Fool's Gold; Or, The Admonition

How good is the book in your head--if it isn't on the page?
What book?
I don't see a book.
In the head or in the heart?

Page, page, page--that's what matters.

Story of my life.

Read less; write more.
Keep on reading, but write more.
Get it down; revise it.
Do the thing that needs to be done.

Voices in my head.

I'd quote my father, but then I'd just be looking for pity or mercy or something.

Right now the book in my head is a mixture of Homer and Robert E. Howard, John Fowles and Robert Stone, edited by Hemingway. All of which ought to make very little sense at all.

Not on the page.
Doesn't count.

I picked up a new used copy of James Lee Burke's Heaven's Prisoners from Pegasus Downtown yesterday, and now the book falls open to the exact page I was looking for--the previous owner/reader had my same hang-ups, I'm guessing--page 262:

"But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."

Ouch.

As one of my students once said when faced with this same passage: "No mercy."

Lighting By Bushmills -- And Brendan Kennelly

Self-Portrait #52.

"We are all occasionally turned to stone by what we witness, think and feel.  Out of that same selfstone, the imagination moulds and coaxes a persona who, entering poems and animating them by his presence, is seen and felt to be a creature of flesh and blood.  The cold of stone is imaginatively caressed into human warmth, surely one of the transfiguring graces of poetry.  (It can happen the other way round too, and be no less a transfiguring grace.)"

--Brendan Kennelly, from his Islandman,
quoted in his Breathing Spaces: Early Poems, 
which I'm excerpted, respectfully, here, among other places in this blog.

I've felt like an Islandman, an enisled "selfstone", and I have wanted others to feel like islandmen or personae too, though I certainly didn't quite have the words for it until this passage from Kennelly.

"You Too Are Mortal"

Wasn't that what the official anti-hubris clerk kept whispering into the Great Emperor Darius' ear?  Or was that Xerxes?  ("Remember the Greeks"?  "Give the Hellespont 300 lashes"?)***

More appropriately, The Humble Potter's Handiwork.  Or, Look Ma, Hands of Clay!

Ugly pot.

I let this one dry too much before trying to trim it, and then I failed to secure it properly to the wheel so that it went flying off during that belated attempt at trimming, though I did catch it on the bounce. You can see stoneware clay improperly mixed with this Navajo wheel /stoneware hybrid at the rim, a failed stamp on the side, and that odd, flawed bottom.

I did manage to put a decent foot (that you can't see). The glazing will be a crucial step.

Just a run of the mill off-piece, truth to tell.  I like to try to save such pieces too.


***A reliable source nudges me towards the Romans and the triumph as the source of the memento mori. 

(I thank EHS and trust the correction -- of course, of course -- but I also continue to resist checking, despite how easy that would be in this day and this age.  There's a perverse pleasure in quoting or citing from memory.)