Once Upon a Time… A Revolution… Howth

Dial, Pointer and Labyrinth in Truth and Lies

“…riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of bay of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs…’

If you have no picture in your mind’s eye to complement a physical one of the lie of the land you may fall over, and for, the lie of the land. If all turns you can be hypnotised or dizzied. All spiritual traditions focus on orientation or are orientated to a focus. All tyrants and demons drag you into a penumbra by, and of, disorientation or disorientate to drag you out. One weapon is the memory-hole (as Orwell noted). Another is distortion of memory by madness or possession. But ignored is the ars combinatoria or art of combination associated with Ramon Llull. We are being rearranged and become deranged. Disorder and derangement is tool of the revolutionary that wants a new order. But this happens spiritually first, especially when we have lost alignment. Revolution is as old as Satan.

Visualise Howth. Think of a peninsula and panorama on the north coast of Dublin Bay with a head over 500 feet and sentinel lighthouse on the south-east that protrudes into the sea. The hill of cloud-sifted colour over the harbour is connected on the other side by a narrow isthmus to the mainland and commanding sweeping views from its high cliffs over the Irish Sea, bay and sky. It is linked by a curving shore to the city. The lower mandible on the maw’s south-side on the map has Howth, perhaps a tubercle on the front of the upper lip - as if to warn you of this talking town. Less than 10 miles away is the centre. Millions passed this point on their way abroad sad or angry, often never to return. Many artists described going or coming home on the ferry. I can visualise Henry II coming home after the Beckett scandal long after Viking boats raided the coast and monks around there. My father’s uncle and other arrested rebels in 1916 went by here in the cattle boat going to one of what would be many prisons in Britain (and Ireland) and they prayed the rosary in the hold.

Think of the circle. We come full circle like Finnegans Wake back to Howth. The philosophy of circles came from Giordano Bruno of Nola and Giambattista Vico for Joyce as well as nature and Ireland. Stone circles orientated us. You can see across to the Vico Road from up the hill. Vico had a theory of cycles in history. Bruno was encircled with flames for his beliefs by the Catholic Church and later became a hero for freethinkers and Masonry. He was very interested in magic, memory palaces and wheels. Landscape itself is mnemonic. Nietzsche was very influential for Joyce and interested in cycles through eternal recurrence. Old foundations could be cast out. God would be dead according to Nietzsche and courageous thinkers embrace mystical figures from the East, like Zarathustra. The Nobel family had got there first and named their oil tanker Zoroaster. They are associated with peace but gave us the dynamite for revolutions that feature in the film I will mention. Both Bolsheviks and Nazis were influenced by Nietzsche. The Gay Science (1882) suited money and radicals. But it was a circular saw. I mean a circular machine, saying and old vision. Values were to be rebuilt but the idea of values was of no value and could not be. He drew people into a closed loop of eternity as opposed to an open one. Intellectual revolution serves the industrial matrix that spread the revolver and Gatling gun that lead to the later Maxim, the most important weapon in colonial expansion.

Think of remembering. This is important when there is a war against you doing so. There is an art to proper retrospection necessary to sustain a person, country or world. It is the skill of the Devil to make you forget what you should remember and remember what you should forget. Yes the doors of heaven and hell may be indistinguishable when you pay no attention. Combatting the great lie of spiritual meaninglessness must involve recombining the lie of the land and history, dúchas (heritage, place) and dinnseanchas (place lore) from earth to the beyond with encrustations between. You may reduce the world to accidents explained by physics. But there must be that pointed-to which we infer, intuit and experience, capable of being personal, having eternal memory, total recall and mirroring reality lest we cannot recollect for it is essence of which our essence comes and reflects. Longing for truth is not a mere infantile desire falsified by avalanche of delusion from Magic Mountains but deep intuition and recognition of Reality we are seduced to ignore by illusion. Paradoxically divine presence is proved in the most painful way by desperate and persistent desire to deny it, thwarting receptivity to its kingdom. Banished to lower realms, disincarnated fixated darkness has advantage of dedication to a sole dimension its essence can find a foothold in to encompass your soul.

