Ecocitizen

Looking beyond the sudded dishes in the sink whilst scouring burnt husks of fat from the oven tray that has held the beef Wellington only a day before, I noticed the plant.  I could only see the top of it, spikes of white wintery flowers, each like an education model of the corona virus, only paler.  I hadn’t bought this plant, but rather had found its roots in the base of a large terracotta pot near the compost pile in the midst of the pandemic.  My actions towards it, whatever they were, had triggered growth and it unfurled into a large waxy green Fatsia japonica over time.  And now it was outside the kitchen window, covered in a halo of flowers.  In the cold December light, its only pollinators are wasps and houseflies.  I have not considered houseflies (Musca domestica) or wasps (Vespula vulgaris) as pollinators.  Come to think of it, I didn’t realise that Fatsia japonica produces flowers or attracted pollinators of any sort. 

Hands reddened from the hot water and soap, I wondered is this kitchen sink ecology to become my bailiwick as an ecocitizen or should I (for now) remember that this ecology is on the other side of the window glass reassuringly removed from me?  I removed the stainless-steel sink strainer and as the hot water, suds and burnt fat are gulped down, down by the invisible kitchen plumbing, I wonder where do they end up?  I had placed the potted Fatsia japonica over the kitchen drain so as not to think about such things as drains and city life are beyond these brick walls.  I reassured myself that this part of Dublin for almost two centuries must have had its own Bazalgette engineering such things away.  Could the hot wastewater scald the terracotta pot or cause the steam to rise and encloud the wasp and housefly?  Or has the hot wastewater triggered the Fatsia japonica to flower in December, prolonging the short lives of its dependent pollinators?  Should the wasp and housefly not be long dead?  Perhaps I am already an ecocitizen of this windowsill dishwater ecology.

Regatta Grata

The seagulls glided silently; their usual chatter quelled by the mizzle.  The sky hung heavy like a proscenium arch above the Irish Sea, supported by the Poolbeg Stacks.  The tide had withered the waters to draw the flock of sail boats together like white-winged terns on a matte centre stage colouring of slate, Payne’s Grey and pewter.  To-and-fro, the white sails motioned, like cut-out scenography in a silent performance, seen just by him.   Sitting on the damp harbour wall, he opened his mobile phone.  He inserted earphones into the auricle of another world, logged onto his online meeting. The other attendees formed a phenakistiscope of slightly moving faces, muted and prepared.  He knew that they were all sitting on their soliloquies, ready to speak about their difficulties in turn.  His gaze drifted back to the little white sails, noiselessly harnessing the wind.

Morning in Dalkey

Early morning in Dalkey is a special time.  It’s when one can hear the sea slop over and around smooth granite.  The local inhabitants have not awoken yet to overlook a house which overlooks another house which has a view of the sea.  The houses look like barnacles adhering to the sea-washed headland rising above the granite bowl of Bulloch Harbour.  A rank of benches crenulate the harbour walls; facing their backs to the afternoon sun.  A bunch of plastic-wrapped petrol station flowers is cable-tied to one of these benches like a improvised epaulette.  I decide to sit beside the wilted flowers as though tentatively meeting a date for first time.  For whom were the flowers left?

On the chest of the bench was a dedication to ‘Betty, 2021’.  Perhaps this was her favourite place, perhaps she died here.  I thought about the person who left the flowers, who packed the cable-tie before driving or walking to the petrol station.  Did they intend to come back with scissors or a blade to remove the cable-tie from the bench when the flowers had wilted? 

A woman walked calmly past me, with a litter picker.  I could sense she was examining me as she quietly picked small pieces of indistinguishable litter from between the cracks of the large granite pavers. She had the gait of a pigeon, and her eye was upon me.  Internally, I was building the courage to thank this woman for her service in keeping the harbour area clean but before I could, she took a small bag from her pocket. She proceeded to empty the small bag on to the ground in a neat pile, and then she left, looking at me with her other eye as she disappeared out of my view.  I couldn’t resist inspecting what the litter-picker had discarded on the ground.  It was cooked asparagus and fish skins, probably left for the seagulls.  

