Author Archives: muntho10

O – waterbodies II

waterbodies II

The river nodes of my wrist
flip cross direct when
they feel the sea near.
Blue tributaries that rush to tingle
fingerpads at the humidity of salt
air. The blue blood sea blush
traces the swirls of this body,
a warmth in the river neck,
the sphere-lake brain,
the seafoam fingertips,
the twin torrent thighs
and the ocean belly.
Pulse pushes for tide.
Feel the white roar of abrupt
end of land. Moon lumens pull
at the blood sea lumens of my veins
and direct a tide between
brain and belly and body,
a slow push of blood sea
to fingers, back to gut.
Ocean sound: deep rumbles wrap
the spirals of cochlea from waterwaves
to airwaves to waterwaves to brainwaves.
Sound. Sound. Roar. Lap-ripple.
Water to air to water to air.
Ocean to sky to body to mind.
We are where the rivers spill
and the sea is all. 

O – Week 6 Log

Week 6

Monday, February 11

1 hours re-reading mauve sea-orchids out loud
2 hours skimming and sorting stack of library books into these categories:

  • art and creativity (interview with Ran Ortner, Art & Soul, the complete letters of Vincent Van Gogh, book on how we experience art, Roni Horn aka Roni Horn), 
  • the body and experience (Secret Teachings of Plants, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenolgy of Perception, The Eyes of the Skin), 
  • water & science (Water & Dreams by Bachelard, Sensitive Chaos, science book on Oceanography, book on the composition of seawater), 
  • poetry (mauve sea-orchids, Never by Jorie Graham, Cantos by Pound, Trilogy by H.D., audio recordings of Gertrude Stein) 
  • and a pile of secondary resources (Tree of Meaning, 2 other books of poetry by Jorie Graham, 2 books on architecture and visual art)

 

2 hours working on the anthology
3 hours reading for and writing seminar pass


Tuesday, February 12

1 hour responding to seminar passes and composing virtual seminar post
2 hours writing
.5 hour reading HD’s Trilogy
1 hour assembling images and quotes at luminoussea.tumblr.com – Discovered googleartproject.com, so cool!
1 hour color and water-rhythm study at Priest Point park
2 hours writing midquarter self-eval


Wednesday, February 13

1 hour midquarter meeting with Sarah
(chocolate-tasting)
2 hours working on anthology with Marisa
1 hour posting images and poetry to luminoussea.tumblr.com
1 hour selecting books and reading through the oceanography section of the library
1 hour reading poetry out loud: Jorie Graham Never and mauve sea-orchids


Thursday, February 14

1 hour posting to luminoussea.tumblr.com
2 hours reading and writing Bachelardian reverie
1 hour meditating on water as the body


Friday, February 15

traveled to Portland
1 hour reading The Eyes of the Skin
1 hour experiencing body in salt water: salt soaking pools


Saturday, February 16

2 hours writing to discover what I want to convey in the term paper-aspect of this project
2 hours collecting poetry, images and diagrams about art, the ocean, tide and salt at my blog


Sunday, February 17

3 hours reading scientific book about saltwater and taking notes
.5 hour writing

 

Totals:
This week: 35 hours
Cumulative: 71 hours

Reading List:

  • The Eyes of the Skin by Juhanni Pallasmaa
  • mauve sea-orchids by Lila Zamborain
  • Never by Jorie Graham
  • Saltwater: Its Composition, Properties and Behaviour
  • The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard
  • Unoriginal Genius by Marjorie Perloff
  • Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
  • online resources: see luminoussea.tumblr.com

 

O – Week 6 Reverie


Constantly moving in a dance that mirrors the tempo of the human body, waves break in time with the beating of our hearts, the in and out of our breaths, like a metronome marking the present moment: now, now.”
                –Ran Ortner, artist statement (http://www.ranortner.com/#!/statement)

This idealizing psychology is an undeniable psychic reality. The reverie idealizes both its object and the dreamer at the same time. And when the reverie lives in a dualism of the masculine and the feminine, the idealization is concrete and limitless at the same time.” (Bachelard 58)

What do I idealize about the ocean? What do I idealize about myself when I daydream of the sea? 

Luminosity. I idealize the light and clarity where the sea rises and thins to peaks and waves and collisions and spray. I idealized that moment when the low-angle sunset light and east wind gale split the green whitecaps and they burst into spray to illuminate the entire sky with salt particles which stuck in my wind-curled eyelashes. I idealize the way water takes light and bleeds it into its vortices. I idealize the fusion of light and liquid on the surface, and how the deep blue of darkness blends in from the bottom up. I idealize the way water holds sky and how water holds depth and dark in the same body.

Ferocity. I idealize the way waves are violent yet gentle. How they are chaotic and unpredictable, yet rhythmic and beautiful in their morphology. I idealize the necessary violence in the dance between wind and water and how it seeks to deconstruct all that is of earth. I idealize the shapes that waves take in the collision against shore. I idealize the strength and persistence of waves that continue in the same rhythms whether illuminated or dark, whether warm or icy, whether now now now or eons ago. 

