I love this photo, taken on the occasion of Pauline’s mum’s 70th birthday. It captures Sean’s attitude to life well.
Good friends we had, and good friends we've lost/Along the way
-
Recent Posts
- WALLS (for Sean, on his 27th birthday)
- Angels
- Time Stands Still
- The Wolf
- Lucky in Love
- For Sean, on His 26th Birthday
- Gatineau 2017: Editors Canada conference
- All Souls’ Day
- Thoughts on Martin McGuinness
- Make Time Good
- Words
- Broken Wing
- Wild Geese and vultures
- Jimmy’s Hall
- The Mystery
- Open the Door
- One More
- To Sean, on his 25th birthday
- To Sean: Six Years On
- Testament
About …
Ballinteer bereavement Bob Dylan Bob Marley Cavan Dante Gabriel Rossetti death diary dogs dry-stone walls Dublin duelling emigration England Ernie O'Malley family life First World War Flann O'Brien football Gaelic football God Heineken Cup IRA Ireland Irish Americans Irish history Irish music Irish parliament Irish War of Independence J. L. Austin James Joyce Jonathan Swift Leinster life local history loss Lough Ramor love Luke Kelly Michael Hartnett Munster Munterconnaught nationalism new songs Paloma Faith Patrick MacGill poetry pop music Provisional IRA reggae republicanism rock music rugby rural life SADS science Sean O'Brien Sinn Féin snow soccer song songs songwriting stalkers The Pogues The Red Horizon this blog Tipperary Ulster Virginia W. B. Yeats waterfall Windy Arbour World Cup writingLinks
Archives
- July 2018
- May 2018
- February 2018
- July 2017
- June 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- October 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
Blog Stats
- 175,919 hits
The road to God knows where … Brendan O'Brien · Good friends we had and good friends we've lost/Along the way
The road to God knows where ... Brendan O'Brien 
Sean as ever, a man for the occasion, popping off like a champagne cork! Lovely picture too of Gran in the background. Cheers Sean!
Cheers, PapaG. 🙂
Hello Bilby.
Hello Brendano
Trust all is well with you and your family. What a beautiful, effervescent picture of Sean and the family.
Hello Shermeen … it’s nice to see you. We’re doing fine, thanks … I hope you and your family are well.
Hello Shermeen. I hope that you are still trying to take over the world so that we can all be properly curried and welcomed into the bosom of the Baitul Futuh mosque in Morden, UK, the epicentre of True Islam.
Keep on trucking as they say.
Awaiting the Caliphate, may I simply say that I see you as a good woman and I am interested in your translation work.
Hi Brendano, nice photographs. Apropos of loss and celebration of a life I was at Joe Slavko’s memorial “do” in England. http://ashkenazim.wordpress.com even a photo of Lough Ramor there! Xmas wishes, C.
Thanks for this, C … shame about Joe Slavko.
Hello Brendano and Xueta. Thank you Xueta for the information about the memorial service for Michael. I was not fond of the Joe Slavko blogs and never found them funny, but I was very fond of Michael through the comments he made. I liked the kindness and intellectual honesty he displayed. I was very sorry to hear of his untimely death. May he rest in peace.
Bore dda, cariad There is an archive of Joe/Michaels stuff and if you or anyone else wants it e-mail or contact me on my site or wherever. It is snowing here now Brrr.
Diolch yn fawr iawn, Xueta.
Drizzling here, and I sound like a bloke. Always interesting how a chill can affect one’s vocal chords.
WE all miss him and even though I never got to meet your son I miss him also.
Thank you.
It’s a lovely, warm photograph, Brendano.
Sean’s uncontainable excitement makes his grandmother look like a girl.
Hello Cymbeline … thank you.
A few moments later:
I must say that the party girl is a beautiful and well-groomed woman. Good bone structure. I love those drop earrings. Amber, I think.
Thanks, Cymbeline … I’ll tell her when I see her. Will ask Pauline about the earrings.
The party girl had insisted on removing icing sculptures of her and her dog from the cake, to keep, claiming they were too good to eat. Apparently she still has them.
Yes, amber earrings, and she has an amber necklace to match.
🙂
Lovely, Cymbeline. Granny was eight or nine when that was recorded. 🙂
The feeling of the song is ageless, and I hear it in the second photograph.
