Gemini X 3 / 5 +9

Charting the passage of time, activities, and identity:

what I do.

There's a lot more humor and a lot less ego involved in the parade of profile pics; at least, that's the way I see it.  (Judge me, if you want, but I don't intend to lose sleep over the matter.)  I have written before of Rembrandt's many selfies and of the third-person would-be objective perspective of mirror-images offered in John Fowles' novel Daniel Martin, an old favorite.  

Tracking my age and how the lines on my face and how the gray or white hairs on my head accumulate can be a sport with different events.  Guessing where the next ache or sore muscle will appear is another such event.  I am not getting younger, right?  

But I am also still paddling and diving and reading around and pursuing other such richly-enlivening activities.  (Man alive, I miss the studio and clay.).   I like to keep track of all those activities I am fortunate enough to pursue -- and keep track of the different people I seem to be and have been: Diver Matt, Kayak Matt, Teacher Matt, Clay Matt, and so forth.  After a long day desk-bound, there's a uplifting joy in checking what I was doing, who I was, in times past.  Sometimes, checking the last trip to Mendocino, for example, can spur me to check the weather and start making plans for the next outing,, however long or far away.  And, if that planning proves merely mental, proves merely daydreaming, that's good too.  I return to the matter at hand at the desk a bit more energized, a bit more ready to dig in.  

What with the pandemic, remote teaching, and reaching 59, I have been feeling reflective.

As a Gemini, I am used to seeing the world and myself through a two-fold lens.  

Here are a few more recent examples.

THE PADDLER:

(A) stern and serious, working at it --

B) Having fun on the water -- salt salvation --

THE VINTAGE LOOK  /  BLACK & WHITE GAMES:

(A) Ducking down an alleyway  -- "Call me Ishmael."          (Thanks, Herman Melville.)

(B) A "Pirate" Looks Toward 60?          (Thanks, Jimmy Buffett)

 

FULL-FRONTAL (portrait-wise):

(A) Post-dive, unmasked: 

red from too much sun and the cold cold water; 

slightly saltdrunk --

(B)  Post-paddle, pandemic ready --

This last shot: that mask gets lots of smiles, lots of laughs, from children and adults alike.  

It's a sea lion mask, technically, but many kids think it's a dog--and why not? 

Sea lions bark too, don't they?

So, I oblige.

Any man who barks in public can't take himself too seriously.

Tools of the Trade

Shelf-love.

Epic Ambitions: "Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel"

Three or four times in the past, I have read around in this poetic labyrinth from Evan S. Connell, first published in 1962, and I have often enjoyed following the lines of thought a few steps or, plunging further, have gotten lost. I am going to attempt reading straight through, which may or may not be the proper path.

I first looked at the book purely because I was born in Carmel, CA, and am taken with message-bottles found on beaches and such. The poetry led me to purchase the volume--which is either a work of genius or a trickster's hoard of bits and pieces. Either may prove compelling.

I can't tell yet how many different narrative voices or personae Connell is utilizing; certainly, while some "notes" are in the first-person, many are in the third-, and the overall narrative voice is Legion.  The interwoven narratives involve multiple historical periods or moments.  Exploration, geography, history, mystery, divinity, humanity, life, death, loss--coins--philosophy, alchemy, heresy, punishment, fear, greed--coins--exhilaration, awe: these are the key words I'm noting on the endpapers as I work my way into this literary place, this world-out-of-a-bottle.

Here is one passage that caught my eye:

Some say the tuna swims around the world
searching for a better life because he is not at home
in the sea. It may be we have met, this obsessed fish
and I, somewhere beyond the Pillars of Heracles.

(I love the use of "Pillars of Heracles" for the antique feeling, like reading an L. Sprague de Camp novel about the ancient world from my youth.  Even more, I love the "obsessed fish / and I".  This is an idiosyncratic choice of quotation, but that's also one joy of not being in the classroom, of being off-duty: I can please myself--and be reminded that the individual response matters, that the social or communal or universal responses grow from the responsible, attentive individual ones.)

And here is a passage I have found particularly compelling:

We know of Saint Dionysius
that when his head had been chopped. from his body
he picked it up and carried it;
and walked to the place where he wanted to be buried.
To what prayer will you listen, if not to this?

