Clay For The Fisher-King

Kiltered, Yet Balanced:  My newest bowl, fresh from the kiln.

(When I am taking such shots, strolling folks often pause to check out what I am doing.  Occasionally, they'll  walk down the bank and just watch; less often, they'll ask questions.  Oh, and if they have any children with them, the children have led them over.  That man's playing in the creek!  I tell everyone who asks that I'm working on an "art project".  Most often in that case, I get smiles, but also a few furrowed brows.  I've had some good conversations, however brief, arise in both cases.  If someone is really interested, I hand over a card for this blogsite.  Tourists from foreign lands have taken photos of me taking my photos.   Crazy American?)

Autumn Dreams

The Sleeper: sculpture mix; nutmeg and shino glazing, layered; leather cord.  (Vintage 2005: one of the first pieces I considered wholly successful.)

Compassion's Compass

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries."
--Theodore Roethke

Sentinels in Blue and Green

Sentinels of the imagination?  Guardians of the bookshelf?  Okay, so they aren't the Ruritanian palace guard nor Strider's ancestors guarding the river approach to the southern kingdom . . . .

Greeters?  "Hello, fellow reader!  Pick a book, any book.  Or, we can suggest one for you, if you'd like?"  That's the duck talking.

The dragon?  I'd like to say he'd caution you against dog-earring favorite pages, but I do that myself.  He may look somewhat goofy, but he does have teeth and fire at hand--as do most books, the ones worth your time; or they should do, if you're lucky.

Welcome to the Gates of Ivory and Horn.

Self-Portrait #50: sculpture mix; blue (with a bit of green) glazing, layered.
Green Dragon (Somewhat Goofy): sculpture mix; green glazing, layered.

Skelton's "Upon A Dead Man's Head"

UPON A DEAD MAN'S HEAD
      that was sent to him from an honorable gentlewoman for a token, devised this ghostly meditation in English, covenable in sentence, commendable, lamentable, lacrimable, profitable for the soul.

YOUR ugly token
My mind hath broken
From worldly lust,
For I have discuss'd
We are but dust
And die we must.
  It is general
To be mortal:
I have well espi'd
No man may him hide
From Death hollow-eyed
With sinews widered,
With bones shidered,
With his worm-eaten maw,
And his ghastly jaw
Gasping aside,
Naked of hide,
Neither flesh nor fell.
  Thou by my counsel
Look that ye spell
Well this gospel,
For whereso we dwell
Death will us quell
And with us mell.
  For all our pamper'd paunchis
There may no fraunchis
Nor worldly bliss
Redeem us from this:
Our days be dated
To be checkmated
With draughts of Death,
Stopping our breath;
Our eyen sinking,
Our bodies stinking,
Our gums grinning,
Our souls brinning.
To whom, then, shall we sue
For to have rescue
But to sweet Jesu
On us then for to rue?
  O goodly Child
Of Mary mild,
Then be our shild,
That we be not exil'd
To the dyne dale
Of bottomless bale,
Nor to the lake
Of fiends black.
  But grant us grace
To see Thy face,
And to purchase
Thine heavenly place,
And thy palace
Full of solace
Above the sky
That is so high,
Eternally
To behold and see
The Trinity.
          Amen.
Mirres vous y.

--John Skelton

(1460-1529)

Autumn Calls

 Hernest says, "Do you hear? Are you ready?"

(If you head to this link, you will find this dear creature's story.)

Pig, In Progress

Wet clay, the other day.

Montague's "Upstream"

UPSTREAM

Northwards, annually,
a journeying back,
the salmon's leap
& pull to the source:
my wife, from the shore
at Roche's Point, calls
John, come in, come home,
your mother is dead.

We pull the curragh
into shallow water,
haul her above tide
level, two sets of lean
insect legs stumbling
up the stony beach,
the curve of the boat
heavy on our napes
before we lift her
high on the trestles,
then store the long,
light oars, deliberately 
neat and calm in crisis,
keeping the mind busy.

