And QUASI UN CANTO for Full Orchestra, then. “I don´t like music but I love to sing!” was Leonard Bernstein´s self-protecting spakes on and off television. In “Quasi Un Canto” a prelude ( it doubles at the end as a postlude also ) frames the orchestral song as it unfolds its 5 tones, A,B,C sharp, C,D and E flat in instrumental groups of three ( three trumpets, three flutes, etc. ) and later in groups of four ( celli divisi, etc. )
Hear my song, sardonic, splintered, quasi unisono then. This branches outlegato or blocked or bursting its way through musical space. Harp, piano and a panoply of percussion ( including bodhrá¡n and clashed cymbals to be lowered in a bath-tub of water ) mediate between the ideas which are really one idea. Vertical is horizontal is oblique. This is song, the full throat.

I. AS I LAY DYING

I had been practising that for in or out ( – which ? ) of sixty odd years now. So I studied my profile, seeking to weed out even one weaky candidate in the list of morituri which my face was showing for all of those said and done and well-sung years. I hummed, then I hawed my Urmotiv, that 3-tone cell from which all of life´s lovely algorhythms trip so lightly : Doh, Re, Mi, from

the “Kyrie” of the Mass for the Dead. As I lay so blythely , controlling my breathing, but not yet my last, a pattern seemed to be emerging: shriving memory recalled flawed projects with me, a child in the forties. The anal stage, definitely my force to move the stars. Wiggle the left big toe; I´m still alive.Thanks, doctor, it can´t be too long now. And
you did promise you will say to dying me: ” Bye-bye now!” – Doc. ? You will ? ( And why does it matter so to us, doc., to us the dear departing, I wonder ? But it does…. )
Then I let my old thoughts loose to roam freely around the next storey of the memory-palace which, it seemed was now finishing with the life which I was terminally
considering…. e.g. my plans in them seventies, just before the diving-rudder was jammed forward into a ” down” angle and the Atlantic´s ocean-floor rose hard to greet us both. I dived. Now old wounds can tear the heart no more, apparently, in a cardiology that´s ” uneasy till it rest in Thee.”
( She peeked around the plastic curtain. ” Is your chamber-pot full yet …. ? ” )

Only rhythm remains in the end,the still firing neurons like to report.Take this left big toe, for example, and its world-formula: Let A be any one of your plans.Then let B minus A be the place you finish up in, eg. second place in the under fourteens´ 4-hand reel. That means C is your unknown quantity and it´s equal to B squared x A squared x O which is nought.

Quod erat moriendum. So which of my dying ” I” s was I currently fooling, eh ?

Begob, now just let the big toe dream its non-existent future after its imminent demise, a future world of toelessness, no less, but no longer my future world as seen from the couch I was sprawled on for the very last time. ( I really was, accept it on faith, really dying to die, but, I suppose, I just couldn´t. It does happen…. ) Suffer , ye multiple selves, all my past tenses. Blow, nurse´s bugle! Don´t forget to hoist this hero´s freshly-dead corpse up on its ( I had not prepaid; I forgot; it, too, can happen ! ) ) pyre. Mother had, father went. Meanwhile my toe was registering a great cold. Suppose mother had wanted me to be a Swiss Guard at the Vatican ? The toe, total cold now, had dozed off.
( So this´d be a further deformation of my phylogenetic derailment somewhere back along the furry-hairy parents´ line, is that it, toe ? )
Do it, dier! Like a wind-hoving skier. Now! So I smacked my hand-held piece of druids´holly that the Hospice For The Dying lady recommended for such vespers. Tap on the middle of the branch twice. Then knock once at the left side, druids ? But which banal deity might sidle in ? I did want to hear his god´s approach, her ghostly patter at my crackling fire. Into the intensive care ward padded, it burst Banagher, The Old Piper of Drooling Pentatonic, knobbly knees all blue under his lent kilt. He blew! ” Stop! Dying, I mean! Stop, this instant! Halt your processes! ” My staged thanatology was halted in its tracks; cold the toe, I saw that the fire barely flickered; my white hair stood on end . The hero´s pyre was consuming those ghostly faggots Mr. Yeats had wisely foresung. – Heavens ! Enough is enough! So it was then. So I snorted: ” Enough is enough! I hereby now appoint ME as Myne Lord Self, I designate myself Lord Smart! I am ,
therefore I am ! I will to will ! Remember her birthing , mother, pious he ! Herald, herald this thus! I am who am reclining here and I am about to reclaim my near-gangrenous toe !” In they trotted, mother´s small trooping gods and, of course, his goddesses. Goodly loud brayed the trumpeter, bold as brass , a Swiss Guard, as it happened. Then it happened. A gigantic weakness made my newly deified bladder burst. It put the pyre out.

