Carta Magazine of Literary Prose Issue Two
© Trinity Publications 2019
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I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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Editorial
Despite the apparent speed with which global events shuttle over the weir, the detritus of lies and misinformation polluting the water remain buoyant and unmoving. According to PolitiFact, 70% of U.S. President Donald Trump’s statements in office have been false. On the same scale, his predecessor, Barack Obama, scored 24%, and his opponent in the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney, 40%. Coupled with the fantasies and lies underlying the campaign for Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016, we seem to have consciously entered an era of constant and obvious misinformation in current affairs — without even asking that the grand liars do what politicians and leaders have done for millennia: lie without getting caught. The question then becomes: what do we do — or, more specifically, write — in an era of bad liars? To this there is only one known answer: something inadequate. At least, this is the only thing to have been written so far; it can take time to get used to living with deceit, and even more 4iii
so with the flagrant, brazen deceit practised by abusers and megalomaniacs. This strain of deceit is particularly difficult to deal with because there is no established method of ‘dealing with it’ beyond ignoring its pedlars. No apology will ever come from a recreational liar, and this is the first thing to realise about writing in the modern day: it won’t elicit an apology from anyone who should be making one, and on this basis the socially transformative possibilities of the written word have lost much of their traditional power. Without any plausible alternative to help us reconstruct this dissolute world at variance with itself, we live in a provisional and fugitive moment. It won’t hold for long, and soon a direction will begin its ineluctable pull. Before we reach the point when this elastic period of lies and negotiation becomes taut and snappable, it must instead be transmuted into material of a different kind. For the writer, with whom we are most concerned here, this act of political alchemy is almost always instigated by tinkering with the elemental atoms of her craft, which together comprise literary form. Most popularly credited with illustrating the power of form are the modernists, and many like Billy Childish and Stuckism International advocate imitating the fierce innovations in literature heralded by the Vorticists and Pound. But where literary modernism threaded its way into the tight weave of its historical moment — a moment of unprecedented social change and global violence — it is difficult to suggest that much of what passes for 5iv
formal ambition in this, our own unprecedented moment, prioritises anything, let alone history or society, over gross, late-capitalist aestheticism. Which is not to say that the fragmentation of form and the playful elision of experiential meaning by the postmodern wave did not arise out of its own historical moment, nor that it holds no value as a literary movement per se. It is simply that it has fulfilled its purpose and outlived its moment. As Agamben notes: When humankind is deprived of effective experience and becomes subjected to the imposition of a form of experience as controlled and manipulated as a laboratory maze for rats - in other words, when the only possible experience is horror or lies - then the rejection of experience can provisionally embody a legitimate defence.1
It is simply as part of the second step — which, as noted, has to be taken whether we like it or not — that we argue for a disavowal of the provisional, perfectly legitimate defence offered up by postmodernism, and advocate a renewed interest in a literature freighted with meaning. Only then might we see the cold green legs of experience unfurl from its shell and find renewed purchase in the mud. Crucially, the consequences of this thought do not begin and end in the art world. The retreat of traditional forms like the essay or even the article from public discourse does much to obscure and polarise our politics. As exploited by v6
groups like Cambridge Analytica, rapid-fire formats like tweets and comments do little to carry transformative debate and instead reduce opinion-forming to a matter of constant reinforcement. Given this frame of discussion, politics can only implode into an art defined by the vague, promising soundbite: ‘Brexit means Brexit’, ‘Make America Great Again’. In essence, politics becomes an overmighty marketing contest. This era of misinformation and bad liars makes for a historical moment where it can feel vitiating and dreadful to sit down at a desk and start to write, especially with the hope to communicate something important; where it is tempting to surrender to Woolf’s glum formulation in The Waves that ‘there is neither rhyme nor reason when a drunk man staggers about with a club in his hand’.2 This kind of apathy relies on some obscure faith in the power of the status quo. It only makes sense to do nothing if we fundamentally believe that things will always remain acceptable. History, however, does not proceed on some inevitable path of progress or stability. Belief in the ultimate security and goodness of ourselves and our world is a luxury not afforded to our generation. We must acknowledge that we cannot only hope for a better world — we must actively try to change it. Escape from our current paradigm lies, perhaps, in a return to basics; most irreverently, in an era of anonymous information, a revival in the warm, human relationship 7vi
between artist and audience. The void of this relationship is apparent in both the disrespect afforded to others by demagogic liars and the self-important, self-concerned poise of bad art. Prose, as the backbone to our engagement with the media, academia and communication at large, is a necessary component of this experiment. This is not to proclaim the ready-made inception of a new mode of art and communication in this magazine; after all, art that still resonates through air grown thick about our heads is the dream of many but the action of few. We do believe, however, that the pieces in this edition begin to hum with that possibility.
Christian Moore and Harry Downes 1st April, 2019
endnotes
1 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (1978: Reprint, New York: Verso, 1993), p.16. 2 Woolf, Virginia, The Waves (1931: Reprint, Oxford: Oxford Universiy Press, 2015) p.159.
