BLOGPOST SPECIAL: Talk on Language, Identity and Nationhood, with reference to Francis Ledwidge

Island Voices lecture series Autumn 2016

‘1916: Language, Identity and Nationhood’

22.9.2016 Museum, Derry

Shovel, bayonet and pen:

Digging for nationhood with Francis Ledwidge, 1916-2016

©Dave Duggan   September 2016

In this talk, in English with some Irish, dramatist and novelist Dave Duggan considers how Francis Ledwidge, navvy, soldier and poet, turned the sods of his own identity, tilling fields of labour, war and language into a complex nationality that continues to resonate today, a century later.

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Tráthnóna maith. Good afternoon. Mo bhuíochas daoibh as a bheith anseo. My thanks to you for being here, for the first, in the 2016 Island Voices series on 1916: Language, Identity and Nationhood, organised by The Museum Services, with support from the Nerve Centre. Buíochas ar leith le Pól, Margaret, Marty agus a gcomhrádaithe. A special thanks to Pól, Margaret, Marty and their colleagues.

Is mise Dave Duggan, drámadóir agus úrscealaí, a chónaíonn i nDoire. I'm Dave Duggan, a Derry-based dramatist and novelist.

The title of my talk this afternoon is:

Shovel, bayonet and pen:

Digging for nationhood with Francis Ledwidge, 1916-2016

It will last about 40 minutes and there will be time then for questions.

We'll meet Francis Ledwidge and many more characters, both real and fictional, some of them alive today, some of them from the recent past and others from 100 years ago.

Let's begin with Alderman Fraser Agnew, MBE, chair of the 100 Year anniversary Battle of the Somme Working Group, in Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council, who writes

It is generally accepted by historians that events in history mould us into the people we are. The Battle of the Somme can be viewed as one of those events in British History that helped mould and create the Ulster nation.

The Alderman reveals much about his identity, his language and his nation. Listen to his words again.

It is generally accepted by historians that events in history mould us into the people we are. The Battle of the Somme can be viewed as one of those events in British History that helped mould and create the Ulster nation.

Check with yourself how they sit with you, in particular the words 'we' and 'us'. Attempt a re-write. Feel free to insert The Easter Rising in place of The Battle of the Somme. Thus we voice utterances formed by, and forming of, our own identities, languages and nations.

Pretty soon we're up to our oxters in quagmires of words, allegiances and passions that make this island and its voices so perennially fascinating, never more so than now, in 2016, with echoes of 1916 still resonating.

In April this year, a report in The Irish Times regarding a remembrance wall in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, said that a misspelling of one the Irish words chiselled onto the wall would be corrected. There had already been controversy regarding what names should be included on this wall, in remembrance of those killed during the Easter Rising of 1916.

A set of four letters E i r i, with two accents, one of them in the wrong place, made a mis-spelled word on the wall. The accent 'fada' in Irish tells the speaker/reader to lengthen the vowel. In this case, a 'fada' should appear on the first letter, capital E and on the last letter, small i, giving the word Éirí as part of the phrase Éirí Amach na Cásca, which translates to English as The Easter Rising. Do the stonemasons' hands shake as they chisel these letters into the wall, under the pressure of the controversies of remembrance, 100 years on from the event?

Deirtear gan teanga níl náisiún ann. There is a view which says that a nation only exists when there is a language. And that a language is a dialect with a bayonet. A language is a dialect with an army. A language is a dialect with a regional assembly. A language is a dialect with a literature.

These views stiffen when they assert that to form a nation a language, often external, offering a civic, united, political sense of the nation, is needed. English for America. English and French, still contesting, for Canada. English for Australia. Hindi for India. Mandarin for China. Portuguese for Brazil. Spanish for neighbouring countries. Visit the Horn of Africa and you'll need Italian, French, English and Arabic. Oh, and a number of African languages, perceived as nativist and ethnic, offering cultural forms of nationhood, not civic forms such as French or English provide. These are the quagmires and trenches of language, where post-colonial cultural wars rage on today.

I suggest we climb into those trenches and do some digging, along with the Noble Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, who wrote

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

And having described his father digging with a spade, Heaney affirms his lineage, while picking up the pen and asserting

I'll dig with it.

So let's dig with pen, gun, spade or as the title for this talk says, with shovel, bayonet and pen in the company of another Irish poet, who, like Heaney, also wrote in English, the civic language of this nation.

Ba as Contae na Mí é Francis Ledwidge; file, saighdiúir agus náibhí. Francis Ledwidge, poet, soldier and navvy, was from County Meath. Ag an am sin, tús an 20ú aois, b'Éireannach é san Ríocht Aontaithe. At that time, the start of the 20th century, he was an Irishman in the United Kingdom, a mono-linguist, speaking and versifying in English. As a young man, fired by the passions of youth and the energies of an age of change, he began taking lessons in Irish, like many others across the country, from the gentry around Yeats and Synge to the emerging urban lower middle classes such as Pearse. Their interest in the language of the peasantry was part of the cultural project of a small nation defining itself as such, a small nation. Ledwidge was himself a landless peasant, raised by his mother in a large single-parent family. Look to the biography of Francis Ledwidge by Alice Curtayne for the basics and much more.

What impulse towards identity and nationhood bent Ledwidge to learning Irish? Cad chuige a rinne Ledwidge iarracht ar Ghaeilge a fhoghlaim? What use was it to him? Hardly much use in his working life, as a road-mender, a day-labourer for farmers and a copper miner. The question still resonates today, 100 years later, as does the yearning Ledwidge felt. How many people have you heard say: I'd love to learn Irish?

