An Apology, A Revelation, an End?

So for anyone who reads this, and also simply for my personal set of goals, I have been a bad blogger and haven't updated since a few nights before Galway. However, things have been insane of late, and previously bad or nonexistent internet situations, along with the desire to simply "be" and not write took over. BUT, here I am, back again, with one last major gigantic post, and perhaps another tomorrow to cap it off.

Revelation- Many people on this trip or back at home have said that one doesn't actually feel like or understand what it is to be an American until they go abroad, an idea that though I was not really opposed to, I thought wasn't completely without problems. However, what I've been realizing and what I expressed to Arne before the incident (later) and our falling out, was that going to Ireland has not in any way made me feel "more" American, or more analogous to "my country," but has actually provoked the Polish roots I hold so dear to flower in interesting ways. More than ever, in a city where beautiful Polish women worked in basically every food or service industry, I felt proud of and stimulated by that aspect of my identity. In Michigan, once in a great while, when I'm in a public place, I hear someone speaking polish, understand them, and get excited. The occurence is so rare, and my language faculties always threatening to be dwindling especially now that I'm away from my family and have not been enrolled in Polish school for quite some time. But here, on the streets of Dublin, I hear the words I learned before I learned English, the words that ARE things and people and moods and places and actions to me, EVERYWHERE and spoken by so many. Before I came here I felt increasingly dejected and depressed that I had such a great opportunity and rich childhood because of Polish school and family, and that in the present I struggled to think of verbs and felt like my basic knowledge was completely slipping away. In Ireland, I've begun to REMEMBER and RETHINK Polish words, especially verbs, which were hardest for me since I had a lot of nouns that I remembered, but couldn't remember how to say "to be", or "I am!" Now I've been thinking thoughts in Polish, having Polish words stuck in my head, and laughing along with Polish speakers as they talk about people they know or expererience on their travels, like people on the Giant's Causeway Bus Tour that were talking about someone smelly that they knew or met :).
All of this re-awakening and excitement around what I used to consider one of my native languages has given me a lot more confidence about pursuing one of my goals this year, to start studying Polish and relearning it, and then even more importantly, apply it to my academic and personal life. I want to talk to my grandfather more, I want to hear his stories, I know what a cool guy he is only through stories that he tells that I understand broadly, but now I want the details. And I want to be able to read Polish poetry in Polish, and start pioneering and writing about it and find out if that's something that I really do want to be doing later on in grad school and beyond.

More generally speaking, since Galway I've realized how much Dublin feels like one of my many homes, and how sure I am that I'll return someday, though never to Trinity and its bureacratic and capitalistic bullshit ways. Though I really cherish the opportunity and privelege to stay here (even though in some ways I jeopardized it), I really hate how money is what we're walking on, not cobblestones, and how despicable some of their practices are in their effort to attain profit. Turning off the heat in the laundry room, while still allowing money to be spent in the machines, and being slow to return money that was wasted (never mind the bloody time!) when malfunctions occured, really speaks to just how miserly this institution is. It's not as if their in financial trouble! About 1000 tourists a day, maybe even more, visit this place, take a tour and look at the Book of Kells (10 euro).

Finally, I can honestly say that I've learned so much while I've been here, and I can't wait to write more poetry and revise the poetry I wrote while I was here. The surreal Giant's Causeway, the miracles of circumstance, the people, and the stories I have collected here will all feed things later, I can feel it. I'm just dying to write and feel like I really can have a productive year and can accomplish a lot.

This is one life goal met, one that I've been waiting almost 5 years to experience, and now I have room to set more of them. I feel very much invigorated, as opposed to the way I felt before I left: sweaty, dull, and near depressed because of the sheer amount of work I knew I had to do in the coming year.

Angus said the whole experiment of education was about loving, something that brought me to tears and that I really couldn't agree more with. Learning and experience here only reaffirms and rejuvinates my love for people and the world, and most importantly, the little stories that are always always bigger than the big ones.

More tomorrow, perhaps. But now for more studying, Magdalene girls and bed.

"Yes I said yes and yes I will Yes"

Poem I've been trying to write

ADRIGOLE BALLAD

Lichens lean toward
the sun in Adrigole
like hands,
shielding my eyes
from finding fossils
that chatter in their rock beds
about who and where
they were

in the era
to come, I will sleep
like them
in Hungry Hill, near
the place where water
knocks stones
like your breath in a
harmonica; sliding
out the throat and
tumbling into
form

I will sleep
to catch the thing
the brown-scruffed pony
will see across
the road:

the flint within
your chest
that sparks before
you play,
as sharp as blue hydrangeas
that prick the mountainside.

