It's about living with a square lake.
To catch up. Just to see what’s new in your worlds. To wonder at the fact of still enduring.
To count off the events and happenstances of a year not easily to be forgotten: Brussels, Portlaoise, Cavan, Limerick, Porto, Barcelona, London; Viking, Active Presence, Missionpoint…. and so much more. None of which made it on here!
To look back incredulously on eight months that’ve just gone to plaid… and to share a coffee at what may well be the eye of a storm.
Go mbeirimid beo ar an am so arís.
This evening a number of sky lanterns floated high over the houses in this part of the village where I live. They were stunningly beautiful. Silent, elegant ships of light in the high darkness.
And while part of me suspects they may simply be among the left-overs from last night – when rockets and lanterns seemed to fill the sky above the trick’r'treating crowds – the rest of me half-hoped it was something else. Something more. I am probably about as areligious as you can be without falling out the door of any community of faith but I do remember that the lighting of votive candles and lights often formed part of the All Saints observations in the chapels of my home town, when I was a child. As did fasting, prayers and litanies offered for faithfulness. While fasting, prayers and those litanies are now mostly consigned to individual and collective memory, it would be nice to think that out there, somewhere to the south-west of where I sit typing this, there is a hand and heart that believes enough in the votive power of floating lights in a dark sky to set those lanterns sailing.
Lt Col Siri Skare who was murdered earlier today in Maza-i-Sharif was one of the most open and positive people you could ever meet.
She took on a mission to Afghanistan because she believed that the UN can and does make a difference to peace and the lives of people in torn & troubled places. She did it because she believed that women can make a particularly valuable contribution to building a more just and equitable order in countries where their voices have not often enough been heard and valued.
When we last spoke, she was looking forward to returning to her family in Norway after a busy but – she maintained – enjoyable few weeks at the UN Training School here in Ireland. Siri talked of perhaps returning for a holiday this summer. Sadly that is not to be.
Siri was Class President of the International Military Observer & Staff Offier Course she attended at UNTSI. She brought a light touch to this role but made sure everyone was aware of what was expected of them! Siri also had a wonderful sense of fun. And she was quietly intense about the buisness of preparing for her deployment. A professional, through and through.
It is easy to admire some people, Siri Skare was one of those. This world is a poorer place tonight without her.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam uasail agus suaimhneas síoraí di.
… your rabbits from your reindeers can get you into all sorts of scrapes when you visit friends with children. Especially when there is a chocolate ‘rabbit’ involved.
- Honestly, it’s a rabbit. You know, a pre-Easter bunny… it’s a little present. Specially for you.
Silence. Quivering lip. Big eyes.
- And those are branches caught between its ears. Not antlers. Honestly.
- I. want. a. rabbit. not. a. rudolf…
Panic rising. There will be tears. It will be a long rabbitless evening. I have failed miserably once again to connect with the whine generation (miniature variety). Old college friend is also approaching tears. The other sort though.
I should have looked more carefully at the stuff on that Maxol shelf. Clearly, Rabbit-ish is not rabbit-enough when dealing with a 4 year old. And come to think of it, ‘not A enough’ is the petulant cry of more than one foot-stampin’ type around here lately… ah yes, the joys of a Belfield Spring.
There was it seems at least one moment of levity at the recent Commencement Address to Graduands at the snow-bound beautiful, leafy campus 4k to the south of the centre of Dublin city. The conferring took place in the O’Reilly Hall which is adjacent to the beautiful campus’ Square Lake – and this, like most of the rest of the place not needed for the safe passage of administrators. VPs and other Key People, was frozen solid.
Those young hearts going out into the world were advised in all seriousness NOT to try to walk on the lake.
Which only goes to show Health & Safety sees off Divinity and possibly even Structural & Solid Mechanics every time…
… a File in her right Hand, and a Garland in her left.
One forgets that the enduring touch is just that – it remains with us. And so others after years sometimes can resurface, still seeing you as a fixture in the repertoires of their lives. Or perhaps a prop to some place or time or character they once were.
An unexpected email, a phone call, a postcard. You though you had moved on. But you’re still a total hedgehog in someone’s world.
- So what am I that connects to the hedgehog — mainly blind, deceptively indolent, fiercely solitary… ?
- Prickly. And living too close to the ground.
You draft your response, your apologia: you talk about ‘pale hens and brightly coloured roosters’ who sit in their open cages until it’s their turn to be the rotisseried or fried chicken they deserve to be…. choked, scalded, plucked, gutted, and portioned. All of which you present as a variant on the sorites paradox. Clever, that. Even slightly erudite.
Further exchanges and you grow a bit tired. These have all the hallmarks of something else that’s going nowhere in your life and you don’t have the time for this. Then an out presents itself:
- So at what stage are we gutted and portioned?
- Probably the best answer there is too often for the first and almost always for the second. I think it has something to do with loss of those bright dreams and caravan moments of the younger self. Anyway, it’s probably a choice for most people between that or taking the chance regularly on being boned & rolled. Though maybe there’s a touch too much of the-Boy-who-was humour there… 
And, yes. I have White Tiger but didn;t read it till you emailed. Not a bad read: I’m surprised in a way I missed it. We must have that coffee sometime…
And what you don’t say is about those spaces in life where we spend your time & energy just trying to keep it all together. Like now as you sit in a shaded part of an overgrown garden with too much to do and too many deadlines and no place in your heart for the sun and the summer.
But only for another fortnight. After which it will get better. Or at least this is what you tell yourself. Gilgamesh on the banks of that pool: his plant long gone.
