Mark Roper's Halcyon Essay

My mother had a very strong need to be outside, in the fresh air, using her body. She loved to walk, to swim, to play tennis, to row. It wasn’t a case of her feeling she ought to take exercise, the need ran much deeper: it was a fundamental part of her nature, something independent, solitary, even wild in her, something which had to go its own way, outside.

When she came to visit us in Ireland, she’d often go for a walk if we were out at work, through the wood opposite our house, Gortrush Wood. It’s a conifer wood, at that time about forty years old: the trees were spread well apart, there was room for other kinds of trees to grow in between them. It was a walk we’d grown very fond of.

One day when we got back from work she told us, excitedly, that she had seen a kingfisher on her walk, on a small pool at the edge of the wood. This pool was actually more a long shallow puddle, where rainwater would collect in a hollow between trees. It was brackish, and would all but dry out in the summer. It was a long way from any reasonably sized stream. It had nothing in the way of a bank. It surely couldn’t have contained any fish. For all these reasons I was quite convinced that she must have been mistaken, she couldn’t possibly have seen a kingfisher there.

Over the years that followed, I used to tease her about this, linking it to her general vagueness about the animal kingdom. This was a woman, after all, who had only just discovered that elephants didn’t eat through their trunks. It became a shared joke. We’d send each other cards with kingfishers on, cuttings from newspapers about them. One of us would pretend suddenly to see the bird, in the most unlikely setting. It was a shared joke, but it also became a kind of shared tenderness. Slowly a kingfisher began to come alive, to appear between us. When she came to the first poetry reading of mine that she was able to attend, I saw she was wearing a medallion with a kingfisher on it. It was quite a large medallion, made of pewter, on a long metal chain, quite ostentatious in its way – not the sort of thing she wore normally at all.

A few years after her claimed sighting, the wood was cut, and replanted in the modern way, the trees very close to each other. Now that they’ve grown a bit, it’s impossible to walk there. But, for a few years before the new trees grew, I continued to do so, and one day I realized that every time I approached the pool, I was looking for the kingfisher. I was quite sure my mother hadn’t seen one, sure that in fact she couldn’t have seen one there, but all the same I was expecting to see one. In this way too, the bird had come alive.

At some point, the line “I’ve never seen the kingfisher” came into my head. Poems often start this way for me, a line cropping up, a line with some kind of ring to it, around which other lines might eventually start to cohere. I didn’t know what to do with this line, but it was there, and one day I discovered that the word Kingfisher is linked to the word Halcyon. I knew the phrase Halcyon Days, days of idyllic happiness or prosperity: my dictionary told me that Halcyon came from the Greek word for kingfisher, Alkuon or Halcuon, from Hals meaning sea, and Kuon meaning conceiving. I consulted my Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, where I found Kuon translated as ‘to brood on’. Brewer’s added: “The ancient Sicilians believed that the kingfisher laid its eggs, and incubated them for fourteen days on the surface of the sea, during which period, before the winter solstice, the waves were always unruffled.”

My father had died some 20 years earlier, and my mother had mourned him deeply. Suddenly I began to see a connection between the word Halcyon and her situation. I saw that ‘to brood on’ could mean both to breed, to conceive, but also to think deeply about something, often in a melancholy way. I went on to look up the word in Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, but I couldn’t find it in the Index. Eventually it occurred to me to look it up under ‘A’, where I found Alcyone (incidentally underneath Alcyoneus, meaning Mighty Ass, which I took as a deserved rebuke for my slowness). Graves gives a fuller version of the story:

“Alcyone was the daughter of Aeolus, guardian of the winds, and Aegiale. She married Ceyx of Trachis, son of the Morning Star, and they were so happy in each other’s company that she daringly called herself Hera, and him Zeus. This naturally vexed the Olympian Zeus and Hera, who let a thunderstorm break over the ship in which Ceyx was sailing to consult an oracle, and drowned him. His ghost appeared to Alcyone who, greatly against her will, had stayed behind in Trachis, whereupon distraught with grief, she leapt into the sea. Some pitying god transformed them both into kingfishers.