My peace was ruined as the seagulls became impatient for their meal and I wondered did Betty ever smell fish skins when she sat here.  Had I interrupted the litter picker’s early routine, perhaps it was she who had brought the flowers from the petrol station and perhaps she sat here every day thinking of her friend and feeding the seagulls. Perhaps litter-picking was her way of protecting the flowers she had left for her friend.  Perhaps she would one day have a blade to sever the cable tie and remove the plastic wrapping from the bench. Perhaps one day, the bench may include a small memorial plaque to the litter picker. Who then, will feed the seagulls?

Facing their Flock

There are more people buried in Glasnevin Cemetery than there are alive in Dublin today.  Naturally, this makes sense, but we don’t like to speak about death these days.  The Victorians embraced the subject more, carrying their memento mori and commissioning fantastical headstone whimsies. Glasnevin has embraced columbaria but has remained shy of ossuary towers, although the O’Connell Tower could be viewed as a gesture to a tower of silence albeit hewn through an Irish round tower reference.  Walking beneath the arching yews, the headstones and monuments cast long shadows from the waning light. Each stone, font, wording is carefully considered.  The great, the good, the bad and the unremarkable are buried cheek by jowl under stones smattered with blood red seeds dripping from the cemetery yews. All facing the rising sun, except the buried clergy who face west that they may lead their risen flock on the ‘Last Day’.

De Valera’s grave has no flowers and Joseph Mary Plunkett’s is understated.  Maud Gonne’s is low and wide; whilst that of Michael Collins is festooned in petrol station bouquets. There were carved Hallowe’en pumpkins left on a recently dug grave for twin baby boys who died a day apart and an elaborate private chapel erected over the wealthy Boland family vault.  This cemetery holds the feet that walked our streets before us, the people who looked through the windows of our homes before we did, the elderly who used the same post offices as us and the children that spent day trips at the same beaches as we do now. These are the dead of our neighbourhoods, the dead of our history books; the humanity that came before us.  Where and how shall we be remembered?  What memorial, what font, what wording, will be chosen for us and by whom?

Dance of the Winds

The autumn wind came today.  She didn’t announce herself, but sounded like the rustle of crinoline. She arrived in green to turn the leaves into a spectrum of falling papery confetti.  I can see her enrapturing the sycamore at my window, dancing with the tree until she loses her clothes. This tree had caused dirt to drop on my parked car during the restrictions of the pandemic lockdown, and we had wondered if she may need to be removed. Seeing the autumn wind dance with her today, I notice her leaves are slightly curled from the erotic dance.  Her leaves look different in October light, they appear to be draining of their summer security.  I wonder do the leaves know that this is a dance to the death, that these are the fatal gusts of the rustling autumn wind, seducing the trees to a deathly slumber?

The Tempest

The mechanics were huddled together watching a video on a mobile phone.  Young, brutish; redolent of what Elizabeth Bishop referred to as “several quick and saucy greasy sons” in her poem Filling Station. I felt uncomfortable in my exercise clothes, and uncomfortable in many other ways in this environment.  I didn’t feel as though I belonged, nor would I be accepted if I were to ask what the video on mobile phone was about. Singling out the thinnest and least threatening of the group, I asked him about my car tyres.  He ushered me to drive my car into the blackened garage and my car shuddered as it hit the ramps.  His gestures were minimal, and suddenly he dropped to the oily floor, animalistically transfixed by my wheels; feeling them, reaching to vehicular places I could not see.  His focus was intense, and he would not commit to a prognosis for fear I would blame him in the future if it were incorrect.  This added to my perceived sense of not belonging.  I decided to have three tyres replaced and he seemed to gesture that I had made the correct decision.  I queued to pay in advance and listened to the vacuous banter amongst the office staff, all friends and all sure of themselves.  A strange language of looks and smirks.

I sipped a hot latte at the Green Lake nearby.  The water was still, and a moorhen busied themself constructing a nest in a reeded island as their partner surveyed the operation.  Businesses backed onto the Green Lake as it had probably once been regarded as a swamp but was now hailed as a nature reserve for native newts.  The signage informed me that newts had once been regarded as “men-creepers” and climbed down male throats during sleep and could be evacuated with salt.  I could see the oily garage from my seat, a mattress company and a garden centre built precariously close to the watery edge of the Green Lake.  I wondered if the newts perused the garden centre when they left the lake instead of the expensive habitats built by the town council especially for them.  These habitats were called “hibernacula” or sods of earth covering piles of rotting timber.  I thought they looked like funereal.

