Fable of the Pooka

Weird

You see, this is a story and therefore there are protagonists. In this case there are two. Now, that would suggest the story-teller is considering possibilities in the narrative to come. It is common to have two lead protagonists as it affords the story-teller opportunities to tap into psychological types deeply embedded in the human psyche. These may be
The Lovers; a tale resonant with forces of attraction so strong, the protagonists are swept along in currents of desire, lust and desire which they are powerless to constrain. This fierce momentum rushes then through tortuous paths of misunderstanding, slights inflated to painfully pierced hearts, reconciliations, surrendering to fatalistic inevitability. All culminating in happiness unimaginable or tragedy unfathomable.
The Mortal Enemies; the protagonists are of such divergent character that accommodation is entirely beyond consideration. Often related as the battle between good and evil, black and white, heaven and hell. Through hatred, treachery, and brute force the protagonists spiral downward in an eternal battle of will. Finally, on emerges triumphant only for the other to avoid annual action and limp on to fight another day.
In most good stories these powerful psychological arc types are cleverly layered in the everyday lives and apparently venial antagonism. This makes them relatable to the human audience before the tale is brought to fruition on an almost cosmic denouement.

And there are of course many other narrative possibilities available to the story-teller but the missing element in the case of the story we are about to relate, the element you would find in all the above and which will become all too apparent is absent in what follows is the fundamental element of all story-telling. Planning.

So for example, no thought has been given to even the fundamentals such as location. So we are confronted with a story with little more than two protagonists sitting (we assume) in an environment devoid of any material reference. We will probably fall into a cinematic representation of a whited-out glow without giving any consideration to the fact that it might as well be black darkness. Well we need something to get the story going as we nave no idea what constitutes our protagonists in terms of appearance, character or even species.

So it begins.

Can you say what it is?
Not at all.
So what’s to be done?
Generally, it’s just ignored.
And does that work?
Well, yes and no.
And will you be elaborating on that?
I will not. Isn’t elaboration the root of the problem.

Now the recipient of the story is already formulating phenomonological references.
The first speaker has an apparently genuine enquiry. While the ‘foil’ does not see the urgency in the matter. That we are left in ignorance of the topic under enquiry seem to be of little importance and may even be essential, providing intrigue in the absence of plot.

Fair enough. I’ll ask a simpler question, so.
On you go, for all the good it will do.
Let’s look at the ‘yes’ element of the act of ignoring. How does that go.
The ignorer gets by.
Right. And now, what of the ‘no’ flavour in the answer?
It causes the confusion with regard to what has not been said.

At this point, being astute readers we begin to twig that the second protagonist is in fact a Pooka. This occurs to us as we can see it is exhibiting a degree of offhandedness which is affected to suggest erudition. Pooka, being sleeveens, and mischievous ones too, often exude this air of aloof superiority.

Well, a bit of confusion can’t be that bad if by the act of ignoring it, the happy result is a body gets by. Getting by is not to be sneezed at. It’s a fair outcome.
You would think, but the nature of confusion is to amplify itself and so, it’s not sufficient to just ignore the thing that can’t be said. It’s now necessary to grapple with the confusion and that’s so absorbing the attention of the individual is consumed by it and the fact of ignoring is forgotten.
The ignoring is forgotten?
It is entirely and getting by is no holiday. It’s now a battle.

There it is, final confirmation. It’s a Pooka. This firm understanding of confusion, which is completely at odds with the fundamental nature of the concept. I mean, who can say they clearly understand confusion?

That’s desperate.
It’s beyond desperate. It’s hopeless.
And all because it can’t be said.
There it is.
Is there nothing to be done?
Well, it can be alluded to.
How would that work?
The thing isn’t said but the listener understands something is not being said.
And does the listener understand that what is not being said might be the only thing that matters.

Here, for the first time, import is attributed to the topic. It is a matter to be given serious consideration. It’s nature is neither mundane nor trivial. In light of this, we forgive the entire absence of plot and rush on.

Not a bit of it.
So, how does the listener react?
They understand there is something not said. And then they ignore it.
Is the ignoring of things ignorant?
Not a bit of it. It’s sophisticated.
That’s a relief.

The other protagonist is now coming into sharper relief, on account of them expressing relief. Myself, your narrator, on the other hand, is feeling I’m being dragged into the milieu of the story with an increasing sense of the undermining of my part as the overviewer of the unfolding. But anyway, the un-Pooka protagonist is coming across as a decent skin. A man of the people. Possibly not too bright but his sense of enquiry is to be lauded.

You don’t imagine that applies to you, do you?
Ah, I expect not.
You see, that there is your difficulty.
What’s that?
Momentary hope.
Did that happen to me?
It did. You there, and your socks pulled up, thinking ‘I might not be ignorant.’
I suppose that fleetingly occurred.

