Monastery Memories

Here's a photo of a photo that my father carried in his wallet for years and years, for most of my life anyway. Brother George, brother Hugh, and myself at Carmel's Monastery Beach a long time ago. I'm how old? Five or six, perhaps? The photo is faded, but the memories are not.

I keep this photo close to me now, usually in whatever appointment book I'm carrying. I think it's too fragile to survive in my wallet.

This may be the same day I learned to fly on that yellow air mattress. Playing in the surf, laying on that yellow pad, waiting for the foam to push me up onto the steep beach, I was suddenly pulled seaward by the undertow of a large wave. I couldn't see it, since I was looking shoreward, but I could feel the surge of energy pulling me back and out. My brother tells me my eyes were as big as saucers--literally, he'll say, no figure of speech--as I felt the power of the ocean and as I looked at the faces of my father and brothers, all aghast or anxious in their own ways. Myself, I don't recall feeling upset or worried; I recall excitement and wonder.

The wonder is I wasn't sucked up into the curl and over the falls, caught inside, wiped out, dragged out to sea, possibly drowned. This was the infamous Monastery Beach, after all, though it must have been a calm day for us to be playing there. (We spent our childhoods roaming the Monterey and Santa Cruz county beaches, even though we lived so far away up in the East Bay. Monterey was--and is--the heart of our family. We'd also learned to swim almost from birth, so the sea, sand, and rocks were occasions for fun, not trouble or worry. And, if ever there were a crisis, I knew my father or big brother Hugh would save me.) Then, instead of being crushed by the mountain of water--that I still hadn't seen, only felt--I flew, propelled high and dry by the watery avalanche.

First, that undertow pulled me out, and then the lip of the breaking wave must have hit the sand just under my feet, flooding forward, sweeping and flinging me and that yellow air mattress up and up and high beyond the water's edge and the hard wet sand, all the way onto the soft dry sand at the feet of my brothers and father. Hugh was certainly right: my eyes as big as saucers the whole time. I hardly had time to worry; I only had time to wonder. What a lucky, lucky boy.

Surfmat Poetics

There's an old Irish proverb that runs "The waves have some mercy, but the rocks have no mercy at all," at least according to the barely legible words inked into my old surfmat. Way back in 1978, because I am who I am, I used a permanent marker to memorialize my brand new blue-and-gold surfmat with poetry and proverbs, not even thinking that being the bookworm was hardly cool in the high school halls and so probably even less cool along the rocky shores of Sonoma and Mendocino counties. I took some ribbing, as you'd expect, but actually most divers who made any comments seemed to like the nautical verses and the weird enthusiasm that obviously gripped me. I think the lucky Greek eyes I'd inked on the bottom of the mat helped too; everyone wanted an extra set of eyes looking out for the great-white-you-know-what.

No matter how copacetic the inquiry, I'd get self-conscious and stammer out something, feeling silly. If you consider that I refused for a full year or so to buy a dive flag sticker for my car, one of the classic emblems of the diver, until I had enough underwater exploration as stock for this new Jacques-Cousteau-esque identity, you may wonder how--and why--I so marked my mat and myself.

On that abalone-floater, I had verses by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Poul Anderson, and many more. I should dig out that old mat; it's still in the garage, though it leaks air too quickly to be of much use in the water now. I used it too often as a pad under my sleeping bag, despite being only two-thirds my length; my knees would end up sore from the hard ground, but hey, man, I'm using my surfmat as a camp pad! Last year, when I started going out for abalone again, I picked up a fancy innertube and net combination for shore swims; then, I got myself a kayak for further excursions, and so there's no call for the old 'mat. Still, I haven't quite abandoned it, and I think I'll check through the garage tomorrow and see which verses are still legible.

Now, when I started this post, I meant to write about waves and rocks. I meant to muse on marine mercies and the kindness of kelp. Another day for that one. Tonight, I'm musing on abalone ink, kelp cathedrals, wave trains, and nightfall by the driftwood fireside, watching the salt crystal colors shifting, sparks popping, from the relative comfort of my sleeping bag and surfmat. For a pillow, I always ended up using a damp beach towel or sweatshirt. I remember sleeping pretty well, though.

Postcard: Battle of the Titans

Postcard: Bullish By Nature

The Minotaur is ready for his close-up.

This piece is four or more years old. I was working with a model, though he wasn't genuinely horn-headed. The impulse to make the piece more mine, as it were, moved mythically.

I've always been fond of Mary Renault's Theseus novels: The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. And, worth searching for, Michael Ayrton's The Testament of Daedalus and The Maze Maker. (And, I still recall from my very, very early years the Mickey Mouse comics version of the myth, still recall the intrepid mouse's ball of yarn unwinding as he moved inward through the maze; that's a memory that had nothing to do with the sculpting, that surfaced only as I typed out this blog.) Here we have the creature out of the labyrinth, if only for an afternoon.

Sculpture mix; overglazed. I hadn't meant for the glazing to be quite so thick; there are faint features beneath all that blue and gray glossing, but I like the unintended effect, the blurring and enlarging of the head as well as the downward flow, matching the jut of the chin, the slightly slumping shoulders, and the melancholy mood of the beast-man.

(The top photo: Ferdinand-the-Bull-meets-Robert-Graves.)

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.