Make a Friend of the Untamed

 Truth is, I have been in love with Ireland for a long time now. I have been drunk on Dublin, drunk on my lunacy, but most importantly, I have experienced being driven insane by her deep beauty and her countryside. There she is, syncing perfectly with the olden souls, her ghosts and the great sense of fervour that sets your heart thumping like a detonated bomb. I have loved her a physical love, one that stretches from desperate adolescence to the banality of life, from patience to wild euphoria - a love loved by the likes of her poets and her paradoxes. And I am far away from regretting it. For all I know, I touch her like I touch the pages of an old, fragile book - with care, with patience and with an eagerness that negotiates spontaneously with most kinds of melancholia life has to offer. 

It happens to be the tamed dog that barks at the unkempt, the oblivious, the unpredictable. It is the ordeal of crippling desires that men succumb to, tethered to a cultish devotion to the idea of being revered. The man, the machine and the tamed look for Jezebel in the woods...her blouse on the ground, the dogs hungry...it is in the nature of capitalism and its dangerous aura of apathy to subject one to horror: a horror that the subject like a Stockholmer desires, a horror so profound that it messes with your sense of truth and your sense of belonging. Horror, as Chris Marker had remarked "has a name and a face; you must make a friend of horror." 

But there is an enormity beyond the desire of horror, beyond romanticism and beyond cosmopolitanism and dry discourses that painfully assert their legitimacy upon the domain of anything that is eventfully alive. Much like the exotic woman who must be exotified of her wits, her grey matter, cortex, neurons, marrow, her insanity and her perennial curiosity and heaven forbid, her beauty. Her beauty must be fetishised and fed upon, and instantaneously equated with frivolity and then owned, caged, enslaved, trophied upon the shelves. And along with that, all that she has ever done, ever achieved, ever ideated is reduced down to nothing but her fetishisable, feedable, manipulative beauty. Aligning with the coloniser's idea of frailty and fragility and womanhood, and the hunter's idea of prey, her resistance must be fetishised, too...her movement, her breathing, her memory, her grief, all of it. And her gaze must be truly colonised. Colonised to the bone so that she is able to colonise her own self in the absence of the colonisers' surveillance. Her gaze must not help but be set upon finding the suitable captor - the true coloniser to encage all that madness, all that is "bombastically crazy". And hail all of that superflous idiocy which allows for Virginia Wolf to be reduced down to pebblestones and a corpse that drowned itself in the Thames or the oven that now officially represents Sylvia Plath. 

But there is an enormity beyond all that projection...that deserves to be treaded, to be felt, to be absorbed in the bones. Beyond the banality of institutionalism, there is "that howling wind, she'll take everything...but she's easy on the eyes". There is a cat that talks to me, the lonely stray dogs who gaze with an entirety that only melancholy can contain, there is a horse that kisses my hand and a one-eyed jackal who lives in the cemetery days of infinity. There is resonance in the air, there is a bridge between the living and the dead. And you can only afford to be so close to the universe once she lets you through into her coves and labyrinths. 

Ireland is a woman, who unlike in the imagination of the nationalists (which of course, remains important in certain ways), is a woman who's neither a mother, nor a frail lover, nor a muse who must supply her existential attribute to inspire men to fight another nameless, futile battle. She is most definitely not a McDonaldised doctrine of cognitive dissonance or the grief exuded by the passivity of metropolitans brimming with ignorance. She is neither a queen, nor a slave as she aimlessly treads on her winds and her cemeteries and her olden soul and her indestructible spirit. Unlike Dublin, Ireland is a woman and deserves to be written by more women in the near future. 

There is this one eyed jackal, who like my relationship with Ireland, an Ireland that stretched far beyond the vicinity of the metropolitan qualities of Dublin, welcomed me hesitantly after all these years. While horror does have a name and a face, its omnipresence comes at a cost: a hollowed out, lifeless mass of spiralling paranoia. I suppose at this point, it would be safe to say that you are not bound to make a friend of horror. Make a friend of the one eyed jackal in the cemetery woods. Make a friend of the untamed. (And now we move on to a bunch of photographs taken by me in different places across the countryside over a period of a month since my Instagram is basically disabled because I was and still am trying to work on a series of posts associated with art in Palestine under a racist, settler colonialist, militarised, shameful regime). Enjoy the photographs!