In the context of Chapter 1 — Desiring Elsewhere, where the potential of queer imagination is explored, Moving Discourse is delighted to open a window into the creative worlds of transdisciplinary artist, performer, and musician Fionnuala Kennedy.
Below, you will find her experimental and poetic prose, which accompanied her cinematic work Nephin Subs. The film, excerpts of which appear in the video section of this chapter, blends memory, myth, and landscape, evoking a journey to the West of Ireland, where surreal encounters and mysterious phenomena stir longing, curiosity, and reflection. Its atmosphere is a dreamlike, poetic, and alive with subtle wonder as the writing itself, which is drawn from the film’s narration. Kennedy’s language is rhythmic and tender, conjuring worlds where personal memory, fantasy, and myth intermingle. Reading her words is like entering the internal life of the film: attentive, lyrical, and quietly transformative. 

There’s a dispute over the shape of some folk, the family name, new and old ailments, who’s child they might be, at the right hand of what? Though the mode is operational here, it’s not uncommon for us to bask in some mild gossip or child’s play, whomever you are, at a certain age, people’s lives, and particularly the fall of others becomes very, very interesting.

These are a series of instructions that will ensure your safety. So, please listen carefully.

The following instructions are applicable for all corporal beings, those who are not, please leave now…

We are here to facilitate the living in a tempestuous crossing, our aim is to deliver each passenger however dirty or cranky they may be to the other side.

There will be strange markets on the other side, selling all sorts, high doses of misery tarnished in bright lights and boxes engraved with cryptic messaging which are actually void of meaning, memorabilia that professes to help you remember the time you spent here, they will convince you of its importance though we can assure you it holds no value except fanatical loss, there will be folk in changeable shrouds, weather dependent, appearing as if they are of the land and sky, in grey or blue, coaxing you into dark caves, swearing they are warm, soft places to hide out from the gales for a short while, these are man made holes, tunnelled by industry folk, shaped like the extinct snake.

We are here to facilitate you in a crossing that over many giants, has become a finely crafted succession of parts making up a larger system, we advise a real acknowledgement of ONLY what is ahead, we are en route to one end. Provided you follow all the parts even the coldest corpse will thaw.

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I sit in a springtime dress beneath a beautiful tree, just north of Joyce’s Country. It would be around about now that I would name a place and the particular flowers in bloom in mid-spring, but I do not know the names, for I have not lived, or even moved. The landscape is thrilling all the same, especially this time of year.

Little lambs fall like thunder, and life is a chaotic Hollywood scene; A Whistle in The Wind! The Quiet Man! An Epsom Dowry! The Cuppeth Over-Floweth!

But the girl, the girl is sick. The frills and white-blossom nips and tucks of her springtime dress bundle up her brittle bones. Her eyes wide open like heathen lead, her cheeks filled with poisoned blood, her mouth a dry socket – full of rails and rails of springtime dresses, moth-eaten and white, turned magnolia in the darkness of her mouth.

Her little hooves buried in mud. Sheets of rain fall down upon their soft skull-een. Steam rises up off the fauna as daylight disappears and a scene is chiselled in moments: a picture-book cottage just ahead of your innocence. Like a wet, hopeless case, you lap at the pain – the warm fire, the mild laughter, the wet sprint for tea. A sad song plays out through all the noise and clatter.

And amid it all, a gentle Faun bends and heels, rising up from beneath The Plantus, scooping up Wet Lamb! Oh! Lamb and Faun burrow up into the limit of the trees, and still further, where hot air rises and ancestors weep!

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Below her breastbone, below her breast, is a pump.
On the island, below.
And it sprinkles these heavy stones onto the land.

When the land dries up from the hot sun, the stones fall through, and we gather to watch this. Our desire – our desire – is to know where the stones fall, so we listen. We listen very hard. We lie on planes of shaded, sturdy land with our ears to the ground, and we hear them fall through and land on something that sounds like warm-ish play dough…maybe the colour baby blue or black – that’s what it sounds like.

Then there’s the sound of wetness moving, so I think the stones make the play dough hungry, and it salivates and swallows them up, whole. That’s what it sounds like.

In recent years, we’ve gathered to listen. A group of older women have been bringing tools. It started with scissors and stones, and now they bring longer, much stronger instruments for cutting and throwing, to penetrate the dry land. They’ve started taking up large portions of the ground.

We all look and shake our heads at them, but we still look down into the big holes they have made, but it’s blackness, still blackness.

There’s also been talk of an industrial light coming to the island next year, and a very big rock. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what they’re for. Some of the women even started building metal frames with curtains around their holes, and charging for entry. We all found ourselves entering this terrible period of longing after these holes had been opened up. I spoke to the other women on the island; we found ourselves relating to how we suddenly started yearning for something entirely opposite to what we had experienced all our lives.

There was this sense of before, like never before. People started writing on the walls: “like never before” and “make this island great… again.” It was a strange epidemic that spread through the land, like a great longing.

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Christo has taken my spirit for all I am worth.
Left out here in the cold, I demand you to tell me where my pyjamas have gone?!
Who took my paintings from the wall?
I have taken nothing from you. Why must you harass me in these last hours?
I demand you step aside and let me in.
No more calls at midnight. No more. I have repented.
You rain down holy orders, though you know I haven’t the tools to build your kingdom.

Out there in the cold.
Wet lamb meets fawn.
The promise is enough, though it has no colour in its cheek nor beef in its heel.

He can live alone for many years, surviving off the image of her ‘coming home’, spinning like his spit roast, the pig, her skin…
He was built for this.

She wraps herself up in a wet leaf.
There is love in my mammy’s hair.
There is a secret I’ve never been told.
I demand to know it before she leaves forever.

A dog barks.

Enter the figure with eyes.
Oh, figure with eyes! Where have you been?!
We waited for so long, but you never came when we needed you.
Everyone has gone home.
They took the chairs and tables with them.

Relinquish yourself to the path, which, honestly, doesn’t feel like it is laden with options. None at all, really. That’s it, really, in a nutshell.
No, this is me in a nut: ’Help, I’m in a nut, what kind of nut is this?’
‘Help, I’m dead and I’m not quite dead. How do I get out, what kind of situation is this?’
‘Help, I’m a blade of grass and it’s really very boring!’
‘Help, an antelope ate me, it’s very dark in here and I don’t feel like I’m a part of the circle of life’.