Derek Mahon: Quotations

See Eamonn Grennan, ‘Derek Mahon: The Art of Poetry’, No. 82 [interview],
in The Paris Review, 154 (Spring 2000) - as attached.

Poetry

“In Carrowdore Churchyard” (at the grave of Louis MacNeice): ‘Your ashes will not stir, even on this high ground, / However the wind tugs, the headstones shake. / This plot is consecrated for your sake, / To what lies in the future tense. You lie / Past tension now, and spring comes round / Igniting flowers on the peninsula. // … // The ironical, loving crush of roses against snow, / Each fragile, solving ambiguity. So / From the pneumonia of the ditch, from the ague / Of the blind poet and the bombed out town you bring / The all-clear to the empty holes of spring, / Rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new.’ (Selected Poems, OUP 1991, p.11; see full text, infra.)

“Glengormley”: ‘Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man / Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge, / And grasped the principle of the watering can. // Clothes-pegs litter the window-ledge / And the long ships lie in clover; washing lines / Share out white linen over the chalk thanes. // Now we are safe from monsters and the giants / Who tore up sods twelve miles by six / And hurled them out to sea to become islands / Can worry us no more. // Only words hurt now. No saint or hero, / Landing at night from the conspiring seas / Brings dangerous tokens to a new era - / Their sad names linger in the histories. / The unreconciled, in their metaphysical pain, / Dangle from the lamp-posts in the dawn rain; // And much dies with them. I should rather praise / A worldly time under this worldly sky - / the terrier taming, garden-watering days / Those heroes pictured as they struggled through / the quick noose of their finite being. By / Necessity, if not choice, I live here too.’ Selected Poems, p.12; Collected Poems, Gallery Press 1999, p.14;)

Note that Seamus Heaney takes the phrase ‘The unreconciled in their metaphysical pain’ [no punct.] as a text in his remarks on Mahon in ‘Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland’ in Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan 1996), p.135 [see supra.])

“After the Titanic” [i.m. Bruce Imlay]: ‘They said I got away in a boat / And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you / I sank as far that night as any / Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water / I turned to ice to hear my costly / Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of / Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches, / Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide / In a lonely house [...] Include me in your lamentations.’ (Collected Poems, Gallery Press 1999, p.15.) [Note: Bruce Ismay, the speaker in the poem, was chairman and managing director of the White Star Line. (For full version, see Selection - as attached.]

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“Rage for Order” (in Lives, 1972): ‘Somewhere beyond / The scorched gable end / And the burnt-out / Buses there is a poet indulging his / Wretched rage for order - // Or not, as the / Case may be, for his / Is a dying art, / An eddy of semantic scruple / In an unstructurable sea. // He is far / from his people, / And the fitful glare / of his high window is as / Nothing to our scattered glass. // His posture is / Grandiloquent and / Deprecating, like this, / His diet ashes / His talk of justice and mother // The rhetorical device of a Claudian emperor - / Nero if you prefer, / No mother there; / And this in the face of love, death, and the wages of the poor. // If he is silent / It is the silence / Of enforced humility, / If anxious to be heard / It is the anxiety of a last word / [22] / When the drums start - / For his is a dying art. / Now watch me / As I make history, / Watch as I tear down // To build up / With a desparate love, / Knowing it cannot be / Long now till I have need of his / Germinal ironies.’ (pp.22-23; Collected Poems, Gallery Press 1999, pp.47-48.)

“Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Massachusetts” (for Eamon Grennan): ‘A dream of limestone in sea light / Where gulls have placed their perfect prints. / Reflection in that final sky / Shames vision into simple sight: / Into pure sense, experience. // Atlantic leagues away tonight, / Conceived beyond such innocence, / I clutch the memory still, and I / Have measured everything with it since.’ (Poems 1963-1978, p.27; rep. in Selected Poems, 25; Collected Poems, p.29; quoted in William Wilson ‘A Theoptic Eye: Derek Mahon and The Hunt by Night’, in Éire-Ireland, 25, 4, 1990, p.123.)

“Lives” (ded. ‘for Seamus Heaney’): ‘First time out / I was a torc of gold [... // ....] It all seems a little unreal now, Now that I am // An anthropologist [...] I know to much / To be anything any more; And if in the distant // Future someone / Thinks he has once been me / As I am today, // Let him revise / His insolent ontology / Or teach himself to pray.’ (Lives; rep. Selected Poems, 1991, p.38ff.; Collected Poems, pp.44-46; see full text, attached.)

“Beyond Howth Head” - for Jeremy Lewis (1970): ‘The wind that blows these words to you / bangs nightly off the black-and-blue / Atlantic, hammering in its haste / dark doors of the declining west / whose rock-built houses year by year / collapse, whose children disappear / (no homespun cottage industries’ / embroidered cloths will patch up these // lost townlands on the crumbling shores / of Europe); shivers the dim stars / in rainwater, and spins a single / garage sign behind the shingle. / Fresh from Long Island or Cape Cod / night music finds the lightning rod / of young girls coming from a dance / (you thumbs a lift and takes your chance) [...]’ (Lives, London: Faber 1972; rep. in Selected Poems 1962-1978, OUP 1979, pp.44-49; Collected Poems, Gallery Press 1999, pp.52-57; see full text, attached.)

“The Last of the Fire Kings”: ‘I want to be / Like the man who descends / At two milk churns // With a bulging string bag and vanishes / Where the lane turns / or the man / Who drops at night / From a moving train // And strikes out over the fields / Where fireflies glow / Not knowing a word of the language, // ... I am through with history ... I shall break with tradition and // die by my own hand / Rather than peretuate / The barbarous cycle. [...].’

“The Last of the Fire Kings׆
I want to be Like the man who descends At two milk churns With a bulging String bag and vanishes Where the lane turns, Or the man Who drops at night From a moving train And strikes out over the fields Where fireflies glow Not knowing a word for the language. Either way, I am Through with history - Who lives by the sword Dies by the sword. Last of the fire kings, I shall Break with tradition and Die by my own hand Rather than perpetuate The barbarous cycle. Five years I have reigned During which time I have lain awake each night.	And prowled by day In the sacred grove For fear of the usurper, Perfecting my cold dream Of a place out of time, A palace of porcelain Where the frugivorous Inheritors recline In their rich fabrics Far from the sea. But the fire-loving People, rightly perhaps, Will not countenance this, Demanding that I inhabit, Like them, a world of Sirens, bin-lids And bricked-up windows - Not to release them From the ancient curse But to die their creature and be thankful. [1979]
Rep. in Collected Poems (1999); available at Troubles Archive - online; accessed 29.01.1972.

