Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

checks to be run

as if I had stepped into a narrow circumstance bordered around by oblivion while

looking for my keys now

frisking my pockets and glancing around, only to see that

Mairead has beaten me to the job, she has been out early and bought the papers — not one but two of them, local and national, both lying in the middle of the table neatly folded into each other, the light glossing unbroken across their surface, making it clear she has not read them herself that I might have the small pleasure of opening up a fresh newspaper, hearing it rattle and creak as it discloses itself, one of those experiences which properly begin the day or the afternoon as is the case now, turning it over and leafing through it

starting at the back, the sports pages, to read the headline

Hard Lessons in Latest Defeat

as if this were the time and the place for a sermon

which prompts me to close it again quickly, not wanting any homily at this hour of the day with the paper showing the date as

November 2nd, the month of the Holy Souls already upon us, the year nearly gone so

what happened to October

come and gone in a flash, the clocks gone back for winter time only last week and

the front-page stories telling that the world is going about its relentless business of rising up in splendour and falling down in ruins with wars still ongoing in foreign parts — Afghanistan and Iraq among others — as peace settlements are being attempted elsewhere — Israel and Palestine — while closer to home, the drama is in a lower key but real nonetheless — bed shortages in hospitals and public sector wage agreements under pressure — all good human stories no matter how they will pan out, you can feel that, the flesh and blood element twitching in them, while at the same time

in the over-realm of international finance other, more abstract indices are rising and falling to their own havoc — share prices, interest rates, profit margins, solvency ratios — money upholding the necessary imbalances so that everything continues to move ever forward while on one of the inside pages there is

one year on

a long article with an illustrative graph and quotes outlining the causes and consequences of our recent economic collapse, a brief résumé of events that culminated on the night of September 29th, feast of the archangel Michael — the night the whole banking system almost collapsed and the country came within a hair’s breadth of waking the following morning to empty bank accounts and

for clarity’s sake

this article is illustrated by a sidebar which gives some indication of just how outsized the nation’s financial folly was in the years leading up to the collapse, debt piling up till it ran to tens of billions, incredible figures for a small island economy, awe-inspiring magnitudes which shifted forever the horizons of what we thought ourselves liable for and which now, stacked on top of each other like this — all those zeroes, glossy and hard, so given to viral increase — appear like

the indices and magnitudes of a new cosmology, the forces and velocities of some barren, inverse world — a negative realm that, over time, will suck the life out of us, that collapse which happened without offering any forewarning of itself, none that any of our prophets picked up on anyway as they were

all apparently struck dumb and blind, robbed of all foresight when surely this was the kind of catastrophe prophets should have an eye for or some foreknowledge of but didn’t since it is now evident in hindsight that our seers’ gifts were of a lesser order, their warnings lowered to a tremulous bleating, the voices of men hedging their bets and without the proper pitch of hysterical accusation as they settled instead for fault-finding and analysis, that cautionary note which in the end proved wholly inadequate to the coming disaster because pointing out flaws was never going to be enough and figures and projections, no matter how dire, were never likely to map out the real contours of the calamity or prove to be an adequate spell against it when, without that shrill tone of indictment, theirs was never a song to hold our attention and no point whatsoever meeting catastrophe with reason when what was needed was

our prophets deranged

and coming towards us wild-eyed and smeared with shit, ringing a bell, seer and sinner at once while speaking some language from the edge of reason whose message would translate into plain words as

we’re fucked

well and truly fucked because

with the signs stacking up like this there will only be one out- come and

here’s more of it

the eyes on that woman

a local story featuring in both the national and local newspaper, the story of

an environmental campaigner who has begun a hunger strike against the energy consortium planning to run a pressurised gas pipeline through her particular part of North Mayo and which has already commenced work on the seabed of Broadhaven Bay, the articles in both papers illustrated with the same picture of a haggard-looking woman in her late fifties wrapped in a blanket and staring bug-eyed from the back of a car as her hunger strike now enters its second week, by which time she has reportedly lost ten pounds from a body that weighed less than seven stone before she began her fast so that, day by day, she is approaching that dangerous weight threshold, the critical loss of body mass at which point her health could be irreparably damaged as she begins to fade from the world entirely, the sight leaving her eyes first, followed by muscle mass and bone density, so that now — both articles make this clear — there is a special urgency to all those pleas and petitions and representations which have been made to the relevant public and private bodies on her behalf but which as yet — eight days into her fast — have elicited no official response from either the government or the energy consortium and while

this woman weakens day by day

she vows to continue her strike till the largest pipe-laying ship in the world, registered in Switzerland, the Solitare — all three hundred metres of it, with its ninety-six thousand tons and four hundred crew — leaves Broadhaven bay and Irish territorial waters beyond so that

two images coming together

this small woman against this ship

recalls that photograph of the lone protester standing in front of the column of tanks in Tiananmen Square, way back in 1989, similar in that it’s equally unlikely the Solitare will run aground on the slight body of this woman who, wrapped in a blanket, peers out from the back of the car, another drama that has the weighted, irrefutable sense of the real about it, that dangerous confluence of the private and political converging on this frail woman’s body to make it the arena of the dispute and, not for the first time, stories like this always strike me as

peculiar to Mayo

Mayo God help us

Mayo abú

a county with a unique history of people starving and mortifying themselves for higher causes and principles, a political reflex that has twitched steadily down the years and seems rooted in some aggravated sense of sinfulness because, like no other county it is blistered with shrines and grottoes and prayer houses and hermitages just as it is crossed with pilgrim paths and penitential ways, the whole county such a bordered realm of penance and atonement that no one should be surprised that self-starvation becomes a political weapon when, to the best of my knowledge, no other county in the Republic has called up three of its sons to starve to death for flag and country so late in the twentieth century

McNeela, Gaughan, Stagg

Arbour Hill, Parkhurst, Wakefield

valiant souls who took their inspiration from our martyred land and saw a world beyond themselves as did