As Audience, As Witness

As I was getting coffee at the cafe this morning, I had a gentleman walk up to me and ask about the Bamboo Reef t-shirt I was wearing.  He wanted to know if the business were still in operation, and I named Monterey and SF as ongoing locations.  He then told me his father had been one of Bamboo Reef's three founders--with Al Giddings and Leroy French -- back in 1961.  We chatted briefly, me asking about his father's name (which I now can't recall, grrr), and then he moved on.

I'm guessing he wasn't a diver like his father, or at least not a local diver, or he would have known . . . but we didn't talk about any of that.

I like how the man wanted to connect with something his father had helped make -- and to say it out loud -- and I, random fellow that I am, was able to participate as audience, as witness.

Playing with Clay

Encouraging Apt Engagement?

When I encounter art of any sort, 
I find myself with these questions: 

What am I feeling now?
What is the piece saying?
What's the story (and backstory)?

[Oh, and how is it made?
--among many, many others.]

Now, my students usually want to start with "What does it mean?"

(A fine, though often
misleading or reductive
question to get to know
something, someone,
anything at all.
Where to begin,
then?)

Artists (and fellow audience-members), 
what responses 
and what responsive questions 
would you encourage 
me to encourage 
in my students?

Coomer: "Three Things Worth Doing"

"There are three things worth doing: making something new, caring for something old, and finding the lost. The fourth thing is your hand deep in dog fur, talking about the first three."

--Joe Coomer, Sailing in a Spoonful of Water

Foreground: The Pict

Background: The Merman's Head.

Alternative titles: Not Hadrian; Deep in Thought; or The Painted Man's Grasp.

Crossley-Holland: "The Language of Yes"

THE LANGUAGE OF YES

The world's wreckers are at their games
and everywhere it is late.

Words words words a fury of words
hype and shred and prate,
sanitise, speculate;
they please themselves.

How can I be content
with hollow professions
or the arm's length of the skeptic?
Even with the sensory,
the pig heart's slop-and-mess?

I still want.

Let me make and remake the word
which reveals itself,
unexpected, always various,

and be so curious
(affirmation's mainspring)
I sing the language of yes.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

Making: Clay in Process

 Wet clay: mask.  Feeling my way here . . . .

 Seals and mermaids: clay almost dry enough for the kiln.

 Bisqued whale with drying glaze.

 Motley assortment just glazed.

Quick session just to keep my hand in, you know?

Neil Young: "When I Write A Song"

"When I write a song, it starts with a feeling.  I can hear something in my head or feel it in my heart.  It may be that I just picked up the guitar and mindlessly started playing.  That's the way a lot of songs begin.  When you do that, you are not thinking.  Thinking is the worst thing for writing a song.  So you just start playing and something new comes out.  Where does it come from?  Who cares?  Just keep it and go with it.  That's what I do.  I never judge it.  I believe it.  It came as a gift when I picked up my musical instrument and it came through me playing with the instrument.  The chords and melody just appeared.  Now is not the time for interrogation or analysis.  Now is the time to get to know the song, not change it before you even know it.  It is like a wild animal, a living thing.  Be careful not to scare it away.  That's my method, or one of my methods, at least."

--Neil Young,

from page 158 of Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream,
A Plume Book, New York: 2012.

Nick Drake's "Time Has Told Me"

TIME HAS TOLD ME

Time has told me
You're a rare rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind.

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
Someday our ocean
Will find its shore.

So I`ll leave the ways that are making me be
What I really don't want to be
Leave the ways that are making me love
What I really don't want to love.

Time has told me
You came with the dawn
A soul with no footprint
A rose with no thorn.

Your tears they tell me
There's really no way
Of ending your troubles
With things you can say.

And time will tell you
To stay by my side
To keep on trying
'til there's no more to hide.

So leave the ways that are making you be
What you really don't want to be
Leave the ways that are making you love
What you really don't want to love.

Time has told me
You're a rare rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind.

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
For some day our ocean
Will find its shore.

--Nick Drake


Seek out Nick Drake's CD Five Leaves Left for the original song, from which I have taken these lyrics. Gorgeous music too.

