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art
November 2009 
Joyce images
Posted on Jul 8th, 2009
by 
Laura
Laura
Roger Commiskey's James Joyce themed art is beautiful.
Here's a link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/artroger/sets/72157620230603255/
Here's a link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/artroger/sets/72157620230603255/
Access: Public
A cryptic maze is only the coiled straight line of a daily life. Through its spins and twists we share an unwritten map to our adventurer heart.
Yes. Been walking a labyrinth a lot lately. I love how you put this. I like how the loops and switchbacks of a labyrinth can teach patience and presence. Adventurer heart. yeah, that's right. Joyce would like that I think.
You're an astute student of James Joyce. I'd love to listen to your teacher lectures on James Joyce as an adventurer of the heart's memory. Joyce kept the unwritten street maps of his beloved city secure in the mazy depths of his literature.I'm sure that you're a very gifted teacher. I see that you walk through the labyrinthine social puzzle with a quiet, hunter's gait.
I wish I could teach Joyce, but my eighth graders might get up and leave for good. I would get in trouble then. Thank you. hunter? not sure. but it's an interesting thought.
Darling friend, You seemed skeptical of my description of your playful ,contemplative gait as a hunter's pace. Let me try to elucidate further with a poem of mine to a hunter friend. His own love of solitude recoiled in unexpected spins coming into animal presence.
A Hunter's Eye
A hunter stands alone
in valley and stream
he hears far below
a farmer's plow
and the city's throng
He gazes
on predator and prey
in titanic dance
Archaic echoes
a silent hymn
he hears again
in the forest
His soul,once free,
in dream,
rises again,
by Rosicrucian magic.
The thing that comes to mind for me, reading this, is how there is kind of a split between the hunter and the farmer. this is a pretty big deal historically, that shift. do you know much about it, and was this intentional? I know it's a pretty intellectual take on things but it's what came to mind.
I know that there was a long historical development of encroaching sedentary societies ( farming-based) on nomadic (hunter-based) societies that is continuing in our own age. Wilfred Thesiger,”The Life Of My Choice” is a memoir of his own experiences in the Sudan, Ethiopia, southern Iraq and the Saudi peninsula. Some believe even the Cain-Abel story is a mythic parable as history of this titanic struggle between nomadic and sedentary civilizations. Georgio Santillana and Hertha von Dechen's “Hamlet's Mill” detail the intriguing story of the pre-Greco-Roman forms of science and history.Jamake Highwater in Primal Mind also investigates the mythic origins of the nomadic alternative scientific world view.
I hadn't heard of the Thesiger book. It sounds interesting, for sure. and yeah, it makes sense that the Cain/Abel story reflects that divide. I haven't read that Highwater book. This is a pretty good book, but it's been awhile since I read it. http://www.rianeeisler.com/chalice.htm
Even though the the hunter/gather way of life and the farmer way of life clashed and diverged in the past and still do in some areas of our world, I like to think we can embody both ways. I feel the conflict in myself, somedays stronger than others, as I still at my desk. And then after long, rambling walks in the mountains or other wilderness places, I feel soothed and happy to go to my warm bed or to stay for a few days cultivating the vegetables growing in the yard. I am a hybrid hunter/gatherer/farmer/city girl and it is good to be all those things at different times, though I always want to have the light, stealthy step and the keen, alert eyes, ears, nose of a hunter. :-)
and ray – I love this!!! “A cryptic maze is only the coiled straight line of a daily life. Through its spins and twists we share an unwritten map to our adventurer heart.”