DUBLIN 2020
We’ve been smitten by Billy O’Hanluain’s poetic takes on the lockdown experience through some of his Facebook posts. We got in touch and asked him if he’d care to expand upon them and try to encapsulate the year we have just experienced. To accompany his thoughts, we asked photographer Aoife Herrity to take a stroll around the city before it re-emerged from Level 5 and share what she saw.
2020 has been like a dream. To call it a year does not do justice to the depths of its strangeness. It has at times seemed like a prolonged season of solitude, twisting so much of the familiar out of shape and making the surreal appear mundane. We have pitched and tossed across its treacherous currents and navigated its warped contours. We have no maps. We have never been here or anywhere like it before.
Remembering is a blunt instrument and if not handled gently, it can pierce the placenta of the dream it is trying to recall, the dream turns to water, slips beyond our reach and is forgotten. So, I will try to recall these fragments as carefully as I can.
In February, Brazilian students in the language school where I teach on Abbey Street started to tell me that their hours were being inexplicably cut. They work mostly in hospitality or as pre-dawn cleaners in the city’s office blocks. They were also the first to tell me that Patrick’s Day might be cancelled. They were like canaries down Dublin’s mine shaft and sensed an ominous shift in the air weeks before the rest of us did. Restaurant bookings being cancelled, hotel rooms not being filled, weddings postponed. The ground was shifting beneath their already fragile circumstances.
“They were like canaries down Dublin’s mine shaft and sensed an ominous shift in the air weeks before the rest of us did.”
Across the road in Muse Café, on the top floor of Eason’s, Sky News flashed headlines about clusters of Covid in Lombardy and Veneto, scientists in white lab coats were interviewed, graphs and charts displayed. A vast warehouse full of empty beds appeared like an image too disturbing to be the cover of a Pink Floyd album, this was real. It all still seemed far away though. Something on the news. Something over there. But each day it insinuated its way deeper into the front pages and into our conversations. One afternoon in the café an old woman turned me while poking her crumble and custard and said:
“Oh, you wouldn’t know what’s comin’ or goin’ these days. I mean, it’s not like in the past when we had our own diseases like TB, they were simpler times.”
It was making its presence felt before it arrived.
In the middle of the month I went to Madrid for five days. I had lived there for three years long ago and wanted to settle a few scores with my past. By the time I arrived the city had already collided with the Covid, but had no idea yet of the extent of the devastation. In the few days I was there thousands of cases were flooding the city’s nursing homes, but life went on as normal on the upper decks. On my last day there, I went to The Prado to see Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”. I got there early in the morning and had the room almost to myself. My eyes gorged on its depictions of The Garden of Eden, the fall from Grace, vast opulent copulations, sacred orgies, swarms of birds and nightmarish creatures devouring and excreting human forms, a city being licked by flames and damnation. I was exhilarated and terrified by it. When I turned around to leave, there was a large group of Asian tourists all wearing masks semi circled around me like a flock of eyes. I was caught somewhere between the third day of Creation and a vision of what was to become all too familiar soon enough back home.
February was studded with uncanny moments like those scenes early on in horror films when a window suddenly shuts or the ethereal youngest child is seen through a kitchen window playing outside on a tyre swing rope, chilling preludes of the terror that is about to unfold.
When I got back from Madrid there was no other talk around town except for Covid. A fog of anxiety was sweeping through the city. One day, while waiting for the bus home on Dame Street, a man approached me to ask me for a cigarette and said, “How’re ye finding things?” I knew exactly what things he meant. The foreboding and the dread. Dublin had entered a sense of collective experience like I had never felt before. We were all singing from the same trembling hymn sheet. We had woken up in season two of a dystopian Netflix drama. It was all the stranger because the script seemed so eerily familiar. Reality was catching up with our collective nightmares. We were living our lives in the frame of a Black Mirror and I wondered how our once beautifully drab lives had gotten woven into a tapestry of sci-fi cliché.
There was panic buying in Fallon and Byrne like it was the Organic Apocalypse. For the many it was queuing in Lidl on Moore Street for pasta and toilet paper; for others it would be a West Clare Lobster Lockdown. A Tale of Two Dublins!
In mid-March I met Donal Smith the owner of Grogan’s pub on South William St. He said he was going to close that afternoon, speculating that he would be reopening again within a few weeks. The echo of those words now sounds like the dashed hopes of troops to return home from the trenches of Verdun by Christmas.
