It was too much of a crusade.
What is the point in trying to make a point? The first thing I need to change is myself, my silence, my inability to articulate or even work out what I want to say. My vocabulary is inadequate. Fighting the system, going against the establishment, breaking the hold of authority, none of those terms work for me. I speak in crowded sentences. A rush of misplaced words that don’t belong to me. I express confused emotions in public that are more suitable for letters. What I say is never memorable, just clumsy and exposed.
I have no gift for concealment. I do my best to speak with guile, but it sounds contrived, like borrowing a scarf without permission.
Better to keep listening.
I am struck by a book I borrowed from the Germany library in which the main character decides to create something that will never be recognised. It describes the furious love of a man who devotes his entire life and fortune to the task of building a monument for his sister in the middle of a forest. His decision to place the structure out of sight is central to his achievement. He builds his cone-shaped construction in a silent place where it will never be seen by anyone, not even by his sister, the person for whom it has been created. It becomes a monument to what is unsaid and unseen.
What a wonderful idea, I thought. A man compelled to squander his living energy on something that makes no sense, erecting an utterly useless edifice in a remote place, for what? For the sake of nothing? For love?
Do something useless today.
Helen has been encouraging me to write. All those silences can be put together into a book, she says. Things I have been collecting since I was a child. The absurd language wars, the mismatching countries, I have a needless need to put things in writing.
I brought the rusted shears found in my mother’s garden with me when we were leaving. At home, I propped them up on the mantelpiece in the empty front room and stepped back to admire the shape. Something about the fact that they could no longer be used as garden shears appealed to me. I began writing down what they looked like. Metal antlers. The skull of an impala. The eyes are missing. The skin has been torn off. What remain are the bones of a face. The rest of the carcass has been severed, possibly dragged up into a tree by a leopard.
Why was I grasping at these comparisons? Going for the refuge of a story? What things look like instead of what they were, the suggestions they flung out rather than the material facts? Was I protecting myself from the real world? Was I describing myself? Does everything turn into a self-portrait?
I went back to the object in front of me. Rusted garden shears. Beyond use. Nothing more than a piece of unearthed metal with no significance attached. I mistrusted even that bare description. The words were full of opinion, imposing a function on the object, it was being looked at, being conquered, given value. I tore up the few sentences I had rolled together and went back to the physical artefact itself. I stopped trying to explain where they came from or who they might have belonged to. I saw them only as the senseless shape they had become. I tied a thin piece of invisible wire to the metal prongs. I drove a nail into the wall and hung them up.
The morning is spent in the basement conducting a stock inventory. Many of the album stacks in the storeroom have been untouched since the last count. I have introduced a stock control system adopted from a publishing house where I worked for a while in Berlin. Each item in the catalogue has a card attached to the stack with the number of copies left in stock. A person filling an order, often myself, will cross out the number and enter the new figure with the amount of sales deducted. If stocks run below a critical figure, the card is brought to the attention of the person in charge, myself in this case, so the item can be re-ordered in time to meet demand. The idea is to avoid the awkward situation of running short of either one of the components, the disk or the album sleeve, one without the other is worthless.
The system is more suited to firms with a greater turnover. At the native basement, some of items in the catalogue sell only a couple of copies a year, some cannot even be given away, ever more precious for being so rare. The stock can be counted with good accuracy in a couple of hours, so there is no need for an early warning system. If a record shop in Saint Paul, Minnesota, for example, orders unusually high volumes of a native singer whose family and friends have gone to live in that part of the world, there is no problem rush-ordering copies. There might be a delay while the latest Madonna album takes precedence at the pressing plant, it can all be explained in a letter, the music on our list is timeless.
The card system is soon abandoned, mostly by myself. We go back to counting by fingers. Numerals are safe provided they are written down. Spoken in Irish, they can be tricky. They seem more scientifically accurate in English, everyone on the street can understand them. The same goes for phone numbers and appointments, less room for error.
I have entered the results of the count into a report sheet. I have the sales figures in one column. A separate column for wastage, returns, warped pressings, damaged or discoloured album sleeves. There is a further column for stock given away as official gifts. Complimentary albums are frequently rushed by courier to key personalities in the community – government ministers, priests, bishops, school principals, theatre managers, men and women in positions of influence.
Once I was finished, I compiled the various figures into an annual audit and sent it upstairs to the commander. He sent me back a note to let me know that he was impressed with the figures. The organisation had been ingeniously established by him as a charity, sustained by a giant lottery held each month in the shadow language. There was no need for the figures to balance out in any commercial sense, no requirement on any of the artists in our catalogue to make a profit. Decisions were based entirely on cultural reasoning, on keeping things alive that would otherwise die without trace. Our loss-making was repaid in a surplus of heritage. One of the latest recordings was made with a solo dulcimer player, his sales remained at zero, but the number of copies given away as promotional material was higher than average.
The commander spoke to me at length about expanding the catalogue, he wanted me to recruit new bands, younger singers, more women. We signed up a singer with red hair from the west of Ireland who had a fantastic voice, she was well known for singing in English, she carried the shadow language in her pronunciation.
Gradually, with the kind of work I do, recruiting the best of Irish talent, the urge to sing begins to disappear in myself. It doesn’t feel right. I still have the rage and the sadness in my repertoire, all the songs I used to sing in bars in Berlin, but I don’t believe I can be genuine without being fully native. Being an outsider makes me inauthentic, half Irish and half German, half man half horse, some say. I don’t get away with singing back home in my own country, only in Germany where people thought I was as genuine as butter.
The Irish for singing is the same as speaking.
One of the band members I toured with in Germany came back to Ireland with a similar problem, not being able to speak. He found it hard to adjust to being among his own people again. In a Galway bar one night, he sang a song about emigration they said he had no right to sing. No matter how good his voice was, no matter how long he had been away from home or how much he missed the landscape of Mayo where he grew up, they accused him of appropriating grief that was not his own.
He might have been a bit like me, a daily migrant, going out the door to a country he was not sure he belonged to any more, he had to check to see who was listening. People treating him like a non-national. He sang from the heart that night in Galway, but he was forced to stop when somebody roared across the bar at him – go back to where you came from.
He grew up in a big house near Westport, there was a triple stained-glass window above the stairs, a view from the windows onto a lake and rolling lands, only himself and his