Tag: romantic literature

Posted in Saturnius McWhirr stories

Old Hand’s Voyage to the Babylonian Theme Park

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

The bewitching breezes wafting from  the intermediate zone that had vexed our northerly course along the bleak, rocky coast gave way to an absolute calm as we stood off the rank harbor of Virtual Babylon.  It was as though the anchorage were under the spell of some vengeful deity that held the stagnant seaport in irons-a fitful sleep of waking dream.

McWhirr called from the wheelhouse:

“All right, Mister Spencer.”

I let go the anchor. The silence was broken by a low rumble as I paid out 3 fathoms of chain into the muddy bottom of Moloch Bay.

After 2 weeks of foul headwinds and devilishly flukey breezes, we were ready to don shore-going rig for a nice row to an ancient, stone pub at the head of a dilapidated wharf to splice, as they say, the proverbial main-brace.

The melancholy treble of a loon-bot echoed over the still anchorage as McWhirr sat in the bows of the skiff brooding upon the lurid, crimson sea. Not wanting to disturb his meditations, I rowed on.

I’d heard Saturnius McWhirr was a pious man of Quaker stock who had fallen into some branch of the Zoroastrian persuasion. Or was it some Sufic offshoot of Shi’ism whose adherents await the 12th Imam’s return and wander the storm-wracked shores of this world seeking some vestige of a golden age–a relic safeguarded from the literalist creed by occult signs that can be decoded only in the secret halls of pure imagination?

Be that as it may, McWhirr gazed into the offing as the violet light of dusk fell over his weathered brow and said:

“I first heard of the Babylonian Theme Park when but a nipper on my grandfather’s knee. He told me of the Neo-Art Exhibition, the wonders of the Pharmaceutical Pavilion and how he touched the robe of the King of Wall-mart. He told me yarns of how it’s foundations had first been laid in the 21st Century by drones captured during the great cyber wars.”

“But,” continued McWhirr with a tone of caution, “he also told a darker tale. He said the streets were paved with sorrow, the walls built with the grief of mothers who toiled over an illusory harvest, it’s ramparts manned by desiccated souls who invested all their goods in the virtual fun-house of Mammon.”

“Yes sir,” I said though, in my green youth, I could scarce fathom the depths of his narration..

We landed the skiff and walked the cobbled street toward the the ancient, stone pub. Soon, my attention was caught by the droning whirr of something hovering overhead.

Could this be one of the fabled harpies that had long plagued unwary mariners who sail these latitudes–these droning machines of evil and ubiquitous surveillance that kill with rockets as well as with the bland, droning sameness that reduces our citizenry to penile servitude to the sexless god of materialism?

McWhirr drew his cutlass and, slashing at the malignant thing,  thundered:

“Get thee hence, instrument of Satan!”

Posted in Uncategorized

The Beethoven Conspiracy

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

The crows have the runs. They drop an astonishing amount of blackberry-colored crap onto Old Hand’s deck from their perch in the spreaders. Ah, late Summer.

In Admiral Smythe’s  Sailor’s Word Book,  I see a familiar term: Plot: 1. To plan a chart of a ships course. 2. To plan the action of a story. 3. A conspiracy.  All these definitions are relevant to our theme.

I go over logs from past voyages and listen to music in the wheelhouse.  I hear, in Beethoven’s dramatic strains, diagonal sheets of sound driven by the cymbal-crash of lightening before they subside into the ominous roiling calm of deep, umber bass tones.

Course plotting is an arcane, hierophanic science mariner’s employ to secure a favorable a passage through the bewildering eddies of chance.  Hardheaded pragmatists as well as the most mercurial romantics have long practiced this art in their attempt to weather shoaling capes, negotiate vertiginous maelstroms of myth and meaning or navigate the harrowing straits between literal and figurative truth.

Shorebirds flute over Beethoven’s sibilant stream on bright updraughts of yellow horns.   Shades  of tympanic gloom rumble on the blood-red horizon.  These are the same tortured, lyric phrasings of Conradian darkness; of swelling narratives built up in the long fetch from imaginal, Austral seas. They are stories of death, resurrection and inspired vision.  

