Mateo: Three Faces (Naked, Hoplite, Diver)

Mateo in Morning Light.

As with living humans, that light can show nakedly the signs and emblems of age.

I think I did a fair job of capturing some of me at fifty, though in other ways this piece is a younger me and/or not me quite at all.  (If that's confusing, that's the Gemini coming through.)

Piece sculpted in a Self-Portrait Class: Summer 2011.

I've posted shots of this figure in the past on this blog.  

Hit the "Mateo" label-link below to see the other shots and commentary, if you'd like.

Mateo as Hoplite / Greek Warrior.

I use the helmet as a visual aid, seriously and/or humorously, when teaching Homer's epics or any of the Greek tragedies.

Mateo: Free Diver.

That's an old mask from the '80s.  Note the side ports for greater range of vision while diving.

This particular mask I picked up and gave to my father to encourage him to swim laps.  He didn't like the feel of standard swim goggles, so I suggested such a mask.  When he didn't pick one up for himself, I made a gift of this one.  I don't think he ever used it more than once or twice, at best.

Mateo: sculpture mix; denim glazing, poured over and mostly wiped off.

For the record, I'm not crazy about the end results here, but making this piece -- the largest single clay piece I've ever made -- has taught me much, not least about envisioning outcomes and artistic control.   The pallor is slightly disturbing, and the shininess of the blue seems just a bit too much.  I am not sure what I had expected or imagined when I glazed the piece.  And yet, Mateo strikes me as a very undersea  fellow, as a merfolk stand-in, which seems quite suitable too.

Flow Factor: Surface and Depth

Note the warbles at the edge of the still--pausing--surface waters here.  Note also the surge showing in the disturbed water in the foreground and in the background/distance.

I love kelp, the simplest, most humble blades, stems, and floats.  The particles in the water demonstrate helpfully how visibility underwater was severely limited as well as the flow patterns as the surge moved in and out.  Such surging will be more apparent, I believe, in subsequent photos.

 Note the flowing away of the surge, with the bending of the sea grass and the movement of the sand and organisms floating free.  "Free" meaning caught in the grip of the surge and the current, but free floating.  Sure.

 The surge recoils, pausing.

Wham!  The surge kicks in as the wave moves through this space, gripping me in this case and sending me flying through the water.  I think the blurry photo, otherwise unremarkable, does a fine job of catching the actual movement I was made to make.

 Flow relaxing, again, momentarily.  More kelp.

Self-portrait of a diver in the surge.  (Don't divers look goofy?  Such unsexy, unglamorous equipment.)  You can see one eye, at least, is bloodshot from the salt and particles in the water that kept leaking into my mask, and you can see the particles flowing in the foreground even as the kelp blades flex in the background.  I'm probably holding onto a rock or a kelp holdfast here.

Now, of course, I prefer better visibility.  The cathedralesque quality of the kelp forests is so hard to appreciate when you can't quite see as far as your arm or your flippers or even a double-body length.  And yet.  And yet being in the water, in the surge, in the mix: that's what matters.  And that's what keeps me coming back even when I suspect that I won't be able to see the beauty at a distance.  I know that the small beauties, the close beauties, deserve attention too.

"There Is A Tide In The Affairs of Women . . ."

Or, "But Actium, Lost For Cleopatra's Eyes"
--Byron's opening to Canto VI of Don Juan:


'There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood'--you know the rest,
And most of us have found it, now and then;
At least we think so, though but few have guessed
The moment, till too late to come again.
But no doubt every thing is for the best--
Of which the surest sign is in the end:
When things are at the worst they sometimes mend.


There is a tide in the affairs of women
'Which taken at the flood leads'--God knows where.
Those navigators must be able seamen
Whose charts lay down its current to a hair;
Not all the reveries of Jacob Behmen
With its strange whirls and eddies can compare:--
Men with their heads reflect on this and that--
But women with their hearts or heaven knows what!


