Famine: An Artwork

With God, the dirty ould bodach, running around in ditches spying on us, my childhood was a very watched event. The concept of privacy didn’t hit me (and it was a good schkelp across the face) until much later, and when it did hit (in my early adulthood) I was able to identify those scratchy doubts I’d had as a kid as privacy’s absence. A bodach in every step, God was one helluvanopponent.  He was the demon that I battled right from the beginning, right from when I was able to form a memorable thought. Think Jam. Lovely. Suffer. The basics.

Food.

Thwart.

The first mouthful of grass is the most difficult to get down. Chewing the green is easy, almost enjoyable; the surface of this particular grass has a kind of a sandpapery finish, a rough embrace on the tongue, but the swallowing, the real reality of that lump of khaki mulch slipping down my throat like a ball of eviscerated oysters, almost alive, ess-ing in a wave towards my stomach, is almost too much to bear. It does take my mind off the hunger though, and I’ll give myself this, I have a mind for method. It took clear thinking  and a whole lot of patience to figure it out, but for freshly cut grass the best-by date is five days after picking; there are three days before it begins to rot and become more difficult to eat. (Because of the dryness or the sliminess.) It is of utmost importance to take into account the dreary humidity and tiresome temperatures on this sodden island in order to avoid a rotten, dead, plant smell and the frightful texture of salinated slugs. I had an enthusiastic supply of Ziploc experimental bags, and then filling no more than two mouthfuls at a time, I rotated them in and out of the fridge. Testing. Tasting. Engagement requires research, research, research. I knew that I didn’t want hay, wasn’t going to experiment with it. Hay implies time. There is no immediacy with hay, no want. I simply needed to perfect the timing of grass’s best-by and use-by dates.

There was an itch, an unsettling rawness on the inside of me that I couldn’t reach.

My relationship with decomposition and survival was, as a matter of fact, becoming more visible. Both on me and in the house, a regular, weird taxonomy of grass. Boxes and bags and bottles and tubs of grass in carefully labelled piles on most of the kitchen surfaces. Alongside all this, I was losing weight and my flatmate, Angela, who in my mind was a plain sort of woman, complained about the stink. The look on her moon-face was kind of haunted and haughty at the same time. I wanted to nuzzle into her neck.

—The kitchen smells like famine, she said.

—Does it? I said.

That was that.

It didn’t occur to me ‘til later to ask her how she knew. What famine smelled like.

I knew the smell of famine because my ancestors described for me the odour: it is in the cells of my body. I was their flesh. We, me and my family, are a list of relatives who survived the famine, the Gorta Mór, and all the mini famines, catastrophic population decline, floods and hunger after; people who had lived in areas of Mayo that were decimated, where the smell of rotting potatoes was the only perfume. And unburied flesh. Now I don’t need to close my eyes to be there.

At the outset of this project I left a potato to rot in a small cardboard box underneath the sink. The decayed tuber had an extremely violent breath. I recognised it - foul cabbage, farts, vomit. The decomposing potato has it all; but it takes a couple of months for a potato to get to that offensive level of liquid putrefaction. I haven’t worked with a blighted potato yet. I think I’m terrified of it, the mould, the disease of it. I think it would awaken something I don’t want to see. Yet, at least.

Really, the desperate patterns of hunger are right there like a song  in my cells, in all the invisible chambers, in my  heart, in my cochlea, in my nasal hair; imprinted through blood from the near-death of a food-crazed ancestor, some lad off out with his spear, trying to land shots into random deer, or rabbits, or frogs, or whatever it was my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather must have hunted.

I knew the smell of famine.

I knew it because of those ancient memories.

As ancient inside me as prayer.

Later, Angela asked me to leave, to leave the flat, said I couldn’t live there anymore. I wanted to suggest that she could do the going but  I saw a defiance in her.

Later still, she began to pack my things. I don’t think she saw the irony.

—Are you evicting me? I asked her.

She looked at me with those wide cow eyes.

—What? Evict? That’s a stupid thing to say.

Her defensiveness was a little funny really. I didn’t like the smell either, but I understood it.

            Her mooniness.

            —We…I…I can’t live like this. You need…

I turned out of the kitchen, leaving her, and her worry for us both, floating in a halo of  futile light from the morning sun, the coffee pot just audible behind my singing.