Off-duty, as it were, I retreat to the poetic and intuitive, if only for the sustenance to shoulder the burdens of teaching once more. (But not only "if only", you know?). The power of that last line in the passage: "To what prayer will you listen, if not to this?"  How is the foregoing a prayer?  How could it not be, on reflection and assertion?  The power and movement of art and the mind of the reader, in this case.  This is a book made up of a thousand poetic fragments, possibly more, and reading these pieces requires mental ordering, assessing, connecting--requires a willingness to suspend knowledge, even comprehension, in the moment for the sake of an emerging pattern.  The process is certainly immersive; the experience can feel overwhelming, a drowning, or feel more positive, upwelling and fulfilling.

Reading the first forty or fifty pages in order so far, attuned to resonance and pattern-making, has led to a familiar reflection.  I can not-know exactly what something means and yet know that something carries meaning, is pregnant with meaning, and standing as a witness feels true and useful. Many of my students take their cues from pop culture and expect meaning to be delivered, upon demand, and to be consumed. So often, however, meaning must be discovered, must be explored, may be missed or mislaid, may be sweated out, must be uncovered--partially, gradually--and may or must be resisted.  Grist for the mill of the mind.

I don't fully know how to teach the absolute sneakiness of art, but I try, I try, I try.

Epic ambitions--Connell's, mine; writer's, reader's--afoot.

The Telling

The telling.

That's what I like best about anything: stories, essays, novels, plays, epics.  That's what I love.

How the makers create meaning sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word, and sometimes morpheme by morpheme.  There's a wonderfully erotic ee cummings poem about bodies that has the phrase "I like its hows" and I'd apply that to every story, every essay, ever offered up to its readers.

The hows.  The telling.

I only wish I'd figured out in grad school how to craft that focus into an appropriate project.

Some might find that a shallow approach to literature, but there's a world of interest in that surface interface between teller and told, between player and audience, between maker and you.  

If you want to dive deep, you have to start at the surface and return to the surface.  There's more there there than we are often taught to understand and appreciate.  (And, frankly, most misreadings arise from lack of attention to detail, to the foundation, to the surface interface I'm calling attention to, to the there.)

Luckily, teaching intro to literature and intro to non-fiction at a community college allows me to delve so much into the telling on a daily basis.

Let's Head for the Land of Poetry . . . .

Sobriquet

"Hey, hey, Teach.  What's with the clay-head?"

--Not-my-student asking about the prop for Macbeth class today.

Second favorite event after the baby duck on campus.  

Since this was the last day of regular classes and I will be suffering from not-teaching soon, I liked hearing the sobriquet.

Julius, Post-Ides: sculpture mix, pit-fired on Ocean Beach, SF, CA.

The Rule(s) of Threes

The Rule(s) of 3s:
today's linchpin in English 1B, a required Introduction to Literature course.

Triples: In Macbeth, we have three witches, three murderers, three apparitions.

I want to talk about a different set of triples, of threes.

Air: you can go three minutes without air.
Water: you can go three days without water.
Food: you can go three weeks without food.

But how does any of that relate to our English class?

Habits?
What do you think?
Three weeks--to break or to lose a habit?
Three months--to make, to create, a habit.

Students, I say as I heft Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Macbeth in my hands,
You've been reading steadily for three months now.  Don't stop.

Yes, some of you were already readers before you came to this class; good for you.  I've been cheering you on all term.

But some of you haven't been readers . . . but now you are.

Keep going.  Make being a reader a full-on habit.

After finals, take a week or two weeks off--I mean, why would you?  But okay, take a little time off--but before that three weeks' mark rolls around, pick up Homer's Odyssey or another Shakespeare play or a novel, crime or fantasy or science fiction or whatever.  Just don't stop reading.


(I think my students appreciated the effort I was making, and I pulled them in with the rules of threes.)

What Archilochos Said

"Greet insolence with outrage."
----------Archilochos,
one of those--his--fragments in Guy Davenport's translation from the Classical Greek.

What Archilochos Said:
four words that have worked well in class, provoking good discussions of diction, denotation, connotation, and character study.

So much in four words.  Just think of what's said, what's signaled, with that choice of "greet" instead of "meet" or "match" or "return".

I must admit I have a qualm or two about the violence in the lines, but then we--our spirits, the collective consciousness--do need rousing in these times.

The Betweens

The betweens.
What I tend to teach.
Each to each.

