Return to Left Curve no. 20 Table of Contents
WHISTLING WITH LOVE
by
Seamas Carraher
Introductory Note
Seamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He has worked as an unskilled
laborer, a dishwasher for many years, has kicked both alcoholic and drug addictions and
has lived in London, New York and Greece along the way. As a documentary film director
and scriptwriter, he directed "Whitefrair Street Seranade," a portrayal of Dublin's inner-city
working class's attempt to preserve its community; and he has lectured on Documentary
Film as a tol for social change. He currently lives in Dublin (Dalkey).
I visited Seamas -- it was our first meeting -- in October, 1995. Seamus Heaney had
just won the Nobel Prize and bookstores in downtown Dublin were proudly displaying his
books. But it was the passion in Seamas Carraher's unpublished book, "Whistling with
Love" that made my journey to Ireland momentous; for he engages body and soul in the
process of downfalls and upswings of revolutionary hope in ways that make the years of
Irish soul and strife vivid and immediate. And his introductory words to the volume tackle
the questions of both love and cultural responsibility with a brilliant display of working-
class understanding.
Carraher has written other unpublished tracts on culture, as well as poems in response
to situations the world over. Left Curve has in the past published his poetry, and will in the
future feature other work of this engaging poet of Ireland. For the present, I'm happy to
introduce his introduction to "Whistling with Love" as well as a selection of three poems
from that book. Both prose and poetry, I'm sure, will convince the reader of an important
voice, one with the courage to record and engage with fire and conviction the ins and outs
of love in these end-of-the-millenium times of soul-swapping marketeering.
-- Jack Hirschman
Whistling with Love
by Seamas Carraher
An Introduction
There seems a terrible sense of contradiction in an age legitimising profit at the expense of
so much collective human suffering, in wanting, and being compelled, to write a short
work of love poetry. The contradiction is perhaps not so ununderstandable when we realise
that our age, -- where so much hope can spring from technological development and
whose cultural production achieves a level of public recognition through the mass media
never achieved before -- is appearing more and more to be what it is and what we, as a
people, fear -- an Age of Hate. Whether this is expressed in the mass murder of civilians
by "precision" bombing and cruise missiles in Baghdad or Southern Lebanon, by the new
Imperial World order, the U.S. and its allies, or in the cruder, less technocratic
bombardment, murder and rape witnessed in the old socialist republics of Yugoslavia. Or
simply in the widespread distribution or hunger, poverty, famine and violence.
And in an age where the popular and the public and the mass have at least achieved token
recognition from the cultural debates and the practical revolutions of this, our century, and
both the achievements and the losses resulting become fixed in time and in our
consciousness and we begin to move on... in an age where all token recognition of
democracy as an ideal now seems merely to highlight, to anyone with an eye in their head,
its grim lack of content, of quality to our lives and more often of quantity (sufficiency)
where we, who supposedly exercise power, or in whose name this power is cexercised,
are involved...
...it would seem then that, as we reach this turning point, on the eve of a new century, as
people who believe we have a future and that this future has its beginning for all humans in
an extension and greater realisalion of democracy in all the spheres of our life and our
relationships... that we are creatures of a world that can only come into being with the
realisation of the content of what we now call democracy (and both the individual and
interpersonal bonds and processes that link its elements into something coherent... )
...and that what is needed, if not expected, (if we are to explain the prevalence of this great
hate from the material of scarcity and the oppression such scarcity has enacted on our
species) is now once again the commitment and the struggle to reconceptualize in our
thoughts, our dreams and our actions a new way of addressing a new human, at this
embarkation point in history, bascd on the progress we have realised and the need to make
this progress human, to serve real human needs. And especially for those of us who have
experienced, through the contradictions of mainstream culture down the decades the
refining of the notion of the individual into a meaningless, fetishised and objectified
state... a creature stillborn and in great danger of total extinction; one amid a thousand other
things, at the edge of oblivion...
