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Family and Childhood in Retrospective Memories.
Pictures of family and childhood life attempt to retrieve the personal account of history and to recollect fragments of the lost past in 'the pictorial and descriptive' by autobiographical writing. At first, "1938" conveys a series of photographic snapshots in the grandmother's shop, the detailed descriptive scenes of everyday life in the account of family history. The poet approaches the shop-family house and then closely introduces the interior arrangement of this shop and a preliminary impression of the grandmother and her world. In the eyes of the poet, nostalgic objects on the shelf animate collections of family photographs in fragments of sequential memories, experiences, and impressions.

Two red-and black matched silky-decorated
tin boxes out of India
fit beside each other behind her
up on the tea shelf, behind her head.

The shoulder of the black iron-flowered
weighing-scales on the counter
balance, embossed, across the socket-top of the stand.
The brass plates hang, equal, in their chains.

Round ounce weights
and multiples and little
black fractions nestle
on one another against the base (BF74)

First, Indian tin boxes of tea on the shelf are regularly behind grandmother. Then "iron-flowered" weighing scales with brass plates still stand on the counter. These first two snapshots of the shop outline grandmother's place in order and detail. Tea boxes clearly signify the necessity of material life in the social context. However, in the cultural context the image of an Indian tin box sophisticatedly brings in a sense of affiliation with commodities imported from faraway colonies in the East. This stanza not only introduces the interior scene of grandmother's Bow Lane shop in detail, but also implies a colonial nostalgia through the social practices of tin tea boxes in everyday life. For the second scene in the shop, the detailed description of "black iron-flowered" weighing scales viewed through a ten-year-old boy's eyes magnifies its scope on segments of realities and fragments of memories. The poet's description of objects on the counter, weighing scales and weights, seem to reconstruct the personal account of childhood experiences and memories, looking at photographs, shot by shot. Unlike those engravings in the earlier sequences, these mimic-pictorial representations of weighing scales in the shop embody a mechanical form of reproduction on the snapshot of moments lived in the child-poet's recollections. For these arrangements and reconstructions of memories, Grandmother, the shop owner, seemingly possessed the power and administrated routines of chores in the shop and family life. Like the antique scales, Grandmother stately weighs up a matter of life and death, actively handling household and kinships. In general, the shop is a thriving business and open to the public; however, this place is more like an extensive space of family territory. Grandmother's shop is closely connected with the whole family, consisting of reciprocal relations and interactions among aunts and uncles in the house. This shop-family house is both a public and private space, simultaneously manifesting and concealing certain realities or truth in the recollections of family history. This first impression of Grandmother and her ownership of the shop-family house not only reconfirms the established symbolic description of the mythic hag successively in Kinsella's Notes from the Land of the Dead and the previous sequence (John 239), but also suggests the criterion of signification, experiences, and recollections derived from the tradition Grandmother represented. From this opening narrative of Grandmother, the autobiographical writing portrays the poet's family and then characterizes these aunts and uncles in a caricature of tedious family life. Like characters in Malton's engraving, depictions of aunts and uncles represent different perspectives of family experiences in the retrospection of personal history and in the introspection of the subjectivity-formation.

With a sense of humor, the poet sketches the practices of everyday life like looking at the ludicrous moments in albums of family photographs. These moments capture the transient aspects of personal memories and metaphorically attempt to penetrate the interior subjectivity in the movement of walking and the process of retrospection. While the poet walks further into the interior of Grandmother's shop-family house, he moves into a rather private and domestic part of subjectivity-the back room. Unlike the front shop, this back room is an enclosed domestic playground or even an inner sanctum for this child, who holds "with a rolled-up newspaper," "killing flies" "at the holy pictures." The poet depicts this moment of burlesque and perceives the project of self-consciousness in front of holy pictures.

There was one on the glass
on the Sacred Heart's face,
with the black little pointed head

and dead eyes
looking everywhere.
It kept twining and wiping its thin paws.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and it disappeared, and started flying
up with the others around and around
at angles under the bulb. (BF75)