As I say, a decent skin. There they are, pronoun veiled, but their humanity clearly on display; humility, aspiration, unassuming self-awareness, acceptance of inevitability.

You see, that is a result of a flaw in the universe.
What? The universe is flawed?
Well, it’s only one of billions potentially, so what are the chances of it being perfect?
I don’t know.
That’s on account of your ignorance. But the answer is eff all.
Right. And this flaw now, is that effecting us?
We are stardust, we are woven. Of the same cloth.
So you’re saying, we are all flawed because the universe we live in is flawed?
That might be that sum of it.
Can the universe be fixed?
You were doing well there for a minute, and now you’re just showing your ignorance.

It’s not much of a start but you can’t help feeling it can’t get much worse and there is a great tradition of story-telling in every culture. It must be almost in our DNA. The campfire, the tribal bonding, the abstraction and retelling of our shared values into a tale we can all relate to. So this too, is a story and we are genetically compelled to continue with it.

The Pooka looked up from his inspection.
‘Right, I’ve no idea what I’m looking at,’ he concluded and set to on the preparation of his pipe.
He was perched like a crow in hornpipes on the shoulder of the eegit.
‘That’s me heart.’
‘Well, it’s like no heart I’ve ever seen.’
‘That’s as a result of it being broken.”
The Pooka lept off the eegit’s shoulder faster than a cat who has jumped onto a hot griddle.
‘I have extensive knowledge and acquaintance with heart. I’ve dined on that of the ox, the lamb and the chicken. I have had affairs in which they have featured. I have conducted arguments in which they have led to the conclusion of the matter.’
‘Yes, but have you had yours torn? Are you familiar with the condition of it scalded? Has yours been sore?’

My goodness, we have progressed. Our protagonists have designation and corporeal features. The Pooka is indeed, as suspected, a Pooka, with a habit of smoke inhalation by means of a pipe, for shodding itself in hornpipes and simulating crow like characteristics. The other unfortunate is clearly afflicted with woes and tribulations. We appear to be dealing with matters of the heart, a theme much beloved of the whole romcom genre not to mention turgid Russian tomes and light weight European relativist equivocation. I mean, who needs a plot?

‘To what end would I require such experiences?’ The Pooka replied, exhaling in short puffs, rings of smoke and might they be contrived as shifting into shapes to emulate the subject of the moment?

Wait a minute now, is that that ‘shifting’ there not a bit shifty?
‘You are not involved in this story with your third wall intrusion. Out with you,” said the Pooka.
And I had to admit that I had had a rush of blood to the head and well exceeded my brief. I apologized and extracted myself.

‘It is part of the human condition.’
‘Very good, as a Pooka I have no need to concern myself with it so.’
The eegit took a moment to consider suicide.
‘Now, before you rush into that melodrama,’ the telepathic Pooka said. ‘Can I point out that if it is a condition then there is a product.’
‘What?’
‘Well, that is how things work now. We are not required to experience inconvenience. There is a product.’
‘Why is that not a relief?’
“Is it not?”
“How can convenience satisfy our longing?”
‘Now, that’s the human condition.’

“I’m going to win,” the eegit declared and to say he was jubilant would be mundanely obvious.
The Pooka adjusted the slant of the cap on his head to increase the aspect of worldliness in his projection of his self to the world.
“Is that good?” he asked.
“Good? It’s great,” the eegit effused, hoisting his trousers to better reflect his new standing in society.
“Well done so.”
The Pooka, seeming unimpressed, said, and emitted a long stream of white smoke.
“What’ll I do with it?”
“Now what is that you’re wanting to do something with?” The Pooka asked laconically.
“My victory.”
“Oh that,” said the Pooka. “I’d keep it to myself.”
“What?”
The eegit’s trouser line may have granted an inch to gravity.
“Well, in that manner, it’d be yours. And is that not the point? You have won. It’s yours.”
The eegit did not seem convinced by this policy of self-effacement.
“No! I’m a winner.”
“Oh, I misunderstood, I thought you were about to just win. But apparently, you always win,” said the Pooka adjusting the crossing of his legs so that somehow he became even more complacent.
“I don’t always win. But you see that’s because I don’t always compete.”
The eegit was inordinately pleased with this response so that he believed it was true.
“Oh, you win when you want?” The Pooka observed.
“Yeah that’s it. I’m a winner,” the eegit said and if asked he’d say there was no hesitation in his utterance.
“Okay, so winning is when you know you won’t lose?”
“What?”
The eegit might now have felt that hesitation or refusal to exhibit it was not so much the issue but rather it was the wavering of certitude that was increasing his anxiety.
“To win is not to lose. But to lose is when you can’t win. So perhaps to lose is just not to be bothered winning and winning is nothing more than making an effort not to keep losing.”
“That can’t be right,” said the eegit and perhaps we now need a third person evaluation of the tenor of his conviction. It was tremulous.
“Well it might mean winning and losing is the same thing,” the Pooka said retrying the lace in his hornpipe that had come loose.

