(Not my words, but those of
December is normally a frosty month. There’s a bite in the air. Many of us have difficulty insulating ourselves against the hostility in recent news stories in Ireland relating to disabled people. …
Source: Cosy Consensus
No need for that language
I was out meeting two friends a couple of weeks ago in Harry Byrne’s in Killester. Midweek, following an evening class I give to advertising students. Quiet couple of pints. I got to telling them the story of a recent loss.
One of my students had ended his life a week earlier. He was 22, and seemed to have everything to live for, but he took things in a different direction. I was baffled, and trying to understand what I could have done, or where I could’ve stepped in and made any kind of difference to the outcome. As I went to the toilet I was, to tell the truth, a bit angry with him. Maybe with myself too, for not spotting what became too obvious too late.
The toilet was empty, and as I stood at the urinal I surprised myself by shouting ‘Fuck you anyway, Mark’ out loud. Then a voice from the cubicle. ‘No need for that language.’ Damn. Not as alone as I thought. I washed my hands and mumbled something back about them not knowing what I really meant. The door opened, and a man in his mid, maybe late twenties stood there. He had Down syndrome.
And he was absolutely right. There was no need for that language.
Rest in peace, Mark.
Snapped this little guy on my mum’s front yard at the start of April. In the most inhospitable crack between the front wall and concrete yard. Life keeps pushing on.
Electric Picnic and the Year of Little Magic
2012 was a whitewater raft ride in many ways. Difficulties, death and despair at every turn, or so it felt. Such wonder as there was seemed pitifully small. And yet, and yet. And yet I believe in magic. There’s too much reality around for us not to need it. I don’t trust homeopathy, but it’s quite alright to believe that fairies might step lightly among us unseen, right? They’re as real as you or me, Auntie Em, spinning on a rock here in nowhere, at 108,000km per hour, and managing on most days to successfully ignore that startling fact.
When 30,000 or so of us come together, and the right ingredients of wantingness are there in heaps, then magic will weave its gold-threaded way into our drudgeries. For three days in early September, in a field in the middle of Ireland, we were in its thrall. The pull of Electric Picnic is not necessarily the headline acts or the music or Mindfield or Body and Soul or who you might meet. This post isn’t about that. Plenty of other bloggers have done that side of it, and better than I could. This is about magic.
‘There is a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in,’ says Leonard Cohen, and if we’re lucky, we might be in the forest, in the dark, in the silence between the drum beats, when it pokes through and spills iridescence into the wallpapered world. It will not outstay its welcome, of course. The light that burns so brightly cannot burn for long. And that perhaps is for the best. ‘Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder,‘ warns Patrick Kavanagh, and by morning the fairies will have folded their tent and left an inexplicable blue mark in the place where their dancing feet never bent the blades of grass.
And we swear to ourselves that we’ll hold on to the memories, that we’ll get it down this time, every shred of it, so that we can, in the bleak Novanuary, draw again on its vivid colours, the guy ropes and pennants and smells on the breeze and how it perfectly was, as though we were there once more in the Instagram of it all. We never do, of course. It Disneyfies itself in the remembering. But it happened, Auntie Em.
I was hoping that Electric Picnic would make a dent in a 2012 of far too much drudgery. It did. It shot an arrow of fire right into September and kept on burning into deep winter. I can feel it yet. You could say that we rented a camper van and went to a field in the middle of Ireland for three days. But I know that I was away with the fairies.
Eileen of Denmark, thank you. 🙂
And thanks too Eddie J, for pointing out that fairies are indeed alive and well.
Addendum from some found notes:
Electric Picnic. A magical moment that slips through the wallpaper of the everyday world, for three mesmerising days, in a mystical gap somewhere between August and September.
I didn’t see Patti Smith or Paul Buchanan. I missed the Strypes and LAPD, and you can add Sbtrkt to the list. Salty Dog eluded me again, off having fun in the Gruffalo woods without me. So many other acts too. I wanted to meet Jim Carroll and Willie White. John Cooper Clark took up far too little of my time. I cry a bit that I missed Donal Dineen. Sorry Aoife Flynn that we didn’t bump. I’m sure I felt your presence there. And why didn’t I jump all over John Banville when I saw him in Mindfield? And how did I miss Patti Smith and Paul Buchanan?
See, as so cleverly orchestrated by Electric Picnic, these things missed over three days will keep me occupied for the other 362. (Although today, April 2nd 2013, it looks unlikely that EP13 will happen.)
Regrets.
But yet I saw so very, very much. I saw The Roots! John Cooper Clark took up some delicious moments of my time. The Cure. Hey, the Cure! Orbital blasted me right back. Plus, I have very few fuzzy pictures of performers 400 metres away, but lots and lots of snaps of magical doors and creatures and things. Plus plus, I saw The Roots!
And meantime, little gems like this one will turn up. I missed Fossett’s Circus again this year, but then this as I downloaded Herself’s pics from EP. Magic is there because we want it to be, and when enough of us want it to be, at the same time, then it is.
There is a crack in everything. Don’t ignore it. Don’t wish it away. And most definitely do not attempt to repair it. It’s how the light gets in.
A message from Brazil for Sean Penn
Good luck to the boys and girls from Brazil who made a movie. They want Sean Penn to pop down for the premier. And why not? Ariel, you’re an inspiration.
Vem Sean Penn.
To the annoying per-pubescent kid from earlier today
And the pushy one
And the one who looked sullen all day
And the one with the all-messed-up hipster hair
And the fat one
And the one who looked too skinny
And the one who threw the tantrum in the gift shop
And the one on the zip wire who was so much less nervous than me
And the one with the annoying voice
And the misguided Man United fan
And the hyper one
And the graceful one
And the one with the posh voice
And the one with the funny walk
And all the others I met earlier today
Keep on being wonderful
Down syndrome couldn’t make you all the same even if it wanted to
Our Jacob 
