October 11, 2004

• MONDAY BOOK

  I’ll be returning to “Grace and Grit” next week when I’ve had a chance to read a little further, but for today here’s an excerpt from Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac, published in 1965. I’d heard he took the same trip on a Yugoslavian freighter from New York to Africa that I did and that he described it in this book so I checked it out from the library and found this passage that cracked me up:
  During wartime I’d actually sailed in those Northern seas of the Arctic but it was only in summertime: now, a thousand miles south of these in the void of January Seas, gloom, the cappers came glurring in gray spray as high as a house and plowed rivers all over our bow and down the washes. Furyiating howling Blakean glooms, thunders of thumping, washing waving sick manship diddling like a long cork for nothing in the mad waste. Some old Breton knowledge of the sea still in my blood now shuddered. When I saw those walls of water advancing one by one for miles in gray carnage I cried in my soul WHY DIDN’T I STAY HOME!? But it was too late. When the third night came the ship was heaving from side to side so badly even the Yugoslavs went to bed and jammed themselves down between pillows and blankets. The kitchen was insane all night with crashing and toppling pots even tho they’d been secured. It scares a seaman to hear the Kitchen scream in fear. For eating at first the steward had placed dishes on a wet tablecloth, and of course no soup in soupbowls but in deep cups, but now it was too late for even that. The men chewed at biscuits as they staggered to their knees in their wet sou’westers. Out on deck where I went a minute the heel of the ship was enough to kick you over the gunwale straight at walls of water, sperash. Deck lashed trucks groaned and broke their cables and smashed around. It was a Biblical Tempest like an old dream. In the night I prayed with fear to God Who was now taking all of us, the souls on board, at this dread particular time, for reasons of His own, at last. In my semi delirium I thought I saw a snow white ladder being held down to us from the sky. I saw Stella Maris over the Sea like a statue of Liberty all in shining white. I thought of all the sailors that ever drowned and O the choking thought of it, from Phoenicians of 3000 years ago to poor little teenage sailors of America only last war (some of whom I’d sailed in safety with)– The carpets of sinking water all deep blue green in the middle of the ocean, with their damnable patterns of foam, the sickening choking too-much of it even tho you’re only looking at the surface– beneath all that the upwell of cold miles of fathoms–swaying, rolling, smashing, the tonnages of Peligroso Roar beating, heaving, swirling–not a face in sight! Here comes more! Duck! The whole ship (only as long as a Village) ducks into it shuddering, the crazy screws furiously turn in nothingness, shaking the ship, slap, the bow’s now up, thrown up, the screws are dreaming deep below, the ship hasn’t gained ten feet–it’s like that– It’s like frost in your face, like the cold mouths of ancient fathers, like wood cracking in the sea. Not even a fish in sight. It’s the thunderous jubilations of Neptune and his bloody wind god canceling men. “All I had to do was stay home, give it all up, get a little home for me and Ma, meditate, live quiet, read in the sun, drink wine in the moon in old clothes, pet my kitties, sleep good dreams–now look at this petrain I got me in, Oh dammit!” (“Petrain is a 16th Century French word meaning “mess.”) But God chose to let us live as at dawn the captain turned the ship the other way and gradually left the storm behind, then headed back east towards Africa and the stars.
  Well, that’s as close as I ever got to Jack. Riding through the same storm in January on the same sea to the same destination in a different year. And we both lived to write about it.
  

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  Deep Thought: Isn’t it funny how one minute life can be such a struggle, and the next minute you’re just driving real fast, swerving back and forth across the road?
  Today I am grateful for: Strawberries
  Guess the Movie: “I’ve had three lovers in the past four years, and they all ran a distant second to a good book and a warm bath. ” Answer: Jerry McGuire, 1996
  Polls Today: Kerry 270/Bush 248 EVP: Zogby did a large (N = 1216) telephone poll Oct. 7-9 (thus, after the second presidential debate) and found the race to be a statistical tie, with Kerry at 46%, Bush at 45%, Nader at 0.9%, Cobb at 0.2%, Peroutka at 0.2%, and Badnarik at 0.1%. The rest are still undecided. I guess they are waiting for the third debate, on Wednesday. Some people like to collect all the data before coming to a conclusion. Interestingly, Zogby also found that among newly registered voters, Kerry holds a 5% lead. Given the millions of people who registered for the first time this year, new voters (along with the millions of overseas voters) could be a serious factor.
  End of Day: 8:35 pm
  + = Started writing Chapter 8.
  - = Death of Christopher Reeve – now there was a fighter.
  

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