Now, every winter, the hen-kingfisher carries her dead mate with great wailing to his burial and then, building a closely compacted nest from the thorns of the sea-needle, launches it on the sea, lays her eggs in it, and hatches out her chicks. She does all this in the Halcyon Days – the seven which precede the winter solstice, and the seven which succeed it – while Aeolus forbids his winds to sweep across the waters.”

I had my poem now, about my mother, a woman who loved the sea, whose need to swim in it had been heightened by the loss of her husband, a loss she brooded on. She was still deeply united with him. In the other sense of the word ‘brood’, I had been part, along with my sisters, of her brood. This was the poem:

HALCYON

I’ve never seen the kingfisher
you claim to have witnessed
on the stand of brackish water
at the edge of our wood.

Years I’ve been looking.
Not a sign. Wrong habitat
too: no bank for nesting,
indeed no fish. Face it

there was no bird yet
each time I pass I peer into
that gloom and each time
this comes to mind:

a flash of chestnutsapphire.
A small flame brooding on ooze.
Your words made light.
Your bright idea. You diving

through the long years
of grief to surface here,
halcyon, incorruptible.
And not one bird but a pair.


My mother died last autumn. Around that time, I had seen a deer vanishing into another small wood nearer to our house. This small wood faces Gortrush Wood over a large field. It’s a wood of alder and willow, on wet ground, many of the trees thickly coated with lichen and moss, quite a few fallen. It’s the last patch of wood left now along this stretch of road and it must be something of a refuge, a way station, for wild creatures. The deer had most likely escaped from the large agricultural college, some 2 miles away, where they have a deer farm, but it was still a special experience to witness it crashing into the trees.

I hadn’t seen it again, but early on this year I was walking past the wood, and I realized that I was straining to see it, in just the same way that I had strained for so long to see the kingfisher that my mother couldn’t have seen, in Gortrush Wood. I grinned to myself, thinking that now I would have to repeat this new pattern, looking for the deer every time I passed this spot.

At that exact moment, from the edge of the wood, where a small stream runs under the road, a kingfisher flashed up, swerved left along the road, then veered right, out across the field, heading toward Gortrush Wood where my mother claimed to have seen one so many years before.

It was an extraordinary moment, an extraordinary coincidence. The bird appeared exactly when I had been thinking about my mother and her kingfisher. And of course that made it an encounter with her, with her spirit. And then I realized that she had been right all along, here was the proof of her claim, a kingfisher in nearly the same spot. I felt a huge need to tell her, to share the news, and then I remembered that she was dead. I stood in the middle of the road and told her anyway.

I have since read that kingfishers roam widely in winter. They can be found far away from water inland, they can be found by the sea. Maybe the bird I saw lives around here, maybe it was a visitor. “Only the righteous see the kingfisher” is a saying recorded in Richard Mabey’s Birds Britannica. After unrighteously denying her sighting, I had been given a second chance. Why I was so sure she hadn’t seen one, I don’t know. But I have learnt to try to check my judgement. And I think I understand more deeply now that what we might actually witness is only a tiny fraction of what there is. I see more deeply how our thinking is formed, has always been formed, by the world around us. So much passed between my mother and I through the image of that bird. I wear the punishment for my unrighteousness lightly: condemned, whenever I pass that wood, to be on the lookout for both deer and kingfisher; condemned to try to be open to every possibility.

© 2008 - Mark Roper

Halcyon Redux

People have been looking for ways to buy Mark's poems, and since the response was great to his essay, I am reposting the essay in its entirety for those that missed it, as well as this link to his new book of poems available at Amazon.



You may have already read the essay, but I am reposting it for people that didn't see it the first time around. So many people have responded in emails to Mark’s essay on his poem that I have promised him I would schedule an automatic repost of the essay to occur while I am on the road.

In other words, if his essay is directly above this post, I am driving and driving and driving. If it is not above this post, I am already driving, but expect it within the next 24 hours.

Why? Why not?

