Iris

Iris, Messenger of the Gods:

scandalously beautiful.  By Auguste Rodin (whose art my eyes consume ravenously, as if they could eat it up, swallow it whole).  

 

I had a lot to say about Iris when I was 23.  You can read about it in Publications.

 

Setting roots in the virtual world.

I’m slowly making links from the publications page to the essays themselves.  you’re welcome to read!

Invocation.

I want to open with text. Like any serious writer, I’ve decided to borrow from someone who is immensely better with words than I am.

John Vaillant describes a Haida death ceremony:

The following afternoon, as the flames rise around the sealed black box, the people continue to sing. For a long time the box seems to sit in the fire as if it were comfortable there, but in time some cracks begin to show. As the box becomes fully engaged, a bag is passed, and one by one the people break out of the circle to sprinkle tobacco on the flames and reveal their private thoughts to the man they loved and admired. As if on cue, a bald eagle alights in the top of a nearby spruce, and for a moment she and the carved eagle atop the adjacent pole neatly bracket the chief’s house. But nothing here is new to her, and after a time she leans forward and, with a few downward thrusts of heavy wings as broad as a man is tall, she finds a draft, locks into it, and glides away. Shortly afterward, a strange thing happens: all at once, the top and sides of the box spontaneously lift off and fall to the side. It is hard to explain this in any structural or thermodynamic way, but it happens suddenly and, for a brief moment, the mask stares out from the pit, engulfed and yet untouched by the fire. The geisha-white face shines around the scarlet lips as flames burst from the eyes, mouth and nostrils. When, at last, the heat becomes too much and the finely carved cheeks split beneath each eye, they do so simultaneously, along the grain, and it looks to some as if the mask is weeping molten tears. What is the carver feeling at this moment, before the chin and forehead give way and his labours crumble into the glowing embers? What is happening in the hearts and bellies of Skilay’s children and the sombre chief as the dim shadow of a grizzly bear holding an empty canoe clocks slowly across the ground?

-from The Golden Spruce

 

(photo of a Haida or Tlingit clan house design)

welcome.