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.