Best of Myles

by Flann O'Brien

  The Academy has a rather remarkable scheme concerning Dublin transport. On this subject there is much loose thinking. Reflect for a moment and you will realise that intra-city passenger transport is quite unique and has nothing at all in common with any other carrying business such, for example, as the railway line from Dublin to Cork. The latter is a life-line connecting a number of isolated communities and it is chiefly important because it carries goods and food to sustain them. The carriage of humans, while remunerative, is not an essential element in such a company’s affairs; moreover, if isolated individuals insist on travelling long distances, it is right that they should be charged (as undoubtedly they are) an enormous fee for being permitted to indulge this egregious whim. Municipal transport is altogether another matter. The inhabitants of a city survive by perpetual movement within it, darting hither and thither about their occasions like ants on an ant-hill. They may be called the blood of the municipal organism and the public transportation system corresponds to the arteries and veins. The people have no choice but to move. It is therefore unconscionable that they should be treated the same as if they were long-distance travellers who undertake a journey possibly once a year, more often than not for pleasure or at least for a purpose that is not essential for economic survival. It is quite ridiculous that a group of individuals should be permitted to extract money from a community for permitting the community to discharge a function essential to its existence.

  But municipal transport conducted by private enterprise is not a servile passive thing, dumbly carrying for a price people wherever they may wish to go. It has a dynamism entirely its own, an influence wholly pernicious in the community’s development. Teeming city slum centres, for example, cannot be cleared because the depressed classes involved could not submit to the tax levied by the company for the privilege of living on the city outskirts. A transport company can crib and stunt a city and its people.

  To approach to the solution of this problem one has only to realise that transport is no less necessary than running water, sewerage, or artificial light. These things are ‘free’ which means that they are charged for according to the valuation of property. The services are universal and one can use them as much or as little as one likes. There, then, you have the solution of the municipal transport problem. We must provide a ’bus service that is completely free to all the citizens and maintained out of the Corporation’s revenues. The present system must obviously be changed and a free service would be much better than the only other solution—a flat rate for all journeys. What would the free system mean in terms of money? Why, nothing to scare anybody. The Corporation’s annual income is of the order of £3,500,000, of which some £2,200,000 is raised from rates; the rate being about twenty shillings in the pound, the valuation is also about £2,200,000. In 1943 the Dublin Transport Company collected £1,000,000 approximately in fares. Of this sum, it is safe to assume that £250,000 represents either profit or charges that would not arise if the concern were owned by the municipality. If we assume that it would cost the Corporation £750,000 to provide a similar service, it would mean about 7/6d extra on the rates. Is that too much? Consider an average man who lives in a house of £20 valuation; he has a wife and four school-going children, and he is in a two-penny fare situation. The man spends 8d on fares himself, the children 1/4d and the wife 4d; that is a fair minimum daily expenditure of 2/6d. You add another 6d to take care of all unessential journeys and you get a daily expenditure of 3/od or 18/od a week, or an annual expenditure of about £47. If you give this man ‘free’ municipal transport it will cost him £7 10s od a year.

  Reflect on that.

  MUCH INTEREST has been evinced in the scheme my highness propounded yesterday for a system of free municipal transport, the cost to be borne by the Corporation. It is obvious that the scheme is flawless financially, and it will repel only those who take fright at anything that is simple and straightforward and innocent of all bureaucratic complexity. But the idea is sound philosophically also. Consider one point. Why are the present transport company’s fares so high? Because, for one thing, the Company’s system is not used by all the citizens. This means that a system adequate to carry all the citizens must be maintained by the proportion of the citizens who have to use the trams and buses. Two classes shirk carrying their share of the cost of this essential urban amenity—those who use bicycles and those who use motor-cars. The cyclist is independent of public transport because he has succeeded in becoming a capitalist in a small way; his contribution to a rate-sustained transport system would be individually small but his numbers being great the aggregate would be considerable. The man who prefers to use his own motor-car and thus provides individual transport at enormous cost should not be permitted to do so if this action causes the cost of public transport to rise and thus causes hardship to the bulk of the people, who have not got the money to buy motor-cars. If you increase this man’s rates by about one third, he has nothing to complain about; he should provide his motor-car only after reasonable minimum transport has been provided for the public generally.