Think of how we orientate ourselves. If hands on your watch are stuck, pointer on your thermometer or barometer are gone, the dial is no use. A combination-lock with four numbers gives you thousands of permutations. A rotational system becomes defined by a key or a sense-making pointer. For many combinatorial systems, used in arcane investigation, pointer was axis of revelation. Absent a reference point, the North Pole or a Northern Star there was no point. We see this in Sufism and their rotational axis.

Ramon Llull led the way in a 13^th century Catholic context with ars combinatoria, one early pointer leading to the work of Leibniz, information science, genes, artistic and scientific techniques of cut-and-mix (including CRISPR) which understood uses of recombination. He used concentric circles that could be rotated in combinations often with divine qualities at the outermost. Leibniz worked also on the Monad, circle with the point. Lewis explains how this medieval worldview was discarded. Scientists confused a physical map with a symbolic or spiritual one. Now we face a rotational movement without object of the process as revolution without any revelation and technique of governance involves a shifting set of concentric rings to ensure disorientation without direction. The pointer may be a continuous thread like Ariadne had back to recollection of Plato’s anamnesis. Umberto Eco talks about three labyrinths. The unicursal is made of one line. The mannerist labyrinth is more like a tree. The third is the rhizomatic or network. Joyce used all but understood the third and demonstrated how it worked in language. It means any point can meet another. Everything connects to everything. Today only net-makers and new fishers of men have the panopticon all-seeing surveillance eye to see how to incorporate the human into it down to our cellular level. You cannot get out of that type, pointers and threads fail. Sorcerers use combination systems without divine values and enmesh and thresh us.

Think of views, perspective, panorama and parallax. I can see in my mind’s eye the bowl of Dublin Bay from paths around Howth Head over Ireland’s Eye. You can walk a circle around the cliff and back through the town. In Denis Johnston, the speaker invites you to sit down on the hillside where they can look down on the Strumpet City that is ”So old, so sick with memories.” There are many looking down, in the mouth and from the heavens, with full knowledge and total ignorance. You can look across in direction of Newgrange and know your people made maps of heavens to let light manifest and unite with earth in orientation. I saw it there penetrating the mound chamber and womb of the ground like an Annunciation back to a source out of the brain’s own constraining labyrinth one Winter Solstice. In the 9^th century Eriugena we see an Irish Neo-Platonist, Taoist-sensed apophatic sense of transcendence embedded in ripples of inherent values people knew well, anticipating Kabbalah for some. It wasn’t off the ground he licked it. Maybe that is the point. It is obvious when scales fall. Just like invaders said the Book of Kells must have been made by angels because the Irish couldn’t have done so. The Irishness of Eriugena becomes disputed when the genius of his work is exposed.

With Hezekiah in the Bible, God turns the shadow on the sundial back ten steps as a sign. Whether we are talking of a reversal of time or appearance might be debated. But God must be higher than time. We are in time and space. We can align with the eternal and recurrent rising sun or son and will behind or in it or we can arrange our own will. The pointer, hand, arm or gnomon helps us know. Perhaps in us conscience is gnomon, that which indicates but is not the source or God itself, save is an essential common pointer.

Howth Revolution

Think of the layers. You fly over Howth coming into Dublin Airport guided by different waves. The castle (up to a few years ago) had been in the same family since the Norman invasion. Cromwell landed not far away on the coast appropriately at Ringsend. After he came, Ireland became the first country surveyed totally in a very detailed way and this helped dispossess Catholics. Vikings had earlier re-named the hill inhabited for thousands of years, coming here with their lore of rings that recurred in later sagas and their expulsion in 1014 occurred on the mainland nearby. Howth figures in Finnegans Wake (as above) and work of Joyce. On the head, Leopold and Molly Bloom had their passionate picnic. Yeats lived here. He understood ’the centre cannot hold.’ I recall saying hello to the writer Hugh Leonard lying on the hill one day. Meadows of memory on emerald patches condense with a faint suggestion of crimson, iron and ink. Like on top of strata of rock melted in striations and rounded with time, prehistory of druids and princesses, struggles and warriors, poems and literature glaze remembrance. Flann O’ Brien would use Dalkey (across the bay) to satirise peasantry or their portrayal (like many thereafter) and use the literal cycle as a symbol. Over there too Brian Eno lived and produced his music without direction for elevators and the elevated. Tolkien would use the ring following sagas, including those that inspired Wagner who was also inspired by the tale of Tristan and Isolde (Tristan und Isolde), some of which could have taken place around the bay through connections to Cornwall. Chapelizod is linked with Isolde or Iseult, Séipéal Iosóid. After the line above on the first page of Finnegans Wake we have mention of Sir Tristram.

