Postcard: Simian Alchemy

Here's another mask from Summer-Fall 2009: The Ape Man.

Somehow, thoughts of reading and rereading the earliest Tarzan novels (and that comics version of Tarzan the Terrible) when I was a boy led to my making this mask.

Now, Tarzan has the face and profile of an English lord, so this isn't him, but it's something.

That's as clear as it gets.

Passages: Melville's Practical Tattooing

Consider these words from Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville's classic Moby-Dick:

"The skeleton dimension I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had been tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale."

This passage may be found at the end of Chapter CII: A Bower in the Arsacides, just before Chapter CIII: Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton.

Ishmael's practical tattooing--using his skin as a notebook--is a remarkably broad-minded advance on Typee's trepidation at being marked as a cannibal, savagely disfigured and so unfit to return to civilization, in Melville's first novel. Typee's obvious discomfort prevented the Marquesan islanders from honoring him, as they saw it, with the tribal adornments to Melville's alter ego's immense relief.

Not so many years later--according to conventional chronology, anyway--Melville in Moby-Dick changes the tune; Ismael regards tattooing as means to either a practical or poetic end. In fact, due to the white whale's sinking of the Pequod, Ishmael loses all possessions save Queequeg's life-saving coffin and his own skin, fortuitously marked. (Queequeg's hieroglyphic and profound markings deserve a separate entry.)

I must quote Thomas Farber's wonderful line, his counter to Melville's famous opening: "Call me Queequeg."

Ishmael's poem must be that novel I'm rereading.

Postcard: The Anti-Gollum

Found a gold ring on the bottom of the pool today, oh boy. Once lost: now found. My salvage-diver alter ego--Nisus of Troy--lives. Gave that ring right to the lifeguard; not even tempted to court bad karma keeping such a trinket, such a trophy.

Second time so far in this life of mine.

First? Best friend's wedding ring lost in a lake. He didn't mean to lose the ring; it just happened.

One very stormy week later we returned to the scene of the crime, as his wife insisted, and I found the ring. We'd brought scuba gear up to this lake in Northern California, Klamath country--just in case--but simple free diving resulted in recovery. (Mucky bottom with a fine layer of moss-like webbing above two feet or so of mud; ring caught in that webbing: lucky.) My first real lesson in comparative geography: the lake was a mere 17 or 18 feet at the deepest, which fit the surrounding environment of rolling hills, glades, and gentle valleys. (We were a steep hike up from the Klamath River, but on that plateau the shifts in elevation were mild.)

Night-diving the shallow lake with that scuba gear and watching plump, pale-bellied frogs sleep beneath the lily pads: that was the real high of the trip. I still like how my buddy's wedding band appeared to me when the swirling cloud of disturbed muck finally settled, me holding my breath as long as I was able, not straining, but anxious for success, and the gold ring shining even at depth. (Gollum, gollum.) Those frogs, though, sleeping and dreaming. I have a fondness for frogs.

Finding the lost truck keys in the Klamath River was a harder task by far. Different trip. Not my keys, by the way, but my ride back to camp four or five uphill miles away. Of course, I had the goggles, and so I had the glory of searching and of finding. The Klamath is a fierce, cold river; fortunately, the keys had fallen out of a pocket in the eddying pool where we'd spent most of our time.

Nisus of Troy. Maybe I need a fourth tattoo.

Postcard: Lost in Translation

I'd meant to muse on translating and translation, but I find my mind further adrift than I'd prefer right now. I've studied a fair handful of languages in my time, mostly for graduate school requirements and related personal interest: Latin, Anglo-Saxon, German, Classical Greek, and Spanish, with smatterings of Medieval French, Medieval Welsh, Old Norse, and Old High German. That list is so much more impressive than any ability I currently possess with any of these languages. Aside from English, frankly, I'm rather tongue-tied.

Translation as a mode of thought and a means of entering into a culture, into the literature, and into contact with the people: those continue to interest me, even as I've let my linguistic skills falter and lag.

For a while in graduate school, I intended to focus on medieval texts of Western Europe (with competing yearnings to shift to Classical Latin, to Vergil, and all those Romans), but the realization that I'd never quite get all the jokes, not from that distance in time and culture, deterred me. It's hard enough to find all the jokes in William Wordsworth or Beowulf (a medieval text, yes), though I used to think I'd managed both of those tasks.

I need to muse further on this topic, the larger topic of translation, but I want to pause a moment with a favorite poem in Spanish for which I'm still seeking the best translation. Yes, I should revive and expand my high school Spanish to read Lorca's gypsy ballad in its original form; yes, I agree, but that project will have to wait. By the way, my eighth-grade Spanish was good enough for me to listen to and decipher much of what the fine folks of Tecate, Mexico, were saying about my grandmother, my brothers, and myself, but even then I was too shy, too unequipped, to speak to and with them. 13 or 14 years old, and tongue-tied. I liked listening, though, and smiling.

I've pieced my way through Lorca's original, and I've read various translations, but I still haven't read the translation that captures whatever mysterious effect I feel when I reflect on the poem and the few phrases I've memorized, on what people have shared with me about this poem: "Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verde ramas." There's a magic to this gypsy ballad of Lorca's, and I sometimes wish I had enough Spanish, enough denotative and connotative knowledge, to truly feel the evocative power at work. I feel much, but not enough.

Here is the opening to Lorca's poem in the original Spanish. If you know of a worthy translation or the missing key, let me know.

Romance sonambulo

Verde que te quiero verde.

Verde viento. Verde ramas.

And besides Lorca, there's Neruda and all those favorite poems from Isla Negra, The Captain's Verses, and beyond.

Postcard: The Element of Surmise

Octo is looking at you. What's the thought behind the action?

I had aimed at flow and at relief, but I can't quite say I've matched what I have achieved with what I had intended. The colors are off too, though there's something there I like.

Rough draft for future projects.

Fall 2009: Sculpture mix; glazes? Stormy blue, sea foam, t-brown, clear.

Flipping the Doubloon

I've been thinking of Coyote and Raven and Puck. Captain Puck at the helm of a swift ship with black sails.

I've been navigating the mytho-historical shoals of Sir Francis Drake, Sir Henry Morgan, and Captain Jack Sparrow, all on behalf of one of those novels I don't expect to write. Such plodding and plotting lead naturally, for me, to Beowulf, Brecca, and Unferth; to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser; and to Corum, Elric, and the Eternal Champion. The Green Knight, Gawain, and Arthur the Bear join the crew of my mind's flagship; Shelley, Keats, and Byron, stepping lively, limping lively, as well.

Never far from thought: Theseus and the bull-leapers. Archilochos, Euripides, and Sappho crowd onto the deck. Would there be room for Medea, Ariadne, and Dido? How not?

And what about the Colossus of Rhodes? Are his feet of clay?

I could never really be a trickster or a pirate, but what's the enduring, recurring appeal then? Appeal? Fascination and yearning, more like, belike. Still, it's not that simple, never that simple.

Frankly, I'm more Law than Chaos (Thank you, Michael Moorcock), and I recoil from James Joyce's stubborn "non serviam" (being a steady student of Virgil and my father's son), and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet . . . .

What are those famous lines of St. Augustine?

Why do I see him at the helm of a swift ship with black sails?

Is that Robin Hood beside him or just Errol Flynn?

Postcard: Up The Creek

The Drowned Man; sculpture mix, cobalt carbonate oxide & satin white glaze.

Strawberry Creek, UC Berkeley.