TD 1
GET ME OUT OF HERE Some poets write poems which I
can’t make head or tail of and other people come along and write reviews of the poems which are equally bewildering. Nobody had got a clue what the poems mean and nobody has got a clue what the reviews mean so everybody says that they are brilliant and deep and meaningful even though nobody had the faintest idea what the meaning is and that is The Arts. As far as I am concerned you can keep it. This poem is not The Arts and not doesn’t want to be. The next section is though. “The ineffable seeking of Life’s self-perpetuating search for itself.” I don’t know what that means even though I have just written it which proves that I can write stuff which is The Arts if I put my mind to it. What a truly terrifying thought. - Poems so Fresh and so New…Yahoo! (1995) T: Did you have any medication after you came off old sparky? (electroconvulsive therapy) P: Oh, I was on all sorts. I was on Lithium, I was on Valium, I was on Parstelin. I’d be brought into a room with my counsellor in St Pats’s and he’d be writing in his folder and then he’d introduce a series of mock pictures - the old Rorschach test - half an hour later I’d be only getting warmed up on the first one. Another time there was a priest in with me, a beautiful aristocratic, gentle man – his bishop had sent him in to be cured of homosexuality. How could the church afford to lose someone like him? The Church was damaging and toxic because it taught unhealthy messages as opposed to loving ones. The power that they wanted to exert was based upon guilt and instilling guilt. I wrote a poem about almighty god and how all he had intended doing was to create one field with a donkey in it but he lost the run of himself and before he knew there was fucking mountains and oceans and his mother gave out hell to him, so he built a church and hid behind it. I was thinking recently the only thing I regret about Catholicism, and it not being what it said it was, is that I loved angels with big wings. And also I asked myself, mermaids used to exist because we believe in them but maybe it’s then other way round? Maybe that’s why we’re here and the same with centaurs and unicorns. And then I thought about mermaids doing bold things like writing messages on the bottom of ships, ‘up yours, skipper’.” T: “When did you stop the street stuff?” 20 P: “I stopped it when the polio was closing me down. The legs are gone now, that’s a shame. I’m only getting used to the wheelchair. Tom (Burke) brought me out to Malahide in his car and it was biblical the way a young man like him helped a cripple like me, holding my foot. He orchestrated my legs for me. I just thought it was so biblically beautiful.” T: “My father died at 96, he was bed ridden and I would help him out of it. He was compos mentis but the body was gone.” P: “I adored my dad and I tried to think of anything good to say of my mother…” T: “My mother was grand until she got old and started losing the plot.” P: “Mine did the same thing with alcohol… oh fuck, chronic. For that reason, I didn’t drink alcohol because with the medication I was warned about all the consequences. Don Baker and me became like brothers for ten years or so because he had an alcohol problem and it suited him that his best buddy wasn’t drinking. That was the simple reason I never drank. I stay well away from it because I remember what my mother was like when she had it… my mother never had a problem, that was the problem.” I ask whether he found escapism through his imagination to cope with these experiences. P: “Before I was walking dad would carry Above: A still from The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby Right: Pat’s home, by Malcolm McGettigan me downstairs every morning when everyone was up in the village green in Malahide. Dad would wrap me in a blanket and put me over his shoulder like a sack of spuds and bring me down the stairs and then I’d be on the sofa for then day. At that early stage I was reading Our Exploits at West Poley by Thomas Hardy, John Millington Synge. I knew Riders to the Sea before I knew Rupert Bear. Dad had this huge typewriter in the middle of the room and he’d be there writing away. My mum’s favourite book was a great classic by Sir Walter Scott, a hardback, because she put the teapot on it.” T: “Did they read to you?” P: “No.” T: “My old man did.” P: “You’re lucky.” T: “He read me the two Alice books and Rudyard Kipling.” P: “No wonder you turned out the way you did. There’s only a handful of us left.” T: “It’s kind of a dying trade.” P: “They are lucky to have us.” P: “That was one thing I remember learning in Gestalt therapy, our unwillingness to give ourselves credit for anything, for achievements worthwhile. If we made a balls of it we had no difficulty saying, ‘I made a Pig’s mickey out of it’ but if we succeeded, ‘it went well’.” T: “I still think let the work do it, keep yourself out of it.”