Pinnochio as an Old Man

Mask: Old Pinnochio.

Sculpture mix; terra sigillata.

I made this piece back in 2001 or 2002, I believe.

"You Can Call Me Ray"

Bat Ray: stoneware; green and sea foam glazing.

Seferis and Sophocles: Character is Fate

TWO POEMS FROM GEORGE SEFERIS, Translated from the Greek by Rex Warner:

EURIPIDES THE ATHENIAN

He lived and grew old between the burning of Troy

And the hard labour in Sicilian quarries.

He was fond of rocky caves along the beach;

Liked pictures of the sea;

The veins of man he saw as it were a net

Made by the Gods for trapping us like beasts.

This net he tried to pierce.

He was difficult in every way. His friends were few.

The time arrived and he was torn to pieces by dogs.

--George Seferis
PENTHEUS

Asleep he was filled with dreams of fruits and leaves;

Awake he was not permitted to pick one berry.

Sleep and wakefulness shared out his limbs to the Bacchae.

--George Seferis

My favorite lines from Sophocles' Oedipus the King, spoken by Oedipus himself, translated by Meineck & Woodruff:

But I see myself as a child of good-giving

Fortune, and I will not be demeaned.

She is my mother, the seasons my kin,

And I rise and fall like the phases of the moon.

That is my nature, and I will never play the part

Of someone else, nor fail to learn what I was born to be.

--Sophocles

Context, as usual, being everything.

The photos: Woad, Under--

Sculpture mix clay, blue and green glazing.

Ferry Point, Richmond, CA

Fish To Fry: Postscript

We had a real English fish and chip shop near my house while I was growing up, run by an actual English family: Rhodes Fish and Chips. The English part amazed me, and I preferred the food from this shop over, say, the H. Salt, Esquire down the road in the other direction, run by locals, not immigrants from England. (I was an early Anglophile in books and fish.)

We often wondered how the Rhodes family ended up in our small town alongside San Francisco Bay. While I was growing up, San Pablo was only known for its murder rate and its proximity to Richmond, with the refinery and formerly the shipyards. I was too polite to ask about the family background, but now I wonder if they didn't come from a small town on the edge of urban and suburban sprawl back in England. I had a friend who moved out to sunny California from Detroit, and he ended up feeling at home in industrial Oakland. I recall my first trip to Portland, Oregon, and feeling at home because it was a scruffy working town/city and it had Powell's Books.

Throughout my childhood, my family often ordered take-out from this fish and chip shop, and as an adult I was saddened when the family gave up the business and the building was bulldozed to make way for an auto parts emporium. (On the other hand, that family must have operated that shop over 20 or 25 years, so I get that the day was done.)

Now, if I want good fish and chips, I head to Bodega and the Boat House Cafe.

Tonight, I baked the cod in wine with garlic and thyme, which proved quite tasty, but the fish market guy's words have awakened a craving: a greasy, salty craving.

I'm planning to hit Rodeo Beach in Marin for some surf action and photography tomorrow, but maybe I should aim a bit further north.

Fish To Fry

I asked the fish market guy how he likes to cook true cod, and he first gave me a handful of good healthy ideas.

Then, he confessed, "I like to bread it and fry it. I like fish and chips. Not that you can say that in Berkeley."

Me: "You can say that to me. I'm from San Pablo."

More Stones with Robert Graves

THE JUDGES

Crouched on wet shingle at the cove

In day-long search for treasure-trove--

Meaning the loveliest-patterned pebble,

Of any colour imaginable,

Ground and smoothed by a gentle sea--

How seldom, Julia, we agree

On our day's find: the perfect one

To fetch back home when day is done,

Splendid enough to stupefy

The fiercest, most fastidious eye--

Tossing which back we tell the sea:

'Work on it one more century!'

--Robert Graves

Byron: "Between Two Worlds Life Hovers . . ."

Between two worlds life hovers like a star

'Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge,

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be! The eternal surge

Of time and tide rolls on and bears afar

Our bubbles. As the old burst, new emerge,

Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves

Of empires heave but like some passing waves.

--Lord Byron's last stanza to Canto XV of his incomparable Don Juan

Robert Graves: Stones and a Goddess

CONSORTIUM OF STONES

The stones you have gathered, of diverse shapes,

Chosen from sea strand, lake strand, mountain gully:

Lay them all out on a basalt slab together

But allow intervals for light and air,

These being human souls; and reject any

With crumpled calceous edges and no feature

That awakes loving correspondence.

Start at this pair: blue flint, grey ironstone,

Which you ring around with close affinities

In every changeless colour, hatched, patched, plain--

Curve always answering curve, and angle, angle.

