"Njal's Saga": "Thief's Eyes"

          On one occasion, Hoskuld was holding a feast for his friends; Hrut was there, sitting next to him.  Hoskuld had a daughter named Hallgerd, who was playing on the floor with some other girls; she was a tall, beautiful child with long silken hair that hung down to her waist.
          Hoskuld called to her, 'Come over her to me.'  She went to him at once.  Her father tilted her chin and kissed her, and she walked away again.
          Then Hoskuld asked Hrut:
          'What do you think of her?  Do you not think she is beautiful?'
          Hrut made no reply.  Hoskuld repeated the question.  Then Hrut said, 'The child is beautiful enough, and many will suffer for her beauty; but I cannot imagine how thief's eyes have come into our kin.'

--the Icelandic classic Njal's Saga -- 
          from the first page of Chapter 1 --

Translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson,
Penguin Books, 1960; 1972 reprint.

Foolery and Rembrandt's Faint Echo

Friend:    Matt, you are absolutely the master of the selfie!

Self:    Well, that's not a thing to be proud of, entirely, but --hey-- Rembrandt created almost a hundred selfies, and he had to paint each one. My point is not that I'm a Rembrandt, but if such were good enough for him, it's golden for me. I'm the easiest model I have to work with, and I have fun with the lines, the shadows, and the (oft silly) scenes. Tomorrow, there'll probably be one with me in my new leather medieval English helmet. How can I resist?

Friend:   If I posted the ones I've tried taking, you'd see why yours are so good.  Looking forward to the helmet.

Self:    Oh, I delete so many. Oddly enough, the first few tend to be the best ones.

Aside: Watching myself age seems hardly the epitome of vanity.  The posting is a measure, a formality, a witnessing more than any sort of declaration.  Besides, who is watching?  This blog doesn't get that much traffic, frankly, and if my self-portraits bother anyone, well, they don't have to look, right?  In part, my natural diffidence has been encouraged to the point of stultification, or so it has seemed in the past, and here I'm countering that; in part, self-portraiture seems honest, an honest art, and this blog is my canvas, after all.  (Should I create a spectrum to chart Vanity/Hubris, Art/Artifice, Foolery/Foolishness?)  Finally, I also use this blog as a way of auditioning for further pursuits, attempting to woo the muses to help me with that novel, those short stories, or that documentary non-fiction; practice-sessions.  Clay feels freer than words do, and yet that doesn't feel quite right.  Posting images, self and non-self, is a way of seeing my way towards the words that matter, I am hoping.

I mean what I said above about lines and shadows and silliness and the easiest model to work with.

Also, if you look back upward at the first self-portrait I've provided by Rembrandt, will you not admire the work with lines and shadows and maybe a bit of silliness there too?  I admire so much of Rembrandt's work, and I hadn't appreciated that drawing until I posted it for this entry.  Witnessing comes in various forms, not all of them self-serving.

(I'm tempted to remake that last sentence into something metaphorical with a tree of many branches, but if I do, I just may end up hanging myself in effigy there, and I don't quite want to do that.)

Most times, I don't quite even look like myself.  Do you know what I mean?  That self in my head, that self I'm conjuring up and projecting from the images of earlier days, childhood and youth and what-have-you.  That's what I am tracking, keeping track of, witnessing.  The syntax of self over time and through time.  A quixotic quest, no doubt.  And one worthless to all but the wandering tracker.

Previously, I've reflected and quoted Fowles on the reflex toward self-representation, even excessive self-representation, as a move from subjectivity toward objectivity, from the first (and fallible) person toward the third (outsider) person, (which you may find in a link here in "Don Quixote's Mirror").

I find the grammar of self to be almost as amusing as the syntax of identity and authenticity, but that comment belongs to a separate blog entry at another time.

*Prof. Andrew Griffin taught me of Rembrandt's many self-representations in office-hour conversations in my undergraduate days.  His energy and his style have helped to shape my teaching style, among other things.  I owe him a debt I haven't yet repaid, and at this late date, I am not sure how.

The images in this entry are all photos of reproductions from and of Christopher Wright's Rembrandt: Self-Portraits, The Viking Press: New York, 1982.

Pound's "Villonaud For This Yule"

VILLONAUD FOR THIS YULE

Towards the Noel that morte saison
(Christ make the shepherds' homage dear!) 
Then when the grey wolves everychone
Drink of the winds their chill small-beer
And lap o' the snows food's gueredon
Then makyth my heart his yule-tide cheer
 (Skoal! with the dregs if the clear be gone!)
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

Ask ye what ghost I dream upon?
(What of the magians' scented gear?) 
The ghosts of dead loves everyone
That make the stark winds reek with fear
Lest love return with the foison sun
And slay the memories that me cheer
(Such as I drink to mine fashion)
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

Where are the joys my heart had won?
(Saturn and Mars to Zeus drawn near!) 
Where are the lips mine lay upon,
Aye! where are the glances feat and clear
That bade my heart his valor don?
I skoal to the eyes as grey-blown mere
(Who knows whose was that paragon?)
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

Prince: ask me not what I have done
Nor what God hath that can me cheer
But ye ask first where the winds are gone
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

--Ezra Pound

Wyrd Oft Nereth: Two Views

Blue Of The Bay

Little Reindeer, Big Antlers

Sculpture mix; brown glazing.