Now our whole narrative loses momentum as someone points out hornpipes don’t have laces. Before we know it, others are piling in claiming Pooka’s don’t exist. Still others are objecting to the use of ‘eegit’, as unacceptably unwoke. As if he cares. All of this is, of course, to shy away from what is in front of them?
And what is that? You ask.
The only thing you can know and all you need to know.
What?
It’s absurd.

The eegit’s trousers were now at a tragic distance from his waist and required the full extent of his arse’ rotundity to spare blushes.
“But then I won’t have won.”
“Hmm.”
The Pooka looked into the distance, aware that the concept was vague and so, quite simply, was not.

For those of us of a delicate constitution, it is a great relieve that what passes for night in an environment which seems to breft of atmospheric features or temporal flow, arrived. Wether the characters ent asleep or temporarily ceased to exist is not explicitly stated but the shite talk stopped. During this hiatus I tried to convey by the power of mind to the powers that be the necessity for something to be done regarding the complete absence of visual simulation. To this end I made a list of the evidence we had at this point hoping to convey the scant nature of it.
The list was not long; two entities one of who appeared to be a Pooka and the other not, a smoking pipe which occasionally produced smoke (white of colour), hornpipe shoes a pair of, a set of trousers ill-fitting, socks one pair of but may be metaphorical in nature and a rotund arse apparently attached to the non-Pooka entity.
My hope that whatever it was was doing the story telling would review this list and from the paucity of it come to realize that they were neglecting important aspects of story-telling such as ‘setting the scene’, ‘creating atmosphere’, ’providing useful context’ and shamelessly using physical objects for metaphorical effect to assist the listener in looking below the surface of what is being said etc.
I have to say, I entered the next phase of the story with low expectations.
The dawn appeared to have broken or at least the sleep terminated.

“Is it yourself?” he asked the Pooka.
“That would be to assume a self is to be assumed.”
“It would that and to be sure.”
“Am I to suppose you are of Gaelic extraction?”
“I am a Gael of the wind thorn seas. I am a Gael of the turf blooming hills. I am a Gael of the thatch roof and smoking hearth. I am a Gael of the Irish Christ and the Saint and the Scholars.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’. Cad is anım duit?”
“Brendan is anım dom.”
The Pooka looked alarmed.

We were blessed with a veritable deluge. A name! Reference made to physical phenomena! Things were certainly looking up.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a sea worthy vessel for the navigating of the same wind torn seas, by any chance?”
“In truth, I am more to be found tossed and tormented in the salt spray on my simple but sturdy curragh, being lashed by the untamed godless forces of enraged seas, and them replete with the anger of being perpetually excluded of all chance of salvation, than I am on the solidity of ground.”
The Pooka tried to assemble the elements of a fresh pipe but whether it was the metaphorically enraged seas of the implicit implication of Gaelic gails, he was having little success.
“You’re in your boat a lot then?”
“I am that.”
“Might you be a man of a religious temperament?”
“I am that also.”
“Would you describe the nature of your convictions as moderate or as rooted more in your definition of self?”
“Before I give answer to that and risk erring, could you given voice to examplifications of each of the propositions you have posited?”
“Indeed I could do that. The former case might be found in the Church of England as practiced in the Home Counties where the afternoon tea and scone is as much venerated as the Eucharist and the Transubstantiated Wine.
The latter might be better seen in the ascetic practices of early Christianities hermit which was later lauded and urged on the larger congregation by the fervent sermonising by Church Fathers and became the bedrock on which Church doctrine of man’s innate sinfulness, which only hope to be addressed through redemption, the submission to the Grace of God and begging for the gift of Salvation. Only this might help him avoid eternal torment in pits of fire in Hell.”
“The latter.”
“Have others considered you as saintly in your demeanor?”
“While I no make claims beyond an expertise in the manipulation of my small and simple curragh, I will admit to an awareness of rumours abounding the nature of which, on hearing them, I am caused to blush and hide my face in shame.”
The Pooka abandoned attempts to ignite his intransigent pipe.
“And have you reached far in your curragh?”
“I have taken my craft from Tra na Rossan ore the wild seas to the land of ice.”
“Iceland?”
“It is often referred to unpoetically in that manner”
“And did you sail on from there?”
“I did. With the aid of winds and carried on the back of great whales, I came to the land where green is not to be found.”
“Greenland?”
“It is often referred to in this manner by those believing irony to be a form of humour to be indulged in.”
“Tell me you stopped there!”
“I did not. On with me in my craft of cow hide and tar.”
“Don’t tell me you found anything else.”
“I did, of course. I found Paradise.”
“You feckin’ gobshite! That was America.”
“What?”
“Yes, you single handedly opened the Gates of Hell.”
“Jazes.”

