Sight and Sound

“In this fleeting moment, what extravagant respite, as Promethian sunsets blossom blaze and recede from splendor to mystery.

In this fleeting moment, what extravagant respite, as booming surf speaks its mystical passage across the undreamed depths.”

– Raymond Persinger

Crunched between densely built ocean front Laguna Beach property, lies a peaceful slice of real estate called Brown’s Park. The land was donated by Joe Brown after his grandfather’s house was ruined by a severe winter storm. At the end of the narrow yet long walkway there’s a spectacular view of the ocean. The overlook is pointed like the bow of a ship. Raymond Persinger’s poem is etched into his artistic iron sculpted fence at the precipitous edge. Persinger, head of Sculpting at Laguna College of Art &  Design, forged his handiwork in 2002. 

My favorite beach in OC has to be Laguna. Here is a painting on a cement breaker wall left  I am assuming because an artist decided to make art out of discarded construction. The shoreline, tide pools and cliffs of Laguna are like no other and inspire many creative and spiritual types.

No doubt, what we create with tenderness and attention, moves another person to respond to it, often with a rebirth or renewal of their own. Similarly, our need to refine and beautify our surroundings motivates us to transform it.

In essence, whether it be people, places or things – the nurturance and reverence we give, generates new life and depth.  

This morning, I awaken to exude the powerful energy of the sunrise and this evening, I vibrate the subtle hues of the sunset.

THINK ACTION: Journal your thoughts on arts and crafts (or any creative endeavor) you enjoy or would like to participate in. Are there classes or techniques you would like to learn more about?

Is your home a reflection of who you are today? Where and how would you improve your domicile? Is there one small removal, addition or moving of an object in your home you could initiate today?

How do the arts affect you? Do you influence your surroundings or does your dwelling impact your moods? Could it be both? Notice the interplay.

Transformation applies to all forms in the material world.

Artists paint furniture, walls and canvas with pigment. They use techniques such as weathering, distressing and gilding. In fact, designers profit from upcycling old, beat up, drab furniture into spectacular, re-purposed statement pieces.

Just as important, the composer makes the musical note dance to the ear. Gifted vocalists sweeten the air.

And, the wordsmith shapes mere words into an expression, action or emotional truth. Letters are combined into thoughts, impressions and observations. The writer transports the reader via an ethereal parlance.

The artist’s intimate love story with its subject transfers deep into our cells.

Straight out of college, I rented and moved into a huge, pre-war, second story apartment in old town Farmingdale, New York. To get to the lodgings, you walked from Main Street through a narrow alley between two tall, brown bricked buildings. After about fifty feet, to the right, stood an entrance. Once you crossed the bottom floor threshold, your nostrils filled with an acrid smell – more pungent than boiled cabbage – that reeked and permeated the walls. Immediately, were a steep stairwell with slanted, broken linoleum steps reached up to the rooms. A 25 watt, bare light bulb dimly lit the landing.

Inside my walk-up, I was powerless to remove ancient wallpaper or eliminate much else. I was, however, allowed to improve or add to the premises, at my expense.

With this in mind, I stenciled red, orange and yellow flower clusters on the claw foot bathtub to match the design and hues of the wallpaper above the white, wooden chair rail. On the twelve-foot-high, tan walls in the common rooms, I stained the raised paneled, plaster millwork in a mahogany hue.

As there was no closet in the walk-through, I created one by sectioning off a three-foot-deep space between two walls with velvet curtains. The makeshift wardrobe was in a small, windowless antechamber of the east-facing back bedroom.

Meanwhile, in the front rooms, the buildings blocked the western sun from fully reaching inside. Yet, a limited and sufficient amount of sunshine dropped in during the afternoon from narrow, floor to ceiling windows. I suspended spider plants from macramé hangers and set iron shelves against the wood sills to hold a jungle of ferns and impatiens.

In light of living in shared dorms for five years, I was euphoric to have a multi-room place to call my own.

I am here to testify that no matter what you call home – big, small, old or new – you can flourish, entertain and be satisfied with enough ingenuity, inspiration and creativity.

Scattered throughout Beryl Markham’s memoir is a scant number of dialog – so pertinent, so useful and so spare as to be significant. Each conversation is consequential either to give you an inside look into a person’s intentions, motivations or their character flaws – and somehow she manages to give it all a distinct dignity of the human kind. People act regal and arrogant yet with a palpable set of values familiar to all of us. Her dialog moves the story along as they are meant to – but with a precision uncommon to most literature.

Although her view of life seems to be that it is hard work and lonesome, when you read this memoir – it seems effortless. She speaks to the loneliness in all of us, having been abandoned at nearly five by her mother (which she doesn’t write about but I learned later).

She observes universal truths: How fate is seen only after from the living that remain, and only then, can be foreshadowed by so many markers. She comments on poverty, hunting and man’s intrusion that changes native lives and landscapes via “advancements”. She explains how everything has an edge, a limit, yet it’s all a bottomless pit of story, swerves, curves, turns and returns, goodbyes, introductions and moments.

This book was written by a superb master, albeit her one full length book. She makes visible how it was and is and let’s you play moral judge. You are a passenger allowed to linger in her cockpit, in her head, for scene upon scene, layered in a life of linear languidness.

Markham’s writing is like nothing else I have read.

To be able to read Beryl Markham’s memorable book was a feast of words onto itself. She uses analagous metaphors steeped in African legend, jungle truisms, earth bound realities and then she (the first woman bush pilot) takes you to the heights of flight over continents and an ocean.

She adds insight into political craziness. Against the backdrop of land ravaged by man, she almost seems to applaud when nature seeks its revenge and swallows him up whole, spits him out, without caring if he is humble, humiliated, fearful or victorious.

She honors the earth and its atmosphere as to make one solemn; I christen her words as sacred text. She never allows herself to be directly emotional, she unveils herself via events, scenes and other’s responses. She is brave and valiant – a true Murabi – the word for man, no longer boy.

I will read this book again as it is well written and I doubt I will ever find such poetry in today’s literature. I want to study it. It is a feat of brilliance, like her life. No matter what she put her mind to, she did it with Herculean effort, all of her heart and focused brain power. Her instinctive and intuitive, sensitive survival skills and tales of human suffering rolled off her tongue and onto the page in the same breath. You feel as you read her words that your are there with the same leverage, skill and eye witnessing as she writes with.

I have become a better writer because I read Beryl Markham.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham is a book I would recommend to anyone interested in the European pilgrimages to Kenya in the 1920’s and early women aviators. Additionally, if you loved Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (aka,Karen Blixen) or just watched the movie with Meryl and R.Redford. Most of the characters in the movie are in Beryl’s memoir. Although, in Beryl’s case, unlike Isak, she omits her love life and instead zeroes in on her childhood, her flying career and her lyrical description of landscapes.

Every review I read before and after I actually read the book seemed to have the same impression as I did, that her writing is superb. E. Hemingway was jealous after reading her singular memoir.

Her story is a life filled with risk, her writing – keen observations as if from a distance, high above in her beloved solitary, lonely sky. Her grasp of English words, in a flurry of detail, spread in an almost fictional timeline is musical. She narrows in, then out to the relatable human race. Her prose is poetic. She writes of people with a universal stoicism, haughtily English and yet close to the heart.

I urge all adventurers and lovers of words to read it.