Je ne suis pas Charlie. Je pense a lui

My response to the events this week were entirely reflexive and solipsistic, and I usually get low or melancholic, in my depression, when I am faced with news of the modern world. Or maybe fatalistic or manically soporific, however I have a pretty good idea of where of my prejudices lie – namely with the staunch atheist, secular humanist, I-don’tactuallycareifyou’reoffendedlearntolaughatyourself crowd. Which means that, the uncharacteristic and, I would hope, altruistic panoptic sadness that enclosed me on Wednesday gave way to a salivating indignation on Thursday that we who are not festooned in fatwas can afford ourselves within the space of a day. For this only would I like to express a kind of shame at not being able to fully support the victims in a dignified way, rather allowing myself to post on social media – the same refuge of the coward masses, including myself, of a certain liberal kind who flagellate themselves and others, and use flowery language to raise the flag for one oppressed people (we have the privilege to pick and choose whom we champion in these modern times, without needing to consult the champions in the matter), yet hide behind their bullshit when it is en vogue to champion the oppressors – or rather, no, we have to be seen to do so.

My unusually pained sadness stemmed from the fact that, despite above prejudices, which allow me to filter my news and social media feed, some of the first responses to the events popping from my screen seemed to preemptively castigate any backlash towards the community that the violent perpetrators might have represented to those blindly stupid members of our society who look for such castigations as a means of provocation. Rather than an unequivocal solidarity with the victims of absolutist decimation First and Foremost -which, granted, most of the social media community I follow did adhere to – in an age of Enlightenment. Where, I would argue a fact of mourning – primarily because of the whole oh no these guys are dead thing, but in parallel because the parameters of free speech shrunk very quickly again –seemed to take on a subjective quantum leap.

How is it not apparent that any misguided representation of the killers as representatives of their community is as syllogistically faulty as hooligans of whatever faith adopting this misrepresentation as a reason to take violent action – it is very apparent. We just must be seen to point out the distinction in as condescending and liberally progressive way as possible. By all means take more than twenty-four hours of the news cycle to carefully choose what your convictions are going to be for the next twenty four hours. Which is when my sadness gave way to indignation (again, I thought I was above modern day media making me either mad, or sad, or glad) when the fight to prove we in the liberal pages knew the distinction very well indeed, and were very vocal to point it out, gladly if you must know, when our self-flagellation took the same amount of play-time as the news that a bunch of people fucking died because they had the talent to ridicule well.

So I’d very much like to be seen to present a very banal, undignified tribute to the dead of yesterday, whom I’d never heard of before (while I have this rare chance of confessional sadness, may I just say “How fucking dare you?” to those comments I’d read from people who wrote “Well, if this had *God forbid* ((ugh)) happened to (a rather salubrious British tabloid newspaper) nobody would be up in arms about it now”…How fucking dare you be so flippant about your *God forbid* comrades at a time like this?)))) it consists of nothing other than a sort of meagre thank you – these guys really know how to sell papers.

This tribute includes offensive material.

Satire is freedomThe last days of laughter

Miss Anthrope Takes to the Hill(s)

An hour’s walk outside Marlay Park, lost and drenched wondering why walking for hours on a Friday had ever appealed, I think a map might have been a good idea after all. It was probably the wait at Castleknock train station that took away my common sense and the heretofore morning’s resolve to undertake my journey despite the weather warning, looking at the tracks wondering how the train wheels don’t get stuck on the rocks. My rain poncho proved pathetic and in the middle of traffic it appears “in-the-general-direction-of-Wicklow” was misguided intended destination to walk and camp.

As it often uncharacteristically happens to me, for a misanthropic curmudgeon, I turn optimistic and cheerful in difficult situations, and in my staunch atheism, the animist in my me sends signals to the universe which means I often get away with my caprices – but how often will fortune be provoked before it smacks me on the lip with a rather large destiny cane, I ask myself. Just then a car pulls up and the nice couple who had guided me uphill, stop and offer to give me a lift. I apologize profusely for disrupting their day, but they insist and take me all the way to Knockree, stopping in Glencree to show me the sanctuary centre for German orphans of WWII, now used as a reconciliation venue for different peoples of the North and the Republic. I imagine a world reconciliation centre where dictators start hurling crockery about because there’s no vegetarian option for tea. Four deer stop to greet us down the narrow path where we look for a hostel which should be here. They leave me at the doorstep eventually, and a drizzle overtakes the floods at the feet of the Wicklow hills. A hare hops towards the fence, and hops back, judging me. I walk inside slightly defeated.

