Picture on the Expatriate's Wall, pt 2

I have also been witness to the expatriate’s return. I have played the visited, rather than the visitor. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties my Irish mother’s brother lived as a missionary in Peru. Every seven years he would make a pilgrimage home to Ireland, stopping off for a brief visit with us in Boston.

I could not come to know him from such short, infrequent stays. I knew him only from old pictures, infrequent letters, and from what my mother told me. Yet, how could she know him? How could she know him, for who he was in the now? Uncle Pat entered the seminary at age seventeen, and left for Rome at twenty-two. Although he didn’t then immediately plunge into missionary work after Rome—he taught in Ireland for years—he had been nearly two decades in South America.

I felt the sad discrepancy between who he was, and who she thought him to be, during his visits. Felt the tension, not between them, but between the past and the present. The myriad of details that made up his present life was unknown, the incidentals, the mundane, the things too common to report, but ubiquitous, that make up a life: How did he get around the mountain roads of the Andes? He had a truck, what kind? Did something hang from the rearview? Did it smell like tobacco? Was it filled with laundry, or soda bottles? What brand of soda did he get in Peru? (I learned that later, during a trip there: Fanta.) Who were his friends? What type of jokes did he tell? How, exactly, did he spend a day with the poor in Cusco and beyond? What is it like to breath, day in and day out, at 11,000 feet and above? His habit of dress: casual, sloppy, dignified? The biaural world of Quechuan and Spanish in his ears, and the knowledge of English, Irish, and Italian in his memory. When did he first begin to dream in Spanish?

All unwitnessed and unexperienced by her, known only by report, through letter or in person, or not reported at all. This life-defining unknown paled before the vibrancy of my mother’s memory, memory like a demand, an insistence for connection, memory harkening back to their shared youth and truncated at the moment of his departure.

Now I understand the discomfort he must have felt surrounded by emblems of his own past, displayed in our house. The enshrinement of much that was probably for him forgotten, or at least outdated, though sentimental. And the frustration? Human nature is perverse: we aspire to be misunderstood. That is, we want to be understood in our own terms, for empathy’s sake, but we don’t wish to be known. That is, defined. To have our measure taken. It is only a step removed from being told:

You know what you are like? I’ll tell you . . . .

We are all spirits of growth, and need to be allowed such growth, have it recognized and accepted. Perhaps one used to smoke, or drink, but does so no longer.

Every revelation, every indication of change adds a degree of separation and confusion for the reunited, and underscores our mortality and essential isolation. No doubt, the expatriate resents the attempts to pull him back into the mold of the expected and familiar.

It is a sensation common to reunions of any stripe, school and college gatherings, and even family holidays, when we may feel the shackles of assumptions formed long ago and doggedly kept.

I think for the expatriate it is much worse. Here is the irony: He has gone off a-roaming, perhaps exactly to get away from the known, and he becomes something different. Only to return and find the assumptions about who he is ever more firmly entrenched by his very absence.

My mother of course, would have grown into a new understanding of this brother, given time. Those who love must adapt. But with such short visits, he continued to live with her still in memory: who he was as much as who he had become. An important expansion of understanding, the new realization, occurred, although it came not about Uncle Pat and his true, evolved self, but rather came in the reluctant, indeed hushed, realization of time, change, and separation.

Poem: I Want to Dance

I want to dance,
I want to stomp my feet like the Irish and the Spanish do,
Romp through the streets of my hometown,
‘Til they say, like Yeats,
‘Who goes with Sean,” he must be mad, there’s no two ways about it.
There’s not.
Who knew? The Irish and the Spanish,
So I want to dance like they do.
But I can’t dance.

