The Brightening, by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

I 'discovered' Doireann Ní Ghríofa last year during the first months of lockdown when I was reading incessantly. Her book 'A Ghost in the Throat' still haunts me, one of the most compelling voices I've ever heard wandering through the lives of women whose souls are intertwined, centuries apart. So I was delighted to find her video performance of her poem 'The Brightening'. 

    I call it a performance rather than a reading, because like her book it's quite hard to tell where the line is between narrator and narrative. We move seamlessly back and forth from interior to exterior, from past to present. Given the title, 'The Brightening' and the way her west of Ireland accent draws out those long O sounds, I was reminded of these lines by Yeats:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, 

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

(from Among School Children by W.B.Yeats) 

    In this performance by Ní Ghríofa the dancer and the dance are truly one. I can't say that I understand it all (could you ever say that about a poem?) but the conjunction with Yeats doesn't seem accidental: the image of the grand old house going up in flames feels connected to last days of the old Irish ascendancy of Yeats and Lady Gregory, and just this moment I noticed  that the video was filmed in Coole Park.

    The poem is a response to 'The Planter's Daughter' by Austin Clarke, but whereas the eponymous daughter in that poem is passive and an apologist for her family of planters in the big house, this narrator is strong and subversive and burns the house down. 

    There are so many extraordinary lines and images in the poem, but I'll highlight these:

Ghosts, those flames, racing up the stairs,

sending smoke through slates,

a vast constellation of sparks

to star the dark.

    But listen to her say them for the full effect. The complete text of the poem is available here on the Irish Times website, though the version she performs has evolved a little since that publication.

Wow.

  

Appreciating Paul Robeson

 A few weeks ago we went for dinner at Damas. the celebrated Syrian restaurant on Rue Van Horne. All five of us together, which took some advanced planning by my partner-in-life as the tables at Damas have to be reserved months in advance and the boys like to keep their weekends open. But it all worked out. The food was fabulous and the dishes kept coming until we were beyond stuffed. And the conversation around the table was lively of course.

In the minivan on the way home a discussion (in French) broke out amongst the boys about which of them had the deepest voice. The two older ones said that the music teacher at Stanislas had said they were both baritones, but they thought that P's voice would end up deeper than theirs, though we don't think his has fully broken yet. I asked had they ever heard a real bass singing voice and they said they hadn't. So I had my chance to introduce a little culture in to the proceedings.

My Dad's favourite singer was Paul Robeson. Not that he ever put on a record or anything, but if a song came on the radio he'd say 'ah that's glorious'. So through the wonders of the internet I played this song over the van's speakers, and the boys all loved it. It was the perfect end to a great Sunday evening. 

At the pub, July 1982

I've been staggering out of bed at the ungodly hour of 6am to write 'morning pages' for over a month now. I'd heard that it's a way of tapping into the unconscious, to spark creativity, before the ego wakes up and demands control. So worth doing, I thought. The results have been interesting, there are a lot of ideas and fragments that I can build upon. Sometimes I write about a dream, more often I take a line of poetry as a prompt and freewrite from there. And then, occasionally a memory pops in to my head, a scene I didn't know I remembered. Like this one, a moment from July 1982.

I walk into the pub. It's seems a simple thing to do but at 17 years old it’s not easy to just walk into the pub without being terribly conscious that you’re actually 'walking into the pub'. So I walk into the pub, looking all around for the group from the office where I've been working for the summer. The first proper summer job I've ever had. The place reeks of cigarettes and stale beer, but there aren’t many people here this early on a Wednesday evening. Still it’s hard to see anyone, the pub twists around on itself in nooks and corners, providing lots of places where you can hide from view. I'm unsure of the layout, it seems wilfully mysterious, like the pub is mocking me. After a moment of panic about the place and time we’d arranged, I finally see them, off to my right in a dim corner. Just the girls. I‘m the first guy to arrive. They’re all lined up on the bench along the wall so I sit on the stool on the other side of the table. It wobbles, and I list dangerously to one side before catching my balance to a ripple of giggles. I’m sweating, and, I’m sure, glowing bright red. A waitress comes over to take my order, it’s one of those fancy pubs where you don't have to elbow your way to the bar. Another first.

    'A pint of Guinness' I squeak, trying and failing to sound nonchalant. 

    'Oooooh!' goes the Greek chorus of female office workers in front of me. I'm going to need reinforcements, and quickly.

Whatever happened next is completely gone from my memory, so I guess it was much less emotionally scarring.