Plus, since Mark's new book of poems (with a cover image I helped him create, although they changed my typography) just came out this month, the timing is perfect. You should order Mark’s new collection.

Meet Tim Braun

I haven't been getting much art done because I had to create a simple gratis CSS web site for a friend. His name is Tim Braun and he is a very cool writer.

No, I won't make you a web site.

How Racism Works

What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review? What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said 'I do' to? What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after cheating on her with someone else and she no longer measured up to his standards (after a horrible car accident)?

What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to pain killers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization? What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama were a member of the Keating-5?

What if McCain were a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

What if Barack Obama had an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

(from an email circulating right now - this shouldn't even be a contest, people)

Maya wireframes

I received a question a while back about Maya and what it is like building things in wireframes and then texturing everything. Here are some screen shots of wireframes from the dresser scene:

Whadup wit Tony?

This posting of Tony Orlando is a silly test. Paula Whyman, a Tony Orlando obsessed writer here at VCCA, keeps talking about how many prisoners are accessing her site via the Tony Orlando image on her site. Is it Tony Orlando, or Tony Orlando and Dawn, or the “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” song, or the image of the cover of the Tony Orlando and Dawn album on her site that attracts so many prisoners? And, what is it with inmates at that prison and their infatuation with Tony Orlando? AND, how many times can I type Tony Orlando and Dawn in one paragraph just because I, too, am now infatuated with this whole Tony Orlando and Dawn Google Search phenomenon that Paula has discovered?

Whackiness.

Actually, we should start a contest. Paula and I both use StatCounter to track our sites. Would a seemingly more famous star, such as Angelina Jolie, get more hits than Tony Orlando, or is there a quirky retro infatuation with Tony that would still beat out such current phenoms such as Angelina? What if they were BOTH in the same image in a tacky, sloppy Photoshopped montage? Ooooh… now we might be on to something.

[back dated]

Shuffle = Random?

Alright. Something weird is going on here.

My iPod is set to shuffle and tons of bands. Hundreds of bands have been transferred to it. The have names beginning with every letter in the alphabet.

So, how come so many “M” bands are coming up? My shuffle is stuck on M. That doesn’t seem so random. You name it: M. Ward, Mount Eerie, Mountain Goats, Mugison, Múm, Mice Parade, Microphones and Menomena - I have heard two songs from each of those bands in the last hour, yet I have everything released by A Hawk and a Hacksaw on my iPod, and nothing all day. Ditto for Okkervil River and others.

Is this an example of that handful-of-pennies-dropped-on-a-grid phenomenon?

Wing working...

I really want to attend a workshop with someone like Lee Lanier and learn from him. It is a pain in the ass teaching myself everything, but satisfying when I troubleshoot something and get it to work. This wouldn’t seem like a very big deal to anyone who uses Maya or has taken classes, but it is satisfying to figure out how to make reference objects and deform the original objects so 2D textures don’t swim (create a texture reference object). Killer. Normal textures? No problem. Complex 3D projections? Ugh.

The angel’s wings and body are now ready to come together. I won’t get myself too excited, though, because I am sure there is another hurdle in the distance. There always is with this program.

If you are really curious what I mean, click on the QuickTime Movie link and scrub back and forth, slowly. The wing was made with many separate polygons. See how the projected 2D texture moves with the 3D poly forms? Great to see, for me, even though a seasoned Maya user would be thoroughly UNimpressed.

Maya updates

Ongoing updates of the dresser items


Detail


Creating jars of jam


The pantry, so far


I unintentionally had a button checked in Maya which started rendering crazy colors in the glasses. Neato

Insight issues

A handful of people have asked me what the Insight looks like without the wheel covers. Well...


Driving down the highway, the panel over the right rear tire came loose. This doesn't look all that bad, but it was actually bent all the way around and upside down when it happened. I straightened it before I thought to take a pic.

A few weeks ago, a new rear bumper was put on. There were bolts missing that held the panel on. Coincidence?


All I had with me was a Swiss Army Knife, but it was barely enough to remove the panel and drive to the nearest town where there was a Lowe's. I picked up some various bolts and washers that would fit.


