Introducing the much-needed neologism: philotyflia

Women are complicated. Most men know this. But in spite of this bland statement of the obvious, there are women out there who are more complicated. I am referring to what I call European woman. European woman has wants and needs. This too seems like a platitude, but it goes deeper than this. European woman is not even so sure what those wants and needs are. She has issues. The issues are often mysterious, undefined, inscrutable, intractable, impossible to untangle, in short; complicated. European woman loves romance. She loves the thrill of meeting for the first time and the dreams and hope that germinate from those initial days filled with the ineffable joy of tenderness and excitement. But this initial happiness is always tinged with sense of fatality. What if the flame were to die out? What if my partner finds me too familiar, lapses into a boring routine and leaves me. She believes that the course of love should be replete with joyous moments, infinite pleasure, exquisite passion. In short, European woman is a philophile: she is in love with love; that is to say she is in love with unreality. This excess of illusion is what sustains her in a sense of faintly-disguised anxiety. The archetypal European woman of whom I speak is educated and ambitious, and her career often serves as a substitute for her personal longings. She throws herself into her work. As she has the misfortune to exist in a world still government predominantly by the opposite sex, she is forced to contrive a suitable modus vivendi, a way of dealing with people, and in this case, men. European woman is no novice in the science of love. If she finds herself single in her mid-twenties, she has already experienced the best and the worst of men. If she has experienced rejection in the past, the next partner will suffer the consequences. She will begin a relationship passionately, but before long, the partner will receive the covert message. An honest European woman with issues, who is genuinely smitten with her new found lover, with usually emit the covert message early on.

The problem with men in love is that they usually discard the covert message, as they them selves are so overcome with desire for the woman, their emotions being considerably overtaken by the ebullience of their reproductive urges. But this can be fatal, as they may underestimate the extent of their emotional involvement and become blinded by the illusion, that is to say, they may develop chronic symptoms of what I call philotyflia. This is a neologism which I have coined myself. Seeing as the malady is common, it is surprising that it has been left to me to invent it. Philos is the Ancient Greek for love. Tyflos means blindness. Philotyflia, then, is the condition of losing one’s perspicacity and sense of good vision through finding oneself helpless in the perilous condition called ‘being in love’. This of course is fatal for the man. He enters into a vortex of desire and wild imaginings, willfully discarding the carefully written letter he has received in his love-infected heart which contains the inscrutably covert message.
The covert message is often something like this: “I don’t want to feel trapped” “I want to maintain my freedom”. “I just have a fear that the flame will die out”. “I want you to be open-minded”. “I fear getting bored” The covert message is always ambiguous and rarely resolvable, a bit like Oscar Wilde’s definition of truth, rarely pure and never simple. European woman wants a faithful lover but not a boyfriend or a husband. She wants to be both in and out of the relationship. The condition of philotyflia is conducive to despair among sensitive men, as it inevitable leads to what old Plato himself called ‘tyflos exein pros to ophelimon’- being blind towards one’s own interests. Sounds more profound in Greek, doesn’t it! To conclude, I will leave you with an analogy. European woman is like the timid Europa herself, enraptured by the amorous bull with whom she will passionately copulate, she looks wistfully back towards the shores of her previous existence, as if in mortal dread of the reality, the inevitable end of all life’s dreams.

Why I was compelled to hug a horse

Let’s face it. Summer is over. That is to say, the idea of summer is over. We have arrived unclothed in flip-flops and shorts at the lugubrious shores of eternal winter. We are in a dark place right now and the dull, grey skies rain symphonies of sorrows upon our drooping heads. What now? Where now? Is there any reason for going on? Of course not, which is why we must be resourceful and invent one? Why should start by trying to be positive. There are many people in the world dying of heat, sweating and writhing under the sun’s inclement gaze, they starve, wither and shrivel to death. We could well say, then, that sub specie exterminates, or if you like, on a general level, we are lucky. We are a nation of daoine báistí, soggy sufferers, wet men and, no pun intended, wet women.

