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Par FAIRYES le 18 Mars 2022 à 05:24
St. Patrick's Day
BY DEREK MAHONNo wise man ever wished to be younger.
— Swift1Down the long library each marble bustshines unregarded through a shower of dustwhere a grim ghost paces for exercisein wet weather: nausea, gout, ‘some daysI hardly think it worth my time to rise’.Not even the love of friends can quite appeasethe vertigo, sore ears and inner voices;deep-draughted rain clouds, a rock lost in space,yahoos triumphant in the marketplace,the isle is full of intolerable noises.2Go with the flow; no, going against the grainhe sits in his rocking chair with a migraine,a light in the church all day till evensong,the sort of day in which a man might hang.No riding out to bubbling stream and weir,to the moist meadow and white belvedere;on tattling club and coffee house a pox,a confederacy of dunces and mohocks —scholars and saints be d-mn’d, slaves to a hardreign and our own miniature self-regard.3We emerge from hibernation to ghetto-blastersmuch better than our old Sony transistors,consensual media, permanent celebration,share options, electronic animation,wave motion of site-specific daffodils,closed-circuit video in the new hotels;for Niamh and Oisín have come to earth once morewith blinding breastplate and tempestuous hair,new festive orthodoxy and ironic icon,their faces lit up like the Book of Kells.4Defrosting the goose-skin on Bridget’s daughtersspring sunlight sparkles among parking meters,wizards on stilts, witches on circus bikes,jokers and jugglers, twitching plastic snakes,pop music of what happens, throbbing skies,star wars, designer genes, sword sorceries.We’ve no nostalgia for the patristic croziers,fridges and tumble-dryers of former years,rain-spattered cameras in O’Connell St.,the sound mikes buffeted by wind and sleet —5but this is your birthday and I want to recalla first-floor balcony under a shower of hailwhere our own rowdy crowd stood to reviewpost-Christian gays cavorting up Fifth Avenue,wise-cracking dialogue as quick and dryas that in The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye;for we too had our season in Tír na nÓg,a Sacred Heart girl and a Protestant rogue,chill sunshine warming us to the very bone,our whole existence one erogenous zone.6I could resign these structures and devices,these fancy flourishes and funny voicesto a post-literate, audio-visual realmof uncial fluorescence, song and film,as curious symptoms of a weird transitionbefore we opted to be slaves of fashion —for now, whatever the ancestral dream,we give ourselves to a vast corporate schemewhere our true wit is devalued once again,our solitude known only to the rain.7The one reality is the perpetual flow,chaos of complex systems. Each generationdoes what it must; middle age and misanthropy,like famine and religion, make poor copy,and even the present vanishes like snowoff a rope, frost off a ditch, ice in the sun —so back to the desktop and the drawing board,prismatic natural light, slow-moving cloud,the waves far-thundering in a life of their own,a young woman hitching a lift on a country road.
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