I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the winter of 2015, although like most other sufferers of this disease I see clues in earlier apparently innocent or at least stand-alone symptoms, like a total loss of smell in 2008, a common symptom in Parkinson’s.
I was helped by the ability to consult my one line a day epoem, Holes, which is in its 18th year, and which apart from being my memory and yet, paradoxically open source and freely available to anyone with a connection to the internet, has now been worked on by the artists and curators attached to the Museum of Literature Ireland, and is included in their current exhibition (running until July) entitled, Is this a poem?
As soon as I was diagnosed and labelled as a Parkinson’s sufferer, it became important to me not to fall back on the metaphysical crutches that are still successfully offered to many suffering souls in the wake of such a sentence. Parkinson’s is after all a “sentence”. It is (currently) incurable, degenerative and, ultimately, terminal. It was from the start important to look the situation in the eye and not to blame Fate or some other mythical and mystical agency.
My declared intent, then, was to remain rational, and I was helped in that by Christopher Hitchens’s famous response to questions about the cancer, that would eventually kill him, why not me? The rational response, Hitchens said, was not why me? (what did I do wrong? haven’t I lived a good life?) But, rather, why not me? In other words, millions in the world get sick every day, every hour, every minute and every second. Over 700 million people in the world live on the equivalent of one dollar a day. Why me? Why not me? I am just part of that huge wave of disease, extreme poverty and suffering to which all organic life is subject.
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This rational response to my condition led me to start thinking about covenant, in its biblical and its more generally diffused presence in our partially secularised cultures of today. The Biblical idea of covenant involves promises from the Judaic god (the Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, and the New Covenant prophesied in Jeremiah 31:31-34) to the whole of humanity and, more specifically, the Jewish people.
It struck me that many young adults I have the privilege of teaching live with a religiously unspecific ─ I believe everything happens for a reason or, even more commonly, the karmic if I live a good life then life will be good to me ─ ideology which keeps them rhetorically safe, so long as they align themselves with its wishes, watched over by an ultimately human-oriented Fate that rewards good behaviour. The idea of a life underwritten by a covenant of care is alive and active in humanity today.
It is these concepts, of living with and living without covenant, and all that means, that haunted me as I slowly wrote the three sections of this book. Section 1 is an account, among other things, of what it means to be given such a medical sentence and yet occupy a place where there are no rainbows, where no judgment has been made and no promise has been broken. No Rainbows Here is the central statement in that first section.
The notion of a deity that does reward and punish in an ethically illogical fashion, and does resile on his sworn covenants, led me to start writing poems about my childhood and final escape (I use the word advisedly) from within the Salvation Army, the church denomination (complete with brass instruments and blue, quasi-military, Victorian uniforms), within which I was brought up. Wires can begin to get crossed here, so let me be clear. I am not saying that I was an orphan or a ward of the court. Very far from it. I was simply a member of a loving family that just happened to have swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the intoxicating combination of active evangelism and highly professional brass band and male and woman choirs.
The subject also led me to start writing about the United States of America, one of the last countries (can we call it a country?) founded on the idea of a covenant. This idea of an especially American covenant is what lies behind and allows for America to view itself as the land of opportunity, the land of the great American dream, the land of manifest destiny. The central poem in this section (section three) is Inauguration Day, written on January 20th, 2017, the day Donald Trump was inaugurated as the US’s 45th President. The day the myth of the American dream finally died, its special covenant forever broken.
Sitting down to describe the ideas within and behind this book, it struck me that there was another dominant but less intentional theme running through all three of the book’s sections, that is a decline in poetic scope and energy, even within our best poets. I was surprised, for instance, how many times these poems mourned a lack of epiphany. Poems like On Not Being Wordsworth, Pandora’s box and Dejection, Killorglin, August, 2018 and quite a number of others, suggest that when we lose all of our gods and we discover all our covenants and contracts are out of date, we also lose our inspiration for poetry and art.
I have no ready answer to that conundrum, save to be a Kakangelistic poet who sings about our diminishment after we have dissected the magic out of our most glorious dreams. I wonder, now the animals are dying, the oceans are polluted and boiling, and half of humanity are fleeing from their homes, whether I am alone in hearing a desperate need for a poetry of the absent covenant and the rising domination, in this world, of the worst.
Without Covenant is published by Salmon Press
