FIRST PUBLISHED IN “TRANSVERSE” journal of the University of Toronto’s Department of Comparative Literature, 2008

I.1.
Never such a shivering tale be told
Etain bathing by the stream one day
Saw a horseman whose brooch and hair were gold
He was a man in beautiful array
His shield and buckle gold, his eyes were grey
His strap of silver and his five pronged spear
Gold as the barley at the turn of year.
I.2.
The rider told her of the fairy forts
Was this prophecy, or was it dream
Desecration of the fairy world imports
A nightmare of what we are or seem
And battle with kings who would deem
It honor to dispute her name
But peace within her beauty not reclaim.
I.3
The maidens shied away from such a man
Others made bold to hold his silver gaze
Then Etain remembered heaven’s plan
Something that would haunt her all her days
The King’s eye healed, another king to faze
The drowned horses, and the Tethbae birds
She to be swallowed in the big Queen’s curds.
I.4
The hooves danced with the cutting of the blades
In tunic red and cloak of deepest green
He turned his back to Etain and her maids
Heading back to lands as yet unseen
She would remember what such colors mean
Borrowed from her the green eternal world
The red was rowan berry, death unfurled.
I.5
The High King thought she was his to woo.
And won her after a summer’s night
Her heart did not stir for him, as who
Rode in the memory like a vision of the light
The king possessed her, did not own her sight
Nor touch, nor hearing, she was yet another’s
Whose mystery dwelt in the lives of others
I.6
He saw her unwind her plaited golden hair
Loosening the golden balls with a silver comb
Her tunic was red and green, each golden layer
Like the year’s turning, handsome as they come
As sweet as life crammed in a honeycomb
Her arms, silken, slender, white
Her head a silver circle in the night.
I.7
Years later, when all that was left was talk
In Tara there was held a loving feast
At such momentous meeting lovers balk
But Echu the King had his magic tryst
And sent out word the greatest was the least
Etain’s famous beauty now enriched him
He had seen her bathing, it bewitched him.
II.1
The King’s brother, Ailil, was stricken
The Druid said it was love or jealousy
So he pleaded with Etain that she quicken
His life, though he was vowed to celibacy
Three times a date was set, three times fallacy
Until stood before Etain her former prince,
Her husband, Midhir, not forgotten since
II.2
The day she saw him in his red and green
Reminders of the holly and the berry
The scent of wild flowers to the eye unseen
The secret of the eternal in the merry
Faultless land of the fairy queen
Which she was, eternal, and he her mate
Living in an unfallen, unblemished state.
II.3
“I was once your husband in a fairy land
Where there is no birth in sin or pain
Only children born to a joyous band
With yellow hair, white skin, and foxglove stain
Not withering to age, but honeyed rain
Sweet water, mead, making a pleasant drink
Eternal life is promised at the brink
II.4
My first wife, Fuaimneach, was a sorceress
With a red rowan wand she cast a spell
Turned you into a pool of water, no less
Than what was between us, to create hell
She then turned you into a worm as well
And as a scarlet butterfly you flew with me
In a wild tempest across the sea.
II.5
Your father’s wife swallowed you in a drink
You were born on Earth, and lost to me
How deep is Paradise, I can only think
It meant nothing when you weren’t there to be
Loved by your husband, you know I am he
Come to reclaim you to your rightful place
In fairyland within a mythic race.”
II.6
The earth-husband, Echu, had a visitor
A stranger clad in purple and in gold
With a chess game challenged the Inquisitor
Let him win, five fold and ten fold
Dark grey horses, broad-chested, with firm hold
Wide nostrilled, swift, dappled red ears
Enamelled bridles for the fifty dears.
II.7
The next night there was wagered fifty boars
Curly-haired, fiery, contained in a blackthorn vat
Fifty white red-eared cows and calves without sores
Fifty swords, gold-hilted, ivory blades to follow that
Three-headed wethers, fifty cloaks. He spat
Another wager to clear stones, lay a road
The fairy folk at night worked at such a load.
III.1
The final stake was a kiss from Echu’s queen
A month postponed, the hire of fighting men
But she had already dreamt the red and green
Her husband had to give permission when
Midhir asked for a kiss, and in that crafty ken
Their lips met, and when she opened her eyes
She was back in the fairy Paradise.
III.2
Echu saw two swans with a golden chain
Fly disappearing into the air
And in the fairy land, life renewed again
Etain was to give birth to his heir
On the first of May, the child was born, so fair
By Midhir’s request, also called Etain
He didn’t mind another’s child to gain
III.3
By a silver stream mother and daughter dreamed
Their life eternal, beautiful and kind
Etain the younger, wondered how life seemed
So dull, when tales of mortal mind
Of feast and famine, light and dark combined
To her, an interesting, fascinating story.
Tara in its golden Celtic glory.
III.4
Echu, at home, longed for his wife
He dug up mounds to find the fairy fort
Each morning not a blade of grass or life
Disturbed the rolling hills of Tara’s court
While ravens came to stir anger, stayed to sport
Blind dogs and cats stood guard with limping hounds
Scleth and Samhair, Echu’s anger knew no bounds.
III.5
Midhir came back to Tara, to ask
Why he was persecuted by the King
“I do not consider you wooed fairly in the task
You who sought magic ways to bring
My wife Etain to the world of eternal ring”
“I will by tomorrow Etain return
If you desist from deeds, my name to burn”.
III.6
By the third hour on the morrow there were fifty
Etains in the mist surrounding the mound
An old hag whose age count was quite thrifty
Stood before him without a single sound
Which of them was his true love in the round?
He saw one with a genuine aura
Who appeared to be a skillful pourer.
III.7
That night, with Etain sleeping on his arms
He found love, remembering his youth
And he was quietened by her fairy charms
Her freshness, with her show of ruth
Till Midhir mocked him with the awful truth
Confessing his joy to him across the water
Learnt he had slept with his own, and Etain’s daughter.
IV.1
Such treachery broke the heart of the earthly king
He now looked at his daughter-wife with pain
How he was saddened in this golden ring
Had lost his soul his bitter heart to gain
Sick at heart that he had with his daughter lain
She was now pregnant with his child
So he banished her forthwith to the wild.
IV.2
Etain was faced with the cruelty of the world
She who already had been to Paradise
Now in the wild wood, with the king’s anger hurled
At her beneath the stormy, earthly skies
She would have to grow old in pain, be wise
The infant to whom she would give birth
Snatched from her, to be cradled in the earth.
IV.3
The men came and snatched away the child
A beautiful girl, with embroidered cloth
The name, Etain thrice-born was now defiled
She was going to be destroyed through wrath
As the evening hour drew upon the moth
Wondering which men were angels, which were weak
To smile on a little girl, not vengeance seek.
IV.4.
Her mother, stricken, wept both night and day
Mourning her daughter she never would see
She who was beautiful, was now bereft
Of gladness, grace, of joy that could not be
A desert life as dry as dust, no glee
But mourning like the grey and bitter hag
Who brought her to earth, the burden of a nag.
IV.5
There were no more feasts at Tara, now deserted
The King died, his mind and heart oppressed
Etain searched the mounds, they were converted
Against the Sidhe a borderland undressed
To which rough soil her silken face was pressed
And so to death, it seems for being a mother
The king her husband, to whom she was wife and daughter.
IV.6
Mind against mortal raged and won the day
Death was a cup as bitter as the gall
When offered life, no one seemed to pay
The end foreclose, to live or not the pall
Death had such sting, why do we live at all
Only the fairy folk know the answer
To live forever as a golden dancer
IV.7
Who can choose to be mortal or immortal?
A fairy love that can last forever
A threshold on this earth that has no portal
Choosing can mean from those we love we sever
All healing love bands, as if never
To the wildwoods ringing our departure
Never signaled by the one-eyed archer.
V.1
With her tunic embroidered at the breast
Young Etain was taken to the woods
The men stopped at Findlam’s for a rest
Resolved to go no further the bud
Where rested the green and red royal blood
To a guard-dog puppy she was given
To a humble cottager, at last forgiven.
V.2
Her existence brought a blessing on the couple
Her beauty all over gained renown
Her face was fair and full, her body supple
In beauty, she was given Nature’s crown
And all who knew her loved her, not a frown
Lived on her handsome forehead, but a glance
As she embroidered made hearts dance.
V.3
The years went by, untroubled rural calm
The mortal parents were bursting with pride
The king forgot the child, the dreadful sham
And soon to mortal doors, which opened wide
And closed again, as he, his story died
But in people’s hearts there remained a story
Of Tara, its blight and its glory.
V.4
Eterscelae was a new king in the province
He heard of Etain’s beauty, and resolved
To go and woo her, he would convince
Her parents that with her was dissolved
All harm, all evil, problem not yet solved
The world with love and wonder would not cease
There would be a beginning of a peace
V.5
She had been brought up in isolation
Now to learn the touch of human hand
A bird flew above in exaltation
Rested his breast on hers in loving band
Eyes closed, he stroked her as the land
From whence she came, from dear earth as a child
Would come the son of Eterscalae, bound in geasa*, smiled.
V.6
Born with three gifts, the greatest gifts to see
What could not be seen by any of sight
Nor judgment, that brought good to be
But his father’s sins were endless as the night
Not to shoot birds, in Tara, around in flight
There was hope that harm in Etain be undone
Not a stranger be admitted to the dun.
V.7
So Etain birthed a new hero who grew only to die
Between times, carved out a noble life
Loved and honoured, though neither could fl y
Back to the end of youth, the end of strife
Conara, son of Eterscalae with promise rife
Broke geasa, his heroic antique vows
The night he was slain in Da Derga’s lodging house.

