What Nisus Said

Nisus ait: 'dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?'


Nisus said, Do the gods add this heat to the mind,
Euryalus, or does a man's own dire desire become a god to him?

-- Virgil's Aeneid IX, 184-185
(my translation)

Identity Crisis

Superhero or nemesis?

Reprise: Shoulders of Clay

Self-Portrait #47.
Sculpture mix;
green and shino glazing:
live model.

Triton

Triton: clay mask in the ocean;
sculpture mix;
tan and blue glazing.

The Adventures of Kelpman

Close-up: Kelpman in the surge.

Kelpman:
chicken wire figure (1996);
kelpflesh (2015).
Bodega Bay surge channel.

Cargo From Cumae: A Fragment

CARGO FROM CUMAE

Latium, 1164 B.C.

Nisus sighed as the shore lifted
With the easing of the tide before his eyes.
Younger, he'd have been under,
Working the wreck, allowing
Muscle and sheer will
To offset mere depth.
The boat shifted beneath his feet,
And the Trojan diver bowed his head --
Gray locks cropped against
The cloy, clammy, clinging weeds
Of long cold nereid fingers
And hotly wanton nereid needs.
Scars he touched and counted breaths . . . .

What youth ignores, age hoards.
Each foot ebbing meant
Longer labor, greater benefits
Below.  Both lungs and eyes
Less exercised by the low tides
Granted -- too soon denied --
By Diana and the marches of her moon.
Nisus surveyed his small domain,
This modest craft, consecrated
By Neptune's priest; nets; ropes;
Reeds; knives; hooks; weights;
A clay cup; worn sponges;
And that flask of olive oil,
Diver's mystery, for sight below . . . .

(an old fragment, newly polished a bit)

MD

Surviving The Shipwreck: A Graphic Glimpse

The Captive, Unbound (Nisus):
sculpture mix; shino and transparent brown glazing;
copper wire, beaten.

(A bit of fun in the shorebreak after a good day's paddling and free diving.)

Elemental!

The Captive, Unbound --

Sculpture mix; shino and trans-brown glazing; copper wire, beaten.

(I also call this fellow Nisus, The Trojan Captive, after a story-sequence and notes that comprise one of those books I haven't written yet.)

Sofia, All Dressed Up

Triton: Intertidal

Reprise: Aqua-Matt in Clay

Self-Portrait #47:
sculpture mix; green and shino glazing.
Summer 2008.

I just had a good quick swim session.  Feeling slightly connected to my aquatic self.

Triton By My Side

Free diving off Pacific Grove: clay mask in tow.

I strapped one of my ceramic masks--Triton--to the belt for my camera pouch this time out.  I had wanted to take pictures of the mask underwater, set against a kelp holdfast or wedged in a rocky crevice beside some of those gigantic green anemones, perhaps, but the visibility was so limited, I ended up not chancing the loss of the mask this time.

The strong surge wasn't helping either.  Now, if I'd been tank diving, the conditions wouldn't have mattered so much for exploratory photography, even with the poor visibility, but I still prefer free diving and its particular challenges in such a situation.

Shore and tidepool shots only with the Triton mask: see those shots here and here.  Next time, deeper shots--or maybe I'll bring along one of my clay fish for such a photo opportunity; I've done such in tidepools, of course, as you can see here.

The Shining God

Nisus dove deeper and deeper, searching the kelp forest for the lost talisman, but Tyrik decided he'd be the wiser one (and drier) as he began to comb the tidepools and crevices in the rocks for any flotsam from the wreck . . . . 

Mask and Kelp II.

