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Our usual spot for blackberry picking wasn’t exactly heaving with mellow fruitfulness this year, but we managed to harvest enough for a couple of jars of jam before S. was distracted by a gate with a sign reading DANGER BULL IN FIELD. The danger bull, much to our disappointment, was nowhere to be seen.
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The pictures below were taken during a visit to the gardens maintained by the Festina Lente foundation, of which I admit I knew nothing until today. If you are in north Wicklow or south Dublin, go and take a stroll around the lavishly stocked nursery area and the formal garden, then leave a donation in [...]
Reading Michael Dervan’s review in today’s Irish Times was a glum reminder that we are missing the West Cork Chamber Music Festival for the first time since we began attending in 2007.
The festival’s main venue for performances, it seems, is now St Brendan’s church and not Bantry House itself. Having experienced both, I suppose I can see the wisdom of this. The library at Bantry House is a very handsome room with magnificent views of the fine, terraced gardens, but very few people can be seated within the library itself, and so seating areas are also laid out on an adjoining hallway and landing.
Seats on the upper landing, in particular, offer neither a decent view nor an acceptable acoustic quality. Even in the front rows in the library proper, where there is at least an intimate proximity to the stage, the sound, in my experience, has never been quite right for chamber music. The absorbency of all those old calfskin volumes and the humidity of July evenings conspire to give a slightly dull and blanketed sound.
The church certainly offers a brighter and more spacious soundscape, though as Dervan observes, its hard wooden pews do tend to test what he decorously terms the “concentration” of the listener during a longer concert. Discreet cushions may become a required accessory at the festival, especially in view of the senescence and poor state of repair of many regular attendees, this one included. A marketing opportunity suggests itself, perhaps.
I hope, though, that the festival does not altogether abandon Bantry House. Lounging around in the grounds before an evening performance, soaking up the grandeur of the surroundings and eavesdropping on rehearsals at an open window are part of the festival’s charm. The house also seems a more aptly nocturnal setting for the evening concerts, the right place for the crepuscular magnificence of, say, the late Beethoven quartets. The church seems better suited to airier, more matitudinal works, like the sprightly Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 we heard there in 2008.
In any case, I look forward to revisiting both venues on our next trip, to sampling the catch of the day in O’Connor’s and to the west Cork summer itself with its somnolent light and its bridesmaid’s finery of fuschia and rhododendron.
For S.
The day will wait for you.
The sun won’t start to rise
Or rub its sleepy eyes
Until you do.
And when you do,
When all those little rays
Have rushed through outer space
To shine on you,
I’ll be there too.
The night will wait for you.
The stars will not agree
To fade entirely
Until you wake.
And when you wake,
The waves will swim ashore
To sing to you once more
About the blue.
I’ll be there too.
Seashells and starfish and cinnamon,
Teaspoons and treetops and tears.
Everything longs to begin again,
But nothing may
Until the day
That waits for you.
The world will wait for you.
Each sacred thing we know
Will sleep beneath the snow
Until you see.
And when you see,
The shining everything
That each tomorrow brings,
You’ll love it too.
Like I love you.
Tigers and toothaches and telephones,
Sand dunes and skylarks and sighs.
Everything yearns to begin again,
But nothing may
Until the day
That waits for you.
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Originally posted on Life on the Outside, 31 July 2006. Sophia Elizabeth O’Donnell, born 29 July 2006. What does it feel like? I’m not sure. It feels like gravity itself has subtly but immensely shrugged, and is reasserting itself around a new centre. The lines I take now, when walking or driving, are not free. [...]
Originally posted on Life on the Outside, 14 June 2007.
For Sophia, 29 July 2007.
You kept us enthralled with feats, unsheathing incisors,
pushing a star, at last, through a star-shaped hole.
In secret, you circled a whole sun, spinning a filament
for your skein of orbits.
Midday that Saturday, texting news from Holles Street,
rushing your name, a held breath, to the air.
We were up for two nights. You feel translucent, slush grey.
Your vitals gleamed green through my faded ribs.
In the delivery room, arrayed for you in hushed purpose,
Everything near you waited too.
At four the radio playing Sibelius, everything depending on
numbers, on the persistence of your heart.
To sit there devouring the tiny, smeared glyphs of you;
what sand writes in a seashell’s lacquered throat is almost
not believably there, allowing only the fairy small
to truly see, to decipher it.
In Avoca, a woman warning her child not even to breathe
on you. Gathering you close, ourselves breathless.
