Frank Corcoran

irish composer

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JULY HOT COLD . DO NOT VOMIT ME OUT

WHO WILL RESIN THE SPANISH BOW ?

Watch the musical chips flying. I hone, I plane, drill, tap and tape together end-music, bring in that small middle bit, an opening idea to trigger the whole miraculous Octet off , my Swiss Octet, e-etched ” QUASI UNA SARABANDE ” , heading for its 2008 premiere.

A string-quintet was always hard enough to handle at the best of times ( – It dare NEVER get too heavy ) . Add your horn, often heavy enough bassoon and clarinet till the eight instruments I am composing add up. To eleven minutes of This Frank Enfolding Escorial Story, the sarabande´s ” Tap ,Tip / Ta / – ap, AND / ” , shaped and slapped on my potter-composer´s wheel .Yes, it´s musical narrative; so this comes before that, then just before the other imperial limp of King Philip II in the music.
” Quasi Una Sarabande” must not flog a kingly rhythm to death; it should not depart so far and so cleverly that its thread is lost on and for the C.I.A. My parameters are including – of course – instrumental colour : that bassoon is at the bottom, yes: it does sing its high, nasal top, yes, and so these are glowing hues of horn and clarinet plus/ minus the five strings I did insist on . The rhythmic muster is neither parody nor pose, but rather a kind of grid through which form is flowing. Melodic wisps are cut by the etched lines for two violins or a string-quartet or by all five strings´ stroke-hammer-plink-pluck-plunk . Take that queenly enough viola; you do hear how the music thickens and thins as it sings the Escoriality of things.
The original sarabande of Spanish music was faster than what we have since Bach . “Quasi ” defends me and the eight musicians. of this midget-orchestra of colours and mixtures , bringing the breaking-news, tones, of course , defining content and its contented form.

No cheating here with placards to announce what´s blowing in next. Not a castagnette in sight suggesting ” Death In The Afternoon Foretold ” ; not a trumpet to ease the Octet´s gear-changes with any: ” Fools ! He died for you ! And you ! “.
I only have the eight voices, quasi un chamber-choir ; five strings-plus-three wind. South of Spain bull-shit and -entrails are out .
The little chapters of my Octet group, re-group, start, false start, drill their octatonic stunts for cunning rhythmic cunts with their ” Tap, Tip / Ta- / -ap, AND / ” . Surely, that grid could Guantanamize us rightly . Use care. ) Whistle while I join up fine lines that chortle, chant, dance, honk, slither and slide, ” Quasi” being the pump for all the fluid bits . Any eejit could solder a sarabande, eight bars. Mine, however, writhes.
How to introduce little drops of suffering with the final violin solo ? – A dialogue between the clarinet and cello ; all parts relate to each other and to the whole work, that is what the band is singing. Three cheers for goal-directed song; it goes like this: ” Forget the sarabande. Forget your QUASI coyness” . This emerging Octet I´m chipping , this sculpted musical form is a clenched fist against any disappearing tricks. It´s my small shout in the dark, the horn´s roar against time up. If the nature of being is time, bring on the Sara-bande.

JULY HOT COMFORT COLD

JULY HOT SERMON – HOT, COOL STUFF

You do not know whence or whither? Nor I. Nor why.

