DOLPHINS
DOLPHINS
I am the last in an old American family. We would pass anonymously if not for our inherited weariness-a noble rot-that has outstripped the ambition that festers in less authentic heirs. We aren’t quite Mayflower stowage, but soon enough after that our origins should be suspicious. It’s hard to imagine a creditable character submitting to an ocean passage with less a reason than shackles or debt. We’re derived from German stock, the rolly-polly, wind-passing, humbug majority, not the rare Teutonic beast, but sedition had a hand in me-something in the woodpile, a thing ascetic, haunted, maybe an original Lutheran-but this anodyne of beer and polka resulted in an arboreal totem.
My father was co-founder of an advertising firm that arose a generation later than those that initially capitalized on the propaganda campaigns for World War I. He did not believe people were gullible, certainly not for long. His fortune was based on two principles at odds in the civilized psyche: the lust to be left alone and the excruciatingly painful ambiguity in seeing a human being make an ass out of himself. Our species simply tears itself to shreds over any mutation of innocence. He recruited sprite, sad figures, waifs and wallflowers and he plastered them on every billboard, radio station and eventually TV, flogging some ludicrous crusade-such as small pianos for toddlers sold by Viennese refugees to save the waltz and schnitzel politesse from extinction. People would buy the junk to spirit the guy off stage and spare themselves the polluted glee-polluted by anguish and self-loathing-of allowing the mob to slaughter a nincompoop. Despair tempered the species, and good advertising played to people’s troubled consciences. He was convinced that most would rather jump into a fire to unfasten a martyr before admitting someone could act without guile.
I remember my father saying I had inherited his vices as virtues. Irony was as far into the human crisis as he ventured. After years spent underfoot and little noticed except as a nuisance, he said these lines during my sixteenth year, when I suddenly towered over him by a full head. The shy toddler with the golden face he had off-handedly trusted to eternity, popped out eerily rust-free: The dream-boat looks of the son of a rolly-polly philanderer-I could wear his vices that looked squalid, even perverse on him, with a flair that everyone would applaud-was sufficiently ironic to him to again foreclose his interest in me.
He overlooked his one vice I had inherited and that may better explain the lee-side to weathering that was to be my course. I, too, was unblemished by self-reflection. We both were free of conscience, but while this sloth-that is what it was-compelled him to act-he fell into the empty space and filled it in a conventional way-I floated unresisting, possibly dreaming from time to time when a hapless image was assigned to me, but for the main dissolving.
My favorite toy was a panda bear. It asked for nothing more than a bed. Wooden swords and pistols had no appeal-it was my mother’s idea that I should have antique toys. And she wished that I would write little plays from the fairy tales she read me. Television and plastic toys delete from childhood, as does American locution, she thought. My childhood must be perfect. She didn’t imagine me growing up. I was so beautiful I must be tragic. She didn’t see that as a deprivation. Simply put, mine was an immortal childhood. I would no more be lost than Peter Pan or The Little Prince, which she read to me and from their color plates sewed costumes. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Jungle Books, she read to me desperately as school threatened coarsening, and I was willing enough as long as I could listen in bed, but nary a spark could she ignite, and I slipped without ripple into dreamless sleep, leaving to her this beautiful boy now untenanted to cast into her own dreams of first love.
I was off to private schools where I never sparked a scandal. I was a listless student in everything, and completely docile, I never excited any hope in a teacher that my indifference was a hidden talent protesting its surrender. I was recruited for sports-refuge for dunderheads. Many a glittering career has begun on the playing fields of private academies, but it was tact to say I lacked killer instinct; I had no lust for contest at all. Then, how could I be used? Crown of thick, wrought gold, lollygagging blue eyes that could be mistaken for erotic intoxication, my virginity was elided from me by an English teacher while I lay under her on the wooden floor, looking at the ceiling-a stone vault, the school was Thames Gothic-as she dredged gasps and squawks from her victuals. But, it never caught on. What about decadence? There’s a market for that in such schools and I should have been a natural at it, so much of it is appearance. Who better to pose with drink and cigarettes, or better yet, disheveled-school tie askew, propped against the founding stone of a bank on an early morning, an empty fifth at his hip, at peace with the insufferable world? I wore clothes well in the upper class way-top quality natural fibers worn to near tatters, never squared to the angle or newly pressed to the pleat, a sinewy, blond pelted wrist depending from quick reefed cuff, unmatched fallen socks in loafers and the whole ensemble achieved without any diligence-but it was too damn unconscious and lacked ambition or statement.
And then, I was discovered.