The setting of this back room is like an inner sanctum, which ironically and ambivalently plays a role as holy place as well as a secret chamber in the family house. The picture of the "Sacred Heart" stately represents a symbol of the Christian belief, like St. Catherine's Church in Malton's engraving, or even ethically as a pervasive power of dominance and surveillance over the public. Interestingly, the poet contrasts the "black little pointed head," the insignificant creature to the Sacred Heart's face. Rather than the discipline of Catholicism, this tiny insect dominates the scene in the back room and intensively intrigues the kid to follow. On the one hand, in front of the sacred picture the fly with "dead eyes" "looking everywhere," which projects from the reflection of the glass on the picture, exactly like a burlesque surrogate of the omnipresent and omnipotent Supreme Being extensively oversees and manipulates the examinees or the sinners of moral life. On the other hand, flies are creatures for pleasure and like Indian tin boxes and weighing scales treated as significant icons in the personal account of childhood experiences. Through this scene of killing flies, the religious convention rooted in Irish everyday life or the disciplines of Catholicism on individual behavior is gradually weakened and intensively confronted with the mundane affairs and those ethically prohibited and consciously desired objects. From the remembrance in the back room, the poet deviously initiates the speaking subject in the sequence or the speaking persona-the autobiographic poet in the stream of recollected fragments. This speaking subject referring to the reciprocal position of the poet in the poetic formation embodies the sense of self-consciousness and extends its relation to the social, cultural, political space of everyday life; particularly socially constructed is the subjectivity of the poet in the personal account of family and childhood experience.

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Memories of Childhood and Urban Experience
Over a span of time, the poet continues to recollect his memories of childhood through experiences of visiting cousins far away from Grandmother's shop, and then initiates his adventures wandering in streets and the riverbank. On the way to his cousins' houses, the scene of childhood experiences unexpectedly becomes the unknown world of memories that differ from the familiar places or streets where he lives.

Up the bright road starting toward Naas
with the line of new houses
going up the long hill

near the big white Chapel
with the two spires
towering up off the front wall
full of arches and holy figures and stone flowers

we turned off into a hidden
street of brown houses
down to door in the quietest corner
to visit our best cousins (BF 76)

The route to visit his cousins represents a recurring image of religious belief or the authority intensively impressed in the childhood experience. Like the presence of St. Catherine's Church and the picture of the Sacred Heart, "the big white Chapel," "holy figures and stone flowers," though probably belonging to architectures and decorations of streetscapes, still suggests the immanent and pervasive significance of religion in relation to practices of social and public space. On his way to the cousin's house, the poet moves step by step toward the rural "country," on a pilgrimage to the wilderness in order to escape from the extensive disciplines of Grandmother as well as Catholic conventions. Through "the line of new houses" and "big white Chapel," the "hidden street of brown houses" metaphorically leads to the adventure of the hidden, unknown secret and implies the jouissance of prohibited desire in 'the quietest corner' of childhood experience.

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Adventure in the Darkness/ Wilderness
This temporary excursion to visit cousins in the countryside significantly imitates the self-awareness and self-understanding of subjectivity through ritualistic but prohibited frolic. The poet and his cousins move to "the river brink" and wildly enjoy their leisure time and outdoor activities among the rushes and the reeds. When it turns into the dusk, the scene of wilderness temptingly intrigues these children.

The Night crept
among our chalk signs on the path
and trickled into the shores.

The moon hung round and silver
out over the empty Bank
between the backs of the people's houses

where we piled the rubbish up
on the clay in the dark
and set it on fire and talked into the flames

and skipped around in wickedness
with no mercy to the weak or the fat
or the witless or the half blind. (BF 77)

At first, the poet depicts the setting of this dark meeting held at the river brink in the moonlight. Accompanying with the Night and the moon, the children's meeting in the wilderness constructs not only the sense of enjoyment at the campfire but also a primitive ritual of flames. On the one hand, the metaphor of the night and the moon here respectively suggests the ritualization of forbidden behaviors that are not allowed in common faithful Catholic families. The "empty Back" and "the backs of the people's houses" assuredly indicate the secrecy and mystique of this riverbank meeting, geographically faraway from the populous town and metaphorically alienated from social conventions and ethics of everyday life in the Catholic community. On the other hand, the shadow of the darkness or "the Night" further implicates the poet's hideous underworld, or the negative and excluded sphere of his autobiography, which the speaking subject represents and intends to reveal.

Like the "chalk sign on the path," the poet implicitly elicits the desire from the oppressed unconsciousness embedded in the retrospection of childhood. In spite of chitchats, curses, or grumbles, the speaking subject consciously perceives the sensational ecstasy as well as the immanent resistance in the enclosure of darkness.

I have struggled, hand
over hand,
in the savage dance.

