I like that they chose to swim about my bit of sculpture, though.
Looking at this photograph makes me want to hold my breath, in sympathy, and to swim like a fish, free amidst the push and pull of surge and tide, to swim with gills and purpose and repose.
Can you hear the water calling you?
I hear the call, and I always hope to.
P.S. I want to append something that I wrote in another venue a few minutes ago. I think this note belongs here, partly because when I look at the photo above, my imagination, my mind, my emotions are triggered in ways that I can't always quite explain, but that non-verbal response is one key to the value, the experience, of art that cannot and should not be reduced to test questions and GRE results.
There are books, poems, that I'll never teach, frankly, for they mean too too much to me. And yet there are plenty of worthy books and poems, so I'm not really withholding anything. And, I've taught poems that caught me by surprise, in which I was reduced to tears in the classroom, and so far I've always been able to turn those moments of vulnerability and potential embarrassment and stifling to worthy account. A few years back, I choked up over Tennyson's "Ulysses" because it's about old guys wanting to seek adventure again and my best pal wasn't going to be there to be old with, for he'd died recently, and that choking up came out of a blindspot, but I turned it all to account in the classroom. I let myself be choked up, and I talked about choking up. I talked about how this poem about an ancient Greek king wasn't just a history lesson for me, wasn't just dead material, but that the poem meant so much more, that the poem connected me to so much more because I was open, emotionally- and not just intellectually-engaged. So, yes, I cried when I tried to read this poem aloud, and I talked about why.
One student came up to me afterwards and confessed that she'd never seen the point of poetry and literature until I showed her that it mattered to our lives, and she wasn't just looking for the A, you know? She got it. And that may be the most valuable single day in that whole semester in terms of literature's real and complex value.