I’d accept this advance on pleasure:
Become a shoe for a pretty cailin, a treasure
Of the O’Banyon’s or O’Malloy’s
And Oh! Her dance would raise a flush unseemly
For such fair young cheeks, her popping knees, her leaps!
I’d blush myself before that passion, expressed without expression,
Perhaps with only chin a-tremble, arms at attention,
A rigid Celtic rod sunk deep and set a-quivering
In a tide of spastic feet
Below
The terse rhythm of heel and toe would shame my poor verse
And its drag-ass time. Of course, as a shoe,
I’d have to soak up her sweat.
But think of the angle I’d have covered,
Imagine the perspective.

There’s a painting in the Gardner Museum in Boston,
You know, the one that got ripped off some years back—
The place, not the painting—
It’s still there, too big for mere thieves to take away,
El Jaleo, by John Singer Sargent,
It greets you when you enter,
Takes up one wall, lit up with flood lights—
Now that’s big—
In black and white, and startling red,
A flamenco dancer at dusk
Before a wall propped up by seated men,
One laughing,
Musicians and muchachos in murky evening, and
Oh boy! I’m not Spanish, but wish I were when I see that painting,
Wish I were that laughing one, head thrown back delirious,
His heart, conviction, the equal of the woman’s show.
(No girl here. Full female figure. Experience.
Something lost and some things gained,
Invitation and rebuff, and the dust of dancing feet.)

Perhaps she’s lost, and he, perhaps they all,
Lost to the world, but dancing,
Caught up in the passionate embrace,
With the frankness of sinners that shocks,
That is almost like Grace,
Yes, a last Grace and a lasting one.

And who is it that is shocked?
I could become resentful
Those who play at having it both ways,
Who play, pretend passions come
Measured like prescriptions.
Medicine is bitter.
I mistrust those who won’t commit
But bleed enthusiasm like bloodless stones, and sit
Like cautious clerks
While I wave my arms and am known as a madman in my own hometown.
Who lets that young girl drown
In a sea of frantic dance,
And get away with it?
What pretense.
With a bland expression she covers
But I hope she follows her feet and not her mother.

So I am not sorry to take my due
For my wish to become her shoe.

Tyranny of Friendship

The 23 May, 2004 Sunday Globe "Books" section had a column by Kate Bolick: On Memoirs. I can't find the link. It discusses loneliness (in memoir) and the post-modern's mania for connection:

Not only is there no time to be alone, there's no excuse for it. The expectation for friendship has come to assert its own tyranny--making relevant what has long been a vague subset of autobiography: "loneliness literature."

I feel out of time in the desire not to embrace this overwhelming connectedness--ironic for someone engaged in a personal blog I know. Friendster gives me the heebee jeebees.

Why blog? Ahh, the drama of the self (for this blogger). At least I'm aware of it.

Check out Buttafly.com for a funny article on Friendster.com.

Ulysses

Here's a reminder that the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday is coming this June. An interesting informal discussion of the pitfalls and pleasures of reading Ulysses.

Irony and Irish character, American character

In the previous article there is also the quote:

As such, knowledge for the constructive marginal is gained from the context of the situation and from the benefit of being a simultaneous participant and observer of cultures.[italics added.] . . . . As supported by Stonequist, "the marginal man may become an acute an able critic. This is because he combines the knowledge and insight of the insider with the critical attitude of the observer.

Crrritic!

That's what I feel like usually. An American, for all intents and purposes, forever talking about how Americans do this, and America is like that. Must sound strange to someone who doesn't know my background.

Here's what I was thinking though: A lot about differences in the Irish character and the American. Specifically about sense of humor, and irony.

Americans: accused of lacking it.
Irish: in danger of wearing it out . . .

Is there a PhD thesis inside of differences between Yanks and Irish and their stance toward irony?

Irish: (post-colonial view) Irony is a language of resistance, perhaps even weakness (sarcasm)?

Yank: Irony is an immaturity. Strong, silent-type archtype in American society. The strong or victorious distrust irony?

Theories of Culturally Marginal Individuals

This is a pretty good summary article about cultural marginality and intercultural sensitivity, especially focusing on first generation individuals.

