Where Are You Now, Chris Bucklow?
Sewanee, 2008

I love the way my friend Chris Bucklow thinks. The following arrived this morning by email from him, at about the same time I was editing the above image for an updated version of the ‘I Have Gone‘ folio. Synchronicity.

My own head is full of watery imagery too. Today a string of images force
themselves into my mind… a little series of ptgs of Titian’s battle with
Michelangelo… Titian showing the master of bounded form how to become porous and
open.

But my wicked side wants to set it in a fictitious return visit of Michelangelo to see
Titian in Venice (sometime after Titian’s actual 1546 visit to see M. in Rome)… And
have Titian, Prospero-like, whip up a storm in the Venetian lagoon and drown the
poor bugger.  …. then I can paint the silent Venetian claws scuttling
across the ‘Venetian ooze’ (Blake’s term) of the lagoon bottom to cut M’s
skin from his hide! Such a painting would have to be called ‘Full Fathom
Five’ wouldn’t it! (with a nod to another more modern geezer who
dematerialized form and made the body porous).

I think Chris is referring to Shakespeare’s lines for Ariel’s song in the Tempest

…

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.

But, amazingly (Chris at it again) it is also the title for a rippling complex song by the Stone Roses.