I shambled down Plunckett Street in Cork on a dank, wet day recently, when I was accosted by a Polish girl trying to convince me that I should sign up for an educational project in Africa. He chided me for looking so melancholy; reminding me of how lucky I was to be living here in wonderful old Eireann. I said that the substance of luck depended on one’s perspective. One is always relatively lucky, yet the fact that one exists is usually enough reason to be unhappy. She asked me why I carried a satchel around with me. I said it was because I liked to dip into the morose world of the Greek dramatist Sophocles, while running my health on cigarettes and coffee. Looking a tad puzzled by my uncompromising pessimism, she turned swiftly to the matter at hand: education for poor children in that part of the world which has been raped and plundered by the infinite decadence of Western man. I need not mention its name. I explained to her that, although I am very much in favour of universal access to education and sympathise profoundly with the plight of the world’s poor, my own bank account is heavily in deficit, and finding myself in such an impecunious state, I could not sign up. She, being Polish, had I need hardly mention, a university education in psychology. In a moment of emphatic warmth, she embraced me and told me to smile. I politely faked a wry grin before resuming my melancholy perambulations. Strangely enough, this bizarre and utterly pointless injection of absurd optimism reminded me of that famous anecdote told of the German philosopher Nietzsche one sultry evening in Turin. Overcome with emotion for the suffering of the world, the great thinker crossed the street and hugged a horse. It was the end of his career and his final eleven years would be spent in hopeless mental disintegration. “But what’s so mad about hugging horses” I thought to myself. “ Are they not animals like us, do they not suffer and sigh, carrying as they often do, the burden of our fatuous desires, gasping and panting in the wind and the rain in order to inflate the egos of punters, hunters and brainless millionaires? Yes, all those millionaires without whom the world would have enough resources to educate every child. Is there anything more touching, more uncannily melancholy than the long face of a horse?” “Nietzsche was right”, I pondered and I resolved forthwith to hug the next horse I came across. But as luck would have it, there were none. But how did I gallop from meteorological despair to matters equestrian? That’s it. I was going to suggest that we should be resolved to gallop in the rain. Let us embrace our rainy lives. Let us jump and frolic in our puddles of woe, sousing ourselves in its aqueous depths. Let us wallow in it defiantly or as Beckett put it, ‘face to the open sky the passing deluge’. And in the meantime, if you see a horse, hug it. For as Greek myth tells us, the light and warmth of Apollo is drawn by galloping horses

On the cases of Occitan and Ullans

Tan m'abellis vostre cortes deman, / qu'ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire. / Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan; / consiros vei la passada folor, / e vei jausen lo joi qu'esper, denan. / Ara vos prec, per aquella valor / que vos guida al som de l'escalina, / sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor"

So pleases me your courteous demand, / I cannot and I will not hide me from you. / I am Arnaut, who weep and singing go;/ Contrite I see the folly of the past, /And joyous see the hoped-for day before me. / Therefore do I implore you, by that power/ Which guides you to the summit of the stairs, / Be mindful to assuage my suffering!

The above quotation is taken from the 26th canto of Dante's epic poem Purgatorio. Those of you familar with French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese might have seemed a bit puzzled by these sentences. The language is neither of the three; it is in fact Occitan or what is generally known as Provencal. If there is any language in Europe which deserves to be called multicultural, Occitan is certainly a notable candidate. Although it's status is often disputed, which most French people referring to it as simply a dialect of French, many scholars contend that it deserves the status of a separate langauge.