Sat on the verandah with a cheap Merlot and Mathiessen’s account of dying species from African Silences, I think this is what my life will be defined by: aborted and paralyzed adventures, something out of an unpublished French roman at the turn of the century. Eating dry-roasted peanuts en masse, listless yet grounded. In the dormitory, an American woman living in London seems fresh from her whole day’s walking. There are bits of her creamy olive skin and naturally shiny hair as we get ready for an early night in our cots, and I tug at my gourd of a stomach and feel my thinning grey hair on the pillow.

In the next, bright morning, the hills blaze in green with cross-stitched patterns of wilderness. After a mocha from the coffee machine, a pear and chocolate biscuits, I head towards where I think Enniskerry should be. The sun shining on the valley in a way to make one think there are mythical monarchs buried all around. Arriving shortly after, I am surrounded by what an Irish village on an autumn Saturday morning should be – I need to write an essay studying the relationship between an Irish village’s topography and its Hegelian essence at certain points throughout the day. Brief stop to adjust my as yet unused camping gear, then uphill to see the Powerscourt waterfall. I confess, I hadn’t woken up this day thinking to myself “I simply must go and visit a waterfall immediately or else my hair will turn into owls,” but it seems like something I must do. Peace greets the visitor from the fee-paying lodge – I mean 5 euro 50…I ask you…- and the trees arrange themselves reverently in the soft light. Above the rumble of the waterfall, a witches’ brew of cloud wisps gathers along docile hilltop. Fatigue and sleeplessness makes me lie against a tree for a good while, listening to water. Falling.

Perhaps because of this, I get a slight paranoia walking back towards Glendalough in search of an isolated spot to pitch my tent for the night. There is a couple collecting blackberries along a steep hill and a hush along spectral iron gates. I push on a bit further and “Community Watch” signs that have been part of the journey, pop up again, more sinister than reassuring. The couple gathering blackberries have taken on a Bergmanesque element of fright. I skirt around towards Roundwood and decide to try to climb up the isolated hill with the abandoned troughs.

On the edge of an intersection where the lower vegetation makes it easier to climb the stone fence, I hoist the bag up and furtively tug at the branches to see if they’ll lift me. I manage to fall in the brambles and drag my bag through the thistles, by this point determined to stay here even if a serial killer with a penchant for Coldplay should happen to be staying nearby.

Immediately, my tent is impregnated with wind and it takes six or more heavy stones to keep it grounded. I struggle to hold on to it and the various pieces that need joining, hoping my Keatonesque pitfalls will assuage any angry farmers or vagabonds- I imagine a Dickensian villain, but more dangerous because he’s actually read Dickens. I’ve a panoramic view of the mountains, Bray coast and an assortment of animal feces. An assembly bracket hits me on the lip and I realize what’s wrong. After a sip of wine, the rigidly flaccid tent takes on a more comic personality, and though it somewhat obey henceforth, it still seems to need some sort of exorcism, flailing and battling in the wind.

Perched on a stone, munching on wine, apple and peanuts, I listen to the ululating wind and see the sun fade over a lush green temple, with thousands of spots that would have better hosted a tent and its useless owner. The wind and persistent paranoia keep me up throughout the night, and finally decide to pop outside the tent to make sure there’s no one approaching. Only a phantasm of a perfectly still half-moon and huge stars atop black hills.

The next morning on the walk towards Bray, I make use of my groggy, sleepless voice to try out my Tom Waits on the quietly grazing horses.

                              Marie you are the wild blue sky

Men do foolish things           They turn kings into beggars            Beggars into kings

The train back to Dublin with a longing look at the sea, a would be welcome relief to my blistered feet, as the women next to me discuss the ingratitude of guests. I turn to Mathiessen and accounts of elephants that aren’t seen and the red hum of the harmattan wind.

