TD 1
At 21 Rue de l’Odéon, we stood on the footpath an
d gazed up at the row of garret-level windows, wondering which one was Cioran’s, and whether we could get up there to see inside. A year earlier, I had come here and done exactly the same thing with my then girlfriend. Was I destined to return annually to the flat of a deceased Romanian nihilist and reflect upon yet another failed relationship. There were a lot of them, failed relationships, like burned-out tanks on the battlefield of my life. “These were authors who influenced and derailed me when I was younger. The very journey creates a narrative framework in which it’s kind of not really about the plaque or even the writer. These are scaffoldings by which I think ok, I can go there. Every journey is a story. In using these authors, you can kind of riff and bounce off those guys to delve into whichever theme or concerns are driving you – really personal, ways for me to have a reckoning with myself and a self exploration. “It is a book of pilgrimage and spiritual questing, as profoundly unfashionable as that sounds. It takes place in the 21st century in this kind of switched on, post-everything era but underneath it all is this quite old fashioned quest for something transcendental, something sublime, profound and meaningful. The book is also a kind of leave taking, a eulogy to a certain phase of life and moving on from formative artistic and literary influences.” Nowadays, Doyle spends his time between here (he is a teacher on the MA course in Creative Writing in the University of Limerick) and Berlin, a city which has invigorated as well as chewed up and spat out Rob Doyle, the person and persona. “I didn’t move to Berlin until my midthirties. I had planned on doing so when I was 25 but after a week of carnage there I had this moment of clarity. I thought I don’t have the self-control at this point in my life to live here. If I do live here, I won’t get the novel I want to write written and so I’ll just destroy myself. I moved to a sleepy fishing town in Sicily instead and wrote a book there. And then, a decade later, I moved there and it was perfect. I can relish the fruits and go home and get the work done.” ‘So what are you currently writing about?’ asked Marc politely. Hew had a narrow beard and a shaved head and he was a DJ. I extemporised about the sedimented psychic histories of Berlin, layers of memory and hallucination. What I didn’t mention was that, ever since we’d sat down at the table, I’d became fired up on the idea of writing about them – Linda and her stylish, not-so-young techno friends. Clubbers who were pushing into their forties seemed to me a milieu worth exploring, one that might illuminate a host of confluent themes that engaged me: what it meant, for instance, to age in twentyfirst-century Europe, and the new kinds of family that emerged when the nuclear family blew itself up. Naturally, nightclubs teemed with sexy young things who could wear any ill-fitting, outlandish clothes and still look edgy and mesmeric. The techno kids danced with animal assurance because they knew the world was about them: they were the future and we – anyone over thirty – were already 34 We all need space to drop into our own empowerment, whatever way that looks like. the past, sinking inexorably into it. Better to leave the gorgeous twenty-year-olds to their photogenic bliss: I would write about Linda and Marc and Thorsten, Julia and Katarina, and in writing about them I would be writing about myself, my own reckoning with the ancient headfuck of ageing, which was the dinosaur in the room of any club I danced at from here on in. away the anguish and the fuck-ups. This consideration has been observed by another friend of his who is a writer also and while it amuses him, he finds an echo of truth also. “I’m fairly old-fashioned when it comes to And so, his take on his home city (Doyle was born in Crumlin) having been largely in absentia from it carries all the flashing amber lights of its time. “Dublin has become unpalatably corporate, a rich persons city… I find it becoming a very bland silicon city and that annoys me, because it seemed there for a while that everyone saw through the fraudulence of the status quo, the money culture and all of that bullshit. Suddenly you had this explosion of cool art and music. It is still happening in the rap and hip-hop scene, but it is slowing down because of the corporate tentacles of Dublin and Silicon Fucklands. That said, just for physical beauty there is no city quite like Dublin when I walk around it, that strikes home to me and I find it inspiring.” At the heart of Doyle’s writings are romanticised notions of the writer when one strips art and literature. I do believe in the idea of going all in and consecrating one’s life to art and literature and putting yourself in a reckless and absolute manner to these timeless adventures. And, hopefully, contributing in some small part to it in the process and even self-destructing. “Bolaño has a description of literature about a samurai who goes out fighting monsters knowing he will be defeated but goes out anyway. At one level you could rip the piss out of that and say what a load of self-aggrandising bullshit but at another level it’s beautiful.” Doyle is prepared to continue fighting those monsters whilst shielding himself with a stronger suit of armour. And while the samurai’s armour is made up of many small parts and a variety of materials, Doyle has forged his own protection from the materials of a life lived. ● Threshold by Rob Doyle is published by Bloomsbury Circus, €18, robdoyle.net