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Contents
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Ready Or Not
Mary O Harte
There is Thunder in our Hearts
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Maija Makela
Ready Or Not Mary O Harte
content warning: sexual abuse, violence
The sand was cold against the soles of her feet; hard
and solid, more like rock than anything else. She stared out at the horizon, where the inky-blue of the water met lilac sky. The wind had caused some strands of hair to escape from her loose ponytail and blow into her face. She hadn’t dared enter the water, but she could taste a hint of salt on her lips. Here I am. A deep, cold breath filled her lungs. For the first time in a long time, she almost felt alive — or at least, she could remember what it was like to feel that way. Where are you? Breathe in. Where did you go? Breathe out. 11
She turned away from the ocean, pulling her coat closer. It was an old coat and several sizes too big for her, but she preferred clothes that were baggier than necessary. Will I ever find you?
*** She had always been good at hiding, much to her parents’ despair: they tore through the house calling her name, getting down on their hands and knees to crawl underneath the hedges in their garden. She would suddenly appear at the kitchen table, sipping juice and cuddling her Sally-Anne. A floppy ragdoll with a cotton dress and long red woollen hair, Sally-Anne had been a gift from her godmother. She had never loved anything as much as she loved SallyAnne. She took her everywhere: to the supermarket, church, doctor, dentist. The only place she couldn’t bring her was school. That just made the weekends and summer holidays all the more valuable; playing with her in the flower bed, whispering stories in her ear during long car journeys to seaside cottages and hotels. She had been here before. Remembered, in fact, the last time she had stood on this beach. It had been someone’s wedding: a second or third cousin, someone like that. If she turned a couple of degrees to the right she would be able to make out the roof of the hotel they had stayed in. It was a little 12
run-down now, but that summer it had seemed like a palace. The staff wore neat blue uniforms and shiny smiles. She ate pancakes every morning. Her cousins played tag with her in the hotel garden. Sometimes they played hide and seek, but not often; they soon tired of how she always won in spite of being the youngest. All of them except Philip, who was fifteen, the oldest of all the cousins. He was used as an unpaid babysitter by the adults who wanted a few hours to sip cocktails and talk about a television programme that wasn’t Peppa Pig. Far from resenting the role, he seemed to genuinely enjoy spending time with them, whether kicking a football around or playing tag. He put up with hide and seek long after the others had started to groan. “How are you so good at hiding?” he’d exclaim when she finally emerged from her chosen spot — only after everyone had admitted defeat, of course. She’d giggle mischievously while he rolled his eyes in a pantomime of bemusement and laughter. She liked that she could make him laugh, and often felt in these moments as if she had an older brother. They spent the afternoons on the beach with the entire extended family. The memories came to her in fragments as she walked along the sand – splashing in the shallow water, running with her red bucket and spade, clutching Sally-Anne to her as she peered into rockpools, experiencing frightened delight at the strange sideways movements of the crabs. The 13
sun reddening her back as she and her mother buried her sleeping father in the sand, each trying not to laugh in case he woke up. They would always take her to buy vanilla ice cream on the beach at the end of the day, never forgetting to ask for the raspberry sauce. The thought of the ice cream drove her now towards the little beach hut, already open for business even though it was barely April. How did little seaside towns like this survive in the off-season? She licked her ice cream thoughtfully; it tasted more artificial than it had in those long-ago days of sandcastles, sea shells, and sausages and chips drenched in bright red ketchup. The sky had turned from blue to purple to pink to red. The sun began to slide under the horizon. Her mother caught her rubbing her eyes at one point and turned to her husband, eyebrows raised, pointedly mentioning B-e-d-t-i-m-e. “Do you want me to bring her to your room?” Phillip had asked, ever the helpful, capable cousin, mature beyond his years. “I can mind her for a while.” “That would be great! I’ll get you the key now, hold on.” Her parents had been delighted, happy to spend another hour on the beach. He took her hand in his and led her towards the hotel. She remembered how she had dragged her feet, sticking her bottom lip out in an exaggerated pout. She hadn’t wanted to go to bed yet. There had been so much to explore, so much 14
to do… Philip seemed to understand. He wasn’t like the others, always bossing her around and telling her what to do. “You don’t have to go to bed just yet. We can stay up for a while if you want.” “Yeah!” “It has to be a secret though. I don’t want to get in trouble with your parents for keeping you up past your bedtime. Okay?” “Okay!” “Awesome. I found a really cool spot where we can go. Come on, I’ll show you,” he said. He steered her towards the mass of rock that bordered the beach. She skipped happily beside him, almost dropping her doll in her excitement. It was like going on an adventure. “There’s a cave just in here…” She lay wide awake for hours afterwards, nestled between her snoring parents, staring at the ceiling, trying and failing to understand. As she stared into the darkness she felt herself slip away, floating from her body and out into the waters that surrounded her. Come back she thought, desperately reaching out to grasp onto it, but it simply lay there, empty. She tried to grab onto something — anything. The more she struggled, the tighter the current’s pull became. Eventually she decided to surrender, to let it drag her far away from the shore and swallow her whole. It wasn’t 15
until she woke up screaming the next morning that anyone realised Sally-Anne was gone. Her parents tore the bedroom apart trying to find the doll. Her uncle and aunt searched the beach, returning redskinned and empty-handed almost two hours later. She cried so hard she got sick. Her parents rubbed her back and kissed her forehead (don’t touch me don’t touch me she wanted to scream), promising new toys and sweets and books. Her father even left a note with their phone number at the reception desk before they went home, part of a desperate, last-ditch hope that someone would find her out on the sand and bring her to the hotel. No-one ever called. It didn’t matter. She knew where Sally-Anne was. Philip did too.
