...DiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiNG!

What I want you to imagine today is an orchestra. An orchestra that doesn't know it's an orchestra. An orchestra of competing sections: brass, woodwind, percussion and strings. Each of these sections thinks the other sections are stupid and doing everything wrong. The brass wonders why the string section isn't blowing into its instruments and the percussion wonders why everyone isn't just hitting their instruments with sticks. The woodwind thinks the brass lacks decorum, a bit 'brassy' if you like, and the brass thinks the woodwind is really 'stuck up'. As far as each section is concerned, it is engaged in a sonic war against the others. Each section attempts to assault the others with waves of sound. The loudest is the victor and each section feels it is always winning because, from where a given section's musicians are sitting, they are the loudest. No one gets discouraged and the war goes on. Kettledrums rumble like tanks. Violin bows are drawn like arrows. Brass blunderbusses blast and clarinets, flutes, oboes and bassoons are raised and fired like guns, rifles, mortars and bazookas.

The conductor is there too of course, on his podium. A stressed out secretary general of sorts, attempting to maintain some kind of order. He waves his baton frantically, favouring one section one moment and another the next. He doesn't really know what's going on. He clumsily turns sheets of notation as he mops his brow. He wishes the whole zero-sum composition would just fucking end.

And the cruel joke is that from a distance all this tumult and enmity harmonises into a single stirring composition, the woodwind soaring over the strings and the percussion and brass propelling things forward. From the seats in the auditorium, the ominous score builds to an unnerving crescendo that explodes and then lulls into the saddest adagio ever heard that then fades before it all happens again but in a different order and with some variations. It's such a tragic twist that those upon the stage are unaware of this and labour in the mistaken belief that they are separate competing entities and not, simply, 'one'. The sections do not know that they are all playing the same music and that the music could be joyful and celebratory instead of frightening and heartbreaking.

But there is one musician who knows the truth. An orchestra member who realises that every orchestra member, no matter what section, is part of an indivisible whole. One guy, sitting all by himself, down the back and to the side a bit. One fella who knows it would be a waste of time to share his wisdom with the others because he'd be laughed out of the concert hall. One member of the orchestra who, quietly and in his own mind, has it completely and utterly right.

He stands there, stoic, poised and mindful. He understands the great cacophony as a symphony and bides his time to prove this to the others. He waits and waits and waits until a great musical swell rises and then crashes. As the crescendo subsides he raises his instrument, holds out his wand and strikes once. Only once and with a perfectly restrained amount of force. The rage from the rest of the instruments dies out and silence rules but for the fading resonance of his modest contribution. The triangle goes ...DiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiNG!

BANAL FROM THIS DISTANCE

The calls to prayer and the omni-drone combine to hum the Anti-Om. The last vibration. The frequency of wrong. The remote sound of death and razed rubble homes. Distant embers. Ribbons rise to oblivion. A dark cloak suffocates unseen desperation. Subdued pops denote the ease of destruction and the absence of any significant resistance. It's the antithesis of coexistence. Evil looks so banal from this distance.

“War vs. Peace” by Joe Frank

To hear more -  Joe Frank's Website.

ON THE M.V. MUNSTER - Dublin to Liverpool (1956)

by Finbarr Shanley

The night is tonight or any other night that the green ship slips her moorings and sadly moves from the river's mouth and heads for the east. Hands dig deeper into pockets and the Custom House clock is seen through the mist of squinted eyes and shoes stamp on hardwood and shoulders are hunched though not from cold.

These are the have-nots and over there on that rising ground the lights of the haves reflect the self-righteousness and the light house lamp now beamed towards the Wicklow shore shines the last goodbye.

NEARLY FRIENDS

by Frank Shanley

He was going out for the night. Out to Dun Laoghaire. The place he thought was strange and far away when he was young. The place where the boats came in. He had lived there for a year and knew it quite well now. He was going to get drunk to bring some excitement to his life. 

It was a dark winter evening. The sharpness of the night and the sense of tension it should have created didn’t make an impact on him. He went down to get the bus, down a dimly lit laneway. The fence on one side and the bushes on the other were more or less ignored. The laneway led onto the road, the road that the bus came down. It came by him just then. He started to run for it, a long run down the road and then around the corner near the church. He caught it up as he was coming near the stop. He got on it with another person. Breathless, he was looking around at the things that really scared him, people. He stared at them a bit. He wasn’t aware why. His mother said it was fear. He believed everything his mother told him. When he got off the bus and changed to another one, he was still feeling deadened. The people on the bus and outside the window meant nothing to him. He was finally in Dun Laoghaire and now he went to the hostel where he lived until recently. 