Returning to the garage some time later, I found my car and the mechanics had returned to looking at a video on a mobile phone, killing time between customers.  I stood and watched them, they were attentive and quietly smiling.  They were completely comfortable in one another’s company; wearing uniforms splattered with old oil stains like blotting paper. Their hair was unkempt due to the pandemic lockdown on barbershops and their facemasks had black smudged fingerprints on them.  There were two now, one holding the mobile phone, the other leaning in close to watch it.  In the busy garage they were a moment of stillness, absorbed in their video. The flashes of blue overalls around them and their mental distraction from the garage around them, reminded me of Oskar Kokoschka’s painting called The Tempest.  The two figures were together, and yet apart in the busy garage of glimmering oil, black tyres and discarded blue paper towels.  The Tempest evoked stillness in a storm, but also of future doom as the couple were protecting themselves in an unfit boat they found near the water.  Could this garage protect the mechanics from the creatures of the Green Lake?  Perhaps this garage was their safety; their tyres were fenders to the shores of the surrounding town. They built this place like greasy moorhens beyond the reach of their threats.  I was a threat; I would not belong here.  I drove away.

(I dedicate this short piece to my childhood friend David, who decided to leave this world last weekend.  His funeral shall pass this garage and his friends who work there.)

Inside the Inglenook

Ever walk past houses and wonder who lives in them?  I was enjoying some such midmorning revery when a woman speaking loudly to her child approached on the same side of the narrow Ranelagh street as I was purposefully imagining. She was explaining something complicated to her young daughter and her grating voice caused me to cross the street to avoid any interaction. My revery was so pleasing, that I didn’t want anyone to burst it with their mundanity. As I crossed the narrow street there was a gate pier and I saw Katie’s face in it.  It was cracked, dull in colour and despite its decrepitude, was built like a brick shithouse. Katie’s cottage was down Katie’s Lane, near home when I was young.  She didn’t have electricity, sat within her inglenook with a face as blackened as the crook perched above the small dirty fire. The room was always dark. There were always fifty pence pieces standing in the plate groove of the dresser opposite the fire. The walls and she were the same colour. Black skirtings and black bent boots.  I can still taste the small of that room, the turf dust heavy in the air.  The windows were small, the floor crooked.  After a time in the darkness of the room, I could discern more of her form. The room revealed itself like a Sigurd Lewerentz church I visited when I lived in Scandinavia; darkness and then half-darkness. The hole in the shed door was just big enough for her loud dog to run through.

When the priest walked into Third Class and asked for altar servers for Katie’s funeral; my arm stayed down. Every boy’s arm stayed down.  One of the boys turned around and asked who she was. Nobody seemed to know who she was.  This meant there was probably going to be no fiver for the effort.  One boy eventually raised his arm and went with the priest to serve at the funeral further up the sweep of lawn in the cold Victorian church.  I felt the priest look at me. The door of the classroom closed and we resumed our learning.  I never heard Katie speak, I don’t know what her voice was like.  Her name did not appear on her family headstone as there was nobody to remember her and the cottage was torn down. Seeing that cracked pier as I crossed the street to avoid the young woman and her daughter; I remembered the skin of her face appearing from the gloom of that room she always sat in, the deep rivulets across her forehead, the solid form of her dull form. The hole for the dog to run through. The dresser laden with unused plates and fifty pence pieces. The bricks of an inglenook, now gone.

And I walked on.

Cast a Cold Eye

The trees are bare. The footpaths seem wider and the streets are naked.  Yeats scribed to local stone “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by”.  Recently, the act of passing someone, eyes cast down above their masks, I was reminded of Yeats.  The disconnection shared across neighbours, families and cities as we stave off death.  Our world has become smaller, our horizons limited.  Yesterday, I was speaking to a nurse in the hospital; her glasses perched atop her medical mask. When I was leaving, she confided in me that what she missed most was the sound of the sea.  She had not been to the seaside over the course of the pandemic.  I looked at her eyes and I sensed that she needed some connection, so I agreed with her and told her that I missed the sound of the Atlantic Ocean along the coast of County Sligo.  For a moment she paused as though to consider what I said and then busied herself as she would have to change her attire for her next patient.

