Monday, November 14
I did this in writing group. Tried to do a left handed writing, but it went to another story about something else I thought was a failure that actually turned out to be a success. It’s slightly edited.
By the way, “Ricky” is Richard Demarco who owned the Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh, and did the trip during the Edinburgh Summer Arts Festival, in 1978.
Write — what to write. I’ve just been talking about left-handed writing. Wonder if I could do one. Just keep the pen moving she said. I went on the trip with Ricky. Joined them in Sligo — climbed to the cairn of Queen Maeve — never been investigated by archeologists because the Irish people refused permission. Maeve is the Warrior Queen of Connaught. We also went over the border to Northern Ireland for a music festival. It was strange, the border defined by barbed wire, people with guns guarding it, stories of people being shot. It was scary. Then what — on to Newgrange in the Valley of the Boyne a huge mound faced with pieces of quartz.. The roof box over the entrance had been found by archeologists and reconstructed. The quartz had tumbled down from the front. They tried to put it back, but the stonework was not equal to the work of the past — it looks like a public bathroom. So I took a picture of the door and the roof box over it, and as little of the facing as I could manage. We went in, up the tunnel to a cruciform opening at the end. At the winter solstice the sun shines through the roof box and up the passage for several days. You can tell the exact day of the solstice by how far up the passage the light reaches.
We were a good sized group of people, always changing. Most were young, artists and art students, who had gotten grants to travel all the way from Edinburgh to Malta. I had signed on the the Celtic part of the tour: Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. Ricky had enticed me to come by pretending to be interested in my knowledge of archeoastronomy, but really he just seemed to want to collect a group of people who would have different ideas. At one point it seemed that the travellers had separated into intellectuals and anti-intellectuals. I didn’t fit in either camp, in fact I felt very much not belonging. I would find people who could talk to me about what I was interested in — we went to a lot of Neolithic stone structures — but they seemed to leave a few days after I found them. I felt more and more disappointed and left out. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that almost as soon as friends left the trip, someone else with similar interests would join. If I hadn’t been so ready to see myself as uninteresting, I might have looked forward, wondering what what new person might join the trip. I look back now and laugh.