It’s a Catholic Thing. Holy Week.

                                                        ENDING, DYING, KNOWING.

When I was twelve year old I spent a year in a place of terror and anxiety,  preoccupied, haunted by the prospect of dying. Of death.  Ending. You would die, no matter what.  You could die, at any time. I struggle now to remember what it was exactly that took me to the edge of that abyss, what thought, what feeling got you there.   Where you could not look away to manage the all consuming fear.  It was the not knowing when, maybe.  It was letting the knowing in, perhaps.  Yeah. The facing of the fact. It was the horror of not being, of annihilation.

                                                   CATHOLICS AND ALL THAT JAZZ

I stumbled on for another year, and for another after that. Looking back now, it seems a bit like depression, a touch like panic, obsession, all the labels.  But. Things, perspectives, were adjusting in me. Ground slowly gained.  Some spirit of survival whispered.  Something.  Oh not Catholicism, all that jazz.  That turned out to irrelevant to what ailed me, the spectre dogging my waking footsteps, tormenting dreamtime, nights.


                                                 

                                                    IF YOU WOULD ONLY LET ME IN 

I can recall my thirteen year old self, can see her clearly walking, back and forth and back again before the gates of our local Monastery, hesitant about going in there and asking them.  On one muggy Sunday when I really couldn't stand it anymore. I did not go in.  I did not know how. I figured they'd have nothing.  None of them,  monks or parents, family or priests.  Adults, being being only a source of pressure and reproach at my irritability, my preoccupation, distraction.  Judging my increasing withdrawal, anomie amplifying my fears of madness now, in the dark terrors of nighttime, beset by the sense of being stalked by something  inevitable, incalculable.

But things were shifting somehow... anyhow.  The more I could hold the idea of ending in my mind, could look at it full on, the better I became at imagining a life, and getting on with things and having things, of doing things, even if and even though the truth was always ending, dying, death... the part of me that could look at that, bear that, becoming a ledge to crawl back onto.


                                                   SO, HOLY WEEK REDEEMED THEM

And so for a few years, I was buzzed and frantic with doing, racing against time, getting things for myself,  having life.  But learned, you learn in time, to slow down, to visit the quiet place where death is, and I am, and life waits.  And being Catholic was not entirely useless as it turned out.  They do Holy Week.

I mean Christmas for a child was all sweaty excitement, anticipation, a giddy high, but Easter, Holy Week, was hiatus, timeout, a quiet space.  Scary, yeah but safe enough, familiar enough, contained in ceremony and in time.  You'd get your Easter holidays, run free and happyish on the farm all the lightening lengthening day ( except when your Mother caught you, put you to work at something needed) and in the evenings you'd go to church.

Memories were filed and stored, places to visit.  Ah there you are, your Sunday Coat, your polished shoes, squashed happy in the family car, a sibling on your knee your mother fussing.  You'd go, all go, all had to for,  Palm Sunday,  Confession Tuesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday.  Confession, praying, kneeling, penitent,  copying adults who knew.  Snickering, yawning,  poking a sister, saying the words of the prayers, tickling the baby, maybe.  Sacred and boring, thrilling and mystery, all in  one. It was all consuming and everything slowing and stopping, for Christ dying nailed to his cross.  Crucifiction.  Stations. The Stations of the Cross.


                                                                     FORSAKEN 

Ah, Stations of the Cross. Our shuffling procession past shadowy pictures of Christ's flayed and splattered agony. See there he staggers under the cross, there falls, he falls, first, second and third time,  he falls, he is pierced in his side.  'My God my God' he cries, 'why? hast thou forsaken me..."  When I was eleven years old I related.

Easter Sunday, after the chocolate eggs, the chicken dinner, was anticlimax. Resurrection, Christ strolling from his tomb was just another thing they all believed, it didn't resonate. I always hated Sundays anyway. The slow winding down of hours, gateway into Monday and the workaday week.


                                               LOOKING THOUGH YOUR FINGERS FIRST

Every year has Christmas, Easter, Summer, School, and here in Ireland, Holy Week. Still hanging on, a relic of the past, and this year roaring back to meaning in Lockdown.  We are given,  whether we wanted it or not, space, where all things stop. We are obliged to look.  See here the beast is caged or over there becalmed, at the heart of darkness.  Obliged to feel the tenderest, darkest,  terrors lurking at the hearts deepest core.  We have to look. To hold.


                                               IF GOD CANT HAVE YOU DEVIL  MUST 

If Covid 19 keeps you up at night, impels your run like blazes to your holiday home, or fuels your rage at random cheaters,  consider this.  It's ending, death, that stalks you,  really.  Death, and this your opportunity to face, embrace and take it in.  Don't blame, don't run, or close your inner borders tight.  Embrace the darkness.  In this thoroughly modern Holy Week.

"And I will show you something  

different from either  

Your shadow at morning striding 

behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to  

meet you

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(T.S. Elliot. The Waste Land)

Do share my post from your social media page or by any other means, dear readers. And comment if the spirit moves you!  Anna. 

All the Good Boys Bend Over. Degrading Democracy.

Permitted exercise

Pulling the door behind me and stepping out on to the path, I take a breath of the good clean air.  I  check to see who's in my path, who's breathing my air as they pass, and who might object to the space I'm intending to claim for a walk.  Permitted Exercise.