The revival of interest in the language and culture of the period before the Anglo-Normans arrived, stretched back into mythological times with Lady Gregory and WB Yeats, themselves far from peasants, and generated an understanding that Ireland could also be seen as a great nation, with stirring heroes and a wondrous literature.

So, in terms of language, Francis Ledwidge lived, spoke and wrote as an English speaker, in nationhood terms, a civic language, while trying to learn a native language of his home place, Irish, and, knowingly or unknowingly, using line and verse forms common in the literature of Irish that he could barely read, such as an internal rhyming between the end of lines and the middle of following ones.

He shall not hear the bittern cry

in the wild sky, where he is lain.

Francis Ledwidge grew up in a period when a sense of Ireland as a small nation quickened. Such quickening, often leading to uprisings, occurred periodically. Czech historian Miroslav Hroch, says that small nations “are those which were in subjection to a ruling nation for such a long period that the relation of subjection took on a structural character for both parties”. So, a small nation, like Ireland, has a long history of foreign rule producing close, and often tense, bonds of subjugation and interdependence.

Céad bliain eatarthu, filí Éireannacha, ag scriobh i mBéarla, Francis Ledwidge ag tús na fiche haoise, Seamus Heaney ag deireadh na haoise, iad beirt ag iomrascáil lena náisiúnachas. Almost a century between them, two Irish poets, writing in English, Francis Ledwidge at the start of the 20th Century and Seamus Heaney at the end, both wrestling with matters of British and Irish nationhood. Perhaps.

Did Ledwidge actually experience any such wrestling? He joined The Irish Volunteers soon after it became clear that violence was the dominant method for resolving the political conflicts of his age. British nationalists imported arms into the north-east of the island, clearly in expectation of needing to use violence to maintain the status quo, as pressure for Home Rule for Ireland increased.

This, among much else, in the spirit of the Alderman's remarks, we remember. And, of course, we forget. We forget whole peoples and countless events. French historian Ernest Renan said that nations are founded “on a rich legacy of memories”, which we, for various reasons, edit. “Forgetting,” Renan wrote, “and I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.”

A consideration of indigenous peoples in the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in Australia in the 17th and 18th centuries and in Palestine in the 20th century confirms this. Google Dakota Access Pipeline, to see how the Lakota Sioux nation experiences historical forgetting today.

What forgetting formed the Irish nation that emerged from the ashes of Easter in Dublin and the gory slime of the World War 1 trenches? Any wonder the stone masons hands shook as they chiselled the words on the remembrance wall? Soldiers like Francis Ledwidge were an awkward fit in the new nation, this new small and great nation, needing to be forged from the bravery and sacrifice of rebellion and the superheated myths of the Celtic Gods.

Francis Ledwidge came to Ebrington Barracks, here in Derry, speaking English, his mother tongue and wearing a British Army uniform, in May 1916. Thus, his language and nationhood were straightforward, like any subject of the British Empire. His identity perhaps, that's the most complex aspect of the three elements of this talk. Cérbh é, dáiríre? Who was he, really?

He arrived in Derry after hard years on the eastern front. Chaith sé seal i mBaile Átha Cliath ar a bhealach anseo. Bhí tionchur mór air ag bás Thomas Mac Donagh, file, chara agus saighdiúir eile. He spent some time in Dublin on his way here. The execution of Thomas Mac Donagh, as one of the leaders of The Easter Rising, affected him deeply. Mac Donagh was a poet, a friend and also a soldier fighting for a small nation, in Mac Donagh's case, Ireland.

Was Ledwidge fighting for Belgium? Like the recruiting posters screamed? Was Francis Ledwidge a cosmopolitan, an internationalist? Is that the nation he espoused? A nation of class consciousness? Quickening of that nature was well underway, north and east of where Ledwidge fought, as another Empire, the Russian one, strained and convulsed.

Francis Ledwidge's oft-quoted lines, that he would not have England say that she defended Ireland while Ireland did nothing but stay at home and pass resolutions, took him into the British Army. Ledwidge was not squeamish. He saw action in Gallipoli, against Turks, Bulgars and Serbs. He did more than pass resolutions. Perhaps his conversations with Mac Donagh and others never ventured past poetry, into blood-letting, sacrifice and carnage, in the cause of Ireland.

How did he hold it together, a soldier affirming death and a poet, affirming life, with, what he called, his little songs

This is a song a robin sang

This morning on a broken tree,

It was about the little fields

That call across the world to me.

Francis Ledwidge used a bayonet, and his locale was the killing beaches of Suvla Bay and the trenches of Macedonia, France and Belgium. His soundtrack was shells in fusillade and the cries of dying men, as well as the echoing call of the robin. Does one cover for the other, in the forging of an identity?

Seamus Heaney never used a bayonet and his soundtrack was the acclaim of the Academy and the applause of a wide-ranging public, though directing his pen, when the barricades of insurrection went up around his home place at the end of the 20th century, may have challenged his sense of nationhood. It perhaps brought on a babhta úr iomrascála, a new bout of wrestling, with the native language and mythologies of his place, as seen in his work on Sweeney's Journey in the great sequence, Station Island.

He writes I was a lookout posted and forgotten.

He is perpetually set above the home-place, keeping guard.

Like many people, Francis Ledwidge included, nationhood and identity, are most fixed upon images of home, so that the limits of our national territory is personal and domestic.

Pressure on the soldiers in Ebrington Barracks, in the period July to December 1916, to remember and to forget, was awesome. I suggest we use Ledwidge's time there to further explore matters of language, identity and nationhood.

Let my play, Still, The Blackbird Sings, first produced by the Playhouse in 2010 and just finished a run, in a script-in-hand adaptation, produced by Creggan Enterprises, be our guide to digging; where to hoke with the shovel, where to pin, stab, cut and clip with the bayonet and where to sketch with the pen, those aspects of identity that make humans, in the time and place life finds us.