I’ve quite enjoyed the peace of the pandemic.  Having had anxiety for most of my life, I can get overwhelmed by people and obligations. Walking through the city had always been stressful for me; my mind racing to read everybody and every scenario in my orbit. Processing all the buildings and calculating the risks involved in making my journey; I always carried that sense of anticipation as though someone was going to throw a ball at me during some forced team sport and I was preparing to keep my composure.  During the pandemic, the city has been a fresh joy for me; I don’t have to worry about meeting people, I can pause and appreciate a street scene or a beautiful doorway without the anxiousness I used to feel. I used to worry about how other people would interpret my actions, such as craning my neck to read an inscription or lost in emotional appreciation of a flower.  As a result of lockdown I can walk through the city and not be overwhelmed by it; I am enjoying the city for the first time.  I have been able to stop and soak in the old buildings as I have always wanted, explore the locality and trace the sunshine across roofs and chimneys with no airplanes, no noise. The luxury of having reason to keep away from people and have my interactions reduced has left me feeling centred; or as close to centred as I have felt before. Not having to hear the nonsense of people jabbering on their phones near me or clogging up the footpath by walking three abreast. I’ve enjoyed noticing the drifts of snowdrops emerge in old city gardens, planted by persons unknown.  Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) have been more noticeable this spring, as we are more observant of the smaller things in our lockdown contentment. ‘Galanthus’ derives from the ancient Greek meaning white flower and ‘nivalis’ means resembling snow in Latin.  The humble snowdrop symbolises hope of spring and the death of winter.  As I pass by the snowdrops, I dream of the sound of the Atlantic Ocean along the coast of Sligo and the wild white waves breaking beneath voluminous Paul Henry skies. When the Dublin streets start to pulsate with people once more, I shall leave the shivery snowdrops behind and be beneath Ben Bulben again.

Stained

As an architecture undergraduate in Dublin studing for my first degree; for a time I lived in a small bedsit. The cosy shared house I had started off with came to an abrupt end when the house was put on the market and sold immediately. I can usually unearth the beauty in a place, however evasive it seems; except that bedsit, I despised it. There was a strange plant growing from the bung hole of the shared bath half-way down the stairs and a coin metre that whirred whenever the light was switched on.  The carpets were matted and the daylight that streamed from the attic windows seemed yellowed with nicotine.  The assortment of other occupiers in the building were not seen, other than fleeting shadows beneath doors when I’d arrive home late from my night job. The landlord appeared like clockwork on Friday night and exchanged my money for the old coinage necessary for the meter to work.

I decided that I should try and find something beautiful in the local area.  Beyond the corner shop where the inflated prices were clearly to cover the cost of having a security man follow shoppers around, there was a large church.  Having undertaken some research on the church at my college library, I discovered that there were some beautiful stained-glass windows somewhere in this church.  I decided to attend a church service the following Sunday as that would give me a lengthy opportunity to scope out the beautiful windows.  As I was entering the church on Sunday morning, I found myself walking next to an African woman with a rather amazing headscarf wrapped into her hair.  I felt that as I was underdressed and as I had bathed with a plant growing from the bunghole, perhaps I should visit the church when it was vacant and less threatening.  This didn’t happen, but I did enter the church when a funeral was taking place in the side chapel some time later.  I had a suspicion that the beautiful windows were within that side chapel, so I pushed my head through the gothic oak screen to see the glass and take a photograph. Suddenly the small funeral congregation stood up, triggering me to rise also and get trapped in the oak screen. The more I struggled, the more trapped I became.  I remember the small congregation passing me by, as I tried to free myself from my prison, embarrassed.

