Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Blocking, and: Hostage Walk, and: Bones’ Evidence, and: Dispatch, and: Mise en Place, and: Bloody Sunday 21st November, 1920, Croke Park, and: Shinrin-yoku, and: Private Rescue, and: Black Holes, and: Trapped by Trees, and: Influence

2023; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2023.a919784

1534-5815

David McLoghlin,

Japanese History and Culture

Blocking, and: Hostage Walk, and: Bones’ Evidence, and: Dispatch, and: Mise en Place, and: Bloody Sunday 21st November, 1920, Croke Park, and: Shinrin-yoku, and: Private Rescue, and: Black Holes, and: Trapped by Trees, and: Influence David McLoghlin (bio) Blocking Drive to Murroe, base camp for Benedictines.Go in the gate—clatter of cattle grid—past the lodgewhere Davy the groundsman lives. Without gaydar or proof,Peter Kelly laughs, “He’s your boyfriend, Glock.”Matron’s gate lodge latches the Back Avenue.Motor up the Front, past cows and bucolics.At the rhododendrons comes the turn: big revealof Normanesque castle on the hill, two fat towers either side,Pax above decorative portcullis. Go throughto a lawn roundabout, our parents’ Jags and Beemersparked among Ford Escorts of the lay staff.On your left, the school; on your right, the monastery.A sign: Reception. Beyond the two rooms where monks meetvisitors, the concept of claustrum, enclosure, begins.Boys slouching there. Here, monks all in black,robes sleek or shabby according to extent of eccentricity,and crossing the semipermeable membrane:the teaching monks. Go up the hill to the church, past a fleetof monastery cars. Near a fender, the monastery cat taking the sun.Somewhere on the school side, the castle degeneratesinto outbuildings: wooden kicking gym, boot room—Victorian concept, a really good way to lose your shoes—bike sheds, tunnel to the labs (Biology, Chemistry)past them and past the cemetery, gravel declivityto Chapel Lake, all lily pads. Beyond thatand the walled Biblical Garden, is an iron gate in a stone wall,to uplands where I imagine myself Wordsworth striding the moors.The way to the ninety-nine steps to the Clare Glen, and the Mass Rockin a dripping forest, I forget it now. [End Page 63] Cut back through woods, and peer inthe window of a working artist, Henry Morgan, or stand belowthe green corrugated gym beside the New Building,where the cooler Sixth Years lean on the railing, roof smoking.Showers are in the basement, near the Drying Room.Most important to know, the time it takesfrom here to there, New Building to Reception, at night,with wet hair, to the door Father Terence has just unlocked. Lessthan five minutes. Here are the props, the troupe,the blocking, the play. Hostage Walk Before Lights Out, we’d be horsing aroundwhen Father Terence would come in,“Hey!—Hey George! Stop that there now!”(There was no one by that name.) Some scowled,off to the side, at the antic ringmaster, or hurriedto finish pulling on their pajamas. But no one ever asked:“What’s a monk doing on the Fifth Year Flooramong half-naked seventeen-year-old boys at nine o’clock at night?”He always left ten minutes before our House MasterFather Andrew Nugent—ex–senior counsel—came to say,“What are you doing still up, Liam Beatty?To bed with you, sir. To bed.” Terry drifted in several nights a week,and in the gaggle that surrounded himestablished enough credentials—“I was at Joan Baez . . .Boston Common in ’68. Oh, of course . . . ”—to draw us across in a smaller groupto talk in the large reception room with the picture windowone day in autumn when crows were aloft. [End Page 64] We was my friend Tim and me. Tim’s hairwas almost white-blond. Terry loosened the collar,talking opium and hashish, and perhapsmembers of ETA in Nationalist West Belfast.“Oh, they were so handsome—long black hair—and so Basque.”Then he slipped in: “Did I tell you I’m gay?”No teacher had been this honest.I’d been reading No One Here Gets Out Alive, Howlfrom City Lights, Baudelaire.(Someone said to Dad, “You let him read Ginsberg?”and Dad was almost proud.) Terry recommended so much. We went back to the school side at four or five in the afternoon,not mentioning what he’d said, clambering the blast crater.We hadn’t been in there that long. It is long.On the other side, First Years dispersed ahead of uslike...