Tomales Bay Morning

West-Atlantis Rising

 The Farallon Islands -- from the highway above Stinson Beach.

The Marin Islands

Julia Whitty, Diving, and Manysidedness: Highly Recommended

The current reading in my English 1As.

Check out Julia Whitty's blog at http://deepbluehome.blogspot.com/

Lighting By Bushmills -- And Brendan Kennelly

Self-Portrait #52.

"We are all occasionally turned to stone by what we witness, think and feel.  Out of that same selfstone, the imagination moulds and coaxes a persona who, entering poems and animating them by his presence, is seen and felt to be a creature of flesh and blood.  The cold of stone is imaginatively caressed into human warmth, surely one of the transfiguring graces of poetry.  (It can happen the other way round too, and be no less a transfiguring grace.)"

--Brendan Kennelly, from his Islandman,
quoted in his Breathing Spaces: Early Poems, 
which I'm excerpted, respectfully, here, among other places in this blog.

I've felt like an Islandman, an enisled "selfstone", and I have wanted others to feel like islandmen or personae too, though I certainly didn't quite have the words for it until this passage from Kennelly.

Nicolson's "Sea Room" -- Gaelic and Norse

Adam Nicolson's Sea Room is a memoir concerning the Shiant Islands in the Hebrides.  Nicolson inherited the islands from his father, and he pays tribute to the islands, their life and history, his own life and history as intertwined with his father's gift.  Here is a longish passage in which Nicolson reflects on the Gaelic/Norse heritage, and though I don't always (or quite) agree with his interpretation of the intrinsic relationships or the causal links between borrowings, I will say Nicolson's delivery takes me into this mixed-lineage, mixed-linguistic world.

(Freyja is Nicolson's trusty boat.)

Freyja does at least belong to that world.  I hold her tiller and she is my link to a chain that stretches over five hundred miles and a thousand years to the coast of Norway.  Because there is no timber on the Outer Hebrides, the commercial connection with the Baltic has remained alive.  Until no more than a generation ago, Baltic traders brought Finnish tar, timber and pitch directly to Stornoway and Tarbert in Harris.  Although Freyja's own timber comes from the mainland of Scotland, her waterproofing below the water-line is known as 'Stockholm tar': a wood tar, distilled from pine and imported from the Baltic at least since the Middle Ages.  Until well into the nineteenth century, kit boats in marked parts came imported fro Norway to the Hebrides, travelling in the hold of merchant ships, and assembled by boat builders in any notch or loch along the Harris or Lewis coast.  In 1828, Lord Teignmouth, the ex-Governor-General of India, friend of Wilberforce, came out to the Shiants in the company of Alexander Stewart, the farmer at Valamus on Pairc, who had tenancy of the islands.  They launched forth in this gentleman's boat, a small skiff or yawl built in Norway, long, narrow, peaked at both ends, extremely light, floating like a feather upon the water, and when properly managed, with the buoyancy and almost the security of a sea-bird on its native wave.

The British Imperialist, the liberal evangelical, member of the Clapham Sect, travels in a Viking boat on a Viking sea.  I nearly called Freyja 'Fulmar' because of that phrase of Teignmouth's.  No bird is more different on the wing than on the nest and in flight the fulmar is the most effortless of all sea birds.  It was that untroubled buoyancy in wind and water that I was after.  But Freyja's  fatness was what settled it.

Almost everything in her and the world now around her, if described in modern Gaelic, would be understood by a Viking.  The words used here for boats and sea all come from Old Norse and the same descriptions have been on people's lips for a millennium.  If I say, in Gaelic, 'windward of the sunken rock', 'the seaweed in the narrow creek', 'fasten the buoy', 'steer with the helm towards the shingle beach', 'prop the boat on an even keel', 'put the cod, the ling, the saithe and the coaley in the wicker basket', 'use the oar as a roller to launch the boat', 'put a wedge in the joint between the planking in the stern', 'set the sea chest on the frames amidships', 'the tide is running around the skerry', 'the cormorant and the gannet are above the surf', 'haul in the sheet', 'tighten the back stay', 'use the oar as a steerboard', or say of a man, 'that man is a hero, a stout man, the man who belongs at the stem of a boat', every single one of those terms has been transmitted directly from the language which the Norse spoke into modern Gaelic.  It is a kind of linguistic DNA, persistent across thirty or forty generations.

