Letters To Nobody
Deep in the midlands of Ireland there is a derelict old cottage. It once sat proud on top of a hill in a Ballyfin farm overlooking the plush and bountiful countryside but now it is baron, burnt and surrounded by overgrown trees. The name of the man who used to live there is unknown to us. However, we do know through anecdotal evidence and first-hand accounts that its former resident was at one stage a member of the Irish Republic Army and by means of a betrayal he was ex-communicated by his fellow soldiers and hunted by the British Forces. This resulted in him becoming an agoraphobic recluse and banishing himself to the confines of a ten foot by ten foot attic. We do not know how he fed himself, who betrayed him or how he died but we do know that the cottage was burnt down some 100 years ago and the only thing that was left unscorched were a few diary entries. Most were incinerated but the following were salvaged:
January 26th, 1919
Peacefully in pieces in these prison walls,
Built by my own hand,
With sorrow instead of mortar,
And naivety instead of sand.
June 2nd, 1919
The sun announces himself to the triumphant trumpet of the cawing cockerel yet my day does not begin until my feet hit the floor. The touch of soft shag carpeting betwixt my toes is but a distant memory and has been substituted for the sour sticky sensation of an overstayed welcome. It is difficult to blame the floor for her abysmal condition as it is me who spits on her daily. However, that is out of necessity not hatred, sometimes it is out of frustration but mainly out of purpose. The purpose being I cannot smoke in this ghastly attic as it is as flammable as a Kerry man’s breath. I talk of purpose. I once had incredible purpose, an incredulous purpose and now spitting over-chewed tobacco is that purpose. The worst thing about it is that when it hardens it becomes welded tight like dried tar. It supplies a strange surface for the taste buds of my toes to investigate. It’s unlike any other stain that inhabits these rotten timbers and there are many. The coarse crust of my heel introduces himself first before the brownish lump is unearthed by the piercing broadsword of my cracking toe nail. It’s different. So different. In this attic, where time is paralysed and stimulation is comatose, I will take all that there is no matter its vulgarity. I am grotesque but what else can I be? For I am here. Stuck. Stuck like this tobacco to the floor.
March 7th, 1920
At first my eyes begin to close,
What I despise is what I chose,
Influential influences influence the weak,
Spoken at not spoken to; I learn how to speak,
Cracks in the wall as lies begin to…
August 18th, 1920
I rise before the sun most days. I remember being trapped between the shattered remains of a printing press and the jagged edges of incinerated brick and mortar. I had taken such a knock to the head that reality had bent. Incessant gun fire screaming overhead seemed like a cohort of hermetic fire flies who employed the GPO as its amphitheatre. Death surrounded me then like darkness surrounds me now. Yet the icy claw of destruction was peeled from my throat that day when my brothers came for me. Later executed, they died so that I should live and now I live so that I should die. What am I? I am not a person? I am not even a thing. I am but a singular motionless emotion sucking and blowing breathe and doing so in a desultory fashion. When the sightless black of night invades the countryside, I feel as if I am once again trapped in that hellish place. Though, my brothers have since abandoned me it appears that the sun’s light is my only saviour from this nightly terror. So I awake and witness it’s robust reclaim of the earth each morning as it banishes the night back to the womb of the devil. Pressing my cheek against the glass of the only window I know, I taste it’s delicious warmth and dread it’s departure.
December 25th, 1920
Madness like art is totally and utterly subjective and you won’t convince me otherwise…
January 12th, 1921
I have too much time to think. I stare out the window as much as I can in search of danger but really its of stimulation. To a new arrival my view would be breath-taking but familiarity breeds expectation. I expect to see the same gigantic oak trees with busy squirrels duelling at their feet. I expect to look up to the sky and witness a golden shower of shimmering light rain down through a break in the clouds as if God himself is reaching down below to stroke his fingers through the dew soaked grasses. And, I expect to see a posse of Chaffinch loiter amongst the branches of the tree’s and hedgerows. I have become infatuated by my fluttering friends. The beautiful contrast in colour of the Chaffinch dazzles me regularly. The subtle blending of red, yellow and orange feathers being complimented with its citified tuxedo like black and white wings brings forth sweet memories of my childhood and the freedom I once took for granted. The chaffinch is certainly the paragon of style in Eire’s countryside. I was once a gregarious chancer like them. Their harmless and boisterous play acting tortures my soul with further memories of my school friends and I having an insatiable hunger for buffoonery. I have become so besotted with my friends from a far that some nights in my dreams I waft from branch to branch with them.
Their concern for one another has led me to ponder companionship. It has been quite some time since I have thought of Penelope as similar to the cold midnight wind her memory acerbically cuts through my hovel. I loved her. Whole heartedly. I cared not of her birthplace or her politics but of who she was. Alas, now I realise I didn’t even know who she was. Imagine being so stupid that you could love someone you don’t even know. “Love an English-woman, Kill an Irishman”, Pah Burke once told me. I didn’t listen.
I was fighting to free my country, my people and myself… surely my choice of lover could be allotted the same freedom as my ideals. I was harassed by most in the brigade and despised by others but their qualms fell on deaf ears. If I was starving, I would share my last morsel of bread with her, if I was gasping from a deadly thirst, I would share my only drop of water with her. How does she repay my total servitude and love? By sharing information with our oppressors and enemies. She had proved those who hissed with venom and snarled with teeth right. A fucking tout. A fucking whore how dare she. Now I lay writhing and rotting in this attic for fear of death from any angle. No, it seems companionship is not for me but only for the Chaffinch. Now my brothers hunt me from the left and the British from the right.
Hopefully they don’t meet at the top of the lane or else they’ll scare the birds away.
October 9th, 1923
We are all to be loved. We are all loved. We are all relentlessly famished of love. We are all terrified of losing love. This is the essence of our environment. It is no surprise then that we kill each other. We take lives and some times our own lives and why not, say I. How is a conscious soul to exist in the paragon of contradictions that is living when all that we want we have but we cannot see it. We cannot see it. We cannot see it. The love that warms our very souls, sparking the fires of art, music and war is evanescent and ever present. Even though we avail of its sweet splendour we cannot see it. We cannot see it because it is shrouded by our own discontent of ourselves. How selfish of us! I cannot see that you love me because I don’t respect myself to love myself? Confusing and infuriating if you ask me! Well that is hell itself no? What’s worse? Nothing. Nothings worse. So we must wave our arms tirelessly in the pursuit of wafting the thick smoke of self-loathing off…dispersing it into the atmosphere . We must be grateful. Gratitude drags us from the icy depths, lays us on the sands of heaven and fills our once suffocating lungs with the breath of God. Not a God or ‘the’ god but your God. Your maker. Your architect. Whoever that may be. It may even be you I do not know but I do know it is not for me to decide. It simply is just as we simply are. Its that simple. You are not powerless in this, you must try to see. We are all to be loved. We are all loved. We are all relentlessly famished of love. We are all terrified of losing love.