Notebook

In the foot tunnel from the Isle of Dogs to Greenwich (or from Greenwich to the Isle of Dogs, of course), in London. On the way to see how badly the Cutty Sark had been damaged by fire. I was in the United States when the blaze occurred, but only learnt of it on my return. Taken on Bank Holiday Monday, sheltered under the river from the howling gale --

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If you go to the Poetry page, you'll see the work I did based on my friend Elaine's remarkable paintings. Then she painted me! It's called "The Secret Garden".

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Last Tuesday, May 22nd, I appeared on the Charlie Rose show, broadcast on PBS in the United States. I mentioned a book called A Story as Sharp as a Knife by Robert Bringhurst, and I gather there's been a lot of interest... I was asked what was the best book I'd read in the last ten years and that was it. It's part of a trilogy, Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers. Bringhurst says: "A myth is a story, and it is a story that insistently recurs: a piece of timelessness caught like an eddy in narrative time. Once the story is known, a single image or even a single word can evoke it. But only a linked sequence of images, words or gestures can tell it. A story is not a solid object or a solitary entity but a transformative relationship. In musical terms, it is not a note or a set of notes but an episode: a large phrase made from other phrases, which are made in turn of intervals – relationships between notes – more than from notes themselves. In linguistic terms, it is a plot: a large sentence made of other sentences. Once you know the verbs, bare names or nouns will call them back to mind,14 though nouns alone can never tell the story.And stories, whether mythical or historical, timeless or temporal, never exist in isolation. They are linked to other stories, forming a timeless or temporal web."

Then here is a very short fragment of his translation of “Raven Travelling” taken from Being in Being by Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay:

Hereabouts was all salt water, they say.
He was flying all around, the Raven was,
looking for land that he could stand on.
After a time, at the toe of the Islands, there was one rock awash.
He flew there to sit.

Like sea-cucumbers, gods lay across it,
putting their mouths against it side by side.
The newborn gods were sleeping, out along the reef,
heads and tails in all directions.
It was light then, and it turned to night, they say.

Then, when he had flown a while longer,
something brightened toward the north.
It caught his eye, they say.
And then he flew right up against it.

He pushed his mind through
and pulled his body after.

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The Empire State in a storm, May 17th. Found on the Drudge Report -- thanks for that, Alice.

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“It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”

-- taken from Wallace Stevens's 'The Idea of Order at Key West'
If you want hear Wallace Stevens reading this poem you can.
I just like her, striding there alone...

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