Douglas Mercer
November 30 2024
Continued from Crow (Part Five)
Had I not made my decision time would have made it for me. So much time was elapsing that the prospect of going back became ever more impossible. With so much time on my hands (I was in effect puttering by now even as my more wild claims became ever more outlandish, at least from the perspective or reality) I began to speculate in my private notebooks, of how on the ocean there was such a pervasive spirituality and the horizons seem infinite and that relative to that I and my alleged problems seemed rather small; I also had time to read for the first time, and in what others might call the amateurish or dilettante pursuit of creative literature; I first tried to make sense of Relativity, which was itself a book that attempted to explicate the theory for the layman; I became obsessed with the idea that beyond the flux of what I was seeing was the only thing immutable, a set of laws, created by a mysterious creator, and that one must let the rest of the world go to nick in order to discover them and live accordingly.
Old nature takes a heavy
Toll on the unwary, weak and sick
No buoys or beacons here
No lighthouses to show the way
The proteins roll in the thunderclap
And the lightening flash
Is a direct and immutable law
It seldom strikes blindly
But destroys everything ill-conceived
When films of prejudice
Wash from eyes
Never blur your vision
To trudge the ways of
Compromising man
Nature is the only law, a deep and impersonal law, and it is hard and cold but opens itself to those who live along it ways. I could see it all so clearly and with so much time on my hands time was making the decisions, it was showing me that there was no going back now, and that I had burned my boats. I also learned about truth, that in the social world truth was not a silver bullet, far from it, in society the truth was perennially the beggar at every ball; but that in a world of perspectives the truth was not a perspective, and that in cosmic terms truth was in fact a sliver bullet; everything else being just an opinion. As for the future I was meant to say still in the present and whatever bridges were ahead of me I would burn them too as I crossed them. I see in my Book Of Truth that I wrote “sighs heard”—perhaps to the skeptical it will be seen that this was only wireless interference and that so desperate for contact was I and with so little to stimulate my imagination that I was inflating everything I was perceiving into events of cosmic significance, but this will be just a blurred vision of those who have truck with the compromised ways of man, that is a perspective.
The rigging sighs a sigh
Of cosmic sorrow
Waves sweep away my sorrow
It occurred to me (amateur poet that I always was) that poetry was funny language, a kind of wavelength that picked up hidden messages in a garbled way and then transmitted them to the people; all words were like that, funny or odd, and were just a way of slowly bringing the hidden into the light. At this point I was “off Brazil” and the phrase “off Brazil” is notorious for meaning basically anywhere at all or perhaps in some versions maybe even plain nowhere. In fact when I thought of where I was I saw the sea and I saw my sights; and it occurred to me that neither one nor the other could give me the answer. I had my books of course. In one was a densely plotted and profusely populated fiction and in one a cold recitation of facts. Was I here or there? Was it either here or there? Had I thought so hard about my pretended positions that I could not tell the difference? Had silent radio stations been feeding me funny language? Had illusions taken charge of me and become reality in my mind? It will be easy enough to make such conjectures from the easy chair of one’s mind in the future; but cosmic sorrows tell a different tale and one that in the future will not be conjecture. Look mesmerized out on the sea long enough you will know and when you see it you will see that just one look is all it takes.
For long period of time little or nothing happened. Equal footing, mermaids stop, and that was about it. I was zig sagging and back and forthing or toing and foring in circles and biding my time; waiting in my alcove or corner of the sea while my fellow contestants perambulated the globe. But this was precious time to me, I could feel in my soul things being plotted or hatched that when I made it back to England might make a fine novel of ideas and just might make my name; a book on which I could cut my teeth or make my bones. But would such a thing be all that different from a confabulated course plotted around the world? Is the life of creation not just one big funny game? But as the time wore on I sought to go out into the empty ocean lest I be spotted by some stray passerby, then the game, such as it was, might be up; I saw now that all I needed to do was expend time, not cover distance; indeed time had become my space, and it was it alone that I traveled though. I did, however, have a badly damaged boat to nurse. On Boxing Day I opened up one my starboard floats to inspect the split skin I had noticed days (was it days?) before; one of its internal wooden frames had come undone; I found yet another split where the glass fiber met the double plywood. The boat was literally being ripped apart from beneath me and I of course with some satisfaction recorded it scrupulously in a now forgotten log; and for a moment I smiled and seemed to be justified in all of the apocalyptic fury I had at my boat builders; but either way I was now lashed to sinking frame, which is a common enough occurrence in what we call life.
