AT SEA ON THE QUEEN MARY TWO

AT SEA ON THE QUEEN MARY 2

            I recall sitting down before a large portal on one of the lower decks of the ship I was travelling on to Southampton,  England. The sea slid beneath me like endless sheets of used tin foil, gloomy, inexhaustible, profoundly unconcerned about the fragile life that sped over its outer limits. It was like observing the erasure of memory, the slow disintegration of everything I had lived through to see the crumbling surface of reality slide by into nothing. There were voices somewhere behind me, echoey voices of people coming out of the planetarium theater after a show. I was grateful that they were all taking the elevators to the upper decks and not crowding into the lower passage where I was sitting. Little patches of white appeared on the top of some wavelets, like Queen Anne's lace in a field trembling in the breeze. But what could be the purpose of such intricate patterns when no one was there to observe them. I didn't count myself as an important pair of eyes at the moment.

            In the decks above, life was throbbing and squirming in anticipation of  some event that would never come. Or if it came, would be so gradual as to be uneventful. The sea told me that. It rolled over itself and spread out like so much dough in a baking pan. It was gelatinous and opaque, sodden with dissolved realities that floated at the edge of consciousness. There were no words to apply to this myriad set of ephemeral conjunctions, just sparkles and disintegrating ideas that could not form themselves into language. We were all at sea, so to speak. Confused, shoreless, without a compass to steer by, just ordinary souls wandering through our brief mortality without hoping for much, not even an afterlife as promised by our childhood catechisms. We had outgrown such rosy visions of heaven or even the fires of eternal hell. We were aliens on a planet made of rock and the ashes of ancient meteors, and rivers given to us by the tails of comets that soared over the empty sky for millennia, dropping their molecules of vapor that gathered in the declivities of a smoldering, still glowing ball of basalt and lava flows.

            Who else was staring down into the pitiless depths of the mid-Atlantic asking questions, probing the strange figures that emerged and dissolved on the surface like vanished languages? Was anyone? Did anyone care to question the elusive predicates on which life is based? All those philosophies in our past that tried to solve the riddle of existence but failed and gone silent, with only the darkness to cover them in eternal ignorance. "I am nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody, too?" asked Emily Dickinson in one of those solemn afternoons in Amherst, Massachusetts. She would sit for hours in front of her bedroom window watching the rain drop down its intricate fragments of mirrors onto the street and yard, leaving no trace of a memory left behind on the long descent from the clouds. She would sit with her pen and scraps of paper in her lap, with the silent house around her, and the shadows lengthening in the other rooms. Her room glowed with her thoughts, like a stray shaft of sunlight that had wandered away from the afternoon to settle at her feet. Words came to her, one word or phrase at a time, measured by the ticking of a clock, and she would piece them together into a poem or a note, and stare at it until she decided it was self-contained and no longer needed the prodding of her will or imagination. She too was on an ocean liner bound for oblivion, with no indication of direction or purpose to its droning engine and creak of iron plates against the waves.  

            What if a hand should reach out to us from the surrounding infinity of nothing and try to comfort us? Would we accept the gesture and fall into the arms of an invisible spirit and be saved from the agony of our doubts? Meurseault had no such consolation when he tells us, "Today, my mother is dead," in the opening sentence of Camus' "The Stranger." That's it, the present tense without a past or a future with which to fit this event into a riddle of existence. He merely goes on to live his life moment by moment, not even concerned that his own fragile place in the world would end without consequence. He lived outside the glow of faith and hope, the binding cords of culture and the means for gripping the unknown as if it were readable. He was on the beach in Algiers and was caught up in a murder that he could not explain in order to be acquitted. He would die from the accusation that this outsider was "the anti-Christ," and was the cause of a man's death. He was only a meager part of the cause, which lay in a vast matrix of other forces and events leading up to the man's demise. He would go to the guillotine after assailing a priest with the depths of his nihilism and atheism. He felt cleansed to admit to the priest that he did not belong to any part of the vast insulation of the human mind from the blunt, soul-obliterating force of the emptiness of existence.

            I was watching the sea disgorge its phantoms from the bottomless depths. They raced across the white caps in a mad dash for embodiment, which was firmly withheld from them. They would rush forward until their energy was exhausted and would sink back into the formless immensity that lapped against our sides. Above me, the crowds moved steadily around the promenade deck chattering and laughing, with the sea below in a profound coma in its bed of unraveled consciousness. The tables were being set for dinner in the giant dining room, where a tapestry of a ship tossing in the waves hung at one end, in view of everyone who would dine there tonight. The sun was lowering to the horizon and would plunge down into night soon. We were anxious to be seated, to make our choices from a menu and to order a glass or a bottle of wine. A tall waiter bent down to straighten the glasses and to replace a faded flower in a slender vase. He was attentive to all necessary details, but the food his staff would serve would be tasteless and indifferently prepared. It would come out of the kitchen doors with a fussy waiter smirking as he lowered a plate of veal before a white-haired woman who pouted at the look of the meat and the skimpy portion of green beans. But she was powerless to argue that the food was not worth eating. She would eat it, and so would the rest of the assembled diners.

            In two days the shore birds would begin to flutter over the ship with their shrill cries. It was a sign that the land would soon appear, edging up with its jagged landscapes like so many discarded civilizations. Then the harbors would appear with faint lights twinkling on the hillsides. They were welcoming signs, beckoning to us at the edge of consciousness after a long night of tormented dreams. By dawn of the next day we would be moored to the pier at Southampton, England, with gangways being pulled up to the exits. It was raining, and the freight wagons were lined up to receive the suitcases. Our ship towered over the roofs of the shore, as the catering trucks were crowding the ramps leading to the storage rooms with fresh food and beverages. It was a kind of birth as we lined up to come down to the corridors to gather our belongings and enter into the human world again.