Author Archives: muntho10

O – the Cosmicizing I

For every appetite, there is a world. The dreamer then participates in the world by nourishing himself from one of the substances of the world, a dense or rare, warm or gentle substance clear or full of penumbra according to the temperament of his imagination.”
(Bachelard 178)
  

The appetite of my imagination that craves the ocean craves the sublime depth, width and fury of the sea. The ocean is a waterbody of movement in waves, rivulets, curls, vortices, currents, storms, tides. Reverie with the ocean is one of diffusion as the substance of thoughts follows the rise and fall of tide and wave and intensifies along the thin slip of horizon. For there is always horizon with the ocean, always the love-affair between sea and sky. Ocean reveries are dreams in color: emerald green-gold light, white blurred beachbreak spray, the tiny sky-colored mirrors on every water surface, and the soft blue wash of memory. Ocean reveries illuminate the breath of salt water through bodies and within bodies as currents and tides. This water-breath is a reverie in creation and creativity and adaptation and generosity and gestation and sensitivity and ferocity and luminosity and life and salt and blood and art.

O – Week 8 Log

Week 8

Monday, February 25
traveled to Olympia
3 hours reading and writing seminar pass

Tuesday, February 26
2 hours water surface study and meditation
2 hours online reading interview about poetry/science memoir of orcas, uploading to my blog, reading about the senses
1 hour writing about body and art
1 hour reading and responding to seminar

Wednesday, February 27
.5 hour editing photos
.5 hour reading H.D.’s Trilogy
1 hour looking at seascape painters (see blog)
2 hours writing
2 hours reading Reverie

Thursday, February 28
3 hours taking notes and writing Reverie
1 hour researching art online
2 hours writing poetry
2 hours working on paper
1 hour reading Leaves of Grass out loud

Friday, March 1
2 hours editing photos
1 hour posting to blog
1 hour reading Turner book
2 hours writing

Saturday, March 2
2 hours field water reverie
3 hours working on paper
1 hour posting to blog
1 hour looking at Turner seascapes

Sunday, March 3
6 hours writing, note-taking and figuring out what to do for a paper
1 hour poetry observed recording
1 hour sorting out blog posts
2 hour online research of water art

Total: 46
Total Cumulative: 160

 

Reading List

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Trilogy by H.D.
Turner: the Late Seascapes
Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard
Unoriginal Genius by Marjorie Perloff
Reading on the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
for online resources see luminoussea.tumblr.com 

O – waterbodies III

Of the body,
the belly identifies best with the sea.
The belly identifies best with the sea, where the closed-sphere skull and the rib-cage gradually open, one unfurling rib-finger by one to the breathing fluid belly.
The belly identifies best with the sea at the opening of the sea-sky fold, when forest or city draws back its curtains and all senses reroute to the belly via the heart.

The belly and the sea know the vulnerability and depth of breath.
The belly and the sea know the language of sensitive salt fluids.
The belly and the sea know the adequate degree of ripeness.

In the visceral language of belly and sea, spirals whisper fluids and resonate waves.
In the language of viscera, vowels are round pebbles rolled in the mouth,
syntax is the churning of shore waves,
and flirtation is the palpitation of sun-lit wavelets.

In the search for renewal, the belly and the sea find
that that which is in the process of becoming is most
ancient.

 

 

****still a work in progress, not sure how to end it.

O – Week 8 Reverie

A poetic force leads these phantoms of reverie. This poetic force animates all the senses; reverie becomes polysensorial.” (Bachelard 162)

Ah! how a passage which pleases us can make us live! …one learns that … at certain times, internal lights render opaque bodies translucent…” (Bachelard 162)

One learns that at certain times, internal lights render opaque bodies translucent. Internal lights render opaque bodies translucent. Reverie is an opening, a softening into the internal worlds of things. Reverie is the spill of light into water at the rising crest of a wave. Reverie is a depth where light flickers in curtains. Reverie is the palpitating shoreline of a descending night tide. Reverie is the wind-shift of oval-shaped reflections in ripples to jagged-edged wavelets. Reverie is backwards-bent curl of beach break spray. Reverie is the lace offering left by a wave at the land’s edge. Reverie is a ripeness, a fullness, an opening. So is art.