*** She was standing there now, in the open jaws of the cave. It seemed to leer at her, reveling in knowing her secret. She remembered how afraid she had been to step inside, but Phillip insisted: “There’s something really cool I want to show you, because you’re my favourite cousin.” She took a step forward. “You have to be quiet. This is going to be our secret.” She fell to her knees, collapsing onto the damp sand. The 16
cave wasn’t that deep — she could see the back wall from where she was — but it seemed to stretch eternally out in front of her. The roar of the waves outside sent an icy chill raking through her bones. The sound drowned out everything else, every thought, every sound. She still remembered how it felt, the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach when she realised that her parents couldn’t hear her, that nobody was coming to her rescue, not even Sally-Anne. Sally-Anne. She had dropped the doll when he pushed her to the ground. The shock of it sent Sally-Anne falling from her pudgy, clumsy hands. She had dropped and forgotten about her until it was too late. Until she was too afraid to ever come back. How had Sally-Anne felt, alone all these years? A little red-haired doll, lying on the sand. A little red-haired girl sobbing next to her. A red-haired young woman here now, on her knees, gasping as it appeared before her, the realisation just within her reach — he’s not here. Her face split into a strange, twisted smile and she burst open, laughing loudly, uncontrollably, as if she’d never stop. She thought of what she had lost. What she had thought she would never get back. The sheer force of her emotion drove her forward, stumbling deeper into the cave. She clawed at the ground, 17
digging furiously, flinging sand all around her. Her fingers scraped against rock and jagged pink shells, but she barely even flinched, just half-sobbed, half-laughed as she finally unearthed the sodden material: Sally-Anne. She clasped the sand-crusted bundle of rags to her chest, rocking backwards and forwards, ignoring her torn fingernails stained with blood and sand and numb from the cold. “I can’t believe that I found you.” Her face crumpled as she stared at the doll, her SallyAnne. Her pink paisley dress was faded, most of her hair lost, but her crescent-moon smile was still fixed in place. “There you are,” it seemed to say. “You found me.” She closed her eyes and wept. Her body and soul were finally colliding after years of estrangement, and the pain had surfaced too quickly. Every sensation — her stinging fingers, the hard rock beneath her knees, the dampness of her jeans — became overwhelming. Other feelings too, the phantom of an ache between her legs, an iron-like grip digging into her arm. Things she had forgotten, things she had to forget in order to survive until she was ready. Or not. Here I come.
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There is Thunder in our Hearts Maija Makela
where sea meets silt an ugly thirsty hound: no shame, no shame at all heart-hand: no shame in the thud of run
*** I was in a big house where my dreams still lingered after I woke. I had dreamt of something volcanic, something with an earth-deep shudder. All morning, I felt the violence of it peal out like a bell. If I keep you, I keep you at arm’s length.
*** Let me tell you something. I rent a small rectangular room in a big rectangular house. The room is twice as tall as it is wide. It is quite deliciously symmetrical, full of straight lines. In one corner, mould blooms out onto the ceiling in coy 19
curves, with a sweet-earth smell if you get close, all damp and sweaty. There is a string of cobweb that hangs just offcentre above the wall facing east. I have noticed that it moves coquettishly each time the door opens. I know the ceiling well by now though I have not lived here long. As you may have guessed, it’s an old house; I decide eighteenth-century, but there is no real reason why I make this assumption other than the blank and ghastly height of it. To keep warmth in over the winter, I never open the curtains and so a dull glare just filters through the fabric and the flesh-pink of the walls curdles in the grey light. It is ugly, this bloated salmon colour, though more exotic than magnolia, the off-white ennui quietly epidemic in the rented bedrooms of this country, and perhaps the world over. But this room brought aspirations towards renewal, and I’ve tried a thing or two. It depends on the time of day. I’ve been told I’d do better not to assign places such unfounded superstitions, that I tend to burden space with faulty esoteric significance; that I expect too much, when a staircase is often — just a staircase. Now. With this in mind, I’ll divulge to you one of my most recurrent fantasies: the white room. Empty and still. A small and perfect square, quite bright and boxlike. A clean and violent white. It’s lavish, this fantasy, I’m sure I just ooze with it. Sometimes I dream of orderly rows of linenclad beds, all parallel and identical, and I have to sigh — other times, even straightjackets. Mostly, however, it’s just 20
the heady draw of the complete and utterly empty that I crave. This need for blankness — it’s almost erotic. In this new white room I imagine I would stretch my arms to the ceiling, they’d be thin and limber then. I would wear new clean clothes with my hair winter-pale and my teeth straight and I would feel no need to address anyone in a voice like splintered rocks. I would stand in waifish curves with limbs all arched and pointed, pose with the taut control of a ballet dancer. I would have no need for binds then, for reassurances, in this white room, I would not know the meaning of the word shrill.
