“Our eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog-days alongshore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles.” ― F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Pages flutter in the wind. My idle hand shuts the words away.
Cloud-shadows shudder up and down the beach.
“Barefoot by the sea, stopping to scratch one ankle With one toe” ― Jack Kerouac, Book of Haikus
I get up, walk into a wave and disappear.
“All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.” ― Brian Greene
(Oh the sharp taste of seaside repose)
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.” ― Albert Camus, The Stranger
Sun-blotted days have bleached my shoulders. My mane is turning white. Hunch-backed, I grasp a scallop-shelled walking-stick, ambling along on driftwood legs.
“My characters are drifters and searchers and they look for something. The journey is a state of mind for them.” ―Wim Wenders
Details peel from my face and trickle away into the citrus breeze.
(Sometimes, I can hear atomies skitter across the metalled sands of apathy.)
“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” ―John Milton
A froth of dinoflagellates sparks electric blue ‘round my stubble-feet. Each step is measured, defying suction as I trace along the arrow of time.
“It all looks the same. You can’t imagine anything anymore. Above all, you can’t imagine any change. I became estranged from myself. All I could imagine was going on and on like this forever.” ―Alice in the Cities, 1974, Written by Wim Wenders and Veith von Furstenberg
(There’s a black maw gaping in the back of my brain.)
“Today was a gloomy, rainy day without a glimmer of sunlight, like the old age before me. I am oppressed by such strange thoughts, such gloomy sensations; questions still so obscure to me are crowding into my brain- and I seem to have neither power nor will to settle them.” ―Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights
I used to retreat into the zebra-striped dusk beneath the sagging porch of childhood. Heaps of detritus gathered ‘round like friends- termite-mounds of frass, sparrow bones, and mulberry seeds.
(The subtle sounds of decay became my life’s refrain.)
“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one.” ―Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Mewling cries swarm like midges inside my weltering mind. I turn away from the virason gasping off the sea.
Flailing like a killdeer, I struggle toward the lavender dunes. A wide yellow moon grins overhead.
“I don’t take care of myself. I think, if I don’t take care of myself and I sit still and I don’t move, maybe they’ll forget about me. But then I’m scared of that too, because I think maybe if I sit there too long, maybe when I want to move, I won’t be able to move.” ―Mikey and Nicky, 1976, Written/Directed by Elaine May
Memory microfilms at the margin: Coarse sheets forming little mountain ranges of wet, crimson-black spires. Cloven hands of ivory clacking against shiny metal bars. Hillocks of pillows burning like red coals against a dried-leaf body.
“Sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.” ―Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe
I can hear the wail of a train from across the lagoon, punctuating the still-water-night. The cloistered whine of mosquitoes quickly throttles the noise. And then, the sound of my quickening steps.
“A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can. Go team, go! Give me an L. Give me an I. Give me a V. Give me an E. L-I-V-E. LIVE! Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room.” ―Harold and Maude, 1971, Written by Colin Higgins, Directed by Hal Ashby
Steps that begin to rap like rain. And thunder through the frenzied lights of the howling causeway. Steps that are heading north.
“I’m glad we went to the Rhine. For the first time I see myself…as someone who’s gone through a certain time, and that time is my story. [Pausing] That feeling is quite comfortable.” ―Kings of the Road(Im Lauf der Zeit, “In the Course of Time”), 1974, Written/Directed by Wim Wenders
Determined to run into myself again.
“We all talked about leaving, but only one of us, one morning, without a word to a soul, actually left.” ―I Vitelloni (“The Bullocks/The Layabouts”),1953, Written/Directed by Federico Fellini …………….…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
A little over a year ago, I traveled north and did something I’d never done before. Toured a series of universities.
Here’s to new beginnings.
“I have to go on makin’ a livin’…so I can die.”―Pickup on South Street, 1953, Written/Directed by Samuel Fuller
“…I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves, mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business, trillions apart, yet forming white surf in unison. Age on ages, before any eyes could see, Year after year, thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? On a dead planet, with no life to entertain. Never at rest, tortured by energy. Wasted prodigiously by the sun, poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves and a new dance starts. Growing in size and complexity, living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein. Dancing a pattern ever more intricate. Out of the cradle onto the dry land, Here it is standing, atoms with consciousness, matter with curiosity stands at the sea, wonders at wondering…I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.”
– Richard P. Feynman
I loomed beneath a dark feathering of sea-oats, pointed tips glazed with recent rain. I listened to the subdued murmur of little waves. The fetid and russet beds of sea-wrack had been washed away, leaving the sand barren and strange. A forlorn gull loitered at the swash line, analyzing the crinkling water as it fizzed in and out.
Distant lightning lazily branched from the moody-blue squall-lines and spidered across a sullen sea of herbal green. Coy ghost crabs emerged, removing dark masses of dripping sand from drowned burrows. They built little, lumpy mounds around the entrances to their small, black holes.
The storm was leaving me. How I longed for it to stay.
I was tortured the other night, seized with the memory of my little Siamese cat squeezing her eyes tightly shut for the last time. How swiftly she was gone, her soft, cinnamon cheek resting upon a colorful, flowing blanket that masked the metal slab beneath. I had never seen an animal euthanized, before. I understood, logically, that it ended the physical misery of her little, bony body.
Yet, how troubled I am by that last image of peace…of life tenderly released.
My mum died of a similar ravenous kind of disease. I remember that final image. Her face waxen and unreal, her mouth a small, black hole. She did not tightly close her eyes. She was not escorted quietly, through a warm wash of sleep, into the darkness beyond. Yet, I was not so disturbed by her image in death. And how vividly there lacked any look of peace…
I do not know what that reveals about me.
But I wish the storm would never leave. I want, forever, to hear its screams over this cold and fleeting sea of herbal green. How I wish there were no end to rain. Just as there seems to be no end to Grief.
“Darkness settles on the ground Leaves the day stumbling blind, Coming to a quiet close And maybe just in time” – From the song God Only Knows by Joe Henry
“He opens his eyes and stares directly into the morning sun which wallows up from the misty sea like some bloated, dying fish. The sky is gray and immobile, a dome of lead. A cloud hangs mute and dark over the western horizon. High up, barely visible, a seagull floats on motionless wings. Its cry is weird and restless.”
– Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal
“I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end. ”
– Joyce Carol Oates, I Am No One You Know
“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“I was a man who thrived on solitude… I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.”
– Charles Bukowski, Factotum “If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”
– Leonard Cohen “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”
– Søren Kierkegaard
(Some feeble footage above of some hunting bull-shark chums of mine as they spilled up into the shallow swash as the tide began to recede. Is there anything better than having a shark swim up into one’s lap? I think not!)
I had a meeting with the Sharks that Sunrise, and they kept their promise. I arrived to the bruised sight of a brooding squall that aged the sky, scudding in and consuming the Dawn.
Pale rosy lightning sniveled across the slate blue of cloud as a lone dolphin breached cold in the distance.
And there in the swash the pastel waves frilled and shivered as a cool wind lumbered forth, and a surge of fish spat out from the sea as the Sharks surfed right up to my feet.
The Surf Fisherman decided not to wade in. I know not why. The water was glorious.
A Day in the Brine 