Landscape

Someone pointed out that people only appear in my photographs in the bottom right of the frame. I hadn't noticed that. I don't really like taking pictures of people. Probably because I don't like it when people take pictures of me. I shoot with my left eye, and seem to use the figures of people as markers on a map. 

Or maybe I get it from my (right-eyed) father, who took the photograph above. I must have always had a long-distance stare. I'm drawn to the horizon, perhaps guided by the compass of others, who gaze quietly at it too. It could be that I want to see what they see, instead of seeing or being seen by them. 

This is a picture of a dear friend of mine. I stole it in Kerry last weekend. He rings, at unpredictable intervals and short notice, to invite me on outings. Whenever I can go, we head out of town to climb a hill or walk along a shore. He twinkles when he listens, so I chatter, giddy in the passenger seat of his car.  We run out of town-talk by the time the countryside quietens me, so we listen to the radio. When I was a child, I used to think that the radio was the engine and the driver of the car, and would imagine that it was driving me too, outside, moving me across the landscape on the same frequency, over telephone poles and trees. 

I still imagine this in my friend's car, but the sense of freedom is no longer a joy. The false horizon - the nation that encloses this landscape - has snapped and sent us skywards. It has been two years now, of trying to change while waiting for change, never knowing which will come first, or if they will cancel each other out. The horizon toward which we speed is no longer ours. We often see and hear joyful things, my friend and I - a hare on the mountain, the first cuckoo - but all they provoke are straining wishes. I want to stop, just for a while, to lie in a summer meadow and watch the clouds pass by. I wish our work was worth more than worry. I wish I was in love with him.

Then I read an account of a recent hill-running race. The straining of will and muscle sounded excruciating, and made me think of horses on the Central Asian steppes. When they bolt they find no fences between them and the horizon, so they run and run until they drop dead of exhaustion. They think there is an end, but there is not. Vertices are kinder than the elusive horizon, however hard they are to scale. The writer describes the particular agony of racing up- and down- hill on a clear day, when he could see far ahead of him and thought there was no end -

but there is.

"For whatever reason, you don’t stop. My theory on this is that defeat hurts more and for a lot longer than physical pain. Your mind knows it too and by flogging you to your limit it is protecting you from the abject despair that goes with giving up." 

So this will be my last wistful post (for a while, anyway). Tomorrow or the day after I will write up my work properly, post it here, and just keep going. (Thanks Brian :))

The Soviet and the Airplane

In April 1919, in response to civil unrest following the death in custody of an IRA man, the British Army declared Limerick City a Special Military Area. Barricades were erected on the streets and bridges, and people needed permits to enter or leave. This caused such disruption that Limerick people called a general strike and set up a committee to fight the restrictions and control their own affairs within the SMA. For a fortnight the committee, which became known as the Limerick Soviet after similar uprisings throughout Europe, ran the city. They even issued their own currency. 

Meanwhile, in Britain, the Daily Mail offered a prize of £10,000 to the first pilot to fly across the Atlantic. Major Wood of the RAF thought he'd give it a shot. He reckoned that Limerick would be the ideal starting point- his plan for navigation was to follow the Shannon to the sea and carry on in a straight line to Newfoundland. 

Wood had obtained military permission to take off from a field in Bawnmore, which had been painted with a large whitewash cross, but was surprised to find that he had to then make arrangements with the Limerick Soviet. The international press, who had gathered in Limerick to cover the only east-west flight in the race, were similarly amused to find themselves in the middle of a story as daring as the flight itself. They were briefed by the Limerick Soviet press office, and sent their copy via an American cable station in Valentia, thus avoiding the British censor and bringing news of the Limerick Soviet to the whole world. [Though not, sadly, to later generations of Irish schoolchildren.]

On the second day of the strike, Major Wood's plane, a Rolls Royce craft called The Shamrock, was expected to land at Bawnmore. The whole striking town and international press corps headed out the road to see the flying machine and Wood and his co-pilot Wyllie, in their specially designed flying suits that were rigged for warmth to a dynamo attached to the propellors; Major Wood and Captain Wyllie, who would attempt the first ever transatlantic flight from Limerick, Ireland's first independent city.   

