But the lucky sod happens to get a bone marrow transplant from someone with a rare resistance to the HIV virus, that occurs in about one in a thousand Europeans. Nearly two years later, he’s as fit as a fiddle and is totally clear of both HIV and leukemia. Talk about a last-minute reprieve from Death Row.

It’s a true story. And, I realise it may sound strange, but it makes me wonder about prayer. About miracles, and that sort of stuff. Around Christmas, I try to remind myself that the tacky extravaganza is not only about shopping and eating and drinking. It has to be about something else, something that isn’t about gratification. Doesn’t it?

You see, I believe that the only word I have for what I’ve been doing in response to AIDS since it first terrified me in the early eighties is praying. Never consciously directed at a Higher Power or a God or Jesus or Allah or anyone else, it’s been a sort of focussed period of concentration, almost an internalized furrowing of my brow, for anything from a few moments to a few hours, in which I am actively willing that the world provides a cure for the bloody disease. The world? Human beings. Scientists. The Fates. The Fureys. Anyone will do.

I was reminded of the sad toll the disease has taken on the lives of so many Irish people when I attended a lecture by Niall Sweeney, the writer and graphic designer and general fount of creativity, (or should that be font of creativity?) on the social and visual history of the annual Alternative Miss Ireland contest, the beauty pageant that is open to men, women, and animals. The team of dedicated professional volunteers who have worked so hard over the years to raise funds to defeat the disease and support those living with it, have a heartwarming story to tell. But the design is eye-watering – it’s a visual feast, grotesque and stylish, absurd and sublime, crazy and serene. Most of all, what is evident in the images and videos in the archive is an extraordinary celebratory sense of humour.

But there is a poignancy to it, as so many of the original team have died of the disease since the competition started. It is the hurt of that mournful, terrifying period in the eighties and early nineties that I was reminded of, seeing those fabulous faces and their outrageous frocks.

All that praying, all that willing, the mental forcing, the bending of one’s will to make something happen over the years. The sadness, the grief, the loss, the fear of those close to me. The missing faces on the scene, the wistful memories of fearless lovemaking. The torture of the regular HIV test that never seems to be anything less than an existential trial, a weighing up of pleasure’s costs, the opening of the door to see if Death is waiting outside this time.
All this, for one little virus. I was speaking to a friend last night who, like a few others, wonder about the strict connection between the virus and the deadly disease. I used to think like him – fear drove me into denial, and had me clutching at straws, the discrepancies in the original discovery of the virus, the squabbling laboratories, the cases of those who didn’t die who “should have”. The impact of believing you’re about to die, and how it speeds one towards death, a placebo effect in reverse. The synchronicity of those dying first being those who (generally) used a lot of drugs and had a lot of sex. All pointing to it being a lifestyle effect, a state of mental or spiritual dis-ease.

But it’s not either/or. It is both, for some people. But, for most people, it’s just a virus that strips away one’s defences. It’s as simple as that.

And now we learn that it can go away. Admittedly it’s kind of impossible to imagine how those same conditions could be repeated for everyone with the virus – every thousandth European with the genetic anomaly would have to be found first, needles in a haystack, then blood-typed and marrow-typed. How many times could a person have their bones drilled open and their marrow sucked dry to save a life? I pity the poor donor, who saved this man’s life. He’s got an unenviable choice.

Anyway. In the meantime, all we can do is hope that this is the first of many such breakthroughs. And pray.

When things seem at their darkest, they often turn out unexpectedly beautiful. Fact. Have a peaceful, loving, healthy Christmas.

It was with high hopes that I went to see Woman and Scarecrow at the Peacock, especially given the mouth-watering cast that included Olwen Fouéré, Barbara Brennan and Bríd Ní Neachtain. Knowing the play was addressing death, I was confident that given Marina’s rich knowledge of myth and loss, I would find myself challenged and disturbed.

Right from the start, one has to cope with the accent, the wogious midlands drone, flat, unrelenting, as dreary as bogland. It alienates, deliberately – and I don’t mean that this Jackeen doesn’t understand or can’t relate to it, I mean that each character is tied by phonetics into a specific geographical area, the bogs east of the Shannon, and by colloquiallisms into a specific time, an Ireland that is long gone. But, because the style is not natural realism, we know this isn’t a story about quirky Tullamore folk from the fifties. Audiences relax when they see and hear the familiar, but the tension created by the contrived nature of Carr’s world can serve to heighten awareness and catch one by surprise with powerful emotions, offering a rich wry perspective on life. When I saw By the Bog of Cats in the West End, with Holly Hunter, I found myself shaken to the core, blasted by a fierce grief, despite having been constantly irritated by Hunter’s inability to master the accent, and, in retrospect, the directorial insistence that it was that specific Offaly brogue or bust. I attributed the power of the piece to the script, and also to Hunter’s emotional commitment to the piece. And it was also wonderfully funny.

