Monday, February 05, 2018

Response to Fred Hoffman

On Rory Waterman's Facebook, in response to Monday, February 05, 2018 blog, Gallery removes naked nymphs painting to 'prompt conversation':

Fred Hoffman: This is like criticism generated by a bot to sound authentic but be absolutely meaningless. Or a human on drugs. I'm not sure how it contributes to the debate but its entertaining. Nice one.

~

 Yes dahling, how dahz eht contribute to the debate? And wot debate ehz that exactly, sweetie tweetie? The debate your one wanted to start about sexual violence against women by removing a painting of nymphs sporting in a pool?

This Commentary is in six parts, so please do bear with me. I got botting and as is the usual case, wrote far too much to be thought of as normal and now am wondering, OMG, have I embarrassed myself on Rory's Facebook and is there any way back to salvaging one's reputation as someone who knows one's place in the bardic order? Lols.

But yeah, although pompously satirically bottish and not without some minor quality of entertainment, my own view is the same as in the satire you are responding to. I am of the opinion that this is a crass and cynically opportunist unoriginal move by someone seeking media-attention for their art gallery and wanting to increase her following on Twitter from the 127 she had when I last looked.

As is made clear in the (hopefully) obviously satirical piece of experimental writing above in the voice of a bot-like doggerelist persona that is one's aping, as I see it, in a satirical voice articulating what is really being thought in the mind of this cultural curator in Lancashire desperately trying to be relevant and get more Twitter followers. In my opinion.

Although on the face of it appearing to have nothing to do with it, the piece comes ultimately out from and is part of a specific satirical process and form that the learning of which was a minor part of one's own specialist area and love in Poetry.

The contents and processes, the various practices and poetics, that were taught on a twelve year long literary Filí poet curriculum of twelve six month Samhain to Beltane winter semesters, on which were taught and trained a thousand years of Irish and North British poets from the 7C up till the 17C.

The native British and Irish Gaelic word for poet, Filí, is glossed in Cormac mac Cuilennáin's 1400 word 10C dictionary (the first in Ireland) as "Fi, toxic in satire, and Li, splendor in praise", and it is various the poet speaks."

Basically the two halves of a British and Irish Ollamh/poetry professor's tongue and practice who qualified not on the UK and Irish equivalent of the Mickey Mouse MFA (Toilet Paper) Creative Writing programmes (which I did myself 2001-4 at Edge Hill) but on the unimprovable original curriculum.

Who worked in the creation of literary compositions in satire and praise. Blending the two into what traditionally was called 'the speckled art' of Gaelic Irish and (North) British courtly poetry due to the mix and ratios of satire and praise that appeared in their compositions.

The poets were the propagandists and mouth-pieces of the various petty, regional and high kings in Ireland and Scotland, slagging off in satirical print those they were in dispute with, and the Ollamh poetry professors (plural ollúna) praising their patrons in their anamain poems that was the form reserved for and signature of the highest qualified poets. And with their compositions being effectively legal texts in the entirely civil Brehon law system that regulated Gaelic society.

A relic from the Heroic Iron age, pre-Roman, that lasted for a thousand years longer in Ireland than mainland Europe, and a living Heroic culture founded on ancient Celtic law, with a way of life measured in cattle and raiding, that disappeared shortly after the end of the Second Desmond Rebellion (1579-83).

And with its foundational ethos not a Penal one concerned with punishment, but a principle of restorative Justice. With every person having what in Welsh is called "wynebwerth", and Irish/British Gaelic, log enech.

One's honour, or literally 'face-price' depending on one's status, and was the base amount by which damages were calculated when someone 'lost face' in a civil law contention, argued and judged by the Filí poets.

It is for those of us who the goddess has blessed to instinctively be drawn to discovering, loving, and who make our life's work droning on about it, a fascinating area of specialist poetic knowledge.

A very profound authentic British and Irish 1200 year old living literary tradition that died during Blighty's historical Golden Age at the birth of our modern Shakespearean English language.