"And now it's morning, we are the sleepyheads"

1) Kebab friends are priceless...
2) Sometimes I feel very violent; someday someone will get their balls chopped off. at least I know I'm not the only one who feels like this sometimes :)
3) I don't like Postcolonial studies very much (sorry ayla! I love you)
4) Cheap red wine is an excellent solution to the question of getting intoxicated cheaply
5) Galway in two days, very exciting
6) White Noise made me feel like a hospital, or like this empty computer lab

This trip is having a stranger effect on me than I actually thought. Sometimes I feel very much like myself, and rarely, I don't, but mostly I feel like me only on like, an X-treme show, as if there was some creepy loud announcer saying "XTREME"
super loud or something. I'm much more vocal about my opinions (haha, as if I could be, but I swear I am)... if I don't like something, there's no pretending... and if I don't like a person, forget being diplomatic... it's blunt all the way here.
I'm much less in my head, and much more on my tongue, if that makes sense... however, the old trope of nightly introspection and wanderlust and heartache still exists, but in a totally different way, more direct, more potent. Sometimes it feels like my chest will hollow itself out with feeling, at night... And yet in other ways, besides anger, all my other feelings feel subdued, not really lessened but just less intense, though i feel I could swim in them like I usually do if I actually dove in. it's like I'm waiting for something to happen, and in the meantime I'm doing all these crazy things like getting along with some unexpected people and simply despising (1) other, and getting more swimmy-eyed than I have in my life.
and I'm always halfway between wanting to go home so bad, and on the other hand getting sick at the thought of returning to the drab.

I also feel like any learning I'm doing is mostly exposure that I'll come to appreciate in different ways later.
I'm like a sponge now, hopefully I'll produce later, though I'm trying to do it as much as possible without forcing... Come what come may!

"Brave men tell the truth
Wise men's tools are analogies and fools
A woman holds her tongue, knowing silence will speak
for her"

haha. yeah RIGHT.


Lastly, I want to sing so badly... it's driving me crazy. and I know just who I want to sing with :)

Yeats

Oh, and even if Lady Gregory was a shape shifter etc. WB Yeats was seriously the biggest bastard ever. The more I learn, the more I'm glad I know nice, intelligent poets. From all I've read about him, he was an attention whore. I still like his poetry I suppose, though some of it really smacks of his prejudice.

Strangeness, Cold Front, Weird Mists

AT AN CUASAN
an old fiddler with
a haunting face,
jack o lantern jolly and
candlelit
talked of things
that happened
in my country:

the things we all know
happen, but rarely see

things we were unaware
of, his personal tales

and the thing they say no one expected,
which riddled him
like termites

and it seems he tried,
in telling, to eject some
ghost or emotion
from us, but
whether fear
or sympathy was projected,
we were blind
to understand

but hard we listened
to his voice, his fiddle too.
like the Acheron boatman,
he knew what was
ahead, where we were
guessing darkly

his Pirandello eyes
only closed
to play a reel;
his hands, still stabbing
beauty from the aged
singing wood.

Cillian Murphy

Ok so all I wanted to say is that Wind That Shakes the Barley ten thousand times better than Michael Collins, even though it's not like I thought that Michael Collins was the best movie ever or anything. WtStB is really really really good.

Also, stores that allow you to buy things but don't take the security tag off are stupid.

Also, I am in the middle of writing a cute cute song that I hope to sing with lovely friends when I return.

Also, CORK THIS WEEKEND. :)

and a sixties minidress with a little bird pin

Alan Rickman, the Fox (Aidan Quinn too)

Today at IFI we watched Michael Collins, a Neil Jordan film I knew absolutely nothing about, and a person I also knew absolutely nothing about until later on in the day, of course...

