Captain, My Captain

On foot of the publication by our beloved former leader of his true, unexpurgated, non-revisionist, and completely unembellished autobiography, I felt it was an appropriate time to post this picture I sketched a few years ago. Truly, a legend in his own mind, he can claim credit for so much of what we see around us today...

Credulity and credibility, credit and the incredible, creeds and greed…

The past few months have thrown all of these words into sharp focus in my mind. Not that they weren't fairly clearly delineated there anyway, given my Irish Catholic childhood and schooling, but the governmental, financial, and clerical shenanigans of the recent past have given them that bit more prominence than hitherto.

The more etymologically inclined among you will have spotted that "greed" is the odd one out in the opening lexicon, but those of a more philosophical and cynical mind will realise that they really do all belong together in any realistic theory of human society. In fact, they underpin most of what we think of as the pillars of our day to day lives.

Let's face it. Whatever our pretensions, rationality is not exactly a driving force in a world that goes through the boom-bust economic cycles or that elects a George Bush to the presidency, or that wages implacable hate-filled war in the names of men who preached love and peace. We all talk a good fight about our sensible, logical approach to the world, but an unbelievably large proportion of our decisions are predicated on blind faith rather than logic. We are, by virtue of herdity and environment, herd animals.

Don't get me wrong here, we can and do act reasonably rationally a lot of the time, but the whole thing of "faith" does underpin our behaviour. Faith is just another word for belief - and it's the fuel that burns brightest in the infernoes of stupidity we perpetrate on ourselves and each other .

Look at the whole economy thing. It is, after all, nothing more than a shared delusion. Money only has a value because we all agree it has a value, and the jobs we do are often only valuable because we believe they are valuable. I'm not suggesting that a doctor or a teacher or a binman don't do valuable work, but the agreed rates of pay are based on an arbitrary set of values set by the market at a given time under the influence of a particular zeitgeist.

What does "confidence in the economy" mean, after all? Just that enough people believe in or don't believe in the value of a currency, which is nothing more than an illusion in the first place. If the human race disappeared off the face of the Earth tomorrow, the entire concept of money would go with us. It is only an artefact of Human belief.

Creeds and credibility and credulity and greed. Whether we're talking about NAMA or Fianna Fail or the Catholic Church or Creationism or Organic farming - as a species, we take so much on trust from those in whom we repose that trust. Priests and politicians, lawyers and scientists and teachers and doctors - they have all been entrusted with our lives and livelihoods.

That's an awful lot of power to hand over to people who are fallible, venal, silly, and weak. But that's what we do for no better reason than that we have chosen to "believe".

Did you ever notice that "lie" is in the exact centre of "believe"?

Shomewhere, Over The Rainbow...

I'm feeling a wee bit bardic today. That's possibly because I've just realised I missed National Poetry Day there a few days ago. Who knew there was such a thing as a National Poetry Day? It gives me a little pang of pride in what could be confused with my patriotic core to think that my country, which is in so many ways a bit of a banana republic, still has the touch of soul required to have such a thing as a day dedicated to the muse of rhyme.

Of course, I live in a city that gave its name to an entire genre of poetry, although the Limerick is not generally regarded as being on the same level of artistic credibility as the work of Seamus Heaney or W.B.Yeats. Still, I'll seize on any crumb of fame by proxy that's going around.
Coincidentally, I notice that this year has now supplied us with an unlikely confluence of rhymable words in honour of the day. Brian Cowen has given us Nama, America has given us Barack Obama, and, just this week, our traffic news gave us three goats and five Lamas ( of the hairy,hooved, grass-eating variety - no Tibetan clergy were harmed in the weaving of this tale) loose on the Dual Carriageway outside Dublin! What a bonanza for any amateur versifiers lurking in the undergrowth.

I'm going to fight the temptation to delve into the world of rhyme for the very good reason that my abilities in that direction have been muzzled by the Geneva Convention. Instead, I'm going to cast my web of words over the related but altogether different subject of music. Given that my own musical ability is actually about on a par with that of my spaniel, some might say that that's akin to a blind blacksmith taking up golf. I'm not saying that they'd be wrong either, so prepare to see some deep trenches in the musical fairways.

Music, basically, is an art form reliant on sound. It's made up of pitch (which, in my day, would control things like melody and harmony), rhythm, which seems to be waaaay too powerful nowadays, and the sonic qualities that connoisseurs describe as timbre and texture. The word derives from the Greek word "mousike" which translates more or less as "art of the Muses",( and has nothing at all to do with moussaka, which features aubergines and tastes really good.) (Aubergines are a kind of vegetable and are in no way related to the word "aborigine", just to be absolutely clear on that.)

I think it was that modern Gilbert-and-Sullivan-type team of Ulvaeus and Andersson who gave us the immortal line; "thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing." What Benny and Bjorn actually meant was "thank you for the demographic which constitutes a spending population with enough cash in pocket to drive our income into overdrive", but that probably wouldn't have scanned as well lyrically as the accepted text does. Also, it would have been hard to dance to. Personally, I was young enough to be part of the Abba generation, which is to say that I was a bog-standard, acne-ridden, adolescent male who laid claim to coolness by listening to Bob Dylan and Neil Young while shamefacedly hiding the Abba Gold album at the back of the meagre collection of LP's. It goes without saying that my coolness was entirely in my own mind and completely evaded the notice of any of my peer group.

