Category Archives: Writing

Day 213 1/24/14: “A Breath of Fresh Air”

by in Art, Jaws, Literature, Writing and tagged , | 1 Comment

sharkptgIt’s a pretty big deal when someone paints a painting for you. So yesterday when my former student  Ani gifted me with this picture, I was, as they say in England, “dead chuffed.” Ani wasn’t even a “shark student” of mine, she took my literature class last fall. Like me, Ani loves the Beatles. Unlike me, she is incredibly together at 22 years old.  She runs a cake pop business with her sister. She writes poetry and has an untainted enthusiasm for language and literature that I admire, sometimes wistfully.

One day after class, Ani showed me a poem she was working on. The poem centered around a pomegranate, a powerful symbol of love, death, renewal and the feminine. I remembered that Pre-Raphaelite painting of Persephone holding the pomegranate in her hand. I recalled the pomegranates on the funerary sculpture of the unmarried women in Ancient Greece.   But Ani wasn’t thinking of all that symbolic stuff when she wrote the poem. She just wrote it. The poem had a lovely, strong female voice, both archetypal and modern.  It made me shiver a little. We talked about the poem for a while–about Persephone, about Armenian history, about images vs. words until afternoon shadows lengthened and it was time to go.

As soon as we stepped outside the classroom, we saw a young guy sitting on a bench. He pulled two pomegranates out of his sweater and handed them to a friend. Ani and I both shrieked with delight.

Had Ani’s poetic invocation caused them to surface in the real world? A correspondence between Ancient Greece and Glendale, California?

I like that this shark seems to be on some sort of dream stage, rising in front  of a curtain of blood. The title is “A Breath of Fresh Air.” The shark seems both to bringing this much-needed freshness to the world and rising out of this dark and light aqua sea in search of it. And the more I look at the deep, rich red background, the more I think of pomegranates and marvel at the palette of images, colors and words we share across time. I like to think of the language we employ and all the echoes it carries. Sometimes this echo is a burden, miring us in old stories we’d like to forget and other times that resonance is the tremor of eternity we need so language becomes a living thing, closer maybe to music.

Lovely things can happen when someone lets you into their poetic process. It doesn’t happen every day.

So thanks Ani, for the poem and for the picture.

Day 211 1/22/14: The White Shark in Literature Vol 1: Richard Wright

by in Animal Welfare, Literature, Shark Trivia, Teaching, white sharks, Writing and tagged , , , | 1 Comment

imagesI just discovered a great short story by Richard Wright (the last one he ever wrote) called “Big Black Good Man.” The main character is a white man named Olaf, a night porter in Copenhagen hotel. Olaf considers himself a broad-minded & fair sort of fellow until a sailor named Jim, “the biggest, strangest and blackest man” Olaf has ever seen, asks to rent a room.

I love literature that explores psychic states and attempts to imitate the impossible rhythms and trajectories of thought,  but I’ve never read a story that plunges straight into the fearful and obsessive nightmare of racism. Wright’s story has very little external action, but takes the reader on a twisted ride through Olaf’s paranoid imagination. After an extremely tense and bizarre encounter with Jim, Olaf curses and says, “I hope the ship he’s on sinks…I hope he drowns and the sharks eat ‘im.” That night Olaf lies awake in bed imagining that the freighter Jim is due to sail out on springs a leak:

“Ah, yes, the foamy surging waters would surprise that sleeping black bastard of a giant and he would drown, gasping and choking like a trapped rat, his tiny eyes bulging until they glittered red, the bitter water of the sea pounding his lungs until they ached and finally burst…The ship would sink slowly to the bottom of the cold, black, silent depths of these and a shark, a white one, would glide aimlessly about the shut  portholes until it found an open one and it would filter inside and nose about  until it found that swollen, rotten, stinking carcass of the black beast and it would then begin to nibble at the decomposing mass of tarlike flesh, eating the bones clean…Olaf always pictured the giant’s bones as being jet black and shining.

Once or twice, during these fantasies of cannibalistic revenge, Olaf felt a little guilty about all the many innocent people, women and children, all white and blonde who would have to go down into watery graves in order that that white shark could devour the evil giant’s black flesh…But, despite feelings of remorse, the fantasy lived persistently on, and when Olaf found himself alone, it would crowd and cloud his mind to the exclusion of all else, affording him the only revenge he knew.”

