The Pump
- Ten weeks being an AbbVie Guinea Pig
I’ve Advanced Early One Parkinsons. After thirteen years of taking pills I’m offered a new development in treating the disease. It involves a pump injecting plasma into the subcutaneous fat of my stomach. It’s attached to my body like a Walkman 24/7. On the very first day I notice I can speak, quite normally. I also note that I feel weak. But the main takeaway was the return of my voice. Nurse 6 says that they want to get to ten weeks and that it will be a ‘trialling’ time ahead.
10 July
Nurse 2: ‘They talk about clarity…some people, but everyone’s different’ She inspects my stomach. The cannula has to move around to different sites on my stomach to avoid infection. I recognise ‘clarity’ in my head. And it feels great, to recover this vital potential. I’m usually waving and drowning as I walk down the street but that’s stopped (dyskinesia). And my voice is back. I do feel weak. At the Lidl checkout the woman says ‘love’ and ‘darling’. I haven’t heard those terms in years.
18 July
There’s a video on YouTube where a man is trying to make a cup of tea. He is in the throes of dyskinesia. Then he avails of the Produadopa pump and he walks away as normal, carrying his cup of tea.
20 likes 5 replies
26 July
Anger feels good to be able to express part of life denied to Parkinson’s people, you can muster up the syllables and heroically pronounce your anger but unfailingly dithers and dwindles away and the Davis Phinney people all applaud and offer helpful tips to reframe perspectives All good hearted and sympathetic. But to feel anger connected to the energy in the body like the time I saw that traveller in the middle of traffic, on Meath street, strip to his waist and his arms outstretched hold the force of two opposing hakas until he claps and releases a roar to correct the countless hurts of generations. A skinny local adult In a tracksuit chirps up – ‘yeahhhh, get into it’ then rubs his hands, then smacks his thighs and jumps in the air.
27 July
A day to live and I squandered it on giddiness and arguing. Was I deluded in expecting there to be some sort of shared excitement in the transformation. The illusion that you can be separate from others, you are configured, you are projected upon, you are enmeshed, you feel a slight ecstasy and you get to help out with the house work for a change.
28 July
Three weeks on the Produadopa and I can speak. I can initiate a conversation after years of nods and limited improvised sign language. There are bursts of euphoria for five or six seconds every second or third day, glimmers of normality and then the doctor reliably informs me this will last for one more week, still I hadn't imagined being able to even think about writing a post like this. Thanks for the support.
71 likes 16 replies
29 July
An infection. A pink streak across my belly, it looks ‘angry’. Nurse 3 arrives. She starts by talking too loud and too slowly. I answer her with my newly regained normal voice. She sits beside me to inspect the skin. She flicks my fingers out of the way, rather than ask me to move them. ‘I’d keep an eye on it and if there’s no change in the morning, go to your GP’. We go to the GP the next day, lucky to have secured an appointment at short notice. At reception there is some bafflement at my medical card. They establish that I should be going to the doctor on the island. I explain that we are in Dublin to avail of the AbbVie nurses, they won’t go to the island. Eventually I get to see a young doctor. He is interested in the new technology of the pump and reveals his own cannula – for diabetes. He repeats the same basic points until he lets us go with a prescription for antibiotics.
30 July
The Spanish Opening
This is Tara’s first time at the chess night at Bismark café. There is a strong smell. My center pawn forks her knight and bishop. She knows moves but not yet strategy. Beginners assume the game is closer than it is with all the empty space. She is willing to concentrate and that will serve her going forward. I offer to go over an opening. I show her the moves and she repeats. Tara takes a phone call, she acquiesces and reassures the other person that ‘no fifteen minutes is ‘fine’ and that she is willing to make a newly invented appointment. We go over the opening one last time and I tell her I learnt this when I was ten years old.
I’m walking home, like a normal person, even though the smell still persists. So it wasn’t Tara all along. The smell is rotten and vinegary. It is from my skin infection. Here I was looking forward to feeling normal. I was so happy walking back along the same route where it used to be an ordeal terrorized by paranoia. The time I carried the bottle of wine, a gift from Valentin. The paper wrapping disintegrated from my sweaty hands, then I slip, then the bottle slips. Half of the wine fizzes out and now I’m worried I look like an alcoholic. I just want to get home, the physical pain in just moving my legs. Back to the house. Grace is glad that I am back.