The thing about music is that it's so rooted in our psyches that we are not, for the most part, aware of how all-pervasive it is. As far as I know, some of the deeper thinkers among us reckon it's older than language as a formal method of communication, which makes a certain kind of sense. After all, birds get by with singing and chirping, so I have no qualms about the idea of a neolithic version of Bruce Springsteen belting out a few lines of "born to run" as a signal that the hunt was on. He could not, of course, sing "Born in the USA" as that great nation had not yet been discovered by any of the ethnic groupings entitled to discover countries, regardless of whether they happen to be occupied or not. The idea of a Jurassic Barry Manilow, on the other hand, sends chills down my spine.

The great minds also tell us that the rhythm component of music can be traced back to the sound of the beating heart heard by the embryonic infant in the womb. That steady pulse forms part of the background subconscious landscape of every vertebrate animal - it is, literally, the rhythm of life.

In the past, music was a vital component of the working and worshipping world, as well as being an intrinsic part of the social fabric of life. Working songs and sea shanties set the pace for many tasks that required close co-ordination by a number of people - hauling sails or digging trenches or reaping the harvest. Spiritual music and hymns gave that extra filip to the whole religious experience. And of course, no shindig could happen without a few jigs and reels and waltzes or polkas.

Now, where am I going with this? Well, it's just this. The twentieth century has democratised music beyond the wildest dreams of any mop-headed twelfth century troubadour. Radio, the gramophone, vinyl, television, the cd, the dvd, the hd, the MP3, the iPod, the mobile phone, the laptop - access to music is all-pervasive. Even when you don't want to listen to msic, it's right there being broadcast over PA systems, or being played too loudly by some guppy with headphones and no sense of the social niceties. Music has become more like that really annoying wallpaper in the bathroom than the fabric of life it once was. Any suggestion of quality control seems to have been disposed of as being somehow an infringement of the democratic right of every half-arsed idiot with a set of drumsticks and a completely unjustified ego to inflict his (or her) latest effort on the unwary listening public.

Of course, a large part of our problems might have been avoided if the parents of the last few generations had refused to give any pocket money to their little darlings. The teeny boppers of the past forty years or so were the fuel that fed the inferno of musical muppetry that has been the bane of so many curmudgeonly ears like mine.

We now have American Idol, the X Factor, Pop Idol and the generally bone idle on our screens around the clock, on top of the plethora of music television channels, local idiot broadcasters, and the curse of viral Youtube stuff. Moses might have thought he was being a bit rough on the ancient egyptians with his various plagues and whatnot, but I'm of the opinion that frogs and locusts run a pretty poor second in the nuisance division when compared with Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh and Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan and (God help us ) the Hoff.

And, as a salutary warning, we have seen Mamma Mia, the musical achieve cinematic status in the last few years. Don't get me wrong. As I confessed earlier, I actually like Abba, even when Pierse Brosnan and Colin Firth are mangling the melodies. I went to see the film with my wife, and, despite being one of only four males in an otherwise solidly female audience, I thoroughly enjoyed it. ( I was actually the only man there when we arrived, and I think it's a tribute to my security in my own masculinity that I didn't suddenly remember I'd forgotten to wash the dog when we walked into the theatre half an hour early and found it already half full of the fizzy and giddy giggling brigade. Five minutes later, another guy showed up in tow to his girlfriend looking even more sheepish than me, and two more trickled in shortly after that. We spent the evening giving each other the manly thumbs up across the darkened aisles…)

The point is, Mamma Mia is just a film built around Abba's greatest hits. It's the thin end of the wedge. What next? Think about it. Do we really want to see Stock, Aiken and Waterman's eighties output given the same treatment?

Or what about Bananarama- the Musical?

Or suppose we get "Shorry - Boyzone, the Shtory Sho Far."

Think on it and tremble. Dark days lie ahead. Now I know how Oppenheimer must have felt.

Homo Sap? Get wise.

Elsewhere in my bloggery, I have paid tribute to two writers who had a huge influence on my earlier reading career - namely Messrs Wodehouse and Asimov. But more recently ( and by recently, I mean in the last ten or twenty years - when you get to my advanced decrepitude, you count the passage of time in decades...) where was I..? Damn those parentheses ... Oh yeah, more recently, I was saying, I came across the work of one Terry Pratchett.

I confess that I had ignored the books of Pratchett up till then, largely on the basis, and I hope I can be forgiven for this, of their covers. The early books were encased in the artwork of Josh Kirby - a fine artist, and much admired by many, but his style was not attractive to my eyes. I thought the books were juvenile looking, and the garish colours and gnarly, distorted figures did not appeal to my sense of humour or aesthetics.

However, when I was on holidays in Majorca, lo, these many years ago now, I was stuck for something to read. I am a confirmed bibliophile and the prospect of a holiday in the sun without something papery and print-covered struck fear into my heart, so an emergency expedition was launched and I discovered an Oxfam shop in the nearby town. And in that blessed place of trade, I found "Feet of Clay" by one T. Pratchett. Desperation whispered in my ear, saying "go on, give it a go." The only other option that presented itself was a shelf of Mills and Boon and a solitary dust-coated copy of Arthur Hailey's "Hotel". I heeded the voice of desperation.

I never looked back. Once bitten by the Pratchett bug, I was a confirmed addict and embarked on a quest to redeem my previous sin of omission by collecting the complete works. For those of you who haven't read any of those books, I can only say you should also try at the earliest possible opportunity to correct that error.

