poetry – Page 3 – A View from the Wheelhouse

Baked Soul-an Artwork in Progress

Posted on December 26, 2013December 26, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

death's door 3 cropped — *Death’s Door-painting by Craig Spencer*

I recently dreamed that I went back to my old studio in Seattle. Its proximity to the neighboring building cut off most of the natural light. The new tenant had hung a mirror on the neighboring wall that reflected sunlight into the studio, creating a greater sense of spaciousness.

This dream seems to reflect the dilemma I face with each new artwork.

Every painting presents an opportunity to break into new territory, beyond habitual modes, toward a more fully realized statement of my particular vision. Each stark white field stands before me like a challenge to move beyond easy solutions; invites the spontaneous gesture that preserves the initial inspiration. It is the free spirit exemplified by Blake’s Songs of Innocence. But the luminous energy of spontaneous creativity is immediately followed by the discriminating mind as shadow accompanies light. The state of Experience is Blake’s necessary counterpart to that of Innocence.

Often, my own “strengths” are an obstacle. I want my work to break boundaries, open spaces where imagination has room to expand.

I begin with laying out broad swathes of muted color to set the stage-to invite images into the memory stations, or conjure a player from behind the Gothic pillars of a Blakean stage-set.

A shift in perspective is also necessary to understand Blake.

Blake recognized that God and Angels reside in the mind. Unlike Christian dogmatists, he saw Christ’s resurrection not as a single event of historical time unique to a single individual, but as expression of the universal Christ-spirit within “…Heathen, Turk or Jew.” This interiorization of the mysteries is a step in the evolution of consciousness, a withdrawing of childish projections, and the realization of the Divine Human.

Materialist science sees the phenomenal world perceived by the 5 senses as the only measure of reality. Blake’s work 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 as sole measure of truth is the fundamental error which precipitated Jerusalem’s’s fall. Los, embodiment of the poetic genius and agent in the soul’s recovery, takes a walk through London streets:

(Los)…saw every Minute Particular of Albion degraded and murder’d

But saw not by whom; they were hidden in the minute particulars

Of which they possess’d themselves: and there they take up

The articulations of a man’s soul, and laughing throw it down

Into the frame, then knock it out upon the plank, & souls are bak’d

In bricks to build the pyramids of Heber & Terah.

-from Jerusalem

Camillo’s Memory Theatre-an artwork in progress

Posted on December 16, 2013December 17, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Francis Yates, in The Art of Memory, tells how Giulio Camillo reinvented memory art in accordance with the renewed interest in Neoplatonism. Camillo’s conception was also inspired by the recently rediscovered teachings of Hermetic philosophy which his friend, Marcilio Ficino had introduced into Renaissance Italy with his translation of the Corpus Hermeticism.

Ficino inspired Camillo in the use of astral talismans to draw down celestial influences into memory images and infuse them with magic power. This imaginative reinvention of memory art was meant to train the mind to receive celestial influences and unify esoteric knowledge by holding an inner image that mirrored the celestial harmony.

The Corpus Hermeticum taught the essential divinity of man and that all phenomena have their origin in the realm of ideas (archetypes.) Camillo’s theatre enabled the “viewer” to recall these first causes, and the essential relationship between man (microcosm,) and the world (macrocosm.)

The first level of manifestation was mediated by the 7 Governors. These astral beings made up the 7 measures by which the interior man descends into creation, acquires a body whose parts fall subject to the dominion of the zodiac, before he reascends through the heavenly spheres. It is through the Hermetic religious experience he regains his innate divinity. The 7 governors have associations with the known planets, 7 days of creation, angelic hierarchy and the lower sephiroth.

Yates says that the greatness of Renaissance art was largely due to perfect proportion that was in accord with celestial harmony. Seen in this light, the grace and majesty of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus is a result of her status as talisman.

Paintings in Progress, videos

A walk through the Memory Stations-an artwork in progress

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

The best way to approach an art exhibit is to work on all the pieces at once. I’m prepping 7 canvases, working on the memory stations and doing the memory practice. Here is a video to give an idea of how it works.

Paintings in Progress

Higgily-Piggily Mindscape-an artwork in progress

Posted on December 6, 2013December 7, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Here is a small study for a larger piece. I’m wanting to keep it lean, avoid accumulation of extraneous detail and focus on atmosphere, light and a general feeling of spaciousness. This one seems to suggest loss.