...lt would also seem that what is needed is to reveal his or her cxistence, to uncover our
presence a step now beyond thc despair and the angst of this bloody and brutal century and
the struggles we have endured to reach this place, and to point towards our journey in a
total sense (more than the economic or cultural or social or psychological, at least in the
West where we are burdened with these categories and our own fragmentation by them... )
a journey beyond the abyss of mass destruction.
...Perhaps in this way we can statc now the peculiar dilemma confronting the lovcr and
his/hcr beloved in this Land of Shadows: the bourgeois, for its own reasons (and among
them the nced to oppress and to maintain a split in consciousness, the split between the
ideal and the real that all oppression enacts) has failcd to realise thc subject, thc me and you
as author of historical change, and thus put a content to its aspirations to democracy. And
we then, as socialists, not to be outdone in the rigorousness of our struggling, decided to
transcend this, in its abolition, in the abolition of private property into socialist society. The
abolition of a ghost. With consequences we have yet to recognize...
...And so our straggles to connect and love turn into a dance among reflections, and love
itself into no morc than a great longing that haunts us with its lack of fulfillment and life,
even among ourselves in the places where we hide from our oppression, an unending grief
for a loss we are not conscious of, we no longer remember.
In other words we can no longer exist on the margins: that is what we need to say and
speak now in our dialogue with each othcr, recognising thc other as another author of our
collectivc responsibilities. And if s/he can no longer continue to exist more like an absence
or an apparition (if what we ever needed from culture was the power to define one's-self a
step beyond the configurations and the battlelines of history and beyond the terms of the
conflicting ideologies that have shaped our century) -- then we must begin to ask, or learn,
how to formulate the questions: how can we? What is nccdcd? Where do we begin -- to
continue...?
And one question it would seem, without dismissing both the power to manipulate and the
banality of the vacuum of contemporary commercial culture: how can there exist either the
individual to address his/her beloved, or the context where a meaningful dialogue between
the lover and his/her beloved could be articulated and understood by a language and an
audience outside a personal space, a private space, (akin to a form or historical psychosis)
that has never reached the surface of its historical realisation other than symptomatically and
now seems to be becoming more hopeless with the extension of the public into not just our
homes as commodity but into our consciousness as a specific, capitalist, definition of
identity, of needs, their recognition, and their satisfaction?...
...As if we lived in the Land of Mirrrors, a tribe of cannibals reduced to feeding off each
other and a multiplicity of voracious images of ourselves. The Land of MTV.
In such terms we are both absent and present simultaneously. And in this way dance
between contradiction and despair, a dance in which any notion of freedom has been
reduced to a mechanical reaction, a grim battle to survive, tooth and claw, a posture --
between things whose parts, hardly separate from each other live out a living death that has
been programmed at birth. And we doubt. And continue to despair in a silence that seems
to leave no space for thought let alone dialogue or action. And thus five out the
impossibility of affirming anything in a context where hate and oppression serve as the
defining characteristics, the fundamental limits of who we are, what we might be and what
we can do? Other than internalize and project the contradictions of a historical unconscious?
And remain subservient to the commercialization of its symptoms? Survival. Always and
already grim mechanical survival. Until the Missile lands.
...And so I hesitated to explore or even try to articulate what I felt, and as a socialist,
thought could not yet, within the terms of the dominant culture, a culture based on
oppression, exist and after experimentation would be experienced only as another failure,
another flag waving with helplessncss and futility over the emptiness, or worse, a slipping
into the old, categories and sentiments, a making do with what weÕve got pragmatic, yet
numbing to the actual reality and our awareness of it and what it means for each of us. Both
socialist and capitalist seem equally averse, far different reasons of course, to the question:
who for? What for? As if it were a sin to exist in the turmoil of bodily presence. Questions
of being, of presence, or human rights, or hope. Of who we are both together and alone.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the present global realignment taking place and the
forces both suppressed and unleashed as its result, and after the initial celebration (by the
entrepeneurs, of course, for the "liberation" of the commodity, the extension of the market)
surely one of the effects that has resulted for those that are aware that all ideology, invisible
as it is, always-already exists as a context for the limits of future development, can at least
be a sense or questioning. A re-delfining or our present problemmalic. A freeing of the
question as to what our place is, and who wc are, and are becoming, in the "New" Order?