Aided by some of Liz 1's mass-murdering courtier-poets such as Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser. With Raleigh most famously cheerily organising the hands on slaughter of 600-800 papal troops at the Massacre of Smerwick, in Kerry, who had surrendered to Lord Grey after being promised their lives wud be spared, and at which point Sir Walter and his merry band, with Spenser present, conducting the religious genocide.

The 'papal soldiers' were in all probability only rudimentary unwanted waifs and strays and economic undesirables rounded up by a papal press-gang, given thread-bare uniforms and barely any weapons, and shipped to Ireland as a perfect way of getting rid of poor and property-less single male migrants.

Part of a wider European Geo-political Religious fight between Spain and England. And a cut-price disastrously uncoordinated toss into the sea of six hundred desperate young migrants, thrown from the streets of the continent into a revolting Ireland at the start of the Second Desmond Rebellion, on the long shot gamble that their arrival created a plosive military momentum that would tip the scales, draw forces away from the main theater of war between Spain and England, and fatally weaken, wound and then defeat England's most historically prestigious monarch to give the Catholic Church the prize of that blessed plot, precious realm, little defensive moat of men that Nature set against a scepter'd stone.

Spenser was rewarded with Kilcolman castle in Cork for his work as secretary to the mission of Lord Grey, sent by Liz 1 to quash the Second Desmond Rebellion and bring to heel the most tragic and romantically remembered of the royal Hiberno-Norman Irish rebel families and noble aristocratic houses.

Who famously lived out to the death of his family's three and a half century noble lineage of four barons and fifteen earls, the heroic Gaelic ethos. And, unlike Hugh O'Neil, the final O'Neil Mór and second earl of Ulster, the final Desmond earl, Gerald FitzGerald, 15th Earl of Desmond, head of the most powerful and important Medieval Munster royal family, never submitted to the Crown.

After having a £1000 alive £500 dead price put on him by the head of the Desmond family's hereditary enemy, Thomas Butler, or 'Black Tom', the 10th Earl of Ormond, who was currying favor from Liz in London by refusing to settle disputes with his Desmond foe using Brehon law, as the two had traditionally done since the literary Filí poet and Lord Chief Justice of Ireland (1367), Gerald FitzGerald, 3rd Earl of Desmond's time; Gerald was hunted down and decapitated by Daniel O'Kelly, a Kerry kern killing in the name of one of his local Gaelic rivals, the Clan Moriarty..

O'Kelly severed FitzGerald's head and it got sent to Liz 1 and spiked on London Bridge as a victorious prize and warning to all other would be rebels, that if the head of the great FitzGerald Desmond family can become just another acorn on the nut necklace of her maj Liz 1, then whose cudnt?

Spenser invented in one of the former earl's residence his Spenserian stanza and wrote in Kilcolman castle in the ancient Kingdom of Desmond/South Munster, his poem of good v evil behind which is concealed the mass murder he partook in, The Fairie Queene.

For which he received his pension as Liz 1s chief literary propagandist, and where he wrote the most egregious intellectually evil literary creation Spenser composed in one's male ancestral family home; his vile genocidal call for the extermination of the Irish race and culture, voiced in his most humanly evil text, A View of the Present State of Ireland.

In which he argues for what he chillingly refers to as the 'pacifying' of Ireland; Orwellian double speak for the physical extermination of Her people, but only of course if they refused to stop speaking Gaelic, wearing Irish dress, and engaging in Irish habits. An arch courtier toady propagandist's most dangerous, dark and disturbing thoughts, far too inflammatory to publish until long after his death, in the 17C. When his suggestions about how to enact official policy for exterminating Irish people and Her culture were more acceptable to voice and were enacted in the Penal Laws that outlawed Gaelic culture in Ireland.

And so the birth of one tradition at the death of another. And a form and source of British and Irish poetry that the student of it learns from the start of our studies is "the noble brew in which is boiled / the true root of all knowledge / which bestows after duty / which is climbed after diligence / which poetic ecstasy sets in motion / which joy turns / which is revealed through sorrow; / it is lasting power / undiminishing protection".

As the student learned in, I suspect, the very first year when introduced to a 7C & 10C voice in a title-less text that appears in only one copy in the Book of Ballymote.