Under the lighthouse dome
the strangeness of Evelyn
weeping for someone
she has never known --
her child's grandmother --
while I stand, dryeyed,
phoning and phoning a cousin
until, cursing, I turn
to feel his shadow loom
across the threshold.

Secret, lonely messages
along the air, older than
humming telephone wires,
blood talk, neglected 
affinities of family,
antennae of instinct
reaching through space,
first intelligence.

(The night O Riada dies
a friend wakes up in 
the South of France,
feeling a great lightness,
a bird taking off.)

--John Montague

Heaney's "Bone Dreams"

 BONE DREAMS

I

White bone found
on the grazing: 
the rough, porous 
language of touch

and its yellowing, ribbed 
impression in the grass —
¬a small ship-burial. 
As dead as stone,
flint-find, nugget
of chalk, 
I touch it again, 
I wind it in

the sling of mind
to pitch it at England
and follow its drop
to strange fields.

II

Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue's 
old dungeons.

I push back
through dictions, 
Elizabethan canopies, 
Norman devices,

the erotic mayflowers 
of Provence 
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen

to the scop's 
twang, the iron 
flash of consonants 
cleaving the line.

In the coffered 
riches of grammar 
and declensions 
I found bān-hūs, 

its fire, benches, 
wattle and rafters, 
where the soul 
fluttered a while

in the roofspace.
There was a small crock 
for the brain, 
and a cauldron

of generation
swung at the centre: 
love-den, blood-holt, 
dream-bower.

IV

Come back past 
philology and kennings, 
re-enter memory 
where the bone's lair

is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady's head
like a crystal

and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes 
on her escarpments, 
a chalk giant

carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken 
fosse of her spine, 
move towards the passes.

V

And we end up 
cradling each other 
between the lips 
of an earthwork.


As I estimate 
for pleasure 
her knuckles' paving,
the turning stiles

of the elbows,
the vallum of her brow
and the long wicket
of collar-bone,

I have begun to pace
the Hadrian's Wall
of her shoulder, 
dreaming of Maiden Castle.

VI

One morning in Devon
I found a dead mole
with the dew still beading it. 
I had thought the mole

a big-boned coulter
but there it was, 
small and cold
as the thick of a chisel.

I was told, ‘Blow,
blow back the fur on his head.
Those little points 
were the eyes.

And feel the shoulders.’
touched small distant: Pennines, 
a pelt of grass and grain
running south. 

--Seamus Heaney

Poem from Seamus Heaney's North, Faber & Faber, London & Boston: 1975.

The clay pieces: Works in progress.  Viking Coin ornament and Ship & Hammer: sculpture mix; green glaze, unfired.  (We shall see how these pieces look after their firing.)

Vigil At Fell Falls

Hrothgar's Pawn: sculpture mix; green glazes, layered.  A sort of Norse minotaur or northern faun.

I've a story brewing, playing off of this shot and off Beowulf, those untold tales in the margins regarding those years of menace and mayhem as Grendel and his mother held sway over the border marches . . . .

(I've posted on this small figure in past years; search via "Hrothgar's Pawn", if you like.)

Dunnett's Macbeth: Thorfinn of Orkney -- A Favorite Passage

Here's a favorite passage from Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter, a novel about the historical Macbeth: Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney, King of Scotia.  Frankly, Dunnett's King Hereafter is one of my Top Ten Novels of All Time, but that's an idiosyncratic list.  Still.

Here, we get a crucial insight into the "secret of [Thorfinn's] success", but even as Dunnett provides Thorkel Fostri's bitter assessment, she also provides Tuathal's reflections on what Thorkel says, making a simple statement complex in the best ways.  I end up appreciating the insight into the main character, even as I feel for Thorkel's frustration year after year.  (And yet Thorkel deserves some of that frustration . . . and if you've read the novel, I'll bet you'd agree.  "Year after year" refers both to Thorkel's relationship over time with Thorfinn and to my yearly rereadings.)  There are worthy ponderings possible here: about leadership, about problem-solving, and about reciprocity and the mysteries of connection and admiration.

