Douglas Mercer
December 1 2024
Continued from Crow (Part Seven)
Do I have regrets? My god yes that is all I have. That one who vaunted himself as such a quick study and as clever beyond clever should have been such a god-awful slow learner. Looking back I see that all the information was there well in advance but I looked askance and with scorn at so many important parts of it and thus was able to put 2 and 2 together with my logic, but there are more equations than that, the number of them is by no means infinite but it is forbidding. Nevertheless, a close reading of the facts and a drop through line with logic would have taken me here in a seriously less circuitous route. For instance I had heard the word bilocate before but glossed over it as if it were nothing.
And also the deception of course. For indeed the most momentous moment in my life was when within the first few hours in this sea I learned that the only sin is concealment. It seems obvious, not to lie, but it means so much more. That we are heading towards a diaphanous world where all beings are transparent to one another, but what is our world built on but a tissue of lies? The domains of this lie, social, personal, political, cultural—would be a vast tome in themselves and it would depress me too much to enumerate them. Indeed, that most human of traits, language, which is supposed to open up the transparency, is the main vehicle for untruth. The one thing that stuck out to me is that I remember reading that many people lie to their own diary even though it is strictly for personal use to which a wag said if you can’t’ lie to yourself who can you lie to? But irony, I can tell you straightaway, does not make it into the Empyrean.
Of course my major deception was my false course. I have made peace with it because it brought me here and the law of necessity is a roughhewn thing. I know now that based on my false projection Tetley, urged on by his supporters, gambled and lost on full speed sailing, which he never would have embarked on had he not learned of my ostensible location. And surely given the prospects for hysterics Hallsworth was sure to pen something on the order that I would be in the Valhalla of sportsmen, one that you would tell your grandchildren about. For the slide rule must have shown them the incredible fact that I would be home by July 8 1969 at the latest. Unlike that infamous appointment in Samara, that one will be missed by a lot more than a mile. And to think that it was that one joking DIGGER RAMREZ message that sent them all on the wild goose chase after what was a red herring. Surely he had them galloping with the blaring headlines of imminent victory (it will be Boy’s Own Stuff, mind you) but, for the record, if there is one thing I will say, if they had stuck closely to the facts they would have kept their mental powder dry and waited events. What a tangled web we weave, my god, of that statement how many hours have I thought fruitfully.
When I got the news that it would come down to a PHOTO FINISH I knew that I had got away with it, or at least the preliminary stage of it, which by then was a relief. My problem then was how I would re-enter the race, that is how I would link up or rendezvous with myself. And I notice that every time I put the words down they allude to a deeper meaning, as if the actual physical existence we bear is a metaphor for what is really going on, or will go on, as if life were not the red herring or wild goose chase many suppose but a parable or paradigm meant to be deciphered. As it was I planned to go in circles or zig and zag off the coast of Buenos Aries until my false route caught up with me. Then it would be Fish and Chips and hello Queenie and Boys Own Stuff until the cows came home. I also was preparing for my critical telegram to my Press Agent and I wrote it three times and erased it as many before deeming it complete. I then sat on it for a week before delivering it:
200 DAYS POST LIZARD FIRST SIGN OF LAND FALKLANDS. HOVE TO SUNDWOWN CAPE. WINDSMOKE ON THE WIND. THEN PELL MELL FOR SAFETY. CONFIRM TIMING TRIFLE TIGHT.
I knew he would like that, he always said that I was a wordsmith who had missed his calling and I can see him already ringing up the publishers. Will he want to collate what I am doing now, or will it be too close to the bone? Is there a market for psychotic ramblings? Will it be shelved among the horror genre? In any event Smoke On The Wind would be a good title; I’ve heard worse. Hopefully he will edit out the inconsequential details and the half-truths, though which is which is not always apparent. At that time before Tetley’s sinking and my mysterious silence I sent out another message which was ill advised. I had always been emotional and tempestuous (petulant really) and the message was a congratulations to the first man home but a gentle, or not so gentle, reminder that elapsed time was the prize. With this to all appearances I was back in the race, I had caught up with myself, and had my integrity restored. Even so I engaged in more circling maneuvers as if to create a hiatus, wondering indeed if my books would withstand scrutiny, yet in my last days of human emotion the lure of the crowd still played havoc with my head. Even a razor close finish in defeat would make me a wild hero with all that would mean for my business. Perhaps my erratic behavior in those fateful days was my way of suggesting that my mind was not fully made up; if so it would be the tail end of what had always been one of my bête noirs.