*promise
(c) Rosemarie Rowley, 2007, 2008, 2011

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The spirit of enquiry which started with the Renaissance, and the discovery of ancient scripts in Europe, brought about a change in the way people thought about the eternal questions of life, salvation, spirit and truth, and of course, how to make one’s way in the world. During the time when Rome held the monopoly of truth, and the monolith and control of everyday life, the secret knowledge of the ages, the Hermetic tradition, had been driven underground, and were it not for the Arabs of North Africa, who valued the higher arts and sciences, much of ancient wisdom would have been lost. In fact, it was the Arabs who gave us the word Alchemy, since it translates Land of the Moon, meaning Egypt. The greatest single loss in the classical world was caused by the fire of Alexandria, when the city was set on fire by Caesar in the year 48 A.D. It is reported that many volumes were lost – volumes whose loss was irreparable, and irreplaceable. A special loss was the number of ancient manuscripts on magic and alchemy.
The beginnings of alchemy were traced back to Hermes Trismegistus, an incarnation of the Egyptian god Thoth, god of wisdom, mathematics, and natural sciences such as magic. A surviving manuscript, what was known as the Emerald Table, or Tabula Smaragdina, describes his credo as:
It is truth, truth without lies, certain truth
That that which is above, is like that which is below
And that which is below is like that which is above
To accomplish the miracle of one thing.
However, it wasn’t until the rubrics of Greek geometry and philosophy reached Egypt that the practice of the magical science alchemy began to develop. When the Greeks reached Egypt and began to trade there, they aligned their philosophical thought models with
Egyptian alchemical practices. This conjunction within the Egyptian cosmos was to bring about the birth of the ancient discipline and learning of alchemy. In fact it was the fusion of Hermetic principles with Aristotle’s elements which is the basis of the alchemical creed.
Before this process could come into being, there had to be primeval matter which encompassed all things. When Aristotle’s teachings reached Egypt, they found a basis in the wisdom of the Emerald Table – the one thing referred to is the primeval massa confusa. From this was born the four elements, that is, Earth, Air, Fire and Water. However, philosophy and science as we know them were not to flourish until two millennia later.
Another manuscript which survives from this time known as the dialogue of Cleopatra with the philosophers, also indicates the birth of alchemy (U. Calgary, 2001) which some have dated as 200 AD. In answer to Cleopatra’s discourse on earth, water and air, the philosophers replied:
In thee is concealed a strange and terrible mystery. Enlighten us, casting your light upon the elements. Tell us how the highest descends to the lowest and how the lowest rises to the highest, and how that which is in the midst approaches the highest and is united to it, and what is the element which accomplishes these things. And tell us how the blessed waters visit the corpses lying in Hades fettered and afflicted in darkness and how the medicine of Life reaches them and rouses them as if wakened by their possessors from sleep; and how the new waters, both brought forth on the bier and coming after the light penetrate them at the beginning of their prostration and how a cloud supports them and how the cloud supporting the waters rises from the sea.
We can see how from the beginning, how alchemy was bound up with an understanding of the origins of life and the natural processes.
And the philosophers, considering what had been revealed to them, rejoiced, as Cleopatra replied to them.
The waters, when they come, awake the bodies and the spirits which are imprisoned and weak. For they again undergo oppression and are enclosed in Hades, and yet in a
little while they grow and rise up and put on divers glorious colours like the flowers in springtime and the spring itself rejoices and is glad at the beauty that they wear.
For I tell this to you who are wise: when you take plants, elements, and stones from their places, they appear to you to be mature. But they are not mature until the fire has tested them. When they are clothed in the glory from the fire and the shining colour thereof, then rather will appear their hidden glory, their sought-for beauty, being transformed to the divine state of fusion. For they are nourished in the fire and the embryo grows little by little nourished in its mother’s womb, and when the appointed month approaches is not restrained from issuing forth. Such is the procedure of this worthy art. The waves and surges one after another in Hades wound them in the tomb where they lie. When the tomb is opened they issue from Hades as the babe from the womb.
According to Aristotle, the four elements are distinguished from one another by their qualities, that is, the fluid or moist, the dry, the hot, and the cold. Each element possessed two of the primary qualities, while the two absent qualities were the contrarieties which cannot be coupled. The four possible combinations were, and still are: hot and dry = fire, hot and fluid = air, cold and fluid = water, and cold and dry = earth.
The alchemists revered the natural world as a template for their work, and did not seek possibilities outside these elements. As well as the human cycle of birth and death, they believed that such natural occurrences were of an intrinsic existing order, and therefore matter such as metal grew vegetable-like in the earth, and had to go through the processes of generation, with the addition or subtraction of varying degrees of the elements, which in turn, brought about the differences between the different metals. Therefore, they reasoned, if metals were treated as vegetables, and went through the stages of purification and putrefaction in the alchemist’s laboratory, they could change what kind of metal they were. This foreknowledge of relationship between all elements only came into being much later on in the twentieth century with the discovery of atoms and the periodic table. However the alchemists, versed in magic, made their comparisons only in the visible natural world, and what they hoped was to bring inferior metals to a stage of perfection by imitating natural correspondences, that is, through the magical theories of similarity, correspondence, like, and substitution, and above all, through imitation of the natural processes of generation or germination, and growth and decay. Since all matter is a combination of the elements, some are more perfect than others, and gold is the most perfect natural form. This is basic alchemy.
What is important in the process was that the alchemist did not dissociate the great work of metal transmutation from himself: perfection, transformation, and transmutation of his own soul was as much an object as perfection of the metals. This inner alchemy was considered to be far more important, by the adepts, than the extrinsic metallurgy. The object was to enter the complete and full life – gold being the great life force (Sol) which is hidden in the ordinary obscurity of daily events.
Albertus Magnus, Ramon Lully, Arnold de Villanova and Paracelsus are the great
names in medieval alchemy, but none were more influential than Paracelsus. (Hartman, 1997). Born in 1493, he was originally called Auroleus Phillipus Theostratus Bombastus von Hohenheim, immortalized as “Paracelsus”. He was the son of a well known physician who was described a Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, and it was from him that Paracelsus took his first instruction in medicine. At the age of sixteen, Paracelsus entered the University at Basle where he applied himself to the study of alchemy, surgery, and medicine. He was already acquainted with the study of alchemy, having previously read the works of Isaac Hollandus. Hollandus’ writing roused in him the ambition to cure disease by medicine superior to those available at that time to use, for apart from his incursions into alchemy, Paracelsus is credited with the introduction of opium and mercury into the arsenal of medicine. His works also shows an advanced knowledge of the science and principles of magnetism. These are just some of the achievements that seem to justify the praise that has been handed him in the last century. Manly Hall (Hall, 1996) called him “the precursor of chemical pharmacology and therapeutics and the most original medical thinker of the sixteenth century.”
However, while a student in Basle, Paracelsus was forced to leave the city because of charges of necromancy brought against him. The Abbot Trithermius, an adept of a high order, and the instructor of the illustrious Henry Cornelius Agrippa, had initiated his study of alchemy and under the guidance of a wealthy physician Paracelsus was pursuing research into medicine, mineralogy, surgery, and chemistry – however for the next few years he had to earn his living as an astrology and practitioner of the magic arts, as he fled through Germany, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Sweden and Russia. Therefore the practice of magic was fundamental to his understanding and work in alchemy.
In Russia, he was taken prisoner by the Tartars and brought before the Grand Cham at whose court he became a great favourite. Finally, he accompanied the Cham’s son on an embassy from China to Constantinople, the city in which the supreme secret, the universal dissolvent (the alkahest) was imparted to him by an Arabian adept. For Paracelsus, as Manly Hall has said, gained his knowledge “not from long-coated pedagogues but from dervishes in Constantinople, witches, gypsies, and sorcerers, who invoked spirits and captured the rays of the celestial bodies in dew; of whom it is said that he cured the incurable, gave sight to the blind, cleansed the leper, and even raised the dead, and whose memory could turn aside the plague.”
In 1526, at the age of thirty-two, he went back to Basle, to the university he had entered as a youth, and took a professorship of physics, medicine, and surgery. This was a position of considerable importance that was offered to him at the insistence of Erasmus and Ecolampidus. Perhaps it was his behaviour at this time that eventually led to his nickname “the Luther of physicians,” for in his lectures he was so bold as to denounce as antiquated the revered systems and he actually burnt the works of these masters in a brass pan with sulphur and nitre! He was denounced as a heretic, and usurper, and even though he had effected cures with mineral medicines, once more had to leave Basle in a hurry and resume the life of a wanderer. He earned a reputation for bombast and conceit, but when he died in 1541 he had laid the basis for a revival of alchemy and the magic arts all over Europe. Although he numbered many enemies among his fellow physicians, Paracelsus also had his disciples, and for them no praise was too high for him. He was worshipped as their noble and beloved alchemical monarch, the “German Hermes.”
In his book Paracelsus, Franz Hartmann says: “He proceeded to Machren, Kaernthen, Krain, and Hungary, and finally to Salzburg in Austria, where he was invited by the Prince Palatine, Duke Ernst of Bavaria, who was a great lover of the secret art of alchemy. But Paracelsus was not destined to enjoy the rest he so richly deserved. He died in 1541, after a short sickness, in a small room at the White Horse Inn, and his body was buried in the graveyard of St. Sebastian. At least one writer has suggested that his death may have been hastened by a scuffle with assassins in the pay of the orthodox medical faculty, but there is no actual foundation for this story.”
The discovery of ancient texts, and knowledge of the life and studies of the European alchemists had reached England’s shores by 1300, and Chaucer (Coghill, trans. 1989) the great writer of this epoch, as in all his work, reflected on these developments which happened to English thinking and society. He is at the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and his sessions abroad as a young man and diplomat had made him an apt commentator on practices in his native country. In the “Canon’s Yeoman’s tale” Chaucer shows a scepticism which had begun to infect those who had disregarded common sense, and embarked on the arduous journey of making gold. The poem contains a hilarious inventory of the gold-making equipment.
Our urinals and our descensories
Violes, crosslets and sublimatories
Cucurbites and Alemyks eek.
which describes the equipment of the deluded Canon and his laboratory assistant, both with leaden visages.
Although gold-making had taken place since the first gold sovereign was struck by Edward III in 1343, for the next hundred years gold- making had become a felony by statute in 1403. This meant that the study and practice of alchemy was once more driven underground.
The first English alchemist was George Ripley, but the heyday of English alchemy was during the reign of Henry VI. During his reign, permission once again was sought for making gold, and there was a revival of the alchemical poems of Ripley and Norton.
The years from 1573 to 1637, which encompass the life of Ben Jonson, the dramatist, were of enormous change in England. Within a hundred years, this small country had experienced a Reformation of the main religion, a Renaissance of classical learning, and the effects of adventure and discovery on trade, to such a degree that the strands of history were interwoven to give us an epoch high in intellectual attainment, material prosperity, and richness of culture and imagination The religious wars of the mid-16th century were finally healed, for a time, by the imposition by Elizabeth of a common worship and a common prayer. There followed the Golden Age of Elizabeth, which, ushered in through an atmosphere of religious persecution and fear, in fact gave rise to a new civilisation which meant that the discoveries of the previous era, both geographical, alchemical, and scientific, could be organised for the betterment of the crown and realm. However, it was also a period of high inflation, and the general insecurity meant that people tried all trades in order to make a living.
Queen Elizabeth herself was a believer in magic and alchemy, and she sought the advice and company of John Dee. Dee was appointed astrologer to the Queen, and was called upon to calculate by astrology a suitable date for the Queen’s coronation. Elizabeth was so gratified by the results that she promised to make him master of the hospital of St. Katherine of the Tower. She did not keep her word, however, and Dee went off to the Continent to pursue his alchemical studies. After Dee’s return to England, the Queen made a special journey to his house in Mortlake to see a crystal gazing-glass he had brought back with him. Shortly afterwards, a comet appeared in the heavens, and Dee was summoned to Windsor to explain its import, which took him three days. On yet another occasion, the Queen urgently requested his presence in order to prevent any evil from befalling her from a waxen image of Her Majesty found in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with a pin thrust through its breast.
It can be seen, that there co-existed, in the Elizabeth world, an accommodation between rational enquiry and scepticism, and magic. Because behind the religious orthodoxy there was a large vein of credulity and superstition, and with the spirit of adventure that existed home and abroad, it was a time when quackery and knavery were the order of the day among the common people.
The last years of Elizabeth’s reign were the most productive as regards the arts. Theatres had been founded, and existed both to feed an appetite of savagery, such as bear-bating, and high sophistication, such as in the dramatic soliloquies of the new self-conscious heroes of the stage, the most notable contributor being Shakespeare, both as an actor and a dramatist
Jonson has been described as the greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters. His early years were not auspicious. Jonson’s father lost his estate under Queen Mary, “having been cast into prison and forfeited.” He entered the church, but died a month before his famous son was born, leaving his widow and child in poverty. The circumstances of his birth were to affect Jonson’s all his life, since his mother soon married a bricklayer, and Ben had to educate himself. He had been lucky enough to attract the patronage of a friend of his father, an antiquarian named William Camden, and whilst unable to continue at Westminster school nevertheless received the basics of a classical education and a thirst for learning which were to last all his life. After a spell at the bricklaying trade, Jonson went to Flanders to fight, but returned to London convinced his vocation lay in being a writer and dramatist. The London he experienced at his coming of age was rich in literary figures, of whom the most eminent, and destined for ever greater fame, was Shakespeare, who was Jonson’s senior by a number of years, and who no doubt inspired him as an actor and as a player – Jonson himself has described their relationship as one bordering on idolatry. Jonson married soon after his return from the battlefield. Early on, in the early 1590s, he had befriended Marlowe, who died after a tavern brawl in 1593, and which much have left a great impression on the young Ben Jonson. Marlowe’s death has been portrayed as a conspiracy in the movie “Shakespeare in Love” and we shall probably never know the real circumstances. Another dramatist, Greene, who was also Shakespeare’s rival in the popular theatre, died, too, in mysterious circumstances. Those who survived, Jonson and Shakespeare, wrote works which had a great posterity. Shakespeare sought to universalise the whole human condition, while Jonson, always in love with learning, sought to satirise and portray the foibles of the day against such a background. Jonson’s actual posterity, like Shakespeare’s was sad and undistinguished, a daughter died in infancy, and a son died of the plague, and although we have evidence that his marriage was not happy – he lived apart from his family for a while in the house of Lord Albany, nevertheless his touching epitaphs on his son and daughter show considerable warmth and are a credit to him as a father.
“All that I am in arts, all that I know;” became Jonson’s motto. He dedicated his first dramatic success, Every Man in His Humour, to Camden. Though Jonson had little formal education, he found favour with the academic authorities and was made Master of Arts by St. John’s College, Cambridge. However, his training in warfare in Flanders stayed with him, and he remained bellicose and argumentative all his life, and having confessed to William Drummond, the Scottish poet when he met him as an older man, recalled he had killed an enemy in battle, and carried a war-wound – a fore-shortened arm – all his life.