The background to all of his stories is fantasy - but he has re-invented a great many onventional monsters in his own unique way. Dragons, golems, vampires, witches and wizards are all here, but they all march to a slightly different drum and have acquired an internal logic that is delightfully credible and entertaining. I won't bore you with the details of how he does it, 'coz half the fun of reading his books is waiting to see what he'll do next.

What sold me on Pratchett's writing is the ability the man has to tell a story from start to finish and leave you satisfied that the story has been told as well as it possibly could be told. There are far too many best selling writers who bring you from page to page in a breathless rush of steadily mounting excitement, only to crash through the last few fences ignoring or forgetting seemingly crucial plot points, and leave you wondering what it was all about. Pratchett doesn't do that. His pacing is perfect, and he plots as well as anyone I've read.

He manages in every book to find ways to dodge clichés and avoid repetition of old and hackneyed plotlines. His characters are flawed, but try to do the right thing, and he retains a strong moral core in all his books without being preachy or po-faced about it. The sense of humour that pervades all of his work is very Monty Python in the earlier books, and becomes more subtle as they progress, acquiring darker shades and carrying more gritty social satire in the more recent publications.

I won't go on too much more about this - it starting to sound a tad eulogistic. But the main thing that I like about this guy's writing is the intelligence and cynical common sense he brings to bear on so many societal assumptions. Human vanity is a regular target of his. Whether it's the concept of monarchy, hierarchy, patriotism, bigotry, religion, academia, or just plain self-importance, there's a Pratchett Pin for every foible's bubble.

The conceit I like best is one he has revisited himself several times - the notion of the innate superiority of the Human Race. I'm reading Richard Dawkins at the moment, and he has similar things to say in his own style, and maybe I'll vent my admiration for his work on another day.

Anyhoo, Prattchett questions the impartiality of the anthropologists who assigned the name "Homo Sapiens" to our species. It translates as "man the wise", you know. In fairness, if you look around at our various political and social pillars, how many times could you apply that term to the so-called great and good of our world? I mean, seriously now...?

Pratchett's thesis (which I understand is not unique to him, but I'll call it that) is that we are not exactly God's Last Word - unless God has a really warped sense of humour. That's hardly earth-shattering, I know, but I really like the idea that the whole issue of anthropological taxonomy should be revisited. That's what the bould Terry suggests in one of his books - that the scientific community should sit down and agree collectively to re-label the human race in a more appropriate manner.

Current evolutionary evidence tells us that we are most closely related to the Chimpanzee, or Pan Troglodytes as the boffins would have it. In fact, the general trend of scientific thought seems to indicate that our common ancestor is distressingly close in evolutionary time - distressing if you are a creationist, that is.

The principal thing that distinguishes us fundamentally from Pan Troglodytes is not our computers or our sailboats or rocket ships or racing cars. It's not even our opposable thumb, although there's no denying that it is very handy. (Sorry)

No, what distinguishes us is our linguistic skill - our ability to communicate. We do it all the time, obsessively and compulsively. By computer or television or radio or telephone, by the written or the spoken word, in cinemas and theatres and concert halls, in poetry and in songs and in paintings and in text messages, the biggest part of our lives is given over to sending and receiving explicit and implicit information. And the thing we do with all of these words and ideas and dreams is this - we tell stories.

We are storytellers - every one of us. It's how we make sense of the world. We build an artifice of information into a coherent structure that tells us enough to help us understand or deal with any issue. The story of the creation or of evolution or relativity or of Gilgamesh the King - they are all vessels for information that allow our brains to cope with the world.

That's not to say that all stories are equally valuable - Jeffrey Archer is not William Shakespeare and L. Ron Hubbard is not Einstein. You have to evaluate every story you are told in the light of all the other stories, and hopefully arrive at a sensible, workable set of conclusions.

Be all that as it may, and I'm not going to debate the relative merits of any of the forementioned here, the point is that we tell stories. We are narrators. And the name Pratchett mooted for our species and which I would like to second with all my heart is "Pan Narrans" - the storytelling chimp.

Oook!

Things to say in Dublin when you're dead - Philosophy 101

I'm in a philosophical frame of mind today. Imminent redundancy gives one furiously to contemplate one's own place in the universe, and I've been looking into the meaning of life, the universe and all that. I've done a bit of research, gazed at my navel introspectively, removed any belly-button fluff that was getting in the way, and I thought I might share some of my insights with you, if you don't mind…

Now I know you'll be familiar with Kant and Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer and Nietzche, so I won't bore you with repeating the more familiar aphorisms - Nietzche's old "When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you" or Hegel's "Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights." spring to mind here, but I did do a trawl of some of the less well known but equally entertaining boffins of the philosoverse - if I may coin a neologism.

Life, according to the philosopher Gump, is like a box of chocolates. (Actually, he said chawk-lets, but I think we all know what he meant.) Personally, I think he was a bit on the optimistic side there. Experience tells me that life is more like visiting the toilets in our beloved workplace. Until you lift the lid, you don't know what you're going to have to deal with. Sometimes, it's pristine porcelain and you can just get on with your own business in a calm and relaxed manner, but more often than not you find yourself having to deal with the crap someone else has left behind. And sometimes it's all just too much and you run screaming from the cubicle. (I've only seen that happen once, in fairness.) But, and of this we are all certain, when that great final flush eventually comes, only God knows what kind of shite will be left.