  What would be the effect of the system on business? Assuredly not a bad effect. The coming and going of the citizens would be much more fluid. If I have a shop in O’Connell Street, I must lose thousands of sales in the course of a year because a prospective customer must pay a surcharge of sixpence or eightpence to the transport company in addition to the profit I demand myself. On the other hand, the transport company dumps tens of thousands of customers at my door week after week and beyond making a general payment to the community in consideration of the prominent location of my premises in the city business centre, I make no direct acknowledgement of the fact that public transport is absolutely essential to my livelihood. If my poor law valuation of £1,000 and a municipal transport scheme means that I must pay another £300 annually in rates, that is not unreasonable.

  The ‘no-fares’ system has another big advantage. It would enable the transport system to be operated at costs lower than ever before experienced anywhere. Superficially, labour would be displaced but that problem has been met and dealt with successfully before. The present transport company employs probably a thousand conductors, perhaps fifty inspectors and supervisors and a large countinghouse staff; add to that expenditure on tickets and on the rental of ticket-punching machines and it is not clear that you would have much change out of £200,000 a year. That is an immediate and clear saving. You enter the vehicle at the front and the driver can easily carry out the elementary conducting duties that would remain.

  The system introduces into public transport a principle that is well recognised in relation to other essential public services—namely, that everybody shares the burden of the service not according to the use he gets from it but according to his capacity to maintain public services. If a watermain extension to serve a new housing scheme costs £1,000, the tenants do not personally shoulder this crippling burden; it is spread over the whole administrative area and becomes a matter of farthings in the bill of each ratepayer. But the same remote tenants, under the present system, have to pay several thousands poundses to the transport company and will never have the continuing amenity of a watermain laid and working.

  There is no real snag in this idea. Yet it will not be adopted because the Corporation and its citizens are too docile: obedientia civium urbis felicitas.

  POST WAR COPPER PROBLEMS ran a heading I read some tie, McGow. I, superb piece of work, in understanding most like a dog, understood immediately what the article beneath the heading would deal with. (I guess it’s the human in me.) Let us pause here to ask what it is that we do in reading. (Pause.) Well, in all reading we abstract, we take only some of the possibilities of the words’ meanings into account. No matter how concrete (nay, copper) the topic or its treatment seems to be, we are abstracting, we are leaving out some of the possibilities, we are not asking your Aunt Agatha, we refuse to invite those frightful Shaughnessies, we could have young Lynch come and play the xylophone,
but no, the hell with it, let’s have an intellectual party for once. Obviously, in reading (to narrow the thing down somewhat) in different sorts of reading we do this in different degrees but always … always keeping as near as possible to standard temperature and pressure. (My little standard joke—Baer with me, as Joe Louis used to say.) Hmmm. We let in (and should let in) less in reading such prose as this than we let in with most poetry, say … (Do you read poetry, de Wrieder, or are you out down town every night drinking your head off? Hmmmm? Drop me a card some time). Now, attention, please.

  The important point is that in all reading whatsoever much must be left out. Otherwise we could arrive at no meaning and what a beautiful pity that would be! Or—half a moment, Mac!—or if we did arrive at a meaning we mightn’t be expected, they mightn’t have got our card, there would be black looks, hemming, haw act (since repeeled) and: Of course you’re always welcome won’t you take off those socks? Misther Meaning no sir there was never anny one of that name lived here there was Mick Manning of course the stoker that had this basement before me but he’s dead this twenty year. (How do you mean, I often ask myself? And should it be done in public? Meaning you know is a thing you can get a lot of praise for—if it’s done well. (Haha. Sharp dry laugh. Not really amused.) But, look—to get back to the pint (stet it has a head on it) omission is essential in the two-fold sense; without omission no meaning would form for us; through omission what we are trying to grasp becomes what it is (gets its essential being).