For weeks we cut careful vees in Pampers to keep safe
a thick inch of cut cord, dense with our woven blood.
By February you strained at candle flames, already
liking light too much, stuck in winter.
Leaving you at crèche that first morning, not crying
Until the Southern Cross, where someone let me go.
The sister took you womb wet to gravity, the scales
Under the fire sign, where your weight, your bearing
Under heaven was set down, measured. Mass in kilograms:
How much the world wanted you.
Then holding you, finally, and thinking: So that’s it.
It’s unending, universal, a constant. It’s never letting go.
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Originally posted on Life on the Outside, 6 June 2007. ‘Cat!’ Your mother and I were enjoying some quite passable reheated pasta, and you had dispatched a second Liga before beginning an animated post-prandial soliloquy from which, I confess, our attention may have wandered a little because you were mostly using words we didn’t know. [...]
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Originally posted on Life on the Outside, 20 June 2006. Have I mentioned that you might be a synaesthete? Relax. In spite of the name, it’s not something worrying that the mothers and babies doctors have detected. In fact, it’s nothing more than an oddity, a harmless quirk that may affect the way you perceive [...]
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Originally posted on Life on the Outside, 3 April 2006. Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I So, we finally got to see that Dürer exhibition we were on the way to at the outbreak of the Ketones Incident. This time, your mother came along too. So did you, in fact, but I’m not sure you had a [...]
Originally posted on Life on the Outside, 2 March 2006.
Well, we visited the mothers and babies (and foetuses) doctors in Holles Street again yesterday. Don’t worry, there wasn’t anything wrong with your mother’s ketones this time. The doctors just wanted to check that you were all right in there, and that you were happy with the standards of food and accommodation and so on.
Unfortunately, this did involve bouncing some more of those sound waves off you, and you probably noticed a bit more banging on the walls than usual. Sorry about that. You’ll be relieved to learn that there should be no more sound bouncing sessions from now on.
This is partly because we discovered something about you yesterday. It’s a small detail, but it’s probably going to determine, among other things, your views on handbags and on Anne Francis and her collection of skirts.
We’re overjoyed at this discovery, but we’re also a little embarrassed. You see, we thought we’d already settled this particular matter at an earlier sound bouncing appointment, but it turns out we were wrong. Not only that, but we were so sure we were right about this particular, er, detail, that we’d started to plan certain things.
We had settled on booties of a certain style. We had started to plan a colour scheme for what will be your room. And then there was the small matter of your nick name, which really had begun to stick. We’ll tell you about it someday. I’m sure you’ll see the funny side. You might require a little counselling, but you’ll see the funny side.
By the way, your mother observes what’s called a superstition. This is a kind of irrational belief. In this case, it’s a belief that magpies, or rather the number of magpies present in a flock, can predict certain categories of events in the life of a person who encounters them. It’s all based on an old rhyme.
To be fair, she doesn’t really believe this. It’s more a matter of tradition and personal ritual. In fact, it’s a bit like what’s known as Pascal’s wager. Pascal argued that believing in God was a better “bet” than not believing, since you stand to gain a lot more if you turn out to be right than if you had bet on not believing.
Anyway, the thing is that, on the way to the hospital yesterday, we saw a number of magpies. It may have been three, it may have been four. Now, these two configurations of birds are said to predict the particular detail (think of it as a flavour, like chocolate or strawberry) about foetuses like you that we were on our way to discover.
Of course, there are certain obvious problems with this. For instance, what if two or more mothers with foetuses are looking at the same flock of magpies, but one has a strawberry foetus and the other chocolate?
But never mind that. The point is that the magpies were wrong anyway. The flavour they predicted was contradicted by the, um, anatomical features we saw in the hospital.
Now, I realise that this hasn’t exactly cleared anything up for you. All we’ve established is that a species of bird you’ve never heard of (and what’s a bird, anyway?) doesn’t have any supernatural influence over something about you that’s a bit like a flavour but not quite, and that we spent yesterday afternoon peering at your “details”. That probably does seem, well, a little opaque, if not downright unsettling.
Just bear with us here, OK? It’s just that you’re quite a big deal out here already. A lot of people are talking about you already, and everyone is dying to meet you. Your mother and I are just trying to preserve a little of your mystique, to save something for the end, for what television executives call the Big Reveal.
And I can see it now. I know just how those television executives would describe you.
You’re going to be fabulous, darling. Just fabulous.
