Ancient History

My favorite honor.

Notes: My Back Hurts

I
Back spasms are no fun.  I don't even know exactly how I strained my back this time.  I didn't carry scuba tanks too far; I didn't lean over and lift a box of books and then twist to put it down somewhere else; I didn't even try to pick up the other kayak, which I know is too heavy for one person.  (I have, I must admit, been carting gear about, shifting book-boxes, and loading up the other kayak, but I haven't had the dramatic pull, that overstepping of muscle through negligence of mind.)

Still, I've had a sore back for days, and today the spasms started.  Really, from long walks in the wrong pair of shoes?  Or a 70-minute hike?  Or, more likely, from the years piling up?

I've applied heat, I've stretched, and now I'm trying ice: three cubes in a glass with Flor de Cana.

II
I certainly don't like pain, but sometimes these back spasms just crack me up.

I've always thought that muscle cramps carry with them a funny sort of pain (they hurt, but the twisting of the muscles seems ridiculous), but some of this morning's spasms seemed triggered by the slightest wrong move, almost by the thought of moving, and I keep having to laugh.

Gasp and grunt, yes, but also laugh.

(I didn't move, I swear; I only thought about moving!)

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

This Year's Model

Wetsuit -- O'Neill Heat 6/5/4 --new;

diver -- MD 54 -- older.

My Girl Motley

Nineteen-and-a-half . . . .

"Kiss My Ab"

Simple shot of an abalone gripping the underside of a rock up in Mendocino waters. Just anticipating some free diving coming up. The non-dramatic elements, like this, please me to no end.

Now, this abalone is undersized, in legal terms, about 5 or 6 inches across that shell, I'd guess.  (I'm holding the camera quite close here.)  And, while I learned to dive while "chasing abalone", as we used to joke, I tend to look and appreciate and not take these days.  Good eating, yes, but also good thriving.

"Kiss my ab" was the motto we'd throw at each other while abalone-diving.   The good old days.  (You know, driving three hours and then limiting out in 10 minutes of water-time.   Or, better, taking our time to find the best abalone we could there off Salt Point or Kruse Ranch, imitating the harbor seals in the surge channels, diving deep into the kelp again and again, and dealing with those rocky shore exits, no matter how much the swell had risen.)  Those days were too short and too few, but golden while they lasted, silver in memory.  I'll toast those days -- and my dive buddy Keith -- with some rum in the evening after the next time I go free diving, and I'll go free diving soon just to be toasting those days, that friend.

Motley: Companion

Motley: 19+ years-of-age; 7 lbs. (down from 14 at her prime); sore and sleepy.
Still a beautiful bundle of love.  Demanding, yes, but she's earned it.

Pacific Swimming On A Grey Day

Went swimming off Lindamar Beach, Pacifica CA, with the surfers. Mask & snorkel; fins; wetsuit; squid-lid; camera. Visibility, as you'd expect at a sandy beach, was almost nil in the water.

Four porpoises cruised through the line-ups, though I didn't get any shots myself. Two were within a dozen feet of me, but I didn't have the camera ready in time.

Have to do better next time.

Age is a number, just a number, they say.  Just the passage of time, wayward time.

I say, time to wend my way back into shape.

Hey Nineteen

Happy Nineteenth Birthday to Motley-girl.

(Kudos to Steely Dan for the title and a good song.)

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.

Once A Boy

Memory Alley . . . .

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Dogfish

Felt good though.

Self-Portrait #52:
Kealakekua Bay, Big Island, Hawaii.
8/4/13.

Just Shy Of Fifty-Two

I've outlived Keats, Shelley, and Byron by a considerable margin with not all that much to show for it.

The heat is on, then, to make the second half-century count.  I embrace the challenge.

Lines: evidence of time passing, though not of any mere passive passage of time.  Maps to the country of character, of mishap and what-have-you.  A lack of sunscreen, certainly; plenty of squinting into the sun, commuting, driving across bridges, kayaking and diving out in the glare.  Pool-time and sea-time too: dried skin from the chlorine and salt.  And all that reading, of course, the concentration above all those pages . . . .  And yet, and this is something I wear with pride: more smiles than anything, frankly.  There's an aspiration, don't you think?  Crease your face with good will and cheer, if you dare.  (I'm smiling as I type that.)

There's a poem by Robert Graves that comes to mind, though he was older when he wrote it.  I'll post it in a day or so.