  The only man that never learnt to omit was Father Dinneen, so that most of the words he has in his book, meaning all things, mean really nothing at all. Putting our point another way, we see that all ratiocinative processes of intellection are addressed, not so much to establishing meaning, but rather to establishing refinements of meaning. Thus the crude uncoloured outline of meaning, familiar even to the lower animals, is of little use to humans, who willingly traffic in nothing that is not recherché and sophisticated.

  Example: a piece of steak. To your dog it has the primary meaning—food! This image begets the brother idea—eat! Now attend carefully please. To you, it is not food. You had refined the idea of food before it could enter your mind: you would have refined it to the more particular meaning ‘meat’ save that the same process forestalled you and you had refined ‘meat’ to ‘steak’. But again you were forestalled, ‘steak’ had become ‘raw steak’—and that really is what you perceived, apparently instantaneously but actually by several steps of reasoning. And of course, each image you admitted as valid excluded countless others you knew to be false: example, ‘horse-flesh’, ‘leather’.

  Ah well! Need I say that when I read POST-WAR COPPER PROBLEMS, I immediately refused to admit two ‘meanings’. Number wan was the possibility that some of the cute lads in Justice were getting out sketchplans for … brain-new stainless arterial polismen, made of plastic material and 100 per cent prefabricated, to be laid on with th’electhric and the wather afther the waaaar. The other idea was that the men on the Dalkey cars were losing their knight’ sleep (they’re nearly all Ely Place men) about what to do with all the loose change afther the w.…

  (There’s only one thing to do with loose change of course. Tighten it.)

  I DISLIKE LABELS—rather I mean it’s not that they aren’t terribly useful. They are, old man. But do … do they sufficiently take account of one as … a … person? There is my dilemma. (How do you like his horns?) But I … I … (little indulgent laugh) I know humanity, its foibles, its frailties, its fatuities; I know how the small mind hates what can’t be penned into the humiliating five-foot shelf of its ‘categories’. And so … if you must libel me, sorry, wrong brief, if you must label me, if you must use one epithet to ‘describe’ a being who in diversity of modes, universality of character and heterogeneity of spatio-temporal continuity transcends your bathetic dialectic, if, in short, one … practically algebraic symbol must suffice to cover the world-searing nakedness of that ontological polymorph who is at once immaculate brahmin, austere neo-platonist, motor-salesman, mystic, horse-doctor, hackney journalist and ideological catalyst, call me … call me…(qu’importe en effet, tout cela?) call me … ex-rebel. Forget the grimy modest exterior, civilisation’s horrid camouflage of the hidden, inner, in-forming radiance. True that … economic stresses force one to spend oneself on … trifles (what with sherry halfdollar a halfglass and sponge-cake … Sponge-cake? Me good woman do you realise there’s a waaaaaaaaaaar on?). About the valid things, for instance, one must not write; ethics, plastics, authority what is its foundation in the compromise of the diurnal round (This is mine, I think?), the lust for Order (with its glamorous satellites, ‘beauty’ and ‘harmony’—not to mention ancient Hibernians), how to reconcile it with man’s unquenchable longing for Freedom? (Rather loosely put but you see what a Haeck Reuter is up against?)

  I mean one’s soul is forgotten but one must be very simple in this kind of thing, and keep frightfully close to the bone, follow the telegraph wires it’s about four miles from here. You see, one is … one is simply a plain hack journalist, concerned with such prosaic things as … getting things across, smoothly, fair play to all, square deal for my masters, and never forget the eager throng of readers (certified) who so instinctively believe in their right to speak their mind that they, they will not be slow to let the Editor person know what they think of one’s pitiful work. Very Irish, very traditional, the only difference being that from the poor berated French Revolution onwards we spoke our mind against what poor John Mitchel called ‘The Carthaginian’ in spite of poison, debt and egg-soil. Now … (bitter laugh)…now we speak it against … writers … the Anglo-Irish, Liberals, individualists, children of the Renaissance and other contemptible … and unarmed … creatures!!!! Of course, when Truth is not paramount, one must cry aloud for Tolerance and free speech. Then as soon as Truth becomes paramount as result of our Tolerance and Freedom (!!!!!) … there is no longer any need for Tolerance—in fact it would be a crime. Grand. Grand. But … just a bit hard on those who … do not believe in ‘Absolutes’, not even in Truth permanent and fadeless. Just a bit hard on those to whom the ‘errors’ of … Plotinus are just as valid, and important as say those molten Iberian lyrics whose sensuous imagery gave Crashaw his melodic line and burning glass.

