The Oracle of Light

The King of Atlantis: sculpture mix; misc. blue and green glazes; twine; copper wire.

I've posted shots of this mask a few times before. This afternoon I took it down from the wall and out into the sun for a good look. I like this piece, and I brought out the camera just because of that liking. I haven't put enough time aside for playing with clay, and this posting encourages me to pursue such pleasure.

These shots somehow call to mind one particular fragment from Archilochos. Here it is, translated by Guy Davenport in his Seven Greeks. Note the range of tones as Archilochos carries us through even this brief piece.

Be bold! That's one way

Of getting through life.

So I turn upon her

And point out that,

Faced with the wickedness

Of things, she does not shiver.

I prefer to have, after all,

Only what pleases me.

Are you so deep in misery

That you think me fallen?

You say I'm lazy; I'm not,

Nor any of my kin-people.

I know how to love those

Who love me, how to hate.

My enemies I overwhelm

With abuse. The ant bites!

The oracle said to me:

"Return to the city, reconquer.

It is almost in ruins.

With your spear give it glory.

Reign with absolute power,

The admiration of men.

After this long voyage,

Return to us from Gortyne."

Pasture, fish, nor vulture

Were you, and I, returned,

Seek an honest woman

Ready to be a good wife.

I would hold your hand,

Would be near you, would have run

All the way to your house.

I cannot. The ship went down,

And all my wealth with it.

The salvagers have no hope.

You whom the soldiers beat,

You who are all but dead,

How the gods love you!

And I, alone in the dark,

I was promised the light.

--Archilochos

(7th century B.C.)

Alter Ego and Friends: Poetry and Clay

ALTER EGO

The boy from Uplyme with his smile

Who stands on cliff-tops staring down:

One stares as well. The sea is barren.

And the beach. But still he stares.

Branches of sloe and bullace

Cloud his dark, his idiot eyes.

Always he wears the vacant smile

Of happy mongoloids and kings.

One day he turned and spoke to me.

I'm John, he said. I like it here.

--John Fowles

Inishboffin on a Sunday morning.

Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.

One by one we were being handed down

Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied

Scaresomely every time. We sat tight

On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,

Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking

Except the boatman, as the gunwales sank

And seemed they might ship water any minute.

The sea was very calm but even so,

When the engine kicked and our ferryman

Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller,

I panicked at the shiftiness and heft

Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us--

That quick response and buoyancy and swim--

Kept me in agony. All the time

As we went sailing evenly across

The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,

It was as if I looked from another boat

Sailing through air, far up, and could see

How riskily we fared into the morning,

And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

--Seamus Heaney, from "Seeing Things"

As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow

And wished that others held the same opinion;

They took it up when my days grew more mellow,

And other minds acknowledged my dominion.

Now my sere fancy 'falls into the yellow

Leaf', and imagination droops her pinion;

And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk

Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,

'Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,

'Tis that our nature cannot always bring

Itself to apathy, for we must steep

Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring,

Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep.

Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx;

A mortal mother would on Lethe fix.

--Lord Byron, from the fourth Canto of his Don Juan

Mateo: sculpture mix; selective denim glazing; scarf. Summer 2011.

The poetry was selected in the usual fashion, intuitively, as an unlikely set of verses that still seemed to fit together somehow. Or, the poetry was chosen by fitness, for contrast, and as proxy or emulation. I've referred to Heaney's anxieties while afloat here, and I'll repeat that I do not share such nervousness. I admire his writing, and Fowles', and Byron's, of course.

Passages: Charon's Steamboat

"During the firefight, I saw a steamboat down by the mouth of the river."

"You mean a floating casino?"

"That's not what it was. I've seen it before. On Bayou Teche."

"I don't know if I want to hear this."

"I thought that was where I was going. I thought they were waiting for me."

"Who?"

"The people on board."

"Don't talk like that."

"You're the best, Cletus."

"No, we're the best. One is no good without the other. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide had one agenda only. We make the dirtbags want to crawl back in their mothers' wombs. We're gonna hunt down the cleaners or whatever they are and salt their hides and nail them to the barn door."

"You've already said it for both of us. It's only rock and roll."

"That because I was ninety-proof. You don't have permission to die." He grabbed my shirt. "You hearing me on this?"

"I was just telling you what I saw. Who else am I going to tell?"

I cupped my hand on the back of his neck as we walked to the car. I could feel the hardness in his tendons and the heat and oil of his skin. I could feel his heartbeat and the fury and mire of his blood in his veins, and in his intelligent green eyes I could see the misty shine that my words would not make go away.

