Less about the world, more about me.

Year: 2022

Messi Messi Messi Messi

I had a little cry last week. The Guardian website informed me Messi had finally won his World Cup. Doing so in the best final of all time. I didn’t watch this World Cup. I am not writing about that. Regret did not make me cry. It was happiness and relief, for I simply adore Messi.

I grew up a Liverpool fan. Being a Liverpool fan in the 80s was an easy time. Then there was Hillsborough and Sky Sports and a precipitous decline in standards. I fell out of love with football and with Liverpool. I wasn’t playing either, so there wasn’t even that.

I moved back to Kerry in the early 2000s, reduced to living with my parents, but they did have Sky Sports. My elderly parents, my mom a half Scouse Liverpool fan, my dad a hurling fanatic, got me into Barcelona. They never missed a game. I began watching Messi. I started playing again, a friendly seven-a-side. I even remembered my Liverpool devotion.

I’m awful at football, but kicking and controlling a ball does mean I understand what Messi is actually doing. In the same way that because I can do simple arithmetic, I understand Stephen Hawking explaining quantum physics. Or since I can read Shakespeare, I must be able to create smooth similes.      

Describing Messi is difficult. I love football. I think it is the most important unimportant thing there is. And because it takes up so much space in my head, I naturally imbue it with a significance that others attach to art or literature.

I was recently introduced to the works of Pierre Bourdieu. He writes about power and the importance of Social Capital in maintaining power structures. How taste is constructed to distinguish between those with power and those without. Football is a sport, but also it is a sport that isn’t rugby. It is for the common folk. Not a game for serious people with serious thoughts doing serious things. It isn’t an art form nor a method for transferring power from one generation to the next.

Football is for grubby people playing out identity rituals with profane chants and fists in car parks. While I didn’t watch the World Cup, I kept abreast through minute-by-minute reports and Messi’s pass against the Dutch was mentioned. I confess I YouTubed it. It took my breath away. A moment of purest creation.

My favourite players over the years have been passers. From Molby to Alonso, it is those who see things, possibilities and movement and have the technical ability to take advantage of that vision to create something out of it. I remember Cruyff describing how when he passed a ball, it was because he saw the pass the player he was giving the ball to should then make.

Is vision followed by creation, not art? Is it the mere artisanal product of a blacksmith or the moving and enhancing experience of a choreographer? 

Messi moves me to speak about art, for he gives me joy doing an activity I also participate in. What he does is familiar, though impossible for me to emulate. But not impossible to imagine. I see it. I can deconstruct it.

I had the opportunity this summer to visit the Netherlands. Thanks to their wonderful public transport system, I visited the Vermeer Museum (Delft) and, the next day, see ‘The Girl With The Pearl Earring’ (the Hague). It is difficult to explain my reaction to seeing it for the first time. Witnessing an example of perfection is overwhelming. I had to look away for fear of crying in a roomful of strangers. But when I analysed my feelings, I was not just moved by the beauty and technical application but by cultural significance. The Girl With The Pearl Earring is one of the best things we humans have done. Art is the only thing that says we are not quite like all the other animals.

Great art is distilled humanity married with the technical ability to make real the imagined.

I play football. I have moshed to Nirvana’s music. I have written a novel. I have been to some of the best museums in the world. I have read some of the best novels and watched some of the best plays. Nothing has moved me to stunned incoherent exclamations quite like Messi’s goal against Athletic Bilbao in 2015. No one and nothing has so consistently made me leave my chair and make weird strangled grunting sounds the way Messi has. In his pomp, with the right players around him, he routinely made the impossible possible.

Messi is not unique. He is the paragon, the quintessential and the apogee of an activity that is both the simplest sport and the most complex activity. He may be dismissed as a mere entertainer, for he is certainly that, but does he do those other things that art does? Is he making the experience of being a human that bit better and richer? Does he give pause, leading to reflection on the human experience? Is he culturally significant?

I don’t know to be honest. I lack the education to insist on his artistic bona fides, but I know I see art in him. I know to my dying day I won’t go a week without watching footage of his creative genius. My joy in Messi’s movement may be a product of being working class, but I would not swap position and education for a single minute I have spent watching Messi.

Rings of Power: Eps 1&2

My new tattoo

The problem with Tolkien is that there aren’t at least two millennia and two fallen civilisations between him and us. Everything he wrote is available to us. Even his workings are public. His opinions and his comments on what he wrote are still with us. This causes tension. 

On the one hand, there’s his grand vision of reinventing a lost English mythology and then there’s the fact that not even a prolific genius can invent an entire mythology. If it could be done, then it would have been done by someone who could spin whole languages out of his imagination. But he left us an incomplete history. How could he not leave it incomplete? Galadriel left Middle Earth when she was over 8000 years old. It would take more than the span of a human life to recount the details of such life. Her part in the final war against Sauron doesn’t even make it into Lord of the Rings proper. She’s relegated to the appendices. Galadriel, arguably the most powerful being in Middle Earth, in an appendix! 

