I mean WHY ARE YOU EVEN TALKING!!!

DONE WITH THAT NOT DONE WITH THAT 

You know the hardest thing I tell my best friend (on the phone), the thing coming back at you, every time?  It's this, that somehow, anyhow, you still have to navigate, I mean, connection? to have the conversations? 

 like I mean with all those sad souls gone the other way?....  and there you are traversing like a rickety bridge over a widening ravine, and I mean walking on eggshells and dancing through minefields and riding lightly lightly,  over rough terrain?  All that, and, I mean,  verbal fencing? With you know, tact, calculation, self censorship?  All that just to hang on in there by your fingernails,  keep your friendships, relationships and all, I mean,  your lifelong loves?... the cruellest thing (it is ) that love becomes the hardest thing, though still the only thing to keep you there?... attached and holding fast the fractured space where once was holy ground... 

She sighs, she knows. I'm not done yet.  Like listening  I say, that all that's left?  Don't speak! The thing is who would actually hear you if you did? Who would or could hear what it is you have to tell them?  So listening,  don't speak! don't scare, don't bring the bad thing in the room. Just hold the line?  observe the SOS in skittering eyes, touch terror under the safe and effective,  bear....the glazed eye stare,  judgements about conspiracy theorists. And just... don't speak! don't name the thing that can't be named, that can't be told.  

Oh... well I'm done with that, she says. I'm done with them, I'm done with that. I'm never no-more looking back. 

......................

 COULDN'T DO ANOTHER  PLEASE DON'T SAY WE HAVE TO HAVE ANOTHER, LOCKDOWN 

Hello,  how are you, (you say)...  they say                                                                                                                                       grand, you know yourself,  hard times! I'd say they would,  they could, they might now,                                                                                                                                                                                               lock us down again next week, next month, again, or would you say? or                                                                                                     Christmas, after Christmas,....sure they have to let us, let us... have the Christmas?                                                     surely let us have the Christmas let us ......let us. Hopefully ( you say),  Maybe, (you say ) yeah they know... you need the Christmas?  Yeah, ah, no, we couldn't like, I couldn't me, I mean I WILL NOT DO another lockdown? no, they wouldn't say another lockdown, no, I couldn't no..... they wouldn't... try..... like could they? ...would they? ...                                                                                        

I know (you say) I know and yeah they know we couldn't, mightn't, stand for that?  Well yeah,  (they say) I mean I'm fully vaccinated now? I've done my bit you have to do your bit, the Grannies, Daddy died... he died I don't... feel... safe, you do it for the others like,  they.... haven't... can't get...vaccinated...we all have to, or it won't be,  won't feel, isn't,  safe... 

oh right (you say) so does it actually, I mean,  work?

DO IT  FOR THE OTHERS AND YOU'LL BE SAFE (FOREVER)

Does what.. it works! It works! It works... you won't get sick, too sick, in, hospital, die! Only the unvaccinated....like, if only they would... far right terrorists you know....tin foil hatters,  conspiracy theorists they are, heard about it on the Television like, those people? get their information from the internet you see, the science says, the TV says, I mean the papers say the science says we have to yes, my doctor says.....you do it for  the others and you don't get sick!  Or only like a cold... the radio says... 

BREAKTHROUGHS

The break through cases now? (you say) like everywhere, they aren't best described as breakthroughs now?

THANK GOD THANK GOD SO LUCKY HOW WE TOOK THE COVID VACCINE 

I know I know, my friend, her neighbour, Mammy, all the teachers at my daughter's school got ....yeah but sure you catch it, spread it sure you do, of course you do, it doesn't... matter, doesn't....  everybody knows you won't get actually sick? or really bad, or go to hospital, things like that, I mean people, everyone I know, has covid yeah.  So all us are....vaccinated,  yeah,  and John, like after, he was really sick, ...and someone that I know's in hospital now with covid, and her heart, her heart.... but thats not anything to do with....vaccines, no, imagine just how bad it would have been,  it could have been if we  hadn't all, we didn't have the ....don't  you see. ..like everyone I know is vaccinated!  No, they weren't sick before but anyway I mean they had to get the covid  sometime?....lucky like it's lucky...that....they got the covid now, after being I mean  vaccinated, ....like we have to follow ...I mean science, everybody knows...

