Riders arrive in ones and twos. There’s hesitation: run it out and back like a normal league race? More riders arrive. Nope, stick with the plan. 60km+, out further to the Galway Plaza and back.

‘Plaza’ still feels alien to me. ‘See you at the Plaza’. Plazzza. Or ‘Applegreen’. Howdyalikethemapples? ‘Circle K’. Don’t get it. Don’t want to look it up. Things change. Things are always changing, underfoot or overhead or right through the middle.

The format is familiar. Club league race anticipation. The same faces might show up every Thursday but you can never know how it’ll work out. Bunch sprint or solo break? Nothing is written until it is.

Wind the legs up, fight for scraps of shelter, dig in and dig in again. If will and energy persist, get up the road. Lean into the landscape, ride into the pain. Count up the miles or count down the kilometres- whatever keeps the mind in its arrow. Dream of graveyed spuds or hot showers. Let a caught tune chase its tail round your noggin. Whatever keeps the body in the bid. Pedal pedal pedalpedalpedal pedaledaledaledaledaledal edal pedpedpedped edaledal pedal edaledaledal pedal pedal

Today the club races for itself, against itself, every rider together and every rider alone. Paul Giblin rode these roads, and rode them well. Rowed and road, powering across the landscape. He’s probably somewhere up ahead, in a break, pushing on. And so it should be.

Horseman, pedal on.

Taken on the semi-functional 50D Canon. Few different lenses. Shutter button fires every so often, and the battery drains fast, and the sensor is dirty and the autofocus lazy. But it's not about the camera, mostly.

Cold. Fresh. Soft. The loft-frozen pellets hop and bounce down the rock face. Pile into little lines and bumps and begin to whiten the ruddy earth. Bounce and hop but then suddenly seem to turn weightless, replaced by scattering petals of snow. Colder still. And then traditional rain joins in, heavy and steady and wet and I crouch deeper under the little flapping shelter.

Fickle winter weather, and a churning mess of cloudmass from the west in slow waves. I came up from the church car park, up the steep pitch of narrow road to the old graveyard. There the exposed hillside tombstones rest on a much older formation, old enough to be the area’s namesake. This is Cashel, from the Gaeilge An Caiseal, a name for a ringfort. These would have been built in the bronze age, which goes back some 3000 years. But this ringfort now sits under the high Cashel graveyard. Clumps of unmarked stumps mingle with rectangular marble and granite slabs and plastic flowers and crosses and bordered beds of gravel.

I notice a tall narrow headstone with a different style

Coleman Nee
Ireland
PVT 103 Infantry
World War I
May 9 1894
January 26 1970

A full run of 20th Century carnage: in a weathered Connemara hillside graveyard built in a weathered 3000 year old fort, lies a Nee who fought in the American army, probably on some blood and mud dug trench in France in the Great war, during which Ireland itself kicked off an uprising against British rule.

3000 years of cloudchurn and yet so quiet and unperturbed. A herd of small sheep with red and blue markings line up behind a gate watching me in hope of feed. An abandoned big house half submerged in a copse of leafless trees. A line of electricity poles lead from its gable back down the hill, the wires long gone: must have been in use after electricity arrived here in the 1950s. Here is a land with abandonment sewn into its definition. More goings than comings. As basic as the acidic soil where the roots of civilising crops are loathe to tunnel. Leave it to the mosses and grasses and layers of sodden peat. Here lies ties to centuries of roaming and fighting and big thick lines being drawn and redrawn on history maps. And yet just a flock of sheep chewing and staring at a gate under Cashel hill.

Higher up, I think about turning back, but the sun pops out again, and I clamber to the summit. It’s not high, just a little over 300m, but is unobscured and panoramic. Straight east huddle the basket of Bens and south of them over the Inagh valley and Recess, the broad Maamturks, and then beyond that Maam, Derroura, Oughterard, and the Corrib. Lakes pocket the bog. Dense conifer plantations in dark green patches. The higher peaks are dusted white, and over them all a canopy of shifting clouds spilling hail, rain, snow. You can make out distant blades of Cloosh wind mills spinning a little more west, and as you spin further that way, the flatter fragmented bogs and scattered houses of gaelic south connemara, from Carna down to Lettermore, Gorumna, and Carraroe and then on towards Galway, hidden now by cloud or slope or both.