I don’t know if she was going to say help, food or love.

Singing. Me.

The only successful thing about my life is the soundtrack.

My Dad was a hunter, which was unusual among the parents of the kids I went to school with (the ragged and lame, the reapers and sowers, the bargain hunters). He was the one who’d arrive at the school in those vibrantly dark autumn mornings with floppy necked pheasants, hares, rabbits, partridges, all neatly foot-bound, his short haired German pointer wagging at his ankles. He’d hand the dead out with his left hand, to anyone who expressed an interest, the hessian bag  nonchalant  in his right. People liked to say that they had fresh game at the dinner table but I reckon a lot of these dead creatures ended up in a black bin bag or the septic tank.

Yeah. My Dad was a hunter.  He had a brother who disappeared when he was thirteen or so and it was assumed (in the way rumour and conjecture and listening to omen from the ditches becomes assumption) that he was dead and buried in a bog, and it was eventually, sneakily believed, over many years and reinterpretations of grief,  that it was Dad, the older brother, who did it. So that’s the story: my Dad killed his brother and left him in the bog. A piece of unreliable past like that goes to the heart of a family and spins its magical story across time and love, and no amount of a God lurking in the ditches, hissing his arcane truths could change what (may have) happened, or the need for someone other than God to be blamed.

The idea of the past is that it is peopled with dead people. But that’s not true. It is peopled with the living, with those who stayed alive.

My Dad, the murder merchant. The churlish lout.  As if to make herself the equal of the man she married and his legendary skill with death, my mother made herself a hobby of dissecting mice she caught in traps; removing, then drying out, their little hearts, collecting the impossibly tiny things in a scalloped  velvet pouch, a fistful of raisins which she tied with the thinnest gold chain I have ever seen. She must have learned how to dissect the mice under proper tutelage, because later, when I saw images of dissections on documentaries or whatever, I found a new respect for my mother’s skill. She was watching her husband all the time for signs that he would leave her. She also watched zombie movies, and practised a yoga sequence, over and over. One. The sun salute.

Wishful thinking.

Everything is strangely clear. I spend my days thinking. Preparing grass food. Being hungry. The pain is tolerable now, a quiet kind of ache. And I spend the time in between these things becoming sure that I am beginning to understand.

I know that if I can name things, I can know God. It was Elias Canetti said it. He did. If we know things by their proper names, they’ll lose their magic, not just their magic, their dangerous magic. God is in everything. But tell me, tell me, is this understanding?

God is in everything.

God is in everything.

Repetition is the trick of childhood.

But tell me, tell me, is this understanding?

I name everything to get rid of the danger. Unfortunately I didn’t know this in theory as a child but I definitely knew it in practice. I had this feeling (all the time) that if I knew the real, given, name of all there was in the ditches and the fields: the various tricky green leaves; the sudden flowers; the discarded household rubbish; the stones that were like punctuation all over the place...then God would possibly come uneasy out, timid and weak, because all the spell of his knowing would have been revealed.

The diabolical ould bodach.

I thought I could see him, in tatters, ribs showing, but until I could name him along with the daisies, the gallfheabhrán, the fist-crushed smithwick cans, the nettles, the fritillaries, he was unavailable; there he was, prancing about, just out of sight, out of reach, invading everything with his furtive benevolence.

Grasses that I pick: Meadow Fescue, Feisciú móinéir,  Festuca pratensis;  Italian Rye-grass, Seagalach lodálach, Lolium multiflorum; Perennial Rye-grass, Lolium perenne, Seagalach buan; Common Bent, Agrostis capillaris, Feorainn mhín; White Clover; Seamair bhán, Trifolium repens. This one I like. Seamair bhán, coming from the old Irish, to sow seeds. Is it the white thing which sows seeds? The White Seed Sower? Long-stalked white flowers, can be pinkish, ever so slightly scented. It droops when it’s time to die. Toothed leaflets, oval-heart shaped, often V-shaped marking. Prostrate stems rooting at nodes. Common on grassland, waste ground, roadsides, except on very acidic soil. The prostrate stuff reminds me of praying and priests. Hearts, teeth, leaves and an ability to survive in the most inhospitable of places.

I like White Clover. Shamrock.

One, two, three.

The awful simplicity.