While the name Howth is seen to be a simple matter of Norse for head, I wonder (poetically) whether it is could be linked to the Scots ‘howff’ and earlier versions (perhaps from the North) of idea of ‘hof’ or enclosure and even sanctuary. But this name was a replacement for the Irish one. Howth may yet have another name in the future as the land changes again.

Think of times past. After my father and uncle died I had a GAA football match on the Hill of Howth to remember them. My father was often out in Howth and one of my sisters married there. I recall going with him at evening and seeing fishermen coming in and getting briny mackerel for the gas cooker in our little Bermuda Blue kitchen a few miles away. My grandfather was interested in housebuilding for the people. There was a huge public housebuilding enterprise whose fruits can be seen below on the mainland stretching west and north from Howth. Vast estates grew up in the new state. Many Irish families could have affordable housing and raise families as they did. Emigration continued, especially as the post-war economy boomed in Britain and needed labour. People have forgotten the process by which north Dublin materialised, especially the materialists. The actual working class or farmers were often never really liked by people who preach revolution and whose identification of the class they espouse is really a construction.

Communists condemned (and still do) private house ownership that socialists advocated, especially for the native Irish poor. The principle of first-in-last-out does not apply here. No person has a superior right of access and certainly not based on nationality or indigeneity. Reformism is sacrificed for revolution. The result is radicals espouse policies that suit transnational forces. Both are materialist, counter-hegemonic and anti-homeostatic. Many anti-Nazi left and supposed right-wing Nazis they oppose in Sweden cooperated in surrender to NATO (to help what some had said were actual Nazis in Ukraine). Both communism and crony-capitalists are working to secure a tech-totalitarian society. Chaos necessary will bring a call for order. The people you think are on your side may have another agenda. Apparently counter-revolutionary forces are revolutionary and vice-versa. Counter-hegemonic forces left and right will probably secure the final end of Irish neutrality.

Howth appears in the mythical cycle. It appears in versions of a story of a foreign king seeking tributes from the Fianna who were there, being challenged to a contest and being bested. Howth was site of a famous gun-running in 1914 by the Irish Volunteers. The Asgard was a private yacht used to transport Mausers there in response to the arming of Northern Unionists. The son of the boat owner became Irish President and as Ireland is very small I remember meeting him. The owner Erskine Childers had written an innovative novel called The Riddle of the Sands (1903) about espionage, especially about location with charts and intelligence. He was executed in 1922 by soldiers serving a state he had helped secure.

I remember seeing Conor Cruise O’Brien often in Trinity library. He lived in Howth. He may have been writing about Edmund Burke (another Trinity person). Burke was the great opposer of the French Revolution who wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France. O’Brien was a bitter opponent of republican violence and IRA. At his home in Howth, O’Brien entertained Rudi Dutschke after an assassination attempt in 1968. See the Irish Times, Derek Scally, May 26, 2018.

“There was Conor waiting on the quay with the rain blasting his coat around his legs,” recalls Ascherson today. “He drove us through Dublin and we got to their house at Howth around dawn, bewildered and tired, in a warm Irish kitchen with Máire [Mhac An tSaoi] making tea for us. Gretchen remembers, too, the warm welcome and long discussions between her husband and their host: Dutschke’s revolution, O’Brien’s wild UN Congo days.”

The man who celebrated Burke - the most famous conservative who opposed revolution - hosted the revolutionary man who conceived the ‘long march through the institutions’ as he condemned Republican violence in Northern Ireland. In contrast de Valera (whom I also met) invited Schrödinger to Ireland because he was interested in helping him and understood the significance of mathematics and advanced physics. De Valera had been sentenced to death in 1916, but spared. Schrödinger lived in Clontarf and would have seen Howth most days. Yet de Valera is painted as anti-Semitic and backward.

