And then we went to Oak Island

And stayed at the end of the beach, where I walked out at low tide on a spit of sand, sand deposited by the ACE dredger Merrit to retard beach erosion, several days, and sat on the sand and drew, read, thought.

And Jami walked out with me there once, beautiful, smiling, and we felt the water lap around our ankles.

Every year we take a photo of ourselves at the beach. Here we are, smiling and happy. Into our fourth year together - content. Each moment precious.

Joy floods my soul.

Last month we went to Kiawah

Last month we went to Kiawah- Jami, Gaby, Jennifer, Grace and I. While there I built a sand figure, reclining in the sand. Our niece, Grace, helped me. It was a wonderful reclining figure with a raised knee. I was only able to get so far, though, before the sea rose and engulfed it.

That night I thought of all the wonderful possibilities sculpting with sand afforded. I pictured a monumental figure, like the sphinx, that I would craft. It would establish its presence on the beach and inhabit the space around it. But I learned, on my attempt the next day, that sand doesn't support slender images to any height and it doesn't cantilever well.

Waves upon waves fold into the shore and tether out

I did a watercolor of a wave for a friend before leaving for the beach two weeks ago. Can it have been two weeks? I painted it before leaving for the beach. While at the beach I did no watercolors. I was too busy looking at the waves, studying the waves, how they broke and foamed around my ankles; how they swelled and lifted me, carrying me away; how they broke near the horizon and reformed behind me; how the water piled up higher and higher, then tumbled down, as if downhill toward the shore.
How long has this been going on? The waves lap a billion years around the dinosaurs over the mountains and under them, roiling into the fissures left by the continental plates. The waves keep time, ticking against the sand.
As I bounced around on the swells off the shore one afternoon, amazed by how gentle the ocean was that day, I pondered my own ephemerality and the emphemerality of human civilization. We've barely made a scratch; even should global warming or holocaust doom the planet for habitation - the planet will go on. Our blip: one minute killing a mastadon with a stick, the next second programming a computer chip: vanished without a trace. What an odd event we are in the universe. What an odd event I am in the the universe: I or anyone of us: that that in a billion years of existence, across vast reaches of space, in all probability we're a conscious blip - our secrets, our antipathies and sympathies, our struggles with change and emotional maturity- occur in too brief an allotment.
I was bobbing out there, watching the waves pile up and a shrimp boat maneuver, and I considered how short a time I have: that 48 years have already passed through my hands and, for all my grasping, I'm holding only the present.
If I live as old as uncle Frank, 99, in a nursing home but with his mind entire, that is only 51 years more. It seems like a long time but my experience is that it is not enough - or maybe just enough.
I paint and create with more intensity now a days. I see a therapist so that I don't waste time in emotional cul de sacs and build my cognitive and emotional skills so that I'm not waylaid by unproductive mental obstacles. I try to eat better and get more exercise. I love Jami with all my heart has. I think of how I can be the best friend to my friends.
The curious thing to me is time. I used to think that everything I'd ever experienced was stored perfectly in my head, like my brain was a high performance video recorder. Now I realize that I've forgotten many things, misinterpreted a host of things, and concluded that my mind more likely functions as a compost pile. A dusty attic that an unknown person cleans out from time to time. What is left behind resembles a Kurt Schwitters collage: a bit of fabric, a photo, a stub. Perhaps that's why I like artists who deal is fragments: Joseph Cornell, Schwitters, Rauschenberg, Salle. My mind takes a dadist approach to the past.
To the question: What happened back there? Whether "back there" was 14th century bce Crete, 6th century bce Jerusalem, or 2nd century ce Rome - or even 1900 Butts County Georgia; can be added the question: What's happening right now? What is this? What is important right now and how do I discern where to go. As to questions about the future - they are not helpful: What will I do? How will this turn out? It's impossible to know, and these questions get in the way of understanding and living in the present.
Living in the present is pretty much the content of Israel's wisdom literature. When the writer of the pastoral epistles admonishes contentment as great gain, (s)he's echoing that literature as well as Stoic thought: that we should be content with what we need and what we have - not in what we don't need or don't have. That the measure of Godliness in us, is that rest in what God has provided. Goodbye consumerism. Don't keep us with the Joneses, instead say goodbye to them and wish them luck. Focus on where you are and what matters.
Genealogy is a distraction too. I've bent over the microfilm reader, scanning newspapers and census rolls, burning out my eyes, trying to make sense out of my family in the 19th century and early 20th. Mostly I've come away surprised at how lynching is treated as a spectacle, attended with picnics and civic pride - and the belief that at least one of my ancestors emerged out of think air. I know that if I went back in time, I would not be at home there. Life is not back there. It is important to understand the past, but with this: that we hold it up to interpretation; we cannot see them as they saw themselves and we cannot read our desires and beliefs back into their lives.
As I paddled out among the swells, always making sure my feet could touch the bottom, I was content.