THE SCIENCE SAYS

Science is a work in progress though?....I mean things change...and scientists differ, learn from one week to the next, contradict each other, TAKE  the  money from the global groups you only hear....the media pets  (you say) ( you're off again) , (you're saying way TOO MUCH again )

Well, I believe the Science? sure it's in the NEWS, and Luke O'Neill... Clare Byrne and Nephet know The Science. All that other stuff is.... just the right wing, racist, TERRORISTS on the... on the internet.  My doctor, and my TD, sure the TV, say...!

But now, (you say),  it's looking like the vaccinated need the booster, would you, will you... take the ....

AND LINING UP THE VULNERABLE FIRST, WHY DON'T WE

Boosters? ah I wouldn't want to take another, thats for older people sure, with like I mean co-morbidities like I shouldn't..... have to, really, like the first one wasn't bad, the second though....I mean it only meant it worked but still......I'm done, my mother now is going for it when she's called,  she should ... she's  vulnerable... old, it's better than the covid... eh?

 you wouldn't think to... stand with people choosing  not to have the vaccine, would you?  maybe... stand with them against the vaccine passes (you say... softly, softly)

TRACK ME 

covid passes!... I have mine, the QR code it's on my phone, it's shocking handy, all your info's there about like vaccinations.... for travelling like,  your boarding pass, it runs like clockwork, straight through  airports, no delays, the ones without the passport have to wait ...they have to... queue?...

Was it to travel then, (you say), why you took the shot or, I mean, on account of covid?

Travel? yeah, I never got to go away, like ANYWHERE for two whole years and now I can,  and so can you and anyone,  if only you would, they would do the right thing stop the spread the SCIENCE says...

TRACE ME 

                 but still, (you say) like, contact tracing means you never know the day the hour you'll be locked down again, and so it's never I mean, ever, over, dearest one.... 

the Contact tracing? sure you have to really, like my kids are home from school  'cause some one had the sniffles. Then you have to, I mean get them tested too, to see if they'll, like, have to  be like quarantined... the testing? no, the kids don't mind, they have to sure, the covid's bad in all the schools...

                                         PASS ME ONE MORE ANTIGEN TEST WHY DONCHA

 but testing, like inserting swabs up, up, your nose, til tipping off the blood brain barrier, daily, up, your children's nose, its tipped with ethylene oxide dear one, hydrogel, it's carcinogenic, (you try)

MASKS ARE PRETTY 

Ah no... I never heard of 'ethylene oxide', anyway how else can they I mean find out, if you have it,  covid? Blood brain barrier? no! they wouldn't send us tests that....no...  I mean, the kids  do sometimes cry, a nose bleed maybe but... sure what else can you do... the virus ...never isolated? ah now, get a grip! the science knows. The kids are just protected, by the tests, the masks... 

                                                                    MASKS ARE WARM 

So what about bacterial pneumonia, from like breathing back you own breath's waste? dear heart (you say) 

bacterial pneumonia, naw... they don't mind wearing masks? The little children have to be reminded, yea, but covid's in the aerosols you know, you have to stop the aerosols.  Waste on your breath? now who says that, the internet? like, sometimes I feel faint in supermarkets or at work but so? I go outside? I take a breath, don't make a fuss.... they make you wear the masks outside? Well, sure there's aerosols outside... hello! Stay home, I'd say,  just order in your food and watch netflix, how hard is that? it's there for you, if you just won't, you can't, you WILL NOT  do your bit. Can't do your bit? ah now I kinda like the masks myself, you don't want people always looking at your face, and sure its even warmer in the cold,  It's grand, its fine, it's pretty!

  SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN/VACCINATE THEM ALL

The kids get vaccinated, yeah, to keep them safe?  already safe? not necessarily, like, some end up in the ICU... it said that on the news, and, like, we have to vaccinate them... they can spread... infect us all?  I mean I have, like,  vulnerable people in my house, I'm living with my granny and you have to have your children done...to save us, save us, save us... all?