We have still got, if limited, time to: ” Live, love, / Tell the bastards they´re wrong ! / And the best time is to tell them / When you´re young ! ” Sob not my song, Hiawatha; sigh, yes, sigh for a slight hope of a sliver of light behind the sea´s glass silvering , our ear-hairlets all agog, straining for any good news in the Sea-Snakes´ Hole . Just a sliver. Ask not more.
Play or doubt or sift through various objective correlatives. I seem to come back again to ” I ” and to its lissom inverted commas, a bit like cuddle sea-snakelets …. You are what you doubt, the say, all willed fantasies, all your self-censored intimations of a kind of immortality; ” I ” brings in the subject / object divide, a walled-in ” Its Me!” ” I exist because you are thinking of me.” Think or be thought of, that it, fish eats fish ? Some drizzly wet day I will not be. Of a dry night you will begin not ever to exist again, even if glass silvers over; light the sliver, a photon at a time .
Light is the burden of nothing. Light lightens everything. Who´s paying the ocean´s light bill and whence swims courage, dignity , hypothemotic longings and oceanic questions why we be ? Then, whither floats our exuded cloud of self-manufacturing, of meaning, of values secreted from submarine us in the deep reef below ? What could become a good surrender , a recommendable swoon ? swoon towards which cosmic swindle or what particular gnarl of sea-serpents ? Steady ! Every twenty minutes, up we go for air, then go below again .
Happy a non-reflecting sea-snake´s partner, the contented pair gnarled in their sea-swoon , let off the hook, – no I-and-Me-and-You distinction; quick now, we have but a sea-spray second, a quick wash afterwards.
Play you may, but sift through our wet objective correlatives below reef and lissom inverted commas mere, sea-wisps above rock-holes, no fishy ear-hairlets agog , no sea-reptilian sensuous glide or slide or chase this sliver of light now or fishy shadows or the deep sea-storm yelling below at full fathoms five. Yet do I fancy some hesitancy under that shadow ? No sea-snake Davy Jones, he solved nothing, died hard, seems to I – sorry, me, don´t you think ? He, did not have to know whence or whither his five fathoms.
Sea-snakes would never in their ultramarine-translucent sea-poison dream up the following watery codology, writ below .
” She did NOT die in coitus ! ! ! She had told you THAT? Post mortem is post coitum ? Much did she unravel before her electrolytic end. Yes, well, much better than death by water, anyway ! And her human intercourse grew less, making her grey matter like blood-flecked gruel, very like buttermilk and urine.”
“How did she, now for a slightly different parenthesis, spin her own linen-shroud? Well may the living mock the Slieve Blooms as the eternal hills shriek defiantly : ” She did NOT die in coitus!” ”
“The dead will keep going on. Thus did she demean our demesne´s mausoleum? She burned her coal without heating herself or the poor children . And was it then, we make out, that she began to approximate to a human scream? ( – A comely bride is easily dressed. ) ”
” Herself and the father , did they make any scuffling noises perhaps ? A musical noise , perhaps ? or was it more like butter, like urine , like buttermilk being strained through the scrim of a mouseskin shroud . Of course memory morphs, as if ” bog-cotton buttercups” might be transformed into upper-case ” Bog of Allen Blossom” ; electrolytically considerde, ” Búireamh suite fíor ina féachaint ” is the same as ” Her eyes were filmed over. Yoiks ! Sea-snakes ! From dusk to dust, to her dust, to her dirt, what was she in her end electrolytically thinking ? ”
Now You ask Me : what sea-reptile would, down in the deepest Sea-Snakes´ Reef want to imagine such A God´s Wallop as my above loopy text , looped between two snaky inverted commas ? Whose poison ? It doesn´t make sense .

PROGRAMME _ NOTES for ” Quasi Una Fuga ”

QUASI UNA FUGA Frank Corcoran

” Quasi Una Fuga” is in no way neo-baroque ( – this I consider to be a pretty unfortunate stylistic aberration of certain 20 th. c. composers ; eg. Stravinsky´s back-to-Bach works are not his best. Bach did it better…. ) . Yet it does have something, in fact everything, to do with counterpoint; my 18 strings play only lines throughout.
Yes, there is a theme, a counter-theme. In my ” Quasi – Exposition” you hear rising entries , from low cello and bass to high violins, then descending entries ( my melodic shape has become its own inversion! ) This protean, easily recognizable theme comes in every conceivable shape through the ebb and flow of my one movement-work, consisting entirely of bits and fragments and smithereens of the “fugal” theme ; it is mutating and morphing all the time until it has become at last the ( five-tone ) Early Medieval Celtic chant, ” Ibunt Sancti”, one of St. Brendan The Navigator´s favourite melodies. Was this the hymn his twelve monks sang , preparing their dinner on the back of a N. Atlantic whale near Greenland …. ? ) .
This is the final composition in my ” Quasi” series of these last years ; from ” Quasi Un Canto ” for Large Orchestra ( Zagreb 2004 ) to ” Quasi Un Pizzicato” for Singer, Speaker and Ensemble ( Hamburg 2005 ) , these works reflect the fact that no composer living today is musically innocent. I know too much music of the past, too much world-music. Of course ” Quasi Una Fuga” feels the shadow of giant-composers from my recent past. Without being beholden to any man, I must know what great music for string-orchestra was written by eg. Bartók, Ligeti and Lutoslawski. My composition is only ” quasi” a fugue, while being entirely fugal.

