New Morning

He was indeed up at 7 the next morning, the sound of the breakfast show on the which reminded him of his schooldays, when news of higher unemployment rates, defeated divorce referenda and bombings in Libya came booming out of his father’s Pantagruelean ‘70’s hi-fi, summoning him from the Technicolor land of his dreams to the black and grey of the classroom like the stentorian angels of death in Orphee. He reached through the haze and the little squiggles that always swarmed around his eyes at this hour of the morning to turn off the radio, not wanting to be aware of anything going on in the outside world for a few days, and put on some De Danann, which he thought more appropriate in the circumstances. Yet his head still felt heavy, as if there were some dreams still waiting to be set free, to scramble away from his subconscious like prisoners in Fidelio. Not till he got some caffeine in him did the desire to rush back under the sheets loosen it’s grip on him. When he got out onto the streets, he was amazed, as he always was, that there were other people around, people who clearly lived in a different time zone to him, though they traversed the same streets, bought their food in the same shops, even watched some of the same TV. Having said that, the streets were actually quiet enough, this being a Saturday, Seamus’ biggest fear as he cycled through the auroran haze was that some yuppie would be taking advantage of the relative lack of traffic and police to break the speed limit and wasn’t going to let no hippie cyclist on a 1978 Raleigh stand in his way. He was out of the city pretty fast, unsurprisingly, as Cork wasn’t nearly as big a city as many of it’s inhabitants seemed to believe.
Once he got on the open road, there was only the odd cacophonous milk van to interrupt the dewy silence. After about an hour, his thighs already straining and patches of sweat beginning to embellish his t-shirt, he reached his turn, when the road turned abruptly from an EU-built superhighway to a traditional Irish boreen, the sort that Beckett’s Molloy or Flann O Brien’s third policeman would have been tossed around in days of yore. He passed the abandoned famine houses which had inevitably been converted into teenage drinking haunts, the secluded yuppie hideaways, a couple of one-shop one-pub hamlets, and ever diminishing signposts which seemed to tell him he was cycling slower and slower. He loved the old, confusing signposts, though, that seemed to have crafted by hand in some kiln by some swarthy blacksmith who once played All-Ireland hurling for Wexford and who tragically lost his wife to polio in the ‘50’s. He passed the point of no return, when he was more than half way there and there was no point in turning back, in blood stepped so far. Eventually he could see the sea again, paradoxically, as he had started off at the sea, but that was the way the west coast of Ireland was, ruggedly sigmoidal from millennia of struggle with the Atlantic. He knew he was nearly there, that hopefully someone who was reasonably well disposed to Jim and his friends might point him on the right path. Maybe he should ask the local priest, ha ha. Or keep his nostrils dilated for the smell of horse shit and marijuana smoke. There wasn’t any dope, mind you, at the last place he’d WWOOFed. The people who ran it were English Methodist types who’d chosen to build an organic farm where a toxic waste dump used to be. He remembered the scrawny, disfigured chickens hobbled around. He remembered the tame cow, which let him pet it, something he thought didn’t happen outside India. But most of all he remembered the Belgian girl, her clear skin, her blond locks and her supple body. There was no escaping from his libido, why even try?
He was being consumed once again with lust for a girl who was by now probably married with little Flemings biting her nipples and stretching her once-firm breasts when a horn blew and a van pulled up beside him. At first he didn’t know if it had deliberately pulled up or just broke down, as it seemed to come from the Ur of hippiedom, to have been to Katmandhu and Marrakesh before mass tourism Khaosanified them. It bore faded psychedelic art the way an old soldier might bear his battle wounds. But it was stopping just for him, and a bearded, beaded man in his late 40’s or early 50’s was asking Seamus if he was heading down for the solstice. Seamus nodded, panting a little, and said he was.
“Why don’t you put your bike in the back and join us, man?” The others in the van, dressed similarly but of varying ages, looked back to see if there was enough space, and nodded assent.
“I don’t know, I cycled most of the way and was hoping to get the whole way”, Seamus replied, timidly.
“That’s just your ego talking, man. It’s another fifteen miles, you probably don’t know the way, you’re already wrecked, and you’ve got a weekend of farming and celebration ahead of you. Hop in, man.”
By now the back door was open and people were pushing around to make room for him and his bike, so it would have seemed impolite to refuse. So he handed them his bike and squeezed in. The van spluttered on, and he was introduced to the crew, a motley combination of old hippies, new age travellers, eco-warriors and druidic tree-huggers. His eyes first gravitated towards Soma, a blond German from an industrial town in the Rurh who was wearing a short purple dress with images of marijuana leaves stitched on the side. Her knees were pressed up against her face, revealing her smooth thighs and a minimalistic thong through which he thought he could see a few strands of pubic hair showing. But when he noticed Seamus noticing her, her slightly older Irish boyfriend Oisin put his arm tightly around her, as if to signify that theirs wasn’t an open relationship. Then there was Moon Child, who wasn’t a child any more, and was going to bore Seamus almost to tears with his tales of Woodstock and Monterray before the weekend was over. Then there was Amargain, who bore a long, scraggly beard and an impenetrable countenance. He seemed locked in intense meditation, and didn’t say a word for the whole journey. Up front there was Elk, who’d invited him in, and Wing Bamboo, who was driving. When Seamus told them his name, it was in a slightly apologetic tone which drew looks of disdain from the others. He’d seen this coming, and diffidently added that he used to be called James.
