Expedition

Munich Stone

Hornblower: Dunkeld

Dunkeld:
Scotland.
Summer 2017--------on the banks of the River Tay.

Kirkwall Ruins

Respite in York: Two Views

The ruined tower outside.

The comfort inside.

I'd caught that sore throat on the plane from Frankfurt, and so needed a respite from walking York's stone walls . . . .

Arthur's Seat and Such

Edinburgh--on a blustery day.

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."

Laws of Life

LAWS OF LIFE

Stone bruises;
Clay forgives.
Yet stone holds,
While clay slips.

Fire cleanses;
Fire burns;
Fire demands;
Fire yearns.

Under fierce fire
Clay becomes stone.

--Matt Duckworth

9/19/15

Update: Wire and Kelp

I like watching the aging process with this fellow.
Merman --
Wire figure: 1996.
Kelped: 2015.

Blue Duck

Fish in the Rain

Wael-Seax: The Slaughter-Knife of Beagnoth

A replica of the famous Anglo-Saxon weapon fished from the Thames.

To give you a sense of the size of this mere "knife", my hands are of a fair size and both of them fit handily on that hilt.  Beowulf used such a long-knife on the dragon; Grendel's mother attempted to use such a long-knife on Beowulf.

Blow, West Wind, Blow

A bit of blarney for the season.

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.

Elemental Visions: The Druid Meets The Sea

"Tied-Up House": Lyrics By Jackie Leven

TIED-UP HOUSE

found a little stone on a harbour wall
sea-spray-soaked and very small
big bay rough and turning brown
little shrimp boat on a dangerous sound

i can't go back to the tied-up house
tied so tight people can't get out
you can hear them wail, you can hear them shout
or they sit in chairs till the silence hurts

the ocean roars from room to room
leaving tide marks in the shallow gloom
i got cuts on my hand from i don't know where
and a sobbing hall that i just can't bear

--Jackie Leven,
from his CD Shining Brother Shining Sister

Centering

Clay and Stone: A Miscellany

Rob.

Sir Patrick Spence: Three ships sailing?  Ballad measures.

The journey of many miles . . . is easier when the Vikings are navigating.

"Dear deer, come here."

Studio Check: Practical Spiral

Pizza stone in process; clayfish; assorted items.

Sea Troll or Wizard?