CHOICE

 I blame unvaccinated people, spreading, getting, passing covid, stopping this from ever being over, yeah, the Taoiseach says, sure only lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations works with them, I wouldn't want to... even mix with them, the anit-vaxxers, indoors... don't feel safe, I always ask in restaurants, bars, say ' have you checked their covid passes', first,  insist,  my friends and me... before we'd even go inside...

IMAGINE IF WE HADN'T  GOT THE VACCINE 

So now well yeah, you might get sick....but not too badly, not enough... to fill up hospitals, infect the vulnerable people...and, I mean,  of course, of course you DO still get it, I know lots of people got it after their vaccine ....at home with symptoms, lost their sense of tase and smell, your mouth all sore with blisters, stuck in bed for weeks with weakness, yeah, but just imagine how MUCH WORSE  it would have been without your.....yeah, at least you know it won't be fatal, if you're, fully ,vaccinated, yeah at least you know...you don't...you won't...

DYING

Never over? yeah, but no but yeah at least you know you're safe. I mean so many people sick, with heart attacks and strokes,  my boss at work, my neighbour, friends, the priest is dead... they're in the  hospital with strokes and blood clots, heart conditions.... dead, it's like... it's scary now.  They say, the TV says, it's lockdowns, covid....normal.  Normal. God oh god, you know, I'm sick and tired of going to funerals?  

.....................................................................................

IN THE SLIPSTREAM 

Leave them at it my friend says. It's, basically, not your business anymore?  

But 

People (yours) they tell you now they can't eat dinner with their family Sundays, Christmas day. They  can't go home, or even talk to former friends... or brothers, sisters.  Can not bridge the yawning chasm now, they fall...let go.... They tell you how they stand for reason, truth.  So here are Truthers. here the Normal People... call each other names. break ties of blood and heart, and still you must, you have to try... to bypass ranting, raging politics, downloaded narratives... seek and look for,  offer, to your loved ones all your good attention....I mean, love?

The children argue with me, buy their antigen tests, and speculate.  Our good friend Ursula is sick, her kind heart crushed, (a huge blood clot). So was it Covid caused it did they say, my son is asking his sister here in my house as I sit at my kitchen table writing.  No (I say) no,  they don't know that! You can't say that!  He looks at me, he turns his head away ... I mean, he says, whose talking to you anyway?,....I mean, why are you even talking? 

.............................................................................................

Yeah I tell my most beloved friend, I said that yesterday,  tomorrow maybe,  'done with it!  I'm done with that, I'm done'.   Today I'm trapped here in the slipstream,  voices of the people rushing though my blood like water,  tinnitus, hopeless,....unconditional,... confounded, you know, love? 

l

Staycation. Kiss a human. Bury a Friend.

So I and some other exhausted members of the extended Fam did a Flight Into the West before Kildare County locked down (though not entirely). For a staycation (native hol) in August. I, having taken three days in Cork in July with Beauty and the Boy, was having a second staycation ( holiday at home) to be truthful. Three nights in Galway, Spiddal, was bought and paid for, to top us up to a week away from Our House.  Our cave and our prison, where we'd all spent more time than we'd ever foreseen or asked for.  Five strange months. Co-exisiting.  Sheltering in Place.  Within walls we'd left behind a year before.

I mean, hey, it wasn't so bad? Not for us.  We were adults all.  We knew how to ignore each other when it was required, come together when it was needed.  It was, I mean,  bonding? Over Netflix, online yoga, knitting (ah yes), messing about in the back garden.  Books. Coffee brewing, and shooting the breeze about the crazy pandemic tornado, howling past Our House, swirling around our boundary line. Out there, at bay. But still, and anyway, time and living in this manner takes its toll  We were getting a little reluctant to leave the house at all, in the end.  In a way. We were obsessing, overthinking things we had to learn to leave alone...

...will I die, will I soon, intubated and drugged, will I scream, inside will I scream? will I....have only strangers masked strangers, masked strangers are turning me turning me turning me... and I'm done? will my mother, my father, my children call out for me, dying, call out for us ...stop! all that fuss, all that hope coming in, coming here, now masked strangers who don't know or forget we must pass with our people....and can I or do I exist now? beginning or ending, if no-one contain me...infection I am..