His life and work are so recent we are understandably a little precious when someone attempts to add to his creation. We are quick to dismiss attempts as fan-fiction. But when someone produces an adaptation as wonderful as Peter Jackson’s trilogy, we forgive the changes, additions and omissions. Changes in his second trilogy are not so forgivable because the entire project was less than stellar.

As for, Rings of Power episodes one and two? I loved them. Many things irked me, and I will get to some of them, but overall, I was transported back to Middle Earth. It is always my fervent wish to be in Middle Earth, and this took me there. And they showed us Telperion and Laurelin. They showed us the Trees! Sanitising the reason the Elves left Valinor irked me. Really sanitising why Galadriel left, really irked. But Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel is wonderful. Elrond, Gil-galad, Celebrimbor, all excellent. Lindon, wow. I enjoyed the Har-foots, though being from Ireland, the Oirish accents grated quite a lot. Why not just give them North Kerry accents and add subtitles? But I’ll get over it as Nori is the ‘everyperson’ character reflecting all our wanderlust and she is very engaging. As for Arondir, I couldn’t take my eyes off him anytime he appeared. If he doesn’t get passage to Valinor by the end of this story, I will be most displeased. And to see Khazad-dûm in all its glory was a pure pleasure. Adding a Dwarven princess worked for me. Sophia Nomvete’s Disa made me regret there never being a female Dwarf depicted before. And I mean within the Tolkien world, of course, Pratchett did that years ago.

The fight with the troll irked me. These are Noldorian Elves. Any one of them should have been able to dispatch a troll without pausing for breath or thought. For the same reason, I didn’t bat an eyelid when Galadriel decided to swim across a sea. She’s Noldor, that’s what they do. I’m not sure they have convincingly conveyed how much time has passed between the Elves leaving Valinor to this point in the history of Middle Earth. Though Galadriel did spell it out at one point with my favourite line in the episode. The trilogy had the luxury of ruins to show time has passed, the Second Age is not as replete with destruction and lost kingdoms.

I wait with bated breath for episode three. 

I hope this continues as is. For in a thousand years this strange mythology will still be studied. It will have survived in fragments. Scholars will debate which parts of the story are original and which were added, no one will be sure. But they will never stop poring over this wonderful secondary creation. 

Being In Therapy

Photo by Finn on Unsplash

I try to be honest about my mental health. I have been in therapy, on and off, for over twenty years for depression and anxiety and have taken medication. Is that oversharing? I don’t think so. I can be open about my mental health for two reasons. Middle age has made me increasingly impervious to the opinions and judgements of others. But more importantly, my employment contract protects me from most types of discriminatory nonsense.

It is a position of some privilege.

Working reasonably well-paid jobs without interruption all my adult life means I can pay for my mental health. I don’t mean I could afford a therapist; I can shop around. I have the freedom to decide what I think is best for me, to choose what I prefer, not what will do for now. I’ve never had to accept CBT as a stop-gap. I’ve never had to return to a therapist I didn’t think was a good fit for me. I’ve never had to justify what I mean by not a good fit.

What does that mean?

I’m never stressed about my mental health issues. In the depths of anxiety, it never occurred to me that I might be unable to get this fixed. I stressed about the best way forward and how quickly I could get this shit sorted. Never did I worry I might not be able to access the care I needed. I could just google the available options and begin exploring the various treatments and approaches. If one must have mental health issues, I think they should have them as I do. (Yes, the not too subtle subtext here is that shocking inequalities in incomes can be seen in the appalling disparities in access to quality mental health care.)

I was discussing this recently with my therapist, a person who has profoundly changed my life. And I only know her because I could Google therapists in my area and play the field. I was discussing with her my openness to therapy. Why would a culchie with a mediocre education be so at ease accessing this kind of health care? Even in my early twenties, I was aware that constantly feeling sad was something one went to a therapist to discuss. This awareness was not taught to me in school. I’m shaking my head as I write this, remembering how little my school did to prepare me for being an adult with feelings and concerns. What I did in my school years was watch a lot of American TV shows.

And in my memory of those shows, every second character was in therapy. A place they went to discuss their feelings (or more accurately their sadness) and why they had sadness. This became normal to me. Of course, it isn’t common for people without disposable income. It isn’t expected for people who weren’t taught that feeling sad all of the time is an issue that might need addressing. It isn’t usual for people who have to be very careful about what their employers might know. It isn’t normal for people who didn’t watch the same TV shows I watched in the 80s.

