If I could I would vote for blackbirds

ON VALENTINE’S DAY someone arrived at the door with red roses, and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. I don’t get many bouquets, so this was special, and every time I sat down to have toast and marmalade during the week, the flowers cheered me up.

Not that I need roses or material things to make me happy. In fact I am at my most cheerful when I am not paying attention to reality at all.

In most humans, happiness is the result of some cause. For example, I spoke to a young woman in the chipper, on Saturday night, whose face glowed with joy. She was working behind the counter, dipping my chips in oil.

“You look extremely cheerful,” I said. “What’s the reason?”

“I’ve just been accepted for a course in university, to study Egyptology,” she told me, as she handed me a plastic container of curried chips. Clearly Egyptology is what she wants in life, and when she got it, it made her happy.

But on the other hand I am sometimes ambushed by joy without any reason. On Monday morning I was standing at the front door, wondering who to vote for, and looking at two blackbirds playing on the lawn, when bliss overpowered me like an emotional rash. The lovely birds filled me with such contentment that I sat on the step dreaming of a perfect world where there are no tears, and I dearly wished that I could vote for that.

But I’m a sophisticated political animal and I know that I can’t vote for happiness, no more than I can vote for blackbirds. Politics is about the real world, and happiness is invariably elsewhere.

The blackbirds played on the lawn for about ten minutes, waddling to the right, and then to the left, while the sound of Anna Netrebko singing on my computer wafted out the door and blended with the birdsong.

Suddenly a jeep rumbled up the avenue, and a politician stood before me, offering me his photograph, but I ignored him.

I was catatonic, in a spiritual sense, paralysed by blackbirds, and in comparison to my inner joy, all external phenomena, including the local candidate, appeared to be nothing more than an illusion. Just like the statue of Saint Teresa in her ecstasy, by Bernini, I had been transfixed by bliss.

The sound of the candidate’s jeep faded in the distance, and I waited for another sound, or anything that might assure me that I still had a foot in the real world.

But no sound came from the road, and I took that absence of traffic as more than just a sign of the Recession; to me the stillness was like a door into some “elsewhere”; a whispered clue of the infinite presence behind the veil of the ordinary.

As a teenager I loved Wordsworth’s poetry, and one summer’s night in the Gaeltacht, I slipped out the window while the other students and the bean-an-tí were sleeping, and I walked the pallid road that meandered like a ribbon into the bog and towards the lake; a teenager in a boggy night of unfocused love, I was wondering what beautiful thing I might see or hear out there in the dark. Perhaps I wanted a god to hold me together as I waited for my Leaving Certificate results, or perhaps I just needed a kiss.

After walking a while, I heard a fisherman in his boat, lamping under the mountain; a grown man grunting and splashing in the silky black lake.

I remember the sound of his oars, sloshing in and out of the water, and the wood creaking beneath the oar locks. He was no more than a shadow in the distance, but later I saw him burning sticks, and boiling a kettle on his fire, and sitting there humming to himself, some song I did not recognise.

When the sun rose the next morning I walked towards the schoolhouse, whistling so loudly that my fellow students wondered what was wrong with me, but there was no point in telling them that I had gone out in the night, alone, and found something wonderful.

And this afternoon, in another schoolhouse, as I face the grim reality of the polling booth, and mark my X for a world that will never make me happy, there is no point in telling anybody that if I could, I would vote for blackbirds, and ghosts that fish in the night and light fires in the dark.