Metamorphosis

Gradually Seamus got the hang of being a politician. He learnt the art of being non-committal, of appearing to agree with someone while really equivocating. As he went round from house to house and encountered hostility to emigrants from many, he was reminded of an old 50’s British TV movie about a labour candidate over there who encounters the same sort of thing. Strange that only now the same thing was happening here and how similar the attitudes were. Over and over again he wanted to say that Irish people had encountered the same sort of thing right up till the recent past, but knew it wouldn’t be pragmatic to do so. When they’d gotten all the signatures they needed and they were trying to relax in a cafe in the centre of town, he brought up the subject of “pragmatism” again.
“Listen”, said Caomhin, looking a little exasperated but trying not to draw attention to himself, “Do you know which party in Europe has done most to advance homosexual rights in the last twenty years?”
Seamus didn’t, and wondered why he was asking.
“It’s Fianna Fail. In one fell swoop we went from having a law against homosexuality to having one of the lowest ages of consent, protection against discrimination in the workplace, pretty soon we’ll be letting them in the army. But do you think they make an issue of this when they’re campaigning in places like Mayo? The fuck they don’t. So that’s the rule: When you’re campaigning you follow, when you’re in power you lead.”
We cannot all be masters, nor can all masters be truly followed.
“What was it Nietzsche said about those who try to fight monsters not becoming monsters themselves?”, asked Seamus, sceptically.
Caomhin said he didn’t know, not without an element of shame as he had cast himself as the older, more sagacious one.
“I’ve pretty much told you already”, said Seamus, laughing inwardly at the Beckettian absurdity. Caomhin wondered silently, as Seamus had on occasion, what he had gotten himself into.
After an awkward silence, punctuated by glances around the cafe and out the windows at the many pretty young women fashionably exposing their midriffs, Seamus asked Caomhin when the election might be on.
“It can’t be any later than August”, he replied. It was now the beginning of June.
“So what are we going to do in the meantime?”, Seamus asked.
“I’m going to get our leaflets and posters ready. I’m also working on a website. I don’t suppose you know anything about HTML, do you?”
Seamus shook his head and asked Caomhin what he wanted him to do with himself while all this was going on. Caomhin told him that he and the people in the office were going to take care of all the dirty work until the campaign started. He pointed out that a lot of other candidates, and some TDs had other jobs as well and that the real work was always done by people in the party. Seamus should just work on his campaigning skills, and maybe pump some iron, Caomhin suggested.
Though he was wary of trying Caomhin’s patience any more than he had already, told him that that made him feel a little like a puppet.
With an insoiusence that surprised Seamus, he merely asked how many puppets earned £70,000 a year, plus expenses. Seamus’ head jerked back in response, having thought it was only about £50,000. The idea of serving one term and then skidalling to Asia re-entered his head with new conviction, and the idea of “pragmatism” seemed more appealing than it did a while ago. He asked if Caomhin wanted to see him again any time soon. He said they should have the campaign leaflets, list of policy positions and posters ready for the end of the week, to call round on Friday to see them. Until then, his time was his own.
“Enjoy it”, he concluded, finishing off the last dregs of tea and putting on his coat. “You won’t have too much free time when you’re a TD.”
Seamus sat down for a few more minutes, doing a few more calculations. In five years time, he’d be thirty-three, ready to rise from this dying culture, where we nailed ourselves to jobs we hated and tied ourselves down to families and mortgages, to seek out a little bit of paradise to call his own. The symbolism appealed to him, as though he had stopped being a “Christian” when he was fourteen, Jesus was still a person who appealed to him a lot. He loved the idea of selfless altruism, of loving your neighbour, and ironically, of forgiveness. How they’d been twisted into the dogmatism of Catholicism and the Puritanism of Protestantism, the twin poles of the sectarianism in the North, was something he’d never quite understood.
He pondered the idea of “Free Time” Was any of our time really free? If it was, could we sell it to people who needed it more than we did and had more money than us? He supposed that that was what many people on low-income jobs, cleaning people’s homes and serving them fast food, were actually doing. Was our time free in any other sense, free from worries and angst and all the other stuff that went along with our consciousness? He’d known moments like this, but they were mainly when he was asleep, when he dreamt of being caressed by some of the beautiful, voluptuous women he went to college with. In his conscious hours, they might come briefly, ephemerally, on the dancefloor or on the beach. But they’d always flutter away, like particularly rare butterflies from a lepidopterist, never to return.
