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davidjodonoghue-blog · 7 years

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The Messers’ Manifesto: ‘’The Sesh” as a revolutionary model for a new society

A spectre is haunting Official Ireland: the spectre of the sesh. All the powers of the anti-craic find themselves aligned against it; the boys in the Dail, the shades, nosey neighbours and your man who gives you the eye for buying off-brand energy drinks, rollies and a frozen wedges at half four on a Wednesday morning.Gaffs and gigs the country round tremble and shake with its unconscious power and in the pre-dawn morning revellers, artists and undesirables dilate like pupils alive with its revolutionary potential.

The Sesh is a concept that seems to escape easy verbal explanation and whose ramifications for discourses surrounding class and the performance are the kinds of things you can only expound upon if you’re the sort of moribund muck savage whose life is empty enough and ego big enough that he might explore such a thing in a big wall of text no one is likely to make it through.

But if the Sesh as a cultural construction can expose the myth of a “classless” Irish society, its essence can also provide a template for developing the kind of radically democratic, egalitarian and just society where we might have peace, bread and craic. Embedded in our indescribable notions of a “serious session” are intellectual and material elements which challenge the most abominable prejudices and emphasise principles that might create a new society were they allowed to slip out from the shelter of shabby study accommodation into the wider world. To adapt an old slogan of those mad sesh gremlins of Paris 1968 “When parliament has become a mouldy 4am gaff sesh, then the mouldy 4am gaff will become parliament”.

Hash, Hunter-Gatherers and an economy of need

“Could I scab a rollie off you bai?”

It’s three in the morning and the cacophonous product of a creaky Aux cord is hardly keeping your friend’s conversation about how “Lizard people run the Premier League” submerged enough to not be irritating. You look up at the stranger whose begging for the remains of the John Player you scraped together the last of your dole for. His eyes are hungry; the hunger of a man whose flash frozen cans of Galahad are probably still defrosting themselves from frothing chunks in his churning stomach. You recognise that hunger and, without grudge of grumble, scrape together the last of your tobacco with a Costa loyalty card and form the single most perfect rollie imaginable. The pristine, white, straight shape of it makes it look like a smokeable shooting star. You hand it over and all the grovelling gratitude and weeping in the world has nothing on the curt nod and “Sound man” this stranger offers you. He disappears into the maelstrom of the sesh and leaves you only with a warm feeling of empathetic satisfaction; or is that just come up sick working its way up your gullet?

The generosity and giving spirit of the Sesh challenges the essential moral religion of our economic and political framework: that human beings are all nasty feens deep down, begrudging arseholes lunging through their lives in the constant spirit of cuthroat competition. But these simple acts of Sesh generosity rail against this grim view of humanity, as we desire to share the craic with as many as possible.The sesh is not alone in this regard and mirrors the hundreds of different systems of social and economic organisation that human beings have adapted in our long history of experimentation with civilisation; from hunter gatherers to Jesus-loving proto-hippies to Spanish anarchists. That time you threw a lad a few of your cans because the offie was closed? Little did you know but your desire to have one more sesh gremli in the trenches with you defied a ruling philosophy of greed and recklessness which has been the moral religion of the West for forty years or more and illustrated the anthropological notion of “baseline communism”; that human beings will generally share resources in the interest of building community given that the need is great enough or the cost small enough.

Anything with a pulse and a playlist: egalitarianism and the sesh

The essence of the sesh is diversity. Moroccan hash, french house, and a bag your friend swears was flown in straight from “the ‘dam”. The greatest seshes are not ruled by a monochrome, hegemonic conformity; that is the spirit that evenings spent at “craft beer tastings” are built of, the hedonistic and intellectual horizons of such an evening never really moving beyond the three square miles where those sorts of dry shites who might be in attendance have never left. The Sesh is built on the elements of the creative mind which Keats called “negative capability”; one’s ability to dwell in the diverse and ambiguous elements of the human condition and to be intoxicated by it. Black fellas, white fellas, culchie fellas, lady fellas, fellas who love other fellas? Why not, the more the merrier.All comers are welcome so long as they are down for the dynamic and democratic debauchery of the sesh. Prejudice is the anti-craic and the only acceptable discrimination based on identity or skin colour is when your friend starts complaining about “Alien grays influencing Top of the Pops” through the gurn as the sun breaks.

The sesh understands that the performance and pratice of differing identities, cultures and beliefs is not most vindicated by their recognition by the stormtroopers of the ant-craic but by their exuberant and confident performance in an environment of loving reciprocity which can challenge those very insitutions of the anti-craic.

Fuck the shades: The Sesh as anti-authoritarian festival

As American radical Hakim Bey put it, people who live in societies dominated by the repression and anti-craic of state structures and a capitalist socioeconomic system have a tendency to create “temporary autonomous zones”, small pocket universes of resistance to a reality of dull suppression and suffering. The sesh cannot be contained within the borders of the corporate sponsored club nights presented for our anaesthetisation by our masters in the world of politics and business, the spirit of the sesh is something that we carry in our hearts, deconstructing and reconstructing it in its every changing and always beautiful kaleidoscope patterns in gaffs, alleyways, bus stops and smoking areas around the country. The Sesh does not submit itself to the authority of the landlord or the policeman but, instead of fizzling out in outright conflict with these forces and serving as a means to legitimise and demonstrate their authority, it disappears and slips underneath doorways like a wisp of hash smoke, ready to reconstitute and reform in other hallways and in the hearts and minds of its revellers.

The discourse and practice that surrounds the sesh is indicative of the most inspiring and entertaining aspects of the Irish spirit; the playful sarcasm and sense of subversion that animates all of our speech and allows us to produce satirists and sonnet-writers in equal measure. It is a language and an attitude which playfully subverts authority; whether the authority of British imperial forces or the authority of that one beefy lad from Campus Security who “i swear to god man, actually has it out for me”. The sesh will accept no spectre of tyranny or domination, only the democratic traditions and codes of conduct that we accept in the spirit of the common good. In the spirit of democratic rebellion you should always pass the doobie on the left hand side, but no one puts you in a cage if you don’t. Our revelry is our resistance.

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