“A Refusal To Mourn”: ‘I’m not long for this world,’ / Said he on our last evening, / “I’ll not last the winter,’ / And grinned, straining to hear / Whatever reply I made; / And died the following year. // In time the astringent rain / Of those parts will clean / The words from his gravestone / In the crowded cemetery / That overlooks the sea / And his name be mud once again // And his boilers lie like tombs / In the mud of the sea bed / Till the next ice age comes / And the earth he inherited / Is gone like Neanderthal Man / And no records remain. // But the secret bred in the bone / On the dawn strand survives / In other times and lives, / Persisting for the unborn / Like a claw-print in concrete / After the bird has flown.’ (For full version, see attached.)

“Everything Is Going to Be All Right”: ‘How should I not be glad to contemplate / the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window / and a high tide reflected on the ceiling? / There will be dying, there will be dying, / but there is no need to go into that. / The poems flow from the hand unbidden / and the hidden source is the watchful heart. / The sun rises in spite of everything / and the far cities are beautiful and bright. / I lie here in a riot of sunlight / watching the day break and the clouds flying. / Everything is going to be all right.’ (?Sea at Winter, 1979; rep. in Poems 1962-1978, OUP 1979.)

See Robert Hass discusses Mahon’s ‘Everything Is Going to Be All Right’, in “Poet’s Choice” [column], Washington Post (19 April 1998) - available online [accessed 20.10.1999]; also Paul Muldoon, ‘Covid comfort’ in The Irish Times (23 Nov. 2021) - as infra. Note: Mahon read “Everything Is Going to Be All Right” on RTÉ on the day of Covid Lock-Down on 27 March 2020 - see the YouTube online; accessed 25.10.2020. The YouTube was posted as part of the NY Times obituary of Mahon by Neil Genzlinger on 2 Oct. 2002.

“Dawn at St. Patrick’s”: ‘I sit on my Protestant bed, a make-believe existentialist, / And stare at the clouds of unknowing. We style, / as best we may, our private destiny.’ […] ‘Light and sane / I shall walk down to the train, / Into that world whose sanity we know, / Like Swift, to be a fiction and a show.’ (Selected Poems, 1991; Collected Poems, 1999, pp.105-06.) [For full version, see attached.]

“Afterlives” (for James Simmons): ‘[...] What middle-class shits we are / To imagine for one second / That our privileged ideals / Are divine wisdom, and that the dim / Forms that kneel at noon / In the city not ourselves’ [...]. But the hills are still the same / Grey-blue above Belfast. / Perhaps if I’d stayed behind / And lived it bomb by bomb / I might have grown up at last / And learn what is meant by home.’ (Coll. Poems, pp.58-59; and see variants, under Notes, infra.)

“Penshurst Place” [on Sir Philip Sidney]

The bright drop quivering on a thorn in the rich silence after rain, lute music in the orchard aisles, the paths ablaze with daffodils, intrigue and venery in the air à l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the iron hand and the velvet glove — come live with me and be my love. A pearl face, numinously bright, shining in silence of the night, a muffled crash of smouldering logs, bad dreams of courtiers and of dogs, the Spanish ships around Kinsale, the screech-owl and the nightingale, the falcon and the turtle dove — come live with me and be my love.

—In Their Element (NI Arts Council 1977; Selected Poems (1991)

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“The Snow Party” (‘for Louis Asekoff’): ‘Basho, coming. / To the city of Nagoya / Is asked to a snow party. // There is a tinkling of china / And tea into china; / There are introductions. // Then everyone / Crowds to the window / To watch the falling snow. // ... // Elsewhere they are burning heretics / In the boiling squares, // Thousands have died since dawn in the service of barbarous kings; // But there is silence in the houses of Nagoya / And the hills of Ise.’ (From The Snow Party, OUP 1975; rep. in In Their Element: Seamus Heaney & Derek Mahon, NI Arts Council 1977; Selected Poems, 1991, p.57; quoted in part in Maurice Harmon, ‘The Centre Holds’, ABEI Newsletter, No. 10, Jan. 1996, p.14; see full text, attached.)

The Hudson Letter (1995): ‘So take us where we set out long ago, / The magic garden in the lost domain, the vigilant lamplight glimpsed / through teeming rain, / the house, the stove in kitchen, the warm bed, / the hearth, vrai lieu, ranged crockery overhead - // “felicitous space” lost to the tribes.’ ( pp.75-77.)

“Ovid in Tomis”: ‘What coarse god / Was the gearbox in the rain / Beside the road? // What neireid the unsinkable / Coca-Cola / Knocking the icy rocks? / They stare me out / With the chaste gravity / And feral Pride // Of noble savages / Set down / On an alien shore.’ (Quoted in Alan Wall, ‘Derek Mahon’s Emblem Books’, in Agenda, 33, No.3-4 (1996), pp.165-75.)

“A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” [Stanza 2:] ‘Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, / Among the bathtubs and washbasins / A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. / This is the one star in their firmament / or frames a star within a star. / What should they do there but desire? / So many rhododendrons / With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud, / They have learnt patience and silence / Listening to the rooks querulous in the high woods’ [...] [Stanza 6:] ‘They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, / To do something, to speak on their behalf / Or at least not to close the door again. / Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii! / “Save us, save use,” they seem to say, / “Let the god not abandon us / Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. / We too had our lives to live. / You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary, / Let not our naive labours have been in vain!”’ (End; rep. in Selected Poems, pp.62-63; Collected Poems, pp.89-90; for full text see attached.)

“The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush”: ‘Before the first visitor comes the spring / Softening the sharp air of the coast / In time for the first ‘invasion’. / Today the place is as it might have been, / Gentle and almost hospitable. A girl / Strides past the Northern Counties Hotel, / Light-footed, swinging a book-bag, / And the doors that were shut all winter / Against the north wind and the sea mist / Lie open to the street, where one / By one the gulls go window-shopping // And an old wolfhound dozes in the sun.While I sit with my paper and prawn chow mein / Under a framed photograph of Hong Kong / The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant / Stands at the door as if the world were young, / Watching the first yacht hoist a sail / - An ideogram on sea-cloud - and the light / Of heaven upon the mountain of Donegal; / And whistles a little tune, dreaming of home.’ (Selected Poems, p.99.)

