080803 Shasta | Memories and Memory: Ireland
Shasta
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How did I get from from Inisheer off the west coast of Ireland to deep sticky
memories associated with photographs from my childhood? Is it meaningful, or
is it a mess, and is there any reason to care? Does it matter where stories
come from and what shape they take, as long as there is meaning? And once I've
gone off on a crooked path, how do I find my way back?
Here is one thing I know: the idea that even one person will read what I am
writing is the difference between writing this and not. I am glad for myself
that I have this, but it is highly unlikely I would write it for myself. 
Travel is about experience, the new and unknown, and it is also about memory
and associations. In memory things become larger or smaller, more elaborate
or less. The photos are half truths, if even that, and really are springboards
to the story that is lurking in our minds that we sometimes manage to let ebb
out, somtimes painfully, to our tongues.
This photo is dated June 1960, meaning I am more or less straight up three
years old. I like the little boy I see, and I wonder what has happened to him.
I like his face, shyness on the verge of friendliness, pausing and looking.
I like the way he stands, active and ready to move, balanced on his right foot,
his left leg bent in and his left foot lifting just a bit. His arms are spread
and he is ready to fly, which is much how swinging can feel. I am saddened to
know that this is me, that I am so much older, so much grayer, so much craggier,
and that as experience and knowledge enters, innocence exits.
But I look at my abovedescription of the boy in this photograph, and I see
that description still in myself. I know that person described, because it is
how I still am, and that I haven't changed that much. And I also know that innocence
isn't lost. It's kicked around and buried, but it doesn't die, and it can be
what brings great joy to life by making things wonderful and new, postive and
full of potential. I want to be that boy as much as I can be.
Several things occur to me about this picture as I look at it today.
- First, this is the backyard of my grandmother, my father's mother, in San
Lorenzo, California. A year or so before this photo was taken she returned
from a year in Sheffield, England as an exchange teacher That event is the
basis for a short story I wrote and drew last July, "Now
his toddler eyes and brain struggled to know her."
- I am not sure who took this photograph- I think my mom did. The swing I
am holding hangs from a plum tree, one of two large trees in the backyard.
Directly behind whoever stands holding the camera is an apricot tree. The
apricot tree figures in another story and drawing from a year ago, "He
examined the evidence of their earlier work." I spent a lot of time
in and around these trees, and ate a lot of the fruit from each of them.
- Upon looking at this photograph recently, not having really looked at it
for a couple of years, the lattice-like fence is remarkably like the lattice-like
abstraction that is supposed to give the feeling of the openness of looking
up through trees and into the sky in "He
dropped his bike by the side of the trail."
- Finally, more tenuously but no less importantly, I have written about and
drawn trees and tree-like images in this weblog quite a bit. In this photo
here I am, with another tree, one that was a lot of meaning for me. A piece
I wrote about a year and a half ago, "Trees
Are The Best Sculpture," provides an idea of the kind of image and
space that forms in my mind when thinking about trees
I take great pleasure in making these connections, as it seems to ground me,
to make life real as I connect the past and present out of the accumulations
of my life into something whole and surprising and evolving.
I remember much of the 1965 Europe trip, but Ireland is a bit of a blur, perhaps
because it was a brief part of the trip. I've mentioned Dublin and Belfast,
and the only other significant memory is the Giant's
Causeway and Finn McCool,
and the Finn mug my brother and I brought back for my father from which he drank
his weekend morning coffee for many, many years. It is a long stretch between
1965 and 2000, the year I finally returned to Ireland. And there is a thread. In the intervening
years I had married an "Irish girl."
"Finn McCool
is the Anglicized spelling of Fionn Mac Cumhail. Finn could be called the "Irish
King Arthur" and is certainly one of the most celebrated heroes of Irish mythology.
According to Peter Berresford Ellis in his Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford
University Press, 1992)..."
This name, Mac Cumhail, is very close to MacConmhaoil or Conmhaoil,
the second being the Gaelic name from which my wife's family name, which I won't
write here, is derived. This is not a terrific stretch; the family name has been
traced to the region around south Armagh, where the reason for our trip originated, and through history has been linked
to Conmhaoil. It turns out that, then, I am married to a woman desecended from Irish warriors.
The reason for our trip to Ireland was a "Mac Cumhail" family event in Co. Armagh,
after which we toured through Counties Sligo, Mayo, Galway, and into Clare,
staying in a small town called Corofin
from which to daytrip the area in and around the Burren.
We stashed our extras in a friendly B&B
at which we'd spent a few nights, caught the ferry from Doolin
for Inisheer, heard Irish - not Gaelic - and looked back at Ireland across a slip
of Atlantic, and later watched the sun set over Inishmaan, the next Aran Island to the west.
*
Karin updates from Amsterdam. Her trip ends in four days.
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