All sparkly, again.

Scarf issues

Sorry - I don't mean to frighten you by posting an image of this woman, but Halloween is fast approaching.



After all of the whining about how much a Dem spends on a haircut, you'd think they could spend $150,000 on Palin's make-up and clothes (true) and she'd at least have the sense to buy the right brands. I kept wondering if this was a Photoshopped job, but I keep being told it is real. Why do people defend this four time college drop out (5 colleges in 5 years - true)?

Clever bastards

Pretty funny, and a clever use of technology to customize the message to each person. But come on people, I've already voted (early voter registration rocks).

Vote early, vote often. :P

Scale

This was the first drawing at the Bemis Center. For scale.

Updates and details

Items on the dresser for the hallway scene of Mark Roper's "Angel" - more items still to show up


Detail of the drawing showing droplets. I might have to tone them down a little.

Laptops for Obama

keep meaning to post this but never think about it...

More with Maya

Back to Mark Roper's poem...


Very unfinished house experiment. Not sure where I am going or what I think.


Some bowls.


Glasses made with Lee Lanier's amazing knowledge.


A bunch of the stuff mashed together for the pantry.

Powell endorses Obama

...and a clear argument for Obama.

Cold & Political

So you are one of the few that think Palin was picked purely on qualifications and say you don't believe the Palin pick was "a cold, political calculation" in order to win people over? What if you heard it from the horse's mouth?

#3, continued

Honest, Mark, I will return to the animation.

I should send Mark an email to explain what's up. For the rest of you, I did spend a little more time on the #3 large drawing (I need a pic of it with someone standing next to it for scale). Much of my time this weekend has been spent working on a web site for Tim Braun so I could get that project out of the way.

Mostly for Meg

It's a long story, but Meg Pennycook loves Oreos and I occasionally send Oreos via the Post to her. When I do, I sometimes include fun stuff (which she never likes as much as actually Oreos, however). I was telling her about how many various versions of Oreo treats there are in the States. Well, Meg, there seems to be another Oreo lover here at VCCA. This is just what is currently in the kitchen here.


It may not taste exactly like an Oreo, but the Pop Tarts sure look like Oreos when you bite into them.


The walnut tree is dropping walnuts at an alarming rate the past few days. You can hear them falling so frequently that you actually want to cover your head as you walk under the trees. I haven't been hit, yet.


Like every other residency I have been to, they like holding open studio nights. Here are some of the artists visiting Julia's studio.

Stereo iPhone

Since the stereo camera has film and I won't have images to show, I decided to show you the fun stereo app on my iPhone. You can take two different pictures and align them on one screen...


...save them on the next screen...


...and view them on the final screen. Of course, this only works if you know how to "look past the screen" to get the middle "third" image. Still, it is fun.

Progress on #3

4' wide x 6' tall

False advertising

Saw this ad on eBay. It animates between before and after 60 minutes of product use. Yeah. In case your monitor is too tiny to read the fine print, it says "Simulated imagery. Results not typical." Duh. I guess you can use "not typical" to mean NEVER. Jerkweeds.

GOP really is EVIL

This is from the CA GOP web site (Sacramento).

How do you vote for this party? Seriously?



Read more

Even Fox News is talking about it.

Blast from the Past

Camera problems

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I am even having camera problems (first the car, then the airport card in my computer, now this...). I thought I would take some stereo images since it would be a pretty straight forward project, but the winding mechanism completely locked up. I had to do some serious work to unlock it, get it out and get it working again. Once I took out the film rewind stud, a tiny ball bearing and spring flew out. I was able to find the ball, but not the spring. Now I have the spool spinning freely, which is a very good thing considering it completely locked up, but the mechanism no longer has anything to hold it in. Until I can get home and fix it (especially since I probably won't be shooting with it, anyway), I have devised a MacGyver solution:




It now works better than it ever has.

...#3

Not sure if it is far enough along for me to be comfortable with it, but I am relatively happy, so, here is a peek at #3. Still in that "painting/rubbing" stage. block it in. work the details out later...

...patience...