    I turn back to the Canadian current atlas.                Let’s see, if I set out from Port Townsend midway through the ebb I should make Cattle Pass by…

“Have ye reckoned for the easterly set of flood beyond Smith Island?”

The voice carries over the anchorage as if down from the dark, oaken halls of time; as if it’s rich baritone had been seasoned by long watches over Arctic wastes.  I squint through the wheelhouse windows to see, outlined against the dusky red glare, the shadowy form of a man in a long, black watch-coat and tattered top hat clutching a lee shroud in one hand and a smoldering pipe in the other.   He seems a vestige of the age of working sail, as if all the hard-won wisdom gained in man’s endless toil on the sea were pithily encoded in his melancholy aspect and stern admonitions.

“Have ye checked through-hull fittings? Ye don’t want to invite the whole Salish Sea aboard do ye?”

“Well I’ve been busy trying to…”

“Avast ye greenhorn! Jettison all the hackneyed claptrap of useless words and get to the point!”

I resent these rude intrusions upon my peaceful moorings and, in less charitable hours, wonder how McWhirr’s “gaunt form” would look hanging from Old Hand’s yard arm. He would probably make a good scarecrow.

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Los’s Bright Halls-The Exhibit-an artwork in progress

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

exhibit 2 I finally got the art show up.  I came down with a nasty cold as the time for hanging approached, and all the work of logistics, promotion, and “finishing” the paintings became a real grind.

But we had a nice opening last night.  Many friends came showing their appreciation and support.  Thanks to all.

In my next post I hope to give a more complete account about the experience of creating these works over the past 3 months.

Lets just say for now that I came to realize I bit off far more than I could chew, though I did this deliberately–as a sort of audacious challenge to myself.

jerusalem in show
Jerusalem-painting by Craig Spencer

There always looms the possibility that the painting was better left at an earlier stage, or that the work may not bear the test of time.  At times I wondered if a painting might be veering perilously close to maudlin tripe, or the whole concept totally misguided.

But I  really don’t worry about it.  It’s best to have the courage to make a clear statement.  I think age and experience has taught me to trust the process and to carry through despite such doubts about relevance, skill level or (in this case) my understanding of Blake’s gorgeously bombastic, prophetic poem.

These blog posts have been an integral part of this exhibit’s creation.  Thanks to all who have been following and commenting.

vala, arches, golgonooza
Vala, Temple 3, Building Golgonooza-paintings by Craig Spencer
albion in show
Albion Asleep-painting by Craig Spencer
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 Paintings in Progress

Building Golganooza-an artwork in progress

Posted on by Dogfish Bay
babylon 4babylon 4
Golganooza

Strange.  For all my efforts to loosen up, I seem to be heading in a more classical direction.  When solid form threatens to vanish in an atmospheric haze, I recall Blake’s admonition to delineate everything a solid line.   William Turner advised enclosing all shapes with a glowing red line that can move easily from cool shadow into warm, brilliant light.  Gauguin used this technique to unify his compositions and bind his luxuriant forms to the picture plane.

Here, I use it to construct Blake’s towering edifice of Golganooza, whose:

  …stones are pity, and the bricks, well wrought affections Enamell’d with love and kindness & the tiles engraven gold, Labour of merciful hands..

This Golganooza is built with primary colors on a scaffold of charcoal lines set along the Golden Mean proportion.  The challenge is to integrate illusory depth with the shapes on the flat surface into a dynamic, interwoven whole.  This is what makes it so complicated.

jersalem detail
Jerusalem (detail)

Painting doesn’t proceed only with big, creative leaps by the likes of a Picasso or Pollack.  There is also a slow evolutionary process at work, and painting, like any other discipline, moves toward ever higher levels of complexity.

The dichotomy between abstraction and realism is a false one.  It’s all abstract in a sense.  What is bad is intellectual, materialist abstraction devoid of feeling and humanity–removed from art’s most exalted purpose:

  To open Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought:  into Eternity  ever expanding in the Bosom of God:  the Human Imagination!

-William Blake