“Brother, you can have any name you like when you’re doing your 9-to-5 job, Down here, you need to be called something imaginative”, called out Elk from the front, then looked around the van as if scouting for ideas. Looking at his slightly dark, Semitic skin, Moon Child decided he must spend a lot of time tanning and suggested “Beach Boy”
“What about `Sandman’?” interjected Wing Bamboo, trying not to take his eyes off the road. It was met with general approval. So for the next two days Seamus was going to be known as Sandman. The rest didn’t know how ironic it was, assuming he wore his hair so short because he had what they disparagingly referred to as a 9-to-5 job when he was still spending almost half of those hours in the arms of Morpheus. But they never asked about work, as if that was some bleak monochrome world that they wanted to shut out, just about music, literature, the environment and mysticism. He started to feel a rapport with them that was different to the one he felt with Caomhin, who felt like a more benign version of his father, whereas these people felt more like the bigger brothers or sisters he never had, even Oisin, once Seamus had mentioned that his girlfriend was coming down. Pretty soon their bumpy ride was over and Jim, who down here was called Banba, and the owner of the farm, who was called Man Four, an Anglicisation of the Irish Mean Fomhair were there to greet them. While man Four greeted the rest, Jim was particularly glad to see Seamus, but wanted closure on one thing, and took him to one side.
“You didn’t tell them about the Sinn Fein thing, did you?”
“Um, it never really came up.”
“Yeah, well, keep it that way. Some of them are big-time peaceniks and don’t look upon members of your party very kindly.”
Seamus, who even after all that had happened still considered himself a peacenik, was a bit disconcerted to hear this. But he did recognise the paradox, that the ancient Celts, for all their ancient lore and mysticism and shapeshifting and worship of the Earth and the stars were still a warrior tribe just as much as the Saxons or the Jutes or the Huns or the Vandals. But he didn’t want to think about it too much right now, just get his hands into the soil. Some early birds were already weeding, one of them may have been called Early Bird. Beyond the carefully laid out vegetable beds there was a patch of grass dominated by an old oak tree, around which the grass was a bit worn. This, he guessed, would be the focus for the ceremonies the following night. But, for now, he was being beckoned into the house where he was going to get some food before work started. Immediately he fell in love with it the way he usually only fell in love with girls he passed fleetingly while walking down the street. He loved the array of ornaments and implements it’s owners had brought back from their travels, from a Nepalese Bhang that could hold enough smoke to get Mr Nice Stoned to a giant Thai Axe Cushion that he’d imagined himself and Grainne lying on top of holdin’ hands at midnight ‘neath the starry sky. In the centre of the room was a huge table that was propped up by what looked like a barely varnished stump of a tree, almost as if the house had been built around it. Man Four came round with what looked like some hand-made cups and then poured some hot green liquid into them.
“This is nettle tea we made ourselves from nettles growing down the end of our garden. It’s good for what ails yeh, especially the kidneys, which means it’s good for preventing hair loss.”
Moon Child, who was balding more than he could conceal, told everyone he wished he’d heard of it before, to general laughter. He took a sip and shuddered a little. Helpfully, Man Four said it was a bit strong wasn’t it and gave him some honey straight from the hive, then asked if anyone was hungry. No-one but Seamus was willing to say they were.
“Well, Sandman, we’ve got some organic bread here if you want it. Made it in the breadmaker last night. We have to buy the flour in, as it’s very hard to grow wheat in this part of the country.”
Unwisely, he asked if there was any milk in the bread, getting a look back that suggested they were offended that he’d even ask. Then moon child asked Seamus if he knew him from somewhere. Looking nonchalant, Seamus said he spent most of his time in the city and that Moon Child had probably run into him there. Running his fingers through the space where his locks used to be, he added that his hair used to be a lot longer.
“No, the guy I’m thinking of has pretty short hair.” At this both Seamus and Jim became a bit edgy, but tried not to show it. Seamus told them all about a doppelganger he used to have up in the city called Stan who strangers used to mistake him for and give him big bear hugs. He’d developed a composite picture of him as a boozing yokehead who only resembled Seamus physically. This story defused the tension that he felt a bit, and no-one bothered to ask what length of hair this guy had. Soon after they were out working. In the spirit of the farm, they weren’t really allocated jobs, just to find one that needed doing and do it. Seamus wondered about the wisdom of this strategy, though in his case it worked out alright, as he had some experience of gardening. He found a carrot patch where the seedlings were about ready to be thinned out. There was a part of him that hated the anthropocentic Darwinism of this task, but perhaps the right side of his brain convinced the left that the seedlings that he discarded would go back to nature, as would some of those that grew into fully-fledged hard-ons of carrots, as all the domestic waste here was used as fertiliser. What was is Thoreau said? I enhanced my land by squatting on it. Great line. Most of all, Seamus liked having his hands back in the soil. This was the very stuff of life itself, pulsating with micro-organisms that alchemically converted dead matter into life. And yet, remembering Jim’s story about Noah’s ark, he realised that was a priceless resource that was being lost, that the world had lost on average half an inch of soil in the last fifty years, some to erosion, some to chemicals. Only about one fourteenth as long as his erections, he laughed darkly to himself, but a little wider. And when he died or became impotent, more young men would come around, but no-one could replace the Earth. Where was all this soil going? Most of it to the sea, where eventually it might spawn new hybrids, but this would be long after we were all dead. What we were left with was lifeless dust that just kept the plants from being blown away. How could we be aware we were doing this, and still do it? Jim’s theory about the American right seemed more plausible every day.