You will have noticed I was by an large silent during that passage. I suggest this is evidence of the spell binding effect of story telling. Here we had the impelling power of the archetype of The Journey providing a clear narrative plot line. We are swept along with the protagonist feeling the great battle against the odds. The equivocal evaluation of the end rewards is unfortunate but at least something happened.
Breathe less, we find ourselves after all the excitement, a shilled story teller will now provide us a passage to regain our composure.

‘Quiet, do you see?’
‘Hmm.’
‘If there were more of that.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Sure then we’d be content.’
The Pooka removed his arse from his elbow and set to the business of being.
‘Content? Is that what’s needed?’
‘Oh you’re awake,’ said the eegit. ‘Only I thought you were away there.’
‘Well, I wasn’t. What do you make of that?’
‘I don’t know, do I? It’s not like I perceive the ways of Pookas.’
‘I assure you, you do not.’
‘No, I expect not.’
‘You cannot guess at the depth of our contrariness. The width of our mischief is greater than your simplistic conceptions of infinity. The weight of our scheming would far exceed your paltry notions of the heft of dark matter. The multiplicity of our idle thoughts would tie knots in the crude approaches of your string calculus. The malevolence of one single yawn from us would so greatly exceed your capacity for evil as to equate you with altar boys.’
‘I know many altar boys who are little bollixs.’
‘Exactly. Little, small, insignificant.’ The Pooka seemed to have worked himself into a right state.
‘There’s a lot to you so,’ the eegit said, conciliatorily.
The Pooka lapsed into sudden contemplative silence while he conjured with the components and compliances of his pipe and though concurrence and conjunction, created a smoke for himself.
‘Content,’ he said.
‘It was well meant,’ the eegit tried to justify.
‘So it’s contentment now! Is that it?’
‘Well, on the other hand, we might have a go at discontent,’ the eegit conceded.
‘Sure you might as well throw in malcontent while you’re at it,’ the Pooka puffed, a stream of confusion of smoke emerging from his mouth with a temper on it and no target for its ill intent.

That is what you can expect from a Pooka. Just when your having a little relax for yourself, off it goes, erupting into uncalled for and unwanted aggravation and strife. They are a heart scald and that is not in dispute.

‘Didn’t I have a pal there and his name was Mal,’ said the eegit. ‘Or Al or Mel. One of them, anyway.’
‘There you are, in confusion on the first simple thing; facts. And you’re talking about being content.’
‘Well, facts only discommode you if you pay attention to them.’
‘You would ignore them?’
‘Well, there’s nothing to them.’
‘There is nothing to facts?’
‘Not a thing.’
The Pooka drew deep on his smoking utensil as, factually, it was no longer to be considered a pipe.
‘That is the problem with contentment. There is nothing to it. It lacks content.’

By any stretch of the imagination could there be said to be a plot in that last bit? In a proper story, the desire for quiet would have been developed into a great yearning. An embrace of the cosmic silence that floods the vastness of the universe, sucking the fizzes and bangs out of the stars and galaxies and smothering all in the enormity of its unmoving matter of darkness, it’s quiescent invisible energy.
I’m so exasperated by this story, I feel compelled to write a counter weight in parallel.

Grainne cast herself on her bed of eiderdown quilt and goose feather pillows. At last she could escape the tension and self-awareness of social interaction, the pretense of polite protocol. Turning on to her back soundlessly, she looked on the white nothing of the ceiling. The concentrated tightness in her clenched brain cells loosed and let free the imps of anxiety. Like blinking fireflies they danced in and out of existence until they were not. She stared at the blankness of the white ceiling until it was no longer blank. Tiny cracks appeared from places unnoticed but now apparent.
She closed her eyes and the black arrived but it quickly swam like ululations of pastel lights of throbbing circles. Fade and replace. Was there no quiet to be had, she thought. Am I locked in the constant insistence of the molecular tension of my body. Earth bound and ensnared in matter, denied all access to the nothing. Am I condemned to be? Am I a quarktile component adding to the racket of an atom and on to the stormy maelstrom of an element and on to the clashing and ripping of matter and on to the blind fury of a planet and on to the scream of a galaxy of explosions and collisions and impotent supernovas. Insignificant ferocity, futile extravagant temper, a spark in the unknowable quiet.

