Fresh From the Kiln: Mermaid and Wave

Mermaid, Swimming and Wave:
silverstone clay; cobalt carbonate oxide.

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

Waiting for Gadot

Soldate clay;
gray/green glaze:
8/10/15

If you've read my blog, you know I have a soft spot for frogs.

(I also appreciate a certain wonderful heroic character.)

Body English: Musings on the Beautiful and Sublime

Let's quote Edmund Burke on "Gradual Variation":

BUT as perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of angular parts, so their parts never continue long in the same right line.  They vary their direction every moment, and they change under the eye by a deviation continually carrying on, but for whose beginning or end you will find it difficult to ascertain a point. The view of a beautiful bird will illustrate this observation. Here we see the head increasing insensibly to the middle, from whence it lessens gradually until it mixes with the neck; the neck loses itself in larger swell, which continues to the middle of the body, when the whole decreases again to the tail; the tail takes a new direction; but it soon varies its new course: it blends again with the other parts; and the line is perpetually changing, above, below, upon every side.  In this description I have before me the idea of a dove; it agrees very well with most of the conditions of beauty. It is smooth and downy; its parts are (to use that expression) melted into one another; you are presented with no sudden protuberance through the whole, and yet the whole is continually changing. 

Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface, continual, and yet hardly perceptible at any point, which forms one of the great constituents of beauty? 


Selections from A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
-- from Part II: Section XV, in particular

Edmund Burke, 1757.

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.

Roundness

Nicolson's "Sea Room" -- Gaelic and Norse

Adam Nicolson's Sea Room is a memoir concerning the Shiant Islands in the Hebrides.  Nicolson inherited the islands from his father, and he pays tribute to the islands, their life and history, his own life and history as intertwined with his father's gift.  Here is a longish passage in which Nicolson reflects on the Gaelic/Norse heritage, and though I don't always (or quite) agree with his interpretation of the intrinsic relationships or the causal links between borrowings, I will say Nicolson's delivery takes me into this mixed-lineage, mixed-linguistic world.

(Freyja is Nicolson's trusty boat.)

Freyja does at least belong to that world.  I hold her tiller and she is my link to a chain that stretches over five hundred miles and a thousand years to the coast of Norway.  Because there is no timber on the Outer Hebrides, the commercial connection with the Baltic has remained alive.  Until no more than a generation ago, Baltic traders brought Finnish tar, timber and pitch directly to Stornoway and Tarbert in Harris.  Although Freyja's own timber comes from the mainland of Scotland, her waterproofing below the water-line is known as 'Stockholm tar': a wood tar, distilled from pine and imported from the Baltic at least since the Middle Ages.  Until well into the nineteenth century, kit boats in marked parts came imported fro Norway to the Hebrides, travelling in the hold of merchant ships, and assembled by boat builders in any notch or loch along the Harris or Lewis coast.  In 1828, Lord Teignmouth, the ex-Governor-General of India, friend of Wilberforce, came out to the Shiants in the company of Alexander Stewart, the farmer at Valamus on Pairc, who had tenancy of the islands.  They launched forth in this gentleman's boat, a small skiff or yawl built in Norway, long, narrow, peaked at both ends, extremely light, floating like a feather upon the water, and when properly managed, with the buoyancy and almost the security of a sea-bird on its native wave.

The British Imperialist, the liberal evangelical, member of the Clapham Sect, travels in a Viking boat on a Viking sea.  I nearly called Freyja 'Fulmar' because of that phrase of Teignmouth's.  No bird is more different on the wing than on the nest and in flight the fulmar is the most effortless of all sea birds.  It was that untroubled buoyancy in wind and water that I was after.  But Freyja's  fatness was what settled it.

Almost everything in her and the world now around her, if described in modern Gaelic, would be understood by a Viking.  The words used here for boats and sea all come from Old Norse and the same descriptions have been on people's lips for a millennium.  If I say, in Gaelic, 'windward of the sunken rock', 'the seaweed in the narrow creek', 'fasten the buoy', 'steer with the helm towards the shingle beach', 'prop the boat on an even keel', 'put the cod, the ling, the saithe and the coaley in the wicker basket', 'use the oar as a roller to launch the boat', 'put a wedge in the joint between the planking in the stern', 'set the sea chest on the frames amidships', 'the tide is running around the skerry', 'the cormorant and the gannet are above the surf', 'haul in the sheet', 'tighten the back stay', 'use the oar as a steerboard', or say of a man, 'that man is a hero, a stout man, the man who belongs at the stem of a boat', every single one of those terms has been transmitted directly from the language which the Norse spoke into modern Gaelic.  It is a kind of linguistic DNA, persistent across thirty or forty generations.

Sometimes the words have survived unchanged.  Oatmeal mixed with cold water, ocean food, is stappa in NOrse, stapag in Gaelic, although stapag is now made with sugar and cream.  With many, there has been a little rubbing down of the forms in the millennium that they have been used.  A tear in a sail is riab in Gaelic, rifa in Old Norse.  The smock worn by fisherman is sguird in Gaelic, skirta in Old Norse.  Sgaireag is the Gaelic for 'seaman', skari the Norse word.  And occasionally, there is a strange and suggestive transformation.  The Gaelic for a hen roost is the Norse word for hammock.  Norse for 'strong' becomes Gaelic for 'fat'.  The Norse word for rough ground becomes peat moss in Gaelic.  A hook or a barb turns into an antler.  To creep -- that mobile, subtle movement -- translates into Gaelic as 'to crouch': more still, more rooted to the place.  A water meadow in Norway, fit, becomes fidean: grass covered at high tide.  'To drip' becomes 'to melt'.  A Norse framework, whether of a house, a boat or a basket, becomes a Gaelic creel.