Gaps there may be, which next year or the next

Will fill to a marvel: never jog Time's arm,

Only narrow your eyes when you walk about

Lest they miss what is missing. The agreed intent

Of each consortium, whether of seven stones,

Or of nineteen, or thirty-three, or more,

Must be a circle, with firm edges outward,

Each various element aware of the sum.

THE BLACK GODDESS

Silence, words into foolishness fading,

Silence prolonged, of thought so secret

We hush the sheep-bells and the loud cicada.

And your black agate eyes, wide open, mirror

The released firebird beating his way

Down a whirled avenue of blues and yellows.

Should I not weep? Profuse the berries of love,

The speckled fish, the filberts and white ivy

Which you, with a half-smile, bestow

On your delectable broad land of promise

For me, who never before went gay in plumes.

--Robert Graves

Robert Graves, along with William Butler Yeats, is a favorite poet from the beginning and middle of the last century. Both poets share a mythic power, though their visions are individual and discrete from one another. Graves, even more than Yeats, is a poet of raw desire and of deep connection with the elements.

Reprise: Dona Quixote

Garage art: the unfinished gymnast.

I've been checking out old projects and unfinished artwork a lot lately. I'd like to be creating more, but I'm exhausted. I'd like to be swimming, diving, and kayaking, but I'm exhausted. It's Spring Break, but I haven't been able to catch up on my sleep in any meaningful way, and I'm so low energy, I can barely get anything done. Flat-out beat, but I need to regain some energy, recoup some energy, something, somehow.

Saddened, reflective, exhausted. I look at the Gymnast here, and I know she feels much the same way. But she's holding on, holding up, and with a bit of style.

I must aim to do the same.

Falling, Flying

Reprise: Reindeer and Bug. (From a slightly different angle, this time.)

Garage art. Bits to dream on.

Not That Nisus

In the ninth book of his Aeneid, the Roman poet tells the tale of two friends, Nisus and Euryalus, who volunteer to deliver a message from the besieged main camp of the Trojans to Prince Aeneas himself, exploring and seeking allies in the Italian countryside. Aeneas' son Ascanius entrusts the two friends to find his father, their commander, and attest to the peril facing the camp. Unfortunately, the two Trojans are distracted from their mission by bloodlust and the lure of glory, and they stop to slaughter some sleeping Italian warriors. The younger Euryalus is seized after the moonlight gleaming off the helmet he'd taken for a prize gives him away, though Nisus has gotten free and could continue on his mission. He does not continue, but returns, wanting to free his younger friend. Nisus throws a spear at one of the warriors holding Euryalus, killing the man, but the Italian leader kills Euryalus in retaliation. (What else was likely?) Tormented by the death of Euryalus, Nisus then rushes in suicidally. The Italians cut him down and take both Trojans' heads as trophies.

Virgil calls forth Homer's very successful night-foray by Odysseus and Diomedes, catching the spy Dolon and slaughtering Rhesus and his company in their sleep, from The Iliad, and he recasts that episode into a fairly obvious fiasco with sentimental and sentimentally ridiculous overtones. Euryalus' mother's speech about the loss of her son and the brutality of war is moving, but the men are still dead. Later readers and writers have appreciated the martyrdom of the two Trojans, casting this episode as sentimentally heroic. Others have seen this episode as Virgil's clear commentary on Homeric pride and selfishness, on Greek "glory", in contrast to the more Roman virtue of honorable duty: Nisus and Euryalus acting as stand-ins for, say, Achilles and Patroclus. Virgil, being Virgil, all is possible, at once. To me, the effect of the episode is complex, morally and emotionally, more complex than I can easily explain. (I may attempt to better this treatment in a future blog entry.)

I've always been drawn to a key question that Nisus raises, which I offer in the English translation of Robert Fitzgerald: "This urge to action, do the gods instil it, / Or is each man's desire a god to him, / Euryalus?" What is the source of motivation? Of desire? And, where does it come from? Is it an external force or purely internal, however we dress it or explain it to ourselves? "This urge to action": the older I've gotten, the more complex my sense of motivation and drive. And yet often what drives us is simple, dress it up as we like. Still, for every action, the riddle of motivation, and only each one of us can truly understand the internal or external forces involved. That's my comforting--sometimes discomforting--fiction, anyway.

For some odd reason, I've always wondered What If Nisus Had Not Died Beside His Friend? What if Nisus survived the ill-conceived, luckless night-foray? Would he be haunted by his friend? Would he be haunted by guilt and remorse?

