Doors into Dark: Memory as Spectral Text

Dream but a door slams then.
Your waking is in the past.
--Glyn Maxwell

The whole landscape a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read,
A part of our past disinherited;
But fumbled like a blind man,
Along the fingertips of instinct.
--John Montague, from "A Lost Tradition"

It is several hours after nightfall in rural Virginia; I am landlocked, miles from any ocean that separates a here from a there. I've driven just under five hours to turn, here, off the highway and onto a winding road, crossing a narrow bridge which serves as a boundary, dividing this artist's haven from "the real world." At first, the studio where I settle in to work seems stuffy, though I know it will soon become comfortably cool, thanks to air-conditioning. I spread my books and belongings around to make the space my own. It's empty, but implicit with the presence of others who've carved their names into a board by the door. Outside it's still in the upper '90s as it's been all week, stiflingly humid from the break of day. Petty distractions which sabotage peace of mind--office politics, the overflowing basket of laundry in my daughter's stuffed-animal strewn room--fade away as I'm transported beyond routine into expansive hours of welcome solitude to work.

Close to midnight, walking back from the studio in the dark, under a gibbous moon, flashlight in hand, I'm frightened. Blue-striped salamanders slipped into hiding places hours ago, but memories emerged. I worked on new projects and keep a cell phone on hand to tie to me the life I know but I'm haunted by the memory of a man I briefly loved. A suburban apartment dweller, I'm uneasy, of course, being close to the land. My fear of the dark, my fear of sleep--these are the predictable and petty neuroses of those who've been raised to live on the land rather than to co habit with it. "Our sensing of place," poet Seamus Heaney wrote, ". . . was more or less sacred. The landscape was sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities" (Preoccupations, 132). Walking, as anyone knows, in contrast to speeding across verdant terrain in a climate-controlled car, brings one close to the spirit of land.

Suspended in my own thoughts, my own work for long, uninterrupted hours, I feel utterly unmoored, as if I'm floating across the water's surface under a lake of stars. The senses, I know, are more alert in the dark, so noise will, of course, seem magnified. The sounds of nocturnal insects rise from all sides of the grassy land this rocky road I'm walking cuts through; there's the hum of traffic from the nearby highway. My steps are slow and uneasy. The gravel crunching under my footsteps possesses an ominous tone. Outdoors infrequently, I'm happiest in a garden--preferably English, that form in which nature is domesticated, its design artfully engineered, wilderness contained. To absorb a sense of place is to apprehend hidden depths, often an intimate, unsettling encounter with the spectral presence of the past. Here, I'm unnerved to walk past the room where I slept, where he worked, where I lay on the floor reading Rilke while he orchestrated background noise--fiddled with CDs, poured wine or played guitar. Strange to find myself a revenant--on the outside looking in at blue-checkered curtains through which, I remember, morning sun broke, our limbs uncomfortably entwined, returning us to waking life and putting good distance between us.

My maternal great-grandfather lived in Ireland, on his farm in County Tyrone. I have never been to the white-washed, thatched-roof cottage perched on a rise in the rock-ridden soil. I have never walked the field behind the haycart as my mother and her cousins did, gathering hay by pitchfork or by hand, helping with the harvest. I have not, like my aunt, boiled rainwater from the barrel outside the door to do the dishes or make the tea: I have not, like my mother, stared into the silvered, silken depths and ladled out a measure with which I might wash. Nor will I. The farm exists now in memory, in two tattered black-and-whites from the fifties, one of which my mother has framed; the other a xerox of the original which belongs to her cousin. They are snapshots and lack any remarkable texture; they give away little historical context or family background. Without my mother's memories, they are nothing more than a glimpse of the past--mere seconds of a life, a country, a time, a swatch of land that's vanished into someone else's hands.

As for the facts of my great-grandfather's life, they, too, have vanished with the passage of time; they give out, like a bad road, to blanks--to rumor and hearsay. I know merely the bad luck that befell him. Cows died, his butter churn was repeatedly tipped over, the roof blew off his barn. He repaired it. The roof blew off again. And again. He took great care to repair it. A priest was called in for exorcism. Before the invocation of rite or any intonation of prayer, my great grandfather answered a litany of questions from this "man of the cloth" only to learn there would be no exorcism, no reign of reason, no Latin rite. Only that he must return the wood he'd taken from the fairy hill.

The fairies of Ireland, the Sidhe, believed to be descendants of the country's original inhabitants, are not the benign presences of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, for whom children are implored to clap for in affirmation of belief. Nor do they exhibit the impish whims of the Lucky Charms leprechaun, frolicking in neon fields. A quick glance at Lady Wilde or William Butler Yeats is instructive on the fairies' true nature: their presence is felt more than seen; they are prone to theft--of property, children, a person's reason or fortune. Surely the advice, coming as it did from a priest, would have frightened my great-grandfather, moved him to retrace his steps across Tyrone's rock-ridden, marginal land to return the wood he'd wrongfully taken. With this propitiation, the disturbances he'd experienced ceased.

Here, in late August, half a century and an ocean away from the ancestral land I've never set foot on, I shine the flashlight on the path and monitor my every step. If it's true what I've read while working here, that the root of haunted is home, I understand this frisson I feel: because now, against both desire and will, I feel this lost lover's presence so strongly I'm certain he'll appear beside me, put his arm around me, pull me close the way he did as we walked under cloud-cover, talking, our voices low. If the land--here or there--is a text I can't read, I need to watch where I walk. I am, after all, even at this distance, John McCartin's great-granddaughter, wary of the landscape that lies beyond reason's measured shore.