So I go around collecting all these things I might need: sounds, facts, grasses, gossip, words, little keepsakes, not knowing how they fit together but having a vague sense of their necessity. Although I assume that things could go one way or the other, I suppose it was no accident that (like my Dad; it’s a family thing) I ended up to my oxters in dead stuff as well. And watching from without and within all this dead grass was Lord Bodach himself; insinuating dis-ease into my dreams.

I think that I remember my father and my grandfather spraying potatoes. In me the facts of this are a requirement and a unity. That the spraying of the crop was right and essential for my family I knew. It made us part of the past: to all you undead ancestors, we acknowledge your potato failed, we won’t let it happen again. I see them (Dad/Granddad), white plastic containers strapped to their backs with what look, to me,  like braces. They wear handkerchief masks and there’s a pump of some sort, but I cannot see how it works. The whole endeavour has a whiff of the ceremonial, the ritual about it. They do it silently. The only sound is from Summer and from the hissy wheeze of the pump. It feels like they were doing an important job.

And if I didn’t know better I’d think that nasty old God was somehow involved.

Bluestone, washing soda, water. These are words that rise off my tongue and assemble in the smooth edges of my brain. Bluestone. Washing soda crystals.

Crystal. Stone. Blue. (Can you see Mary, the mother of God, the beads? Can you see it all appear?)

And the ratio of pints and ounces. They worked their alchemical magic, my dad and granddad.

I need to sleep.

No matter how long I sleep, I want to have more. This is no ordinary tiredness.

But before I sleep, I find out what the Smith Period is.

Back when they needed to, they didn’t know about it like this, when they were forced to buy Indian meal.

Two days, two continuous days,  is the length, in time, of the Smith Period. The sun measures it. In these consecutive days, the air minimum is at least 10oC (cold I think), and the relative humidity is 90%, or above, for at least 11 hours. These two days can predict a blight. This sodden island is more than perfect for infection to begin. Conditions provide the conditions for the destructive ruin of the blight. And voilá.

How do you respond, though.

Go out. Dip your cup into a field, a puddle, or simply hold it under a downpour.

Half the world can’t find a clean cup of water. And we can’t drink the stuff that’s scooped up into the pipes in most parts of this country; those old trihelomethanes, that slippery shit. But from the clouds, surely directly from the clouds?

I collect rain water.

I drink nettle tea that echoes distraught fish.

The hoariness of the dregs, the taste of old homes. The thrill of dangerous food.

Seaweed? Feamainn. Periwinkles? Faochan. I don’t live by the sea, and it’s too fa away for me tor to walk to it. But then again, I like the idea of pilgrimage. And I like how the naming of things, those nouns with their promise of revelation, takes me closer to the past.

How could you meet and truly embrace doubt without ever having dallied with the idea of God, or chased him through an unforgiving ditch, or opened your eyes when masturbating to see him staring at you? How?

My hands are blistered, cut and itchy from the grasses; from the hairy, the spiked, the hairy-toothed, the toothed, unbranched, unstalked, and whatever else.

Today I recorded an ancient breeze wheezing under a gate.

Dad’s brother’s name was Paddy. Such a common name.  As if by naming him this after he had been Little Patrick on account of Granddad, they could hide him; but there was no hiding him. I was familiar with the absent fact of him all my life.

I am going to make a dinner party (with background music).

I think that hunger makes truth.

So, what…what if I ask them, the guests, to fast; fast for a couple of days, three if you can, and then come and eat with me. Don’t worry if your hunger isn’t as real as mine, I’ll tell them. Just come to dinner and we’ll eat. I’ll have all the food prepared.

And we’ll eat. And listen.

(Experience the catastrophe of history.) I can show you how.

And we’ll talk, and I know that truth will come out.

Because.

What were the conversations about when the last ridge of spuds was being dug?

You know, I am making a soundtrack that will show you all. You’ll be able to feel the ancestors in you too. The soundtrack.

It’s often the case that I’m not sure what the work means until it’s finished. Performed. Seen.  You know. Hung. Starved. Whatever. Look it up.  Other artists say this too. I don’t know what it means until it’s over.

I make  little invitation cards. I was always good at delicate drawing. A subtle Seagalach Buan is what I chose for the image; a durable rye-grass. Seagalach Buan. Reliable. Perennial. Roadside.