--James Lee Burke, from The Glass Rainbow.

Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell's friendship is one of the glories of Burke's novels featuring these two characters.

Passages: Going Solo with Duff Around Ireland

Here's something to read: Chris Duff's On Celtic Tides: One Man's Journey Around Ireland By Sea Kayak. And, here are two passages that I like quite a lot from this non-fiction book. The first passage presents action and the consequences of action. The second passage moves us from the physical to the emotional, though the physical and emotional are constantly interwoven together and with the intellectual and even the spiritual in this fine book. Duff makes me want to pay more attention to the world around us, especially the natural world, but he also makes me want to get out the kayak and get wet even as I want to explore my Celtic heritage, to visit Ireland myself.

Mostly, I want to feel the salt and the burn of being out on the sea. I like solo outings, though on a much humbler scale than anything in this book. Here are Duff's own words I want to share:

From Chapter 5: Abbey Refuge:

After an hour getting tossed around like a cork, I entered the narrows between Dursey Island and the mainland. I was drained and it felt good to close my eyes and let the current gently spin me in a circle. Rough water paddling was exhausting. The physical exposure seemed to strip away all the protective emotional layers, and I felt as worn as the rocks on the outer coast. In the thick of big breaking waves, it was a constant measure of controlling the flight or fight instinct: too little adrenaline and I won't be aggressive enough, too much and I'll burn up energy too fast. The inclination is to pour on the power and try to get through the rough stuff fast. It doesn't work. The boat charges ahead, then plows into the oncoming wave or crashes into a trough. The only way is to slip into low gear and grind it out. Slow and steady, not fighting the power of the waves but letting them break on themselves. Dig in, a brace or back stroke here or there, then dig in again. It can be frustratingly slow and fatiguing.

After a brief rest in the channel, I turned and headed back out. Moments after leaving the calm, I almost went over. An inflamed tendon in my right wrist made gripping the paddle shaft with my thumb impossible and I couldn't control the angle of the blade. I had ignored the pain in the rough waters on the outside of the island. Now, without the distraction of breaking waves and a pitching boat, I was keenly aware of it. A wave tossed the boat over on its side and I sliced the edge of the paddle, rather than the back of it, into the water. A last-second hip flip with my right knee jammed against the inside of the cockpit kept me from going over. Despite the tendinitis and the near capsize, I was encouraged by my reaction time. It was instant and automatic, the way it had to be.

Getting thrown over and hanging for that millisecond on the edge of the boat was a reminder of just how tenuous my grasp on the trip was. I had to be "on" one hundred percent of the time and it was wearing me down. It hadn't been a massive wave that had almost upended me. In fact, it had been a ridiculously small one that I hadn't been paying attention to. I had come down off the adrenaline high of an hour earlier and I was focused on a cove a quarter mile in front of me, looking forward to getting out of the boat, into warm clothes, and already thinking about how much food and water I had in the rear compartment. I hadn't been attentive to the moment -- the worst mistake I could make. It wouldn't have been a big deal to have gone over, but it was a reminder of how a month of paddling had both honed my reactions and also begun to take its toll.

From a bit later in the same chapter . . . I like how this section builds off of the previous passage and how it builds in itself, as we move from the beginning here to the final paragraph here:

Kenmare River is actually a bay, longer and wider than both Bantry and Dunmanus, but for some reason, certainly Irish, it had been given a river status. I had wanted to paddle into the town of Kenmare, twenty-five miles up the bay, but after my experience with Bantry Bay and the westerly winds, I changed plans. It was almost mid-July. I had lost a lot of time sitting out bad weather and was less than a third of the way into the trip. Clearly this wasn't going to be a repeat of the previous summer, and I couldn't afford to get trapped by the winds again.

That was the trouble with big trips and exposed waters; so many miles and so much to see, but the weather always dictated the pace. If I explored every bay and island along the way, I could find myself a month behind schedule and running into bad weather on the last leg into Dublin. On the other hand, the fall could be fine and I would be kicking myself for not taking more time early in the trip. Time and weather were a gamble.

As I paddled across Kenmare River, I had plenty of time to think of the demands of the journey. The sky felt like a wet gray sponge waiting for a shift of wind to wring out its weight of trapped moisture. An easy four-foot swell did nothing to pull me out of the low that had crept up and hung like a shadow over my emotions. My mind and body felt disconnected, out of harmony with each other, for the first time in weeks. I was two or three miles from land and wanting desperately to crawl into the warmth of the bag, somewhere out of the wind, and just sleep off the physical and emotional drain. I wanted to be warm and dry. I want to eat the breakfasts that I dreamed about and see things familiar. I missed home and was tired of being on guard, of constantly worrying: food, water, tides, the weather reports three times a day, summer slipping by and still eight hundred miles to go. Four miles per hour if the seas were flat. The trip suddenly felt too big.