Ach roimhe sin, lig dom caractair eile a mhealladh isteach. But before that, allow me to invite in two more characters. Writing in the London Review of Books in 1985, Brandywell man and ace literary critic Seamus Deane tells us about Donegal writer, Patrick MacGill.

As Rifleman No 3008 of the London Irish, MacGill fought in the First World War and wrote of his experiences in the trenches, particularly of the offensive which climaxed in the Battle of Loos, during which he was wounded and invalided out of the war. The Red Horizon deals with the preparation for the assault; The Great Push gives an account of the battle itself. The war is a reproduction of the conditions of the labourer’s life in peacetime, more brutal and remorseless, but not essentially different. There is a System, which is impersonal and kills; there is a Sentiment which persuades the victims to accept what is happening to them. In war, it is called patriotism.

Yet why should MacGill, of all people, be willing to give his blood, to be made into an emblem of that idiocy which he attacked so vigorously in his writings? The answer must be, in part, that he did not know what he believed.

Patrick MacGill's confusion about what he believes, as suggested by Seamus Deane, may have an echo in Francis Ledwidge, though their sense of patriotism may not have been as confused as that of Jason Bourne, in his latest Hollywood blockbuster.

Seamus Deane suggests that digging with the shovel (navvying) and cutting with the bayonet (soldiering) are not much different. Certainly MacGill didn't make much difference between them in telling tales of them. Deane sees this as a failure of language. Ledwidge's failure – if you might call it that – to write war poetry like Sassoon, Graves, Owen, Kipling and others may also be a failure of language, but more likely it is a manifestation of the complex patriotism he, and MacGill, experienced as the sentiment that kept them in line. Ledwidge could readily use the shovel and the bayonet for war, but not the pen.

Unlike Deane and Heaney at the end of the 20th century, Ledwidge and MacGill did not live in the Academy, but in the rat-pits and the trenches of the early part of the century. Theirs is a very different experience for persons of similar nationhoods, identities and languages. Irish nationalist in British territory. English speakers and writers in English.

Seo iad anois, Francis Ledwidge agus a chomhrádaithe samhlaithe, sa bheairic i míle naoi chéad is a sé deag. Let us meet, then, my fictional, dramatised Francis Ledwidge in Ebrington Barracks in 1916. On arrival in the barracks, Francis Ledwidge is with his squad of young men, glad to be home, already marking out their personal territories. They banter in a babble of voices. Can you make out Lance Corporal Francis Ledwidge?

This - most certainly - is not my home.

Closest you’re going to get to it for a wee while.

I’ll be up that road to the city of Belfast just as soon as I get the sand out of these boots.

Belfast is nothing but a bogging village.

And what “village” are you from kiddo?

Drumahoe.

Never heard of it.

There’s nothing in Belfast only a swamp.

Not another country boy! Are yeez all country boys or what?

What do they call you?

Mc Laren. Right men. Settle down.

Frank! You made it.

Add me to your list of countrymen, Mc Laren. Cadden. Right?

That’s right. You know me from Suvla Bay.

We dug in together, thousands more of us stretched along the beach.

Damn right we did. And we gave those Turks hell.

By their voices, accents and home places, the soldiers assert, contest and affirm their identities and their language in ethnic, almost pastoral, word play until the killing beaches of Suvla Bay confirm their current lot.

As to nationhoods, the civic language of the Empire is required to bring that on stage. Francis Ledwidge clashes with Major Willock, a professional soldier. Again, can you hear the Lance Corporal wrestle with his complex nationhood, while Major Willock is having none of his lip? Éist le Major Willock, ag éirí mí-fhoighneach.

And Ireland’s duty lies with his Majesty The King and with the Empire. At least until this war is over. Tell me, Lance Corporal Ledwidge, are you loyal?

I am a soldier, sir.

And something of a poet I believe. You knew some of the insurrectionists?

I met Pearse, sir. MacDonagh was my friend.

Your ‘friends’ were anti-British when they attacked our troops in Dublin.

They were Irishmen, doing what they thought was best for Ireland, sir.

Your poets are rebels, Lance Corporal Ledwidge. True Irishmen are in this uniform.

My countrymen are fighting for freedom and the self determination of small nations on many fronts. In Belgium, France, Gallipoli, Serbia. And here.

The cataclysm that was World War 1 plunged Francis Ledwidge into a maelstrom, where small nation projects were fending off the dominance of large nations, with actions that were essentially ethnic in character, where the impetus came from a charged mix of the cultural (locale, religion, language, descent, myth) as opposed to the political or civic sense of group identification, known as nationhood.

Often, for their own ends, imperialists, even today, describe certain other nationalisms as ethnic (that is irrational, nativist, inherited) and their own as civic (voluntary, rational, consensual), when it is quite clear that all nationalisms are composed of ethnic and civic features and that civic nationalisms, such as the French or American, can be just as exclusive and xenophobic as ethnic ones.

The 'small nation' description often suggests a degree of similarity between Ireland and the postcolonial world. This interpretation was reinforced by John F Kennedy’s 1963 speech at Leinster House, where he proclaimed that “every new nation knows that Ireland was the first of the small nations in the twentieth century to win its struggle for independence”.

Is this the nationhood Francis Ledwidge espoused? And how fares it today as Ireland's state forces move into closer and closer international co-operation with the UK, where we, in the UK, have voted to leave the massively-flawed, cross-national entity that supports European economic, cultural and social ties, the EU, while remaining within the military one, NATO?

