Two Bar was a name they gave a certain view of the Paris Basin, from their side of the river looking north past the clumps of muck and stranded flood wrack which would later host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, set just upstream, the favorably disposed citydwellings of the anciently and permanently rich of present day Paris, but seeing then, instead, the place where by the wrestlings of chance and design it would become.

coil The controversial Barry Coat of Arms

The controversial
Barry Coat of Arms

coil

January jollies

ustice is often possible among the humans.

Attempting to extend the palliative order of justice to the other animals brings on all the known difficulties.

What meet justice is there where human greets the dog, as example? Surely only the clique of them who are the humans among a crowd made up of dogs and humans would own any interest at all in that consequential quality should some pasing regard for it arise among them. However strained its effort, the given dog will poorly appercieve what smells like justice to the humans. Justice is not noted by the dog, however much the dog may figure in its measured consequence.

Mercy, though, ah well, yes, the dog notes that, along with unmercy's contrasting dole at times in the consequential acts of human justice.

By dint of the mercies it recieves the dog is at play in the field of human justice, and by daunt of the rougher justices it remains.

It may appear at times that those of us here at HCE who speak for the dog do take with a grain of salt the entailed mercies necessitated by our adopted position in the matter.

There is some justice in this view.

To this day the hint of all the justice long visited on pigs besetting the Barry Family down the millennia in the Paris Basin survives in the tropes of those of us here at HCE descended from that ilk.

When finally justice reached its cathartic if gradually achieved culmination in the unhousing of the swine forever from the abode of Barrys on reaching the southwestern shore of Ireland (influenced not only by the interactive presence of the cumulative pigs themselves as they played their consequential role among Barrys all the while, but also deriving admittedly from due deliberation on the part of Barrys regarding the expressed position on the matter of the pigs offered up consistently by neighbors down the ages and just as consistently by the odd visitor from afar) the Barry Family did what was simply merciful by no further extending its long established harping on the justices inherent in its usages of pigs in the first place.

Reaching Ireland the Barry Family expended all its mercies on the argument of justice for the pigs, exhausting in that momentous transaction what little natural store of the gentle substance its members were endowed with: justly or no, in principle the pigs were foreverafter excluded.

Mercy spent in that tremendous act, an evident asperity entered into the Barry Family conversation, scenting what sparse measure of kindlinesses its members were capable of delivering unprovoked with the dry sage odor of suggestive substitutes for the depleted quality.

Certainly, as regards the dog, the quality of mercy is constained here at HCE by temperament and training.

January 16, 2007

January 17, 2007

The Incorporeal Da

I.

-I see where Santa Clara has beaten Maryland in the first round of the College Basketball Tourney. The Jesuit fields a good squad. You have to give him that, whatever you might think about the Order.

The Da is a Christian Brothers man, himself. The more Jansenist the better, is the expressed view of the Da. Between the two he scents a bit of the frivolous in your man the Jesuit.

The Da holds no brief for the March Madness, no. Not the smallest bit. The current status of the hoops, you know. His father-in-law was a giant of a man in his time at six foot even, towering over everyone on the court. Played center for the Olympic Club in the days of the old AAU.

- Your grandfather and the lads. A privelege to witness. We’ll never see their like again, is what I’m thinking, is how the Da puts it.

- Do you know what I’m saying?

-Amateurs! Would they take a penny? Never! Devotion to the contest: played for the love of it!

-Crushing victory in the finals: 12 to 6, I think it was, with two knockdowns and a standing eight count. Won on foul shots.

-And never a thought to lifting the hoof up off the floor: slid along the court, you see?

-Two handed set shots

-Every move considered

Stately.

And all the while the low moaning tones of the battle song. The Irish rhymes better, but still:

Go on over there now, McGreavey,
Maybe I'll have the ball out
your way!
Over where you left your tooth
last time down, man,
go
thataway!

Chorus
Aw, no, no,
Not that tooth, man . . .!

II.

Gone with the Da to the Geneological Society's cubby in the Santa Cruz Main Library.