And it was with a feeling of urgency into the nature of this questioning that I embarked as a
poet and a socialist, into this space to explore if it was possible that our own revolution had
been limited not least on the terms of responding to the enemy in kind; that the thesis of
capitalism and its relation(ship)s and their effects had, in no small way set the terms for our
organising and reorganising of inner space as well as the social space... and that while we
had become the antithesis to all that was (often living out its terrible lacks in our lives, our
poverty) and continue to be in our struggles and by our existence, (our experience and
actions outside the realm of the mainstream, here, in the realm of the excluded), we had
failed to synthesize what was new andhoped for from own position-of-strugglc as it
traveled its long journey from the underground of our absence, in this world of evident
plenty, to the surface... from the depths of our despair in the old order, from our hearts to
our actions and relationships: confronted by the monolithic machine we had sought to
launch our deepest needs at.
And that in the terms of this heroic struggle which is still a necessity, where many
sacrificed much even by survival, by maintaining hope in the darkness of a world cluttered
with objects whose status was obviously more important than our own, there could be no
time or space for a re-appraisal with what was most human and so reclaim in our labour --
the task of de-objectifying the world and each other. An end to this Age of Hate and its
legitimisation of itself as reality and us -- as objects, dead things.
While already here in the West both the Christian cleric and the middle-class liberal have
colonized concepts like love, (both masochistic and romantic "love") and imposed their rule
or law there just like any other territory they hope to exploit and benefit from and then
despite the evidence of their eyes seem happy to co-exist alongside the barbarity their
system imposes and feeds off; it was US who claimed and re-possessed (and who now lay
claim and exereise in our defense) HATE as an energy that could overthrow our
oppression. And with our faces to the wall we did that as working people in the best way
we could. It would seem that in some sense because or our opprcssion and its effects, and
moreso because we had internalised as our language the split between master and slave,
that we never felt that we had a right to the light, the "sweetness and light" that our sweat
had produced for the benefit and privilage of the few. And it was this space, with the
failure of prior defintion, that I hoped to explore and see what of the new could be found
there... seeing that we are still confronted, no matter how fierely we struggle as oppressed
people, by walls that block, both our progress away from scarcity and our journey towards
the realizaton of ourselves as subjects both of change and of the hope it brings. From each
according to their ability to each according to their needs. Our response and our deepest
hope and aspiration submerged beneath their facade of a history uncontrollable and beyond
human agency... their exoneration of violence, of barbarity... our lives...
And while in the struggle that occured in the process, much material was rearranged, at
least in this provisional grasping or the dark, or the issues and the personalities involved,
i.e. the maps and balttleplans of this internalised war, what I really learnt was to understand
that the tools we havc so often used to force change in the unbearable situations we are
faced with are not necessarily our own -- it would seem now that putting it simply -- these
objectified relations, this grim struggle for prolit this dehumanization of men and women,
is really itself a link both in the interpersonal connection as well as in the social and
collective. And confronts us as an impossible impasse, a living terror that behind the walls
of our uneasy co-existence there lies the void, the darkncss, and not our future, the
possibilities of growth, the presence of light and love.
And so we remain trapped in the mirror, imprisoning ourselves in an endless chain of
reflections with no possibility of release. And it is here that our peculiar status as being
both Within and Without, excruciating as it is, is at the same time the point at which we
appear capable and ready to effect change.
So in looking for the echo coming back from the abyss and in tentatively questioning some
of the contradictions involved in desiring to produce a short book or love poetry in an age
whose credentials are more tuned to meaninglessness and murder than to profound
statement, or to despair, or to longing, I saw, how we, who are excluded from both power
and belonging in this social order based on inequality and the legilimisation of this
inequality, with its theory and practice of racism, of hate, could ourselves be an inextricable
layer in the mesh of what is -- how we are and do be both present and absent within the
same moment and that through confronting our own contradictions as both more than and
less than, the human subject, in this impossible era, we could begin to re-define, as
socialists-in-the-process-of-change, the space we are forced to inhabit, the losses we are
forced to suffer and make bearable and the desire for change that is inextricably experienced
and repressed in the same moment...