30 July
The antibiotics don’t seem that effective and now cellulitis is forming so we go St.James’ A and E. Again there was a questioning over why did I go there
and not to Galway. There is a brother and sister sharing headphones watching funny episodes of the Voice. An elderly woman walks in and stops in front
of the woman behind me. ‘’How do I know you?’ She shares with everyone. The woman who she believes to be know is amused, a distraction from the
parade of pain. The standoff is maintained by smiles until the knower throws out disjointed bits of information. Billly…Cositigan?.. or the Drimnagh…?
The woman unaware of the connection to this stranger just shakes her head and says no, no. It does not deter the woman who believes in the connection. In the meantime, a biker in his fifties has entered, he is playing a video on his i -phone on repeat about how to predict the future. I assumed he was foreign , in that was why he would let the video loop. Now the brother is curled up on the floor and his sister is crying and trying to get some attention. The security arrive and get him to sit in a chair. I’m called to take my blood. The nurse is kind and interested in the Aran islands when I tell her my story. As soon as I’ve served her purpose, she lets me go - ‘take a left and a left’. The brother is being seen. His sister is still crying. The woman behind me has come to recognise the other woman, a character has been projected upon her which she now playfully entertains: ‘oh yeah, Drimnagh, living there for years’. ‘Oh yeah Johnny Costigan, the tall, baldy lad…he’s my cousin’. Two hours later and I’ve a new script with better antibiotics.
I piss five or six times during the night. The urine is clear and almost regular as clockwork. Nurse 3 says this is not one of the symptoms. I ask her if weakness is a symptom? She says no. She reminds me to massage the nodules. After a cannula is removed the subcutaneous matter tends to harden and is supposed to be massaged back to the original texture. But this doesn’t happen as easily as your led to believe.
7 August
We have an appointment in Galway, the first check in since the pump started. C is wearing an excellent pair of black polished brogues, he’s nailed the student-junior- doctor aesthetic. I’m giddy and making jokes. How is the gambling? I still haven’t won. Nurse 6 enters. He’s carrying forms. He’s usually carrying forms, these are rolled up into a sort of baton. Refusing offers of a chair, he demonstrates his make-do attitude by ingenious use of a table to support his relative heft. I mention that it feels very good but is weakness a symptom? No. C adds that this is the first three or four weeks but it will taper off thereafter. No one told us this and Fred starts to shift about and says everyone is different and we just want to get to ten weeks and take it from there. Nurse 6 tells us about someone who lacks the dexterity involved in maintaining the pump, then he crosses his arms, shrugs and ends with a toss of the head that lands with a tilt to one side, there’s nothing to be done just be thankful it’s not us. Where’s the consultant? He’s with someone at the moment. C gets me to tap my feet and to tap my fingers. Nurse 6 smiles, almost smugly. Yeah like there’s a guy who used to run, had to stop, now he’s back running. Another guy had to stop driving and I saw him the other day in traffic. C goes to see if the consultant is coming. returns. The consultant won’t make it. Unforeseen circumstances. That’s probably a good sign.
12 August
I go to the island.
On the boat I start shaking uncontrollably, images are dark, I can’t supplant them with light or goodness, I involuntarily think of the Israeli hostage in a tunnel, this gives way to a memory of being in a fun fair thing, a vessel designed to shake the kids inside. A vague memory of being groped heretofore never manifested. Eventually I hit upon the image of proton stars and how there can be physically nothing after these, offers some temporary relief but when I think I overhear through the noise, some lads talking about me, I zone in on this and I am calm. It lasts about eleven minutes until I’m back rocking again. Then through Sunda Salach a céilí band lashes into an impromptu session.
Hallucination
I see a rat run over my foot and I jump. I am standing beside my mother at the window. We are looking out to see if there is a crowd gathering on the beach, a search party. The rat was large and furry. I know that it wasn’t real but the worry is that is a side effect of the pump. I e-mail Fred, he says to turn the pump to base level. At every appointment the doctor will ask if I’ve being seeing things, and the answer has always been no. This could be a sign of psychosis. However, I believe it to be a consequence of not being able to sleep straight through for a whole night. Instead the frequent urination is constantly interrupting. I google: Nocturia.