I was still in a form of what you might call redacted or retarded communication with the world. On January 15 1969 I wrote this and then I sent it four days later to Hallsworth:
100 South East Gough. 1086 Generator Sealed transmission when possible especially 80 East 140 West.
This of course was a very precise location which is what the man of facts was begging for; but of course it was a very exact spot in a very fictional universe; it was also a clear warning that all messages were soon to cease; it was also a dragging of various red herrings across my radio trail, by asking coastal stations in the future to listen to me from where I ought to have been. I also sent one to Mr. Best in the ever more laconic language of the sea about such things as frame smashed, no typist foxed, soon decode confirm, skin split, ill found boat, clauses unconditional, and the inevitable by then some days in hand, as if I were a god flicking images from a screen, for one thing you learn in my situation is that in a trice further leaps of the imagination can easily send you 300 miles across; but the idea that kept coming to me most was the old truism that silence was golden (olden really!) and that there was not a silence quite so deafening or defining as radio silence. The transmitter, in other words, had been retired.
It was during this period of the voyage that I became fascinated by birds. I would draw and describe each one carefully in my books. You might say that I needed a kind of natural companionship at this point but this was more than natural history to me at this point. Birds are aerial messengers from the skies and the connection between words and birds was not lost on me. If I say so myself my long descriptions of them were funny without being silly, exact without being pedantic, and with extraordinary vivid sympathy, and contained none of the nearly inevitable pastiche of former writers. I suppose this attention to detail shows how important they had become to me.
He did not keen on the water but I had to suppose that he might swim. It was pure white below. Variegated light grey above. A dark “V” on the wings, swallow tail, long bill, the whole elegantly finished with small almost unnoticeable black markings on the side of the head behind the eyes.
The birds flew, you see, and when it call seemed clear they went ahead and disappeared.
Now that I am sequestered (or quarantined you might say!) on the wide Sargasso Sea from time to time when I idle I look back at some of the things I have written: not all of it is totally clear but one jotting makes me smile. I wrote: Last night lying on the deck in peace watching the white moon I was thinking about my……” The next word was indistinct in my at times illegible hand and could have been either fate, or fortune, or father. They all mean the same thing and if I have learned one thing in the days since it is that you just have to write them down word for word (or bird for bird!) for all words mean the same thing and any one is as good as any other.
***
But my poetic wanderings could not distract him from the fact that I had entered into a trap, one which it would take all of my patience, cunning, and ingenuity to extricate myself from. For as it always sank into me: I was not where I was supposed to be. Back home my now complete radio silence began to take its natural toll. People begged for news. You see the transmitter was failing, and I became obsessed with the repeated the phrase: I have heard nothing, I have heard nothing. Later as they try to make sense of what happened (I am on the record now that they shall fail) commenters might say in elegy that sailing and living were similar. That one starts out on a long journey that one thinks will never end, and that you start off on this journey unprepared. That you have triumphs and disasters, but what you learn most of all is that the mistakes that you make stand forever. There is no evading that but suddenly you learn that what is done is done, and this realization bring its own kind of peace. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.