We must behave like everyone we met including ourselves are infected. I am infection. 

 

We were looking at the world from a position of retreat, peering out at a place at the end of a lengthening tunnel....had to get out!

And how my lungs expanded as miles flew,  fields streamed past the car on the motorway. Speeding. Probably.  A little. Being anywhere, away, was exhilarating, kickstarting, strange, scary-strange. Scary? Well, the gutted towns we slowed for, shop fronts boarded up on high streets in towns. in a city, gaping absences on main streets like missing teeth, exposed, down an out, were disturbing.   Edgy waiters washing down your seat your table,  before you crossed the threshold, dis-infecting your seat your table after you had eaten, was that, scary. Chilling even. The sense of dystopia was there and everywhere.   Like you're getting back to normal, not. Never.  You're on the road to nowhere, or somewhere not mapped (maybe in horror movies?).

But, you know,  the Family was there. Those dear familiars, to meet for meals out, to walk the beech with, and wander through the streets. To drink with, and debrief. Despite that invisible fence hampering essential connection. You know the one. You've learning  not to cross it.  A scared new world. Where you can't have a drink, in a dark warm pub with your people, a mate.  (you can't)  Just drink together and talk, and your talk getting wilder as pints flow, til you're in the zone? If you're Irish, if you're human.

Well I knew where the invisible fence was, and didn't expect to leap the perimeter in  Galway. But walking through a properly cavelike lounge, as we checked into the hotel, I realise it is not empty, as all pub lounges have become. There is the brother in law, gazing philosophically at the far wall, nursing a pint. At 4pm in the day! Hurrah! Turned out there was a way of having one, or a few.  If you were eating, like later, or staying, or something like that. "Come join me" he called like the Host of Drinking, only waiting for us to arrive.

So we joined him and once I got over my fear of the barman snatching the second pint from my hand, or the third, had the most fun I'd had in I mean, five months? A seriously laughing dissection of everything, happening or stalled.  Interrupted, finally,  by dinner when we absolutely had to shift ourselves into the restaurant. How I used to take this,  connecting, for granted. How it is judged by the non-partakers, naysayers,  as valueless, dispensable, not allowed, in these long dark days of panicked pandemic. 

That, my dear readers, was an an actual session?  And then there were communal meals, cooked and served up to you in actual restaurants, while all you had to do was eat, talk and smile (like a good thing).  Compulsivly. Your grown children arranged at the table behind you,  distanced, their chairs shifting closer and closer to the adults to join in the talk. 

My sister,  her daughter and my daughter, eat with me the night before we leave.  Just us, at our socially distanced table, marooned near a window, well served by a not busy waiter. We are all still giddy/happy to be able to do it,  to be in.  All animation, forthcoming and confessional, that night. My sister and I talk of secrets,  family things, happenings, only ever taken for an airing in closed door spaces.  Spilling beans as the wine flowed, the food came and went. The time when someone's mother, on her tenth birth, did  not recognise the child the nurses brought... or so the mother said said.... "Apparently, the nurse said that that was a thing, you know, if your own mother died when you were expecting" my sister says. But the child who was not recognised felt this deeply,  enduringly, for years and years afterward, when a chatty aunt spilled the beans about it.

...and then there was the Uncle Misplaced, a new born babe given to another mother in a nursing home, whose own mother took the stranger baby to her breast, took it home. A fact the lost child never forgave when the mistake was uncovered, the babies replaced. 

....my own memory that may not be a memory, (the chatty aunt again) of hanging upside down from my pram by my pram-straps for an eternity, as I screamed and choked, no one coming, in a field.  Mother having left me in my father's care, the pram parked in a corner of the field he was ploughing, his eye trained on the churning earth. His mind fixed on... ploughing. Evidently. "I didn't remember this, til I was told about..I mean. Then I did?".  I explain. And, (explained)  that I figured it may have given me an interesting and permanently upside down view of life...at the best view of things...