This mountain is sick.
Bird, beware all ferritin
Of a high recluse.

The mosquito blood
Sang in the shining syringe
Brown sultry music.

Na cuisleanna ag
Iompar ualaigh dearg na marbh.
Fear bréige órga.

E s´illumina
Il spaventapasseri.
Sera dei morti…

Hear that colour song -
Crimson wine, dark blueberry;
Insects have no blood?

Ease out that rice-plant .
How badly she planted it !
Slowly it rises, green.

Blossoms´ferrous pain
I am a sour-sweet cherry!
Big world now bigger.

Little mountain-bird,
Coo not; woo not my iron
In its thick sick blood.

Would you now trot down to me, outta your Heaven and into my splendid Garden, Dad . Praise it and de viper here, you are “a man and not a whinger” , Dad ; laud its lithe, green-and-yellow neck up for divilment , Dad. If that tongue strikes, no more the bittern will cry in my Italian Garden nor will they find lamb or lion in the wild sky. Nor a whinge out of us little five, Dad, no whimper.( I was offered on two altars at one time , I just had to. I had . To. ) .
Cry and we weep alone to a thick barytone smather of God´s rich Italian harmonium : ” Sick est qui tantum ergo “. So c´mon down, Dad, and just accept a little glass of Italian love, a small nip of limoncello to our tangible, yellow success at husbanding and husbandry, Dad , with ripening neighbours; the purple plums may even heal worse, little-known woes.
Dad, ” I hate the sun! ” – will I save this ? Sick were our ” Tantum Ergo”s on the family´s modest harmonium . So, Heavenly Dúidín, it´s our wish, we little five, that you climb down to us in this Magic Garden. We´ll , our turn, be wanting to shin up out of this Italian-balmy air , to glide up from a barytone´s lawn-mower-pride and his sickle and clippers and leather gloves and heavy viper-boots with your jaw-bone in our hand , Dad, as a warning to life and limbo, to five mites´ hopes and fears .
Often was your agathology dressed up, marinated angelology; this garden would like to know how often . In this Lazio evening-glow . Really and truly. Dad, it´s your silence. But my garden. You´re STILL lonely up in that stellar Nunc Stans ? Dad, you gotta be tough to stick that for ever. Up there alone ?
Here I´m alone with our evening-viper. Hello, viper alone, hallo, hallo, alone Dad ; what about The Bonaventuran Light Which Created My Snake ? Not, Dad, that you ” hate the light” ? ( – Bonaventura was a reasonable my-stick, si, sic, and all these boreens of his Jacoponean- Franciscan un-sandled foot-work lead thither et whither and thence nunc. Surely, he was reared under Bagnoregio´s burning, thermonuclear sun.
No sun shone into Tullamore Jail. You told little us nothing. C´mon down now on a sun-ray, Dad, sliding into my viper-garden and forgive ( you have ) your first-born treble singer. Is it Heavenly loneliness gives a little gardener sunny pause. How awful our saintly isle is becaming , Dad, how awe-less its Second Coming, your Hibernia . You sought for Bonaventura, Happy Fra of Happy Light, up above your sunless jail-window, Da, in ( meantime, it was procreate, procreate, procreate, procreate, procreate ) Tulach Mór Jail.
So you don´t miss us five mites.You never did? On occasion – that viper flashed – I miss you, yes. – Dad, suppose YOU are my Heaven fair. Suppose It, You, equals the lonely pain, no Nirvana for Nathair Nimhe in No One´s Heaven, our Dad; it´s Our Total Flop. And yet I´ll put my Seven Last Questions to you, Dad. For a start: 1. Where have all the pixels gone ? Wo sind sie geblieben? ” An bhfaca daoinni´sliabh riamh? ” 2. Who is typing these here questions here on this snowy screen anyhow ? 3. Is Bonaventurean Light even whiter than white ? 4. Who shall ever dare judge the Judge ? 5. Are His daughters beautiful ? 6. Are you allowed to answer these questions, Dad ? – Who´s there stopping you ? 7. Supposing I did get back from you seven answers, Dad, what then ? Would it allow me to compose haptic music ? Would it ? With an inane title like : ” All The People I´ve Slept With Since 1969″, now would it ?