~

  And had no title because it didn't need one as it was the standard set ars poetica text that all the poets in this Tradition knew, as it is the oldest, most authentic and foundation text giving the Reader a comprehensive explanation of where poetry comes from "the mysteries of the elemental abyss", what it is (see above), how it works, and how many of us the gift of the 'good knowledge' aka poetry "comes into" (ie are born with it).

Which the student poet learns is "not everybody, but every other person." Myself learning of the existence of this text in the fifth year of one's study of the voluminous mass of material making up the original twelve year British and Irish literary poet training course.

And that took me sixteen years before I'd everything understood in apple pie order enough to write fluidly and comprehensively present the hard-won fruits of one's joyously undertook labours to an audience. Which i have only begun doing recently after years of writing a few million words all over the internet, failing, failing better, until finally all the various pieces in the jigsaw of the literary Filí poet Tradition have like a closed box clicked shut into a perfectly and coherently understood whole.

It took four years over the twelve, not least because I was learning it via the medium of English translation, and there were no teachers to guide me apart from the texts themselves. And I only stumbled across the Amergin text detailing the twelve-year curriculum's Poetics five years into one's studies when I had been eighteen months out of university.

As an independent scholar in Dublin, in my office at a sweet shop internet cafe on Wellington Quay, at the foot of the Ha'penny Bridge on the South bank of the Liffey river, at the time I was in a fit of furious composition of either my (unpublished) long poem on Michael Collins, Mouth Flower Rock, or my (unpublished) long poem on John Lennon and the Beatles, Mersey O'Bheal.

And then there's the whole question of what part, if any, is played by the culturally magical aspect of ancient Ireland? Though it may sound terribly snobbish, arrogant, and frankly crazy, is there any truth to the notion some used to infer when Heaney was alive, of one being born to become a practitioner at the very highest level in the mold of this most naturally gifted, modest and humble of Ireland's High Poet / Ard Ollamh Érenn?

The theory that this inspirationally inclusive and warmly uplifting Derry oak was in some sense the first modest born most naturally blessed and gifted modern working-class custodian of Her authentic spiritual flame, in a way born to the role?

I am probably not making much sense and sound highly delusional, but this is a very speculative stream of consciousness and in no way meant to convey it as a fixed idea. But there is the theory that anyone with the gift for poetry can be born and led by their poetic instinct to become a primary global beacon of this scholarly drudically rooted Tradition that has at its heart the intellectual keys codes and blueprint for any creative individual no matter what station in life we are born into, no matter who our parents are, to unlock the mind within and by joyous scholastic study learn how to uniquely evolve and spiritually self-ennoble via the act of studious composition.

So one can ask, not expecting an answer but as a speculative exercise, is s/he born into it at the highest level? After all, the advocate making the case for this position wud argue, one of the words for poetry and a poem in Gaelic is dán, from Tuatha Dé Danann, "people of the goddess Art"; and as well as art/poem dán also means 'gift', highly developed 'skill', and also 'fate'. Summed up in the druidic saying: "One cannot drown whose dán, whose art, whose poetry, whose 'fate' it is to hang."

A sense of being born to the role of spiritual custodian of the totality of bardic knowledge, aka,  Coimgne,
“knowledge held in common” or “comprehensive knowledge". The saying being that "s/he is no filí/poet who does not preserve coimgne and all the stories", ie,  the “complete and coordinated knowledge” of the entire narrative corpus, in an ancient and sacred culture connected in an unbroken literary line to the oral practice of druids. 

And that s/he a feted genderless eternal spiritual being having a brief earthly experience in a human body --(as the legendary great British eccentric David Icke begins his twelve hour lectures by stating)-; is feted and blessed by Her to possess, carry, and reveal in letters this Tradition as a living repository of Coimgne, and torch of this ancient scholarly learning and practice founded on the literary Principles of Poetry aka Auraicept na n-Éces?

That began in the modern age with the literary practice of our Coole Dublin Sligo London spacer William Butler Yeats, who founded his own practice on the same course, and was lucky enough to be surrounded by the experts of his time, and had most of it; but certainly not the Ars poetica, as that only got translated in 1978.

