Art O’Connor is a writer and manager of The Whistleblower. The Ditch and The Whistleblower held an event last Saturday, featuring a Ditch live podcast with photojournalist Eman Mohammed and conversation with author Eoin Higgins.
∴ I am
Marching through Stephen’s Green, rolling a cigarette, buttering an apple, whistling a tune, thinking about life, thinking about death, thinking about the complex inner mobility of longing, thinking about the treacherous dimension of time, thinking about March. Thinking about how beautiful March is, wavering at the threshold between winter and spring, between shit Irish weather and marginally less shit Irish weather.
Thinking about Hart Crane’s poem March – thinking about how it celebrates not the triumphant arrival of spring, but the fragile unravelling of winter. Thinking about how the poem continually violates the grammar of expectation, both in concept and execution – most exquisitely here:
and when the sun taps steeples
their glistenings dwindle
upward …
Thinking about the vertical axis in poetry – that old Romantic ladder leading down to secret knowledge – thinking about how Crane refashions it mid-descent, through an incongruous combination of trochees (“… dwindle / upward. . .”) into something fleet & elusive, evaporating in its own ellipsis. . .
Thinking about how March evaporates in its own ellipsis, thinking about how spring arrives, like love, in whispers, hints, little stirrings well below the threshold of articulation – and how it makes itself felt, at first, in the heart, the place where all the ladders start –
in the mad elastic quobbings of -
in the hithering-and-thithering rivers of -
Thinking that if I hadn’t fallen in love, I’d probably have spent the rest of my life marching towards some distant summit, staring at my right foot / left foot / right foot / left foot / right foot / left foot, thinking: Am I Good? Am I Not Good? Do I Love? Do I Not Love? Is this Real? Is this Not Real?
Thinking and marching.
Thinking how we got married in March.
∴ II am
Marching down Grafton Street, lighting a cigarette, buttering an apple, decomposing with longing for some unattainable love object, thinking about Lego, thinking about Disney, thinking about Lululemon, thinking about consumption, transaction, spectacle, thinking about the dominant urban logic whereby land is treated primarily as a financial asset rather than a social one. Thinking about how independent spaces like The Whistleblower operate as a sort of counter-infrastructure to that logic, principally in virtue of the fact that they are not optimised, that they permit a certain degree of uselessness.
Thinking about how uselessness, properly understood, is the precondition of value.
Thinking about how so many cultural spaces in Dublin right now seem more interested in postponing the foreclosure of intellectual life than in generating anything new and exciting.
Thinking about how Saturday felt new and exciting.
Thinking about making the guestlist with Eoghan in the weeks before the launch, thinking about what he said whenever I asked him, “How do you know that person?”
“Just from different marches over the years.”
∴ III am
Marching down South Anne Street, smoking a cigarette, buttering an apple, whistling a tune, thinking about bookshops, thinking about communities, thinking about bookshop communities not as stable bodies of people but as collective expressions of curiosity.
Thinking about how curiosity is the precondition of knowledge.
Thinking about how I spent the two weeks before the launch, alone in South Anne Street, getting to know the building in its silence and its slumber.
Thinking about how slumber is the precondition of spring.
Thinking about how good it was to see the space move from emptiness to density last Saturday, from potential to actuality, from winter to spring. Thinking: how good was Saturday? Seriously, though? How good was Saturday? Thinking how full the place was. Properly full. Not just with bodies, but with energy – attention, ideas, laughter, chat. Such chat! And Eoin Higgins! And Eman Mohammed! Thinking about how hard it is now to shake the breathless and intrepid feeling that we’re all marching together towards some new and invaluable interstice – some beautiful space of indeterminacy, like the month of March itself – and thinking that what occurs there, in the gaps and fissures and contradictions that compose the space, will be something far more valuable than mere usefulness:
thinking –