I remembered a retired lighthouse keeper warning me about the waters around Malin Head, some three hundred miles to the north. An Irish banker I had met two days ago in Allihies had told me how rough the seas were in County Sligo and how the winds were always so cold.

Why did people always do that? Why did they tell me of a fisherman who had drowned just two weeks earlier, or of waves bigger than any I had seen so far? Were they trying to distance themselves from something they did not understand? I had heard the same warnings when I was paddling up the Mississippi River, and in Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy, in the Bristol Channel, and the Pentland Firth in northern Scotland. People were always quick to point out the hazards and just as quick to label me mad for attempting something they did not understand. Most days I could handle the doubts that people so freely shared, but on days when the trip had worn me down, their disbelief burrowed inside and undermined my confidence. People didn't realize that what I needed to hear was encouragement not stories of an impenetrable coastline or severe weather a hundred miles to the north. They had the comfort of returning to a warm, safe house after telling their tales, while I was left with the task of sorting out what I had been told. The irony was that I couldn't cut short these stories people wanted t0 tell me, because hidden in the telling there might be a bit of truth that I needed to hear. The trick was to separate the truth from the teller's emotions and balance that with my own knowledge and abilities. When I was low, the deciphering didn't work as well.

Where were the highs that I had felt just last week?

And so forth.

Duff, Chris. On Celtic Tides: One Man's Journey Around Ireland By Sea Kayak. New York: St. Martins Griffin, 1999. Print.

(Thanks, Hugh, for the forty-ninth birthday present.)

Book Jacket Fantasy

Oskar Kokoschka's The Crab (1939-40)

The best cover for yet another one of those books I haven't written yet?

Now, it's not quite the best choice for what-will-be Kraken House or The Armour of Your Virtue or even Feet of Clay, but it could work for Isla Verde or possibly Cargo From Cumae. Titles are easy, projecting is so easy, but the discipline to write instead of swim, kayak, dive, sculpt, read, read, read, drink some coffee (or rum), think about teaching, or--hey--work is what's actually so hard. In other words, don't hold your breath waiting for any of those projects to appear in book-form. I'm behind on the swimming and the prepping for class, as it is.

Still, if you've looked into this blog at all, you can see the art's fitness here. I like that swimmer (struggling with the currents or simply stroking along?) just beyond the giant crab's rather sharky head. Is that swimmer aware of the crab? Is that crab aware of the swimmer? No matter what, the arms have to keep cycling, the legs pumping: swim, swim, swim!

What about the fishing boat in the distance? Or, are those smugglers, rather, making for a handier cove? What do you think?

Sometimes, I'm that swimmer out in those currents.

Other times, I'm that crab.

Aren't we all?

Four Friends

Drake's Bay State Park, February 1980: Keith, Gary, and John.

I'm the fourth friend, taking the photo. I'm fairly sure I had to sneak up on the trio to snap the shot. Nobody much liked getting their picture taken back then.

We were so young then, and we hadn't a clue. We couldn't hardly wait to get on with life.

Good crew, though.

Photo of a photo: still counts.

By the way, that's my pal Keith, the best friend who passed away all too soon, that I've talked about in other entries. I hope Gary and John are doing well; I've let time and distance mute the essential connection between us. My fault, entirely.

Yeats: "The Moods" and "The Mask"

THE MOODS

Time drops in decay,

Like a candle burnt out

And the mountains and woods

Have their day, have their day;

What one in the rout

Of the fire-born moods

Has fallen away?

THE MASK

'Put off that mask of burning gold

With emerald eyes.'

'O no, my dear, you make so bold

To find if hearts be wild and wise,

And yet not cold.'

'I would but find what's there to find,

Love or deceit.'

'It was the mask engaged your mind,

And after set your heart to beat,

Not what's behind.'

'But lest you are my enemy,

I must enquire.'

'O no, my dear, let all that be;

What matter, so there is but fire

In you, in me.'

--William Butler Yeats

P.S. The sense of loss that pervades "The Moods" is absolute, though I'm never quite sure how to answer that question at the end of that poem. (I look around me to see who is missing now, to see whom to name. I wonder about the "fire-born" and yearn to join that "rout," even as the loss is presented to me.) The repetition of "Have their day, have their day" has always worked its magic on me, resonating down the years.

