Poetry # 2

• The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Charles Baudelaire to Anne Carson. Jeremy Noel Tod

  https://genius.com/Charles-baudelaire-the-bad-glazier-annotated

• I wake up with the name Claudia Rankine in my head. I rarely remember dreams, but sometimes names or lyrics survive sleep. Later on in the day, I learn that it is World Poetry Day. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/play/76906

• The Voice at 3am Charles Simic

  I read Charles Simic’s The Voice at 3am. Selected Late and New Poems. It was strange to read this book and never become immersed in its strange world. It would be akin to being immersed in a hedge.

  Helen Vendler:

  He (Simic) has written that in its essence, “a lyric poem is about time stopped. Language moves in time, but the lyric impulse is vertical.”

  The poems are like self-developing Polaroids, in which a scene, gradually assembling itself out of unexplained images, suddenly clicks into a recognizable whole.

  I don’t recognise the sudden clicking into a recognizable whole. Instead I feel the strangeness is eventually accommodated on its own terms. Like the piece of wrack that arrives on the shore, it’s a fragment and through its endurance it insists upon becoming a whole.

  Edited by my limited attention.

Published Bits

https://speakerscornerdublin.blogspot.com/

https://adiarts.ie/artists/showcasing/meet-an-artist/martin-sharry/

Martin Sharry is a theatre maker and poet based between Galway and Dublin. Martin received an Arts and Disability Connect Mentoring award in 2020.

Tell us about your art.
I am interested in theatre’s capacity to hold space for people. I believe in the spiritual potential of the live event. This can be discovered through clownish action and poetic storytelling. Either way you must acknowledge the enabling limitations of the form.

Where are you based? Inis Oirr, Aran Islands and sometimes Dublin.

What are you working on at the moment?
I’m developing a piece that started as On / Off, a work-in-progress staged in Project Arts Centre, 2019. It’s inspired by the cycle of Parkinson’s symptoms. I want to open it up to wider questions of identity in the context of theatre. I’m thinking of it as breaking up with performance. It’s not me, it’s me.

Confidence in the project is fragile due to the ongoing pandemic. There is a constant question over whether performance will be able to happen. Hopefully, all going well, it should be staged later in 2021.

Can you tell us a little bit about your career path as an artist? How did you get to where you are now?
I was unhappily studying English and Folklore Studies in 2007 as a mature student in University College Cork, then one day I dared myself to audition for a course – Elements of Theatre Practice with Regina Crowley. I survived my incessant inner critic and found room for something else.

Then in 2008, the Masters in Drama and Theatre Studies in National University of Ireland, Galway was practical and encouraged collaboration. That year’s class formed an ensemble, we were interested in innovating and devising original work. I learned about theatre practitioners that shared a certain aesthetic that resonated with my interests – New York City Players, Pan Pan and Tim Crouch. They admit a certain irony in the name of truth, they play closer to the edge. Irish reviewers dismiss this as ‘postdramatic’- they notice the breaking of the fourth wall and the indulgent testing of tradition. It’s like they want to cover up the trembling, naked emperor. Maybe they shop at the same store. I guess I have a problem with authority.

Together with Richard Walsh and Zita Monaghan, we formed Side-Show Productions in Galway. We brought Dreams of Love to the Dublin Fringe Festival, 2011. Then in 2012 we produced King Alfred: A Mystery Play – inspired by MGM’s movie filmed in Galway in 1968. We were interested in making experimental performance ‘before’ an audience as opposed to ‘for’ an audience. We embraced awkwardness and exhausted spectacle. There was great craic and camaraderie in amateur theatrics, I was saved from academia.

In 2012 I wrote and performed I Am Martin Sharry in Solstice, Cork and the Dublin Fringe Festival. This was my first solo show. The Dublin Fringe Festival proved to be a home from home, for my work and the inspiring work of fellow artists. Also, Project Arts Centre has been an important resource and support for my somewhat aborted career. It was there in 2010 that I saw the revelation of Richard Maxwell’s People Without History. The performance leaves space for the audience’s imagination, the poetry of the words, the way people stood and carried their bodies, how attention was guided- all combined to open something up new. I was buzzing all the way back to the island.

I availed of opportunities such as MAKE in Annaghmakerrig, The Next Stage programme at Dublin Theatre Festival and the Pan Pan International Mentorship with Tim Crouch. From 2017 to 2018, I was part of the Six In The Attic development programme at the Irish Theatre Institute and continue to benefit from being part of that community.

I’m interested in live art and was lucky enough to perform in Live Collision 2014 and exhibited work in Tulca in Galway, 2016.

If you have been a recipient of an Arts and Disability Connect Award, how has this impacted your career path as an artist?
I received an Arts and Disability Connect Mentoring award to work on poems with the mentorship of Jessica Traynor. This experience provided perspective to evaluate what is important in writing. To honour a persistent live impulse rather than worry about the future. I’ve harboured hopes of publishing poems from a young age but failed to discipline a habit. The deadlines of theatre are more concrete than those of poetry. Throw myself on stage before a few human beings for enough minutes and you have a performance. Keep their attention sufficiently occupied and you might get three stars. However as Paul Muldoon notes, poems have a much higher pressure per square inch. Punctuation’s impact is pronounced, which is apt as I feel more punctuation than statement, these days.

Conversing with Jessica and considering the potential of poems has boosted my confidence. I’ve always been rather tentative with my writings but her treatment and insight have given hope that they might have a life as objects in the world, rather than remain as private scribblings. I also appreciate the responsibility to find the appropriate accommodation for said poems. When you achieve relative success in your chosen field there’s an automatic expectation to continue with that momentum. Poetry offers a viable alternative to completely giving up.