I picked this one on the 16th of August, on waste-ground beside a closed-up building in town. It was on one of those afternoons that reminded me of school holidays years ago; dry, warm, bees. The idea of picking blackberries not far away. I used to like fences, being beside them, feeling the heat on my neck, wondering about inside and out.  A childhood searching for God and love was a kind place really, wasn’t it?

I grew up in that drumlin-humped landscape wanting to do something symbolic (like my Dad), (whether he did it, or did not do it). The idea that grew up in my day-dreams was to have a street or a park named after me, rather than having, say, a bench in a park, or a pew in a church in my memory. Think Fidelma Street or For Beloved Patrick. I know which has the sound of something exciting behind it.

I know where the story lies.

The symbolic was a vague idea before it became vital.

The symbolic. An implicit part of the future.

The symbolic was embedded in there and when I caught up with it, I knew its inevitability.

Dinner.

I’m not mad. I’m not crazy.

They’ll say all that sort of thing. It wasn’t, and isn’t, true. I know this. I do.

Language is symbolic.

Words are symbols.

State the obvious.

I like the history of grass.

Feisciú Móinéar. Fescue. Meadow Fescue. Turf. Grass. Festuca  pratensis.

The solemnity of it all. The ritual.

These words are a way to craft me. Phytophthora infestans. The uncraftable.

Trying to put all grass’s little foibles into the words. How do you get the spikelets, the one-sided flowers, the two-face ones, panicles, the bruised colour, the roughness, its ability to hybridise, its ease of picking, its awful edibility, the love of wetness; how do you get all of that safely into its name? Fescue. And that’s not even the half of it.

Consider the festuca, the ceremonial rod used to touch the Roman slaves when freeing them. The guy in his purple toga, the lad doing the freeing, laid the rod on the head of the confused slave.

Grass is my festuca. 

I might weave a garland for myself.

The invitation is quite beautiful.

Before she threw me out, Angela introduced me to a sound engineer who spent hours researching, recording, listening and explaining. To make a soundtrack for the space. This was in the early days of hunger.

A soundtrack for impending starvation is a tricky ask.  You’d think that it would be one long tone, a mournful deep thing, the sort of moan you could imagine an old tired God making, a jaded rumble; but no, the longer I spent with Coco (the sound engineer), the more I began to see that starvation, it’s a panic noise.

He taught me theory of collecting sound.

Coco layered the rustle of the grass with the sound of bodies falling, and the sound of a cry, and the sound of digging, and the sound of picking grass, and when you go deep down into the intricacies of these sounds, the result is really frightening. Confusion. As if all the colours in the world were forming together in a cloud;  horror and dread percolating at its core.

—You know Coco, I said, it’s true what Parnell said.

—You’ve lost me, he said, who’s Parnell? He held my eyes for an uncomfortable amount of time, the famine sound like a great snake becoming alive in the background.

—Parnell, I said, was Parnell. His passions killed him. He said that Irish famines are caused by man, not by God.  

—You’ve lost me, he said again.

The trees outside are aching in an autumn breeze.

Did you know, too, that most people who died, or left in the famine, were native speakers. The country really and truly lost her voice. That is sad. It hurts me too much to think about it.

If I can name the place, if I can see God, I’ll give the ditches back their singing.

I want to feel history in me.

I need a place to fill with the knowledge of impending death, and the reality of starvation and hunger, and the land eating people, and people eating the land. We know about their deaths, but their lives… I want my dead ancestors to live in me. I am an artist. I am an agitator. I can do this.

So I need to ask the city for a space to have the starvation dinner in. I have to go to a gallery, to City Hall, the relevant offices, another  gallery, to meet the power, to see the people with the keys. To explain to them that I know not everyone died of hunger, or ate grass; but the ancestors, the ones that didn’t get on a boat, or perish, and who weren’t rich; those ones, my real ancestors, the poor who survived, well, they’re us, aren’t they? Aren’t they?

And they saw the death.

And the leavings.

And maybe they even ate grass to stave off the hunger, or when the Indian meal ran out, or when their homes were locked against them.