I have literally only just discovered the discussions and studies of first generation individuals (and others, like global nomads.) It is strange to suffer the sensation of something for so long and then suddenly discover yourself and your experience so accurately (in a sentence like 'One of the problems typical for encapsulated marginals is that they "perceive themselves as so unique they may be incapable of envisioning a peer group with whom they can relate."')

As an English teacher I should be able to list the interwoven ironies:

Feeling 'terminally unique', and yet finding 'uniqueness' is a shared experience of those with a foot in more than one culture. ha ha.


Now: feeling jealous that that 'unique' feeling, however distressing, isn't so uniques after all. ha ha ha.


Pretending that there is now a 'peer group with whom [I] can relate." Why?! Who is reading this blog, anyway!!?

How 'bout it? I have been interviewing those few people I know with a bicultural experience, specifically Irish to begin with, in hopes of pursuing a book about real Irish and Irish American cultural isssues.

But I would certainly be interested in hearing from 1st Gen people of any ethnicity. I guess I better activate my email on this blog . . .

Old Diaries

Old diaries. Old diaries.
Old diaries are the creed of a former self
A personal religion I have followed as faithfully as any hypocrite.
In them are writ a litany of mottoes, anagrams, and bluster
By which I would muster up a better man than this tepid self.
Old diaries reveal the shortfall of the man
Next to the demands of his former self.

They are the text of soul, desire, and
Impossible standards,
Impossible despair.
They are a panting rebel breathing
White whispery towers of resolution
Into the steaming air, and believing
In the immaterial vision.

Old diaries—my former selves—
Make judgments, and more
They embody an entire store of ideals atrophied and
Eased away,
Forgotten by this present day.
They are the unswerving gaze of a man sworn
Never to be couch-content, material-bound,
Or wound up in any mundane sentiment.

Yes. Old diaries reveal the shortfall
Of the man.
But here, here’s the gall:
I must stand to being a fool,
But when?
Am I now
Or was I then?

Picture on the Expatriate’s Wall

THE picture on the expatriate’s wall. Two little girls, seated, in bright dresses and bright smiles. A green cardboard frame, containing the picture on the left, and on the right, a calendar of the year: 1996. An era recorded and unchanging, a multitude of associations as frozen as the captured young subjects in the photo.

In 1997 I moved home to Ireland for a stay that lasted just under a year. I became a voluntary exile from my other, real home. I left behind America, my parents, many friends, and the majority of my life experiences.

I fell into the habit of studying that picture of two young cousins. I wondered if it would become a relic of my personal Diaspora.

As a “first generation” Irish American I have been both an observer and a participant in the rites of separation. I know how long separation and displacement unfolds.
The phone calls, the letters, the frequent trips home to Ireland, and the less frequent visits from family across the world. The powerful emotions theses brief occasions impress upon memory, and the photos that capture the momentary and transient.

I looked at the picture and wondered. More than an image, more than a single moment had been preserved. Rather a whole reality, stilled. Ossified, say. That snapshot becomes the representative of the absent person it contains. The real person, absent, lives on and differently, as do I. We are no longer animate in the past; obviously, we have left it behind, in increments perhaps, or in giant leaps. Yet we don’t often experience change, that subtle continuum. Intellectually, we acknowledge it, but we don’t live it. The course is continual and gradual. Occasionally, we suffer the shock of it: Say upon reunion with a person or place after long separation.

The funny thing is no amount of letters or email or photos or updates of any kind between displaced family or friends ever displaces the memories, associations, and biases of our actual encounters over the years, and the photos and other relics that have documented them.

Physical memory remains primary, and it enshrines the past.

I encounter pictures of my past selves in the houses of relatives in Ireland I have visited over the years. There is always the strange sensation within me that my relatives are disappointed in my growth, in my maturity, in my difference. Old pictures make me uncomfortable. Who is this other person, this past me? Pathos, pathos at the heart of separation lies within this sensation. How sad and skewed is this connection between us: a few hour’s togetherness and a few photos?