Are there any standout moments in your career as an artist?
I walked out of a performance of Running + Walking in the Phoenix Park, which I wrote and directed in 2018. That was a big regret. The show was poorly reviewed, had low audience numbers and I had just attended a networking event where you’re expected to sell a show to people who have no interest in what you have to say. Which is fine if you have full health. A lesson learnt, get going again.

I was awarded Highly Commended Poem in Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, 2014.

Writing and directing Playboyz in the Dublin Theatre Festival, 2017.

Overall, the joy of shared creativity is the main thing. Being in the room with talented human beings dedicated to designing an ephemeral experience, in the hope of rendering a few moments of communion or beauty.

Who or what are the most important influences on your art?
Mike Diskin, only a few weeks left to live, giving us a bollocking for our lack of promotion for a show in the Town Hall Theatre Studio, Galway. Róise Goan, Cian O’Brien, Willie White, Lynnette Moran, NUI Galway, Irish Theatre Institute and The Arts Council.

I seem to be concerned with bearing witness to disregarded things. I feel the conditions for empathy are being constantly eroded. There is an overkill of information together with a slow kettling through economic pressures that desensitize and facilitates a drift towards unfeeling politics. The conditions of the theatre and event inform how I play with a subject. With the backdrop of Ireland’s housing crisis, the act of spending time in a building might say more than any rehearsed arguments about freedom. Although, in spite of being conscious of the wider context, I do enjoy the lovely exclusivity of being in a theatre, watching a show where your focus is rewarded.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
(1) I was 33 and asserting myself with the show I Am Martin Sharry, when I was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s. It was initially dismissed as a benign tremor in my right index finger. The subsequent shows were affected, particularly when I tried to direct work. You have enough energy to appear as if you’re not affected then you’re floored until you’re back in the next day. The cognitive deterioration and the sudden instant exhaustion is more limiting than the more obvious physical symptoms. There is less time to be creative and there is less capacity to do it. It’s frustrating trying to describe the frustration!

Lately I struggle to read which is a big loss. So I turn, slowly, to poems and graphic novels such as Rusty Brown by Chris Ware. This limitation inspired the project with Jessica and poetry – to find ways to manage my minimal attention more efficiently. I think of Matisse’s Snail.

(2) I suppose it took 26 years to overcome shyness.

Who is your favourite artist?
As part of the Arts and Disability Connect Mentoring award I maintained a blog on poetry. I read Czeslaw Milosz A Book of Luminous Things, that’s my favourite anthology of poems.

Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson, Geoff Dyer, Ben Lerner for writing. Ozu and Marc Isaacs in film. Steve Reich, Cate Le Bon in music.

What do you like to do for fun?
I walk to the shore and photograph wrack*, if I’m lucky.

*a remnant of something destroyed that washed up on the shore.

Biography
In 2008 Martin completed a Masters in Drama and Theatre Studies in NUI, Galway. Since then he has been involved with creating live events, setting people opposite people in real time. He is interested in questions of presence. There is the sense in which presence allows ‘integration’, as Dr Dan Siegel explores There is also the contrasting of liveness with mediation. And there is the foregrounding of disregarded subjects.

The latter has included disconnected family members that share the same name in I Am Martin Sharry. The play dealt with the downside of the Aran Islands’ idealised authenticity. His aesthetic is informed by the conditions of the theatre and the event. He is interested in the form’s shared finitude and the capacity to hold some space in this mass mediated world.

He writes, he directs and he performs. In 2012 he was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s Disease. This degenerative condition has increasingly limited his creative ability. He is getting slower and the work is less frequent. The most recent thing was a project funded by the Arts Council’s Covid Funding. He wrote and recorded a story, read by Shane Connolly, title Head Home. This project will be ongoing.

There was a great symposium hosted by the ever brilliant people of the Irish Theatre Institute.

Here's a link to a text which includes my contribution amongst others. It's free to download:

https://www.irishtheatreinstitute.ie/news/launch-of-what-is-a-play-publication/

MARTIN SHARRY

PLAYOGRAPHYIreland’s 20TH ANNIVERSARY PUBLICATION.

I haven’t the wherewithal to harness an argument in order to overhaul any inherited ideas. Instead, I offer a loose assemblage of associating

thoughts, provoked by the question and invitation. Bruce Naumann declared that art was anything that he made in his shed. I enjoy

the freedom in his definition and I appreciate the work enabled by such liberation. A play is bound by the terms and conditions of its construction.

People in space/time. (people/space/time?) A play is what survives of theatre. The porous fourth wall distracts us from seeing all the other walls, floors,

and ceilings. The overhead and bottom-lines are front and centre in shaping a culture in which plays are received.

A robin keeps flying into the window, the new double glazed one into the kitchen. I worry about the unintentional self-harm, it repeats and I get angry

at its stupidity. I search Google, it appears that the male sees his reflection in the window and thinks it is a rival trying to usurp his territory. He flies

at the window to try and make the rival leave. I relax.

Dr Daniel J. Siegel talks of ‘presence’ that allows integration. Being with trauma and not over-identifying with your story. Without presence and

integration everything is like soup. The state of being present and being able to integrate difficult things that happened, is likened to salad. A play ca

create the conditions to go some way towards this nutritious reversal.

A play is shared finitude. It involves the coordination of implicit and explicit agreements. Situation and behaviour. We are conscious of the limits in

expression and language. There is space around things. Time happens. Things end. Thank God. Negative Capability, end of.