Occitan was widely spoken in the South of France up until the 14th century, and it was the principal vehicle for the poems and songs of the troubadour poets, whose influence spread to Gaelic verse after the Norman invasion in the 12th century. But its multicultural aspect becomes apparent when one realises that it was not only spoken in the territory pertaining to modern day France. It was also spoken in Spain, in the form of Aranese. This dialect is now commonly referred to as Catalan. There were also many speakers of Occitan in Northern Italy in the regions of Piedmond and Liguria as well as parts of Calabria in the south. With the standardisation of French after the foundation of the Academie Francaise in 1635 , minorities languages such as the Celtic Breton and the Romance Occitan went into terminal decline, but efforts to preserve and restore the status of Occitan resulted in the creation of bilingual schools in 1979. These schools are known as Calandreta and there are currently 26 of them in the South of France.

The status of a language and its standardisation is often the source of heated debate. Should one refer to Occitan as a dialect of French, Spanish or Italian or as a language in itself? The question is considerably complicated by the fact that there are many different versions of Occitan. These have been identified as Gascon, Northern Occitan,Lemosin, Auverhat, Vivaroalpenic, Southern Occitan, Provencal and Langadocian. But the fact that Occitan has an august literary history, must be taken into consideration. The status of a language is inextricably bound up with nationality and ethnicity.Why, for example are Swedish, Norwegian and Danish considered separate languages, when they are almost mutally intelligible. It is because these dialects of Scandinavian, if you like, have each become a standardised lingua franca of the nation-states bearing their names. Ireland has officially two languages, Gaelic and English, but the status of Ulster-Scots in the North still poses problems for linguists. The question is whether we can call it a language or a dialect of English.In a sense, all these languages are both separate entities as well as forming part of standard languages which suppressed and supplanted them; they are therefore both language and dialect, depending on how one views the cultural integrity or independence of the regions to which they belong. The fact that Ulster-Scots, for example, was willingly abandoned by Unionist Ulstermen after the formation of the United Kingdom, only to be revived recently as a sort of antidote to Sinn Fein's Gaelic project, has meant that few if any have taken it seriously as a langauge. But as they say in Ullans, E'enin orts is guid mornins' fother-what is despised today may be valued tomorrow and perhaps this could change if Ulster Unionists were to pursue the idea shared by some of making Northern Ireland an independent state. Just as in the case of Occitan in France, the formation of Ulster-Scots bilingual schools would go a long way towards the formation of a separate Ulster identity as well as encouraging more cultural appreciation, exchange and diversity throughout the region.

The road to perdition

With oil prices continuing to rise, our economy keeling over, and the obvious effects of global climate change manifesting itself on this increasingly rain-swept island of ours, this might be a good moment for Dáil Éireann to reflect. One cannot deny the necessity of our new motorways connecting key nodal points on the island, but certain projects defy rationality. The most notorious of these is the controversial M3 motorway which will dissect the Tara Valley . Apart from the irrevocable damage such a motorway will cause to the valley’s archeological heritage- much of which has yet to be excavated and studied- the motorway is itself superfluous and it is unlikely to ease congestion for motorists connecting to the M50. Since its pompous unveiling of the Transport 20 national plan, the Government has concentrated heavily on motorways, but in this case, the obvious environmentally friendly and efficient solution would be to re-open and upgrade the Dublin to Kells railway. If the Government had the prescience and competence to create a comprehensive transport system, our excessive dependence on oil and deplorable record on CO2 emissions could be reduced. Why, then, have the voices of reason calling for the re-opening of the Dublin to Kells railway been ignored, and why has the Government drawn international opprobrium upon itself in its insistent destruction of our national heritage?
According to a new press release from the Tara Watch campaign, the answer lies in the internal power-politics of Fianna Fáil. Since the inception of the M3 project in 1999, its chief proponent has been An t-Aire Iompair Noal Dempsey, and all of the compulsory purchase orders have been handled by his brother Loman. Loman Dempsey is directory of Potterton Auctioneers based in Meath. The Government has plans to invest billions of Euro in property investment schemes for the Meath area, ergo, Noel and his brother have, one might say, a personal interest in this project. As for the once vociferous, once progressive-sounding Greens? There is a rare word in the English language to describe them: obmutescence, obstinate silence. This was the party that had futuristic ideas for a twenty-first century transport system before their election to the Dáil. Does anyone remember their plans for Cork ? They proposed to construct a water-schuttle project, whereby commuters could use the River Lee to connect to the city centre. I haven’t heard a word about this plan since.