We unfortunately didn't get to discuss it much in class, but we all seemed to find it at the very least entertaining and full of awesome stars: Alan Rickman, Liam Neesom, Aidan Quinn, and Julia Roberts (only semi-good, as usual)

Salah echoed Kevin Rockett's comment about how the Michael/Kitty/Harry love triangle in the film became more important than the general/historic for some, but I thought that perhaps if we had more time to talk about it, I, and hopefully others, certainly would have brought up the idea that the goings-on in Ireland in the film, and the love triangle itself, were working together in the narrative. I thought the love triangle was not really taking over, so much as being used as a way to get the audience to feel how divisive the civil war was to friends and people living in Ireland, to get them to feel the betrayal seekers of the republic felt by those who accepted the treaty as a stepping stone, and vice versa. I mean, Ireland is often represented as a beautiful woman (Cathleen ni Houlahan), in this case, both loved by two men who are best friends. The romantic love Kitty has for Michael and not for Harry, though of course she treasures both as friends, and inseperable ones at that, eventually rends the two from each other, and both from her. It is interesting also that Michael "gets the girl" just as he gets the treaty for his country, the free state, but loses his best friend Harry, and the trust and fellowship of some of his people, De Valera being the most notable. Michael proposes the Treaty to England and its Queen, and also proposes marriage to Kitty. Harry and Michael are linked to Kitty in love and friendship prior, but go their seperate ways after the treaty. To me, these things seem not subtly but evidently linked.

Perhaps it was just because we had another lecture, but I somehow feel that Salah thinks that we are nothing more than we might seem to be. Ignorant American college students out in Ireland for the freedom to binge drink and be away from home, responsibilities and reputations. I hate the fact that some professors, rather than prod and really try to get us to think critically, present history upon history and dense rhetorical pieces and then especially with the more salient things like film and literature, ask us what we thought, and if we say, "we love alan rickman," we can't possibly have a critical or intelligent thought in our heads. It is early on to make such a judgement, but I really only want to express it as a feeling, that I get the feeling that some of that is there. He asks questions after we talk about our perception of something, tries to get us to not generalize, which I think is good, but that's not actually helping us branch out from our own perception or opinion. Challenging us would be nice, I hate being left out in the cold to think by myself, I love talking with others. You never know who will say what or learn what, sometimes the most critical answers come from the most surprising of mouths, and I don't want to be bedgrudged of that experience, if I can. If I am, I'll attempt it unofficially ;).


PS:I foamed about 300, again today.... So help me Frank Miller, I'll see you in Hell.
AND a great speaker talked to us today (I might write more about his speech later) and mentioned Yeats and hinted at his aristocratic fascism... AND TS Eliot's, high art and all, it was lovely, and Joyce's denounciation of both. I read Yeats later, some poems I hadn't read before, and I was pretty astonished by how blatant it was...
I can't wait to read Ulysses, another self assignment for the year!

I also told the genital herpes story to a new audience, gets better every time ;)

Explanatory Rory

I know this is somewhat preachy and rather explanatory too, but sometimes you just have to write what you gotta write. Later on I can workshop and write more.


"SIGNS NOT PERMITTED HERE"
-A sign near Dublin

At the end of
a hike in Glendalough
through the vacillating greens
where things lie
in their own shadow,
I saw a swarm of middleschoolers;
all wearing the same backpack
in noir and red and round

like ladybugs they skittered across
the hills, struggling to catch up
with their commander, and the sight
of them made me ask
whether they looked like the insect shells
or the other way around

in that place no one could
be sure, whether
present or past
image or image-maker
while Ireland slinked by, her
tail pointed sharply forward

later someone marvelled at
the age of nearby headstones,
photo ops for ageing tourists:
wells to drown deep in,
mirrors to polish clean.

TERMINUS: the shards of desire

So even though I was really excited to talk about Rocky Road to Dublin, I ended up thinking a lot about it and not really stating what I wanted to say very well... I touched on some important things, but I think I could write a lot more about it, though I might need to watch it again. I ended up feeling more comfortable with my reading of Terminus, the play we saw, though I feel as though there's still critically much more to discover.


I talked about the tipping point, the edge of the knife sort of feel that Terminus has to it. In a way, it like much drama, has this Greek aspect to it, of choices having direct consequences, though it didn't, except for the girl/demon story really have an establishment of fate or the gods being the main source of control. But it did what I like drama to do most of all, like the end rhyme of a good Bob Dylan lyric, the moments of truth were unexpected until the moment they happened, and then we all felt "of course, of course." Examples of this would be the daughter's soul going into the Helen's baby, the baby that made the mother think so intensely of her daughter for a moment or two... the play, like the soul, knows all already. It gives us the raw material, and through it's narrative leads us around, even though we've already known the ending all along.


More Later... I'll probably write a paper on at least one of these.