After all, it is not exactly a job you apply for and have a written schedule, but, if you accept the claims of the most waffly higher esoteric Irish writers waxing lyrically over Yeats and Heaney, it is an otherworldly calling.

And to play even a minor part as I am, it is a great honor and responsibility to carry forward and present to the world the reality of this learning in its most fully realised articulation yet, for the next however long.

And only possible with the creation of the internet making easily available and accessible the voluminous amount of textual matter and research needed to make this a practical undertaking and not just the mad airy dream of a working class English son of Irish immigrants.

Who without the internet could not have done it. Turning up in Dublin and asking wild-eyed randomers about this great and noble 1200 year literary tradition, one would need several lifetimes because you'd be going down a thousand and one rabbit holes for every one that led someplace authentic. Summed up in a Wisdom Saying of Cuchulain: "Great the calamity in the number of ways and paths at the beds of the noble stream only one in a hundred will lead you successfully across.

But i digress, please, the above aside shud be treated with the utmost skepticism, and one wud urge the Reader to take with a pinch of salt the private phantasmagoria of an unpublished working-class Anglo-Irish FitzGerald Desmond in Dublin botting on social-media from the Liberties, heartland of working-class Dublin 8.

No, look not to the garbled doggerelistic personae voice/s drawn from the aural silence of ones imagination, but seek instead the knowledge of this Tradition in the superlative literary utterances of the numerous multi award-winning poets of Ireland with far more professional poetic pedigrees than oneself.

And whose elite Irish voices appear regularly in the global broadsheets as examples of contemporary poetic greatness in the English language, cherishing and celebrating Her literary warmth and all that is kind loving lofty and true in the art of beautiful song spoken in an eloquent literary mouth-music that is the poetry, dán and gift of the good knowledge birthed to half of everybody from this faery woman and Tuatha Dé Danann triple goddess of Banbha, Fódla, and Ériu.

The ones that represent Official Verse Culture in Ireland at its most supremely cultured level, and whose practices have been especially acknowledged, selected, nurtured, trained, and had the cold eyes of the world's finest publishing professionals cast over them; by a multitude of poetry professors in the golden circle of ollúna, that appraise, measure, sift, accept, reject, choose, judge; and in their infinite wisdom decide and publish what is best, finest and the most illuminating examples of lofty Yeatsean greatness.

Carrying forth and launching into the rarest realms of eloquence, truth and beauty, the names and voices of only the most highly trained and deserving goddess-blessed people of this speckled art possessing much more nobility of spirit, and with a far greater natural ability than oneself in communicating the full literate grace, poise, pose, scope and purpose of Her culturally learned Tradition of poetry than this common werking-klawz Ormskirk oink.

And so, ay, twuz about and around the time of being five years into learning, when I was composing one of these two long unpublished poems; that I first stumbled across one of the five or six English translations of the Ars poetica, by one of the world's most expert authorities on the Ogham or Celtic Tree Alphabet, Erynn Rowan Laurie.

And on doing so, after having been sending poems out to small mags and the like for eighteen months since the final year at Edge Hill, racking up about 20 publishing credits, what small remaining desire I had to carry on playing what I viewed as a head-game with others, none of whom were on the path I was as a student poet, having been very successful at it, and then bored with it - totally vanished.

As I thought, knew instinctively, excitedly reading it and making little sense of it, but knowing; that this was the holy grail text of the Gaelic poetry tradition. Not quite able to believe that I was one of the few people in the world to stumble on it and immediately grasp its significance. What Poetry Editor I thought buzzing my mental bits off, even knows of this text, or even knows anything at all about what I am studying and loving studying?

And so, I thought, laughing to myself, they are of absolutely no use to me at all, as this text, which has picked up the name of Cauldron of Poesy, due to the cauldron imagery in its metaphorical explanation of what poetry is and how it works in a person, is worth the acceptance of every single poetry editor on the planet, bar none.

