Fin Keegan

The “Classical Irish Island”, according to archaeologist Paul Gosling, is “replete with…

• a megalithic tomb
• a hilltop cairn
• a medieval parish church
• the site of a watermill
• a smattering of ringforts or coastal promontory forts, and
• a number of miscellaneous hut and house sites”

He is hardly exaggerating: the average Irish square mile, like the average Irish soul, seems to teem with the workings of a long human history.

Reference: The Mayo News, Oct 9th, 2007

Escapism is a vital aspect of all art, indeed of all entertainment from the Dukes of Hazzard to the Second Viennese School. But Art only endures insofar as the work in question (sometimes accidentally, as in Casablanca) stirs up fresh insights into who we are and what, as human beings, we are capable of.

Similarly with life. Though our recent move to the West of Ireland undeniably involves escape, it will only succeed if fresh challenges are raised, fresh insights attained–and fresh failures endured.

Such is Life…and Art.

Onward!

KNPR called me up for my first week impressions of Ireland, where I recently returned after 14 years away. You can hear or download the interview here.

We are moving back to Ireland, after 14 years away. Perhaps I might be permitted some Torschlusspanik?

In Edouard Roditi’s Dialogues, painter Oskar Kokoschka talks about this curious German word, defined by him as the “panic that breaks out before the closing of a door”

Given its usefully precise meaning, the word has been used in English on occasion: the OED records the following instances:

1963 P. Bracken I Hate to Housekeep Bk. ix. 92: The random housewife is often prone to Torschlusspanik, or fear of being locked in the park at night, after the gates are closed.

1977 Time 8 Aug. 21/3: She was haunted by Torschluss-panik (mid-life crisis).

1980 Times Lit. Suppl. 14 Mar. 287/2: Mme de Staël is perhaps history’s most outstanding case of Torschlusspanik: the panic at the shutting of the door.

and our lexicographer ventures beyond the painter to offer a more metaphorical definition:

Torschlusspanik [Ger., lit. ‘shut door (or gate) panic’] A sense of alarm or anxiety (said to be experienced particularly in middle age) caused by the suspicion that life’s opportunities are passing (or have passed) one by; spec. that manifested in an ageing woman who longs to (re)discover the (sexual) excitement of youth, and who fears being left ‘on the shelf’.

Either way, the door closes in two weeks…

One of the best dramas ever produced by television has just ended in a hail of ambiguities.

The Sopranos‘ dialogue, acting, conceptual wit, and direction have all been praised to the skies elsewhere. Like HBO stablemate Big Love, it is at once both believable and unbelievable that such lives could be lived in our modern world.

But, the deepest appeal of this mobster clan may be their elemental likeness to us: wealthy, or comparatively so, both we and they alike live with a radically split consciousness: worrying over our children, vain about our waistlines, more or less slaves to our appetites, we remain wilfully ignorant of the pain of those (the victims; the poor; the powerless) upon whom our lifestyle is based.

If Chinese peasants-turned-factory-workers, to take but one example, were to successfully organize for fair working conditions tomorrow, our cheap clothing and footwear would be gone in a week.

For Tony Soprano there is “out there” and “in here”, with markedly different rules and moral imperatives at work in each context: aren’t we all a little like him?

It’s hard to think of another nation as principled as the United States: the system of government and values, as set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is a richly conceived philosophy, many of whose propositions and imperatives are not only known by rote but also profoundly grasped by her citizens.

The Enlightenment values upon which the American system rests are equally impeccable: Freedom, Equality, and the Dignity of the Individual. One cannot find fault with them.

But the massacres of Baghdad and Blacksburg alike illustrate the difficulty we face: our ideals confound human frailty: as time wears on, the gap between Principle and Reality grows wider.

In Iraq, the right thing to do was to depose Saddam Hussein–but we were patently the wrong people to do it: in fact, the only right people to do it were the Iraqis. Taking their history away from them proved catastrophic.

At home, meanwhile, the moral laxity of our response to the Virginia Tech massacre (i.e. the refusal to examine our gun culture) exposes the danger of attachment to principles that may seem eternal and necessary but are anything but. We need to outgrow our childish fascination with firearms, together with the delusions of power it embodies.

The principle is not the issue: we are.