‘Loosed, is it?’ Said the Pooka. He was missing a horn pipe but the smoking pipe was burning nineteen to the dozen.
‘What?’
‘The imps there. You had them loosed and away with them to oblivion.’
‘What if I did?’
‘Let’s leave aside the shocking literary pretension, is it not a bit irresponsible?’
I noticed the Pooka had a hat about him. It’s design approximated a fedora, but it fell short of its aspiration. Still, a band had been attached before the project was entirely abandoned and a crows feather now protruded from that. I say about him, rather than on him as it was not where a hat might expect to be found, on the head. Instead it was atop a finger as he spun it round and round as if inviting inspection.
‘Shockingly irresponsible. Shocking till the cows come home,’ said the eegit.
I noted he had improved the purchase of his trousers to his mid-riff by use of a piece of rope. This might have been an improvement but for two aspects of the rope. Its breath would be familiar to any sailor as the rope could secure a substantial vessel to a wharf. In length, it might reach across the short dimension of Leitrim and as a result he was at constant risk on entanglement.
‘How is it irresponsible? It’s a word. You will find it in any dictionary of repute,’ I protested.
‘There may be nothing known to man more dangerous than the word,’ the Pooka said.
‘And the word was made fresh and dined among them,’ offered the eegit, although to what end is anyone’s guess.
‘And in this case it is a word of the most dangerous class,’ the Pooka noted, drawing hard on the pipe and funneling its vaporous content out both tunnels of his nose. ‘The adjective can cause slight and offense and the cowardly adverb never acts alone but gangs up with others to effects its nefarious intent. But here you have unleashed a verb, a man of action, and so must be held responsible for the outcome. In this case, obliterated imps.’
‘Puff!’ said the eegit.
‘This is nonsense. And besides, if there were anything in it, it was Grainne who loosed the imps.’
‘Leave me be,’ said Grainne. ‘I am worn down with the weight of my sorrows.’
It would have to be conceded she gave the appearance a woman greatly put upon.
‘Ah, sure, Grainne of the Sorrows,’ the eegit remarked.
‘Deirdre,’ I corrected. ‘It’s Deirdre of the Sorrows.’
‘Well, yer wan there is looking down in the mouth to me,” the eegit insisted.
‘Is there no peace? Is all solitude now cluttered?’ Grainne moaned. ‘Is quiet impossible?
‘Quite possibly,’ the Pooka said, then turning to me asked. ‘Is that the yearning you were going on about? I don’t think you can worm out of that little loose use of words. Shameful.’
I could mention at this point that it was the hat that was smoking the pipe but that would involve us in a lengthy diversion of a scientific explanatory basis and the pace of the story would be sure to suffer. Smart Alec reviewers are always on the look out for that kind of thing, ever ready to pounce.
‘You should be ashamed.’
‘You’re nothing but a sham of a man,’ chimed in the eegit.
Grainne sighed and a thousand impetuses aspiring to hope, died.
‘Wait, hang on. What are you pair doing here?’ I asked.
‘Trying to curb you worst excesses,’ said the Pooka. ‘Have you even read that heap of shite you’ve written?’
Whilst I had to admit, having only completed writing it, I’d not had time yet to read it back. But I felt it deserved better than this one line impressionistic review.
‘I don’t care for your comments as I didn’t ask for them,’ I said. ‘My point is, you have no business being here at all. You shouldn’t be in this story, at all.’
‘Do you hear him?’ The Pooka asked the eegit. ‘He’d have us follow the imps into oblivion.’
‘Obliterate, my granny! I’m going out fighting,’ the eegit said raising a pair of fists pugalistically.
‘Well, I know where I am not wanted,’ the Pooka said pocketing the pipe in a waistcoat I had never noticed before and donning the floppy fedora.
I could mention that the crow feather was circling in the air around the crown of the hat but that would necessitate discussion on the sense of one wing flapping and so the phenomena is best passed over.
‘Can I not give him a puck before we leave?’ the eegit enquired, swirling the fists about in a manner so haphazard it was difficult to ascertain any clear intent.
‘Please yourself,’ said the Pooka.
I placed a foot on a length of his trouser rope. There was such an abundance of it, the act was easily achieved. Riven as he was with insecurities of trousers security, he desisted from his boxing pursuit.
‘Are we leaving the poor cooleen to his cruel mercies?’ The eegit asked as they exited the story.
I turn around only to find Grainne’s form sprawled across the floor. (She may have brought this floor with her as I have recollection of seeing it before). When I turned her around, there was a smile of contentment on her face. Grainne, having come into this story but a few short paragraphs before, was dead.
‘Shite,’ a distant voice chuckled but I knew it was the Pooka.