My very return underscores the distortion between present-me and this old me, not-me. Then, my relatives and I spend the time reminiscing about that very past, the fulfillment of their expectation and understanding of me. Short visits and distant updates by letter and phone cannot prevent the ossification of memory. And yet, during these visits, the contrast, the distortion remained in the air, a discordant note. How much more pathetic for this situation to occur not with friends or cousins, but with a sister, or a mother?

Self-Consciousness

My aunt, my mother's sister, was a young adult when she took her first job and was sent home the same day for disturbance. She reported that everyone was talking about her, saying things about her. My family, my grandparents and aunts, uncles, were baffled. So slight, foolish, yet disturbing, it took them some short while before realizing that this sudden and odd stance was not nonsense or silliness or even the expression of reluctance of a shy or nervous girl venturing out into the world for the first time, but a phenomenon suddenly apprehensively intuitively threatening, ominous, requiring the visit of the local doctor, and soon after, further inquiry with specialists. Not paranoia alas, which would have been completely understandable in the scrutinous and begrudgerous world of a small town Irish midlands village at the middle of the 20th century: Hyperawareness and deftness in accommodating others through self-deprecation being stock in trade social skills. No.


Diagnosis: schizophrenia.


I spent every summer until I was seventeen in that family household, and my aunt lived there with, until he died, my grandfather, retired Guard, and my uncle, retired Guard. I am someone who will shortly complain about a similar sense of hyper social awareness, but paradoxically I am often completely cluelessness. That I sensed something odd about my aunt, is true. That I never questioned her situation, her lack of occupation, or friends, or independence, or driver's license, is a fact. That I had a vague understanding of health problems is also fact, but I was for some time in the understanding that they involved sinus and allergy suffering. Behold the great observer! My uncle had to tell me her story when I was well into my twenties for me to finally say Oh yes! Now I get it!


Since seventeen, I have visited Ireland many times, and have lived there twice, for three months, and for seven months. The family household is now my uncle's. My aunt lives in some form of institutional 'supervised-independence' housing situation in Mullingar. The family report is vague. The vague report includes: she seems to like it very much.


My uncle also informed me of suspicions he had of similar symptoms in at least two other family members, cousins. It's amazing I have been told anything about this, since the Irish don't talk about anything. As the saying goes "They wouldn't tell you if your coat was on fire." Or something like that . . . :|


I wonder: Isn't there a link between the very style of Irish culture: the hyper-aware social skills, the possible begrudgeries, the "valley of the eyes" sydrome, and the symptoms of schizophrenia, or other less serious neuroses? A post-colonial critic would probably understand much of Irish culture in terms of strategies that have been developed as resistance: their power of language, especially their love of irony; and frankly their love of making a fool out of another, especially setting someone up to make a fool out of themselves.


This is no doubt one reason why an Irishman can't take a compliment. He wouldn't trust that it is genuine, just an opportunity to see if he would run away with his own self-importance. The Irish pursue an "overextended humility", to use Maureen Dezell's term, in Irish America: Coming Into Clover. It is a culture in which one must always be aware of possible subtexts. And irony is a tool that requires an awareness of subtext. In The Gutenberg Elegies, author Sven Birkerts argues that one reason young readers today dislike works by the likes of Hnery James or Charles Dickens, is that they miss the complexities of tone (IE Irony) in the language. Rather, they are just aware enough to know they are missing something. How paranoid might an already sensitive person become in a culture in which you are always in danger of "missing something?"


Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy posited: Are there neuroses of health? Well. Are there neuroses of culture or ethnicity? I did a quick Google search on ethnicity and schizophrenia and found surprisingly little, but it was only a quick search. Interestingly, there are some studies relating the heightened psychological troubles of immigrants. Sounds similar. Doesn't the liminal state, or the experience of the Outsider, relate to paranoia, for example, in some way?

