"Because I Know, From Plato"

I have ground up hemlock and it releases a nose-wrinkling sour smell.  It also sparks a pain above your eyes and across the brain.  I have never known, though, whether this is psychosomatic.  Because I know, from Plato, what hemlock can do.

--Bettany Hughes,
The Hemlock Cup: 
Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life

Pinnacle

I have taken so many shots of this pinnacle.  I really ought to check my archives and present a blogpost on the different moods, the different silent voices of this one hunk of stone.  I don't really explore.   I really enjoy coming back to the same few places again and again and again in different seasons, different weathers, different mindsets.  And, just as I love getting coffee at Moody's and a fish & chip dinner at Sea Pal Cove in the harbor, I love looking at this pinnacle from the deck of my kayak or, even better, from the water itself.

Dickinson: "Exultation is the Going"

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea --
Past the houses, past the headlands,
Into deep Eternity!

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

--Emily Dickinson

collected in
Poems of the Sea,
selected and edited by J. D. McClatchy
Everyman's Library

What the Horse Knows

William Finnegan: Learning Curves

Here's a paragraph from Finnegan's excellent memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life:

The ocean itself was another story.  I waded into the waves at Will Rogers, diving under pummeling lines of foam, thrashing toward the main sandbar, where the brown walls of the big waves stood and broke.  I couldn't get enough of their rhythmic violence.  They pulled you toward them like hungry giants.  They drained the water off the bar as they drew to their full, awful height, then pitched forward and exploded.  From underwater, the concussion was deeply satisfying.  Waves were better than anything in books, better than movies, better even than a ride at Disneyland, because with them the charge of danger was uncontrived.  It was real.  And you could learn how to maneuver around it, how long to wait on the bottom, how to swim outside, beyond the break, and, eventually how to bodysurf.  I learned actual bodysurfing technique in Newport, watching and imitating Becket and his friends, but I got comfortable in waves at Will Rogers.

--Barbarian Days -- page 71

Penguin Press, New York: 2015

Throckmorton's "The Lost Ships"

Boyhood reading revisited.

Nautical Know-How

"Before you try to steer,
learn to row."

--Aristophanes

via Peter Green
and his novel about Lucius Cornelius Sulla,
Roman dictator,
The Sword of Pleasure

Barry Lopez: "River Notes" and Questing

I have been crippled by my age, by what I have known, as well as by my youth, by what I have yet to learn, in all these inquiries.  It has taken me years, which might have been spent (by someone else) seeking something greater, in some other place.  I have sought only you.  Enough.  I wish to know you, and you will not speak.  

--Barry Lopez,
from River Notes: The Dance of Herons

I can't say enough how much this slim volume mattered, how much it made complex, made even more emotional and even more intricately verbal my relationship with nature and story, when I first discovered River Notes in Moe's Books of Berkeley, CA, so long ago in 1980.

On this recent rereading -- and River Notes is a book I reread more or less each year, haphazardly, piece by piece over all the months of the year -- I realized how much his chapter "The Salmon" prepared me for the art and artistry of Andy Goldsworthy and for so many of my own efforts in clay amidst sea and creek.

I've witnessed this writer giving a talk and reading one of his stories at least once --"The Mappist," at the Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafael -- and I took this rather intimate opportunity (such a small venue, a somewhat select gathering) to thank Barry Lopez for his body of work.  I'm glad I overcame my natural diffidence to do so.

The passage above spoke to me when I was a mere youth, not even 20, and speaks to me now, a bit over 50.  I like the appositive defining of age in terms of knowing, in terms of what we don't understand and of what we do, as well as the sad, even bitter tone.  Loss breathes through the passage, through most of the book, and Lopez's voicing of that theme, that truth, caught my ear, and the ear of my soul (if you will), even if I didn't--perhaps, still don't--truly understand wherein that sense of loss resides, takes form.  Recently, I have read an interview with Barry Lopez in which he reveals that the writing of River Notes, though a sequence of fictional narratives, was deeply informed by the death of his mother.

The book takes us from the seaside, the mouth of the river, upstream until we reach the headwaters, the source.  The last chapter, be warned, is entitled "Drought."  I'll hold off saying more, for I'd rather awaken curiosity and intimate mystery.  I have taught two chapters in particular a dozen times, I think: "The Bend" and "The Rapids."  Here's another passage from "The Salmon":

There is never, he reflected, a moment of certainty, only the illusion.   And as he worked among the rocks in the middle of the river he thought on this deeply, so deeply that had his movements not been automatic he would have fallen off the rocks and into the river and been borne away.

In the summer light, even with the coolness of the water welling up around him in the air, thinking was all he was capable of; and this distraction left him exhausted and unbalanced so that at the end of the day the physical exhaustion he felt was something he lowered himself into, as into a hot bath.  He pondered gentleness often.  And he tried to pry (hefting the stones, conscious of the resonance between the idea in his mind and the work of his hands) into mysteries which remained as implacable as the faces of the stones.


Thank you, again, Barry Holstun Lopez.

River Notes: The Dance of Herons
A Bard Book / Avon Books: New York,  November, 1980.

Voyage-charm: sculpture mix; floating blue glazing; matte finish.   

Kelp College

"The law of gravity becomes complex under water, but it is not beyond our comprehension."

--Honor Frost,
Under the Mediterranean

(One of my favorite quotations--from a favorite book which I've written about here and here.)

From The Toolshed: Dan Duane's "Caught Inside"

You can tell I've been using this book for a while.

I think Caught Inside is an excellent choice for English 1A, especially if you want to work the local angle and model an encyclopedic approach to a subject. Also, Duane attempts to convey his passions here--passions for the sport or pursuit of surfing, yes, but also the Santa Cruz coast, for nature in general, for knowledge, for history, for story-telling, for awareness and engagement--and all such should always deserve respect.

Why wouldn't we want to model "passionate scholarship" (his phrase) to our students, to ourselves?

By the way, I've quoted my favorite Duane bit before here. Since I've been teaching his book for some years now, I should interview the author; some time back, he was willing, but circumstances got in my way. I should try his number again.