7 Days with...Stephen Shaheen
In the mind of a stone carver with a golden tongue
Steve Shaheen is a artist trained in marble carving, belonging to a small club of sculptors who are able to profoundly manipulate stone. He uses his skills to multiple ends, not chained to his craft but using it as a runway for his ideas on Empire, Deep Time, and the intersections between the geological and the living to take flight. He’s also a talented writer. His Journals read better than most people’s published writings. I can attest to him actually writing like this. It’s kind of wild.
Monday, April 8, 2024
Stopped at Phil’s this morning and wandered around the weathered old bones of marble off cuts, funerary blanks and architectural remnants. There was a dirt-stained slab of Tennessee pink with the right length and depth that I need for a commission, but it was short on the width by about four inches. Not a lot of time for window shopping today as we had to push north for the eclipse.
Around 2:30 we stopped on an unkempt hillside above the brick middle school, distant mountains dusted with the last April snow. The air grew progressively weirder. People scattered across the grass were relaxed in form, anxious in content. The light grew anemic; the breeze cooled.
When it happened, it was like turning down a multi-sensory dimmer. The azure sky shifted to indigo, streaks of cirrus crispening against it, the air sinking to nighttime cold, and sound muting as insects and animals and people and cars went silent.
It is an assumption-shattering experience, because it at once dismantles your epistemology of the passage of time as tethered to natural phenomena (the sky should grow dark over thirty minutes, not three seconds), and your taking for granted this unflinching fortress above, which suddenly become a portal to magic and mysticism and endless children’s days lost in tales sat under violet skies.
It was like dying, like plunging backward into an abyss of oblivion and looking far up at the circular wire of light of the surface, behind this manhole covering, the world of color and warmth and birdsong and language; here, instead, is the underworld, where everything is turned upside down, even our reason. It’s the underworld, it’s insanity, it’s a dark veiled vault of enigma with a puncture wound to reality, to the comfort of blindingly bright illusions suffered under worship of Apollo.
The eclipse is like sex, it’s like losing yourself suddenly and inexplicably. It’s a black hole of meaning; it’s a question unanswered. It’s loss, it’s absence. Eclisse, ekleipsis. The drain Persephone was sucked down.
It’s a DeChirico painting.
And if all of this sounds irrational, it is because such is the eclipse. And how perfect that it should be the biggest communal ritual we have.
By contrast, the slog back to Connecticut felt especially mundane. The tediousness of traffic, the long, monochrome river of taillights: a purgatory that seemed requisite passage to return to the world.
Tuesday, April 7, 2024
Having coffee on the back deck, in the sunlight, late morning, houseflies and wasps alighting on the weathered, lichenous railing. The flies cluster, like scattered seeds, many immobile, as if recharging in the sun. I am reminded of a stanza in Nanao Sakaki’s Future Knows:
At a department store in Kyoto
One of my friends bought a beetle
For his son, seven-years-old. A few hours later
The boy brought his dead bug
To a hardware store, asking “Change battery, please?”
A wasp explores my coffee mug then probes the folds of lichen. He brushes his antenna with his forearm and raises his thorax, appearing to nestle in: a brief repose from the exigencies of survival.
“The arytenoid physical movements are subtle but can be felt.” Reading about the cartilage involved in singing.
Today felt shambling and awkward, no sense of time, day turning to night marked only by the pecking of birds against the suet feeders. A few pabulum digital chores, walking the dog in the sun across the rain-soaked fields. The ticks are bad this year: I intercepted two meandering up my bare legs. Still feeling ambivalent about the risks of potentially exposing Scilla to tick-borne disease, versus chronically flooding her system with pesticidal compounds that basically toxify her blood to parasites. How is it possible that we paid two billion dollars to one hundred and thirty thousand scientists to split an atom and kill masses of people, and we still haven’t figured this out?
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Day 2 after the Eclipse. Low slung clouds like silver-blue mackerel slide behind the hills. The air is mild. Scilla gambols among the matted, winter-dried marsh grasses below the willow tree, undoubtedly picking up ticks. Now she chases after a vulture, for acres, and I am grateful for every day here. I told myself over and over again in Brooklyn that someday I would wake up to birdsong, and although it occurs regrettably early, this has come to pass.
I went to Mark’s studio today. It felt good to get some work down outside. There’s not a lot of usable indoor space there, and it’s been a long winter. Mark is rough shaping abstract forms in granite using massive, 16” cutting discs and an oxygen torch, so dexterity isn’t a priority, but my fingers only serve me when it’s above the mid-40’s.
I spent the first half hour working on an old axe I’ve been rehabilitating. I picked it up in a flea market, chipped and pitted and loose on its handle. It was ostensibly to split firewood, and didn’t need to win any beauty competitions, yet I was pained to see it rusted and neglected. My obsessiveness ran amok and compelled me to resurface the crusty steel head, grind flat the mushroomed poll and darken the whole thing again with gun bluing.