Then all of a sudden I burst northwards. On May 4-5 1969 I actually made the 243 miles in a day that I had only previously claimed—the conditions were very good but nonetheless it was an impressive burst of speed. But after this heady feat I began to get cold feet when I began to do some calculations, I re-read some of my missives and was appalled, I had always been a clever enough liar but also an uneasy one. And I saw that when I was deceiving I would always in fact put in many “in facts” and “of courses” and “actually” as if the lie required overt statements of empathic truth. And I began to realize that the falsehood was not just a one time convincing, there would be the reporters, and the television shows, and the memoirs, the essays in Sunday magazines, the book tours and the speeches, the future retrospectives and, no matter what, in my dotage I would have to recount the harrowing passage of the Roaring Forties to some whipper snapper who wanted to hear tell. Did I have the heart fo that? Or was it too rich for my blood? When I got the cable from Hallsworth that my hometown would be agog---my feet got icy cold and never warmed up. So I began a lackadaisical half-hearted approach, purposely dithering to buy time but it was borrowed time I was living on. Soon enough the Times put back my projected arrival day by a week by what they must have thought bafflingly slow speeds. Then of course prodded on by my sudden and theatrical re-entry into the lists (it must have seemed to him that I came out of nowhere like the ghost of the past) Tetley’s went hell for leather they said and his boat split. It must have been from a life raft that he saw his beloved Victress slip slowly into the Atlantic. From this heightened perspective, I see the boat go down in my mind’s eye without emotion. I know what was sunk with that boat; the list is too long to enumerate, but one of the things that went down was my past. Detached from it now I simply see the boat as a harbinger and as the ultimate good stroke of luck. Though, I must admit, the thought crossed my mind at the time, thinking of the vanities of the irony, that if one looked at it in a sober and judicious way, with great dispassion though wry enough, it was enough to think that the gods had penchant for cheap and tawdry melodrama. It certainly had all the elements, the lady tied to the track and histrionic panic music thundering. I still think it the case though I would replace cheap and tawdry with epochal and hair raising. Even at the time I savored the progression of logic as a delectation. Had I not claimed ersatz circumnavigation times Tetley would have cruised to victory; and I would have sailed home as an as an univestigated hero; but when it was just me the full glare of the media was on me and there was no way to avoid winning. Had I slown down enough to lose to the man who landed first no one could have suspended disbelief; no, when the Victress went down it sealed off my last route of escape. I was a man out of options. I was that man back in the tortuous room of the game with walls closing in. Ostensibly at least. But you never know if you have a card up your sleeve until you really look.
When I say my last option for escape I of course am being ironic. In my imperious state I want to get this all down so there is no mistaking it. And I want as it were to put myself in the shoes of my biographers—I assume that though Hallsworth is my first Boswell I will have many more, many more, men trying to sort it out until the crack of doom, normal and fearful men, men with book contracts and men genuinely interested, and men with small minds. They will wheel out the domain of psychiatry or psychopharmacology, they will have gray beards doing the pondering, they will have journalists gathering the facts, and book after book and film after film will take a crack at it. No doubt they will focus on the word Mercy—it is my showstopper—my version of Christ’s It Is Finished, but let the interpreters be careful in their interpretation. I still believe that Old Nature is cold and indifferent, but it is humanity which will cry Uncle and only then will wishes become real and beggars ride. And of this moment of moments they will get on their hobby or high horses or their superannuated soap boxes and the will say—with pity perhaps, or with sorrow—that it was my last rational option. But I have taken ratio up as my god, I would not build idols to the goddess of reason, but I would make statues upon statues of ratio or logic—as reason is too time worn and to capture the attention of the public it has to be a bit off beat but not so much to be weird. So when I think of the rational options I know they are limitless for if rationality has any bottom I for one have never seen it and I have been looking—and quite hard for about a week. So if anyone is an expert on this subject it is me. If I have no qualifications I make up for it in the fact that I speak without any also. For you see I found another way out and one of a totally other kind. I had given up sailing for good and had retreated (I hear them bleating) into a totally private world. One in which all that mattered was to propound my revelations of philosophy that had been forming in my mind, world so frighteningly internal that I had lost contact with the external world. But it’s not a private world at all, I know now that any private world is a concealing world and there is nothing more public than what I am about to do---and if there is no one around that is just a trick of circumstance. Trust me I could stand in Piccadilly Square and do the same—but when it’ time to shove off you hove out of view. My only hopes is that it is to be my who is the narrator of events and people take this text seriously, for the journalists will only be able to scratch their heads and produce footnotes.