Some of the stuff that's out there is written along the same lines as the Lisbon Treaty or the recent NAMA legislation. I mean, if someone says "I tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying," you're going to feel a tad confused. That was Charles C. Finn's contribution, and it frankly left me in the same zone as the Zen thingy that advises you should knock on the sky and listen to the sound.

Of course, one of the classics of this sort was by a dude called Chuang Tzu, who said "The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?" This was clearly a man who understood the Soul of Ronan Keating, or who had been smoking something very herbal very recently.

Ram Dass said that if you think you're free, there's no escape possible, which didn't really cheer me up much and Heraclitus wasn't much better with "Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death." A lot of these guys erred a trifle on the gloomy side, and wouldn't be ideal holiday reading in the same class as, say, Dan Brown or Cecilia Ahern.

Stanislaw J. Lec said "If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?" which I thought was pretty good. Edward Albee said that sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly, which I also thought was fairly ok, but not as witty as Lec's line. Santayana, not to be outdone on the cryptic paradox thingy told us that almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

A guy called Robert Brault, who's obviously spent a lot of time on Ticketmaster, tells us that "I've observed that there are more lines formed than things worth waiting for." I concur. Although I did enjoy the recent Leonard Cohen gig, which was definitely worth waiting for and supplied more than a few philosophical moments of its own. But I think shopping in Tesco or Dunnes on a Friday evening bears out Brault's thesis.

Of course, if you want profundity, you've gotta go to Buddha (he ain't heavy…) who said "The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground." I don't know if he actually said that for the record, but you know how it is when you're at a good party. A few pints and a couple of shorts later, and you'll say any old thing that comes into your head, and the next day it's all over Facebook or Bebo. Look at Antonio Porchia, who told us in 1943 that "a thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence". He never heard the end of that one from the lads, and eventually started going to a different local just to dodge the wisecracks.

The Greeks, while we're in the classical world, apparently have a saying that goes:" A thousand men can't undress a naked man." That sounds like something Graham Norton might have said at a party, but it is, apparently, both ancient and authentic. Stand-up comedy has clearly been a part of human culture for a long time. In the modern world, and not to be outdone by those Greeks, America has a proverb that states that eggs cannot be unscrambled, but I betcha there are plenty of government research groups and Fas employees out there trying to disprove that one.

Anyhoo, having dipped my slightly discoloured big toe in the shallows of philosophy, I can only say that my own experience leads me to the conclusion that the man with the most profound insight was an Irishman. Apparently, some years ago a deep thinker called Murphy formulated a Law as all-pervasive and accurate as Einstein's wild notions about Relativity, and I firmly believe that Murphy's Law underpins the very fabric of our day-to-day existence within the walls of this wonderful world.

Days like today and months like the coming months and governments like the present shower definitely drag me, kicking and screaming, to the sad conclusion that anything that can go wrong will surely do so with vim and gusto.

Best regards and philosophical salutations,

Des

I KNOW IT'S INDEFENSIBLE, BUT...

I know this is kinda lazy of me, but I do want to persist in the bloggery thing, so, even though I have already posted this elsewhere, I decided to put it up here too..


I have often reflected on the conundrum of the apparently symbiotic nature of the co-existence of a surreal dreamtime creativity alongside a grimly pragmatic earthiness in the deep valleys and airy hills of my native country. That has absolutely nothing to do with this. I penned this a while back and I just wanted to inflict this peculiar little parable on you guys and see what you think.

I have already been threatened with excommunication and decapitation by my family and friends. Let me know . Have they been too kind?


McGill’s Defence

Paddy McGill and Roderick Guilfoyle were two small farmers in the valley of Ballygore in the shadow of the grey, rocky peak called Knockferrit. Their lands adjoined in the flood plain of the Poulaskiddy River, which was more frequently a flood than a plain, This had inspired McGill to take a leaf from the experience of the Chinese agricultural community and branch out into rice farming.As a consequence, the community of Ballygore were much entertained and edified by the spectacle of this little man wading through the waters of the Poulaskiddy with his trouser legs rolled up above his knees as he pursued the arcane practises of the paddy fields.

Guilfoyle, in particular, derived great amusement from the enterprise of his neighbour and was frequently heard in Mannixes hostelry of an evening lambasting the foolhardiness of McGill. Great mileage was got out of the coincidence of McGill’s Christian name and the fact that he was working a paddy field. Along with Denis McColl, the local wit and bard, Guilfoyle was co-author of a lengthy ballad entitled “McGill and the Folly of Paddy’s Paddy” which the pair would sing as a regular diversion for the other patrons of Mannixes, drawing great gales of laughter and ribald commentary from the audience.

All of this, not unnaturally, had it’s effect on McGill, and he became progressively more dour and withdrawn. His visits to the pub became infrequent as he avoided the unwanted wit and attentions of his neighbours and former friends. He was seen by day wading the waters of the Poulaskiddy, a lonely, taciturn figure with his trousers rolled up, his felt hat jammed on his balding crown, and his pipe clenched between stubborn teeth pouring great clouds of noxious smoke into the air as he tended his rice.