Visually, this production is stunning; the set design is by Conor Murphy. It opens with a home movie of the young Woman, a girl in a red coat playing on the seashore, projected onto a scrim; then, as it grinds open, sounding like the gates of Hell, she dances across the stage, one of the most beautiful openings of any show I’ve seen in a long time. There is a wonky bed set high on an indoor snowdrift, and lying langorously in it, there’s the Woman, Olwen Fouéré, dying of spite, bickering with her alter-ego/guardian angel/dream lover/Scarecrow, Barbara Brennan. Death is waiting in the wardrobe, growling, “making a bracelet out of infant ankle bones”. And immediately, we’re right in it. This is quintessential Carr, clever, unapologetic, caustic, pugilistic, absurd, bitter, merciless. We have to figure it all out for ourselves. We must banish all memories of Tom Murphy’s Bailegangáire – an impossible task, really, for Siobhán McKenna’s swansong as the dying bedridden Mommo is still etched in my heart after over twenty years.

Woman and Scarecrow is inhabited by unashamedly one-note characters, as if tightly bound into corsets of wrought iron, squeezing out all sentimentality, maturity, and hope. The message is that life is brutalizing, rancorous and toxic. Compassion is absent. Happiness is baffling, self-awareness brings no relief from twisted complexes. Self-examination is forensic, pathological, in the detached sense of an autopsy report; in Woman and Scarecrow, there is no enthusiasm or life force or joie-de-vivre waiting to be undammed, no redemptive cathartic release is possible, to go pulsing through the heart after the knotted tourniquet of hate is untied. In the Woman’s arteries, after a life spent using up everything she had giving everyone else what they wanted, there is only venom. These characters are already dead, ghosts of themselves. But even the word ghost is grossly inappropriate – ghost comes from the word for spirit, life, breath. Looking for life? Move along. There’s nothing to see here.

Woman asks at one stage “When did it all turn to tragedy, Scarecrow? When did I stop lampooning the world, and why?” In some ways this is Carr speaking – she has given up the ghost in this play, and, casting her cold eye on life, it’s as if she has immersed it in liquid nitrogen with her gaze, and shattered the resulting brittle shapes with an icepick. Woman and Scarecrow is cadaverous. Beckett, in comparison, had a deep rich humour that enabled us to mine existential depths with his characters. Carr’s humour, however, is in her sophisticated wordplay, a barrage of pithy ironic complaints, that gives us no room to catch our breath. By the time death comes in the end, (for of course death comes in the end) and Woman and her Scarecrow/Ghost Mother arrange themselves for us in a posed and dismaying still life portrait, my heart was as cold as marble.

This is an analysis of a failed marriage, a self-sacrificial suffocated woman and a philandering husband, a marriage that was a façade for procreation. A study of the gangrenous effects of a girl losing a mother, herself self-loathing and bitter, too early in life. A portrait of a stifling repressed community. It is a reflection on lives unlived. It is played with bravery and total commitment by all the cast, but the absence of subtext in each character poses severe challenges for even the most talented of actors. In particular, I was struck by Barbara Brennan’s compelling physicality, agile and angular, and Olwen Fouéré’s astonishing capacity to bare all, emotionally as well as physically, always impresses.

The one moment of aching loss that I felt in the evening is not in the script – director Selina Cartmell had Barbara Brennan move hauntingly across the stage, as the Woman is describing to the redoubtable Auntie Ah (Bríd Ní Neachtain) her last memory of her long-dead mother, and in that moment something shifted for me. But it was fleeting, over in an instant, a hint of what might have been.

I left the theatre as bitterly disappointed as the Woman herself, with the confusing relief of leaving a morgue, albeit a strangely beautiful one. Not wanting to say goodbye, because I still hoped in some way that, if I could stay long enough, I would see a flicker of life in the corpse, some flash of recognition, some insight about life that would enrich or comfort me. Like the Woman herself, I had no such luck.

I reviewed this production with Pavel Barter of the Sunday Times on Nadine O’Regan’s show The Kiosk on Phantom FM.

There is no “truth” when it comes to understanding the motives for suicide. It’s a wretched business, purely speculative, and no one can reach any solid conclusions because the violence of the act leaves everyone close so traumatised, and, of course, the aggressor is not around to explain his or her motives. I say “aggressor” deliberately, because suicide punches a hole in the fabric of the consensus to which we all cling, with various degrees of effort: that life is precious and worth preserving at all costs.