stop twitching those toes!

Gentleman, certainly, mighty odd giullare, toady of God. Your shocked fingers fingered her ( way too ) young, ( way too ) limp hair-shirt.

Musical lawyer in Todi of the very finest stone, you saw her fatal dance, then the floor collapsed ? It was your “self ” – or hers – was meant in not-quite-yet Pope Honorius´s slim paper-back ” On Contempt Of The World ” in Todi´s only book-shop ?
Knots and thorns mixed into your she-less Umbran grallya, in your dirt you recalled it , your dancing giggles for Cristo. Fancy foot-work and the wrong side of Bonifatius, gets you into San Fortunato dungeon´s dung, lauding and lalling and crooning and moaning and keening not HER but Her Church Incontinent, My Young Bride´s Robber, A Her – Him Swindle, The Big Key To What If Not Real Walls Of Palestrina, Real Music All Lost, Bony Fazius As Well As Well Crowned , Todi´s Cristo -Debt Stopped Short , Never To Go Again, And All Our Transcendental Spam Sent Awry .
You wished to burst asunder HER onion-self , her childhood piano-lessons in “The You and I Walz” , still much stuck in C major. Why so late fingered that lovely hair-corset , her Franciscan stays and her tears? You´d not nightly ? Pope Honorius dictated in the bedroom ? You despised her hair-shift and -drawers and -shirt and -blouse and -slip and -tanga and all de dainty tings made for delight ? Poetic form was thrn for you as toads dancing in Umbria .
” Jacopone” = “Famous Séamus Dauncing”, ” Hairy Trot In Todi”, ” Her Stays Stayed A More Heavenly Knickers”, ” Bony Fazius The Worst Curse” . What morphed you at all ? That dance-hall floor or her falling hair-shirt began your ” rinnce le ceol” , best done around Todi. But how eg. despise all of “my” world ? ” All ” ? ” My” ? ” World” ? Why should you ? She ? -that rickety dancing-area collapsed on her hair-underclothes ? Her stays, your moment, jabberwocked Jim ?