Just on cue, Seamus found the shoot of an old potato plant from one of last years crop. It was an encouraging sign that they used crop rotation instead of the monoculture that was so common in industrial agriculture, but it reminded him that that one of the GM companies had patented several types of potatoes and had made it against the law to plant any seeds. So your garden could become a criminal if you left one of last years spuds to go to seed. It could become impounded by the government and made the property of GM companies. It seemed like something from a dystopian futuristic novel, but this was the real America of today. Seamus was glad he lived in Europe, free, for the moment from the grasp of the WASP plutocrats. It was liberating to think that in this era when everything was being sucked into the cash economy, even water, and surely air would be next, that here he could derive nutrition from the Earth itself. It turned out that when they went for lunch, that some of the same concerns were pressing on other people’s minds. Lunch came early, for though the work was labour-intensive, there weren’t any productivity targets or any benefits for working overtime. No-one was going to be rewarded for reporting anyone else for slacking off. And there definitely wasn’t going to be any drug testing. How did it come to this, as it had in the US? How did all the gains of years and years of union organisation get pissed away like a rich kid’s allowance?
Like Seamus, some of the others around the table weren’t shy of tackling big questions like these. Neither were taxi drivers, Right-wing shocks, or Bjorn Lombjork, but here the discussion seemed a lot saner to Seamus’ ears. The discussion was about global warming and what they should be doing about it.
“We are doing something about it”, argued Moon Child. “We’re growing our own vegetables, locally, without the use of petrochemicals. I wash all my clothes in cold water. I recycle nearly all my stuff.”
“Yes”, interjected Soma, but added, with typically teutonic pragmatism, “But how do we convince other people to live the same way?”
“Not by sitting around here talking about it, that’s for sure”, sneered Oisin, a slightly sinister glint appearing in his eye. “We should be out there blocking roads, tying ourselves to trees, sabotaging the construction of new factories. We should take our cue from Earth First!”
Seamus had heard of Earth First!, but he didn’t approve of some of their ideas, like that the famine in Ethiopia was a natural event which was better left to “run it’s course” as there were too many people in the world already. That was ignorant, ill thought out, racist nonsense. He also abhorred the androcentrism of the movement, as if they were heroic knights in shining, phallic armour coming to the rescue of Mother Earth. Yet he admired their outlaw chic, their commitment to their ideals and their determination to stand up for their beliefs. But he felt compelled to play Devil’s Advocate.
“So why aren’t you doing any of these things yourself?”, he asked Oisin.
Oisin, who thought he saw Seamus leering at Soma while he was saying that, told him they didn’t have the numbers here to pull off stunts like that.
“Nah, I don’t accept that”, replied Seamus, feeling that the Gauntlet had been thrown down. “The way to gain support is to do something spectacular. Like the 1916 Rising, that worked.”
“It doesn’t work for the Unabomber. Everybody thought he was just a lone nutcase.”
“That’s because he was a lone nutcase. He didn’t have any ideas on how to implement his utopian, back-to-the-Earth fantasies.”
“And I suppose you do, Sandman?”
“The way to do it is to inform people, to show people there can be a better life, that they don’t need their big cars and their big houses, that all the stuff they buy just makes them unhappier. It’s not that hard to spread ideas. It happened before the reformation, and before the French Revolution, when there was no TV, no radio, no net.”
“Yes”, averred Man 4, who’d been listening to the conversation with interest, ignoring the sexual tension that others might have picked up on, “But those movements took hundreds of years to gain momentum. We’re not even going to have another hundred years on the planet if we keep going the way we are. That’s why Oisin is right about having to do something spectacular and soon. And not just here, but all over the world.”
“And what sort of spectacular things did you have in mind?” Seamus didn’t know what a Pandora’s box of wild fantasies he was opening by uttering this question.
Oisin began by telling people he’d wanted to get a job on an assembly line making SUVs, where he thought he could commit some act of industrial sabotage, like not lubricating the brakes properly, or making imperceptibly small holes in the petrol pipes that would eventually lead to a yuppie holocaust. Seamus thought of all those SUVs exploding, their owners being thrown into the sky in a burst of flames like in some hackneyed Hollywood movie with Jean Claude van Damme. He looked around the room and saw the smiles on everyone else’s faces, and realised that they were having similar fantasies.
Soma’s idea, as if you needed to be told, was more complicated and had been thought out in more precise detail. She was going to get a job in a supermarket transit depot. She knew that standards of hygiene were high in places like this, but she would have her six-monthly health test just before she went on holidays. She would say she was going to Italy, from where a friend of hers would send postcards to her place of work. But she would really go to somewhere like Mexico or India where she would drink the local water and give herself chronic diarrhoea. Then she would come home, spit into the water supply that was used to clean the fruit and vegetables there and create an epidemic which would bring people back to local organic stores, or perhaps even to grow their own food. The reaction to this story, with it’s Jesus-like suicidal martyrdom, and it’s obvious earnestness was a little more muted.
Man 4 believed that, as air travel was growing too cheap relative to it’s environmental impact, something spectacular had to be done to cut it down. It was his hope that the skies were becoming so crowded that a horrible accident would happen of it’s own accord. Then Seamus was asked if he had any similar plans. This put him in an invidious position, as he was probably the only one in the room who’d committed a really gory piece of violence, was representing people who’d committed many more, but was having to get into the habit of renouncing violence.