All nationalisms draw upon the mythology of a glorious past and create a narrative of greatness. A grander version of Irish nationalism, almost tongue-in-cheek, in music festivals and on golf courses, is heard today in phrases like 'little island, punching above its weight' and 'you'll never beat the Irish' and seen in St. Patrick's Day parades all over the world. Everybody is Irish for at least one day. Is that the nationhood Francis Ledwidge lived? An í seo an náisiúnachas a mhothaigh Francis Ledwidge?

The bottom line with nationalism, whether derived from smallness or greatness, is that nationhood has to be the most important group we're in and that every nation should have its own state. A complex formulation in the early part of the 20th Century for Ledwidge, MacGill and others of peasant stock, in the midst of the convulsing of British, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.

David Rieff, in his recent book, In Praise of Forgetting, wonders if

a decent measure of communal forgetting is actually the sine qua non of a peaceful and decent society, while remembering is the politically, socially, and morally risky pursuit? Or, to put it somewhat differently, what if the past can provide no satisfactory meaning, no matter how generously and inclusively … it is interpreted?

What people choose to remember and are enabled to remember for the creation of identity, nationhood and language, as in the outline given by the Alderman, is an edit. Rieff also points out that

the historical importance of an event in its own time, and in the decades that follow, offers no guarantee that it will be remembered in the next century, let alone for many centuries after.

Agus ná déan dearmad ar an foláireamh cáiliúil a thug an úrscealaí, Milan Kundera, dúinn. Of course, there is the famous caution offered by novelist Milan Kundera, from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, that

The struggle … against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Who does it suit that people forget events, languages, identities and nations as we forge our languages, identities and nations?

Seamus Deane tells us that Patrick Mac Gill's first novel, The Children of the Dead End, sold ten thousand copies in a fortnight in 1914. In the same year, James Joyce's Dubliners sold a mere 499 copies, a fifth of them to himself. Most of the MacGill sales occurred in Britain and further afield. We have here an example of what the historian Rieff said about forgetting. The cosmopolitan view of the modernist Joyce seems better remembered in the early 21st century. Joyce spurned the nationalist view that you must have a nation before you could have art. In the artistic manifestation of his own nationhood, Joyce is an Irish writer, writing in English, travelling across Europe, much as Ledwidge did, but without shovel or bayonet, while continually writing about home. Mar a rinne Ledwidge. Much as Ledwidge did.

In my play, the fictional Francis Ledwidge meets the fictional Rosie Friel, a serving girl at the home of Lord Dunsany, Ledwidge's officer and literary mentor. Dunsany teases the young woman about love. Does Rosie's assertion echo Ledwidge's?

And what about love then, Rosie? Do you know anything about love?

What would I know about love, sir?

Oh, come now, Rosie, surely a young woman like yourself must sometimes think about love?

I leave that to the poets, sir.

And to the soldiers no doubt?

The soldiers have their fighting and their killing to do.

You don’t mention their dying.

They talk enough about that themselves. They should talk more about their living and their lives at home.

Then you don’t think about the dying of soldiers?

I do.

The ones at the front?

I think on them. And I think on the poets in Dublin.

My God, Rosie, are you a rebel?

I’m an Irishwoman, sir.

Ba téagartha é an strus a mhothaigh Ledwidge is a scuad is iad bailithe in Ebrington Barracks, i míle naoi gcéad is a sé déag. When Ledwidge and his squad gathered in Ebrington Barracks in Autumn 1916, the stress among them was immense. They awaited their next posting, knowing that their chances of surviving were decreasing each time. Ba bhreá leis na saighdiúirí feastal ar na tabharní i Sráid Duke, leis an strus sin a laghdú. The soldiers delighted to go to the pubs in Duke Street to relieve this stress. Bhí siad ar bís le nuacht faoi ordaithe úr, len iad a thabhairt chun an Fraince. They were delirious for news of orders that would take them to France. Listen to their arguments, spilling over into violence. What do you expect with soldiers, even those working with the pen, as well as with the shovel and the bayonet? Is saighdiúirí iad, cad chuige nach mbeadh foiréagan ann?

You thought Johnny Turk’s shells had got you, only to find yourself waiting to cheat death once more. A strange thing happens in the course of war, my friends. We transform. No longer human, we alchemise into … cats.

Miaow! Miaow!

Enough of your tricking, Ledwidge!

In this way the generals are guaranteed at least nine lives out of each and everyone one of us. So drink up, my fine, Irish feline friends. Who’s to say, when the English generals will want us out there again, losing our lives at the front?

Treachery.

Listen! Cats! All hissing and spitting.

You’re two-faced Ledwidge.

Fights bubble up through the comradely surface all the time. The word 'traitor' is used as the vilest curse. A fellow-soldier chastises Francis Ledwidge:

You’re two-faced, Ledwidge.

This echoes the description Seamus Heaney gives in his poem,

In memoriam Francis Ledwidge

In you, our dead enigma, all the strains

Criss-cross in useless equilibrium.

The 'useless' is harsh here. Does it reflect on Heaney's efforts to juggle his own sense of nationhood?

Many writers have been drawn to Ledwidge, an enigma, surely, as are all the dead. Dermot Bolger has written marvellously about him, including a fine play called Walking the Road. There are memorialising societies in Slane, Inchicore and elsewhere. Scríobh mise faoi Francis Ledwidge don chéad uair, i míle naoi chéad is a nócha seacht. I wrote a radio talk about Francis Ledwidge for the RTÉ programme Sunday Miscellany, in 1997, - an age ago - after I visited his grave in Belgium, in Artillery Wood Cemetery, near Boesinghe.

I wrote

Grave number 5, Row B, second plot. There is a corner of a foreign field that is forever Ireland.

I stood amidst the gravestones, pleased somehow that Ledwidge should be lying among the green fields outside a small village. No Boyne water rushed by, but a small river passed under a bridge.