O – Week 7 Log

Week 7

Monday, February 18
1 hour perusing ealphabet site and posting logs
traveled to Corvallis
2 hours writing seminar pass
1 hour writing poetry
(4)

Tuesday, February 19
.5 hour reading sem passes and responding
4 hours walking, observing, photographing and writing about the shore
1 hour reading Poetics of Reverie
(5.5)

Wednesday, February 20
3 hours in the presence of the sea: drawing, painting, listening, watching, shivering (started raining)
2 hour reading Poetics of Reverie and daydreaming
2 hours journaling for reverie, drawing and researching Lila Zemborain and HD online
2 hours composing reverie, posting online, perusing the blog and adding to luminoussea
2 hours editing photos
(11)

Thursday, February 21
.5 hour finishing interview with Zemborain with Leonard Schwartz
.5 hour reading NYT article about salmon geo-magnetic naviation
2 hours drawing
1 hour reading Never
2 hour writing
.5 hour braving the storm to experience waves & wind
1 hour reading The Eyes of the Skin
(7.5)

Friday, February 22
.5 hour looking at waves in a surfer magazine (way too wet to walk to the beach)
1.5 hour researching ocean-architecture and other ocean art to compile to luminoussea
3 hours roughing out my 7-steps and experimenting with other ways to organize a term paper
1 hour ocean visit: low tide sunbreak
(6)

Saturday, February 23
traveled to Portland
2 hours reading Eyes of the Skin (finished)
.5 hour listening to Gertrude Stein
2 hours writing term paper
.5 hour testing out my idea for a term paper idea on a friend
1 hour editing photos and reading Walt Whitman
(6)

Sunday, February 24
1 hour editing photos
1 hour posting to blog
1 hour writing poetry
(3)

Total: 43 hours

Reading List:

The Eyes of the Skin by Juhanni Pallasmaa
mauve sea-orchids by Lila Zemborain,
Never by Jorie Graham
Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
Poetics of Reverie
Reading on the Brain
Unoriginal Genius 

O – Week 7 Reverie

 

 

 

 

 

“In memories it is always blue, slow, light. Why?” (Bachelard 127)

 

Franz Hellens:
“My memory is fragile; I quickly forget the contour, the feature; only the melody remains within me. I have difficulty retaining the object, but I cannot forget the atmosphere, which is the sonority of things and beings.” (Bachelard 135)

 

Water is home. Not just any water, but the extreme surge of flood and ebb where northern salt water meets muddy river water. The memory of the sea lives in my body as slow, deep, blue, resonant and illuminated. I am oriented towards the sea. I feel the magnetic pull of salt water at my blood, as if my connection to the pull of moon or the pull of the cosmos is stronger on the shore than inland. Our asymmetry concentrates all our sensory organs to orient forward and all my sensory organs orient seaward.

Memory: saltwater from my eyes matched and trumped by the salt spray of sea.
Memory: shore scents of kelp, receding wave, burst seafoam, distant-born wind.
Memory: luminous green waves as the clear flood water pushed against the east wind, the sandbars, the river ebb; confused seas, choppy waters, wave pyramids collided and burst, simply burst into air; saltair filtered through my curled-back eyelashes as I looked into the wind, looked with the sun setting rays, stinging.
Memory: eyes unfocused at the frothing white raging horses of the boat wake.
Memory: fullness, safety, relief of high tide; excitement, danger, awe at the early a.m. sisterhood of high tide and wind; expectation, magic, curves of slacktide hightide fish.
Memory: the sleep of the fish, the waterdreams of waterbodies held in the cradle of the hull; a return.
Memory: body in a body; salt skin girl enveloped by liquid light waves.
Memory: breath.
Memory: motion.
Memory: light.