I imagine them all in the field in Bawnmore, scanning the sky, goosebumps standing to attention for the double dare of an uprising and a flight. They waited there all day, crackling like a needle on the edge of a record. There is a grace to suspense that cannot be grounded by any eventual outcome: when, holding your breath and feeling time tumble over itself from a just-dropped cup, you sense that this has already happened, and not happened, then happened again, because you are poised, taut, on the horizon.


They did not know, as they waited, that The Shamrock had crashed into the Irish Sea. Major Wood and Captain Wyllie were rescued by a group of Welsh picnickers who put out to sea in a rowboat. The strike ended twelve days later, after a compromise was reached with the military. The barricades and permit restrictions were lifted. 


Two months later, Alcock and Brown crash-landed their plane into a bog near Clifden, co. Galway, having flown all the way from Newfoundland. My great-grandfather, founder of the Connacht Tribune, directed the Daily Mail correspondent the long way round the mountains, got there first, and scooped the first interview with the pilots of the first transatlantic flight. 


In 2000 I flew to Vilnius to meet a group of artists who, flush with the success of their campaign to erect a statue of Frank Zappa on a plinth once occupied by Lenin, declared their part of the city the Independent Republic of Užupis. They further declared 2000 the Year of Užupis Airport in the hope that the beautiful poet-pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose plane was last seen over the Mediterranean in 1944, would finally come back to earth.


In 2001 I found the story of the Limerick Soviet and Major Wood in the archives of the Limerick Civic Trust; Liam Cahill has written an excellent account in Chapter 8, here. The story came to mind twice lately, as this is a time when people are thinking and dreaming about the city again. We need airports for inspiration as well as for people and goods. De Saint-Exupéry flew across oceans and continents to bring the post - a twentieth century Hermes. Every dashing airman needs a safe place to land, to exchange news for fuel, to take off again. I think of ideas as belonging to the air, sometimes alighting to whisper in our ears; we can follow their trails but we cannot ground or keep them. We do not know who, or what, will land. Yet everything is possible in the grace of suspense. We must paint a white cross on the grass, light the tar barrels at night, keep listening and watching the skies. 

Ecce Eco

Lately, there has been a convergence of ideas in town. People who would not have sat at the same table during the silly-money years are now speaking and planning together for the common good. The recession has brought a levelling. Once, all the local business and cultural groups were competing for funding and custom. Now that the money is gone, people are using their time and energy to achieve what used to take a forest-full of forms. (and begrudgery.)

I've been looking into the economics of barter. I have found common ground with people who have been working on environmental initiatives. We are both interested in sustainability and an alternative to the zero-sum game.

It only struck me today that the words economy and ecology have the same root: οἶκος (oikos) Greek > oeco Latin > eco-.

It means home.

Now that the empires of speculation have collapsed, we are starting again from the hearth. The people who gather around no longer expect someone else to fix their problems - for a fee or tax - nor do they suggest solutions that they are not prepared to carry out. Spare time, whether it be from unemployment or lack of disposable income, can be volunteered for activities to benefit everyone.

Today I went to UL along the riverbank and photographed the rubbish that washes downstream when the river swells with rain. A colleague had done the same. She has resolved to bring a bag and gloves and clean a little every day. I'll do the same. We will invite people to join us in a regular, social day out, and then we can all enjoy our river again. A student environmental group did a day of this last year in March but, as she pointed out, the new growth of spring will bury the rubbish so winter, though it is cold and mean, is the time to do it.

A quote from Richard III- "Now is the winter of our discontent" - was thrown around a lot two winters ago, when the bubble burst and protesters marched in the snow, but it was taken out of context. The line is not spoken at the time of discontent, and it is followed by -

"Made glorious summer by this son of York

And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house

In the deep bosom ocean buried."

I think we should bear that in mind.

Thanatosis

(photo by Risssa, and a very sweet one too, public domain)

Today (windy, sideways rain, again) I was trying to account for being workshy for the past month. There's no positive stress to groan under- no deadlines, no people waiting. I like that kind of stress. Nor is it the weather, for which I have a waterproof coat and boots. It's the negative stress that must be guarded against: the absence of expectation. Instead of adrenalin from demands, there is a vast, unfocussed fear which comes from wondering about the point of it all. I think unemployment might lead to existentialism. While it may make for a stylish dole queue, I'd hate to fall in that line.