I'm putting Dunnett's passage below the photo of knife and novel.  (The point of view, here, is that of Tuathal, Prior of St. Serf's, as the POV shifts throughout the novel, usefully so.)

Did [Earl Siward of York] regret his exile?  Had he envied Kalv, turning his coat so adroitly over and over, and at least buying back some years at Egge?

'Envy?  He despised Kalv.  Kalv was a fool,' Thorkel had said.  'There was only one man he envied.'

'He hated Thorfinn?  Always?  I suppose he must have done,' Tuathal had said, thinking aloud.  'Or the Lady Emma would never have risked making Siward her buffer between the rest of England and Scotia.  But then, what if Siward had tried to take over Scotia?'

'Twelve years ago?  Against Thorfinn's manpower, and his money, and his fleet?  Even with England and Denmark behind him,' had said Thorkel Fostri with scorn, 'I doubt if he would have got a levy over the Forth.  And England wouldn't have backed him.  Magnus had Norway then, remember, and half a foot in Orkney already through Thorfinn's nephew Rognvald.  England would rather have had Thorfinn in Scotia, I can tell you, than Siward or Norway.'

And that, thought Tuathal, was still true.  Despite Thorfinn's present weakness, it was still, thank God, true.  He had said, 'And Thorfinn?  He's used to dealing with princes these days.  Does he resent being forced to barter with someone . . . '

He had paused, having caught Eochaid's eye, to rephrase the question, but Thorkel Fostri's voice, at its most sardonic, had taken him up.  'Someone like me, from the barbarous north?  Haven't you noticed yet that Thorfinn is prouder of being Earl of Orkney than he is of ruling Scotia?  He fought for Orkney and won it, against men just like Siward.  His own kind.  He knows them too well to despise them.'

His own kind?  Thorfinn was three-quarters Celt.  They were not his own kind.  Tuathal had said, 'So it's just another negotiation?  Thorfinn neither likes nor dislikes Kalv's nephew?  I find it hard to believe.'

To which Thorkel Fostri had answered in a way he had not expected.  'When did you ever know whether Thorfinn likes or dislikes a man?  He takes them for what they are, and deals with them accordingly.  It's the secret of his success.  You don't fight the sea by getting angry at it, or persuade it to be kinder by loving it.'

The bitterness was plain to all to hear.  Eochaid had got up and left, and he, Tuathal, had asked only one or two questions more.

He was not embarrassed.  It merely appeared to him a paradox worth someone's attention: how a man such as Thorkel described could inspire what Thorkel undoubtedly felt for him.

Yeats' "The Valley of the Black Pig"

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

The dews drop slowly and dreams gather; unknown spears
Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,
And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries
Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.
We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,
The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,
Being weary of the world's empires, bow down to you,
Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.


--William Butler Yeats


(I like the look in the young boar's eye, by the way.
Young Boar: Navajo Wheel clay; brown glaze, layered.)

Mask: Hermes / Puck

Sculpture mix; raku-fired.

(Not sure which year that was.)

Ragnar, Ethelred, and Robin

Playing with clay.

Boland's Mythic Craft

LISTEN.  THIS IS THE NOISE OF MYTH

This is the story of a man and woman
under a willow and beside a weir 
near a river in a wooded clearing. 
They are fugitives. Intimates of myth.

Fictions of my purpose. I suppose 
I shouldn't say that yet or at least 
before I break their hearts or save their lives
I ought to tell their story and I will.

When they went first it was winter; cold,
cold through the Midlands and as far West 
as they could go. They knew they had to go-
through Meath, Westmeath, Longford,

their lives unravelling like the hours of light-
and then there were lambs under the snow 
and it was January, aconite and jasmine 
and the hazel yellowing and puce berries on the ivy.