Sensitivity. I idealize the tides. I idealize the great salt-water sensitivity to the moon as this body of connected seas around our sphere-planet ebb and flood around the continents to follow the pull of the moon. I idealize water’s ability to form sensory organs with motion, in each swirl and ripple, that catalogue the cosmos of that moment. I idealize water’s properties of stagnation and preservation and its ability to provide life through movement and interaction. I idealize the generosity of water in how it is capable of filling the smallest gaps along a shoreline and the deepest trenches of the Pacific Ocean. I idealize its capacity to engulf all that enters it (except air which always pushes upwards to rejoin the sky).

O – waterbodies

Our body is a temporary membrane, necessary to hold our waters.

Our body is a body of water that breathes in and out as a watery lung.
Liquid environment in, altered water out.

We consume water from leaf bodies, from root bodies, from animal bodies, from fruit, egg, seed, milk, fungi bodies and from groundwater bodies.

We give water back as thin layers of sweat spread across our skin, concentrated in places like
under the arms, under breasts, behind knees, between legs, across the brow, along the spine.

We breathe water from the wet caverns our our mouth and nose, from the spongy cave of our lungs.

We leak water from between our legs to show excitement and ecstasy before love, during love, after love; dewdrops, streams, oceans.

Our blood water blushes red as it passes by the alveoli of the lungs, rushes to a purple-blue in the capillaries before it rivers up against the thin skin of wrists, eyelids, the backs of knees, throats.

Water wells up against the water-orbs of our eyes with joy or with pain or at that inarticulate
moment of emotion.

Water cradles our organs as interstitial fluid in the translucent pockets around the lungs, the heart, below the diaphragm.

Water filters in the kidneys, through the loops of henle and glomerulus, flows in and across membranes, down tubes to swell in the bladder before one descent of many through this particular body to join another body of water.

Our body moves like water as the arching waves of the tongue, as peristalsis down the esophagus, as the twisting of the stomach, as the smooth-muscle glide through the intestines.

Our body moves like water in the rotating of sockets, the twist of spines, curve of bellies, roundness of skulls, fluid traced in air by motion.

Our body senses with water through lake-orb eyes, through water-spiral cochleas, through hot-film saliva, through neuronal cytoplasm.

Our body once knew the fluid press of seas against our ever-moist skin.

Our body gushes at the wetness of water on the shore.

Our minds gush at the memory.

O – Week 5 Reverie

The paradoxes of life are all there in the sea. The ocean is often referred to as feminine, but the waves arrive in a masculine surge. As soon as they reach the full extent of their masculine expression, they shape themselves into a tube, a womb.”
– Ran Ortner in an interview in The Sun Magazine, June 2012

“In every language, then, the feminine ending was softer, more tender one might say, than that of the masculine.” (Proudhon via Bachelard 38)

water words that i know in portuguese:
wave – onda (f.)
sea – mar (m.)
ocean – oceano (m.)
crest – cume (m.)
tide – maré (f.)
flow – fluxo (m.)
moon – lua (f.)
sun – sol (m.)
wind – vento (m.)

Waves as words, the sea as androgyny.
Reverie on the word ‘ocean’:
a word that sounds like the sea:
ooooooooooosssssshhhhnnnnn

beginning with the whole, the o, the circle the feminine, the complete beginning and end, where life begins, began. Womb, the primordial sea, the beginnings of thoughts from the salt sea of consciousness and unconsciousness—the sea is circular, all water swirling, beginning and ending in spirals, circles, waves finding their form in curves.

O
oh
ohhhh
ooo-followed by a shhhh
the shhhh of waves retreating, dragging fingers and grasping on to pebbles, the erotic ebb and flow of lovers, earth and sea grasping, retreating surging, eroding, caressing, lapping, raging, flowing.
Shhhh: started by the crest of C, the crest of wave rushing forward, compelled by wind to earth. “there is always violence at the shore”
the transition from shhh to the deep resonance of nnnnnnn: nnnnn the masculine rush, the crest, the rise upwards, a latent sexual drive, the momentum of water energy, surge, to begin again. 

Oooooooooosssssshhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnn
Ocean as androgyny, the union of anima and animus.
The power and decisiveness of the animus in the dependence of the tides and the push of waves to change shorelines and to humble human spirits (we are small).
The lucidity and luminosity of anima in the reflectivity of sky on still water, light through water, in the circular forms of wave, vortex, spray. Gentle reminder to humans that though we are small, we are deep. And ancient. And fertile.

Wave as androgynous word:
push and peak of masculinity (violence, virility, strength)
curl and swirl of femininity (unity, compassion, flow)
ends as softer and more tender (but not without the history of the masculine surge)

Wave as orgasm, wave as creation:
The crest, peak, masculine surge to represent the hard work of contemplation, experimentation, observation, attention, patience, trial, immersion.
The tube, curve to represent unity of self and other, self and the world, the epiphany, empathy, distillation of the world into art, body and the distillation of self into the world.