Was he on the opposite trajectory to the rest of the Sinn Fein Party? They were moving away from violence, away from physicality and towards dialogue, he seemed to more obsessed with his body than ever. He’d always thought of himself as contrarian, though. When, in the early 90’s it still seemed that Ireland, as an American historian once predicted, was going to implode on a central vacuity, or disappear down it’s own plughole if you will, he was up to his eyeballs in his studies during the winter and toiling in Sissyphean labour in the summer. When the Celtic Tiger came along and it seemed the country had been gripped by some Asiatic work fever, he gradually went back to his first love, slacking. Was his imminent new position a sign that the Irish economy was headed for a tumble? How egocentric would he have to be to believe such a thing?
He ate some dinner and then listened to some Clannad.
He woke up when the music had finished playing, thought about going up to visit that guy Jim but instead stayed in bed and thought about how his life had taken a strange turn. There was a time, basically his first year in college and the summer after, when he’d come around to the conviction that life was predetermined, that his genes and his upbringing had led him inevitably down this path with the certitude of those laws of physics he’d been supposed to learn at school. Didn’t that seem specious now? His ex-girlfriend had believed something similar, that she and he had been predetermined to meet, that they were soul-mates, two halves of a platonic sphere, etc. She didn’t realise what a burden this was putting on Seamus, the expectation that he had to be perfect in every way all of time, bohemian yet responsible, hedonistic but hardworking, independent but willing to settle down and have perfect little kids in a perfect little house. He’d read of the belief that women wanted their partner to be perfect because of the rarity of their eggs and the huge emotional investment involved in having a child. It sounded scary in theory, in practice it was terrifying. He also believed that woman’s ability to choose the right partner was hampered by the fact that their brains were just as stuck as ours in an earlier stage of evolution, which if why women went so often for men that they felt were strong enough to protect them against... he didn’t know what, exactly. That why Maude went for the Cunt.
That subject would never leave his mind.
He decided he would go and talk to Jim in the morning.
He felt a bit threatened walking up that way on his own, as if somehow the tattered old coat upon a stick that was Caomhin somehow made him feel safer. But then, both his grandmothers felt safer with a man in the house, even when that man was one of his ailing, paraplegic, slobbering grandfathers.. He wondered why the shaven-headed shell-suit wearing yobbos he passed on the way weren’t calling him a hippy and ordering him to get his hair cut. Then he ran his fingers through where his curls used to be and remembered that traumatic haircut he’d had a while ago. It was one thing he’d succeeded in forgetting.
He knocked on Jim’s door; with the association of Door-knocking and Damascene conversion implanted pretty firmly on his mind by now, he almost expected some sort of epiphany. When he opened the door, dressed only in a longhi and some beads, he didn’t recognise Seamus at all. When Seamus told him who he was, he ran his fingers through his long, receding locks, and said, “Right, right, come on in.” He showed Seamus where to sit, beneath a giant poster of a benign-looking purple Ganesh. Opposite was a poster from the other Indians whose land the Anglo-Saxons had stole, with the following message that sent a shiver down Seamus’ spine.

When the last tree is fallen
And the last blade of grass is cut
Then you will realise
That you cannot eat money

Jim came back from the kitchen, gave Seamus a glass of wheat grass juice, sat down in the Lotus position and asked Seamus what he wanted to talk about.
“Well, I went round to around eighty houses yesterday, in seventy-nine of them I heard bigotry, whining, homophobia and profanities. When I came here I heard someone offer me a theory of Irish history that I’d never heard before. Naturally I was intrigued and wanted to come back.”
Jim paused a while, took a sip of wheatgrass juice, grinned and said, “I can see why Caomhin chose you as his candidate. You’ve got a certain charm about you, as well as being a pretty boy.”
A little embarrassed, Seamus replied, “Well, there’s a bit of a story there. Maybe I’ll tell you some time, when I get to know you better. But tell me why you think we should go back to worshipping the old Celtic gods.”
He pointed to the sign behind him and said, in a voice deliberately portentous, “Because the Earth is all we have. As long as we believe in a transcendental god that gives us dominion over nature we’ll continue to rip her to shreds, burn her fossil fuels, pollute her rivers, kill off her species. And fight one another.