Then I have my second hallucination. I wake up and there is a guy in my bed. I recognise him from school. He was in the same year as me but in a different class. I knew him to see but I never spoke to him. I think he befriended Dermot and Eoin when we got into UCG. I might have met him there, as I was playing pool with Cathal who had been in his class in Mary’s. The unreality of this experience made it less worrying than the rat. It is hard to render the quality of the hallucination, the thing isn’t fully three dimensional, yet it is not two dimensional either. It feels fragile and real.
I go to the doctor, to try and sort out the urination. He tests a sample, there is no uti. He advises me to stop drinking any liquids from five o clock onwards.
I think I sleep better.
A few days later and I’m on the toilet for three hours. I put a finger up there and I’m shocked to find something hard and solid. I go to the doctor and he says that I have to go to Galway, to hospital. My brother books two seats on the plane. We are lucky to secure two seats on such short notice but the weather does not look good. Fog is the one thing that stops the plane. We pack our packs and wait at the airstrip. The fog seems to be clearing in the east by Blackhead. Then there is a window available and we get to the mainland. (plane takes eight minutes) We wait for about three hours in A and E. Then a nurse inserts two enemas. We have to stay in a hotel that night and return to the island the next day.
.Two days later and I get my second skin infection. I go to the doctor and he prescribes the same antibiotics that I received in St.James’. but for five days instead of seven. I ask him does he think I should keep on with the pump. He replied that it is a question only I can answer. Then I go to the doctor again. I am terrified that my muscles are wasting away. He pats me down to disprove my worry.
Muscle wastage
The weakness is rife throughout my whole body. It is the worst feeling. The nurses say that it isn’t a symptom of the pump. They refer me to my GP, who in turn refers me back to the nurses. Which leaves me to research online. It seems that with the three courses of antibiotics that my biome has been compromised. And that my muscle is being broken down to compensate for lack of energy. It is frustrating the way in which people discount the ‘terror’ of feeling weak throughout my body. Am I better now than when I didn’t have the pump? People don’t want to put up with a voice that is painful to listen to or to deal with someone flapping about without explanation. I buy Revive supplements and prebiotics.
I start looking online for the easiest way to die. It seems that Nembutal is the best option. But how to access it is proving difficult. I order Foxgloves to be available next year. I read that salt can lead to death but it isn’t foolproof, I don’t want to hang or drown myself, just wouldn’t like to disturb the person who discovers my corpse. I look at Dignitas. I think of someone I know who now runs a pharmacy. I could befriend him ala Better Call Saul Goodman and devise a plan to secure the right drugs or Nitrogen apparently works best. I’m terrified of being reduced to mere autonomic responses at the mercy of casual cruelty, so often exposed in undercover exposés on TV. I order the RNLI Lifeboat free Wills. I’m not suicidal, it’s just that I want to act while I can.
Dublin
It’s safer to be in Dublin. More access to both nurses and doctors. I tell Nurse 3 about the ‘weakness’. She proposes that it is a worsening of the Off symptoms. I tell her about my theory re the biome, she doesn’t shoot it down. She wants to know if we are going to stay in Dublin now. It’s as if we’ve had our fun trying to live on the island but isn’t it time you settled, unless you don’t want to avail of our services. What services are they? An irritated attitude that is not concerned with health as a vocation but rather is interested in protecting AbbVie from any possible negativity. She repeats – do you feel better now than you did before the pump?
Nurse 6 and Nurse 4
They take an antagonistic attitude from the beginning. Nurse 4 there seems to be two different stories going on. Nurse 6 says that he believed that I had said that I was getting more out of the pills than I am out of the pump. I never said that. I had a terrible morning and was just coming On, halfway into the meeting. I told them that I’d stayed in bed to conserve energy for the travel. Nurse 4 latched onto this and said that it’s not a good sign if I’m staying in bed all the time. I had to correct her three times. It was bizarre, this onslaught of false information and misconstrued feedback. Nurse 6 says to have the pump on max as much of the time as possible. They seem to blame me for the constipation. They seem suddenly to be afraid of the likelihood of psychosis. Nurse 6 says in fairness, you are running out of options, followed by his signature shrug. Nurse 4 brings up Nodules blatantly ignoring the fact that I had just said that I massage them. They point out the lack of dyskinesia compared to when I entered. .I ask them what is the deal with getting to ten weeks? They admit that it is an arbitrary deadline and that they are learning about the pump all the time.