I love how these poems make me think, dramatically and thematically, and yet the emotions emanating from and evoked by these poems are the roots, the sources, the impulses for such thinking. When I was younger, I always thought that more thought was needed to "get" Yeats' work, but older now, I see that more feeling is the real key. Imagination demands both sides of the coin, after all.

"For I Will Consider My Cat . . ."

Motley: sixteen and a half years of age; still seeking out the sun.

All honor to Kit Smart and his cat Jeffrey, of course.

Haunted By Lice: The Power of Suggestion

Here's a poem by Seamus Heaney that my mind can't quite let go of, and I take such grip to be a fine sign of quality and power in any writing. "Vision" is the seventh and final strand of "A Lough Neagh Sequence" from his 1969 volume Door Into The Dark.

I am struck by the "vision" of "hatched fears" resulting from, what, the childhood admonition to comb his hair, an admonition accompanied by an invocation of monstrous, fatal lice. How could the child not imagine the worst, no matter how well or how often he combed his hair. Words and images, particularly, woven into story have tremendous powers, if only to awaken our imaginations, our own dark envisionings.

The "jellied road" haunts my imagination, certainly.

7. VISION

Unless his hair was fine-combed,

The lice, they said, would gang up

Into a mealy rope

And drag him, small, dirty, doomed,

Down to the water. He was

Cautious then in riverbank

Fields. Thick as a birch trunk,

That cable flexed in the grass

Every time the wind passed. Years

Later in the same fields

He stood at night when eels

Moved through the grass like hatched fears

Towards the water. To stand

In one place as the field flowed

Past, a jellied road,

To watch the eels crossing land

Re-wound his world's live girdle.

Phosphorescent, sinewed slime

Continued at his feet. Time

Confirmed the horrid cable.

--Seamus Heaney

I want to echo what surfers say about prime conditions: Not a drop of water out of place, not a word out of place, not a single syllable gone awry. I take it that he drowned, finally, and probably such an end came from too much caution, too many cautionary tales, than from any simple clumsiness by the bankside.

"Whirl Is King"

(Or, "Kinesthetic Learner.")

Aristophanes comes to mind each time I sit down at the wheel. Putting the bowl in the creek and watching the water surround it --working against, working with, working around it-- seemed appropriate too as an extension of the Greek comic poet's claim and of the power of the spiral, the power of flow.

And, I like when a bowl comes out okay.

If I practiced more, such success would be a less remarkable thing, but for now when a decent piece of pottery comes out of the kiln, I'm taking photos.

(The last shot: a cordial nod to the fellow veterans of this particular and ursine alma mater.)

A Handful of Clay

Clay Fetish: Gestural exercise: live model, limited time.

Sculpture mix; pit-fired on Ocean Beach: 2000 or 2001.

P.S. The model had arms, but I left them off on purpose. They didn't look right, at least in my hands. Instead, I wanted to focus on the curve of the back, on the way the model folded his body upon itself, and on the way the whole piece fit--sat, lay--in the palm of my hand.

Profile Pic

"Hail Muse, Etc.": Poems as Prompts II

Here are a few of the poems I have in mind for that introduction to how poetry works. Read aloud, of course, and with appropriate emotion and emphasis. (It's a little like karaoke, but better.)

EPIGRAM. Engraved on the Collar of a Dog

Which I Gave to His Royal Highness

I am his Highness’ dog at Kew:

Pray tell me sir, whose dog are you?

--Alexander Pope (1737)

(Kew= one of the royal palaces)

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

--Ezra Pound (1916)

YOU FIT INTO ME

you fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye

--Margaret Atwood (1971)

CONQUEROR

Huge leaps. Epic soarings of the head.

He glowed within, without. Born to conquer.

“You look fragile,” she said.

--Brendan Kenneally (1999)

THIS LIVING HAND

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed. See here it is—

I hold it towards you.

--John Keats (1820)

MARKS

My husband give me an A

for last night’s supper,

an incomplete for my ironing,

a B plus in bed.

My son says that I am average,

an average mother, but if

I put my mind to it

I could improve.

My daughter believes

in Pass/Fail and tells me

I pass. Wait ‘til they learn

I’m dropping out.

--Linda Pastan (1978)

I'm also considering getting into how poetry works by using and abusing some pieces from various rock & roll songs:

Love is a rose, but you better not pick it;

It only grows when it’s on the vine.