Life on the high seas

First off, we had a wonderful week. We spent time together and with Jami's mother, Gaby, her sister, Jennifer, and our niece, Grace. We ate a lot of food, possibly going over our weight watchers total allowance of points - for the week, but still within our allowance for the month. Just one day in the sun and my belly was horribly burned. I mostly wore a shirt the whole rest of the week. But the beach is a wonderful place, perhaps the only place, in America where you can wear just shorts and be socially acceptable. I felt like a kid again, barefoot, coursing over the dunes and into the waves, whistling the Sailor's Hornpipe (the Popeye theme) with variations in minor and modal keys and in odd syncopations of rhythm, keeping my eye eye out for the Kraken. Especially the notorious Kraken Jack, who'd entered in a kraken time, and might be mistaken for a kraken the pavement. A few tumbles in the surf, the mild surf of Kiawah, and I was Kraken up. Breakers, rollers, tumblers, crashing, sliding, sucking, swelling, slapping, lapping, pulling, pushing, left me in waters wracked, laced with foam, green and sparkling, jagged and eddying, but cool under the hot sun.
Of the ten beers I brought, I consumed all but two. The best beer was a kolsch. But I enjoyed an assortment of IPAs and ales.
Among the books I brought I really enjoyed reading Rabelais. I read him standing in the surf and sitting under an umbrella. The five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel are satirical classics without parallel. I wrote earlier in the year about reading Bakhtin's Rabelais and his World, about Bakhtin's take on carnival and laughter and the grotesque: how these practices heal and subvert. Out in the surf, I read Rabelais in pure enjoyment: his lists, the fantastic adventures, the humor (scatological and sexual), all amid the roar and race of the foaming breakers.
I wound up bringing 42 books to the beach and managed to touch on 20 of them in some fashion.
I drew some but was unable to do any water colors. I spent some time trying to get my remaining .35 mm faber-castell TG1-S technical pen to work: the nib and the central needle and weight were misaligned and ink wasn't flowing through the nib. Months before I'd dropped the pen on my studio floor. I finally broke the pen, the needle becoming dislocated from the weight. I have to order these pens from Germany now, and two should be on their way to me. One day, I will have to change pen brands or go over to a different kind of pen. I don't know what that day will be like. Sad and expectant at once.
Again I read Barth, this time CD IV.2. After being burned the first day, I determined to expose only one square inch of my body to sunlight at a time (as witnessed above).
The best part was being at the beach with the most beautiful woman in the world, smiling and laughing.

beach photos

Last year's beach trip was wonderful. This year, we're at new place on Kiawah, but still with Jami's mom and sister and our niece. I'm still getting used to being an uncle, but it's great. How could I have lived so much of my life without a niece?