Still turning, now facing into the sun as it approaches the Atlantic lid somewhere over the Aran Islands. Just below, the sea negotiates a series of complex bays and inlets. There’s something Escher-like about the one and the other. Perhaps the bog is the bay and the bay the bog? The ocean is boundary, limit, barrier, but yet passage, potential, murky and laden. Further north, the other lonely sisterpeak of Errisbeg over Roundstone, and past that the clouds sitting thicker and opaque. Another band rolling in.

The wind is howling again and flecks of new hail begin to patter, even while light still pours. There’s no scrap of shelter here, so I don’t wait beyond trying to stick something of the place into a digital sensor. Snappity snap. Then I flee back down towards the sheltered slopes and crouch under another rock face when the soup gets thick. The umbrella buckles. A dial cover is missing from the camera. Losses. I track back down by the graveyard and its layers of stones and story and down the hill to the car across from the church. Its wipers have been acting up, but they twitch into life now first time, and I pull out onto the road for home.

Why climb a hill at all? There might be a point. There might not. Is it not all self serving in the end, and the self not a thing at all?

“We’ll climb that hill, no matter how high, when we get up to it.”

I run
For poor shelter under wavebashed rock
Scattering sea birds
Into jolted gale-hung grace
And me, jolted but clumsy,
staring at waves,
Intruding.

Beach and coast at Furbo, January 2018.

It’s early January, and 2018 is still shiny and new and cold, and I pull in 5 miles from Clifden to get a photo of some mounds of gravel that have been piled up by the N59.

I’m hoping to get something that is Connemara but not cliché, something that I can’t visualise, something I’m not even looking for. I’m trying to see in a new way, you know, just another new-year go at giving life a kick up the rump to see if a gear takes. Feels like the clutch has been stuck all the way in, melting and grinding away, for a long stretch.

I snap the mounds, and then wait for a van to pass to record that too, diligent accumulator of slices of reality. The morning was bright but the afternoon is dull, and hovering around 0 Celsius.

On the way back to the car I see a plastic bottle, half submerged in the mossy earth. Here on the bend there is some flat space on each side of the road. On the other side are the mounds of gravel. On this one a marshy shoulder leading into a rising ridge of stone, where a car can’t pull in. But it can certainly roll down a window, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, and fling out a snot of rubbish, and roll it back up, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, without skipping a pistonbeat.

The ground and its ecosystems are normally very keen on the discards of the passings of lumbering creatures. It rots them into its bosom, breaks them down, savours any organic compounds to build and rebuild itself. Nothing is wasted, so nothing is waste. A thriving economy of basic materials.

But these materials, these plastics, these metal foils, these quick-bought quick-used quick-discarded spoils, they do not melt back into the ground. They resist, their long chains of compounds too tough and too toxic.

Instead, they slowly sink down into the soil, unusable obstacles to be grown over and around.

Good old polyethylene terephthalate: cooked from the soups of oil sucked/fracked from the guts of the planet.

I walk from the car along the roadside as far as a broken branch from which hangs a fast food meal bag. 100 paces or so.

How much junk would you find along 100 paces or so of the N59, thrown from the windows of passing cars?

I start to look more carefully, to see what I can see. And every time I look, I find more. More cartons and bottles, more fast food wrappers, tins and glass, car parts and coffee cup lids, gloves, clothes hangers, sun cream bottles, a pregnancy test box, and a set of spectacles left balanced on a bottle stuck into the gravel.

These are the marks of our passings.

From a distance, there is nothing here but bog and a ridge cut into the bank, under the loom of the twelve Bens, and the N59 snaking along over Ballynahinch lake.

But up close, if you look, are layers of rottable and unrottable rubbish, flung from our day trips, commutes, visits, and shopping errands. We do not see, when the window buzzes down, that we are not merely silently cleaning out car kingdoms into eager emptiness, but are instead adding to mounds of junk that line our passings. On one hand we might sell to strangers the beauty of the wild and rugged landscape, while the other is tossing wrappers out into it, where it will lie for centuries to come.