 

O – Week 5 Log

Monday, February 4th

2 hours field study to Evergreen beach: journaled and photographed
2 hours reading
2 hours reading and seminar pass

Tuesday, February 5th

1 hour reading
3 hours writing, planning and brainstorming

Wednesday, February 6th

2 hours reading
3 hours researching Ran Ortner interviews and images

Thursday, February 7th

4 hours reading and writing reverie
2 hours field work: water and light forms, ripples and reflections

Friday, February 8th

1 hour reading Sensitive Chaos
2 hours researching Roni Horn and other water-artists online

Saturday, February 9th

1 hour field trip to Ocean Shores
1 hour reading mauve sea-orchids

Sunday, February 10th

3 hours reading Sensitive Chaos
1 hour field research/water observations
2 hours reading Sensitive Chaos (finished)
1 hour reading mauve sea-orchids (finished)

Totals

This week: 36 hours

Cumulative total: 36 hours

Reading List:

  • Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air by Theodore Schwenke
  • mauve sea-orchids by Lila Zamborain
  • Interview with Ran Ortner in The Sun Magazine
  • The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard
  • Unoriginal Genius by Marjorie Perloff
  • Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

O is for Ocean

Field Study Proposal

Why does the ocean and water in general have such a powerful resonance for our imagination and attraction for our bodies? Using the Goethean-inspired practice of direct perception and delicate empiricism, the student will investigate the movement, reflection, horizon, diffusion and luminosity inherent in the ocean and in art about the ocean. The student will conduct field studies during which she will write, draw and photograph as a way to record and investigate these qualities of the sea and what effects they have on the imagination and body. She will also explore how other painters, poets, photographers, artists and scientists explain and study the poetic aspects of the ocean and will compile her research at luminoussea.tumblr.com as ‘an anthology of the ocean’ through poetic, artistic and scientific lenses alike. As a supplement to her study of the ocean and art, the student will also study creativity, the process of delicate empiricism, and how “an object well-contemplated opens an organ of perception within us” (Goethe); what processes and techniques do curious people use to translate the essence of a phenomenon into art with love, openness and well-crafted poetry, image and research? The month’s research will provide the basis for a short winter term paper explaining the process of delicate empiricism. The student will then create a manual for conducting this process of sensitive  science, supplemented with her poetry and photography into a small, beautifully formatted booklet as a spring quarter project. This ocean study is about body-knowledge and water-knowledge, is about how art can show us where our selves overlap with the phenomena of the world, and how creativity is rooted in and resonates with the world.

Read complete field study proposal here

ABCs and 123s – weekly log and field notes

[catlist tags=o-logs date=yes excerpt=yes excerpt_size=30]

Bachelardian Reverie

[catlist tags=o-bachelard date=yes excerpt=yes excerpt_size=30]

Poetry

[catlist tags=o-poetry excerpt=yes excerpt_size=30]

Poetry Observed

 

Fall Term Paper Abstract: The Bracken Fern

The language of scientific research is increasingly divorced from the poetic experience of observation. Descriptions are often stale and highly specific in a way that doesn’t encompass the entire character of the organism. By practicing Goethean science, one can use science and art to describe specific scientific findings with the subjective experience of being in contact with phenomena. The body emits electromagnetic frequencies from the heart that are constantly in flux with its environment. These waves manifest as emotions: in short, the sensory input from the heart as emotions is important data to use when perceiving phenomena. It is difficult to translate emotions into linear language, which is why poetic language and art can be more effective tools for conveying the sensory input of experience. This paper is about the search for knowledge about the Bracken fern through observation of the plant and observation of the observer as she observes. It strives to use poetic language alongside specific facts to compose a holistic portrait of the bracken.

Read full fall term paper here

 

Winter Term Paper Abstract: Seven Steps Towards a Delicate Empiricism

These seven steps are an attempt to illustrate a process of “delicate empiricism” as a way to conduct creative and scientific investigations. The process is based in the phenomenological experience of the senses paired with imagination, research, and creation that results in discoveries that may be communicated to others through art and science. These seven steps urge the observer to recognize the merits of using both the heart and the mind when exploring the world, and are a way to bring together the inquisitive nature of science with the subjective experience of art. These are the steps used by the student during a month long field study during which she studied the ocean, and are a part of a larger paper that explores the power of art as a means of expressing truths about the sea. Delicate empiricism is a process that illuminates how love can be translated from a phenomenon through the senses into art, which is a new phenomenon in itself. It starts: passion, observation, imagination, conversation, context, and organs of perception. It begins anew in love. 

Read full winter term paper here

Spring Term Booklet: waterbodies

This booklet is a manual to the methods I lived while sensing through art, the ocean, my body and memory during my winter term field study of the sea. The regular type poses the prompts I asked myself; the italicized type is the poetic voice of my experience with the wide, churning, sensual, somatic, deep, horizontal, salty subject of the sea, encompassed in the oceanic whisperings of parenthesis.
This project began with a question: How does the ocean affect the body and the imagination?
(Why does the opening from vertical land to horizontal sea seem to mimic a shift from brain analyzing to belly sensing?
Why does it feel that thoughts turn to substance and churn, settle, spread when in the presence of the sea?
What do artists render in art about the sea? How does art then illuminate ocean-experience in turn?)

This booklet explains some of how and what I learned.

Read waterbodies here