The story of the next month will be able to be told in my very own words—these and others---and what will be noted above all is for all the outlandish and farfetched claims I make—how normal it is. Now normal and organized speech is not proof of sanity far from it---I once knew a psychiatrist who told that although some of his patients rave and are incoherent and disorganized for every handful of those you will get another who in tones unimpassioned and dry and level will explicate how he was cloned on Alpha Centauri and can give you a reasoned analysis of their social structure and power dynamics---but crazy he is. But then in the end all theorizing and claims are beside the point. I believe we British are fond of saying that the proof is in the pudding and the pudding is in the eating—we always having been a very wise Island people. And they will say that this surface calm was but a mask for the turmoil within, my true dark and brooding nature, and that the terrible costs and crisis came on with a thundering suddenness. I will admit that a storm hit me when I was in indecision, though even then I could glimpse the serenity to come; but as I said when you make a final decision all cares melt away, devil may care and come what may being the hallmarks of the time. For I have been following the reports of the launch not far from here—and if I were a Boswell of Armstrong I know what would I have him say as he made contact—you always want to put yourself in someone’s shoes to imagine reality—to literally walk in them and live via them vicariously and I can see it when the Eagle—which will be their module---will land. It may seem far afield to the layman but then as someone said it’s only esoteric until you know about it.
After hearing about Tetley’s misfortune—and my sporting nod to his wife about Davy Jones dirty trick—I kept on going as if in a trance but it was not all holiday cruising. The self-steering gear was now totally on the fritz and defunct---and not even my theoretical ingenuity involving the mathematical calculations of oscillation could cure it—and past cure is past care. Of more concern was getting back on the air. My last two weeks before taking the fated plunge were spent sitting naked at tiny worktable soldiering on with soldering equipment trying to get the transmitter up and running. For respite I would pick up the microphone and talk into my tape recorder—Crowhurst’s last tape you might joke—as a fruitless way I suppose to maintain human identity. Listening to them now I can see that they are full of role playing—the hero, the bon vivant, Peck’s bad boy, the Boy’s Own Stuff bluff—but I know what was going on beneath though for the rest I suppose it can only be imagined at least until they read this carefully.
It was then that I began to have some fun with the creatures of the sea. I took a few hours off from the communications and electronics maze I found myself in to record the high-pitched sounds that were emanating from a shoal of porpoises that were frolicking near my boat. I found the noises difficult to capture and I wondered why the human ear was able to tune in to such sounds which came in above the sea and rigging, but the microphone was not. I then began to play a silly game with them in order to garner their attention, what I would do is as they were playing great games of it all around my boat, thinking they had it all sewn up, I would go up on the bow and as they leapt into the air I would shine a powerful beam of light on them. It is kind of a dirty trick to play because doubtless the sudden burst of light causes them to panic and be frightened; when thus hit they twist in the air, go once again down into the water, and then they are off at terrific speeds; zig zagging this way and that in an attempt to flee from the beam of light which of course I track them with. They go 150 yards in two seconds—such speed is amazing to behold—and then after circling a bit they come back again to see what this strange creature has in store for them. So they are quite afraid but also very courageous. They come back and take a look, for whatever fear they have they definitely want more of it.
Continued at Crow (Part Nine)