*** Chopping, absolutely manic chopping. Onions, garlic, various stem and green. It’s nice to break thin spaghetti into a large and rattling pot of brine. At the kitchen table, a splash of orange paint meets white paper and spreads out like a quickening wound. I watch and the joy I feel catches me quite by surprise. The pleasure of the colour is almost unbearable. Orange! It sends a jolt of heat down my spine and, hands gone clammy, I resist the urge to moan. You know, after the little earthquake happened in me, an alarming obsession with red foods followed. It was almost pathological: fresh fig, cranberry, blood orange, and then soon afterwards, with red things in general. (I want to tell you about this new sensuality, the bodily 21
pleasure of colour. I want to tell you about the new death-red of a pomegranate.) Now here’s another thing: I found a lover. Yes, I did. A new one at the close of the year, the very last thing we expected and I can tell you I was just as appalled as anyone. In the mornings he was here, we lay on our backs and acknowledged the blooms on the ceiling. This room, you see, I thought I would make it a sanctuary. When we talk, we talk mostly about his work. I listen and make myself small and beautiful. He tells me I am interesting when I agree with the things he says. When he tells me I remind him of himself, I burn with a bright and yellow pride. He watched his reflection in my face and said that I was made from glass. He tells me he has not felt such want in a very long time and I feel useful, I feel like a vitamin supplement, something pastel, so quaint and compartmentalised. Syruping. It was only afterwards and with surprise that I noticed how tightly I had coiled myself, vine-like, around him. In my white room I would never think to climb a man the way you might a staircase. All morning we are slow and clouded, and move as though through cement. He tells me that this house is weird, that it brushes past with strange, ghostly fingernails. I visualise icicles and tell him this. He looks at me the way one might observe the contents of a museum cabinet. When he leaves, and he does leave, he dresses quickly and goes traceless before the sheets dry. Some mornings when I wake I scan the room for movement. 22
I think about hands, and words like caution. When he put me back (intact, crystalline) he looked down at his coarse wide hands with the knowing nod of accomplishment. In my still room I imagine my eyelids are petals. I decide I am a very small and frail thing, perhaps glass is not incorrect after all. Slippery. Just more tangible than ghost. That day I ran to the sea. My whole body an open wound, you see, something was to claw out of me so white hot and all-consuming that I was appalled the rest of the world couldn’t see it. Briny salt smell, the sharp bright silt of it. Remember the arc of voice against wave: chest tight and the irregular thud of rubber meet sand, meet pavement, meet me ungraceful, careening. Salty sea, thunder thunder thud of me. Mouth: water! Water as blue, water as a cure, water as cause of death, water as element, water as bodied, water as sanctuary, water as compulsive, water as cool shock, water right up to the neck, water as the expanse, water as contained, water as warm and shallow and pushing your fingers into my mouth. In this strange box, dry now, the words come out whole and perfect spheres. This is how I want. This is what I want. So I’ll tell you about the dream now: when I dream, I dream of a body suspended in blue light. Quite ravaged by it: this blue, a hot cerulean, it really takes hold. It runs in the bloodstream like a heavy metal. A strange toxicity. In my dream I 23
watch the body convulse with it. I acknowledge a growing pleasure that I do not have the language to verbalise. In this dreamplane words are invariably ugly things. Dropped with the same dull consequence of boulders. Observe: a body in pain, a terrible thing. Nothing more than a layering of skin — really, the frailest thing, the most fragile, most treacherously delicate thing — this thin, fleshless membrane. A body is a thing that just happens. From my dream-perch I can see this and I understand: a body undergoes. In this cavernous blue, love grew in me something ulcerous. Shame as a sadness to be sung: I might still, I would lick up melodies and wear them on my tongue like pearls. In the blue of my dream, I open my mouth, just to try it; the sound that comes out is foreign, a pealing and strangled melisma. I think of treacle, I think of gravel. And when I wake, the house a-shudder, a wild delight comes with the sudden compulsion to really put my hand to something, to pull meat quite literally off the bone. The day tasting faintly of fennel.
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Something Else Caomhán Ó hÓgáin
And to think I try my best not to talk about myself. Samuel Beckett, Molloy
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n the dream, the smurfs have been apprehended. A normal human (to them a giant) plans to eat them. In a big forest clearing, they are gathered near a cauldron. Onions and stock have given a brown colour to its water. The captor/chef is nowhere to be seen; he has gone into the forest to look for more firewood. For some reason, the Smurfs are not in chains. Many are anxiously saying that they all need to leave. But they don’t know where to go. And they don’t really think they’ll outrun Him. Then one Smurf – Smurfette, rather – announces that she does not mind the impending soup. To emphasise this, she climbs up and falls back into the cauldron. I see her from above, her hands behind her head, reclining. She makes visible the current left by the gi25
ant the last time he gave the water a swirl of his spoon. Does the dream end there, her head spinning around the centre? Or does she rise over the brim and invite the others in, promising the loveliness of the water? I wake in fear and look across to see my two younger siblings. We share what we can fill of a double bed in the guest room of our grandparents’ house, Tigh Nana-agus-Flan, in Clondalkin. (We are Irish speakers. I don’t know what relevance that has for what follows, but there you have it, whichever way.) We live here for now because our house-moving is slow. I know exactly how close I am to seven years old. The round light on the wall above our heads emits the least amount of light that the dimmer switch allows without being turned off. On this setting, it produces its loudest buzz. The quilt is heavy and soft and never-ending. Beyond the bed is a red and thick carpet. More than these details, what makes Tigh Nana-agus-Flan feel like a luxurious resort is the Sky box in the living room downstairs. It has opened our horizons past the staple four Irish channels to include all the strange English ones, some of which don’t broadcast until seven o’clock in the evening, some of which show the same thing at all hours (including the night’s). I feel more wary of that box now. I know this is a new kind of dream. More than any cartoons, I blame the nature documentaries with their footage of scuba divers. Without fail, they fall back from a seated position on the edge of the boat. I wish they did not have to do that. In diving forward, 26
