an objective, like at work or cleaning house, I can develop a strategy. I can plan a course of action. I can do linear, sequential planning. I am good at ideas and making connections. I like people and ideas and conversation. But my abstract, alone thinking is messy.

My thinking feels sluggish, like some amorphous body, a slow crawling insect or maybe an octopus thinking with its tentacles. I blindly thrash and grasp at intangible and far stretched, contorted ideas. I try to straighten them out, turn them into lines of text that I can read and turn into a strategy. But then I forget the thought altogether and I find myself swimming, or cooking or cleaning the floor.

No my cogitating isn’t pretty and is completely untrained. I find my inner wishes trying to manipulate my thinking. My dreams interfere and kidnap my thoughts. I find I try to weave my thinking from the fabric of my desires. Then, I have to guillotine those thoughts and do something.

Maybe I cannot think clearly because I am a doer. Do I like to do because it distracts my thinking? I don’t know. I cannot think about it now. Let me know what you think.

I have just kissed the Blarney Stone and it was no mean feat. First you climb a 50 metre shrinking spiral stone staircase in a narrow stone tower on tip toe. It shrinks because each step gets smaller the higher you get (remember  in the 16^th century folk were only about five foot high and had small feet, and I am 5’10” with size 8). You then lie down on your back on the parapet, hold on tight to iron bars, lower your head backwards before planting a smackeroo on something the fella holding on to you says is the Blarney Stone. It was amazing. I sat back up and burbled a stream of witticisms and esoteric terminology never before heard.

I was impressed with the Blarney Castle experience. The castle itself is exciting with towers, turrets, murder holes, bathrooms, dungeons and even a ‘family’ room. I could just imagine Chief Cormac MacCarthy and his three girls (who also had their own dressing room above) snuggled up next to the roaring fire on which a wild boar was roasting and watching Disney films.

The gardens are varied: wonderful herbaceous borders, poison gardens, arboretum and pinetums, sculptures, lake paths, and woodland walks with strategically placed cafés and gift shops where you can purchase Blarney Stones (but it won’t be as good as the real thing).

So, I am in Cork, celebrating twenty five years of marriage. We spent our first night in the city. I had booked us into the Cork Opera House for a treat and a bit of culture. It was a one man show written and performed by Ray Scannell called Deep. The blurb described it as a multi media performance depicting the social and political influences of Cork in the eighties through music. Interesting, I thought. So bright eyed and bushy tailed (that’s the Blarney stone coming out), we presented ourselves in the grand  foyer of the Cork Opera House only to be shown the door and told to go round to the back entrance which was carpeted with cigarette butts and flyers. There we were directed into a small room with a stage and 15 rows of plastic uncomfortable looking chairs. Ah well, the best laid plans and all that…

The show, though, was mesmerising. Depressing, heart rendingly bleak but brilliant. When we sat down in the plastic seats, the multi media backdrop suggested this was a show about house music. House Music??!! Where had I brought us? Ah well, maybe I’ll be able to impress my son with my newfound knowledge, I comforted myself. But the show was riveting. Ray Scannell performed as a DJ taking us through the story of the absolute joy of a young teenage boy caught up the discovery of a new, different, compelling music in a local Cork night club which spilled into dance, love, drink, drugs and more drugs against the backdrop of unemployment, poverty, violence, emigration, loneliness. It was compelling, haunting and cleverly done. Check it out if you get a chance.So twenty five years of marriage…also compelling, cleverly done and certainly no mean feat.  Not sure it’s a performance you’d want to see!

I went to see a wonderful Indian film last night at the Ramor Theatre, The Lunch Box. It was set in Mumbai and was a slow moving film set within the frame of the frenetic and bustling tenor of a lunch delivery service in the city, which, when I googled, I discovered is called the Dabbawala. It is an extraordinary service:

 ‘Dabbawallah is a person in India, most commonly in Mumbai, who is part of a delivery system that collects hot food in lunch boxes from the residences of workers in the late morning, delivers the lunches to the workplace utilizing various modes of transport, predominantly bicycles and the railway trains, and returns the empty boxes to the customer’s residence that afternoon. They are also made use of by prominent meal suppliers in Mumbai where they ferry ready, cooked meals from central kitchens to the customers and back.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

In this film, the lunch made by the lonely young wife for her ‘never at home’ working husband is delivered to the wrong person: an older, rather grumpy widower about to retire. The lunches look delicious and come in five cylindrical, silver lidded bowls that lock into each other, containing breads, curries, vegetables. They are then put in a vac pac holder to keep warm. But the story is about the notes that the mother and the widower exchange.

His first note complains of too much salt. She responds by putting too much chilli in one dish.  But from there on in the notes  in the lunch box are used by each character as a means of expressing a fear, a thought, not necessarily seeking attention or advice but looking for a listener. For me, the film is about the importance of expression.