This distance offers potential relief from the official commissions andhe perpetual deniability. And better still, it seems to be an ideal forum

for interrogating accountability. I’m reminded of Vicky Phelan identifying ‘accountability, action and change’ as missing from political culture. All

advertised as possible ingredients for a play. These stories only process emotion and might soothe an annoyed conscience.

Stories sell plays. There are online classes that teach people the right moment and way to laugh when watching plays by Beckett. A play is a good place

for walking backwards à la Diogenes. This ticks the box for immeasurable outcomeson funding applications. Plays are laughably pathetic in their effort

to simulate reality. This can be used for comedy or tragedy.

The play is the thing to catch a king. We’re a great little country. A play can reveal the lies we tell ourselves. Professor Timothy Snyder, speaking on

Trump, says fascism wants to maintain the ‘big lie’. In relation to the Mother and Baby Homes Report, TD Catherine Connolly rejects the ‘prevailing

narrative (is) that we’re all in this together’. Perhaps some of us are in some play whereby we’ve been schooled into suspending disbelief. Occasionally

there are outbreaks of reason and justice. Plays are somatic, they are made of bodies in space, regardless of whether they open their mouth or not.

Play helps the brain to grow. Liveness is not guaranteed by being live.

Each morning a Blackbird sings in the garden. The postman arrives at about 11 o’clock, he comments on the weather, ‘it’s not too bad’. He brings the

same postcard from my brother, for five days in a row. He asks me if we’re actors in some play. I say no, but we might be characters. Have you seen your

man’s shed? Steve Bruce?

I want to liberate the process of a play from the pressure of market forces. Would Croke Park work without a sliotar or a football? Maybe reframing can

help reappropriate the play. John Cage defined music as the production of sound. This inspires the definition of a play as the production of community.

Where two or three are gathered in theatre’s name, theatre is among them

Poetry

Poetry # 1 Paul Durcan

I am starting a new project. To work towards a collection of poems worthy of publication. I have always written poetry, intermittently, over the years. When I was ten years old I wrote The Man With Ten Fingers And Just One Hand. I remember the exhilaration of writing it, the electricity. It was the work of a ten year old child but the charge I felt remains the same sought after feeling today. I had picked up Paul Durcan’s Jesus and Angela, intrigued by the cover, a series of stills from a roll of film showing the poet in various stances – thinking man to fist shaking passion. I settled upon a poem – The Woman Who Keeps Her Breasts In The Back Garden. It starts with an anonymous interviewer asking the question Why do you keep your breasts in the back garden? The woman responds Well it’s a male dominated society, isn’t it? .She then goes on to explain that she wants to avoid the ‘ballyhoo about breasts’ and controls how much ‘bosom gaping’ males get to do. She reveals she has other things on her mind such as Australia. To tell you the truth I think a great deal about Australia.

I didn’t know what to make of this, I was happily baffled. It was working away in the background and its meaning was discovered in my translation. The next day there was a story in the news about nuns that had died in a plane crash. Upon hearing this I immediately wrote the poem. The text included something along the lines of: the man with ten fingers and just one hand, can write and eat but cannot pray/ God has moved in a mysterious way. Durcan’s magic pedestrianism offered a tool to make sense of the world. It enabled my attempt to ‘hold justice and reality in the one thought'. All the time being ignorant of Yeat’s lofty equation for the poetic aim. I was ten and my family had just moved from a housing estate in North Dublin to Inishere of the Aran Islands. I spoke English, the second language on the two square miles of limestone rock, there were no forests or shopping centres or traffic lights even, it felt like a world away from where I’d come.

Now I’m going to try and engage with poetry for a sustained period of time. (while I can!) I frequently experience a distinct lack of alacrity, a dull slowness and creeping vagueness, this is a consequence of Parkinson’s. This can inhibit creativity but there moments where I can forget Parkinson's.

Poetry is a form of expression that might be more manageable than the

drama of theatre production. I’m not going to stop being a playwright but I hope to box clever and write some poems.

I look forward to working with poet/teacher/dramaturg Jessica Traynor in her role as mentor And I am grateful to Arts Disability Ireland and the Arts Council Ireland to support this relationship. Also I would like to thank Irish Theatre Institute in facilitating my application.

 http://adiarts.ie/news/

 Poetry #2

Paul Celan

Assisi

Again, the surprise of something that seems to bypass my conscious understanding yet lives happily ever after somewhere in the brain. This is twelve or thirteen years later and I’m in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway, always a great place to browse. I pick up a book Collected Poems By Paul Celan translated by Michael Hamburger. I’d never heard of either poets before. I flicked through and stopped at the poem Assisi, included below. I read it once and I was stunned. I couldn’t account for it. I tried some of his other poems but they didn’t even start to have the same effect.

Writing about this event automatically invites an analytical voice to justify the significance of the poem. It would naturally follow that I should trace the influences and identify the allusions beneath the text. Of course there is the horror of the Holocaust haunting his biography. But the joy of reading this poem survives intact without realising such consideration. At the same time I don’t want to just plonk it here.

What happened?

Firstly, props must be given to Michael Hamburger’s translation. I doubt you can improve something through translation, instead it’s far easier to desecrate the original. Especially if that something is as delicate and nuanced as Celan’s poem. I think Heaney said poetry happens before words happen or something to that effect. And I feel, albeit acknowledging my inability to verify, that Hamburger honours that early impulse of the poem.