headfirst, you maintain some sense of agency, of self. You keep it long after the water is breached. But when you fall back, you allow yourself to be taken. You locate your centre of gravity behind you and you’re gone, part of something else, long before you hit the water. I am sure that I’ve done something bold in having this dream. I remind myself it was all in my head; no one could know. Calmed by this thought, excited even, I allow myself to think of the Smurf and my fear of her. What I fear, and what I pinpoint before sleep comes again, is that her logic will contaminate me, that I too will learn, when faced with an impending soup, to gladly fall back. Have I ever been inside? Ann Quin, Berg Afternoon sun rains golden upon the quays. I am going to college. I am scratching. It is Thursday. I have been on this bus for an hour now. I am scratching my left arm like mad. That April sky must the bluest of the year so far, how it brings out the brick of the buildings. I am scratching because I think I might urinate. I don’t know why but it helps. I have to keep doing this. It was at Chapelizod, little more than halfway, that I could no longer distract myself by re-reading the poems for the Keats tutorial. On this bus, yellow handrails curve from seats to ceiling. Red buttons say STOP. I cannot stop. I must not let go. On reaching the 27
quays, on seeing that traffic which promises half an hour between Heuston and Ha’penny, I decide I will not make it. The question now is at which bridge to explode? My only recourse is to scratching. I don’t know when it started. All I know is it grounds me. My left arm. My right nails. Fast. I do not care how it looks. I am upstairs, towards the back, on the left. There is a man and a female in the pair of seats opposite and one row behind me. I don’t know if she is his partner, friend, or daughter, because I do not turn to look. I hear them. She whispers something. More clear is the man’s reply: “He sure must be itchy.” I put it out of mind. Scratch and control, that’s all that matters. I have tried other things. My other arm, my legs, the blue fur of the chair, I tried pinching. Scratching the left forearm is nicest. I am wearing a pencil-grey hoodie. I tried without the sleeve. I didn’t like that. Too harsh. Too rough. And I do not want to look at the damage. There is a shallow wound, more plasma than blood, grey cotton strands in it, starting to scab. It begins one third of the way up from the wrist and ends one quarter of the way down from the elbow. Half a bus journey’s work. I am crazy, I note that. But what matters now is control, i.e. scratching. So this is a panic attack. A somewhere voice finds it interesting. I tell it that this isn’t the time, that I’m terrified. I don’t know how we’re on D’Olier Street. Upstairs has emptied. Will the lack of others’ 28
eyes remove all motivation for my not letting go? There are spikes in my chest. I want to slow this heart which pumps adrenaline blood. This body of vessels is an idiot. Nassau Street. Has the stop always been so far past the entrance? I’m afraid to stand. Scratching, I make the stairs. Ridiculously, I thank the bus driver. The path is full of commuters waiting for buses to the RDS, Ballsbridge, wherever; how could they mind? They have control of themselves, they are sure of the barriers between them and the world, they are solid. I wonder what they make of the porousness sprinting by. I navigate the Luas construction but bump into a girl leaving college. I whimper an apology over my shoulder, running on. Inside, I slow to a brisk walk while choking. If I can make the last few yards, the last steps, I’ll be golden... I am at the porcelain faced with the nothing I deep-down expected all along. I don’t want to be graphic, but I am there a long time to a negligible result. My throat is dry, forehead flushed, legs are not bone. I want to tear in half and fall, jittering on the red tiled floor, a sack of skin in puddled piss where duffle bags are dropped while homeless men shave and hand-dryers roar. Maybe I do so. But the physical part of me stays up. He zips up. He washes my hands. What were the poems again? Odes to a Nightingale, a Greek Urn. Beauty, the sublime, all that. I apologise (a small class) for being late. No, First Year is not going as it should be. 29
That man has been he and now matters no more to him. Jorge Luis Borges, The God’s Script Two months have passed as I finish the ten minute walk from the Shop to stop 317 on Westmoreland Street. Here, after each day of my summer job, I wait a further eleven minutes for the bus home. Here, after one particular blur of a shift at the tills, I receive a phone call from my father. The following is translated from Irish. “Where are you?” “In town. I was working. About to get the bus back.” “Right. Do you have a key? We might not be home.” “Yeah I’ve a key.” “We’re in Clondalkin. Something has happened with Flan.” My granddad. “Oh.” “Nana is very upset, we’re looking after her.” The bus pulls up. “I have a key anyway.” “Right, see you later.” “Bye.” I decide on the bus that there is no use speculating. I escape into the long novel I’ve been reading since the end of First Year. When I get off, I have pushed to the end of a chapter. The slow summer sunset falls through the housing estate’s trees on my unchanging walk home. My father 30
arrives shortly after me. I am informed while filling the kettle. “He was out gardening, it seems, when the heart went. Nice way, considering. The paramedics had...” I mumble and nod until I can leave the room. I drink green tea in the warm twilight. My mother comes home. I know the polite thing is to hug her. She seems strong, untired. In the excitement she’s forgotten her cancer. Next morning I leave the house before anyone is up who can protest. I am told by my manager that I am needed not at the tills but on the mezzanine today. I want to thank her. This means I will not be confronted every thirty seconds by a customer with that question which reminds me of what I most long to forget: “How are you?” Lately I pretend not to hear it during transactions, so hard is it to come up with an answer. It is hard to guess what task our mezzanine will demand of me as I fetch my bottle of water. A delivery of boxed books might need accepting from a DHL driver. Alternatively, newly delivered books might need unboxing. Alternatively, newly unboxed books might need scanning into the system. Alternatively, newly scanned books might need pricing. Alternatively, newly priced books might need shelving. Alternatively, there may be a list of books which, damaged or unsold, have been chosen for Return to the Warehouse; such books are to be removed from the shelves, de-priced, scanned out of the system, boxed up, and readied for the DHL driver. Alternatively, the above might need to be done with 31