Recently, I was in Dublin for important business and I was near that same church and noticing how vacated the city was due to Covid-19, decided that it may finally be a good time to see the beautiful windows.  Placing my sanitised hands on the glass was a moving experience, sensing the textured hand-blown glass properly for the first time. The flecks of colour and the intensity of light through the deep hues was like a shattered bottle of wine.  I realised after a time, that my facemask was catching the tears rolling from my eyes. Eighteen years ago, I was imprisoned in the oak screen behind me, and now I was alone; seeing the artistry of Harry Clarke and feeling it on my fingertips.  His hands had worked this glass. It is timeless; experiencing the Arts and Crafts Movement as freshly as he did before these windows. I have seen better examples of his work in various museums in London and Dublin, but it is the vernacular of these windows that appeals to me as they utilise recycled glass due to monetary constraints of the church.  Harry Clarke’s artistry was able to work within these parameters to illicit an emotional response from me, a passer-by, all these decades later. These windows are nothing without light. So may the sun not go down on them.  These windows remind me of the small church my grandmother used to attend in Monaghan and of leisure days in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London when working for Sir Norman Foster. To see daylight metamorphosised into intense colours was worth wating all these years for. 

Photographs taken by Ben Mc Cabe

SNOW STATUS

There are 5698 footsteps between my door and the place that I love to sit and stare at the lake. As a child it was a great adventure to run away to the lake and run through the reeds and imagine the great ships made from sellotaped milk cartons that I would cast off the shore.  Today in the snow, I walked to the lake again, listening to my soft snow steps through the centre of the car tracks.  Once in a while, the wind would blow snow dust off the boughs above and it seemed to me as though the arms of the old trees moved to wave at me, sending their snowy dust out upon the fields. I walked along the lake shore to my favourite vantage point, the waves tremoring along the edge like the meniscus of clear white wine in a nervous grip. The snow had gathered in shallow drifts, like the stuccowork of a great house staircase.

Sitting on the lakeshore today, the undertones of trauma well up, the anxiety heightens and the need to keep moving settles into a heartbeat rhythm.  A drip from the blackened overhead branches drops into the almost still water and the tension lifts. For a moment, there is peace. A single drop. A teardrop from the wintery canopy.  The lake water looks like it would freeze a soul in perpetuity. Do I want to sit there forever or take the 5698 steps back to the house? And before I’m ready to make a decision, my anxiousness is taking me by the hand back along the snowy shore.

MARGINAL

The margin can sometimes feel like the safest place to exist.  Being on the edge of somewhere but looking towards somewhere else.  Looking to the other side. That ‘somewhere else’ or ‘other place’ can be obscure, or just out of sight.  Moving an inch closer towards it can give comfort that it is a better place, a place where you can feel safe and secure.  What makes that other place so appealing is that we cannot perceive it properly; there is room for our imagination to make it whatever shade of greener green we wish.  The trick is to not reach that other place.  It may be disappointing; it may be worse than our starting point. Sitting on the margin just looking over at it, being aware of it is enough.  Living in hope that there is another place that is better gives us reason to strive. Living in that hope is a positive place to be, being on that margin is a magical place. Sit in that marginal place and look across to something that you hope is better.

A WHOLE NEW WORLD

I spent my lockdown time walking in the woods. Before, the trees were passing posts of green moss as I was busy thinking of something else, of other things. Over the past few months, I watched spring and early summer roll out across the woods and I had time to notice the natural changes. The coloured layers of woodland anemones and bluebells as the canopy burst into a cloud of papery green. The deft swoops of the buzzard through the mossy tree trunks and the agile pine martin intrigued as to what I was doing in his world. A curious red squirrel squatting on the same fallen tree on which I lay. Lying on a fallen tree in a forest is a great way to see the sky through the canopy hole. It is through a void where a tree once stood that the movement of the other trees can be noticed; the forest sway.  With roots deep in the landscape, the forest offers a communal protection to all the trees.  When one tree falls, the hole in the canopy is noticeable and appreciated for a short time by myself and a fleeting squirrel. In time, the forest will heal itself and new growth will emerge from the forest floor, dormant seeds will awaken and new life shall heal and fill the communal canopy.  Those that have fallen during this lockdown have left holes in our lives through which the light shall shine and new, stronger growth shall emerge.  We should remember the beauty revealed during these times, the squirrel on the fallen tree,  the sky revealed, the memory of the fallen and the new growth emerging towards the light. We are tentatively returning to our everyday lives or for many what may be a whole new world.