They could not eat where they had cooked, 
nor sleep where they had eaten 
nor at dawn rest where they had slept.
They shunned the densities

of trees with one trunk of caves 
with one dark and the dangerous embrace 
of islands with a single landing place. 
And all the time it was cold, cold:

the fields still gardened by their ice, 
the trees stitched the snow overnight, 
the ditches full; frost toughening lichen,
darning lace into rock crevices.

And then the woods flooded and buds 
blunted from the chestnut and the foxglove 
put its big leaves out and chaffinches 
chinked and flirted in the branches of the ash.

And here we are where we started from-
under a willow and beside a weir
near a river in a wooded clearing. 
the woman and the man have come to rest.

Look how light is coming through the ash. 
The weir sluices kingfisher blues. 
The woman and the willow tree lean forward, forward.
Something is near; something is about to happen;

something more than Spring 
and less than history. Will we see 
hungers eased after months of hiding? 
Is there a touch of heat in that light?

If they stay here soon it will be summer; things
returning, sunlight fingering minnowy deeps, 
seedy greens, reeds, electing lights 
and edges from the river. Consider

legend, self-deception, sin, the sum 
of human purposes and its end; remember 
how our poetry depends on distance, 
aspect: gravity will bend starlight.

Forgive me if I set the truth to rights. 
Bear with me if I put an end to this: 
She never turned to him; she never leaned 
under the sallow-willow over to him.

They never made love; not there; not here; 
not anywhere; there was no winter journey; 
no aconite, no birdsong and no jasmine, 
no woodland and no river and no weir.

Listen. This is the noise of myth. It makes 
the same sound as shadow. Can you hear it? 
Daylight greys in the preceptories. 
Her head begins to shine

pivoting the planets of a harsh nativity. 
They were never mine. This is mine. 
This sequence of evicted possibilities. 
Displaced facts. Tricks of light. Reflections.

Invention. Legend. Myth. What you will.
The shifts and fluencies are infinite. 
The moving parts are marvellous. Consider 
how the bereavements of the definite

are easily lifted from our heroine. 
She may or she may not. She was or wasn't 
by the water at his side as dark 
waited above the Western countryside.

O consolations of the craft. 
How we put 
the old poultices on the old sores,
the same mirrors to the old magic. Look.

The scene returns. the willow sees itself 
drowning in the weir and the woman 
gives the kiss of myth her human heat. 
Reflections. Reflections. He becomes her lover.

The old romances make no bones about it. 
The long and short of it. The end and the beginning. 
The glories and the ornaments are muted. 
And when the story ends the song is over.

--Eavan Boland

Reprise: Fergus

Fergus: stoneware; brown glazing, layered; copper wire.
      --a Talking Head, as it were, in the Celtic tradition.

Viking Wisdom: "Fire Kindles Fire"

Flames from one log leap to another;
      fire kindles fire.
A man learns from the minds of others;
      A fool prefers his own.

--from "Words of the High One"--
one of the many Poetic Edda poems
translated from the Old Norse
by Patricia Terry

There are many reasons why I like this stanza and why I've quoted it to many a class.  I like to discuss with the class the governing concerns and imagery, the communal intelligence and the kindling fire.  And, I like to ask my students what happens if you substitute "tree" in place of "log" in that first line.  This stanza and that juxtaposition of wild vs. domesticated "fire" provides a foundation for worthy discourse in the classroom and out.

John Montague: "A Slow Exactness"

A BRIGHT DAY

for John MacGahern

At times I see it, present
       As a bright day, or a hill,
The only way of saying something
      Luminously as possible.

Not the accumulated richness
      Of an old historical language --
That musk-deep odour!
      But a slow exactness

Which recreates experience
      By ritualizing its details --
Pale web of curtain, width
      Of deal table, till all

Takes on a witch-bright glow
      And even the clock on the mantel
Moves its hands in a fierce delight
      Of so, and so, and so.

--John Montague

Monster In My Head

Work in progress: wet clay.