The simple repetition is effective in creating a solemn mood and drives the poem down and in. The attached information is worked through to arrive at a new epigram which gives the impetus for the next round. Together they operate like the declension of some verb. Which in turn facilitates the impression of a grammar as opposed to a narrative. Its like the verb for the earth in the location of Assisi. This may or may not explain the profound impression this poem made. Altogether, I feel that a rare generous sensibility came through and still does to this day.

Assisi

Umbrian night.
Umbrian night with the silver of churchbell and olive leaf.
Umbrian night with the stone that you carried here.
Umbrian night with the stone.

Dumb, that which rose into life, dumb.
Refills the jugs, come.Earthenware jug.

Earthenware jug to which the potter’s hand grew affixed.
Earthenware jug which a shade’s hand closed for ever.
Earthenware jug with a shade’s seal.Stone, wherever you look, stone.
Let the grey animal in.

Trotting animal.
Trotting animal in the snow the nakedest hand scatters.
Trotting animal before the word that clicked shut.
Trotting animal that takes sleep from the feeding hand.

Brightness that will not comfort, brightness you shed.
Still they are begging, Francis – the dead.

Paul Celan reads his poem Assisi (1955).

Michael Hamburger translates:

 Poetry # 5

In writing this blog I’ve learned at least one thing: writing is better than not writing. It’s taken too long to be able to make that blindingly simple observation. I’ve spent most of the years and the few lives on offer, not writing. I suppose I had to learn how to suspend my own critic.

I’ve learnt another thing. Seamus Heaney and WB Yeats seem to be working away in the background. I see them as guides in helping to understand an art that I care about. Others might see them as perpetuators of patriarchy or worse. Sometimes the cyber security software slows things to a standstill. Why I remember their words is not because of their biogs.

My primary aim is not in critiquing poems, instead celebrate the fact that writing opens the potential for celebrating what is.

Existence is a function of relationship – Alan Watts

I’m interested in the way poems can come from somewhere bigger than the self.

I had wanted to write about ‘cut-through’. (Stares at the screen for minutes, mouth open) Just that sometimes I suspect that I don’t ‘get’ things, I otherwise would. But there’s no doubt about the impact of Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women. I ‘get’ things but the difficulty lies in the clear communication of such reception. But Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women makes an impression. Not a palpable impact. Rather a wholesale reorientation of the world.

A world is in fact the projection of meaningful patterns onto the surrounding space of lived experience, and the sharing of a common code whose key lies in the forms of life of the community itself - Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

Demystify inspiration. Is it Metoo time for the muse?

Garments Against Women made me want to watch less television.And I did.

My attention is compromised

Yeah but isn’t everyone’s?

Maybe but my attention isn’t what it used to be.

I know, I’m the same…

Fuck off and get Parkinson’s, then we can struggle to talk.

But I do have Parkinson’s

Do you?

Yeah, of course I do.

A law that exceeds the bounds of law

What is that law but poetry

Anne Boyer

For better, further reading:

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/poetry-after-poetry/

Poetry #6

A Book of Luminous Things. An international anthology of poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz

I should just award this anthology 5 stars and move on, especially since my hands are intent on non-compliance. But that great 'deadener' – habit, is stronger than disease, and my capacity for saying nothing of any consequence to no one, remains undiminished. I think back to the lucky audiences who’ve endured my presence and voicings for 50 or 60 minutes, and I’m proud to realise that they were ahead of their time. They intuitively practiced extreme social distancing. It’s easy to laugh, though not literally- my first speech therapy session is today.

I’ve been a fan of Czeslaw Milosz’ poetry for a while. Ted Hughes pointed me in his direction via Al Alvarez’s Faber Book of Modern European Poetry. With minimal knowledge of Milosz’ work and his compatriots Wislawa Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert, I was inspired to lurch towards a TEFL job in Poland. It turned out to be my first rehearsal in performing to a reluctant audience. I was the only person in a town of 70,000, that didn’t speak Polish, apart from a Canadian pastor who was evangelising through, and two Americans I witnessed one night at a karaoke. But I wasn't that desperate to break cover.

There were many tower blocks there and they were named after poets, I lived in Ul Konipickiej (she came second in the competition to write the Polish national anthem). I was holed up in a top floor flat reading The Captive Mind, mystified to what I was actually doing with my life. I soon found out that the students I tried to teach, were oblivious to the products of the poetic propaganda. What was I expecting? I honestly don’t know.

However, I was more confident that A Book of Luminous Things would deliver on its promise. And I was not disappointed. In the introduction he identifies science and technology as having caused a 'deprivation' that 'pollutes the natural world' as well as the 'imagination'.

The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colours, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time...Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot- if it is good poetry, look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated and exciting...poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.

In The Middle Of The Road – Carlos Drummond de Andrade

In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Never should I forget this event
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Translated- Elizabeth Bishop

Epiphany is an unveiling of reality...This poem is like a joke and we are inclined, first, to smile, yet a moment of thought suffices to restore a serious meaning to such an encounter. It is enough to live truly intensely our meeting with a thing to preserve it forever in our memory.

I always got the sense that Milosz knew more than other poets. That wisdom is revealed in the brief notes on selected poems. He values conciseness and simplicity. Through these qualities the poems achieve a certain register, a luminosity. And they, like the editor, persuade through their lack of strenuous persuasion. Which brings me back to speech therapy. My 'outside voice' is fading so I have to practice loudness. This makes me appreciate when someone else can see beyond the surface.

Going Blind – Rainer Maria Rilke

She sat just like the others at the table.
But on second glance, she seemed to hold her cup
a little differently as she picked it up.
She smiled once. It was almost painful.

