Captain Turner

Kayak-Fishing: JP / Mendocino

June 13, 2019.

CUPPA-JOE

How many of you are like me--in that you buy more coffee than you actually drink?

That is, I will buy this cup and that cup (in my personal travel mug, of course) that I never quite finish.
Sometimes I've barely sipped from the cup I need to dump out for the next cup.

Still, if I didn't have that new cup of joe in hand, I'd be less relaxed, less happy, less able to focus on the next thing.

Dive-Knife

When I was exiting the water after kayaking there at the Park Service launch in Jenner, CA, a boy (with his brother and a dog in a kayak on the launch) waiting for dad immediately spotted the dive knife on my leg and asked, What's the knife for?

His dad immediately answered, For whatever is necessary.

I was also answering with Just in case of fishing line in the water, you know, and whatever's necessary (which is the truth: mostly the fishing line phobia).

Still, I was struck by how the boy had noticed the knife so quickly.
Cutting to the chase, as it were.

And, years from now, will that boy be thinking it will be cool to be a diver guy with a knife on his leg?


P.S.  I think of this scene and I think of my Uncle Bob in Guam in the 1970s sending my family Cousteau books about diving and sharks (books I still have) and I think of the speargun Dad had on the wall of the garage, and I certainly relate to that boy on Saturday in Jenner waiting in a kayak with his brother and his dog . . . .


P.P,S.  My kayak-pal JP writes: "For context, if I remember right, the lad asked first if we'd been fishing.  You said no.   Then, after a beat, he asked what's the knife for."

To which I say, Good catch, JP.

What Nisus Said

Nisus ait: 'dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?'


Nisus said, Do the gods add this heat to the mind,
Euryalus, or does a man's own dire desire become a god to him?

-- Virgil's Aeneid IX, 184-185
(my translation)

"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.

My Old Joe

Closet-diving turns up all sort of things.
Action-figure from long ago.

(Old Joe is older than most of my colleagues.)

Clay Pony

"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.

The Kelp Crawlers: A Close-Up

Postscript: Diana Nyad just completed her Cuba-to-Florida, 110+ miles, at age 64.  I have nothing but respect for open water swimmers.

Lively Water

I love when the water's lively like this, but then I'm a free diver by nature or maybe just a swimmer, in cases like this one.  Flat days are fine, and helpful when tanking, but there are too many flat days every year.

Surge is good, I say.  Let there be engagement.  I like when the water pushes back, pushes hard; I like working against and with the flow, particularly the latter.  Whether free diving or kayaking, give me some texture, some liveliness, and I'm a happy fellow.

The picture tells the story better than my words.  Doesn't that look fun?

Shakespeare: "If It Were Done When 'Tis Done"

Light -- and dark -- reading.

Wordsworth and Byron: "The After-Vacancy"

Action is transitory,--a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle--this way or that--
'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark,
And shares the nature of infinity.

--William Wordsworth,
headnote to "The White Doe of Rhylstone"
(originally a bit of speech
from the suppressed drama The Borderers)


The world is full of orphans: firstly, those
Who are so in the strict sense of the phrase
(But many a lonely tree the loftier grows
Than others crowded in the forest's maze);
The next are such as are not doomed to lose
There tender parents in their budding days,
But merely their parental tenderness,
Which leaves them orphans of the heart no less.

--Lord Byron,
the opening stanza to the final -- and unfinished -- canto of Don Juan


I am not sure why I am putting these two passages together, but they rise up in my mind that way, often.  Of course, both pieces concern emotional loss and absence, concern consequence: "after-vacancy" As an exercise in grad school, I'd often ponder how one poet would speak another poet's words, how one poet would cast the same thought into different words, but I must said that I always felt that Lord Byron would have ended up with phrasing quite close to Wordsworth's original "Action is transitory" and so forth;  that was an invigorating insight since I'd mostly approached these two poets as poles in an agon, as antagonists in the Romantic Battle-Royal.  Much of Cantos III and IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage reveals Wordsworthian themes, Byronized (of course) . . . .