At summer break between junior and senior year, I was invited by a classmate for a week at his family’s summer house on Fisher’s Island. He was trying to become a homosexual. He wasn’t, but he was too vain to admit he didn’t have it in him and was simply boring. He was nearly an invalid by practice. He played his infirmities as decadent inbreeding, but they were less witty and more vigorous than that. I don’t know why I accepted his invitation. Maybe, it was adolescent rebellion against dad. How far would I go to spare someone failure who perfectly deserved it? If that was the reason, the answer was not all that far. Conrail to New London was a couple of hours. For the rest, I don’t know what’s become of him, but in spite of being neurotic and pouty, he lacked the imagination to compose theater, and on this tiny island subject to floating in clouds and fitted for a Chinese dream book-steep perspectives and muted wash colors-he moped about soggy at heart. It couldn’t have helped that the dampest fodder in the whole academy-what that ailed me couldn’t a gifted demise employ?-flared on the second day of the visit and burned continuously for the rest.
The family had a 32 foot ketch, and I was born to be draft animal for the wind. Within a day, the pool hall math of sailing spooled out from my ropey limbs. My passivity had found its genius. The harness was strapped across my shoulders; a consummate hacky bent to his task.
Before I had completed school, offers to crew on yachts were arriving weekly. I began as crew on island hops in the Caribbean. The crews were the same as resort staff anywhere-comely and friendly. It is not a profession that admits age. I was perfect, but underemployed. There is a place for dreamboats; by nineteen, I was caddying yachts on the South Pacific. There I caught the eye of B. and he made me skipper of his 72 foot single hull wooden yacht while it was still a gleam in his eye.
I was nearly adopted by him, but deferentially, shy of spurning: he had found the falcon for his buried heart. His fortune came from installing computerized accounting systems for welfare payments in several states. He had nasal problems, allergies that barred him from tropical bouquets, and constantly sniffed and snorted. He spoke with panicky haste and gripped the arms of the chairs where he sat as if a natural act would soon depose him. He had the thick-lidded, slit eyes and lipless-gash mouth of the hard-scrabble, small farmer from Texas, which he was, but none of the easy, laconic drawl, and as I said, couldn’t fold out in a chair, appropriating it, legs akimbo, brim over eyes, sitting it, holstered in a cat nap that marks the range cowboy. Mistaken identity and exposure hounded him.
I was there at the keel laying and when her mainmast was seated on a double eagle gold piece minted in 1872. His ship was built with tradition, rune, and superstition, and he wanted me to take him to the sunken landscapes of the imagination where nihilism had yet to reach. I learned to navigate by the stars-the world corseted digitally seemed sadistic wardrobe to him. We paced the shore at sunsets while the ship emerged from bony fossil into gull’s wing. I was the perfect vessel to receive a soliloquy. Beauty seems to gainsay chance. He believed the stars in their distance gave safe harbor for the promises given to the heart.
The champagne bottle weathered the first blow to the bow; the “Beatrice” white and lovely tempered the swing, but second time the shipwright’s wife-forty, bluff, hale and wind-carved, with a sharp check bone and graceful neck-made good, and with cheers she slid home to the sea, nesting stern first more heavily and matronly than she was ever bound to do again.
We made Roratonga and the Tuamoto Archipelago with B. aboard. We were bound for Tahiti where he would leave us. His plan was to rejoin us in ports along the sidereal arc of the heart, but in between he’d be stateside, running his business.
However, in the Tuamoto Archipelago where the ship floated within blue spectrums, the keel as visible as the rigging, the traces of the wind that had steered me since Fisher’s Island were replaced by those of adamantine light, and within months I was presumed lost overboard, fallen from the face of the earth.
We dropped anchor and the illusion was the ship dangled above the blue vault. We lowered the skiff and a jack ladder, and leaving one man on board, rowed out on the lagoon. I was suddenly vulnerable to that vertigo of a bird, its spiral fall upward on Jacob’s Ladder. I suppose I always had been falling through the trap door into my own empty vault and meeting with whatever makes its home there, but this must have been the first time I recognized its realm extended beyond slumber. Blue calls us into it, but this abduction, lathing back to an animus in immersed light that would shuck any retarding mood, this rejected temperance, spurning the reflective rapture in blue, this impetus was different. The moment I stopped rowing, ripples ceased defining a surface membrane. We could see fish below us, seemingly unmediated by refraction. We had diving masks, snorkels and fins. I took first watch on the skiff, remaining behind with the owner who was wary of sharks and octopi. He was not at ease in these low islets. From our vantage the ocean flooded down from its climb up the horizon. Clarity can be more relentless than exhilarating, sparing nothing. He belayed with sharks and pearls, relying on something convoluted and coveting to stain this pure velocity within matter: the moon’s tears hoarded by fallen monsters. He clung to the skiff as he did to chairs.