And then sending it immediately to another mad Irish poet I knew from my time of going out every week reciting live poetry, and he is the only other person who I know who gets its relevance. He read it a couple of years later at midsummer solstice at Tara the year after I recited poetry there at dawn, low key just me and a friend. And two years later the official poetry body in Ireland had made a big official jolly out of it and now the ollúna all tramp up there every year following in the footsteps of what one's own started as a thing for poets in 21C Ireland to do.

So, poetry, aka, the noble brew in which is boiled the true root of all knowledge, aka the good gift, doesn't come into every person but every other person. Which means, according to the most expert and original authority on the matter, that fifty percent of all of us are born with the basic gift that if we train it can end up on Facebook satirically wellying culture professionals in Manchester if s/he the individual gender-less poet's mind made up entirely of consciousness and human spirit, believes, or even doesn't believe, that their decision to remove a painting to start debate, is merely the cynical attempt by someone to get more Twitter followers.
~

  And so the above lines from Amergin Glúingel's one hundred line Ars poetica, were first translated into English in only 1978, and is a text made up of thirty lines of 10C prose gloss extrapolating on the fifty lines and then twenty more of 7C rosc (plural roscanna).

The rosc is the first poetic form written down in Britain and Ireland. An ancient alliterative form of almost impenetrable condensed wisdom sayings, in this case about British and Irish poetry being 'the noble brew in which is boiled / the true root of all knowledge'.

That sadly few are interested in learning about even though it is all there in black and white apple pie order in English translation. And especially poets, I find, do not want to know of it. As soon as ye open ye gob about it they look at their watches and remember they have a suddenly very important appointment elsewhere, anywhere but listening to oneself pontificate on what they by rights shud have a little bit of interest in but sadly all too often do not.

Bear with me brother, I will get to the relevance of all this and how it relates to the above piece after some preparatory contextual remarks that will give you an idea of where I am coming from.

The origin of the twelve year curriculum is linked directly to druidry and beginning at the birth of Brythonic and Gaelic writing in the Ogham alphabet.

And over the next five hundred years the literary processes and poetics evolved in the Ancient and Old Irish language out from a seven year bardic training course, with two classifications of bard, dóer/servile/unfree and sóer/noble/free, and eight grades in each classification (a total of sixteen) - to by the 10C the literary Filí poet curriculum in Middle Irish.

Many of the texts have the same bot-like quality you detected in one's own satire above. Paragraph-long lists containing masses of information the student poet was expected to memorize and learn.

The student poet with dreams of becoming a fully qualified linguistic expert over the arduous twelve year course, began the twelve year literary curriculum undertaking the studies of the first of three bardic subgrades, the ollaire/apple.

Glossed in the annals as "a buffoon without skill", and so called because their art was at the level of "the bastard sport of the juggler's apple".

The ollaire was required to learn seven tales from the corpus of 250 prim-scéla/primary tales that make up the totality of tales and corpus of the Four Cycles of Irish Myth: the Mythological Cycle, the Ulster Cycle, the Fenian Cycle, and the Historical Cycle.

Of these there are around nearly four fifths remaining in manuscript, and easily available to access and read online in English translation for anyone wanting to follow in the educational wake of the original Gaelic poets.

There were also as part of the learning, 100 fó-scéla, or 'secondary tales', that were never written down and passed from the lip of the Ollamh to the ear of the anruth over the final five years. It represents the oral and druidic roots of the literary Irish and British poet's craft and vocation.

By which time when the anruth had qualified as an Ollamh they were writing praise poems in the form reserved for this apical grade, 'Anamain, ie, án somain, glorious profit'.

It could be the major or minor variety, anamain mór or anamain becc; with four divisions of anamain mór, Nath, the Anair, Laidh, and Eman.

And at which point the poetry professor qualified on the twelve year curriculum was 'A great sage then, (s)he does not apologize for his/her ignorance of anything in the four divisions of learnedness (Gaelic, History, Latin and Poetry)'.

~

  But the ollaire/apple was a long way from learning all this. And on completing the memorization of seven tales and being introduced to the Ogham scales in the Book of Ballymote, the student poet, still in the first year, writing their low satiric doggerel, progressed into the studies of the second bardic subgrade, the taman/headless body/trunk/stock.