Hey Beautiful

Jami, thankfully, loves puns. She may aver otherwise, but, as I was telling someone today, eating blue cheese burgers with bacon at the Brick Store, Michael McLaughlin, I think, who I was telling, describing our cats, which Jami had named, of which two, Thelma and Louise, refer to a movie, which Michael found hilarious, not the movie, but the naming of the cats, and two, Catalina and Cleocatra, both "cat" puns, that it would seem that she protests too vociferously about my puns, when she entertains the habit on her own and nurtures her own wordplay.
[a 92 word sentence: hold the applause, a tour de force of syntax, a taxing of syntactical tacticianation; a grammar phone home about] She had a pun for me tonight on the phone, which I can't recall right now, but I'm sure that she remembers. What I did come up with was this idea that in the Old Testament, ancient Israel, olden Palestine, that huge mobs would form on the seventh day, causing no end of interference with human intercourse, and these mobs would prowl the country side, sightseeing as it were, but causing societal breakdowns; all this because of these wandering groups on the seventh day, and so these so called "sabbath-tours" had to be stopped.
Look at that smile up there. That is the most beautiful smile in the world. And she's bringing that smile here this Friday.

The near end

Our vacation had begun on Kiawah, where there are placid waves gently lapping the shore, like a kitten hovering over its milk. During five days there and four days at Oak Island, the ocean cuddled around our ankles and hugged us about the waist, rocking us like infants serene in bassinet. But the last three days of our excursion the ocean displayed its fickle nature and turned on us, Poseidon sending great loads of churning foam shell cracking against the sand caked bluffs of the shore. The wind wailed and blew sand in our hair, building up in our pores. The face of the water occluded and the inhabitants of the beach were shrouded in haze. Heat, wind, sand, salt, wrack, jetsam, haze: all joined together. I sat upon the shore in these days, reading Kierkegaard in an effort to come to terms with nature's changes. All too soon I retreated back to the beach house where I water colored.

No writing , just images

Home from the sea

Above is a photo of the most beautiful woman in the world, reading on the beach at Oak Island; below is a picture of the roundest ordination candidate in the PCUSA. While Jami is in Durham, settling down, I remain here in Atlanta, preparing for the exam committee and beginning my chaplain residency. I sure do miss her. I love her terribly. Not that I'm terrible but that her absence is an awful thing.
I would write more, but I have a sermon to write.

Traveling Marcies

In the above drawing I consider that more women should smoke pipes. Cigarettes are too ordinary, and while cigars have a shock value, they are disturbingly phallic. A pipe is a reversal of the Ward Cleaver trope: The pipe contains notions of relaxation and thoughtfulness, albeit reserved for Ward after he comes through the door in his "Honey I'm home!" domestic bravado - taking control of the castle once again, after spending a day as a middle executive eunuch. I suppose that I'm talking about the pipe pictured above. Corn cob pipes would reverse the Tom Sawyer trope for instance; Meerschaum pipes would reverse the Sherlock Holmes trope. The effect of these reversals is at least twofold: the pipe moment is demystified; the element of play is introduced - and play in these senses: the sense of carnival mask and the sense of the sign loosening, becoming pliable.
I will miss the mighty phallic symbol that looms over the Agnes Scott campus. As I walked around the track, and Jami ran, I was always conscious of some fetishized remnant of human origins hovering over us - I kept expecting a witch doctor to walk out the door or to encounter a shaman performing arcane rites with powdered herbs.


I'll be back on August 15th. Joe's picking me up the evening of August 14th at MARTA and we're going for a drink at Twain's. I don't say that I'll be back on the 14th because it will be late, almost ten, when I get back. But any intrepid soul is invited to join us. Jami will be back in Durham and will begin work on the 15th as Duke Divinity's Director of Development. Couples do this living in two cities thing - and now we've joined their ranks.
For those praying: you could pray for us about that; for us making career transitions and geographic transitions; for my meeting with the examination committee on the 16th; and my beginning a CPE residency at Atlanta Medical Center on the 20th.
Today, this morning, finally we're heading out.
We're both glad we didn't leave yesterday: too many things to tidy up, and I have this sinus congestion. I'm feeling better this morning. Jami's feeling better. The car's loaded with belongings for her to settle in in Durham. I think that there is room for my suitcase and computer bag.
This evening we'll be dipping our toes into the Atlantic (or else first thing tomorrow). If I find a hotspot I'll be able to post some more.
Years ago I attempted to change the typical prayer for "traveling mercies" which seemed to me too much like "travailing marcies" to something more thoughtful like "perigrinating providence" or "itinerant loving kindness" - but my idea never caught on.