We retrieved a few of the snorkelers and I got my turn. They hadn’t been there before, the crew chided me, but within minutes I was being driven by a pod of dolphins. They were not nice dolphins. No youthful innocence or open spirit. They weren’t even curious about me. I was an object of opportunity, like the tons of garbage idling about the globe. They circled me, they poked me, and they targeted me with sound pulses that would have atomized kidney stones.
They wouldn’t let me back on the skiff. I was nudged off course, sometimes physically restrained, hustled along as you do for a staggering drunk. Other times they would flash through my lane so rapidly I knew better than to continue in that direction. Finally, they seemed to grow bored. With their celebrated enthusiasm for everything, I expect they quickly exhaust their interest in the specific. It appeared that way; they suspended themselves about me and looked to be questioning what it was about me that could have been mistaken for fun. And then it happened, and if I had been a consequential nature-a person who has established himself as himself with a Polar Star to mark deviation-I would have left the south Pacific and not deplaned on less acreage than a continent and there sought work in a bank with marble walls where time with all its solar mutations has been incarcerated in money.
They sang as mermaids and sirens are reported once to have done, and though I couldn’t hear their songs, I couldn’t resist or forget them. Our ears have always belittled music, and poetry bridles in wordy confinement. None of us ever first hears the song we can’t forget. With ludicrous clicks and squeaks, the dolphins sluiced a caroling echo into the chambers of my heart.
That night-having been wrenched from the sea by the reveling crew who took my encounter with the dolphins as an initiation by extraterrestrial party hounds-I talked with B. about a voyage to the west. As we talked, I sensed eavesdropping from the choir below the starry mirror, the bottom continuing to drop beneath the ship’s keel, and later their airs in my dreams as I slept in a hammock strung from the boom. The boom festooned with fruits and flowers dressing the ‘Beatrice’ like Carmen Miranda or Demeter, and aware as I slept of the metaphor of a cacoon stapled to the night’s canopy; continuing through slumber the route fabled to B., bearing towards Lyra, though this last I had left unspoken, stopping even before passage around Good Hope where just before words I had seen Neptune’s steeds churning the sea. A voyage through the Indian Ocean tremulous with lyrics-all the organs made of light unsheathing wings from their awakened nap-we would soar to the Indonesian Archipelago where, like St.Expury’s Little Prince, we would meet men stranded by cosmic schedules on tiny islands sitting behind desks tilting on a missing leg, wearing starched white shirts, waiting for this or that comet or shooting star to finally make its whistle stop. And on to Ceylon or Sri Lanka for the names alone that both make navigation a rescue of abandoned love. B. and I agreed on this course-swooning in the transparent night. We would smell cloves while still at sea-his falcon had returned with a flute in his beak. He agreed to every port-of-call and the amniotic tides between. Though they were all daffy for computation, they sang well for a minstrel.
The dolphins had given initiative to echoes.
We sailed to Tahiti. B. flew back to the States in less than a week of our arrival with plans to rejoin us in the China Sea. There would be plenty of funds. We left it that way out of shame. We had been indiscrete. Grandly indiscrete in the way a sailor is not permitted. It is taken as gospel that no true sailor charts a course through heaven. You get away with trespass on the waters just so long as you put one caliper foot in front of the other, eyes set on weathering. Daylight revealed we had no plan, just A thousand Nights and a Night. The ports would be extortionist sewers, the inland seas lousy with pirates. It must have occurred to the owner, as it did to me, that the ship had become an encumbrance. Only her name might have made this passage.
We remained anchored in Tahiti. I radioed the owner. Over Christmas he stayed in his ranch in the badlands of northern Montana. The sun was low that hour in Montana; it settled a thin wash of salmon on the snow. I could hear the snow’s hush on the ground. It was a thick carpet. There was no wind so it piled where it had fallen. He was watching the low horizon sink into night. It was serene past grief. News from the ‘Beatrice” grated on his ear. The lights were off where he sat, he had not lit a fire and cold was welling up. He nearly floundered in a slumber that would have no dreams to follow.
I offered to sail her to San Francisco. He had a town house there. He covered his eyes with his hand as if blinded by glare. He didn’t want to think about it right now. The affair was over. You might like it here, he said. Give it a thought. I’ve got a manager, but you’ve got skills would work here. No rush. But, come out in the winter, I think it’ll suit you. The white, but any season. Spring’s more careful here. You could appreciate that. You’ve got a tempo. Sometimes it’s a little feverish out there. I’ve got kids. Did that sound like begging for my life? The whole gang is coming, grand kids, the whole gang. Merry Christmas.