“Courtyards in Delft”: ‘Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile / Immaculate masonry, and everywhere that / Water tap, that broom and wooden pail / To keep it so. House-proud, the wives / Of artisans pursue their thrifty lives / Among scrubbed yards, modest but adequate. / Foliage is sparse, and clings. No breeze / Ruffles the trim composure of those trees. // [...] I lived there as a boy and know the coal / Glittering in its shed, late-afternoon / Lambency informing the deal table, / The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon. / I must be lying low in a room there, / A strange child with a taste for verse, / While my hard-nosed companions dream of fire / And sword upon parched veldt and fields of rain-swept gorse.’ (End; in Hunt by Night, 1982; Collected Poems, 1999, pp.105-06; see full text, attached.)

“Tractatus” (for Aidan Higgins): ‘The world is everything that is the case’ / From the fly giving up in the coal-shed / To the Winged Victory of Samothrace. / Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God / Who hides, shame-facedly, His agèd face; / Whose light retires behind its veil of cloud. // The world, though, is also so much more / Everything that is the case imaginatively. / Tacitus believed manners could hear / The sun sinking into the western sea; / And who would question that titanic roar, / The steam rising wherever the edge may be?’ (Hunt by Night, 1982; rep. in Selected Poems, 1991, p.135; Collected Poems, 1999, p.120.)

“A Garage in Co. Cork”: ‘[...] Like a frontier store-front in an old western / It might have nothing behind it but thin air, / Building materials, fruit boxes, scrap iron, / Dust-laden shrubs and coils of rusty wire, / A cabbage-white fluttering in the sodden / Silence of an untended kitchen garden -/ Nirvana! But the cracked panes reveal a dark / Interior echoing with the cries of children. / Here in this quiet corner of Co. Cork / A family ate, slept, and watched the rain / Dance clean and cobalt the exhausted grit / So that the mind shrank from the glare of it. / Where did they go? South Boston? Cricklewood? / [...] Left to itself, the functional will cast / A death-bed glow of picturesque abandon. / The intact antiquities of the recent past, / Dropped from the retail catalogues, return / To the materials that gave rise to them / And shine with a late sacramental gleam. [...]’. (Hunt by Night, 1982; Collected Poems, 1996, pp.130-31; see full text, attached.)

“The Globe in Carolina”: ‘[...] Out in the void and staring hard / At the dim stone where we were reared, / Great mother, now the gods have gone / We place our faith in you alone, / Inverting the procedures which / Knelt us to things beyond our reach. / Drop of the ocean, may your salt / Astringency redeem our fault! // Veined marble, if we only knew, / In practice as in theory, true / Redemption lies not in the thrust / Of action only, but the trust / We place in our peripheral / Night garden in the glory-hole / Of space, a home from home, and what / Devotion we can bring to it! [...] Listening to that lonesome whistle blow ...’ (End; Collected Poems, pp.143-44; see full text, infra.)

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“Achill” [ im chaonaí uaigneach nach mór go bhfeicim an lá.] ‘I lie and imagine a first light gleam in the bay / After one more night of erosion and nearer the grave, / Then stand and gaze from the window at break of day / As a shearwater skims the ridge of an incoming wave; / And I think of my son a dolphin in the Aegean , / A sprite among sails knife-bright in a seasonal wind, / And wish he were here where currachs walk on the ocean / To ease with his talk the solitude locked in my mind. // I sit on a stone after lunch and consider the glow / Of the sun through mist, a pearl bulb containèdly fierce; / A rain-shower darkens the schist for a minute or so / Then it drifts away and the sloe-black patches disperse. / Croagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water / And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art / And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover, / Wild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart. // The young sit smoking and laughing on the bridge at evening / Like birds on a telephone pole or notes on a score. / A tin whistle squeals in the parlour, once more it is raining, / Turf-smoke inclines and a wind whines under the door; / And I lie and imagine the lights going on in the harbor / Of white-housed Náousa, your clear definition at night, / And wish you were here to upstage my disconsolate labour / As I glance through a few thin pages and switch off the light.’ (Selected Poems, 1991, p.180.)

“Landscape” (Opening poem of The Yellow Book): ‘I shut the shutters and close the curtains tight / to build my faerie palaces in the night / and dream of love and gardens, blue resorts, / white fountains weeping into marble courts, / birds chirping day and night, whatever notion / excites the infantile imagination [...] Rattling the window with its riotous squabble / no mob distracts me from my writing-table - / for here I am, up to my usual tricks - / evoking spring-time on the least pretext, / extracting sunlight as my whims require, / my thoughts blazing for want of a real fire.’ (Quoted in Jefferson Holdridge, ‘Night-Rule: Decadence and Sublimity in Derek Mahon from The Yellow Book to the “Italian Poems”;, in Journal of Irish Studies [IASIL-Japan], 2002, p.53.) See DM’s remarks: ‘My soul landscape is Irish, and there’s no getting away from that. When I start to slowing down I’ll come back to it.’ (Interview with Terence Brown in Brown, Northern Voices, 1975, p.211. Note Brown’ remarks: ‘the problems of confused identity can partially be solved in an identification with Irish landscape’, p.210.)

“Smoke”: ‘Autumn in Dublin; safe home from New York, / I climb as directed to our proper dark, / five flights without a lift up to the old / gloom we used to love, and the old cold. / Head in the clouds, but tired of verse, I fold / away my wind-harp and dejection odes / and mute the volume on the familiar phone / (‘... leave your number; speak after the tone’) / to concentrate on pipe-dreams and smoke-clouds.’ (The Yellow Book, 1997, p.44.) Note, Jefferson Holdridge comments: ‘Mahon is self-consciously climbing to Yeats’s proper dark of subjective idealism; a post-romantic concentrating on “pipe-dreams and smoke-clouds.”’ (‘Night-Rule: Decadence and Sublimity in Derek Mahon from The Yellow Book to the ‘Italian Poems’, in Journal of Irish Studies, 2002, p.61.)

