Beforehand the room had a precarious equilibrium, dusty fullness, every nook having been gradually filled past full, things balanced, stacked, compressed and wedged away over years, a slow accumulating, the residues of different periods of me. Fadó fadó here I was a child in a bunk bed, then a teen in a cave built from posters and drawings, later arriving at and gathering speed into adulting and never quite coming to terms with it, with being me or being at all. Such a strange thing, to be a thing.

Every strand of stuff I pull at releases a new plume of disorder. I wade into a treacle of material memory.

Insurance and NCT letters, faded receipts, letters and postcards from friends and loves. I aim to go through a morsel each day.

Some nights I push aside a heap on the duvet to reach the solace of bed. 1 am probably, maybe as deep as 2. The small quiet hours where poetry and curious low tides that leave things uncovered on the sand come from. Where does the night go? Drips down to dawn.

Perhaps it is a comfort, to lie under a cairn like this. Half a dozen pairs of swimming goggles. Cycling shorts with holes on the hips from crashes. Bits of helmets, shoe cleat bolts. Rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls of undeveloped film. Oh shit how will I ever get through all of it? Bags of screws, bits of broken cameras, lenses with stuck shutters or with guts hanging out. Envelopes with my name on them and nothing inside. Notebooks of unfinished sentences, unanswered questions, tangents and trails. Officious letters reminding me how awful I am at the systems of living in systems. Dead watches, torn straps, safety pins, scraps of paper. Batteries and coins and books and books and books. So many unread. My tendency to shove the ones I’ve travelled further out of view.

Two tiny plastic snow-globes of the Taj Mahal that kids sold me on that business trip to New Delhi. They trailed us full of eager gestures, brandishing trinkets, marking us as rich foreigners.

Bottles and cups and medals and tickets and boarding passes and nails and screws and shoelaces and thickets of cables and creams and toothbrushes and florescent golf balls and two baseballs with writing on them- indecipherable. Not mine. Brother’s.

Shaving blades. A shirt that I’d refused to wear again because of a memory, stuffed into a plastic box with no lid. Two packs of out-of-date condoms. Camping gear. Four gas cannisters, all used but none emptied. Expired survival meals. A broken typewriter, a broken Gameboy, broken watches, a whole graveyard of broken cameras. Blue and red boxing gloves. Heart rate monitor straps. A set of postcards so neatly written that they draw tears before they can be put back down. Anxious letters from someone to a brother from two decades ago. Two stopwatches and two whistles. How it all flies by. In between the bank statements and marketing junk and delivery invoices, the river of everything.

Each day I aim to go through a morsel but it feels like fighting an Atlantic tide, thrashing against the unperturbed waves.

A little stack of letters that crossed an ocean and sparkle and glimmer with heart and the holding on to that.

Here’s how we go back over our lives of accumulation, and here’s the stuff from which we’ve erected who we are. I think about the difference between getting, having, and having had.

Through heaps of detritus, I divide the artefacts, aspiring to two pure categories of yay and nay, but inventing labels as I go. Good, not good, don’t know, dump, keep, unsure, dump, keep, good, good, crap, nope, unsure, uncertain, maybe, confounded, need a break, what even is this? From a need for clear binaries come hello-ing more options, various levels of unsureness. Each time after a few ticks of the clock the question “have I done enough for now?”

Assemblies of things I do not know what to do with survey me from somewhere between nostalgia, possible-future-use, how icky it feels to put them to landfill, and the low level need for a clearing in the woods that set this whole thing off. I’m not even sure but perhaps it will feel like an escape from a trappedness, a smotheredness squashedness narrowness compressedness. Caught in a purgatory flapping in the wind of various energies, making fitful efforts to move and clarify, but so randomly that the average from afar is a wobbling kind of silly stillness.

I cannot win, but am slowly shrinking some mounds while cycling many pieces of interest back into boxes and shelves for another time, another discussion. it is getting a fraction neater. Why do I need three bottle openers? Is this bulb ever going to be used? Is it wrong to dump unbroken objects?

I remember helping Jackie clearing out the attic of Nanny’s house, the tiny cottage in Mullaghglass within earshot of the sea’s rumblings. Its stout stony walls had raised two generations but how little now there was left, only vague scraps, nothing worth money. It was good to find no material treasure, good to have only memories, to remember that I am partly made from those ocean sounds and the fuchsia hedges and the many scramblings down and up the grassy cliffsides in search of adventure.

I think of spare contemporary homes, chic modern minimal restrained grey clean, and the landfill needed to curate a path to hallowed hollows, all the once sought-after things binned in favour of the space of their absence, the habitats cleared to make the businesses to make the things that will never be used and be stored away until still in their packaging sent to a mountain of waste.

Is it a moral virtue to use what you buy? I imagine an evening cooking a fine dinner slowly, then chucking it into the bin without eating it, and going to bed hungry instead. Why is this so unjust?

I give up again. Little victories. Our domestic spaces and trailing traces. Our materiality, the fill and crumble of our bodies and the river of stuff that we buy.

A big part of art for me is noticing and reflecting in a less than instrumental way. Listening to the world, letting it dent and imprint, and then asserting something back into it, something that you can’t articulate at all clearly. And this is all tied to honesty. And honesty seems to contain the holding of as many details as possible, witnessing them in a oneness, having them speak in a way through you, skirting around the contradictions. Maybe.

Perhaps I can keep on tidying my room now, the room of me, the physical space but more truthfully the scaffolding of memories and beliefs, desires, principles, urges, wishes that I inhabit as my roving interior.

I feel sometimes that I should pray, not to whatever gods may or may not be, but to the absurd speeding cosmos that refuses to be reduced to an understood entity. Sentences directed not to any other but towards the idea of everything, and some untouchable oneness that might move within it. To accept the clutter and the weight of memory while reaching beyond it, to tidy while knowing about entropy, the dance of order and disorder, to keep returning to the wild world.

From the front pocket of a backpack I fish out a decrepit fossil of a banana skin.

Life is absence much as presence,
names, stones, the splitting of sticks
missyous strewn across the holy scape like erratics.
Cavern deep, rope narrow
one day bow, next day arrow.

Some verses will be supermarket queuing to buy
discounted cleaning spray
and words may not mean tomorrow what they mean today
but breeeeeeeeathe;
dig for voice when you strain from want to say,
though we know that the roll of the tune can matter
more than the words we sing
and power is busy and to its children will cling
and what really punctures us happens faraway
to the hearts of others.

And water can shimmer and glint and take our weight and
contain everything that we meant and
hold us in and hold us up if we only stroke stroke strooooke
past the depths where we sank and
the shores where we broke.

And from a distance many things sit pretty but
touch is the more true
and through parts of me folds the feel of
you.

And times we sow solitude and let it grow
teeth that chew loneliness into
this coat rack we call soul
whose shadows are never quite the whole
even if they towering sway and
you may not be tomorrow who you are today.

This is the way:
light will play on the surfaces and
we will dream forwards and backwards and
Love is wild animal
Wild animal is pilot.