Then came a thunderclap. It was announced to me that I was going to win. You see outside of our minds the wide world goes on dreaming its dreams and it lives its drama of dramas. I was getting messages but not giving them out and the ones that were coming in now were startling to the bone. Of course I had been giving out my ambiguous radio messages (on frequencies not heard by man) and though to me I was heading down a dark tunnel into the cosmic mind to the earth bound I was a knockabout sailor making great time and headway. One racer had finished and he would win the first in prize for first finished; but it is elapsed time that is always prized and the wild Frenchman (given to odd flights of poetic fancy like myself) has abruptly sailed off for further Tahiti---escaping the game of I supposed. Then the last competitor, spurred on by my amazing feats, tried to spur himself on and on—sunk—or abandoned ship I am not sure. Had I sunk his chances? Had my reported positions made him take unnecessary (literally!) risks. Of course, but one pays one’s money even as one takes one chances. Now there was increased pressure on me to perform, at least that is what the world thought, the increased pressure was of another sort. I could no longer slip into the queue unobtrusively; now everything would be checked, And if I knew my man the Nemesis Chichester would be on it like a hawk or an Evil Stepmother demanding a thoroughly rational accounting (he want receipts). If fate has twists and turns it also has trap doors and this was certainly one. But to tell you the truth it only confirmed in me what I was going to do anyway, most likely. This just made it certain. One might return to England or be off Brazil or make a mad dash to Tahiti, or to the hinterlands of Hyperborea, or the wilds of Katmandu, or trek to Patagonia. But there is a better place on this lovely blue planet we now call home to hide away in and I was about to wildly stumble into it on a wildly calm and fierce day. One could easily see this as a nesting or recursive series of ironies within doubling ironies; for when one says things plain it will nearly always seem that way for there are always overlapping frames and until the frame is blown away: for just as my dream was about to materialize I was in ruins, the scene of victory would be utter defeat, and the millions of those cheering would turn into a vengeful jury, that is the very engine of my triumph would be the cause of my downfall. I think the glib Greeks used to call that something like fate, that man is complicit in his woes, that some mortal stain (Shakespeare called it the dram of evil) would spread like a black spot before one like a fatal dagger of demise. But character is not fate, and I drew an entirely different lesson: that one must be careful what one wishes for for one is going to get it.
And so to be fair there was now a binary: travel home to laurels and accolades which would turn to dust; or death by my own hand by misadventure.
Is there a third option?
Most certainly.
There always is, I know it from personal experience.
***
The wide Sargasso Sea lies near what they call the Bermuda Triangle. They say that when Columbus came near it he experienced haywire compasses, strange lights, and flames falling into the sea; and sailors who arrived on the island were unnerved by the calls of cahow birds and the sounds of wild pigs from the interior.
The Sargasso Sea is a body of water in the mid-Atlantic known in legend and in truth for its windless days and eerily calm waters. A boat on this water can be stranded motionless on it placid surface which is ringed by seaweed everywhere. They say that the water there is of an exceptional blue clarity and transparency and one can see two hundred feet down. It is to this silently uncanny spot on our lovely blue earth that I decided on making my lazy day getaway and to take my final test, having sold all of my fortune’s many hostages.
I began to write, write what later would surely be called metaphysical speculation and delusions. That is I took out the log book and began to write what I myself (in my own right) called simply Philosophy.
The Sargasso Sea is a region in the Atlantic Ocean bounded by four currents forming an ocean gyre. Unlike all other regions called seas it has no land boundaries. It is distinguished from other parts of the Atlantic Ocean by its characteristic brown Sagrassum seaweed and often calm blue water. The sea is bounded on the west by the Gulf Stream on the north by the North Atlantic, on the east by the Canary Current, and on the south by the North Atlantic Equatorial Current, the four together forming a clockwise-circulating system of ocean currents termed the North Atlantic Gyre.. It lies between 20° and 35° north and 40° and 70° west and is approximately 1,100 kilometers (600 nautical miles) wide by 3,200 km (1,750 nmi) long. Bermuda is near the western fringes of the sea. While all of the above currents deposit marine plants and refuse into the sea, ocean water in the Sargasso Sea is distinctive for its deep blue color and exceptional clarity, with underwater visibility of up to 60 m (200 ft). It is also a body of water that has captured the public imagination and so is seen in a wide variety of literary and artistic works and in popular culture.
***
Death By Misadventure is a legally defined manner of death that describes a way by which an actual death was allowed to occur. Death by misadventure is a coroner’s term that originated in England to describe a death due to risk willingly incurred, that is a preventable death. For example a death caused by illicit drug overdose may be ruled a death by misadventure, as may be that of a thrill seeker who goes into the wilds of nature unprepared.
Everyone uses words to obfuscate; but the only sin is concealment.
Continued at Crow (Part Seven)
