Instigating Art

Jim Woessner lives and works on a houseboat called Casa de Amor on Issaquah Dock in Sausalito, Californa. The entire top floor of the houseboat (where you would expect to see a living room/dining room) is devoted to his art studio, save the small kitchen area that faces the dock. He lives there with no evidence of the fact that once he worked as a nuclear engineer and showed up everyday 9-5 and then some for PG&E on Market St. in San Francisco. That was before one sunny afternoon when in frustration Woessner suddenly threw his briefcase across Beale Street and proceeded to watch in amazement as the briefcase hit a fountain, broke open and all his papers were swept up and carried aloft by a sudden gust of wind. Witnessing this surreal display, Woessner realized he had just ‘let go’ literally and figuratively. Very liberating, as he tells it.

read more

A Fair Maiden and a King

I just finished reading A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates, who continues to be one of my favorite authors. I'm convinced she is not of this earth. Her ghostly photograph haunts the book jacket with eyes that stare out from another century. And I wonder if she is a creature who sleeps. I don't know if there has ever existed an author so prolific or one so adept at being able to write from the inside of her characters--be it a girl of sixteen or a man in his late sixties who is obsessed by her.

This is not a book review. Although like most of her stories, A Fair Maiden captivated me by the middle of the first page. It's Joyce's magic--her ability to hypnotize us into surrendering to her stories. And it's a willing surrender. Her characters leap off the page. They smile and breathe and moan. We feel their sweat, their chills, their sexuality. We come to know them. They are real, so real in fact because we recognize their thoughts, their perceptions. They are our thoughts, our mothers' thoughts, the boys we were attracted to in high school's thoughts. It's as if each of Joyce's books is personalized to speak to something specific in each one of us. And yet it is the same book we hold in our hands that is read by millions of others. How does she do that?

All these people that speak through Joyce. As if she is a medium, a transmitter of lives that make themselves known through her stories. As if she is the purveyor of souls--from now and before.

In A Fair Maiden, what could so easily be construed as 'sick, perverted, unlawful' is instead something incredibly beautiful. It is a love story, in the mode of a fairytale, a story of old. Where a fair maiden and a beloved king interact in a storybook house to the backdrop of the sea and ocean birds. Where soul mates, art, and love intertwine in the rich fabric of something resembling a dream. And it all happens in New Jersey.

Buoyant Life

Much more on: Buoyant Life. Articles about living afloat around the world. Good for the soul. Check out the article on Cosmic Muffin, a floating home that was once flown by Howard Hughes: Just Another Plane Boat Muffin.

Such a tactile thing

Knitting is such a tactile thing--the feel of the yarn between your fingers, moving, gliding as the project evolves from a spool of yarn to a pattern that grows before your eyes into a dimensional shape. Weight, warmth, colors that please you, the feel of the knitting needles, the soft patter and clinking of them moving slowly or rapidly--it really doesn't matter. This is one of those many examples in life of something that is as enjoyable in the process as the completion. Perhaps even more enjoyable. Maybe it's the continuity, the comfort of this piece of craftsmanship that sits in your lap as it grows--like a soft, warm cat curled up in total contentment.

Buoyant Life

Working on a new website called Buoyant Life--all about living afloat. Very exciting. Most recent article is about wine-tasting barge cruises through France. What's not to like?

Shadows and Reflections

These have always fascinated me, because they are a door, a passageway to a more secret life, the other side--the stuff of dreams and the imagination.

The book that is your soul

A new book, or rather an old one that has been stored away in a bank vault in Switzerland, is soon to make its appearance in the public marketplace. It's Jung's Red Book. The review in the New York Times is long and fascinating, and is less a review than the story around the book itself and its publication.

I'm only halfway though the review and found this passage particularly interesting. It is an excerpt from something written by one of Jung's patients. It was Jung's advice to her for how to deal with some of the more frightening things that went on in the far recesses of her mind:

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”