Now, in the way of such things, McGill had a daughter and Guilfoyle had a son, both of marriageable age, neither of them unattractive, and, of course, they were mutually attracted, for it is both trite and true that no one can dictate where the heart will go, parents least of all. Mary McGill and Mick Guilfoyle kept their passion a secret for as long as they could, for the antipathy and bad blood between their parents had become deep and bitter, and the Capulets and Montagues could have taken lessons from them in the art of mutual vilification.But truth will eventually out, and when Roderick Guilfoyle found his son behind a bush in the low field passionately embracing the daughter of the subject of all his scorn and laughter, his suspicions were aroused.By the judicious application of his blackthorn walking stick, he broke up the encounter, and later, as his wife treated the bruises and lacerations his son had acquired, he conducted an inquisition and the whole story was brought into the light of day.

In a fury, Guilfoyle made a beeline for the farm of his neighbour. Arrived at the cottage, he was informed by a surprised Mrs. McGill that her husband was tending his crop in the Poulaskiddy. Undeterred, he removed his shoes, rolled up his trousers, and waded out to confront the father of the seductress of his only son. Paddy McGill met his neighbour in the middle of the flooded field with some surprise. He was tired, his feet were three inches deep in the oozy mud, and the crop, for some obscure reason, was not thriving as well as it should. Additionally, word had reached him that Guilfoyle had last night composed and sung three new verses of “Paddy’s Paddy”. It was, accordingly, with tired, cynical and inflamed eyes that he regarded his tormentor as Guilfoyle launched into a tirade against his daughter, his family and himself.

The two men stood there calf-deep in the flooded field. McGill’s pipe poured greater and greater puffs of smoke into the air as he listened with deepening emotion to Guilfoyle’s harangue until they were both nearly completely shrouded in a purple haze of tobacco fumes.No one saw it happen, for the mist was too thick, but McGill’s frustration finally came to a head and he struck Guilfoyle such a blow that witnesses later swore they saw the man rise out of the cloud vertically, travel through the air for six feet, and fall back with a mighty splash into the muddy waters of the Poulaskiddy River.

The case came before the circuit court three weeks later. The judge listened carefully as the arguments for prosecution and defence were expounded and gave careful ear to all the witnesses called. Guilfoyle sat at the front of the court, his jaw still in a sling, and glowered at the little man in the felt hat who sat in the dock with an air of unassailable innocence, noxious fumes pouring steadily from his pipe. Mary McGill sat in the gallery with a defiant Mick Guilfoyle, their hands firmly clasped.

Finally, after much learned argument and debate and impassioned denunciations on both sides, counsel for the parties rested and the robed and bewigged officials waited on the verdict with the anxious public.Judge Lawrence MacFennish was calm and dispassionate as he spoke. He declared that the case had been a difficult one. On the one hand there was a clear case of assault, battery, and grievous bodily harm. On the other was the mitigating fact of the prolonged aggravation and the final provocation which finally led to the blow being struck. However, he said, what finally swayed him to dismiss the case was the fact that, as a man of intelligence, learning, and wit, he could not ignore the fact that McGill was well within his rice when he struck the blow.

Cool in the Shade(s)

I LIKE SUNGLASSES. Not, please understand, because I labour under any illusion that they make me look cool. Not even my new supersized LG fridge can achieve that miracle. No, I like them because they make the world look cool. (I’m using the word cool there in terms of the recognised vernacular slang for neat or keen or groovy, as against any apparent lowering of the global temperature, which would in any case confound the proponents of global warming.)

I’ve worn glasses since I was about ten years old. I remember the first time I put them on being amazed by the sheer amount of detail I could suddenly see. These panes of oddly curved transparency resolved the world around me into sharp outlines and recognisable features. Even looking down, I found I could now see individual pebbles on the ground and the texture of tarmacadam. Leaves on trees ceased to be impressionistic blobs of fuzziness and became individually distinct marvels of creation.

I don’t know what prayer is to most people, but for me the simple ability to see and appreciate the details of the universe are as close to a spiritual experience as makes no difference.

Don’t worry, I’m not living in a state of perpetual ecstasy or spiritual transcendence. I’m a grumpy, cranky git at the best of times, but I’m trying to say that when I do count my blessings, which I try to do regularly, I include the gift of sight among them with a touch more gratitude than those of us who have been blessed with perfect 20-20 vision might do.

The thought that the technologies of glass-making and lens grinding from the time of Euclid in ancient Greece through Ibn al-Haytham (or Alhazen as European’s called him) the Persian Polymath in Basra, through the developments and refinements of Kamal al-Din al-Farisi through Keppler and Huygens combined with Newton’s exploration of the world of optics and the discoveries of Galileo and innumerable other great minds through the ages have culminated in the twenty first century being able to grant with almost supernatural casualness the gift of clear vision to almost anyone is, you will admit, a bit uplifting.

So, from an early age I was impressed by the additional levels of detail and information that my glasses gifted me. That interest in detail inspired, to a certain degree, my interest in science. Science is basically a mental lens on the universe that allows us to see the details that the eyes can’t otherwise perceive.

It takes us down through the microscopic, through cellular structures, through atomic theories, into the subatomic world of quantum mechanics and the granular chaos of the theoretical stuff of space-time itself. It takes us up by way of geology and geography and astronomy into space and out through the solar system into the galaxy beyond, and out again into the intergalactic vastnesses all the way to the fringes of the universe and the beginning and end of time and space. It takes us into the physical structure of our brains and the mechanics of perception and memory. It explores our origins and our natures and reveals our underlying commonality with the beasts and the birds and the planet we live on. It takes us to places where our minds can only boggle and to ideas that put our entire existence into cosmic perspective.

All of which, I think you’ll agree, is pretty cool.

