Prodrome of the Present Condition of Ireland

 

My word of the moment is ‘prodrome’:

“In medicine, a prodrome is an early sign or symptom (or set of signs and symptoms) that often indicates the onset of a disease before more diagnostically specific signs and symptoms develop. It is derived from the Greek wordprodromos, meaning "running before".[Prodromes may be non-specific symptoms or, in a few instances, may clearly indicate a particular disease, such as the prodromal migraine aura.” (from prodrome

Where I came across it was in what I would have called the prologue part of ‘The Death of Grass aka ‘Not a Blade of Grass’.  A odd word I thought perhaps ill chosen but having read the book I now think that it is appropriate.  We are given a picture of the comfortable life of the middle class in England in 1933 and 1958. After the war the country is on the mend,  everything is going swimmingly but is there a malaise or a lack of moral preparedness that will manifest itself by a speedy return to barbarism under the pressure of self preservation.  That is the implicit judgement in the choice of the word ‘prodrome’.

What was Ireland’s prodrome or the little signs that prefigure the descent into our present state of malaise, societal dissociation, and a government gone rogue heedless of the people.  What were the dizzy spells, irritability, spontaneous groans, manic laughter of a poisonous village.  There was always those places which seemed madder than a bad tempered dog but now its general.  Plantation 2.0 is the name we have given it.

I offer for the present condition of Ireland the prodrome of The Millenium Candle and your very own native tree planted in a forest near you. More anon.

'The Death of Grass' by John Christopher (pub.1956: in America as 'No Blade of Grass')

 

Speaking of William T. Vollmann; by the serendipity machine that is google I found ‘The Death of Grass’ by John Christopher as a suggestionwhile looking for ‘The Dying Grass’ novel,   Its from 1956 (penguin modern classics) in the dystopian genre.  The prodrome or introductory section sets the scene for the two Custance brothers who are visiting with their parents their grandad’s farm in the lake district.  There having discovered that the elder Davey has a taste for farming and country life it is decided that he will inherit the farm.  The other brother John wants to be an engineer and so indeed it turns out.

Fast forward to 1958, twenty five years later.

It opens up with the news of disturbances in China where the shortage of rice has caused unrest.  A virus affecting the rice crop has destroyed the staple of the masses.

"What's the latest? Did you hear the news before you came out?'

'The Americans are sending more grain ships.'

'Anything from Peking?'

'Nothing official. It's supposed to be in flames. And at Hong Kong they've had to repel attacks across the frontier.'

'A genteel way of putting it,' John said grimly. 'Did you ever see those old pictures of the rabbit plagues in Australia? Wire-netting fences ten feet high, and rabbits - hundreds, thousands of rabbits - piled up against them, leap-frogging over each other until in the end either they scaled the fences or the fences went down under their weight. That's Hong Kong right now, except that it's not rabbits piled against the fence but human beings.'

But like any virus we have scientists to protect us from its predations by inventing a vaccine, a cure of some kind.

They isolated the virus within a month of it hitting the ricefields. They had it neatly labelled - the Chung-Li virus. All they had to do was to find a way of killing it which didn't kill the plant. Alternatively, they could breed a virus-resistant strain. And finally, they had no reason to expect the virus would spread so fast.'

The author has studied his species of grass and is able to tell us that rare rice grass is found in the Lakes district and that it too is affected. But not the grasses we like to eat; wheat, oats, barley and rye. Chung-Li is very selective.

Yes,' John said, 'wheat is a grass, too, isn't it?'

Wheat,' David said, 'and oats and barley and rye not to mention fodder for the beasts. It's rough on the Chinese, but it could have been a lot worse.'

'Yes,' Ann said, 'it could have been us instead. Isn't that what you mean? We had forgotten them again.

And probably in another five minutes we shall have found some other excuse for forgetting them.'

David crumpled the grass in his hand, and threw it into the river. It sped away on the swiftly flowing Lepe.

'Nothing else we can do,' he said.

Two hundred million have died in China despite partial success of the isotope 7 spray.  Unfortunately it has released the phase 5 of the virus which had been masked and ineffective before that.  It became more virulent and attacked all forms of gramineae, wheat etc.  What are you going to feed the stock on without grass in one form or another.

