 |
Joy To The World
Our lives are heroic. Regardless if we are amongst the unknown or the unheralded, we venture into the world everyday, as schoolchildren and adults, and we battle with the meaning of life within the particular universe into which we are born.
I have always loved life and the joy of every day.
I am not a labourer or in an organised profession.
My life is my own.
I am a composer.
Once, I got up in the darkness every morning, the only boy, with sisters dressing in the next room. We were prised by my mother out of bed, and went to school. A younger brother came along and, to show off, I minded him and dandled him on top of 1969 barricades, hoping that people might think I was a prolific sixteen-year-old and that he was my son.
Looking back, for example, to this time in February 1970, thirty-four years ago, I was plagued with angst about the meaning of life, with, in the immediate, getting exams, and getting a girlfriend who could tolerate my driven, screwed nature, my nonsense, my awful dress sense, my love for Leonard Cohen and King Crimson.
Later, life was a tiny, little bit, more organised, and I motivated myself and went to college and helped pay for it by working in the White Fort Inn.
Then, I joined the Republican Movement, which was magnificent, and still dominates my life.
My comrades who sacrificed their youth, their entire lives (in detail to their families), for a thing I hold dear – freedom - haunt me every day with their potential lives, and the responsibilities they left. They oversweep, anger, frustrate - and inform me - with their love of life and the sacrifice they had for the people, for our struggle, and, now, how it has, unplanned, panned out. Those times have a gravity that persist and influence current judgement and politics - which is why I support Sinn Fein.
I cannot see the IRA that was in my life ever going away.
My days with fallen comrades arise at every dawn with the glory and luck of - and justifying -Danny being alive. Sometimes I will get on my bike and cycle for forty miles, but anonymously – with a freedom (and a little risk) - wearing a cap and false glasses, beyond Lisburn or Saintfield, or down to the land, outside Donacloney, a place called Islanderry, where my grandmother was born: metaphysically stomping ground, claiming Ireland, a common history, ownership, memory, and life - carrying through my impulse my comrades’ souls through territory that they dreamed was part of the liberation.
More often I live this life in my space, walking, in West Belfast, as my life ticks. It is the universe. There are stacks of the past. I could write a book. Walk down the road. Shop. You meet the past. We are so gloriously a part of life, and our particular lives.
Last Monday.
The sun rose slowly, unfolding its fingers from the horizon over by North Down and skimming its cold, dawn light over the contours of Belfast, coaxing frost from the roofs and colour from the landscape. People were leaving home and entering the outside world, the cheer of the good weekend fading before the daily chores ahead.
Buses drove down the road towards town, and behind misty windows all passengers, young and old, seemed filled with that gloomy, nervous silence that precedes the taking of an exam or the dread of seeing the dentist. Few want to go where they are going. They all know they must.
Monday, Monday.
I passed Bill, a roofer, hair thinning. A warm morning we would perhaps joke and talk a few moments about something current or a reference to a shared past. He once carried a rifle, twice went to jail and burned down Long Kesh, in incredible days about which he, now a grandfather, is quietly stoic. He stands at his corner, a jerkin zipped to his chin, over his work clothes, waiting on a lift to take him to the other side of town, is sucking at a cigarette and shifting from foot to foot to keep warm. On the ground, to his side, leans an old canvas schoolbag with, presumably, his flask and sandwiches.
We acknowledged each other with nods of recognition and with philosophical upward jerks of the head towards a summery blue sky without a trace of cloud, and a wind below winter-laced with razors.
I passed a child rushing up a street to a shop. He was in school uniform with a tie that was choking him, had big brown eyes, sticky-out ears, hair sticking up, and a mien of total innocence. In his outstretched hand he held a £20 note like an Olympic torch, as if he didn’t trust his own grip and it would be lost - bequeathing a crisis to his family - if he couldn’t continuously see it. He looked like my anxious self out of a photo album from over forty years ago in a snap that captured me without warning, my mouth half open in full-time wonderment.
He had no satchel across his shoulder and it came to me the likelihood that his mother had gone to her purse and discovered that she had no change to give him for the bus (or taxi) and so sent him on this errand. Or perhaps, with a feeling of shame and guilt, she had gone to the fridge and found she had nothing for his lunch.
Either way, he had that troubled expression of running late, of having a deadline stacked up against him, or a teacher who didn’t like him, and silently railing against his mother for her lack of organisation.
And there Danny was. I saw my ten-year-old self in an Andersonstown street last Monday
I didn’t need a diary to see into my resentment, at a mother ill prepared. Thinking back, I didn’t know what difficulty or feeling was in my mother’s life (she wouldn’t have even been forty), the vicissitudes of an exhausting life dictated by a querulous brood, a husband with wavering job prospects, demanding friends who leaned on her, worrying kinships, the politics of the land abroad. This woman, who lived her romantic life through library books.
I saw my ten-year-old self and I loved the experiences that were before him - the wonderment, the challenges, and the joy of life. And I felt half (which isn’t bad), half-justified, to be alive in a community which is thriving, which has matured, in which I can live and hold my head high: this flawed being who keeps alive Jimmy Quigley, Paul Fox and Bobby Sands, every day as the sun rises from North Down over West Belfast, every day of breath, of life, of memory.
[ back ]
© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison