Pluto In Ulster

There was no greater metaphor for the Plutonian experience than the conflict in Northern Ireland in the late 20th Century. Its grim aesthetic perfectly evoked the two sides of Pluto, both schizoidal internal conflict and external oppression.

The alien presence of the British security system evokes the ever-present eye, monitoring everything, revealing nothing. This was perhaps the ultimate Ballardian world, although Ballard himself never wrote about it. It is strange in hindsight how films and television dramas always soundtracked The Troubles with ethereal Celtic folk music from the likes of Clannad, when they should really have employed Chrome or Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft.

Even the euphemistic title given to this conflict, "The Troubles", was suggestive. The central Plutonian experience is The Ordeal, in which we are dragged down into the Underworld in order to be torn apart, experience our most atavistic selves, before being forged anew and lifted out on the other side. Although the Pluto ordeal is agonistic, it is also evolutionary; all that is obsolescent and outgrown is dispensed with, so that a new, higher self can emerge.

All the protagonists in The Troubles descended into Hades. They all performed acts of depravity beyond what they might initially have thought themselves capable. This was the essential nadir of Pluto, and only after this nadir, or series of nadirs, could the journey out of the pit commence. This could also be said about the 20th Century as a whole, that it was one great Plutonian travail in which humanity plumbed the utmost depths of its consciousness, before slowly pulling itself upwards.

At the time, the conflict appeared to be interminable, this being another characteristic of the Pluto experience; that while you are in it there appears to be no end in sight. I remember a Northern Irish comedian being asked what it would take to resolve the differences between the two communities, and his reply was "coastal erosion".

The Pluto experience isn't quite over for the province, although its most intense phase has abated. The older identities of Unionist and Nationalist are still apparent, although they are gradually attenuating, and a singular Northern Irish identity is slowly growing. Although Pluto tears apart, if the individual or society under its influence endures, then it also reconstitutes anew.

Eventually, at least.