On Leaving Ireland, Returning to America

Pardon my enthusiasm, I'm learning to be dull
I am learning how to eat crow
No longer full, I'm learning emptiness
Forgive this slow student's excess of dreams
Dreams are the better stifled for mundane success.

The eager foot has displaced
The passion of my tongue
And its empty enthusiasm.
Some noise of artistic intents,
Foolish declarations,
A removal to the Continent, and a land
Of spirit and imagination,
Are not enough in the actual event
For a man of attitude short of action.
All undone, and why blame the tongue
When the heart is a coward?

Leaving here, I know there
I have produced nothing but complaint,
And being a malcontent is not enough for prose.
What is left is this weary pose and the echoes of my intents.
I came with two goals:

Produce a better art,
Produce a better soul.

Both flown,
At the first approach of a dollar short day.
Proving what I do belies me.
But, hypocrisy dooms most men.

How can I again face those
I know thought me foolish and callow,
If only to console their own bland security?
How did I let their concerns become my own?
I spurn conformity then
Worry at the disapproving tones.
And poverty holds no terror for me
Except for its impropriety.
Hypocrisy dooms most men.

So much for art.
So much for soul.
Who was I kidding?
What do I care for art or any thing?
I, who would sit
On a curbstone in Westmeath
And produce nothing at all,
And be content?
Perhaps the fault lay in my goals.
But . . .
Peace of mind is a worthy end.
I wish I could do it again.

Leprechaun

Leprechaun Index

· Name: Seán.

· Mother: Irish.

· Mother’s name: Maura.

· Mother’s accent: Irish

. Origin: Westmeath, greatly tempered with the indeterminate “educated Dubliner” (This is pre the D4 .); tempered not at all by 37 years in Amerikay.

· Lifelong residence: Massachusetts.

· Yearly vacation destination: Ireland.

· Obvious Irishness quotient in American suburb of my youth: 100%.

· References made to said Irishness, expressed in terms of Seldom, Infrequently, Frequently, Constantly: Constantly.

· Consideration of the last two facts above, in their importance to this author in the formation of Self, expressed in terms of Little Consideration, Some, Extensive Consideration: Little Consideration.

· Literary term that describes the last fact, in consideration of the vast importance of identity issues to this adult author: Irony.

· Upon consideration, the effect of this American portion of this author’s youthful experiences: Unknown.

· Number of times green was worn by this author to school or anywhere else on the 17th of March: Zero.

· Purported reason for youthful neglect of St. Patrick: Mother Maura never remembered that it was St. Patrick’s Day.

· Proposed real reason for mother Maura’s lapses of memory: Utter rejection of ludicrous American displays of Irishness, expressed through passive/aggressive “forgetfulness”.

· Degree to which mother’s attitudes have influenced her son, this author, expressed in terms of: Not at All, Somewhat, Greatly, Hard to say how much they haven’t, subtly and subconsciously, been of great influence: Which do you think?

Leprechaun

There is a story I tell my literature students, when the topics of stereotypes, prejudice, and racial epithets come up in the classroom. While there is a growing minority presence in the suburban, south of Boston school in which I teach, my students remain the descendents of Irish, Italian, Portuguese, and Polish Catholics. Our discussions on race are invariably genuine, thoughtful, very correct, and surreal. What the hell do they know of prejudice?


We have fun. We brainstorm ethnic slurs and stereotypes, and anything Irish or Italian that comes up gives us a big laugh and utterly fails to raise any hackles. “No Irish Need Apply” means nothing to them (if it was ever historically accurate.) “Wop” or “Gumba” are terms that elicit connotations of gangster movies more than they push buttons. Most of my students can’t even produce an Irish slur. They fall back on cereal and soap commercials. Lucky the Frosted Charms leprechaun seems the best they can do.


