Sobriquet

"Hey, hey, Teach.  What's with the clay-head?"

--Not-my-student asking about the prop for Macbeth class today.

Second favorite event after the baby duck on campus.  

Since this was the last day of regular classes and I will be suffering from not-teaching soon, I liked hearing the sobriquet.

Julius, Post-Ides: sculpture mix, pit-fired on Ocean Beach, SF, CA.

Homework

English 46A: Setting Up Paradise Lost 9 & 10 -----– Plus, Quick Quotations

Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”  
--Lord Byron, from Manfred (1816)

A.  Consider Books 9 & 10 of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a tragedy, as a blank verse drama, and what happens?  How can such a conceit aid us in understanding what Milton is doing, what Adam and Eve are doing, what Satan and God are doing?


B.  Who Wrote What?  What Else Ought We To Notice?

=1. Nought is there under heav’ns wide hollownesse,
   That moves more deare compassion of mind,
   Then beautie brought t’unworthy wretchednesse
   Through envies snares or fortunes freakes unkind:
   I whether lately through her brightnesse blind,
   Or through alleageance and fast fealtie,
   Which I do owe umnto all woman kind,
   Feele my heart perst with so great agonie,
When such I see, that all for pittie I could die.

-2. What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds?  Or to be smothered
With cassia?  Or to be shot to death with pearls?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits, and ‘tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways.

-3. Tell fortune of her blindness;
Tell nature of decay;
Tell friendship of unkindness;
Tell justice of delay.
And if they will reply,
Then give them all the lie.

-4. When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least . . . .

-5. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike terror to my fainting soul.

-6. Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear She might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain . . . .

-7. “O place of bliss, renewer of my woes,
Give me accompt, where is my noble fere,
Whom in thy walls thou didst each night enclose,
To other life, but unto me most dear.”

Each stone, alas, that doth my sorrow rue,
Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint.
Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,
In prison pine with bondage and restraint.

And with remembrance of the greater grief
To banish the less, I find my chief relief.

-8. Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

-9. They looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Fictional Identikit

There's a game going about to identify one's self via three or four literary characters.

Here's my submission from the four quarters of my soul, or some such:

Jim Hawkins, from Stevenson's Treasure Island;
Ishmael, from Melville's Moby Dick;
Frank Bascombe, from Ford's The Sportswriter;
and
Robert Walton, from Shelley's Frankenstein.

"The Other Worlds": Life's Largest Riddle

The Other Worlds is an excellent mythopoeic novel by a dear friend, Christoph Greger.  Christoph's own humble way of introducing the book to the world is worth quoting: "Hey all you cystic fibrosis lit fans, Ren fair geeks, and/or mythopoeic/modernist bildungsroman junkies -- here's something that might be of interest."

This fine novel deserves deep interest, presenting classic character-in-crisis; entertaining and evoking in the tradition of Yeats, Morris, Dunsany, de Lint, and Windling; and offering entry into multiple worlds, this one we share and those others 'beyond the fields we know'.  The setting and the style are distinctly contemporary; the themes and dilemmas, definitely timeless.  Life's largest riddle--mortality--met by mystery, measured by memory, and beset--or aided?--by magic waits at the heart of The Other Worlds.

Read this book.

Identity Crisis

Superhero or nemesis?

Logbook: Helping

June 6:  Today a woman about my own age or a little younger approached me in the grocery store, asked me to help her with a high shelf an aisle or so away, and then directed me to which items she wanted. She was rather short, as she pointed out, I am tall, and the shelf was high.

I am often approached for help in many situations, but I was wearing very ragged, dirty jeans and a rather ragged, dirty t-shirt, carrying a six-pack of Negra Modelo and a box of Instant Oatmeal, and hadn't shaved in a couple of days, so she probably didn't mistake me for an employee, but she wanted help and asked. Power to her.

I was happy to help.

(I don't think she was hitting on me, by the way.)

P. S.
I should add that when she first approached me I was reaching for a giant stuffed octopus above the freezers, so there was at least one clue I might be harmless.

Face Your Inner Fish

Face your fears?

Face your fish.

Frogfish:
stoneware; blue and brown glazing.

Identity Issues

That sharp sweeping black
fin and that shiny solid black
back moving through the water:
porpoise sighting from kayak-
back a mile-and-a-half-and-change
out in Half Moon Bay.