Sometimes the words have survived unchanged.  Oatmeal mixed with cold water, ocean food, is stappa in NOrse, stapag in Gaelic, although stapag is now made with sugar and cream.  With many, there has been a little rubbing down of the forms in the millennium that they have been used.  A tear in a sail is riab in Gaelic, rifa in Old Norse.  The smock worn by fisherman is sguird in Gaelic, skirta in Old Norse.  Sgaireag is the Gaelic for 'seaman', skari the Norse word.  And occasionally, there is a strange and suggestive transformation.  The Gaelic for a hen roost is the Norse word for hammock.  Norse for 'strong' becomes Gaelic for 'fat'.  The Norse word for rough ground becomes peat moss in Gaelic.  A hook or a barb turns into an antler.  To creep -- that mobile, subtle movement -- translates into Gaelic as 'to crouch': more still, more rooted to the place.  A water meadow in Norway, fit, becomes fidean: grass covered at high tide.  'To drip' becomes 'to melt'.  A Norse framework, whether of a house, a boat or a basket, becomes a Gaelic creel.

But it is the human qualities for which Gaelic borrowed the Viking words that are most intriguingly and intimately suggestive of the life lived around these seas a thousand years ago.  There is a cluster of borrowings around the ideas of oddity and suspicion.  Gaelic itself, if it had not taken from the invaders, would have no word for a quirk (for which it borrowed the Old Norse word meaning 'a trap'), nor for 'strife', nor 'a faint resemblance' -- the word it took was svip, the Norse for 'glimpse'.  The  Gaelic from 'lullaby' is taladh, from the Norse tal, meaning 'allurement', 'seduction'.

The vocabulary for contempt and wariness suddenly vivifies that ancient moment.  Gaelic borrowed Norse revulsion wholesale.  Noisy boasting, to blether, a coward, cowardice, surliness, an insult, mockery, a servant, disgust, anything shrivelled or shrunken (sgrogag from the Old Norse skrukka, an old shrimp,) a bald head, a slouch, a good-for-nothing, a dandy, a fop, a short, fat, stumpy woman (staga from stakka, the stump of a tree), a sneak (stig/stygg), a wanderer -- all this was something new, and had arrived with the longships.  Fear and ridicule, the uncomfortable presence of the distrusted other, the ugly cross-currents of two worlds, the broken and disturbing sea where those tides met: all this could only be expressed in the odd new language the strangers brought with them.

--Adam Nicolson

Adam Nicolson,
Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides,
North Point Press: New York,
2001

I've quoted from pages 30-33.

The Sign Of The Elephant

Rodeo Beach, Marin Headlands, CA.
That's Bird Island, but it always looks like an elephant to me.

Kennelly: One from "Islandman"

The sea's music affirms

What at best I have half-known.

I turn deaf ears to it for the most part

But now and again

It coincides with a music I find in myself.

I hear

'My glittering green is your power to move,

My spindrift is your fear,

My roar is your blood's emphasis

On what you can hardly face,

A cosmic push towards nothing,

Green weed like a necklace

Round the world's throat that whispers

Always back to me

How those on land live to reject

The insights of the sea.'

--Brendan Kennelly,

from "Islandman":

pages 337-338 of Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004

Persona: What Kennelly Says

Consider these provocative paragraphs from Irish poet Brendan Kennelly:

The use of a persona in poetry is not a refusal to confront and explore the self but a method of extending it, procuring for it a more imaginative and enriching breathing space by driving out the demons of embarrassment and inhibition and some, at least, of the more crippling forms of shyness and sensitivity. A persona, though apparently shadowy and elusive, can be a liberating agent. It/he/she can provide friendly company in loneliness and give dignity to desolation.

Through an act of sustained and deliberate indirectness, it is possible to say more completely whatever one has to say. It is one of the fertile paradoxes of poetry that one can be more candid by engaging less in frontalism and by listening more keenly to the voices of the personae in the wings. A persona embodies not only some essential, peculiarly bewildered aspects of one's self but also, one hopes, something of everybody. I don't know why, but I'm convinced that the persona, obliquely manipulating and orchestrating the monstrous yet magnificent energies of egotism, is capable of revealing what the poet at any given moment believes he knows of reality in such a way that, for example, horror is presented with a grace, and therefore a precision, only rarely available to the mere self. Like a courteous host, the personal introduces the self to itself and lets the dialogue begin and continue unimpeded. (Other individuals at the party may crash in, of course. Such interruptions must be endured and allowed to expire before the dialogue can resume.)