Byron: "Many Are Poets Who Have Never Penned"

Many are Poets who have never penned
Their inspiration, and perchance the best:
They felt, and loved, and died, but would not lend
Their thoughts to meaner beings; they compressed
The God within them, and rejoined the stars
Unlaurelled upon earth, but far more blessed
Than those who are degraded by the jars
Of Passion, and their frailties linked to fame,
Conquerors of high renown, but full of scars.
Many are Poets but without the name;
For what is Poesy but to create
From overfeeling Good or Ill; and aim
At an external life beyond our fate,
And be the new Prometheus of new men,
Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,
Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain,
And vultures to the heart of the bestower,
Who, having lavished his high gift in vain,
Lies to his lone rock by the sea-shore?
So be it: we can bear.—

--Lord Byron, the opening lines to Canto IV
of The Prophecy of Dante

Howard Nemerov's "The Makers"

THE MAKERS

Who can remember back to the first poets, 
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus? 
No one has remembered that far back 
Or now considers, among the artifacts, 
And bones and cantilevered inference 
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets, 
So lofty and disdainful of renown 
They left us not a name to know them by. 

They were the ones that in whatever tongue 
Worded the world, that were the first to say 
Star, water, stone, that said the visible 
And made it bring invisibles to view 
In wind and time and change, and in the mind 
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world 
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers 
Of the city into the astonished sky. 

They were the first great listeners, attuned 
To interval, relationship, and scale, 
The first to say above, beneath, beyond, 
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine, 
Who having uttered vanished from the world 
Leaving no memory but the marvelous 
Magical elements, the breathing shapes 
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

--Howard Nemerov

The New Tea Mug

That's the same bowl I posted in yesterday's entry here, but with the light from a different angle, suddenly there's a shiny band about the upper section.  I had some luck making this piece, both in the throwing and the glazing, especially as I was using up some rather dried up clay that I should have wrapped better.

I could point out the three flaws -- or more? -- in this small piece, but I like it more than enough to keep it for my own tea-drinking.  The piece is short (only 3" high, 3 1/2" wide), but the shape is quite right for holding and sipping.  (The slightly flared top; the slightly bulging belly; the smooth and rounded lip, neither too thick nor too thin.)

Also, with the flaws, I have an excuse not to give it away to anyone I like, right?

Tea Bowl: studio-mix clay (stoneware + Navajo wheel);
transparent brown, floating blue, and clear glazing, layered and dripped.

Hardcore Waterman; Irreverent, Generous, Genuine Soul

MICKEY MUNOZ

My favorite book right now: Mickey Munoz is amazing.
He's a wonderful model for living life to the fullest and keeping your sense of humor.
The title really says it: "No Bad Waves."

I'll have more to say and samples to share once I finish the work of the semester.

Mickey Munoz,  
No Bad Waves: Talking Story with Mickey Munoz, 
Patagonia Books: Ventura, CA,
2011

Regarding Rules?

Rules and personality types: followers, breakers, makers, and unmakers.

I'm a weird mix of all four, especially the last two.

How about you?

F: Well, I don't know about the last two, but I'm a fairly strict rule-follower… until the rules make no sense.

M: Then you become a rule unmaker, right?

F: I don't know; how do you make the distinction between breaking and unmaking?

M: Attitude.

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.

Touchstone: The Testament of Daedalus

Consider this quotation from Michael Ayrton's The Testament of Daedalus:

What there is in me of poesis rests in my fingertips and in my eyes, but because the poem exists in the thing I make, and not in me, it comes to me in the act of discovery. I make votives of one sort and another and celebrate possibilities in gold and bronze and other materials. In the making of things and especially in the making of images, lies an act of conquest which is sufficient exercise of power for a proper man.

I put this passage next to Seamus Heaney's "The Diviner" (and next to various parts of Mary Renault's The King Must Die and The Mask of Apollo) when I think about teaching, about art, about craft, and about ambition. The books I haven't written yet; the stories I tell, have told, will tell.

Ayrton, Michael. The Testament of Daedalus. London: Robin Clark, 1991.

Renault, Mary.  The King Must Die.  New York: Pocket Books, 1965.

---.  The Mask of Apollo.   New York: Pantheon, 1966.