He took a sip of juice and a deep breath.
“You see, the basic dichotomy is between man and nature. When we started seeing ourselves as being outside nature, about ten thousand years ago, all the other dichotomies sprung up; male/female, black/white, work/play, Christian/Muslim, Protestant/catholic. Yet there’s almost no difference between us and any other animal. We’ve got 98% DNA in common with chimps. Our foetuses are indistinguishable from most other mammals until a very late stage. We haven’t been there that long, two million years at the most, when the universe is at least 15 Billion years old. We inhabit one planet in a universe that’s probably infinite. Yet we imagine that some transcendental deity created the whole universe, just for us. That’s why we’re using up 60% of the world’s resources, just for our own greed.”
None of this was entirely new to Seamus, but he was interested to see where it was going all the same.
“You know the story of Noah’s ark in the Bible?” he continued, sensing Seamus’ interest, becoming more animated, thrusting his fingertips into the air repeatedly. “It’s the classic anthropocentric story. A vindictive God punishes humanity - it’s there in Hindu mythology as well - and a man and his family save the animals, by cutting down trees to build a ship. But you know where this story came from? Soil erosion. Cutting down trees in the Mesopotamian basin meant the area was flooded, giving rise to that legend. Pretty ironic, huh?”
Seamus recalled his fanatically religious primary school headmaster telling him there was some geological evidence for a great flood, and that he’d wanted to know at the time how Noah had possibly had time to count all the millions of pairs of different insects that would have been killed in any global flood. But he felt the ball was in Jim’s court, so he let him go on.
“And the garden of Eden? The Jews were kicked out of their ancestral home in Armenia, forced to wander in desert in the Middle East, yet somehow they inferred from this that they were God’s chosen race, and that humans were his chosen species. The tragic thing is that our whole way of life is based on the teachings of the old testament. Work six days and rest on the seventh? Before that there was no difference between our work and our play. We hunted, we looked for berries, the ironic thing is that all our modern games are an attempt to get back to the primitive hunt. How many games involve aiming at some sort of target? All of them, dude”
A little disconcerted but sensing that Jim liked to argue, Seamus interjected that he was a vegan.
“So am I, brother. Look around this house, you won’t see any meat or dairy. I wouldn’t dream of eating any meat the way it’s produced now. Cattle force-fed enough soya to feed an entire African family, chickens two or three times their natural size, their legs breaking under the weight, rainforests cut down to produce animal fodder... it’s all part of Christianity’s plan to destroy life on Earth.”
Seamus’ eyelids raised. Even by the standards of this conversation that was a pretty contentious statement.
“Yeah, I can see you’re surprised. When I read about it first, on the internet, it made no sense to me that followers of Jesus Christ would want to bring about Armageddon. But the thing is, fundamentalist Christians apparently do believe that life on Earth is a punishment for our transgressions in the garden of Eden. As soon as life ends, they believe, we’ll all go up to heaven forever. Like I say, it seemed mad to me when I read it first. But why are we using up the Earth’s resources so relentlessly? Why are we cutting down rainforests to grow soya for cattle? Why are we burning fossil fuels that have been absorbing the sun’s energy for millions of years, turning the whole Earth into a furnace? Why are we encouraging Africa and Asia to become so dangerously overpopulated?” I hate to say it, but it all makes sense.”
Seamus, who still had some faith in Human Nature, remained a little sceptical, and it showed on his face. Trying to make himself understood, Jim began with the words, “Destruction is beguiling to us.”It was true to Seamus in a way that Jim did not know, but Jim went on, “Up ‘till very recently in evolutionary terms we lived as primitive hunter-gatherers. Often, our whole communities would be wiped out, with just one or two people to continue the bloodline. That’s why we continue this endless cycle of Shivite destruction and Vishnuvite renewal.” He looked over at Seamus to see if he recognised the reference to Hindu mythology, decided it didn’t matter whether he did or not. “Two world wars, Vietnam, Kosovo... of course the template for the modern cycle of death and reconstruction was the American Civil War, the first truly capitalist war. But capitalism’s real war is on the earth itself. The thing is, the Earth will survive. It just won’t be habitable by humans any more.” With certitude that seemed misplaced to Seamus, He gave a bitter, ironic laugh.