FEBRUARY SLUG _ THE STORY SO FAR

The seed twitches. It has to. Sixty years on in the script, that particular plot thickened into my spaceship´s curdled Bortsch soup while our captain and lovely she sang their myxolydian,” high – art – how -are -you?”
Shy, still dreadfully young, of course, theologian Johannes Kepler had arrived in ” My Mamma´s-A- Witch” interspace dog-cart at my intragalctic sluice ( Heaven´s planetary leps still far ahead in this canophile´s future )
; I had to pay for the good eight dogs´ astro-taxi, proving how impossibly uvular Swabians behave, actually .
The seed sighs. Bubble, young, troubled extraplanetary professor´s chalk-on-our-N.A.S.A.-blackboard , bemused young gynophobe our – on that evening- bedoggled Johannes .
Take space-time off .
Metaphors or adjectives, in truth, time – travel killeth.Imagine starry Kant who´d have throttled at first warning an astronaut´s quickie in our module ? Which student taught them two chance-theory? Slurp the Bortsch , all eight taxi-dogs ; a long way it surely is ye´ve rocketed from around Jupiter´s lunatics . We´ll suppose that Kepler´s and Kant´s seed-sighing did unite ; well, what offspring of which female pilot admits to immortal longings while whooshing planets are hurling by our small modular windows in astonishment ? “He´s NOT here!” was the Soviet statement that settled that at the time!
Real truth was seldom hidden by Johannes Kepler´s dog-taxi equations eg.Newton´s gynophob = his own kynophob ? Yes, I did pay that unshaven Swabian astronomer´s astronomic taxi-bill ; yes, our captain was aft in the engine-room. And future generations will hymn her , will call her Stella .The seed sings , it makes no mention of any taxi-astrohounds raping their food tin that was warped by General Relativity on that astral occasion of my starry conception. Ex Oriens, unshaven Kepler, as yet no Newton praying for the sinners´ parabola.
Once upon a time I was nothing, not even space-travel dog-soup! ( It´s all the wrong people travel by taxi up there nowadays ) . Mind how you hymn the equations. Who will stir the Bortsch pot for eight Stuttgart shuttle-hounds? Quick now , we have but a second. Ease her back on Jupiter´s solstice fierce, throttle in your left; never mention words like “scrotum”, or ” space-coffin” again on our ship while I´m still at hatch number one extracting an odd Swabian astronomer out of his ” My Mammy Is No Witch” canelingual interplanetary taxi.

There were no Catholic dogs in Kepler´s eight-pack that night as I fumbled for small change for his enormous taxi-bill . Bay uvular Swäbisch, cosmic taxi-pups after rescuing Kepler´s Swabian Ma from burning , quantum seconds after my own conception in the rocket-hold. Twitches seed ? Sings seed ? Or why should travel burn all our metaphors to a Von Braun Frazzle ? Hymn her what ? Kant´s starry tent over a Stuttgart sky and her ” yes ” to Terrific Captain Startrek´s quickie charm while stirring Bortsch in a narrow space-cabin.

Steiger ! Down ! Hush, Puppy von Braun ! Wait your turn, Prancer and Dancer and Black Pup and Sky-Keeper´s off-spring, the Basker Twins! Eat Your Bortsch ! Sons and mothers worship module images: He and She and Our Captain´s Feinty Foot-work, fusing their galactic Bortsch and their quickie-seed at high velocities. From where comes this comets´ soup ? Whooshed detritus is our mysterious preterite and our future fumus, our Swabian Werner von Braun horizon all awash, aglow, awhoosh, a-Swab , ah Stuttgart, eight dogs pulling Kepler´s taxi , bound for my stratospheric home that night as Jupiter glowed and the captain, my future father, was down on the sack at her back. Plying my business.