Extraordinary Rendition #3

Technically, this would be #2 since I abandoned the original #2 (yep - it is history - gone). However, I will count the replacement to #2 as the new #2, rather than #4 or something else, so I will refer to this new drawing as #3.

That shouldn’t be too confusing.

I would post an image of the new drawing so far, but after the failure of #2 I have developed something of a misapprehension that if I post too early a version of #3, I will doom it to the same fate as #2.

Wait. Maybe it is getting confusing.

Anyway, I like the way #3 is coming (Shit, I hope I didn’t just curse it by admitting that). I don’t want to jinx anything, but maybe it too late at this point? I will wait until it is in a presentable state before I post it.

Why? Because I don’t want to freak myself out again by thinking how bad it looks in an early state. IOW, I want to avoid posting #3 as early in the process as I posted #2, which of course I never did with #1. This way, I will not allow myself to second guess #3 like I did #2, so I can move past that halfway point, like I did with #1, without stumbling like a runner over a hurdle.

what the…? Okay, even I am confused now.

Issues & Presentation

Very little art created over the last two days.

Why?

#1 - I had my first issues with my 2 year old MacBook Pro. The AirPort card is crapping out. I had to drive two hours to an Apple Store in Richmond. The “geniuses” were stumped. Still no wi-fi, so I purchased a longer ethernet cord while I was there.

#2 - Both headlights on my Insight crapped out at the same time. I went and bought two new lamps (even though one looked okay) but it didn’t fix the issue. I still have no working headlights (though I have one working high beam) and the fuses are fine. Argh.

Yesterday was completely shot because of those two issues.

#3 - I was asked to do a presentation at the local college (Sweet Briar) so I have been digitizing old photos and slides and I am going through tons of files of art I haven’t looked at in a long while. I was asked to explain my process when I create art, so instead of it being the usual presentation about the finished work, it will be about how I get from concept to completion. Luckily I used to take images of my art as I worked on it (kind of like I am doing on this blog).

Hopefully it will be interesting, but I have spent hours going through prints, slides and digital files and organizing them. This is partly because I am so disorganized, but also because I haven’t thought about these works or looked at many of the process images in ages … ages, I tell you.

Read Me Max

Happy Belated Birthday, Max! I think I said that to you when I saw you, but I never sent a card. UGH.

While going through all of these old images, I ran across a few images of you, Max. How young you were (both of us):







Man, how time flies.

Happy B-Day, Mom!

Early iPhone pic this morning on my Mom's birthday

Renditions...

Once again, maybe I shouldn't be sharing this while it is in rough shape, but it is starting to come together. In addition, it is almost down to details, at this point, so you likely won't be able to see a lot of the changes after this. Maybe I will post details, too.

Once again:

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Random stuff

I forgot to post this phone pic. We took time away from art to watch the debate, of course.


This is Fella. He loves attention. If you get too close, he will butt you with his head and make you pet him. How can anyone pass up that face without some lovin'?


The Flying Spaghetti Monster looms over us all at VCCA.

New objects for "Angel"

Hallway scene lighting test with a new room (using items from first room)


I guess I am starting with simple objects so I feel like I am making progress. Cans for the pantry scene, based on real labels from the '50s that I collected or created for the Fallout Shelter from a couple years ago.

U.S.A.

Extraordinary Rendition 1 & 2

Extraordinary Rendition #1 [above] was completed earlier this year. This one was shown at the Bemis last Spring. All three of these images will be 4' x 6'


I just started what will hopefully be Extraordinary Rendition #2 (if I don't blow it on this one). Sloppy, nasty looking early version of the new drawing. I can't believe I am sharing it at this stage, but... I hope to get this one and the third one done this month. We'll see.

Apologies for the bad phone pic.


This is a detail of the first stage of the drawing. It might be weird to think that I approach drawings with the mindset of a painter, but I literally brush (using a paint brush) graphite on when I start a drawing, then refine with pencils as I go. I have a painter's approach in particular to large scale drawings. It is just faster that way. Maybe I am impatient or lazy. I don't know.