Tag: blogging

Posted in Old Hand's northern voyage, Uncategorized

Voyage on the Salish Sea

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

The 30 mile passage from Port Madison to Port Townsend is marked by the doleful names of voyages that came to grief on the Salish Sea. It is the saga of sunken tin-pot steamers who plied the vertiginous depths of Admiralty Inlet and now lie some fathoms deep among the fouled chain of time and memory.  The place names along the first leg of Old Hand’s forth-coming voyage to the San Juan Islands bear testament to historic, tortured founderings: Point no Point, Skunk Bay and Foulweather Bluff.

Perhaps the names are meant as caution to jaded yatchies who, besotted by the mirror calm of the convergence zone and assured by their virtual, abstract trajectories, sail blithely on over the sun-dappled main while toasting a lowering Margarita sky.  What are these names but vague appellations foor that stubborn tyranny of tide and rock that mark this bewitchingly placid and, by turns, malevolent stretch of sea?  And what are all our errant eastings, leewardings and embarkations but the the soul’s recurrent flight into the dream time–the Homeric drive by which all voyages are undertaken–and part of the eternal, unquenchable drive toward the further, mythic shore.

My plan is to sail with the new September moon toward a not-too-adventurous landfall in the San Juan Islands and there to blithely hang amid the encantadas of the north; to seek, to groove, to go where no green lubber has gone before, that my soul might find solace, inspiration and release.

Who knows? Maybe even that old Miphisto of the sea, that horn-fisted coot with the line-squall scowl might loom again in the night, his gaunt profile etched against the thundering flash of doomsday.  For none but Saturnius McWhirr can skipper Old Hand proper. None but he can set the serpentine track of this labored narrative on a course that is steady and true.

Posted in Musings

Otter Weather

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

wheelhouseRain hammers the deck as the wind roars over the high bank of the south shore.  Like big, blue wings, the tarp on the derelict boat rafted alongside billows in the gusts and shoots spray high onto Old Hand’s wheelhouse windows.  Windward is a sorry sight–the once proud Herreshoff racing sloop now lies rotting through the long Northwest winter rains.  I used to pride myself on my tarpological creations, but now they are blown to blue tatters before the furious onslaught of the Pineapple Express.

A kingfisher chatters high over the rigging as the whole boathouse sways above Old Hand’s starboard rail.  At times like this, I wonder if I should have used 10″ lag bolts to anchor the posts onto the dock.  But it seems to be holding fine.

This is the weather the otter likes.  One slithers onto the float and lies momentarily atop my inverted Livingston dinghy before again vanishing into the green depths of Port Madison.  It’s good to see them otter croppedagain–my pals the otters–if I could only get them to use the cat box.  But they scoff at such refinements, and prefer to poop all over the lines I’d so artfully coiled on the dock.  Such is the life of those who toil at sea.

After all the work creating my art exhibit, I went through a depressed phase, exacerbated by a lingering cold.  This down time usually accompanies the completion of a project.  It’s just part of the process.  It’s only natural that we feel emptied out after such an expenditure of energy, and the empty feeling, far from being  bad, is just what I need.  Rather than feeling washed up, it’s better to make friends with the emptiness and spaciousness in order to be filled again with the creative spirit.

So now I roll and split great oak rounds near the old Ed Monk workshop, repair Old Hand’s diesel heater and go over current tables–making long, Springtime passages over the Salish Sea of my imagination.

Posted in Paintings in Progress

Albion Asleep-an artwork in progress

Posted on by Dogfish Bay
albion asleep 2
Albion asleep, painting by Craig Spencer

My art show goes up in a week and now the most difficult part has arrived–the Artist’s Statement.  But in this odious task, which I’ve always dreaded, I may have a small advantage.   I’ve actually been working on it since I began this series, some three months ago.  I only need glean the relevant bits from my blog posts and tidy them up.  Right.

 

Blake saw Albion (universal Man) held in deadly sleep, in thrall to satanic, scientific-materialism that separated him from Jerusalem, his emanation, and the Heaven within himself.

The Gnostics taught that soul is imprisoned in matter; that Gnostic experience is a return to Divinity through overcoming the demonic forces (Archons) who hold humanity in bondage to dense spheres of matter.  These teachings informed much of Blake’s work.

