Tuesday Poem - About Blue

Hello. I'm back after having been away again - life keeps taking unexpected turns. Maps don't exist for certain uncertain territories so it's been a case of staying present to the moment, being vigilant, trusting my gut; the upside is that by 'taking our waking slow and going where we have to go' (I'm scrambling Theodore Roethke dreadfully here. . . apologies ;) ) we discover new ways to keep our rudder more-or-less straight in the water; we pick up new tools for our toolboxes, learn better fire-building skills, come to know better where to look and what for, what to bring and what to leave behind. And we discover to our relief that there are ways to introduce light and warmth to dark, unfamiliar landscapes.

My older son Daniel spent last week enjoying in the physical world a number of maneuvers I was finding challenging in my emotional and spiritual one. . . jumping out of airplanes with flimsy parachutes, crossing deep river canyons on spaghetti-thin steel cables, surfing white water rapids. . . From soar to dump to tumble, he loved every moment of it and returned home glowing with health; I swear he looks taller, more tautly muscled and bright-eyed because of his adventures. I, on the other hand, feel a little puffed and out of breath on my separate marathon and have a way to go yet before I can untie my laces and lie back on soft, cool grass. 

But enough of that for now. . . It's Tuesday and I'm already seven days overdue with last week's poem. I don't want to miss another week. 

Just a few quick words about my boat-making process, because the exhibition's opening an hour from now. Making these boats has been enormously soothing during these past hectic weeks. I finished mounting the installation in the Blue Oyster gallery yesterday. . . they're in a room of their own, occupy one full wall from North to South and West to East. For many reasons, I have more depth of feeling for this piece than any other I've made in thirty years of art-making - which says something, doesn't it? It has peeled back the shadows and opened up a myriad new spaces; has contained me and taken me traveling in ways no other 'static' piece has. I've come to see myself and my loved ones more clearly as a direct result of my involvement with this work; these are truths to be grateful for. My hope now is that Drift will go on to bring a sense of calm and replenishment to others who come to experience it. 


As I mentioned, the exhibition, titled A Museum of Obsessions and curated by Jodie Dalgliesh opens to the public at 5.30PM this evening (please come along, anyone who's near enough?). It will be up until 24 December. (You can read more about this group collection here and here.)

(I was thrilled to find that the paper boats become transparent when the film is projected across their surfaces; they look as though they're made of ice or glass. This allows for all kinds of intriguing spatial ambiguities.) 

*

For today's TP, I've chosen a poem that relates to this current project quite by chance. I wrote it years before embarking on these bamboo and paper flotillas and years before Antarctica was anywhere in the frame. . . (Don't you love it when your unconscious runs up ahead of you, showing you the way forward even though you might not know it at the time?).    

ABOUT BLUE

Blue is vagabond amongst colours.

Reckless, untamed, it disembodies

whatever becomes caught in it.

Once, I brushed the surface 

of a boat blue; within moments 

there were the ocean and sky - 

no longer a boat in view. 

And have you heard? Blue 

has an appetite for monsters.

Stampeding and bellowing 

like shapes fall into themselves

slip down the throat of blue 

into water the inside colour

of glass.

Imagine a slow drunkenness

on vapours of blue. Easy it is 

to spin dizzy just at the thought

of it coupling some distance 

from shore, at sea with rose madder 

or gold. If you close your eyes

tightly, I think you will find blue
coiling a wind rope, coaxing lines 

of water and air from currents 

of emerald and indigo. 

CB

For more Tuesday Poems, please visit the hub where Brian Turner's wonderful poem Fisherman begins. . . 

"When the fisherman found

he could no longer row his dinghy

the tide went out with his heart . . . "

DRIFT - snippets

Oh yay, what I'd hoped to be able to post today turns out to be do-able (doable?). . . 


I want to share three very short excerpts from the film sequence that accompanies the paper flotilla. . . The film 'proper' is now finished (it's not very long - 11 minutes or thereabouts, and silent - but it'll be looped to become a kind of visual mantra that has no beginning and no end). I haven't quite settled on the configuration for the installation part of this piece yet, but it seems to want to be a circle; ie. a mandala. 

I see this as a meditation piece, an invitation to step outside the noise and bustle of every day and into an ambiguous, dreamlike space. By stepping outside and away, we are sometimes able to re-enter our ordinary experiences more fully, returning to them refreshed or replenished? 


In my imagination, the boats sit away from the wall, packed closely, hull-side up in the lower hemisphere and gradually inverting and separating out as they rise. This is what happens under the ice - - - in order to drift, the boats have to flip themselves over, capturing an invisible cushion of air as they do. It's the air that then carries them through the water, transporting them upwards till they come to rest on the under-belly of the ice. I'm playing around with the idea of creating a circle out of the static or 'frozen' boats, with a 'still centre' that becomes the container for the film's activity - rather like an 'eye' within whose 'iris' the drifting boats come alive, journey and tell their story. Hopefully they will reveal something to us about our story, too, as they act out their small boat drama. 