But it is the human qualities for which Gaelic borrowed the Viking words that are most intriguingly and intimately suggestive of the life lived around these seas a thousand years ago.  There is a cluster of borrowings around the ideas of oddity and suspicion.  Gaelic itself, if it had not taken from the invaders, would have no word for a quirk (for which it borrowed the Old Norse word meaning 'a trap'), nor for 'strife', nor 'a faint resemblance' -- the word it took was svip, the Norse for 'glimpse'.  The  Gaelic from 'lullaby' is taladh, from the Norse tal, meaning 'allurement', 'seduction'.

The vocabulary for contempt and wariness suddenly vivifies that ancient moment.  Gaelic borrowed Norse revulsion wholesale.  Noisy boasting, to blether, a coward, cowardice, surliness, an insult, mockery, a servant, disgust, anything shrivelled or shrunken (sgrogag from the Old Norse skrukka, an old shrimp,) a bald head, a slouch, a good-for-nothing, a dandy, a fop, a short, fat, stumpy woman (staga from stakka, the stump of a tree), a sneak (stig/stygg), a wanderer -- all this was something new, and had arrived with the longships.  Fear and ridicule, the uncomfortable presence of the distrusted other, the ugly cross-currents of two worlds, the broken and disturbing sea where those tides met: all this could only be expressed in the odd new language the strangers brought with them.

--Adam Nicolson

Adam Nicolson,
Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides,
North Point Press: New York,
2001

I've quoted from pages 30-33.

"Kindness Flows": More From Archilochos

In time of shame,
Can you spare me the evil?
Kindness flows both ways.
Woman, woman,
Why do you keep me here,
Why this road, of all,
And why do you care at all?

----------

How many times,
How many times,
On the gray sea,
The sea combed
By the wind
Like a wilderness
Of woman's hair,
Have we longed,
Lost in nostalgia,
For the sweetness
Of homecoming.

----------

There's nothing now
We can't expect to happen!
Anything at all, you can bet,
Is ready to jump out at us.
No need to wonder over it.
Father Zeus has turned
Noon to night, blotting out
The sunshine utterly,
Putting cold terror
At the back of the throat.
Let's believe all we hear.
Even that dolphins and cows
Change place, porpoises and goats,
Rams booming along in the offing,
Mackerel nibbing in the hill pastures.
I wouldn't be surprised,
I wouldn't be surprised.

--Archilochos



from Guy Davenport's 7 Greeks: Translations,
A New Directions Book: New York, 1995.

Illustration: outtake from the previous blog entry: "Water Bowl".

Introducing Fern Capel

I'll quote a lengthy paragraph from the first chapter of Jan Siegel's Prospero's Children.  I am tempted to quote something about the elemental mermaid from the rather gripping, rather fantastic prologue, but the novel really gets going with the introduction of our main character: so sensible, so grounded Fernanda Capel.

That was the beginning, she decided long afterward.  The meeting at the gallery, the sense of menace, the picture.  The incident seemed trivial enough at the time but it left her feeling vaguely perturbed, as if the outlying penumbra of some far-flung shadow had brushed the borderline of her bright safe world, or she had caught a few isolated notes of an eerie music which would soon come booming from every corner of the universe, obliterating all other sound.  The events of that extraordinary and terrifying summer became perhaps easier to assimilate because she was in some sort prepared: from the moment of that initial encounter an unfamiliar atmosphere began to seep into her life, unsettling her, unbalancing her cultivated equilibrium, making her vulnerable, unsure, receptive to change.  She was sixteen years old, well-behaved, intelligent, motivated, a product of the Eighties in which she lived, viewing the world with a practical realism engendered by the early death of her mother and the responsibilities which had devolved on her as a result of it.  Her father's easygoing manner had acquired its undercurrent of anxiety from that time, left alone with a small daughter and smaller son, but it was Fern who had gradually taken charge of the household, trading au pair for housekeeper, seeing the bills were paid, bossing her surviving parent, attempting to boss her younger brother.  She had coasted through puberty and adolescence without rebellion or trauma, avoiding hard drugs, excessive alcohol, and underage sex.  Her future was carefully planned, with no room for surprises.  University; a suitable career; at some point, a prudent marriage.  She thought of herself as grown-up but behind the sedate facade she was still a child, shutting out the unknown with illusions of security and control.  That summer the illusions would be dissipated and the unknown would invade her existence, transforming the self-possessed girl into someone desperate, frightened, uncertain, alone--the raw material of an adult.


--Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children, A Del Rey Book, Random House: New York, 2001.  Pages 16-17.

Now some will say that there's far too much telling and not enough showing in the above paragraph, and I can see the point of such an observation.  I can also see the point of laying out the larger trajectory of Fern's summer, her transformation, in one such paragraph and then devoting three hundred pages to the How of that summer, that transformation.  Desperation, fright, uncertainty, isolation: those are crucial ingredients of the stew of life, the factors without which we may never mature.

Fern Capel's career spans three books: Prospero's Children, The Dragon Charmer, and The Witch Queen.  I recall reading somewhere that Jan Siegel was interested in taking the child-hero of the classics of the fantasy field--the Narnia books, The Dark is Rising books, and so forth--from that special, fantastic, and haunted childhood into adulthood.  For as we all know, stories never really end, not even when the books are unwritten . . . .