Our daughters listen carefully, silent for a change. As though they are imputing information, receiving key instructions concerning  themselves, for their journey.  And they are, and so it goes.  We pass it on, we rid ourselves of memories that laced, curled about and floored their conception, their making.  One day maybe, they will pass on such stuff to their daughters, to shadow, or illuminate the way. Of course, they will, in telling, medicalise, catgorise  each perfect story, as people do now.  Instead of leaving it perfect, released in it's telling. Illuminating all around it happening in that time.

We left there replete, unequivocally happy and hugging like Americans at the door, tipsy and sure that we'd covered all bases. Like, we said, who knew when we'd do this again? Precarious good times!  Giving urgency, heat,  to the good food we eat, to everything said.  A glorious airing of things needing presence, close contact, the smile in the eyes and the head cocked for listening.  The energy linking, co-mingling your body my body, the only way ever we humans connect.  

                            .........................................................................................................

Visit my site annacoganwriting.com to access my latest book. 

Where do you go to (my Lovely).

                                                                   Unmoored

 "So, we'll all break for coffee...ah... will we,"  the hostess says self consciously  "...and we'll all I mean go down to our kitchens now, from wherever you are, in your (chuckle) socks, and, you know, make yourself a cup of coffee, or tea even, make tea, and come back...from wherever you are in the house in your...your PJs"  She chortles at her own insouciance, trials off...
And I'm pushing up from the desk in the box room, the play room that was, shelves still holding children's books, splashy children's paintings. I am disorientated in place and time, yanked from aural connection via tele conference, and in need of strong coffee.
'Wherever you are in the house' 'our kitchens??'  Oh.  The words erase my inner visual of colleagues  in a room around a table, besuited, a secretarial station humming just down the hall.  Like I know I'm in my socks in my boxroom, but they were at work where my mind had placed them. Picture perfect, arranged,  never disturbing me with visual cues or body language. My captive audience. Not.  And I'm shocked into body, pins and needles, real.
I need an infusion of coffee. (not tea).

                                                                    Stunned

I offer that palliative to my younger daughter, passing her room, her open door, where she is a pale silent presence hunched over a desk. She looks up and through me, failing to connect.  She's online at a lecture, the lecturer's voice grown familiar to me over weeks, catching stray words, dutch accents, intoning on physics, micro-macro duality, vectors and whatnot.
She beats a path every day of this lockdown from kitchen to garden to bedroom, listening, writing, staring at a screen.  Connecting for lectures sometimes in the early morning, sometimes in late evening. The Dutch are always ahead of us. Or behind us... They're down with an early start, anyhoo.
"But, so,  I mean... what about dinner... the hoovering... your washing? (spilling untended from the washing machine) I variously ask, forgetting that she is not really here, in my house. She's in a lecture. She's not really there either.

Days she has a stunned look, like a bird smacking hard on a windowpane.  Times she grows wild and rowdy on zoom calls, only wanting to connect, hysterical in the emptiness of virtual presence.
The Garden is taking shape under her restless fingers, strawberries forming, tomatoes, lettuce tips peeping from the raised bed. She grows the vegetables, leaves the flowers, the grass cutting to me.
She is a lover, a hugger, a dancer with dancers, given pacifiers of virtual meets, netflix, lectures online. Tossed back and forth from virtual interior to empty exterior, each and every day.  Sometimes suspended in the transition. Lost.

All night she dreamzs,  creates... astonishing astonished scenarios to locate herself, somehow, in this bizarre and total up -turning of her everyday life.
Dreamzs. She dreamzs, and in her dreaming leaves her lockdown, travels far and wide and seeking.

                                                                   Barbarian

I stand and stare at the kettle thinking this, and remember the other one, the sister.  In virtual college too, bedroom door closed, desk neat, pencils lined, computer placed, content I think you might say.  Her papers submitted in a timely fashion, her grades looking good, at ease with this slowing down of every day tumult, worldly invasions.  At ease at the wheel that lockdown has placed in her appreciative hands. I wonder if Beauty in her tower, Rapunzel and Sleeping were just as OK with it, were humming and upbeat in the cool quiet space created by bricked walls, lockdowns.
She comes down, steps out, slips away periodically to meet her BF, her lovely boyfriend, quarantined
in similar rooms, waiting.

