SIP: Captain

 Morning.

Evening.

One Shiny-Clean Truck

I was happy to see CA Fish and Wildlife making their presence felt up north.  Too much poaching going on.

I didn't expect to find myself looking back at me, however.

I was taking a shot of the warden’s truck (for I admire the proud logo and the officer’s mission), yet his vehicle was so squeaky clean, I ended up with a rather good shot of my own truck—as my kayak-buddy JP pointed out.

Chesterton: "Very Big Ideas in Very Small Spaces"

On art and limitation and "very big ideas in very small spaces":

"Meanwhile the philosophy of toy theatres is worth any one's consideration. All the essential morals which modern men need to learn could be deduced from this toy. Artistically considered, it reminds us of the main principle of art, the principle which is in most danger of being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact that art consists of limitation; the fact that art is limitation. Art does not consist in expanding things. Art consists of cutting things down, as I cut down with a pair of scissors my very ugly figures of St. George and the Dragon. Plato, who liked definite ideas, would like my cardboard dragon; for though the creature has few other artistic merits he is at least dragonish. The modern philosopher, who likes infinity, is quite welcome to a sheet of the plain cardboard. . . . .

"This especially is true of the toy theatre; that, by reducing the scale of events it can introduce much larger events. Because it is small it could easily represent the earthquake in Jamaica. Because it is small it could easily represent the Day of Judgment. Exactly in so far as it is limited, so far it could play easily with falling cities or with falling stars. Meanwhile the big theatres are obliged to be economical because they are big. When we have understood this fact we shall have understood something of the reason why the world has always been first inspired by small nationalities. The vast Greek philosophy could fit easier into the small city of Athens than into the immense Empire of Persia. In the narrow streets of Florence Dante felt that there was room for Purgatory and Heaven and Hell. He would have been stifled by the British Empire. Great empires are necessarily prosaic; for it is beyond human power to act a great poem upon so great a scale. You can only represent very big ideas in very small spaces. My toy theatre is as philosophical as the drama of Athens."

--G.K. Chesterton,
     --from his essay "The Toy Theatre" from Tremendous Trifles

"His First Drug"

"Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug."

--William Gibson, Zero History

Byronic Opposition

Byron's expressions of the heroic saliently focused on opposition figures--the Trojan view, Priam's sons, a Turkish infidel and his sons, a cripple--to express that heroism, a thought I'd misplaced from back in the days I was working on that dissertation.

(How odd, especially given that my intended and partially-unexamined title read "With a Trojan's Eye."  I knew Byron was more cosmopolitan, more liberal, of mind and heart than many have given him credit for, but I wasn't quite digesting all that I'd been consuming, reading hugely as I was, and so . . . .)

Identity Crisis

Superhero or nemesis?

Kelp Love

Lines Upon Lines

Swimming Around In My Head

Images from a June 2015 excursion out from Timber Cove.

Byron: "This Odd Labyrinth"

I won’t describe—that is, if I can help
    Description; and I won’t reflect—that is,
If I can stave off thought, which, as a whelp
    Clings to its teat, sticks to me through the abyss
Of this odd labyrinth; or as the kelp
    Holds by the rock; or as a lover’s kiss
Drains its first draught of lips: --but, as I said,
I won’t philosophize, and will be read.

--Lord Byron
Don Juan: Canto X, #28

Metrical Reflection

Two trochees and a spondee: my full name.

Can you tell that I'm bored with hanging around being ill and just "resting"?

Face in the Mirror

I once went on a camping trip to Fish Lake and didn't shave for a week, which meant I didn't look at my face in a mirror for a week.  We were in the woods, so no shop windows to check my hair, no car windows to glance at my reflection.  Sure, I could have looked at my face in the surface of the lake, just as Eve did after God had created her--and she saw an absolutely beautiful creature, so beautiful that Adam was a real let-down when she first saw him--but I didn't think to look at my face in the water while fishing.  I don't think I would have had an Eve-like experience anyway.

Instead, I was surprised when I got home at the end of the week, staggered into the bathroom, exhausted from a long day hiking, swimming, and fishing and from an 8 or 9 hour drive, and stood in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, reaching for my toothbrush and toothpaste.  (And yes, I'd been brushing all week long; don't get distracted from my story.)  So, a week away from a mirror and when I looked I saw a stranger.  I saw myself as I guess I really am.   I saw the wideness of my jawbones, the narrowness of my chin, the skinny roundness of my nose, the shaggy eyebrows, the bright blue eyes.  I saw all that and the rest from a different perspective, a perspective not governed by my own ideas of myself, not governed by the way I'd always thought of my face (unremarkable, but mine).  

I looked in that mirror, and I saw myself, but only for a moment, a flash of sight, and then there was just me, just Matt, looking back at me, a slightly quizzical look on my face as if that reflected self were amused by all that had passed so swiftly through my brain.  'Thinking too much again,' Mirror-Matt said, 'It's just you and me here.'  

I looked frankly at myself in that mirror, and I laughed.

--entry found in an old notebook back in 2014

(lightly edited)

Green Dreams

 Surface shot: kelp forest.