Swam

Swam.  Feeling sore but good too. More like myself. Time to turn the tide toward fitness and soul-solace.

Winter Solstice Beach Lit

Waterside reading/listening for the turning of the year.

One-Legged Reindeer, Still Flies

Lucky, one-legged reindeer (aka "Glaze-test"): still flies.

Dream: Wave-Crash

Kelp-time. Slightly disturbing, disorienting dream last night (among many) about free diving off a rocky shoreline just down the coast. I was distracted and checking out a circular "tide pool" out near the impact zone. A surfer stopped to give me the heads-up the tide was changing, the swell was rising, and the waves were getting closer and closer, ready to take me out. I thanked him, wondered how I could have gotten so focused on the shellfish and such in the crater-like collection of rocks, and started checking my exits. The waves were indeed crashing closer and closer, and the dusk was falling hard. Where had the time gone? Suddenly I was cold to the bone and tired. I went to the shoreward side of the rocks, and there was a twelve-foot drop to water and rocks (a completely unrealistic effect, but it was a dream). I'd have to time my getaway dropping over that side. I'd need water on the rocks to cushion my fall, but I wouldn't want to be caught in the crater for a full-on wave strike. Suddenly, in a rush of thick, thick water and thick foam, I was over the edge and getting rolled deep. I came up gasping. A very odd dream, but the cold water, the salt, and the kelpiness pleases me, despite the rough handling.

Rhymes With Orange

My best ceramics instructor once watched me walk into the studio just after the end of summer and in the first week of my new semester and observed, "Your aura is all spiky."  And he was right.

When I looked at this shot, that's what I remembered.

Feeling a little spiky, a little under the weather, now too.

Reindeer, Swimming

Lucky, swimming again.

Recommended Reading: Nicola Griffith's "Hild"

A new and quite fine historical novel about 7th-century England and a very remarkable character.

Wael-Seax: The Slaughter-Knife of Beagnoth

A replica of the famous Anglo-Saxon weapon fished from the Thames.

To give you a sense of the size of this mere "knife", my hands are of a fair size and both of them fit handily on that hilt.  Beowulf used such a long-knife on the dragon; Grendel's mother attempted to use such a long-knife on Beowulf.

"The Wanderer": Burton Raffel Translates From The Old English

THE WANDERER

This lonely traveller longs for grace,
For the mercy of God; grief hangs on
His heart and follows the frost-cold foam
He cuts in the sea, sailing endlessly,
Aimlessly, in exile. Fate has opened
A single port: memory. He sees
His kinsmen slaughtered again, and cries:
               “I’ve drunk too many lonely dawns,
Grey with mourning. Once there were men
To whom my heart could hurry, hot
With open longing. They’re long since dead.
My heart has closed on itself, quietly
Learning that silence is noble and sorrow
Nothing that speech can cure. Sadness
Has never driven sadness off;
Fate blows hardest on a bleeding heart.
So those who thirst for glory smother
Secret weakness and longing, neither
Weep nor sigh nor listen to the sickness
In their souls. So I, lost and homeless,
Forced to flee the darkness that fell
On the earth and my lord.
                         Leaving everything,
Weary with winter I wandered out
On the frozen waves, hoping to find
A place, a people, a lord to replace
My lost ones. No one knew me, now,
No one offered comfort, allowed
Me feasting or joy. How cruel a journey
I’ve traveled, sharing my bread with sorrow
Alone, an exile in every land,
Could only be told by telling my footsteps.
For who can hear: “friendless and poor,”
And know what I’ve known since the long cheerful nights
When, young and yearning, with my lord I yet feasted
Most welcome of all. That warmth is dead.
He only knows who needs his lord
As I do, eager or long-missing aid;
He only knows who never sleeps
Without the deepest dreams of longing.
Sometimes it seems I see my lord,
Kiss and embrace him, bend my hands
And head to his knee, kneeling as though
He still sat enthroned, ruling his thanes.
And I open my eyes, embracing the air,
And I see the brown sea-billows heave,
See the sea-birds bathe, spreading
Their white-feathered wings, watch the frost
And the hail and the snow. And heavy in heart
I long for my lord, alone and unloved.
Sometimes it seems I see my kin
And greet them gladly, give them welcome,
The best of friends. They fade away,
Swimming soundlessly out of sight,
                         Leaving nothing.
How loathsome become
The frozen waves to a weary heart.
               In this brief world I cannot wonder
That my mind is set on melancholy,
Because I never forget the fate
Of men, robbed of their riches, suddenly
Looted by death—the doom of earth,
Sent to us all by every rising
Sun. Wisdom is slow, and comes
But late. He who has it is patient;
He cannot be hasty to hate or speak,
He must be bold and yet not blind,
Nor ever too craven, complacent, or covetous,
Nor ready to gloat before he wins glory.
The man’s a fool who flings his boasts
Hotly to the heavens, heeding his spleen
And not the better boldness of knowledge.
What knowing man knows not the ghostly,
Waste-like end of worldly wealth:
See, already the wreckage is there,
The wind-swept walls stand far and wide,
The storm-beaten blocks besmeared with frost,
The mead-halls crumbled, the monarchs thrown down
And stripped of their pleasures. The proudest of warriors
Now lie by the wall: some of them war
Destroyed; some the monstrous sea-bird
Bore over the ocean; to some the old wolf
Dealt out death; and for some dejected
Followers fashioned an earth-cave coffin.
Thus the Maker of men lays waste
This earth, crushing our callow mirth.
And the work of old giants stands withered and still.”