“The idea of being around at the end, on the day of judgement, is really beguiling to us. That’s why so many people thought the world was going to end a year and a half ago. What was that Millennium thing about again? Oh yeah. The length of time since, in the opinion of some mediaeval monks in the North of England that it would take the Earth to revolve round the sun multiplied by the amount of fingers on both hands squared, multiplied by the number of hands we have, that Jesus Christ, who some people think was the son of god, was born. Yet we were surprised that nothing changed. That’s how strong the appeal of destruction is to us. Yet when we’re all gone and all the rainforests are cut down and genetically modified soya is growing in it’s place and only a fraction of the plants and insects that once existed are still around, life will still go on. The Earth has been through much worse, meteors, ice ages, dinosaurs, life always goes on. There’s some of us who believe that the Earth’s a self-regulating mechanism, that our consciousness is just another thing for it to deal with. I think they might have a point. But isn’t it tragic that humans the only species that can appreciate how wonderful and diverse and beautiful the Earth is, are the same ones who are destroying it?” His tone suddenly became melancholy as he realised the import of what he was saying.
Seamus, to an extent, was being preached to the converted, as he’d long since made the decision not to have kids, as, quite apart from all the heart disease, melancholy, depression and alcoholism in his family, he knew that it was impossible to grow up in the west without creating a huge drain on the Earth’s resources. But he asked Jim what all this had to do with him being a member of Sinn Fein.
“Can’t you see? It’s about Romans and Celts. Celts live in balance with the environment, live on just enough to get by, live on the Earth, create homes that go back to the Earth. Our ancestors worshipped the Earth, recognised that we were a part of it, in ways that scientists are beginning to understand only now. Their myths were about shape-shifting, like the children of Lir, or about the primacy of nature, like the Finn McCool legend. The Romans wanted to conquer the Earth, to dominate it, make their mark on it with huge aqueducts and viaducts, suck all it’s life into thier cities for their entertainment. The Greco-Roman myths are of people who conquered nature, like Achilles and Hercules. In around six or seven hundred years they denuded North Africa of all it’s wildlife, turned Andalusia and La Mancha into desert, and almost wiped out Europe’s indigenous cultures completely. The Anglo-Saxons, who’ve adopted Christianity with the same zeal, are doing the same thing now, on a global scale, sucking as much of the Earth’s resources as they possibly can, converting everyone to their way of life with the same vigour. And who were the first people to suffer at their rapacious hands? Yup, it was us, the Celts.
“I’ll tell you something really ironic. You know that Holy Grail myth? Those Anglo-Saxons actually thought the ashes of Jesus were somewhere in England, that the Celtic Christianity practised there before the Church was Romanised was the one true faith, and when they created a Church of England they were returning to that faith. That’s what gave, and still gives the Protestants in the North their mad Zeal to rid the country of “papism” Yet like most of their beliefs, it’s the complete opposite of the truth. While Ireland was officially part of the Roman church, belief in the old Celtic gods persisted, we danced at Lughnasa, celebrated the solstice, fucked like bunnies, got high on mushies. That was until the famine, of course.
“They were great days, before the famine”, he continued, speaking with the nostalgic tone of someone who was actually there. “We lived on potatoes, which are so fucking easy to grow - plant them in the spring, harvest them in the autumn, in any soil you wish, they don’t need any artificial fertilisers, the rest of the time we sat around playing music or writing poetry. The only thing was that spuds came from Peru originally, and they allowed our population to explode, so I guess we were interfering with the natural balance. Yet the response of the British was to upset the natural balance even more, kicking peasant farmers off their land and forcing them to work in their mines and factories, digging their canals and building their roads. They’d done the same thing in their own country a generation before, with the enclosures act. They’re doing the same thing in the third world now, but now they call it development.
“It’s because they never really conquered us that I thought this was where the resistance to their rapacious onslaught could begin. And that we could start with the North. It was one of the most beautiful parts of the world, before King James, the same guy who the English-language Bible was named after, patched it up, filled it with Protestant drones who built some of the ugliest towns and factories in the world there, while they forced the natives into working for them on the land, sucking them into the cash economy and taking all their money in rent. That’s why I thought the resistance could begin here. Now I see how misguided I was.” His tone became deeply melancholy with those words. Half expecting what the answer would be, Seamus asked anyway.
