The Local Yarn 
My little sister is in third grade and she had to make an instrument for music class. We wanted to do something that was small and unique. So I came up with taking sand paper and putting it on two tins. Then as a double I put rice in it to be a shaker. So in the end we had a shaker/scraper.
— Stephanie
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
The world was once so big, the sun so large in a large sky; the son of David wrote “The dead know not any thing” at a time when the wide, unbounded, untamed world was all we could see and the only universe we knew, and to be dead was to be removed from everything. It was only after a much later revelation that a man who was not a king would write “We are confident, and prefer to be absent from the body and present with God.”
In the age since, the world shrank further and further, until near the end we occupied it with our bodies but hardly lived in it at all, and the hills and oceans became only pictures in our minds. Finally, at the very end, it shriveled completely and disappeared in a fizzle, like a match going out. What a surprise, then, that the last work was not to lead us into a brand new world, but to make this one big again.
Jessica and I just returned from our honeymoon, and from a trip to Indiana. Life together is still in its formative stages. We’re still learning what to buy at the grocery store, how to breathe and sleep together at night. Not that any of it is difficult; the hardest adjustment has probably been how to be apart during the day, now that I actually have to go back to my day job. But it is all very new. We love that.
We have a blending of artistic identities to manage as well, as pretentious as that may sound. We both love art and literature and music, and creativity, and we enjoy expressing it. So there will be some changes around here as the site begins to reflect the new jointness-of-residence. I lucked out in that we both have the same first initial, so the site’s address will be the same, but everything else is wonderfully up for grabs. We get to pick a new name and probably a new header doodle. You’ll start seeing paintings as well as reading words.
The “call of the Sea” – the utterly fixating draw of the oceans to certain kinds of people – is a special case of its own. It seems to be the extreme end of the effect we are talking about here: darker, larger and more fearsome, in proportion to the size of the body of water. This tallies well with the effects of the sea decribed in Moby Dick above, and in other stories. At its best, it is pictured in the call of the seagulls to Legolas in Lord of the Rings; at its worst, it is exemplified in the myth of the sirens and some mermaids, who call to sailors, captivate them, and drown them. In all instances the effect is powerful and heavy-handed, though usually limited to a select small group of people. Indeed, the Call of the Sea is hardly ever depicted without also drawing the contrast between those who are fatally attracted to it and those upon whom it has no effect whatsoever.
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
Size of the water: Ratty in Wind in the Willows presents a very clear illustration of Water the Transcendent Lens in varying strengths. All his life he has lived by the River, (a relatively small body of water) and whenever he describes his lifestyle on its shores, it revolves around recurring themes of meditation, “aimless” puttering, and simple dreamy pleasures. The River is Ratty’s muse, and when she speaks he has no attention to spare for anything commonplace.
The Rat was sitting on the river bank, singing a little song. He had just composed it himself, so he was very taken up with it, and would not pay proper attention to Mole or anything else.
In a small body of water the muse is perhaps harmless; in a larger one the effect is often more sinister. When the traveling Water Rat regales him with tales of the Sea, Ratty, who never before wanted to hear a word about the Wide World, is utterly entranced and taken out of himself as though answering a call:
“Where are you off to, Ratty?” asked Mole in great surprise, grasping him by the arm.
“Going south with the rest of them,” murmured the Rat in a dreamy monotone, never looking at him. “Seawards first, and then on shipboard, and so to the shores that are calling me!”
…Poor Ratty did his best, by degrees, to explain things; but how could he put into cold words what had mostly been suggestion? How recall, for another’s benefit, the haunting sea voices that had sung to him, how reproduce the magic of the Seafarer’s hundred reminisces?
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
The first chapter of Moby Dick is one of the clearest examples of waters’s effect on us:
“Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
Bodies of water — lakes, streams, oceans — are frequently connected, in literature and experience, with moodiness or meditation. Characters near the sea, or near rivers, are found to be lost in reveries, daydreaming, thinking up poetry, or otherwise listening to their muses. The water is connected in some way with a lifting-up of our attentions away from the visible.
What do you see? — Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries…Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
— Moby Dick, Chapter I: Loomings
Attached here are examples of this peculiar connection.
Today I read this quote, which reminded me of the thought I was trying to express here:
“He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men whose sins are forgiven them.”
— G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
Two of the best examples of this “reader submission” model that I know of are Edward Tufte’s Ask ET Notebooks (written about at length in his article Moderating Internet Forums ) and the user notes on PHP’s online reference.
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
Most posts on this site now accept submissions for additional notes. If something in a post jogs your memory — reminds you, perhaps, of a related experience or something in a book which sheds further light on the subject, we invite you to make the connection for other readers by submitting a note for permanent publication alongside the original post.
That said, if you do get a comment published here, you should add it to your resume.
Keep in mind, you are not simply “commenting” on the original, but actually being invited to try adding to it. Be authorial; be original, be clear. There is no limit on length as long as your writing justifies it. If we see promise in a submission that nonetheless contains non-trivial shortcomings, we may contact you with our concerns and work with you to shape the thing up.
Note that we don’t display the time/date of published comments (although they do appear in order of publication), so readers will not know what year you wrote unless you need to mention it. Avoid statements whose relevance will expire with time – think of writing for a limited-edition book, not a fish-wrap newspaper.
Simple statements of opinion do not have much chance (even if they are nice opinions!). Obvious marketing and incivilities will be shot on sight.