He who these ruins rightly sees,
And deeply considers this dark twisted life,
Who sagely remembers the endless slaughters
Of a bloody past, is bound to proclaim:
          “Where is the war-steed? Where is the warrior?
                         Where is his war-lord?
Where now the feasting-places?
Where now the mead-hall pleasures?
Alas, bright cup! Alas, brave knight!
Alas, you glorious princes! All gone,
Lost in the night, as you never had lived.
And all that survives you a serpentine wall,
Wondrously high, worked in strange ways.
Mighty spears have slain these men,
Greedy weapons have framed their fate.
                These rocky slopes are beaten by storms,
This earth pinned down by driving snow,
By the horror of winter, smothering warmth
In the shadows of night. And the north angrily
Hurls its hailstorms at our helpless heads.
Everything earthly is evilly born,
Firmly clutched by a fickle Fate.
Fortune vanishes, friendship vanishes,
Man is fleeting, woman is fleeting,
And all this earth rolls into emptiness.”

               So says the sage in his heart, sitting alone with
                              His thought.
It's good to guard your faith, nor let your grief come forth
Until it cannot call for help, nor help but heed
The path you've placed before it.  It's good to find your grace
In God, the heavenly rock where rests our every hope.

--translated by Burton Raffel,
borrowed from Beowulf and Related Readings,
McDougall Littell; Evanston, Illinois; 1998.

Kelp / Yearning

Exam Prompt: Channeling Peter O'Toole

The late great actor Peter O’Toole expressed something I feel is worth remembering:

"I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony.   I do not crave security. I wish to hazard my soul to opportunity."

How can we use this quotation to help us to understand the characters, the actions, and/or the outcomes in the books we’ve been reading? Connecting the quotation to Melville's Captain Ahab seems fairly easy, but what of Queequeg or, say, Ishmael? To Shakespeare's Prospero? To Kem Nunn's Ike or Preston or Hound? Would such connections be true ones or mere poses? Or . . . ?

Go deep into one long text, or use multiple texts in your response. Use clear references to explore O’Toole’s statement and its possible application to what we’ve read.


(Thanks to Jay Trinidad for leading me to the quotation; thanks to Peter O'Toole for the words and the life lived.)

Blow, West Wind, Blow

A bit of blarney for the season.

Crossley-Holland: "Comfort"

COMFORT

Who said anything about comfort?
Those syllables do not rhyme
with zinc slakes or ice-bright sky.
The sea is grinding her spears.
Up creeks and gullies, over groynes
the black tide surges
and the hag wind rides her.
In the bleak forest on the staithe
rigging clacks and chitters.

Little but memory for company,
wild geese, swans whooping,
but no urbanity no
gossip prejudice bitterness sham.
In London I dream of these harsh folds,
the sea's slam, the light's eagle eye,
and here again I draw
this place -- hair-shirt, dear cloak --
around such infirmities.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

With Luck, Puck

Always a welcome sight.

Waiting For Macbeth

Seyton: sculpture mix; dark green, transparent brown, and celadon glazing.

Seamus Heaney: "Imagine Being Kevin"

SAINT KEVIN AND THE BLACKBIRD

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

--Seamus Heaney

A Man and A Boat

Self-portrait #52.


An empty boat
will volunteer for anything.

--Harrison and Kooser

Julia Whitty, Diving, and Manysidedness: Highly Recommended

The current reading in my English 1As.

