Rising to the Challenge of Summer.

Solos – whether living, working or otherwise alone - need to be just as creative as parents occupying children, double as much if you’re child-minding alone as well.

At the gates of a play-school last year I met a Grandmother, child-minding for the summer. She was visiting from England and lamenting the absence of activity groups to join. ‘Every group I contact has stopped for the summer months.’ I recommended investigating the Meet-Up site online but, living alone myself, I fully appreciated the challenge she was facing. At least her adult family would return home in the evenings but they’d have their own commitments. She needed a life of her own – temporarily in suspension across the Irish Sea - to complement child-minding and acting adjunct to her younger family, so busy themselves they’d be unlikely to fully appreciate her difficulties which could lead to problems. She could quickly find herself isolated, or at odds with the family she had come to assist with little left to contribute in terms of company after a day of child-minding alone.

Solo, whether through living alone, working alone from home, recently: retired, widowed separated, with a spouse working away or simply absent with their own activities – is a challenge to rise to if you are not to disappear into yourself and feel body-less. Without the synergy of engaging with others, as interested in you as themselves as you collectively engage in a shared enterprise, it takes a lot of creative energy to simply keep on track. Don’t dismiss that as valueless. This creative engagement can have you more consciously weaving life than those who are more engaged. It would be worse were there no challenge to keep you creative. This realisation is a good place to start.

Setting up a structure that works for your day and week, once you’ve practised it for a while, will save you from wasting energy. President Obama bought suits of only two colours, with matching ties for each, when he began his presidency. He wouldn’t have the time or energy to be daily deciding on clothes. I’ve also taken this advice from a seasoned solo traveller heard on radio before I took my first trip away alone to Rome a few weeks ago. ‘Decide beforehand what you will do when you get there, give yourself an itinerary -otherwise, when you arrive, you won’t bother and find yourself wandering aimlessly’. It worked a treat. Tired from simply getting there, it was great to have sought out the city tourist travel bus before I’d even left the station on arrival and to take it up next day without effort. All that was left to decide was where to get off and when to get back on!

Exercise needs to be part of your structure. A daily walk, tai chi or yoga exercises or whatever you fancy yourself. At the worst of times: movement of any kind is a first step back on track – even if it’s walking across the kitchen and stretching before you put the kettle on. Already your brain is re-activated. I love Julia Cameron’s idea of Artist Dates – from the book The Artist’s Way. Choose to visit or do something you wouldn’t normally select and go there, or go somewhere that will stimulate your creative side - and don’t think about creativity as something that is only for artists, it is not. Engage in a project: make something or learn. Wellbeing research indicates that anything that absorbs you to self-forgetfulness leverages happiness and August is a good time to visit special events and put a toe in new waters.

‘Power poses,’ I’ve been known to chant as a mantra on occasions. The research indicating that people who have taken power stances before interviews – hands on hips, leaning on a table with your hands, or punching the air – instead of only sitting curled over to surf the internet on a smart phone before being questioned, not only performed better in their interview but felt better too. Their cortisol levels, associated with stress, were down and testosterone levels up leaving them more sense of agency and action.

Smile, it changes your brain chemistry and there is something to be said for the old adage about the world smiling with you but I wouldn’t rely on it. You need company and it is good to do everything you can to find it but failing that there’s a lot to enjoy and, meanwhile, you’re building resilience, toning muscles readiness to rise to your next challenge – maybe the new group you’ll join in September or the skill you’ll take to the next level when you add it to the familiar friends and activities you enjoy during the rest of the year.

The Honouring of Poets: Derek Mahon

     I was listening to poet Derek Mahon’s controversial biographer, Stephen  Enniss, last night - as he was interviewed by Vincent Woods on  Arts Tonight on RTE Radio 1*. Savouring the pleasure of hearing Derek Mahon himself, in excerpts from previous interviews and hearing him read a few of his poems. Stephen Enniss acknowledges that Mahon and Seamus Heaney were good friends but also, inevitably, rivals. He linked the withdrawal of Derek Mahon from the public sphere of poetry, including his refusal of an OBE from the Queen of his birth-place, Northern Ireland, to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Heaney. The wisdom of which withdrawal Enniss absolutely regrets and he hopes his book will provide a counterbalance, keeping Derek Mahon’s poetry closer to the foreground of international attention. It will be good if it achieves that although the poems speak for themselves.

     Whatever his own reasons, such as he knows them, Derek Mahon himself, however, has not only done the right thing in withdrawing but given the greatness of his commitment to serving poetry; he has, arguably, taken the only possible option open to him. This is, I predict; what the greats of his generation, his early friend Evan Boland, perhaps, and friends Michael and Edna Longley - along with other present and future great writers will say, or may have already said privately or in public.

     There is a paradox at the centre of a culture of awards and prizes. True poetry and art is beyond such things – there can be no single winner, given the diversity of poems and poets  - yet they are crucial to maintaining a framework that ensures it can continue to be formed. The humanness at the centre of it, also paradoxically, requires sufficient recognition to battle on in the face of few material rewards. The greatest prize in literature was awarded – to Heaney.  The only thing left to a true poet and candidate of similar stature is to transcend that culture, put himself beyond the question of current acclaim and leave it to history.

     It is important that Seamus Heaney was awarded and accepted the Nobel Prize. It was important that in the year of his seventieth birthday the laureate could be heard on radio at the centre of Irish life reciting his poems - in the midst of the collapse of so much. He held, and held us, to poetry.  It is equally in the service of Irish and all poetry that Derek Mahon has not second-placed himself by accepting less prestigious awards, however honourable in themselves, but rather holds for us the space in poetry that is beyond all such.