And when they finished and it was time to stand
and slowly, as chance selected them, they left
and moved through many rooms (they talked and laughed),
I saw her. She was moving far behind

the others, absorbed, like someone who will soon
have to sing before a large assembly;
upon her eyes, which were radiant with joy,
light played as on the surface of a pool.

She followed slowly, taking a long time,
as though there were some obstacle in the way;
and yet: as though, once it was overcome,
she would be beyond all walking, and would fly.

Art That Mattered # 2.

2023

Jane Clarke - A Change in the Air - 2023

Tolka 2022/2023

Rachel Cusk - A spy - on seeing without been seen - Harper's Magazine - 2023

Nick Laird - Up Late - 2023

Jesse Darling - Turner Prize Winner - 2023

Billy Collins - Aimless Love - 2013

Victoria Chang - Obit -2020

Joe Dunthorne - O positive – 2019

2022

Kerri Ní Dochartaigh - Thin Places (2021)

Claire Keegan - Small Things Like These (2020)

Sally Rooney - Beautiful World Where Are You (2021)

Geoff Dyer - The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (2022)

Victoria Kennefick - Eat Or We Both Starve (2021)

Don Paterson - Arctic (2022)

Grace Dyas - A Mary Magdalene Experience. Rua Red (2022)

Darragh Mc Loughlin - Stories of Falling Objects. Áras Éanna (2022)

Atlanta - Donald Glover. (2016 - 2022)

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold Director - Martin Ritt, (1965)

2021

Áine Mc Bride – Mother’s Tankstation Limited and Douglas Hyde Gallery.

Hiwa K – Hugh Lane Gallery.

Checkout 19 - Claire Louise Bennett (2021)

The Second Place – Rachel Cusk (2021)

Constellations: Reflections From Life – Sinéad Gleeson (2019)

Jakob Von Gunten - Robert Walser (1909)

About Endlessness Roy Andersson (2019)

I was at home but… Angela Schanelec (2019)

Party Scene (Reflections on a Chemsex Crisis) Choreographer Philip Connaughton and

writer/director Phillip McMahon, THISISPOPBABY, Cork Midsummer Festival 15 June.

The Approach – Mark O’ Rowe, Landmark Productions in association with Project Arts Centre and St. Ann's Warehouse, 23 January.

Mental Health & Art

People keep on asking me: when am I going to list all the art and artists that have helped keep me sane? In light of the new Level 5 restrictions and the renewed concern for people's mental health, I cast my mind over the past when art has proved to be a positive intervention. True, it's no 'bleach on the lung' but it provides some help.

So here's a list:

Some of the art and artists that have helped preserve some mental health.

1. How I Got Over - Mahalia Jackson. The back and white grainy version on Youtube.

2. Samuel Beckett- From an Abandoned Work. Sitting in the Galway Library, opened a book at random and started reading. Lifted me right out of the dark.

3. Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Slave. I read this and I stopped gambling for 6 months. The book has nothing to do with gambling.

4. John Clare - I Am

5. Donal Dineen - No Disco. During the self-isolating teenage years.

6. Lola Gonzalez – Able and Elio. Temple Bar Gallery.2018.

7. Richard Maxwell and New York City Players.

8. Francis Alys. IMMA. 2010.

9. Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson, Deborah Levy, Penelope Fitzgerald.

10. Lars Laumann at Galway Arts Centre. 2009.

11. Catcher in the Rye, Catch 22, Catch by The Cure, ‘a catch in the breath…’

12. Geoff Dyer, Ben Lerner, Ismail Kadare.

13. Paul Celan - Assisi

14. Rosanna Cade. Walking: Holding. 2013.

15. Paul Muldoon.

16. Dublin Contemporary 2011, - Doug Fishbone- Elmina, Jonathan Grossmalerman etc

17. Anne Briggs

18. Anocha Suwichakornpon – By the Time it Gets Dark. 2016.

19. Artur Zmijewski, Blindly. 2010. *****

20. Ozu, Hou-Hsiao-Hsien, Hong Sang soo.

Blog 1.

Sticks +Stones

​​​Lecture Notes

​- Mary Harris

​Introduction

Thank you. 

Thanks for that warm, welcome and eh generous introduction.

I am honoured to return to my Alma  Mater. I remember being on the other side of this rostrum. Some things haven't changed. Monday mornings are hard enough, without this weather.

I don't want to conjure up opinions in order to orchestrate some phoney argument.

I want to create a character who really existed. A person who lived in a certain place in a certain time.  Someone, say, born on Inishmore, early in the twentieth century, 

A character to answer Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran. I think this place and time provides the best context to inaugurate such a figure. Maybe…to invoke the authority of the university.

I invent an artist who practices an aesthetic of ‘erasure and erosion’, who deliberately removes evidence of any action. Think of John Baldessari's Cremation Project or Michael Landy's Breakdown but without knowing what they did. If a tree doesn’t fall in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Or Thomas J.Price's work Licked, where he licked the walls of a gallery over three days, it was meant to be an invisible installation. Or did you see the invisible statues, by Salvatore Gurau, I don't know if that's the right pronunciation, one sold this year, for 18,000 dollars! 

An artist who may be more than one person, using a nom de plume. An artist I envisage as a sort of outsider performance artist, a 'Banksy' of the shoreline, only using chalk or lines in the sand. An artist who made ‘sculptures’ with seaweed, wrack or stones at low tide.

Theoretical – theatre both stem from the Greek thea: 'a view, a seeing, a seat in the theatre'.

Why? I'm compelled to counteract the mythologizing process because it sacrifices reality.

I am guided by Hans Thies Lehmann’ contrasting of media – representation versus theatre – representation, behaviour and situation. 