Graves: "A Pinch of Salt"

A Pinch of Salt

When a dream is born in you

With a sudden clamorous pain,

When you know the dream is true

And lovely, with no flaw nor stain,

O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch

You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.

Dreams are like a bird that mocks,

Flirting the feathers of his tail.

When you seize at the salt-box,

Over the hedge you'll see him sail.

Old birds are neither caught with salt nor chaff:

They watch you from the apple bough and laugh.

Poet, never chase the dream.

Laugh yourself, and turn away.

Mask your hunger; let it seem

Small matter if he come or stay;

But when he nestles in your hand at last,

Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast. 

--Robert Graves

Hermes/Puck: sculpture mix; raku fired.  

Therapy: Clay / Hands / Soul

I allowed myself an hour or so in the studio today.

Fowles: "Lightning Strikes"

"Truth is born as lightning strikes."  --Archilochos  (via Davenport)


TWO POEMS FROM JOHN FOWLES:


THE EXPERIENCE

You go down the right turnings
just as it says in the guide,
and it isn't there.

You turn up at the right room
at the right time,
in the right month and moonlight;
and it isn't there.

You discover the right grove,
you stand about on damp leaves.
A man on a tractor passes
and thinks you are mad.

You have the paper and the time,
you have the lot, 
and nothing comes.

And it comes
at the start of a busy day
as you shave in a hurry,
cog with no time.

The wind.  And you stand,
blinded till you are not blind.

--John Fowles



WITHIN TEN SECONDS

Within ten seconds
I knew I wanted to kiss your eyelids.
This is why I kept staring
Past you, as if to a cold horizon.
You were not boring me, as you thought.
I was looking to where you stood
Smelling of rain, with naked breasts.
Naked, defenceless, needing defence.
It was not as you thought,
You were piqued and moved away.
I was the one who by silence,
Staring, no move, moved away.

Where pine trees touch water.
I am
Men who tie themselves to masts.
You are
Sirens with delicate eyelids.
Penelope is white with lust.
Molpe, the deck has tears
And the rock has tears.
Even the sun has molten tears.

Meeting, never to meet again.

--John Fowles

Duck, Duck, Bowl

Work in progress.

Ben Jonson: "The Entertaynment Perfect"

INVITING A FRIEND TO SUPPER

To-night, grave sir, both my poore house, and I 
Doe equally desire your companie : 
Not that we thinke us worthy such a guest, 
But that your worth will dignifie our feast, 
With those that come ; whose grace may make that seeme 
Something, which, else, could hope for no esteeme. 
It is the faire acceptance, Sir, creates 
The entertaynment perfect : not the cates. 
Yet shall you have, to rectifie your palate, 
An olive, capers, or some better sallad 
Ushring the mutton ; with a short-leg'd hen, 
If we can get her, full of eggs, and then, 
Limons, and wine for sauce : to these, a coney 
Is not to be despair'd of, for our money ; 
And, though fowle, now, be scarce, yet there are clerkes, 
The skie not falling, thinke we may have larkes. 
I'll tell you of more, and lye, so you will come : 
Of partrich, pheasant, wood-cock, of which some 
May yet be there ; and godwit, if we can : 
Knat, raile, and ruffe too. How so e'er, my man 
Shall reade a piece of VIRGIL, TACITUS, 
LIVIE, or of some better booke to us, 
Of which wee'll speake our minds, amidst our meate ; 
And I'll professe no verses to repeate : 
To this, if ought appeare, which I know not of, 
That will the pastrie, not my paper, show of. 
Digestive cheese, and fruit there sure will bee; 
But that, which most doth take my Muse, and mee, 
Is a pure cup of rich Canary-wine, 
Which is the Mermaids, now, but shall be mine : 
Of which had HORACE, or ANACREON tasted, 
Their lives, as doe their lines, till now had lasted. 
Tabacco, Nectar, or the Thespian spring, 
Are all but LUTHERS beere, to this I sing. 
Of this we will sup free, but moderately, 
And we will have no Pooly, or Parrot by ; 
Nor shall our cups make any guiltie men : 
But, at our parting, we will be, as when 
We innocently met. No simple word 
That shall be utter'd at our mirthfull board 
Shall make us sad next morning : or affright 
The libertie, that we'll enjoy to-night.

