Goofing with Clay: Mythomarine

Wet clay.

Transformation almost complete --from man to fish --

Merman: body-armored against the cold sea.

Bookend: A nod to Moby Dick.

Fowles: "I Learned To Value What I Couldn’t, Over The Years, Forget"

   "As a student of French at Oxford, I read omnivorously, though much more out of ignorance than intelligence.  I had very little notion of my real tastes, having swallowed the then prevalent myth that only one’s teachers had a right to personal preferences.  This is not an approach I would attempt to sell to any student today, but it did have one advantage.  Likes and dislikes were eventually formed on a strictly pragmatic basis; I learned to value what I couldn’t, over the years, forget.  One such obstinate survivor was Alain-Fournier’s Le Grande Meaulnes.  A number of young thesis writers have now told me they can see no significant parallels between Le Grande Meaulnes and my own novel The Magus.  I must have severed the umbilical cord—the real connection requires such a metaphor—much more neatly than I supposed at the time; or perhaps modern academic criticism is blind to relationships that are far more emotional than structural."

John Fowles,
from “A Personal Note” to his translation of Marie de France’s “Eliduc”
in his collection of short stories The Ebony Tower, pages 109-110:

Passages: Stevenson on "How" in Literature

Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not regard the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventures, the shock of arms or the diplomacy of life.

--Robert Louis Stevenson, from "A Gossip on Romance," an essay I find useful and influential when I consider how literary arts truly work and what I feel such arts should aim at.

I've written about Stevenson's Treasure Island also; here's the link:

http://mattduckworthunderwater.blogspot.com/2009/04/touchstone-stevensons-treasure-island.html

Tuning Fork, Compass Needle

Here's a slightly apologetic line from Rebecca Solnit's excellent A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland that matters to me, that provides a focus, a model, an admonition, and some solace:

"I tried to use the subjective and personal not to glorify my mundane autobiography but as a case study in how one can explore the remoter reaches of the psyche by wandering across literal terrain."

My tuning fork, my compass needle. I use personal anecdotes in class--yes, a lot--but for the same reason that Solnit uses her own subjective journeys, her own experiences and reflections. I adhere to the principle behind that "case study" approach, for my heart declares even the "mundane" matters, if your "aim is true" (to borrow from Elvis Costello) and if you tell it right.

As a reader, a teacher, and a maker in particular, I add a second continent to her phrase, much as Solnit herself does in actual practice, joining such "wanderings across literal terrain" to explorations of the literary terrain. Both matter so much to me, but reading richly is a crucial key to the lock of life's treasure chest I've found. Picture the scholar as a Robin Hood, stalking the forest of words, as a pirate, navigating the shoals of the soul: silly, true images. (Even Bilbo Baggins was a burglar, remember.)

The Commonwealth of Letters, to use an old phrase, is a vast expanse, often quite civilized, often still savage. The pathways are not all paved, and the way isn't always clear, despite all those who have gone exploring before you. On such a journey, there will be pubs and palaces as well as pitfalls: famine, drought, lacerations of the soul. Persevere. If you are lucky, you'll find treasure; luckier, dragons.

No passport necessary beyond literacy; no invitation needed beyond your own curiosity.

Start wandering. When you get back, start talking.