And yet a headlong, headstrong, downright she,
Young, beautiful, and daring--who would risk
A throne, the world, the universe, to be
Beloved in her own way, and rather whisk
The stars from out the sky, than not be free
As are the billows when the breeze is brisk--
Though such a she's a devil (if that there be one)
Yet she would make full many a Manichean.


Thrones, worlds, et cetera, are so oft upset
By commonest Ambition, that when Passion
O'erthrows the same, we readily forget,
Or at the least forgive, the laving rash one.
If Anthony be well remembered yet,
'Tis not his conquests keep his name in fashion,
But Actium, lost for Cleopatra's eyes,
Outbalance all the Caesar's victories.


He died at fifty for a queen of forty;
I wish their years had been fifteen and twenty,
For then wealth, kingdoms, worlds are but sport--I
Remember when, though I had no great plenty
Of worlds to lose, yet still, to pay my court, I
Gave what I had--a heart:--as the world went, I
Gave what was worth a world; for worlds could never
Restore me those pure feelings, gone for ever.


--Lord Byron

Minerva, Mermaid: sculpture mix: sea foam glazing; copper wire.

The Blog as Book(s)

This is a vanity production, not a commercial one. Still, I like having the book-versions. Easier for me to get a sense of the whole, frankly, paging through the entries.

Volume I: In memory of Keith Sanders (1961-2011).

Volume II: In memory of my mother and my father.

Waterscape

Monastery Beach: three views.

I'd meant to hit the water either south by Monterey or north by Mendocino this long weekend, but no luck. Instead, I've been working and swimming and prowling through my photo archives.

I took these pictures the day after my 50th birthday last June.

Happy birthdays, George and Abe.

Happy birthdays to us all.

First Free Dive of 2012

Or, So This Is What I Look Like?

My mask straps need adjusting, and I think I'm about to dive. Hence, the sort of hovering there.

Or, maybe I haven't yet adjusted to the cold water on my face.

Beautiful day: Sunday, January 8, 2012.

First dive of the year; first dive in ages and ages.

And here's a photo from just after the dive.

Note the slightly goofy, mask-marked, cold-salty-water-swollen look.

(I still remember noticing on television how Jacques Cousteau, his right-hand man Falco, and Cousteau's eldest son would all look so much older after cold water diving. Or, the cold water reveals real age?)

Mere Mortal

That's my favorite self-portrait of the year: free diving off Salt Point State Park in Sonoma County, CA. This dive was an early August jaunt with dive partner Gerald. Very surgy day, though the water looks clearer than I expected or recall here.

Late lunch at the Fish House in Bodega to celebrate and refuel.

Just a random shot from that August dive, the last dive of 2011, I think. Even the random shots of an urchin, fish, abalone or kelp get my blood pumping for another dive.

Before that happens, I need to put in my pool time, rebuild some swimming muscle, and drop some blubber. This semester was the most difficult in memory for keeping the pool sessions going. I must have gotten sick every other week, catching the latest cold or flu or sore throat time and again. And, as a teacher who relies perhaps too much on my voice in class, it was a rough, rough term.

All that time out of the water has not been good for me. Seriously, I need to work off some of the excess weight, or turn it into useful muscle, or I'll need a slightly bigger free diving / kayaking wetsuit. Four years ago I was dropping below 160--which was too light, too thin--and these days I'm sliding past 180. More than the issue of weight or neoprene fit is fitness. I miss the muscle and the muscular support. When I was doing all that dolphin kicking with the Rocket fins on, I didn't have the back aches from too many hours at the desk. (Or, if my back hurt, that was because I was kicking, diving, and kayaking too much, which felt better, even if it did still hurt.) I didn't have the same knee issues. And, I would bounce up the stairs. (Don't you love aging?)

I'm reminding myself of all this to power the return to swimming regularly, frequently. I like myself better when I'm swimming too much.

Pool: here I come.

Wavy hair: if I can't hit the beach, I'll wear it. Something like that. Growing it out; resisting the buzz. December 2011.

