18-20/09/12

The cemetery on the outskirts of Athenry was lacking in symmetry and it was difficult, in consequence, to locate the grave of my maternal grandmother, whom I had been led to believe was buried there, possibly since 1961 or 1962, a year or so before, with the coast finally clear, my mother packed me off to a children's home in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, and I bade goodbye to life in Aldershot, Hants. Her maiden name was Payne, but there was only one Payne listed on the noticeboard containing the names of those buried there, namely a Bridget Payne, whom my mother had led me to believe was her sister, whereas my grandmother's first name was – or had been – Mary. The plot number of this other Payne was 304, but strangely enough none of the graves was marked, as far as I could see, with numbers, so locating that particular grave was no easy task in view of the large number of graves involved. She had apparently been buried, this Bridget Payne, in June 1961, which would have been around the time of my grandmother's death, and for a moment I thought it might be her, that her real first name was not Mary but Bridget. I only knew that my grandmother, whom I adored as a child, had been buried in her home town of Athenry, together with her sister (Bridget).

I am afraid and deeply saddened by the fact that no-one would have attended to the grave in all these years, and that may have been an additional reason why I could not locate it, presuming it overgrown or somehow effaced. All in all, a deeply distressing situation, compounded by the fact that my mother, who at the time of writing is still alive, has only ever fed me sketchy and vague information, some of which, at one time or another, had been blatantly contradictory, like her telling me, several years ago, that her mother's first name was Polly!

It's no wonder I'm confused! But when I pressed her recently about the location of her mother's grave, she had no idea at all, only saying, as before, that she had personally seen to her burial, having travelled back to Co. Galway with the coffin. But the grave, alas, had been neglected all these years, and therefore it was difficult if not impossible for me to locate it and make some small attempt to recognize it and perhaps tidy or clean it up a bit, whatever that might entail. I feel so utterly helpless and, at the same time, angry and frustrated that I couldn't even lay some flowers. Some people continue to get a raw deal even in death!

The Irish flag, the tricolour, is rather like the weather in Ireland, with violent and sudden shifts between rain and sunshine, but with a fair amount of cloud coming in-between. Hence the green of rain, the white of cloud, and the orange (or gold) of sunshine, with, alas, more green than white or orange!

In the evening one hears the thwack of tennis balls going to and fro next door in the Galway Lawn Tennis and Health Club. I never much cared for tennis, rarely if ever having played it (at school). In fact, it was for me one of those taboo occupations, like chess and golf. How unlike Ezra Pound!

So much drama, so little karma.

The sidewalks of Ireland vis-a-vis the pavements of Britain.

The Irish are loquacious, the British – and in particular the English – reserved. Alpha and omega.

Ireland wouldn't be Ireland without the rain. If you don't like rain, don't go to Ireland, because you're bound, sooner or later, to get soaked, shot through with a wind-fuelled rain that has a certain acerbity about it which is quite unpleasant and very likely to piss you off.

In Ireland male self-esteem drains away with the weather; you become less self-conscious and correspondingly more open to other people, especially women. The notion of trusting in your stars or, alternatively, in some guardian angel makes more sense in Ireland than does trusting in yourself as a male, since the female aspects of life, which are primary, are noticeably more prevalent than in, say, England, being, in any case, fundamental to life.

Everywhere where substance exists – meals, fruit, sweets, cakes, refreshments, etc. - women are behind it and live, like caryatids, to serve it. Being intellectually or spiritually independent (to a degree) or contrary to all this is, for the male, more usually a product of misfortune than of calculated intent, since males are only capable, when true to themselves, of abstractions – ideas, philosophies, ideologies, religions, laws , etc., which usually come to grief in relation to a reality dominated by females and, hence, by what is concrete.

We can, as males, hope for and dream of a better world, an altogether different type of society, but that is only a manifestation, so to speak, of the abstract, and is always up against the concrete realities of a world characterized by female domination which it would be difficult if not impossible to overthrow, since abstractions are no match for the concrete basis of life in female power and glory, will and spirit. The male attempt to overthrow this concretion from an abstract standpoint (the only standpoint according with anything properly male, and therefore with what is contrary to such concretion even though extrapolated from it) leads inevitably to failure, of which the crucifixional paradigm of the so-called Saviour is a case in point, a potent symbol of religious failure in the face of concrete reality, be that reality scientific or political.

The Judeo-Christian tradition, with its subconsciously-truncated metachemistry and its subsensuously-truncated metaphysics, could be regarded as being flanked, in an anterior manner, by the supersensuously-biased Hindu tradition on the one hand and, in a posterior manner, by the superconsciously-biased Buddhist tradition on the other hand, each of which does more justice to metachemistry and to metaphysics, respectively, than would anything Judeo-Christian. Frankly, the truncated metachemistry of Judaic monotheism and the truncated metaphysics of Christian (Roman Catholic) theism are less indicative of a human-orientated alpha (metachemistry) and omega (metaphysics) than of an alpha-stemming worldliness in the one case and of an omega-orientated worldliness in the other case, neither of which would be anywhere near as scientific (metachemical) nor as religious (metaphysical) as their Hindu and Buddhist counterparts.

The sight of all those fat shiny books in bookshops is, frankly, depressing to anyone who is capable of regarding life from a standpoint centred in eScrolls and eBooks, both of which could be argued as pertaining to an axis at variance with that upon which the vast majority of books, whether hardback or paperback, exist – presumably in polarity to magazines of one sort or another.