In the beginning of the begun, Jah pondered in a reverie of glimmering ennui, waiting for nothing to happen. Then, a photon of light was washed in silver nitrate and pegged out to dry; a set of flowers, Coltsfoot, Tussilago fafara opened upon a hillside. (Their yellow florets are many and thin, resembling a lion’s mane.) And the ionosphere yawned as the big ball of burning hot gas hissed again in the candle-lit, glittering expanse like always. Its solar flare(s) would burn into the retina of the human condition forever in endearing, creative consciousness. A needle crinkles along a record groove and bumps into digital, sparking bright blue – let there be joy and harmony in the cosmos.

Down on planet Earth, in the Western world, there was the Judeo-Christian Bible, Marxism and then Ulysses. The Odyssey, The Iliad, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Milton Friedman were on the other side of that trajectory. And a road turned toward war, conflict, and evil. Now we have Neoliberalism, capitalism in taught hand gestures, spin, and politico-heads in crisp white shirts who try to exude confidence and erudition—extolling their brand of DeMockracy. Charlatans. Known colloquially in Ireland as the Gobshite. Gobshites tumbled down from the rafters. Hundreds and thousands of verbose Gobshites, espouse their particular brand of Gobshittery.
Fallen apes. Fallen apples. Fallen caped crusaders. Fallen, upturned, Autumn-brown the colour of ripened-horse-chestnuts and mud, as leaves rush over the small stones of life with the sound(s) of a river flowing.

*

Midday, in rural Ireland, a ginger-and-white tabby cat licks its chops before it heads up the yard and slinks under a wooden gate. A taepot would soon dance on a stove. The tae would be poured before it was stewed. A small grey tractor engine thumps and turns over melodiously as the wind carries the sound. The ploughed, yeast-laden, cleaved fields ripe with Autumnal freshness relent to the picking of naked, tumbling worms by the cawing, hopping black crows.

In the Upper West of the country, three miles outside the small town of Letterook, lies a small white-washed house upon the side of a small mountain, Knocknarooney.

Inside the cottage sits a man in his kitchen at a wooden table made of ash, a pot of purple Roosters steaming in their skins at his shirt-covered elbow. The waiting plate lies empty. Table salt sits alongside black pepper. If he had it, a glass with a drop of buttermilk would help shelk his thirst, and a golden doubloon-dollop of Kerry butter would glimmer on the spuds, melting in. A foggy floor the colour of Brazilian slate, grey in its tincture, has been swept and lies cold and evocative.

Internal: Yer man, Paddy Nahneghri, gripped in a holy primitive terror at his mid-morning-to-noon hunger has a fork by the throat, so he has; and one hand on the auld mobile phone looking at the auld porno online and his stiff prick all a red-purple, veiny riot wanting to escape the clutches of his farm-field, damp woollen trousers. The slaps and spores of the Orish seed are like a thrash of the auld harvest, boyo. He has on the worn, tan brown brogues of his father; he has the expectations of his dead father in them. They are feet antiques and creak like his wardrobe door whenever he walks in them, so they do.

External: on the window-sill, a line of Nationalistic Ants march under the army-green sun. ‘Arfathuer Griffithis for Pope’ reads their rippling, tiny banner. A hen picks at the dirt through the kitchen window. A rattle of a debacle registers as a chicken call from outside. Paddy’s flat face goes to the flat pane of the window, and his ginger whiskers are a riotous assembly. His pug-nose in the Socratic aesthetic pressed firm against the hardened sodium silicate – he opens the window and calls out, ‘Come Sabrina, here chook-chook,’ he scatters a handful of oats over the oven-warm ground.

Cracked blue China sitting on a portly mahogany dresser depicts people in faraway Eastern lands, in Paddy fields, harvesting rice with the odd cormorant here and there in the pastoral scene, one assumes, morosely and hungrily, perched on the back of bamboo rafts, watching life sail by in the vain, tentative hope of a tossed fish.

*

Paddy often fails to brush his teeth with an algo-ryth-mickical-rhythm. So, green-to-yella lichen cultivates and is embedded between his chompers. Moss grows in the recess of his thick-lug ears. Paddy has all the grace of an honest but during his latter ‘mad’ stage, Van Gogh portrait.