Still making our way out of Decatur and onto the Beach

Last year I brought 32 books to the beach, vital things like Pound's Cantos, my Greek New Testament, Finnegan's Wake, and Portnoy's Complaint. Jami took great delight in counting them and proclaiming to her friends in the beach house, "my fiance' has brought 32 books to the beach." And I can only wonder, what's wrong with the world where a simple man such as myself can't drag along 32 books to browse through during a seven day sojourn at the beach? This year I said things would be different: I would only bring five or so, less than ten, no more than 20, but not 32 books. Not that I'm ashamed of bringing such a number of books to the beach: books like David Markson's Reader's Block and This is not a Novel: books of a fine avant guard sensibility. Books are fuel for the intellectual furnace. A lot of steam power is needed at the beach because the furnace is forging ahead, full steam, against the ocean, the ocean as symbol of unconscious desire and archetypal burbling. That is: the ocean is not just a body of water influenced by tides and having variable salinity; the ocean is a repository of longing and weltschmerz and schadenfreude, and heroics and courage: the Aran Isles, men and the sea, Old Spice, Moby Dick and the devious cruising Rachel. I can't just face the ocean alone, flailing at its waves like Cuchulain: it's the siren's song (name that tune), terror incogneato, terra firma and terra recota (the cheese of a new world). 32 books may not be enough.

Keeping Track

The track at Agnes Scott, in all its pristine glory, with only a couple souls following its course. I am amazed at how many different greens there are in the world. Jami runs and I mostly walk, but sometimes I heave my body with its 50 surplus pounds over part of the oval. It feels good, especially along the shady part.
For seven years I lived in New Mexico where this green leafyness is an alien occurrence (among other alien things). Whenever I see places this lush I enjoy them in a new way. Not that New Mexico doesn't have charm. It's very quiet there at night and you can see all the stars. Even after 100 degree days, the nights are very cool. I remember once in Athens 20 years ago, it was 85 degrees at night. The heat was trapped in the humid air.
Agnes Scott is where Jami and I saw Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves last Fall. McElwee is a documentary film maker who teaches film at MIT. The first film I saw of his was Sherman's March - a film about romance in the South during a time of thermonuclear threat. Bright Leaves is about his family's involvement in the tobacco business. His great grand father was a competitor of the Duke family. I think about this film more now that we're heading into tobacco country (or terbaccky as they say there).
This is our last week together here in Decatur. This Saturday we're driving to South Carolina and then to North Carolina. People will be here to see after the cats and the realtor will show the house. But Jami will stay up at Durham, beginning as Director of Development at Duke Divinity and I'll come back here to begin my chaplain residency at Atlanta Medical Center.

No Place like Heimat

Yes,I went on a bit of a rant (a rantlit) about the quorum and what an inconvenience it is; I was a bit sarcastic about members motivations for effecting this deficit; and I impugned their character: a full scale ad hominem attack. In the South we call that an add hominy attack.

Above is a photo of the house Lurilene was born in and lived in until recently. It replaced one of those houses with the columns, the moonlight and the magnolia, after it burned down ca 1917. This house is still there, on land that the family had lived on since 1867. Of course, now it's surrounded by a subdivision: hundreds of cookie cutter houses resembling monopoly pieces stacked on sidewalkless winding streets, each in yards with spindly trees that might produce shade in 15 years or so.

The house we're leaving now, here in Oakhurst, is not quite that storied, but for us, it is the house we were married in, the house we spent our first months together in, and the first house Jami bought. Now we say farewell to our modest 1100 sq ft domicile. Hopefully it will sell to a person or couple who wants to live here and fix it up further. We'd like to think it's not just another tear-down, like those that are already dotting Decatur and Atlanta.