It's off to the side there as you enter the building, filled with all manner of raw facts of the past, lists of folks registered in accord with the indiscriminate exactitude of the scribe. It's not up to your scribe to evaluate the telling detail, merely to record and store. Local newspapers on microfiche, polling lists, registries of addresses. List of passenger arrivals on ships entering SF Bay 1860-1889. Reams of handmade heartfelt brochures: family trees of folks you've never known (The Johnsons of Sussex, World Concordance of Burgesses, that sort of thing). Great midden heap of ur-history, lives barely remarked, noted in passing, checklists of myriads of common selves.

Two articles we'd come to see, Santa Cruz Daily Surf January 26 and 29, 1906, hinting the tale of James of the Hanahans. First, on the 26th:

THE BODY OF JAMES HANAHAN

William Hanahan has received a telegram from a brother who went to Newman that he had unmistakable evidence that the body buried here as Frank Nolan was that of James Hanahan.

And then, on the 29th, another, lengthier piece, written in the newspaper style of the turn of the century, which hadn't yet quite shrugged off the more formal elements of English prose, but nevertheless aspired to a colloquialism of expression true to the frontier work of Harte and Twain, blending reportage and editorial comment.

Apparently the man had come into Newman a few days before Christmas and drunk himself to death.

A fellow no one knew at all well, perhaps he'd called himself James Nolan, and mentioned a sister living in Santa Cruz. The Santa Cruz Nolans were contacted, and notified of the sad particulars.

ìJames, you say? James Nolan? Sure if he isn't right here in his bed sleeping it off,î replied the Nolans (or words to this effect).

Some confusion on the Newman end of things, followed by disclosure of their scant knowledge of the deceased: description of the body, previous occupation. Suddenly it dawns on the Nolans.

ìAh! Oh no, if you aren't after indicating Frank Nolan that's the brother of James!î they cried (we are convinced they did cry, though the record is silent on this point).

The newsman sees his opening and takes it, noting that the ensuing confusion was sealed because the two men in question, or rather the body of the one and the name of the other, were easily conflated in that they were both ranch hands of dissipated habits. He goes on to report that the mistaken identity held . . . until Frank Nolan turned up and positively denied the report that he was dead.

So "James Nolan" was found out, and his alias, adopted for a reason now never to be known, was stripped from him for another, equally innacurate, and finally his deathfreight of grief transferred to its rightful owners the Hanahans. History has nothing more of him. A broken life, summed in a droll headline in a defunct coastal newspaper:

IDENTITY ESTABLISHED
HANAHAN WAS HANAHAN
AND NOT NOLAN

The Da has the sage eye always, receiving this tale in his measured way and placing it in his store of knowledges. Not one to overdemonstrate his sensibilities, even with regard to this, his poor grand-uncle's tale. His grandma's brother it was, James Hanahannotnolan, whose gravesite we have visited, not three blocks distant from our house in Santa Cruz. Holy Cross Cemetery in Santa Cruz. The various dusts of the Hanahans are sunk in earth there, surrounded by a low concrete curb. His mother's people.

In the library we wind back the spool of microfilm and place it in its box. We give each other our brief looks: known unwritten language of Barry eyebrows bearing the brunt of meaning.

We see it clearly, the Da failing, no longer nearly spry, and catch ourselves hoping uselessly against his passing.

ìWell, I'm thinking you'll be my executor, eh?î he says just then.

We laugh for all the reasons.

III.

Heaney has it like this in "A Drink of Water":

She came every morning to draw water
Like an old bat staggering up the field:
The pump’s whooping cough, the bucket’s clatter
And slow diminuendo as it filled
Announced her.

Curious use of the word bat I’m thinking, no bat wobbles you precise man, as all along the twilight air, each and every in memory a swift smudge (half seen in half light) with Jack Lucey calling down to us how they’ll catch in your hair: we run shrieking back from the river.

I reach for the twelve pound mediocrity "Deluxe Second Edition" Webster. Bat: beast pictured perched in foliage, in unlikely upright stillness with one elbow up close, arm raised, the other arm stretched like some caped carousel rider set to grasp a ring. Face in rictus I’d as like misread for startlement as for the reflective moment of shouting it must illustrate: sensing its world in wordreturn.

Not Heaney’s bat there.

Above, bat a cudgel it says. Sure, cudgel Irish, diagnostic as a raindrop. But I dismiss.

Bat a this and other: oh, ha! Go on a bat it says: a drunkard’s way with walking. Eh? Ha! (Joke on me and mine. Bartholomew: named for the man they called Bat Barry).