“Night and Day”: ‘These images will persist until life cease, / exploding like the sulphurous candlelight / which showed us clearly what was taking place, / pre-coital fever and post-coital peace / consensual chiaroscuro and thumping heart.’ (Quoted in Jefferson Holdridge, op. cit. 2002, p.63.)

“McPeace & Mickey Mouse”: ‘Not long from barbarism to decadence, not far / from liberal republic to defoliant empire / and thence to entropy; not long before / the pharaonic scam begins its long decine / to pot-holed roads and unfinished construction sites.’ (Quoted in Jefferson Holdridge, op. cit., 2002, p.51.)

“Death in Bangor”: ‘We stand - not many of us - in a new cemetery / on a cold hillside in the north of Co. Down / staring at an open grave or out to sea, / the lough half-hidden by great drifts of rain. / Only a few months since you were snug at home / in a bungalow glow, keeping provincial time / in the chimney corner, News-Letter and Woman’s Own / on your knee, wool-gathering by Plato’s firelight, / a grudging flicker of flame on anthracite. / Inactive since your husband died,your chief / concern the ‘appearances’ that ruled your life / in a neighbourhood of bay windows and stiff / gardens shivering in the salt sea air, / the rising-sun motif on door and gate, / you knew the secret history of needlework, / bread-bin and laundry basket awash with light, / the straight-backed chairs, the madly chiming clock. / The figure in the Republic returns to the cave, / a Dutch interior where cloud-shadows move, / to examine the intimate spaces, chest and drawer, / the lavender in the linen, the savings book, / the kitchen table silent with nobody there. / Shall we say the patience of an angel? / No, not unless angels be thought anxious too / and God knows you had reason to be; / for yours was an anxious time of nylon and bakelite, / market-driven hysteria on every fretwork radio, / your frantic kitsch decor designed for you / by thick industrialists and twisted ministers (‘Nature’s a bad example to simple folk’); / and yet with your wise monkeys and euphemistic ‘Dresden’ figurines, / your junk chinoiserie and coy pastoral scenes, / you too were a kind of artist, a reage-for-order freak / seting against a man’s aesthetic of cars and golf / you ornaments and other breakable stuff. [...]’; ‘... Little soul, the body’s guest and companion, / this is a cold epitaph from your only son, / the wish genuine if the tone ambiguous. / Oh, I can love you now tht you’re dead and gone / to the many mansions in your mother’s house. / All artifice stripped away, we give you bck to nature / but something of you, perhaps the incurable ache / of art, goes with me as I travel south / past misty drumlins, shining lanes to the shore, / above the Mournes a final helicopter, / sun-showers and rainbows all the way through Louth, / cottages buried deep in ivy and rhondodendron, / ranch houses, dusty palms, blue skies of the republic ... (The Yellow Book, 1997, p.51-53; END).]

“The Seaside Cemetery”, a version of “Le Cimetière marin” by Paul Valèry [first & last of 25 stanzas]: ‘A tranquil surface where a spinnaker moves / flickers among the pines, among the graves;/objective noon films with its fiery gaze / a shifting sea, drifters like pecking doves,/and my reward for thought is a long gaze / down the blue silence of the celestial groves [...] [T]he wind rises: it’s time to start. A stiff breeze / opens and shuts the notebook on my knees / and powdery waves explode among the rocks / flashing; fly off, then, my sun-dazzled pages / and break, waves, break up with ecstatic surges / this shifting surface where the spinnaker flocks!’ [End] (Times Literary Supplement, 7 Sept. 2001, p.23.)

“Shapes and Shadows” (after a painting by William Scott): ‘The kitchens would grow bright / in blue frames; outside, still / harbour and silent cottages / from a time of shortages, / shapes deft and tranquil, / black kettle and black pot. // Too much the known structures / those simple manufactures / communion of frying pans, / skinny beans and spoons, / colander and fish-slice / in a polished interior space. // But tension of hand and heart / abstracted the growing art / to a dissonant design / and a fat dream of paint, / on the grim basic plan / a thick white pigment / knifed and scrubbed, in one / corner a boiling brown / agony of mahogany, / behind which there loom / ghosts of colour and form, / furniture, function, body - // as if to announce the death / of preconception and myth / and start again on the fresh / first morning of the world / with snow, ash, whitewash, / limestone, mother-of-pearl, / top-of-the-milk cream, / bleach, paper, soap and foam / to find in the nitty-gritty / of surfaces and utensils / the shadow of a presence, / a long-sought community.’ (from A Conversation Piece, ed. Adrian Rice & Angela Reid, National Museum & Galleries of N. Ireland [2002]; rep. in The Irish Times, Weekend, 29 June 2002.)

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“Calypso”: ‘Homer was wrong, she never “ceased to please”. / once he’d escaped from Circe’s magic castle, / the toxic bowl, shape-shifting witcheries; / from the underworld, from Aeolus’ watery roar, / the high-pitched Sirens’ penetrating whistle, / cliff monsters, divine anger, broken boats, / on soft, tinkling shingle he crept ashore / through juniper and parsley, cows and goats, / and found the hot path to her open door, / a cart parked in the lane, a smoking fire. // Gaily distracting him from his chief design / she welcomed him with open arm, and thighs, / teaching alternatives to War and Power. / A wild girl rushing to the head like wine, / she held him fiercely with her braided coils, / her swift insistence, aromatic oils, / her mild, beguiling glance, tuning his days / to a slow sea-rhYthm; and through a salty haze / he watched her moving as in a golden shower / or swimming with her nymphs from the sea-shore. // Ithaca, “home”, not far now as the kite flew, / he sniffed those evenings when a sea-wind blew / but lingered in her cool cave behind the dunes / enchanted by those hazel and sea-grey eyes, / the star-flow of the hair, the skittish tones, / sand-quivering foam long leisure, lip and gland / in the early-morning light, the sun ablaze / through leaves and linen, through her open hand, / bramble and cumuli; / so the years unwound / in a whisper of spring water and kitchen noise. // He spent his days there in a perpetual summer // Stuck in a rock-cleft like a beachcomber / washed up, high and dry amid luminous spray, / intent on pond life, wilflower and wind-play, / the immense significance of a skittering ant, / a dolphin-leap or a plunging cormorant, / he learned to live at peace with violent nature, / calm under the skies’ grumbling cloud-furniture / and bored by practical tackle, iron and grease - / an ex-king and the first philosopher in Greece. // Bemused with his straw hat and driftwood stick, / unmoved by the new wars and the new ships, / he died there, fame and vigour in eclipse, / listening to voices echo, decks and crates / creak in the harbour like tectonic plates - / or was he sharp still in his blithe disgrace, / deliberate pilot of his own cloudy shipwreck? / Homer was wrong, he never made it back; or, / if he did, spent many a curious night hour / still questioning that strange, oracular face.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 29 Nov. 2002, p. 13.)