Floating round a zine launch

Walking into the Vintage Room of the Workmans Club, the sounds of the “The X Files” theme tune permeate a dark blue hue while projected drawings make curtains of the wall. The founding members of The Runt zine are scattered about the venue getting ready for the launch of the paper’s sixth issue, this one on the theme of SPACE. Colm Kearns sits concentrating on the UFOs he constructs out of tin foil and the finished products that end up swinging on the chimney and beside the entrance, anticipate the whimsical evening that awaits the audience. I first met Colm at the Zine Fair a couple of weekends ago, the polka-dot handkerchief in his breast pocket sprouting a discussion about the pitfalls of being a truly original tramp.
The zine was co-founded by a group of friends* in English, Media and Cultural Studies course out of IADT college as much a platform for their own writing as an incentive to write more and do something with it. The overall theme was to be one of “hyper-capitalist parody,” eventually opting for specific themes, like “Friendship” and “Music” once the submissions started pouring in and members were assigned individual issues to edit. The editor of the current issue, Richard Howard says there’s a healthy zine culture in post-depression Ireland analogous to more people going to see bands than they used to. He himself is suited to the theme having grown up on “the trippy science fiction,” enjoying its irreverent sense of humour. The current cover by resident artist Lori Turner, redolent of “Houses of the Holy” was inspired by sci fi book covers, specifically Hawkwind.
I confess to having no real knowledge of science fiction besides radio plays of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and am impressed by the amassed knowledge of the genre and the contributors’ comic and heartfelt take on it, which I think is what creates a feedback loop of goodwill throughout the evening. Enthusiasm for the genre and the spirit of community at the birth of the zine is also present in its sixth series’ launch.
While images of esoteric landscapes and alien creatures shift shape around modestly dressed contributors – with the exception of the sartorially innovative Colm – lovingly hand-crafted baked goods are offered in exchange for a space-themed limerick.
“SPACE is really big…and yet we’ve captured it in a Zine”
Colm starts the proceedings, introducing a create-your-own-adventure Neptune travel story, stringing the evening with the audience and adding a new level of whimsy. Stephen Hill, provider of sweets, reads the adventures of a potato in space, and Saul Philip Bowman presents Stephen Totterdell’s piece, not included in the issue, of a lonely man who looks at the ambiguities of his past and present relationships through his newly diagnosed Asperger disorder, then Lorcan Blake is gifted with the back issues give-away before his poems. Current editor Richard reads “Floating Hell,” where Irish allusions still linger aboard a spaceship, and snails (or slugs?) take on a metaphorical dimension. Vestiges of human emotions, of the human condition seem to be a motif in most of the pieces somewhat confirming my notion that the zine and this particular issue come from a place of alienation; to a very small extent I hasten to add, these people are amiable and welcoming. A cosmic loneliness in an age where the cosmos is cool.
Brian Dunster reads an existential piece about how big space really is, and Ruairi Conneely presents a verbally engaging story from the perspective of a private contractor on the moon. James Moran is introduced “for the sparkle,” a softly spoken funny stoic (I’m guessing) with hair that is both static and mobile: “I don’t want you to feel like you can relax,” he sighs, while the James Blunt-like troubadour next door serenades us. I feel the slightly clunky delivery by most of the readers adds to the charm of the evening and the feeling of ease about the rafters. It’s refreshing considering the oftentimes obfuscating, or alternately overly optimistic poetry nights I go to. This isn’t trying to be anything and there’s a quiet self-deprecation within the humour that follows the evening’s rhythm. A simultaneous world-weariness and a kind of euphoria – many audience members laugh consistently and loudly throughout.
It’s a pleasant evening in the company of writers and artists who love what they do, often paying for the publication themselves without any knowledge of what profits may come “like lending money to a friend” as Colm quips. At the end of the day, it’s a window into storytelling from a niche publication: if we ever have to leave this planet, we would spend our intergalactic journey telling stories about adventures we imagine we might one day have.
And not one Uranus joke.

*Founding members: Colm Kearns, Richard Howard, Lauren Turner, Stephen Hill, Stephen Hughes, Colm Whelan, Mary Margaret Regan, Rose Fortune, Stacey Grouden

My first Edinburgh Fringe show

At Ray Fordyce’s Brunchtime Banter, 2013. Video by Gen Cytko.
This was at 11 in the morning. I can even be funny at 11 in the morning

Collapse of the wave function

Hey, I’m going to apply for  a radio show – apropos of which, you should all be listening to the P.G.Wodehouse serial on BBC Radio 4 Extra- but until then you can listen to my demo show, a rather sordid affair, full of awkwardness and self-indulgence. But also, a glimpse into a folkloric tradition, some jokes, a new classic serial I’m writing, and some choons from Brel, Simone, Segundo, and Cape Breton, Montreal, Bulgaria, England, Ontario.

