The Pen Friend by Ciaran Carson

Author:Ciaran Carson [Carson, Ciaran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Catholic, Paris, Croxley, Tate Modern, Gloomy Sunday, Lee Miller, Belfast, the Troubles, Pentel rollerball, pens, 1940, notebooks, French, trilby, Daylight Raid, railways, Waterman’s, Antrim, Blackbird, dreams, Goligher Circle, London, bombs, vision, Barkston, collectors, France, Elsinore Garden, Zamenhof, postmark, Porte-plume, psychic, perfume. Onoto, National Gallery of Ireland, stamps, Dubliners, Dior, guns, Bible, Ann Street, Acme, Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, opium, stamp, Church Lane, Gemini, aura, Two Dutchmen and Two Courtesans, Billie Holiday, love, paranormal, Merlin pen, Ireland, IRA, city, Exodus, fountain pen. memories, museum, Conway Stewart, Crown Entry, Crown Bar, memory, vintage clothing, Empire State Building, BBC, lists, berlin, New York, Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, John Lavery, Swan, watches, Victoria and Albert, North Street, Carlisle Circus, Grand Central Terminal, Christian, Municipal Gallery, Civil rights, Gerard Dillon, V&A, romance, Clifton Street, Earls Court, bullets, Esterbrook, Antrim Road, Wasp Clipper, Vermeer, cigarettes, Clapham, Joyce, Smithfield market, Esperanto, Avedon, Andy Warhol. Auden
ISBN: 9780856401053
Publisher: Blackstaff Press Ltd
Published: 2009-11-12T20:00:00+00:00

Only an infinite present

Leonardo da Vinci observes that if you look at a damp-stained wall long enough, you will begin to see landscapes in it, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, valleys, and so on. And you will also see fleeting figures, and strange expressions of faces, and people dressed in outlandish costumes. The effect, says Leonardo, is like listening to a carillon of bells, in whose clanging you may discover every name and every word you can imagine. So when last night a surveillance helicopter perched itself for some hours in the sky above Ophir Gardens, I could hear the syllables of your name, Nina, repeated in the washing-machine spin-cycle noise of its engines. Then I would hear my own name, Gabriel, then both our names together, Gabriel, Nina, Gabrellianina, till they would become scrambled and garbled back into the meaningless chaos from whence they had come.

Just after dawn the helicopter swooped away and dwindled into silence. I was left with the not unfamiliar feeling that I had somehow been drained of my identity by this infringement of my acoustic space. And I was reminded again of how, in the 1970s, young Catholic men like me would be routinely stopped by British army patrols, spread-eagled against a wall, and interrogated for some hours as to our identities. Our names. Where we lived. What we did for a living, if anything. Our parents’ names. Those of our relatives, our friends, our colleagues, our associates. We soon learned that these details were already known anyway, as they were checked by a field-radio link to a central database; so these regular interrogations seemed a gratuitously thorough exercise. Some names, though, Irish names, proved difficult for the English soldiers: Fintan, for example, would be pronounced by them as Victor, Ciaran as Karen, and Manus as Menace. Fiach was Fake. Then there were the Irish-speaking zealots who would refuse to respond to questions put in English, though they spoke it better than they did Irish, and would demand an interpreter to be present at their interrogations: but this procedural difficulty was often easily circumvented, as an Irish-speaking companion would provide that service, the two acting as interpreters for each other. I was once forced to become one half of such a double act myself, having been latched on to by a drunk, Irish-speaking acquaintance of my father, on the way home from the pub one night.

Such episodes were clearer in my memory when I related them to you, back in 1982 and 1983. Isn’t it extraordinary, I’d say, that the Powers That Be seem to know everything about everyone – or at least the Catholic population, I could not speak for the other side, though it did seem their identities were not so thoroughly examined – yet they can’t identify who really is who, and who’s doing what. Well, you’d say, so-called intelligence is one thing; knowing what it means is another, and the same information can be used to draw very different conclusions by different parties, with different vested interests.

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