“Lucretius on Clouds” (De Rerum Natura 6, 451-523): ‘Clouds take shape in the blue sky and gather / where flying bodies get tangled up together; / tiny clouds are borne along by breezes / till the moment when a stronger current rises. / Hills, for instance: the higher up the peak / the more industriously they seem to smoke; / wind blows these wisps on to the mountain tops / while they are still vague, evanescent strips / and there, heaped up in greater quantity, / they reveal themselves as a visible entity / trailing from snowy summits into the ether, / the empyrean spaces torn by wind and weather. [...]’ (Times Literary Supplement, 11 March 2005; first and last stanzas - for full text, see infra.)

“The Cloud Ceiling”: ‘An ocean-drop, dash in the dark, flash in the brain, / suspension in the red mist, in the light-grain, / a twitching silence in the hiding place, / fine pearly night-glow of the forming face, / the pushing brow, the twirling cars and knees ... / Space-girl, soap on a rope, you like cloud-swing, / bath-water and world music; a kidney bean, / you lie there dreaming on your knotted string / listening hard with shut, determined eyes / a soul of barely determinate shape and size. [...] I who, though soft-hearted, always admired / granite and blackthorn and the verse hard-wired, / tingle and flow like January thaw-water / in contemplation of this rosy daughter. / Be patient with an old bloke; remember later / one who, in his own strange, distracted youth / awoke to the cold stars for the harsh truth, / now tilts a bottle to your open mouth. / So drench the nappies; fluff, bubble and burp: / I probably won’t be here when you’ve grown up.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 11 March 2005; first and last stanzas - for full text, see infra.)

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“Research”: ‘An actual conch / Like a human head on its side, / Washed up and left here by the ebb tide, / a magigal-sculpture, perfectly arbitrary, / lies as if dropped from orbit. / Oh, they will launch // research to find / ice in the Sea of Rains, / a first dubious twitch of mud and plants, / signs of life on the other planets, / whispers of inchoate mind / and flickering brains. // Meanwhile on Earth / we’ve mud, plants, pleasure, pain/ and even real livies to be getting on with; / seasons for this and that, the works and days / of many mice and men / as Hesiod says. // Best to ignore / “the great ocean of truth”, / the undiscovered seas of outer space, / and research this real unconscious conch on the shore with its polished, archaic face / and its air of myth.’ (From Life on Earth; Gallery Press; printed [in advance of publication] in The Irish Times, 4 Oct. 2008, Weekend.)

“America Deserta”: ‘Not long from barbarism to decadence, not far / from liberal republic to defoliant empire / and thence to entropy; not long before / the great money scam begins its long decline / to pot-holed roads and unfinished construction sites, / as in the dark ages a few scattered lights – / though it’s only right and proper we set down / that in our time New York was a lot of fun.’ (Quoted in Gerald Dawe, ‘So much going on it could make a soul dizzy’, review of New Collected Poems, in The Irish Times, 2 July 2011, Weekend Review, p.11 [given as “American Deserta”].)

“Dirigibles”: ‘We who used to drift / superbly in mid-air, / each a giant airship /before “the last war”, // shrink to a soft / buzz / about financial centres / surprising visitors, / hackers and bean counters / in cloud-flown highrises. // Cloud-slow, we snoop for hours / on open-plan offices / and cloudy cocktail bars. [...]’ (For full text version, see attached.)

“Monochrome”: ‘The coat an uncle bought you as a girl - / tweed by the look of it, in a fifties style, / your blonde hair unfinicky and natural / lying in short waves round the hidden ears. / You’re prematurely wise for eighteen years: / that level gaze, and that reserved smile! [...] But don’t mind me, for the important fact is this, that you were once uniquely here, / a brief exposure, an exceptional act / performed once only in our slower lives / with your blue gaze and your longer hair / now ash for ever in the long sea waves. (For full text version, see attached.)

“To Mrs. Moore at Inishannon”: ‘[..] here I am / at last, install’d amid the kitchenware / in a fine house a short step from Washington Square. / Protestants, mind you, and a bit serious / much like the Bandon sort, not fun like us, / the older children too big for their britches / tho’ Sam, the 4-yr.-old, has me in stitches: / in any case, the whole country is under age. [...] Eagles and bugles! Curious their simple faith / that stars and stripes are all of life and death - as if Earth’s centre lay in Central Park / when we both know it runs thro’ Co. Cork. [...] yr loving daughter, / - Bridget Moore.’ (1987; rep. in The Flight Path, ed. Maurice Hayes [The American Ireland Fund] Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 19 June 1996, pp.68-69; p.69.)

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From Against the Clock (2018) - in The New Yorker (Aug. 2018)

Posted by Cormac Kinsella on Facebook (28.08.2018) See note on "fanatical existence" under Notes - infra.]

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Prose

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‘MacNeice in England and Ireland’: ‘[...] There is a belief, prevalent since the time of Thomas Davis, that Irish poetry, to be Irish, must somehow express the National Aspirations; and MacNeice’s failure to do so (the National Aspirations, after all, include patriotic graft and pious baloney) is one of the reasons for his final exclusion from the charmed circle, known and feared the world over, of Irish Poets. “A tourist in his own country”, it has been said, with the implication that this is somehow discreditable. But of what sensitive person is the same not true? The phrase might stand, indeed, as an epitaph for Modern Man, beside Camus’s “He made love and read the newspapers”.’ (In Terence Brown & Alec Reid, eds., Time was Away 1974; quoted in Hugh Haughton, ‘“Even now there are places where a thought might grow”: Places and Displacement in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, ed. Neil Corcoran, 1992, p.88).

‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, Twentieth Century Studies, 4 (Nov. 1970): ‘Like Ireland itself (and I intend no sneer), the “Irish” poet is either unwilling or unable to come to terms with “the twentieth century”. This begs at least one question, of course, and in any case one cannot prescribe for poets what they should write about or how; but to the extent that the Northern poet, surrounded as he is by the Greek gifts of modern industry and what Ferlinghetti called “the hollering monsters of the imagination of disaster”, shares an ecology with the technological societies his rulers are so anxious to imitate, he must, to be true to his imagination, insist upon a different court of appeal from that which sits in the South.’ (p.91; quoted in Hugh Haughton, op. cit., p.89.) [Cont.]

‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’ (in Twentieth Century Studies, 1970): ‘The war I mean is not, of course, between Protestant and Catholic but between the fluidity of a possible life [...] and the rigor mortis of archaic postures, political and cultural. The poets themselves have taken no part in political events, but they have contributed to that possible life, or the possibility of that possible life; for the act of writing is itself political in the fullest sense. A good poem is a paradigm of good politics - of people talking to each other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level. It is a light to lighten the darkness; and we have darkness enough, God knows, for a long time.’ (Quoted in Elmer Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, London: Macmillan 1996, p.17; also [in part] in on back cover of Gerald Dawe, ed., The New Younger Irish Poets, Blackstaff 1982.)

Northern literary tradition: ‘[T]here is not a Northern tradition in any real sense, merely a number of individual talents’. (The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry, 1972, p.20.)

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Philip Hobsbaum ‘[T]he Hobsbaum seminar [at QUB] was probably first to crystallise the sense of a new Northern poetry. Here was this man from London, people thought, whose name and whose friends’ names appeared in leading journals, and he’s actually taking us seriously. Hobsbaum’s own verse was not greatly admired but his enthusiasm generated activity in people who might otherwise have silent; [...] a natural affinity between two pretty tatty industrial areas, helped to bring alive the poetic possibilities of this “armpit of Europe”.’ (Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’ Twentieth Century Studies, No. 4 (Nov. 1970), p.91; cited in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, 1975, 171-72).

Further: ‘only went once and didn’t like it. Too Leavisite and too contentious, intolerant. Philip was a good-hearted ruffian really, but I didn’t understand his opinions. Much guff has been talked and published about the Group; in fact it had little influence, certainly not on me. I think the Belfast crowd (whom I saw during vacations) went along for something to do; but anyone who was any good went their own way.’ (Interview with William Scammell, Poetry Review, 81, 2, Summer 1991, p.4; cited in Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, p.18); Note: Longley comments that Seamus Heaney can be ‘seen as generalising from his own experience’ rather than accurate recall when he counts Mahon in this group. [op. cit., 1994, p.20; and see note on ‘a common misconception’, infra]. (See also under Notes - supra.)

Sense of Place: ‘Seamus is very sure of his place; I’ve never been sure of mine. My home landscape, and here I mean North Antrim where I spent most of my childhood holidays, and not Belfast where I was born, figures largely in my poems. Aside from these poems the place that the poetry occupies is not a geographical location; it’s a community of imagined readership. / Some of my poems don’t take place anywhere in particular, others take place quite specifically, in Co. Wexford, or Northern Antrim.’ (‘Each Poem for me is a New Beginning’, interview with Willie Kelly, Cork Review, 2, 1981, p.11; cited in Joris Duytschaever, ‘History in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, in History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. Duytschaever & Geert Lernout [Conference of 9 April 1986; Costerus Ser. Vol. 71] (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988), pp.97-109; p.103.

Southern states (on Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, et al.): ‘because they created a curious little focus of poetry in a place that was generally disliked, rightly disliked, in the States’ ‘morally ambiguous situation [gave rise to] tremendous poetry.’ (See ‘Harriet Cooke talks to the Poet Derek Mahon’, in The Irish Times, 17 Jan. 1973, p.10; quoted in Kathleen Shields, ‘Derek Mahon’s Poetry of Belonging’, in Irish University Review, 24, 1, 1994, 67-79.)

‘Metaphysical unease’: ‘Their assumptions and credulities were those of the Irish country people of the time: and the Irish, for many years, returned the poets’ reverence with reverence for a poetry which evaded the metaphysical unease in which all poetry of lasting value has its source.’ (Sphere Book of Irish Poetry, Intro., p.12; cited in John Byrne, ‘Derek Mahon: A Commitment to Change’, in Crane Bag [‘James Joyce and the Arts in Ireland’], Vol. 6, No. 1 (1982), pp.62-72, p.62.

John Hewitt - ‘An Honest Ulsterman’, review of Ancestral Voices: Selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed. Tom Clyde, in The Irish Times (2 Jan. 1988) - quotes Hewitt as follows: ‘He must be a rooted man. [...]" - and offers a comment: ‘This is a bit tough on thistledown; and, speaking as a twig in a stream, I feel there’s a certain harshness, a dogmatism, at work there. What of the free-floating imagination, Keats’s “negative capability”, Yeats’s “lonely impulse of delight[”]?’ (Rep. in Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995, Dublin: Gallery Press 1996, pp.92-94; p.94; see longer extract under Hewitt, supra.)

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Religious nature? ‘I don’t think I have a religious nature in that sense but I have a consciousness of things over and above, beside and below human life. I am deprived of belief in God, if deprivation it is, by my own rationalist habits of mind [...] I make room for the numinious, for the unexplained.’ (Maurice Harmon, review of Elmer Andrews, The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2002, in Books Ireland, Feb. 2003, quoting uncited source from essay by Gerald Dawe.)

Northern Troubles: ‘I think probably there were things that I should have come to terms with, researched, looked into, looked at, but I didn ‘t. At that time, Protestants like James Simmons, Michael Longley, myself could think that this was not our quarrel - our peculiar upbringing as middle-class, grammar-school-educated, liberal, ironical Protestants allowed us to think of ourselves as somehow not implicated. I told myself that I had more important things to do. Which were going to London, getting on with my own literary career as I had now started to conceive of it, marrying Doreen, getting myself together, discovering a sense of purpose. And writing directly about those conditions in the North was not part of that purpose. One of the damnable things about it was that you couldn’t take sides. You couldn’t take sides. In a kind of way, I still can ‘t. It’s possible for me to write about the dead of Treblinka and Pompeii - included in that are the dead of Dungiven and Magherafelt. But I’ve never been able to write directly about it. In Crane Bag they’d call it “colonial aphasia.” Perhaps, in fact, that’s what it is. I was not prepared for what happened. What happened was that myself and all of our generation (particularly in the North) were presented with a horror, something that demanded our serious, grown-up attention. But, as I say, I was not able to deal with it directly.’ [Cf., “Afterlives”: “Perhaps if I’d stayed behind / And lived it bomb by bomb / I might have grown up at last / And learnt what is meant by home” - quoted by Grennan in the interview.]