The taman is glossed as a satirist who ‘assaults everyone with his recitations’, and their doggerelistic works ‘do not make the apportioning of the truth’, ‘oppress the chiefs of the court’; and the first year students at this grade ‘spew their brute mouthfuls’ of satiric doggerel that the Writing Programme Directors and Ollamh Poetry Professors running their poetry schools no doubt viewed this entry level grade of would be literary poet, as the intellectual Trinity College Oxford librarian and polemicist Rebecca Watts does Instapoet Slammers publishing trite and meaningless Inspirational doggerel on Instagram.

Our cerebral Suffolk poetry assassin profoundly disappointed that these tweet length pieces of contemporary 'poetry' draw to them from the common emojinal masses millions of clicked like, smiley and super hearts.

The core studies of the headless body/taman grade was learning another three of the prim-scéla/primary tales, before, still in the first year, they entered the studies of the final of the three satiric bardic subgrades, the drisac/thornbard.

The final bardic subgrade before the studies of the first literary grade were begun at the start of the second year, the drisac/thornbard, is the name of the third grade of eight in the dóer/servile/unfree bard classification.

So called because their low lampooning level of doggerel "sticks in the face of all." S/he had to learn another ten tales before progressing into the second year and begin the studies of the first of seven literary grades.

Beginning in the second year studying the requirements of the fochloc/word-beginner (so called because their two-leaved art is "slender as a sprig of brooklime", "fochlocan").

Then in the third year the studies of the macfirmid/son of composition, then in the fourth year the four-leaved art of the dos/bush, then cano/whelp, cli/ridgepole; and in the seventh year the wannabe Irish and British literary poetry professor began the studies of the anruth/noble stream.

At which point they were already very learned, and the anruth was "'at the heart and in the middle of his disciples who are learning from him".

The anruth/noble stream is said to be named for four reasons: "the splendor of his teaching, for the numerousness of his interpretations, for the eloquence of his speech, for the extent of his knowledge. Indeed he is found in each division of learning, whether poetry or Latin learning, or historical learning, the only thing being that he has not reached the summit".

There are various canonical texts which deal with the status and grades of poets in Brehon law.

The 8C Críth Gablach, Branched Purchase; Uraicecht Becc, Small Primer; Uraicecht na Ríar, that details the poetic grades in Early Irish Law; and, among others, Tract 26 (of 48) in the Senchas Már, Great Tradition. Which is Ireland's most important collection of vernacular legal tracts said to be written in the fifth century, at a meeting of St Patrick and Lóegaire mac Néill at Tara.

~

 And this penultimate Noble Stream grade of Anruth the Irish and British literary poet is glossed in the Rank Sections/Míadslechtae text in the Corpus Iuris Hibernici, as being:

"A stream from a cliff, this is what characterises it: it overwhelms every weak, light, insignificant thing, it carries off rocks, it alters the appearance of a strand along with intense weather. So also, the man who is likened to it: he overwhelms bad (Latin) scholars, he overpowers them with the foundations of texts and interpretations, and his teaching is capable of altering the appearance of exposition, with indulgence towards the unrightful people of little learning who ebb in the presence of a splendid stream."

And the anruth/noble stream, over the hill into the second half, took on the higher aspects of learning and the spiritual side of their practice; with another five year scholarly slog before qualifying after twelve years at the apical grade of Ollamh/poetry professor.

At year eight they were expected to have entered into and have an understanding of the apical compositional and prophetic state of Imbas forosnai, and its two sub-strands tenm láida/illumination by song, and dichetal do chennaib/chanting of the heads.

Collectively these three prophetic states were an ability for impromptu, spontaneous speaking, performance, and writing, without prior preparation.

And Irish Tradition glosses them collectively as The Three Things Required of a Poet. Once you had an understanding and practical grasp of the prophetic state you were two-thirds qualified and only another four years to go before attaining the status and grade of the Ollamh/poetry professor.

