Stay deep.
If you must surface:
Handknit Aran sweater from Harris Knitwear.
When we were in the Aran Islands, Sean bought one of these from young woman who was sitting in a tiny room packed floor to ceiling with sweaters she had made, and even as we spoke to her, she was methodically knitting while she rocked her baby's cradle with her foot. She took one look at Sean and pulled off the shelf a sweater with longer arms and a narrower torso that fit him exactly. It's too warm to wear on any but the coldest, dampest days.
It's only a myth that each fisherman had a uniquely patterned sweater to help in his identification in case he drowned and washed ashore.
They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me. . . I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea
The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris:
In May 2007, Harris spent nine days following an Inupiat whale hunt. He went to document, not to tell a tale or mount a platform. His process involved establishing a 'photographic heartbeat' by taking images every five minutes, even using a timer as he slept. The 'heartbeat' was variable, accelerating in times of stress and resulting in more pictures of those moments. The resulting 3,000+ images are gathered on the project site.
Harris' statement is fascinating reading, and the site is brilliant. His C.V. says that he 'designs systems to explore and explain the human world' but the genius thing about the project is that it is not an explanation. The site interface allows you to flip and filter through the images in a myriad of ways, constructing your own narrative. It's irresistible and dangerous. Given my own bloody-mindedness, my first goal was to find images of the kill. The tenor of the project left me uneasy with the impulse of reducing a cascade of moments to a single point.
I'm interested in that tension between messy comprehensiveness and the incisive word or image. That sort of editing is necessary to give ourselves some reassurance of our own understanding - to take the barrage of data swirling around us and find the handles, the crystalline points, the small piece that lets us think we understand the whole. But what gets left out? What do our choices say - these images we feel encapsulate so much? How much is miscommunicated in these acts of editing?
Images from top to bottom:
May 6, 11:35 PM: Smeared blood from dragging muktuk across the ice.
May 7, 12:40 AM: Whaling knives.
May 7, 1:40 AM: Joe Ahkivgaq's whale harvest.
All photos by Jonathan Harris.
Disney short from 1927.
(The Alice series is interesting to me because it mixes live-action footage of a little girl with the cartoon characters.)
(The narwhal) tusk, it turns out, forms a sensory organ of exceptional size and sensitivity, making the living appendage one of the planet's most remarkable, and one that in some ways outdoes its own mythology.William J. Broad, 12/13/2005 NYT
The find came when the team turned an electron microscope on the tusk's material and found new subtleties of dental anatomy. The close-ups showed that 10 million nerve endings tunnel from the tusk's core toward its outer surface, communicating with the outside world. The scientists say the nerves can detect subtle changes of temperature, pressure, particle gradients and probably much else, giving the animal unique insights.
I love watching nature movies, but I hate the dramatic narrators - this clip features shifting ice that momentarily pens the narwhals in, which the narrator plays up for all it is worth. I'd prefer just to watch them, without having to worry about their imminent, potentially televised demise.
(Don't worry - they survive.)
Something wondrous for a Tuesday morning: narwhals surfacing for air near the edge of an ice floe in Arctic Bay, Canada.
It's hard to believe such creatures exist, but they do. Apparently, the Inuit name for them translates as 'the one that is good at curving itself to the sky', because of the way they poke their heads out of the water.
Beautiful.
The photo is part of the 'Irreplaceable: Wildlife in a Warming World' project/Paul Nicklen/National Geographic Image Collection. Discovered through The Big Picture.
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.
I was sad over the holidays that we didn't get real snow - it flurried on Christmas day, but barely - so I made some of my own. I finally took my snowflakes down this week, and real ones have arrived, right on cue.
I'm ordering a pair of these, going through soup recipes, and taking my cues from the dog:
Time to hunker down.
The other day, I came across a photograph by Takeoshi Tanuma of Ito Sei in his shosai. Per Momus:
A shosai is a room for books, a study, a workspace, a den for reading and writing. For me, this photo is the archetypal Japanese literary den. Ito sits on the floor in a tiny space, seen from a staircase. A naked bulb hangs above, and from floor to ceiling books line the space, less than one tatami mat across.It looks like what I imagine sitting in your own brain would be like - overwhelming information, close to hand, idiosyncratically organized.
Pages from Anne Sexton's scrapbook, chronicling her elopement at age 19. From here.
Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts — like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.
The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather — in many cases — offers an alternative to it.
There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow than actions. I am thinking now of what I read today (when I went up to 122 Bd. St-G to check for her mail) in H’s journal about me — that curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concludes by her saying that she really doesn’t like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune. God knows it hurts, and I feel indignant and humiliated. We rarely do know what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us)... .Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal. Will H. ever read this?Susan Sontag, journal entry of December 31, 1958. Via the NYT.
