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!)

Body Language

Captain:
sending me signals.
Those ears back, and that tail like a metronome.

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!)

William Finnegan: Learning Curves

Here's a paragraph from Finnegan's excellent memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life:

The ocean itself was another story.  I waded into the waves at Will Rogers, diving under pummeling lines of foam, thrashing toward the main sandbar, where the brown walls of the big waves stood and broke.  I couldn't get enough of their rhythmic violence.  They pulled you toward them like hungry giants.  They drained the water off the bar as they drew to their full, awful height, then pitched forward and exploded.  From underwater, the concussion was deeply satisfying.  Waves were better than anything in books, better than movies, better even than a ride at Disneyland, because with them the charge of danger was uncontrived.  It was real.  And you could learn how to maneuver around it, how long to wait on the bottom, how to swim outside, beyond the break, and, eventually how to bodysurf.  I learned actual bodysurfing technique in Newport, watching and imitating Becket and his friends, but I got comfortable in waves at Will Rogers.

--Barbarian Days -- page 71

Penguin Press, New York: 2015

Whiskey Friday

Or, The Devil Is In The Details

Body English:
sculpture mix; transparent brown and shino glazing.
20-minute exercise.

Body English: Musings on the Beautiful and Sublime

Let's quote Edmund Burke on "Gradual Variation":

BUT as perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of angular parts, so their parts never continue long in the same right line.  They vary their direction every moment, and they change under the eye by a deviation continually carrying on, but for whose beginning or end you will find it difficult to ascertain a point. The view of a beautiful bird will illustrate this observation. Here we see the head increasing insensibly to the middle, from whence it lessens gradually until it mixes with the neck; the neck loses itself in larger swell, which continues to the middle of the body, when the whole decreases again to the tail; the tail takes a new direction; but it soon varies its new course: it blends again with the other parts; and the line is perpetually changing, above, below, upon every side.  In this description I have before me the idea of a dove; it agrees very well with most of the conditions of beauty. It is smooth and downy; its parts are (to use that expression) melted into one another; you are presented with no sudden protuberance through the whole, and yet the whole is continually changing. 

Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface, continual, and yet hardly perceptible at any point, which forms one of the great constituents of beauty? 


Selections from A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
-- from Part II: Section XV, in particular

Edmund Burke, 1757.

Body English in Green

Clay: soldate;
glaze: oribe.

Body Language

Clay play:
body parts.

Clay Dreams: Torso

Body English:

sculpture mix; transparent brown and shino glazing.

20-minute exercise.

Kennelly: "A Singing Wound"

WHAT?

'What is my body?' I asked the man made of rain.
'A temple,' he said, 'and the shadow thrown
by the temple, dreamfield, painbag, lovescene,
hatestage, miracle jungle under the skin.

Cut it open.  Pardon the apparition.'

'What is my blood?' I dared then.
'Her pain birthing you and me,
the slow transfiguration of pain
into knowing what it means to be

climbing the hill of blood, trawling the poisoned sea.'

'Where have I been when they say I have returned?'
'Where beginning and end
combine to make a picture, compose a sound
reminding you that love is a singing wound

and I could be your friend.'

--BRENDAN KENNELLY,

from "The Man Made of Rain"

Collected in
Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems, 1960 - 2004
Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

Body By The Numbers

Clay: Figuring

Anatomy class.

More Frog Than Fish, More Log Than Frog

I am just back from the pool, where I was more frog than fish, and more log than frog, I think.  Still, another start toward fitness and joy.

Wisdom Sleeps

 Wisdom: sculpture mix, unglazed; copper wire.

John Buchan: "A Barndoor Fowl"?

Here are two paragraphs from the very end of the first chapter --"Lost Gods"-- of John Buchan's The Island of Sheep, published in 1936, that I'm finding resonant.  Richard Hannay, of The Thirty-Nine Steps, is our narrator, and he's reached his fifties . . . .


I continued my journey -- I was going down t the Solent to see about laying up my boat, for I had lately taken to a mild sort of yachting -- in an odd frame of mind.  I experienced what was rare with me -- a considerable dissatisfaction with life.  Lombard had been absorbed into the great, solid, complacent middle class which he had once despised, and was apparently happy with it.  The man whom I had thought of as a young eagle was content to be a barndoor fowl.  Well, if he was satisfied, it was no business of mine, but I had a dreary sense of the fragility of hopes and dreams.