“There was panic buying in Fallon and Byrne like it was the Organic Apocalypse.”
The unravelling had begun.
I remembered the immortal words, whispered to me at a party, with stoned Pentecostal intensity by a beautifully deranged Dubliner.
“Are ye feelin’ any negativity around the periphery of the buzz?”
His sense of the geography of being wasted was sublime.
Lockdown was a word I had until now associated with American policing in the wake of an atrocity. The Boston Marathon Bombings. A word to conjure fear. The sound of cackled voices on walkie-talkies. Chaos. Our first lockdown was a time of poignant paradoxes. Being alone together. Being proactive by being inactive. Showing solidarity in solitude. Clapping in our gardens to invisible front-line workers.
If the 1930’s saw the rural electrification of Ireland, then Lockdown 2020 saw us make the transition to fully inhabiting our online alter egos. Our avatars paid their final visit to the virtual tailors to be fully fitted out for a world that had changed from physical analogue to detached digital the space of a few months. Schools, offices, pubs, cafés were all drained and muted. Our veins hummed with electricity like never before.
The Night We Called it a Day
Day and Night play tricks
on me now,
like identical twins,
jokers gloating at
my loosening grip on
the exchange rate of
their slippery currencies.
The only commission charged
is confusion.
The Day rolls into town
whistling silence,
a circus juggling empty streets,
ghost trains and
traffic lights blinking at invisible
cars. The glass façade of an abandoned
office, a Hall of Mirrors bouncing back
my shrunken world.
A weed sprouts defiantly like
a bouncer at the door of a shut pub
letting in only the regular ghouls.
Foxes dare come closer; their curfew suspended.
My rusted jewel and darlin’ Dublin is a parched
Atlantis, studded with the algae of Luas tracks,
random people scurry like plankton through
confused currents.
I palm scroll the braille of the day trying to read for
signs that the day has unbolted
the night’s stables and let loose its mares.
They gallop around me now, lassoing
headlines of plague. The Devil saddles his horse and
rides at noon. Supermarket aisles are
Halloween parades, all the streets a silent Samhain
where we trick or treat our parents through window
panes and see them dressed up in
State sewn caterpillar costumes.
Kafka is retching as so many wake, branded
as insects. The schools are silent save for
the laughter of the Stolen Children, gone now to
the Waters and the Wild.
The Night’s Generals have staged a Coup
declaring martial dream law on the day.
Eyes bruised with screen time,
mattress moored, docked in my bed, in
the midnight hour.
And there in the cascade of sleep
I set sail to that archipelago of once
maligned mundanities, chance encounters
and the now, almost erotic thrill of
a traffic jam.
Before opening my eyes again
on the shore of another
waking dream.
If Brendan Behan was lurching through this desolation, he might have described it as “28 Pints Later”.
……………………………………………………………………………..
Gaelige can be devastatingly poetic.
Listening to An Nuacht.
“Beirt eile curtha chun Tíre…”
“Two more people laid in the land…”
Empty Crematorium Days.
A hearse shines,
chrome black on
Sundrive Road.
Every funeral like
Eleanor Rigby’s
Now.
An Lár
The minutes
cross dress as
hours and the days
slip into loose, dream
sewn months. Time
stares at her bruised
reflection in the changing
room mirror. One size
fits all.
It has only been a month
but it feels like
The Seven Year Itch.
Scratching the
cul-de-sac nerve ends
of my State arranged
marriage to Suburbia.
Oh, there were good enough
days at first. Or were
they hours?
She wore me out
with walking. Through her
lawns, crescents, and heights.
My fingers plucking her black
painted railings,
patent like hair clips
parting fringes of
brown clay.
Carnal Cleptos, we were,
stealing kisses in her
secluded side streets,
Undressing her addresses.
Seducing me with her
neatly trimmed front gardens,
the euphoria of her swollen
property prices and the
strict discipline of
her private schools.
Her triple glazing.
A dash of Pebble
perfume.
Car showroom
driveways. Land Rovers
crunching the gravel
like clenched fists.
Her Dutch designed
office over garage
conversions.
I traced my finger
along the outline of
her postcode tattoos.
D 12, D6, D6w
Her mute bell tower
spurned,
no one diggin’
her digits.
Quiet enough to hear the hidden
Swan gurgle, like a hunger,
beneath her
low tide streets. Always
talking to me about the
past with her fella
in The Stella. Dancing
The Time Warp Again
in her lost Classic.