... making our utterances of love, another dialectic, a knot we begin consciously to push
against, to expand our apparently constricted horizon outwards and to speak and be heard
for who and what we are -- products of our own history, both subjects and objects of
processes thatup to now have confronted us with monolithic arrogance... to speak for who
and what we are becoming... for life, for change, for hope... for the realisation and the
materialisation of democracy...
Until we have realised that despite the silence, as well as the terriblc noise we are drowning
in, despite the Abyss and its presentprecarious impasse, for better or for worse we are the
ones who will change our world from the bottom up, and in this process change ourselves
and each other and that this world waits for our voices, however hesitant they may be, both
individually and collectively, to explore the contours, the limits and the geography of this
process of change which we lay claim to, and which we will own, and which is vital both
for our well-being no less than for our collective survival.
Nothing, in the final anlysis, on the road there, is as simple as it sounds. And everything,
to our hearts and our minds and this struggle of our bodies to be free from the pain of hurt
and exploitation... and despite the noise... everything is "precisely as serious as it sounds."
Missing Parts & Rendezvouses
At the glow if your distant sex
we meet,
eyeball to eyeball like small animals.
i christian you furiously, god-deserted
in this body of muck.
Here, the architecture explodes and
angels fly free.
In this dead space, anaclitic in its orbit,
a church-full of plague
collapses on your head.
Listen to the unthinkable of sight!
My flags are falling into disrepute.
It is hard to win this war endlessly.
i call you lovingly from your sentry post
on the ceiling.
My weapons are unsheathedby the bedroom door.
And the hour hands of my heart
beat each other raw.
In my minute considerations
a door has opened in the machinery
of my insides.
My love, we had already met, one hour previously,
in the glass and grinding of these ghosts
in this station of our orphaning,
your hads nailed to my chest in desolation.
Sweetheart, it is easier
to undress the night of its darkness,
to roll away the waves of our deserted universe,
to uncover the crusts of our boiling rages,
than call, in our suppleness, from
this abandoned birdcage.
But here, in the bellowing of eyes,
like beasts, deserted,
and at the dead end of our mingling,
O you lit half my body parts
with words
sharper than broken mirrors
and the other half, my love,
swam for safety
like spermatoza, towards this
wordless destruction.
My Love, In Commodities
Blinded at the edge of my skin,
timeless in its cruel twisting
and on the bent back
of your strange hill, crossed
with arms folded heartways
in this country of my undoing,
i meet all my sex - (unravelling
my male and its females in
the sphere of their scorching)
in-commodities.
You stare, wooden in my
mirroring,
this body spiriting its muscle
in extractions,
cluttered with absence, these
children, freezing, who
never had a name,
these welts of love!
Then the day comes
and in my halfway house
the sun of your touching dismembers
the walls.
It is so simple in my urging on --
you were like us all:
a father's daughter,
a mother's son,
in this century of evil
and crossing now, like a refugee,
this gulf between bodies,
i am my own prisoner's enemy and
our love is filled with corpses.
Your sun in the staggering darkness
a knife to light the night within.
The Shrapnel of Love in Mothering
At this painful joint
of my coupling
i throw myself away
like birds sparkling into gunshot.
These waves that cover my chest
are going and coming,
tides that tnese
between the muscles of our thighs.
i should have known better --
suffering in skin and shadow
all the figures of my loss,
the last drop of an eyelid
onto a bottomless world.
Here now is a room
exploding in its wombs
all the myths and embrace of mothering,
with a claw that fill to the lips with suffering.
Still, i grab the mintues in fistfuls,
holding you naked in my eyes,
this drunkeness that lasts for ever!
Then, sadly, it is this dead
country called home, again,
we are marched to our suffering
like animals to the slaughter.
You retreat into your frozen interior.
Here is the machinery of progress,
your belly soft with seduction
harder than a mountain to climb.
In this uncoupling of love and
the chromosomes,
where i threw all
my selves
like shrapenel, in this deceit of lovelessness.
In this way i write another defeat
in its bruising, into
the limbs
the lies of democracy!