Shark Dream

A couple nights ago I had one of those dreams . . . . Keith was still alive, and we were free diving somewhere down south, for we had thin wetsuits and no hoods nor gloves. We were swimming about a quarter mile off-shore near a rocky reef that reached up to the surface in places, but not enough to count as an island. At some point, I realize a great white shark is swimming beside me, just appearing, as it were, not bent on attacking or feeding . . . yet. The shark swam beside me, or rather I swam beside the shark, kicking hard yet smoothly to maintain equal speed, not wanting to draw attention to myself by jerking or halting or anything, really. I wanted to warn Keith, to tell him to climb up onto the reef or something, to take care, but I was busy swimming and breathing, for I was using a snorkel, not a tank, and I was trying to keep my eye on the shark the whole time.

The shark leaned closer, swam closer, so I put my left hand out and touched the shark, holding it off, or attempting to, by pressing firmly and smoothly against the creature's side, though I ended up with my hand firmly against the creature's jaw just behind the teeth, the mouth. We swam like that, the shark effortlessly, me straining to maintain smoothness and speed, afraid to pull away, to make any sudden movements. This swimming, my hand against the shark, went on for what seemed like forever, but was probably only a minute or two. I wanted to warn Keith; I wanted to break away and climb up onto any protection I could; I wanted to kick and swim forever, for this shark was the most powerful creature I'd ever been so close to. Kicking and breathing, now holding my breath as the shark leaned in even further, pushing against my hand, bending my arm, and then my hand slid into the mouth of the shark, and I could feel the teeth tearing into my skin, the shark not yet even biting . . . .

And I woke up, lurching upright, dragging in that lungful of air as if I'd been holding my breath for too long, fully alert, fully freaked, happy to be alive, and unhappy in that dream-way that the long moment with that shark was over already.

A dream, as I said. Anxiety-expression? Longing? Power -- in part?

Ring: "Waves"

A good-luck ring, I'm hoping.

Classic artistry from the Irish metal-workers on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, CA.
You can find their fine work here.

For me, the wave-ring is also a wyrd-ring, the pattern of becoming, of winding and unwinding, that marks the Old English idea and practice of fate, of the world's workings, of past/present/future.

Check the rings and lines of age on my hand too.  I'm reminded of how trees show their life-lines.  Knotwork.  Or, there's a Bruce Sterling novel that I never liked much of a future dystopian universe in which wealthy people could live long, long lives in young and younger bodies, but their hands would give them away -- the signs of aging in the wrinkles and lines of their hands being resistant to the otherwise miraculous drugs to offset mere age -- would give them away, and as an older reader now, as an older man now, I see what he was getting at.

That's cool.  Slipping over the cusp of 2015 into 2016, I think about something the great surfer Fred van Dyke said --in an excellent documentary, David L. Brown's Surfing for Life -- "I'm getting older, and I gotta dig it."

Something like that.  And I am digging it.

(Talk to the hand, if you don't dig it too.)

Alice Jones: "Knots of Possibility"

PAINTING

He'd go down to the basement
wearing his dark blue work shirt,
to the corner of the windowless,
cinder-block room where he had
his canvas propped, and somehow,
after years of being tangled up
in knots of possibility, after
days of talk, after wrestling 
with the angel of Not-painting,
he squeezed a wildly orange
Vermont landscape out of those
bright oily tubes, smeared it,
all its red-leafed, golden blur,
onto the rectangle of cloth
and gesso that had been waiting,
like me, for his stroking hand.

--Alice Jones

from her The Knot,
published by Alice James Books,
Cambridge, MA: 1992.

Identikit

Water, salt;
paper, bound;
clay, wet;
forest, kelp;
beach, jade;
whiskey, Irish;
friends, true.
--April 9, 2008


I just rediscovered this note on a bulletin board in my office. Old notes can pull you into the labyrinth of the past, much like anything -- perhaps everything -- else. (Amongst a myriad of landmarks and turnings, Keith was still alive, for example.) I do have "Identikit" posted in the column to the right, but I realized that this doggerel of self-description lacked a specific place in the body of the blog.

As Keats said in a fragmentary identikit of his own, "See here it is -- I hold it towards you."