But too much detail can be dazzling. It overwhelms the mind and can give rise to disorientation and confusion and, counter-intuitively, a loss of clarity. Which brings me back, somewhat circuitously, to sunglasses…

Growing up, I didn’t wear sunglasses for a long time. The only ones available to me were the standard polaroids or else the kids’ cheap plastic glasses which probably did untold damage over the years to retinas unable to cope with the unscreened UV coming in through the dilated pupils of unwary eyes. Neither of those options was any good to me because, with my short sightedness, wearing sunglasses relieved the glare but left me without the clarity of vision I had become addicted to. So I preferred to put up with the glare of bright summer sunshine through my standard clear prescription lenses. At least, I could see, even if I was squinting like a demented gargoyle.

But then I got the option of prescription sunglasses free with my standard specs. I will confess that, having done without them for so long, I was ambivalent about getting them. I mean, the whole Miami Vice thing was so eighties! Ok, so maybe CSI Miami reinstated the look, courtesy of David Caruso, but even so I had the Irishman’s horror of being thought of as trying to look like I was with it, or even that I might think myself hip to the groove. It’s ok for you young hepcats, chicks and dudes, but I have a gravitas to maintain. Not to mention my street cred..

It was the driving that made up my mind. Sunlight, even the bright glare of an overcast day reflecting off the road, was giving me headaches in the car, and I was spending increasing amounts of time behind the wheel. For safety’s sake, I opted to get me a pair of them shades.

You know, it took a little while for me to get it, because the effect wasn’t as startlingly obvious as the first time I got glasses, but it gradually dawned on me that my prescription sunglasses were not just shading my eyes from the sun. They were giving me an entirely different way of seeing. Suddenly, colours were richer and more intense, and landscapes that had seemed pale and washed out were reborn in my vision as oil paintings from the golden age of the Gainsboroughs and Constables and Vermeers of the past.

Polaroid lenses work by polarizing light. They eliminate a large proportion of the chaotic tidal wave of photons that bright sunlight hurls at your eyes, eliminating all but those aligned along the axis of polarization and acting as optical breakwaters so that all that reaches your retina is a relatively gentle wash of light.

So, by eliminating all the excess ‘noisy’ light, my eyes are allowed to see the more relaxed, true colours of the world. And no, it’s not cheating, or in any way self-delusory. Bear in mind that the colours we see are, in any case, just an artifice of the brain – useful tools to allow us to interpret the electromagnetic waves reflected at us by the universe. We have no way even of being sure that we all see the same colours.

I do wonder sometimes if some of those old Dutch and English landscape artists were wearing Polaroid lenses while they painted, but the thought of Vermeer in CSI shades is a tad bizarre. I’ll just accept the privilege of being granted the chance to look through his eyes courtesy of my friendly local optician.

Why here - Why now - Why?

By way of clarification, I feel I should offer a few introductory words to explain why I deemed it worthwhile to produce the pages currently the subject of your perusal.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure why I started this. I know I wanted to compile, for myself, the various bits and pieces of things I’ve written or drawn over the course of the past quarter century – kind of a mid-life landmark type thing.

I also felt I should put on record my sense of gratitude for how good life has been to me. It’s an odd thing, but when times are bad, as they sometimes are, counting your real blessings is a powerful help, and having them in black and white in front of you serves to drive home viscerally that there are things in the world worth drawing breath for.

Also, and finally, I wanted to explore what it is that compels me on a regular basis to pick up a pencil or pen and commit my weirdnesses to paper. Let’s face it, it is eccentric behaviour, this tendency of mine to break into poetry, prose, or pictorial self-expression at the drop of a pun or verbal quirk.

So this bundle of nouns, verbs, adjectives, weird syntax, warped grammar, punctuation, prose and pictures you are looking at with a glazed expression on your face is a compendium of vanity publishing, prayer and self-medicated psycho-therapy.

I’ve been writing and drawing all my life, a fact for which, as usual, you can blame the parents. They are the ones who gave me access to the world of books and pictures and they must shoulder their share of the blame for the outcome. Words and images have been the wallpaper in the room of my mind since as far back as I can go.

I can remember finding a copy of one of the old Fleetwood comics under the pillow in my cot when I was about four years old. Lord Snooty, Biffo the Bear, Roger the Dodger… words and pictures and stories all together in one package. I was hooked.
Comics and books – The Sparky, Noddy, The Beano, Whizzer and Chips, Superman and Rupert Bear, Spiderman and Richmal Crompton’s William and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Franklin W. Dixon’s Hardy Boys, and then, of course, Hergé’s Tintin and Goscinny and Uderzo with Asterix…

I started reading really early, before I started school, again thanks to those aforementioned parents, and devoured everything I could get my hands on at the time that was even marginally worth reading. I’m not claiming any kind of high art for those early comics I read – the stories were strung together on a weekly basis for kids who were completely unsophisticated, but they entertained and educated and interested and stimulated my imagination with their weird and wonderful art and their completely uninhibited sense of anarchy and fun.

And comics presented challenges – I remember the thrill of figuring out what speech balloons were versus thought balloons versus captions – comics gave a completely different set of insights into the art of story telling in such an entertaining and streamlined package.

On top of those, I started collecting “serious” books , because that was the kind of “serious” kid (read pain-in-the-ass know-it-all) I was – the Look and Learn series gave me pictures and words about science and dinosaurs and history and all kinds of fantastic facts. The writing was a bit dry, but the pictures were great. Encyclopedias in my school gave me stories about Napoleon and Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar, and those little bible books in our classrooms gave the images of the Middle East and Egypt. I was a Time and Space Traveller!