He likes bacon, thick-lug slices, and walloping pleats in the pan and can often turn the last of a pig in the frying pan before seven or eight in the morning under a couple of wiffling (fried) divan eggs. Their edges hung over like a counterpane on a big bed. A fistful of soda farl and a garble of vowels when he’s in the holy hunger falling upon a filled soda, ‘Ahh, Oooo, Jazyhus, lads, that’s some feed. Ahhh.’

His bedroom has a poster of Clint Eastwood fixed to the wall—a cheroot stuck between his bate and squint-eyes due to the sun.

In his bathroom, a handful of soap ends make a fatuous clink of colours: a mild-scented fat ball of clean. The empty white bath exudes a cold flocked air—the taps do not drip, and there is no cumulative stain caused by a dripping faucet. Paddy does his washing with no bother, and a clothesline out the back can dry his duvet in a day if the weather is decent.

*

In the small patch of the front garden stood a decent-sized Irish Whitebeam, Sorbus Hibernica. Paddy wanted Tetrapanax Papyrifer as well, as he heard about it on a Gardening Programme, and he loves the sound of it in Latin. (It was the Chinese paper-rice plant.) Hornbeam Carpinus betulus skirted the side of the cottage.

Paddy, looking at his smartphone and at the ladies on Instagram,

‘Ah, pure holy terror,’ says he, ‘sure, you couldn’t pack them into thon hen-house for all the brazen hussies online. Nattering Patois.

Paddy has a poster of Peter Brook’s King Lear on the back of his kitchen door; it depicts Paul Scofield as the bearded figurehead who seeks out which of his three daughters loves him the most to satisfy his portly ego.

*

The letterbox flaps open, and a white-pressed envelope, like ironed napery, drops onto the mat. It’s a letter from his ex, Margo; to be frank, it is not from Margo but from her solicitor.

‘What does she want now?’ He says, ‘Me to be trampled under the working hoofs of a mad bull? To be rolled on by a sighing sow? To be rendered mad and carted off into an asylum? To end my days in the Big House?!’

‘Saying to the head honcho, “A blackbird’s song will do me, your majesty.”

And, “I love the Rooster spud.”’

He opens the letter and reads it says that Margo is looking for his double bed, which she slept in. And this is partly half hers. Paddy is outraged,

‘That auld witch!’

‘She’ll not get that bed. Damn to the bit, she’ll not get that bed!’

The frame is brass and ornamental, with delicate fretwork and solid posts topped with brass acorns. It is an antique worth a few pounds, hence Margo’s interest. Paddy sighed and left the letter on the kitchen table, tucked back into the envelope.

‘Gon ye auld Gossoon.’ He says out loud. Heads to the toilet. He pulls on the scullery light, plink-plonk, or, dink-dink, it goes, illuminating the infinite darkness. Sits on the toilet and muses about Autumn – The yard—the scarf. The Autumnal swishes through a tide of leaves with your water boots high on the calve muscle, cold, rubber through trousers—the Golden-eared hare of Rathflin isle. Coal smoke scuts over the brushed, cold, grey sky. The colour of metal alloys: burnished steel. Rusting hulks of metal slabs and contours assembled in the mind by Richard Serra. Forget Keats’ clichéd Ode to Autumn; yet, it was a sound poem Paddy mused. It has just been wheeled out upon its seasonal gurney to be revived again. Time after time. Year after year. Decade after decade. A limp, musty Frankenstein monster lying there, parched lips. Reaching for relevance.

‘Bloody done to bloody death.’ Paddy muttered.

‘My teef are stressed,’ says he. A cloud hung upon his brow. Gets up. The toilet soon roars. Heads back into the kitchen.

*

The tawny cat wearing a black and white servant’s attire in latex with a bowtie enters. Miaows languorously. Licks his lips and sits down with his tail swishing to a stop behind him. Looks up at Paddy, expectantly.

‘Ah, Sir Peter Teasle! If you please, your honour.’ Paddy bows out of respect.

The cat responds modestly. Paddy reaches down to pet him.

The cat, in turn, bends upwards, curls, and arches, his back to the caulking hand. A smooth shimmy glides over its fur. His tail is a feline question mark that asks no questions. It purrs contently and miaows again.