Yep, that song seems to be a perfect complement to the 2nd picture, even though I don’t understand one word. Yet there is so much fun and jollity going on. . Cymbeline you seem to have the knack of recognising the ‘moment’ by tagging it with some other seemingly unrelated expression.
Brendano I know I will return to this specific post just to see Sean and his gran and to listen to that Charles Trenet song!
Marvelous.
Thank you, PapaG. 🙂 Happy days.
I’m glad you liked the Trenet song, Papaguinea. ‘Nationale 7’ and ‘Jardin Extraordinaire’ are two other Trenet songs I like. I particularly like ‘Nationale 7’. It is about the magical holiday road from Paris to the South of France :
Whilst on the subject of partying and being jung in spirit, I was interested to read about a new film called ‘Method in the Madness’. It is all about the Freud-Jung split which involved a woman called Sabina Spielrein.
I thought that you might be interested in it, Brendano.
‘When they were jung and easily freudened …’ – a line from Finnegans Wake.
Thanks, Cymbeline … that does sound like my kind of thing, and I shall look out for it. Could be really good.
‘when we were jung and easily freudened’
Brilliant and funny line. I’ll remember it.
Joyce met Jung to discuss Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, who had mental health problems. Jung disapproved of Joyce’s writing … he thought it dredged up unconscious contents too readily, or something like that.
I like what seems to be prudence on Jung’s part. Surely a sign of great wisdom in the context you have outlined.
Thanks Cymbeline for ‘Nationale 7’ by Charles Trenet. He is perfectly charming, both singer and entertainer. I imagine both young and old adored him – we would say he was a national treasure. i was watching his face and lips in the film footage, and seeing how expressive he is in song, enunciating the words with such love and affection for the language. Every line he tosses out as if he were flinging ribbons from a basket carried on his arm! I am going to get a Trenet CD for my sister-on-law who speaks good French! I might get two – he paints such scenes of innocence and love of life. I really enjoyed the song, thanks!
That may well be. I think I read about it in Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce. As I recall, Lucia was schizophrenic. She suffered badly after Samuel Beckett rebuffed her.
Incidentally, there was a good quote from Meister Eckhart in the Schelling book: ‘The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.’
I do not know much about Christian theology, but the Eckhart quote makes me think of Methodism ( there is a strong Methodist tradition in my family). The idea of being able to speak directly to God, with no need of the middle man.
The ‘me and my Maker’ idea.
It makes a lot of sense to me. The middlemen are usually in it for their own benefit.
The ‘one love’, to me, is an echo of Bob Marley, or vice versa.
I think that it is very much about ‘one love’. I also think that Marley sang that idea well. But Marley must not become a middle man.
No, certainly not. Just a musician. ‘I’m just a song and dance man’, Bob Dylan once said when some people were trying to make him into a saviour.
I do not have an abstract mystical nature. I cannot relate to God without Jesus.
Which is why He was given to us.
I don’t think that we can see eye-to-eye with God without Jesus.
Samuel Beckett messed up MY mind when I was seventeen, and he had long been dead, so I sympathize with Lucia. He must have been even worse when he was alive.
And Samuel Beckett does not even have the excuse of being Jewish.
Actually no, I see that Beckett died in 1989, so some ten years after I studied ‘Waiting for Godot’ at school.
Very bad choice for young minds. Criminal even.
Yes, I remember he died in late December 1989, around the time Ceausescu was killed. My mother died a couple of weeks later.
Pauline did Waiting for Godot at school too, and hated it too.
I understood every word. I was given top top marks for explaining the pointlessness of life in linguistic and philosophical terms. I was an ace at explaining pratfalls and non-communication. I made it clear that I knew about the plant that grows beneath the gallows, fed on the ejaculation emitted when a man is noosed and murdered.
I received an A in English Literature at A-level. There were other writers on the syllabus too, of course, but I remember Beckett most of all.
Some years later, my sister met my English teacher in a shopping precinct somewhere. My sister mentioned that I had been affected by ‘Waiting for Godot’. The teacher laughed and said that she was surprised about that. She had thought that the class was bored.
I am glad that my simple Christian instruction proved strong enough to counter and beat the ideas encountered in ‘Waiting for Godot’.
I do not wish that I hadn’t read the play.
Absolutely perfect image of Trenet flinging ribbons from a basket, Papaguinea!
I hope your sister-in-law enjoys the gift.
(one also cannot help looking at his tiny bathing trunks).