“I still think information is the key. Once people know the impact their lives are having on the ecosystem, they’ll live differently. People aren’t stupid. They know the corporate nay-sayers are lying to them when they say he Earth isn’t heating up. And we’ve got to take the message to the third world, to India, to China, to South East Asia, that our lifestyles aren’t something to be aspired to, that their civilisations that have lived for thousands of years will die along with the rest of humanity if they do. The one act of industrial sabotage we could get involved in is to rob the formula for contraceptives and produce them in an underground lab in Calcutta or Shanghai, and sell them on the open market like the British used to sell opium. Because, whatever anyone says, over-population is a huge problem.”
Jim looked over at Seamus and smiled at his passionate renunciation of violence. Man 4 remarked sardonically that now they had the world’s problems solved, they could get back to gardening and preparing for the night’s celebrations. He looked out the window and sensed, like an ancient seer, that the signs were propitious, that the clouds were starting to clear and that the sunrise might be visible in the morn. He asked who was going to help him lift the table out to beneath the old oak tree. Moon Child tried to look as old and frail and Soma as female as possible, so it was up to Seamus, Oisin, Jim and Amargain. It was a job for Celtic warriors, the sort that could chop down a tree with a single stroke. It occurred to Seamus that nowadays there were people as sinuous as CuChullain was said to be, but they became that way not by worshipping the Earth, but by putting poisonous chemicals into their bodies that would make their eyes go dark and their livers burst, leaving them a helpless, slobbering pile of muscles that would rot like the rest of us. Nevertheless he took a deep breath and took his place under the table. As it took four of them to lift it, it reminded him of nothing more than his father’s funeral, when four teachers that he’d never gotten on with lifted him into the old family plot.
Yet this was not death that they were celebrating, but life. But in another way, it was a sort of death, as the nights were only going to get shorter from now on. After a few minutes of carrying this table up to the old oak tree, he stopped thinking things like that and started thinking things like “My back hurts” Then he recovered a little, realised that for him, the image had more biblical resonances for him than anything from his own mythology, that he had been climbing up poles all week and was now carrying a heavy weight on his shoulders. When he had long hair and a beard surrounding his part-Jewish face people would come up to him on the street and tell him he looked like Jesus all the time. He was sorry that Grainne wasn’t going to be there that night to share in the fruits of his labour. Maybe they would have breakfast there in the morning. There was no stump to hold it up, so Man 4 and Moon Child brought up a few wooden chairs on which to balance it. They placed it to the west of the tree so that they could sit around it and watch the sun come up behind the tree. Seamus and the other three let it down gently while Man 4 gave the directions. Building Stonehenge must have been a bit like this, except the weights involved back then were bigger and the labourers were more accustomed to physical labour. He marvelled at the intensity of the beliefs that could lead people to exert themselves so much, beliefs that now seemed like primitive superstitions to most of us. Or maybe they were slaves, like those that built the Pyramids and the Temples of Angkor. This much he did not know.
What he did know was that he wanted to lie down for a while, admire the fruits of his labour. Man 4 had a big bottle of home-pressed organic apple juice some of which would surely bypass Seamus’ digestive system and go straight to his sweat pores. It didn’t taste much like the apple juice he bought in the supermarket, or during his infrequent bursts of extravagance, in Health food stores. It was sourer, but it had more bite, it tasted more like the apple juice that Johnny Appleseed, the child-marrying satyr of Ohio probably drank after his days of ecological imperialism. Seamus didn’t find out that apples could be grown in Ireland until he was eleven or twelve. Before that he had assumed they were some sort of exotic foreign fruit that Columbus had brought back from what he called the Indies. How alienated from the Earth would you have to be to discover such a revelation at such a late age?
Man 4 told them that they could help him prepare for the feast, or work on the garden, or else help him to get his electricity generator going. Seamus, his paranoid streak coming to the fore, saw this as some sort of test to see who were the hunters and who were the gatherers. He decided he was a gatherer, and went back his carrot seedlings. It grew sunnier, as Man 4 predicted it would, and he felt the back of his neck start to burn after a while. A part of him wished he was working in the kitchen, that he probably wouldn’t have that many opportunities to cook if he became a TD. Then he wouldn’t have many opportunities to garden either. In truth, he hadn’t though that much about the subject at all, just about his fantasy of going to live in Asia after it was all over. When it was time to clock in (as it were) he asked Man 4 if he had anything for sunburn, and where he could take a shower. He recommended some tiger balm that he’d brought back from Nepal for the sunburn, and, as he was busy getting the feast ready, along with Soma and Moon Child, showed him where to find it.
As Seamus was rubbing the balm on his neck, he was told that the only shower they had was one that utilised rainwater, storing it in a tank they’d fashioned from a car that’d crashed nearby and releasing it slowly. As they were going through what was a drought by Irish standards, he was told not to spend too long in there. As he never spent more than five minutes in the shower, Man 4 was preaching to the converted. When Seamus got to the shower it looked like something the humans fashioned in the crapulous TV series of Planet of the Apes, much to disdain of their simian overlords. Or like the showers they probably had in places like India today. But then it was never winter in those places, and while the cold water was refreshing right now, it might not be in December. But then they probably didn’t heat the house that much in winter, so never got sweaty and didn’t need to wash. So it was possible to be nice to the Earth, even if Gaia wasn’t always nice in return. Of course, the reason why we were so sensitive to changes in temperature was that we could only live within a narrow range, which was why global warming was such a pressing issue.