“It turns out that we want to be rapacious, accumulative Romans just as much as the Anglo-Saxons. Look at us, man, driving around in our SUVs to our houses that we pay quarter of a million for. Look at all the factories springing up every day. And farming industrially, digging up hedgerows that have been there for hundreds of years, and getting the soil hooked on chemicals. Whether this is because we’ve interbred so much, or because accumulation is such a natural urge, I don’t know. I just can’t deny that it’s happening.” He paused for a while, seeming to sink into a melancholic trance, which Seamus was diffident about interrupting. Finally Jim himself broke the silence by asking how Seamus felt about all he’d said.
“Well, actually I can relate to a lot of it since... Listen, you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone this, as it’s a bit of a secret, and I haven’t told anyone, and if certain people found out I’d be totally... fucked, basically, but...”
“Well, C’mon, tell us. You can trust me, dude.”
“Okay”, he averred, diffidently. “When I was offered the chance to stand for Sinn Fein, the first thing that came into my head was that I’d live simply for five years, save up the money to buy an organic farm in Latin America or Asia, and live off the land there.”
“Fuck me!”, exclaimed Jim, “I think I’ve found a kindred spirit. “But tell me, why are you standing for Sinn Fein, and not, say for the greens?”
“Well, I’m not sure I can tell you that.”
“Dude, you’ve just given me information that could lead to you’re death by baseball bat if it got back to the wrong people. So I think you can trust me with this information.”
Not without a certain degree of apprehensiveness, he related the story, which made Jim’s eyes raise almost as much as Seamus’ did when he was giving his short history of the last 13,000 years. It was the first time he’d had the chance to share it with anybody, and he felt a mixture of relief and fear of what Jim could do with this information if he was not the dreamy mystic he appeared to be. However, if he had any such dastardly schemes, he was keeping them to himself.
“You do realise if you double-cross them like this, they’ll probably come looking for you?”
“The thought has crossed my mind, though I figure it probably wouldn’t be such good PR.” He laughed inwardly, thinking of those two geeky spin-doctors and how they’d work on presenting such an action.
“They could always pin it on someone else. There’s going to be some sort of terrorist activity, no matter where you go.”
“Yeah, well, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“So have you got much experience of this sort of thing?”
“I did a little bit of WWOOFing just before I started college. After that I just concentrated on my studies, having had this crazy ambition to be a writer at the time. And paying for my studies”, he added bitterly. For some reason I never went back to it. But I always had this fantasy, especially when I was studying Latin American history, to go to somewhere like Guatemala and start growing organic beans and vegetables, while teaching the peasants there the little bit of useful information I’d picked up between preparing for exams and paying for my education by doing shitty jobs I hated.”
“I’m actually doing a bit of WWOOFing at the moment”, replied Jim, interrupting Seamus’ recollection. I’m going down to West Cork during the Summer Solstice, I’m going to stay on for a few days, do a bit of work weeding and such. Of course, if you’re a real deep ecologist, then there’s no such thing as a weed. But people have to eat, and it’s better they eat organic than anything else. You’re welcome to come with me if you want.”
Seamus was really flattered, but said he’d have to check with Caomhin first. Jim nodded his head, said he understood, but he was welcome to come back any time he wanted. Seamus, for his part, wanted to know where Jim had got all his totalising theories from.
“Oh yeah, most of my books are in the bedroom. Come in and have a look.”
Once again was he confronted with that Socratic apothegm that the more you learn, the more you realise how ignorant you are. Between the posters of Bob Marley in a haze of dope smoke and an unshirted Jim Morrison, a hoard of books arranged in no particular order on a huge range of themes, but mainly on history, environmentalism, and mysticism confronted him. One called Ecological Revolutions caught his eye, and he asked Jim if he could take it home. Jim assented with a wave of his hand and told Seamus to let him know if he could come down for the solstice in a couple of weeks. He asked Seamus if he’d like to stay and chat some more, but Seamus decided he’d have enough new ideas spinning round in his brain for one day and decided to go home.
When he got there, after he’d made a stir-fry with some organic TVP and Plum Sauce, he settled down to read some of the books that Jim had given him.
