Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea, The

In poet Ronald Johnston’s great epic “Ark,” in the first book “Foundations,” the poem “Beam 29” has this passage: “The seed is disseminated at the gated mosaic a hundred feet/below, above/long windrows of motion/connecting dilated arches undergoing transamplification:/ ‘seen in the water so clear as christiall’/(prairie tremblante)” which breaks into musical notation that, “presto,” becomes a design of spatial tilts: This is where the film began; and I carried a xerox of the still unpublished ARC 50 through 66 all that trip with Marilyn and Anton around Vancouver Island. As I wrote him, “The pun ‘out on a limn’ kept ringing through my mind as I caught the hairs of side-light off ephemera of objects tangent to Marilyn’s childhood: She grew up in Victoria; and there I was in her childhood backyard …”: and then there was The Sea – not as counter-balance but as hidden generator of it all, of The World to be discovered by the/any child … as poet Charles Olson has it: “Vast earth rejoices,/ deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all things,/ everything issues from the one, the soul is led from drunkenness/to dryness, the sleeper lights up from the dead,/ the man awake lights up from the sleeping” (Maximus, from “Dogtown – I”).