Circle 2

Rogier van der Weyden, Pietà, c 1441. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

Curtis Winkelmann | 16 October 2024

When greased with an even skin of daylong rain, the new concrete pathways of Kingstown Baths become a mirror. Strewn reflections so crystal that all eventide strollers are free to gaze upon the sky’s heliotrope pattern with relaxed neck. A beautiful scene, if it wasn’t for the almost palpable repression. The ubiquitous greyness staining the air sombre and dead and the puddles seeming too designed in their distraction, a part of something sinister, a conspiracy of sorts, an entombment of something natural, and yet shameful.

Since renovation, the bath’s upper-level patio has acted as an echo chamber of conversation. A place where acquaintances can bump into one another, chat, laugh, and then part ways to discuss the failings of the encounter.

Alone, I snake my way between them all atop the rippling clouds, trying hard to wonder about anything except how I might be perceived. In this case, backwards seems profitable, and so this is where I travel. Back to a time before the council used my adolescence to plug the bath’s gap with concrete, when some of us local lads would venture down into its sunken pools and throw stones through the windows of the ruinous changing rooms.

Air, salt-laden from rotting seaweed dumped by ancient tides, permitted only a few minutes of fun, before something coarse had to be hocked from lungs, fantasy ceased, and a return made to surface streets in search of proper breath.

On one excursion, likely our last, we observed a thrawn figure framed in the upper-leftmost window. A yellow needle decorating his forearm.

Expressionless, his eyes remained hung in our direction. His body was shockingly minimalist and swayed from East to West like a twig in breeze. At the crest just above his left brow a perfect forehead gash coloured one side of thin face red and he was singing. It was soft and melodic and it was no tune I recognised.

As I recount, we all stood there for a few moments, silent, gazing up at him, imperturbable, listening, waiting for something to change the current of the moment, and also hoping that nothing would. But in the end, something did. It must have. Though as to what, after all this time, I can’t quite be sure.

Only by casting my mind back with greater strain while I pass beneath the same window, now glass-filled and painted a gleaming white, am I slightly brightened with a variety of smudged memories concerning a saving grace, a pleasant ending for the figure, a redemption of sorts.

The changing rooms then recede from my view entirely, and with them, all interest in remembering what happened next.

I descend the granite staircase into the bath itself. An amphitheatre of sorts. A man-made cavern of reflected sunlight lined with twenty or so rows of stacked slabs pointed inward at a whole lot of nothing.

At the water’s lip, some of the old rocks sprout defiantly up through the new and flawless ground. Dark frowns chiselled into all. Concrete wedged into every former crevasse dams the sea from flooding in where it once did, and the air has a chalky smell about it. No longer any scent of rotting seaweed. In fact, no scent at all. Just millions of numbers in brutalist form.

I tame my galumphing stride to a plod and with an under-breath grunt cop a squat on the fifth stair of the case. It’s wet. I don’t care. The sweat off the backs of my knees is absorbed by my jeans as I stare right out past a floating statue of Roger Casement, a nationalist martyr immortalised in rusting copper and hard white shit. The horizon behind him no longer hues of sweet purple, but an ever-changing ember, a stunning conflagration leading into another Dublin nighttime, a dull sense of peace.

Several static moments drift past here before I notice the milky tears which have reframed my vision into a shimmered ripple. I don’t react. At least not immediately. I give the matter space to resolve itself, half-thinking it’s my body’s instinctive defence against the sharp coastal zephyr which, in irregular rhythm, sweeps across the harbour bay and brushes my eyes with a feathered touch.

I run diagnostics. The results yield nothing in relation to sadness and my heart seems at peace. I’ve no quarrel with life of late, and yet, once I turtle my head into my chest to regain some levelled sense of composure, I start to feel my breath fall into this stuttered chug.

On the sixth or so heavy sob my entire body is convinced to participate. Up and down and back and forth, my throat precedes my limbs as it mimics the actions of getting sick. With every second inhale a great seize engulfs my muscles and then releases me, over and over. I try limit the outburst to my chest out of fear of judging eyes on the patio above. I focus on the furnace of my body and treat it like something celestial, a collapsing star. I visualise the gravity of my mind clawing back the light of all excess emotion, drawing it down deep and into my core where it can be swiftly incinerated.

And this helps, somewhat. Like burning rubbish, bits remain.

I haven’t cried in years. And the trivial game of discerning when the last time was leads me to an image; a text from one person about the death of another. Back then, and still even now, tears only visit with a definite reason, and without one, I can’t help but feel a certain glow of falseness about myself, especially while my blubbering convulsions grow even keener.

I try meditate and become self-aware to the point of inanimate. But my body refuses. All I am offered is the same filmic flash of the singing figure, the burnt yellow of his needle, a tear in his eye too.

I think, Is this supposed to be poetic? A sign? Should I sing? It seems impossible to know. So I resign myself to wagging my head thrice and slapping my cheeks to check and see if I’ve been caught up in some form of dream.

No. Nothing in my states changes.

The sun now engulfed, I shoulder both sockets dry and press extra hard at the ducts. Then, with great caution, I raise my head to notice a family of four who have spawned at the bottom of the steps upon which I sit. A mother, father, and two young boys around the ages of three and five, hands all joined in preparation to make their ascent as a unit.

Not two steps are conquered before the youngest of the bunch takes an impossible slip and lands silent, being already so close to the ground, on the exposed part of his knee just below the cuff of his shorts. A frozen moment follows, eyes widen, the boy drops his jaw like an anchor, tilts his bolus head back and chants a stream of wailing tears. And the second he does so, the father snatches his brother onward and leaves the mother behind to care.

A kindred tingling envelops me. I don’t question it.

Without hesitation the mother gently takes the boy’s moaning face into her hands and directs his sobbing gaze up into her own. “You got a little bit hurt. You got a little bit hurt,” she repeats, enunciated diction so fine-edged every word slices the air into thin even strips. And this goes on for some time. The same sentiment reissued in the same stern tone and the boy like clay in his mother’s hands, wanting to be moulded stronger.

It’s after two minutes of this that I notice a new airborne salt about my nostrils, the thrum of lapping waves easing into existence, the cry of gulls overhead. I look around at all the people in the sunken pit and on the patio above and I see them now only as reflected energy, dancing in-between the backscattered portals which lead up into the sky.

I notice a single tear trickling down the boy’s knee and the new stillness of him. I watch through my drying eyes the mother enact her ritualistic initiation into the concept of hurt, keeping her son solid and aware, as if she wants him to remain in the moment, notice his pain, share it somehow, dissect the shape of its life and achieve some deepened understanding of its evil sensation.

Because this is the way life is, the mother seems to profess. If you wish to stay, you better get used to it.