Along with the fun, I get the sensation that my usually honest classroom, which works hard at keepin’ it real albeit in a relaxed way, has suddenly become a self-conscious and ingenuous caricature of itself. I don’t mean that underneath the humor and the correct attitude, there is a seething prejudice. I mean, the exercise is mostly academic. What a testimony to America: these ethnic Americans before me have no real capacity to appreciate the doubt, the frustration, the despair, and perhaps the sense of group identity, that comes as a result of prejudice. Real prejudice, the assaultive belief that one is inferior, socially, intellectually, morally, based on the inescapabilities of skin color, nationality, or religion. The othering prejudice, the liminalizing: that which ensconces the victim on the outside.


My acute sense of this was awakened after a trip to Ireland that was very different from any of the other thirty or so times I have visited or lived there. Importantly, I was not in the company of my family, but my wife’s. My wife’s grandfather was the only one of eleven siblings to emigrate from Newry, County Down, in the north of Ireland. As a result, the town of Newry, an at times particularly troubled area within the history of the Troubles, is literally teeming with my wife’s close relatives—a fact only belatedly discovered by my in-laws. After an unexpected call from a Newry cousin to my father-in-law, I found myself in enthusiastic tow on an early spring trip to the north of Ireland.


The fact that we were traveling to the North is most important. I had been over the border several times to visit relatives in Fermanagh, without incident. I was always amused at my American friends and their assumptions about Ireland as a war zone. The average American has no reason to distinguish between the six counties and the occasional, terrible reports that have in the past come out of it, and the Republic. In this particular case, my smugness was unfounded, since I had no adult experience with the north, or a place like Newry. But this was 2001, well into the Peace Process, and the truce. And, moreover, my mother-in-law was almost comically worried about the possibility of violence. Her nerves only quieted me in a horribly self-satisfied way. I was genuinely at ease in Ireland, even here.


Martin, my father-in-law’s cousin, took us for a drive in the Mourne mountains. Clusters of rhododendrons amidst unseasonable sunshine made for a perfect spring day. As we were returning home in the long late evening, we came over the rise of a narrow, hedge-lined road. Just beyond the ridge, a patrol of British soldiers cordoned off the road. They were fan out beyond the road, where the hedgerow had ended and flat fields extended on either side. The patrol included a member who carried a gun the size of an M60.


As we rolled to a halt, the soldiers circled the car. I lacked the slightest concern. The truce was in effect. Martin was an innocent. We were American tourists, worthy of scorn in a general way sure, but obviously not a threat. Moreover, all of this would be evident in less than an instant.


The soldiers were young. It struck me. They were nervous. It bothered me. Martin rolled the window down. He and the soldier at the window murmured almost conspiratorially, almost intimately, almost wearily. Not friendily, though. There had been a bomb threat called in. I considered: Martin’s license plate, his last name, his address, any of these might report everything the soldier needed to know. He was a Catholic. Innocent of any wrongdoing, but on the other side for sure. Yes, we were Americans. But weren’t we here visiting our Catholic relatives? Were we the boozy, sentimental, ignorant Americans who sang Kevin Barry and sent money to the freedom fighters, or just generic ignorants? What we were, no matter what, was the Other. Yes, a British Para in Ireland might in fact be the outsider, but we were certainly the others to him. In the glance he gave us, I felt a load of assumptions descend on me.

Inferiority, misunderstanding, anger, confusion, fear, imprisonment

I felt labeled, with conviction, by his eyes. Utterly foreign, utterly belittling, and nervous, his eyes. I did not feel like a cocky, an impervious, even an ignorant American at that moment of scrutiny. I felt insecure, judged, found wanting, due to my . . . blood. The word Teigue out of his mouth would have devastated me, not because I Americanly and fantastically associate myself in romantic and impossible ways with my ancestral connections, but because I felt in his glance that I was connected, in his all-encompassing and stereotyped glance, and that what I was connected to was inferior and hateful, albeit dangerous.