As he read, it seemed increasingly to him as he did that the history of the human race really did depend on how we regarded the environment and other animals. In India, the Hindus had revered the Cow, logically, as they could plough their fields, eat their waste and convert it into fertiliser. The ancient Egyptians, to their misfortune, had chosen to revere the snake, which they considered majestic and intimidating, but was completely useless from a utilitarian viewpoint, and their civilisation had died. More pertinently, the English had used oxen to till fields until the late 16th century, when they started to import horses. Then they started to eat cows, the genesis of the rosbif sobriquet, they needed more grain to feed their cattle, inevitably they started looking to the lush green island to the west. Whosoever should be an Irish patriot must be a vegetarian... he wondered how his paraphrasing of Emerson would go down at a Sinn Fein rally.
But one of the things that struck him more was the same thing was going on at almost the same time in North America, where indigenous people who clung to traditional Gaiaist beliefs were being forced away from a way of life that had sustained them for thousands of years by people with the same messianic sense of their own importance. As in Ireland, the landscape was changed beyond recognition, wild grassland turned to fodder and pasture, buffaloes hunted almost to extinction and replaced by cows from Europe. It all led credence to Jim’s belief that there was an eternal battle between Celts and Romans. The Indians too worshipped the Earth, believed with even more conviction in shape-shifting, while the Germanic settlers believed in an god that wanted them to acquire possessions to prove they’d won his favour. Intriguingly to Seamus, the Amerindians didn’t believe in mining, as they believed the Earth was our mother and you don’t go drilling holes in your mum to go looking for resources. The so-called puritans didn’t have any such inhibitions, and started to turn the landscape inside-out as soon as they got there. It was impossible to overestimate their impact on the environment, yet it was still growing, the way the map of Europe gradually turns black in documentaries about World War II. The parts of the US that were still wilderness were being auctioned off to loggers and oilmen. Roads were being paved through the Amazon jungle, preparing to turn it into the sort of desert that Oklahoma already was. And this was all being driven by the relentless mantra of economic growth, which both depended on and stimulated population growth. In a story that was already familiar to him from lazy afternoons watching westerns, families were guaranteed land for each child, encouraging them to have big, Sons of katie Elder, Seven Brides for seven Brothers families. Then this land was bought up by speculators or stolen by ranchers, people were forced to move into places like Chicago and work in meat-packing factories, the apotheosis for many of the brutality of free-market capitalism. The most explicit in their desire for population growth were the Nazis, who were the first to provide state support for single mothers, provided they and the putative fathers of their children were of pure Aryan stock, but implicitly it seemed that everyone of Germanic ancestry had a sense of god-given-mission to populate the planet.
The Amerindians’ story was our story, it was the planet’s story, we were all victims of Anglo-Saxon imperialism.
When we were hunter-gatherers men and women shared labour and power equally, women taking children with them to pick berries. When we developed agriculture, “We” in this case being early Mesopotamian farmers in the fertile crescent, women were suddenly forced into the home to grind flour and churn butter, while all the power fell into the hands of men. When, in the twentieth century women started to look for it back, it would naturally be on men’s terms. Was Seamus living at the moment when the wheel was coming full circle, when the one thing that allowed white men to take over the world was going to come back and destroy their civilisation? He feared not, as it seemed the Asians and Latin Americans who were filling the US had caught the work ethic bug like some horrible virus.
He wondered why, as we developed more and more machines to work for us, we seemed to have to work harder and harder and harder to earn the money for things we needed. The answer lay partly in the fact that as we “advanced” our “needs” became more complex. It was also true that we clung onto the Protestant work ethic long after it had served it’s evolutionary function, the same way many were doing with our historic disdain for homosexuality. That, two, had served it’s function when we needed to produce as many children as possible to replace those who died of disease or in battle, when we had no welfare state to take care of us when we were old.
Seamus, though, had read enough for one day. He often wondered how his life would have turned out if he’d had the same enthusiasm for his schoolwork that he had for books in his adult life. He might be a doctor, a country GP like his dad had wanted him to be, prescribing pharmaceutical companies wares to naive pensioners and sickly kids with snot running from their noses. Or a small town lawyer, defending yobbos who’d stolen car radios to pay for drugs. Funny the way life can turn out, he thought.