Blue-bird sings the Blues by Noël Sweeney
THIS BOOK is my greatest challenge from The Visitor so far as it consists mainly of poetry a genre I am least familiar with. My affair with poetry never really got started, and at best, only survived for a short time many years ago at school. The Rape of Lucretia comes to mind , but even with its titillating title it only got half read. I can still recite the whole of The Owl and the Pussy Cat, and can remember one verse of the Jabberwocky the one that goes One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. This is probably because, of only nineteen different words, four are so deliciously unusual and invented. I always imagined my pen-knife to be vorpally sharp, unlike my wit. I did also like Gray’s Elegy for its bucolic imagery at the start, The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, and Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wand'ring near her secret bow'r, Molest her ancient solitary reign. More of the owl later. 30 THE VISITOR June 2022
Noël Sweeney is a barrister specialising in criminal and human rights, as well as animal law. He says he wishes animals to have the power to determine and live their own lives. And that their only valid voice is the “solid sound of justice by the unassailable truth within the core of law.” This tells us that Sweeney is a committed lawyer and accepts all of the shortcomings of the laws’ political origins. He quotes Honoré de Balzac from La Rabouilleuse apparently, “Women are inferior animals. We must make them afraid of us. Otherwise we will be governed by them.” Bear in mind this is an early 19th century text within La Comédie humaine expressing not necessarily de Balzac's view, but those of the contemporary character in the book. Eight pages later however, Theresa May and Liz Truss are criticised for their wish to revive hunting. Would either of these clownettes recognise a fox if they saw one? I speculate whether the advances in communication and its interpretation might overtake that of political science, allowing real horses, pigs and cats a seat in Parliament. They can then have a hoof, trotter or paw in their own legal destiny. But as Robert Lee Frost, another realist like de Balzac 1 , said on the subject of law, “A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide
who has the better lawyer.” I have recently been following Chris Warburton’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt, BBC Five Live’s podcast series on the case of Micheal Peterson in Durham, North Carolina. At one point in this fascinating famous case an owl is thought by Peterson’s next door neighbour, a practising lawyer, to have inflicted the fatal injuries on the head of Peterson’s wife. This is an astonishing case where it seems the accused was involved with two women who died of head injuries at the foot of the stairs, but he only served eight years in prison and ultimately made use of the infamous Alford Plea (a North Carolina origin case) in an appeal which resulted in him being freed.2 The owl, actually a Barred Owl, (barred as in striped not barred from court or the pub) got off Scot free, and was not even questioned by the police! “Blue-bird sings the blues” does stray into human rights law. Captain Collingwood and The Voyage of The Zong are there. Also there is a prosaic dialogue on the topic of a three-legged pig, which for me is more readable. It may even have its origins in Cuba? When I was in Havana several years ago a similar story was doing the rounds. This was at a time when Fidel still had most of his marbles, and was getting a good rent for Guantánamo even
though only one cheque is reported to have been cashed. In the Havana version, a medical student was sharing a tworoomed flat in an old mansion, with his mother and father, five siblings and a pig, which they kept in the bath. As they had no refrigerator the student was persuaded by his family to sedate the pig, and amputate one of its legs to eat while the rest of animal remained fresh. Sweeney’s book is a rather special anthology, which is beyond my range, but will I am sure find a place on the bookshelves of many. At this point Edward Lear comes back to mind, I think it was in 2013/14 I found this rather funny cartoon by Andrew Birch in Private Eye. Andrew has kindly agreed that we can reproduce it in The Visitor. Thank you Andrew and Private Eye. 1. Honoré de Balzac was an apprentice at law before he became bored with it and moved on to writing and failed entrepreneurship. 2. These events are on Netflix as a documentary entitled The Staircase spanning the whole sixteen-year story by the Oscarwinning director Jean Xavier de Lestrade. A dramatisation also entitled The Staircase and starring Colin Firth is currently being shown as a mini-series on Sky Atlantic.