A handful of thorns and you’ll know you've missed it:

Lose your love when you say the word “mine.”

--Neil Young

She calls me baby

She calls everybody baby

It’s a lonely old night

Ain’t they all?

--John Mellencamp

When I said that I was lying I might have been lying.

--Elvis Costello

“What is your destiny?” the policewoman said.

--Elvis Costello

And finally . . .

I light your cigarettes

I bring you apples from the vine

How quickly you forget

I run the bath and pour the wine

I bring you everything that floats into your mind

But you don’t’ bring me anything but down . . . .

--Sheryl Crow

P.S. I'll probably only have 30 minutes to spare for this "introduction," so I'm just going to do what I can with what feels best in the moment. I may start from the last of these pieces and work upwards, emphasizing voice, characters, and the dramatic situations that are unfolding. (And, actually, I have another two or three pages of handouts, just in case I need them. Frankly, I'm hoping to start some conversations that will continue beyond the official meetings . . . . Oh, and do apples even grow on vines? Sheryl Crow, c'mon. A favorite mistake? I enjoy your music, but how can I believe the speaker of "Anything But Down"?)

Surfmat Poetics II

I pulled out my old surfmat, vintage '78, for a possible session this past weekend. I'd meant to suit up and slip in at Rodeo Beach, but for a variety of reasons I just didn't make it. I've written about this surfmat already here, but now we have the photos.

Can you see the now-faint markings?

Gear ready for a bit of wave-riding. I'll need my old mask & snorkel as well as the camera too, after I've warmed up a bit and dredged up some skills.

I'd covered my surfmat with poetry and proverbs and only later realized I was blowing my cover as a strictly physical diver-guy (as if anyone would have looked at my skinny-lanky bespectacled self and not said "English major" already).

Actually, most divers liked to see the songs and such I'd inked onto the blue-and-yellow abalone floater. "Hey, what's that say?"

I had to draw in eyes, you know, because Jason's Argo had such eyes. The better to see those abalone . . . .

Even a bit of Beowulf, lines that translate as "Fate often saves the undoomed man, if his courage is good."

1978 vintage, recall, so you won't be surprised to find out that there's a slow leak--at least one--in the old 'mat. I breathed it full in the evening, but in the morning after I got my coffee I found the surfmat to be rather flat.

Honor almost requires that I patch it, her, up, but will I really put the surfmat into the water? The boogie board requires no blowing up to work just fine, and yet I have to say that board lacks soul.

"Kiss my ab" --abalone, that is. Just quoting.

Where's that patch kit?

Fins and Antlers

Passages: Kodak Moment?

"Every picture tells a story--don't it?" That's Rod Stewart singing, but today I'm thinking of how pictures work standing alone, as history, and in that difficult, turbulent territory that exists between subjective history and pure image.

Richard Ford is a writer I admire, both in his novels and in his short stories. I read him avidly, and I've taught his short stories to my students. The Ultimate Good Luck is Ford's second novel, a sort of detective-story-without-a-detective, a wonderfully tense excursion that has Hemingway's short stories, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato in its bloodlines. (I don't know the truth of those possible influences, but that's what I thought when I first read the book in 1986, and I still do).

There are so many moments I could quote for you, but today I want to pull out one moment. This passage concerns the way a picture can tell different stories to different people, concerns how a picture may be worth a thousand words, but we just may need those thousand words to properly appreciate the picture (or the real life of the picture), and concerns the manner in which the character Quinn just may be too susceptible to what the character Rae thinks and wants. (And Rae matters to him, though he'd better figure out how to make that work and be okay with it; happiness would just be a bit too much to ask for--themes of the larger novel.)

Anyway, here's the part of one paragraph from a tense, action-oriented, reflective novel that held my attention today. And, as I have been telling my students, writing that holds my attention is writing I value:

There was a picture taken nearly that long ago that showed him standing alone on the sand beach on Mackinac Island, staring gloomily into the camera as though into a dark thundercloud that threatened to ruin his day. Rae said he looked saturnine and didn't like the pose. But the truth was that he had just fucked a big Finnish girl from Ludington, whom he'd met on the boat from St. Ignace, and who had wide Finnish blue eyes and dusty skin and was older than he was. And he was, he thought, in the best spirits of his life, and had gone back in fact, the very next moment, and found the girl and fucked her again. But in his mind, over time, he had defeated the facts, become convinced that he was sour and out of sorts, and he didn't like to look at the picture and kept it in his footlocker where he never saw it.

--Richard Ford,

from The Ultimate Good Luck