From allusions in Dekker’s play, Satiromastix, it appears that Jonson, like Shakespeare, began life as an actor, starting with the company of Philip Henslow, and acting along with Shakespeare. He “ambled in a leather pitch by a play-wagon” taking at one time the part of Hieronimo in Kyd’s famous play, “The Spanish Tragedy.” By the beginning of 1598, Jonson, still in needy circumstances, had begun to receive recognition. Francis Meres well known for his “Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets,” printed in 1598, and for his mention therein of a dozen plays of Shakespeare by title – accords to Ben Jonson a place as one of “our best in tragedy,” a matter of some surprise, as no known tragedy of Jonson from so early a date has come down to us, and must be considered lost. There has been speculation that Jonson had a hand in Shakespeare’s works, and this may be the reference to those plays. Jonson’s career began to take off in 1598, around this time, but just at that point he killed a fellow actor, and was arraigned on a charge of murder. He pleaded an old custom, “benefit of clergy” and elected to be branded a felon from then on, the initial “T”, for Tyburn, being branded on his left thumb. It is fair to Jonson to remark however, that his adversary appears to have been a notorious fire-eater who had shortly before killed another fire-eater in a squabble. Duelling was a frequent occurrence of the time among gentlemen and the nobility; but it was regarded as an impudent breach of the peace on the part of a player. This duel is the one which Jonson described years after to Drummond, to whom he confessed much. The incident seemed to have shocked Jonson profoundly, because he had a conversion to Roman Catholicism at this point, and remained true to this religious creed for at least ten years.
On his release from prison, in disgrace with Henslowe and his former
associates, Jonson offered his services as a playwright to Henslowe’s rivals, the Lord Chamberlain’s company, in which Shakespeare was a prominent shareholder. A tradition of long standing, though not susceptible of proof in a court of law, narrates that Jonson had submitted the manuscript of Every Man in His Humour to the Chamberlain’s men and had received from the company a refusal; that Shakespeare called him back, read the play himself, and at once accepted it. Whether this story is true or not, certain it is that Every Man in His Humour was accepted by Shakespeare’s company and acted for the first time in 1598, with Shakespeare taking a part. The evidence of this is contained in the list of actors prefixed to the comedy in the folio of Jonson’s works, 1616. But it may be that all members of the acting company were named, because most of them were shareholders.
From these early tribulations Jonson developed as a major dramatist, though imprisoned again after he was named as co-author in Eastward Ho and once again he was in danger of his life, this time being threatened with having his ears and his throat cut. However, it may be that he was given an impetus to write more, for there followed the period in which his major plays were written – Volpone, Epicene, or The Silent Woman, and of course, in 1610 The Alchemist, and his final great comedy, Bartholomew Fair – all of which were performed contemporaneously. Then followed a period of exile, and a post of tutor to Sir Walter Raleigh’s son – during which his reputation was consolidated. There had been nothing like Jonson’s comedy since the days of Aristophanes. Every Man in His Humour, like the two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others, Jonson’s contemporaries. The method of personal attack by actual caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama. Why Jonson choose to attack a personage at the time, Simon Foreman, is not clear. The play, The Alchemist, is both an attack on the man and the work of alchemists in general.
It is thought that Jonson based the character of Subtle, the Alchemist, on this man called Simon Foreman, the subject of a pamphlet on alchemical abuse by Nashe. Jonson himself refers to Foreman in Epicene. Foreman was a character well known in London at the time for his swindling and cunning.
Foreman was a fellow dwelt in Lambeth – a very silly fellow, and yet had not enough, but to cheat Ladies and other women, by pretending skill in telling their fortunes, as likely they should bury their husbands, and what second husband they should have, and whether they should enjoy their loves. Besides, it is believed, there were meetings at his house, and that the art of Broad was more beneficial to him than that of conjurer, and he was better in one than in the other.. he himself was a cuckold with a very pretty wench to his wife, and two astrologers, who cannot foresee their own destiny –
(Anthony Weldon, Court and Character of King James, extant)
The official attitude toward alchemy in the 16th to 18th century was ambivalent. On the one hand, the Art posed a threat to the control of precious metal and was often outlawed; on the other hand, there were obvious advantages to any sovereign who could control gold making. In “the metropolis of alchemy,” Prague, the Holy Roman emperors Maximilian II (reigned 1564-76) and Rudolf II (reigned 1576-1612) proved ever-hopeful sponsors and entertained most of the leading alchemists of Europe. This was not altogether to the alchemist’s advantage. In 1595 Edward Kelley, the English alchemist and companion of the more famous astrologer, alchemist, and mathematician John Dee, lost his life in an attempt to escape after imprisonment by Rudolf II, and in 1603 the elector of Saxony, Christian II, imprisoned and tortured the Scotsman Alexander Seton, who had been travelling about Europe performing well-publicized transmutations.
The situation was complicated by the fact that some alchemists were turning from gold- making not to medicine but to a quasi-religious alchemy reminiscent of the Greek Synesius. Rudolf II made the German alchemist Michael Maier a count and his private secretary, although Maier’s mystical and allegorical writings were considered extraordinarily obscure and made no claim to gold-making. Neither did the German alchemist Heinrich Khunrath (c. 1560-1601), whose works have long been esteemed for their illustrations, make such a claim.
Behind the self-confidence and arrogance of a brave new world of the Elizabethan renaissance, there was a seething underground of fear and chicanery which enabled those called to the esoteric professions much leeway both in practice and in theory. There is no doubt that Jonson’s play reflected the latter view. Jonson’s “learned socks” were on in “The Alchemist” – and he portrayed the subject in accordance with the received wisdom of the day. Whatever his own views on the subject, and we may presume that the play mirrors these to some extent.
Why, now, you smoaky persecutor of nature!
Now do you see, that something’s to be done,
Beside your beech-coal, and your corsive waters,
Your crosslets, crucibles, and cucurbites?
You must have stuff brought home to you, to work on:
And yet you think, I am at no expense
In searching out these veins, then following them,
Then trying them out. ‘Fore God, my intelligence
Costs me more money, than my share oft comes to,
In these rare works.
Jonson shows a thorough knowledge of the alchemist’s art and aspirations, and its lack of success in his day. He is conversant with alchemy in all its stages: calcination, sublimation, solution, putrefaction, distillation, coagulation, and tincture. The symbols of the serpent, the green lion devouring the sun, the grey wolf, the peacock’s tail, the union of opposites, the king devouring his son – all are processes in alchemy and are noted in the play. Jung much later on, in the twentieth century, (Jung, 1980) has shown that these symbols were unconscious projections of the alchemist: in the quest for what he called individuation. Iosis and negritude were powerful changes, ritualistic in meaning. The King was gold (Sol), the Queen, silver (Luna) and each of the seven recognised metals had correspondence with a planet – Mercury with mercury, copper with Venus, iron with Mars, tin with Jupiter, and lead with Saturn.
However, Jonson’s aim in writing The Alchemist was to expose those fraudulent practitioners of the art – the entire play is linked entirely with a spurious claim to making gold. There is no evidence, however, that he himself was anything but sceptic:
If all ye boast of your great art be true
Sure, willing povertie lives in most of you
Epigrams
It is probable that fraudsters like Foreman may have caused the deeply sceptical feelings and opinions some writers had at this time, but we cannot be sure if this was rooted in anti-Semitism, for Foreman was a Jew, or whether it was a position on the spectrum of views held at this time. This scepticism and cynicism was not universal among Jonson’s circle of friends and acquaintances, even enemies, the latter with whom he had engaged in a war of the dramatists. In the time of James I, his reputation was highest of all, and his influence felt by nearly all of his contemporaries. He remained friends with Shakespeare until the latter’s death in 1616, and Donne, Francis Bacon, George Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Cotton and Sempler were his friends and cohorts in the famous literary tavern of the Mermaid, and later, in the Apollo room of the devil, and St. Dunstan Tavern, where his rules, known as leges convivales were inscribed over the mantel piece. His chief patrons were the Sydney family, the Earl of Pembroke, the Countess of Bedford, and the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle. His followers were many, who styled themselves “the tribe of Ben”, and consisted of the younger poets Randolph, Herrick and Suckling with a host of others who published verse in that day.
Jonson’s friends were as a group, divided along the lines of sentient wisdom, feeling, affections and cynicism – as were his enemies. However, it was not until much later on, when evaluations began to take place, and some of these poets were labelled by Samuel Johnson as metaphysical. Samuel Johnston developed the argument in his famous work, The Lives of the Poets where he noted (with reference to Cowley) that ‘about the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets’. He went on to describe the far-fetched nature of their comparisons as ‘a kind of Discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult semblances in things apparently unlike’. Examples of the practice Johnson condemned would include the extended comparison of love with astrology (by Donne) and of the soul with a drop of dew (by Marvell).
Metaphysical concerns are the common subject of their poetry, which investigates the world by rational discussion of its phenomena rather than by intuition or mysticism. This division of thought into rational and mystic elements widened throughout the following centuries, and has, in the scientific and philosophical worlds, a parallel system of valuation into subject and object, interior and exterior reality, as science began to take experience apart at the seams. Of the poets, Dryden was the first to apply the term to 17th-century poetry when, in 1693, he criticized Donne: ‘He affects the Metaphysics… in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign, and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts.’ He disapproved of Donne’s stylistic excesses, particularly his extravagant conceits (or witty comparisons) and his tendency towards hyperbolic abstraction.
In the 20th century the question was once more taken up by T. S. Eliot (Eliot, 1950) in an essay published in Times Literary Supplement, on 20 October, 1921:
Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practice it and in which of their verses. The poetry of Donne, to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors, is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very close to that of Chapman. The „courtly‟ poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin, it expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally the devotional verse of Herbert Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christian Rossetti and Francis Thomson). ..It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group.
It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not found in any of the prose, good as it often is. If we except Marlowe, a man of prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were directly or indirectly (it is at least a tenable theory) affected by Montaigne. Even if we except also Jonson and Chapman, these two were notably erudite, and were notably men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility, their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought. The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England (my emphasis) between the time of Donne or Hebert, and the time of Tennyson and Browning, it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think, but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience, it modified his sensibility. When a poet‟s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man‟s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino.
In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden…. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard..is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress.
The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced, they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley‟s “Triumph of Life”, in the second Hyperion there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.
The relevance of this essay to alchemy lies in the fact that for the first time a clear division is articulated in the public mind between the inner and outer worlds, the arcane and the mundane. Eliot’s essay on the metaphysical poets outlines this division quite succinctly, but it was a distinction not elaborated until the twentieth century. In a famous definition Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist aestheticist, described the school’s common trait of “looking beyond the palpable” and “attempting to erase one’s own image from the mirror in front so that it should reflect the not-now and not-here”. foreshadowing existentialism (Luka∕cs, 1975) The Metaphysical poets introduced a fresh approach to poetry. They rejected the flowery imagery of their predecessors, such as Spencer. Instead they sought to concentrate on clearly defined topics, often of a religious interest. The poems were also characterized by sharp polarities and paradoxical imagery. This imagery is often called metaphysical conceit and T. S. Eliot, made the point that the Metaphysical poets were able to combine reason with passion, showing a unification of thought and feeling. However, Eliot dates the split between feeling and reason, between intuition and learning, from the time of Jonson and his works.
Jonson’s life is a sure proof of what a robust character he was, and his love of learning shows how he developed his character in accordance with objective criteria rather than spiritual and intuitive modes. In his dramas, where he concentrates on ideas, and on characters which represent ideas, we find the genesis of the “dissociation of sensibility” and the stylistic manoeuvres which were to affect Donne in an entirely opposite way, since his personal journey had been in the opposite direction to Ben Jonson’s. Donne, like Jonson, changed his religion, but in his case, from being a Roman Catholic to becoming a Protestant. Ben Jonson’s conversion to Catholicism can be seen as a desire for unity in a sea of troubles. His being involved in a murder had in some important sense affected his inner or spiritual life, as some would say, he had murdered his own soul. Shakespeare wrote about the effect of murder on the personality, when he describes Macbeth’s thought “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day”.
Eliot, in his essay, mentioned the characteristics of obscure words, and simple phrasing. Now what happened was that words became of the simple variety, but philosophy became more cumbersome later on under the dead weight of Locke and Hume and their followers. So it is to Donne, Jonson’s contemporary we must go, if we are to trace in this short piece some of the philosophical divisions of the day, and how the spiritual and inner life was truncated in favour of empirical evidence. As Eliot points outs, this affected the way in
which poetry was written, which gave us the work of Milton and Dryden, which had no spiritual qualities. Nowhere was this loss more in evidence than in alchemy, and how from then on the investigation into life’s processes became a matter of external observation and verification, with science as we know it now in the ascendant.
The interior was denied altogether, the five doors of sense became absolute, and the inner life of the mystic, religious adherent, or adept, became a matter first of scepticism, then of ridicule, and finally, in our own times, has almost ceased to exist altogether. Strangely enough, this movement came to be called the Enlightenment.
We can trace the beginnings of this loss back to the late Elizabethan age. This had happened because the earlier division of belief had fissured into several strands. The thinker, or sceptical writer, began to ignore the life of feeling, which meant that the affective part of humankind’s nature, the spirit, began to crumble in the new quotidian, the division between subject and object, between inner and outer reality, now began an impassable gulf.
Within a few decades, scepticism began to take hold entirely, and the birth of modern science, as we know it, began. Rene Descartes, (1596-1650) coming quickly on the heels of Jonson, is often regarded as the first modern thinker to provide a philosophical framework for the natural sciences as these began to develop. In his Discourse on the Method he attempted to arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can know as true without any doubt. To achieve this, he employed a method called methodological scepticism: he rejected any idea that can be doubted in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge.
He was soon followed by Robert Boyle, who, in his book The Sceptical Chymist or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes published in 1661, (Boyle, 2003) pleaded that chemistry should cease to be subservient to medicine or to alchemy, and rise to the status of a science. Importantly, he advocated a rigorous approach to scientific experiment: he believed