The only frustrating thing about my mental health, which is a doozy of self-indulgent narcissism (if you’ll indulge the tautology), is that I cannot write about why I have mental health issues. I must wait for quite a few people to die before I write my full story. It’s really annoying. It’s why I have been so creatively stunted for so long. I even struggle to blog. Interesting and concerning things are happening in my life and the world, but all I want to do is write about my childhood (and no, it wasn’t that).

Writing to not be read seems unnatural to me. I should be journaling. I should be exploring this momentous shift in my mental health through my writing, but I can’t. I write to be read. I have always been thus. It’s a need I am delving into in therapy. The need to be seen is a significant theme in the work I am doing there. Over the years, with various therapists, I have been concerned with not coming across as trivial. Not whining over things unworthy of that therapeutic space. I remember a session many years ago where I explained my devastation at a team I supported, losing a game on penalties. I saw my therapist’s eye glaze over.

I am reasonably confident wanting to be seen is not a trivial thing. Many of the heaviest weights causing that suffocating pressure in my chest have been addressed and/or ameliorated. Now I am dealing with the bad habits, all that non-living engendered. I want to write stories that people want to read. Everything else amounts to making sure the mortgage is paid.

You see how important writing is to me? The previous paragraph came unbidden through my fingers. I hadn’t realised that my primary ambition remains being a storyteller. I thought I’d moved on. I wanted to blog as a mere hobby. And I don’t know how to square the circle of wanting to write but being blocked by not being able to write the thing I most want to write. It’s a conundrum I cannot blog my way through. I am left thanking a god that doesn’t exist that I have the privilege of disposable income. My therapist is going to have to sort this one out.

Sex With The Lights Off

Sometimes a political opponent will come out with a dig that is too funny. Brendan Griffin, a Fine Gael TD from Kerry, accused the Green Party of wanting people to have sex with the lights off. It’s a wonderful line. It is communicating a message on a visceral level. Contrast that then to Eamon Ryan, leader of the Green Party, saying, amid a cost-of-living crisis, that people should take shorter showers. I know who I’m voting for in the next election and I’m actually in the Green Party.

I described Griffin as an opponent. His party is in coalition with my party. But in Kerry, what passes for constructive analysis of the problems facing rural Ireland, is to attack the Greens. It’s an understandable reaction to a crisis. There are no elected Greens in the constituency, so an easy target. The politicians who have been elected for generations in Kerry have allowed a situation to develop where there are few jobs here. Where economic development is uneven. Where the housing supply is inadequate. Where the climate crisis is downplayed and even denied. Where short-termism is regarded as common sense. Where a knee-jerk reaction is giving the ‘little’ people of Kerry what they truly need. So, attack the Greens louder and more vociferously than the other Kerry TDs. But never offer solutions.

There is an almost violent reaction in my part of the world to something called, Green ideology. I don’t know what this ideology is. I’ve yet to meet another Green Party member I agree with concerning ideology. I’ve met members to both the left and right of me. Though more on the left than the right. All that binds us is a basic understanding of science. No, not that. More, it is a willingness to accept the word of a scientific community when there is near consensus in that community. Our civilisation’s dependence on burning carbon is warming the planet. The warmer the planet gets the fewer of us it can accommodate. To head this disaster off we need to take as much carbon out of our economies as possible, as quickly as possible.

The pandemic, the war on our doorstep, the cost of living, the housing crisis, the poor state of our health system, and sex in the dark, are important. In an ideal world, these would be all that should concern our politicians and we the voters. Yet combined, they do not represent even an iota of the calamity barrelling towards us in the form of rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and famines.

I don’t have children. I joined the Green Party because I have young nephews and I was worried that their future would be one of hardship, preventable hardship, as they endure a world marred by a damaged climate. Then I began to worry about my future. Surely an overweight middle-aged man would be dead before things got bad? Now I worry about my parents, in their 70s, who might be around to see the beginning of the unravelling of what we have, for millennia, called normal.

I understand for politicians all that matters is winning the next election. That is the nature of politics. And I understand the rather underhanded assertion that Kerry’s problems are the worst and therefore most important. While simultaneously saying that Kerry is too small and unimportant to contribute anything to solving our climate crisis. To tackle the climate crisis is to embrace the enormous disruption required to take carbon out of our civilisation. There is no easy way to do that. It will necessarily be uncomfortable, possibly downright awful. And I fervently wish it didn’t need doing because I quite like my life as it is. But we have already wasted decades prevaricating. We now have mere years to change things.

I really wish an elected politician in Kerry would begin to tell the truth about this. Just one Kerry politician speaking the truth of what is to come would be a welcome change.

And if the majority of people in Kerry decide they would rather lose whole swathes of the county to the sea rather than make an effort, then so be it. At least that would be an informed choice.


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