Did his eyes speak this? Am I a Plastic Paddy? A drama queen? How many words should I waste qualifying myself and declaring my awareness of the differences between American, Irish, American Irish, and all the pitfalls of spurious I am Irish associations that the latter constantly make, to the cynical delight or disgust of native Irish? What is this American talking about: that he felt like an oppressed Catholic Northerner? Yes. Yes yes yes yes. I am not one nor think I am. I am not Irish. I know. Blah blah blah. I am not American, for that matter, but that is the subject of another essay. Perhaps the soldier’s thoughts were nothing like what I interpreted. None of this matters. My sensation of what was true is what mattered because, of marginal interest, I intuited what true prejudice feels like, and how debilitating prolonged exposure to it must be.

And because, fabulously more interesting, how empowering it can be.

Empowering, yes. How limiting, but also how straightforward, how easy. Your attitudes, your religion, your beliefs in general, your habits, your identity, your group identity, all neatly to be assumed and summed up by society. To have a tribe! To know who you are, and what you are about! To be wounded by a slur!
Leprechaun? How laughable. No ingenuine and uninformed “Irish” insult has ever bothered me in America, at three years old, or thirty-three.


(At my youngest and before any distinct memory must be a me, as observer. That is, he who has outside knowledge, that is, perspective. My first trip to Ireland was made at six months old, and I was raised by a mother who never assimilated. Leprechaun! Ha ha ha hahaha! The numskulls. A word like that just reminded me of how little they knew. Of how stupid were their ideas of me, or of Irishness. Or how they didn’t know just how much they didn’t know about me. Or about how much more I knew about them. And about us. And about how Leprechaun couldn’t get at me, because I, and it, were so different from what they knew; different yes different and coldly I considered this difference, even at three years yes coldly, between what they knew and what I knew. Coldly, yes, that is, reasonably and distantly considered this difference that kept them from hurting me but rather only reminded me of this: difference.)

Consciousness

First memory

I am three years old. I am with a group of children. Neighbors. Children older than I, perhaps most or all of them. It must be the spring or summer, because I remember sunshine, green grass, tree leaves—in my youth ours is a well-canopied street, an arbor tunnel--the absence of coats.

I do not remember our activity. We are in front of my neighbor’s house, two doors down, on the green median strip of grass and trees between the lined sidewalk and the curbstone and street. The sky is a vivid blue. I see us gathered, moving like a school of fish, wavering and flashing in a loose group, in warm greenblueyellow airlight; me in parallel play: not of the unremembered play but next to it, and I don’t know but that I am already familiar, this disembodied experience of other, which at three is also only normal exclusion of age, limited understanding, naiveté.

That is it. I do not remember the event itself.

The next event occurs some short time later.

I am standing in my kitchen. It is dim against the brilliance of the windows and the yellow sheers. Cool and amber cast and my bedroom is directly behind me, into which I am retreating. On the steps beside the back door, the entire family of my neighbors, several girls and a boy, all older, and perhaps other neighborhood children, are standing, looking in the window, chanting.

Sean Sean the leprechaun went to school with nothing on

I have apparently thrown a stone and hit the youngest of the girls in the head. I have no memory of this. I believe my mother will clear them away from our steps, but she does not do so immediately.

Sean Sean the leprechaun went to school with nothing on

I do not know if she is telling me that one must ignore people making fun of you. When she does clear them, they will chant it from the neighbor’s yard, across the street. This is infinitely worse. This is a public neighborhood event. The intimacy of the window is preferable to the public spectacle. This I think now. This, I could feel then.

Sean Sean the leprechaun went to school with nothing on

Chanting is musical, rhythmic. Insistent. Beautiful ugly unison.

Sean Sean the leprechaun went to school with nothing on

I do not know, I do not remember if I have thrown a stone, or am oppressed. I do not know the outcome. I do not know my detailed feelings or reaction. I have virtually no other memories from early childhood, save two. I cannot enact memory, today. I cannot practice quietude. I practice busyness, distraction, odd mental noise, impatience with the pursuit of remembering, even dullness: the pursuit of sleep.