Heaven knows, we're on this journey together and it's sure as nuts unpredictable. There are passages of great turbulence, heartache, ecstasy and calm - not to mention everything else in between. We must make our solo voyage within our communal one. . . and, too, the other way round. Drift (I think that's the name of this piece) alludes to these themes. If we were to liken this business of living to a piece of complex music, I think we'd all agree that playing it with both technical facility and full feeling requires years and years of practice; some bits we have to go over and over and over again in the hopes we might some day get them right. Some passages are a breeze and we can sail through without batting an eye lid; others, we might have to accede, are better played by someone else with a different skill set or instrument. One thing's for sure - no bar of it is dull. 


Kate's sad, but rich and triumphant funeral yesterday illuminated again how life is urgent, precious - and now. 

Underwater film footage captured in New Harbor, Antarctica, by Henry Kaiser and Shawn Harper; boats released under the sea ice by Sam Bowser; concept and direction by moi (as part of an ongoing collaboration; 2005 - the present) 

When in doubt

. . . add another boat or ten to the flotilla

(I think I have just about enough now to create my wall poem)

Drift

drift |drift|verb [ intrans. ]1 be carried slowly by a current of air or water : the cabin cruiser started to drift downstream | figurative excited voices drifted down the hall.

adrift |əˈdrift|adjective [ predic. ] & adverb(of a boat or its passengers) floating without being either moored or steered

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . . . ~ ~ . . . . . . ~ . . ~ ~ ~ ~. . . . ~ ~ ~ . ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . . . . . . . . ~ ~ . . . ~ ~ ~ . . . ~ ~ . . ~ . . . ~ ~ ~ ~ . . . ~ ~ . . . . . . . ~ ~ ~ . . ~ . . ~ . . ~~. . . . . ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . . . ~ ~ ~ ~ . . . ~ ~ . . . . ~ . . ~ . . . . ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . . .

Certain themes seem to be recurring both at home base and out here in the blogosphere. Walk. Run. Leap. No don't. Wait. Oh-oh. Splotch. Slowly now. . . r e a c h. No, sorry, I meant to say crouch. Ouch. And so on and so on. Bumpity, bump, bump. . . bump, bump. As Marylinn wrote in her recent post, wake me up when it's not stupid any more? 

Meantime, while things are as they are, we do as we must to keep ourselves on course. I am finding work really helpful at the moment. My focus is on getting an installation together - its various components need to be conjured up and completed within the coming ten days or so (instal date, Sunday 28 November; official opening, Tuesday 30th). I think I might have mentioned this idea here before. . . basically, my task is to produce +/- a thousand paper boats (made in three different sizes to create subtle spatial tensions) and a silent film showing a similar flotilla adrift under the sea ice in Antarctica.

The film part of this installation will be circular in structure; by that, I mean it will loop, and therefore announce no obvious beginning or end. There will be no familiar points of reference, nothing explicit in terms of 'statements of context' or intent. There will be no narration and no music; nothing but the play of light and dark and an ocean of static (on the wall) and floating (in the film) boats to draw you in and hold you there. You will be able to float underwater for hours or days if you feel like it, and you will not have to hold your breath while you're there; neither will you need to come up for air. And, guess what? You won't be expected to wear swimming togs or a wet suit. . . and - you have my word on this - your skin will not resemble a wrinkly old prune when you emerge.

The paper I'm using to make the boats is 300gsm cotton; sheets left over from the printing, in 2007, of my poetry collection. Piles and piles of proofs would ordinarily have been tossed aside and renegaded to the rubbish tip but thankfully I was there at the time the book went to press so was able to rescue (literally, hundreds) of beautiful, large sheets of creamy, acid-free paper for future projects.

In a way, these small boats are messengers, each one carrying a fragment of our common story on its surfaces - a lithographic drawing, a few lines of poetry.

Making paper boats is a wonderfully steadying exercise. I highly recommend it. It has a similar effect (on the mind, at least) as yoga does. There's something about the repetition and focus and the accompanying head-clearing rhythm that does it, I think. It feels a lot more like meditation than obsessive industry or - heaven forbid - indulgence (although I can see how it could easily take on the appearance of either or both, given how many hours - no, days - I'm spending at this.) My intention? To say something about community - how we're a kind of constellation composed of many parts - and at the same time to create a space that loosely references T. S. Eliot's line 'at the still point of the turning world is the dance'. And then I want to invite people in to partake and participate for an extended moment. Does this count as a 'reason'? And is it reason enough? I'm not sure. All I know is that I feel compelled to make this piece.

Measure, rule, cut, stack; mark hull joints, puncture axes with compass point, cut to midpoint using scissors; score, crease, fold, glue, peg x 653 (so far). . . As a process, it's kind of numbing, kind of nice - or, ecin of dnik, gnibmun fo dnik. (Siht si tahw deneppah ta eht dne fo eht yad, detpmorp yb Alemap dna Epolenep aiv liame dna Koobecaf. Ti dah em gnihgual flesym yllis. Uoy dluohs yrt ti, yllaer uoy dluohs. Eht erom uoy od ti, hte reisae ti steg. Dna eht reinnuf.

Sdrawkcab gnitirw smees ot tif htiw s'yadot ddo erehpsomta, t'nod uoy eegra?

Os, owt sgniht ot yrt. . . (1) evititeper gnikam-taob dna (2) gnitirw sdrawkcab. 

?!? 

   

; )

147 boats packed together make a mandala, a paper buoy, a kina (sea urchin). . . 

*

PS. You can find out more about this group exhibition at

A Museum of Obsessions