The Man of Aran is a film made by Robert Flaherty in 1934, on Inishmore. A fictional family of three photogenic islanders are recorded living a traditional peasant life. Men hunt a basking shark in a currach and people brave bad weather to eke out a subsistent existence eg making the soil from seaweed, sand and guano.

The leading man Colman ‘Tiger’ King, was tracked down and found to be labouring in Leeds, when asked his opinion of the film, he dismissed it as ‘all bullshit’. And George Stoney’s film The Making of a Myth shared a range of perspectives from the islanders. Stoney had worked with Flaherty on the original and failed to be completely objective. Stoney's own predecessors had hailed from the island.

The film is partly famous as an example of the questionable nature of a documentary’s claim to recording actuality.  I think of Werner Herzog who stated that there was no difference between documentary and fiction. Or more recently Marc Isaacs. Critics have pointed out the lack of social-realist criticism. There are shots which crop out signs of modernity.

Perhaps The Man of Aran's is true to the process of its material, film . It is its fidelity to storytelling for the screen, that guarantees its afterlife.

Behind the scenes

The Irish government sought to have an Irish language film made using the same director and company to account for the lack of Irish language in Man of Aran. Robert Flaherty proposed a film about a storyteller. Eventually after a lot of toing and froing with various options, Seáinín Tom Sheáin was selected. He told a wonder story about three brothers who went fishing. Each was advised by their father to take a pike and turf ember with them in the currach, for protection. The two eldest dismiss their father’s urging but the youngest  heeds his words. And then a storms starts blowing and the youngest son throws the pike at a swelling wave and suddenly the storm dissipates and they are saved. The following is a translated transcription of the end.

P71

Oidche Sheanchais

The man mounted the horse, the lad went up on the horse’s back and off they went. And they were not two horse lengths from the door when the boy didn’t know where in the wide world he was.

They kept going until they arrived at a right fine beautiful castle with a wonderful court. The gentleman asked the door to open, and it opened. They went inside. They were going from room to room, and they walked through so many rooms, and each room finer than the other until they went into a room full of fine young women and a young woman was up in her bed. The end of the pike was sticking out of the sheets.

“pull this,” said the gentleman, if you are the one who put it in her,” he said. “that is the Queen of the Fairy Dwelling, and I am King of the Fairy Dwelling!” (Oh, O Blessed Virgin!) The boy grabbed the pike and gained a footing with the pike and pulled from the side the pike and the burning turf. “Thank you,” said the young woman.

“Thank you,” she said, “and it is unlikely that you should lose anything by it. I will grant, perhaps a small reward to you,” she said, “I am the stormy ocean wave that was going that night,” she said, “and who drowned so many people, and it is not likely that you will be any the worse for it,” she said, “for what you have done,” “ I am the one who lifted the sea and the gale that night,” she said.

He went out- the gentleman- when the pike was pulled out, and the boy walked after him. They went on the horse again so that he would be given back to his father again safe and sound.

After three years, the luck and happiness flowed and was with Máirtín Mac Conraoi and with all he had, and three years after that he bought Cuan an Fhóid Duibh, and all that was there, and after three more years, he bought the entire parish where he lived.

That’s my story now, and I am not the one who composed or thought of it.

So honour the patriarchy and you'll prosper. The fantasy of the fairy is more real than the re-enacted fiction of harpooning a basking shark. The islander's actually hunted basking sharks in bigger vessels, fifty years previous.

However, the film endures and enjoys fame, whereas the wonder story survives courtesy of the academy. A copy belonging to Harvard University, surfaced in 2012, salvaged from being forever forgotten.

Antonin Artaud 

​

Could someone volunteer to read the next short section?

Who's feeling brave? It's just a short section...

How about you?…good woman.

Thank you!

For a little over six weeks Antonin Artaud struggled to overcome impossible odds in that "devouring place" until he was deported from Ireland as an undesirable alien on September 29th, 1937.

The original Bachall Isu or Staff of Jesus was the most sacred relic of the Irish Church, which had hung in Christ Church until …1538.

It was said to be the staff that Jesus had used to drive off Satan during his 40 days in the desert.

Earlier in May, 1937 he had suffered the social discredit of an aborted marriage with the daughter of a wealthy Brussels family, who in turn became an opium addict.

Sean O Milleain's daughter, was 20 years old and just married when Artaud and his "stick" came to her parents' Eoghanacht house… "There was something in the stick. I was always play acting to get it off him. My mother would shout after him - `Stop chasing with that one as she's only married'. . . but I was not afraid of him. The only thing was to keep away from the stick but I suppose I was a divil, like himself."

He was given lodgings in the St. Vincent de Paul night shelter for homeless men in the Back Lane, which ran into Skinner's Row where the Bachall Isu had been burned exactly 400 years previously almost to the day,

The police report details that he was arrested "in possession of a branch of a shrub he had pulled in the grounds".

… after exhaustive searches the gardai informed his family in Paris that no trace of "his walking stick" was to be found anywhere in Dublin.

Well done, thanks very much. If you want to fill in the  gaps, the full article is by Peter Collier:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/artaud-on-aran-1.96677

I just wanted to foreground the performance of the written word

https://soundcloud.com/martin-joe-sharry/head-home

From The New Revelations of Being read by Shane Connolly.

Artaud played the role of Jean Massieu, Dean of Rouen in Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928. The face in the picture, belongs to Renée Jeanne Falconetti. She played the title role. I would like to quote the director, bear with me:

Dreyer said he "felt there was something in her which could be brought out; something she could give, something, therefore, I could take. For behind the make-up, behind the pose and that ravishing modern appearance, there was something. There was a soul behind that facade."