A performance of Ravel's piano concerto in G major

As I mentioned in an earlier post I was at Montreal's Maison Symphonique to see this concerto performed by Hélène Grimaud and the Orchestre Métropolitain with Nézet-Séguin conducting. It was a powerful performance, amplified by how long it had been since any of us had experienced a live performance.

The second movement has been spinning around in my head ever since. I used my memory of the concert in a piece of creative non-fiction, where the narrator is uncovering his feelings about the death of someone to whom he used to be close. It finishes like this:

   She raises her hands above the piano keys and pauses. Time congeals and stops. Then, at the perfect moment that only she has foreseen, she slowly lowers her hands and begins to play, delicately unwinding that long lyrical melody I know so well. Time is liquefied, flowing, meandering back on itself in a long loop. We hear her breathing in the quiet passages of music. It’s only when you’re as close as I am that you appreciate how much physical effort it takes her to play as emotionally as this. I wait for her breath at the end of each phrase, like you do when you’re at the bedside of a dying person, waiting to hear if there will ever be another breath. And then those discordant notes that initially sound so wrong, but as the harmonics linger you realise that they’re so right. My heart is sore. We’ve arrived at a truce, but peace is still a long way off.

    The end of the second movement, a long-drawn-out note, and then there is silence. The air is charged, radioactive, and no one in the hall stirs for a long time. There is not a cough, no sound of a breath, as we await the final movement.

Postscript, September 2025:

A later version of my piece was published in the September 2025 issue of the Canadian magazine Blank Spaces. You can find information and links to all of my writing at www.LaurenceWrites.com. 

An October cycle in the Eastern Townships

 My partner-in-life and I went cycling in the Eastern Townships last Thursday. I took this photo, which prompted a haiku.

Through leaf fall tunnel,
wheel crushing the golden dead.
Autumn life cycle.

Books, memory and the Holocaust

Last Friday I visited the Montreal Holocaust Museum along with my partner-in-life M, and our neighbour J. I've wanted to go for years, since the boys went with their school, and we eventually committed to a date over back-garden drinks with J and her husband. They're a jewish couple, something which is incidental to our usual conversations, but it came up this time after they recounted receiving anti-semitic insults from Trump supporters at their holiday apartment in Florida. They've decided to sell it.

Of course the museum is a terribly moving experience, but it's also a brilliantly educational one. What are the first warning signs of an impending genocide? The museum tells of several, and the one that struck me most were the huge book burnings in Germany in the early 30's. We saw a video of smiling people running to toss piles of books into the towering flames, watching on by celebrating crowds. Books in Hebrew. Books written by jews like Proust and Einstein. Books written by 'degenerates' like Hemmingway. Hatred with smiles, a communal experience in front of a roaring fire, a loosening of repressions, an opening of terrible possibilities. 

It seems to me that writers have a special responsibility to memory. What else is writing other than the ultimate act of remembering? And books have a special symbolism, representing memory and culture, a voice kept alive long after death. 

It's easy to be critical of the modern state of Israel. There's a many good things about it, but its treatment of the Palestinians is so obviously wrong. Criticism of that is just. And needed.

Sally Rooney is a fine writer. She clearly loves books and, well-educated in modern Ireland, she undoubtedly knows the history of the 20th century. She has refused to have her latest book published in Hebrew because the publisher operates in Israel, her way of expressing solidarity with the Palestinians. Frankly, the symbolism of that decision is horrific. And liable to be jumped upon by some of the most unsavoury elements in Irish society, anti-semites who lurk in the so-called republican movement. 

So although I don't always agree with Anne Harris, I'm in complete agreement with her article in today's Irish Times. The rabid reaction of some of the people commentating on it shows why.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Over the weekend I finished 'Beautiful world, where are you' by Sally Rooney. A few years ago I read a fine short story she wrote in the Irish Times, but with all the hype about her since Normal People was televised I thought it was about time I read one of her novels. Well reader, I found it to be a strangely complex and unsatisfying experience. But that might be exactly what she was aiming for. 