His work also reflects the Neoplatonic doctrine that acknowledges the primacy of the spiritual world and sees nature as the “vegetable glass” reflecting spiritual truths.  Post-Cartesian science that recognizes only natural phenomenon perceived by the senses as sole measure of truth is the fundamental error which precipitated Jerusalem’s’s fall.

diagram by Foster Damon

Jerusalem tells of Los’s  struggles with Urizen (reasoning power) to re-establish harmony among the four Zoas (universal, four-fold man,) and the building of Golganooza, Los’s great city of art and science.

  …and fourfold the great City of Golganooza:  fourfold to the north ,

And toward the south fourfold & fourfold toward the east & west,

Each within the other toward the four points:  that toward

Eden, and that toward the World of Generation.

The Zoa’s correspond with the four Buddha families who inhabit the vast edifice of spiritual architecture in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  …at the northern gate of one’s skull is Vajra, Dark green, snake headed, and holding a bell.

O you, the four female gatekeepers…

Perform the rites which obstruct the doors leading to rebirth from the intermediate state!

Like the Buddhist masters, Blake saw that salvation lay in the recognition that God, Angels and Demons reside in the mind.  Christ’s resurrection was not a single event of time, unique to a single individual, but as expression of the universal Christ-spirit within.  This interiorization of the mysteries is part of the evolution of consciousness and the realization of the Divine Human.  For Blake, Jesus is imagination, and lamented “Abstract thought warring against imagination.”  The tragic effects of Urizen’s reign were evident in the squalor and slavery of the London cityscape where was enacted the cosmic drama of spiritual redemption.

Los is the fiery, artistic genius whose task is to restore Jerusalem and re-establish harmony among conflicting aspects of Albion; an inner kingdom that has been usurped by the soul-denying power of Urizen.  The soul divided into warring entities is a sign that Albion has fallen into a sleep that closes the doors of spiritual perception.  Caretaker of archetypal images,  and fluent in the language of correspondences, Los forges celestial links in his fiery furnace, and illuminates the inner, demonic specters that would banish Jerusalem forever.

Posted in Saturnius McWhirr stories

Old Hand’s Babyonian Voyage part 5 – The 9th Wave

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

“Hang on to yer hat, lad.  Looks like we’re in for a dusting.” McWhirr pointed at the darkening horizon and commanded: “Ready to man the pumps.”

“Aye, Captain.”

I scrambled aft and pulled the aged, bronze pump from the lazarette before looking up to see the immense, glassy wall looming over the masthead like the adamant finale of doomsday.

Old Hand rose up the vertical wall to its breeze-feathered crest and launched skyward with a spray of rainbow light. It was as if she sought escape from her natural element, to take her place amid the constellations as guide to unborn mariners of this tropic-this weary globe where man has long toiled on the treacherous seas.

We landed in the trough with a bone-jarring crash as the wave broke with a deafening roar astern.

Old Hand yawed like a stunned boxer shaking off a vicious right hook and steadied up, ready to meet the next one.  We mounted the second wave of the set and were again hurled down it’s backside, until I thought we might sound the very depths of the Mariana trench.

Each time McWhirr counted each wave until, after the 8th had thrown us rudely on our beam-ends, he said:  “This is it, lad-the 9th wave. Say yer prayers, this may be the end of our pleasant, little cruise.”

The sight that met my eyes as I braced against the wheelhouse was enough to make Blackbeard blanch and Ahab drop to his knees and beg for mercy.

“No, it can’t be that big,” I said, upon seeing the wave’s awesome height. It’s aspect was all the more terrible for its calm refulgence-as gleaming and resolute as an executioner’s ax. The crystalline beauty of it seemed to mock all our puny efforts to survive.

Again, we faced the interminable ascent. As it jacked up over the reef, it turned a back-lit, emerald-green hue.

Good reader, we’ve all heard how time stands still, and the imagination falls prey to odd fancies in times of extreme terror. So it was with me. I thought I saw strange shapes in that massive beast of a sea-spectral figures who swam before my eyes and vanished again like mackerel  flashing upon the wave’s face. One such apparition was dressed in a flowing white shirt and tight pants. He had the angelic look of one inspired by the muses and held, in his delicate hand, a goose-quill pen. His melodic words seemed to echo above the dismal keening of gulls that circled overhead:

…My spirit’s bark is driven,

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!

I am born darkly, fearfully afar…

 

Poetry from Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelly