You would be a fool to believe in the ends of journeys at their beginnings
It would be mad to encompass huge distances
What you can't imagine
Let it unfold
If not day to day then hour to hour
If not hour to hour then minute to minute
If not that then sleep
And see where it takes you.
I could have been an officer
How uncomfortable I would have been
managing and guiding
given official position
with the inference I could be customarily despised
I want to be despised on my own terms
and my whole life is an assertion of this
my inalienable right to be wrong.
I suppose you can have too much even of beauty, if that is what we are dealing with here
You could see those sunset colours as the poisoned, corrupted horizon
These signs bring on the night and night is often our enemy
We have not mastered the night
Merely pushed back its boundaries in some places.
Humans have tamed the world, but not the night
They withdraw to their fortresses and cede the world to others
Many of them without physical existence
That is not necessary to the night
There emotions are as important as the solid
Even physical laws are suspended
Even the boundaries between those alive and the dead
The graves give up their secrets to the imaginations of each night
That is how far we are truly reational
Until those colours flash up each evening and we withdraw.
At the bow
far from the engine
is the only place
where the sea is the sound
Here, where power forces apart the waters
the significant struggle takes place in peace
amidst the machinery of stopping the ship
and keeping her in her place in the world
Here is all about the things that stop ships
It is easy for the questing eye
to see landfall where there is none
the clouds come in 10,000 variations
of colour, content and texture
and those below the horizon
reveal only their peaks
which we are unused to assessing baselessly
and you yearn for the seascape to have meaning
to tell you something authoritively
but everything is gaze and interpretation
when soothsayers were exploded they became navigators
or, even worse, interpreters of weather.
But seascapes are like landscapes or cityscapes
each quarter has its story
implants it in your mind
there is high ground and difficult places
there where the easy life is to be found
The sea is flat but communicates contours
It is neutral but conveys judgements
you are helpless in its handling in so many ways.
The Bosun's birthday.
It is hard for the englishman
The world is so unkind
It does not conveniently slot itself into the necessary categories
To maintain its due ideas
Instead it must be berated and cajoled
Into the requisite shapes
It must be told its lines then
Encouraged to repeat them
Above all it must be shepherded
Its inconveniences ridiculed
Its lower lives depressed
Its order affirmed
Because this is the world
as the englishman knows it to be
The Knowledge of faith.
Every day he sat out in the sun
as they moved south
soon his pale drinker's flesh became red, then raw
and pitted into sores
which inflamed and infected
still he would not come out of the sun
easing any feelings with swigs of rum he bought from passing islands
spending his money in the mess
two bottles of wine a day and many beers
his flesh trailed about him in raw strips
straw-coloured liquid jellied him
his face black and brown
his ears crisped
laughing and coughing his clouded cackle
they warned him about dehydration
but not in any language he could understand
each day he rose later and later
until finally not at all
the young steward cleaned around him
and as always said nothing
these were the ways his weeks went
and when the ship berthed at Dover
he rose and pulled on his clothes, surprised at the pain
vaguely loaded his bag, leaving much behind
and set off down the gangplank into autumn England
where he fitted in so well.
All over the world
these ships are balls of rust
swelled up to twice their size
casting off their own weight of oxides daily
to percolate down through the sea
to the bed, where lies two centuries' dandruff
a disaster just waiting to happen.
1740: It has been another long day, but easier to get through. I seem to have paced it better. I seem to have unconsciously come to the conclusion that my creativity in this project is diminishing, in the production phase anyway. I have done a lot of work. One of the big fishing birds came back and I filmed and photographed it and did two pieces to camera, plus some other stuff. And I have written a lot in my notebook.
I went to the bow to recce for another 'Much have I travelled' piece to camera, and decided to wait until after Guadeloupe when an empty container or two might mask my activities from the bridge.
I felt a bit odd around lunchtime. I thought it might be too much direct sun. I don't know what I'm doing basking in Caribbean sunshine. Berk. Some sort of macho thing I suppose.
Later I decided, as there is finally no deck repair work going on, I would launch myself into walks around the deck. So I set off - five times anticlockwise, then the other way. I work that out at about 2 miles, which is just about respectable. On the 4th time round, at 1640, I saw a school of dolphins leaping about off the port quarter. Peter wasn't at his post, so he missed them again. There were at least 10, and they looked black with dorsal fins. They were the same as I saw a few days ago, and they were definitely dolphins rather than whales.
I like the deck circuits. It is peaceful at the bow, with almost no engine noise.
ETA Guadeloupe seems possibly to be between 1200 & 1300 tomorrow because:-
2100: Clocks forward 1 hr (to GMT -4).
1500 LT (GMT -5):
Position: N14 14 W67 51.
Course: 74T
Speed:19.4 Kn.
0820: Not that I can see Venezuela, which is somewhere down below the horizon. We haven't seen land since Costa Rica nearly two days ago.
The sun is back and the sea is blue. Before breakfast I was filming a pair of large sea birds fishing the ship's wake. My first successful wildlife footage! I still can't get the pesky flying fish.
Perhaps the sun will restore some sense of purpose. It was unfortunate that the coming of the grey skies coincided with us turning our bows east and north. Peter did not appear at breakfast.
(The Venezuelan music on the radio includes quotes from Jingle Bells, reminding me that many of the shops in Limon had Christmas displays, all dark red and green.)
Last night I asked Ivan to sort out the overhead lights in my cabin, one of which kept flashing on and off. Someone did this very promptly and they also repaired or discovered a light new to me, above the writing desk, set into the unit. There is no apparent way of turning the light off. It also illuminates a hidden key which fits nothing in the room. Weird.
There is nothing natural or inevitable about this way of ordering things
Economic relationships
Here we see where it unravels
The people involved in the day to day machinations
The practical working out of distant so-called laws
We can invent better ways with bananas
Really. Can't we?
Bananas?