The porpoise wasn't surging
with that sinuous
up-and-down
mojo that I'm used
to viewing -- to feeling --
so I wondered if
I'd observed a faulty
identification.

Motions and emotions,
shall we say, mixed.

I'm a diver, you know,
neoprene-blubbered,
rubber-finned and masked,
and -- yet -- I didn't bother
to dip in, didn't slip free,
but kept to the yellow
deck of my kayak,
tasking myself with ill humor.
Swimming with any marine
mammal is awfully
awesome, but a shiny
black back cutting
through the salt
could be a great
white joke.

--MD




P.S.  My kayak-partner JP reports that there'd been a caution posted for kayakers (that we missed before heading out) that a 12-foot GWS had been sighted the last few days roaming the area just off Pillar Point Harbor, so that may not have been a porpoise, actually, after all.

Flying the Flag

I don't worry too much about fitting in, but a sense of community still feels good. Among the communities that have made me feel good, I have to rank the beachside parking lot full of divers fairly highly. I recall how my buddy Keith and I did our (old-school) diver training back in the late 70s and we went diving up and down Northern California, but we wouldn't put stickers on our cars or wear dive t-shirts until we felt we earned the right after a year or so. Then, we each put a modest diver-flag on our bumpers. (I think my dad gave me one that read "Think Deep.") And, we kept diving fairly frequently, at least for a few years before English grad school and law school distracted us. Nowadays, I like walking up the beach, in a soaking wetsuit, pulling that kayak with the rocket fins and weightbelt and other gear secured properly, getting and sharing the nods and smiles of like-minded souls in pursuit of salty experiences. I shoot my fish and creatures with a camera, but I still can talk abalone and spearfishing, and I like hearing those stories.

Rembrandt's Mirror; Facetious Echoes

I snapped this selfie to check the lighting from this direction at this time of day, and I both laughed at how that mask and I happened to echo each other here and found myself snagged in the rush of a memory-whirlpool.  The image pulled me towards something, someone, some other image . . . .

I had recently picked up Christopher Wright's Rembrandt: Self Portraits as a consequence of another memory-snag, though I have only flipped through some of the reproductions, haven't quite read the text itself.  I had obtained Wright's book because of my recently recalling, once again, how Prof. Andrew Griffin, one of my major influences at Berkeley, used to teach a unit on Rembrandt's self-portraits in his autobiography/biography seminar, and while I did not take that specific class from Prof. Griffin, he generously shared in office-time much about the subject.  (That the Dutch master had painted himself so often, so many times, over the course of his life was a compelling conceit to me, particularly caught as I was between Joyce's young Stephen Dedalus and my sense of the older Shakespeare-As-Lear, As-Prospero.)  I was drawn to these conversations by the professor's compelling and humorous delivery, but also by my own compulsions in the areas of self-representation and Rembrandt himself.  That Pocket Library of Great Art edition of Rembrandt pictured above was a book that just happened to be stuffed into the family bookshelves in the back bedroom I shared with my brothers, a book that I happened to discover in my childhood, far before I could understand the words or the images beyond the obvious, a book that I have puzzled over and studied from my earliest years.  I have carried that book from the family home to my first apartment and to every subsequent dwelling, though I can't say that I've actually looked into or, perhaps, even at this pocket volume for years and years now until today.

Still, once I looked away from my mask laughing in the background and thought, "What image am I aping (unconsciously) here?", well, "Rembrandt -- the cover portait!" was the immediate answer.  (I was then compelled to root out that specific volume, though that took two days.)  Now, reading this and comparing (contrasting?) the two images may not bring such an answer to your mind.  The link may be more emotional than anything else.  As a maker, I bow with the utmost respect from a station far far below the great Dutchman.  And, as a child, I was probably fascinated by the age, the agedness, in that cover shot, by the old, old man with the funny hat.  As an adult, Rembrandt seems steady, steadfast and sober, weighing himself in the scales of life, not entirely happy with the balance at hand; the artist doesn't seem near as old, either, as he must have seemed in my relative infancy.  But my peers will understand that shiftiness of perspective, I think.  (There's a key scene in John Fowles' Daniel Martin in front of one of Rembrandt's portraits, perhaps this one, and that novel was quite formative as well.  Another echo, another mirror.)  Even as a boy and a young man, I'll bet Rembrandt's gaze held me, for it certainly holds my own gaze even now.  Rembrandt's mirror, each of us looking at, looking into, this portrait, don't you think?