    In the greatness of time in Northern Ireland it will not be the creeds and identities of the relatively petty wrangling that will be remembered but the bloodshed. Neither will it be awards of literature, whatever gratefulness is felt that the artist received recognition in their time. It is poetry that endures. The words and the due honour inherent in the manner it has been served.

Reference & Link:

Book: After the Titanic: The Life of Derek Mahon by Stephen Enniss. Gill & Macmillan.

*http://www.rte.ie/radio/utils/radioplayer/rteradioweb.html#!rii=9%3A10440736%3A1538%3A%3A

*First broadcast Autumn, 2014

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Postcript and Prelude

An Apprentice Verse-Maker’s Take on the Exhibition -

Postcript: Visual Artists Respond to Seamus Heaney’s Poem.              

Transfixed, I was listening to the radio in my kitchen when I heard the Chair of the Irish Countrywoman’s Association, Bridin Twist, say that she was in favour of legalising divorce. There was now every chance something heretofore unimaginable could happen. I was reminded of that as the votes were counted in the recent referendum.  It was one of those heart-stopping moments when time is suspended and you know the landscape has irrevocably changed. A few years later I met my hero in her home The Burren Holistic Centre below Mullaghmore Mountain, where I was to facilitate a workshop.

Bridin, who sadly died a few years ago, brought my attention to the poem Postscript, by Seamus Heaney.  I bought a copy from the Kinvara shop named after the poem and had it hanging in my own house afterwards.

On Saturday evening last in the Russell Art Gallery, just north of the flaggy shore road that inspired the poem, I attended the opening by Micheal O’Suilleabhain of ‘Postscript: visual artists respond to Seamus Heaney’s poem’ - an exhibition curated by Tim Emlyn Jones. Introducing Micheal, Tim spoke of the transformative powers of the Gallery space where, if you stop by for a cup of coffee before walking the flaggy shore, anything can happen. You can even find yourself agreeing to curate the exhibition to which you had agreed to contribute!

The response of the artists he invited was so generous that the Burren Art College is now going to host more of the exhibition. It will be formally opened there by Fintan O’Toole on Thursday 9^th July at 7pm. Both sections of the whole exhibition will continue until the end of July. Just over a week later, on Friday 17^th July, The former RTE radio producer, John Quinn, will introduce and present “Remembering Seamus – interviews & correspondence,” a selection of radio interviews with his friend.

The RHA artist, Donald Teskey’s Longshore II - a wild seascape created in mixed media, waves crashing the rocks of the shoreline, immediately grabs attention on entering the Russell gallery space. To the left of that is an exhibit where lines drawn in black interact with thick white paper, drawing attention across the waves to the horizon and the sky’s lines above. This picture had me smile without quite knowing why - the horizon, with its persistent waves, its sense of timelessness maybe. It is the work of Tim Emlyn Jones himself and there is a smaller similar piece of his further along the wall, with more variety in the waves and light. The juxtaposition of colour and black-and-white is striking in the montage of images in mixed media in Judith McKimm’s work, while The Blue Flower, in oil, by Nick Miller and Geraldine O’Reilly’s work give a more immediate take on the Burren landscape - as does RHA Charles Harper’s, striking piece Burren Day highlighting mountain and flagged Burren landscape – although in a very different style. I was also particularly taken by the abstract work of the other artists: Ann Quinn, Lorraine Wall and David Ferry.  Conor McGrady’s ‘Borderland 1’ and 2, undertaken in Gouache on Paper, revealed to the returning eye of this observer a zen-like sense of stillness. I wondered was the artist influenced by Japanese landscapes: a black sun above a strong I Ching-like line was suggested to this novice when I reflected further. And the placement of the scene on the paper in his second piece, reminiscent of rocks planted in the Japanese landscape – timeless and natural, yet carefully placed, this time here in Co Clare, suggested it further. The blurred boundaries of the gouache medium somehow only strengthen the outline. Again, there’s the suggestion of a here-and-there-ness.

The boundaries of the exhibition itself are blurred in the Gallery. Hunting for treasure, glance moving from catalogue to walls, it became clear all the paintings on the walls are exhibits. The other work, enjoyable for itself any other day and propped on shelves among exceptional craftwork, cards and jewellery that, one suspects, assist the gallery to host such exhibitions – they have related books too – inevitably distract somewhat from the exhibition.

‘Heaney’s “…neither here nor there” might be taken as an insult but it also reveals something of poetry’. ‘It is the place where poetry meets you’, Micheal O’Suilleabhain suggested as he reflected on Heaney’s lines. ‘Everyone should have a flute carrier’ he remarked as the young man kneeling at his feet unbent himself to extend the instrument. The musician did not want the audience to be trying to imagine wild swans or any such – ‘we’ll just see what happens’ and the notes trickled and danced.

Across the road, as I left, across the fields and the grey sea in the bay the white and yellow light was highlighting dark edges in the white clouds. Silver glanced the arms of the wind turbines lit from the disappearing light behind them as they turned on the hills – straight across from the place Heaney visited and wrote, in Postcript, ‘You are neither here nor there,/a hurry through which known and strange things pass/As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.’

Relevant links:

Russellgallery.net

http://visualartists.ie/listings/exhib-munster/postscript-group-exhibitions-at-the-burren-college-of-art-and-the-russell-gallery/

aica.ie/postscript-group-exhibitions-at-the-burren-college-of-art...