Dear Lord Byron . . . .

I've been teaching some books about specific obsessions, and in order for my students to understand that I was not judging or maligning the authors for their obsessions, I made a bit of a joke about understanding obsession myself, about being obsessed.  I mentioned my nine years in graduate school and detailed how I'd not only read and annotated all that Lord Byron had written, published or not published, but also had read and annotated the thirteen volumes of his letters that we have and had read and annotated the letters sent to him and had even started reading and annotating all that Byron himself had read . . . in chronological order.

(And that's not counting the bookcase or two full of literary scholarship on Lord Byron and English Romanticism and European history and heroism I also read and annotated.)

What started out as a joke became a little more serious: I do understand obsession.

I survived mine, but not everyone does.

Dream: Out Into The Garden

Quite early yesterday morning I had one of those teaching dreams turn into one of those deceased-parent dreams.

I was helping a student, though I didn't have the right handouts on hand, in a lovely office: old wood and sunlit glass, more spacious and less cluttered than my actual office, with French doors to a most lovely rose garden.  Anyway, I am helping this student grapple with his research project when my father, many years dead but not in the dream, appears in the doorway.  He is dressed in a white shirt and khakis.  He gives me the barest of glances, but isn't rude, as he walks through my office to the French doors and out into the garden.  I tell the student that's my dad even as I realize--in the dream itself--that my father's dead.

Looking through the French doors, looking for my father, I awoke.

Not as Obvious as It Ought to Be

Teach the book on its merits, not on its laurels.

(And by book, I mean anything.  I mean specific books first, of course, the ones by Homer and Melville and Austen and Shakespeare and whomever is popular in the moment, but I certainly mean anything also.)

What I Have Learned

English 1B: two questions.

How does X serve the story?
And, what does the story serve?

English 1A?
Shift "story" to "argument".

Mirror

"I have a jumbled mind that only achieves clarification at times and then under pressure, as in a classroom. Then the material provides the unity; the random insights."

--Theodore Roethke

"A Seed-Sower": M.C. Richards

It took me half my life to come to believe that I was OK even if I did love experience in a loose and undiscriminating way and did not know for sure the difference between good and bad.  My struggles to accept my nature were the struggles of centering.  I found myself at odds with the propaganda of the times.  One is supposed to be either an artist or a homemaker, by one popular superstition.  Either a teacher or a poet, by a theory which says that poetry must not sermonize.  Either a craftsman or an intellectual, by a snobbism which claims either hand or head as the true seat of power.  One is supposed to concentrate and not spread oneself too thin, as the jargon goes.  And this is a jargon spoken by a cultural leadership from which it takes time to win one's freedom, if one is not lucky enough to have been born free.  Finally, I hit upon an image: a seed-sower.  Not to worry about which seeds sprout.  But to give them as my gift in good faith.

--Mary Caroline Richards,
Centering: In Pottery, In Poetry, and the Person, 1964.


(Thank you, JMcC, for first pointing me toward Richards' book.)

"The Sounding Furrows"

Keith Sanders, Drake's Bay, February 1980.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

--from Tennyson's "Ulysses"

I really missed my pal Keith today. He died back in March.

Very unexpectedly, I choked up while reading Tennyson's "Ulysses" aloud in class today and had to stop. Ulysses is asserting his need to keep seeking, to going out beyond the horizon, rather than just slowing down, just dying at home. The poem is many things: the complaint of an underemployed, active man; a celebration of ambition and exploration; a variation on happy-ever-after; a paean to friendship; a poetic death-wish; a farewell. Even as I was reading aloud, I was looking ahead at the place in the poem where the Ithakan king calls upon his comrades, his sharers in adventure, to seek further conquests, further explorations, and the thought of my belated best friend took hold of my voice. I staggered, as it were, to a stop.

Keith is supposed to be here; we were supposed to grow old together, you know?

We were supposed to say the sorts of things Ulysses is saying to his crew to each other. Glory days and scars. Rallying cries. Shared folly and achievement. So much loss and anger flashed through my head.

The silence lengthened, and then I picked up the next line, continuing, but I had to stop again. Instead, I paced around the front of the room, and I told them why I had to stop, that the poem brought back my dead best friend, even though I hadn't expected it too.

