Lily hurt her foot when we docked at East Sound for our dance. Then yesterday, a storm blew up from Southeast, blowing a good 35 knots with gusts to 40. Old Hand took a hammering at the public dock while Lily lay below getting seasick. But the local EMT team were there in no time to get her off the boat, up to the nearby Oddfellows Hall where we had a wonderful event despite Lily’s injury. It was a sweet circle praying for peace in this stormy world.
In the mid 70’s I had a studio in Eugene. Nearby was a pioneer cemetery where stood a tall, gray weathered tomb which housed an early patriarch of the Oregon Territory named Septembus Spencer. While I won’t deny my memory may embellish the facts, this outlandish moniker has stayed with me all these years. Now I find that one of Willamette valley venerable line of Spencers had made his way further north to this stormy spit on Lopez Island’s east shore.
As though by a master sculptor’s hand, Equinoctial storms have carved cyphers into the rough stonework of the storehouse. Apples still fall from the trees he planted on the grassy knoll.
Septembus comes from Septentrio, which is Latin for North.
On this gravel spit formed with perfect symmetry by alternating currents are seen middens of a tribal fish camp that had been used for over 3,000 years.
Though I bear no relation to the Eugene and Lopez Spencers, I find it strange to arrive at the most northern outpost of those Northwest settlers-that venerable line whose family tomb I saw in my earlier days. It is their most, so to speak, Septentrionic point.
I take heart in knowing that the same northern, wayfaring spirit calling us toward these enchanted Isles inspired the peregrinations of T. W. Spencer-that the same pole star he set his course by is the way point toward which Old Hand shapes her course.
I was taught by a Cowlitz elder that the cardinal directions are more than physical points on the compass, but spiritual states which must be embarked upon with full awareness of all their various qualities.
Black Elk once said the center of the world was Harney (was this the same hawkish general who tried to incite war with England over a dead pig?) Peak in South Dakota. Black Elk went on to add that the center is everywhere. It’s the same awareness that lead Jesus to sing to his round-dance on his crucifixion eve:
“The universe is inside the dancer.”
The tide flows into the lagoon at full flood like the rushing green flow of the Willamette River by which I sat staring so long that, when I rose, the solid banks seemed to move with the same fluid motion as the water.
The sacred land is everywhere-is already won. It is somewhere in Harney Channel (Harney again!) The Center is in the old Odd fellows Hall on Orcas Island where we hold our Dance of Universal Peace on this Sunday. The universe revolves around Old Hand’s keel as we voyage to the spiritual state of North; to honor the wisdom teachings of all faiths that ever points us toward the true polestar.
Lily and I have been making flyers and organizing our September 22nd Dance of Universal Peace in East Sound, Orcas Island. Our voyage has a direction beside that which the winds take us.
From the vantage point of the Doctor’s Office coffee shop (it was an actual doctor’s office), I watch all manner of craft and float planes enter and depart Friday Harbor. Old Hand lies anchored in 9 fathoms off the Oceanographic laboratories on the north east shore.
We are leaving later today for either Spencer Spit or Fisherman’s Bay on the north end of Lopez Island before our event. it’s not really our event, but part of a tradition-a spiritual community that exists all over the world.
Here’s Lily leading a song/dance she wrote based on the Amitabha meditation. I may have gotten a little to free with the effects, but you can maybe get the jist of it.
I rebed pad eyes by day and rewrite the wandering craft of my prose after dark.
Our plan is to leave September 5th 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.
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.”
You must give up your personal history.
This terse comment by Carlos Castaneda’s teacher Don Juan, in Journey to Ixtlan, contains the key to this spiritual travelogue in which he renounces his anthropological career to enter the sorcerer’s path.
The drawings done of Castaneda, partially erased by himself, speak more eloquently than revelations of his mendacity or alleged misogyny.
For the sorcerer, reality, or the world we know is only a description.
For novelists (it is absurd to argue which category this work belongs) the world is the reality in which they are immersed at the moment of creation.
My feelings were clear bodily sensations; they did not need words.
Yet he describes, at great length, terrifying encounters in the intermediate realm. When Castaneda is shaken by these experiences, Don Juan commands him:
Write! Write or you’ll die!
It is an imperative Castaneda takes to heart. Abandonment of personal history might contradict Don Juan’s statement about writing as survival but, rather than a bid for immortality, Castaneda’s account may be the final act of self erasure. It resulted, ultimately, in irrelevance. As he progressed to the rank of Nagual (teacher of sorcery), the fiction stylist was displaced by his persona-his double. As he was subsumed into the anemic New-Age genre, he became infatuated by his own image (or its absence) and got mired in convoluted explications of sorcery. Most fatal, he lost his sense of humor.
Unfortunately this seems to be the lot of many successful artists who find endless justification for their surrender to the allurements of the marketplace.
But Journey to Ixtlan is Castaneda in his prime. Take the hilarious scene where Don Juan and his sidekick Don Genaro-as antidote to Castaneda’s attachment to his worldly vehicle-make his car disappear:
“Where’s my car?”