20
all theories must be proved experimentally before being regarded as true. For these reasons Robert Boyle has been called the founder of modern chemistry. In the form of a dialogue, the Sceptical Chymist presented Boyle’s hypothesis that matter consisted of atoms and clusters of atoms in motion and that every phenomenon was the result of collisions of particles in motion. He appealed to chemists to experiment and said they should not be limited to the classic four, earth fire, air, and water. The Sceptical Chymist is well written, enlivened with touches of humour, as when the alchemists are compared with “the Navigators of Solomon’s Tarshish Fleet, who brought home … not only Gold, and Silver, and Ivory, but Apes and Peacocks too”, since their theories “either like Peacock’s feathers make a great shew, but are neither solid nor useful; or else, like Apes, if they have some appearance of being rational, are blemish’d with some absurdity or other which makes them appear ridiculous.” The chief value of The Sceptical Chymist, aside from its main message, was the wealth of chemical experiment that showed the chemist how to employ standard terms and nomenclature in chemical explanation and also presented new chemical fact.
The foremost medical texts that would have been available at that time were Friedrich Hoffman’s Fundamenta Medicinae, which is a general system of medicine, and later, William Harvey’s The Circulation of the Blood, which is a classic scientific thesis. Harvey demonstrated that in all animals blood is pumped from the heart, circulates around the body and returns to the heart. Surgeons such as Archibald Pitcairn accepted his theory as proven, though it was long before microscopes were sophisticated enough to allow observation of the capillaries that make this circulation possible. Isaac Newton, one of the last alchemists, became the first great astronomer, and also wrote works on alchemy, and is known to have practiced the art.
As I have argued in this essay, Jonson was the first to bring scepticism into the field of belief, and although he remained a religious adherent, his whole impetus now became a deeply cynical approach to mystery and to those who sought enlightenment. So, Jonson as the first sceptic had lampooned the alchemists, and paid no attention to, but had poured scorn on, their individuation projects
Jonson’s dramatic technique dwells not in the soliloquies which Shakespeare wrote, but in the configuration of character, often exaggerated, and delineated in a way which would fit into observation and empiricism. That is why the references to alchemy in the eponymous play have nothing to do with the inner life of the alchemist, but instead the physical and exterior trappings – the quotidian with its boring recount of money and pettiness. The exalted aim of the real alchemist was lost.
This can, in turn be linked, to the abuse of those who sought the means of magic, and tried to turn it into a profitable enterprise. The number of times money is mentioned in the play would be quite tedious, save that Jonson mentions it in the context of foreign coins most of the time. .
SUB. O, I did look for him
With the sun’s rising: ‘marvel he could sleep,
This is the day I am to perfect for him
The magisterium, our great work, the stone;
And yield it, made, into his hands: of which
He has, this month, talked as he were possess’d.
And now he’s dealing pieces on’t away. —
Methinks I see him entering ordinaries,
Dispensing for the pox, and plaguy houses,
Reaching his dose, walking Moorfields for lepers,
And offering citizens’ wives pomander-bracelets,
As his preservative, made of the elixir;
Searching the spittal, to make old bawds young;
And the highways, for beggars, to make rich.
I see no end of his labours. He will make
Nature asham’d of her long sleep:

WORKS CITED
Robert Boyle: The Sceptical Chymist or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes published in 1661, original in University of Pennsylvania Library Reprinted: Dover Publications 2003 ISBN-10: 0486428257 ISBN-13: 978-0486428253
John Dryden: The Major Works, ed. by Keith Walker, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
T. S. Eliot: The Metaphysical Poets, first published in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 October, 1921. Published Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, Harcourt, 1950, reprinted ISBN-10: 0151803870 ISBN-13 978-0151803873 Manly Hall The Philosophy of Astrology Philosophical Research Society Reprint edition (July 1996) ISBN-10: 0893143006 ISBN-13: 978-0893143008
ANGEL, gold coin worth 10 shillings, stamped with the figure of the archangel Michael.
BLANK, originally a small French coin.
COMMODITY, “current for –,” allusion to practice of money-lenders, who forced the borrower to take part of the loan in the shape of worthless goods on which the latter had to make money if he could 23
CROSS, any piece of money, many coins being stamped with a cross.
CROSS AND PILE, heads and tails.
CRUSADO, Portuguese gold coin, marked with a cross
DENIER, the smallest possible coin, being the twelfth part of a sou.
DRACHM, Greek silver coin.
GAZETTE, small Venetian coin worth about three-farthings.
GROAT , fourpence.
GUILDER, Dutch coin worth about 4d.
HANDSEL, first money takenIMPRESS, money in advance
MOCCINIGO, small Venetian coin, worth about ninepence
NOBLE, gold coin worth 6s. 8d.
PISTOLET, gold coin, worth about 6s.
PIECES OF EIGHT, Spanish coin: piastre equal to eight reals.
PORTAGUE, Portuguese gold coin, worth over 3 or 4 pounds.
PORTCULLIS, “– of coin,” some old coins have a portcullis stamped on their reverse
RING, “cracked within the –,” coins so cracked were unfit for currency.
SESTERCE, Roman copper coin.
SLIP, counterfeit coin,
SPUR-RYAL, gold coin worth 15s.
TALENT, sum or weight of Greek currency.
THREE-FARTHINGS, piece of silver current under Elizabeth

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This essay is based on a paper given at the Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College, Dublin, in December 2005, and represents a purely personal point of view.