Hahaha! Seamus, your laurels fit, man. Exacting, the way the poem’s pushed by the force of the needed word.

–You find the good one now and then, says the Da. Loops around in the head like a song, y’see: over and over; can’t be helped. That’s why . . . I’m telling about . . . the man . . .

A pause.

–Mmm . . . Smooook! . . . gahk! Ah! Pleh!

The pipe tool sits unused on the table by his chair. Like a pocket knife, but no blades. A little spoon-thing, a little rod, a little piece turned like an L for flattening the tobacco down in the bowl. He’ll use his thumb for that, giving it the stern eye all the while to see it meets his specifications.

–Nn. The Skeleton, you see?

–Skeleton … ?

–Yes.

–You’re talking about your man of bones, now?

Light of the sun stumbling into the room through three layers of Mission District opacity; fog first, then the grimy window, last the lace curtains. It reaches his form leached of mischief.

–Remains of the fellow, is what I’m saying.

–Ah. Sad.

–What’s that?

–Death, you know.

–What?

–Finality. Endpoint. Farewell. Gives pause.

–Ah, what? Nonsense! Who’ve you been talking to?

–I’m saying . . .

–Leave off with that, now! We’re not a family for the gravitas.

He looks at his chair-side table. At his knees. Up.

–Where? . . . Nn, yes . . . Skeleton, . . . mm . . . ah, our family always had its own way with death, y’know: mirthful crew. Fond of a good burial. Couldn’t crowd them in without a wave of chuckles rolling through the building. Raised a hackle or two now and then, interrupting services with all those roistering guffaws. Someone coffinside sighs, "She hasn’t looked this good in months," and off we’d go. Ah! Nothing planned about it. Temperament and training. Thought it was Dies Ire, Heeheehee for years, myself.

A placid look. Memory and mystery. He glances at the pipe tool quizzically. Lifts it. Turns it in his hand.

–What? Ah.

He replaces it on the table, satisfied.

–Skeleton staggers into the bar, y’see? Says to the barkeep, "Give me a beer. And a mop."

– Ah! Ha. Ha. It’s a short one, for you.

–Oh, aye: blunt. Terrific slander on your man the dead drunk. But still. Clings to the brain.

January 8, 2007

January 8, 2007

Edwin B. Barry, (December 8, 1917-January 5, 2007)

The Controversial Coat

The other night when I sat down to write this eulogy for my dear dead father I'd hoped to come up with some bright insight into his life that I could share with you today, and I admit I labored over the few snappy phrases that follow. Yesterday at the funeral parlor after the rosary was said, Dennis spoke, and John, and Kevin, and many others spoke of Dad, of who he was and what he meant to them, and it appears that my bright insight into his life is shared by practically everyone with a tongue in their head and a willingness to speak about Dad in public. Nevertheless, for the benefit of those who couldn't attend yesterday or weren't paying attention, I'll say this:

Years ago the stern parental eye of Edwin B. Barry, the man I call Dad, would, from time to time, focus its glance in my own youthful direction while he went about the business of telling me plainly, emphatically, and in all seriousness to be good.

I've mostly forgotten, now, all these years later, what particulars might have caused Dad to bring the subject up; aside from the unmistakable asperity of his tone what I remember most vividly of those conversations is the repeated mention of that same mysterious and precious quality so firmly endorsed in all seriousness by my father. Dad told me unequivocally to be good, and over the years this has turned out to be some of the best, most useful and important advice I've ever been given, even considering the original context.

In his life, my Dad made a serious try at being a good man himself.

Everyone who knew him, all of you gathered here today to honor him in this ceremony, recognize this about him and will agree.

Dad was a devout Catholic. He gathered comfort, inspiration, guidance, and purpose from the Church's teachings and practices.

He was born over there on Bernal Heights, in this parish, long, long ago, in a time before this marvelous building even existed. Growing up, he lived in a family, in a neighborhood, of devout Irish Catholics, and this, St. Paul's parish, was his parish. From baptism to burial now he is a St. Paul's parish man.

He had an innate decency, Dad did. He owned a wry, forbearing sense of humor. Mentioning how succinct he could be uses up more words than he ever needed: with a significant eyebrow and a slight shift of his head he could express without an uttered word what others might be sorely tempted to go on and on about.

