Chesterton: "Very Big Ideas in Very Small Spaces"

On art and limitation and "very big ideas in very small spaces":

"Meanwhile the philosophy of toy theatres is worth any one's consideration. All the essential morals which modern men need to learn could be deduced from this toy. Artistically considered, it reminds us of the main principle of art, the principle which is in most danger of being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact that art consists of limitation; the fact that art is limitation. Art does not consist in expanding things. Art consists of cutting things down, as I cut down with a pair of scissors my very ugly figures of St. George and the Dragon. Plato, who liked definite ideas, would like my cardboard dragon; for though the creature has few other artistic merits he is at least dragonish. The modern philosopher, who likes infinity, is quite welcome to a sheet of the plain cardboard. . . . .

"This especially is true of the toy theatre; that, by reducing the scale of events it can introduce much larger events. Because it is small it could easily represent the earthquake in Jamaica. Because it is small it could easily represent the Day of Judgment. Exactly in so far as it is limited, so far it could play easily with falling cities or with falling stars. Meanwhile the big theatres are obliged to be economical because they are big. When we have understood this fact we shall have understood something of the reason why the world has always been first inspired by small nationalities. The vast Greek philosophy could fit easier into the small city of Athens than into the immense Empire of Persia. In the narrow streets of Florence Dante felt that there was room for Purgatory and Heaven and Hell. He would have been stifled by the British Empire. Great empires are necessarily prosaic; for it is beyond human power to act a great poem upon so great a scale. You can only represent very big ideas in very small spaces. My toy theatre is as philosophical as the drama of Athens."

--G.K. Chesterton,
     --from his essay "The Toy Theatre" from Tremendous Trifles

Waiting for Gadot

Soldate clay;
gray/green glaze:
8/10/15

If you've read my blog, you know I have a soft spot for frogs.

(I also appreciate a certain wonderful heroic character.)

"Lay On, Macduff"

                 I will not yield
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet
And to be baited with the rabble's curse.
Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane
And thou opposed being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last.  Before my body,
I throw my warlike shield.  Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'

          Shakespeare's Macbeth, 5.8.3334


Macbeth's final lines, though not his final appearance in the play . . . .

Hubris, Desired

"Resolve me of all ambiguities."
--Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus"

--a line I had pinned to my bedroom door, so that I would see it each day upon waking and exiting, in undergraduate days.

Expressive--of What?

Old clay.

Looking for Cool

Old clay: Mateo.
10/30/2015
Art class assignment.

Comfort Reading Since 1982

Martha Grimes'
The Old Fox Deceiv'd.

Classic English mystery penned by American writer:
still counts, still delivers the goods.

Richard Jury, Melrose Plant, Wiggins--
A cast I find so much fun.

Divination: A Quartet

Tomales Bay:
December 2016.

"Why Should I Envy Such Freedom"

PENELOPE'S STUBBORNNESS

A bird comes to the window. It's a mistake
to think of them
as birds, they are so often
messengers. That is why, once they
plummet to the sill, they sit
so perfectly still, to mock
patience, lifting their heads to sing
poor lady, poor lady, their three-note
warning, later flying
like a dark cloud from the sill to the olive grove.
But who would send such a weightless being
to judge my life? My thoughts are deep
and my memory long; why would I envy such freedom
when I have humanity? Those
with the smallest hearts
have the greatest freedom.

--Louise Gluck

Wizard Locks

12/8/15
Two years ago, but still relevant.
A favorite profile pic.
I look my age, and that's not always easy to accept.

You'll find out, my young friends.
MD

Hornblower: Dunkeld

Dunkeld:
Scotland.
Summer 2017--------on the banks of the River Tay.

Journey-Charms

Old clay.

TBT: Fishing with Dad

Fishing trip.

I caught my first fish at age seven with my dad at my side.  I'm older here, obviously.

This trip out into Monterey Bay, oh, my father was miserable.
Seasick so much.
Still, the whirr of the reel would catch his attention . . . .

