Unique Books

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His roll rock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake fall home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitch-black, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through?
Wiry heath packs, flitches of fern,
And the bead bonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft?
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

This book started as my third Inversnaid book. Unfortunately, I had overworked it and grown frustrated with it. While I was bemoaning this fact to a friend she asked, “But what does IT want to be?”

After a few days of thought my answer was, “It wants to be destroyed.”

So, I decided to obliterate the side I had been writing on and work on the back which is very pretty.  I wet the whole book, picked up some bottles in which I had mixed acrylic paint many months ago and squirted randomly over the whole piece. As it had aged the yellow paint had curdled and the result of my attempted destruction was a new and exciting background that reminded me of the then daily television images of the California fires. In my search for an appropriate text I found another Hopkins poem that fitted perfectly. This palimpsest is the result. You can still pick out bits of Inversnaid in the background under the fiery lettering. This seems to fit the spirit of That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection perfectly. The folds are irregular to create a feeling of landscape when it is standing up on the long edge. It is a difficult text to read regardless of how it is presented. I have approached this with a more oriental sensibility trying to give the meaning of the text rather than just paint beautiful letters.

It is on Arches Text Wove paper on which I did acrylic washes and then lettered with brushes and gouache.

The dimensions are:
Closed H 6.25″ x L 12.25″
Open:    H 6.25″ x L 101″ (approximately)
The box dimensions are: H 7″ x L 13.125″ x D 1″

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

This is my third book in which I have written out this little poem that I wrote in 2009.

I keep coming back to it trying to channel Paul Klee

The mind trembles from the assault of angels;
Running in familiar light it sees the sea,
It remembers the dark subway and the lost fields of childhood,
It remembers the loneliness of first love and the end of a summer:
These are familiar and small.

But the assault of angels is more terrible: angels are invisible,
Angels cast no shadow, and their unpredicted motion
Moves the familiar shadows into light.
Angels cannot burn the fingers: unacknowledged,
They pass unseen. No one will ever know.
Refuse them: they have no claim to charity,
To ignore them offers a key to omniscience.
Angels breed darkness out of light, angels rejoice
In things we hate and fear.

Angels are the launching of a new ship,
Angels offer to inhabit the landscape of your body,
Angels will let you grow as a child grows,
They are your enemy: they will destroy you.

And a time comes when a man is afraid to grow,
A time comes when the house is comfortable and narrow.
A time when the spirit of life contracts.
Angels are at your door: admit them, now.