Passages: A Door into Sorrow

THE DOOR

When she came suddenly in

It seemed the door could never close again,

Nor even did she close it--she, she--

The room lay open to a visiting sea

Which no door could restrain.

Yet when at last she smiled, tilting her head

To take her leave of me,

Where she had smiled, instead

There was a dark door closing endlessly,

The waves receded.

--Robert Graves

Studio 49

Works in progress: two views. The shift in perspective highlights the apparent relative sizes of the three pieces. Doesn't that smaller bust look larger in one shot than the other?

Navajo Wheel clay. The red sticks to your hands for days, despite scrubbing, and it's a soft clay, so building, building up, may take patience, but that clay comes out of the kiln so handsome, so deep-toned.

Next step: I make heads for at least two out of three. The largest is meant to be a self-portrait, either literally or figuratively so. "Just shoulders" or "lacking a head" feels appropriate, I must admit. Rough efforts spark rough thoughts, rough drafts.

The Waiting Game

I like the ripples, the rippling hills of water in this photo, even though the waves, the mountains of water, were slow--infrequent, fashionable guests--to arrive at the break here.

Two Views of Cannery Row

Sea-Wolves

Sea-wolves; or, happy divers at Pt. Lobos.

I've mentioned my old surf-mat, circa 1978, with all the poetry and the Greek naiad eyes in permanent marker (pre-Sharpie days, my friends), and on that 'mat you can still read a popular 19th-century poem called "The Sea-Wolf," though I can't quite read those markings enough to tell you the poet's name. I'll have to do some research and report back. (It may be summer, but those words bring the daily classroom right to me, happily so.) I'll blog on that 'mat, just as soon as I take a good photo and decipher all the faded poems and sayings. ("Kiss my ab"--as in abalone--is still legible.)

Here are two 20th-century sea-wolves. Well, I'm definitely (and defiantly) 20th-century; Philip, my dive partner here, would probably claim to be 21st-century, and power to him, the young rascal. Carolina took the photo, for which I thank her. (If you are looking for a water-sprite, you should seek her out.) She caught Philip and myself smiling, and though we look goofy, as everyone does in neoprene, you can't blame that on her. There's nothing false about such high spirits, and Carolina documented it. That happens far less often than it should.

Pt. Lobos, Carmel, CA. Early December, 2009, though doesn't it look like a wonderful summer day? (Not a summer day in Carmel, though, since there would be fog, lots of it.) Glorious day. Great temps, 60's and even low 70's, on land; possibly high 50's in the water. However, visibility in the water was quite poor: five feet at best? I recall Philip keeping even with my fins just to not lose me; I was checking every half-minute or so. I was so glad he was sticking tight; I didn't want to get separated and lose dive-time just reconnecting at the surface. We headed out, moving along the alley out there, hugging the rocky configurations to the left, and headed back, still hugging that same side. Lots of fish, however unclear, and fun in the surge, but that's why you dive, good viz or not.

The high points of this dive were (a) when the big ling cod pushed us aside to return to his favorite crevice and (b) when we managed to navigate right back to our starting point without undue surface swimming or kelp-crawling. That last blessing was pure luck, as I recently discovered; in my latest dive at Pt. Lobos, I navigated my partner and myself into a long kelp-crawl without enough air or weight (a different story) to leap-frog our way back to the boat-channel and launch zone.

I'm going surfing and free diving tomorrow: Cowell's Beach, Santa Cruz. Lindamar in Pacifica is my back -up. I haven't surfed in a long time, and I've only progressed to being an apprentice (don't-wannabe-kook) anyway. After a session reminding myself how much I should have been surfing already (best prep) or doing more pop-ups (2nd best), I think I'll swim out with a camera and try to document some happy surfers. Looking at Carolina's photo here has given me that idea.

"Touch magic, and pass it on." (Terri Windling? Charles de Lint? Robert Graves? William Butler Yeats? The Waterboys? Read Windling's The Wood Wife; de Lint's Memory and Dream; Graves' Homer's Daughter; and Yeats' "At Baile's Strand." Listen to the Waterboys' Fisherman's Blues.) "Touch magic, and pass it on": Jane Yolen, those Merlin stories, I think.

By the way, that's me on the left. I think my tank is hanging a bit low here, a habitual error. I position the tank low because I don't want to hit the tank with the back of the head as I look up and about while diving, but the tank has been slipping down in the pack a bit too much the last few dives. What goes down could come up. In a heavy surf-exit, that could matter. At Lobos, at this protected entry/exit, no big deal; at a steep beach like Monastery, now, I could knock myself out. Wouldn't that be truly goofy? I'd better fix that.

Mermaid Grieving

Mermaid with a Broken Tail

Here is another mermaid from years back. I keep her as a prototype, given that I broke her tail fin at some point. I may have broken it before the first firing, or perhaps I used too much glaze and her fin broke when taking her out of the kiln. I've just examined her again, and I can't tell what went wrong.

Flawed, and yet still a favorite piece. I made her, brought her out of those images in my mind, out of mytho-erotic preoccupations. Those images that, frankly, seem apart from myself, greater or lesser but apart. Much like the dreams that rival any feature film, but don't seem to derive from any obvious idiosyncratic psychodrama, any obvious soup-pot/maelstrom of extensive viewing or deep reading. Lately, my dreams have made me second-guess the concept of culture mind, given the wild disparity between my apparently feeble conscious imaginings and what's been playing on that widescreen set in the hollow of my skull. (Marlow should be narrating; Euripides, Mundy, and Perez-Reverte could be plotting the next installment. Who's directing? I want subtitles, yet I'm the producer of the show or, at least, the landlord.) Not that I'm making great claims for this mermaid; she stepped from my skull, but she's not quite Athena (and I'm not quite Zeus). Not Athena, but then that's not the goddess I dream of, and what I dream is still richer than anything I've yet brought to fruition. I need to work on that.

The mermaid: I failed her, failed to bring her to fruition. I like the hair, though not exactly, like her hands and small breasts, the patterned bluing of her belly. Her face is still too stark, too static, though that keel of a nose was intended; I wanted strong features, an otherworldly seeming. I'd like the scales of her tail to stand out more sharply; I'd formed them with an old Celtic ring, but over-glazed and lost the detail. She's a sentinel, a creature of the deep, and an admonition for further efforts.

She's nameless, but not unknown.

Postcard: Turtle Reef