THE DRIVE TO DROOL DIES LAST

THE DRIVE TO COMPOSE DRIVEL DIES LAST

This next shot slows down the perception of Time = MÉ FÉIN .It will ( – aha! now sneaks in tense ? ) brake my féin-tempore , mo fhéin-am, the fine self as 1500 x 997 pixels .
I was nine and not well. In our pre-Famine school-lavatory, little “I” was wandering up from the nethers to the little treble voice, pet.” Do thy milking ” it sang. ( Years later, she was my cow )
The next but one shot slows the keening of chronological time down . July 11 will be the Limerick premiere of new orchestral work, right beside the glistening Shannon. While she ( it´s Irish, silly ) awaits this event , this brazen river is asking blithely why I appear more future-dependent , look you, than I was ever gone on the idea the world couldn´t possible dare to have existed prior, say, to my beginning to exist ?
The Shannon Estuary is wide. Good image here, never soiled by bad or virtual poets.The River Jordan is chilly and cold – and it was thus as I came up for breath, nethers and torso well-oiled for the day´s acquatic struggle. ( A change of river for an unusual shot , gaffers – from Shannon to Jordan to Lethe, sorry, no, make it Styx. )In the shock of hitting the surface I had´nt time for usual Augustinian speculations about infantile wanderings on, about the I-pains , not even time for a quick thought about that cold, old, gray river portending great cosmic cold. ( Is the infinite great ? )
What about diving under again, blue boy, axel-grease a thin protection for the nethers and your little treble voice, pet, and the wandering self-chill, pet, and a partially developed “mé feín pain” and the pet´s song-pain that my young treble fluted through the class-room to prop a nine-year-old´s wobbly enough féin-ghrá, little sagging ” I” and the cosmos indifferent. Pan
then from Styx to Jordan, back to Shannon . My guardian- archangel´s pig-slurried left foot ( they, too, have two ) sharply shoved my surfacing anew junior swimming ” ringletted youth of my love ” back down into his riverly The Heavenly Anaesthetician´s Song . ( She was my cow years later )
Slurried he , a real churl archangelic, soiled the lovely ringlets with otherworldly pig-slurry – yet without converting me one whit from wandering child´s I-pain , nor yet from a ( – hey ! – totally justifiable, – I have argued several ” Musings ” earlier, perched on the West Face of Skellig Mhichil , was it September 2005 or a balmy, autumnal thereabouts ? ) – or my – perfect right to whinge A Cold Shannon Song .
Under those mutinous Shannon Estuary waves , for that oiled, greased moment, cold little I had the cold peace to argue the toss: was it true ” I = Time ? ” Would it hold water, my watery equation, that ” the Present Tense = Mé Féin ” ? And, if yes, does it also entail ” My Future = Only Me ? ” i.e. my final cadence will be the pet´s ringlets and my treble lay fluting in our Pre-Famine school´s ruined toilets , singing of post-birth : ” mé-féin = mé-pains ” ? Or: ” Nethers and their wandering ” I” ? ” But if yes, yes, yes, does this, why this, wherefore this Shannon – Euclidian turn, how entail that: ” the past before my lived past = the lie of my ” I ” ?
More succinctly versed: ” Supposin´, supposin´ / The Shannon was frozen . / – I am Time . / So´s THAT just fine ? ”
T´was full fathoms five down I fluted The Young Shannon Estuary Lay Of The Ringletted Youth :
” Winter-time is bleak ! / Small me ´s not well. / – Swam up , nethers meek, / My infant I-pain leaked / Its féin- ghrá wild ! / Oh cold Shannon-child ! / My sub-Shannon drivel ! / Like which nether evil , / Like what temporal weevil – / Nerves now me ? / Nerves also it ? / A child´s cold it / Which longs to be born again ? / – Like life after a life ? / – My Shannon- or my Styx- life ? / Is that more IT ? / More archangels´ shit ? / Maybe It = You ? / Time , bist DU ? / Spoiled water-pet, / Philo-monster , let / Shannon´s gluttonous waves / Roll over knaves, / And archangelic pig-slurry, / Over all selfish hurry / To peek, to slobber , / To flute treble verse / With its end-rhyme, ” HEARSE! ”
Then ´twas a sharp second slurried archangelic foot-feint sent this youthful, greased diver down under I -chilling waves. I was now under in Jordan. ( – he and He. She figured later as a cow. ) . River-doves fugued my fluminal I-ruin, my fluvial, doomed baptism. Duck deadly the slurried foot-puck, cold my Raphael, bold my Gabriel, a bit slurried my Michael. Thus was I Jordan- and Shannon-besoiled, say be-Styxed . A submarine pet´s only chance now: DO NOT be always goin´ on with the Shannon- Question! – cease your Jordan-Query ! Leave Lethe alone !
Bold Raphael, slurried Michael, strong-kick Archipatel , side-kick Gabriel, how can ye bisect my temporality ? how on earth mingle with my present ( or future) tense under this Estuary ? Beats me. I drown.

HOW WAS YOUR FILTHY NIB THIS CHRISTMAS ?

HOW THEN WAS THAT FILTHY E-NIB THIS CHRISTMAS 2006 ?

They wouldn´t even bother to write it out in a verse. eg.