Wright’s italicizing of the word “white” makes the shark into an Aryan messenger of the deep, meting out the violent racial “justice” that the impotent Olaf cannot, and unfortunately killing a few innocent blondes in the process.  I’m sure some scholars find the anthropomorphism too extreme, but I like the shark-as-ethnic-cleanser metaphor. It’s original and eccentric, obvious and preachy at the same time. And do we know that “a white one” is actually a great white shark, or is it some super white albino style that is as white as Jim is black, the only creature capable of vanquishing this “mountain” of a man?

But however wild Olaf’s fantasies become,  Wright doesn’t really exaggerate the fear that drives them, and all the wild and furious ways that fear can metastasize. Thinking about racism led to thinking about speciesism and all the hate doled out to sharks in Australia, to the wolves of Idaho, all the creatures made “other” by human beings.  Alice Walker’s essay “Am I Blue?” is the first piece of lit I read that links racism and speciesism. Please check it out here.

Day 209 1/20/14: Get To Know Your Stigmata Toaster

by in Literature, Poetry, Writing and tagged , , | Leave a comment

UnknownIn my endless quest to combine the most unlikely texts possible, I have joined in holy linguistic matrimony a pamphlet called “Stigmata and Modern Science” and the user manual to my Oster TSSTTR6329 Toaster. I hope this inspires you to write an experimental poem or at least make some toast.

IMPORTANT SAFEGUARDS: Young children or incapacitated persons should not bear the external marks of the wounds of Christ or the material element of stigmatization, except to the extent prohibited by law.

Warning: Atheists reject the stigmata as an aggressive form of miracle. Never insert your fingers into the holes. Handle with Care.

1. Spontaneously, in ecstasy, and during complete suppression of will and suggestibility, insert the crumb tray into the slot.

2. If living for years without earthly food, lightly tap the sides to dislodge any crumbs lodged in the toast chamber.

3. After the desired level of darkness has been reached the wounds must not vanish.

4. When the wounds bleed they must emit fresh blood. Accumulations create unsanitary conditions and the possibility of fire.

5. The nail-shaped formations of the wounds should be of equal size and freshness and glow more brightly than others.

6. The frozen light will illuminate the crust in the middle of the wound and the brighter edge to assure even browning.

7. English muffins cannot be created by mystical contemplation alone.

8. It is normal for non-Catholics to create an odor.

9. To reduce the risk of electrical shock, bleed during a vision of the Crucifixion and wipe with a damp cloth.

10. SAVE THESE INSTRUCTIONS

Day 206 1/17/14: Friday Poetry/Science Mishmash

by in Animal Welfare, Environment, Marine Conservation, Poetry, Shark Conservation, Writing and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

basho81. Your eyes will love this: Beautiful biofluorescent sharks & other fishes.

2. Nature has feelings: A fascinating piece on the poetics of Basho.

3. Writer’s block? Pshaw! Check out poet Bernadette Mayer’s writing experiments.

4. New Zealand welcomes Shark Whisperer Ocean Ramsay.

5. Weirdly beautiful time lapse video of living, breathing & fighting coral from the Great Barrier Reef.

Day 204 1/15/14: Whales Weep Not!

by in Environment, Literature, Poetry, Writing and tagged | 1 Comment

whalesWhat writer could get away with using “whale phallus” in a poem and still make it beautiful?

That hot-blooded Brit D.H. Lawrence of course!

Whales Weep Not!

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains

the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge

on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.

The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers

there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of

the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages

on the depths of the seven seas,

and through the salt they reel with drunk delight

and in the tropics tremble they with love

and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.

Then the great bull lies up against his bride

in the blue deep bed of the sea,

as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:

and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood

the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and

comes to rest

in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale’s

fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale’s strong phallus, linking the

wonder of whales

the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and

forth,

keep passing, archangels of bliss

from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim

that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the

sea

great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-

tender young

and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of

the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring

when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood

and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat

encircling their huddled monsters of love.

And all this happens in the sea, in the salt

where God is also love, but without words:

and Aphrodite is the wife of whales

most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin

she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea

she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males

and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.

Day 203 1/14/14: Poetry & Impermanence: A Rant

by in $eaWorld, Activism, Humor, Inner Turmoil, Marine Conservation, Poetry, Writing and tagged , , | Leave a comment

Keats-Bright-StarPoetry is a brutal art. One (meaning me) slaves for hours and hours trying to finish a poem that is nearly there. What am I not doing? Am I thinking too much?  Pursuing instead of waiting? Filling up instead of emptying out?  Oh the pressure of the final stanza! Oh the need for transformation, the weighty promise of the unwritten. I wanted some sharp outline of the knowable unknowable. I wanted a final image that resonates in the body as much as the mind. I wanted a poem that shimmered with intellect like T. S. Eliot regurgitating The Upanishads, its edges limned with a the ghost of Robert Frost holding a delicate pane of ice over a swollen stream in March. That kind of poem. All that suffocating desire.