The response to fear in living things is most commonly expressed in fight or flight, but I'll leave that to the biologists to explain. Today I was thinking of a third, much rarer option - thanatosis, or "playing dead". Various creatures do this: certain snakes, beetles and the Virginia Oppossum pictured above, as they know that most predators will presume the flesh is rotten if it's already dead.

I have, on occasion, had writer's block, and made myself sit in a chair doing absolutely nothing for a day so that the fear would go away and boredom itself would eventually become motivation. It just seems to be taking so much longer this time. Yet I can't blame fear of the gloom for my inertia because while thanatosis seems to be a successful strategy for survival in the species that practise it, certain individuals, regrettably, have tried to use it against oncoming traffic.

A cautionary tale.

In Which I Finally Put Social Media to Good Use

This little cat made a home for herself at the entrance to an empty basement on O'Connell Street. I first saw her sleeping, curled up on a stair, and thought it odd that a cat would sleep so close to a busy street. The next time I passed she sat up and greeted me with a polite meow. When I stopped she slinked out through the railings and slalomed round my ankles, purring and kissing my shoes. I was smitten.

For about a week I saw her in passing several times a day, sometimes stopping to sit with her on the neighbouring stoop. As she had the same colouring, I wondered if she was a descendant of thesis cat, who had visited my building exactly two years ago. I liked to see her, but started to hope for her absence, which I would take - optimistically - as a sign that she had found her way back home, or to a new home. And she must have had a home once; she was in good health, and not at all shy around people. All people -everyone who passed by, many of whom brought her food and water or played with her for a while. We wondered where she had come from and compared notes about attempts to find her owners through lost and found notices and local animal welfare organisations.

After a week of learning nothing about the cat (apart from her charms), I telephoned the Limerick Animal Welfare sanctuary to see if they could take her. They are in Kilfinane, about 40km away, (where my great-grandmother came from) and completely overstretched with abandoned and mistreated animals. Their "cat lady" was on leave, but responded on Tuesday evening to a message I sent on facebook, saying that they could take the cat the following day if I could get her out there. If I couldn't get her to Kilfinane on Wednesday, there was half a chance the local vet might keep her till Saturday, when they would be in Limerick City, but by then there might not be room any more.

As I was already on facebook, I started sending messages to friends with cars and friends who live nearby and wouldn't mind helping me put her in a box and getting her to the vet's early the next morning, before I had to sign on and get to the ISSTA concovation. At one stage I had 4 chat windows open and was fielding comments on my help-the-cat-wallpost and one that a friend had put on his wall. Within 15 minutes, I had a Schroedinger joke, contact details of someone else who works at the sanctuary, two offers to adopt the cat, an agreement to help me get her to the vet's the next morning and, best of all, a lift to Kilfinane in a brand-new cat-carrier in a car driven by one of my iMedia lecturers at the IDC, who had adopted a cat from the sanctuary the previous week.

I had previously only used social media to socialise, never to organise anything more complicated than a coffee. This was almost frightening in its immediacy and efficiency. So many people helping, or passing details on to others if they could not help directly, all because they happened to be online, connected, and interested. It spread out across networks until it found the right connection and tied the ends up in a very neat bow. This is encouraging, and light years of improvement on the lonely hand-written posters you still sometimes see in shop windows. And so it happened that the following morning I met Lui, who loves cats, and the lovely little cat went into the cat-carrier and into the car, purring, as if she had known all along that we would find a solution.

And as if this post isn't recursive enough, Itsy will adopt her next week.

It's true: The Internet is Made of Cats.

Too Busy Bartering to Organise Barter

A sound art proposal I wrote - and subsequently forgot - back in March was accepted last month for ISSTA's inaugural convocation, "Overture", which will be held at the University of Limerick next month.

Yikes.

I think I got so used to rejection that an acceptance was a bit of a fright. (It's ALIVE!) And now I have to actually go and do it.

My current co-barterer, for whom I'm proof-reading, will be presenting a paper at the convocation. This tangled up our plans to exchange jobs (proof-reading for audio guidance) one at a time in order of urgency. Still, it's Summer and the evenings are long and bright, if not particularly warm, so we have a head start on it.

Here goes.

At the end of Summer I'll get back to the bartering site. I'll bring my co-designers Keith and Lette up to my grandparents' house in Furbo, co. Galway, for an offline week of planning and programming. The sea will be warm for swimming and we'll walk in the woods and give carrots and parsnips to Bánín:

and all will be well.