We don’t have to be a signed-up Freudian to recognise that thanatos, the death wish, rumbles around in our psyches more often than we care to admit. Those frightened of heights are not so much scared of falling, but of the awareness that some part of them wants to fall, to jump. Those who buy packets of cigarettes wilfully ignore the words “SMOKING KILLS” every day. The death wish can manifest in a subtler way, through neglect; those who overeat and find themselves becoming obese, putting a strain on their heart and not really finding the will to diet, or those who starve themselves or are anorexic or bulimic. Those who get addicted to something, however harmless in small doses, find themselves centring their lives on something that is the opposite of engaging with life. Addiction has its root in a desire to manage feelings, to dam the flood of emotions that threaten to overwhelm our rationality, our stability, our sense of well-being.  It’s present in those who get a little bit too drunk and ending up having unsafe sex with someone they don’t know. And in those who endure endless levels of stress at work or at home and do nothing about it, and end up with a heart attack at the age of 50. All of us, at some stage, have been through phases in our lives where life doesn’t feel worth living, even if it’s just the passivity of waking up in the morning and just not being bothered about carrying on with the day.

When someone acts on that deathwish, we are confronted violently with our own, and that is a nauseating, disturbing experience. Those who loved the person who has died inevitably feel responsible, racked with guilt, driven to distraction wondering if there was anything that they could have done to avert it. The sad truth of it is that, despite everything we are taught, despite the conceit in the West that preserving life is our main priority, we learn each time someone takes their life that there can be a greater, darker force, one of a fierce, almost tyrannical,  individualism. It is the most powerful expression of the desire to take control over our feelings, to extinguish that which we cannot tolerate any more. Paradoxically, it is the ultimate expression of control over life.

The other paradox with suicide is that it is not the person who takes their own life that, necessarily, suffers. We can speculate at the struggle that led them to such a drastic act, and we can learn from those who have threatened suicide, who are dealing with depression or other existential crises, to examine at the rocky terrain that leads up to the final act. At heart, there is a monstrous obsession with one’s own pain, to the exclusion of all others. There may be cries for help, self-harming or talk of losing the will to live, or, indeed, unsuccessful attempts. They should always be taken seriously. For, as much as we may “tut tut” and dismiss such attempts as “attention seeking” or self-inflicted – especially in adolescence – the truth is, in my experience, that someone who is calling out for attention to their pain is demanding that everyone in their  family address a similar pain, which is often so frightening that few dare to wade into those shark-infested waters of the unconscious. The person who is acting out becomes the one with the problem, the sick one, the disturbed one, while the rest of the family, with the best will in the world, fail to grasp the nettle for themselves.  This is not to attribute blame to families – far from it – this is to point out that in our society we are deeply uncomfortable with allowing the expression of disturbing feelings, and we are loath to acknowledge the relational matrix that connects us like a web. Death, or the threat of it, is sometimes what it takes to call attention to what is wrong in a social system – whether that be a relationship, a family, a community or a society.  And what is wrong is usually an imbalance, rather than a matter of culpability; an (all too human) desire not to deal with savagely uncomfortable feelings.

“Why did she do it?” blares the headline in the Evening Herald in front of me, as I write. Her letter may offer a clue, and I understand it to be heart-breaking, but it is but one piece of the jigsaw of evidence. What’s missing is an understanding of the emotional turmoil that led up to the cold, clear decision, the process that led her to conclude that one shocking statement, one lament, would suffice. One of the most unsettling things that her family and friends will have to face is their rage at the choice she has made, how she (through whatever logic she employed) came to such a decision, to disregard the pain she would cause them. I believe it to be one of the most harrowing experiences of life. I hope they manage to find some peace of mind, and forgive themselves – and her.

It was only this weekend that I discovered the local cemetary, after living here for nearly five months, because it’s three-quarters of the way around the village from me, the “wrong” way around the one-way system, or circonvallazione. So you’d have to really want to go there, to find it. (I’ve already photographed the cemetary at nearby town San Giovanni d’Asso in December, right.) People around these parts are interred above ground, in the main, with just a small panel of marble on show for people to remember them by. It’s quite charming, really, and I love what people have done for the headstones, with photographs and little light bulbs and flowers.

]]> http://bonhom.ie/2006/03/there-are-two-types-of-people-those.html/feed 3 http://bonhom.ie/2005/12/wednesday.html http://bonhom.ie/2005/12/wednesday.html#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2005 22:59:00 +0000 Dermod http://81.17.252.110/~dermod/2005/12/wednesday.html Hello, I’m Wednesday‘s child.

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