Monday, November 14<\/p>\n
I did this in writing group. \u00a0Tried 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.<\/p>\n
By the way, “Ricky” is Richard Demarco<\/a> who owned the Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh, and did the trip during the Edinburgh Summer Arts Festival, in 1978.<\/p>\n Write \u2014 what to write.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019ve just been talking about left-handed writing<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/span>Wonder if I could do one.\u00a0 <\/span>Just keep the pen moving she said.\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>I went on the trip with Ricky.\u00a0 <\/span>Joined them in Sligo \u2014 climbed to the cairn of Queen Maeve<\/a> \u2014 never been investigated by archeologists because the Irish people refused permission.\u00a0 <\/span>Maeve is the Warrior Queen of Connaught.\u00a0 <\/span>We also went over the border to Northern Ireland for a music festival.\u00a0 <\/span>It was strange, the border defined by barbed wire, people with guns guarding it, stories of people being shot.\u00a0 <\/span>It was scary.\u00a0 <\/span>Then what \u2014 on to Newgrange<\/a> in the Valley of the Boyne a huge mound faced with pieces of quartz..\u00a0 <\/span>The roof box over the entrance had been found by archeologists and reconstructed.\u00a0 <\/span>The quartz had tumbled down from the front.\u00a0 <\/span>They tried to put it back, but the stonework was not equal to the work of the past \u2014 it looks like a public bathroom.\u00a0 <\/span>So I took a picture of the door and the roof box over it, and as little of the facing as I could manage.\u00a0 <\/span>We went in, up the tunnel to a cruciform opening at the end.\u00a0 <\/span>At the winter solstice the sun shines through the roof box and up the passage for several days.\u00a0 <\/span>You can tell the exact day of the solstice by how far up the passage the light reaches.<\/p>\n We were a good sized group of people, always changing.\u00a0 <\/span>Most were young, artists and art students, who had gotten grants to travel all the way from Edinburgh to Malta.\u00a0 <\/span>I had signed on the the Celtic part of the tour: Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>At one point it seemed that the travellers had separated into intellectuals and anti-intellectuals.\u00a0 <\/span>I didn\u2019t fit in either camp, in fact I felt very much not belonging.\u00a0 <\/span>I would find people who could talk to me about what I was interested in \u2014 we went to a lot of Neolithic stone structures \u2014 but they seemed to leave a few days after I found them.\u00a0 <\/span>I felt more and more disappointed and left out.\u00a0 <\/span>It wasn\u2019t until much later that I realized that almost as soon as friends left the trip, someone else with similar interests would join.\u00a0 <\/span>If I hadn\u2019t been so ready to see myself as uninteresting, I might have looked forward, wondering what what new person might join the trip.\u00a0 <\/span>I look back now and laugh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Monday, November 14 I did this in writing group. \u00a0Tried 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 … Continue reading