Imbas forosnai is defined by Cormac mac Cuilennáin in his 10C Glossary of 1400 words as "Manifestation that enlightens': (it) discovers what thing soever the poet likes and which he desires to reveal. Thus then is that done."

Basically the poet begins writing and the act of composition itself leads one to resolve and find illumination on whatever it is s/he is seeking to understand.

Eloquently summed up by Frost in his essay The Figure A Poem Makes, the act of writing a poem, or any piece when written in the apical poetic and psychological state under the influence of Imbas forosnai: "it begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

Although Frost is referring explicitly to writing poetry, the same is true of any high-grade writing written in the white-hot fury of this joyful cerebral state one has learned to harness and trained as the 21C closest equivalent to the Medieval literary Filí poet.

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Read it a hundred times: it will for ever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."

~

 And so, finally, the experimental writing of the satirical piece mocking your one in Manchester, is in the form of 'ainmedh: full blown sarcasm'. Which is one of the ten varieties of the satirical form Aircetal: Incantation/verse.

Which the student British literary poet from the non Mickey Mouse Schools learned when introduced to the Medieval treatise on satirical forms in the Book of Ballymote which was a requirement of learning on the twelve year trainee literary Filí poet curriculum; and that begins with a question, obviously meant to be asked out loud, and then answered, out loud, crooning: Cis lir fodla aíre? ‘How many types of satire are there?'

Ní hansa. A trí .i. aisnés ocus ail ocus aircetal. 'Not difficult, three i.e. declaration, insult, incantation’.

'Aisnés: declaration; a declaration in prose, reproach without rhyme.

Ail: Insult; verbal injury or derrogatory nickname which sticks, rhymed or not.

Aircetal: Incantation/verse. Divided into 10 varieties with several sub-varieties.

1. Mac Bronn; son of the womb, son of sorrow. This satire is told to only one person. (gossip)

2. dallbach: (blindness) An Inuendo. In this satire, the victim remains anonymous while the deeds done or not done are explained in detail. Further subdivided into three subtypes:

a: firmly established. Done when there is sufficient evidence for the poet to be able to prove the contention.

b: lightly established. Somewhat questionable evidence exists.

c: Heresay or rumor.

3. Focal i frithshuidiu: word in opposition. "A quatrain of praise and therein is found a word on the verge of satire". That which looks like praise but is actually derrogatory.

4. tar n-aire: outrage of satire. A reproach made through negative comparisons about the subject.

5. tar molta: outrage of praise.' Praise soooo overblown as it is ridiculous or ironic. The praising of qualities that the subject actually lacks.

6.tamall aire: touch of praise.' Similar to tar n-aire but not as flamboyant.

7 tamal molta: Satire which praises the subject faintly. Merecer (a commentator on the satire text) states that this could be a praise poem that praises the subject about the shine of his shoes.

8. Lanair. full satire. The name, family and residence of the victim are detailed in a very public way.

9. ainmedh: full blown sarcasm.

10. glam dicind: a religio-magical ritual using public satire and incantation against an unjust king. It involved 30 clergy, 30 poets and 30 warriors and the spell being spoken just before dawn, by all seven grades of bard, circling a thorn-bush on top of a hill that divided territories, facing north, speaking their part of the satire into their left hand, in which was held a rock and thorn, keeping the legs straight and bending their back perpendicular up and down. Honest. Search online and discover the truth of it.

So, yes, the bot-like doggerelist voice meant to be an aping of the cultural curator in one's first home place of Lancashire, aping this woman's thought process, as I satirically view it through the lens of a form of literary bardic Satire, reflects the Medieval style of paragraph long sentences enumerating the many processes and poetics of the Filí poet's practice of 'Fi, toxic in satire, and Li, splendor in praise, and it is various the poet speaks."

Cheers ears, thanks very much. If you are into this kind of thing, there is a brilliant talk by the foremost expert on all this, Ollamh Liam Breatnach, Professor in the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute For Advanced Studies. I wont link it because Facebook has begun marking YouTube links as spam, but it is titled "The Church in the Laws of Early Medieval Ireland - 2014 Lecture".


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