Paddy takes a bottle of milk out of the fridge and lets it glug, slowly into a saucer; he sets it down on one of the flags. The cat hunkers down and thruts purr over the dish of milk he has poured. Little pusskins purred, and the green flints of its eyes reflected in the shine-light of the kitchen. Coarse rough little ribbon tongue one lap, then another, to test. Then hunkering down in the lactose wash, and lapping ceremoniously, haune-shouldered and down to the ground and over the white fluid pour, lap, lap, lap. Repeating. Laps. It’s pink and budded small tongue that juts out and back over the fluid, drawing it in. Then up and away from the dish with an arcing back and a sprawl of claws on the floor and a yawn cast wide and looks at Paddy with smacking chops and a miaow, of catisatfaction, of milk tasted and enjoyed on the porous lapel of pink and in moggy’s system now all plushy and milky, little affirming harvester.

*

Paddy has an old clacking typewriter on a trestle table he had made by sawing lengths of two-by-four and glueing the bundle together to make the top and X-like legs of the same lengths of timber. He has a stool to sit on. He has an oil-cloth-bag intrigue of literature like John McGahern on his way home from the two protestant farmers’ library in their musty home; father and son, red in face due to the elements and the yard-crested early morning.

There’s a Walter Benjamin poster above his type-writer and writing table.

‘Arcadia decadia.’ Paddy mutters, looking up at him.

Paddy sits down to write –

No tricolours on boxes of morning cereals; no pictorial Eire duvet sets; no gang of Roman Catholick priests assembling at the border waiting to swoop down on the hoary protestant sentiments and invade, invade, invade… Chairman Mao’s mad, ego-centric, so-called ‘cultural’ revolution – Antediluvian.

Clack, clack, clack, Paddy throws idiomatic words, half-sentences, and sentences out there without continuity, which pleases him.

The Batman reboot trilogy was an exercise in classic storytelling and a move away from the glossy mulch which sugar-led diets crave, the high-octane stuff of gilt-edge Hollywood that trendy music channel heads felt was ‘the normal.’ The Robespierre reign of terror. Hegel’s view on history is repetitive. David Lodge’s university novels are a clutch at immortality. Yer, man, Hunter S. Thompson’s wild-man antics, part-sociopath, part fool, to one-quarter, enabled ingenuity wailing around with a buzzing cattle prod flicking blue sparks with electricity. St. Michan’s Church, the six-foot corpse of the supposed Crusader Knight with his feet chopped off – too tall for the coffin. It is more likely that he was an 18 th -century Dubliner who was abnormally tall for the era. There’s no shield of Christendom. No broad sword.

II

Enter a young man to the house, Paddy’s nephew, Lorcan ‘Spooney’, or ‘Spoons’ Lemass. He is twenty-seven years young. He has watery-cabbagey, sad cold eyes, like that of a beaten old priest who could not find the strength to leave and to find a life, freer, away from the holy Roman Catholick church. And was chained to the pulpit by an earlier, immature decision. Spoons also had black wavy hair like a priest – one from the Irish seventies.

‘Ah, it’s yourveryself, how are ye, Spoons?’ Paddy infers.

‘Paddy, were you at the auld Cooking Brandy the day?’ Spoons asks.

‘I was not, Spoons. Am as sober as a Northern Presbyterian.’ He quips.

‘Paddy, I have been postulating under the synergy of the starry firmament by the byre door on the cultural embargo Oreland has lost to this old haggard woman, which is the debit which Oreland will be paying off for generations to come.’

Paddy exhales a whistle,

‘Thuuuuuuu, ah, would you look at that now,’ studying the young man, ‘Spoons, the fools in parley-ment, any, parley-ment, are caught up in any briny scam they can get their greedy hands on!’

Paddy proceeds to spit diligently into his two cupped palms, through a made hole, through his thumbs, then slaps his dry, large hands together and rubs them together audibly. ‘You’d be a right honorary fool to believe Ireland has a socialist heart in the midlands of the political country!’ Looks at Spoons more defiantly, ‘A sentimental fool at that too!’

These words then passed through Paddy’s mind, ‘Expectant quadrant of lazy hypothesis.’

‘Just wat is Dialectical Materialism?’ Spoons asks him in rebuttal.

Paddy waves the question away.

‘If you’re looking to crowbar in Marx from off the Communist ideal, you’d be hard-pressed these days, Spoony, my lad. That’s not even a term from Marx. Just some follower of his. It means how things are measured and gauged regarding the outcomes of Communist agitation. That’s my grasp on it, lad.’