Today I’m trying to stay off Instagram. Just for twenty four hours, just for today, just to feel that I have agency or something that feels like agency, though I’m not sure I actually have that agency or where it might begin and end. Me of little faith. I’ve been saying words but have I been saying words, really? Seems to me they’re a cloud of flies, a column of smoke, gibberish spoken from a mountaintop into a ferocious wind, swallowed by some much larger and unknowable conversation, of which I am not a voice. Not a voice at all. What is it that this stuff implies, what of the speaker, can you say it is real, that it has a soul? Could you have a conversation with it?

I’ve been compulsively checking it, Instagram, and it tastes sour, like going hungry through a pile of crisps, desiring more and annoyed at yourself and feeling kinda unwell and both full and empty at once. Crumbs and sticky fingers. I am mad needy, needing pings of love, wanting not to count the total after but to feel each tiny jolt of arriving heart, one by one. Reassure me you little zaps of soothe. The algorithms have us figured out you see, have learned how keen we are to see ourselves seen, to base our sense of ok-ness on validation by likes. Loves even. They’ve stolen our languages of love because they know we want this love deep down we want love and we’re suckers to feeling more of it, a river of love that has no end and maybe no beginning and maybe tomorrow the most love of all if I can only optimise my content. I check my phone for any new messages.

o p t i m i s e

It is raining. Steady heavy mild mist-rain, late September fading greens rain, here comes the dark half rain, shrinking day rain. Swallows still here but on the verge now. Packing their bags. On the wires. Or perhaps they’ve just now set off south? How in the fug is it late September? How now? All an abstraction, this time business. Maybe it’s already March 2028 or June 3045 or whatever. I go back to this again and again, same themes, the strangeness of being and oddness of time and the resistance to actually taking part in the normal schemes of life and living. I feel I run in tight circles, the same thoughts and maybe there is a loop that I have been in since I began. A little toddler bemused that he is already 1 and a half, almost two, and nothing done, nothing done at all.

What is it then? Let’s try to define anxiety without looking it up. A fine challenge for a man who figures out about 1 crossword clue from 20.

Anxiety is a humming shifting of unquiet, a buzz of fearful tension, a microphone turned up way too loud, a barking dog chasing a car’s wheel, grinding gears, a wobble in the spin of a washing machine, static in the nerves, a pot boiling dry, the heater left on, a phone ringing, driving into thick traffic, reading a newspaper, and the bit before you reach to check Instagram or whatever feed you feed.

Later I develop film for the first time in months and 6*6 negs begin to emerge with memories from last year. There are people. Some of these people are now out of reach. And places too, that feel like they were once a big part of me and are now a part of the big strange. And the melancholy that played for the whole summer and before starts to tune up again. It swoops and curves and there is a falling away, an unmooring that is always unmooring and never quite unmoored, falling with no ground below. AM I learning something about the nature of loss?

Work to do, work to do. I need to try and fix the tripod and order more fixer and figure out how to develop lots of film quickly.

I breathe yet and here breathe into that old website that feels a billion me’s out of date and receding.

Work to do. Work to do. We’re always living the dream, it’s just not always the good kind of dream.

Out in the rhododendron, an old wind lies coiled lengthways along thick roots. The acidic slopes they twist through drop steeply towards the curve of the fjord. Sounds of the Atlantic and its dwellers drift up on younger, more eager airs. This tired wind has lost most of its voice, taken to a bed of sinewy shade. It has grown accustomed to perpetual dimness, tolerant of its intolerant soilmates, respectful of their drive, their entrepreneurial vision. But it struggles to relax, to unhitch memories from hungrier ages hurling foam-tipped gales or exhaling light sighs across glint-rippled tapestries.

Some days the fishermen retreat, cursing. Other days return with blessings. Always somewhere hearts are left unsealed to draughts.

Reilly is in the school’s round room. Nothing seems to have changed since he walked out ago ago after the last exam. Faded watercolours and a framed inspirational quote. “Words must be weighed, not counted”. When he’d started reading heavy books he’d felt big in a small town, but now a piece of furniture, identifiable from distance. The real heft lies in the oral tradition, in such venerable classics as “MAYBE SOME OTHER TIME” or “NO”. You can be big in a small town if passing through. Or become scaled down by a narrow description that pares your mysteries back, as far back even as wherever the bare line of dignity is drawn.

That’s Pat Reilly’s middle lad, the dropout who missed the free in the quarter-final.

Out near the lakes, in roofless ruins, a dream of lost love is wedged, a folded note in a gap over a big irregular hearthstone. It once burned bright enough to throw light across the back of a winter, but comings and goings faded to goings alone, and later the village was emptied of its dreamers. This survivor has grown used to silence, tuned to the wear and tear of season etched onto season, grand palimpsest of skins.

It watches the thin sally growing amid tumbled stones, spring fuzz being overtaken by impatient leaves, impossible greens bucking in the breeze.

“Will wait for you on Tuesday at Lough Shindilla by the pier.” ends the note, after much leaking of love. The dream reads its text often, alternating the focus, perhaps on the yearning opening, notes of despair about the middle, urgency towards the end. It looks like it took a long time to finish, many drafts deep.

Can it still be unfolded?

Andrea reaches for her water bottle, wedged into the backpack’s side pocket. She keeps walking. It must be more than four miles to the hostel. Here would be an ok spot to pitch, but after last night’s fragmented sleep and loud rain, she wants a shower, soft bed, sound of voices.

Anxiety from the early days has gone quiet. Now there’s a basicness, the gradual changing of terrain, the carrying of food and planning of meals, the arriving and disappearing of towns and villages. Out here in the wilder sections, wide skies, map checking, big silences, mountains. Soon, the ocean. Can almost smell it.

She pauses to take a photo. She likes verses of skies that carry soft pales, subtle gradients, the vault opposite a sun sliding down horizon’s lip.

Is this what she needed? Is she healing? The better days are when she doesn’t ask.

“The green’s too green. Looks fake.” says Reilly. Michael glances up at the bobbing poplars, continues his tangent. “Which is more important?” he asks. “To be able to do something, or to want to do something?” They are behind the boathouse. The swelling of late April is giving way to the riotous advances of May. Reilly is, as he says, “flat”. The greens look like someone added a filter.

“I suppose if you have things you want to do then you are probably not depressed?”, he says.

Michael snaps open another tin. “Think of all the things you could actually be doing right now if you had a reason. All the places you could be.”

“But how much time should you spend thinking about being somewhere else?”

“Yeah. Tricky. Selling discontent; that’s how a lot of the world seems to roll.”

“There’s a market for it.”

The river gurgles, water boatmen skim about a calm crook in the shelter of a bay in the bank. “I didn’t realise that hanging out by yourself was an ability until I couldn’t do it.” says Reilly. Michael reaches out to kick a low green plant. “That’s another one. Invasive”, he declares. “Probably brought in when they widened this car park”. They survey the car park and what it had brought in. More cars. A jogger goes by, nodding.