I thought about the poet and the lines from his own poem, A Soldier’s Grave

And where the earth was soft for flowers we made

A grave for him that he might better rest.

So, Spring shall come and leave it sweet arrayed,

And there the lark shall turn her dewy nest.

Let me draw upon the reflections of philosopher Richard Kearney to bring these considerations of Francis Ledwidge and his language, identity and nationhood to a close. Writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books in July this year, Kearney underlines doubling.

A year of double remembrance for the Irish, 2016 marks the centenary of Ireland’s Easter Rising against Britain, when almost 500 Irish citizens died, and it commemorates the Battle of the Somme in Flanders, in which 3,500 Irish expired in a single day fighting in British uniform against Germany.

Richard Kearney invokes a symmetry, an equivalence of nations as between ethno-religious groups, when, on a civic level, the nations were far from on a par. This historic asymmetry has changed in the passing century, though in economic terms, it essentially remains. The body politic in Ireland is shaken as the UK tentatively embraces Brexit. Fears erupt, from considerations of trade, the free movement of people and the survival of the peace process.

Could we imagine if Brexit, call it Eire-exit, were the other way round? Unlikely. Furthermore, that the Union in the United Kingdom is under stress, from Scotland to Cornwall, from Londonderry to London, no one would deny. Where might Ledwidge's nationhood get to now?

Richard Kearney advises that we retrieve unfinished stories, as we hold to memories that emancipate rather than incarcerate. He sees in Ledwidge and the impact on him of Easter 1916 and the Somme a useful doubling, a way of intruding and/both into our considerations, rather than either/or. I'm with him on this, in regard to identity, language and nationhood. I suggest we could reach for more.

Ledwidge's story is retrievable among his work with bayonet and shovel, because he also worked with the pen. The great many more who worked without the pen, who laboured in fields, trenches, behind barricades and under fusillades, with just bayonet and shovel, their stories are not retrievable. They left no marks, no little songs, such as Ledwidge's. How do we retrieve these? An bhfuil a scéalta, a saolta, caillte go deo? Cad é a chiallaíon sinn don náisiúntacht? What does that mean for nationhood?

I fear doubling the remembrance of Easter and the Somme 1916 offers a convenient salve to the slaughter rather than a meaningful narrative healing, as sought by Richard Kearney, who says you cannot commemorate a contradiction, such as Ledwidge's effort. We can relish it, however, for what it is – as human a life as any other, encouraging us to push against either/or, on to and/both and then to push further on yet, through singles and doubles, onto multiples.

Not only and/both but also more/all.

I suggest we view Ledwidge's identity, language and nationhood in this way. There are no direct equivalences. Oppression on an imperial scale occurred then and occurs now. Easy doubling will not assist with Heaney's 'useless equilibrium'. The dynamism of multiplicity, more whirl-gig than see-saw, offers us the best hope.

The notion has taken hold publicly that it is a 'good' thing that large numbers of Irish Catholics died at the Somme and in other World War 1 battles and, that it is also notable, if not exactly 'good', that Irish Protestants played revolutionary roles in the early 20^th century – think of Sean O'Casey, as secretary of The Irish Citizen Army.

All I see is a failure to face the immolation of the early 20^th century and to commit to making it never happen again.

I see Ledwidge, not motivated by a noble if unfulfilled dream, as Richard Kearney suggests, but as a human in his time and place, making choices, contingent life choices, by acts of remembering and forgetting. What's the point of remembering and forgetting, if we do nothing about what we remember and forget? Our past, including Francis Ledwidge's, holds different meanings, depending on the future choices we build from it.

The most telling act of remembering we could make now, I suggest, an act of retrieving that might create a genuine healing narrative from which to forge the future, would be to chose to remember the slaughter and to actively work towards it never happening again.

What would Ledwidge's nationhood, language and identity be then, with the bayonet re-cast as software, a digital ploughshare for the age, in support of the shovel and the pen?

Thank you. Míle buíochas.

© Dave Duggan 22.9.2016

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

WARD OFF TERROR WITH THE LUCK OF FINTAN O'TOOLE

Fintan O'Toole (F O'T) is an opinion writer for The Irish Times. He is one of Ireland’s best-known columnists, with a large readership in Ireland and internationally. He is also a well-regarded theatre critic. Writing on July 16^th, directly after the Bastille Day killings in Nice, F O'T defines the line between civilised, democratic society and its nihilistic opponents as the line between terror and pity.

Immediately F O'T has waded into the language quagmire which conflates civilised with democratic and describes certain perpetrators of violence as nihilists. The people who mow down other people, with a truck driven along a sea-side promenade as citizens and tourists enjoy a fireworks display, do not describe themselves as nihilist, if nihilists are people who have no beliefs or who believe in nothing. Like many of the people who fly fighter bombers, guide drone weapons and sit on the boards of arms' manufacturers, they have beliefs of various kinds, including, very often, religious beliefs.

According to F O'T, it is all a matter of luck. Some of us (sic)

are lucky enough to live in times and places where there are no warring tribes, no marauding armies, no exterminationist ideologies, no messianic cults, no megalomaniacal emperors, no young men convinced that they can become immortal by preying like vampires on other people's morality.

Who does the 'us' refer to? Such lists always present problems of 'what is missing?' How about people lucky enough to live under the protection of one of the great power blocs, in particular the ones with weapons of mass destruction; lucky enough to live in a country where the international arms industry is concentrated?; lucky enough to live where what the state's army does is legitimate and not terror, though it creates as much carnage as the lorry driver and his fellows; lucky enough not to be made so desperate by economic and war circumstances that you load your family onto makeshift vessels and venture into the sea to face the gun-boats?