There is another connection with the idea of revolution. A few flashbacks in a famous film Duck You Sucker! Or Che Tiestu iù la testa, lit. "Duck Your Head" were filmed at Howth Castle. Released in 1971 the parts were apparently filmed in 1970. From Howth Head one can see also places in the distance where Henry V, Braveheart, The Tudors were filmed. The area where Powerscourt lies is visible and thereto we can trace origins of Dispensationalism that informs the Rapture and thereby much foreign policy and power in the US which justifies military action in the Middle East. When you rearrange recognisable elements to build a new arrangement, the derangement can interfere with overall coherence and inter-relationship so that the integrity is distorted.

A Fistful of Dynamite

Spoiler alert (for our world as well). The name should have been Once Upon a Time … A Revolution as part of a trilogy which included Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984). It was known by the name A Fistful of Dynamite. Once Upon a Time … A Revolution was a good name. However the term revolution was almost a cliché then or was controversial. The general locus is Mexico in 1913 or around the time of the Howth gun-running. Dynamite brings us back to the Nobel family (the peace people, remember) made famous for military-industrial technologies.

Guns portrayed in the film seem to be anachronistic for people who know their arms but the revolver or revolving mechanism show to me how the military-industrial revolution is more important than the supposedly liberating doctrines preached to workers who continued to make them in their production-system that emulated the Venetian Arsenal based on combining skills and parts. Galileo went there to explain about the compass. The scientific ‘martyr’ wasn’t against contribution to weaponry. Revolutions of the planets (formerly conceived as set up by God) became a new military-industrial revolution which needed to displace the Church. Isn’t it funny that so many in Ireland support The Arsenal football team in England? Sport replaces Spirit. If I am not mistaken, the Colt that Juan uses is correct in time and place appropriately. Colt also perfected modern industrial production during the US Civil War. Do you see a pattern yet?

This film was a ‘spaghetti Western’ filmed in Spain and Italy. The conceptual backdrop is probably less Mexico and Ireland but Italy and internal political strife, though universal. Its director was Sergio Leone. Music was by Enno Morricone and the soundtrack is haunting. The name of the Irish protagonist Seán (John) is twanged in a twin Seán-Seán repetition that sounds (consciously or not) Oriental and associative, maybe hinting at Mao (quoted at the start) or war and revolution in Asia. Rod Steiger stole the show with his inscrutable and uncomprehending expressions in incomprehensible times. James Coburn worked well off him. One of the intellectuals was an obvious reference to Trotsky.

Steiger’s peasant Juan Miranda is right to be mistrustful and watching (as his surname implies). He realises people who read books come and tell the poor they need to revolt and respond and lose their lives. But intellectuals sit at their polished tables still. In Dublin the intelligentsia laughed at their peasants, just as Trotsky did not have a favourable view of the poor. Gramsci realised the counter-revolutionary peasants would choose God over revolution. Being a revolutionary was much more dangerous than being a bandit but Juan Miranda (in his dastardly robber’s way) was more honest about what happens.

Think of how views are made or constructed and what they mean. The connection to Ireland comes in two locations. One is Toner’s pub in the city centre (where I stood in the same place, then unchanged) on the same street where the artist Francis Bacon was born. The second is Howth Castle. Here we have flashbacks to a sort of triangular love affair between Sean the IRA man, his fellow Nolan and his woman. The pub scene plays out a betrayal, a Judas-twist with another turn. The woman represents Ireland on another level or the dream of her. But ambiguity is written all over appearance. The Irish flashbacks are hard to decipher and interpretations may lie behind what we have shown.

Flashbacks contextualise the present but remain de-contextualised from the past and can clarify or obscure just as much as intrude into a present delusion. The history we had, told in story and maintained in memory in community has become a recombinant wheel of movable emphases turned by those who will recreate reality. When you then fix the line in your story the lie can become true through force of insistence and world can be beaten into shape of your version of reality or destroyed in your experiment.