Check out Julia Whitty's blog at http://deepbluehome.blogspot.com/

Reprise: Wave-Back Longing

Free diving off Lovers Point: February 2012.

I haven't been in the water for forever (too many months), so I like looking here and remembering how I swam out to the surf zone and played for an hour or so. I kept out of the way of the surfers, of course; my mask kept leaking from all my smiling as I duck-dived wave after wave after wave.

Oh, I'm missing some kelp-time, seriously.

Hermes And Company

Prepping For Class

Kem Nunn's first novel, Tapping the Source; Bushmills; and the Eelfish.

In between chapters, I'm contemplating Point Molate and a quick kayak-run in the Bay this weekend.

Coomer: "Three Things Worth Doing"

"There are three things worth doing: making something new, caring for something old, and finding the lost. The fourth thing is your hand deep in dog fur, talking about the first three."

--Joe Coomer, Sailing in a Spoonful of Water

At A Gallop

Happy Thanksgiving

 Pilgrim (cork and construction paper):
elementary school project from the 1960s.

Watching The Boats Sail By

Visual joy: 

the view from Ferry Point.

Visual toy:

study aid, truly, to model knockdowns, whale attacks, and skulduggery;

stand-in for the Essex and, soon, for the Hispaniola.

Wistful

Mermaid w/Fin:
sculpture mix; green glazing.

Defying Gravity

The Buckeye and the Beast

Rembrandt's Mirror; Facetious Echoes

I snapped this selfie to check the lighting from this direction at this time of day, and I both laughed at how that mask and I happened to echo each other here and found myself snagged in the rush of a memory-whirlpool.  The image pulled me towards something, someone, some other image . . . .

I had recently picked up Christopher Wright's Rembrandt: Self Portraits as a consequence of another memory-snag, though I have only flipped through some of the reproductions, haven't quite read the text itself.  I had obtained Wright's book because of my recently recalling, once again, how Prof. Andrew Griffin, one of my major influences at Berkeley, used to teach a unit on Rembrandt's self-portraits in his autobiography/biography seminar, and while I did not take that specific class from Prof. Griffin, he generously shared in office-time much about the subject.  (That the Dutch master had painted himself so often, so many times, over the course of his life was a compelling conceit to me, particularly caught as I was between Joyce's young Stephen Dedalus and my sense of the older Shakespeare-As-Lear, As-Prospero.)  I was drawn to these conversations by the professor's compelling and humorous delivery, but also by my own compulsions in the areas of self-representation and Rembrandt himself.  That Pocket Library of Great Art edition of Rembrandt pictured above was a book that just happened to be stuffed into the family bookshelves in the back bedroom I shared with my brothers, a book that I happened to discover in my childhood, far before I could understand the words or the images beyond the obvious, a book that I have puzzled over and studied from my earliest years.  I have carried that book from the family home to my first apartment and to every subsequent dwelling, though I can't say that I've actually looked into or, perhaps, even at this pocket volume for years and years now until today.

Still, once I looked away from my mask laughing in the background and thought, "What image am I aping (unconsciously) here?", well, "Rembrandt -- the cover portait!" was the immediate answer.  (I was then compelled to root out that specific volume, though that took two days.)  Now, reading this and comparing (contrasting?) the two images may not bring such an answer to your mind.  The link may be more emotional than anything else.  As a maker, I bow with the utmost respect from a station far far below the great Dutchman.  And, as a child, I was probably fascinated by the age, the agedness, in that cover shot, by the old, old man with the funny hat.  As an adult, Rembrandt seems steady, steadfast and sober, weighing himself in the scales of life, not entirely happy with the balance at hand; the artist doesn't seem near as old, either, as he must have seemed in my relative infancy.  But my peers will understand that shiftiness of perspective, I think.  (There's a key scene in John Fowles' Daniel Martin in front of one of Rembrandt's portraits, perhaps this one, and that novel was quite formative as well.  Another echo, another mirror.)  Even as a boy and a young man, I'll bet Rembrandt's gaze held me, for it certainly holds my own gaze even now.  Rembrandt's mirror, each of us looking at, looking into, this portrait, don't you think?

Maybe so; maybe no.  Hats, brows, noses, lines, chins, cheeks: I see likenesses, though differences too.  I could have dressed the part, certainly, to heighten the linkages, but that's an accidental shot, more or less.  Anyway, the way I'd like to see it, the Dutchman's looking back at me, back at us; and, I'm looking at him, at you.

Facetious echoes, as I've announced above.

The mirror, I'm forgetting: the mirror and the making.  Rembrandt is gazing into that mirror, that reflective canvas, into himself, weighing and balancing; and, therefore, he's a fine model for yet another painting; therefore, a fine model for himself and for us.

Flow (With Tentacles)

More Than A Handful: 
sculpture mix; stormy blue, celadon, and transparent brown glazes, layered.

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