Soft you, before I take on ” Let me “. Consider weakish ” Definitely” and, after I´ve lambasted that, sherry-swinish ” Nest Myself”, all of this on this our
post-Samhan ” Ogni Santi” / ” Aller Seelen” ( – poor Schubert´s teeth ! ) thermometric fall .
Next in line to be criticized ” All over the world !” as creeping arrogance, a time-server for word-pigs! Her “glob” = his ” blogadr” = ” their wished for “playbar “. So whisper it wistfully, cautiously: ” pressword = wordpress/swordpressworryswishI´dódonítfirstan´foremosht/ ”
( In principle, was not our pressing out Dat But Only Just Dat Just Word long foreconceived, in fact some aeons earlier ? )
Press down. Shut up. Shut. Nest down. Mrs. Blogs, born in this Night of The SHE, she is helpless, so shes nesting on Culann´s Dawg, Cú. Down, hound, dawn fawning!
On one such “sacred”, ” livid” ( Luther ) October 31st evening, I happened to wrench the fifth rib while slipping across my own SHE Divide, up interviewing Mother on Skellig´s West Face. I´d faced wet-to-the-skin Blogadr.s, all, and I mean all, of her wet E-Mails; Luther – long before- had been pressing out The World At Stool, anti-Jewish pighound, we are more on the alert today. Marvel, though, at what he did expel: ” B.Lo.Go´dr. Sw´nish // “, the professorial theologians´ Thuringian privie practically blown apart by this lovely part-song for shitters.
Allow for ” SHE”, for our Celtic Fun On The Time-Line. October was doubtlessly grand, now the Sí were shovelling up her soil. I slipped over her own grey-hound. I had to sneak by, smacked by Samhan saints, by SHEs and by poor Schubert´s teeth, nesting with Mother´s hush-puppy hounds under a purgatorial Skellig Mór down-pour where no playbar ever did split Luther´s ” sacred” from “livid”.
I come to Martin´s beblogadred statement. I am referring, of course, to his Wartburg Question: ” Suppose I HAD rescued her out of her own vomit?” Watch that reformed barplay, his typical Augustinian pressing on HER words, her” HAD” and her “OF” .
My Diet of Worms beloved, sitting Musicus Luther how did strain, pressed he (still at you-know-where , ja ? ), propagated he, a case sensitive type, still a-sitting, he entered his post, evacuating Immortal Stool-Words:
” Let SHE out, gentle swine ! Press my Marty ICH certainly out of all great art ! Sitting rather than in good standing ( in this my private privie) , I Martin, Musicus, Marty cut ICH out of every thaumatological letting -go, verily out of Gad´s every Thuringian Word-server, each of His word-processors and, well, Son-pressers “.
Plop. Pull handle.Our theologian sedens now stroked his wordpress; the playbars coupled. ” You Lady Blog , me Blogadr. We nest ourselves on world-, time- and self-servers?”
This was ” aller Seelen”, a wet night, our ” ogni santi” on projected Irish Samhan Sí -sod and Skellig West Face ( closed to tourists, there´s sheets of foam a mile high in winter ), these were a myriad open faders, cross-overs, media-connectors. Press harder, young Sí-devils ! Strain, ye SHE-men! Grace ignoreth consequence ! Samhains prime time! Muscular ecstasy now´! Or never again for an artist a true-blue option! Wider! Open! She comes!” Schubert´s teeth ( fixed media work ), Mother´s wet hound-puppies on Skellig, drowning SHE´s ” glob” and Our Reformer´s ” blogadr ” pushed Herr Doktor Martin Luthers playbar down, aiming´for all Servants of the Strained Word.
´Tis easy speaking it : ” Suppose I had NOT rescued her out of her vomit?” Martin´s Satan snarl : ” She was all slopped out on the bed. death by drowning if you hadn´t. Certain.” Then the Tempter struck: ” What about her delayed death at sea? ” Our Reforming Sitter: ” Ancient Tempter! ” Lucifer was blazing back: ” Would have inhaled her own supper.” Dr. Marty Theologus: ” Haste to the wedding, guilt I Thee bring? ” His Mischievous Evil: ” Let the pitch-cap fit!” Our theological shitter:” Release my pressbar! ” Old Satan, his feary Father: “You did want to nest!” Luther´s Old High German Wartburg expletive was ” Blogadr! ”
After this Thuringian curse, all world-servers went silent. I´d said goodby to Mother on wet Skellig´s Wet Hell, goodbye to her wet hush-hounds and to Schubert´s syphilitic teeth, to wet Glob and drowned Blog and rescuing her out of her own vomit aeons earlier . Soft this wettish Sí Morning. Who ELSE is listening up on that West Face to my soft tale about how SHE is not necessarily of the Samhan Sí ; that we´re all flowing down the same river, down to Samhan City,