cards, toys, or stationery. I buy a Coke for good measure. Easier to guess with the Mez is the demanded number of hours. Our mezzanine is reached by descending a wide flight of stairs that is located at the wall across from the magazines and newspapers. The Mez can be hot, especially in summer. Other uncontroversial terms that could be applied to it include “oppressive”, “foul-smelling,” and “dusty”. This is to adopt an outsider’s perspective, of course. A worker posted there comes to think of it as a fish thinks of stale canal water. I find this to apply also to the regular customers who haunt its non-fiction sections. Nearest to the worker’s station are Business, Personal Improvement, Spirituality, and Illness, sections which attract people who seem to be either coming back from the brink or about to take over the world. (These are hard to distinguish.) I am at the worker’s station removing hardened stickers from yellowing books, trolleys of them, a task that has taught me to stop cutting my right index fingernail, when a voice behind wonders if I can help. I swivel with a creak of my stool to face a woman of thirty in dark running clothes. “I’m looking for a book that’ll help me channel my inner...” She makes a precise, wavy hand gesture. “Well you’re at the right section. Though I’m not sure I’ve come across a book specifically about channelling your inner...” I replicate the gesture. “Right. See, I’m creatively and logically challenged. I do 32
intense yoga and after my yoga I feel like Lady Gaga and the rest of the time I feel like shit. I just want to be successful. I want to dress like Lady Gaga and not get laughed at. She’s so much more successful than Madonna, in my opinion. Madonna takes things from outside, but Lady Gaga finds it within herself. Like her costumes, I just watch her videos and think, does she storyboard them? Does she get help?” “Ah yeah,” I say. “I’m sure she gets help. The big pop stars, don’t they have all sorts of teams.” I’m not sure she hears me. She seems lost in the thought that makes her pause between sentences. She turns again to the shelf. “There’s only so much you can get from a book, though. I have most of these books already and like I start them, but I never finish. It’s about luck, really. The right time and the right place. I do acting, but I keep getting shitty roles and each one leaves me so unfulfilled. It actually gets worse. And I keep...” I nod and mumble in agreement or sympathy where appropriate until she is done. I wish her luck and mean it. The travel section is also down here, nearer the stairs. Would-be tourists, very normally, come to scan the names of Earth’s places, hoping for inspiration, a destination. Having found one, they then search for a clear indication that it’s D.K., no, the Rough Planet, wait, the Lonely Guide that is right for them. The greatest freaks of all, in their way. When it is time for lunch, I descend another flight of stairs to the staffroom. If the room is occupied, the sweltering heat 33
will be remarked upon. If the room is empty, the hum of the fan will be listened to while the kettle is boiled. In this latter condition, I realise every now and then that weeks and weeks have flown by. I am scared by how much longer it can go on like this. “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? “I never know what you are thinking. Think.” T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land On a rare day off work, I read to my girlfriend the highlighted extract from the long novel I’ve been reading. It involves a character who is highly successful at academic and social levels but who, internally, is nothing. That is to say, he has no inner life. Events bring him neither joy nor pain. In truth, he is not really there. The book describes this as “anhedonic depression”. I come to the end of the extract. Her eyes are fixed on me from her side of the couch. They have not moved in a long time. My eyes slide in escape to the easier sight of her ankle socks, the coffee table, anywhere else in her living room. “Are you saying you’re depressed?” I close my eyes. I wasn’t saying that. I don’t think I was saying that. I have long given up on saying anything. That extract had spoken to me and I had simply wanted to share it with her. That is all. “Please,” she says. 34
“I don’t...” My head is in her lap. She is stroking my hair. Facing out are my eyes, full of wall and the fireplace opposite. She is saying something over and over. The past few months feel cut off from me as if by a sheet of glass. It is because she has named them, turned it all into a phase, a concrete Thing. I feel changed, also. Hello. I am a depressed person. I am a person who is depressed. Mine is a life that has encountered depression. I have a life, and at times it is depressed. I practise saying these kinds of things in my head. They weird me out. I put them down, feeling sick. Let all who can think and use words and laugh do so while I stare at the fireplace. To be wooden and horizontal. To be left among statues in the wax museum after dark. What I long for. She is talking to or of the heavy head in her lap. It sounds like she is calling for something. A word for that is “yearning”. But you can tell she can tell it is hopeless. “Mourning” is the word in that case. It’s all very complicated. I am happy to be at one and none with the fireplace. The wall above it is red. There is a mirror on the wall. The wooden mantelpiece has pictures of her family, framed. A tubby Buddha candle sits among them. The wood’s colour is light. Around the pit and inside it is all black from the coal. The fire-screen mesh is in place. From its centre there hangs a handle-ring which even in the day’s overcast light reflects gold. The stroke is made with the back of her middle finger, the 35