Interestingly, in Mumbai a number of languages are used: Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, English, Telugu, Konkani, Dangii, Varhadii and Hindi. Ironically enough, this must serve to lessen communication in one the most populated cities in the world. In the film, the language in the notes that the audience saw was English but there were sub titles for the conversation, which I think was Hindi or Gujariti, though often greetings, or phrases were also in English. Language and expression certainly does get complicated in our gobal world.

But what I found  interesting was the content of the notes. They were simple observations, personal reflections, memories. They did not seek advice, or solutions. They were exchanges. But this simple exchange of written words engendered interest and excitement  for each of the characters and led  each one to create change in their lives.

I don’t want to give more away so I won’t discuss it further, but watching the film, I recognised the importance of my own need to state, tell, and describe what I see, hear, and feel. It provides me with  form, reason and  context. Maybe we are losing this in our virtual world.

I lost someone once, and one of the things I missed most what not being able to write notes and messages to that person describing how beautiful an autumnal evening was, or how the morning sun light behind my curtains suffused my bedroom in a glory of soft expectation. In losing him I lost a conduit of expression.

Freedom of expression isn’t only a political and social right, it stems from a basic human need. I recommend the film.

At risk of courting an avalanche of mirth, or even worse, scathing academic scorn, I want to write about my ‘analysis’ of ‘Birches’, a poem by Robert Frost ( see copy below). But first, by way of self justification, I just want to say I agree with one of my poetry workshop participants last night who said that what she loved about poetry was how every poem, whatever the intention of its author, becomes the possession of the reader  because it is the reader who interprets its meaning.

So, that said, I’ll continue. According to general literary commentary, the poem, Birches, is about truth and imagination, heaven and earth, control and abandon, flight and return. I quote sparknotes[i]

“The whole upward thrust of the poem is toward imagination, escape, and transcendence—and away from heavy Truth with a capital T. The downward pull is back to earth.”

However, when my friend and I read the poem, we came up with another interpretation. Is this poem about the adolescent awakening of boyhood sexuality? The following two lines provoked our initial questioning.

“Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.”

Both of us felt uncomfortable with the two lines. We felt they were at odds with the previous naturalistic bent of the poem. The image was strange. The girls must be there for a reason, I said. Let’s go back and look at the poem to see if there are other similar references. And suddenly, we could see them everywhere.  So, I came to the conclusion that swinging on the birch trees was definitely akin to the early sexual experience /lustful thoughts of a young boy. Now, I don’t know whether one can make double entendres of anything once one has the idea, but, given the earlier assertion that the poem is owned by the reader, this is now my official interpretation. My friend is less sure so I am putting forward this argument to see what others think.

Here is my brief justification:

For me, the portrayal early in the poem of the birch covered in ice and sun, blowing in breezes  in the sun’s warmth, “as the stir crazes and cracks their  enamel” has a feel of awakening, and stirring of emotions.  The line “You may see their trunks arching in the woods” just before the lines about the girls on hands and knees has sexual over tones and surely the reference to the dome of heaven “fallen” could refer to the early orgasm. I wondered whether the young boy who does not have the  distraction of sports, “whose only play was what he found himself” also suggests this. The use of the word ‘subdue’  which has connotations of  sexual power in relation to his father’s trees (the birches) is  strange, as are the following few lines:

“One by one he subdued his father’s trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away.”

They seem to me be to  refer to a boy exploring his own body and sexuality. Frosts description towards the end of the poem could easily be describing the joy and exultation of the sexual act; its reaching for escape, the tip of the world, and returning to earth which is the ‘right place for love.’

I am not a poetry critic, other than in appreciating what I like and understand. But I wanted to write this as we haven’t been able to find any other reference to such an analysis in relation to Birches, and as a result, began to feel ‘wrong,’ and ‘stupid’ and ‘way off course’. But the poem is ours now, whatever Robert Frost intended. And, I like it better.  There is the ‘solar’ (the sense/meaning),  the ‘lunar’ (the sensual, the beauty), the ‘musical’ (the tone, the sound) and the ‘visual’ (the form); the poem is a torrent. Unlike, The Road Not Taken, there is no particular form… as is the case with young adolescent boys.

So, I rest my case and hope you enjoy the poem…do let me have any thoughts!

On a more personal note, I am really looking forward to reading in Galway tomorrow (Culture Day) twice! In Clifden at the Arts Festival I am reading my poem, The Ancient Song of the Pebble, published in the last Skylight 47 and then in back in Galway City I am reading Please May I Have a Man, long-listed in the At The Edge competition this year. Then back to Cavan at 10pm for the Trans-Art event celebrating Dermot Healy!

Birches

BY ROBERT FROST

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father’s trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

[i] _{http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/frost/section8.rhtml}