” Fitzgerald, De Malster and Kyne /
Der Bishop and others of mine /
Whence their mothers and brothers? /
Their so lying Christmas line ? ”

Verse heightens, yet it failed to reach emptiness this blessed night, all our banal gifts, loving wrapping-paper industry. The Word was NOT made Flesh. It did not go into mince-meat wrapping. There was born there no cigar for The Child in a donkey´s ” here-I-bray-HEE-HAW-my -slob´s-knife-at-my-throat. ” Writing was out this Christmas. Naw. Bray a Hercules whinney .
Thus we our email had shut off for The Hovering Solstice. Whatever is felt will not be written down ; safe is only word- of -mouth in violent Bethlehem´s unstable lean-to.

Paddy De Malster plus Mine Bishop Kyne tried to sing ( both had donkey-voices, a trifle foul-smelling, ) in Sankt Petri´s chanticleer.
Paddy to Bish : ” He felt nothing ! Honest! I rooted his, too young, deep-frozen; what might Your Lordship ? ” De Bish Kyne Myne : ” Let go of that member ! He is myne, my alter ego! ”
Pet De Malster: ” Him tendering with svelt left glove, I adore Mummy “. Bishop Kyne in Christo:
“He´ll take Chemistry and Physics. Any B.Sc. degree´ll suffice for our future diocesan fiddle. ”

As it so turned out, I did fiddle at Bish Kyne´s Cheltenham funeral-games. ( How fitting: Her Majesty´s horse went berserk near the episcopal railings. )
Was it De Bishop´s or Paddy De Malster´s trickery was worse? Which? Young I was, yet devoured with justice and goose-juice at That Feast Of That Second Coming. Who sang? What was the reading ? Is now ? Will be for ever The Book of Christmas Seals. Of his , our svelt glove touching, fiddling or adoring or pawing or doing the milking – Hush! do not email ; dangerous times. Write it out in a verse:
” Pat Malt and De Bishop Mine ,
You get our pet ? – No! He´s mine!
Pull you his trousers !
Bad verse arouses! ”
For the two lambs, all innocently Chrismassy, my shattered doggerel thus:
” My Malster and Bishop won´t whine
Together, they´ve broken my spine!
Pat wheedled , Kyne needled ,
Bish fiddled , Malt fiedeld .
For me, no redemption in time.”
Or this petty nib-drivel ( awful , isn´t it ? ) :
” Paddy Fitz plus my former Kyne, Bish ,
Planned his that , then their other, now this.
One fondled his lamb,
(The other´s all sham )
Thus, between them, they´d tongue- sloughed my dish”.

Awful Christmas nib, God is not mocked in the unstable lean-to. Verse heightens not emptiness, not the wrapping-paper ( it wrapped the Child´s cigar that was not in the manger when De Bishop and Patrick Malster called by , for my heart was given to Another. ) Verse certainly heightens what ? We will.

HOW WAS YOUR FILTHY NIB THIS CHRISTMAS ?

HOW THEN WAS THAT FILTHY E-NIB THIS CHRISTMAS 2006 ?

They wouldn´t even bother to write it out in a verse. eg.

” Fitzgerald, De Malster and Kyne /
Der Bishop and others of mine /
Whence their mothers and brothers? /
Their so lying Christmas line ? ”

Verse heightens, yet it failed to reach emptiness this blessed night, all our banal gifts, loving wrapping-paper industry. The Word was NOT made Flesh. It did not go into mince-meat wrapping. There was born there no cigar for The Child in a donkey´s ” here-I-bray-HEE-HAW-my -slob´s-knife-at-my-throat. ” Writing was out this Christmas. Naw. Bray a Hercules whinney .
Thus we our email had shut off for The Hovering Solstice. Whatever is felt will not be written down ; safe is only word- of -mouth in violent Bethlehem´s unstable lean-to.