Spoons spots the envelope on the table. Nods in its direction and says,

‘Is that from yours truly?’

‘Ah, that auld witch is always on the front doorstep of an argument, Spoons, always on the precipice. She is always front and centre in her own constructed Ancient Greek tragedy. The Widow’s Shawl or something similar would be the title.’

Paddy looks at Spoons,

‘Sure, the world, and the universe, is dreamt up by an ogre with his shoulder to the wheel of life.’

Spoons smiles.

‘What’s on your agenda today, Paddy? I will build a computer tower with a
decent graphics card, an NVIDIA one so I can play COD online with my nerd-linger, pedigree chums.’

‘Not sure, Spoons, maybe look up the derivation of some words…Balustrade for example. Yesterday, I looked up the etymology of Alcohol, which is derived from Arabic. Did you know that?’

‘I did not. No.’ Spoons looks on.

‘You’re a fierce man for the auld gaming, Spoons, eh?’ Paddy adds.

‘Aye. It’s either that or Netflix. Paddy, these days.’

‘I suppose, so, Spoons, I suppose so…’

Spoons looks on at his uncle and then says,

‘I have too much blood.’

‘Ah, fore the love of Jazyhus – how can ye have too much blood?’ Paddy asks him, perplexed at this strain of immature introspection.

‘I am just full of blood and thinking all the time. My thoughts themselves have thoughts. The system is topped up past the limit.’ Spoon replies.

‘This is conjecture, Spoons. Pure conjecture. It’s a good hike you need. Red out the system. Head up Knocknarooney there and clear the cobwebs away.’

‘Maybe… maybe…’ Spoons answers, tapering off.

‘How’s the writing going, Paddy?’ He then asks.

‘Aye, Spoons, you know, someone once told me that it was a marathon, the auld writing game, and not a true sprint. ‘Tis a very true statement that.’

‘Do you still fall out with agents and publishers you send work to? And to other writers, you know?’ Spoons buts the boot in. Paddy comes back with, after eying his nephew for a few seconds and measuring up his answer,

‘I did burn a few bridges, yes, Spoons, but where did those bridges cross to,
Spoons? Can I ask you that?’

Spoons shrugs characteristically.

‘To the calculating archipelagos of Egotism and unabated sycophancy, my lad. I do not dare to dare to dwell amidst those Swiftian charges.’ Paddy answers.

Paddy looks at Spoons, again,

‘Will you tell us this, Spoons?’

‘What’s that, Paddy?’

‘Do you ever lift a book a’tall?’

‘Rarely.’ Spoons answers tacitly.

‘That’s a great shame, Spoons, me lad, a great shame.’

‘Sharpened, or maybe, flattened by the anvil of experience. ‘It’s the X-Files you’ve been watching Spoons, last night, eh? On YouTube?’

‘Oh, I love the X-Files.’ Spoons says in return.

‘Ye’d be more at home with a cut of ginger loaf and a cuppa tae, Spoons, than that auld carryon, yes, sir-ee.’

Paddy continues,

‘Wait till I tell you, Spoons, some of the greatest and rarefied minds that came to being in the world, put their ideas down. Even though they were ignored by all asunder, these minds headed for the page. Ah, you don’t know how good Dickens can be as an author. The humanity! The love he centres his work around. The hunger. The poverty of London in his day. One short novel set in the North, too,’ looks at Spoons, knows he has to clarify, ‘the North of England, lad. Hard Times, it’s called.’

‘Irish writers, too. And I mean writers. Creating Art. Not some glib romance for widows. Joyce, boy, James Blooming Joyce!’ Paddy slaps his leg.

‘His intellect and humour carry you through Dublin streets with Poldy Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in his modernist masterpiece, Ulysses. A novel no one was interested in publishing! Until a lady called Sylvia Beach offered, and the rest is literary history.’

‘Joyce was something else. Powerful writer – could make a comma do a handstand… In later Joyce, sure, every sentence was an operatic performance.’

Paddy falls into a literary reverie and looks out at the approaching night. Spoons realises it’s time to head home and leave Paddy to it.

‘I am heading on here, Paddy. I’ll call around soon.’

‘Enjoy your computer-generated blasting, Spoons.’ Paddy relays.

Spoons takes his leave and exits the cottage.