Adrift, the crew sunk into party. It can carry you along, a sludgy flood, a laconic, self-pitying, boasting philosophy of callow nihilism. For the rest, a slurry of booze, screwing, a score of languages, an almanac of skin and hair colors, hangovers, Hawaiian and Thai dope, bleary, bemused, sated, pleasantly numb.
I remained clear-headed in dreams. I heard the popped kiss of lapping water on the hull. There was a shallow shore, and a white dome. Moonlight painted the dome. The dream was remarkable for its impartiality. I had never had a dream that asserted nothing but objectivity. My dream didn’t elaborate; I was pretty sure they no longer could.
My narcoleptic tropism affected the crew. It must have struck them that way-my vagueness when awake. They reacted against the entire lethargic captivation, but they didn’t completely escape it. I know this from my last night on board and from a turn the partying took that they were eager to abandon. My crew needed to repel what they took for romanticism; dreaminess itself seems a lapse into faith. Pointless screwing was some reply, but too familiar to burn off the vapors. They bent it sardonic but afterwards were not prepared to face their desperation.
I was lost on a dead calm night.
We set out from Tahiti to shake the moths from the closet. Open the doors on the high seas. We would circle to a compass point on the deep, and then return, running for two weeks. That night we were becalmed. I have been aboard for gales and lightening storms, but only fog may match the eeriness of becalming, and it may be its breathlessness more than blindness that sets the balance. The world has relinquished you, and this crew had been running to the arms of voyage from just such an eddy. The dolphins were singing through the hull, ghostly wailings and rounds of interlocking fermatas. The crew strung hammocks from the yards below the dewlapped sails. Then they thought to reve up disc players and blast a hole through the silence. We were here for the ocean’s tutoring, but it was superstition doused their cannonade. What already stirred from sleep by the party in Tahiti might this coda draw along from twenty thousand fathoms? Even your thoughts should be governed so they wouldn’t move freely past frontiers usually contested by substance.
I took first watch. I ducked below and put my ear to the timbers and listened to the dolphins’ songs. They washed over me like floating tresses. What an agar for longing the sea makes-jabber it couldn’t have been, you can glean the mood in a foreign language-but should any melody in their tongue plead the case of those lost in the deep? Above deck again, I passed to the stern weaving by my suspended crew. If any of my crew noticed the actions I took, he was never to give a sign. I looked down into the polished sea, non-existent except as the floating garments of the moon. I smoothly lowered the Jacob’s ladder. I removed my clothes, folded them shipshape, and naked descended.
The dolphins were waiting at the foot of the ladder and totted me away.
The smithing and molding is not done in the seas’ deep lockers, but in their nurseries, shallow bays that are charged by light. When did we separate from dolphins? You’d know my story was false if I should trace back to some common ancestor in the Miocene. What lab work could reconcile that divorce? But, more than reason would be offended. Every fiber in you would protest the cacophony. You’ve floated in the lambent bays that were the slips for the Argosy, and know the division can be marked at childhood or at some degree in a love affair, but we can historically date it to when Atlantis fell beneath the waves-the time when imagination founded lost cities in the ocean that before exile had teemed with light and other emissaries from the sun. Or, it can be marked when darkness from before the first Sabbath was invited back to extinguish coitus between men and angels. Those stories lament our vigilance. At the moment we dread falling, we have become too grave to follow into weightless soaring.
The trip was a long one. I mounted a dolphin and it would carry me on its back and then relay me to the next. They assumed a formation, essentially a “V” or ship’s bow and the one carrying me would coast the turbine. Their skin is smooth and riding the toboggan was close to mounting a bar of soap. I got the hang of it to the point that I could stay seated without constant monitoring. No vessel or land: our run was on a tangent to any ship’s lane across the South Pacific, and not just by compass reckoning, but as well the spokes of radii to the axis. No sunburn or thirst, a sunset with a train of unfamiliar colors, drenched and glistening, a night where constellations had joined by colors like wildflowers. Morning, and dolphins filling the sea with leaping. My limps have been sheared, only the straight floss of boyhood on my sleek legs, a sea from storybook, each surging school sporting its clan tartans just loomed. Plowed from the loam their plaids dim but here, no sooner did the hook taken too hastily to heart yank them up, then that same heart was redressed to fit its passionate hold.
