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Brynhild, Sleeping

Regarding Rules?

Rules and personality types: followers, breakers, makers, and unmakers.

I'm a weird mix of all four, especially the last two.

How about you?

F: Well, I don't know about the last two, but I'm a fairly strict rule-follower… until the rules make no sense.

M: Then you become a rule unmaker, right?

F: I don't know; how do you make the distinction between breaking and unmaking?

M: Attitude.

Roots

Mom never had pink hair that I recall, however.

(In case there's any confusion, that's a mermaid-duck on the left. My earliest memory of my mother involves her swimming with me on her shoulder at the Richmond Plunge. I think I was two-and-a-half or three years old.)

Watershots: Feeling Groovy

I love this view, the sea level view, just as much as the underwater perspective. I love bumpy, marbled water, and these shots mean I was out there, swimming. I like kayak shooting too, but free diving means more feeling of the ocean's motions. Groovy.

These shots are all from last January, and I'm posting them more as a goad and a guide to getting back in the water than as worthy shots in themselves. I could look at such shots all day, I must admit, though I'd rather be out there. Sadly, I'm too out of shape right now to round Lover's Point in Pacific Grove on such an energetic day.

So, next task: check the lap hours at the local pool. The mask and fins are already in the truck.

Aeschere's Echo

Or, "Field of Confusion"?

Or, "The Woodman's Spectre" or "What the Wolf Left"?

Originally, I called this entry "Who? What? Where?" to highlight the odd camouflaging quality of the shots, and then a number of alternative titles came to mind, as you can see. Finally, on reflection, I am recalling a poignant passage from a favorite medieval poem, Beowulf.

Aeschere, the beloved advisor of King Hrothgar of the Danes, loses his head, literally, and his life, of course, as Grendel's mother's victim in revenge for the brutal slaying of her son. The vicious mere-creature (or devoted, though monstrous mother) mounts the Dane's head on a stake beside the mere in which she lairs, the mere into which Beowulf, the Geatish warrior, must dive to gain vengeance in turn.

I recommend reading the poem in the original Anglo-Saxon, but if that's not possible, why not pick up Seamus Heaney's wonderful translation of the poem?

Shoulders (Brown & White): brown clay; white slip, applied and scored; clear glaze.

I'm not sure what I was trying to do, originally. I probably started making the base for a full bust and stopped at the shoulders. I like that form, not sure why (or, the subject of past and future blogs), whereas I've found that making a full bust puts the emphasis on the head rather than the shoulders. As to the glazing, maybe I thought the scoring would look tribal or would draw some sort of proper attention to the curves of the form. That didn't work out, but now that I'm moved the piece onto this mulch, I am seeing possibilities for future projects.

There's life even in our mistakes, if you keep your eyes open and move stuff around. Now I'm glad I didn't trash these "shoulders" when I was tempted too.

"Throw Physic to the Dogs; I'll None of It"

A favorite scene: Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act 5, scene 3.

The bloody usurper is about to find that the tide of fortune has turned against him. Macbeth is both a blunt fist and a haunted soul, though the blood beats the nerves every time. I've always felt drawn to Macbeth, though I am not entirely sure why. Certainly, you've got to love a character who claims he'll never quit, and who lives up to that claim, mostly, but for one moment of doubt. And who would gainsay this man that doubt after such fatal promises?

"I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hack'd." With that line Shakespeare channels much of the old heroic alliterative beat-based tradition. You can hear Beowulf and Byrtnoth in that line.

Macbeth is a heroic play. Heroic, but twisted, bewitched, as we all know. Lord Byron's favorite of Shakespeare's plays, at least in his youth. (You can see a bloody Scottish hand all over Manfred, for example.) I think Anthony and Cleopatra spoke clearly to him as the years of exile accumulated. Still, despite (or because of) the iniquities of Macbeth's character, I find much in the play that draws me back again and again. The starkness, the bloody dilemmas, the feast of fortune and the failure of reading fate: all that and more.