*

Paddy listens as the front door closes and starts typing again and comes up with some half-gabardine ideas on Bullying (as he was bullied as a child in the schoolyard of St. Pious’s, a local National School, and it had a big impact on his development) as an emotional form of abuse and intimidation –

Bullies come in all shapes, sizes, and mentalities, from all decrees, backgrounds, and classes. Their driving charge controls, which instils fear in their chosen victim. This helps shine the flowing chromium pipes into the steely vessels of the Ego. The base nature of the bully is insecurity—this must be recognised. They aim to try and psychologically dominate another person into submission.

Paddy postulated that, generally, a bully will have power over someone, which feeds their ego and self-evaluation system, something akin to, ‘Yea, I am your boss, and you will do exactly what I say and do.’

Bullies don’t have a general sense of decency or overall common morality. They have a primed set of inner morals by which they justify their bullying and self-worth by. Their Axis Mundi.

I posit that The Heidleburg Percept Function has its base thinking in the small state of Heidleburg, Germany, and Doctor Franz Winemiester III. Who stated that the early years of the bully are one of terror and abuse from a parent or guardian and this in turn, makes the bully relive this trauma through a conduit victim… a weaker, vulnerable victim who they can control – this happens in power hierarchies and why H.R departments are essential arbitrators and mediators in the dynamic of someone who has more power and bullies their lesser-power, their co-worker. Who they deem, sub-consciously, as their immediate inferior. This makes the co-worker feel alienated and, thus, to use a Marxist term, work-based alienation. Until there is mediation and the situation is resolved.

Yes, Francis Fukuyama, you were correct; it is the end of history for the setters of history, as their boundaries and selfish ends have become transparent due to technology. The female animus: Jungian desire & projection of a mysterious projection of what man is: intense, protean, heroic, romantic.

Paddy decided to write a few sentences about Margo,

She was defensive; barriers were set, and she would venture out and defend those barriers so often fought over, and underneath all of that, she was as soft and warm as sunlight. It was all to do to keep up a pretence. This projected reputation that she fought to herald and defend.

He wrote about how the novel was not dead, and the problem was not the novel but the reader,

The problem with badly read people is that their tiny minds are so predictable. And with no emotional maturity to deal with offered advice on how to expand their views, is usually met with, and meted out with, abhorred hate, and further, they retreat into their destined chambers for eternity only to peek at the real, Platonic world now and again. Beware, the Don Quixote who sees glory everywhere. Sees their radiance as zeal, knight heraldry, and entitlement.

Paddy stops typing. He reads what he has written. Is happy with it. Cracks his knuckles. Stretches. Yawns loudly. And goes out to the moonlight-draped, cold hall. He reaches for the coat stand, whereupon he lays his hand on a jacket and puts on his Duffle coat, the one with the peg-end buttons. In the pockets is a shredded hanky; one fluff-balled sweet – a Bullseye. A solitary brick-red peanut. A brass key. Solitary. The accumulated lost atoms of the past-theorized Big Bang. And heads down the lane for a walk.

*

The air was fresh and cleansing. Paddy coughs, hacks up and sends a gob-ball spinning into the bed of the cold lane, where its nebulous form mingles with dirt. Luff, luff, wading through muted Autumn leaves, he looks up at the yellow pool moon and envisages it as a vast blinking eye on the end of a telescope searching for a trout in the shadow streams of the mediating, constant penumbra.

Looking at the brambles and bracken in the hedges of the lane and remembering that it would be winter soon, there would be Rosehips. Holly bushes. The Robin Redbreast with his heart-shaped, red-breast shield on a wooden-snow-capped-post. A hoary frost would cover cows’ troughs and their inquiring, steaming nostrils, nosing in wonder at the silvery wintery development that compromised the ice lid. Then, finally, snow fleeting down. Snow cascaded, settling, covering the fields, landing on the lane, and mounting window sills. Snow weighing heavy and rustling on the hedgerows – almost like Tempura batter frying in a fryer. He ended this track of thinking with a final image of envisaged blobs of settled snow on a wisteria tree. A rabbit’s whiskers twinkled in the moonlight somewhere nearby – soft, pink nose twitching apace.

---

Neil Burns is Northern Irish. He has been published in The London Magazine, The Rialto, The Honest Ulsterman, Cassandra Voices and The Agonist Literary Journal.