Then my Dad introduced me to two of my most reliable friends and fallback failsafes – P.G. Wodehouse and Isaac Asimov. The former arrived into my life as two old books from my grandfather’s bookshelves when he moved from Kerry to Ballincollig in Cork. Love among the Chickens and Uneasy Money landed on the floor of my bedroom where I was lying on my belly reading a Micky Mouse comic one afternoon. I was about eleven at the time. Dad thought I “might like them”.

He was right. Wodehouse is the unshiftable core of my book collection, and short of fire, flood, or famine, will remain so. Asimov came with a similar lack of fanfare, in the form of a slightly battered copy of I Robot that a friend had loaned my father, and again he thought I might be interested in “the science fiction stuff in it”. Again, he was right.

Messrs Wodehouse and Asimov influenced me irrevocably in my perception of the nuances of language and humour and narrative structure. Wodehouse gave me a love of the fluent and flexible use of words and an appreciation for the work that needs to go into seemingly effortless elegance in prose. Asimov showed how simplicity of style and clarity of language can be the most useful tools in any entertainer’s or educator’s toolkit.

I’ve discovered many more writers since, of course, – Alistair MacLean and Frederic Forsyth, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, Iain M. Banks, Ian Rankin, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Poe, Robert Silverberg, Mervyn Peake, Shakespeare, Dickens, Alistair Reynolds, Henry Kuttner, Ian MacDonald, Philip K. Dick, Garth Ennis, Alan Moore, Flann O’Brien… I could, and frequently do, go on for hours.

I’ve acquired a weird and wonderful variety of interests over the years. Particle physics, dark matter, evolution, philosophy, detective stories, the poetry of Yeats and Heaney and Tennyson, science fiction, superheroes, vampires, werewolves and witchcraft, the warped and wonderful world of Gary Larson’s Far Side, Charles M Schultz’s Snoopy, Berke Breathed’s Bloom County, the books of Terry Pratchett, the art of Michelangelo and DaVinci, El Greco and Picasso, Gainsborough and Constable and Pauline Bewick and Jim Fitzpatrick, Harry Clarke and Barry Windsor Smith and Jim Lee and Steranko and Buscema and Colon and Kane. These lists are in no sense intended to suggest that I’m either a prodigy or a polymath. If anything, I’m a dilettante with a penchant for bullshit.

But I do consider myself blessed and privileged that through the simple skill of reading I have been afforded so many windows into so many wonderful worlds.

In the past few years, I’ve bumped into quite a few people from the dim and distant past, and the invariable question that arises is “what have you been up to all this time?” Now, the answer is fairly complicated because the last quarter century of my life has been, by turns, very boring for long stretches but then subject to bouts of change fraught with excitement.

By way of chronicling these varied events and diversions, I have failed singularly to keep any sort of formal record. Instead, I marked certain periods with attempts at poetry and prose. I also drew cartoons and things.

Basically, and boiling it down to its essence, I have spent the latter twenty-five years of my life being unbelievably lucky compared to the bulk of the human race. My wife (who has put up with me for that entire stretch having been in at the start ) is still absolutely wonderful, still my wife, and still my best friend. My three daughters are gorgeous and gifted. We have survived the eighties, endured the Celtic Tiger, painted signs, murals, and an eclectic range of odd commissions, written, worked in a variety of jobs, moved from bedsit to flat to house, bought a few cars (all second-hand – We’re not ostentatious…), visited France and Spain and Italy and Greece and generally had a whale of a time – when we weren’t having an awful time, as happens from time to time.


But all I have to show for your delectation is the doodles and scribbles and daft derelictions of paper I produced over those years

This here what you are looking at is a bit of a compendium of those there.

I can only say that I thought they seemed good at the time.

Polar Opposites

Oppositeness is fundamental to our understanding of the forces and characteristics of our universe, and in the worlds of maths and physics it is a vitally important factor. Positive and negative electrical polarity, magnetic north and south, on and off, one and zero – all of these underpin our very existence.

But equally, gray areas and gradations are a dominant feature of our daily lives. It’s not just a question of being wet or dry; in Ireland, at least, it’s a question of how wet you are. The sliding scale under our climatic conditions ranges from mildly damp in a light shower to soaked-to-the-skin in a slightly heavier downpour to swimming-for-your-life in a mild wintery squall. (Definitions of rainfall conditions are those used in weather forecasts in Ireland. )

It’s a funny thing, the concept of opposites. Everyone thinks they know what they mean when they say things like “opposites attract”. I remember when I was about four years old grappling with the idea like every kid does, because one thing the human brain really likes is neat categories. We all like to be able to pigeon-hole things, label them neatly, and know where to find them afterwards.

That’s fine with concepts like “up” versus “down” or “wet” versus “dry”. Black and white, happy and sad, awake and asleep – they all seem to label neatly as opposites. As a four or five year old, they make perfect sense, and in a very naïve way, they still work into adulthood as functional definitions. Of course, a four year old brain doesn’t know where to stop. Everything must have an opposite - the opposite of a man is a woman, a girl is the opposite of a boy, a cat is the opposite of a dog, a cow is the opposite of a horse…

Except that’s not how it really works. A cow is no more the opposite of a horse than a cat is the opposite of a dog. Oppositeness as a concept implies the complete reversal of characteristics, which is certainly not the case in the world of vertebrate mammals. One four legged, warm blooded, herbivore is not the opposite of another. Even allowing for gender, the male of a species is not the opposite of the female except in the extreme instance of biological sexuality. In every other respect, the male cat and the female cat are pretty much identical. Animal behavioural science is now telling us that homosexuality is not confined to the human race, so psychological gender opposites are not even necessarily the same as physical gender opposites up and down the evolutionary scale from earthworms to homo sapiens, although the vision of a camp gorilla or a gay hippopotamus is one that frankly boggles the mind.

