           Many Hogs
Tea Lovers Committee
                2020

Credits
Mantratronic - main code and graphics
Fbev - music and code
Aldroid - code
Bossman - TLC logo
Decca - font

I had high hopes for what I could do with this demo, I hit some of them
and have left the rest for later productions. It has a ludicrously 
complicated timing and sprite display system in it, in the expectation I
would compress the data later, but this makes it pretty remixable if 
anyone wants to have a go. It’s in the scenes array, near the bottom of 
the code. Feel free to use the code in this demo for your own 
productions, but ask Decca for permission to reuse the font, pretend you 
haven’t seen the terrible pigs I pixelled, and don’t ask me to maintain 
anything!

A couple of the overlay patterns were inspired by the graphics 
Beesandbombs and Saskia Freeke (@sasj_nl) post on their twitter accounts, 
though they shouldn’t be blamed for my versions.

The poem, which isn’t exactly a poem, or easy to read in the demo is:

Many hogs

Many hogs mean many bogs
Stripped logs no togs
Many hogs know you ate bacon
Many hogs don't you be fakon

Many hogs from ancient fogs
Hogs ridden by angry frogs
Feral frogs on feral hogs
Crush upright shields
Bury many men
Out on open fields

Tusks leave husks
Tusks dig up borders
Tusks leave holes
In Nigel’s orders

Many tusks knacker rebel horses
Shouldn't have asked for equal quarters
Short hunts long now hears unheeded orders
Soft silly feet tasty two leg treat

Their snout full of trout
Their snouts to the trough
Their Boris will fit
We’ll eat the toff

Swine scrolling trotters rolling
Tails up and twisting and horrors unfolding
Swine on the twine all mine all swine
Four to the boar two legs to the floor
The farmer no more
Four legs moar

---

Jimmy Kelly was my uncle. He was a difficult and wonderful person who 
rarely got what he needed in life. When I was a child he was coming out 
of a dark period of being in a mental hospital, and as I grew up he 
started to get the help and environment he needed to feel comfortable. He 
taught himself Latin to read Virgill, French to read Proust, published 
terrifyingly honest poetry in Irish about his schizophrenia, played a 
guitar with too few strings, and knew Joyce's Ulysses completely by 
heart. I once saw him drink 40 cups of tea in one day.

He taught me to love and fear language, to be proud of my poetry and 
music, to understand that other people's reality may be a very different 
one to my own. He sent me an Irish music magazine every week for years, 
just so I wouldn't miss out on what was happening at home. He spoke at 
100 mph about literary theory, rock and roll, neuroscience, physics, 
religion, and our family's history. One day he would explain the beauty 
of a perfectly weighted phrase, another that no metaphor could possibly 
be better than direct description, and the next that St Augustine wasn't 
bad but had got that bit backwards. When he hadn't been taking his 
medication, he spoke of the paranoid fantasies that ruled and destroyed 
his life, and tried to fight the horror in his mind by explaining the 
failure of language to control the world he saw. The one thing he didn't 
do was be quiet.

In July we got news he had been taken to hospital, and assumed it was 
another infection in his leg due to an amputation years earlier. It 
wasn't, it was cancer, and it was already spread throughout his body. 
Covid meant we couldn't visit him in the hospital, couldn't comfort him 
or talk to him for over a month. When he was sent back to his care home 
for end of life care, we had to wait for two weeks as he was quarantined 
just in case he had covid. Myself and my father went to see him for half 
an hour the first day we could, and he was philosophical about his 
diagnosis, but fell asleep in the middle of talking to us. 3 days later 
we were told we couldn't return, as lockdown was reintroduced to Dublin.

It was 8 weeks later when we got a phone call early in the morning that 
we would finally be allowed back, as he was not expected to survive the 
day. We went in full PPE, like we were visiting aliens, or were the 
aliens ourselves. He was in so much pain. I was horrified to see how much 
smaller and distraught he was. Worst of all, he couldn't speak. We told 
him we loved him. We told him all his nephews and nieces loved him. How 
much his teaching and kindness had meant. He didn't respond. And then we 
didn't know what else to say to this shadow of our loved one. So my 
sister played him a reading of a W. B. Yeats poem, and he did respond, 
nodding along to the rhythm. We spent the next eight hours reading him 
poetry and prose. W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, and Paul 
Muldoon. Irish wordsmiths who loved language like he had taught us too. 
He woke up a couple of times, grabbed my hand and stared at me. I think 
he was trying to say he loved me. I hope it was that and not "shut up 
please, you're getting the Irish pronunciation all wrong, and anyway 
O'Riordan was better".

I came home in the evening, as someone needed to look after my mother, 
and started to write the poem in this demo. My head was still full of 
Beckett's Fizzles and Muldoon's Incantata that I had read that day, both 
of which verge between streams of unconsciousness and beat poetry. Many 
Hogs is nowhere near as good, but maybe Jimmy would have liked it. I know 
he would have been kind, told me to keep at it, and told me twenty new 
contradictory paths I could go down next.

He died during the night. I never saw him again. He was the only family I 
had that encouraged me to express myself, that accepted me as who I was 
and wanted to be. May it be kind wherever you have gone Uncle Jimmy, Rest 
In Peace.

 - Mantratronic