After a mild autumn this year, the white stuff was suddenly back on the menu after some thick showers snuck in during a cold snap in early December.

I drove up the Shannapheasteen road until the Astra got stuck, wheels spinning in second gear on a bend. I reversed/slid back down to a junction, and went for a hike.

Turns out hiking in snow is awkward. Especially when the it’s on a bog and the bog has big holes in it and slopes up. My boot slipped and I dipped the camera down. It came up white. Crap. Wipe wipe wipe. Two minutes later I did it again. Learn: use the tripod as a walking stick and put the camera in the bag while going up a slope. I still managed to do a third time.

When I got back to the car, a tractor was helping a couple get up the road where I had parked. I was, er, slightly blocking the road. Sorry.

Interview room 341 is very small and dark, like a segment cut from a corridor. Harry notices the odd ratio of wall to door to window as he automatically moves towards the one empty chair. An inspector sits opposite behind a small desk, staring down at a screen. He’s thin, suited, with short hair starting to grey, and legs crossed with the raised foot absently tapping air.

He doesn’t seem to notice Harry standing there awkwardly. Just swipes and stares. Harry sits. Now the inspector looks up.

“Ah, Mr Thomas?”

“Yes. Yes?”

“Sorry to keep you waiting. It is nice to meet you.”

“Um, yes, it’s nice to meet you, too.”

The inspector smiles, showing his top teeth.

“I hope you got here without any trouble.”

“Yes, it was fine.”

“Well. I’m glad you could make the appointment. We’re very sorry about the delay. You know how things are right now.”

He waits.

“That’s ok.”

“Good, good. I’m sure you understand. It’s beyond our control. And of course doing things properly takes some time.”

He waits again. Smiles. Teeth.

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

“It won’t take long now though. Not long at all. We have gone through your work in detail. Everything in the feed, and everything in the archive. A considerable portfolio.”

He holds the screen up.

“This is your account, right?”

Harry looks at the old feed; its thumbnail images, shared edgy articles, and cringeworthy contributions from an old virtual self. It has been scrolled down to some point in the past, maybe five years ago, or more? There’s a photo of his brother with arms folded, standing outside under trees. Harry remembers it. 35mm Kodak film in a Canon FD camera, on a 50mm lens, just after the house was finished.

“Yes, that looks like my account.”

“Excellent. Yes. It is. We have gone through it in close detail. Thoroughly. Quite a body of work. Substantial.”

He waits. Smiles. Teeth.

“Thanks.”

The inspector turns the screen round. Tap, swipe, tap, tap. He holds it up again.

“And this, this is also yours? From the archive.”

Harry looks. A gallery of much older photos. A red van outside a bungalow on a drumlin hill. A long exposure of waves hitting a dark-rocked coast. A blurred horse running on an island. A boy in woods holding his hand in front of his face. A reflection of a row of white houses in a puddle.

“They are yours?”

“Yes, yes, they’re mine. from before. I haven’t seen them in…”

“Yes, well, here they are. Alive and kicking. Very consistent.”

He puts the screen down on the desk next to a sorry plastic plant.

“Well, we have gone through everything in detail, great detail, and we feel we have a good measure, a very good understanding, of your work. A very broad output indeed. Landscapes mainly, wouldn’t you agree? A degree of escapism? Some Longing? Classic straight composition, with the odd effort, off-piste, as they say.”

Harry’s eyes roll around the very small room.

The inspector waits.

“I guess, I’m drawn to landscape, somewhat.” He shifts in the chair.

“Yes, yes. Landscape is a fine subject. A fine way to spend a day off, out in the open air, recording the conditions, the light, the weather. The change and the unchanging.”

Harry shifts uncomfortably again.

“And of course, some street work here. Black and white in the main. Very, I suppose, un-intrsuive. Unintrsive street scenes, with little eye contact. Some reflections, windows, skies, observations. Perhaps a sense of, disconnect? Certainly a measure of observation and complexity. But a distance nonetheless. Very interesting. The curse of the observer, in the street, of the street, but always feeling outside, perhaps?”

“I suppose.”

Another long pause. Harry looks up at a fan cutting its loop overhead. Snipsnipsnipsnip…

The inspector nods and stares, his finger still flicking across the screen. He angles it so Harry can’t see what he sees. Pale blue light strikes his steady inspector face, and into his steady inspector eyes.