My mounts plunged beneath the water and we resurfaced inside a barrier reef. The center of the earth is molten iron, I’d been told, and I’d never asked if the poles that wound the stars were grimly purposed and any destiny foretold by them sure to be mournful. Certainly, whatever is down there requires back-breaking labor to pry out, and once it’s dragooned issues corporal punishments. But, artesian springs hint at cross-purposes below graves, not at a right angle to the horizon, but somewhere along the arc of the sun’s slumber. All around me was a clearer and denser light than any I remembered, or remembered at first. But, touts for such light often accost us, and when they catch our sleeve or an ear with a ‘psst’ they offer more than sleight of hand. They have offered: sea and frond in a jewel’s light. The old plumbed earth I’d been skirting was shorn to its greener purpose. Again lithe, it set to the task of outfitting light for a denser tempo, but tempo nonetheless, and rang to the work and drove that peal into the matter.
My transformation wasn’t painful. I wasn’t even aware it was taking place except for an enduring immersion in ecstasy? Ecstasy has become so brief for my old species that we have confused it with rapture, a giddy seizure from above that precedes a fall. We dolphins feel it as inspiration-that is our experience when surfacing to grab a breath-we burst into light and it fills us with lyrics it wishes to be. To us, the world is this inspired transparency, the acute emptiness inside a musical instrument. We witnessed this inside the womb, but have forgotten. It was song as the elements assembled-their distinct spectrums are octaves and their chorus is enchantment.
I was wound according to my fulfillment-my ear came first and at each stop where another form might have emerged from the particular note, I found a dissonance until it was dolphin and my ear would never become deaf again.
We visited the caves in Lascaux that were painted before the oceans withdrew. You didn’t spot us? Look again at the spinning herds. Their hooves never touch down. Stone was not yet solid earth. It was a tale of light and song. We swim the channels in the Sahara, and even the canals of Mars, and it’s not just for the sunken galleon that we find a starfish to light the yardarms; should a star go out in a constellation, we hasten there with a diamond in our smile. Wherever we went, forms were known to not be fixed, but to be catalysts for the elements that were recognized as being pure spirit. We spun through Greek temples that have always been the mediation between light and stone, which is how the Greeks viewed the leaping spark. And we thread the sea through a compact mirror into the single eye of a woman and forecast generations. No coitus-not even between lawyers and accountants-that we didn’t circle in the gyres, and poets and musicians, sculptures and artist, and dancers outside of themselves, we would shunt them about in the oceans we know-and the daydreamer, the wool-gatherer-especially those who remember nothing but can taste a scrim on their inner lids-we had messages for them. Dreamers, who do you think leads you to golden cities? And drowned sailors, suspended in the cold depths, we will retrieve you to fairer shores.
You’ve only glimpsed us. Look again and consider the eye placed so nearly at the hinge of the spiked platens. Isn’t this the eye you looked for that would reflect you in each thing so that you might again behold them? Isn’t it the eye scarily missing from statues, and haven’t you betrayed it in portraits, abandoning it so that it follows you accusingly-the memory of a wrongly despised relative? Your soul always seemed to be placed over blackness, fading into abyss, and even this dourness discouraged you, knowing it was spiteful and callow.
The mosque is on an island off the coast of Kenya. When the moon elopes with the tide, the dhows settle on the sandy bottom, rocking off their keels to lay port or starboard, and all hands roll to the bulwarks in their sleep, as if a cradle has tipped. Then, they spot the mosque in the moonlight and know it’s their mother’s breast to sweeten sleep once again. Outside the reef, we watch them through conch shells shaping cochlea from departed waves.
When you sleep, sometimes you swim with us. You’ll wake hearing a clear note coming from the stars-as if a crystal globe had descended around you. Sad to lose that so quickly, to feel it lift again and racket flooding in. You’d have left the boat then, while it was still in water so clear it was vanishing, and joined us-if you had just wakened a little sooner-five hundred fathoms down where whales in their celestial flight are radiant as comets.
We went to the North Pole. It disappointed you. You put your hope in finding a diamond there. Now, you think you’ll find it beneath the ice on one of Saturn’s moons, because your soul is immortal and unloved.
The Northern Star is chained there. It’s your doing, that like Persephone, she is held there. She would leap like a gazelle to the Pleiades if only you didn’t believe you could finally rest your longing when you could no longer distinguish it from death.
She welcomes us. Shoals of the Milky Way float in the water, and as swallows stitch the underworld to the blue, with leaps and spins we darn the stars to their ghosts-so misunderstood by you-and trailing gowns circle the May Pole that Polaris would have it be. We sing among their wishes, and the heavens are again an orchard.