Evenings she comes down from the mountain, sits with us. Knitting, headbands, scarves, a shoulder bag, her needles weaving blues and greens and reds, her eyes fixed on the TV screen as she dissects narrative arcs on box sets, Game of Thrones rehashes, Normal People.  Scherezade distracting us.... 

I wonder how the hell she'll ever go back to clamour, non verbal communications, the great unwashed humanity.  If she ever has to.  I expect she can do it, she's done it before, (if she ever has to...)
I roar, invasive, from the kitchen  "Hey, d'u want a cup of Coffee! Hey?  Hello?... Answer me when I'm talking (shouting) to you!"
I am the Barbarian (at the gates)

                                                                Dreaming

I'm spooning Lavazza into a jug when a phone call comes in, from the boy, in the moment as you might say.
I ask him how he's going, how he's spending his days. He has refused to come home, preferring the pandemic payment, rent assist, long days fishing, long nights talking with mates on his xbox, his snapchat, his facebook page.  Unwilling to give all that up. DOH! Unable to see any down side,  I suppose ...
"yeah, good, yeah, I mean weathers good? I'm, like, fishing, on the river all day... in the evening I yeah, talk to the lads on the xbox?" he offers me.  "Right".
A silence... "So, the days are like melding? one into the next? in a dream, like, a daze?..." he says
slowly.  Hmm.

He is a poet, a baulker, a bird you toss strategically, tenderly, from the nest. As I had done a while back, watching keenly from back here on the nest's rim as he got on top of routine, got into having to  work every single solitary day even summer, got his head around paying for things. Which he managed, pretty well.
Until now. When he doesn't have to manage anything at all. Uncongenial, I mean.
We talk some about his (maybe) Masters, his (kinda of) notion to do an MA in the Autumn. About getting going at it, taking steps, that sort of thing.

I mean I talk, and he (half) listens...



                                                             I Will be your Virus.

He tells me how he won't come home, start yet, infect me maybe...maybe? baby!, I think, truly, you've got nothing I've not given you? and maybe I won't call you out on that (just yet) ( I'll wait) (timing's everything) Yeah. 


In the kitchen the Caged Bird has taken over making the coffee, and Beauty has the cups.
I catch them eye rolling as I say goodbye to the Boy, remind him to switch off the Xbox occasionally, eat Good Stuff, wear Sun Block, come Home (occasionally)


                                                                 Enmeshed.




Somehow we've slipped back in time, in years. I have put on the halter of Mammy and they the mantle of adolescence, as though leaving home, growing up, flying solo had never happened at all... has to happen all over again.

Sometimes I slip into my car on my own and drive. For foodstuffs, or medical supplies or, I mean
essential business. The car is my Oyster, my Chariot to Nowhere, my own crazy headspace. My own.

And just when you're thinking you're getting away with it a txt flashes in on your screen which you decide not to read and you read...
"where u? in town? u nvr sed!!!
You stare at the screen.
And another
"We'd hve likd 2 go 2? get out of here 2!!!"
And another
"U nvr sed?"
I am barbarous...keepy...viral... I am.

Sometimes I wish I didn't know so much about them. I wish that they didn't know so much about me either...


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The Chemical Angels Came for Us

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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. 

OH CORONA

Having a sustaining glass of wine,  post shopping for (essential) supplies.  Just a quick in and out I figured, just  a few necessaries, bread, wine.  I stand in a snaking queue for the check out, pushed and rushed and shaken by a panicked crowd, wondering whether, maybe, the universe had sent a plague to test us, shake us, hold a mirror to us, people.  I have a notion that the Virus, all the Viruses, have a function, shifting, nudging body rhythms in effect,  altering perceptions ( of survivors ).  The Virus as an instrument that refines, retunes, reboots, releases, human bodies.