It was about myself that I felt most dismally.  Lombard's youth had gone, but so had my own.  Lombard was settled like Moab on his lees, but so was I.  We all make pictures of ourselves that we try to live up to, and mine had always been of somebody hard and taut who could preserve to the last day of life a decent vigour of spirit.  Well, I had kept my body in fair training by exercise, but I realized that my soul was in danger of fatty degeneration.  I was too comfortable.  I had all the blessings a man can have, but I wasn't earning them.  I tried to tell myself that I deserved a little peace and quiet, but I got no good from that reflection, for it meant that I had accepted old age.  What were my hobbies and my easy days but the consolations of senility?  I looked at my face in the mirror in the carriage back, and it disgusted me, for it reminded me of my recent companions who had pattered about golf.  Then I became angry with myself.  'You are a fool,' I said.  'You are becoming soft and elderly, which is the law of life, and you haven't the grit to grow old cheerfully.'  That put a stopper on my complaints, but it left me dejected and only half convinced.

--John Buchan, The Island of Sheep

Moya Cannon: "Emptinesses Which Hold"

NAUSTS

There are emptinesses which hold

the leveret's form in spring grass;

the tern's hasty nest in the shore pebbles;

nausts in a silvery island inlet.

Boat-shaped absences,

they slope to seaward,

parallel as potato drills,

curved a little for access --

a mooring stone, fore and aft,

and a flat stone high up

to guide the tarred bow

or a hooker, pucan, or punt

when the high tide lifted it

up and in, then ebbed,

leaving it tilted to one side,

in its shingly nest.

--Moya Cannon

'WE ARE WHAT WE EAT'

That's what she said,

'Every seven years

almost every cell in our body is replaced.'

I thought of her own art,

how faithfully rendered

the miraculous lines, the miraculous lives,

of feather and bone --

and I remembered an oak rib,

honeycombed with shipworm,

given as a keepsake to another friend,

who had sailed from Dublin to the Faroes

in a wooden fishing hooker,

which was later rebuilt.

These boats are rebuilt, renamed,

until every plank and rib

has been replaced so often

that nothing remains

except the boat's original lines

and a piece of silver,

hidden under the mast.

--Moya Cannon

Salvage Work (small): sculpture mix; blue slip; clear glazing; copper wire; twig; twine.

Montaigne's "Grotesques and Monstrous Bodies"

The opening sentences from Montaigne's essay "On Friendship" strike a chord:

As I was observing the way in which a painter in my employment goes about his work, I felt tempted to imitate him.  He chooses the best spot, in the middle of each wall, as the place for a picture, which he elaborates with all his skill; and the empty space all round he fills with grotesques; which are fantastic paintings with no other charm than their variety and strangeness.  And what are these things of mine, indeed, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together from sundry limbs, with no definite shape, and with no order, sequence, or proportion except by chance.

--Michel de Montaigne, 

(translated by J.M. Cohen, Penguin Books, 1958)

"The Sea In The Head": Two More From Kennelly's "Islandman"

When will we permit the sea in the head

To flow as it will?

The moon has laws but no theories.

It sends out a cold, golden call

And hangs in suspense for the answer

We fear to give.

I would release the sea in the head.

I would let it live,

Pour through the brain's darkest caves,

Out through the eyes,

Touching the distant skin of other 

Minds and bodies.

Who will say which is more real --

My hands on the sea,

The strange flesh or the hurt roar

That is part of me?

Who will say which is more felt --

Loneliness

Or the desolation written on stones

When the sea withdraws?

I have learned to live both night and day

Uncertain of day and night.

This beautiful island is poised forever

In a dubious light.

--Brendan Kennelly,

Two poems from his "Islandman," a book or sequence of poems that  I've pointed to and quoted from before here and here.

Borrowed, with respect, from this volume:

Brendan Kennelly, Breathing Spaces: Early Poems, 
Bloodaxe Books: Newcastle upon Tyne, 1992.

Anatomy Class: Full Figures

Here are full-figured shots of the palm-sized clay pieces I featured via partial shots in "Anatomy Class: Details".  There were 30-minute gestural exercises with live models; I probably made these pieces back in 2002 or 2003, at the latest.

Anatomy Class: sculpture mix, unglazed; copper wire; twigs.

Below I offer two shots of each figure with slightly varied lighting.  The different directions of the light source highlights slightly different features of the pieces.

I can point out numerous flaws in each piece, but I will remain silent.  I like the pieces, particularly as three-dimensional documents of my efforts to understand anatomy and clay in combination at that point in time.  I'm posting these shots of old pieces as a prod to self, a push to make that trip to the studio and work a bit.

Anticipation