He died in 1948, the last thing he wrote:

the same individual

returns, then, each

morning (it’s another)

 to accomplish his

revolting, criminal

and murderous, sinister

task which is to maintain

a state of bewitchment in

me and to continue to

render me

an eternally

bewitched man.

The Quare Fellow

Brendan Behan was not seduced by the mythology of the Man of Aran. It was representative of De Valera’s poverty porn of post nationalist Ireland. The desecration of the idealised cosy projection is punished with a severity that reveals the Irish government to be a reincarnation of the previous authority. This explains the sentence for anti-hero who never appears.

‘The quare fellow’ is hanged because he committed a ‘real bog-man act’ with a ‘meat-chopper,’ while ‘Silver-top’ is reprieved because, having dispatched his wife with his ‘silver-topped cane that was a presentation to him from the Combined Staffs, Excess and Refunds branch of the late Great Southern Railways, he is deemed to be a ‘cut above meat-choppers whichever way you look at it’.

Note the opposition between the clean cane and the stained moisture of ‘meat’ and ‘bog’. It’s probably no accident then that The Quare Fellow was first produced by Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift of The Pike Theatre, 1954. They explain the origins of their theatre’s name:

After much discussion, we fixed on ‘The Pike’, meaning the long pole with a spike on the end, which was used by the Irish insurgents of 1798 to discomfort the slick English cavalry. In other words, we wanted our theatre to be a revolutionary force of small means which, by its ingenuity, would stir up the theatrical lethargy of post-war Ireland.

https://comeheretome.com/2019/05/30/beckett-behan-and-the-criminal-courts-herbert-lanes-pike-theatre/

The pike echoes the pike of the wonder story of Oidche Seanchais. Like Seáin Tom Sheainín, Behan is not too attached to authority. ‘That is my story now. I am not the one who composed or thought of it’. The playwright credits the ‘lags’ for writing his play about capital punishment in Ireland. When Behan watches the rehearsal of his play and loves what he sees then ecstatically declares ‘I must be a genius’, he’s not wrong. A reviewer in the Irish Times dismisses his work 'almost all Behan's best works are sublimated biography, and outside that he lacked invention or authenticity;. As if he could only recycle material from his life. Hence Behan's putdown of critics as 'eunuchs in the harem'.  It appears that he was not too precious about authorship and was open to collaboration. John Brannigan celebrates his ‘socialised writing’. The deeper reading reveals that it’s the particular relationship to self that salvages his work. A certain relationship that gets lost in translation for television.

Imagine if I delivered this lecture, if we can call it that, via Youtube. And some people argue that is what should happen, instead of dragging you all here on a Monday morning, into this vast expensive space.

Not only would you miss my charismatic presence but you would be deprived of ‘situation and behaviour’, going by Lehmann’s formulation. Theatre is situation, behaviour and representation versus media being pure representation. The truth of bodies sharing space/time, is, I believe, an important immeasurable truth. In fact, it may be more important than the content of what I’m saying.

Going to mass, the churchgoers saying rounds of prayers, regardless of the words, it was the coordinated rhythm that regulated their communal hearts.

light touch regulation

Late winter 1923; outside Kilmainham Jail, Dublin. A young woman, clutching a baby, strains towards the top row of cell windows. She is trying to attract someone’s attention. At last, she sees the face she is looking for, a man comes to the window and catches a first glimpse of his new-born son.

Brendan Behan was born to Kathleen Behan and her Republican activist husband, Stephen, on the 9th of February, 1923.

This story reminds me of the scene where prisoners are looking through prison bars to see the women’s prison. The same women’s prison that outlasts the solemn off stage denouement of the execution.

(P3 O'Sullivan, M)

Prisoner A. I see the blondy (sic) one waving.

Young Prisoner. If it’s all the one to you, I’d like you to know that’s my mot and it’s me she’s waving at.

P55 Brendan Behan, Methuen.

Bear in mind that this was a time and place where one had to be conscious of being watched.

Mindful of the climate of the times, the actor playing the homosexual, Other Fellow concealed his identity under the pseudonym Patrick Clarke and this went undetected by the spooks at G2.

(P181 O'Sullivan, M)

Patrick appears later on, in another guise, in Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha, Ha, Ha.

The brilliance of the book is that all the drama is offstage. We feel only its reverberations in the boy’s world. Few novels have ever captured so well the idea that children and adults may occupy the same space but do not live in quite the same universe.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/modern-ireland-in-100-artworks-1993-paddy-clarke-ha-ha-ha-by-roddy-doyle-1.2645577

Beatrice retained intense cameo memories of their courtship, like cinematic flashes. The most vivid, and the most joyful,  were scenes from their pre-marriage stay in the Aran Islands: Brendan unusually silent in a dark bar on Inisheer, listening to the poems and songs of the islanders; Brendan swimming naked in Kilmurvey harbour, turning somersaults and referring to his bare bottom as ‘one of the Sights of Aran’; 

(Note: Borstal Boy - the swimming scene. // short story -bathing?)

(P 187 O'Sullivan, M)

Elizabeth Rivers was an English painter who lived in Man of Aran Cottage. She would host like-minded individuals, such as Basil Rákóczi. He was a co-founder of The White Stag movement. They were interested in painting and new practice of psychotherapy.