Then, I shifted back to the beginning of the poem and the rather difficult first five lines, which I had written on the board already, and we considered the voice and the tone of that voice together. Shoring up my fragments--to steal from Eliot--against my ruin, I used the intellectual to hold the emotional in its proper place, more or less. As an English teacher, I moved forward in the poem, meaning to do honor to friendship as well as to Tennyson and his Ulysses.

Today, the students took all of this in stride, working with me. I've gotten a bit emotional, a bit engaged, with our reading before, treating characters and situations "as if they were alive," as if they mattered. They seem to like that. I'm not sure how many other teachers have acted this way, and the thought occasionally hounds me.

Here's a favorite image from the poem that transcends mere character, that we can all engage with, I hope. Certainly, the lines recall Keith's amazing energy, his wonderful engagement with life, his own aspirations and actions to "shine in use."

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

I recall years ago preparing to teach an essay by Ellen Mairs, I think, on "being a cripple" (her choice of phrasing) and on multiple sclerosis, her affliction, being behind in my prep, and so I arose at 4 a.m. to catch up, and something about that early hour allowed me to be more vulnerable and I just wept reading the piece, a piece I'd always approached intellectually before. I went in and told my students how I wept, and more of the students than usual opened up to discuss the emotional and then the intellectual aspects of the essay.

I have learned to teach, for example, Richard Rodriguez's essays through the emotions first, and the students get so much more, emotionally and intellectually, out of these pieces. And so forth.

Another arrow in the quiver of instruction? I say that as I don the armor of the intellectual for another day in the classroom, but whether or not I am wearing such armor, my heart is still on my sleeve. Emotions matter, and critical thinking that doesn't consider and value emotional responses isn't really all that properly engaged, is it?

Here is the whole of Tennyson's poem on the Greek adventurer long after the close of Homer's epic:

ULYSSES (1833)

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honoured of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and through soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

P.S. Today, one student thanked me after class for being openly emotional in relation to our reading and commented on how the class was helping her to revisit a slightly younger self, as self who read, who had time to read, feel, and be.

I appreciated hearing those words, and I think the ghost of my pal appreciated them too.

Trickster

Or Trisha, after the art instructor with the pigtails who ended up modeling one day in our gesture class. She kept on her clothes, unlike the three previous models, so we kidded her gently about that, and then we all pretended that she'd modeled nude anyway. It was fun watching what different people did with her hair; my version seems very accurate to my memory, though the tails look rather like horns, don't you think?

I learned a lot from her and enjoyed watching her both work and teach. (You can learn quite a bit watching good teachers at their craft.) She guided me through my first full-sized heads and through working with real models. She was also good in that her students produced pieces that didn't look anything like her own work; I take that as a good sign of someone who fosters the individual vision in her students. She also got me to listening to Lucinda Williams again, and that was a happy reminder.

Puck is certainly in her bloodline, somewhere.

Trickster: sculpture mix, brown and black glazes, blended. Maybe some Shino in there too. I made this one back in 2005 or 2006, and I saw it hanging on the wall of the garage, took it outside to see just what I'd done with gesture and glazing, and now share it with you. Not so much: still fun.

Homework: Water Adventure Non-Fiction

Or, Happily Annotating.

This upcoming semester, I will be teaching a fairly recent water adventure book: Tori Murden McClure's A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean. As the front cover sets forth, McClure becomes "the first woman to row alone across an ocean."

I've taught a fair amount of water and underwater nonfiction (and fiction), but I am particularly looking forward to reading and teaching this book with my classes. For one, McClure fails her first attempt to row across the Atlantic. The majority of the volume concerns this first voyage, this first attempt, and that seems fitting too. We shall see; I've read enough to know this book will work well, but I am in the midst of a true reading, a committed reading, with the classroom in my mind.

I don't just mean concocting vocabulary lists, quiz questions, and essay topics, but also conceiving exercises in practical imagination. For example, in a few minutes, I'm going out to the garage to pull out a handy blue tarp to be folded into the dimensions of McClure's rowboat, a robust 23' x 6', more or less. And if you imagine being confined to a space like that for, say, three months, there's more less than more involved.

Okay, where's that tarp?

Or a cardboard mock-up?

The possibilities . . . .

One reason why I teach, frankly: feeling out the possibilities, invoking the practical imagination.

McClure, Tori Murden. A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Print.

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.

From the Toolshed