Tonight we ate sushi at Nikemotos, and as we left, we looked up at the Atlanta skyline and remarked how this view won't occur in Durham. I said that 20 years ago this view wasn't here either. When I was a child, the blue domed Polaris restaurant was the most significant building on the Atlanta skyline. Now, when you're riding into town on MARTA you can see the Polaris, the Hyatt, and it's surrounded by other buildings. When I was a child, growing up in the country, I had classmates who would go into town. They would proudly recount their experiences: they rode the Pink Pig at Riches at Christmas and they ate at the Polaris. They is really a little girl named Tammy, God knows what happened to her - but I remember her as being the queen of elementary school. She had sung on an album with her church choir - now I am wondering, "what did happen to her?" By high school I think she was still around, but we never heard from her. I guess you've got to be careful not to peak in elementary school. You've also got to be careful not to peak in high school. It's also good if you can avoid peaking in college and grad school. Actually it's best if you can still be working toward your best years when you're in your 50s and 60s. I hope that I'm still swinging at 90. I believe that Neill Young's "better to burn out than to fade away" is a false dilemma and that we need neither burn out or fade away. Perhaps it's possible to be the best we can be at any given moment.

Now it's back to Durham. But first the Beach.

The Mysteries of the Deep

Last August we went to the beach on Oak Island, southward from Wilmington, NC. The top photograph is the view from where our rental beach house was. We'll be there again this August, but the pier was to be torn down. Will a local effort have saved the pier? Will the pier, through some local effort, have been preserved, allowed to stand against the tenditiousness of development, which supplies its own argument: no parcel of land that could be converted into money producing space can be allowed to stand idle - every square inch of humanely habitable land has to belch out dollars in a constant stream or there's no justification for it.
We enjoy the beach and right now, with a month to go before vacation, we're ready to hit the sand and dive into the waves. This year we've two solid weeks at the beach: one week in South Carolina and the next week in North Carolina.
At the end of those two weeks, Jami begins her new job at Duke Divinity. It's official now. Their offer letter arrived in the mail. Of course the way posts are dated, this post will appear off a day from that. That is I suspect that this post will be dated for Wednesday, even though I will probably finish writing it early Friday morning. Things interfere with writing: painting, sermon writing, reading for the sermon, thinking about the sermon, rewriting the sermon, eating lunch, shopping, replacing the dishwasher hose. But now I can write. Rain has pelted down on Decatur since 8 PM. I find the rhythm of rainfall to be conducive to creativity and meditation. Tonight was the first good rain we've had in over a month.
At the beach it will rain at least one day, maybe two. Last year it rained and Tony and Leanne braved the treacherous wind and surf to retrieve our beach umbrellas.
Last year I brought 32 books to the beach. Among them were Pound's Cantos and Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. This year I am thinking about Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Jung's Mysterium Conjuntionis. I will try to keep the total of books under 20. It will be difficult. I want to do more water color this year. And this year I will try to do some blogging, even as others blog from that location.
I brought a bunch of DVDs last year because the place we rent has a giant TV. The house gets Turner Classic Movies so I'll keep the number of movies down. I'll try to hold the total down to five. I have to keep my total baggage down because I'll be flying from Durham back to Atlanta. My CPE at Atlanta Medical Center begins on August 20. Jami and I will do the long distance thing for a few months as I arrange a transfer to a CPE program in Durham or Chapel Hill.
In the bottom photo I'm on a small charter craft with about 30 other people fishing 20 some miles off shore. Tim, Tony, Leanne and I went fishing last summer. This year I'm staying on shore. I've never experienced sea sickness before.
During our honeymoon, walking out to the pier on the Thames for a boat that would take us to the Tate Modern form the Tate Pre-modern, the lapping of the waves brought back the beginning of the whole sea sick wooziness that I'd experienced last summer. Jami felt it too but didn't want to say. We took other means to the Tate Modern. We loved the Modern. It's on the south bank in an old power plant. They had a great surrealist exhibit up. A large David Smith retrospective was displayed. I've never seen so much of his work up close and it blew me away. One of the concerns of modernism is attention to the spirituality of form in itself through attention to the form and material of work in process - without recourse to overt subject matter: that is the subject matter of painting is painting and of sculpture sculpture. Smith exemplifies this. Looking at his work in this retrospective, I could see how he'd progressed, how his process changed to meet new personal challenges, and finally how he'd mastered the materials and created a vocabulary of shape and handling that brought about a spiritual experience. That is: the sculpture created a space that I entered, and in that space the sculpture changed that space as I was in it and changed the way that I was in it. I think this is what my teachers meant by the presence of a piece. They used the word presence like most people would us the word illusion to describe premodern painting or sculpture. The presence of a piece can not be conveyed by a slide or photo representation.
A lot of work doesn't have presence - or I should say, we're not taught to experience presence. The lure of mimesis is that we're taught to search for mimetic illusion - but illusion fails to represent: illusion betrays itself as not the thing. This is the subject matter of Magritte's C'est ne pais une pipe. When we cease looking for mimesis and its false comforts we can enter into the presence of a piece - a piece is more like nature in that that's the way we enter nature (although mimesis is attempted in nature now as well in certain kinds of theme parks, think Maggie Valley or Pigeon Forge. Or consider that now we look at the Grand Canyon but look only for its resemblance, its mimetic appeal, to an idea we have of Grand Canyoness - we are now trained not to see its presence).
We can experience presence in terms of scale. Scale is the relationship between the size of the parts of a piece to the size. That is: it's possible to have a small but large scale piece - as well as a large but small scale piece. When a piece is really large it acquires the characteristic of monumentality. Monumentality is a large scale but with the absence of any kind of ratio between small and large. The monumental, because it is often minimal, becomes the small part of the surrounding space - and this is what makes it monumental - like Richard Serras tilted pieces of wielded steel plate - there is no small piece to large piece ration; there is only the fact of these large slabs. What these slabs do is energize the space so that the whole area is brought into the artwork's field. Or what these slabs do is make you the smallest part of the ratio - and they bring you into the field of the artwork. This is what Smith's later work does.
Last year we three brought in a modest haul. We got our 13 pieces of fish back to the house and Jami broiled them with some lemon and garlic - I think. It was the best fish I'd ever had. 23 miles out, the bottom feeders are fair game. You cast out 100 ft of line and wait for your baited hook to bump into the wide open mouth of whatever these fish were - I can't remember the name, although a young girl on board caught a Spanish Mackeral - far from home. It was a beautiful fish, all dark and smooth, silvery and fierce. It had a presence.

