My newest painting. I like to get back to traditional form sometimes. It’s good practice for the times you get really inspired.
I’m not sure where this is going. I was just struck by the juxtaposition of this classic guy with Pherny, one of the local goats.
I’ve gotten to work on my November art show, beginning with an image inspired by an encounter with raven.
In waking life, while walking in the forest I heard the a rush of a raven’s wings beating the air overhead.
Later, the same sound woke me from sleep. The clear call pierced my dream and I suddenly woke in my bedroom with nary a raven in sight and the doors firmly shut against intruders.
A visitation, a call? The light-bringer moved between worlds with a sign for me to to transpose into the language of art.
So this is where the work comes in. It is a Art Deco stained glass window motif I thought appropriate Raven’s boundary-crossing spirit. It is a spirit that, as James Fielden puts it in his beautiful post, A Lapse of Time, “pushes against the edges of mystery.”
Cormorants are huddled like a conclave of robed mystics brooding over lost fish. The wind blows from all directions in Port Madison.
I write windy dialogue that transpires between two contrary characters. I suppose the I of the story refers to myself, but even this first-person identity gets pretty tenuous at times. I am obtuse foil to McWhirr’s exacting command, and he is confounded by my poetic flights. This tension, this ever tipping dynamic, propels the leaky vessel of my prose.
In the voyage of this yarn to it’s “conclusion”, fact and fiction are interwoven to create a tapestry of associative episodes in order to express some ineffable truth about man’s impulse toward adventure.
But to what degree can I actually claim these adventures mine? Where was the line crossed between inspiration and plagiarism? All my powers of expression are called upon to render a fictional account of vaguely recalled events in the transient world of sensations and ideas.
I’ve come close to foundering in a fog of fantasy, relevant only to myself or to those souls fortunate enough (or unlucky enough) to be conversant with sailing lore, and experienced in the sea’s fickle ways.
Where has McWhirr gone? While his vanishing act seems a natural outcome of the narrative flow, it has left me without bearings-without a meaningful waypoint. He’s left me becalmed at slack water, transfixed by sunlight on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with only an obscure missive from Virgil’s heroic verse: From me learn courage and patience, from others the meaning of fortune. Then again, maybe this is all the bearing I need.
Though the dream of finding a copy of the Aeneid happened some 20 years ago, it’s true import remains enigmatic. But I feel it has to do with carrying on a lineage, the bearing of the household gods to establish a new homeland or mode of awareness. It’s also about a mutual need, a pact made with the dead to honor them. My dad’s ghost comes and goes in the story, and recalls me to some forgotten bond. He says I should heed McWhirr.
The View from the Wheelhouse is a fluid one, and successful navigation depends on an ability to tolerate a constantly shifting perspective. The conclusion of this tale is as elusive as a Micronesian landfall.
So I trust this isn’t the last we’ve heard from McWhirr. The wily old coot’s vanishing act may be prologue to his reinstatement on a more believable level of fictional existence.
Wars are started by mistaking the thing in itself for the metaphor, and the inability to see through the symbol, as through a veil, to the symbolized. Scientists have recently discovered that the north wind doesn’t really have a beard and puffy cheeks. We’ve evolved beyond such nonsense. But this knowledge is of little use to the sailor driven on a rocky lee shore by a fierce northerly gale. For myself and everyone, I pray to the household gods.
A bewildered Grebe in a punk hair-do ducks under the lightly rippled, gray surface of Eagle Harbor as we steam past the green buoy marking the channel. Old Hand heels sharply to port in a sudden gust as the honk of the Bainbridge/Seattle ferry echos over the rolling hills of Eagledale.
It’s Spring, season of departures; when we succumb to the age-old lure of quest, and deeds of heroism, tragedy or folly are undertaken. They are the stuff of legend, of epic voyages recounted around the galley table by dreamy minstrels or aged salts over a pint. Something in us is forever departing along the imaginal meridians vaguely descried in youth, over the bleak whale-roads of yore.
There’s Agamemnon’s dramatic farewell and foul sacrifice for a fair breeze toward windy Troy. Oaths hurled into the spray are drowned by the weazy bellows of a fake northerly gale. A sword held against a blood-red sky by a masked tragedienne brings down the threadbare curtain. It is the ritual re- enactment of the primal leave-taking, when carved gods brooded from the bowsprit, holding vigilant watch while we set out toward the golden isle of dreams.