Back in the mid-90's, I started making notes for stories involving this Nisus-who-survives, casting him as a fugitive moving through southern Italy and the Greek isles to return to Troy, an exile masquerading as a fisherman and a sponge-diver. In my imagination, he gets caught up in Odysseus' scheme to salvage Greek ships sunken in storm on the way home laden with Trojan gold and other treasures. Does Odysseus realize that Nisus is a Trojan, a blood enemy, and if he does, does he care?

Back then, I also wrote the following poem, which I recently rediscovered.

NOT THAT NISUS

"I thought you were dead,"

The old ghost said,

The familiar boy with the helm

Too great for his head.

His arms so unsteady--

Yet his voice readily refrained--

"That you'd fallen with me,

That your devotion I'd gained."

"But I'm not that Nisus,"

The clay-gray dreamer denied.

"Not that epic figure, that hero--

If I were, I'd have died.

When you fell to the foe

Like the rose to the plow,

That Nisus was striving--

Scything Fortune knows how."

"I'll return with the night,"

Swore the young warrior at dawn.

But old Nisus had known

That he'd not slumber long

Without the bronze forms of fright

Cast into shadows of shame:

Marked by the might

Still sculpting his name.

--Matt Duckworth

"There is a tide in the affairs of men . . . ."

Sea-Jester: sculpture mix; shino and blue glazing, layered.

Fall 2011.

Kennelly: One from "Islandman"

The sea's music affirms

What at best I have half-known.

I turn deaf ears to it for the most part

But now and again

It coincides with a music I find in myself.

I hear

'My glittering green is your power to move,

My spindrift is your fear,

My roar is your blood's emphasis

On what you can hardly face,

A cosmic push towards nothing,

Green weed like a necklace

Round the world's throat that whispers

Always back to me

How those on land live to reject

The insights of the sea.'

--Brendan Kennelly,

from "Islandman":

pages 337-338 of Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004

Persona: What Kennelly Says

Consider these provocative paragraphs from Irish poet Brendan Kennelly:

The use of a persona in poetry is not a refusal to confront and explore the self but a method of extending it, procuring for it a more imaginative and enriching breathing space by driving out the demons of embarrassment and inhibition and some, at least, of the more crippling forms of shyness and sensitivity. A persona, though apparently shadowy and elusive, can be a liberating agent. It/he/she can provide friendly company in loneliness and give dignity to desolation.

Through an act of sustained and deliberate indirectness, it is possible to say more completely whatever one has to say. It is one of the fertile paradoxes of poetry that one can be more candid by engaging less in frontalism and by listening more keenly to the voices of the personae in the wings. A persona embodies not only some essential, peculiarly bewildered aspects of one's self but also, one hopes, something of everybody. I don't know why, but I'm convinced that the persona, obliquely manipulating and orchestrating the monstrous yet magnificent energies of egotism, is capable of revealing what the poet at any given moment believes he knows of reality in such a way that, for example, horror is presented with a grace, and therefore a precision, only rarely available to the mere self. Like a courteous host, the personal introduces the self to itself and lets the dialogue begin and continue unimpeded. (Other individuals at the party may crash in, of course. Such interruptions must be endured and allowed to expire before the dialogue can resume.)

We are all occasionally turned to stone by what we witness, think and feel. Out of that selfstone, the imagination moulds and coaxes a persona who, entering poems and animating them by his presence, is seen and felt to be a creature of flesh and blood. The cold of stone is imaginatively caressed into human warmth, surely one of the transfiguring graces of poetry. (It can happen the other way round too, and be no less a transfiguring grace.) My islandman is as real to me as the people I meet every day because he is, in fact, these very people, but without their disconcerting ways, arbitrary opinions, puzzling eccentricities, transient yet upsetting incursions in the the mere, messy self which nevertheless remains the truest if murkiest source of poetry. The persona helps me to see through and under these necessary distractions to the essential humanity of people and therefore to come into contact with what I hope is my own. It is possible, and necessary, to hope that we are beginning to be more human. Poetry insists that we, with the help of the liberating persona, allow ourselves to dare become ourselves, for a time at least. The persona appears to want to make the self more fluid, multiple, articulate. It is like a shadow that darklylightly stresses the validity of the substance.

There may be simple and more effective ways for a poet to do this. I'd love to know them because I want to love every heartbeat, every musical second of happiness and grief, boredom and fun and the usual no-man's-land of viable and reasonably rewarded half-being, permitted between stoneself and definitive dust. Whatever forces help one to love this frequently muted music of time are to be welcomed by the imagination and intelligence, body and soul. Whatever or whoever you are, be with me now.

--from the prose introduction to the poetic "Islandman" in Brendan Kennelly's Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004.

Bloodaxe Books, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: 2004.

I've quoted extensively from page 323 of Familiar Strangers. I feel the need to read and reflect upon these paragraphs on persona. I hope you find them as useful and engaging, as provoking and promising as I do.