As with sculpture, I’m not patient enough to do everything by hand if there’s a power tool that can assist without overly compromising the result. I do think that most forms of mechanical mediation between the hand and the material sacrifice degrees of nuance and consideration that accompany a more attenuated, deliberate realization process. But I’m OK with a less-than-perfect axe
I sanded some battle scars out of the hickory handle, then soaked it with raw linseed oil before turning to a couple of welded steel armatures destined for two, hollow marble tables I’m making. I have to prep these cages for placement under the stone, where they will receive pinned legs. I spent my remaining time hand-pointing texture into one of these, a peach-hued Portuguese marble, mapping my chisel-marks in real time as if alla prima painting - but a little scarier. You only get one, irreversible shot at this. If experience confers anything, it’s trusting my gut on these things. And it comes.
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Some days just fly by, and it’s hard to account for the time. How does that happen? Life felt seventy-five percent less hectic at age twenty-three. Feeding the dog, brushing the teeth, cleaning the house, sending the texts, sending the emails, having the coffee, maybe eating, maybe getting some movement? Finding time to create while awash in a river of quotidian demands feels like half the battle these days.
I find myself blaming the dog often. Scilla is an easy scapedoggo: she’s a highly intelligent and energetic mix of working breeds, with a basketful of sass. Scilla has been known to start chasing chipmunks on camping trips around 5:45 am, and will still be rolling her ball into the campfire light at midnight.
The winter sun shot through the black trees
I told myself it was all something in her
But as we drove I knew it was something in me
- Highway 29, Bruce Springsteen
It’s so easy to blame the dog, the toothbrushing, the fatigue, the emails, the hunger. There are a million ways we sabotage ourselves, planting cartoon banana peels between us and what Gary Snyder calls “the real work:” what is to be done.
And by the way, would my love for Scilla not be reason enough - as Rilke recommends - to change my life?
Is there anything more intuitively familiar yet epistemologically alien than a dog? When a dog looks into your eyes with intelligence, her cognition is at once intimately relatable and forever unknowable. Her sensory experiences are largely beyond my ken. What would it be like to smell twice as well, let alone fifty thousand times? There is no door of speech we can open between the walls of our perceptions.
But then how does language size up to other modes of communication? We think speech grants us greater insight into another human than, say, a dog. Yet obfuscation - deliberate and not - always contaminates human speech, when there are no veils cloaking the body language of a dog. We operate under presumptions of trust when interpreting the words of another person, and they must pass the filters of our subjective psyches, but with dogs there is no need for translation and inference. Human speech is more nuanced, yet less direct than limbic communication. And while we have no idea what a dog is truly thinking, we just suppose we do with humans.
I go into the bathroom to start nighttime rituals, and through the open windows hear the plangent, choral peeps of spring frogs in the darkness, out in the marsh where deer are grazing on the first tender cordgrasses, and I realize the obscenity of my earbuds in this moment and rip them out.
Friday, April 12, 2024
A seagull drifts across the misty, sputtering sky that smothers the New Jersey Turnpike this morning. I drive past my favorite spot, the painfully ugly and strangely beautiful jumble of oil tanks and refinery towers in Elizabeth, reputedly the cancer capital of New Jersey. This stretch always makes me think of Spingsteen’s wretched end to the ironic hymn, Born in the USA, narrated by a war veteran:
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go
I think he’s referencing Rahway State Prison, which is a few miles from the petroleum plants and part of this greater wasteland. I grew up in the wake of the generation devastated by Vietnam. My father’s generation. My father who, after his number was called up and his army-issue duffel packed, learned the week before deployment that the war had ended. Some of my friends’ fathers were not so lucky. I remember them having anger issues. But they were alive.
On my way to see my family, including my father, who squandered his healthy, war-spared body, avoiding necessary hernia and hip surgeries and who must now sleep in a chair downstairs and use a walker to get around. He’s difficult. But he’s my father, and I don’t know how much more time we have.
I’ll have to leave the dog on the porch, because when he uses the walker she thinks he’s a quadruped and wants to herd him.
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Cold water surfing is not for the lazy. Even though it’s April, it’s still a winter ocean: temps in the 40’s, the tenebrous waters humorless and brooding. Everything feels heavier. I went out for the first time in weeks, between two jetties near a massive dredging pipe planted like a rusted stent in the beach. At first I was surprised to see no one else there enjoying the enticing waves, but then I remembered a friend’s recent commentary that winter surfing is, in fact, “exotic.”
What is it like to surf in the winter?
You step into the ocean, you are waist deep in water. Wrapped in 5mm neoprene, save for an ovoid of exposed flesh from lower lip to eyebrows. The offshore wind pushes you forward, but there is an impulse to turn back. The ocean is a graphite mass cut by rows of sizzling white lines rushing toward shore, and beyond, ominous walls obscuring the horizon.
You make your best estimate of the intervals, wait for a break, jump on your board, and begin swimming. The paddle out can range from a pleasant warmup to a near-drowning, cardio nightmare. You are almost always confronted by waves and whitewater, under which you must “duck dive” with your board. You continue this way, over and under, over and under, gasping until you mercifully pass the impact zone, arriving at the lineup, the correct nexus of longitude and latitude - determined by physics and ascertained largely by experience - which allows you to optimally attempt to catch a wave. Here you collect yourself.
