Honking to Insanity
It is that time of the evening in Ireland.
There is a vixen in my life and she skulks into my garden to eat apples now every day. Do foxes eat apples? I wondered too. But through sheer epistimology I can now swear that they do, and that they are mine. The golden apples of the sun, of the moon.
Strangely, magpies alight with no fear nearly at the nose of this stalker built to maim. They know they are quicker than the fox. They want my apples, too.
Then this almighty racket has started breaking out every dusk and here I am again thinking — can Ireland possibly get any weirder? The answer is “Oh yes we can. Infinitely.”
The sound is of an insolent car horn honking over and over again by the dreamy peace of my river, the Blackwater to the beyond.
At first, I thought it was of a wedding celebration, noisy youths in a procession of joy. But not so. I looked around in consternation and found the truth. The farmer across the river, across the bucolic timeless Irish vista in the green valley under the hills has apparently become impatient with the last vestiges of the old ways — such as relate to Thomas Hardy visions and maybe even human decency.
How far can the Irish go in losing their soul?
Don’t ask.
Instead listen to my neighbour in this oasis of beauty driving his big mother of an SUV around at dusk across his fields, madly honking his horn at each cow to herd them to some other field, honking over and over again like a celebrant of Puerto Rican Day parades in the ghettoes of New York, spewing petrol and dissonance and perhaps listening to absolute crap from the car radio.
Of all the things I have seen, never have I seen this. So sad.
My fox runs away, magic is gone … Ireland is losing its soul.
The poor salmon, keepers of divine knowledge, in my river.
