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.