For me, the first three quarters of the book are a bit cold and lifeless. The interactions of the four principal characters are stilted, all manners and pose. Their conversations never seem to get to a point, very little that they're saying seems authentic or of any real consequence. Their sexual relations are detailed explicitly but are self-conscious and, dare I say, passionless. In their emails to each other the characters of Eileen and Alice adopt  intellectual personae to pontificate about politics and culture, each seeking to impress the other in an earnest and writerly way, and neither trying to read deeply what the other is saying. The narrator's perspective moves in and out, sometimes intensely close to the thoughts and feelings of the characters, sometime floating far about them and puzzling about what they are thinking, just like the reader is. That seems intentionally cinematographic, like Rooney was already thinking about how this could be filmed. But her mastery of the building blocks of the novel is evident, there is real skill on display here. to the point where I feel she must be deliberately making a point of highlighting the narrative technique rather than the characters.  

And then at about the three-quarters point the four characters come together to share a house for a few days and the story finally grips and we see the emotions come to the fore. Each of them is flawed, and none of them is particularly likeable. But this part is compelling, and as I read it I thought that Rooney had been using the first three quarters as a set up just to emphasize the impact of these moments when the characters reveal themselves. And if that was her plan, well, it worked very well. But just as I was ready to say that this was a great novel, the last two chapters bring us back again into an email exchange, and we're back to that shiny surface that occludes the interior.

At the end I feel this is not a great novel but a very clever one, and that Rooney is in some way challenging her readers, testing what she can get away with. I admire what she has done, but can't say I really loved it. Frankly I got a bit bored with it and rushed to finish it because I didn't care about any of these characters at all. But the author's skill is undeniable and I'm really curious about what she'll produce next.   

A charged moment

Last night I was at the opening concert of the Orchestre Métropolitan's new season, the first concert with a sizeable audience in a long long time. The excitement of the crowd was palpable. The centre piece of the evening was the Ravel piano concerto in G major featuring Hélène Grimaud, and at the end of the wild and jazzy first movement we couldn't contain ourselves, breaking into applause to the obvious pleasure of the musicians. Grimaud paused for a while before beginning the lyrical second movement which was just stunning, lifting us all on waves of music. When that movement concluded there were ten or fifteen seconds of electric silence, not a cough or sniffle to be heard, everyone suspended in an atmosphere that was almost radioactive in intensity. And then the orchestra launched in to the super third movement.

What a evening.

The opening piece of the night was also wonderful, a composition by Barbara Assiginaak, a composer with First Nation's ancestry, evoking the Fleuve St-Laurent as it meandered through this ancient land. It succeeded perfectly.

Apple picking

Yesterday we went apple picking. Little now-taller-than-me Philou came too, but none of his older brothers did. We filled our bucket with cortland, spartan and redcort, plump and juicy and crisp, my son reaching higher and higher for the best apples.  On the other side of the orchard a crowd of families sought the immediate sweetness of honeycrisp, but those trees had already been picked almost bare. The sun angled across the rows of trees, surprising us with its post-equinox strength, reddening the pale Irish skin of Philou and me.

Saturday at Verger Labonté

Today I made an apple pie, cooling it in the fresh breeze passing through the house. It tasted of late season, of another summer passing, of children who will soon no longer be children. It was comforting and sweet with a hint of tartness.

Sunday on Côte-Saint-Antoine

Tomorrow and the day after I'll remember the Saturday in autumn when we went apple picking.

 

Kukum by Michel Jean (en français)

Kukum is the story of a white francophone woman in late 19th-century Québec, who marries an Innu and takes on the life of the First Nations people. She embraces the life of a hunter, moving with the seasons from summer lakeside idylls to harsh winter camps. But over her life of ninety-seven years the natives' lands are taken for logging, their children are taken for forced re-education, and they end up living bleak sedentary lives on a reservation plagued by alcoholism and deprivation (the reservation now known as Mashteuiatsh.)

    You might think you've heard this story before, the tragedy of the First Nations that's sparks much hand-wringing but little action. But what you haven't heard before is the story told in first-person, in the rich and compelling voice of this woman whose passion leaps off the page to inhabit you completely. The voice belongs to Almanda, the eponymous Kukum (grandmother in Innu-aimun). The author has lightly fictionalised the story of his own great-grandmother to create this unforgettable character. The story is not at all bleak. The strongest feelings are her love for her husband and children, and her passionate engagement in their life amongst the lakes, rivers and forests. Her narrative places the Innu at the centre of the history of this part of Québec, along the North Shore of the St. Lawrence (called Nitassinan in Innu-aimun), and weaves in strands such as Francophone politics, Anglophone logging companies, and Irish immigrants. 