So a quick look in the mirror to remind me of myself, and glimpse me haunting myself, and the clumps of hair in the brush, and the fetid-fetid underneath the toothpaste, and the red toothbrush, and the green-stained tongue and lips, and the loose bra, and the stare, and the old brown dress, and the thumbrest of my hipbone.

Green is such a browny colour.

I long to touch, to grieve with history.

The guest list is short. I was unable to source a table that would seat more than twelve, but that was plenty in the end. Even at twelve, this table will be uncomfortable, and that is the point really. It is the table itself that matters. It has to have an urgency in it; it has to hold all the dinners that were ever eaten, and all the hungers that were unfed, at it.

Not all tables do this.

I found the right table, with all its piny gnarliness, through an antique-dealer my father put me in contact with, a long string of a man with an irritating habit of rubbing his nose.

1852, the dealer said. I don’t know whether I believed him or not, but he wanted to get rid of the table. Whatever about its age, the solid planks had held onto all their stories; the dryness of the wood, the stains, the knots, and that one deep crack. They all spoke to me and I knew that this table would listen, and that it would feed and hear the soundtrack, and absorb it into itself as surely as it had absorbed hunger and post hunger and guilt.

The guest list:

Dad.

An empty chair for Uncle Patrick.

Angela (although I don’t think she’ll come).

Granny.

Me (at the head of the table).

Another empty chair for my mother. I don’t think she’ll leave her sun salutes to come to a dinner where she might have to talk about her little bag of hearts. I wish she would though, I think the party needs a woman who has mis-learned how to live.

A local politician and their husband or wife. (I haven’t decided who yet. I need to do some more research).

A priest.

I thought about asking Granddad but I don’t think he’d manage to fast.

The director of the gallery.

An art college student.

A farmer.

Don’t quite know what day today is. I walk. The gallery didn’t want to see my proposal. There’s an awkward light, and suddenly, how unfriendly the houses along this stretch of road are. Colours, not-quite-greys, not-quite-blues, not-quites. The Not-Quite street, full of the Not-Quite people. There are locked gates and lots of wintry lightlessness and then I go to my body. Feel how my toes are sure in my socks, in my shoes. Comfortable. The gallery didn’t understand. There is a slight ache at the bottom of my left foot and I know that this is from walking for silly distances across fields and boggy ground, with dead Uncle Patrick underneath somewhere, and me hauling heavy bags of grass, and from stretching over low stone walls, too. My calves itch as a result of these trials, and I scratch myself with my nails but my nails are too short to be satisfactorily vicious. The city needs art. And history.

Gone from the mooring of my body.

—How did he die? I asked.

—Who? my Dad said.

—Uncle Patrick, I said.

Dad turned to look at me. I felt him turn his head. We were driving towards the middle of the county and I was admiring all the purples and browns and greens.

—You’d be better off looking after yourself than asking about my dead brother.

—What does that mean? I asked.

—Look at you, he said, you haven’t got a pick on you. Are you eating at all?

—Work, I said, too many late nights. Do you ever wonder about him?

—Patrick? he said.

And I was expecting him to say no, but he said yes.

—Yes, I do. He was too young to die.

—We all are, I said.

And then we were quiet for miles and miles, and the county passed by outside with all the fertile fields and patterns of crows and the neat lines of the hedges, until eventually Dad said.

—They never found his body.

It was my turn to look at him. That was the most I had ever heard him say about Patrick, and the hunger in me was audible, and I thought Dad could hear my heart.

—They never found it.  And I…I always thought that maybe he’d just come walking up the road. But no. He’s down there. Preserved like butter. God only knows, God…

In all my earthly memory, I never saw my Dad cry. But a little wetness on his cheek dropped onto the shoulder of his red jumper. I wanted to record the falling tear. It occurred to me that the sound and feel of sadness was not dissimilar to the sound of devastating hunger.

-You need to look after yourself, he said.

-Do you love me, I said, under my breath.

***

Yes.

A frazzlement.

I could see myself, from the clean distance of myself, doing it all. And this morning, I rolled out of bed and, ohhh, the unkind air as the duvet fell away. Yes. The day licking my skin. I rustled into the silence. And socks.

Cry. Hold the mic. Silently cry. Listen.

Clothes.

Knickers.

No bra.

Dirty t-shirt.

Those trousers.

Converses.