I have lain inert, the flesh in the nightmare,
eating and eaten,
with eyes wide open. (BF77)

For the speaking subject in this unusual experience, the "I" specifically demonstrates the existence of self, the presence of a speaking subject in a confessional account of autobiography. In the moonlight meeting, "the savage dance" and the desperate attempt to "struggle" over the "nightmare" strongly suggest both the practices of ethical disciplines and its counteraction of sinful behaviors and thoughts. Accompanying with the flames, the savage dance metaphorically implies the mystic rite of sexual self-recognition through sensational experience of desire, the physical impulse to devour imaginary representations of sexual body ("the balm a clouded breast"), the temptation to whiff the olfactory pleasure of fragrance ("the musk of a stocking"). Like the speaker in "Nightwalker," the speaking subject is conscious of the self's presence in the process of recollection. However, more than the speaker in "Nightwalker," this speaking subject specifically reifies the desire and the temptation of sexuality from the unknown world of personal experience. Through implications of sexual temptation, the poet implicitly recollects the daring experience of the immature and the fascination of sexuality in the context of Catholic ethics and family-life. In other words, the particular experience of forbidden pleasure not only exposes the hidden secret of autobiography, but also allows him to acknowledge the subjectivity, the self-perception of his existence through self-reflexive accounts of historical past and recollections. While historical figures are characterized and discerned in the process of multiple implications on previous engravings, these fragments of personal memories, particularly for unusual or forbidden experiences, also suggest the discontinuity and incredibility in the accounts of personal history. Moreover, this process of recollection selectively is written in part as personal history and then revisions of that account that yet dislocate the perception of personal experiences and self-understanding of subjectivity in the fragmentation of retrospection.

However, these self-reflexive recollections do not merely emphasize on the alluring desire of sexuality and self-conviction of immorality, but rather intensively attempt to replenish fragments of the past and meticulously to reiterate, to reconstruct, and to re-authenticate the subjectivity of the I in the poem, or the poetic formation of a provisional but fluid identity in the autobiographical account. This movement between memories and self-consciousness, which discerns the forbidden experience like an interpretation of a dream or nightmare, implicitly varnishes over the authenticity of personal experience underlying the speaking subject's words. This process of recollection does not really reflect the past but further blurs the vision to retrospect and to perceive truly realities in the personal history. For the self-awareness, the recurring imaginary subject "she" (or specifically the reification of the sexual desire from the "picture book") obviously plays an important part in the psychical evolution and also alludes to the influence or the temptation of female figures, like Grandmother, hag, and the "femme fatale" in the picture book. For this moment of peculiar experience, more or less the imaginary She occupies, conducts and further moves the poet's mind in that "she was really minding us." In other words, the speaking subject indirectly recognizes himself and falsely authenticates his words by the identification of She in the picture book. This identification with the She misplaces the order of recollection and then transfers the hallucination to the reality. Moreover, this transference from forbidden behaviors to the repentance in the scene of the savage dance and flames leads to the confessional account and to the candor of self. Before stopping at the second hour of his walk, the speaking subject impressively announces the confession and indirectly refers to the poet's autobiographical statement in public as well as emerging in the account of memories.

I know I was not bold
even if I did terrible things.

I was not a barefaced liar
or a thick-ah or a go-boy, or a pup

I never went with the cur next door
or those gets down the street.

I was always properly dressed,
and minded my brother.

One night we scrounged up together
and felt the little eggs in each other.

And I always remembered
who and what I am. (BF79)

The speaking subject's confession characteristically expresses the intimate feelings and metaphoric implications of the poetic formation. The speaking subject is both psychological and metaphorical in these recollections. The confession is a psychological evolution of experience, a displacement from these forbidden behaviors in the wilderness to the reserved conduct in the church. Like a confession in the church, these words in the context of spatiotemporality admit those moments lived in the past, to recite experiences of "terrible things," and to enunciate "who and what I am" straight away. For the structure of this sequence, the verb tense transfers to and fro the present and the past that assumes a process of displacement, disillusion and in part self-identification, possibly demonstrating latent memories and reclaiming the existence of the progressive present in the poet's account of walks.

In the context, this confession intensively manifests the poet's affinity with the town Dublin, the colloquial expression of language and its urban subculture. For the local idiom, "thick-ah" (signify 'stupid') and "go-boy" (derived from "go-by-the-wall," meant 'a sly person or hypocrite') suggests the transference from the standard to the local, or rather the specific use of language in the cultural/historical context. In addition, the pejorative expressions "pup" and "gets" that respectively indicate an unpleasant lad and kids "in the street" expressively depict its socio-political context of local culture and tradition that further brings the poet close to the living moment of his childhood memories, the sense of belonging with his place and town. Moreover, the use of Dublin dialect in the confession suggests returning to his roots, to the ground, and to the self-position in life. Therefore, the conflation of colloquial expression of daily language, practices of everyday life in the memories, and retrospections of the past in both public and private history constructs the trajectory of walking in a metaphorical discourse of St. Catherine's Church, Thomas Street, and Dublin as well as Kinsella's poetic formation through the speaking subject's meticulous observations and self-scrutiny, untiring and perpetual revisions of the past or going back to the beginning within historical discourses, art works, poetic works, and autobiography.

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