As he was thinking about it, he heard a knock on the creaky shower door and then the voice of Oisin telling him to hurry the fuck up. He realised he’d forgotten to bring his towel with him, but he decided no-one would make an issue of it, so he pressed his clothes against his groin and opened the shower door and exited. Oisin just smiled and said “Nice Bod”, not without an element of sarcasm. Then he scuttled up to his room, glad that Grainne wasn’t there to see him embarrass himself like that. As he got dried and dressed, he started to smell the odours coming from down below, saw the suns rays light up a phalanx of dust particles and sensed that this ancient, immovable feast would be one of riotous hedonism. He went downstairs, wearing what he thought would pass for hippie threads that he bought in a charity shop, and asked if there was anything he could do to help, while scouting around the kitchen to see if there was anything that was once walking around being cooked. Being the neurotic, angst-ridden type that he was, he often wondered if, deep down, his veganism was something he did to set himself apart, from his family and his peers.
Anyway, it later transpired that the feast was veggie, though not vegan. A few of the people there were vegan, though, so he was being catered for. He was asked to go and pick some carrots and turnips for the vegan stew, he balked slightly at the idea, not wanting to get dirty again, but went about the task anyway. When did we start thinking of soil as “dirt”? Until relatively recently, we lived directly on the soil, “we” being westerners, as there were many people in Africa and Asia who still lived that way. So maybe “dirt” was a reminder of where we came from, an atavistic threat to Victorian notions of progress. The paradoxical thing was that, the further we moved from the Earth, the more waste we generated. We created whole professions whose job it was to get dirty all day, binmen, oil riggers, lavatory attendents, so the rest of us could live in our little petrochemical bubbles, in a Metropolis-like hierarchy of hygiene. Even with all these thoughts in mind, he still took care not to bring too much of the Earth back in with him. He sort of envied Man 4 his supermarket of nature just a walk away, with no queues, no screaming kids, no lethargic check-out girls, no mind-fucking layouts, no superfluous packaging. But who knows, in a few years he’d have his own, on which he’d grow lots of labour-unintensive crops like potatoes, while he and his spouse would teach their adopted Asian offspring all sorts of arcane stuff, like 17th Century French Drama, or the History of left-wing movements in Latin America, whatever took his fancy. He was complex, he contained multitudes. And if the monsoon didn’t come one year, he would always have little nest eggs in his bank and ethical investment portfolios and credit card accounts.
As he handed Man 4 the carrots and turnips, he asked how he managed to keep off all the insects. He said he used to introduce other predators, but that that started off a viscous cycle of dog-eat-dog, as it were. Crop rotation kept the little fuckers confused, and there was a book of natural pesticides which he pointed to, which he used as a last resort. He made it seem really easy, and wondered why all those farmers sprayed such a cornucopia of chemicals with periphrastic names dreamt up by men with steel-rimmed spectacles on their crops. It couldn’t just be because they were told to, could it? Man 4 argued that farmers were still stuck in a feudal mindset, but that instead of paying fealty to Dukes and Barons, they were paying it to corporations, the most powerful of whom dwarfed the great emperors of the past in their global outreach. It was said by those in the industry that thanks to advances in science, food cost little or nothing to produce. But this wasn’t looking at the bigger picture, at the cost of transporting chemicals, and the fossil fuels from which they were derived, and the wars it took to secure their supply. The so-called “Green Revolution” in the ‘50’s was the start of the corporations’ rise to hyperpower, and that was why organic farmers like him were in the vanguard of the resistance. But, realising he was starting to sound a little hyberbolical, he added, “But we’re not here to mourn the loss of so much of the Earth, we’re here to celebrate it’s continued existence.” He quoted Tennyson, no friend, Seamus noted silently to himself, to the Irish.

Raise the can, and Raise the cup
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up
And is Quickly laid again.

Everyone who had access to any sort of drinking receptacle raised it in salute. But Seamus just fixated on the word “dust”, thought of the dust bowl, of the dust that blew through the streets of Rajasthan, of the dust that blew into his own eyes and clogged up his nostrils when he worked on a building site. Eventually we would create so much dust and smog that the sun would be blocked out. He tried to block such dark thoughts from his mind, to concentrate on the view outside and the people he was with, to whom Grainne would hopefully be added tomorrow.
Eventually, when all the food was prepared, Man 4 asked for some volunteers to take the cauldron up to the oak tree. It reminded him of the witches cauldron in Macbeth, which is probably the effect they were going for, though Seamus, even though he’d renounced his Catholicism years ago, still thought of witches as being evil. Once again, it was left to the able bodied types like Seamus to carry the cauldron, while the old and infirm followed behind with the food and the sticks to light the fire. He was a little dissapointed that they didn’t have a foluch fiath, but then Seamus never could understand how our ancestors made these work, so it was unreasonable to expect Man 4, who was leading this procession to the top of the hill, to know. He stood over and watched as everyone, as if being led by some unseen hand, prepared the fire and then the cauldron was put in place, and filled with a variety of vegetables, pulses, and water. Then, everyone else stood aside, as Man 4, taking a deep breath, as if summoning latent forces from the bowels of the Earth, looked up and said:
“Friends, we are gathered here today, away from the mundanity of our normal existence, to offer praise to one of our ancient gods, the god of our ancestors, Lugh the Sun-God, on this, the longest day of the year. Now, I initiate the ceremonies by using his gift to us, fire, to begin this feast in his honour.”
Seamus, who was amused by his appropriation of Christian ceremonies - how ironic was that? - half expected him to create fire by a mere wave of his hand, or even by rubbing two sticks together, but instead he was handed a candle which Soma had been carefully protecting all the way from the kitchen. At least he didn’t use a firelighter. Once the fire was lit and the feast was cooking, they were beckoned to join hands round the tree, and sing chants in Irish, led by Man 4. While many of them knew the words, and for all Seamus knew, what they meant, Seamus was reminded of nothing more than saying the Angelus in School, when he used to think beitdoneuntome was one word. Yet he rolled with it, trying not to be too self-conscious, something he’d often achieved on the dancefloor in nightclubs, even without alcohol or drugs, so it shouldn’t be impossible here. But he couldn’t help noticing that though this was a fertility rite and that they were dancing round an overtly phallic tree, that there was only one female here. He longed for Grainne’s tender embrace, and no amount of Earth loving could seem to make up for it.