Aristotle defined as second nature those habits and customs which together make an identity, as distinct from the permanent attributes that go to make up human nature. Since the end of the cold war, globalization has taken off as a second human nature, even according to some theorists, the market mentality being intrinsic to the composition of the human being and capitalism being an essential feature of life on earth. This would no doubt upset Aristotle, but we do know, from our studies of other peoples and cultures, that some characteristics are more constant than others, and we have much to learn from each other. What is interpreted as temporary sometimes turns out to be a permanent, depending on your point of view.
It may be a good thing at this stage, after the Fall of the Wall, to have a look at the role of the intelligentsia, particularly as dissidents, from the positions of right and left, and to see how they have fared in the past, and how we will go forward, in a project of peace which yet acknowledges the diversity of the modern nation states, and to see particularly how Ireland fits into this remit.
The intelligentsia, traditionally, have transcended the boundaries and limitations of class, gender, and race, and in a stance of detachment, comment on and effect the power play and cultural policies of a nation – and so negotiate and reach the area of the desirable qualities which come to be defined as permanent aspects of human nature in a broader context.
Because the idea of nationality is first and foremost an emotional identification with a group who share language, social customs, but not always territory, it is by its very nature prone to warfare: as we have seen in the 20th century great wars were fought on the basis of nationality, fascism being the most emotive form of nationality, with its mystification of blood and brotherhood, which linked its symbols and paraphernalia to the methods of of modern communications. The progress is from the tribe, with its gods, to the nation state, with its heroes, to a wider arena. Therefore one of the roles of the dissident in the nation state is to be vigilant against emotional excess and over- identification with the nation, whilst promoting the welfare of the people not to go to extremes where hostilities are engendered. However because the nation state by definition shares an ideology with its members the dissident or intellectual must also watch out for the dangers of ideology, which are carried together like a capsule in the minds of the people. There are many well-recognized ways in which ideology works against the truth, where the group mind takes over to the detriment of honest self examination.
On the other hand, in the Western model of rationality and equality, there are specific problems, in that the rhetoric of equality cannot always find a match in an atmosphere of competition and self-aggrandizement that the nation state embraces and the market upholds at this point in history. Some political systems have tried to solve this problem – equality and power: the left socialist countries in their beginnings notoriously entered a duplicity of mind to keep these two balls in the air. What Noam Chomsky calls the bounds of the expressible had its historic moment in 1917 when the fabrication of necessary illusions for social management entered the 20th century. The Bolshevik revolution gave concrete expression to the Leninist conception of the radical intelligentsia as the vanguard of social progress exploiting popular struggles to gain state power and to impose the Red bureaucracy of Bakunin’s forebodings. This they proceeded to do, dismantling factory councils, Soviets, and other forms of popular organization so that the population could be effectively mobilized into a “labour army” under the control of supposedly far sighted leaders who would drive the whole society forward. We have seen in each of the great communist countries that this forceful rule of the intelligentsia resulted in totalitarianism and the banishment of consent. I am old enough to remember the dunce caps of China in the 1960s and 70s and how professors and academics had to walk the streets draped as fools to convince the masses of the omnipotent reign of Mao, who reached further into places even emperors couldn’t reach with the subjugation of the masses. So the failure of these communist revolutions has shown us there is the least tolerance for dissent in those countries which have espoused totalitarianism, the so-called dictatorship of the people, when in fact the new emperors and dictators killed unprecedented numbers and threw even vaster numbers into prison.
So we can see under the conditions of pure Marxism, when the proletariat were considered to be led by the intelligentsia, these intelligentsia became the conservative power at the heart of social control, banishing real dissidents to Siberia or the slave camps. Therefore it seems there has been a hiatus between the individual liberties enshrined by the state and the more fundamental values of a global view which have been held by the intelligentsia.
Has the rule of the people from the right fared any better? What is a state now when the people ARE the state, where the individual is held to be equal yet is vulnerable to enormous economic powers held by those who are richer and more adept and able – some are unable to access the media and leadership structures, others seem relatively powerless. Reagan and Thatcher tended to give new meanings to equality and liberty by superimposing additional rights, the right not only to own property absolutely but to make boundless wealth whatever the cost to the environment, in fact, during the Cold War the environment was regarded as a non-issue as both sides of the globe heaped up armaments; and laid waste the resources of the earth like an enormous party that the world was going to end and they were going to get as rich as possible on the proceeds before pulling the plug on it. At the European level there was a committee for the Environment in the European Parliament following the Jahn report in the ‘seventies. At national level, where were the intelligentsia during this crucial cold war period? Those at odds with the government were deprived, with few exceptions, through the power of the mass media, of having any foothold on public opinion since the media backed the consumer culture, save for a small number of literary, academic, and specialist journals and newspapers. There have been movements of the intelligentsia, such as the counter culture in the United States which have been largely absorbed as a sub culture, and which have been deprived of political nous by association, usually through the press of amorality, or as corrupted individuals who don’t even have the romantic allure they had in the 60s. Instead they are recycled as a superior form of garbage in the popular culture.
So in the western model, with the emphasis on individual liberty, it took no time at all before this became translated by ordinary people led by private company despots, into the unquestioned right to rule the earth more than any war lord of the medieval times. And the mass media backed them, there was hardly a colour supplement without its full complement of energy burning devices, cars being featured even as I speak (in 2005) without mention of the downsides of air pollution, carbon dioxide poisoning of the earth and global warming. During this time of economic expansion the mass media ruled and decided who was in and who was out. Since the enhancement of civil liberties and the incentives of endless wealth was the engine that drove the economic war between East and West, it would be rational to suppose, once the argument had been won by the West, that they could revert to better husbandry of resources in the light of the coming generations that had been saved by the avoidance of full scale confrontation and nuclear warfare. The intelligentsia could come back on stage, that generation of the 60s who had been demonized as lunatic protesters and lefties of the Vietnam war, and by draconian drug laws (and drug use, legislation and control remains a serious problem) could take their place in the body politic and dissent from the programme of endless profiteering and economic expansion. But that didn’t’ happen. Reaganism and Thatcherism, while they won the argument against communism, held little hope for the advancement of the human project and civilization because the primary focus was on a sort of preternatural greed, and that greed became normative in a media that was too lazy to react to the challenges at the end of the Cold War. The question of global warming was mooted, in fact, by Thatcher in the ‘eighties, but not addressed by society at large, and not taken up as environmentalists continued to be lampooned as tree huggers and ancient hippies. The BBC was notable in following its public service remit with excellent nature programmes by David Attenborough.
On the whole, however, instead of enabling dissent, the mass media colluded with the giant economic multinationals as they took the planet a day at a time, and in that day, to waste and consume as much as possible. The intelligentsia or those that thought ahead, used to being side-lined, were largely silenced, with the result of the notorious dumbing down culture that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the concomitant rise of gangsters and drug warlords.
The role of the intelligentsia had been to call attention to these democratic deficits in the real politik , but they remained marginal figures at the time. On the broader front, the silencing of dissent from the intelligentsia has through the media emphasis on consumerism continued right until very recently. The result is that dissent and dissidence have become extremist, in the face of a seductive and powerful advertising presence; and for these dissenters, a wholesale rejection of the Western model of the nation state has developed. The extremists among the intelligentsia are given conditions in which they thrive, particularly those who oppose the images of the commercial West, as they have embraced not just consent to dissent, but a hard edged political programme against those they have cast as the enemy. The Al Quaeda are a case in point.
We could ask if there anything about nation states where the intelligentsia still have a role to play as dissidents in a way that moves forward the democratic processes of society instead of creating a climate of fear and terror with the usual outcome of hyper security, or should I say hyper insecurity. The threat to democracy is very large, as with the enabling of communications such as the internet, a whole culture also has grown up which aims to steal from this demographic group; stealing – from common larceny with credit card numbers, to high powered stealing of identity – and the infiltration of society where bomb makers can go undetected until the latest suicide bomber makes the ultimate bid for what he or she calls freedom. They have seen freedom defined as licence, and have opted for a genuine freedom of the will, a freedom he or she will not live to enjoy.
They are helped by ideologues who posit an idealized state as distinct from the real nation states of our time, as put by some Islamist radicals:
“So all creation issuing as it does from one absolute, universal, and active Will, forms an all-embracing unity in which each individual part is in harmonious order with the remainder.”
It would be another day’s work to see how this idea of unity, a single will, can be squared with the separatist and isolated acts of terrorism, such as the suicide bomber. The ethics of nationalist Islam, with its education for extremists who do not want the delicate balance between a fundamentalist state and modern states, and who embark on a progamme of destruction which is aimed at the western democratic states, need to be examined and dialogued with even more than the need for security.
The huge modern nation states are thus at a threshold where everyday events like writing on the internet can yield clues to a hostile intelligentsia many miles away, allowing them access to the culture in order to destroy it. How can dialogue be made between these fundamentalists and the core values of the nation state which have been with us since the Enlightenment, the appeal to reason and to individual liberties which are enshrined in the modern nation state? That is the challenge facing the modern nation state today, and for which we hope to find some answers.
The newer nation states, such as in Ireland, have not always proceeded along these rationalistic and cooperative means and measures of pan-Europeanism, the conflict in the North being paradigmatic in this case. However, the space and platform, with the possibilities of cooperation at national level, and the opportunity of Europe gave us was, in the end, crucial to the solution of this conflict.
The earlier modern nation states were not without conflict, indeed it was because of their warfare and the possibility of over-coming it that the idea of the European community had its genesis just after the Second World War, when that cataclysm propelled the participants to search urgently for peace.
The revulsion to killing, especially for political ends, is rooted deep in human nature, and while it has inspired the modern miracle of the European Union with its programme for peace, on the national stage in Ireland, for many years, it was still mired in the politics and extreme actions of the past. Since Ireland remained neutral during the war, this meant that the impetus for change was slower than in those countries which had endured the cataclysm.
The role of the intelligentsia is more clear-cut in nation states at the time of their emergence than at any time thereafter. They are to the forefront of the founding of nation states, especially the modern nation states and republics that have sprung up worldwide after the Enlightenment. Ever since that time there has been a class apart from government whom the government cannot fool, and the outcome, whether cultural or political, depends on the noise they make, but we have seen, with the advance of communication, this can be impeded through mass-media strategies.
The very word nation is etymologically rooted in the Latin word for birth, and since death is the mother of beauty, in those early days of the state, the intelligentsia are almost always bound up with death. Indeed, of the leading 1916 leaders who were executed, three were poets. What cannot escape us is their emotional identification with territory, the nation state.
Therefore, the first level of nationhood is the celebration of death and sacrifice and equating it with birth and fertility. The intelligentsia who first brought about the modern nation state were also romantics, some with an imperative to act out their ideas. They are responsible for the birth of what Yeats called a terrible beauty, nationalism.
Not only did the revolution against despots took place there over a century later than those of the nation states in Europe, but Ireland was revolting against colonial powers. More pertinently, after the revolution against colonialism, we had a civil war almost immediately. Therefore it took Ireland longer as a state to recover from the revolutionary ferment. A long extended wake is perhaps the first legacy of any revolution, particularly in Ireland where the tradition of the wake was already established with its funeral games and fertility rites all bound into ceremonial both tragic and comedic.
Our propensity for funeral-going has marked our first hundred years as a nation. By respecting the dead in a very ostentatious manner and never speaking ill of them we are creating conditions in which the bloody birth of the nation can be subsumed into a celebration of mourning.
Revolutionaries have looked on their projected nation state as a mother, and in some cases, as in Ireland, writings such as in Patrick Pearse’s “The Mother” have posited a state of sacrificial death as being more akin to or even superseding birth itself.
Perhaps the long extended wake was needed to mourn not only the physical deaths but the spiritual betrayals of the Civil War. The intelligentsia who brought about the revolution were soon silenced by a culture of complicity, mired in the betrayals of that war. Frozen in that historic moment, politicians are seemingly unable to transcend the divisions of gender, caste and class, but rely on covert and secret associations based on past loyalties and survival tactics as in a time of civil war, to do the business of everyday. In the fractured psyche of the new state, a consensus, largely anti-intellectual, arose – this being largely marked in the early period of the state, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. It may be that all bloody revolutions, for reasons of blood sacrifice and guilt, are unable to progress towards a reconciliation with the past, but this is much more the case with a new state that has endured a civil war.
In Ireland, the successors to this revolution are the heirs of families involved in the Civil War, so behind the familial pedigree is the shame that their ancestors who engaged in warfare may have had blood on their hands. In the day to day life of the new state, a quietism set in, and this recourse to silence in Ireland has resulted in a clandestine style of decision-making, which means that the loyalty is to a person and family rather than a more abstract idea of justice, and such loyalties exist even today having their origins in the early conflict of the state.
For example, it is noted that individuals who are corrupt on election, are discovered to be so, are re-elected – which would show that what matters in Ireland is not the rights or wrongs of any issue, but the number of your supporters you can muster. Core principles of justice are abandoned in the need to identify with power and success. So these local and provincial leaders of the former dispossessed are at the heart of governments who win elections bust lose future direction.
In the quietus that followed, in the 1930s, when the Constitution was written (1937), with its concomitant anti-intellectualism, the role of the intelligentsia is subdued – the conflict with the authority of a colonial power marked them as dissident, but they found themselves silenced by those who succeeded in that clandestine style of power became dynastic rulers with popular appeal to the people, based on past association and loyalties. The Irish Constitution, which places the family above the state, therefore plays on the loyalties of our fractured past, with a detrimental effect on the real process and cooperation needed in nation-building.
The territorial war waged in the North has only recently allowed us to bring to national closure the fact that our birth as a nation was one in which death was the preferred modus vivendi, which is a paradox because the succeeding people of the nation have both to deal with the waste of sacrificial death whilst ennobling it. This is an impossible aspiration, as the deaths in H-blocks in the eighties showed, while in the south of the state, the constitution itself was based on ideals which are at the same time life enhancing and death embracing- and a claim to the territory in the North which was only abolished by the Belfast Agreement in 1998, more than two hundred years after revolution broke out in Europe.
On the international front, there were many ideological battlegrounds during the Cold War period and Ireland became in some way the focus of a special attention because she was unique in the West – not only had she a colonialist past but also the best aspects of a pre-industrial society, so the negative effects of the industrial revolution in producing a mass culture had not yet taken hold, resulting in a high individualism along with, however a social conservatism. Ireland was ripe for the importation of new ideologies, such as Marxism and feminism.
Because we are a modern nation, we have been inundated with ideas and ceremonies from other cultures, and have found ourselves celebrated nationally as the first state to break away from the habits of colonial powers. Scholars and historians have written of us as a post-colonial state, noting sadly that no sooner have we dismantled the power apparatus of colonialism than we mimic it in our customs and observances. What we have seen in our short history of less than a hundred years is the dismantling of the past of imperialism, while the more revolutionary intellectuals, those who stayed revolutionary after the foundation of the state, have made it their life’s work to find imperialism at work in the heart of the new nation, found that the Catholic Church continued in its role of stifling opinion long after the birth of the nation. The meaning of the territory has shifted from the polemical aggrandizement of the state to the control, and thought control over different bodies, such as women’s bodies.
In the years of quietus in Ireland, the Constitution laid out the forms of government while both the Church and the Press and the government presented a monolithic face of Catholicism. This was broken in the 1950s by the Noel Browne affair, who sought to bring the family into the social sphere, so that it would no longer be a private institution, but a function of the state. The bishops, particularly Jeremiah Newman of Limerick, and John Charles McQuaid of Dublin fought to have the supremacy of the Church in the family, to the point of impoverishing families. Therefore the role of the first intellectuals of the nation state, its writers, was to dissect and criticize the role of the Church, and since Church and State were bound to each other as Siamese twins, often their criticism had to come from afar, as in the early days of the state when all intellectuals were per se banished from the land – O’Connor, O Faolain, Beckett, not to speak of the earlier émigrés Joyce and Yeats, who despite his nationalism, spent most of his years outside Ireland.
It seems the exile’s eye is sharpened by the experience of being alien in another country, all the better to feast those eyes on the homeland and because it is tinged with the fresh air of being an outsider, their criticisms are all the more pungent and powerful.
Indeed this “advance and return” of emigrants, who are raised in an alien culture – but with emotional identification with an Irish mother ,who then comes to symbolize the nation – is a pattern in Irish culture, and goes back to the revolution of 1916 in that those intellectuals who brought about the birth of the nation state follow this pattern. Not only is the identification with the mother and her passive state upheld by the Irish intelligentsia, and embodied in the constitution, it is a pattern of modern nation states founded on religion, and is the core of the present profound disagreement with Islam that all the western liberal democracies experience as they move away from the identification of nation and the mother, with its life/death antimonies in the past.
Since, with our accession to Europe it was possible for the first time since our beginning as a nation to move away from the stifling authority of Church and an inherited class who took power – we have been able to move in a wider brief towards a liberal agenda away from patristic concerns of death and history. As we approach the centenary of the founding of our nation state, Ireland, we have a richly documented past both from the early days of the nation state, since our emergence as a nation coincided with a huge increase in communication possibilities both nationally and internationally. This can have positive as well as negative effects.
In the countries of the EU, the role of the intelligentsia as critics is central to maintaining a good government, and the accord of nations which has brought about the birth of the European Union has always had the possibilities a free and questioning press, where intellectuals of different nations debate and discuss their priorities – even if this at times was stunted because of the polarized ideas of the Cold War. This mutual exchange is beneficial to the modern nation, because with the modern emphasis on purely commercial aspects, or globalization, where, we have seen, there is always the danger of an in-built elite who will take and maintain power without interrogation or specific direction, other than self-aggrandizement. The possibilities of integration with Europe also goes on hand-in-hand with the building of national consciousness, and therefore Europe holds, in its structures of legislative process, and the framework of dialogue, the possibilities reconciliation and ultimately peace at all levels.
The intelligentsia, from the time of their emergence to their existence as a fully equipped nation state, articulate the deeper longings for a new identity and a future based on justice, as against recidivist emotions such as clinging to the past. They in fact make the past dynamic, and the grounding of their search for justice.
This is all the more so for the intellectuals of modern Ireland, who must engage abroad, or with former powers, and move away from the dynastic style of nation we have inherited.
The basis of the EU political entity is not ideological, and what was imperative in the nation state of the past, has progressed through rational and legislative structures, to a community founded on common accord, which takes precedence over the ideology of the past. The challenge now is how to balance the demands of commerce with the need to protect the environment.
On the European stage, the maintenance of national identity and cultural difference such as language means that globalization will not subsume these important distinctions, which give to the whole a rich and sustainable model and fabric, based as it is on intelligent cooperation and rational ordering of legislation.
The common destiny of nations is to be bound together in those deep concerns affecting them which transcend national identities and national boundaries.
We are rich in perspectives. Indeed, the role of the intelligentsia was never more needed now that the market has become so dominant, the need for an objective critical voice which will guide us through the next stage, as we contemplate the need to address the damage such free for all policies have cost the environment.
We are a long way from the time Louis XIV declared “L’etat C’est Moi”, and found his descendants headless under the new regime of the Enlightenment. What the new modern states need is the detachment of its intelligentsia in finding away out of the artificial consensus which arose out of Cold War politics, and is now having its nadir through globalization. Globalisation is a custom, a second nature to which we have adapted ourselves, in the over-riding need for peaceful engagement after the War which had arisen out of nationalistic concerns. The engagement of these intellectuals, dissident though working towards a higher form of unified humanism will affect all the modern nations, including Ireland, in its on going and successful project of peace on earth.