You can access the show if you go to ckdu.ca, go on “Program Archives” on the left-hand side of the screen, and enter December 11, 11 am-noon, for the length of  two hours, in the appropriate sections. Because I don’t know about the internets and such.

Whew

Dead poets/mice society

The two Irish poets I like quite a lot who died this year

Now, it is the least necessary thing, the most superfluous, the most un of unnecessary things to have a day dedicated to poetry, especially for those of us for whom poetry is important on a daily basis. However, it is National Poetry Day in my recent homeland, the British Isles, and I’m drinking beer and smoking in my bachelor flat after a very prosaic work week, in anxiety of the mice that are sauntering along the cracks of my ceiling, atop their dead comrades ,(I’ve named one Robert for obvious reasons, and the other one Duchess, re; Blandings) and Seamus Heaney died recently, and there was no one, being new and odd in town, to whom I could say “Janey Mack, isn’t it terrible about old Seamus being dead ‘n’ all,?” and the other party going “O aye, the poor creatuir – sure he looked grand on the telly all the same.” So I’m including a poem I wrote that will (hopefully) be included in the fifth issue of Dublin based The Poetry Bus magazine.

The problem with attachment

–Prosigo sin cuerpo – Octavio Paz

Find your breath in meditation

and the world outside turns into

hundreds of starlings

unfurling your fingers in flight

The thing you desire the most,

like a telephone wire

hanging from the side of the building,

burnishes trapped memories

you catch from the corner of your eye

Each calculated move in gratification

starves in a satisfied hunger,

lives in folly on a stage

of its own making

You fall into the unwinged

shadow of your being

Fingers break the skin

that bind you to yourself

A Telmetale Bloomnibus: 18 Tales from Modern Dublin

Can’t believe I’m missing this. Should be brilliant

Alan Jude Moore

To celebrate Bloomsday the Irish Writers’ Centre asked 18 writers to bring Ulysses into the 21st Century. As Joyce once took inspiration from the texts of Homer, the writers have taken the 18 episodes or chapters from Ulysses and transported them into modern Dublin.

They have each written a story inspired by a title from Ulysses and will perform them in the Irish Writers’ Centre on the 14th of June. Stories will be told through prose, poetry and song. The only rule given to the writers is that the stories cannot mention Ulysses, The Odyssey or Joyce (though inspiration from the texts is allowed).  The stories are all original pieces of work set in contemporary Dublin.

A Telmetale Bloomnibus: 18 Tales from Modern Dublin,
Irish Writers’ Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin 1,
Friday, June 14th, 2013 at 7pm.

The Writers (in order of reading):

Pat Boran, Colm Keegan, Jane Clarke, Niamh…

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Three things

1. Yoani Sanchez’ celebration of trains http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy/?p=3220

2. I am doing a show in Dublin July 8 and 9 at Exchange Dublin, as part of 10 Days in Dublin Fest. Social media links – https://twitter.com/JamandFreedom

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tales-of-Jam-and-Freedom/441730452576611?ref=hl

3. I’m hoping to get away into the country once I manage a bit of dosh, but am returning to Edinburgh for a bit for the Festival (oh dear), doing a couple of stand-up spots, and perhaps some sort of revue. Details to come. Although there’s not much more to say. Spread the word, will you. Troubadour karma will reward you

33 abandoned stories

Movie of the week, because  I don’t know

This week’s post, along with the upcoming 32 or so, is inspired by a photo editorial roaming around the internets, showing pictures of 33 abandoned places around the world. I found it through Etgar Keret, another writer I’d like to write like…like whom I’d like to write..with which…  From his Facebook page, after I had read his book Suddenly a Knock On the Door from cover to cover, and took on board his suggestion that a story or script might be written about each place. It will be as much an exercise in imagination as an apology to the stories, ideas and poems I’ve abandoned, especially lately, due to lethargy and solipsism. It seems appropriate in the year after the apocalypse.