Eamonn Grennan, ‘Derek Mahon: The Art of Poetry, No. 82”, in The Paris Review, 154 (Spring 2000)

[On his religious belief]: I believe in the words, and in the tunes. I’ve never seriously asked myself the question, Do you believe in God? I believe in the words and the tunes; that’s quite enough for me. As a child, I suppose I brought the same kind of apprehension to these things as to other phenomena: we were singing from sheet music, hymnals, anthologies of hymns, with the music written out and the verses underneath. For example, let’s take a verse like this (I won’t try to sing, it’d only be embarrassing): “From Earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast, / Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host, / Singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost: / Hallelujah, Hallelujah!” / Very imperialistic, “From Earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast.” But the way this was printed in the hymnal was important to me: it was under the music, far-thest, so somehow I created a whole geography of my own, around ocean’s far-thest, as it were far-flung, coasts. The words themselves became facts, objects; and I believed in those objects, those clumped printed objects.

[...]

[On his Trinity education:] It’s hard for me to say, but I suppose it must have a lot to do with it, because those words would describe the environment at Trinity when I was there; probably it’s how a contemporary undergraduate there would describe it today. That is the mode, not only the conversational mode, the mode of discourse, but it’s also the mode of composition, of imaginative discourse. It’s the tone of voice. Of course, there was a struggle going on within myself at the time. It took me a long time to get hold of anything I could begin to think of as being my own voice, with the struggle going on between a surly Belfast working-class thing and something, to use your word, debonair. The flaneurs I couldn’t help but admire and envy, also on the written page: the way that some of the students had that at their fingertips. So there was a clash in me between the one and the other, which Eavan Boland was very conscious of in her poem “Belfast vs. Dublin.” Those things more or less came together at a later stage, maybe ten years later - those two kinds of rhetoric were able to negotiate with each other and come together in a single voice. In putting together the Selected Poems I tried to manufacture belatedly a homogeneous voice, but, in fact, in those early poems there’d be one man on one page and a totally different person on the next page. To my ear anyway.

[...]

[On the Northern Irish Troubles]: I felt very far from home in those years. (In fact, for a large part of my life I’ve been terrified of home.) I think that this has a great deal to do with what started happening in Northern Ireland in 1968, 1969 - how it took me by surprise. I’d been away from it for a bit, not too long, but I was still close enough to it to get burned inside. (I’m thinking of the marches, of Burntollet, and so on.) I was horrified, and I didn’t go up there after a certain point. No, that’s not true. I would go up to Belfast from time to time, right up to 1970. In some sense (this may sound very phony) it was almost as if the things that were happening up there were happening literally to me. I felt “beaten-up.” I wonder if others felt the same. I felt that I had been guilty of something that I wasn’t aware of. Although I’ve never been a motorist, I felt as perhaps a hit-and-run driver must feel when he wakes up the next morning. It was extremely upsetting, especially when the death toll started mounting. I couldn’t deal with it. I could only develop a kind of contempt for what I felt was the barbarism, on both sides. But I knew the Protestant side; I knew them inside out. I was one of them, and perhaps I couldn’t bear to look at my own face among them. So I adopted a “plague on both your houses” attitude.

[On the Northern Irish Troubles.] writing directly about those conditions in the North was not part of that purpose. One of the damnable things about it was that you couldn’t take sides. You couldn’t take sides. In a kind of way, I still can ‘t. It’s possible for me to write about the dead of Treblinka and Pompeii - included in that are the dead of Dungiven and Magherafelt. But I’ve never been able to write directly about it. In Crane Bag they’d call it “colonial aphasia.” Perhaps, in fact, that’s what it is. I was not prepared for what happened. What happened was that myself and all of our generation (particularly in the North) were presented with a horror, something that demanded our serious, grown-up attention. But, as I say, I was not able to deal with it directly.

[...]

[On the Northern Troubles:] I think probably there were things that I should have come to terms with, researched, looked into, looked at, but I didn ‘t. At that time, Protestants like James Simmons, Michael Longley, myself could think that this was not our quarrel - our peculiar upbringing as middle-class, grammar-school-educated, liberal, ironical Protestants allowed us to think of ourselves as somehow not implicated. I told myself that I had more important things to do. Which were going to London, getting on with my own literary career as I had now started to conceive of it, marrying Doreen, getting myself together, discovering a sense of purpose. And writing directly about those conditions in the North was not part of that purpose. One of the damnable things about it was that you couldn’t take sides. You couldn’t take sides. In a kind of way, I still can ‘t. It’s possible for me to write about the dead of Treblinka and Pompeii - included in that are the dead of Dungiven and Magherafelt. But I’ve never been able to write directly about it. In Crane Bag they’d call it “colonial aphasia.” Perhaps, in fact, that’s what it is. I was not prepared for what happened. What happened was that myself and all of our generation (particularly in the North) were presented with a horror, something that demanded our serious, grown-up attention. But, as I say, I was not able to deal with it directly.

[...]

[On poetic form:] Well, there’s no point in beating about the bush. After many years of beating about the bush, the fact is, I am an out-and-out traditionalist. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it’s going to stay. I find that certain poets want to express certain things, want to be truthful about their emotions, about the nature of the world as they understand it, about the changing nature of society, about their instincts and their opinions. They are full of liberal intentions, they are admirable people; but they are not poets, not to me they’re not. They’re writing free verse (I suppose you would still call it) - without any specific talent for poetry - to express themselves, to deliver narrative, to state opinions. But they are not doing the thing that poetry does, as far as I’m concerned. Formally, that is. I remember talking to Richard Pevear about this, and the three principles that we found ourselves agreeing on were soul, song, and formal necessity - the Coleridgean sense of formal necessity that the poem should “contain within itself the reason why it is thus and not otherwise.”

