It seems such a long time since I heard Pat
Kenny yesterday. It seems like a full week and Dad is like the rest of the
world despairing at the fleeting passage of time. On the other hand it seems like
only yesterday since life itself began in the memory of the Prodigal. What is
time or is there such an entity as timelessness?
Is it merely the instrument we use to pass
through this finite existence we call life? For those who have negotiated the
journey successfully it must be a great relief to have fulfilled ones earthly
chores and get the fuck out of here altogether. Somebody said if you want to
see if your life is worthwhile try and imagine the world with and without you
in it and see did you make any difference at all. In other words what have you
contributed to this vale of tears that is uniquely yours and unlikely to have
been achieved by anyone else leaving aside the issue of procreation which any
newt can achieve.
Billy Natton's saying was that “time is the greatest loss that man can sustain”.
But while this maxim may
strike a chord with some the reality is that time in real terms cannot be
lost. Someone else said;
“you cannot waste time, you can only spend it unwisely”.
“I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present”.
My favourite quotation about time is by one Dion Boucicault;
“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them”.
When this mortal coil is abandoned and along with
it the human concept of personal time is it worthwhile to be remembered and if
so how might this be achieved?
One way is through the power of creativity and
the other is through procreativity. A masterpiece in verse or on canvas or the
often random location of seed can achieve some degree of perpetuity.
On the subject of lineage dad is the only male
member of the family to have fathered sons. This maintains the line which is
considered very important by those where continuity has not or cannot be achieved.
As well as that I’ll have two fine sons and thus far three sturdy grandsons to
spread my ashes whenever they need ferrying to wherever. The elder of my sons
has a son who bears my father’s name and I am in fairly regular contact by
blackberry which used to be a fruit. I doubt if any of my girls will marry
soon, if ever, and all things considered they may well be right. Which one of
them would wish to repeat the sins of the father?
Of the items of note which I might call
achievements one surely is surviving when both priest and doctor told me I was
going to die. One further side issue of this event was the case of the doctor
(Coyne) telling me that a side effect of the illness from which I had recovered
was the fact that I was certain to be impotent. Either the good doctor was
mistaken or I was taken in on a goodly number of occasions by women in whom I
had total trust. But there it is. That’s procreation for you. The other route
to perpetuating ones time in this vale of tears is through the avenue of
creativity and on this subject I have been asked the very obvious question ‘why
write’? Because of a veiled one.
Sister Bernadette. A big knuckled nun with the
calluses of graft and top-soil under her nails. She was the prompt for me to
engage in the world of words and phrases, poets and poetry, though of course
she never knew this and indeed might not have approved. How I became fascinated
by the craft of the wordsmith and the scribe I can remember vividly. Why I
continued to be intrigued by this subject still eludes me. The structure of
writing and its architecture still excites me as much as what Tutankhamen’s
Tomb might have done for the archaeologist. Why this is so is unclear and might
amount to no more than an exercise in vanity or perhaps insanity.
Why do I admire the great works of creativity
and their creators? Perhaps it’s because there may be a tenuous relationship
between one great poem and immortality. Consider all the poems that have made
their creators household names. Everyone has heard of Kipling’s “If”. “If you can meet with
Triumph and Disaster / and treat those two impostors just the same” is written on the wall of the players’ entrance to the Centre Court, where
the Wimbledon Tennis Championships are held. How’s that for immortality?
Similarly, Yeats and his “Lake Isle of Innisfree”, Wilde and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and indeed our own
Padraic Colum with “An Old Woman of the
Roads” have all achieved something approaching permanence and eventual
immortality.
The same might be said of the great exponents of
palette and brush. We are all aware of the great works of Manet and Monet, of
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh and Jack Yeats. If these gifted
ones of creation had not excelled in their studios would they be remembered for
any other reason? I think not. Every writer in verse or prose must possess,
however subtle or covert, a belief or ambition that somewhere, sometime, by whatever
fantastic intervention, finite or divine, they might just create a masterpiece.
One work of universal acclaim could launch any of the pen pushers of creativity
into immortality.
I do not suggest that this particular motive is
more influential than, for instance, writing for the sheer pleasure of it, yet
it must remain a factor. How many people who write don’t secretly wish to be
published at some stage?
Back to my big-boned nun! Long after she had
shuffled off this mortal cesspool and had gone to God to whom she was always
promised I found an old diary of hers covering the year 1932. The mottled and
faded diary was pickled with snippets of poetry, essays on how to tend bees and
grow chickens, recipes for rhubarb and her favourite prayers; all short. Eight
concise lines of poetry in that diary of the dead brought about my obsession
with and initiation into the world of the poet. These are the lines which I
presumed she penned herself and bestowed on them the title “Fame”.
Has Fallen Down
It’s Leaves Are Dead
And No One Ever
Comes By Day
Not Even To Sweep
The Leaves Away.”
They don’t make nuns like that anymore. Sister
Bernadette was a cousin of my mothers or so my mother claimed. It was the
crowning star on a family tree in those days to have any member of the
religious as a member, however remote, of the extended family. It added
respectability to the name and you couldn’t criticise or look down on anyone
who had a cousin studying in Maynooth for the priesthood.
As Declan Nerney used to sing;
“If I knew then what I know now, I’d be a
wiser man”.
The carry-on of priests and clergy in Ireland
and worldwide for the last sixty years would make Thomas Wolseley, Pontius
Pilate, Rasputin and the leaders of the Inquisitions look like ‘altar boys’.
The most recent Archbishop of Armagh and Primate
of All Ireland, a cardinal no less, actively covered up clerical sexual abuse
of young boys for years thus actively promoting the practise among his
paedophile subordinates. The Church will probably want to make a saint out of
him when he pisses off. Decent primates and capuchin monkeys should sue
somebody for despoiling their names.
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