A commenter has sent some verse set on an indefinite beach, at once made familiar by things we all know: a half-drained glass of champagne beside a slice of cocktail salami on the sand, and sound of children’s voices; but unfamiliar, as if on a world that begins at the water’s edge where a tide threatens to take us away. For as long as there has been poetry the sea has been calling man home and away from home. John Masefield captured the sense in his famous lines:
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Let’s find out, on Whale Day.
WHALE DAY
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?
Whether the sun has earlier exchanged
meaningful looks with earthly denizens
or not, we are uncertain, but a strange
hush settles on the surface, ocean gleams
under the new-washed air, —a time for flight
has not arrived yet as the banks go down,
the banks of clouds, I mean, to touch the sea
at her horizon. Here the air is clear.
And past the line of breakers,
where they play,
one is reminded of all salients
of land, all bays and inlets, bights and gulfs
of ocean, how there’s really only one
for all of us, to fight over and sail
across—or, spirit prompting, to watch whales
on Rosh Hashanah, humpbacks in this case,
some eight, maybe, a quarter mile offshore,
as this poor world goes straight to hell, some say,
though that is maybe not the whale’s eye view,
I don’t know. Let’s say after a short fast:
some champagne, brush a few stray grains of sand
off dropped salami.
—Is the world then
better aligned with how things ought to be?
But what uncertain structure in the thump
of oceans, surface pearl and violet green
beneath, makes leaving easy, as they stay
the course in that deep medium, to play
between the poles, but never in a line
easy to trace? If singing made the sun’s
refracted rays stop aging, we’d stay young
among the whales and porpoises, this time
the year drawing itself back, the abyss
somehow less threatening, as children run
right to the water’s edge.
Pennants and flags
of turbulent air earth elaborates
elicit unending streams of complaint
from sailors (we’re all sailors now). All saints
decamped, the field of the sea being bare
of all but vital light. Yet there is more:
We’re grateful for these terns, grateful for snow
-y plovers, for all birds that are as rare
as love, as honesty… The atmosphere
is one of children letting go balloons
of every color, and of dueling kites
that older kids would play with, were they here.
Let’s you and me be lonely, with such scraps
of cloud as are vouchsafed, whales moving on.
Is not this just the way it was to be?
Rosh Hashanah, September 30, 2008
V.09.2009
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I too have stood on a lonely beach, listening to the gentle shushing of the waves, fishing the Atlantic Ocean in the deepness of the night, a translucent moon lighting the water, turning the sand to glittering bits of tiny diamonds. At such moments I care naught about catching fish, for I am waiting for the moon to set, waiting for the night to surround me, waiting for the fish to sing. For they do sing, but only to those who choose to hear them. Old standards, mostly, standards like
SALMON CHANTED EVENING
Something’s fishy, people say
A slur to briny cousins
You don’t hear fish say that ‘bout us
Though reasons they have dozens
We treat them all about the same
With hook and net and trawler
We bait them with some eel or squid
And sometimes a night crawler
And all because they’re good to eat
Their taste is quite delicious
Salmon, trout or small mouth bass
Just show me where the fish is
They’re not as dumb as some do think
They talk and sing till late
Nearer My Cod To Thee is one
And another Kiss Me Skate
Come Joe Sardine In My Flying Machine
And the popular Am l Blue
I love to hear those good old songs
But I sure wish they’d sing something new
Sorry for early OT:
Welcome to 9-10-01
Though the initiative is a work in progress, some senior counter-terrorism officials and administration policy-makers envision it as key to the national security strategy President Obama laid out last week — one that presumes most accused terrorists have the right to contest the charges against them in a “legitimate” setting.
The approach effectively reverses a mainstay of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, in which global counter-terrorism was treated primarily as an intelligence and military problem, not a law enforcement one. That policy led to the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; harsh interrogations; and detentions without trials.
The “global justice” initiative starts out with the premise that virtually all suspects will end up in a U.S. or foreign court of law.
That will be the case whether a suspected terrorist is captured on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the Philippine jungle or in a mosque in Nigeria, said one senior U.S. counter-terrorism official with knowledge of the initiative.
“Regardless of where any bad guy is caught, we want the bureau to be in a position to put charges on them,” the official said, adding that the Bush administration’s emphasis on CIA and military operations often marginalized the FBI — especially when it came to interrogating suspects
Wrong Then, Wrong Now by Andrew C. McCarthy
One attack does not a jihad make. Radical Islam followed up with a more ambitious plot to bomb various New York City landmarks — a plot stopped only because the same informant agreed to re-infiltrate the cell. But by 1994, plans were under way to murder the pope, murder the president, and blow up U.S. jumbo jets in flight over the Pacific. By 1996, Osama bin Laden was publicly calling for the global slaughter of Americans while Hezbollah and Iran were killing 19 members of the U.S. Air Force at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.
