"Scotch-Irish"
If you're prone to think of such things, and I think most children are, by the time you're 6 or 7 you'll ask your parents the equivalent of, "Where do our people come from?" Certainly, if you're a child drawn to map-gazing and you've also been exposed to even a smattering of history and epic, you'll home right in on this matter with the unerring accuracy children have for the Big Important Questions. At such familial times, we were answered with the mildly prideful, but almost terse, "Scotch-Irish." It even sounds plaid. Or like a hippogriff --- a mythical hybrid beast oddly and unnaturally joined somewhere near the thorax.
While I do have Scottish and Irish ancestry (MacGregor and Bailey respectively), I was well into my thirties before I inadvertantly discovered that my surname is way Welsh. Whether my grandfather, Numa Phillips, was conscious of his Welsh ancestry, I know not, but it goes a long way toward explaining his vocation as a Methodist minister (after spending a freewheeling decade, circa 1905-1915, as a railroad engineer). The connection between Wales and Methodism goes all the way back to the founder of that eminently rational sect, John Wesley, who got a lot of Enlightenment buzz for his work among the benighted Welsh coal miners.
But as with my lineage from Scotland, Ireland, and the Cherokee nation, it's not later religious and cultural overlays that provide the navigational apparatus and sometimes fierce identification I hold with Celts and Cherokees --- it's the cultural and spiritual wealth that existed before various upstart predators used a few technological tricks to get the upper hand, at least in the temporal sense. The Mabinogion, that great Welsh epic, is as vibrant and moving now as if just written or recited for the first time. The Welsh language has proven to be the most survivable of the Celtic tongues, with over one million fluent speakers (including 20% of the three million people of Wales) offering this important conceptual alternative to dominant, more utilitarian languages. In spite of the leaden champions of a legion of conventionalities and niceties, I suspect that the linguistic confluence of Welsh and English forms an unbroken line of bards and shape-shifters stretching at least from Taliesin to Dylan Thomas.
Instead of a servile indoctrination into a variety of recent cultural encrustations, one would do well to seek out intuitively and through oblique research, a connection with the unseen, pre-existing cornerstones of your actual heritage. Disney and Norman Rockwell were fine artists in their own way, but without a foundation that resonates with an older brew of magic and skepticism, and an almost feral awareness of authority's game, their work can be an instrument used to manipulate us into a facile, soft and fuzzy mental state bordering on ..... wait!
is that Dumbo flying overhead or is it Goering?
You're still allowed to laugh at such conceits, but bear in mind that Celts laugh whether allowed to or not, as they've proven while enduring several hundred years of expliotation, persecution, and the supression of their authentic culture. And I think they will have that last big laugh, and it will be a triumphant one. It's a matter of being more in synch with the actual design of the cosmos.
------------ Lp
The Drinker Walks to Wales
Throw the nunbers around the concrete room,
reverberantly.
Music ricochets
back into itself, riddling its own body.
The patron is unable to demand
another Double Dragon.
He thumbs the recurring
rotary fire of the Wahonick Lighter,
gift of a fastball pitcher.
Memory puffs in the first failed smoke-ring:
"For almost three years
he had seen no colours.
They were there,
they were even entering the eye,
but in their constant surrounding,
he forgot them."
He can view every shade wordlessly, now.
No mouth has the eloquence
of a pile of leaves,
million-layered mask.
Here in Aberystwyth
they are mulching the overpass
near Great Darkside Street.
Blood-blistered fingertip
slides into the guidebook.
When last he looked
the directions clearly said
to cross the bridge marked 'Unsafe'.
Only rarely would Asmodeus be waiting
on the other side with a dog,
and a ferocious demand.
Walking there now,
I wear,
against danger,
my circle made of squares.
Not even a billion,
not many.
----------- Luke Phillips circa 1989