‘Is that a phone you’re on? ‘ the Pooka asked, pulling the pipe from his mouth such that the heat in the stem was sufficient to tear at the dry fiber of his lower lip and cause him a modicum of pain.
‘This thing? I suppose it is,’ the eegit laughed with the glow of his phone screen accentuating his numerous inept shaving nicks.
‘And do you imagine it’s real?’
The eegit looked up from his screen for all of a moment then dived back in.
‘Well, I’m on here a lot, so it’s as real as anything else.’
‘Hmm,’ the Pooka reflected, staring at the uncaring, unresponsivness of the stars in an unsky. ‘But you’re suggesting there might be some kind of reality on your phone?’
‘There might be I suppose but where’s the harm in that given the alternative is now old and used up?’ The eegit decided. ‘It’s boring. But this is great, all together.’
‘So, that is the new reality?’
‘Have you a problem with that?’
The Pooka considered getting the finger out. On balance, he decided instead to get it into a nostril and have a rummage.
‘Nevertheless, the clapped out old reality might be out there. You know, something that appears to be real. And even if what we experience is a facsimile for actual reality, it resonates with our senses in a manner that allows us to feel it is real.’
‘But do you not see? That is what this is,’ the eegit enthused, brandishing the phone. ‘It’s only zeros and ones, dots and dashes, bits and bobs but so is the auld reality. The auld reality just fools our senses into thinking sense impressions are rooted in reality but they are only sense impressions. The New Real here is similarly duping our senses into thinking this shite is real.’
The Pooka regarded the eegit with alarm.
‘Have you been reading again?’
‘I don’t have to. It’s all on t’internet. I can watch half of the video and then find a Tinder young wan and then write abuse on a feedback line and then sell me mother on EBay. It’s called doing my own researches, do you see? Then I can say what’s real according to me. That’s the New Real.’
‘What? It’s so superficial it cannot extend beyond real to reality?’
‘Away with you and your Old Thinking, my folkloric friend,’ said the eegit distractedly as he worried the keys on his phone with a frenzy that formally was associated with first sexual encounters.
‘And what is on there that’s replacing myth and legend?’ The Pooka asked.
‘Komputer Games, do you see?We don’t need fairy stories and folklore now. It’s all digital and the characters use foul language and go around shooting up things and everything, do you see?’
It would be a lie to say this did not disturb the Pooka. He was already a phantasmagolical creature on the verge of extinction. The ubiquity of the Leprechaun was dominating the ever diminishing folk tales landscape. Increasingly, he sensed he’d been condemned to peripheral obscurity.
Rising above his own personal concerns he pressed the question.
‘Hmm. Is there culture on there?’
‘How d’ye mean?’
‘I don’t know, Greek philosophy, the Olympian’s, the Roman Myths, the Hindu Sanskrits, Confucianism, Teaching of the Buddha, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Islam, the Aztec and Mayan Imperial religions, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, Communism, the rise of Capitalism, that kind of thing?’
‘Sure that’s all nonsense,’ the eegit said finding the Siri Oracle on his phone. ‘Siri, are you real?’
‘I’m a virtual assistant, not an actual person. But you can still talk to me,’ Siri replied.
The Pooka raised an eyebrow.
‘What? You heard the man. He’s virtually a person. A kick in the arse and he’d be over the line,’ said the eegit. ‘There’s plenty of real people and you’d be talking to them until the counted sheep are asleep themselves and your man there wouldn’t give you the time of day, let alone assistance.’
‘But is that reality?’
‘Look at this, would you? Siri, what’s my name?’ he asked.
‘It’s eegit O’Shawnessey.’
‘I didn’t know you were an O’Shawnessey.’
‘There you go and you’re making out you’re the real one,’ the eegit said, smugly.
‘Of the O’Shawnesseys of Rathdowney?’
‘God no! They’re a desperate untrustworthy shower. My family is Ballybrophy.’
‘But they are only five miles away.’
‘A mile is never long enough as far as they are concerned.’
‘Really?’
‘There is nothing more real than the necessity of keeping a distant from Rathdowney.’
‘But that’s just ridiculous,’ the Pooka dismissed.
‘And that list you were spouting there is not?’
‘It is, of corse, nonsense and yet there’s not an artifact in the world that’s free of one culture or another.’
‘There’s none of them culture artifacts on here. We’ve no need of all that,’ the eegit said.
‘Is that a selfie you’re taking?’ enquired the Pooka.
‘What of it?’ the eegit responded, moving his head slightly and trying out a pout. The effect was disconcerting.
‘Is that just looking at your external self and calling it reality?’
‘Are you saying I’m not real?’ the eegit asked.
‘I don’t know, ‘ the Pooka said. ‘How are you feeling?’.
‘What?’ the eegit said without looking up from his phone.

