What Else Happened in Dublin? «

What Else Happened in Dublin?

Saturday 25th March 2017

We left Dublin after 3 very happy days but probably not leaving it in a better state than we found it – at least as far as flexes trailing everywhere was concerned.

One got the hang of Irish tablets on the wall, public inscriptions, and memorial tablets. In one north Dublin street somebody had gone to the lengths of erecting a plaque which said, ‘Once this Street had the Elegance and Grace of Paris but then the Poles arrived ‘ – words to that effect, dated about 1840. In St Patrick’s Cathedral Swift’s memorial stone speaks, in Latin, of his ‘savage indignation’ and another tablet has such strings of adjectives re: the departed one, you get the distinct feeling of someone or something else being got at.

We visited the studio of Bertram Dibantry’s partner, Oisin MacNamara, whose exquisite steel rolls for the portals of an important Irish museum were knocked off by a delivery truck. That was the end of them. The studio was in an abandoned Georgian terrace house. Could a place be more derelict and draped with flexes and cables caked with old paint? Oisin pointed out that the O’Connors opposite had done a lot of restoration of their house but they’d left out one thing. On closer inspection it emerged that the building had no roof.

At the Hugh Lane Gallery I dozed agreeably in front of a huge picture of a carriage accident caused by snow. I can’t remember whom it is by. Someone very well known. They’ve also got Les Parapluies by Renoir there and that v. famous picture by Manet of a woman artist painting while wearing a very good frock. You must know them. I had no idea they were in the Hugh Lane Gallery. They’ve also got Francis Bacon’s studio, uprooted from Kensington and re-installed there exactly as it was. He was Irish too, you know, in origin. There’s no end to it – the Irish creatives. The studio is a living death, a Hell of untidiness, dirt, items buried alive, abandonment, a brutal and deliberate horror, a smashing-up of what a room should be. He was perfectly charming when interviewed on TV by the likes of Melvyn but was a masochist and keen on dodgy semi-criminal boyfriends. The paintings are horrible but can’t be ignored.

For the final evening, Harry gave his own Death piece assisted by a world-class performer who was riveting. Performing the Death piece was for him itself dicing with Death so hard is the piece. This time he survived. Harry’s Death piece is incredibly great although I am yet to grasp it fully. For most of the time it is the terror and unrelentingness of Death but something happens at the end – I’m not sure what because on the face of it, what could happen? But something does. Death is a fantastic drama and where would we be without it?

On the plane going back we encountered the performer who had diced with Death. He was going on for further perfs in Stuggart or somewhere of other works. But in the meantime he was trying to buy a camper van although foolhardy, he admitted, and had had trouble with airport security on account of the rocks he was carrying from Spain which he wanted to use to write something on some other rocks in Wales. I think that was it.