“Knotweed,” says Michael. “That’s the real bastard.” He begins to list its qualities. Grows ten centimetres in a day, gets right into concrete foundations, wreaks them from the inside out. Invincible to potions. Sword hacking only makes it spread. “And once it gets in! You can spend years at it, think it’s wiped out, and a horse can trot along after a decade, kick up the ground, and boom, off it goes again.” They both sup. “You know you can’t get a mortgage or sell your house in England if they find it?” They silently consider such a predicament. Neither would be given a mortgage or feel comfortable talking to a bank manager, even about the weather.

They both struggle to explain their unmortgageable trajectories, or would if asked. Let sleeping black hounds lie and so on, but these things have a tendency to gatecrash the small hours.

“Sharon said there’s a pile of it out her way, you know, where the old road goes out to the lakes. Someone dumped a load of topsoil. I heard it was Fitzy’s dad.”

The apathetic old wind has no plans to unwrap itself, but today, all is change. Distant engine noise since morning, getting closer and closer, until soil twists and buckles in a torrent of sound and hack and slice. An attempt at clearing is underway, heavy machines cutting into the soft earth, saws buzzing into stems, Roundup in syringes.

Dislodged, the wind is thrown into the light. It spins, knocks off a man’s hat, rustles the glossy toxic leaves, then rises, jostling awkwardly with the prevailing, afraid at first, confused, then higher up beginning to waken.

It will blow inland, find something loose to scatter.

A forever home is being hoisted up where Fitzy’s lane ends, down past his dad’s sheds, in on the field where Reilly’s oldest brother once tore his knee on a chunk of sheep bone when attempting a sliding tackle. The raft is down, nine feet of wall waiting for a roofer, thick layer of the latest insulation padding up the floor atop a warren of air-to-water pipes. “You can’t even build without this stuff now” says Fitzy. “They won’t sign off on it.” He says he doesn’t know how the Dublin crowd got planning permission in the first place, but they have connections. And cash.

“They’ll fire it up on Airbnb,” he says to Reilly, pulling a leaf from a trendy shrub. “Money flows, price goes up, they’ll come down for a few weeks in the summer.”

Fitzy has the engineering job, mortgageable, never says how much his aul fella got for the site. Claims he doesn’t know, though he bought the beemer after. “At the end of the day it’s money coming in,” he says. “The place needs it. And what’s the alternative?”

Over Lough Shindilla, a stray memory roams, hovering between oaks on the little island, then across to the blackstoned shore. The water is starting to warm. Spring at late tilt, skylarksong, hawthorns preparing to wear white. It has been detached for so long, so free, so lonely, trying to keep its now from seeping into its original. How does it go again?

Two by the water, evening into night, bats flickering over the lake, an unlikely pairing, an intersection of stories, simple but charged hours, hinge on which change spins, one with a name that the other cannot hear later without darts of prickly blue.

The memory has to be careful not to over-remember itself, aware of a delicate co-existence, so easy to distort.

As it traces another lap of the dark lake, a red van comes bouncing down the narrow track running to the east, and the memory is nudged that way by a sudden kink in the air.

Just off the path, Andrea sees a cluster of ruins. Instinctively she begins to walk over, crossing spongy ground, a stream, an undulating field of lazy beds. A wind blows by, throwing hair across her eyes, shaking a skinny willow that grows in one of the long-deserted homes.

Reilly figures he has the right spot, leaves the van on the rough road, pulls the plastic bag from his pocket, walks to the mounds where people dump, marked by a pair of ancient mattresses. On his phone he opens up the knotweed picture. Mike said even a few morsels would do. A fine gift for the blow-ins and their tidy lawns. But he sees first only an indistinct mess of plants, and by the time he starts to resolve them and pick out the segmented redgreen stems of Fallopia japonica, evening is afoot. He puts on gloves and pulls scraps of stem and root and soil into the bag. A wind kicks up. Everything mobile shivers. He straightens up suddenly, shivering too, and he remembers sharply.

She did come after all, down to the pier and she threw stones into the water and cursed them all to hell and they had both cried and sat there for a long time in silence. Until darkness chased the last glimmer of orange over the hills and a crescent moon walked.

And then. Then the long lapse. Heavy whether weighed or counted. And what exactly did she say? And what did he say back? And why?

Andrea lifts the camera up in front of the unusual hearthstone, inside the remnants of cottage. The odd wind returns, stronger, swirling round the little space. The world begins to flap, and when she moves to fix her balance something small and folded blows out from the wall, lands by her feet.

Reilly stuffs the bag into his pocket, leaves the van where it is, starts walking down to the lake, trying to remember better. How is it so urgent and yet so vague?

Impossible blues, impossible greens, impossible kinds of memories.

The note is almost worn through, and tears when she unfolds it, but Andrea can read parts, and a part of her that has been still, stirs.

She sets her bag down, slides out the map. It wobbles in the wind. There’s the lake it names, Shindilla, just a few hundred metres west, right next to the track. She hauls the pack onto her back and clambers out over a crumple of stones.

Beyond the pier the wind is giddy, digs creases into the water. It too remembers being here before. It cannot help but caress, pick and drop, poke or knock, whatever will budge to its bidding.

“Oh, hi, sorry, I didn’t think anyone was out here!”

“That’s ok! Neither did I. Are you from nearby?”

“For my sins. You doing the Western Way?”

Night has set. A red van bumps from a narrow track onto the N59, turns towards Clifden.

Inside, an unlikely pairing of unmortgageables chat with the openness of unguarded strangers.

In his pocket, a plastic bag of dirt and invasives. In her pocket, shards of paper. Between the worn engine pistons, an old wind, massaged by the vibrating drone. In the cabin air, a detached memory that is letting go, ready to be written over. All are
Flimsily tied to
These fleeing hours
That we sometimes share
In happenstance hush that flies
Between the tumbling walls of
Noise.

Written Spring 2022. Been some time since I finished even a very short story. Such is life. Is it even finished now? Every time I read it I see tweaks. I tweak and untweak, never quite sure about the direction. Better or worse? It’s not quite like left or right. I think my stories are both too simple and too complex. Narrative cluelessness, too much texture. I have a tendency to slip into poetic fancies. Fallacies. How much of our mental scape is fantasy? I think life has a tendency to slip into many different kinds of clothes. On it goes. Thank you for reading, you are part of the chosen few. Praise be with you. Go surf that void.

I am that shrugging embodied man who does not care that he is in an advertisement.

There is a little round tabletop and a pen with a fine click and a soft blank waiting page and her darting but settled yet darting eyes from across the bay of coffee smells and clinking spoons. I add in such restlessness to make this agenda mobile, give it room. I pull on lines and tweak tensions as the hull knocks on waves and ocean opens out. But that is not what this is about.

Of course that sea is near enough for gulls to shriek in their harbour of creased skies, and the narrow street outside to parade a trail of intriguing characters. No diesel fumes here. No letters from the bank or hospital. No unexpected phone calls. But I miss the point as always.

—

Where are you now?

You cannot look?

—

My hand above the page, grasping the pen. The bustle glancing to acknowledge a hush, like new Spring watching the sun raise its conducting gleam. The apex of ease, spasm of creation, an airman heaving his propeller round until it catches and abruptly explodes into smoky clattering go.

—

Did you leave out the bins?

No.

