Some shore dwellers object mightily to derelict boats constantly before the picture windows of their vast houses. They have a point. It is important to validate the position of the "opposition". But when you have to get approval from a neighborhood association to moor in a marina, it is carrying things too far. One of the reasons I took up sailing, was to escape the gray/beige aesthetic of the American, urban landscape. My girlfriend just informed me that the BAMBI plan did, in a sense, call for a neighborhood association. That's the trouble with girlfriends, they have an irritating tendency to prick the self righteous bubbles of us menfolk.
But imagine , if you will, if the cliff dwellers of Athos had to conform to an officially ordained color scheme: Mediterranean blue with a dash of bougainvillea red. Or what if such fascist dictates were imposed upon the decor of gaudy, Mexican hacienda's? Pancho Villa would rise from the grave to lead that colorful citizenry in open rebellion.
I recently spoke to a local, well educated and tolerant woman who complained of her neighbor's color choice for his home. When I pointed out that it was the same hue and shade of the overhanging cedars, she replied: "Well, it's alright on trees!".
For a country that prides itself on our alleged liberties, we seem only too willing to abdicate our right to paint our dwellings whatever color we might fancy, whether it be chartreuse or viadurya blue. We cherish our freedom to choose between dish soaps over the freedoms that truly liberate us from the role of passive consumer; a role ruthlessly imposed upon our placid population by corporate "culture".
Once there was a live aboard in a lurid pink vessel that appeared to have zoomed straight out of the final frontier to land before the appalled citizens of the south shore, causing much gnashing of teeth among them. But the proud captain of this dilapidated, interstellar craft felt it worthy of a berth in the Museum of Science and Industry, and boasted of her status as a unique, Boeing prototype from Seattle's early sixties, golden age. Ah, but those days are long gone and I, for one, do not miss them. This was the era of the Jetsons aesthetic that brought us John Graham Junior's brutalist architecture and that phallic monument to Seattle kitch, the Space Needle. This abomination can be seen all the way from fair Wicca's deck. Can't some thing be done about that space hypo? I mean, it's alright on the Jetsons.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Death of a Liveaboard
2/15/10 1415 hrs. Easterly wind @ 8 knots, Sunny.
Another lovely February day in Eagle Harbor.
Yes, there are some sad looking vessels about. They tug at their moorings like forlorn pooches awaiting their master's return. Whether these craft qualify for the designation, liveaboard, depends on your definition of the term.
With all the regulations restricting liveaboards of late, I wonder if our venerable lawmakers have considered restricting other categories of boaters as well. What about a prohibition against zombie mariners? No Undeadaboards.
Since nothing exists apart from it's contrary, the sailor's life has death as steadfast shipmate, and death's dark aspect attends us all across the ocean of samsara until we reach either the blissful pure land or the fiddler's green. We may recall the words of that sorcerer of the active imagination, Don Juan, who councils his obtuse apprentice, Carlos Casteneda: "Death is your only ally, he is always following you, six inches behind your left shoulder". How he came by this precise data is beyond me. I can only trust it emerged from a very real experience undergone by an equally unreal character, whose presence looms all the larger for his fictive power.
With the physics of color, every hue produces it's after image, it's opposite on the color wheel. When an artist chooses a red, it's compliment, green, is immediately present and demands to be resolved within the whole composition.
As that great western sage, William Blake, said: " Without contraries there is no progression".
Waking is to sleep as life is to death. Given the logic of this metaphysical equation, it is only fair to rule out waking aboard as well. Imagine the shipping lanes of the globe navigated by somnolent sailors snoring through long watches at the helm. But with the advent of ever newer technologies, this proposal may not be so far fetched after all.
And what might be the final solution to the liveaboard problem? Death? They might get life, aboard floating penal colonies, hefting rocks for the bulkheads of wealthy waterfront home owners.
When it comes time for me to stand before Saint Peter or the Lords of Death, as a final act of protest, I would like to pass away aboard Wicca, thereby asserting my right to my own meaningful death aboard.
Another lovely February day in Eagle Harbor.
Yes, there are some sad looking vessels about. They tug at their moorings like forlorn pooches awaiting their master's return. Whether these craft qualify for the designation, liveaboard, depends on your definition of the term.
With all the regulations restricting liveaboards of late, I wonder if our venerable lawmakers have considered restricting other categories of boaters as well. What about a prohibition against zombie mariners? No Undeadaboards.
Since nothing exists apart from it's contrary, the sailor's life has death as steadfast shipmate, and death's dark aspect attends us all across the ocean of samsara until we reach either the blissful pure land or the fiddler's green. We may recall the words of that sorcerer of the active imagination, Don Juan, who councils his obtuse apprentice, Carlos Casteneda: "Death is your only ally, he is always following you, six inches behind your left shoulder". How he came by this precise data is beyond me. I can only trust it emerged from a very real experience undergone by an equally unreal character, whose presence looms all the larger for his fictive power.
With the physics of color, every hue produces it's after image, it's opposite on the color wheel. When an artist chooses a red, it's compliment, green, is immediately present and demands to be resolved within the whole composition.
As that great western sage, William Blake, said: " Without contraries there is no progression".
Waking is to sleep as life is to death. Given the logic of this metaphysical equation, it is only fair to rule out waking aboard as well. Imagine the shipping lanes of the globe navigated by somnolent sailors snoring through long watches at the helm. But with the advent of ever newer technologies, this proposal may not be so far fetched after all.