[On poetry & brain activity:] Well, it’s all about love, really. This also connects with something that I’m not allowed to do anymore, which is drink. I used to drink a lot. There was a certain kind of consciousness - false consciousness, no doubt, especially the morning-after lucidity, which I thought of as being a kind of revelation. I think there are various points in the Selected Poems where that moment is touched upon. I suppose it must be, it must have been, akin to what is considered to be a religious experience - I’m talking about the apparent suspension of time, the transcendence of bother and the quotidian, the sense that life is long and life is full, the sense that if we are here to perceive anything it is this kind of perception that is particularly intended. The surrounding chaos is the stuff that keeps you awake at night in lower Manhattan. For me, the revelation that came the morning after came as a formal thing - the morning after, mind you, since the clarity of drunkenness itself, as is well known, is a complete chimera. A “systematic derangement of the senses.” I think Rimbaud was well acquainted with what we’re talking about, and gave it the kind of weight that I’m giving it here. For me it has a great deal to do, it had a great deal to do, with a certain bohemian way of being - living at a certain angle to life, spending quite a lot of time having the brain active, having the senses active at certain times of day and night when other people are asleep or out at work. I think that way of life can help the creative. I don’t think that’s bohemian sensibility; I think there’s truth to it. Before the bohemian clichés, there were bohemians who were originals. There is an original bohemian idea to which I still have an attachment, despite all the nonsense that has been said and done in its name.

[On the poet’s audience:] If we’re going to talk about solitude and community, we’re going to have to talk about non-belonging, about marriage, about homelessness. All these themes are subject matter for me just at the moment, which have as their origin the way I shut myself off from my family, from my family origins. Not entirely: I still see my mother once a year. But, at the age of eighteen or so, when I left home to go to Trinity, I wasn’t just going on to college; I actually was leaving one life altogether and stepping into another. Throughout my teens I had a sense of the immediate community - extended family, the neighborhood and so on - but I felt that there was something terribly amiss and lacking and skewed about this whole carry-on. It seems a very insufficient community. The question in the back of my mind all the time was, Is this all? Is this it? Is this life? These people, this place? In fact, of course, looking back on it now, there’s a lot more vividness in actuality about both the people and the place than, at the time, in my intolerance, I was able to appreciate. A mistake Heaney has never made. But I was an odd fish. Heaney was part of his community growing up - part of the extended family and society - but I found the nature of that society intensely repressive, neurotic.

—Eamonn Grennan, ‘Derek Mahon: The Art of Poetry”, in The Paris Review (Spring 2000) - see copy as attached.)

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Trinity College (1) ‘There was a particular kind of community there, a unique community involving certain very vivid characters: Alec Reid, Con Leventhal, Owen Sheehy Skeffington. These were both teachers and friends. The professor of English then was Phillip Edwards. Phillip was English, a nice man, but much more inspiring was a reprobate like Alec Reid or a humanly interesting person like Con Leventhal. We grew up in a very pleasant way. Physically the surroundings were extremely attractive. Beautiful college, beautiful trees, beautiful girls: wherever you fell there was something to please. At the same time, it was a place apart - golden days, golden moments.’ (See Eamonn Grennan, ‘Derek Mahon: The Art of Poetry”, No. 82 [Interview], in The Paris Review, Spring 2000; available online; see also copy, as attached.)

Trinity College (2): ‘... conspicuous sobriety was frowned upon. Nor, contrary to tradition, was it us natives who were the most dedicated practioners (though we kept abreast) but the Sloane Rangers, the tough fops with silk scarves and snarling red two-seaters. This lot, public-school men who weren’t bright enough for Oxford or Cambridge, and posh gels not tall enough for the Brigade of Guards, created noise out of all proportion to their numbers, bawling “Charles!” and “Miranda!”, Brideshead style, and revving their little roadsters. But you know all this. / What you may not know is that some are still in circulation ... / Trinity, in those days, wasn’t much about work, though quite a lot of reading got done. The word meant different things. To the question, “What are you reading?” one might have replied, depending on context, “Honours Maths”, “the racing page”, or even, in exceptional circumstances, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The old circular Reading Room, presided over by the good-natured Harry Bovanizer (the name of eighteenth-century Rhenish-Palatine origin), seemed as much a social focus as a locus of serious study. Packed to the doors like a fashionable restaurant, it was used partly as a pick-up joint. Girls dressed up then to go into College, the cobbles playing hell with their high heels. Men dressed up too, sort of, except for slobs like myself who wore the same sweater and jeans for four years. Front Square was like a Dior catwalk and the two sexes sat in the Reading Room with blurry volumes before them, sizing up the talent out of the corners of their eyes. The air crackled with sexual electricity.’ (From Trinity Tales, given as an extract in Trinity Today, Oct. 2009, p.27.)

In praise of typewriters: ‘[...] “Ineluctable modality of the visible ... Signatures of all things I am here to read” - Joyce. But high tech introduces, if we let it, a cognitive dissonance between subject and object. / Rewired for electronic information, blinded by science, we’re in danger of losing touch with primary experience; the unmediated sea wrack on the strand is even stranger to us than it was to Joyce. Whatever the dire economic and social consequences of the “digital revolution”, and they are many, it’s the commodification of thought that’s most alarming, that and the robotic invigilation; but there’s nothing “ineluctable” about it. / Olympia and I commune with each other in private. I post and receive unopened mail - letters, you know: it can still be done - and nobody taps my phone as far as I know (why would they?). A friend in New York took one or two Arabic lessons before a trip to Dubai, so maybe they tap his: who knows? “Just because you’re paranoid,” as Delmore Schwartz said, “doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you”. Sure they are, they want everyone in the system. / In the US I’ve been reproached, impatiently even, for not being online, as if this was a serious solecism. To engage with the topic at all is to play an insidious game. It’s not neuroscience, much though it claims to be (the ghost eludes the machine), nor is it the new way of thinking and being that the system likes to pretend. / The brief space age is over, at least for now; and the internet too will implode in time if not properly regulated: an old model of production masquerading as new. Its infinite magic is mostly commercial hype, a recreational mysticism for ever breaking down. It has its uses of course, and might even help reactivate the radical politics we left behind with the typewriters. Olympia agrees. She doesn’t do hegemony or coercion, preferring her own slow pace and modest achievements; and she can boast a distinguished cultural provenance. [...]’ (See full-text copy - as attached.)

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