Reflecting on Self (and Selfies)

This wasn't a selfie, but a driver's license.  A current conversation with a friend:

One old driver's license, I showed it to a very good friend and said, "Look at this. I look dead in the photo."

Old Friend said, "It takes ten years off you."

I said, "Ten years off dead--what's that?"

OF smiled, wryly.


(OF always keeps me down to earth.)

McIlvanney: "The Language of My Living"

Here's a passage from one of William McIlvanney's novels that I've always liked.  The juxtaposition of humility and arrogance, the mix of what others think versus what the narrator knows, has stuck with me, has resonated over the years.  I recall giving this passage to a colleague, for I felt that the passage conveyed both his affect and his self-understanding, but he just smiled as he read, so I wasn't given a full commentary.  I relate and don't quite relate to what's voiced here, but it always resonates.

Here, read for yourself:

'Well,' she said.  'I'd better be going.'

I looked at her and nodded.  She smiled and pointed to the ground behind the cars.  There were tread-marks on the grass.

'Those,' she said.  'They'll always remind me of Scott.  Him and me here.  I wonder how long they'll last.  What is all this about for you really?  I mean.  What is it you're doing exactly?'

'I don't know exactly.  I suppose I'm trying to make my own peace with Scott's death.  I suppose this is how I do it.'

'How do I do it?'

She started suddenly to cry.

'Damn,' she said.  'Will you hold me one time for him?'

I crossed and held her.  It was a small, chaste ceremony of mutual loss.  Her hair in my face gave off a melancholy sweetness.  Clenched to her, I felt the tremors of her body, how the edifice of beauty was undermined from within with deep forebodings.  In the embrace I experienced our shared nature--so much questionable confidence containing so much undeniable panic.  That was me, too.  Some of my colleagues and bosses liked to say I was completely arrogant.  They misunderstood the language of my living.  Arrogance should be comparative.  Humility was total.  Faced with simplistic responses to life that tried to fit my living into themselves, I was arrogant.  I seemed to meet them every day and I knew I was more than they said I was.  But when I sat down inside myself in the darkness of a night, I knew nothing but my smallness.  I knew it now and shared it with hers.

--William McIlvanney,
Strange Loyalties,
A Harvest Book,
Harcourt Brace and Company,
1991

This is the third Laidlaw book, and the other two are worth looking for.  This one shifts the narration from third-person to first-person (and for excellent reasons).

Rum Reflections

When I was in my teens, my 20s, and my 30s, I wanted to rescue people. When I was in my 40s, I wanted to rescue myself. At the edge of 55, I'm still committed to a little of both, but I am also fairly sure that the matter is largely out of my hands.

I'd like to help out, in any event, as the case may be.

TBT: Water / Damage

A 2008 shot, from Hawaii, and the water got into that disposable camera, but that's okay.

I'll never be that young again--and, hey, eight years ago is younger--but I yearn and aim to be in as good a shape as I was that year.  I swam and swam and swam that year.

Aiming to make the rest of 2016 a water-year.

Kayaking: Whales Feeding Near the Jetty

Folks on the jetty were treated to a feeding show for over two hours that I witnessed with whales feeding within 10-30 yards. Jeff and I were about to head back into the harbor at the end of the afternoon paddle when two humpbacks in tandem lunged forth and then another humpback spouted right behind us! Too cool!

We didn't get any shots of that finale, but here are two more of my shots of a humpback feeding a little earlier.

"You Too Are Mortal"

Wasn't that what the official anti-hubris clerk kept whispering into the Great Emperor Darius' ear?  Or was that Xerxes?  ("Remember the Greeks"?  "Give the Hellespont 300 lashes"?)***

More appropriately, The Humble Potter's Handiwork.  Or, Look Ma, Hands of Clay!

Ugly pot.

I let this one dry too much before trying to trim it, and then I failed to secure it properly to the wheel so that it went flying off during that belated attempt at trimming, though I did catch it on the bounce. You can see stoneware clay improperly mixed with this Navajo wheel /stoneware hybrid at the rim, a failed stamp on the side, and that odd, flawed bottom.

I did manage to put a decent foot (that you can't see). The glazing will be a crucial step.

Just a run of the mill off-piece, truth to tell.  I like to try to save such pieces too.


***A reliable source nudges me towards the Romans and the triumph as the source of the memento mori. 

(I thank EHS and trust the correction -- of course, of course -- but I also continue to resist checking, despite how easy that would be in this day and this age.  There's a perverse pleasure in quoting or citing from memory.)

Passages: "A Humbler and A Prouder Mind"

Here's a resonant passage from a historical novel, which I share for itself and as a model of the way I cherry-pick my way through what I read, finding the scenes, the moments, the words that I can appreciate or use in some way, in any way.

The context of the passage involves a formal occasion in the offing, a crisis about appropriate attire, and friendship. I pick the specific words here for the insight into character.

For his part, Tobias would have been content to go in a sack, or even (the weather being what it was) nothing at all; for he had both a humbler and a prouder mind than Jack--humbler in that he did not suppose that anyone would notice him at any time, and prouder in that he did not suppose that he could be improved in any way by gold lace and taffety. But he was very much concerned at Jack's distress . . . .

--Patrick O'Brian, The Western Shore

I believe--though I'd have to check after all these years--that The Western Shore was a precursor to the famed Aubrey and Maturin novels. We certainly get a pair of friends at the heart of this novel and of that series.