He loved his children, he loved his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren and he loved his nieces and nephews and their children, too. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to be in the presence of his family.

Dad lived almost 28 years longer than his beloved wife Kay, whose death was the great crisis in his life. Her death shook him terribly and it was a long dark struggle for him to come to terms with the sad fact of her ending. Sustained by his faith, and supported by his family, he lived on.

He was a handsome man, Dad was, and always meticulously dressed and well-groomed, an inclination he passed on to almost all of his children, as you can see.

He was a generous man who never called attention to his own generosity. Although never wealthy, Dad gave away freely and without fuss much of the money he accumulated in his life, to charities, to his family, and to this church we're meeting in today to help when it needed rebuilding.

Dad was the last surviving member of that wonderful generation of people who gave life to so many of us here today. Last night I looked at their faces again in old photographs of Barrys and Fitzgeralds and Luceys spread out on Kathy's dining room table. They're all gone now.

Dad's gone now, and Bob Fitzgerald, and Frank, and Mir and Barbara and Eleanor and Vera, and my own dear mom, long gone, and Dave, poor Dave, who went first. All gone now.

I was young when my father told me in all seriousness to be good, and I lived then surrounded and entranced by all those marvelous people enacting right before my eyes the practical lively application of what he meant by that.

I honor Dad, I honor all of them, with whatever good I ever do.

Thank you, Dad.

January 3, 2007

January 3, 2007

Aporia is familiar in rhetoric as the nicely excecuted launch into speech offered up by delimiting at once the speech giver's own poorly developed skill at knowing exactly where to begin just before getting around to saying what's intended; a brisk, common, throat-clearing opening made just before the main subject is chewed to bits by your speaker's way with words.

It has never been the practice of the Barry Family to deny the potentially infinite regress of things that can be interposed in active speech before that thing being interposed as an aporia leads to the speaker going on about what's intended. So that if there is an aporia, identified as the moment of discourse where the region of not knowing where to begin or what to say exists and can be spoken of, there are always also an arbitrarty number of pre-aporias available to the speechgiver, as well, each identifiable as a distinct moment of its own arriving before the aporia itself where what is being said is known to an arbitrary level of exactitude but which in itself has little or no relation at all to the main subject meant to be kicked off by its aporia.

The subject of the weather, of course, is the pre-aporia most often trotted out in common speech, but there are a host of other announcements and exclamations that might be and as often as not are interjected there depending on the dynamic of speaker and audience peculiar to that given transaction of speech-giving.

A joke is good to start, it's said, after the weather. Getting a decent laugh out of a pack of humans can be a chore, but it has its rewards if successfully accomplished.

Admittedly, each pre-aporia, not being about not knowing where to start or what to say, but being about some other thing entirely, has in itself the potential to drag the attention of the audience off completely onto the matter of that other thing entirely and away from precisely that subject which the aporia stands ready to pronounce itself at a loss to initiate. Unless constrained, the offered pre-aporia may deny to aporia the hoped-for opportunity to identify the place where words fail by going on and on itself about the other arbitrary thing instead.

January 1, 2007

January 1, 2007

In the bog the balanced hoof is but an aspiration, a transportation devoutely to be wished in going forward.

Balance is a prospect rare in the bog's equivocal clime. In the very least of bogs the hefted hoof falls flatly subject to the innate indeterminacies of the bogsurface. The justice of the move is quickly known, the micromanagement of the prospectively just step ever subject to the naturally selective attentions of the stepper there.

The injustice of the misspent hoof in the ageless quest for the seemly step drew the close attention of the Barry Family in the era of the Discovery of the Barry Family.

Using the crude notation then available, its new members derived the bogtrotting aesthetic of the Standard in a Step, whose discerning practices guided the traditional motions of the Barry Family in all its ranks and ages.

In the bog the justice of many a step is indeterminate in advance, the micromanaged offering of the hoof held hostage to the failed balance of a mistaken object.

The unjustly offered step, abjured by the Barry Family in its daily bogpractices, could not fail to occasionally result from any unmanageably random evidence of bipedalism among them, such as might be offered in an unthought exercise in movement about the common point of the Discovery.

And yet, intractably human in this regard, the Barry Family could not fail to trot about, however failed an enterprise the unjustified step might prove in the event.

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Use the appropriate Volume control to descend to the desired annum).

 

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