Well not to worry. What?

'Yes,' Roger said, 'that's something that worries me, too. Every government in the world is going to be comforting itself with the same reassuring thought. The scientists have never failed us yet. We shall never really believe they will until they do.'

Can’t we all live on root crops even if we have no butter for our parsnips?  Yes but, there will be panic in an orderly British fashion:

"The disaster in the East, it was explained, had been due as much as anything to the kind of failure in thoroughness that might be expected of Asiatics.”

John talking to David on his farm where he is visiting with his family learns that the order-in-council to plant potatoes where previously wheat was grown has been rescinded.  Just the kind of confidence restoring measures that democracy specialises in.  No good will come of it and David the farmer is going to put in potatoes and beet next spring.  Moreover he is going to erect a high rampart across the neck of the narrow valley that his farm Blind Gill is on.  At the back of the farm is a  mountain so he can barricade himself in. He invites his brother and family to wait out on the farm any trouble which may happen.

Things very rapidly go South, which means that the family must go North from London to the brother’s place, the agricultural bunker. They learn that a Fascist takeover plans to nuke major cities to bring the population down to a feedable size.  Can they make it in time? John’s friend from the propaganda ministry tells them they have got to get out now.  That journey and its adventures have become a stock dystopian device.  They learn that a sharp shooting killer is a useful member of a team and that being strong and ruthless in the war for survival is necessary. Roaming bands of marauders leave the cities. To be armed is essential.  John Custance as leader of the little group driving and walking to Blind Gill must make decisions which would be unthinkable to the middle class engineer of a few days previously. He must kill without hesitation.  Society has returned to a barbarism.

Its a short intense book much better written than the average of the genre.   It was published in America as ‘No Blade of Grass’.  Read it.  Remember it happened to the humble potato.  Now if there were an evil vegan scientist in Wuhan....

'Rising Up and Rising Down' by William T. Vollmann

 

William T. Vollmann was totally unknown to me but a review of his multi volume book ‘Rising Up and Rising Down’ seemed to promise an interesting read in that no man’s land between the IGR (intelligent general reader) and the savant.  A touch of hands on ontology, a report from harm’s way, written by a man who knows the smell of death. Vinegar and vomit but not as experienced outside the chip shop as a drunk’s technicolor yawn.

Hemingway had a go in ‘For who the Bell tolls’.

“All right, Inglés. Learn. That’s the thing. Learn. All right. After that of the ship you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toledo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around her, with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin, and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of the bean, not bristles, but pale sprouts in the death of her face; put your arms tight around her, Inglés, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made of.”

I’m only beginning to read the first volume so I won’t be able to give a full account of it but the augeries are good.  Death is his subject and the anatomy of the grave. There is good Doctor Browneian stuff, the catacombs of Paris, the skulls of Cambodia, blunt force trauma in San Francisco, the corpses delivered for autopsy in an upright position strapped to tall sack trolleys to avoid the hills. Then he smells the coffee in Vienna. There’s a cure in that. He says - I take my meaning where I can find it, when I can’t find it, I invent it.’

He is not as keen to make your flesh creep as the Fat Boy in Dickens who offered to recite ‘The Blood Drinkers Burial’ (in character).  Hello darkness my old friend, but there must be a sense of injustice at being compelled to feel guilty over the death of his sister by drowning  when he was in charge of her, he being 9 and she 6.  Care sears guilt into our bones.

He would concur with that other eschatological doctor Saint Francis de Sales in his Fifth Meditation (Introduction to the Devout Life):

“Consider the universal farewell which your soul will take of this world.  It will say farewell to riches, pleasures, and idle companions, to amusements and pastimes, to friends and neighbors, to husband, wife, and child, in short to all creation.  And lastly it will say farewell to its own body, which it will leave pale and cold, to become repulsive in decay.”

The writing is good, clear, sober prose with a moderate cadence, no flights.  There is no sense of running to meet your inevitable fate, that full stop.