  No, no, no, this is forbidden … And still—how wonderful, how indestructible is human nature! and still this man who goes to jail and death will go on saying ‘Alas, that Might can vanquish Right, They fell and passed away, but true Men like you Men, are plenty here today!’—the foolish Greek! the silly Renaissance ass!! The comic liberal! By heavens, this time once and for all we’ll eradicate from his silly carcass his thousand-year-old folly! … But enough! Pass me the strychnine, Mac, it is in the top left-hand corner of the chest of drawers under the old Ph.D (Heidelberg) scroll.

  TODAY ONE of those flashes of intuition again lit me (from within) ignited, fused, shattered me with a light at once agonising in its implication, in its intimation of the loneliness, the sense of isolation, of … separation which is the penalty, the glorious, empty penalty, of the modest, harassed, poly-noetic super-person … and at the same time exalted and healed the restless, weary intellect, worked to a glistening, scarlet, over-sensitised … thread by the tremendous besogne of cramming a … light-year’s thought into three calendar months. I had, at last … realised, (in the sense ‘felt the truth of’) I had experienced in transcendant sense-immediacy a blinding illumination not without its message of goodwill for groping, under-privileged … dowdy humanity. I suddenly saw … quite clearly … sub specie aeternitatis … that that … strange object, so highly esteemed—(I might almost say esteamed) by our winsome, unscented housewives, even in its essentially knitted, parboiled form, as … a table delicacy … I saw, I tell you, that that … object is pregnant with great possibilities for gallant little Irish industry struggling valiantly to keep its head over the Plimsoll line in a world delirious with the excruciating slap-stick of Free
Trade. Yes, I repeat, that odd cephalomorphous object can be made a vital element in our important warp production; from it, I promise you, shall spring a newer, greater and more glorious … wool trade, the markets of Cathay and Samarkand shall clamour for our incredible bawneens, the carriage trade of New York, Paris, Berlin shall come to our (intensely half-) door, our ships shall sail H.M. seven seas without Lett or Huendrans, wine shall incontinently bark on the winedark waterway, and Ireland long a province be a nation once again. I am, of course, quite serious. This great plastic is for the future and I am confident that given the time, the research, above all the money, our … Irish chemists will be more than equal to the task of extracting wool from its resilient, elastic heart. Meanwhile it is a matter of extreme urgency that the Public Real Asians Department of our Ministry for Agriculture should put before the public the dangers inevitably attendance upon the present attitude towards this essentially resinous mineral. Our … eager, and no doubt, affectionate, Irish wives must be made to see that though eating is … a necessary business, and … parboiling is an interesting way to treat objects intended for vulgar carnal provisionment … yet, not all sublunar Offal is really suitable for this purpose; alarm clocks, umbrellas, wax flowers, telescopes, carpets, wall-paper and hardwall plaster are instances of a few of such not terribly edible things. Another more obvious one is the interesting worsted bomb of which this evening I have been speaking.

  One wonders what absent-minded colleen first dimly, myopically dropped one of these valuable reverse-calf objects into the melting pot and then … obstinate, though charming … insisted that poor Tadhg … eat it. The delirious, half laughable, whole lethal recipe spread from wife to wife, from mother to mother, from generation to generation until at the present day there exists scarcely an adult male in this island who has not at some time or other actually performed the intensely music-hall magic of … eating a … turnip! (I mean, it’s like drinking that most vitriolic of embrocations, milk!)