So I stopped writing poetry and wrote an e-mail to my school asking them not to offer employee discounts to SeaWorld. I wrote and rewrote the e-mail. I added things and took things away. I wondered what magical syntax or brutally economical description would be enough to make Recreation Connection re-think the idea of a killer whale living in a cracked aquarium. I started off cheerily! Happy New Year! Thanks for adding Whale Watching to the list of Employee Discounted Activities! Sure beats watching the aforementioned animals perform tricks in a chlorinated pool!  I didn’t use so many maniacal exclamations, but I did make an attempt at friendliness (Hello, I am not insane and soon you will warm to my politics). 

I wonder about all the writing we do. All the many non-poems, non-public pieces that we nevertheless compose with compassion and conviction. I think of the journals occupying the shelf on my closet. I think of burning each one, records of my life made long before “journaling” became a verb.

Keats had the best epitaph: Here lies one whose name was writ in water. His epitaph is better than any line of poetry I will probably ever write. A name writ in water is then inscribed in stone. Moss fills the letters.  E-mails vanish into the ether. The blog posts accumulate behind burning links.

If I destroy those journals, will I  stop feeling the weight of accumulated unread years? I’ll wrench pages from spines and light them on fire with adolescent glee. Or maybe just toss them casually in the garbage or donate them to Goodwill and dream of some hipster finding them. But first I’ll transcribe a line or two. A few words from each entry. A record of each vanished day. Some sort of path from there to here.

Day 199 1/10/14: Peter Benchley’s Working Titles for JAWS

by in Jaws, Pop Culture, Shark Trivia, white sharks, Writing and tagged , , | 3 Comments

I am doing my homework, preparing for the February 22 benefit reading (JAWS: An Evening of Relentless Terror And Really Awkward Sex) and I stumbled on Peter Benchley’s early working titles for his novel.  Think how different all of our lives would be if JAWS had been called:

The Grinning Fish

Letter on Mundus

Leviathan Rising

Throwback

The Coming

Horror

Haunt

The Fish

Phosphorescence

Looming

Clam Bay

Spectre

The Edge of Gloom

Maw

Endurance

Tumult

Shadow

The Survivor

The Unexplained

Penance

Hunger

Survival

Messenger

Dues

Ripple

HOOPER/CLASPER

What have we done?
4_0

Day 187 12/29/13: Poetry Exercise: The Alphabet’s Spine

by in Poetry, Writing and tagged | Leave a comment

Had a great time at an Artist’s Way workshop this afternoon.

In addition to inventorying our creative triumphs and horrors, we used each letter of the alphabet to write a word or an entire line. These off-the-cuff exercises are great because you might find a gem of a line that you can use later on. Writing like this also reminds me to loosen up, to stop thinking, “This is good,” or “This is bad,” but to say instead things more appropriate to the time, energy, etc. that the piece took to write like: “this writing has a nice sort of galloping spirit to it,” without it having to be “good,” or a product. I admit,  X was hard. Xenophon, (a student of Socrates) wrote a famous treatise on horsemanship, and though using him was a bit of desperate stretch, it opened the poem up in a new direction that I could keep pursuing beyond the end of the alphabet if I so chose.

Alluring

Beasts

Can

Demand

Elementary instruction, but

Far off in the misted glade

Geometric shapes resolve into

Horses carrying messengers.

In another life perhaps,

Joyously you awaited them.

Knowing you had just the right fragment

Learning first how to translate and

Maybe someday becoming the words themselves

No matter if you’ve forgotten alchemy

Or another lost art,

Perhaps still there on the edge

(Quiet) of remembering  or

Re-envisioning how it was or went

Somehow, even now, all is not lost.

There is still something there.

Understand you can still see or

Visit those places once outside now

Within and maybe a third space will open

Xenophon spoke of the unlikely

Yoking of instinct and sense and

The Chariot of Zeus (1879 illustration from St...

The Chariot of Zeus (1879 illustration from Stories from the Greek Tragedians by Alfred Church) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Zeus changed forms so to enlarge his own myth.