—

No, I refuse to cast this with characters from my spare interiors. I love you all but I cannot. I cannot be let loose in my own free domains. I will bring me to a standstill again. It is another I, that comes here, sits intensely and exudes unities, notes unruffled the passings of weather and  emptying of cups and clocks. Here they will not ask exactly what it is that this I does, or where exactly it is that this I comes from or goes back to. Outside wait empty sets of possible futures, uncorrupted by script or gesture. Of course I wander as usual right off the script, such as there is.

—

Can you fill out section 3 B on Pensions?

Sorry, I was miles away. Miles away.

—

Dreams are so fragile, too eager for the intrusion of anxious ripples. The part that cooks up suggestions, that has been shouting ‘is it a ghost?’ since a child’s mind painted in the first shadows, is always busy in the kitchen. True fantasy takes diligent work. Commitment. Dedication. I imagine, in any case. My efforts to meditate are like trying to juggle with clumsy limbs. Thoughts go up, come back down, spill to the ground. What am I left holding? Bare fingers and a clock that refuses to stop beating.

—

So I’ll call you in a few weeks and organise to pick up my stuff.

Ok.

—

Americano, no milk or sugar?

Yes please.

I endeavour to project a light and open confidence. A high road overlooking the ocean. A break in the clouds. There are some people in but the table is free. It is always free.

And could I get a chocolate brownie?

For here?

Yes.

I will sit and flicker between shabby slouch and collected poise. It is more difficult with the backpack shoved under my legs. It is far too bulky and old. I wrestle out another sheet of blank paper. It is the same sheet. If only I knew how to draw. Then I could be free.

A poor snake charmer, feeling that he was passing his prime, went to the mountain to pray for a better life. “God, I have served you well,” he prayed. “I have paid my dues and expected little in return. But I am getting old and weary and life is avoiding me. I am tired of being invisible to my family and friends. Soon they will forget even my name.” He hiked higher and higher, until he became lost on a holy peak capped with snow and ice.

Somewhere high on this mountain he stopped again to pray with chattering teeth next to the ice and noticed there was a large shape buried within it. Next to the surface, he could make out huge curved teeth and an enormous head. “It is a dragon!” he cried. “A real dragon! This is my future. I have charmed asps, adders, constrictors and cobras. But people lose interest. But a dragon, a real dragon; this will make me famous. I will not be forgotten.”

So the snake charmer returned to his home village far below in a quiet valley. He traded all of his remaining belongings and claimed all his unclaimed favours to assemble a dozen deadbeat donkeys, a big old wagon, and a sack of food and supplies. With great difficulty he went back up the mountain, and began to chip out a huge block of ice with the dragon inside. After a long week of cold cold work, the massive ice cube was carved out and over the next two days he used logs, wedges, chains, ropes, and the donkeys to slide it onto the wagon. Slowly they slipped and slid back down the steep frozen slopes.

Once they reached flatter ground again, they set off, not for the snake charmer’s village, but for the ancient city of Baghdad. There he would find the people who would appreciate his dragon and see that he was no simple dull snake charmer from the highlands.

The road to Baghdad gradually became hot and dusty. The donkeys strained, complained, and grew irritable. They threw kicks and bit each other. Hot sun poured down for hours on end. Faintly at first the heavy block of ice began to melt. The snake charmer gave meltwater to the bickering donkeys and drank more himself. For a long time it seemed they barely moved. But slowly the weight reduced as the ice melted and the pace quickened, and the snake charmer forgot how tired he had become and straightened his shoulders and sang to himself walking behind the cart.

After some days, they began to meet other travellers on the dry road, and some noticed the strange wagon with its strange cargo of melting ice. They began to follow behind, arguing about what was going on and breaking off chunks of ice to suck and share. “What is this ice for? What is that shape inside? A frozen cow? But it is too big. An elephant? Hey old man, where are you going? Your strange load is shrinking with each step.”

The snake charmer soon lost his patience and tried to get them to leave, cursing them and urging the reluctant donkeys to trot, canter, gallop. They refused. So, he stopped at a traders and swapped the two weakest for a huge sheet of canvas that he fastened over the ice. Now it looked inconspicuous, except for little streams of water that fell from the sides. Despite this, the group behind the ice only grew larger as he approached the city. Water poured busily and at times the whole wagon lurched unpredictably. The snake charmer had not slept in a week and down his forehead dripped an unending line of sweat.

Finally, they reached one of the city’s big open squares. Exhausted but happy again, the snake charmer patiently began to lay out his wagon and for a crowd to gather. “Come see!” he shouted. “The most amazing sight of your lives!” “From the frozen peak of an ancient mountain.” Under the covered wagon he lit a fire to melt away the last of the ice. “Come see the world famous Mahmoud, the famous dragon charmer.” By now a crowd had indeed gathered. But they mocked the snake charmer. “There are no dragons you fool!” some cried. “Go back to the mountains.” “Where is your eel, your worm?” The snake charmer paid no heed and eventually took his carefully polished snake flute and began to slowly begin his favourite melody. Every time he played this he was brought back to early boyhood, sitting on his grandfather’s knee in the evenings in the village, listening to sounds of family and mountain, singing and chirping and dozing until dusk had fully dropped into night. And when he played it, it seemed to share the canopy of its oasis with others, even the mesmerised snakes. The rustling crowd quietened, stopped mocking, and pushed closer.

Now the wagon began to twitch and the canvas to shift. The charmer gestured at two of the followers. They grabbed hold of the canvas on each side and dragged it off. Underneath was a groggy thick-scaled emerald green dragon. Waves of gasps rippled through the people. The dragon lifted its head and opened its bright golden eyes. The snake charmer missed not a note, and played with tears flowing down his cheeks. “I have done it” he realised. “They will not forget me now. They will not ignore me nor disrespect me again. I have realised my inner truth on the canvas of life.”

The dragon swayed its head in time. But it was still waking. It began to unfold and stretch powerful wings and flick a long narrow tail. The closest people began to back away. Still the charmer played, smoother and faster than he had ever managed before, than he had ever thought possible with his thin fingers. His life’s many little failures and few little triumphs all passed through his lips and fingers and down into the melody and out into the air of the crowded square. Smoke was now pouring from the dragon’s snorting nostrils. it opened huge jaws revealing glittering dagger-sharp teeth, and it yawned a huge long yawn and stared at its surroundings. Then its eyes began to focus, narrow, notice. Suddenly it casually spat an arc of liquid flame across the square, and the tree at the centre burst into fire. People began to scream and push and run.

Now fully awake and impossibly hungry the dragon stood fully upright, and tore at the donkeys still tied to the wagon. The snake charmer, through his playing, was unable to stop, staring up while staying in tune, his fingers a blur. Huge blasts of red and white heat shot over his head. The dragon looked at him, blinked, and reached down to neatly bite him in two. The tune ended. The dragon swivelled to grasp at more people with tooth, claw and molten flame.

The square ran red with blood and burning, and when nothing was left that stirred a living limb, the fully wakened dragon spread wide its wings, rose into the air still belching fire, and set off to find some other excitement. The snake charmer’s mute flute drifted by on the red river.