Eventually he puts it down again, and turns to face Harry, folding his hands carefully after thoughtfully brushing dust from the corners of the desk.

“So, this is good. I think we can come to a very clear understanding.”

“I hope so.”

“Certainly. Certainly. You see, your work is excellent, very good, very broad. Curious. Introspective. Persistent. And very consistent. Perhaps trying at times to, er, find a, find a foothold. A voice. What do you think?”

“Well, I guess, I mean, it’s… hard to say. I’ve put a lot of… It’s not really something I’ve…”

“Not to worry. Not to worry. Of course overthinking can disrupt the intuitive quest. Art is an, active form of contemplation, and expression shouldn’t be, pigeon-holed. Never tied down, strictly, fully. In any case, I’m sure it has been a valuable process, very educational. And an interesting, active hobby. We must always strive to see, to see better, no?”

“Sure. Yes.”

“Yes, We have to be, be in the world, and, take it for what it is, with us, in it, in the, flow, exactly. We have to let the world flow by us. Through us. Let it settle, percolate, integrate. Exactly. You have explored and I’m sure have learned a great deal about this human condition of ours.”

He rubs dust off the desk again, and glances at a clock that hangs on the wall behind Harry. Smiles. Teeth.

“Now, I’m glad we agree. You have learned and experienced and explored. A valuable process. You know, people like you are very important, vital even.”

Harry tries to stretch his body out of its slouch. The plastic chair seems designed to push it into a collapsed hunch. The tiny room is warm but he shivers. The daylight that had striped between the narrow grey blinds is gone.

The inspector puts his hands together in another practiced gesture.

“Of course, it is vital too, essential, to help people find their right, role. Their best calling. Vital to all of us. Otherwise, so much, so much potential, goes wasted. A great inefficiency.”

Harry stops fighting the slouch.

“I’m sure you have studied the greats. The giants of the art. Bresson, Capa, Adams. Man Ray. Atget. Aarbus. Koudelka. Steichen. Mann. Strand. Kenna. So many, so many. So true to their art. Art in every direction. We must never forget to study them, learn from them. Try to see as they saw. Don’t you think?”

“I suppose.”

“Yes, of course we do. And at the same time we must also struggle, struggle to find our own path. Sometimes we fall naturally into it, but of course, we can be helped. can we not? We have to embrace our path with integrity.”

“I guess.”

“As sure as we are sitting here. As sure as the sun still rises. We must help each other, for the sake of all of us. Not in a theoretical way. In real ways. Concrete ways. We must keep our purpose clear and our hearts open. Would you say that you are open, Harry?”

Harry lets his eyes float again, from those clean careful hands with close cut nails, to the looping fan, to the grey blinds.

“I, I.. maybe.”

“It is a fact. It is obvious from your work. You are an open, inquisitive individual. With so much to offer. I am sure you can see the opportunity, and that is all it takes, to see it, to see the path ahead.”

The inspector seems to count a preset number of seconds of pause, looking intently at Harry, then thoughtfully at his desk and office and the upturned screen and the clock, as though they have suddenly just appeared and are arranged just right.

“So. Time has no mercy. I am sure you are eager to get moving. It is great to find agreement. I am sure you can have many new experiences, good, great experiences. There is always time” As he speaks he pulls the screen back across with one finger, without looking at it. Then he does look, and it lights up again with the same blue, and he touches and taps.

“Now, here we are. Harry Samuel Thomas. One Seven Six Zero Seven Six Five Nine Two. This is you.”

“That’s me.”

“Of course. Now. Let’s just quickly… (tap tap tap).. and (tap tap tap) ”

He leans over the screen on the desk, but Harry can still see.. another gallery of his photographs. Numbers and dates. His memories. On one side he can see a star rating and underneath it some comments.

Two and a half stars out of five.

The inspector stares for a long moment then tap-tap-taps again.

Now a big button appears saying “Confirm Cleanse”

He looks at the screen.

“No point in looking backwards Harry. We must learn from the masters, pull together, find our optimal path. We must let our lives be our content.”

