the tea bag
by Aodán McCardle
I thought what did she put in that tea bag, and I thought who makes their own tea bags, is that a thing even, to make your own tea bags and in the middle of the line I hit that e and the entourage application started to open and I didn’t, though I nearly, though I didn’t curse so I guess the dancing helped, did help, but then you have to wait, wait for it to open to shut it and it makes a noise like an announcement like its trying to reach you in some way and it says you haven’t set up an email yet and I haven’t and I won’t it’s like so many things in life, it comes as part of a package with something else you need and then it’s there and it hangs around and every so often you open it up into a space you don’t want to be in and briefly in your life there’s a moment where you have to wait to shut it down but briefly there you just have to wait but really do you make your own tea bags and if you did what would you put in it on a Sunday afternoon, what would you give someone in a tea bag, I suppose it depends if you like them, so does she like me, would she poison me, I mean in the middle of a forest in a house made out of cake and sweets surely the tea bags are safe.
If you could put truth in a tea bag would anyone drink it, or perhaps I could plug the hole with it after its drunk, really not all truth should be about faith, it shouldn’t be a trade off, belief, faith and truth tattooed on the knuckles of a three handed person and one of those hands needs six digits, we had a lamb that had an extra leg growing out of its shoulder, it stumbled about for a while but got to its feet and ran on and after a while we had the other leg removed and it said lamb things to us and ran on and its mum thanked us or would have but she’s a sheep and I no longer eat them but I’m still human so there is that, something that’s not really getawayable from so in truth there could be anything in that tea bag, I wouldn’t drink it.
And green tea is not the same as looking at green and by green I mean leaves on trees in abundance or grass but not the fake grass on a golf course or in a field pumped with chemicals like a bodybuilder or even anything that’s just too even and measured but the swaying green of mayhem in a grove or a spinney, a copse or a coppice or a thicket, a wood or a forest, maybe a jungle but uncontrolled or on its way to being uncontrolled or seemingly uncontrolled. They say that green, the rays, waves, particles of light, somewhere around 550nm can have an effect upon pain, specifically migraines, I listened to a radio show about it, they’re doing research, they started with lights, you sit for periods with just green light, but we’re lazy really so they’re testing glasses now so you take the green light with you but I know they’d rather just have a pill, a green pill. Maybe they’d settle for putting it in a tea bag and then they could fight over calling it green tea but not Green tea because that’s already a thing and you can’t have two things in the world like the court case over barbed wire, look it up, the copyright for barbed wire, or for a certain way of barbing it, or wiring it, it was worth millions and millions in the way now that billions are billions like millions used to be but then tea used to be only for rich people so it’s a bit the same though they didn’t put it in bags. I wonder who has the copyright on tea bags?
Copyright and ownership are funny things like tea bags, is it that they are just too general to copyright, like you can’t copyright water but then you can own it or the right to it or someone if they’re big enough or rich enough they can buy the right to it and they can use too much of it if they want to and mostly they use an equation language times money equals whatever they want it to equal, if you don’t believe me you can look up inalienable property you’ll find a link to academic papers on JSTOR all about it but then you’ll have to pay to read it, funny how that works. Or maybe I’m just being cynical, cynical • adj. 1 believing that people always act from selfish motives. 2 doubtful or sneering. 3 concerned only with ones own interests: a cynical professional foul. I’m leaning towards doubtful and sneering but feel there’s something more in there so I look up cynic, cynic /si-nik/ • n. 1 believing that people always act from selfish motives. (sounds familiar but wait for it) 2 a person who raises doubts about something. ( that’s getting warmer) 3 (Cynic) a member of an ancient Greek school of philosophers who despised wealth and pleasure. There’s nothing new under the sun. I could look up the word cliché here, in fact I do as the dictionary is already at c, and the thing is a cliché doesn’t make a thing untrue, just ‘overused’, so that means our ears have turned off, it occurs to me that political language has just supercharged the cliché so we stop listening and we’re back at the same equation, language times money equals whatever you want it to mean and at least the ancient Greeks made a school out of it though that’s a bit problematic in the current age of factory education where a tin of Yale of Harvard or Oxford or wherever costs so much more than a tin of community college or University of Local and now if you want to get into some countries you need to bring your top fifty college tin of education with you, I’m not sure when you actually open it or if the beans inside are magic beans but we’re definitely in the territory of golden eggs and fee fi fo fum and powerful giants who own everything and need slaying if you’re to get away with your life and of course that’s ridiculous, as ridiculous as needing a tin of magic beans from the top fifty universities to get into a country… fee fi fo fum I smell the blood of an English man… it’s funny that, it’s not like you could build an empire out of tea bags.
With the tea bag or with tea in general it’s the contradiction of the mundane and the exotic in one object, like love. It’s like the potato in Ireland. It was both a blessing and a curse. It fed people so well that after 250 years when it no longer fed them then they starved. My great grandfather was born in the midst of the famine, I’m sure he drank tea, I’m sure he ate potatoes, two objects from opposite sides of the earth but he died fairly close to where he was born and we have no connection to him or his family beyond a timeline and the common dietary plenitude of tea and potatoes but how can you lose touch with your family, it’s easier to remain close to a potato or a tea bag, you know where you stand with them, you never second guess what you’ve said or how you’ve said it. You know where you are with a tea bag, as long as it’s not in the woods, in a house, made out of sweets.
***Stay tuned for Aodán McCardle next monthly installment on September 13, 2025***
Photo of Aodán McCardle
BIO: Aodán’s current practice is improvised performance/writing/drawing. His PhD is on ‘Action as Articulation of the Contemporary Poem’ though physicality and doubt are the site of meaning and the stance respectively where the action operates. He opened the Performance Month at Beton7, Athens 2015, and the Performance Philosophy Centre Uni. of Surrey Sep 2016. He was a member of the anti-performance group LUC, London Under Construction and the Collaborative/Improvisational Performance group Cuislí.
Three books of poetry, Shuddered and ISing from Veer Books and most recently just out Small Increments from Beirbua Press plus an online chapbook LllOoVvee, Smithereens Press. New book of long poems/scores for performance that lean into the concrete and sonic elements of language coming this summer from Veer Books, based around issues of censorship and power structures. Recent critical work in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric on the poetry of Maurice Scully, Shearsman 2020, and in Hilson Hilson, Crater Press, on the Organ Music poems of Jeff Hilson. What Happens If A Poem is About Nothing? On the poetry of William Rowe, Esla (English Studies in Latin America; A Journal of Cultural and Literary Criticism, No.28 January 2025 https://ojs.uc.cl/index.php/esla/issue/view/3820
663 Reasons Why; What Might Seem Extreme on the poetry of Stephen Mooney. Enclave Review No 18, Contemporary and Modern Art Magazine, Ireland, Eds. Fergal Gaynor and Ed Krĉma, 2024
Current Project is a series of paintings and a series of etchings using dynamics from within Performance, improvisation as a mode of investigation and immersion in a subject and environment, and considering ‘experience’ in Twombly’s terms as our most intimate form of commonality. The works are a residue of these performances rather than simply an object of desire.