same of her index, and the tip of her thumb. It goes down the cheek to where the ear ends, lifts, and returns to the hair above the temple to start again. A somewhere voice realises her sounds make my name. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am. Virginia Woolf, The Waves It is the only thing, that summer, able to make me see the beauty of colour, or laugh, or be inside, or feel, and so I accept every chance to smoke it I get. This explains how despite never being stoned off my face in Blanchardstown, I am there tonight being just that. I am in a bar. The people I am with study philosophy. I don’t know them that well. There are four of us. The purest one is a musician. He reminds me of Shaggy from ScoobyDoo but all energetic and twenty. He is going on about how at times he thinks he is a genius, but that these times reveal to him that we are all geniuses, that genius inheres in all of us. I zone in and out. I am smiling. Small orange lights shine to my right. They hang from the ceiling and stretch from the far wall, where the toilets are, to the wall with the entrance, beside us, which is all glass, ceiling to floor . Beyond that is the road outside, the car park behind, and the streetlights. I see this all by peering above the low and opaque glass barrier that keeps us in this elevated corner section. Against 36
the view I relocate my friend’s words, now as foreground, now as background. Perverse sounds enter the picture. My head turns left a little, my eyes a lot. Three tables away two heterosexual couples of the same age as our parents make fun of us. They are making fun of my pure friend. They mimic what we say, make verbal caricatures. The men wear expensive-looking and well-ironed shirts. They look like they belong here. I realise we do not. I have said nothing in a long time. I am hearing our words (coming from them) in my left ear and our words (coming from us) in my right. I try to tune to the right, but the left channel is overpowering. Every time my pure friend says something that I want to find a mixture of gas, beautiful, and brave, I hear it from the perspectives three tables across. I tense and await the blow. This (for them) is gold. One of us talks about ego-death, of returning from something beyond stars, and going bowling in Leisureplex while the processing starts. Tangents go wayward from there as the collaborative potential of psychedelics and bowling is explored. Soon enough, I hear middle-aged cackles from the spouses’ side as they plan their own games of inter-dimensional bowling. How have none of us noticed them? I don’t know when I stopped counting myself as one of us. My friends are gone. I am the only one at the table. Some went for the jacks; the pure friend, I think, for a rollie. Two from the other table have gone too. So three of us populate this corner section. And the one called I starts staring them 37
out of it, a smile on him. The woman notices. She looks away. She twirls the straw in her drink. She looks back. One cheek and chin still rest in my palm. The same length to my smile. The same glasses. She begins to whisper to her husband. She is telling him not to look. The husband looks. He no longer looks. He tells her not to mind. Her eyes dart again. I understand her. She cannot relax while he (this he meaning me) is still doing it. “He’s still staring,” she whispers. “Right at us. Why is he–” “You know why.” My volume is measured to perfection. It is not a shout, not a mutter, but an articulate address. Inside, I celebrate. I have no more quotes, but I know I proceed with passive aggression to ask them to stop making fun of my friend. I do not use the word “pure”. They tighten their brows. They answer back. Everyone returns and I find myself the centre and cause of an argument. I am new to this. I mention how I distinctly heard them laugh about inter-dimensional bowling. The woman says “inter-dimensional bowling” with an audible question mark. I learn a lot. One of my half-friends has sat down. The other is still where he was when he first grasped the scene. They back me up and help deconstruct the others’ arguments. The bartender is over now, a young fella. We agree to stop. A sort of silence grows, but the husband with a red snooker ball for a head has to get the last word so he erupts: “But he is not a genius! He is not a genius.” He practically 38
jumps in his chair. The barman asks us to leave. We do so as if it was our idea. The pure guy has just finished his smoke. He asks what’s happened and the others narrate. Pinching the contents of an Amber Leaf pouch as he walks, he interjects with “Hahaha” or “Dude” or “No way”. I walk slightly in front. I don’t know who/what that was. I look for joy or shame and find nothing. Blanchardstown is all empty car parks. We go back to someone’s sister’s apartment. There is seasoned sucking from cans. Some stay up to watch McGregor. One has no interest and fades into the couch. At one point, he wakes up as if realising something. He walks out to the hall. There are two doors to the left. One, he knows, is a bedroom. He pushes a door. The light reveals a bathroom. He is okay with this. He kneels down, hangs onto the seat, and pukes his ring for four to eight seconds. Is seated there for a while. Gets a bit of toilet paper, dabs his lips, runs another sheet around the seat though he knows he did not miss. He flushes and makes sure to turn off the light. On the couch, he feels the smugness that comes with a correct decision. I remember all this when the sun is up and I have found my glasses at last; they were folded behind a cup of toothbrushes. What is unbearable in life is not being but being one’s self. Milan Kundera, Immortality 39
Summer ends. Second Year begins. My girlfriend has stopped being that. I feel nothing and cannot take any more. Thankfully, I am asked the question I have been waiting for. I tell my parents I will be staying the night in the house of a friend I know through Philosophy in college. This is no lie. I get a train to the free gaff after my lectures. The house is in Meath. It is large. It is perfect. There are four of us. We eat pizza and chat. We go to the supermarket in the village to buy liquids and snacks. The time comes. We are in a lamp-lit box room. There are bookshelves, a record player, a study desk, posters on the wall. I sit with my knees to my chest on a small battered sofa. I must appear nervous because the others ask if I’m alright. “Yeah,” I say. “I just forgot that doing acid actually involves doing acid.” This brings them to empathetic laughter. I smile but feel gutless. I want whatever New this will bring to start so that the Old can be over. Like Christmas presents, I don’t know where they’re kept, all I know is they appear, filling the room with their aura. One is taken from the neatly folded tinfoil and given to me. I have a look at it. I am electric with sweat but still freeze from the fear. What I fear is not taking it. Then someone mentions it dissolves on your skin and that’s enough, I turn off, my body does it, that sum of muscle jerks and chemical reactions that together are more me than I could ever be. It lands under my tongue. This is where I had been told the 40
