About

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Boats are like Shamans – they move between worlds

Being of neither world

they glide over the taut membranes that separate

The Opposites

 

Throughout time and disparate cultures it is the boat

that has provided mytho-religious passage across the

dark straits that

separate the living from the dead

 

Being gently rocked by water attends one’s beginning

and one’s end

the wake stirring the membrane edges of what was 

and what is to be

 

People ask, ”The rib boat, how did it come to you? “

 

In the beginning, all creation starts, I believe, with a small still point      

Infinitely small

enormous with potential

Then, a blink of an eye, and one can only grope half-

blind

along the red shift ripples left by that

expanding energy

 

For me, ripples from Eternal Return lead back to a

scene

half horror, half fairytale…

 

Hair as black as ravens

lips as red as blood

skin as white as snow

 

In a January, twenty years ago, I was taken to the

necropolis pit in a wilderness park

There, out of the crystalline snow, arched great racks of

ribs — red

with ragged flags of flesh drooping between the white of

bone

Black trees ringed the pit

tall and massed with ravens as thick on the limbs

as leaves

 

It is from this pit

That the boat’s thirteen pair of moose ribs come

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A ripple moves across the black water of a small lake

It is

a perfect circle

set in the center of a dense forest

so the wind rarely makes the dark water sparkle

The lake is one

of only two of its kind in the world

 

There is no shore

 

It is a cylinder of frigid water, tinged with tannin, eighty

feet deep

The lake bottom is so cold the eons of leaves that have

fallen in its water do not rot  Without decay or the

stirring of wind, the water contains so little oxygen that

it will not support life

 

It is my father’s small lake – and the long slim boat his

Inuit kayak

And it is here, in the lake’s warmer surface water, I

learn to swim

I am allowed to flash around in the thin skin boat

with the painted double paddle, as long as I trail behind

a black inner tube tied to me by

a long rope

 

My father says that if I drown he can pull up my body

by this rope so it will not spoil the lake for others

He calls it a lifeline

 

To me, at seven years, this perfect black circle is a deep,

darkly abiding, unblinking eye looking back

at God

Some days I try to do the same, lying flat in the kayak

all but my head enshrouded by its canopy

eyes open wide

while far below, deep down in the dark water

my lifeline

drifts

 

This is where the kayak part of the boat may have come

from

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I place the hard black circle to my eye socket, open my

eye, and look into gray mist

 

My artworks deal with science and spirituality, and so I

have been granted access to one of many labs working

worldwide on

The Human Genome Project

 

I begin turning the knob on the massive electron

microscope

and see nothing but grey mist – and then

I begin to fall

through the rabbit hole of smaller and smaller

past wisps of darker gray

 

down, down…

 

coming up to a piece of black screen

to the screen

through a hole in the screen

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     down, down…

 

and then, very deep down

there it is--

A tiny black rope of

DNA

 

The DNA sequencing gels

in the black bier

floating between the ribs of the boat

come from the kindness of a geneticist 

working on the Genome Project

 

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I have heard of a Japanese religious ritual that involves

the cutting down of a mature plum tree just before it is

about to blossom

It is then taken to a shrine

and venerated 

for opening 

into full blossom even as 

it dies

It is the coming together of opposites

 

Creation and Death

 

 

Geneticists have not found a gene

for the spirit that infused Mozart’s dying body as he

wrote

The Requiem

 

Though, by strange coincidence, every set of DNA has

the

Exact number of lines needed to write music

 

The music on the DNA sequencing gels

on the bottom of the boat’s black bier

is a copy of The Requiem score as the dying Mozart

wrote it:

staffs, adagio, treble clefs . . . and notes

row upon row of pits and black pools

all with lifelines attached

 

The Requiem is a great work of art

And great works of art, I believe

come from the far side of what I will call The River

the collective unconscious

the world soul

There is no time, no gender, nor any one culture in this

River

It flows with the distillate of what it is to be human

It is not always beautiful

but

it is always powerful

 

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I have wondered if art and creativity are a balance to

the great weight that is the knowing of our own

mortality

If so

spirit levels are needed

 

And if all things come into the world bringing

the balance of their opposite, is it then the same boat

now returning from its

dark crossing

moving like a loom’s shuttle

between opposite shores

that weaves with its recurring rippled wave

a matrix for Art?

 

What I do know is that all Art is the language the soul

speaks

 

 

It speaks louder than death

and

has always been

humanity’s lifeline

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But, where the source for the spirit that moves the boat

comes from – that I do not know

 

To that spirit

I bow my head  

 

            

                                                        Stephanie Rayner   2015

 

 

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