Keating’s men are typically upright and engaged in some useful activity. If posed, they do so with a gun, camán, or other attribute that signifies manliness and vigour. Rákóczi’s Islander on Inishmore (c. 1940-41) adopts the same ethnic clothing familiar from Keating’s depictions of the men of Aran: the geansai, pampooties and cris; stone walls and cottages fill in the background. But the similarities end there. Rákóczi’s Islander is supine and languid. His waist is slender, boyish or even feminine. He rests his head on his shoulder exposing the long and sensual nape of his neck. His large hand rests on his thigh close to his groin which is painted in a curiously suggestive manner. He represents a combination of passivity and latent strength. Rákóczi returned to Dublin and exhibited these works in 1942. He was surprised with how well they sold and wrote in his personal journal, ‘I think the unconscious homosexuality sold them.’

http://www.modernirishmasters.com/context/patrick-hennessy-context/

Content: Seán Kissane, Riann Coulter, Sarah Kelleher, Jason Ellis, Kevin A. Rutledge, James Hanley, Meredith Dabek and Martyna Starzinskaite.

Conclusion

It’s early days in this work…

I have tried to refrain from sticking my oar in. 

By following loose allusions, stemming from the Man of Aran, I’ve arrived at no hard and fast conclusion. I stand here empty handed. I have failed in my effort to invent a person that might somehow answer the myth. My desire to insert an artist, feels like a retrospective correction to superimpose some contemporary intersectionality into a history with its own complexities.

Double world wars, soldiery and corporal punishment.

Modernism, Primitivism, Surrealism, Nationalism, Socialism, Fascism .

All underscored by what Derrida termed: phallologocentricism. The opposite of this, is, I think, ‘indeterminateness’. Writing.

A year after the Man of Aran is made, The Informer wins four Oscars. The script is adapted from Liam O’ Flaherty’s novel. Liam is a real man of Aran, having grown up there, then fought in World War 1, lived in America and occupied the Rotunda for the Council of the Unemployed. His novel is described as 'mythogenic' (p1 meaning productive in story) Patrick F. Sheeran argues that O'Flaherty wrote the story, pitching it towards German Expressionist cinema. His writing was screenplay friendly and it proved to be the case with three film adaptations. 

The screenwriter for the American version, Dudley Nichols, employed a detailed symbolism –e.g a blind man’s cane represents conscience. It wasn’t necessary for the audience to appreciate this code but it ensured that there was an integrity woven into the work nevertheless. John Ford would dismiss the very detailed scenes and claimed the film’s achievements for himself. It seems he was more at home with mythology and is remembered for the quote ‘when the truth become legend, print the legend’. Nichol's was the first person to refuse his Oscar, in solidarity with the Screenwriter's Guild, who were in dispute with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences . John Ford initially refused his Oscar too, but four months later quietly accepted award. 

I'm sorry I may have wasted your time and lead you away, from something more concrete.This reminds me, I was in a café here in Galway, late 1990’s, Apostasy it was called, as you may already know, and I came across this flash fiction or micro text, and it was essentially the prequel to the Pied Piper and how a witch rewards a boy who helped her by turning him into a cripple thereby saving him from the fate of all the other children of Hamlin. Of course he doesn’t appreciate it at the time. This story reappears years later when I’m watching Martin McDonagh’s Pillowman. And I’ve no doubt it’s the inspiration for the play that made his career:The Cripple of Inismaan, which has a disabled young man’s attempt to get into Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran. That play portrays a violence in its representation, a theatre of cruelty, inspired by Mc Donagh's true love, the silver screen.

Any questions?

Ok. Good.

Thank you.

Photos taken while walking the distance of the island's circumference:

Found Text

Available to move in:

 Immediately

Property Description:

The proposed new development in Newmarket will be located in the heart of this vibrant Dublin 8 location. The immediately surrounding area is currently benefitting from a significant level of redevelopment. There is a 202-bed hotel and 406 bed student accommodation currently under construction. Planning has been granted for an additional 137 bed hotel. Other applications submitted include a 268-bed hotel and 303 bed student accommodation premises and in excess of 100,000 sq ft of offices over 3 different sites.

Newmarket is an ever growing vibrant commercial and residential centre benefitting from a variety of amenities and lies just 1km from Dublin city centre. The location allows convenient access to a range of public transport facilities. The Luas Green line can be accessed just 1km east of the property at St. Stephens Green and Harcourt Street. Frequent Bus services to the city centre and suburbs are provided on Clanbrassil Street and Thomas Street. Dublin Bike Stations are located within a short distance of the property.

The 8 Building Newmarket will be designed to be a A3 rated building providing approx. 80,000 sq ft of high-performance workspace over 5 floors.

Inventive new streetscaping proposed for Newmarket and Mill Street will flow seamlessly through the impressive entrance doors and into the lobby to dramatic effect. Step into the bright and expansive reception with high standard materials and contemporary finishes and you immediately get a sense of the quality of this building.

Reading Material

Artaud, Antonin. (2019) Artaud 1937 Apocalypse-Letters From Ireland. Diaphanes.

Behan, Brendan. (1989). After the Wake. O’Brien Press. Dublin

Brannigan, John. (2002) Brendan Behan- Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer.

Four Courts Press Ltd

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. (2006). Postdramatic Theatre. New York

Milne, Tom (1971) Cinema of Carl Dreyer (International Film Guides) TBS The Book Service Ltd

Ó hÍde, Tomas. (2019). Seanín Tom Sheain, From Árainn to the Silver Screen. Four Courts Press. Dublin

O’ Sullivan. Michael. (1998) Brendan Behan. A Life. Blackwater Press.

Sheeran, Patrick F. (2002). The Informer. Cork University Press

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/a-quare-fellow-indeed-1.129658

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/artaud-on-aran-1.96677