Blasé
about her
Elephants and Castles.
She poured the
first drinks.
Two glasses
of Bushy Park,
shot through
me like a promise.
Swirl of
pond and poultry.
Elation of slopes.
The sudden rush
of open space.
Two glasses of
Bushy Park
slurred into six.
Déjà vu of a
time when I might have
done Bushy Park
twice a year.
It is every day now.
I am Powerless over
her phantom pitches.
I am hard on
the parks now, a
few times a day
just to stay steady.
Weaning myself off with
quiet roads never hit
the spot like
the parks did.
I am back
worse than ever,
three laps of
Bushy a day now.
Waking with
the shakes, I
find the cure
with a stroll
of Dodder.
Morning drinking Dodder,
full bottle of
Bushy Park in the afternoon
Lunch. Nap. Up and out.
A cheeky mid-afternoon Poddle
before hitting the Bushy
in the evening again
in time for the
last light.
One month into my marriage,
I am stuck at home
getting wasted on parks,
hung over on Bushy.
Remembering my ex,
the woman the bus drivers call
“An Lár”
Early in May I walked into town from Kimmage for the first time since March. It felt like I was going to meet a lover with who I had fallen out with. I wanted to repair things with her and start again.
Abalone
We were like plankton today
surveying the recent wreck,
the parched Atlantis,
the sunken city,
Dublin.
We left the submersible
at Portobello bridge and
traded our skin for scales.
A transfusion of cold blood
on Camden Street to allow
us swim the dry currents
of the boarded up seabed.
The main frame was
still intact
but the impact
must have been
extreme.
We swam past
shuttered memories,
through the silence
of these new depths.
Tufts of grass like a
neck lace of barnacles
wrapped tight around
the roots of a bus stop,
electronic times tables
blinking like night lights
on lobster pots.
Peering through Café
windows, our eyes unblinking
see the stacked chairs
and Titanic furniture of places
we once called our own.
Our gills exhausted
exhaling all
this emptiness.
We dive deeper, below
The Aungier Street Shelf.
A school of Brazilian Couriers
swarm the entrance of a pizzeria,
Pearl Fishers on mountain bikes,
thermal sacks like oxygen cylinders,
preparing for their ascent to the
surface beyond the canals.
Everyone dials seafood now.
Encrustation everywhere,
some shops have been
claimed forever, become
shells, scallop, abalone.
And if you held
these places
to your ear you
might just hear
the music of
your life
before.
The first weeks of lock down and the silence that wrapped around them felt like a fresh fall of snow. You could hear an ant flex its muscles deep below a drift of pure powdered white. It seems like a taboo to say it but there are strains of that silence I already feel a certain nostalgia for. The crystallization of seconds into epiphanies, days that stretched like long calendar months and months that evaporated after drawing their first breath. Even at this short distance, March already seems like a faraway time, another era, something I am imagining and not remembering. I knew this time was ending even as it was happening. I felt beatified by the oddness of everything. In the stillness, things appeared to be liberated from their prescribed functions. Roads dreamed of how it would feel to never have a car ride on their backs again. What might have become of them if they had never been tarred and macked? They lay there stretched and mostly untyred and for the first time in their lives. Traffic lights pined for eye drops to cure their meaningless blinking, imagining what they might do if they could see the world through one constant green light. Empty buses dreamed of taking early retirement and writing that book they had conjured, in their heaving bombardier sides, each rush hour morning in the time before. Escalators and elevators swapped exist strategies of what to do in this post foot fall world. Who knew that the silence would be such a fecund place? That dreams, like frog spawn, could hatch in the most unexpected corners of our ruptured routines. And now the thaw is here. That first snow has turned to slush. Commerce comes like a sheriff on horseback, a holstered shadow on the horizon of our reverie, corralling us all away from dreaming. Forks put to one side notions of ever becoming spoons, of scooping and souping and not just being again what they have always been, the thing that holds steady the objects of the knife’s slicing desire. And with the melting comes the first shock of forgotten pavement beneath the ice. The slip. The hard fall. Woken too soon. A dream interrupted. Denied completion.
The city is bruised. I want to hold her close.
My darlin’ Dublin, hollowed out like a seashell
I want to put you to my ear now
and hear you
roar!
Reverse the charges, talk all night,
will you take me back?
Can we begin again?
Words: Billy O’Hanluain
Images: Aoife Herrity