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The source quoted is from Scott Belcher “Biphenol-A Is Released from Polycarbonate Drinking Bottles and Mimics the Neurotoxic Actions of Estrogen in Developing Cerebellar Neurons,” -from Toxicology Letters January 30, 2008, pp.149-156.

This book “Ecological Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman is of major importance, analysing all the factors in the production of consumer items, and enlightening us on how best we can make choices for our health and the health of our planet.

Published in the UK by Allen Lane, Penguin, 2009, Euro 18.99, Sterling £16.99

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JUST A REMINDER…….

No plastic containers in microwave
No plastic water bottles in freezer
No plastic wrap in microwave

Johns Hopkins has sent this out in their newsletter ..some time ago, it’s definitely worth repeating, and it’s definitely worth noting.

This information is being circulated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center

Don’t freeze your plastic water bottles with water as this releases dioxins in the plastic.

Dr. Edward Fujimoto from Castle Hospital was on a TV program a while back explaining this health hazard. (He is the manager of the Wellness Program at the hospital.)

He was talking about dioxins and how bad they are for some.

He said that we should not be heating our food in the microwave using plastic containers. This applies to foods that contain fat.

He said that the combination of fat, high heat and plastics releases dioxins into the food and ultimately into the cells of the body.

Dioxins are carcinogens and highly toxic to the cells of our bodies.

Instead, he recommends using glass, Corning Ware or ceramic containers for heating food. You get the same results, without the dioxins. So such things as TV dinners, instant processed food and soups, etc .should be removed from the container and heated in something else. Paper isn’t bad, but you don’t know what’s in the paper.

It’s just safer to use tempered glass, Corning Ware, etc.

He said we might remember when some of the fast food restaurants moved away from the foam containers to paper. The dioxin problem is one of the reasons. To add to this, plastic wrap placed over foods as they are nuked, with the high heat, actually drips poisonous toxins into the food; use paper towels.

Pass this on.

Thanks to Mairead for passing this on to me.

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Grammar, myth, prophecy and environmentalists

The understood definitions of public and private is of separate and mutually exclusive realms of operation where “public” includes what is common and general as well as commonalty itself, whether in the shape of a defined sector with specific rights and interests, or in the looser, more amorphous sense of community. The word “community” itself with its warm echoes, is usual where the political is not too defined and so can exclude or include. The rights of community are informal, and by association, but it is the association, with its benign accretions, that carries the edge of meaning. “Private”, of course, is what is not open or available to the public and in this sense it is restricted to an individual or groups of individuals and has privilege as well as rights attached to it.

From the Kantian point of view, the private world belongs to the a priori universe with its dangers of solipsism, while the public world belongs to the empirical and epistemological sphere with its burden of history and social development. Since the age of mass production, particularly of culture, what was once private and individual has crossed over, usually in the form of artistic or literary narratives, to the public domain. Under the inherited system of capitalism, however, the private musings of poets have become a public pop industry, while the skeleton frame of capitalism has remained to stalk the public with rights stemming from ownership, such as copyright and the profits adhering thereto. In the world of multinationals, mass marketing which is rooted in the private sphere of ownership by a few individuals has produced countless artifacts particularly of drinks containers which litter the public landscape and become the content and policy making decisions of public corporations who collect and process waste. Perhaps the motor car is the best example of a private space bought at the cost of public amenity – especially air – but as we note more and more people becoming addicted to the private space at a cost to the environment, it behoves us a little to look into what has become private, and public, in our culture.
The inheritance from the French revolution gives us ideas which can confuse the ground of our understanding. Since the revolution 200 or so years ago we are still not clear on the complementary categories of community and private ownership. Marx and his dialectical followers tried to exclude the private altogether, leaving the individual with no rights at all, not even to a private conscience, while in the West individual ownership rights were paramount and excluded any kind of responsibility. Ownership means that you literally have the right to destroy what is deemed your property. The West offered unlimited personal freedom, keeping areas like private property separate from the idea of stewardship. Hence in the western democracies, which are now categorized as globalization, we have the cultural freedom of the throw away artifacts whose cumulative effect is waste of resources, especially resources such as landfill, which have become a focus of child abuse in the poorer countries –as we see children grapple in these waste areas of dirt and contamination for a small left over which can help their parents survive, and waste products which are released into public areas such as air and water are common in the developed world.

The creation of private wealth through the acquisition of common resources has been at the heart of the Cold War. The progress of capitalism from the 19th century meant that this method of creating wealth came to be seen as normative. Individuals with capital could purchase resources in a particular country, and use the population of that country to manufacture goods which brought more wealth to that individual. After the Second World War the opposition between capitalism and communism became so marked that it defined the beliefs in the private and public domains as the Cold War.