This year I've written at least one poem worth keeping, and that's a fine judgment, a fine declaration.  More would be better, but then that's homework to be dealt with in the next few months.

Just now, right now, I am toasting all of us with a bit of Bushmills.  Carry on, and live as large as you can.

May the devil . . . oh, you know.  And, here's to King Brian in the interim.  I'm drinking Irish, after all.

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.

Seamus Heaney's "In The Attic"

IN THE ATTIC

1.
Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the crosstrees
Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him
But still green water and clean bottom sand,

The ship aground, the canted mast far out
Above a seafloor where striped fish pass in shoals—
And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead
Appears to rise again . . . “But he was dead enough,”
The story says, “being both shot and drowned.”

2.
A birch tree planted twenty years ago
Comes between the Irish Sea and me
At the attic skylight, a man marooned

In his own loft, a boy
Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,
Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced

By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,
Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most
Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.

3.
Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma
Of hallway linoleum, Grandfather now appears
Above me just back from the matinée,

His voice awaver like the draft-prone screen
They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier.
“And Isaac Hands,” he asks, “was Isaac in it?”

His memory of the name awaver, too,
His mistake perpetual, once and for all,
Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.

4.
As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness

Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

--Seamus Heaney,

Human Chain, 
Faber and Faber: London, 2010.

Barry Lopez: "River Notes" and Questing

I have been crippled by my age, by what I have known, as well as by my youth, by what I have yet to learn, in all these inquiries.  It has taken me years, which might have been spent (by someone else) seeking something greater, in some other place.  I have sought only you.  Enough.  I wish to know you, and you will not speak.  

--Barry Lopez,
from River Notes: The Dance of Herons

I can't say enough how much this slim volume mattered, how much it made complex, made even more emotional and even more intricately verbal my relationship with nature and story, when I first discovered River Notes in Moe's Books of Berkeley, CA, so long ago in 1980.

On this recent rereading -- and River Notes is a book I reread more or less each year, haphazardly, piece by piece over all the months of the year -- I realized how much his chapter "The Salmon" prepared me for the art and artistry of Andy Goldsworthy and for so many of my own efforts in clay amidst sea and creek.

I've witnessed this writer giving a talk and reading one of his stories at least once --"The Mappist," at the Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafael -- and I took this rather intimate opportunity (such a small venue, a somewhat select gathering) to thank Barry Lopez for his body of work.  I'm glad I overcame my natural diffidence to do so.

The passage above spoke to me when I was a mere youth, not even 20, and speaks to me now, a bit over 50.  I like the appositive defining of age in terms of knowing, in terms of what we don't understand and of what we do, as well as the sad, even bitter tone.  Loss breathes through the passage, through most of the book, and Lopez's voicing of that theme, that truth, caught my ear, and the ear of my soul (if you will), even if I didn't--perhaps, still don't--truly understand wherein that sense of loss resides, takes form.  Recently, I have read an interview with Barry Lopez in which he reveals that the writing of River Notes, though a sequence of fictional narratives, was deeply informed by the death of his mother.

The book takes us from the seaside, the mouth of the river, upstream until we reach the headwaters, the source.  The last chapter, be warned, is entitled "Drought."  I'll hold off saying more, for I'd rather awaken curiosity and intimate mystery.  I have taught two chapters in particular a dozen times, I think: "The Bend" and "The Rapids."  Here's another passage from "The Salmon":

There is never, he reflected, a moment of certainty, only the illusion.   And as he worked among the rocks in the middle of the river he thought on this deeply, so deeply that had his movements not been automatic he would have fallen off the rocks and into the river and been borne away.

In the summer light, even with the coolness of the water welling up around him in the air, thinking was all he was capable of; and this distraction left him exhausted and unbalanced so that at the end of the day the physical exhaustion he felt was something he lowered himself into, as into a hot bath.  He pondered gentleness often.  And he tried to pry (hefting the stones, conscious of the resonance between the idea in his mind and the work of his hands) into mysteries which remained as implacable as the faces of the stones.


Thank you, again, Barry Holstun Lopez.

River Notes: The Dance of Herons
A Bard Book / Avon Books: New York,  November, 1980.

Voyage-charm: sculpture mix; floating blue glazing; matte finish.   

Narcissus At Sea? Diving Like A Duck?

