Magic Carpet

 

Buoy out front: 

Van Damme State Beach,

Mendocino

This shot is so much better on a big screen.

Yearning for Salt

Light winds --
kayaking off Van Damme State Beach
in Mendocino County.

--a shot from years ago: 2017? 2016?

SIP: Captain

 Morning.

Evening.

Yearning

Swimming Again

Tomales Bay:
Off Pelican Point.

Yearning

2013 birthday shot:
a good memory.

I wish I were paddling.

Orkney Vistas

Keats and Yeats: Two Odes

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
         My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
         One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
         But being too happy in thine happiness,—
                That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
                        In some melodious plot
         Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
                Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
         Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
         Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
         Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
                With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
                        And purple-stained mouth;
         That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
                And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
         What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
         Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
         Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
                Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
                        And leaden-eyed despairs,
         Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
                Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
         Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
         Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
         And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
                Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
                        But here there is no light,
         Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
                Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
         Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
         Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
         White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
                Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
                        And mid-May's eldest child,
         The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
                The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
         I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
         To take into the air my quiet breath;
                Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
         To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
                While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
                        In such an ecstasy!
         Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
                   To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
         No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
         In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
         Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
                She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
                        The same that oft-times hath
         Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
                Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
         To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
         As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
         Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
                Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
                        In the next valley-glades:
         Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
                Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

--JOHN KEATS




BYZANTIUM

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

--WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

King: Clay from 2011

King Holmberg: Sculpture mix; transparent brown and denim glazes, layered.

Missing the play of clay in hand . . . .

Yearning

"The Other Worlds": Life's Largest Riddle

The Other Worlds is an excellent mythopoeic novel by a dear friend, Christoph Greger.  Christoph's own humble way of introducing the book to the world is worth quoting: "Hey all you cystic fibrosis lit fans, Ren fair geeks, and/or mythopoeic/modernist bildungsroman junkies -- here's something that might be of interest."

This fine novel deserves deep interest, presenting classic character-in-crisis; entertaining and evoking in the tradition of Yeats, Morris, Dunsany, de Lint, and Windling; and offering entry into multiple worlds, this one we share and those others 'beyond the fields we know'.  The setting and the style are distinctly contemporary; the themes and dilemmas, definitely timeless.  Life's largest riddle--mortality--met by mystery, measured by memory, and beset--or aided?--by magic waits at the heart of The Other Worlds.

Read this book.

Risk Assessment

Mendocino sea-cave that leads through a cathedral arch to an amphitheatre.

The swell was a bit too high and the tide too low to pass through that arch safely. At a low tide, the bottom of the arch pinches inward, and with this swell a more skilled paddler could ride in on the wave, but the risk of being jammed down into that crevice was too high for me.

Mendocino Blue

Reflections on Autonomy and Literary Experience

1.   "Toward" or "towards":
I always figured that if I could get through 13.5 years of Berkeley higher ed without knowing the exact rule, then there must not be an exact rule and I would let euphony be my guide.

2.  Trying to teach the mix of discipline and independence -- necessary and resolute discipline in thought and knowledge, boneheaded and clear-eyed independence of thought and knowledge -- that I absorbed before, during, and after my years at UCB . . . that's hard.  I've modeled it as much as possible, but I still have not quite found a way.

I don't always live up to my model either, though I do try.

I sometimes think crucial key components include a repressive childhood, strong individualistic modeling (thanks, mom & dad), and lucky genetics (the boneheadedness, for example).  At other times, I think a devotion to the idea (and ideal) of literary apprenticeship is necessary.

Of course, in my main teaching duties, my focus is on awakening and honing the skills of critical reading, critical writing, and critical thinking, which is a different path than the literary one I referred to above.  Such awakening and honing is a joyous thing, too, by the way.

3.  What depressed me the most during my long years of graduate study was what seemed to me to be the suppression of the original text and, more so, the actual literary experience in favor of something decidedly secondary.  Ideally, and practically, such study enhances the ability to experience literature in the fullest sense -- and I give credit and thanks to certain professors and colleagues to this day for their part in the true way (or ways, for there are different paths to explore) -- but I also watched other professors and other colleagues who turned away from literary truth toward something -- or some things -- not so worthy . . . .

Singing Your Song

Soldate clay, still drying.

Body Language

Clay play:
body parts.

Revisiting: The Merman's Head

The Merman's Head:
sculpture mix;
copper carbonite oxide;
matte white glaze.

This must have been the third of the four or five full-sized heads I have sculpted.

Yearning (Oh, I Miss The Salt and Kelp)

I need to go diving.

(And, to be realistic, this diver would have a camera in his hands, not the speargun, and he'd ditch the tank for free diving.  Well, a tank dive would be fun too.  Oh, and the knife would be strapped to a leg.)

Maybe next weekend--or the one after that.

Kelp / Yearning

A Man and A Boat

Self-portrait #52.


An empty boat
will volunteer for anything.

--Harrison and Kooser