Galway was most enjoyable. Rather disappointingly Glasnevin didn’t follow through on that half-invite. EDEN 2011 is coming to Dublin. The UCD – TCD MDP programme is out of the blocks, despite everything. Two, possibly three, new doctoral students from September.
And with that, belfield – like all those other academics who do nothing more than teach 3 or 4 hours a week, October to May – has decided it’s time for a break and is now in recess. Have a good summer, reader.
… get so annoyed with the facile and offensive nature of something in your email in-box that you hit Reply, slam out a response, and hit Send. Then you think a bit.
Another in an ever-increasing stream of hectoring emails from some VP or other arrived in my inbox today. It was banging on about some missing annual return from the 2008/09 academic year without which the world was likely, it seems, to stop spinning.
Academics are obviously too thick to appreciate the absolute necessity to …demonstrate compliance with the policy and the procedures outlined therein. So the email went on at some length about failure to complete… deemed to indicate … should information to the contrary emerge… viewed most seriously… and so on. You get the drift, I’m sure.
But bad as it was, it wasn’t this that really pushed the button. No. It was the public listing of all members of university staff who had shamefully defaulted on this essential act of probity and not returned the essential form. There we were @ after @ in the ‘To’ list: 225 in all. On The N@ughty Step, so to speak.
I was both a little angry and a bit surprised that anyone could be so casual about publishing this kind of information. So I replied. To all.
This seems to cause a bit of a flap campus-wide because my inbox buzzed for much of the afternoon with observations and comments from others on the ‘Wall of Shame’. Some were simply wondering what it was all about, others were just angry about the endless sand-storms of administration. One respondent put the whole thing in a wonderfully elegant way; it was all about meeting the ordeals (of the greatest triviality) devised by the VP’s office concerned.
For some reason I kept thinking of grey philistines and also of a conversation earlier today here. They connect – somewhere around the notion of direction, autonomy, and respect. Or lack of it.
Only one response – from an economist colleague – was in any way hostile to either my own contribution to the rather unintended thread or to those who kept the conversation going using Reply All. The message was pretty direct: I don’t care what you think. Using Reply All like this was, in a very clearly stated view, an abuse of email facilities.
Perhaps. But I can’t help thinking that sending an open-list email isn’t all that far behind in the abuse stakes. It also shows a pretty spectacular lack of timing to drop a fox like this in the hen-house when so many are struggling to meet marking and grading deadlines right across the university. But then VPs and straight-talking economists probably don’t have to think too much about that sort of thing. 
“Today’s students will learn nothing from such fatuous exercises as devising a marketing plan for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre … The whole notion of “marketing” in this context is completely misconceived. It invites students to bring a 21st-century, consumerist, mass-media mindset to bear on a cultural context in which none of its basic assumptions actually apply.”
Wonderful stuff…
Maybe it’s to do with fighting fire with fire. But I must admit I find parts of Mary Daly & Brigid Laffan’s response in today’s Times to Tom Garvin’s piece a little, in their own words, ‘distant from the challenges we face’. Or at least from those that I do.
There is no doubting the sincerity and zeal with which the achievements of the past decade or so at UCD are extolled. What I find most interesting though are the metrics that are used to nail the argument — CAO first preferences up, exponential rise in doctoral students, 230% rise in research income and so on. There is talk of a radical transformation of academic structures and promotion systems overhauled to suit research excellence in scholarship and teaching. (I may be wrong but I seem to recall that the writers were among those at UCD who not all that long ago were most incensed that the ’new’ system actively militated again promotions on anything other than a quasi-science worldview /model.) And I’m sure that there are merits in English literature students devising a marketing plan for the Globe in Shakespeare’s time. Even if I can’t, personally, even begin to think what these might be.
But I can’t help wondering a bit if this sanitized take on UCD and its life actually really offers anything other than an articulation of what the new order wants to see, rather than what it needs to see. To my mind it seems every bit as loaded as Tom Garvin’s view but towards an alternative reality.
There has been chaos associated with aspect of the move to Horizons. UCD Staff Association is on record as being concerned that morale at the university is at an all-time low. Pathways to professorships – and almost everything else – are gate-kept by the guardians of the new way and set within a performativity net of musts and shoulds that boggle the mind. And I seem to remember reading somewhere, now that I think of it, that there is a freeze on promotions in any event for the next lifetime or so, ‘unless you poison a (senior?) lecturer’. And on recruitment. Some schools here are running on vapour - with recently retired staff being practically begged to stay-on to plug the gaps.
Nevertheless, I’d have to say that their closing note – the bit about the reward for dedication to research and scholarship being knowledge and the transmission of that knowledge to the next generation – is both true and heartening. It sure as hell won’t mean advancement though; unless you do as both Professors Laffan and Daly have (each of whom I hold in high regard as academics) and, taking the zeitgeist of these days & time to heart, sing along to the corporate UCD line with gusto.
Tom Garvin may be wrong in parts of his Irish Times piece. But he is not wrong in anything like all of it.
“UCD, an historically respected Irish university, increasingly resembles an English provincial college, run on authoritarian top-down lines, profligate financially, and anti-intellectual. What is referred to with surrealist humour as “intellectual leadership” in UCD is in the hands of medics masquerading as businessmen (they’re nearly all men; welcome to 1961) and practitioners of non-subjects such as “management” and “teaching and learning”.”
Prof Tom Garvin in The Irish Times, 1 May 2010.