--Ben Jonson

Shakespeare's Sonnet 122: "Thy Gift, Thy Tables"

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character'd with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain
Beyond all date, even to eternity; 
Or at the least, so long as brain and heart 
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to razed oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss'd. 
That poor retention could not so much hold, 
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score; 
Therefore to give them from me was I bold, 
To trust those tables that receive thee more: 
   To keep an adjunct to remember thee 
   Were to import forgetfulness in me.

         --William Shakespeare

Fowles: "I Learned To Value What I Couldn’t, Over The Years, Forget"

   "As a student of French at Oxford, I read omnivorously, though much more out of ignorance than intelligence.  I had very little notion of my real tastes, having swallowed the then prevalent myth that only one’s teachers had a right to personal preferences.  This is not an approach I would attempt to sell to any student today, but it did have one advantage.  Likes and dislikes were eventually formed on a strictly pragmatic basis; I learned to value what I couldn’t, over the years, forget.  One such obstinate survivor was Alain-Fournier’s Le Grande Meaulnes.  A number of young thesis writers have now told me they can see no significant parallels between Le Grande Meaulnes and my own novel The Magus.  I must have severed the umbilical cord—the real connection requires such a metaphor—much more neatly than I supposed at the time; or perhaps modern academic criticism is blind to relationships that are far more emotional than structural."

John Fowles,
from “A Personal Note” to his translation of Marie de France’s “Eliduc”
in his collection of short stories The Ebony Tower, pages 109-110:

Song

Coach Xena And The Captive

Motivational garage art on the wall nearest the weights, the mat, and the Exer-Rider.
I should dust off those barbells, huh?

The Captive: sculpture mix; brown and shino glazing; copper wire.
20-minute gestural exercise with live model.  Old, old piece.

I Am Not Stubborn

 Or, I Made This Figure, But I Did Not Model For It.

Something like that, right?

Sure.  Tell me another.

"All The King's Horses"

Puzzle/Regret: sculpture mix w/green slip, but unglazed; copper wire.

Not sure what to do with her, with this piece, with these pieces.  

Know that I wish I'd handled things better.

A Celtic PIg

Young Boar: Navajo Wheel clay; brown glazing, layered.

Mermaid Mosaics (II)

Pygmy Pachyderm

Elephant (Tiny Tantor): recycled studio mixed clay; unglazed.

I make and use such pieces to keep track of my projects in the studio.  Once you cover the bowls or sculptures with plastic, one bat looks much like another.  My duck-heads, birds, and elephants stand out  in such company, and they lead me to my own work . . . as well as warn off others that this bat-ful of clay is not theirs.  (That's the theory, anyway.)

One more for the menagerie.

Work In Progress

Message In A Bottle

The Glenlivet bottle is empty.

(Am I hearing Captain Jack Sparrow with a Caledonian accent now?)

Moya Cannon's "Prodigal"

PRODIGAL

Dark mutter tongue
rescue me,
I am drawn into outrageous worlds
where there is no pain or innocence,
only the little quiet sorrows
and the elegant joys of power.

Someone
businesslike in his desires
has torn out the moon by its roots.
Oh, my tin king is down now mother
down and broken,
my clear browed king
who seemed to know no hungers
has killed himself.
Old gutter mother
I am bereft now,
my heart has learnt nothing
but the stab of its own hungers
and the murky truth of a half-obsolete language
that holds at least the resonance 
of the throbbing, wandering earth.

Try to find me stones and mud now mother
give me somewhere to start,
green and struggling, a blade under snow,
for this place and age demand relentlessly
something I will never learn to give.

--Moya Cannon,
from Oar

Slow But Steady

Turtle: stoneware; seafoam glazing.   (8 or 9 years old?)