Day 180 12/22/13: A Strange, Dark Winter

by in Activism, Environment, Writing and tagged , | Leave a comment

Today my friend Carolyn sent me Derrick Jensen’s essay “World Gone Mad.” I am a big fan of “Loaded Words,” his piece on writing and activism, and I also like that Jensen is so polarizing.For every reader who finds his work too strident or too nihilistic, another seems to feel relieved that someone is finally telling the truth about what is happening right in front of us—the wholesale destruction of the natural world. Jensen’s thesis in“World Gone Mad,” reminds me of the central idea of the documentary “The Corporation:”  if corporations are legal people, than as people, they fulfill the clinical definition of a psychopath.

As I walked home today, trees on St. George Street shed scarlet leaves. A cool breeze sent them skittering into the gutters. An October feeling, an autumn event, in the gathering darkness of a December afternoon. Then I remembered how hot October was this year, and perhaps the year before, although I confess time has always seemed more blurred in California where the seasons are mild.  Now that climate change has made the weather and time itself more scrambled, coherent patterns seem even more elusive. But I remember for the first ten or so years I spent in California, the winters brought torrential downpours.  Now rain is rare. The hot days stretch far into fall, and seasonably appropriate cold ones are often followed by afternoons of blazing heat and relentless sunshine whose cheeriness seems slightly eerie in the wake of what we know is happening to the earth. The weather is crazy everywhere this winter.

And as I passed the leaf-strewn gutters with their smokey-sweet, vaguely nostalgic smell, I remembered Jensen’s essay and how he questions the refusal (or inability?) of most people to mourn the death of a species or the decline of the oceans. What, I wondered, does that sort of mourning entail? If grieving the loss of a person involves the shattering and rearranging of the self, how might mourning the loss of a river, of lions, of snow, of wolves remake us as people?

This blog sometimes feels as erratic to me as the recent seasons. I write about sharks and ocean conservation and I write about mourning my father and the anticipatory grief I feel about losing my mother. I write about loss of place. The death of great artists. Maybe many of these threads are just variations on a theme—things that are going away. Which brings me back to Jensen’s essay. While it may not be brimming with holiday cheer, his piece, if not a seasonal wish for peace on earth, is a plea for sanity that will save earth (and ourselves) from destruction. Let me know what you think.

Seasons winter summer earth sun

Seasons winter summer earth sun (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Day 174 12/16/13: Sharks, Bad Grammar & The Mystery of Life

by in Humor, Shark Behavior, Shark Conservation, Teaching, Writing and tagged , , , | 1 Comment
Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I endlessly complain about student writing. I am forever scrawling “AWK” or “Huh?” or even “Whaaaat?” along margins and above cryptic sentences that jerk and twitch between lazy slang and stiff, fake formality. I hate weird syntax, wordiness, foggy thinking, limp verbs and the epidemic misuse of words like “portray,”  “careless” and “depict.” I dread the insertion of the falsely fancy “Webster’s Dictionary defines,” invariably used to decode the most obvious words.

But once in a while, a slightly awkward sentence lumbers across the page bearing an odd gift in its clumsy paws. Like primitive special effects in monster movies, or wobbly tombstones and melting makeup on old “Dark Shadows” episodes, dopey sentences can cut through the confines of logic and expectation and help us see “beyond.”

While I criticized my class for the anthropomorphic tendencies of their first essay on Mary Oliver’s “The Shark,” strains persist in subsequent drafts:

“Due to its naivete, the shark was caught and killed,” or “Sharks and humans are similar in the sense that…neither of them can understand many aspects of life.”

As absurd and maddeningly vague as the second sentence is (“aspects” is a hallmark of the half-baked thesis), there is a promising glimmer of intrigue:

What are the mysteries of life that vex both human and shark?

I wonder about the limits of our sophisticated intellect, and their keen senses. I consider the loneliness of our respective otherness.

What does that black eye see when the white shark pops his head above the surface and “studies” the men in the boat?

Maybe it’s impossible to bridge the mystery between humans and animals without projecting, exchanging, blurring rational boundaries between man and fish.  But maybe selective, purposeful anthropomorphizing, like the accidental power of a sloppy, silly sentence, could open up some understanding between us.

I recently bought a watercolor of a shark wearing a crown and holding a scepter. I wanted the little painting because it was ridiculous and fun, but now I realize that in that picture’s absurdity there’s a certain feeling of justice restored, a reminder of the truth, of the way things should be: sharks are the natural rulers of the sea.

And I declare myself a most loyal subject to the rightful king.