To return to the Tara project, Vincent Salafia, says in Tara Watch press release of September 4th
“"The M3 is a perfect example of Irish 'pork-barrel' spending. There is simply no need for a fifth motorway in the small county of Meath, running only five kilometres from the M2. Minister Dempsey’s local supporters will have to do with just four motorways in one county. "Tax-payers cannot afford to pay for the construction costs over the next three years and then turn around and spend another twelve euros a day to drive on it, before they even hit the M50."The M3 is sucking money from badly needed public transport projects, such as re-opening the Dublin to Kells railway, not to mention health and education projects”

Interesting phrase that, ‘pork barrel spending’. It certainly encapsulates the ruinously incompetent infrastructural planning of our present political incumbents. But personal interest and short-term gain are concerned, Fianna Fáil have always shown them selves to be determinedly inflexible. This is unlikely to change unless, of course, proposed property contracts fall through and the economy goes into free fall. In a country that relies so helplessly on volatile multi-nationals, whose bottom-line is profit, it might be prudent to think of the only indigenous industry we can rely on: tourism; and what a shame if the only way for tourists to access the Tara Valley was through a motorway which destroyed its unique ambience.

Reflections on the origins of the word Boulangerie

If one were to single out one item of food that epitomises the French way of life, the baguette would undoutedely be a contender. The French love freshly baked bread, and there is hardly a village or street in all of France which does not have a Boulangerie, where baguettes are lovingly prepared as well as various delicious cakes and pastries. That is why one will not find a French equivalent of the Anglophone expression ‘ the greatest invention since sliced bread’. Industrially packaged sliced pans never really took off in the land of haute cuisine
, where the pleasure derived from good food bears an importance of almost religious intensity.
Considering its centrality to French life, one would think that the word boulangerie would have an obvious origin in the French language, something self-evident and logical ; but, surprisingly, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Most French etymological dictionaries derive the word from medieval Latin, citing the obscure word bulangarius as a possible source. But this doesn’t explain much about the literal meaning of the word. Seeing as the Latin word for bread is panis, from which we have derivations in all the Romance languages, the origin of this quintessentially French word still remains obscure. The Latin for boulangerie is infact pistrinum. French philologists contend thqt boulangerie is derived from the latin bulla, but this word, although containing the notion of something round, was only used to denote the seal of a letter, as in a papal bull. But there is no evidence of this word being used in the sense of kneeding dough to make bread. This mystery becomes more complex when one examines equivalent words in the other Latinate languages. Italian has fornajo and panateria, while Spanish gives us the obvious panaderia. So where does this puzzling word boulangerie come from ? It should contain a meaning pertaining to the baking or kneading of bread. One can safely conjecture that the medieval bulangarius is a mere latinisation of a pre-existing word, peculiar to the province of Roman Gaul.

Flicking through my Gaelic etymology dictionary by Charles Mackay recently, I stumbled on a possible solution to this problem. Mackay, equally puzzled by this word, derives it from the Gaelic builin meaning a loaf and anas, a dainty, a cake, a pastry. However, the former word rather disconcertingly means anus according to O Donaill’s Irish dictionary ! But assuming that it is an old word in Scots Gaelic, the language most familiar to the author, I have to admit the ingenious cogency of his interpretation. The Irish word denoting striking, beating or kneading is bualadh, whence builin meaning kneaded dough or bread. Putting these two words together we have bualanas, which is startlingly close to boulangerie. But if boulangerie is indeed cognate with the Irish word for loaf, perhaps we can only cite eight hundred years of British colonisation for the absence of a corresponding appreciation of bread and confectionary in Irish culture.
If one were to accept this etymology, one would have to conclude that boulangerie is an old Gaulish word which lived on in the superimposed latinate language of French.