Paddy De Malster plus Mine Bishop Kyne tried to sing ( both had donkey-voices, a trifle foul-smelling, ) in Sankt Petri´s chanticleer.
Paddy to Bish : ” He felt nothing ! Honest! I rooted his, too young, deep-frozen; what might Your Lordship ? ” De Bish Kyne Myne : ” Let go of that member ! He is myne, my alter ego! ”
Pet De Malster: ” Him tendering with svelt left glove, I adore Mummy “. Bishop Kyne in Christo:
“He´ll take Chemistry and Physics. Any B.Sc. degree´ll suffice for our future diocesan fiddle. ”

As it so turned out, I did fiddle at Bish Kyne´s Cheltenham funeral-games. ( How fitting: Her Majesty´s horse went berserk near the episcopal railings. )
Was it De Bishop´s or Paddy De Malster´s trickery was worse? Which? Young I was, yet devoured with justice and goose-juice at That Feast Of That Second Coming. Who sang? What was the reading ? Is now ? Will be for ever The Book of Christmas Seals. Of his , our svelt glove touching, fiddling or adoring or pawing or doing the milking – Hush! do not email ; dangerous times. Write it out in a verse:
” Pat Malt and De Bishop Mine ,
You get our pet ? – No! He´s mine!
Pull you his trousers !
Bad verse arouses! ”
For the two lambs, all innocently Chrismassy, my shattered doggerel thus:
” My Malster and Bishop won´t whine
Together, they´ve broken my spine!
Pat wheedled , Kyne needled ,
Bish fiddled , Malt fiedeld .
For me, no redemption in time.”
Or this petty nib-drivel ( awful , isn´t it ? ) :
” Paddy Fitz plus my former Kyne, Bish ,
Planned his that , then their other, now this.
One fondled his lamb,
(The other´s all sham )
Thus, between them, they´d tongue- sloughed my dish”.

Awful Christmas nib, God is not mocked in the unstable lean-to. Verse heightens not emptiness, not the wrapping-paper ( it wrapped the Child´s cigar that was not in the manger when De Bishop and Patrick Malster called by , for my heart was given to Another. ) Verse certainly heightens what ? We will.