Maybe so; maybe no.  Hats, brows, noses, lines, chins, cheeks: I see likenesses, though differences too.  I could have dressed the part, certainly, to heighten the linkages, but that's an accidental shot, more or less.  Anyway, the way I'd like to see it, the Dutchman's looking back at me, back at us; and, I'm looking at him, at you.

Facetious echoes, as I've announced above.

The mirror, I'm forgetting: the mirror and the making.  Rembrandt is gazing into that mirror, that reflective canvas, into himself, weighing and balancing; and, therefore, he's a fine model for yet another painting; therefore, a fine model for himself and for us.

What Fish Is This?

White-spotted pufferfish, actually.

Identification courtesy of Jeff Peterson.

In the photos for pufferfish in the two Hawaiian fish books I had looked at, the specific striations and coloration did not seem as clear as they did in person and in this photo, particularly.  An online search found photos that matched more obviously.

Mirror

"I have a jumbled mind that only achieves clarification at times and then under pressure, as in a classroom. Then the material provides the unity; the random insights."

--Theodore Roethke

Crossley-Holland's 'Leaf-Girl'

LEAF-GIRL

'Round and round the trampled 
ground between the flaming
maple and the black walnut,
and out across the nickel rink 
to the winter warming-hut,
round, round with bounds and 
yells, skips and little rushes 
you chased October leaves.

Curtsy, shout, leap and spin, 
your pale face thin and hair 
haywire, the best red-gold:
so you became the leaves 
you caught. And watching you 
I think I thought there's 
some movement, some pursuit 
best expressing each of us.'

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

Practice Session: "A Hazy Vision"

A HAZY VISION

Foot, bare; hand, inked;
Tongue, Latin and Greek;
Books, piled; treasure, child;
Fountain, Irish; wishes, so fair;
Song, sublime; wildness, rhymed --

Her measure, untapped;
And the course, unmapped.

--MD


An exercise in verse; an exercise in vision.
Composed/posted 12/23/12;
Revised 1/10/13.

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."

Wanted: Sea-Monkey On My Back

I love my Power Fins.

I had meant to free dive today, but after the rain-drenched commute yesterday I bagged, quite unhappily, Monterey Bay for the local workout pool. I had a good session, in the rain, but that's not a kelp forest experience. Oh, and the illustrations will make more sense if I tell you that I swim with mask & snorkel and my dive fins. I swim as a diver now, having hit my limit with regular lap-swimming about a decade ago now.

I miss my full-on pool addiction. As recently as early 2010, I was still swimming almost daily, but wear and tear and serial illnesses--sore throats, flues, and cold after cold--sapped my energy and my compulsion to swim, swim, swim. So, for the first time in years, I barely swam at all last semester, and so gained 20+ lbs (from a skinny, muscled, but unhealthy 155 to a plump, slack-muscled, unhealthy 187). I have kept meaning to return to the pool, but that's hard to do when I couldn't breathe for coughing, and I knew that working out in the cold water just might push me into another lingering illness and I'd been missing too many work-days already. I started erring on the side of caution, and once you break, really break, a routine it's so hard to get back to it.

Simply, I've been happiest in my life when I must swim. Just must.

Such an addiction, for me, is tied to sense of self. When I was a recent college graduate back in the--gasp--80's, I needed an identity since I'd just lost my "student" status. (And, you know, as a student, you can work any job anywhere and no one judges you.) Sheepskin in hand, but allergic to offices and not having a clue about a career, I was working in warehouses and driving delivery vans, and so I reached back to a somewhat neglected love and swam, swam, swam. I was a "swimmer," no matter what I was doing to earn a buck.

Note: At the time, I was also feeling my way into another deep love--genre fiction--which I'd neglected in favor of Literature as an obsessed English major at UC Berkeley. And, I'm proud of the 28 lit courses I took as an undergrad--double the number required for the major, thank you very much--but my time at Cal also had me Gemini-ing my reading life, suppressing my yearnings for popular contemporary fiction even as I reveled in the classics and my eager immersion in the whole heroic tradition of European literature and a special attention to the British (and American) "greats," from Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales up through Moby Dick, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Wasteland.

