Something About Love (#SOL15, Day 17)

Irish, Too (M.A. Reilly, 2015)

I

I wish I could recall Connemara with more detail. The morning we left Achill Island it was a rare sunny day and we traveled south crossing through Connemara National Park towards Galway. For most of the time we were in Ireland I wore heavy sweaters, even though it was late summer. We had been traveling for a few weeks, stopping where we wanted and having no set destinations in mind save the two days we spent in Dublin at the Shelbourne Hotel.

The hotel's on the Green. I figured it's your first time back. We'd stay someplace great.

We would later kid that we took our honeymoon prior to actually being married. That wouldn't happen until a few months later when we found ourselves in Vermont and a man named Dave married us in the front room of his home. His wife, whose name I have long forgotten, served as our witness.

But now, here, twenty-five years later, what I mostly recall about Connemara are its colors and slopes, how the valleys open before you like a gift.


II.

Towards the end of Ulysses, Molly Bloom is lying in bed next to her husband. She's recalling his proposal of marriage to her.

…he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I remember saying to Rob that if we had done a more traditional wedding and actually invited other people, I would have wanted to send an invitation that simply said:

yes, I said yes I will Yes

III.

There's something here, in all of this that I want to say about love, but I have forgotten, perhaps it isn't too important--the things we say.  What I recall most are its colors and slopes and what opens before us like a gift.

Adopted (#SOL15, Day 3)

Ordinary Angels (M.A. Reilly, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, 2008)

I.

A word uttered still fails to encompass the whole of meaning.  I think of this as I read the word adopted in the opening to Darcy Moore's post, DNA and My Ancestral Tree.  He writes:

I was adopted as a baby. My adoptive parents made no secret of that fact but never had any information they could share about my ancestry. I often wondered what my ancestors had experienced and where they originated. It made me sad that I would likely never know. It was not something I talked about and if the topic came up I was very philosophical about it all. 

Darcy chronicles what he learned about his deep ancestry by participating in the Genographic Project.  I was fascinated as I read.  Imagining the whole time that I too might participate in the project.  Spend $150 and this slight fee might enable me to name a past I cannot name today.


II.

Meaning is never stationary, never stable.
Language allows us to know partially.

               Adopted.

Sometimes it is too hard
                                           to breathe.


III.

Decades ago I traveled with Rob to Ireland and while there we spent one morning at the Joyce House--a place in the Republic where birth records are kept.  I went there armed, knowing my name at birth: Olivia Muldoon, and the year, date, and place of my birth (Stamullen, Ireland).

I knew as much as I could, and yet I found no record.

When I was leaving, a man working there stopped me and said that about 50% of the records were never collected as registering a birth was voluntary at that time in Ireland.  He said this with such kindness.


IV.

Later that day, after we left Dublin and travelled to Grange I wrote the following poem.

Lineage

At the Joyce House on Lombard Street
in Dublin—we climbed the staircase
to the second floor. The narrow aisles
of the registry were crowded with others
searching too. I looked through
the oversized ledgers, moving a finger
steadily down the long list of names—stopping
with a jerk at each sound that hinted
of my birth—only to breathe out
exhausted, and then continue on, till we each
had looked through the same six years of paper
and names and I knew no record would be found.


We left that Dublin office, traveled
north of Sligo to the seacoast town
of Grange. There I slept the length
of afternoon while you explored
some jagged coves. Later, you took
me in hand over tall grass dunes
to a cliff, overlooking the strong
Atlantic. We sat there, dangling
our feet well above the foam
and smashing waves,
as my finger traced
and retraced the rock
hardness of a fossil.

V.

It wouldn't be until years later that I understood that being adopted is not the same as being abandoned.  

Each requires its own sense of time.

"My mother died one summer—/the wettest in the records of the state."

Moon Longing (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

And SoulBy Eavan Boland

My mother died one summer—

the wettest in the records of the state.

Crops rotted in the west.

Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens.

Empty deck chairs collected rain.

As I took my way to her

through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly

behind houses

and on curbsides, to pay her

the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something

I remembered

I heard once, that the body is, or is

said to be, almost all

water and as I turned southward, that ours is

a city of it,

one in which

every single day the elements begin

a journey towards each other that will never,

given our weather,

fail—

       the ocean visible in the edges cut by it,

cloud color reaching into air,

the Liffey storing one and summoning the other,

salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and,

as if that wasn't enough, all of it

ending up almost every evening

inside our speech—

coast canal ocean river stream and now

mother and I drove on and although

the mind is unreliable in grief, at

the next cloudburst it almost seemed

they could be shades of each other,

the way the body is

of every one of them and now

they were on the move again—fog into mist,

mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze

that lay on the railings of

the house she was dying in

as I went inside.

“And Soul” from DOMESTIC VIOLENCE by Eavan Boland. Copyright ©2007 by Eavan Boland. 

Self is a Location

Be for Me, Like Rain (M.A. Reilly, Wall Street, NYC, 2009)

In Seamus Heaney's (2007) poem, "The aerodrome," he concludes:

If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.

Bridge in Fog (M.A. Reilly. George Washington Bridge, 2009)

I have long been enamored and intrigued by the people, locations, and circumstances native to Manhattan. Through my camera, I have sought to represent the bearings taken in ordinary lives: a couple out for a ride on a bike, a bridge in fog, a woman beneath an umbrella. Like most things human, Manhattan is a complex place, resisting the ease of categories. At once it is privileged, poor, nomadic, broken, healed, rooted, and common.

Etta and Butch Go for a Ride
(M.A. Reilly. Washington Square Park, 2009)

Although born in Ireland, I have grown up in the shadow of Manhattan and its rhythms have (in)formed the ways I see and fail to see. What I know about the geography of home has allowed me to look closer at all I don't know. In this manner, the familiar houses the unfamiliar, like an old woman houses her younger self.

Homeless (M.A. Reilly. 57th Street. 2009)

William Faulkner noted:

"I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it."

As an emerging artist, Faulkner's advice resonates with certain truth I turn an ear to hear.

This visual record, a portfolio of sorts,  is a testament of the bearings taken, markings noted, and cardinal points recorded. It is intentionally contradictory as stances are made (now and then) against such grain.

Take the A Train (M.A. Reilly. Harlem, 2009)

Through the lens, I have witnessed people love, be loved, and not. While shooting, I have found myself repeating a line in my head from Kathleen Norris's (2001) Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. She writes: "You have only to let a place happen to you...the loneliness, the silence, the poverty, the futility..." (p. 220).


It is in letting a place happen that I have learned (perhaps unlearned) how to hold still. A challenge that remains often uncomfortable and nonetheless important. This bearing witness is the closest thing I know to what might be called grace. As such it carries both burden and blessing.

Bearings Taken (M.A. Reilly. Brooklyn Bridge, 2009)

Works Cited
Heaney, S. (2007). District and circle. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Norris, K. (2001). Dakota: A spiritual geography. New York: Mariner Books.