Happy Night Carousel

Out near Shelly Banks/Pigeon House Road again, I walked onto the beach and shot quite a few frames; the colours were so seductive, so swoony. I considered posting this more panoramic one, but I like the heavier night-inks in the one above. Just before that, I had driven out onto the scap metal dock, where I watched the Sealink ferry coming in.

I have been doing quite a few land/seascapes like this recently, though it is far from my favourite photography; the scene is simply there, and anyone with a good camera could (and, more to the point, very likely would) click it. But there is something to be said for being a mere receiver, for being there to make the 'capture'. For one thing, it makes one look more intently at the scene; details emerge that otherwise might escaped those old primeval cameras that are always rolling behind the eyes. If I were not focusing and framing, would I have noticed that last little slash of sunset on the far right? Or the one tiny figure in the photo, the bird on the wet sand on the lower right? Maybe, maybe not. I couldn't have missed the two Christmas/New Year touches on the skyline though, the tall RTE aerial (our local Eiffel Tower) lit like a tree, and that carousel on the right, a fair in Donnybrook perhaps: a bright cog wheel-barrowing the last of the darkening old year.

And what a dark bottomless year it's been. The death of my mother in February, then her brother , the youngest in the family, just a fortnight ago. Six of those seven siblings have died now, five of them in the last two and a half years; as I said before, an extinction event rippling through the family. Then there was the death on Christmas Eve of well-known and well-loved Irish poet Dennis O'Driscoll. I gave a couple of writer friends (Enda and Bara) a lift to the funeral on Monday in Naas. As for the other poets, they were all there: Longley, Macadra Woods, Joe Woods, Theo Dorgan, Paula Meehan, Thomas Lynch (who flew in from the States), Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and of course Denis's old friend Seamus Heaney, who gave a wonderful eulogy. And let's not forget The President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, who is also a poet. Thomas McCarthy gave a summary today on FB:

"If a poet's funeral can be called magnificent we had a magnificent funeral for Dennis O'Driscoll in County Kildare yesterday. The President of Ireland and his ADC were there, as was Seamus Heaney who gave an incredibly brilliant eulogy as only Seamus can, Michael Longley, Thomas Lynch, and dozens of us lesser luminaries. Perhaps 400-500 poets and followers of poetry all took over the public highway and delayed traffic as we followed the coffin to the place of burial. It was a Yeatsean funeral in the grand manner for a very private man, but a man who held a very grand view of the power and purpose of poets." I would add that Seamus finished by paraphrasing a line from Auden (writing about T.S. Eliot): 'so long as one was in his presence, one felt it was impossible to say or do anything base.' Yes. I can see how Dennis would have had that effect. He was a lovely man.

After taking the photo above I drove back around the bay and sat in my car on Sandymount strand for an hour or so. Around 6 p.m. I saw fireworks going off a few miles distant on the East Pier, flowering and popping silently as soap bubbles. Then out to my cousin Slant's place in Greystones for a few glasses with him and P and C. After the others had gone Slant and I stayed up watching, of all things, Kill Bill 2. We went to bed around 3.30, as if we were still adolescents. that's one way to see in the new/old year.

Happy Night Carousel everyone.