And what might be the final solution to the liveaboard problem? Death? They might get life, aboard floating penal colonies, hefting rocks for the bulkheads of wealthy waterfront home owners.
When it comes time for me to stand before Saint Peter or the Lords of Death, as a final act of protest, I would like to pass away aboard Wicca, thereby asserting my right to my own meaningful death aboard.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
The point of it all
2/12/10, 1400 hours, wind N.W. @ 10-15 knots
The sun emerges again after a brief shower. Wicca is undergoing a refit after her perilous crossing of the Straits. To undergo such trials may be asking too much of the old gal who, face it, is no longer the spry ship of her prime when she shoved aside the most riotous seas with haughty disdain. Maybe it's time she rest on her laurels, anchored up some peaceful creek, far from the uncouth caresses of the turbulent ocean. Old mariners will stop their morning constitutional to gaze wistfully at her graceful lines, and hearken back to youthful days when Wicca's brave tops'ls could be descried running before a stiff southerly breeze off Hecate Head. "Aye, she sails like a witch."
After her sinking in Eagle Harbor, Ray stripped her soggy interior and now you can see in her cobbled frames, evidence of a venerable legacy of shipwrights, amateurs and neophytes who, over four decades, kept her sailing into posterity.
Her interior is cozy, with a spaciousness that seems to expand to the unbounded horizon.
1500 hours
A seal rises like a submarine to a surface dimpled with the drops of a fleeting shower. Captain Jack, a pleasant smile for everyone, hails Wicca as he rows past brandishing a honeycombed piece of corroded aluminum: "found art is everywhere" he calls, and tells of electrolysis produced by the ferry maintenance yard nearby. "Ten Amps a day", says he, or some figure that escapes recollection now. Jack comes from one of Bainbridge Island's founding families, with a street in Eagledale named after them. He is full of such maritime wisdom, and warns of swamped properties along the waterfront due to melting icecaps.
I'm still contemplating the Noah story. According to Emanuel Swedenborg, "Buddha of the North", Noah's time was when "the deceitful persuasions of man's being suffocated all truth and good". The Ark's cargo consisted of "everything that life still possessed and was worthy of possessing" after the essential truths of the most ancient church were mostly forgotten. These truths, hidden behind the arcane language of the bible, are the remnants of a time when man had immediate access to the Divine influx from Heaven, and was still connected with good of faith united with love and charity.
Swedenborg apprehends the story as one of an inner history of the soul. We are threatened with suffocation when the esoteric truths are immersed within us by an exclusive preoccupation with literal meaning and a need to have spiritual realities verified by the physical senses. These preoccupations drown out man's ability to speak with the tongue of angels, to hear their call, or even trust in their existence, since the physics of Angels do not conform to our obsession with "facts".
How do these themes play out in our own day? Is Noah still out there floating in some aged, barnacle festooned tug with no engine?
The sun emerges again after a brief shower. Wicca is undergoing a refit after her perilous crossing of the Straits. To undergo such trials may be asking too much of the old gal who, face it, is no longer the spry ship of her prime when she shoved aside the most riotous seas with haughty disdain. Maybe it's time she rest on her laurels, anchored up some peaceful creek, far from the uncouth caresses of the turbulent ocean. Old mariners will stop their morning constitutional to gaze wistfully at her graceful lines, and hearken back to youthful days when Wicca's brave tops'ls could be descried running before a stiff southerly breeze off Hecate Head. "Aye, she sails like a witch."
After her sinking in Eagle Harbor, Ray stripped her soggy interior and now you can see in her cobbled frames, evidence of a venerable legacy of shipwrights, amateurs and neophytes who, over four decades, kept her sailing into posterity.
Her interior is cozy, with a spaciousness that seems to expand to the unbounded horizon.
1500 hours
A seal rises like a submarine to a surface dimpled with the drops of a fleeting shower. Captain Jack, a pleasant smile for everyone, hails Wicca as he rows past brandishing a honeycombed piece of corroded aluminum: "found art is everywhere" he calls, and tells of electrolysis produced by the ferry maintenance yard nearby. "Ten Amps a day", says he, or some figure that escapes recollection now. Jack comes from one of Bainbridge Island's founding families, with a street in Eagledale named after them. He is full of such maritime wisdom, and warns of swamped properties along the waterfront due to melting icecaps.
I'm still contemplating the Noah story. According to Emanuel Swedenborg, "Buddha of the North", Noah's time was when "the deceitful persuasions of man's being suffocated all truth and good". The Ark's cargo consisted of "everything that life still possessed and was worthy of possessing" after the essential truths of the most ancient church were mostly forgotten. These truths, hidden behind the arcane language of the bible, are the remnants of a time when man had immediate access to the Divine influx from Heaven, and was still connected with good of faith united with love and charity.
Swedenborg apprehends the story as one of an inner history of the soul. We are threatened with suffocation when the esoteric truths are immersed within us by an exclusive preoccupation with literal meaning and a need to have spiritual realities verified by the physical senses. These preoccupations drown out man's ability to speak with the tongue of angels, to hear their call, or even trust in their existence, since the physics of Angels do not conform to our obsession with "facts".
How do these themes play out in our own day? Is Noah still out there floating in some aged, barnacle festooned tug with no engine?
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