Welcome to the Labyrinth

Happy Autumn!

Clay mask: 2013
Rudi's apples.

Garage Art: Davenport's Paragraph, Ayrton's Golden Hive, and Hilary's Bees

Guy Davenport, in his literary scholarship, is the model I should should should have found when I was wrestling with the dissertation-daemon.

This was a mere aside in the essay, but what a rich paragraph, yes?

Please seek out Guy Davenport's scholarship and his translations (not his fiction, I say), and you will be rewarded by living, breathing, sharing erudition, especially regarding Modernism in Art and Literature, the Classical/Primitive, and archetypal aspects of how literature works as well, no matter the period.

Oh, and he's just a great practical and generous-minded reader of texts.

I have that quotation--and others worthy of attention, posted on a wall in my garage.  When I am working, or working out, out there, I often reread such words, such a paragraph, with renewed enjoyment and even wonder.

Daedalus at Work

"Aptness to purpose: one definition of beauty." --Ezra Pound.

Or, as a different caption:

THE MYTHS

Italy and Greece lay in ruins,

inhabited by beasts: the Minotaur

in his labyrinth,the scrush of his hide

against its walls; the blinded Cyclops

groping for Ulysses among the sheep.

Dad taught us all the myths.

Up on Mount Olympus

people disguised themselves

as animals. It was like that then.

It's not like that now.

Back then you were half animal

if your father was a god.

--Chase Twichell

from Dog Language

Touchstone: The Testament of Daedalus

Consider this quotation from Michael Ayrton's The Testament of Daedalus:

What there is in me of poesis rests in my fingertips and in my eyes, but because the poem exists in the thing I make, and not in me, it comes to me in the act of discovery. I make votives of one sort and another and celebrate possibilities in gold and bronze and other materials. In the making of things and especially in the making of images, lies an act of conquest which is sufficient exercise of power for a proper man.

I put this passage next to Seamus Heaney's "The Diviner" (and next to various parts of Mary Renault's The King Must Die and The Mask of Apollo) when I think about teaching, about art, about craft, and about ambition. The books I haven't written yet; the stories I tell, have told, will tell.

Ayrton, Michael. The Testament of Daedalus. London: Robin Clark, 1991.

Renault, Mary.  The King Must Die.  New York: Pocket Books, 1965.

---.  The Mask of Apollo.   New York: Pantheon, 1966.