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’
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’
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’
In November 1962 my father made my mother leave the marital home, 257 Cannon Hill Lane, a mock-Tudor semi in the south London suburb of Morden. I was eight, my brother, Sasha, six, and my father forty-eight.
Over the following months my father became highly irritable, very quarrelsome, and his sleep pattern went to pot. Now he wrote through the night, went to bed around seven in the morning, got up about four in the afternoon, and resumed work on his plays and novels at seven or eight in the evening.
One evening, he called us to the kitchen. He’d made one of his standard suppers, brown toast, mashed sardines and a sliced tomato. The plates were on the breakfast counter and there were three of them. He was eating with us, which usually he never did. He must be in a good mood, I decided.
Continue reading ‘The good and the bad brother’
Through the summer months I take my dog on a speedy early morning walk to the sea. I do it in the hope it will ease his incarceration in our small back yard while I am at work. Most mornings I meet a grey-haired woman who arrives to the shore dressed in layers of rain gear and wellingtons. She sits herself in an alcove by the water to perform her toilette and brings to her sea shore boudoir a small stool on which to sit while her shopping trolley serves as her dressing table. She uses a large golf umbrella to curtain her ablutions. I battle with the desire to watch. I once discovered my dog and herself with heads bowed in silent and serious contemplation of a satsuma which lay on the boundary of her space. I called the dog away.
One morning among the rocks, I found an orange t-shirt and a pair of brilliantly white underpants. I looked towards the sea and wondered if a body had been swallowed by the waves. Maybe it was just a late night swim. In case someone came looking, I left them to dry on the rocks. Moments later the woman arrived. She looked to the sea. Then she carried the clothes to her trolley.
Continue reading ‘On discarded shells’
During the summer, I completed a new literary translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for Dublin’s Second Age Theatre Company. As far as I am aware, the last Irish person to translate Ibsen into English was James Joyce. Thus I stand on hallowed ground and bow my head in deference to these two giants.
Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House signalled a seismic artistic shift, not only in the history of theatre, but also in the world of literary and political discourse. The first ever production of A Doll’s House was staged in Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre in December 1879, and when, at the end of the play, Nora Helmer quietly closed the gate on her old life as an apparently solidly bourgeois and respectable housewife, nothing would ever be the same again. The uproar that followed was comparable to the Abbey’s first staging of Playboy of the Western World, except that it was more geographically widespread.
I was recently at a dinner party in a posh part of Dublin, and I raised the issue of Ibsen being an out-and-out rebel. “Do you,” asked a woman who set her fork with emphasis down on her plate, “believe in the due process of law?” “No,” I replied flatly. Of course I believed in the need for law, but laws were invariably used by a ruling class to suppress all the classes beneath them. This was lost in the howl of outrage coming at me from across the pasta. When things calmed down, I explained further. I cited three writers in my defence: Euripides, Henrik Ibsen and Stieg Larsson.
Continue reading ‘Ibsen the incendiary, unrepentant, insurgent humanist’
I’ve been away a lot with work this last month. When I’m away on my own, I catch up on my reading and, like everyone in unfamiliar places, I look around me more. One evening in Galway a few weeks ago, I was in the hotel bar, ready to have dinner and perhaps a drink or two before bed. I had a new book with me: Max Blecher’s Scarred Hearts.
Max Blecher, a Romanian, died in 1938. He was twenty-nine years old. When he was twenty-seven years old and dying of tuberculosis of the spine, otherwise known as Pott’s Disease, he wrote to his friend Mihail Sebastian:
“I tell myself that Jules Renard died in 1911. At a distance, death becomes so inconsequential. I just have to imagine that I too died a long time ago, in 1911. I’m not scared of death. Then I’ll rest and sleep. Ah, how well I’ll stretch out, how well I’ll sleep! Listen, I’ve begun to write a novel. But I don’t feel that I absolutely must complete it. If I die first, I don’t think I’ll even regret not having finished it. What a minor thing literature is for me, and how little of my time it takes up!”
Continue reading ‘Reading Max Blecher’