Not That Nisus

In the ninth book of his Aeneid, the Roman poet tells the tale of two friends, Nisus and Euryalus, who volunteer to deliver a message from the besieged main camp of the Trojans to Prince Aeneas himself, exploring and seeking allies in the Italian countryside. Aeneas' son Ascanius entrusts the two friends to find his father, their commander, and attest to the peril facing the camp. Unfortunately, the two Trojans are distracted from their mission by bloodlust and the lure of glory, and they stop to slaughter some sleeping Italian warriors. The younger Euryalus is seized after the moonlight gleaming off the helmet he'd taken for a prize gives him away, though Nisus has gotten free and could continue on his mission. He does not continue, but returns, wanting to free his younger friend. Nisus throws a spear at one of the warriors holding Euryalus, killing the man, but the Italian leader kills Euryalus in retaliation. (What else was likely?) Tormented by the death of Euryalus, Nisus then rushes in suicidally. The Italians cut him down and take both Trojans' heads as trophies.

Virgil calls forth Homer's very successful night-foray by Odysseus and Diomedes, catching the spy Dolon and slaughtering Rhesus and his company in their sleep, from The Iliad, and he recasts that episode into a fairly obvious fiasco with sentimental and sentimentally ridiculous overtones. Euryalus' mother's speech about the loss of her son and the brutality of war is moving, but the men are still dead. Later readers and writers have appreciated the martyrdom of the two Trojans, casting this episode as sentimentally heroic. Others have seen this episode as Virgil's clear commentary on Homeric pride and selfishness, on Greek "glory", in contrast to the more Roman virtue of honorable duty: Nisus and Euryalus acting as stand-ins for, say, Achilles and Patroclus. Virgil, being Virgil, all is possible, at once. To me, the effect of the episode is complex, morally and emotionally, more complex than I can easily explain. (I may attempt to better this treatment in a future blog entry.)

I've always been drawn to a key question that Nisus raises, which I offer in the English translation of Robert Fitzgerald: "This urge to action, do the gods instil it, / Or is each man's desire a god to him, / Euryalus?" What is the source of motivation? Of desire? And, where does it come from? Is it an external force or purely internal, however we dress it or explain it to ourselves? "This urge to action": the older I've gotten, the more complex my sense of motivation and drive. And yet often what drives us is simple, dress it up as we like. Still, for every action, the riddle of motivation, and only each one of us can truly understand the internal or external forces involved. That's my comforting--sometimes discomforting--fiction, anyway.

For some odd reason, I've always wondered What If Nisus Had Not Died Beside His Friend? What if Nisus survived the ill-conceived, luckless night-foray? Would he be haunted by his friend? Would he be haunted by guilt and remorse?

Back in the mid-90's, I started making notes for stories involving this Nisus-who-survives, casting him as a fugitive moving through southern Italy and the Greek isles to return to Troy, an exile masquerading as a fisherman and a sponge-diver. In my imagination, he gets caught up in Odysseus' scheme to salvage Greek ships sunken in storm on the way home laden with Trojan gold and other treasures. Does Odysseus realize that Nisus is a Trojan, a blood enemy, and if he does, does he care?

Back then, I also wrote the following poem, which I recently rediscovered.

NOT THAT NISUS

"I thought you were dead,"

The old ghost said,

The familiar boy with the helm

Too great for his head.

His arms so unsteady--

Yet his voice readily refrained--

"That you'd fallen with me,

That your devotion I'd gained."

"But I'm not that Nisus,"

The clay-gray dreamer denied.

"Not that epic figure, that hero--

If I were, I'd have died.

When you fell to the foe

Like the rose to the plow,

That Nisus was striving--

Scything Fortune knows how."

"I'll return with the night,"

Swore the young warrior at dawn.

But old Nisus had known

That he'd not slumber long

Without the bronze forms of fright

Cast into shadows of shame:

Marked by the might

Still sculpting his name.

--Matt Duckworth

Pooling My Resources

Once again, going swimming has me feeling more like myself.

When I haven't been swimming, that idiom--"more like myself"--seems more a lame riddle than a reliable truth. After even such a short swim as today's, however, I do feel more like myself, like my better self.

Nisus of Troy stirs in my imagination's deepest waters.

Also, my muscles are already sore in the better ways.

The real trick or test will be to build a pattern, to craft that practice again with three, four, or even five workouts a week while school is in session. I've done it before, and I've needed to restart before. Time to begin again.

Maybe the ocean tomorrow. Just a quick dip, you know.