“WOMAN AND LION AND THE LORD KNOWS WHAT”

 

Being introspective is never a very good thing. You develop a tendency to deliberate over every action, every thought. To most this appears to be prevarication, and often downright rudeness. Nevertheless looking into your soul means that you become aware of your shortcomings, the arenas of life in which you fail to perform. The more cogent individual will note what he/she has to improve upon and act in a way that is conducive to this process. So is with the most cogent of University societies, the Literary and Debating society.

 

The society has been in existence for 153 years, or so the learned sages say. There is documentary evidence form the report on the Queen’s Colleges of Ireland in 1858 stating the existence of the Literary and Debating Society in Queen’s College Galway. The earliest Queen’s College annual from 1893 lists the committee and the society’s President. The society’s constitution dates from this period also. Traditionally the society records the proceedings of each meeting in the minutes book. When the university library was moved from the Quad many of those precious accounts, particularly from the beginning of the twentieth century, were carelessly misplaced or thrown away. Minutes from the late thirties and from the sixties were recovered but we now have only the college annual to cast a cold eye back on the history of the society, the attitudes of its members and thereby the attitude of the student population of University College Galway. (Incidentally the society, in its constitution, is known as the Literary and Debating Society, University College Galway, and I would never be one to break the Constitution).

 

But we can look back with perhaps over-due nostalgia – for instance, there are pessimistic reflections on the level of student participation in University life in the College Annuals from 1937 and 1957. Yet we must look to the future with a little trepidation. Are we to look with foreboding as Yeats did upon the new millennium, believing that “the centre cannot hold”? In a euphemistic sense, are we to ask are the circus animals refusing to perform? Perhaps the difficulty lies in the fact that few issues are taboo in Irish society, and the pan-Western development of Clinton/Blairite consensus politics. I do no believe that students are wholly apathetic, when it comes to charities we show ourselves both generous and active. However there appears to be a dislike of cogent argumentation on issues which are vaguely political or relating to society and its concerns. It is as if we looked into “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” and were found wanting. Can we find a way forward, holding true to the society’s integrity, without merely expounding empty rhetoric? How are we to weave symbols and subtle meanings as Yeats did — “woman and lion and the lord knows what”- through which we express our feeling for society.

 

Yet I do not believe as Yeats did that “our ladder is gone”. I believe there is still a passion and earnestness about students. We just have to sight the backing the student Nurses have received in their struggle to gain free fees and the USI march in Dublin last semester at which over 2,000 students were present. The red-hot rhetoric of the past may be gone but there is a steely, logical approach to putting a case forward for student demands. I believe we have moved on from Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’, a barren culture beyond redemption; nor do we join with Ginsberg in ‘Howl’ in raging against contemporary society and culture. Students take the transience of things with a smug comport knowing that as William Carlos Williams Spring And All that there is growth and wakefulness beneath the frost. To-day’s society and culture is fractured, the old meta-narratives of the past have disappeared (with the possible exception of ethnic nationalism) yet these disparities expose creativity. The new art will be a creative criticism of the Internet age and that group of society which is to escape its influence. We have moved from the cold modernism of the twenties, the art for art’s sake of the post-modem era, to a more dialogic centrifugal present. If the minutes and College annuals teach us anything they show that history and society spin in gyres, as Yeats believed; the constant of all ages is the art of debating and that ironic twist of the backbench heckler.

 

Keith Maye 3rd Arts

Vice-Auditor