TUESDAY POEM | Antarctica by Katherine Glenday

                                      

Sounding bells | 80 feet below the ice - Explorers Cove, New Harbor, Antarctica 2008

Katherine Glenday (with a little help from her friends!) Photograph by Shawn Harper

                                      ANTARCTICA

                                                  Our thoughts form us

                                                  And like the forams

                                                  And the caddis creatures

                                                  We live in our

                                                  Patterned habits

                                                  I can run with this

                                                  And do

                                                  Away from text and fact

                                                  And the common herded wayfare

                                                  Of thought and learned behaviour

                                                  It is too dense for me

                                                  I am overwhelmed already

                                                  And the truth of it

                                                  Scampers off somewhere

                                                  And snarls in the brambles

                                                  Beneath the woods

                                                  Of a forest of trees

                                                  I would rather drop my sounding bells

                                                  Below a frozen sea

                                                  And watch with my long distance heart

                                                  As my friends swim them down

                                                 To sing an angelus

                                                 On the ocean bed

                                                 Here all things are weighed

                                                 In the company of creatures

                                                 Who build their hearts on the sleeves

                                                 Of their houses.

                                                 Katherine Glenday

Katherine and I met at the age of eighteen as we embarked on a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Our lives have been woven together in ways mundane, mysterious and magical ever since. During our 2008 season in Explorers Cove, Antarctica, scientist Sam Bowser and I traveled with a series of porcelain forms created by ceramic artists Christina Bryer and Katherine. (You can see some of these on my new, very-much-still-under-construction, website here - scroll down to the bottom of the Antarctica page).

Katherine lives in Kalk Bay, a quaint fishing village in Cape Town (SA). Last weekend she opened the doors of her home and studio to the public for an extensive retrospective - 30 years of her exquisite porcelain work. The words 'numinous' and 'luminous' come immediately to mind. She is an artist in light, her work at once grounded in the natural world and occupying a space that's 'beyond' form. Weightless. Metaphysical. It needs to be seen to be believed --- please visit Katherine's website, prepared to be moved, awed and - yes - altered.

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Janis Freegard

with Tuatara by Nola Borrell

Please click on the quill. 

All Colour Depends on Light

These fragile candle-bearing porcelain vessels live on the mantle*piece in my bedroom; they were made by artist and dear friend Katherine Glenday. Katherine lives in Cape Town; we'll be working together on various collaborative projects (a porcelain flotilla?) when I return to South Africa for a month or two this coming December/January. . .

And don't you love the word 'mantle'? Like every grain of sand, it contains the universe. . . 

*mantel |ˈmantl| (also mantle)nouna mantelpiece or mantelshelf.ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: specialized use of mantle 1 .mantle 1 |ˈmantl| |ˈmøn(t)l| |ˈmant(ə)l|noun1 a loose sleeveless cloak or shawl, worn esp. by women.• figurative a covering of a specified sort : the houses were covered with a thick mantle of snow.• (also gas mantle) a fragile mesh cover fixed around a gas jet, kerosene wick, etc., to give an incandescent light when heated.• Ornithology a bird's back, scapulars, and wing coverts, esp. when of a distinctive color.• Zoology an outer or enclosing layer of tissue, esp. (in mollusks, cirripedes, and brachiopods) a fold of skin enclosing the viscera and secreting the substance that produces the shell.2 an important role or responsibility that passes from one person to another : the second son has now assumed his father's mantle. [ORIGIN: with allusion to the passing of Elijah's cloak (mantle) to Elisha (2 Kings 2:13).]3 Geology the region of the earth's interior between the crust and the core, believed to consist of hot, dense silicate rocks (mainly peridotite).• the corresponding part of another planetary body : the lunar mantle.

This weekend I hope to post word re; the environmental nightmare that's pummeling our North Island coastline. . . Our hearts are in our mouths. Meantime, please love the waters - wherever in the world you are - love the waters and light candles. . . ? Thank you xo. 

  

Reminders of fireflies

I wake happily before 5 most mornings these days - love being up in the early dark, early light. It's blissfully quiet. There are no cars. No dogs barking. The harbour gulls and neighbourhood birds are still asleep, sweet heads tucked neatly underwing. 

There's an interesting energy in the air at the moment and it's not just because we're finally experiencing summer. It's deliciously warm for a change, but this is about more than that. The energy I'm talking about is fiery - the kind that comes with a buzz and crackle. Good fire. Welcome fire. Fire that energizes, rather than scolds, devastates or scorches. It's transformational - in the way light is. 

Do you feel it, too? 

Light dancing in a tin bucket  - Antarctica 2005

Speaking of light, this morning I visited The Tearful Dishwasher and was reminded of fireflies. (Thank you, Tearful.). The image on his latest post took me back to a time and place I return to often in heart and mind and is one I am always grateful to be reminded of. 

Four years ago, my good friend Katherine and I spent three days and nights with a river in the lap of the Du Toit's Kloof mountains. 

I told Tearful how we'd both needed the river "... to be afloat in it, carried by it, near it' and how on the third night '... the black mountains flanking the river like curious custodians came alive with flocks (not swarms) of fireflies. They were big as birds. We had never seen anything like it before - and haven't since. For what might have been an hour or so, but was a timeless time in the way such moments are, we watched them delighting in the moonless night... I have never forgotten its magic."

How susceptible are we to seduction by light and fire? 

I know I am. At the moment, for instance, I'm working on an exciting and somewhat unexpected project - a film. It's totally firing me up - I especially love the fact that it's a collaboration, that we have an absurdly tight timeline and that its completion depends entirely on people's trust, creative surrender and generosity of spirit. This is the very best way to work. Fire under foot, in the belly, ablaze in the group.  

Robert Wilkinson over on Aquarius Papers posted this marvelous piece by Goethe a day or two ago - 

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.”

Goethe's encouraging us to think in terms of capacity, rather than limitation. Not necessarily a simple straight line, this, but definitely worth a try!

><

PS. I have enough parsley in my garden right now - Italian and the old-fashioned, crinkly-perm kind - to send in all directions; as fast as I pick it, it multiplies. Every day, I bring a small armful into the kitchen to snip and pop into the freezer. It'll come in handy some months from now, when soup weather returns... would anyone out there like some?