The myth of Narcissus: fatuous overly-self-absorbed fool looking into a body of water and being pulled under by a water-nymph--as I'm recalling from memory, for it's been a while since I've read my Ovid . . . .  (How long can I really go without checking whether I've remembered correctly or not?  I may have to time this one.)  Wait.  Am I confused by the tale of Hylas and that sexy Pre-Raphaelite painting with all those water-nymphs I've got posted in the garage next to the posters of the famous Pre-Raphaelite mermaid, of Xena, and of Scully lifting weights?  What about N's metamorphosis into a flower?  (Tick, tick, tick.)

Or, to take the myth more seriously: looking deeply for self in any reflective pool, body of water, mirror, lens of the camera . . . .   Note the consequences, the dangers, of paying the wrong kind of attention, of distracting yourself, of inattention . . . .  I'm not trying to revise away the cautionary value of the original tale, but what can you see if you never look?

Unmythologically, these last few years I've been watching the signs of age--the lines, the gray and white hair amidst the brown--with something like fascination.  (I compare the gray in my hair to that in my father's hair, at different ages, in different photographs.)  Sometimes I fight the feeling of aging, working out harder, pushing myself physically and mentally, taking greater risks, and so forth.  

With my recent and 51st birthday--those three seventeens--I've been working to get back into shape, working to do the things that make me feel alive, no matter the years or the lines or the aching muscles.  Today, I put in two useful, playful hours in the kayak, paddling fairly steadily, reacquainting myself with North Coast kayaking, attuning myself to the light swell amidst rock gardens, practicing my surf landings on a mellow day, tasting the salt.  (I'm more anxious about sharky conditions, though I'm not sure if that's a measure of foolishness or wisdom finally kicking in.)

I'm a bit of a fool, whichever way you replay the tale, the myth, but that's all part of life, isn't it?  I'd far rather be a bit foolish than so many other things a person could be without any tincture of Puck in their veins.  

Dive like a duck, and keep on paddling.  My current foolish motto.

Kayaking off the Sonoma Coast.

Racking up the boat after a good workout.   Blind Beach, Goat Rock State Park, Sonoma County, CA.

(The marks on my face are from a recent visit to the dermatologist, who burned off the developing skin cancer spots on my temples and my cheeks again.  A life in the sun has joys and consequences too; don't forget to use that sunscreen!  I slathered three or four times today and wore a hat . . . most of the time.)

Time-Travel: A Mere 34 or So

Or, 2 X 17 versus 3 X 17.

I was probably 34 in this shot, and I looked like a child, don't you think? That's Motley as a kitten! She's 17+ now.

Here, I'm 51 now, and you can read the trail of years in the lines and in the gray and white on my head.  I've gotten quite a bit of sun here too, but that's all good, a sign of summer and outdoor activities.  Slather, slather, with the sunscreen.  (6 feet tall and 170 pounds, so that's not so bad; I've dropped 19 pounds since December 30th.  And, I could be in a bit better muscular shape, but that's what summer's for too.)

Just keeping track.

Book review or preview or tempting taste to be posted manana.

Pinnochio as an Old Man

Mask: Old Pinnochio.

Sculpture mix; terra sigillata.

I made this piece back in 2001 or 2002, I believe.

Banks' "Raw Spirit": Making a Splash

I've been reading celebrated Scottish author Iain Banks' non-fiction Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram. I felt I needed a bit of background and further knowledge of my current favorite beverage--Scotch--and this book seemed a lively entry-point and initial tour. So far, it more than suits. (And, I'll be looking for the novels by Banks that I haven't yet read.)

Today, I want to share a passage that has nothing to do with alcohol, though it does involve high spirits. Enjoy.

At Glenaladale, despite the fact I am 49 and Les very nearly is--Les rarely allows an opportunity to pass when he can remind me I am a whole three months older than he is--we spend a significant amount of time and effort skipping stones, trying to hit large stones with small ones while the former are in flight, throwing stones at logs, using thin or circular stones--spun--in our attempts to produce duck's farts, and sweatily heaving the largest rocks we can manage up to the tops of small cliffs so we can throw them into the water and so produce Really Big Splashes.

(Look, growing up is about this sort of stuff no longer being the only way you're allowed to have fun, not about having to give it up altogether.)

I've always thought so, and it's good to find my own sentiments in a book. Wouldn't you agree?

Make some splashes of your own.

Cheers!