A wanderer with an anchor

 A ship is a wanderer with an anchor.

And silent answers crept across the stars

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,

Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,

Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;

And silent answers crept across the stars.

From 'Sonnets to the Sea' by John Blight

Down from the Country

When we came down from the country, we were strangers to the sea.

The rise and fall of waters without rain,

the lunglike breathing of the estuary

caused our amazement; and the white stain

of salt on the rocks, when the tide receded,

where we were used to dark mud that a flood leaves behind,

held us enthralled; and we needed

some mental adjustment which people noticed. When the mind

is confronted by such magnitudes of sight and sound

there is no mask for refuge in frown or grimace;

but the face looks blank, as if it were dragged up, drowned.

How much loneliness is there in a different place,

out of one's shell, out of all knowledge, to be caught

out of dullness of self by such alien thought?

A Cup of Sea Water

I had no thought for a poem, so I wrote

casually of the sea. The sea is 

a common subject, and easily

described -- for who doesn't know of a boat

and sand and rocks and what the sea is?

I wrote of the sea, and I spoke of it breezily;

but not in a poem -- for who doesn't know

that a poem couldn't capture the sea,

save as a cup holds it? Then the sea tastes

warm and not unlike blood; and though

it has water's colourless anonymity,

like blood it is all too savage to drink, and wastes

and is thrown away, once you taste its fierce flavour

which is all I will you to taste, my few words to savour.

A Child's Essay about the Sea

Tides come in, tides go out. There is all about us

the movement of waters, the motions of fuss.

Even the shallow ripples discuss in whispers of hush

the boat pushing into the beach. There is a rush

and surge of waters to tell you of its landfall.

The sea is never silent. The sun, the moon, and all

heavenly bodies are dancing upon it. The sea

is never still. Be it a cloud's image, or be

it a passing gull in its mirror of calm.

There, in the distance, is a tall waterspout like a palm, 

or a whale spouting. Children shouting along the beach;

and dogs barking -- gulls quite unable to teach

dogs that dogs can't catch gulls. A constant turmoil

of tides; disorders which the steadfastness of the land

    cannot foil.

And about Phosphorescence

The round tank of the ocean reaches far

as the eye can see, and contains every star

and the image of the moon. They are

constantly filling it with light. Swirl and oar

and their phosphorous glows. Step ashore

and slap the wet sand, and, once more,

a repetition of stars. They have been filling the ocean

with light, all their light-years. A potion 

of time and starshine the sea is. The notion

of night at sea as dismally black is a joke.

Not since Phosphorous, the morning star, first woke

has there been any cessation of light

pouring into the ocean. It is just as bright

in its fastest deeps, where fish seem alight.

The Sea and Infinity

He sat by the sea, and he sighed, 'Infinity.

Ah, Infinity!' But there was another side

to the ocean -- an eastern shore, a north, a south...

each was a limit, a boundary

to his knowledge; and the ocean, wide

as it was, was not infinite. Strange word of mouth

-- Infinity. For there was the sea linked molecule by

    molecule;

and the sky, atom to atom; and space

by each wave-length of field and field; and all

of nature the rational, natural order and rule

of space-time was finite in time or sapce.

And there was nothing that he could call

infinite but Nothing. And what is Nothing?

He has not seen it. It is not the sea. His own imagining.

Meridians

For which centuries there may be tracts

of ocean never approached, only

netted by meridians. In these lonely

castnesses such netting protects

them from disintegration into space.

They were, and are, will always be some place

in the ocean where a ship might pass

or a plane plummet, and may be found

entangled in the net. As the years pass,

some time we'll find in the net a rock, a fragment of ground

thrust our of the sea by submarine volcano.

It is the net will hold it in its place:

the net we've cast around -- a flimsy lace

to hold five continents; yet, strong enough.

The Anchor

Know then, the only joy of an anchor -- to be strong,

have iron arms, and be long

immersed holding by cable a ship

like an iron kite in the blue, deep

waters of a port. Know then, the anguish

of its cross -- to lie as stone, while fish

hover and flutter like leaces, and love

botes, in a barnacle, a red groove

into its flukes. To be the 'pick'

in common talk, thrown over through slick

to the dirty bottom with bottles and tins;

an anchor in all its servitude, its sins

flaking off in rust like a scurvy:

yet straining to hold a city in heaven -- cause topsy-turvy.

his blood wooed by grace of language

 Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed. 

Tim Winton

From Land's Edge:

"Swimming is a geat mystery, like riding a bike, like reading. Suddenly, after days and weeks of trying and failing, one morning you can do it."