As much as I’d like to skip to the train depot one, I’ll follow the article’s order, so here is number 1.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-33-most-beautiful-abandoned-places-in-the-world

Christ of the Abyss at San Fruttuoso, Italy

Padre Antonio wrung his hands in the vestibule and shuffled his feet before reaching the pulpit. When he looked up, it was just as he expected. Hardly anyone present. The two members of the congregation were trying to hold on to the last bits of the miracle, and Padre Antonio didn’t know what they expected him to do.

Weeks ago, he was awoken at the break of day by his curate, asking him to come outside. In the garden, the fisherman’s moustache twanged with expectation; he explained that he and the other fishermen had seen something from the boat. At first, they had thought it was a large fish, but there could never be such a large fish in these parts, and the shadow didn’t move, even though they sat in the quiet dawn for an hour, staring at the water.

“Was the shadow bigger than your boat, Alessandro?” Antonio asked him.

“It was bigger than two boats, Padre.”

Antonio looked into his eyes for signs of inebriation, but they were just as sober and frightened as they had been minutes ago.  At the gate he met the other fishermen and a crowd that had formed from the village, and they all set out together for the shore as the sun came up. Alessandro was told to bring someone on the boat with him and go back to the spot where they had witnessed the shadow. Maybe things would become clearer in the light of day. Antonio waved to the boat that drifted on the clear water and turned the see the whole town congregated on the beach, looking at him expectantly, some wringing their hands. He made a decision and felt the sun’s warmth embrace him.

“Figli miei,  I ask that we, gathered here on this most blessed day, bow together and give thanks. I had a dream during the night that San Fruttuoso del Sottomarino came to whisper in my ear, as I sat on this very spot, that he would bless our town by inserting a statue of our Lord within our waters. That our sea may be blessed with an abundance of fish, that our trade with our neighbours might soar, and that our textile industry might take a new turn for the better, all its workers happy in the new prosperity, contributing to the well-being of our happy village. I ask that you join me in prayer, that we give thanks to San Fruttuoso for a new age of prosperity and productivity for all.”

When he lifted the veil of his eyelids, Antonio looked on a sea of faces rejoicing, and he joined his palms together peacefully.

“But Padre, how do we really know San Fruttuoso put a statue of our Lord in our waters?”

Antonio went up to Felipe, the bar-owner, and smiled into his calm eyes, then placed a kiss on his sylvan forehead. Alessandro’s boat headed back towards the shore.

“My child, we must believe. If we believe in the statue at the bottom of the sea, San Fruttuoso will bless this wonderful village, and give us all that we desire. Our saint appeared to me in a dream and brought to me the vision of what this statue will bring, and San Fruttuoso doesn’t just go around placing statues underwater, volente o nolente.”

Antonio went to meet the fishermen, and locked eyes with Alessandro.

“And did you see our Lord underwater, my son? Did you see his arms outstretched amongst the fishes?” he smile-shouted.

Alessandro gazed at the happy crowd, who seemed distracted and wasn’t paying as much attention.

“Yes, Padre, I saw the statue of our Lord. And more fishes in the sea than I have ever seen in these thirty or so years I’ve been a fisherman. But Padre, how did this happen?”

And Padre Antonio put his arm around Alessandro’s shoulder and explained about his vision, and they all went to Lucia’s cafe to celebrate with gelatto.

From that point on, the village prospered, and its citizens became productive and successful just like in Padre Antonio’s vision. With the extra prosperity and productivity, they built three more churches, one big one, and two not so big ones. Eventually, they became too busy  exporting their textiles to neighbouring countries, and cultivating their fish delicacies for the growing number of tourists to go to Lucia’s cafe, or Felipe’s bar, or hang out at the beach making dresses or sweaters for their sweethearts. Or even fishing. They began importing fish because the fishermen were tired from all the fishing, so they began working in the numerous new churches, making San Fruttuoso del Sottomarino relics and accessories for their houses and for the tourists.

Felipe was sitting alone at his bar, waiting for Fidelma, listening to his records. Nobody came in anymore, and he had nothing to do, but sit around listening to records, occasionally going fishing by himself. He got up from his stool and shut the lights and went outside, just as Fidelma was coming in.