We jerky little kids swung our then little limbs over that then little style ( – Donnelly´s sawn-off instrument had successfully shot my priestly vocation to tatters. ), that escape-path from our ´Aras Mór leading to a hole-in-the-wall, our walk or you push de flat bipeds toward angelic Sister Augustine and walk tall Sister Senan and their mountainy Hidden Object of Tabernacular Adoratio, wasn´t it Big Mister ´Eamonn Mór Dé .

I am past ” forgiving ” ? – No, dope, my PIANO TRIO of your 1977 was our Cúchullanistik. No, years later I did have to FEEL that ASSYMETRIC grey – plus – Brahms piano-interior .Yes, forgive Hugh Donnelly´s shotgun´s sawn-off sound ? Yes, forgive my tattered vocation? Forgive also, up at our styles, a child´s thrust towards fulfilling the hero´s crazy project? Forgive the Tabernacle and all who can´t forgive themselves? We were jerky, all so little, help us in out of the forlorn cold . It was dire. Not a piano-trio as yet in my childish imagination, it was the sound of sawn-off thunder. How could they let us loose beyond the limits of the style in the wall ? I know my little limbs were blue with cold, how about yours in cold Áras Mór ? Smell the explosion , hark to our thousand awakened rooks yelling blue murder under a leaden night-sky ; I was no match for the Cúchullans above at the square where never a drop of Vesevo White soccoured our parents ; no glass and a half ´d stop blue child-abuse, though Áras Mór featured lead-pipes and lead roof-lining, had included once Thomas Mann´s red wines ( after all, his own Lübecker Rotspon evening-glass did look the other way as his childer turned all blue ).

I hardly knew my young body´s lower half in our ´Aras Mór cold mansion of a Saturday Night Is Bath-Night. Nor did ever actually see the white wine” Vesevo”, our Celto-Hanseatic snobs´ ” Sannio Falanghina” . Nor could my Setanta´s hurley-stick ever hope to open a Thomas Mann bottle of ” Vin Pays d´Oc” ( – apparently it used to arrive as his own red ” Rotspon von Lübeck” , imagine! ) . But could I shriek for us five children at the style, for our rooks and our parents´ ” Heal Yerselves, Mites, Ye´ll Have To ” throughout that long October forbidden night of the shotgun? Could I?

Ask not now from which Lübeck wine-cask Immanuel Kant smelled our twisted wood . Even I still smell my very own private child-abuse, our milking, his honey. Indeed, his milking of my honey. Not a bottle of Tipperary Red Rotsporn was found aboard the rubber raft for the five orphans. Sing, Thomas Mann´s desolate, blue-white children, my old favourite, how well we know that Lied “HOW SWEETLY WE SHIVER NOW” . What bliss at whose cool pianoforte for blue-cold little, precious witnesses ? Want little, waste little. Whinge little, for ye shall not be heard.

Now I’ll paste in mother, she’ll be next to her Casey sisters and cousins, her school-class photo about level, as in life, with our Dad’s caubeen in his very own photo.

Who is looking at who is what these two images (bundled phota are best) are asking me down from this Wailing Wall; in which time are these imputed glances ‘‘taking place’’, is what I should be exploring in my hunkered position.

To live your life is not as easy as to be plastering the builders’ wet-room, gleam, angle, shadows or light, its line and circle, de- and in- and excisions.