I'd rather grow some gills. Wouldn't that be the best mutation? Or, to phrase it as a question: if there were a surgical procedure to implant gills in the sides of your throat/neck, would you go for it?

Maybe some of that Harry Potter gillyweed for the next dive.

Silly thoughts at the end of a long day. Why not?

Portrait of the Artist as a Gemini

Alter Ego and Friends: Poetry and Clay

ALTER EGO

The boy from Uplyme with his smile

Who stands on cliff-tops staring down:

One stares as well. The sea is barren.

And the beach. But still he stares.

Branches of sloe and bullace

Cloud his dark, his idiot eyes.

Always he wears the vacant smile

Of happy mongoloids and kings.

One day he turned and spoke to me.

I'm John, he said. I like it here.

--John Fowles

Inishboffin on a Sunday morning.

Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.

One by one we were being handed down

Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied

Scaresomely every time. We sat tight

On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,

Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking

Except the boatman, as the gunwales sank

And seemed they might ship water any minute.

The sea was very calm but even so,

When the engine kicked and our ferryman

Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller,

I panicked at the shiftiness and heft

Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us--

That quick response and buoyancy and swim--

Kept me in agony. All the time

As we went sailing evenly across

The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,

It was as if I looked from another boat

Sailing through air, far up, and could see

How riskily we fared into the morning,

And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

--Seamus Heaney, from "Seeing Things"

As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow

And wished that others held the same opinion;

They took it up when my days grew more mellow,

And other minds acknowledged my dominion.

Now my sere fancy 'falls into the yellow

Leaf', and imagination droops her pinion;

And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk

Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,

'Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,

'Tis that our nature cannot always bring

Itself to apathy, for we must steep

Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring,

Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep.

Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx;

A mortal mother would on Lethe fix.

--Lord Byron, from the fourth Canto of his Don Juan

Mateo: sculpture mix; selective denim glazing; scarf. Summer 2011.

The poetry was selected in the usual fashion, intuitively, as an unlikely set of verses that still seemed to fit together somehow. Or, the poetry was chosen by fitness, for contrast, and as proxy or emulation. I've referred to Heaney's anxieties while afloat here, and I'll repeat that I do not share such nervousness. I admire his writing, and Fowles', and Byron's, of course.

Midstream

Self-portrait #50.

Kiln-Ready: Mateo

Mateo is headed into the kiln this Wednesday. I can count at least fifty flaws, but I'm going to bake him, if nothing else than as a glaze test.

After he comes through the fire, I'll have to consider the specific glazing. Not sure, yet.

Alter Ego

Once "Mateo" dries, I can put him into the kiln. After bisquing, I'll have to make decisions about glazing. Not sure which vibe to go for, just yet.

Probably something amphibious or aquatic.

The piece has lots of flaws, but then so do I.

(His head isn't big enough, quite --at least, the back of it-- and my head's probably too big. Or, it has been. Just one example . . . .)

Sea Monkey See

Sea monkey do.

I'll admit freely that as I've approached fifty, and now turned fifty, I've been taking more self-portraits, trying to get some sense of what I really look like, what I really am like. (We all know the rose-colored or coal-colored glasses of personal melodrama and history.)

And while profile-pic games only take us so far onto the surface of things, we work with the tools at hand.

You may be able to see the water dripping from the camera in the close-ups (click, click) of a few of these shots; after immersion in salt water, the camera must be submerged for an hour or so in hopes of soaking away the salt crystals that could screw up the seals upon opening for recharging the battery and for downloading the pics. I'd been soaking the camera in a small plastic tub in front of this mirror and got the urge to play. Afterwards, I placed the camera back into the tub for further soaking.

I look at these goofy shots and, mostly, chuckle. What vanity to think I'm going to learn anything about myself in such an exercise, and yet there I am, clicking away in front of a motel room mirror after a long day of sun and salt.