I'm not sure we caught those or if we were gifted by cousins on the same trip.  The conditions were raw that time, and we went out more than once.

1996?

Pedagogical Clay

For strict pedagogical reasons, I asked my college students to work with clay.
Here are some of the results of the experiment.
Aren't these cool?

"Though Whether Those Feet"

"The heels of Milgrim's Tanky and Tojo brogues, as he sat astride the high, raked pillion of Benny's Yamaha, didn't quite touch the cobbles of this tiny square.  Something about the angle of his feet recalled some childhood line-drawing from Don Quixote, though whether those feet had been the knight's or Sancho Panza's, he didn't know."

--William Gibson, Zero History

"His First Drug"

"Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug."

--William Gibson, Zero History

Clay Play: Blue and Brown

Missing clay-time.
Samples from 2013: Strawberry Creek play.

TBT: A Boy and His Cat

Playing with Sam:
1979, I believe.

Clay Noir: Jotun

 Jotun / Frost-giant:
clay: soldate;
oribe glazing.

Autumn Dreams

Gemini, Sleeping--A Mask: sculpture mix; denim, transparent brown, and clear glazing, layered.

Photo: August 10th, 2012.

Mission Statement

There are differences in form between literary works--novels, short stories, poetry, and drama--and classic/standard non-fiction, sure, but the methodology of approach and comprehension--the reader's task--continues: to ascertain and analyze the facts and the visible signs of argument, emotion, and ethics.

Analysis:
identifying the parts and understanding the relationship between the parts and their relationship to the whole.

Understanding complexity (and not merely complication).

Answering the question, over and over again, for each part:
How does X contribute?

Creating--or encouraging--readers.

Enabling--and enobling--students?

What else?

What Archilochos Said

"Greet insolence with outrage."
----------Archilochos,
one of those--his--fragments in Guy Davenport's translation from the Classical Greek.

What Archilochos Said:
four words that have worked well in class, provoking good discussions of diction, denotation, connotation, and character study.

So much in four words.  Just think of what's said, what's signaled, with that choice of "greet" instead of "meet" or "match" or "return".

I must admit I have a qualm or two about the violence in the lines, but then we--our spirits, the collective consciousness--do need rousing in these times.

Class Planning

Spring 2018:
Why ever not?

B & W Challenge: Day Four

The Betweens

The betweens.
What I tend to teach.
Each to each.

Byronic Opposition

Byron's expressions of the heroic saliently focused on opposition figures--the Trojan view, Priam's sons, a Turkish infidel and his sons, a cripple--to express that heroism, a thought I'd misplaced from back in the days I was working on that dissertation.

(How odd, especially given that my intended and partially-unexamined title read "With a Trojan's Eye."  I knew Byron was more cosmopolitan, more liberal, of mind and heart than many have given him credit for, but I wasn't quite digesting all that I'd been consuming, reading hugely as I was, and so . . . .)

Dear Lord Byron . . . Postscript

Friend:  What was it? Do you know now?

Me:  I wanted to be able to say that I knew what Byron thought and felt and meant in any given moment and any given text, but since I didn't mean to write the next biography all of that did not serve me well. I failed to digest much of what I was consuming and I didn't know how to stop except by teaching other people.

Me:  Though, you know, there were times when I did know. But that was mysticism and not academically allowed.

Friend: Matt, so the obsession was mastery--and you achieved it, just not in the exact way you envisioned.

Me:  Mastery is an illusion, but I once believed in that illusion.

Dear Lord Byron . . . .

I've been teaching some books about specific obsessions, and in order for my students to understand that I was not judging or maligning the authors for their obsessions, I made a bit of a joke about understanding obsession myself, about being obsessed.  I mentioned my nine years in graduate school and detailed how I'd not only read and annotated all that Lord Byron had written, published or not published, but also had read and annotated the thirteen volumes of his letters that we have and had read and annotated the letters sent to him and had even started reading and annotating all that Byron himself had read . . . in chronological order.