Magical Revolution In Combination

Aoibhinn bheith i mBinn Éadair,

fírbhinn bheith ós a bánmhuir,

cnoc lánmhar longmhar líonmhar,

beann fhíonmhar fhonnmhar ághmhar.

Alliteration, assonance and assumption of place reflect the old Gaelic interweaving of sound and sight. The poet thinks how nice it is to be in Howth (Binn Éadair), lovely over white sea. Magic. But sorcerers divorced combination from divine orientation.

Globalists are using ideas of political and tech-revolution to form a technocratic heteropolis. The poor will lose out as ordinary non-political are pawns and have been pawned. Middle-class revolutionary-wannabees or pseudo-nationalists (of post-IRA-flavoured corporate-proxies serving wider interests) are moving the world to suit their theories as are tech-millionaires and billionaire sponsors. As movements and countries, religions and families will be betrayed, so will the human species itself as they help

Revolution means a process of change of governance, usually violent, a dramatic change in context, a return to a starting position, a planetary trajectory around a centre. Revolution is associated with wheels and electrical generators. The ars combinatoria, central to Ramon Llull, sought to inform people about divine attributes and explains revolutionary process. That tradition of circular or concentric representation of the world and concepts used in proto-science, cryptography, magic and divination is ignored, though it involves ‘revolutio.’ Kaleidoscopic interaction of forces in a globally crystallising context of governance involves a shifting set of alignments often without rhyme nor reason, save the strategy that lies behind combination. You might give your life for God and find you have been working for the Devil. You might think you’re saving your country when you have already been sacrificed by some traitorous policy. When we forget the transcendental aspect we lose orientation. We then enter a Russian Roulette, roulette crony-capitalist hall of mirrors.

The fellow revolutionary, the IRA man Mallory is forced to shoot, is named Nolan. Curiously, this is what Joyce called Bruno. Bruno of Nola. Nolan. Executed by his own team in the revolution or counter-revolution. Are there complications we do not know of, especially from the implied love triangle? Maybe circle is better. Nothing is certain when you enter the game. But I say the Greatest Game is to control human consciousness.

AI is a child of the military-industrial complex, calculated to maximise control and minimise human freedom. The data-flood will flow according to this nature. Having allowed the gravitational pull in our consciousness, if we forego the natural one embedded in liquid crystal receptors of our being, we cannot return home but must be banished as our sense of direction vanishes. Think of how we organise our own memory and let technology leech us for that which would have been conviviality.

Most of all the ars combinatoria became linked with analysis, creation and ideas of the memory-palaces. This was central in a number of occupations from magician to spy. But there is good enough evidence that building up a mental structure offers protection perhaps when dealing with other entities. We see this suggested by The PK Man a book by my friend Jeffrey Mishlove. The cultivation of memory capability somehow offers a wall of protection just as our outsourcing to technology makes us vulnerable. The labyrinth was a protection for your psyche or spirit. As we yield our memory to others we will give up our soul and spirit through possession or simple collapse.

Everything is about combination. Monopolies and cartels get their power from combination, as do military alliances, the feudal system, revolutionary network and armouries. Compounds are combinations. Life itself is endless rearrangement. The New World Order intends to recombine through derangement and chaos the discombined nations and religions and even families in an amorphous heterogeneous mass to be managed by a new arrangement. You must understand that you and your descendants are the object to be eternally rearranged in the new order. To avoid reconstruction in a lower form we must maintain the structure of our inner temple properly orientated as external ones are disorientated. We must protect our memory, stories, maps of meaning and place and resist the spin within. When you cut out the beyond and your lifeline to grace there is no way out of the labyrinth. There is but one revolution, the mono-revolution, against the divine, supernatural and natural. You can choose to orientate thereto or get trapped in endless cycles which reduce your worldview to a de-divinised, de-superaturalised and de-naturalised one. Llull also had God as centre. Then we can think more in terms of the gimbal and gyroscope whereby the centre remains stable as the outer nested rings move. Again we orientate to a united axis of ourselves with the Logos. We need a spiritual arsenal with spiritual arms not guns and a spinning wheel gambling with the globe.