Skip to main content

Getting towards the end

 

Getting towards the end

 

I've finished my book about my childhood & feel like I really don’t want to air it, for an audience who wasn’t there will have their conclusions & I don’t want that. We live in a country where if a man lays a finger against any members of his family, he is written off as being beyond redemption, in a country that has only villains & victims, like Hollywood. It’s old testament, fire & brimstone stuff. Strange for a post-religious time.

Most people here have watched more movies & tv than done anything else. They see ‘narratives’ in life, which may or may not be there. Modern medicine, for instance, doesn’t look at narratives to heal people, it looks at what works/proximity. In our post-God era, there is no basis for belief in narratives. Narratives are biblical, homilies, parables. But in a world of competing subjectivities, which story trumps the others?

The reality for my father, if we’re to say fuck it – if you can’t beat em join em – & write a narrative summation, is to say that Dad’s good outweighed his bad. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?

As one of my siblings put it “he had a few bad years” but apart from that he was “pretty crisp.”

He didn’t go to the pub, or any club. He was available at home, doing his marking & writing his elegies.

But as we know, it’s the darker poems, the psalms that have more gravitas than the hymns, more power.

I’m writing without inspiration today, as I try to finish this book. It’s quite plausible I won’t publish it, but nothing else really captivates, apart from fruit & occasional people, but with nothing of the passion I feel about my dad. I miss him. I’ve decided we’ve gotta scatter his ashes soon, so that his spirit can be with Mum’s. From the time he met her, all he wanted was to be with her. But it was instant family. Instant responsibilities. Instant swimming against the tide. The world against the 5 of them for Dad leaving the priesthood. & then all these bills arrived from people who’d given the priest free services. The hostility was incredible. My parents had done something taboo. & So we all saw what people are really like. How quick to condemn to seek vengeance for some perceived betrayal. When really it was the ending of their bad faith that a priest is somehow different to a man. Sociological deviance is like that. Break a norm & watch the birds of war gather. United in their hatred.

So we were brought up in a scandal & taught to be ourselves. Compassionate but determined. Kind to those in need & unabashed about who we are. So I write this for you mum & dad. “We’re as good as anyone else.” So fuck you!, judges.

 

 

Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2023.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“I didn’t know!”

  “I didn’t know!”   Don’t get me wrong In a Two Party preferred system  I have no choice but to give preferences to Labor The Coalition are scum But Jacinta Allen, Victorian Premier Claimed in a Truth Telling Commission that she never knew about massacres Of Indigenous people in the state She’d never looked up The history of her country The history of the state she leads She’s Premier! She leads a department that ‘manages Indigenous affairs’ We are currently in the process of negotiating a Treaty What did she think happened to all the Aboriginal people?! They went up to live up the Magic Faraway Tree? “No one told me!” No one ever told me either I fuckin researched It was really easy Took 10 minutes There’s this new thing called the Internet & you search stuff up Like History A subject no longer taught in many schools past year 7 I deduced a lot from observing the place & how allergic we are of looking at ourselves ...
2 comments
Read more

In a very unorthodox way

  In a very unorthodox way # (For Max Sometimes) In a very unorthodox way, I’m an Irish Catholic. Of course, in terms of Belfast politics that MEANS something. & while that maybe true – in Australia, for different reasons, as Fr Bob Maguire put it – when Mary first saw Jesus walking out of the tomb on day 3 of his death, she exclaimed “JESUS!!!” – the first time his name was used as a swear word. In that way of an irreverent joke, REVERENTIAL & ORTHODOX are not my way to the Sacred/Love*. For me – I’m not really into Theology – as Max Sometimes quoting me, quoting my mate Richard, quoting Bob Marley, quoting Rasta elders, said today “who feels it knows it.” & I believe that if I am to write my Mass/Symphony of Hope/Love, I must include at least one blasphemous hymn, else the vision depicted be simplistic, like George Handel’s Messiah. The Hope/Love represented or perhaps alluded to (if you prefer) must include genuine despair, dejection, transgression else it...
Post a Comment
Read more

Though it made me a poet

Though it made me a poet   This is a superior microwave to the last if  everything has to be a competition I guess it does! In the Kafkaesque vortex Where one is trying merely to ask a question Instead one is sold something I’m monastic or have acute anxiety Anxiety is pretty cute Like a decapitated bleeding brain Covered in snails turned carnivore By the wrack & ruin of a child’s innocence The fist in the sister’s face The knife in the wall Did I imagine the latter, dream it or see it? Who threw it? Must have been the bowie Still life goes on So I went to school the next morning & got my mouth taped up For being a chatterbox Such is the life of a privileged 5 year old It made me a poet     Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2025.  
Post a Comment
Read more