Harry watches the inspector’s quick fingers tap “Confirm Cleanse”. The screen flashes. A new view: “Confirm content cleanse. All feed content will be removed. Save feed content to archive? Remove all archive material?”

The inspector de-selects “Save feed content to archive”, and selects “Remove all archive material”. He taps “CONFIRM”.

“Identification required. Level Four. Department of Culture and Data Provisioning.”

“Ah, of course.”

He turns the screen to Harry.

“Can you put your thumbs here. Both thumbs? On the circles.”

Harry presses his thumbs onto circles marked L and R.

“Identification confirmed. Processing request.”

A loading bar appears.

“Removing feed content. 3%”

Harry can hear the fan and his own breathing. He tries to remember the places he has been. Fragments. A windswept day out on the coast. Deep grass, hollow-pocked under tripping feet. A windy afternoon and the sun blasting between clouds. Crawling on his belly to the edge and holding the camera over it.

The ocean bellowing below sheer cliffs. Seagulls squealing. The huge mass of the sea stack over the waves. Lines of white froth and bullets of specular glint. Clear horizon and sea sound and sea smell from one edge to the other.

“100%. Source material removed.”

“Removing archive material. 1%”

Or, another time and place, getting out of the subway at night, during winter in a cold city, and turning to look down at steps running back to the station. A man hurrying down, and suddenly jumping the last few steps. Too many to be practical. A flourish, not meant to be seen. Just for the heck of it.

A long time ago now.

“100%. Archive material removed. Procedure complete.”

The inspector smiles broadly and leans forward.

“That is it. That’s great. Nothing to it. Now we can move forward. Onwards and upwards, to new adventures.”

He continues to tap.

“And the requisition unit will call to your home this very day, for the equipment recycle order.”

He turns the screen off.

“Now, good news. We have a great position lined up for you. Perfect. A brand new opening. Right next to your home. A fine promotion. With a highly reputable content subcontractor- Merko Kontent.”

Harry feels far away, and being far away and empty, finds he is now able to meet the inspector’s gaze. It doesn’t waver. It holds his eyes and drinks them in and deletes whatever they are saying, unflinching, unreflective, steady.

“You will be straight into the images department. None of the ground floor work. A proper contract.”

It is easier to look at the blinds, and the lines of darkness where the lines of light had been.

**************************

Office six eight four, floor three, Merko Kontent Building Seven, Department of Content and File Administration. Eight minutes of brisk walking from the outside door of the apartment block.

A lady in a blue suit with a name tag shows Harry to his desk. His name and number are displayed on a large flat display. She points out the bathroom, the coffee and vending machines, and the smaller second screen to the left of the other. On this, a red clock showing “09:00:00”

“Just put your thumbs here.”

Harry puts his two thumbs against the L and R circles on the big display. It immediately lights up. Text appears.

“Assignment 3707124. Content Agent: 176076592. Session: 1186503. Time allocated: 24:28:00. Time accumulated. 00:00:00. Session length: 09:00:00. Press screen to begin.”

There you are”, the lady says. “Just follow the screen. Easy peasy. A basic session to get you started. It automatically stops when you leave your chair.”

She starts to walk away then pauses.

“Oh, and your work will be monitored of course, I mean, especially, for the first few days at least. It’s just protocol. Press the Support button under the clock screen for tech support. But you shouldn’t need it.”

She hurries off. Harry watches her disappear into a maze of separating dividers and then he glances up at the camera overhead. Then at the screen. It waits.

“Press screen to begin.”

He presses the screen.

“Assignment type: Image Allocation. ID 3707124. Session: 1186503”

“Assignment content: Private Feed Images”

“Assignment target cluster segment: Pornography”

“Press screen to continue.”

The only sound is a low background hum, and possibly faraway traffic, and something like flowing water. Overhead pipes?

He presses the screen.

“Instructions overview: Choose Yes if image is of a graphic or pornographic nature. Otherwise choose No. Press screen to continue.”

Harry presses the screen.

The clock on the left suddenly starts counting down.

“8:59:59”

“8:59:58”

On the main display: an image of a windswept sea, probably taken from a boat. Two buttons. YES and NO.

Harry touches NO.

A new image. A truck being unloaded outside a warehouse in the rain.