“Where are you off to?” she asked him.

“I’m going to go see this statue that our blessed saint has put in our waters. Maybe have some visions of my own, you know?”

Fidelma tried to keep up with him on the shore, telling him he was being silly, and to come back. But Felipe was already taking off his clothes, and went into the water with an LP he had snatched on his way out of the bar. Something to lean on, in case he got tired swimming. Fidelma watched him go in, and swim until she couldn’t see his shiny back in the moonlight anymore. She sat on the sand and waited, then she lay down and waited. When she opened her eyes, the sun was shining and her feet were wet. Felipe hadn’t returned, but she didn’t cry because he didn’t like people crying. She found pieces of algae that she began to weave together, and waited a bit longer.

Felipe didn’t return the next day either. At the end of the week, they held a wake at the bar, and avoided the church for a while. Fidelma opened up the bar at the end of the month and some of the kids in the village came in to learn weaving and listen to music.

Years later, some travellers were scuba-diving off the coast of San Fruttuoso, looking for the lost underwater statue. They found the ruins of the old city, and fishes swimming happily around some sort of moss-covered vinyl.

Landscapes and renditions

Comedy/Food/Travel film of the month – comedy hero Maeve Higgins whose Irish Times column warms the cockles of my noggin

 

The month started off innocently enough, entertaining American tourists at Captains Bar with resident troubadour Neil Thomson, then Hugo Chavez went and expired on my birthday, I was further initiated into the local comedy scene, with at times surreal effects -like speaking about jam and death to an audience comprised of three people on a couch, during the course of which night the headlining act dangled from the chandelier (I think) – and I rambled Holyrood Park in the spring snow, bellowing my rendition of “Stormy Weather” in preparation for the jazz club’s singing night, only to be met by a  group quietly enjoying the scenery.

My friend from Oxford encouraged me to write a piece for Europe & Me magazine, of which she is an editor, so I’m including it here, as  I’m far too busy being a down-and-out lassie to make new observations. Except to say that the best place to hear Fats Waller and Hungarian folk is in a cathedral after mass, as I discovered in the tremendulous St.Giles.

 

Foibles of Freedom

“Placelessness and rootlessness do not create contentment, but despair.”

–Paul Kingsnorth, Real England; The battle against the bland

Upstairs the Waverley Bar down the cobbled path of Edinburgh’s High Street, a group of storytellers meets every month to share tall tales and true adventures. The patchwork, shadowy room is conducive to gather-round-me-children revelry. On my first encounter with the place, the featured guest was raconteur Andrew Steed, who told a story of reincarnating Robin Hood as a teenager and foraging with friends in a north England forest, only to be found and struck down by rangers, the Sheriff of Nottingham and his deputy. He changed the end of the story so that Robin and his merry friends stood back and laughed while a branch reached out and lifted the sheriff up in air, and then they made their daring escape. The epilogue to the story was that we have the power to change and create our own stories, and that we mustn’t limit ourselves with what we perceive our stories should be.

I set out to do just that a couple of years ago, to brave the unknown in creating my own story, when a particularly strong wanderlust hit me in my fairly cushy, busy existence in Vancouver, Canada. While freedom and how to go about getting it had been a main source of anxiety for a while, the notions of belonging, in that I didn’t feel I did, and national identity, had been pestering the noggin, and I ignored them – except to resign myself to the fact that I couldn’t really belong anywhere and I couldn’t really claim any national affinity. Instead, I would belong everywhere. I would be a traveller without having to conform to the constrictions of a homeland and a home. To drive the point home, I would occasionally mutter under breath that line from the ending of The English Patient, where the nurse reads from the dying man’s scrapbook, “We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps,” imagining myself to be saying it to a passport officer or government bureaucrat, sufficiently smugly.

Originally from Albania, that long-suffering piece of Balkan land struggling with its own boundaries and identity, my family immigrated to Canada when I was eleven. Had I misplaced a bit of identity, maybe related to Europe, along the way that I’d never got round to recovering? It could have sparked my need for self-exile. Whatever the case, I never felt compelled to return to my country of birth, and felt more of a tourist when I eventually returned for a visit. Only an anthropological interest in our rich folklore remained. I went to Ireland instead.