Using 'luck' in this opinion piece removes agency from human endeavours. It's 'luck' then that a country has factories, colleges, schools, material goods in excess, farms that produce food and money, beneficial trade relations, sought-after currencies and gold reserves, nuclear and other weapons, stock markets and hedge funds.

Globalisation works, as you'd expect, across the globe, but unevenly, as within benefiting countries such as Ireland. What hope then for deficit countries, like, say, unlucky Bangladesh?

F O'T offers us pity as a counterbalance to terror, from the ancient formulation by Aristotle for understanding tragedy in theatre. F O'T suggests that nihilists have only terror. But who are the nihilists? The humans who plough lorries through festive crowds? The humans who smile to see their share prices rising when they review the balance sheets of the arms manufacturers?

Could it be that there are no nihilists, simply hypocrites who manage to hold beliefs in moral ideas of 'the good', often supported by religious beliefs, while engaging in economic, political and military acts, which others, on the receiving end of them, could not believe as 'the good'?

F O'T writes of 'our moral boundaries' without clarifying who he means by 'our' and not making any attempt to pin down the compass and extent of such boundaries.

Pity complicates things, as F O'T says, and that's no doubt the case. And vital. The use of the words 'we', 'us' and 'our' further complicates matters. F O'T asserts that compassion is a boundless as fear.

However, with all this resting on 'luck' rather than human agency, how might the largest possible compass of 'us' experience this compassion in 'our' lives? Get lucky?

There is an opposite to terror – and it is stronger; Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times, Dublin, 16.7.2016

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POLITICIAN GETS EDGE

The next Prime Minister of the UK will be a politician.

This shocking news follows heated debates on overnight radio talk shows and headlines in this morning's London papers, in a story only displaced by the devastating use of his military skills by an ex-US Army reservist in Texas, well-known as an oil-rich state with a heritage of gun-toting.

The next Prime Minister of the UK will come from the current government party, the Tories and is now a contest between the last two MPs standing. They will go before members of that party who will vote for one of them. In a long-cherished manifestation of a well-loved democratic deficit in the UK, the electorate will not vote for the leader of the UK, which is the person who has the power to blow the world up with nuclear weapons and lead the charge to war and ruin like a previous incumbent did, as revealed in a recent report.

Of course, with such high stakes to play for the candidates will be using all aspects of their experiences, characters and personalities to give them the edge so that their fellow party members will give them the nod.

A report appears this morning in The Times, a newspaper based in London not to be confused with The Times of India or The New York Times, The Irish Times, Antrim Times, Angling Times, Arab Times, China Times or The Times produced on a weekly basis in Brownsville, Oregon. No, this is The Times, owned by News Corp., a Rupert Murdoch business. Historically, the paper has been very close to the political and financial elites in London, so a front page article is a big thing for a challenger for the position of key holder of No. 10 Downing Street.

In this morning's front-page report one of the candidates offers a specific personal attribute as a reason why they would make a better Prime Minister than the other candidate. The question is what personal attribute could cause politicos and pundits, bloggers(!) and blabbers to get into the major froth that this report has produced? It appears both candidates are heterosexual, white and not living with a disability.

Can you fill in the gap in The Times headline?

Being a—gives me edge

While the candidate concerned has rejected the article as being the opposite to what was intended, the journalists who did the interview, Rachel Sylvester and Sam Coates, stand over it. They are reported to be reputable, and no doubt they can record spoken words and write copy and probably have everything backed up mightily. Some people might suggest that writing for a newspaper in the Murdoch stable of titles immediately draws into question their reputations, if not their technical abilities.

But what could it possibly be about a candidate that could, so early in an electoral contest, however democratically deficient, have led to this furore when one candidate claims a more real stake in the future of the country over the other one, said to be ahead in the polls of the 150, 000 members of the Tory party who will vote for the Prime Minister of the UK, a country of 65, 000, 000 people?

Rupert Murdoch won't let you see the full report on-line without paying money. The Guardian has its own version, free on-line. Between them you should be able to fill in the gap and all the other gaps such a headline leaves. One possibility is, of course,

Being a politician gives me edge

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/being-a-mother-gives-me-edge-on-may-leadsom-0t7bbm29x

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/08/andrea-leadsom-suggests-she-would-make-better-pm-as-she-has-children

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WHEN SHOULD YOU STOP READING THAT NOVEL?

Today.

Today is the day to stop reading Amnesia by Peter Carey. At precisely page 68 of the Faber and Faber paperback export edition of 2014.

Stopping likes this leaves you with mixed feelings. Elation, disappointment, resentment, amazement, that you started the thing at all and wonder as to how a splendid writer like Peter Carey could so lose the run of himself as to write it and how publishers and editors at an esteemed publishing house could produce it.

Over all, you feel better, though perhaps a little let down, as if you've been found out. You are usually so sound in matters of judgement in all areas of your life, none more so than in your choice of reading and here you are with nearly 70 pages of wasted time and effort behind you. Of course, you consider ploughing on. You considered it first at page 29 and the plough seemed viable enough at that stage. But no more.

Beyond the notion that a book, like a lobster claw, has to 'grab you', it's hard to say what didn't work for you with Peter Carey's Amnesia. Beyond the sense that it is shite.

You wondered for a while if you're weren't smart enough to get just how much parody Peter Carey was loading into the sentences and the paragraphs and then you began to realise that, far too often, you were putting the book down because one of the sentences just read wrong.

I negotiated a prescription for Dexedrine, a MacBook Pro, a Cabcharge account and, finally, a place to live until my wife forgave me for being myself.