NO

A group of people in a room, looking at the camera and smiling.

NO

Two young naked women in a kitchen with their hands raised to their faces in ‘owl eyes’ shapes.

YES

***********************************************

When the clock reaches zero, Harry realises he hasn’t eaten, or moved from his station for a full nine hours. The light has stayed exactly the same throughout. The sounds too, bar an odd shuffle of passing feet followed by clunks from a vending machine or whirring from the coffee machine. The big screen is blank. The small one reads “00:00:00”. Now it too fades into black. Harry’s phone vibrates in his pocket. He takes it out. New message.

He takes the stairs down and goes through door, door, gate, to get to the street. It’s dark and not yet busy. An eight minute walk home. He has finished early.

After four minutes, Harry reaches an intersection and stops. His stomach is rumbling. He stands there for two full light changes, watching other workers going home, and cars driving through. He sees lights switch off in the opposite block, and others switch on. He sees a woman walk by with a little girl wearing a dress and eating an ice cream. Instead of going straight on towards the tiny apartment, he turns left, and walks faster.

Eventually, he reaches a bridge and crosses, looking down into the dark river below. Now he is in the old part of the city, where warrens of streets thrown on streets mingle and twist. Old unprofitable shops hang stubbornly onto corners like barnacles.

Harry stops at a dirty lit window with red and black lettering overhead. “Darcy’s. Buy and Sell. Technology specialist. Classic items.” He looks around before pushing the door in.

A bell tinkles. An old man leans over a glass counter at the end of the dark narrow space, working with a little pliers over something disassembled. The centre and sides are lined with shelves and cases. Harry makes a slow line around the outside towards a display of antique cameras. Dented metal SLRs, a couple of worn rangefinders, and a random mix of lenses, bags, and coloured filters. He picks things up, twists knobs, presses shutters.

The old man stops his work and stares.

Harry picks up a small SLR.

“How much for this body and lens?”

The man peers through his thick glasses.

“Mmmmm, that’s not a common model, that one. In good nick too. Serviced it myself. And no digital footprin… mmmmm…. 50 pounds for both.”

“Do you have any film for it?”

“Mmmm, film? I’ll check.”

The keeper disappears into the back, and Harry waits, listening to the sounds of cabinet doors opening and closing and muttered swearing.

The old man returns with a small cardboard box filled with rolls of old film.

“Expired of course. But I had them in the fridge.”

“Fine.”

He picks up a loose roll and holds it up to his face.

“You know, I don’t think you can get these developed anywhere anymore.”

“I know.”

“Oh, well, 3 pounds a roll, as they are.”

Harry picks up and puts down some of the rolls. He looks around the empty shop again then pulls out a battered wallet. Carefully wrapped inside an old receipt are two 50 pound notes.

“Will that do? For the lot?”

“Yep, that’ll do. I’ll find a bag.”

Harry hands him the cash and turns to the door. Back outside, the street is quiet. The streetlights that work throw cones of muddy orange along its narrow curve. Harry fumbles with a roll of the expired film and eventually loads it. He stares at the row of houses, the lights, and the blackness of the sky that they fade into.

He wipes the viewfinder and lens with his sleeve then holds the camera up to his eye. Fragments from the nine hours of “Assignment Section: Pornography” begin to dislodge. He tries to see only what is in the viewfinder.

Click.

THE END

All photos, drawings, and text by Donal Kelly. Please let me know if you liked it. If you hated it, that's ok. I can accept this. But no need to let me know. I find it really hard to get anyone to actually read my efforts, and I can't read it properly myself because it's too familiar. Maybe if I spend a year or two forgetting.

Then I decided to draw an actual sketch. Of the little interview room. Who knows why. Then I felt I had to add lots more, for closure, and then I lost a whole pile of time. Hours and hours. Gobble gobble gobble. And I still think, it probably, should be, you know, deleted.

This is when Daylight Savings Time is cut from the clocks and autumn cedes to winter. It’s a transition from light to dark, from long summer days to long winter nights. Yadda yadda yadda.

On the edge of things, comfort and definitions are tested. Hallow’s Eve was a point when the souls of the dead were able to mingle with the living. To confuse them, we, the living, put on masks of them, the dead, and danced a hooley. We marked an indistinct edge between light and dark, life and death, growth and decay, here and not here.