The commonality of resources was largely ignored. The social contract in what was the Eastern bloc “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary it is the social being that determines consciousness” defined the tyranny of totalitarianism which disallowed personal responsibility in the former communist states. In communism, there was no perception of what private meant, everyone and everything was defined as belonging to the public sphere, even at some stages, private sexual relations. While the state took overall responsibility for the commonalty of resources, individuals were punished if they felt any responsibility in the private sphere, their very consciousness was defined as false if it did not embrace the concept of what was public. Property, therefore resources, was public, individual autonomy was seen as essentially corrupt and parasitic. The result was that the realm of objective reality, the Kantian categories of epistemology, experience, and society, were disavowed, and following Hegel, were all seen as a thing in itself, a power of itself which acted on society and history and took on the characteristics of a moral entity. This thing in itself, materialistically defined, took over the so called outworn categories of conscience and responsibilities, and while all people looked to the masses and the public for motivation, work and reward, in real terms they were rendered powerless to make any contribution to the common good, since all their actions were interpreted as being determined, fatalistic, and without any sanction save in the bureaucracies of the state. There were no personal values or virtues, therefore no incentive to preserve what was public. The waste created from centralized economies was only paralleled by the waste created by private ownership in the West. We must remember that one in every five persons were in the secret police, so people were afraid to risk the wrath of their co workers and neighbours and embrace any cause that would put their head above the parapet. . The result was, behind a veil of probity and public good, there were covert and secret agencies who behaved badly and were rewarded for corruption, and resulted in the deterioration of the environment that went along with state socialism.

Therefore, the former Eastern bloc fared no better than the West in protecting the environment. Just as existence precedes consciousness – what one would see as a Descartian reversal – consciousness cannot be generally understood without the articulation of language by self-conscious observers. No one in the West suggested at the time, or were allowed to suggest, that the commonalty of resources should be considered as the actual grounds of the social contract or construct which could be implemented by trans-national and international environmental organizations. This was the pivot of the East West divide, and explains the delay of a developing a consciousness towards the common resources or environment. This did not happen until much later, the Kyoto agreement did not take place until the early 1990s, and denial of common responsibility to the environment remained the hallmark of capitalist countries like the US. The public in America took a long time to convince just how much their addiction to the motor car and cheap oil was affecting the world climate. This has been as a result of the isolationism that has characterized politics since World War II.

Since that time, as capitalism advanced its remit of private wealth in the West, all resources were seen as being the property of certain powerful individuals. After the Second World War, the West embarked on an unparalleled technological development which deployed common resources, and made consumer goods available to the public at a reasonable cost. The world of throw- away came into being after the Second World War. Food, which had been tinned and packaged during the period of the war, now became the focus of more and more packaging. There was going to be no tomorrow, so throw-away was born. Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were at an impressionable teen age when the atom bomb was exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is conceivable that deep in their hearts they did not anticipate there would be a future for the planet at all. During the rise of monetarism with Reagan and Thatcher during the eighties, no individual responsibility was attached to matters in the public arena. Ownership was absolute, and resources could be used without their owner being held to account. During the Cold War, and especially with the rise of uncontrolled capitalism in the ‘eighties, the West polluted the environment with unprecedented waste and chemicals.

It was the continual success of technology, coupled with the political philosophy
of advanced capitalism, that caused the huge environmental crisis we have today. Finite resources were used and developed without a thought for the future, or the unborn grandchildren of this generation which grew up after the war, and for the first time in history, savored and enjoyed consumer goods which were expendable. With the aggregate power of each individual, each individual produced household waste which was unprecedented in the whole of human history. It wasn’t until the advent of the German greens in the early 1980s that recycling and re-usage appeared on the agenda as the greens were the first political party to articulate the dangers of unlimited waste production and link it to the economic systems of the time.

However, it was because of humanity’s need for freedom that the battle for capitalism was won, and unlimited consumer goods were part of the armory of propaganda for the capitalist cause. The deeply felt need for human freedom has almost cost us the earth.

However, because many of the moderate political parties proposed a golden mean between freedom and determinism, between the market and social responsibility, some countries in the west evolved a method which was inclusive of the public good, such as the National Health Service in the UK, initiated by the Labour party, and other initiatives such as social insurance which covered the remit of the social obligations of the community in, for example, the Scandinavian countries. So far this social remit towards the environment has been slower to develop.

Generally in the western liberal democracies, what has taken over community today is not the agreement on what rights they must hold to be a moral entity, but rather the aggregate of individual rights, known as the public. If the public are misinformed or misled by advertising, then authorities feel no obligation to keep checks or balances based on actuality. Common resources like air and water are polluted shamelessly. In Ireland, the advertising industry is self regulated, so there is no established public body with executive powers which could counteract advertising. For example, although we now in the past two decades have an information centre dedicated to giving the public information about the environment, and it has had some successes, such as the encouragement of recycling, in actual fact there is no statutory or legislative body to counteract the claims of advertising and how it impacts on the social or public sphere. There are now protective agencies for the air and water, but no agreement on how common resources should have the effect of stopping waste being poured into water and air. We have legislation against pollution, but it tends to be post-hoc and piecemeal. Manufacturers consider these natural essentials as waste receptacles. Ireland obtained a derogation on the Kyoto agreement whereby it agreed to limit the aggregate growth of carbon emissions, but it did not have to agree on reducing the limits to match the real dangers which are evident today. The biggest job has been persuading the media to take the threat of global warming seriously. All the media at this date, November 2006, carry large advertisements for cars which are carbon polluting, and adding to the danger of a catastrophic situation when the polluted air, treated as a waste receptacle, becomes so full of carbon that it precipitates global warming. The ownership of resources considered to be private, such as the ownership of a car, means not only has an individual bought a vehicle, but right to a private space, and a commensurate right to pollute public areas, such as the air we breathe. The Irish government not only gains import tax on cars, but also what is known as vehicle registration tax, then value added tax on the price of the car, and every time the consumer buys petrol. In the eighties, Ireland obtained a derogation from the EU on lead being added to petrol for a five year period, a time when carbon emissions were growing, but also children were exposed to the high lead content of petrol. A study published in Edinburgh in the ‘eighties and which was the basis of the EU legislation phasing out lead in petrol, showed that inner city children’s IQ in some UK cities dropped to more than 70% of what would be considered normal. However, the specific nature of anti pollution legislation (banning chemical components stage by stage rather than an outright embargo) is still piecemeal and the dangers arising now of carbon emissions from the private space and private ownership of the car have become more acute in the overall common problem of air pollution with its attendant dangers for people, and the planet.

During the capitalist expansion during the Cold War, the line between private consumption and public good was rarely drawn. Even where there were developments of social responsibility, they tended to take expression in the private sphere. Each member of the public can be said to hold rights but these rights are often vested in individuals seeking empowerment for themselves, so an unofficial private agenda could decide the outcome for the common good or ill, depending on how much power an individual has. For example, the trade unions became powerful and the privilege of trade union membership became more important to the bus workers than responsibility to the public or planet, hence their frequent resort to sudden strikes meant the public lost confidence in bus transport with the result that car ownership increased hugely, thus facilitating the oil companies. The electric car was a feasibility as far back as the ‘Sixties, and bio fuels are today a reality, but the grip of the oil companies has been so powerful that these environmentally friendly alternatives were little publicized and are only now at this stage being considered as oil resources are being depleted.

So we have seen that, even when a commonality of resources is identified, and virtue created in a commonwealth of interests, the power play of aggregate individuals masquerading as the public view can be far from true and it can actually be dangerous to the commonalty of humankind.

We know, like in the case of the oil companies, wealth in the hands of a few multinationals can hold the entire world up to ransom. The Coca Cola company can make unlimited cans, but they themselves take no responsibility for recycling them. This is most noted in so called third world countries, who having had a pristine environment after the war, a mere fifty years ago, now are dotted with dumps full of waste. Even the rural areas are littered with packaging and throw away drink cans. The EU philosophy of making the polluter pay is wise only after the event, when in fact, it would be much better to have environmental protection matters built into the actual manufacturing and distribution stage, and not make the polluter responsible only after the harm has been done. For harm is not always reversible. The manufacturers should be responsible for collecting and recycling their waste cans and containers.

Social change can be brought about by pressure groups, but behind these groups often lies the idea of the amorphous masses, and there is the danger that the politically powerless can become uncritical of their own image of powerlessness. The root problem is that the individual is unable to contribute to the community in a way that is meaningful for him or her, since in advanced capitalism there is no real responsibility to anyone or anything in the public sphere, especially at the manufacturing stage. Individual recycling is not cost or waste-effective as much as if it were a manufacturing responsibility.

For the moment, it is this division at the centre of our thinking which allows a certain kind of community, but one without responsibility. Private wealth knows no bounds, and the owners of supermarkets, car manufacturers and arms manufacturers have the sanction of the law to promote throwaway policies, and waste and pillage of the environmental resources we all have as a people.

Because no agreement (Save Kyoto) was made until recent years on the basis of our common ownership of the planet, the environment has only recently been taken up in the language of our rulers and it is now only slowly being negotiated, while we need it more urgently as spoilage and pollution is happening all around us. The earth is our own, yet people have won the right to despoil it as there are no conditions attached to ownership, just rights. Hence, in our day, the tragedy of the commons. Our common inheritance, the air, sea, and countryside is being used as a dump for private individual and corporate waste. The air and the sea “belong to no one” so people dump everything into these precious and finite resources. The limited agreements which are in place need to be much expanded, and the European Union is now inviting submissions from the public and interested parties to draw up a new agreement for the marine environment which will protect resources and species. It is encouraging to see these developments, but one has to wonder as to how long it took before the wake up call was heard.

In the past, our society had felt no sense of obligation to pass on these resources as they are in the state of nature. Water is being privatized so that a resource which is essential for life itself is being used as an expendable commodity. Pollution means that there may be serious water shortages in the future. It is a further insult when we see water sold in plastic bottles. If sold at all, it should be in glass bottles. There are some indications that plastics leaking into water have become part of the food chain, and may be responsible for the rise of cancer. But because of absence of absolute proof, the connection is not made.

People have lost completely the idea of common resources. “Common” now means “what belongs to nobody”. British Nuclear Fuels can discharge radioactive waste into the Irish Sea, the atmosphere itself is now the waste repository of pollutants and streams and rivers are the dumping ground of poisonous effluents of pig farms, pesticides, slurry and factories. The anti-pollution legislation has attempted to deal with this, but as long as we have social “double-think” – advertising with its appeal to private irresponsibility – we will have the common resources abused. The claim of advertisers to our consciousness and time must be debated and challenged. The cultural freedoms we enjoy must not give us a licence to waste earth’s resources.

Today, the idea of the public calls to mind a group of people with interests in common, such as a nation or a reading population, who informally receive information based on social prediction, or a constituency. They may have no status or recourse in law, save in vague generalities. For example, if advertising misinforms or misleads the public, there is no legal obligation to redress the harm, just a system of self-regulation which is inadequate to the problem, based on a very often misinformed public. So if the public are misinformed or misled by advertising which pollutes, there is no immediate access for the public, save in piecemeal legislation and in ad-hoc principles such as making the polluter pay. The actual pollution rather than being stopped by law at source from even being embarked upon, is often recognized too late.

