O DEATH, where is thy sting? Waiting for my long narrative poem to be published, I am 'falling slowly' into morbid thoughts, prompted by a corpse at the bottom of the garden and further inspired by the Bardic stylings of Glen Hansard, writes Ultan Quigley.
I got an awful fright this week. Spring had come early to our hideaway and I was allowing myself a rare moment of buoyancy. You know how it is. The air is still as cold as a seal's snout, but the prickly energy of the sunlight somehow manages to poke the hibernating soul out of its cave. You know how it is.
I was staring down the garden towards filthy pylons and the female neighbour's smugly tended lawn, when I spied Gealbhan, my own daughter, running in a state of apparent panic towards the house. She has the legs of a spry leveret and the lungs of an angry howler monkey, so it was not long before the kitchen was full of her sobs and exhalations.
"Bush! Dead! Dead on the ground," she wheezed. "I just saw. Dead. Rotting." The terrible imperatives of wishful thinking compelled me to jump to a truly insane conclusion. Then, in a mayfly's blink, I moved from celebration to wretched self-castigation. If George W Bush, champion of violent stupidity, had indeed passed on, those of us who claim sanity should compel one another to mourn noisily and publicly. After all, we are not the ones who worship death.
It was all nonsense of course. Gealbhan, though she has the crafty, ferret-eyes of my first wife, would barely recognise the Texan Mussolini. Such sombre intelligence is, moreover, rarely gathered in the hedgerows of Wicklow.
The bush was just a bush and death had come to nothing more presidential than a humble Eurasian badger. Gealbhan and Derek, my life partner's sparkling child, attached themselves to either hand and dragged me down to view the late beast. I could tell they had been frightened - moved to the human core - by the vista, but, unable to admit alarm to one another, were forced to wrap a pathetic false bravado about themselves.
"There's, like, blood and goo coming out of his eyes," Derek said, hopping from one "trainer" to the other.
"It's like that bit out of Saw III when the guy gets the screwdriver stuck up his tummy," Gealbhan, whose tolerance for American filth disgusts me, gabbled in a voice punctuated with nervous giggles.
Something delicately monumental had just happened to them. They were, for the first time in their brief lives, being forced to contemplate the awful oblivion of death and - I understood; I understand - could only express their fear through rolling eyes, gambolling dances and allusions to cheap, trans-Atlantic pabulum. We who are older cannot afford such levity. We have less time to accommodate ourselves to the bitter flavours of coming unconsciousness.
With all this in mind, I ran my dampening eyes up and down the sad, striped body of the poor mammal and tried to learn lessons from its terrible rankness. The creature's innards, still stubbornly moist, spilled out on the grass like awful raspberries. Angry flies dive-bombed the open intestines.
What of its eyes? Two black pebbles asking me questions. Here was this dead, dead thing - one member of a species that had barely changed since men carried wicker shields into battle - rotting in a hedge beneath a dirty pylon that propelled electricity towards an amnesiac city juiced up on Starbucks and "gangsta" rap. Poor créatúr.
Had those eyes, then still vibrant, been following us over the day that had come before? You never know. Perhaps, when evening came, he had curled himself into the elbow of the great sycamore to scrutinise me as I agonised over notepad and typewriter. Maybe he allowed himself a crooked smile when he heard me bellowing down the phone at my increasingly evasive publisher. You never know.
"Poisoning Our Own Wells", my most recent long narrative poem, was originally intended for publication last autumn, but, every time a particular launch date was set, some public calamity intervened and sent the book back into limbo. The parents of the latest abducted child might, perhaps, be offended at the imagery involving mass infanticide (a comfort to know others shared their pain, I thought). Certain illiberal politicians may object to their portrayal as anthropomorphised lizards and dung beetles (a compliment, surely). Wood pulp shortages in Finland were affecting all publishers. (There seemed to be sufficient Scandinavian lumber to accommodate Muldoon, Heaney and the rest of that log-rolling mob.) I imagine the brave animal, accustomed to feeling the breath of foxes on his rear, snorting at my pathetic fury and falling back into a happy slumber. The noises of human parenthood would not have woken him, but, hours later, he might have stirred at the sound of a door being playfully slammed on a versifier's retreating feet. My partner had, once again, misunderstood certain comments - "pervy", apparently - I had made about the female neighbour and banished me from the bedroom.
Aware that her anger was largely mischievous, I managed to remain in relatively good spirits as I carried a tumbler of uisce beatha into the living room and collapsed on the couch. The television set was on. I never watch this wretched medium, but, before I had a chance to reach for the remote control, I found myself propelled into a paradoxical conflict of fury and pride.
Some etiolated Dublin nincompoop was entertaining Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová on his "chat-show". The singer and his attractive Romanian partner had, apparently, recently won an American Academy Award for best original song and had just returned from a triumphant tour of the United States. The footage of the ceremony was delightful. While the American "celebrities" were all polished and primped to resemble department store mannequins, Hansard had turned up in clothes rifled from builder's skips and landfill sites. Good for him. Whereas the other songs were inflated with Hollywood platitudes, Falling Slowly had the loose, epic quality we associate with the Bardic tradition in Celtic literature.
Then there was the happy symbolism provided by the sight of an alluring young immigrant and her uncorrupted Irish companion standing before a suddenly receptive universe. Were our nation's abundant racist theocrats watching? I sincerely hope so.
Anger surged through my veins as I contemplated the way the Dublin media elite had, to this point, ignored - no, suppressed - this happy story. Images of millionaire footballers, cocaine-snorting heiresses and Nobel Prize-winning "poets" had cluttered up the front pages, while these two Gaelic champions were pawned off with the odd half-paragraph beneath the bridge column.
Look what they shovel onto television in the small hours! Women in bikinis selling knives that can slice up soup tins. Superannuated country singers flogging their misogynistic back catalogue. Some programme about a talking car that solves crime.
This is not a fit country for such heroes.
A fiercely swung poker struck me on the temple and, before I passed out, I caught sight of the playfully ironic scowl on my partner's face. Apparently, I had been speaking my thoughts out loud (and at volume).
The following day, staring at the badger's filthy corpse, which was now being tossed from child to child as part of some improvised new sport, I found my eyes misting over yet again. This time, however, I was crying for all of us. How long have we been rotting beneath our own hedgerow? I got an awful fright.
Ross O'Carroll-Kellyis resting.