Reread with me this time:

Dunsinane. A room in the castle.
Enter MACBETH, Doctor, and Attendants.

MACBETH:

Bring me no more reports; let them fly all:
Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane,
I cannot taint with fear. What's the boy Malcolm?
Was he not born of woman? The spirits that know
All mortal consequences have pronounced me thus:
'Fear not, Macbeth; no man that's born of woman
Shall e'er have power upon thee.' Then fly, false thanes,
And mingle with the English epicures:
The mind I sway by and the heart I bear
Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear.

[Enter a Servant.]

The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!
Where got'st thou that goose look?

Servant: There is ten thousand--

MACBETH: Geese, villain!

Servant: Soldiers, sir.

MACBETH:

Go, prick thy face, and over-red thy fear,
Thou lily-liver'd boy. What soldiers, patch?
Death of thy soul! those linen cheeks of thine
Are counsellors to fear. What soldiers, whey-face?

Servant: The English force, so please you.

MACBETH:

Take thy face hence.

[Exit Servant.]

Seyton!--I am sick at heart,
When I behold--Seyton, I say!--This push
Will cheer me ever, or disseat me now.
I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.
Seyton!

[Enter SEYTON.]

SEYTON: What is your gracious pleasure?

MACBETH: What news more?

SEYTON: All is confirm'd, my lord, which was reported.

MACBETH:

I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hack'd.
Give me my armour.

SEYTON: 'Tis not needed yet.

MACBETH:

I'll put it on.
Send out moe horses; skirr the country round;
Hang those that talk of fear. Give me mine armour.

How does your patient, doctor?

Doctor:

Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick coming fancies,
That keep her from her rest.

MACBETH:

Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:

Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

MACBETH:

Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it.
Come, put mine armour on; give me my staff.
Seyton, send out. Doctor, the thanes fly from me.
Come, sir, dispatch. If thou couldst, doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health,
I would applaud thee to the very echo,
That should applaud again.--Pull't off, I say.--
What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug,
Would scour these English hence? Hear'st thou of them?

Doctor:

Ay, my good lord; your royal preparation
Makes us hear something.

MACBETH:

Bring it after me.
I will not be afraid of death and bane,
Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.

Doctor: [Aside]

Were I from Dunsinane away and clear,
Profit again should hardly draw me here.

[Exeunt.]

I love the doctor's aside at the end here. He's speaking to and for us, and the wry humor is just another example of Shakespeare's canny layering of emotions. Just look at all the emotions the Scottish king is cycling through in what I've quoted. A brutal confidence may be overriding the doubts of others, but an underlying melancholy undercuts the hubristic joy some other battle-king would be feeling much more sincerely. Macbeth knows he's crossed the line that divides proper manliness, in his terms, from monstrosity, that separates society from those outside it, whether they be nobles or not. Macbeth truly is a usurper and a murderer, and he knows it too too well. Yet he was a glorious thane with all the martial skills that his true king admired, and that's a fact too often neglected by readers of the play, I feel.

Macbeth, above, is at his most Hamletish, if you will, and yet Scottish king and Danish prince burn with strikingly divergent fires. The bonfire of ambition vs. a funeral pyre? Or, perhaps, the way into the parallels and contrasts between these noble figures would be to consider the patterns woven from emotion and intellect, from ambition, hubris, consciousness, responsibility, shame, guilt, anger, and revenge.

I should work on the Macbeth vs. Hamlet conundrum--aiming at the nuances rather than the broad strokes--for that's what I feel it is, a conundrum, as I hear and feel the echoes between the plays. I even have some of the best books on the shelf or in mind to check what the authorities have claimed, but I want to work these two characters out in conjuncton for myself, by myself. An independent exercise in critical reasoning, in dynamic character construction and storytelling: something I think all of us should practice often. (I've been reading a book on Beowulf in which the lack of critical practice and of dynamic narrative awareness has been so frustrating.)