Holding up a mirror, showing us what we are, or have become:

1.  Supplies.

We are not short of foodstuffs people. We have more stuff stashed.  Foodstuff, medications, sanitisers,  tissues, loo roll, paper towels.  We have warehouses,  supermarkets, trucks a  trucking across continents with stuff, more stuff,  And yet, and still, and anyway here we are.  Pushing, shoving, grabbing, emptying shelves so that we will have it before the next woman takes it.  I WILL have my sliced bread and my loo roll in my bunker.  I WILL ALWAYS eat (and wipe my bottom) whatever!  Whenever! things run out...on you.

2.  Loving Care.

Don't touch, don't hold, don't speak too closely, whisper kiss, go skin on skin.  Don't accidentally brush, doors handles, people, petrol nozzles.   I think of orphanages, in Eastern Europe before Glasnost,  all the love lorn places, where infants, tiny humans, were driven mad,  irreparably stunted by lack of touch.  Forget the loo roll, people, grab a loved one, snatch a partner, take an infant, a random relative, into the lock-down coming down the tracks.

3.  Go Virtual (at your peril)

And here we'll be corralled in our houses, busy bees  remotely working, living, eating, safe removed from human contact, in the kind of isolated bubble Child Psychologists, Talking Heads, tell us leads to (has led to) to over-weigh, disabled, anxious teens. Teens are us.

4.   Avoidance.

Is this lockdown for a week, a month, a year? Are we shadow boxing with a mystery Virus
which may or (may not) have been here for  a week, a month, a....since November 2019?  Eh?
Who can say? People have been dying, getting better, since November last (or forever).  Of... well ...something! Influenza?  No one panicked? No one knew back then to blame, to name, Corona.

So now we know. What do we know? We know The Virus will be defeated by the young folk who are not, if they are not, immune compromised. There will be an uneven battle with the old, the sick, and all those people whose immune function has been messed up, broken down, un-underused. All the people insulated by vaccine from the common cold, the influenza, everyday infections, whose immune systems sag flaccid and unused. How many are there of those people? Do we know?

5.   Fear:  

The hardest thing to hold steady in the mind, for us poor humans, is that fact that we will die. So we do not ( hold it in the mind)  We cosset children, prolong adolescence, hobble resilience, suck the marrow from the buzz of living,  rather than let life flow to dying when it comes. We vaccine, insure, corral, distance ourselves to the point where children suffer anxious states, self harm to feel,  grow into helpless half baked adults, narcisstic, lost, irresolute. We would not let them face the perils of the world and leave them reaching after chemical highs. We will not face the abyss, or accept the defining, life enhancing clarity, that we will die.

6.  Denial:

I listen to the pundits, politicians on the radio, on the TV,  Social Media, getting off,  enlivened, as they talk talk talk.  Oh, not about the Virus, no,  but about the things we'll do to stop this happening, backs turned oblivious to the Elephant in the Room. We cannot stop this, people? We can delay it, yes, give the always patchy Health Service, our heroic Health Care Staff, a break,  but can't, we can't  close down normal service indefinitely,  or turn the Virus back.  And so we lock-down for a month, six months, a  year, await a vaccine.  And then the next Corona, and the next, and the next one after that.  Each one oncoming sooner than the one before.  Until we learn. We can only live, eat, mind ourselves cannily,  live, until we die.

7.  Consolation.

There is a strange strange turnabout just now between the minders and those who must be minded, that is truly rich.  How often have I listened lately to the young ones blaming, claiming, wailing how I, and you, have stolen their future, wrecked their planet, used up all the good stuff leaving none for them.  How often tried to soothe their youthful terrors, anxieties, about climate change, the carbon footprint, a planet dying while they're on it,  quite before their time.  Apologies, soothing, good attention, silence offered as they speak, accuse, indict.  Rage, against this, that I have not and you have not prevented dying, ending, death. That we will not.

And now it's us, the minders, first, who face this grim and grinning Reaper.  And I'm waiting for the Darlings to step up, get the picture, read the writing on the wall.   See true and clear, unblinkered,  for whom this great bell tolls.

My daughter, my cell mate in isolation, drops a Newspaper article from 2017 in my lap concerning long dormant Viruses awakening.... from frozen places melting,  from buried places unearthed, from forests burned for profit,  headless hardcore fracking.   Elephants in the Room.