how to be idle and blessed

Substack 13

In the worst hour of the worst season

    of the worst year of a whole people

a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.

He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.

     He lifted her and put her on his back.

He walked like that west and west and north.

Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.

    Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

     There is no place here for the inexact

praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.

There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.

      Also what they suffered. How they lived.

And what there is between a man and woman.

And in which darkness it can best be proved.

— “Quarantine”, Eavan Boland

i. west and west and north

A friend reminded me of Eavan Boland recently — more than one friend — and there is something mercilessly unsentimental about her poetry. Not for her the romanticism of W.B. Yeats or the gurning myth-making and religious sentimentality of Patrick Kavanagh, nor yet the recognition or the easy changes of register of Seamus Heaney, nor the faint pretension that I always find in Michael Longley. Can I name another female Irish poet of the 20th and early 21st centuries? Not with ease, no. But I think there are few that could match Boland’s spare ruthlessness, with history, the world, language and herself.

Match “Quarantine” with “That the Science of Cartography is Limited”, “The Pomegranate” with “Atlantis,” and tell me otherwise.

…Maybe

what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word

to convey that what is gone is gone forever and

never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name

and drowned it.

from “Atlantis – A Lost Sonnet”, Eavan Boland.

ii. the best traditions of where we come from

On the border of Co. Louth and Co. Antrim, there’s a forest. A small forest, near Carlingford Lough. A friend drove us up there a weekend or two ago, to Ravensdale Forest Park, and we walked for a few hours in the warm summer wood. It’s strange to be so close to a border whose existence is so much contested, and such a live point of contention. It’s beautiful up there, and we still don’t know, and will never know, where all the bodies are buried: both things are true at once.

Parts of the wood looked like set dressing for Rivendell.

My photography does not do it justice.

iii. easy graces.

In my house now dwells a cat who has figured out how to open a bedroom window using the handle and the weight of her body. She is persistant, clever, and too easily bored: there’s a reason her wet food pouches now live inside a clip-top box inside a cupboard, because neither cupboard nor box were, on their own, enough to keep her from exploring three or four pouches for novelty’s sake whenever she grew tired of making her own entertainment otherwise.

She’s very proud of herself, even though she had to wail at us to come get her because it was raining — she can, apparently, open the window wide enough to squeeze out, but not quite enough to get back in again.

iv. what is gone

For a brief time — too brief, and too soon gone, even though it lasted some years — Palais des Thés had a shop in Dublin. I have a collection of tea, some of which dates back to that time. I don’t remember to drink it often enough, but I’ve rearranged cupboards and shelves so that instead of being hidden, it’s now obvious every time I walk down the hall. In consequence, I’ve finally finished the 100g packet of vanilla black tea I’ve had for… probably ten years? I have a packet of cardamom black tea that I’ve had for the same length of time, and it might be up next. We’ll see.

I have a lot of tea. Like ink, it appears to be quite easy to collect and less easy to use, because what happens if you use it all up and don’t have anything nice anymore? It is difficult to lose the scarcity mindset and move towards nice things should be used. I mean, if you’re not using the thing, then the only enjoyment can be a) anticipation of using it or b) pleasure of hoarding it, and I think maybe hoarding too much might be unhealthy for me.

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

— “The Summer Day”, Mary Oliver

Ramblings about the countryside

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave

like a blue flower, in his beak

he carries a silver leaf. I think this is

the prettiest world–so long as you don’t mind

a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life

that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?

There are more fish than there are leaves

on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher

wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.

When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water

remains water–hunger is the only story

he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.

I don’t say he’s right. Neither

do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf

with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry

I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body

if my life depended on it, he swings back

over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it

(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

—Mary Oliver, “The Kingfisher”

i. like a blue flower

It’s an 80km round trip (approximately) from our house to the Hill of Tara, where evidence for human ritual activity goes back to the Neolithic. We set out on Monday in the beginning of a very warm afternoon to visit and picnic, through countryside alive and green with our warm, damp summer. Along the way we met with a cow in labour (cows in labour look bizarrely many-legged), a kestrel on the wing, a hexagonal folly in the fields of a private estate, several horses, and at least one sunbathing cat.

I don’t know as much about the archaeology and history of Tara as I’d like to. Irish archaeological and historical monographs are far less accessible than English ones: we lack even a single university press, these days, and popular treatments (as far as I can tell) are generally slanted to appeal to neo-pagans. Conor Newman has at least one interesting paper, though.

Tara is, it seems, a popular destination for families having outings, and few enough of the people were taking care to maintain the two-metre social distancing — especially around the pub serving food and the ice-cream van on the road outside. I’m a judgy bastard.

We came home via Skreen, where I peered through fields to get a view of the back of Skreen (or Skryne) Castle, whose oldest parts date to the 12th century. And then at some point I took a wrong turn and we found ourselves cycling along by bamboo plantations, closer to Dublin Airport than we’d ever intended to get…

…including time for picnics and getting lost, it took us about eight and a half hours to travel 80km. Google Maps thinks cyclists go significantly faster than that.

ii. not born to think about it

A few weeks ago, it appears that an update for my Xbox One — which I generally use as much as a DVD player as anything else — updated its security protocols so that it began to complain and refuse to play DVDs, because my screen didn’t comply with its latest HDMI security protocols. I’ve been using this monitor and this HDMI cable since we moved in, without a trace of difficulty. I proved to my satisfaction it wasn’t a hardware issue, which left me with the baffling puzzle: how to play my DVDs now?

Extensive googling revealed that the only known solution — short of getting a brand new screen — was to get a HDMI splitter that would strip out the security protocol. I did, and it works: so that’s a technological triumph.

iii. its splash of happiness

There’s a taco truck in cycling distance, only 12km away. La Cocina Cuevas: I thought it was a hoax last weekend, when my beloved wife suggested we bike out to the middle of the countryside, on a road lined with farms and farmland. But tucked away in a farmyard is a truck selling the most delicious food.

They’re really popular. So popular that when we arrived on our bikes, they’d stopped taking walk-ins (or drive-ins). But they took pity on us for coming via muscle-power for that many several of kilometers, and bloody hell, beef brisket tacos and fried potato balls and chipotle mayo are a revelation when you’ve been spicing all your own food for months. (With the exception of the occasional Indian takeaway, but salsa and curry are entirely different points on the spectrum.) So we had a picnic by a fencepost.

We went back the following day with my mother. I’m definitely in favour of going back, again, this weekend. OM NOM FUCKING NOM.

iv. over the bright sea

It’s hard not to be cast down by one’s own inadequacies. The bright and humid warmth of the weather makes a contrast to my sluggish, unfocused mind. I worry that I’m lazy, or somehow broken: that the difficulty concentrating, or deciding between tasks, is permanent.

But I have walls to paint and bookshelves to move and dishes to wash, so I suppose I should not repine.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

— Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”