At that time, away from school and not knowing what to do with myself, I took some time off to just read, swim, play ping-pong, and party like a college student (since I'd been working too hard between the classes and the job to pay--no loans, no debt--for college to party when I was enrolled). Then, having spent my meager savings, I took any job at hand: packing clerk in a table linens factory in the Mission, warehouse worker in an electrical supply house in "Point" Richmond (and I put it that way since the company did), driver and then head driver with that same company, and eventual lifeguard and swim instructor for the City of Richmond. I was recruited to teach swimming to children and adults because I spent so much time at the Plunge. And, to tell you the absolute truth, I credit my swim instructor job as having a greater and most positive influence on my classroom teaching of English literature and composition than any part of my experience as a student and later instructor at UCB (aside from the fine example of the enthusiastic Prof. Andrew Griffin).

Anyway, away from school, working, and swimming, I rediscovered genre fiction and contemporary American fiction in general. Jenifer Levin's Water Dancer was an important book to me, for all that it's a rather clumsy first novel. More importantly, Levin wrote one of the best books on swimming, literally, that you will ever find. (*See note below.) That there's a quest motif and two strong characters, the swimmer and the coach, only made that book more significant to me, and that experience with this book solidified my sense that the best literature is not universal, but particular. I needed such a book at that time in my life, and there it was.

The novels of John Le Carre, Thomas McGuane, Richard Ford, and Robert Stone also mattered, and those are not merely genre writers. Still, I was making my way back into the mysteries, crime novels, science fiction, and heroic fantasy that I did in fact love deeply.

While I was reading whatever I wanted and swimming before work and during lunch or after work most days of the week, I became addicted to my water-time and my identity as a swimmer. I swam and swam and swam, putting in my miles--my timed miles, for speed--day after day after day. There was an older lawyer who would swim at noon or in the evening with whom I shared a wonderful competitive relationship. We didn't even know each other, never spoke beyond the locker room, and yet if we were in the pool, we'd pace each other, racing for distance. (Occasionally, we'd see the other person coming in and one of us would say, "Let's pretend we aren't here at the same time, okay? I'm not up for racing today." We each respected such a request, for we knew on plenty of other days, we'd be racing lap after lap for 30 minutes or even an hour at a time.) I still recall the day I beat the lawyer, finally able to keep ahead of him lap after lap after lap in one of those workouts that started as casual pacing and then turned into serious racing. He took it hard, harder than I expected, and we never were able to race together again. I pointed out that I'd been pushing myself with two-a-days just to be competitive with him, but having the younger guy finally beat him like that just ruined something. I really missed having such a pacer to help me to push myself. The laps just weren't as much fun for a while there.

(Now that I'm older, I understand how much keeping ahead of the younger ones can matter. Heck, when I was a mere 33, as I say now, and working the summer at the pool again during grad school, I made myself ill not letting any of the younger lifeguards and instructors beat me during training races. They didn't realize there was a real race on, but I was damned if I was going to lose to any of those guys. Seriously, I couldn't get out of bed the next day between the exhausted muscles and the sinus symptoms knocking me down. Lame, but "heroic": to tell you the truth, I wasn't in the best shape at that moment, but that wasn't a good enough excuse not to push myself too far. I miss that sort of drive, sometimes, too.)

I'm not and have never been the fastest swimmer, but I've mostly always swam. My earliest memory is of being in the water at age 2 or 3 with my mother. I swam distance in high school, but I didn't bother going out for the college team. I wouldn't have been fast enough. And yet I am at ease in the water like any true wannabe-fish, and I've put in the time during the best periods of my life. I'm not fast, but I'm devoted, you know? Or, I can be, and that's where the sea-monkey comes in.

Anyway, back in my warehouse and driving days, I swam all the time, and if I wasn't swimming, I was thinking about it. I quit counting laps and started counting miles, counted time spent going back and forth in the pool, any pool.

I started getting a bit obsessed, though I also wasn't interested in competition, per se. I didn't join a Masters team, for as a recent college graduate, I was a bit tired of being told how to do things. Still, I needed to swim.

How can I put it?

If I swam twice a day, I was okay. If I only swam once per day, I was lazy. If I didn't swim at all that day, I was fat.