**Donal Kelly, January 2020.**

A version of the original Rumi story can be found here: https://harpers.org/blog/2007/12/rumis-the-snake-catchers-tale/

The snake is your animal-soul. When you bring it
into the hot air of your wanting-energy, warmed
by that and by the prospect of power and wealth,
it does massive damage.

Three constables crouch in the lee of the short concrete wall at the stubby pier, their leaking boat bouncing in the miserly harbour shelter. Away from worn old pots and barrels, pipes of a half dozen stills are piled in a tangle by their mud-caked leather boots. The dusk has been swallowed early by thick torn cloud. An unexpected storm is dragging over the small island, raising broad hills of wave on the exposed stretch back out to the mainland.

Having appropriated the poitín operations in a rush, and quit the rising frustration of the islanders, constables three have returned to find their boat scraping loose against the pier in the opening notes of rising gale, with a fresh hole torn near the waterline. Retreat blocked, angry locals behind, in the half shelter of a loose wall, they consider the long night ahead.

Three young constables crouch and mutter and swear.

“Why did we start so bloody late?”

“Why send three? What use is three? They sent a dozen and more to Inishkea, and that was in June.”

“Is that a light up on the hill?”

“Up where?”

“Did you see it?”

“Can’t see a thing.”

Flick flick lights in corners of eyes. Snapping in and out, eager winking notions. Partly there and mostly not. Why does this life of constabling flicker along its edges?

“We should have left.”

“Go if you want. I’m not getting in that boat.”

“Send the three buckos out, and himself grigging behind the desk.”

“How was I to know?”

“It’s rotten cold.”

“There it is again.”

Squat glass bottles of the bitter contraband, fragments of grass floating inside, stacked in a short line. To pass the tumult, three constables taste the fiery liquid. A little to warm cold limbs, a little to burn hungry throat, a little to steady tight nerves. Sip and swig in the leaky lee. Constables three lament their troubles.

“What if we fall asleep?”

“In this weather?”

“With this stuff.”

“We shouldn’t drink it.”

“It’s bloody freezing. Pass it over.”

“We’re sitting ducks.”

“It’s alright for ducks, we’re not made for this.”

She was a fine morning alright and held the gaze and what more could a slosher hope to hold? Respectable receptacles and the same dinner for every tomorrow and pension enough to repair old window panes. Don't mind them they're only jealous of a clean-ironed uniform. An instrument of the wholey God himself and holding hard onto that gaze still it's only a job and who would want to leave a solid patch and rogue away?

“We’ll be good for nothing soon, sleepy and pissed.”

“That’s when they’ll sneak down, throw us into the harbour, sink that bloody boat.”

“Would they?”

“Send the three gombeens to the islands. A great joke.”

Another swig, another rumbling gust over three constables crouching further down.

“I saw lights, up there. Look again.”

“Why are we waiting?”

“Lights out in this gale? Have to be out for us. What else would they be at?”

“We broke up their stills. Probably their only easy money.”

“How do they make a penny out here?”

“Less shite than we have to put up with I’d say.”

“We’re soft. Wouldn’t last here.”

Mallards landing in new canal and the rustle of new park grass under a shining new pram and always something new in the pockets and in the mind and no holes in the new socks and why would they be shouting and roaring over old shite they can't understand and why hiding rifles in damp sheds and always cursing the world and dumb with threats and isn't it good enough as it is?

“A week maybe, never a winter.”

“Now’s our chance. They’re just watching us get drunk.”

“What do we do so?”

“I’m just saying, why wait?”

“This really is strong tack.”

“I think I’d like this wild life.”

“Never mind your wild life muck.”

“We can cut them off up there, or scatter them. We have these ties. We can lash them down. For Christ’s sake we’ve pistols. What do they have? Only old blunt tools.”

“Blunt Knives still sharp enough.”

“Shovels? Oars? Or rocks. Pitchforks. Haven’t they fists and boots?”

“We can tie them down easy. Sleep out this gale, get out quick in the morning. It’s a short run in.”

“It’s long enough.”

“Send out the townies. I’m sure they’re having a good laugh now round the fire.”

Night steadily clamps down on the island. Constables three match each flung gale with fresh sup, squirming and cursing their discomfort and fear.

“Now or never.”

“I’m not staying on this blasted pier all night.”

“Sons of bitches laughing at us.”

One unfolds unsteadily, finally emboldened enough, and the others haltingly follow. For a moment they stand and rock, clumsily checking pistols and waiting for bubbles of dizziness to burst. Then they set off up the knuckle of hill where they swore they saw torches. Up mushy slope, with squalls haring down against them. Boots sliding in short sheep-chewed grass, clumps of rough heather, spurts of rushes, knobs of weathered stone. Boots sticking in holes of wet black soil, falling into hidden hollow drops, taking jerking arrhythmic steps.

“Keep low. Keep low.”

“What?”

“No, the other way, right, right.”

“Quit roaring.”

“What?”

Constables three, table fed mainland gombeens far from the paved ends of regional towns, labouring over unsympathetic soil.

“Low, low, come on, get up.”

Marooned keepers of parochial peace at the mercy of concealed savages, offical steel pistols loaded and cocked and cleaned in prescribed belts.

And now up and over mushsoft hill brow, wind squinting into sharp whip, barrage of rain slung over dull blunt dark. The entire Atlantic tilting from sky to ocean bowl, emptying ancient fatigues on harassed outskirts of rock. Tide after tide of rolling wild, breath chasing breath with barely a gap between.

Three bone drenched constables can no longer speak or swig or see, and wobble under each wave of rushing air. By no choosing now they follow in hunkered lean a furrow towards faint broken cottage walls where field stones converge. Wordless they stumble over spillings of knocked wall and in under the flapping last scrap of roof.

Suddenly they are inside with the islanders.

Teak tough currach-worn men of scythe and oar and long dark damp-turf winters and unshielded ocean sun, blunted on rock-ridden land and giddy pitchfleck sea. Six of them in a low huddle round a lean fire, drunk.

A sudden disorderly straightening of men in dark, one groggy as the next, in the careless lashings of wind singing round the gable to lift and drop the rusted morsel of roof.

Shouts in two languages, severe postures of expectation, all muted in the noise and clutter. Two huddles separate, and constables raise shoulder to shoulder three shivering steel pistols.

“Stay back.”

Goose loose in a bog's bag of flesh. Badger sow stuck in a scraw of tunnel and skinny terriers yelping down down down. Accumulation of wave on wave, one nameless as the next. Creases in bare skin that will soon be leather cliff face waiting to crumble. Wave on wave and the wearing of rock into small round beach stones. Holding on to the gaze of the world.

“Go on. Back.”

Two poitín poised drunk huddles in a broken cottage. An islander leans carefully forward with oar calloused palms showing.

“Steady, lads. Steady now.”

Gawk into shadows on the handle end of a prescription pistol. More polished than pointed. Not what they teach you in constable school. Girth of a long night's craw, carbuncled tunnels of trapped badgersows stonesundering on an uncle's farm into hollow tiers that narrow to thin points. Every man's mainland has breaking shores.