I too, have sat hungry around those ancestral fires, a villan, hero or common swab, subject to the changeable turns of an unswerving fate.
I haul the main halyards as the mainsail flaps in the freshening breeze. Old Hand hesitates, like a portly dowager lifting her skirts before a pier-head jump, and falls off on a starboard tack toward the red buoy that marks the southern extent of Tyee Shoal.
We hear melodious calls to haul away in the pump shanty’s that float over the troubled waters of time- a theme that has lifted the spirit of land-lubber and salt throughout the ages.
In Watteau’s painterly celebration of leave-taking, Voyage to Citheria, we see jaded gentry waltzing down a winding path to a moored lighter bound toward the Arcadian isle.
Courses drawn on a yellowed, dog-eared chart mark the departures and arrivals that make up the saga of Old Hand. She recedes forever like a fog-bound light, into the theatical haze of memory.
What am I departing from? I set out before dawn, with only my own noisy mind as mate. The Captain, asleep below, will soon ascend the companionway stairs, glare at the rising swell, shout imperious commands like Gregory Peck, and set the unsteady keel of this narrative on a true course toward an imaginary landfall. He is the guiding spirit of this voyage, a horn-fisted old coot named Saturnius McWhirr.
Writer’s cramp is neither a basic muscle problem, nor the high level disorder of the composition process seen in writer’s block, but somewhere in between.
Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease
1. I’m on my own for a week. Lily has left for Hawaii, leaving me to do something meaningful with my 7 days as a bachelor. Its time to start a post. Have I lost my ability to write since the last? Did I ever have it? 
2. I’ve been reading my morning pages from 2010-2011. Those who follow of Julie Cameron’s Artist Way books know what I mean. Basically, you write 3 pages every morning whether you feel like it or not . Though I never progressed beyond this to her subsequent exercises, I’ve been doing them now for some 20 years (can it be true?)
After perusal of the pages and notating with the recommended red and green colored pencils, I see certain themes recur in dreams. Usually, I’m lost in some city looking for food and burdened with too much gear. The blockages I face in writing, art and life seem reflected in these endlessly recurring images of abandonment and loss in crowded cities somewhere to the south.
3. I listen to Hawaiian, slack key guitar and imagine what Lily is doing. A cascade of clear, lazy notes falls like rain on banana leaves while puffy clouds are blown across a vivid, blue sky with the tradewinds. Festoons of bright jewels play over the dancing palms Jewels of radiant light festoon the swaying palm trees while Lily does the hula.
4. I read more pages from 2010-11. There are exhortations to myself to get moving-to overcome stasis. to get moving. I throw pages out and keep only the dreams. These are the only things of interest-like the one of the earth gyres that inspired this painting. Only later did I realize it was a tribute to my ex-boss and dear friend Doug, who passed away from cancer 40 years after exposure to Agent Orange during the Viet Nam war.
The image of the twin gyres spiraling like whirlpools on the earth somehow seems related to this dilemma of intention versus receptivity. Or maybe Doug is simply telling me to get off my ass and get to work.
5. I told Lily before she left for Hawaii that its best not to stick to a set itinerary. Better to go with the flow, and adjust to circumstances over which you have no control (like volcanoes.) I might well have been speaking to myself as regards writing. After faced with a week of my own dark thoughts, negativity and acedia (sloth), I’ve decided to surrender to he natural ebb and flow of ideas and, like the ancient poets, call upon the muses for their aid in meeting the self-imposed weekly deadline for my blog post.
6. Today is overcast. The wind blows dark masses of cloud northward past the cell phone tower that looms overhead like an Archon whose only duty is to arrest my flights of prose. Dark clouds fly past the cell tower looming overhead like an Archon whose sole duty is to arrest my flights of prose.
Maybe I’ll go clean the galley on my boat, Old Hand, or lay some dark hue on a fresh canvas and invite the muse into my fortress of solitude on the farm.
7. Why not write something? I resolve to have courage in the face of the blank page. I shall summon fortitude, and let not my hand be stayed by the inarticulate. O Muses, grant me a loftier theme! Inspire my oft-times loopy pen to transcribe thy song. Or at least not let my computer crash.
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