We are all occasionally turned to stone by what we witness, think and feel. Out of that selfstone, the imagination moulds and coaxes a persona who, entering poems and animating them by his presence, is seen and felt to be a creature of flesh and blood. The cold of stone is imaginatively caressed into human warmth, surely one of the transfiguring graces of poetry. (It can happen the other way round too, and be no less a transfiguring grace.) My islandman is as real to me as the people I meet every day because he is, in fact, these very people, but without their disconcerting ways, arbitrary opinions, puzzling eccentricities, transient yet upsetting incursions in the the mere, messy self which nevertheless remains the truest if murkiest source of poetry. The persona helps me to see through and under these necessary distractions to the essential humanity of people and therefore to come into contact with what I hope is my own. It is possible, and necessary, to hope that we are beginning to be more human. Poetry insists that we, with the help of the liberating persona, allow ourselves to dare become ourselves, for a time at least. The persona appears to want to make the self more fluid, multiple, articulate. It is like a shadow that darklylightly stresses the validity of the substance.

There may be simple and more effective ways for a poet to do this. I'd love to know them because I want to love every heartbeat, every musical second of happiness and grief, boredom and fun and the usual no-man's-land of viable and reasonably rewarded half-being, permitted between stoneself and definitive dust. Whatever forces help one to love this frequently muted music of time are to be welcomed by the imagination and intelligence, body and soul. Whatever or whoever you are, be with me now.

--from the prose introduction to the poetic "Islandman" in Brendan Kennelly's Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004.

Bloodaxe Books, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: 2004.

I've quoted extensively from page 323 of Familiar Strangers. I feel the need to read and reflect upon these paragraphs on persona. I hope you find them as useful and engaging, as provoking and promising as I do.

Time to reread "Islandman" too.

"Like Pearls, The Pain"

A moment from Joe Coomer's Pocketful of Names:

She climbed up into the stern of the boat. Flakes of rust and paint rained on the granite floor. Driftwood watched her climb, then settled down, chin to forepaws, to wait. She sat on the bare wood of the washboard, clasped her hands and pressed them between her crossed legs.

So Will had loved Emily. And he had loved her. And now he was in love with Zee. It was plain to see, and impossible to understand, how his affection was so embracing, so encompassing, and so malleable. His heart seemed so easily restored. She knew that she herself held grudges for years after the end of a relationship. She revisited diaries, letters, and even greeting cards in attempts not to understand old failures but to relive them. There was nothing to be resolved, no transforming catharsis in memory. Time did not heal old wounds. The hurt persisted, and like pearls, the pain survived deep in a center that had to be continuously swathed with yet another layer of forgetting that only soothed until the next remembering. The boy at Haystack, Mark, his name a crystal she cut her tongue on each time she said it. It was the first time in her artistic life that art seemed unimportant. She just wanted to bury her face in his neck and lie there forever. It was more important that she watch him create. And Jalendu, who was as lost in love as he was in New York, and who tried to hide from love and the city in her. How could you not love my sweet brother? It was easy not to love him. She had no other choice. After months of desperately trying to be in love with a man she admired, who made her laugh and cry with his tenderness, a man who found the world around him strange and mystifying and full of beauty, who regarded her as its zenith, she'd given up. "It's not that I don't want it to be there," she'd told him. "It simply doesn't exist."

"Perhaps it will be born later," he suggested.

And from that point on she could not meet his eye or hear his voice. It was all part of the world she already knew and did not need. When they separated she did not miss him. After he was gone, there were times when it was only as if he'd moved back home to India. He was safe, at home in his culture, surrounded by comforting, close reflections of his own face. "I will die if I cannot be with you," he said. And he did. And he was right about love, too. It was born later. She came to the understanding that this was a man who would have been a companion. There were worse things than being adored. She saw him in a glass of water, in puddles on the street, the rain sweeping down her windshield before she switched on the wipers. His sister came and took his remains back to their parents' home on a sandbar in the River Houghli. Sitting there in the stern of Break of Day, she suddenly realized that both men, Mark and Jalendu, had lived on islands. It was troubling. Is that why she'd come here? Or was it only coincidence? Arno had left her an island, not a farm in Nebraska. In fact, she'd only moved from one island to another. Manhattan was an island, too. If you wanted to be direct about it, every land mass on earth was an island. The only thing that differentiated every human, every island dweller on the planet, was their individual distance from the water.

--Joe Coomer, Pocketful of Names.