Cathleen met him at the door. He remembered thinking of her as the Countess Cathleen. She brought him up the stairs and into the kitchen. There were a few people there – friends, nearly friends, anyway. Martin said hello. ‘Martin do you want to go out with me tonight’, he felt like saying but he didn’t have the courage. He waited a while and then started to talk to Martin. A few inappropriate comments and a few weak jokes later, he asked Martin to go out. It was cool Martin said so they went out.

They went first to a shop to buy cider. The two litre bottles, big brown bottles full of intoxicating liquid which tasted like poison, a few years earlier would have been very precious but now they didn’t mean that much. They went down a laneway to drink them. They really didn’t taste like poison. Drinking it wasn’t nice but the talk and repartee were and all he was thinking about was good. He wasn’t drunk but felt invigorated.

 

He and Martin were both schizophrenic. A dirty horrible thing both for the sufferers and non-sufferers. They were both suppressed, depressed, downtrodden human beings. Both in a chain gang of psychiatrists.

MY SCIENCE FICTION STORY

A desert world strewn with petrified corpses. Starry missiles plummet fiercely and fragment what remains of these remains. Limbs detach and leap and twist and land and tumble and settle back down on the perished surface. And this happens again. And again. And again and again. Until the body bits are powder and the powder is dust and the dust is a memory and the memory is forgotten.

Jaded by supremacy but fearing obsolescence, soldiers across a galaxy attend an interplanetary launcher. Nonchalantly loading ammunition. Yawning. Closing a hatch. Pulling a crank. Another projectile soars and, once again, a victory is won for a planet called Ridiculous that floats mad and alone in the absurdest reaches of outer space.

And that is the end of my science fiction story.

AN EXPERT

I've become an expert. When people need an expert they call me and I show up and display my expertise. This usually involves clipboards. I'll show up with a clipboard and look around and make little ticks on a form type of thing that is fastened to the clipboard. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the consultation, I will wear a beekeeper's outfit. If anyone asks why I'm dressed like a beekeeper I tell them to be quiet because I'm trying to concentrate. I might spray a few things with a can of something, like deodorant or something, and then go over the sprayed area with a small brush and then peer at it through binoculars. Then I might hold up a radio that isn't tuned to any channel and is just emitting a static buzz. I'll wander around with the radio, gradually turning the volume up and down. Then, when all that is done, I sit in the centre of a circle of lit candles and animal skulls and, in a low voice, chant the following: 'The Vengabus is coming and everybody's jumping. New York to San Fransisco, an intercity disco'.

After all that is done, I pull off the beekeeper hood and look thoughtful and say that I'll be back in a week. Then I come back in a week and give a powerpoint presentation that contains lots of graphs. I point to the graphs with a pointer, which is useful for pointing, and say things about 'sectors' and 'quarters' and 'synergies' and 'utilisations' and 'deliverables'. Then I pack up my presentation equipment and charge an astronomical fee for my time.

My clients are usually pleased with what I do as the results provided are open to interpretation and can justify whatever the clients need justifying or validate whatever notion they had before I arrived. It is with the help of my expertise that services have been privatised and ghosts exorcised. I have given restaurants certificates of hygiene and recommended that vicinities be doused in phosgene. Or so it seems. I did no such thing but I didn't do otherwise either. I just provided abstract data that can be construed any old way.

Actual experts have objected to my consultative enterprise. They say that one man could not possibly be an expert in all things and that it takes years to become an expert in just one field. However, to allay any worries these expert opinions might cause my clients, I did a study on the opinions of these other experts. This study resulted in a graph that (depending on what you choose to see in it) proved the expert opinions on my expertise to be far from expert. That seemed to do the trick as my clients did not want the actions they took upon my advice to be found dubious. I didn't bother wearing the beekeeper outfit for that one but I do sometimes wear it at home. I find that I am more relaxed with it on. When I remove it I am sometimes gripped by an overwhelming sense of doubt and the unshakeable feeling that the whole world is completely and utterly insane.

The above graph clearly proves something. 

Unless it's upside down, in which case it clearly proves something else.