And Then I saw

And then I saw two people walking along a beach: a man and a woman. They were wearing shorts and over-sized t-shirts. On one t-shirt was an image of a heavenly banquet and on the other t-shirt was an image of a great beast. As they walked along the beach the man was trying to explain the balk rule and was doing so badly that he was confusing himself. Around them children played in the surf: frisbees, surf boards, beach balls, kites all bounded from one body to another, filling the air. Dogs romped up and down the wet sand, large ones with lots of hair, while smaller dogs were on leashes yipping at the surf tickling their paws. Under large beach umbrellas sat men and women reading books and drinking beer. Some were sleeping, emulating the color of lobsters - perhaps for a pageant later that evening. Radios blared, but all sound was engulfed by the sound of the waves crashing and the wind blowing.
I went back toward the beach house. I showered off my sand caked feet and my sunscreen irritated eyes. How hot my head was. I went inside the house. It was dark and cool and I became aware that the TV was on. On the couch was a half-finished New York Times crossword from Sunday. I could not remember what Wilde might have said in the Literary Review. I thought that I would just grab a Corona with some lemon and then head back out to the beach. I remembered that I hadn't come to the beach to stay inside all day. As I looked back out toward the ocean I saw a fishing boat, a charter, and I remembered a picture of my grandfather, standing with a catch of Snapper, eyes glistening with life, on Daytona Beach in 1956. Fish would be good. I pushed the lemon into the Corona and took my first swig. Happy I walked back across the wooden walkway and onto the hot sand. Over head flew a large white kite with an image I couldn't make out.

I don't want to have to create a blog

As you can see there are no pictutres here. I just wanted to respond to a photo in a friend's blog, but already this whole process has become labor intensive. What should have taken only a few seconds has now telescoped into a quarter hour diversion. And that's not "diversion" in the good productive sense: that sense of a pleasant afternoon spent wandering among books in an old library or hiking through woods filled with springtime blossoms. This is a diversion in the sense of a long torturous detour on unpaved roads of an indeterminent length.