You read this and realised you were simply not hip enough for this novel. There is no way you could negotiate a prescription for Dexedrine and all the rest. How many more times will you have to read novels where a seemingly hapless man, very often a writer, who causes pain and mayhem for those around him, as in this case, is 'saved' by having wealthy friends who own yachts, castles and pent-houses and who has a cousin in the CIA to sort passport, currency and immigration problems in cities labelled foreign only because the writer doesn't live there. Peter Carey lives in New York and even his home place, Australia, site of his luminous books, Oscar and Lucinda and Ned Kelly is foreign to him in Amnesia.

Living in New York doesn't help Pete Carey with the New York Times. Janet Maslin, writing in that paper reckons

“Amnesia” can’t sustain a sense of purpose throughout. For all Mr. Carey’s formidable powers and the righteous fire he means to light here, “Amnesia” isn’t one of his most memorable efforts.

It's just as well that you read that after you'd stopped. If the New York Times doesn't reckon much of the book, then maybe your judgement isn't impaired, just napping. If you'd read that review before you stopped, you might have heaved the plough out of the mire, in a rage of stubbornness, and driven your tractor on to the end of field, over the edge and into the despair of the reader who looks back on lost days when you could have been reading, say, Balthasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago or Pronto by Elmore Leonard or an ice-cold and refreshing short story by Nadine Gordimer.

Stopping is good, because it means you can start again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/books/amnesia-peter-careys-new-novel.html?_r=0

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IN MEMORY OF PAUL DEVLIN, THEATRE MAKER

Words in memory of Paul Devlin.

Magee theatre department, UU, Foyle Arts Building. 26.5.2016

Is mise Dave Duggan. Drámadóir is urscealaí is ea mé.

I'm Dave Duggan. I'm a dramatist and a novelist.

Is mór an onóir agus an pribhléid dom focail cuimhneachán a rá ar son Paul Devlin.

It is a great honour and a privilege to say some words in memory of Paul Devlin.

Mo bhuíochas do Lisa as an cuireadh.

My thanks to Lisa for the invitation.

Words are my business. Paul loved words. Essentially, I want to say and use four of them. Three S words and one F word.

Let's start with the F word. Paul Devlin was my friend. There are many people who were Paul's friends, and very much more: Kate and their fine daughters; Paul's wider family; men and women he grew up with, knocked about with at school and college; worked with, staff and students, here in Magee and elsewhere. Myself and Paul Devlin were friends as theatre makers and as men. There are misconceptions that men don't form friendships. Men do. That men don't share. Men do. That older men (me) and young men (Paul) – (the tragedy of Paul's death is a tragedy of youthfulness) don't become friends. We did. We'd be in the canteen, invariably with a plate of his chips between us, me ngucking them and we'd be talking about making theatre. Often with Adrian to add the seasoning.

Which leads me to the first S word. I quickly realised that Paul knew things. Deeply. That he was wise. That Paul Devlin was a savant. I saw him speak at a conference and was struck by the depth of his knowledge, his felicitous use of language and his humane yet wry take on his work and on the world.

And he did more than know things. He found things. He detected opportunities, airs in the zeitgeist, possibilities in the culture that could be explored by theatre. He was a researcher, yes, but in the fine tradition of unearthing that is the realm of the sleuth. Paul Devlin was a Shamus, the second S word.

I was not long out of hospital, recovering from a critical illness that had almost taken me away, when he asked me to make something about borders. I found a townland name on a map and we went there, to Brishmachree – an anglicisation of the Irish do bhris mo chroí, my heart broke – and I wrote and performed a theatre piece on borders, under his commission and his direction. It was a pleasure to take direction from him in this room/building. And then to perform the work on a June day of near persistent rain, down a muddy lane, where fine mists occluded the ancient sun fort at An Grianán in front of us and the medieval keep of the O'Doherty's beside us, but could not occlude the magic and wonder of Paul Devlin's making.

Thus I find the third S word. Paul Devlin was shaman, a theatre maker of ritual and magic, rooted to our wondrous earth. One of his great shamanistic acts was the theatrical carnival of memory he directed in the department store, Austins of the Diamond. He led students and staff, and he included me, with my writer's kitchen, in a grand theatrical embodiment of living history, remembering and performing, which has particular resonance now that the shop, like Paul's all too short life, has come to an end.

We cannot shirk away from tragedy, in life and in theatre. Tragedy, as a concept and as a reality, as a manifestation of the cruelty of life, was often addressed in conversations Paul and I shared. Is tragedy ever a boon? Never. The boon is living, as Paul Devlin did. As savant, shamus, shaman. And of course, the F word. As friend.

Let us chose our words, then. S words and F words.

L words too. Live. Love.

Míle buíochas. A thousand thanks.

http://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/blogpost-special-new-short-drama.html

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IS YOUR MIND DEMORALISED?

John F Schumaker, writing in April 2016's issue of New Internationalist, reckons 'our' minds are demoralised and that it is 'our' culture, and not 'us' that is sick.

Western consumer culture is creating a psycho-spiritual crisis that leaves us disoriented and bereft of purpose.

John F Schumaker means those of 'us' who live within a version of 'western consumer culture'. He reckons the reported increase in depression is actually a rise in demoralisation, which used to be

limited to specific extreme situations, such as debilitating physical injury, terminal illness, prisoner-of-war camps, or anti-morale military tactics.

He reckons 'we' are suffering from an existential disorder, because 'we' haven't a clue who 'we' are, where 'we' are, where 'we're' going and what 'we're' going to do when 'we' get there. 'We' are disoriented, bereft of a map.

'Our' personality structures are undermined by

individualism, materialism, hyper-competition, greed, over-complication, overwork, hurriedness and debt.