I think what I appreciate most about surfing is its raw honesty. It’s just you and a small flotation device, helpless in a massive wilderness, interacting with natural forces, with energy that has been generated hundreds of miles away by wind and, traveling toward land, manifests itself in water the way a “hump” moves through a blanket snapped while flat. There are infinite contingencies that come to bear on any given moment you find yourself in the sea during a swell event. The direction of the wave energy, its size, the period between its peaks, the direction and strength of the wind, the tide, your physical ability, your capacity to read the ocean, the size and shape of your board, the dimensions and configuration of fins you’re using, your mood, the crowds, and on and on. Every day is different, every wave is different. It is such a dynamic experience I hesitate to call it a “sport.” It is more like a rite, with every session an unpredictable audience with the gods.
Riding a wave is indescribable, but winter wipeouts are stark. A wave is approaching. You start to paddle, and are lifted up its face. You pump your arms to keep up, the bottom of the wave drops out below you, droplets blown from the lip pelt your face like hail. You commit, and drop in. As you rise to your feet, you realize there is actually no wave to greet your board; it is too steep. You fall through the air, trying to twist away from landing on the fiberglass. Then dark, cold gravitational disorder laced with panic, tumbling blind, arms overhead bracing to be pile-driven into the bottom, you don’t touch bottom, you flap your inky arms toward what you think is up, open eyes, slightly lighter upward, swim up through freezing chaotic swarms of bubbles hoping head will break surface, water shifting from olive to amber, mouth now out into mucous-hued foam and then, finally, air.
You grab hold of your board. The ocean smells floral in the wake of its detonation. You notice a tiny, aphid-looking creature shiny against your black glove, alive through all of this. It bunches like an inchworm. You climb back on your board. You are upright again, panting. The sea-aphid is gone. The water is a muddy taupe over which diasporas of bubbles form archipelagos and disperse. You now notice the icy bright blue overcast sky of the horizon, with cotton ball clouds floating like small prayers. Gulls wheel. There is no leviathan approaching. For now.
Sunday, April 14, 2024
Warmed up on the bass this morning for my 11am lesson. What is sexier than the upright bass, except for maybe a dobro? The bass is jazz, it’s classical, it’s bossanova and bluegrass. Bass is taken for granted, in the background, and that upon which all else depends, the skeletal system without which the viscera of melody would flop to the ground. The upright bass is analog; electric bass is like a physical controller for mediated sounds. With acoustic bass, there are endless customizations based on variables such as posture, finger pressure, arm force, your body’s proximity and contact with the instrument, its age, size, woods used, design and construction, type of strings, action and setup. The wood bass is a sensitive but finicky lover, reacting badly to weather that is either too humid or too dry. You can feel its resonance through your own body, and making sounds emerge is a haptic immersion, as there are no frets, and notes are located by muscle memory, with a precision that needs to be within millimeters to sound right. You literally feel your way through a song; to play double bass at a high level, you quite literally need to become one with your instrument.
A goal that feels light years away. After a humbling lesson, I take the dog down to the beach. The sea is relaxed this morning. This briny smell of slick jetty rocks is synonymous with home. Black silhouettes of fishermen flicker against the sparking water. I grew up in the ocean. Does that explain my draw to it? Or is it the inexorable pull of the sea back into itself? Our blood is strikingly similar to marine water in salinity and ions. The sea is both alien and, profoundly, home.
Spindrift gathers in the roiling border between mare e terra, and I’m thinking how I prefer Italian terms of the sea. Not foam, but schiuma. La schiuma rolls and falls over itself, like some non-Newtonian substance, unable to merge with the beach, gliding back over the wet cheek of sand to collect and spread and shapeshift as it mediates the intercourse of sea and land.
I look at Scilla, crouched nearby and unperturbed by the milky froth approaching her. I think I will always be deciphering the confluence of her breeds, which have produced a very quirky canine. She stares at me, the ball between us. Her focus is terrifying. She has forced me out of Lorenzo’s throne into Giuliano’s: the life of action over that of contemplation. Her little bat ears flutter in the salty air.
I find it hard to journal. I stand up to retrieve the ball, with background awareness that I am fulfilling her collie’s genetic expectation that her stare compel me to move. I throw the ball into the surf so she won’t chew sand and erode her teeth. She lunges for it, a wave breaks around her. Pulling her sopping body from the undertow like a calf emerging from the suction of her mother, Scilla blossoms from the sea as if she never belonged to land. She is named aptly: Scilla, ShÄ“’-lÉ™, the Italian version of Skylla, sea creature who is maiden above and monstrous dog below.
I find an enormous driftwood stump, at least two feet across and maybe fifty pounds, the grains wrapping over sea-tumbled curves in unevenly eroded, parallel rows. It already looks like a chair. I lug it haltingly across long stretches of sand back to the car
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