Anyway, I only introduced the sex motif to illustrate that something so commonly perceived as polarising as gender is only in the eye of the beholder. We have an entire range of human types, ranging from psychotic war-mongering females to male interior designers and hairdressers and right back around the continuum of psychological and personality profiles.

In the reductio ad absurdum case where you take two similar sized animals – say a horse and a cow of either or any gender – and break them into their constituent atoms, there will be no difference whatsoever. You will be looking at two similar heaps of dust, and closer inspection of those heaps will show they are effectively interchangeable. The relative proportions of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen and the various trace elements and metals will be almost identical. No opposition whatsoever. A carbon atom doesn’t really care whether it is currently a component of a horse or a cow or a whale or me.

What got me thinking about opposites and our simplistic approach to same was the reflection that two of my favourite writers could be defined as opposites. Asimov and Wodehouse have loomed large on my literary horizon for most of my life, and, objectively, you could argue that a taste for one might preclude the other.

Isaac Asimov was a Russian-born Jewish American from a relatively poor background with a doctorate in Chemistry who wrote some of the most influential science fiction stories of the twentieth century. He also wrote non-fiction on a hugely diverse range of subjects from Shakespeare through world history through science to the bible.

He was a polymath and a renaissance man in the best sense in the world of writing, and had a huge influence on my own early interest in science. His science fiction writing style was sparse and almost completely devoid of descriptive passages, relying mainly on conversation and argument for exposition of plot. Virtually all of his stories are puzzles or whodunits under the guise of science fiction, and his hard science – allowing for the intrusion of plot devices such as faster than light travel or time travel or his famous ‘positronic’ robots – always hewed to the line of the best and latest science available at the time of writing.

Asimov’s science essays, which I discovered by accident because I bought a book of them thinking they were more of his science fiction, were models of crystal clarity, simple explanations, and genuinely interesting anecdotes about the sidebar stories of science. To my mind, he did more to inculcate a genuine affection for science in me, and probably thousands of others, than an entire six years of Secondary education did.

Asimov’s ability to breathe life into the apparently dry questions posed by science was amazing. In a few short sentences, he engaged the attention, posed the question, and showed how it could be looked at so the answer and the question both made sense to a child of twelve.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, or P.G., or Plum, on the other hand, was a quintessentially English writer who wrote light, frothy comic novels and musical comedies and churned out in his lifetime the Jeeves and Wooster stories, the Mulliner books, the golf stories, and the Blandings Castle series. If you don’t recognise these works, don’t worry. Just go and look for a volume or two of this remarkable oeuvre, start reading, and your artistic and spiritual scoresheets will be restored.

Wodehouse wrote elegant, witty, wonderful prose about the misadventures of well-to-do idiots in an eternally idyllic, carefree landscape of ancestral castles, suburban refuges, and pastoral never-never lands. His work is permeated by an innocence and unworldliness so complete that, outside of children’s literature, no other writer I’ve read can approach him.

The thing about these two authors is this: Asimov wrote brilliantly simple prose about absolutely everything, while Wodehouse wove elegantly witty and convoluted plots out of nothing. Asimov’s prose was lean and sparse to the point of minimalism, while Wodehouse’s wordcraft was all about putting a topspin on an elegant aphorism and letting it fly. Asimov dealt with science, literature, the world, history, religion, detective fiction, science fiction, and just about anything that engaged his encyclopaedic interest, while Wodehouse confined his entire body of work to the misadventures of generally well-to-do carefree denizens of middle England or America, woven around the most insubstantial of plot points.

And yet, notwithstanding the apparently polar natures of these two writers, both of them engaged and held my attention at about the same time in my life, and have held that attention and affection ever since. The reason is that, despite the many apparent differences, both writers held in common an absolutely generous and open spirit, free of any trace of mean-mindedness or bigotry. Both also epitomised the sheer versatility of the English language as a medium for education and entertainment.

The point I’m getting to here is that, in the world of human thought, opposites do exist, but only as points in the greater continuum of the complexity of human personality. People may seem to be opposites, but that’s only because we are very quick to spot obvious differences, and much slower to appreciate subtle points of commonality, What Asimov and Wodehouse shared was greatness of spirit and talent.

Regrets are something that you accumulate as you go through life, and all you can do with them is learn to live with them. I’ve acquired my share of regrets, some more significant than others, but among them I’ve carried a minor pang of guilt that I never communicated to these men in their lifetimes how much I enjoyed their work. An artist deserves to know his efforts are appreciated. I know my plaudits would only amount to a single handclap in the thunderous ovation they both received in their lifetimes, but, for what it’s worth, this is my salute.

I didn’t start this essay with any real endpoint in view. It really is just my mind freewheeling around an idea. However, on rereading what I’ve written to this point I can say that if it proves anything, it proves how profoundly both of those authors influenced me. Their literary genetic fingerprints are all over my verbiage, and for that I can only be grateful.