After what seemed like an eternity, this part of the ceremony was over, and they were almost ready to eat. He was already as sweaty as he’d gotten from all the gardening, and midges were starting to bite his hair. Once again, in another parody of Christian ceremony, they gave grace for their food to Lugh. Seamus was regretful that he didn’t know enough Irish to know if their prayers were genuine or just gibberish that Man 4 had made up. Then Man 4 looked into the cauldron and decided that the food in there was good. Seamus, who was pretty hungry by now, was relieved. As the food was passed to him in a bowl that’d been made from locally sourced clay, he ate ravenously, like one of the Fianna would have done in the Ossianic cycle.
How he regretted that those corrupt shysters who always got re-elected had appropriated that word.
He refused the goblet of mead and asked for some carrot juice instead. He noticed that no-one was saying much, and assumed this was part of the ritual. After the eating was done, Man 4 said it was time for them to start receiving insights from the gods. This, of course, meant doing some drugs.
Seamus knew that the bifurcation between religion and narcosis was a relatively recent phenomenon, that Shamans from religions all over the world used some form of drug to transcend their worldly state, that even today sadhus in India still used a lot of Ganga, a name derived from a river goddess in the Marharabata who drowned her first seven, virgin born children. Some boffinn thought that the ecstasies that mystics from all over the world were caused by the same sort of chemical imbalance that drugs like E induced, while at the same time ravers claimed spiritual, out-of-body experiences while on MDMA. It seemed that religion and drugs were making friends again. But when Seamus was offered a joint, he refused, citing the long history of heart disease in his family, and asked if he could make some bhang tea instead. Man 4 smiled, while Elk told Seamus that Man 4 made the best Bhang Tea in the world. He filled one of the clay cups from old rusty kettle and filled it with what looked like tea leaves, then burnt some resin over it, all the time replicating gesticulations from Catholic ceremonies. Then he passed it around, asking everyone to take just a sip.
He took a sip
He knew instantly that the tea wasn't just tea.
He got giddy and everything else got brighter.
Soma danced on the table.
All the men danced around her.
Soon they were all naked too.
The light reflected from Soma’s blond locks
Seamus swirled around intensely, breathlessly, while everything around him became a blur.... The next thing he knew, the festivities had died down, he was still sitting under the tree, Jim was sitting next to him. He had a garland of flowers round his neck, his clothes were in a pile on his groin, the chill morning breeze made his cold sweat even colder.
“What the fuck happened, man?”
“Looks like you passed out. Think you had a bit much of Man 4’s little masala.”
“But I only had a tiny sip.”
“Yeah, well, maybe your tolerance isn’t as high as some of the people round here.”
Seamus looked around with renewed clarity, saw everyone with their clothes back on, except for Oisin and Soma, who were lying down, making love. Everyone else was in a little circle, having the sort of argument you have when you’re high on such a cocktail.
“How come you aren’t with them?”, he asked Jim.
“They asked me to keep an eye on you. To be frank, I was getting a little tired of all their bullshitting anyway.”
“I thought you’d be well up for this, what with your back-to-the-old-gods philosophy.” He paused slightly, then added, “Do you really believe in all this stuff?”
“I think we’ve got to get away from Christianity, that’s for sure. Whether we can replace it with this sort of arbitrary hodgepodge or not is another issue.”
“I can actually see a lot of young people going for a religion that involves drug-taking and naked dancing.”
“I can actually see in the whole rave culture thing a desire to get back to worshipping the earth. It’s music of pure rhythm, replicating the rhythms of the Earth itself. A lot of the people who listen to it are displaced agricultural workers, who seek a return to nature in it’s pounding backbeats. It originated in Chicago, where most of the population were forced from the land, and it’s popular in working class area of cities here, where most of the population were forced off the land during the famine. It’s congregational as well, as all religions are. And the D.Js make their own interpretations from a few basic rhythms, as priests interpreted basic religious texts in the past. So it does give me some hope. The problem is that, like everything else in our culture, it’s been appropriated by capitalism. So it’s something you do on the weekends, spending hundreds of pounds on MDMA instead of finding magic mushrooms in the Earth, money you earn doing some shitty job in a call centre.”
“First thing I’ll do when I become Taoiseach”, responded Seamus, who clearly hadn’t come all the way down yet, “is close down all those call centres. I’ll turn them into yoga and tai chi centres, into health food stores and organic gardening centres. Then...”
“Y’know, I know you’re just bullshitting, but judging from the people I’ve been talking to, I’d say you’ve got a good enough chance. There’s a lot of disillusionment around, and you’ve done well by starting your campaign so soon. Most important, though, people seem to like you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They say you’re not like other politicians, that you don’t try to second guess them and tell them what they want to hear. They think you genuinely feel the same anger they do towards the government.”
“You’re shitting me. Who’ve you been talking to?”
“Just a few neighbours. But they do seem to generally like you. Just make sure you have your clothes on when you’re campaigning, wontcha?”
