Mendocino Miscellany

Captain: A Sequence

Captain, sleeping: arms and legs in the air.

A silly sequence of a lovable boy.

For JW.

Waiting for the Blow

Photo courtesy of JP.

Here's that shot, by the way:

Fool's Gold; Or, The Admonition

How good is the book in your head--if it isn't on the page?
What book?
I don't see a book.
In the head or in the heart?

Page, page, page--that's what matters.

Story of my life.

Read less; write more.
Keep on reading, but write more.
Get it down; revise it.
Do the thing that needs to be done.

Voices in my head.

I'd quote my father, but then I'd just be looking for pity or mercy or something.

Right now the book in my head is a mixture of Homer and Robert E. Howard, John Fowles and Robert Stone, edited by Hemingway. All of which ought to make very little sense at all.

Not on the page.
Doesn't count.

I picked up a new used copy of James Lee Burke's Heaven's Prisoners from Pegasus Downtown yesterday, and now the book falls open to the exact page I was looking for--the previous owner/reader had my same hang-ups, I'm guessing--page 262:

"But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."

Ouch.

As one of my students once said when faced with this same passage: "No mercy."

Louise Gluck's "Dawn"

DAWN

1

Child waking up in a dark room
screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back

in a language nobody understands in the least —

There is no duck.

But the dog, all upholstered in white plush —
the dog is right there in the crib next to him.

Years and years — that’s how much time passes.
All in a dream. But the duck —
no one knows what happened to that.

2

They’ve  just met, now
they’re sleeping near an open window.

Partly to wake them, to assure them
that what they remember of  the night is correct,
now light needs to enter the room,

also to show them the context in which this occurred:
socks half  hidden under a dirty mat,
quilt decorated with green leaves —

the sunlight specifying
these but not other objects,
setting boundaries, sure of  itself, not arbitrary,

then lingering, describing
each thing in detail,
fastidious, like a composition in English,
even a little blood on the sheets —

3

Afterward, they separate for the day.
Even later, at a desk, in the market,
the manager not satisfied with the figures he’s given,
the berries moldy under the topmost layer —

so that one withdraws from the world
even as one continues to take action in it —

You get home, that’s when you notice the mold.
Too late, in other words.

As though the sun blinded you for a moment.

--LOUISE GLUCK


(Thank you, AB, for the gift of the collected works!)

"When the Ancients Speak"

In a lecture given at Oxford, Wilamowitz said: 'To make the ancients speak, we must feed them with our own blood.' When the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves. They tell us about us. They do that in every case in which they can be made to speak, because they tell us who we are. That is, of course, the most general point of our attempts to make them speak. They can tell us not just who we are, but who we are not: they can denounce the falsity or the partiality or the limitations of our images of ourselves. I believe they can do this for our ideas of human agency, responsibility, regret, and necessity, among others.

--Bernard Williams
from Shame and Necessity (pages 19-20)

Here's the link to the book itself from UC Press.

Old Favorite: Bullish By Nature

Minotaur:
Exercise with live model: 2004?

Sculpture mix; overglazed.
I hadn't meant for the glazing to be quite so thick; there are faint features beneath all that blue and gray glossing, but I like the unintended effect, the blurring and enlarging of the head as well as the downward flow, matching the jut of the chin, the slightly slumping shoulders, and the melancholy mood of the beast-man.

Berkeley Kayaking (Waterspots Included)

Windy, choppy day; good workout.

Agon: Truth vs. Error

"A central consideration is that a correct understanding of how, for instance, true factual beliefs are formed has no tendency to undermine them, while the opposite is typically true of ideological beliefs, for example. This is a truth--admittedly far from clear--at the heart of the Enlightenment enterprise."

--Bernard Williams, in a note to Shame and Necessity