Album: 70's Style

Cover art:
concept-driven,
playful, somewhat mysterious,
often literary.

Interior art:
the artist's portrait,
informal and yet pensive,
often black-and-white.


Looking back, the sheer sameness, the simple paradigm, the artifice meant to signal sincerity, well, it's all so much easier to see with a bit of perspective.  Time the Leveler.  The struggle to represent a vision, to play it cool without seeming to try too hard, and to have a bit of fun as well . . . .  

Crime Scene?

Riddles at Random

. . . in the rain.

Crossley-Holland: An Anglo-Saxon Riddle

 RIDDLE 61

A woman, young and lovely, often locked me 
in a chest; she took me out at times,
lifted me with fair hands and gave me 
to her loyal lord, fulfilling his desire. 
Then he stuck his head well inside me, 
pushed it upwards into the smallest part.
It was my fate to be filled with something 
coarse if that person who possessed me 
was virile enough. Now guess my name.

--translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Solution: 61 -- Helmet

The Exeter Book Riddles, translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland,
Penguin Books, ______.

Considering Hrothgar

In the original Beowulf, Hrothgar is both a good king and a king beset by woe from outside. I like that situation, that model, better than the newer versions in which King Hrothgar is complicit in the woes afflicting him and his people. Understanding how someone can be good, excellent to his people, and blameless . . . and yet also understanding how that someone can suffer, and how his people can suffer, through no specific fault of his or their own is powerful and compelling to me.

Such riddles matter.

Crossley-Holland's "Idling"

IDLING

The way waves fold into themselves, sigh, then
play themselves out high on the foreshore,

a man draws and redraws the crescent contours
of the salt-woman he loves to draw to love.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland


P.S.  There are riddles here that I am working to work out; the images and unfolding of the lines draw me in here.

Crossley-Holland is a renowned translator of Anglo-Saxon riddles, a popular genre in the medieval period, among others.  His own poetry, as above, often shows such trickster influence.

Crossley-Holland: Do You Ken?

SALT- COMPOUNDS

salt-scythe
sweeps onshore, corrosive and hissing; pins back
ears; rifles each stay, shroud and halyard.

creek-wood
the old ones, clinker-built and always thirsty;
noses blunt and bottoms glaucous; still quivering.

sea-garment
roseate spinnaker, light-breasted; no less
stiff canvas, often split and mended, grey with salt.

herring-haunt
see-through escarpments toppling and barking
as they dive through themselves into ghosts of flint.

mauve-mist
delicate as breath suspended over marsh grass;
summer carpet, wiry and tide-beaten, knotted in mud.

wave-arms
without joints, creaking and groaning; like wings
their strange spade hands salute and dip and rise.

mud-runes
ribbon-casts, blow-holes, keel-scrapes, anchor-spikes,
darts of the stitchers and strutters and mincers.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

from his Selected Poems,
London: Enitharmon Press, 2001

Berberick: Hunting, Hunted

Still, even in those unlighted times when I'd shut my eyes tightly to the skald leygr, I remembered the teachings of my old friend, of Stane Saewulf's son.  One of the things he taught me was this:

"Men and Dwarfs, we are all riddles," he said.  "We are puzzles to our friends, puzzles to ourselves.  Who finds joy in riddling, pleasure in the patient stalking of the hidden truth, that man knows how to live."

But what do you think happens, my Sif, when truth becomes the hunter, man becomes the hunted?  To me, it seems that the man stalked by a truth becomes a brother to the wolf-haunted moon.

--Nancy Varian Berberick, from Shadow of the Seventh Moon

Berberick's narrator is Garroc, dwarf, soldier and skald.  Berberick's tale is a historical fantasy set in 7th-century Britain, amidst the wars of Saxons and Britains and Welsh, a tale paying tribute to Old English poetry and poets.  Garroc is one of the last generation of dwarfs, a race now cursed with infertility and thereby extinction for attempting to steal the goddess Idun's apples of immortality.  In the passage above, Garroc's reflections have a more personal flavor, a more specific context, and yet the lines on riddling, on hunting and being hunted, ring true in this life, for life in general.  

One can know too too much.  Or, to put it another way, the man (or dwarf) hunted by a truth may need to flee, may need to stand, and who outside that pursuit can truly judge?   Or, whatever the judgment, the passage speaks both to the joy of the hunt and to the desperation, the haunting, of being hunted by a truth.  Garroc is haunted by a pack of truths in the tale, until . . . .  

I'll repeat my favorite portion of the passage: "Who finds joy in riddling, pleasure in the patient stalking of the hidden truth, that man knows how to live."  

And woman, too.  

Berberick's adopting the older style of pronoun use to match the older times, the older English, in which she has set her tale.  Sif, Garroc's human foster-daughter, is a respected character, Garroc's confidant and our narrative conduit.

Touchstone: Neruda, Once Again

I want to quote Neruda, if only because this woman he describes, he evokes, he invokes, is such a riddle to me.  An enticing, arousing, provoking riddle: the best kind.   I want to know her, my version of Neruda's her.  Is that such an inappropriate desire?

I offer the translation from Stephen Tapscott.  The original is readily available: Eris Hija Del Mar Y Prima Del Oregano.

You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.

Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;

cook, your blood is quick as the soil.

Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.

Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;

your hands go out to the earth, and the seeds swell;

you know the deep essence of water and the earth,

conjoined in you like a formula for clay.

Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,

they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.

This is how you become everything that lives.

And so, at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms

that push back the shadows so that you can rest--

vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.

Neruda, Pablo.  100 Love Sonnets.  Trans. Stephen Tapscott.  Austin, TX: U of T Press, 2004.