Electronic confetti is no substitute for the human experience

I’d put cutting out social media on a par with giving up smoking. The fruit of putting the gadget down is reading, enjoying live shows, and participating in real life, writes Gerard Howlin

WHAT I remember intensely this year, what struck me most was a dancer, a funeral, and a forgotten masterpiece of Irish writing.

Dance legend Valda Setterfield at 83, was King Lear in John Scott’s Irish Modern Dance Theatre’s production. It travelled to New York, and was won awards at Edinburgh. Setterfield danced with Merce Cunningham.

She is dance royalty. She viscerally intensified the drama of the play in movement. Her three daughters were men. She regendered a king. It was an amplification and a paring back. There was a sense of the elemental and essential. This is what dance can do.

Then there was the rhythmic thud of mourners’ boots on the tarmacked road, walking a coffin down from one small hill and up on to the crest of another, hardly more than a mile away.

The chapel, surrounded by headstones, looked like a city that cold day. In a way only known to families who have lived in the same place for generations, the adjoining graveyard is a metropolis of the dead. You know everyone in it, you are related or connected to most, and the few who can’t readily be placed can be easily mapped out. You will inherit your place too.

Graveyards are social in that sense. It’s a phenomenon of passing the age of 50 that you become more aware of the old and of ageing. We, smaller families now, are heirs to much bigger ones. Mostly we have fewer children and some of us, none at all. Demographically we are tapering out exactly as the great storm walls of people around us are falling.

Parents, uncles, and aunts were a generation that was legion. They were so many, leaving me with 50 first cousins. Close to the head of the posse, I have childhood memories of them in their 20s. I remember some of their weddings. In my mind’s eye there are permanently much younger in age than I am now. But decades have passed. Eightieth birthdays have replaced weddings and christenings. Some are not as strapping as they were. There is a winnowing. But as the first who lasted the long road move on, there are little ones sitting on high chairs.

Santa came to houses on Monday that he hasn’t called at for a long time. What is ebbing is that phalanx of people in photographs, who were, I once thought immutable. Men and women who could lift me on their shoulders, who now need to be carried or helped themselves.

Days are lengthening already. In the synthetic climate we enjoy, but which is caused by global warming, demented daffodils will be out too soon.

Synthetic, which I used to associate with clothes made from scratchy cloth, is recast as miasma in the mind. Even the Irish weather isn’t natural. That will undermine the national character and conversation.

Now there is a synthetic, intensely sticky, and emotionally unwholesome diet of social media. It’s a form of diabetes for the brain; fermenting inanity with aggression to be served on shiny screens. We are agitated when deprived of light from the gizmo. It is not the shaft of light laboriously sought at Newgrange, or the star in the East.

There was novelty once. Now it’s just gormless sanctioning of social media companies to monetise our time. Our time is their money. The only commodity they have, the one they harvest to sell, is human attention.

There is nothing much wrong with any of it specifically, but the cumulative effect on the human attention span is alarmingly diminishing.

I’d put self-restraining time spent online on a par with giving up smoking. It’s sneaky. It’s pernicious. Most of it is pointless. The fruit of putting the damned gadget down is reading, enjoying live performance and participating in real life. I had almost forgotten how satisfying a long read is.

This year, the novels of John Broderick were brought home from The Lilliput Press nearby in Stoneybatter. It’s an important publisher, and its shop is a place of local repose.

Broderick was “a heavy drinker and a homosexual”, according to David Norris in his introduction for Lilliput’s reissue of Broderick’s 1965 novel The Waking of Willie Ryan.

“He had high critical standards,” he remembered, “and an acerbic style in which to express those standards, which he was not afraid to do, often at the expense of his colleagues in the writing trade.”

A contemporary of Edna O’Brien, he didn’t enjoy her public appeal. His evisceration of petty snobbery in the small town he came from — it was Athlone — was unsparing. His evocation of the expansive flat landscape on either side of the Shannon and of the river itself was hauntingly beautiful. His eye for the failings and pretensions of the clergy was high satire and a full frontal challenge to order.

His writing about homosexuality put him beyond the Pale. There were dirty books, and then there were his books. His dialogue of the great gossip between two priests’ housekeepers in the graveyard in his first novel The Pilgrimage published in 1960, is some of the most delicious mendacity I have ever read. It was all prophetic insight into a way of life, though it didn’t seem so at the time, that was already overripe and decaying.

The sense of time passing, and of nothing being immutable, is an incentive to prioritise. Prioritisation and productivity are different things. There are busy fools. Lear imagined he could create a living will. But controlling the future is always between megalomania and a fool’s errand. Things have a way of working out differently. Unintended consequences are everywhere.

What is passing for many now, and what many more will simply never know, is the dense sense of kinship, embedded in a specific place that was a hallmark of Broderick’s Ireland. An Ireland where everyone knew everyone is gone. Even in rural areas now, strangers abound. But the suffocation has passed.

These smaller families may have their share of Lear-like strife. More probably, it’s Facebook not the mart, the chapel or even the local school that is the crossroads of the future. But it is synthetic. It is inadequate. It is an imitation of life.

WHAT appears as limitless vista online, is in time spent randomly flicking, while being flickered at, a re-enactment of people gazing at moving statues. If we look long enough, of course it moves.

You and I don’t have a kingdom to divide. The addictive attraction of the gizmo is that, Lear-like, we imagine power. But it controls us. All the while, life goes by. Electronic confetti substitutes for human experience.

Every hour spent with a good book, a live performance, or if it can be had, entertaining conversation, must be better than the abyss beyond the flickering screen. Unlike Lear, gawking into the glass trips across the thin line between tragedy and comedy.