Sticking with the journey metaphor, John reckons 'we' have no compass either, and are easy prey for a consumerism that is brittle and dispiriting. He invokes Noam Chomsky's 'philosophy of futility', saying that's about all 'we've' got if 'we've' got any philosophy at all.

'We're' all wankers, basically.

Resilience traits such as patience, restraint and fortitude have given way to short attention spans, over-indulgence and a masturbatory approach to life.

'We' are living in an existential vacuum and are

quickly engulfed by boredom, as well as jadedness, ennui and discontent. This steadily graduates to ‘existential boredom’ wherein the person finds all of life uninteresting and unrewarding.

He refers 'us' to Raoul Naroll (The Moral Order) and Erich Fromm (The Sane Society) for guidance as to how 'we' might give attention to 'our' needs for

belonging, rootedness, identity, transcendence and intellectual stimulation.

He asserts that 'our' culture is dominated by economic priorities and manipulates 'us' by sophisticated industries that trade in illusory consumer satisfaction and unsatisfiable consumer needs, to the point, John F Schumaker reckons, where

Being normal is no longer a healthy ambition.

All grandly analytical, true and feistily written, but from about five paragraphs to the end John F Schumacher starts down a road of prescription that is downbeat, itself demoralised, while crying out for

credible cause, or credible leadership.

The tone of the essay shifts from description to prescription and then it finishes with cataclysm. It becomes the siren cry of a

retired psychology academic

bereft of any hope or meaningful sense of options other than

global catastrophe.

What's striking about the essay's turn of tone, change of discourse and finale of despair is that it appears in the magazine New Internationalist which, in its own words, has been

putting the world to rights since 1973.

It's as if John F Schumaker didn't read the rest of the April, or any other, issue of the magazine, where he might find

credibility, meaning and purposeful action

at forestpeoples.org, wrm.or.uy and among other activists on forests and related issues. Or perhaps he could seek a conversation with Caterina Martins in Portugal and others across Europe firmly opposing the austerity agenda being promulgated by the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank. Or even have a read of George Monbiot's new book “How did we get into this mess?”, reviewed on page 37.

Then ask himself, his friends, colleagues and neighbours how 'we' might get out of it and when 'we' might make a start?

Resilience traits such as patience, restraint and fortitude

are everywhere in the world.

Read the magazine, John. Get active. Connect. Remoralise.

This writer doesn't know John, but guesses he's probably doing that.

Write about it, John. Push back, even in a small way.

'We'll' all feel better for it.

http://newint.org/columns/essays/2016/04/01/psycho-spiritual-crisis/

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JUSTICE. MERCY. POLITICS.

Antisemitism is widespread in the world, along with many other hatreds and discriminations based on religious beliefs, race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation and physical and mental abilities. No surprise, then, that antisemitism exists in the British Labour Party. Hatreds and discriminations are potent political tools, used widely by opposing political groupings.

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,

it will feed my revenge.

In a world where powerful states base themselves directly and indirectly on belief in gods, the manner of making critical comments about such states is compromised by the possibility of criticising the beliefs and the people who hold them.

The spectrum of theocratic and near-theocratic states is wide, running from the United States of America, where the head of state, the President, closes public pronouncements with 'God Bless America', to Saudi Arabia, where monarchs, great allies of the USA, oversee a despotic regime, consistent with their preferred form of Islam, which, like all religions, is comprised of many variations. The state of Israel privileges Judaism. Pakistan and Iran privilege Islam. The head of state of the United Kingdom, the monarch, must be a member of a particular Christian church. Could Putin and Kim Il-Jong be seen as privileging secularism into a form of 'god on earth', in Russia and North Korea, with leaders having access to nuclear capabilities?

The recent upheavals in the British Labour Party surrounding allegations of antisemitism show the potency of that manifestation of hatred and discrimination as a political tool. Particular orientations, in relation to responses to the circumstances of the Palestinian people, mean that criticism of the actions of the state of Israel are often on the lips of members of that political party.

That there is antisemitism in the British Labour Party is without doubt the case. That opponents of the party, and the current party leader, might use this as a stick with which to beat them is also no doubt the case. Ken Livingstone's mini-marathon of media recordings that launched the recent row says as much about the febrile nature of allegations of antisemitism as it does about the man (Drink taken? Loose cannon? Mouth almighty? Egotist? Celebrity ex-politician?) or the party's opponents (The Murdoch press? The Tories?) and their ability to use antisemitism as a political tool.

How do you make critical statements or express critical opinions about the state of Israel or the current regime there? With very great difficulty and with maximum sensitivity, that in making such criticisms you are challenging power orthodoxies based on huge international support for the state of Israel by the United States of America.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison

us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not

revenge?

Even Shakespeare may be flummoxed. Any number of categories of people could be put into his great speech from The Merchant of Venice.

I am a Jew/Muslim. Hath

not a Jew/Muslim eyes? hath not a Jew/Muslim hands, organs,

dimensions, senses, affections, passions?

That the Middle East is the hub of these matters is no surprise. Three of the world's great trades have hubs there: weaponry, oil, digital security. Three of the world's great monotheistic religions have hubs there: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. There are problems with all states in the region, problems that are actual in themselves and also as proxies for problems across the world as experienced and promoted by the Great Powers.

The approach to criticisms then needs to be infused with a quality of mercy; something only found in the heart, where mercy should season justice, yet it is this very justice, as an ideal and as a lived experience, which is most contested.

Is it overly pessimistic to suggest that villainy is the order of the day and the basis of all human activity?

The villainy you

teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I

will better the instruction.

When mercy seasons justice, might there be some possibility of criticism begin heard and acted upon? But then again are not 'mercy' and 'justice' political tools, often aggressively used as such?

http://opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/playmenu.php?WorkID=merchantvenice

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