To realise that you are but fragments, that the short and the longer and the longest of times are nothing but fragments … that the lifespans of cities and of countries are nothing but fragments … and the earth a fragment … that development in its entirety is a fragment … that perfection cannot be … that fragments came about, that they continue to come about … no road to travel, only to arrive … that the end is without consciousness … that then nothing can be without you and that thus nothing can be …
Those people who die without having known their illness, their mortal ilnesses … life would then be unbearable…
The stream has frozen over, the spring has frozen over, the summer has frozen over, the winter has frozen over, people, animals, sensations, everything … that spoken word that just shuts the world off …
Continue reading ‘From Amras, by Thomas Bernhard’
Six months ago, in January, I was lying in bed with the flu when I looked out the window and saw cows on a roof. There were two, black-and-white, painted on the side of a water tank of a Georgian building across the canal and a few houses up. They were facing each other. One’s head was lowered to the other. How funny! I thought. Who’d bother painting cows on their roof? You can’t even see them from street-level. I smiled. Crazy neighbours, I thought. I sneezed. I picked up the novel I was reading. My spirits were uplifted by the thought of eccentric people living in close proximity. I got on with recovery.
This sunny June morning, I’ve noticed them again. I woke up with a stomach ache and decided to stay in bed. I’ve had plenty of opportunity to contemplate the cows since January, but the fact that the trees have come into full leaf obscures them from easy sight. Plus, I rush to get ready in the mornings. In the evenings I don’t spend time in my bedroom until sundown.
Continue reading ‘On riots, blackouts, and customs officials’
You – seen from here – are a deeply flawed person; you know this, and so do your friends; in fact, they frequently discuss your flaws behind your back.
When you die, they will not discuss these flaws, which will have been transmuted into virtues (“Vlad, you know, was so passionate, so … resourceful”).
Your enemy knew you best; were he allowed to deliver your eulogy, he’d speak without the stutters of the newly bereaved; he’d speak you well, float you along in your coffin on a fast stream of articulate bile. Your coffin would wear away. Your body would topple out. Your suit would rip on jagged rocks.
Continue reading ‘Words for my dear departed self’
Artist’s note: I returned to Dublin in early 2006 and got a job with a large engineering firm. At first, I wasn’t supplied with a computer and I hadn’t been assigned to a project – so I sat at an empty desk for about two months. I had been contributing weekly cartoons to The Scotsman, part-time, for two years previous to this; but they finished with my services. So I started this series of cartoons; there are seventeen in all. They are purposefully crude, quick and sparse ink drawings, on pages of printed text.
Continue reading ‘Office greeting cards’
After a visit to the impressive library at St Gallen in Switzerland, one of the most famous monastic libraries in the world, I walk into the St Gallen Cathedral. The cathedral is so opulent, so gilded; I realise I can’t stand Baroque architecture.
I light a candle and try to pray. I don’t know how. I can’t find spiritual feeling inside myself.
I remember something Cioran wrote in his notebooks, after a visit from an orthodox poet: What right have you to pray for me? I need no intercessor, I shall manage alone. The prayers of a wretch I might accept, but no one else’s, not even a saint’s. I cannot bear you bothering about my salvation. If I apprehend salvation and flee it, your prayers are merely an indiscretion.
Continue reading ‘Some thoughts on the impersonal eternal’
The doctor prescribed tranquilisers. I had gone into the surgery with a severe stomach ache, but I was stressed, not suicidal. He looked at me with contempt and resentment. He was wearing a dirty yellow shirt that made him look seedy and somewhat depraved, like he might have a job on the side as a porn actor.
“I don’t think it’s that serious a problem,” I said.
I thought it might have had something to do with having newly returned to London. I was living in a bed-sit the size and shape of a ship’s cabin, kitchen included, and was unemployed. I was twenty-six years old with a degree in history from Cambridge University.
Continue reading ‘How a Cambridge man makes an Egg McMuffin’
In the early hours of June 28, 2009, the Irish writer Julian Gough wrote on his blog: “I was crossing Torstrasse about an hour ago, round midnight, and I thought I saw Johnny Massacre coming across the road towards me.”
It would have been a miraculous sighting. Gough lived in Galway, as Johnny Massacre did during the last days of his life, in the summer of 2003. It was a decent summer by Irish standards, dryer than most. I lived there as well then, though I knew neither of them. Most people would spend six months in Galway and learn the star sign of everyone in town, but I clung to a shyness then that I hoped was aura. The closest I came to meeting Johnny Massacre was passing him at the top of Eyre Square one overcast weekday afternoon, lugging a giant suitcase. He looked world-weary.
Continue reading ‘The death of Johnny Massacre’
Brooding clouds in the sky over Compañía Street. A street like a flexed arm, but the blow never arrives. I wandered into Víctor Jara’s bookshop, undefiled, but possessed by the Dionysian spirit. It was just what I was waiting for, just what my life needed: a hint of inebriation, a touch of madness, action. I wanted risk in every movement, knowing that in Greek, to seduce also means to destroy. I sought destruction. I made my way to the poetry section and stopped beside a volume by Pascoli. Take from each thing the smile and the tear, says Pascoli. I closed this book and took another, something more du jour, from Michaux: Man needs a landscape within which to rage. And then another, from the poet Alberto Santamaría: When I came down, I hardly knew where my body led me. Half beaten and exhausted from these truths I took down a book from Calasso: The Dionysian phallus is a hallucinogen, we know nothing of the fidelity to cultivation and only copulate in the wild woods. Finally I tired of poetry’s instruction. I heaped all the books onto a funeral mound fancying that by osmosis Pascoli would be Michaux, and Michaux Calasso, and vice-versa: Santamaría Pascoli, and Michaux Santamaría and like this agitating all the poetry until it formed a single compendium of verse that would say everything and then I thought: now that I have read these books I need to live some of what they say.
Continue reading ‘A natural history of instantaneous seduction, by Víctor Balcells Matas’
Artist’s note: The installation Estranged Relations was inspired by the an area of Swedish bourgeois villas, in Helsinki, that had been left in ruin since the 1940s, called Kruununvuori. The piece consists of an assemblage of materials collected from the site, combined with a photo of a hallway, melted together with a projected still image, blurring the lines of representation.
(Images follow)
Continue reading ‘Estranged Relations’
Recently, I was walking down Nassau street and I saw a blind woman, with a stick, walking in front of me, very quickly, in the same direction. She had bashed into several people who were waiting for buses and looking the other way. After she collided with the fourth person, I walked up to her and offered her my arm. She took it and the two of us walked, still very quickly, up around the front of Trinity College Dublin and toward D’Olier street. She was on her way to work and basically knew which direction she was going in. I mentioned, as we approached D’Olier street, that the old Irish Times building was progressing well with its renovations. She said that she had never known that the building was there.
I worked as a structural engineer for some years in Scotland and Ireland. On one particular project I received geotechnical information from a two-acre site just outside Edinburgh. The information was in the form of borehole data. These boreholes determine the nature of the soil, from the surface to, usually, a depth of about twenty or thirty metres. This borehole information provided me with the nature of the different types of strata of material and at what depth these strata occured. I was looking at the black boulder clay stratum.
Continue reading ‘Shapes I understand’