For this Holy Solstice , December 21 2006

ROAST OUR LAMB RARE ENOUGH

Yes, rape. Not of the sacred deposit ” in full and perfect integrity” , but how mangily poor and how linguistically appalling to my little Christmas ears in Saint Finian´s were his vowels and town-lands: Moyvore was foreign, Ballinacargy a laugh; I cringed at Clonmellon, Mount Nugent, Beaupark, Oristown, monstrous Ratoath, Kilcloon; I could just about hear the native echoes in ” Moynalty”.
On 27 June 1816 our Bishop Cantwell, deep, roundy, was appointed dean with an annual salary of 121 pounds, Propanda Fide not being asleep. Our tenant-farmer´s son had written: ” The sum of one thousand a year, which you specify, instead of exaggerating, underrates the amount available for these sacred uses.” For little me the Priests´Library shone gold vermilion in that afternoon sun.
It is just meat to offer a medium rare lamb for all the sheep of Taghmon. It is a collar of gold over the necks of those engaged in the mummery of superstition, whose generosity was established by a free parochial house, a fat cow or a 10 pound note at Christmas. Influenced by a mysterious torpor, many have not found Ballinacargy a laugh. Several gentlemen were on their legs together. ( Music and dancing were also available at an extra charge )
Even if , as an expectant postulant, it is my present fancy transsexual, I had travelled by boat down the Royal Canal from far-flung Castletown Kilpatrick to measled Athboy , how might his relatio for Rome have looked after my back-bone was broken , that first Christmas dinner? Mother was to live only for eighteen months in Madras, okay. The stately cypress of the Tropics waves above where she sleeps, her long last sleep, okay. How would I provide for the instruction of the female youth of the town and vicinity?
I intended to send an explanation to His Holiness from Ratoath, it being the sacred privilege of all sons to have recourse to the father of the faithful , okay. Yes, I did accept benefits from those crafty and cunning Ministers, okay.( Do not blush to whisper in the ears of certain credulous people that they have a well disposed and favourable attitude. No inverted commas. No upper case. ) I was denounced through all the moods and tenses of Billingsgate, so I was.
Time was elapsing and it was prejudicial to me, as long as my limbs could sustain me in Kilcullen or Navan, having as my object the amelioration of the social condition of a people like the Irish. ( It is the Maynooth education that is working all this evil. The priests there are very violent. )
At the hustings, Sir Richard Levinge, Urquhart and Mostyn lounged ; I was not yet well enough acqainted with the malignity of my enemies to attach the slightest credit or importance to statements emanating from such a source.” Lambaste him ” ; I had not heard a single serious charge of violence or imprudence aimed at my sacred character. As to Mullingar: I much feared, religion had not much benefited from their example there; it required no very great stretch of the lamb´s intelligence , no astute notions of a sheep´s propriety to know that the rostrum was not the place most suited. At St. Finian´s, where I snatched a hasty meat-dinner, a number who were present expressed great indignation at the proceedings of my conference along the following lines: why were the country butchers reduced to such misery as to be obliged to flee from the land of their lambs, with which their dearest associations are entwined ? The gangrene had eaten into all classes of society, and all classes , therefore, must contribute to the cure, or it could not be affected. Their conduct nothing but a well established plea of insanity could explain. Many, very many, I was still confident,had been forced to join the movement through intimidation of every species, worldly and spiritual.
He, the bishop , I mean, ( it was either him or me ) then wrote in September 1865 to Propaganda from Calais seeking faculties to say mass. I was fair game, I´m afraid. This boy attained the age of fifteen years, that period of pauper existence which the law pronounces to be manhood, that at which it declares education shall cease, and idleness and increase of diet make up for any lack of knowledge. He denounced, of course he would, a house of ill repute on the canal banks in Mullingar ( the result was that mine was burned down a few nights later by some midnight incendiary, who had profited by the mild and Christian instruction of his pastor. )
I was charged with outraging common decency, by going with strumpets into groves and forts. My health was better than in Rome ; however, during the week of the last Bellewstown Races, our worthy neighbour of Sheephouse volunteered in the most handsome manner, to supply , gratuitously, from his quarry, all the cut-stone for the front of my sacred edifice in Mount Bolus.
Or take Oristown. Bish Cantwell´s good self , possessing the confidence of Rome, would be enabled not only to save but, healing past dissensions, he would restore it to an influence and character that heretofore had rendered the Irish church the terror of the enemies of our holy faith. I suggested – too late , as it then transpired – that he travel to Naples and Gaeta to visit the Pope and Fransoni.
“I did all in my power to damage him and his two classes of supporters” was his later chilling report on me to Propaganda. The greater good determined that he should not stay silent about my unsuitability for episcopal office, in those days of unparalleled suffering an appointment which would be hailed as present blessing. He rammed the point further home: ” He ( he meant little me ) declared he ( again ditto ) would not refuse absolution to a priest who took office in the Queen´s Colleges “.
Even after this rescript, I felt the proquinquity of a lamb to its slab. He, Cant Well Enough, again wrote to Propaganda in my case: ” His sad calamity has been publicly notorious : he not only cut his own throat to an extent that rendered recovery for some days hopeless, but even endeavoured to kill his sister…. ” The blood welled . Roundy well, Bishop Cant , again: ” I would look on his episcopal appointment as a national calamity.”
How terrible are the dangers augmented by the folly or treachery of some of our Brethren. Rarely well done is the Christmas lamb. The Pope telling Prince Doria, an emissary for Lord Shrewsbury, that he knew of the true circumstances from a letter posted out of Ballinacargy one wet and dismal night that December, I quote from memory: “We hope Dr. Cant will not go to London. His meddling will be most mischevious, as such men are more to be dreaded in Ireland in a religious point of view than the openly avowed hostility of the worst Tory Government”.
If the pitch cap fit , let this Christmas lamb wear. My bishop´s comments on all of this were sarcastic and well over the top o´the hill : ” Were Luther on earth he would be a suitable climax to the disgusting young of Ballinacargy, young spawn of that Metropolis who in the numerous institutions and professions laugh at religion and trample on morality . I shall forward to Rome a true report of this deep laid and unchristian plot! I trust it will decide His Holiness and the Propaganda on affixing their strong and solemn condemnation on a project which if brought into operation would soon extinguish the Gospel light in this country!”
My mother slept her long , last sleep not in Moyvore but in Madras; she was in no way convinced : ” Lord, emancipate the rising generation from the thraldom of Priestly domination, then ! My son ! My lamb´s collar spiked against the prowl of Roman wolves!” But Bish Cant´s reply was characteristic:
” How she has been bamboozled to make such a testamentary disposition of her son is astonishing! It unfortunately shows the sad power that some of their reverences possess over even respectable females, and how they turn and twist them to their own selfish views. Here we have a lady bequeathing every particle of her beloved son whom she possessed to a class of men that never existed. Nor, from the well known certainty there is of some of the cloth feathering their nest to their heart´s content, is there the remote possibility of having such a son in esse!”
Ballinabrackey and Tubber, once desert Dysart, nobbered Nobber and Dromconrath and safe Slane and monstrous Ratoath. How are ye ? Where are ye? Can´t leave ye well enough alone this Holy Solstice?