    The book is organized into 48 short chapters, bite-sized chunks which worked well for me as I read more slowly in French, helped by the online dictionary of my Kindle. I've been enthusing about the book in dinner conversations with my family, so I've bought a paper copy today to leave in the kitchen where I hope one of them will pick it up.  It's a book that deserves to be read, a compelling novel in its own right but also one that can help to build greater empathy and understanding of the difficulties faced by the First Nations peoples today, and our shared history that brought us to this point.

Reading, not blogging

This is my first post in over a year. But if the pandemic hasn't been a good time for my blogging, it's been great for reading: in these eighteen months I've read twenty-three works of fiction and two collections of poetry. 

What struck me when I listed them was that the majority of the authors were women, sixteen of the twenty-five in fact. That wasn't a plan, it just somehow turned out that way. 

Picking the next book to read is a bit of a convoluted process for me. I research carefully, reading book reviews, recommendations by authors I like,  as well as word-of-mouth from others readers I know. I don't want to waste my reading time. And there were several authors whose book I liked so much I decided to read more of their work so they show up several times in my list: Ali Smith, Francis Spufford, and Madeleine Thien.

Of the books I read for the first time, it would be hard to say which one I loved the most. But if I were forced to choose it would be hard not to say Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, so she's on my 'must read more by her' list. 

So here's the list of fiction and poetry I've read since March 12th 2020. There's not one here I didn't enjoy greatly:

Fiction

Snow, by John Banville
Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry
Quarantine, by Jim Crace
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
Outline, by Rachel Cusk (my second reading of it)
Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo
Travellers, by Helon Habila
Sudden Traveller, by Sarah Hall
A Ghost in the Throat, by Doireann ní Ghríofa
The End of the Road is a Cul de Sac, by Louise Kennedy
Dinosaurs on Other Planets, by Danielle McLaughlin
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
Autumn, by Ali Smith
Winter, by Ali Smith
Spring, by Ali Smith
Summer, by Ali Smith
Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford
Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford
Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeleine Thien (my third reading of it)
Dogs at the Perimeter, by Madeleine Thien
Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (my third or fourth reading of it)

Poetry

A Poet’s Dublin, by Eavan Boland
Call Me Ishmael Tonight, by Agha Shahid Ali

The fine art of resurfacing

The resurfacing of Cote St-Antoine is finally done. For a while anyway. The heavy machinery has fallen silent, the dust is settling and, little by little, the cowering citizens of NDG are timidly emerging to reclaim their front gardens and footpaths.

It wasn't quite a war zone but what a bloody noise those machines made! Worst of all was the orange brute identified on its flank as a Hamm HD+ 140 High Frequency. In this picture it looks almost benign, and its name reminds me of a HiFi audio component. But it flattened tarmac to a brutal soundtrack.

The Hamm HD+ 140 High Frequency

It hit with two distinct sonic impacts simultaneously: the first a low frequency rumble felt in the chest (amplified in the swimming pool water where I'd taken refuge so that it almost took my breath away); the second a high-pitched whine that a Boeing would be proud of, that rose and fell and, just when you believed it had ended, rose again.

The noise was exhausting, draining, but the workers seemed not to notice it. They wore no ear protection at all. (Nor did they wear anything over their noses and mouths against the dust and fumes, or anything to cover their bare arms and necks in the fierce heatwave that ambushed us this June). Their work looked and sounded violent but was so precise: the thickness of each layer of tarmac carefully measured by one of them every few seconds as he stabbed the tarmac with a stiletto ruler, a second wielded a spirit level to check the camber from roadside to crown and along the channels leading to each drain. Most impressively the driver maneuvered the giant roller to within millimetres of each path.

Their last day, Friday, was a long one as they rushed to finish: 7 am to 7.30 pm. Next week they'll undoubtedly invade another neighbourhood in a blitzkrieg of resurfacing. But for us on Cote St-Antoine the rest of the summer is, hopefully, silence.

The Coal Hole

The coal hole was the dark closet under the stairs of my childhood home in Crumlin. I would crawl in between the winter coats to sit down beside the hoover, staying still in the close darkness for hours with only the sound of my own breathing for company. 

There was no longer any coal there - there may never have been any - but there was certainly a faint yet sharp odour of gas from the metre. But mostly it smelled of my Dad's old coats, a comforting smell, the smell of him, of home. The ancient crombie overcoat which, though well-worn through many years, he still considered to be his best coat. A view most emphatically not shared by my mother. Various anoraks which he'd forgotten he had. And most impressively to my young eyes, his brown leather motorbike jacket, thick and heavy, and with it his old helmet and goggles.

