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Musings II

Musings I Archive

When we began our work editing texts for Ardrigh Books over two years ago we had hoped to have been trading by now. However, the financial Tsunami that has been building up worldwide over the past thirty years, finally hit Ireland just as we started this project. It has created treacherous waters for any individual attempting to build an honest small local business based upon a real economy of scale. We have, so far, managed to stay afloat, but our publication dates have been severely pushed back as we have had to negotiate the financial tides.

This international revolution of short term profiteering has encouraged the demolition of beautiful vernacular architecture and a wanton destruction of our natural landscape. Driven by progressive ideologies and casino banking its guiding principles are change for change’s sake and minimal speedy input for maximum return. This has led everywhere to a political despotism over local culture informed by hackneyed design. The soulless result is to be experienced in the dominating no man’s land of the shopping mall, green field terminal crop housing estates or the cathedrals to Mammon where we are all now forced to buy life’s necessities.

A unique web of memories is built up by the generations as they live in a particular place. Walking familiar routes of the heart. When much loved local architecture is torn down to make way for Progress the historical foundations necessary for an ongoing sense of shared space are ripped to pieces. The resulting grief at its loss eats away at the moral fibre of the community, quickly resulting in social fragmentation. Recently, a friend of ours found himself cast adrift in an alien landscape, an exile in his own home.  He had lost his way after going out to pick up a newspaper, the maze of identikit redevelopment having made him a stranger in his native town. New build estates are a source of quick profit and encourage a culture of perpetual economic mobility. These motives are built into their layout encouraging crime and alienation. Once peaceful it is now a violent place marred by terror.

Some days it seems hardly worth waking up as the reactive madness of those inspired by greed and led by ignorant fanaticism unfolds. Those who have taken charge worldwide proffer ever more bizarre final solutions to the crises they have created. Shooting the moon in order to find water supplies to permit its human colonisation, bombing the earth with chemicals in order to control the weather and spending billions on a Big Bang in a Basement in order to create the ultimate renewable energy source. A One World Bank.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this. The seeming permanence of this brutalising modernity is illusory. Everything that we build begins as our idea. It was all of it once some individual’s Grand Design and is merely manmade. Action is directed by the imagination, it is the portal to the divine spirit that breathes life into our material world.
Dream it different.

 

In that dim twilight region, where day meets night, the intellect of man, tired by the vulgarity of actual things, goes back for rest and recuperation, and there sleeping, projects its dreams against the waning night and before the rising of the sun.
Standish James O’Grady (1918)  ‘Selected Essays and Passages’ p.27

 

images

Looking South from the Queen’s Seat, Knockdhu

 

View of Slemish from the Queen’s Seat, Knockdhu

 

‘The road not taken’ Into the twilight above Carnlough Bay