The government’s response? Its obsession at the time was the fear that federal judges might think the FBI was abusing its national-security wiretapping power — using it as a pretext for conducting ordinary criminal investigations. So in 1995, the Justice Department raised a regulatory “wall.” The effect was to bar intelligence agents and criminal investigators from “connecting the dots.” More significant, the wall fostered an ethos of risk-aversion. The message to career-minded agents was: “Take heed: The mere hypothetical (and highly unlikely) possibility of civil-liberties violations is of greater concern to us than the potential of jihadist mass-murder attacks.”
And what good is risk-aversion if you can’t export it? In 1995, President Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 39, making the FBI, with its matrix of law-enforcement procedures, the government’s lead counterterrorism agency — even overseas, which had been the preserve of the CIA and the military, agencies operating under the quaint notion that where you have enemies and exigencies, rather than criminals and crime-scenes, you need a different, less onerous set of rules.
How effective was the Brave New World of “global justice”?
Whitman’s Candies had their “Samplers”
Walt serves full meals,
not mere tiny examplers.
Gratis
Oh Walt, I tried to read it aloud to my husband but was laughing so hard I couldn’t get the whole way through. Thank you!
Btw, I heard today that salmon season doesn’t exist off the California coast again. Fillets are $15.95 a pound at the farmer’s market, flown in from Alaska. Consecutive seasons of no commercial or sport fishing for salmon should result in a surge in the seal population, which in turn means more great whites. Surfing is going to be interesting!
Sylvia,
And Farmed Salmon is worse than nothing, imo.
I buy Alaskan in cans @ COSTCO.
Wife hates smelly canned fish.
Choices narrow.
. . . as if on a world that begins at the water’s edge where a tide threatens to take us away. For as long as there has been poetry the sea has been calling man home and away from home.
Wretchard is channeling Tennyson again:
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
I have not before read this verse nor pondered its significance. Watching wales on Rosh Hashanah, the day when books are opened and accounts settled to start the new year.
Crossing over the bar into the sea to account for eight wales while the world goes to hell
From the wales eye view —Is the world then
better aligned with how things ought to be?
Is not this just the way it was to be?
dancing between the poles.
A few years back I watched a humpedback playing and feeding in mineral rich and kelp invested coastal water. Rising up and out of salty blue so close to shore and against a coastal evergreen mountain side arising out of the same blue it seemed to swallow leviathan whole at the apex of flight. Spouting off after a large crash back into the surf and spray. Odors carried on the breeze, of brine and wet critters live, and in various states of decay.
” But what uncertain structure in the thump
of oceans, surface pearl and violet green
beneath, makes leaving easy,”
The leviathan left the cove and sweapt out to sea with a broad strong muscular sweep of tail and fin, leaving me to feel the insignificance of my being on the side of the evergreen coastal mountain.
We are not alone as self-aware tool users. Killer whales, bottlenose dolphins, elephants, New Caledonian crows, European magpies, ravens, and the four great apes (human, chimp, gorilla, and orang) all possess sapience at various levels, defined as being self aware and capable of judgment. For example, an untrained dog, cat, capuchin monkey, pigeon or human infant (up until about 18 months) cannot spontaneously recognize itself in a mirror. But I’ll bet that adults of the aforementioned species typically pass the famous “mirror test,” and create primitive culture and use tools as well. IMO, if humans were to disappear from the planet, sapience would remain unless these other forms were wiped out simultaneously.
Rolling Down to Old Maui
It’s a damn tough life full of toil and strife we whalermen undergo
And we don’t give a damn when the gale is done how hard the winds did blow.
Cause we’re homeword bound from the Arctic Ground with a good ship taught and free.
And we won’t give a damn when we drink our rum with the girls of Old Maui.
Chorus:
Rolling down to Old Maui, me boys, rolling down to Old Maui
We’re homeward bound from the Arctic Ground,
Rolling down to Old Maui
Once more we sail with the northerly gale through the ice and wind and rain
Them coconut fronds, them tropical lands
we soon shall see again
Six hellish months we’ve passed away on the cold Kamchatka Sea
But now we’re bound from the Arctic Ground,
rolling down to Old Maui
Chorus
Once more we sail with the northerly gale
towards our island home
Our mainmast sprung, our whaling done and we ain’t got far to roam
Our stun’s'l bones is carried away, what care we for that sound
A living gale is after us, thank God we’re homeward bound
Chorus
How soft the breeze through the island trees, now the ice is far astern
T^hem native maids, them tropical glades is a-waiting our return
Even now them big brown eyes look out hoping some fine day to see
Our baggy sails, running ‘fore the gales,
Rolling down to Old Maui
From: Stan Rogers, “Between the Breaks..Live”
Also, Judy Collins’ interpretation of George Scroggie’s “Farewell to Tarwathie” on her “Whales and Nightingales” recording had me pull over in traffic to hear it complete.
But I’m a softie.
Boom!
Pixar Productions