Shadowy forms step forward from the mists with a single swipe of the paint rag. They appear in my dreams silhouetted against ancient fires, as if to demand I attend to their their melancholy plight wandering the in-between.

The memory practice is working. I went from recalling no dreams at all, to writing 5 pages this morning. These seem to have associations with the art project, “real” life, and offer encounters with Asiatic shamans in crazy hats who get on my case for some vague act of forgetfulness.

The intent to work with the spontaneous flow of dream imagery-the attempt to bring unconscious content into the light of day-involves a confrontation with subject/object paradox. Who is doing the observing? Who is observed? Looking inward brings up thorny issues about perception and reality that artists have been struggling with since Cezanne, and which mystics have explored for centuries.

How needing of compassion are the ignorant and the deluded, bound in this confining dungeon of egotistical attachment and the subject-object dichotomy…

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Blake saw his brethren bound in this dungeon, and sang of fallen Albion held in thrall to the satanic, scientific-materialism that set man apart from nature, charity and the Heaven within himself.

Paintings in Progress

Particulars-an artwork in progress

Posted on December 1, 2013December 1, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

William Blake stressed the “particulars,” how the details of daily life are continuous with cosmic totality. In Blake’s expansive vision the two perspectives interpenetrate and this all-inclusive vision animates and unifies his art in way that is unique in the history of art. In Jerusalem, the local village scene merges with vast space and opens on the mythic city:

Pancrass & Kentish-town repose

Among her golden pillars high,

Among her golden arches which

Shine upon the starry sky.

So my Black Friday visit to a Port Angeles fabric store acquires new significance. This particular Clallam anchorage is where the angels weave this narrative into the fabric of myth. Or maybe it was just a place where I could score a good deal on the canvas I need for my February art show.

I am imagining some large canvases painted in the muted, earthen tones of the gray, English landscape overlaid with an architecture of arches and pillars of insubstantial, golden light.

At the same time I continue the memory practice, learning Jerusalem “by heart” and using the mnemonic imagery of the memory stations as a starting point. These stations continue to evolve as I memorize the text and work the paintings. In this way I hope to in infuse the paintings with some of Blake’s generous, all-encompassing spirit.

This process may sound cumbersome, but it works well in maintaining a broad perspective and helps avoid a myopic fixation on details. This fixation is far from the non-dualistic attention to particulars Blake writes of. I hope my art may be as expansive and generous as his.

If you look closely at the background, some ethereal light forms emerge; vague figures who begin to emerge from beyond a misty veil. Or maybe the turpentine was just going to my head.

Paintings in Progress

The Memory Theatre-an artwork in process

Posted on November 20, 2013November 20, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

I’ve made some memory stations and begun the memory practice. Maybe I’ll try to memorize Jerusalem (at least parts of it) by William Blake. The organization of the space and creating the stations is not separate from the work of sketching out the composition on the canvases. The placement and spacing are important.

I imagine the paintings might take the form of a still life that opens onto a vast landscape. Blake had a vision that beheld the universe in a grain of sand, infinity in an hour and the celestial city built on the rolling green English countryside. I want my art to share some of this all-encompassing perspective.

The fields from Islington to Marybone,

To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood,

Were builded over with pillars of gold,

And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

I’ve found that memory practice leads to amazing experiences. It is a way to attune to subtle influences and bring to conscious awareness the too-often suppressed messages from the unconscious. In her brilliant book, the Art of Memory, Frances Yates quotes Cicero’s recollection of the poet Simonides, who was said to be inventor of the memory art:

…persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.

Saturnius McWhirr stories

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

Posted on October 22, 2013October 22, 2013 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 8^th had thrown us rudely on our beam-ends, he said: “This is it, lad-the 9^th 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

Saturnius McWhirr stories

Old Hand’s Babylonian Voyage-The Escape

Posted on October 19, 2013October 20, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Attention! Attention! Tsunami alert! Tsunami alert!

The speakers on the church walls crackled over the dismal howl of sirens.

Dust of crumbled masonry rose from the collapsed reliquary amid screams and prayers for deliverance. I ran into the streets and made for Old Hand. I leaped onto the dock as the engine roared to life above the frenzied tumult of the throng. McWhirr had just cast off the dock lines when a repulsive splog pirate wielding a cutlass grabbed my monkey jacket and said in a malodorous, rasping tone: “Are you sure you want to close your Babylon account?”