Dmitri Fydorvitch Karamazov packs pistols

 Dmitri Fydorvitch is on his way to Mokroye and Grushenka and the Pani that has come back to claim her, he that ruined her and left her a prey to a rich merchant, Samsonov. His life is going to change and the pistols won’t save him. Plug the Pole and then himself in a grand guignol of atrocity and take the rap for parricide, Daddy weltering in his blood and brother Ivan Fydorvitch in colloquy with a junior devil. Give me the pistols at once he says to the man he pawned them to. His destiny is there in Mokroye and is the significance of the Elder’s bow before him. 

It is just as De Quincey wrote in essay on ‘The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’  tension is heightened by business which delays the denouement of the horrible event that is to come. We give the shopping list, load the troika, show fistfulls of money, describe the grasping nature of the landlord, the foolery of Maximov and Kalegnov. There is an atmosphere of unconstrained hysteria and folly. How are we to go on? Send for Jews with fiddles and cymbals. Dmitri dissolves in tears and then laughs woodenly. Round his head the terrors begin to gather.  

Dostoyevsky is at full strength automatic writing here, his genius has taken control and everything must be said.  The things that ought not to be said, that are left for us to find, the parallels between the early life of Zosima the Elder and Dmitri are flickering shadows.  As in life personalities blend together and at once are separate and alone with personal guilt that denies mitigation.  Its not that we should have known but that we in fact did know.  A great novelist creates that symbiosis, the sense that we are dramatis personae, flowing together in a single mind.

Leftovers show

 As I was saying about the connection between Atheism and Technism, Del Noce’s coinage for the fascination with gadget solutions to whatever ails you.  ‘Is there an app for that’?  As with the secret of Mont Saint Michel lurking at the bottom of a microscope even works of fiction, dramas, shows on tv have that belief that there is a final answer to be given by a sage scientist. This is evident in the rather, for the most part, excellent and imaginative show ‘The Leftovers’ put out by HBO in ‘14 - ‘17. 

The Leftovers

Its more than a riff on rapture. Heidegger might have been consulted for it, I jest. Much of it has an underlying theme of the ultimate precarity of life and how facing that anxiety can either destroy us or demand authenticity. ‘That’s a lie’ is a constant refrain being said by all the characters in the 3 season show. John Murphey will burn your house down for that. All that is good and we accept the symbolism, shamanistic travels to other worlds, the bureaucratization of sudden departure, the scamming angle, the cult of the Guilty Remnant that adopts smoking as remembering. All of that is brilliant, deep, metaphysically profound, obscure, and simple as death. Then however it goes awry in the third season when they bring in the scientific solution, let’s call it by its true name, a one way teleporter between the two worlds that of the leftovers and that of the departed. Really they ought have, like Iris Dement sings in the theme song of the second series, ‘Let the Mystery Be’. Live in Keatsian Negative Capability.

II had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare  possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Hope is cheaper than despair.

 

My tweets of the moment are grim and dark even melodramatically so. But that’s the nature of the tweet. I write:

Compared to Repeal (of the 8th Amendment) all other social ‘improvements’ are tinsel and glitter. Ireland is on the skids heading towards a sea of evil.

At least we haven’t been presented with the argument that ‘durable relationships’ would strengthen marriage, so far.

By the branches of Rhetoric: No Logos (reasons), Ethos (testimonials from celebrities), lashings of Pathos (emotional manipulation). Such is the referendum debate from the Yes/Yes party.

At this point I can hardly add much to those sentiments. Repeal did the most serious, indeed deadly, damage to Childhood, Motherhood, Fatherhood, and Family. These proposed amendments are merely tidying around the edges, cleaning up the debris and facilitating the erosion of the nation state and in time its destruction. At this point they look likely to be defeated. I hardly dare hope that this could be a return to moral sanity in the way that some small event could recall a different world. I remember the cop that got one of the pair of serial killers that went around Ireland years ago to confess by asking him if he remembered the day of his First Holy Communion. Everything is captured in Memory as Bergson wrote and can be a key.

Socio-Political analysis would deny this and point out that a deeply unpopular government is having its claret tapped. That too and the Covidology Codology that continues to rankle even among those who were taken in by it, perhaps especially those. We’ve gone all antithetical as it were or contrary. Bile to be purged, boils to be lanced and the Green Party to be put away like the toys we are bored with and won’t bother to buy batteries for.

Let’s hope. It’s cheaper than despair and you can always return it.