Warrenpoint by Denis Donoghue

Author:Denis Donoghue
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781564789846
Publisher: Columbia University Press

The soul is what refuses the body. What, for instance, refuses to flee when the body trembles, what refuses to strike when the body is provoked, what refuses to drink when the body thirsts, what refuses to take when the body desires, what refuses to give up when the body recoils in horror. These refusals are the prerogative of man. Total refusal is sainthood; looking before leaping is wisdom; and this power of refusal is the soul. The madman has no power of refusal; he no longer has a soul.*

I wonder. It was a disgusting commonplace, ten or fifteen years ago, to claim that madmen—or those supposedly mad or thought to be mad, on socially agreed considerations—had far deeper insight, a greater visionary capacity, than the sane. R. D. Laing and David Cooper lent themselves to this sentiment and did much mischief in the process. Lionel Trilling, slow to anger, denounced Laing and Cooper for their lurid sentimentality. If you have ever looked into the eyes of a mentally ill person, Trilling said, you would have some sense of the appalling loneliness of his condition. Of course the eyes which look, in such cases, are those of a sane man and therefore an incompetent witness. In literature it is customary to prefer Blake to Wordsworth, Dostoevsky to Tolstoy, finding vicarious satisfaction in experiences we would not choose to have or to suffer.

As a boy, I did not feel that my soul was independent of my body. On the contrary, I felt that it squirmed and shuffled in the monstrous container provided for it. During the war, when clothes were rationed and we had to save up coupons to gain entitlement to them and we had, in any event, little or no money, my mother extended the life of my trousers by adding a swathe of cloth above the waistband. This had the effect of making the fly buttons come in the wrong place and extend beneath my private parts. Taking off and putting on the trousers required opening two ill-adjusted sets of buttons. I wore a long jumper to hide the additional cloth, which was of a different colour and pattern. At school, when I had to use the toilet, I tried to avoid the open receptacles and hovered till a closed stall was free.

I was no good at sports. In the rudimentary gymnasium at the Abbey, I could not climb up the rope or leap onto the parallel bars or do a head-over-heels. Forced to play Gaelic football, I pleaded that because I had to wear glasses, I should not be compelled to play. Brother Newell, who lived for Gaelic football, refused to dispense me from playing. It was a further complication that my brother Tim was not only the best player in the school but probably the best in the whole province, a wizard.

I failed to learn to swim. At the baths in Warrenpoint, Tim pretended to teach me. I wore a loose belt attached to a long pole, which he undertook to hold as I went through the motions of the breaststroke.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.