Don Genaro began turning over small rocks and looking underneath them…
“Don Genaro is a very thorough man,” Don Juan said with a serious expression. “He’s as thorough and meticulous as you are. You said yourself that you never leave a stone unturned. He’s doing the same.”
Genaro, puffing and sweating, tries to lift a boulder.
We could not budge the rock. Don Juan suggested we go to the house and find a thick piece of wood to use as a lever…
Resigned to this insanity, Castaneda lends a hand; with a tremendous effort, they lift the boulder.
…Don Genaro examined the dirt underneath the rock with the most maddening patience and thoroughness.
“No. It isn’t here,” he announced.
Other passages are suffused with a beauty as stark and dramatic as the desert landscape through which they travel. In the chapter, Becoming a Hunter, the sophisticated anthropologist, Castaneda, admits to the reader his feelings of superiority over an Indian. Reading his mind, Don Juan says:
“We are not equals. I am a hunter and a warrior and you are a pimp.”
Don Juan then meets Castaneda’s angry protest at these harsh words with a masterful act of “not doing.”
…when it was pitch black around us he seemed to have merged into the blackness of the stones. His state of motionlessness was so total it was if he did not exist any longer.
It was midnight before I realized that he could and would stay motionless there in that wilderness, in those rocks, perhaps forever if he had to. His world of precise acts and feelings and decisions was indeed superior.
I quietly touched his arm and tears flooded me.
Castaneda has been maligned for having done his field-work exclusively in the UCLA library. But, for me, this only makes his work more impressive. No other writer so cannily expressed the manic spirit of the psychedelic era. I am forever astounded by the man who could transmute the dusty anthropological tomes of the UCLA library into supreme works of imagination.
I’ve been working on 2 guest posts for Katie Sullivan’s wonderful blog, the D&A Dialogues. The experience has inspired this video. I will reblog the posts here on A View from the Wheelhouse.
Cats paws darkened the blue reach of Puget Sound beyond Skiff Point to the north. I went below to shut down Phyllis, my Norwegian diesel engine (named after my mother,) trusting the breeze would hold and keep us off the shallow bank south of Fay Bainbridge park. There’s nothing so peaceful as that moment when the wind lifts and the engine is shut off. Old Hand sails better without human interference close-hauled, so I sit back and listen to the sound of water moving along her hull as she gathers speed along Bainbridge Island’s east shore.
It was lovely. We had attained a state of harmonious accord between man and boat in the mandala of winds, and that single point we occupied at that particular moment in time and space was golden perfection. I try to seize such moments on the fly and, by retelling them, prolong existence itself and sail with the generous breeze into eternity.
“Look sharp, Mister Spencer.”
The resonant voice was hoarse, as if graveled by long watches in the north Atlantic-as if it emerged from the very depths of the bilges.
“Ready about.”
“Ready about.”
McWhirr paused then called:
“Helm’s alee!”
I let go the jib sheet as the bow came across the wind and hauled in for a port tack toward deeper water northeast.
“Nicely done, lad. Ye’ll be a sailor before long.”
McWhirr is a pain in the neck sometimes. He’s a relic of working sail and can be as dark as Ahab in rehab on a bad hair day.
But such a breeze can soften a heart encrusted by long watches over icy seas. McWhirr stood stark against the red sky like a weathered piling on a rocky cape. Light flickered through the dark shrouds behind him as if projected on a movie screen.
“What do you make of the Ancient Mariner’s yarn, lad?”
– through soul’s stations he sails…sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze…sigh of compassion that pervades all creation… repents his cruel slaughter of the innocent bird and sees divinity in all beings… it raised my hair, it fanned my cheek…essential reality…wisdom and compassion combined…
“It’s a strange tale.”
McWhirr brooded as if some heavy recollection had made him grow, if it were possible, even more saturnine.
“Aye, we all carry the albatross’ weight around our necks.”
-tangled lines lost in fouled line-lockers…it mingled strangely with my fears…endless dream pilgrimages through foreign city streets looking for misplaced baggage… He loved the bird who loved the man… all those times too slow on the uptake, clueless or proud... who shot him with his bow..neglect of kin…Mom’s eyes…executors of karmic law…archons of the muddy sphere in which my life is, more or less, firmly moored …Oh, my neck.
“What about that part where he must repeat his tale endlessly to strangers?”
“I don’t know. It sounds like a writer I know. But I won’t mention any names.”
Pen to paper
Tales from the mouth of a wolf
Just another WordPress.com weblog
Reflections on Canadian Culture From Below the Border
STAY AN ARTIST
poetry w/teeth
Raku pottery, vases, and gifts
Everything You Want To Read
"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." Ps 147:3
Astral Lucid Music - Philosophy On Life, The Universe And Everything...
Art Towards a Happy Day
George Lakoff has retired as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. His newest book "The Neural Mind" is now available.
Drawing my truth and writing what burns.
Photographic Life In The Little Studio
Artist
Fantasy and sci-fi reviews and fiction by J.J. Adamson
A View from the Wheelhouse 