This is where Macnas aims to tread, on the edges, crafting primal energy into a fling with moderated chaos.

Leaves still cling on for dear colour in the university trees. The whole parade is lined up outside the quad and doing its final prep. This is probably the first time it has assembled in full, costumed, made-up, skipping with wait, ready to roll.

It can’t go overboard. It can’t become the objects of menace that it hints at. But it can resonate with and fill the spirit, and throw a bone to the pagan within.

I’m not sure about being there. I’m an imposter, a parasite, a camera-appended outsider, an invasive specimen.

If you’re in traffic, you are traffic.

If my view is blocked by a photographer’s head, then I’m blocking someone too. I can’t be invisible. To measure, interferes, and to record, is never truly unintrusive. We change when watched. Yet here I have a DSLR and a bag of lenses and here I join more reputable media and here I try to not be there but be there all the same. I’m not sure what I’m trying to get exactly. Just going from one shot to the next, clickity click, aperture down, ISO up, and wishing I could absorb and become the energy.

I sometimes think that in these situations empathy becomes a communal wave, and the social animals within align. Do we need to commune with a spiritual herd, every once in while?

But crowds are tough, and 40,000 is a lot of bodies to cram along narrow Galway streets. So many faces, so many reactions, and all so unique and aware and real. Imagine how the parts of your brain that work on face recognition are right now, zooming from figure to figure in the dark. It can’t keep up; it dissolves and quits. Someone yells at me and it takes me three or four goes to see Morgan there with his family.

Contorted-but-elegant masks. Bangs and belts, thumps, and rumbles. Music and singing and voices over the din. Clapping and roaring.

The crowd must become ones, must interact, react. The audience is part of the show. Et unum pluribus.

Some fill in the blanks with imagination and find fear- yelp and roar.

“Wooooooahh!”

“Aaaaagh!”

“It’s an allllliieeeen!”

Others push out from inside a comfort zone, grimace and grin back, assured that they are solid and correct.

“You’re not scary!”

“Raaaaaaar!”

Some have lost it altogether or never arrived.

“I wanna go hommmmmmmme!”

Tweenage girls notice looks and costumes

“Oh my God she’s so pretty!”

Excited parents ride on the innocent connections of their children.

“Look at the ship Annie! Look at the big dog!”

And then there is the mediation. The extensions. These are our holy digital devices, which we layer between our senses and the world, like necessary appendages. Maybe they form another enormous inter-connected social brain where we extend our empathy. Or not. We haven’t figured it out yet. Too new. Our digital appendages greet us when we wake and lull us to our sleep. We manage our own parade on the edge of being there and not being there. Life, mediated.

What is the most THERE you can be? I mean, in the world. I’m trying my best. Engaging the senses. Using my camera to stare, and hopping along between a group shaking sheets of wobbling loud metal, and a beautiful singing lady with a silver ship for a hat and her own trailing lighthouse. A woman with a smoke-making device keeps pace, and every few dozen metres fires it off. Such a smell! My left eye is still seeing green squares from when I stupidly fired the flash into it at point blank range earlier. I guess now I’ll find out if it really does damage the retina. And all the time I feel I shouldn’t be there, and should be grabbed and flung out. Am I in the moment? Clickity click. Shutter speed too slow, ISO too high, Av, manual, back to Av, autofocus just not on point at f1.8. Where am I?

I shouldn’t be there, in the body of the parade, but once I make the transition from the preparations to the streets, which seems to happen with no border (was I expecting a starting pistol?), it seems like there’s no way out. There isn’t a single chink in the buzzing wall of people from NUIG all the way through town to the Claddagh. Left across the Salmon Weir bridge, right onto Eglinton, right onto Shop Street, down the cobbles to Mainguard, across Cross into Quay, on over the Wolfe Tone bridge, and left off Fr. Griffen to the Claddagh.

The entire city seems to be wearing a costume and has transformed, and stepped into a gap (mind the gap, mind the gap) between by-the-book routine and what-the-hell chaos. It’s a touch Mad Max, with more dancing and less Rocky Horror, with uproarious noise and balls of fire and smoke and masked dancers. There is a beauty, and a grace, bulbous contortions, sudden leaps, intense pauses and frantic swivels.