Is that my father I see in those features? Of course, but what about mom? Hugh, yes, but . . . George? And, how many selves could I have? Which one (or two) is really me? (I am a Gemini.)

There's something about the camera shot that I can stop and look at that differs from the mere mirror. I am not sure what that difference is, but discovering that is part of the exploration, perhaps even more than capturing these glimples of self.

Sea monkey see. Sea monkey do.

Now if I were a real writer, I'd be working harder to capture these differences and these images in words. Or, so I can castigate myself. More likely, while I am a word-guy and story-guy, the visual world matters to me a lot more than I'd ever realized while growing up and, what, maturing. I've always had a good visual memory (which page is the poem on in the book? right-hand or left-hand side? Rembrandt or Vermeer? Which Vermeer?), but the story I've always told myself involved words, always words words words. Yet even as an excellent student, I tended (and tend) to look out the window. And my other medium is clay; sculpture is three-dimensional, like the best writing, right?

Anyway, while I was playing profile-pic games in that motel in Fort Bragg, I started thinking of how hard it is to convey specific outdoor experiences, in my case diving and kayaking.

I mean, the whole session on the closed-deck kayak, I felt as if I were in a bowl, a giant watery bowl, and no matter how hard or in what direction I paddled, I still couldn't get out of the bottom of that bowl. I can try to explain this by pointing to currents and wash rocks catching and diverting flow, but in my gut there just wasn't a sea "level"; the whole ocean seemed tilted on its side, slightly, just enough to create a visceral sense of imbalance and dislocation. Frankly, I loved it. The sensation was otherworldly, and yet quite common if you spend enough time on the water.

Professional photographers will emphasize the need for that straight horizon, but I must say I prefer sea-shots that tilt. They seem truer to the experience, but then I'm a diver and kayaker more than a hiker or landscape painter on the shore.

"Being grounded" carries a different freight for the boater. Seamus Heaney wrote a great passage on how the floaty boat-edness (my term) that he felt unnerved by came from the very buoyancy that guaranteed his safety. I'll have to look out his original words.

My quest over this summer will be to catch images that convey that sense of meaningful imbalance, that unfreighted lift of sea and sky. Somehow, I just haven't been able to translate via images those occasions when the whole world seems askew, seems tilting. Often, those heavy water sessions look tame to the camera, and there must be a way to figure that untamed feeling.

In the next shot, you can see the wave approaching, but it felt a lot taller than it looks. There are also the matters of mass and speed. This was a fairly mild, though energetic day, so I didn't feel in danger, but I also knew I was a bit of cork bobbing amidst far greater forces. (But that's also why you go out there.)

Perhaps in the close-up (after clicking on the shot), you can see the energy behind the texture. Kelp bobbing about, the waves were moving through; I felt like Sofia, my kayak, was half-horse in this session. More emphatically, the whole surface seemed (and seems) to loom over us.

When I first began thinking of this entry, I thought of the self-shots above as monkeying around, and then I thought of how much I've played with catching images while diving and kayaking for so many years.

I started with simple disposable "submersible" cameras and used them, effectively enough, for years and years. Above, you can see my amphibious Canon Powershot, and lately I've been using a tough submersible Olympus that I found in 25 feet of water off Maui last summer. I have some basic tools, and those tools ought to be enough to catch the sorts of experiences I'm after sharing. Yes, I could throw cash into equipment, but that's not my nature, and anyway it's a vision thing, not a limitation via technology, that matters here.

I need to figure out how to take my shots to get what I want; I need to learn how to shoot so that I can share what I truly see and, more importantly, feel.

Oh, I haven't quite got the words, but I'm throwing them out there in hopes that upon rereading I'll find and make better words. Also, perhaps some of my story here will prove more effective than I'm thinking now.

I felt compelled to share these images, these words, and that compulsion is parallel to what grips you playing on the water, in the water, and under the water. There's something about all that mass flowing that makes any pool session so obviously sterile, no matter how intense the workout.

