The Same Thing

The Same Thing is part of the series All I Wish to Own.

The Same Thing 38X15 Pastel and pencil on paper

The title The Same Thing is a line from Bob Dylan's Boots of Spanish Leather:

Oh, how can, how can you ask me again?
It only brings me sorrow
The same thing I would want today
I would want again tomorrow

The Same Thing depicts a fantastic scene from the allegory The Rime of the Ancient Mariner where the Mariner is so enchanted by seeing swirling water snakes in the ocean that his heart fills with love and the infamous albatross falls from his neck. In spite of this, the Mariner's destiny is eternal penance. There is also a reference to Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium where the narrator, a singer, is eternally separated from nature.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
......
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmèd water burnt alway
A still and awful red.

Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

Sailing to Byzantium
W.B. Yeats
.......
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

​The Same Thing captures colors of a fantastic sea battle.  The image that inspired my thinking about the sea snakes is called Sea Storm by the artist Michael Lang.