Just dressed. And that worn-out smile. I am aware of the way my eyes are wrinkled. I feel the droopy skin. The bottomless  yawn that continually claws its way from my sprung lungs to my deprived throat. The neediness of this yawn. Its insistence. The muffled universe in my ears. I cannot open my eyes yet.

But then.

Dressed and out.

MP3 player. Headphones.

I go.

Imagining the details of the way because the world is so far gone.

Soundtrack in my ears. Ha! It is the voice of God.

To agitate the local politician in his clinic about finding a place to have the starvation dinner party in.

An empty house, because the council has loads of them while they put the homeless in queues; or one of the gallery spaces they could influence; or an abandoned shop that needed just this sort of rejuvenation.

As if you could explain how starvation, and God, and art, work, by sitting in a thread-worn chair, in a room that needed a lick of paint, in front of a guy whose mind was on the dinner he ate last night. But what the hell.

I was thinking that I deserved to be loved for all sorts of things I hadn’t done yet; for the person and the artist I was going to become, not for the girl I was here in this present.

I mean, don’t all these people realise that I will be there in the future with them too, but that it won’t necessarily be like this. 

There was a quality of hate in the sunlight and I could hear the little waves lick the boats sitting in the water underneath his office window.  Yes. Outside, water turning over in the sun, and the dock, deep as a mirror that shows you where you will be in a few years, when you get over these little doubts that are holding you back.

I really wanted to do that. Get over the doubts.

Instead, I was sitting in this constituency office, in front of a man who didn’t want to be there either.

It was ridiculous.

—What can I do for you? he asks, and a seriously artless laugh explodes from me. This is absurd. The absurdity of my life doesn’t exactly creep up on me in those moments - it hits me full in my very empty gut, right there in that office, where the astonished man is unable to meet me in the eye, because he anxiously searches for someone else who seems to be back over my shoulder. Absurd. Clearly.

I laugh, and the poor man fiddles with a pencil and, of course, as soon as the idea of fiddle is in my thinking, that’s it.

Nothing intelligible, or logical is going to emerge.

—How does it work? I say, through an unmanageable smile, the only facial movement I could make that is capable of denying a rude, unruly second laugh. Fear, or interest, or embarrassment would have been more appropriate than pleasure or contentment. But that’s not how this was playing out.

—How does what work? Are you ok? he says, rather than asks.

—Yes. I just want to know how it works. Like...how? You know. I’m alive over in this corner of the country, and it’s awful, I can’t do anything I want. Everything costs. I’m afraid. And I don’t know what to do? I think if I know how it works, how change happens that maybe….

—Are you doing a project,  he says in a confused sort of way.

—Yes, I say, the starvation project, that’s it, I just want to know how it works. Like, how do we get it to become fair.

—What? What’s not fair?

—Everything. Housing. Water. Hunger. Why can’t I have a space to starve in, to feed the starving in? I’m almost homeless. Angel threw me out.

And I know I said ‘Angel’, not ‘Angela’. The poor man. I smile. He tries to talk.

—Listen. I don’t think this is the…

At this point I wish I hadn’t put on mascara as I can feel my eyes begin to itch and water, and I know that this daft twit is thinking that I am going to cry, and then I think that maybe that isn’t a bad idea.

The sun flirts with the blue sky outside and flashes between clouds, so every couple of seconds the room is filled with luminous angels. It makes the dirt on the walls more visible. Seagulls manoeuvre past the sparkling glass.

—Are you married? I ask him. It seems to be the right question to ask, and who am I to question the question. He’d need a partner at dinner.

He says nothing.

—I’m not, I say to his open mouth. And as I say it, I have a tiny inkling that this may be weird. Don’t I? But I don’t think that I care.

—It’s the hunger, I say, this is my Smith Period.

I don’t think he is on my wavelength.

I start to hum the soundtrack, begin the drone deep down in my stomach.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

The seagulls outside.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I can hear the past.

The seagulls.

Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I tell him I hear God’s hunger. Show him the headphones.

The lonely politician gets out of the chair and kind of stumbles over to the door, and I’m not at all sure that he understands the boundaries between participating in the play we’re in, and being a performer. I hear him calling for a doctor. I hear the clear panic in his voice, and I want to tell him that he would be good on my soundtrack.

Famine: An Artwork was first published in The Stinging Fly, Winter 2017-18.