What the public interest needs, as well as reclaiming community and the common, is an open examination of the notion of public and private. If people must have status, it should not be based on their material possessions. Primitive society relied on decoration, or reputation as a social marker. Now the only social marker is money. The private and the public good are confused. Sometimes journalists undertake to solve this, but in piecemeal fashion. In Ireland, we could ask, as journalists sometimes do, how the Industrial Development Authority justify the creation of personal wealth for individuals from public funds, simply in the name of job creation for multinational companies who close down when it suits them, having received tax free trading concessions and having polluted the air and water supply. The discretion at the IDA is in contrast to the public humiliation at the dole queue, the pollution arrived at is in contrast to the frugal lifestyle on the dole. The political language we speak, the very syntax shows the gap in understanding, and shows just how mixed up our paradigms for success and survival are.
Now with the advent of the Celtic Tiger the Irish are experiencing wealth at an unprecedented scale, and are investing hugely in private property, taking out loans up to eight or ten times their actual annual income. The wealth generated and saved by their elders, particularly in countries like Germany, have enabled a huge expansion in credit since the advent of the Euro, but the actual investments, the property bought inside and outside in Ireland, is vastly overvalued, and may result in serious hardship later on if interest rates rise and houses to not keep the high prices they command at present.

However it is probably in the area of sexual activity that private and public are more confused than ever. Sexual activity was once the exclusive domain of the private sphere, now sexual activity is part of public experience and public discourse. The private area of sexual morality now receives its affirmation from multinationals who exploit the young. The banks have appropriated the language of love friendship and romance to carry out their often non friendly business. Their invisibility, on the one hand, has allowed all powers of discretion to wane, so we have, along with the language of love in actually alienating circumstances, the complementary incidence of pornography, leading to enormous suffering by children, women, and men. Sexual morality is considered to be irrelevant yet headlines about leaders and pop stars show and their “shocking sex lives” show there is a more sinister “morality” going on, the doublespeak and newspeak written of by George Orwell. “1984” is actually happening, but the surprise is that it is happening in the capitalist western democracies. We have failed to arrive at a correct social grammar – the freedoms we enjoy culturally do not allow us to reach into a public arena of responsibility. Understandably, after the experiment with communism, our political leaders are unwilling to embark on a new ideology which might lead to a different form of totalitarianism. Even if the experiment with communism failed, we must not use it as an excuse to deny our responsibilities to our commonalty, the planet.

Social prediction and myth embody the wholeness of the community, and now the world is community. If we think of how “primitive” societies held land in common, we can see the land preceded the social contract. And in those agrarian early societies there was no private abuse that led to public waste and littering. There was not a single sweet wrapper thrown away on the Great Plains when the Native Americans roamed that continent. Individualism had to be negotiated in the tribe through proper role models , using example and ritual such as dance. Virtually all primitive people have used a system of encouraging social virtue, while our society encourages greed and waste. In small communities people lived by their reputation and a regard for all was the hallmark. It was possible for the individual to become an integrated autonomous individual with self knowledge and self respect, often linked to non-monetary tokens of wisdom, practice, and decoration which had an echo in the beauty of nature surrounding them. The myth recreated their wholeness through their participation and witness of their truths and responsibilities. The myths we have at present are in advertising, which promote greed and waste endlessly. We have confused ownership and stewardship with self indulgence and irresponsibility.

Ownership in tribal society was community based, even the future of the land. The Indians regarded land and the common ownership of land as a sacred trust, and handed the land back to each new generation in a clean, healthy unpolluted way. No “savage” tribe ever put human or animal waste into the water. Before the whites came to America, the whole continent, its water and air, were unpolluted. The Indians were not saints, they were meat eaters, but said ritual prayers for the animal, realizing they themselves would become part of the cycle of nature in due course. They certainly would not have treated animals as animals are treated today – in battery factories, in narrow pens, in force-feeding with chemicals. With all the poisonous waste being dumped into rivers, we can see how the faults in our thinking have resulted in huge harm to the environment, our common and public responsibility. The legacy of the industrial revolution need not necessarily be one of waste.

Some modern myths create artificial needs simply in order to sell new products. Myths can provide good models, or false ones. Parties based on the left and right, as we have seen, make social predictions into determinants. The minds of our young people are polluted from advertisers who see them as stereotypes and making profit from it. The older people are failing young people by not passing on survival tactics – they have been seduced by consumerist cold war propaganda which promoted greed and the aggrandizement of the individual with no personal responsibility whatsoever.

We are in danger from the myth of infinite resources and the idol of our personal greed. Montezuma, the Aztec king, saw a fair form on the horizon and presumed it was the return of the god – predicted from the myths of the tribe. Psychologists tell us we need social prediction in order to survive, that we cannot tolerate unpredictably. The cosy world created by advertising despoiled the natural resources and was as far removed from nature as the Aztec prediction of the return of the god. Prediction is necessary for survival, but we have to respond consciously, and with conscience, to it. Montezuma and his tribe were wiped out by the Spanish conquistadore, just as we are in danger of being wiped out by the social predictions of advertisers who pollute and take no responsibility. Myths create belief systems, but unless these beliefs are rigorously examined, we can fail the reality test and be wiped out by the myth.

On the other hand, a myth can create a private distinction without laying waste what is common or public. It must be based in reality, and have a relationship with the natural world. Myth also has a public input, it can mean that a meta-reality is accepted, that a person can accept a role or stricture for the sake of a perceived greater good. In our society sometimes the reality is not understood, or the reality itself eludes the experience of a people, but the myth can convey a model, a pattern, and the right behavior.

We can all remember, as students, that we had to learn the paradigm and only in practice discover its meaning. If children can learn the correct social and legal grammar, we can tie stewardship into ownership. Just as myth was translated into ritual and understanding, we can translate our community wholeness into practical paradigms of conservation and responsibility – by practices such as recycling and the proper use of technology. We can learn environmental lessons from those societies like the Native American. Or we can make serious mistakes from the disinformation we receive about resources, about need, from advertising when crucial aspects of the truth are omitted.

Language can be hidebound in the past and as advertising so far has concentrated on greed, it does not create the solutions we need for the future, just short term gain. Teaching children positive role models, wherever they come from, the cinema, art, or people we know can counteract some of this damage which takes place in the public sphere but makes its way into every home.

We could teach that common ownership of public spaces should lead to stewardship and responsibility for them. The negotiation of human rights has gone along without defining these kinds of obligations for the world community. The idea of ownership at present is that a person can own without having responsibility, to the point where they can destroy a property of any kind. Those who have thought about obligations are often working in a vacuum, but our mutuality and intrinsic inter-action must be emphasized if we and the planet are to survive in a healthy state. Each member of the community should have the right to act as guardian of present and future resources, upheld in the law, and carried out in practice. We can start with proper education, and restrictions on advertising. We should not have to wait until the crisis comes and vigilantes take the place of informed action and debate, but given the present scenario, this may be quite likely to happen.

Territorial disputes continue. Raw tribalism and revenge has been the counter side of aggrandizement and greed, now we need more than shadowy figures and puppet play to understand our rights. Our rights mean more than being a figurehead, it means giving people the opportunity to interact meaningfully with the environment. The people, if they have the possibility, cannot make the mistakes of our consumerist past. The rhetoric of the state, disguised as backhand, must give way to honesty.

It is now a commonplace that colonialist kingdoms beget neo-colonialist ones,
that government by the people and the enfranchisement of millions leads to bleary tyrannies, or dreary ineffectual government, that the withering away of the state and the restoration of the people, a dream which has been with us since the eighteenth century, has not been achieved. I think if we research rigorously in our language for the social constructs necessary to the commonalty of the people of this earth, we can do away with the short-term and hold what binds us together. Between the national and the international, the rational and the mystical, there is the real world of land and common resources, which belong to all of us by birth-right, we must construct a correct social grammar.

The private ethos which endorsed unprecedented greed without community responsibility and left us in a society where waste is paramount must be made to end. In other words, the air, seas and water belong to everyone and should have stewardship agreements. There should be a common understanding, backed up by law and custom, that these precious resources guarantee life and are to be respected. Our society looks upon these resources as a dump. In short, we need a Universal Declaration of Protection for the Environment. It would put all air and water under stewardship, design land agreements based on justice which would include care for the environment. If we do not take stringent measures against non-biodegradable packaging, monitoring supermarkets for selling plastic-bottled goods and any non biodegradable materials, the whole of earth will gradually turn into a dump.

The Earth Summit in Rio was the beginning of negotiations of the responsibilities we bear towards the planet, but we must complete the work by creating an awareness of how urgent such work is. This will bring into play the interrogation of myths of our time, and our task to separate what is good from that which is bad for us and the planet. Even as I write, with global warming now being recognized by the public as a serious and actual danger, the advertising of cars continues unabated in our newspapers and television.

Burke believed that there was no right in the state of nature, just agreements. We have learnt that there are other things besides the rights of agreements and corporations. Territory can be understood to extend both in space and time, in space with possession and in time with history and inheritance. These rights all have responsibilities attached. We must make laws that respect both individual and common responsibilities, we must share both caretaking for the large resources of the planet, which belong to us all, in particular, air and water.

When we look at the world we must be careful to distinguish whether it is a private adventurer, or indeed the god Quetzalcoatl on the horizon. Montezuma failed to do so, because he thought the approaching stranger was like him.

I will leave the American Indian Chief Seattle to have the last word. “Only when the white man knows that he cannot eat money will his ways change.”

Do we have to wait until then? Are we at that point now?

Bibliography

The God that Failed, ed Richard Crossman, Gateway editions, 1983
Ecology as Politics Andre Gorz (trans) Pluto Press, 1975
Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher, Abacus, London, 1973
A History of Political Theory, George H. Sabine, reprinted Harrap & Co., 1960
The Windscale Experiment (Sellafield) Dr Rupert Blackith and Dublin Clean Seas Campaign, 1984
Writers and Politics, Edith Kurzweil & Wim Phillips, eds, RKP London 1983
Blueprint for a Green Planet, J. Seymour and H. Girarder, Dorling Kindersley, London 1987
Thinking Globally and Acting Locally Rosemarie Rowley, in Across the Frontiers, ed Kearney, Wolfhound, Dublin 1988

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I don’t think I will ever fly long haul again, and am seriously cutting back on my travel. I have been invited to read my poetry at a conference in Brussels, organised by Dr Franca Bellarsi of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, on behalf of the European Association for the study of literature, culture and the environment. It is paradoxical to be travelling to a ecology themed conference, yet it is an opportunity also to bring the work of a great Irish writer of nature, Patrick Kavanagh, to a world wide audience of literary specialists. In the future, I expect that most conferences will feature pod-casting, DVD viewing, and other marvels, instead of live presenters. The day is not far off
Still busy on my prose work, I am also putting together a word document for a friend, for publication of her poetry. I am enjoying reading too, including “The Classical World -n an Epic History of Greece and Rome” by Professor Robin Lane Fox of Oxford, and a chilling account of crime in our time, “McMafia” by Misha Glenny. It is time the problem of drugs and crime was tackled in a realistic way.
The poetry world has been saddened by the death of Robert Greacen, whose passing will be mourned. He was an individual voice of great courage.
The Trinity readings are still going on, I heard that Anne Enright gave a wonderful performance, and I bought her book of short stories, which are hilarious. However, I am not sure if they dig deep enough for me, I am curious as to how this post-modern society has come about, what lies there at the root. I do think growing up in a culture with so much advertising on television has to have some effect. I don’t like the idea that sex is used to sell everything. We are heading for a re-visit to the Roman Empire. Look what happened there. It’s happening around us, now. Help!

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Since then, I have been busy putting a prose work together, of uncertain destination as yet. I took some time off to hear the first of the Trinity Readings, organised by the Oscar Wilde School of Creative Writing in Trinity, and enjoyed tremendously the readings of Derek Mahon, Mary Morrissy and George Szirtes – the latter’s work seemed to me to be elegant, beautiful, sonorous and magical.

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Rosemarie

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