A blast from the ship’s deck sent him sprawling into the rank harbor. McWhirr threw aside his smoking musket and hauled me over the rail before jamming the ship full throttle and steaming for deep water. A glazzy spam-bot, with wires dangling from her stove-in side, gushed at McWhirr as we bore away from the pier-head: “Look! It’s Gregory Peck! I saw you on MeTube. Can I have your autograph?”

We headed for open sea just as a group of cyber-ruffians thundered onto the wharf with a volley of deprecatory oaths and small arms fire.

Once clear of musket range, I lifted my head above the rail to inhale the sea air. It lay calm and of a such a limpid sheen that I fell into tranquil revery. It felt as if all the fetid smog of Babylon were dispelled by the sweet Levantine zephyrs that wafted over the sun-dappled main like Mother Gaia’s beneficent caress. I silently offered a prayer for the gentle hand that had rocked the Adamic cradle of mankind. It was as if I quaffed from the verdant spring of the mystic Green One of Araby-that master of masterless souls who wander the globe’s Byzantine seaways seeking the vivifying elixir of immorality.

“Look sharp, Mister Spencer.”

McWhirr’s cautionary words roused me to behold the distant horizon demarcated by an edge of deep ultramarine blue that advanced steadily upon our gallant ship.

“We’re in for some fun and games now.”

Uncategorized

Old hand’s voyage to the San Juan Islands 1

Posted on September 12, 2013September 13, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

This is my post in some time. I’ve been busy preparing for our trip north to the San Juans.

Again, our crossing of the infamous Straits was placidly uneventful. This is fine by me as I’d rather get my adventure in other ways than getting slammed by the huge waves that can travel all the way into the eastern Strait of Juan de Fuca. The pictures ~~of the huge waves that can travel all the way into the eastern Strait of Juan de Fuca~~ have struck my heart with a cold dread. Then there’s the fog which can veil the looming menace of beasts like this bearing down on Old Hand at 18 knots.

Musings, Old Hand's northern voyage

Maybe I’ll write about the Sea

Posted on August 22, 2013August 24, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

I rebed pad eyes by day and rewrite the wandering craft of my prose after dark.

Our plan is to leave September 5^th on the new moon-the time propitious for undertaking our voyage north through Saratoga Passage, by way of the Swinomish Channel, to the funky wharf town of La Conner. We then cross Rosario strait into the San Juan Islands.

I paint the deck a battleship gray that colored my 50’s childhood with visions of martial efficiency projected in the gaunt, strident scenes of the Great War.

I read Look Homeward Angel, marveling at the luscious prose. Who are these characters that populate Thomas Wolf’s stories? The stone carver, grave ornament maker, who had an Angelic vision as he chugged west to die among granite hills.

O lost!

The refrain Is heard throughout the story-as if our prodigal hero was born lost in this juicy world whose co-ordinates had been firmly laid with ancestral rites and arcane laws of property.

I’ll bring back McWhirr to tell of the Sea. I miss the old guy during long spells of writer’s block-as if he were my inner navigator admonishing me to hold a steady course through the endless watches over the dim sea. It is his Saturnine compass that scribes the boundary of possible outcomes. Only his stentorian oaths can direct the wandering track of my narrative along a course that is true.

As the wind freshens, strange voices call my name. A woman’s voice beckons over the slimy, creaking sea, and vanishes when I turn to hear. It’s as if she called softly from in the groaning, weathered piles that sway with the tides; when I least expect a visitation from the other world.

I hear faint drumming that-like a star that is seen only peripherally-falls silent when I listen. Are they ghostly drummers chanting over the bright waters of Port Madison on a moonlit night. Grandfather said their voices still sound over the waters, calling from the other shore. Haya, haya, haya-the song carries on the cool breeze.

How does my own story fit in here? How woven into the warp of necessary fiction? Shadows ebb blue violet as blackness rakes the mudflats between two tides-between two lights. Raccoons paw the foreshore where starfish glow. A heron is perched on Reah’s dockhouse like he owned the place.

I change writing pads so my crimped hand may expand in florid loops beyond the web of type-into fictional streams that draw me toward a vague landfall in some maritime dream of adventure. I’ll write about the sea, about Old Hand’s tortuous passages into far reaches of the Skagit Channel. As ensign of our great endeavor, we shall festoon the masthead with laurel, and call upon the gods to bless our voyage. It is toward the faint sound of chanting drums that we set our course, toward an ever-receding song dimly heard from the north.