Seamus noticed that he had, indeed, been conducting the conversation with just a few pieces of clothing covering his groin, like some renaissance model or... He tried to get dressed without getting up off the ground, but was far too wasted to attempt a task that required that amount of dexterity, so he got up and got dressed. It was about 3 in the morning, soon it would be dawn, they’d make their offerings to Lugh and then get some proper sleep. In the meantime, he sat back under the tree, and confided this to Jim:
“You know, I don't want people to elect me because they like me or because they think I’m a pretty-boy or whatever - I bet I’m not that pretty now - but because they agree with what I have to say.”
“Don’t give me that shit - you want to go and live off the land in the Third World - you don't care how the fuck you get the money.”
“Aw, dude, that’s a bit unkind. You know, there is a part of me that genuinely wants to change things, it’s just...”
“Just that you know parliamentary democracy is a pointless sham, that corporations have all the power, that you’ll never make anyone’s life better by being a TD, except yourself and a few cronies?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”
“So, have you told Grainne about your little plan?”
He gulped and said that as she was such a staunch Shinner, that he was more scared of what she might do than Caomhin or anyone else.
“But you want her to come with you, don't you?”
“Well, that’s purely up to her. If she wants to go back to her shitty job working in a call centre, I’m sure there’s plenty of local girls willing to be my concubine.”
“Two whores living off the Earth together.”
“I think all politicians are basically whores”, he replied, with the sort of equanimity he knew he’d need to acquire on a full-time basis if he was ever to get elected. “In fact, all professions basically are. Prostitution is not only the oldest profession, it’s the template for all others. I’ll be serving the needs of the establishment, of the corporations, of Power, to have the illusion of democracy, they’ll pay me handsomely for it.”
Seamus said he was tired and wanted to go to bed.
“Why sleep when we can watch the sun rise? I don't think we have much of a choice, Seamus. Man 4 won’t let you stay here if you don't stay for the sunrise.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
He just grunted acquiescence and made like he was contemplating stuff deeply but was really just dozing off. He was awoken when the sun was about to come up.
When he did see the sun rise - it was the first time he could remember - he realised why people once really did believe it was some sort of transcendent deity, instead of just another huge ball of glowing gases, floating aimlessly through an infinite void. It seemed to creep, almost sentiently, over the hills, and nature itself did seem to respond, as if baptised, converted, sanctified, impregnated even. He vowed to get up and enjoy this spectacle more, instead of staying up late, as he’d heard that if it’s brighter when you go to bed than when you wake up you become susceptible to depression. But this was just an idle vow. When the sun was high in the sky, everybody finished their chanting and started to leave. It appeared, thankfully, that all the stuff would be brought down in the “morning”, which meant after they’d slept. On the way down Elf told Seamus about his trips to the full moon party in Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand. That was a sunrise to behold, he told him, as he’d undoubtedly told many people before.
He was woken up in the morning, or perhaps the early afternoon, by news of a phone call. It was Grainne, of course, and she was trying to get to where he was. He told her he’d be there in half an hour or so. He knocked back his vitamins with alacrity, then hurried downstairs, grabbed some bread, wolfed it down with some water, and got on his bike. When he found her, half an hour later, standing under a signpost like some femme fatale in a Film Noir, he didn’t look like a Celtic warrior come to take her to the land of Tir na Nog, just a shabby, unwashed, unshaven hippy. A pity, because, as he she got up on the saddlebar of his bike, they could have looked like a traditional Irish dancing-at-the-crossroads couple if only he’d been wearing a black suit with a flat cap covering his number two. They made their shaky way, with Seamus telling her how much he would have loved to have made love to her under that tree, just as Oisin and Soma did. She just looked back at him and said that when he was a TD they’d have plenty of opportunities to fuck in far-flung outdoor destinations. He just grinned, pretending not to be able to respond because he was so tired from cycling. By the time they got back, everyone was up and having breakfast. When Seamus and Grainne entered, Man 4 greeted them with the words, “so this is the glorious creature I’ve been hearing all about.” Grainne blushed, told him to get away out of that, and found somewhere to sit. Man 4 asked her if she was also a vegan, when she said she wasn’t, he gave her some goat’s cheese with her bread, while Seamus had to do with some honey and some home-made jam. Then Grainne was asked how she met Seamus. They hadn’t really discussed what to do in this eventuality, so Seamus Panickingly blurted out that it was in a nightclub. Not thinking anything of it, Man 4 said he didn’t see Seamus dancing that much last night, with a knowing grin that Seamus would inevitably be asked to explain.
Soon breakfast was over, and it was time to clean up last night’s mess. Though Seamus was well and truly knackered, he didn’t want to seem weak in front of Grainne, so volunteered for all the hard jobs, which he performed Job-like stoicism. When all this was done, he asked Grainne if she wanted to go for a walk.
“I thought we were here to do some work.”
“Oh, I got plenty done last night.” Looking at his soiled clothes and smelling the sweat from his clothes, it wasn’t hard to believe him. So she followed him past the tree, through the fields till they came to another quiet spot, an opening in a hedgerow where a stream ran underneath.
They lay down, kissed and embraced for a while - aside from the danger of being caught, Seamus was far to tired to go any further - then lay back, let the sun shine on their faces, and started to talk.
“Wouldn’t it be great to be able to do this every day, sit in the sun, by a babbling brook, all by ourselves?”, asked Seamus, running his fingers through her hair.
“I suppose”, she replied, with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “There’s no way you could do it here, though, where it rains every other day, and gets so cold in the winter. I think I’d miss the city after a while, anyway.”
“What is about the city that you’d miss?”
“I don’t know, shopping I guess, movies, nightclubs.”
Seamus reflected on a theory he’d heard that shopping was what females did to satisfy their primitive gathering instincts while living in a cash economy. The irony wasn’t lost on him, sitting among briars which would yield wild fruit within a few months. Feeling he wasn’t really getting anywhere with her, he took a slightly different approach.
“Well, these days you can do all that from wherever you are. You can buy anything on the internet, download music, pretty soon you’ll be able to download movies as well, in addition to all the stuff you can get on satellite TV.”
“Yeah... but I think I’d miss all the sights of the city, all the different faces, the shops... I don’t know, I spent my whole life trying to escape from a small town, that way of life. So... tell me... if you get elected, will you...”
“Take you to Dublin with me? Yeah, sure.”
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“No, I am, it’s just that living in Dublin is the part of being a TD that appeals to me least.”
“Really?”, she asked, sounding surprised.
“Yeah, the whole Celtic Tiger thing pisses me off, all that conspicuous consumption, all those yuppies driving round in Range Rovers.”
“It might seem different if you were one of those yuppies driving round in Range Rovers.” “Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen. I might get a new bicycle, and one for you and...”
“You might get a new bicycle! Seamus, you’re going to be earning £50,000 a year. What are you going to do with all the money?”
“It’s not about the money”, he replied, evasively. “It’s about this” - he laid his hand on the grass, feeling through the leaves till he could touch the roots - “It’s about our right to own this land, about not continuing to reward those loyalist scumbags in the North for taking it from us.” That wasn’t really the truth, but he knew he was going to be getting back on the campaign trail tomorrow, that he needed to practice his nationalist rhetoric, and that that was a sort of argument that might appeal to her. It did, but only in a limited way.
“Look, if you become a TD, you’re going to have to work really hard, and get paid a lot of money. You may as well enjoy it.”
“I want to enjoy it, but... well, I’m not sure you and I want the same things.” Thinking how this might sound, he quickly added, “But we’re adults, we’ll be able to work something out.”
Why couldn’t he be honest with her? Because, if he told her the truth he feared she’d leave him there and then, he’d become depressed and anxious as a result, fail to get elected, and go back to his aimless life on the dole. She’d been more forthcoming with him, but though he had a lot to learn about women, on thing he did know was that the only time you can be honest with them is when the truth and what they want to hear are the same thing. And this wasn’t such an instance. But one thing she did tell him, if not in so few words, was that she’d probably dump him if he wasn’t elected. So this leant a new urgency to his campaign.
“Course we’ll be able to work things out. So s’pose you do get elected, where do you want to go on holidays?”
Seamus gulped, said he’d always wanted to spend some time in Latin America or Asia.
“Really? Don’t you want to see Rome, Paris, Prague, all those places?”
“I’ve been to all those places, backpacking”, he replied, diffidently.
“Well, if you get elected, you can go back to all of them, and stay in luxury hotels - with me. With those words she planted a kiss on his lips. He just replied, “Yeah, Sure” - as noncommittally as possible, not looking her straight in the eye and then said it was time to go back to the farm, that people would be wondering where they were. He was sorry he broached the whole subject, that it had opened up a can of worms that could have remained closed for some time afterwards.
He showed her how to garden, though he felt more like a 50’s British instructional film producer than a Celtic Shaman. She picked it up quickly, it seemed she also had a feral side. As it was work in the open air, and the sun was shining, and there was a beautiful woman by his side, the hours passed quickly till it came to 5’ O Clock. Man 4 looked upon Seamus and Grainne’s work, and decided it was good. He asked them if they wanted to stay for tea, Seamus thanked him but said he was going to have to take Grainne back to the bus stop.
“Well, come down for the Samhain, wontcha?”
“Sure”, said Seamus. Grainne didn’t offer any response.
“You must give me your phone number and email address, so I can let you know about it a few days in advance.” Seamus was a bit surprised that Man 4 had email, but gave him the details all the same.
“So, Back to your day job, then, Seamus. You never said what that was, by the way.”
“No, I didn’t”, replied Seamus, with an air of finality. Man 4 just nodded his head and said to come in and say goodbye to everyone. So he did, going round the table hugging everyone, even the people he hadn’t spoken so much to, like Moon Child and Armargain, and the people he didn’t get on so well with, like Oisin. He said he’d really enjoyed his time here and would see them again in a few months. Grainne looked on, maintaining observer status during this process. When they left, Grainne commented that some of the people in there were a bit “weird”.
“In what way?” asked Seamus, genuinely intrigued.
“Well, they’re... hippies, basically.”
“What’s wrong with hippies?” Seamus asked, a bit surprised to hear her say that.
“I don’t know”, she replied. “It just seems like a strange way to lead your life.”
Seamus reflected that she probably didn’t know why she didn’t like hippies, that she’d been subjected to so much anti-hippy propaganda in the media, at school and among her peers that she’d never asked herself what was wrong with them. The depressing thing was that he thought she was capable of being converted to his way of thinking. Now he guessed she’d become a vegetarian primarily for health reasons. He also figured that as she’d rebelled against her upbringing by fucking that English guy, and suffered so much as a result, that she was going to think inside the box from now on. These depressing thoughts filled him head as he cycled back, knowing the woman on his saddlebar probably wasn’t ever going to come to Asia with him. When they reached the bus stop he told her he was going to cycle the rest of the way home, but that he’d wait with her. It was an awkward few minutes, once they’d made arrangements about when to see each other again, they didn’t say much, partly because Seamus was so tired, partly because he wasn’t sure what to say. She got on the bus, blew him a kiss out the window, unaware of the rupture she’d opened up between them.