most oral veins are, where it should most quickly absorb. I get what I came for. Afterwards, I am alive and curious and in-the-world for a number of months. By the end of second year, exam season specifically, I am as dead inside as I’ve ever been. Work does that to me. But now I know what to do. A free gaff comes up in late June among old friends from secondary school. It is late at night. This time it is I who brings out the tinfoil. They are nervous. I am nervous, but less so. I draw a scuba diver leaving the edge of a boat on some copy book paper. “At any junction,” I say, “do as they do. Fall back.” I get what I came for. Next afternoon, one of the friends has to go to work at a concert handing out free pints of water. Before he leaves, I take the drawing from the mantelpiece and ask if it helped. “Eh,” he says, “to be honest, I had no idea what you meant with that.” The other friend, whose house it was, says: “Me neither. The other side really helped, though. That hit the nail on the head.” I flip the page. On the other side I had written the word Breathe. Later that afternoon, this second friend sleeps while I continue coming down in the living room. I had taken more than them. My friend’s dog shuffles in from the hallway. Its laboured journey continues before me towards a bed in the 41
kitchen. It is an old dog, and small. Its breathing is loud. It has big bulging eyes that might be unseeing. It is certainly deaf. In recent months, my friend had said, it has started to have fits that resemble an epileptic’s. I swell with love for this thing. I am the same as it. I want the best for it. This is why I command it to die, to drop down and let go, to give up. The somewhere voice says there is something not right with this. “Why don’t I sleep a while longer and forget all this nonsense?” Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis I knew I needed a change of change, so I applied to spend my third year of college in Prague on Erasmus. During stuttering attempts to add to my languages, I was pleased to come across the German word Fluchtpunkt (the point to which one flees). It was in Prague that I read the quoted lines I’ve stuck in between this piece’s sections. They are just seven among the hundreds underlined, highlighted, or copied out in a Word document. What began with taking such quotes soon involved notes on the quotes and later notes on these notes. To my surprise, I was writing again. Still, reading took up most of my time. Reflections of my experiences seemed to be everywhere. They were in the theoretical texts which led me to conclude, among 42
other things, that televised images of people letting go of themselves unnerved me so as a child because most of what I watched had told me to be true to my self, as though that were something I was born with ready-made. They were in the novels and poems which led to me wonder if identifying superlative works of art might in fact be worth more than, say, championing the dung beetle’s best attempts at a sphere. All I read helped me see all of it — not feeling yourself, not feeling fully there, not being sure where (or if) the World ends and You begin — as normal, as human. I had no discoveries to break to the species. There remained only facts to inform day-to-day friends. Towards the end of my stay in Prague, a group of us went to a music festival that was held in the Holešovice exhibition grounds (the Czech version of the RDS). A friend from Ireland had flown over to join us. After the headline act had finished, he and I found ourselves drinking beer in a small pavilion on makeshift couches with sponsored cushions. I started telling him about my difficult time in college. For the first time, I managed to put some version of it all into words. I felt warm though I was shivering. The MDMA made everything sparkle as if under some kind of frost. When I was done, he told me he twice tried to kill himself. He had to hold onto my leg to do this. “You have no idea how good it is,” he said, “finally getting this out.” 43
I asked him a lot of questions. He was happy to answer them, but it would not sink in. I am in the presence of Pain, I told myself. Actual Pain. I realised I had gotten off lightly. My two years were nothing in comparison to Actual Pain. I tried to imagine myself pushed to that limit. I came up blank. What could send me there? What self could I long to kill? During a silence a group of Czechs in their thirties sat on the couches beside us. At the same time, our friends returned from the hypnotic drum-beats filling faraway halls. We agreed it was best to resume this conversation back in Ireland. I had immediate regrets. I wanted to tell more. I wanted him to tell more. But he was already laughing at the Czechs, who were offering us a pipe of strange grass they had grown in Brno (the Czech version of Cork). I would have to wait. I promised myself it would get better in Dublin. For the time being, I told myself, it would be best to forget, release myself from my story, turn off and fall back, become part of something else, something bigger, and check in later. After all, this was something I had developed into a fine art, something to be deployed where necessary until it is discovered what healing is. Return to the present, I tell myself. Take a deep breath. Return to where all I am is the moment, this Bohemian air...
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The Contributing Writers
Mary O Harte is a first-year student of Middle Eastern and European Studies.
Maija Makela is a third-year student of English Studies.
Caomhán Ó hÓgáin is a fourth-year student of English and Philosophy.
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The Editorial team
Christian Moore is the Founding Editor Harry Downes is the Co-Editor Sam Murphy is the Contributing Editor Aoife Donnellan and Maya Bushell are the Design & Layout Editors
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This publication is funded partly by the DU Trinity Publications Committee. It claims no special rights or privileges. To get involved with Trinity Publications email secretary@ trinitypublictions.ie or get involved on social media. The Carta staff acknowledges Trinity Publications and Digital Print Dynamics for making this issue possible. Contact us at carta.magazine@gmail.com with any queries, prose-related or otherwise.
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