Filled to the gills with the nectar of appropriated island stills, rocking on snapping air snatching at poor shelter. Every man has his myth to maintain, for his sons of sons to be or not to be, or the torture of a bad word from one neighbouring ear to another.

“Steady now. It’s a bad night to be out in lads. A bad aul wind.”

There are myths to maintain and defences to be manned, for fear of being caught on the wrong end of logical inductions. But here, they may reason, before or behind raised handle ends, of gains and losses and future returns, and of the distance of defendable truth from boozeshot memory.

Gusts in the gulley. Constables three consider the drying of feet and the knowing grins worn by sergeant suits.

“I don’t remember exactly, sir. It was a long night. A terrible storm indeed. At least nobody came to harm.”

“We waited out the night sir, by the pier. No shelter at all, not even a tree. Damn lucky to get out of it in one piece.”

“We held our ground, sir, and were well surrounded. But held firm sir.”

“You can have this damn uniform back, I’m done done done.”

Oar worn fingers hold out an open bottle of illicit booze.

“No need for any trouble, is there lads? Don’t we all have homes to go to?”

The thin fire fizzes flame enough to throw weak wobbling shadows.

Lowering shaking pistol, a constable of three reaches his free hand slowly for the outstretched bottle.

“It’s a fierce storm for sure. I don’t know how ye manage them out here.”

“`We manage, same as everyone.”

“`But the winters must be cruel.”

A long pause swallowed in gust. Slowly shoulders relax, soften, and two huddles shrink into one over lean flame.

In the brokendown island cottage tough men drink themselves dumb on dense spirits in the dark of a wild storm. The night folds into itself, and folds again. Stained terriers chasing tumbling down views. What can you grow where the hardiest of trees can’t hold a root?

Far from the paved ends of regional town streets, wave and wind drum away as deepdrunk sleep soaks up the remains of the night.

Hours later.

After elongated waking with coughground draganchor sunkbog wetskull heads, surfacing into fresh dawn, with sea drone from edge to edge, three constables whole stumble out alone over broken stones.

The storm has blown its guts out. The small hill over the harbour is soggy and benign. A skylark pauselessly sings somewhere above. Loose lumps of cloud trawl higher up in implausible blue.

The copper pots and blackened barrels and scraps of pipe have all disappeared from the pier. The hole in the boat had been hastily plugged. The stretch out to the mainland is calm and flat as new road and glimmergreen in the sprinkled glint of early sun. You could make out the white gables of houses speckling the strip between the sea and the hills.

On a clear day, they say, you can see out what’s cooking inside through the open windows.

See the line, it’s far away but
Getting closer all the time
I turn my back, try to run, but
Can’t escape what’s in my mind.

Anyway, anywhere, it is waiting
For a slip, for a fall, for my failing.

Under the boards of all our floors is a hollow space
Where we confide in what we hide in our shadows’
Deep blue eyes
That recognise us
Our secret sides and
Our trapdoor smiles.

See his box, concede, I’m in it
It’s all I’ve got, so paper thin
Salutate my loves, my limits
Something’s loose under my skin.

This is a simple salute to the folds in our shadows and the rustles in waiting dark nights. You never know when a fog will fall, a darkness will drop, or a day will snap in two. It’s not something that can be outran, or contained or pacified. So sometimes you have to sit and confide, and stare into its pools of eyes, dark and blue and wide. Sink or swim. Things get out or they get in.

Here’s a fun way to generate a headache. What’s the definition of irony?

Is it when you write a song called ‘Ironic’ that lists examples of irony but which aren’t technically ironic?

First, here’s how a movie can get a definition to lodge in your memory.

Exhibit A: Reality Bites. Ethan Hawke, Winona Ryder, 1994, written by Helen Childress.

“It’s when the actual meaning is the complete opposite to the literal meaning”

Ok, so irony is an opposition. I say X and X, taken literally, means X. But the actual meaning, in the context is -X, the very opposite. So… sarcasm? The words “Well done!” taken literally are an expression of praise, like “Nice work” or “Good job”. But If you drop the vase and it shatters into a gazillion fragments and I say it slowly in an exaggerated tone with my eyebrows raised, then it means the very opposite. Its literal translation, without context or tone, might be “You idiot!”

But this seems incomplete. Irony is used in more ways than to indicate only a clash between literal and intended meanings. It hints at other forces. Dark ones. Good stuff just doesn’t seem to be as ironic. And this definition includes the word “literal”. Literally. Oh God, a word that gives my brain indigestion. They seem akin, do they not?

The way people use the word “literally” is literally ironic.

Is it not interesting that these concepts are often seen together? Irony plays with literal meanings versus reality (whatever that is). ‘Literally’ itself is used to add adjectival force while also keeping it ironic. Despite its own literal meaning. Maybe because of it. You can get mad as hell and not take it anymore or accept that language changes even if its use requires rules and coordination.

Moving onwards. Or backwards. Sideways?
Exhibit B: a divisive list of coincidences that may or may not be ironic or whose lack thereof may itself be intentional or otherwise a case of irony.

• Dying the day after winning the lottery at a grand old age
• A black fly floating in your beougeoise glass of white wine
• A death row pardon arriving 2 minutes after the execution is carried out
• Rain on your wedding day
• A free ride offered after you’ve just paid for one
• Good advice that you ignored
• The one time you confront your fear of flying, and the plane really does crash
• Getting stuck in a traffic jam when you’re already late as hell
• Going out for a cigarette break only to stand under a No Smoking sign
• Looking for a spoon and finding all knives
• Meeting the person of your dreams, then meeting their partner

Also 1994! Alanis Morissette.

Bitterly has this divided the west, into those that hum along and the rest, who call foul, foul!: “NOT IRONIC! (how ironic)”

But switch on your ironometer and consider: You live in the west of Ireland. Rain is a natural state of being. Aha, you declare, not on my damn wedding day. You organise your big day out in the Atacama desert, where it hasn’t rained in years and years. You joke about escaping the shite weather at home. Most people decline the invitations: why the hell are you going so far away? Do you know how much it costs to get there? And then of course it rains. In the Atacama. And back in Ireland, blazing sun. Is there not here the sweet taste of irony?

Now, you may argue that this is just plain old misfortune- a regular-sized portion of coincidence. Ketchup?

Exhibit C: So what do dictionaries have to say?

Definitions of Irony seem to list a few bases. Here be three:

1. Using language where the intended/suggested meaning is opposite to the literal/straight interpretation of the expression, often used as wit
2. When something happens that is contrary to expectations
3. When an audience knows something that a character in a play doesn’t (dramatic)

Definition from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/irony

Seems plausible. Look at the last example though: “The irony is that his mistake will actually improve the team’s situation.” Did he intend the mistake?

The examples have it, but does the definition itself describe how that taste arises, that ‘delicious’ irony that might be ‘gotten’ like a joke. In what direction are the roots?