Otherworldly, I've said, but perhaps I spend too much time away from the more raw forces of nature. Worldly, in the best sense? Natural.

Sea monkey see; sea monkey do. Just one of Mother Nature's sons.

"Mateo" Is Taking Shape

"Self-Portrait in Clay" class at the ASUC Art Studio.

I see about twelve flaws, without trying, so I'll look away for now.

Tomorrow, I'll approach the piece in a constructive mood.

Still in-progress, by the way.

Or, maybe I'm done, flaws and all.

P.S. As a boy, my mother often called me "Mateo," and that was my name in the three years of Spanish classes.

And, if this is any kind of a self-portrait, it's of and from a younger self.

Fifty Grains of Salt and Two Waves

My birthday: June 19th, 2011: my fiftieth, which I find hard to believe and which I am honoring. In my head, over and over: What kid ever thinks he's going to be fifty? I'm fifty? Here, I'm at Monterey Bay Kayaks, getting ready to go out on (and under) the water. Breezy, choppy day with a lot of sun. The breeze from the west and northwest meant a good amount of work heading down Cannery Row toward the Aquarium. It also meant a quick ride back, though effort was needed to keep straight and not capsize at times, especially while focusing on taking photos. In fact, this was a rough day for pictures from all that bobbing about. I did better --as you'll see-- while underwater and less subject to the quirks of wind and swell.

I picked the photo above because it reminds me of my father, oddly enough, and that was Father's Day also. Something about my stance here recalls pictures from the 60's and early 70's of my father getting set for a fishing trip or a motorcycle ride.

Today, June 20th: Monastery Beach, Carmel, CA. I like waves, flat out, but this one held me with the echo between spray and fog-line.

Also today, June 20th: Monastery Beach, Carmel, CA. I like the texture here, and the scene itself was fairly mesmerizing, the colors and textures. A bit of energy, but not too much. (If you can, click on the photo and enlarge it to see the layers and rolling here.)

I didn't dive, but I was sorely tempted, though I'd have been solo in the water. (Monastery has a nasty reputation for treating hubris harshly, and I'd paddled and swam to exhaustion, happily, the day before.) I plotted my free diving from the north end of the beach out through the kelp bed (where you can see the rolling swell but no breaking waves) and then down, down and up, down and up. The last time I dove here, I used a tank, and my partner Jeff had a harbor seal making advances to him. We had gear failures, so we had to shift our original plan, but still had a nice dive down to about 50 feet and then up the north wall to the shallows.

I need to call Jeff for a dive at Jade Cove down Big Sur way. That would be cool.

My Father's Fiftieth: The Belly Dancer

For his fiftieth birthday, my mother dispatched a belly dancer to crash the police officers' conference that my father was chairing. I was shocked by the idea, frankly, given my father's dislike of public show (and of revealing his prominent heart surgery scar), but he was a very good sport about the whole thing.

Like most Duckworth's, my dad was a professional extrovert, despite the characteristic personal reserve. Actually, on reflection, I am not sure if his co-workers or team mates ever realized just how introverted he was. In other words, my father could be a ham when he felt the need, and he often felt the need. I proudly take after him in that regard. (Just ask my students.) In sports, my father could be a genuine extrovert too.

When he started playing the tambourine, I had to laugh. Luckily for me, my mother had alerted the relatives about the event, and we crashed the conference just as the belly dancer did. (Well, not just as.) Afterwards, when my brother questioned him about how he reacted to the dancer, my father replied, "What else could I do?" Something like that.

I like remembering what a good sport my father could be. I like to remember him having some fun. (I'll put this memory next to the one of him diving off a rock into the Carmel River when I was a very small boy. I recall thinking, Wow, he's OLD and he's diving right OFF that rock --and my father must have been only 30, 31, or 32.)

My father at 50. I'm grayer than he was, but I hope I can be such a good sport my whole life long. Happy Dad's Day, Dad! I'm a day early, but you won't mind, will you?