I’ll be taking next the ontology of the musical work, take Lutoslawski’s Livres Pour Orchestre of 1968, premiered in Hamburg, was it? No, Hagen; wrong, Warszawa. Wrong again. I veer away from the slippery slope ( – this wet-room is quite new) of the Polish composer’s question for whom his Chapters and his still wonderfully fresh, still very tricky, polyvalent Interludes will sound now as they swirl around the few corners the builders did leave me? Who owns? Neither hath Casey ear heard, nor Corcoran eye seen what this grand orchestral wash announces: – yes, it is sweet and it is proper to construct my wet wash-room, to work in Horace’s brass, no surrender, non serviam, no sir, it wasn’t me, sir, ask Lizz Casey, sir, bold as brass, sir . (How they cower in their lowly school snap-shot). Yes, erect wet washroom, yes, write Lutoslawski’s Sound-Pages, yes, sounding brass a sonorous Book of Life. Whose, Horace? Ah, Horatius, ’tis countless, unsung lives of Irish slaves, their being temporal, their time silent, still, unsung.

We know not the wet-rooms of our future. The past is mine, sayeth Horace. Build ye, bold as brass. Wipe down the streaming walls of orchestral wash, Lutoslawski’s great monument. Wrap sound in little Interludes between his mighty Chapters, short, tiny verses for clarinets and vibraphone and low harp-patter, piano-dabs before the big stuff gets sounding. In that photograph the air is dead, no sound. So how? Yet, the Horatian thrust to build a monument, try any class of a gazebo, even a metaphor, a wet-room extended, Mr. L’s final orchestral Chapter wrapping up all minor wind- or string-glissandi-arguments, it seems basically normal in our species, keep cool, poet, a basically decent and reasoned thing to be at, whether it’s photographing mother’s little grey school-class of 1927 or pasting his photoéd caubeen’s phota up on my father’s son’s faintly wet Italian walls.

I am very wrong, nonsense arrant and sheer. The Roman poet (I have late, too late cribrated and post-cribrated) needed neither wet-room nor Irish slave’s hunkered position as he sounded our challenge to the vermiculation which our being-in-time is heir to : ‘‘those who can, make!’’ – G’wan! In spite of every slave’s daily, holy fight against The Hole. So who is looking at who on my Wet, Wailing Wall? What precisely are they wailing about? Did they save the dam? Kept the march-music going? Were born, they saw what glory? More snare-drum ’n bugles music than Lutoslawski’s strange harp ’n vibraphone subtleties, I ask myself in this by now uncomfortable, contorted position.

(We don’t normally number Horace among the Stoics. Still… ) Perhaps my pasting parental photos up on a still damp wall there does belong also to Horatian aesthetics: carpe photon et photas, picturas de gloriosa miseria humani generis, oaf, yes, and orchestral tutti. Final whimper or final yell. Depending on your line of vision as light falls on my builders’ slapped-up result. You never hunkered in your Soracte wet-room, poet; but your: ‘‘Son, artist, keep de faith’’ could be Old Roman wind, little foreseeable win. Hunkered you are asking hunkered me to take a Pascalian leap, a wet-room risk? Far into the future, you insist, brays, blares my brass-music and we famously programmed to palliate our plight with your home-baked beans mprogramme, classical smartie-poet. This tone-poet. Or his wet-room builders. Or my parents’ phota fixed in two washy photos pasted on my washed, Wailing Wall. What’s now fixed is fixed more (or less?) for ever, will beat Time and the River, the Hole, the Dam, is that what you’re oraculating to me, Horry? Hurray for the sweet and for the decorous, to die for a wet-room, for my orchestral gazebo, a sounding ziggurat, tormented gong, clarinets and marimba and piano and the harp that once. ‘‘Horatian’’ is not ‘‘horrible’’, seldom
‘‘horrid’’. Yet, horrific oracle, orientate this orphan’s orison; the wet wind is blowing through my cell. What Greater-Than-Horace conceived the whole plot? – Did Horry mean ‘‘Fame is a meat that dead men eat’’? – Why didn’t Horsey pen, then: ‘‘Get it / While you can!’’? How shall all manner of things be well?