Like a joke, irony seems to involve reversal and revelation. It also seems to require some kind of jarring juxtaposition or incongruity: a clash between what is expected or literal, and what is actual. Now, if I use sarcasm, it could be argued that the intended, sarcastic meaning implied by tone and context, is itself the expected/intended, even the literal meaning (see, it can always go meta). But there is still a clash here, a use of language to indirectly express a meaning, a usage that includes “I intend the opposite to what the words add up to normally” that is immediately revealed as it is said.

So, getting closer, maybe. Maybe not. There is a contrast. But also, a connection, a… drumroll… symmetry. For example, here’s a non-ironic rain:

• It rains on your wedding day in the west of Ireland

.
And here, an ironic rain.

• It rains on your wedding day in the Atacama after you travelled there from Ireland specifically to avoid rain. Meanwhile there’s a grand dry day at home

Ok, you can protest. See, you can always protest about the effect of ingredients. But what was added to make it seem much more ironic? I declare that it was this polar symmetry: a link, connection, that the brain immediately recognises and appreciates on a narrative level, the level where we ascribe intention and blame and significance. It satisfies us; resolves like a joke can. Intentions and outcomes, or even different aspects of an event are linked in some tasty way, or on some plane of expression or meaning.

Here’s another example: Not ironic

• You crash your car

.
Oops. That’s unfortunate. You weren’t hurt though; it was a hypothetical crash. Now, add something that gives it a taste of irony

• You crash your car on the way to attend a safer-driving lesson

Hmm, can I add some more?

• You crash your car on the way home from a safer-driving lesson

yes, yes, getting there

• You crash your car on the way to teach a safer-driving lesson

Mighty, it stinks of irony!

• You crash your car, distractedly commenting on an article about dangerous driving, while driving to teach a safer-driving lesson.

Interestingly, while this seems strongly to taste of irony, you can still contest. Contesting levels of irony is fun. There’s a website called http://www.isitironic.com/ that allows you to vote on whether something is or is not ironic. Currently, popular results include:

Exhibit E Things whose ironic quality is popularly voted on, on a website dedicated to exactly this sort of thing:

So, irony is difficult to pin down in a way that will cleanly cut the ironic from the non-ironic. It’s almost like asking to split jokes into funny and not-funny. Count the laughs? It also shows that some stuff is more ironic than other stuff. At some point most of use will taste it, at another very few of us. It cannot boil down to strictly looking for black flies in (white) Chardonnay, or saying ‘good’ when you mean ‘bad’.

I propose to explain it as I have been using it here, as a taste that is affected by a bunch of things and which may be argued about until the cows come home and listen to Miles Davis while drinking hot chocolate until 5 a.m. But deep down what we are looking for most of the time, at least according to current use, is some satisfying connection or symmetry on some level, plus a conflict or jarring incongruity, and generally misfortune. The conflict/contrast/clash needs to be related in some way to the similarity.

A stab at an alternative definition:

Irony is a quality attributed to expressions or situations involving some revealed intersection of incongruity and symmetry.

Let’s say I say X but mean -X, i.e. sarcasm. There is an incongruity between the literal and actual meanings. Where’s the symmetry? Well, there’s a polar symmetry to opposites, as in black and white or great and awful. The polar symmetry of using opposties intersects with the conflict of saying something that seems to be untrue.

Let’s say I’m in a group trying to organise where to eat, and we go on and on and nowhere will get enough consensus. “Great to see such agreement :-)” I post. I indicate irony with the smile/tone. There is a literal/actual disparity. There is a symmetry of these opposites. It’s not the same as saying “Sad to see such disagreement”. Consider how you might react to it.
Us (loads of texts): Arguing
Me (text): “Great to see such agreement :-)”
You (thought 1): Ok, he said it’s great to see agreement.
You (thought 2): But there is no agreement!
You (thought 3): Ooh, is he doing sarcasm?
You (thought 4): Look, he used a smiley face: yes, definitely sarcasm
You (taste): irony feels?
The irony is used as a device of wit. What does that do? It points out the disagreement without attributing blame, without challenging the actors. If I say “Jeez, why can’t we agree, it’s simples” people might get defensive. The tone is different. Language that tastes of irony can be a useful tool used with nuance. Wit can allow you to say stuff without directly challenging people. Suggestion not force.

Going back up to the car crash example: You crash your car on the way to teach a safer-driving lesson. Hee hee. You end up doing exactly what you teach people not to do. This symmetry is where irony seems to be very strong.

And the bear/bare? just a pun? But see the contrast between ‘bare’ and ‘hairy’ and then the connection/symmetry between ‘bear’ and ‘bare’. They intersect at bare/bear. It is the opposite (bears are hairy) to the meaning of another word that sounds the very same (bare is NOT hairy)

How about posting this comment: “I think you’ll find its ‘their’ not ‘there'”. Ah the sweet irony of a grammar error in a post deriding a grammar error. What has happened? Message 1: “the grammar be bad”. Message 2 (revelation): Message 1 has bad grammar. Symmetry: the mistakes are the same. And it’s self referential to boot. Irony and its kin contain within the urge to eat one’s own tail. When it appears, is recognised, language loses transparency, shows its mechanics, and a game may begin. Must begin- as when a pun is made and conversation dissolves into competitive pun compositions until everyone gets tired of being meta and language drops back into the service of pointing at things.

Dramatic, Socratic, and Cosmic Irony
In dramatic irony, an audience knows something important that a character doesn’t. In these cases there is still a disparity: the characters will say and do things that have a titillating symmetry with that audience knowledge. Hamlet will play mad, then Polonious interprets it in a totally different way. The audience sees both. When Polonious talks about the madness they feel that symmetry and the incongruity/discomfort of knowing it. “You fool” you want to shout, “you’ve got it backwards!”. “It’s behind you!” “In the curtains!”

With Socratic irony, Socrayts plays dumb and pretends not to know the meaning of supposedly basic words like, er, justice. Pfffsh! who doesn’t know what that means? “Tell me Thrasymachus, since I haven’t a clue myself, being but a fool- what does this word ‘justice’ actually mean?” In this case, we are the audience and we know that Socrates is feigning. And there it is, the very taste, as he exposes Thrasymachus’s concept of justice as being dumb by himself pretending to play dumb. Educational dramatic ironying?

‘Cosmic’ irony is like dramatic irony and close to the feel of a joke, except the joke is being played, by the universe, on you. This generally involves something bad happening to you that you didn’t expect, and in fact, seems to indicate dramatic irony at your expense where someone or something else knows your situation and does something very specific to screw you up. For example: you haven’t been pulled over by the police for years. Today is the very first time you’ve driven your car without a tax certificate, and boom, you get pulled over, and fined. What are the chances? This is an unfortunate coincidence, but it also draws on expectation-vs-reality and symmetry. The more effort you put into avoiding getting caught for tax, the more irony generated when you do. There is a symmetry and a surprise: the very specific thing that could happen, does happen. Yet it is not simply coincidence. “What can go wrong, will go wrong.” Sod’s Law. Murphy’s Law. It’s a coincidence to bump into a friend on the street. It is ironic if you met him while specifically taking that route and going well out of your usual way, to avoid him. And he is doing the very same thing! You can argue that it is still technically coincidence and therefore not ironic because irony does not equal coincidence.

Wouldn’t if be funny if… ?