September
Nurse 2 is standing over me. I can’t find a potential site for a new cannula. She is willing to correct the way the belt is attached to the pump. Nurse 3 is there too and she reminds me to massage the nodules.
I email Nurse 6 that I will be stopping the pump, as I had tried four sites on my stomach, and each one flared up and stung. My stomach is a dartboard of scar tissue and inflamed patches of skin.
But at least I can dress myself.
I don’t post this on Facebook.
New tactics
Bad poems might make for interesting writing. By bad I have TS Elliot’s configuration in mind – a work of fancy. The presence of the disease seems to inhibit the possibility of transcendence. The channel of inspiration is compromised. Keats leaves on a tree are painted on. I used to imagine I was drifting out to sea, just a little out of earshot, testing the eyesight of others, if they could discern whether I am waving or drowning Sometimes they would recognize my particular plight, they would let me know as they passed by in cars – laughing and jeering. Or sometimes they would be sensitive and anticipate my needs, noticing the sudden offers of baristas to carry my coffee. I met an old friend in Lidl, he tentatively touched my elbow as we went our separate ways. But recently that sea-side scenario has given way to a glitching screen that reveals the layers, the abundant skyscape full of cloud and colour blinks and disappears. Then the entire sea empties leaving a damp lunar landscape strewn with seaweed and flopping fish and the bits of pottery I used to collect at low tide. I am too afraid to turn around and look towards the beach behind me. I sense a shuttering darkness rush in behind me. A version of Eurydice…Will anyone be there if I dare to look around. Then the floor gives way, like the sensation when I get the plane, I can’t stop imagining the seat I’m in just falling through, I have to battle this thought while I shake violently, trying to settle the mind, I concentrate on the pilot’s flight deck controls. Grateful that its only eight minutes.
A new tactic:
Keys cut
Locks fitted
Shoe repairs
Keys fitted
Locks repairs
Shoes cut
Keys repairs
Locks cut
Shoes fitted
Written during the 10 week Duadopa experiment
The following piece of writing, was written under the influence of the Duadopa Pump. I was obsessing over how to end things in the tidiest way. I don’t feel that way now. A lot of the actions are determined by bio-chemsitry. The first drug that was prescribed for me was Amantadine. I would be walking out to Sandymount when the thought would occur - why shouldn’t I just walk into traffic. it would be a neutral thought, not fear or depressed, simply why shouldn’t I? like an abstract consideration. The Emesis crisis was still fresh in my mind. And the sudden acceleration from being a person with Parkinson’s with reasonable independence to being a vulnerable human being that would need constant care, felt like an imminent threat.
I don’t stand over it as something that might have any artistic value. Instead, it serves as a way of getting a read on how I was during that strange time. It demonstrates the difficulty of making art with this particular dynamic.
Confession
Why did I expect an untimely but respectable death?
Why did I assume that after the initial disarray
Things would slowly resolve themselves and
Ultimately people would say kind things
And leave not relieved but glad that they came
My body is intact in these imagined scenarios
The mindless optimism that there’d be a them
To attend at all!
Maybe there’s blunt force trauma and a coma
Just enough time for 85% of friends and family
To express contradictory emotions but by the end
Things swing slightly in my favour
I danced to Bill Callahan’s ‘dress sexy at my funeral’
I mocked death and mocked the people who didn’t
Mock death
I complained that the Late Late show was just
Too late – when it came to celebrating disability
I failed to commiserate with the victims of
Drink driving ads
That’s why there are no sitcoms about stroke victims
And/ or kids with long term illnesses
Now I pray to god, don’t leave me in a home
To be ignored and victim to casual everyday cruelty
Locked into a body without any control
My neo-nazi neighbours work as nurses
‘Martin the things they do, you don’t want to know’
And I don’t. Dear God, please save me
From a desperate dwindling death
After all didn’t you assist your own son
In dying?
Christian Schlingensief
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/director-christoph-schlingensief-faces-mortality-i-have-no-desire-to-go-to-heaven-a-597544.html?sara_ref=re-xx-cp-sh
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.
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.
It all begins with an idea.
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