Britain is going through such tumult at the moment–between the Iran Hostages episode and its aftermath, the prospect of Scottish nationalists effectively destroying the Union, and, almost as a footnote, ex-terrorists joining sectarian bigots to take control of a ‘home nation’–that it is beginning to seem as though a new historical phase is announcing itself.

The shift–or downshift–is all the more painful coming as it does on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their last memorable exercise of unilateral power: the retaking of the Falkland Islands.

Now Britain is characterized as the impotent partner in the transatlantic alliance: a perception verified as actual by President Ahmadinejad who has expertly demonstrated how pitiful is the UK’s friendship with continental Europe and even, to some extent, with the US (arguably the US laid low in order to keep the situation calm–but the plight of limey sailors also failed to capture the American public imagination).

Geopolitics aside, the behaviour of Faye Turney and her 14 colleagues has exposed some ugly division, none more so perhaps than in a Jan Moir piece for the Telegraph whose anger at Turney in particular for “singing like a canary” to the Press and “writing screeds of damaging propaganda” for Iran after being “lightly coerced” shades into a classist subtext.

How, one senses the traditional Tory class wondering, did this ignominy come about? Moir provides the answer: desire for ‘cash and celebrity’ among the cannon-fodder multitudes, the “low-ranking workhorse…personnel” as she calls them.

British elites have always been somewhat embarrassed by their working classes, upon whom the whole show has always depended–as Kipling knew but the world, before mass media at least, did not.

Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams sitting side by side is such an unprecedented image that it sets the mind flicking back through the mental archives for aparallel: Vaclav Havel as President of the State that had but months before assaulted and imprisoned him seems closest.

The saddest aspect of this generally happy day (apart from the fact that moderates have been so sidelined) is that it took almost forty years to get the two sides to share power in a jurisdiction that is so tiny.

In an ideal world Paisley and Adams would be provincial councillors or part-time local politicians. Instead they are known throughout the world, from Tehran to Tulsa, very often for their sectarianism and, betimes, more or less veiled approval of political violence.

Now we may be headed for a situation, once unthinkable, where Ian Paisley is in charge up North and Gerry Adams is President down South. Who’s to say now that such a thing could not happen?

Since 2002, the Six Counties has been mired in the excruciating stasis of Direct Rule from London–which well suits the obstructionist rump of Paisleyite Unionism. Dennis Bradley raises the prospect of a Plan B:

Joint authority has much to recommend it. It incarnates the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement in giving equal expression to both traditions. It neuters all the paramilitary organisations. It draws a clear line between politically motivated actions and criminal actions. It encourages all of our parties to move beyond the suffocating parameters of the Troubles.

Dublin Ministers running key departments would also neatly yank the DUP back into the real world.

Reference: Bradley: Political vacuum is no longer an option Irish News, Feb 3rd, 2006

Listening to Margaret Atwood recently, defining Canada’s identity solely in terms of its heavyweight neighbour, made me fear for the future of smaller, peripheral nations such as Canada and my own native country, Ireland.

With globalisation of culture and commerce rising around us as inexorably as the oceans, our Nation States are showing signs of disintegration: Anglo-Canada’s identity seems to be dwindling down to “NotAmerica.ca”, Ireland’s to “NotTheUK.ie”, and Francophone-Europe to “PasLaFrance.zut”.

Dubliners, when not gossipping into their cellphones or weeping over the tribulations of English celebrities and soccer teams (AKA corporations) , are forever telling us how confident and well-adjusted into Europeanness they are: so well-adjusted that if you describe them as British, which they largely are, they almost suffer a stroke.

But, if there is no positive identity behind the rhetoric, what is the point of carrying on, except out of an atavistic vanity? Dublin now has reverted to the quasi-English city it was when Queen Victoria visited, only with designer icons in place of Union Jacks; all one ever hears from Anglophone Canadians is how frightful it is to be mistaken for Americans.

The fact is that Mother Tongue more than Location or even History, mass trauma aside, defines groups most exactly and the foundational slogans of the New Exceptionalists (Ireland and Canada, e.g.) will quickly wear thin when actual sacrifice is called for (e.g. meeting the true costs of Defense, Counter-Terrorism, or Oil)

Margaret Atwood was speaking on ABC Radio Australia.