My Dad's old motorbike had long gone by this stage. It wasn't very practical as transportation for a family of four. After a decade standing unused and forlorn in the garden, green, grimy, and rusting, he sold the old Sunbeam S7 to a passing dealer who restored it to the point that we saw it on display with other vintage motorbikes in the St. Patrick's Day parade. But my Dad always and forever considered himself a biker, as evidenced by his ownership of that jacket, even if he no longer possessed a bike. 

In my teen years I was often annoyed at Dad, for lots of trivial teenage reasons. Later, when I got over myself and wanted to talk to him, my Dad proved difficult to connect with. He adopted a persona for each situation, and with me he was always the parent. It was hard to get through to the real him, whoever that was, and I never really succeeded.

I've heard it said that it's in the effort to not be like our parents that we become most like them. As a teenager I resolved that I would be a biker, that I'd have the coolest and most uncompromising sports motorcycle, and that's exactly how it worked out. I had several bikes, each as red and deafening as a fire-engine and just as alarming to my wife. And of course, I had matching one-piece leathers and helmet. But the truth is, my bikes weren't very practical as transportation for a family of five. Eventually my Honda VFR750F stood covered in the shed for a decade before I finally sold it - and then only because the shed was being rebuilt and I had nowhere to store it. For I still considered myself a biker, and the bike represented that. Now it's gone. But I still have the red leathers and helmet, stored carefully in the space we call the cedar closet, a space I've seen my youngest son snuggle into on top of the bags of duvets and pillows.

What do we leave behind us when we die? Memories in the minds of those who knew us, a few material things we possessed that invoke those memories. Mannerisms and phrases, maybe even a predisposition to certain choices that we unwittingly pass on to our children. Things that we ourselves inherited.

I wonder what my children will remember of me.

 

Coronavirus: week 1 thoughts

'In years to come, let them say of us: when things were at their worst, we were at our best.'

- Leo Varadkar, St. Patrick's Day 2020 television address

'History is new, my friends, and we are all of us making it, all the time, together.

- John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

'I never thought I'd say this, but I wish I was at school.'

- Philou, over bedtime milk and biscuits this evening

We don't want the aliens to think we're idiots

One morning this week little (no longer at all little) Philou asked me: 

'Dad, what's a parsec?'

Our conversations often begin like this, a subject coming out of the blue.

'It's a unit of distance', I said, delighted to have one of those increasingly rare moments with my children to show off my brilliance. 'A parsec is a few light years.'

This is the sort of topic I geek out on.

'You're wrong Dad, 'cos in Star Wars they use it to talk about time', he replied.

Well that can't be right. So we dug out the wikipedia article where it says plainly that a parsec is a unit of distance, and also that it's used incorrectly as a time unit in the first Star Wars film.

'So why do we need parsecs if we have light-years?', Philou continued.

'Well', I replied, 'if we were to meet aliens in a distant star system and tried to explain where we came from using light-years, they'd just think we were idiots!'

Imagine the conversation as humans encounter an alien on a faraway planet.

'We come in peace', our earthling spacemen might say.

'Cool! Where exactly do you come from?', the aliens might ask.

'Oh, a blue planet called Earth, a few light-years that way', we'd reply. 'You know, the distance light travels in a year'.

'The speed of light, gotcha', the aliens would say. 'That's a universal constant. But what's a year?'

Well that is indeed the killer question alright.

'A year is how how long it takes our planet Earth to orbit our sun. Well sort of, it actually takes a bit longer than that so every 4th year is 1/365th longer, called a leap year. But we don't use light-leap-years. Well actually we don't use years to measure light-years at all, we use metres per second. A metre is how far light travels in 1/1299792458th of a second. Seconds are 1/86400th of a day - a day is the time it takes our planet to rotate once on its axis. Well sort of, it actually takes a bit longer than that so we have leap seconds. So we've redefined a second as the ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom which in hertz is 9192631770 when...'

'Oh you guys are idiots!", interrupt the exasperated aliens. "How did you ever find your way here at all'.

And that's why we have parsecs. All our alien needs to understand is the concept of a circle and a little trigonometry, both probably understood by any intelligent life form, and then we can tell him how far away earth is in parsecs.

A parsec is the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends an angle of one arcsecond.

Like this:

How cool is that? (OK so there's teeny bit more complexity - see the parsec wikipedia article - but still!)

If you must know, a parsec is around 3.26 lightyears - but let's not go there again.