A Ridiculous Injury

This early afternoon I was in too much of a hurry, rushing from a classroom down a hill via sloping walkways punctuated by steps and walkways and steps.  I felt I needed to hustle to get materials from my truck in the lower parking lot beyond the soccer field before my office hours.

So, I was rushing downhill, not really watching my footing, and right before the second set of steps my right foot came down on a small pinecone that turned under my ankle and my ankle turned with it, rolling.  I had such momentum going forward, a heavy pack of books on my back and another bag of papers and files on my shoulder, that I could not just stop.  Instead, gravity was sending me forward without any gravitas whatsoever.  I was going to fall, but falling down the set of steps seemed too fraught--I feared for my teeth and my skull, so I leapt and ran, lunging and launching myself even as I dropped one bag.

I "ran" down the steps, barely keeping my feet, that ankle protesting, ran down the steps and the next ramp--impossible to halt until I had run out all that momentum, had jumped a flowerbed, and had landed, sprawling on the sloping lawn.  So lucky in this mild misfortune.

Luckily, the wind was not blowing, so the papers that had fallen and scattered from that bag had not gone far.  One witness to my running-fall insisted on helping me gather the materials, insisted on telling me where the Health Center was.  I hobbled to my office time, late now.

Hours later, after ibuprofen, I am icing the ankle again and, also, icing a dram of rum.

I had to hurry, you know?


4/19/19 Further reflections:


The whole thing felt like one of those dreams in which gravity doesn't quite exist, dreams in which we run and leap and find ourselves too far from earth, too far from safety . . . and then gravity returns.  It was both hilarious and humiliating, both scary and beyond fear or thought.  I am glad I kept going, you know, for anything less would have resulted in injury, serious falling, and the strain on my ankle is from that first rolling.  Lucky me, seriously.

Also, when I limped past the scene of the crime this morning, I was chagrined to find that the whole thing -- from pinecone to lawn-sprawl -- only comprised about ten yards of territory.  And, the second "ramp" was actually flat pavement, though leading to another flight of steps, which made the flowerbed hop (not "vault," as I first wrote) and lawn-roll mandatory.

P.S.  About three weeks ago, I strained the other ankle by not paying sufficient attention, so there's a lesson for me, for me.

Notebook: Dive Thoughts

1.    Scribble, scribble, Mr. Gibbon:
A box of saltines,
Two cans of sardines,
And a bottle of Irish:
I feel ready.

2.  Wearing the 20-pound weightbelt
three hours straight diving and paddling
may have been a mistake--I realized,
as the first muscle spasms started in my back,
40 minutes out from Moody's in Mendocino--
but every diver knows, whether weightbelt or tank,
it's lighter if you never take it off.

3.  Why do I keep putting
these clay pieces underwater?
I don't quite know,
but I do and I do.

4.  See photos.

5.  Maybe free diving wasn't such a good idea with this temporary crown in my mouth.

Step Sideways Towards A Truth

I have always preferred Herodotus to Thucydides and Byron to Wordsworth.

That meant, that means, according to grad school criteria (don't you know), I am damned to frivolity, to the frivolous.

At least by association.

(Or, so they say.)

Terrible that I let old school judgments color my own thinking, my own self, now.
Hard to resist, I think.

My other response is to give in, to agree, via an essential insight:
ham-bone connected to the brain-bone.

Kelp and Wire: Old Art

Fool's Gold; Or, The Admonition

How good is the book in your head--if it isn't on the page?
What book?
I don't see a book.
In the head or in the heart?

Page, page, page--that's what matters.

Story of my life.

Read less; write more.
Keep on reading, but write more.
Get it down; revise it.
Do the thing that needs to be done.

Voices in my head.

I'd quote my father, but then I'd just be looking for pity or mercy or something.

Right now the book in my head is a mixture of Homer and Robert E. Howard, John Fowles and Robert Stone, edited by Hemingway. All of which ought to make very little sense at all.

Not on the page.
Doesn't count.

I picked up a new used copy of James Lee Burke's Heaven's Prisoners from Pegasus Downtown yesterday, and now the book falls open to the exact page I was looking for--the previous owner/reader had my same hang-ups, I'm guessing--page 262:

"But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."

Ouch.

As one of my students once said when faced with this same passage: "No mercy."

Today's Profile Pics, Annotated

Today, but so 80s.

Practical #1.

Practical #2.

Earnest -- or goofy?

Focus on the water.

Cold water reveals your (that is, my) age.

Up top again.

June 7th, 2015.

A silly exercise in characterization?
A characteristic exercise in silliness?

Foolery and Rembrandt's Faint Echo

Friend:    Matt, you are absolutely the master of the selfie!

Self:    Well, that's not a thing to be proud of, entirely, but --hey-- Rembrandt created almost a hundred selfies, and he had to paint each one. My point is not that I'm a Rembrandt, but if such were good enough for him, it's golden for me. I'm the easiest model I have to work with, and I have fun with the lines, the shadows, and the (oft silly) scenes. Tomorrow, there'll probably be one with me in my new leather medieval English helmet. How can I resist?

Friend:   If I posted the ones I've tried taking, you'd see why yours are so good.  Looking forward to the helmet.

Self:    Oh, I delete so many. Oddly enough, the first few tend to be the best ones.

Aside: Watching myself age seems hardly the epitome of vanity.  The posting is a measure, a formality, a witnessing more than any sort of declaration.  Besides, who is watching?  This blog doesn't get that much traffic, frankly, and if my self-portraits bother anyone, well, they don't have to look, right?  In part, my natural diffidence has been encouraged to the point of stultification, or so it has seemed in the past, and here I'm countering that; in part, self-portraiture seems honest, an honest art, and this blog is my canvas, after all.  (Should I create a spectrum to chart Vanity/Hubris, Art/Artifice, Foolery/Foolishness?)  Finally, I also use this blog as a way of auditioning for further pursuits, attempting to woo the muses to help me with that novel, those short stories, or that documentary non-fiction; practice-sessions.  Clay feels freer than words do, and yet that doesn't feel quite right.  Posting images, self and non-self, is a way of seeing my way towards the words that matter, I am hoping.

