Face it: the fucking Moon is on Uranus

Some weeks you just have to face that there are interplanetary forces beyond your control at play. You have no choice but to accept that the fucking Moon is on Uranus and move on or, more likely, move sideways, like a hobbling crab on a rocky beach looking for shelter in a crevice.

This last week has been one of those weeks for me: I am liberally using the term week to cover the last ten days and counting. The shit fest may last a fortnight or longer, who knows.

There have been shootings indirectly, but worryingly and freakishly, connected to my future, I kid you not. There have been misunderstandings; acute pains; a sense of foreboding and dread; darkness.

On a political level, the UK chose to leave Europe for the stinkiest reasons possible, unleashing a tide of ill feeling and queasy regret that is wafting across the Irish Sea; making these last few days as depressing and unpredictable as the I-am-taking-a-dump-on-your-head-Seven-Plagues-of-Egypt weather that has put the kibosh on the brief summer spell we had at the end of May.

To top it all up, I went to bed last night having learnt that Partido Popular (a de facto criminal organisation mired in corruption and malfeasance) has won the election in Spain, getting more seats in Parliament in this second round than they did at the end of December. Their “ideology”, and I am using the term very loosely, revolving around the worst tenets of greedy free market policy and intrusive narrow-minded social conservatism, has garnered around eight million votes. I realise once more that Franco’s ghost is still haunting Spain: a mediocre, vindictive, choke-the-air-out-of-the-country spectre that will not be rid off until we perform the collective exorcism that we are too pusillanimous to face.

There just aren’t words to describe the ill feeling that has taken over me. Well, there are, in English they mostly start with “f”; in Spanish they include some highly scatological takes on the holy host. I will spare you the details.

I tend to make minor corrections to these rotten spells through food and drink but fate has not finished slapping me around just yet. This afternoon I stood at the cash register of my local supermarket with a bottle of bubbly and some coffee cake, amongst other treats, hoping they would provide an antidote to the poison of the week. As I am about to pay, the cashier informs me that they are not taking Bank of Ireland cards as the servers are down. I have no cash. I leave everything behind and I go home with my tail between my legs.

There is some cheddar cheese and the dregs of some take away salad in the fridge.

Face it: the fucking Moon is on Uranus.

Mystic Lemons

What draws me to the sober drama of Zurbarán’s paintings?

To those monks who show us the exact demarcation of good and evil on the line separating their starched white habits from the inky darkness of their rapt visions?

To the female saints who turn martyrdom into their Geisha-like stiffness of brocade and taffeta?

Above all, what draws me to his sparse, orderly and luminous still lifes?

It could be my tendency to hoard and collect; it could be the dashes of yellow, orange and green filling my house with rainbow. It could be that I cannot conceive of even the most cursory improvised meal without parsing it as first and second courses followed by desert. It could be the soul whisper I heard on a frosty night that sank into my bones unsettling my avowed atheism.

Opposites attract, they say.

There is a certainty in Zurbarán that stills the air. If art could give proof of the existence of God beyond the subjective passions of the artist or the viewer, I think it would be his that would be taken to the lab. The universe would be as fixed and numinous as the micro galaxy in this composition and the sky would taste yellow and sour like the blood of a lemon.

The time of the ant. The time of the wolf

Sometimes I feel like a blank canvas, sparsely blotted by experience. There are days when I take the steps through my section of the maze of this gigantic formicary and I barely register my surroundings. Days where life is perched on the bare bones of subsistence, as we know it in post-capitalist societies. The senses are dulled, vacuum packed, the knife with which I slice time has a blunt edge. They are days where temperature is tame; colour is cream, brown fading into beige; all music turns into static; eating is only registered because my plate is suddenly empty and my hand suspended in the act of driving nothing to my mouth.

The world is a poorly sketched backdrop and if I get close to you and you and you, I will see you have no features on your hastily drawn faces.

They are days without smell.

Not tonight. Tonight the air was grater-sharp as I rode my bike uphill to an unknown part of town. Rows of houses reeled before me: the peaks of their neo Tudor roofs promised Poe-like disturbances behind their walls. It was dark and damp with the slate sheen of a close Irish night. I turned round to look at the oncoming cars and they rode by spectrally: headless drivers behind the wheel. I knew nobody and nobody knew me. The world was menacing but new for all that. I felt hunger and cold, I barely knew where I was going. I had to pay attention. On a bike in this dark damp god-forsaken night in an unknown part of town, I was a fragile body.

This is how lambs feel in the company of wolves, a trembling catastrophe.

There is a moment, on a night like this in an unknown part of town, when you turn round to go home and the path is new and the familiar to which you move is fire and shelter.

Tonight I turned towards home and in that moment, wheeling my bicycle in the darkness, I smelled grease and potatoes wafting out of a chip shop.

And then I remembered.

A touch of frost

Dusk is falling and I am standing outside a newsagent on Dublin’s South Great George’s Street waiting for a friend. The day is shedding its mild breeze, replacing it with a touch of frost and I begin to shiver as I hold on to my bike in the looming twilight. Where do you look when you are waiting outside a newsagent? No window displays to engage the eye, just a narrow glimpse of brightly coloured packets of crisps brimming under a formica counter and a multitude of stickers on the automatic sliding doors: bus passes for sale, cards accepted, lottery tickets can be purchased here. Then I look up the side window and I see this:

And it makes me think of a single man looking for loose change in his pocket at this very moment about to buy a version of the baguette on the poster with limper lettuce and staler chicken. It makes me think of this baguette being his dinner. It makes me think of this man sitting on a step somewhere to eat this baguette on a cold night like tonight. It makes me think of the narrow crossroads where poverty and consumption fleetingly meet.

The same baguette has been hastily eaten by a man sitting at his desk for lunch. The same baguette may be hastily eaten by a young man looking for cheap fuel on a night out. But this baguette as somebody’s dinner becomes something very different: something desolate, profoundly lonely, forlorn.

A few minutes later my friend and I are parking our bikes in the square outside Dublin Castle, one of those sterile modern spaces that pepper the old town. As I am about to lock my bike a man in his thirties approaches us. He is dressed for the cold: grey winter jacket, hands in pockets, wooly hat. He smiles and politely asks for any change we can spare. We shake our heads, apologise. He walks away, thanking us, a picture of urbanity, moving on to some other pedestrian, likely to be gently repelled once more.

Sometimes despair and inhumanity are subtly scripted.