The Temple

At first we saw very little that was recognizable; or each other. We had been scattered all up and down the beach and there was almost no wreckage to be found. But after two or three days we began to find each other. We gathered into a small group and combed the sand near the high water mark to salvage what we could. There was some luggage and some clothing but not much else. There were four of us altogether and for a long time we did not even speak. It was as if we knew that words no longer mattered; there was just nothing really to say. We walked about in a daze for a week. Hastings fashioned himself a spear and went off in search of something we could eat. I stayed with the others and helped to build a camp. It was just William Tinner and Laurent Papille and myself. We constructed one of those stick-shelters you find sometimes, where kids go to drink. A lean-to of driftwood and flotsam dug into the sand at the base of the high dunes. It was alright during the day but after dark it grew very cold and I had nothing but a skirt and a light jacket. And I had my purse, if you can beleive that. I found it washed up on the beach. Laurent had an overcoat and, after much desperate searching, he also found his briefcase; which he never let it out of his sight. It was like it was filled with money or drugs. He never showed us what he had inside. Tinner was obsessed with his wristwatch. He insisted on adhering to the rituals of time and dates. Hastings had on that ridiculous yellow suit. We all held onto something. I suppose we had to. Everything else was so strange. Like the way the plane just plummeted out of the sky on a clear, moonlit night. No loud bang, no smoke, no warning. We just fell like a stone. And then there was the beach itself. The sand was strange. It was composed of such large grains. It was a beach of small stones and odd things. On the 15th day we found what Hastings called the Temple. He had discovered it on one of his failed hunting excursions, buried there in the sand like some sort of ruin. I'll admit I was drawn to it. We all were. It was oddly familiar-looking and seemed to possess a power over us. We'd often go out to stand beside it. It made us feel safe and less lonely. We never spoke of it back at camp, nor did we ever make the decision to got to it. We'd just go without saying a word. The only time we'd ever really talk is when we were gathered round the Temple. Hastings said it spoke to him. Tinner said it screwed with his watch. Laurent would just stand there and mumble with his eyes closed. He was the first one to lay his hands upon its surface. He said that it felt like it was breathing. I didn't know what it was about it but it wasn't a sound or anything I could feel, not physically. It was more like a shadow of a memory, like a name you can't recall, and in those first weeks all I could do was just stand there and look as if something would make itself known to me if I had enough patience. If I had enough faith...

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Artemis is Dead

Hours and hours of wind and rain. Salt spray and pounding waves, hammering, just hamering against the hull, over and over, the rise and the fall, the rise and fall, all those pre-dawn forays in pursuit of salmon - the fish of courage, the fish that battles its way up into those small streams to mate and lay their eggs in the places they were born. Then they die. The Point Reyes, lodged in a sandbar at Inverness, is dead. Her skeleton is all that remains. She will find fish no more. The great hunter is no longer a threat. Artemis is at rest. A fishing boat is not designed to be a thing of beauty; though often it is the lack of intentional beauty that produces it. The hulk of the Point Reyes is a beautiful object. It is accidental art. Her lines are more utilitarian than graceful, yet there is an elegance to the sweep of her bow and the rake of her standing. She seems to be reclining. She is an old reclining nude. In her exaggerated reflection, it's easy to imagine Noah's ark, with it's tall hull and tiny pilot house. The Point Reyes, though, was a killer, not a savior. It took fish from the sea. It also took a couple fisherman out to make their living when fishing was still something a man could do for one. She was a workhorse and she was well-used. Now she is a curiosity and a subject for soul-stealing photographers, who are also fishers of sorts.  The photographer is always trolling, always luring, always looking for something to catch. Photographers will sometimes sit motionless in one spot for hours and are known to travel great distances for a chance catch something and bring it back. The stillness of this scene belies the true nature its subjects. The sea is chaotic and rough. The boat is anything but static and useless. Yet here she lies - listing, rusting, warping.  And here lies an inlet to the sea, as glassy and still as a pool of hardened resin. The true nature of these things is not pictured here. This photograph is a lie, or at best a half truth. And the truth is that everything rots. Everything comes to a rest and decays. There is an end. There will be a day when we can no longer do that which we were best at. And when that happens, we can only pray that our final resting place is as lovely and fitting as this. 