Dancing with Myself/ Rocky Road

In the time since I flew into Dublin, I have experienced nasty jet lag, the best guinness (poured by ME), the best cheese, and the lightest yet most changable weather. I have learned that saving money is important, but being hypoglycemic offers no real choice as far as "should I eat?" or should I not eat and feel close to fainting.

There's much creative and intellectual stimulus here, and I'm sure much more will follow in the coming days. The doors are all colored the brash and lovely colors of my thought process and overall countenance: Bananna Yellow, Fire Engine Red, Ice Cream wrapper blue, and Deep swathing, tempermental Green. Growing green. I feel beautiful and unknown and quiet and knowing, I feel like I'm already learning so much and that there's only more to learn. The smell here is the strong but quiet smell of a new rain, all the time.

Also, my moleskine has been invaluable as far as helping me and others find places, and yet it doesn't make me appear to be a stupid bloody tourist. Perhaps it, like my hello kitty mirror and little stapler will make me friends.

Today we watched Rocky Road To Dublin, a film I'd never heard of, but that I thought was amazing and brilliant. And Irishman named Peter Lennon wrote/directed it, and Coutard, Godard's cameraman, filmed it. Never before have I been so struck by the power of the image, to defy words that are being spoke with it, to always show you the truth, even if the truth is disguised, and to be arranged in such a way that you understand why filmmaking is an art, and not just a commercial venture. It's ironic that one of the many irish critics of the movie (it was very contraversial) dubbed it "a film for the blind" when in fact it may as well have been made for the deaf! I can't wait till we discuss it tomorrow. when I'll probably write more in depth about it.

Tonight we're watching a contraversial play, Terminus, which I am very excited, especially after Rocky Road, to see.
I don't know about the people in my program, it seems like many of them were asleep for the movie (somewhat understandably) and that while I was frantically and happily writing down notes and feeling my heart beat faster and faster with the anticipation of discussion, that everyone else was barely getting through, if at all. Perhaps this trip will reaffirm the disconnect I feel with many of my peers, the disconnect that hinges on the fact that learning and writing and reading all stir me up, and that drinking, promiscuity and material goods bore or disgust me. Or perhaps it will reassure what I already told my roommate this morning, when she decided that based on the way they looked, two girls would not be goodroommates and would fight.... Anybody can get along with anybody, if they actually try.
And this goes for loving too.

Totoro is abroad...

It seems so many beautiful people I know are experiencing times of learning and change and of new territories. Andy in Taipei, Libby on the farm, Arne in China, Seth in Germany soon... Arne sent a huge email with stories from China, and reading it made my heart feel golden again.

I started The God of Small things, it's beautiful... though a critical sense of how it's working is fuzzy but promising... and sometimes it makes my stomach turn uncomfortable ways... things about children and the theory of
the soul knowing all at birth, innocently and gradually losing it in distraction until death, the final "Eureka!" and how those "adults" no longer in-the-know sometimes perpetuate this ignorance and in one instant, bring their children into it.
"A little less Ammu loved her..."

I also thought a lot more about the Sopranos ending, I liked it when I watched it and thinking about it makes it even better and in a strange fit of .... I don't know what, had a talk with my mother about cashiers at K-Mart being false consumers in an empty transaction....

I'm feeling electric again, I was feeling like a slab of slate that knew it could become a lightning rod before...
rhythms...

it's one of those times where I feel like composing but I know that later when I can think it will be better, for now I can only revel in the shower of sparks...
it's the night of a thunderstorm and we're all the sky turning green and the wind, and the wind...

And Another...

Strange, but when I drove home yesterday I saw ANOTHER Great Blue Heron... this time flying over my car...

meanings?

Double Instant Karma

Today is my unofficial day of leave (Leave MSU->LO) for Ireland. The morning passed rather uneventfully, until about 10:30, there was an abrupt darkness and rainstorm which was fun to walk into and out of.
This was the first good omen; rain on a day of departure=good experiential harvest.

On the way to the Writing Center, I saw a strange shape against the flooding Red Cedar. It was white and sharp and scary looking. I thought at first it was an emaciated swan (definitely a bad thing as far as luck goes) but in fact it was a beautiful Great Blue Heron! I think that it was fishing for its lunch, it was certainly making neck-swooping moves and little head dives towards the water, but it stopped short of putting its head in or getting in.
This was the second good omen; great blue herons, predatorial birds of elegance= I will make a killing, learning wise... and Ireland will be beautiful :).