If we contemplate the striking similarities between Gaulish and Gaelic words, the hypothesis becomes all the more convincing. It also raises questions about the ability of French philologists to find suitable derivations of non-latinate words, being for the most part ignorant of our noble Gaelic. I am reminded of the famous declaration of Dr.Murray, late professor of Oriental languages in the University of Edinburgh, who said " Without a considerable knowledge of Gaelic, no person can make any proficiency whatever in philology " The more I dig into this linguistic soil, the more convinced I am of the ineluctable veracity of this assertion

Götterdämmerung

die da oben sitzen, oben nur weil jene unten sitzen,
….those on top sit up there only because the others sit below
Bertold Brecht

Crisis, doom, gloom, panic, freefall, meltdown, catastrophe, disaster, despair, the abyss. Oh the crisis the crisis the infernal crisis ! Oh how the mighty have fallen ! By now the names have almost engender quasi- lyrical connotations of disaster on a grand scale : Northern Rock, Merril Lynch, Fanny Mae, Fanny Mac, Lehman Brothers, the great Titans of the world economy, either on the brink or consigned to the dustbin of history. For most of us, consumed as we are with the inevitable chores of daily life, the interminable labour we perform for food and raiment, the crisis is really something that doesn’t concern us. It has something to do with those guys we see on the Tele, sweating and fretting over frantically fluctuating figures on overhead monitors. Very few people understand the financial markets, the Nasdac, the Dow Jones etc, and it is precisely this pandemic ignorance which allows the traders, bankers, stock brokers and investors to clandestinely determine the fate of the planet. The bankers are the rulers of the earth and as such they could be said to have the status of gods. Just like the gods, they rarely make an appearance in public, preferring to keep a low profile. Instead, they communicate with us mere mortals through their obsequious emisseries, the angels. The angels are the governments whose duty is to communicate the messages of the gods. When I use the term gods, I am thinking more in terms of the Ancient Greek deities, who were anthropomorphic, that is to say, bearing all the qualities, characteristics and many of the weaknesses of the mortals over whom they so indifferently reign. The gods are complex creatures. They eat, drink and feast and are always hungry for more. They have nothing but contempt for the masses of the faithful who are compelled to make regular sacrifices to satiate their voracious appetites, and it is precisely this need for sacrifice which constitutes the essential weakness of these capricious deities ; they rely on the subservience and ignorant belief of the faithful to perpetuate their superiority. In other words, the greatness of the gods depends on the voluntary smallness of man.

There is one central difference between the Greek gods and the Christian deity. The Greek gods were also subject to the arbitrary and inscrutable forces of Fate; they lacked the omnipotence and omniscience of what the Christians call God, who is a bit of a bore in comparison. And so, just like their Grecian predecessors the gods of the modern world are incapable of controlling their own fate. Ergo when their excesses are punished by fate, it is the faithful who have to pay. The United States government has proposed a rescue package of 700 billion to save the American economy from ruin. This means further taxes on the working class, the faithful of capitalist theology. The faithful, too terrified to object, are well advised on this matter, by their local clergy, the economists. Economists are often hard to understand, but as many of them are bald and have glasses, they seem to know what they are talking about. So, we the ignorant faithful listen and take their advice. They often says things like ‘the market moves in mysterious ways’ or ‘It’s important to raise consumer confidence’, which is a bit like saying ‘ god is good even if nobody understands him, so be a good boy and say your prayers’. Such economists are what I call Market Catholics. For the Market Catholic there is one way and one way only. On the other hand there are also Market Protestants. The Market Protestants are usually endowed with prophetic powers ( no pun intended). They often predict when the crisis is going to come; they are harbingers of the apocalypse who exhort us to work harder and join in prayer. At the very end of the scale are the atheists. They live on the left hand side of the capitalist world. Many of them seek the overthrow of the gods and the construction of a new world order based on the principal of equality. Since the fall of the rebel angels 18 years ago,( ie, the Soviet Union ) they have been kept in the underworld. In Ancient Greek society Socrates was the first intellectual of note to question the existence of the gods. In Christian mythology Lucifer, whose name means ‘ bearer of light’, was the first angel to challenge the tyranny of God. Considering the darkness in which we currently find ourselves, perhaps these metaphors merit reflection.