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Fossil, Fungi & Gingci

What is amazing, other than the fact that life clings to anything, everything, it can - is that it can also announce itself with such vibrancy. Some things magically pull us closer with smell and shape, while others do it with color. This stone, an 'accidental' discovery beneath the canopy of an oak tree, is about the size of a bedroom pillow and, as you can see, is spangled with blooms of celadon lichen. In this case celadon is a color, that sublime shade of pale green that almost seems to glow, even when not in direct light. True Celadon was a type of Korean pottery that varied in color but which was typically lighter and less saturated. Over the centuries, it took on different hues as it was copied in Chinese glazes. The color is known in some Eastern cultures as Gingci and is created by the addiction of iron oxide in the clay or glaze.

The incredible bloom of lichen on this stone adds to its already organic shape to create something that appears to be wholly alive.  It might be a very old tortoise, or a mammoth Echinoderm, crawling slowly across the bottom of a Cambrian sea. The photograph itself offers what appears to be an optical illusion, in that it seems to move, when viewed in full screen at full resolution. It seems to throb. http://twitpic.com/4junu7/full This is a trick of the light and the lens; which is a wide angle and very close to the subject. In this view, the pitted surface of the gray stone is beautifully adorned by the bright, floral blooms of the lichen, like bouquets of green carnations on an old charcoal suit. 

Lichens exist in the harshest of environments, and are capable of long life. Yet they are fragile organisms susceptible to climate change and excess ozone. Delicate canaries in the coalmine of Earth, they are fascinating and ancient. A lichen is a composite organism - a fungus teamed up with an algae. And they have been around for more than 400 million years. The process by which a fungus takes on a photosynthetic partner is called Lichenization, and it is nothing short of miraculous. It boggles the mind to contemplate the machinations and happy accidents of nature. It is even more mind-boggling to contemplate the ignorance and blindness of man, who seems to learn nothing from fossils and fungi.

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Little Effigies

Effigy: {a representation of a person, especially in the form of sculpture or some other three-dimensional form}.  In this case a child's doll. Most likely a female child. Little girls would practice for motherhood with a doll such as this; a doll with wide, ever-open eyes. Its pupils permanently dilated in acid-trip-wonder. It's over-sized hands perpetually reaching for you, me, anybody to grab onto. Little boys didn't have real-world scale effigies to hold, or which begged to be held. Their effigies were much smaller in scale: army men, plastic dinosaurs, G.I. Joes. And they were not to be cuddled, they were to be posed, put into action, thrown, smashed, melted and burned. A smaller effigy is a more distant effigy. A more distant effigy is removed from us as a conceptual being, and what that teaches boys is anything but fatherhood. Not that a vinyl baby-doll was a substitute for a living role model. But dolls such as the one pictured above. for sale at a flea market, were designed to be held closely and with tenderness. Most little girls did not set their dolls on fire or tie them to the end of their kites. Dolls had names and pretty clothes. They were given special privileges. They sat at the dinner table and and took long trips in the car. But they don't age well. An old doll is a creepy doll, and as the hair falls out and the flesh takes on the patina of a street vagrant, they begin to more accurately mirror people - people we'd rather not acknowledge.  A doll is intended to mimic those features in a child that play to our nurturing nature, but there is something very false about them beyond the plastic skin and stiffness. It's trickery stops working at a certain age and the effect must be something akin to what a duck feels upon touching down beside a wooden decoy. Man creates many different kinds of effigies for all sorts of purposes, but none have the impact of those we create for child's play. Those first interactions with little fake people -  the first 'people' we ever fully control, the first 'people' whose fates lie in our hands, form our earliest people dynamics. Girls were given dolls they could hold and have conversations with, boys were given tiny monochromatic men with no discernible features, bearing weapons or equipped to carry them. Both options feel disturbing in hindsight. And maybe that's why dolls like this one are often found in flea markets and garage sales; the army men were all melted years ago.

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