You will have noticed I made no intrusion in that passage. This can be accounted for by a number of factors, not least of which being I had no clue what they were imagining they were talking about. In addition, having demanded they removed themselves from my story, I felt it best in the short term at least, that I respect the boundaries of their story and so quash this story hopping tendency before it became endemic. Imagine the confusion that would result? We would find ourselves living in a constant state of suspicion wondering if the current people we had to react with were supposed to be there at all. Or worse, were we supposed to be where we found ourselves or had we wandering into an entirely different reality? It would be akin to living your life on LSD. You’d be constantly hungry and unable to concentrate enough to work a spoon.
But the real reason I left them alone was i had my own problems. I was heartbroken.
You may laugh at my romantic naivety but you didn’t met Grainne. Not the real Grainne. You have read about her but you’ve not experienced her presence. It is true, my acquaintance with the woman was brief but the force of that presence completely overwhelmed me. The chasm of her yearning was frightful in its extent and yet it drew me in. Her sorrow was so boundless, it was heart rending. To even glimpse it left me with an acute sense of the inadequacy of any compassion I could draw from the depths of my being would be. Such sweet, sad tragedy could only leave my soul sundered and suffused in suffering.

‘She was a big girl, I’ll give you that.’
I swung around to be confronted with the Pooka, imagining himself to be debonair in his shapeless fedora. The crows feather appearing to have flown the coup.
‘What the f**k! You are in the other bit. I deliberately left you there in peace.’
‘I’m a Pooka. I can be in two places at once and you don't imagine it takes much out of my commodious capacity to deal with that eegit, do you?’
‘Whatever, you’re not supposed to be here.’
‘Just ignore me,’ he suggested, fishing pipe and tobacco accoutrements from the waistcoat pocket. ‘But come here, you have to concede she was a big girl. There was ample of her there.’
‘I didn’t notice.’
The Pooka gave the tried and trusted knowing look.
‘The auld eegit might have a point. Reality is nothing more than the things we choose to allow our senses to tell us. There is nothing more to it than the outcomes of our own researches.’
‘That is cheap relativism and it completely overlooks the fact that everything our senses experience is filtered through the culture we live in.’
‘Who told you that?” the Pooka asked, using the same finger to explore the inner recesses of an ear.
‘No one needed to tell me that. I worked it out myself.’
‘It’s the result of your own researches?”
“We, yes, I suppose it is.”
“And this could be summarized as ‘All sense impressions we use to form our picture of the world is heavily influence by the culture we live in’.”
“Yes, I expect that is it,” I managed but I hoped I’d not be asked to repeat it.
The Pooka nodded his approval at this. He blew out a stream of smoke that sought escape but its force dissipated before its impetus could be formulated into a plan.
‘Culture is nonsense of course, but there is not a thing can be done about it. Like air, it’s there and we have to breath it. So, you will admit she was a large girl and that some of her attractiveness is consequent on your culture prizing women of hefty dimension.’
‘My appreciation of her was not based on physical attributes.’
‘Fine child baring hips.’
‘Not anything I gave consideration to.’
‘No spring chicken, so a bit of experience on the clock. There’d be satisfaction in that bed.’
I felt a compelling desire to apply my boot to the Pooka’s arse.
‘You fail entirely to understand the woman’s greatest allure. I would ask that you desist with your line of enquirer or insinuation, for I cannot say which it is, and honour the woman’s passing. I also request you f**k off back to your own story.’
The Pooka grinned and rather than deport himself in a civilized manner, disappeared.


‘How do you mean, you don’t know?’
The Pooka paused the pipe before his mouth for a moment, then placed it firmly within and drew contemplatively on it. The smoke imbibing completed and the expelling underway, he deigned to share his thoughts.
“I have no knowledge of it,” he advised.
“Well, that puts us in the quare place and no mistaking.”
“Do you imagine?” Asked the Pooka.
“It’s not clever to be going about without knowledge of things,” said the eegit and he hoisted his trouser. “And that’s a fact.”
The Pooka sent an unreasoning plume of smoke into the atmosphere.
“And you are cleaver enough to know thing, is that it?”
“I’m clever enough to know I’m not stupid,” the eegit grinned and gave a wink. This wink is often ascribing to a state of knowing, although for what reason this is the case, who knows?
“Oh, you know that, do you?”
“Listen, just because you don’t know the thing I asked you about, which I know to be a fact on account of you admitting no knowledge of it, that is not to suppose we are all in the same boat.”
“You’re an independent boat man now? Is that the way of it?”
“Sure amn’t I out there with the best of them battling the high seas of ignorance, the foam of obscurity will not deflect me from my endeavors, there is no swell of agitated misconception I will not quiet.”
“I think that is admirable,” the Pooka comment to the disconcertion of the eegit. He could never remember a previous occasion when the Pooka had commented on anything had said without ridicule.
“But Admiral, have you notice the hole in your boat behind you?” The Pooka asked with a glance behind the eegit.
Forgetting he was not actually on a boat, the eegit swung around in alarm and fell over.
“Unsteady on solid ground, we launch ourselves into seas of unknowing, our confidence over brimming in anticipation only to find we don’t know how to sail,” the Pooka said adjusting the seat he had taken in the world so that it suggested insouciance. “One might say, we don't know of what we speak.”
“There’s no hole in this boat, is there?”
“Is there not?”
“Well, where is it?”
“Some would say it is the hole in our soul where morality ought to be.”
“Well, that would not apply to me. I am a very moral man.”
“And yet discourse on matter of which you have no knowledge.”
“I’m a plain speaking man. I call it like I see it.”
“You give oral expression to things of of which you are ignorant”
“I am oral when it is necessary to give expression to my beliefs.”
“You am oral.”
“That’s bad grammar.”
“Pray, let me correct it. You’re amoral.”