The pool was closed on Sundays, so that was my official, non-fat day of rest.

And that's my best way of understanding my anorexic friends, by the way, for I had both the obsession and the issue with body fat. (Just a few years ago, I dropped down to 155 or below, and that's just too too thin for a 6-foot man, but I liked how you could see all my muscles, and I was swimming 5 or 6 or even 7 days a week and feeling great with loads of energy . . . .)

At that time in the past, just out of university the first time, I did read my way through all of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee mysteries, finding the old paperbacks in used bookstores throughout Central California (one of the perks of my driving job), which offered me the model of retirement taken whenever a person could afford a piece of it, now ideally, and then back to work until the next flush period of ease. I think I really absorbed my desire for gainful unemployment at this time in my life. No wonder I've embraced teaching with summers off for rejuvenation and immersion in new pursuits. Also, Travis McGee's moral-yet-allergic-to-conventional-thinking character and consequent narrative perspective fed something inside too. Travis McGee is a good man, but don't expect him to work 9-to-5 or to join the country club. Rather, expect him to help out a friend and to act for what's right and fair over what's legal or illegal.

Finally, this morning, I found myself longing for the addiction to training while practicing my underwater laps. I want that sea-monkey on my back. I want to finish my commute with a compulsive longing for chlorinated water and not whiskey-and-water. I can drink the Bushmill's afterwards, as a reward. More importantly, I want to dive and kayak quite a bit this coming spring and summer, so I need to get in shape. As a 50-year-old, I have to work at it a bit more and not just expect being in shape to happen. That's fine. I'm looking forward to the pool work, for I can almost taste the joy and exuberance of being a real working swimmer. I'm a swimmer even if I'm in the middle of the desert, but . . . you know what I mean.

Time to get serious again.

I'm smiling as I type this entry. And my muscles are sore in the best ways.

_________________________________

*To help you to understand when I say that Water Dancer is a great book about swimming, consider, say, John Cheever's famous short story "The Swimmer" about suburban New England and a man who decides to travel across the county using one swimming pool after another. Despite being included in anthologies of swimming literature, Cheever's short story isn't really about swimming; it's about existential angst and the late 20th-century American suburban male. Levin's novel is about swimming lap after lap after lap, about stroking through open water, crossing miles and miles from mainland to island or up rivers and across lakes, and (not "but") it's also existential in its own way, what with the lesbian main character seeking meaning in life through action.

Seeking meaning in life through action is a fine methodology, by the way.

Get wet!

Posing as Myself

At the risk of revealing my intense narcissicism, I am posting four photos of myself from this summer's adventures.

The top photo: Drake's Bay, Ca; foggy, overcast midday. We are cruising at the mouth of the Estero, getting ready to play in the waves on the sandbars there. There's a squid-lid on my head for warmth. Also, I'm wearing my Rocket Fins just in case I'm capsized for speedy recovery. Capsizing will happen: solid practice for rougher days up north in quest of abalone.

The second-from-top photo: Tomales Bay, Ca; foggy morning. Self-portrait. (I hate how my neck bunches up from the wetsuit and the way I'm holding my head. I like this shot because I can see how much older I really am than how old I tend to think I am. Plenty of gray hair and those lines from so much sun and wind, from so many half-thoughts and full smiles.)

The third-from-top photo: Tomales Bay, Ca; different day, cruising back to base. Sofia, my Ocean Kayak Scrambler, is a lovely diving platform and surf-creature, but she's at best a sturdy cruiser and so demands muscle to gain any speed or distance. Here, I'm feeling very relaxed from the efforts and experiences of the day. (This is one of my favorite photos.)

The fourth or bottom photo: Del Monte Beach, Monterey, Ca; ready for a kelp forest jaunt. (And yet, despite such anticipation, I obviously am not comfortable trying to smile for the camera. Why not wait until we are in the water for a photo? Hey, am I too skinny? too fat? What am I worrying about? Take the picture, so we can go and have fun. I know that I asked for a picture. So what, let's go.) Many otters--mommas & babies--that day.

Note: Recently, I received an email reporting that someone else may be presenting himself as "mattduckworthunderwater," as the blogger of this site, as myself (as odd and humorous as that sounds), so these few photos may make such a masquerade slightly more difficult.