(And that's not counting the bookcase or two full of literary scholarship on Lord Byron and English Romanticism and European history and heroism I also read and annotated.)

What started out as a joke became a little more serious: I do understand obsession.

I survived mine, but not everyone does.

Missing the Muses

Salt water;
clay;
blank pages and time;
a new album to spark my own lyrics to titles and tunes;
and a good book of poetry or prose to knock me off my feet a bit.

Strange Clay

Fishfolk, werefish, not quite sure.
2015 clay-play.

Graves: "Mermaid, Dragon, Fiend"

MERMAID, DRAGON, FIEND

In my childhood rumors ran
Of a world beyond our door—
Terrors to the life of man
That the highroad held in store.

Of mermaids' doleful game
In deep water I heard tell,
Of lofty dragons belching flame,
Of the hornèd fiend of Hell.

Tales like these were too absurd
For my laughter-loving ear:
Soon I mocked at all I heard,
Though with cause indeed for fear.

Now I know the mermaid kin
I find them bound by natural laws:
They have neither tail nor fin,
But are deadlier for that cause.

Dragons have no darting tongues,
Teeth saw-edged, nor rattling scales;
No fire issues from their lungs,
No black poison from their tails:

For they are creatures of dark air,
Unsubstantial tossing forms,
Thunderclaps of man's despair
In mid-whirl of mental storms.

And there's a true and only fiend
Worse than prophets prophesy,
Whose full powers to hurt are screened
Lest the race of man should die.

Ever in vain will courage plot
The dragon's death, in coat of proof;
Or love abjure the mermaid grot;
Or faith denounce the cloven hoof.

Mermaids will not be denied
The last bubbles of our shame,
The Dragon flaunts an unpierced hide,
The true fiend governs in God's name.

--ROBERT GRAVES

Dumas' The Three Musketeers (novel and films)

My favorite version--after reading Alexandre Dumas' classic novel The Three Musketeers--to watch: Richard Lester's version (scripted by the author of the Flashman novels!)--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-LfUtHnEBY

But then you'll also need to watch Richard Lester's sequel (though part of the original French novel):
The Four Musketeers--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMhwGUGNuxI

Dougie MacLean's "Leis A Lurighan"

On the ocean o‘he
Waves in motion o‘ho
Not but clouds could we see
O'er the blue sea below
Islay loomin‘ o‘he
In the gloamin‘ o‘ho
Our ship's compass set we
And our lights we did show
Aros passing o‘he
Was harrassing o‘ho
The proud belows to see
High as masthead to flow
Captain hollers o‘he
To his fellows o‘ho
Those that courage would flee
Let him go down below

In the tempest o‘he
Waves were crashing o‘ho
And the cry of the sea
As the cold winds did blow
Captain hollers o‘he
To his fellows o‘ho
Those that won't stay with me
Let them go down below

Neoprene Dreams

Or, A Sense of Menace?  Doesn't that first shot seem like a certain type of paperback crime novel cover?

Or, really, the other shots, the accidental photographs . . . .

The Witch and the Frog

My mother always told me that she was a witch and that when I was a very small boy she'd turned me into a frog and that I had hopped around the yard behind her while she watered the plants. I could remember that, or almost, you know? I believed her, my mother.  And who wouldn't want to be a frog?  Who wouldn't want to be the one child that she had transformed in this way.  And, she'd always turned me back into her dear boy.

And our whole lives together, we never questioned these truths. We never broke the bond of the shared story. All our lives.

So, whatever I may think rationally, I never read transformation stories the way a person who hasn't been a frog--my mother said, right?--reads that story. (I mean, I probably don't even think about frogs the same way someone who hasn't been a frog thinks about frogs.)

And that's a gift she gave me, a gift we shared together: the magic of story, of imagination, of transformation and sharing.

Cannery Row Free Diving

A fun quick swim
down and about
on a low viz kind of day.