Mid Winter Blathering
17th January 2025
How to get through this period - raw to the bone - January-February, 2025.
Not to mention the other tortures we are experiencing and bracing for daily via news outlets and social media.
The carnage is morally and emotionally shattering.
I am still new to the Cape and I am wandering beyond my usual routes to discover landmarks or views.
These real-time experiences can sometimes reset my equilibrium. In the seeming safety of my landscape environment, a high vista of empty ocean can conjure thoughts of a less fractured time, or on the other hand - send me out to the deep.
And so, ----- Whales and whaling have come to mind.
I am reading an absorbing book on Herman Melville titled "Dayswork" by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Babel. It is a pageturner.
On the day a friend recommended this book, I came upon a whale carving fashioned from baleen (whale material). The two events were tossed together in my birthday salad.
A passing interest in whaling began in 1994 when I spent a month on Nantucket. Whaling is powerfully mysterious, strange, dangerous, and oddly exotic to someone born in New York City.
Sperm Whale cut from baleen. Ten inches - acquisition number penned on back.
Below: Herman Melville writes to Sophia Hawthorne.
Lifted from Dayswork (I thank and simultaneously apologize to the authors in advance):
Life is a long Dardenelles.
The shores we pass are bright with flowers.
We want to pluck them, but the banks are too steep.
And so we just keep floating.
We float on and on, looking for a place to land.
Until swoop! we launch into the great sea!
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To mingle with local Cape people I submitted to a winter show targeting children (vacation week) and my "Sparrow" was chosen along with other artists' pieces with "trick" or intriguing surfaces. Currently at the Cotuit Center for the Arts.
Below: "Sparrow" -- digital scan of 35mm negative.
Not to mention the other tortures we are experiencing and bracing for daily via news outlets and social media.
The carnage is morally and emotionally shattering.
I am still new to the Cape and I am wandering beyond my usual routes to discover landmarks or views.
These real-time experiences can sometimes reset my equilibrium. In the seeming safety of my landscape environment, a high vista of empty ocean can conjure thoughts of a less fractured time, or on the other hand - send me out to the deep.
And so, ----- Whales and whaling have come to mind.
I am reading an absorbing book on Herman Melville titled "Dayswork" by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Babel. It is a pageturner.
On the day a friend recommended this book, I came upon a whale carving fashioned from baleen (whale material). The two events were tossed together in my birthday salad.
A passing interest in whaling began in 1994 when I spent a month on Nantucket. Whaling is powerfully mysterious, strange, dangerous, and oddly exotic to someone born in New York City.
Sperm Whale cut from baleen. Ten inches - acquisition number penned on back.
Below: Herman Melville writes to Sophia Hawthorne.
Lifted from Dayswork (I thank and simultaneously apologize to the authors in advance):
Life is a long Dardenelles.
The shores we pass are bright with flowers.
We want to pluck them, but the banks are too steep.
And so we just keep floating.
We float on and on, looking for a place to land.
Until swoop! we launch into the great sea!
----------------------------------------------
To mingle with local Cape people I submitted to a winter show targeting children (vacation week) and my "Sparrow" was chosen along with other artists' pieces with "trick" or intriguing surfaces. Currently at the Cotuit Center for the Arts.
Below: "Sparrow" -- digital scan of 35mm negative.