I mean what I said above about lines and shadows and silliness and the easiest model to work with.

Also, if you look back upward at the first self-portrait I've provided by Rembrandt, will you not admire the work with lines and shadows and maybe a bit of silliness there too?  I admire so much of Rembrandt's work, and I hadn't appreciated that drawing until I posted it for this entry.  Witnessing comes in various forms, not all of them self-serving.

(I'm tempted to remake that last sentence into something metaphorical with a tree of many branches, but if I do, I just may end up hanging myself in effigy there, and I don't quite want to do that.)

Most times, I don't quite even look like myself.  Do you know what I mean?  That self in my head, that self I'm conjuring up and projecting from the images of earlier days, childhood and youth and what-have-you.  That's what I am tracking, keeping track of, witnessing.  The syntax of self over time and through time.  A quixotic quest, no doubt.  And one worthless to all but the wandering tracker.

Previously, I've reflected and quoted Fowles on the reflex toward self-representation, even excessive self-representation, as a move from subjectivity toward objectivity, from the first (and fallible) person toward the third (outsider) person, (which you may find in a link here in "Don Quixote's Mirror").

I find the grammar of self to be almost as amusing as the syntax of identity and authenticity, but that comment belongs to a separate blog entry at another time.

*Prof. Andrew Griffin taught me of Rembrandt's many self-representations in office-hour conversations in my undergraduate days.  His energy and his style have helped to shape my teaching style, among other things.  I owe him a debt I haven't yet repaid, and at this late date, I am not sure how.

The images in this entry are all photos of reproductions from and of Christopher Wright's Rembrandt: Self-Portraits, The Viking Press: New York, 1982.

Jack Spicer: Of Fools, Goddesses, Heroes, Oceans, Love, and Memory

ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN

Any fool can get into an ocean   
But it takes a Goddess   
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
    water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

--Jack Spicer

(Thanks, JP, for the suggestion.)

"The Armor of Your Virtue"

THE ARMOR OF YOUR VIRTUE

Coffee cups, pastry plates,
Corner booths, and study dates--
The rushing fool who hesitates
Lately finds that his angel is lost.

Should you ever address such divinity
With this litany of virtuous sinning?
Do you dare press this unsuitable case
In the bare face of a model affinity
On the strength of such illusory
And unsubstantiated winning?

Not proven, not proven, not proven--
Do you rue the imprudent fiction,
The innocent, illicit diction?
You ration out your conquests in respect
To consequence, conscience, and blundering.
To a Scotch verdict, no contest you've pled
To govern such botched, besotted hungering.
Never guilty quite, you oddly-kiltered martyr,
With the armor of your virtue left
Virtually without a dent.

Back to the coffee cups, pastry plates,
Corner booths, and study dates--
The stammering fool fails to prevaricate;
Another angel-- oh, hesitate--is lost.

How do you ever qualify for happiness?
How do you ever quantify your joy?
Where's the form for furthering matters
Or the pattern to know and avoid?
Chipped glass, stalled payment,
Standing traffic, walking the pavement--
Till the pang of passing passion's freshly frosted
In an ashen hour of friendly fashioning.

Coffee cups, pastry plates,
Corner booths, and study dates--
The fearful fool bravely hesitates,
Though fortune favors a state of grace,
And finds his angel is lost.

Finally, you fear shyly she will be offended.
If only she could condescend to be flattered
By the curtained confession still to be amended,
Still to be shuttered and shattered.

Coffee cups, pastry plates,
Corner booths, and study dates--
The brazen fool still hesitates,
For fortune favors a state of grace,
As he finds his angel is lost.

--Matt Duckworth


(I wrote this poem back in 1996 on my 35th birthday.  Lightly edited recently.)

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.)

Roman Holidays?

Or, CLASSICAL DOGGEREL (circa 1995)
     And "doggerel" means fairly bad poetry, or wannabe poetry, or something that looks a bit like poetry, but isn't quite.  I've written my share of sea-doggerel.  Here's a piece of classical doggerel from an old notebook . . . though at the bottom of the blog-entry, there's a chorus from a really cool dysfunctional would-be love-song: "Rome Fell."

NOR SWIMS*
     Neither reads
A fool the old
Roman gibe
But Caesar
Swam, wrote
Books, scrolls
Historical, political
Who knew
The Rubicon, the die
Once only, but cowards
Cleopatra loved
Egyptian grain
Against odds
King Nicomedes 
Too, but after
Laurels, bald
Truths too few
Posterity, can't
Plan for it:
Paine's idea,
Burke agreed.
Julius, wily
Julius: he
Flourished
For a while.

--I just found this doggerel in an old notebook from grad school, the notebook itself entitled "Dioscuri" and dated "1995."  I've lightly edited this piece, something that had grown out of my reading in Julius Caesar, of course, but Byron too--however unnamed--as well as Shakespeare, Talbot Mundy, English Romantic era political theory, and Roman history.  Barton's Sorrows of the Ancient Romans is probably the source of the Roman proverb, the Roman definition of a fool*--He neither reads nor swims--which I've presented previously here.

About that time I also wrote a song called "Rome Fell," but I can't quite recall nor find those old lyrics.
I can sing the chorus for you:

ROME FELL
Like I fell for you
ROME FELL
You can walk through the ruins
ROME FELL
Empires never last
ROME FELL
Who cares about the past?

(REPEAT!)

(REPEAT!)