"Those summers were both active and contemplative, the weather always fair but never gentle. Morning and afternoon I learned the pattern of my life, of hunting and gathering and picking over flotsam in the outer world -- fishing, diving, swimming, surfing, lighting fires, rowing boats, feeling the landscape rush in from all sides -- and of retiring indoors to wonder and write and read where only the breeze could reach me, in there where my dreams were. I would never be content with only one world or the other. At the time it felt like the ideal life, that coastal summer idyll, and maybe I've lived all my years a hostage to a six-year-old's fantasy."

Later:

"Freediving in the open ocean, for all the other things it is, is mostly a form of forgetting. Surfing, swimming laps, drifting a bait from a jetty or a boat are similarly forgetful things. They are forms of desertion, retreat, hermitage, a stepping-aside from terrestrial problems to be absorbed into the long moment. The sea is immense, trackless, potent, but above all, neutral. ... Of all water occupations, freediving is the most forgetful. You turn your back to the land, to the sun, and slide down to where all sound is flattened to chirps and rumbles. The deeper you dive the heavier is the blanket that insualtes you. You willfully forget to breathe; you sidestep the impulse and your thinking thins out to the moment at hand. The poet Jogn Blight had it clearlt: 'All reason drowns: drowning in you.' It's a religious feeling. On the seabed, or gliding midwater with everything sharp in focus and my body aching with pleasant, urgent hunger, I understand the Christian mystics for moments at a time. I too feel swallowed, minuscule, ready. But like the monk the diver contemplates on borrowed time. Sooner or later you have the surface to return to."

Rachel Ruysch

 

1714

Late 1680s

1709

Early Still-life

1708

Humanities

 According to the legislation that created the National Endowment for the Humanities, "the term 'humanities' includes, but is not limited to, the study and interpretation of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of the social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life."

1965.

 

Education, Germany, early 19th century

From early 19th century, one of the characters in Budenbrooks talks about the new education system:

"Practical ideals - well --h'm -- they don't appeak to me in the least.... We have trade schools and technical schools and commercial schools springing up on every corner; the high schools and the classical education suddenly turns out to be all foolishness, and the whole world thinks of nothing but mines and factories and making money...That's all very fine, of course. But in the long run pretty stupid, isn't it? ... I don't know why, but it irritates me like the deuce... I don't mean, Jean, that the July Monarchy is not an admirable regime..."

 

Bits - space & time - structure & sequence

 "A digital universe...consists of two species of bits: differences in space, and differences in time. Digital computers translate between these two forms of information - structure and sequence - according to definite rules. Bits that are embodied as structure (varying in space, invariant across time) we perceive as memory, and bits that are encoded as sequence (varying in time, invariant across space) we perceive as code. Gates are the intersections where bits span both worlds at the moments of transition from one instant to the next."

George Dyson (Turing's Cathedral) 

An oasis of art-appreciation

"Tea with us became more than an idealization of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life. The beverage grew to be an excuse for the worship of purity and refinement, a sacred function at which the host and guest joined to produce for that occasion the utmost beatitude of the mundane. The tea room was an oasis in the dreary waste of existence where weary travelers could meet to drink from the common spring of art appreciation."

Kakuzo, Okakura. “The Book of Tea.”

A sense of the human cell

"If a cell were blown up to the size of a high-school gym, you wouldn’t be able to see across it. It would be filled with tens of thousands of proteins, most about the size of a basketball. Other biomolecules no bigger than your hand, and water molecules the size of your thumb, would fill the spaces between. (To scale, your whole body would be about the size of a ribosome.) The mixture would have the consistency of hair gel. In such a world, gravity would be virtually meaningless—you would be weightless, as if suspended in a ball pit. And everything would be moving. The mixture would buzz constantly; spend just a few seconds inside it and every medium-sized object around you would have explored every square inch of your body. It would feel like pandemonium, but it wouldn’t be."

- From 'A Journey to the center of our cells.' - James Somers, New Yorker. Link

A Surfing Life

Reading 'Barbarian Days' by William Finnegan. One of the more beautiful reads of the year. Many things to say about the joy and delight and inspiration of the book, but perhaps a quote. Even to a non-surfer like me, the book holds in its enchantment of surf that I keep seeing it as a metaphor in other things. To a reader, perhaps found in reading.

"The close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast, every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell -- a longitudinal study, through season after season -- is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break. Getting a spot wired -- truly understanding it -- can take years. At very complex breaks, it's a lifetime's work, never completed."

From 'The Book of Tea'

From 'The Book of Tea' by Okakura Kakuzo

But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea cup.

it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.

It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.