Going back to the idea of jokes and a cosmic joke being played. The situation can often be framed in the question form: “Wouldn’t it be delightfully funny if X happened?” , says the Universe itself. An implied human mind at play. Our minds are designed to find this agency everywhere, like seeing faces in towels or rocks or clouds or worn on the front of heads.

• Look, he has gone to all this specific effort today to clean his car today- wouldn’t it be funny if a gaggle of gulls cover it in guano?
• Hmm, she has traveled halfway round the world to make sure it doesn’t rain- wouldn’t it be especially funny if it pours (for the first time in a decade)?
• Ooh, it’s a list of supposedly ironic things. Wouldn’t it be funny if they weren’t ironic at all?
• heehee, he’s writing about how he hates splling mistakes. Wouldn’t it be funny if…?
• He’s walking down the street. Wouldn’t it be funny if a car ran him down?

See how the last one is not the same? Where’s the irony? Where’s that peculiar symmetry between what is going on and what could happen and what actually happens,
to the view of a cosmic doer of do’s? Humour being what it is, and language being what it is, and isn’t, some people will find the poor guy getting run down funny (it’s ok, he didn’t get hurt too bad and doesn’t exist), and some could probably find irony too.

I don’t see this “wouldn’t it be funny…” format as being a pure reversal of expectation. I see this as a symmetry and opposition between plans, intentions, expectations, normality, and actuality. For a person, as cosmic irony, it is taking your plans and intentions and flipping them. They are read and understood by the universe and then deliberately inverted. Such fun! Your thoughts can be heard and they directly impact the future. Santa can hear. Jesus, too. And your parents and partners and kids and friends. And that guy in the office. The world is listening and it reacts. We try to cull those “wouldn’t it be awful if…?” thoughts as they arise spontaneously inside. Don’t even think that. Superstition (writing’s on the wall) Interestingly, this is like dream life, where merely the suggestion of something going horrible when asleep after gobbling a full platter of cheese can make it so. I hope these wings don’t melt… oh darn. I hope that car doesn’t grow teeth and look like my old teacher… shoot! Not a reversal of expectation but a reversal of a feared outcome that you might have worked hard to avoid (the harder you work, the crueler the twist). And in the symmetry between twist and intention, what looks like the hallmarks of intention.

Pics or TLDR

Here’s what the taste of irony might look like: a commons image taken from Wikipedia’s irony article (research depth 1)

This seems like a paradox, like the verbal one ” I am a liar; everything I say is a lie, including this”. It is a STOP that has been defaced by a message saying “STOP defacing Stop signs”. This can be put in the “wouldn’t it be funny… format”: wouldn’t it be funny if a sign to not do X was itself an example of x? This could be a coincidence, or ‘cosmic’, or it could be arranged by the writer of a play, or it could be the way that you cope with the absurdity of existence.

I did some more cutting edge research by searching twitter for #irony and making screenshots of ones that I understood; that I tasted irony in (I didn’t get lots of them).

1: A sign where the word ‘QUALITY’ is itself broken. The intention is to express ‘quality’ but this intersects with the brokenness of the actual sign, which suggests the very opposite.

2: Posting on social media that you hate social media. Now, this also seems to taste of hypocrisy, where there is a clash between what you say you will do and what you do… but hypocrisy also suggests intentional inconsistency for some personal gain, i.e., it’s nasty.

3: Following a campaign talking about how the US has tons of problems and so much is wrong and how there’s a giant swamp that needs draining, Trump now swivels to saying “if you have a problem with things here, just leave”. This seems much closer to the strong aroma of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy certainly seems to also contain the ingredients for irony. But whatever. Use it to attack a group of black women senators to energise your racist base. If it angers the liberals, then great- success! Maybe that’s most of the aim, not a side effect? It’s actually not racist, it’s just trolling. This whole thing is about the innards of the big whole of voters and one baiting the other. The direct targets are not even part of it, and that’s just the way it is. Reality, see? Oh dear.

4: We spend our lives trying to get to some happy place, but the journey itself takes up our whole life. A similar example might be spending all your free time reading books on what to do in your free time. But the whole ‘life is a journey’ thing is moot. Do we really dedicate our lives to reach some specific point? Do we have to stop all goal-based-behaviour completely to really live? Where does one draw the line?

The symmetry that seems to be at the nub of irony is often ‘meta’, in that it can be on a different layer or form, or can feed on itself like that coiled snake gnawing its own tail. Here the taste of irony might become a quest, and the quest immediately starts hitting loops, where everything is meta, everything is seen as part of a search to expose irony, and irony is found everywhere, in every bush in town. This state is akin to the general ironic stance mentioned above. A style of language is used to keep fixed descriptions of reality at a distance, while there is always an urge to turn this on itself, to treat this ironic distance itself in an ironic way, to flip in and out of actual sincerity and try to impress or deride strangers on the internet and urge each other to meta meta meta. It can seem that irony itself is an endless loop of no return. There is a whole aesthetic of irony online.

Irony it seems can be a ‘way of life’.

It’s perfectly possible to take a long term “ironic stance” that becomes a hallmark characteristic of your youness. You float off into parody and deflective language, and abandon sincerity having judged all efforts to form systems of meaning to be lacking. Take nothing I say or do at face value as I no longer believe in systems of face value. In the way that so many things can be labelled as ironic, perhaps a whole life or period of life or of civilisation can evoke that taste.

This might be plain old cynicism. If your world view is cynical, you might not maintain the notion of a framework to validate or categorize in terms of a big Truth or a patchwork of little ones. You might start seeing and injecting irony everywhere. But is it pure insincerity or cynicism? Perhaps it is itself a sincere reaction as a stance on the lack of reliable truths or Truth from experience?

Irony here now seems to morph into a blend of self reference, cynicism, and possibly a hint of asparagus… I mean fatalism. Is everything meta or meta-meta or more ironic? If an expression includes a reference to itself as expression, is this irony?

Here’s a final artefact from the world’s wild web: a look at David Foster Wallace on Irony… well, a look at a video that looks at Foster Wallace on Irony but mainly talks about TV shows. Actually I don’t like video essays any more. Is that just me? Maybe I’m jealous. It looks at a shift back towards sincerity and away from irony, where irony is being meta, “Hi, I’m an actor doing an ad… yadda yadda yadda… buy buy buy!” and being cynical and mocking society and your own format.

Exhibit Z A video essay (and I don’t like video essays anymore and I’m not even sure why but I did watch it twice):

And here’s the top comments. Enlightened, much?

Will you now start seeing irony everywhere, or nowhere? Do you already pepper your pronouncements with it? What percentage of the language you use do you reckon is less than literal?

This ‘essay’ started as a ten minute effort to jot down the guts of what irony is in one of those pretentious notebooks. It morphed into this sprawl that yet defies a conclusion. Irony is rich and invasive, circular and evasive. Hopefully I can come back to this and straighten out a thought or two.

It throws muddy shadows from bikes as they swing round the circuit, on the flush summer grass, on the country flags creased by the odd puff of breeze.

Race organised by Galway Bay Cycling Club with the support of the Highfield Park residents.