The Art of the Broken

Simple farmstead vernacular is immensely appealing, lacking the ubiquity of chichi city buildings. Unpretentious, under-articulated and humbly risen from the place it sits, the cottage is the crucible of our culture.  Simple materials and design in a vernacular minimalism; pure functionality through localised evolution. The cottage was the little white-washed power-house of a western smallholding, producing food for itself and the nation.

The farmstead has fallen out of liveable use and nature reclaims what was borrowed from it; the lissom lime render caking off, caving corrugated roofs and chimneys collapsing onto a mound of nettles.  If we stand for a moment on the brink of forgotten, and look around at our island vernacular, we can appreciate the art of the broken.  The Japanese call it kintsugi; reparation of the broken pieces – the beauty of the mends in something that was surely to be discarded.  The fissures are expressed; the damage is accentuated, creating something profound.  There is enormous opportunity to explore this artistic ideology in architecture, in vestiges of our broken vernacular.  However, the result should become something more beautiful than the original pieces, otherwise leave well alone.

Art Ceramics

The design cognoscenti are inevitably able to recognise the work of the Martin Brothers from forty paces away.   I was a little unsure what to think when I saw their work first; their pieces appeared grotesque, their perceptive beauty slowly growing with time.  And after their beauty has revealed itself, there is no going back.  You’re hooked.

Edwin, Walter, Charles and Wallace produced their stoneware from the 1870’s until it petered out in 1923 after the First World War.  Started in Fulham and ending in Middlesex, the pottery worked mainly with saltglazes.  Their sculpted characters have a knowing anthropomorphism, best captured in their eye detail; a dry humour, a withering look.  A look that Mr Carson the butler might give Daisy the maid or the pigeon on the sill or the natural history museum may give the dodo.  In recent years their work has become incredibly sought after for its brilliance.  Meticulous attention to detail, individualised strands of humour and a packaged idolisation of nature sets their work apart.  Their birds are marvellous, and have the same effect as watching Hitchcock’s ornithological thriller – your perception of nature is slightly altered afterwards.  The knowingness of the stoneware birds is menacing. 

Contemporaneously, there are some excellent art ceramics being crafted by artists such as Sophie Woodrow in Bristol.  I admire her work, evolved from misrepresentations of natural-world discoveries by the confident globe-trekking Victorians.  Her visual language is distinctive, a fragility of material and colour.  Anthropomorphic details almost become skeuomorphic, as each piece takes on a life and identity of its own.  Again, you find yourself wondering if the figures are looking back at you with their hollow eyes.

Martinware & Sophie Woodrow

Landscape

It’s amazing.  Forced and foiled by glaciers, millennia old.  Nurtured, worked and revered, our soils are our nation’s greatest asset.   I didn’t appreciate that fully until I was researching our food systems and how they evolved into the first human settlement, the first villages, the first cities.  Food underpins our existence, our culture.  The soil dictated our settlement.  Movement of harvests developed into roadways and infrastructure.

Perhaps we’ve lost our connection to the soil, to our landscape.  In Ireland, the landscape is so beautiful, so ‘everywhere’ that we take it for granted.  One-off housing and expanding non-sustainable development is eating it up.  I guess we like the photo-view of a valley or a mountain range on our Christmas calendars, but if we look closer, the micro-view of our landscape is pretty amazing.  Everything is interconnected; everything has a purpose, a symbiosis.  From the fungi, fishing, to the farm buildings, everything is useful working to a collective seasonal assembly line of food production to our cities.

On our landscape are the vestiges of an urban migration, disused buildings and abandoned fields.  The strong farms disassembled after the Land Acts, a seismic shift in the constructional hierarchy of our land.  Redistributed ruins and abandoned orchards.  The draw of New York and London leaving clusters of homesteads to be reclaimed by an unforgiving landscape.  We turn our backs on these, seeking a new definition of our national identity.  But what were wars fought for if not to protect a culture over which we now cast a cold eye?  Our landscapes, our vernacular, our soils are some of our greatest cultural and economic assets.  Traces of lifetimes vested into defining our identity over an unforgiving landscape; the story of who we are.  Tread softly.