                               cocooning

Navigating the brave new world ordained by our (good boy) Government is not for the fainthearted, people.  It's a trip down the rabbit hole where the public space is forbidden the Over 70s. Period. Regardless. Well or ill or robust, doesn't matter.  Makes no difference. They can stay in their houses can't they? They can be left in there alone, can't they? Just a few months we can steal from what's left of their good living days, can't we?  Sure, it won't be the same for them, Limbo.  Not as though life moves with any felt tumult through their ageing veins. Not as if the sweet song of sound and vision, birdsong and burgeoning nature sings to them or for them.   Nor connection, fined tuned over a lifetime, with God in the ground you walk, the long line of trees on the river road, the first pale pink hint of the apple blossom, needs preserving.  Cocooning.

                                                     within two kilometres              

I am developing an etiquette out there on the open ground. Sometimes its like Easter. Open-ended Easter. The light, the calm quiet spaces you find on that holiday, that gift of days when work stops, schools close, traffic thins, a holiday without Christmas frenzy,  summer crowds.  It's Easter, there are only chocolate eggs and Christ dying and rising again in the gentle melancholy of Holy week. On those days, my brain says it's Easter! I'll take it!

Sometimes it's End of Days, Mordor.  You are a wraith meeting wraiths and Winter is Coming.  Grey sky only slightly less ominous than the silent spreading gloom in your house, the stale air in your living room, redolent of sanitiser, bleach. Your hands in your pockets close-fisted,  skinned red. Within two Kilometres.

                                                                             with (un)social distancing

Days where the people cross the road 20 metres back when they see you, when you see them, or else shuffle out to the edge of the pavement as you segue unto the grass margin, to pass.  When you catch the eye of the other out of stubbornness, need,  exact a wavering smile, a blank nothing, depending.
                           
Days you reach Main Street, hear your shoes slap the pavement as you pass shops shuttered, doors closed, an emptied out world.  But wait, just up there on the corner, a gang of men calling loudly, talking loose, claiming space. You will not cross the road, you do not walk around them but though them to throw them off course as you have learned to do.  Scattered,  they separate, the sense of tension that is not quite menace, easing. For that day, for that time, at least. Social Distancing.

                                                                                                              and tell on your neighbours (do)

A speeding jogger,  a flying cyclist, two girls softly chatting, a woman pulls out her phone...to report them? Well maybe.  I listen to one such on the radio yesterday,  enraged by joggers,  indicting flying cyclists, pleading for policing, arrests!  You are invited, no, encouraged! to unleash your inner paranoiac, your instinct to judge, your will to control.  All the glad haters come in from the cold!  The Swedes says their people have judgement, discretion, control. Go, Prime Minister Loften! They hold the line, the public space, as the rest of Europe watches and waits for them to fail. Anticipates failure. And tell on your neighbours.

                                                                               
                                                                                                 necessary journeys

I remember the scattered men later, alone in my car on my solitary shopping trip for groceries, medicines.  Alerted, the hair standing stiff on the back of my neck, as a lorry drives tight to my bumper, trailer rocking perilous behind,  never once falling back on a ten km journey.  I speed up, he speeds up,  he does not pass.  I slow below the speed limit, grit my teeth and watch him through my side mirror as he watches me, slowing, revving, slowing, bumper to bumper until I turn off the road for the shop.

A few days later I get out of the path of a carload of howling boys, slipping unto the hard shoulder sharpish from necessity. Necessary Journeys.
 
                                                                       so why as I doing this again?

I'm going with this lockdown, this shutting down, for now.  This slowing down of a lung eating virus, dispatching those of us already in the departure lounge,  threatening those beloved others living by grace of Vaccine, Transplant, Chemotherapy, but tell me this good boy Varadkar, all of you good boys voting in your emergency laws on Friday last,  giving way everyway to a virus, (as you gave way to Bankers, a decade ago) to whom do you imagine we're ceding our public space. Who and what will colonise, gain ground, in the spaces we have so obediently vacated. Every idle bad actor, every dispossessed, untethered soul, rocking up from the highways and byways vacated, that's who.


Even as Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, gain ground in the world.  While we carry on carrying on, turning back a Virus that keeps on coming regardless.  About which the science is not clear. You think you can easily turn back this tide boys? can whistle back an abandoned economy, throw in a shifting Sunset Clause to a Charter for a Police State, an Autocracy.  And afterwards, Pandora goes obligingly back in her box?  Do you know you don't know what you do? And why am I doing this, again.

                                                       degrading oppression.                                                                            

I talked with a man last year,  a refugee to whom asylum was granted after long years in Direct Provision, after endless Requests, Appeals, and Court applications.  He told me every counted hour of trying, waiting, disappointment, was worth it to be here and not there under the dictatorship he escaped. He told me how the very air in that country was poisoned from top down, how the stealing of personal space, of any say, of human rights, degraded all.  All.  Those who assumed the power and those who allowed it to be taken from them, whether they could stop it or not.  You did what they said until you could not,  he told me, and then you ran for your life from your own hopelessness, depression, despair.  Degrading Oppression.

  ... only for a little while...

Back home, my daughter's days are entirely virtual. She sits for her virtual lectures, has virtual chats with her struggling, jittering friends, consigned all to virtual reality.  She sings like an angel alone in her room,  Billie Eilish today.  She uploads on Instagram, for her friends, for her virtual audience,  for me.  For us, who have failed to hold the space for her and for all the jittering girls and boys.  Failed... as the good boys fail us.

"Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me".

....only for a little while?