What is the question?

The radio-waves of the world saturate our working-days with tidings of the latest woe. The only perceptible difference is its progessive worsening. The halcyon days of lassez-faire economics that facilitated an orgy of reckless consumption have passed abruptly into the frosty fold of winter. This is indeed the winter of our discontent, one which is likely to last beyond spring and summer, a long-term winter.

But what have we done wrong, what have we the workers, labourers, assistants, functionaries of the capitalist system done to deserve such an tornado of depression. What is the crisis about ? Who is responsible ? What can be done ? Where do we go from here ? Up until now, the daily economic question was principally one of scale. The morning business reports would tell us that the market was for the most part growing. People were getting richer. Yes, the general assumtion was that ‘people’ were gaining. But which people ? We were inundated with reports of the highest people. That is to say those who manage the banks, the new secret aristocracy of our time. So an so’s annual salary reached 3 million this year. Mr X or bank Y made 2 million on bonuses this year etc etc. Of course, all this meant that the economy was fine. The miraculous trickle-down effect would ensure that we would all benefit. Just as God functioned as a incontrovertible source of autocratic power in the middle-ages, keeping the peasants and serfs quaking with fear, today’s unquestionable authority is the market. The market loves us all and only madmen and socialists would challenge its infallibility.

In pre-renaissance or late-medieval Europe when universities were being founded throughout our backward continent, universities began to teach the liberal arts : grammar, rhetoric and theology were heavily emphasised. Through the mediation of Islamic scholars, the works of Artistotle began to circulate throughout Europe. The challenge for European thinkers was not so much to understand the works of Aristotle but to assimilate them to Christian dogma. Thomas Aquinas-an Italian scholar who received his instruction in Aristotelian philosophy from an Irishman known as Petrus de Ibernia- did his utmost to subordinate Greek philosophy to Christian theology. Since God’s existence was incontrovertible, the dictum of the times was fides querens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.

The philosophical question which would demand valid and rational reasons for belief in God was excluded from the outset, and so the aim was to work out the rationality of God’s ways as revealed to us in Christian mythology. We have come along way in Europe since then. The enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century put an end to theocracy and the tyranny of monarchy, proclaiming the rights of man and the sanctity of liberty. Today’s post-enlightenment world still cherishes these ideas, so much in fact that the sovereignty of the individual has mutated into a grotesque dogma. Having seen the excesses and failures of the Soviet Union and its sudden fall, apologists of the new dogma proclaimed the aim or end-target of history. Human beings had reached the era of liberal democracy and market capitalism was the only system that permitted the exercise of this new freedom. In this sense plutocracy or the rule of the rich, has replaced theocracy or the rule of God. So, just as Aquinas was unable to excogitate valid reasons for belief in God, today’s world is unable to imagine an alternative to capitalism. In such a quandary, the only question that can be asked is how to fix the system, how to repent and seek the remission of sins. This frantic search for an answer, a solution, a quick fix can only be an answer to an unquestionable presupposition, that the market should continue to function. In other words, that the plutocracy should remain in place. The problem , then, is as the Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Zizek has noted, not that we don’t know how to formulate an answer to the crisis, rather, we do not know how to ask the question concerning the crisis. In other words, rather than asking ‘what is the answer’, we need to have the audacity to ask ‘ what is the question ?’ What is it that we want ? Who is this ‘we’, the majority of working people, or the minority who determine our working conditions ? If we cannot ask the right questions we will only reinstate the problem, and of course this is the nature of the depression or rather the oppression that has been perpetrated upon us by the plutocracy. The questions they pose already presuppose their desired answer.