And then, it ends, like it began, with no distinct finish line or checkered flag, only a gradual breaking up. I’m frazzled as hell and have filled a 32Gb memory card and am a bit drunk on being-there. Still feeling guilty, too. Still wishing I had a lanyard and a title and a tag to give me a bulwark against the idea of me-as-parasite, showing up, tagging along, soaking it in, adding nothing. I assume my pictures will be mediocre.

And I’m thinking about the way we put devices between ourselves and the world or if the devices are just more of the world. I’m wondering if we can fully immerse or if we could ever fully immerse or if the noise is just noise and we need to remember that we can tune out and see that the country is richer than it ever ever was. That the sense of foreboding is itself an indulgence. I’m somewhere on an edge under a squadron of diving thoughts. Feckers. One of them is that all witnessed things need to be given space, and put on a pendulum not a pedestal, not held up as pure, atomic, definitive episodes, only nudges to a scales. Hyperbole. Hyperbore.

The water in the Claddagh quay is calm and still. The roads are back open to cars again. The city has dropped the costume into the River Corrib or the Atlantic (where does one end and the other begin?). Buskers return to the streets. It’s still not raining, but grows cool then cold. 40,00 people need to be fed. It is a full-house Bank Holiday Sunday night.

We have gone to an edge, signposted, planned, and policed, and now return back to the safe routines. But we will go edgewards again, one way or another.

and magnificently we would fold, into the mystic

Leaves on the ground turning to sodden mush. I make slow progress, booted, stopping, stooping, trying to see, to grasp. Grasses, mosses, ferns, lichens, mushrooms; endless details of the mundane. I do not know their names. I am a surface junkie. I can name some of the trees: birch, beech, oak, chestnut. Names are surfaces too.

A pair of dark-haired donkeys. I scratch one’s ears. Sheep stare from the ruins of old homes. Forestry, some cut, with saplings growing in plastic tubes. Streams, pools, and the lake. Surfaces and depths. I wonder is there anything there to see, or if I am just more water streaming into a pool. My boots sink into a soft hole: I have left the road, clambered to the shore. A tree has fallen on the edge, still living, laid out in the waves. Maam rises to the North.

I stop where the ground turns to wetter exposed bog, and head back up to the car. It darkens. Raindrops. Am I taking the same photograph again and again? If you keep going back to a place, do you tread any deeper? It is important to re-tread, to exist in spaces at different times, in different moods and seasons. The water will have changed. Yet in our minds we carry static snaps, snipped from one visit or compressed from a mass of passings. It is so hard to see the places where you commute every day. It is hard to see what seems to be always there. It is not always there.

We need to go back when we can see the change, or try to change how we see. We change regardless, without pause, without effort, and it is hard to catch. Maybe it is an accumulation, or maybe a flow: a river path eroding lines through fracturing terrain, down to some waiting pool.

Lough Corrib is churning. It’s raining full pelt. Up in the high bogs the clean new cloud-scraping windmills continue to turn. Water whips from the blades. Trees bicker and bend. Bend and bicker. but they do not fall. Midday and then beyond. The skydome rotates; gales suddenly flip from South East to South West. That means the centre has moved north?

So, have we escaped the worst? The trees flail but don’t fall; rattle but don’t collapse. Safe enough to venture out? Out to the coast. The sea is amok amach, and high tide has already passed. Rossaveal, Inverin, Spiddal, Barna, Salthill. Seaweed strewn.

Thousands of dead worms near the prom. The car park has been flooded again. Giddy teenagers kick balls, soak each other, bounce, record. Everyone is recording, on phones and cameras. Me too, me too. Updates, updates, updates. Is it done?

It has been moving north. Darkness falls. Seems windier in the dark. News again. Three people dead up the country, where trees did buckle and split and crack and fall. The real deal. Three hundred thousand homes without power. Thirty-five Lime trees knocked in Centre Park road in Cork. Would we complain if nobody are hurt? Why are we so angry at those who went swimming, surfing?

All images and text copyright Donal Kelly. Don’t use without permission.