Time to reread "Islandman" too.

Possession

I have always admired Martin Cruz Smith's novels, particularly his series treating Russian investigator Arkady Renko. As a grad student at UC Berkeley, I once taught Gorky Park in conjunction with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Lessing's The Good Terrorist, and Shakespeare's Macbeth. I may have thrown in some tales of ratiocination from Edgar Allan Poe as well.

Here, I'd like to share a section of Martin Cruz Smith's Havana Bay. Arkady is in Cuba, following up on an obscure call for aid, feeling his way into a volatile situation with no knowledge of the language or culture. Haunting the investigator is the recent death of his beloved Irina, killed accidentally, negligently, in a Moscow clinic. I'll stop the plot summary, but I am drawn to the following passage because it exemplifies one of the writer's real strengths: portraying undercurrents in and between characters.

Here is the final section of Chapter 13 from Havana Bay, an exchange between Arkady and the PNR detective Ofelia Osorio (whose original assessment of this Russian investigator is quite succinct: "idiota"). The two characters are talking together late in the evening on a balcony above a Havana street busy with couples and commerce. Detective Ofelia Osorio's ostensible reason for spending time on that balcony is to protect Renko, if necessary, from being attacked or even killed before she can put him on a plane back to Moscow.

"We don't have to talk about it," Arkady said.

"It was the way you asked."

"I sounded smug? It's just my ignorance. I apologize."

"We will not talk about religions."

"God knows."

From the radio in the portal rose the deep beat of a drum that Ofelia knew had to be a tall iya with a dark red center on the skin, accompanied by the grinding rhythm of a belly-shaped gourd. A single horn insinuated itself, the way a man asked a woman to dance.

"Anyway, it's not a bad thing to be possessed," Ofelia said.

"Well, I have an unimaginative Russian mind, I don't think it's going to happen to me. What is it like?"

"Theoretically?" She watched him for the slightest hint of condescension.

"Theoretically."

"As a child, you must have spread your arms and put your head back and danced in the rain. You are drenched and clean and dizzy. If you are possessed, it's like that."

"Afterwards?"

"Your mind still spins."

An abwe, the poor man's triangle, joined in from below. It was nothing more than a hoe blade played with a stick of iron, but an abwe could sound like the ticking in the mind when a man's strong hand reached around your waist. As the saxophone tried to wrap around it, the gourd trembled, the drum stopped and started like a heart. These were the snares set for silly girls who lingered in shadows. Not Ofelia. She visualized a clear mind.

She looked toward his arm, the one she had found the bruises on. "You're sounding better. You were not in a healthy mood when you came here."

"I am now. I am curious about Pribluda and Rufo and Luna. I have a new purpose in life, so to speak."

"But why did you want to hurt yourself?"

She half expected contemptuous dismissal, but Renko said, "You have it backwards."

Ofelia sensed the next question so strongly she asked before she checked herself, "Did you lose someone? Not here. In Moscow?"

"I lose people all the time." He lit one cigarette from the other. "Most boats that go on the rocks really don't intend to go there. It's not a mood, it's just exhaustion. Exhaustion from self-pity." He added, "You're with someone and for some reason with them you feel more alive, on another level. Taste has taste and color has color. You both think the same thing at the same time and you're doubly alive. And if you manage to lose them in some gruesomely irrevocable way, then strange things happen. You wander around looking for a car to hit you so you don't have to go home in the evening. So this incident with Rufo is interesting to me because I don't mind a car hitting me, but I do mind a driver trying to hit me. A fine distinction, but there you are."

In the night Ofelia woke to find lovers gone, the moon becalmed. In the very lack of breeze she detected a faint scent, a perfume she traced to Renko's soft black coat, to the sleeve of a man who claimed he'd never been possessed.

--Martin Cruz Smith, Havana Bay.

Tidal Ignorance, Deeper Bliss

My dive-buddy Keith and I never mastered the tide tables.

We'd aim at early morning dives, high tide or low, figuring we'd pick the calmer, less wind-driven waters of most dawns over shallower, supposedly easier diving. Up on the Sonoma Coast, we weren't beach-diving, but were entering and exiting via rocky shores. Thinking about the wave action mattered more, we felt, than thinking about the tidal action. Especially, for exiting the water.

If the tide were in, well, we'd just hold our breath a bit more, kick a bit harder.

And, if the tide were in, later we could point out that we were diving deeper for our abalone. We'd laugh, knowing that we should know those tide tables better, but not really caring.

We were diving deep enough, deeper than some.

We didn't mind laughing at ourselves either.

Of course, if we'd been surfers, we'd have figured out those tables in very short order.