I was a Canadian citizen six years after emigrating from Albania, but never developed an attachment to the new homeland. It may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy; after a few weeks in Ireland on a working-holiday visa, I felt at home because I imagined I would long before I’d decided to go, visions of it looming in my mind: reading Joyce when I could muster the courage, gorging on comedy like Dylan Moran’s, avoiding going out on Fridays because of the Celtic Connection programme on the community radio. I was going to be a poor poet in Dublin’s streets, like in the folk songs, and hang around village bars with fishermen, making vague references to the crops and the high seas. After I’d been in the country a few months, I found a copy of Pete McCarthy’s McCarthy’s Bar in a hostel, another soul struggling with his roots. Raised in England, he spoke of feeling the ancestral connection to his Irish roots as a form of genetic memory that drew him back to the homeland. What genetic memory drew me, who had never touched on the Emerald Isle before this? My identity was being created anew, piecemeal, comically initiated in bureaucratic work in Dublin, the pubs where portraits of Kavannagh, Joyce, Yeats and Wilde look on the characters they’ve created and been created by, peacefully meditating around Lough Gill in Sligo, the joy of getting a seat by the window in the bus’ upper deck, the pathways and coastline of West Cork. I had identified with Ireland’s landscape and its people, so it would serve as my adopted homeland and its story would weave into mine.

As a result of which, I felt homesick for the first time in my life when I had to leave last year. I was reluctant to diagnose myself as such, as the concept of home was still nebulous, and chastised myself for wrong sentimentality. If I was going to be free there couldn’t be any overbearing attachments.

Reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Real England recently, I realized it could be that I had deprived myself of a landscape. Kingsnorth laments a gentrified world,that a continuous connection with our landscape is essential to identity and happiness, and we create our stories from that connection. A lot of cultures learn their behaviour based on the prescriptions of the anthropomorphised nature around them – the Athapaskan people of Alaska avoid certain foods and monitor their noise levels to appease the glaciers. By writing my story in rootlessness, am I depriving myself of the tools of storytelling, namely the connection to a landscape? Furthermore, in a globalised world, the effects of gentrification have made it difficult to uphold cultural characteristics, making the whole thing more confusing. Kingsnorth talks about the difficulty of preserving a place’s idiosyncrasies in the face of mass production and convenience; there is really no England, or Ireland, or Europe any longer, so national and continental boundaries are blurred as it is. It could be all in my mind, that little pub by the sea where I felt so at home, the chats around the fireplace, the patch of land I camped out in after bidding the donkeys goodnight. I might have found the same atmosphere anywhere else in the world – was I confusing the ideal with belonging?

A bit of consolation or affirmation comes from other travellers, wandering souls like myself. While we are facing one of the biggest socio-economic challenges, on a global scale at that, we are on the cusp of the bellest époque where it has never been easier to be a citizen of the world. Students have many opportunities for transferring to universities on the other side of the world, maybe ending up with a new permanent home, volunteer projects in disadvantaged, exotic nations attract a mass of middle-class youths in a way I imagine Delta blues musicians did white art students in post-war England, troubadours and labourers rely on the international currency of storytelling to make a home out of a tent. And irritating passengers on trains repeat the mantra of their travels, that of “finding themselves.” The trend of leaving a comfortable life and heading off with a rucksack seems to be more predominant than I thought, whether people are searching for a home, or choosing not to have one. A globalised world means global citizens. It helps that travel writing has become as great a fetish as the food network.

The thing is, wanderlust can hit anytime. Like Larkin wrote in “The Poetry of Departures” about feeling at home,

…that helps me stay

                             Sober and industrious

                             But I’d go today…

Having strong inclinations to it might mean I wasn’t built to have a homeland anyway, so the problems of not belonging to a landscape remain, possibly forsaking bits of identity for freedom.

At one point, mired in nostalgia for my briefly adopted homeland, I sat in bed trying to come up with cunning plans to return permanently and join a permaculture initiative with an adjacent jazz bar and writer’s club. And I remembered the self-exiled Dutch septuagenarian I met on a bus from Sligo to Galway, whose account of his life and move to Ireland thirty years ago, ended in the summation “Yes, but now sometimes I think, maybe it is time to settle down.” Then he added what I expected him to, “But there is still so much to do and see.”