“It’s a fable, do you see?” the eegit said looking at the corns on his feet.
“Is it now?” replied the Pooka from the telegraph pole he was had taken up occupancy of. “I wouldn’t have thought that.”
“There you have it. A grand thing, the fable.” And he dug deep into a corn with a penknife he held about his person.
“Isn’t a fable not dissimilar to a Fairy Story? A tall tale of mythical creatures of little or no consequence.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” noted the eegit. “But you’re wrong there in the most fundamental way.”
“That’s a great surprise to me, given I’ve never yet been wrong through the duration of my not inconsiderable years.”
“Well now, Mister My Man, haven’t you only overlooked the fundamental difference between them two genres there. Isn’t it the moral.”
“Ah the moral!” Remarked the Pooka. “That’s a tricky concept.”
“There’s nothing tricky about it. It’s as plain as the wart on the nose. And the Fable has a moral while your Fairy Story is little more than a flight of fancy.”
“That might be right or it might be wrong,”
“How is it right or wrong?”
“Is that not what a moral is all about? Isn’t a moral person a person with a strong sense of right and wrong?”
“Well, yes, I suppose. But the moral of a story is an instructive lesson. We get learning from fables That’s the point of them. When we hear one, we furrow up the brow and the learning seeps in and then bingo! We get the purpose of the lesson. Sure aren’t they only fabulous.”
“Fabulous fables, indeed, and there was me thinking they were tricky,” said the Pooka having move the seat of his arse and the rest of him to residence in the midst of a nearby thorny bush. “But it surely is as plain as you say. The wart on the nose. The wart being the right and the nose the wrong.”
“What? Warts are shocking things. How could they be right?”
“Well, could you have the wart without the nose?”
“No. The wart grows on the nose.”
“So the wart is a development based on the nose?”
“What?”
“First there was a nose and then there was a wart, so the wart is the development of the nose. QED the wart is the right intention for nose development and the nose it only a wrong intermediary point in that development.”
The pooka had now maneuver himself through the thorny bush and was perched most delicately on a toe atop a rose on the bush. The elegance of this stance made the pipe protruding from his gob seem most incongruent.
“Now wait, now. You are ascribing morality to evolution.”
“There’s plenty of people who believe evolution is a fable.”
“They’re eegit.”
“Hmm. But that’s not what makes morals tricky.”
The Pooka appeared to have shared himself out to multiple mini-versions of himself and each was perched on every rose in the bush.
“Well what is it?”
“They want more.”
“More of what?”
“All,” he said, expansively with extended arms for he had coalesced into a single Pooka again.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“That’s all there is,” he said and the reunified Pooka shrunk to the size of a regular sized squirrel. “So you can’t have more of all there is.”
“Could you not give it a bash?” the eegit asked. “Could you not be inspired by the moral?”
“Well, morals exhort people to be more than they are. But if all they are is all there is, then they can’t be more.”
“Jazes that’s desperate. But c’mere if this is a fable, what’s the moral?”
“We are all, all we are.”
“Is that it? Is there nothing more? Only, it seems very little and I want more, I want it all.”
“You can’t have more all.”

And there is a perfectly good ending.
But we always want more and every time we get it, its not as good as what went before. And no matter how often this happens to us we never learn and we want more.
Take Grainne, she was ample but I wanted more and now I wonder was it my wanting that caused her death.
There were blagards and scoundrels who said it was nothing more than she deserved. She had it coming and it was only a matter of time. They made mutterings of her past hanging out in decedent, decaying bars in the wrong part of town. Accusations of a light touch with the pocketbooks of others, of driving countless lovers to madness and poverty, of dabblings with contraband substances, of suicide attempts bungled.
But they did not know the presence of the woman. They only was her outer shell. They did not know her inner soul as I did.
And it was I who wanted her yearning and her sorrow and she, forced by the circumstances of the fable to be compassionate and generous, assumed all that cosmic yearning and all the world’s sorrow and it was more than too much. It was singularly all too much more than one can take on.
She died of a-more-all-ity.